In The Shadow of The Rocket

Anyone travelling the I-75 corridor through south Georgia for the first time is bound to be befuddled as to how a Titan missile came to rest in a Krystal’s parking lot at the edge of this rural stretch of interstate. You’re driving along past a sea of cotton fields with center pivot irrigation systems crawling over the land, pecan orchards, pine trees, humble country churches, adult superstores, and suddenly, there it is. For years, aside from the pine and pecan trees, it was the only thing rising high enough out of the rolling Coastal Plain to break the horizon. Now, though it competes against America’s corporate chain restaurants and gas stations for the attentions of passersby, the “rocket” still bears a commanding presence, if for no other reason, than it’s incongruous placement.

But, how did it wind up here, behind a Gas N’ Go, next to a fast food joint selling little square hamburgers in Cordele, Georgia? Titan missiles are a relic of the cold war. The Titan missile program started in 1955 as a backup to the Atlas program, which began ten years earlier. The rocket towering over the endless stream of cars headed North and South along Eisenhower’s Interstate, is a Titan I missile to be exact. It is one of 163 such missiles in operation under the U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command from 1962-1965. The Titan I was the United States’ first multistage Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) and an important piece of Cold War America’s strategic nuclear arsenal.

Six squadrons of nine Titan I Missiles, each, were stationed in underground silos beneath the open prairies, foothills, mountains and deserts of Colorado, South Dakota, Idaho, California, and Washington. The silos alone were engineering marvels, buried 160 feet deep, encased in 3-4 ft of concrete, designed to withstand earthquakes and nuclear missile impacts. Shock absorbers were built into important areas to protect the delicate wiring and instruments from vibration. The missile silos were supported by propellant and equipment terminals, a powerhouse, control center, and antennas. The sites were self-contained and were on alert 24/7. Launch crews were trained to raise each missile into position in 15 minutes. If launched, a missile could reach its target 5500 miles away (although its maximum range was 6300 miles) in just 33 minutes. 

I won’t belabor the whole story of the Cuban Missile Crisis here but the Titan I missile was a part of that story. We are fortunate that it wasn’t a bigger part. The long and short of it is that thankfully, in Kennedy and Kruschev’s wisdom, restraint, and anxiety, Titan I missiles were among those never launched. Each one was designed to bear a single nuclear warhead in the megaton range atop the 10 foot diameter, 110,000 lb, 98 foot tall missile body. Given the time to fuel, raise, and launch the missiles in response to an incoming attack, they would do little good beyond knowing that at least if you were destroyed your enemy would be as well. The fear of this scenario by both sides during the cold war is likely the only thing that prevented such an event.

In the early 60’s, the inertial guidance systems that allowed rockets to break free of on-ground computer guidance had not yet been developed. The Titan I’s now-antiquated radio guidance system required the missiles to be placed in close proximity to each other in groups of three, which also made them vulnerable to attack. The two stage rockets armed with separate engines generating 300,000 lbs and 80,000 lbs of thrust, respectively, provided the Titan I Missile with its intercontinental ability, but its propellant (RP-1 Kerosene fuel) was dangerous and hard to handle. It also required super-chilled liquid oxygen oxidizer to be pumped aboard the missile just before launch and complex equipment with which to store and move it safely. The Titan I was a learning experience for America’s early missile program. They were replaced with later missiles, using safer fuels and more advanced guidance.

Seventy Titan I missiles experienced test launches. Fifty three of those launches were successful. Unlike the Titan II, which replaced it, the original Titan I missiles were never re-purposed as space launch boosters to carry satellites into orbit. However, 33 Titan I’s were saved for museums or displays. About two dozen still survive today and are displayed at places as varied as Cape Canaveral, the White Sands Missile Range, numerous Air Force Bases, science museums, a High School in Titusville, Florida, and a couple of small towns, including Cordele, Georgia.

One missile’s fate was determined in an act of late 60’s small town boosterism. The 98’ tall missile, labeled SM-49 with tail number 60-3694, built in 1960, was dismantled in California and flown to Warner Robins Air Force Base before being donated by the U.S. Government to the Cordele, Georgia Rotary Club. The Rotary club, in turn, gave the missile to the town and county, who then erected it on its present site at the intersection of U.S. Highway 280 and I-75 on July 17, 1969. The club’s president, John Pate, was an Air Force Veteran, who got wind of the retirement of the Titan missile program and instigated the retired missile’s deployment to Cordele.

               I learned to swim in the pool of the Holiday Inn across Highway 280, under the shadow of the fabled missile during one hot, humid summer in the mid to late 1970’s. As a kid, I marveled that our town had a rocket. I imagined it as a genuine spacecraft that could blast off and carry one to other worlds. The rocket was pretty far out of town in those days. The Holiday Inn and Ramada Inn were about the only two things out that way.  We rarely travelled on the Interstate and I usually only saw the rocket as we drove out of town to visit friends who lived on the east side of the county or relatives who lived in nearby Pitts, Georgia. For the town’s residents, the rocket, despite its fascinating history, technology, and the grim purpose for which it was built, often largely fades into the background, much I suppose, as majestic mountains do for those who live among them.

                I left my hometown 36 years ago, sort of. Like many, I went off to college, started a career, and raised a family. In all that time, I never lived more than 160 miles away. I returned to see my grandparents and my Dad on holidays and occasionally on weekends, increasingly as they aged. I hunted and fished and birdwatched and roamed the family farm outside town in adulthood, as I did growing up. At the age of 34, though I lived about 40 miles away in another small town, I decided to plant and farm pecans on that familiar family land. I have been on the farm and in Cordele at least 2 or 3 days a week ever since. So, in a way, I didn’t really leave. But, time and experience changes us all. It changes people and it changes place. That is the way of things. I didn’t go far, at least not to live, but I’ve logged a lot of experiences, taking me further than the 6300 mile range of a Titan I missile since I left on that August day in 1989.

I’m not sure I believe Thomas Wolfe’s observation that you can’t go home again. Some may say the place we came from can’t be found because we are not who we were when we left it, which was the point of leaving in the first place. Maybe that’s true and maybe it isn’t. Wendell Berry writes a lot about staying put, about being a “sticker” rather than a “boomer”, as his mentor Wallace Stegner put it. Mr. Berry, himself, left his native Kentucky for a time. The place he was from made him who he was, so he returned. The places he went and the experiences he had in between added to his early experiences, gave him something to say, and a voice to say it with. Many of us enjoy our brief adventures, gaining different experiences by going out into the world away from the place we came from. Upon return, we often find it changed. The landscape changes. People we knew and cared about are often gone. But, the residue of the place and people we knew remain. They, and we, are the foundations of the place itself.

Juxtaposed against fields of cotton, orchards, and pines, perched along an interstate, flanked by chain restaurants and gas stations, the rocket provides quite the metaphor for how the world has changed over my lifetime. Erected here at a time in which the technological age was rapidly eroding an agrarian world, the rocket has stood as a witness to the devouring of that world through the runaway consumerism and unprecedented human mobility that destroys the very foundations of that world. Yes, the rocket provides perhaps the perfect symbol.

For people driving up and down I-75 in south Georgia, the rocket is a landmark, a way-point to meet up with others on their journeys or a signal to exit the interstate for a bathroom break. It is a technological marvel that once represented the optimism and promise of a new space age and the military prowess of a nation, breaking up the seemingly endless wave of monotonous agricultural landscape. To the natives of Cordele, like myself, the rocket is a way-marker for home.

Anytime I gaze upon that 98 feet of steel designed to travel 6300 miles, I am reminded of the people who helped raise me under the rocket’s shadow. I am reminded of days spent in this small, quiet place–at the Farmer’s Market among bustling stalls full of late 1970’s and 80’s model pickup trucks, their beds loaded down with watermelons or of some of those same trucks being driven slowly through the Burger King Parking lot on a Saturday night. The pecan orchard in town across from the police station, where we, as high school squires in our own minds, gathered to escape the watchful eyes of parents but never got into anything that would hurt us. I am reminded of the dances held at the old country club following Friday night football games to keep us out of trouble, an old building on 7^th street where my father toiled at his gunsmithing business, the glorified drainage ditch I called a creek beside the old hospital where my mother worked, mowing grass at my grandmother’s house, the meals she filled my belly with (the likes of which I’ll never taste again), Little League baseball and football on the Recreation Department fields behind the movie theatre, the old granite post office, the Carnegie Library, and the modest, two-bedroom house on 13^th Avenue, we called home. Some of these things still exist. Some of them don’t, though if I concentrate really hard, I can conjure them up.

               The rocket is a talisman, evoking a time, place, and people I’ve known and loved who, like many a Titan missile, indeed like all of us, were designed to leave this world. A reminder that no matter where I’ve been or where I might go, like this particular rocket—Titan I Missile SM-49, tail number 60-3694— I am still anchored to the earth for a time, rooted among the pines of south Georgia. Leaving the farm on summer evenings, I sometimes take the fastest route home. If there’s not a train stopped on the tracks along Drayton Road, I am rewarded for taking the shortcut into town and cut across, past the cemetery, to I-75 and head south. One exit down, I pass the rocket. Looking back to the West, the sky glows orange with the falling sun. A Titan missile stands silhouetted against the burning sky, a silent witness to the ravages of time in a small town.