Thinking about the unthinkable in Mount Dora gives pause to reflect about the value (and strength) of our community.
Mount Dorans in the 1950s lived, as elsewhere in America, in the shadow of catastrophe.
Maybe the heat made fear of the Red Menace more intense; maybe living in the South made it more oppressive. However great the threat of global communism actually might have been to a small community like Mount Dora, fear of it was surely fanned by winds of change. Lake County sheriff Willis McCall routinely called Mabel Reese Norris, the Mount Dora Topic’s undaunted editor, a “damned communist” for her shouting out his racist rule of law and editorials in support of equal rights.
And while the little town had never suffered any actual privation of war (save intense rationing during World War II), the threat of nuclear war was bigger than anything local. Maybe it was that television was connecting residents to a larger stage they could less and less evade.
Fear of catastrophe may have created a solidarity among the citizens—the sense (if you were white, anyway) of a common threat—and yet at home alone at night, with ill-bodings babbling on the airwaves and whispering on the night breeze, that fear was both captivating and isolating. Unaccustomed to conflict (unless you were black) and facing an unseen enemy capable of destroying the world many times over, even in a hot little town—no one had air conditioning back then—the threat of nuclear winter could freeze down from within. In the atomic age, the nuclear family was the only one with a chance of survival.
The threat was out there, and it seemed to be getting closer and closer. But it would take a book written in Mount Dora to convince the locals that the end was truly near.
The bomb shelters people began building around town were private affairs, large enough for one family only. Except for the big one, which remains to this day of Mount Dora’s greatest secrets. It also provides some clues to what this city mustn’t do when the big one comes calling again.
Alas, Mount Dora
When Harry Hart Frank showed up in Mount Dora in the mid-1950s, he was coming off an epic bender on Atlantic Beach in Jacksonville. It was time to start earning money again. Frank was like this, accomplished and then drunk, writing his way up and then drinking back down.
Born in Chicago, Frank had been a successful journalist in New York, Washington and in Florida. During the Second World War he’d worked for the Office of War, representing the United States in Australia and Turkey, and then quit to become a war correspondent in Italy, Austria, Germany and Turkey.
His first novel Mr. Adam (1946)—published under the pen name of Pat Frank—was about a nuclear mishap which causes all men to be infertile except one very, very lucky guy who happened to have been working deep in a silver mine when the big one went off. One reviewer referred to the novel as “a fat prank by Pat Frank,” but the tale—woven of fear an fantasy—sold 2 million copies.
Frank also reported on the Korean War. His novel Hold Back the Night is an account of the withdrawal from the Changlin Reservoir after a massive Chinese assault. It was made into a movie in 1956 starring Chuck Connors and Peter Graves. Frank certainly had seen the really brutal stuff; maybe that’s what made him so thirsty.
Frank also knew a lot about threats to national security. His 1956 novel Forbidden Area was a cold war thriller about Soviet sleeper agents who come ashore on a North Florida beach (where Nazi subs had prowled during the War) seeking to sabotage the U.S. cold war effort. Rod Serling adapted the book for the debut episode of his TV show Playhouse 90.
Now in his mid-40s, Frank set up shop with his second wife Dodie in a 4,744 square foot house on Lake Beauclaire in Tangerine. Just to his north was the blue-collar neighborhood then known as Pistolville, a run-down and somewhat seedy area that has all but disappeared from present maps.
Dodie was said to be a great beauty (he liked ladies) and was good for Frank, somehow managing to keep him off the sauce and focused. He sat down to write in his study overlooking the lake, a spacious, 2-room affair filled with reference books and maps. His new novel picked up from the end of Forbidden Area, harrowing the present, cold-war moment of angst about the communist threat with promises finally delivered—the flash of nuclear bombs in a little town called Fort Repose, in which he would use both the city of Mount Dora and the little town of Mandarin (south of Jacksonville, where he spent many earlier years writing) as its real-life template.
Alas Babylon will scare the bejeezus out anyone seeking to understand what practical survival in the nuclear age might mean. What is there to eat in Mount Dora when there are no markets anymore and money is meaningless? What is daily life without coffee or cars? It was one of the first apocalyptic novels of the nuclear age, and the tooth of the tale has made Alas, Babylon one of the most durable. The surest evidence of that came when I found five new copies in the mall bookstore where I bought it—fifty-five years after its publication.
It’s odd to read about survival in Frank’s imaginary Mount Dora while living in the real town that never had to survive, now almost six decades later. Downtown is there, with a small collection of shops, “Marine Park” with the shuffleboard courts and a gazebo where the locals hang out. Pistolville has moved elsewhere (maybe Paisley? Leesburg?), but back in the ‘50s it was a turbulent blue-collar neighborhood just down the road from the all-black East Town—poles of down-and-out Southern life. The city’s wealthier residents lived downtown or in Sylvan Shores, and then there’s everyone else—the middle class—existing in the middle of that, undefined and hardly memorable. (Maybe the erasure of the middle class is due more to dullness than to disparity.)
In the novel, Frank takes escalating cold-war tensions of the day and whispers What If: What If a fighter jet in the right time in the wrong place fires an errant missile that explodes the wrong Soviet thing, in this case an ammunition dump in Syria? What If that’s enough to cause the Soviets to launch an all-out nuclear strike at the U.S. and its allies, who then respond launching their missiles in response?
The question thus permits the unthinkable, which in turn gives rise to the rawest of awakenings to the real question: What If America is hit with an all-out nuclear strike? Frank nails us to that question as his protagonist is awakened from his nightly sleep:
At first Randy thought someone was shaking the couch …. Except for the dachshund, tail and ears at attention, the room was empty. Again the couch shook. The world outside still slept, but he discerned movement in the room. His fishing rods, hanging by their tips from a length of pegboard, inexplicably swayed in rhythm. He had heard such phenomena accompanied earthquakes, but there had never been an earthquake in Florida. Graf lifted his nose and howled.
Then the sound came, a long, deep, powerful rumble increasing in crescendo until the windows rattled, cups danced in their saucers, and the bar glasses rubbed rims and tinkled in terror. The sound slowly ebbed, then boomed to a fiercer climax, closer.
Though Randy Bragg would not learn the news for a long time, Soviet missiles had obliterated the SAC base in Homestead, sinking the southern tip of Florida, and exploded hydrogen bombs on the bases at Cape Canaveral and Tampa and Jacksonville. Only a few towns in the vicinity of Fort Repose are clear of what turns the rest of the state into glowing, smoldering ruins.
So begins The Day, that marker which divides everything before and everything after in to wildly different realities.
What follows is a story of survival near this lone little town, far enough away from nuclear fallout to keep from getting sick in that way, but facing survival after civilization has melted down. Things do not go well for Fort Repose: downtown stores are ransacked, winter residents in the Riverside (Lakeside) Inn suffer and die of stress-related heart-attack or complications from diseases they no longer have mediation for. Bartering in the gazebo is fierce, with coffee the most prized possession of all, followed by the rare gallon of gasoline. In Pistolville, the black market thrives as crooks and profiteers connive.
Far enough away from all that in the fictional equivalent of Tangerine, Bragg and companions—a white and black clan living together (for after the Day, racial prejudice is meaningless), work and suffer to survive, growing thinner as the months progress. And then there is the threat of armed gangs on the road, coming from what’s left of Tampa and Orlando, desperate to take whatever they can find and willing to kill with abandon.
The book’s climax centers around how the locals of this fictional Mount Dora community come together to fight a common threat in order save what little they still hold on to. How well can a brutalized humanity work together? Fort Repose survives, and not long after a military helicopter flies over, the first hopeful sign that America is surviving, too. Given that there aren’t any running cars any more (no gas), that whirlybird must have seemed a freakish apparition to the locals, flying where no one has been able to drive in months—a phantom of from the past.
Mabel Norris Reese, who had been wowed by Forbidden Area (in 1956 she gave it a front page review, proclaiming the book “will disturb both the liberals and the conservatives and make the Air Force both mad and glad for the attention he gives it”) gave Alas Babylon a two-thumbs up in a March ’59 edition of the weekly newspaper. “Mr. Frank’s newest book deals more brutally with the human failing of self-concern; more bluntly with the struggle for survival as men face ‘the thousand-year night,’” she wrote.
A fair way to compare daily life in Mount Dora before and after the events of Alas, Babylon would be to read Robert Bowie’s 1998 memoir, A Roast For Coach Dan Spear. His tender and simple portrait of Mount Dora life in the late 1950s juxtaposes harshly against the cruel realties of survival in Alas, Babylon.
Same city, different Day.
Gimme Shelter
Alas, Babylon sent Frank’s career back up into orbit—he went on to serve on the Democratic National Committee, and traveled with John. F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign; in 1961 he received the American Heritage Foundation Award and was a consultant to the National Aeronautics and Space Council; and published many magazine articles and few more books. But success in career was not kind to the person. Frank began drinking soon after Alas, Babylon published, and his marriage soon fell apart. Despite the world’s applause, in a few years Frank was dead, at age 56, of complications from acute pancreatitis. Having seen the future with such alarming vision, Harry (Pat) Frank then drank himself to death.
For Mount Dora, Alas, Babylon put a local hammer on the civil defense nail that had been driving people underground throughout the ‘50s. Aware the evacuation was not an option when nuclear missiles could come so quickly and affect such large areas, so the government promoted “duck and cover” strategies and urged the building of bomb shelters. Bomb sheltering became another face of surburban life in the ‘50s, and pictures of families sequestered in their little cement tombs appeared throughout the media.
In 1961, 25 prominent Mount Dora families (including the mayor and Lake County’s superintendent of schools) coughed up $2,000 each to build a 5,000 square-foot underground shelter dubbed The Catacombs, six feet under an orange grove in Sylvan Shores. With 1″ thick walls of steel and concrete and blast door for a main entrance too big to re-open once it was closed (they would have to tunnel around it), the space was big enough for 100 people to live for more than half a year down under. The location was kept secret—to this day, few know the precise location—and stocked with .357 magnum weapons and 10,000 rounds of ammo to keep away anyone who might stumble on them.
Frank wrote about the Catacombs in his 1962 book How To Survive the H Bomb–and Why, calling it the country’s most elaborate privately financed shelter. (Also in 1961, a six-acre, 33-room subterranean shelter big enough for 30 families built in Livermore, California, but its location was not a secret.) Frank wrote he wouldn’t be one for such an exclusive shelter:
I can imagine being visited by my sister and brother-in-law and their children at the precise moment that the balloon goes up. What do I say? Do I say, ‘Sorry, Dolly old girl, we can’t take you into our shelter. You and Leonard and the kids will have to stay here and be irradiated. But meanwhile, feel free to use anything you find around the house.’ No, I don’t think I can say that.
Fear does funny things to people, to be sure. There are visible bomb shelters all around Mount Dora. The neighbors behind me have a bomb shelter they turned into a fruit cellar and built a deck over. However, in my reading of Mount Dora Topic from the late 1950s, I saw no visible community effort to prepare for the worst. It was, I guess, unthinkable. The closest evidence for any communal effort was the Catacombs. However, as the consummate gated community, it was private and secret and selective most of all.
Families paid $200 a year for the Catacombs upkeep, but by the mid-1970s most of the families had dropped out of the group and care of the facility went into disuse. It’s still under there, somewhere in the Sylvan Shores area, a vast set of underground rooms with mouldering relics—a shelf with a Gieger counter and big bottles of aspirin, children’s bunk beds with bedding still wrapped in protective cellophane, a moldy family Bible.
Aboveground, life went on. The Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis both came and went. President Kennedy was assassinated. Mount Dora schools integrated.
Somehow the town survived its holocaust.
What If—Today?
Fast-forward six decades in the same town, and consider following scenario of a Day that, we now know, could far too easily come to pass.
This Day starts much like any other in Mount Dora—let’s say’s in June, an overheating, 21st-century summer day, sunny and too hot already by 9 a.m. Tropical breezes twisting the ant moss on the city’s oaks. Many have left already for jobs in Orlando, kids are finishing up classes before the summer break, neighborhoods buzz lightly with contractors and street crews. City Hall is stirring into another day of business with board meetings and conference calls. A few citizens are lined up at the customer service window to pay on various things.
Suddenly the lights flicker and with then with a sudden slash are gone. Backup lights kick in but all workaday ambience has been lost. Government workers and contractors and citizens mill about, wondering what’s up. Cellphones are working but the Internet, that great communal ocean that hyperlinks us to the world is gone. The roar of the digital everyday vanishes. An officer runs for the door and sirens can be heard pushing up through the heated silence.
After an hour it becomes clearer that this is more than a local blackout. While cellphone batteries are still working, people make desperate calls to school, to spouses at work, to aging relatives and loved ones. News is scattered and wildly contradictory. Terrorists have exploded a nuclear bomb in Tampa. A meteor has struck somewhere across the world.
Actually a massive cyberattack, launched from any number of criminal quarters or hostile nation-states, has taken out the country’s vulnerable electrical utility system.
There’s a run on food at Publix, gas at the local stations and supplies Walgreens and Lowe’s, and since all of these retail outlets are ill-prepared for panic buying, supplies run out fast. Those who didn’t get there right away and don’t have emergency supplies at home make the grim realization that all refrigerated food will spoil in a couple days.
Come nightfall there is a general sense that civilization itself has gone dark. Except for the sound of frightened voices and the occasional car, Mount Dora has returned to its distant past. Those who were here during the hurricanes of 2004 might remember the eerie silence between wind gusts, the unlit spectacle of occupied houses without juice.
Come daylight cellphones are dead. Generators running on fuel last a while longer then die. With no running water, Someplace Special soon begins to ripen with untreated human waste.
Within a day or two the sense of the light going out on America becomes dire. There is hardly enough bottled water to satisfy the locals’ thirst, and Florida is hotter than ever. Everyone heads for the shade, fanning themselves with bills for services no longer needed with one can pay, much less mail.
Home care patients who rely on ventilators and other machines are among the first to die, and without medications many more suffer the hard road of symptoms. Emergency services are woefully short.
Information on radios and TVs is loud for a time, but information is growing increasingly scarce. The blackout extends over a great distance, perhaps the entire country or beyond.
Within days it is apparent the help is not arriving, and panic grows on the streets. Gunfire from a thousand armed households begins to crack in the night. Armed mobs break into houses and stores, the booze gets into things and people start getting killed, or raped.
If the official estimates are correct, in a year, only one in ten Americans will be alive.
America Unplugged
Welcome to Warfare 2.0—accomplishing what nuclear missiles once threatened by tripping the Internet wires that connects us now too well.
That’s the assertion of Ted Koppel in his recent book, Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath. If they wanted to inflict devastating damage on the United States, terrorists or a hostile nation could do so by taking out the country’s electrical grid with a cyberattack or electromagnetic pulse. Thanks to the Internet age’s hyperconnective state, the number of places where such an attack could launch are ridiculously huge, and performed in the right sequence, part or all of the nation’s aging electric infrastructure could be destroyed, requiring months—possibly years—to restore power.
And unlike 50 years ago when the fear of nuclear attack was keenly felt throughout the nation—and citizens took measures to prepare—oddly, the most dangerous threat this nation currently faces is government inaction and distracted citizens.
It’s not that the authorities aren’t aware of the danger. Koppel writes,
On April 13, 2010, a bipartisan group of ten former national security, intelligence, and energy officials … sent a confidential letter, not previously released, to the chairman and ranking member of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. Written in support of the pending Grid Reliability and Infrastructure Defense Act, the letter came to some blunt conclusions: “Virtually all of our civilian infrastructure—including telecommunications, water, sanitation, transportation, and healthcare—depends on the electric grid. The grid is extremely valuable to disruption by a cyber- or other attack. Our adversaries already have the capability to carry out such an attack. The consequences of a larger-scale attack on the U.S. grid would be catastrophic for our national security and economy.”
Though the House passed the proposed legislation. It has been stuck in the Senate ever since.
Partly at fault are industry players who are resisting further government regulation (and added costs). It doesn’t help that Congress is so ineffectual at passing any legislation these days.
Still, the danger is real and growing. Koppel asked former Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano what she though the chances were of a major attack on the country’s electrical grid. She replied, “Very high—80 percent, 90 percent. You know, very, very high.”
Yikes.
But no one seems to be sweating this one. The national media wires are a-throb with other, more click-worthy fears, like terrorism and politics and sexual predators texting people’s kids. The shadow of fear seems to loom largest where the threats are hardest to see, as if there is something we are missing in our vigilant scan. As if there was something we could do.
Locally, those responsible for security in Mount Dora don’t seem too concerned. Police Chief O’Grady said he knew of no local governments in the region that had been cyber-attacked. And while he acknowledged such a threat was real, the possibility was low. “Look, there are lone wolves and tech-savvy anti-government people who could cripple a city,” he says. “But Mount Dora is low on the threat list. This town has some people who have very strong opinions, but its hard to see that whatever damage they might want to inflict would be worth going to jail over.”
Certainly no community can be blamed for a sluggish response to a threat no one is energetically communicating, and we’ve all grown somewhat immune to Chicken Little conspiracy theories and threats. Besides, we all have enough on our personal plates to worry about, with identity thieves following our fingertips, and brick-and-mortar thieves breaking into our houses. Difficulties in our personal lives consume most of the energy in our daily bandwidth, and distraction takes care of the rest.
Much like Mount Dora in the ‘50s, those who perceive a major threat to the city’s security are hunkering down. Instead of building bomb shelters, they’re arming their homes to the teeth or have a plan for getting the hell out of Dodge, stocking up for doomsday and/or marching with militias in the woods. The Red Threat for many these days are Obama’s storm troopers, come to take away their guns and force them to sign up for the Affordable Care Act.
There are others in this community who wonder if guns can provide enough security, if armament perhaps is more of a collective job, something our authorities should commands. (Depends, I guess, on what you decide is in your better interest to trust.)
But I wonder. Have we simply become so disconnected from our community that threats can’t motivate us to work together? Is there no motivation to act because the community itself no longer exists?
For one thing, there is very little cohesive local media—no Mount Dora Topic newspaper, nothing with close to even 20 percent share of the community’s attention—to give any sense of local identity. With the city beginning to sprawl eastward, we don’t know its confines any more and we don’t know who our neighbors are.
The Internet, for all that it connects us to, separates us from each other. We might better know the world, but we know less about each other. It also separates us from our own heads. With information so easily accessed online there’s no need to remember things. That works until devices fail, and then we’re way too short of precious knowledge.
We are victims too, of what our relative (storied, fictional, fading) affluence has sold us. We paid for the permission to live apart and separate in suburban, my-slice-of-Eden homes, and that has made us forget altogether what it means to be citizens.
All this plays very badly on Mount Dora’s chances for surviving The Day, 55 years after Pat Frank imagined it here. And the odd thing is that in Frank’s telling, the catastrophe is from bombs from without. In our modern version, someone trips the wires, but we end up killing each other. A power-grid-destroying cyberattck is the perfect catastrophe for an America which has become too connected to devices, too reliant upon power to carry it through the day.
Certainly there is nothing like a catastrophe to bring a community together. After Hurricane Charley walloped through Orlando in 2004, it was amazing to see how much neighbors all turned out the help each other, removing debris, sharing food and helping to cover roofs with blue tarp. Equally amazing was to see normally indifferent traffic actually proceed in order through dead stoplights.
When the threat was real enough in England during the Second World War, civil defense became a collective neighborhood effort. Here in the United States, the Home Front got citizens participating in the war effort through their efforts to ration and save every bit of scrap to put back into manufacturing.
Great to see—but once the threat passes and the all-clear is sounded, everyone goes back to their little private Edens. Mount Dora’s daily life resumed with hardly a blip after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and after power was restored after Charley neighbors went back to waving the occasional ‘Hi’ in passing each other.
The problem is, if a long time passes without a threat, it’s hard to know how much of that communal fiber still remains. If people can still work together. Things atrophy from disuse, rot from neglect. Take a look at the current photos of the abandoned Catacombs.
The last major power outage was in 2003, four years before the first iPhone was introduced. Dependent as we now are on those pocket rockets, just how far have we gotten lost in them? Will we know enough how to survive without being able to Google it?
Our community needs to re-learn how to behave as a community before the next catastrophe. Abraham Lincoln nailed it when he said, “I will prepare and someday my chance will come.” How different the story for Mount Dora will be on the Day if each of us knew what to do, where to turn, how to proceed. And if the Day doesn’t come, there are still plenty of things a vibrant, growing, interconnected and each other-facing community can achieve, far better than the Central Florida wasteland we are developing into.
Understanding how much better this city can fare with a strong community is why apocalyptic novels like Alas, Babylon are so helpful. But fear is not the motivator that builds strong communities. Fear is what tears them apart, driving neighbors into isolation, everyone out for themselves. The nuclear family may be most trusted, but it is not sufficient for surviving the greatest challenges. (During the Kennedy administration, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara came to realize that civil defense initiatives supported in the past—including building fallout shelters—were worthless as a deterrent, as all the Soviets had to do was to ramp up their retaliatory strike tonnage to overwhelm the capacities of those shelters.)
I can’t help but wonder if the Red Menace Mount Dora was so afraid of was actually fear of the Black Integration. And once that was accomplished in the mid-1960s—and Mount Dora went on—what had been feared for so long became a new strength in the community. Maybe a little more courage to deal with the present and local might have gone a long way to allay fears from without.
What are we afraid of today that is keeping us separate and apart? There are huge disparities between neighborhoods, huge differences of opinion about how the city should be governed and who can be trusted. We have no role models outside the city we can much trust, so we don’t have much to go on, anymore.
But we have what every community has—each other—like each other or not. Whatever can be done for the strength of the community must come from within. Help does arrive at the end of Alas, Babylon, though the news isn’t good: the scientists still working here and there across the country don’t think major blast areas like Florida can recover fully for a thousand years. Whatever new world is found after The Day, we’ll have to make it ourselves.
Lincoln also said: “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we have destroyed ourselves.”
So … lets see if we can develop a community strong enough to face any challenge.
Facing each present challenge will strengthen us for the next. Let’s make our city government intact so we can wisely face what’s developing on our eastern border. And tackle economic storms sure to come. And know what to do as the state gets hotter and stormier and smaller due to rising waters.
Fleeing into suburban shelters is just making it worse.
Duck and Cover will kills us.
Emergency postscript
Mount Dora has a Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan, a 200-page manual that is maintained by fire chief Skip Kerkhoff and updated annually. It outlines how local, county, state, and federal departments participate in the mitigation, planning, response and recovery from emergencies and disasters.
CodeRED is the city’s voluntary emergency notification system pushes emergency messages through phones, email and text. You can sign up through the city’s website.
The city’s Information Line is (352) 735-7102 also provides updated information during emergencies.
Lake County’s emergency management website is here, with a hurricane guide, shelter locations, sandbag pickup locations and more.
The County also has a Neighborhood Preparedness Program offers communities a 9-step program for carrying out a disciplined community response to emergencies.
The Red Cross suggests that every household prepare for emergencies with a kit that includes a 3-day supply of water and food, first aid kit, medications, copies of personal documents, a multi-purpose tool, cash, family and emergency contact information, and maps. For a complete list, visit the Red Cross website at <http://www.redcross.org/get-help/prepare-for-emergencies/be-red-cross-ready/get-a-kit>
David Cohea, Writer (david@mountdoracitizen.com)