Command and Control

Working at Dogpatch was a lot of fun, and King got a full-time job there after college. He fell for Judi Clark, a tap dancer at the park, and the two soon got married. Backed by a brother-in-law, King started looking for a good place in Arkansas to open a new radio station. Clinton, they decided, was the place. It was the county seat of Van Buren County, in the foothills of the Ozarks, with a population of about 1,600 and a downtown that attracted shoppers from throughout the area. In 1977, KGFL went on the air as a 250-watt “sunset” station, licensed to broadcast only during daylight hours. King wanted the station to assume the role that a small-town newspaper would have played a generation earlier. KGFL started each day with the national anthem. It played gospel music for about half an hour, then switched to country and western. During the morning, it broadcast phone-in shows like “Trading Post,” a radio flea market that allowed local callers to buy and sell things. In the afternoon, when kids got out of school, the station began to play rock-and-roll, and that’s what it played until going off the air at dusk. King’s wife opened a dance studio near the station, teaching jazz, tap, and ballet to children. Her studio was on the second floor of the only two-story building in downtown Clinton.

Sid King and Tom Phillips were about the same age. They’d met at Dogpatch, where Phillips had played Li’l Abner. And they were already familiar with the Titan II site in Damascus. KGFL had covered an accident there a couple of years earlier. At about three in the morning on January 27, 1978, an oxidizer trailer parked on the hardstand had started to leak. The trailer was heated to ensure that the oxidizer remained above 42 degrees during the winter. But the thermostat was broken. Instead of keeping the oxidizer at about 60 degrees, the heater pushed it to more than 100 degrees, far beyond its boiling point. A brown plume of oxidizer floated from the trailer, eventually becoming a cloud half a mile long and a hundred yards wide.

The crew in the underground control center had no idea that the trailer topside was leaking oxidizer. The leak was discovered about five hours later by the missile crew arriving at the site to pull an alert that morning. The crew spotted the cloud of oxidizer from the road, turned around, drove back to Damascus, and called the command post from a pay phone. A PTS team with RFHCO suits was flown by helicopter to Launch Complex 374-7. They fixed the leak and lowered the temperature of the oxidizer by spraying the trailer with cold water for hours. The missile site’s neighbors were not pleased by the incident. A cloud of oxidizer had drifted across nearby farms, killing more than a dozen cattle, sickening a farmer who’d gotten up early to milk his cows, and forcing the evacuation of a local elementary school. The farmer later filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the Air Force and the companies that made the trailer.

Gus Anglin, the sheriff of Van Buren County, was standing with a state trooper on the shoulder of Highway 65, near the access road to the silo, when King and Phillips rolled up in the Live Ear. Anglin was in his early forties, thin and wiry, the sort of rural sheriff who knew the names of all the teenagers in town, knew their parents, and knew the right threat to make kids slow down, go home, or stop doing what they were just doing. Van Buren County didn’t have much crime, aside from petty theft, some pot growing, and the occasional domestic dispute — and yet Anglin still found himself constantly answering the phone in the middle of the night and leaving his house to deal with all kinds of unexpected things. He wore a badge and drove a squad car but didn’t carry a gun, unless the situation seemed to demand one. He and a couple of deputies had to cover thousands of square miles in the county, which took him away from his wife and two children for long stretches of time. Anglin felt obligated to answer every call personally, from the minor ones to the most urgent. That was what the Van Buren County sheriff was supposed to do, a lesson learned from his father-in-law, who’d previously held the job and hired him to serve as a deputy.