Flinching at the jangle of his office phone, Ray Toland, president of Los Angeles' Nuclear Survival Corp. last week explained to a visitor his current sales policy. Said Toland: "I have to be blunt and ask, 'Are you serious or just inquiring?' I haven't got time any more to tell people what fallout is." As a result of the Berlin crisis, builders and salesmen of nuclear fallout shelters all across the U.S. last week found themselves with more business than they could handle.
In Boston one builder lost a $780 contract because he couldn't start digging a small shelter for a panicky citizen the very next day. In Dallas, the Acme Bomb & Fallout Shelters Co. anticipated $100,000 worth of orders in its first month of operation. In Orlando, Fla., Shelter Builder Douglas Bartholow observed: "For two years I've starved in this business. But since Kennedy's defense talk, I've averaged two sales a day at $2,195 each."
Biggest activity in the shelter business" has been in California—a phenomenon apparently due in equal measure to the state's unusual concentration of bomb-conscious scientists and to its even greater concentration of those who, whatever is being done, want to be the first to do it. Fox Hole Shelter, Inc., offshoot of a swimming-pool firm that got into shelters two years ago by turning its original product upside down, has already sold 236 Fox Holes from San Luis Obispo to San Diego. Sacramento's Atlas Bomb Shelter is starting to merchandise a 35-ton prefab model for six that, depending on excavation costs, will sell for between $5,000 and $6,000. "We haven't done any advertising yet," crows Atlas' Boss Frank Ringer, "but even so, there's so much demand we can hardly keep up with it."
The Suede-Shoe Problem. Many of the shelter sales are going to solidly established concerns such as Chicago's Wonder Building Corp., whose shelter division is headed by former U.S. Civil Defense Chief Leo A. Hoegh. Says Hoegh: "We, have already sold 5,000 shelters this year, and our volume must now be ten-to fifteenfold over a year ago." Wonder Building offers four all-steel models ranging from $395 to $995. With one plant already working around the clock, Wonder will open a second Chicago factory this week, is laying plans for others in Ontario and on the West Coast.
Inevitably, the infant industry is faced with what one Los Angeles shelterman describes as "the problem of keeping out the suede-shoe boys and the siding salesmen." Says an Atlanta builder: "One firm ran an ad selling shelters at $450. The thing was 7½ by 7½ and not anywhere near Civil Defense specifications, though they claimed it was."
To add to the confusion, builders claim that in some areas, high financing charges and the practice of counting shelters as property improvements (thereby increasing tax assessments) are scaring off potential customers. In Los Angeles, pre-nuclear building codes generally prevent builders from installing septic tanks, which many of them believe to be the only sensible sanitation device for shelters.
More Than a Hole. The U.S. Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization has set forth clear specifications on what is—and what is not—a proper fallout shelter.*