Free Martian's Daughter: A Memoir by Marina von Neumann Whitman Page B

venture which would have as far-reaching significance as I now know Brookhaven National Laboratory will have.” 8
     
    Asked what impact she thought her job was having on her children (a standard question put to working women in those days), she replied, “As a mother, I consider myself unusually fortunate. When my children hear the words ‘atomic energy,’ their minds do not immediately jump to ‘the bomb’…My seven-year-old is not building an atomic pile to blow up the neighborhood. Instead he pretends to treat the sick cat with radiation…My thirteen-year-old daughter commented to me ‘…Mother, I am glad you are not making hats, designing clothes, or other stuff like that. I like your job much better…’ I am quite sure that the men who were smart enough to make the atom bomb will be smart enough to use it for something which is not only used in war, and I am glad we are all in on it.” 9
     
    In a high-school graduation speech delivered that same year, she elaborated on the need for the younger generation to be actively involved in world affairs. Citing the mistake her own generation had made in believing, after World War I, that if “each nation paid strict attention to its own business…there would be no more war,” she urged her listeners “to take an active, living interest in these two things, government and science.” 10 The lessons of their youth were never far from the minds of either of my parents. My stepfather soon joined my mother in the new venture, first as a consultant and later as a department head. But until the site could be cleared and the necessary structures built, Brookhaven National Laboratory operated out of offices at Columbia University. So we stayed on for a year or so in our elegant digs in the heart of New York City. My new school was as dull and stuffy as Shady Hall had been open and stimulating. And the independence I had been so proud of in Cambridge now marked me as an outsider. I soon discovered that I was the only girl in the fifth grade who made it to school—a distance of three blocks—without either a chauffeur or a nanny.
     
    While I was plodding my way dutifully but unenthusiastically through school days, intellectual stimulus arrived from an unexpected source. George Gamow, a brilliant physicist who was a friend of both my parents, had embarked on writing what he thought would be a book on modern science for children. After he had finished a draft of the first section, he looked around for a real child to try it out on and settled on me. I adored Gamow, a wild-haired Russian who suited perfectly a child's vision of a mad scientist, and I worked hard to carry out the task he set me. I spent evenings and weekends making notes on all the things I didn't understand, which was just about everything.
     
    Gamow's acknowledgment in the preface to the published version of One, Two, Three, Infinity describes the outcome of my labors: “Above all my thanks are due to my young friend, Marina von Neumann, who claims that she knows everything better than her famous father does, except, of course, mathematics, which she says she knows only equally well. After she had read in manuscript some of the chapters of the book, and told me about numerous things in it which she could not understand, I finally decided that this book is not for children as I had originally intended it to be.” 11
     
    This well-intentioned bit of teasing, aimed at my father as much as me, was to cause me painful embarrassment when, as a high-school senior, I started dating Princeton freshmen who read Gamow's book as a textbook. Talk about a reputation as a bluestocking—a female egghead—scaring off the men! But when it was published, I was only eleven. Concerns about boys and dating had not yet entered my head, and I was proud and delighted by such public recognition of my efforts.
     
    My father may not have been a constant presence in my life during my first twelve years, but he clearly adored