After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the seventeen years leading up to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and beyond, were peppered with the testing of ever more powerful bombs. The greatest impact of the Cuban Missile Crisis was on the teenaged baby-boomer generation. The Crisis unleashed a torrent of philosophical questions about how social command and control was structured.
1964 was the year Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb came out. The movie’s crowning moment comes when the actor, Slim Pickens, whose character, Major T.J. “King” Kong, acting on the orders of a deranged general, Jack D. Ripper, who thought the Communists were secretly polluting “the precious bodily fluids of Americans” – straddles the Bomb as it drops from the bomb bay of a B-52 flying over Russia. He waves his cowboy hat above his head, like a bull rider in a rodeo. His expression reflects the orgasmic ecstasy of the final climax. The movie was based on a novel, Red Alert, written by Peter George and published in 1958. The plot takes in the apocalyptic threat of nuclear war and the almost absurd ease with which it might be triggered. The story was one of a number of fictions that sought to dramatize the possibility of nuclear war. The genius of Dr. Strangelove was that Kubrick turned a very sobering story into a very black comedy. The movie’s impact became clear in the years following its release.
Who’s calling the shots? Who’s making the rules? Do the rules make sense? The reservoir of questions young Americans began to ask breached the dam holding them back. And after the flood, the Free Speech Movement sowed more seeds. It spoke to boomer teenagers all over the country. We abandoned the center for the periphery. We went all the way Out–looking inward, looking backward, and looking toward the next century’s great affirmation/query: “What-the-Fuck!?”
I was seventeen years old when the Crisis began and ended. Many of us can still remember diving under our desks and covering our heads when the wail of the warning sirens screamed through the air. The world was coming face-to-face with a real threat of nuclear war. We got used to thinking about the unthinkable. If the apocalypse came, could you pack it in and hide underground? Back in that day, conventional wisdom held that if you spent from 24 hours to 14 days underground, nuclear radiation would dissipate. The reality, as we have seen with Chernobyl, is that the threat from radiation lasts much longer.
Fear was palpable and visible. New bomb shelter signs, designed by Robert Blakeley, an employee of the Army Corp of Engineers (with help from his children), featured three yellow triangles on a black background. They could be seen nearly everywhere there was some space underground in which people could shelter. Signs began to appear on any building that had a basement as well as on public facilities such as subways and tunnels. There were public announcements and practice drills. It didn’t make much difference what your politics were; everyone was in the same boat, or so it seemed.
Even so there were staged dramas where people were forced to choose between sharing their shelters and supplies with strangers or not. Issues of life and death blew up, becoming an almost tactile presence for humans on the verge.[1] What would the Aftermath be like and what kind of world would be left after all the radiation spread? Would we emerge like Norwegian Wharf Rats – the most common New York City pests – scavenging through the debris?
Along with the new signage of the times, came a new industry, the survival industry. Everything to eat, if not in a can, was available in a dehydrated form. Bomb shelter designs and the bomb shelters themselves were suddenly available. For a modest sum suburbanites could have a family bomb shelter constructed or purchase a ready-made and have it installed underground in their backyards. It so happened that as the Cuban Missile Crisis was unfolding, I was trying to convince my mother to allow me to have my own apartment. She had several cottages and a small apartment building in the Hollywood Hills. The income they generated was my family’s sole means of support so my request was a nonstarter.
The Crisis peaked during the stare down between Kennedy and Khrushchev when Khrushchev blinked and agreed to remove the nuclear armed missiles from Cuba. The survival industry’s boom went bust when the missiles and their warheads were sent back to the Soviet Union.
Once the Soviets had pulled their nuclear missiles out of Cuba, demand for survivalist things – including bomb shelters – diminished. It just so happened that my mother found one on a lot on Santa Monica Blvd in West Hollywood. She noticed a “For Sale” sign attached to a front fence. It wasn’t clear exactly what was for sale. My mother pulled into the lot and entered the office shed to find out. The person in the office said that everything was for sale. They were trying to clear the lot. He accompanied my mother as she walked around. When she saw the bomb shelter she asked about it. The sellers wanted it gone. A building project was being held up until the lot was cleared. If she would promise to get it off the lot by a certain date she could have it for a hundred dollars. She agreed. My mother figured it would fit in the lower section of our patio and that a bathroom could be added. She was right. The room that I had been dreaming about since puberty, where I could come of age was soon to be mine.
I first had to dismantle it and get the parts moved to our house in the Hollywood Hills, where I could reassemble it in our backyard. I got the tools I’d need and gathered a few friends. It was a simple structure. A quonset hut on a parapet wall of poured concrete. The hut was made of 1/8” corrugated steel sections bolted together and all supported with 1/4” steel “I beams.” It measured 11’ x 16’ and at one end there was a spiral staircase about 20’ high which was inside a culvert pipe also made of 1/8” steel. It was designed to be erected underground. To get to the shelter you descended the spiral staircase and entered the shelter through a solid wood door. At the other end there was a smaller culvert pipe that would extend to the surface and provide a source of fresh air to the inhabitants below ground. As I was dismantling it, I wondered, “How fresh could that air be if it was infused with radiation?”
My mother recouped her costs by selling the spiral stairs for $150. The extra $50 was used to pay the trucker who hauled the parts to our house. The trucker was an interesting character. He wore a white uniform and had slicked back hair and a pencil mustache. His truck was a 1935 White flatbed with stake sides. A contractor was hired to build the parapet wall on which the steel hut rested. When it was time to put the shelter up, I called on the same friends (plus a few more) who helped me dismantle it. They helped get the pieces into the backyard where the wall was built. Then we all worked to stand the end pieces up as we bolted the plates back together. I made a track of 2 x 12s that I’d waxed up to slide the end pieces where they went. By late afternoon we had it back to the way it looked on that Santa Monica Boulevard lot. Later I got a cutting torch and cut two openings for windows, one on each side, and then framed them in. Because of the curve of the hut, the windows, were also box windows, each with its own skylight. The window next to my bed provided a view across Cahuenga Pass to the foothills of Universal Studios where many Western movies were made and where, in the late spring or early summer, the studio lot managers would bring on a flock of several hundred sheep with their Basque herders and their Caravans. The sheep would graze on the grasses while the herders and their dogs kept track of everything. It was a very pastoral scene.
In Los Angeles cars were the thing. Cars gave you social credentials. Girls looked at guys with nice cars. I didn’t care about cars. I had a Bomb Shelter, with indoor plumbing, windows and a view. My mother provided limited room service. I began to live a kind of defiant life, mocking that part of society who thought they could dodge annihilation by having a bomb shelter under their house or under their backyard. Inside and alone the solitude induced a meditative state. It was a place to think. And to party.
I spent nearly four years living in it, only moving out when I went to graduate school. My mother promptly rented it out and today it is a recording studio.
Note
1 Versions of this Great Fear persist today among the many survivalist organizations, who spend their free time acquiring arsenals and practicing military style maneuvers in the woods. There is even a popular television show, Survivor, where athletic men and women practice living in precarious environments demonstrating their knowledge of the Boy Scout handbook by building primitive shelters and starting fires with a flint stone. Survival is at once entertainment and serious shit.