All us baby boomers grew up with films like these.
For those who actually had to practice duck and cover you’ll get a kick (or bring back those recurring childhood nightmares ) from this actual film that was used to teach us what to do when they drop the bomb.
For those who don’t have a clue, you’ll just get a laugh from this archived educational film.
For those with time to kill, you can watch a ton of these strange films.
edited to add- I put the link in here but for some reason it did not make the trip- anyway scroll down a couple of messages- stewysmoot’s got it
They sound great, but as Darwin said—Where the heck are they?
I do remember in kindergarten having to practice getting under our desks during atom bomb alerts. Thank goodness I didn’t know enough to realize how futile that would have been.
I am very grateful that I did not see a movie like that when I was little. When I got a bit older I was indeed very afraid of the atom bomb and this movie would have sent me tumbling into I don’t know what. The flash! Like you might or would want to live through it.
I am looking forward to investigating that website. It looks interesting.
I can remember thinking “this is not going to do any good against the bomb.” Now if I thought that as a little kid, why on earth did they think anyone would believe this stuff?
No wonder my baby boomer generation is so messed up…
My husband ducked and covered. By the time I was in school they’d abandoned that drill in favor of having us file into the school hallway and sit in front of the lockers. I guess those army-green school lockers were supposed to be nuclear resistant or something.
You know, I thought that you were going to post a “trip down memory lane” that might make YOU duck and cover!
I’ve never had to do “duck and cover” but I have heard about it. Does that count for something?
We ducked and covered for tornado drills… well… one time it wasn’t a drill… they tried to keep us from knowing it wasn’t a drill… but we noticed the teachers all listening to radio reports… anyhow… we weren’t actually hit by the thing. When I first got in school I didn’t know what a tornado drill was, but it sounded awful… I pictured a cross between a drill and a tornado.
When I was in high school (circa 1958), I used to spend time in the “civil defense” tower (about 30 feet high) that had been erected at the golf course. We were supposed to be looking for Russian planes that happened to be flying over the farmland of Indiana. I have to admit that I didn’t see one enemy plane, but we did have a lot of fun communicating with our short wave radio equipment.
A local private fallout shelter at a house in a 60’s era subdivision was just removed by the new owners. It had those pipes coming out of the ground and everything. I use to worry and wish Dad would build us one…
Well, since I don’t have broadband, I really can’t check those movies, but having lived through it once, I really don’t want to anyway
I often wondered as a child whether I was the only one who felt it was ludicrous to hide under a flimsy wooden school desk in the face of bombs that blew up whole cities. By the time I was in sixth or seventh grade was arguing with teachers that the best way to deal with an H-bomb was to go outside where you’d be closer to it - on the theory that the best place to be was ‘ground zero’.
Needless to say, I was a cynical child who wasn’t always loved by the gym teachers (who were the ones who usually showed this stuff).
Wow. I was obsessed with the fear of a nuclear war when I was a lad.
Like Emmline, we didn’t duck and cover but sat in the halls with our hands behind our heads. Both for nukes and tornados. I could not figure out how my hands would protect me from big bricks falling on my head or 5,000 degree fireballs.
Fail-Safe was my favorite movie from about the age of 9. It was comforting to think that the Soviet Premier wasn’t a total animal and President Fonda could get by with merely blowing up New York. Hell I didn’t live there.
Dr. Strangelove scared the crap out of me. No good ending that.
“We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when…”
I graduated from Duck and Cover, to the hallway, then in the sixties I was in the army stationed in Germany, when the real business of the Cold War slapped you in the face.
We were constantly practicing for tactical nuclear strikes…Our sergeant would take us to a nice spot (away from the front lines), have us sit down, take off our packs, helmets whatever, “smoke if ya got them!” Now this is what I was taught. Undo your boots, relax, even undo you belt, slip off your pants and boxers, place your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye!
You can’t hide and you can’t dig fast enough! So enjoy your last minutes alive!
I still remember which building at my old University was a designated fallout shelter. It couldn’t have been the only one, since it was on the other side of campus from all the dorms.
But thanks to tornado drills, I never had any nightmares about nuclear war. The nightmares were mostly about tornadoes. I wonder if anyone grew up in the midwest who didn’t have those.
The duck-and-cover drill that made me move from California back to Utah in 1990:
My daughter, in the second grade at the time, came home from school and told me they’d had “drill day” that day. She said, “We had a fire drill, an earthquake drill, and a drill for what to do when a man comes on the playground and shoots at us.”
When I was in junior high, we lived in the Philippines, and my sister and I attended a small inter-denominational school for missionaries’ kids. We didn’t have drills, but we did have an emergency plan for if rebels ever came and invaded the school. The plan involved a secret code to hide under our desks. I had doubts whether the guerillas would fail to notice us under the desk, and further doubts why we needed a code word and couldn’t just say “get under the desk.”
