99% Invisible - 121- Cold War Kids

Episode Date: July 1, 2014

During the 1961 Berlin Crisis—one of the various moments in the cold war in which we came frighteningly close to engaging in actual war with the Soviets—President John F. Kennedy vowed to identify spaces in “existing structures both public and … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Recognize the possibilities of nuclear war in the middle age, without our citizens knowing what they should do and where they should go. If bombs begin to fall, it would be a failure of responsibility. And that, of course, is President John F. Kennedy speaking on July 25, 1961, during the Berlin crisis. One of the various moments in the Cold War where we came very, very close to engaging in actual war with the Soviets.

Tomorrow, I am requesting of the Congress new funds for the following immediate objectives. To identify and mark space in existing structures, public and private, they could be used for fallout shelters in case of attack. To stock those shelters with food, water, first aid kits, and other minimum essentials for our survival. Basically what Kennedy is saying here is, it's a real possibility that bombs are going to start falling and we need to figure out where you can all go to take shelter if they do.

That's producer Katie Mingle. And after Kennedy made this horrifying speech, as you can imagine, the phones started ringing. Immediately, the Kennedy administration was besieged by people wanting more information on fallout shelters. I'm Kenneth D. Rose. I wrote One Nation Underground, the fallout shelter in American culture. You know, businesses that had previously been making swimming pools now declared themselves to be experts at building shelters.

They were door to door bomb shelter salesmen. Shelter displays at malls and county fairs. But by the time Kennedy made that 1961 speech, there was one place that had already broken ground on a unique shelter. Artesian New Mexico population 11,000 is about 40 miles south of Roswell in the southern part of the state near Texas.

And in 1962, they opened a brand new elementary school, completely underground, equipped with a morgue, decontamination showers, and a stockpile of food and medicine. Because this school, it was built to double as the town's nuclear fallout shelter. This was a pilot program with the idea of protecting school children and also members of the local community in case there was a nuclear attack. During an attack the school was supposedly with shelter its own students and those from other schools or the first 2100 people to show up

and those who arrived late at the school would find their entry blocked by 1800 pounds steel doors And it is 821 and joining us in the studio this morning is Katie Mangle. She's up from Oakland, California and good morning How are you good? Thanks. Thanks for having me. Well, okay, first up, I guess you're good. Wait, what is going on? Alright, let me explain. I went to Artija, and because small towns are amazing, they invited me to come on their local radio station,

KSVP, and put a call out for people who had gone to Abbo Elementary School as kids. Exactly, it was cool. Yeah. Good deal. So if anybody has information or stories you want to share about Abola, a mentor, be it a student there or administrator or maybe you worked on or whatever, give Katie a call once again her phone number is there. So did

people actually call you? Yeah, they did and we'll meet one of them later. But first let's go look at the school. Abola was tucked away in a quiet little neighborhood, not too far away from the center of town. You could easily miss it driving by since it's mostly underground, but there is a sign out front and you have to squint to make it out, but it says. Abo Elementary School and Fallout Shelter, and that's of course the original on there. That's Scott Simmer. My name is Scott Simmer and I'm currently the director of maintenance

for the public schools, for Artigia Public Schools. I met Scott and Thad Fips, the current assistant superintendent of Artigia schools on the roof of ABO. The school is closed now, but kids still went to school there until 1995. The roof of ABO school is a concrete blacktop at ground level with basketball hoops and

three covered stairways that go down underground and into the school. Like if you're in first grade you went down this set of doors. If you're in second and third you will come over here and then fourth and fifth graders would line up at this one. One mother described the scene of kids entering the building as looking like ants lining up to go into their ant hill. Scott and Dad actually both went to school at Abo in the late 70s, early 80s, and they said that even though the signout front says follow-out shelter, and even though their

school was entirely underground, they never really knew what that meant. I never knew growing up that it was a built as a bombshell there. It was just a school to me as a kid, you know. And then once you get older and you, you know, you hear stories and all that used to have a morgue down here. And you know, Habbo Elementary was designed by an architect and civil defense enthusiast named Frank Stanthart. After he built Abbo School, he went on to design an underground shopping mall slash bomb shelter that was never actually built. Over here, this is our shower room. It gets the contaminants off of you before you come into the

rest of the people underground. The decontamination showers at each entrance were easy to miss, as were the blast doors which were swung up against a wall and not used during normal school days. You know, solid steel door. You can close it and it has three or four different latches to latch it so nobody can get in or out and never knew that this door existed till I started working here. and never knew that this door existed till I started working here. And so... We go down a couple flights of stairs into the main hallway of the school. And basically, it just looks like a school.

I mean, it's windowless and kind of drab since it hasn't been used in almost 20 years. But otherwise, it looks a bit like other schools I've been in. This is the kitchen area. Whenever you came to lunch from the classes, you always came through this door. You see back there, they had a big stage back there where we put on our productions for,

I was in a few plays during grade school, so that's where it all happened. The kids at Abo actually got to vote on what the school mascot would be. And appropriately and adorably they chose to be the Abo Gofers. We're underground just like the Gofers are and so right through here is our generator room to keep it up and running for the people that are coming in inhabitants or whatever counts people that are coming here for the fallout.

It also has right over here in the corner its own water well underground. And as you can tell right here, you've got doors, you've got to close that for survival, open this and for survival, and you're shutting ventilation shafts and open ventilation shafts and trying to keep the bad air out of here. Scott and Thad weren't sure which room doubled as the morgue. And I think it's back by the elevator. That's what I learned. There's a little room, but I didn't ever see where it could fit, you know, a tremendous

number of bodies. But this is a typical classroom. Certainly there's not any windows, there's not any sunlight, but we went upstairs two, three times a day for recreation. The teachers reported that they generally liked our school because the students weren't distracted by staring out the windows, and I think the students themselves were generally proud of other school. But once again, this creates a huge debate with many people saying that the needs of schools and the need to shelter people during a nuclear attack were not compatible.

That's Kenneth Rose again, author of One Nation Underground, and he says in fact there was a lot of debate going on at the time about fallout shelters. The subject was virtually inescapable in the early 1960s. Every newspaper was running articles on shelters and the potential for survival. Time magazine published an article called Guns Eye Neighbor in which they interviewed a guy who said, that if any of his neighbors tried to get into his fallout shelter during a nuclear attack, he would kill them. It is fierce. Today you can watch shows like Doomsday Preppers on Cable TV and think about what it would be like to prepare for the apocalypse. But in the 1950s and 60s, it was a brand new idea. Also back then, it wasn't a fringe idea.

I mean, the president of the United States was telling people to build these things, and the whole country was involved in the debate. On one side of the debate, you had people against shelters. Those against shelter said that your people who burled into the ground to say their own skins were no better than moles or gofers. Shelters would militarize America and turn the United States into a garrison state. And after the nuclear war had ended, shelters would sort of be America's pyramids. All that remained of a wasted defunct civilization. And on the other side, people for shelters said,

wait a minute, this is just a precaution, like any other. They compared follow shelters to lifeboats. Here's a sarcastic letter that a proponent of shelters wrote to the Harvard Crimson in 1961. It's been brought to our attention that certain elements among the passengers and crew favor the installation of lifeboats on this ship. Although we share their concern,

we remain unalterably opposed to any consideration other course of action for the following reasons. The letter gets increasingly sarcastic. It demonstrates a lack of faith in our captain. The apparent security which lifeboats offer will make our navigators reckless. These proposals will distract our attention from more important things, i.e. building unseniable ships. You will only be saved for a

worst fate, inevitable death on the open seas, so far from so on. I think in this little letter, you can see some of the issues that are being debated. Like what kind of world will you emerge to if you survive a nuclear war? And whether the shelter system could somehow make our leaders more likely to engage in war. It's a very complicated calculus on this, this whole issue of whether to build a shelter or not to build a shelter. For the town of Artigia, in the early 1960s, the calculations seemed easy enough. They needed a new school anyway, and the Office of Civil Defense agreed to pay the difference between building a regular school and a fallout shelter school.

Artisia was near Walker Air Force Base. It's closed now, but at the time it was the largest strategic air command base of the US Air Force. It was also close to the White Sands missile range. These and other factors made Artisia feel particularly vulnerable to attack. These and other factors made Artisia feel particularly vulnerable to attack. New Mexico has always had nuclear programs going on. That's John O'Williams. Her friend's mom is one of the people that heard me on the radio and got in touch. John went to Abu Elementary in the 1960s when Cold War tensions were still really high. I do remember going through white sand's missile range every once in a while

you see a missile going up and you're thinking wow how do we have 30 minutes to live or what you know it's kind of a creepy feeling. Like that in Scott that gave me the tour of Abo, John I didn't know it first why her school was underground. The teachers never mentioned it and her parents didn't tell her either. They didn't tell us anything and don't ask real questions. We'll lie to you. But you know how most kids have that one friend in elementary school that knows about sex? Well, Johnna had Fidelia Brennan and she knew about nuclear war. Fidelia Brandon, I'll never forget. She's the one who opened my eyes to that kind of, I guess, reality or unreality. She was very intelligent. Of course, they had a fallout shelter in their backyard, so I'm sure they had already gone through the whole survivalist thing

growing up and, you know, knowing the kids and her family, it seems like they were taught things like how you could survive nuclear holocaust. I know I had kind of a freaky feeling about that after that. Like, oh my gosh, we're all gonna die! Oh, there you go! As Janna and I are talking, an alarm starts going off. It's an emergency test alarm that the oil refinery plays every Monday at 6.30pm. Artisia's large oil refinery was another thing that made them feel vulnerable to attack in the 60s. Refineries are often targets during wars, especially the ones that make death fuel like the one in Artisia did. It's almost like a nuclear rain sound, isn't it? That's how you knew that High-Live Lucy was coming on with as a kid.

When Abbo was built, it got a fair amount of media attention. Dan Rather did a story on the CBS evening news in 1962 and more than 60,000 people toward the school in its first few years. The Soviets found out about it and were critical. One Moscow newspaper criticized artisans for indoctrinating pupils to the inevitability of war. But actually, while the rest of the country's students

were doing duck and cover drills, which was probably strange and scary for some kids, Johnna doesn't ever remember having to do one at ABO. He got me and got me. But we never did any nuclear raid tests having to do one at a bow. But we never did any, you know, like nuclear raid tests where we had to drop tech and roll and all that kind of stuff. We were already down there, we were safe. So. Be sure and remember what Bert the Turtle just did, friends,

because every one of us must remember to do the same thing. That's what this film is all about. Duck and cover. This is an official civil defense film produced in the Soviet Union. We're putting down the US for their preoccupation with this whole shelter issue. But in fact, the Soviets built a very elaborate secret shelter underneath Moscow. And of course, our fearless leaders had their own hiding places. The most elaborate one being the bunker hidden below the Green Briar Resort in West Virginia, built the house all 535 members of Congress and their staff, but not their families.

It was decommissioned in 1995 and is now open for tours. Remember the speech that we heard at the beginning of this story, in which Kennedy vowed to allocate millions of dollars to find places where Americans could take shelter from nuclear bombs? Well, it took place in July of 1961. To identify and march face the existing structure of the Canfrey. It could be used to fall out shelters in case of attack. In the fall of 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy asked for a status report and found that his shelter program was far behind schedule.

The government hadn't been able to find all that many places where people could take shelter, and the ones they had found weren't fully stocked with supplies. By 1962, the private shelter business was also failing. But it wasn't in decline because Americans stopped being afraid of nuclear war. The Cuban Missile Crisis was arguably the most frightening moment of the Cold War. Kenneth Rose thinks Americans rejected shelters for a lot of reasons. For one, they couldn't afford them. The cost of a decent shelter was about $2,500. And that was about half of the median family income in the 1960s.

And Dr. Rose also believes. Americans simply did not like the image of themselves cowering underground. I think it dug at American pride. We think roughly something like 200,000 shelters were built from the beginning of the Cold War to about 1965. And you could say that, well, 200,000, that's a lot of shelters. It's about one for every 900 people. But in an era when a majority of Americans actually believe that there was going to be nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union, I would say that 200,000 is actually a small number. Cause somebody tells me that death's coming round

And I will not carry myself down to die When I go to my grave and my head will be high Let me die in my footsteps Before I go down under the ground. As been rumors of war and war. As far as aboellum entry, it thankfully never had to serve as a fallout shelter, and they got rid of their supplies back in 1989. They had rid of all the bedding and the food, the medicine, even a few body bags.

But the school stayed open until 1995. When they stopped using it as a school, it wasn't because they were tired of being underground. Here's assistant superintendent, Thadfibs. It is a little sad after growing up in this school to see it not being used or to see it in this type of shape, but we understand as a district the cost to renovate this type of building was more than what the community was willing to put into it. So we built a brand new school right on almost on top of it, just slightly to the west. The new school is called Yeso Elementary. Yeso and ABO are both named after geological layers of Earth. YASO being in the layer just above ABO. It's clever.

YASO is above ground, but in the spirit of ABO Elementary has very few windows. Now ABO Elementary is used for district storage, and one other thing. It's being used as an active shooter training facility for the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. They go through all of their scenarios and use it to practice for situations that none of us want to think what happened. But school shootings that you know have been around the nation. This has been a really good facility to use because it's all downstairs there's no windows

and they can do everything that they need to do and nobody, nobody sees. So twice a month, the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center goes into ABO and practices for school shootings, running drills, firing at fake targets. If something ever happens, you want to be prepared. I don't think you can ever be prepared enough, but in case something does happen. Because if there's one thing Artija has always been good at, it's being prepared and protecting its kids from whatever dangers they might confront. 99% invisible was produced this week by Katie Mingle with Sam Greenspan, Avery Trouffleman, and me Roman Mars.

We are a project of 91.7 local public radio KALW in San Francisco and produced out of the offices of ArcSign Architecture and Beautiful Downtown Oakland, California. If you like the stories on this program, you can get more and more and more of it at Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, but photos of ABO await at 99pi.org. Radio Tapio. From PRX.