Take Cover, Spokane

Lee O'Connor explores the fascinating subject of Spokane's backyard bunkers, basement hideaways, and public fallout shelters, in this book about an eastern Washington city that set its Cold War fears in cement. Take cover, Spokane, Washington. That thought propelled residents into a fallout shelter mania in the summer and fall of 1961. "It soon reached the point," Spokane humorist Kent Graybill recalled, "where if you weren't at least planning a shelter in the basement or under the petunia bed, you were practically un-American." Years earlier, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had bellowed at the capitalist countries, "We will bury you " In the midst of Spokane's obsession with shelter digging, Spokanite Mrs. June G. Potter observed, "Maybe Khrushchev won't have to 'bury us' after all-we seem to be doing it for him."