COLD WAR KIDS

THE NUNS LIED.

In October 1962, those of us in the third grade at St. Peter’s School in Worcester, Massachusetts, noticed that we were being herded into the basement of the old school building every day. The basement was concrete, and it smelled of age and wet linoleum. It was also chilly, and yet with all of us milling around, the walls started to sweat anyway. It was a cold October that year.

Along about the fourth or fifth day of this, somebody asked the nuns what was going on. Not that we minded the break in the school day, but there seemed to be a weird kind of urgency in the way the sisters hustled us between the new school building and the