My DAD - A Father's Day Tribute

This is a tribute to my father, Ken Hanning. Not until the past two years, did I find out I hardly spoke about him in high school and college. Not sure ‘Why’ I didn't talk about my father, at that time… most likely because it came after the divorce. My father was very talented; he mastered more technologies and sciences that, in another time, he would have been thought a genius. The image below, I just recently pieced together where it was taken.

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The photo, of my father, above… was taken… @ Los Alamos Laboratories in 1943. About two out of ten readers just got where my father worked. My Dear Readers, think back, about a year and a half, to an article I wrote of my mother and where she grew up. The diner she ended up working @ and where it was located. One could never imagine the coincidences that took place to create the family I am a part.

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When I was eight, my mother used to tell me stories. Stories about her childhood, about who raised her (it wasn’t her mother, she died in childbirth), about the reservations, about the Native Americans (her mother was a Native American living on a reservation just outside Los Alamos, New Mexico) and about meeting my father. Today is about father(s), especially mine.

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My father was trained as an X-ray technician, by the Army/Air Core, at the height of the Second World War, he was a very patriotic young man. He was stationed @ Los Alamos and took his off base meals at a little diner located on the single road that lead to this infamous base. My mother used to tell me how she first met J. Robert Oppenheimer. (About 70% of those that, already, didn't get it before…  just did)

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My father was very good at whatever he put his mind too. (One of the few good attributes I inherited) He was brilliant at taking X-Rays, and hand processing the film. In the civilian world, he spent twenty-five years working at the orthopedic practice of Hutchinson, Moore and Baker (later Moore-Baker-Christensen) the ortho doctors for the Houston Rockets. Too bad I wasn't really into basketball, Dad used to always be able to get courtside tickets to home games.

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My father excelled at anything electronics. He built his own kit transmitter (and antenna) so that he could help boys fighting in Vietnam talk with their parents here stateside (via an electronic/broadcast device called a phone patch). When my brother Darrell broke his arm, my father helped set his right arm… while I held Darrell’s shoulders. My father could speak in Morse code at an alarming rate (he was a Ham General before his death), fix a television or radio in an afternoon, break down a car engine and repair said engine, put up a Baker tent in record time, read electronic schematics, and know just how to comfort a son scared by the dark.

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I knew those things, about my father, since I was eight. Only recently did I discover that father worked @ Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project building Little Boy and Fat Man.

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As he was directed, my father never spoke of his training there, or what he did. However, there was only one role for an X-ray technician @The Manhattan Project. They x-rayed the shell casings to make sure there were no weak spots or metal fatigue. The atomic bomb casing had to stand up to immense pressures, before explosion.

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My father met my mother at that same diner, where she met Dr. Oppenheimer. My father must have made quite and impression, on my mother. All the geniuses that were gathered there, and she picked my father to wed.

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I am half done… but my hands just exited stage left. I am sorry Dad, I WILL finish just as soon as my hands work again...