Inside Box 1663, by Eleanor Jette

On a recent trip into New Mexico’s Jemez Mountains, we visited Los Alamos, an almost nonexistent spot on the map until the Army commandeered the valley in 1943 for work on the Atomic Bomb. In Inside Box 1663, published in 1977 by the Los Alamos Historical Society, the story of life in the compound is  vividly recalled by Eleanor Jette, wife of a scientist and mother of a nine-year-old boy. The place was ill-suited for a rapidly-expanding workforce. Begun on the site of a boys’ school, the original dormitories and Bathtub Row, housing for school personnel, quickly overflowed into surrounding fields. Living space, allotted by status in the bomb-building effort and family size, was seldom adequate. 

Water, in limited supply to begin with, was soon a dire situation – springs that fed the source creek were clogged and during the dry months, dwindled. Constant exhortations to conserve water were unequal to the severe disconnect between population and supply. Eleanor Jette, on arrival appalled by housing conditions, was not a complainer but a doer, and soon employed her wit and native intelligence to the problems, battling frequently with Army officers whose hands were tied by budget constraints. She and a few women friends quickly formed a group that helped newcomers adapt, hounded the decision-makers, and found ways to blow off steam. 

This human’s-eye-view of the cloistered world of Trinity, the Los Alamos section of the Manhattan Project, is a useful addition to the biographies of famous men (Robert Oppenheimer, Leslie Groves, etc.) whose experiences have gained wider recognition. Without the pressure of women like Eleanor, it’s possible Los Alamos itself may have burned to the ground, its occupants poisoned by polluted water and alternately frozen in hard winters and roasted in hot summers (while the Army directive to stoke furnaces till May 15th regardless of conditions, rendered dormitories uninhabitable). 

She has fun with the secrecy – they were not allowed to tell anyone where they were going nor why. Her New Mexico drivers license identifies her as Number 44, her residential address Special List B, Santa Fe. “I had joined the secret society whose membership was closely guarded. Thus, I later became Number 9 for income tax purposes, and when the laundry service was resuscitated, I was Number 464. We were numbered for everything except our ration books, and the numbers were never the same. Our official address was Box 1663, Santa Fe.” 

As Robert Oppenheimer is in the headlines again in a new film, it’s worth considering the lives of those who toiled to make existence tolerable alongside the bomb-builders.