Something went array with today’s piece that was to be called “The Super Mario Bridge.” Somehow the body of this piece merged with last week’s piece “The Cold War Re-visited” and I can’t retrieve it.
I regret this attack by gremlins and hope that I can shake this off and properly publish another piece next Wednesday.
John Delach
June, 2017: Number 186. Revised and edited: March 2024: Number 503
Thursday, June 8, 2017 found Bill Christman driving our rental car 33-miles south of Tucson on Interstate-19 to the exit for Green Valley. It’s hot, really hot as we drive west for a mile on a two-lane road before we reach our destination, the Titan Missile Museum, formerly Launch Complex 571-7. A cyclone fence stretches from one side. In front of the fence is a small sign that says: “Watch for rattlesnakes. We’re not kidding!”
Behind the fence sits a concrete structure low to the ground, the welcome center for a de-commissioned and preserved Titan II missile silo, now a National Landmark.
Welcome back to the Cold War.
Captain Joe Scott, our guide is a retired air force officer who spent two years as the launch commander in just such a facility. He leads a party of ten, Bill and I, a family of five, mom, dad and three teenage girls, another couple and a single fellow with a Germanic accent, into the facility. We enter a twisting passageway to begin our descent fifty-three steps down a metal staircase.
If the site had been operational, we would have had to pass through four locked checkpoints to gain access. As it is, we pass through two massive blast doors to enter the control room. Everything about this facility is deadly serious. Scott explains how serious from the intricate steel rebar pattern used to strengthen the massive concrete floors, walls and overheads to the complex’s communications system that has four independent and redundant back-ups.
The design and engineering of this facility is based on one over-riding reason, protect the Titan II missile and the four-person launch crew from all but a direct hit from an incoming nuclear device. (As an un-nerving aside, Scott pronounces nuclear in the same manner that W does.)
Completely sealed off inside, the crew has enough food, water, power, clean air and a/c to function for 12 days. Massive springs and shock absorbers, flexible cables and hoses protect the missile and the launch instruments from a nuclear shock wave. Positive pressurization prevents contamination by fall out or the use of poison gas..
The complex contains three separate chambers connected by tubes. The control center, the missile silo and the crew’s quarters. We only visit the first two but Scott explains the crew quarters are basic, a small kitchen, bunk beds and a toilet. “The crews rotated every 24-hours so there wasn’t’ a lot of downtime. For the most part we didn’t cook as the kitchen had to be cleaned for the next crew. Instead, we subsisted on a diet of Coke and Twinkies.”
Scott is matter-of-fact, friendly, open and knowledgeable. He leads us through an excellent presentation of the launch procedure while we stand around the control room. He reminds us that the crew (two officers and two enlisted) were in their early twenties or late teens. Crazy as it sounds, the fate of civilization could have rested in the hands of personnel who could not legally buy a beer!
Our guide selects two of the girls to play the roles of the commander and her executive officer (XO).He directs them to sit in the two oversized rolling office chairs each at her appropriate work station. They are about six-feet apart with the sister playing commander perched before a console bursting with a plethora of 1950s and early 1960s technology. Phones featuring rotary dials, analogue displays, and black & white TV monitors.
Scott points to a large metal cabinet with all the drawers marked “empty.” He explains: “Originally, these draws were filled with vacuum tubes that powered the internal guidance settings for the missile. The air force estimated these missiles would remain in service for about five years. They actually lasted 20. Tubes must be replaced at regular intervals but after ten years, manufacturing ceased.” Pointing to one panel in the cabinet where a display is located, he continues, “Fortunately, NASA, Boeing and MIT developed this digital guidance system that replaced all those tubes.”
He instructs the sisters to re-enact a missile launch. First, he has the commander find a series of six numbers from the orders which she instructs the XO to enter into a her console that releases the locks holding the missile in place. Then he instructs them to simultaneously turn their two keys on the commander’s count.
(The position of these two keys is deliberately placed about twelve feet from each other making a one-person launch impossible.)
A series of turns activates a green light on the commander’s console. Scott gives the command, “Push the launch button.”
Reality check: It takes less than two and a half minutes to launch!
Scott notes, “By the way, the air force thought it best that the crew had no knowledge of their missile’s target.”
Someone asks, “What was the crew to do next?”
“One and done. They had no further real orders.” Scott is not without a sense of humor. “Remember, we were basically big kids. One night, off duty, after a few beers, we concocted a ‘what if’ plan. We’d leave the complex, walk down to the interstate, use our side arms to hijack a vehicle, rob a bank, hook up with four hot girls and hightail it to Mexico.”
In case you are wondering, the missiles cannot be recalled. The time to target was a little more than a half-hour.
As I absorb this information, I think to myself: And now: “Let us pray.”
March 2024: No. 502
This edited piece combines two pieces, Once Upon a Time in Middle Village (No. 182) and Time and Again in Middle Village (No. 195) both written in 2017.
(All of these events happened between 1970 and 1977.)
One hot, steamy Saturday morning found me vacuuming the orange shag-rug that covered our first-floor living room and dining room. Mary Ann had left me alone taking Beth and Michael with her. A fortuitous glance out of our front window revealed my cousin, Bob, exiting his car…a dream come true. At that time, Bob was a Seventies swinging single and it was within the bounds of reason to believe he’d fantasize knocking at a door answered by a bored housewife wearing only her panties and bra. Close but no cigar; In fact, I was the one smoking the cigar and dressed only in a tenement tee shirt and Jockey shorts. I didn’t even give him the chance to ring the bell … I threw open the front door, vacuum cleaner in hand, cigar in the other to exclaim: “What can I do for you good looking?”
We moved into 65-33 77 Place in February of 1970. Beth was born in 1969 and Mary Ann would soon become pregnant with Michael who would be born in April of 1971. The house was where my Aunt Helen had grown up. She had it renovated with new appliances. She offered it to us a rental so low that the amount was almost a miracle.
A word about street addresses in Queens County. There is a code to them that is not readily apparent. 65-33 77 Pl. The 65 is the number of the closest cross-street. The 33 tells you that house is the thirty-third house on the block and 77 Place, Street, or Way is the actual location.
My cousin Helen, her husband Don and their family lived four houses away from us in 65-25. In April 1972, they moved to Ramsey, NJ but first sold the place to her brother and his wife, Bill and Del, and their family.
Middle Village is a real community with its own character. We lived in pre-war attached houses, 18-feet wide, two-stories with a basement. The main floor, back to front began with a small foyer with a closet off the front door. An inner door opened into the living room that was the only room that took advantage of the full width of the house. On the extreme right of the living room was the staircase leading to the second floor. The dining room occupied about 2/3rds of the back of the house and the kitchen the other third. This made for a narrow kitchen only six-feet wide before being reduced by counters, sink, stove and refrigerator.
A second foyer in back of the kitchen led to a small back yard and a garage that opened to a common alley that ran the length of the block. The neighborhood children including our own kids loved to race their Big Wheels in this alley. The Big Wheel was a plastic tricycle built close to the ground with an enormous front wheel and two small trailing wheels. The kids could quickly get it up to speed, it was extremely stable and built for quick and rapid turns.
Money was scarce in those days. One Sunday, I attended the 7:30 morning mass at St. Margaret’s, our local parish. A well-dressed couple sat in the pew behind me. They were both still dressed for last night’s activities in Manhattan and I had a distinct impression that these strangers were there because she insisted on attending morning mass. When the time came for the collection, he placed a $20 in the basket. Wow, I thought to myself, that’s more money than I can get my hands on until the banks re-open at nine tomorrow morning.
Fred and Huguette arrived from Viet Nam in 1975. They moved into 65-31, a heretofore vacant house right next to us. Fred first served in Viet Nam as an army electronics technician during the early days when the army was still advisers. After completing his service he took a job with Decca and returned in country where he met and married Huguette. Fred was a pragmatist with a terrific sense of humor. One Saturday afternoon witnessed the two of us consciously deciding not to prevent an accident. It was one of those Saturdays between Thanksgiving and Christmas when the Long Island weather gods produce a mild day perfect for installing outdoor Christmas lights. We were both outside, each working on our own displays, when Bill came out lights, ladder and staple gun in hand. Bill erected his ladder, plugged his string in and climbed up to begin fixing it to the house.
“Should we tell him to unplug them first,” Fred asked?
“Naw”, I replied, “Let’s watch the show.”
Bill’s second or third staple hit the wire. Fred and I watched as the spark, shock and sound took him off the ladder and onto the grass. Unhurt but flustered, Bill didn’t appreciate our uncontrolled laugher and our now useless advice to unplug the lights first.
One of our favorite Friday night activities was “stoop sitting” around the front walkway leading to the door. Bill and Del, Fred and Huguette and we Delaches lived within five attached houses of each other. We’d leave the widows fronting the street from our kids’ rooms open allowing these organic baby monitors to sound the alert by way of crying if one awoke.
The gals smoked cigarettes, guys cigars; we drank beer or wine and a few exotic drinks, mostly for the ladies like whiskey sours, sloe gin fizz or whatever else was trendy. Eventually, the need for pizza would strike our collective stomachs and a couple of the men would make a pizza run to Tudor Tavern Pizzeria on nearby Eliot Avenue and 80th Street. The later it was, the better the pizza tasted.
Fred and Huguette lived right next door to my aunt’s house. That fist winter, Fred complained about the amount of his heating bills from The Brooklyn Union Gas Company. It cost him almost twice as much as we were paying. It seemed this disparity repeated itself every month. No matter where he set the thermostat, his bill was enormous. He even had the gas company check his system to no avail. One night I mentioned to Mary Ann how this was driving him crazy. “John’ it’s his wife’s doing. Huguette has no tolerance for the cold so as soon as Fred goes to work, she cranks up the heat to 90 degrees so she can wear summer day wear. She lowers it back to 65 about an hour before he comes home.”
“You’re kidding me! Oh boy, one of these days he’s going to explode once he figures that out. I don’t want to be around for that, but damned if I am going to tell him.
I can report that they are still married, so I have no idea how that was settled if at all.
By 1977 we were ready to buy the house, but Aunt Helen wouldn’t sell as she wished to keep her house in her immediate family. So we bought a house in Port Washington where we continue to live to this day.
Part of me still misses Middle Village.
The Supreme Court’s decision in Roe versus Wade on January 22, 1973 forced me to announce to my friends and family that I couldn’t accept abortions performed for convenience. Of course, I realized how unpopular my belief was so I explained to that this was my belief, and I would never try to stop someone from having an abortion. I simply ask others to accept my beliefs the same way as I accept theirs.
I also explained that rather than engage in discussions about abortions, I would avoid each and every one of these debates as they can be too emotional. In return, I would take on reporting the daily weather information from The New York Times. For any readers out there unfamiliar with the Times daily weather report, it is quite comprehensive.
My particular task would be to monitor the paper’s daily measure of our rainfall for the last 30 days and for the last year. I assumed responsibility to monitor shortfalls and report possible droughts.
Fortunately, everybody accepted my wacky solution and so ended further debates of pro-life versus pro-choice.
Once I committed myself to belief in the right to life, I came to understand that I had to come to terms with death in combat and public executions. War turned out to be too big and too complicated to wrap my mind around and I finally decided to remove it from my consideration. I will admit that if I was forced to choose, I would lean on the side of becoming a conscientious objector, but I will never know if I would have had the courage of this conviction if push came to shove.
I also had a hard time coming to a meaningful conclusion for absolute prohibition of capital punishment. My problem was that to be meaningful, such a prohibition would have to include those who are so evil that to let them live would be repulsive. Thankfully, we rarely encounter people who are this vile and my epiphany didn’t arrive until Timothy J. McVey destroyed the Alfred P. Mirrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995.
April 19th was a Wednesday and Mc Vey detonated his eight-hundred-pound ammonium nitrate / fuel oil bomb that he hid in the cargo compartment of a rented Ryder truck that he had parked outside the north entrance to the building. The massive explosion destroyed the entire facade of the eight-story building and about a third of the interior killing 168 people including 19 children, most of them in a nursery pre-school located on the first floor.
McVey said this about his victims:
To these people in Oklahoma who lost a loved one, I’m
sorry but it happens every day. You’re not the first mother
to lose a kid, or the first grandparent to lose a grandson or
a granddaughter. It happens every day, somewhere in the
world. I’m not going to go into that courtroom, curl into a
fetal ball and cry just because the victims want me to do that.
.
In other words, His victims were merely collateral damage.
Of the children he had killed, McVey remarked: “I thought it was terrible that there were children in the building.”
Mc Vey was charged and convicted for killing eight federal agents who were on active duty that day. The penalty for killing each one of them was clearly death. Mc Vey was transferred to the federal death row at USP Terre Haute in Indiana where he was executed by lethal injection on June 11, 2001.
If you can, find the iconic photo by Charle Porter of a fireman gently cradling the body of a one-year-old child fatally wounded by Mc Veigh’s bomb. It sums up the results of Mc Vey’s despicable attack.
Well, there you have it. I took a long time to straighten out my feelings and to make peace with my beliefs. Finally, I realized that my belief for life must prevail, even for Timothy Mc Vey. That photo will haunt me until the day I die,
Still, I choose to belief in life, so help me God.
John Delach 