Duck and Cover

by cfmullen ••• "Duck and cover, children, duck and cover." I dove under my desk and put my arms on the top of my head and tossed a giggle to the girl under the next desk. ••• "Quiet!" a pair of ugly black shoes and thick ankles demanded. “Children, this is serious.” ••• Even as a first-grader, the absurdity of this drill didn’t escape me. To survive a nuclear blast:  squat under your desk with your head between your legs. Piece o’ cake. ••• On a recent Sunday morning, I was walking down a street in Inwood when I spotted an old fallout sign on the front of a building. And KABOOM, just like that, I was a seven-year-old hunched under my desk. ••• This sign is a graphic masterpiece: three triangles in a circle, yellow and black, awesome typography. It is simple, compelling, and became a unique symbol of both fear and reassurance. (Credit a guy from the Army Corp of Engineers named Robert Blakey and a graphic arts firm named Blair Inc. for the iconic design, and credit the website Conelrad for digging up all that info.) ••• During the coldest days of the cold war, we lived in a walk-up apartment in the Bronx. And no one was worried about the A Bomb or the Commies or digging a fallout shelter in the backyard; we worried about paying the rent. However, I do distinctly remember the day that Gus, my building’s super, stood on his ladder inspecting the fallout shelter sign that had just been installed on the front of our building.  ••• "Gus, so where's the shelter?" I asked him. Because I hadn't seen anyone building or digging a shelter and the women who sat in lawn chairs in front of the building “knew nothing about no fallout shelter. ” And they knew everything about everything. ••• Gus winked and motioned towards the cellar. "Chuck. Don't worry. It's there," he said in his thick German accent. ••• But I knew that the only things that were in our cellar were ash cans, rusted bikes and the occasional mouse. It didn’t take a genius to deduce that the sign was no more than a grown-up version of Duck and Cover. ••• "Gus, is it big enough for everybody in the building, even my dog?" I asked. ••• "Don't forget about my dog," Gus chuckled to himself as he got down from the ladder. ••• Gus's dog, Fritz, was the biggest, most ferocious dog I’d ever seen. Fritz lived behind a huge wooden fence in the building’s back alley. He growled and barked and scratched at the fence ferociously when anyone came near. I wasn't afraid of the Russians, but I was terrified of Fritz. ••• The propagandists of the day did their best to scare us into believing that a Soviet nuclear attack was imminent. At the same time, they tried to reassure us that tin signs and wooden desks could protect us and keep us safe. ••• Gus, Fritz and the Soviet Union are gone, but a couple of weathered and faded fallout shelter signs and a couple of thousand nuclear weapons are still around.