Herbert Pomerance was a research associate at the Chicago Met Lab during the Manhattan Project. Pomerance was transferred to Clinton Laboratories in Oak Ridge, TN on September 1, 1943. He was married to Eleanor Hauk, a technician and draftswoman at Oak Ridge.
In a 1976 interview with Charles Johnson for the Center for Oak Ridge Oral History website, Pomerance recalled being transferred from the Met Lab to Oak Ridge: “I came to Oak Ridge with one or two suitcases and a cello.” He explained that the reason for his transfer was probably “because there was a tendency to take the less attached people and send them to Oak Ridge.” In terms of attachment, he pointed to his lack of family, marriage, and established home in Chicago.
Pomerance worked at the Oak Ridge’s X-10 plant, which was the location of the graphite reactor. He worked about forty-eight to fifty-four hours per week. Pomerance described the X-10 plant’s culture as “more like a university research place” than the production-based laboratories.
After World War II, Pomerance continued to live and work in Oak Ridge. He continued to work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) into the late 1970s. In 1976, he published a report for Information Division entitled, “A Short Guide to SDI Profiling at ORNL,” which outlined how the use and add to the ORNL databases and search systems. It should be noted that SDI stands for Selective Dissemination of Information.
If you are interested learning more about Herbert Pomerance, listen to or read the transcript of his oral history, which you can find here.