Los Alamos—John and Nancy Bartlit—Recognized At Reception
April 15, 2012
Jim Gautier

John and Nancy Bartlit, whose combined destinies seem to have been preordained—have become a tapestry, a living illustration of a multi-faceted story as inspiring as it is instructive.

John Bartlit was born in Chicago and raised in a suburb south of the city. Nancy Reynolds Bartlit was born in Linthicum Heights, Maryland, and lived in New Jersey, Kansas City, and finally Wallingford, Pennsylvania, where the two eventually met.

John was working a summer job at Sun Oil in nearby Marcus Hook, along with several other young men, who were all invited to dinner one evening at the home of the company’s public relations manager. When the manager’s daughter heard they were all looking for dates, she pulled out her old high school yearbook and ticked off various girls she knew for each young man. She looked at Nancy’s photo and declared she would be perfect for John.

John was working on his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering at Purdue University and Nancy was an underclassman at Smith College.

That first meeting was in 1955, but they didn’t see each other again for more than two years. They started dating and Nancy proposed to John, but he wanted to finish his doctorate before getting married. So, Nancy took a job in Japan.

Nancy’s next two and a half years were busy and inspiring. She taught English as a second language to high school and college students, a class at UNESCO and scientists at the University of Tohoku in Sendai. She traveled Japan extensively, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and visited 17 countries on her 60-day return from Tokyo to Philadelphia.

John and Nancy married in 1961, when she returned (after John won her hand in a watermelon seed spitting contest with her father). And there was another bit of delay due to a bad sledding accident John sustained.

He said he fantasized starting down the aisle on crutches, then flinging them aside and robustly striding to his bride’s side—but he was already off crutches when the ceremony took place.

John took a summer job in Los Alamos in 1959 and initially wasn’t very taken with the area, but it started to grow on him. He accepted a full-time job with the lab in 1962, where he remained until retirement in 1993.

Once in Los Alamos, the two settled in, started a family and in 1966, moved into the home they built in Pajarito Acres, where they still reside. Nancy was at home with the children but was beginning what would be her extensive career as a volunteer.

John was buried in work at the lab until that fateful day he attended an air quality hearing at the New Mexico Legislature, at Nancy’s urging.

Another Los Alamos resident, Joe Devaney, had been striving to bring attention to New Mexico’s declining air quality and loss of its turquoise skies. His persistence finally resulted in a legislative hearing. That’s the day John said he became an environmentalist.

He didn’t react due to pollutants utility companies and others were dumping into the air. He reacted after quickly learning the companies were misleading legislators by insisting the best, state-of-the-art pollution control equipment was being employed in their plants.

In fact, companies were using outdated technologies to avoid the cost of newer, more efficient ways to limit contaminants entering the air. As John put it, “there was a sea of engineering information that bore directly on this large public problem,” none of which had been discussed at the hearing. The Bartlits took up the fight.

In 1969, the New Mexico Citizens for Clean Air and Water was founded in the Bartlits’ living room and the two spent the ’70s at air quality hearings and producing testimony.

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