Oral Histories

The VanWycks, Fred (“Van”) and Diana (“Di”), moved to Richland (near Hanford) in 1944 from Charleston, West Virginia, where Van worked at DuPont’s Belle Plant as a technician. At Hanford, Van was a plant operator, while Di raised their sons and volunteered actively in the community. In this era, Richland was a raw, new, wind-blown, almost treeless town. The VanWycks watched it change to a pretty city of more than 30,000, with shade trees in abundance and grass that halted the sand storms of the 1940s. Richland had been a government-owned town, and remained so until 1957 when the Atomic Energy Commission allowed private ownership of residences.

Kay Manley’s husband was personally called by Leo Szilard and asked to move from the Met Lab at Chicago to Los Alamos. She herself worked on calculations at Los Alamos, although she left after six months to focus on raising her children. She talks about how Pearl Harbor galvanized the nation and the responses she and her husband received after the war from soldiers who would have been involved in the invasion of Japan if the atomic bombs had not been dropped.

Becky Diven began her work for the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos in 1944, where she developed a quartz fiber microbalance to weigh extremely small amounts of plutonium. Diven discusses what it was like for women working at the Manhattan Project and talks about workers’ relations with the Pueblos, most of whom worked as maids or janitors.