Charlotte Serber ( Leof; July 26, 1911 – May 22, 1967) was an American journalist, statistician and librarian. She was the librarian of the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II, and the laboratory's only female group leader. After the war she attempted to secure a position as a librarian at the Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, but was rejected for lack of a security clearance; the likely reason was due to her political views. She later became a production assistant for the Broadway Theatre, and an interviewer for Louis Harris.
Biography
Charlotte Leof was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on July 26, 1911, the youngest of three children of Morris V. Leof, a physician, and his wife Jennie Chopin. She had an older brother, Milton, and an older sister, Madeline. Her father was a member of the Socialist Party of America and was involved in left-wing activities. Visitors to their home included playwright Clifford Odets, journalist I. F. Stone, and physicist Wolfgang Pauli. She entered the University of Pennsylvania in 1929 and graduated in 1933. She married physicist Robert Serber soon after. Her father was the uncle of his stepmother, and they had known each other for many years.
Initially, they lived in Madison, Wisconsin, where Robert was a teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin. They paid $25 per month for an apartment. From 1933 to 1935, Charlotte worked as a freelance journalist, writing articles for newspapers like the Boston Globe. Her work included an interview with the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Robert was awarded a $1,200 postdoctoral fellowship by the National Research Council in 1934, and he decided to study it at Princeton University.
Robert and Charlotte Serber packed up and began the drive to Princeton, but en route they stopped at Ann Arbor, Michigan, to attend a summer school at the University of Michigan, where Robert met Robert Oppenheimer, and decided then and there that he would study at the University of California, Berkeley, instead. They lived in Berkeley, California, from 1934 to 1938. Charlotte Serber worked for the California State Relief Administration. They became close to Oppenheimer, spending the summers from 1935 to 1941 at his New Mexico ranch, (Spanish for "hot dog").
In 1938, Robert accepted an assistant professorship at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He was reluctant to do so, but was convinced by Isidor Isaac Rabi, who reminded him that there were few tenure-track academic positions for Jews. In Illinois, Charlotte initially went back to freelance journalism. From 1941 to 1942, she worked for the Office of Civilian Defense. She was politically active, serving as secretary of the Medical Aid Committee for Spain at Berkeley during the Spanish Civil War, and later of the Aid to Britain, Aid to China, and Aid to Russia Committees during World War II. She was also involved with the League of Women Voters. Although she had left-wing views, she was never a member of the Communist Party, unlike her brother and sister.
Manhattan Project
In December 1941, Oppenheimer visited Urbana and asked Robert to join the Manhattan Project, the effort to develop an atomic bomb. Robert and Charlotte set out for Berkeley again in April 1942. They initially stayed in Oppenheimer's garage apartment. After taking a job in a shipyard, where she worked as a statistician, Charlotte Serber joined the Manhattan Project as a librarian at the Radiation Laboratory on January 11, 1943. On April 23, 1943, she officially transferred to Project Y. Serber was recruited as the project librarian despite having no formal training as such, because Oppenheimer wanted someone who would not be concerned about cutting corners. Arriving at Santa Fe, New Mexico, in March 1943, she spent her first couple of months working in the office of the Project Y director, Oppenheimer, at 109 East Palace as an assistant to Priscilla Greene, the executive secretary, because no books had yet arrived. She instituted the system of security passes, which were typewritten letters signed by Oppenheimer.
Serber and Greene purchased supplies for the new office, including stationery and a mimeograph machine. After the move to the Hill, as Los Alamos, New Mexico, was known to its residents, communication with the outside world was initially over a single line formerly maintained by the Forest Service. The PBX was manned by volunteers. During a thunderstorm in April 1943, the phone rang. As Serber reached for it, lightning struck the line. A spark jumped to the lamp on her desk, blowing it out. Afterwards, people in the Technical Area became wary of answering the phone during a thunderstorm.