Time Capsule ....or.....Now We Are Six(ty)

" I don't feel very different, she said, I know it's strange....."

Back When We Were Beautiful

Matraca Berg

I remember the '57 Chevy...and not just the pictures of it, either. We drove it a long time. Laura and I were very young, but it seemed very big, and the only thing keeping two little girls from rattling around the back seat was the bubbly vinyl seat covering my folks put in to protect the upholstery. We stuck to it pretty good; this was long before seat belts in the back. The '63 red Dodge Dart didn't have seat belts, nor did the '64 Volkswagen Beetle.

We had the Volkswagen while my mother was attending night school to get her teacher's certificate. While she was in class, my father took us to the laundromat. I learned my multiplication tables and long division to the swishing and sloshing of washing machines in Naperville, Illinois. When we had completed our lessons, we got to share a bottle of orange Fanta from the vending machine....or maybe a Tab...while we were folding the laundry. Tab was new and it tasted terrible, but I remember feeling quite adventurous trying it.

Afterwards, Laura would curl up behind the back seat and I'd stretch on the back seat. The Bug didn't have a radio, but my father hung his AM-FM transistor from the rear view mirror and listened to one of Chicago's classical music stations while we waited in the dark.

I was hanging my coat up in the hallway outside Mrs. Erdman's second grade class when I heard President Kennedy had been shot.

When I asked my father whether he thought Mr. Goldwater or Mr. Johnson should be President in 1964, he said one would probably be a better president and the other would be probably be better for his job.

In 1968, our class spring field trip to either the Museum of Science and Industry or the Field Museum was canceled because of the rioting after Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination.

Our family watched the first moon landing while gathered around a tiny black and white television  in the creek side rooms of a lodge in South Dakota when my father's work took him there for several weeks. We didn't watch much television that summer, nor did we stay up late: doing both in one night marked the occasion as momentous.

I remember when Harry Caray was with the Cardinals( til 1969); the first stumbling broadcasts of Mike Shannon(1972); our first air conditioned car, a 1968 pale yellow low slung Plymouth Fury with a cushy suspension but no power steering; and the epic collapse of the Cubs that broke the city's heart and paved the way for the Miracle Mets (1969). I got to see “The Sound of Music” on a theater trip with our Girl Scout group and “Mary Poppins” with our family at the theater in LaGrange." Dumbo" made me sad and "Pinocchio" made me scared.

We played whiffle ball in the driveway. I had a pair of roller skates that adjusted length and width-wise with a key; I loved to coast down the driveway and turn right onto the sidewalk of our long corner lot. After a while, sand and grit got into the bearings, or the metal spread and your wheels would either lock up or spill bearings into the street.

I got a social security number the summer I accompanied my father to practice and play several concerts with the Lemont Town Band under the direction of Mr. Nichols.  I dearly wish I could tell you more about Mr. Nichols.  My impression is that he had been a band director of some note in the hey day of John Philip Sousa and his peers. He was aged by then, a tall spare stooped figure of few words leading a smallish town band in the basement of the city hall.  His wheelchair bound wife always accompanied him to practice.  The sheet music was old, yellowed, black with fast notes and stamped with his name at the top.  When we played virtuoso chestnuts like “Norma”, “Carnival of Venice”, and original arrangements of “The Washington Post”, “Stars and Stripes Forever” and “Colonel Bogey”, the band barely hung together through the multiple repeats and the trio, but somehow maintained its force and plunged with a flourish and much relief to the coda. I knew no one could really hear one small clarinet or had time to notice me foundering in my search for the key signature, or the fingering for some accidental an octave above the staff, but the experience that summer left lasting memories of a musical past just out of sight behind me, and what technical quick wittedness was required to make all those notes bubble out effortlessly.

I got three checks in the mail…$6 dollars each for playing with the Lemont Band.  It seemed an immense amount of money at the time for a player no better than I was. Those checks, with their official looking Social Security number, undoubtedly went directly into my savings account.  

Kids my age got chicken pox...and German measles (what we called the three day measles).  My sister and I got one of the very first measles immunizations, which has lasted all these years.  We never did catch the mumps despite being exposed to them many times.

 We went to the dentist every six months like we were supposed to...but instead of a new toothbrush and tube of toothpaste, we left the dentist office with one of those fruity suckers on a looped string!

When our family lived in Orland Park, it was a town of 4500 people with an IGA, a lumberyard, a laundromat, a Dog 'n Suds, a library, the Orland Bank, a new Methodist church, our church, Christ Lutheran, and St. Michael's Catholic Church and parochial school. A harbinger of the growth to come, I attended both of the elementary schools, Orland Park,in town with its 1950s addition to the brick school and 1930s rock gymnasium, and Orland Center, with its one room schoolhouse and 1950s building addition, set between the sod fields and hog farms. I could walk to both from our subdivision...over the railroad tracks and through the older neighborhoods...

......or past the vacant lots flooded during the winter for ice skating and hockey, past the little league baseball fields, under the Osage orange trees and across 151st Street.

We can't stay Six...or Clever as Clever either for that matter.  But Winnie the Pooh is full of wisdom...for a bear "of very little brain"....and has a solution for all of us six to sixty.....

So be it....

Underground

It's funny how these old feelings hang around

You think they're gone...

No, no

They just go underground....

 ......You and me, we're like America and Russia

We're always keeping score

We're always balancing the power

And that can get to be a cold cold war..

...Joni Mitchell,  1976

Emblem of the 351st Missile Wing, Whiteman Air Force Base

After all these years, the strident beep of the Emergency Broadcast System alert still freezes me in my tracks.  The recorded script was just part of the familiar background noise of my childhood, the menacing tones  causing barely a ripple in everyday activities even as we awaited the message emphasizing the words 'This is only a test.'  The EBS test was a much a part of life as fire alarm evacuations and huddling in the hallways, faces to the wall, during a tornado drill.  Tornado warnings were a  fact of life on the Illinois prairie and a genuine risk in a tract house with no basement: conversation stopped if the sirens went off.  But we chattered away during an EBS test like it was a car commercial.

Until the day we didn't.  I was standing in the kitchen when the alarm came through the teak speakers in our dining room.  My mother heard it too; my sister was playing in our back bedroom.  "THIS IS NOT A TEST".   The FM radio station we were listening to did not tell us what the actual emergency was, just that further information would be forthcoming.  And then there was silence.  

My father was out of town.  We had no way to reach him.  In confusion, we switched over to other radio stations, but several of them were broadcasting normal programming. Suddenly our routine sunny winter Saturday became terrible. We could only assume the worst: that Chicago was under attack by Soviet missiles.

It is a warm sunny afternoon in September at Whiteman Air Force Base near Knob Noster, Missouri. Though we stand in the middle of the middle of the U.S., a visit to the hangar of a B-2 Spirit or the National Guard Apaches reminds me I'm on the front lines of the defense of our nation.   But to step inside the gate of the Oscar-01 launch control facility is to enter another era, of missiles, of fallout shelters, of the Emergency Broadcast tests: the Cold War .  Oscar-01 was home to three Strategic Missile Squadrons which controlled 150 Minuteman II ICBMs from 1963 to 1995.  The missile silos and command centers dotted the rural Missouri countryside in fourteen counties, silent sentinels in pastures and cornfields behind barbed wire on lettered state highways. 

 We sit in the former crew lounge in front of a map of sites and control centers, now owned by farmers and ranchers, storing hay or machinery, the facilities now empty, filled with debris or imploded: the last missile removed in 1995.

Minuteman missiles were based in the Midwest and Northern Plains, designed to fly across the North Pole to their targets in the Soviet Union.  They were armed with a single nuclear warhead and could not be recalled once they were launched.  From launch to target took 28 minutes.  

The freight elevator delivers us to the underground control center as if it slogs through the weight of time itself.  To our left is the machinery of survival after the unthinkable: an Allis Chalmers generator, scrubbers and filters for contaminated air, an air conditioning unit for the immense banks of non miniaturized computers, a suspended floor to absorb the shock of detonation, 750 gallons of water for the two man crew living stationed within the hardened concrete capsule and responsible for turning the keys that would launch the missile.  

The commander and deputy commander were on duty for 24 hour shifts behind their multi ton doors; the sites in Missouri were connected by more than 1770 miles of hardened buried cable.  The 150 facilities were built on bedrock anywhere from 60-90 feet deep, used more than 25,000 tons of steel and were completed in just over two years from ground breaking.

The Cold War was serious business...and the precautions and preparations were terrifyingly specific in dealing with an untested eventuality.  Every contingency had its solution...up to and including an exit strategy for those trapped underground during a holocaust of fire above.

For those of us who grew up with the missile silos in their neighborhood (Orland Park Nike missile site) and the EBS as their sound track, this back stage visit is a sobering reminder; for those who came of age after the fall of the Soviet Union, the history seems as dated as Great grandma's woven plaid Lazy Boy rocker recliner and the deterrence of mutually assured destruction an acronym from the bad old days. The EBS false alarm of 1971 was revoked after an hour; that afternoon we went shopping for fabric. And I remember thinking how normal it was to be standing among the bolts of fabric, enjoying an innocent, harmless outing with my mother and my sister, when a few hours earlier, we had been shocked speechless with fright.

It may be that removing our shoes at airports and walking through metal detectors in public buildings is more a charade than an assurance of public safety.  But the men and women that stood guard in Strategic Missile Squadrons like that of Oscar-1 exhibited the same dedication and fortitude to their duty as those manning the Apaches and maintaining the B-2 Bombers at Whiteman today.

 "Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it." --Thomas Paine: The American Crisis