Rochester, Minnesota award-winning author Teresa Wilhelm Waldof brings to life the incredible story of her grandfather, Harley Wilhelm, the brilliant yet humble Iowa chemist who played a pivotal role in the Manhattan Project. Packed with personal anecdotes, Harley's story is as much about scientific breakthroughs, as it is about the power of the human spirit. Teresa also shares the fascinating journey of writing 'Wilhelm's Way', where she uncovered her own writing prowess along with her grandfather's impactful legacy.
Teresa Waldof
Experience Rochester, MN
Rochester, Minnesota award-winning author Teresa Wilhelm Waldof brings to life the incredible story of her grandfather, Harley Wilhelm, the brilliant yet humble Iowa chemist who played a pivotal role in the Manhattan Project. Packed with personal anecdotes, Harley's story is as much about scientific breakthroughs, as it is about the power of the human spirit. Teresa also shares the fascinating journey of writing 'Wilhelm's Way', where she uncovered her own writing prowess along with her grandfather's impactful legacy.
Teresa Waldof
Experience Rochester, MN
The Growing Destinations podcast is brought to you by Experience Rochester. Learn more about Minnesota's third largest city, which is home to Mayo Clinic and features wonderful recreational and entertainment opportunities, by visiting experiencerochestermncom.
Speaker 2:I've been hearing stories from my father and my aunts about him, and there's more to this man than I understand. And then I started digging into the Manhattan Project and realized that the histories that are out there about the Manhattan Project focus on the physicists, and it's of course. none of it would have happened without the physicists. However, it also wouldn't have happened without the chemists.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the Growing Destinations podcast, where we take a deep dive into destination development and focus on a wide range of topics from tourism and entertainment to economic development and entrepreneurism and much more. I'm your host, bill Vaughn Bank. In her award-winning book Wilhelm's Way, rochester, minnesota, author Trisa Wilhelm Waldorf writes about the inspiring story of her grandfather, harley Wilhelm, the Iowa chemist who saved the Manhattan Project. It's Trisa's first book as an author. She spent 10 years researching and writing this book that reveals the life and times of her grandfather and his significant contribution to world history and ending World War II. Trisa Wilhelm Waldorf, welcome to the Growing Destinations podcast.
Speaker 2:Thank you, i am so thrilled to be here.
Speaker 1:Trisa, you are an award-winning author and scholar in the world's leading expert on the Ames Project section of the Manhattan Project, all of which we're going to discuss today. But first share a bit about yourself in your career journey.
Speaker 2:I did just retire, on April 30th, so Congratulations, thank you. I'm so thrilled to have this new chapter of my life. no pun intended as an author, that's a bad pun to use but Puns are welcome here.
Speaker 2:So my career was pretty eclectic. I've done a lot of different things. I did start selling in second grade on the playground selling creepy crawlers for a buck a piece And I got sent to the principal's office, anyway. So I was in sales and sales management primarily throughout my career. Sales operations, did project management. Really in the last 10 years did a lot of turnarounds of organizations and teams that were in serious problem, losing money or just mismanaged, and got kind of a knack for that. And I think my problem-solving skills probably come from something I inherited through my grandfather and my father, both In 2022, you published a book, Wilhelm's Way the inspiring story of the Iowa chemist who saved the Manhattan Project.
Speaker 1:That chemist was your grandfather, harley A Wilhelm, who, through his important work for the federal government, changed the course of history in broad and end-of-world War II. Before we learn about Harley through your writing, share with us your memories of your grandfather.
Speaker 2:My grandfather was kind of an affable guy, very likeable, very level headed and mild mannered, And he was just kind of fun to be around. He was a big sports fan. He was a Drake Bulldog for life. I remember going down to their house in Ames, Iowa, And during the holidays he was always watching the football games and then the basketball games for Drake And, of course, Iowa State they were playing as well.
Speaker 2:He was the original recycler. As a metallurgist He understood the value of non-renewable resources And so he had a lot of tin cans in his basement and aluminum when he passed away And I remember that because it just seemed so odd at the time, but now it just makes perfect sense to me. He was a do-it-yourselfer. There's some funny stories. There's so many stories I was not able to share in the book about him due to space, but there's a lot of stories about him trying to do things on his own that didn't turn out too well, And those are fun stories in the family that we like to share. Gardener always had would make jam and he had this thing called super juice that he would make for us. It was orange juice loaded up with sugar. He's like not really good for you, but Doesn't orange already have a lot of sugar?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly exactly. And oddities like as a chemist, he had this Lazy Susan on his kitchen table that he kept all these vitamins and minerals and things and the kids had to have to have those on their food. They had to sprinkle it on their food to stay healthy. So he was just a very interesting character And I didn't know how important of a person he was as I was growing up. I really learned that later in my adulthood, and even more so after he'd passed away.
Speaker 1:I have been enthralled with your book, will Helms Way. For me it's an incredible history lesson, more so than I ever imagined For our audience. walk us through the book in the significant contributions of your grandfather.
Speaker 2:Will Helms was brought onto the Manhattan Project initially to solve a problem of finding a substitute for uranium, and they needed uranium. The physicists had a theory that they wanted to prove a chain reaction. Controlled, self-sustaining chain reaction was possible, and they realized they needed uranium to do that, but it had to be pure, because impurities would steal neutrons and kill their reaction. However, that problem had been something scientists had worked on for 150 years and not solved. In terms of purifying uranium, it didn't exist, and so Arthur Compton, who ran the project, was looking for somebody who could find a substitute for uranium, and that was what Will Helms was initially tasked with doing. But he knew the physicists really wanted pure uranium, not a substitute. So on the side, he worked on this purification of uranium, and him solving that enabled us to build the atomic bomb and end the war quickly and swiftly and definitively. A few years later, his team at Iowa State produced over two million pounds of pure uranium that was then used to be transmuted into plutonium, which enabled us to build the plutonium bomb.
Speaker 1:It's incredible that this was a top secret project. of course, all across the United States, Many scholars, many physicists, many chemists just I mean, how big of a project was it? And, really, who saved the project? were your grandfather and his team out of Ames, Iowa?
Speaker 2:Yes, there were a couple hundred thousand people, i believe on the Manhattan Project in total, and his part of it was very critical. I mean, if not for Will Helms, we likely would have invaded Japan because his invention made it possible to move the project forward quickly. And the people in Iowa working on it actually the people underneath him working on it didn't know what they were working on. They knew they were purifying uranium but they didn't know they were working on the atomic bomb And so it was highly classified. And there's stories about the building down there in Ames. There'd be fires and explosions in the building, sometimes looked like it was glowing And yet the community didn't know what was going on there and the workers did just the top level chemists and physicists knew and, of course, top general and the army. They knew what was going on with the project.
Speaker 1:Growing up. You didn't know.
Speaker 2:No, i did not know, he was just my grandpa. We called him Grandpappy And I remember him giving me horsey rides on his back And he always liked to claim he was the person that gave his grandchildren their first piano lesson. He'd set us down in front of the piano or organ and let us just pound on it, and he wanted to be able to take credit if we became famous pianists or something later in life.
Speaker 2:Of course he was famous Yeah he was famous in the scientific world. In his realm he was very famous, but he was very humble, And one of the aspects about my grandfather and his humility is that he would win awards and then he would bring them home and show my grandma and he'd put them in the closet on a shelf and they stayed there until the day he died.
Speaker 1:When did you find out that your grandfather did something really important for our country? And then, after that, i need to know when did you decide to start to write the book?
Speaker 2:So I didn't really understand what he had done or accomplished until I believe it was 1985 or six when they named Wilhelm Hall at Iowa State University after him. It had been the metallurgy building, which was a building that was built following the war. When the US Atomic Energy Commission was created, they gave funding to build this metallurgy building, and it was decades later when it was finally named Wilhelm Hall and there was a big event and my parents said you need to come to Iowa, they're naming a building after your grandfather, like what. So I went and the newspapers were there, the TV stations were there and the governor and a lot of important people. And that's when I really came to understand that his impact on the outcome of the war was huge.
Speaker 2:And yet I was fairly young and I didn't do anything with it And I wasn't even thinking about writing a book. Until later in life, about 30 years later, i finally said you know, i've been hearing stories from my father and my aunts about him and there's more to this man than I understand. And then I started digging into the Manhattan Project and realized that the histories that are out there about the Manhattan Project focus on the physicists And of course, none of it would have happened without the physicists. However, it also wouldn't have happened without the chemists, and Wilhelm's role as a chemist was a critical role that contributed to us being able to be successful with the project.
Speaker 1:There has been a lot written about the Manhattan Project. How was this story missed?
Speaker 2:Well, the original history that was written by Henry Smythe, i believe it was. He was a physicist himself and he was asked to by General Groves to do a be an embedded kind of embedded journalist during the project and he really understood the physics of the project And he just didn't focus on the chemistry. And it has been kind of understood out there that the physicists got all the credit and the chemistry kind of got left behind. There was a lot of other chemistry besides what Wilhelm did. I mean they needed, they needed polonium for the trigger and there were, you know, all this work with plutonium, although Wilhelm and his team did a lot of research on plutonium also, which I don't even talk about.
Speaker 2:That in the book. There's so many things that we're working on that I couldn't add to the book. And Richard Rhodes, who wrote the making of the atomic bomb and he actually won the Pulitzer Prize for that, doesn't go into the chemistry either. And there's one passing sentence in there about spitting and the uranium coming from Iowa and that's it Usually you'll read about. There was a problem with uranium they needed to solve and it got solved, but they never say who solved it, why. You know how it was solved, why it was so important for it to get solved, and I'm not quite sure why they missed it, except that I know the physicists were the ones who were writing the history.
Speaker 1:Well, you made up for that in this book, so tell us that journey.
Speaker 2:Well, I started to think about writing a book after I took a writing class. So I was gonna go back and get my MBA and I hadn't taken a class or written a paper in almost 30 years. I thought I better take a writing class and I took a class up at Dakota County Technical College.
Speaker 1:In the Twin Cities.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And the instructor there asked for me to give him a copy of one of my papers for him to use for future classes and needed my permission. I'm like, okay. And then the next paper. He said you need to get this one published. So all of a sudden I thought, well, maybe I have a skill set I didn't know I had. How could I parlay that into something? And then I was thinking about my grandfather and I thought you know I should do this.
Speaker 2:Well, it wasn't until 2012 that I really dealt into working on the project and which is after I got my MBA. So I finished my graduate studies and then went on to start researching the book And I spent probably a year doing the initial research and then another year continuing research and doing the first draft and then drafting and redrafting and researching, and over and over many drafts, before I ever put it in front of an editor. But I also belonged to the Rochester Writers Group and they were very beneficial for me in the early stages. I took my early chapters there and had them give me feedback to make sure I was on the right direction, going in the right direction, and it was very beneficial for me to get that feedback And then, prior to taking it to an editor, i also had beta readers, so I'd six people read the book in its entirety and give me feedback, and I took all of that into consideration as I edited and improved the book.
Speaker 1:How long of a process was it?
Speaker 2:A decade.
Speaker 1:A decade? Yeah, so break down the research to the writing. In terms of time.
Speaker 2:Probably more time in the research because I really had to dig to find things and travel. I spent time in the archives at Iowa State University many, many, many days time in Drake University archives And when I first started the project there really weren't records online yet. But within a year or so these companies came into being where they were taking old archives, documents from old newspapers or little museums and doing this historic preservation and putting them into digital form, and so then I was able to find things I wouldn't have been able to find. For instance, these records in Montana, which was a. There was a college out there in our, in our mountain union college that my grandfather taught at for a year.
Speaker 2:That no longer exists, but I was able to track down these digital records. And then this little high school down in Iowa they had digitized their records and the little museum there you know. They gave me access to be able to get these records, but I kept digging and digging. Actually, it was like up to a month before I went into proofreading. I was still adding things, i'd written the book, but I kept finding more and more as more things came online that I could add to the book.
Speaker 1:What I really like about the book and I mentioned earlier, it's a great history lesson, but it doesn't feel like a history book, thank you. It feels like a book that has personality, that has emotion and you really get to understand your grandfather, who is a very humble person. Yes, can you speak a little bit more about that person in this book? Maybe a few examples?
Speaker 2:Well, i mentioned that he would win these awards, and this big award that he won at the end of the war was the Army Navy E-Flag, which was a flag for industry that he was the only individual to win. And he won that award. He was actually given it in private by General Groves And he took it home, showed my grandma the award and then he put it on the closet because his boss didn't get one. Right, he got the award but his boss didn't. Iowa State got the award and Iowa State had, you know, the flag that they had won, you know, flying for a few years, and it's actually on display in Spending Hall. Frank Spending was my grandfather's boss, So it's on display in his building. But the Wilhelm Army Navy flag went into a closet and it's in mint condition because it was never flown. And I have that. Oh, wow, yeah, it's pretty cool.
Speaker 1:What are some of the ways Wilhelm's work affects our way of life?
Speaker 2:For starters, nuclear energy. That very first nuclear reactor was the chain reaction experiment that took place on December 2, 1942 under Stagg Stadium at the University of Chicago, and Wilhelm's uranium was at the core of that. So from that we got the nuclear weapons, but we also got nuclear energy which powers a lot of the world today, not even not just the US, but over in Europe and other places around the world. Nuclear medicine is a result of that. Agriculture, tracers and even Rover on Mars can be traced back to Wilhelm, because the NASA, a lot of their spaceships, are powered by plutonium, and plutonium is derived from transmuting uranium, and uranium has to be pure in order to transmute it.
Speaker 1:Wow Over my head right now, sorry.
Speaker 2:It was over my head. before I started this project too, It was all over my head.
Speaker 1:But you've done a really good job. I mean I'm giving you a lot of compliments because you deserve them.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:It's really an engaging book because it's not. You know, it's about a chemist, but it's not so technical.
Speaker 2:I really was conscious of that because I myself am not a chemist And when I started working on the project and I was looking at the original documents from 1942, which are probably still radioactive because they are around all the uranium and everything And I'm reading these documents and all these experiments and I had to figure out from this huge abundance of documents what are the important experiments that were taking place.
Speaker 2:And so I had to learn the terminology of chemistry and discern okay, that one's important and this is not. and I can put this one in the book and then convert that into layperson's terms so that they could understand what it was and define things along the way. If I didn't know what it was, i figured the average reader didn't know what it was and then put it into a story that's interesting and that will keep them turning the page. I didn't want them to get bored by the chemistry, but I felt it was important for them to understand that this was a huge undertaking and almost like a miracle that he pulled it off as fast as he did when people had been trying to do what he did for 150 years, and he solved it in six months.
Speaker 1:There's some musings in the book too, and so you mentioned in the book that because this was so top secret that even the fire department weren't allowed to the office, so they had to learn how to put fires out, and I guess they had some.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, they had a lot of fires. It was highly explosive and if you don't handle it just the right way, you're going to end up with a fire or an explosion. and the building they were manufacturing the uranium in was an old building made out of corn cob wall board which is highly flammable, and so the technicians had to learn how to put out the fires, because it was classified and and if the fire department came they had to stay outside, and the firefighters are. The employees had to figure out how to put those fires out themselves, and one time there was six fires in one day And the secretaries who were on site there didn't really appreciate all the explosions and fires in one day. They all walked out. They all quit and walked out. It was quite explosive engagement.
Speaker 1:This is your first book and you've recently won first place at the Minnesota Book Awards for general nonfiction, and this is a big award. Congratulations, thank you. Must be gratifying. Does it motivate you to write more?
Speaker 2:Yes, i am. I'm feeling very blessed. You know I had it was a long process to get here, but I I also wanted it to be a credible book and I wanted to take the time to make it right and not have, you know, make mistakes that could be discredit it. So it really took the time to make it right and I wanted to make weave in that. History is his life will have. His life is born in nineteen hundred, the world change throughout his lifetime and the war, and we've all that together to keep people turning the page. And winning the award is a validation that I know how to write, which I really didn't know because it was my first book and I did learn more about writing and how to write By taking the criticism and listening to the criticism along the way that I was given by the righteous writer's group and by the, my beta readers and by my editor, and I'm very excited to have several projects that I'm working on right now that are underway.
Speaker 1:What advice would you give to aspiring authors?
Speaker 2:I would say be patient and be kind to yourself. Be patient because if you wanted to be a good product, you gotta take the time to fix the errors, improve the verbiage, make the story flow, consider who your audience is like. and that's one thing I kept going back to is who's gonna be reading this. who do I want to read this? I don't want this book to be for scientists. I want this book to be for the average person to understand this amazing thing that happened in our history, because Wilhelm's way is really Iowa.
Speaker 2:history is US, history is world history, and I wanted it to be engaging enough so that people would do that. but I had to take the time to do that and I was in a race against time because my Parents were both in their 80s, late 80s, and they both have passed away in the last six months. I made it just in the nick of time for them to be able to see the book, but I could publish a book three years earlier. It wouldn't have been as good a book because I would not have done this Intensive editing and rewriting that is required. so took a lot of patience and and I'm willing this to take my time to do it, and so I had to be nice to myself, be kind to myself, to be okay with doing that and not being myself up for not getting it done faster.
Speaker 1:Where can we find your book?
Speaker 2:at Wilhelmsway dot com or Teresa Waldoff dot com. You can buy it and you get an author signed copies if you order from my website, but it's also available on Amazon or you can order it through any bookstore.
Speaker 1:It's a great book, teresa Wilhelm Waldoff, thanks for being our guests on growing destinations and best of luck on your next award winning.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:Thank you for tuning in to the growing destinations podcast and don't forget to subscribe. This podcast is brought to you by experience Rochester. find out more about Rochester, minnesota, and its growing arts and culture scene Its international culinary flavors and award-winning craft beer by visiting experience Rochester, mn dot com.