Sixty years ago, on Aug. 6, 1945, when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, their secret became headline news. In a wartime laboratory led by the charismatic physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, a group of Nobel laureates and other scientists, engineers, and technicians had worked nearly nonstop for more than two years to create a weapon of unprecedented lethality. Their work helped usher in a new scientific and political era -- and helped bring World War II to a close. Los Alamos is commemorating the bomb and the war's end with a series of special events, including art exhibitions and an Aug. 9 program of readings and reminiscences.
One hot May day, I drove 35 miles northwest from Santa Fe and met Johnson at a reunion of Los Alamos High School classes from the 1940s and early '50s. With spouses in tow, attendees had traveled across the country to picnic beside Ashley Pond, a tranquil oasis near the town center.
Reunion organizer Dan Nelis, 74, a community college administrator in Las Vegas, moved to Los Alamos in 1945 with his electrician-father. He recalls his friends as ''normal teenagers trying to have a normal life in very adverse conditions."
Not much remains of wartime Los Alamos, whose mostly rudimentary housing and technical buildings were torn down almost as quickly as they had been built. It is possible, though, to tour the structures that survive, and learn the stories behind them at the Los Alamos Historical Museum.
At Fuller Lodge, in the company of Nancy R. Bartlit, president of the Los Alamos Historical Society, and Georgia Strickfaden, a guide with Buffalo Tours, I sat beneath the vaulted ceilings in the building's central room, where Manhattan Project scientists once dined. The lodge, designed by architect John Gaw Meem and built in 1928 with 771 vertically placed pine logs, was once the dining hall of the Los Alamos Ranch School, founded in 1917 by Ashley Pond Jr., one of President Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders.
Pond's small preparatory school was designed to toughen up the sons of the Eastern elite with a vigorous outdoor regimen. The writer Gore Vidal was among those educated here.
