Divide County has missed a historic opportunity this summer, and I fear I am as much to blame as anyone for letting it slip by. The Fortuna Radar Station was opened 50 years ago, in 1951, and we’ve let the Golden Anniversary year march by with not so much as a blip on a radar screen. In a way, I suppose that’s appropriate, because the base arrived in Divide County with almost as much secrecy. When I went back in our archives to search for the story heralding the opening of the facility, I became frustrated. Paging through week after week of newspapers between 1949 and 1952, I discovered something sort of amazing. There is not one word in those papers about the construction, size, or purpose of the Fortuna Radar Station, or even a notice of the government decision to build a facility in Divide County.

What is in those papers is just as interesting as what is not. You’ll find notices of social events at the base, news stories when an airman died in a car accident, when one drowned at Brush Lake, baseball stats showing the base team leading the Border League, and even a notice of a first annual Labor Day celebration. Obviously, the men were here, but there is not a whisper of information on why they were here. After much digging, a couple of stories I found made the reason for the secrecy abundantly clear. During the same period I know the base was built our newspaper contained two articles asking for civilians to participate in civil air and ground patrols to watch for signs of Russian infiltration. Aha! The Cold War, I realized.

Other than the vague imprints their social goings-on left behind, the real duties of these military men were as obscure to the local community then as the purpose of the base today seems to youngsters like my son, who ask, “What was that place for?” “Soldiers lived there,” I answered, “and your grandfather and your great-grandfather both used to work there.” This get’s Mick’s interest, but I’m afraid the picture his imagination paints of men in camouflage, hiding in foxholes, bayonets fixed, ready to repel a horde of some faceless menace, is far from accurate. Even when he is older, I won’t have much to tell him about what really went on there.

I know from my mother’s memories that pilots from the Minot Air Force Base did training missions to see if they could fly “under the net” of the base’s radar detection. She swears those planes flew so low you could tell the color of the pilots’ eyes. I know I would freak out if I were out in my little backyard in snoozy Fortuna and some jet came screaming overhead, just clearing the rooftops.

I know my grandfather, Harold Scheff, worked at the base for 20 years as a general fix-it man, yet I never heard him utter a word of what it was he really did. I’ve heard stories about my father, Bill Bially, pulling guard duty at the entrance, but other than that, I have no idea how he filled his time.

I recall fondly the regular “blip” the radar base imposed on our radios in Fortuna, one “ping” for each revolution of the “net” as it twirled endlessly, searching the sky for an enemy who never came.

I can’t stand the thought of history being lost, and it won’t be too many years before the young men first stationed at the base have all passed away. Like many people who live in Divide County, my heritage has as much to do with homesteading pioneers as it does with the fact that the U.S. Air Force decided to build a radar listening post west of Fortuna. Because I am one of those hybrid people made from the union of a Fortuna girl and a “baser”, I am curious about the place, frustrated by the waste the government allowed in letting it sit so long before selling it, and vaguely wistful about an impending tax sale this fall.

There’s lots more current residents of Divide County, who like me, have ties to the base.

Wouldn’t it be fun to try to reach all of the people who were once stationed there, and invite them back to reminisce? I’m not sure how we’d go about finding them, but there’s got to be a way.

I would love to collect the stories of people who know how the place worked, and put it all into a history book. Such a book could leave a positive record of a force that protected our country’s security at a very uncertain time for our nation.