Boomers' Wisdom Blog

A friend reminded me about the bomb shelter craze in the 1950s.  I had forgotten about the fear that was instilled in grade school children that at any moment Russia was going to drop bombs on all the major cities in America.  So, about once a month we heard the fire alarm go off in our school so we could practice getting under our desks in a crouched position.  It is laughable now to think that our little wooden desks with tubular metal legs would protect us from anything let alone a nuclear blast and radioactive fallout.  But, since our school was about a mile from a factory that had been converted from making tractors to bomb parts during WWII, it was assumed we were probably still on the primary target list.  Our school administrators were determined to do what they could to protect us.  So we dutifully dove and assumed the tuck position but turned our heads to giggle at each other that for a few moments we had escaped our lessons.

The back yard bomb shelter was a big topic of conversation all the years we were growing up.  You could send away for plans on how to build one for your own family.  I remember programs on television that showed inside various shelters.  They all had bunk beds and basic supplies stacked to the ceiling.  It looked like a great place to play on a rainy day to me.

Our own back yard had a hill in one corner that rose to the house next door.  I begged my mom and dad to consider digging a doorway into the side of that hill and building us a shelter.  My dad had drawn the plans for and helped to build the house we were living in after all.  It would be no trick for him to do it in my opinion.  When they repeatedly refused I determined that they did not value us enough to save us from certain death.  It did not occur to me until years later that we did not have a single friend or neighbor with a bomb shelter.  The family budgets in our neighborhood would never allow such an expense.  Our walkout basement had a cement block storage area that held coal for the furnace.  That would have to do for our protection.

My friend Chris remembers:

I grew up in a small town in central Illinois.  We had a basement.  My parents and two other families (who didn’t have a basement) helped to build shelving in one corner.  Each family was assigned a set of shelves.   We all stocked canned goods, blankets, water, medicine and bandages.  They brought CASES of canned foods and other supplies.  We spent a lot of hours in that basement during tornados, but we never did break into the food.  The food on those shelves was reserved for use during nuclear warfare.  Our basement was our refuge instead of building a bunker in the backyard.  My biggest fear as a child was - who had the can opener?

In the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s the fear was always that some explosive device would shoot in from outside our borders and anonymously destroy lives and property.  Decades later we now have information flying around the globe that gives us news within seconds about happenings thousands of miles away.  Unfortunately, this amazing creation of free flowing information has not helped to make this the more peaceful and tolerant world we dreamed of in the 60s.

We raised our hands in peace, we demonstrated for peace, and some of our generation joined the government to try and work toward peace.  Nothing has given us the lasting world peace we hoped for.  My continuing wish is that some future generation can find a way to finally make that happen.

By Paula Scanland