July 2011 Featured Story: Introduction
Introduction
Revisiting our back pages brings Cold War chills and thrills
Twenty years ago this December, the Soviet Union went kaputski. It seems hard to believe it’s been that long since the “evil empire,” whose leaders once boasted they’d bury the West, was shoveled out onto the ash heap of history.
An entire generation of Americans has grown up without fearing the “red menace” or even jeering those seemingly unnaturally-imposing Olympic athletes in the “CCCP”-emblazoned uniforms.
What do the youngest generations make of the serious 1950s-60s Civil Defense films showing how to “duck and cover” — in case the “atom bomb explodes right now”? Viewed on YouTube, they now seem as absurd as the black comedies of their day, like “Dr. Strangelove,” or the surrealistic humor in early Bob Dylan songs, like his “crazy dream” of World War III: “I lit a cigarette on a parking meter and walked on down the road.”
Into that Cold War period, this publication came along. Then known as Indiana Rural News, the first issue was produced for July 1951.
Throughout its 60 years, your Indiana electric cooperative publication has remained dedicated to bringing readers news and information about their cooperative, the electric industry, safety and efficiency. But it also has included general interest features about rural Indiana, consumers, their culture and lifestyles, Indiana destinations, history and more.
In the 1950s and 1960s, that included covering new businesses and electric consumers that catered to the Cold War needs, be it bunkers burrowed into hillsides or military missiles bunkered in the meadows, or community projects that lifted our eyes skyward. Some stories outlined U.S. Department of Agriculture booklets pointing out the need to safeguard crops and animals from radioactive fallout.
This month, to celebrate the anniversaries of our beginning and the Cold War’s end, we set the “wayback machine” to 1952, 1961 and 1963 to bring you three blasts from the past: stories from the early days of this publication. We visited sites related either directly or indirectly to these stories to see how the years and the changing world landscape changed them.
In addition, check out the other “online exclusives” packaged together under the “red sky” banner.