The Girls of Atomic City (9 page)

Captain P. E. O’Meara, Town Manager

Corps of Engineers, U.S.A.

Oak Ridge, Tennessee

Dear Sir:

My compliments to you sir for your very fine “message” in the October 16th issue of the Oak Ridge Journal. I think it’s darn near time that some got up and gave the Army a great big cheer for the swell job they have done here, and stop finding fault.

The other morning, while waiting for the Cafeteria to open, one of the “patriots” was complaining about having to stand out in the cold. I wondered to myself if this chap had ever read an eye witness account of the invasion of Attu. . . .

Sure, we would all like to be home with our families, so would those kids who “hit the beach” at Salerno—some of whom will never come home.

There’s only one thing wrong with your message, Captain—you hit them with a powder-puff.

Sincerely,

W.J. O’B.

Dorm M-6

★ ★ ★

“What godforsaken place have you brought me to?”

Celia had to laugh at the outburst, one sister howling at the other as they stood in the dorm lobby.

Fresh off the bus and just processed, the pair were still gawking at their new surroundings. New arrivals didn’t stick out for long. With the number of people constantly swarming in from all over the country, it had taken Celia only a few weeks before she began to feel like part of the old guard. It wasn’t like other small towns, where you spent your entire life surrounded by the same faces, where brothers and sisters and parents and grandparents had known each other for generations. There was no established cadre of locals who could trace their roots back to Oak Ridge.

If there were no locals, there were no outsiders. Everyone was from somewhere else. Everyone was anxious to meet new people.

Some took to the Reservation immediately. Others found the surroundings a little more raw than they had anticipated. There was always a sympathetic ear close by, a make-the-best-of-it spirit infusing the brand-new yet dust-covered town.

We can do it!
That’s what Rosie would have said.

Stop your belly-achin’!
That’s what Appalachian folk would say.

None had figured the Clinton Engineer Works into his or her plans. How could they have? Nonetheless, this is where they were going to make their stand: together, knee-deep in mud, for the remainder of a hellish war that seemed to have no end. They were told they were going to help bring that end about. They had to believe that was true. And no matter what, they were All in the Same Boat.

Summer’s searing edge was softening into an autumn much warmer than those in Pennsylvania, but still a welcome relief. Celia thought it must have rained every single day that first August of 1943. Hot summer rains exploding into the middle of a steamy southern afternoon, tearing through the sky and sun and leaving in their wake a sultry memory. Steam rose off concrete and tar, mud swirled beneath ever-present wooden sidewalks, cutting rivers into recently denuded soils. Real “frog stranglers”—that’s what the locals sometimes called a good downpour. Luckily, the few shops, cafeteria, rec hall, and bus were close by, because the only real deterrent to walking remained mud, which Celia soon learned was not the result of some sort of climatological fluke. It was there to stay, occasionally upstaged by its dryer, hack-inducing cousin, clay dust.

“You’ve got a case of the Oak Ridge croup . . . ,” more than one doctor would quip in the face of a wheezing patient.

The main cafeteria was a short walk from the dorm and right on Celia’s way to the Castle on the Hill. The food served up there was basic, affordable, plentiful, but a far cry from her mother’s cooking. The cafeteria also served as a coffee klatsch/sing-along lounge for not just women, Celia noticed, but many, many, oh-so-many young, single men that had come to work all day, every day, on whatever it was this place was working on.

On her drive in that first day, Celia hadn’t noticed any stores lining the dirt roads, but with so much construction and all the buildings cut from the same prefab construction cloth, it was hard to tell what was going up where. Williams Drugstore and a few other shops had since opened in Jackson Square, the shopping and cafeteria complex in the middle of Townsite. And there was even a pint-sized version of Miller’s of Knoxville and a grocer that boasted rationed
and
unrationed picnic lunches, along with potted meats and far-from-Vienna sausages. That month’s
Journal
advertised rayon panties—
with elastic bands!
—dickies, and even 25-gauge rayon hose. But if a gal wanted to do some serious shopping, Knoxville was the place to go. Twenty miles away was not a quick trip. There were buses moving in and around the area 24 hours a day, bringing workers who lived off-site onto the Clinton Engineer Works, and transporting Townsite residents to and from Knoxville and surrounding towns. But cars were better, faster, and less crowded.

Celia, like most residents, did not have one.

So when Lew asked her if she was interested in taking a drive over to Knoxville to pick a friend up from the train station, Celia jumped.

She’d met Lew Parker at one of Father Siener’s youth group meetings. Celia was always hearing about this or that different “group” forming. Was this what college was like? Maybe she hadn’t missed much after all. Attending mass had helped ease Celia’s transition and proven a boon for her social life. There were, she soon learned, plenty of good Catholic boys to be found.

When she first arrived, there was no church, but she had heard that one was being built. She met Rosemary Maiers, a young nurse recently arrived from Chicago who was helping to get the clinic up and running. The two went to mass wherever they could. In the very early days, all denominations had to make do: Services in the rec hall could be conducted by topping off a couple of 3.2 percent beer kegs with some plyboard and covering it with a simple tarp. Instant altar. Mass was held at Father Siener’s home on Geneva Lane, his living room converted to a small chapel.

The Chapel on the Hill was finally dedicated at the end of
September and copies of keys were passed around to various religious representatives, all of whom offered prayers and invocations for the single, wooden white building that would serve Jews, Catholics, Baptists, Episcopalians, and more. But Celia still liked the intimacy of Father Siener’s house best. Potlucks and prayer groups, the familiar rise-and-fall cadence of the Latin mass, the kneel-sit-stand-kneel Catholic calisthenics that were soothing in their repetition. That’s where she had met Lew.

Lew had been working for DuPont in Alabama before the company transferred him to CEW, where it was managing the X-10 pilot plant. Now his old roommate, whom he’d convinced to apply for a transfer as well, was arriving at the train station. Afterward, Lew told Celia, “we’ll all go to dinner at the Regas.” Done deal. Even if it was only a quick drive over and back, Celia thought, at least she’d get a good meal.

They picked Henry up at the station, and soon Celia and the two men were at dinner. Celia listened as the friends played catch-up, but couldn’t help but notice a definite shift in her mind from one to the other.

Who is this guy?
she wondered. Easy on the eyes, polite.

During the long car ride home, Celia listened as Henry sat in the backseat and talked about some girlfriend he had left back in Alabama, about his family.

What’s that? Polish? He’s
Polish?

Maybe he would ask her out,
Celia thought. She hoped Lew wouldn’t mind. He seemed to be getting serious, but serious was not for Celia. There were too many available men behind these fences. Dating around was the ticket. Lew drove through the gates and back into Townsite, dropping Celia off at her dorm. She said good-bye to both men, hoping that wouldn’t be the last time she’d hear from that charming Henry Klemski.

★ ★ ★

In the meantime, Celia had no trouble keeping herself occupied. She worked from 8
AM
to 4:30, Monday to Friday, overtime when needed. She was happy not to have shift work, unlike women she’d met in
the dorm or cafeteria who worked in the factories and had changing schedules that sometimes required them to work through the night. Nothing ever seemed to shut down here.

The short distance between her dorm and the Castle on the Hill remained a sticky obstacle course to be maneuvered at least twice a day. And vanity be damned, the I. Millers were gathering dust in the tiny closet she shared with Maybelle. She more regularly opted for a trusty yet fashionable pair of ladies’ saddle oxfords—
Now available at Miller’s in Jackson Square, shoppers!
—but even those weren’t immune to the pervasive shoe-sucking gunk. It wasn’t long before, on her way to work, she stepped right where she should have stepped left and found herself knee-deep in the mire. By the time she managed to extricate her foot from the soppy goop, her brand-new saddle shoe was no longer attached to it. She felt sick. Hard-earned money sucked into the earth.

Days were busy at the Castle on the Hill, now headquarters for the entire Project. The day Celia arrived, August 13, 1943, Kenneth Nichols (now a full colonel) had officially taken over as District Engineer and was in charge of all things administrative for all the Project sites. Celia was in the secretarial pool that served Lieutenant Colonel Vanden Bulck, Colonel Nichols’s righthand man, but spent most of her time working with Mr. Smitz. Typing up letters and memos and taking dictation occupied a sizable slice of Celia’s time, though the office also handled some sort of insurance, hazard insurance, based on the little she had seen, taken out for individuals working at the CEW. There was a lot she didn’t know. She had heard about the big factories located elsewhere on the Reservation, but she had never actually seen them. Lew worked in one, she thought; Henry, too. She saw people getting on buses labeled Y-12, K-25, and X-10, which she guessed were the factories. But you didn’t go anywhere your pass didn’t permit you. If you did, at the very least you’d get a good talking-to. At the most, there might be one last bus ride—right off the Reservation for good. And, she had been told, people were watching, to make sure you didn’t shoot your mouth off about what you did and where you did it.

When necessary, she also filled in for Lieutenant Colonel Vanden Bulck’s personal secretary, Sherry. So it wasn’t much of a surprise when she was called in to take Sherry’s place one morning. She walked into Vanden Bulck’s office to find the colonel and another man awaiting her.

“Sherry’s not here,” Vanden Bulck said. “I’ve got someone visiting me and I want you to take dictation from him.”

Celia stood, her notepad and pen at the ready.

General Leslie Groves stepped forward. To Celia’s eyes, he was a military man in uniform, maybe in his late forties. He had a thick swath of wavy hair combed straight back over his head, with a small streak of gray sprouting over one eye. His mustache was thick but tidy, like the rest of his appearance, and his midsection ample. There was no reason for Celia to recognize this particular man, of course. They had never met before, their paths had never officially crossed in Manhattan, though they had both been there. Still, she could tell he was important by the way everyone was scurrying around him, looking at him. There were few other visual clues. His uniform bore no name tag. And Vanden Bulck didn’t bother to introduce Celia to the big man, either.

Celia didn’t ask who the man was, why he was there, or what all the multicolored stripes on his uniform meant. But she liked something about him immediately. He smiled at her and was polite and had a serious sort of warmth when he spoke. But that wasn’t enough. Celia liked to know how to address people. That’s how she had been raised. So she asked Lieutenant Colonel Vanden Bulck’s nameless friend what she should call him.

“Just call me GG,” he said.

★ ★ ★

Christmas 1943. “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” wafted from radios across the country, its wistfully hopeful lyrics striking a somber chord for those who knew loved ones remained thousands of miles away as the 25th rolled around. Mothers scoured the few stores that had opened in the Townsite area of Clinton Engineer Works for anything that might pass for a present. A new game called Chutes and Ladders
was all the rage, but wartime and rations had affected children, too. Any child who longed to see a brand-new Lionel Train chugging around the base of their Christmas tree would be disappointed: the company had ceased production of metal trains in order to build compasses for the war. They offered only paper train sets this year, a dollar apiece, that were notoriously frustrating to put together, with their flaps and perforations. Chemists and cubicle operators sat in cafeterias that remained in operation as if the holiday didn’t exist, toasting each other with contraband booze that quickly dissolved the feeble glue holding together tiny cone-shaped paper cups designed for water and nothing more.

December. A month of personal evaluation and remembrance, one that would now live in infamy. For the Project, it was a month that had historically brought shifts in fortunes.

Just a year earlier, in December 1942, Project scientists had ushered in a new age of power, one they were rapidly working to fully understand.

December 7, 1941, brought Japan to the shores and skies of Pearl Harbor and brought the United States into World War II.

But in December 1938, events had transpired that would send the first ripples across the Atlantic of the unleashed power of what the Greeks called
atomos,
news that had resulted in the birth of the Project.