Camas native secretly helped usher in Atomic Age

People figured that Phyllis Cady Johnson had an interesting wartime job back East. After all, FBI agents had visited Camas High School to talk with her former teachers. The FBI also interviewed people she’d worked with at Lupton’s ice cream parlor and at Penney’s.

So when Phyllis came back to Camas for a weeklong visit during World War II, even her own family was curious about her job.

“Our mother kept pestering her,” Jim Johnson said. “She’d say, ‘I’m your mother! You can tell me anything!’ She wouldn’t let up, and Phyllis left after three days.”

And then in August 1945, things changed — in so many ways.

“After the bomb went off, Phyllis wrote us a letter,” Jim Johnson recalled. “She said, ‘Now you know what I’ve been doing.’”

His older sister helped develop the atomic bomb.

Phyllis Cady Johnson worked at Oak Ridge, a top-secret facility in Tennessee that was part of the Manhattan Project.

An accomplished mathematician, she helped oversee the calculations required for high-level physics in those pre-computer days. After helping usher in the Atomic Age, Johnson remained in Oak Ridge after the war for the dawn of the Computer Age.

Johnson died March 4 in Vancouver at age 88. A memorial service will be at noon Sunday at Waterford at Fairway Village, 2911 S.E. Village Loop, in Fisher’s Landing.

Phyllis Cady Johnson graduated from Camas High in 1939, then earned a degree in mathematics at the University of Washington. She went to work in Berkeley, Calif., at a research center headed by Ernest Lawrence, who won the 1939 Nobel Prize for developing the cyclotron.

Johnson soon was recruited to Oak Ridge, one of three sites — along with Hanford and Los Alamos, N.M. — that were part of the Manhattan Project.

That’s where she met Jane Greer Puckett, who had just graduated from the University of Tennessee with a degree in math — which was not her first career choice, by the way,

Try business, Miss

“I got into the line in the (university’s) engineering department and said I wanted study engineering,” Puckett said by phone from her home in Tullahoma, Tenn. “They turned me down and sent me to the business department.”

At Oak Ridge, “I was immediately given a course on the formula that was used for splitting the atom. I became a supervisor of what they called record clerks, people taught to use adding machines,” Puckett said.

“We had four or five, and once they got the system working, we grew fast — up 30 to 40 girls who worked around the clock in three shifts.

“It was top-top-top secret. You threw one piece of paper away, and it went into a red basket and an armed guard took it away. We had to zip our lips,” Puckett said.

“I knew from the beginning Phyllis was an extremely bright woman,” Puckett said. “She and I worked together. I was in charge of the clerks, and she helped with it.”

The two mathematicians helped teach the clerks how to do the calculations. Eight clerks sat at each table, where they worked with six adding machines and two electrically powered mechanical calculating machines.

“The girls would come in five minutes before the shifts started so they could get a good seat. It was so fascinating, when you consider the computer age we have now,” Puckett said.

Along with a third teammate, Johnson and Puckett “were in charge of checking everything out, make sure figures were properly calculated,” Puckett said. “We sat at adding machines, holding strips of adding machine paper and calling out numbers. They were unbelievable .000 numbers.”

They worked at the Y-12 plant, where scientists used cyclotrons to generate electromagnetic fields that separated U-235 from the natural form of uranium, U-238. The U-235 fueled the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 6, 1945.

Did the Oak Ridge workers realize their role in that history-making event?

“We had an idea. We talked about it when the bomb burst. We knew it was powerful,” Puckett said, referring to the object of the research, “but not what form it would be used in.”

Mixed feelings

His sister had mixed feelings about the atomic bomb, Jim Johnson, 85, said. According to the family, one of her prized possessions was a small bell, a replica of two international friendship bells created to observe the 50th anniversary of the founding of Oak Ridge. One of the 4-ton bells was installed at Oak Ridge, the other at Hiroshima.

Johnson continued to work at Oak Ridge after the war, and participated in the evolution of computers.

“She was amazed how the progressions have gone,” Jim Johnson said. “The first one she worked on was 20 feet by 30 feet, and they constantly had somebody changing the vacuum tubes. Now you can buy something for $10 that does everything one of them did.”

Phyllis Cady Johnson went on to earn a master’s degree in math at the University of Tennessee

His sister was a passionate supporter of social equality, the Vancouver man said. She was a member of the American Civil Liberties Union and a contributor to causes that included the Southern Poverty Law Center, Habitat for Humanity, Heifer International and UNICEF.

After breaking a hip, Phyllis Cady Johnson spent the past six years of her life at the Waterford.

Jim Johnson said he was talking with a recreation specialist at Waterford, and “I told her that Phyllis was a math genius.

“She said she’d been wondering how Phyllis could do all those sudoku puzzles,” Jim Johnson said. “Everybody else was erasing, and Phyllis just filled them right in.”