Early Lab Love Stories

Edith Warner and Tilano Montoya

During the Manhattan Project, Edith Warner ran a tea room open only to Los Alamos staff—but she didn’t do it alone. Warner baked cakes and served scientists while Tilano Montoya procured well water, fed the woodstove, and assisted as needed. Their regulars included pseudonym-using physicists like Lab Director J. Robert Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr, and Enrico Fermi.

Warner and Montoya met when he built her an adobe fireplace in 1928. Soon after, they were roommates. Warner was in her mid-30s, unmarried, and the freight agent for the Los Alamos Ranch School, a private school on the mesa that became the site of the laboratory. For $25 a month, Warner secured shipments at the Chili Line’s Otowi Crossing stop. The tea room was her side business, until scientists from the hill made it her mainstay.

Twenty years her senior, Montoya was a former San Ildefonso Pueblo governor who had danced his way across Europe with a group of San Ildefonso performers. Montoya was known for his fine carpentry, kindness, and storytelling.

They ran the tea room through 1946, though WWII ended in September 1945 and many of their most famous diners had left Los Alamos.

In the decades they spent together at Otowi Crossing, Warner and Montoya never publicly shared whether theirs was a platonic or romantic partnership. In 1951, Warner died of cancer. Before she passed on, Warner mail-ordered two years’ worth of blue jeans from Montgomery Ward for Tilano. He passed away almost exactly two years later. 

Laura and Enrico Fermi

In 1927, physicist Enrico Fermi told a friend that “ . . . he felt like doing something out of the ordinary, something definitely extravagant: either to buy a car or to take a wife,” according to Atoms in the Family.

To Laura Capon’s disappointment, Fermi bought a yellow Peugeot Bébé. Her worry was for naught, as Fermi soon proposed—though he was late for the wedding due to sewing his own shirt sleeves.

Fermi taught theoretical physics at the University of Rome, where he conducted the experiments that led to his 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics. Also in 1938, Nazi-allied Italy passed its first antisemitic laws. Laura and the children were Jewish, though the children’s passports identified them as Catholic.

The Fermis decided to emigrate to America, and Enrico accepted a position at Columbia University. To secure travel, Fermi lied to Italian officials, stating that he had a six-month teaching sabbatical. On December 6, 1938, the family departed by train for Stockholm, where Enrico would collect his Nobel Prize.

Recounted in Laura’s 1954 memoir Atoms in the Family, a German checkpoint guard stood “stiff and official, a personification of our past and present anxieties.” Young Nella Fermi loudly asked what took so long, what was wrong, and, “Would the man send them back to Rome and Mussolini?” Fermi asked to assist the guard. He turned pages until a visa appeared. The guard relaxed. The Fermis continued to Stockholm. Afterward, they boarded the Franconia for America, arriving on January 2, 1939. 

In 1942 at the University of Chicago Met Lab, Fermi supervised the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction (Chicago Pile-1), an important precursor to atomic bomb research at Los Alamos. In 1944, Oppenheimer recruited him to be associate lab director at Los Alamos and Laura to assist Dr. Louis Hempelmann in the Health Group.

As soon as Enrico was allowed to share his work at Los Alamos with Laura, he did. Handing her a book, he said, “It may interest you to see the Smyth Report. It contains all declassified information on atomic energy. It was just released for publication, and this is an advance copy.”

Arline and Richard Feynman

Before Richard Feynman was a bongo drum–obsessed, Nobel Prize–winning theoretical physicist, he was a 15-year-old kid from Far Rockaway, New York, who fell in love with a girl named Arline Greenbaum.

During their courtship, doctors diagnosed Arline with terminal tuberculosis. The couple wed anyway, in June 1942, not long before Feynman was recruited for Project Y, the top-secret Los Alamos lab of the Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer secured a room for Arline at Southwest Presbyterian Sanatorium in Albuquerque, and the couple arrived soon after, in March 1943. Every weekend, Feynman made the 200-mile round trip to see Arline. Between, they wrote one another, often in code or jigsaw puzzle pieces, which infuriated wartime censors checking the mail.

In May 1945, Arline flooded Los Alamos with fake newspapers. Feynman recounted in a biography, “The whole damn place was full of them—hundreds of newspapers. You know the kind—you open it up and there’s this headline screaming in thick letters across the front page: ENTIRE NATION CELEBRATES BIRTHDAY OF R. P. FEYNMAN!” A month later, Richard wrote her, “This time will pass—you will get better. You don’t believe it, but I do.” Ten days later, Arline’s father called for Feynman to come quickly. Feynman borrowed a car from his friend (and later-confirmed Soviet spy) Klaus Fuchs. He picked up two hitchhikers in case he needed help changing a flat tire. He got three, with the last flat 30 miles outside of Albuquerque. He hitchhiked the rest of the way and made it in time to say goodbye. Arline died on June 16, 1945.

After Feynman’s death in 1988, biographer James Gleick found a well-worn letter from Feynman to Arline, dated October 17, 1946. In it, Feynman wrote, “I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead—but I still want to comfort and take care of you—and I want you to love me and care for me. I want to have problems to discuss with you—I want to do little projects with you.” He continued, “I am alone without you and you were the ‘idea-woman’ and general instigator of all our wild adventures.”

Rare Film of Marjorie Hall & Hugh Bradner Marriage

Because of the insular, isolated nature of life in Los Alamos during the Project Y era, weddings were often a community affair.

One celebration of a match-made-on-the-mesa occurred at the home of Dorothy McKibbin, secretary for J. Robert Oppenheimer. Marjorie Hall, a newly arrived secretary, and Hugh Bradner, a physicist, met and fell in love in McKibbin’s office. They were married at McKibbin’s house in September 1943.

Although weddings were often held at McKibbin’s home, there are not many photos from these events. Thanks to a home movie preserved by the Lab’s National Security Research Center, we can catch a rare glimpse of the Hall-Bradner nuptials.