Readers Remember

It was 1954, I was 6 years old and I lay in bed with my head under a pillow, hoping to silence the droning above me. It was common for private planes to fly over our home in La Crescenta, but I was convinced that every plane I heard was going to drop an atom bomb on us.

The constant threat of nuclear war filled my childhood with waking and sleeping nightmares. My father talked incessantly about building a bomb shelter, I’d shake under my school desk during the infamous duck and cover drills and, as an incessant reminder, a civil defense siren was mounted on a telephone pole directly behind my house. On the third Friday of each month it would release its horrifying wail and not even a pillow could drown it out.

JIM TROMBELLA

Santa Barbara

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I remember the day in 1942 at age 10, living in Salinas, when my mother could not explain to me why some officials took away my best friends Alice Udeda and Miyoka Hada and their parents to concentration camps for Japanese Americans. I remember one of their mothers giving me warm soup on a cold, rainy day, and today wonder if “we” gave them warm soup in their barbed wire camps.

I wish I knew where my fifth-grade playmates are today so that I could apologize to them and their families for what horror they must have endured by our unnecessary fears.

LORI OLSEN

Laguna Woods