Page 54 - WTP Vol. IX #2

Oak Ridge (continued from preceding page)
Oak Ridge Tour Fact: Without preference, the chapel
served all the Protestant sects, Catholics, and Jews.
Westcott Photo #4: Square Through in Oak Ridge
Each Saturday night, in Oak Ridge, Bill Pierce calls squares for workers out for a good time at the Mid- town Rec Hall. Comfortable or clumsy, the couples keep following his lead. The city women have learned quickly from rural friends, but their men are as reluctant as boys at an eight-grade social. “Do-si-do,” Pierce calls, “now four ladies chain.” Behind him the fiddler has time to slip in a pinch of chew tobacco. Later, the fiddler has a sad solo when the dance turns slow and private, but now it’s the simple refrains, the sound of shuffling and laughter as Pierce works old- timey into his calls: Hey, all join hands and circle to the south, And get a little moonshine in your mouth. This night, Pierce switches to wartime patter: Now alle- mande left with a soldier’s wife. If we finish our work, we’ll save his life. During a break, the fiddler tells Pierce he had misread a gauge into red earlier in the week. Thankfully, correctible, the danger brief and only to himself. Luck is singing with a fiddle and bow. All move together now, and do-si-do. Right now there’s time enough to celebrate the unraveling of whatever’s feared, a near-rhyme for urgency’s solitaire with a single, mysterious lab task. Pierce calls three familiar couplets to close, and the fiddler holds the last note, then bows. There’s a necessity in everyone perform- ing the smallest share of production; any larger, it would be impossible to bear.
Oak Ridge Trivia: Besides a bridge club and a swim club, wartime Oak Ridge stabled horses enough for its residents to form a saddle club.
Absolutely, my father-in-law once said, we were right to drop the bomb, though he had been home for a year by the time Hiroshima and Nagasaki were decimated.
Bucknell University, twelve miles north of Susque- hanna, and so he is listed there as a notable alum.
Oak Ridge Tour Fact: In all of the dorms of the Secret City, the ironing rooms were for women only.
Westcott Photo #5: Hutments Come to Oak Ridge
In Oak Ridge, the races were separated at the gate, the Negroes packed off to hutments in Gamble Valley, their jobs, by design, requiring nothing more than dirty hands, heavy lifting, and huge humility. Hut- ments, they learn, are sixteen by sixteen packing boxes. In each wall, one window without glass or screens, boards available to shut out flies, mosqui- toes, rain, and light. What’s more, Negro husbands are not allowed to live with wives, and though they visit each other like prisoners, in the evenings the wives are widows, the night as formless as Genesis. It’s no surprise that more than half the Negroes refuse those cells, choose to commute daily from Knoxville, but always, like migrants, driven in by bus, rebroken like badly set, fractured bones, searched each morning for weapons, contraband, the rem- nants of reasons not to obey. Always, through the translucent, stained windows, they watch the guards gather as if woken by alarms set so low in frequency, they seem to insist from within like pulse.
Oak Ridge Trivia: Cigarettes were in such demand that long lines formed to purchase them.
Navigation is the art of determining geographic posi- tions by means of (a) combination of these 4 meth- ods. By any one or combination of methods the navigator determines the position of the airplane in relation to the earth.
About the time my uncle and “Dutch” VanKirk would have been ready to enter active duty, they would have read these lines by Marvin Peterson:
SILVER WINGS
“The Navigator Graduate”
I’ve won the right to wear these Silver Wings and see the many awesome sights of which the poet sings.
I’ve earned a place among the gods of flight under the sun’s and moon’s eternal light....
Dutch
When “Dutch” VanKirk was interviewed about his
“Dutch” VanKirk grew up in a town across the river from Selinsgrove, where Susquehanna University is located. Anticipating the war, he left school to enlist before Pearl Harbor, becoming an Air Force cadet
in October, 1941. After the war, VanKirk enrolled at
47