It’s hard, so many decades later, to make my way back to my Cold War youth, that time when the history of humanity was, as LIFE magazine so classically put it, “The Epic of Man.”  But hey, that was the era when we still thought dinosaurs were lumbering beasts, an electric typewriter was the leading edge of high-tech, and if, like my wife, you happened to live in El Paso, Texas, in the early 1950s, your TV set had nothing on it because the signal for the programs had yet to make it over the mountains.