By ROBERT W. SEIDEL
Formerly of Los Alamos

Apparently the ‘Black Hole’ has absorbed its own history.

Long before Ed Grothus purchased it, it was the home of Mesa Market, which began as a part of the Bond-Willard Store in Espanola, and was purchased by my uncle, John Martins, and remained in business throughout the 1960s.

I was the son of his partner, Wayne Seidel, and worked in the store every summer from 1963 through 1967.  After John Martins bought the Community Center, Keith Kelly took over management and the store was briefly part of the Piggly-Wiggly chain until Grothus bought it in 1973, not 1953.

As Los Alamos Science Museum administrator in the 1990s, I acquired Grothus’ copy of the first neutrino detector, which was responsible for the only Nobel Prize in physics won for work at the Laboratory.

As LANL historian in the 1990s, I chronicled the history of the laboratory in my book Los Alamos and the Making of the Atomic Bomb.

I moved to the University of Minnesota as the ERA Land-Grant College Professor of History of Science and Technology and became Emeritus in 2011.