Pasco was a quiet little burg in 1940. A friendly town where everyone knew nearly all their neighbors.

Folks would drop by the coffee shop for a discourse on the day's weather or the latest in farm equipment. The wait was short in the barber shop and shopping at the corner grocery store took only as long as you wanted.

Lines for anything were unheard of.

The Pasco High School football field was for Bulldog games, not bivouac.

Then, Dec. 7, 1941. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Within months, Pasco was sleepy no more. Lines and waiting replaced leisurely chats in the barber shops, the grocery stores, the coffee shops.

The football field held Army troop tents in precise formations. Spare bedrooms became "home" to strangers. Unused high school rooms became government offices.

The imprint of the Hanford project crossed the river into Franklin County and pummeled Pasco with the force of change.

Yet for many teen-agers living in Pasco half a century ago, Hanford was an afterthought, a place "out there," some invisible, mysterious place soon overshadowed by the flurry of war-related activity going on right in their own town.

"Pasco had a little over 3,900 living here in those days and Kennewick was about 2,200," said Jim Crewdson, now retired in Richland.

"Things began to crank up in the spring of '43 (at Hanford), but a year before that, all hell was breaking loose in Pasco," he said.

The Army's Holding and Reconsignment Depot was being built along the Columbia River at the south end of town. It became known as Big Pasco, Crewdson said. To the north, the Pasco Naval Air Station was going in to train pilots for combat duty.

"There was a lot of construction on both ends of town," Crewdson said.

A smaller material-holding facility was built near what is today's Burlington Northern humpyards.

"It was known as Little Pasco," Crewdson said.

Big Pasco was processing handling materials for Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union, which was then fighting invading German forces, Crewdson said. Logistical supplies also were being sent to Alaska and the Pacific theater.

New arrivals were pouring into Pasco on the three northbound and three southbound daily passenger trains, with sizable numbers heading for jobs at Hanford, Crewdson said. But activities in Pasco itself were creating sizable change and making their own imprint on young residents like him.

"Du Pont's (the Hanford contractor) influence during that time period was smoked over by the other activity," he said. Pasco was overrun by sailors from the Navy base and their presence was very noticeable, he said.

"I would say nobody was really spending a lot of time wondering what was going on out there (at Hanford)," Crewdson added.

Duane Taber, now a Benton-Franklin Superior Court judge, and a 1943 classmate of Crewdson's, agrees.

The influence of the Navy base and Big Pasco were visible everywhere to Pasco residents, with sailors all over town and planes filling the air.

Hanford, he said, "seemed like a huge construction project. We were more engrossed in the naval air station. You couldn't look up in the sky without seeing planes everywhere.

"That was action; that was exciting."

During his senior year, he also worked at Big Pasco.

"That also was very exciting," Taber said. "They were shipping war materials to Russia. We knew everything we were doing was helping the war effort."

Army troops also took over the high school football field for bivouac.

"All that pretty much blocked out (thoughts about) Hanford," he said. Still, you couldn't help but notice its influence, Taber said.

"They took every available room in the high school," Taber said, referring to the Hanford project, which was gobbling up office space everywhere. "There were 100 women in there hitting typewriters."

Students strolling through the hallways could hear the steady clickety-clack of 1,000 fingers and thumbs typing all day long, Taber said.

A few years later he was in the Pacific on a U.S. destroyer, fresh from combat, when word was received the atomic bombs had been dropped on Japan and news was announced of Hanford's part.

"We were fighting the Japanese and the bombs stopped the war, so that meant a lot to us," Taber said. "When they talked about it and talked about the atomic bomb, it didn't mean anything to us. We just figured it had to be big."

Elaine Hailey Minkiewitz, who still lives in Pasco, said her town was very aware of the disruption caused by Hanford.

"People didn't know what was going on," Minkiewitz said. "We just knew we were being disrupted." Disrupted day and night. Trainloads of newcomers arrived at all hours.

"We began to wonder: 'What is happening to us?' " Minkiewitz said.

Anna Marie Scott of Pasco, whose father, Fred Scott, had the town's only plumbing shop when Hanford started, said Hanford was like some distant mystery, although only a few miles from town. The Pasco Naval Air Station also was nearby and that made sense for the war effort, although veteran Pascoites wondered about the wisdom of a Navy base in the desert.

"We had a lot of Navy and that was something we could see and understand," Scott said.

As for Hanford: "We knew it was going to be a huge plant, but nobody knew about atomic stuff."

Scott herself got a first-hand look at early construction. Before major contractors were ready, the project called on her father's shop for plumbing needs. With a shortage of help, she often drove truck for her father.

"I was still going to high school," Scott said. "I would make deliveries to the fellas who worked out there."

Around her dad's plumbing business, no one really discussed the overall Hanford project, she said. Work had not yet begun on reactor vessels and work involving her father might be something like a refrigeration unit. That's what talk usually revolved around, Scott said.

Pasco was becoming accustomed to the military and government projects with the Navy base, bivouaced troops and Big Pasco, she said.

"It was government and the government was doing a lot of things," she said.

Anne Taber, a 1943 Pasco High graduate who later married Duane Taber's brother, Bruce, said she went to work at Big Pasco after graduating. Housing shortages throughout the Tri-Cities forced many Hanford workers to live in Pasco and to commute.

"It was such a change," she remembers. "Going to work was like being in downtown Seattle because of the traffic. It was just totally different," she said. "This sleepy little town of 4,000 was all of a sudden a boom town."

Italian prisoners of war were shipped to Pasco for work at the reconsignment depot and Anne Taber, who was born in Italy, said the Army often would escort some of the POWs to the home of her parents, Nick and Carmena Rogers (the family had changed its Italian name). There they were treated to Sunday dinner and a feeling of home. Anne's parents would speak to the POWs in their native Italian. Other relatives of Italian descent also took escorted Italians in for Sunday gatherings, Anne Taber said.

Donna Westby Carroll, whose father and mother, Allen and Marian Westby, ran Westby's Men's Shop at 326 W. Lewis St., said her parents where overwhelmed by the sudden upsurge of business with Hanford arrivals.

The store was only a couple of blocks from the Pasco train depot and one of the first hit by new arrivals.

"They needed clothes and that's where they came," said Carroll, now living in Kirkland. "The poor little town just could not handle it."

Lines were everywhere, for everything, she said.

There was no way to understand the Hanford mystery, Carroll said. "We knew all those things were happening, but we couldn't put the perspective to it as we understand it now," she said.

Crewdson said he returned to Pasco on an Army furlough in 1944 and his parents took him for a drive to the Richland village "where a good many of the houses had been built."

By now, the term "damn Du Ponters" had made its way into the language of longtime residents frustrated by the monumental changes in their lives.

"That's when I began to hear some negative comments ... and nobody knew what they were doing here," Crewdson said.

By the time he returned home from fighting in Germany, news of the atomic bomb had spread around the world and questions about what was going on at Hanford during the war were replaced by a single question, Crewdson said: "What are they going to do with that Hanford thing?"