Bomb shelters, mall openings
October anniversaries seem to loom especially large in Central Florida’s past. Walt Disney World opened in October 1971, about nine years after one of the Cold War’s hottest events — the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Its dates are often given as Oct. 16-28, 1962, but we might say the crisis really began Oct. 14, when Maj. Richard Heyser took off from the California desert in a U-2 spy plane, flew over Cuba and landed at Orlando’s McCoy Air Force Base.
The images he captured from 70,000 feet above Cuba would start the United States on the road to a scary confrontation with the Soviet Union.
Eight days later, on Oct. 22, President John F. Kennedy told the nation on live television that the Soviets were installing nuclear missiles in Cuba that were capable of striking most U.S. cities.
Secrecy at McCoy
Although secrecy reigned at McCoy, residents noted “the presence of at least two U-2 spy planes” at the base, the Orlando Sentinel’s Charlie Wadsworth reported Oct. 24. “Sternvisaged spokesmen again refused comment last night and continued to wrap a heavy cloak of tightened security measures around increased activity at McCoy Air Force Base,” Wadsworth wrote.
It was obvious that something was up. The sky over the Orlando area roared with “an endless procession of troop carriers and cargo planes,” and two of the Air Force’s top-performing fighter planes had also been spotted at McCoy.
Lt. Col. Robert “Bud” Grierson, a B-52 commander at McCoy in 1962, recalled later that waves of C-119 aircraft, loaded with paratroopers, had begun landing at McCoy on Oct. 22.
He wondered what the heck was going on. McCoy was a Strategic Air Command base, “and you didn’t see paratroopers at a SAC base,” Grierson said in 1987.
Soon, McCoy’s B-52 fliers were told that the Air Force was sending them to other bases to make room at McCoy for more Army paratroopers, who could be dropped into Cuba for an invasion.
As longtime Central Floridians look back at October 1962, many remember confusion and fear. Grace Chewning, then secretary to Orlando’s City Council, recalls that “City Hall was being stocked up with supplies to be a city emergency control center.”
“The mayor and City Council were debating whether or not to declare a state of emergency,” recalls Chewning, who went on to serve as Orlando’s city clerk for a half-century. “We had to put extra people on to handle all the building permits for bomb shelters.”
But if you scan the city’s newspapers from late that October, you might be impressed by how lowprofile the crisis appears. Headlines about it competed for Orlandoans’ attention with the grand opening of the expanded Colonial Plaza. Hailed as “the largest and newest shopping complex south of Atlanta,” the shopping center now included an enclosed mall capped by a four-story Jordan Marsh department store.
At the mall’s opening Oct. 22 — the same day President Kennedy would address the nation — 11 beauty queens snipped a ribbon, kicking off “one of the biggest shopping sprees in the history of Orlando,” the Sentinel reported. By Oct. 27, the annual Parade of Homes vied for front-page space with the latest from Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev.
It’s important to remember that news coverage in 1962 was far different than it is today. Television stations didn’t broadcast around the clock; they signaled the end the broadcast day with the national anthem, followed by a test pattern. When President Kennedy asked for TV time from the three broadcast networks for 7 p.m. on a Monday night, his address signaled a major event not only in the Cold War but also in the evolution of television.
There’s more about the events of October 1962 in “Edge of Armageddon: Florida and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” an essay collection edited by Florida historians Nick Wynne and Joe Knetsch, which includes a chapter on Orlando and McCoy Air Force Base by this writer.