I was at the campus library here in town and, to my surprise, they had a couple displays about the ‘good old days’ of the Cold War bomb-shelter era.
Interestingly, about twenty years ago, I’d heard some rumours that there was a stash of CD supplies hidden in the machinery level of one of the campus dorms. A sympathetic and equally curious head resident grabbed his keys and we went exploring. Sure enough, on the levels above the elevator machinery were dozens of the old Sanitation Kits and some of the old water barrel kits. This stuff is still out there.
The pamphlets and booklets are quite interesting. Some of them I had not seen before.
Around 1980 I stumbled upon a couple of pallets of CD stuff in one of our US Navy buildings complete with a “this is a fallout shelter” signs. Dog help us if we had to actually use the stuff; no electricity, no water, no sanitation, no air filtration.
I do love the old fallout shelter signs.
I used to see an old brass sign at a customers house (by the pool)
“To Lifeboats”
The older NYC public schools are a treasure trove when it comes to this stuff. I was in the basement of a New Deal era elementary school in Bushwick a few years ago, and not only did they have the water barrels, they even had a few rudimentary Geiger counters, which I’d never seen in storage before. Even a not-so-subtle attempt at bribery couldn’t get the school’s custodian to part with the stuff – apparently they is still some sort of archaic “checklist” associated with these obsolete stores…
I think I have a few of the old pamphlets around somewhere. My dad had picked them up somewhere along his journeys and I’d found them back in the early-to-mid-nineties when I was getting into “survivalism”. The old man and I used to split the cost of a subscription to the old ASG magazine also.
eBay is a treasure trove of this stuff. It would make for an interesting collection, if I didn’t already have too much “stuff” as is.