Early June 1971. Two friends and I are driving from Stockton, California to New Haven, Connecticut. Our plan was to camp along the way. We stopped to camp in a park a few miles west of Kimball. However, a weather front that was just a few hours behind us caught up with us and made camping unfeasible. We decided to drive on, and stopped in Kimball to buy some food to eat along the way. While in Kimball I noticed something tall and shiny poking up behind some trees. We decided to go and investigate. The tall, shiny object turned out to be what looked like a fully operational Titan missile in the middle of a public park. I say it looked fully operational because it was behind a chain-link fence with concertina wire around the top, and The rocket motors at the bottom of the first stage had a number of pins with flags reading “remove before lunch” fluttering in the breeze. They were a number of capped large diameter pipes sticking out of the ground near the base. It looks like they may have been connected to underground fuel thanks. We were used to seeing surplus World War II and Korean War tanks and airplanes in that part of the country so this would not have been all that unusual except for the fact that it looked brand new. We got out of the car and walked over to gawk at it. No, you have to remember this was 1971. So there we were — 2 long-haired hippies with a happy girl latched onto this chain-link fence. One of us was still wearing the ceremonial “driving hat” which was a beat up construction worker’s hardhat riddled with bullet holes. In other words, we very definitely did not look Nebraskan. Buy and buy a police car came up and parked next to our car. The occupants of said police car were eyeing us intently. Both seemed to be afflicted with an extreme lack of any identifiable sense of humor. It being 1971, we had things in the car that we thought it would be better if they did not discover. We ambled back to the car trying to appear as casual as we could appear given the fact that we were now extremely rattled. We motored back to the main road and headed east, frantically looking for a speed limit sign to make sure that we did not exceed it. The police car followed us all the way to the county line and a few miles beyond, before turning around. We didn’t make any more stops in Nebraska. And now you know the rest of the story.

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I did not do a great job of proofreading. But you get the idea.

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