109 East Palace

by Jennet Conant

  “In the mountains of New Mexico,” Jane Wilson wrote, “the women aged”:

  We aged day to day. Our electric power was uncertain. Our water supply ran out. Crisis succeeded crisis. Everything went wrong. We had few of the conveniences which most of us had taken for granted in the past. No mailman, no milkman, no laundryman, no paper boy knocked at our doors. There were no telephones in our homes. We shared unique difficulties of living with our husbands without sharing the recompensing thrill or sometimes even the knowledge of the great scientific experiment which was in progress.

  It was painfully clear that some of the young wives had not taken well to being transplanted onto a military post, particularly when they were also deprived of many of the basic resources they were accustomed to, and the strain was beginning to show. In a rare concession to the opposite sex the army had installed a beauty parlor when the town first got going, but that did not compensate for the lack of a reliable dry cleaners or laundry service. With dirty diapers piling up, and typhoid endemic to the area, more than one desperate new mother came close to burning down the house while boiling diapers on the stove. The problems got to be so serious, according to Segrè, that Oppenheimer consulted a psychiatrist on how to cope with them. The doctor advised him to “find work to keep the women busy and to pay them so that they would have a tangible proof of their usefulness.” By then, the women had already come to much the same conclusion and were taking steps to remedy the situation themselves. Women who had never held jobs before, and had little or no training, went to work either full-time or part-time in the Tech Area as “human computers,” or adding machine operators, working on long, complicated sums. They were given a three-month crash course in computing by Joseph Hirschfelder, a balding chemist and ballistics expert, and then put to work in the Theoretical wing. Just to make things more complicated, most of the Tech Area jobs were for three-eighths-time work—not half-time or even three-quarters-time positions—as though a solid grounding in fractions were requisite. Those who could not stomach the pressure or factorylike grind took jobs in the community as teachers, administrators, and medical technicians.

  After putting up with as much as they could, the women waged their own private war with Groves. The general, who ruled the outpost from the relative comfort of Washington, had dictated that they make do with absurdly backward conditions. Tired of feeling powerless, and determined to improve their living standards, they rebelled. They deluged Oppenheimer with complaints, laid siege to the post commander, and organized meetings in which they articulated their demands, If for no other reason than to restore peace and to stop them wasting so much of Oppenheimer’s time, Groves gave in on a number of issues. After that, Dorothy observed that things at Los Alamos began to change for the better, as the scientists and their wives “pitched in and started schools, churches and a library.”

  The wives arranged for church services in one of the project’s two theaters, importing priests and ministers from Santa Fe and rising at dawn to clear the floor of cigarette butts and bottles left over from the Saturday night dances. Although Groves once remarked that he thought physicists were a “godless bunch,” they strove to achieve a pious frame of mind in their makeshift house of worship, though the odor of stale beer made that almost impossible. The same theaters with their rows of hard wooden benches were used to stage amateur orchestra performances, choral recitals, and theatricals, all part of the wives’ desperate attempts to civilize life on the dreary army post they were forced to call home. They organized community laundries and instructed the Commissary that better vegetables could be had locally in the villages. They started a mesa paper, the Daily Bulletin, a mimeographed sheet that covered all the community events the army saw fit to print. It bore the admonition, “This paper is for the site—keep it here.”

  The scientists and their wives also created a community radio station, KRS, which was accomplished by hijacking the public address system the military used to communicate with the town residents in the absence of telephones. The control room was on the ground floor of the Big House, and the post’s power lines doubled as an antenna. A capacitor cut off the signal, which limited the broadcast to within a five-mile radius. Volunteers manning the station played jazz and classical records culled from the residents’ own collections. Occasionally, one of the more talented in their number would give a “live” concert. The announcement that Edward [Teller] was playing the piano almost always signaled a moody selection from Wagner. When they achieved a public address system in the technical buildings, some prankster decided to have some fun with the new toy: for two days the operator, by request, paged “Werner Heisenberg, Werner Heisenberg” over and over again in dulcet tones. Finally, a kindly physicist told her she was being had, and that Herr Heisenberg was in Berlin running the Nazi bomb project.

  They also talked Groves into starting Los Alamos’s four-room school, which was built on the slope west of the water tower. Initially, Groves had refused to allow a high school on the post and had only yielded to the argument that several essential physicists with older children would refuse to come to Los Alamos unless college preparation was available. They hired a principal and induced the wives who had graduate degrees to serve as instructors to the sixty students in the combined junior and senior high school. Alice Smith, who had a Ph.D. in English history, was talked into teaching social studies; Jane Wilson volunteered to teach English; David Inglis’ wife, Betty, agreed to teach math; and a young chemist named Barbara Long arranged to take time out from her job in the Tech Area to teach science. To make it easier for the wives with small children to devote their days to community jobs, a nursery school was established. Such was their enthusiasm and idealism at the time, the organizers assumed the offspring of so many Nobel Prize winners would naturally be addicted to study, so they extended the academic year to eleven months, with only a brief respite in August. As it turned out, the children in Los Alamos were like children everywhere else, and after enduring their howling protests all that first summer, the school authorities adopted a normal schedule.

  Groves had declared himself all in favor of the scientists’ wives working to “keep them out of mischief.” But, as Elsie McMillan observed, more was needed: “Even poor General Groves realized that with so many women working, and babies being born in spite of him, and people getting sick, we had to have some domestic help.” Oppenheimer appealed to Dorothy for assistance, and together with Vera Williams, the wife of the physicist John Williams, she organized a maid service to do the heavy housework and watch over small children. Dorothy recruited Anita Martinez, whose mother-in-law, Maria Martinez, was an acclaimed New Mexican pueblo artist known as “Maria, the Potter of San Ildefonso.” Several of those lucky enough to retain Anita’s services were invited to visit her family’s adobe home and began collecting Maria’s beautiful blackware pottery, which unbeknownst to them would later be worth a fortune. Martinez went all over the valley recruiting Spanish and Indian women to work at Los Alamos and told them to report to Dorothy at 109 East Palace.

  Dorothy screened, fingerprinted, and issued passes to the dozens of pueblo women and men who served on the Hill as maids and janitors, waitresses and cooks. Though they said little in answer to her questions, most were fluent in three languages and communicated in a mishmash of English, Spanish, and their native Tewa. Throngs of them gathered outside her office at 109 each morning—the women dressed in colorful pueblo shawl-like mantas and high, white, deerskin boots, their glossy black hair pulled back in chignons or two thick braids—their native dignity undaunted by this latest Yankee incursion. The army buses would pick them up and haul them to the mesa, depositing them outside the post Housing Office in the old Ranch School garage, where they would be assigned jobs, and then bring them back to town at the end of the day. It was hard to say how impressed they were by General Groves’ strict security bans, but it seemed to Dorothy that the Indians thoroughly enjoyed their excursions to this strange other world, and they regularly ret
urned loaded down with goods purchased at the army PX.

  Like everything else at Los Alamos, maid service was strictly rationed, with working women getting first dibs. As the nonworking wives complained they needed more help and haunted the pseudo-employment office trying to pick up any extra Indian maids, working women like Charlotte Serber realized they were losing ground. When it finally dawned on them that the system was no longer working in their favor, they pulled rank and instituted reforms. “When demand got so far ahead of supply that things were thoroughly out of hand and hair-pulling arguments seemed a likely prospect,” she wrote, “the Housing Office inaugurated a priority system. Illness and pregnancy were the highest caste, full-time working wives came next, then part-time working wives with children, nonworking wives with children, part-time working wives without children, and lastly, the nonworking childless wives.” Elaborate as this system seemed, it by no means put an end to the squabbling between the working wives and those in the “leisure class.”

  In setting up their novel community, Oppenheimer, Groves, and his army engineers had seen to the practical necessities of providing places to live, work, eat, and gather, but not a lot of attention was given to the social needs of the population. Not surprisingly, social problems began to crop up almost immediately. Whether they wanted to or not, as the tensions mounted, “Oppie and General Groves had to talk about problems concerning the community,” said Greene. “It had a strong effect on morale and how people got along.”

  For one thing, Los Alamos was a very young community, with the majority being more or less college age. Single men and women were packed like sardines in dormitories, with the WACs sharing bunk beds placed only two feet apart, seventy-five to eighty to a barrack. A goodly number of the young people had never been far from home before and did not necessarily handle their newfound freedom well. Given the close quarters, and the fact that there was not much to do after dark, a fair amount of carousing went on at the two PXs, which sold cigarettes, burgers, and warm Cokes to the scratchy tunes of a jukebox. They were the closest thing to a singles’ scene at Los Alamos and were always smoky, noisy, and crowded at night.

  There were also frequent “dorm parties,” held in one of the large dormitory lounges, that featured a makeshift dance band and a lot of dancing. The main focus of the parties was always the mystery punch, served in a five-foot glass chemical reagent jar pinched from one of the laboratories and spiked with whatever booze could be purchased for the occasion in Santa Fe and enough Tech Area 200 proof to guarantee a good time. After most of the dancers were exhausted, Dick Feynman usually did a drum solo, and if Rabi was around, he performed on his comb. The raucous mixers, which were attended by everyone from Nobel laureates to the lowliest graduate students, usually went on until the early hours of Sunday morning.

  The parties ranged from casual to formal affairs held at Fuller Lodge, when all the scientists and their wives would make an effort to dress up in their finest clothes. Square dancing became a popular pastime for the older set. Sometimes invitations would be issued, though mostly hosts relied on word of mouth. One of the first big blowouts was called the “Necktie Party,” and a mimeographed summons requested gentlemen to “wear a necktie if you have one.” Shirley Barnett recalled a “Suppressed Desire” costume party hosted by her husband and the mesa’s overworked medical staff. The three much-in-demand doctors came dressed in their pajamas with pillows strapped to their heads, a testament to their desire for a good night’s sleep. Others came dressed as well-known screen actresses, pin-ups, historic figures, and, not a stretch for this crowd, college professors. The highlight of the night was when Harold Agnew won first prize for his uncanny impersonation of Jezebel. One fellow came in roller skates and just did loops around the room. Single women were a rare commodity on the post, and there was always a long stag line. Dorothy never lacked for dance partners. Determined not to miss out on the fun, she drove all the way from Santa Fe dressed in a leopard-skin number, with just a coat slung over her shoulders. She said later that she prayed all the way she would not have an accident or any car trouble, and end up trying to explain to the local police what she was doing on the lonely back roads late at night in such a crazy getup. While someone fetched her a stiff drink, she sighed that she had her hands full as it was trying “not to explain” what she was doing all day on her crazy job.

  “We were awfully busy, we worked all the time, so the parties were naturally pretty wild,” said Shirley Barnett. “We were all young and liked to have fun, and it took the sting out of all the restrictions. Everyone would go, and Oppie always put in an appearance.” There were a lot of romances, but given their age and the extenuating circumstances, Barnett remembered being surprised at the time at how little “hanky-panky” there was among the married couples. “There was some, but much less than you might expect,” she said. “Partly because we had no time, and because there was no privacy, no back stair. Anything you engaged in ran the risk of exposure pretty soon.”

  They all “drank like fish,” added Barnett, and “going to work the next day with a hangover was perfectly acceptable.” Alcohol was regarded as the nearest anesthetic to hand, and they all needed to occasionally blot out the reality of what they were really doing there. Whiskey and gin were in short supply, but cheap rum and Mexican vodka were easily purchased in Santa Fe. Taking their cue from Oppie, they made vodka martinis their drink of choice, and John von Neumann, who was great fun at parties, once drank fifteen in a single evening as a kind of experiment. The next day he remarked, “I know my stomach has a cast iron lining, but it must have developed a crack.” Tins of tomato juice, which had long ago disappeared off the supermarket shelves in most parts of America, could be bought at the Commissary, and everyone swapped home-made cures for benders.

  While the scientists and their wives looked like college students, and for the most part acted like them, the army had the added difficulty that the laboratory employees were in fact independent working adults over whom it could not exercise the same control as over soldiers. There were the inevitable broken curfews, alcoholic binges, fist fights, incidents of “co-mingling” in the single-sex dorms, and outbreaks of the clap. Complaints that a number of WACs were soliciting men outside the PX, and at a price, caused quite a flap. While all this provoked the wrath of the authorities, nothing particularly untoward ever happened, though stories about the wild goings-on would later confirm the suspicions of some outsiders that Los Alamos was a place of licentiousness and loose morals. At one point, the post commander attempted to crack down on the late-night carousing and threatened to place one of the WAC shacks, or women’s dorms, off-limits. The women tearfully protested the MPs’ action. The bachelors argued even more forcefully against closing the dorm, the community took up their cause, and the whole matter threatened to escalate into a full-blown mesa scandal. “The post commander got quite upset and said, ‘Women were not to be allowed in the men’s dormitories after ten o’clock at night and visa versa,’” said Greene, who was once caught necking with a young chemist in his room. “People were outraged at the suggestion—these bright young fellows were used to doing what they wanted to do. Oppie took it really rather calmly and wrote them a polite note back saying that they really were quite mature and it ought to be that one did not interfere with this.”

  By late spring, it was already apparent to the scientists that they needed to have a greater say in the rules that governed their lives. As Alice Smith put it, “The American preference for being governed by almost any guy in tweeds or a sack suit rather than by an efficient chap in uniform soon led to agitation for a civilian representative body.” Since their fractious little community clearly required some kind of orderly forum through which they could negotiate compromises and clear the air, Robert Wilson proposed a Town Council be formed. The council would be a civilian governing body, its members democratically elected, and could serve as an advisory committee to the army administration on domestic problems. Oppenheimer was cauti
ously supportive, as was Whitney Ashbridge, the new CO, who had come in with the mandate to secure greater civilian cooperation. In the beginning they both agreed it would best to proceed with appointed members, lest it appear the council was trying to subvert military authority.

  The army, however, was loath to take this constituency seriously and did its best to ignore it. “Robert Wilson was seen as quite a hot-headed young man for doing this,” said Greene. Wilson had already earned a reputation as a singularly energetic and resourceful individual for organizing his own barbershop after noticing members of his division wasted valuable time standing on line for a haircut. After his request for additional barbers was rejected, he requisitioned a barbershop chair and other supplies through the laboratory and set up his own shop with a technician who was handy with a straight razor. After Groves had spotted Wilson’s impromptu Tech Area salon, he ordered that the post’s barbershop be expanded and its staff enlarged. He was less tolerant of Wilson’s Town Council, which allowed the civilians to second-guess the post command—awkward to say the least—and which became a thorn in the administration’s side. Greene remembered Deke Parsons, who enjoyed being the only naval officer in an army camp, drolly noting at a Town Council meeting that such a board was not standard. “You know, usually on a military post, the commander is the social arbiter and top dog. It’s really sort of hard for the military here because everybody looks down on them.”

  Having won this small concession to democracy, however, the scientists would not be denied, and by June 1943 a Town Council with six members drawn from the community was duly elected. Bob Wilson became the first elected chairman. The council faced its first major crisis in the dog days of summer. The instigator was quite literally a dog, a large Airedale belonging to the physicist Bob Davis, which had been observed foaming at the mouth. Reports of a sick dog menacing pedestrians spread like wildfire, touching off the mesa’s first rabies scare. Parents were so frightened they kept their children at home and immediately demanded that all the dogs that roamed freely around the post be banished for health and safety reasons. The army responded by issuing the order—the dogs had to go. But for many of the workaholic scientists, whose dogs were very nearly their best friends, this order was tantamount to treason. Ed McMillan promptly announced he would leave Los Alamos before he let anyone confiscate his cocker spaniel. As the rhetoric grew hotter, the pro-dog and anti-dog forces stormed the Big House, where at the end of a cranky, emotionally overwrought meeting it was clear that the vast majority of the population was in favor of keeping pets on the mesa. The army agreed to rescind its order of removal. After all the dust settled, it appeared that Davis’ Airedale had probably just eaten some soap flakes and he, too, would be spared.