Hey folks, this is Max Young Rice from the StoryCorps podcast. Just want to remind you that you can tell us your stories by calling our voicemail at 702-706 talk. This week, tell us about a time you had to make a gut call. How to go? Lay out that story in a voicemail at 702-706, T-A-L-K. And one more thing.

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Now, on with the show.

My great-grandmother and great-grandfather, they were ranchers in southern New Mexico,

and they lived there their entire lives out near the town of Las Cruces.

Tyler Johnson called our voicemail line to share a moment where his family members had an accidental brush with history.

They told us that in 1945, they had to gotten the family car and driven to a town near the border of Arizona.

And they had to stop for the night, so they slept in their car on the side of the road.

Early the next morning, they were in their car on the side of the road.

Early the next morning, they were awoken by a bright flash.

And that bright flash turned out to be the Trinity Test, the first atomic bomb ever tested.

And they just happened to witness it in their car.

It was less than a month after the Trinity test that the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

That was the start of the atomic age that continues to this day.

After we got Tyler's message, we looked back in our archive, the largest collection of human

voices ever gathered, to see what other people had to say about living in a world under the

shadow of nuclear war. And we found conversations like this. When I really became conscious

of the Cold War was in eighth grade, my dad was in the military, and he had an office

at home. That's John Conme, telling his kids what it was like growing up near Washington, D.C.

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