plant it,’ which made no sense as it was planted by wild nature and suits me better than dust. The soldier left, but was back next day and insisted he had more orders ‘to finish this neck of the woods.’ So I called all the ladies to the danger and we put chairs under the trees and sat on them. So what could he do? He shook his head and went away and has not come again.” Contrariwise, to clear a ski area on the hill to the west of the mesa, George Kistiakowsky wrapped the trees with half-necklaces of plastic explosive and thus noisily but efficiently cut them down. “Then we scrounged equipment to build a rope tow and it became a nice little ski slope,” he recalls.
The Fermis moved to Los Alamos in September 1944 and requested one of the less coveted fourplex apartments rather than the Ranch School faculty cottage that had been prepared for them, to make a point about social snobbery. The Peierls, Rudolf and energetic Genia — Otto Frisch's dish-drying coach in Birmingham — lived below. The mix of birthplaces and citizenships was typical of the Hill: Peierls a German Jew, his wife a Russian, both with British citizenship; Laura Fermi still nostalgic for Rome but she and her husband new American citizens as of July. “Oppie has whistled,” Fermi would announce with a yawn when the morning siren sounded. “It is time to get up.” The Italian laureate directed a new operation, F (for Fermi) Division, a catchall designed to take advantage of his versatility as both theoretician and experimentalist. One of the groups he caught was Teller's. “That young man has imagination,” the forty-three-year-old Italian emigrd told his wife drolly of the thirty-six-year-old Hungarian. “Should he take full advantage of his inventiveness, he will go a long way.” Teller stayed up late at night working out ideas and playing the piano and hardly ever appeared in the Tech Area before late morning.
“Parties,” remembers Fuze Development group leader Robert Brode's articulate wife Bernice, “both big and brassy and small and cheerful, were an integral part of mesa life. It was a poor Saturday night that some large affair was not scheduled, and there were usually several of them… On [Saturday nights] we raised whoopie, on Sundays we took trips, the rest of the week we worked.” Single men and women sponsored dorm parties fueled with tanks of punch made potent with mixed liquors and pure Tech Area grain alcohol and invited wall-to-wall crowds. The singles removed all the furniture from their dormitory common rooms to make areas for dancing and by unwritten rule kept their upstairs doors open through the night.
Square dancing evolved as a natural Saturday evening activity in that Southwestern setting. (“Everybody was wearing Western clothes — jeans, boots, parkas,” Stanislaw Ulam's French wife Franqoise remembers noticing with surprise when she and her husband arrived on the Hill. “There was a feeling of mountain resort, in addition to army camp.”) The dances were first held in Deke Parsons' living room, then the theater, then Fuller Lodge, finally expanding to crowd the large mess hall. Eventually even the Fermis attended with their daughter Nella to learn the vigorous reels. Long after mother and daughter had been persuaded from the sidelines Fermi sat unbudging, mentally working out the steps. When he was ready he asked Bernice Brode, one of the leaders, to be his partner. “He offered to be head couple, which I thought most unwise for his first venture, but I couldn't do anything about it and the music began. He led me out on the exact beat, knew exactly each move to make and when. He never made a mistake, then or thereafter, but I wouldn't say he enjoyed himself… He [danced] with his brains instead of his feet.”
Theater sometimes supplied a Saturday alternative. At a performance
Kistiakowsky preferred less formally intellectual entertainment:
I played a lot of poker with important people like Johnny Von Neumann, Stan Ulam, etc… When I came to Los Alamos I discovered that these people didn't know how to play poker and offered to teach them. At the end of the evening they got annoyed occasionally when we added up the chips. I used to point out that if they had tried to learn violin playing, it would cost them even more per hour. Unfortunately, before the end of the war, these great theoretical minds caught on to poker and the evening's accounts became less attractive from my point of view.
And Robert Wilson, Cyclotron Program group leader, who served on the advisory Town Council, discovered even more elemental activities on the Hill despite security screening before employment and roving military police:
Of the many problems that were presented to us during my term of office, the most memorable was when the M.P.'s who guarded the site chose to place one of our women's dorms off-limits. They recommended that we close the dorm and dismiss the occupants. A tearful group of young ladies appeared before us to argue to the contrary. Supporting them, a determined group of bachelors argued even more persuasively against closing the dorm. It seems that the girls had been doing a flourishing business of requiting the basic needs of our young men, and at a price. All understandable to the army until disease reared its ugly head, hence their interference. By the time we got that matter straightened out — and we did decide to continue it — I was a considerably more learned physicist than I had intended to be a few years earlier when going into physics was not all that different from taking the cloth.
Married or single, the occupants of Post Office Box 1663 were young and healthy; they produced so many babies that Groves ordered either the reservation commander or the laboratory director — both versions of the story survive — to staunch the flood. Oppenheimer, if Oppenheimer it was, refused the duty. With justification: his wife Kitty bore him a second child, a daughter, Katherine, called Toni, on December 7, 1944. So many people wanted to see the boss's baby that the hospital identified the crib with a sign and lines formed to file past the nursery window.
Crowded together behind a fence, Hill families worried about epidemic disease. A pet dog that had bitten several children turned up rabid and pet owners debated angrily with parents about which category of dependent should be kept on a leash. More frightening was the sudden death of a young chemist, a group leader's wife, from an unidentified form of paralysis. Fearing an outbreak of poliomyelitis, doctors closed the schools, put Santa Fe off limits and ordered all children indoors.
No new cases appeared, the danger abated with the continuation of cold weather and work and play resumed. “I don't think I shall ever again live in a community where so many brains were,” comments Edwin McMillan's wife Elsie, Ernest Lawrence's sister-in-law, “nor shall I ever live in a community so confined that visitors expected us to fight with each other. We didn't have telephones, we didn't have the bright lights, but I don't think I shall ever live in a community that had such deep roots of cooperation and friendship.”
Some reserved Sundays for church and hobbies; others devoted the day to outings. The Oppenheimers maintained magnificent riding horses and rode regularly on Sunday morning but only once in three years found time for an overnight excursion. Kistiakowsky bought one of Oppenheimer's quarter horses and refreshed himself trailing in the mountains after his late Saturday poker nights; the Army stabled the private animals along with the remuda it kept for the mounted MP's who patrolled the mesa fences. Emilio Segre found excellent fly-fishing. “The streams are full of big trouts,” he announced happily to newcomers. “All you have to do is throw in a line and they bite you, even if you are shouting.” Fermi took up angling, says Segre, “but he went about it in a peculiar way. He had tackle different from what anyone else used for trout fishing, and he developed theories about the way fish should behave. When these were not substantiated by experiment, he showed an obstinacy that would have been ruinous in science.” Fermi insisted on fishing for trout with worms, arguing that the condemned creatures should be offered an authentic final meal, not the dry flies of tradition. Segre made a point of reviewing the subtleties of trout fishing with his old friend. “Oh, I see, Emilio,” Fermi eventually countered, “it is a battle of wits.”
Mountain climbing had long been a Hans Bethe hobby. He and Fermi, among others, sometimes scaled Lake Peak across the Rio Grande in the Sangre de Cristos, one of Bethe's admiring group leaders remembers, to “sit there in the sunshine” at 12,500 feet “discussing physics problems. This is how many discoveries were made.” Leona Marshall, who moved with Fermi to Los Alamos, recalls less Olympian hours with “nothing to do but admire
