By Jeremiah Horrigan
Times Herald-Record
December 09, 2008
NEWBURGH — Like plenty of 10-year-old boys with a passion for machinery, Stephen Poje loved hanging around in the basement with his dad. Except the basement of Stephen Poje's youth was a top-secret bulwark against the possibility of nuclear holocaust.
Poje's dad was an engineer in the late 1950s and early '60s in the basement power plant that supported the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment Building, a massive four-story concrete bunker on the edge of what was then Stewart Air Force Base.
Memories of Beaver Dam Lake boyhood days spent inside a top-secret bastion of the Cold War were triggered by a recent article in the Times Herald-Record about a group that continues to hope to make a Cold War museum of the building.
If young Poje's time in the SAGE Building basement was cool by kid standards, his periodic trips up the stairs (accompanied by an adult) to the building's top-floor war room were almost unbelievably cool.
What he found there was what he believes must have been among the first interactive video displays, something he remembers as resembling the vintage Nintendo "Duck Hunt" video game:
"They could point this sort of pistol with a wire going to the computer at a radar blip and find out what kind of plane it was, if it had a flight plan, what its trajectory was — whether it was friend or foe."
He wasn't burdened by the building's mission. Instead, he said, "The technology captured me."
His fascination became his life's mission. He grew up and became a marine engineer, helped design nuclear reactors for submarines, and became superintendent of Three Mile Island. ("It was running when I left it.") He lives in Indiana, Pa., and is employed as an engineer by General Electric Corp.
Washingtonville High School teacher Dawn Vandervloed has used the SAGE Building's history to construct a lesson plan aimed at ensuring that her students never forget its historical significance.
Her global history classes just finished creating a variety of projects meant to illustrate student understanding of the Cold War and whether or not they thought a "peace museum" commemorating that era was justifiable, especially in tight economic times.
The Port Authority of New York, which has control of the long-abandoned building, has shown zero interest in helping establish a museum. But Vandervloed and many of her students disagree:
"It makes sense to me. This region's a great place for historical museums, but they're all colonial sites. History kept on being made after that."
jhorrigan@th-record.com
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