Saturday Man Movie

I know. I fell away from doing these when I went traveling a few months back. Truth be told, it was getting tougher to find video clips that I hadn't already shown.

But I found this one, from the 1955 movie Strategic Air Command, with Jimmy Stewart, himself a real Army Air Force bomber pilot in World War Two and an Air Force Reserve General by the time he retired. Granted, you can only see him for a few seconds in the first cockpit shot, but he's there, as is recently deceased actor Harry Morgan, who sits with his back to the camera but speaks at 02:45 and 03:04.

And then there's the Convair B-36 Peacemaker bomber that was the real star of this movie. Yes, they were real. They really flew. The one in this movie is really flying.

There were 384 of these bombers built, and they were operated by the US Air Force for ten years, from 1949-1959. They required a crew of 15, and they had a range of 10,000 miles. The original idea when they were designed was to be used to bomb Europe from American airfields if England fell, but during the Cold War, they were tasked with dropping the nuclear hammer on Soviet Russia if the need arose.

The B-36 bombers never dropped nukes on Russia, but they did accidentally drop two of them due to emergencies in training operations, losing one atomic bomb into the Pacific off the coast of British Columbia in 1950, and one hydrogen bomb into the desert outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1957. Whoopsie.

There are five of these aircraft left today. Just five out of three hundred eighty four. Wright-Patterson Air Force Museum has one in Dayton, Ohio. I've seen it. There's another at the Strategic Air Command Museum in Offutt, Nebraska. I've seen that one, too. Both are stored indoors and you can really get up close and personal with them.
A third is at Pima Air Museum in Tucson, Arizona, and a fourth one resides at Castle Air Museum in Atwater, California.
A fifth one was bought by military collector Walter Soplata and is still in pieces in his yard in Newbury, Ohio.

Here's another clip on the B-36 and the then-new Strategic Air Command.


And here's James Stewart talking about his real-life military exploits. A modest man, he didn't speak of these days very often, but he flew 20 combat missions as pilot in command of a B-24 Liberator bomber.

Harpers Ferry's Cold War contribution

Many people visit Harpers Ferry, WV every year to take in it's rich history. They come to see where John Brown--America's first terrorist--led his ill-fated attack on the US Arsenal just prior to the War between the States. They also come to see the place that served as a Union supply depot during that war, at least when it wasn't changing hands, as it often did. They come and they learn that Thomas Jefferson spent time here, as did George Washington, who owned much land in the area and who profited greatly in his post-presidential years when he convinced the Continental Congress to build the arsenal there, arguing that it would be safe from seaborne attacks by the British or French. (Yes, there was a time when those two nations were actually good at things military...) Visitors may also learn about Storer College, the nation's first school of higher learning devoted to educating black people, which was built here just after the war.

But most people leave Harpers Ferry unaware of it's Cold War history, that of the site of the Emergency Relocation Bunker set aside for the Secretary of the Interior and high-ranking Interior Department personnel.

Yep. Right there on the grounds of Storer College (now the National Park Service's Mather Training Center) sits this rather innocuous-looking door.

It's carved into the side of the hill that the Mather Center sits on, and it draws little notice, as do these ventilation ducts above it on the lawn above it. This little Cold War survival shelter was quite literally hidden in plain site for decades. Once intended to be the refuge of last resort for Department of the Interior bigwigs, (because they'd be so needed after a nuclear war, right? We gotta make sure that someone's still around at Cabinet level to make sure that Yogi and Boo boo get fed...) it was reported to have been fully stocked with food, water, and other essential supplies.

These days, it's no longer in use as such. One can presume that the government had to abandon plans to use it when someone blabbed about it. (Did anyone check to see where Joe Biden was when that happened?) Or perhaps it became obsolete when other plans were made for those "essential" personnel. Who knows? It's not exactly something that the Park Service tour guides will or can talk about these days.

Now it reportedly serves as a storage area for important Interior Department documents. I guess we can all be relieved to know that a bunch of papers are all set to survive Armeggedon.

So here's Lagniappe, sitting in front of the door. He figures that if the Secretary of the Interior ever does really show up when the sirens sound, the Secretary'll have to negotiate for entrance with the German Shepherd if we can get there first.

Ironically, his plotting to be the first one to this door was cut short as it opened from the inside and a young woman attempted to exit. of course Lagniappe had to turn around and stick his nose in as the door began to open, causing her to issue a scream worthy of any vintage horror film and slam the door shut again.








After a moment, however, Nicki managed to convince her that it was indeed safe to come out, and as Lagniappe sighed and sauntered away, she told us that she was the sole employee now working within and that she was herself unaware of the facility's once-classified history.