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Living under the mushroom cloud. This 1955 photo illustration from the Houston Post shows what the skyline would have looked like if a nuclear bomb were dropped on the city. Photo courtesy the Houston Metropolitan Research Center.

By Dave Schafer

In the 1960s, Paul Valdez’s mother meticulously stacked nonperishables in a closet. If the Soviets launched a nuclear attack, she hoped the closet would shelter the family from fallout, the radioactive particles that settle after a nuclear explosion.

“Looking at the size of the closet, I thought I had better practice my sprinting to get there before my sister,” said Valdez, chief technology officer in Public Works & Engineering.

Valdez’s mother wasn’t the only one concerned about a nuclear strike in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. All throughout the city, metal and concrete fallout shelters sprouted up like mushrooms around the Cuban Missile crisis.

Height of hysteria
On Oct. 15, 1962, reconnaissance photos showed Soviet missiles under construction in Cuba, kick-starting the Cuban Missile Crisis and the fallout shelter-building boom.

Eleven days later, with tension from the crisis growing, the Houston Post published an eight-page booklet about fallout protection. But some in Houston had been thinking about it long before.

The first Houston “air-raid shelter site” was at L&C Cafeteria, 820 Main St. Designated as a shelter in December 1953, it could hold 1,000 people.

In ’55, the Christmas family in Houston became the first in the United States to live three days underground in an H-bomb shelter, newspapers reported.

In September 1961, the federal community fallout shelter program began. Local governments, such as the city’s Civil Defense Department, found facilities above and below ground suitable as fallout shelters, and the U.S. Defense Department’s Office of Civil Defense stocked them with water, food, radiation kits and other supplies.

At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the city had six or seven stocked fallout shelters, then CD director Floyd Miller told the Post. Eight months later, it had 114 buildings prepared. There were possible fallout shelters in 292 buildings that could accommodate 475,000 people, a little more than half the city’s population.

The home G. King Walters bought in ’63 came with a 100-square-foot fallout shelter. But it wasn’t one of the selling points, the Rice University professor of physics and astronomy said.

“We regarded the shelter as a negative, just something that could leak.”

They weren’t worried about a nuclear strike, King said. “The only time we thought about the shelter was as a joke. ‘Look what we have in our backyard.’”

Despite the hysteria that news reports and government publications related, other families agreed with the Kings.

By 1968, the government’s focus had shifted to public shelters, and the city had 464 fallout shelters. The largest was in the basement of the Foley’s at 1110 Main, which could hold nearly 39,000 people. There were also shelters under City Hall and underground where the Hobby Center is today.

“The official government policy has turned away from the use of family fallout shelters and evacuation routes because they would be almost no help in case of a nuclear attack,” the Post wrote. “Also, the public showed a total lack of interest.

“The fatal flaw in the program is that few persons know the location of the (public) shelters.”

Two years later, the Houston and Harris County Civil Defense Corps published its Plan for Survival handbook.

“SAVE THIS Community Shelter Plan … IT MAY SAVE YOUR LIFE!” warns the busy, type-filled cover. The handbook includes maps of the county and numbers that correspond to the shelters listed at the side.

De-emphasis on de shelters
By the late ’70s, the federal government returned to the ’50s’ philosophy of evacuations.

Local officials were skeptical.

“We try to evacuate this city each morning and evening,” John Caswell, then the city’s CD administrative officer, told the Post in 1979. “We call it rush hour. You know how effective that is.”
Over time, the fear of a nuclear strike simmered down. By the time the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics fell in 1991, the government had de-emphasized the shelters.

Diane Pranke, 10, reads a book in her family’s fallout shelter Aug. 17, 1960. The Pranke’s shelter was similar to others that were built as fear of a nuclear attack intensified. Photo courtesy the Houston Metropolitan Research Center.

The city’s Civil Defense Department became the Office of Emergency Management. President Bill Clinton abolished the federal Civil Defense Department in the early 1990s, and the supplies were given away or destroyed.

But there are still oddly shaped, steel shafts in backyards leading to private shelters, like relics uncovered in an archeological dig. Now, though, they’re likely to be stacked with junk or toys.
King’s three children used the shelter, which was surrounded by decorative shrubs, as a playroom. Then, King used it as an office.

“We had qualms about it, but we were able to use it,” he said. “Just not as a bomb shelter.”

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