A few weeks ago, I finished writing a novel about a teenager whose search for her mom unearths supernatural secrets in her small Wisconsin hometown. (My agent is reading it now!) I based the locations and mythology on the town where I grew up: the abandoned amusement park, the legend of the deranged circus performers who haunted the woods, and the mysterious Nike Site on the hill above my house. In my research, I learned the amusement park and the Haunchies were unique to my hometown, but Nike Sites were open secrets throughout the United States, part of the Cold War arms race left to the dustbins of history.

[Ad detail from The Big T, the yearbook of the California Institute of Technology, 1958, public domain from Wikimedia Commons]

According to Wikipedia, “Project Nike began in 1944 when the War Department demanded a new air defense system to fight jet aircraft that flew too high and fast for anti-aircraft guns.” Fear of Russian aggression ran rampant throughout the 1950s, so the U.S. government built about 265 Nike missile bases in small towns throughout the United States. The reasoning was that large cities like New York and Chicago would be likely targets, so rural areas outside major metropolises were the perfect place for anti-aircraft missile defense sites. That way, if Chicago or Milwaukee was obliterated, little Muskego, Wisconsin, could retaliate.

[Image by Bwmoll3 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Muskego must’ve housed guards and soldiers, people watching radar or holding their fingers over a launch button, but I never met anyone who remembered a large number of soldiers working or living there. Perhaps that was because the Nike Site by my house was decommissioned after only seven years. By 1963 the government wanted bigger missiles with nuclear warheads that needed to be kept further away from “target areas.” (It’s also possible the explosion at a Nike Site in Leonardo, New Jersey on May 22, 1958 that killed six soldiers and four civilians had something to do with that decision.) The overall Nike program sputtered along until 1974 when high costs, rapid obsolescence, and the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty ended it for good. But the government didn’t always clean up the sites they abandoned.

[Photo by Panegyrics of Granovetter from Lincoln, NE, USA – 8653, CC BY-SA 2.0]

When I was a kid in the 1970s, I’d ride my bike up the hill to explore the old guard house and humongous metal doors in a concrete patch on the ground. Rusty chains held the doors shut, but I’d lift a corner with a stick and peer at the big, pointy missiles all shiny and round. The other kids and I would throw stuff down there or jump on the doors to make them clang and boom like thunder. Older kids hung out there to smoke and drink, judging from the empty beer cans everywhere. To us, the Nike Site was a just weird part of the landscape, like the porch steps without a house in the woods or the tractor graveyard at the back of a cornfield. Nowadays it’s a suburban neighborhood, its grim history forgotten. The photo above and this collection of photos are similar to what I remember, a blot on the landscape nobody wanted to deal with for years.

You can still visit a decommissioned site preserved as a museum in the Marin Headlands just north of San Francisco. At the Nike Missile Site at the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, “three Nike Hercules are displayed in the original bunkers” and you can check out “the missile bunkers and control area, as well as period uniforms and vehicles that would have operated at the site.” The base is open to the public, including demonstrations of the operational missile lift from the bunker to the surface. Someday maybe I’ll visit that strange, secret example of my childhood playground in its heyday. Or maybe it’s more fun to imagine who, or what, hides beneath the surface of a quiet Midwestern town.