The Duck and Cover Pennant - Part 2 of 2
After Chicago’s air raid sirens sounded to celebrate the White Sox’ 1959 pennant, the clean-ups were nearly as bad as the messes.
Last week we told you about some unorthodox celebrations following the Chicago White Sox 1959 pennant victory. Today we tell you about the (ahem) fallout. It’s an unorthodox but still high-quality holiday gift from your favorite baseball history newsletter.
Here’s Part 1!
It doesn’t win many votes for Most Exciting American Decade, but for sheer existential dread, the 1950s deserve your consideration. Here’s just a taste of the content frequently served to Americans in this period, just a few years after the United States had (supposedly) made the whole world safe for democracy:
Yeeeesh.
Popular media inevitably picked up on the unnerving tenor of global affairs. Science fiction anthologies like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits offered plenty of atomic-nightmare content, but even sitcoms like I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched, and Mr. Ed—the show about a talking horse—touched on Cold War intrigues once or twice. On the Beach was released in 1959, depicting a near-future societal collapse as a shroud of nuclear fallout slowly enveloped the planet. A generation of moviegoers used to enjoying Fred Astaire’s effervescent dance routines watched aghast as he, of all people, explained that the world and everyone on it was doomed, and without throwing in as much as a soft-shoe:
On the topic of national civil defense, the line between creative media and instructional propaganda could be hard to discern. The federal government hired an actor, Arthur Godfrey (a sort of folksy cross between Ward Cleaver and Ryan Seacrest, if we have it right), to pre-record a series of emergency messages telling Americans that the country had come under foreign attack. In 1957, CBS produced The Day Called ‘X,’ a piece of “edutainment” depicting the actual people responsible for the civil defense of Portland, Oregon as they prepared for a simulated attack by incoming Soviet aircraft while the cameras rolled.
The resulting program—quietly harrowing to these modern eyes—was actually panned by Time magazine for being too dull, a critique which tells you a lot about the juices people in this era were constantly stewing in.
Even this background of perpetual anxiety could not keep Chicago from partying on September 22, 1959. The “Go Go” White Sox had beaten the Cleveland Indians to secure the American League pennant and earn a berth to their first World Series in 40 years. With the ghosts of the “Black Sox” banished at last, people cut loose on rooftops and telephone poles and hung out of cars, trucks, and buses streaming all over the city.
By 10:30 pm, an hour or so after the game ended, thousands of Chicagoans were enjoying the sights and sounds of victory when the city’s network of 110 air raid sirens suddenly burst to clamorous life, filling the city with the sound of incoming danger. The rising and falling wail lasted for five painful minutes and then cut off. As the echo faded, hundreds of thousands of startled and confused people pondered the empty skies overhead. There was no precedent for such an alarm—the sirens were only test-fired one Tuesday a month and never in the middle of the night. Whatever this was, it wasn’t a drill.
“Our rejoicing over the victory of the White Sox was turned to fright and even panic by the wailing of the civil defense sirens,” one fan later complained to the Chicago Tribune. Some of the downtown celebrations broke up as revelers sought out the nearest public bomb shelter.
“They wouldn’t attack now,” one woman remembered saying to her husband, “Nikita Khrushchev is here.” The leader of the Soviet Union was in Des Moines, Iowa—practically in the neighborhood—following a busy day of eating hot dogs and admiring tractors. With the Soviet premier sleeping over, surely America had never had a safer night. “On the contrary,’” a neighbor said from his back porch, “it would be a good chance for them to get rid of him.”
“I thought Khrushchev had been shot and the Russians were coming to bomb us,” another letter-writer explained. She said her ten-year-old son had her woken up “crying and fearful of what he had been told in school to expect if he heard the siren at any other time than at 10:30 am Tuesday.”
“I teach my children that air raid sirens are only for air raids,” one teacher added. More than one child that night found themselves telling less-prepared adults what they were supposed to do in response to that sound: make for the basement and turn on the radio.
No matter what Fred Astaire had to say about it, there was a theoretical strategy for “winning” a conflict fought with atomic weapons. Essentially, the doctrine took as a given that both sides would be badly damaged in the fight’s opening moments. No one was likely to score a knockout in that devastating first round, but the fighter who did the best job keeping their guard up would have the best chance in the long run. In this grimdark calculus, civil defense training campaigns and continuity-of-government preparations were considered as important to victory as scrap metal and other material resources had been to winning a conventional war the decade prior.
By 1960, responding to a nuclear attack had become standard curriculum in elementary schools, and 15,000 high schools had installed radiation monitoring kits. The government printed out 55 million wallet-size cards with emergency instructions, and these were often distributed tucked in to people’s utility bills. Suburbanizing Americans were encouraged to practice “fireproof housekeeping,” minimizing the amount of combustible material in or near the home; trained to rush to shut off the gas and electrical sources in the event of an emergency; and reminded, for heaven’s sake, to not look out their windows.
Government officials had low expectations for how the average citizen would perform in a real crisis. Time later cited a newly declassified White House memo from 1956 in which President Dwight Eisenhower rebuked a member of his Cabinet for smugly reporting the results of a modest evacuation drill in his department.
In the memo, Eisenhower reminded the official that in a real situation, “[Americans] will not be normal people—they will be scared, will be hysterical, will be absolutely nuts…We are going to be taking care of a completely bewildered population.” A former military man of some accomplishment, the President reminded his deputies that the only meaningful weapons against panic and confusion was intensive preparation and repeated training.
If the worst ever happened, the first track on America’s apocalypse playlist would be the wailing dirge of the tens of thousands of networked air raid sirens embedded in population centers across the country. The underlying system was a remarkable marvel of pre-digital technology, coordinated between the military, regional and local governments, and the telephone companies. Built from only basic electrical components, the system required only minutes to produce a targeted and unambiguous signal to Americans to assume their places. To the people living in this world, no mechanical sound would have been more unwelcome.
When those unmistakable alarms sounded in Chicago, many people seemed to forget what they were supposed to do. Instead of heading downward towards shelter, thousands of people meandered into the streets, abandoning bar stools and night spots to scan the skies and listen for the sound of incoming long-range bombers. Going out into the open was the last thing to do in an air raid, but a quarter of the city seemed to be out in pajamas and robes, staring straight up.
In fairness, during those first chaotic minutes, there were few better sources of information than one’s own eyes. “I called the police but they didn’t know a thing about the sirens,” one citizen complained. The Bell Telephone Company said the telephone traffic that night was the biggest surge since President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had died unexpectedly in 1945. People also tried calling the fire department, the newspapers, local civil defense offices, and even City Hall. You weren’t supposed to do that, either. “Callers jammed newspaper and radio station switchboards and dialed central operators to ask: ‘What’s happening?’ or ‘are the Russians coming?’”
What people were supposed to do for information was turn on their radio and tune to something colloquially referred to as “Conelrad”—an acronym for Control of Electromagnetic Radiation. In peacetime, the Conelrad stations (AM 640 and 1240) played inconspicuous, upbeat contemporary music, but in an emergency they would become national stars. If an incoming Soviet attack was detected, all radio and television stations in the affected area would make a single emergency announcement directing listeners to switch over to the Conelrad stations and then shut themselves down, cutting off the domestic broadcast network that Soviet bombers could use to navigate in hostile territory. The Conelrad stations were where Arthur Godfrey’s pre-recorded messages (“Ladies and gentlemen, the United States is under attack…”) would play, followed by specific information and instructions.
Many Chicagoans tuned into Conelrad on September 22, but the emergency stations were still in their usual melodious standby mode. “We heard nothing but music, so we went to the basement anyway,” one writer said.
“Nothing on Conelrad,” another resident remembered, “nothing about the sirens anywhere—until finally a television announcer told us not to get alarmed.” It fell to the non-emergency television and radio stations to hurriedly confirm and then report to their remaining audience that there was no attack—the sirens had been sounded to celebrate the White Sox’ pennant victory.
It turned out that those who did the best job following the emergency civil defense instructions—huddling in their basements and tuning to Conelrad—ended up the last to learn that it was all just for “fun.”
A few hours later, the victorious and semi-intoxicated White Sox salvaged what champagne they could from their Cleveland locker room and boarded a charter plane bound for a frazzled Chicagoland.
At Midway Airport, an estimated 25,000 people were waiting for the White Sox’ plane to land, including a party of dignitaries headed by owner Bill Veeck and Richard J. Daley, Chicago’s mayor. The plane ended up delayed out of Cleveland, but the crowd waited and grew, with later arrivals frequently showing up in their nightclothes. Well, they were already up; why not make the best of it?
When the plane arrived, the noise of the crowd was reported to drown out the sound of nearby jet engines. Early Wynn, Gerry Staley, and Luis Aparicio were the heroes of the hour (which was two o’clock in the morning). As Aparicio disembarked the crowd took up the “Go, go” chant that had become synonymous with the team.
Bill Veeck greeted manager Al Lopez and congratulated him for besting Cleveland’s Joe Gordon in the pink-slip pennant-race. Veeck—never one to neglect a news-worthy moment—announced right there on the tarmac that he would hire the fan-favorite manager back for another year.
The White Sox soon got into 12 waiting taxis and drove off into the night. The Tribune reported “some fans were accused of looting cargo from an American Airlines hangar,” but also said “the 100 police on hand said the crowd was not too disorderly,” so, a wash, we guess?
Later, Al Lopez was said to be “sickened” by the unintended panic the win had led to, but we weren’t able to find any direct comments from the manager or the players. If you are sitting on this extremely niche treasure-trove of source material, your star turn has arrived:
“This is a great night in the history of Chicago,” Mayor Daley said. The assembled press had plenty of questions for the mayor regarding the use of the air raid sirens, but the Bridgeport native and chief White Sox fan brushed them aside, reminding them of the city council resolution proclaiming that there should be “hilarity in the streets” and “shouting and celebration.”
The next day, City Hall received an average of 1,100 calls an hour, all of them complaints. Meanwhile, Daley had conveniently left town to speak at a Democratic Party political meeting in Troy, New York.
In the mayor’s absence, a spirited “whodunit” began. Or, as one resident put it: “Who was the nincompoop responsible for this?”
It wasn’t Robert Woodward, the Illinois civil defense director, who called the use of the sirens “shocking and irresponsible.” Woodward said the federal funding agreement that paid for the alert system was explicit in requiring that the sirens be used only in case of an enemy attack or natural disaster.
It wasn’t Gerald Slattery, the city’s acting coordinator for Civil Defense, who said that he hadn’t gotten so much as a “heads-up” phone call before the sirens turned on, even though he was the city’s senior civil defense official. Slattery suggested that journalists contact the city’s Fire Commissioner, a man named Robert J. Quinn.
It took a minute for anyone to find Quinn, a lifelong South Side firefighter turned political appointee, but once he was cornered, he sounded a lot like the mayor, saying he’d decided to sound the alarms “in the hilarity and exuberance of the evening.” “I regret,” he went on, “if anyone was inconvenienced, but after 40 years of waiting for a pennant in the American League, I assume that everyone who was watching the telecast was happy about the White Sox victory. This was intended as just a tribute to a great little team that brought Chicago a pennant.”
Quinn claimed he, too, thought the city council’s lighthearted “Make Some Noise!” proclamation constituted a legal authorization to use air raid sirens like they were bells atop a country church. He also said he had not been able to reach Daley before he ordered the sirens turned on, but that the mayor had given him retroactive approval. This was relevant to get on record because—according to an actual city ordinance—anyone using the sirens without the mayor’s authorization faced a fine of $200 and six months in jail.
As historic non-apologies went, the commissioner’s remarks fell somewhere between “Mistakes were made,” and “I’m sorry if you were offended,” but Quinn diluted the message even further with some old-fashioned victim-blaming, claiming that attentive listeners should have known that a five-minute siren blast signaled “all clear,” so of course there was never any danger.
Mayor Daley couldn’t hide in Troy forever, and when he surfaced, his official response was even more condescending and tone-deaf than that of his subordinate. The mayor said the use of the sirens occurred “during the course of a hilarious evening” and “expressed the natural joy” felt by Chicagoans in that moment. “Everyone can understand how it came about,” Daley said.
Here are some other expressions of Chicagoans’ “natural joy,” shared in letters to newspapers and via the “piles” of mail sent directly to City Hall:
I’m just as much as a White Sox fan as Mayor Daley but those air raid sirens are for one purpose and that’s not to terrify children and old people.
Those dirty, goofy politicians. Whoever pulled this stunt ought to be relieved of his job. It’s a hell of a thing.
We are proud of the White Sox, but in the future let’s save the sirens for disaster.
The mayor should be impeached.
Anyone so stupid as to sound the air raid alarm simply to celebrate a baseball victory should immediately be removed from his post.
Similar responses came from nearly every level of government. A Chicago police detective (unsuccessfully) sought a warrant for Quinn’s arrest on charges of disorderly conduct. An assistant state’s attorney said, “If stupidity were a crime, I would be the first to bring those responsible before the grand jury for indictment and prosecution.”
Robert Tieken, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, was actually checking on that, saying his office was looking into whether any federal law had been violated.
In a sensible, accountable system, Quinn’s stunning blunder would have earned him at least a long, unpaid vacation, but consequences could be elusive in Daley’s Chicago. As the chief firefighter, Quinn was accountable only to Daley, who had achieved a near-total grip on the city’s politics and mechanisms of government in a landslide reelection earlier that year. Quinn was not fired, he was not sanctioned, and he wasn’t even indicted, after U.S. Attorney Tieken glumly announced that because he could not find evidence of “willfully malicious intent,” the false air raid alert was not a crime.
So safe was Quinn’s position that despite the public anger and multiple criminal inquiries, he quickly took back his earlier pseudo-regrets, vowing, “if the Sox ever win another pennant, I’ll do it again.” Determined to prevent another air raid fiasco, the Chicago White Sox nobly refused to win another pennant in Quinn’s lifetime plus the duration of the Cold War plus another 15 years for good measure.
Quinn served as fire commissioner for another 19 years. He finally retired in 1978 at the age of 72, eased out by Daley’s successor. The Chicago Tribune called the move “a welcome relief,” described his fire department as “facing serious problems,” and then bid Quinn a truly bizarre adieu:
Though some of his antics have often raised hackles at the time, they have also been the sort of escapades a true Chicagoan can look back on with a worldly smile. …Other cities might be slightly better off for the lack of such eccentricities [in their public officials], but they are less interesting, too.
Chicagoans’ bewildered response to Quinn’s false alarm sparked a national conversation on the state of civil defense in 1959. According to one school of thought, the incident proved that civil defense planners had clearly underestimated haplessness of the average citizen:
Imagine, after years of trying to teach people to get out of the streets and into places of shelter, they ran into the streets.
Some felt public officials now needed to “back the public up against the wall and drill into its collective head all over again what to do when the sirens let go,” including adopting a rather radical form of exposure therapy, moving from pre-announced system tests and drills to what would be essentially pop quizzes on the end of the world:
Would it not be advisable to have periodic “surprise tests” so the populace might train themselves not to panic and thus perhaps save our nation in time of real emergency?
In the other school of thought, September 22, 1959 had provided a true test of the civil defense system, and the system had failed.
The worst that had been said was that air-raid drills were a form of conditioning for war. It was generally assumed, however, that officials involved in such drills took their jobs seriously. In Chicago at least, this is obviously too charitable a view…the only conclusion one can draw is that the people in charge don’t believe a word they say, and the system itself is just another boondoggle.
One year later, a group of four University of Chicago sociology PhD candidates put a few real numbers behind all of this discourse via a snappily titled research paper: “An Examination into the Public Response to the Air Raid Alert When the White Sox Won the Pennant.”
Exploring how people responded to “extraordinary circumstances” like those encountered after the pennant victory, the authors interviewed a statistical sampling of 250 Chicago residents from all over the city. 83% of the subjects said they had heard the sirens, which was a pretty good number for an alert that surely caught many people already asleep in bed.
The sirens had much less success getting everyone on the same page. Before they received any actual information, 33% of the group who heard the sirens thought they signaled an air raid alert, but 37% of people thought they were a response to the pennant. In other words, because of an impulsive decision made by one enthusiastic White Sox fan with far more authority than sense, 30% of Chicago’s population had actually feared the world might be ending.
On the other hand, in the midst of the Cold War, a full third of Chicagoans heard the sirens—used to announce the imminent arrival of nuclear-armed Soviet planes—and decided, I bet that’s probably just about a baseball game.
And in the end, those people were proved right.
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We’ll be back on January 6 to add on to a few of our recent stories and officially kick off the new year.
In 2025: “Postscripts - Volume 3”
Paul, it’s funny how the air raid system morphed into the emergency broadcast system and then the emergency alert system we now have. The sounds and tones have changed over time to hopefully be unusual enough to capture our attention. It’s scary to think how that many people in 1959 thought it was an actual air raid but it’s even scarier to think how many people were complacent thinking it was for a baseball celebration. Thanks for an entertaining and informative 2024! Wishing you and your family a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year in 2025! Meg
Paul, quite a comprehensive telling of the story. Mayor Daley (the elder) was a consummate butcher of the English language, but he was beloved, because he hung the tag, "The City that Works" on Chicago (whether it was true or not), and being from Bridgeport, he was all White Sox fan.