The Manhattan Project: Lyda Speck's Story

In her early years during the Great Depression, Lyda Speck, who held a college degree in chemistry, had been an elementary school teacher in Livingston, but when school attendance dropped she was let go and in May of 1941 became a rural mail carrier.

And then came Dec. 7, 1941. “I remember it distinctly,” she said of the day of the surprise attack from the Japanese Navy at the U. S. naval base at Pearl Harbor. “It was on a Sunday. Momma had just told us lunch was ready, and they broke into the news on the radio before we got to the dinner table. It was just unbelievable.” Suddenly there were jobs. The war brought the Depression to an end. As the men volunteered or were drafted for service overseas, the women stepped up to handle the jobs on the homefront. Lyda had felt the patriotism itch and in 1943 took a leave of absence from her mail route to join the Women’s Army Corps. She volunteered for anywhere in the world that she was needed. She thought her service would have something to do with the mail since that was what she did, but her high score on an Army intelligence test caught the eye of those involved in a top-secret project to produce the first atomic bomb.

After basic training, Lyda’s entire company of women awaited their orders. Eventually, they started shipping out her fellow soldiers more and more until Lyda was the only one left. She thought that perhaps she was the only woman that they can’t find anything for her to do. She was only told to await “special orders.” Soon, she was on a train bound for the Army base at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, which was the point from which troops were sent overseas. But it was all a sham, a way to keep hidden the secret job that awaited her in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where she would serve as part of the Provisional Engineer Detachment. She was debriefed about what she could say or not say. The one thing missing was the truth. It took her a while to figure out what the “truth” was. She was actually going to help build a bomb.

I have written stories about how my aunt Mada Boles Allen had moved to Oak Ridge, Tennessee in early 1944 to work at the Y-12 Electromagnetic Separation Plant, whose purpose was to make enriched uranium, and about she and the others had no clue what they were doing until after the fact. The Clinton County News reported in 2022 that Opal Talbott of Albany had celebrated her 101st birthday at the American Museum of Science and Energy in Oak Ridge, where decades earlier she had worked on the Manhattan Project. She showed the media the silver pin they had given her for her work.

It seems strange to think that a woman from Livingston, Tennessee would end up working with materials that were sent to New Mexico from Oak Ridge, so close to her home, but Lyda's part in the process at Los Alamos involved day after day of being in a physics lab. She tried to tell her boss that the Army had been misinformed about her schooling, that her major had been chemistry, not physics, but she was told she would be taught what they wanted her to know.

While assisting physicists in the experimental physics group, she became the only woman to work with the Van de Graaff accelerator, whose initial motivation for development was as a source of high voltage to accelerate particles for nuclear physics experiments. Her job was to develop the photographic emulsions and make the thousands of measurements of tracks needed to determine neutron energy. Over the next couple of years she got to know her microscope extremely well. Measuring the tracks would help scientists perfect the explosion. It had to do with determining what size the bomb would have to be to go off. Her job was tedious and nerve-racking, and though no one ever said the word “bomb,” it became clear to Lyda that a devastating weapon was coming together.

Lyda also never said the word “bomb," but the thought that she was contributing to the creation of such a device was never far from the young sergeant’s mind as she pushed slide after slide through her microscope, carefully measuring between what looked like constellations amidst a starry sky, not that anyone ever confirmed her suspicion and not that she ever asked, but nothing was left to doubt on July 16, 1945 as she gazed into the New Mexico desert sky from her vantage point on “the hill” and was among the first to witness a level of explosive fury the world had yet to experience.

It was a blast so powerful it could destroy an entire city, with shock waves felt more than 100 miles away, erupting into a monstrous mushroom cloud and leaving a crater of jagged radioactive glass where once was sand. The first test shot detonation had confirmed for her that the two and a half years she had contributed to the top secret research and development endeavor known as the Manhattan Project had not been in vain.

"It was always referred to as a gadget by thscientists and everybody else. I never heard anyone mention that it was a bomb.”

After the war, Lyda returned home to Livingston. There was no hero’s welcome, not even a mention of her arrival in the local newspaper. Life resumed as it had been, back to her mail route, a job Lyda would hold for more than 30 years, but in her home was a reminder of her contribution to the war effort, a small bit of jagged glass enclosed in a globe, a momento of that day in the desert. “That first test shot had everybody so nervous,” she would say. “We didn’t know if it was going to work and when it happened, the view from the hill was amazing."

On Sept. 28, 1945, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Director of the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, wrote Lyda a commendation, which said in part, "For the past twenty months you have worked as an assistant in our research laboratory making microscopic measurements which called for a great deal of judgements on your part. This work was extremely tedious and involved a good deal if nervous strain. Nevertheless you have performed your duties in a cheerful and diligent manner and it must be clear to you that you have made a real contribution to the success of the project."

Lyda Speck died at Livingston Regional Hospital in 2014. She was 100 years old. Her parents were Floyd Morgan and Narcissa Allred Speck. Her grandparents were Magness and Delia Looper Speck. She was the great-granddaughter of Morgan Speck, brother of my 3rd great-grandfather, Calvin.

From a story about Lyda Speck at ajlambert.com

The Goat Man was Everyone's Folk Hero

My most popular story, written in 2011, was about Charles "Ches" McCartney, aka the Goat Man, who traveled the countryside with a wagon pulled by goats. Over the years, I have had countless numbers of emails, well over a hundred, from people wanting to tell me about their experience in meeting him. Every single one has mentioned how bad he smelled.

One man in South Carolina wrote, "It was around 1970 when the Goat Man passed through my community. I remember daddy taking him to McCarty's Store, with me riding in the middle of our '66 Ford pickup. My God, I still remember the stink! It was like something out of a fairytale or a movie. As a 5- or 6-year-old boy, I was amazed by his herd of goats and the shaky wagon they towed. Daddy was a good man. It took a week of keeping both windows down to air out the pickup."

Before I tell you about his background, I must first offer up a disclaimer of sorts. The story of the Goat Man's beginnings seemed to change occasionally from one telling to the next. He claimed to have left his home in Sigourney, Iowa when he was 14. He claimed his first wife, Sadie, was a knife thrower in a sideshow in upstate New York and he was the target in her act. He claimed to have experienced a religious awakening in 1935, during the Great Depression, whereby he hitched up a team of goats to a wagon and took to the open road to preach the gospel. His wife and son, Albert Gene, accompanied him, but she quickly grew tired of the road, and him, and returned to Iowa, taking their son with her. He married at least twice more. The last one ended when, according to the New York Times, he sold his goat-weary wife for $1,000 to a farmer she'd grown sweet on, he claimed.

McCartney chose to live in Jeffersonville, Georgia, eventually in an old bus. When the son got older, he reunited with his dad, and for decades they traveled the backroads of the Southeast, sometimes with as many as 30 goats. His path was easily traceable from the wooden signs he tacked on trees by the roadside, signs bearing messages like “Prepare to Meet Thy God.” "People are goats, they just don't know it," he would often say. Maybe McCartney said that because he, himself, looked like a goat. He smelled like one, too, because he never took a bath or washed his clothes. You take a fellow who looks like a goat, travels around with goats, eats with goats, lies down among goats and smells like a goat and it won't be long before people will be calling him the Goat Man, and that is exactly how he got his name.

Someone would spot McCartney and his cavalcade of goats clamoring down the highway with the old iron-wheeled wagon piled high with garbage, lanterns, bedding, clothes, an old pot belly stove, and plenty of scrap metal that he gathered and sold. Word would get around and pretty soon the curious townsfolk would come out to meet him. He would preach the Gospel to them and sell picture postcards of himself.

In 1985, during one of his final journeys away from his home, McCartney set out on foot to California, hoping to meet actress Morgan Fairchild, whom he wanted to marry. Along the way, he was mugged and hospitalized with injuries. He had been beat up before, most notably in 1968 at Signal Mountain near Chattanooga, when he was severely beaten by men who also slit the throats of some of his goats, but this time he left the road for good. His final years were spent at a nursing home in Macon, where he died on Nov. 15, 1998 at the age of ninety-seven, a decade or so younger than he had claimed to be. Five months earlier, back in Jeffersonville, Albert Gene had been found murdered behind the old bus they had called home. Both are buried at Jeffersonville Cemetery.

It has been said that Charles McCartney was the essence of freedom, wandering around the rural highways of America at a goat's pace, unfettered to schedules, clocks or calendars, and surviving by selling scrap metal he would find on the road, postcards of himself and the goats, and of course, free goat milk. He was a simple man and a folk hero.

McCartney told people he was a preacher at the Free Thinking Christian Mission he had built near the old school bus in Jeffersonville. While the New York Times wrote that he had admitted his preaching was a gimmick, he insisted it was sincere.

The Goat Man passing through Albany, Kentucky in the 1950's.

Courage Sometimes Skips A Generation

I watched "The Help" last night. It is a great movie on many levels. The film stars Viola Davis, Emma Stone, Octavia Spencer, Bryce Dallas Howard, Jessica Chastain and many others. It is a story about one white woman's (Skeeter Phelan's) relationship with two black maids, Aibileen Clark and Minny Jackson, during the Civil Rights era in 1963 Jackson, Mississippi. Skeeter is a journalist who decides to write a book from the point of view of the maids (referred to as "the help"), exposing the racism they are faced with as they work for white families. It took a lot of courage to write the book, and it took even more courage for the maids to talk about:

...the truth.

A quote near the end really took me back. It was from the mother of the writer, who, when discovering her daughter is writing this book, says “Courage sometimes skips a generation.” She was speaking to her own lack of courage and not standing up to her peers.

Is it true? Does courage sometime skip a generation? Naturally, it is not true with everyone. It is a person to person issue. Many people do courageous things every day.

Where does courage come from? Someone said it comes from being exposed to a remarkable act that you personally witness. Take 'The Greatest Generation' for instance. Was that age of Americans, our great grandparents, more courageous than we are? Journalist Tom Brokaw coined the term, "The Greatest Generation," in a book he wrote to describe the generation who grew up in the United States during the Great Depression, and then went on to fight in World War II, or supported it on the home front. Brokaw wrote, "It is, I believe, the greatest generation any society has ever produced." He said the men and women fought not for fame and recognition, but because it was the "right thing to do."

In America today, more so lately, we have been hit with a deluge of issues that should have brought us to our feet, but, except for the occasional emotional spark, nothing like that has happened yet, except for the less than five percent group, who seems to be organized and getting everything their way.

Someone needs to step up and soon, but who, and when? In 1957, President John F. Kennedy authored a Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "Profiles in Courage." In it he said...

"In whatever area in life one may meet the challenges of courage, whatever may be the sacrifices he faces if he follows his conscience - the loss of his friends, his fortune, his contentment, even the esteem of his fellow men - each man must decide for himself the course he will follow. The stories of past courage can define that ingredient - they can teach, they can offer hope, they can provide inspiration. But they cannot supply courage itself. For this each man must look into his own soul."

Corrie ten Boom, who, along with her father and other family members, helped many Jews escape the Nazi Holocaust during World War II, wrote:

"If a bird is flying for pleasure, it flies with the wind; but if it meets danger, it turns and faces the wind in order that it may fly higher."

The characters in the movie faced head on what frightened them most (prejudice, disrespect, abuse, rejection) and did not retreat, even though they were scared. It took a lot of courage.

Courage to change begins with a whisper. It begins in a person’s heart and mind, then it works itself outward to change a life, a relationship, a community, even a system, empowering everyone around them to do the same.