Few Left to Recall ‘Scary Day’ of 40 Years Ago : First A-Test Site: Bleak Desert Spot

Lee Coker was slicing bacon at his family’s ranch just before dawn when suddenly a terrific light and a strange-looking cloud filled the kitchen window.

His infirm father, hobbling halfway between the house and the outdoor toilet, screamed, “God Almighty!” and thought the world was coming to an end, recalled Coker, now 80.

Unknown to them at the time, the Cokers--and a handful of other ranchers on that morning 40 years ago today--had become the only unofficial witnesses to the world’s first atomic explosion.

On July 16, 1945, at 5:29:45 a.m. Mountain War Time, American scientists successfully tested a nuclear weapon at a sand-covered site, code-named Trinity, about 30 miles south of the Cokers’ desert ranch and about the same distance southeast of the town of Socorro.

Area Hardly Changed

It was a blast that transformed the world, but it changed this rural area hardly at all.

Today, few clues point to Socorro’s role in the dawn of the nuclear age. Alamogordo, a town 80 miles from Trinity, is linked indelibly to the bomb because it is the dateline on the first Army press release about the blast. By contrast, Socorro’s chamber of commerce makes no mention of the town’s proximity to Trinity in its promotional literature. Two-thirds of the 24,000 residents may not even know of the link, Coker estimated.

Most of the ranchers frozen in place at the sight of the sky that July 16 are now dead. Those who remain acknowledge their accidental presence to history matter-of-factly.

“I think most of us would just like to forget what was a very scary day,” said Rowena Baca, who was shoved under the bed by her grandmother when the sky exploded.

Baca, 49, is now the owner of the Owl Bar & Grill in nearby San Antonio. It is the same tavern where her father served cold beer four decades before to men who later were identified as scientists on the Manhattan Project, the code name for the effort to develop an atom bomb.

The ranchers knew the government explanation for the event on July 16--an ammunition explosion near Alamogordo--”just didn’t make sense,” Holm Bursum Jr. recalled.

But the residents lived with their doubts in silence.

“Hell, our nearest neighbor was 11 miles away, and we had no phone,” Coker said. Even in town, Bursum said, “nobody really busted their guts to find out what it was. They just sort of took it in stride.”

Not until President Harry S. Truman’s announcement three weeks later about Hiroshima did the townspeople understand what they had seen.

A month or two after the explosion, cattle from some of the ranches turned gray and were collected for examination by government radiation specialists. (The grayish color resulted from hair growing back a different color from where skin had been burned.)

Out of curiosity, the ranchers began visiting Ground Zero, the location of the tower from which the bomb had been detonated.

“I went in on horseback the first time,” Coker said. “There was green-glazed glass all over what looked like cremated earth.” Heat from the blast--at 100 million degrees Fahrenheit the hottest ever encountered on Earth--had melted sand into a glasslike substance later named Trinitite.

Sold to Tourists

For a time, it appeared that Socorro might become a tourist spot. Residents collected the Trinitite by the pocketful and sold it. Bursum remembered that H.A. Max Smith, general store proprietor at the hamlet of Bingham, sold a coal-black coat with gray spots from the blast to a tourist for $5.

But a year later, the government issued a request, largely ignored, for residents to turn in their Trinitite because of possible adverse health effects.

“Hell, in them days, everyone was completely ignorant of things like that (radiation),” Coker said.

The government had the area bulldozed in 1952, and much of the remaining Trinitite was hauled away. A visitor to Trinity Site today receives more solar radiation than that from atomic residue, said physicist Marvin Wilkening, a Socorro resident who worked on radiation measuring for the test bomb.

Few Tourists

Still, the tourists are few and far between. The former ranch land, in the northern fringe of the Army’s White Sands Missile Range, is traditionally opened only once a year to the public, on the first Saturday in October, after summer temperatures of 100 degrees or higher have dissipated. (It will be open today to mark the anniversary.)

Trinity appears today as only a bleak spot in the desert, encompassed by silence save only for the occasional hiss of a rattlesnake. A solitary obelisk marks Ground Zero.

Few area old-timers have visited Ground Zero in recent years. There is no special attraction for them.

“It was enough of a shock to last the rest of my lifetime,” Coker said.