August 9, 2023
By Landry Brewer
When this 1964 photo was taken, Lyndon Johnson was United States President.
President Kennedy had been assassinated the previous year.
More than 23,000 American troops were in southeast Asia trying to prevent a Communist takeover of South Vietnam, and that number would increase by more than 160,000 the following year.
In 1964, 11 nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles were housed in southwest Oklahoma—one as close as Willow, another at Granite—to deter a Soviet nuclear attack and retaliate if deterrence failed.
B-52 Strotofortress Bombers capable of dropping nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union were operated at Clinton-Sherman Air Force Base in Burns Flat.
Two years earlier, the world reached the brink of nuclear war during the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
Civil defense sirens to warn locals of imminent tornadoes or Soviet nuclear attack had also been installed in Elk City two years earlier.
Basements inside of Community Hospital, the Casa Grande Hotel, and the First Baptist Church building were designated public fallout shelters in case of a nuclear attack.
The editor of The 64 ELK, Jill Stallsmith, wrote a poignant Editor’s Message in the 1963-64 Elk City High School yearbook that included these words:
“During this turbulent year, feelings of distrust and hatred have enveloped our nation and the world, resulting in such distorted acts as the Vietnam Crisis and the tragic assassination of our President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
“We are fortunate that from our youth may come the ideals and actions which will form the keys necessary to lock this door of the material devastation and plundering and the ideological degradation of the cold war and open the door of peace and brotherhood of men.
“The value of this book will not be realized now while these activities are still vivid memories, and we are yet too young to change or influence world ideas, but rather in ten or twenty years when the memories of these activities have been obscured with the passing of time and we are the leaders of America. Then these pages, if we have been successful, will become treasured possessions.”
Copyright 2023 Paragon Communications. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission.
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