SWIMBO surprised me. She snagged some used doors. I was happy
because I had found homes for all the used doors I had collected over
time. Now I have 3 more very heavy doors to move store and try to
find a home for. But, these doors have an interesting history. They
are connected to the Manhattan project. Thus the glow in the dark
reference. Part of the Manhattan project was to find a way to
refine uranium to sufficient purity. That was done at a national lab
located at a university. It involved a lot of chemists and
physicists. to house all these chemists and physicists, they built a
3 story link building between the chemistry building and the physics
building. This became the offices for the highest ranking members of
the project, like Dr. Wilhelm. The link also housed a special
library, and relevant parts of the university library were moved
there, so the scientists could have easy access to the books. It was
later renamed the Physical Sciences Reading Room.
The doors she snagged are the Physical Sciences reading room doors.
A double set with glass panels and a book drop, and the door from the
opposite end. SWIMBO want to use them in our retirement house to
build a library an use these doors.
No actual refining was done in this link building, so the doors
never did glow in the dark. Later Nuclear Engineering moved to a
separate building, the National Lab offices moved to the renamed
Wilhelm Hall, and later to a new building with the acronym TASF. The
link building became overflow for otherwise homeless faculty. Now
the Physical Sciences Reading room is being remodeled into something
else, so the old doors were being tossed.
The term "Glow in the Dark" was actually invented in 1944 as part of
the refining. The actual refining was done in a wood "temporary
building" on the east side of campus. Nobody living knows what went
on in there, but it was always said that if you went by at night,
there was a strange glow coming from the building. You could see
the glow through the wood. That was the only "temporary building"
that didn't stand for 40 years.
When I built my house in 1980, we used all new doors in the house,
but when I finished the basement a couple of years later, I used
scrounged doors with stories. The bathroom door came from the house
I lived in through college. It was framed with elm that my Granpa
had cut during the depression. I had double doors leading into the
shop that SWIMBOs dad scrounged in Milwaukee. The double doors to
the outside were from the 1909 remodel of the church my mother went
to growing up. Her ancestors were in on founding the church in 1832.
Unfortunately we had to leave that house after only 8 years.
So, "Glow in the Dark" doors are a logical progression I guess. Just
have to find a way to store them until we retire and find/build that
"retirement home"
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