abandoned fallout shelters fall out shelter sign

In all likelihood, the 1,690 people huddled in Memorial Hall would’ve had to stay there for two weeks, waiting for the radiation to weaken outside and relying inside on crackers, carbohydrate supplements and stores of water put there by the government sometime in 1962, the year President Kennedy’s National Fallout Shelter Program kicked into gear.

“It was the culture in which we grew up.” “It was part of the culture in which we lived,” said Hune, who now, at age 63, does commercial sales for the local Batteries Plus store. The reality is, the frost of the Cold War nipped at everybody, everywhere - even locally. “That sign,” Hune said, “is there to save my ass.” It’s a time that defined several generations and now seems completely strange, even kitschy, to others.Īnd in regards to those fallout shelter signs, one generation’s ironic bedroom decoration was another generation’s last line of defense. “As part of the training,” recalled Ned Hune, a former volunteer for Clark County’s defunct Office of Civil Defense, “we had to sit down and plot fallout patterns based on what we thought was the kilotonnage for the bombs dropped on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and the Springfield airport.” If they made it to Memorial Hall - or Crowell-Collier or the downtown Post Office or any other tank-thick public building with a yellow and black fallout shelter sign out front - it was a good thing.īut they still were at risk of hair loss, leukemia, sterility and even death because of fallout, those radioactive particles of dirt swept up in a mushroom cloud, then carried hundreds of miles on the wind and sprinkled across everything. In the early 1960s, Memorial Hall was designated by the federal government to play host to a crowd it never hoped to entertain - 1,690 scared friends and neighbors, moms and dads, brothers and sisters, all hoping to live through a massive strategic nuclear attack on the U.S. It’s the only real radiation the decrepit downtown landmark has been subjected to - but it was prepared for worse. The metal sign on the front of Memorial Hall has been baked and bleached by more than 45 years of exposure to the sun. and Soviet Union narrowly avoid nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Abandoned fallout shelters fall out shelter sign