I see a lot of dogs at movie theaters these days. I won’t do it, but I admit that I’m tempted to bring my three dogs to Oppenheimer when it opens on Friday. My dogs don’t know it—they don’t know much, but we love them—yet they’re sure to see some familiar sights in Christopher Nolan’s film.
This essay was adapted from the Alta newsletter, delivered every Thursday.
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Every other day or so, here in my quiet Pasadena neighborhood, I walk my dogs through a slice of the history of the Manhattan Project, that top-secret effort to design, build, and successfully detonate atomic weaponry that began even prior to U.S. involvement in the Second World War and is at the heart of the film. It’s odd, I guess. Midsize bungalows, the occasional large Tudor, a few ranch-style homes hanging on, a handful of red-tile-roof mission revivals (like ours, built in 1923): these are the mostly unassuming homes of my neighborhood, and you wouldn’t expect (and my dogs certainly do not) that they contain secrets of atomic America if you listen closely.
We live across the street from Caltech, where I taught for a dozen years. If I take my dogs over there, to the beautiful tree-filled, open campus, we walk in the steps of J. Robert Oppenheimer in the years before he went to New Mexico and established the Los Alamos National Laboratory within the Manhattan Project, built the atomic bomb, and forever changed the world.
It’s only a couple of hundred yards from our house to the heart of the Caltech campus, less than a 10-minute walk, an environment our dogs never tire of exploring. Devoted mostly to classrooms, dorms (“houses,” in Caltech parlance), and research labs, the campus is almost always quiet, and if you know where to look, there are places on campus that are little changed from when Oppenheimer and members of his eventual Los Alamos team worked there.
Hiding in plain sight, innocuous and out of place, is a small Spanish revival home, smack-dab in the middle of everything else. This is the Tolman-Bacher House. Built around the same time as our home, which it resembles, the Tolman-Bacher House was the residence of Richard Tolman and his wife, Ruth (Louise Lombard plays her in the film). Richard Tolman had come to Caltech in 1922 as a professor of physics. He was a giant at Caltech and, later, in the Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer (played in the film by Irish actor Cillian Murphy) often stayed with the Tolmans when he’d come to Caltech from Berkeley during many a spring term in the 1930s. His brother, Frank, was a graduate student at Caltech then.
The Tolmans eventually sold the house to Robert Bacher and his wife, Jean. Like Tolman, Robert Bacher had been an instrumental scientist at Los Alamos. It was he who convinced Oppenheimer that the Manhattan Project would have to be a civilian initiative, not under the thumb or control of the U.S. military, if it were to succeed.
Gone, however, is the home where Richard Feynman lived on Holliston Street when he came to Caltech after playing a fundamental role in the Manhattan Project as a physics prodigy in his early 20s.
If I go left out our front door, instead of right toward Caltech, we get to other geographies and other facets of the big story. Our littlest dog, a black pug, is named Linus Pawling, in honor of the double Nobelist, who spent most of his life either in Pasadena or up north at Stanford University. When I went off to college at Stanford, my father told me that I ought to meet Linus Pauling sometime during my college years. My best friend and I did that one memorable day when we showed up uninvited and unannounced at his door. But Pauling and his wife graciously welcomed us into their home. Ava Helen Pauling told us that students didn’t visit as much as they had done in earlier years. She left the three of us to return to her garden, and Pauling—tall, kind, and urbane—talked with us about his work (vitamin C was big with him then) and our courses at Stanford.
Pauling’s first Nobel came from pioneering work in chemistry. His 1962 Nobel Peace Prize, awarded the year I was born, was in honor of his efforts to warn the world about the dangers of atomic weaponry and nuclear war. That work, that effort, a courageous attempt to put the atom genie back in the bottle from which Oppenheimer and the other physicists pulled it, got him into all kinds of trouble with the government and scientific establishment. My physician father deeply admired Pauling, hence that “make sure you meet him” insistence more than 40 years ago.
Four blocks down our street is the place where Pauling lived for a time while in graduate school in the 1920s. His housemate was his good friend Paul Emmett; the two men went to high school, college, and graduate school together. Emmett’s mother lived with them. Late in life, Emmett married Pauling’s sister, Pauline. Emmett was an important figure in the Manhattan Project, where his lab worked to separate uranium isotopes, a critical facet of the bomb’s production.
Slightly more than a block east down our street is the home where Charles C. Lauritsen and his wife, Sigrid, lived for a time. Charles Lauritsen received his PhD in physics from Caltech, befriended Oppenheimer there, and was a key figure at Los Alamos. The Lauritsens (their son, Tommy, was also a prominent physicist) eventually moved two blocks due north of my house to Blanche Street. I could nearly throw a baseball from my backyard to theirs. It was at a 1939 Lauritsen backyard garden party that Oppenheimer met Katherine Harrison, whom he would eventually marry. “Kitty” Harrison (played in the film by Emily Blunt) worked in Lauritsen’s lab across the street at Caltech. I’m curious about how the film will handle Oppenheimer and Harrison’s courtship and whether it will delve into her later, troubled life.
A bit farther east, part of the walk when we go left out the front door, is the home of Robert F. Christy on South Greenwood Avenue. Recruited to New Mexico, Christy helped design the triggering mechanisms on the atomic bomb, eventually returning to a long and distinguished academic career at Caltech.
These people, these streets and houses, are but a small part of the story. My neighborhood—like any neighborhood, anywhere—is full of stories and mysteries. This early-20th-century transit from Southern California to New Mexico fascinates me. Thanks to the upcoming film (and the wonderful book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, upon which it is based), I’ve got all the more reason to get out and about. And I have the four-legged companions to bring along with me—if not to the theater, at least into the past.•
William Deverell is the codirector and founding director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West and a professor of history at USC. He is also the founding director of the USC Libraries Collections Convergence Initiative. He is a historian of the 19th- and 20th-century American West. His undergraduate degree in American studies is from Stanford, and his MA and PhD degrees in American history are from Princeton. He has published widely on the environmental, social, cultural, and political history of the West.
