National Museum of Nuclear Science & History
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.
Gus Essig began working on the Manhattan Project in May, 1946 in Dayton, Ohio. Essig was selected to work in the highly classified initiator program and spent several months at Los Alamos learning how to design and construct initiators.
