“We got under our desks and covered our heads – like that could stop the radiation,” I overheard the woman say to the two other women with her. They were standing in front of an auction table cramped with tarnished silverware pieces, but her thoughts were sparked by a bright yellow sign just behind them.
The sign had the same yellow and black colors, but it cautioned against hazardous radioactive materials. I think she was confusing it with the universal sign for fallout shelters. A week or ago, I had seen one of those original Fallout Shelter signs with the three inverted triangles at another auction house. Once, they were as commonplace as traffic lights
Her two companions looked too young to remember the “duck and cover” drills that the woman recalled as a child – how she and her classmates had ducked under their school desks and covered their heads in event of a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. Back then, she likely didn’t question the futility of the procedure, not knowing that if it happened close by, no one would survive the blast, and if it happened within two miles, the radioactive fallout would kill them then or later.
I don’t recall doing any of those drills in my southern elementary school, but I’m assuming that we must have. I have seen the black and white newsreels and photos showing little white girls and boys following the drills.
Some of those Fallout Shelter signs are still out there, even if the shelters are no longer in play (well, I assume they’re not). The Cold War is over and the threat of nuclear destruction by the Soviets went with it. But we are still not safe. Now, we are besieged by terrorists of another sort – some are countries, others are cells – that have ready access to not only nuclear weapons but other means of destruction. Then, the country had one enemy it knew; now, there are many more.
After World War II, the United States was fresh from its nuclear bombings of the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima when it learned that it was not the only country with bombs of annihilation. The Soviet Union detonated its own in 1949, and soon the term “fallout shelter” inched its way into conversations as the arms race intensified. By the time John F. Kennedy became president, relations between the two countries were tense, fueled in the 1960s by the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Kennedy urged Congress to allocate money to build fallout shelters and told Americans to construct their own. The aim was to build a shelter – preferably out of concrete – to protect against the gamma rays emitted from nuclear fallout, and supply it with enough food and water for two weeks.
The government designated shelter locations, private citizens built shelters, and the signs were affixed to schools and other government buildings. Children of the 1950s learned to duck and cover from a turtle named Bert. On Sept. 29, 1961, the popular “Twilight Zone” showed an episode of a family besieged by neighbors after shutting themselves up in their shelter. There’s a fascinating interview with creator Rod Serling about the episode along with why he and his wife decided not to build a shelter. He said he was more afraid of what life would be like after a nuclear attack.
The sign itself was introduced in 1961. It was intended to be simple – and boldly colored – for practically anyone to read and recognize, including children and non-English speaking people, according to a draft fact sheet for the sign.
Apparently it worked. Even if the women at auction mistook another one for it.
What do you remember about those “duck and cover” drills?
