In May of 1945, a tall, lanky private reluctantly boarded a train in Lemoore, California for a two-day ride toward an uncertain future. For the previous four months he’d been assigned to a desk job shuffling papers—a task unrelated to his academic credentials: a BS and MS in Mathematics. Much about the private was atypical. At age 24 he was married, had a son, and had accepted a tenure-track position at Nebraska Wesleyan, offered to him despite his lacking a PhD; the war had reduced the available number of traditionally qualified candidates for the job. But when his educational deferments ended in the summer of 1944, and he knew his induction in the military was imminent he took leave of his teaching job, found temporary work at Goodyear making self-sealing gas tanks for aircraft (in case the tank was punctured by an enemy round), and waited for his orders to return to Minnesota for induction into the military. Those orders arrived in September of 1944 just as the fall semester was beginning.

 

After Basic Training at Buckley Field, Colorado, and his subsequent assignment to the 4th Air Force in California, the private’s orders at Lemoore Army Air Force base were cryptic: On or about May 21, 1945 he was to travel to Santa Fe, NM, by train without dependents. Upon arrival he was to call the provided phone number, 0015, for further instructions. He didn’t know where he’d end up, what he’d be doing, or if he’d ever see his wife and son again. Germany had surrendered two weeks earlier and focus was shifting to the war in the Pacific, where progress was slow and difficult; alarming rumors circulated at Lemoore, and every other military base in the world, of the inevitable Allied invasion of the Japanese mainland. Thousands of the military and civilians would die, especially since in March 1945, Japan had declared all civilians (males aged 15–60, females aged 17–40) as military combatants, though the newly conscripted soldiers had no uniforms.¹ If and when Allied troops landed on Japan’s shore, they would not be able to discern the difference between military and civilians. 

 

The private also knew FBI agents had visited his hometown of Lake Wilson, MN, asking questions about his character, his trustworthiness, his loyalty to the United States.   

 

Before departing Lemoore Field he’d asked the base Assignment Officer about military installations near Santa Fe: While Bruns Hospital tended to the mental and physical health of returning war veterans, the hospital had no use for a mathematician of his caliber, and no known military installation existed near Santa Fe.   

 

As he stepped off the train that May evening at the station in Lamy, NM, nearly twenty miles south of Santa Fe, he was likely the only G.I. on the platform. If the private looked to the southwest of the Lamy Station platform across the Galisteo Basin, he’d have seen the Sandia Mountains haloed by the lights of Albuquerque tucked in the valley to the west. The Sandias, a range so large it generates its own weather, seems to rise out of the desert floor for no particular reason except as a certain reminder of the independence of rock and geologic time from the current vicissitudes of human wars; yet, even old Sandia Crest was about to be shaken by the human efforts at work on the other side of the Rio Grande valley, just a few miles north.

 

After a bus ride to Santa Fe, the private found his way to the historic LaFonda Hotel on the plaza where, per his orders, he dialed the number. The voice on the other end immediately interrogated the private: Who are you? Why are you calling? How’d you get this number? The private explained he had orders to call this number, and he was summarily transferred to another interrogator who asked the same questions. Again, the private explained his orders, and again he was transferred to another respondent. The private introduced himself, “I’m Clint Gass. Private Clinton Gass. I have orders to call this number.” The party on the other end of the line finally confirmed those orders and his expected arrival in Santa Fe, then instructed him to be at a specific intersection on the Plaza at exactly 11:00 p.m. and a car would pick him up. Private Gass hung up, sat down in the lobby of the LaFonda, and immediately wrote a letter home to his wife Myrtle. It’d be the last letter he wrote during his military service that wasn’t subject to government scrutiny and censorship. As Clint recalled years later, “I told her I didn’t have a clue as to where I’d be stationed but it was now even more evident to me that there was a high degree of secrecy surrounding my entire assignment procedure. I assured her that even if I didn’t answer her questions or tell her what I was doing, and even if my letters sounded strange, I still loved her.” 

 

Had Private Gass looked past Sante Fe that night to the northwest, he’d have seen dim lights glowing atop the Pajarito Plateau jutting eastward out of the Jemez Mountains. Those were the lights of Los Alamos, home of the former Ranch School for Boys, and high on that hill members of Project Y were building a weapon the likes of which most of humankind could not imagine. What was initially conceived of in 1942 as a collection of perhaps one hundred scientists working on “The Hill” had now swelled to nearly 6000 military and civilian men and women, all working toward a single purpose. Private Gass was among the last to be summoned to The Hill.

 

Just five years earlier, in the spring of 1940, the frozen north country of Minnesota yawned, stretched and yielded to longer days and warmer temperatures, its ice-locked rivers and lakes slowly cracking, breaking apart, then easing its slushy waters toward Lake Superior, slowly at first, but with increasing speed and urgency as the flows reached the north shore waterfalls above the great lake.  

 

Also responding to the urgency of spring were three fraternity brothers from Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, MN, some 220 miles to the south, speeding toward Lake Superior, Duluth in particular, on a mission. Their destination: The Flame Restaurant, “the Northwest’s most spectacular nightclub.” Behind the recently remodeled Art Deco façade, the restaurant sported “large picture windows that looked out over a garden of ‘trees and shrubs, a waterfall, trout pool, and stuffed wild animals.’” Inside, guests were treated to “‘strolling musicians, a cigarette girl’ and [c]offee served by ‘The Sultan of the Second Cup, a man wearing a turban and curl-toed shoes.’”² The three fraternity brothers were looking for romance and The Flame seemed like the right place to find it. One of the fraternity brothers, Clint Gass, explained decades later, “Every three months we had a new girlfriend and the three of us went up to Duluth with our [current] girlfriends and looked for new ones.”  

 

Clinton B. Gass was born on a farm near Lake Wilson, MN, on January 9, 1920 to Frederick and Elvira Gass, the third of three children: An older sister, Chloris, and a brother who died before Clint was born. A Boy Scout in his youth, credited with saving a life using skills he learned as a Scout, Clint was taller and smarter than many young men his age, smart enough to earn a scholarship to Gustavus Adolphus, a top liberal arts college in St. Peter, MN, where he graduated magna cum laude. Clint’s father had survived the Depression because he resisted the encouragement of other farmers in Murray County during the 1920s to expand his farm by adding more tillage. With little debt, Frederick was able to maintain his farm and, in 1936, send Clint off to college with the assurance Clint would still work the farm during his summer breaks.

 

Inside The Flame Restaurant that April evening in 1940, Myrtle Evelyn Brewer sat with fellow St. Luke nursing students in one of the “custom-made, semi-circular booths,” newly introduced to Duluth society. A few of the nurses at the table had just returned from their third quarter studies at St. Peter state mental hospital; Myrtle and her cohorts were about to begin their fourth quarter training in psychiatric nursing at St. Peter. While the fraternity brothers might have been prowling for potential girlfriends, it’s unlikely Myrtle was terribly impressed by whatever airs the young men chose to put on: She was too smart and too tough.  

 

Myrtle was born on Sept. 27, 1919 in a log cabin near Baudette, MN, just west of International Falls, across the Rainy River from Canada. Winter temperatures routinely dip into the –30s, the record is –51. At less than 3 1/2 pounds, Myrtle was bundled in a shoebox and placed by the fireplace to stay warm. Myrtle, the third child of Harry and Hazel Brewer, survived the winter and beyond. After the family moved to Duluth, Myrtle’s father found work with the steel mill until he was severely injured after being struck by molten steel. U. S. Steel was notorious for busting unions in the early 1900s: Without the protection of a union or a pension, Henry was unable to work.³ Driven by family need, Myrtle graduated early from high school, first in her class. She then lied about her age to gain admission into the nursing program at St. Luke’s Hospital in Duluth, where she again graduated first in her class. Still, that night at The Flame, she must have seen something of interest in the tall farm boy. A few weeks later in St. Peter, MN, where Myrtle was completing her final quarter of nursing training at the St. Peter Hospital, and Clint was completing his junior year of college less than a mile away at Gustavus Adolphus, the two had their first date at the State Hospital insane asylum, later known as the Minnesota Security Hospital.

 

The romance continued through the summer, apparently breaking Clint’s three- month time limit on girlfriends, as Myrtle made the long trek from Duluth to Wilson Lake to visit Clint on the family farm. Clint’s father Frederick enjoyed her visits and even tempered his language and joke-telling if he knew Myrtle was within earshot. Clint returned to Gustavus Adolphus in the fall while Myrtle, now a registered nurse, found work in the nursery at St. Luke Hospital, back in Duluth. Their attraction to one another survived the fall and winter and several visits back and forth between Duluth and St. Peter added tinder to the fire.  

 

In the spring of 1941, as Clint approached his graduation from Gustavus Adolphus,  he applied for graduate assistantships at Universities of Nebraska and South Dakota, but received no offers before his final term ended. He returned home to work on the farm that summer, and just one week before the fall term began, he secured a job in Balaton, MN, teaching high school physics, biology, chemistry, general science, and junior business training, but no mathematics. Of his qualifications to teach junior business training Clint said, “I didn’t even know how to fold a business letter.” On the first day of class at Balaton, Clint received a telegram from the University of Nebraska announcing his application for a graduate assistantship had been accepted. He wasn’t Nebraska’s first choice: The assistantship was previously awarded to another student who was subsequently drafted. After securing his contractual release from Balaton (the superintendent of the school system was also a Gustavus Adolphus graduate) Clint accepted the appointment at Nebraska. On day two at Balaton, he received a special delivery letter from the University of South Dakota offering yet another assistantship.

 

Clint set up residence at Lincoln, NE, in September 1941, teaching undergraduates while also pursuing the graduate degree in mathematics. On October 17, Myrtle arrived from Duluth; they were married the following day by a justice of the peace at the Lincoln courthouse. Two court employees stood as witnesses. After the ceremony, as the newlyweds walked down the courthouse steps, Myrtle stopped and asked Clint, “Can I have my ring now?” surmising “I suppose the judge thought we couldn’t afford a wedding.” Clint confirmed,“We couldn’t.” The honeymoon consisted of taking the elevator to the top of the Nebraska State Capitol building to “gaze over Lincoln.” Mrs. Seifert, the Gass’s landlady, provided a few dollars as a wedding gift to ensure the young couple had a good meal that evening. Just three weeks later the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the United States was at war.

 

Clint taught at the University of Nebraska for two years, finishing his master’s degree midway through the second year. Myrtle worked as supervisor of the nursery at Lincoln General Hospital. Fred, the Gass’s first son, was born in April 1943. Later that year, Clint accepted a position as Associate Professor at Wesleyan University in Lincoln, teaching for one year; however, in the spring of 1944, knowing that his deferments would not be renewed, he resigned his professorship in anticipation of being called up for military service. Clint had registered with The National Roster of Scientific and Specialized Personnel, a database administered by the Civil Service Commission and the National Resources Planning Board.  According to records held by the Library of Congress, the organizations utilized a “horizontal sorting machine as an aid in the exacting task of picking just the right combination of specifications. This machine selects from the prepared index cards the men who have the required specifications such as a definite specialization in one of the engineering fields, familiarity with certain languages, locations, marital status, ethnicity, age group, extent of education, etc.”⁴ Somewhere in the collective war effort against the Axis powers, somebody needed one more mathematician.  Clint and Myrtle wouldn’t wait long before the sorting machine spat out Clint’s card and he was called to active duty.

 

Clint was registered for the draft in Minnesota, so he had to return to Minneapolis for his induction into the Armed Forces at Fort Snelling. Clint recalled it was the first time he’d ridden on a train; Myrtle and Fred accompanied Clint back to Minnesota and a pattern was established that if the family could be together, they would. Shortly after the induction ceremony Clint traveled back to Lincoln before heading to Colorado for six weeks of basic training. Myrtle and Clint were on the same train with Fred, who was then 18 months old, and was hanging out with his father in one of the Pullman sleeper cars reserved for troops while Myrtle slept in a passenger car near the front of the train. At 4 a.m., Fred decided he’d had enough of hanging out with Dad and began to yell “I want my mommy!” at the top of his lungs. At the Lincoln, NE, train station, Myrtle and Fred stepped off the train, likely to the delight of those soldiers who’d been awakened by Fred’s early morning hollering. Clint continued on to Colorado for Basic Training.

 

Eight months later, on May 22, 1945 at 11 p.m., Private Gass was standing as ordered at the corner of West Palace Avenue and Lincoln Street in Santa Fe. A sedan pulled up, the door opened, and Clint climbed into the car. Recounting it later, he remembered little of the conversation. He didn’t ask where he was going and the driver didn’t volunteer details. Clint remembered crossing the Rio Grande River in Espanola, a small town north of Santa Fe, then riding across a long flat stretch of highway before the car started up a steep and curvy mountain road. After about 40 minutes, the car pulled up next to a military gate house. The guard demanded Clint’s orders, and after checking the papers carefully, waved the car through. After a mile or so, the car pulled up to a second gatehouse. Again, Clint produced his orders for inspection before being waved through. Finally, the car arrived at a building on the west side of the campus. Clint was escorted into a barracks and taken to an empty bunk. He sat on the side of the bed, and while he had some idea of where he was geographically, he still didn’t know why.

 

After a sleepless night, Clint crawled out of his bunk and wandered outside. He still didn’t know where he was but “boy, was it beautiful.” And he was right. With an elevation of 7,320 feet, Los Alamos sits nearly 2,000 feet above the Rio Grande Valley below, but also 3,000 feet below the peaks of the Jemez Mountains and the Valles Caldera to the west and north, a landscape forged in the sediments of ancient oceans, ripped and torn by volcanic eruptions, relentless winds and torrential floods; a landscape both beautiful and terrifying. The view above the Rio Grande Valley, a parched flat of sand and clay holding a tiny ribbon of water, dotted by pinyon, juniper, cholla, and sage, and ringed by mountain peaks of subalpine forest, inspires momentary perceptions of grandeur. It’s as if somehow all that is viewed can be held, cradled; but the scale of the view, horizon to horizon, can quickly reveal a sense of insignificance, a reminder of just how small a human can be when placed in such a large, majestic cathedral of rock. These are the New Mexico landscapes of photographers Alfred Steiglitz and Ansel Adams. Painter Georgia O’Keefe, just 30 miles up the road as the crow flies, was painting her mountain, Cerro Padernal, from below the fire red and orange cliffs of Ghost Ranch. Today along the valley, Tewa pueblos line the river on sacred land, Pojoaque, Santa Clara, San Ildefonso, Ohkay Owingeh, and Tesuque. The residents here are the oldest in the region, dating back to 1200 c.e., and this is the region where Robert Oppenheimer found solace and respite in the years before the Manhattan Project existed, prompting him to suggest this location for his most important task.

 

During his first day of processing in the Special Engineering Detachment, 9812th Technical Service Unit, Clint received “an impressive security talk,” so impressive he remembered the details decades later. He was not allowed to request a transfer or apply for Officers Candidate School; in fact, he was told he wasn’t going anywhere and that he’d be stationed at this location for the duration of the war.  Having no desire to ship out to the Pacific, Clint said this information was “music to my ears.”    

 

He was not to discuss his work with anyone outside the “tech area—a well-guarded set of buildings in which . . . offices and some of the labs were located.” And if he felt compelled to violate this restriction, he’d be “sent somewhere where [he] could talk all [he] wanted to and no damage would be done.” Clint recalled he “never really wanted to find out where that ‘somewhere’ was.”

 

One particular moment during his orientation left the greatest impression on Clint.  He still hadn’t been briefed on what the Los Alamos mission actually entailed, that is, what he’d be working on, but was assured that “If our project is successful, the war will end within a month.” Clint found that assurance “hard to believe,” but as it turned out, the projected difference between project success and the end of the war was nearly exact.

 

During Clint’s first day of processing he was instructed to “list all the names and addresses of all the people I would be writing to and being informed that all my outgoing letters would be posted unsealed so they could be microfilmed and passed by the Army censor. Also, my incoming mail would be opened and [micro]filmed.”   Project members were forbidden from mentioning “last names, distances, and the word ‘physicist.’” Outgoing letters that “did not meet the censor’s approval were returned with a slip enclosed indicating what rule had been broken.” Security on The Hill was of the utmost importance; FBI agents were rumored to be “shoulder to shoulder” in Santa Fe bars and clubs lest some Army engineer have one too many drinks and let slip the secret mission. In the midst of this heightened security and oversight, Clint received his first letter from Myrtle, addressed to his P.O. box in Santa Fe (no mail could be addressed to Los Alamos). She included this inquiry: “By the way, did you end up at Los Alamos, the old boy’s school north of Santa Fe? I hear that the Army Engineers have a super-secret project going on up there.”   Clint was convinced he, “and possibly both of us, would be executed for mailing secret information!” 

 

But executions weren’t forthcoming for either Clint or Myrtle. Shortly after Clint departed Lemoore, Myrtle took Fred to the USO club on base, and another woman noticed Clint’s absence. When she inquired where Clint had been transferred and Myrtle responded with Santa Fe, the woman, who had previously lived north of Santa Fe, concluded Clint had been sent to Los Alamos, where seemingly everyone living in the Rio Grande Valley knew the Army had a “super-secret project” in the works. The new road up the mesa, hundreds of Army tractor trailers hauling loads up The Hill, and the influx of military troops through the Lamy train station who were subsequently processed through one office on the Santa Fe plaza, were hard to miss. What area residents didn’t know was what the Army was building.

 

During his second day of processing, Clint learned exactly why he’d been ordered to The Hill. Clint was assigned to Group T-2 of the Theoretical Physics Division, headed by Dr. Hans Bethe, who in 1967 would be awarded the Nobel Prize. One of several divisions, each with its own charge, the Theoretical Division was “formed to develop nuclear and hydrodynamical criteria for design of the atomic bomb and to predict its detailed performance. At first, most of its effort was devoted to calculating the critical mass and nuclear efficiency.”⁵ By May of 1945 when Clint arrived, Group T-2, headed by Dr. Robert Serber of the University of Illinois, was primarily concerned with “‘special problems arising from sphere multiplication experiments’ where calculations had to account for the variation of the average cross sections after the initial and each following collision of neutrons emerging from a central source.”⁶ In short, the shape and size of the container relative to the amount of fissionable material had a direct impact on whether critical mass could be maintained to support a nuclear explosion. Group T-2 was composed of four civilian and four enlisted scientists; seven other groups, roughly 75 civilian and enlisted scientists, completed the Theoretical Division.   

 

In Clint’s recollection published by the Atomic Heritage Foundation, he recalls his interview with Serber who, “outlined our task in broad terms and told me the current state of development of ‘the gadget’—a term always used instead of ‘the bomb.’”⁷ Clint was also instructed to check out a copy of The Los Alamos Primer from the on-site library, a collection of Serber’s lectures given to orient new scientific members of the project. The document was declassified in 1965 and while “the gadget” was used in conversation among members of the Los Alamos community, Serber’s language in the stated objective of the project is more direct: “The object of the project is to produce a practical military weapon in the form of a bomb in which the energy is released by a fast neutron reaction in one or more of the materials known to show nuclear fission.” Serber goes on to explain the challenges of maintaining a Fast Neutron Chain Reaction: “In an actual finite setup, some neutrons are lost by diffusion out through the surface. There will be, therefore, a certain size of, say, a sphere for which the surface losses of neutrons are just sufficient to stop the chain reaction. This radius depends on the density. As the reaction proceeds the material tends to expand, increasing the required minimum size faster than the actual size increases. The whole question of whether an effective explosion is made depends on whether the reaction is stopped by this tendency before an appreciable fraction of the active material has fished."⁸

 

In one family recording from 1998 Clint explains his specific task at Los Alamos, confirming the focus of Group T-2 in 1945:  “I remember one problem I worked on—it was called . . . shape factors. They knew if you had a sphere of critical material—how big [would] the sphere have to be . . . when it would start sustaining a chain reaction. But [if] you distorted this [fissionable material] from a sphere, the same amount of material wouldn’t be critical. So, for example, if you had an ellipsoid, how big would the ellipsoid have to be? How much critical material would that take? I remember Peter Lax and I were working on this together and Peter said, ‘Hey, we ought to expand this in a series of Legendre polynomials’ . . . I knew what a series was but that was about all.” Of Lax, who was nineteen at the time, Clint later wrote, “Even at that tender age Peter knew more mathematics than I learned in a lifetime.” Lax would return to school after the war to finish his formal schooling, later serving as the Director of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. In 2005 he received the prestigious Abel Prize. Dr. Richard Smock, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at DePauw, recalled meeting Dr. Lax at a conference in the 1980s. When Smock mentioned he’d been hired by Clint Gass at DePauw, Lax “lit up” and fondly recalled his friendship with Clint and their days working together on the project.

 

Shortly after Clint settled in at Los Alamos, Myrtle and Fred made their way from Lemoore, CA, to Albuquerque, NM. Rules forbade spouses and children of lower ranking military men assigned to Los Alamos from living within 100 miles of the site; Albuquerque was 105 miles by road. In June 1945, Clint secured a three-day pass so he and Myrtle could look for an apartment. After three days of “beating the streets” of Albuquerque, they hadn’t found a place to live. So while Myrtle and Fred, both sick at this point, stayed in a hotel, Clint hitchhiked back to Los Alamos to plead his case for an additional three day pass, which was granted. The family managed to finally find an apartment where Myrtle would take care of the landlord’s son during the day, along with her son Fred. Clint began a weekend routine of taking the bus from Los Alamos to Santa Fe, hitching a ride on Friday evening to Albuquerque, and then heading back to Los Alamos on Monday morning around 3 a.m.  

 

Up on The Hill day-to-day activities retained some semblance of military decorum.  Clint recalls morning calisthenics being canceled for the enlisted scientists, though the calisthenics for all other enlisted men were “fun to watch.” Weekly inspections of the barracks continued. Enlisted men were required to wear uniforms and prohibited from possessing civilian clothes unless, as Clint notes in his recollections for the Atomic Heritage Foundation, the G.I. “was off on a mission of some sort” to “Oak Ridge, Hanford, Washington. DC, or some other place.” On departure day the G.I. “would dress in a brand new civilian suit, shirt, tie—the works,” signaling to all present that another secret mission was about to begin.   

 

World events on the weekend of July 14 and 15, 1945, indicated movement toward normalcy even as the war in the Pacific continued. Allied troops were suddenly permitted to fraternize with German women. London’s West End no longer had blackout restrictions. Byron Nelson won the PGA Championship in Dayton, Ohio.   The U.S. Navy destroyed a steel factory in Muroran, Japan, and a Japanese destroyer was sunk.⁹ On Monday, July 16, 1945, the world was about to change.

 

Clint spent that weekend in Albuquerque with Myrtle and Fred. As was his weekend routine, he awakened on Monday at 3:00 a.m, put on his uniform, and headed to the highway to hitch a ride north to Santa Fe where he’d catch a bus to Los Alamos. Clint knew the Trinity test was scheduled for early that morning, 4 a.m. to be precise, but storms had raged through much of the state on Sunday evening and into Monday morning. July is monsoon season in Northern New Mexico; 75 percent of the annual rainfall accumulates in the three-month stretch between July and September. Clint recounts watching the sky on his way back to Santa Fe, not knowing exactly what to expect or what he might hear or see. The highway north out of Albuquerque follows the Rio Grande River Valley; the Sandia and Manzano Mountains buffer the valley to the east, while White Sands to the south, the Trinity test site, is buttressed on the west by the San Andres Mountains, and the Sacramento Mountains to the east. Clint waited as he rode north in the passenger seat. “It didn’t go and it didn’t go. Well, I wondered what happened. Of course, there was a very bad storm and that delayed the shot.” But at exactly 5:29:45 a.m., Clint was somewhere on the road between Albuquerque and Santa Fe when “the whole sky lit up just like the sun had been turned on for a split second. Then I knew that not only had they tried it, but that it was successful.”    That moment signaled the countdown to the end of the war.

 

Clint arrived back at Los Alamos and immediately wrote to Myrtle. “Save all the newspapers from this week,” he said, without telling her why. While the “[t]he shock broke windows 120 miles away and was felt by many at least 160 miles away,” the U.S. Army’s official line was that a munitions storage area in the Alamogordo Bombing Range had accidentally exploded.¹⁰

 

Little Boy, a uranium, gun-type weapon (essentially firing a uranium bullet into a uranium target to ignite the fission process) was dropped over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Fat Man, a plutonium, implosion-style weapon like the one tested at Trinity, was exploded over Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. On August 14, 1945, the Japanese announced their surrender, and then formalized that surrender on September 2, 1945 aboard the U.S.S. Missouri.

 

With the war ended, restrictions on dependents relaxed, so around the first of October 1945 Clint, Myrtle and Fred moved into a small adobe house on Nanita Street in Santa Fe. The home had an indoor hand pump for water, an outdoor toilet, and Clint recalled only buying one hundred pounds of heating coal at a time “because I was always hoping I’d get my discharge and I didn’t want to leave all that coal behind.” While the mission of building a successful atomic bomb was completed at Los Alamos, enlisted men still needed to earn enough points to be discharged through their Adjusted Service Rating Score. A single point was awarded for each month of service, five points for each campaign, five points for a medal of valor or for merit, five points for a purple heart, and twelve points for each dependent child up to three dependent children. Initially, 85 points were necessary for separation, though that number was lowered to 50 by the end of 1945.¹¹ And while the U.S. Military processed-out over four million soldiers and sailors between September and December of 1945, Clint was still woefully short on points.

 

With little else for the enlisted men at Los Alamos to do, classes were set up with academic credit awarded through the University of California. Clint took a course in Electronics and Magnetism taught by Robert Brode who was “put in charge of a team that was tasked with the creation of a fuse for an atomic bomb that would cause the bomb to detonate at a certain height.”¹² Clint notes that other “heady” members of the Los Alamos project also taught courses: Hans Bethe, Nobel Prize Winner, taught Electromagnetic Theory; Enrico Fermi, Noble Prize Winner, Associate Director of Los Alamos, taught Neutron Physics; Edward Teller, Group Leader, Father of the Hydrogen Bomb, offered a course in Elementary Quantum Mechanics. 

 

In fact, many of Clint’s coworkers had notable careers after the war. Richard Bellman, also an enlisted man, was the inventor of dynamic programming and according to Clint, “For years, hardly an issue of Mathematical Reviews appeared without one or more entries under Bellman’s name.” John Kemeny was a co-inventor of BASIC (Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), and served as an assistant to Albert Einstein before building and chairing a mathematics program at Dartmouth where he eventually became University President.

 

One of the theoretical physicists garnering no respect from Clint was Klaus Fuchs of Group 1, Theoretical Physics Division, who was supplying Russia with classified information. Another was Sgt. David Greenglass, the younger brother of Ethel Rosenberg. Clint recalls, “When I was commuting between Los Alamos and Albuquerque on weekends, usually hitchhiking, Greenglass was making the same trips. However, he was carrying classified information to his sister and brother-in-law, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who in turn passed it along to agents of the Soviet Union."¹³

 

After writing to Benjamin F. Schwartz, President of Nebraska Wesleyan, and asking for a support letter to accelerate his separation date, Clint was finally able to secure a discharge. Dr. Schwartz had been holding Clint’s teaching position for him. Once the discharge was granted, presumably with Dr. Schwartz’s advocacy, Clint traveled to Fort Bliss, El Paso, TX, where all members of the 9812th Technical Service Unit at Los Alamos were sent for out-processing. The staff at Fort Bliss were cautioned not to ask too many questions of unit members.

​

During his out-processing, Clint was given the option of joining the inactive Army reserves with the promise of an eventual military retirement income. Clint recalls, “they really put pressure on us to stay . . . you couldn’t go wrong there. Your time would accumulate, you didn’t have to go to drills! Just accumulate time and then when you’re retired you would have a military retirement income.” But Clint refused the offer, recalling, “I said ‘no boy!’ Am I glad I did because when the Korean conflict came along the first ones called were the inactive reservists and they were taken right out of school. I had them in my classes . . . a lot of these fellows . . . they were about my age—they were drafted earlier than I was and hadn’t finished, so they came back to school.” On February 16, 1946, Corporal Gass was discharged.   

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With his discharge papers in hand, Clint hitched a ride in a 1936 Cord, a sharp- looking roadster with front wheel drive, from El Paso to Santa Fe “where my pregnant wife and son were sitting on our bags, in our little adobe hacienda.”   Nebraska Wesleyan was holding his teaching position for him, the spring term had already begun, and so they headed back to Lincoln. Among his possessions on that trip home was a small, radioactive chunk of green trinitite, sand melted into glass by the explosion, from ground zero at the Trinity test site at White Sands. Also, there was a letter signed by Robert Oppenheimer, thanking him for his contribution to the effort, noting his assignment as a “Junior Scientist computer.” The letter continues with “Although it was not always possible to assign you work in the field in which you were trained, you have completed your assignment well and have in this way contributed to problems the solution of which was essential to the design of a workable atomic bomb. Your work has always been cheerfully and accurately performed. Very truly yours, J. R. Oppenheimer.”  

 

A second son, Ken, was born in June 1946. Clint recalled, “One other nice thing we got out of the Army—free—was our second son. There was a nice program called the Enlisted Men’s Maternal and Infant Care so when the war was over in September or August we figured this is a good time to have our second child and since I was an enlisted man we had the finest care and after I was discharged, got home, the baby was born and the first year the pediatrician’s bill was paid for us so it was a good deal.” 

 

Over the next eight years, Clint taught during the fall and spring semesters. In the summer months, he took courses, funded by the G.I. Bill, at the University of Nebraska toward his PhD, which was awarded in 1954. With his PhD completed, Clint interviewed for a position at DePauw University. Clint recalls “we came here for an interview on the 15th of March and it had rained all the way over here [in Greencastle]. Oh, this place looked gloomy and the streets were so narrow, and I can remember, plainly, Mom saying you could just as well turn around and go home. We’re not coming to this place.” But with a job offer from President Humbert on the table, a hefty salary promised ($5200 a year), and a full month to weigh the pros and cons of a career move, Clint spoke to colleagues who knew something about Indiana and DePauw’s reputation. By the end of month, Clint accepted the offer and he, Myrtle, Fred, and Ken headed to Greencastle. Lost in the job acceptance was a European trip Clint and another faculty member at Nebraska Wesleyan were scheduled to take with students. Over the following three decades though, Clint and Myrtle would make several trips overseas, many as part of DePauw’s Winter Term Program where Myrtle served as trip nurse. Clint and Myrtle's third son, Glenn, was born in 1956, the same year Clint was promoted to full professor. In 1960 he became department chair, a position he held until 1984.   Clint retired from teaching in 1986 and took up fixing and building clocks; in fact, in later years he had over one hundred clocks in his house, all coordinated to gong and ring and cuckoo at the same time, many at 15-minute intervals.   

In the process of raising a family and making a life in Greencastle, Clint and Myrtle prioritized service to this community. Professionally, Clint established a national and international reputation in mathematics, holding several state and national leadership positions in the field. Locally, he continued working with the Boy Scouts of America and was an active member of the Masons, Shriners, Rotary Club, and Gobin Church. In 1972 he and Professor of Zoology Forst Fuller led DePauw’s first winter term on a mission to the island of Anguilla. Myrtle volunteered at the island hospital during the trip. Clint continued Winter Term projects in Central America and the Caribbean from 1973–1977.

 

Myrtle also worked with the Scouts and local chapters of national organizations including the Order of the Evening Star and PEO. But her volunteer work in health care for Putnam County was exceptional. Myrtle was an instrumental advocate for establishing the Putnam County Health Clinic, along with Dr. James Johnson (DePauw Class of 1936) and Dr. Anne Nichols (DePauw Class of 1936) in 1970.   After Dr. Johnson’s death in 1997, the clinic was renamed the Johnson–Nichols Health Clinic. Myrtle died in 1999. She’d volunteered as a registered nurse for 17 years at the clinic, prompting Dr. Johnson’s widow, Judy Friend Albin Johnson, to write in January 2001, “The family is very happy and honored to have this honor bestowed upon these two deserving and dedicated family physicians. But someone else was also very important in the early days of the clinic: Myrtle Gass, a very caring and concerned registered nurse. One cannot operate a successful clinic without the help of faithful and dedicated nurses, and Myrtle Gass was such a person.”   

 

As Clint prepared to retire in 1985, he was one of the first faculty members at DePauw University to receive a “pre-retirement sabbatical,” which permitted the faculty member a one-semester paid release from teaching to prepare for retirement. Clint chose to take a correspondence course on fixing clocks, a passion he’d “tinkered” with for the preceding twenty years. The unique offering to retiring faculty garnered national attention, and Clint was featured in a segment on NBC’s Today Show on May 2, 1986. Said Clint, “I think it’s so important when you retire to have something you really are interested in doing. I have seen some of my friends who retired without anything special and time drags awfully heavily for them.” The December 1986 issue of Modern Maturity also featured a piece on Clint and DePauw’s pre-retirement program.

 

In April 1995, DePauw University hosted a panel discussion marking the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II. Moderated by Professor Barbara Steinson, the panel was composed of five WWII veterans with long time connections to Greencastle. All had been either students and/or faculty at DePauw University:  John Baughman, Clint Gass, James Johnson, Clifton Phillips, and Harold Spicer.  

 

Professor John Baughman was drafted into the Army while a student at DePauw in 1942 and served as an infantryman in France. He spent 68 days in combat, eventually being wounded by enemy fire, and was awarded the Purple Heart.   

 

Dr. James Johnson was a 1936 graduate of DePauw and after completing medical school in 1942 he enlisted in the Army Air Corp where he became a flight surgeon.   Returning to his base in Italy after a bombing run to Blechhammer, Germany, the flight crew discovered they had only 20 minutes of fuel left while still an hour away from base. The pilot ordered the crew, and Dr. Johnson, to bail out over Bosnia.   

 

Professor Clifton Phillips served with the Army’s Americal Division on the island of Cebu in 1944 before being assigned to the Philippines Civil Affairs Unit where he worked to reestablish local governments as Japanese forces were defeated.  Phillips later served in Occupied Japan.

 

Professor Harold Spicer, born and raised in Gosport, IN, was a Rector Scholar at DePauw before enlisting in the Navy in 1942. He spent two years as a corpsman with the U.S. Marines 3rd Division before returning to DePauw as part of the select V12 program for future officers. Professor Spicer spent most of his career teaching at Indiana State University.

 

Each veteran on the panel summarized highlights of their service during the war.  After summarizing his experiences at Los Alamos, Clint was asked by the late Professor John Dittmer to reflect on his experience: “You were talking about seeing the first test of the atomic bomb and I wanted you to talk a little bit about the conversations after that with you and your colleagues concerning what you had seen, its potential use, whether you felt it should be used . . .”

 

By 1995, of course, the conversation around nuclear weapons and energy had evolved. The end of WWII marked the beginning of the ensuing discussions. The immediate casualties, along with the residual and long-term consequences of atomic weaponry, became clearer. Clint’s generation had lived without the threat of atomic war for decades, not knowing, of course, what they didn’t know; subsequent generations, beginning with the baby boomers, have known nothing but the threat of nuclear war.  

 

Clint’s full response to Professor Dittmer’s request is as follows: “First of all, we had the feeling it was successful. After all, our goal was to get an atomic bomb built and tested. Beyond that, we didn’t really have much to say about things. I certainly had nothing to say about it. The decision was made higher up but I know there was great concern whether the bomb should be used. Tell the Japanese we have the bomb and see if that will stop things but Truman was convinced that would not happen. There was consideration given of course to dropping it someplace on an isolated island and [showing] that we had it that way but again I think it was Truman’s decision that you make sure that they got the message and in fact they didn’t get it real quickly. You know the first bomb was dropped on the 6th of August and a couple of days went by and nothing happened so then three days later the second bomb was dropped. You know I can’t feel the way a lot of people are feeling now, at least with the writing. I remember well when Pearl Harbor was bombed and I had a good friend there at Hickam Field at the time bombing took place. All indications were we were going to invade the mainland of Japan and if the war could be stopped you would save a lot of lives. Of course, it cost a lot of lives but it certainly saved a lot of not only American lives but Japanese lives by doing it. So, you know, I was a G.I. and I really didn’t give much thought to it, and this was wartime and the most urgent thing was to get it over with and get home.  

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“I remember when I was processing in at Los Alamos and it was explained to me that we were working on a project here which if successful will end the war within one month. I just couldn’t believe that anything could be that successful.”

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With the release of the Academy Award-winning film Oppenheimer in the summer of 2023, audiences were reminded (and in some cases informed) of when and how the Atomic Age originated. Many of the film’s exterior scenes were shot just 30 miles north of Los Alamos at Ghost Ranch, a 22,000-acre spread larger than the island of Manhattan. Oppenheimer’s ranch, the makeshift town of Los Alamos, the main gate, and all the scenes with broad vistas (along with Cerro Pedernal) were filmed at present-day Ghost Ranch. But during World War II, while Clint made his dutiful trips to Albuquerque on the weekends, the program heads, Oppenheimer, Bethe, Weisskopf, Serber, Fuchs, and others, spent many of their weekends at Ghost Ranch. Staff at the ranch were subjected to background checks, and guests from Los Alamos were given code names: Mr. Brown, Mr. Black, Mrs. Green, and such, until after the war ended. Staff members were forbidden to ask the visitors any questions, and the visitors were under the same restraints as were all members of the Los Alamos project: Discussion of the project outside their own technical areas was prohibited. As late as the early 1990s, some longtime staff members, some of whom grew up on the ranch and were children during World War II, still recalled mysterious visitors from The Hill arriving on Friday evenings and departing on Sunday afternoons.  

 

When asked if he’d ever visited Ghost Ranch while stationed at Los Alamos, Clint laughed that while he’d heard of the place, “Enlisted men at my rank weren’t invited to socialize with the upper echelons.” Neither were enlisted men, at the time, asked to consider the ethical and moral consequences of building and utilizing an atomic weapon. Those questions weren’t part of the mission.  

 

The owner of Ghost Ranch at that time, naturalist, writer and philanthropist Arthur Pack, hosted the top scientists from Los Alamos and offered some insight into the discussions among those guests after the bombs were dropped. Pack notes in his book, We Called It Ghost Ranch, “After the surrender of Japan, our atomic energy friends could talk a little more freely and philosophically about the future of the world. Here, on a Ghost Ranch evening, the utter incompatibilities and terrible contrasts inherent in man’s warring natures stood out as starkly as did mountain, cliff and sky. The Hiroshima destruction, which one or two had actually witnessed, was a nightmare they might vainly wish undreamed of, but it still haunted their waking thoughts. And if man failed to avoid a future atomic war—then what?  . . . The problem was not the bomb, but the man himself. And what could man do about it?”¹⁴

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After Myrtle's death in 1999, Clint remained in Greencastle and in 2004 reconnected with longtime family friend Betty Slack. Clint and Myrtle met Betty and Neill in Nebraska where Clint and Neill were professors at Wesleyan University. Clint’s son Ken recalls, “Neill made the audacious offer to help Dad build our new home if Neill could put in an apartment in the basement so that he and Betty could move out of the sub-par housing reserved for veterans.”¹⁵ The two couples remained friends for years. Neill died in 1986. In 2006, Betty and Clint began visiting each other regularly between Greencastle and Logan, UT, and in 2013 Clint moved to Logan.

 

Clint died on July 27, 2015, 70 years and two months after standing on the train platform in Lamy, NM, wondering why he’d been ordered to the high desert, what he’d be doing, and what was next in his life.

 

Special thanks to Glenn Gass, Ken Gass, Vicki Timm, Rick and Angie Smock, Tiffany Hebb, and Bethany Fiechter. 

Steve Timm is a playwright and filmmaker residing in Reelsville, IN.

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End Notes

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¹Frank, R. B. (2020, August 4). There Are No Civilians in Japan. The National WWII Museum. https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/there-are-no-civilians-japan

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²Dierkins, D. and M. C. Norton. (2021) Flame City, an excerpt from Lost Duluth: Landmark Buildings, Homes and the Neighborhoods in Which They Stood. Zenith City Press. Nanci and Allan Garon, Our Extended Family Website. http://www.garon.us/images2/bus/Flame%20Restaurant%20-%20ZenithCity.pdf

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³Hemphill, S. (2006, November 15). How Duluth Became a Union Town. MPR News.  https://www.mprnews.org/story/2006/11/14/laborhistory  

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⁴Photo of The National Roster of Scientific and Specialized Personnel sorting machine. Library of Congress.  https://www.loc.gov/item/2017691955/

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⁵Hawkins, D. (1983) The History of Modern Physics, 1800-1950, Volume II, Project Y: Toward Trinity. Tomash Publishers.

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⁶Ibid.

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⁷Gass, C. (undated). Recollections of a G.I. at Los Alamos. Atomic Heritage Foundation. https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/clinton-b-gasss-memoirs/

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⁸Serber, R. (reprinted 2018). The Los Alamos Primer. Innovative Eggz.

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⁹July 1945. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_1945

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¹⁰Trinity Site. U.S. Army, White Sands Missile Site. https://home.army.mil/wsmr/application/files/3316/8020/2958/T-site_brochure_S.pdf

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¹¹Bamford, T. (2020, August 27). The Points Were All That Mattered: The U.S.Army’s Demobilization After World War II. The National World War II Museum. https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/points-system-us-armys-demobilization

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¹²Hawkins, D. (1983) The History of Modern Physics, 1800-1950, Volume II, Project Y: Toward Trinity. Tomash Publishers.

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¹³Gass, C. (undated). Recollections of a G.I. at Los Alamos. Atomic Heritage Foundation. https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/clinton-b-gasss-memoirs/

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¹⁴Pack, A.N. (1979). We Called it Ghost Ranch. Ghost Ranch Conference Center, Abiquiu, NM.

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¹⁵Gass, Ken. Email to author, October 9, 2024.

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Bibliography

 

Print

Hawkins, David. The History of Modern Physics, 1800–1900, Volume II, Project Y: Toward Trinity. Tomash Publishers, United States, 1983.

 

Pack, Arthur Newton. We Called it Ghost Ranch. Ghost Ranch Conference Center, Abiquiu, NM, 1979.

 

Poling-Kempes, Lesley.  Ghost Ranch. The University of Arizona Press, Tucson,  2005.

 

Serber, Robert. The Los Alamos Primer. Innovative Eggz, United States, 2018.

 

Online

https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Science/BombDesign/gun-type.html

https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/4a8452fcb31946a19da308fefba30745

https://www.nps.gov/people/manhattan-project-scientists-robert-serber.htm

https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/profile/robert-serber/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_1945 

https://home.army.mil/wsmr/contact/public-affairs-office/trinity-site-open-house/trinity-site-history

https://discover.lanl.gov/publications/the-vault/the-vault-2023/a-tale-of-two-bomb-designs/

https://www.nmnaturalhistory.org/volcanoes/valles-caldera-jemez-volcanic-field

https://libguides.mnhs.org/sh/stpeter

https://historyinsantafe.com/santa-fe-hospitals/

https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/profile/clinton-b-gass/ https://www.nationalww2museum.org/students-teachers/student-resources/research-starters/research-starters-us-military-numbers/http://www.garon.us/images2/bus/Flame%20Restaurant%20-%20ZenithCity.pdf

https://www.afnwc.af.mil/About-Us/

https://www.depauw.edu/about/campus/history-traditions/the-rector-scholarship/early-rector-women/ 

https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/points-system-us-armys-demobilization

https://www.depauw.edu/news-media/latest-news/details/19880/

 

Videos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqHgGN3ZoB0  (Clint and Myrtle recollection)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dA3ts6quLh0&t=637s  (Gass Family reunion at Los Alamos)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhNjC-9oM3I&t=619s  (Clint Gass at DePauw, WWII memorial panel) 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=2vw2li80FVM (NBC Today Show)

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