FogHorn May 4, 2017  - Nonagenarian Al Koehler's Life Memories 

      

Born in 1921 in Ferndale, California at his grandmother's house, he lived in Orland, Calif. until age 6, and lived in Lolita, Calif. and worked on farms in the summer until going to college. Later he worked for 42 years in engineering.  The places he worked included SRI, Lockheed and Ray-Chem in Palo Alto. In the summer of 1942 he worked in the Richmond shipyards, and in 1943, he got a job with the Manhattan Project. He graduated in 1944 from the University of California at Berkeley with a bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering, and worked with the Manhattan Project until October 1945 
His work brought him into contact with a lot of things, and at one point he said he suffered some stomach pains which he attributed to food, but were actually caused by exposure to carbon tetrachloride, which is a cleaning fluid. Some of his work was very dangerous, requiring him to be in a confined area, like an enclosed tank, working in a magnetic field with uranium compounds. 
He was classified 4-F, which kept him out of the Army during World War II.  But as a civilian scientist, he worked on the machine invented in Berkeley, Calif.,  that enriched uranium 235 as the core of "Little Boy," the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. In addition to Berkeley, he worked at Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Los Alamos, N.M. Most of his work was on  the electromagnetic enrichment of uranium 235. Most people don't know what was their biggest contribution to the war effort;  his was the design of an electrical insulator which solved a major production problem.
He observed the women who operated the Calutrons, machines which separated the isotopes of uranium. For that work, the women received bonuses based on the amount of time they kept the electrical meters reading correctly. The workers fudged the numbers and fooled the machines to keep the meters at high levels by using their fingernail files, until they were stopped by the people in charge. He recalled a sign that warned employees not to talk to the women operators but he did anyway, as did other young men. His work demanded knowing a great deal about machine design.
He talked about his salary. In 1944 dollars, he said, he made $7,500 for 30 months' work. Most jobs in 1942 would pay about 50 cents an hour except for war-related jobs, which paid 85 cents and up an hour.
He passed around some photographs of the Calutrons with the insulators he had designed. He passed around the book "The Girls of Atomic City," which focused on the domestic war efforts of women. The cover includes a photo of Y-12, the name of the area he worked in on insulators. For additional income, he played saxophone and clarinet in a big band, performing regularly in recreational halls used by construction workers. Sometimes, he said, altercations would break out among the workers and the band would use music to drown out the shouting.
Talking a little bit more about himself, he said he enjoyed horseback riding English style for a while, and then turned to flying. At age 92, he did a parachute jump. He and his wife enjoyed many adventures flying together, and also traveled to places like England, Alaska and Hawaii.
He spoke of going to Oak Ridge, Tenn., five days on a troop train, in 1944. He mentioned "code words" like "Tuballoy" for uranium or plutonium and "the gadget" for the bomb. He never felt the need to use them because the people he was working with knew what he was talking about anyway.
In May 1945 he returned to Berkeley and Lolita, California (where he had lived as a boy) for his only vacation during the war, and then he went to Los Alamos in late July. Due to a case of the mumps, he missed being in Los Alamos in mid-July of that year, when the atomic bomb was tested at the Trinity site. He would have gotten up early in time to see the flash 250 miles away. He tested the detonators for Fat Man, the plutonium bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki. At Los Alamos, arriving after most of the work in preparation for the bombs was done, as a "new boy" he was shown a sample of "heavy-heavy water," which was to be used in making the hydrogen bomb.
He spoke of President Truman, who he felt did not order using the bomb, but left that decision up to the military. But he felt that Truman did enable the surrender of the Japanese by allowing them to keep their emperor. He also spoke of his mentor, Dr. Rick Condit, a physicist who was at Berkeley, Oak Ridge and Los Alamos at the same time he was.  
What he called the highest point of the war for him was being in a square dance at Los Alamos with Dr. Enrico Fermi, whom he called the most important physicist in the project after Oppenheimer, and Fermi's wife and daughter. The wife, Laura, was Albert's partner who said, "Don't swing me so fast," which he said would be the subtitle of a book about his war experiences, if he were to write one. 
He also riveted listeners with stories about potential disasters like the time he was standing near a woman pouring acetone, an extremely flammable material,  into a vacuum trap while holding a cigarette. Finally he presented some historical items from the times, including yellowed, delicate clippings from a Santa Fe newspaper showing photos of both "Little Boy " (the bomb dropped on Hiroshima) and "Fat Man " (the bomb dropped on Nagasaki) and the first announcement of the dropping of the bomb at Hiroshima. Rotarians had questions and discussion followed, touching on Los Alamos after the war, on safety glasses, on what happened to the leftover enriched uranium, details about the actual plutonium core ("as big as a softball" he said) and what were the feelings of those involved in the project both before and after the bombs were dropped. He said that some wondered whether they would even work, and whether the Germans were ahead of the Allies in the development of these weapons.
The presentation concluded when several Rotarians gave a standing ovation to Mr. Kaehler.

Greeters:  PP Susan Kealey and Ed Daniels who read an Inspiration Thought based on the celebration of Earth Day " This grand show is eternal......"

Dr. Nancy Harris; Director of the Terma Foundation, A Tibetan Health Initiative (in HMB)

Franciose; Terma Assistant Director

Bob Swift, American Mountaineer, Geologist and Teacher

THIS DAY IN HISTORY by Liz

On May 4^thAudrey Hepburn was born 1929  -

On May 5th, 1961 Alan Sheherd became the first American to go into Space. 

May 5^th Cinco de Mayo; it is not Mexico’s biggest holiday.  Sept 16^th is their biggest holiday which celebrated when they became a nation.