109 East Palace (24 page)

Groves had declared himself all in favor of the scientists’ wives working to “keep them out of mischief.” But, as Elsie McMillan observed, more was needed: “Even poor General Groves realized that with so many women working, and babies being born in spite of him, and people getting sick, we had to have some domestic help.” Oppenheimer appealed to Dorothy for assistance, and together with Vera Williams, the wife of the physicist John Williams, she organized a maid service to do the heavy housework and watch over small children. Dorothy recruited Anita Martinez, whose mother-in-law, Maria Martinez, was an acclaimed New Mexican pueblo artist known as “Maria, the Potter of San Ildefonso.” Several of those lucky enough to retain Anita’s services were invited to visit her family’s adobe home and began collecting Maria’s beautiful blackware pottery, which unbeknownst to them would later be worth a fortune. Martinez went all over the valley recruiting Spanish and Indian women to work at Los Alamos and told them to report to Dorothy at 109 East Palace.

Dorothy screened, fingerprinted, and issued passes to the dozens of pueblo women and men who served on the Hill as maids and janitors, waitresses and cooks. Though they said little in answer to her questions, most were fluent in three languages and communicated in a mishmash of English, Spanish, and their native Tewa. Throngs of them gathered outside her office at 109 each morning—the women dressed in colorful pueblo shawl-like mantas and high, white, deerskin boots, their glossy black hair pulled back in chignons or two thick braids—their native dignity undaunted by this latest Yankee incursion. The army buses would pick them up and haul them to the mesa, depositing them outside the post Housing Office in the old Ranch School garage, where they would be assigned jobs, and then bring them back to town at the end of the day. It was hard to say how impressed they were by General Groves’ strict security bans, but it seemed to Dorothy that the Indians thoroughly enjoyed their excursions to this strange other world, and they regularly returned loaded down with goods purchased at the army PX.

Like everything else at Los Alamos, maid service was strictly rationed, with working women getting first dibs. As the nonworking wives complained they needed more help and haunted the pseudo-employment office trying to pick up any extra Indian maids, working women like Charlotte Serber realized they were losing ground. When it finally dawned on them that the system was no longer working in their favor, they pulled rank and instituted reforms. “When demand got so far ahead of supply that things were thoroughly out of hand and hair-pulling arguments seemed a likely prospect,” she wrote, “the Housing Office inaugurated a priority system. Illness and pregnancy were the highest caste, full-time working wives came next, then part-time working wives with children, nonworking wives with children, part-time working wives without children, and lastly, the nonworking childless wives.” Elaborate as this system seemed, it by no means put an end to the squabbling between the working wives and those in the “leisure class.”

In setting up their novel community, Oppenheimer, Groves, and his army engineers had seen to the practical necessities of providing places to live, work, eat, and gather, but not a lot of attention was given to the social needs of the population. Not surprisingly, social problems began to crop up almost immediately. Whether they wanted to or not, as the tensions mounted, “Oppie and General Groves had to talk about problems concerning the community,” said Greene. “It had a strong effect on morale and how people got along.”

For one thing, Los Alamos was a very young community, with the majority being more or less college age. Single men and women were packed like sardines in dormitories, with the WACs sharing bunk beds placed only two feet apart, seventy-five to eighty to a barrack. A goodly number of the young people had never been far from home before and did not necessarily handle their newfound freedom well. Given the close quarters, and the fact that there was not much to do after dark, a fair amount of carousing went on at the two PXs, which sold cigarettes, burgers, and warm Cokes to the scratchy tunes of a jukebox. They were the closest thing to a singles’ scene at Los Alamos and were always smoky, noisy, and crowded at night.

There were also frequent “dorm parties,” held in one of the large dormitory lounges, that featured a makeshift dance band and a lot of dancing. The main focus of the parties was always the mystery punch, served in a five-foot glass chemical reagent jar pinched from one of the laboratories and spiked with whatever booze could be purchased for the occasion in Santa Fe and enough Tech Area 200 proof to guarantee a good time. After most of the dancers were exhausted, Dick Feynman usually did a drum solo, and if Rabi was around, he performed on his comb. The raucous mixers, which were attended by everyone from Nobel laureates to the lowliest graduate students, usually went on until the early hours of Sunday morning.

The parties ranged from casual to formal affairs held at Fuller Lodge, when all the scientists and their wives would make an effort to dress up in their finest clothes. Square dancing became a popular pastime for the older set. Sometimes invitations would be issued, though mostly hosts relied on word of mouth. One of the first big blowouts was called the “Necktie Party,” and a mimeographed summons requested gentlemen to “wear a necktie if you have one.” Shirley Barnett recalled a “Suppressed Desire” costume party hosted by her husband and the mesa’s overworked medical staff. The three much-in-demand doctors came dressed in their pajamas with pillows strapped to their heads, a testament to their desire for a good night’s sleep. Others came dressed as well-known screen actresses, pin-ups, historic figures, and, not a stretch for this crowd, college professors. The highlight of the night was when Harold Agnew won first prize for his uncanny impersonation of Jezebel. One fellow came in roller skates and just did loops around the room. Single women were a rare commodity on the post, and there was always a long stag line. Dorothy never lacked for dance partners. Determined not to miss out on the fun, she drove all the way from Santa Fe dressed in a leopard-skin number, with just a coat slung over her shoulders. She said later that she prayed all the way she would not have an accident or any car trouble, and end up trying to explain to the local police what she was doing on the lonely back roads late at night in such a crazy getup. While someone fetched her a stiff drink, she sighed that she had her hands full as it was trying “not to explain” what she was doing all day on her crazy job.

“We were awfully busy, we worked all the time, so the parties were naturally pretty wild,” said Shirley Barnett. “We were all young and liked to have fun, and it took the sting out of all the restrictions. Everyone would go, and Oppie always put in an appearance.” There were a lot of romances, but given their age and the extenuating circumstances, Barnett remembered being surprised at the time at how little “hanky-panky” there was among the married couples. “There was some, but much less than you might expect,” she said. “Partly because we had no time, and because there was no privacy, no back stair. Anything you engaged in ran the risk of exposure pretty soon.”

They all “drank like fish,” added Barnett, and “going to work the next day with a hangover was perfectly acceptable.” Alcohol was regarded as the nearest anesthetic to hand, and they all needed to occasionally blot out the reality of what they were really doing there. Whiskey and gin were in short supply, but cheap rum and Mexican vodka were easily purchased in Santa Fe. Taking their cue from Oppie, they made vodka martinis their drink of choice, and John von Neumann, who was great fun at parties, once drank fifteen in a single evening as a kind of experiment. The next day he remarked, “I know my stomach has a cast iron lining, but it must have developed a crack.” Tins of tomato juice, which had long ago disappeared off the supermarket shelves in most parts of America, could be bought at the Commissary, and everyone swapped home-made cures for benders.

While the scientists and their wives looked like college students, and for the most part acted like them, the army had the added difficulty that the laboratory employees were in fact independent working adults over whom it could not exercise the same control as over soldiers. There were the inevitable broken curfews, alcoholic binges, fist fights, incidents of “co-mingling” in the single-sex dorms, and outbreaks of the clap. Complaints that a number of WACs were soliciting men outside the PX, and at a price, caused quite a flap. While all this provoked the wrath of the authorities, nothing particularly untoward ever happened, though stories about the wild goings-on would later confirm the suspicions of some outsiders that Los Alamos was a place of licentiousness and loose morals. At one point, the post commander attempted to crack down on the late-night carousing and threatened to place one of the WAC shacks, or women’s dorms, off-limits. The women tearfully protested the MPs’ action. The bachelors argued even more forcefully against closing the dorm, the community took up their cause, and the whole matter threatened to escalate into a full-blown mesa scandal. “The post commander got quite upset and said, ‘Women were not to be allowed in the men’s dormitories after ten o’clock at night and visa versa,’” said Greene, who was once caught necking with a young chemist in his room. “People were outraged at the suggestion—these bright young fellows were used to doing what they wanted to do. Oppie took it really rather calmly and wrote them a polite note back saying that they really were quite mature and it ought to be that one did not interfere with this.”

By late spring, it was already apparent to the scientists that they needed to have a greater say in the rules that governed their lives. As Alice Smith put it, “The American preference for being governed by almost any guy in tweeds or a sack suit rather than by an efficient chap in uniform soon led to agitation for a civilian representative body.” Since their fractious little community clearly required some kind of orderly forum through which they could negotiate compromises and clear the air, Robert Wilson proposed a Town Council be formed. The council would be a civilian governing body, its members democratically elected, and could serve as an advisory committee to the army administration on domestic problems. Oppenheimer was cautiously supportive, as was Whitney Ashbridge, the new CO, who had come in with the mandate to secure greater civilian cooperation. In the beginning they both agreed it would best to proceed with appointed members, lest it appear the council was trying to subvert military authority.

The army, however, was loath to take this constituency seriously and did its best to ignore it. “Robert Wilson was seen as quite a hot-headed young man for doing this,” said Greene. Wilson had already earned a reputation as a singularly energetic and resourceful individual for organizing his own barbershop after noticing members of his division wasted valuable time standing on line for a haircut. After his request for additional barbers was rejected, he requisitioned a barbershop chair and other supplies through the laboratory and set up his own shop with a technician who was handy with a straight razor. After Groves had spotted Wilson’s impromptu Tech Area salon, he ordered that the post’s barbershop be expanded and its staff enlarged. He was less tolerant of Wilson’s Town Council, which allowed the civilians to second-guess the post command—awkward to say the least—and which became a thorn in the administration’s side. Greene remembered Deke Parsons, who enjoyed being the only naval officer in an army camp, drolly noting at a Town Council meeting that such a board was not standard. “You know, usually on a military post, the commander is the social arbiter and top dog. It’s really sort of hard for the military here because everybody looks down on them.”

Having won this small concession to democracy, however, the scientists would not be denied, and by June 1943 a Town Council with six members drawn from the community was duly elected. Bob Wilson became the first elected chairman. The council faced its first major crisis in the dog days of summer. The instigator was quite literally a dog, a large Airedale belonging to the physicist Bob Davis, which had been observed foaming at the mouth. Reports of a sick dog menacing pedestrians spread like wildfire, touching off the mesa’s first rabies scare. Parents were so frightened they kept their children at home and immediately demanded that all the dogs that roamed freely around the post be banished for health and safety reasons. The army responded by issuing the order—the dogs had to go. But for many of the workaholic scientists, whose dogs were very nearly their best friends, this order was tantamount to treason. Ed McMillan promptly announced he would leave Los Alamos before he let anyone confiscate his cocker spaniel. As the rhetoric grew hotter, the pro-dog and anti-dog forces stormed the Big House, where at the end of a cranky, emotionally overwrought meeting it was clear that the vast majority of the population was in favor of keeping pets on the mesa. The army agreed to rescind its order of removal. After all the dust settled, it appeared that Davis’ Airedale had probably just eaten some soap flakes and he, too, would be spared.

The Town Council weighed in on everything concerning day-to-day life at Los Alamos—from the hazards of having no traffic lights to slow the army jeeps and no sidewalks to protect pedestrians, to the problems of noise, flies, bad food, no food, and so on. It also dealt with those issues where army and civilian life collided, as was the case with the rifle range. The practice range had been carefully laid out on the highest ground on the mesa in the early days of the project, but as the town spread it was perfectly situated to spray bullets all over the makeshift golf course, baseball field, horse corrals, and picnic areas, all places frequented by small children. The chronic problem was finally resolved when the range went up in flames after a month of blistering heat. The council met on Monday evenings in the private dining room in Fuller Lodge, and as time went on, people took to drifting in after dinner to lodge some protest or listen in on local justice. One young British physicist recalled gently being fined five dollars for speeding, by Victor Weisskopf, a Viennese physicist who was one of the town’s most popular “mayors.”