Thursday, June 22, 2000

Deep insights
Missile silo open house will let visitors descend into the area’s past
By Bill Whitaker

If longtime Abilenian Larry Sanders has his way, hundreds of folks will be taking their leisure pursuits underground — 185 feet down, to be exact.

Last Saturday, Sanders and several like-minded souls were devoting time and energy toward that very goal, performing restoration work at an old, long-forgotten Atlas Intercontinental Ballistic Missile silo a couple of miles east of Lawn.

If all goes according to plan, the dark, cavernous silo and its launch control center will serve as the most bizarre banquet hall in all Texas, attracting veterans, Air Force groups, college and high school clubs — and anyone else brazen enough to hold a gathering deep underground.

Don’t look for Sanders to dress the place up all nice and pretty, even for what he drolly refers to as this Saturday’s “open base” — actually an open house for the public to explore the Lawn silo.

“We’re always going to try to emphasize the technical aspects,” the 47-year-old Texas State Technical College dean for institutional advancement said. “We don’t want to hide or deny the reasons for its existence.”

That existence involved what many people once upon a fearful time dreaded might yield the doomsday climax of the Cold War.

One of a dozen Atlas ICBM silos built in the Big Country in 1961 and stocked with missiles, the lonely Lawn silo played its role in accelerating the nuclear arms race, which reached a fever pitch in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Yet, just a few years after the silos ringing Abilene were built, the missile technology was deemed outdated. The missiles were removed, the silos turned over to small towns and school systems, and the U.S. missile program left to blossom in new, more deadly forms elsewhere in the country.

Who’s down there?

Only in the past few years have local missile enthusiasts gathered to try and salvage those area silos not ruined by decades of disuse or abuse. That’s why Abilene-based Atlas ICBM Historical Society members were out in force last weekend, fixing and cleaning the Lawn silo.

Restoration work includes removing water from ventilation shafts that run deep into the silo, itself covered at ground level so nobody can fall in.

“When we first began working down here,” said Sanders, a hard-core Atlas enthusiast, “it smelled like a fish market that had been deserted for a month.”

Sanders worries about what they might find in the depths, particularly the 90 feet of water at the silo’s bottom. Through the years, thrill-seekers and curious spectators have put aside good sense and climbed down deep shafts to view the black, gaping, eerily echoing silo hole.

In the Lawn silo, one can still view the light-hearted handiwork of long-gone graffiti artists, including one who, obviously to honor certain smelly denizens of the dark, spray-painted on a heavy bomb blast door, “Guano Grotto.”

Sanders says the society’s involvement has come just in time.

“It’s amazing that silos like these that were constructed to take all but a direct hit are giving way to nature,” he said. “I can say with confidence, if I hadn’t intervened here, this structure might have had another five or eight years without rust taking over and the beginning of its collapse.”

Sanders and his fellow enthusiasts can never get out of their minds the doomsday significance of these 39-year-old silos. Moving about in the cool of the dark, it’s easy to let the imagination run wild.

In fact, Sanders encourages it — especially when the wind blows.

“They’re voice sounds,” he said. “I’ll be working down here, and I’ll hear wind coming down the stairwell and the air vents, and it’s voice sounds. It’s neat that, of all the sounds nature could create down here, it’d be the voices of men at work.

“It’s like the spirit of the place.”

Come on down

Hinging on a lease agreement with the city of Lawn, which owns the silo, Sanders plans to invest $150,000 into converting the place into a banquet hall, and his marketing plan shows dead-on savvy. While some might understandably avoid dining in an abandoned missile silo, Dyess personnel, college associations and high school groups might well jump at the chance.

“Another benefit is that, because of the highly transitory nature of those groups, every few years there will be more wanting to come down here.”

Sanders’ effort is just one aspect of a diligent effort to play off the area’s Cold War heritage. Bruce Townsley, 54, who owns an Atlas ICBM silo 12 miles away in Oplin, is beginning a marketing campaign to attract tourists to these spooky West Texas sites.

Of silos near the small communities of Nolan, Corinth, Lawn and Oplin, none can convey a wholly accurate picture of how they looked during the early 1960s, Townsley said, “but between three or four of them, you can get a very good feel for what it was all about.

“I think it’s wonderful all of us are so cooperative in setting up tours. You don’t find that kind of camaraderie in many other things. I mean, you can go to all four sites in our area, and that’s remarkable.”

Ironically, Townsley says his four-silo tour — ultimately to include a night slumbering in one of the silos — is priced according to what it would cost if you got caught trespassing to see these sites, which is how many folks used to view them.

“What can I say?” Townsley joked. “I’m just doing this to raise money to finish restoring my own silo. It’s blatant commercialism!”

And isn’t that what we fought the Cold War for?

Contact associate editor Bill Whitaker at 676-6732 or whitakerb@abinews.com. Check out Bill’s previous columns at www.brazosbill.com.