The day that the very first United Air Lines DC-3 flew to Catalina Island happened to be the same day that the U.S. military made the first post-war atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll.
On July 1, 1946, UAL Captain Donald McBain flew an excited group of reporters and airline personnel to the Catalina Airport in the Island's interior to inaugurate service to the Island.
Despite the previous detonation of three atomic bombs, including those dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the world was terrified that the Bikini test would do anything from destroy the earth's gravitational field to crack a hole in the earth's crust through which the world's oceans would drain.
A Catalina-destroying tidal wave was believed to be in the realm of possibility and newspaper accounts of the flight could not help but touch on the subject: "Imagine taking off to find no island," wrote one reporter. "That would bother the hell out of the pilot and co-pilot."
The same reporter quipped, "It occurred to all the passngers that something ought to be done to protect Catalina from A-Bomb damage. Buffalo, goats and beautiful women in bathing suits make an esoteric combination. It would be very sad if this thing no longer existed."
(Little did that reporter know that within a few years the descendants of those "bathing suits" would be named after the very atoll that was about to be nuked.)
