Wonderful to Play In

In a Los Angeles backyard one day last week, a panting publicity man led Actress Adele Mara past a cheering throng of Hollywood starlets, gift-laden advertisers and proud neighbors, and out into the bright glare of television lamps and popping flashbulbs. There she smiled winningly at the camera and scooped up a shovelful of light, sandy earth. The occasion: the groundbreaking, Hollywood-style, for Mrs. Ruth Colhoun's private A-bomb shelter.

Mrs. Colhoun, a divorcee with three children, was afraid, like many others on the West Coast, that an A-bomb attack would catch her napping. In hundreds of California backyards, sweating husbands and excited children were blistering their hands and straining their backs burrowing into the ground. Overnight, dozens of new construction firms appeared, offering everything from $13.50 foxhole shelters to luxurious $5,500 suites equipped with telephone, escape hatches, bunks, toilets and a Geiger counter. City switchboards were flooded with calls asking for shelter specifications. Newspaper ads exhorted home owners to buy "Life Safes . . . protection for you and your family against aerial attack."

Even city officials were thinking about going underground. Los Angeles city planners were looking into the possibility of making three proposed underground garages bombproof enough to shelter 90,000 people in an attack. The county board of supervisors ordered immediate construction of an $80,000 storage room for microfilm records, and tax assessors worked out new rates for dugout-equipped homes.

Whether the bombs dropped or not, Californians were sure that the shelters would come in handy. "It will make a wonderful place for the children to play in," beamed proud Mrs. Colhoun. "And it will be a good storehouse, too. I do a lot of canning and bottling in the summer, you know."

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