One Eagle Hill

I finally finished reading Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s biographical tome about J. Robert Oppenheimer, American Prometheus. One of the things that draws me into the Oppenheimer story, both this book and the blockbuster movie of a couple years back, is that my family history intersects quite strongly with the places, the people, and the science in the narrative. Both my parents studied chemistry as undergraduates at Ohio State University, and they moved out to the Berkeley area in 1948 when my father started graduate studies in nuclear chemistry at UC Berkeley. His major professor was Glenn T. Seaborg, who in 1940 discovered plutonium and worked on the element’s chemical extraction at the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago during the Manhattan Project. Seaborg knew most everyone in the Oppenheimer story, and because Berkeley became the premier center for nuclear chemistry, my father met some of these scientists as well.

Oppenheimer came to UC Berkeley around 1929 to develop a research program in theoretical physics. An article in the magazine Berkeleyside that came out around the movie illustrates the places that figured in Oppenheimer’s time at Berkeley. Two of these places I know well. Around 1940 the Oppenheimers rented a house at 10 Kenilworth Court in Kensington. I know this place because it was just around the corner from where chemistry professor Joel Hildebrand lived. Hildebrand lived to be 101, and when I would walk to high school in the late 1970s I would sometimes see Professor Hildebrand ambling about near there. (Also, scholarly longevity can be a family thing I guess. Joel Hildebrand’s son Milton became a distinguished zoologist and professor here at UC Davis. Milton died in 2020 at the age of 102).

The Oppenheimers then bought a house at One Eagle Hill Road in 1941. This house is 75 yards away from the home on Edgecroft Road where I grew up and my sister still lives. My parents bought the Edgecroft house in 1953 by which point the Oppenheimers had already moved away, but it’s fun to think about the coincidence in space if not in time. As a kid I played up and on the hill a stone’s throw away from where the Chevalier incident took place (Oppenheimer’s conversation in 1943 with his close friend Haakon Chevalier that would lead to Oppenheimer’s downfall in the 1954 security clearance hearings).

There’s a detail in the Berkeleyside article is of interest to Davis folks. When Oppenheimer moved to Los Alamos in March 1943 to lead the atomic bomb research there, he rented out the Eagle Hill house to a food scientist at UC Berkeley by the name of Emil Mrak. Mrak would go on to start the food science program at UC Davis and then became chancellor in 1959. The administration building at UC Davis is named Mrak Hall after him.

A final astronomical note. I remember looking at Comet Kohoutek through binoculars probably in January 1974 from the top of Eagle Hill. Kohoutek was not the spectacle people hoped for, but it was still fun to see.