Drove out to the former Strategic Air Command Air Base in Salina today after lunch with my old friend Bert. Salina used to have a SAC air base back in the Truman/Eisenhower days - the cold war days. You wanna talk about fear. This terrorist shit is lame compared to instant thermal Nuclear annhilation at 5,000 deg.F. Salina was home to several B-52's with nuculear bomb storage bays spread over acres of old farm land converted to government property. Yeah, we had a special spot on the Ruskie's missle target charts.
I used to have nightmares as a boy walking through the Kansas Van Gogh-yellow sunflower fields with periwinkle blue skies - and all these magnificent white plumes, lines of missle vapor trails, converging on our town hoping to get us before we got them. Time for one more breath. Maybe two. Yellow flash. Then white. Then heat. Then - silence after my body goes microscopic, atomic.
Our teachers taught us to get under our desks if there wasn't enough time to go to the bomb shelter. WTF? It would have been better just to all go outside and PROUDLY give the decending white plumes the one-finger salute...a last futile act of defiance.
But I digress.
Sarge's apartments. My very first job as a licensed architect. They're still standing, those magnificent converted SAC barracks I so lovingly turned into sad boxes of cheese for sad cheesy people to live in. They still do. And, Sadly, they were better off in 1975 than they are today.
It's never too soon to panic.
Good Lord.
ReplyDeleteI remember sarges apartments!!! We were starting our careers, so full of hope and anticipation.
sigh