Madonna Elaine Thennes was in born 1925. When she had just graduated from high school in Pocahontas, Arkansas, in 1943, her father told her the military had good-paying jobs for civilians in a new place in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. She applied, was hired, and worked in the “typing pool” of women who typed up documents for the Manhattan Project. Everything she was given to type was in a secret code and didn’t know or understand the things that she typed every day. She said that they were all closely monitored by military staff, and at the end of each workday, a military worker would come by and get all the discarded papers out of the trashcans and destroy them. She was single, and shared a small room at the Oak Ridge site with other young women who also worked there. After the war, she saved up money from her earnings to put herself through nursing school. She later married (her married surname was Hoelscher). Madonna was a registered nurse her whole career and died in 2015 at the age of 90.
National Museum of Nuclear Science & History
