Page 14 of The Women of Oak Ridge
“Our mama could make the most delicious meals out of the simplest ingredients. I was glad when she and Harris came to live with me after Pa died. I hope I was able to make her last years a little easier.”
After we tidied the kitchen, I was anxious to look through Aunt Mae’s Oak Ridge memorabilia. As we moved into the living room, my eyes fell on the plain, medium-sized wooden box where it sat on the coffee table. I hated to abandon her and carry it to my room, but I also didn’t know if it was a good idea to look through them in her presence.
She must’ve sensed my dilemma. “Why don’t we go through the box together.” She settled on the sofa. “It’s been ages since I opened it. I can’t recall what I might have saved.”
Thrilled with her change of heart, I sat next to her.
I read the words stamped on the lid. “Union Carbide Company.”
“That was the name of the company in charge of K-25, the plant where I worked. They still run things today.”
“I thought everyone was employed by Clinton Engineer Works.”
“We were,” she stated matter-of-factly, “but Clinton Engineer Works was just a code name for the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge. Of course we didn’t know that at the time. There were different companies under CEW’s umbrella, I guess you’d say. Tennessee Eastman operated Y-12, where Georgeanne worked. DuPont was involved with X-10, which was the graphite reactor.”
It was extraordinary to hear my aunt share her knowledge of the history of Oak Ridge. She’d seen and experienced things I’d only read about in history books.
“I didn’t know you worked at K-25. Do you mind if I ask what you did there?”
She hesitated before answering. “It’s not very exciting. I was with the maintenance department and worked as a clerk and an errand girl. I rode a bicycle around the plant because it was so big, and carried parts and tools to the various areas where machinery was housed.”
“I saw an aerial photograph of K-25 in a book at the university library. The caption said the U-shaped building was the world’s largest structure at the time. Bigger than the Pentagon, which had recently been built.”
She nodded. “General Leslie Groves oversaw the construction of both buildings. President Roosevelt handpicked him to head up the Manhattan Project, although we didn’t hear his name or the official project name until everyone knew about the bomb.”
I couldn’t imagine working for a company without knowing what its purpose was or what was being made. Yet that is exactly what over seventy thousand people did every day in Oak Ridge during the war.
She seemed to warm to the subject. “General Groves was given the monumental task of finding people—scientists, physicists, and the like—smart enough to figure out how to construct an atomic bomb before the Nazis beat us to it. Then he had to build the facilities to make it. No one had ever done anything like this before. Years later I read that even some of the scientists who worked on the project weren’t sure the bomb would work once it was built.”
To prepare for writing my dissertation, I’d done quite a bit of research on General Groves, J.Robert Oppenheimer, Los Alamos, and the making of the atomic bomb. Yet it was utterly fascinating to hear the story from Aunt Mae’s point of view. Like Georgeanne and the others, she’d witnessed it all unfold and had a unique, personal perspective that doesn’t carry over in written historical accounts of the event.
Those were the stories I was after.
I lifted the lid to the box. A yellowed newspaper lay on top.The Knoxville Journal’s bold headline announced, “War Ends.”
“Wow,” I breathed, carefully removing it from the box. “I’ve seen microfilm of newspapers from August 1945, but to actually hold one is really cool.”
Aunt Mae leaned in to get a closer look, squinting behind her thick glasses. “Newspapers generally cost five cents in those days, but after the bomb fell, the price went up to a dollar because there was such a demand. We didn’t have television back then, so newsprint and radio were how we heard about everything.”
Two more newspapers followed. One front-page headline read “Oak Ridge Attacks Japanese” and another proclaimed “Atomic Super-Bomb, Made in Oak Ridge, Strikes Japan.”
Aunt Mae rubbed her eyes and leaned her head against the back of the sofa. “As you can imagine, the atomic bomb and the role Oak Ridgers played in its creation was the talk of the town for weeks.”
I longed to ask her all sorts of questions—the same ones I’d asked Georgeanne earlier—but I didn’t want to spoil things. Aunt Mae seemed willing enough to share general information about the history of Oak Ridge and her experiences, so I didn’t want to push. Hopefully she’d see that talking about the past wasn’t as unpleasant as she believed.
I set the newspapers aside with a plan to read them later that night after I turned in. Beneath lay a hodgepodge of items. A bound security manual. Ticket stubs to a movie theater. A booklet that once held ration stamps. A man’s yellowed handkerchief.
At the very bottom lay two identification badges.
I picked up the one that had a black-and-white photograph of a younger Aunt Mae and held it where we both could see it. A five-digit number was printed beneath her picture, followed byOak Ridge Resident.
She didn’t lean forward as she’d done before but fixed her gaze on the badge. “We couldn’t go anywhere on the Reservation without that.”
“The Reservation?”
“That’s what everyone called Oak Ridge back then. Sometimes people used its code name, Site X, or Townsite. Oak Ridge as a city didn’t exist on any map. It sprang up out of the ground nearly overnight after General Groves decided this was the location where he wanted to build the plants to enrich the uranium. It’s said that by the end of the war there were over seventy-five thousand people living and working on the Reservation, yet the world didn’t know we were here until the bomb was dropped on Japan.”
“It truly was a secret city,” I said.
