my experiences and history of my hometown, oak ridge, tn, the town was built in total secrecy in 1942 for the sole purpose of building an atomic bomb with which to end ww2. the workers were hired not knowing what they were making, why they were making it, and asked to trust those who told them what to do. there were 3 plants, y-12, k-25, and x-10. the largest, k-25, continues to be dismantled but is a slow process due to asbestos and nuclear contaminants. another is closed and another converted to a national laboratory. the workers never spoke about their jobs to each other or anyone else. the main street in town had many billboards promoting patriotism and pride in what they were doing, even if they didn't know what that was! interestingly, there were many female employees. at it's height, there were nearly 100,000 workers and the median age was 27. many didn't have college educations and they came from all over the country. lots were single and met and married co-workers and lived here the rest of their lives. as mentioned before, my family moved there in 1946 when i was 6 months old. we lived in one of the trailers at first then moved to a "tdu" (temporary dwelling unit" which was a 2 bedroom duplex. from then until my mom died in 2009, the family home was one of three of this type. there were 7-8 types of houses and you were assigned to yours depending on the importance of your job. i think rent in ours was originally maybe $20/month. my dad was the projectionist for the movie theater so not high up on the totum pole! the houses were never meant to last long and had interior walls that were the thickness of sheetrock. outer walls weren't much thicker. no insulation, coal stoves, and built up on stilts, if needed, to adapt to the contour of the land. one of our houses was built up high enough so that we could play under it and stand up. i spent hours sweeping dirt while playing house.........lol. my husband's father was in the accounting dept. at one of the plants and they had a better grade house than we did. to this day, people refer to what type house they used to live in....."A". "B". "C", "D", TDU, cemesto or flat top. even back then there were social stigmas based on your house and neighborhood since all houses in any given neighborhood were all one type. after the war ended the houses were sold to the occupants. in the case of duplexes, which we lived in, the side with seniority of time in residence was given the first option to buy the whole building for about $4,000 - $5,000. we were forced to find another house to move to and rent one side from an owner who didn't plan to convert it into one large house. we lived in one end of 4 different places, having to move when the owner who usually lived in the other side, decided to convert. i was 12 when we moved to what turned out to be the last time. my mother continued to rent until her death in 2009. i can remember rent being about $40 when i was a teenager and she was paying $325/mo when she died! this house was unchanged since the early 1940's other than paint, removal of the coal stove, and replaced bathroom sink and showerstall. hard as i tried, i couldn't blast her out of that place! the schools were segregated until the mid 50's. yes, i grew up in the front of the bus and never had any contact with a black person until late junior high or early high school. until the change was made, they had to be bussed to knoxville which was about 30 miles away. their neighborhood was physically segregated also and sat on the outskirts of town. each neighborhood had it's own elementary school...9 in all. the schools were all named after trees, or nature related - linden, willowbrook, cedar hill, woodland, etc. there were 2 junior highs and one high school. my graduating class of 1963 had over 400 students. the schools were top-notch and the high school was consistently in the top 100 in the us. this was due to having so many scientists living here and working on "the bomb" and needing quality education in order to keep them there. there were community programs that were implemented for the same reasons. my favorite was the summertime playground activities. each elementary school had "coaches", usually one male and female in their early 20's who planned and executed the activities - arts and crafts, costume contests, softball leagues with end of the season tournaments and a huge parade at the end of summer. i hung out there ever day, all day long. at some point in my youth, the city gave away blueprints that were made of some strange substance. they were layered and if you washed them multiple times they turned into a muslin type fabric that my mom made curtains out of! crazy...... another thing that might not have been unique to my town but we had a "rolling store" that was a converted bus that contained groceries and candy. it traveled through the neighborhoods on a regular schedule. there was also a library bus, the bookmobile, that came once a week so we could have access to library books without having to take the bus to the main library. i remember having air-raid drills quite often in elementary school. the town was surrounded ny barbwire fences and there was no air traffic allowed over the town. we had to cover our heads and duck under the desk during the drill. the sirens were sounded all throughout the town. i remember playing outside in open fields and finding huge clumps of grass that we would jump into the middle of and claim to be our spot if an air raid signal sounded while we were playing outside. in high school i was a cheerleader and we had to travel to neighboring cities for games. our opponents were seriously leery of us believing we were "radioactive". to this day, anyone who knows of the history of oak ridge is apt to comment on whether i glow in the dark having grown up there! there were small grocery stores in each neighborhood and a larger one in the center of town. we drove to the country each weekend for chickens, caught and butchered on the spot, and eggs. the town was built in a unique way. going east and west was the main road from one end to the other for about 9 miles, gate to gate. the main offshoots from "the turnpike" were names of states. they went at right angles for as far as possible and were alphabetically named after states. not every state was used and in later years there were new roads put in that broke the pattern. all of the lanes and circles branching off of, say, tennessee avenue, were named something with a "t", and so on for every state named street. it made it fairly easy to find where someone lived even if you just had to drive up and down tennessee looking for townsend.....you'd find it before too long. i left home in 1964, when i got married, and mc donalds had only been in town a couple of years. we had a u-shaped mall with jc penneys and sears and locally owned drive-in restaurants. eventually more retail opened but any major shopping had to be done in knoxville. in the 70's and 80's the main emphasis tended to be for the town to concentrate on medical facilities. the population is now tending to be elderly and very little retail.....just doctors and restaurants. the schools are still great and the high school athletics are still strong. we were state football champions in 1958 and that has been repeated a couple of times since. it was normal when we lived it but the older i got, the more unique and special my youth and experiences growing up here became. i guess i thought everyone would have learned in history class about the important part this little town in tennessee played in ending ww2. but then, wars aren't popular and maybe it's easier to not remember that time in the history of the us. this is a 10 minute video produced by a man who wants to get support for his screenplay. i don't understand the 9/11 connection and his fictiional parts he wants to include but it is an interesting look at the past. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQO7pOfBdxY i just found this site that has some interesting information and a short film, if you can get it to work. http://www.secretcitythemovie.com/

Mayflowers, I felt that way about Longmire at first, too, when comparing it to Justified. I decided to accept the fact that it was an hour-long procedural first with season-long story arcs second. And I don't know that the casting is poor as much as the writing and character development isn't as deep as on Justified. But I stuck with it and really got to like it. Of course it's filmed near me, so maybe I have a local bias. On that note if anyone is a sic fi fan, consider Battlestar Galactica (2003). It stars Katee Sackhoff (Vic on Longmire) among others.

I'm reading "City of Thieves" with my book club. I really like the writing style thus far. It's a historical fiction book about the siege of Leningrad WWII told from the Russian side. I read "A Little Life", but only one other person in my book club made it through the book. It was a devastatingly powerful book, but so sad. I can understand why some people didn't like it. I like books that lend new insight into life, so this book, although very hard and depressing, fit the bill. After reading through these posts, I see not one science fiction book! I just finished "Red Rising" another one of those dystopian Mars novels. It was a quick read, and very action packed, but I had to use a large suspension of disbelief to get through it. A sci fi book that I did love, however, was "Ready Player One" which is currently being made into a movie by Spielburg. I think it's coming out 2017. That was entertaining. I'm glad to see so many liked "Glass Castle" as I have had it on my to read list for years. I need to move it into my currently reading list. And I loved "Boys in the Boat". I had to read several passages out loud to my family. I thought it was fascinating reading what that era had to go through. "Unbroken" was the same time period and full of courage and bravery as well. I did not like "A Man Called Ove". Entirely treacly and predictable and so boring for me. Thank you for who ever mentioned "Secret Life of Bats". I've put that on my reading list!

Finished The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. Agree with chisue about the self-absorbed nature of the characters, but that’s precisely the essence of teens and 20+ year year-olds in the throngs of self-doubt and self-discovery, right? Loved — simply loved — the authenticity of grad students and post-grads doing pure research (i.e. anything remotely readily applicable to real life), their life of intellectualism, poverty and blissful impracticality. Before I went into law, I did my doctorate in what was the beginnings of AI at a time when AI wasn’t a household word. With those street--creds (for what they’re worth), I can tell you the book felt like a capsule of those impossibly heady years of high-octane interdisciplinary discussions and debates that lasted all night. Evolutionary biology, yes! Stephen Gould, yes! Theory of meaning, yes, yes, yes!! Anyway, you get the point, the author gets it, it’s the real deal. As chisue points out, the book also bears witness to the sad, slow and painful unraveling of the mind of a manic-depressive. (I recall Katherine Graham’s account of her brilliant husband’s descent into bipolar disorder in her memoir from the late 1990s, with uncannily similar details of a manic-depressive’s behavior.) The writing was quite good too. Overall, a great read if you’re into subjects of this kind. 3.5 to 4 stars.