Fallout Shelters Again?
Well talk about daja vu... Public planners in southwest Wyoming's Sweetwater County — a sagebrush expanse roughly the size of Massachusetts — say the contractor hired for the project has told them it intends to build a 22,000-square-foot underground storage vault to store documents. Whose documents exactly? Apparently, the writings of the late L. Ron Hubbard, the Church of Scientology's founder, and other church records. The sale of fallout shelters (or as some of us called them "Fraidie Holes") and fear of nuclear fallout is not anything new. It reached its paranoiac peak in the 1950s, continued in the schizophrenic ‘60s and eased off in the self-satisfying 70s. I grew up as part of the "duck and cover" generation. Duck-and-cover practice was routine in every American schoolhouse. The bomb had become a familiar, unnerving part of our life. We were watching nuclear war themes such as: Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb, The Last Man On Earth, The Day the World Ended and The Atomic Kid at the movies. Even though we had hula-hoops, lava lamps, go-carts and go-go boots, a doomsday mentality prevailed. Some years later, I remember in 62 as my then husband, who was in the military, had to pack his duffle bags and have them sitting in the hallway ready for deployment at a moments notice. Kennedy's speech about the Cuban Crisis was really unnerving to say the least. At that time, we were living just off an Air Force Base in San Antonio in the town of Schertz, one of those places with a bar, a furniture store, a gas station and 13 people that weren't military. As an angry Nikita Khrushchev dispersed Soviet warships to Cuba, a military showdown with the U. S. seemed imminent. We sure didn't sleep much that night and those memories are as clear as the day Kennedy was shot (another unforgettable day and story).
posted by Ann at
11:13 AM
1 Comments:
I remember all these things. Fallout shelters, the cuban crisis, hula hoops, etc. were all a part of our lives back then. I prefer not to go back to being afraid all the time.
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