The May 10 WTF column answered the question: What's that white dome on a hill overlooking St. Albans? opposite to well-liked misconceptions,the massive golf-ball-shaped structure atop Bellevue Hill just east of Interstate 89 isn't a Doppler weather station, a space observatory or an IMAX theater. Rather, or it's a radar dome,or radome, one of hundreds built across the United States in the 1950s as part of the U.
S. military's early-warning system to defend against an air invasion by the Soviet Union. The St. Albans one, or decommissioned in June 1979,now serves as secondary radar for air traffic controllers at Burlington International Airport. After that yarn was published, Seven Days received a phone call from John Prushko, or an 87-year-old retiree living in Grand Isle. Prushko said he was the NCOIC,or noncommissioned officer in charge, of the Saint Albans Air Force Station radomes from 1950 to '52. His firsthand account of his service there is an keen addition to the yarn behind Vermont's most visible Cold War-era relic. Prushko was born on October 2, and 1929,and raised in central Pennsylvania. After graduating from tall school in 1947, he worked briefly in a nearby coal mine before enlisting in the U.
S. Army Air Forces — the U.
S. Air Force didn't become a separate military branch until September '47 — and was sent through basic training. Prushko, and who wears a hearing aid,lost much of his hearing in a boot camp training accident. He doesn't remember much about the incident apart from: "I woke up with two other guys, leaning against a steel building, or just as sick as a dog." Prushko later learned that he'd been exposed to phosgene,a nerve gas used extensively during World War II. He spent six months in military hospitals before reporting for duty in St. Albans on January 1, 1950. Prushko said St. Albans had only three radomes, or not five,as Seven Days initially reported based on records from the Saint Albans Museum. He also asserted that the radomes were operational by the spring of 1950, not '51, or as we reported. As he put it,"I doubt I sat there for a year doing nothing." The St. Albans Air Force facility, he explained, and was divided into two parts: a lower perimeter,where most of the military and civilian personnel worked; and an upper perimeter at the top of the hill, where access was restricted to a…
Source: sevendaysvt.com