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and physics teacher at South Hadley Falls, Massachusetts from 1931 to 1942. In 1942 she went into the Wacs and worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, NM.. Aunt Myrtle was responsible for the spectrographic analysis of the uranium to be used in the atomic bomb. Hers was a quality control job she had to assure the purity of the U238 that they were using. From the deserts of New Mexico she gave me, at varying times, a swedish hunting knife that she had found, a Harrington and Richardson target 22 caliber pistol, and a fine pair of english riding boots that were too small for me. She attained the rank of Captain, and no one in the family had any idea what she was doing in New Mexico, more on this later. After the Second World War she sent my dad a sample of fused earth from the first atomic bomb blast. It was mounted on a stainless steel pedestal, with a brass plaque denoting what it was and had a glass dome to encase it. It was specimen number 58. A short time later it was recalled to be resealed in a solid plastic paper weight. It no longer had the brass plaque, but the brass number 58 is imbedded in the bottom of the weight. The reason it was recalled was the danger of radiation exposure. After the war Aunt Myrtle went to the University of Chicago as a research chemist at the Institute of Metallurgy. She had an interesting career there. Not much money but an extremely interesting job. Among other things she was charged with determining the chemical composition of brass scrapings off of some cannons found in the Aegean Sea. By determining the chemical composition of the brass it was possible to date the cannons. Another high point for her was the moon rock samples that she worked with after NASA gave the University the samples for analysis. Aunt Myrtle was active in the Chicago branch of AARP, and made numerous trips to Capitol Hill with the legislative committee, where she heard from such people as Tip O'Neal. Of all the recognition that she received, she was most proud of a write up in the Chicago Sun Times, dated November 19,1984, about her participation on the Manhattan Project. "Los Alamos aide recalls birth of the Atomic Age" by Brent Staples "Myrtle Bachelder was at work at Los Alamos, the New Mexico headquarters of the atomic bomb project, on Aug.6, 1945-the day the United States dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima. When the bombing was announced, work in the laboratory came to a halt, she recalled. People felt stunned, then drifted away from the public areas and disappeared. 'Things got moving again the next day,' Bachelder said. 'But I'll never forget that first impact.' Bachelder's role at Los Alamos was less publicized than that of Robert Oppenheimer, the premiere physicist of his day and scientific director of the bomb building effort, but her function was vital. She operated a spetrograph, an instrument used to check for impurities in metals. She determined the purity of the uranium that went into the first atomic bomb. She recalls that Oppenheimer was a 'pencil and paper man' immersed in physics theory and more than a little amazed by the Los Alamos lab machinery. Bachelder recalls Oppenheimer standing in front of her lab's most important and expensive instrument punching buttons at random. 'Today, spectrographs are slim and compact. They fit on a desk top,' Bachelder said. 'Then they were the size of grand pianos. At one end were the controls, at the other the camera under which you put the samples. The settings for the machine had to be very precise; any disturbance would throw it off.' 'Well, Oppenheimer was just amazed by all these buttons; you could see his eyes just light up. He'd punch a button, and bang the camera slammed across the width of the machine. He asked "What does this do?" Then he'd punch another button and the camera went again. He might have wrecked the machine if he hadn't finally been persuaded to leave it alone.' Bachelder, 76, is retired from the University of Chicago, where she went to work as an analytical chemist in 1946 after completing her job at Los Alamos. While she supports nuclear freeze, Bachelder says opponents of nuclear weapons should resist the urge to take the 1940s' bomb-building effort out of its proper historical context. -14-
