Grew up on a farm, but not far from a SAC base and one of the old ICBM missle silos. My father tasked me to use my summer vacation to dig a shelter hole next to our house, exposing the basement wall which we eventually put an entrance into it. About 6 weeks into the dig, I found a set of buried stone steps going to the foundation basement (and a few other artifacts). My father then brought in a family member with a backhoe and did 6 weeks of work in a day (Yes, I was PO'd). I then hauled stones from old stone fences and mixed cement while my father built the walls of the shelter. It became our root cellar (primarily), but would have worked fine as a fallout shelter.
visited the farm a couple years back. The farm house was torn down and a new house built, but the top entrance was still there and the shelter still existed. Pretty cool to see...
It was all academic in my case as well since we lived in southeastern Virginia near Norfolk, Langley AFB, the Naval station, Newport News Shipbuilding & Drydock, etc. Probably first strike territory anyway.
Reminds me of where I worked for ten years, in Mountain View, CA. The building was built for Sylvania in 1958, just a mile from Moffett Field NAS, on the south SF bay. The basement wasn't a fallout shelter, but a bomb shelter.
The company was GTE by 1997, when they sold the campus to a housing developer. The builder was going to demolish all the old buildings for townhouses.
This buildings basement walls protruded about three feet above ground, so they needed to come down. However, the walls were so thick and strong that the demo contractor could not touch them without explosives.
Since this was in the middle of a residential area, with an elementary school across the street, blasting was not an option. They had to alter the plans to account for the old bomb shelter. Instead of housing, they put a small park inside the basement walls.
As far as I know, those old walls still shelter the park.