Health & Fitness
Blog: You Have WHAT in Your Backyard?
To some, the Soviet Union is a distant memory—but back in the 1950s, it was an existential threat. Your neighbor's back yard may show that history is never too far away.
One afternoon while taking a “virtual” walk through my old neighborhood, using the online Internet site googlemaps, I noticed something in a backyard that I had all but forgotten about.
It was a small cinderblock building, probably built during the late 1950s, when the thought of nuclear attack was on the minds of many Americans.
It was a bomb shelter.
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According to an article in the Roseville Press Tribune, September is National Preparedness month. Since the 9/11 attack, disaster preparedness has been the focus of many communities throughout the United States, just as it was 60 years ago.
Makeshift bomb shelters became commonplace in many American backyards after the 1949 announcement that the Soviet Union was testing atomic bombs.
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School children learned about it by watching a 10-minute civil defense film starring Bert the Turtle.
I remember being taught that at the first sound of an air raid siren, we were to duck under our desks and cover the back of our necks with our arms. We were usually in the classroom during these drills, and it was fun to take a break from the monotony of our studies and scurry for cover.
In the meantime, the teacher turned off the lights and pulled the heavy classroom drapes closed to protect us from the potential of flying shards of glass.
While walking home for lunch one day, I heard the air raid siren go off and I froze in my tracks. Not knowing what to do, I quickly searched for shelter. There was a car parked in a driveway—should I crawl under it? I saw a man mowing his lawn, and an elderly woman walking her dog, and wondered why they weren’t afraid. Only then did I realize that it was just the local fire station blowing the noon whistle.
The next time you want to scope out your hometown without leaving the comfort of your couch, try the Internet. Enjoy a bird’s eye view of your old stomping grounds. And, if you look real close, in the older parts of town, you may see a small cinderblock building in one of those back yards, that looks like a shed, but is really a piece of history -- a leftover remnant of the Cold War.