WHITING, ROBERTSDALE AND THE COLD WAR, PART 2

Ducking and covering, dog tags and tattoos

Jerry Banik, June 2024

A previous article here discussed in detail America’s Nike ballistic missile defense program, and its missile launch sites in and around the Calumet Region.  You can find a link to that article at the bottom of this page.

Today, for locals younger than Baby Boomers, it can be hard to imagine that for the better part of three decades we lived under the harsh reality that deadly, guided missiles stood ready to be fired from the shore of Wolf Lake, from two sites in Gary and one in Munster. But life was a little different during the Cold War.

For many, the nineteen fifties through the seventies were an unnerving time in which to live. The Cold War with Russia had been intensifying for years.  Paranoia grew with it. 

How could it not, when…

…our Defense Department exhorted schools to have children practice planning for a nuclear attack by diving under their desks and covering their heads with books. 

…Hollywood churned out nightmarish sci-fi movies about nuclear annihilation and hideous monsters created by nuclear radiation.  “Mom, can we go see ‘The Gamma People’ at the Hoosier?”

…our U.S. Attorney General issued a list of “subversive organizations” during the aptly named Red Scare, effectively blacklisting anyone they could accuse of associating with communist or socialist organizations on the list.  Many people lost their livelihoods as a result.

…Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev announced to the free world, “We will bury you!”

…the Cuban missile crisis brought us within a hair’s breadth of nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

…we were involved in a “space race,” in large part out of fear that the Soviets would attempt to put hydrogen bombs in orbit over America.

…our Defense Department created and distributed detailed instructions for how to build eight different types of family bomb shelters, and neighbors got together to build them in their basements and backyards (easier said than done in these parts, though, when you hit water after digging more than a couple of feet deep). If you think you might want to build one of your own, you’ll find a link to the instructions at the bottom of this article.

**********

We were kept in constant fear of being subverted, or even invaded, by the Soviet Union. Locally, some schools issued Civil Defense dog tags that their students were expected to wear in the hope that they could be identified after an attack.  Whiting resident Al Koch, who grew up on Cleveland Avenue and went to Sacred Heart grade school, saved his tag and recently shared it with our historical society.

In Robertsdale and in Whiting, some schools took to tattooing students with their blood types (negative or positive A, B, AB, or O).  We must have been pretty special here, because, according to the American Academy of Dermatology, community-wide tattooing occurred only in three places in the United States: Lake County, Indiana, and two counties in Utah.  Whiting man Chuck Kosalko told of how he and his classmates at St. John the Baptist grade school were marched down to the nurse’s office, where they all got tattooed.  He laughingly says that was the only “A” he got that year.

Most schoolkids went through drills similar to fire or tornado drills to prepare for a nuclear bomb attack.  A memory shared by many school kids who grew up in that era was a frightening film called, “Duck and Cover.” It was created and distributed to schools across the country by the United States Office of Civil Defense And Scaring Kids To Death.  “At last — ATOMIC DEFENSE for school children!” Thanks to the Library of Congress, you can still see Duck and Cover. You’ll find a link to it at the bottom of this article.

It came as a rude shock to many people when the Army had at first tried to acquire properties for their new missile installations.  Most hadn’t even heard of the Nike program.  The Army had serious problems trying to buy land from some landowners, due in part to Army regulations aimed at preventing military secrets from being revealed.  Some people refused to even allow surveyors on their property.

The Army, however, soon discovered they needed to become much more open about their intentions, and found it necessary to reach out with public relations work.  They even teamed up with TV’s Lassie and Timmy, producing an episode in which Lassie helps train an abused and dispirited German Shepherd to become an Army guard dog at the local Nike site, saves a soldier from a crashed, burning fuel truck, and earns the undying gratitude of the Nike base commander.  Good girl, Lassie!

The Army offered Nike missile installation open houses and other special events to impress visitors with our nation’s supersonic missiles and sophisticated electronics. These gave people a chance to ask the Army questions face-to-face, and the opportunity to ease their concerns.

Despite the Army’s public relations full-court press, many homeowners were still reluctant to have ballistic missiles installed in their neighborhoods. They feared the sites would diminish their property values, and even more so, they worried about the possibility of accidental explosions or damage from falling missile debris.

There were, in fact, accidents at some missile sites, including a major one in New Jersey.  In 1958, while a modification was being made on a Nike Ajax missile, something went wrong.  The missile blew up and touched off seven others in a chain reaction, killing six soldiers and four civilians.  Other nearby residents were injured by flying debris.  People were outraged, yet for the next several years, sites continued to be deployed.

The desire for protection from Soviet nuclear bombs apparently won out over any dangers the missiles posed.

**********

Some interesting things arose from Cold War programs, like CONELRAD, the Emergency Broadcast System (EBS) and the Emergency Alert System (EAS).

Of those three, CONELRAD, an acronym for CONtrol of ELectromagnetic RADiation, came first, back in 1951.

If you happen to have an old radio whose dial is marked in two places with triangles in circles, or simply two triangles, you can date it back to between 1953 and 1963, when all radios sold in America were required by law to have those markings to show you where to tune in case of an emergency .

In 1963 the government gave up on CONELRAD and replaced it with the Emergency Broadcast System, or EBS.  It, too, was full of flaws and false alarms.

Yikes!  The EBS system had accidentally sent out a wrong code to 800 TV stations and 5,000 radio stations, with no specific information as to the emergency or what the stations were to do.  Panicked citizens who heard the warnings called the stations, the police and fire departments who, of course, were clueless.

Eventually, broadcasters were required to send out regular tests of the EBS alarm signal that included a scripted, “this is just a test” message, and those tests became part of the fabric of our culture.

In 1997, the EBS was replaced by the Emergency Alert System, or EAS, which is in use today.

In theory, the EAS was designed to allow the President to be able to speak to all citizens through every possible medium within ten minutes of a national emergency, but none of our emergency warning systems were ever actually used for this.

Today we can receive almost immediate news coverage via radio, broadcast, cable and streaming TV,  the internet, etc., and it’s the media itself that provides us quick information about actual or impending national emergencies, and so the need for an EAS warning has diminished.  Now state and local authorities, and the National Weather Service have access to this system, and it is used for severe weather alerts, Amber Alerts and the like.

Our federal government may still have a penchant for keeping us on the edge of our seats over one potential catastrophe or another, but Americans seem far less united today against a single menace, as we had been for decades during the Cold War.

**********

To view the video, “Duck and Cover” at the Library of Congress web site, click here.

To view a pdf copy of the Department of Defense’s detailed family shelter designs, click here.

To view “Whiting, Robertsdale and the Cold War, Part 1: Ballistic Missiles In Our Back Yards”, click here.