The Girls of Atomic City (25 page)

The man asked again, this time leaning in through the car window. She could see him now, but still did not know who he was. He clearly wanted their attention—Dot’s and her date’s.

For a first date it had started out pretty nice. She stopped by his tiny, cramped trailer—he was a construction worker—and they had a little something to drink. She thought it tasted awful, local and illegal, but it was wet enough and par for the course considering their theoretically dry county. They had gone out to eat—his treat—and, finally ended up here, sitting in the car on a quiet country road. This was a far-from-unusual pastime for dates on the Reservation, since there was little privacy available anywhere and men were forbidden in the dorms. The stranger hadn’t interrupted anything too personal, but still, an unexpected visitor peering in from the darkness was incredibly unnerving. Dot managed to regain her composure.

How on earth does he know my name?

Dot assured the man that she was fine, but the experience brought a quick end to the date and sent Dot scampering back to her dorm.

It wasn’t the first time, after all, that she had felt eyes on her in unexpected places. Once, while waiting in line at the movies with a group of friends, a woman had suddenly appeared.

“Spread it out!” she barked. “One behind the other.”

And they did. Discouraging large groups kept things orderly, sure, but Dot had also heard that the powers-that-be didn’t want people congregating in large groups and
talking.
As house lights went down and the newsreel started, monitors—creeps, as they were called—might walk the aisles shining flashlights down the rows of patrons, checking to see who might be whispering in the dark.

Dot took her place in front of her cubicle the next day, and got to work as usual. Men milled about in the vast space: delivering this, picking up that, speeding away with logbooks, tweaking the giant panels, or pretending to do any of the above when their only real intention was to flirt.

A man approached Dot as she was minding her dials. Another maintenance man trying to get a date? Didn’t seem to be.

“Are you Dot?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she answered. Again, she didn’t recognize him. He appeared to be a little older. He introduced himself as the boss of her date from the night before.

“I don’t want you to see him anymore,” he explained.

So, they did follow us,
she thought.

Whoever had approached the car last night had reported back to her date’s boss.

She agreed. The man left. Dot never learned his name.

★ ★ ★

Loose lips might not only sink a ship but also endanger the top secret Project. Should you forget this, there was propaganda plastered on every available surface, positioned in every line of sight, to quickly remind you.

Billboards, posters, pamphlets, notes in the newspaper. Blackboards throughout CEW offices and labs were stamped with reminders that users should erase all work at the end of their shift. Propaganda ranged from inspirational, up-by-the-bootstraps images designed to inspire patriotism and responsibility to ominous images depicting death by enemy hands, or losses on the battle front resulting from a moment’s indiscretion. These reminded anyone who wasn’t doing their part that they were aiding the enemy. Oak Ridge was inundated with the Message.

Ride sharing and bond buying were popular themes.
When you drive alone, you drive with Hitler!
Other posters found throughout the United States were absolutely foreboding. Images of graves and injured soldiers. A lonesome dog or child alone at home holding a service flag embroidered with the single golden star of a now-gone brother. Drowning men and bodies impaled on barbed wire. Messages were crafted to keep individuals quiet and working hard. If you spoke out of turn, you were not only un-American, you were responsible for the senseless murder of troops. If you dared inquire too closely about your job, you were endangering the lives of innocent children, damning democracy, and joining the ranks of Hitler and Hirohito.

There were messages of support and encouragement as well. Advertisements in magazines showed mothers and daughters standing side by side, canning food. Cookbooks like
War Time Meat Recipes
and Armour’s
69 Ration Recipes for Meat
helped women maneuver the world of rations and coupons. They taught the value of all forms of protein and how to reproduce juicy, meaty flavors with the clever use of easier-to-come-by staples like potatoes and oatmeal, lessons modern-day vegans still use today. Advice columns and friendly tips were echoed in the
Oak Ridge Journal
, and were the refrain of many a man or woman who had grown up during the Depression:

Use it up!

Wear it out!

Make it do!

Or do without!

Contests for good work attendance were routinely held at various plants. The importance of a plant’s work rate and production at the 24-hour Reservation were drummed into the workers’ minds. But reminders to keep quiet were perhaps the most prevalent.

Who Me? Yes You . . . Keep Mum About This Job

Think! Are You Authorized to Tell It?

One large billboard on the Reservation featured a large looming eye, its black iris surrounding a large swastika-embedded pupil. It read:

The Enemy is Looking for Information. Guard your Talk.

Mandates greeted workers at every gate. Patriotism and secrecy went hand-in-hand. One of the most memorable Oak Ridge billboards featured a virile Uncle Sam, hat off, sleeves up, forearms thick with muscle. Three monkeys sat before him, one covering his eyes, another his ears, and the third his mouth:

What you see here,

What you do here,

What you hear here,

When you leave here,

Let it stay here.

Such propaganda was not exclusive to the Project, but arguably made for a disquieting backdrop to a nascent town striving to grow into a community. But many Oak Ridgers didn’t see it that way. These disparate residents had come together to work, to love, to get married, and plant Victory Gardens behind makeshift trailers and
cemesto prefab homes. They fought to smile through the lines and the mud and the long hours, dancing under the stars and under the watchful eyes of their government, an Orwellian backdrop for a Rockwellian world.

★ ★ ★

Q: What are you making over there?

A: Babies.

Guns and badges and checkpoints and propaganda were only part of the force that kept the lid on the Project. The Intelligence and Security Division had around 500 plainclothes agents in addition to its uniformed personnel. And the more informal creeps played a key role in maintaining the aura of secrecy that pervaded life and work in Oak Ridge and the other Project sites. The actual number of creeps on the Project would be difficult to estimate, but what many residents did know was that anyone—
anyone
—could be a creep.

They came in all shapes and sizes, from official-looking, suit-wearing types to the workers next door. They could be anywhere: across the table from you in the cafeteria, down the hall in the dorm, in a dining car on a train, or even lying in bed next to you. They could be men or women. The real power of this unseen force moving in and among the population was not that these monitors were all-knowing, well-heeled government types, with some sort of high-ranking role within the Project. It was that the informants themselves were just like the people they were observing and writing reports about. For a young woman of 18 years like Helen Hall, whose experience beyond the family farm had been limited to the sleepy diner of a nearby town, being approached by dapper men and asked to inform on fellow workers, friends, and roommates likely felt like more of a directive than a request.

What this meant for everyone living and working in Oak Ridge was that anyone you met, anyone you passed on the street, anyone you befriended could be reporting your conversations and activities. Anyone at all could be deciding whether your actions or discussions were endangering the Project. Anyone might pass judgment on your
encounters and associations. When coworkers suddenly stopped showing up for work, no one dared ask why—because no one could be sure that the person to whom they were speaking was not a creep, too. That lack of details about what had happened to the individual in question amped up existing suspicions, leaving others to imagine anything from a simple firing to relocation to a remote island in the Philippines. Since mail was censored going in and out of Oak Ridge—albeit in a rather haphazard and unsystemized fashion—the possibility of word arriving from that recently departed coworker describing the details of their dismissal was slim.

★ ★ ★

The work of the creeps dovetailed nicely with the Statement of Availability. It meant that once the Project got their hands on a worker, it was easier to keep them on and provided an added incentive to help keep workers focused and tight-lipped. If you lost your job as a result of subversive talk or
seditious
activity, it meant no Statement of Availability and no new job without a 30-or 60-day wait, sometimes longer. “Seditious talk” was loosely defined. To merely be accused by an informant was enough to cause a worker to be let go
with
cause. No SOA.

From a memo dated June 14, 1944:

“. . . personnel discharged for cause will not be permitted to work for any other organization on the area unless investigation reveals that discharge for cause was improper. . . .” Suggestions were made in an effort “to obtain maximum labor efficiency,” emphasis was to be put on “continuing urgency of the program,” “appealing to the sense of patriotism” and making it clear that “we now can afford to weed out inefficient personnel and that it is intended that such action will be taken . . .”

So, if a creep dropped an anonymous letter about your seditious activity into any one of the cloaked drop-off points throughout Oak Ridge and that missive arrived at the offices of the fictional ACME Insurance Company, within 24 hours, you, your family, and all of your
belongings might be plopped down outside the gates. If the worker in question had initially relied on CEW or one of its construction contractors, for example, to provide for transportation to the site, he or she had to foot the bill for their return to outside civilization. Or worse, in some cases the dismissed workers were required to pay back the money that had been spent to transport them to the site in the first place, money that would often wipe out the precious last paycheck that they had received.

★ ★ ★

Q: What are you all doing over there?

A: Pinning diapers onto fireflies.

“What kinda bread y’all want today?” Kattie called out to the small crowd gathered around Willie’s hut.

“Cornbread!” was more often than not the answer she got back. Cornbread or biscuits. Kattie quickly found that her brand-new, repurposed K-25 biscuit pans were coming in handy and in ways that she had never anticipated.

Not only had she begun to solve her “what to eat” crisis, but she had discovered an entirely new use for her hut-baked treats: bribery.

Cooking and eating was done at Willie’s hut. The couple was lucky that they could manage to work the same shift often enough. When they did, the two of them would head back to the huts right after work to get ready for dinner. Kattie had three pans in all and, thanks to some trial and error in the standing-room only hut, she had perfected her system for cooking with them.

Her method worked equally well for biscuits and other breads. The key to it all was the potbelly stove in the middle of the tiny hutment.

When it was cranked up, the stove got red-hot. So hot, in fact, that Kattie couldn’t set the pans right on top of it or the biscuits would burn on the outside before they were cooked on the inside. So instead, she carefully leaned the blackened pan at an angle against the stove’s potbelly. She kept them from slipping and sliding with a brick she’d found lying on the ground near Willie’s hut. She took her special biscuit mix, formed dollops of the sticky, southern staple, and put them on the pan near the bottom, closest to the floor. Once the first side was nice and brown, separating effortlessly from the metal, she carefully flipped the biscuits over to the other side.

The savory smell filled the small hut, wafting out doors and windows and hanging in the air with the dust. Dinners became the highlight of their day, and she made an effort to make each of them as good as they had been back home. Kattie always left the pans at Willie’s hut, since she was allowed to go to visit him, but he was never permitted to visit her (although he did try scaling the barbed-wire fence once). Her friend Gerdy—lovingly called “Small” because she was—occasionally made a trip all the way to Knoxville to find affordable stew beef. Kattie adored Small. She came from Tupelo, Mississippi, and worked with Kattie at K-25. Kattie cut the meat up nice as was possible and the group might cook it in a little orange juice that one of them bought at the grocer or from one of the trucks that made the rounds near their hutment area. There were usually some greens to be had, perhaps some snap peas, bought from nearby farmers who sold their produce and chickens outside the gates. This meat was often available without coupons, which was an even bigger boon. Kattie would boil those together with the little bit of stew beef and serve it with the fresh-baked, brown-bottomed biscuits. It was as near a feast as you could get.