Month: March 2025

I think many of us find some humor in the idea that residents who’ve been here in Los Alamos since the late 80s and 90s remember Film Festival at Home as the place we stop to grab a video or a DVD to keep us occupied for the evening, while modern residents known Film Festival as a place to grab coffee and do their laundry. In a strange turn, many businesses in Los Alamos have done double or even triple duty over the years. Then again, Los Alamos has always been a place where businesses or even just a building make space for whatever our community needs. And back in the early days, even just the completion of everyday household tasks took an awful lot of ingenuity.

So You Want to Grocery Shop?

I think most of us have lamented the grocery shopping situation here in Los Alamos. We have a lovely Co-op, Natural Grocers, and two different Smith’s stores, but it always seems as though our community is getting less in the way of options and inconsistent availability of products between the stores.

Strangely enough, it used to be something of the opposite back during the Manhattan Project! Los Alamos had a commissary which was stocked by the military supply lines. Most of the shoppers were military personnel, but even the civilians were allowed to shop at the commissary thanks to the sometimes erratic working hours and the unreasonable expectation of having time to leave Los Alamos after working a long day on site.

Though the initial offerings of produce and other items were not of great quality, there were several memos from the management in Los Alamos to the Army distribution center in El Paso suggesting that Los Alamos residents should be given access to higher quality produce and other grocery items in order to encourage their motivation to keep plugging along on “the mission”.

That pattern continued as the project progressed. In a memo dated August 1944, the commissary in Los Alamos was asked to procure a wider variety of goods than were made available under Army regulations. Even with the rationing, it was decided that the population of Los Alamos needed to be given some perks to keep them productive and happy. This meant Los Alamos moms could pick up milk, Jell-O and other hard to find necessities at the local commissary.

So You Need to do Your Laundry?

Back to the task of doing laundry in early Los Alamos. It’s not easy to think back to what laundry facilities were like in the 1940s. In fact, the 1940s saw a huge change in the way folks did laundry. This short YouTube video offers a look into just how much time it took folks to wash their clothes back in those days!

Now, laundry facilities were something residents here in Los Alamos were always clamoring for more of. So by the summer of 1946, the laundries were all updated to the point where there were 36 machines available for the 6000 residents of the hill to utilize in keeping their clothing cleaned, pressed, and presentable.

I think it’s important to remember that clothing back then was different as well. Uniforms and work clothes required pressing. Back then you would rent an electric iron for $0.30 per hour. That was if you wanted to iron by hand. You could also use a machine called a “mangle” which had two heated rollers and would press your larger items at the cost of $0.40 per hour.

Many folks who could would hang their clothes out on a line to dry. But that didn’t alleviate the need to press them! Can you imagine in our world today if you actually had to iron all of your clothing? We are so used to wash and wear fabrics for most of our clothing that it would likely feel like a return to the Dark Ages to have to iron each day’s outfit for every member of the family!

So You Need to Send a Letter?

We’ve discussed the importance of Post Office Box 1663. And I’m sure most of you are fully aware of the incredible level of censorship going on back then. The security handbook at the time stated specifically that personnel, professions, numbers of people, size and scope of the Project, and even opinions and rumors could not be revealed or commented upon. Before long, the 6000 strong population had outgrown PO Box 1663 and two more “boxes” were created.

PO Box 1539 was a “regular mail service” box and PO Box 180 was mostly for military personnel. Sorting, censoring, and delivering mail was one of the most complicated processes of the Manhattan Project. In previous posts, we’ve talked about the enormous volume of catalogs delivered to Los Alamos residents. The ridiculous number of scientific magazines sent to one address. The huge number of library books ordered to PO Box 1663 from the central lending library in Santa Fe. Mail indicates population and that was a big worry of officials of the project.

With that in mind, military and civilian residents were asked not to mail anything that they could hand deliver around town themselves. Christmas Cards were an especially big concern. In 1946 Norris Bradbury and Colonel Herbert Gee themselves made a request that residents hand deliver their cards as much as possible in a way that prevented the holiday greetings from clogging up the mail clerks’ task lists!

So You Want to Look Good for the Weekend?

Considering many folks in the early days were living in barracks, doubling up in Sundt Apartments, bunking in McKeeville, or even living in a camper, places to spruce up your personal looks with frequent hair washings, barber services, and even the nail salons were in high demand here in Los Alamos. Several early residents recall there being so few barbers in the early days of the project that the Tech Area guys got a barber chair and honed their barbering skills on each other. But that doesn’t sound like a solution for the ladies, does it?

It didn’t take long for barber and beauty shops to set up in the Service Club, the Military Police Exchange (MPX), and the Special Engineering Detachment’s Club (SED PX). The SED barber was so efficient he won a $50 bet for proving he could complete 12 haircuts in an hour. For reference, the average cost of a haircut at that time was twenty-five cents so a $50 bonus was an enormous amount of money!

I hope you’re noticing that there is a certain ebb and flow to life in Los Alamos. In some ways, our retail markets are a bit like the weather. Just wait a bit and it will change so entirely you hardly remember what came before! For now, I’d encourage all of you to get outside in Los Alamos and enjoy this glorious spring weather we’re having! Whether you’re already a resident or looking to find your home here in our lovely community on the Pajarito Plateau, give me a call! I’d love to talk with you about housing in Los Alamos!

You might look at the title of this post and scoff. Nightlife in Los Alamos? Does that exist? Well yes, actually, it does! Even more interesting is the fact that Los Alamos has always had quite a vibrant nightlife. It’s just not driven by block after block of bowling alleys, restaurants, stores, theaters, and bars. A pub crawl in Los Alamos is usually done simply because one establishment has the beverage and the other has the food!

In the early years of the Manhattan Project, the nightlife here in Los Alamos was really all about the parties. ANY excuse for a party. Holidays, birthdays, office gatherings, going-away parties, outdoor picnics, steak parties… EVERY occasion was a chance to let loose. Simply suggest an event and someone would start planning it. But as I’ve said before… The thing that social events and nightlife had in common was the existence of an actual human to plan the event!

Radio Los Alamos

Modern folks are pretty demanding with their personalized playlists, Spotify accounts, and iTunes libraries. But back in the early days, Los Alamos had a “closed circuit” radio station. A man named Bob Porton was the first station manager and the first announcer of the radio station named KRS. If you weren’t aware, radio stations west of the Mississippi begin with the letter K and if your radio station is east of the Mississippi you begin your letters with a W. The official record states that KRS was established in February of 1946 as a “carrier current” station with limited broadcasting. KRSN took over in 1949 and was officially licensed to broadcast beginning in 1950.

During the early years, KRS was said to be keeping a lot of Los Alamos sane! Talented classical musicians like Otto Frisch often played live on the broadcast and there was a daily show called Music of the Masters. The show utilized records owned by anyone on the post (aka in Los Alamos) who wanted to contribute and a playlist was tacked outside the broadcasting booth. In some ways, KRS was a lot like many of us remember local college radio. The station sponsored dances and encouraged just about anyone with a music related talent to showcase on the broadcasts.

The Bands and Musical Groups of Los Alamos

One of the most well known and loved musical groups in Los Alamos in the mid 1940s was Los Cuatros. The group consisted of three military men and a civilian machinist, (Los Cuatros is pictured above). Sometimes Lois, wife of bass player “Locky” Lockhart would provide vocals for the group. Lois also regularly appeared with the Keynotes and Sad Sack Six. The Keynotes included a larger number of players and some brass instruments which made them super popular for “big band” sound dances, and dancing was the thing in Los Alamos in the 1940s!

Dances were available nearly seven nights a week! Even with three children under six years old, the Lockharts were constantly busy with the business of entertaining Los Alamos. Los Cuatros finally had to break up when the war ended and Gallo and Gard eventually left the Pajarito Plateau for their next military assignment. Los Cuatros actually made it 10 years. Both Locky Lockhart and Jon Michnovicz stayed on in Los Alamos, too enchanted by the scenery and the life to want to leave. Michnovicz can be spotted in almost every photo of musical talent acts in Los Alamos at that time. Of course, that might be due to his status as first a military and then a civilian photographer. A good number of the photos we’re used to seeing when we head to the Blue Window for a night out were taken by Michnovicz.

Theaters 1 & 2 were popular places for dances when there weren’t weddings, church services, theater performances, or other events going on. In the John Mench interview, he talks about the battles for supremacy that often happened when there was a basketball game and a sewing circle or a quilting bee overlapped on the Theater 2 schedule. Can you imagine?

Dorm Parties and Service Clubs

From the earliest times, life in Los Alamos involved lots of people living in tight spaces. In the early days you would have married couples and singles all living in the dormitories together. Los Alamos wife, Bernice Brode, once said that “Dorm parties were the biggest and brassiest.” She spoke further about the boys removing all the furniture from the common rooms in the dorms and bringing a supply of “Tech Area Punch”. Brode swore that even with the rather stiff punch, behavior never got out of control. Having grown up here myself, I find that a bit difficult to believe…

By 1946 when the town began to open just a bit, one of the most popular places to hang out was the Service Club. All were welcome. Indian or Hispanic, immigrants, scientists, PhDs, and regular working folks got their cokes or beer and ate a lot of fried egg sandwiches! As you can see in the photo, a jukebox sits in the lower left hand corner of the photo. The jukebox and the pinball machines were always going as folks gathered to enjoy a break.

In the early days, the service clubs were actually military post exchanges. There was a Military Police PX and a “Special Engineering District” or SED PX. Both required attendees to be military service members in some way. The WACs didn’t have their own PX, so they were welcome in the SED PX and often spent time enjoying the refreshments, snacks, sundries, and tables where they could meet up for a beer or a coke.

There was a NCO club for officers and it was once reported in mid 1946 that while beer was becoming scarce in the “outside world”, Los Alamos was scheduled to get 10,000 cases of beer. The speculated rate of arrival of alcoholic supplies in Los Alamos was rumored to be 200 cases per month. One PX procurement officer reported that 300 cases per beer were consumed a day at the Service Club.

I personally wonder if that number was padded in order to assure there would be enough delivered to keep the customers coming back. I can’t help but think of that long standing slogan: “Los Alamos is a drinking town with a science problem.” Maybe this is in part because there were so many Europeans here from the beginning. Alcohol tolerance, consumption habits, and limits are very different from culture to culture. We can’t forget the huge amount of stress either! A night of dancing and Tech Area Punch was likely to help you forget all about the actual project you were working on during the days.

Tech Area Punch!

Several times in the past I have mentioned “Tech Area Punch”. I first found references to this mysterious sounding beverage in Toni Michnovicz Gibson’s and Jon Michnovicz’s book, “Los Alamos: 1944-1947”. With a bit of poking around I found a mention in the Michnovicz’s book that the liquor component of Tech Area Punch could be somewhat uncertain. Some of the female writers refer to “mixed alcohol of all kinds” and there are plenty of suggestions about grapefruit juice or any available fruit juice as a mixer. But according to the John Mench interview included in the “Voices of the Manhattan Project”, Tech Area Punch developed like this:

And every night in the barracks they had a party where they played cards and drank “Tech Area Punch.” For those who don’t know what Tech Area Punch is, in “K-stock”—which was the chemical stock room—you could draw out a gallon of 190-proof grain alcohol. And they cut it with pineapple juice. And this was the drink of people who drank in Los Alamos, at least among the GIs, all during that period. So there was lots of Tech Area Punch, lots of card playing, lots of swearing, lots of singing, lots of noise, lots of hell-raising every night in the barracks.

Let’s Go to the Theater!

Something that John Mench refers to quite often in his interview, is the frequency of theater productions and movies available in the evenings. Remember that the Los Alamos Little Theater has been in operation since the first attempt at a play, “Right About Face” happened in 1943. If you want to know more about LALT, visit their website or check out a previous post HERE.

Take a look at the marquee visible in this photo of two GIs exiting the theater after enjoying a matinee. There were movies available almost every evening. John Mench remembers there being a lot of John Wayne pictures to see, but I imagine it didn’t matter what there was to watch. Escapism was going to be popular during wartime no matter where you are! Hmm… Not unlike escapism of any kind is welcome today!

So whether you love hanging at the Los Alamos Little Theater or you want to support SALA events, you’re on target as a Los Alamos Local! I’d like to think that part of our long standing local tradition involves supporting our LAMS Hawks, the Hilltoppers, attending theatrical and dance productions from DALA and many of the other wonderful and varied dance studios in town, catching an art exhibition, attending a Brown Bag Lunch lecture at Fuller Lodge, and pretty much being part of life here on the hill! This is how we developed as a community and it’s what we do best. And when you’re ready to join our community, give me a call! I’m a hometown girl who LOVES to chat real estate in Los Alamos. Whether you’re looking to buy or sell your home or even commercial property, I’d love to chat about it!

Why do people stay here in Los Alamos? I think that’s something newcomers or visitors often wonder. As you might imagine, I hear a lot of first impressions of the town from my clients as they search for a home to fit their needs. Many of the initial thoughts aren’t that flattering. The first thing that begins to shift their perception is how beautiful it is here. No matter how much you dislike the lack of restaurants or shopping, very few people have anything negative to say about the scenery. But the natural beauty of this place seems to soak slowly into the newcomers. While they are house hunting, they might be uncertain about whether or not they plan to stay. Oftentimes when I meet up with them again in months or even years, their opinion has changed.

Enchanted

What happens to change opinions about life in Los Alamos between first impressions and the decision to stay in town for pretty much the rest of someone’s life? I think the image below explains a lot! For the record, this is a photo of the Valle Caldera. Folks living in Los Alamos weren’t allowed access to this area for recreation or any other reason until the year 2000 when Congress purchased the Baca ranch and created a National Park.

Steak Parties

Okay. I’ll admit. I was a bit baffled by this concept. According to Images of America: Los Alamos 1944-1947, when the residents in Los Alamos were a bit frustrated with living on top of each other and being stressed about making progress on the Manhattan Project, they liked to drive, ride horseback, or hike a short way into the surrounding area to get away. And often this event included steak.

Sports on the Plateau

I’ve spoken in the past about the long history of baseball in Los Alamos. But you don’t have to hang about in town for long to see that we really enjoy our sports. In fact, Los Alamos has always been a place for sporting.

During the war years, the Army encouraged organized sports as much as they encouraged their GIs and civilians to set up pickup games of softball and football. Once the war was over, there was an organized softball league. Men and women set up teams with names like the Exploders, the Plutons, the Bombers, and even the Sad Sockers. Each week the Los Alamos Times would publish batting averages and team standings.

Los Alamos has always enjoyed winter sports. The Ranch School had already made a place to ice skate and had cleared some runs for skiing, activities that have never ceased to be favorites in the winter months. In the second winter of the project, as more Europeans joined the community, skiing took on a whole new importance as the Sawyer’s Hill Ski Tow Association was created. Eventually this group developed into the Pajarito Ski Club, which many people still know today.

While our golf course and horse stables are not in any way connected these days, that didn’t used to be the case. The original stables/golf course was the giant meadow which later became Western Area. Notice the split rail fencing in the background of the photo of the two golfing gentlemen? It was agreed upon that most of the course was sand trap…because it was a horse pasture…and golfers had to climb onto the “greens” as they were fenced off to keep the horses from munching the better grass. I often picture the horses watching humans smacking little balls around their pasture with great amusement!

Just about everyone rode horses in the early days of Los Alamos. The military acquired the ranch school stock when they purchased the land, buildings, and machinery. These horses were for public use, but it didn’t take long for many families to purchase their own horses. Horses were acquired in much the same way they are today. Someone tells someone else they have one they’re selling and a deal is made! Eleanor Jette tells in her book of finding maps in one of the abandoned cabins which opened the entirety of the trails to riders and hikers. Residents weren’t allowed to drive to Santa Fe but once a month. If you wanted to ride the trail to Caballo Mountain every day of the week, nobody would tell you no. In much the same way they do for local equestrians today, horses equalled freedom to the residents of Los Alamos!

Exploring the Past

Another popular activity was a continuation of something the boys of the ranch school had also enjoyed. Nowadays we are encouraged to view the native ruins dotting our landscape. You can head to Bandelier, Tsankawi, or the Puye Cliffs to hike and climb the ladders as long as you stay on the path. Back in the 1940s, folks were free to hike out, climb around, experiment with amateur archaeology, and generally poke about in whatever manner interested them!

As with any population of young men and women, Los Alamos soon became a hotbed of dating, marriage, and babies during the Manhattan Project era. It actually reminds me a bit of the “romances” that seem to happen all throughout history on the wagon train trails, long voyages on ships, and in tiny communities all over the world. Being thrown together for a single purpose (work!?) never stops the social scene from happening in the background. Evidently, the male to female ratio in those days wasn’t all that unlike the one today. The was reported to be one woman for every ten men!

Wedding Fever!

It probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that weddings happened in Los Alamos about as often as sunrise and sunset! Sources say weddings were typically held in Theaters No. 1 and No. 2, the chapel, the chaplain’s office, in churches in the surrounding communities and even in private homes! The couple below is preparing for communion during their Catholic Wedding Mass in Theater No. 1.

One of the popular beverages in Los Alamos back in those days was called Tech Area Punch. This mixed concoction was usually flavored heavily by grapefruit juice. But we’ll talk more about that in a future post. You can see from the happy faces, the elegant little wedding cake, and the enormous punch bowl that weddings were a wonderful social event!

I hope you’ve noticed that the topic of “things to do in Los Alamos” hasn’t actually changed all that much between the ranch school days and right now. Next time we’re going to take a dive into the Los Alamos Nightlife! (Yes, that’s actually a thing!) Until then, I hope you get outside with your favorite family, friends, coworkers, fellow club members, and anyone else who shares your passion for this place and all it has to offer. And when you’re ready to talk homes and real estate in Los Alamos, give me a call! I’m a hometown girl who always has time to talk housing in Los Alamos!