http://www.post-gazette.com/magazine/19991223norad2.asp Red (suit) alert!: Military keeps keen eye on Santa as he delivers gifts Thursday, December 23, 1999 By Bob Batz Jr., Post-Gazette Staff Writer One December morning in 1955, Col. Harry Shoup had just gotten into his office at the Continental Air Defense Command in Colorado Springs, Colo., when the red phone rang. The red phone very seldom rang. Only two people even knew the number: He, as director of the Combat Operations Center, and the four-star general who was CONAD's commander-in-chief. Shoup, a career military man who grew up in the Lawrence County town of Bessemer, was hunkered in a concrete bunker at Ent Air Base, where he literally oversaw a giant clear plastic map of North America, on which were marked any unidentified ships, aircraft and other objects that had been picked up by radar. So when the phone rang, Shoup expected dire news. What he got was a boy reading his Christmas list. Shoup was shocked and wondered if one of the staff were playing a joke. But nobody was smiling. The boy on the other end of the line finally paused to take a breath and said, "You're not really Santa, are you?" With the fate of the free world hanging in the balance, what else could a senior officer do? "I said, 'I really am Santa,' " Shoup recounts. " 'Have you been a good little boy?' " 'Oh yes, I have ...' " The major played along long enough to get the boy's mother on the line, then demanded to know where she got the number for the general's hot line. Apologetic and frightened, the woman said the number was published in a newspaper ad for Sears Roebuck and Co. in which Santa invited, "Hey, Kiddies: Call me direct on my Merry Christmas telephone. Just dial ME 2-6681. "Kiddies, be sure and dial the correct number." Turned out, the boy had it right, but the ad was one digit wrong. After doing his best to calm the woman and wish her a Merry Christmas, Shoup vowed to get to the bottom of this and hung up. The phone rang immediately. This time it was a girl. Shoup again played along, while motioning for his lieutenant colonel to come over. "Here I was -- 'Ho Ho Ho!' and 'Yes, I am Santa,' and he looked at me like, 'Oh my God, the old man's flipped his lid.' He really was concerned." While the girl went down her list, Shoup put his hand over the mouthpiece and told his assistant, "We're in serious trouble." Then he instructed him to take the phone, plug it into a secret red jack downstairs, and, "You play Santa Claus for the next two hours." The calls rolled in, one after the other. Shoup gave his morning briefing, then got the hot-line number changed. Nothing probably would have come of it except that local media got hold of the story. And it got even better: That plastic map that CONAD used to track unidentified aircraft? Shoup describes it as a 60-foot-wide, 30-foot-tall "football field on edge." Behind it, on three vertical levels, worked the "spotters," who were WACs (women of the Air Corps) who'd been specially trained to write backwards. Whenever a suspicious siting was phoned in from a radar station, the spotter in that area of the gridded map would mark its coordinates -- backwards, so the staff on the other side could read them -- and activate a gong alert. One day that season, the spotter working on the top tier, in the vicinity of Alaska and the North Pole, drew an elaborate rendering of Santa Claus in his toy-filled sleigh being pulled by his reindeer. "Just a beautiful thing heading south," says Shoup, who not only allowed her to keep it up for a day or two, but also joked about asking the Royal Canadian Air Force to escort Santa to the border. The papers loved it, and so did the people -- so much so that, the next Christmas, CONAD again was flooded with calls. Thus a tradition was born, as the joint U.S.-Canadian agency, which became the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, has ever since tracked Santa's progress on his Christmas Eve around-the-world flight. The popular program got even more so in 1997, when NORAD put it on the World Wide Web, where people could check in from their computers. That year, the site had 1 million hits. Last year, when it expanded to five languages, it had 80 million hits from Santa watchers who could learn technical data like sleigh weight at takeoff (75,000 gd, or gum drops). Another 20,000 people called NORAD for up-to-the-minute updates. "It's a goodwill gesture," says NORAD spokesman Master Sgt. Larry Lincoln, who notes that this year, some 100 NORAD volunteers, at its current operations center deep beneath Colorado's Cheyenne Mountain, will answer the phones on Christmas Eve. "They love it," Lincoln says. "It's an opportunity to give something back and keep the magic of Christmas alive for these youngsters." Also loving it is Shoup, who, for his role in helping start the fun phenomenon by accident 44 years ago, frequently fields calls from reporters this time of year. But he doesn't recall ever telling the tale for anyone from the Pittsburgh region, where he grew up. It was at an Associated Press photo shoot earlier this month that Lincoln met Shoup and learned that they're not only both Lawrence County natives (Lincoln is from New Castle), but also both attended Westminster College in New Wilmington. (Shoup graduated in 1938.) After he retired in 1969, Shoup worked at the college for about a decade as its vice president for development. Then he moved back to Colorado Springs, where, now 82, he lives with his wife, Louise. Looking back to that distant December, Shoup makes it sound like answering the red phone and becoming Santa was the most natural thing in the world. "We had three girls at home -- 13, 11 and 6 -- and my wife had just blessed me with a baby boy in October," he says. "We were very much into the Christmas spirit." He thinks it's terrific that NORAD, which still watches the skies for missiles and other evils, takes a little time every year to look out for the generous fat man in fur-trimmed red suit: "It indicates that we're not all bad."