Corporation

My husband's (Robert Mason) Vietnam memoirs, Chickenhawk and Chickenhawk: Back In The World and my book, Recovering from the War, describe how we lived with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder when it didn't have a name and wasn't supposed to exist. When Bob came back from his tour as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam (1st Cav, ‘65-’66), problems developed. We lived with PTSD for 14 years during which I felt there was something wrong with me because I couldn't make him happy. He thought he was crazy. We did not associate any of it with Vietnam.

The telephone was first introduced at the Centennial Exposition in 1876 and was an instant success. Although first rented only to "persons of good breeding" and seen as an expensive luxury for doctors and businessmen, the telephone soon transformed American life. Trees gave way to telephone poles as operators known as "hello girls" began to connect a sprawling continent.

The Fifties in America were a contradictory time. This was a vibrant and wholesome era, characterized by malt shops, sock hops, beatniks and the hula hoop, hot cars and cool jazz. At the same time, however, the nation was plagued by racial injustice, anti-Communist paranoia and the dread of nuclear war. The atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 taught Americans an unforgettable lesson about the power of humanity's terrible new weapons, and this frightening awareness increased their concern about the spread of Communism.