The Wiki Man

23 May 2009

When I was a child, almost everyone I knew had a single telephone kept in a draughty hallway.

I don’t bet, so my own version of internet-enriched viewing is checking up on period trivia while watching historical dramas. During the final episode of Mad Men, set during the Cuban Missile Crisis, I was intrigued to hear Acker Bilk’s 1962 instrumental ‘Stranger on the Shore’ (the first British male single ever to head the US charts) played during a bar scene. So was this the song people chose to buy when minutes from oblivion? How appropriate if it were.

I checked Wikipedia. Wrong. Brace yourself for the actual number one, because you’ll find it as unbelievable as I did. While, deep beneath the Caribbean aboard the Soviet submarine B-39, Commander Vasily Arkhipov was beseeching his superior not to fire a nuclear torpedo on the USS Beale, Americans in droves were going out to buy ‘The Monster Mash’ by Bobby (Boris) Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers. As so often, television delivers the polished narrative view of history while the web provides the humbler truth.

A few links later I learned something more surprising still. During the crisis, each knife-edge communication sent between Kennedy and Khrushchev took eight hours to arrive. Forbidden to use the telephone, the Soviet embassy painstakingly encrypted each side’s revised terms in standard telegrams. As Anatoly Dobrynin, the then Soviet ambassador in Washington, recalled: ‘We had to ring up Western Union and a black man on a bicycle would come round. We had to hope he wouldn’t get distracted by some girl.’

If you ever want a reminder of the value of modern communication, that’s surely it. And, Western Union man, thank you.

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DaveF

May 26th, 2009 6:38pm Report this comment

Lucky old you! When I was a child almost everyone I knew didn't have a telephone at all.
Seriously, though, I think people worry more about the Cuban missile crisis now than people did then. At the time I never believed for one moment that the superpowers would really start chucking nuclear bombs at each other, and I was not in the minority amongst the people I knew.

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