Such memories! LOL!
Along about 1960 I bicycled to a friend’s house in my neighborhood and a backhoe was busy digging up their back yard. I asked my friend if they were getting a pool and he said no, they were getting a fallout shelter.
Later I asked my dad (a WWII vet) if he was going to put in a shelter too.
He said, “What house are you talking about exactly?” When I told him, he said, “We don’t need a shelter, because I have a gun and if we ever need a shelter, I know where to get one.”
Grew up on a farm, but not far from a SAC base and one of the old ICBM missle silos. My father tasked me to use my summer vacation to dig a shelter hole next to our house, exposing the basement wall which we eventually put an entrance into it. About 6 weeks into the dig, I found a set of buried stone steps going to the foundation basement (and a few other artifacts). My father then brought in a family member with a backhoe and did 6 weeks of work in a day (Yes, I was PO'd). I then hauled stones from old stone fences and mixed cement while my father built the walls of the shelter. It became our root cellar (primarily), but would have worked fine as a fallout shelter.
visited the farm a couple years back. The farm house was torn down and a new house built, but the top entrance was still there and the shelter still existed. Pretty cool to see...