Book about workers who kept Los Alamos lab running details their stories, health concerns and pride
Employees have health concerns, resentment, but pride in role they played
The stories of the Manhattan Project scientists who designed the first atomic bombs at the secret city on the hill during World War II — men such as J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe and Klaus Fuchs — have been told in dozens of books.
But the roles of the men and women, many from Northern New Mexico, who built the laboratory, kept it running, cleaned up the accidents and often risked their own
lives — the janitors, machinists, radiological technicians, engineers, heavy equipment operators and
secretaries — are largely unknown, outside their own families.
Men like Ray Casias, a water specialist who worked at the lab for more than 30 years and said he once fell into a vat of contaminated water up to his waist. “Don’t worry about it,” supervisors told him.
“Safety was very, very poor, I’ll tell you that much,” said Casias, who is 89 and in poor health. “All the ones working with me, they’re all dead.”
Casias is one of 150 Los Alamos workers interviewed by Peter Malmgren for an oral history project launched by the El Rio Arriba Environmental Health Association at Northern New Mexico College in 2000.
Now Casias’ story, along with those of more than 30 others, also is told in a recently published book by Malmgren and writer and editor
Kay Matthews, titled Los Alamos Revisited: A Workers’ History.
Malmgren said he approached the original project as kind of a salvage mission — to talk to people, many from a dying generation, to get an account of their lives and fill a hole in New Mexico history.
Over five years, he scoured Northern New Mexico, interviewing the veterans, mostly in their homes, about their jobs and how they felt about them.
He found most to still have a strong sense of patriotism and pride in their work.
Not many of the workers had a good education, but coming from rural communities, they had a “tremendous number of mechanical skills and were able to solve problems for the Ph.Ds and engineers who would scribble the design [of what they wanted] on a workbench,” Malmgren said.
“Sometimes they even had to design the tools [to do the job].”
But a recurring theme was that “they got no credit because they didn’t have the credentials.”
Malmgren, who has lived in Chimayó for decades, was warned that these men and women would not open up or be willing to talk about their jobs at the high-security lab because they had been pledged to secrecy.
When he attended a meeting of former employees seeking compensation for illnesses related to their work, however, Malmgren found a gold mine of stories.
People wanted to share feelings bottled up for years and liked the attention, Malmgren said. And they referred him to other former lab workers living in Northern New Mexico.
The themes that emerged from these interviews were continued patriotism (many of the workers were war veterans), pride in the work but also lingering resentment.
Many felt Hispanic people had been discriminated against in employment. Of the first 500 security service employees hired in the post-war period, only four were Hispanic.
Many also expressed concern for their own and others’ health and safety.
At the end of each interview, Malmgren always asked the person if he or she would choose the same path if given a chance to live their life over again.
Half of them said working at the lab was the best thing that ever happened to their families; the other half told him they would never go near it because their health was more important than a paycheck.
During the war, however, jobs were scarce everywhere, especially in the Española Valley, and many people were grateful for the work.
Malmgren quotes Josefita Velarde, then 92, about whether people were hesitant to work at the lab.
She told him, “Heck no. … We knew all about danger. … Our men risked their lives every day in the mines. … No, they were just glad to have a job where they could go home every night.”
A 54-year-old radiological technician who reflected on his work at the lab said, “I’ve been in every building in the laboratory and been exposed to all sorts of things. It’s been a good job and provided well for my family, but I know it is going to kill me. I can accept that knowledge. I knew the risks going in and I made my choices.”
Most remained loyal to the lab, no matter how things turned out for them.
Malmgren devoted a whole chapter to Gene Westerhold, a pipefitter who once volunteered to troubleshoot a radiological accident that killed a co-worker and could have blown up the lab. Westerhold said that on at least three occasions, he received a lifetime dosage of radiation.
But when he retired in 1998 and asked for his medical records, he got only one page.
“One sheet of lies, that was his payoff for 44 years of work,” Malmgren said.
The lure of the lab persists in the valley today, Malmgren said. “If it were to shut down, my community would dry up and blow away. It’s still a dominant force in our lives.”
The transcriptions of his interviews are now stored at the state Records Center and Archives, but “nobody goes to look at them,” Malmgren said.
He organized some readings at the Lensic Performing Arts Center, and there was an attempt to produce a play based on the stories, but that didn’t materialize.
Then Malmgren decided to collect some of the best stories for a book and got Matthews to help him write and edit it.
He said he is about to buy a machine to transfer the cassettes to CDs, and has considered producing an ebook or a webpage.
Malmgren, who graduated from Brandeis University and studied at both University College, London and the New School in New York City, traveled west in 1969-70 in a refurbished school bus, playing music, and came to rest in Chimayó in 1971, where he has since made his living as a cabinet maker.