The Last Reunion

Untold Secrets from World War II’s Secret City

by Jay Searcy

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…..I was a child of Oak Ridge, the hidden town in East Tennessee where the Atomic Bomb was developed. There were 11,000 of us from virtually every state, children whose parents worked around the clock for 2 1/2 years and ushered in the Atomic Age.

…..The book contains our stories and the stories of others who left their home towns and moved to a mysterious encampment that didn’t exist on any public map. Almost nobody knew what they were producing or that many were at risk because of where they worked and what they were subjected to.  Hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, unknowingly gave up their lives or their health.

…..In our mid-seventies now, we came home for a last reunion in the summer of 2010 and brought our stories with us – memories of our working parents and our neighbors and the genius scientists who lived together behind a secret curtain and helped create the miracle of Oak Ridge. What did we see there, what did we hear there and whatever happened to them and to us?

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..   .       ..Gene Roberts, former executive editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Pulitzer Prize winning co-author of The Race Beat, said of the book:  “A magically written, wonderfully nostalgic account of growing up during World War II in America’s most secret place, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where much of the work on the atomic bomb took place. You will marvel at a coming of age account that was so strikingly different from that of other Americans, yet could have happened only in America.”