They put up temporarily at the King’s Crown Hotel, opposite Columbia University, where Szilard was also living. George Pegram, the tall, soft-spoken Virginian who was chairman of the physics department and dean of graduate studies at Columbia, had met the Fermis as they debarked the Franconia; now in turn they waited at dockside to meet Bohr. The American theoretician John Archibald Wheeler, then twenty-nine years old, who had worked with Bohr in Copenhagen in the mid-1930s and would be working with him again at Princeton, joined them on the crowded West 57th Street pier.
