Monotony, isolation, stark living conditions and strict security made it hard to call Hanford home.

Hearts filled with disbelief and disappointment when new arrivals found themselves in a sagebrush desert rather than in a cool Washington state forest.

But with all the work to be done at the Hanford site, the federal government could ill afford a hasty retreat by dispirited workers.

To mend the disenchantment and heighten morale among women workers in particular, Hanford Engineer Works hired Buena Maris.

Maris - a widow with a teen-age daughter - was the dean of women at Oregon State College in Corvallis and a regional expert on homemaker issues.

To help the war effort, the Oregon State Board of Education granted Maris a one-year leave of absence to serve as Hanford's supervisor of women's activities.

From the time she arrived at Hanford in September 1943 until she left a year later, Maris madly established programs to try to ease minds as well as the doldrums.

She first focused on taking better care of the women from the moment they arrived at the chaotic Pasco receiving center.

New arrivals got a pep talk on the importance of their work for Hanford and the war effort.

Maris immediately hired housemothers to oversee each of the women's barracks in the crude construction camp.

"She was running all day long," said her daughter, Marjorie Peterson, who lives in Richland. "She'd come home exhausted and say: 'What I need is a good wife.' "

Peterson, then 19, came to Hanford on summer break from college and did what she could to help, writing out the checks for her mother to sign to pay the bills.

At the same time, Peterson worked in a first-aid unit and as a file clerk.

Peterson recalled her mother lost a lot of weight working 80-hour weeks for her $4,000 annual salary.

"She had no time nor energy to drive 40 miles each way (to her barracks) on top of her work day," Peterson said.

Hanford managers needed to keep Maris happy, so they allowed her to fix up the top floor of one of three houses left at the old Hanford town site.

With two bedrooms and a parlor, Maris had the only apartment in town. She shared it with her daughter and two female friends. The rest of the houses were used for nursery schools.

Maris was the only woman who regularly attended the staff meetings of site commander Col. Franklin T. Matthias.

Maris once wrote that despite the pressures on Hanford administrators, "their doors were always open to me, and they apparently always had time to consider any problem I thought important enough for their attention."

The most famous tale involved Maris' complaint about the rough gravel walkways surrounding the women's compound. The river rock was destroying the women's rationed shoes.

So when G.M. Read, Du Pont's chief engineer, asked her in the summer of 1944 what she most needed, Maris replied: "Sidewalks or asphalt."

"To my amazement, the trucks were pouring and rolling asphalt the next day!" she later wrote.

And she managed to get some lawns planted in barren patches around the barracks.

She also searched boxes and boxes of employment cards to identify six Hanford workers with experience erecting a circus tent.

The huge tent was used for Protestant and Catholic church services and as a movie theater until a large auditorium was built.

Maris established a library, started a Red Cross chapter and Girl Scout troops that still exist in Richland.

The Red Cross branch served as an important link for Hanford workers who worried about being out of touch with distant relatives during wartime.

Maris also recruited a women's clothing store to open an outlet closer to Hanford and organized a special 5 p.m. bus to Pasco, so women could get to town for shopping, dinner or to the beauty shop.

And she scheduled special sports and recreation events for women, including parties and dances.

"In addition, Mrs. (Maris) served as a kind of wailing wall, maintaining day and evening office hours during which the women could come to her with their complaints and troubles and sorrows, knowing they would find comfort and sound advice," wrote Gen. Leslie R. Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, in his book, Now It Can Be Told.

Peterson noted, "Her job was to make this place a home because there was nothing but work. And nothing was too much for my mother to do.

"For many months, Mom carried a photo in her purse of a girl who was a Jane Doe in the local morgue," she said. "She showed it to everyone she could that might help identify the girl. I'm not sure the girl was ever identified. ..."

Despite Maris' busy schedule, she always found time to tend to a small flower garden and yard.

At first, the Hanford house she lived in was barren of a yard.

Peterson recalled, "They just handed Mom a sack of grass seed and said, 'Here's your lawn.' "

She also recalled that sometimes for fun her mother would buy peaches or pears and take them to a custom cannery by the old green bridge in Kennewick.

And Peterson remembers times when friends would pool ration stamps to buy steaks to cook. The old Hanford houses had the only kitchens on the site outside the mess halls.

But otherwise, Maris took little time to relax. Even on her day off, she attended conferences.

Despite her mother's work to improve life at Hanford, Peterson loathed the place.

"It was hateful. After one summer here I vowed I would never come back," she said. And in the fall of 1944, when Peterson became seriously ill with chicken pox, her mother drove her back to Corvallis, where Peterson later returned to school.

Maris left Hanford in September 1944, returning to Oregon State College to teach and lecture.

She remarried in 1946, but her second husband, Charles Mockmore who headed the college's civil engineering department, died seven years later.

She went to work as an extension specialist in child development and family life at Iowa State University, but returned to Oregon after marrying Avery Steinmetz in June 1960.

She was 69 when she died of brain cancer in 1967 in Portland.

Though she spent just one year at Hanford, her influence lived on there.

"All times of the day and night we saw her. Everybody knew who she was," said Geneva Owen Hammer, who was 17 when her family moved from Missouri in 1943 to work at Hanford.

"She couldn't have done all she did and still have gotten six hours of sleep at night," Hammer said.

Peterson, who later returned to the Tri-Cities, said, "She was adored. She was the bright glimmer of hope and light in a dreary place."