QUIET ARCHITECT OF ATOMIC BOMB PASSES

I just got the news the other day while I was in Denver. John had died. Had a heart attack and fell into the very grave he was digging for someone else. He didn’t come back out. He didn’t send invitations, announcements or lacy accessories full of regurgitated, dutiful sympathy.

All I really remember of John was lusty cigars on Sunday morning, his day off at the cemetery. My German Shepherd adored him but my relationship stopped with a smile and a hushed hello. He lived in the same house that I called home across from Bonfils Theater. In the Forties John had helped perfect the atomic bomb down in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the company town built by the Atomic Energy Commission.

A graduate of Harvard, he had probably approached bomb building with the same painstaking whole-hog intensity that earmarked his latter day trade. Each morning I heard his shovel and pick standing at attention before the sun came up. No alarm clock. No coffee pot. No morning news. He had had enough of the news.

Then he slipped off for the composed crypts of the 1970s.

Some people might be put of by the spectral nature of the work. However ghastly, it was steady. It seemed almost an ancient endeavor what with backhoes and the like employed at most other burial grounds. John came home dirty each night, took a bath, ate supper and disappeared into his wallpaper. Only on Sunday morning did he stretch out, read The Post and smoke his cigar. That’s when my tail-wagging dog visited.

As a much younger man John had gained admission into the secret fraternity of atomic scientists plotting to end the Second World War. He had moved to Los Alamos from Cambridge in 1943. The research laboratories had been set up to create a weapon that would silence Hitler and Tojo in one foul swoop.

At the time the Allies knew that the Nazis had experimented with the V1 and V2 guided rockets. There was also conjecture that German scientists were nearing the capacity to build weapons of mass destruction like the atomic and the hydrogen bomb. Hitler would use it to be sure. At a time where the war appeared to be won, men like Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi and Vannevar Bush found themselves in a race against a desperate German push that would make the Battle of the Bulge look like grandma’s birthday party.

Along with these infamous atomic scientists was my neighbor, John, who told me one time he “didn’t like Northern New Mexico because it was too damn windy”. That’s all he cared to say about his four year stint there.

As we all are aware the allies won the dreadful race which culminated in the torching of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Almost immediately it brought on the nuclear arms race.

In 1946 John left Los Alamos and attempted to blend back into an American society intoxicated with victory, on a treadmill to wealth and prosperity. During the Fifties he continued related research at Northwestern University and then spent a year back in Massachusetts at M.I.T. He even traveled on the lecture circuit telling his story to bomb shelter building cold war captives while they digested their salisbury steak. He even met Senator Joseph McCarthy. I think they were both from the same part of Wisconsin.

Then the walls caved in and John disappeared from view for decades, emerging in Denver with a pick on his shoulder. He dug graves all through the Seventies and into the Eighties retiring in 1986 at age 65. After about a year of leisure John returned to the necropolis as a sort of cadaverous consultant. He hung on until just the other day. – Kevin Haley