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Journal North: Home | Sports | Opinion | Obits | Entertainment
Friday, February 13, 2009
Anti-Nuclear Activist Dead at 86
By Raam Wong
Journal Staff Writer
Ed Grothus, an anti-nuclear weapons activist whose overflowing Los Alamos surplus store was a wonderland for amateur inventors, died Thursday. He was 86.
Grothus had cancer and died in his Los Alamos home surrounded by family, according to his daughter, Barbara.
Throughout his life, Grothus battled to get a hand on thousands of Geiger counters, circuit boards, and other gizmos and widgets that he collected from Los Alamos National Laboratory over more than a half-century and had piled high inside his store.
But even as neighbors grumbled and county inspectors shook their heads, the piles continued to grow inside the Black Hole, where it's said everything goes in, but nothing comes out.
“He left work undone, and he was sorry about that,” Barbara Grothus said. “He didn't want those things to be a burden to the family.”
The family plans to keep the store open for now and hopes one day to open the old church nearby, purchased by Grothus years back, as a museum displaying his collection of artifacts from the Atomic Age.
It was there, at the First Church of High Technology, where Grothus made himself “cardinal,” preaching peace and nuclear abolition.
With a dry wit and an unrelenting opposition to nuclear weapons, Grothus was a celebrated eccentric across the globe and hero to peace activists.
“He found a way to effectively protest nuclear weapons from within the very heart of the nuclear weapons Establishment,” said Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group, which opposes nuclear weapons.
Grothus was born on June 28, 1923, in Clinton, Iowa. He served in the Merchant Marine before joining the fledgling federal lab at Los Alamos on March 26, 1949, four years after the atomic weaponry invented there ended World War II.
A child of the Depression, Grothus established the Los Alamos Sales Co. in 1951 to buy and resell surplus lab equipment. He worked for 20 years at LANL, first as a machinist and then in a weapons group, before the Vietnam War turned him against nuclear weapons.
“He was a very smart man who, I think, found his calling after he left the laboratory,” his daughter said.
Grothus' company operated for many years as a catalog business, selling to universities worldwide. He typed and mimeographed pages, and his kids helped pack and ship. As the Black Hole became more famous, the shop drew artists, inventors and film set decorators who hauled away X-ray machines, oscilloscopes and odd shapes in metal, rubber and plastic.
Grothus was the subject of two documentaries, including “Atomic Ed and the Black Hole,” broadcast on HBO.
But federal authorities never warmed to his antics, like the time he sent “organic plutonium” to the White House. Secret Service agents visited his shop more than once.
To follow Grothus on one of his aimless tours of the Black Hole was to stumble through more than 60 years of atomic history.
“I make a business of selling last year's scientific equipment and hardware,” Grothus said in his final Journal interview in November. He wore a puff of unruly white hair and his trademark purple camouflage pants and 5-inch bolo tie. “I only sell about 5 percent of what I buy, so I've built a huge pile over 50 years.”
His artwork, fanciful and apocalyptic, filled the store, such as an enormous sunflower formed out of 500-pound test-bomb casings. He kept his most valuable artifacts — like heavy mechanical calculators and a radio said to be owned by Robert Oppenheimer — stashed inside a trailer for the museum he always talked of opening.
His most prized possession in recent years seemed to be a testament to his credo of “always build, never destroy.”
He paid $200,000 to create a massive granite monument marking the first nuclear bomb explosion as a reminder of the nuclear threat posed to humanity. Grothus stored the two towering obelisks inside their original shipping containers as he worked until the very end to find them a home.
Sitting in a lawn chair as he soaked up the sun in front of the Black Hole last year, Grothus smiled wryly when asked about his legacy.
“There's always one man who makes a difference,” he said. “Jesus Christ. Josef Stalin. Chairman Mao. Abraham Lincoln. And Ed Grothus.”
The family invites friends to visit DeVargas Funeral Home, 623 N. Railroad Ave. in Española, from 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday. A memorial service will be announced at a later date.
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