Cold War Hideaway Museum Officials Won’t Accept Gift Of Rusty, 1960s Bomb Shelter

Five rungs on a rusty ladder led the three historians back to the Cold War.

The trio broke the lock on a rusted lid implanted in a South Hill lawn and descended into a bomb shelter built when the nation worried about Russian satellites in the sky and Russian missiles in Cuba.

As far as the owner knows, Wednesday was the first time the chamber was penetrated since the 1960s. Her late husband installed it against her wishes when John F. Kennedy was president.

Like millions of Americans and thousands in Spokane, the South Hill man was pessimistic enough to believe war was coming, but optimistic his family could survive in the shelter.

The woman, who didn’t want to be identified for fear of being pestered by curiosity seekers, never has been in the shelter and never wanted to know what was inside.

If bombs fell, she told her husband, he could go underground without her. He lost interest in the shelter not long after it was built, when military leaders started questioning whether a home shelter could withstand a nuclear blast.

The shelter rests under a mound of dirt, with two ventilation pipes poking 6 feet above ground. It looks like a submarine about to break the surface.

Over the years, the woman planted tomatoes, garlic and butternut squash on the mound, all the while wishing it wasn’t there.

She recently called the historians at Cheney Cowles Museum, hoping they’d be so intrigued with the shelter, they’d want to have it.

The museum already has other Cold War relics, including fallout signs, and tin canisters of crackers and water from a community fallout shelter.

The historians couldn’t help the South Hill woman. They found the shelter interesting, but too deteriorated for restoration.

“It’s more of an archeological interest than anything,” said curator Marsha Rooney.

The owner furnished and stocked the shelter sparingly: Two steel bed frames without mattresses, a can of S&W pork ‘n’ beans, and a few cans of apple, apricot and grapefruit juice.

There were 10 paper cups, twine, candles, 12 Kerr canning jars filled with drinking water and a hand-cranked fan for drawing air through a filter.

There was no toilet or toilet paper, no first-aid kit, nothing to read.

The damp and dingy shelter probably was built by Spokane Culvert & Fabricating Co., one of at least six local companies that capitalized on America’s nuclear fear in 1961.

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev stepped up aggressions in Berlin that year, leading Kennedy to call up reserve soldiers. The reserves had not been released long when the U.S. learned in 1962 that the Soviets had missiles on Cuban soil.

Spokane Culvert made its shelters from 12-foot sections of steel culvert, using a 200-ton press to flatten a floor. Finished shelters, like the one on the South Hill, were six feet tall and eight feet wide.

Other companies made shelters of concrete blocks or plastic. Some homeowners built their own with bricks or other materials.

By 1962, one in every 20 Spokane homes boasted its own shelter, according to a Boy Scout survey. Nationwide, one in every 25 homeowners was digging up his back yard to install a shelter.

Once, the shelters were status symbols, like mink stoles, color TVs and cars with tail fins. Now, they’re just Cold War curiosities, buried and often forgotten.