After the threat of the Cold War lessened, Civil Defense declined in activity and the signs and shelters were deemed out-of-date with changing protection standards. Some residents remember a sign outside Trinity Lutheran Church on the east end of Sturgis near the hospital and on other church facilities in the 1960s. Some fallout-shelter signs no longer hang on the buildings. The supplemental sign, barely readable, pointed people to the facility’s basement. In Burr Oak, the high school building “fallout shelter” could accommodate 100 people. A block to the east, the Sturgis post office was also an emergency shelter, although the capacity number sign long ago deteriorated.Īt the other end of the city, the former Sturgis Hospital, now known as Grobhiser Medical and Professional Building, had an admission of 140 residents. Two doors down, Sturgis Fire Department could offer protection to 90 people.

and the Soviet Union.Īt the former Sturgis High School, now Sturgis Central Commons, capacity was a sizable 370. Sturgis Journal headlines in 1958 frequently referenced missiles, the Cold War, the tension between the U.S. “People were building shelters in or behind their homes.” “I was 11, maybe 13 during the height of it,” Merkle said. Every time she would hear a plane - she was part of the civil defense - she’d grab her binoculars and recorded what she saw.”Īirplanes brought suspicion because it was a way to drop bombs on cities and towns. “A woman a mile down from us always had her binoculars. “Someone was always a designated spotter in town,” Merkle said, as he reflected on memories of the era. He remembers the school drills and the threat of nuclear or atomic catastrophe lurking in the news almost daily. A secondary sign stuck to the lower half of the sign usually denoted where the shelter was located, typically “In Basement.”ĭonald Merkle of Sturgis was a young teen during the Cold War era. The signs noted the capacity of the designated shelter area. The metal, mustard-yellow and silver-colored signs were designed in 1961 and hung on any public building that could offer underground protection against a nuclear event, including schools, hospitals, fire departments, post offices and churches.

Those who are old enough to remember the escalating Cold War crisis in the 1950s and 1960s, and the threat of nuclear attacks, remember handbooks mailed to homes by the Office of Civil Defense, the drills of hiding underneath school desks and knowing the location of the nearest nuclear fallout shelter. They are reminders of a bygone era, when the threat of nuclear catastrophe was on people’s minds almost daily.

Fallout shelter sign original