George Pitman
Rocky Hill, CT
grpepsllc@home.com
(Received 25 Dec 2000)

I grew up in the Central Vermont area, and my parents, from my 18th year on, vacationed at a summer cottage on Lake Elmore near Morrisville, Vermont. In 1970, while my wife, Marilyn was pregnant with our first child, Bradley, I was in the process of reading The Manhattan Project by Stephane Groeff. I was, at the time, finishing my degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of Vermont and found the book to be incredibly informational and interesting. While reading the book, I noted that a not very distant neighbor at the lake had on his driveway entrance sign, the name E. P. Wigner. I wondered how many people with this name there could be; so I took a walk up the long driveway to a brick single story home and found Eugene working in his garden. We introduced each other and Eugene immediately became concerned that I may have come into contact with poison ivy that was growing nearby. He took me inside to wash up and then served each of us a glass of cognac. That was my first and last taste of cognac and I will forever treasure that experience.

Over the years, I visited with Dr. Wigner on several occasions and learned how truly humble a man this was. You could never follow him through a doorway; you never learned anything about him from him; he was always interested in learning about you.

I've since read just about all the material there is on the Manhattan Project and the nuclear years immediately following the war. The opportunity to meet Eugene probably steered me into the nuclear power field where I worked for 27 years in Nuclear Engineering for a CT power company that owned five nuclear power stations.

I have often wondered how as small a country as Hungary produced so many scientists and mathematicians and ,in general, great men who have had such an impact on the world. I have concluded that we are creatures of our circumstances, and, when threatened by such events as wars (which Hungary has a history of), we are driven beyond our normal capacity and capability to accomplish the unimaginable. I have often attempted to read Dr. Wigner's technical publications such as the bible that he and Alvin Weinberg produced on reactor design and I become lost in the first few pages. I realize that I cannot even learn from developed documents, that which individuals like Eugene were able to first imagine and then develop.

My wife and I attended the Princeton University Memorial Service for Eugene early in 1995. Edward Teller provided an incredibly informative, interesting and entertaining eulogy, starting off by characterizing Eugene as his "friend,......best friend......and only friend." I believe this stems from the Red Scare period when Edward took much heat from his colleagues for not coming to Robert Oppenheimer’s defense in a more helpful way.