Word: amboy
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Last Friday night a slow, chilly drizzle was falling on South Amboy, but it was shopping night and many housewives were downtown. Over on the river front, a gang of longshoremen worked late. From twelve railroad cars they were unloading a deadly cargo: anti-tank and anti-personnel mines for Pakistan's army, 2,000 cases of dynamite for blasting in Afghanistan. It was a tough but familiar job to the dockers. From the cars they moved the cases across the dock to four lighters, stowed them in neat, harmless-looking piles. When the job was done, the cargo...
...Stalin's Started It." Over in town, South Amboy's Mayor John Leonard, a short, fat man who likes to wear a baseball player's warmup jacket, was done with his day's work. He was watching Captain Video on his television set, had settled down for a snug evening at home. His plans were quickly changed...
Across South Amboy windows burst into hurling, razorlike shards. Plaster crashed down from ceilings, doors blew in, walls bulged. The lights went out. All over town, the clocks stopped at 7:26. River mud, coal and metal fragments hurtled down from the sky. From the docks a huge mushroom cloud rose grey-white and languid...
Panic swept South Amboy. "Atom bomb," someone yelled and began running. Said a townsman later: "I saw that big pile of smoke just like in the newsreels and I said: 'That bastard Stalin's started it!' " Men & women, carrying children, ran south, away from the blast. Cars loaded with frightened people sped out of town. Mayor Leonard rushed to the city hall, piled into a sound truck and rode about town bellowing reassurance. Finally, the southward rush slowed and stopped...
Pallid Flags. Nearly every house and building in South Amboy was damaged. Regular troops from nearby Fort Monmouth were rushed in, took up guard over the blasted banks and the post office. In Perth Amboy, two miles across the estuary, hundreds were cut by shattering glass and a chunk of steel buried itself in a downtown sidewalk. By midnight, South Amboy swarmed with ambulances and fire engines. Some 350 people were injured, 57 of them hospitalized. Others patched their own cuts, tramped the streets peering at wrecked stores, excitedly comparing notes. Through the town's shattered windows, white curtains...