Fail Safe

October 15, 1962, was a Monday and I sat in the kitchen of our apartment on Main Street waiting for an astronaut. Signaled by a racket of distant police sirens, we got to the front porch in time to see a waving Wally Schirra seated on the back of a convertible.

Only days earlier, Schirra, one of the seven original NASA astronauts, orbited earth six times. Born in my hometown Hackensack, his motorcade was headed for a day of celebration and dedications in the town of Oradell, where Schirra grew up.

Wally Schirra in Hackensack

(In the Oradell native son pantheon, Schirra was number one until he was displaced by Bill Parcells. Nobody remembers that Nelson Riddle also grew up there).

Seeing Schirra ride past my house made perfect sense to eight-year-old me, further acknowledgement that Hackensack was the center of the universe.

Later that week, as my mother ironed with the television on, there was an afternoon news broadcast, strangely out of place when Truth or Consequences should have been on instead. If it didn’t interfere with Yogi Bear or Snagglepuss cartoons it didn’t concern me. Mom said we might be headed for a war with Russia, something about Cuba.

It didn’t seem like a big deal. I’d read enough children’s American history books from our public library to know that “we” always won: the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World Wars I and II. And Cuba? My Boys’ Adventure Story background told me that Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders led the charge there up San Juan Hill. We’d won that war too.

War was something that happened in other places, at other times, to other people.

Suddenly, a shelter sign was posted outside of our school. Then, one Saturday while we were shopping on Main Street, there was a wailing siren unlike anything I’d heard. It was loud, it was everywhere and it didn’t feel like the good-natured noon reminder that it was time for lunch. We stood under a store awning until it passed.

(Decades later, I came across several cartons marked, Property U.S. Govt Canned Drinking Water, in the basement of an old apartment house in Hackensack, no doubt a public bomb shelter at one point).

If an astronaut could ride past my house, why couldn’t a nuclear bomb be dropped here as well? Was that the fate of my center of the universe? And there was no Teddy Roosevelt to lead the charge this time.

With the warning that Soviet ships were not to come within 500 miles of America’s blockade of Cuban waters, the crisis ended abruptly on October 24 when Khrushchev ordered a Soviet fleet to turn around. Said Secretary of State Dean Rusk, “We were eyeball to eyeball and I think the other guy just blinked.”

Yogi Bear might have said Khrushchev was smarter than the average bear for ordering the ships back. And if the Russians hadn’t blinked, the fate of our world would have been captured in Snagglepuss’ catchphrase: “Exit, stage left.”