‘THE DAY I WENT DOWN INTO A NUCLEAR MISSILE SILO AT WHITMAN AIR FORCE BASE’
Was the Day I Went from Being a Naïve Journalist to a Mature Man
BY ALAN GOLDFARB
June 27, 2025
This is a story about my journey navigating through a decades-long journalism career. And subsequent path from naivete to finally emerging as a mature writer and by extension, as an appropriately developed man.
It has nothing to do with wine, but a lot to do with the profession of journalism, which is an integral part of how I regard my work for All Media Winery Solutions.
The process of getting from there to here began on a hot day in Missouri in the summer of 1964. It was the summer of I Want to Hold Your Hand, which I eschewed for its poppiness. Only three years later, Sgt. Pepper hipped me to The Beatles. A first indication of maturity – both for me and The Beatles -- in-spite of and perhaps because of, weed.
An indicator of my puerility (I didn’t have a clue of worldly things in those daze; although I thought I knew everything) is when I emerged from an 80-foot- deep Minuteman nuclear missile silo at Whitman Air Force Base, located in Knob Noster, MO.
It was the summer of ’64 and this is in part what I wrote for the Windsor Review, a weekly newspaper for which I interned during my junior and senior years: “Tonight, Windsor can sleep well …”
The premise being that since so many nuclear missiles sat hidden underground, 13.75 miles away, we had gained a certain kind of privilege to feel secure.
Wow, was I naïve, thinking that and relaying that sense of well-being to the good readers of the Review. Listening to the Lonely Hearts Club Band and listening and reading and attending meetings and demonstrations against the war, only four years later my life and my political awakening, had inculcated in me, a certain awareness and understanding of how the world works; which I’ll take to my grave.
All this came back to me after I realized – a day after we dropped the bombs on Iran’s nuclear sites that those B-2 stealth bombers -- flew out of Whitman Air Base. That Whitman, which I thought was a tiny backwater military facility. And on the day I went down into that silo, I thought I was among the lucky few with a crewcut, allowed down there. I was invited as member of the press to tour the site. As I recall, we were told only good things would come of having such a facility. The men (only men, then) manning the switchboards, knobs and dials, perhaps rudimentary computers, only had smiles to display. Everything was copacetic. Everything was secure. America was safe.
Perhaps so. Maybe because of those rockets down there, the U.S. or no other country since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has not been attacked by a nuclear weapon. But, of course, there’s nuance and complexity to all that. On that day and in that summer at least, monumental things were happening. I hadn’t much of a clue.
It was the Freedom Summer when Riders went down to Mississippi to try and quell voting intimidation; which led to the Civil Rights Act being enacted. And the Vietnam War began to escalate.
I only knew of those things tangentially. During that summer, I would drive to Kansas City 85 miles away to go to Kansas City A’s games and to 12th Street & Vine to see for myself what Wilbert Harrison was singing about. And, of course, writing that article that so superficially enabled Windsorites to play unfettered, on the sand greens on their hometown nine-hole golf course.
Now? They’re giving tours down into those same silos at Whitman that I submerged myself; and from where Bunker Busters now hold the imagination. Hopefully not the naïve imaginations of some cub reporter sent on an assignment for which he wasn’t prepared.
What if the reference to bottles (bolded by me above) were wine bottles? The hooligans -- who are definitely not gentle men, and dressed as I imagine them, in knickers and tweed newsboy caps -- are hurling wine bottles onto the field; even smacking the outfielders in the noggin. They’ve been sitting in those bleachers, since bleachers were built to accommodate their asses, and throwing wine bottles since the turn of 19th-to-20th fin de siècle. Then, the baseball coppers took action to stop it, albeit in the form of those placards.
A little research into the vintage of ’07 -- both in wine and base ball -- revealed a list of wines (courtesy of Wine-Searcher) from that year. Most on the list where Bordeaux, Armagnacs & Sauternes, and Madeiras, now worth upwards of $34K(!) for a Jean Cave Armagnac. But among them is a 1907 Heidsieck Monopole Extra Dry, now selling for a mere $48. In today’s bucks, that comes to about $1.50.
I decided there and then: That must have been the spent dead soldier bottles those guys (only guys, I’m sure) at Fenway, at Wrigley and at Ebbets (and most especially at Ebbets) and at Fenway; even though those museums of ballpark immortality didn’t come into existence ‘til 1912, ’13, and ’14, in that order. I betcha a sawbuck that (wine) bottle throwing didn’t cease at the country’s ballfields for a long while after that. In spite of those, “No Throwing Bottles” warning signs.
Detroit and the Chicago Cubs won the pennants in ’07; and the likes of Cy Young, Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner and Christy Mathewson were the Judges and Ohtani of the day.
So, where was wine in 1907? Doing a little more digging, I came up with these fascinating tidbits:
The 1907 vintage for Bordeaux was “large and reasonably good in its day. Wines from the Right Bank arguably performed slightly better than the Left, particularly Pomerol. However, the vast majority of wines will be past their best. Little information exists on the Port vintage, which suggests it was mostly undeclared. It is still possible to find both Armagnac and whisky from 1907, which are likely to still be drinking well.”
Nineteen-ought-seven also saw the Romanian Peasants’ Revolt, Europe's last major uprising against feudalism. And the Workers, Socialists, and the Winegrowers' Revolt in the Languedoc grabbed attention, as well..
A French protest song from the day sounds eerily familiar and relevant:
We are the ones who have wine to sell and can't find a buyer;
We are those who have our labor to sell and can scarcely find a job;
We are those who have goods that no one can afford to buy;
We are the ones who are dying of hunger.
Play ball – and drink wine – at your own risk and resist.