My book about my dad and The Manhattan Project

I'll be closing Planet California down for a while to research and write the book I've been contemplating for twenty years: the story of my father and his involvement with the world changing Manhattan Project.

Much of the material I'm seeking is available through The Freedom of Information Act, while much more must be gathered through personal interviews. I wish I hadn't waited so long, frankly, as many of the people I need to talk to are gone now. I also plan to travel to the place of my birth, Hanford, Washington, one of the three Manhattan Project production sites, for the intense experience of feeling and knowing by putting my feet on that ground again after 57 years. My sister, who is fifteen years older than I, will go with me.

Dad wasn't forthcoming, obviously, about his job, thus, the reason for the need for so many outside questions. I admit it may sound odd to many of my readers that I have only just found out in the last few years of my father's FBI agent training at Quantico. We didn't speak of Dad's job, even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and into the Cold War years when Dad was transferred to another high security job in Kansas City, Missouri in 1949. There were many middle-of-the-night phone calls that were not discussed.

My father's story is one that deserves telling. He was the oldest of eight in a family of yeoman Indiana corporate farmers, a high school and college four-letter athlete, state champion athletic coach and beloved teacher. He had a beautiful, brilliant and educated wife (also a teacher) and two fine children. Things went swimmingly except they were absolutely without money. No one had money.

Then he made a dramatic, painful jump to private industry from the love of his life--teaching--made out of economic necessity, not choice. No more painting barns or schlepping his entire family to work in the steel mills in Gary during the summers for the man with two degrees and a nice job the rest of the year. He had to find other work. He did...in about 1939. Right down the road at DuPont, the folks who put the security into The Manhattan Project...in about 1942, when a flat organizational democracy of scientists were running riot with their loose lips and riling against the constraints of national security to the point of chaos and jeopardy. It was at this point my father became a part of the project and my entire family moved from Indiana to temporary barracks housing in Richland, Washington.

I hope to write this story such that it instructs and allows my grandchildren to grasp the greatest generations' early motivations, patriotism, hardships, dreams and sense of honor. I'm driven also by the ideal of setting the record straight by demonstrating just who was involved with this critically important phase of world history. After all, it wasn't all Einsteins, Oppenheimers, Groves, Fermis (our neighbor) and Tellers who did this deal. Real people put this thing together. My father was one of them.

Until the book, without so much as a working title, is much further along...

thanks for the read.