Month: April 2025

Most of us think we know what censorship is. Our modern communications are peppered with terms like “encrypted” and most of us are well aware of the danger of sending electronic communications with our personal health information, identifying info like a social or even a phone number in some cases. But no matter how much you think you understand about censorship, I don’t think it’s possible for us to fully grasp what it was like in Los Alamos in the 1940s.

Day to Day Post

If you were part of Site Y, you had a responsibility to follow the provisions of paragraph 3d of War Department Training Circular No. 15 dated 16 February 1943. Eleanor Jette provides these guidelines in the appendices of her book, Inside Box 1663. The layers of security are daunting to imagine. Tech Area employees had to deposit their mail inside the Tech Area Censorship receptacle. Everyone else had to use either the Army receptacle at the Army post depot or the civilian receptacle. But in the early days, everything came in and out of PO Box 1663.

The guidelines specified that all censorship would be done off site by personnel educated in the specific process of censorship. It’s difficult to imagine what it would’ve been like to be up on the hill in the Secret City back then. Even today it’s somewhat difficult for locals to explain to “outsiders” that if you have a partner or family member who is LANL employed, you can’t really ask them details about what they do. Growing up, we used to joke about the grunt and nod and significant look language that seemed to develop when our parents or other adults got together. As though they were not talking about things just as often as they were discussing them.

During the Manhattan Project, employees couldn’t even tell their families why they were here or where, exactly, HERE was! There could be no mention of what was happening. They were given the explanation of being attached to the Engineering District and that it was aligned with the war effort and that was about it.

Communications could be conducted in English, French, German, italian, and Spanish. If you wanted to use another language, you had to get special permission from the Post Commander. No codes, ciphers, or any sort of secret writing was allowed. You couldn’t even use doodles, cross out words, or any other symbols. An ink stain probably would’ve gotten your letter returned to you.

One letter was returned to sender because the writer had attempted to use a humorous analogy about teaching employees to dance. Can you imagine what it would be like to move your family to the “ends of the Earth” and not be allowed to explain why or even what what happening on a day to day basis? Letters and packages had to be sent to the censors unsealed. No wrapping a birthday gift. No carefully arranging a holiday package.

PO Box 1663

Most of us have heard of PO Box 1663. But how weird would it feel to ask your mother to send your birthday cards to Mr. John Jones, PO Box 1663? There could be no use of any project personnel’s names in communications. Mr. John Jones of Santa Fe, NM was probably the most prolific correspondent in history!

Of course, as the population of technical staff, military and support personnel grew, there was a strong necessity of creating two more “dummy” post office boxes. One specifically for the military folks, and one for the civilian support staff. It became a hard and fast rule that sending and receiving mail was done through your assigned PO Box in order to keep the censorship staff on track. Sending a letter or package at that time was a bit like writing a paper and getting back the corrections until you’ve done it to the professor’s satisfaction! You can read more about the post office situation in a previous post HERE.

The Infamous Letter

Correspondence coming into Los Alamos was censored just as heavily as that going out. One story I find fascinating is of a rather infamous letter which remained a mystery for nearly 80 years!

Sgt Katherine “Pat” Patterson from Oxford, Mississippi was a WAC posted here in Los Alamos. Her brother Jim was stationed in France during the war and she corresponded with him. At one point she mentioned she was stationed somewhere northwest of Santa Fe and Jim send her a very interesting response. The following is an excerpt from Jim’s letter which is part of the archives in our local history museum.

“You ask how much I know about the place out there,” Jim wrote, adding, “you would be surprised.” He continued by asking a series of questions. “Has Bencis Gonzales in the PX there killed a deer yet? Is Ashley Pond frozen over? What does Peubelo Canyon look like? Do you ever ride a horse named Chili from the corral under the hill? I find out all these things by gazing into a big crystal ball.” He continued, “I know just how to get out to where you are. From Santa Fe to Pajaque, then left across the Rio Grande up Cubbra Hill, Otowi Hill, and past the Mesa.” His spelling was wrong in several instances, but it was clear enough to get the attention of the mail censors.

As you might imagine, the top brass grew VERY concerned! They asked Pat to send a letter back asking where her brother got this info. He didn’t seem to understand the problem and just kept telling her he and his “buddy” had looked into their crystal ball. Pat was informed she was no longer allowed to correspond with her brother while she was in Los Alamos, and the letter went into the archives and became one of unexplained mysteries of the war. Then Pat’s daughter, Debra, discovered her uncle Jim had been in France with a man named Collier Baird.

Baird had fought in the Battle of the Bulge and had lived to return home. He’d been stationed with Jim Patterson in France with Yankee Company during the war. But before that? Collier Baird was part of the last graduating class of the Los Alamos Ranch School! Baird knew all of those details about Los Alamos because he’d been here for years before Project Y took over the school and the Pajarito Plateau! You can read more about that story HERE.

You can find a lot more info about censorship in Los Alamos on the Historical Museum Blog HERE. And if you’re ready to change up your living situation here in Los Alamos, give me a call! There are some really amazing properties for sale in Los Alamos and this could be the perfect time to discover your dream home just waiting for you on a quiet street full of gorgeous scenery and interesting history! I’m a Los Alamos native and I love to help folks discover Los Alamos!

If you’ve spent much time in Los Alamos, (or if you’re like me and your family has been here for generations), you might take a tiny Northern New Mexico town perched on the Pajarito Plateau for granted when you think about the location of a National Laboratory.

Sometimes I marvel at the sheer number of out of state cars and obvious rental vehicles parked around town while their drivers walk wide eyed up and down Central Avenue between museums. Meanwhile folks who come for a peek scratch their heads in amazement at the sheer isolation and lack of hotels, restaurants, and “touristy” things to do. And that’s in modern times. Can you even begin to imagine what it was like back in the 1940s? Los Alamos isn’t the sort of place you accidentally drive through. You aren’t likely to stumble upon it now any more so than you would have in the early 1900s. You have to WANT to go up to Los Alamos. The road doesn’t automatically take you there.

But seriously. Why Los Alamos? Surely in the 2,959,064.44 square miles of land that makes up the United States, there was another location that met the necessary requirements to host Project Y. There actually WAS another contender, one that will probably surprise you, but there was also a sort of “Project Y Wish List” that ruled out a lot of possible locations.

According to Toni Michnovicz Gibson’s and Jon Michnovicz’s book Los Alamos: 1944-1947, the list focused on seven different points:

• The population within 100 miles of the site had to be sparse, both for security purposes, and in case of an accident.
• Access by roads and railroads was necessary for bringing large amounts of personnel and material to the site.
• Housing facilities had to be immediately available to quarter the first personnel to arrive, and there needed to be room to grow quickly as the project proceeded.
• Some parts of the area had to be large enough to provide for adequate testing.
• The climate was to be mild enough to allow outdoor work to proceed throughout the winter.
• Water, electricity, and an adequate fuel supply had to be readily available.
• The ownership and/or easy acquisition of the land had to be considered.

Something that strikes me about the first six items on that list is that one requirement or another rules out a significant portion of our country. A climate mild enough to allow outdoor work to proceed throughout the winter. One only has to listen to the population of Los Alamos County lament that brief six inch snow of two weekends ago and you might entertain the idea that Los Alamos doesn’t meet that criteria.

Except, where else can you expect six inches of a spring snow to be gone without a trace in less than 72 hrs? And it isn’t that we don’t like the snow, rain, hail, and whatever other moisture we can expect. It’s that we’re used to something like 300 days a year of sunlight, good weather, and outdoor fun! Even when the monsoon rains were coming down hard and as predictable as clockwork, the fact that they were predictable and short made it perfect for outdoor work of many kinds!

We are truly blessed in our climate. While there have been some shifts in the last several decades, most homes in Los Alamos did not need much beyond a few fans in the summer even into the 2000s. Passive solar has always been a wonderful and surprisingly effective way to heat your Los Alamos home. One homeowner on Barranca Mesa even installed climate controlled electric blinds which would go up and down throughout the day based on a thermostat to keep the home at the desired temperature in all four seasons while utilizing next to nothing beyond the sun and a bank of east facing windows.

However, if you look again at the list, it strikes me that AJ Connell was the one who prepped Los Alamos for the Manhattan Project without even realizing it. Connell and the ranch school staff had carried on HH Brooks’ task of improving available water sources, establishing generators to provide electricity, and shaping the land into a self sustaining compound. Connell proved beyond doubt that structures could go up and down and be repurposed, reused, renovated, and revamped for whatever next task they needed to do. The fact that Fuller Lodge was Connell’s pet project and is still the centerpiece of life in Los Alamos today is a stunning testament to the Ranch School’s unknowing contribution to the project.

The plateau’s wide cleared land for farming and ranching provided ample space for both temporary and permanent structures as well as technical areas and locations for testing that could be isolated from the population for safety purposes. Unless you’re entirely “in the know” these days, you might not even realize the amount of testing that still goes on right here on Lab property. Considering the boom in population between 1944 and 2024, the fact that Los Alamos STILL meets a lot of those criteria for a “secret city” is rather impressive.

Accessibility to Los Alamos wasn’t exactly pretty back in the 1940s. Many of the personnel who got off the Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe railroad in Lamy, NM often couldn’t believe they had hours yet of travel across rough ground before reaching the project site. But it was access to rail and road that the Army wanted. They didn’t necessarily want the railroad going through their secret camp.

The fact that this access was often gained through a detour through places like Espanola or the handful of Pueblo communities was considered a bonus. These were the small local communities asked from the very beginning to provide support staff and laborers. It’s a relationship that began with AJ Connell and Ashley Pond, continued through Project Y, and still continues today. Though in modern times it often feels like the outlying community members are tired of commuting and are moving UP the hill and those atop the plateau are wanting to sprawl out and have more space so are moving DOWN the hill. It’s a transition that never would’ve happened back in the early days, but now that there are no “official gates” into Los Alamos itself, it’s a possible one.

So where was the “other potential site” I mentioned earlier? I was kind of surprised to read in the Michnovicz book that Jemez Springs was considered to be a possible location for Los Alamos back in the day. It was accessible by road and via that road also had access to rail service. There were small rural ranching and pueblo communities to provide support staff and it’s certainly not readily accessible to the general public. Jemez Springs is also a place folks generally intend to visit and isn’t often stumbled upon by accident.

Eventually, the top brass chose Los Alamos over Jemez Springs because of the closeness of the mountains around the Jemez Springs location and lack of larger expanses of flat ground which were necessary for operations. It was decided the canyon location of the Springs was “too close” to provide the room necessary for the Manhattan Project’s needs.

So the next time you overhear a visitor or tourist commenting on the things we locals often wish we had too, (more restaurants, hotels, and shopping), offer a polite reminder that the lack of those things was literally what made Los Alamos THE perfect place to hide something so important and so vital to our history that people from all over the world still want to visit us over 80 years later! In a certain light, the lack of “modern conveniences” is exactly why they’ve come to Los Alamos.

However, what we do have is glorious weather, tons of sports, outdoor activities, four seasons of fun, great schools, community events, music, art, culture, and one of the most educated populations around. Kind of amazing, right? And when you’re ready to find yourself a “new to you” home or even a brand new home in Los Alamos, give me a call! There are some really great homes available here in Los Alamos and I would love to chat real estate in Los Alamos with you!