Los Alamos Historical Society Executive Director Heather McClenahan describes Master Cottage Number One during its Los Alamos Ranch School days, when the school’s director, A. J. Connell, lived in the home. Physicist Stirling Colgate, who attended the Ranch School, shares his memories of Connell.
Narrator: A. J. Connell, the director of the Los Alamos Ranch School, was the first person to live in Master Cottage Number One after it was built in 1931.
Heather McClenahan: This is Master Cottage Number One, also known as the Hans Bethe House. It was originally built for the Ranch School. In fact, this is the second building that was on this site. A. J. Connell lived here when he was Director of the School early on. Then when Fuller Lodge was built, he moved to a set of rooms on the third floor.
A couple of young masters were living here. The building caught on fire. When A. J. rebuilt the building, he did have it built out of stone, and it was just a little stone rectangle.
Narrator: Stirling Colgate was a student at the Los Alamos Ranch School before the arrival of the Manhattan Project.
Stirling Colgate: The boss man, A. J. Connell, extraordinarily able man at running the school. He had been a forest ranger or something like that, and rose to the top of that, and then managed the boys’ school.
He was just an extraordinarily able man with boys and students and so on. He just made us all feel that everything we did was our own responsibility—learning, as well as all our relationships and everything else.