The End of June (and the World)

The End of June (and the World)

June 30, 1946

In honor of the 100^th birthday

of Dr. Abraham Kremen›

born 17 June, 1905

W

hen you are nine years old, new words enter your vocabulary with unexpected power. One such word was “atoll.”  I’m not sure when I first heard the word. Perhaps in school, or possibly in the Movietone News of the Week that played in the theaters each Saturday, separating The Durango Kid from a Three Stooges Comedy. In any event there is no question that the word arose in the context of the exotic geography of the Pacific—the battleground in our war against Japan. For the whole of my eighth year our playground “skirmishes” were marked with cries of “banzai” and “kamikaze” as we imagined ourselves battling for Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

But in my ninth year, in the summer of 1946, the war with Japan was finished—had been for nearly a year—and peace had returned to our lives in Baltimore. For me, the most welcome measure of that peace was the increased frequency with which we could go to Patapsco State Park, nearly an hour by car from our home. On the afternoon of this memory—the last day of June—on the long and hot ride home, I was not at all calm. My mind was not on the forested area that bordered the Patapsco River. It was far away, conjuring as best I could a vision of the Bikini Atoll.

The road out of the park was dusty—clouds of fine brown dirt chased after us as we headed home. We called the car, and all cars, “the machine,” as in “Get in the machine. We’re going to the park.” This machine was Uncle Abe’s big black Oldsmobile. Uncle Abe was special in our extended family. He was married to my father’s sister—my Aunt Leona. My father was one of nine children, and most of my aunts and uncles lived in Baltimore. Family get-togethers were big and boisterous. Everyone was a storyteller, and the tellings were animated with laughter. My cousins and I would sit on the edge of the crowd and pretend we were not listening. Periodically, one of the wives of my father’s brothers would notice us and caution the speaker of the moment: “Not in front of the children.” And of course that got our attention.

But, back to Uncle Abe and the machine. He was special because he was so quiet. More than that, he was educated. HE WAS A DOCTOR! My father was a salesman. Uncle Nathan drove a taxi. Uncle Alec played the horses at Pimlico, although it was rumored that he worked in the clothing business as a cutter. I never did know what Uncle Albert did. Uncle David was an engineer, but no one really knew what that was, so he got no special attention for that. But Uncle Abe was an eye surgeon, and we all held him in special respect.

There was something else about Uncle Abe that was truly singular. He had served with the Army as a surgeon on the Mariana Islands in the Pacific. If the war had not ended the previous summer, he would have gone in with the troops in the invasion of Japan. But he got to come home instead. That was especially important to me that day, because I needed to ask him a question. I knew he would have the answer, because he had been on the island of Tinian, and we all knew that the Enola Gay took off from Tinian bound for Hiroshima.

With one last glance through the rear window at the road receding into the brown dust I turned and called over the tall seatback in front of me.

 “Uncle Abe?”

He looked into the rear view mirror but said nothing.

I asked, “Where’s Bikini Atoll?”

“In the Pacific. North of the Marianas,” came the reply.

“How far away is that?”

Abe answered, “It’s thousands of miles.”

I twisted around, got up on my knees and peered through the dusty rear window again. Abe pursued my silence. “You’re worried about the A-Bomb?”

It was more of a statement than a question. There had been newspaper articles all week. The fourth atomic bomb will be detonated at Bikini Atoll. It was a test, to measure its “effects.” It was not clear to me what effects were going to be measured. But the Baltimore Sun, and the neighborhood kids, were full of speculation. A scientist from Johns Hopkins said it would crack the earth open and all the molten lava would come up. Another predicted that the blast would set the earth’s atmosphere on fire.

Uncle Abe said, “I’ll put the radio on. Maybe they’ll have something about the test.”

As if on cue, an announcer was saying that the detonation of the bomb was just minutes away. No one else in the car seemed much concerned about the prospect of our instant incineration. My cousin Paula sat on one side of me, quietly reading a book. Her brother David was doing the same on my other side. Finally the announcer began a countdown, and at “Zero” we heard…nothing.

“What happened?” I asked.

Abe answered right away. “The bomb site is a few miles from the radio announcer. It takes time for the sound to get that far. And sure enough, there was the sudden crack of an explosion, followed by static for what seemed like a long time.

Again I asked, “What’s happening now?”

Abe simply said, “I don’t know. Maybe the station went off the air.”

Off the air?  Like incinerated?

The car started to feel hot inside. It looked like the dirt was blowing faster—chasing us. I remembered that when you see lightning, you count until you hear the thunder, and from that you could tell how far away the lightning is. I started to count, and I watched as the road receded from the back of the car. The ground hadn’t cracked yet, but I thought the air was beginning to glow red.

The car lurched as we pulled out of the dirt park road and turned onto the highway. Uncle Abe drove faster and the terror diminished slowly as we headed home.

I can still recall the feelings of the over-imaginative little boy. What remains, even stronger, though, is the feeling of safety in the big black Oldsmobile as Uncle Abe took us home.

Happy Birthday, Uncle Abe. Thanks for the ride.

The Enola Gay on Tinian, 1945