A Los Alamos Landmark, The 'Black Hole,' Is About To Disappear

It's called the Black Hole because "everything goes in and nothing comes out," as founder Ed Grothus told NPR's John Burnett in 2008. But now, after the death of "Atomic Ed" in 2009 and his wife Margaret's passing in March of this year, what has been one of the weirdest government surplus stores in the nation (and Los Alamos' second-most visited tourist attraction), is closing. A liquidation sale is set for Friday through Sunday. Grothus' "cluttered, five-acre compound," as John described it, has since its opening in 1980 offered for sale surplus from "the nation's foremost nuclear weapons lab — the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory" in New Mexico. Grothus had "everything — from oscilloscopes and galvanometers to Geiger counters and centrifuges — stacked in canyons in the Black Hole." The "featured items" in the Black Hole's inventory include a 6,000-gallon capacity "cryogenic dewar" that was manufactured to store helium but never got used. Asking price: $18,000 or best offer." The store's broader list of items for sale includes: flow gauges, a greenhouse, movie props, rodent cages, typwriters and vacuum tubes...more