The Girls of Atomic City (19 page)

So workers used codes for even the most innocuous of materials, and designations might switch from plant to plant, lab to lab. In Y-12’s chemistry department, you might find these:

704: hydrogen peroxide.

728: liquid nitrogen.

703: nitric acid. (This made mincemeat of cotton work clothes.)

720.724 was TO4, Tubealloy oxide.

723 reacted with 753 to make 745 (TC15) which was transformed by sublimation (think dry ice in a Halloween punch) into TC14—feed for the calutrons.

Of course, across the ocean, the Germans had their own way of doing things. They called Tubealloy oxide “preparation 38.”

★ ★ ★

In another building of the Y-12 complex—which would eventually contain 268 permanent structures—clerks raced to arrive at work earlier than their coworkers, and for good reason: The Marchant and Monroe adding machines. Early birds dove on the newfangled automatic models to avoid the slower hand-cranking machines. The extra
effort to lock down a model that worked a little more smoothly was worth the minuscule loss of sleep when you took into consideration the long shift ahead.

Jane Greer spent most of her days—and sometimes nights—in that room, monitoring the workers as they sat punching a slew of numbers into their adding machines. Like the cubicle operators in another building in Y-12, a room that these women never saw, clerks worked around the clock, each woman performing a single function. Each day, the couriers arrived and brought Jane the numbers that she needed. The numbers were passed to the group of young women she supervised, who put them through the series of calculations Jane had painstakingly explained to them.

They seem so young
, Jane often thought. But in truth, most of the women were only a few years her junior.

Instructing and supervising was old hat for Jane by now. She had worked part-time during college teaching physics to Army Air Corps cadets at the University of Tennessee, so she had developed her own knack for explaining mathematical processes and calculations to those who had not used them that often or, in some cases, ever.

She had started out in building 9731 of Y-12 as a production records clerk, making thirty-five dollars per week. Within a couple of months she was given a raise to thirty-eight dollars. By Christmas of 1943, she had already been made chief clerk, and had helped establish the plant’s statistical office, checking the reports that were arriving from, as she was told, various production departments. With the most recent promotion came yet another raise, this time up to thirty-nine dollars per week, and soon a move to the production manager’s staff. In addition to her supervisory role, Jane prepared summaries of operating data that were submitted daily, weekly, and monthly. She checked every calculation the women made and then compiled all their information into one, larger report that would tell her superiors something about how production was going.

But despite her constant advancement, it hadn’t taken Jane long to learn that men working beneath her were making more money than she was. Other women throughout the Reservation had observed
the same. This came as little surprise to Jane, in particular, a young woman who had been denied entry into engineering school because of her gender. But it was no less disheartening.

Jane chose to focus instead on the importance of her job. Her purpose. She couldn’t imagine the other job opportunities she had passed up turning out any better than this one had. At Oak Ridge she felt needed and was grateful she could remain close to home and her widower father. She also felt valued by the young women who worked with her, and that camaraderie meant a lot and suited her nature. Flighty Jane was a social bird, no doubt. She was a Greer from Paris, Tennessee, after all, a true Southern Parisian in every respect. Boyfriends, parties, impromptu performances in her parents’ parlor—Jane was up for anything. But once at work, the magna cum laude graduate got serious.

Her own training had been quite intense. The “technical knowledge of the production process” had been explained to her in great detail along with the chemistry and production calculations involved. Everything was presented in an exhaustive manner that was at once specific and yet still vague. Jane was given much more information than many at CEW—men or women—but never, of course, the whole picture. Her meticulous notes detailed the material, the T, as it worked its way through the Y-12 plant.

Here’s what Jane learned, in a large, coded nutshell:

There were two processes, Alpha followed by Beta, during which the feed material went through D units. Jane had painstakingly sketched the semicircle production unit at the heart of these processes and when necessary referred to her notes. Across the top of her sketch, she had written simply, THE D. She drew a detailed flow chart, marking E boxes and Alphas and Betas. She labeled D units, Q readings and R readings, and T material.

Then came the mathematical equations. Now
here
was where Jane could shine. Jane may not have been
told
what T stood for or the real name of the D, and she certainly had never laid eyes on them in person. But as a statistician she knew how to calculate just about anything. Just give her the numbers and get out of her way.

How the production process related to the production reports—that’s
where the rubber met the road for Jane. She collected tallies from her flock of Marchant and Monroe mistresses and checked and compiled them, computing the final data that she herself had to submit. Her final reports were picked up by two security guards and delivered to her department head. The work must have been important: Someone stopped by her desk during her training session and stamped her personal, handwritten notes in a bright red SECRET.

Jane loved it.

★ ★ ★

Pipes came in and pipes went out. Men welded and pounded and split beam upon beam. Kattie looked up at the construction workers overhead, sparks flying as they welded a constant flow of two-by-fours together. The fire and flares popped and flew and finally fell, fading as they approached the ground. She looked again and thought the answer to her prayers might be found among the glints and flashes raining down from above.

Kattie was on the swing shift, sometimes working from 8
AM
until 4
PM
, sometimes from 4
PM
’til midnight. She entered the massive K-25 plant through the Clock Alley (so called because that was where all the workers clocked in). Once in, she was sweeping and scrubbing every inch of space in her section of what was, though she did not know it, the largest building in the world.

There were enormous tanks to shine, too. Work was fine, she thought. She was meeting other women. They’d talk and gossip as they worked from one end of the floor to the other and back again. Willie was working on the railroad tracks, one of many men sweating and singing, day and night.

Hey boys, can’t you line,

Hey boys, just a hair,

Ho boys, line them over,

Hey boys just a hair . . .

The tracks they maintained routed train cars and their cargo straight into K-25. Perhaps nowhere else was the perplexing absence
of tangible product more evident than where the train tracks crossed into CEW. At this juncture, workers from Louisville & Nashville railroads transferred control of railcars to crews working for the Project. Those L&N workers watched as thousands of packed train cars made their way onto the Reservation while only empty ones ever exited.

Everything’s goin’ in and nothin’s comin’ out . . .

Willie earned a good bit more than she did—and goodness knows she was working just as hard as he was—but the amount she earned was nearly
twice
as much money as she’d made cleaning the library back at Auburn University in Alabama.

The night she received her first check, she hurried home to her hut. She carefully took the cash out of the envelope she’d gotten from the bank and laid all the crisp, new bills out over the top of her cot. She just stood there, looking at it all. So much in one place at one time. After relishing the moment, she gathered it up in her hands and began to divide it up as she always had with every bit of money that had ever crossed her palm: One pile for expenses, one for savings, and the biggest chunk to be sent home via Western Union to her mama and the babies she missed so much.
Babies.
They were getting bigger all the time, whether or not she was there to see it with her own eyes.

But good pay alone was not enough to solve her more immediate problem. She wanted to cook at home, badly. And she knew that to do this she would need a pan. Today, she thought she might have found an answer.

Kattie looked closely at the construction workers. When they cut off the end of a beam, they tossed it aside. It looked to Kattie like there was plenty of material that the men weren’t using. They were treating it like trash! There was no reason for any of that good material to go to waste, not if she could use it.

She waved to one of the workingmen overhead, getting his attention.

“Make me a biscuit pan!” she yelled up, straining to make her voice heard over the incessant grinding and pounding and yelling of the construction crew.

Kattie didn’t know who on earth this worker was. She had no idea if—or why, for that matter—he would do as she asked. He had no reason to. Everyone certainly had enough work to do in this place. But sure enough, the next morning when she showed up for work, there was not one but three pans waiting there for her before she started her shift. They were far from perfect—a little rumpled and crinkled at one end or the other, far from flat and a far few angles short of being rectangular. But they were done and they were hers.

She carried them home at the end of her shift, careful not to attract too much attention from the guards. She left them in Willie’s hut and began gathering ingredients so that she could bake her first batch of biscuits, wondering how she was going to keep her cooking under wraps and out of sight.

How about that: A mere construction afterthought. Trash.

But those slabs of metal, scraps that would never be missed by the soaring girders of K-25, would serve to make her and Willie and the rest of her hutment friends some fine biscuits.

★ ★ ★

Colleen Rowan had never seen pipes so big, and she came from a family with more than its share of plumbers.

After the training at the Old Wheat School—a repurposed remnant of one of the evicted communities—she had spent the first few months of her new job working upstairs in the conditioning building. There she spent her days among a maze of pipes while working as a leak tester.

Her new position and life were awash in acronyms and numbers: She worked in building 1401 for FB & D at the K-25 plant on the CEW and had earned a Q clearance. Her boss was a GI with the SED who had been recruited from the ASTP. She rode the AIT bus and, being the good Catholic girl that she was, attended CYO at Father Siener’s B house.

Ford, Bacon & Davis operated the conditioning building, which was located back and to the right of what most called the big U building (though most knew not what that letter might represent). When Colleen first began working in 1401 she was out on “the floor,” an
enormous, open, airplane-hangar-sized room. A wall of square-paned windows ran the length of one side and the whole space was full of people and pipes and vats and cranes. And
clean.
There may have been mud outside, but inside was spit-shine, inspection-ready spotless.

There were pipes of every size and shape imaginable. The multistory ceiling height and hard surfaces amplified the clinks and clanks of jostling metal, the squeaking and rustling of chains of pulleys and gears, the low grunts and high shouts of workingmen and workingwomen.

Colleen stood at her station alongside other leak pipe testers, all of them women. She looked up: Overhead, tiny open-air cars piloted by a single man shuttled back and forth along a ceiling track that ran the entire length of the room. One at a time, these tiny ceiling trolleys would hoist pipes at one end of the room and ferry them to the awaiting leak pipe testers at the other. The millwrights—the pilots—lowered the pipes in front of Colleen and the others. On the floor, the pipes were open and not connected to each other. The millwrights connected one end of the pipe to a vacuum pump and sealed the other using a red, sticky resin called “glyptal.” As their promotional materials would later trumpet:

Glyptal! From General Electric. The Paint Industry at War! When the complete story of the formation of protective finishes developed for specific war needs is known, it will be as important to a Nation at Peace as it now is to a Nation at War.

With one end sealed and the other connected to a vacuum pump, all the air was sucked out of the pipe and it was Colleen’s turn to go to work. She used a probe that was connected to a tank which most workers referred to simply as a leak detector. She would slowly run the gas-emitting probe along every centimeter of every weld on every pipe, making sure never to miss a spot.

As she worked, she kept one eye on the gauge of the machine connected to the pump. She watched the needle. She kept moving the
probe, nice and slow, looking to see if the needle jumped. If it stayed put, the pipe was okay and was taken away. If the needle moved, then she had a leak. When that happened, she moved the probe over the suspected area one more time, working to locate the trouble spot. As she finished with each pipe, Colleen would take a piece of chalk and mark it as “OK” or designate any spots that had caused her needle to wiggle. After she finished each, an inspector checked her work.