Oppenheimer

It’s brothers Dave and Steve and me at the Pickford Theater before we went in to see “Oppenheimer.” We took the family photo because two of us were there at Los Alamos where Oppy and the gang of physicists built the bomb. I was 8 weeks old when we moved to Los Alamos. Dave was born there. Dad was one of the original physicists and even was with Oppy and Groves when they chose the school at Los Alamos for the location of the project, though he wasn’t in the movie. We knew several of the characters when we were growing up. Earnest Lawrence was our uncle, Mom’s older sister’s husband. We knew Teller. I played 3-D tic tac toe with him when I was a kid. We knew II Rabi. His wife gave my husband Arvin her orange marmalade recipe. And Segre visited often. Bob and Charlotte Serber were so close we called them Aunt and Uncle. I even remember Oppenheimer when he was at our Berkeley house standing in front of the fireplace talking.

The movie was excellent. It wasn’t what we thought it might be, with more about life in Los Alamos. But instead it told Oppy’s story, an important one for people to know, and it did that very well.