Black and Klemski quickly learned to get over any scruples about wearing trousers to work. "You'd be climbing all over these pipes, and testing the welds in them," Black says, so skirts were impractical. "Then they had a mass spectrometer there, and you had to watch the dials go off, and you weren't supposed to say that word either. And the crazy thing is, I didn't ask. I mean, I didn't know where those pipes were going, I didn't know what was going through them ... I just knew that I had to find the leak and mark it."
She never asked what was in the pipes, "because they told me not to," Black says. "I'd come from a Catholic school where I minded the nuns, and from a family, did what my parents told me ... so then I did what the boss told me!"
Klemski and Black say the secrecy surrounding Oak Ridge didn't make them nervous. "But see, we didn't have all these things that you all have now," Black says. "We didn't have cell phones, we didn't have TVs. If we wanted to know the news, we went to the movies and we watched the newsreel, so it didn't bother me ... and if somebody was to ask you, 'what are you making out there in Oak Ridge,' you'd say '79 cents an hour,'" she laughs.
They only learned that they'd been processing uranium when the news of the Hiroshima bombing broke. "That was the first we heard," Klemski says. "At that time, the Knoxville News-Sentinel came out and it was five cents a copy, but that day, when the bomb was dropped, it was a dollar," Black adds.
"At first, we were really excited," she continues. "We thought, oh, we've done something to help win the war. It wasn't till after we saw the devastation — you know, we didn't like that, but we were glad that we had a part in bringing the war to an end." Klemski chimes in: "I certainly was happy that I was here, and that I was part of the war effort too."
That was the overriding sentiment at Oak Ridge, says author Kiernan. "This world that they were in, the world of early 1945, was not a world that knew what nuclear winter was, it was not a world that knew what a fallout shelter was," she says. "All they knew was the war, and the day the bomb dropped, all they knew was, this new superbomb has dropped, and it looks like the tide is turning for us."
"I was really upset, you know, about all the devastation, but there was nothing I could do about it," Klemski says. "They asked us to stay on, and they were going to do research on, you know, something to see if they could help do something for peacetime," Black adds. "And we thought that would be the end of all wars."
Read an excerpt of The Girls of Atomic City