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


They drew on training that Nancy received while attending a government/League of Women Voters co-sponsored conference on how to bring public participation into federal law decision-making.

John became a tireless advocate for stringent emission requirements and dug into the economics. Nancy became a volunteer for the American Lung Association, eventually serving on both state and national boards for several decades.

They both worked to improve outdoor air quality and reduce acid rain, and were often joined in their efforts by former Los Alamos Ranch School headmaster Fermor Church. John discovered Fermor’s wife, Peggy Pond Church, was a cousin.

Nancy also pushed efforts to clean up indoor air, starting with efforts to ban smoking in elevators. In time, the endeavor to limit smoking in public led Nancy to run for office and influence public policy.

Sen. John F. Kennedy, keynote speaker at Nancy’s college graduation, had admonished the graduates to do something with their lives — a philosophy Nancy took to heart.

Her parents taught her that politics was not a dirty word—it’s the art of finding answers to problems, as is engineering. Nancy won three terms on the Los Alamos County Council in the 1980s and served as Council Chair in her final year.

During those terms, she was also on the boards of directors for the New Mexico Association of Counties and the Women Officials in the National Association of Counties.

History has become a calling for Nancy. She is a member of the Los Alamos Historical Society, the Fuller Lodge/Historic District Advisory Board and the Historical Society of New Mexico, serving in a variety of capacities.

Her work with those groups is extensive and impressive. Some of her accomplishments include guiding the purchase of the Oppenheimer home for preservation, sponsoring a Los Alamos ordinance establishing the Art in Public Places and chairing the historic sculpture project that thus far, has brought statues of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Gen. Leslie Groves to the lawn at Fuller Lodge.

The New Mexico Historic Women Marker Initiative was created in 2005 by the New Mexico Women’s Forum, to recognize women’s contributions to New Mexico in a permanent manner.

Nancy worked to get the marker, now located by Ashley Pond in Los Alamos, recognizing Peggy Pond Church and Marjorie Bell Chambers. Additionally, since 2004, Nancy has worked locally to establish a Manhattan Project National Historical Park that would be “headquartered” in three locations—Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Tennessee and Hanford, Washington.

She is a member of the Southwest Oral History Association, adding to historic preservation through preservation of oral histories.

She is an author and Chautauqua speaker for the New Mexico Humanities Council. In her spare time, she earned her master’s degree in communication and took a two-and-a-half year graduate study program called Japanese Industry and Management of Technology, both from the University of New Mexico.

John and Nancy are both writers. John has been authoring columns for the Los Alamos Monitor for four decades. He describes an engineer as a person who designs systems, noting, “that’s what the environment is and that’s what a town is to—a system.

There is too much time spent looking at pieces instead of the system in which it operates.” His columns, therefore, are what he describes as “many sided.”

They both contributed to an anthology, “Voices of New Mexico,” published in 2011 to celebrate the state’s 100th anniversary of statehood in 2012.

Nancy co-authored, with the late Professor Ev Rogers, the 2005 publication, “Silent Voices of World War II: When Sons of the Land of Enchantment Met the Sons of the Land of the Rising Sun,” written after interviewing a diverse group of WWII veteran—from Navajo Code Talkers and Bataan Death March survivors to Manhattan Project physicists—learning how New Mexicans helped shorten the war.

Nancy is co-chairing a Symposium on WWII Internment of Japanese Americans in New Mexico, including the Santa Fe Camp, at the New Mexico History Museum this spring. The Bartlits both find irony in how their professional and personal lives have brought together the cultures of Los Alamos and Japan.

Not surprisingly, these examples are only a portion of the Bartlits’ activities that enhance the Los Alamos and New Mexico we know today.  ❇