reverses its decision and awards the patent for the radio to Guglielmo Marconi in 1904.  In 1943, the U.S. Supreme Court reverses that decision and decides in favor of Nikola Tesla as the radio's true inventor.

Tesla, Continued.

 

Image U.S. Government archive, circa 1957.  Model Fallout Shelter.

You can revise history.  You can repeat it, and you can even rewrite it too.

Local concerned citizens invited the Government to unhitch and leave a semi tractor trailer in the park in the center of the town when I was very young, around the time the image above was made.  We then lined up and got to walk up a set of little stairs and go inside the trailer which was completely fitted out as a model FallOut Shelter with all the accessories and instructions on how you too could build your own and stock it with supplies, replicating the design in your basement or barn or root cellar.  My father had brought us all into town to see.  Ham Radio afficianado and subscriber to Popular Mechanics, Dad was Tom Swift grown up, a lover of gadgets and inventions and technology.  His enthusiasm was contagious.  He could hardly wait to get started.  Even I, more drawn to the aesthetic and interior design challenges of the project, was intrigued.

Normally, upon returning home, five kids would spill from the Plymouth station wagon and scatter, my grandmother emerging only after the coast was clear and given sufficient lead time to make her way from the barn to the house while my parents followed up the rear, picking up stragglers.  On this summer evening, however, my mother lagged behind, her mood like a slow bank of storm clouds rising up over the treeline where the woods met the field we were running and screaming through, pretending the Russians had already commenced the bombing.

"You go right ahead," she announced in far too carefree a fashion to go unnoticed, and we all froze in our tracks. 

"Seriously," she continued, addressing my father in that tone of voice that meant she was trying very hard to be good-natured and meant him no harm but don't press your luck.  "You have my permission," she explained.  "Build your bunker and stock it and get it ready for you and your mother and the kids.  Just don't include me.  I'll take my chances with the Russians."

Due to my limited reading skills at that time, I had missed the fine print about the necessity in nuclear warfare of staying in our Shelter for several weeks, until the radiation which had killed every living thing above ground had presumably exhausted itself and we were safe to come out, as it were.  Details are sketchy, since this was long before Chernobyl, but I quickly surmised that my mother's objections had more to do with the length of the proposed stay, yet also extended to concerns about sharing a chemical toilet with the rest of us and the lack of a bathtub due to space consideration, not to mention the steady diet of canned goods. 

Needless to say the fight over who got the top bunk paled in light of our mother's refusal to join in the fun.  Like the time a bucket of water on the cats stopped them playing leap-frog, her words had a dramatic effect.  Confined to very small quarters or nuclear annihilation?  The choice was no longer so clear-cut.  In fact we reversed our decision almost instantly.  We were now unified in favor of defending the farm in person against the Communist hordes when they arrived.  My brother even graciously volunteered to kill each of us individually with a baseball bat once the radiation kicked in.  So that, as he reasoned, we would not suffer.  That settled, we resumed our play. 

Years later, we further revised our thinking, crediting sensible Mothers across America with ending the Cold War, sparing all of us from facing the unspeakable, locked up underground with unwashed and unhappy husbands and siblings and children and mothers-in-law.  History Class dismissed.