This is an IHeart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is our American stories.

And we tell stories about everything here, from arts to sports, from business

to history, and everything in between, including your stories. Send them to our American

Stories.com. They're some of our favorites. Our next story comes to us from John Clausen in the Seattle

area. Here's John to introduce himself and then share his story.

Hello audience, this is John Claussen, the author of Missile Man, and it's the story about my father

as a Cold War engineer who lived a secret life for over 40 years.

And once he was diagnosed with cancer,

and he was told he had 18 months to live,

I got a phone call from him that he wanted to come out to New Jersey where it helped me select a home and build a fence.

I picked him up in Philadelphia at airport,

and if you know, 95, it's south of Philadelphia.

And as usual, he was casually dressed,

and my mom is an avid knitter.

I refer to it in the book as a Mr. Rogers knitted sweater. And with a piece of luggage,

we drove up 95 to go back up to New Jersey. Just north of the airport, there is an exit called Broad

Street. And my father said, John, ten men sat down in the basement of a YMCA and decided how nuclear

weaponry was going to be deployed and missiles.

And he started naming off names, and one was in Urique Fermi, which I recognized immediately.

But I didn't recognize the other names, and he was looking

quite pensive, kind of looking down the street. And he gets to the ninth person, and he could not

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