Free 700 Sundays by Billy Crystal

to die down, and then hit the crowd with the topper. It was like surfing, riding the wave and taking it wherever it was going. Sitting on the top of it, with all of that power, gliding you almost gently to the shore only to start all over again. Not only could I hear it, I could see it, I could feel it. It really was my rock and roll.
    This was an important time to be laughing. We needed laughter, because we were in the middle of the Cold War. We had a president who was an aging war hero, and a first lady too old to wear bangs. We were terrified of the Russians. It all started in 1957 with Walter Cronkite telling us, “This is the sound from Outer Space.” We heard a few electronic beeps, it was Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit the earth. What the hell is this thing? Eighteen inches around with a bunch of small knitting-needle-type prongs protruding from it. We’re doomed, we all thought. It’s a death ray!
    Nikita Khrushchev came into our lives then. A squat, scary little bald man, and his equally scary wife, and the fact that Khrushchev didn’t speak English made him even scarier, so I became even more frightened of his interpreter. How did we know this interpreter was getting it right? Khrushchev came to the U.N. He took off his shoe and banged it on the table and screamed at us, “WE WILL BURY YOU!” At least, that’s what they told us he said, what he really said, was, “THESE ARE NOT MY SHOES! WHO STOLE MY SHOES?”
    “The Bomb” was on our minds all the time. We watched films in elementary school, showing us what nuclear explosions looked like, what they could do to a city. Horrifying. People were building fallout shelters all across the country. It wasn’t a matter of
if
the Russians would bomb us, it seemed like
when
. We were practicing duck-and-cover drills in school, in case of an enemy attack. They would hurry us into the hallway, we’d sit on the floor with our arms folded, our heads down, our legs crossed. This position was surely going to save me when the Russians dropped the big one on us.
    At the end of Long Beach, in a place called Lido Beach, about two miles or so from my house, was a Nike missile base. Every day at noon the air raid alarms would go off and the Nike missiles would rise up and point to the sky. You could see them from the street. I would be playing ball on the mall in front of our house, and flatbed trucks with new missiles on them would pass us. Sometimes they would stop at the light, and I would just stare at these weapons of mass destruction, and the military men guarding them, just feet from me. Terrifying.
    It’s also terrifying to think that we accepted it as just the way things were. The early sixties was a stunning time. Kennedy was elected. I was thirteen, and he got me interested in politics. I thought he was amazing, a president you could relate to, and the wife was pretty cute too. Then came 1961, the summer of Maris and Mantle, Yuri Gagarin orbited the earth, the first man in space. While the Yankees were winning the pennant race, we were losing the space race. The Mercury Seven astronauts, Alan Shepard, John Glenn, were now huge stars. “We’re going to go to the moon first,” JFK promised. The Bay of Pigs came, the Cuban blockade, Kennedy vs. Khrushchev. The aerial photographs of the Russian missiles just ninety miles from Florida. The Russian ships bearing down on our destroyers. They will bury us! Duck and cover, duck and cover . . . At the last moment, the Russians turned back.
    Terrifying. We thought the Russians were the enemy. They thought we were the enemy. And we were both wrong. It’s the French.
    And then Dad brought home an album called
Bill Cosby Is a Very Funny Fellow, Right!
I loved Bill Cosby. I thought Bill was the greatest comedian of that time, and the most important one to me. I could relate to Cosby. He had brothers. I had brothers. He played ball at Temple. I belonged to a temple. So there was a bond.
    On that album—I think it’s