The Fallout Shelter. We walked into the backyard and I helped Katie lift the heavy metal door that led down into the fallout shelter that her Dad had built. She was the only person I knew that had a fallout shelter. Her Dad was a contractor as well as a bricklayer and an electrician by training. He could build just about anything. I followed her down the ladder into a room that was about 25 feet below the ground.
“We don’t come down here very much anymore,” she said. She turned on the lights so we could see. There was a layer of dust everywhere. She said that her Dad had run electricity from the house but that there was also a generator that could run the lights if necessary. To my surprise there were actually three big rooms and a bathroom in the shelter. The shelter was equipped with running water from the house but it also had a big water tank attached to the bathroom. I couldn’t tell how thick the brick walls and ceiling were but it was obvious that Katie’s Dad had put a lot of time into building these underground rooms. There were air pipes in each room that led to the surface and there were air pipes above the generator and the cooking stove. The front room was primarily for storing items such as canned goods, water, blankets, clothes, tools, batteries, and anything else that her Dad thought would help in case of a nuclear attack. There was even an old Geiger counter. The next room had three bunked beds along one wall and a stove, a refrigerator, and a sink on another wall. There was small dinner table in the middle of the room. In the next room there were several chairs, a small couch, an old television set, a radio, a short wave radio, and a phone. He had also built a small bathroom off the third room.
I looked at all the canned foods along the walls of the first room and laughed. “Katie, does your Dad like sardines?”
She laughed and answered, “He eats them morning, noon, and night.”
“Yeah, so does my Dad. I hate them.”
“Well, Dad said they would last a long time and these cans have been down here since the summer of 63. I certainly wouldn’t eat them now.”
Katie said that her Dad started building the shelter almost immediately after the missile crisis had come to an end and had finished just before summer of 63. She said that her Dad had promised her that she would always be safe in the future because of this fallout shelter. We had been in the same 3rd grade classroom during the missile crisis.
“Remember the missile crisis?” I asked.
“Yes, I’ll never forget it. I remember hiding under our desks in class as if that really would have protected us if a nuclear missile hit nearby. But you know what I remember most? I remember our teachers and parents being so very scared. Mom said that the worst thing during the crisis was that she felt so helpless. She said she never wanted to feel like that again.”
“Thanks goodness President Kennedy made the Russians back down,” I said.
We went into the third room. Katie turned on the radio and we could hear “Ride Captain Ride” by Blues Image. We both sang along and talked. It was easy to talk to Katie despite the fact that she was a head taller than I, very striking in her appearance, and extremely intelligent. She intimidated many guys at school. She loved learning probably more than I did and we had all of our classes together. She was especially good at algebra and any math or science. She had already decided that she was going to be a scientist and work for NASA on the space program. She couldn’t stop talking about the recent Apollo 13 mission. She wanted to learn all the math and science that was involved. She was the only girl I knew that wanted to be a scientist. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do but I thought it would be exciting to be an astronaut. Katie said that maybe she’d be the scientist who helped build a spaceship to Mars and that I would be the one to fly it.
“Do you think we can actually do those things when we get older?” I asked.
“Of course we can. What could stop us?” Katie always knew what she wanted and was so very confident in herself. Deep down I envied her confidence.
I very timidly said, “You know there aren’t many girls that become scientists. I’m not sure why but when you look at pictures of Mission Control during a space flight, I never see women.”
“Well, it is time for a change and I am going to be part of that change. You know Mrs. Short at school, right? She says that women can do anything men can do and if we have to fight to be able to do that then so be it.” I never doubted that she would achieve everything she set out to do.
Several times that summer we ended up in the fallout shelter just talking for hours. It had become a refuge where we could talk freely about what we had seen on the news like the Vietnam War, the draft, the shooting of students at Kent State, our hope that the voting age would be reduced to 18, and, of course, the Apollo space program. We even talked about sex, something I had never spoken about with any girl my age. Our parents and our teachers, except Mrs. Short, rarely talked about controversial current events to us and my parents never talked to me about sex.
Katie and I became the best of friends although we never dated. The guys that I grew up with never understood our friendship. Our friendship deepened that fall but the following spring Katie’s Dad sold his contracting business to a national company and they moved to upstate New York. We wrote a few letters to each other but over time we fell out of touch until I received a short letter congratulating me on receiving my Ph.D. It was from Katie. It simply said, "We both made it! I am helping to develop the Hubble Space Telescope. Remember the fallout shelter..."
The other day after class, my best student, Gwenn, came up to me in the hallway. Gwenn, like so many of my female students, is one of those you know will be successful and make a difference in the world. She was a double major in physics and political science. She had already accepted a scholarship into a graduate program in physics. She played on the university softball team and somehow she found time to volunteer in the local soup kitchen. “Professor, my parents bought a new house and we discovered that it had an old fallout shelter in the backyard. Do you remember fallout shelters?”
I looked at Gwenn and smiled as the memory of Katie came to mind. I thought a minute and replied, “Yes, I spent a summer in a fallout shelter with a friend just like you. In fact, she probably helped pave the way for you.”
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