The group gathered in the parking lot of Ladera Elementary School on Calle Almendro and broke into small groups that canvassed surrounding streets. “I’m hoping we find as many bomb shelters as have been rumored to be here,” professor Michaela Reaves said before nearly 20 students from her Cold War class set out on May 4. MORE: What to do in a nuclear explosion? Ventura County has a planĮxactly how many buyers chose the fallout shelters isn’t known, but a California Lutheran University history professor recently sent students knocking door-to-door on a Saturday morning in search of data. “H-BOMB? SURVIVE,” bellowed text below an image of a mushroom cloud in the 1961 ad, which touted Sunset Conejo and The Dales tracts as Southern California’s “only residential developments with fallout protection.”īuyers could opt in for “only $1,100,” the ad said, equating the optional shelters with basics like “your range, oven or disposal.” The starting price for the houses from developer Richard Doremus’ Exhibit Homes was less than $30,000. An ad in the Los Angeles Times wove concerns about nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union into the fabric of everyday suburbia. Two Thousand Oaks neighborhoods developed in the 1960s featured nuclear bomb shelters as an option for safety-conscious home buyers. The skull and femurs lying at the base of a shaft roughly 10 feet below a Thousand Oaks garage are plastic, perhaps leftovers from some Halloween tableau.īut the entrance they adorn - to an underground fallout shelter - stands as a reminder of Cold War fears of nuclear destruction that were hauntingly real. Watch Video: Peer into a Conejo Valley home's Cold War past
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