Hygiene Class Dropout

The Scranton School District required one period per week of Hygiene instruction from 7th through 12th grade. We were hoping for Sex Education (fat chance of that in the early 60s!). Instead we got "the bone structure of the inner ear" (hammer, anvil, and stirrup), the Food Pyramid (Did you eat your dark green leafy vegetable today?), and cool filmstrips that showed how a sneeze distributes droplets of mucus over an entire classroom (which, of course inspired fake, gross-out sneezes by the juvenile delinquents among us).

There is only so much you can learn about bones, food, and the perils of sneezing over six years. In the spirit of the times, the Hygiene curriculum also covered "How to Survive a Nuclear Attack". An article in the "50 Years Ago Today" portion of yesterday's newspaper brought this back to mind. On Valentine's Day, 1961, the Northampton County Civil Defense Director issued a dire warning. "A worldwide Communist conspiracy is challenging our way of life...We are going to have to fight sooner or later because we are hemmed in. If a hydrogen bomb falls... We must protect survivors of an attack from radioactive fallout."

Ironically, it was just about February, 1961 that my 8th grade Hygiene class was learning how to do precisely that. They didn't tell us that no matter how careful we were in slicing open packages of bread or opening cans of food and water, the air we were breathing had about 100,000 radioactive dust particles per lungful. Hello, radiation sickness. All that food stored in the Civil Defense shelters or the dark green leafy vegetables we could eat wouldn't help.

A couple of weeks ago, the new Nuclear Arms Limitation Treaty went before the Senate for ratification. Some senators voted against limiting nuclear warheads because they felt that we couldn't trust the Russians to comply. Evidently, these are the guys who trusted in their 9th grade Hygiene class training. "If we're careful, we can survive a nuclear attack." I was one of those guys still doing the fake sneeze and missed out on the finer points of fallout survival. I'd like to see all H-bombs deactivated. I'm worried enough about that guy in the room who just did a real sneeze.