Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Abandoned Cold War base has stories to tell
Wisconsin installation stood guard during Cuban missile crisis
ANTIGO, Wis. — The radar base is abandoned, overgrown with weeds. Buildings with broken windows and sagging walls are almost completely obscured behind trees and bushes. The platform that once served as the base for the search radar is now the home to a hopeful sapling.
In a rural area near Antigo, the base is easily missed, the USA Today Network-Wisconsin reported. Its driveway is nearly a quarter-mile long and has been patched over and over, making for a bumpy drive. The small single-level houses in front of the base have been kept up, all 12 of them still filled by renters. But the base behind has grown into a jungle; the only signs of the past are the buildings that poke up above the weeds and shrubs.
The 676th Radar Squadron was decommissioned in 1977 and has sat abandoned ever since. Today the empty Air Force base stands as a haunting reminder of the Cold War, those days of underground shelters and nuclear fallout drills when U.S.Soviet tensions could break out into full-blown nuclear war. Although fallout signs still hang near the entrances to local buildings, they no longer carry the same meaning that they once did. Today, they serve mainly as mementos.
It was those fading yellow-andblack signs that led USA Today Network-Wisconsin to look back at the Cold War’s quite-real effects on central and northern Wisconsin. In Marathon County, shelters still lie beneath churches and in the backyards of homes, and those who lived through the Cold War — especially folks who experienced the Cuban missile crisis — remember just how scary it was to go through every day with a gnawing fear of the Soviets.
A knock on the door of one of the small houses was the culmination of a month of research into the base.
The house was one of about a dozen on the former base, arranged in neat little rows. The tiny residences once served as housing for officers who staffed the 676th Radar Squadron, a minute’s drive away. During the height of the Cold War, the base served as a state-of-the-art warning system, searching for Communist planes or missiles. Today, the base stands empty, owned by civilian Roy Kleisch.
Kleisch is a 65-year-old man with a large smile and an interest in the history of the base. He bought the property about 15 years ago, hoping that he could reuse the buildings to create a source of renewable energy. When he bought the base it had been decommissioned for years, and all the buildings had been stripped of metals and other valuable remnants. His dreams have yet to be achieved, but in the meantime, he was happy to show a reporter around the base and reveal some of the history of property.
Curtains still hang in the windows of the barracks, tattered and weather-worn. The radar base can now be likened to more of a ruin than a military outpost.
The 676th Radar Squadron opened in 1952, as the threat of nuclear attack by the Soviet Union reached a crescendo. The base was outfitted with three radars, a tall radar, that reached hundreds of feet into the air, for detecting potential threats, and two smaller radars, used to find the height of the threats. Those radars have been removed since the base closed in the late ’70s, but at the time, they helped to make up a highly sophisticated first line of defense for the northern part of the country, called the Pine Tree Line. The line stretched from coast to coast and was on alert for attacks that would have been launched over the North Pole.
Walking through the base now, which has been stripped of metals and used for storage for years, it’s impossible to see the history behind the buildings with chipped paint and cracked walls.
Paul Fisher, who served at the base as an administrative clerk from September 1960 through January 1965, recalled his time there fondly. He returned from his home in Nevada in mid-September for a reunion, something that the airmen who were stationed in Antigo do every few years. Fisher is in his 70s now, but since leaving Antigo he’s kept his memories of the base alive through photo albums.
Although Fisher and his friends didn’t recall ever feeling the pressures of the Cold War at the base, they did participate in drills.
“We were given guns,” Fisher said. “Made of 2-by-4s. And we had to patrol the perimeter during drills.”
He remembered talking with buddies about how they’d have to poke an intruder to death were they to come across something, which they never did.
Documents that the former airman showed to a reporter revealed that one of the most serious times at the base was during the Cuban missile crisis, a tense 13-day standoff in October 1962 between the U.S. and the Soviet Union over nuclear-armed Soviet missiles placed in Cuba. The base was moved up to high alert, according to the once-classified documents, and set at DEFCON 3, which meant officers were ready to flee the site if they needed to survive.
Antigo is far from Cuba, but there was nothing more important than being prepared for the worst.
Just as the Cold War faded into the past, the base has too.
Once, the yellow-and-black fallout signs stood out against the concrete and brick of city buildings. Those signs signaled a safe space to hunker down if hostile missiles were ever to be spotted by the radar base, or if larger cities within America were attacked. The shelters would provide protection from harmful radiation, which experts expected to be carried to northern Wisconsin from cities such as Milwaukee, Chicago and Minneapolis.
Fallout shelter signs can still be spotted in downtown Wausau, although they no longer carry any sort of modern purpose.
And some of the shelters residents built in their backyards and basements remain, too.
Wausau resident Bill Holm, who has lived in his house for two years, discovered a Cold War secret in his basement.
In a small room off the main basement lies a heavy metal door, mostly hidden to entrants. Behind the door lies a time machine to the 1950s, when families were prepared to hide underground were a bomb to go off.