On television, “The Twilight Zone” depicted friends and neighbors in fear of an imminent nuclear attack fighting over access to one family’s shelter. Homeowners built shelters in basements and backyards, and the morality of private shelters accessible to privileged families became a raging national debate. Children learned to “duck and cover” in schools. Newspaper articles detailed the killing effects of Soviet nuclear weapons. It was the time of the Berlin crisis, when fears of a nuclear holocaust, and survival mania, reached a fever pitch in America. Blakeley died on Wednesday at 95 at Brookdale Southside, a senior living community in Jacksonville, Fla., his daughter, Dorothy Carver, said. Blakeley, the 1.4 million fallout shelter signs he produced for the Army Corps of Engineers in 1961 were just a routine job, soon forgotten as he moved on to other tasks, never dreaming his utilitarian creation would become America’s most visible symbols of the Cold War. To others, they symbolized the insanity of war and the folly of defenses against nuclear attack.īut to Mr. To many, they represented hope for survival amid the destruction of cities. They marked the way to the fallout shelters where millions of Americans were to take refuge from the deadly radioactivity of thermonuclear explosions.Ī half-century ago, the bright orange-yellow and black placards were ubiquitous on courthouses, town halls, schools and other shelters packed with canned goods and water supplies to sustain anywhere from 50 to thousands of people for days or weeks. Blakeley’s ominous signs on old public buildings, rusted metal relics of an age when nuclear war was a clear and present danger.
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