[Milsurplus] Re: Conelrad

[mstangelo at comcast.net]

I started elementary school around 1957/58 in Queens, New York.

I remember we had air raid drills, usually in the morning, and we had to duck under our desktops and cover our heads. (I later transferred from public to a Catholic school, we had to recite the rosary while under the desks!)

We were taught to seek cover when we hard the siren. My parents had a store a couple of blocks from school and I went there for lunch. I was on the way back to school, right at the school enterance, and the siren went off. I ran back to my parent's store. I reasoned this if it was real I'd rather be nuked with my parents and if it was a test, it would be a good excuse to miss school.

I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1963. By that time, I had my transistor radio and was listening to the top-40 hits on WMCA and WABC. I remember
hearing news about the start of the blockade. We used to play in a vacant lot and we had a fort. When the Crisis started, we reasoned we could use the fort as a shelter and always had the radio on, listening for news breaks between the songs.

These memories are etched in my mind to this day; I took the threat of an attack seriously; especially living in New York City. I still have the radio; the Conelrad stations are marked on the dial with triangles.

Mike N2MS