(A letter to Scientific American , July 21, 2009)

Dear Editors –

A chance recall of mine the other night led to the following email penned next day and sent to some of my online pals. The thought occurs – that since the “story” really centers around a long ago “SA’ issue – that you might find it interesting or be able to use in one of your “flashback” or “then-and-now” columns, etc. etc.

Bernie Powell

Ps-

Now resident Central Florida: you can reach me at the anvilbangr email address. Text of the email in question follows.

“I don't know... Everyone keeps saying that every time someone tells a tale, or says they have been to some place, I pop back with a "...been there, done that" anecdote ... and so what can I say, anyhow?  

LOL!  

You gotta' believe:  82 years on the road covers a lot of mileage!  And I don't make this stuff up!  You can't!  Just living does it up nice and brown for you every time...!  You'll see...  

Like, the other night I was watching this old lateshow on TV.  It starred Nick Knolte who was acting big and stupid (and I don't think with him it is really acting: he just being himself! LOL!) and already I have forgotten the name of the movie - but in it they find the body of a woman and when she was autopsied for cause of death, the coroner found a "sliver of glass" in her heel (!) and this was held to be highly significant (not necessarily by Nolte: he was just going along with the show! LOL!).  Furthermore the glass sliver was radioactive, etc. etc. - and it all led in time to fact this woman had once strayed with Knolte and his fellow LAPD detectives onto a forbidden atomic site somewhere in the desert, and stepped on some of the glassy fused sand around the bomb crater...and so on and so on etc. etc etc...  So anyhow, the flick ended and I turned the lights out and lay there in the dark... thinking... trying to remember something... long ago... 

 

When my daughter Candy was maybe 2 or 3 years old, my first wife and I lived in top floor of a two family house in Glenbrook, CT.  One bedroom was my "office" - and  Candy's "nursery": her crib was pushed into one corner.  Since I was freelance writer, I often retired here for "peace and quiet" - like as not to be disturbed by Candy, who like all kids that age, would grab the bars of her crib and then bounce up and down on the springs - occasionally launching herself rocketlike right out of same and Splat! onto floor....  

Thus, to preserve my sanity and the sought-for peace and quiet, I got a 4x4 sheet of heavy plywood I guess it was, and put it over the top of the crib... like a big lid, you see.  If she bounced she would then bang her head on the board - but remain contained in the crib.  (She would then grip the bars and peer out at me like a little chimp or something...Sigh!)  

Anyhow,  about that time there was big national "craze" to "find uranium ores".  Carnotite, as most know, is (was) bigtime favorite in Western States In its "just dug up" condition it looks like fresh block sulfur - same color, etc. (A onetime "find" I made of such out West I once detailed elsewhere but can't find now: it involved a "sample" I picked up that fell off an AEC truck as it entered the highway in front of me from a mine back up in the Lukachuki's or some range there - and I showed to a motel owner that night hundreds of miles down the road and he wanted to found a company on the spot and go prospect the place next day! LOL).  But I want to stick to the current tale...  

Lots of rockhounds and geo-buffs were buying geiger counters in those days and spending their weekends prowling the woodlots and Nature Preserves of Fairfield County (and nearby Westchester County, NY) in search of "uranium."  Like gold, pitchblende and uranium ores come in a very wide variety of unlikely forms, deposits and occurrences - so always a chance of running on to same just about anywhere.  (In fact, I recall that a small "workable" deposit of "hot" stuff was indeed found by an amateur seeker somewhere over along the Hudson once - and it made news coverage way back when...).  

So I had bought a 'counter' and was all whipped-up by all the ferment going on and all - and anything to do with "atomic energy" and the search for uranium - Count me in! LOL!  

Now back then I was also an avid Scientific American reader - and especially its Amateur Scientist column (where once a coelacanth fossil I had found in, rather under, the NJ Triassic Sill (Palisades) -  had been duly "written up" by the Department Editor (a red-haired guy named C.L. Stong, whom I met once or twice - his fulltime job being with Western Electric which is neither here nor there - but funny how isolated "facts" sometimes lodge in your brain and just stick there...).  Well, it seems that the SA issue that month carried an item about "...hobby things the enthusiast can do with radioactive material" or some such - and in which "Red" Stong was giving out "hot" samples of same to any who requested them.  (He was mailing these direct to recipients in the regular mail - which says a whole lot about those faroff times and events...no? LOL!)  

So nothing would do but I sent in for my free sample!  

What you got was an ordinary straight pin - and on its head had been pasted or somehow "stuck" a miniscule grain of the "hot" material.  Stong's note went on to say that it was actually trinitite - glassy, fused sand from Ground Zero at the site of the very first atomic bomb explosion (Almagordo, N. Mex.).  Someone somehow had managed to wander into or about this spot afterwards, and had "collected" a box of the glassy chips and thus they had come eventually to his attention...  

So, I , of course, "tested" my pin with my handy-dandy geiger counter and sure enough! the needle went right off the dial!  Hot Stuff, indeed!  So I put my pin in a box (or somewhere) and put it in my desk drawer (or somewhere) and turned to more pressing matters.. LOL!   

The weeks rolled on - I was busy - and my patriotic endeavors to find a workable uranium site within 40 or 50 miles of Manhattan itself (talk about a "Manhattan Project" - I'd show 'em!) took a back seat and I forgot all about the 'hot pin."  

Then came a letter from "Red."  It was actually going out to "all recipients of the radioactive pins" - and it was a very thinly veiled concern over the pins - and if I still had mine to please mail it right back to him posthaste - or take some other drastic step for disposal - I don't recall all the particulars.  But I do recall one added line: it seems that several of the recipients (males, one presumes) had worn the pins as stickpins in their neckties - and had now developed stomach tumors just under the site where the pin had been worn...  

Sheesh!  

Wow!  I ran into my office... Dang! Now where in the dickens had I put that pin anyhow?  I searched a couple of desk drawers, a file cabinet or two ...no pin!  (Candy in her crib was peering out attentively through the bars...).  I know!  I'll get my geiger counter out and sweep the room!  

No pin!  Not a single crackle out of the counter!  Jeezul!  This is getting serious...h-mmmm.  So I told Jean (my wife).  She proceeded to go bonkers!  "What if Candy found it and ate it?" she wailed.  (I hadn't considered that possibility).  

Back then, every town boasted a "Radioactive DecontaminationTeam" or something like that.  The whole country was on edge over radioactivity and atomic fallout dust, and like "climate control" today - it was the favorite boogeyman of politicians (on both sides) and mothers and cops and Army Generals and just about everyone.  

Most towns had "decontamination volunteers" - and they wore special white helmets and the better heeled communities (ours was one) had all-white trucks and ambulance-like vehicles - with the large propellor-like international insignia of atomic energy prominently displayed on them - and the words "Hazard" and "Warning! Hazard Team!" and all that kind of thing prominently displayed down their sides.  

(You can see what's coming, I'm sure...)  

Andy - our Italian landlord who lived with Mary his wife downstairs, always suspected that I was in league with the devil anyhow: my (huge) 8-inch reflector telescope that I "hid" in the garage and dragged out at 4 in the morning (he never got over how I always knew when Sputnik was due to flash by overhead...) LOL! - the rocks and fossils and...skeletons even!... I stored in his attic, etc. etc. - all convinced him I was not a renter to be trifled with, you see...  

So we called the Radioactive Hazard folk and that day went down in history.  (To help Andy recover, I used to take him eel-fishing in my rowboat - and Mary would fry them up in oil and garlic and all would be "copesetic" again - for a a little while at least, till the next escapade devolved...)  

Well, they arrived in white suits and white truck in the driveway and swarmed the place.  Neighbors came out to stand in their drives and watch.  They "swept" my office with their super-counters and all.  Then they "swept" Candy herself as she pirouetted around in her Doctor Dentons - center of all attention and out of her cage for once.  (One hazmat guy asked if I "kept her locked up" that way all the time, etc....).  But she was given clean bill of health and Jean almost broke down in tears...  

But no pin was ever found or forthcoming... "from that very day to this one, Kiddies!... and  hope to die if I tell a lie!"  

Grin!   

So there, too!  Now you have it.  The Nick Knolte movie stirred a forgotten memory.  Perhaps I can add one final detail:  somehow – later – I was to acquire some additional trinitite sherds (believe it or not!)… I can’t really recall if this was again through “Red” Stong or not… or whether I might have obtained same in swapping deals with rockhounds out West (a hobby I was once quite active in).   I kept these glassy, larger pieces in a little plastic container with my rock collection in an old steel file cabinet.  

And once (long after as I say...Jeezul!) I got to worrying about them, too - so one time, I took the little box they were in and dumped in some lead fishweights, and the next time I went sailing, (I once had a large centerboard sloop on Long Island Sound), I took the box with me, and when my companions were otherwise occupied I surreptiously dropped same over the side way out in mid-Sound - maybe half way to Eaton's Point already yet!  LOL.  

Sperlos versenkt!   

(German for "Sunk without trace!" - what the U-boat commanders traditionally wrote in their logs every time they sent an Allied ship to the bottom during WWII...)  

Bernie (aka Boy Scientist)