Billy Connolly's Route 66_ The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip - Billy Connolly [88]
For many years, Los Alamos was a secret town that didn’t officially exist. The locals carried driving licences that had no names, addresses or signatures on them, just always the same occupation – engineer – which indicated to the police that the holder was conducting secret government work. Cut off from the outside world, this small town in the mountains was home to the Manhattan Project – America’s top-secret effort, with participation from Britain and Canada, to develop the first atomic bomb during the Second World War.
When I arrived in Los Alamos, I was flabbergasted to find it was a beautiful country town – clean, well laid out, with fantastic facilities and crystal-clear mountain air. It also has the highest concentration of residents with Ph.D.s anywhere in the world, and consequently the highest per capita income of any American city (and the highest house prices).
It was a beautiful day, the kind you dream about, as I rode into the centre of town, where a string of handsome wood and stone lodges make up the Los Alamos Historical Museum. In 1942 these mountain lodges were requisitioned by the military from Los Alamos Ranch School, a private boarding school. The site was chosen for the Manhattan Project because of its isolation, access to water, and location on a table mountain that allowed all entrances to be secured. Originally referred to only as Site Y, it later became the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory and, after the war, the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In a strip of buildings known as Bathtub Row – because they were the only houses in Los Alamos with baths – stood the school’s Fuller Lodge and Big House. Both were social gathering places for Manhattan Project personnel, while other nearby buildings were used for housing.
At one of the historic lodges I met Jack Aeby, who used to be a driver for the project’s scientists, many of whom had codenames in this no-questions-asked town. Sitting beside him was Frank Osvath, a machinist on the project. Both men are now in their eighties. I asked Frank what he did exactly.
‘Can’t you tell by looking at me?’ he said. ‘I glow in the dark. I machined uranium for thirty-nine years.’
‘You did not!’ I was amazed.
‘I did.’
‘Is that a safe thing to do?’
‘It was mostly depleted uranium. Enriched uranium – I just did a little bit of that.’
‘How did you feel about being part of manufacturing an atomic bomb? Did you know that’s what you were doing?’
‘They came looking for machinists at the Ford Motor Company in Detroit and about a dozen of us came out here. They told us we would build something that might end the war, but we didn’t know for sure what it was.’
‘Really? Well, it certainly did that.’
‘They said they couldn’t tell us how long we would be here. We would be restricted from travelling and our letters would be censored, so it was quite a restriction to come out here. Our names were changed; they gave us false names. My folks, who lived in Detroit, used to write me letters and they were censored coming in and going out. My folks came from Hungary and I wrote them in Hungarian. Those letters couldn’t be censored here, so they sent them to Washington, DC, then back here, and then they delivered them to my folks. So it took a very long time.’
I turned to Jack. ‘And you were a driver?’
‘I would get the people who were coming up here,’ he said, ‘take them to 109 East Paulos, which was the headquarters in Santa Fe, and they would be met by military personnel for their induction to work up here.’
‘Were you allowed to speak to them about the project?’
‘They all arrived with assumed names, like everybody else that worked here,