Fallout

I submit to you on this fine day — and every day above ground is a fine day — that a bit of perspective is in order as we continue to deal with the cleanup in the surreal aisle. Whenever I hear one of the network talking heads talking about how the current situation is something that is “unprecedented in our lifetimes” my immediate response is, “Well, maybe in yours, Junior. You apparently never had a fallout shelter in your house.”

A little background might be appropriate. The Soviet Union and the United States in 1961 were engaged in what was known as “The Cold War.” It threatened to heat up when the possibility of atomic warfare between the two nations was thrown into the mix. People were scared. There was a headline in one of the local newspapers that read “30 Minutes: Moscow to Columbus.” We were saying the Prayer for Peace in church every day. The Catholic school I attended was rehearsing what students would do if the air raid sirens sounded while we were in class, which was to either put our heads down on our desks or to huddle under them. What they didn’t tell us was that we were figuratively tucking our heads between our legs and kissing our posteriors goodbye. More on that in a minute.

Somewhere along the way, it was suggested — nay, encouraged — for American families to either designate an area in their homes (preferably the basement, if you had one) as or to outright construct something called a “fallout shelter.” 

A fallout shelter wasn’t a man cave. It was supposed to protect the folks huddled inside it from radioactive debris in the event that an atomic bomb or missile was launched at (fill in the name of your city) and hit its target. The term “fallout shelter” really became chiseled into the national consciousness when President John Kennedy suggested in a letter published in Life Magazine that the state of world affairs was such that the utilization of fallout shelters was advisable.  

The collective shirtsleeves of the nation were rolled up. Areas of government buildings were adapted to that purpose but it wasn’t as if they could hold a lot of people. No one wanted to be caught napping when the sirens went off and thus be the one standing outside when the doors got locked after the shelter got filled to capacity.

The alternative which people went for was making their own. Most folks, like the Hartlaub family, dedicated a portion of their basement to the task.  It wouldn’t have withstood a stick of dynamite, let alone a 50 megaton indirect hit, or anything in between, but that’s what we had. My dad solemnly stated over dinner one night that our dog and cat would have to remain above ground while we were downstairs. The rest of the family replied that we would be upstairs with the pets if that were the case. As with the United States and the Soviet Union, neither side’s resolve on the issue was put to the test. 

One could also buy plans to construct fallout shelters, and some construction companies made a killing by building them.  I don’t know anyone who did that, but people did. Apparently there are still some that can be found as outbuildings in older neighborhoods, the same way that you can occasionally find Fotomat kiosks done over as drive-up keymaking services and the like in shopping center out lots

Whichever course one took, their fallout shelter needed to be stocked with food and supplies. I don’t recall lines at the supermarket, shortages,  or anything like what we are seeing now — people were, generally, a little more polite and genteel than they are now — but it seemed for quite a while as if everyone had a supply of groceries stashed in a special room in the house that they called the fallout shelter. 

Photo courtesy Smithsonian

The basic awful truth was that it was a way to keep folks busy and distracted. Busy hands are happy hands. If the big one had dropped we would almost all have been toast. Burnt toast. No one talked about what the aftermath would have been like, either. Time passed, however. People continued to go to work and school and stopped cringing every time a plane flew overhead. The repurposed room in the house got repurposed to its original purpose. Things got back to normal after a year or so. Then the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred. That’s another story, for another time. 

Fallout shelters are more or less forgotten now. The term lives on in popular culture here and there. As recently as 2015 a semi-light-hearted video game named Fallout Shelter was released for PlayStation. It wasn’t a laughing matter in 1961. There was nowhere to run. Putting on a mask or maintaining social distance wasn’t going to change things. We were quietly terrified as we went about our business. 

My favorite story of the era was and is “Inside the Fall Out Shelter!” It was a comic book tale that was published in Marvel Comics’Tales of Suspense #30. It was written by Stan Lee and drawn by Steve Ditko, the gentlemen who created a little known, all-but-forgotten character named Spider-Man. “Inside the Fall Out Shelter!” was one of those five-page understated masterpieces that populated the Marvel monster comic titles in the late 1950s and early 1960s. 

Copyright Marvel Worldwide Inc.

The plot of the story was simple enough. A guy named Mr. Clagg constructed a home fallout shelter for one, that being himself. He installed a timelock on the door that would not open for a month from either the outside or the inside. Clagg also bought enough groceries to last him for the duration in a manner which we would now call “hoarding” and announced every couple of panels that he wasn’t sharing with anyone. He actually seemed eager to have something happen so that he could test drive the shelter and at the end of a month be one of the few (if any) survivors.

In due course — page three or so — the NORAD emergency alert sounded. Mr. Clagg rushed into his shelter and locked the door behind him. He almost gleefully listened to the people outside pounding on the door and laughed at them for not planning ahead as he had. Clagg decided that he would open a can of — beans? soup?— to celebrate his foresightedness. His celebration turned into hysteria, however, when he realized that he had forgotten to pack a can opener (ring pull tops had not been invented at the time). Oh, The Humanity! The End. Well, almost the end. The point of view shifted to outside of the cad’s shelter, where the folks who were pounding on the door walk away, unable to tell Clagg that the siren was only a test. That’s The End. 

Copyright Marvel Worldwide Inc.

I am accordingly a little blase about the current situation. I’ve been through worse. So, too, the majority of the world’s population, who deal with hunger, disease, and lack of shelter and water on a day-to-day basis. How would you like to be a cane cutter in Haiti who is helplessly watching their child suffer from dengue fever? I wouldn’t. I have food, internet, a computer, a television, a radio, a solid home, a bed to sleep in, and chairs to sit on. I also get to watch my cat watch a bird resolutely taking twigs one at a time to a nest it is building in a tree in my backyard, which is much more entertaining and informative than Tiger King, if you think about it.

Coronavirus? Isolation? Travel restrictions? I think I’ll have a Bud Lite. Or a peach soda. And keep writing.

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About Joe Hartlaub

Joe Hartlaub is an attorney, author, actor and book and music reviewer. Joe is a Fox News contributor on book publishing industry and publishing law and has participated on several panels dealing with book, film, and music business law. He lives with his family in Westerville, Ohio.

27 thoughts on “Fallout

  1. I remember fallout shelters, drop drills (and, because we were in California), earthquake drills.
    The staying home doesn’t bother me as much as the people who think it’s a stupid rule and can’t wait to get back out and infect everyone.

    • Terry, we here in the midwest had tornado drills. Still do, actually. Thanks for the reminder and the information. I never knew that there was such a thing as earthquake drills. Makes sense.

  2. “… cleanup in the surreal aisle.” – Indeed…

    My aunt and uncle built one of those things in their backyard in Cleveland – Tennessee – perhaps because of its approximate proximity to Oak Ridge, NOT Chattanooga or Atlanta (at that time). When they built a new house across town, they built a fall-out-ish guest room their basement – no windows, thick walls – but claimed it was the “tornado room” by the mid-70’s…

    The big safety-net hospital that employs me was built in the mid-50’s, and there are still a few of those fallout shelter signs in some parts of the basement – I’ve always thought if the big one came, that building would be the only standing in downtown ATL…

    And lastly, that Marvel “Inside the Fallout Shelter” reminds me of the Twilight Zone story with Burgess Meredith, called “Time Enough.” He’s a reader with comically thick glasses, who retreats to the basement of big downtown library to read uninterrupted, but not because of the big one, which happens while he’s ensconced below ground. (SPOILER ALERT) He comes out to find total destruction, with himself seemingly the only survivor, rejoicing that now he can read all he wants… until he bends over, his glasses fall from his face, and crack to uselessness on the steps of the library…

    Any way, I’ve blathered on long enough – as I am wont to do (self-isolation hasn’t helped any), and I, too, have a cat studying bird nest construction techniques and a mixed-breed hound studying the cat…

    Thanks for this walk down the “…surreal aisle…”

    • Sorry…. but I forgot all the Y2K preppers, too… rooms with floor-to-ceiling/wall-to-wall shelving for 50 pound bags of grits and cereal… generators for the deep freezes full of venison and chicken fingers…

      Funny, but I don’t recall seeing any toilet paper caches either…

      I LOVED that Twilight Zone episode…that would be me! Thanks for the reminder.

      • George, as you know Oak Ridge would have been a prime potential target because of all of the research done there. My usual comeback, when caught out of being ignorant on something, is “Well, if I were an atomic scientist, I’d be working at Oak Ridge!” These days, the remark gets a blank look.
        You’re right about the toilet paper being off of Y2K list. Thanks for the reminder.

  3. The little grade school I went to had no hallways. The classrooms had once been apartments, so when you went out to recess, you opened the door and you were out on chat.

    One day, the announcement was made via the media that we would be having duck and cover drills all day. They didn’t say which siren you had to obey, so our teacher decided we should obey all of them. Eight or ten times that day, we had to stop our arithmetic or reading or language (English, not any other), and duck under our desks and cover. Well, actually, we didn’t have desks. We had tables. Three students to a table that was slotted for your books and stuff.

    I had to interrupt the cold war because I had to go to the restroom. I felt obligated because they had just built a new one. So I did.

    When I returned to the steps of our room, I decided to see if I could sound like an air raid siren. I put my mouth close to the door and did a wooooOOOOOOOOoooooooo. Sure enough. I heard people inside scrambling under the tables as Miss Woods called out, “Everyone down.”

    I walked into the room. Everyone including Miss Woods was hiding from the bombers that Georgy Malenkov might one day send over to atomic-bomb our little school. I dropped to the floor because . . . I don’t know why.

    I never, until now, told anyone what I did.

    • Great story, Jim! Your secret is safe at TKZ! Thanks for sharing. I have the feeling that we have in common the problem that many don’t appreciate some of more unusual talents…

  4. A good post, Joe. I didn’t pay much attention to the possibility of a big bomb. I was busy working and dating as I was twenty years old. My dad was a firefighter and probably knew we couldn’t survive the fallout of a bomb that size so never talked about it. I wasn’t reading the papers much. Dad has been born in 1897 and survived diphtheria as a child thanks to a new vaccine. He was in the U.S. Navy during WWI and woke up one morning to find the man in the hammock next to his had died during the night. After the Spanish Flu and WWI, he survived the Depression and lived through WWII and the Korean War. He might have been worried but never talked about it as he probably didn’t want to scare my mother and me. —- Suzanne

  5. Good morning, Joe. Great post.

    Thanks for the history lesson on fallout shelters. I was in school during those years, and don’t remember any of my friends’ families creating any such spaces, unless they kept it secret. I do remember that my family built a new house in the early 1960’s. One room in the basement seemed to have been built with extra heavy construction. My dad just said it was the well room. It wasn’t stocked with food, but that room was right around the corner and one could have grabbed a large supply on the run to the “well room.” Funny that no one in the family, including my sister (who argued about everything), said nothing.

    I look forward to all the hysteria being over, but meantime I’m enjoying the extra time to write.

    Stay safe and healthy!

    • Good morning, Steve, and thank you, not only for your comments but also for taking time to be here after what I am sure have been a busy several weeks for you in your practice.

      I learn something from each and all of these comments every two weeks and today from yours I learned that you and I apparently have the same sister! How about that! My brother and I kept asking our parents 1) where ours came from and 2) why couldn’t they take her back! Now I know.

      Please be well and safe, Steve, and don’t neglect sleep. Thanks.

  6. Ahh…another walk into the memory flashdrive…

    (And, I’m heartily sick of the phrase, “unprecedented in our times”. If you say it twice, it’s not unprecedented anymore…)

    I’m with ya 100%, Joe. I, too, remember the dim past when my Dad stated to my mother, “I’m building a bomb shelter. In the basement.” Mom had a way of looking at Dad that took the wind right out of his tarp. It never got done. But, we had plenty of conversations around the dinner table about what would be essential for the three of us kids to take to the basement in a crisis.

    We all had our own ideas. My older brother wanted the Risk game. (He always won-probably why he chose that.) My thought was to take my entire library-which was considerable for an eight or nine year old. I was promptly vetoed. So, I had to resort to plotting how to accomplish it with no one knowing. Kept me busy for about a week. My little sister wanted her dolls, and my little bro wasn’t born yet. And isn’t it interesting that T.P. was never mentioned?

    I kind of think that governments are experts at notching up the hysteria on a crisis they probably created themselves. Then they enlist the help of their bedfellows, the media, and the circus begins. Send in the clowns.

    The rest of us out here in Real Life Land are just getting on with things, waiting for the next crisis to be thrust upon us. (Too bad the mister and I don’t have a basement now.) 🙂

    • Thanks, Deb, and I’m with YOU 100% on bringing your library with you. Your folks would have thanked you eventually, I am sure.

      Re: no basement…quick story which I hope I haven’t told. A good friend of mine does estate appraisals. He goes out to the house of a deceased and meets the attorney who is handling things. There is supposed to be a basement, and there are window wells, but there isn’t a staircase inside or out. They look around and finally my friend, for the third time, opens a cupboard full of canned fruits, vegetables and the like. He notices that the floor, which he can barely see for all of the contents, is plywood. My friend and the attorney look at each other and begin removing cans. When that job is done, they lift up the plywood and find the basement stairs. The basement was full of stuff right up to the top of the stairs, said stuff holding the floor of the makeshift cupboard in place. Hoarders, anyone?

      • Ooohhh…

        Now it’s confession time. Since this is TKZ and all confessions are kept secret, here goes:

        We built our house in 2001. Our GC was a gem. He did exactly what we wanted, how we wanted it.

        We have two *Ahem* areas in our home. We call them Area 51 and 52.

        And that’s all I’ve got to say about that…

  7. Joe, thanks for the reminder that one of the advantages of aging (ahem) is equanimity. If we live long enough, fewer and fewer events are “unprecedented.”

    Pre-dating the Cold War, a relative worked on the Manhattan Project. He told me that b/c no one had ever detonated an atomic bomb before, scientists and engineers had real concerns that it could set the atmosphere on fire and destroy the entire planet. The risk was unprecedented and the responsibility was daunting.

    Hiroshima and Nagasaki were undeniably catastrophic but the planet survived.

    Another relative was a World War II veteran who’d seen the A-bombs’ destruction. In the 1950s, he and a coworker (also a vet) lived next door to one another. Both were scientists at the same top-secret defense facility in southern California. B/c of their high-level security clearances, they had far more knowledge than the general public about the likelihood of a Russian attack. And they were plenty worried.

    They designated one car for both families to share as the bug-out vehicle–full gas tank, trunk stocked with food, clothing, camping supplies, etc. In case of attack, the kids were instructed to go to a meeting place at their elementary school where the moms would pick them up in the bug-out car and head for the mountains. The dads would follow when/if they could.

    As a kid, I remember Khrushchev’s shoe tantrum played on our black-and-white TV. He promised: “We will bury you!” He didn’t.

    Also, every Monday at noon, the neighborhood dogs howled when the street-corner air raid sirens went off for testing.

    Despite lots of saber rattling on both sides, nuclear annihilation didn’t occur and the planet survived.

    Fifty years from now, more than likely, our grandchildren will be sharing Covid 19 stories with THEIR grandchildren.

    • Thanks for sharing the memories and the outlook, Debbie. My granddaughter, who is thirteen, will remember not being able to see her friends for several weeks other than over facetime or whatever it is. I have already promised her a party when the all-clear is sounded.

      That is really interesting about the concern of the scientists as they took the first tentative steps into the nuclear era. I must confess…I have similar concerns over particle accelerators. But don’t tell anyone.

  8. You can’t talk fallout shelters and not recall the movie Blast From The Past – Brandon Frazier and Christopher Walken – in which a mother, father and child go into their shelter and stay for 20 or 25 years, only to discover -Spoiler Alert- there was no bomb.

    I wonder if that was a book.

    Friends of mine bought a house on Long Island where some previous owner had dug out under the basement and put in a fallout shelter. It had since been converted into a wine cellar. The weird part is it is really small with just enough room to lay down in a sleeping bag and have a few supplies- more like a place to hide from a tornado than to wait out a nuclear attack.

    • Michelle, thanks for the recommendation of Blast from the Past…I just looked it up and saw that Sissy Spacek is in that as well.

      I think that a LOT of people underestimated what it would take in terms of supplies to get through the aftermath of an atomic attack. Lesson learned.

  9. Yeah, was there, remember that. I was too young to be terrified of the drills, etc., in school and the news, but I’m sure my parents were. If it had come to the destruction of the infostructure, we would have been fine with a hunter dad, a large garden, and vivid memories of the Great Depression. But scary.

    With the lack of real history in schools and the belief that right now is always worse than back then, people have no perspective. As an apocalypse goes, this isn’t much of one in comparison to the yellow fever epidemics which would wipe out much of a town’s population and all of its small kids. The Spanish flu. The plague. Heck, I went to school with kids who had survived polio. I’m not belittlng the deaths, what the first-line responders are facing, and the economic destruction, but historical perspective is desperately needed.

  10. Thanks, Marilynn. You are SO right. New Orleans lost ten percent of its population to Yellow Fever in the early 1800s. Bodies were stacked up around St. Louis Cemetary #1 because they couldn’t bury them quickly enough. As far as polio goes, I was going to discuss that as well but edited it out since my post was too long a it was. Every grade up and back had at least two or three kids who could only walk with braces, and the Chlidrens Hospitals all had polio wards. It was quite a time. Perspective is sadly lacking in the Eternal Present.

  11. Thanks for the post. I remember being taught to hide under my school desk if the bomb came in the daytime. We even practiced doing it. I don’t even know what to think about doing that.
    I also remember the great fiction from that time. Books like Alas, Babylon, by Pat Frank, Phillip Wyle’s Triumph, and early post-apocolyptical novels like Harlan Ellison’s A Boy and his Dog.
    I almost left out one of the best of this lot, Neville Shute’s On the Beach.
    It begins with the last lines of T.S. Elliot’s poem, The Hollow Man:
    This is the way the world ends
    This is the way the world ends
    This is the way the world ends
    Not with a bang but with a whimper.

    Makes you think.

  12. You’re welcome, Brian, and thank you for the great reading list. I regularly re-read A Boy and His Dog, a story that I strongly identified with when it was first published and have continued to do so.

  13. Joe, when I was in college I had a temp, PT job doing some kind of recording work about fallout shelters. I think about it every time I’m in Grand Rapids and drive past the storefront where we worked. I can’t remember the details, but we spent our time recording something–the location of feasible fallout shelters, I think–on what must have been Scantron-type sheets. Somehow this data was [these data were?] meant to end up in an early 1960s computer, but I don’t think we actually were creating punch cards. Maybe there was a machine somewhere that converted the Scantron sheets into punch cards. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

    But we can be thankful,
    And tranquil, and proud.
    For man’s been endowed with a
    Mushroom shaped cloud.

    (Kingston Trio? Chad Mitchell? Limelighters?)

    • Punch cards, Eric…THAT brings back memories, too!
      The song you referenced was by The Kingston Trio! You got it in one. It was “Merry Minuet” and at first I thought it was written by Tom Lehrer (who is still alive) but it wasn’t. Speaking of The Kingston Trio…there’s a new John Stewart collection coming out next month comprised of unreleased demos. Very nicely done…

  14. I lived in St. Louis doing the Cold War, and it was the home of McDonnell-Douglas, the major military contractor. I asked my father for a fall out shelter and he said, “Forget it, kid. We’re living in Hiroshima.” My mother said, “I’d rather be dead than cooped up for months with four kids and only crackers and water for food.” I understood how they felt. After all, they were OLD — 35!

  15. Elaine, I am howling because my parents were impossibly “old” during that era as well. If I had had me as a kid when I was in my 30s I wouldn’t have made it to age 10! Thanks for the reminder. BTW, my mom never said what your mom said but I am sure there were times that she thought it…and not without justification…

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