At 0835 on 25 July 1946 by the Bikini calendar (24 July in New York), the 23 kiloton Baker bomb was detonated from underwater in the Bikini Lagoon. The enormous cloud of water from the Baker blast dispersed a spray of radioactive water over the men and ships in the Lagoon. 

Watching from the deck of the USS Fall River, 12 nautical miles from the target site, was Gunner’s Mate Bill McGee. 

Reporting from the press ship USS Mt. McKinely was Don Mozley, describing what he heard and saw on an NBC Radio live broadcast.

Six decades later, in 2009, Don Mozley and Bill McGee crossed paths at a Broadcast Legends luncheon in the San Francisco Bay Area. Don was by then a renowned CBS broadcast journalist having spent 62 years with CBS Radio and KCBS/74 in San Francisco. Bill was an award-winning broadcast marketing consultant and had worked for NBC Radio in New York City in 1960. The two men had a lot to talk about, including their participation at Operation Crossroads in July 1946.

At the time, Bill and his co-author/wife Sandra were producing the audio format of Bill’s sight loss memoir, Learning To Cope With Sight Loss: Six Weeks at a V.A. Blind Rehabilitation Center. When Bill put out the call for fellow Legends to be the voices on the recording, the response was immediate, including Don Mozley (Narrator),TV producer Ed Dudkowski (Bill’s voice) and ABC’s Emmy-winning news anchor Cheryl Jennings (the women’s voices). 

L to R: Don Mozley, Sandra McGee, and Bill McGee recording at Command Productions, Sausalito, CA, December 2009. (McGee Collection)

–Recording courtesy of the Hoover Institution Library & Archives