In Santa Barbara, in the 1980s and on through 2022, if you ever stopped into a place called BEADS, you would certainly remember the intelligent, kind, and friendly gentleman named Andy, the handsome and helpful proprietor, affectionately known as “Mr. Beads.”
BEADS was a community hub for lively conversations and connection. Music, art, travel, and the history and culture of beads and bead craft and glassblowing were just a few of the topics of interest. If you got lucky, Andy’s funny and wild real-life stories might be shared.
Andy lived an extraordinary life in extraordinary times. As a young boy, he carpooled to Catholic school with the kids of a Miami mobster, who kept a loaded pistol on the center console. As a teenager he met Lenny Bruce (who bummed a cigarette outside The Peppermint Lounge). As a young adult, he marched for civil rights with Reverend Ralph Abernathy, and attended a Moon Landing LSD Ball in San Francisco.
Andy passed away after an extraordinarily lived three-quarters of century here on this wild ride called Planet Earth. In a collection of stories called “My Backstory,” Andy looked at his life through an “ain’t life strange” lens. Here is one of his stories.
Rest in peace, Andy.
Civil Defense
by Andy Nelson
About a month before I was born, the Soviet Union exploded its first nuclear bomb. I was a Cold War baby. I didn’t realize it yet but the world was freaking out about nuclear annihilation and terms like “civil defense” were entering the national conversation.
I heard it first from older kids when I was about 7, because adults tried to shield kids from their new reality, that everyone and everything may be obliterated at any moment by a godless cult called “commies.”
Each year of my childhood, the Cold War got hotter, the bombs got bigger, the missiles, nuclear submarines, Iron Curtains, and Domino Theories crept into air-raid drills from kindergarten on: Duck and cover, kiddies! Every Saturday afternoon at one o’clock, the air-raid sirens all over the country would test our attempts at childhood with a dose of the last sound we might ever hear.
Church bells were replaced by the terrible shriek of the air-raid sirens. Fear of annihilation was universal. Every night at the dinner table, we listened to the news on the radio. Nikita Krushchev was itching for all-out war. Berlin wall, Suez Canal, containment strategies fell like dominoes. Russia was suddenly a global power that was swallowing up the world, one country at a time.
When I was in the 7th grade, I signed up for the Civil Defense. Everyone did. They sent me packets of instructions to join the Civil Defense Network and prepare my family and neighborhood for attack. I did the checklists. I enlisted a bunch of kids in the neighborhood and some of their parents, and we had contacts with the other neighborhoods around us.
We designated shelters and stored food and essentials. We were serious. If you have ever had someone point a gun at you, then you know how we all felt. The Commies were coming!
Then the Bay of Pigs took everything to full-blown panic. People started converting their swimming pools to bomb shelters. The grocery stores ran out of Spam for the first time since the war. All canned foods were gone.
I had milk bottles full of drinking water in my closet with my survival pack. I wasn’t ready for nuclear combat. We had only a closet in the center of the house, so I didn’t have a post-blast plan. I didn’t expect to need one.
One night, November 10, 1962, on my mother’s birthday, we were all dressed up and going out for her birthday dinner. My father was driving. It was raining hard, and we got stopped at the traffic light at Dixie Highway. We were the first car at the light as a huge convoy of military trucks came rumbling by headed southbound toward Homestead Air Force Base. Truck after truck went by like a grim parade of death and destruction. We watched over a hundred trucks. I got tired of counting at some point.
My dad said, “You guys know what’s under those tarps?” As we looked, a gust of wind picked up a corner of one of the tarps covering the back of a truck and we saw racks of missiles. Everyone in our car got quiet. All I could think about was, who those missiles were going to kill. That night, I said a prayer before I went to bed for all the kids our missiles were going to fall on.
