Dr. Robert Patterson

My grandfather had very few close friends in his life time. Robert Patterson was not one of them.

As I mentioned in my earlier blog, these four men spent months and years trapped in the mountains together with infrequent and rarely friendly contact with the rest of the world. They did have supervisors and company higher-ups who would visit daily to check progress, but they would never stay to see the actual work being done.

This naturally made the four of them as close to brothers as they could get. However, being someones brother doesn't mean you have to like them. Dr. Patterson would constantly butt heads with grandad on minor issues simply to prove a point. My grandfather was a few years younger than Patterson, but very obviously his intellectual superior and that is what drove a wedge between them. Grandad would always say watching him work was like watching an angry child with a broken toy.

I think before I tell this story about Patterson, it is important that I mention there were not always four men. The team hired was originally only three. That lasted all of six weeks because of Patterson's stubborn ego.

When the previously mentioned meteor struck near the test site, he went by himself to investigate. After hearing there was nothing interesting to see, Patterson was determined to find something worth presenting and making my grandfather look like a hack. All he could come up with is the theory that this sort of thing may happen again and they would need a astrophysicist and/or space rock specialist in case it did. It was then Dr. Richard Smiley was added to the team, rounding off the four.

A few years back, Dr. Patterson passed away. Our family went to the funeral and paid our respects, but Grandad had to get in one last jab and reminded the open casket that he was also better at not dying.

The work of Stephen Klein and his colleagues.

In my last entry I mentioned the kind of work my grandfather would do. Here, I will elaborate a bit to make things a little easier to follow. Several years ago, I think in the 60's or 70's,the US government put together a project to attempt to make nuclear weapons a viable war tool. They wanted to be able to blow up the bad guys without annhialating everything in a 50 mile radius of the bad guys. My grandfather, along with Dr. Lauren, Dr.patterson and Dr. Smiley would facilitate these
tests and expieriments.

Generally, this meant unbearably long stays in secluded mountain labs, crunching numbers. Sometimes,this meant exploding bombs. My grandad always said watching them go off was worth the three months of
prep work.

In order to test the bomb sites for living people, they would place common objects from a persons home near the test site and test it for Radio Activity at different incrememnts. The cool thing is, sometimes the bombs would be way too powerful and destroy whatever they put out. My gramps has a treasure chest full of cool, mangled, melted and otherwise unrecognisable stuff. The coolest of all are the recordings he called "godspeech". I'll go into more detail about that later, but trust me, it's really fascinating.

That is my grandads job description in a nutshell. He blew stuff up and did a lot of math, he couldn't have picked a better profession.

Dr.Horatio Lauren

1.
When I was very young, my grandad would tell me stories of the good ol' days in the lab and out
out in the Fields working to perfect a new technology and a new kind of warfare. He would
especially rave about his good friend and fellow nuclear physicist, Dr. Lauren. This man is who I'd like to
focus my first blog entry on.

Dr. Horatio Lauren is, as my grandad remembers, a very stubborn and haphazardous individual. Once,
while working with "people-friendly" nuclear warheads in Colorado, there was a strange flash
behind and slightly to the left of the original bomb site and mushroom cloud. The suggestion
was to allow the site to "de-activate" or lose it's radio activity before going and investigating
the weirdness. However, Dr. Lauren, being as he was, couldn't wait and dragged my grandad along
to see what had happened.

Luckily, it was nothing more than space debris they assumed was just in the wrong place at the
wrong time, but this gives you an idea of not only what I mean when I say "haphazardous individual"
but also the kind of pull this man had on my granfathers free will.

They stayed fast friends up until just a few years ago, I don't even think he knows of gramps
passing. I wonder how the old fella is doing...