Black Hole gone dark
In Los Alamos, unique store once stood as an ex-lab worker’s testament to his anti-nuclear beliefs; now it’s for sale as his daughter hopes for its second act
TLOS ALAMOS he Black Hole is now an empty hole.
The once-packed surplus store, which offered patrons the chance to purchase recycled, nonradioactive items discarded or sold by Los Alamos National Laboratory, is a dark and vacant shell on Arkansas Avenue nearly a decade after its founder’s death.
All a visitor could see on a recent weekday visit were two empty glass display cases, a few signs warning visitors away, a couple of cardboard boxes full of paper files and — perhaps incongruously — an oil painting of a blackand-white cow surrounded by sunflowers.
And maybe, if you looked long enough and wanted to believe in such things, there was the ghost of Ed Grothus.
Grothus, who worked at the lab as a machinist and technician for 20 years, later became the facility’s fiercest local critic — transforming to an anti-war, anti-nuke activist in the late 1960s.
Prompted by his beliefs, he converted an old Piggly Wiggly grocery store into the Black Hole, a repository of electronic and atomic gadgetry, recycled hardware pieces and assorted knickknacks that would have made good stocking stuffers for anyone planning a career in nuclear physics or practical joking.
He also bought an old, vacant A-frame church that sat on a small slope next door and transformed it into the First Church of High Technology. He then appointed himself minister, and later cardinal, of the site. Late in his life, he tried to elevate himself to the position of pope and claimed to have earned 154 votes supporting his quest.
“But they didn’t recognize me in Rome,” he said at the time.
He called his workplace the Black Hole because “everything goes in and nothing comes out.” It’s all gone out now. After Grothus died in 2009, his family kept the business going for another three years before shuttering it and holding a closing sale to empty out the place. Even then, two
60-foot trailers that once housed Grothus’ artifacts and two granite obelisks (which he dubbed “doomsday stones” and were once on display) were left behind, as were a huge water tank that sits on its side and a handful of other objects and items inside the old store.
All those remnants have to go, too — and soon. Grothus’ daughter, Barbara Grothus, has been spending the past weeks working to clear out what is left to meet county code mandates. In a recent court appearance over the issue, she told Los Alamos Municipal Court Judge Alan Kirk that she recently tore down the church at a cost of $100,000 as part of that requirement.
She has until a scheduled court date of Aug. 13 to get the stuff off the property. If she complies, Los Alamos County Building Safety Manager Michael Arellano said, “We will dismiss the case or go before the judge and say she complied.”
While a couple of workers from an Albuquerque towing company looked over the two trailers on a recent morning to figure out how best to haul them away, Barbara Grothus wondered about not only the fate of the property but her dad’s legacy.
In the midst of the current “Atomic Summer” of events and discussions about the atomic bomb and just two years away from the 75th anniversary of the test detonation of the bomb in Southern New Mexico, she fears her father’s voice and all it stood for in Los Alamos will go the way of the Black Hole.
“Now we have a person [President Donald Trump] who is tweeting threats to people, Iran, when he wakes up,” she said. “It perpetrates this idea that we would just nuke people. My father used to say, ‘You can spend all this money to build this thing [the bomb] and then you can’t use it.’ “But someone could use it.” She said the reality of Los Alamos National Laboratory depresses her and complained that the lab’s promotion of its mission and history leaves little room in the community for alternative voices like her father’s.
At best, she wants someone to reclaim the old Black Hole and rebuild her dad’s business and vision. Or, barring that, she’d like to see city officials or artists work together to create a Prada Marfa-like installation based on the history of the Black Hole. Prada Marfa is a biodegradable art installation located about 30 minutes from the Texas town of Marfa that recreates a one-room Prada store with fake merchandise.
The Black Hole was a tourist destination, Barbara Grothus said. It could be again.
“Besides serving its ultimate purpose of recycling the technology of the lab, it was my father’s place to hold a forum on his ideas,” she said. “People came from all over the world, not just because it was this place, but because he had a name. They knew what he stood for.”
The man and his work
Ed Grothus was born in Davenport, Iowa, on June 28, 1923, the eldest of eight children. After studying to be a machinist at a local college, he got a job at Rock Island Arsenal in Illinois, where he worked on rifles and machine guns. He served in the United States Merchant Marine and worked on cruise ships. Eventually, he settled in New Mexico, where he accepted a job as a machinist at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Grothus was a pack rat and he kept reams of paperwork related to his past, including a letter detailing a job offer from the lab dated April 18, 1949, offering him $1.70 an hour.
He took the job, eventually moving up the ranks to become a technician. He stayed there 20 years, marrying Margaret Jane Turnquist, who he met at a bridge club gathering. Together, they had five children.
By some accounts, he began worrying about his kids’ future in the angstridden late 1960s, so he retired from the lab and got to work earning a reputation as an anti-war activist and civil rights advocate. To some, he was a crackpot. His daughter recalls him opening the Black Hole in the mid- to late 1970s, though a National Public Radio piece from 2008 cites the date as 1980. Tourists who came to Los Alamos to visit its museums or take in its history would often be pointed toward Grothus’ store, where he would happily take them on a tour.
The labyrinthine place seemed to have just about everything in it but a Minotaur. You could come across old stoves, computer consoles, gutted torpedoes and missiles, clamps, meters, Geiger counters that didn’t count … and a can of organic plutonium (a gag item, but Grothus claimed the FBI didn’t think so and paid a visit to the Black Hole to chat him up about it).
His daughter said Grothus made a profit in the business, and he invested in real estate on the side. The only debt he had when he died, she said, was for the cost of having the two obelisks made in China: $160,000.
Every summer, on the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he would display a huge banner that read: “We apologize for the nuclear bomb.”
“He tried to maintain a sense of humor while adopting a moral code that was commensurate with his cardinal costume,” Barbara Grothus said. “And of course, that was a good way to get attention.”
In 2007, New Mexico’s leaders, perhaps seeing the arts-and-entertainment appeal of Grothus’ work, awarded him with one of its Governor’s Awards for Excellence in the Arts.
At that time he praised the lab’s work in medical research but told The New Mexican, “It’s been a bad business. They should leave the uranium in the ground.”
Less than 18 months later, in February 2009, Grothus died of cancer at 85.
Black Hole’s demise
The Black Hole began dying its slow death almost immediately after Grothus’ demise. Maybe all those tourists had come to the Black Hole not to see the place, but the man behind it.
Despite her concerns that her father’s contribution and anti-war sentiments will be slowly forgotten, remnants of the Black Hole’s influence remain. Some pieces have found their way into the hands of artists and museum curators who might use them in exhibitions. The Los Alamos History Museum also nabbed some items — including a gamma exposure meter — for possible use in a future exhibition, museum library Don Cavness said. And the museum wants the iconic Black Hole sign, which Barbara Grothus still owns, so it can be displayed, Cavness said.
The Bradbury Science Museum got some Manhattan Project-era furniture from the Black Hole as well, spokesman David Moore said by email. Whether Ed Grothus would have approved of the museum’s plans for that material — it could be used in the development of Manhattan Project National Historic Park — is another matter.
Spanish photojournalist and documentary filmmaker Janire Najera recently compiled a photo book about Grothus called Atomic Ed that she is currently trying to finance publishing for through a Kickstarter campaign.
Najera, who first visited the Black Hole in 2012 as it neared its closing date, said in an email Thursday that though she never met Grothus, he was “able to imagine a different world was possible. … I felt his cause deserved a legacy on paper to remind us all of his activism in a time where technology has brought us together but also distracted us from standing up for a better and safer world.”
That’s not enough for Barbara Grothus. She thinks Los Alamos needs to be reminded of her father’s influence.
“People here could benefit from having a space and a voice like his in a place like this,” she said.
She just listed the Black Hole for sale. At least one prospective buyer is coming to look at the propertythis week, she said. Despite her dreams of what the place could be, she understands the reality of the real estate business.
“It would make a good grocery store,” she said.