Ask Cecil Drotts what he remembers about Aug. 9, 1945, and he guesses it was work as usual at the Hanford nuclear reservation.

That was the day that the atomic bomb using plutonium Drotts helped produce at the Hanford nuclear reservation was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. It also was the day he turned 36.

That means he'll turn 99 today as one of the dwindling number of surviving Manhattan Project workers. Like Drotts, many were working on the atomic bomb project because they were too old to be called to military service.

Earlier in the war Drotts had worked at the Denver Ordnance making ammunition, but was recruited to the Eastern Washington desert in 1944 to work on the secret Manhattan Project.

He didn't have any idea what he was helping produce, he said. Few workers other than the top scientists did.

But he remembers that workers had been told when they were recruited to Hanford that "the war would end within two weeks of whatever was happening happened."

Initially he worked at Hanford's 300 Area, where fuel for Hanford reactors was made. His job was to move the uranium fuel slugs to "little igloos" for storage, he said.

In January 1945, he was transferred to help operate Hanford's second reactor, D Reactor. B Reactor, the world's first production-scale reactor, had begun operating just four months earlier and D Reactor had started operating just a month before Drotts was assigned to it.

As a nuclear operator, his work assignment rotated week to week. Some weeks were spent in the control room monitoring operations. The control room later was shipped to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., for display. And some weeks, he was assigned what he called "more or less janitorial work."

"I thought it was great," Drotts said.

DuPont, which then operated Hanford, struggled to retain workers during the war, particularly when the air turned brown as winds swept across the newly bared dirt of Hanford and Richland. Workers called them "termination winds" because they sent so many people packing.

The dust was bad, Drotts remembers, with construction leaving bare, soft and sandy soil. But it wasn't as bad as the dust he remembered drifting like snow growing up during the Dust Bowl in Kansas. And he didn't miss Colorado's ice and cold.

He moved into a dormitory provided for workers and ate meals in the cafeteria.

"They fed us good," he said, despite the wartime rationing that most people lived under across the nation.

For entertainment, he played on a softball team and fished for steelhead.

Hanford workers learned what they were making Aug. 6, when the headline across the front page of the Richland Villager over a story about the bombing of Hiroshima announced "It's Atomic Bombs!"

Three days later a second bomb, this one using Hanford plutonium, was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. By Aug. 14 the war was over, just as Hanford recruiters predicted.

"I think all of us were thinking this was a good thing that we won the war so quick," Drotts said. "But later we kind of felt bad we helped kill so many people."

Drotts would stay on at Hanford, working at different times at each of Hanford's nine plutonium-production reactors. Divorced when he arrived at Hanford, he remarried in 1949 and was assigned to one of Richland's government-built homes.

He still lives there today.

"Moving from Denver up here is the best move I ever made," he said. "I've always liked it here."

At 99, he continues to drive -- at least around Richland during daylight hours -- and just had his driver's license renewed. A widower for more than a decade, he keeps house for himself and cooks his own meals.

Once a week he volunteers at Central United Protestant Church, usually doing maintenance and carpentry work. One recent project was helping build a new set of storage shelves.

He also likes to watch the Mariners play and to read, he said. His coffee table is covered with tidy stacks that include Bibles, novels by Tom Clancy and baseball books.

He credits his good health and longevity to good Swedish genes.

He'll wait to celebrate his birthday until next week when his family will gather in Richland. He has four children, six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.