Some of the most fun I had as a kid was when I had enough money on me to buy a water pistol. Neighborhood kids in Rialto, California, had fabulous water-pistol fights back in elementary-school days.
Not just fun, the pistols were safe. No danger of poking out an eye. I guess that’s why mom and dad never bought a bb gun for me. They didn’t want to see a neighborhood kid lose a eye due to a badly aimed shot by me.
A friend, though, had a bb gun. I’d go to his house and we’d shoot at birds. Thank goodness we never nailed one.
Water pistols were just one of many fun water games I remember from my kid days. We’d run through sprinklers, splash around in above-ground pools, run and dive onto Slip-N-Slides. Water was our friend.
Was it a simpler time? Not when I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis. Those days in October 1962 really brought home to ten-year-old Mike that nuclear war was a real possibility. Ducking under a desk wasn’t just a game. Missiles based in Cuba might just head for Rialto and other towns and cities in the USA.
I recall mom buying can goods in October and stacking them along the walls in the main hallway in our house on St. Elmo Drive in Rialto.
In the decades since the Cuban Missile Crisis, books have been written and we now know far more about the events of October 1962.
Had a nuclear missile struck March AFB near Rialto, I doubt any of my family would have survived. Thank God President Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev had the good sense to pull back from the brink. Playing ‘shoot ‘em’ is far more fun with water pistols than with nuclear-tipped missiles.
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I’m Mike Staton and I’m an author with six published novels. Three are sword and sorcery novels, and the last three have American Civil War settings. The latest, which debuted on May 1 of 2023, takes place during Reconstruction in North Carolina, and stars a newspaper editor, and his wife, a graphic artist. It’s part of a four-book series that will see my main characters head westward into the American frontier in the final novel, now being written. I’m currently writing that fourth book, which I’ve titled A Wyoming Dawn: A New Beginning.