109 East Palace

by Jennet Conant

  The Town Council weighed in on everything concerning day-to-day life at Los Alamos—from the hazards of having no traffic lights to slow the army jeeps and no sidewalks to protect pedestrians, to the problems of noise, flies, bad food, no food, and so on. It also dealt with those issues where army and civilian life collided, as was the case with the rifle range. The practice range had been carefully laid out on the highest ground on the mesa in the early days of the project, but as the town spread it was perfectly situated to spray bullets all over the makeshift golf course, baseball field, horse corrals, and picnic areas, all places frequented by small children. The chronic problem was finally resolved when the range went up in flames after a month of blistering heat. The council met on Monday evenings in the private dining room in Fuller Lodge, and as time went on, people took to drifting in after dinner to lodge some protest or listen in on local justice. One young British physicist recalled gently being fined five dollars for speeding, by Victor Weisskopf, a Viennese physicist who was one of the town’s most popular “mayors.”

  While it is debatable how much governing the Town Council ever did, trying to impose discipline on what Oppenheimer once called their “odd community” was certainly an eye-opening experience for the innocent academics, who until recently had been living in quiet campus towns. The council received recurring reports of “goings-on” in the women’s dorms—the culprit usually turned out to be a soldier-husband who had been billeted in the men’s barracks and was bent on a conjugal visit—and the investigations required butting into a multitude of areas that were nobody’s business, but they proved vastly entertaining to the growing throngs who packed the balconies during the meetings. As Wilson later recalled, by the time the council got to the bottom of the WAC shack controversy, and the “flourishing business” the girls were doing servicing the boys, “I was a considerably more learned physicist than I had intended to be a few years earlier when going into physics was not all that different from taking the cloth.”

  It still fell to Oppenheimer, as the laboratory’s administrator, to arbitrate all manner of mundane disputes over living quarters, construction, mail censorship, seniority promotions, and salaries, almost all of which were well beyond his experience and purview at Berkeley. He turned out to be surprisingly good at this, but unfortunately the nature of the problems was such that he often had to choose between a number of equally bad possibilities. Los Alamos’s pay scale was a particularly sore subject. It had been settled at the beginning of the project that all the established scientists would receive twelve-tenths of their university salary, as they would be carrying a heavier load than their usual ten months of teaching; younger scientists would receive less, based on the OSRD scale; and graduate students even less than that. Meanwhile, the technicians and construction crews were paid the prevailing commercial rate. This meant that a doctoral candidate like Harold Agnew was earning $125 a week, while the electrician or carpenter working alongside him was pulling down $500 a week. The grad students were willing to make sacrifices for their country, but this was above and beyond their endurance. “We all did pretty much the same things,” said Agnew, who was not happy when he discovered the disparity. “If the scientists needed us to hook up a motor or build a bench, you just did it. There were no union rules or anything like that. So a bunch of us got together and decided this was unfair and we would go to the director.”

  Agnew approached Oppenheimer and explained their grievance. Oppenheimer agreed to hear them out. Later that day, he ambled over to the Z building wearing an indulgent expression and chain-smoked his way through the meeting. “About twenty of us had gathered,” recalled Agnew. “He stood in the hall and listened while we explained our beef. Then he smiled and said, ‘Well, there’s a difference. You know why you’re here, and what you’re doing, and they don’t.’ Then he turned around and walked out. And we all stood there smiling and nodding in agreement, and said, ‘Yeah!’” Agnew shook his head admiringly and laughed. “That was almost four hundred bucks we lost on our special knowledge. But the way he did it—with just those two sentences—he had us.”

  At times like that, Oppenheimer radiated power. With his grave, almost priestly manner, he could electrify a crowd, or with one masterful gesture silence opposition. On the rare occasions he lost patience, his usual warmth would be displaced by the infamous “blue glare,” an icy stare he leveled at those who crossed him. But ultimately, those who were there say he was so compelling because he led by example. In September, he sent a letter to Robert Sproul, the president of the University of California, which officially oversaw the Los Alamos contract, requesting a reduction in his salary. He explained that his current War Department salary of $10,000 a year actually exceeded by $200 his peacetime pay as “a professor of physics and not a director of anything.” Noting that as he did not regard “work done for the Government of the United States in time of war as the occasion for any essential increase in income,” he suggested his future salary should be brought into line using “the procedure we usually follow.” Of course, Oppenheimer could well afford such high principles, but his peers found it no less commendable. He copied the letter to Groves, who wrote back that he heartily approved of his attitude.

  In one way or another, everyone became caught up in the Oppenheimer charisma. He established the tone, and it followed that they would do what needed to be done and know how to invent what did not yet exist. “Oppenheimer stretched me,” recalled Bob Wilson. “His style, the poetic vision of what we were doing, of life, of a relationship to people, inflamed me. In his presence, I became more intelligent, more vocal, more intense, more prescient, more poetic myself.”

  No detail of their lives, inside or outside the laboratory, seemed to escape Oppie’s notice. No matter how busy he was, he would take the time to stop by their office with a suggestion, a word of encouragement, a lit cigarette, or an expression of confidence that left them feeling flattered and validated. In typical know-it-all fashion, he once stopped a physicist’s wife and congratulated her on her pregnancy—she swore she had not yet told a soul—and politely inquired after her health. Then, before she could utter a single complaint, he proceeded to list all her ailments in rapid order and strode off down the road. When the woman later told a friend of the encounter, she said, “How the devil does Oppie know how a pregnant woman feels?” Then grinning in spite of herself, she added, “You know, he was dead right.”

  With such small insights and kindnesses Oppenheimer succeeded in charming the mesa and holding sway over his community of crackpots. He thrived in his role as president of his tiny republic, and for a man who was once a shy loner, he became a gregarious campaigner, shaking hands and kissing babies like a seasoned politician. On Sundays, Oppie could be seen riding his handsome chestnut stallion across town on his way to the mountain trails, wrote Joseph Hirschfelder, “greeting each one he passed with a wave of his pork-pie hat and a friendly remark”:

  He knew everyone who lived in Los Alamos, from the top scientists to the children of the Spanish-American janitors—they were all Oppenheimer’s family…. Each of us could walk in, sit on his desk, and tell him how we thought something could be improved. Oppy would listen attentively, argue with us, and sometimes dress us down with a clever cutting sarcasm. At all times he knew exactly what each of us was working on, sometimes having a better grasp of what we were doing than we did ourselves. Needless to say, we all adored and worshipped him.

  NINE

  Welcome Distractions

  TO BOOST HIS OWN SPIRITS, along with the mesa’s slumping morale, Oppenheimer began taking small groups of friends to dinner at Miss Warner’s small teahouse by the Otowi Bridge, which in earlier times had been frequented by the Ranch School boys and their families and by tourists on their way to see the ancient cliff dwellings in the Frijoles Canyon. Edith Warner had transformed a little shack by the train tracks of the old “chili line,” which once connected Antonito, Colorado, with Santa Fe. Supplies for the Los Alamos Ranch Sch
ool were hauled along the line as far as the Otowi Switch, where Miss Warner served as station mistress from 1928 to 1941, when the line was discontinued. Miss Warner was a Pennsylvania Quaker who had come out west because of her health and had made her home on the mesa back when the Indians of the San Ildefonso Pueblo were her only neighbors. She had caught a bad case of “New Mexicoitis,” as Peggy Pond Church dubbed the affliction by which people succumbed to the spell of the area. Warner was a thin, pixieish woman, with a faded beauty and regretful air, who wrote unpublished poetry and had taken a Hopi named Tilano as her lover. She was exactly the sort of self-styled individualist Oppie liked to collect and that he invested with great importance in his life. Soon after he was married, he took his wife, Kitty, over to meet Miss Warner, and sample her legendary cooking. Later, when he invited small groups of scientists to go down for delicious home-cooked dinners at her little house by the river, they could not help wondering if he had planned it that way all along.

  In truth, Miss Warners was almost the first casualty of the military occupation of the Pajarito Plateau. By late 1942, the closing of the chili line had reduced Miss Warner’s business to a slow trickle, and the news that the Ranch School would also be shutting down, and the army blockading the road to Frijoles, that areas major tourist attraction, seemed to doom her small establishment. One evening in the spring of ’43, Oppenheimer and Groves stopped by “to reassure her,” as Oppenheimer later recalled, and Groves suggested that Miss Warner might consider running the dining facility at the school lodge, or perhaps a cafeteria on the post. With her livelihood threatened, Miss Warner had little choice but to agree to consider the generals proposal. But moments after they left, Oppenheimer was back, standing on her stoop, the blue eyes plaintive. “Don’t do it,” he told her, before climbing back into the car and disappearing into the night.

  After that, Oppenheimer had stopped by on a regular basis and soon hit on a compromise. He asked Miss Warner if she would turn her dining room, known for its savory chicken and the fabulous chocolate cake that was beloved by so many schoolboys, into a private restaurant for the laboratory personnel. She agreed, and Groves approved the plan. For security purposes, her house would be closed to tourists. Soon Oppenheimer was bringing down groups of eight or ten for small, intimate dinners once or twice a week and introducing them to his old friend Edith, who never joined in, but padded quietly back and forth between the table and stove in her soft buckskin moccasins. Visiting dignitaries like Fermi, Compton, and Conant were always treated to a wonderful dinner at Miss Warner’s, where the simple, nourishing stews arrived steaming hot on big terra-cotta plates and the fresh corn, salads, sweet relishes, and five varieties of squash all came from her garden. Her companion, Tilano, with his weathered face and long, graying braids, acted as butler, and at the end of every meal he served the strong black coffee in big pottery cups.

  Somehow, Oppenheimer had sensed that in stealing away to Miss Warner’s tiny, welcoming home, the Los Alamos scientists would find, as he did, some measure of relief from life on the barren military post and the relentless six-day-a-week grind. It was a badly needed escape and did much to restore everyone’s outlook on life. By late summer, Miss Warner’s reputation was such that her one large table was booked for months in advance, though old friends like Oppie and Dorothy could always get a reservation. The Agnews, McMillans, and Serbers, along with the other couples who had made Miss Warner’s acquaintance early on, were privileged to claim one night each week for their own party, and the less fortunate had to wait until notified that it was their turn. A new adobe dining room was added to accommodate the demand, and Miss Warner charged only the modest sum of two dollars a head and refused to accept tips. Dorothy fondly recalled those cozy, candlelit dinners in her dining room, scented with the aroma of freshly baked bread, where the food was always indescribably delicious, particularly the chocolate cake with fresh raspberries, which she served in hand-carved cottonwood bowls. “That cake was famous around the country,” Dorothy recalled. “There was no secret about its recipe, and many people tried to make it but it never tasted as good as Edith’s.”

  At the end of the evening, fortified by the cooking and warmed by the fire and conversation, they would all step out into the quiet darkness of the Pajarito Plateau, where the only sound was the river, which Edith called “the song of the Rio Grande.” Miss Warner looked down on alcohol and did not allow it in her dining room, so guests usually shared a bottle on the twenty-mile drive down the winding dirt road and polished it off during the return journey. Thanks to Groves’ economies, the post never had any streetlights, so as they made their way home, the night sky over Los Alamos was always carpeted in stars that looked impossibly bright and close enough to touch. That they could be grateful to the general for this was something. “Robert well realized what these dinners and Miss Warner’s presence would do for our morale,” wrote Elsie McMillan. “The moment one walked into her home, one felt the beauty, peace, dedication, and love that existed there.”

  Just as Miss Warner had once been an example to Dorothy when as a young widow she had struggled to make a new life for herself in New Mexico, she now taught the scientists to appreciate their isolated surroundings. She was a deeply spiritual woman, and her reverence for the land was expressed in everything from her well-tended garden to the fireplace brooms of hand-picked, dried grass and the neatly bundled piñon wood that she used for kindling, and which scented every room with its pungent fragrance. She made her home a lovely respite without the benefit of electricity or indoor plumbing. The old pine floors of the log cabin were smooth and gray from years of scrubbing. She worked miracles on her slow wood stove and firmly put the Los Alamos wives in their place when they complained about their awful Black Beauties, stating that in her experience, “a coal or wood stove was the only proper way to cook.” She also did a great deal to help alleviate their sense of deprivation by allowing first Kitty, and then Elsie, to help themselves to all the surplus fruits, vegetables, eggs, and chickens from her garden. Miss Warner had little money of her own, barely making enough to cover her simple needs, and Elsie worried that they could not begin to repay her kindness with the meager profits from what they earned selling her harvest to the housewives on the Hill. “I am ashamed to say it was like sale day in a bargain basement,” Elsie wrote of the greedy mob who would overrun her kitchen and make off with the coveted produce, “as so-called ‘ladies’ would fight over a bunch of fresh carrots or a dozen wonderful Warner eggs.”

  Miss Warner wore herself out cooking and waiting on the Los Alamos crowd, and Dorothy fretted that the work was too much for her. She had always been thin, and she grew frailer over the months, but all the available help in San Ildefonso was working for good wages on the Hill, and there was no one to help Edith and Tilano with the backbreaking chores. The Agnews took to stopping by and helping Edith haul water from the well, which was drawn by bucket using a rope and pulley and then carried to the kitchen. As time went on, Miss Warner also let them come down and help pick fruit, as she and Tilano were getting too old and unsteady to climb trees. After Harold Agnew noticed she needed batteries to run the old radio in her kitchen, he took to hoarding the used dry cells from the laboratory, which were discarded when they were low, and bringing them to her so she keep up with the news and listen to the symphony on Sunday nights. That was the least they could do for the one friend—other than Dorothy, who was part of the project—they would be allowed to make outside of Los Alamos during the war years.

  Miss Warner was a special case, and one of the few exceptions to Groves’ maximum security laws. Officially, she was not supposed to know anything about the project, but she was far too canny a woman not to come to her own conclusions. As she wrote in one of her annual Christmas letters after the war, “I had not known what was being done up there, though in the beginning I had suspected atomic research.” She never took part in their discussions before or after dinner, or inquired about the secret city on the Hill. She
regarded feeding the “hungry scientists” as her duty, though some of her guests knew that such a peaceful woman would deplore weapons research and sensed an unspoken reproach. “It would have been easy for you to reject our problem,” Phil Morrison, one of the physicists who frequented her “candlelit table,” wrote her in gratitude in 1945. “You could have drawn away from the Hill people and their concerns and remained in the compact life of the valley. But you did not.”

  Morrison’s letter is a hymn to the small teahouse at the quiet Otowi crossing and the woman who helped make their time on the Hill, a time made of “long night hours and of critical discussions, of busy desert days and patient waiting in the laboratory,” both more bearable and memorable:

  We lived in a community. We grew to know each other. But that was hardly novel; most of us had been friends long before Los Alamos. What was new was the life around us we began to share. We learned to watch the snow on the Sangres and to look for deer in Water canyon. We found that on the mesas and in the valley there was an old and strange culture; there were our neighbors, the people of the pueblos, and there were the caves in Otowi to remind us that other men had sought water in this dry land. Not the smallest part of the life we came to lead, Miss Warner, was you. Evenings in your place by the river, by the table so neatly set, before the fireplace so carefully contrived, gave us a little of your reassurance, allowed us to belong, took us from the green temporary houses and the bulldozed roads. We shall not forget….