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During the Cold War, Mother's Day was the one day of the year when a launched nuclear missile could have gone out of control. All commercial telephone satellites were overloaded with transatlantic Mother's Day calls, and the US military often used these satellites as back-up guidance systems for their ICBM missiles.
This scary tidbit of information came from a man who designed missile guidance systems for a company in San Diego California. He was my mother's live-in boyfriend when I visited her at home in 1983. He laughed when he told me this amazing story, but assured me it was true, and he asked me not say anything about it as it might be a national security issue. 27 years later, I feel confident that such a story is ancient history.
Back then, we had not yet entered the digital age and a computer that could do what a cell phone does today was the size of a small car and cost millions of dollars. Military communications satellites were already in space in 1960 with the Courier and Advent systems. But the height of the Cold War in the late 60's and early 70's was also the infancy of telecommunications satellites.
Commercial telephone satellites came a few years later. Telstar I & II, launched in 1962-3 were the first. But Telstar was not a geostationary satellite and had only 25 min of talk time on each Atlantic orbit. Geostationary satellites were not common until the late 70's and quickly became overused by phone companies with transatlantic calls. In 1964 congressional hearings resulted in a government policy to establish and maintain separate military satellite communication systems to satisfy unique and vital national-security needs that commercial systems could not satisfy. But the government was still able to use commercial satellites if those satellites provided links of the required type and quality in a timely manner at reasonable cost.
12 years later, in 1976, the need for military satellite time had grown so much Congress directed The Department of Defense to increase its use of leased commercial satellite services, and specifically applied this direction to the tactical satellite system. Everything seemed to work rather well, except on Mother's Day!
Mother's Day is an annual holiday that recognizes mothers, motherhood and maternal bonds in general. Mother's Day was thought up by Anna Marie Jarvis, following the death of her mother Ann Jarvis on May 9, 1905, The holiday was declared officially by the state of West Virginia in 1910, and the rest of American states followed quickly. On May 8, 1914, the U.S. Congress passed a law designating the second Sunday in May as Mother's Day.
On May 9, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation, declaring the first national Mother's Day as a day for American citizens to show the flag in honor of those mothers whose sons had died in war. In 1934, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt approved a stamp commemorating the holiday. Today, more than 70% of the world's population has a living mother, and 353,015 babies are born every day. So, Mother's Day will once again be the busiest Sunday of the year for telephone use.
