Unless you go to school with m.c. escher.

Point well taken...execpt that the only thing specifically pre-1950 was the leg painting . I think of myself as having "grown up in the '60s", alhough I was born in 1952.

By the time I was in a public school they no longer taught "duck and cover"...what had been a "air-raid drill" was now called a "retention drill", and while the procedure card still had the Homeland Security^h^h^h^h^h Civil Defense logo on it, it was clearly generalized to be useful for weather emergencies as well.

I suspect "duck and cover" was expected to be useful for a *nuclear*("Atomic", A-bomb, fission bomb) attack; the standard position for *thermonuclear* ("Hydrogen", H-Bomb, fusion bomb) attack was "head between legs/kiss ass goodby".

Tim Leary always said growing up in the 1960's was like being raised in an insane asylum. Anybody remeber the movie "Pleasantville"?

I love that movie. Own it too.

I started school in 1950. Strangely enough, I do not remember any of the duck-and-cover drills from my school days, and only know about them because from the beginning they were mocked in the media as absurdly inadequate to deal with any real emergencies. If we had them, I would have remembered because I always thought it was great fun to pretend that a hurricane was coming and we had to get under the dining room table and stay away from windows when such weather was approaching. I DO remember fallout shelters for the backyard being sold, however, and how well into the 1960's the civil defense sirens were tested at noon and signs directing you to the (supposed) shelters were posted in large buildings. The attitude in this country nowdays about protecting the public is nonexistent. While Switzerland and China have completed massive projects to greatly increase their chances of survival, America outside the Mormon church would not even have a clue what to do or where to go. But fear not, this Administration has well provided for the protection of Dick Cheney, Congress and their families, and the nitwit in the White House who will probably be on vacation anyway should something befall us.

Living in D.C., the one thing that struck me about the attacks of 9/11 is that our government is impotent in an emergency. There were lots of sirens and lots of activity that day in DC, but nothing of any value was done (except by the Arlington County fire department and area hospitals.)

New Orleans simply reiterated that lesson.

I now have little more than disdain for my government's ability to do anything worthwhile in an emergency. Just assume there is no government when there is an emergency, and take care of yourself. You will be better off. How full is your pantry?

I don't recall the emergency drills other than fire drills. I spent a lot of my tad days in Catholic scool, so maybe that explains it . I reckon we just thought Mother Mary would handle it.... Not to mention St. Chris. But he got fired, didn't he? hmmmm...

Email, not ascribed to anyone. I'm too old to be writing about the 80s.
Yes, dial 4 digits in your own exchange, which in my case was the whole town. They didn't get a touch tone system until the late 90s. Although you could use a faux touch tone phone, data transmission was kaput. :smack:

One of the most fascinating things I've ever seen was in 1989 - an old telephone switch still in operation. At the time I worked in telecommunications and was working with various baby bells to upgrade their equipment. Every phone number came into the old switch building and terminated at a set of relays. The room was full of these relay sets. The old dial phones would activate these relays and a mechanical connection would be made. The room was loud with clicking relays.

These massive switch rooms previously replaced massive rooms of operators, who would help you make your call by actually plugging wires into jacks. The switches were a huge advance back in the day: "direct dial". People actually had to be educated in direct dialling and how NOT to use the operator.

Now, these switch rooms are replaced by silent computers which can make these connections at the speed of light. An entire room of switches replaced by, roughly, a desktop system.

All those hundreds of thousands of operators jobs are lost, but we are better off without them because it doesn't cost $20 to call Omaha for 5 minutes.

Think of the energy savings as well. I wonder what we do now that'll be seen as so obviously inefficient. Of course those relays were EMP resistant...

I suspect that's a perception that's reinforced by time spent in (or watching through the lens of media that originates in) urban centers, an ecological niche that cultivates a population that depends on the government to do everything for them and screams in abject victimhood when it doesn't.

I don't think it's a fair assessment of the US population as a whole. Folks I know in other areas are much more self-reliant.

I was born in '64. we did a LOT of tornado drills in the 70's.

That's so cool! Somehow my dad finagled a tour of the local teleco for my siblings and me back in the early '80s. We went into a switching room just like the one you describe. I was amazed that there was one switching machine that corresponded to each telephone line in my home town. The guy led us over to the mechanical switching machine for our phone number, but of course it was idle since we weren't at home placing a call.

I went on so many tours of places like that when I was a kid. A sardine packing factory in Maine was a real treat to see. They have little old ladies that pack those fish into the cans like that. Raw. Then they bake the can, and apply the lable.

Companies used to give tours back then. Now privacy issues and liability concerns mean that you can't get tours of anything. The few places that offer tours are really just trips to the gift shop.

Nope, my perception is based on a sister who has lived in Switzerland for 10 years and who is required by law to keep a fully stocked shelter in her basement. Then there is my cousin who is married to a Chinese national and travels back and forth frequently due to her job teaching at William and Mary College. Both countries started long ago on a system of public defense that is mind-boggling to American mentalities. The Swiss even have all those tunnels through the Alps set up to act as giant fallout shelters if necessary. This stems from being a country located inbetween historic adversaries who might launch attacks on each other over the top of Swiss heads. Sounds like foresight against the obvious to me, not dependence on the government. As for China, they have all the slave labor they need and even built the largest dam in the world by ordering women and children carrying woven baskets of dirt to do what we do with union workers on bulldozers for 1000 times the price. China got the very logical idea that either the US or Russia was going to end up attacking them one of these days, so when they started rebuilding all their cities they made sure the proper facilities were added underground. Chinese do not ask the government to take care of them, they have no choice in the matter.

So you are quite mistaken on this count. And may I ask, if the government is NOT required to take care of the population in this area, how do you think it will get done? For one thing, how would you suggest that private industry handle it? Sell timeshares?

despite my near complete lack of musical aptitude (although I can remember lyrics to songs after only hearing them once or twice, I only need to learn to carry a tune) I always wanted to start a group that only played fifties and sixties cover tunes and call it "Duck and Cover."

I just thought it was too obscure for most people. That and my afforementioned total lack of talent.
:(

Tonchi:

I have heard, and this may be one of those viscous rumors/urban legends that all those fallout shelters etc. we had in the US during the cold war (such as gymnasiums and school basements) weren't intended to help anyone survive the blast or firestorm, but rather created a tidy way of dealing with the inevitable, unmanagable population of rotting corpses. "Be calm and follow the signs pointing to your nearest mass grave."

That way when the folks in the really deep holes came out to salvage what they could, they wouldn't face the overwhelming pile of decay, it would be neatly below ground already.

It could have been just the P.O.V. of my hippy science teacher.