Elinor P. Hempelmann

Elinor Pulitzer Hempelmann (1922-2012) was a secretary at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project and wife of Health Group Director Louis Hempelmann. She was the granddaughter of Joseph Pulitzer, a media mogul and creator of the Pulitzer Prize. She and her husband were both born and raised in St. Louis. They married in June 1943, a few months after her husband had started working on the Manhattan Project. After their wedding, she joined him in Los Alamos. While there, she befriended Kitty Oppenheimer, wife of J. Robert Oppenheimer. The two couples remained friends for life. Many of the wives as Los Alamos worked part-time on the project; Hempelmann worked as a secretary, having trained for that before the war. She passed away in 2012, while at the house near Santa Fe that the couple had bought after the war.