By ART CHANCE
The hydrogen bomb and I were born in the same year, 1949. I grew up surrounded by major military bases including a strategic air command base– the guys with the nukes — about 75 miles away. Today, the U.S. military has a few hundred active duty aircraft at any given time, but in the 1950s and 1960s, it had several thousand.
A major military exercise produced an aluminum overcast. Our fields and lawns were littered with strips of aluminum foil; the WWII term was “window,” that they dropped to confuse radar. Let me assure you that a B-52, an 8-engine, intercontinental range nuclear bomber with a 180-foot wingspan is a very impressive sight and sound at 500 feet over your head when you’re a young boy.
There was a mid-air collision involving a B-47, a smaller 6 engine cousin of the B-52, a few miles off Tybee Island, Georgia, on Feb. 5, 1958. The B-47 was damaged but still aloft, so it dropped a 7,600-pound Mark 15 nuclear bomb load offshore to lighten its load; the bomb has never been found, or at least nobody has admitted finding it.
To a 10-year-old boy who loved trucks, trains, boats, and planes it was an almost idyllic existence. For a boy who hadn’t yet really discovered sex, it didn’t get much better than a B-58 Hustler, 4-jet, delta wing supersonic bomber flying over at the better part of a thousand miles per hour with a wall-shaking sonic boom in its wake.
But there was a price; every couple of weeks you heard the piercing scream of the air raid sirens and got to dive under your desk at school and wait for the blinding flash of the nuclear bomb. Major buildings all had that yellow and black sign that designated a “Fallout Shelter.” People who were wealthy enough built and supplied personal bomb/fallout shelters. The rest of us took the traditional Southern “God will make it right” attitude and went about our lives, but for most who still lived very close to the land, food and survival supplies were just what you put in for winter every year.
In October of 1962, I had just turned 13; I was grown, and I knew everything there was to know, and just wanted to be on my way to ruling the world. In the election of 1960, John F. Kennedy had made politics into a popular television show. NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley Report and CBS’ World News Tonight with Walter Cronkite dominated American dinner tables and opinions. Only if you lived in a major urban area did you have the choice of one or the other; most of America had one TV channel in those days, and a good bit of the country still had no television service.
Longtime Alaskans recall that the first live TV broadcast ever in Alaska was the moon landing in 1969 and it took the entire resources of the Congressional delegation and the US Department of Defense to bring it to Alaska. If it is any comfort, I was going to college in Southeast Georgia about 100 miles from a good sized city; I watched the moon landing on a small black and white TV with rabbit ears and a very snowy picture. Nobody had 200 HD channels in those days. When I came to Alaska in 1974, the evening news was at 7 am the next day — if the plane from Seattle got in with the reels.
I lived in the Huntley-Brinkley World; we didn’t have one of those rotators that could turn your TV antenna toward a different city. I climbed up on the house to turn it to the CBS station to watch The Beatles on Ed Sullivan a few years later. If you were a kid in those days, your information was the evening news, whatever there might be on “educational TV” at school, and whatever you got from your parents at the dinner table.
Most families took the paper, both the daily from a nearby big town and the local weekly, and they read it cover to cover and the covers too, especially the local paper. Everybody understood what the political bent of a particular paper was. In Georgia, the Atlanta Constitution was the paper the Yankees loved; liberal, by Southern standards, and was New Deal supporting. The Constitution won Pulitzers. The Atlanta Journal was the business-oriented paper, but not business enough to be seriously considered a Republican paper. The Augusta Chronicle was old-time Southern, as was the Macon Telegraph. The Savannah Morning News was the one and only Republican paper in Georgia in those days. You made a political declaration by the newspaper box on your mailbox, just as you once did here in Anchorage.
Radio was still somewhat important but not so much as it had been a decade before. Radio had become more of an entertainment medium than an information medium, but if you had the radio on in the car, you got their minute or two of what passed for news. We had a lot less information in those days, but in my view it was better if not always objective information.
Even if you were a kid, you couldn’t escape world events. The movie “October Skies” was very real and we all went out at night to see Sputnik tracking across the sky. It was as good an education as federal money provided to Southern schools. The first telecommunications satellite went up that summer, Telstar, which brought the first live transatlantic television and other modern telecommunications.
In retrospect, it might seem a tense period, but in reality, it had been a tense period for our whole life, and we were accustomed to it. And then it got tense. The news started to bubble up that the Soviets were placing nuclear missiles in Cuba. It was still unsettled in those days just what Fidel Castro was; some said a Cuban patriot, some said a Soviet puppet. Soviet missiles 90 miles from the U.S. settled that question. The Soviets/Cubans shot down a U.S. U-2 reconnaissance plane trying to take a peek, which only increased the tension, and this wasn’t long after the Soviet shoot-down of a U-2 over the Soviet Union, so nerves were raw.
The truth was as rare then as now, and nobody knew that the US had nuclear missiles in Turkey as close to Moscow as the Soviet missiles in Cuba were to Washington. The U.S. demanded the removal of the Soviet missiles from Cuba and the Soviets said “Nyet.”
The interstate highways weren’t yet finished in The South in 1962, so the way to Florida was the two lane blacktop of the old federal highways. My home town has the singular distinction of being the first place that two transcontinental federal highways intersected. US 80 from San Diego to Savannah and US 1 from somewhere in Maine to Key west cross at the Courthouse Square in my old home town, though the courthouse isn’t there anymore and there isn’t much traffic. In 1962 there was still a lot of traffic and soon came a lot more.
In October of 1962, my world turned olive drab green. The roads were clogged with military convoys headed for Florida. Soon our intersections were supervised by MPs and we were limited to only certain hours on the major roads. Endless miles of convoys of troop transports and transports for tanks and other military vehicles. The rickety old Georgia and Florida Railroad, built to haul Florida watermelons to Yankee markets, carried never before seen traffic as it hauled tanks and heavy vehicles south to Florida. The skies were filled with aircraft.
I don’t know that I was afraid; I was a young teen and immortal. But my parents were afraid. They heard from their grandparents first-hand memories and recollections of Sherman’s troops in the yard; they knew something about war. And then calmer minds intervened. The Soviets agreed to remove their missiles, maybe, from Cuba. The U.S. agreed to remove its missiles from Turkey so long as it didn’t have to admit that it had them, and the Soviets went along.
The hydrogen bomb and I have had a good run; we’re still here after 70-odd years. For a few years there, I thought we were done with this. Nikita Khrushchev was a rational actor, as was John F. Kennedy. I’ve long said that we are all alive because the Russians loved their children. In my 72 year,s this is the first time that I’ve heard a Russian leader threaten nuclear war out right, and I’ll confess to being afraid.
Art Chance is a retired Director of Labor Relations for the State of Alaska, formerly of Juneau and now living in Anchorage. He is the author of the book, “Red on Blue, Establishing a Republican Governance,” available at Amazon.
