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How the USA's Most Important Defense RADAR became “Santa Tracker”
This year, that changed as a trio of siblings contacted NPR’s StoryCorps to tell the tale of how the Continental Air Defense Command Center’s red phone was turned into a Santa Hotline [npr.org]:
“Only a four-star general at the Pentagon and my dad had the number. This was the ’50s, this was the Cold War, and he would have been the first one to know if there was an attack on the United States.” The red phone rang one day in December 1955, and Col. Shoup answered it. “And then there was a small voice that just asked, ‘Is this Santa Claus?’ ”
His children remember Shoup as straight-laced and disciplined, and he was annoyed and upset by the call and thought it was a joke — but then, Terri says, the little voice started crying.
“And Dad realized that it wasn’t a joke,” her sister says. “So he talked to him, ho-ho-ho’d and asked if he had been a good boy and, ‘May I talk to your mother?’ And the mother got on and said, ‘You haven’t seen the paper yet? There’s a phone number to call Santa. It’s in the Sears ad.’ ”
The rest is an amusing, surprisingly heart-warming story that doesn’t even edge near the treacly ‘entertainment’ that tends to take over at this time of year, much to their credit. It also left me thinking: society back then was far stricter, it was believed that the nation could come under nuclear attack at any minute, yet even the the most crucial defense leader & team was able to retain the sense of humor, humanity, and stay genuinely cool under pressure — so why is it that now they appear to have completely lost those traits in our less endangered, more relaxed era?
