Nike Missile Bases - A Forgotten Tale of the Puente Hills

Working for the phone company I get to travel through 3 to 4 counties sometimes in one day. I get to see quite a bit of the countryside. Which is pleasant from the city life.

This last Saturday I had a trouble ticket for a customer down this one way road. The road was called Nike road. I had no idea what this once was until I started digging into the past.
Some of these area's are still intact all over America... you could be living close to one of these cold war reminders of the past.

DF-50 Nike 3D/18H/12L-U Dallas Fort Worth Alvarado Aug 1960 - Oct 1968 Intact, Private ownership Intact, Private
http://www.themilitarystandard.com/missile/nike/locationstx.php

Missile base in Alvarado a Cold War reminder

If one date sticks out in U.S. history this time of year, it’s Nov. 22, 1963, the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.

But a year and a month earlier, one of the most tense engagements in the Cold War erupted between the Soviet Union and the United States — the 13 days from Oct. 16-28, 1962, the standoff known as the Cuban Missile Crisis, when nuclear-armed Soviet missiles were discovered in Cuba.

As historians note, it was the closest the two superpowers ever came to plunging the world into a thermonuclear war.

That the U.S. might be attacked by the Soviets or other communist powers in the 1950s and 1960s is still visible in Alvarado, where the abandoned remains of a Nike missile base can be found on private property along Farm-to-Market Road 1807. The Nikes were the first surface-to-air anti-aircraft missiles ever developed and were nuclear-capable.

The base, manned by elements of the 4th Missile Battalion of the 562nd Artillery, was one of four in North Texas, along with Mineral Wells, Terrell and Denton.

“The Dallas-Fort Worth area was considered a major target because of the aircraft plants and military installations in the area,” wrote former Times-Review columnist John Watson.

Watson worked for Transit Mix Concrete in Cleburne in 1958, when work began on the base, and the company held the contract for the concrete to build the underground silos.

“We had a portable plant set up near the missile site, and whenever they were ready to pour cement for a silo we went over and worked out of the portable plant,” he wrote, recalling the site’s construction.

Designated DF-50, the base opened in 1959 and gave Johnson County residents its first and only open house, according to a Times-Review story of the day.

It was a Saturday afternoon when the base opened and, according to the article, “Automobiles lined the farm road for several miles in each direction from the launching site, where the muscled Nike-Hercules and the Nike-Ajax guided missiles are poised in underground hibernation, instantly ready to repulse invading aircraft which might venture near the Dallas-Ft. Worth Metropolitan complex.”

Gisele McCurdy of Cleburne remembers coming to the base the year it opened with her husband, Howard McCurdy, who served on the base when it opened.

When the troops and their families stationed there had Thanksgiving dinner on the base, she recalled in a phone interview, they would always go to the far end of the base away from the missile silos.

During the time the McCurdys were at the base, the Nike-Ajax missiles were joined by Nike-Hercules missiles armed with atomic warheads.

The McCurdys were among the first troops at the base. Gisele McCurdy had met her husband almost 10 years earlier in Berlin, Germany.

“I met my husband during the airlift,” she said, speaking of the Berlin Airlift, when Soviet occupation forces in Berlin cut off food and other supplies to residents of West Berlin. Allied aircraft dropped food and other supplies to the German residents.

Historians note the airlift was one of the first major crises of the Cold War. When Gisele and Howard McCurdy arrived in Alvarado, they would become directly involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis, as Howard worked 24-hour shifts at the base during it.

The base kept its missiles trained on Cuba, Gisele McCurdy said.

Growing up in Berlin, where she was born, when Hitler took power, and having seen Berlin under siege and the horrors of war first hand, Gisele McCurdy worried about the potential of the world collapsing into a third world war during those weeks of the crisis. “I was always afraid to go to war. I know all about war.”

The McCurdys left the base in Alvarado in 1964, transferring to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, after Howard discovered he was allergic to missile fuel.

After his career in the U.S. Army, Howard and Gisele would move back to Texas after a visit to Alvarado in 1970.

By then, the base had been closed for a year and the land sold to private individuals.

But the McCurdys stayed in the area, living and working in Cleburne, Howard in air conditioning. Gisele McCurdy served for a time as docent to the Chisholm Trail Outdoor Museum.

Howard McCurdy had to retire from the air conditioning business in 1987 after a severe heart attack, his wife said. His health improved very little from then until he died in 2002.

Gisele McCurdy still lives in the area. “I’m so happy to be over here.”
http://www.cleburnetimesreview.com/news/missile-base-in-alvarado-a-cold-war-reminder/article_757bdb3c-b35b-11e6-a5e8-87c79ed157d9.html
http://www.usmilitariaforum.com/forums/index.php?/topic/90256-nike-missile-site-df-50/

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