Boston Herald Radio

Charles F. Lanzillo had a front-row seat to the Atomic Age. He was a crew chief on a B-29 bomber on Tinian Island, the launching point for the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That tiny outpost in the Pacific Ocean "looked like the Garden of Paradise ... Tinian is a miracle," Richard Rhodes wrote in "The Making of the Atomic Bomb." The Air Force transformed that island into the largest airport in the world preparing for the day the world would change forever. "Everybody around the island was talking about it. We knew they had two bombs," said Lanzillo, a 99-year-old lifelong Chelsea resident who served as a B-29 crew chief during World War II.