The atmosphere in America during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 was extraordinary to say the least. With the immediate threat of annihilation in the forefront of everyone’s mind, the collective consciousness of the public moved through their lives with the insane thought that if things didn’t go right in Cuba we’d have to figure out ways of surviving a nuclear holocaust in our own country.
Much like the psychological craziness that has dogged us since 911 and the extreme reactions to it, in ’62, and even prior to that, people were all suddenly finding the idea of building bomb shelters as somehow reasonable in the face of nightmarish odds. If we just build something under the ground in the backyard, stock it with hordes of can goods and stay there until the smoke clears we’ll survive.
At least that’s what folks were considering because they couldn’t come up with another answer to complete devastation so ‘hey, I guess we have to build a bomb shelter’. Now most families that I knew didn’t do that because it was expensive (especially the concrete ones that resembled swimming pools with a lid) and besides, this was the Midwest and it was far more likely that they were going to drop a nuke in Washington D.C. or New York City before they’d ever start aiming at Michigan so we mostly decided to take our chances.
To reinforce our need to do something we were practicing ‘duck and cover’ tactics at school, hoping that crouching under our desks would help us to dodge the nuke strike and then we’d all crawl out safely after the bombing and go ‘wow, that was a close one.’ Adding to our mutual paranoia was the fact that on every radio and television the government had stepped up Civil Defense practice warnings. You know the ones: ominous high pitched tone for a minute or so followed by “If this had been an actual alert you would have…”
Would have what? Been blown to smithereens? It seemed like every time you turned around that damn Civil Defense alert was going off and it was making people a little jumpy like what if the guy doesn’t give the little practice disclaimer at the end this time? Then what? It’s go time?
I didn’t really have a sense of my mother’s concern throughout this thing but my guess is that she stayed relatively calm so as not to freak me out but I remember watching the TV as President Kennedy showed the aircraft reconnaissance pictures of the missile launch pads in Cuba and thinking ‘well, that’s way down in Cuba’ and I had some blind faith that President Kennedy would take care of it. In other words, I just didn’t get the gravity of the situation and how close we were to having our asses blown off. I should have been more frightened but for some reason I figured it just wouldn’t happen and it didn’t and President Kennedy did take care of it but I had sort of distanced myself from the reality of it all.
But one day brought it closer to home for me and that was the day I went to the Miracle Mile shopping center with my baby sitter and her son. We all knew the concept of the bomb shelter but none of us felt any real connection to one. That particular day a bomb shelter manufacturer had set up a makeshift showroom near the parking lot and there were all these low-cost shelters made of corrugated steel, lined up in rows like new cars.
This was my first exposure to the commercial use of fear-mongering for profit and after all the tension that was being disseminated people were seriously looking at these small, vulnerable little shells as a practicality. To me, they didn’t appear capable of stopping a good rain storm but those retailers wouldn’t have been out there if they didn’t think they could make a sale. People were frightened and that caused them to do things out of character like dig a big hole in the backyard, buy a corrugated steel coffin with a periscope and no place to take a shit. Stock it with a couple of blankets, several cans of soup and, by God, we’ll outlast ’em.
Those shelters may not have been practical but their commonplace existence made me feel less secure in my indifference to the Soviet buildup. For an 11 year-old the reasoning is if they’re selling these at the local shopping center then just how close is this thing to happening? Am I safe in my own bedroom?
Now my memory of that day is an historical curiosity to be filed away with all the other oddities of my memory but what I took away from that time is how fear pulls us away from logic and how it can be used to control our lives. The Y2K doomsday scenario brought that all back once again as profiteers sold jugs of water, crank radios and guns to normally reasonable people who were afraid that computers would massively fail and along with it civilization.
Didn’t happen but nobody gave back the scads of cash they made from the scare.
And even if Kennedy had stumbled and Khruschev would have delivered on his bombast to “bury you” I doubt that the corrugated tin can at the Miracle Mile shopping center would have done much good.
