The first Christmas that the Rochester gang was here Oak Ridge town’s shape was pretty well fixed. They had a lot of dormitories to add on but the cemestoes [homes] were mostly finished construction.
And yet we were, in the middle of the war, and none of us, my own Pennsylvania and some of these guys in Rochester, some of them in Indiana, none of us could go home for Christmas so it was a blue time. And the thing that made it blue, was that the gals that we had been dating all fall, our good friends, turned out most of them were Tennesseans and they all evaporated for Christmas. So they weren’t even here.
The one mistake that the army engineers made in picking out the site in the mind of us young folks was that both of the counties that they located the reservation in were bone dry as far as liquor laws go, and you just couldn’t get a drink anywhere. Not that we were alcoholics, but we wanted to celebrate occasionally, and all you could drink was 3.2% beer, called Barbarossa Beer at the rec. halls. And you could drink that all night long, all it did was give you a lot of exercise.
The Rochester crew though had gotten word before we came to dogpatch [a common nickname for Oak Ridge] that it was bone dry so a couple of us had squirreled some booze. I had a little bottle of Imperial whiskey, but it was a pint. That was nothing. That didn’t even last through the month of October.
But Bob McPherson, one of my best friends in Rochester had squirreled away a bottle of Champagne. We didn’t know anything about it. But we’re all sitting around after eating at the army cafeteria Christmas Eve and feeling sorry for ourselves and he said, “You know boys, I got a bottle of champagne.” He says, “I think what we ought to do is just sort of have ourselves a Christmas toast.”
So we went back to M3 dormitory, went up front and there was a water cooler and a tube of those conical shaped white cups. We each got one of those and he popped the cork with ceremony and we all stood around there. There were about five of us I guess, and he poured somebody a drink. I don’t know who it was, but he [gave] it to him and then he started pouring the other one, and by the time he got this one half poured, this [other] one was on the floor. It turned out that the champagne was a marvelous solvent for whatever little glue there was that held that cup as a cone, and so we said, “Well, we’re going to make the best of a bad situation.”
We all got fresh cups and he poured it as fast as he could and we just chug-a-lugged it. The last time I’ve ever, first time and last that I’ve ever chug-a-lugged champagne, but we just drank it down like that and all said, “Merry Christmas” and that was that.
And the next day, I don’t remember if we had Christmas day off or not, but that’s how we celebrated our first Christmas.