Late in the 1960s, the people of Victorville brought pickaxes and shovels to dig a capacious shelter deep in an abandoned mine shaft. Those people were the mister and missus, their three young children, their three married children and grandkids (if they could get there before the hatch was sealed), four servants, and a collie, a Pekingese and a miniature bulldog. It was fitted out with radio, phone, TV, and Geiger counter, and capacious enough for 15 people to spend 30 days. In September 1961, up in Benedict Canyon, a family man built a “subterranean castle” beside the swimming pool. In Redondo Beach in 1951, a contractor got permits to build two shelters: one at his own home, with room enough for six, and another for a house he rented out.Ī 1964 Covina estate, where some descendants of the founder of the Singer sewing machine company liked to summer, gloried in a koi pond, an aviary and a 10-bed bomb shelter.
The renowned architect Wallace Neff built a bubble-shaped underground shelter for his renowned “Bubble House” in Pasadena, where one post-Cold War owner would retreat for primal-scream therapy and guitar jam sessions. Jones, a stalwart believer in civil defense programs, was completely sincere when he said, “If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody’s going to make it.” Micciche, L.A.’s civil defense director, “is the only means of survival in the event of nuclear attack.” As late as 1982, President Reagan’s deputy undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, Thomas K. “The home fallout shelter,” opined Joseph J. From the end of sizzling World War II through the Cuban Missile Crisis and until almost the defrosting of the Cold War, federal and local governments, along with any number of doomsday entrepreneurs, promoted the bomb/fallout shelters as something no family should be without. As a Los Angeles musician of note once noted, “no one here gets out alive,” or at least unscathed.Īnyhoo, matters seemed simultaneously scarier and more chipper in the ’50s and ’60s when it came to nuclear survivability-think. Today, as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists sets the hands of its doomsday clock to an ominous 100 seconds to a nuclear midnight, maybe those hidey-holes are starting to look pretty good, although truth to tell, they were probably a bit more performative Cold War theatrics than actual protection.
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