April 3, 1956

They stood on the knoll of the farmyard—the farmer and his sixteen year old helper, a high school senior—and watched it come in the southwestern sky. It was early evening on April 3, 1956. All of nature about the farmyard was suddenly, mysteriously still before the roaring monster approaching a few miles distant. Not a bird chirped; not a cow in the nearby barn uttered a sound or rattled its stanchion; not a leaf on one of the apple trees in the orchard surrounding the farmyard stirred. An...