Anniversary in Chicago

At exactly 3:52 of a wintry Chicago afternoon in 1942, a scientist working in the University of Chicago's tightly guarded athletic field house dryly announced: "The curve is exponential." The speaker was Dr. Enrico Fermi; his four quiet words meant that a chain reaction had just been successfully brought about in the experimental uranium pile. Last week a TIME correspondent witnessed the unveiling of a plaque to mark the site:

The air was damp and chilling. Overhead, leaden black clouds were pushed across the sky by a gusty wind. The snow on the street was flecked with coal dust and dirt. It was melting slowly, producing desolate puddles of cold water.

To the right of the field house's entrance stood a somber platform draped with faded purple and new black bunting. Radio men puttered about, four microphones. Photographers arrived.

A little crowd gathered--mostly students in odds & ends of G.I. clothing. A young man with a red face, an Army combat jacket and a G.I. wool cap climbed out of an excavation across the street. "What's happening, Mac?" he asked. I told him they were going to unveil a plaque marking the approximate spot where the atom bomb started five years ago this afternoon. "They ain't makin' no bombs there now, are they?" he asked. I told him I didn't think so. He said: "Wadda ya know" and went back down in the excavation.

Weather-beaten George Mirandi came out of the field house and looked up at the wall. "I was in there five years ago this afternoon," he said. "I was a security guard, but I didn't know what I was guarding. If I knew then what I know now, well, brother, I would have started running and wouldn't have stopped until I was eight miles north of Evanston."

A blue bus arrived from downtown and a lot of important-looking people got out. You couldn't miss tall, grey Robert Maynard Hutchins in a neat-fitting brown top coat and pearl grey Homburg. The important people mounted the platform and the photographers started taking pictures.

Hutchins looked around. "Where's Fermi?" he called. Several underlings started yelling for Fermi. He was standing in the dirty snow talking about the atom. I asked him how it was five years ago. He said shyly: "Well, it was awfully cold, and there was a wind blowing." I asked him how he felt when the curve was "exponential." "I didn't think much of anything because I knew it was going to work," he said. And what did he feel this afternoon, five years later? He looked at the slush and shrugged his shoulders: "Well, for better or for worse, it's here. . . ." He grinned through his teeth and mounted the platform. A photographer yelled: "Hey, Fermi, take off your hat."

They shooed the photographers away and the radio men took over. They unveiled the bronze plaque on which was written: "On December 2, 1942 man achieved here the first self-sustaining chain reaction and thereby initiated the controlled release of nuclear energy." Fermi said a few shy words. Iowa's Bill Waymack, representing the Atomic Energy Commission, also said something. The crowd of 150 didn't hear what they said because the public-address system got fouled up. The red-faced man came back out of the excavation again and asked: "They get it all fixed, Mac?" Yes, I told him, they got it all fixed.

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