I was just a kid in 1960 but I remember well the fallout shelter craze, CONELRAD, and the ethical debate over the problem of unprepared neighbors. Your perspective shows that survival preparation is nothing new.
Since we go back that far, you must be familiar with Pat Frank’s “Alas Babylon” and the survival manual he wrote later. Also at the time Earl Stanley Gardner of Perry Mason fame published “How to Survive” in several issues of Field & Stream magazine. His favorite survival firearm was a .22 caliber handgun.
My favorite Pat Frank quote: “The day may come when a pound of tobacco is worth more than a pound of gold.”
***My favorite Pat Frank quote: “The day may come when a pound of tobacco is worth more than a pound of gold.”***
I remember when Kurt Saxon was on the Phil Donahue show. When asked about buying gold, she said that in a collapse of civilization gold will do you no good. Invest in sewing needles, he said.
But then, he was expecting a complete collapse back to the stone age.
Most of my books are of the old Fur-Fish Game types from the 1930s. Hunting, trapping, living off the land, ect.
Alas Babylon was the first novel (non school related) that I bought. I think that I paid $0.25 for the paperback. I later read his "Forbidden Area", and I was hooked on reading for life. Recently came across a reprint of Alas, and bought it and reread it. I was never aware of the survival manual, might look for it.
Bill Mauldin wrote a book (A Sort of a Saga) about his childhood in rural New Mexico, in the Ruidoso/Cloudcroft area.
He told of one episode in which a flood cut his area off from town, and the tobacco supply ran out.
It's been about 40 years since I read it, but as I recall the tobacco users went to some fairly extreme lengths to try to remedy the situation.