♀Barbara Blanchard

Barbara Blanchard (22 March 1928 – 22 October 2008) was a Northwestern University graduate who went to work at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico in 1953, married one of its physicists, and lived most of her adult life at Los Alamos. She was the elder sister of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), and the eldest child of Dr. Kenneth Blanchard (1897–1975) and Mary Esther Schneck (1900–1968).

Early life

Barbara Blanchard was born in New York City, where her father, a pediatrician, was then practicing. Her birth was reported the next day in her mother’s hometown newspaper, the Mount Carmel Register of Mount Carmel, Illinois, which announced “the birth of a baby daughter, Barbara, at the home of Dr. and Mrs. Kenneth Blanchard, in New York,” and noted that her grandfather, Dr. S. W. Schneck, had left that day for the East. The family soon moved across the Hudson to Essex County, New Jersey; the 1930 census found them at South Orange, with her sister Nancy Jane, born the year before, and a brother, Robert, followed in 1934. She grew up in South Orange and appears in the 1945 yearbook of Columbia High School, which served South Orange and Maplewood. Like her mother before her, she went on to Northwestern University, where she took an A.B. degree and joined the Alpha Delta Pi sorority. In the spring of 1950 she was living at home again, at 484 Harding Drive, and working as a real estate clerk for a life insurance company.

Los Alamos

In the spring of 1953 her parents moved to Great Falls, Montana, and that summer she went south to New Mexico. On 28 August 1953 the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory announced the names of twelve new employees, among them “Barbara Blanchard, Great Falls, Mont.,” assigned to its Health Division. The laboratory was then building the country’s nuclear weapons, and Los Alamos was still a closed government town. Her grandmother’s obituary the next May listed her as “Barbara Blanchard (Los Alamos, New Mexico).” By 1959 she had moved to the laboratory’s Theoretical Physics Division.

Marriage

Her engagement was announced in the Santa Fe New Mexican on 6 September 1959, which noted that she and her fiancé were “both employed by the Theoretical Physics Division.” The groom, Dr. Alfred Tredway Peaslee Jr. (1930–1995), was a physicist at the laboratory. A native of Dubuque, Iowa, and the son of Mr. and Mrs. A. T. Peaslee of El Rancho Sueño, Española, New Mexico, he had been schooled at Phillips Exeter, graduated from Harvard magna cum laude in physics in June 1952, and taken his doctorate there in 1955.

They were married on the afternoon of Tuesday 29 December 1959 in the living room of her parents’ newly built house in the Grand Estates at Estes Park, Colorado, with the minister of the Community Church of the Rockies officiating. Her father gave her away; she wore a chapel-length gown of Chantilly lace and an heirloom veil embroidered with seed pearls. Her sister Nancy Jane was matron of honor, followed by Nancy Jane’s small daughter as flower girl, and the groom’s brother-in-law was best man. The night before, the groom’s parents had given a dinner for the wedding party and relatives at the Scandia restaurant in Estes Park. By then, the Santa Fe paper reported, she had left the laboratory, where he remained a staff member of the theoretical physics division.

Later life

After a wedding trip to the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas, the couple made their home at Los Alamos, and both of her father’s obituaries in 1975 named “Mrs. Barbara Peaslee of Los Alamos.” They had three sons. A family compilation records that the Schneck family Bible passed into her keeping, which would make her the custodian of one of the few documents in the family’s own hand from the Pennsylvania and Illinois generations.

Alfred retired from the laboratory in 1991, after what his death notices called forty-three years there; the next year the couple moved down to Los Ranchos de Albuquerque, where he died on 18 June 1995 and was cremated.

Death

Barbara Blanchard Peaslee died on 22 October 2008, aged eighty. The Social Security death index records the date under the name Barbara B. Peaslee; a Denver, Colorado obituary index lists her death in Colorado in the same year, but the text of that obituary is not known, and no record confirms the place of her death.

Notes

The birth date rests on a single sentence in the Mount Carmel Register of Friday 23 March 1928, which can be read as dating either the birth or the arrival of the news to “yesterday”; the census and the yearbook agree on the year, and if the day is wrong it is wrong by a day or two. Two descendancy charts give her birthplace as Orange, New Jersey, evidently from where the family lived two years later; the newspaper’s “in New York” is taken as the better record. A lineage application transcribed her birth year as 1918, a decade before her parents’ marriage, which is a copying error for 1928.

No record gives her a middle name. Her birth notice, the 1930 census, her yearbook and her wedding report all call her simply Barbara, and the “B.” of the Social Security index is her maiden name, Blanchard, used as a middle initial after her marriage.

The family remembers that both she and her husband worked on the Manhattan Project. The wartime project itself ended when the Atomic Energy Commission took over the laboratory on 1 January 1947, before either of them reached Los Alamos: he first worked there in the summer of 1952, and she joined the staff in August 1953. Both belonged to the laboratory’s postwar years, when it was still designing the nation’s nuclear weapons.

His middle name, Tredway, is the form printed in the 1960 wedding report and the one under which Harvard’s library catalogues his 1955 doctoral thesis, and he wrote it out in full, “Alfred Tredway Peaslee,” on his own application for a Social Security number in November 1961, which names his parents as Alfred T. Peaslee and Marie L. Burch; his death notice gives only “Alfred T. Peaslee Jr.” Tredway was a well-known name in Dubuque, the home of Alfred Tredway’s hardware firm, A. Tredway & Sons, though no record seen ties that family to his. A short paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in May 1948, “Melting Point Curves of Optical Isomers” by Charles L. Bickel and Alfred T. Peaslee, is probably his work as a seventeen-year-old schoolboy, but the index record of it does not say where its authors were.