Nuclear Friends and Family

“I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all.” - J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

There is no more confounding experience than being a participant in a school lockdown. The feelings of dread, anxiety, frustration, senselessness, insanity, anger, resignation and many, many other emotions attendant to such events apply almost equally to the real deal, which I’ve experienced on several fraught occasion, and drills, which I’ve been through countless times. In whatever form, lockdowns are now as ubiquitous as faculty meetings.

The lockdown became a thing, at least where I taught, several years into my career, probably about 2008. Prior to that, we had plenty of fire and earthquake drills, which for the most part involved some sort of evacuation — immediate or when the imagined shaking stopped. I suppose that with the horrific increase in school shootings, those who must consider such things figured that discharging hundreds of students out into the potential line of fire didn’t make much sense. So, they invented the lockdown.

At the time, I had a classroom with several odd architectural features. It had no windows that opened to the outside to let in light. Rather, the windows it did have opened above the school library and what light my room did take was filtered through some semi-transparent window-like features on the library’s exterior wall. While the ambiance was horrible, and knowing what time of day it was impossible, this architectural mess would prevent ninja invaders from swinging on ropes and crashing into my room through exterior windows. My students were only somewhat comforted in this knowledge, though they appreciated that I had their safety in mind when I explained this feature as we discussed disaster planning attendant to Room 214.

My room was the same depth as the school’s other classrooms but half again as long. As a result, it had two doors that opened to the main hallway serving the second floor. Two doors doubles the work a teacher much do in the event of a lockdown and increases the anxiety geometrically — or is it logarithmically? I don’t know, I taught English. When the lockdown order is given, which in our case was an administrator’s voice over the PA saying, “Code Red” there are well-rehearsed steps to follow. First, you instruct students in your room to get under the tables, out of sight of windows (which I had none) and doors (which I had two) and to stay silent. Then, you have to find your keys. The more we did these drills, the more keys became permanently affixed to our persons (along with personal panic buttons, but that is a later story). My next job was to rush into the hallway, check the bathrooms across the corridor, and exhort any stray students to immediately seek refuge in a nearby room, which are now being locked frantically. If you know anything about a high school campus, there is generally a constant stream of students slow-walking between the bathroom and where they are supposed to be.

With the halls clear, I race back across the hall, lock both of my doors, and get under my desk, and immediately worry if I have, indeed, locked both of my doors. You are then supposed to take roll, which was easy enough when attendance was taken on paper sheets — a simple tick mark worked fine. The brains behind electronic attendance didn’t account for lockdown roll-taking. More to the point, you are supposed to refrain from noise-making and light-generating activities. So, you try to look across the darkened floor and ascertain who in this particular period is supposed to be there, who is not, and what strays have joined you.

Some students really step up. One in particular, an otherwise silent ninth grade boy with long stringy hair, whose name I have long-since forgotten but will call Zach, with a wardrobe alternating between vintage Led Zeppelin and Lynard Skynard t-shirts, and who is an absolutely lousy English student, takes his position next to the door. His is brandishing some sort of weapon, a broom maybe, in his reed-like arms. “I’ve got your back, Mr. P.” This is maybe the second thing he has said in class all year. I am only somewhat comforted.

We teach students to be assertive questioners. Seconds after assuming the lockdown position and getting as close to silent as possible with 25 high school students, someone asks, “Is this real or a drill?”

Y ou mentally try to sort through the crap that has filled your mailbox, endless emails and whatever announcements were made at the last staff meeting to determine if this is a drill or not. The tone of the “Code Red” announcement sounded urgent, as does the running outside in the hallway and aggressive rattling of door handles to see if classrooms are locked.

You really don’t know for sure, but miraculously respond as the adult in the room, “Whatever the case, we need to treat this as if it is real.” That buys another minute of silence.

The cell phones come out, illuminating the dirty tile floor on which we are all sitting or lying. I know this is against some lockdown protocol, but social media prohibition is always fruitless, especially now. Besides, it provides an invaluable window into lockdown behavior.

Some students are texting their mothers. We later learn that a cadre of mothers immediately assemble on the median outside the school. I understand the concern, but wonder if bringing more people into such circumstances makes a lot of sense. Perhaps the mothers are well armed.

Other students are texting friends throughout the school. This gets interesting.

Ms. So and So is losing it.

Mr. Blah Blah keeps opening the door to look out into the hallway.

They are peeing in graduated cylinders in the chemistry room.

Several math teachers continue teaching. How typical.

If the damn math teachers are at still at it I wonder if we should continue our discussion about symbolism in Catcher in the Rye, just more quietly and from our prone and supine orientations. We’ve got 45 more minutes of class and if this thing isn’t resolved soon, we could be here for hours. For the time being, it sounds calm outside. Even a bad literary discussion would be better than lying here trying not to imagine what is really going on.

Symbolism is tricky concept for some, I think, often hard to differentiate between metaphor and motif, terms we English teachers throw around interchangeably and as if we understand them. I think about modeling how I approach the titular symbol in the book, remembering some facet of otherwise useless teacher training where experienced readers should talk aloud about their reading process as a means of bringing along their more tentative apprentices. I remember that in my mind I never see Holden actually catching any of these innocent children running through the rye. Rather, I see hordes of children, lemmings really, arms flailing, rushing headlong toward and then over the precipice. Holden is at once helpless and useless. My indelible image, which I am certain is not what Salinger had in mind, is a bad mashup of Alfred Hitchcock, David Attenborough and Quentin Tarantino or maybe Sam Peckinpah. Still, it’s my image and literary interpretation, however ill-conceived, is a very personal matter.

As I clear my throat and start to explain my symbolic interpretation, we thankfully hear a key in the door, and the calm, reassuring voice of an assistant principal saying, “All clear.”

. . .

My maternal grandmother, Muriel Chapman, who we called “Mimi,” was widowed at age 58 in 1965. I was eight when my grandfather, Rowland, died of a heart attack. My grandparents were central to my early life and I can trace my earliest political awareness to moments in their care. I was staying with them in 1963 when JFK was assassinated. Mimi picked me up early from first grade. When I see John John Kennedy saluting his father’s funeral cortege, the image is on my grandparent’s console TV and I am sitting at their feet, hearing them cry and trying to sort out what on earth is happening.

In these simpler times, which I still see in black and white, I think we generally believed what our government told us, and certainly what Walter Cronkite reported. So, when our teachers explained the best way to survive a nuclear attack we listened without question, and then returned to multiplication tables, history devoid of meaningful context (and truth) and singing “Dixie,” which we all learned as a perfectly appropriate patriotic song.

Several years after my grandfather died, an old beau started circling around Mimi. His name — well, really his title — was Rear Admiral Robert S. Quackenbush, U.S. Navy, Retired. Mimi called him Bob. Her family called him the Admiral, at least behind his back. As best anyone can figure, Mimi must have met him as a young woman, perhaps when she was in college, and when he was in the Bay Area as a Naval Cadet. He graduated from Annapolis in 1927. Muriel and Rowland married in 1928. Mimi was a 20-year-old bride.

The Admiral was kind of a big deal. In the Navy his champion was Fleet Admiral William “Bull” Halsey, who is associated with every important Pacific naval battle of World War II. In addition to being a naval aviator, Admiral Quackenbush became a skilled photographer and photographic interpreter. In was in his role as photographer that Quackenbush shined. He ran photo services for the U.S. Navy in World War II, leading a group called “Quackenbush’s Gypsies” that traveled the Pacific shooting whatever they wanted. I suppose when Halsey or Nimitz or Spruance needed a heroic photograph, Quackenbush or one of his charges was there, with lots of fresh film. Following the war, Quackenbush ran photographic interpretation for the Navy and shot historic events, like the Bikini Atomic Tests and Antarctic expeditions with Admiral Byrd.

In retirement, he worked for Polaroid Corporation in some sort of liaison capacity. I’d like to think this involved interesting or artistic endeavors like introducing Andy Warhol to Polaroid cameras. I fear, however, that he probably convinced the Armed Services and other federal agencies that they needed lots of Polaroid products, especially expensive film.

It was during his Polaroid years, the late 1960s, that the Admiral and Mimi rekindled their relationship. I don’t know who initiated the contact, but suspect that the Admiral must have learned of my grandfather’s death and reached out in writing or on a trip to the West Coast. I was too young to understand what was happening. My aunt Patty, Mimi’s youngest child, remembers her mother enjoying the attention, describing her as downright giddy. Who wouldn’t? Mimi was a very attractive, very social woman who had been alone for more than five years. Besides, there was the whole “Officer and a Gentleman” thing.

While the Admiral pressed the standard courtship buttons of attention and flattery with Mimi, he worked the schwag angle with the family. The adults all got fancy Polaroid cameras and an unlimited supply of ridiculously expensive film. The grandchildren were supplied with Annapolis gear; there are pictures of us all in our Naval Academy sweatshirts. As the oldest, probably ten or eleven I could articulate my interests, which included space exploration. I received an endless supply of official NASA photographs —Apollo astronauts, space missions, lunar images. I also recall being given a small black and white photo of “Mt. Quackenbush” — an 8,000-foot peak in the Antarctic. I am not sure how much capital these items got me with my contemporaries. We didn’t think of going to the Antarctic and if we did, we likely were not going to do much mountain climbing. The Admiral’s calculation was obviously that I would more forcefully lobby Mimi on his behalf. I didn’t understand the concept of pimping at the time and really don’t think I was ever asked by Mimi to offer my opinion on the Admiral.

My father was unequivocal. The Admiral was a windbag. He was also an environmental menace. It is hard to remember in today’s digital photography era how much waste Polaroid cameras generated. The film packs were encased in foil packs. Each exposure produced pull tabs and chemical-laden paper backings. I remember foul-smelling image fixers in disposable plastic bottles and lots and lots of flashbulbs. One Easter, the Admiral photographed our family celebration. My father said it took him years to find all the Polaroid garbage the Admiral flung into the garden.

Like so many love stories, there was one tragic flaw. The Admiral was married. Though he professed it to be a loveless relationship that that my grandmother was the end all and be all, Mimi did not see herself in that sort of a relationship. Hostile phone calls from the Admiral’s wife didn’t help matters, I have since learned.

The Admiral tried one last heroic gesture to win Mimi’s heart. Honestly, I don’t know that to be the case at all, but I like to see myself as the mechanism through which he would attempt one last Hail Mary, or whatever the Navy boys called their last-ditch efforts. The Admiral offered to provide the entertainment for my eleventh birthday party. You’re likely asking what could a retired Navy admiral possibly provide of interest to a group of pre-teen boys? A tour of a ship? A ride in a fighter jet? Wrong on both counts.

The Admiral offered a private viewing —following presents, cake and ice cream — of previously classified U.S. Navy Photographic Service footage of the Atomic Bomb Tests at Bikini Atoll — all shot on glorious 16-millimeter color film and at considerable expense to the American taxpayer. This was not going to be just some home movies of the initial test, but the Full Monte of Cold War excess — the greatest hits of detonations from 1946 to 1954. We would see what only a handful had witnessed, from Operation Crossroads to Baker to Redwing to Hardtack. Had we known it at the time, I am sure my mother would have used Nobel Laureate Glenn Seaborg’s description of Operation Baker as the “world’s first nuclear disaster” on the party invitations.

Upon reflection fifty years later, it is hard to imagine that the Admiral’s film would have been much of a draw. Perhaps I sold it as a war film that my friends would be among a very few privileged souls to ever see. Maybe they would have come anyway because they liked me and the movie was secondary. I think I am accurate to note that at that time, smack dab in the middle of the Cold War, we all had a very different feeling about nuclear weapons and the potential for our individual and collective annihilation. For the most part, we were blissfully uninformed and trusted what our government told us. There were certainly chinks in the armor in 1968, especially from a Civil Rights perspective. My eleventh birthday predates the ugly Democratic Convention, most of the bloody confrontations over the Vietnam War and the confidence-shattering Watergate mess. Though many very public upheavals were happening just minutes from my Bay Area home, Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” essay was not yet being read by most fifth graders.

So, as a white boy, growing up in a privileged, all-white environment, for the most part we believed in the party line and trusted authority. If the authority was Miss Morrison, our young, attractive, blonde-haired fifth-grade teacher showing a government-produced filmstrip on surviving nuclear fallout and then telling you to get under your desks and “duck and cover,” we ducked and covered. We were convinced that Miss Morrison had our safety and best interests at heart. Never mind that ducking and covering would do little to counter the impact of super-heated nuclear winds incinerating thirty compliant fifth graders (along with the balance of the student body and neighbors for miles in all directions) of Wade Thomas School.

T he Admiral must have really talked up his film, or its viewing solved a major problem for my parents as to how to celebrate my birthday. Whatever the reason, it motivated my father to rent a 16-millimeter movie projector — the exact same Bell and Howell model we had at school. As a certified AV geek, we all knew that the secret to threading a Bell and Howell is to keep the film tight against the sound drum. I can’t solve for x to save my life, but I can still thread a 16-millimeter movie projector.

On the morning of my party, a uniformed Naval officer delivered the film to our house and made my mother sign for it. It was two full-length film reels in nesting boxes all lashed up with crisscrossing canvas straps. Very military. I imagine the officer drove it over from Naval Air Station Alameda, just across the bay from my house. In my mind, I see the Admiral calling up (on a secure line) some subordinate at the Pentagon who dispatches the film from a vault, onto a series of expensive, taxpayer-funded flights. The film bundle is handcuffed to an officer’s wrist as it circumnavigates the globe, making the final leg from Diego Garcia to NAS Alameda on a P3 Orion submarine hunter. It most likely came via Greyhound Bus or the U.S. Mail.

As best I can recall, the party was typical — half a dozen fifth or sixth grade boys, eating hot dogs, cake and ice cream, followed by some sort of present opening. The guest list is murky, save for a few attendees — my lifelong friend and neighbor, Ross Perry; Gary Domer, a good pal at the time; and Mark Katkov, a family friend who was a year older, and already reading Foreign Affairs as a sixth grader. Mark was there as much for interest in the subject matter as anything else. I am confident my brother, Charlie, would have been at there as well. At the time, he would have been four or five years old. I know there were more guests; I just can’t remember who.

My parents were there as was Mimi. There was likely another parent or two. Interestingly, the Admiral was not in attendance. I infer that at this point in his relationship with Mimi it was harder and harder for him to get a pass from his wife to travel west. It is certain that when we were enjoying cake and ice cream, the adults were drinking. My parents enjoyed “martinis,” which were really lots and lots of cheap vodka over ice — they had given up any sort of drink mixing ritual, including vermouth, by this point in their illustrious alcohol careers. Mimi drank Scotch and water, always saying, “light on the Scotch, dear.”

Our living room was transformed into an intimate theater, with the rented screen at one end and dining room chairs as seating. My birthday is in June, so I know the shades and drapes were drawn to darken the room — something that rarely happened. The boys sat in the chairs, the adults stood in the rear of the theater so they could sneak out periodically to freshen their drinks in the kitchen.

Earlier in the day, I had I helped my father thread the first reel of the film onto the projector, making certain it was indeed tight over the sound drum. The lights were darkened and from the projector, my father made a brief introduction noting “how lucky we all were to see a part of history that few would ever see. Thanks to the generosity of a special friend of Mimi’s, here is a movie about testing atomic bombs.” With that, that familiar whirr of the Bell and Howell started and the blotchy countdown illuminated the screen.

I recall, based on actual and fabricated memories, that there was a few minutes of introduction — some background on the atomic test program, glamour shots of the Marshall Islands, footage of the careful preparations of the blast site and the massive scientific undertaking to study the events. This was all narrated in a typically heroic fashion. After this introduction, which was not of particular interest to any of us, the scientists, sailors and other dignitaries put on their protective eyewear and the real fun began.

What the film lacked in any narrative appeal, the U.S. Navy more than made up for in detonations per minute. Explosion after explosion filled the screen, shot from sea-level, from fixed wing aircraft, and probably from helicopters and airships, too. There were reverse angles and cutaways, and probably some smash cuts and star wipes that some hip, young Navy filmmakers tossed in for fun. Each detonation would yield a mushroom cloud, bigger and more glorious than the last. Unlike most commercial films where the final point is brought home with a fully-formed mushroom cloud, this version held the shot and then showed the aftermath of super-heated, radioactive water falling back to the once-pristine atoll. It was nuclear porn on an epic scale and it was as loud as any Irwin Allen disaster flick.

What the film lacked, I remember, were the iconic shots of goggled men watching the scenes intently as their faces are illuminated by dangerously bright nuclear flashes or test structures being obliterated by forge-hot winds. By the time they started tests in the Nevada desert the military must have hired a new director who injected more human elements into the carnage.

By this point in the film, probably only about fifteen minutes in, my friends and I were supplying the horrified looks. We sat there in stunned silence, jaws agape, having gotten the point that these weapons were beyond powerful. My parents and other adults were circling in an out of the theater, increasingly medicated and largely unaware of the psychic damage unfolding at my birthday party.

Gary Domer was the first to crack. I don’t know how it happened exactly — whether some adult noticed him in tears or if he had sought solace in the kitchen. Whatever the case, my father returned to the theater, watched for a moment, and then realized how horribly things were going. He stopped the projector, said something like “I think we’ve seen enough of that.”

There is nothing more maudlin than the aftermath of a party, especially one that ends so poorly. Somebody who probably shouldn’t have drove Gary Domer home. Ross Perry excused himself and ran home down the street. It was all over so quickly.

I have an indelible image of the quiet projector sitting there, just an inch or two of film run off of the main reel and a like amount on the take-up reel. I knew how to rewind a completed film; I didn’t know what to do about one abandoned mid reel. I didn’t think I’d be watching it alone with my dad.

Though I can’t be sure, and am likely putting myself too much at the center of the story, I don’t think we ever heard much more from the Admiral.

. . .

I spent the last half of my teaching career in a classroom on the main floor of Albany High School, Room 109. I moved downstairs to share a huge room with a teacher with whom I co-taught classes technical education from time to time. We were and continue to be good friends, too. Other teachers didn’t want the room because it was so close to the prying eyes of the administrators. Oddly, I always thought it was the administrator’s responsibility to see what’s actually going on in classrooms.

By this time, I learned that making kids feel safe was as big a part of my job as trying to impart any academic content. For teenagers, safety often means treating them like adults and listening to whatever was troubling them or bringing them joy. It also meant making your room available to kids who had no other place to eat their lunch or for clubs, however weird, that could not find a teacher to sponsor them.

Of course, safety also meant the physical kind. A new room required a whole new set of lockdown protocols. I only had one door now, but it opened up to the main hallway and was just feet from the front entrance. So, locking it was imperative. I now had a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows that opened up to the courtyard. Ninjas wouldn’t even need ropes to swing in on — they could easily launch themselves in at ground level or drive their high-performance motorcycles through the tempered glass. By this time, every teacher was wearing a panic device on a lanyard. I recall one button signaled some sort of localized problem, another called for a school lockdown, and the right combination of buttons directed an air strike with conventional weapons. Albany is a nuclear free zone.

Lockdowns — drills and the real deal — were no less frequent. Students and staff were far more experienced, if not callous, to the whole process. We had all watched horror after horror unfold in our newspapers, on our TVs and now on our phones. Politicians told us that their thoughts and prayers are with the families of Sandy Hook and Marjory Stoneman Douglas and Virginia Tech and Oikos University and…

So, you are there on the floor in the dark with thirty high school seniors. It’s the time of year when college sweatshirts are regular apparel for those fortunate enough to make such a decision. Those who for academic, family or financial circumstances are looking at community college or work or the military keep their plans to themselves. A new volunteer, likely in a Ramones tee-shirt, has taken up the sentry position by the single door brandishing the same broom. He nods at me in silent confidence. His arms are skinnier than Zach’s.

I think about reminding my students that should we be directed to evacuate we assemble on the lawn next to the Memorial Building. I wonder if I should talk quietly about the ninjas or if the chemistry students making use of the glassware or the math teachers trying to cram one more problem into already full brains. I stay silent.

I hope I can catch them all. I know I can’t. I pray I won’t be asked to.

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