Space Age Memories

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In Maine at 200, I write about how the history I was covering gradually morphed into memory as the events I was writing about eventually became subjects I had witnessed personally.

That transformation started with the chapter about the 1960s, where I write about the Telstar satellite and the big ground station built in western Maine to communicate with it. The station was a huge inflatable dome that housed a giant antenna that enabled the people on Earth to hear the satellite’s faint electronic whispers. The big white dome rose out of the wilderness outside Andover, Maine, and it became a tourist attraction after the launch of Telstar in 1962. This was cutting-edge technology at the time, right on the vanguard of the Space Age, and it was in a remote part of western Maine where the nearest town still had hand-cranked telephones.

I remember going with my family to see this technological wonder more than a half a century ago. We all climbed into the family station wagon and made our way west. My memory of the event remains somewhat hazy, but I do recall going into the little visitor section inside the dome and looking up at the round ceiling high above me. My father told us that one time melting snow had pooled on the outside top and that technicians had to take a gun and shoot holes through the dome to drain the water. He was partially correct, as my research revealed. In fact, the melting snow had been a problem for the first, temporary dome, which was erected to protect the antenna as it was being assembled. And once the bullets had done their work and the water drained, the flattened bubble popped back into shape, dislodging a huge snow pack that fell and crushed a construction trailer next to the dome. Such are the hazards of pursuing cutting-edge technology during a Maine winter.

I returned to Andover last fall to visit the earth station, or what remained of it. The dome is long gone, but the big satellite dishes peering into the sky showed that the company that now owns the site still talks to spacecraft. The parking lot where my family had parked 50+ years ago, though, was empty and weeds were sprouting from the cracked asphalt. There were no tourists around this day. In fact, I did not spy another person as I poked around the site.

One thing that had not changed, though, was the natural beauty of western Maine. The leaves were turning, the sky was a deep cerulean blue, and the air had the perfect bite of an early fall morning. During my drive, I stopped at a covered bridge, discovered a herd of bison, and visited a monument to Maine’s Senator Edmund Muskie in his hometown of Rumford. It was a great day.

I also paid a visit to the Stanley Museum in Kingfield. The Stanleys, twin brothers famous for their Stanley Steamers, are the subject of Maine at 200‘s 1900s chapter. During that decade Stanley cars set speed records at races in Florida. That story belongs to solely to history, though, not memory.

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