How I saved Poseyvile from the Bomb

In the third-grade, pal Billy and I were helping save Poseyville, Ind., from The Bomb. But the experience turned us both into cynics.

We didn’t know the word at that point, although in a flash of simultaneous recognition, we decided that most adults were totally full of it.

Surviving childhood was going to be a pained exercise in pretense, a requisite to believe the unbelievable.

But heeding adults on any matter of importance was not likely to make our lives better. In fact, cynicism is a trade that makes you both more informed and less happy with the knowledge.

Knowing about Santa’s identity makes you more informed that way.  Thinking you have the technique or secret for surviving a direct thermonuclear bomb blast on your block is comforting.

Childhood is a long process of finding that most of the comforting illusions of you childhood are not true. Who said knowledge is always a good thing?

Billy and I were crouched under our wooden school desks with our arms rightly wrapped around our heads. In this position, we would fend off the nuclear fireball about to engulf St. Francis Xavier parish.

Why the Russkies would wipe out Poseyville was not clearly understood because nuking Poseyville was mostly going to kill cows and thousands of watermelons still ripening in the fields.

It would also wipe out the several thousand of people in town. None of this bothered me particularly because I lived in Cynthiana, a little town a few miles away and only graced Poseyville as a visiting scholar.

People in Cynthiana didn't care much in a positive way for folks in Poseyville. Quite the contrary, in fact.

Or course, any Russkie nuke also would wipe out Sister Bridget’s third-grade class at Saint X, and that did concern me more directly. We were certain to meet doom at about 10:15 when our rote memorization of the Baltimore Catechism was all bringing us all closer to redemption.

The nuclear fireball — about 500 million degrees spurting forth in a gush of subatomic plasma — would vaporize the lovely brick church and dilapidated school, reduce the monkey bars on the playground to a pool of molten steel and all of us third-graders would become thin grease spots.

Billy and I both figured this out at the same time and started laughing, as we crouched with folded arms over head.

Hey, it was the 1950s.

If the nuns said hide under your desk to prevent nuclear annihilation, you hid.

But Billy and I knew as much about thermonuclear explosions as anyone in Poseyville, and certainly more than the nuns of St. Benedict who ran our joint. Our families both had the Encyclopedia Britannica.

From the “A”  volume under the category “Atomic bomb”, we had found the truth.

At first, we thought this hiding under our desks strategy was some form of Benedictine Order emergency management, probably ordered by the Vatican under the seal of papal infallibility. In those days, the nuns implied the pope was more or less in charge of everything.

We were wrong about that.

Billy and I did know for certain — based on reading of the Britannica — that we were going to be about as protected as bread is from becoming toast inside a 10,000-degree oven.

So, we asked ourselves, why would adults be so goofy?

Billy was smarter about this than I was.

Because they’re all dumbasses, he said.

Yeah, I thought at the time.

Plus that Santa Claus thing turned out to be a crock, didn’t it?

Thus was my career in journalism launched — mostly a cover for a life of cynical nosiness, late nights and pitiful pay.

To this day, each time I see vast amounts of money being spent on “disaster preparedness” for schools, the mind reels back to the pending arrival of the nuclear fireball.

Local schools go through the 21st century version of such education regularly. Some counties spend millions on “preparedness” which you’d think meant “survival” but does not.

Thousands are spent in earnest organization that will save local schools from everything from terrorism to chlorine spills to outbreaks of head lice.

Most plans eventually pose some variation of  duct-taping the entire school in case a tanker full of chlorine overturns on the adjacent highway.

Plug the windows, the vents, the doors, and just sit tight until help arrives.

Try not to breathe.

And if this doesn’t work, there will be several well-trained “grief counselors” arrayed to walk among the survivors, offering solace.


Personally, I don’t think it will work.

Making the students hide under their desks remains a more proven option. Under some forms of stress, I still feel the urge to hide under desks. I'm still here; so it must have worked.

At least it saved Poseyville from The Bomb, and has protected me from annihilaion ever since 1955.