Bob Richtmyer had replaced Bethe as leader of the theoretical division. He took the place of Placzek, who had held the post for a few months after the war's end. I had met Richtmyer during the war when he visited Los Alamos periodically from Washington where he worked in the patent office. He was tall, slim, intense, very friendly, and obviously a man of great general intelligence. He was interested in many areas of mathematics and mathematical physics. Later we learned about his intense musical interests, his great linguistic talents, and his specialized skills. For example, he was very good in cryptography. But he was so extremely reserved that I found it difficult to know him intimately even though we were and are on very friendly terms.
Norris Bradbury had replaced Oppenheimer as director of the laboratory. I had met him only briefly during the war. He was a pleasant, straightforward, matteroffact younger man, eager to take on the responsibility for continuing this extremely important work, even though he realized that it was not easy to step into the shoes of Robert Oppenheimer who was in the process of becoming a legendary figure.
Norris deserves all the credit for rescuing the project from a slow decline into a mere "ballistics" lab. It could easily have shrunk into the narrow confines of a weapons arsenal, not unlike some that remained in the California desert. Under his management the intellectual and technological level of the laboratory began to pick up slowly but surely. It became a solid and permanent place staffed by good scientists, with an increasingly broader range of interesting scientific problems and the fantastic prospects of atomic-age technology. (Now, under Harold Agnew's direction, even more so.)
Norris was rather diffident in his approach to the scientists who had left. He felt that they should recognize by themselves how important for the country and the world it was for them to come back. As a result, although he wanted to, he did not like to ask people like Fermi or Bethe or Teller to visit. It was actually left to me, with his consent, to write such invitations, along with Carson Mark and Richtmyer. Thus, in a way I was instrumental in bringing Teller back to Los Alamos.
The laboratory began to expand again. The realization of the political importance of nuclear energy for peace and of nuclear weapons for defense made it again a most prominent vital spot in national affairs. High government officials were again frequent visitors. Jim Fisk, a former Junior Fellow at Harvard and friend of mine who had become involved in atomic energy activities and was high up in the Bell Telephone Research Labs, was one of them.
During the von Neumanns' visits, we made excursions to Santa Fe and surrounding spots, frequently eating in the small local Spanish-American restaurants.
On the road to Santa Fe, each time we drove by a place called Totavi (really more a name than a place), I would launch into Latin and recite, "Toto, totare, totavi, totatum," and he would add some form of the future. This was one of our nonsensical verbal games. Another childish one was to read road signs backwards. Johnny always read "pots" for stop" or ''otla" for "alto" in Mexico.
Another game Johnny and Klari liked to play on that road was the Black Mesa game. Black Mesa was an Indian landmark in the Rio Grande Valley which was visible on and off on the way down from Los Alamos. The first one who spotted it called the other's attention by exclaiming "Black Mesa!" and scored a point. The game went on from journey to journey, points being scored as in tennis with games and sets. They never seemed to forget from one trip to the next what the score was. Johnny always liked these brief verbal distractions from serious concentrated thought.
In the early years after the war, the AEC started to build an elegant, permanent structure for its offices and those of the security services, even before new and more comfortable housing was ready for the residents. Johnny remarked that this was entirely in the tradition of all government administrations through the ages, and he decided to call the building "El Palacio de Securita." This was a good enough mixture of Spanish, Latin and Italian. So to go him one better, I immediately named a newly built church "San Giovanni delle Bombe."
This is about the time we made up a "Nebech index." Johnny had told me the classic story of the little boy who came home from school in pre-World-War-I Budapest and told his father that he had failed his final examination. The father asked him, "Why? What happened?" The boy replied, "We had to write an essay. The teacher gave us a theme: the past, the present, and the future of the Austro-Hungarian Empire." The father asked, "So, what did you write?'' and the boy answered, "I wrote: Nebech, nebech, nebech." "That is correct," his father said. "Why did you receive an F?" "I spelled nebech with two bb's," was the answer.
This gave me the idea of defining the nebech index of a sentence as the number of times the word nebech could be inserted in it and still be appropriate, though giving a different flavor to the meaning of the sentence according to the word it qualifies. For instance, one could argue that the most perfect "nebech three" sentence is Descartes' statement: Cogito, ergo sum. One can say, Cogito nebech, ergo sum. Or Cogito, ergo nebech sum. Or Cogito, ergo sum nebech. Unfortunately this elegant example occurred to me only after Johnny's death. Johnny and I used this index frequently during mathematical talks, physics meetings or political discussions. We would nudge one another, whisper "Nebech two" at a particular statement, and enjoy this greatly.
Now, if the reader is sufficiently mystified, I will explain that "nebech" is an untranslatable Yiddish expression, a combination of commiseration, scorn, drama, ridicule.
To try to give the flavor of the word, imagine the William Tell story as acted out in a Jewish school. In the scene where William Tell waits in hiding to shoot Gessler, an actor says, in Yiddish: "Through this street the Nebech must come." It is obvious that Gessler is a Nebech since he will be the victim of William Tell. But if nebech had been in front of the word street, then the accent would be on street, indicating that it was not much of a street. To appreciate this may take years of apprenticeship.
Some months after I returned to Los Alamos, I invited my old friend and collaborator from Madison, C. J. Everett, to join me in the laboratory. He had remained in Madison through the war; I knew from our correspondence that he was getting tired of teaching, so I proposed to him to visit and renew our collaboration. He was the first and only person ever to arrive in Los Alamos by bus for an official interview. The project always paid for a roomette on the train, or plane fare, and his modesty caused a sensation. Shortly after the interview, he moved to Los Alamos with his wife and son and there began the continuation of our collaboration in probability theory and other mathematics, then our joint work on the H-bomb.
In Madison he was already a shy and retiring man, but as time passed he became more and more of a recluse. In the early days of his stay in Los Alamos, although he was reluctant to mingle with people, he could still be coaxed into coming to our house if one made the solemn promise that no one else would be there at the same time. Later he even refused to do that, and now the only place one can see him is in his little windowless cubicle of an office or in a carrel in the excellent laboratory library.
One of the laboratory routines was the preparation of a monthly progress report. Every staff member had to turn in a brief résumé of his work and research activity. I have already said that Everett had a very excellent sense of humor, and one month when we had been exceedingly busy with our own work he turned in a report which said only, "Great progress was made on last month's progress report."