Route 285 brings one into Santa Fe on its southeast edge, into what was once the main wagon trail from the east. One plunges—almost instantly, it seems—from the open skies and beige desert outside the city to Old Pecos Trail and its charming adobe buildings within the city. (This is quite unlike entering the city on its southwest side. That entry point, Cerrillos Road, was, even in 1950, an unattractive line of motels, gas stations, and eateries.) But whatever the entry point, one is led to the Plaza at the center of the city, next to the Palace of the Governors and close to the St. Francis Cathedral, made famous in Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop. I quickly found Dorothy McKibbin in her inconspicuous office—labeled “U. S. Eng-rs”—at 109 East Palace Avenue, just a block or so from the Plaza.{2} She was the point of first contact for visitors headed for “the hill.” As I was checking in with her to get a pass that would let me into the fenced city of Los Alamos, I was conscious of the fact that “Mr. Baker” (Niels Bohr), “Mr. Farmer” (Enrico Fermi), and many other notable scientists had preceded me in that small space on the same mission.
After crossing the Rio Grande and heading toward the higher elevation of Los Alamos, I was stopped, along with other uphill traffic, to make way for a downward-bound convoy of trucks bearing wooden barracks on their oversized trailers—a demonstration that the city’s transition from wartime to post-war was still under way. That gave me a chance to chat with some residents, who were evidently happy to live where they did and, as I soon discovered, happy to be sheltered behind a fence.
Once in the city and installed in a men’s dormitory, where I was to share a room with John Toll, I went to see the Wheelers in their “Bathtub-Row” house at 1300 20th Street. This house, and others near it on 20th Street, had been part of the Los Alamos Ranch School before the war and, unlike the housing thrown up by the Army, contained bathtubs.[42] Next door to the Wheelers, at 1152 20th Street, were the Ulams—Stan, Francoise, and their daughter Claire, then five. (Stan and Francoise Ulam liked to say that their daughter was born in Santa Fe’s P. O. Box 1663. In fact a great many babies came into the world in that box.) The Wheeler children at the time were eight, twelve, and thirteen.[43]
Janette Wheeler and the three children had in fact cut their stay in Paris shorter than planned. The children were pulled from formal education in France and by the end of April 1950 the whole family was settled in Los Alamos. Janette Wheeler did not take to her new home “on the hill.” She missed her friends in Princeton and judged the schools in Los Alamos to be inferior to those in Princeton. She saw Los Alamos as a “company town” in which social hierarchies matched professional hierarchies in the lab, and in which newcomers like herself had barriers to overcome. Her attitude played a role in John Wheeler’s advocacy later that year for a separate H-bomb group, ancillary to Los Alamos, in Princeton. More on that later.
On my first or second evening in Los Alamos, the Wheeler family took me and John Toll to the eastern end of a mesa just outside the town for a picnic supper and some amateur art. We dutifully tried to sketch the incredible scene before us, with deep canyons near us, Black Mesa visible down in the valley, and the aptly named Sangre de Cristo mountains farther east, indeed blood-red at that time of the day. The children were the better artists, and, in any case, what John Wheeler really wanted to do was to brief me on the state of thermonuclear work at the lab. (John Toll had been there a few weeks and was already embedded in the lab work.) So I got the story in as much depth as a half-hour conversation could cover. I can’t remember whether my Q clearance had by that time already been approved, but to Wheeler that must have seemed an unimportant nicety. Within the next few days I was at work in the lab, well briefed and with Q clearance in hand.
As it turned out, there were, at the lab, almost no barriers to open communication among all the scientists, engineers, administrators, and consultants. “Need to know” was very broadly interpreted, leading to an agreeably open—and thus more exciting and more productive—work environment. I remember only one occasion where some information was withheld from me. That was when I was back in Los Alamos for a visit in the fall of 1951, and was denied information on what we knew about additional Soviet nuclear-weapon tests (“Joe 2” and “Joe 3”) and how we knew it. By “denied information” I just mean that I was shooed out of an office containing Carson Mark and Hans Bethe and a few others—probably including Edward Teller and John Wheeler—when that topic came up.
John Toll and I were compatible roommates and compatible work-mates. Both of us were used to working long hours, both of us found physics to be exciting, and both of us enjoyed life in the lab and in the town. There was only one small difficulty, which I label “How I learned to hate Martin Agronsky.” John Toll, at the stroke of seven each morning, as his alarm clock rang, went from sound sleep to complete alertness in a matter or seconds, seconds in which, while getting out of bed, he reached for the radio and turned it on in order to hear the morning news reported by the gravel-voiced Martin Agronsky. So, as I slowly awakened, I had to endure Martin Agronsky. His program got to be like cod-liver oil.
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Through the agreeable workings of bureaucracy, I was assigned the bathtub-row house at 1300 20th Street in the summer of 1968, the summer when my seventh child was born. We qualified, apparently, on the basis of family size rather than lab seniority. We enjoyed the large house, the large yard, the Indian ruin in the back, and our neighbors the Ulams.