109 East Palace Quotes

“One popular story had it that Los Alamos was a wartime plant that made windshield wipers for submarines. Others insisted that workers were actually assembling submarines in a factory. This theory persisted even though there was no deep water for hundreds of miles around: against all reason, people actually believed the army had cut a secret passage to float the subs down the Rio Grande.”
― Jennet Conant, 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos

“For the first few weeks in Santa Fe, Oppenheimer and his key staff worked out of the office at 109 East Palace Avenue in the early mornings and made daily trips up to Los Alamos to inspect the progress of the construction. "The laboratories at the site were in a sketchy state, but that did not deter the workers," Dorothy wrote of those hectic early days. "In the morning buses, consisting of station wagons, sedans, or trucks, would leave 109 and pick up the men at the ranches and take them up the Hill. Occasionally, a driver would forget to stop at one or another of the ranches and the stranded and frustrated scientists would call in a white heat.”
― Jennet Conant, 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos

“In the Hindu scripture, in the Bhagavad Gita, it says, “Man is a creature whose substance is faith. What his faith is, he is.”
― Jennet Conant, 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos

“Greenglass was arrested in June 1950, six months after Fuchs, and received a thirty-year sentence. His case might only have been a footnote had it not blown the lid off the far greater treachery of the Rosenbergs and triggered the events that would lead to the most infamous espionage trial of the century. The Rosenbergs were executed in 1953.”
― Jennet Conant, 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos

“Groves’ refusal to allow key project members to travel by air meant that the British had to come by train, and the Super Chief, which would be bringing them west after they changed trains in Chicago, was so chronically late that when it actually pulled into Lamy on time one afternoon no one was surprised to discover it was the previous day’s train.”
― Jennet Conant, 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos

“probably the most enduring rumor about Los Alamos, no doubt prompted by Dorothy’s scavenging scarce baby clothes and cribs for new mothers on the Hill, was that it was a home for pregnant WACs.”
― Jennet Conant, 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos

“her sisters die and then falling under the same shadow”
― Jennet Conant, 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos