Amidst potential radioactive fallout over major US cities, the American music industry in the 1950s, proposed its own soothing solution to the citizenry’s growing anxiety over 6-AM siren blasts, Duck and Cover routines in schools and President Eisenhower’s Civil Defense Program. Outposts of CD offices were open throughout the land to, hopefully, answer questions and quell public anxiety. There were several such locations in downtown Lowell.
A Dark Cloud of National Fear and Anxiety – Can R&R music make Americans safe?
The good and patient nuns, who were teaching a class of spirited boys and girls (thirty and more, sometimes) of ethnic and culturally distinct Franco-American children at l’Ecole Saint-Louis de France in Lowell’s Centralville school district, shared with all neighboring adults, the same depth of profound ignorance regarding the deadly blasts of neutrons, X-rays and gamma rays, which are associated with a nuclear device upon its detonation.
Of course, at ground zero, scientists at the Los Alamos Radiation Laboratory in New Mexico knew very well that the blast would locally generate temperatures exceeding 1000 decrees Centigrade with concomitant winds approaching hundredths of kilometers per hour.
Clearly, no known physical structure could sustain damages under these conditions. The fact of the matter is quite simple. There is no surviving an A-bomb or H-bomb attack if you happen to be living within the strike zone. The exact details are available in unclassified government documents, which are available to the public.
Early Space and Activities
Much was in flux as I reached even a child-like understanding of my small world in the 1940s, which basically included the French-Canadian version of Roman Catholicism, spoken French as taught in Quebec Province, the Pope in Rome, lower Centralville neighborhoods near the Merrimack River plus local architctural highlights like West 6th Street, Saint-Louis Church located on West 6th, the associated nuns and priests and the fire-station at Ennell and West 6th.
Of course, on a larger scale, there were also public figures like Lowell’s mayor, the archbishop in Boston and, naturally, the President of the USA.
However, my everyday life was centered on the corner of Ludlam and Dana streets where a grey, aging, three-story, multi-familyVictorean building proudly proclaimed its independence. That ground-floor tenement at 179 Ludlam Street nurtured the lives of my Mom and Dad, my brother Bob, my sister Michelle and, later, that of my sister Denise. Of course, I also learned much about life while living there.
Curiously, however, our family stay started back in Juanuary, 1945, just when the super-secret Manhattan Project located at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, LANL, was in its final test and evaluation stages. It, however, was many years later that I could appreciate the coincidence of these two semeengly unrelated events.
For us, however, all nestled in our quiet, lower-to-midde-class, mostly French-Canadian neighborhood, daily life in the days following the end of WWII returned to their pre-war activites such as: chores, empty hopes, languid, slow-moving drudgeries that the decadent, local textile industries still offered to the city’s labor force.
WIP – Work in Progress – more soon!
