Lane Smith (Dr. Lawrence) and Edward Asner (Lou Grant) both later played the "Superman" character Perry White, the editor of the Daily Planet: Smith in Lane Smith and Asner in All-Star Superman (2011).
The Japanese Attack on Los Angeles, which Margaret Pynchon mentions, occurred from Tuesday the 24th to Wednesday the 25th of February, 1942, which caused three deaths from motor collisions and two from heart attacks. On the Tuesday there was an alert, but nothing really happened. Then in the early hours on the 25th the fifty calibre and 12.8 pound big guns opened up for just under an hour until the All Clear, then the Blackout order was relaxed after 7am.
Friends of the burn victim made 1,000 paper cranes because, according to legend, making 1,000 cranes allows a person to get a wish. It was the also the premise of the 1977 book "Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes" by Eleanor Coerr, which centered on a Japanese girl dying from atomic bomb radiation poisoning.