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.

Barack says Iran's just a tiny country. So was Germany; just ask Einstein.

One of the reasons FDR was so hot to trot on The Manhattan Project was because of the strategic interests of this tiny country--Germany--having a nuclear bomb. Einstein sent the famous letter that alerted F. Roosevelt of the urgency of an atomic bomb project to respond to the fascism that Adolf Hitler offered Europe, and that this little faction of Nazis would find a way to rule to world with their own bomb.

Amazingly we face almost exactly the same scenario in the middle east while we again sit our kids down and answer questions like, "But, why do we have to actually hurt them...kill them, Daddy? Isn't that? Well...Jennie and all her friends says it's mean."

Obama and his followers are factually wrong and philosophically wrong. He's wrong, wrong, wrong. He knows nothing of life and nothing of the world. More importantly he has the wrong information. They're also weak.

Look at the correlation I've just placed before you and think. Things and people don't change.

Also, Cindy McCain: release all your tax returns immediately. Gotta do it, girl.

Thanks for the read.

I wrote this email to my subscribers today along with the above blog.

Subject: I had lunch at the Hotel del Coronado today

They say there's a ghost there, you know. I wonder. I certainly wouldn't be surprised.

Coronado Island is a turtle's throw off San Diego available via the famous Coronado Bridge. I had their fabulous cioppino while I watched the hotel guests ooh and aah over our gorgeous weather out here in sunny CA. We are blessed. Every time I'm there I feel almost like a tourist because when the tab comes I've spent as much as being on vacation.

At the table next to me were affluent Czechs and Russians also spending money like crazy. I had to laugh to myself that I would be seated next to a bunch who remind me of rather lugubrious time in my life when my ex-husband of three months, the Czech who married me for US citizenship (I didn't know).

It was during that courtship and strange marriage that he embellished our relationship with the horrors of communism--his father was a party leader. I also found out about how Eastern Europeans have a tendency to get anti Semitic after the fourth Vodka, in the morning.

Because of their high status, my hubby's family had a chauffeur and a phone, and a four room apartment, a pride over which this American couldn't quite show enough appreciation in his opinion. However, considering the basis of our union I don't think a little extra effort would've made any difference. I can say my heart overflowed when I first viewed the see-through coffin lid in his father's funeral pics. Top notch.

Absolutely top notch. I had to admit I'd NEVER seen something like that in my great American family. WE just went for average walnut, oak if we wanted to put on airs.

I couldn't top this one. That's for sure. No sir. I hope that I had finally shown enough respect for his Slovakian roots. Indeed. I could not top an ivory acrylic coffin lid that very closely resembled a canopy cover that was probably cut down from some fab 50s OC design manufactured at by one of our guys out here in sunny CA. It was just too ironic.

My ex had run off to Sweden in the 70s to a Beatles concert, then off to Canada and never returned. Then, lucky me, it was off to Orange County and the rest was...I guess we can say it was his bad. If it hadn't been for the inconvenience and the notching part, I suppose I could just forget it. But there is that notching part that everyone seems to have to do. "How many is this now, Honey?" This question usually came from my mother's most competitive sister. The one my mother hated.

Anyway. He never thought he'd see his mother and sister again.

Now, I was sitting next to an entire group of rich children of communists.With their parents, and my ex husband's parents, they didn't stand a chance. They wouldn't be having lunch here. They'd be in a one or two bedroom apartment working for the state.

Reagan saved their lives. I knew that as sure as I was sitting there because of what I heard happened there in each of their daily routines and lives under communist rule. I'm so, so happy for those eight people and their children. They were having the time of their lives.

I shake my head. I have to ask myself a lot of questions about what if? What if we hadn't listened? It's so tempting when you're tired.

So, then on the way home, I tuned into Huge Hewitt and thought more about appeasement. . We just can't give in to weakness.

It's about where Iran is now (strategically)...now. So I wrote this. Hoping I could still change a few minds.

www.Planetcalifornia2008.blogspot.com

Thanks for your support and pass it on if you like it, dump it if you don't.