Build your own fallout shelter in Cleveland? Better dead than red.
If you are of a certain age, you’ll remember those yellow and black fallout shelter signs. Three yellow triangles inside a black circle on the sign marked public places you could head to in case of an atomic bomb blast. Yes, even decades after the Cold War, there are older public buildings where they hang.
Some homeowners of the 1950s and 1960s built their own fallout shelters as a way to survive to perceived imminent dreaded communist radioactive bomb attacks.
Our archives listed two fallout shelter clips, both from 1961. Workers are constructing a shelter using cement blocks. The card lists this as a demonstration shelter in a store. The second part of the clip is a family shelter demonstration.
The demonstration shelter is listed as a Beachwood home. We have a family on hand to show us what life in your own basement fallout shelter would be like. Very sixties furniture, provisions, food and water and a bible bring all the comforts of home to your end-of-the-world experience.
Looking back, it seems silly to think we thought we could survive nuclear Armageddon with a few cement blocks. Note there is wood on the ceiling of the basement, not a great protection from a firestorm.
But it is the summer of 1961 and the Cold War was raging. We were a year away from Russian nuclear missiles being discovered in Cuba, a discovery which would bring the Soviets and the United States to the brink of nuclear war.
