I grew up in the shadow of the H-bomb. When I went to the movies, there was a cartoon, a trailer, and the news. The news was big, as big as the movie screen. In black and white there were images from Hiroshima, of atomic bomb testing, of mushroom clouds.

At times, I looked to the horizon watching for a mushroom cloud. I thought about shelter, about radiation, about contamination, about dying of radiation disease. WWII was still so much with me that at night if I heard an airplane and woke up, I still went to the window to see if German paratroopers were descending from the sky. I knew about paratroopers because of the newsreels but also because there was an airbase close to town and once a year they held an air force day.