The Letter

As I have described in earlier posts, one of my great joys in life was rummaging through the closets, cabinets, and drawers at Grandmother's house in search of old photos, letters, curiosities, and other family treasures. It was on one such exercise in bedroom archeology that I unearthed one letter in particular that caught my eye. It was from Dad, addressed to his parents, and begins like this:

"Dear Mom and Dad,

Now I can explain what all the secrecy has been about the last few months. His name is Davy and he was born on November 7th. His mother's name is Claudia."

I was surprised to see that the letter was about Mom and I. But why the secrecy? Puzzled, I keep reading until I come to this line:

"I fear that she is not long for this world, as she has had heavy exposure...".

At once my attention shifts from the "secrecy" part to Mom. I was just a kid, true, but I was an Oak Ridge kid. I knew what the troubling phrase "heavy exposure" meant. I remember what went through my mind as I stared at the letter in my hands:

I'm worried.

Is Mom going to be ok?

Maybe Dad is wrong.

Mom is fine.

She has always been fine.

The letter is from a long time ago, ten years or more.

Yeah, Mom is fine.

Dad was wrong.

I did not mention the letter to anyone. I did not want anyone to know that I had read a secret letter.

I found the letter in the early 1960s. I was in my early teens. Mom was in her early thirties.

~~~

Less than ten years later Mom is not fine anymore. Uterine cancer is trying to kill her. Doctors intervene. Surgeons remove the affected tissue with an abdominal hysterectomy. Radiation therapy appears to stop the cancer from spreading. Mom lives cancer-free for thirteen more years.

~~~

In the fall of 1979, a new cancer appears. It is swift, aggressive, and lethal. This time the cancer wins. Mom is fifty-three years old when she dies.

~~~

Mom's dad died at age 71. Her mother died at age 87. Of her nine brothers and sisters, five died in the eighties, three died in their seventies, and one died at age 59. Of her four grandparents, two died in their eighties, one died in her seventies, and one died at age 61. Mom's death at age fifty-three was not typical for her family.

In the days surrounding her illness and death I wondered why she was taken from us so young. I remembered Dad's letter. Was he right? Was Mom's cancer related to her work at Y-12? I did not bring up the secret letter. Doing so would not bring Mom back. I let it go. With time I forgot it completely.

The Cellar

The cellar is the space I spent the least amount of time in for several reasons. First off, the cellar was very dark. Especially when the lights were off. Secondly, the steps going down into the cellar had a handrail along the wall, but not along the open side. At least that is how I remember it. I could be wrong about that. Nevertheless, for that reason or another the steps were deemed a bit precarious. Everybody who was older than me, which was everybody, advised me to take much care when descending the steps, but really preferred that I not go there at all. Of course, from my perspective, that was all the more reason to go there. 

Turning on the light switch helped the visibility situation, but only a little. Peering down into the murk of the dimly lit cellar from the top of the steps left me with a certain sense of awe, foreboding, and curiosity. I was pretty sure that somewhere down there among the lumps of coal and the many shelves of empty mason jars there was treasure to be found. With a firm grip on the handrail with my left hand, and uncle Wendell's flashlight in my right hand, I began my descent. Upon reaching the bottom, but before stepping away from the security of the steps, I traversed the flashlight from left to right, and back again. I discerned various objects and spaces that with out the help of the flashlight had been invisible from the top of the steps.

It was a strange world, and an odoriferous one at that. Not stinky mind you, but different, odd, unlike the smell of the world above. It was a mixture of mold, coal dust, and just plain old age. In other words, it smelled of adventure. Cautiously I stepped away from the steps onto the cellar floor which crunched beneath my sneakers, the result of eighty years of grit and insect exoskeleton accumulation.

I moved towards a bit of light coming from the narrow spaces around the outside cellar doors. I tried to imagine what it would be like down here during a tornado like the one that carried Dorothy away in the Wizard of Oz. Mom had told me about tornados in Alabama and they sounded really scary. I wondered if they had tornados in Ohio too*. I pushed on the doors to see how sturdy they were. I concluded that they would blow away like the leaves from the big tree in the back yard, letting me or anyone else down here to be sucked out by a big tornado like bug beneath a Hoover. I moved on.

Holding the flashlight at the ready like a club in case any critter hiding in some dark corner should suddenly jump out at me, I slowly circumnavigated the perimeter of the "cave". Of the gazillions of Mason Jars, none had anything in them but dust and spider webs. You would think that at one or two of them would have contained a treasure map, a secret message, or at least some explosive powder**. Ultimately the only object of any real interest was the coal furnace. Since it was summer, it wasn't running. But I remembered hearing its comforting rumble in the winter months as warm air came up through the floor vents in the parlor. I had never seen it up close before. It reminded me of a dirty, rusty, alien robot. Uncle Wendell's shovel was nearby next to a pile of coal. On really cold winter nights Wendell would have to crawl out of his bed on the second floor, make his way to the cellar, a shovel more coal into the gaping mouth of the beast while the rest of us snuggled deeper into our warm wool blankets. He deserved some kind of medal for that. 

I have never forgotten my few explorations of the cellar and the mason jars, the furnace, and the pile of coal. Most of all, I can never think about the cellar without thinking about Wendell.

Ernest Wendell Case, Claudia Osborn Case, William David Case, circa 1948. Norris Dam in the background.

*In 1965, nine years after I pondered these matters, Mansfield was hit by a large tornado causing 30 injuries and 4 deaths.

**Not entirely a random thought with no basis for bubbling up from the depths of my eight year old subconscious. I was well aware after all, of my uncles' post adolescent fondness for explosives and Wendell's catastrophic accident.

Dad's Toys - Geiger Counter

One day Dad came home from work toting a Geiger Counter. I do not remember the gadget in great detail, but it did have earphones and a wand, similar to the one in the photo. 

I'm told that Dad and another fellow, a co-worker from the lab I suppose, used to prospect for uranium in the hills of East Tennessee by  driving around the countryside holding the wand out of the car window. As far as I know, they never found any promising sites.

One summer, Dad brought the device along on a family trip to Ohio. Sitting in the back seat of our car, I held the wand out the window for hours, prospecting for uranium. Occasionally the needle on the dial would suddenly jump to the right and the clicking in the earphones would get louder and faster. Excited, I would immediately notify Dad. His response was always "Oh, ok", or words to that effect, and kept on driving. He never stopped to investigate further. I guess he wasn't really interested in prospecting for uranium.

A vintage Detectron DG-7geiger counter. Circa 1953.