When it came time, in 1949, to open the gates to the public, Oak Ridgers protested. Though the adults had complained during the war about government rule and the Army and the mud, they voted 4-1 against opening the town. The government overruled.

Our family stayed in Oak Ridge because we had no better place to go. And there were thousands like us. We stayed and watched it gradually lose its ugly, pock-marked, mudhole-of-a-war-town appearance and become a culturally alive and warm little home town, with its own symphony orchestra and civic ballet troupe and community theater and an internationally known museum, and state championship high school athletic teams. Today it has one of the highest per-capita incomes in the South and an education level well above the national average. And it has more than 1,100 Ph.D.s among its 27,310 residents and employees.

Oak Ridge was, after all, heralded by architects as one of the most skillfully planned U.S. cities. It still is one of the top research centers in the world and still home of the world's most specialized nuclear fabricating operation. Some equipment for the moon launch was made there, as well as various elements for other rockets and nuclear submarines and space craft. The first successes with kidney transplants in animals were there, the first investigations of bone marrow transplants. Nuclear medicine got its start there. Computer experts at Oak Ridge National Laboratory planned the transport of troops and material for Operation Desert Storm, the largest military movement in U.S. history.

Except for the American Museum of Science and Energy, which attracts tourists from all over the world, and the first full-scale nuclear reactor, now a national landmark, there is little to remind one of the town's nuclear war days.

Oh, you might run over a "hot" frog now and then, as some motorists did a few years ago on one of the plant roads. A curious plant researcher, noticing an increasing number of frogs flattened on the pavement, inspected a few in his laboratory and found a radiation reading. The discovery made headlines in supermarket tabloids, but in spite of the sensationalism, authorities said the little creatures were the harmless, non-glowing variety that had ventured from their overpopulated and contaminated native pond. It was the kind of explanation Oak Ridgers have accepted since the beginning, more out of trust than understanding.  The trust generally stops at the city limits.

WHEN THE WORLD STARTS running out of other resources, when acid rain and acid mine water are out of control, when Japan is making its products with cheaper electricity, then - say Oak Ridge's pioneer scientists - perhaps the potential of nuclear energy will be appreciated again and the great promise of Oak Ridge will be fulfilled.  To most of the rest of the world, the great promise was destruction and contamination.

When Oak Ridge was built, it had two major objectives: one, to isolate the isotope U-235 (hot uranium) from U-238 (natural) and use it in a weapon, and, two, to design and test a graphite reactor to burn the U-235 and, in the course of its burning up, create plutonium, which also could be used in a weapon and required only a third as much. No one had ever seen plutonium until the first small amounts were made at X-10, which served as the pilot plant for the massive plants in Hanford, Wash. Plutonium fueled both the New Mexico test bomb and the bomb detonated above Nagasaki.

But Oak Ridge had another mission: to explore the biological hazards that were produced by the fission products. And it began to wrestle with the problems of nuclear waste. No one knew for sure what to do with it. Some of it was sealed in steel tanks and buried in concrete graves. Some was dumped in holding ponds where it could decay and be released into streams. Mercury, which was used in large amounts at Y-12 until the '50s, was discharged into East Fork Popular Creek, contaminating sediment and adjoining privately owned off-site land. No fishing is allowed there. No swimming. No boating. At K-25 today, 77,000 drums of trans-uranic waste, retrieved from an old sludge pond, sit out on concrete pads waiting for final disposal.

No one is certain about how much nuclear waste there is, or how harmful it might be. But many of the Oak Ridge pioneer scientists insist the danger is grossly exaggerated, and they bristle at the suggestion that they were careless. "Don't people realize," asked Robert Santoro, a longtime Oak Ridge National Laboratory physicist, "that we are scientists who also live here and have children and family and loved ones who live here, and that we are not interested in hurting them?"

"We tried to put it in a safe place," said Waldo Cohn, who spent most of the war years in nuclear-hazard research at X-10. "We had a special drain, and it went into special holding tanks. We figured it would sit there until kingdom come. It was never discarded willy-nilly. When they talk about contamination in Oak Ridge, it's largely not the fission products, because those are mostly decayed away, and if they're not, they're in such small amounts anyway, they never were a problem. They're talking mostly about uranium spills, plain old natural uranium, which is radioactive, but relatively harmless because its radiation is so weak."

None of the talk seems to faze most Oak Ridgers one way or another. They have read the results of the frequent medical surveys, none of which has shown conclusive evidence of medical harm. In fact, some studies have shown cancer rates in Oak Ridge to be below the national average.

(Interestingly, radioactivity is not what is troubling Oak Ridge the town, which starts less than a mile from the Y-12 complex. It has another unusual environmental problem: the cemesto houses, the most desirable of the wartime dwellings. Many have deteriorated and need to be demolished, but because of their asbestos-coated boards, they are classified as hazardous by the EPA and must be discarded according to strict - read "expensive" - standards. The cost of removal is more than the worth of the lot.

So banks holding mortgages on cemesto homes are reluctant to foreclose: Even if debris is hauled away according to EPA standards and properly discarded, the banks, as owners, would remain liable for the asbestos into perpetuity.)

But it is Oak Ridge the government reservation, not Oak Ridge the town, that is on the Environmental Protection Agency's list of Superfund sites. A 30-year cleanup plan, financed by the Department of Energy, is now in its third year and, in the next five years alone, will cost $3 billion.

"We're cleaning up for the legacy," said Gale Rymner, community relations manager for the Department of Energy's Environmental Restoration Division, ''for the years of making nuclear weapons . . . when they were mainly digging ditches and putting it in the ground. . . . There is no imminent health or environmental hazards . . . (but) it's tough to fight emotions with facts. Perception is reality."

MANY OF THE WARTIME scientists never left Oak Ridge, or left and returned because of its stimulating scientific environment. But like the farmers they displaced, they have been largely forgotten. They are in their 70s and 80s now, still deeply wise, living out their time, a little hurt perhaps that, after almost 50 years, only about 5 percent of the world's energy comes from the atom.

You see them at the symphony, at church, walking their dogs, singing in choirs. If they are remembered now, outside the scientific community, it probably isn't for the new energy they harnessed a half-century ago, or for the war they helped to end. For all the good things, for all the peacetime opportunities their discoveries opened up to the world, their triumph more often than not is stigmatized by scandalous tales of contamination, and by the horrible weapon they helped to create.

Grass-roots America never quite understood them or what they did beneath the yellow glare of light in those distant, windowless plants in the '40s.

"Everything has changed," Albert Einstein said after the atomic bomb detonated above Hiroshima, "except the thinking of the people."