10-11  Charles Critchfield

He nonetheless declined their offer because he was already doing important war related work, had a newborn son and he and his wife were wanting to have yet another child ... me, as it turned out. In April of 1943 he was involuntarily assigned to Los Alamos, but quite eagerly accepted his fate because by then General Groves had acquiesced to allowing the laboratory staff to retain their civilian status and to bring their families along with them.

After the war my father worked briefly at Oak Ridge and then accepted a professorship with the University of Minnesota's physics department. There he worked closely with Project Y alumnus John Williams and also conducted classified high-altitude research for the Air Force, which resulted in the development of the high-altitude helium envelopes that are still in use today. During his tenure at the University of Minnesota he also took a year's sabbatical leave (1952/1953) to return to Los Alamos for work on the H-bomb project. In 1955 his friend John von Neumann convinced him to relinquish his professorship and join the "space race", where he took a position with General Dynamic's Convair division as their vice-president for research. In that capacity he headed up the Atlas missile project, which succeeded in successfully launching our nation's first satellites. Wanting to return to his first love of teaching, in 1961 he accepted a professorship at the University of Wisconsin but he never made it to Madison. Word of his pending change of employment reached his friends at LASL, and Carson Mark and Norris Bradbury put together a package to offer him a teaching position at the Laboratory. This involved creating a new group (T-9) in Mark's division, composed of post-docs whom my father would mentor. The opportunity to teach exclusively at the post-doctoral level while having access to the Laboratory's world-class resources (notably its technical staff and computer capability) did the trick, and he gladly returned to Los Alamos. In 1977 he was forced by then LASL policy to retire, yet he remained active at the Lab as a consultant until his death in 1994.