Lindsey A. Freeman - Longing for the bomb : Oak Ridge and atomic nostalgia

Longing for the Bomb

Oak Ridge and Atomic Nostalgia

Lindsey A. Freeman

The University of North Carolina Press
Chapel Hill

This book was published with the assistance of the Authors Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

2015 The University of North Carolina Press
All rights reserved
Set in Utopia and Aller
by codeMantra
Manufactured in the United States of America

An earlier version of chapter 6 appeared as Happy Memories under the Mushroom Cloud: Utopia and Memory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics and Society, ed. Yifat Gutman, Adam Brown, and Amy Sodaro (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 15876. An earlier version of chapter 7 appeared as Manhattan Project Time Machine, in Death Tourism: Disaster Sites as Recreational Landscape, ed. Brigitte Sion (Seagull Books, 2014). Each is reprinted with permission of the publisher. Atomic City Boogie, by Willie Little Red Honeycutt, 2014 Phyllis Honeycutt Simpson and The Honeycutt Family. Reprinted with permission.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Cover illustration: Postcard of Jackson Square, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, published by Werner News Agency, Knoxville, and seal of the city of Oak Ridge

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Longing for the bomb : Oak Ridge and atomic nostalgia / Lindsey A. Freeman. First edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4696-2237-8 (paperback : alkaline paper) ISBN 978-1-4696-2238-5 (e-book)
1. Oak Ridge (Tenn.)History20th century. 2. Oak Ridge (Tenn.)Social life and customs20th century. 3. Oak Ridge National LaboratoryHistory20th century. 4. Official secretsUnited StatesHistory20th century. 5. Atomic bombSocial aspectsUnited StatesHistory. 6. Manhattan Project (U.S.)History. 7. World War, 19391945TennesseeOak Ridge. 8. Popular cultureUnited StatesHistory20th century. I. Title.
F444.O3F74 2015
355.825119097309044dc23
2014038124

For Nan

Joe and Dorathy Moneymaker,

Seal of the City of Oak Ridge,

Lie-detector test,

Billboard in Oak Ridge, 1943,

Santa going through security at Elza Gate, 1944,

The Beginning or the End, Grove Theater, Oak Ridge, 1947,

Gate-opening celebration, Elza Gate, 1949,

Opening-day float, 1949,

Rod Cameron, Marie McDonald, and Adele Jergens with mechanical hands, 1949,

The Secret, 2004,

Calutron Girls,

Greetings from the Atomic City, 1960s,

J. Robert Oppenheimer at the Oak Ridge Guest House, 1946,

Oak Ridge High School science class, 1950s,

Authors grandfather in uniform,

One of the most beautiful gifts I have ever received was a vigorously annotated early draft that became this book. I remember when Vera Zolberg handed it over to me, full of seemingly endless, multi-colored post-it notes sticking out from every angle. The mass of text resembled a stegosaurus with a rare disease. Slowly and methodically I worked from these notes to try to cure the ills of my creaturely text. I cannot thank my professors at the New School for Social Research enoughVera, Jeff Goldfarb, Elzbieta Matynia, and Oz Frankel. Without their close reading, support, and wrangling, this book would not have been possible. Im also grateful to Oz for pointing out that doing academic work is not the same thing as joining the Navy.

Im thankful for the intellectual community in and around the NSSR, where the ideas for this book emerged and gradually came to take shape. Special thanks to Monica Brannon, Linsey Ly, Aysel Madra, Ritchie Savage, Dan Sherwood, Sam Tobin, and Hector Vera for the years of camaraderie and support, intellectual and otherwise. Work on this project was also encouraged and enriched by the New School Memory Group, especially Naomi Angel (who left too soon), Adam Brown, Rachel Daniell, Yifat Gutman, Laliv Melamed, Benjamin Nienass, and Amy Sodaro. Long live the octopus of memory!

Throughout the years of work on this book, in between pushing around my own paragraphs, I taught in the sociology and social science departments of FIT, Pratt, Eugene Lang College, Rutgers-Newark University, and SUNY-Buffalo State. At Rutgers, I taught evening classes in social theory, reading drafts and pounding out notes for this manuscript on the most beautiful train route from New York City to Newark: marshes and rusting industrial ruins provided the backdrop for new insights and turns of phrase. In the first-year writing department at Eugene Lang College, I taught classes on utopia and memory, the two poles of this work. Special thanks are due to Sherri-Ann Butterfield and Kate Eichhorn, who led those departments, and to all my sharp students who pushed my thinking. I would also like to thank Jonathan Veitch, whose interest in utopias and nuclear spaces fortuitously lined up with my own.

The social geography department at the Universit de Caen, where I presented earlier versions of this work, provided a space for thinking, spirited collegiality, and calvados. Thanks go to Pierre Bergel, Patrice Caro, Jean-Marc Fournier, Benot Raoulx, and especially to Stphane Valognes, who introduced me to nuclear Normandy. The folks at the Center for the United States and the Cold War at New York University offered valuable feedback and endured my non-linear approach to the nuclear past. I am also grateful to my new students and colleagues in the sociology department at SUNY-Buffalo State, where I was able to put the finishing touches on the manuscript. Special thanks go to Allen Shelton, who tolerated my long sentences and gave valuable advice to a greenhorn writer and professor.

I am forever indebted to Sara Jo Cohen, who picked me out of the wilds of the Association of American Geographers program; to copyeditor Eric Schramm; and to all the hardworking and talented folks at UNC Press: Stephanie Wenzel, Alison Shay, and my wonderful and charming editor Joseph Parsons, whose support, smarts, and good humor constantly exceed expectation. I would also like to thank Karen Engle, Hugh Gusterson, and Bruce Hevly, who carefully read earlier drafts of this book and provided helpful critical insight. The book is much improved for your efforts. Additional thanks to Karen and Yoke-Sum Wong for their support of the secret telephone.

And much love and appreciation to Jessi Lee Jackson, who abided all the bees in my bonnet, encouraged me when I felt blue, read endless scraps of texts, and listened to so much talk about the atomic bomb, even allowing me to read pieces of the text to her at Rockaway Beach.

Finally, most of all I would like to thank all the Oak Ridgers who took the time to talk with me and to share their stories. Without you, of course, none of this work would have been possible. Special recognition goes to the late Bill Wilcox, D. Ray Smith, Jay Searcy, Earline Banic, Jim Comish at the AMSE, Phyllis Simpson and the Honeycutt family, reference librarian Teresa Fortney at the Oak Ridge Library, the folks at the Center for Oak Ridge Oral History, my mother, Bobbie Freeman, my uncle Frank McLemore, and my grandmother Nan McLemore. I would also like to thank my father, Dennis Freeman, who began his career as a clinical psychologist at the Oak Ridge Mental Health Center when he was a young PhD.

Im from Oak Ridge. I glow in the dark. This was the luminescent phrase that graced my favorite T-shirt when I was seven. It was the mid-1980s and all kinds of neon and day-glow attire were popular, but this was different. The shirt meant Im radioactive and I have a sense of humor about it. During World War II, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was one of the three top-secret locations created for the sole purpose of producing an atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project. I didnt quite understand the glowing then. It felt magic, like something a superhero could do. When you turned the lights out the letters actually glowedilluminating the messagemaking me feel even more powerful than my Wonder Woman underoos did. Smart as I thought my T-shirt looked in all its 50 poly/50 cotton glory, it was not a good sartorial choice for hide-and-go-seek, as I learned the hard way.