109 East Palace

by Jennet Conant

  Things got so bad that when Dorothy would call up to Los Alamos to say that she was sending up a new family for one of the vacant units, she would be informed by the Housing Office that someone had already claimed the property that she had reserved for them. Dorothy would then be forced to engage in elaborate delaying tactics down on her end while the Housing Office desperately scrambled to find them new quarters. She would take the scientists and their worn-out families on the lengthiest orientation tours of Santa Fe she could devise and treat them to their first enchiladas at the knee-high tables at La Fonda, while frequently excusing herself to phone up to the Hill until she was given the all clear. At one point, things got so bad there was even a rumor going around that the WAC in charge of counseling tried to dissuade one physicist from getting married rather than have to find new accommodations for him and his bride.

  The town’s services, originally designed with a small community of a hundred or so scientists in mind, were rapidly becoming insufficient for the population that had grown to more than 3,500 and counting. There were signs that the water supply was dangerously low, reminding them that they were hostage in a dry land. Army bulletins containing instructions on water conservation were distributed door-to-door by uniformed soldiers. Leisurely ablutions were to be replaced by a “good citizens shower” lasting only a minute or two. The Bulletin issued a rash of edicts along the lines of “REPORT LEAKY FAUCETS IMMEDIATELY!” Toilet flushing was to be kept to a minimum, gardens were not to be watered, automobiles were not to be washed, and so on. The shortage was so great it became the main topic of conversation among the mothers wheeling their young around the mesa. Water had to be boiled, and typhoid shots were ordered for everyone. When long string worms starting turning up at the bottom of teakettles and drinking glasses, Doc Barnett would shrug and tell them of the “chow mein” that flowed from the faucets of San Francisco and remind them of the S. J. Perelman story about “the Filipino houseboy who arrived via the tap.” It got so bad Elsie McMillan recalled that after disinfecting her baby’s bottles in a pan of water, she would do the dishes in the same water, and then reuse the gray liquid to scrub the kitchen floor.

  There were signs of overcrowding everywhere. Government trailers and Nissen huts sprung up on empty meadows, turning them overnight into urban slums. New arrivals sometimes waited weeks to get their plumbing connected. The back porches behind the apartment buildings were jammed with stinking garbage cans. Rows of parked cars sat hub deep in the spring mud. The lines of laundry flapping in the wind added to the Dogpatch look. Electricity was intermittent, and it was regularly turned off when a major experiment was in the offing. Food shortages were also a recurrent problem. Some anxious mothers even suspected Groves of instructing the Commissary not to carry sufficient inventories of milk and believed the chronic scarcity of diapers and formula to be part of a vast conspiracy to discourage them from expanding their families.

  The mesa populations exploding growth was a constant source of jokes. Eighty babies were born in the first year, and by Doc Barnett’s best estimates, the coming year would far exceed that figure. Another ten babies were born in April, and in the month after, and he had every reason to believe the birthrate would continue to be roughly the same. Most of the couples were young and healthy, and since the vast majority of infants he had delivered were first children, more were likely to follow At one point, there were so many babies being born that nearly half the hospital was being used as a nursery. A June 22 memorandum on the Los Alamos baby boom from Colonel Stafford Warren, an officer in the Medical Corps, to General Groves, highlighted the problem:

  Item 3.d. Approximately one-fifth of the married women are now in some stage of pregnancy. (The birth rate over the nation elsewhere is decreasing.)

  Item 3.e. Approximately one-sixth of the population are children, one-third of whom are under two years of age.

  When confronted by the escalating birthrate, and the corresponding rise in the cost of hospital services, Groves all but ordered Oppenheimer to do something about it. The laboratory staff was reproducing at such a rate that the situation was straining the post’s resources and threatening to turn his top-secret garrison into a glorified pediatric ward. Oppenheimer objected that population control was not one of his duties as scientific director, not that it would do any good. What he probably did not mention, however, was that he was the last person who could take a stand on the issue as his own wife was with child.

  Word of Groves’ complaint quickly spread around the post grapevine and became fodder for all sorts of gleeful limericks and jingles, the politest of which went in part:

  The General’s in a stew

  He trusted you and you

  He thought you’d be scientific

  Instead you’re just prolific

  And what is he to do?

  After that, poking fun at the general’s attempts to police their love lives became a favorite mesa sport. When a scientific journal published a report stating that there was statistical evidence linking male infertility to long immersion in hot water, several scientists suggested sending a copy of the article to Groves in a bid to have bathtubs installed in their homes. They would all have gladly risked a night of sterility in exchange for a good soak.

  Groves, like any absentee landlord, did not see the humor in the “constant and unanticipated increase in the population.” The town was overloaded, and the crowding aggravated the existing tensions between the military and civilian personnel. The scientists were not the only ones with wives and children on the post: officers could also bring their families, as well as the few civilians who manned key facilities, such as the fire station, steam plant, and lodge. Noncommissioned officers had to make do with visiting their wives in Albuquerque. More dormitories were built for married civilian couples, but married GIs were ineligible. This meant that the many soldiers and WACs who had fallen in love and married while at Los Alamos had to live apart, until the regulations were eventually changed by the end of the war and apartments were set aside where they could keep house for two-week periods. Lieutenant Colonel Ash-bridge, who administered the post, was under constant fire from both groups, and suffered a mild heart attack. The Los Alamos inmates had defeated two COs, and would doubtless try for a third. “It was obvious,” Groves wrote, “that until most of the innumerable petty annoyances could be removed, the frictions would continue.”

  While Groves did not like coddling the civilian population, or wasting an extra nickel on the temporary wartime town, he recognized that they had to build more satisfactory housing and that to better the morale of the community, some improvements had to be made for all the families. To alleviate the housing problem, he approved the construction of Morganville, and in early 1944 a swarm of tiny duplexes were erected at the north end of the alfalfa field near Fuller Lodge. They were built for the machinists coming in from Dallas, but the union rep took one look at the poorly built houses and refused to let the workers live there, demanding apartments instead. The Sundt and Morgan outfits were succeeded by the Robert McKee Construction Company as the primary contractor, and Groves ordered one hundred new prefabricated houses to be built in regimental formation in another field. In no time, seven city blocks of the boxy, flat-roofed MeKeeville houses were erected. While they looked to be just as small and drab as the Morgan houses, they had the advantage of being single-family dwellings and thus immediately took precedence in the residential hierarchy. As a result, Morganville became known rather ignominiously as the neighborhood of last resort, the project’s very own Siberia.

  When fourteen families received memos from Oppenheimer explaining that they had lost out in the housing lottery and would have to give up their apartments to make room for larger families who merited the space, a minor revolution brewed. The notice to Eric and Eleanor Jette read in part:

  There is a very grave housing shortage at the present time, particularly in the larger size apartment, and it will be some months before new housing can be built… .
When you were assigned your present apartment you were told that such an assignment was temporary and that you might be required to move to a smaller apartment at some time in the future. This time has unfortunately arrived… .

  The Jettes did not have to check with Dorothy to know what it meant. They were headed for Morganville. Eleanor Jette declared bitterly that the only place she was moving was “back to Croton-on-Hudson.” Their plight was the talk of the Tech Area. Everyone was in an uproar. The “Fighting Fourteen,” as they became known, called a meeting and threatened to leave. A young draftsman quit and promptly got a better-paying job in Santa Fe. More threatened to follow suit. They drafted a lengthy petition and presented it before the army representatives, complete with impassioned oratory and questionable logic, at the Town Council the following week. Foreign scientists jumped up and down brandishing the Constitution and Bill of Rights. The threat of imminent insurrection was more that the administration could stomach, and the moving order was nullified. “Nobody will move unless they want to move,” a subsequent notice pleaded.

  In the months that followed, the scientists exacted a few other hard-won concessions. The original hospital, which was not much more than a shack, could no longer accommodate the soaring birthrate and was replaced by a new, larger project hospital. A full-time dentist was hired, so that if they had an aching tooth they no longer needed to go to Dorothy begging for relief. She had somehow always managed to get them a last-minute appointment with Dr. Lord, who had two sons in the service and was “cleared” to treat Hill people. But there was nothing she could do to spare them the long ride down the rough roads, each bump sending them into paroxysms of agony as they cursed the general anew. A dry-cleaning concession was established to solve the ongoing problem of lost clothes, which rankled the scientists and their wives. They had grown tired of sending their few good suits down to the cleaners in Santa Fe only to have them disappear for weeks on end, and in some cases never to be seen again. Another post laundry was also added, as the existing service was overwhelmed by soiled diapers. By popular request, an empty field east of the lawn in front of Fuller Lodge was turned into a victory garden, and plots were made available to those who wanted to grow their own vegetables. A barren pasture just west of the site was turned into a nine-hole golf course, but as it shared the acreage with grazing horses who were apt to gallop onto the greens, and the layout was so rambling a guide was essential on the first few outings, it was not quite the country-club amenity it sounded.

  Some forms of progress were lamented. The original Trading Post, housed in one of the quaint old log cabins built by the Ranch School, had grown too small to serve their growing numbers, and the army announced plans to build a new one. The civilians protested the wanton destruction, but their concern for preserving the local architecture fell on deaf ears. They woke up one morning to find that the rustic little cabin had been leveled. The new PX, similar in construction to so many other recent additions to the site, was nothing to make John Gaw Meem proud. But it boasted a soda fountain, a jukebox, and a large dance floor, and quickly became popular with the soldiers and single girls.

  By now, everyone at Los Alamos was used to making do. Emilio Segrè repaired Laura Fermi’s broken washing machine, and Dick Feynman kept the Tech Area adding machines and computers running. Ed McMillan, Johnny Williams, and Bob Wilson kept an eye on Los Alamos’s four old diesel-run generators, probably acquired from some defunct mining company, so the town had a more or less reliable source of power. They had learned to be tolerant of what Jane Wilson called their “Barnum & Bailey” world, a way of life that was backward, inefficient, and, more often than not, absurd. “If the laundry wasn’t taking clothes one week, you were a little less fastidious,” recalled Charlotte Serber. “If there was no gasoline in the local tank, you walked to work. If the PX had no cigarettes, you rolled your own.” If the faucets deposited more algae than liquid, you gave up bathing and waited until you could take a day off and go to Dorothy’s for a shower and shave. In the meantime, everyone from world-renowned scientists to buck privates grew beards and went around in rumpled khakis and looked more than a little scruffy. Women took to wearing overalls and pulling their hair back with bandannas. They joked among themselves that if the post were suddenly opened to the public, people would take one look at all the blue jeans and lumberjack shirts and assume the top-secret facility was being run by a bunch of cowboys. Elinor Pulitzer Hempelmann, who somehow always managed to look lovely, and clung stubbornly to the hat-and-glove requirements of good society, turned to Shirley Barnett one day and bemoaned the state of things, concluding in disgust, “I’m just so sick of looking at all the ugly people in the Commissary!”

  That April, Kitty threw Oppenheimer a big fortieth birthday party. A group of his old Berkeley friends got together and made a spoof yearbook of his tenure at Los Alamos. It was organized like a high school album, complete with “campus” highlights and illustrated with “class pictures” consisting of poorly mimeographed copies of their pass photos. Most of these portraits were worse than mug shots, and some of the physicists resembled the pictures in the local museum of New Mexico’s old hard-luck prospectors, with their unkempt hair and flowing beards. Everyone agreed it was a fitting way to commemorate their first year.

  By late spring, the available housing lagged so far behind the number of potential occupants that Dorothy noted the situation was “again and yet and still more critical.” She was called to a meeting on the Hill and informed that the project would be taking over the Frijoles Canyon Lodge in Bandelier National Monument, and they needed her to get it up and running in five days. They also asked if she would stay on and manage it for the next six weeks until the new dorms were completed.

  Only twenty miles from Los Alamos, Bandelier National Monument, a fifty-square-mile park that bordered their mesa, had been closed to the public shortly after the government claimed the site, and the empty lodge was available for interim housing for the new laboratory staff. It was an ideal location, as it was much closer than the ranches in the Espanola Valley and an easier and less conspicuous commute than the long trek back down to Santa Fe. “I was asked if I would put on my Army cap instead of a scientific hat and go over there,” recalled Dorothy. “We were told by personnel that there were eighty people coming that summer who had no place to sleep.”

  Before she even had a chance to think it over, Oppenheimer stuck his face in the door and said with beguiling simplicity, “Dorothy, I wish you’d do this.” She started to object, stammering that someone would need to man the Santa Fe office, adding half-heartedly, “I’ve never run a hotel before, I don’t know how… .” But nothing she said mattered. They both knew she would do as he asked.

  The isolated mountain inn had been owned and operated for eighteen years by Evelyn Cecil Frey, a formidable old-time rancher. Back in 1925, the government had granted the newlyweds George and Evelyn Frey a ninety-nine-year lease on concessions, and they had worked tirelessly to develop the remote guesthouse, planting fruit trees and gardens, and providing hot meals and cabins for archaeologists and travelers who came down the steep trails by burro. After the Forest Service built a road to Frijoles in 1933, the canyon became easily accessible to tourists, and Mrs. Frey, who took over after her husband left her, was forced to stand by as the old stone lodge was torn down and a new, larger facility was constructed, along with an administration building, museum, pool, and extensive parking area. The new lodge proved extremely popular, but in June 1943, Mrs. Frey found herself displaced by the Park Service once again when they offered the lodge to the Los Alamos project. The secret installation had put a stop to the tourist traffic, and with no other source of income, she had little choice but to cooperate. The army took it over and used it as makeshift quarters for technical experts and consultants from the universities, private industry, and branches of the armed forces.

  When Mrs. Frey was briefly allowed back on the premises to inventory the lodge’s contents before turning it
over to the army, she had been scandalized by all the damage. Between January and March 1944, a hundred men from the Robert McKee Construction Company who were working at the Los Alamos site had used the abandoned lodge and had left it in a terrible state of disarray. Mrs. Frey had just managed to stop their bulldozers from rolling over a parking area that was thick with bushes of purple and yellow asters and tall trees and was an integral part of the lodge’s backwoods charm. The cabins the workers had occupied were filthy. The walls were coated with sooty fat spatters from the fire-places, which the men had used to cook their dinners. “They were pretty rough,” recalled Dorothy. “They just nearly destroyed the kitchen, the stove was so greasy, and they found dead rodents in the flour bin. The whole place had to be absolutely scraped clean.” When Mrs. Frey heard Dorothy was coming in to prepare for another wave of recruits, she let her have it. “She didn’t care a bit for the words ‘Los Alamos’ and I didn’t know this,” said Dorothy, who bore the brunt of her fury until she could persuade the old lady that this time the lodge was in better hands. “They just sent me into these battles like a lamb. I just waltzed in there and the worse it is, the cooler I get, so she and I became great friends.”