14-05  Frances M. Carroll (Allman)

responsibilities:

Operator/supervisor/maintenance & research. She used to describe the problems with leakage in pumps & vacuum tubes. That was what she worked with. She was sent sometimes back & forth between Columbia and Oak Ridge.

mp-contribution:

She said she was in the lowest level of those who knew that they were working on the atomic bomb. She worked with the scientists and was assigned tasks more on the basis of there was no one else than from prior training. They sent her to classes to learn more. I think she was a technician/specialist who worked on the problem of the microscopic leaks in the vacuum tubes. What they asked her to do, she did. And she'd been there a long time, since before the military and Groves took over, so she'd learned a lot.

mp-experience:

She wanted to do something to help in the war. The military wouldn't take her because she was nearsighted. She was working in the Brooklyn Navy Yard when a friend recommended that she apply at Columbia. It would be more interesting, but she couldn't be told why. Columbia offered her a job, and she accepted. Her boss at the Brooklyn Navy Yard was furious when the SAM Lab hired her away. All jobs were frozen then, and he couldn't understand how they were allowed to take her away. He sneered at "secret projects"; nothing was more important than the Navy Yard for the national defense. He appealed to her patriotism, but he couldn't talk her out of leaving. She loved all her time at Columbia on the Manhattan Project. She always said it was the best time of her life. Everything she did was so interesting and important and worthwhile for the war cause. When the military lowered its standards and offered to let her join, she refused. By then, she knew what she was doing was the most important thing there was towards ending the war.

mp-stories:

Well, she hated Groves! She said he ruined the easygoing camaraderie with all his stupid rules and regulations and security when the military took over. Apparently all the scientists felt that way.

She especially loved getting to talk with the physicists. At Columbia, any physicist(or any other scientist) was happy to stop what he was doing and explain his work in detail if you asked a question. The military didn't like it, but they were never able to stop it.

Of course, she could never tell anyone outside the project what she was doing. So most of them had friends only inside the project and socialized together. Columbia gave them a vague job description to tell other people. She and her friends did get somewhat "loose" with their talk sometimes in a restaurant or bar. It upset my future dad very much since he was in the military and took security more seriously. He'd never let them drop any vague references at all when he was in town from Oakridge and out in public with them. He wouldn't even let them refer to "electricity" or "pumps" or "the project". Someone else in the restaurant might overhear. I'm afraid the civilians, though, treated all that security as rather extreme. They kept the secret, but didn't get "paranoid" about it. Dad was probably a good influence on them and often made them shut up. For Mom and her friends, the work was so fascinating that they wanted to talk about it all the time.