1. First Memory of Something Really Funny
It was 1958 in Sumner, WA.

2. What I saw in Sumner
This was the dry cleaner, which looked then just as it does now, and in that parking lot to the right, behind that light pole, was . . .

3. All Proceeds are dedicated to the fight against communism!
This was the sign, and I associated it with another fact of life . . .

4. Hiroshima. We all knew what a nuclear weapon could do, and we knew that the U.S.S.R. had them and might drop them on us.

5. We were taught to duck and cover
We were taught to duck and cover. This was what a poster looked like, but that kid isn’t doing it right. He’s going to get his damn head blown off.

6. This was more like it, as we had those kind of bolted-to-the-floor desks, even in high school.

7. We saw these kinds of warnings
We saw these kinds of warnings. This one is long, so I cut it into three parts. Here is the first part.

8. And the second part -- read it aloud-- You still get similar advice on airplanes

9. We all thought that was pretty funny, but there is more to come.

10. Nuclear Worries Mount-1
January 4, – Sputnik 1 (launched on October 4, 1957)
falls to Earth from its orbit and burns up.
Sputnik was up there, which meant that the U.S.S.R. could rain destruction down on us anytime it wanted to.

11. Nuclear Worries Mount-2
January 31,1958 – The first successful American satellite, Explorer 1, is launched into orbit.
Explorer was our attempt to catch up with the soviets, but there was a “missle gap,” and we were on the wrong side of it.

12. Nuclear Worries Mount-3
February 6, a 7,600 pound Mark 15 hydrogen bomb is lost in the waters off Savannah, Georgia.
MAD (the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction) was supposed to keep us safe, but accidents could always happen. Like this: There was a mid-air collision and the bomb was jettisoned in order to protect the bomber crew, who pulled off a successful emergency landing. The bomb has never been located. The Air Force insisted that the nuclear core was on the ground, but the 400 pounds of conventional explosives are still there.

13. Nuclear Worries Mount-4
March 11, 1958 – A U.S. B-47 bomber accidentally drops an atomic bomb on Mars Bluff, South Carolina.
This is a bigger version of the fat boy that was evaporated Nagasaki. Turns out the pilot got a warning that a security pin was loose, but when he tried to fix it, the bomb dropped out of its cradle, crashed through the bomb bay doors and landed on a play house of little girl. The girl was elsewhere , and the bomb did not have its nuclear core installed, but that core was actually on the plane!

14. And there was the Draft
March 24 – The U.S. Army inducts Elvis Presley, transforming The King Of Rock & Roll into U.S. Private #
If they could draft Elvis Presley, they could draft anybody. You could stay out of the draft by joining the National Guard. Also, going to college would do the trick, until you were out of college. And you could also get somebody pregnant and become a father, but that seemed a little extreme, seeing as there was no shooting war going on at the time.

15. Hot New Group, 1958
Jim, a friend who had a car and was way more “with it” than I was took me and a couple of other guys on the basketball team to see the Kingston Trio, probably now most famous for the song “Tom Dooley.”