Celia Szapka Klemski

Celia Szapka Klemski was featured in Denise Kiernan’s “The Girls of Atomic City.” She grew up in a small coal-mining town in Pennsylvania. She worked as a secretary in Washington, DC, before she was transferred to New York City to work on the Manhattan Project. There she enjoyed sightseeing and touring the skyscrapers. Eventually she was transferred to Oak Ridge, where she settled down and married another Manhattan Project worker. She remembers receiving dictation from General Leslie Groves, who told her to call him “GG,” and the ever-present mud in Oak Ridge ruining her nicest pair of shoes.