A House with a Bomb Shelter? In Cloverdale?

In this day and age building houses with bomb shelters is pretty much non-existent. But what about during the world wars? Or threat of a cold war or nuclear attack from Russia back in the fifties and sixties?

Growing up, none of my friends lived in houses with bomb shelters. I knew of only one house in Cloverdale with a bomb shelter. I lived in it.

My father had our house built in 1962 on 182 Street, formerly Thomas Road. My mother grew up in Glasgow, Scotland. She remembers World War 2 and the sound of bombs dropping. It was probably this fear of being bombed that made her insist to my father that the new house have a bomb shelter built in it.

In my lifetime I've never known of another country waging war on Cloverdale and singling out this rural farming community as a bomb drop.

So there it was this cement bunker in our basement, accessed through the storage room beside the furnace and hot water tank. From an early age we understood that if bombs were dropping over Cloverdale we had to run down to the bomb shelter and take cover.

Fortunately no bombs ever descended on our part of town and our bomb shelter's usefulness kind of shifted to storing the Christmas decorations.

Sometime around 1970 my mother must have decided Cloverdale was unlikely to come under attack and decided the bomb shelter could be put to better use by having a sauna installed in there.

Forget bomb shelters. I'm sure we were probably the first house in Cloverdale to have a sauna installed in the basement. This was a good sized sauna too running half the length of our house. My mother still made sure we understood that if any bombs dropped on Cloverdale we were supposed to make a beeline for the sauna.

Like all things when the sauna was new my parents and their friends used it a lot but eventually lost interest. The storage room beside it became a spare bedroom and eventually my bedroom around 1973. I wasn't too excited about people tramping through my bedroom to access the sauna. Soon the sauna suffered the same fate as its bomb shelter predecessor and became storage for Christmas decorations and other items.

Our old house still stands and sometimes I wonder whatever became of the sauna/bomb shelter. The room really couldn't be used for much else other than a sauna or storage. Its underground, no windows, no access other than through my old bedroom. I suppose a new access to it could go through the old den. I keep hoping that one day the house will go up for sale and I'll call the agent to take a look. Not that I'd ever want to live there again, but I'm kind of curious about any renovations that have taken place in the past 25 years since my parents sold the house and whatever became of the old bomb shelter.