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Agnew was only 24 when he went up in the Great Artiste, but he had already seen a lot of the new world of split atoms. As a physics student straight out of college, he was taken by his professor to work with the people at the University of Chicago under Enrico Fermi. At the age of 21, Agnew was one of 43 people to witness the world's first man-made nuclear chain reaction, in a squash court under the football field. A few years later he was testing yield-measuring devices at Wendover Air Base in Utah, where...
...years, then, Harold Agnew's life tracked the atomic age--from Chicago to Los Alamos to Hiroshima to Los Alamos to La Jolla. His perspective on Hiroshima specifically is that a bomb had to be made...
...Britain. So we were all signing up. But a professor of mine said, 'Don't sign up in that program. I think something's happening where you can be much more useful.' That's all I knew. A couple of weeks later he said, 'You're going to Chicago...
...that knew anything about nuclear energy--nuclear physics. It was just in '38 that Enrico Fermi got the Nobel Prize for his work with neutrons, so it was all really brand new. What happened was that the heads of the few places--Ernest Lawrence at Berkeley, Arthur Compton at Chicago, John Dunning at Columbia--they contacted all their former graduates and said, 'Come on back.' They were told that if they knew any semiliterate undergraduates, bring 'em too. It's for the war. So my professor at Denver brought me, first to Columbia, then to Chicago, to see what...
...want to know how I got to Los Alamos? It was my wife's good looks. We were married in May 1942, and Beverly got a job as personal secretary to R.L. Doan, the administrative head of the project in Chicago. She also handled the whole security system in Chicago--21 years old, an English literature major. She was pretty too, and whenever Oppie came around, he liked to talk to her. Naturally, when Oppie was going to start up the lab in Los Alamos, he decided that he needed someone to work for him who had experience--like Beverly...