The Girls of Atomic City (14 page)

Housing options ran the gamut, from three-bedroom houses for a family of four down to hutments like the ones Colleen’s uncles and Kattie and Willie lived in. Though on-site housing was a recruiting perk, need continued to outstrip availability. Housing guidelines were strict and getting stricter. A childless couple could not live in a two-bedroom house, for instance. Proper single-family houses were generally reserved only for those earning $60 or more a week and were assigned depending on the number and gender of children. If you worked for an hourly wage below the position of foreman, you needed special approval for a house. If you lived within 40 miles of CEW,
then you were out of luck altogether. You commuted. If you were single, there were dorms or barracks. Some civilian married couples found themselves destined for separate dorms with no in-room visitation for members of the opposite sex.

When the Rowans decided to move to CEW, Colleen’s father left his job at the post office. But the Postal Service was vital to the war effort, so James Rowan had to wait for his Statement of Availability before he could be hired by another company. What Colleen’s parents did not anticipate, however, was that her father’s absence would complicate their search for housing. Only “heads of households” were eligible to apply for available on-site family housing. Women were not, no matter their circumstances, considered heads of household.

Despite the fact Colleen’s mother was the primary family member at CEW, working to support her children while her husband took care of the kids back in Nashville, she was not regarded as a “head of household.” So she was ineligible for a house, apartment, or trailer when she first arrived.

Women who made enough money or held the right positions—though the vast majority did not—
might
be able to get a house for their family, but it required additional approval from the District Engineer, an approval that Colleen’s mother would never receive. In some cases, women were told they might—MIGHT—be considered for some sort of family housing if they could find another female employee to share the house with them.

Most of Colleen’s extended family was at CEW. So when they arrived, Colleen lived with her aunt Nell and uncle Jack, and her mom lived with Uncle Spike. Colleen slept on a bed at the far end of the trailer that folded up during her waking hours to make a table. Cleaning was easy enough. As Aunt Nell would joke: just walk the length of the trailer and kick the drawers shut.

Finding room for household items like high chairs was another matter. When Uncle Jack had taken some metal pipe from the K-25 job site and crafted a high chair with it for one of his kids, he couldn’t get the finished chair in the door. Instead, it stayed outside, sinking down into the mud, baking into place by the sun. At least Aunt Nell could keep the baby close by while she was hanging up clothes.

★ ★ ★

The Happy Valley encampment featured row after concentric row of identical trailers. Thousands had been hauled to the Reservation by train and dumped on the newly razed ground.

Everything’s goin’ in . . . Nothin’s comin’ out . . .

Once James Rowan received his Statement of Availability, he took a job with J. A. Jones Construction. The entire clan—Colleen, her parents, and eight brothers and sisters—moved into a double-wide trailer in the J. A. Jones Trailer Camp, near K-25, where Colleen and her mother worked. Colleen’s family lived toward the back of the camp near the security barrier. Colleen’s youngest sister, Jo, still in elementary school, was scared to approach the barbed wire, certain that the Germans were lurking in the woods on the other side of the fence. Thoughts of Jimmy and the specter of war were always with them. As soon as the Rowans moved in, Bess Rowan was quick to hang their service flag in the window, a reminder to everyone why they were here.

Some trailers had small, makeshift yards and some trailer sites were given street names, hoping to make residents feel a bit more at home in their temporary surroundings. Happy Valley also included H-shaped barracks with male and female wings and hutments for white single men. Trailer camps like Colleen’s were hot and dusty in the summer when they weren’t covered in mud from temperamental southern thunderstorms. Bright streetlights shone all night to support the 24-hour shifts, giving everyone a feeling of never quite being at rest. Blackout curtains—normally an air-raid go-to—were indispensable if you could get them.

The Rowan family’s double trailer at times housed eleven people—though it was hardly designed to do that. There was a double bed at each end of the trailer and a kitchen in the middle. It was larger than Aunt Nell’s single trailer, but small compared to their two-story house in Nashville. The trailer had electricity but no bathrooms. Water had to be hauled from a distribution center down the hill and stored under the sink, which drained into a bucket. Some families kept what they called slop jars for waste. Everything was emptied
by crews with the daunting task of servicing the quickly multiplying structures dotting the landscape. A stove served double duty for heat and cooking. It often leaked oil onto the wooden floorboards below. If you weren’t careful, one stray spark and the whole thing could ignite.

Taking advantage of shift work was key to making a snug, pressed-metal trailer fit large families. Family members slept in shifts, ate in shifts, cleaned in shifts. If there was a cot free, you slept on it. If a child needed to be picked up from school, you fetched her. If there was some food, you ate it. And you had better clean up after yourself, because everyone else was too busy to do it for you.

Happy Valley began in 1943 when J. A. Jones built about 450 hutments on the south side of Gallaher Ferry Road near K-25. The area was so raw that they had to have water trucked in. Just months later, Happy Valley was bursting its brand-new seams. Colleen’s uncles told her that citizens of Clinton were renting out garages and smokehouses to CEW workers, sometimes on a shift basis. Have sheets will travel. Others stayed in common rooms in hotels, with workers coming in and out at all hours. Now new roads and housing appeared in the time it took Colleen to leave for work and return home again. Throughout CEW roving construction crews worked in tandem: One crew laid foundations, a second pass added chimneys standing alone above bulldozed ground, then finally the cemesto siding was slapped on. At the peak, it was estimated a house went up every 30 minutes.

Many people living in the camps at Happy Valley had never laid eyes on CEW’s main Townsite, only 10 miles away. They knew only the trailer camps and the ever-growing plant. Though Colleen may have loved taking the bus to Townsite, Happy Valley had everything: Cafeterias (there were 11 scattered throughout CEW by now) operated virtually around the clock to account for the 24-hour work schedules. Snacks at 2
AM
? Sure, why not.

There was the communal bathhouse, a post office. Most news arrived by mail. Calls for Colleen and others living in the camp were announced over loudspeakers posted to electric poles for all to hear. Indeed, personal phones were practically nonexistent. Only those who could demonstrate need or importance had a phone in their homes.

Laundry was another adventure altogether. Colleen soon learned it was better to do your own with a scrub board, though keeping clothes clean hanging on the line was a Sisyphean battle against the elements. Gusts of wind blew trailer site soot, and pounding rain sent muddy spatters flying. Better this than take your clothes to what many referred to as “the shredder.” If you were lucky, you might get your clothes back from the drop-off service in four or five days. If you were unlucky, they might be lost or mangled.
Why risk it?
Under no circumstances would you gamble panties with elastic. Those were hard to come by in wartime, as rubber now served a purpose higher than a young lady’s waistline.

There was shopping, too, though it was more akin to “waiting.” Waiting in line for cigarettes. For soap. For meat before it ran out. For Jell-O. When available, Jell-O was a real score and guaranteed a wait. Sugar was rationed and Jell-O was a little something sweet. All you had to do was add a little hot water and you could have yourself a ruby-hued, cool, bouncy treat in the hot Tennessee summer.

Colleen soon realized the second she saw a line she had better get on it. Chances were there was something good at the other end.

Most services were managed by the Roane-Anderson Company, so named for the two counties in Tennessee that CEW straddled. Roane-Anderson, a shell company of Turner Construction, was created for the Project and operated as an agent of the government under the direction of the United States Engineering Department. Luckily, some services came to you. The library, for example, headed by the New York Public Library’s Elizabeth Edwards, was in Townsite. Soon Edwards instituted the rolling library. There was a rolling grocery, too, that made the rounds through the trailer sites, propping open its shutters for a quick treat. Each Thursday it offered copies of the
Oak Ridge Journal.

The front page read:

NOT TO BE TAKEN OR MAILED FROM THE AREA

Under no circumstances should pictures of the various installations or panoramic views be taken!

Colleen always wondered why you weren’t allowed to take the
Oak Ridge Journal
off the “area.” There was never any real news in it.

“Dog bites in Oak Ridge: 40 a month . . .”

But what
could
the paper print? If
Colleen
wasn’t allowed to know what she was doing, how could they print what anybody else was doing? The
Journal
was useful for mass schedules and social events. It featured reports on “presenteeism” in the plants and a smattering of fashion news—always useful to the woman up to her knees in mud 24-7.

“It’s just like camping. . . . It’s only temporary. . . .”

So went Colleen’s mother’s mantra, one for all of those who have endured tough times. Oak Ridge was difficult, yes, but also exciting and different. Colleen knew she wanted to remember her time here. She began collecting bits and pieces of her life. Two fires during her childhood had robbed Colleen’s family of so many personal memories. Those experiences had made her oddly sentimental. She began saving almost everything she got her hands on: important newspaper clippings, memorable photographs, sketches, and poems inspired by her new adventure. Each ticket stub glued into a scrapbook or stuffed in a keepsake box further cemented her spot in a place that she was certain would be only temporary.

Sakes alive, look at it! How could it be anything but?

★ ★ ★

A flashlight moved across Kattie’s sleeping face. It was the guard again, coming into Kattie’s hut. They were allowed, it seemed, to come in almost whenever they wanted.

“Ain’t nobody here but you, but there are four beds,” the guard barked at Kattie.

He left, flashlight waving, no doubt heading to the men’s area to see if he could shake the women out of there.

Guards were a very regular presence in the black hutments and always stationed outside “the Pen”—the name that Kattie, her friend Katie Mahone, and the other women who lived in the black female hutment area had taken to calling their little corner of CEW. Kattie had noticed it when she first arrived, the barbed wire. High, tall
fencing with barbed wire separated the women’s hutment area from the men’s, which was across a ditch and up a bit of a grade. That’s where Willie was, and would stay, for the foreseeable future.

They didn’t put men in a pen, though, Kattie noticed. Her hut was around back, right near the fence, wire in every direction. There was only one way into the Pen and the guards were there, night and day, making sure no men entered the women’s area. She still saw Willie every day after work at his hut. But there was a curfew. Come 10
PM
, flashlights waved and folks scattered. Were they FBI men? Kattie thought so. Oh, but the women hated those guards. Most of them, anyway. The head guard, the one who looked the oldest to Kattie’s eyes, was quite nice.

It was authority, he explained to Kattie, that made the younger guards behave the way they did.

“Get your marriage license the next time you go home,” he told her one day when she was being hassled by one of the younger guards. “Don’t let them tell you who you can and can’t visit.”

He never ran her off from Willie’s hut, not once. Of course Kattie always made sure she was back inside the Pen before curfew. Not all the women did, though. And then the flashlights came out.

There had been plans for an entire Negro Village, one that would have resembled the main Townsite with construction like the white homes, separate but essentially equal. But as housing became limited throughout CEW in 1943, it was decided that the Negro Village would become East Village—for whites. Lieutenant Colonel Crenshaw, who was in charge of the program, explained why. Negroes didn’t want the nice houses, he wrote. His office had received virtually no applications for the village. The negroes felt more comfortable in the huts, that was what was familiar to them—or so went Crenshaw’s rationale. Black and white construction workers and some GIs lived in hutments, but no white women lived there. The hutments remained, no matter one’s marital status, earnings, or seniority, the only housing for black workers. Five grown men might live in the 256-square-foot space if the coal stove was removed in the summer to allow for one more cot. When the Negro Village became East Village,
hutment areas for black residents were equipped with separate roads that took them to the nearest stores, fenced off from the white areas. Theft was a persistent problem, privacy practically nonexistent, and amenities few.

Treatment varied widely, and some black residents wrote letters of complaint stating they were not permitted to visit their spouses at all, no matter the time.

B. W. Ross, spokesman for the Colored Employees of Roane-Anderson Company, wrote: