Cold War Oral History

So despite what mama Pugs told us, neither of my parents thought that they grew up during the cold war, so I had to do a rushed interview with my grandmother instead.

She was living in Southern California from the mid-50s on through the end of the war, and she said that the West Coast just seemed much less worried about impending doom than the East Coast.  I have never seen her worried about anything, and I could definitely see her shrugging off an alleged threat from halfway around the world.  The only way in which it affected her life was that when voting, her primary concern was attaining a lasting peace with the USSR.

Desperate to find something about Cold War paranoia, I asked about the weird cement foundation on their house in Portola Valley.  She told me that the people who had lived there before them had been insane about the war, and they had built a bomb shelter into the house.  They had a full food supply and independent gas lines and a generator, fearing the nuclear apocalypse.  But in general, the war didn't seem to worry her that much, and the only emotion I could get in the conversation was internally laughing at the crazy people who used to own their house.