On its unclassified surface, the quiet mountain town of Los Alamos seemed an idyllic place to raise children in the 1940s and 1950s.

Young boys would run down the canyons, chasing paper sailboats as they splashed through trickling streams. They'd fish, or try to catch a glimpse of wild deer as they built tents to camp in the wilderness behind their homes in the sealed community.

Little girls would splash in puddles on the sidewalk in the late spring rains, and hug their daddies when they came home from their jobs — covered in the toxic and sometimes radioactive materials they secretly worked with during the day.

"We thought we were in a good place because it was a closed city and our parents didn't have to worry about us getting kidnapped," said Lynne Loss, 65, who lived in Los Alamos from 1949 to 1957. "We had no idea what was going on."

But while nobody warned them to stay out of the radioactive water or to not eat the contaminated fish, there were strange signs that, in retrospect, indicated something was amiss, she said.

Lowell Ryman, who lived in Los Alamos from 1950 to 1953, told his daughter, Rene Ryman, about oddly colored streams where he used to play with paper sailboats.

"When he would stand in the water, he said it looked really chemical," Rene Ryman said. "It looked like water from a washing machine. But he was a kid. He didn't care. He just wanted to play."

Lowell Ryman died of multiple myeloma, a cancer associated with plutonium, at age 63, in April 2005.

Rene Ryman's lawyer, Michael Howell, filed a lawsuit on her behalf in U.S. District Court in Albuquerque earlier this month against the University of California and other managers of the lab in the '40s and '50s, charging negligence and wrongful death. It could turn into a class action suit, Howell said.

"If enough people come forward, there's a chance we could do a medical-monitoring class action," Howell said.

That sort of suit, if successful, would pay for the testing of all people who grew up in the area at that time, he added.

Looking through a list of her classmates at Los Alamos High School, voice cracking, Loss said she thinks there are a lot more out there who suffered from the contamination.

As if reading from some grim grocery list, she ticks off the large numbers of old friends that have already died of cancer. "Breast cancer, brain cancer, breast cancer, lung cancer, lymphoma, brain cancer ..." she said, adding she keeps an obituary scrapbook in hopes the government might one day pay attention to her group's plight.

"Nobody has done anything for us," Loss said. "I've written letters asking them to please, please do something for the children of the Manhattan Project."

Loss, who now lives in Arizona, added she might join the Ryman lawsuit, but hasn't decided yet.

Loss' father died of beryllium disease in 1994 from his work with contaminated materials at the lab, and her mother died of a brain aneurysm in 1990, but also had strange tumors on her neck since her days at Los Alamos, Loss said.

And Loss has her own list of suspicious memories from growing up in the area. Like her brother — who played with Lowell Ryman as a boy — coming back from camping expeditions with strange wildlife tales, she said. "They'd tell my mother when they came back that the deer had big tumors on them," Loss said. "We also used to catch trout up in those streams and bring them back so my mother could cook them."

Her father used to work with liquid waste at the lab, and she remembers three times when he came back "hot." "He'd come home with that stuff on his clothes, and we'd run up and hug him, and we'd get that stuff on us, too," Loss said. "They'd sometimes call him in the evening and tell him he was hot. Then they'd take him to the hospital and scrub him down and throw away his clothes after he'd been around us."

Lowell Ryman, who worked as a cameraman for WGN in Chicago for 40 years, didn't have many signs of damage from the contamination until he suddenly collapsed about six months before he died. The cancer had damaged his bone marrow and eaten his bones from the inside out, his daughter said.

"It was a horrible ordeal," Rene Ryman said. "Our whole lives came down to managing his cancer, and then he said he didn't want to do it anymore."

Before he collapsed, he had some back pain, but doctors were mystified about the cause of his problem until they talked to her about his past, Rene Ryman said.

"I told the doctor he grew up in Los Alamos, and he looked at me, put down his pen and said, 'Your dad has radiation exposure,' " Rene Ryman said. "Suddenly it all clicked in my head."

Before he died, her father asked her to investigate whether other children from the area at that time had suffered similar problems, she said.

She moved to New Mexico for a few months to do research in the basement archives of Zimmerman Library at The University of New Mexico, where she said she found evidence of negligence in protecting the public from the contamination. "In one of those documents, they had talked about fencing off the canyons, but they never actually did it," Rene Ryman said.

And with that and other evidence, she decided to file a lawsuit in hopes of using some of the money to help more people like her father, she said.

"He said, 'I need you to dig into this matter because I know other people are suffering,' " Rene Ryman said. "He never really showed anger so much as concern."

The University of California, which is part of the consortium that manages the lab for the U.S. Department of Energy, is aware of the lawsuit but doesn't comment on pending litigation, spokesman Chris Harrington said when asked for comment about the suit.

But Loss certainly fits the description of one of the people the elder Ryman would have liked to help.

Her hip was completely eaten away from the inside by cancer, and she had to have a total hip replacement, Loss said.

After that, doctors removed 8 inches of her intestine, which also contained cancer.

She still has a hard time walking and feels sick to her stomach most days, she said. "My body hurts," Loss said. "I don't feel well. I have to use a breathing thing at night. It's awful."

Her son, Mark, has massive, violent headaches, which she thinks is related to her exposure, she said.

And while Loss and her brother were given $75,000 to split as part of a settlement for her father's death because he was a lab employee, there has been no settlement for people who just lived in the area.

She's spent so much on her cancer that she has nothing left, Loss added. "We have just spent so much on medical bills, and I can't even get insurance anymore," Loss said.

When she thinks about it all — what happened to her family, what happened to her friends, what happened to her — it sometimes becomes too much, and it makes her angry, she said.

"I think about my poor dad," Loss said. "He did his job. He did what they asked him to do. They all tried to do something to help the war effort. We didn't know this would happen."

Contact Sue Vorenberg at 986-3072 or svorenberg@sfnewmexican.com.