BRATTLEBORO — “Everyone down to the basement,” Emily King, principal of Oak Grove Elementary School, said over the intercom.
Class by class, the 100 or so students took their cue. Quickly and calmly, they walked past the library to the below-ground area near the boiler.
Children were encouraged to take as little space as possible. The principal told everyone to be silent as the final members of her staff squeezed in the front of the children, sat down, and waited.
Nancy Goldsmith, a third-grade teacher, recalled the day.
“We never told the children that day in 1962, but news had come to the school from the federal government, that it was possible that enemy aircraft had been sited over the United States,” she said. “We were told to take cover. For about 15 minutes, we waited in the dark for the all clear.”
In October 1962, this nation waited through 14 days of fear during the Cuban Missile Crisis. President John F. Kennedy steered the nation away from nuclear disaster, but the remaining panic generated the need to plan for a nuclear disaster.
The Federal Civil Defense Administration designated public sites for fallout shelters.
Stanley “Pal” Borofsky, president of Sam's Outdoor Outfitters at 74 Main St., still has the gold fallout shelter sign with the familiar circular black icon.
“The basement of the Barber Building below our store was a designated shelter,” recalled Borofsky's son, Brad. “The government left containers of food and cans for water to have on hand. Several buildings on Main Street had shelters in their basements too.”
While every Vermont town was required to designate shelter areas, many citizens took it upon themselves to build their own.
David Wright of Brattleboro remembers his father and grandfather constructing one in the basement of their farmhouse in West Brattleboro.
“My father took me to the basement one day to watch as he and my grandfather mixed up some cement and laid concrete blocks to create a bomb shelter in the corner of the basement,” Wright said.
“Fresh air was piped in from the outside, and all our camping gear was put inside with crackers, cans of orange juice, two bunk beds, an AM radio, and extra batteries,” he remembered.
Plans could be requested from the Department of Defense's Office of Civil Defense, along with suggestions about how to build and furnish a shelter. Each Tuesday, the Brattleboro Daily Reformer featured a column written by Professor Willard F. Libby, an American chemist who had won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1960 and who had an extensive background with knowledge of radiation.
Each week, Libby featured an educational piece and described practical applications that citizens could create themselves. One such column's title shouts in bold print, “Real Shelter Is A Real Life Saver.”
The article begins, “My $30.00 fallout shelter consists of a hole in a backyard hill, bags of dirt and some railroad ties. Anyone with a basement is lucky; he could build a shelter more easily and perhaps more cheaply. My costs were:
“Burlap bags $11.00
“Nylon string and needle to sew bags $1.00
“Railroad ties $9.00
“Trucking in the ties $7.00
“Zinc chromate to treat burlap bags $2.00”
Libby went on to explain, “The vital point is that lethal X-rays from intensive fallout are stopped by two feet of concrete or anything with equal density of mass. Thus, it takes 10 feet of water or wood to do it, about two to three feet of dirt, but only two to three inches of lead.”
He cautioned that “an air filter for the shelter is a good idea, but not absolutely necessary. Some radioactive dust might seep in, but probably not in significant amounts through ordinary air circulation.”
Other weekly columns from Libby included plans for community shelters in churches as the cheapest and best alternatives, while still others educated a hungry-for-answers public about the effects of nuclear bombs and how they could “cope with firestorms.”
While citizens considered where they would go in case of nuclear disaster, a Nov. 10, 1961 headline stressed that “183 Professors from five universities in the Boston area urge[d] a 'positive program for peace with freedom' rather than the construction of fallout shelters.”
Forty-seven years later, two Brattleboro residents, who spoke on condition of anonymity, recently removed the bomb shelter that came with the house that they purchased in 1981.
“It was made according to U.S. government specifications; the plans were right there in the shelter,” joked the owner. “We have not had to use it for shelter from a bomb for 31 years. Two friends slept in it one night a long time ago, and they said never to have anybody ever sleep in it again.”
“In its place we now have a Ping-Pong table, a much more enjoyable thought than to be the recipients of a nuclear bomb.”