The Girls of Atomic City (11 page)

The mind-your-own-business ethos permeated life at CEW. The moment you passed through the guarded gates, the veil of secrecy descended: No specific information about the world within the gates, no matter how mundane, was to be shared. When in doubt, shut your mouth.

New residents were often briefed unofficially by “old-timers” who had lived on the site for at
least
a few weeks. Signs and billboards posted throughout the Reservation reminded all to mind their “loose lips.” The following appeared on the first page of the resident’s handbook:

This military area contains a vital war project. Like other installations contributing to the war effort, its security depends upon the whole-hearted cooperation of all concerned in the observing of regulations designed to safeguard the place, the people having access to the area and the information, material, and operations pertaining thereto.

Accordingly, a safe rule to follow is that What you do here, What you see here, What you hear here, please let it stay here.

Background checks were only one step and did not always guarantee employment. Officials also used the waiting period and training process to screen people’s behavior.

One story described a locksmith who sat bragging about his lock-picking prowess to the rest of his training group. He was chomping at the bit to get into those plants so that he could show the military just how lax their security was.

He promptly disappeared from Y-12 training classes.

Others might be dismissed for problems at home, the personal kind that most individuals would consider none of an employer’s business. But this was no ordinary employer. Money issues, for example, might make someone more likely to do or say things for personal profit. Despite the Project’s desperate need for labor, empty chairs routinely appeared with no explanations given.

Some new recruits viewed orientation films depicting the enemy cloaked in blazing terror. Others were asked questions like:

Do you drink? How often?

If someone close to you revealed a secret, would you report them?

Have you ever belonged to any group with communist ties, or that opposes the democratic form of government?

Someone was always watching. One man training to be a supervisor at the Y-12 plant was told that one in four persons here was FBI. Those who worked in processing sometimes broadcasted anecdotes meant to drive home the “zip it” message for new recruits. These were specific enough to be believable, yet vague enough to leave you wondering about the fate of the offending individual.

A woman thoughtlessly wrote her family describing the size and number of facilities in her new town . . . Someone kept a diary . . . A man told a friend about the type of machinery he saw in his plant . . .

During processing and training, individuals, no matter the rung they occupied on the information ladder, were given just enough detail to do their job well, and not an infinitesimal scrap more.

While waiting for his Q clearance, one young scientist in training received a refresher course about topics he’d studied in high school. During the briefing, he asked the instructor to clarify one of his statements. The response from the instructor was clear: Curiosity for curiosity’s sake was not appreciated. If the young man wanted to stick around, he had better shift his focus to his work and trust that everything he needed to know would be told to him precisely when he needed to know it.

★ ★ ★

Oddly enough, Virginia had already received clearance. She had answered the questions, signed the forms and gone through the rigmarole when she came to CEW in December 1943 for her interview. At the time, she was still in school and not available to work. Now, no one seemed to know where her clearance was. She was assigned a dorm room in the newly established West Village, and each day she
reported to the bull pen. Because she had a college degree, she was thrust into the unexpected role of teacher.

Back at the University of North Carolina, Virginia had specifically decided
not
to teach. Initially majoring in English, the first teaching course she took at Chapel Hill changed her mind. She found it rote and uninteresting. But she had always been inclined toward science; she found it endlessly fascinating. There was always something new to learn, always something that had applications to what was going on in the real world,
today.
She switched to chemistry and never looked back.

A recruiter came to speak to Virginia shortly before graduation. Virginia listened as the woman described a 90-square-mile area, with plants operating for the war effort and free buses running all night and day. There Virginia could put her science background to use. This magical place was in Tennessee, and Virginia was invited to come out for an interview over Christmas break.

It had been Virginia’s first train trip. She left home in Louisburg, North Carolina, where she had been spending Christmas with her family, and caught the bus to Greensboro. She spent the night with some friends at Greensboro College and caught a cab to the station the next morning. The train headed west and the flat Piedmont terrain exploded upward as they got closer to Asheville in the mountains of Western North Carolina. She had driven through Asheville before with her family. The Blue Ridge scenery was so different from her usual sea-level surroundings. Wisps of cloud clung to the rugged slopes of the Smokies, seeming to dance alongside the car just beyond the window. “Roll your windows down,” her father used to say, “and wash your hands in the clouds.”

Virginia’s friend Johnny, who had already begun work at CEW, met her at the Knoxville station, flower in hand. It was late, and she went straight to a boardinghouse in downtown Knoxville where the recruiter had arranged for her to stay. Virginia’s friend Virginia Kelly, also from Chapel Hill, had made the trip down from her hometown of Rochester, New York. The city appeared booming, jam-packed. Virginia was glad to have someone she knew to share the experience with.

Breakfast couldn’t have come soon enough. Not knowing how much a meal would cost in the dining car, Virginia had ignored the porter’s call to dinner and gone to bed hungry. Afterward, a car whisked the girls away to a Knoxville office where they were given physicals. Then the driver took the two Virginias down the highway through guarded Edgemoor Gate, onto the Reservation and straight to the Y-12 plant. Virginia enjoyed the view on the way in, passing along the frosted Clinch. Once through the gates the palette shifted. Slushy construction trails sprouted where wide tires had cut into the frozen earth.

The interview at Y-12 was mercifully brief and offered little more information than the recruiter who had visited campus. Virginia was offered a job and had accepted it. She was going to be a lab assistant on a very important war project. She would start after graduation.

Now after arriving at CEW no one could find Virginia’s paperwork. Officials instructed Virginia that the other workers in the bull pen with her needed to be trained. For what, specifically? The officials couldn’t say.

Virginia racked her brain to come up with interesting and impromptu lessons. The individuals were as varied as the jobs they were going to fill and they had arrived from farms across the state, and states across the country. Southern. Northern. Educated. Dropouts. City. Country. Male. Female. Virginia thought some looked bored to death no matter what she had planned for the day. Others were surprisingly interested. Virginia made the best of the uninspiring surroundings. She even performed small chemical experiments, designed to help explain, for example, how reactions took place and what “gases” were. She trotted out the old chemistry class standby of baking soda and vinegar. The hydrogen in the vinegar slammed into the bicarbonate of the baking soda, the resulting acid transformed into carbon dioxide and water, releasing a bubbling over of foaming energy, a visual show of new expanding forces resulting from the collision of two quiet and inert ones.

Virginia taught everyone how to read water and electric meters. Some had never used or even seen a yardstick or meterstick before, and Virginia explained the difference between the two. If nothing
else, it gave her something to do besides sit and wait. Occasionally someone would stand up and wander out of the room mid-lesson. Sometimes they would come back in an hour, sometimes never.

There were a fair number of young women, many still in their teens, who had just strolled out of rural Tennessee high schools. Another part of the training was to show this fresh-faced group how to read dials and gauges and what, precisely, dials and gauges were. Virginia didn’t know why the women would be reading the instruments, so the instructions covered basic concepts. All the better, considering the limited education some possessed. She explained what she considered to be the rudimentary movements and logic. Some dials, gauges, and knobs move in both directions, she explained, around a zero or central position, and not just simply from left to right, from smaller to bigger. That idea was slightly counterintuitive, especially for an 18-year-old coming from a home that lacked plumbing or electricity. But Virginia loved meeting so many new people and found many of the women to be attentive and quick learners.

One of the bull pen regulars was a man named Mac Piper, who had been paying particularly close attention to Virginia. He introduced himself and explained that he was going to be a personnel head for the division at Y-12, to which Virginia was originally assigned. Mac wanted to know if Virginia would like to work as his assistant. The job would be in human resources and not a lab. But she needed to get out of the bull pen. This offer seemed to be the quickest path to freedom. She took it.

This wasn’t the first time things hadn’t gone the way Virginia had planned. She had learned early on in life to make the best of what came your way, even if it was painful or seemed unfair. She had seen both. This was just an unexpected twist in the road and she would happily follow it.

★ ★ ★

Dorothy Jones must have spent six weeks in training working on those darn machines. She had just graduated high school, finally free of schedules and teachers and yet here she was—back in class again.

Dot knew the panels in front of her weren’t the real thing. But she
wouldn’t see the real thing until training was over and her building at the plant was ready. In the meantime, she learned about knobs and dials, the likes of which she had never seen back in Hornbeak, Tennessee. Her quiet little hometown in the sparsely populated northwest corner of the Volunteer State sat roughly 20 minutes from the state line, where the Mississippi snaked in and out along the southernmost foot of the state of Missouri.

The Project liked high school girls, especially those from rural backgrounds. Recruiters sought them out relentlessly, feeling young women were easy to instruct. They did what they were told. They weren’t overly curious. If you tell a young woman of 18 from a small-town background to do something, she’ll do it, no questions asked. Educated women and men, people who had gone to college and learned just enough to think that they might “know” something, gave you problems. The Project scoured the countryside of Tennessee and beyond looking for recent graduates.

Dot had no fixed plans beyond high school, and she wasn’t alone in that respect. She could only think of two or three kids from her graduating class of 12 or so who were going to college. When the job notice went up at school, she jumped at the chance to take the short, handwritten test the recruiters administered. She was shaking in her boots when she took it and couldn’t remember much of it, but it had been blissfully free of math.

For the life of her she couldn’t figure out why more students weren’t meeting with the recruiters, why anyone would want to stay in Hornbeak for the rest of their lives. She had always dreamed of traveling, of flying off to somewhere like Paris, even though she had no idea how she would ever make it happen. She wanted to marry well, someone with a college degree, someone who would be a good supporter. It all seemed so far removed from her life on the farm. But she dreamed anyway. Why deny yourself that? And why not leave? How often did opportunities like this come along in Hornbeak? Opportunities to go and do something, anything, to go somewhere—else.

Wanting to leave home didn’t mean Dot wasn’t scared. She had been surprised how quickly she got the news that they had already
found her a position. Her father drove her in their truck to the bus stop in Nashville. When she arrived in Knoxville there was a bus waiting to take her through the dusty gates and onto the Reservation where she would build a new life. She was the only person—male
or
female—who had made the trip from Hornbeak to Knoxville to work.

But it wasn’t exactly what she was expecting.

When she first spied the guards and the fences and the Wild West–looking, mud-covered, half-built town that had sprung up in the Cumberland Foothills, she thought,
If I had enough money I would turn around and go back home!
The recruiters and the handbook and the billboards had rattled her. Dot worried she would say something wrong, sure she’d slip up and be arrested or shot. She was a country girl far out of her comfort zone.

Good gracious—at least Hornbeak had sidewalks.

But she soon got comfortable. There were other girls in the dorm just like her—out of their element, waiting for clearance, enduring training on fantastical machines. And there were women who seemed very much on the ball, or at least they acted like they were.

She missed her mama, though. A good ol’ plump woman with a welcoming lap no matter your age, a soft bosomy shelf that held the answer to any crisis, a pillow for your troubles. But Dot wouldn’t run home. Her parents were happy that she found a good job. She had always been useless on their farm and she knew it. Simple tasks like making runs down to the pump for water turned into long spells of sitting by the radio and listening to soap operas.