Happy Air Raid Friday!

1961     The Sacramento Bee of Autumn 1961 did little to assuage mid-century atomic anxieties, if the paper's October 25 issue is any indication. That day's paper greeted readers with stories about private backyard fallout shelters, fallout from a Soviet open-air nuclear test sweeping into Alaska, and orders for a new fleet of U.S. bombers. As if all that wasn't enough, there were the damned sirens too. "Sirens Will Get Another Test Friday," announces a the headline to a blurb on the coming monthly test of the city's civil defense sirens. The article describes the three stages of the scheduled test run: "Alert signal (steady blast), one minute, followed by one minute of silence; take cover signal (fluctuating or warbling), one minute."

And after fifty years it's become something of a tradition, or maybe just a consistent curiosity. If all is well, the slightly terrifying sound should have gone off this morning, as it does at 11 A.M. on the final Friday of every month. I don't remember my reaction to the first time I heard the monthly civil defense siren test in midtown Sacramento, but the eerie and antiquated sound has been a monthly highlight since I moved to the neighborhood in the mid-90s.

1986     Twenty-five years later America's nuclear worries had apparently grown so unmanageable that we began to worry about nuking ourselves too. And it was not for nothing; the Three Mile Island Accident had freaked the bejeezus out of reasonable people just seven years prior, in 1979. In October 1986 a local group, Sacramentans for Safe Energy, formally began its campaign to shut down SMUD's troubled Rancho Seco nuclear power facility. According to a October 30 Bee article, in the plant's twelve years of operation, it functioned at 45% of capacity, compared with a national average of 62%. As of the end of October, the plant operated a total of three of the previous nineteen months. SMUD rates in this period increased approximately 42%. Fed up with the plant's frequent malfunctioning and SMUD's apparent inability to address it, Sacramentans for Safe Energy spokesperson John Poswall announced, "We intend to take the decision out of [the SMUD Board of Directors'] hands." The group's first task was to quickly collect the 25,200 signatures required to place Rancho Seco's future on the March 1987 ballot,  a goal Poswall was confident the his colleagues could achieve.

Related: If you see me on the street, ask me about Cake frontman John McCrea's first single.