Trade-Offs

It was scary growing up in the early 60s. Today's Express-Times notes that on this day in 1961, the newspaper informed its readers what would happen if a 50 megaton nuclear weapon were dropped on Easton's Center Circle. "Virtually all of Easton, Phillipsburg and the contiguous communities would vanish from the face of the earth. The initial violence of fission would vaporize everything within a mile radius of its point of explosion. The ensuing fireball would burgeon out over a seven mile radius consuming buildings and burning to death everyone outside the sturdiest underground shelters."

Whether the school basement area with those scary yellow and black signs qualified as a "sturdy underground shelter" was open to question. Our weekly drill of ducking beneath our school desks with out arms over our heads certainly didn't.

Paranoia increased when 10th grade Hygiene class changed from learning the three bones in the inner ear (hammer, anvil, and stirrup) for the fifth consecutive year to Nuclear Survival. "The Russians will certainly drop a bomb on Bethlehem Steel, so the Christmas City will be vaporized. The greatest danger for the rest of northeastern PA is nuclear fallout." The thing I'll always remember was that we were given wrapped loaves of bread and knives and shown how to carefully cut and peel back its wrapping so that nasty fallout wouldn't get on the bread itself.

Fifty years later, I realize that handing a knife to a 14 year old in a classroom setting might be more dangerous than nuclear fallout. Also, once the wrapper was removed, fallout would contaminate the exposed bread immediately. Still, the manually dexterous among us who successfully completed this task were given certificates and charged with insuring our families' survival.

As a side note, the sandwiches served in the school cafeteria on those days seemed to have more dirty fingerprints on them than usual.

Life is a series of trade-offs. 10th grade Hygiene traded potential stabbings in the hallways and likely post-lunch food poisoning for providing 14 year olds the knowledge to lead their families to post-nuclear safety. And they say that school isn't relevant.