MORAN — Memories flooded Virginia Burke when she read “The Girls of Atomic City.”
The recent book details the crucial role thousands of young women played in the development of the atomic bombs used on Japan that ended World War II.
Virginia, now 94, was hired in 1941 by the War Department to help investigate potential employees of the Manhattan Project — code name for development of the atomic bomb.
“Patriotic? I didn’t think too much about that,” Virginia said of the job. “I was interested in the money,” $120 a month, not to mention the excitement of moving from sleepy rural Jasper, Mo., to Washington, D.C.
THE DEPRESSION played a huge role in her life. Virginia Coday was born April 9, 1922, in Commerce, Okla., now famous as the hometown of Mickey Mantle.
By 1929 she had finished first grade, before the financial collapse that year “wiped out my father’s business.” He had dealt in real estate and insurance. When mining, a common pursuit in Commerce, went belly up, employees couldn’t meet loan or rent payments. “A little house then cost just $2,000, but no one had any money,” she said.
Virginia and her family — mom, dad and brother — moved to Jasper, Mo., seeking refuge with her grandfather.
“Times were tough,” Virginia said. “Dad tried to get on with the WPA (Works Progress Administration), but that didn’t work out.” Farming, and a garden, put food on the table, but there was little money for frilly dresses or anything else. Even so, they were luckier than some; bread and soup lines stretched for blocks in many cities.
Virginia whizzed through elementary and secondary grades in Jasper. From there she enrolled at the Joiner School of Business, just 12 miles down the road in Carthage, to concentrate on bookkeeping. At the end of her first year a teacher encouraged her to take the Civil Service examination. Times were starting to pick up and a government job would be a plum opportunity. Her score was good and she was offered a job as a typist and clerk in October, just two months before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
She was ordered to the Munitions Building on Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C., where she helped process job applications to the War Department. Her daily task was to contact the FBI, Office of Naval Intelligence and hometown police when an application came to her desk.
When the United States was thrust into the war, Virginia was moved several times around D.C. as the war effort grew. “I was near the White House for a time,” she said, and then moved to an office in the Pentagon. Clearing applications for the Manhattan Project — what that was, she nor anyone else knew — became a daily chore. “All we knew was it was highly secret. I read a lot carbon copies of FBI reports, looking for organizations that were subversive or pro-Communist.”
SECOND CHAPTER
Her wartime work then took her to the Presidio, a military base on the northern tip of the San Francisco Peninsula.
Her vetting chores continued, but now it was with Japanese Americans who wanted to enlist with the U.S. military.
“I was excited about going to San Francisco,” although a boyfriend in Washington wasn’t. “He wanted me to stay there, but my dad was working at a shipyard in Richmond, Calif., and I jumped at a chance to see him” and others in her family. “I hadn’t seen Dad for two years.”
A reality that distressed Virginia, which she saw more vividly in California, was the internment of Japanese Americans, many of whom had been born in the United States.
“I thought what they did to the Japanese Americans was terrible,” she said. Government rationale was the U.S. citizens might have sympathies for the Japanese cause and act accordingly. Ironically, Japanese American soldiers were among the most highly decorated, particularly in Italy where units sustained high casualty rates.
