The Girls of Atomic City (8 page)

Investigation
? Jane wondered.
What kind of investigation
?

It was all very hush-hush. Daddy had heard from a few of the neighbors that men had come around asking a lot of questions about Jane. They were “Secret Service.” That’s what everyone in town kept calling them, anyway. That, or FBI.

What kind of girl was this Jane Halliburton Greer? Was she wild? How did she do at school? Did she drink? Really now, tell the truth. And what about that family of hers? Any rotten apples there? High school teachers, college professors, neighbors—everyone, it seemed, got a visit.

Jane didn’t know the specifics about the Project, but it was clear that whatever it was she would be doing must be important, or else why all the fuss?

A petite 22-year-old, Jane carried herself with a down-to-earth air, despite her family’s long history in Middle Tennessee. She wore her dark brown hair parted on the left, undulating tousles washing past her prominent cheeks, ebbing again at her gymnast’s shoulders, before landing with a final bounce at the top of a spine that exhibited the kind of impeccable posture grown out of a lifetime of grooming and horseback riding. Whatever bad things the “FBI men” might have been looking for they apparently didn’t find because now, in front of Jane, was the final word. She was to report to work at 204 Empire Building on Market Street in downtown Knoxville. She would work as a statistician, and the pay was good. She would earn $35.00 per week to start, three dollars more a week than General Electric had offered her. She was expected to work 48 hours each week. So factoring in overtime, the total would come to $45.50. Nice.

But it all wasn’t about the money. She wanted to work close to home, and this was a good job doing what she had studied to do.
Not what she had
wanted
to do, of course, but what she had ended up doing. Several years earlier, she had decided to become an engineer. And she had worked hard at Judson College in Alabama to take all the right courses that would allow her to study engineering once she’d transferred back home to attend the University of Tennessee. But come registration day, a university official rudely yanked her out of line where she stood waiting to register for the School of Engineering.

“We don’t matriculate engineering as a major for females,” he told her.

Jane stared, heat rising up through her cheeks, speechless. Angry. Who did he think he was to tell Jane Halliburton Greer what she could or could not do?

“See that man standing over there?” the official said, gesturing to a professor Jane would soon learn was one Dr. Paul Barnett. “He’s a statistician. You can study statistics.”

And just like that, all her hard work, all the course choices and the studying and the stellar grades she’d earned at the junior college didn’t matter. No engineering, no matter what. She was going to study statistics. Jane finished her two years in the Department of Business Administration with a degree in governmental economics, after taking all the statistics courses they had, and some math and physics to boot—the first woman ever to do so at the University of Tennessee. The work had paid off. The job offers that came her way were certainly good ones, and there was some dismay, especially on the part of George Washington University in Washington, DC, as to why she decided to accept a job in the sticks outside Knoxville. GWU had even offered to bring her up to Washington, show her around.

“I find it a little hard . . . to decide exactly upon what basis you have made your decision to accept the offer of the Clinton Engineering Works but I have a feeling that you have decided largely upon the basis that you will be able to stay near to home,” the GWU official wrote snippily. “Yet I seem to gather from your letter that the type of work which you will be doing for them is not entirely to your liking, and what you actually would prefer would be to have a
project like ours located where the Clinton Engineering Works now stands.”

She
did
want to be near home, but not because she didn’t want to travel. Not Jane: She had always been ready to pack a bag, see the world. But her father, who had his own transfer and storage business in Paris, Tennessee, was a widower now. It was still hard to believe her mother had already been dead several years. If she had the opportunity to use her degree to help the war and stay nearby home, she was obligated to do that. Obligated to her daddy and to her deceased mother, Hattie Newell.

Once in Knoxville, Jane received her pass—No. 2449—and had plenty of papers to sign, lots of fine print to read. Her agreement stated that she would not “at any time disclose either orally or in writing, or otherwise, to any person except such as shall be designated in writing by the general manager of Tennessee Eastman Corporation, any knowledge or information which I may have acquired while in the employ of Tennessee Eastman Corporation, or elsewhere, or which I may hereafter acquire while in such employ, pertaining to any of said work done directly or indirectly for the United States Government . . .”

Boy, those government folks sure could blather on.

She signed without hesitation, like most everyone else. She took a bus to the Clinton Engineer Works, where an old college friend, Doris, met her. Doris had accepted a similar position and had moved in, expecting to room with Jane. But limited space had already forced Doris to take in someone else. Housing employees were continually shuffling people around, converting single rooms into doubles, improvising in the face of an ever expanding workforce. There wasn’t a spot for Jane yet, so she would have to stay temporarily at the Site’s one “hotel” of sorts, the Guest House. It was a long, two-story building with two wings that extended out in either direction from a central entrance marked by four large white columns. It was right in the middle of Townsite, near the bus depot and cafeteria.

But when Doris showed up to gather Jane and take her to the Guest House, she wasn’t alone. She had brought along the fellow she
had been dating, a man named Jim, whom Doris said she had met on the bus. Exiting the car at the Guest House, Jane stepped onto what she believed to be solid ground, only to find herself sinking fast, like so many women before her. Doris and Jim didn’t seem at all surprised. Jim helped her get her footing and retrieve her shoe, and Jane watched as he carried her suitcase inside. Jane was still dating someone from back at UT in Knoxville, but couldn’t help but notice the polite young man. Up the stairs that handsome man went, where larger guest rooms had been crammed full of Army cots to accommodate Jane and others who were waiting for housing, waiting for training, waiting for the next dorm to be built. But waiting looked like it would be a real pleasure with interesting work, good pay, and a town full of mannerly young men at your beck and call.

★ ★ ★

When news of the big war factory in Tennessee spread as far south as Kattie’s home in Auburn, Alabama, it hadn’t arrived by word of mouth alone. Recruiters had set off throughout the rural south seeking laborers by the droves. J. A. Jones Construction, responsible for the construction of the gargantuan K-25 plant where Willie worked, hit Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi for as many workers as they could get their hands on, sometimes bending rules established by the War Manpower Commission (WMC)—one of several acronym-wielding labor bureaucracies that had been established to regulate the recruiting and distribution of the workforce throughout a country desperately in need of war workers. Complaints were filed, one by the WMC stating that a J. A. Jones recruiter, in an act of “labor piracy,” had pulled up to a United States Employment Service office in Mobile, Alabama, with a large truck and left with 40 black workers bound for jobs in Tennessee.

In 1942, presidential Executive Order 8802 stated that “there shall be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color or national origin.” The Fair Employment Practices Committee had also been established to address discrimination in wartime industries. But that did not mean an end to segregation in a Jim Crow state like
Tennessee. Though the government had the opportunity to establish the Reservation as a completely desegregated zone, it did not; black residents on the grounds of the Clinton Engineer Works would be primarily laborers, janitors, and domestics, and would live separately, no matter their education or background. This would prevent noted mathematician, physicist, and engineer J. Ernest Wilkins Jr., who was working at the Metallurgical Lab at the University of Chicago, from being transferred to Oak Ridge.

In September 1944, Hungarian physicist Edward Teller wrote Harold Urey, director of war research at Columbia, of Wilkins’s abilities and the problem his race would present in a transfer to Site X.

Mr. Wilkins in Wigner’s group at the Metallurgical Laboratory has been doing, according to Wigner, excellent work. He is a colored man and since Wigner’s group is moving to “X” it is not possible for him to continue work with that group. I think that it might be a good idea to secure his services for our work.

★ ★ ★

Kattie, Willie, and Harvey entered CEW on the Kingston side, arriving from the southwest, and drove up to the gate. Harvey and Willie knew the drill now. Guards stopped the car and directed the trio up a short road to a processing building where Kattie could retrieve her official working papers. She returned to the gate, showed the guards, and—badge in hand—was now allowed full entrance onto the Reservation.

Harvey and Willie took her next to the Camp Operations Office for the K-25 plant where, Kattie learned, she would begin working as part of the janitorial service. She had never glimpsed anything like K-25 in all her life. The building wasn’t even finished yet and it was already the biggest thing she had ever seen. The building was so long that she couldn’t even see where it ended,
if
it ended. And the construction workers milling around were still adding to it.

Kattie’s new living assignment, on the other hand, was notably smaller: a 16-foot-by-16-foot “hutment,” a square plywood box of a structure that had a potbellied stove sitting right smack-dab in the
middle, its stovepipe heading out through the low roof. There were no real windows, no glass, only shutters. And she would be sharing the 256-square-foot space with three other women, not with Willie. Despite their marriage license and four children, black couples were not permitted to live as man and wife on the Reservation.

Kattie got to work settling in. She had packed quickly, bringing only one bag and one trunk full of khakis and shirts. It was getting to be that you couldn’t tell the women from the men anymore, Kattie thought, what with the way women were dressing when they went to work these days. She had also brought along something for church, just in case. She sure hoped there would be somewhere to go to church. But despite her meager belongings, there was barely enough room in the hutment to store what she had. It was rickety, it was small, but it would do. And it would only cost her $1.50 a week to live there. Here, she would earn better pay than she had ever known. What was left after she covered her basics would go back to Alabama, to her children.

Whatever this place was, she would find a way to make it home.

★ ★ ★

Despite great effort, the Project was facing stiff competition for labor. Men had volunteered to fight, others were drafted. Patriotic duty called for every able-bodied individual left at home to work in war-related industries. Skilled tradesmen such as electricians and plumbers were in such high and constant demand that they were often brought down to Tennessee from cities in the Northeast. But secrecy was a hindrance and advertising a challenge for the Project as it competed with other wartime industries for workers. While other outfits could advertise exactly the type of jobs that were available—
“Build bombers in Tacoma! Munitions plant in Chicago seeks pipe-fitters!”
—the Project had to pull its punches. Job notices were necessarily vague, describing posts in the most basic terms: carpentry, drivers, plumbers. The work was of vital need for the war effort. Full stop. Contractors rarely mentioned the specific location or additional details regarding specific tasks.

There was, however, on-site housing, a free bus system, and for white workers with families, there were even schools. The federal restrictions put in place to prevent employers from snatching workers from other jobs forbade offering better wages, for fear of inflation. But at times the Project did just that, enticing workers with excellent pay, dorms, cafeterias, and low rent. The advertisements could not mention, however, that workers were being hired to help create a device the military hoped would decisively end the war.

There were some perks that the Army could offer that other companies could not, not the least of which was deferment of military service. And as individual contractors like DuPont pulled employees from other locations to come to work at the Clinton Engineer Works, the government was pilfering labor from its own ranks as well, sometimes zeroing in on boys as they were preparing to be shipped overseas, only to suddenly find themselves reassigned to a completely unexpected post.

Formed in May of 1943, the Special Engineer Detachment was one way that the Project dealt with a lack of technically trained labor. Army men with special skills—a background in chemistry perhaps, or engineering experience—could be directly assigned to the Project. The program’s initial roster contained 334 names, but that wasn’t nearly enough. As fall neared, the SED’s search expanded into the realm of academia as potential draftees with the right skill set were recruited. Then the Army expanded its reach still further to include the Replacement Training Centers and the Army Specialized Training Program. Many of these recruits still wore their uniforms in and around Clinton Engineer Works and lived in specially designated barracks.

The Project pulled out all stops in an effort to locate educated soldiers who could be sent to CEW. It even reached out to colleges and universities, asking for the names of any graduates who had been drafted so that it could track the young men down and reroute them from wherever they were headed to Oak Ridge—or, as some of the northerners had affectionately begun to call it, Dogpatch.