Lawrence Johnston died last week.
In the summer of 2009 I came back to Pullman, Washington from Southern California for my 40th high school reunion. Pullman is home of Washington State University, and the University of Idaho is a sister college located just eight miles away in Moscow, Idaho. (I was born in 1950 in Moscow.) Lawrence was a professor of physics at the University of Idaho, and my dad was a professor of physical chemistry and the founder of an experimental nuclear reactor at Washington State University. Lawrence used my dad’s reactor for some neutron-activation analysis for his research.
What these two men had in common was that they worked on the Manhattan A-bomb project during WWII.
During that summer visit to Pullman/Moscow in 2009 I arranged a meeting between Lawrence, my dad and our families. During a period of several hours Lawrence and Harold (my dad) reminisced about the Manhattan Project and the WWII years. We all asked many questions, and I learned amazing things I had never heard before.
Lawrence wrote up his memoirs about the Manhattan Project for a talk he gave on August 9, 2006 at Los Alamos, New Mexico. This is some WWII A-bomb history and detail you will not read anywhere else.
It can be found here.
This is my personal website. If you are not interested, please do not download it and massacre my bandwidth. If you do download it, please e-mail it to interested parties.
Lawrence was a devotee of ID theory.