The Girls of Atomic City (32 page)

Such were the lessons learned while working for the first time on a military Reservation. There was a code of behavior beyond “keeping to your knitting,” but it wasn’t always clearly stated. Colleen had had training in leak pipe testing, a baptism by fire into the deep and endless waters of acronyms, and lecture after lecture not to talk about what she saw or what she did or where she worked to anyone. But there had been no “don’t wear your boyfriend’s fatigues” lecture.

Most just rolled with the punches, making mental notes of what they could and couldn’t do.

Joking about work was
okay
. . . up to a point.

Showing your patriotism was
encouraged
. . . if done in the right way and under the right circumstances.

Making fun of the cloak-and-dagger nature of life in Oak Ridge was sometimes celebrated with laughs onstage at the theater in Jackson Square . . . until you took the humor too far.

Colleen and so many like her were young civilians adjusting to life in a community that was part science and part industry, part civilian
and part Army base, socially stimulating like a college campus, but locked down and patrolled like the military Reservation it was.

Out here in the woods, acronyms and regulations had no place. Colleen relished her time off-Reservation with Blackie, and their outings to Big Ridge were some of her favorite dates. So it should have seemed only natural that Blackie took advantage of the privacy of Big Ridge to ask Colleen something that had been on his mind: Did she want to get married?

Married?!
Colleen thought.

She knew she shouldn’t have been surprised, but she wasn’t expecting the question, either, not so soon. Maybe that’s how proposals were supposed to be: a surprise, but not
complete
surprise.

Colleen adored Blackie. Her family had taken to him, too, and he seemed to return the kindness, though a family as big as hers could have sent many an unsuspecting suitor running. Still . . .
marriage.
What was the rush? Everything felt so temporary here.

So she gave Blackie, her boyfriend, her sweetheart, an only child from a Yankee background who had taken with such ease and patience to the football squad–sized southern Rowan clan, the man who shared her desire to travel, her longing for adventure, the only answer she could in good conscience:

“No.”

★ ★ ★

For Dot and Celia, life in 1945 was very different than it had been just months earlier. What Colleen continued to resist, these two had already embraced.

Both were married now, and their lives in Oak Ridge as young, single working girls were coming to an end. The transition was an abrupt one for Celia. Henry had wanted to start a family immediately, and they were off and running: Celia got pregnant almost immediately. She was now realizing that what she initially believed would be a brief bout of first-trimester nausea was turning into a permanent condition. Her morning sickness showed no sign of abating and was almost intolerable. Every day, without fail, she was as sick as could be. And alone. She might have a cup of coffee with a neighbor
if she felt up to it, but the days of work and commuting and chitchat in the secretarial pool at the Castle or in the cafeteria were gone. Spring was rapidly turning to summer, eastern redbuds and dogwoods had long yielded to flame azaleas, and oxeye daisies would soon fight their way up through the clay. With this came the heat and humidity, compounding her already debilitating symptoms. She was miserable.

Dot, in her new life as wife to Paul Wilkinson, her former supervisor, had discovered the ceaseless wonders of canned ham.

Thank goodness for Spam
, she thought at first as she struggled to learn her way around the small kitchen she and Paul now shared. The spiced canned meat was a favorite for shipping overseas—no refrigeration necessary. Massive six-pound cans had been specially devised for the military. In many ways, it was the meat of the times. As journalist Edward R. Murrow had said just two years earlier, while reporting from London over the holidays, “Although the Christmas table will not be lavish, there will be Spam luncheon meat for everyone.”

Dot and Paul had married during a lovely early spring wedding at the Chapel on the Hill. The chapel still served countless denominations, and it wasn’t unusual to see menorahs and a Star of David swapped out for chalices and crucifixes, as one group departed after service and another arrived to begin their worship.

The chapel’s setting was lovely: It sat up on a hill behind Jackson Square, a large expanse of land in front of it, a quaint white steeple with a clapboard finish. From a certain angle, at the right time of day—if you squinted a little—the chapel atop its hill could have been a small, mud-covered town square in New England.

Dot’s first instincts about Paul eventually played out: He was smart—if an occasional know-it-all—who was well-mannered and from a good family. She knew he would always take care of her, be a good father. That mattered to her. Dot had gone shopping in Knoxville for her dress and found a lovely pink crepe gown at Miller’s department store. The ceremony was very small, attended only by family. Dot’s mom and sister Margaret came for the service as did Paul’s mother, sister, and father. It was nice to have everyone there, but since they were getting married on the Reservation, Dot and Paul
had to arrange ahead of time to get everyone security passes. They didn’t have a lot of money to spend but did host a small reception at the Guest House, by far the nicest option within the gates. There was dinner and cake in the small banquet room on the main floor of the hotel—but no alcohol. Afterward, the newly married couple took a trip to nearby Gatlinburg, Tennessee, for their honeymoon.

Back on the Reservation, Dot noticed her social life was changing. She had loved the dorms—the freedom, the friends. She was usually tired after work, just enough time to go home, wash out some undergarments in the bathroom, string them up in your dorm room, and then head to bed. But on those occasions that she felt like being social, but not necessarily going out, she could visit with girls down the hall. There was always an open door, someone to gossip with or have a flip through a magazine.

Now, it was just her. Nights were hardest. Paul sometimes worked the overnight shifts at Y-12 and Dot found herself lying in bed at night, scared, kept wide-awake by a cacophony of noises—buses, voices, bugs, breezes that rattled the shaky walls of homes destined to last only a handful of years—the nighttime soundtrack of a nonstop factory town on a mission.

She had worked for the first couple of months of marriage, but now she was feeling a little sick. Pregnancy had arrived almost instantly for her as well, which was fine, but she finally told Paul she was going to quit her job. He didn’t give too much argument, although he did like the extra money Dot was bringing in. Keeping house in the little one-bedroom flattop—essentially a plywood box on stilts—on Altoona Lane took up more time than she initially imagined it would, even though the prefab structure occupied just under 600 square feet of space.

There was no car for her to use, so she walked to and from the market. She shopped more now, since her days didn’t revolve around the cafeteria and snack bars. The house came furnished with the basics—beds, dresser, table—but she did have to buy dishes, pots, and pans. She experimented in the kitchen and had to learn to cook. Despite her best efforts, it wasn’t long before Paul’s stomach told him
that it was time to take over meal prep from his new wife. At least as far as his meat was concerned. Paul liked his meat rare. Dot was used to cooking the precious rationed entrée into a grayish slab devoid of any visual reminder of from whence it came. Spam had been an early lifesaver—just crank open the can, scrape off the jellied fat if you liked, heat it in a pan, and you were good to go.

But after too many nights of relying on canned ham, Dot found herself making a vow: If this war was ever over, and rationing somehow became a thing of the past, and they could buy and eat whatever and however much they wanted, she would never, ever, eat Spam again.

★ ★ ★

Benchmarks for progress were often difficult to assess at CEW. While workers in other areas of the war-at-home machine could point to tanks or tires or bombers as achievements, many, if not most, workers in Oak Ridge did not have those kinds of touchstones of accomplishment. A quick end to the war was a motivator, certainly. The safe return of troops, absolutely. But something tangible to hang your pride on—that would be nice.

So workers often created tangible goals of their own. Kattie, Colleen, and other workers at the K-25 plant had donated two weeks’ worth of overtime pay to help build a brand-new plane called
Sunday Punch
. The bomber had been delivered to its pilot just several weeks earlier on March 18, 1945. Kattie and others could point to its existence as something they had helped make a reality.

Two Sundays were easy enough for Kattie to budget. She had always been smart about managing what little money came her way, whether stretching it through rations and between paychecks or making sure enough made its way back home to Auburn. Sending funds was much easier now than it had been in the early days. When she and Willie had first arrived, their options had been limited. Usually Willie would fill one of his small tobacco bags with the dollars designated for those at home and pin the precious cargo to the inside of Kattie’s blouse. Then she endured a long, nerve-racking bus ride back to Alabama, their savings strapped close to her bosom, on her way to visit her mother and children.

She certainly managed their money better than her boss, who routinely borrowed money from her. He was nice enough, a little older, white, and with a penchant for chewing tobacco, rivulets of juice dripping their way south along the time-worn creases of his mouth.

“Kattie . . . ,” he’d say with a sheepish smile.

One look and Kattie knew what was coming next. It was always the same.

“Give me ten dollars.”

Kattie knew good and well that he went down the road to entertain some of those Chattanooga women with Kattie’s 10 hard-earned dollars fattening up his wallet.

She always gave him the cash and her boss had always paid her back quickly. Kattie had built good relationships with all her supervisors, something she felt was important. It made for less hassle.

She never missed work and she was never late, which was a point of pride for her. Each and every day she clocked in trying to be as near to first as she could for her shift. “Four five five six!” she’d call out to the one-armed man who worked the alley. She had never in her life seen a man with one arm work so fast.
Man works like he has three arms
, she thought. She went to work when she probably shouldn’t have, too. Passed clean out one day and hit the floor. It was the kind of day that most would have clocked out and gone home to recuperate, but not Kattie. No. She was going to wring every cent she could out of her job. After all the sacrifice, she couldn’t imagine any other way. That day she took a few minutes to lay down in the room they kept for women who were feeling under the weather during their time of the month. But that’s not what had caused her to collapse. Exhaustion was the culprit, plain and simple. As soon as she could, she was back on her feet. She did not want to go to the hospital, despite a coworker’s request. Kattie wanted to work and proudly donated some overtime to the
Punch
.

The phrase
Sunday Punch
meant a knockout hit—and a film bearing that name had been a hit at the box office just three years earlier. Now a very lucky 1st Lt. Tom Evans of Knoxville, Tennessee, would soon take the keys, so to speak, of the brand-new B-25J plane,
which had been christened at the Knoxville Municipal Airport. When 22-year-old Evans heard that the bomber recently arrived at his base near Karachi, India, had been bought and paid for by the hourly workers toiling away behind the fence down the road from his hometown, he knew he had to get into that pilot’s seat. The
Punch
was a stunner, her name in all caps emblazoned on the side of the plane beneath the cockpit. The total cost of the bomber rang in at approximately $250,000, a price tag that the thousands of K-25 workers had calculated could be covered by just two Sundays’ worth of work.

The bomber was now bound for the Chinese-Burma-India theater, with the 81st Bomb Squadron (the Battering Rams) of the 12th Bomb Group (the Earthquakers), in the 10th Army Air Force. How long Evans and
Sunday Punch
would be flying missions in the Far East depended not only on Evans’s skill and fortune or on the endurance of the Japanese. It depended, too, on the success or failure of the employees who had helped make
Sunday Punch
a reality.

★ ★ ★

Over in the hospital, care had taken a disturbing turn for the automobile-crash patient HP-12, formerly known as Ebb Cade. He had been set on a new course of treatment not related to his immediate injuries: The injections had begun April 10, 1945. The first dose that was administered to HP-12 was 4.7 micrograms of 49: plutonium.

Years later, a Dr. Howland would state that he had initially objected to the instructions he’d received to inject HP-12 with plutonium. There was no consent given from the patient to proceed with the injections. But he stated he performed them in any case, because he said he was given a direct order from his superior, Dr. Friedell. This was an order that Dr. Friedell, for his part, later claimed never to have given. Indeed, Dr. Friedell said HP-12’s injections were administered by a Dr. Dwight Clark. This has never been resolved.

The doctors made plans to collect biological samples—tissues, urine, feces—all of which would be tested for the presence of plutonium, to see how it would travel, how much of it would remain in the body, and what effect it might have on HP-12. The day after the injection, Dr. Friedell sent news to Los Alamos. “I think we will have
access to considerable clinical material here and we hope to do a number of subjects,” he wrote.