101-year-old atomic bomb worker returns to Oak Ridge, where she helped make history

Donna Smith

The Oak Ridger, Part of the USA TODAY NETWORK, online at oakridger.com

[Editor’s note: The following article was published in the Oak Ridger and the Knoxville News-Sentinel last week. It is being reprinted in the Clinton County News with permission of those publications.]

Before she was a Calutron Girl, she was a Rosie the Riveter.

Opal Talbott returned to Oak Ridge on Thursday to visit the town she left 77 years ago. In addition to a private afternoon tour of the Y-12 National Security Complex, where the young 21-year-old started working in 1943, she celebrated a birthday — her 101st. Relatives, friends and others helped her celebrate with a lunchtime party at the American Museum of Science and Energy.

Opal is one of Oak Ridge’s famed Calutron Girls, the title given to the young women charged with making sure the calutrons — a component in processing the uranium used to make the atomic bomb eventually dropped on Hiroshima, Japan — were operating effectively.

But don’t call her a Calutron Girl.

She quickly pointed out that she was a “cubicle operator.” Opal said she suspects the workers were never told they were calutron operators because the word “calutron” would have revealed too much information about the top-secret project going on in the area that would become Oak Ridge.

“I started in ‘43 and worked until the war was over,” Opal said.

Born in the small town of Albany, Kentucky, in a house where still lives by herself and where her father was born before her, Opal traveled to Akron, Ohio, to work in an aircraft plant for a year before she moved to Oak Ridge to work at Y-12. She was a riveter at the aircraft plant, she explained. Each of those women, too, had been given a fond name for their role in World War II — “Rosie the Riveter.”

Opal returned home to Albany to see two of her brothers before they left for Europe, where the war was raging. Her two brothers, twins, had joined the Army. Her nephews, Greg and Morris Talbott, sons of one of those brothers, said Opal heard about a war-related project in Tennessee while she was home in Kentucky. She and her older sister Nola got jobs with that project and moved to the government-run Secret City. The nephews said they thought Opal wanted to be involved in the war effort because of her brothers’ decisions to fight.

With fondness, Opal recalled her Y-12 co-workers and the other women workers who lived with her and her sister in the dormitory, including their “ house mother.”

She remembers a lot of that time.

There was no competition among the wartime workers, she said, because “everybody was in there to do the very best they could.”

“I knew it was something that was really important,” Opal said of the work she and the other workers were doing in Oak Ridge. “I knew it was something big.”

The secrecy behind the work clued her in, and the fact they were told to never talk about it. She said she didn’t know if she should tell, but that one of her brothers read a lot and he’d noticed during that time period that news of “splitting the atom” had suddenly disappeared from the publications he read.

Unlike the sunny skies she’d experienced on the two-hour trip from Albany to Oak Ridge that morning, Opal recalled the weather when she started working in Oak Ridge.

“It was a rainy spring,” she said, echoing the words of other ‘43ers. “It was as muddy as it could be.”

Wood was placed over the mud to form makeshift sidewalks for workers.

But other than the mud, she said, “It was nice, it really was.” She spoke of the “city” set up for the Manhattan Project workers, of going to the movie theater and church.

She returned home to Albany in 1945 after the war was over. Her nephews said their aunt, who never married, retired from a local bank more than 30 years ago. They were joined by longtime family friend Luther Conner, an Albany area attorney and the son of her best friend, to talk about how she actively gardens, lives independently, continues to drive and attend church. It was Luther, who one nephew described as a historian, who organized Opal’s birthday party and historic return trip to Oak Ridge, along with with the help of Alan Lowe and Matt Mullins of the American Museum of Science and Energy.

“Oh, there’s a world of difference,” Opal said when asked to talk about Oak Ridge then and now. “The other (1940s) was nice, we had nice places to eat.”

But now Oak Ridge is a city, she said, and back then “it was just sort of ‘countrified.’”

Opal showed the pin she received for her work in the war effort. She said she’s proud of the work she did.

“I feel like if we hadn’t have had the bomb, I don’t know if any of us would have been here now,” she said.

The Oak Ridger’s News Editor Donna Smith can be contacted at dsmith@oakridger.com. Follow her on Twitter @ridgernewsed.