It wasn’t just the work; in fact, for most of us, the work was the dull, dreary part; the hours were long and the work was backbreaking or mind-numbing. It seems exciting and glamorous now, but back then, only a handful of people knew our place in the grand scheme of things. The top military leaders, like General Groves and Colonel Nichols, saw the big picture; so did the senior scientists, like Oppenheimer and Fermi and Lawrence, although those three never lived here; they just descended on Oak Ridge now and again, like visiting heads of state. Of the hundreds of scientists in Oak Ridge, Novak was one of the very few who grasped what this vast, desperate endeavor was all about.
The other eighty thousand of us were grunts; we saw only our own tiny little speck of work, and we had no idea what it meant. So I spent eight hours a day, six days a week, staring at needles and twisting knobs. Other people spent fifty or sixty hours a week pouring concrete or bulldozing mud or fitting pipe or welding. When we weren’t working, we spent a lot of time standing in lines. Lines to clock in, lines to clock out. Lines to buy groceries—groceries that sometimes ran out before the line did. Lines to buy cigarettes. People would see a line and queue up, sometimes not even knowing what the line was for, because if other people were in line, there must be something worth lining up for. It was like something out of a Charlie Chaplin film, the one where Chaplin is reduced to a human cog in a huge assembly line.
You’d think we’d have been exhausted, ready to tumble into bed after so much drudgery, but we weren’t. For me, staring at those two dials all day, every day created a pent-up energy, like static electricity. The tedium was exhausting, but at the end of my shift, something in me would wake up, and I’d be ready to stay up half the night. And thousands of other pent-up young people were happy to stay up with me.
The Central Rec Hall was near the middle of what was called Townsite—Jackson Square now, a couple of blocks below Chapel on the Hill. There must have been a dozen or so dormitories within a few blocks of the rec hall, and each dorm housed hundreds of young men and women, most of them single. So the rec hall was jammed every night, all night. Right around midnight, about the time the day-shift workers would start running out of steam, the people who worked evening shift would clock out and come pouring into the rec hall and stay till dawn, and just as they were staggering off to catch some sleep, the graveyard-shift workers would come in. On weekends, the dance floor would be so crowded you could barely move.
One night in the spring of 1944, my roommate Roxanne and I walked in figuring we’d do a little jitterbugging to Glenn Miller records, but instead, there was a guy singing and playing the piano. He looked sophisticated and older—twenty-five, maybe all of thirty; can you believe that? These days Oak Ridge is full of fossils like me, but back then, nearly everybody here was under thirty. Construction workers had to be young and strong to do the manual labor, and scientists had to be young and mentally agile to do the mental gymnastics. I was twenty; most of the girls I worked with had just graduated from high school.
Roxanne and I worked our way up to the front of the room, but it took a while, because we had to wiggle between scores of men to get up there, and the men didn’t want to make it too easy for us to get past them. Oak Ridge in the early forties was like a Gold Rush boomtown back in the 1800s; there were fifteen or twenty men to every woman in Oak Ridge during the war, so it was always easy to get dates—some gals would double-or triple-book, starting one date at eight, another at ten, and another at midnight. But the sad truth was, what Oak Ridge had in quantity, it lacked in quality. Lots of the men were just dumb louts—fine if you wanted to dig a foundation, bulldoze a road, or tangle in a darkened doorway, but if you were looking for more, the wheat-to-chaff ratio was about as low as the ratio of U-235 to U-238.