The Oppenheimer House on Bathtub Row in 2023. Photo by Chris Judson

By CHRIS JUDSON
Presented by the Los Alamos Historical Society and Team Oppie

On the evening of Dec. 7, 1942, a letter from Secretary of War Henry Stimson was read to the students and faculty of the Los Alamos Ranch School. It notified them that the school was being acquired for military use as part of the war effort. The purchase price, around $335,000, included the school’s buildings and all its property, including the land, equipment, and horses.

The school had only until Feb. 8 to arrange for the students, staff, and school obligations. They canceled the Christmas holidays and accelerated classwork so the boys could finish their academic year before the school closed. On Jan. 21 they held the school’s last graduation for the four senior boys. A persistent myth insists that Robert Oppenheimer spoke at the ceremony, but records show that he was not in Los Alamos that day.

The school had 50-some structures, which were valuable for getting the new laboratory started. Especially useful were the rustic but comfortable Fuller Lodge, the Big House, and the residences now called “Bathtub Row.” The name came from the fact that they had bathtubs, while the temporary, army-built housing did not, since cast iron was needed for the war effort.

The Ranch School people were not the only ones who had to move from the plateau. Local Hispanic people and the few Anglos who had made homesteads on the surrounding mesa tops had to sell their lands as well. They were compensated, but later it was decided that the amounts were not sufficient and additional payments were made to their descendants.

Background of Characters

Henry Stimson (played by James Remar)

By the time Henry Stimson (1867-1950) joined FDR’s cabinet as Secretary of War in 1940, he had been a US Attorney, Secretary of War under Taft, Governor General of the Philippines, and Secretary of State under Hoover. He had received his law degree from Harvard and was a Brigadier General in World War I. At 73, when he joined FDR’s cabinet, it was said he had “energy that men 20 years his junior couldn’t muster.” During World War II he worked with US Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall to prepare the US for war, including organizing housing, training, and equipment for 13 million soldiers and airmen. After the war he insisted on judicial proceedings against Nazi war criminals, leading to the Nuremberg Trials. Stimson had direct control of the Manhattan Project. He made sure that it had the highest priorities for anything needed. He was General Groves’ immediate supervisor and insisted that Kyoto not be a target. He gave Truman his first full briefing on the secret project. In 1948, with McGeorge Bundy, he wrote his  memoir, “On Active Service in Peace and War.”