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Secret Cold War bunker
probably built to protect
President Kennedy |
Larry Millwood is one of the few people who knew how it had looked. In 1961, he and his fellow Seabees were sent on the classified task of finishing the interior of the bunker. Now a 56-year-old marketing representative in Columbia, S.C., Millwood still remembers it well:
The descending hallway of round corrugated metal — much like a big sewer pipe — leading to the heart of the shelter. And the portable generator tucked away in the corner, which Millwood painted as a teen-age Navy reservist.
"When you turn left, you turn into a shower area that was a decontamination area," he recalled aloud, as though he were walking through it again. "From there you proceeded on into the main room. We just partitioned it off and made rooms out of it. There were portable potties in there, and bedrooms, and just kind of an open area."
From the ceiling hung thick pipes for the air filtration system. There was room for a communications system, and in the back, a 25-foot ladder leading straight up to an escape hatch.
Millwood and his fellow Seabees finished off the interior of the bunker by painting redwood stain molding around the room — to give it a homey feeling. They didn't think much about it ever having to be used. "It looked very good when we finished," he said. And it looks good now, although probably not very authentic.
The maritime museum has painted a giant presidential seal on the hard gray floor, and there's an Oriental rug under a set of bunkbeds. The main room is not partitioned. There's a few lockers and a hardwood desk flanked by flags. There's also a television set in full Technicolor — where visitors can watch a 4-minute video of news clips on the bunker's restoration and the Cold War.
Tony Owens spent five years with his Marine reserve unit on Peanut Island. He said the soldiers never bought the government's story about the bunker being for storage. There were too many guards and wire fences. "It was the president's bunker," said Owens, 62, of West Palm Beach. "We knew that's what the security was all about."
Owens admits with pride to having home video of the president waving to the soldiers from his presidential yacht. And he sheepishly admits sneaking into the drab and dingy shelter after the president's assassination.
"Mosquitos used to be so bad on the island ... we used to go in there and sleep," Owens confessed. "Of course, it wasn't the president's bunker any more. He was gone." |
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