OK, so I came up with some copy

It turned out not to be quite as difficult as I’d feared to make up some ad copy for my Cold War ephemera collection.  I only hope it sells, because I sure don’t want to keep the damned stuff; I lived through it once and that was quite enough.

While I was hunting up the best category for listing my item, I found to my astonishment that some military-surplus dealer had glommed onto and was selling a bunch of early ’70s radiation meters of exactly the sorts I remember using when I went through radiation monitor training.  And just what was a kid of thirteen or so doing in a Civil Defense radiation course, you ask?  (Of course you ask that.  Don’t be a bore.)  You see, my father was the county Civil Defense coordinator, and he allowed me to go along with him when he was giving courses to the volunteer fire departments in the area.  His rule was that if I could be ready to go when he hit the front door, I could go along.  This applied not only to CD training, but to Red Cross first aid courses (which he also gave), fires, tornado watching, and (later on) EMS runs as well.

And that was how I wound up doing all kinds of weird and exciting stuff not in your average teenager’s experience.  I turned out to be a great help with drownings, because my sinuses were so bad I generally couldn’t smell the body—which used to vex Dad no end, because his stomach would be turning over from the stench, and I’d be ready to finish the meal we’d had to abandon midway (for some reason, floater calls always seemed to come in at breakfast time).  The only time my sinuses let me down, so to speak, was the one time we had a burn case to deal with.  That stink got even to me, and I found out why you come home from working a burn death and throw every piece of clothing you had on into the trashcan.

The editorial department’s petunia will interview Don Rumsfeld at the Watergate Hotel.  Fnord.