Beatrice (Freeman) Sheinberg was a member of the Women’s Auxillary Corps (WAC) and worked at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. She was the wife of Haskell Sheinberg, a member of the Special Engineer Detachment at Los Alamos.
Beatrice Freeman was born in New Jersey. To join the WACs, Beatrice trained in Fort Oglethorpe in Georgia. In his interview for the Voices of the Manhattan Project website, Haskell said that during training “they tested the women psychologically in every way they could to see if they could take an isolated life and all these sorts of things.” Beatrice was sent to Los Alamos in October of 1943 with the second detachment of WACs.
At Los Alamos, Beatrice first worked in the ceramic section, where she made magnesium and other crucibles for casting uranium or plutonium in. Beatrice and the sergeant of the WACs were the only two technicians in her group.
After working in ceramics, she moved to work in the enriched uranium foundry. At the foundry, her responsibilities included cleaning and weighing S-cases, machine parts, and chips. Beatrice also performed record keeping of her work, which was important, as Haskell noted, because “everything had to be accountable to a gram, or perhaps a tenth of a gram.”
For her work, J. Robert Oppenheimer presented Beatrice with a letter of commendation. He lauded Beatrice for her work with refractory material, recordkeeping and operations with “certain materials” (also known as uranium or plutonium).
Later, Beatrice joined a business group. Her duties included accounting and ordering and receiving materials.
In 1946, she was discharged from the WACs and returned to her home in New Jersey. She reunited with Haskell in New York, and the two married in October 1947. They had two sons.
Beatrice (Freeman) Sheinberg passed away in 2000 in Santa Fe, New Mexico.