Personal Narrative: An Interview With My Uncle

For my project, I interviewed many different people of all different ages. My Grandpa, Vern, born in 1942, remembers most of the cold war. Our family friend, Terry Markuly, was born in 1950 and she also remembers most of the Cold War events. My Uncle and my Mom, both born in 1967, do not remember many of the big Cold War events such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, but they still have memories of the events that they were alive for. Vern lived in Wisconsin for the entire war and still lives there to this day and my Mom also lived in Wisconsin for the entire war, except for two brief periods right after the war where she lived near Berlin. Both Terry and my Uncle also resided in the Midwest for most of the war, but Terry lived in St. Louis, Missouri and my Uncle lived in Indiana. Their experiences were different with each event and place but there were also many similarities among their experiences. Everyone that I interviewed felt that all of the presidents during the Cold War handled the situation confidently and safely. My Uncle’s first presidential election that he remembers was when President Reagan won. Both my Mom and Dave thought of President Reagan as the most confident, smart, and good with words. Since the Presidents were overall confident in their leadership, the cold war did not affect my interviewees a lot. Vern remembers not

Terry was not alive for the first three years of the war so the first major event that she remembers was the Cuban Missile Crisis and Nikita Khrushchev’s quote to the U.S., “We will bury you”. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, there were not very many major events that affected the U.S. so the first major event that my Uncle remembered was the destruction of the Berlin Wall. This signified the end of the war, which had been happening for as long as he could