Los Alamos Scientists Feeling at Home on the Range : New Mexico: A peculiar mix of cowpokes and computer specialists, the town is totally intertwined with its huge nuclear lab and associated contractors.

It’s Friday night, and there’s music blaring from the downtown parking lot.

They’ve come with their children and their dogs, folding chairs and pickup trucks to enjoy the weekly summer concert and to dance on the asphalt pavement.

Nearby a firecracker goes off, and a dozen kids scatter in excitement. It’s ordinary fun on a hot summer night.

But this is no ordinary town.

“The conversations can get pretty strange,” says Russ Gordon, 51, the ponytailed owner of Gordon’s Music Store, who’s organized the summer concerts for years.

In the folding chairs, or leaning against a car fender, you’re as likely to meet a nuclear physicist, or experts on condensed matter or computerized fluid dynamics, as you are a waitress or a local cowpoke.

This is Los Alamos, a product of the nuclear age. A few blocks from Gordon’s shop, the municipal building rests on a site where, 54 years ago, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and other scientists made the world’s first atomic bomb.

A town of 18,000 people, perched nearly a mile and a half above sea level on a mesa known as the Pajarito (Little Bird) Plateau, the town was until 1957 closed to outsiders.

The Los Alamos National Laboratory, which encompasses some 43 square miles, is across a canyon bridge from downtown. But community and lab could not be more intertwined.

About 12,400 people work at the lab and at its associated contracting companies, including more than 4,600 with advanced degrees--a third of them PhDs. High lab salaries make Los Alamos among the wealthiest communities in the country, with an average household income of more than $64,000 a year, triple the statewide average.

Local historian Marjorie Bell Chambers remembers that security here once was so tight that when a baby was born at Los Alamos, the certificate listed the place of birth simply as “P.O. Box 1663.”

The paranoia about secrecy is long past. But people here, almost all of them with some connection to the nuclear weapons lab, still cherish their privacy.

The recent dust-up over Taiwan-born Wen Ho Lee and allegations of Chinese spying at the lab still makes for weekend coffee-shop conversation.

“The people that know him don’t think he’s a spy. He’s a guy that slipped with the rules at the wrong time,” says David Gurd, a physicist who works on a linear accelerator project at the lab.

Almost everyone here has some connection with the lab. They either work there, retired from there, have relatives working there or work for companies dependent on the lab.

“It’s been a one-employer town, and that’s been a problem,” says Mildred Hoak, who should know. She and her husband were forced to take early retirement when more than 900 lab employees were phased out in the early ‘90s.

Still, she says, it’s “a wonderful town to raise a family.”