The Girls of Atomic City (15 page)

And too, at the war man power board where we signed for employment on these jobs we were promised living facilities that would allow man and wife to live together. And now we colored married couples are here working on this Govt. Project. With our wives living in one house and we being their lawful married husbands are living in separate houses alone to our selves. We are not allowed to visit our wives home. And our wives are not allowed to visit our homes at no time day or night.

The black cafeteria was close—right near the huts—but Kattie could not, no matter how she tried, stomach the food. One resident penned a letter of complaint detailing food served in the black cafeteria—“rocks, glass or some dangerous piece of harmful trash in this food”—and sent it to Roosevelt himself. Kattie remembered the night of the dreadful turkey thigh—at least she
thought
it was a turkey thigh—her cramps kept getting worse and worse, so severe. Willie had to physically carry her to the bathroom.

It must have been a
buzzard
thigh
, she thought in retrospect. Once they arrived at the communal bathroom, it was full. Apparently, she hadn’t been the only one whose stomach had been torn up by the buzzard. So Kattie made Willie go into the men’s bathroom to check and see if the coast was clear. It wasn’t entirely—there was another man there and in obvious intestinal despair—but she had no choice.

Something
had to change.

There may have been better pay here, but there was not better food. Kattie knew she had to figure out another way to get something
decent to eat. There had to be a way to make this place feel a bit more like home. She was going to figure out a way to cook in her hut, out of sight of the guards, rules or no.

★ ★ ★

Celia had been getting ready to turn in when her dorm mother buzzed her room. Celia had a phone call.

Was it her family calling about her brothers?

It was late—already close to 10 o’clock. She went down to the lobby and picked up the phone. The voice on the other end was one she had been waiting to hear for some time. It belonged to Henry Klemski.

“Do you remember me?” Henry asked. “You picked me up at the train station.”

Did she remember him?
Celia stifled a laugh.

There was certainly no shortage of available men, but Celia had found herself thinking about Henry more and more. After that first meeting, Celia had begun to distance herself from Lew. She liked him, but he was talking marriage, and Celia wasn’t ready for that.

She also knew that if Henry thought that she was still dating Lew, there was no way Henry would ask her out. So she let Lew down easy.

“I’m not going to get serious with anybody,” she’d said. “I’m taking up your time. See if you can find another girl.”

Time passed, and Celia had begun to wonder if she’d ever hear from Henry. And then, seemingly out of the blue, he rang.

“Meet me for coffee at the cafeteria,” Henry said to her.

“I can’t. It’s too late,” Celia said. “The dorm mother won’t let me go.”

Celia found her dorm mother to be strict, but not unreasonable. That said, she still didn’t think that this idea would fly.

“Put her on the phone,” Henry said.

Celia handed over the phone to the dorm mother and stood by watching as she spoke to Henry for a few moments and then hung up.

“He sounds like a nice guy,” the dorm mother said. “You can go.”

Celia freshened up and ran over to Jackson Square to meet Henry at the cafeteria. She had been given one half hour. And that was all
the time she’d need. Now, a few months on, she and Henry were spending more and more time together. But one person she had been hearing less and less from was her brother Clem.

★ ★ ★

By the summer of 1944, the dorms were teeming with thousands of individuals. Single white women lived in dorms where they could be strictly monitored. Along with the no-cooking rule, there were rules against gambling and liquor. And, perhaps most challenging in a town with dorms chock full of single men and women in their late teens to mid-20s: No male visitors allowed. Sexual infractions meant eviction and were often punished most severely. Dorm mothers were relied upon to regulate comings and goings, and curfews. Some of these marms had been lured from places like Bryn Mawr and Smith and trained other dorm mothers about how best to handle the challenges of looking after so many single young girls living away from home for the first time.

There were violations and complaints. Some of the griping made it as far as the District Engineer, who found himself visited by a delegation of ministers. Some of their congregants—the “good girls”—had complained about “bad girls” breaking dorm rules, including those prohibiting male visitors. The ministers suggested that all the “bad girls be moved into their own separate dorm, so as not to disturb or, by association, damage the reputations of the rule-abiding women.” The Engineer told them it was a fine idea. All the ministers needed to do was supply two lists: one of the good girls and another of the bad girls. The Engineer did not hear from them again.

Despite her initial panic and thoughts of turning tail and returning to Hornbeak, Dot began adjusting to life in the dorms. There were those living in the dorms who complained about laundry, or cafeteria food, or about having to share a bathroom. But Dot didn’t think it was any worse than the “two-holer” outhouse she had grown up with. She had only brought one bag from home—mostly hand-me-downs from her life as the youngest of seven children—so she found her room to be big enough. The furniture was so new that some women had to unwrap the plastic from their dressers when they moved in.
One young woman reported moving into a dorm that was so new the windows weren’t yet installed. She slept in an overcoat and found ice gripping the edges of her water glass the next morning.

Dot’s adjustment was also thanks to Katie and Thelma, two women who lived down the hall. Though they were only a few years older than Dot, they seemed to have it all together and took Dot under their wing. Most importantly, the two women loaned Dot money when her cash ran out, as it always seemed to, and the arrival of a paycheck was still a few days off. If the rent was due or Dot needed an infusion of dollars for the cafeteria or a movie in town, Katie and Thelma always came through. Dot always paid them back. She may not have saved much, but she was having the time of her life. Learning to manage her finances was a tiny bump in the road. The nervousness and fear she first felt was soon replaced by a heady feeling of freedom. There was no farm and no chores to do. All she had to do was go to work.

For those who had gone to college, like Jane, the statistician, Virginia, the budding chemist, and Rosemary, the nurse, the dorms had a familiar feeling. Everyone was roughly the same age, all living together for ostensibly the same purpose. Friendships were cemented as fast as saddle shoes in wet clay in Oak Ridge during the war, and clubs sprouted quickly. Jane and Virginia eventually joined the College Women’s Club, organized by a mutual friend. The members of the College Women’s Club got together to socialize, sometimes putting on fashion shows or dances. But their primary activity was babysitting for local families—families living in real, honest-to-goodness houses—for 25 cents an hour. The idea was to raise money for a college scholarship fund for girls graduating from Oak Ridge’s high school.

There were perks to babysitting, as well. The women enjoyed a night in a house with access to a real kitchen. If they could cobble together enough sugar ration coupons, they baked cookies and maybe brought a date along. Sometimes another couple would stop by and the young women could sit in a real living room and play a game of bridge or relax in mixed company without fear of running afoul of dorm regulations.

Celia’s friend Rosemary babysat occasionally for the head of the hospital, Dr. Charles Rea. After a short stay in the dorm, Rosemary and the other nurses finally got their own living facilities, a housing complex right next to the hospital. Rosemary loved the convenience, and her new rooms were definitely a step up. Two rooms, rather than a whole hall, shared an ensuite bathroom. But she, too, liked to enjoy the comforts of what felt like a real home now and then. Dr. Rea and his wife had taken Rosemary in, in many ways. That first Christmas when she wasn’t able to travel home to Holy Cross, Iowa, she spent the holidays with them. And if they got home late, she would often spend the night at their home rather than go back to the dorm.

Dorms and dating, babysitting and bridge. CEW was in many ways an outpost best suited to the young, those for whom enthusiasm trumped exhaustion and the sense of adventure outran hardship.

★ ★ ★

For some residents, however, life on the Reservation was
too
trying. Chief Psychiatrist Dr. Eric Kent Clarke, who had just arrived several months earlier in March 1944, found himself challenged by what he soon realized was a very unique community. Combine cramped quarters with isolation and secrecy and he discovered that a lot of people were in a perpetual state of edgy exhaustion. The kind of rehashing of a day’s work with a spouse or roommate that most adults took for granted was not permitted. Relieving stress by talking about what was worrying you was not an option, since most worries were related to work, an off-limits topic.

Residents had left familiar traditions and support networks behind, and there was little to replace them. Clarke reported that it had for some time been suspected that there were many psychiatric problems plaguing the residents of Oak Ridge, but that these situations were neither recognized nor well defined. That’s where he came in.

“By March, 1944, the need for specialized service to cope with the personality disturbance became apparent and the psychiatric service was established,” Clarke wrote in one of his early reports.

From the beginning the residents have been subjected to many additional stresses absent in the usual community which have created tensions. Material necessities were still in embryo form, and it required a true pioneer spirit, that was often lacking, to make an easy transition to a community still in the making.

But how did one foster community from scratch amid nonstop deadlines, round-the-clock work schedules, and a high turnover of residents and laborers? The Project had little time or inclination to institute social change.

Despite all the planning the military did with regard to Townsites and homes and religious groups and softball leagues, there was no real plan for Oak Ridge beyond the timetable of the war itself.

CEW had a single goal: to enrich Tubealloy for the Gadget.

But whether the Project had intended it or not, CEW
was
a social experiment of sorts. A military-run Reservation handling the most top secret of assignments but inhabited by not only military men, but civilians, women, children. Native Americans from Oklahoma worked alongside construction workers from Mexico and good ol’ boys from Virginia. Black employees who were segregated and forced to live without their children and apart from their spouses in small hutments, and construction workers packed like sardines into tin-can trailers lived mere miles from out-of-town PhDs, who enjoyed prefab yet roomy homes. Those PhDs themselves—some living under assumed names for security reasons—might be next door to a plumbing foreman and his family, neither knowing the other’s job.

Women added a social dimension to this military installation that had not yet been taken fully into account. They were an essential part of the Project’s success. Without them, there would be no Product, and without Product there would be no Gadget. But women brought a sense of permanence. Social connectivity. Home. Women seeking work or promotions were quizzed about whether they planned on having a family. Families—babies especially—were potentially disruptive to the production process. Women were powerful. And oh so necessary.

Women infused the job site with life, their presence effortlessly defying all attempts to control and plan and shape every aspect of day-to-day existence at Oak Ridge. The Project may not have known what was to become of the town after the war, but the women knew that while they were there, they would not only work as hard as the men, but they would make it home.

The Project probably never saw this coming. The government wasn’t interested in social experiments, didn’t give a second thought to the cultural-anthropological ramifications of the world they had set in motion. The Project had put all the pieces in place: single young men and women from all over the country. Wives. Mothers.

They lived in close quarters, surrounded by visual reminders of solidarity, camaraderie, and sometimes threat. Maybe it was the gates, or the common enemy. Maybe it was the tracts of identical housing, which served—at least for some, at least in their immediate surroundings—as reminders that no one was better than anyone else. A bond formed among them. For those who chose to stay, there was going to be community and family,
planned
or otherwise, like it or not.

The military may have been in charge, but the irrepressible life force that is woman—that was well beyond their control.

The only thing that would be temporary was the war.

TUBEALLOY

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

THE QUEST FOR PRODUCT

Tubealloy’s journey started deep in the earth, much of it in Edgar Sengier’s Belgian Congo mines, with a bit arriving from Canada and a smattering from vanadium mines out west. The first leg of Tubealloy’s trip was often a long voyage across the sea to the New York metropolitan area in 55-gallon drums. There the Tubealloy might head to Eldorado Mining in Canada for processing and then perhaps take a trip to Westinghouse in New Jersey, Iowa State College in Ames, or maybe St. Louis, where it landed at Mallinckrodt, or to Cleveland, where it was welcomed at Harshaw. At different times during the Project, these companies transformed the Tubealloy into a variety of forms—oxides, fluorides, salts, metals—before it was piled on trains or trucks and bound for Project sites including the Clinton Engineer Works in that tiny corner of Tennessee.