As'tWas: Columbus Day Typhoon and Cuban Missile Crisis 1962

Sometimes we find ourselves swept up on a 'current of events' that defines part of our outlook on life.  Such was the case for me in October of 1962.  It  was Columbus Day in Eugene, Oregon.  As I looked out across the street from my student desk anxiously awaiting to go home towards the end of the school day, I observed that the smoke from a chimney suddenly started to flow down the side of the chimney and curl on the ground.  Before I could ponder on this too long, an announcement over the school PA system told us to all go home early without delay.  Typhoon Freda, despite the previous assurances of the national weather services, had continued up the coast and was soon to be upon us.  

I lived only a mile away, and even though I hadn't 'dilly dallied' at all, I was being hammered by steady winds that forced me to walk leaning into the wind in order to not be bowled over before I was even a third the way home.  I pitied those who had to walk further than I did.  Soon after I got home, my father arrived and the winds had increased to the point that gusts had buffeted his truck such that he'd experienced sideways slippage on the wet roads.

During the night, the storm did its worst.  In the morning, with the sun shining, we climbed out through the front window of our apartment because the neighboring buildings' shingles were all stacked up in front of our door.  Trees everywhere were either mangled or laying on the ground.  The roof had been blown off of my school -- with 2x4s from it shot like arrows into the building across from the school like arrows.  A wall in an old folks home down the street had blown inwards and killed several unfortunates.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbus_Day_Storm_of_1962

I had a couple of weeks of staying home while the school was being repaired -- but it wasn't as enjoyable as it could have been.  The Cuban missile crisis was peaking before the school could be reopened.  And having  just experienced what a typhoon could do, I was all too aware of what a nuclear war could hold in store for all of us. [Four years prior, we'd been living in rural Idaho close to an air base and I'd spent one summer digging a deep hole in the ground to build a nuclear fallout shelter in.]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis