By Geri Delfino, April 17, 2019 — This was the 1950s. I was 11 years old and it was the McCarthyism Era. I was going to St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic School on 8th Street in Brooklyn. I remember the nuns telling us how communists were everywhere, and our school would have a drill where we would have to duck down underneath our desks with our heads in between our legs. When I would try and peek and look at my friends sitting around me my teacher would come over and shush and yell at me.
I became so scared of communists that I began to think everyone was. There was one night where I was sleepwalking and had a bad dream that my mother and father were communists, so I tried escaping our apartment through the bedroom window, luckily we had a fire escape and my mother heard me screaming, but as my mother tried to pull me back in I kicked and screamed and tried to get away. Everyone scared you so much back then. Our teachers, celebrities, and the television instilled such a fear into us as children that I’ll never be able to forget.