During the golden Indian summer of 1948, I was an eleven-year-old aspiring journalist in Shell Lake, Wisconsin. My parents owned the local weekly newspaper, the Washburn County Register. I was the sports editor, printer’s devil, and errand runner. We had received an unending barrage of press releases from the local Democratic party proclaiming that President Truman would be in Spooner, whistle-stopping on his campaign across the Midwest. Mv father, a staunch Republican, refused to print such rubbish, claiming that he would not allow his paper to provide political propaganda for a discredited administration. Somehow my mother and I persuaded him that the President’s visit in a town only six miles away was a genuine news event. He insisted on rewriting the press releases, but in the end he ran the story on the front page under big headlines. Then, to our surprise, Dad announced that we would cover the President’s speech. He had been convinced by our argument that history should prevail over partisan politics.
As we drove north to Spooner in our ancient Model A Ford (the weekly newspaper business was not exactly lucrative), my father regaled us with his familiar repertoire of Truman insults, from “To err is Truman” to “bankrupt haberdasher.” In those more casual times press credentials were nonexistent, but fortunately the station agent recognized us and directed us to a choice spot right along the railroad tracks. The train of course was late. To an impatient rookie reporter the delay seemed like hours, but it may have been only forty-five minutes. As we waited, the crowd grew steadily larger. The party faithful later estimated it at ten thousand people; my father saw fewer than twenty-five hundred.
At last the great moment arrived, the high school band played “Hail to the Chief,” and the President appeared at the back of the train, looking remarkably similar to his image in the Movie Tone newsreels. I couldn’t see over the heads of the adults who pushed forward, so to my mother’s consternation I climbed up a nearby coal pile for a better view. The speech was short and incisive: Truman blasted the do-nothing Republican Congress and the selfish Wall Street capitalists and urged us to turn these rascals out. His constituents applauded loudly and exhorted him to “Give ‘em hell, Harry.” After one final swipe at those rich robber barons and their Republican cohorts, the President introduced his daughter, Margaret, and the “Boss,” his wife, Bess. The train was ready to head north for Superior when Truman pulled a note out of his pocket, glanced at it, and then raised his hand to quiet the crowd. In his Missouri twang he thanked everyone for coming and said he was astonished that so many people had turned out. “I would particularly like to thank the Sheas, who featured my stop here in the Shell Lake Register. Would they please step up here so that the Truman family can thank them personally?”
Who cared if he didn’t get the name of our paper right? My parents waved me down from the coal pile, I tried frantically to brush off the black dust, and we boarded the train. Father explained that the story was my idea. “Well, I have two Shea votes, young man, but you’ll have to wait a few years,” Truman said. “I think I can carry Wisconsin with your help.” He shook my hand, Bess hugged me, and I think Margaret may have kissed me on the cheek. The crowd cheered (not really, but memory is not an exact science). Mother was ecstatic, although she worried that the President might have gotten coal dust on his hands.
An aide gave Mom a small package, we stepped down off the platform, and the train thundered out of Spooner on the most successful of all whistle-stop campaigns. The package contained an autographed Truman photo and a pair of presidential cuff links. I don’t remember what happened to the cuff links, but the photograph was still in Dad’s office when he sold the newspaper years later.
Fast forward to 1965, the year before my father died. Despite my promising debut, I had abandoned both journalism and politics and gone to law school. Dad, still a skeptical newsman, was asking my opinion of the Warren Commission, saying, “John Kennedy was far too liberal, but I thought an Irish Catholic should have the chance. He was the only Democrat I ever voted for.”
“What about Harry Truman, Dad? You and Mom seemed awfully happy when he beat Dewey.”
Dad just smiled. “You don’t think I would be persuaded by an old pol just because he invited us onto his railroad car and gave me some cuff links, do you?”
I still think my father voted for both Harry Truman and John Kennedy.
—Jeremy C. Shea is an attorney with the Quarles & Brady law firm. He lives in Madison, ‘Wisconsin.
Secret Summer
In June of 1941, just before my seventeenth birthday, Harry Goldberg, my physics instructor at Brooklyn Technical High School, asked me if I would be interested in a summer job at Columbia University. He could not tell me what the job was, but he indicated that I would be helping to build something. Being young and eager to learn (I was seventeenth in a class of five hundred graduating the following year), I accepted. Soon after school let out, I reported to a Mr. Herbert Anderson at Pupin Hall, Columbia’s physics building.
When I arrived that morning with two other teenage boys, we signed a mimeographed form promising to keep our work secret. Then we were introduced to Dr. Walter Zinn and Dr. Enrico Fermi, who was in charge.
We started our first day by choosing different tasks according to our interests and skills. The jobs offered to us were soldering and sealing eight-inch cubical cans made of tin plate, machining graphite blocks to a four-by-four-by-twelve-inch configuration, and carrying or moving the various materials with which we all were working. Another important effort, supervised by Herb Anderson and Walter Zinn, was drying the uranium oxide powder that went into the eight-inch tin-plate containers. This was done in an adjacent building in a room with a concrete floor. Red bricks were placed close together on the floor to make an insulated surface. Uranium oxide powder was then spread over the bricks and dried with electric heaters.
I knew that machining and handling graphite was a dirty job, one I would rather avoid, so I chose to solder and seal the tin-plate containers, which were filled with hot uranium oxide when they arrived at my workstation.
I have no idea how many containers I sealed, but the flow of them seemed unending during the hot July days of that summer. The seal had to be perfect so that no moisture entered when the container cooled. On my workbench were three gas-fired soldering-iron-heating furnaces. We wore leather gloves to avoid burning our hands. The work I was assigned was not unpleasant, but as I learned years later, the danger in it was unseen. The containers I was sealing—this was openly discussed—were filled with U 235. There was absolutely no mention of risk from radioactivity.
We must have handled an enormous number of graphite blocks and containers of uranium oxide over the weeks, gradually assembling them into a twelve-foot cube. Finally one day in August I found myself in the large ground-floor room of Pupin sweeping the residue from our work into a dustpan. Dr. Fermi, a fine, sensitive, softspoken person, came into the room with a serious countenance. We were alone. He was carrying a metal device that looked like a long-handled spatula. He approached the large black cubical structure and inserted the spat- ula into an opening about waist high that had been provided in the center during construction. Then he pulled it out and tapped it with his fingers to determine if it had gotten hot. After a few times, inserting the spatula farther into the pile each time, he finally reacted as if the metal were hot. At that point, without turning to me, he left the room.
The episode is indelible in my memory, but I did not understand its significance until later: that under Fermi we were assembling the material to be used in the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction ever, and it had begun to approach a critical mass.
In May of 1944 I was inducted into the U.S. Navy. In July, while my ship (LSM 49) was in Guam getting provisions, a few Air Force people stationed there began making bets that the war would end soon because of something that had just arrived at the airport. Looking back, I realize it must have been the A-bomb. We were aboard ship heading north for Okinawa when the bombing of Hiroshima was announced on the ship’s radio. Then early the following year, when our ship was assigned to Tokyo Bay, I and part of our crew drove to Hiroshima to observe the devastation first hand.
It has always amazed me that I witnessed the first step into the atomic age and saw the devastating finality of it in Hiroshima exactly four years later.
—Leonard Leonardi is a retired mechanical engineer.
Benevolent Bartender
Watching television recently, I saw a documentary about Douglas MacArthur. It explained something that had puzzled me for more than fifty years.
Just after the Second World War, I was a young cameraman in the Philippines working for the Army Pictorial Service, a branch of the Signal Corps. One day the assignment desk in Manila directed me to the harbor to photograph some general. The general turned out to be Douglas MacArthur. In those months just after the war, everyone was trying to relax, and five-star generals were no exception. MacArthur had organized a short cruise and party on Manila Bay. At the last minute someone decided that photographs of the excursion were needed.
Out around Corregidor the assignment began to get grim. Never before had I been bothered by seasickness, but a choppy Manila Bay was doing its dirty work. Old Navy salts claimed that watching the horizon for a while would make the queasy feeling go away. Rather than embarrass the general’s guests, I reported to him to explain my problem and how I planned to solve it.
“Son, I think we can do better than that,” he replied. He put his arm around my shoulder and ushered me into the bar. He ordered for both of us. To my twenty-two-year-old palate, the resulting concoction tasted like brandy with a dash of this or that added for good measure. Whatever it was, it did the trick. I finished the assignment with no more trouble.
But over the years, I did wonder at his consideration of my plight. Until I saw that documentary. At one point, it noted that General MacArthur was plagued with the tendency to become air or sea sick, and it was a great embarrassment to him.
Now I knew! That old rascal was in the same shape I was in on that cruise, and I was his excuse to alleviate his condition.
I photographed General MacArthur many times in Manila and in Tokyo over the next year. I always had the feeling I was extended a benevolent generosity not given to other photographers. And that, too, I now understand. We were two souls plagued with the same malady.
—Dave Wallis is semiretired from running his own advertising firm.
Readers are invited to submit their personal “brushes with history, ” for which our regular rates will be paid on publication. Unfortunately, we cannot correspond about or return submissions.
