Page 10 of The Women of Oak Ridge

Aunt Mae leaned in to get a closer look, squinting behind her thick glasses.

“Newspapers generally cost five cents in those days, but after the bomb fell, the price went up to a dollar because there was such a demand. We didn’t have television back then, so newsprint and radio were how we heard about everything. ”

Two more newspapers followed. One front-page headline read “Oak Ridge Attacks Japanese” and another proclaimed “Atomic Super-Bomb, Made in Oak Ridge, Strikes Japan.”

Aunt Mae rubbed her eyes and leaned her head against the back of the sofa. “As you can imagine, the atomic bomb and the role Oak Ridgers played in its creation was the talk of the town for weeks.”

I longed to ask her all sorts of questions—the same ones I’d asked Georgeanne earlier—but I didn’t want to spoil things.

Aunt Mae seemed willing enough to share general information about the history of Oak Ridge and her experiences, so I didn’t want to push.

Hopefully she’d see that talking about the past wasn’t as unpleasant as she believed.

I set the newspapers aside with a plan to read them later that night after I turned in. Beneath lay a hodgepodge of items. A bound security manual. Ticket stubs to a movie theater. A booklet that once held ration stamps. A man’s yellowed handkerchief.

At the very bottom lay two identification badges.

I picked up the one that had a black-and-white photograph of a younger Aunt Mae and held it where we both could see it. A five-digit number was printed beneath her picture, followed by Oak Ridge Resident.

She didn’t lean forward as she’d done before but fixed her gaze on the badge. “We couldn’t go anywhere on the Reservation without that.”

“The Reservation?”

“That’s what everyone called Oak Ridge back then.

Sometimes people used its code name, Site X, or Townsite.

Oak Ridge as a city didn’t exist on any map.

It sprang up out of the ground nearly overnight after General Groves decided this was the location where he wanted to build the plants to enrich the uranium.

It’s said that by the end of the war there were over seventy-five thousand people living and working on the Reservation, yet the world didn’t know we were here until the bomb was dropped on Japan. ”

“It truly was a secret city,” I said.

She nodded but didn’t elaborate.

I removed the second badge. A pretty blonde woman looked into the camera, her lips lifted in a slight smile. “Who is this?” I handed it to her.

Aunt Mae squinted at the badge, then gasped. “I’d forgotten this was inside that box.” She stared at the photograph, clearly distressed by the image.

My question went unanswered. Without knowing who the woman was, I couldn’t begin to guess why seeing her pleasant face upset my aunt. It seemed best to end this trip down memory lane.

I gently took the badge out of her grasp. “We can put these things away now, Aunt Mae.”

She let me take it from her, but her face had drained of color. “I knew it was a mistake to revisit the past,” she whispered, shaking her head. “I’m sorry, Laurel. This is all a big mistake.”

Without waiting for a reply, she stood and hurried down the hall. Peggy trotted after her. The door to her bedroom clicked shut a moment later. Muffled sobs followed.

I huffed out a breath, loaded with frustration and regret. Even though it had been her idea to look through the contents of the box, I felt guilty. Curious, I studied the picture of the blonde woman, then turned the badge over and found printed information.

Bearer: Sylvia Jean Galloway.

I’d never heard the name before. It listed her height, weight, hair and eye color. It also bore her signature and that of an Identification Officer.

Her hair was styled in the fashion many young women wore in the 1940s, with a large roll of hair in the center of her head and bouncy waves of golden locks to her shoulders. Her rounded cheeks and bright eyes gave the appearance of innocence.

“Who are you?” I wondered aloud. “And why did seeing your picture hurt Aunt Mae?”

The answers to those questions may never come.

I picked up Aunt Mae’s badge. “Maebelle Ann Willett.” It too gave her physical description. When I turned it over again, twenty-something-year-old Aunt Mae looked at me. She was young, pretty, full of dreams, I suspected.

I thought back to the day before I left for Tennessee. I’d gone to my parents’ house for dinner, hoping for some inside information on Aunt Mae. Dad said his sister was beyond excited to leave Kentucky on what she’d called a grand adventure.

“Mae was always curious about the world,” he’d said. “Always had her head in a book she’d borrowed from her teachers. She’d wanted to go to college and do something with her life, but she was different after the war.”

“How so?” I’d asked.

“It was as though the light in her had been snuffed out. She’d lost her zest for life.

Whether that was due to the war or the atomic bomb, I couldn’t say.

She stayed in Oak Ridge and worked at K-25 until it shut down in 1964.

Funny thing, though. Mae never wanted to talk about her job or anything to do with Oak Ridge’s big secret. ”

I repacked the box, put the lid on it, and carried it to my room.

Reading through the newspapers tonight, however, no longer appealed.

Clearly Aunt Mae’s memories of life in Oak Ridge during the war held an unpleasantness she had no desire to revisit.

Research for my dissertation wasn’t important enough to cause distress to my aging aunt.

As I readied for bed, I came to a conclusion.

I’d simply need to find other Oak Ridge residents like Georgeanne willing to share their stories and leave dear Aunt Mae’s in the past.