In 1959, the year the Durbin family returned from Ohio, a sign went up on St. Clair Avenue announcing that East St. Louis had been chosen as an “All American City.” The designation, bestowed by Look Magazine for the city’s good government and progressiveness, made some wonder if the magazine had made a mistake. Plenty of words had been used to describe the ESL government during the nearly one hundred years since its founding, but “good” was rarely among them.
Economic decline was by this time turning to collapse in ESL as employers relocated farther south for ever-cheaper labor. Racism didn’t help. While the city’s overall population declined steadily, the percentage of Black residents went up. This so-called white flight was happening in cities across the country, so in this sad sense East St. Louis was, indeed, All American.
1960 was a big year in U.S. history, and Bill and Lorraine and their kids watched it all on a big TV—black and white, of course. Filled with glowing tubes, it generated enough heat to warm up leftovers. John Kennedy was elected President that year, ushering out the Eisenhowers and ushering in what liberals called a New Frontier and a “return to Camelot.” The Durbins and Kalishes were ecstatic to see a Democrat—and a young Catholic one at that, with a gorgeous wife and cute kids—in the White House.
The Cold War was in full swing at this time, and the most frightening event of that same year would have a direct effect on this family’s future. In May 1960, Air Force pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down while taking spy photographs from his U-2 plane, high above Russia. The U.S. denied it, trying in vain to convince Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev that our pilot had just gotten lost. But the lesson of the setback was simple: The U.S. would have to take photographs from higher than any plane could fly, and that meant satellites would be our next spies.
A top-secret program, code-named Corona, was just getting underway when the U-2 came down. Corona satellites would snap photos from the edge of space, then drop the exposed film in parachutes, which were snatched out of the air by jet planes towing giant hooks.
The spy birds—which would have been considered something right out of Buck Rogers science fiction had they not been such a well-protected secret—of course required navigation. This required excellent maps, and the department in charge of maps was the ACIC, where Bill Durbin worked. Hence, Corona got a big boost in funding in 1960 with the termination of the U-2 program. Bill would spend a good part of his defense career on the top-secret Corona project, though none of his family knew it at the time.
Bill loved his job. He wore with pride his civil servant’s uniform: a dark suit with thin lapels and an even thinner tie, atop a starched white shirt, finished with dark horn-rimmed glasses and short-cropped hair.
Driving to work each morning, crossing the Mississippi River in the family station wagon—always a Ford—Bill no doubt pinched himself as he thought about his assignments to classified projects like Corona, wondering how the son of a railroad clerk in East St. Louis had found himself working on matters of national security.
He would have loved to tell his parents, wife, and children about it. But Bill Durbin was a loyal American who loved his country as much as he loved his family. He kept it all to himself. It would be decades before his family knew anything about the work he did. The only visible sign he was doing something secret was the government agents knocking on his neighbors’ doors, dressed like the characters in the Men in Black movies, conducting periodic background checks as Bill received ever-higher security clearances.
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Michael Durbin 