Atomic Sex Symbols

1952 - YB - 60 bomber, photo: courtesy of James Vaughan/x-ray delta one

The strategic bomber! The YB-60 Bomber was something of a less successful precursor of the iconic Boeing B-52 Stratofortress, but still - what an outstanding shot!! Both aircraft were long-range, subsonic, jet-powered strategic bombers, forever associated with the Cold War.

1954 - Miss Atomic Test, Las Vegas Photo: courtesy of James Vaughan / x-ray delta one

Ummm... errr... uh, as you can see, this particular atom bomb test was, umm... hugely successful *cough*

The Red Phone at Strategic Air Command, head-quartered near Omaha, Nebraska, alerts nuclear bomber and missile crews in event of war. The individual buttons light as bases respond.



A 1955 Convair ad proclaiming the Nation's protective military defense:

"All over America these days the blast of supersonic flight is shattering the old familiar sounds of city and countryside. At U.S. Air Force bases strategically located near key cities our Airmen maintain their round the clock vigil, ready to take off on a moment's notice in jet aircraft like Convair's F-102A all-weather interceptor. Every flight has only one purpose - your personal protection!"



In stark contrast - did you know a nuclear bomber went down on U.S. soil? This photo shows the MK 39 nuclear bomb retrieved after the 24 January 1961 Goldsboro B-52 crash. The weapon's parachute deployed, resulting in a soft landing and the weapon being recovered intact.


The YB-49 Flying Wing - at the time it promised to be the symbolic next big step in the future of aviation. It was simply an idea too far ahead of its time to become the ultimate jet-powered strategic bomber of the Atomic Age. It took another age, the Computer Age, to help the flying wing concept to finally obtain it's goal.

Men On Guard! The Unicorn Book of 1953

No self-respecting fighter jet pilot would be caught in front of the camera without the latest advancement in military issue pressure suit - now available with figure flattering two-way stretch!


And that ultimate symbol of the Cold War, the looming Mushroom Cloud, circa 1953.

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Fall Out Shelters are "In"

photo: courtesy of James Vaughan/x-ray delta one

Here we are in American Suburbia. The kids are playing outside in the backyard with smiling Mother looking on. She knows that if the imminent threat of atomic annihilation should rear its ugly head, she has peace of mind thanks to good ol' American ingenuity - the family fall out shelter! She's ready to survive any menace.

No, no, no... that is not what we mean by surviving the nuclear menace! Let's try this again...

photo: U.S. Governement photography

Here we go! Now this is what your ideal fallout shelter would have looked like as envisioned in the early 1950's. It may not have quite the same appeal, but ummm... that's Life. In here, protected from the airborn effects of an atomic blast you would live with your family. Once you had your shelter structure completed and stocked, you could rest with some peace of mind. The family "foxhole" was much more convenient, practical and reliable than trying to reach a public shelter in times of emergency.

An example of a public fallout shelter as depicted on the January 1962 cover of LIFE magazine.

The public shelter. Crowded, no privacy, and probably has only one working bathroom on a good day. And wouldn't you know it? That nosey neighbor lady from down the corner is here to indulge you with her non-stop company for the next several weeks, prattling on about begonias and her gall-stone operation.

The Mrs: "Henry! I told you we should have built our own family shelter instead of wasting your time down at the pool hall, you lazy lummox!"
Hubby: "Yes Dear."

A swanky high-rise shelter; photo: courtesy of James Vaughan/x-ray delta one

A very stylin' backyard shelter as portrayed by the publishers of Fawcett Books.

The family fallout shelter would usually have been built by the home owner as sort of a do it yourself project, and the whole concept of "do-it-yourself" was quite the popular thing to do in those days.

The Family Fallout Shelter @ nebraskastudies.org states that according to civil defense authorities, a concrete block basement shelter could be built as a do-it-yourself project for $150 to $200. Exactly how much protection they actually afforded was an open question — one that, thankfully, no one has had to test.... yet.

Pre-fab shelter; Photo: courtesy of James Vaughan / x-ray delta one

In fact, if you had the money or were simply a lazy lummox like poor Henry, you could even order a pre-fabricated fall out shelter. Just dig the trench and in she goes!

Pre-fab shelter; photo: courtesy of James Vaughan / x-ray delta one

It was recommended that people stay in the shelter full time for at least 14 days after a nuclear blast. Families with children were advised to stock their shelter with recreational materials to break the monotony. Monopoly games were popular. Other suggested items included playing cards and diaries to keep a record of one's stay.

Photo: courtesy of James Vaughan / x-ray delta one

Be equipped, be organized and be prepared. Life in the fall out shelter was basically approached like you would a long family camp out, only you were isolated underground and you wouldn't be roasting marshmallows.

Photo: courtesy of James Vaughan / x-ray delta one

What would you do? Do you have a plan? What would you do if you were committing to protect you and your family with dead-certainty that atomic warfare was eminent?

Photo: courtesy of James Vaughan / x-ray delta one

And hopefully, when the all's-clear is given, and it's time to open that hatchway... there will be a mid-century modern world to return to.

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The Uranium Rush is On!

Photo: courtesy of James Vaughan / x-ray delta one

Let's do a little prospecting! After decades of being considered as a waste product of vanadium mining, worthy of nothing more than a tossing in the scrap piles, Uranium ore suddenly came into demand as a key element for nuclear weaponry. 

Photo: courtesy of gair_dunlop

In 1949, the rush was on. The U.S. Government launched the first federally-sponsored mineral rush in history. The Colorado Plateau, more specifically the Four Corners area (where Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico all meet), was swarmed by prospectors in the greatest ore search since the gold fever days of the wild west.

All prepackaged and ready to go. Here's a vintage do-it-yourself prospecting kit - not for finding little trinkets of gold but for highly valuable Uranium ore! Ideally, you'd probably want a little more than this novelty kit has to offer. But hands down, a reliable Geiger counter or radiation detector was an absolute must. Anything else you could use was already available for cheap as war surplus.




In 1949 the boom was roaring! Any one able-bodied enough and daring enough to head out west with a Geiger counter in hand and dreams of riches in their head was prospecting for atomic age riches. See blog.Modern.Mechanix.com for oodles more articles of the Great Uranium Boom.

And what of all this uranium ore? What did it have to do with the threat of of atomic fallout on Mr. Everyman and Mrs. Everywoman? The unquenchable hunger for uranium ore was for the sole purpose of producing nuclear warheads, which were aimed right between the eyes of those who were also aiming their atomic arsenals at us. Without getting into the politics of it all, quite simply and against all the odds, the mad stalemate obviously stood.

So, its been a long day's work of sweating under the desert sun and getting rich from your haul of ore. Who wouldn't want to settle down after the night's dinner, relax by the glow of your cook stove and enjoy a lively round of the "Uranium Rush" board game? Maybe you could give your pack-mule companion a head start just to make things fair.

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Everything the Junior Atomic Scientist Could Want

"Hey Mom! Can I have my very own atomic science laboratory and play with alpha particles in my bedroom? I promise to use it on the dog like last time" Maybe, but it looks like no good can come out of atomic power being put in to the lap of this child. But that's just what happened back in the 1950's thanks to the genius's at A. C. Gilbert Company.


I'm not sure if Mother is completely buying the whole "harmless" line, but I bet Dad can't wait to get it away from Junior's hands!


And here it is, the Gilbert Atomic Energy Lab - highly sought after and covetted by Dad and Junior alike. A.C. Gilbert Co. sold this kit from 1950-51, for $49.50 (kind of steep for a toy set!) which included the following highly scientific components:

• U-239 Geiger-Mueller radiation counter
• Electroscope - to measure radioactivity of different substances
• Spinthariscope - to watch "live" radioactive disintegration
• Wilson Cloud Chamber - to see paths of electrons & alpha particles at 12,000 mps
• Three very low-level radioactive sources - Alpha, Beta, Gamma
• Four samples of Uranium-bearing ores
• Nuclear Spheres - used to build models of molecules
• The book "Prospecting for Uranium"
• The "Gilbert Atomic Energy Manual"
• The comic book "Learn How Dagwood Splits the Atom"
• Three "Winchester" Batteries - size "C"

Geesh! What a mouthful. Just repeating the names of some of these components is guaranteed to boost your I.Q. by 10%! My brother didn't have the Atomic Lab kit, but he did have a Gilbert chemistry set that included the 'spinthariscope' for viewing radioactive decay. When this kit finally was passed down to me I remember treating the scope with extreme caution. I was smart enough at an early age to know that radioactivity wasn't a plaything to be taken lightly!

And if Junior should ever get bored with his alpha particles, he could always go out and do some urnaium prospecting, to build up his atomic pile.


Science so simple that even Dagwood can teach you how to split the atom. I wonder how many U.S. nuclear physicists today got their start by reading this material?


There's that "harmless" word again.... and Mother still isn't buying it. "Absolutely not, Jimmy! I've just gotten these floors scrubbed and the laundry all put away. I will not have you messing-up this home with any radioactive fallout."

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The Derby Tradition is a Family Tradition

Brother's 1957 Pinewood Derby Car

As some of you may know by now, Junior is active in the Scouts. Really active...

So far we've (because the dad's are supposed to be partners with their boys) been to weekend camp outs with several thousand other scouts, a couple parties, and a banquet with entertainment performed with Junior's help. He's helped clean a lake, studied science, nature, geology, history and how to properly respect the Flag. For a month he had to follow an excercise routine and show steady improvement. He can now read a map. Recently he's taken classes in First Aid and knows how to treat everything from snakebite to shock to performing the Heimlich Maneuver on a choking victim. I've been lucky not to have any of these performed on me yet!

This past weekend Junior participated in an annual event which has become a tradition with young American boys since the mid 1950's. It's his Scout Pack's Pinewood Derby. It's not his first derby – he's got two church-sponsored events under his belt – but this is his first time to have the grand experience where it all began, with the Scouts.

Page 59 in the October 1954 issue of Boys Life magazine, featuring the story of the first pinewood derby race

The first pinewood derby was the idea of Don Murphy, a Cub master in Manhattan Beach, California, back in 1953. His young son who was a cub scout who wanted in the worst way to try soapbox car racing which was a popular hobby with older boys at the time. Soapbox involved building a homemade car to compete in a sponsored race downhill. Since Don's son was a bit too young for soapbox, the Cub master came up with the idea of building miniature cars for all his scouts to race. He had his scouts and their fathers together shape cars from wood. Some fathers built a 31-foot race ramp with two lanes and a battery-run finish line made from doorbells and rigged with red and white lights to identify the winner.

Fifty-five Cub Scouts participated in that first Pinewood Derby race in 1953 and the event was a hit – not only with the young scouts, but their dads too (imagine that!).

This is an example of a Soapbox Derby racer which inspired the Scouts Pinewood Derby racers. Soapbox competitions were very popular in the 1950's, the one shown above was built by a cousin.

Like wildfire it grew and thanks to publicity provided by Boys Life magazine, spread to packs all over the country. Within a year the pinewood derby was adopted for use in all Cub Scout packs. By 1955 an official supplier was found to make ready-to-build kits containing nails, wheels and a block of white pine to carve anyway the young builder could imagine. From the start, Don intended the derby cars to be done as a father/son project, too. It grew, the annual races went from being a side event to becoming their own premier event. And generally the rules for the competition have stayed the same as Don Murphy had first laid them down.

Brother (playing the jug) and his Scout Den, circa 1957

All this means that when my own brother was a Cub Scout in 1957, the derby was still a fairly new deal, he was lucky to participate in the big event. Dad had helped him shape the body by taking it to work with him and using the electric equipment of the sign shop... Good ol' Dad! How did he do? He walked away with the bragging rights to First Place in "Best of Show." The trophy was simply a typewritten "plaque glued to a wooden base painted silver, but it was still a big deal to win it!

Junior's modern derby car kit

From what I've been able to piece together, the derby car kits themselves perhaps changed the most over the years. First the original wood block was changed to a length of 7" even. Some sources say around 1973 the block swapped its height for width, resting the wider dimension flat so as to resemble modern racer designs more closely. In 1977, the wooden struts were moved to the axle position used today, and then removed completely in 1980, leaving a solid pine block. The big notch cut out of the block for the "cockpit" would also eliminated. The wheels also changed from skinny wheels to a wider tread around this time.

And what does all that mean? It means when I was a Webelos scout in the 70's, that my derby car was a bit of the old mixed with the new. When Dad asked how I wanted to design it I said I wanted it to look just like my big brother's car from 17 years earlier... I had a big case of envy for that thing. So we shaped it together in Dad's workroom on a sanding wheel. It was one of my first experiences working with dad using big power tools. When all was done, I had my dream car. And when comparing cars at the next den meeting I was also the only scout in my den with a 50's style racer! But it looked good in it's shiny blue paint and a racing stripe down the center made of metallic tape. I even accessorized it with a pair of exhaust pipes taken off a toy car. It left some of the other kids filled with the envy bug because when we next met up the night of the race, they'd tricked-out their own racers too!

On derby night the whole Pack met, all the Cub and Webelos scouts in our neighborhood, which maybe amounted to no more than a dozen or so kids all together. Our pack was small! I was feeling very proud and optimistic, that is until much to my horror, the cool exhaust detailing on my derby car had to be snapped off because they extended out too far for the race track. So much for showing-off the best-looking car! By the way, our raceway was very, very simple compared to Don Murphy's back in '53. The track ramp was fashioned from a couple of plywood planks sloping straight out for about 16 feet. And there were no electric lights to at the bottom to indicate the first car to reach the finish, it was all eyeballed by volunteers. And I'm still grumbling because I'd swear that my racer beat that other kid's to the finish line first! Oh well.... it was sudden death elimination in those days. My derby days were over before they barely got started... the story of my life!

Now fast forward to the present. 53 years after the very first pinewood derby began by a Cub leader, Don Murphy. By now more than 90 million Pinewood Derby car kits have been sold since. And the event has long become synonymous with the Scouts. Saturday afternoon Junior finally got his opportunity to compete with almost 40 fellow racers (at the very same church activity center where, some umpteen years ago, I was doing the same thing with my scout pack in fact). He proudly showed off his racer, the one that both his dad (me!) and uncle helped him build. For today's meet, a computer was used to automatically keep tabs on each racers time. The brand new derby track was around 40 feet long, a perfectly smooth aluminum construction officially sanctioned by the Scouts... and with electric sensor beams at the finish line. Each and every racer got to complete in at least 4 heats, once in each of the four lanes, so as to be as perfectly accurate and fair as possible. It's all about the kids having fun.

Junior had a blast.

Junior's Big Day at the Pinewood Derby

By the way, those TWO trophies that Junior brought home at the end of the day? They definitely were not fashioned out of a couple of small wooden blocks painted silver ;)

- - -

Are you interested in more? For more on the beginnings of the very first derby, Pinewood Derby History is a great place to start.

Pinewood Derby Times has a nice timeline explaining the changes made to the derby car kit since the Fifties.

What's in Your Backyard?

So the Jones' are at it again. So they think that the new swing set they had installed for little Timmy is the best in the whole neighborhood, eh? And now Jone's keeps rubbing it in how sorry your own Junior's tire-swing is. Well you'll show HIM who should do the bragging... Just wait until the delivery truck brings this to your front door!

It wasn't supposed to be an ongoing series, but I have an update to my posts last summer on the influence of Mid-Century design and fads on children's playground equipment. But this has to be added! The very retro-looking robot slide above was taken from an manufacturer's catalog dated to the 1970's, obviously still influenced by the space-madness of the 50's and 60's. If you Google "robot playground" it appears that there's still one or two surviving examples hopefully still out there intriguing young and old alike today. So sad that a bunch of busy-bodies had to tear down most all this wonderful equipment from our city parks and school playgrounds as being unsafe. Silly adults!

But on to the link that I've included! Along with Giganta there's a rocket slide, lunar lander and a very Trekkie looking starship jungle gym. Now I'm not exactly sure where these images were originally posted, but I've seen this catalog first at Retro Playground Equipment @ Plaid Stallions along with other swell examples of jungle gyms shaped like castles, tugboats and a few which, umm, may be hard to describe.

The Divine Caroline.com article has a large number of additional images: rocket slides, barrel runs... all kinds of goodies to get the inner-child all excited. So just follow the link if you're ready for more. But be warned - there's much packed on this site in 3-parts... 70's Playgrounds @ DivineCaroline.com

The Big One-Oh

So... I haven't been seen too much in recent days, but I have a good excuse. Yesterday the formerly 9-year old Junior turned double digits - the big one as in the Big One-Oh (pssst... that'd be Ten-years old, btw)!

You'll be happy to know that he's been living it up on this monumentally big occasion, and that his Pop (that'd be me) is surviving fairly well, with all things considered. Junior started off his big day with a pancake breakfast in bed. Next he was forced to watch home movies of his original birth day from exactly ten years ago (muah-ha-ha!). Then we had a day at the waterpark followed by a night of video games (yes, he's earned it). We wrapped up the festivities last night by braving mosquito hordes to laze away in our over-sized kid pool while watching the moon and the lightning bugs dancing overhead.

Today we're headed to the lake. And tomorrow, if I can hang on that long, were aiming to go to the RR Days event up in Omaha.

Three days, three full days of fun-filled kid-excitement and thrills... what on earth was I thinking? =O

If you don't hear back from me again by Monday, send a rescue team - please!

= = =

So where's the vintage connection I'm supposed to make with this blog??? Worry not... Here's a few favorite pics from the family album of birthdays past...


Brother Dear's birthday goodies: A Merry-go-Round cake (probably made by Grandma) a gumball machine, a dump truck and a nifty tin machine gun!


Sis's baby doll cake, also likely made by Grandma... she was a cake designing genius!


A Snoopy-themed birthday party for the future Space Commander! Is there nothing in this poloroid shot that doesn't just scream "Seventies" at you?