Hi, I’m Jacob Erickson, I’m a recent graduate of the New Mexico Highlands University media arts department. Almost immediately following my World War 2 oral history project, I was recruited to do another oral history project; this time we’ll be focusing on what life was like in Los Alamos in the late 40’s – early 50’s, during the development of the A-bomb and what not. I’m really excited to begin work on this new project, hopefully developing my interview skills and further developing my filming/editing skills during the course of this project. I’ll be doing almost the exact same thing that I did over the summer, with the added tasks of coming up with interview questions and being the interviewer. For my WW2 project, I was doing strictly camera and technical work, so this is an exciting change to the process.
As with any oral history project, you need to do your research so that you have a basic foundation of knowledge of the subject that you’ll be covering. The research that I’ve been doing covers reading “Norris Bradbury’s chapter in Badash, et al, Reminiscences of Los Alamos, 1943–1945″ and also “Jon Hunner, Inventing Los Alamos: The Growth of an Atomic Community (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007).” I really enjoyed both of these reads, especially “Inventing Los Alamos”, as it was a great look into the life of the town back when it was first starting out till pretty much present day.
Did you know that Los Alamos practically popped into being in what seemed overnight? It took only a year to get the basic foundations up, housing settled (at least somewhat), some of the labs built and ready for research. Life in early Los Alamos was rough, housing shortages, water shortages, food shortages… all of that coupled with the fact that Los Alamos was really isolated, led to a tough lifestyle. Recruitment was relatively easy as scientists were drawn to the place due to the sheer amount of new research going on at the time. However, no matter how tough it was, the residents of Los Alamos made the best of it. They had house parties, eventually got a couple churches up and running, they had a commissary built, held dances, put on plays and theatre performances (which revolved around the research at the lab…so imagine some nuclear plays I suppose 😉 ), and so much more. Housing was always a concern, as numbers kept growing rapidly by the years.
As with the last blog, I’ll have interview snippets featuring our interviewees, along with a brief summary of the interviews and what I took from it. I hope you like what you see, and follow me throughout the project as this will be going on through next April, 2016. Thank you!
Los Alamos Oral HIstory Project 