school civil defense alarms

[bradhig]

https://youtu.be/Aya-hBmLKkM

Anyone seen one of these? Where did they get the signal from? One was featured in Ladybug Ladybug They were gone when I was in kindergarten in 1979.

[Unit of Civil Defense]

...When you where in Kindergarten , I was a Freshman in High School......any way, I don't recall seeing anything like that , but that doesn't mean there never was in the Topeka Public schools. At one point in time , Topeka was a target city due to Forbes Air Force Base. By the time I started school, 1970, all we had was fire drills and Tornado drills.
I would imagine that the signal(s) where sent via a dedicated phone line or much the same way a signal would have been sent to a siren during the Cold War era.
If there was threatening weather, I do know as a fact that there would be a phone call made from the NWS Topeka office to the Unified School Dist. office where they had the ability to call all the schools at once via telephone.

[Model L]

it would be quite a simple thing to accomplish, although it could have been made up for the movie...

[Model L]

it appears to be called a "civil air defence phone"

[Daniel]

By the 1980’s, those units were gone from public schools in Oregon, but most schools still had Model A-sized sirens in the hallways that were used as fire alarms.