Greetings ~
I can still remember hiding under my school desk back in the 1950s when the Nuclear Attack alarm sounded over the PA system at Harris Grade School in Akron, Ohio. As if that thin hunk of plywood would protect me from the falling roof when the Atomic bomb dropped on the city.
During the two decades of the '50s and '60s, everyone was wondering who would nuke the other first. Russia, the U.S.? Maybe even another country. It was a game of Russian Roulette. But, like so many international threats back then, nothing happened.
In those decades the family man was always looking into the newest concept to protect his family and Fallout Shelters came to be. These were little tiny concrete boxes that you buried in your yard and stocked with food, medical supplies, tools, games, water and, don't forget, toilet paper. Tons of toilet paper. Then once the government announced that a bomb was on it's way, we would all run to the back yard and gather down in our underground utopia and wait a couple of weeks for the fallout to settle down. Then we could all come out and live again.
Fathers across the country were getting loans, mortgaging the house, putting off buying that new car to get the money to pay for a bomb shelter for the yard. After all, who would need a new car when we were all covered in fallout dust? And you wouldn't have to pay the loan back when all the banks were gone.
After the threat was over, around the early 1970s, Those shelters stood empty. Still fully stocked with canned goods, bandages and that supply of toilet paper. They grew cobwebs and some filled with water over the next several decades. Some were even re-purposed as fruit cellars or underground storage sheds. But if the bomb would have come, we were sure ready for it. Dad made sure that, in the "new world", we would have survived to re-populate the earth.
This blog is dedicated to our fathers and grandfathers. These guys surely had their families in mind when they dug that big hole in the yard and filled it with cement blocks and bottled water. Hats off to them all.