[Roadside Relic] AGM28 Hound Dog | Presque Isle & Limestone

Oh. More missiles.

I'm not doing my best impression of a "disappointed Kim Jong Un on Christmas morning", I'm just realizing that this is the fourth time I've written about these fascinatingly retrofuturistic airborne weapons. I hope that between the Snark base in Presque Isle, the Nike sites in and around Limestone and the Bomarc base in Bangor that you're not getting too awfully tired of my mild obsession with the technological progeny of Werner Von Braun.

Summer is coming so it's time to add a new roadside attraction from the age of atomic horror to the list: The AGM28 Hound Dog. Available for your viewing pleasure in Presque Isle and Limestone.

AGM-28 on display in Presque Isle (OC)

This is a distinctively different weapon than what we've covered before. Rather than being located at a stationary base either underground or in a hardened launch structure like the Nike or Bomarc, the Hound Dog was intended to be launched from a B-52 bomber while the aircraft was still out of range of the target area's defensive weapons. This weapon was not designed to destroy the bomber's primary target but rather to get there ahead of the bomber and damage (or destroy) the enemy's defenses.This weapon also carried a W28 nuclear warhead with a 70 kiloton - 1.5 megaton yield. Compare this to the Bomarc and its relatively measly 10 kiloton yield and you can see why these make rather interesting roadside monuments.

To give us a little perspective, according to NUKEMAP if a bomb this size were detonated in the center of downtown Bangor, the fireball would engulf the mall, Husson and over half of the airport. Still, it's a nice place for a picnic.,...

At Veteran's Park (OC)

This missile is located in Veteran's Park in Presque Isle. If you want a picnic, see this one. If you want to see a nicely painted up missile whose graphics are not mailbox letters, the Loring Military Heritage Center can help you there, and their museum is pretty fantastic too.

AGM 28 at Loring Heritage Center (OC)

Spaceport | Bangor Mall

Bangor Daily News

You're living on Bangor's east side and it's 1978. Ten years past the closure of Dow AFB, one of the town's farms had been transformed into a modern mall. Star Wars had just shown everyone that you could do action movies in space and reap in cash hand over fist. Texas Instruments had just released the first microchip, and the first Bulletin Board System was allowing people from all over the globe to dial in to argue about Star Trek and write creepy Redwall fan fiction from basements of pastel split level ranches everywhere.

While in a time of relative tumult, technology was making the world a lot smaller. The consumer computer revolution was just beginning, and computing power six times faster than what was used to track supersonic aircraft and control nuclear countermeasures only sixteen years prior had been dedicated to play Pac-Man.

Video games had gone from being a fledgling industry in 1971  to a loud and colorful "public health threat" by the late 1970s that would surely still make Brewer's city council blush even today. A hubbub grew surrounding these magic boxes into which kids could deposit coins and become transfixed. Even the Bangor Daily News had run a series of  essays from children running from themes like "Pac Man eats the brain" to "video games are no worse than sports." 

There's not a whole lot available on the Internet regarding Spaceport other than the ad above and various news stories related to various incidents, achievements and accidents there. Fortunately for us, Space Port appears to have been a chain which means that it's more or less guaranteed that a lot of what had gone on inside had been standardized to some degree.

In addition to the training video above, there exist several stories collected in the Bangor Daily News over the years that help paint an affectionate picture of a chain that provided a couple generations of us with memories in exchange for quarters. 

• An ad run on October 4th, 1978 gives us an image of the inside of a futuristic wonderland full of top of the line machines that would deliver us to places elsewhere. It touted Space Wars and Middle Earth.
• February 17th, 1983 saw a collection of children's essays about whether or not video games were a social problem on par with rock music and...rock music.
• A touching story from ten years later tells us of a gentleman with muscular dystrophy who received a pioneering piece of adaptive technology; a custom remote control unit that allowed him to play video games. The piece indicates it was one of the first devices of its kind in the country. 
• In 2005 Emily Burnham wrote about Dance Dance Revolution.
• In 2007, it caught fire.

Nowadays it's a head shop. If you want to play arcade games you've got to go to a sports bar so you can get your daily dose of other people's jukebox preferences while you do it. Personally, I preferred the cacophony of tens of arcade machines as they wildly vied for our collective attention.