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Fran to her Mom & Dad; Sept. 26, 1945  Oak Ridge, TN 

Fran to her parents, Mr. & Mrs. F.E. Carroll.  Sept. 26, 1945.

Dear Mother & Dad, 

Marriage is a common circumstance- it is all around- but I do not know when it will seem like an ordinary affair to me.  So far, it is a prolonged vacation.  Two reasons for managing the necessary preliminaries to our coming back down to Tennessee together, the way we did, are that Bill wants to go back to school & so do I, & tho we may never, any possible view in that direction eliminates children which eliminates a Catholic ceremony.  Secondly, I didn’t want to be talked out of the whole idea.  And this as you probably know would have been quite possible.  However, I don’t believe the test of a good idea is whether or not one can be talked out of it.  We are aware of any drawbacks & still wanted to try it.  Continued emphasis upon any real or imaginary disadvantages as only Father can emphasize could change the picture.  And I Don’t Want to Change The Picture.  I would never marry anyone if I had to wait around for an engagement and various arrangements.

 Bill’s furlough was up Monday nite, 9-19- he had been in NYC a week.  We talked about getting married Christmas which is the next time he may have a furlough if he isn’t discharged by then.  And while we were waiting to go to the train, it seemed so senseless to wait when I could go right back with him then & there.  I know it was too much of a surprise to hand one’s parents & if you had sounded at all faintly slightly enthused about the situation, we intended to come to Hartford for the evening, but I guess I was looking at it from my point of view only.  Bill is wonderful, lots of people think so, especially me.  He’s not happy about meeting new people because a skin disease he’s had several years still exists plus having left innumerable scars.  I didn’t notice it or that is think about it one way or the other, but he’s so damn aware of it which I didn’t realize quite how much , that I didn’t insist on our coming up.  I guess you wouldn’t have thought it a good idea anyway since we had made up our minds.

 It’s an awfully long ride down to this here now secret city & I’ll probably not make it back again till we save up plane fare.  I’m staying at the Andrew Johnson Hotel in Knoxville, and we could keep this up a while longer- am going to stay thru the weekend anyway- but it’s a dreary town & of course Bill is back at work, and it’s about an hour & a half’s ride to work so I’ll start lining up a job today.  This will probably consume several days if our former visit to this spot is a criterion.  There are lots more bad features than you know, the most outstanding of which is that it’s very difficult to procure a place to live on the area when one of you is a soldier.  Soldiers are supposed to live in barracks & not in houses.  Everything on the Area itself is built far away from the actual working section, originally for safety reasons & the surrounding towns of course are even farther away than that.  Much farther.  And yet that’s where most of the soldiers have had to get living quarters.  If by some stray luck you could get on the Area, you have to pay double- your own rent & barracks deductions.  This is a problem we have yet to solve.

 The demand for employees is slight since the whole business is just pending till Congress does some deciding.  If worse came to the absolute worst I can go back to SAM in NYC.  In fact Dr. Cook’s, one of my former superiors, first impulse was to get Bill transferred to New York & thus keep me, but since the entire lab may be transferred in the spring, we vetoed that.

 I hope you will be inclined to write once in a while.  Love, Fran