You can still see Robert W. Blakeley’s ominous signs on old public buildings, rusted metal relics of an age when nuclear war was a clear and present danger. They marked the way to the fallout shelters where millions of Americans were to take refuge from the deadly radioactivity of thermonuclear explosions.
A half-century ago, the bright orange-yellow and black placards were ubiquitous on courthouses, town halls, schools and other shelters packed with canned goods and water supplies to sustain anywhere from 50 to thousands of people for days or weeks. To many, they represented hope for survival amid the destruction of cities. To others, they symbolized the insanity of war and the folly of defenses against nuclear attack.
But to Mr. Blakeley, the 1.4 million fallout shelter signs he produced for the Army Corps of Engineers in 1961 were just a routine job, soon forgotten as he moved on to other tasks, never dreaming his utilitarian creation would become America’s most visible symbols of the Cold War.
Mr. Blakeley died on Wednesday at 95 at Brookdale Southside, a senior living community in Jacksonville, Fla., his daughter, Dorothy Carver, said.
It was the time of the Berlin crisis, when fears of a nuclear holocaust, and survival mania, reached a fever pitch in America. Newspaper articles detailed the killing effects of Soviet nuclear weapons. Children learned to “duck and cover” in schools. Homeowners built shelters in basements and backyards, and the morality of private shelters accessible to privileged families became a raging national debate.
On television, “The Twilight Zone” depicted friends and neighbors in fear of an imminent nuclear attack fighting over access to one family’s shelter. A Life magazine cover featured the alarming image of a man in a “civilian fallout suit” and the headline “How You Can Survive Fallout: 97 of 100 People Can Be Saved.” The government issued a 46-page pamphlet, “Fallout Protection: What to Know and Do About Nuclear Attack.”
President John F. Kennedy’s public fallout shelter program was intended to ease the nation’s anxieties, but its very announcement terrified many Americans. “We have another sober responsibility,” the president told the nation on July 25, 1961, “to recognize the possibilities of nuclear war in the missile age, without our citizens knowing what they should do and where they should go if the bombs begin to fall.”
The program began with a nationwide survey by the Army Corps of Engineers to identify shelter sites. But signs for the public to find the sites apparently occurred to no one at the White House, the Pentagon or the Corps of Engineers. Almost as an afterthought, Maj. Gen. Keith R. Barney, the deputy chief of engineers, posed the matter to Mr. Blakeley, the director of administrative logistics support function.
In plainer language, Mr. Blakeley was one of those important but anonymous civil servants down the chain of command where the buck really stops. He had been a civilian manager for the corps for five years, in charge of administrative work for some 60 harbor, river and other military construction projects.
And in a lifetime of memorable experiences — he was a combat veteran of World War II and the Korean War, and would eventually meet Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Jimmy Carter in the course of his duties and become president of Toastmasters International — the shelter signs seemed, as he put it, “no big deal.”
“Like so many other things in life, you solve a problem and go on to the next thing,” he said in a telephone interview for this obituary from his home in Jacksonville in 2014. “I must have just wiped it out of my mind.”
Robert Wilson Blakeley was born in Ogden, Utah, on Aug. 30, 1922, one of four children of Robert G. and Elsie Jean Wilson Blakeley. He attended public schools and Weber Junior College (now Weber State University) in Ogden, and studied for a year at Utah State University.
He joined the Marine Corps in 1943 and was a sergeant major in the Fourth Marine Division invasion of Iwo Jima in 1945, one of the bloodiest battles of World War II. He was recalled to duty in the Korean War in 1951 and 1952.
His first marriage, to Jean Brown in the 1940s, ended in divorce. In 1952 he married Dorothy McArthur. She died in 1992. Besides their daughter, Dorothy, they had a son, Robert, who died at age 36. In 2003, he married Irene Allan Davis. In addition to her and his daughter, Mr. Blakeley is survived by three grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
Mr. Blakeley studied landscape architecture at the University of California at Berkeley, graduating in 1954. After two years with the Veterans Administration, he joined the Army Corps of Engineers in 1956. To improve his speaking, he joined Toastmasters in 1958. He became its international president for 1976-77.
Given responsibility for the fallout shelter project, he decided that for durability, the signs would be made of metal, and that the colors and design would be simple and eye-catching, even in the dark chaos of a city under attack.
“It would have to be usable in downtown New York City, Manhattan, when all the lights are out and people are on the street and don’t know where to go,” Mr. Blakeley told Bill Geerhart, a blogger on Cold War topics, for an oral history that appeared on the website Conelrad Adjacent in 2006. The sign, he said, “had to be something that would get people’s attention and give them direction to the location.”
After experimenting with reflective paint in the basement of his Virginia home, he chose orange-yellow and black for the primary colors, and drew the sign as his children watched over his shoulder. The graphic design was suggested by Blair Inc., of Fairfax, Va., and was probably inspired by “Hornung’s Handbook of Designs and Devices,” published in 1932 and updated in 1946.
What he came up with entailed three bright, inverted equilateral triangles joined at the center on a round black background, with shelter capacity circled near the base, followed by the words “Fallout Shelter” in large block capitals and directional arrows .
The details were approved by Powell Pierpoint, special assistant to the secretary of the Army. Mr. Blakeley recommended that the Army accept bids by Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, for 400,000 large exterior signs, and Alfray Products of Coshocton, Ohio, for a million smaller interior signs. The total cost was $700,000.
They were put into production, and Mr. Blakeley unveiled the first prototype (capacity 1,730) at the Westchester County Office Building in White Plains on Oct. 4, 1961. Over decades, the signs proliferated as commercial and apartment buildings joined government sites as shelters — 230,000 sites in New York City alone, civil defense officials estimated.
And as the Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam War and the buildup of nuclear arsenals raised the stakes, the Blakeley signs became counterculture icons of the Cold War, mock symbols of apocalypse bobbing in antiwar protests, featured in films and television dramas and plastered on campaign buttons, refrigerator magnets and album covers, like Bob Dylan’s 1965 classic “Bringing It All Back Home.”
But as the Cold War passed without nuclear calamity, federal funding and interest in the shelters faded, their signs rusted and, in 1980, Mr. Blakeley retired from government service, his omens of Armageddon all but forgotten or, where they still remained on buildings, ignored.
When his children were young, he told Mr. Geerhart, “We’d go down the street, and one of the kids would say, ‘Hey, Dad, there’s one of your signs.’ But, you know, other than that it’s just like many of the other things that happen in life. It’s just one of those routine things.”
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