Laughter echoed through the Andover Historical Society last month as a group of local satellite pioneers reunited to share memories of working at the Andover Earth Station, the groundbreaking facility that opened in 1962 and helped usher in the Space Age while transforming global communications from a remote corner of western Maine.

Inside the Andover Earth Station on July 10, 1962, engineers, Bell Laboratories scientists, AT&T executives, government officials and reporters waited for Telstar to come into view. Telstar, the world’s first active communications satellite, had been launched into space earlier that day.

At 7:17 p.m., project director Eugene O’Neill announced, “We’ve acquired Telstar!” Minutes later, an image of an American flag flying outside the station appeared on television screens, and then confirmation arrived from a corresponding tracking station in France that the signal had been successfully beamed to Telstar and rerouted to France, successfully crossing the Atlantic and making history in western Maine.

But when the former employees gathered to reminisce more than six decades later, they remembered the moment with characteristic humility.

The five men — Ken Field, Dan Clark, twin brothers David and Danny White, and Steve Hall — downplayed their roles at the satellite station, which they variously called “The Site,” “The Bubble” or “The Cape,” a reference to Cape Canaveral, as they looked through historical documents preserved by the society.

Asked about the historic first transmission, Field said, “They told us ‘get outa sight.’ I got took to the shadows.”

“They told me to ‘look busy,'” Clark recalled.  He was a custodian who became a facilities engineer working on air conditioners, diesels and motors. Field said he still calls his old friend when he needs mechanical assistance.

Construction of the massive white inflatable radome — 161 feet high and 210 feet in diameter — began around that time. Enclosed within it was a giant horn antenna used to track satellites.

Clark recalled telling his mother in 1960 that he met a surveyor in Andover who said they were building a satellite station “five or six levels high.”

“That guy just filled you with baloney,” he remembers his mother replying.

Engineers had plans to build five bubbles. In the end, there were only two.

“That was before they had the technology to put a satellite in synchronous orbit,” said Danny White.

Field, who worked at the Earth Station from 1962 until it closed in 1985, added, “22,300 miles in synchronous orbit.” He was the station’s longest-serving employee.

He held the job title of electronic craftsman.

“That was back in the vacuum tube days. Meaning you had to work on the equipment instead of just replace a card. When you had trouble you got out your soldering iron or multimeter. Pre-transistors,” said Field.

Hall said his father helped him get his foot in the door at the Earth Station. He had been working at the Rumford paper mill for $100 a week and took a pay cut to work at the station for $80 a week. To prepare, he took correspondence courses in electronics.

He went on to a 35-year career with AT&T, rising through the ranks to manage more than 150 people.

Clark, of Roxbury, remembers his exact hiring date as the last technician hired at the station.

“November 9, 1964.”

He arrived after Telstar I. Pointing to a huge photograph on the wall, he identified where he “drove the antenna” from the lower cab of the enormous horn antenna on Telstar II.

“We’d receive the signal, lock onto it, follow it, all on its orbit,” he said, a process that could take anywhere from 30 minutes to more than an hour.

Working nights

Some of the men worked the midnight-to-8 a.m. shift. At night, they sometimes had little to do, so they played cards, made pizza or brought homemade chili.

They also played tricks on the security guard filling the tank of his brand new Volkswagen so he would think he was getting excellent mileage, then later siphoning gas out to produce the opposite effect.

Field remembered that, “The smartest of Bell Labs had some strange people, who knew everything about their one job. Other than that they didn’t know how to come out of the rain.”

David White added his own observation.

“The guys were outside in the pouring rain. ‘We’re looking for stars,’ they said. You’ll never see stars in a rain storm like this in Maine,” said White.

The irony of the earth station construction, noted Hall’s son, Guy Hall, was that in 1962 Andover was still using a crank telephone system while some of the world’s most advanced satellite technology was being installed up the road.

The Andover Earth Station became a major tourist attraction, reportedly drawing thousands of visitors annually during the 1960s. David White, who held a commercial pilot’s license, sometimes flew dignitaries and other visitors around the satellite station.

“I’ve seen them build it; I’ve seen them tear it down,” said White of his aerial views.

The station closed in 1985, but for those who worked there, memories of the place remain as vivid as the day Telstar’s signals first arrived in western Maine, placing little Andover at the center of one of the most important communications breakthroughs of the 20th century.

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