The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Rhodes

At that point Oppenheimer spoke up and said “if you go on up the canyon you come out on top of the mesa and there’s a boys’ school there which might be a usable site.” Oppenheimer proposed the boys’ school site, grouses Dudley, “as though it was a brand new idea.” Dudley had already scouted the mesa twice, rejecting it because it failed to meet Groves’ criteria. But a mesa is an inverted bowl, its perimeter similarly fencible. And the first requirement was to make the longhairs happy. “As I . . . knew the roads (or trails),” Dudley says sardonically, “ . . . we drove directly there.”1747 “The school was called Los Alamos,” the daughter of its founder writes, “after the deep canyon which bordered the mesa to the south and which was groved with cottonwood trees along the sandy trickle of its stream.”1748 Ashley Pond, the founder, had been a sickly boarding-school boy sent West for his health, like Oppenheimer, who returned to New Mexico in later adulthood when his father died and left him with independent means. He opened the Los Alamos Ranch School on the 7,200-foot mesa in 1917. It was organized to invigorate pale scions, as Pond had been invigorated: boys slept on unheated porches of a chinked-log dormitory and wore shorts in winter snow; each was assigned a horse to ride and groom.