Issue link: http://ihouse.uberflip.com/i/703833
31 There was a group of physics students, some of whom had been together at Cal Tech in a similar program. Ted Taylor was one. He became a physicist at Los Alamos, and he was instrumental in creating the bomb. In later years, he was horrified at what they had done — he spent the rest of his life trying to undo it. He worked mainly on proliferation, just wanting to get rid of anything nuclear because it was too easy to steal. Ted was a physics graduate student here, and then he went to Cornell, where he got his doctorate, and then to Los Alamos. There is a book about him by John McPhee called The Curve of Binding Energy. It is about nuclear problems, but it alternates with chapters about Ted; so it is a biography of Ted Taylor. The physicists who had been at Cal Tech spent a lot of time creating elaborate practical jokes to play on each other. High-tech people — they loved tricks like picking locks and stealing in at night to mess with clock faces, so that when the alarm went off it was: "Well, it is later than you think!" They would move things up from downstairs and throw things out of windows. Somebody tossed a watermelon into the courtyard and screamed. Dave Bishop, Matt Brady, Ted Taylor — they all belonged to that group. In those days there was maid service. I think they spent a lot of time playing tricks on the maids — not nasty tricks, but funny things. Were there divisions between people who served in the war and those who didn't? There was not a lot of reminiscing. I think people were getting on with things. They had put their careers on hold, their education on hold, and they wanted to put the war behind them. There were survivors, like Lottie; she didn't talk about it. My husband, Galen, did not talk about the war — he was on Okinawa — and he almost never talked about it. We probably should have. We had never heard about post-traumatic stress disorder. Maybe a lot of people suffered silently, and they could have used some help. Doug Powell saw a lot of action in Europe. He was a platoon leader, perhaps. He was not an officer, but during one fierce engagement, all of the officers were killed, and Doug took charge. He was commissioned in the field, and later he was awarded the Silver Star Medal. He was one who talked about some of his experiences. He told me that, near the end of the war, as he was driving a jeep, he saw a woman struggling as she walked along the road; she was obviously in great difficulty. He gave her a lift in his jeep. It turned out she was going into labor. So he took her to the village she was trying to reach, and made sure she received care. Years later Doug went back and visited. I think he was bicycling around, visiting some of the scenes and places where he had been during the war. He went back to the village, and as he walked into the village bar, somebody said: "That is the American! That is the American!!" They recognized him. And the woman's baby had been named after Doug. How did we spend leisure time? We spent a lot of time in the Dining Hall, eating and talking; and sitting out in the patio, having lunch and talking; and sitting in the Great Hall and talking….There were some places that we went for beer, like Vernetti's.