Here's a glimse at the craziness of growing up in Utah in the 50's:

In the early 1950's, the town fathers in Logan, no doubt inspired by the whole civil defense phase of the early cold war and the threat of an atomic attack, decided that every citizen should have their blood type tattooed under their arm. This was done so that in the looming circumstance that an attack has occurred and we're all lying in the street needing medical attention, the doctors wouldn't have to take the time to find out our blood type before proceeding with our life saving care, they would just have to look under our arm.

So, at 5 years old, I was marched into the basement of our ward house (which implies church sanction of the whole exercise), my finger was pricked to get a drop of blood for typing and then I stood in line to get the tattoo.

I have a vivid memory me standing with my left arm in the air in front of dozens of people, the buzzing of the tattoo device and my crying at the top of my lungs.

I thought this was something that happened to everyone until a physical exam years later resulted in a "what the hell is that?" I explained, the doctor gathered the rest of the staff to show them and I realized that it was not something that had happened to everyone of my age.

It turns out that it was done only in parts of Utah and Texas. It has come to be known as the "Atomic Tattoo" due to the connection to the fear of an atomic bomb attach. If you google "atomic tattoo," you will find an article from the local paper in Logan describing the proceedure (http://www.conelrad.com/atomicsecrets/secrets.php?secrets=11).

I did have some fun with it with my kids when they were little. It turns out that I must have jumped when the "+" was being drawn, it leans over and looks more like an "x". So, I would tell my kids that my nickname, "Ox," was tattooed under my arm and show them.

Did anybody else get the Atomic Tattoo?

First I ever heard of it. Makes some sense IF the threat was real. But how traumatic for little kids!!

Are you sure you weren't a member of the SS?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_blood_group_tattoo

Very creepy how similar.

Add: Sorry the SS connection was in that article. They even used the word "creepy". LOL



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/22/2013 02:34PM by crom.

that's my first thought as well!

my loyalty is my honor mein Fuhrer

My aunt from Logan has one.

Those were the circumstances.

I was a few years too late to know/hear of this this.

I do remember the "under the desk" drills/siren on Fridays. And the Fallout Shelter signs all over town.
And constant streams of propeller aircraft in and out of HAFB.

And (off topic) I remember the polio sugar cubes.

I'l have to ask dear old mum about this.... she's from northern Utah.

And a quick web search turned up this:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18280343

since this topic came around again. I did ask my mom a while back, she has one, and she said all the kids got them in school.

Yep...They also did it in Lake County Indiana. I got mine when I was 6.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/15/2014 05:24PM by Susan I/S.

got the CTR symbol tattooed on my right butt cheek. Does that count?

That gives a new meaning to choose the right.

That sounds kind of wild but consistent with the hysteria at the time....

On a similar note my combat boots I wore in Iraq still have the last four of my Social Security number and my blood type written on the sole with a sharpie and a dog tag laced across the tongue in the event my foot ever became separated from my body....

Certain countries military do the tatoo as well.

I was not tattooed, but I do have my small pox scars.

Duck! And Cover!

Never had anything like this, no nuclear drills, either, even though we were in the middle of four nuclear attack sites that the USSR would have targeted!

The Nazi SS used to require all their soldiers to have them, and on the same part of the body you described. My guess is someone remembered an idea they heard in the 1930s when the Mormons were BFF with the Nazi party.

The story I heard is that the idea was pushed by a German doctor living in Logan.

so a blood transfusion will cure deadly radiation exposure ?

Yep, scared me to death. I could hear the other kids crying and wondered what I was in for. My parents didn't give permission--maybe in those days stuff just happened without permission. Mine happened in Whiting, Indiana.

so getting a blood transfusion cures radiation sickness ?

maybe you will die slower.

Those were the same people who told Baby Boomers that they would be safe from a nuclear attack under a wooden desk, or that covering your neck would be enough to protect you if you were outside and didn't have time to get to a bomb shelter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyo3opAW4z0
Warning: NSFW due to language.

Nobody in my family ever had those tattoos, but the thing that scared the crap out of my mom was when the siren went off accidentally.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/29/2014 04:18AM by adoylelb.

Living in a remote area of the west, I never had to dive under my school desk. Ironically, the atomic age got me worse than the kids in the big cities. A fallout cloud or two from open-air tests drifted over our ranch. My 4-year old sister died of kidney failure, even though it didn't run in the family. I have no idea whether her death was coincidental with the radiation or if it could have been side effects from measles, or maybe she drank anti-freeze when no one was looking... But I will always wonder.

Obviously the blood type won't help you in the case of rad exposure, but for survivors of such an attack with a complete breakdown of infrastructure and support, taking one less thing that needs to be tested for out of the medical equation makes some sense.

Lets suppose that the 'attack' occured 6 months ago, and now your 10 year old has appendicitis, the traveling doctor, who is running out of supplies as is, now doesn't have to carry around a microscope to test for blood types, instead he looks at the kids tattoo and finds a few matches just in case enough blood is lost to warrant a transfusion.

As for the duck and cover: 2 fold, it makes people feel in control, like they can do something in response. This is far better than succumbing to blind terror and panic. Secondly, for those outside of the immediate incineration zones, there will still be a lot of debris being thrown around at high speeds and taking shelter from that could save your life in the short-term, even if you might have thyroid cancer or leukemia later on.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/29/2014 11:25AM by footdoc.

I'm all for having people's IQ tattooed on their forehead. It would save time on judging people when you first meet them. Would streamline coming to first impressions.

No, but I've had an atomic wedgie.

My father has a tattoo of his blood type under his arm. I think he said it was done during World War II, but I'm not sure. He grew up in Ogden, Utah.

my oldest brother, who was born in 1942, had his blood type tattooed under his left arm but I don't know what year it was done. My father had been in the army during WWII & Korea and my family moved around alot so I don't know where they were at the time it was done. I would imagine before 1949 because that's when my other brother was born and he didn't have one..

We didn't have to have them growing up in the 1960's near Idaho Falls. We were an hours drive from the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, a US nuclear weapons research and storage site, on the Arco desert.

We did have drills in grade school, if there was going to be a nuclear attack. We would kneel down under our desks, lol, and cover our heads with our hands. Like that was really going to help. Yikes!

It was as good as curling up and kissing our butts goodbye is what it really amounted to.

LOL, it was done in a Latter Day Saint church house? But getting a tattoo is a sin. Gordon B Hinkley would not be pleased.

One of my teachers just a few years older'n me had one.

I don't have any memories of duck and cover drills, and I've never heard of them from anyone who was a student in LAUSD (Los Angeles Unified School District) schools---or in the many private/parochial schools in the same area.

Ever since I first saw the "duck and cover" photos in LIFE magazine, I have puzzled about "why not"---because I lived in the center of a gigantic, geographically close and interconnected, complex of aerospace industry businesses (to the point where, when my Dad changed companies, he usually just moved down the street a bit).

If ANY schools in the nation were doing duck and cover, it SHOULD have been US.

When I worked at Litton Industries (beginning with assembling circuit boards for inertial guidance systems...I later moved to their purchasing department...which set me up for my later job as a purchasing clerk at Capitol Records), it was during a particularly fraught time in American/Soviet international relations, and all of us were remarkably sanguine about it...we just matter-of-factly accepted that, were atomic bombs to be dropped on the continental USA, "we" (the San Fernando Valley) were on the Top Five list of Soviet targets, so we (and our families and communities) would be vaporized from the git-go (though most families DID have family emergency plans in place "in case"---similar to the "Big One" earthquake emergency plans families have today).

We talked about our possible vaporization occasionally (from time-to-time), but not all that much unless international relations momentarily became even more fraught than they had been a short time earlier.

Mostly, I think, we just accepted that the chances were pretty good that our lives, and the lives of our families, might not be that long.

As I look back on it, it is incredibly difficult for me to believe how accepting we all were.

It was a VERY "different" time in American history.



Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 05/19/2015 01:56PM by tevai.