house to alphabet-lettered house, installed pulleys and old tires on the ropes and devised their own wondrous contraptions so they could ride back and forth. They played tin-can telephone, ate out on special occasions at the local pancake house and hated Sunday school no more or less than kids anywhere. At night sometimes they’d drive with their dads to the by-pass highway west of the shelter belt, then stop the car and listen to coyotes howl at the desert moon. School life had its own hierarchies not always congruent with the way one’s dad ranked at the Area. But kids knew who lived in the south end and who in the new and more prosperous northern section (whose managerial occupants and proximity to the Columbia earned it the name “The Gold Coast”). As in any company town, the boys would warn each other teasingly that “his dad’s a top boss” when they got into arguments in the playground. When a major strike threatened in 1961, children of union craftspeople and of engineers and managers knew enough about who was on which side to spark major arguments. It was convenient that the town had so many young families, because kids would find a dozen playmates their own age on every block. Their friends came from reputable stock, of course, as the town had no “other” side of the tracks and poor people were seen only in magazines or if the kids were taken to Seattle or Portland. Richland’s few blacks were, in the words of an engineer’s son who grew up here and left, “treated like pets.” Although the town had a dozen Jewish families — half scientists and engineers, half doctors, dentists and merchants — Richland’s children generally assumed all kids were Christian. With its inhabitants overwhelmingly middle class, dedicated to their careers, well educated (whether in conventional institutions or through their own efforts) and assimilated, parents considered Richland “an ideal family town.” In a sense it was, because the parents who created this place in a context of wartime fear did everything possible to safeguard their children against all privation, danger and uncertainty. One father prohibited his daughter from watching “Twilight Zone” or “Outer Limits” — not because the shows were trashy, but because, like horror movies, they might lead to nightmares. Although it was Each job offered challenges to ingenuity, craftsmanship and skill. Whatever the mysterious product being created here, its use would help defeat the barbaric enemy now threatening the world. safe to play outside even at night, parents were careful always to ask their kids where they were going and who they were seeing. The wives worked as hard at raising healthy, well-adjusted children as their husbands did at making plutonium at the reactors. Just like everywhere else, the Hanford kids dove beneath their school desks in surprise blast protection “drop drills.” But here teachers often told them that their town’s elm- and maple-lined streets were among the Kremlin’s top military targets. One engineer’s son had a junior high math teacher who showed government films about Hiroshima, Bikini, Eniwetok and White Sands. He talked of the weapons’ destructive power, savoring each detail of melted eyes or bodies so vaporized that all that remained of them were shadows burnt into the bridges or streets where they’d been walking. He said there were secret Japanese films so horrible the government would let no one see them. Then he switched his tone and, like a preacher letting the children choose between damnation and salvation, explained the ease of recovering from nuclear attack by brushing fallout off food containers, drinking water from toilet bowls and holing up reading books and magazines until it was safe to come out. Because only the most visionary built shelters, and because the authorities took seriously the notion of Hanford being specially targeted, the school kids were caravanned in practice evacuations (some went on school buses, some were driven by their mothers) to presumably safe rendezvous points in the desert 20 miles to the south or in the Horse Heaven Hills behind Kennewick. One woman’s son woke up crying the night after a class on civil defense and asked her, “What about the cow?” and “How do you know you’ll find me?” She soothed his fear by assuring him that the real bombings wouldn’t happen anyway — but that if they did all problems were planned for and anticipated. Another boy was reassured by his precocious 8-year- old sister that he shouldn’t worry about the Russians seeing the sun reflect off their new yellow Buick, because they could always cover the car with peanut butter “and then eat the peanut butter if we get hungry.” In any case Hanford developed in an era when Americans all across the country returned from the fighting and moved into suburban garden cities secured by government loans and connected by endless new highways. They left behind, as did the atomic pioneers, the extended networks of relatives and ethnic kin that had supported them in immigrant days. The smells of Sara Lee and Swanson’s replaced those of home- cooked lasagna and lutefisk, old country history was no longer even mentioned and the old languages no longer taught. The trimming of hedges and manicuring of lawns replaced agricultural labors. Dissent became buried in the National Labor Relations Board institutionalization of the union movement and the postStalin backlash and McCarthy-era suppression of the left. The relics of preindustrial culture were given final burial by television screens showing only a nostalgia-laden past or clean domesticated present. ■ DAILY LIFE AT THE WORLD’S LARGEST NUCLEAR COMPLEX IS UKE LIFE ANYWHERE ELSE That's Meat’s So Scary! IF YOU HAVE CHAMPAGNE TASTE AND A BEER BUDGET . . . TRY A WINDFALL CLOTHING HOUSEWARES PARTY SUPPLIES FABRIC Specializing in factory overruns, closeouts and irregulars. 4712 University Way NE Seattle 522-1220 • open 7 days a week • NUCLEAR CULTURE is the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in southeastern Washington State—site of plutonium production for nuclear warheads, home of nuclear power reactors, and an area for both military and commercial nuclear research. Nuclear Culture is the story of the people who live and work there. “Paul Loeb’s portrait of a nuclear weapons and power community is as brilliant as it is disturbing. The dangers of banality that threaten our sanity and existence have rarely been so vividly offered.” — STUDS TERKEL, author of Working "Nuclear Culture is invaluable to citizens organizing around nuclear weapons and power facilities.” —BILLSIMPICH, member of the Abalone Alliance fundraising collective Nuclear Culture may remind you of Alice in Wonderland as if written by George Orwell. For anyone involved in anti-nuclear initiatives, Nuclear Culture is essential reading. For those who should be involved, Nuclear Culture is a fascinating, natural starting point. You can order Nuclear Culture right now, using this coupon. Your purchase will help raise money for the anti-nuclear movement. Send for your copy today. nUCLEAR CULTURE LIVING AND WORKING IN THE WORLD’S LARGEST A iom ic COmPLEX PAUL LOEB Send Your Order To: PAUL LOEB 1500 Grand Ave. Seattle, WA 98122 Please send me____copy(ies) of Nuclear Culture at $13.95 per copy, plus $1.50 for postage and handling. Enclosed is my check for the total amount payable to: Name____ Address__ City_____ State____ Zip. Clinton St. Quarterly 11
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