Editorial

More evidence of McCook's role in historical events

Monday, July 20, 2015

Where were you 46 years ago today?

If you were old enough to know what was going on, you were probably glued to the television or listening to the radio to hear the latest from NASA, first that the astronauts had landed safely, and then to watch fuzzy video of Neil Armstrong climbing down the ladder of his lunar module.

"That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." (Armstrong supposedly said "a man," despite audio evidence to the contrary. It makes more sense as written above.)

We have a standard local astronaut story we've used in this space before; Alan Shepard Jr. flew into McCook in the early 1960s to inspect a potential oil well investment. He might have been alarmed to see a crowd of kids waiting at the airport, but he needn't be concerned; they were waiting for a pretend TV spaceman, Major Astro, and didn't notice the real hero walk by.

That's not our area's only connection to NASA, of course; another Apollo astronaut, Ron Evans, was born in St. Francis, Kansas, and more recently, Nebraskan Clayton C. Anderson flew in space twice.

We won't remember where we were when the New Horizons space probe sent back photos from Pluto, but it was an historic occasion none the less.

The same goes for news from Washington that the United States and Cuba re-established diplomatic relations at 12:01 a.m. today.

They broke off after the 1959 revolution and went downhill from there, with the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

A 1948 McCook High School graduate, Captain (Later General) Jerry McIlmoyle received a personal thank-you note from President Kennedy for his role in defusing missile crisis.

McIlmoyle was one of 11 pilots to fly U-2 reconnaissance missions over Cuba (he flew four), photographing Soviet nuclear missile sites only 90 miles from Florida, where McIlmoyle now lives.

Where were you during World War II?

If you were old enough to know what was going on, you probably remember when the Army Air Base north of McCook was its own bustling community, training B-24 and B-29 bomber crews on their way overseas.

Military and civilian veterans of that all-out effort are being lost every day, and we lost another landmark last week.

A large double-hangar at the old base, still earning its keep as a storage place for hay and farm equipment, burned to the ground.

The fire is still under investigation, but whatever the cause, it's another loss of a piece of history that connected McCook to world events.

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