History in a hat: Film clip of atomic bomb scientist Oppenheimer found in 1952 Socorro home movie

Feb. 18—SOCORRO — It's the hat — somewhere between a fedora and a porkpie — that's the tipoff.

"The hat kind of struck me as a hat from the Midwest," Gary Jaramillo said.

"You see that hat, and you see him walking up and see his face," said Van Romero, a physicist at New Mexico Tech. "It took a fraction of a second. And then, Oh my gosh, that's him."

"Him" is famed Manhattan Project physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.

As portrayed by actor Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer has been on screens everywhere in director Christopher Nolan's 2023 biopic, which has been nominated for 13 Academy Awards.

But in October 1952, the real Oppenheimer can be seen in several seconds of 8 mm film taken at the Socorro Plaza during New Mexico Tech's annual 49ers parade.

The scientist who led the team that created the first atomic bomb is strolling around the plaza wearing his distinctive hat, a suit and tie and carrying a camera.

"One of the most famous people in history, and he's walking around taking pictures just like everybody else," said Jaramillo, 70, a former firefighter and paramedic and a past member of the Socorro City Council.

Oppy craze

Jaramillo's uncle, Joe R. Wills, manager of Socorro's Loma movie theater in 1952, shot the film that captured Oppenheimer at the Socorro Plaza.

"Uncle Joe knew everybody," Jaramillo said. "I would be willing to bet he knew Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer had a camera. Maybe he took a picture of Uncle Joe that's in a closet somewhere."

Wills died in August 1988. Before she died in 2022, Jaramillo's Aunt Leah, Wills' widow, gave Jaramillo a box of 16 or so 8 mm films made by Wills between 1948 and 1957. He sent them to a company that digitizes old film.

"They could not repair some of the films," Jaramillo said. "But they were able to work with about half of them. They sent me thumb drives and DVDs."

There are a lot of men, women and kids in cowboy hats in the footage of 1952's 49ers parade, which is probably why Jaramillo noticed the nattily dressed, lanky figure wearing a different sort of lid.

"But I didn't know it was (Oppenheimer) at first, not until I checked it out on the internet," he said. "Even then, I didn't think much of it."

But that was before the Oppy craze that exploded during the build up to, release of and aftermath of Nolan's blockbuster movie.

Ties with TechJaramillo, a member of the Socorro County Historical Society, put together 43 minutes worth of Wills' films and gave the compilation to Chuck Zimmerly, long-time Socorro teacher and coach and president of the county historical society.

Zimmerly showed the film in the Hammel Museum, a former Socorro brewery and ice house, during recent Socorro Oktoberfest celebrations. He said Jaramillo had not mentioned anything to him about Oppenheimer being in the film. It was while watching the movie in the museum that Zimmerly first noticed those few seconds worth of Oppenheimer.

"There were a lot of people related to (New Mexico) Tech at Oktoberfest," Zimmerly, 75, said. "I showed them the film. 'That J. Robert Oppenheimer?' they said. I said, 'Yeah, I think so.'"

The film proved popular with Socorro residents — not just because Oppenheimer is in it, but because they could see parents, grandparents, other relatives and friends in it and enjoy looking at cars from decades ago and savoring for a short time a different era in American history.

As the Oppenheimer stir created by the 2023 movie swelled, however, Socorro's New Mexico Tech started to think of the 1952 film clip's potential for promoting the school.

"Van (Romero) called me and asked me if I could come out to Tech and show it," said Zimmerly, a New Mexico Tech alumnus and a former member of the university's board of regents. "I showed it at Brown Hall."

Romero, a Tech vice president for special research, said interest in the Socorro Plaza film clip was pretty much universal among faculty and students at the university because of the Hollywood movie.

"For people who had been around Tech for a while, the reactions was 'Oh yeah. It makes sense that he was here.' But some who are newer to Tech were surprised."

Romero said Oppenheimer was good friends with physicist E.J. Workman, who was president of New Mexico Tech from 1946 to 1965. That in itself was sufficient reason for Oppenheimer to be in Socorro on that October day in 1952.

But Oppenheimer also knew physicist Marvin Wilkening, a member of the Tech faculty in 1952. Wilkening worked with Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project and was among the scientists who witnessed the detonation of the first atomic bomb on July 16, 1945, at the Trinity Test Site, 35 miles southeast of Socorro.

Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz, a protégé of Oppenheimer's at the University of California-Berkeley in the early 1940s, was, like Oppenheimer himself, suspected by the United States government of having Communist affiliations. Romero said Oppenheimer used his influence with President Workman to get Lomanitz a position on the New Mexico Tech faculty in 1962. Lomanitz retired from there in 1991.

The university used Joe Wills' film clip of Oppenheimer to publicize the school's ties with the famous scientist, the Manhattan Project and the Trinity Test Site. The clip is posted on Tech's Facebook site, and the university has just published "New Mexico Tech and the Trinity Site Connection," a 20-page booklet that begins with the story of Wills filming Oppenheimer on Socorro's plaza.

49ers foreverThe film Jaramillo spliced together includes footage from the 1945 and 1949 parades as well as the '52 parade that Oppenheimer attended.

Romero said 49er celebrations, which continue to this day, date back to the 1910s or early 1920s.

The 49er name is a reference to the famous 19th-century gold rush and to the mining legacy of Tech, founded in 1889 as the New Mexico School of Mines. The celebrations are the university's version of homecoming, even though Tech has not participated in intercollegiate sports for many years.

There were plenty of horses, donkeys, cars and assorted vehicles in the 1952 parade. In one clip, Oppenheimer can be seen crossing the road between parade entrants. In another, he is walking across the plaza right toward Wills' camera.

Jaramillo said it is not surprising to him that Oppenheimer was in Socorro. The town is between Los Alamos, home of the atomic bomb project, and the Trinity Test Site and the only one of any size close to the latter. It's more than plausible that Oppenheimer would have stopped in Socorro while the atomic bomb was being developed and prepared for testing.

But besides that, he said his grandfather, Juan Jaramillo, a barber in Socorro, and his father, Tony Jaramillo, who once served Socorro as mayor, told him stories about Oppenheimer's visits to Socorro.

"I heard he would stay at the Park Hotel or the Val Verde when he was in town," Gary Jaramillo said. "He was a regular at Gerard's Cafe, which used to be on the north side of the Plaza. He would go to the Capitol Bar and read newspapers and visit with friends."

The Capitol Bar, established in 1896, is still operating on the east side of the plaza. Remnants of the Park Hotel are on the west side, behind the post office. The Val Verde, mostly in disuse, is across Californian street and several blocks east of the plaza.

The Loma Theater, which opened in 1937, was once located on the west side of the Socorro Plaza, near where the post office is now. In Wills' 1952 8 mm film, the theater's marquee shows that "The Singing Hill," a Gene Autry singing-cowboy movie, was playing that day. The Autry film was originally released in 1941, so it was probably not the first time it had played in Socorro.

Wills managed the Loma for years, but in December 1956, a fire that is believed to have started in a nearby garage destroyed the theater. The 200 patrons in the theater at the time escaped safely. They had been watching "Day the World Ended," a 1955 science fiction film about the survivors of a nuclear holocaust.

Finding historyGary Jaramillo said his Uncle Joe and Aunt Leah moved to California after the Loma fire and ran movie theaters and drive-ins in Fresno and Corcoran until they retired and returned to Socorro for the remainder of their years.

The Loma reopened a few blocks east of the plaza, near the Val Verde. Gary Jaramillo's father, Tony, operated the Loma from 1959 to 1974. Gary and his brothers and sisters helped.

Jaramillo said he's glad Oppenheimer surfaced in his Uncle Joe's movie.

"It helps people know the history of Socorro," he said. "Even people my age, old guys, don't know the history of their town."