This is an interview of Jerry Wojciechowski, born 1939, and Linda Wojciechowski, born 1950, who both lived in the United States during the Cold War about the time period. They were asked the following 11 questions, their answers recorded and transcribed below.
Interviewed by: Cali Wojciechowski
1. How do you define the Cold War?
Linda: “I always thought of it as… It was already in progress when I was born. I was born in 1950. Or it was already in progress when I would’ve become aware of the world. So, I always thought it ended when the Berlin Wall came down.”
Jerry: “For me the Cold War began soon after the end of the second world war, when the Russians were trying to dominate things and when they restarted… when they blockaded Berlin and made it very difficult for all the Allies that were taking care of Berlin. That period of time probably lasted from 1949 all the way up to the time that the Berlin Wall came down, which was in the ‘80’s. The… It was always always a period of adjustment to try and keep the Russians and the Communist regimes from expanding.”
2.Do you remember when Sputnik was launched into space? What about it do you remember?
Linda: “I just remember that American citizens were like devastated when they launched Sputnik successfully, because all of our rockets were blowing up. That's what I remember, you know, and that is really what kicked our space program into high gear with President Kennedy, I think.”
Jerry: “Well Sputnik was launched and it was an immediate world wide event that sparked the interest of the American public and the American defense community and the Kennedy administration. And at that time it wasn’t Kennedy, it was the president before Kennedy, Eisenhower and really made for the United States to really get involved in the space research. Although they had been doing some stuff prior to that Sputnik was that little ball in the sky that really made things change. Changed the world when it came to outer space.”
3. Do you remember the landing on the moon? What about it do you remember?
Linda: “I remember waiting all day for this to happen. Then, you know, you’d sit and watch the television and wait and wait and wait for it finally to happen. And the whole family was there and it was really really really big event. And that was at a time when you didn’t have all day news but it was all day news that day.”
Jerry: “It was an event. I watched on television. I took pictures of it. It was such an outstanding achievement to have man really land on the moon. And it really happened.”
4. What memory from the Cold War do you have that strikes you the most?
Linda: “ There were people building bomb shelters at their houses. Not that many people did it, but when I was 12/13, that would have been in ‘62/‘63, we had a neighbor who built a bomb shelter in their basement. That’s something that paints a picture in my memory.”
Jerry: “They had a lot of drills. They also had a lot of times when they exploded nuclear weapons for testing programs. And I can remember one day where it was a Sunday afternoon, we were sitting in our home, and I had a white house that was next door to me. And during the entire day, the house changed colors because of the radiation that was in the air. It changed from a red to a blue to a yellow to a green and it was all due to the Strontium-90 that was in the air, because they did open air testing. They finally got away from it by doing it underground. At that time I lived in Buffalo [New York] and at that time, Strontium-90 used to effect cows. It affected their milk supply and milk stuff. So you could have babies drinking milk from cows like that.”
5. Did you fight in Vietnam? If not, do you anyone who did? Or do you what do you remember from it?
Linda: “My very good friend from high school who went to Vietnam. And he served there for about two years and he was killed in action. He was a radioman on a reconnaissance team. The other main thing I remember about it is that when I was in college there was an awful lot of guys that went to college just to avoid the draft, not because they particularly wanted to get the college education.”
Jerry: “The Vietnam War was really created by the Johnson administration. When he had the Bay of Tonkin situation, it was more of a put on thing to involve the United States into a war that really wasn’t a real war for us to fight because it really wasn’t anything against us. The war was a total… after awhile the American public got so disenchanted with the war that the protests that they started totally threw our nation into total disarray as for people who were for it and people against it. And if you just saw the program on the University of Kent State shooting, that was an output of this war going on because of the protests going on. And it lasted for like 8 years/10 years. It got worse as it went along.”
6. Did you have drills in case of bombings in your school and work places? What were they like?
Linda: “When I was in elementary school. I don’t remember it so much in high school. But I remember just being terrified when I was little that we were gonna have a bomb and going in the hallway. What was…. Was that gonna be enough protection? I was scared.”
Jerry: “We’d have demonstrations of how to protect ourselves in schools but when they showed pictures of the bomb blast and what it did to the buildings and everything else there was no sense really trying to sit down and protect yourself from that kind of disaster, because with the Hydrogen bomb it would kill 20 million people with one bomb blast. It would wipe out cities for 6/7/8 miles around them.When you get into that people start to think about what, what is the real purpose behind this training? And there wasn’t any.”
7. Were you ever frightened that the Soviets would attack America?
Linda: “We were always scared of the possibility. But I never like heard an airplane overhead and thought a bomb was coming so.”
Jerry: “Well, I talked about the clock [refers to the “Doomsday Clock”] that they had that made people think about the possibility of a nuclear war going on any time. And depending on different political situations that happened or disputes that happened, like the Cuban Missile Crisis or many other things that were in the… Russians walked into Czechoslovakia and took over Czechoslovakia again from the people, and the Polish uprisings, you never knew when the political creations could create a problem where the countries could go to war with each other. There was a constant threat, depending on circumstances that could happen at that time.”
8. What was your opinion of the Cuban Missile Crisis?
Linda: “I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis because it was very imminent that something could happen and very close to home. So yea, we felt very threatened by that.”
Jerry: “The Cuban Missile problem was a big deal when I was in the military. I was in the U.S. Coastguard. They were… started to move everybody from our… many of our ships to Florida to be operating small boats if we were going to have landing issues in Cuba. We waited to see what was going to happen. It was a, luckily it was a, quickly resolved situation where within several days of Kennedy putting the blockade on about the Russia delivering missiles to Cuba, that things resolved themselves rather abruptly and the Russian ships turned around and went back. Which is a wonderful thing, ‘cause we didn't go to war.”
9. Did the war affect your daily or personal life in anyway?
Linda: “I became interested in the space program as a teenager. I joined a civil air patrol where there’s a lot of aerospace education and the development of our space program which was part of our competitiveness with Russia. This was very important and very exciting for me. So, that was a positive impact it had on me.”
Jerry: “No I would say it didn't affect my family or life too much. I joined the military to do my military service and to help my country do what needed to be done, and serve my time into there. Got involved in many things that ended up being defense orientated, military usage of stuff like that and different jobs that I had that, because of the military defense complex. A lot of things changed the economy because of who had jobs, who didn’t have jobs, and the military, and the space program, involved a lot of things. So, really a lot of things happened that went from day to day you couldn’t see but they were doing… everything was happening.”
10. What was your opinion of Communism and Communists during this time period?
Linda: “We were the good guys. They were the bad guys.”
Jerry: “Well Communism had a very bad record as far as everybody in the world and it wasn’t a good system to live under. A democracy, which are still trying to develop through the world, and we haven’t been able to complete it because so many obstacles in its way, that you have to live with all the ‘ism’s in between communism and democracy. ‘Cause they’re all different. No two are alike. And you don’t know which ones people want to hear and which ones they want to follow. Communism is one system, the way we live with all kinds thats in the world today.”
11. Is there anything you weren't asked about from the Cold War you would like to talk about?
Linda: “I’m a child of the ‘60’s. My high school years were from 1962 to ‘68, it was a very tumultuous time. There was a lot of protest against the war that happened at that time. It was a very…. A lot of parents fighting with there kids over having long hair and the younger generation grew up opposed to a lot of things their parents did or stood for. I think that I remember the war protests more than anything. Although, I have to say I never went out and marched in a protest myself.”
Jerry: “Well the space program really created whole new industries in the world, created a whole new aspect of how we can live in our lives, communications, satellite for weather, everything else. Driving these things caused governments to expand money that they hadn't spent before that which lead to the breakdown of the communist society because they couldn't keep up with our spending money the way we did. And the only good thing we is… We have a lot of money to spend.”
Notes
*Any where a “...” occurs the speaker paused and recollected his/her thoughts then formed a new sentence
**There is omission of all stuttering, ‘um’s and ‘uh’s from the text
***If any grammar errors occurred, this is how they spoke and was transcribed it as truly to what they said as possible
****If any historical inaccuracies are found, again it was just recounting the information recorded
Interviewed by: Cali Wojciechowski
1. How do you define the Cold War?
Linda: “I always thought of it as… It was already in progress when I was born. I was born in 1950. Or it was already in progress when I would’ve become aware of the world. So, I always thought it ended when the Berlin Wall came down.”
Jerry: “For me the Cold War began soon after the end of the second world war, when the Russians were trying to dominate things and when they restarted… when they blockaded Berlin and made it very difficult for all the Allies that were taking care of Berlin. That period of time probably lasted from 1949 all the way up to the time that the Berlin Wall came down, which was in the ‘80’s. The… It was always always a period of adjustment to try and keep the Russians and the Communist regimes from expanding.”
2.Do you remember when Sputnik was launched into space? What about it do you remember?
Linda: “I just remember that American citizens were like devastated when they launched Sputnik successfully, because all of our rockets were blowing up. That's what I remember, you know, and that is really what kicked our space program into high gear with President Kennedy, I think.”
Jerry: “Well Sputnik was launched and it was an immediate world wide event that sparked the interest of the American public and the American defense community and the Kennedy administration. And at that time it wasn’t Kennedy, it was the president before Kennedy, Eisenhower and really made for the United States to really get involved in the space research. Although they had been doing some stuff prior to that Sputnik was that little ball in the sky that really made things change. Changed the world when it came to outer space.”
3. Do you remember the landing on the moon? What about it do you remember?
Linda: “I remember waiting all day for this to happen. Then, you know, you’d sit and watch the television and wait and wait and wait for it finally to happen. And the whole family was there and it was really really really big event. And that was at a time when you didn’t have all day news but it was all day news that day.”
Jerry: “It was an event. I watched on television. I took pictures of it. It was such an outstanding achievement to have man really land on the moon. And it really happened.”
4. What memory from the Cold War do you have that strikes you the most?
Linda: “ There were people building bomb shelters at their houses. Not that many people did it, but when I was 12/13, that would have been in ‘62/‘63, we had a neighbor who built a bomb shelter in their basement. That’s something that paints a picture in my memory.”
Jerry: “They had a lot of drills. They also had a lot of times when they exploded nuclear weapons for testing programs. And I can remember one day where it was a Sunday afternoon, we were sitting in our home, and I had a white house that was next door to me. And during the entire day, the house changed colors because of the radiation that was in the air. It changed from a red to a blue to a yellow to a green and it was all due to the Strontium-90 that was in the air, because they did open air testing. They finally got away from it by doing it underground. At that time I lived in Buffalo [New York] and at that time, Strontium-90 used to effect cows. It affected their milk supply and milk stuff. So you could have babies drinking milk from cows like that.”
5. Did you fight in Vietnam? If not, do you anyone who did? Or do you what do you remember from it?
Linda: “My very good friend from high school who went to Vietnam. And he served there for about two years and he was killed in action. He was a radioman on a reconnaissance team. The other main thing I remember about it is that when I was in college there was an awful lot of guys that went to college just to avoid the draft, not because they particularly wanted to get the college education.”
Jerry: “The Vietnam War was really created by the Johnson administration. When he had the Bay of Tonkin situation, it was more of a put on thing to involve the United States into a war that really wasn’t a real war for us to fight because it really wasn’t anything against us. The war was a total… after awhile the American public got so disenchanted with the war that the protests that they started totally threw our nation into total disarray as for people who were for it and people against it. And if you just saw the program on the University of Kent State shooting, that was an output of this war going on because of the protests going on. And it lasted for like 8 years/10 years. It got worse as it went along.”
6. Did you have drills in case of bombings in your school and work places? What were they like?
Linda: “When I was in elementary school. I don’t remember it so much in high school. But I remember just being terrified when I was little that we were gonna have a bomb and going in the hallway. What was…. Was that gonna be enough protection? I was scared.”
Jerry: “We’d have demonstrations of how to protect ourselves in schools but when they showed pictures of the bomb blast and what it did to the buildings and everything else there was no sense really trying to sit down and protect yourself from that kind of disaster, because with the Hydrogen bomb it would kill 20 million people with one bomb blast. It would wipe out cities for 6/7/8 miles around them.When you get into that people start to think about what, what is the real purpose behind this training? And there wasn’t any.”
7. Were you ever frightened that the Soviets would attack America?
Linda: “We were always scared of the possibility. But I never like heard an airplane overhead and thought a bomb was coming so.”
Jerry: “Well, I talked about the clock [refers to the “Doomsday Clock”] that they had that made people think about the possibility of a nuclear war going on any time. And depending on different political situations that happened or disputes that happened, like the Cuban Missile Crisis or many other things that were in the… Russians walked into Czechoslovakia and took over Czechoslovakia again from the people, and the Polish uprisings, you never knew when the political creations could create a problem where the countries could go to war with each other. There was a constant threat, depending on circumstances that could happen at that time.”
8. What was your opinion of the Cuban Missile Crisis?
Linda: “I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis because it was very imminent that something could happen and very close to home. So yea, we felt very threatened by that.”
Jerry: “The Cuban Missile problem was a big deal when I was in the military. I was in the U.S. Coastguard. They were… started to move everybody from our… many of our ships to Florida to be operating small boats if we were going to have landing issues in Cuba. We waited to see what was going to happen. It was a, luckily it was a, quickly resolved situation where within several days of Kennedy putting the blockade on about the Russia delivering missiles to Cuba, that things resolved themselves rather abruptly and the Russian ships turned around and went back. Which is a wonderful thing, ‘cause we didn't go to war.”
9. Did the war affect your daily or personal life in anyway?
Linda: “I became interested in the space program as a teenager. I joined a civil air patrol where there’s a lot of aerospace education and the development of our space program which was part of our competitiveness with Russia. This was very important and very exciting for me. So, that was a positive impact it had on me.”
Jerry: “No I would say it didn't affect my family or life too much. I joined the military to do my military service and to help my country do what needed to be done, and serve my time into there. Got involved in many things that ended up being defense orientated, military usage of stuff like that and different jobs that I had that, because of the military defense complex. A lot of things changed the economy because of who had jobs, who didn’t have jobs, and the military, and the space program, involved a lot of things. So, really a lot of things happened that went from day to day you couldn’t see but they were doing… everything was happening.”
10. What was your opinion of Communism and Communists during this time period?
Linda: “We were the good guys. They were the bad guys.”
Jerry: “Well Communism had a very bad record as far as everybody in the world and it wasn’t a good system to live under. A democracy, which are still trying to develop through the world, and we haven’t been able to complete it because so many obstacles in its way, that you have to live with all the ‘ism’s in between communism and democracy. ‘Cause they’re all different. No two are alike. And you don’t know which ones people want to hear and which ones they want to follow. Communism is one system, the way we live with all kinds thats in the world today.”
11. Is there anything you weren't asked about from the Cold War you would like to talk about?
Linda: “I’m a child of the ‘60’s. My high school years were from 1962 to ‘68, it was a very tumultuous time. There was a lot of protest against the war that happened at that time. It was a very…. A lot of parents fighting with there kids over having long hair and the younger generation grew up opposed to a lot of things their parents did or stood for. I think that I remember the war protests more than anything. Although, I have to say I never went out and marched in a protest myself.”
Jerry: “Well the space program really created whole new industries in the world, created a whole new aspect of how we can live in our lives, communications, satellite for weather, everything else. Driving these things caused governments to expand money that they hadn't spent before that which lead to the breakdown of the communist society because they couldn't keep up with our spending money the way we did. And the only good thing we is… We have a lot of money to spend.”
Notes
*Any where a “...” occurs the speaker paused and recollected his/her thoughts then formed a new sentence
**There is omission of all stuttering, ‘um’s and ‘uh’s from the text
***If any grammar errors occurred, this is how they spoke and was transcribed it as truly to what they said as possible
****If any historical inaccuracies are found, again it was just recounting the information recorded