I have been a pessimist from early life. I recall when I was six year's old in 1937, I worried about the Chinese which I had been told in Sunday school are nice people and hard workers, carrying heavy loads upon their heads.* Gen. Chiang Kai-shek was already a hero. The Japanese were threatening to invade China, there had already been skirmishes, and I didn't want to hear the news. My father in the pre-TV age was going to turn the news on the radio and I got up to leave. He asked me why I was leaving so I told him I was afraid to hear news about China. He assured me there wouldn't be any, but, as it turned out, there was and I ran screaming from the room. I was worried that the Japanese would invade us also and that they might be small in stature but were supermen. This was four years before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Though the Japanese never were able to completely take China, my pessimistic nature was already at hand at the age of six.
I do admit that most of my memories are of a rather pleasant early childhood in the 1930s when gasoline was 25 cents/gallon or five gallons for a dollar, but, more importantly to me, candy bars were a nickel or three for a dime. My mother had an artistic temperament so there were times with a lot of yelling and spanking over some indiscretions that were real or imagined. I had some speaking problems, mainly pronouncing "Rs" as "Ws", for example, I would pronounce "car" as "cow." I had trouble memorizing the multiplication tables, particularly so with the times 7s, a defect that was cured with flashcards and daily exercises with them. I became a sickly child in the later 1930s and ran through all the communicable diseases one after the other, it seemed (mumps, measles, whooping cough, chickenpox). At that time, you were quarantined for four to six weeks each so I missed a lot of school in the early grades. I wasn't held back a year because it was judged that I was working up to my abilities (We didn't have As and Bs, etc).
Finally, however, in the 4th grade, I missed only 4 half days of school in the entire school year. I wasn't held back a grade so I could start playing catch up. I was a terrible daydreamer and would dream full stories with a beginning a middle and an end. This tendency would result in my missing instructions in school so that I would turn up at school without some piece of homework that every other student turned in. It was humiliating, but daydream I continued to do.
On December 7th, 1941, I had just come in from playing "kick the can" when my brother told me that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. More terror and my belief that the "Supermen" were going to invade us. I was sure they would win. Late that Sunday afternoon the family was playing the card game "Hearts" when over the radio came news flashes of the damage done to Hawaii. These did nothing to soothe me.
The supermen never did invade us, but there was a costly war with Japan and Germany that finally ended in 1945. I was in camp when I heard that the atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. I don't recall being scared of the Germans maybe because my mother's side of the family was all German, though I didn't know this until I was maybe 15.
Then came the Berlin Blockade** when the Russians cut off all ground transport (highways, rail, and barge) to Berlin in June of 2008. As a result, President Truman decided on airlifts (not only food but coal as well and other essential items) to Berlin to sustain the people. By the end of the Blockade, 2.3 million pounds were flown into Berlin. The Blockade ended in May of 1949, but the airlift continued until September. I was sure this period of about a year with the airlift would lead to nuclear war (either by design or accident) and that I had maybe five years to live. So the 1950s were ushered in as a time of terror for me.
Things became rather quiet until 1958 with the Hungarian Uprising that we had encouraged. The Soviet response was brutal,. Again I felt it would have to end in a nuclear war. As I have said elsewhere, I never would have thought that Eisenhower would just say something like, "Too bad boys, You are on your own."** But he did and a nuclear war was avoided.
The 1960s were ushered in with Jack Kennedy as the president who started off his tenure with an abortive battle in Cuba called the Bay of Pigs. The Cubans did not join the insurgency and the invasion was aborted. Next, the Soviets tried to ship missiles to Cuba that created another incident threatening nuclear war. Curiously, I felt that it would not come because Cuba was in our sphere of influence just as Hungary was in the Soviet sphere of influence; however, we came closer than I thought. Just in case, however, I went out and bought the best bottle of cognac I could find and drank some. I thought that if I was wrong and I was going to suffer the rest of my life, at least I could look back and say that at one time I had the best of something. Secretly, we made a deal with the Soviets that if they withdrew from Cuba we would remove some threatening missiles of our own aimed at them though we weren't told that at the time.
To lift our spirits, President Kennedy committed us to send men to the Moon and bring them back safely to Earth before the decade was out. This seemed impossible to me because our rockets were still blowing up on the launching pad, yet it happened. I had been against space research because it was so expensive. A single disposable rocket mission cost about what my branch in my organization spent in a year, including salaries.
In 1965, President Kennedy and the prime minister of Japan, Ikeda, had a meeting in which the premier said that many Japanese scientists came to America but few American scientists went to Japan so they ginned up a program we called the U.S.-Japan Scientific Cooperation Program. It was meant for academic scientists but few were volunteering to go. One day in 1965 my boss called me in and said, "Think of something to do in Japan." OK, I was to go, but I was not in great health (In fact when I was 22, I was told that if I lived to 35 I would be immobilized in a wheelchair.) and was sure I would die there. Though the trip was exhausting, I did survive it and had many great memories.
In October of 1968, I was sent to Switzerland for a year and I was there during the Christmas message of our astronauts*** who circled behind the moon. I had an epiphany and became a booster of the space program. Apparently, I sent ESP signals to my organization and they lent me out to NASA to help set up the lunar sample program for 15 mo. This was an exhausting job and I was glad to get out of it at the time, but great memories remain. NASA members had great depression after the failed Apollo 13 mission that, however, brought the astronauts safely back to Earth. Everyone thought that the upcoming Apollo 14 mission would be the last. It would end if it was successful so President Nixon could go out of the program successfully, or it wouldn't be successful so the program would end because it was too costly in equipment and lives. Astronauts had already died during an accidental practice session fire in the lunar module. Each mission was said to cost $300,000,000.
I had felt that life was closing in ahead of me and that I would never get to Europe or Japan again. In the early 1970s, I was sure I was going to be fired by President Nixon who was out to "get" Civil Servants. To prepare for this, I started to drink Gallo red wine that I could buy by the gallon and that I called Nixon Boudreaux. But I was to visit Japan again in 1975 after the "Americanization of Japan" had set in and there were McDonald's and Mr. Donut stores around, and I was to visit Europe several times, mostly with my second wife who loved travel.
(To Be Continued)
* We attended a Presbyterian church called House Of Hope which had close ties with China through supporting a medical missionary to China, Republican Rep. Dr. Walter H. Judd who served as a U.S. Representative for 20 yrs, a strong anti-communist, and became known as a leader of a group informally called the "China Lobby."
** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Blockade
*** A rather glorious title because they were going to the Moon, not the stars..
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