Tonight: Cook to discuss his book, ‘Ignored Heroes of World War II’

Oak Ridge resident Richard Cook will discuss his book, “Ignored Heroes of World War II: The Manhattan Project Workers of Oak Ridge, Tennessee,” during a meeting this evening (Thursday, November 10).

It’s a public and membership meeting of the Oak Ridge Heritage and Preservation Association. It’s scheduled to start at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Midtown Community Center at 102 Robertsville Road.

The book is an oral history, a press release said. Cook has lived in Oak Ridge since 2000, and his wife was born and raised in Oak Ridge. He wrote a newspaper column for The Oak Ridger from 2003-2005. He has written more than 100 columns, which have appeared in The Oak Ridger, The Knoxville News-Sentinel, and on The Tennessean website, the press release said. His book has been profiled locally on WBIR, WATE, and PBS.

“It’s one of the great untold epic stories of American history,” Cook said in the press release. “The Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was one of the largest industrial projects ever undertaken by mankind.”

Cook draws on oral histories to describe how the workers built, out of raw farmland, the fifth-largest city in the state of Tennessee, the release said.

He explains the purpose of the project was to provide fuel for an enormously powerful new weapon, the atomic bomb. Oak Ridge was one of three major initiatives making up the Manhattan Project along with Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Hanford, Washington. The three of these sites make up the emerging Manhattan Project National Historical Park.

“Cook’s book brings alive the people in Oak Ridge who actually accomplished the secret mission to create the weapon that helped to bring an end to World War II, which had resulted in 60,000,000 deaths,” the release said.

“Modest by nature, optimistic by the demands of war, these workers, mostly young, mostly women and mostly single, in ‘Ignored Heroes of World War II,’ weave their tales of work, love, marriage, and the stresses of war and isolation,” Cook said in the release. “It is unlike any narrative from our nation’s history.”

The public is invited to tonight’s meeting as are members of the Oak Ridge Heritage and Preservation Association.

The Oak Ridge Heritage and Preservation Association is a nonprofit historical society founded in 1999 to preserve and educate the public about Oak Ridge’s unique and rich technical and cultural history, and to work to preserve selected historical buildings of the World War II city and nuclear installations, the release said.

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