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.

Don't be coy, Barack. "They'll say I've got a funny name"?

I think "hot" words are thrown around too easily by people who really don't know what they mean, especially people who shouldn't be using them.

For instance, I'll bet many people don't even know what xenophobia actually means. Correctly used it describes an irrational fear of foreigners.

So when Obama called our swing staters xenophobes, was he slipping, Freudian-wise? I'm just sayin...what with the birth certificate thing and all.

Relax, folks; it's a joke.

Then there's the word racist--one who practices discrimination or antagonism towards other races. That word's tossed around like a gamecock. What is a gamecock, anyway? (It's a male game bird, not a thing that flies over a badminton net, like I first thought. That's a, a...poppycock. No, that's foolish talk or a popular snack.)

And now for my personal favorite, the politically correct, irrationally coined noun racism: (how this reconciles intellectually with science and anthropology I'll never know; but we do live in the land of Lewis Carroll): the belief that there are characteristics, abilities or qualities specific to each race.

I was taken to the mat on that one by my ex-friends (I have many, hard as it is to believe) whose contentious and obnoxious nature argued such things, e.g., taking exception to the sun rising in the east. He refused to exhibit any sophistication as it related to DNA and tendencies to genotypes. It made me laugh to watch this idiotic liberal make his PC point to protect his ideology. Of course, his SOP was to attack me personally when he was losing his political point, which was all the time.

Words. Just words.

Mulatto. It's the new N word. Watch out. Don't use it. I found that out when I read an article in the Washington Post online magazine by a M word person who suddenly is self consciously--get ready--taupe! So he and the rest of the taupe people in this world have declared that in addition to Obama being the patron saint of taupe, there will be no more M word usage. Then he ranted militantly about Sally Hemmings and leaving her door unlocked for the president.

Exhausting, isn't it?

By the way, do you know or care what a Mulatto is? After all, that's all we've ever heard in this culture, Mulatto this, Mulatto that. A girl from Kansas hears Mulatto, oh probably ten times every one-thousand years or so.

Obama is a Mulatto, a black person's and a white person's offspring. But you can't say that anymore. It's on the Do Not Touch List in Obama's Do Not Touch Book.

Reminder to self: write a note to Barack and tell him that the big fat race cards he just played 3x yesterday? Risky strategy. They work with other Dems. Not with the opposition. And time for another memo to the minions to tell 'em to stop the payback thing, ala Ludacris--read Radio One Mayo's study on modern African-Americans. http://www.blackamericastudy.com/

Better lighten up in swing states with the race thing.

Update to memo: Barack, bad news about Bebe in Israel, huh? Your worst nightmare, kiddo, because he'll take Iran out before you can print up that meeting agenda with Khomeni or whatssiname.

Later update to memo: check with econ advisers on how to re-spin good econ news today about growth and lower unemployment rate...revise "economy in tank" remarks. Find other ways to scare people, etc. Read Clinton's class warfare playbook. Stick with old man remarks--they resonate with kids. You better hope and pray they sober up and vote.

Thanks for the read.