Growing up in the early sixties I was exposed to the every day threat the Cold War brought to us via the nightly news. As I think about it, it seems that 1962 was a very scary year internationally. It was more that a little scary In Muncie, Indiana because that was the year my parents decided to build a bomb shelter in our house. In the context of the time, I guess it made sense but now it appears laughable.
You see, at school we were used to Air Raid Drills. On the first day of the new school year in 1962 all the kids in the class were giving a block of instructions as to what to do, in the event the Air Raid Siren was sounded. Intermittently, during the year , a loud siren whose speakers were located in the hallway of the old brick school building, would be activated. Just the sound of the siren blast, with no warning, was enough to make your bladder forget all of it’s training. At the inception of the warning we were to drop to our knees and crawl under our old wooden desks covering our heads with our arms; remaining there until the teacher called for an “All Clear”. At that point we were to returned to a seated position and resume our studies. All of this was protect us in the event a bomb was dropped on our school by the Russians.
Even at eleven years old, I had a few questions. Not the least of which was, why would the Russians want to bomb our school? Another was , how is the desk top going to protect me on the top floor of a three story building? When asking my parents for answers I was told , “do what the teachers tell you to do”. That was code in the sixties for, I don’t know the answer either.
Returning to any semblance of learning experience was pretty much out of the question when we had all been crawling around on the floor. That and the fact that we all needed a trip to the bathroom. The teachers did what they could to maintain some sort of decorum but mostly we were just told to read quietly until the bell rang for class dismissal.
Enter into this insanity the recommendation, from some office of the Federal Government, that it was a good idea to build a bomb shelter in our backyard in case the bombers were to fly over at night. Construction of a properly built “Bomb Shelter” ten feet below ground with a ventilator shaft and concrete cover was cost prohibitive for most of the folks on my block. However, most homes had converted from coal to gas heat in the last few years. What we did have were unused coal bins in the basement. They were concrete reinforced and about the right size to house a family of five in the event of a nuclear war. So down to the basement we descended. Cleaning the coal dust out was no small feat. Once cleanliness was pseudo accomplished, survival preparations were next in order.
My Dad built 2 sets of bunk beds on opposing walls and Mom set about equipping the shelves with the summer’s vegetables and fruits that she and Grandma had canned. No survival stone was left unturned. We warehoused water, matches, flashlights, toilet paper (although we had no toilet) and a whole lot of reading material. It seems that if the television station would be bombed we were to wait out the catastrophe catching up on back issues of Field & Stream and Look magazines.
Next came the family practice drills. They were usually on Sunday evening, right after Supper and before the Ed Sullivan show on TV. My father would announce in a very concerned voice that this was an air raid drill. We all gathered up our favorite toys and scampered down the stairs to the coal bin to wait out the drill by the light of a kerosene lamp. Once sufficient time (usually about 15 minutes) for the bombers to fly over, we would gather up our things and head back upstairs to return to normal life in the sixties. This practice was not the exception in our neighborhood, it was very much the normal way of doing things. Eventually, the Cold War threat cooled off and we stopped gathering in the coal bin on Sunday nights. My brother LB1 and I had begun to use the shelter as a secret club house , where no girls were allowed. And few years later when we moved to a new house we found several jars of canned goods waiting patiently on the shelves in the now little used room in the basement.
As I look back into my memory, I can still see my Mother’s smiling face sitting on a bunk bed, in a coal bin, on a Sunday night while trying to organize a board game to pass the time. I feel like these times made us closer as a family because we were forced to rely on each other for entertainment. I do wonder, occasionally, what idiot from the federal government persuaded Americans to huddle underground and in basements all over the US for years in the interest of personal safety. Probably the same guy that convinced us, if we send a few advisors to Vietnam it would all be over in a matter of a few months.
