Being a kid in the 1960s was really wonderful. I kind of feel sorry for the kids today who are growing up in a much different time. Perhaps it feels the same to them, but there isn’t as much mystery and awe as there was when I was young.
After all, it was the middle of the Space Race, the dawn of the hippie revolution, the Red Scare, an unjust war in Southeast Asia, the beginning of the computer era, and a time when you still ate together at the dinner table and talked about all the amazing things you did that day.
For me, of course, it was all about the hydros, space exploration, and playing war, not engaging in a real one.
I didn’t really know what a commie was, but they seemed to be all around us. Joseph McCarthy had begun to point them out before I was born. People were put on blacklists and everyone ducked and took cover under their desks.
I don’t remember any of this, though. I came on the scene just a little late for it all. Still, we were in a duel to the death with the Soviet Union and all those folks in Mao suits. These were pretty exotic places to a little kid. If someone had asked me to point out where China was, I would only be able to point to the butt of my GI Joe which said it was made there.
Growing up in a major population center skews your existence some in the nuclear age. I remember my mother telling me when I got older how she and my father had hatched a plan for rendezvousing in the evacuation that was to take place during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
If you’ve ever watched documentaries on the crisis, where both sides can tell their story, we came scarily close to annihilation.
Seattle was one of the big targets. Not just because we had a decent population center, but because we built airplanes, ships, had naval, air force and army bases, ports… we were a juicy target.
To protect us, there were many Nike missile sites around Seattle: Bothell, Redmond, Renton, Kent, Vashon Island, Ollala, Poulsbo and Kingston to name a few. The last of the bases, Vashon, Redmond and Kingston, didn’t close until 1974.
There was also the one near us, up on the top of Cougar Mountain. The mission of the Nikes was to take out enemy aircraft. It was named, of course, after the goddess of victory, Nike.
This site had the very first Nikes, the Nike Ajax. If you go up to the park up there today you can see the remnants of the control facility. It contained the radars and tracking equipment, the fire control system and barracks to house the troops.
The missiles were located near 166th Southeast, down range from where the park stands today. All that’s left now of the facility is some concrete pads and sidewalks.
It’s not like it was a big secret, what was up there. About a hundred men were stationed at the base so there was a lot of activity on that dead end road that led to the top of the mountain.
Here’s the base as it was in 1957. You can see the access road in the map. It comes in from the top of the page and curves to the guard gate. The barracks are the rectangular pads on the right. At the far left is the launch site for the Nikes.
While the buildings were torn down because of asbestos contamination, the underground storage and launch facility was never dismantled. The hatches were welded shut and covered with dirt. So if you have a metal detector and it suddenly redlines, you know what you’ve found up them.
As kids, we knew it there was a super secret military installation on Cougar Mountain. My father had a customer up near it. Right where you turned off to his house was a big No Trespassing sign by order of the President of the United States.
I seem to come from a long line of rule benders and boundary testers. I can still remember my dad leaving the guy’s house. He drove unusually slow, up to the road that ran diagonally to the private drive.
Then he turned the Greenbrier left instead of right. Instead of going down the hill, he headed up. I knew where that led, even at my young age.
He drove past a couple of soldiers armed with rifles. They looked like they were on a little hike. It didn’t take long for us to reach that curve in the road. There before us was the gate that led into the missile base.
At this point most people would turn around. Not my dad. He drove right up to the gate. Two soldiers trained their guns on the Corvair, as if anyone in a Corvair could ever be a threat to national security.
They were not amused. My dad played lost, pretending that he was looking for the house we had just come from. I started to tell him we were just there, but my dad was quick to soothe my childish fears, now that four rifles were pointed at us.
“Don’t worry, son. These men won’t shoot a little boy.” Some comfort.
A command was barked, the guns were turned away and the guard asked my father to turn around. We backed the car up and headed back down, knowing that all the rumors were true and there was something cool going on at the top of Cougar Mountain.
My brother, for his part, was convinced they had an alien spaceship up there. He was always convinced the government was up to something sneaky. Wait, he still is.
Me, I wondered what it would be like when those missiles all fired off at once, blazing into the sky in search of enemy bombers set on ruining the American way of life. I had a really wild imagination. Wait, I still do.
In the Emerald City, wondering if my brother is an alien who crash landed on Cougar Mountain all those years ago,
– Robb