The bomb shelter that bombed

By JUDITH HARRIS CARTER

© St. Petersburg Times, published October 29, 2000

The news in the fall of 1961 was ominous.

Avondale, Ga., could be reached easily by missiles deployed 90 miles off the coast of Florida. Triangular signs with a large CD in the middle were reminiscent of World War II days, when Civil Defense was a common phrase and people arranged an outlying place to reassemble should evacuation be called during hours when family members were scattered.

Drills were held, and children flung themselves under their desks, hands over their heads. With the daily threat of another war, the safety, even the lives of seven helpless children weighed heavily on our minds.

We took a drastic step.

The fallout shelter salesman was at our house within 24 hours of our tentative call for information. He convinced us that we owed it to ourselves, to our children, but especially to the future to see that a few survivors of world holocaust should be Carters!

"Show me a 10-foot circle." I was sitting in the driveway holding the end of a string, trying to measure the size of the shelter we'd need for nine people.

"Most of them are 6 by 6," Hank told me, stretching the string straight out from my hand.

"6 by 6? Is that all?"

Quickly multiplying in my head, I came up with 18 by 18 for nine plus the maid. I couldn't believe it! I thought of her ample proportions and claustrophobia. That would be mild, compared to the mania I envisioned cooped up underground with seven kids.

"Well, you can't have a 20-foot circle. The whole back yard would cave in."

Hank was firm. We would build a "generous" 8- by 10-foot steel breadbox-shaped affair with a shaft containing a ladder attached to an outside corner. Stand-up room at peak roof point would be 7 feet; 5 feet, 6 inches at the sides.

It would be covered with 3 feet of solid-packed dirt that "guaranteed full protection against radioactive fallout." I couldn't help wondering who held our guarantee.

Our virtuous thoughts of repopulating the world with Carters turned to abject consternation when we saw the enormous, gaping hole where our wide, pretty patio had been. The corrugated steel shed was sitting beside it, waiting to be dropped in. We gazed into the future, silent and appalled.

During the four-week period before it was finished, Hank and I inspected each day's work, arms linked, standing on the brink of that hole.

"No way I'm going to be able to go down in that shelter, Hank. Especially when they cover it with dirt." I couldn't even stand the sheet over my face, a leftover, no doubt, from my brother's torment when we were young.

"Seven kids in a box with no windows? Un-unh. I'd choose radiation any day." But I was just bluffing, and Hank knew it.

"You'll do it, hon. Just wait'll you hear those sirens. You won't be able to get down that ladder fast enough!" Hank was laughing at me.

Slathered with an inch-thick layer of tar to ensure its watertight condition, the shelter was finally buried and covered over. I was glad not to be faced with it and its implications every day. I hoped if I ignored it long enough, it would go away.

Inside the "Breadbox" were shelves for food and equipment. Three fold-down bunks along each side would allow us to sleep in relays: six sleeping, three up performing various life-saving duties, all outlined in our two-page booklet, Instructions in Survival Tactics.

"Two pages?!? There must not be very much you can do to save life, Hank."

"Well, after that kind of blast, we probably wouldn't want to anyway." Again, Hank was calm.

An electric pump was housed in one corner; a single, bare light bulb hung from the ceiling. Pale green walls glowed eerily in the dim light, and shadows loomed from the stores we'd gathered.

Although it was cool in the shelter, it was not the temperature that made me shiver in the unearthly silence. I could hear my own heart beating rapidly. Just thinking about it made the walls and ceiling look warped from pressure.

An exercise pump, connected to the air pump, provided oxygen from two outlets that ran up and out, emerging at some distance, camouflaged by bushes. It would provide energy release for the inmates, uh, inhabitants. An 80-gallon water tank was buried alongside the "Breadbox." And there was a square little box with a toilet seat and a chemical wash in the bottom.

Not included in the $2,000 price tag was the $50 bright-yellow Geiger counter, bought through the local medical society. That the medical society was encouraging people to have one ready was a comforting indication that we were not the only war-conscious couple on the block. But a more cheerless place than the shelter cannot be imagined.

We stocked it with canned goods, toys, books, flashlights and batteries, cards, radio, a medicine chest, a gun. With the addition of each article, the thought of what would make its use necessary captured my hyperactive imagination. Medicine chest? Oh Lordy! A medical emergency buried 10 feet underground in a little tin box! Well, for once Hank would be around to take care of it.

My mind leaped ahead to hypothetical situations.

"What if a neighbor demanded entry, and he'd die if we refused?"

"What if a diseased, raging person tried to force entry, could you, a doctor, actually lift the gun and kill him?"

In spite of the foolishness we felt in our hearts sometimes, we'd done the best we knew in the face of growing concern about Cuba.

All went well. Until the spring rains.

Atlanta's downpours are not called "gully washers" for nothing. We descended into the shelter one day to find ourselves and our precious stores standing in 3 feet of water as red as the Georgia clay which colored it. Labels floated limply in the thick, red water, disturbed now by our probing feet as we moved toward cardboard boxes with swollen sides bursting to reveal rusting cans.

Frantic calls to the builders brought stunningly quick results. They certainly didn't want any bad publicity: It was, no doubt, hard enough to sell bomb shelters as it was.

This was the final blow, the Awful Truth I'd worked desperately hard not to face: For $2,000 precious dollars we had bought the most grimly uncomfortable and frightening mass coffin in the world, and, worse, we'd buried it right in our own back yard! I knew I'd never get over the expense.

"Two thousand dollars, Hank! Two thousand dollars! Right down the "Breadbox!' "

Hank was, as usual, calm about the whole thing. Patting my hand, he smiled. "Don't think of it as a mass grave, darling. After all, for a time there, we owned the only underground swimming pool on the block!"

Judith Harris Carter is retired. She lives in Norfolk, Va.

Do you have a story to tell?

The stories must be true, not previously published and 700 to 900 words. Send submissions to the St. Petersburg Times, Floridian/Sunday Journal, P.O. Box 1121, St. Petersburg, FL 33731, or by e-mail to bockman@sptimes.com. Please include "Sunday Journal" in the subject line.

© St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved.