I was 13 years old when John Kennedy faced down Nikita Khrushchev, during the Cuban Missle Crisis, and I lived about 12 miles north of the Florida State Line. For my entire life, up to that point, Emergency Preparedness - or as we called it then, Civil Defense - was a significant focus in the lives and education of school children in the American South, and those conditions shaped the minds and spirits of an entire generation of Southern children. We expected "The Bomb" to arrive any day, bringing with it TEOTWAWKI (the end of the world as we know it); and the fact of Soviet imperialism simply reinforced those expectations.
