Reader Gary Hamilton wrote directly to us regarding our newspaper’s Austin Answered project: “I just finished the latest Harlan Coben book, ‘Don’t Let Go.’ Missile sites from the Cold War era play a central role. I Googled ‘Nike ‘missile sites’ and, if Wikipedia is to be believed, there are several former sites around Austin.”
Indeed, there are.
Col. John Willis stands beside a decommissioned Nike missile located at the headquarters of the Texas National Guard 111th Area Support Group in West Lake Hills in 2001. The site served as the command center for the missles during the 1960s. Kevin Virobik-Adams for Austin American-Statesman
We uncovered several references to the area missile sites, including two stories in the American-Statesman archives.
We share this thoroughly illuminating 2001 article by Denise Gamino in full here.
“Rodney Patterson grew up with strange neighbors.
They lived behind intimidating fences. They had big warning signs to keep people away. And they dozed day and night.
No one saw the weird neighbors. Until Sunday afternoons.
Then, they screamed like sirens, an otherworldly wail that jolted the hills of Austin. Sometimes, the racket went on for 10 minutes.
If Patterson climbed a hill across the road, he could watch the neighbors come out of hiding on those long-ago days. Steel locks groaned open and the neighbors rose to their feet. They stood tall, pushing their noses to the sky.
It was a Cold War salute to Russia.
Patterson’s next-door neighbors were Nike Hercules missiles, designed to shoot down Russian bombers if they headed for Austin.
In the 1960s, Austin was considered a target for the Communists. The bull’s-eye was Bergstrom Air Force Base, home to huge B-52 bombers of the Strategic Air Command. Twelve Nike missiles were based southeast of Bergstrom. Another dozen were nestled in the hills west of Austin off Bee Cave Road. The 40-foot Nikes kept a low profile except when the occasional drills kicked them into launch position.
Patterson’s father had to cede part of his Bee Cave Road land to the government for the Nike base.
“I saw the glistening white missiles often, and believed in them, ” said Patterson, now a Fort Worth malpractice defense lawyer.
“They were beautiful and they were terrible, ” he said. “I accepted that we would use them one day to shoot the godless Russians out of the sky. Everybody did back then. People accepted the missiles as a fact of life.”
The missiles of Austin are forgotten by many. They arrived in 1960 and were deactivated in 1966 when the Vietnam War forced the Pentagon to cut elsewhere. At the height of the Cold War, more than 100 sites across America had Nike missiles, named for the Greek goddess of victory.
President George W. Bush has reopened debate about missile defense and nuclear arsenals. For many, the discussions may be academic and political and pie-in-the-sky. But there are those who remember how the missiles moved to Austin the first time America installed a defense against nuclear air attacks.
War, they know, can affect ordinary people in their own back yards.
The federal government used its power of eminent domain to force landowners to sell property for the Nike missile bases.
South of Bergstrom Air Force Base, the military got 16 acres of Charley Anderson‘s cattle ranch.
“Lots of people were afraid, but we didn’t care, ” said Anderson’s daughter, Ella Ross.
She and her husband live on her father’s ranch today. Next door, the Nike missile site is abandoned and overgrown with trees and weeds. Rattlesnakes skate on the concrete launching pads and hide in the grass.
The Nike missiles were stored outdoors, horizontally, on concrete launching pads hidden by tall dirt berms. They rested on a steel framework that unfolded and pushed the Nikes to a vertical position during drills. Only then could outsiders see the tops of the missiles pointed toward the sky.
Dan Mathews was a young Army enlisted man assigned to the Nike site near Bergstrom. He was part of a three-man crew that could control the missiles from a remote van if something happened to the main command post across the road. Backup crews also waited in underground bunkers hardened to withstand a blast.
Sometimes, Mathews pulled guard duty, patrolling the site with a shotgun. Guards were also posted at the entry gate and on top of the earthen berms. Attack dogs walked the perimeter with handlers at night and on weekends.
“The only time it ever got tense down there was during the (1962) Cuban missile crisis, ” he said. “We were fully staffed and working around the clock.”
Mathews never knew if the missiles had nuclear warheads. But he suspects some were brought one day when the security was tightened excessively.
“When two warheads came in, they had guards all the way around the inside of the base. It was a big deal, ” he said. But, “(the warheads) looked exactly the same and were treated exactly the same.”
UPDATE: Historian Christopher Bright confirms that Nikes were nuclear-armed.
If people around Bee Cave Road were living near nuclear weapons, they never knew it. The government told the neighboring landowners as little as possible.
Patterson was the only child who lived near the site. He was 8 years old when it was built, so the guards became his friends. He came to the fence almost every day looking for castoff Army treasures. “They tolerated my approaches up to the outer perimeter fence, and sometimes cautioned me that I should not tell anyone that I saw or talked to a sentry while I hunted,” he said.
Patterson’s family made a living by hauling cedar wood, and they lived in a shack with a tin roof and wood-burning stove. Missile base leftovers tided them over. One year, Patterson collected enough returnable Coke bottles discarded by Nike guards to buy a bicycle.
“What the government threw away was astounding, ” he said. “Piles of building materials and tools appeared in little dumps around the edges of my father’s land from time to time. I recovered lumber, paint, rope, shovels and a lot of miscellaneous bric-a-brac.”
The Nike missiles off Bee Cave Road never attracted much attention from passers-by. Even when the missiles were raised for drills, cars just drove on by, Patterson remembers.
“People accepted the missiles as a fact of life, ” he said. “Acceptance was easy in a day when sonic booms of aircraft from Bergstrom or the San Antonio area regularly shook the light fixtures at Eanes school.
“One day when the Cuban missile crisis was in full swing, somebody falsely announced that our Navy had torpedoed a Soviet ship somewhere in the Gulf Stream,” he said. “Every kid on the bus cheered.”
The 1966 closure of the missile sites seemed to attract as little local attention as the occasional full-alert drills.
“The soldiers were gone in the blink of an eye, ” Patterson said.
Today, the former missile site on Crystal Creek Drive off Bee Cave Road is used by the University of Texas. The UT police shooting range is there. The astronomy department and the geology department have scientific equipment there, too. And the Harry Ransom Center stores aged, nitrate movie film in one of the underground bunkers.
The bunker, retrofitted with special temperature and humidity controls, houses about 100 reels of films: silent Westerns made in the 1920s, a movie called “Cavalcade of Texas” made for the state fair and others.
Until a year ago, UT stored its entire David O. Selznick collection in the bunker. This included “Gone with the Wind” and all screen tests, music and special effects for that movie. Also, Selznick’s personal copies of “Rebecca, ” “King Kong” and “The Prisoner of Zenda.” The Selznick films were moved to the George Eastman archives in New York.
The Nike site now is surrounded by high-dollar homes that have an enviable view of the western sky at sunset.
Two miles closer to town, near Bee Cave Road and St. Stephens School Road South, the Texas Army National Guard’s 111th Area Support Group uses the hilltop acreage where the Army operated the radar for the nearby Nike site. An old Nike missile is on display near the front gate.
Out by the city’s new airport that once was Bergstrom Air Force Base, Ella Ross still remembers a sweet, black dog the Army accidentally left behind when it closed the missile site. It was skittish and had an ear tattooed with a serial number.
“It took a long time to tame that dog, ” she said. “It was a good dog. Momma got it.”
The legacy of the Nike missiles lives on with Rodney Patterson. He raised himself out of the cycle of cedar chopper poverty and went to law school. After he graduated, his first client was his father, Ross Patterson.
The Army had torn down Ross Patterson’s handmade cedar fences near the missile site and imposed a restrictive easement that prohibited rebuilding the fences. The easement remained in effect even after the Nikes left.
“We couldn’t have a fence, so we couldn’t keep livestock, ” Rodney Patterson said. “The government actually took only four acres from Daddy, but they ruined the rest.
“Daddy needed a lawyer, but with a fourth-grade education, he felt intimidated. He had land, but no money.
“In 1978, the year I became licensed, I removed the nonsensical easements that had ruined my father’s land for so long.”
