My Grandfather and the Atom Bomb

The fall of 1942. A father comes home from work to greet the last of his nine children living under his roof, his three youngest sons having enlisted in the Army, Navy, and Coast Guard to fight the second great war. Only his daughter, a freshman in high school left sharing a small four room house with an short attic above, accessible only by climbing a hand built ladder, that housed all the children built on an acre with a barn, garage, chicken coop, and a cow, when Blue Island was just wide meadows well outside the city of Chicago, dotted simply with family homesteads, immigrants staying close to their own kind.

The father, one of the fortunate, after they took away his brother he got a letter warning him to flee. The Russian Army brutal. His family teachers in the Eastern city of Grodno, he hopped a ship, skinning vats of potatoes to pay for his fare, before making Chicago his home in 1913. His wife one of many children of an illiterate rural family who brought root vegetables by ox cart to the town of Worocevicsi sometimes in Russia, other times in Poland, shifting borders with every war. His wife and her sister, sold as seamstresses for two years work in payment for the voyage aboard a gleaming Cunard steamer to a new life. Stuck in steerage with cows, babies and the very sick for two months of cold choppy waters the winter of 1912.

She never learned English, able only to sign her name with an X when necessary, stayed home and had a baby every year and a half until her last caused hemorrhaging, the birth of her last daughter to live forever under the shame of needing a hospital, and then there were no more. She fed her children as she was fed with milk still warm from the cow and thick slices of rye bread coated with newly rendered lard covered with salt. He was tall, strong, and a quick learner. He mastered English, sported a broad smile and had an encouraging word and amusing slap on the back story for everyone he met. Through ties with the Russian Orthodox church, he lied about his age and got a job as an assistant groundskeeper at the University of Chicago.

Over decades, he became the mentor of countless athletes and was mentored by athletic director Amos Alonzo Stagg and as his family grew and the great depression pressed, he brought home every kernel of left-over popcorn and any hotdogs he found while cleaning to feed his family. His last little girl born in 1928, he brought home towels left to rot in lockers and underwear to clothe his children for school. The kids played with regulation volleyballs and thick nets with leather bound edges. When offered the head groundskeeper job, Mr. Stagg insisted that both man and wife sign an allegiance of intention to work toward United States citizenship. They signed but never changed their allegiance, years later the man would gather his grandchildren around him and tell them in solemn tones, "Be proud of your name. When the Czars come back to rule Mother Russia, our name will be important, very important indeed."

So, he comes home in 1942, to a near empty house and tells his last child, a daughter, that something very important is happening under the stadium. He tells her there are scientists and builders. He says he is helping, bringing them lunch, water, and towels. Her father famous as a storyteller, she pokes fun at him, but day after day as the fall turned to winter, he comes home with more details. They are building a bomb. One like none before. A weapon created end the war. He and someone named Enrico have become friends, he has invited Enrico home to enjoy a meal with them. It becomes a joke between father and the daughter, just 15. He builds on the details. The pile is huge, twenty foot tall. He is there every day, doing what he can to help those working day and night around the clock. Soon they will test it. No one knows. Only the two of them, father and daughter.

A few weeks before Christmas, the father tells his daughter, the test had occurred, the reaction was successful, the theory had been proved. The project relocating, moving on to the next step. Enrico will never come for dinner. His daughter laughs. She knew what was under the West side of the stadium. As a child, all her family would go there to the indoor squash courts with gleaming wooden floors and take warm showers after playing on the large precisely mowed oval lawn while her father powdered on white chalk lines for the next game. Not a place for an important experiment, not at all.

On August 6, 1945, the three, mother, father and youngest child, gathered in the heat of their kitchen to hear on their small radio that Hiroshima has been destroyed by an A-bomb. All of it. Gone. Three days later, President Truman drops the bomb on Nagasaki and the war ends for good. All three brothers come home. In June of 1946, the daughter graduates from Blue Island High School and gets a job in the accounting department of Mr. Kraft's large company taking the train downtown each day dressed in a suit and heels. She still recalls Mr. Kraft himself with a large basket of small cheese samples giving them out personally to every employee with a handshake and a word of thanks. The father, still working, tells her that the university is dropping out of the Big Ten. He is saddened, as much as when the university ended their football program in 1937. The father missed picking through the things left by the crowds topping 50,000, things he brought home to feed and clothe his children.

In 1949, the daughter married a Hungarian man five years her senior in a small ceremony not attended by either set of disapproving parents, firm in their beliefs refusing to bless this inter-nationality marriage, before leaving the city for a small farm in Minnesota purchased with money pooled from GI pay and earnings from Mr. Kraft's firm, where they had two children. A boy, 11 months after the marriage, named after his father and a girl following 15 months later named with great expectations Joy Pearl. In June of 1957, the daughter received a rare long-distance phone call. Her brother told her their father had fallen suddenly ill. When she went in to see her father at the Billings Hospital, while her husband stayed with the children on the lush green lawn in front of the building, she came out shaken. "He's white, his hair, even eyebrows. He's never been so white or so thin." On July 2, 1957, the father died. The university hospitals had given him their finest care. Brought in their best doctors and scientists. None of them ever figured out exactly what was wrong. He was only 69. They had never seen his unusual cluster of symptoms before.

The funeral was on his granddaughter's sixth birthday. Her memories belay the truth of the situation. Thrilled, she had a real party with a three-tiered cake with orange, lemon, and lime whipped cream icing. And lots of relatives with presents. She had never been to a funeral before. Someone named Mayor Daley came as did a Mr. Stagg, many athletes, and so many tall others all in suits. Too small to see, she was lifted to view her grandfather's face. He was smiling. Eyes closed. Later she overheard aunts and uncles talking. Her grandpa smiled so much out in the sun that the mortician couldn't unsmile the deep wrinkles of his dark tanned face, without making it look unnatural. His wife, for fear of grave robbers, wouldn't leave the Beverly Cemetery until the casket was lowered and all had pitched shovelfuls of dirt mounded up in the sweaty summer sun. After, an uncle took all the cousins to a restaurant where a train brought their order right to your table with a whistle. Seventeen days later, the university began to tear down Stagg Stadium. Great care was taken with the demolition of the West side. Trucks of concrete lined up for blocks.

Months later, when the thick enveloped autopsy arrived, again the family gathered. Through many hushed tones were heard the phrase radium poisoning. Only then did the daughter relate to the others, for that one and only time, the stories her father told her every day after work the fall and winter of 1942.
"It was not a lie."