The Girls of Atomic City (6 page)

In August 1943, long after construction had begun and as people like Celia began making their way to the Reservation, a House Military Affairs subcommittee held an open investigative committee to address ongoing complaints of the dispossessed who felt they were not fairly compensated for their property. Congressman John Jennings Jr. was in attendance as locals stated their cases, often loudly, their dusty faces streaked with tears. But there was little to be done.
The governor himself, Prentice Cooper, was not informed about the Project until 1943, after land had been acquired, razed, and reshaped for what was to come.

By fall of 1943, three plants, code-named Y-12, X-10, and K-25, were under way and thousands of construction workers were laying foundations and erecting colossal structures at what was
now
called the Clinton Engineer Works. Toni’s family had been lucky, all things considered. Tinier communities had been all but erased from the landscape. Downtown Clinton remained intact. No one had taken Toni’s home. Kids were still playing Red Rover, joyriding in borrowed cars, and sneaking around for a puff or two of some rabbit tobacco. The Five and Ten Cent Store where Toni worked summers making $1.42 a day and spending 25 cents of that on a hamburger at lunch remained a place to enjoy a gossip or a dance in front of the jukebox. Hoskins Drug Store was busier than ever, and the Clinton Theater, where she had delighted in seeing every Laurel and Hardy film she possibly could, was still taking tickets. The pearl hunters might have been gone, but Market Street cut a fine figure through town and was home to whoever had something to sell.

Toni knew there was no money for college, so she never bothered asking. Mama always said once school was finished, it was time for kids to start paying rent. After graduating in spring 1943, Toni had taken the job at a local law office and stayed with her sister Tincy, who had eloped with the love of her life. It was a house of drinking, laughing, smoking, and ceaseless carrying-on. But no matter what kind of nonsense transpired, or what wet roadhouse in their dry county Tincy and the gang returned from, late night carousing always ended in a stop by Toni’s room. Toni would wake to the sound of doors and giggles, shadows in the hall, a warm hug from her sister, and a hot Crystal’s hamburger in a grease-stained paper bag.

But Toni was ready for something new. Her personality had gotten her as far as her smarts. Her shoulder-length waves framed a face perpetually highlighted by an impish grin. Her father had taught her that excitement could be found just around the bend. “
Man decides to hold his own funeral before he dies
. . . ,” her father once read in the paper.
“Kids! Get in the car!”
Off they went to a stranger’s “living” wake. Now it was Toni’s turn to seek adventure. She was going to join the girls who had gone to look for jobs at that big site down the road.

Toni could not help but be influenced by the new expectations of the young women of the time. This was the era of Rosie the Riveter, when a song by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb gave voice to more than one million women who had already joined the workforce, bandanas in their hair, grease on their smocks. Then artist J. Howard Miller, commissioned by Westinghouse to create a series of posters, gave Rosie a face after seeing a photo of Geraldine Hoff, a 17-year-old Lansing, Michigan, cellist-cum-factory worker. Miller’s poster caught the eye of artist Norman Rockwell, and his take on the war’s working woman graced the cover of the
Saturday Evening Post
on May 29, 1943, forever linking Rosie’s name to the image inspired by Geraldine. Clad in denim coveralls, an American flag waving behind her, the woman sits, sandwich in hand, a riveting gun and lunch pail inscribed with “Rosie” in her lap. Goggles and a welder’s shield frame her proudly smudged face as a copy of
Mein Kampf
ably props up her tired feet.

Rockwell famously painted the world not as it was but as he would have liked it to be, he said. His was a more comforting vision of a world in conflict, a vision that focused on determination and stick-to-it-iveness, on family and home, even as that home, that way of life, felt threatened.

Rockwell’s vision would be echoed more locally in the images of a young, unknown photographer who had been hired to document Site X for the Project from the very beginning of things, as ground broke and fences grew. Twenty-one-year-old James Edward “Ed” Westcott was tall and thin, pressed shirts hanging off his wiry frame. Hair parted deep on one side fell in a slick swoop along his put-you-at-ease face, a camera permanently suspended from his long, thin neck. Given unlimited access, he spent his days prowling every inch of Site X and the lives of the people who were moving there to make it home. His lens captured the grand and seemingly mundane, the towering edifices under construction, the somber and smiling faces of the displaced seeking work. As the Reservation grew and the newcomers settled in, he would portray Site X as the Project envisioned it, and as those who traveled there wanted it to be. He snapped the rising town’s pioneering spirit and the expressions of a newfound camaraderie among those for whom family and home were far away. Maybe here life could be the way everyone would like it to be, a view of prosperity and hope, of digging in and smiling down any adversity, a sentiment shared by many who survive the most difficult of times.

Bad peaches can always make peach butter.

Today was Toni’s 18th birthday. She was old enough to go and do and be whoever she wanted. She was heading down the road, straight through those armed gates, past that barbed-wire fence and right into that place she had heard so much about. Adventure could be right around the corner.

She was going to that damn Site.

TUBEALLOY

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

IDA AND THE ATOM, 1934

A brilliant 38-year-old German geochemist named Ida Noddack had read Italian physicist Enrico Fermi’s paper “Possible Production of Elements of Atomic Number Higher than 92,” in
Nature
, with great interest, as had the rest of the international scientific community in 1934.

Ida, however, was not on board with Fermi’s conclusions in this case.

Fermi’s groundbreaking work was identifying “new radioactive elements produced by neutron bombardment.” Neutrons had changed the physics game, and Fermi was doing more than anyone at the time to analyze the impact that these tiny, subatomic particles had on other elements.

An
atom
, the basic unit of existence of the material world, contains a central
nucleus
made up of
protons
and
neutrons
, with
electrons
orbiting around it. Ernest Rutherford first proposed that the atom contained a small, positively charged center orbited by electrons. He later theorized about the existence of neutrons, and was soon proven correct. Protons possess a positive charge, electrons a negative one, and neutrons are the Switzerland of atomic particles: neutral.

The number of protons in an atom determines its
atomic number
and, in a sense, its identity. It also determines where that element lives on the periodic table. The number of
neutrons
present in an atom determines the
isotope
of that element. Some elements have only one isotope, while others have several. Carbon 12 and carbon 14 are two isotopes of that abundant element. Both are still carbon, both have six protons, but they behave differently because they contain differing numbers of neutrons.

The advantage to being neutral on the atomic level is similar to that of being neutral politically: You can enter charged situations more easily.

Neutrons can more easily slip into the positively charged nucleus of another atom than can positively charged particles or protons. And they can do so at slower speeds.

Why encourage neutrons to enter the nucleus of another atom? To see what happens, of course. In 1934, this is precisely what Fermi had been doing in his famed laboratory at the Institute of Physics at the Università di Roma La Sapienza. He and his team, known as
i ragazzi di Via Panisperna,
were bombarding elements all the way up the periodic table with neutrons to see how they behaved.

When a nucleus absorbed another neutron, radiation was often emitted and new isotopes formed. These new isotopes tended to be in the same neighborhood of the periodic table as the element that had been targeted.

But when Fermi got to the largest naturally occurring element on the periodic table, element 92 (later referred to as “Tubealloy” by the Project), things got interesting.

When Fermi bombarded element 92 with neutrons, several different products were observed, but he and his team could not identify all of them. He worked his way down the periodic table from 92, comparing the products of his experiment to the attributes of elements 91, 90, and so on, down to lead, atomic number 82.

No match.

Fermi concluded that the unidentified fragments in the resulting postbombardment mix might have been from a new element, even heavier than element 92: an element with an atomic number of 93 or beyond.

Why did he stop at lead?
Ida Noddack wondered.

Ida was a woman with more than just a passing knowledge of the periodic table. She had long studied Mendeleev’s organizational chart of known elements and devised her own version in 1925. Head down in her lab, dark hair pulled back in a chignon, she worked alongside and eventually married chemist Walter Noddack, with whom she had discovered element 75, rhenium, named for her homeland, the Rhine Valley. In her opinion, Fermi stopped his comparisons too soon.

She deemed Fermi’s work inconclusive, and in late 1934, she published her views on Fermi’s findings in an article titled “Über Das Element 93” (On Element 93), in which she proposed an idea that seemed unrealistic to most, preposterous to others.

Ida wrote that while doing this sort of experiment, it could be assumed that “some distinctly new nuclear reactions take place which have not been observed previously . . . When heavy nuclei are bombarded by neutrons, it is conceivable that the nucleus breaks up into several large fragments, which would of course be isotopes of known elements but would not be neighbors.”

Fermi and the rest of the physics community disregarded Ida Noddack’s take. Her paper was both ignored and on occasion mocked. However, Noddack’s proposed, and subsequently dismissed, theory—that the nucleus might actually be able to
split
—was not wrong.

Ida Noddack was simply ahead of her time.

CHAPTER 3

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Through the Gates

Clinton Engineer Works, Fall 1943

We were indignant when we had to sneak out of our home communities without telling our friends where we were going and what for. If it was all so important, why not impress the friend by giving them the “dope.” What was it all about anyway?

—Vi Warren,
Oak Ridge Journal

Kattie leaned back in the car, exhausted. Not too much farther to go now. Her brother-in-law Harvey was driving and she and her husband, Willie, sat watching out the window as Alabama eventually turned into Tennessee. They’d rest once they got to Chattanooga, but then tomorrow they had to press on. Willie had been away from home and from Kattie for a while now, but that was all changing.

These were the times for men to be away from home. Kattie knew that. At least he wasn’t off fighting. Willie had done what was best for the family and now she was traveling more than 300 miles to do the same, to move to the Clinton Engineer Works, a place she’d never laid eyes on, a place not on any maps. Good work, good money.

“Ain’t here yet,”
the cashier used to chirp every time Kattie strode eagerly into the Western Union office in Auburn, Alabama. Kattie would circle back later, anxious to receive the $50, $70, or sometimes even $100 that Willie sent home like clockwork.

And he was sending that money right into the hawk’s hands. Kattie’s grasp on money was fierce. She didn’t let go unless she put food on the table or savings in the bank. When she got to Tennessee she
would be doing the sending, too. Sending money home to those precious babies she was forced to leave behind.

Harvey had gone to Tennessee first, then returned to town with word of a big war site that was hiring at rates they were never going to see in Auburn. It was all right, Harvey had said. And they badly needed workers. So Willie went along with him, and when he finally came back to Alabama for a visit, he told Kattie that she should come with him to Tennessee. There was work for her, too.

Kattie’s mama—who’d always liked Willie—had to disagree. Kattie was the only child of her parents’ nine boys and girls left at home to help out, though she now had kids of her own. Kattie had been working at the library at the university, dusting every corner, every shelf, then returning home to help her mama and take care of her own four children. But it was hard to argue with this Tennessee money, and finally Kattie’s mama gave in. No one would dare raise a word against bringing more dollars home.