Memories ~
From Falls Church to Kilmarnock
© 2007 Abilini's Computer Services
English
Paper
(1977)
In
1977, I was a senior in High School. Around the third week of school, my English
teacher got sick and was going to be out the rest of the year. So Mr. Thoms, the
principal of the school, elected not to hire a substitute. Since he was an
English major, Mr. Thoms would take over the class. His first day teaching the
class, he assigned everyone an essay, to be turned in two-weeks before the end
of the year. He assigned the paper’s subject, and the papers themselves would be
at least 20 pages in length, double spaced, and had to have a bibliography. He
assigned me, since my last name started with an ‘A’, “The Atomic Bombs of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
I spent at least an hour in the library, everyday for a week, gathering note
cards on which books contained the correct information, for the paper I needed
to write. Basically, I created the bibliography first, and then I wrote the
paper around it. Somewhere along the course, dad read my paper and looked at
the diagrams and then proceeded to throw the 10 pages I had already written into
the trash. He said, “It’s nice, but all your diagrams are wrong.” I said, “but
that’s what I could find in the encyclopedia.” He said, “here, use this
instead.” He handed me a whole bunch of papers, and some small engineering
manuals. I started the whole thing over, and when I was done I had a 25 page,
double-spaced report with diagrams, and a bibliography. Dad read the paper,
corrected spelling and grammar errors, and then told me, “that will get an A,
for sure”. So, I retyped the pages that dad scribbled on, and then turned in my
paper.
The next week, the Principal returned our papers with a grade marked on them; He
gave me a D and specified that none of the diagrams matched those in the
encyclopedia and he couldn’t find any of the books mentioned in my
bibliography. I was shocked and very disappointed. I took the paper home and
handed it to my father. Needless to say, he was shocked too! The next day, my
father accompanied me to school. It was maybe 30 minutes before school started
and dad walked into the Principal’s Office, unannounced, with his leather
satchel and he shut the principal’s door. The principal’s door was one of those
heavy wooden fire doors which no sounds could traverse. Well on this day, the
people in the cafeteria 75 feet away, could hear the yelling coming from the
principal’s office! About 15 minutes later, I was called into the office where
I received another copy of my paper. This one had an “A+” marked on it.
What the principal failed to realize, and since he failed to look at my ‘student
folder’ to see, who my parents were. My father was on the design and engineering
team of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. The papers that dad gave me to use to
write my paper were the recently declassified notes and diagrams that he had
helped to write 35 years earlier, in Oak Ridge Tennessee. My father explained,
loudly, to the principal that “of course the diagrams in the encyclopedia are
wrong. Do you expect the United States to show the world how to build an Atomic
Bomb?!!” Luckily for me, it was the end of the school year. If, I had to see
that principal again, for another year, I would have died from numerous
humiliations!
Oh, in case you would like to know, the bibliography consisted of books by:
Einstein, Oppenheimer, Lingstrum and a few others on the ‘Oak Ridge’ project.