The People: Ready to Act

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In Chicago, the plush Lake Shore Club tested its $35,000 fallout shelter, held a practice alert that sent 150 members and employees to the basement bowling alleys, where they obediently stretched out supine across the lanes. Said Manager Byford Troutt: "Our members have been asking us to do something like this. So have our employees. We've already stocked enough food for 500 people for 15 days, 13,000 gallons of drinking water in one of our basement swimming pools, plus medical supplies, chiefly morphine and burn medications."

Cancer Insurance. Everywhere in the U.S., the possibility of war was the top topic of discussion. Said Atlanta Constitution Editor Eugene Patterson: "Now people who call me, people who write letters, people I talk with on the street, speak mostly about war and bomb shelters and where they ought to go and what ought to be done and what's going to happen. These are gut concerns.''

But concern and panic are far different things, and there were none of the usual signs of panic, such as food hoarding, job absenteeism and dramatic stock market plunges. Neither was there any unusual rush to the psychiatrist's couch. Reported A. G. Cook, director of San Francisco's Disaster Corps: "I'd say that people's attitude is very serious, but not frightened. The people who come into our office for information have the attitude of, well, if we're going to have trouble, let's be ready for it."

Said Washington, D.C., Housewife Jane Cleveland, inquiring about how to build a fallout shelter: "It's like cancer insurance. I don't expect it to hit my family, but I'm going to be prepared." Said the Rev. Francis L. Filas, head of the theology department of Chicago's Loyola University: "My students talk about these things every day. It seems the news keeps getting worse. But these students aren't basically pessimistic. There's a lot of goodness and strength in them."

Last week just such strength expressed the nation's will in even more activist forms. In Santa Barbara, 23 "survival groups" joined the "Minute Man" vigilante organization, swelled its membership to 2,400, enthusiastically began an elaborate program to train themselves as guerrilla fighters. They have caches of water in the California hills, 100 rounds of ammunition for every weapon they own. Their aim: to survive, and to fight the Russians if they should attempt to land in the U.S. after a nuclear attack. Tree-loving scientists recommended supplies of pine seeds in every shelter, to reforest the post-atomic world (see SCIENCE). In that same spirit, 15 young Chicagoans, aged 18 to 20, recently fell into a bull session at the Brentano playground. The talk came round to Berlin and the whole war crisis—and by last week, as a direct result of that session, all 15 had enlisted in either the Army or the Marine Corps.

And while a few pundits wrung their hands or threw them up altogether, the nation's press as a whole expressed the nation's mood in the tones of a Hartford, Conn., Courant editorial: "We must be ready to act, no matter what the cost. We must be ready to act alone if need be. And we must act swiftly, with strength and purpose."