Back during the Cold War, when it did not seem at all far-fetched that a Soviet nuclear bomb might ruin your day, Glenn Easton’s mother-in-law looked into building a fallout shelter in her backyard.
I can safely report that Glenn’s mother-in-law was not killed by an atomic bomb.
Nor was Phyllis Naylor of Gaithersburg, Md. After buying a house in Montgomery County in 1967, she and her husband fretted over whether to build a shelter. Newspapers at the time suggested that if bombs were coming, people should head to the Paw Paw Tunnel in western Maryland, a 3,117-foot hole that carries the C&O Canal through a mountain.
It was estimated that the dark, clammy tube could accommodate 1,404 survivors.
“If they don’t catch pneumonia, they might stay alive until the danger is over,” Col. Christian Hanburger, director of Maryland’s fallout shelter program, told a Washington Post reporter.
Wrote Phyllis: “We actually took a day trip there to look it over. All it had to offer refugees was a five-foot-wide sidewalk to lie down on beside the water, packed, I supposed, like sardines.”
A friend of Phyllis did wind up building a shelter, but only because her neighbor did.
“She reasoned that if the sirens sounded and she had no bomb shelter of her own, she would walk her child next door and ask them to take her daughter in,” Phyllis wrote. “If they refused, she would actually make the request at gunpoint, and since she could not imagine doing that, she decided to build her own.
“I tried to picture a family at gunpoint reluctantly squeezing in an extra person to consume their food and water. After a few months of slow starvation, I think I know whom they would have for dinner.”
That’s dark, Phyllis.
In 1962, when Bill Carroll was a student at Providence College, he worked a summer job in Rhode Island hauling and setting up portable forms into which concrete was poured for building foundations.
“We got a job that required excavation as well as setting up forms for a bomb shelter in the yard of a Providence residence,” wrote Bill, who lives in D.C.
As Bill jackhammered away some rock to clear the area for the concrete, he watched a neighbor saunter up to the homeowner.
Next-door neighbor: “How much to build a bomb shelter?”
Homeowner: “Five thousand dollars.”
Next-door neighbor: “How much to build a tunnel from my basement to your bomb shelter?”
Julien Hofberg grew up in Silver Spring, Md. “We didn’t have a bomb shelter,” he wrote, “but we did have a portion of the basement sort of set aside for emergencies, with stored cans and some other items.”
There didn’t seem much chance of being able to actually use those items in the case of a nuclear attack — at least, according to some things he had heard at school.
“The most important [was] that living in the Silver Spring area, if a bomb landed on the Capitol building, we were all instantly dead, and that the accuracy of missiles wasn’t very good, so hitting the Capitol, Washington Monument or White House was about as likely as hitting our school,” Julien wrote.
Still, his parents kept a Government Printing Office pamphlet from 1950 entitled “Survival Under Atomic Attack.” Julien recently came across it.
The 32-page pamphlet is written in that distinctive mid-century USA amalgam of cheery optimism and brutal candor. True, should you “happen to be one of the unlucky people right under the bomb, there is practically no hope of living through it,” but almost 70 percent of people a mile from the bomb in Nagasaki “lived to tell their experiences.”
The center page was designed to be removed and memorized. Its “Six Survival Secrets for Atomic Attacks” included “Try to get shielded,” “Drop flat on ground or floor,” “Bury your face in your arms,” “Don’t rush outside right after a bombing,” “Don’t take chances with food or water in open containers” and “Don’t start rumors.” (“In the confusion that follows a bombing, a single rumor might touch off a panic that could cost your life.”)
There’s actually not much in the booklet about building a fallout shelter. Shelter mania was still a decade away. It did suggest seeking safety in a basement. If you were caught upstairs or in the open during the blast, you’d probably be pierced by radioactive rays, which would cause vomiting and, two weeks later, hair loss.
“But in spite of it all,” the pamphlet offered reassuringly, “you would still stand better than an even chance of making a complete recovery, including having your hair grow again.”
And then you could help rebuild our shattered nation.
Twitter: @johnkelly
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