Sister Mary Paula and school secretary Anne Marie Netzel examine the cramped, dusty basement of the Mount St. Michael convent and school in north Spokane on Thursday. (SR photo: Jesse Tinsley)

In August 1945, the United States dropped nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Five years later, the superintendent of schools in Spokane stood in front of 900 educators at Lewis and Clark High School and warned: “The same thing that happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki could happen here, and we must prepare for it.”

For decades, that’s just what a lot of people in Spokane did. If the 1950s and ’60s were sweltering with Cold War paranoia, Spokane had one of the higher fevers. Local government officials urged public action and compiled potential nuclear targets and impacts. Newspapers published maps of potential destruction in the case of a nuclear attack. Citizens were schooled in blackout procedures and practiced a citywide evacuation while planes dropped leaflets that read: “This Could Have Been an ‘H’ Bomb.”

And a lot of people – though it’s impossible to say how many – dug and stocked their own backyard bomb shelters. Lee O’Connor, the author of a book on Spokane’s history of fallout shelters titled “Take Cover, Spokane,” says that while this was a national passion, “Spokane really distinguished itself in terms of civil defense”/Shawn Vestal, SR. More here.

Question: Did anyone you know have a fallout shelter?

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