ANTIGO — Because of it, every so often, their televisions would beep.
That’s what they all remember, those people who grew up near the Antigo Air Force Station, the radar surveillance base which from 1951 to 1977 housed the 676th Radar Squadron about eight miles due south of Antigo.
The beeps were caused by disruptions from the rotating radar antenna at the station — though according to B.J. Podtburg, whose husband Byron Podtburg worked from 1963 to 1965 in heavy ground maintenance in the tower upon which the thing sat — what it really resembled was a giant checkerboard flag.
“Six 100 horse motors drove the antenna,” Byron said. “When the wind got up over 60 miles per hour, six 100 horse motors wasn’t enough, and we would shut it down. Just the antenna was about 130 feet I think. It was pretty amazing.”
In that pre-satellite age, Bob LaPointe, who spent 1966 to 1968 maintaining the radar apparatus itself, said the antenna was state of the art, capable of pinpointing any aircraft within 300 miles that passed into its beam. The particular aircraft that personnel at the Antigo base and others like it hastily being erected across the northern United States were searching for, of course, were those from the Soviet Union.
“It was during the Cold War, and if Russia was going to attack us, they were coming over the top of the north pole through Canada into the United States,” LaPointe said. “We were kind of the last line of defense as far as radar in the northern part of the United States. It went all the way from the east coast to the west coast. Our range was about 300 miles. So every 300 miles, there was a small radar site to fill up the gaps.”
And filling up the gaps at the radar base itself were young men like Podtburg and LaPointe. Instead of living on base, many of them rented rooms in Antigo, and the reaction of the local populace to their arrival, to put it delicately, was mixed, according to Sandy Ziesemer, formerly Sandy Grall.
“I was a little girl growing up in the area, and my dad thought they drove fast and would say, ‘Don’t ride your bike at 4 p.m., because those flyboys are going to be on the road,’” she laughed, before going on to suggest, as many girls who became friendly with the airmen did, that boys from Antigo were jealous of the new arrivals. “But some of my best friends were stationed out there, and we’re still friends. Some of the girls, we were roommates in 1967 and we all dated guys from the base at that time.”
Many did more than date them.
B.J. Podtburg, for one, married her husband Byron in 1966 at a small white church located across the street from what is now Antigo Middle School. This was only after they were torn apart when Byron was sent to Vietnam. For the entire year before their wedding, they never once heard each other’s voices, forced instead to communicate by letters and recordings they mailed one another. Presumably, many of these messages were as romantic as they sound, but others, apparently, were more pragmatic.
“I was a former home economics teacher and he knew I liked to sew and everything, so he would go downtown in Vietnam and send me fabric,” B.J. said.
“I asked him, ‘Can you find me white silk fabric so I can make my wedding dress?’ So then I had to design it to be only 24 inches wide, and he bought me a whole bolt of silk satin fabric, and it cost him $6 in Vietnam. The buttons that I put the fabric on cost a heck of a lot more than what the fabric did.”
Years earlier, Indiana native Jessie Matthews, a different airman that had transferred to Antigo, had been in the city no more than a few hours when he spotted the woman he would one day marry, a waitress at the Dixie Diner named Laura Forbes.
“Her and another girl worked there. I heard they’d get off there at 11 o’clock, and there was a bar out on the north end of town they were going to. Back in those days, they had what were called teenage bars. They got a taxi, and I followed them in my truck to see where they went,” chuckled Matthews, now 91, as if he could still picture his teenage self tailing them through the night. “When they got there, I waited a while after they went in, and then I walked in.”
The proof of all this fraternizing so long ago could be seen Friday afternoon at Melody Mill, where a small group of former servicemen from the rader base including the likes of Matthews, Podtburg, and LaPointe, — and most of their wives, many of whom are originally from the Antigo area — had gathered for a base reunion, which some have attended since it began around 1980.
The bar was an exceedingly appropriate meeting place for the reunion, according to LaPointe, who said it happened also to be the location of many very off duty nights after their shifts searching the skies for the Russians.
“Sgt. Don Karcz was my boss in the tower where we worked. But he also leased the bar. Originally, it was the Sugar Shack on Highway 45. When his lease ran out, he actually bought the Melody Mill bar, which is on the corner of 45 and 52 in Aniwa, and I worked for him as a bartender for a few years there too, and to be honest with you, I wasn’t old enough to be a bartender. I was only 19 years old when I started tending bar there, and it was a 21 year old age limit for drinking at the time. I brought it up to Don and said, ‘Don, I’m not old enough.’ He said, ‘It doesn’t matter. If somebody shows up, go to the back room,’” LaPointe laughed. “I never got caught.”
LaPointe said that in fact, most of his time stationed in Northern Wisconsin was “laid back.”
“It didn’t really occur to us that we were going to be attacked. There was always a possibility, but it wasn’t a big concern,” he said. “Being stationed there, the atmosphere wasn’t exactly military-like. I lived off base most of the time, so it was like going to the base for an eight hour job, and then the rest of the time I was off and enjoying what I wanted to do. So it wasn’t really a military life for me: it was more of an extended vacation.”
The reality of ongoing conflicts around the globe, however, was never entirely lost to some on base, including Don Paulus, who, among other duties on the base from 1961-1967, was responsible for something called “casualty assistance.”
“When a military man died in Vietnam, I was part of the team that went out to talk to his parents, express condolences, help them get the benefits from the VA and everything. It was an additional duty that every base had to do. I was responsible for a radius of 100 miles. Anybody that died within that radius, I had to go see his parents or the surviving wife. I probably talked to 25 people over that two year period,” Paulus said. “I was notified that someone died, and I would call his family, and set an appointment, and go out to see them. Even though they knew I was coming, I’d knock on the door and they’d start to cry. That’s the way it went.”
Paulus also was a radar operator.
“We had to look for people that might be flying a strange airplane, like Russian airplanes. If he was flying and he didn’t fly over a certain portion of real estate, or if he flew over real estate and we didn’t know he was supposed to be there, that was a concern,” he said. “We would scramble an interceptor and vector him to where this Russian airplane was and he would investigate and tell us whether or not it was a Russian airplane. We never had a Russian intercept — it was always another airplane that was late or early or the winds had caused them to drift radically, and sometimes they didn’t know it. We never had to intercept a Russian airplane while I was here. Other places I was — I was stationed in Fort Lee, Virginia and northern Thailand — I did.”
LaPointe’s wife, Kathy, who organized the past weekend’s reunion, described the comradery between those that remain in the group as unique.
“There’s a bunch of the wives that have our own yearly thing too where the wives meet up without the guys. There’s ten of us — we all rent a house somewhere and we have a girls week,” Kathy said. “The girls and I, we talk about it often, because it was really a short time period that we were there, and yet, we’re still all friends. Everybody lives elsewhere. For being such a short time period, just two to three years, here we are 50 years later, and we’re still friends.”
Despite the sobering nature of some of his memories in the area, Paulus said the positive ones still stand out.
“I wish there were more small communities like Antigo,” Paulus said. “Now, I live in a town that’s rapidly growing, and it’s not the same. You don’t get the personal feeling of attachment like I did back then. We had a good time. Good memories. It’s hard to find people like this again.”
Members of the 676th would like to thank CoVantage Credit Union and Thrivent, who provided funds for the banquet the group attended Saturday night.
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