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  1. I’m at least a decade too young to have participated in the hide-under-your-desk drills at school, but I did know people who had bomb shelters. They weren’t all that common, but they weren’t weird, either.

    I wonder what they’re using them for now, root cellars? Of course, they’d be perfect protection for the zombie apocalypse, too.

  2. I was at a very impressionable age in the 60’s and remember being afraid of any airplane flying over as I was walking home from grade school, due to various snips on TV about the “iron curtain” and fallout, etc. Then a tornado hit our town in Arkansas and everyone was building tornado shelters.

  3. My brother built a bomb shelter when he built his first home up in the ‘Meadows’ of Altadena. I often wonder if it is still there and what the present owners use it for. Storage? It was like climbing down into a sewer. As a kid I was terrified. But he had it stocked for whatever might happen.

  4. In 1950, I was very concerned about how cold it was going to get in the Cold War. I had seen movies and knew war was about hurting people. I heard my relatives in Memphis talking, concerned. I was reassured dozens of times. Finally, no one listened. Or responded. My mother did reassure me, endlessly. Her answer never satisfied me, so I gave u. I was only four-years-old.

    In 1953, we moved to Jackson, MS.I rode the school bus and saw the bomb shelters built along the country route. Some of my friends parents were having shelters built for the inevitable bomb. When I begged my father to build one, begged for months, he finally laughed and said, “Hell, if a bomb hits,a shelter won’t save us.” I concluded after months of begging that my father just did not love us.

    Now, when I hear “Cold War,” “bomb shelter,” “fallout” I have clear memories of a visceral fear.

    In the South those are now tornado shelters.

    I tried to post once and did something wrong, I think. If there are two comments from me, I did not mean to post twice. Just delete the first one.

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