William S. Lenihan Jr., age 91, of Oak Ridge, died peacefully on Thursday, Jan. 30, 2014.

He was born in 1922 in Boston, Mass. Mr. Lenihan attended Boston Latin High School and Tufts University prior to World War II. He was one of the original engineers working on the Manhattan Project at Columbia University at the very inception of the project.

He came to Oak Ridge in 1943 as a young engineer and helped design and build the massive K-25 Gaseous Diffusion Plant. He married his fiancée, Christine, in 1946.

In the late ’50s, he was transferred by Union Carbide to Ohio facilities. In Cleveland, he worked on fuel cell technology for the Apollo and Gemini NASA projects developing several metal patents.

In 1968, Union Carbide transferred Bill and his family back to Oak Ridge where four of his five children graduated. Chris also taught for many years at Oak Ridge High School. He received a M.S. in Finance from the University of Tennessee and became an analyst for the Plans Division of Union Carbide in the early ’70s. He retired in 1995. Mr. Lenihan was a longtime member of St. Mary’s Catholic Church, where he was a leader of the Knights of Columbus and served in many volunteer capacities. [Read more…]