Quote:
Originally Posted by mntlblok
Should you ever lack for folks to sit and listen to your stories, I will always make myself available. :-)
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Thank you. I had not thought about Los Alamos for years but the movie brought it to mind. When I was in high school in 1959 I did a book report on a biography about Oppenheimer. I do not remember the book’s title but it had been published at that time.
When I was hired at LASL the higher-ups held a welcoming cocktail party for new staff members. It was held at the lab’s museum which had an inner patio containing surplus casings for Little Boy and Fat Man bombs. I remember leaning up against Fat Man while nursing a martini.
There are now several museums in Los Alamos.
Probably the most ironic event in my life concerning the lab is in the early 1990s I took a job in Orange County, CA, frequented a Japanese restaurant for lunch and got to know my regular waitress. Turned out she was born in Hiroshima! I gently asked how her parents had survived the bomb. She told me her mother’s family lived outside town in a suburb. Her father was a street car conductor who lived downtown. He was sick that day with the flu but due to the wartime labor shortage was forced to work. His street car with him on it was at the end of its run in a distant suburb when the bomb exploded.