 |
|
|
|
July 2011 Featured Story: Part 3
All along the Watchtower
Volunteers kept watch for enemy bombers at nation's first ‘Skywatch’ tower
by Richard G. Biever
The nuclear family (right) stands hand-in-hand, gazing stone-faced toward the sky, ever vigilant for enemy bombers.
 That’s the takeaway image that remains unchanged at the tiny burg of Cairo where the nation’s first “Operation Skywatch” tower was commissioned early in the Cold War.
Operation Skywatch was a civilian volunteer program of the U.S. Air Force. It began in 1950 to fill in the gaps in coverage in the nation’s nascent radar defense system to guard against air attack by Soviet bombers. Volunteers in the Civilian Ground Observer Corps at Cairo, just north of Lafayette, stood watch 24/7 and would report to the Air Force relay center in South Bend whenever they’d spot an aircraft they could not positively identify as “friendly.”
Some 90 to 120 individual volunteers participated in the program, each taking a two-hour shift every six days. Cairo at the time, by the way, had a population of just 25 people.
The post was organized by Cairo’s grocer, Larry O’Connor, a retired Navy chief petty officer in 1950, at the request of the Air Force. The story of how the community came together to build the program’s first formally commissioned tower, known as Delta-Lima 3-Green, was featured in the October 1952
Indiana Rural News, “Cairo goes into Action.” (Click here to download a pdf of that story.) The commissioning ceremony took place Aug. 16, 1952, and was attended by 500 people.
Before the tower was built, volunteers gathered on top of O’Connor’s brooder house behind the grocery. They soon realized they needed something higher and more substantial than a chicken shed to stand on. The tower was planned and built from donated materials and labor from around the area. Tipmont REMC donated utility poles for the four main corner timbers of the framework and the use of a truck to set the poles.
The tower was topped with a 12x12-foot railed observation deck. Centered on the deck was a covered 7x7-foot shanty, with a desk, chair, telephone and electric clock.
Nationwide, Operation Skywatch at its zenith enlisted over 800,000 volunteers at over 16,000 posts and 75 relay or “filter” stations. After the Korean War, the program was phased out. The Cairo tower was decommissioned in 1954.
For the U.S. Bicentennial in 1976, the tower was reconstructed at its original site and the statue of the family was commissioned to be sculpted. The statue was installed at the site in May 1980.
In his 2002 book
Oddball Indiana, travel writer Jerome Pohlen noted the tower was one of his favorite off-beat places in Indiana, and quipped in a caption beneath a photo of the aging tower, “Let’s see the Russkies get past THIS.”
Even though the reconstructed tower is now crumbling, slowly shedding its splintered weathered boards piece by piece into the tall grass below, who’s to say the original — along with its corps of civilian volunteers — wasn’t an effective deterrent? After all, 60 years later you’re able to read this, and our cities, our nation and our freedoms are all still here.
Return to previous page
|
|
|
|