Sanford McDonnell was a mechanical engineer with the Special Engineering Detachment at Los Alamos from April 1944 to April 1946. McDonnell was born on October 12, 1922 in Little Rock, Arkansas and entered Princeton University in 1940. In March 1943, he joined the U.S. Army and received his B.A. in Economics from Princeton “in absentia” after getting six months of engineering in the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP). McDonnell worked initially in a Los Alamos lab developing a vacuum casting process for Uranium 238. He later was a member of the flight test equipment section at Kirtland Field in Albuquerque.
After the war he was discharged from the Army in April 1946 and entered the University of Colorado during the summer of 1946. He received a B.S. in Engineering from Colorado in August 1948 and went to work in St. Louis for his uncle, James S. McDonnell, the Chairman of McDonnell Aircraft Corp, which became McDonnell Douglas in 1967. McDonnell became Chairman & CEO when his uncle died in 1980. He later became national president of the Boy Scouts of America from 1984 to 1986. In 1988, he retired from McDonnell Douglas.
McDonnell wrote this about his experience:
“The military security was so well kept that most of us G.I’s didn’t know what we were working on until the first bomb was set off at Alamogordo. I remember that in the Metallurgy Lab where I worked initially on U-238 casting, there were other G.I.s as well as civilians and military officers working on U-235. At the end of the work day I remember washing my hands until I no longer got a reading on the Geiger Counter, but the men working on U-235 often failed to get the contamination off their hands by repeatedly washing them. They would often give up and leave the building with their hands still getting significant readings. The sand underneath the bomb at Alamogordo was turned to glass and of course was highly contaminated. Souvenir hunters got pieces of that glass and some pieces were made into jewelry and sold to people to wear before the authorities put a stop to it. When we left the Manhattan Project, every G.I. received a letter from Robert Oppenheimer expressing his appreciation for our part on the project.”
McDonnell passed away on March 19, 2012. His obituary from the Atomic Heritage Foundation can be found here.