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Tucson’s Catalina High School opened its doors in 1957. The facility was done in the latest mid-century style of curving Brutalist brick walls and angular light fixtures, state-of-the-art HVAC, and acoustic tiles in all the classrooms. Even the teachers were of that mid-century “best and brightest” mold: idealistic and young, college-educated and caring.
By the time I enrolled in 1979, the school was starting to fall apart and only a few of the original teaching staff remained. There were some fine teachers among them (especially my journalism teacher J.G. Carlton), but there were some crazies, too. Aaron Sulman, a history teacher who sported brightly-colored sta-prest pants pulled up to his armpits and was obsessed with Nazi Germany; Edgar Zaharia, the chain-smoking former Army officer who hated the Kennedys with intense passion because Jackie made him “walk her fucking dogs.”
And the zaniest of all, driver’s education teacher Clyde Ivan Phillips.
Clyde was a man obsessed with Ford Mustangs, nuclear war, and bees. He believed in preparation. He wore heavy medical bracelets that specified his bee allergy, he carried antivenom (the precursor to the EpiPen) in a small flask around his neck. My friend Wes talked a beekeeping friend out of a spare queen and set her in a gallon sun tea jar, resulting in a cubic foot of live bees buzzing and squirming under clear glass. During the lunch hour, Wes and a fellow wag set the jar on Clyde’s desk. When Clyde saw this he was so rattled that he didn’t come in for a week, and when he reappeared he’d somewhat reinvented himself with a bold new toupee (seen in the above photo).
Clyde had numerous peccadillos. He always called motorcycles murdercycles and referred to the riders as “organ donors.” His middle name was Ivan and he always introduced himself as “Clyde Ivan Phillips,” never neglecting to add “but I’m no Commie.” If you neatly typed your essay and put it in a three-ring binder, it was an instant A no matter what the content. Wes typed an article from Dear Abby, making sure to include a few figures such as “110%” for Clyde to circle with red pen. He used a hole punch and binder even some of those transparent plastic sleeves. A+.
These eccentricities paled in comparison to his obsession with the Cold War. He taught his classes in the bomb shelter. We’d descend a steel staircase to a cavernous room beneath the shop building, the row of desks made pale and forbidding by the fluorescent lights.
On the concrete wall was a giant map of the US with the blast radius of primary targets (circa 1960). Clyde told us that each of his four Mustangs had at least a half tank of gas at all times. “That’s to get me out of the blast zone,” he’d say, tapping the map. “Make it as far as Globe.”
It turned out that Clyde was the best history teacher at the school, albeit inadvertently. Clyde’s history was real. In his Cold War fervor, he preserved things such as the boxed Civil Defense survival biscuits and cans of water, at one time fighting the custodians who tried to dispose of the weevil-infested boxes. Clyde rescued them from the dumpster and brought them back down the stairs. They stood in the back of the classroom, ready for the end of the world.
Once, we opened a box and gazed at the waxy parcels packed in the cardboard. I took one of them out and with some difficulty unwrapped it. We passed the biscuits around. Supposedly three of them contained all the nutrients that you would need to remain alive during the months-long fallout period. I took a bite. It tasted like a graham cracker made from chemical-saturated sawdust. Starvation might be preferable.
Clyde had also saved stacks of the government-issued little cards for surviving families to send in after they emerged from the shelters. I surmise this was so the IRS could keep track of the remaining taxpayers. I have a couple of these cards on my refrigerator now. They look brand new. Perhaps the paper, like the survival biscuits, is heavily saturated in preservatives.
By far the best part of Clyde’s collection was his trove of Civil Defense movies from the fifties. Duck and Cover, Life in the Fallout Shelter, The House in the Middle, and many others. They’d made and distributed many more of these movies than most people know about, and Clyde had kept them all. He showed them earnestly, often commenting that the information might well save our lives. Living history, intentional or not.
Clyde saw these movies as a mere prelude to the brutal driver’s ed films like Red Asphalt and Signal 30. He liked to tease the class with the upcoming movie Friday, telling us “You like scary movies? Well, you haven’t seen anything. Last year I had a girl faint in class. That’s a scary movie you won’t forget!”
His favorites were the Highway Safety Films, most of which were captured by vulture-like amateur cinematographers who listened to police scanners, first on the scene of gruesome accidents to capture forever the sad story of the decapitated passenger, the driver with the steering column through his chest, the burned-up kids in the back seat. Many of these were in black and white, but some were in color. Clyde wasn’t kidding. I still remember them.
The climax of Clyde’s class was when we were taken to the bomb shelter annex and allowed to use the 1950s-era driving simulators (which Clyde called “stimulators”). They were time machines. We’d sit behind the 1950s car consoles watching a film of 1960s America where kids with balls ran out in front of us. The films were so old and scratchy, and some of the reels had been spliced so that they were out of sync with the analog computer that tracked our reactions on rolls of paper. Turn right. Apply brake. Shift.
Tucson was the home of Davis-Monthan AFB, Fort Huachuca, Hughes Aircraft (who made missiles and guidance systems), Hamilton Aviation, and a host of other military targets. The juiciest of all were the thirteen Titan II ICBM silos that ringed the city, each one capable of first- or second-strike attacks that would incinerate cities across the Soviet Union.
When these weapons were decommissioned in the late 1980s, some people got together and turned one of the siloes into a museum complete with an empty Titan missile. They gave tours where you went through the sally port security gate and walked down a long steel staircase shock-mounted on springs and through a series of blast doors to the control room. They’d reacquired most of the equipment so the room looked like the set of Dr. Strangelove. After walking us around the place, looking into the silo at the towering missile, they took us through a simulated launch, saying “this is the sound nobody wanted to hear.”
DEFCON ONE.
To call it chilling is an understatement.
When I was growing up the city conducted twice-weekly tests of air raid sirens. The speakers were mounted on pylons set every half-mile or so. During the test, the sirens would start up a mournful wailing like giant coyotes, one joining another until the whole valley throbbed with the sound. This lasted a full two minutes, and then they would fade out in unison, the sound dying the same way the television picture faded to a tiny dot.
My dad was frank with me about what they were, and even more honest about our chances in the event of a nuclear war: zero. I’ve always been interested in aircraft and weapons, so sometimes we’d talk about the planes and rockets that would be involved in such an event. We used to go to the Pima Air Museum adjacent to the USAF boneyard and look at all the mothballed planes. There was a handful of B-29s leftover from WW2, but most of what they had were F-4s, B-52s, A-6s, and A-7s, and a few of the also-rans like the B-58 Hustler. All of them stood wing to wing, the Plexiglas canopies milky from the desert sun.
One time when the sirens went off I walked to the corner of the vacant lot next to my house on Palomar Drive and stared at the siren tower. I tried to imagine what it would be like if (when) the real thing happened.
Would there be lights streaking down from the sky? Would traffic stop?
And most important: would it hurt?
In the 70s and 80s, we had gotten past the bomb-shelter phase of American culture. People had no illusions of surviving a nuclear war. When The Day After aired in 1983, it drove the nail in the coffin for all but the most hardcore preppers (and of course the Mormons, who seem to view Armageddon as some kind of epic Christmas).
What took its place was a jaded fuck-it-all cynicism. Reagan pretended to be a tough guy and a war hero, and Americans lapped it up. He wanted a war so badly he made up two of them, Noriega and Grenada. George HW Bush, who flew TBFs in the war and faced death before becoming a murderous cog in the CIA, did him one better with the made-for-TV Gulf War. Gorbachev opened the Soviet Union and set Eastern Europe free with fire-sale rapidity, the Berlin Wall came down almost as fast as it went up, and it seemed that we might avoid nuclear holocaust altogether.
Pop culture celebrated its victory with a Billy Joel video.
But weirdly in this time of hope, my cynicism only grew deeper.
Reagan was Donald Regan’s cue card reader, George HW Bush a tool of the state who sold what soul he had for political gain, Clinton a slick opportunist in the mold of Huey Long but minus the socialism. And then there was W, who reminded me of Catalina’s inarticulate football coach who taught government and also drank from his flask at games.
Nothing surprised me save the credulity of people who took these things at face value. I viewed the election of Trump as a logical end to what had been happening for years. I expected it.
We’re at the point where corporations are the supreme beings, the worst capitalist impulses now the nation’s foundational creed because profiteering has morphed into a spiritual principle. Small towns grow increasingly conservative as the downtowns board up their stores and people shop at Amazon, Walmart, the Dollar Store, chain restaurants, and chain service stations. Their paltry spending money is funneled to the same handful of bastards who own everything and pay no taxes, the same people who dictate the laws nominally designed to protect citizens from environmental catastrophe, poverty, sickness, and starvation but actually perpetuate all of the above on an unimaginable scale
My wife is a hopeful person. In a neighborhood where most of the houses have a stagnant poison-soaked lawn of Kentucky bluegrass, she planted a pollinator garden of local weeds and flowers. She reads the news just as I do, follows the same stories, yet she is still able to retain a belief that somehow we’ll survive this. Somehow our gracious humanity will prevail and we’ll figure a way out of this. She gets upset when I reveal my feelings to the contrary.
I don’t know. Maybe growing up surrounded by the silos hardened me against hope. Or maybe it’s that my hope has nothing to do with the survival of humanity. It hasn’t impressed me much. There are exceptions, of course. John Coltrane, Adrienne Rich, John Singer Sargent, Bernie Sanders.
This is such a beautiful and complex planet, yet so few seem to value it. There are so many lovely moments, yet anger and hatred seem to spread without effort. People are thoughtless and cruel, rude and mean-spirited.
Maybe they don’t mean to be.
Maybe they grew up among their own silos that hardened them against hope.
As Cormac McCarthy wrote, “A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.”