National Museum of Nuclear Science & HistoryMichele Gerber's Interview
Michele Gerber: My name is Michele Gerber, M-I-C-H-E-L-E G-E-R-B-E-R.
Why should people today care about the Manhattan Project?
Housing
Dorothy Wilkinson's Interview
Dorothy Wilkinson: My name is Dorothy Wilkinson, D-o-r-o-t-h-y W-i-l-k-i-n-s-o-n.
Cindy Kelly: Okay, if you could just tell a little bit about where you were born and how you happened to come Oak Ridge.
Paul Wilkinson's Interview
Paul Wilkinson: My name is Paul Wilkinson, spelled P-a-u-l W-i-l-k-i-n-s-o-n.
Cindy Kelly: Great, and we will start the same way, by your telling us where you are from and how you ended up at Oak Ridge.
Paul Wilkinson
Paul Wilkinson got a job at the Y-12 Plant Oak Ridge after graduating college. He supervised calutron work and some of the “calutron girls,” including his future wife, Dorothy. Wilkinson.
Sheila Rowan and Jo-Ellen Iacovino's Interview
Interviewer 1: Why did your family come to Oak Ridge? When did that happen?
Rowan: Well, we actually came to Oak Ridge in 1945. We left Nashville in early 1945. Because there was no housing available onsite in Oak Ridge, we had to stay in South Harriman, which is about twenty miles away. In the summertime of 1945, we moved into—
Iacovino: No, no, that was ’44. It was ’44. Because we went through the winter, because then the war was over.
Rowan: We should have gotten our story together. [Laughter.]
Jo-Ellen Iacovino
After her brother was drafted, Jo-Ellen Iacovino and her family moved to Happy Valley, Tennessee to support the war effort.
Sheila Rowan
After her brother was drafted, Sheila Rowan's family moved to Happy Valley, Tennessee to support the war effort. Although Rowan and her sister, Jo-Ellen Iacovino, were too young to participate in the construction of the K-25 gaseous diffusion plant, their older sister, Colleen Black, and their parents worked to support the Manhattan Project. When the war ended, Rowan left Happy Valley.
Louis Rosen's Interview
Rosen: Well, my name is Louis Rosen. I was born in New York City, not the best part of the city. I’m now almost eighty-five years old. My parents were immigrants from Poland. They were escaping from the pogroms, which were taking place with the Russian Cossacks coming in and raiding villages, especially where Jews where plentiful. My father came over here in about 1909. My mother—they were girl and boyfriends in the old country—came over two years later.
Louis Rosen
Louis Rosen, a native New Yorker and the son of Polish immigrants, was personally selected to work on the Manhattan project in Los Alamos while a graduate student in physics. Once in Los Alamos, Rosen was assigned to Edwin McMillan’s group, where he worked on implosion technology. Rosen remained in Los Alamos after the war ended and was considered the father of the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility.
Helene Suydam's Interview
Helene Suydam: I find this story of how Norris Bradbury came to Los Alamos rather interesting. He was a graduate student at the University of California in the ‘30s and every student who was a graduate student of Professor [Leonard] Loeb had to join the Navy reserve. So when the war started all these scientists were activated into the Navy, and about four PhDs ended up at the naval proving ground in Virginia. And the commandant of the proving ground was a retired naval officer who had been passed over and had been called back because of the war.
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