(click to enlarge photos)




On September 24, 1959, City Hall’s busy Board of Public Works easily approved a temporary display of Thor, the Air Force’s Intermediate Range Ballistic missile named for a Nordic deity with a not always righteous reputation and a rather ignitable temper. The faithful to scale public relations copy of the Air Force’s Intermediate Range Ballistic missile was lifted above University Plaza, still one of the central business district’s rare public places.
About two stories of stairs led a line of curious visitors up one side of the shiny Thor to an open door and on to a platform that eight feet later reached another open door leading to the stairway designated “down.” It was a command that some of the visitors were no doubt pleased to obey, And yet while walking that plank the explorers were, of course, safe, and kept free of the BM’s liquid fuel (aka gas), stabilizing gyros, and “pay package” of merely one nuclear bomb.

By the fall of 1959 Thor had been running through nearly three years of flight tests that included several crashes. Meanwhile both the Navy and Army were working with their own Cold War responses to Russia’s surprising success two years earlier with the three weeks of world circling by Sputnik, a shining metal sphere with antennas. I recall the “Sputnik Surprise” of October 1957 very well and I suspect that many readers will also remember that the satellite that began the space age was about the diameter of the two basketballs that were famously dribbled side-by-side by one member of the Globe Trotters.

More than for its citizens, the Seattle appearance of Thor was engineered for the about one thousand delegates to the 14th Annual Convention of the National Defense Transportation Association, a happy group of munitions dealers and military brass that represented well what former President – and general – Dwight D. Eisenhower named “the military industrial complex.” Unfortunately the primary show-time for Thor before the three-day convention was foiled by a forgetful air force sergeant who had the keys to the missile’s two doors, but was off-duty. Besides the disappointed military brass, among those invited to walk the eight foot plank thru the full width of the Missile that special day was Donald Douglas, of Douglas Aircraft, the builder of the Thor.


WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, compatriots! Welcome home to Green Lake Jean following your applauded performance on the morning KING TV show.
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Why that’s no capitol, that’s San Francisco City Hall.