North Main Street, Jellico, TN

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The annual Secret City Festival is June 17-18 in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

I was born in Oak Ridge, Tennessee in 1952, smack dab in the middle of the coldest part of the Cold War. Oak Ridge was built during WWII as part of the Manhattan Project. The project was located here for two reasons:  1) the extreme isolation of the place in the Cumberland Mountains (Oak Ridge is still known as ‘the Secret City’) and 2) its proximity to the first TVA dam at Norris, Tennessee and hence the availability of massive amounts of government controlled electricity.

My parents came to Oak Ridge very early . The uranium for the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was enriched at the Y-12 plant in Oak Ridge. There were two other war time plants here, K-25 and X-10. So you see, Oak Ridge was founded to manufacture nuclear weapons, continued to exist during the Cold War to manufacture nuclear weapons and even today, the biggest industry in town is the manufacture, maintenance and retrofitting of nuclear warheads.

Anyway, when I was growing up, Oak Ridge was always in the cross hairs of the Russians. I forget what number we were supposed to be on their target list….something like three or four…after Washington D.C. and New York, no doubt.  We were scared to death of the Russians!  In fact, I don’t think it’s possible to convey in a simple sentence how really scared we were.

Every elementary school class room had a trap door in the floor, which went underground to a bomb shelter. The house I grew up in had a bomb shelter. The house I live in now has a bomb shelter (now full of Christmas ornaments and assorted other junk…we really should convert it to a sauna.) And the drills! Oh my God, the endless drills!

Every day, at 5:00 p.m., the wail of the emergency sirens filled the city.  There was no escaping that horrible sound.   There was a siren right behind our house on Delaware Avenue and the volume was mind numbing, bone shaking, deafening and lasted for one full, seemingly endless minute.

The code was if the siren wail was one steady tone, that meant it was just a test. If the tone was undulating, however, that meant panic time, either an attack or a nuclear accident at one of the plants. Of course, every once in a while, the siren operator would make a mistake and the siren would undulate: false alarm, but you could have picked me up off the floor every time. I wonder how many people fainted all over town.

Off to Jellico

So we practiced and we drilled, we drilled and we practiced.  We held our ears every afternoon at five o’clock and we played house in bomb shelters. But the bomb shelters were only for an urgent, last minute emergency. If per chance we had advance warning of an impending attack, and if there were enough time, we would not go in the bomb shelters.  We would flee! There are still remnants of escape roads through the woods around here.  And where we would flee?  Why, of course, to Jellico!

In elementary school, we practiced lining up, marching outside in orderly fashion, and boarding school buses to be transported to Jellico Mountain.   For a few carefree souls, it was a lark, a delightful opportunity to go outside (like for my friend Mark who says he never cared where we were going, as long as it was outside.) But I’ve never been the carefree sort.  And I was raised by a Cumberland Presbyterian mother who drilled hell fire, damnation, end of days and judgment into me night and day. So the whole Jellico exercise took on a Biblical quality for me. You see, I had Jellico confused with Jericho. You know….’and the walls came tumbling down.’

For me, Jellico Drill meant Doomsday, Apocalypse,  and Jesus descending on a cloud to judge the world.  It was VERY scary.  I was terrified.  And I always felt guilty.  I’m not sure why or for what.  But boarding the bus to Jellico felt like boarding the bus to the never-ending torture of damnation.

Recently, my old elementary school class had a reunion. We’re all still close friends. We have a website and yak all the time. I sort of think we have remained close because we shared such a peculiar childhood in such a strange little town.  I don’t think anyone who didn’t grow up here during the Cold War can ever understand how all-pervasive our fear of nuclear attack was and I guess that’s why we’ll always be a strange little tribe from a strange little town.

At our reunion, Jellico came up and I discovered that I was not the only one who had Jellico and Jericho mixed up in a Biblical End of Days sort of way.  And I have to say, we never talked about it back then.  It was a shared, secret confusion that we arrived at independently.  I think that’s kind of amazing.

And one more thing, which is probably the most amazing thing of all. You know how we were scared to death of the Russians? Well, guess what! Oak Ridge is now full of very smart Russians, working at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. You’re just as likely to hear people speaking Russian in the Oak Ridge WalMart as you are Spanish.

Yes, the Russians, the people we thought were the biggest, baddest wolves of all, are now our allies, neighbors and friends. Which just goes to show you, an enemy doesn’t have to remain an enemy.

Now, if we could just start beating those warheads into plow shares.  But that’s another blog.

Be well and Good Luck.  Martha Maria (Dogwood Daughter)

This is a guest post by our very talented Martha Marie. You’ll be reading more from her as she’s going to be a regular contributor here.  If you’d like to write posts for this blog, please contact me at hausman1229@gmail.com

Martha Maria is a singer/songwriter, composer, poet and photographer from Oak Ridge, Tennessee.  Her music has been featured on CNN and many other venues around the world.  She records as Dogwood Daughter and you can hear her there.