By John LarsonSOCORRO – Although American history books state that the first atomic bomb was tested at Alamogordo, longtime residents of Socorro County know differently. The Trinity Site was practically in their own backyard.
Many remember the flash and noise that morning, and others remember Robert Oppenheimer sitting with Brig. General Leslie Groves having a beer at the Owl Bar in San Antonio.
The site of the first atomic bomb explosion, known as the Trinity Site, will be open to the general public Saturday, Apr. 3, from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.
The open house includes the site of the blast - ground zero - and the Dave MacDonald ranch house, two miles to the south, where physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer oversaw the assembly of what was referred to as the “gadget,” or the “device.”
Whether the location of the site of the first atomic bomb explosion is a matter of pride or embarrassment to county residents, no one can deny its historical significance.
Many locals remember that Monday morning when a light brighter than the sun flooded the area.
First State Bank President Holm Bursum III told the Mountain Mail he was staying on the family’s ranch in the summer of 1945.
The 10 year-old Holm may have been the closest civilian to the blast – only 16 miles – on the morning of July 16.
“Highway 380 cuts through the center of our old ranch,” Bursum said. “The military had taken over the south portion – one half of the ranch - from 380 down to three miles north of what is now the Trinity Site. In fact, 99 ranchers were displaced. The military said the ranches would be returned three years after the end of the war. They never were.”
Bursum said he actually spent his first eight years on the ranch, and spent most summers there throughout his youth.
“We lived at the old stagecoach stop for the Ozanne Stage Line,” Bursum said. “In the old days a stage coach from Carthage came through there on its route to San Antonio to meet the train.”
“That summer I was staying in an adobe building, four miles east of Bingham and 16 miles north-northeast of the shot,” he said. “The army had blocked part off the highway (Highway 380), and there was a military presence in San Antonio. We later learned they were there to evacuate Socorro if the radioactive cloud blew over it.”
The test was scheduled for midnight, but because of a big thunderstorm, was rescheduled for just before sun up.
At 16 miles away the detonation at 5:30 a.m. shook the building in which Bursum was sleeping.
“I slept in a top bunk in a bunkbed against the south wall of the adobe place that morning, and it woke me up,” he said. “It shook the house pretty good and rattled all the cans, and it was bright as morning.
“For a minute I thought the sun was coming up in the south,” he said. “We had no idea what it was. It was announced later that an ammunition dump had blown up.
“On a ranch 10 miles east of us there was a kid who visited us that summer to go horseback riding, things like that,” Bursum said. “He was outside the house in his yard at the time of the blast. He said ‘I just glowed in the dark’.
Bursum said all the cattle that were within range of the explosion “were turned white on one side.”
“There was one sheepherder whose hair was turned white,” he said. “Another rancher, Mac Smith, had a black cat who was also white on one side. He sold it to a tourist for five dollars.”
He said that a few years later he was able to find ground zero with some friends.
“When the army left, all the ranches were abandoned. It was empty ranchland,” Bursum said. “In the early 1950’s, two or three of us rode our horses down to the Trinity Site. This was before it was fenced off. There was a big circle of green sand, somewhere around 50 to 70 yards in diameter. We walked all over it. It didn’t seem to cause us any health problems.”
Ben Moffett, retired chief of public affairs for the Rocky Mountain Region of the National Park Service, was a boy living in San Antonio at the time.
"I may be the only person who slept through the blast, but I remember it vividly because my parents (John B. and Regina Moffett) ran from the kitchen where I was asleep and woke me up to see if I was safe,” Moffett said. “I was a month short of six years old, but I remember the panic in their eyes, something I had never seen before. Later in the day we went to Socorro to peddle vegetables house to house and it was all anyone could talk about.”
In 2005 a group of San Antonio natives gathered for a discussion on their experiences at New Mexico Tech’s Skeen Library.
The talk was organized by San Antonio native Ricardo Padilla Reyas.
Lucille Catherine Miera told the audience she remembered military men in San Antonio. “There were other men, too,” she said. “I met many of them, and was told later that Oppenheimer was there. I may have met him, but I was only 13 at the time, so I'm not sure.”
She said the men were gone during the day, and came back at night. “No one said where they worked other than they were just working on a project,” she said.
Miera remembered overhearing some of the GI's talking on the telephone. “They said they were talking to their girlfriends. 'Oh, I've got to call Mary Ann,' they would say,” she said. “But the things they were saying didn't sound like it. They were saying things like how many of this or that, and what are the times, something you wouldn't expect someone to talking to their girlfriend about.
“Then they would say I've got to call my other girlfriend, so-and-so,” Miera recalled. “We figured they using some kind of code. Or they had lots of girlfriends.”
She said her grandfather had rented out cabins for the servicemen and government people, and there were also trailers and army tents in the vicinity.
“Friday night was always movie night at the recreation area, and all the soldiers were there like usual, eating popcorn,” she said. “Saturday was normal, but Sunday was quiet.”
“We had a flashlight, and my grandmother would sometimes wake me up by shining it in my face,” she said. “That Monday morning I woke up because of a bright light, and I said, 'Turn it off, Grandma,' but she wasn't there and there was no flashlight. The whole room was lit up. I didn't know what was happening.”
She said her grandmother came into the room and told her to stay inside. “But I went outside to see anyway,” she said. “Everything was real bright, like a halogen lamp. The little trailers and tents were all gone.”
Juana Gonzales Odeb remembered waking up at 5:30 that morning. “There were no lights, no phone, no nothing,” she said. “It was already getting to be daylight. You could see it. A big mushroom cloud.”
“I remember thinking we were being bombed by the Japanese,” she said.
Cecelia Padilla Woodward said she was playing in her yard with her sisters when the bomb exploded. “I remember we were playing outside,” she said.
She remembers the farm animals being sick afterward. “There was a kind of mucus coming out of their beaks,” she said. “Some of the cows lost their hair.”
Ana Lee Padilla Montoya said her husband, Atreraclio Montoya, worked at the trinity site on the tower that held the bomb.
“They never told him what it was for,” she said.
About 200 local workmen helped construct the tower, a fact which hasn't been made known to the general public. “But, all you see in the old photographs are military workmen,” he said. “They kept the locals out of sight when pictures were being taken.”
Ana Lee said after the test her husband went to work for the Bureau of Land Reclamation. “He was never told to keep secret about his job,” she said. “He just started looking for a new job.”
What she remembers that morning was seeing the cloud. “We saw the mushroom cloud and all that red light,” she said.
After the blast she said some of her sisters had cysts and other health problems, and she had three miscarriages. “We didn't find out the radiation dangers until after the war,” she said. “They should have notified us about the risks.”
Declassified documents have revealed that the military knew about many of the dangers of fallout to the local population.
“The military was apparently afraid that any request for residents to move would give away the secret nature of the project,” Reyas said. “Although they knew about the risks of radiation, they felt it wouldn't be high.” He said subsequent documents state that future tests should be held 150 miles from any populated areas. “That's why they moved above ground testing to Nevada,” he said. “This indicates they knew the radiation was more dangerous.”
Reyas said the first choice for testing the WMD was California. “But since General George Patton did his tank training there, Oppenheimer would not consider it,” he said. “He hated Patton personally, and didn't want to have to deal with him.”
Visitors are allowed to enter and exit White Sands Missile Range’s Stallion Gate off Highway 380 unescorted during the open house, although identification is required to enter.
During the free open house visitors can personally inspect ground zero where the July 16, 1945, 20 kiloton explosion occurred, and take a shuttle bus to the MacDonald ranch compound where the bomb was assembled.
The Trinity Site is open to the public only two days each year; on the first Saturday of April and October. The Stallion Gate turnoff is 12 miles west of San Antonio.
Pictured: The Ozzane Stage Coach stopPhoto courtesy of Holm Bursum III.
Trinity SiteTo Hold Open House
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