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Retro Book Installment No. 5


 
 Today's retro installment comes from a book I found at a garage sale about 2-3 weeks ago by Mechanix Illustrated's How To Do It Encyclopedia. This sweet old Polish woman named Harriet was telling me all about her life and talking about her husband right in front of me ("He's ok, but eh! What the hell?" she said with a Polish accent coming through.) She also told me to "use your brain" when thinking about kids in the future, who you pick as a husband, etc. Hilarious but perhaps sound advice from a seemingly near-90 year old woman.


 I'm assuming these were her husband's books he no longer cares about. They only had 2 of them and this one is Volume 14, "Sa through Sw", printed in 1961.

I also got an awesome 60s polyester dress from her which she says was her daughter's (that will make an appearance soon enough!), a bag, and some curtains which fit perfectly in a window here.


I saw the photo of this on the back of the book - look how hilarious this is! (My boyfriend commented that it looks like they're on Tatooine in this photo. Haha.)



 So obviously, the idea of nuclear war was a very real idea back in 1961 and a good idea to start planning out how you would construct one of these on your own, given the space and time. I don't know when anyone who had the money to construct one of these would have found the time to make one of these, but hey. I guess if you wanted to?


I love the detailed layout instructions right here. 


"General Specifications Recommended by the Office of Civil Defense". Wow. My boyfriend was reading over much of this and he says that much of the information about how nuclear radiation works in here is outdated.  Not sure if it's on this page, but there is part where they detail to construct your shelter with specific angles so the radiation doesn't come in. I'm not well-versed in any of this, but he says radiation doesn't work like that and you'd be out of luck either way, build "correctly" or not.

 And look how proud the man in the middle is here! The women are like, "Dear God... do we really have to live here?" Does a radio or TV work underground like this so they can hear if it's safe to go outside?

Clearly I know nothing about fallout shelters, but I definitely enjoyed reading these pages as I hope, did you.

Yes, I am back! I had a few personal issues going on ( turns out I'm NOT moving from my awesome house... yet.) And I have a few more fashion creations to post on the blog (including my new fall jacket about 7 months in the making - yikes! and the cloud dress that I learned the super-hard way to hand-baste the zipper into it.)

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