109 East Palace

by Jennet Conant

  “There was never a dull moment,” she recalled. “The office was a madhouse. It was bedlam. We worked six days a week but even so I couldn’t wait to get back to work in the morning. There were always people who needed attention—they were hungry, exhausted, in a hurry. If there was anybody [left] at the end of the day I sometimes took them home with me.” When she noticed that Bob Bacher had a cold, she insisted he stay the night with her in town, refusing to allow him to go up to the Hill because she could not be sure he would be properly looked after. From then on, her adobe farmhouse became known as a refuge for weary scientists, the only place they could steal away to for a good meal, warm bath, and peaceful night’s sleep in a real home.

  Because of her importance to the project, Dorothy held a Q badge, giving her laboratory security clearance and permitting her home on Old Pecos to be used as an officially sanctioned “safe house” by scientists who needed to overnight in town in order to catch an early train the next day. As the months went by, however, it turned into a popular getaway spot for couples who were desperate to escape the military post and enjoy a late night on the town. Kevin would return home some Friday nights to find cars stacked in the driveway, and bodies in sleeping bags strewn all over the lawn. “It was the only place Los Alamos people could fraternize off the Hill, so they would all come for the weekend,” he said. “On weekends, the house was always full to overflowing.” A hastily scribbled note from his mother on the kitchen table would inform him of the obvious: “All the beds are full. See if you can find a bedroll and a place to park it out back.”

  Dorothy was on call twenty-four hours a day and became accustomed to fielding frantic messages from Oppenheimer in the middle of the night. Once he phoned in a state explaining that Ed McMillan had returned late from a trip and had gone straight to La Fonda only to discover “there was no room at the inn.” Dorothy promised to fetch him, hurried down to the hotel, and brought him home. McMillan had said an official car would be coming to take him to Los Alamos, so the following morning when Dorothy left for work at 7:00 A.M., she did not wake him. When Kevin got up, he found a stranger in his kitchen breaking eggs, and the two sat down for an amiable breakfast. They got to talking about Kevin’s car, an old ’27 Chevy parked in the driveway, which he had purchased with money he had been saving to buy a horse. He had gotten a good deal on the car, he told the Berkeley physicist, but it just would not start. McMillan offered to take a look under the hood, and happily employed, they lost track of time. “That’s where my mother found us at noon after the lab had called, urgently searching for the scientist who’d missed his crucial appointment,” said Kevin. Dorothy informed the Hill of McMillan’s whereabouts, and shortly thereafter a car came and spirited him away.

  All that month and the next, a steady stream of scientific luminaries stumbled into Dorothy McKibbin’s office from the great universities across the country, from Harvard and MIT to the universities of Chicago, Wisconsin, and California. She took particular note of a fellow who came from Princeton, her husband’s alma mater, a gangling youth named Richard Feynman, who hardly looked old enough to be an expert in anything. Many were foreigners, with oddly tailored clothes and battered briefcases, who looked poignantly out of place on the platform in Lamy. Displaced and disoriented, often showing up days after they were expected, the travelers collapsed into a chair as though they “could never move again,” she wrote, so exhausted “one could almost see [their] fatigue dropping off and piling up against the old adobe walls”:

  They arrived, breathless and sleepless and haggard, tired from riding on trains that were slow, trains that were held up for troop trains, trains that were too crowded to take on the hundreds of passengers waiting on the platforms, tired from missing connections, and having nothing to eat, and losing their luggage, or sitting the dawn hours in an airport waiting for a plane…. The new members were tense with expectancy and curiosity. They had left physics laboratories, chemistry, metallurgy, engineering projects, had sold their homes or rented them, had deceived their friends, had packed their lares et penates [personal belongings], and launched into the unknown and unheard of.

  All they knew of their actual destination was contained in the “Arrival Procedure Memorandum” sent to all laboratory employees, instructing them to find their way to Santa Fe and report to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers office at 109 East Palace Avenue. “The following procedure is suggested as the method by which your arrival in Santa Fe and the Site can best be simplified for you and for this office …” it began in language that was as bureaucratic as it was uninformative. East Palace Avenue was their last known address before the heavy door of secrecy shut behind them. It was the rabbit hole they fell into. In the jargon of the Manhattan District, Los Alamos was never referred to by name and was designated as “Site Y” or the “Zia Project.” But as neither phrase really caught on, it was known generally as “the Site,” “the Project,” or simply “the Hill.” These were all code words they learned to use interchangeably. Machinists dashed in and asked, “Where is the dance hall?” “Thirty-five miles to go” was all the reply they would get from Dorothy.

  Joe Lehman, a civil engineer, drove out west in his own car, and expecting that the capital of New Mexico would be quite a large metropolis, blew right by it. “I drove through the square and kept on going looking for the main part of town and I found myself out in the desert again,” he recalled. “So I turned around and came back and finally pulled into a service station right off the square and asked where downtown Santa Fe was. The guy said, ‘This is it. You’re in it.’” Unconvinced, Lehman asked for a telephone and called Dorothy McKibbin. “Where are you?” she asked. Lehman described his whereabouts as best he could, and she said, “Oh, yeah, I see you.” She was right across the Plaza from where he had stopped and went outside to wave at him.

  Most of the new arrivals could not get over the inconspicuous little office that was the entrance to the all-important Los Alamos laboratory. One afternoon, Dorothy got a call from the Hill asking her to go over to La Fonda and round up two lost scientists. They had been sent from Chicago with instructions to report to 109 East Palace and had walked up and down the sleepy town without seeing anything that looked like a government office. Apparently, a child had been playing on the gate outside Dorothy’s office, and the iron-grill door had swung shut, further obscuring the miniature sign. Confused and tired, they had gone to the hotel, called the Met Lab in Chicago, and demanded, “Where the hell are we?” When Dorothy finally led them down the narrow passageway to her modest cubbyhole and invited them to fill out a few forms and turned the crank on the old-fashioned desk machine that produced their passes to the project, she saw the look of disbelief on their faces. “They were not impressed,” she observed dryly.

  A silent understanding of sorts developed between Dorothy and the townspeople. The phone would ring, and it would be the owner of the corner drugstore calling to report that some oddly dressed character had blundered in: “There is a party here who is lost.” She would just laugh and reply, “Send him over right away.” After wandering around the Plaza for hours, Leon Fisher, one of the young Berkeley physicists recruited to work on the project, and his wife, Phyllis, staggered into a nearby bakery by mistake and hesitantly told the girl behind the counter that they had been “told to come here.” They stood staring in bewilderment at the freshly baked loaves, wondering if this was some elaborate ruse meant to mislead the general public, or if they were supposed to break open the bread to find a coded message bearing their final directions. Just then the bemused voice of the proprietor on the other side of the shop directed them to “the office down the way,” adding in a bored drawl, “People are going in and out of there all the time.”

  For security reasons, even the word “physicist” was taboo. Some of the more jaded staffers took to calling physicists and chemists “fizzlers” and “stinkers,” but Dorothy thought that was disrespectful. The most famous physicists traveled under assumed names: Enrico
Fermi was known as Henry Farmer, Emilio Segrè was Eugene Samson, Ernest Lawrence was Ernest Lawson. When G-2 fretted that Lawrence’s code name was becoming as well-known as his real one, they came up with an alternative—“Oscar Wilde”—reportedly because Wilde had written the play The Importance of Being Ernest. Dorothy was told to refrain from using their proper names at all times and to refer to them only by their “covers” when on the phone. Some came to stay permanently; others came only temporarily, as consultants. The latter included Fermi, who arrived in Dorothy’s office accompanied by John Baudino, a “tremendous bodyguard, a big halfback of a football team.” Baudino had been a lawyer before he was drafted into the army, and he now served as the famous Italian physicist’s plainclothes protector, chauffeur, and messenger. Fermi was short and stockily built, and seemed dwarfed by the hulking Baudino, though the latter, Dorothy observed, “tried to efface himself as much as he could.” Like most of the refugee scientists, Fermi was classified as an “enemy alien,” and it was safe to assume that among Baudino’s many duties was filing weekly reports to army intelligence.

  Dorothy came to know Fermi quite well from his frequent trips, and he always stopped in, not only for his pass, but also to make a phone call. “He’d always call the Hill as soon as he got to Santa Fe and suggest they try such and such a computation. Then he’d call again from Lamy with another idea, and when he got back to Santa Fe, he’d call again with another suggestion.” He would often look at her in an inquiring way as he talked on the phone, as though she might possess the answers to his questions, his eyes twinkling, as his fingers nervously played with a pencil on her desk. Fermi found his all-American code name quite funny, especially since as soon as he pronounced it in his heavily accented English, it immediately aroused the suspicions of the Los Alamos security guards. He was always stopped and questioned, and once the guards demanded he produce letters addressed to “Mr. Farmer” to prove there even was such a person. Dorothy, who more than once came to his rescue, overheard one guard swear under his breath that enforcing the security regulations was not half as hard as trying to understand all the strange accents.

  The code names were an endless source of confusion, missed connections, and delays. The physicists often forgot their aliases, or got them mixed up. The problems were compounded by the fact that many of the scientists or their family members were never informed of their new identities in the first place, so they failed to respond to the WAC drivers waiting to pick them up at the train station to take them to Dorothy’s office. Fermi, in particular, enjoyed making fun of all the cloak-and-dagger precautions, which struck him as fairly comical in the Wild West setting of New Mexico. He particularly loved the local Santa Fe policemen, who wore snappy Pancho Villa-type uniforms, all black and heavily studded with silver, and looked straight out of the movies. One afternoon, when Fermi and Sam Allison were in her office waiting for a car to take them up to the Hill, Dorothy, who had been instructed never to address any of the scientists using titles such as “Doctor” or “Professor,” could not resist teasing them. “As I made out their passes, I tossed my head and informed them that we had to demote them down here and speak of them and to them as plain ‘Mister,’” she wrote. But as usual, the two physicists had the last word on the matter:

  They strolled around the town while waiting. Near the Cathedral, they noticed a statue in the yard.

  “Who is that?” asked Allison of Fermi.

  “That is Archbishop Lamy,” Fermi replied.

  “Shhhhh,” whispered Allison, grabbing Fermi’s arm and glancing around cautiously. “Mrs. McKibbin would suggest we call him Mister Lamy.”

  Dorothy understood that all the secrecy was because the army feared too many visitors in the off-season would give rise to curiosity. It was also the case that too many assorted European accents might have the same effect. There was also the possibility that some of the more famous scientists might be recognized from their magazine covers or newspaper photos, and that could lead to talk. It had happened once, in the case of the much-photographed Albert Einstein. As Dorothy recounted in her memoir, the little old man with the distinctive shock of white hair was sitting alone on a bench in the Plaza one afternoon when he caught the attention of one of Santa Fe’s more colorful gadflies:

  Brian Boru Dunne was by no means an everyday small town reporter. He wore a great ten gallon hat and rode a white horse to town which he would tether in front of the Post Office. He was from the East, had written books one of which had a forward by H. G. Wells. He not only wrote a column on visitors for the town newspaper, a Cutting property, but was business manager in Santa Fe for senator Bronson Cutting’s interests. It was with undisguised excitement that he brought his column to the editor on a certain day. He had interviewed Einstein. The column was submitted to General Groves for approval, and brought the general storming into the office. The column was ordered killed and any mention of it forbidden. There was never an admission in the Los Alamos annals that Einstein ever visited Santa Fe.

  While Dorothy tried to be vigilant about security, she comforted herself with the thought that Oppenheimer and company would probably be able to go about their business without people paying too much attention. “Santa Fe had always been a town of comings and goings,” she wrote. “After all, its only industries were tourists and politics.” For the most part, she was proved right. Will Harrison, who was editor of the daily paper, The Santa Fe New Mexican, instructed his staff not to bother her, cautioning them, “She won’t tell you anything.” In any case, the government had ordered the local papers to make no mention of the Los Alamos project until after the war. When the Albuquerque Journal slipped up and reported that Los Alamos personnel had helped put out a forest fire in the Jemez hills, the editor was raked over the coals by G-2. The official policy called for a complete media blackout—no newspaper and radio reports, no publicity of any kind, no mentions even indirectly related to the subject of atomic energy. The idea was to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. If everybody kept quiet, it would be easier to track the talkers and to pinpoint suspects. Another reason for the policy was to lull the Nazis into underestimating the Allied effort and, as a consequence, not to accelerate their own atomic research program.

  No matter how busy or bizarre the comings and goings at 109 East Palace, people in Santa Fe went about their business just as if it were life as usual. They all watched the coal trucks tear up the old road to the Pajarito Plateau and said nothing. They heard about the big moving vans that got stuck on the washboard road and had to be pulled out of knee-deep bogs, and shrugged. Neighboring shopkeepers were aware that Dorothy’s office was in some way attached to a wartime project, but knew better than to ask about it. Dorothy did her part to keep it from becoming prematurely famous, using a combination of charm, soft soap, and double-talk to dismiss daily suspicions. When asked about people who had suddenly packed up and disappeared from town, as happened after she recommended her neighbor to fill the job as fire marshal on the site, or when a local baker went to work at Fuller Lodge, Dorothy made no reply. There were rumors that some folks had moved up to Los Alamos, but no one knew for certain. Over time, even her friends grew reluctant to stop by the office, where the most casual questions might be greeted by an awkward silence. They did not know what to say, so they stayed away.

  At the end of March, Harold Agnew, a twenty-two-year-old graduate student, barged into Dorothy’s office and demanded to know if all his boxes had arrived safely. Most of the young laboratory staffers arrived in a sweat, panic-stricken that their irreplaceable equipment had failed to arrive in one piece. Having witnessed some alarming displays of nervous agitation, Dorothy knew there was nothing she could say to relieve his distress. Seeing would be believing. She just smiled serenely, handed him his pass, and pointed the way to Wilson’s Storage & Transfer. Agnew rushed straight to the shipping company, found a driver, jumped in the cab of the truck, and took off with his boxes without a clue where he was headed. All Dorothy had
said was to “go on up” with the truck. She had supplied him with a yellow map covered with red pencil markings carefully indicating every mile and every turn of the last leg of the trip. He read the instructions: “Go around the Federal Building, turn north, Tesuque six miles, Pojoaque seventeen miles, turn west there and wind down the valley, cross the Rio Grande y Bravo, turn southwest ten miles and then ten miles directly west and up.”

  In every direction he looked there were dirt roads leading off into nowhere. They passed through sleepy villages and fields being worked by farmers still using horse-drawn plows, as though in a time warp. He and a handful of others had been recruited by John Manley to be part of his team at the new laboratory, and before coming they had spent a few days at the University of Illinois helping him painstakingly dismantle his Cockcroft-Walton accelerator. Agnew’s bride of a year, Beverly, who had trained to be a schoolteacher, had stood there with a clipboard in hand, counting the number of boxes and making out the manifest. Some of the parts were made of hand-blown glass, and Agnew thought of them now, bouncing in the back of the truck. Manley had not been able to divulge their destination, but one night after dinner he had played them a record—“On the Santa Fe Trail.” Looking out the window of the cab of the truck as they climbed past lava beds and black escarpments, and cut through strange volcanic rock formations and a bed of white pumice, bits of stone clattering down the canyon walls and bouncing off the side of the truck, Agnew thought he was beginning to understand why Manley had been so reticent: “It was a dusty, isolated, uncivilized place.” A guard stopped him at the first gate and checked his pass and identification, and then it was another three miles of piñons and junipers to the settlement. Taking Dorothy’s last piece of advice, he stuck his head out the window and shouted for directions to the Tech Area.