Fallout Shelter Article – October 1969

Civil Defense and fallout shelters has been a favorite topic on this blog. Back here, I posted the story of a contractor who built “Lorain’s first atom bomb shelter” in 1951.

By 1961, with the Cold War well underway, fallout shelters were quite popular. I’ve mentioned several times how my own parents were thinking about building one along with some good friends that lived behind us in Loretta Court.

But by the late 1960s, however, fallout shelters seems to be falling out of favor. And the people that built them were beginning to wonder if it was a mistake.

That ‘buyer’s remorse’ is the topic of the article below, which ran in the Journal back on October 5, 1969.

As the article notes, “Many thousands of homeowners did put up shelters (197,000 have been built, in fact), and a lot of the people feel pretty hang-doggish about it now. Trouble is, the things are generally sunk 6 to 15 feet into the back yard or the basement, and they’re mostly made of reinforced concrete, and it’s just not all that easy to get rid of them.”

One person interviewed for the article notes, “When we were building the shelter,” says Dr. Edward Benedict, 73, a retired Newton, Mass., physician, “neighbors dropped by and gaped at the hole in the ground and just grunted. They thought I was a fool, and now I guess I was.”

Courtesy myfirefighternation.com

“”We responded to what we believed in 1961 the government wanted,” says Washington businessman Aaron Goldman, glumly eyeing the $3,500 shelter in his basement. “Now we feel kind of stupid.”

The article also notes, “Fallout shelters turned out to be bad business, even for fallout shelter businessmen. For example, there was James Byrne, a Royal Oak, Mich., plywood wholesaler, who listened to his President and defense secretary, noted a Life magazine cover story which took the shelters seriously, and leaped forward to do his part.

“BYRNE OBTAINED the franchise to distribute shelters built by the Kelsey-Hayes Co. and thereafter bought 52 unassembled units for $525 each. He planned to sell them for $700 to retailers who would then market them to the public for about $1,000.

“But a funny thing happened on the way to the public.

““WE really worked for six months,” says Byrne. “We took our demonstrator model around to shopping centers on weekends. Nothing. We put it on display at two auto-agencies. The auto dealers thought it might attract attention. It didn’t. We advertised it. Nothing.”

In the end, Byrne couldn’t even give them away to friends.

The punchline of the article is that even then, in 1969, the Office of Civil Defense was still pushing a shelter program, asking Congress to provide $2.5 million in tax incentives to homeowners to construct fallout shelters in their new homes.

Vintage Kelsey Hayes Fallout Shelter Ad 
(Courtersy AmericanIkons.com)