#throwbackthursday
Trigger Warning! This is a series of posts about my personal experiences. It has nothing to do with self-defense, hand guns, or Personal Protection.
I recently watched an entertaining video by Joey B Toonz, an Idiocracy commentator on YouTube. It is titled Starbucks Employee Crying Over Having to Work. The young fella was upset about having so many customers and having to work a full 8 hours.
https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxyTKxPH-MPuYQ01wF8lTlXRYExkYwjUoY
It got me to thinking about the things that concerned me while I was his age growing up in Chicargo. Unlike the Greatest Generation, I didn’t have to walk seven miles through the snow to school, only one. However, one of the things we Boomers did grow up with was The Cold War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War and the accompanying specter of thermonuclear annihilation.
My Cold War memories in Chicargo
The Air Raid Sirens
My earliest memories of the thermonuclear specter are the air raid sirens that were tested mid-morning the first Tuesday of each month. I remember beginning to hear them around the time President Kennedy was assassinated when I was in Third Grade. Chicargo had many sirens, reportedly over 100, scattered throughout the city. The monthly tests continued long past when I joined the Army after I graduated from high school.
Probably once a year we would have an ‘Air Raid Drill’ at my elementary school. Because our classrooms had ‘cloak rooms’ where we hung our winter coats, we didn’t do “Duck and Cover.” We just all got up and went into the cloak room for a couple of minutes. In the case of an actual thermonuclear attack, we would have waited there for the building to be destroyed or completely set on fire by one or more 2.2 megaton thermonuclear explosions. More about the actual effects of what such an attack would have done to the city in a later post.
The loudest sirens were the Chrysler Victory sirens. They were marvels of engineering. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Air-Raid_Siren Power for the siren was supplied by a Chrysler Hemi 180 horsepower engine and it produced a wail of 138 decibels, which is similar to the sound of gunfire. Hearing protection was required to operate them just like shooting a gun. They were mounted atop tall buildings, fire stations, and other such places that would allow them to be heard for miles.
A marvelous website called Victory Siren http://stall.net/victorysiren/ has a great deal of information about the Chrysler sirens. There is a recording on it http://stall.net/victorysiren/wav/sound.htm that sounds eerily similar to what I recall of those days. It is Sound Clip #10 – Warning Signal.
“This is a recording of Harry Barry’s Detroit siren as heard five miles away. Although the siren was pointed in Harry’s direction, it was not visible over a ridge between the two distant points. The siren was mounted on a trailer and not at optimum height for sound coverage. At this distance it takes the siren sound about twenty-four seconds (same length of time as this clip) to travel from the siren to the listener. The siren volume was estimated to be 55 to 58 dB at this distance!”
Next week: The nuclear armed anti-aircraft missile batteries surrounding the City of Chicargo back then.
The entire Joey B Starbucks boi video is here. https://youtu.be/KYf8HLDwNhs
tacticalprofessor 
I remember a little about this, though I never knew any details of the sirens. What I do remember is from my first semester at college, Fall ‘62, when while I was eating dinner in the dorm Kennedy came on the speaker announcing the Cuban blockade. I figured nuclear war was a 50/50 proposition. I was mostly concerned for my family, since I was safely (?) at UI, and wanted them to go to our summer place in rural Michigan. My dad wouldn’t. It’s only a few years ago that we learned how close we came, that one Soviet submarine officer prevented a nuclear torpedo’s firing. Somewhere in Ukraine there’s another Russian officer.