Westerville Natives Had Memorable Roles in World War II

Westerville natives Agnes Meyer Driscoll and Allen Bartlett played crucial roles in World War II, she as a skilled cryptographer breaking enemy codes, he in the Manhattan project that developed the atomic bomb and ended the war.

Both went to Westerville schools and on to two years at hometown Otterbein College, where fathers Gustav Meyer and Willard Bartlett taught. She graduated from Ohio State University in 1911 with physics among her majors. He was a 1944 summa cum laude physics graduate of Colgate University, with a doctorate in physics from Harvard University in 1951.

A historical marker posted by the Westerville Historical Society in front of her childhood home at 110 S. State St. recognizes Driscoll as the “first lady of naval cryptography,” cracking codes that compromised Japan’s naval operations.

She is in the National Security Agency Hall of Fame as “one of the true originals in American cryptography” and is among 51 Great Ohioans enshrined in the Museum Gallery of the Ohio Statehouse.

She died in 1971 and is interred in Arlington National Cemetery.

Allen Bartlett joined the Manhattan project in July 1944 as a 21-year-old and went to New Mexico to study plutonium to be used in the atomic bomb. Two men staying next to him in their Los Alamos dormitory died in chain-reaction plutonium experiments.

Reported the Westerville Public Opinion in a brief story on Aug. 23, 1945, headlined “Local Boy Has Been Helping on Atomic Bomb,” his family “had no idea as to what he was working on, and only a general idea as to where he was located.”

“Although I don’t like to be associated with anything so destructive,” Bartlett said in the Public Opinion, “it’s been a race to see if we could get it before they did. I now feel as if I had made some contribution to the winning of the war.”

Bartlett went on to a distinguished 38-year teaching career at the University of Colorado. The university paid tribute to him at his passing in 2013 for his “profound impact on the Department of Physics, the University of Colorado and the city of Boulder” and his “transformative influence on science education and public policy.”

He led a citizens group that succeeded in limiting housing growth in the mountains above Boulder by setting a maximum elevation for city water.

“Boulder’s pristine mountains, city parks, greenbelts and open spaces are the direct results of Professor Bartlett’s leadership,” the university’s Department of Physics wrote.

Bartlett was famous for his public lectures on Arithmetic, Population and Energy highlighting the connection between population growth and the energy crisis and providing a compelling call to action. He gave the lecture 1,742 times in 49 states and 7 foreign countries.