Peggy Bowditch was a young girl when she and her family moved to Los Alamos in 1943, where her father, Rear Admiral William Sterling “Deak” Parsons, was chosen by General Groves to become head of ordnance for the Manhattan Project:
I was eight when we moved there, and just short of eleven when we left after the war. My father had worked on the proximity fuse. Although he was a regular Navy officer, he had worked in science, from the beginning of World War II on. And General Groves picked him and he meshed with Oppenheimer, so he became the head of ordnance at Los Alamos.
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He was Captain, Navy Captain William Sterling Parsons, and later, after the bomb was dropped he became quickly Commodore and then Rear Admiral.
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A spy there under our very roof was our babysitter, Klaus Fuchs. He would come and take care of my sister and me, and since we were five and eight, we did not need much looking after. But we had a piano in the house and he loved to play the piano, so that was our babysitter. Then, when I got a little older, I was actually Peter Oppenheimer’s babysitter. I mean, you should not really trust a ten-year-old to babysit, but you know, with a guard walking around outside, what could go wrong?
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After the war, we certainly continued our friendship with the Oppenheimers and went up to Princeton, oh, it is hard to remember how often. But the friendship continued and it was fun to go and visit them. And I remember I was struggling with my geometry homework, and Kitty Oppenheimer was the one who helped me [Laughs].
And then in December of ’53 my father heard at a cocktail party that Oppie had been separated from his Q clearance, and he was so upset that he came home and began a heart attack, which he checked with the Encyclopedia Britannica, which was his idea of where you go. And it did not sound as if he had a heart attack. The next morning, Mother took him to Bethesda Hospital and he died, a week after his 52nd birthday.
And, of course, Oppie did lose his security clearance.
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General Groves would show up now and then, and he was a terrific administrator. I mean, he got the Pentagon built, and he was head of the Manhattan Project, but he was basically, I would describe his personality as bully. And there was an Army colonel, maybe, Whitney Ashbridge, who was, I think he was a graduate of West Point, and a very nice fellow, but Groves was a regular Army officer and Ashbridge was maybe engineering duty only. So Groves looked down on him. And one morning at inspection time, he and Groves were marching along, the soldiers were coming by, and Groves saw a piece of trash blowing and ordered Ashbridge to pick up the trash in front of the troops, which was really demeaning. I remember my father talking about what a nasty thing that was.
After the war, my parents would still see and they would play tennis with Groves and his daughter [Gwen Groves Robinson]. Groves was the kind of tennis player who did cuts and nasty shots. His daughter, Gwen, she was a good player. But, I remember General Groves asking me, he said, “Would you like me to send your father back to Los Alamos?”
Well, since I loved it, “Oh, yes, yes, yes.” Of course, he was just fooling, just, you know, typical bully type, taking advantage of a kid’s enthusiasm.
My father came and went. He went to Washington quite often. And Groves, I do not know whether he was nervous. For some reason, he was nervous about air transport, so you always travelled by train. That was considered safe, and of course, the trains were pretty nice then. I never got to leave Los Alamos, except to go to Albuquerque or Santa Fe.