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There still seemed to be a delay and Wilson went to Los Alamos to find out what was holding things up. When he got there, he found that the construction company was working very hard and had finished the theater, and a few other buildings that they understood, but they hadn’t gotten instructions clear on how to build a laboratory—how many pipes for gas, how much for water. So Wilson simply stood around and decided, then and there, how much water, how much gas, and so on, and told them to start building the laboratories.
When he came back to us, we were all ready to go and we were getting impatient. So they all got together and decided we’d go out there anyway even though it wasn’t ready.
We were recruited, by the way by Oppenheimer and other people, and he was very patient. He paid attention to everybody’s problems. He worried about my wife, who had TB, and whether there would be a hospital out there, and everything. It was the first time I met him in such a personal way; he was a wonderful man.
We were told to be very careful—not to buy our train ticket in Princeton, for example, because Princeton was a very small station, and if everybody bought train tickets to Albuquerque, New Mexico, in Princeton, there would be some suspicions that something was up. And so everybody bought their tickets somewhere else, except me, because I figured if everybody bought their tickets somewhere else.
So when I went to the train station and said, “I want to go to Albuquerque, New Mexico,” the man says, “Oh, so all this stuff is for you!” We had been shipping out crates full of counters for weeks and expecting that they didn’t notice the address was Albuquerque. So at least I explained why it was that we were shipping all those crates; I was going out to Albuquerque.
Well, when we arrived, the houses and dormitories and things like that were not ready. In fact, even the laboratories weren’t quite ready. We were pushing them by coming down ahead of time. So they just went crazy and rented ranch houses all around the neighborhood. We stayed at first in a ranch house and would drive in in the morning. The first morning I drove in was tremendously impressive. The beauty of the scenery, for a person from the East who didn’t travel much, was sensational. There are the great cliffs that you’ve probably seen in pictures. You’d come up from below and be very surprised to see this high mesa. The most impressive thing to me was that, as I was going up, I said that maybe there had been Indians living here, and the guy who was driving stopped the car and walked around the corner and pointed out some Indian caves that you could inspect. It was very exciting.
When I got to the site the first time, I saw there was a technical area that was supposed to have a fence around it ultimately but it was still open. Then there was supposed to be a town, and then a big fence further out, around the town. But they were still building, and my friend Paul Olum, who was my assistant, was standing at the gate with a clipboard, checking the trucks coming in and out and telling them which way to go to deliver the materials in different places.
When I went into the laboratory, I would meet men I had heard of by seeing their papers in the Physical Review and so on. I had never met them before. “This is John Williams,” they’d say. Then a guy stands up from a desk that is covered with blueprints, his sleeves all rolled up, and he’s calling out the windows, ordering trucks and things going in different directions with building material. In other words, the experimental physicists had nothing to do until their buildings and apparatus were ready, so they just built the buildings—or assisted in building the buildings.
The theoretical physicists, on the other hand, could start working right away so it was decided that they wouldn’t live in the ranch houses, but would live up at the site. We started working immediately. There were no blackboards except for one on wheels, and we’d roll it around and Robert Serber would explain to us all the things that they’d thought of in Berkeley about the atomic bomb, and nuclear physics, and all these things. I didn’t know very much about it; I had been doing other kinds of things. So I had to do an awful lot of work.
Every day I would study and read, study and read. It was a very hectic time. But I had some luck. All the big shots except for Hans Bethe happened to be away at the time, and what Bethe needed was someone to talk to, to push his ideas against. Well, he comes in to this little squirt in an office and starts to argue, explaining his idea. I say “No, no, you’re crazy. It’ll go like this.” And he says, “Just a moment,” and explains how he’s not crazy, I’m crazy. And we keep on going like this. You see, when I hear about physics, I just think about physics, and I don’t know who I’m talking to, so I say dopey things like “no, no, you’re wrong,” or “you’re crazy.” But it turned out that’s exactly what he needed. I got a notch up on account of that, and I ended up as a group leader under Bethe with four guys under me.
Well, when I was first there, as I said, the dormitories weren’t ready. But the theoretical physicists had to stay up there anyway. The first place they put us was in an old school building—a boys’ school that had been there previously. I lived in a thing called the Mechanics’ Lodge. We were all jammed in there in bunk beds, and it wasn’t organized very well because Bob Christy and his wife had to go to the bathroom through our bedroom. So that was very uncomfortable.
At last the dormitory was built. I went down to the place where rooms were assigned, and they said, you can pick your room now. You know what I did? I looked to see where the girls’ dormitory was, and then I picked a room that looked right across—though later I discovered a big tree was growing right in front of the window of that room.
They told me there would be two people in a room, but that would only be temporary. Every two rooms would share a bathroom, and there would be double-decker bunks in each room. But I didn’t want two people in the room.
The night I got there, nobody else was there, and I decided to try to keep my room to myself. My wife was sick with TB in Albuquerque, but I had some boxes of stuff of hers. So I took out a little nightgown, opened the top bed, and threw the nightgown carelessly on it. I took out some slippers, and I threw some powder on the floor in the bathroom. I just made it look like somebody else was there. So, what happened? Well, it’s supposed to be a men’s dormitory see? So I came home that night, and my pajamas are folded nicely and put under the pillow at the bottom, and my slippers put nicely at the bottom of the bed. The lady’s nightgown is nicely folded under the pillow, the bed is all fixed up and made, and the slippers are put down nicely. The powder is cleaned from the bathroom and nobody is sleeping in the upper bed.
Next night, the same thing. When I wake up, I rumple up the top bed, I throw the nightgown on it sloppily and scatter the powder in the bathroom and so on. I went on like this for four nights until everybody was settled and there was no more danger that they would put a second person in the room. Each night, everything was set out very neatly even though it was a men’s dormitory.
I didn’t know it then, but this little ruse got me involved in politics. There were all kinds of factions there, of course—the housewives’ faction, the mechanics’ faction, the technical peoples’ faction, and so on. Well, the bachelors and bachelor girls who lived in the dormitory felt they had to have a faction too, because a new rule had been promulgated: No Women in the Men’s Dorm. Well, this is absolutely ridiculous! After all, we are grown people! What kind of nonsense is this? We had to have political action. So we debated this stuff, and I was elected to represent the dormitory people in the town council.