CHAPTER 43
WHILE FRED HARVEY MADE MUCH OF HOW MANY TROOPS IT was feeding, the company’s most notable contribution to the war effort was top secret. In the spring of 1943, Dr. Robert Oppenheimer came to New Mexico—where he had once visited as a sickly teen—to establish a hidden laboratory on a secluded mesa above Jemez Springs canyon, thirty miles northwest of Santa Fe, at the site of the old Los Alamos Ranch School for boys. It would be the new home of the “Manhattan Project”—so named because it had briefly been located in New York City before scientists realized they needed a more secure location to develop the first atomic bomb. But while some of the world’s greatest physicists would work on “the Hill”—as they referred to the mesa lab—their social lives and family time were spent in Santa Fe, more often than not at Fred Harvey’s La Fonda hotel.
The Manhattan Project had an office in Santa Fe just a block from the hotel, in an adobe storefront at 109 East Palace Avenue. When Oppenheimer and his family first came to town, they stayed at La Fonda and ate all of their meals there, starting a pattern that continued through the project. For this reason, the government immediately infiltrated the hotel staff, and many of the bartenders and cocktail waitresses in La Cantina—the hotel’s main watering hole—were undercover agents. So were several of the front desk clerks and various other staff members. At the Alvarado in nearby Albuquerque, the staff also had its share of G-men.
Oppenheimer hired a local woman named Dorothy Scarritt McKibbin, a fortyish widow from Kansas City, to run the office in town. She and her family had been social friends of the Harveys. McKibbin handled all the logistics for the Manhattan Project scientists and their families, who primarily traveled on Santa Fe trains, many of them from Chicago (where work was being done at the Metallurgical Lab at the University of Chicago) and California (where radiation research was being done at Berkeley). Since there was still no direct train service into Santa Fe, McKibbin would arrange to have the scientists picked up in Lamy and brought to town, where they would eat at La Fonda before heading up to the Hill, and sometimes spend a night or two there, if there was room, as a reprieve from the spartan accommodations at Los Alamos. La Fonda was usually very crowded, since servicemen stayed there on furlough, sometimes creating a rowdy atmosphere that seemed out of place in laid-back Old Santa Fe.
As the main nexus between the Manhattan Project and the real world, La Fonda served many roles—everything from a lunch spot for shopping Hill wives to a secret rendezvous point. In July 1943, the first physics experiment was completed at Los Alamos—counting the number of secondary electrons emitted by a speck of plutonium-239. Afterward, the speck, which was virtually all the plutonium that existed in the world then, needed to be returned to the University of Chicago. So physicist Robert Wilson drove it down from the Hill before dawn in a pickup truck, armed with his deer-hunting rifle.
He brought it to La Fonda, where Chicago physicist Glenn Seaborg, whose team had discovered the rare element (and would later win the Nobel Prize), was staying with his family. Seaborg was handed the plutonium while a Harvey Girl served him breakfast.
“I just put it in my pocket,” he later recalled. (It’s unclear what kind of container it was in, but it may not have been anything elaborate—he had originally kept it in a wooden cigar box.) After finishing his meal, he transferred the plutonium to his suitcase for the ride back to Chicago on the Santa Fe.
Once Oppenheimer even tried to use La Fonda as a gossip laboratory to spread disinformation. After reporters were found snooping around town asking about government weapons research, Oppenheimer chose Charlotte Serber, the very chatty wife of his protégé, theoretical physicist Robert Serber, to go spread some rumors at La Cantina that their research was electromagnetic in nature, not nuclear—so journalists and foreign spies would be thrown off track. She decided to make an evening of it, dragging along her husband, another physicist, and Oppenheimer’s secretary as they ordered drinks and then talked loudly and obnoxiously about bombs equipped with some kind of “electromagnetic gun.” They felt ridiculous doing it, and nobody seemed to be paying much attention to them—except for all the U.S. government spies.
“Every once in a while there would be some young loudmouth who would go down to the La Fonda bar and shoot his mouth off,” recalled physicist Joseph Hirschfelder. “There would be detectives from the Manhattan Project with notebooks taking this all down; and they would build up a book on the indiscretions of a particular guy. The young loudmouth wasn’t warned, but once they had the book on him enough so they could salt him away, he just disappeared.”
The bar at La Fonda also saw its share of stealthy arrests. One day a mechanic from the Hill managed to steal a large piece of equipment, a turret lathe, which he unscrewed from the floor of the shop, lifted onto an army truck with a portable crane, covered with a tarp, and sneaked off the compound. He arranged to meet at La Cantina with his buyer, who turned out to be an undercover agent, and was arrested on the spot.
Between the spies and the rowdy servicemen on leave, tensions at La Fonda could run high. Monte Chavez, the maître d’ in the hotel’s main dining room, would never forget the night a big fight broke out in his dining room between army and navy men. Not knowing what else to do, he walked up to the bandleader and whispered into his ear, “Play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’” In a moment right out of Casablanca—which was still playing in theaters around the country—all the servicemen in La Fonda immediately came to attention, long enough for military police to arrive and restore peace.