Northampton has a Cold War stockpile - Allentown Morning Call

In the 1950s, the federal government equipped the building to be transformed into a 200-bed emergency hospital in the event of nuclear war. In the basement and attic of the big banquet hall on Laubach Avenue in Northampton there are still stacks of supplies that can turn the building into an Armageddon hospital.

The boxes are still there, but the apocalypse was called off decades ago.

A curling piece of paper labels one wooden crate "United States Government Property." The letters CD inside a triangle mark it for Civil Defense use. That logo, once as recognizable as the Nike swoosh, went away before the collapse of the Soviet Union all but eliminated the threat.

The date on the box is Sept. 10, 1958.

In those days, "We knew the Russians were going to attack," said borough Secretary LeRoy Brobst. But by the time he started working for the Public Works Department in 1966, the boxes were already collecting dust.

The biggest one contains an electric generator. On it, a label warns "Do Not Unpack This Crate." And as far as Brobst knows, nobody has.

Inspectors from one office or another used to come through to take inventories, but that was years ago.

No one at the borough office knows exactly what's there. Borough Manager Gene Zarayko says it's not borough property and the county's emergency management office was the last to take inventory.

Other municipalities say they've gotten rid of their Cold War supplies of crackers, water and blankets. Northampton hasn't thrown its away because it belongs to the federal government and because some of it — old blankets and cots — could still serve a purpose, Zarayko said.

The county's emergency management services got rid of all the disposable stuff years ago, he said.

The borough's medical implements are unique, said Nick Tylenda, Northampton County Emergency Management Services' deputy director for emergency management. During the Cold War, the federal government selected sites across the country to serve as emergency hospitals in case of a nuclear attack. One was the Northampton Borough Memorial Community Center.

Tylenda still gets the occasional phone call from a municipal employee about a hidden war chest of old bomb shelter supplies. Tylenda tells them to throw the stuff away.

"I keep some stuff for hysterical or historical value," he said. For example, Tylenda says he sometimes for a joke hands out old sugar tablets from bomb shelter kits.

In Northampton, the emergency supplies sit in the basement like museum pieces.

They are something of a rarity, said David Hoover, curator of the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in Albuquerque, N.M.. Hoover's museum collects Cold War artifacts, including bomb shelter implements. Most of it, he said, begins with the Kennedy administration in the 1960s, when the Cuban Missile Crisis made the potential for nuclear Armageddon seem more immediate. During Eisenhower's presidency, there were national plans for civil defense, but they were less comprehensive, Hoover said.