General Discussion

I guess us kids were kept in the dark.
Probably for the best.
My dad had been a B29 pilot in Korea. I don't know what he was flying back then. He went to Vietnam several times when we lived in Japan and always brought home cheap junk. He would be gone for several weeks. That stuff ended up being my parent's home decor.


But no, I didn't know anything about the Cuba missile crisis. But we sure knew about John Glenn Naively, I went outside to "see his rocket". John Glenn circling the globe was a big deal in our house. So, I wasn't kept in the dark about everything.

We had Japanese TV in Japan, so when the TV was on, it was always in Japanese. If the TV was on, we were usually watching Japanese dubbed cartoons or Lassie. (Lassie may have been in English. I learned to sing the Mickey Mouse song in Japanese) Any news would have been in Japanese and my parents didn't watch Japanese news.

I didn't know anything about Cuba (that it was a communist country etc) until I was much older. In 7th grade, my parents forced me to take Spanish, when I wanted to take French. Spanish became the most popular language offered in schools because of Cuba. However, even when I was in 7th and taking Spanish, I didn't know why. It was during the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, so I thought that was why I was forced to take it. Since Mexico was a rapidly growing neighboring country that could host the Olympics, we should learn that language, as opposed to French, which was across the ocean. We watched parts of the Olympics in Spanish at school.

It wasn't until, I was in HS, in the 1970s, that I learned about communism in Latin America and that was why everyone was taking Spanish. We were told that Latin America was one the largest threats to the US and schools were encouraging everyone to take Spanish and familiarize themselves with the countries. Jobs were opening up for people who spoke Spanish etc.