Monday, February 2, 2009

Watching for planes

Today I was listening to my satellite radio and listening to a old broadcast of the Gunsmoke series. During it there was an old commercial for recruitment of volunteers to watch the skies for planes in the 1950s. It said that it was necessary for the help of the American people to fill in the void where the radar system missed. I hadn't heard of this before but I'm sure many of young men and boys loved to do this.

On getting home today I did a small search of the Internet to see what I could find. I didn't spend a lot of time searching but found an interesting article on it. Sentinels Of the Sky
The volunteers would make notes on planes they saw with criteria like
number of planes, types of planes,altitude , planes heard or seen,direction of planes, distance of planes from the volunteers post.

Just thought it might be of interest to you . Had you heard of this?
ok till next time

2 comments:

Katney said...

I didn't listen to Gunsmoke, but watched it on TV in the 50s. I got to stay up late because it was on Saturday night. On radio, I remember listening to "Yours Truly Johnny Dollar" and "Boston Blackie" on the car radio when we traveled to visit our grandmothers one weekend a month.

The "official" groundhog--Punksatwney Phil" saw his shadow this morning. Our local ground hog, "Hanford Hank" didn't--unless he slept late. The marmots are still sleeping under a dozen feet of snow, dreaming about food. They won't be out until late April, or early May.

Katney said...

BTW, I spelled Punksatawney wrong--and I still may have done so. And as to the watching for planes--it is definitely not something I remember, but I was just a little thing then.