For decades, award-winning newspaper reporter Jon Sorensen covered government and politics for papers including The Schenectady Gazette, The Buffalo News and the New York Daily News.

But his latest dispatch takes a page from the Red Scare of the 1950’s.

“When Mommy was a Commie” is Sorensen’s first foray into fiction. It’s a comic novel that borrows from real-life events — dwelling in that uniquely American moment when kids ducked and covered, baseball was king and U.S. Sen. Joe McCarthy was the most hated man in the country.

Sorensen joined Capital Tonight to discuss the novel.

“Years ago, when I was working for the Schenectady paper, I was in the library — and that’s back when the library was very much uncomputerized — and I found (a folder) marked ‘Communists,’ of all things,” Sorensen said. “I opened it up, and there were these stories about Joe McCarthy.”

By 1954, McCarthy’s luster was starting to fade, so he decided, as Sorensen puts it, to go after the low-hanging fruit: General Electric’s union, which was well known as a Communist stronghold.

“His last hurrah…his glory days, were spent here in Albany going after the union at General Electric,” Sorensen said.

McCarthy hauled members of GE’s union in before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee twice, once in 1953 and again in 1954. Several were fired.

This period in U.S. history was especially fraught because the Soviets had detonated a nuclear warhead in 1949 —  an event that served as a wakeup call to a nation that had started to feel invulnerable as the world’s only nuclear power.

One outgrowth of the USSR’s nuclear ascendency was the specter of communism, something a junior U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy, was able to harness and then weaponize.

Sorensen’s novel takes a page from Vonnegut by finding the absurdity in all the horror of that time period.

As Marion Roach Smith, author of The Memoir Project writes, “Who knew that the Electric City was such a live wire and hotbed of subversive activity and who knew it could all be so much damn fun?”

Sorensen will speak at the Open Door Book Store on Jay Street in Schenectady from 1 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. Saturday, October 1.