Ruby and Harold Briggs on top of their Moorhead fallout shelter, 1961.

Clay County Histories

Markus Krueger | Program Director HCSCC

I have a fallout shelter in my basement. According to the building permit dated November 3, 1961, the owners of my house, sisters Signe and Selma Lee, paid $785 plus a $3 fee to install it. If the nuclear bombs of World War Three dropped, the thick concrete walls would have shielded the Lee sisters from the radioactive fallout swirling around outside. After about two weeks, radiation levels would drop enough for them to go outside and drive to a safe place that had not been nuked. So you need to stock your shelter for two weeks of food, water, flashlights, blankets, books, etc.
When you say you have a fallout shelter in your basement, some people will let you in on a secret: they have one too. I was recently asked how many fallout shelters were built around here. Since this is a subject that fascinates me and I’ve studied it a lot, I could give an educated answer: we don’t know. Because the people who built them usually did not want their neighbors to know they had one.
When the bombs start dropping, you don’t want all your neighbors to come a-knocking. When Signe and Selma Lee installed my home’s fallout shelter, the building next door was (and still is) an apartment building. If WWIII started, how would the sisters keep their neighbors out of their shelter? Shoot them as they come into the basement? It’s best if the neighbors don’t know about their fallout shelter. There is simply not enough food, water, and room for everybody in there.
But what about all those neighbors without their own private shelters? What will they do when the bombs start dropping? Our government provided public fallout shelters, typically in basements of large public buildings. They were stocked with food, medical supplies, Geiger counters, and trained Civil Defense wardens. In the mid-1960s, people would know where their families would go when the bombs dropped just like people living in trailers know where to go during a tornado. We took most of the yellow fallout shelter signs off these buildings in the 1990s after the Cold War ended, but I remember signs by the doors of the old Moorhead High School (now the Townsite Center) and Trinity Lutheran Church, and I’ve seen old Civil Defense water barrels in back rooms of the Moorhead Public Library.
If you see fallout shelter supplies, don’t eat them. The government only really stocked them in the 1960s, so they’re probably from the Lyndon Johnson administration. Fallout shelters were only fashionable for a few years in the mid-1960s. Before 1961, our Civil Defense plan was to evacuate our cities, not build shelters. By the late 1960s, the USA and USSR had so many thousands of nukes aimed at each other that shelters were seen as pointless – there would be no safe un-nuked place to go after we emerge from our two-week stay in our shelters. In time, the yellow public shelter supplies got shoved into storage rooms or dumpsters, and my fallout shelter became the basement bathroom.