AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
In 1957, a young woman stood in the Nevada desert wearing a bathing suit and threw her arms to the sky. She posed with a radiant smile as a photographer with the Las Vegas News Bureau snapped away.
JOSEPH KENT: She's wearing a costume over a bathing suit that is a cotton cloud. It's a cotton mushroom cloud, meant to look like a mushroom cloud from an atomic bomb.
RASCOE: That's Joseph Kent, a curator at the Atomic Museum in Las Vegas. The woman became known as Miss Atomic Bomb. The picture, meant as a promotional shot for the city, took on a life of its own over the years.
KENT: It's really become an iconic piece of not only Las Vegas history, but also the pop culture of the atomic age.
RASCOE: But who was the unidentified woman, and why promote a city with a weapon of mass destruction? Robert Friedrichs has been trying to solve the mystery of Miss Atomic Bomb for the past 25 years. He's a retired scientist who spent most of his career working at the nuclear test site north of Las Vegas. He was a founding member of the Atomic Museum in the early 2000s and wanted to get in touch with the woman in the iconic photo.
ROBERT FRIEDRICHS: I thought it would be nice if she were still alive to have her attend the opening of the museum.
RASCOE: He searched through dusty boxes of photos at the University of Nevada and through newspaper archives online. Eventually, he stumbled across a photo of four showgirls. There was Miss Atomic Bomb with a name.
FRIEDRICHS: Lee Merlin.
RASCOE: She was a dancer at the Sands Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip. The casino was frequented by the likes of Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong, but Lee Merlin was her stage name. So Friedrichs kept going. His files grew as the trail slowly went cold. Finally, last year, Friedrichs was giving a talk about his search for Miss Atomic Bomb, and he admitted to the audience.
FRIEDRICHS: I've hit a dead end. I don't know where to look now.
RASCOE: But a few days later, there was an email from someone in the audience. Attached was an obituary from a newspaper in Santa Cruz, California.
FRIEDRICHS: That opened the floodgates. I found her birth certificate. I found her wedding license.
RASCOE: Miss Atomic Bomb was Anna Lee Mahoney. She was born in the Bronx, trained in ballet and modern dance, then went on to a long career in mental health counseling. She died in 2001, right as Friedrichs was starting his search for her. Even though he never got to meet her, he's glad to have filled in this gap in history.
FRIEDRICHS: I prayed that I'd live to see the answer (laughter).
RASCOE: This week, there's a new exhibit opening at the Atomic Museum, all about the photograph that might seem absurd to viewers in 2025. But in the 1950s, it kind of made sense. For Las Vegas, nearby nuclear testing was a huge selling point for casinos, says curator Joseph Kent.
KENT: They would host these viewing parties, and it would be right before dawn. They'd be drinking their atomic cocktails. The sky would just light up from the initial flash.
RASCOE: People saw the atom bomb as a triumph of science, he says. It ended World War II and turned the U.S. into a superpower, and promised an amazing future fueled by never-ending energy. That's what Las Vegas wanted to promote, and it's what Anna Lee Mahoney captured so perfectly as Miss Atomic Bomb.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MISS ATOMIC BOMB")
THE KILLERS: (Singing) I feel the heat, I see the light from Miss Atomic Bomb. Making out, we got the radio on. You're going to miss me when I'm gone. You're going to miss me when I'm gone. Racing shadows in the moonlight. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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