1 50 146 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fca1cd27779d2a53e9b9a5fb904573fa3.jpg dd6665ad63d7fe5c5acc2cb6fa5d2b46 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F8e26990ed6f57cf106722b5faea48c57.mp4 407f005756ef54638c41f44cafc967f7 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Bauman Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Leonard Gustafson Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Northwest Public Television | Gustafson_Leonard Robert Bauman: We're ready to go. So if we could start by having you say your name and spell your last name for us. Leonard Gustafson: Okay. You ready? Bauman: Yep. Gustafson: Okay. I'm Leonard Gustafson. Last name is spelled G-U-S-T-A-F-S-O-N. Bauman: All right. And my name's Robert Bauman. And today's date is October 16th, as we clarified, 2013. And we're conducting this interview on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. So let's start, if we could, by having you tell us when you came to Hanford, what brought you here, how you heard about the place. Gustafson: Okay. Bauman: Why you came here. Gustafson: Well, we do that almost any direction. I knew about the place so for a couple reasons, but the main reason was that some of my fellow chemical engineers from Montana State University had come over a year or two earlier. And so when I finished up at Bozeman and started looking for a job, it seemed like I might take at least a temporary assignment at this wartime installation until I found a real job. So I arrived on October 15th of 1950. It's been a little while ago isn't it? 63 years. Bauman: Almost your anniversary, yeah. Gustafson: Went through, I guess, the normal procedures. Found out about what was going on in the plant, and security, and a little bit about how to deal with radioactive materials. And then I was assigned to my first tasks. I was what they called a Supervisor-in-Training, and went into the operations part of the chemical processing department. My first building that I went to was T Plant. The T Plant, the bismuth phosphate separation plant. And about all I did there was so learn how to detect contamination and clean it up. I always tell the story that the operators really loved having these young supervisors-in-training come in, because they could hand them a bucket of acetone, or something like that, and bundle of rags, and a cutie pie—which was our instrument for detecting radiation—and send us out to scrub the deck. In the separation plants, and this was common after the crane operator removes the blocks from the cells, he always leaves a little bit of contamination on the deck. So that's a rather regular job. So I learned how to handle the cutie pie. And how to go through the—how to dress. Put us in our white coveralls and learn how to go through what we called at that time, the SWP, Special Work Permit. It's been called many different things. Anyhow, that started me out. After I believe it was about two months in T Plant, I was assigned to the startup of the REDOX operation. Now the REDOX was the first of the solvent extraction plants. So it was essentially near completion there at the end of 1950, the beginning of 1951. So we went through the final inspection processes and started up. And then I was assigned to one of the four operating shifts that operated that building. This was extremely interesting. It was like a great big pilot plant laboratory, and we chemical engineers essentially had the responsibility for operating. We moved into that plant without having much time for a lot of training and procedural preparation. So in order to at least establish some kind of order beyond simple procedures. The operation was strictly conducted by the engineers, by the supervisors. Each shift had eight shift supervisors and two senior supervisors. And initially all the operation was conducted by the supervisors. The operators were just learning at that stage. After, oh, year or so, the operators were ready to run the plant. We didn't need so many supervisors. So in late 1953, I went out on another rather interesting assignment. Engineering at that time was responsible for inspection. We didn't have anything like quality assurance organizations. So engineering inspectors took care of the required inspection of any materials or equipment that we were ordering from Hanford. I was assigned mostly out in the Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky area, New York. I spent a little over a year. It was a very active thing. Frequently I'd turn in an expense account for seven different locations in a week. So is this about-- Bauman: Yeah, this is great. Gustafson: --where you want to go? I can cut things pretty short if you'd like. Bauman: This is great. Keep going. Gustafson: So anyhow, we got into some fabulous big plants and all this sort of thing. Learned a little more about how to build things. Because some of the time we were actually not only assigned for the final inspections, but we went right through all the manufacturing stages. I returned then to Richland in the beginning of 1955. By that time, the PUREX plant was nearing completion. That was the second of the big solvent extraction plants. So I was assigned for the startup and so on of that plant. My final assignment there was basically I was the operating supervisor for C shift. C shift was one of the four shifts that was responsible for operating the plant. By that time, the operators were pretty well trained, so I had about 18 or 19 operators and two chief operators. And there was one technical man also assigned to the shift. I'd have to look upon that assignment as probably the most responsible job I ever had, starting up and running that plant. The operating group was basically responsible for the main process. The shift crews have the responsibility to run it, unless there were some real serious problem or question, we have to find the answers and go ahead and do it. There were many experiences there, but I was--after a couple years, well, I'd been married in the process there at the end of ‘55. My wife was a teacher and it was getting to the point where shift work was not the most desirable. We'd touch base occasionally. So I moved into one of the engineering groups again in the separations department, process design and development. [UNKNOWN], just one who is still around, managed that group. A good friend. And so I spent a couple years in that work. We were basically responsible for new activities or problem activities that the engineering group was supposed to take care of to support the operations. So after two or three years there, I thought it was about time to see some more of the plant, so I moved on down to the 300 Area, and worked with the Plutonium Recycle Test Reactor. So I spent a couple three years there. So that had to be about 1960, 1961, somewhere in there. I didn't get the exact dates. So I went through the startup and operation of the Plutonium Recycle Test Reactor. Now this was not associated with plutonium production. This was really in support of the oncoming nuclear industry for power production, for electrical production. And the reason for the PRTR was to demonstrate that plutonium could be used as well as uranium-235 as the fissile fuel for commercial reactors. It was a successful project. And at that time, projects were completed on time and usually under budget. So it was a success as far as I'm concerned. After that plant is operating and they didn't have much need for me around anymore, I moved on out to the 100 Areas. And good friend of mine, Gene Astley, asked me one day what I was doing. I said, well, I guess I'm about ready to do something else. And so he said, well, come on out work for me for a while. So I went out to the 100 Areas, must've been ‘64 or ‘65, and worked largely with so water plant type problems and questions that were going on. Now we're getting into the area where we're getting about ready to--the Cold War was sort of winding up. So production wasn't the number one priority anymore. There were a lot of questions about what was the future of Hanford and so on at that time. So after working a couple three years out there, I guess not quite, I moved on down to the fuels department and worked with Charlie Mathis, the manager of fuels production at that time—this must've been about ‘65. And my main activity there was mostly planning, what are we going to do with the fuels manufacturing plants in the future? So very, very interesting and we worked along with—Roy Nielsen had a group that was overall Hanford planning at that time. So after a couple years there in the fuels department, I actually moved into Roy's group. And so this had to be ‘67, maybe ‘66, I'm not real sure. With that assignment, one of the things that was done at that time the AEC, countrywide, was studying and planning for what to do with the nuclear facilities and how they were going to support commercial electrical power generation. So they had a group down at Oak Ridge that was called the AEC Combined Operational Planning Group. And Hanford, as well as most of the sites, were responsible for providing two or three representatives. So I spent about a year and a half down there. That was in basically ‘68. Of course, that was quite fascinating, because we were looking at the overall AEC complex and what was the future for nuclear power, essentially. One of the things I got involved with were the nuclear power forecasts. I spend a lot of time at headquarters. Frank Baranowski was the head of the production division, essentially responsible for Hanford, Savannah River, Oak Ridge—all of the main production facilities. I spent some time with him every now and then. Very fine fellow. And so after year and half or so there, I felt it was about time to get back home. And we had actually moved the family there, so we moved completely and sold our house and rented in Oak Ridge. So we came back to Richland at I guess the end of ‘69. And one of the big activities at that time was the FFTF. So I again I went with the FFTF project. So I changed, I had been with Douglas United Nuclear, so at that time I went to Battelle who was responsible for the early FFTF bid. My good friends Astley and Condoda, who were the manager an engineering manager, they did not stay with the project. We Indians sort of stayed with it. That was when the AEC—the Milt Shaw years—decided that Battelle was not adequately competent to take on a project like that. They needed somebody with more, I guess, manufacturing and big project experience. So Westinghouse had been assigned to take over that responsibility by the AEC. So I then became a Westinghouse employee. Spent most of the next, I guess, ten years with the FFTF project until it was a complete and operating. By that time we're getting up to 1980 range. So those were interesting times. We had a lot particularly early conflict. The assigning of Westinghouse to take overlooked project didn't really satisfy what Milt Shaw was after. We had a rather severe conflict. Milt Shaw was finally ousted. I still don't know for sure who was the most influential in getting that because the project was floundering. We moved the AEC representatives from Washington, DC. The most closely associated came to Hanford and became essentially the FFTF project office on site. Most of the closely associated Westinghouse staff who had been in Pittsburgh moved to Hanford. And we were able to work over a local table rather than on the phone and at crazy meetings. And the FFTF came together quite well. I think it was very successful project. Perhaps we didn't finish it under budget, but we did well after it was reorganized. It started up and ran very successfully. Too bad that we couldn't find a better use for the plant. Of course, the liquid metal fast breeder program essentially fizzled. Let's see, from that—well, I'm getting pretty well along and I needed something maybe a little different. So I got into a rather, again, what I regard as an interesting assignment. Westinghouse there somewhere close to the period ‘78, ‘79, ‘80, had been assigned to run a nuclear quality assurance program office. And although Westinghouse Hanford was running that office, we were really a part of the AEC, or what became DoE. The work we did the next few years was largely to try and add something, coordinate the quality assurance programs around all of the sites. Lots of travel involved. Lots of lecturing. Lots of QA audits. I ran so many QA audits that I can't remember. Like I tell people, I got into more parts of Savannah River than most of the people who worked there. I think I was involved in at least 30 audits there over the years. This evolved into--that office—let’s see, it finally closed down in ’87, perhaps. And so I came back to a more conventional Hanford-type quality assurance and did that until I retired in ‘90. One of the last projects that I was on there was an SP-100. We were going to do a space reactor. And SP-100 was an interesting project, but it also never came to pass. Amazingly, ended up back in the PRTR building. Because we cleaned out some of the cells in the PRTR building and were going to put in a big vacuum tank there so we could simulate space for running this space reactor. Let's see, where'd I go from there? After I spent a little bit of time with a number of the waste program projects, including our own, and got into a little bit of the early vitrification plant. I retired in, what, December of ‘90. Spent the next three or four years doing part-time consulting. The main thing that I was associated with at that time was another interesting project. The only really commercial chemical reprocessing plant that was built was the West Valley plant, just south of Buffalo, New York. It was a small, but commercial, reprocessing plant. See, most of the reprocessing was shut down in 1970. And of course, that led to a lot of problems here at Hanford. Early '70s. I could go on about that for hours, but-- [LAUGHTER] Let's see. So I spent a lot of time at West Valley. And that was very separate. It didn't hit the newspapers. But that plant was completed. The waste that they had was vitrified into glass. And as far as I know, it's sitting there ready to go wherever. It could be up the mountain, but who knows. It's a good project in many ways. Bauman: So you've had a long and varied career in many ways. A number of different assignments. Gustafson: Yes, I think so. I think I was very lucky to see so much. Bauman: I wanted to ask you a few questions about some of the things you worked on. So you said you worked at both REDOX and PUREX. Could you explain the solvent extraction, and what that means? Gustafson: Yeah. Well, you know the purpose of our chemical processing, or chemical separation plants here at Hanford, is to take the fuel that has been irradiated in our reactors and extract from that the plutonium. And get the plutonium into a form so it can then go on down to Los Alamos for the bombs. So the chemical reprocessing plants essentially dissolve this uranium metal fuel that had been irradiated in the reactors, and a small amount of the uranium-238 has been converted into plutonium-239. And of course the atomic bombs can use either uranium-235 or plutonium-239 as their fissile source. So these plants are gigantic. They're 1,000 feet long, great big canyon buildings, as we called them. Basically just involve a lot of chemicals running from one end to the other. We start with the fuel and end up with--in the initial separation plants, they ended up with a waste stream that also included the uranium. Now we wanted to recover that uranium, so that early waste from the B and T Plants, as we refer it, these were the early bismuth phosphate separation plants. The waste from those reprocessed to recover the uranium. And the high level elements that we wanted to get rid of were put back into the waste tanks. But in both the REDOX and the PUREX processes, we actually extracted both the plutonium and uranium. So we ended up with two products. So the uranium could be immediately converted into UO-3 and then eventually back in the metal. And the plutonium could be converted into metal so it could be used for the bombs. So kind of an oversimplification there. Bauman: And so your work there—your position there was operational management? Gustafson: I was mostly associated with the direct operation. In the 200 Areas, except I said, after my PUREX assignment I was in just what we call the process design and development. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: And then you talked about this AEC combined operational planning group that you were part of in the late '60s. And you said, one of questions you were looking at was, what's the future of nuclear power? Did the group come up with any conclusions about that at the time in the late '60s, what the future of nuclear power was? Gustafson: Well, I think we were quite optimistic about nuclear power at that time. Of course, also what was developing was resistance to nuclear power. So our forecasts were extremely optimistic. And although we did end up finally with about 120 operating power production plants in the United States, far short of what we expected. The government had assumed, basically, I guess, overall responsibility to see that the technology is okay. And in particular, to assure commercial operators that they will have enough enriched uranium to run their plants. Because we didn't need that weapons-type material anymore. But see at Oak Ridge they ended up the producing almost pure U-235 while we were producing pure—or near pure—plutonium-239. So either of those could be used for the bombs. But what happened with the commercial power, we had to use about 3% or 4% U-235. Only slightly enriched. But we still had to use enrichment plants, and the government had all the enrichment plants—basically, like Oak Ridge and the rest of them. And so as far as AEC combined operational planning, their goal was to make sure that nuclear power did what it was supposed to do. Provide us with lots of good economic electric energy. And to a large extent, it has. Bauman: Hanford, obviously as a site, was a place that emphasized security, secrecy. Were you able to talk about the work you did? Was that something that was allowable given the security secrecy? Gustafson: Yes, there wasn't a great deal of the security concern. It was mostly what are the resources and what can we do with this combination of government and industry to provide good electricity for the country. Economic. Bauman: I want to go back to when you first arrived in 1950. What were your first impressions of the place here, of Richland, of the area? Gustafson: Oh, I don't know. It was a temporary stop. [LAUGHTER] Never expected to spend the next 40 years or so working here. It was a great place, particularly for young single people. We moved into dormitories and there were a lot for fine single people, ambitious, and always wanting to do things. Those were good years. We certainly accepted the security. We were part of what we felt was a very necessary effort. We were in the Cold War. And we had to do a better job than the Russians. Bauman: How long did you live in the dorms and where did you move to after that? Gustafson: Well, I didn't actually live too long in the dorms. There were four of us, still good friends of mine, except one of them's gone. But we actually moved out to a small place in West Richland. So a number of the people in the dorms were looking for a little better living conditions. One of the problems with those early dorms—in theory we weren't even supposed to do any cooking in the dorms. So we strictly were going from the dorms to the local cafeteria, or a few commercial places that were opening up in Richland. It was a fascinating time, those early '50s. I got married the end of ‘55, so the first five years of single life and included my year plus when I was offsite, skiing, water skiing. Like my crowd, we were essentially the first water skiers in the Tri-Cities. At that time to find a boat, we had to go to Seattle to get one that we could use for water skiing. There wasn't any Mets Marina at that time. So we sort of started the water skiing in the area. Created the Desert Ski Club which was a snow skiing, but also got in the water skiing. Desert Ski Club still exists. So my close associates, we were sort of the instigators that. All went through our time as officers of the club. It was a big social group. Still is, I think. Bauman: Richland was a federal town when you first arrived. How did you see that change over time from when you first arrived? Gustafson: It's kind of hard. We certainly enjoyed our early years. We had a lot more individual responsibility on the jobs. I tell one of my stories, I came in at midnight to take over my shift at PUREX. I was the operating supervisor on C shift. And the operating supervisor on swing shift wasn't there. And I'd been met at the door with an assault mask, all of the crew were. And when I went in the building, the operating supervisor who I was to replace wasn't there, but my boss was. And I never saw him again. So, I guess I tell the story that they didn't really tell me I was captain of the ship. So anyhow, we restarted the plant. And it took us a couple months. Bauman: And about when would this have been? Gustafson: Pardon? Bauman: What time period would this have been in? Gustafson: When was that? Bauman: Yeah, roughly. Gustafson: Well, let's see, I guess that was, must have been early ‘57, right? I'm not exactly sure now. It was a different time. Individuals have a lot of responsibility. And we made a few mistakes, but in general, I think we did a damn good job of operating the plants. And safety and radiological exposure, these were major parts of our responsibility and our concern. Bauman: Yeah, I was going to ask you about safety. Obviously, you said it was very—emphasized quite a bit. What sort of precautions did you have to take on your job? And were there ever any incidents when you were working of someone overexposure or anything along those lines? Gustafson: Well, I think we operated with a lot of what you would probably expect military officers to have as a responsibility. And you know, you were responsible for your job and you--As an operating supervisor of my C shift at PUREX, there wasn't any other group that was responsible for the training of my operators. They were my responsibility. And if we had to send them to some special training, we'd do that. But the basic training was conducted by the supervisor. They assured whether they were qualified and whether they were able to do their job. I guess that's why when my counterpart was ejected, it was a military type operation, I guess. But I think we did a really good job. Safety was a number one concern. Radiological exposure was also a number one concern. And as far as I'm concerned, from everything I've seen, very, very few people suffered from working in our plants. Bauman: I was going to ask you about President Kennedy came to the site in 1963 to visit. There was a story in the paper, a while back because it was the 50th anniversary of that. I wondered if you have any memories of that? Gustafson: Oh yeah. Half the plant was out there. And I was there to welcome him as he came in on his helicopter. We were all out there. Bauman: Anything in particular stand out to you about that day at all? Gustafson: Well, I don't know. It's what we all expected at that time. There wasn't anything really unusual about this. Although I came out in 1950 saying, this is going to be a very temporary thing, I think we became--[CRYING] We became Hanford. [CRYING] Didn't expect to get emotional. Bauman: Well, you built a sense of community, it seems like. Gustafson: Really did. Those were good years. Really good years. Bauman: Yeah, I was going to ask you, you talked about a number of different places on site that you worked. Different assignments. Was there one of those that was the most challenging? Or the most difficult? Or maybe one that was the most rewarding? Gustafson: Well for me, it had to be those first few years with the PUREX plant. I've had a lot of other—what I think—good work assignments over the years. I know of no one who had the variety that I had. Certainly projects likely FFTF, I felt I had a very important role in that. I was one of these so-called cognizant engineers and my system was the main heat transport system. And it included basically the primary and secondary cooling systems. Everything from the reactor on. And the operating conditions for the plant, all of the design events and so on were channeled into that system. So that was a rewarding job, too. And I think we did a good job. As I said, we had a lot of early trouble getting that project going, but finally. So I enjoyed those years. I didn't feel the same individual responsibility that I had with the early time at PUREX. Bauman: Obviously, Hanford also had the shift from production to a reduced production that you talked about, and then a shift to clean up. I wonder if those sort of mission changes impacted your work and in what ways? Gustafson: Well, they certainly did. I've been involved in many parts of that. Even during my last few years with generally this overall quality assurance type bit, getting into working with the Washington, DC folks and that sort of thing. Bauman: And you mentioned when you first came here, you thought it would be a short term. Gustafson: Oh, yeah. Bauman: And so for some people was. Some people did come for a short time and left. So why did you stay? I know you had some assigned that took you way to a bunch of other places, but-- Gustafson: Yeah. I don't know. We stayed for lots of reasons. We established a lot of close friendships. And sort of had our crowd of social as well as work relations. And we just became Hanford. Bauman: Is there anything I haven't asked you about yet in terms of your work at Hanford? Or your experiences that you'd like to talk about that you haven't had a chance to talk about yet? Any stories or things that stand out in your mind? Gustafson: I have so many stories about Hanford that it's kind of hard to come. Of course, many. My operational years, the most direct part of the operations, were the early years. I have a lot of individual things that happened. Some of them were good, some of them weren't. I remember particularly one incident. I don't want to be called a hero, but it was rather exciting. My operator was unloading a caustic car. And he was properly dressed with his shield and so on, but the hose from the railroad car came loose and it ended up spraying up underneath his protective clothing. And I felt that I was sure glad I was there, only about ten feet away. Because he was just kind of yelling with--You know, caustic getting sprayed into your face is not really good. Grabbed a hold of him and we both got under the safety shower was there. And at least he retained most of his sight. So, that was a situation where—just sort of individual kind of exciting happening, certainly was. I had a lot of other things go on. I feel that I had a lot of important tasks at Hanford. As I said, probably my most responsible thing was when I was still pretty young there, and operating the early couple, three years of PUREX as one of the operating supervisors. Had many chances to do so many different things over the years. Let's see, what would be of--It's kind of hard to come up with individual things that you might be interested in. Bauman: Well, you've already talked about a number. That's been great. So I want to thank you very much for coming in today and sharing your experiences with us. We appreciate it. Gustafson: Okay. Thank you. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:48:52 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview T Plant REDOX PUREX PRTR (Plutonium Recycle Test Reactor) 100 Areas FFTF Westinghouse Hanford 200 Area B Plant Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1950- Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1950-1990 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource An interview with Leonard Gustafson Description An account of the resource Leonard Gustafson moved to Richland, Washington in 1950 to work on the Hanford Site. An interview conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 10/16/2013 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2017-04-12: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Radioactive substances Nuclear fuels Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities 100 Area 1955 200 Area 300 Area Battelle Cold War Desert Hanford Kennedy Los Alamo Los Alamos Plutonium PUREX River Safety Savannah River T Plant War Westinghouse https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F7022bb74a0ba57959267cd96ac015ced.jpg 0aafabc17d93e102362c6d2e53e8abc5 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F061db68a7c1d8e77ce0f3f249b8a7e72.mp4 dad1f7349628cab3706efa956239db82 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Alice Didier Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Alice Didier on July 12th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Alice Didier about her experiences working at the Hanford site and homesteading outside of—Connell? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Alice Didier: Eltopia. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Eltopa. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Eltopia, yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Eltopia, okay. So why don’t we start at the beginning. Where were you born? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: I was born in Portland, Oregon. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Oh, okay. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: I was a city girl. Met my husband, who was born in Condon, Oregon, and he came from wheat farming country. However, his dad was not a farmer; he ran a machine shop in Condon. However, Don worked on many of the farms up there in Condon. We were married in 1951, and Don was in the service. He was in the Air Force. So after he was discharged, we came home to Condon. Our dream was to have something of our own—a farm, or—you know—mainly a farm. But the ground in that area was way too expensive for us to ever dream of owning anything. So we had the—we decided to make a trip to Canada. We went all the way to Prince George looking for land to buy, because they were encouraging American citizens to come up there and settle. Well, after that trip—before that trip, Don got an inquiry, or got a letter from the—I don’t really—it was the Bureau of Reclamation? I don’t know. It was if you were a veteran, you were entitled to throw your name in the hat, and if your name was drawn, you might have an opportunity to draw some land up here in the Columbia Basin. On a whim, he filled that out and mailed it before we left. And we were very glad we did because Prince George was a pole thicket up there. [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: It was a what? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: A pole thicket. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: A pole thicket. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: My goodness gracious, if you had to clear that land it’d take you forever and a day. Plus—what is—peat? It had a peat—you couldn’t burn it, because you’d burn off everything that was worth—of value to farm. So you had to clear everything by hand. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Oh, wow. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: So, anyway. Very glad that when we got back, he had sent this in, and he was informed to come for an interview in Connell by a board of people that would determine if we were qualified. You were supposed to have assets, I think, of $1,500. I don’t remember what the qualifications were. But we did not have—we did not meet the qualifications. But we decided that we’d bluff it through. [LAUGHTER] So we came up in the fall of 1953. To Connell. I was eight-and-a-half months pregnant with my daughter. First thing I did was look up the name of the doctor in the phone book in Connell, because I thought I might not make it back to Condon before she appeared on the scene. But anyway, didn’t work out that way. But they took Don out in a Jeep, and bounced over hill and dale, and showed him the land that they had laid out that was available for drawing at that time. Not everything was available at the same time. So he picked out our farm unit. I had never—I didn’t get to see the land. I didn’t have any part of that, because I didn’t want to chance taking a trip in the Jeep in my condition. February of ’54, his dad and Don loaded up—we bought this Army tent, and he loaded up everything we owned in the way of furniture and moved up to our unit. It was nothing but rock, sagebrush, rattlesnakes—[LAUGHTER]—and, yeah, sagebrush, I said sagebrush. A lot of sagebrush. All of that had to be cut and burnt—cleared, in other words, in order to farm anything in the area that we picked out. Some land around there had been farmed—wheat farmers had tried their hand at raising wheat in that area, small areas. But not enough rainfall. And there were sheep camps in there. They had been running sheep, some of them. When Don brought me up, he pulled up on this—we had to come in from Eltopia; there were no roads built. So we had to come over hill and dale to get out to our farm unit. And he pulled up, and he said, this is it. And I said, this is it? I mean—[LAUGHTER] there was nothing there, period. It was sort of a shock. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: And you hadn’t seen it before this? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: I had not seen it before then. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: It had been purchased sight unseen by you? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Yes, yes. And he and his dad had preceded my coming up there to drop our stuff off and build a wooden floor and side—what would you call it? Sidewalls. Sidewalls for the tent. So they had it pretty well constructed. Anyway, that was the beginning. [LAUGHTER] Don had borrowed from a farmer in Condon a small little D4 Cat, I think it was. We hauled that up here. And he and his dad had built a scraper, a small scraper, to put behind it. So Don started developing a piece of land behind where we had pitched this tent. My daughter was three months old when we moved up here. Let’s see—October, November, December—four months old, I guess. And my son was about a year-and-a-half, or less than two. So we took up residence in our tent. [LAUGHTER] And when we finally got our power, we had a refrigerator. Like I said, I had a Sud Saver washing machine that you could dump the water. We had two tubs out front—laundry tubs, like there used—women used to have in their house. So I’d save the wash water, and I’d save the rinse water, because we were hauling every drop of water. It was pretty precious. You reuse it a couple of times. Maybe not the most sanitary, but that was the—[LAUGHTER] That’s what we had to do. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: How long did it take from when you moved in to when you got power? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: I’d say two weeks at the most. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Oh. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Big Bend came in and dropped power in. But we still had no roads. We had a little ’51 Oldsmobile and we had a water trailer, and we had to go into Eltopia to the railroad—there was a railroad well. And we’d fill there. It took a half a tank of gas to get down to the well and back with a tank of water. Yeah. And we had no neighbors. There were no neighbors. It was just Don and I out there. Over the hill was a couple. She was an English war bride. And they had settled in there before we did. And then we had another couple to the south of us. But we were the only people in that whole area. It was pretty dark at night, I’m going to tell you. There were no lights. There was nothing. It was black. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Wow. So how fast did the land clearing go? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Not very fast. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Not very fast? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Because we didn’t have any money. We used a big Noble blade and cut the sagebrush. Then we’d have to go out and pile it by hand in big stacks and burn it. Don managed to level off, I think—well, I don’t know, what was it? 14, 15 acres was the first—because in those days, there were no circles. It was all either you had hand line—irrigation hand line, or you had to level the ground to a grade that you could put in a ditch and use siphon tubes—rill irrigation, they called it. And Don didn’t want anything to do with the hand lines. So he was leveling it for rill irrigation. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: And so you used real irrigation? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: We did. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: And how do you spell that? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: R-I-L-L. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: R-I-L-L. We did a previous oral history where someone mentioned that and we didn’t— </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Know how to spell— </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: No one at the Project had heard of that and we weren’t sure how to spell it. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Really? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: So it’s R-I-L-L— </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Mm-hmm. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: --irrigation. Thank you so much. Can go back and fix some transcripts. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: So it’s—just will you explain that again? That’s when you lay down—where you grade— </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier; You have to grade the land so that the water will flow from the top to the bottom. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Okay. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: You know, enough of a grade so that the water will flow down the—well, you put ditches from the head ditch up here that carries the main body of water. You would back up to that with ditch shovels and make ditches every so far through your crop. That’s where you would set the siphon tube and the water would go from the top to the bottom. When it reached the bottom, then you’d pick them up and move on down. You could only set so many at one time, depending on how much of a head of a water you had—or how many feet you had coming down the ditch. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: So that’s a much more labor-intensive type of irrigation. I imagine, probably an older type of irrigation, as well. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Right, but not maybe as labor-intensive as packing that hand line. That’s work. [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: And what would the tubes be constructed out of usually? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Aluminum. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Aluminum tubes, okay. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Okay. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: And there’s a picture, I think, in that magazine I gave you from International Harvester, showing me priming one of those tubes. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Oh, okay, great. Wow, that’s great. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: You had to learn how to do that. You had to learn how to give it a deal like this and flip it over quick so you didn’t lose your prime. [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Wow. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: A lot of people didn’t know how to do it in the beginning and they’d suck on it, if you can believe that, to get the water running. [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Kind of like siphoning gas? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Yeah, only—the water was much cleaner than later on. I mean, after more—we actually, on this end of the Basin, reuse the water that comes in up north. So a lot of it’s recovered—what is that lake up there that—there’s a lake—I can’t remember the name of it right now. So, that was our first—and our first venture was to plant some hay. There was nobody to buy what you raised. We had no markets then. So I remember the hay that we baled—we finally got it baled and it sat out there until the hay grew up over it, because there was no sense picking it up; we didn’t have anybody to sell it to. [LAUGHTER] So it wasn’t a very productive, I guess, in the beginning, as far as producing money. So I went to work at Camp Hanford. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Do you remember what year that— </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: No. Well, it’d be—okay, ’54 we moved up here. It was probably during ’54. Because we had to eat. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Right, you needed some cash coming in. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Hay wasn’t going to cut it. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: No. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: So what did you do at Hanford? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: I was a secretary. I was interviewing people for jobs out there. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: All kinds of jobs, or--? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: You know, that—I didn’t work there a whole long time. That was a long trip for me, clear from Eltopia. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: I imagine. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: I had to drive that every day. I don’t remember. Not all kinds of jobs, I’m sure, because I’m not versed in scientific things, you know. I’m not sure it was Camp Hanford, so I don’t know what did Camp Hanford do? They were—it was long before all this Project stuff started out here in—I think it was—wasn’t that a military type of camp? Camp Hanford? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: There’s a few different things that are referred to as Camp Hanford. There’s the actual Camp Hanford, as it’s oftentimes noted as the camp where the construction crews lived. Then there was—there were a couple—there was a military camp-- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: I think that was it. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: --called Camp Hanford as well, where they—when they had the military stationed there for— </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: But I wasn’t interviewing for military; it had to be civilian people they were hiring or stuff. I wasn’t military. Because I was not in the military and whatever. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Right. So you said you were a secretary, but then you said—didn’t you do something with the whole body counter? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: That was for GE. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: For GE, okay. So in the beginning you worked at Camp Hanford, secretary/interviewer. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: And then I went to Bureau of Reclamation in Eltopia. They had a construction office there. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Okay. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: So I went down and applied for a job there, and I was so happy when I got a job, because I didn’t have to go very far to go to work. They were still completing canals and doing work. So I worked down there for a while. And then I decided, I guess, that I guess that I needed more money—or that we needed more money. So I went out—I applied to go to work at GE. And the first job I had was for Roy Lucas in tech shops. That was 300 Area. All my jobs that I held during that time that I worked out there were all for GE. It was just as GE was phasing out. And I forget who the next contractor was that came in, but GE—yeah. I left just as GE was—they were changing over. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: And you said you worked for Roy Lewis at— </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: No, Roy Lucas. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Roy Lucas. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Lucas, L-U-C-A-S. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: At the tech shops? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Tech shops. He ran—it was like machining. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Okay. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: They did machining. They had these tech shops—T-E-C-H—tech shops. And then I went to work for—well, there was a little incident between there. I got pregnant again. So I had to take a leave of absence, and my youngest son was born in 1960. So I think three months after he was born, I had taken a leave of absence, I came back, and I got a job at the Whole Body Counter—I think that was next—with Frank Swanberg, where they did all the testing on people that were working out there with their dosimeters or whatever they were wearing. They did a lot of testing on people that had worked out there for their levels of radiation exposure. Then I got a job—I got a promotion and went out to 300 Area again, and I went to work for Ward Spear. I don’t remember the name of that. They were all scientific people there. The papers I typed up were horrendous, with all their equations in them. [LAUGHTER] Then I worked for the boss of that whole group and he eventually became the CEO of Battelle, Ron Paul. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Oh, okay. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: You know Ron Paul, or have you heard of him? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: I’ve heard the name, yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Yeah, he was—I can understand why he was promoted to what he was. He was one of the best bosses I ever worked for, let’s put it that way. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: And why was that? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Very well organized. Never, ever last minute, I got to have this like ten minutes ago. No. He was always—I don’t know—just was a very personable man. Yeah, I really liked him. And then I got another promotion and I went to work for Art Keene in radiation monitoring. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: So kind of back to radiation monitoring. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Yeah. And he was head of the whole group that supervised the Whole Body Counter and whatever work—you know, all the people that were doing the monitoring out there. And that’s when I decided that I’d better call it a day. I had five children, and I was driving—I was spending ten to ten-and-a-half hours a day—well, ten hours, I guess it was—for eight hours of work out here. I mean, it took me—we still were not financially doing that well, so I hopped car pools. I had three car pools by the time I got to work at 300 Area. I had to switch and pass go. [LAUGHTER] And then had one more switch, I think. I can’t remember, but anyway. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Wow. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: So then you moved back to the farm. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: I went back to the farm, and that’s when things started to pick up, and our markets were better, and you had more choices of what to raise. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Do you know what year that would have been? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Well, Brett was born in 1960—oh, gosh. I think he was two, something? Probably 1962 or ’63. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: And so you said things had kind of improved, at least market-wise by that time? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Right, well there were more variety of crops to raise. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: So what were you—so you started with hay, so what were you expanding out into? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Well, we raised—in the beginning—well, we tried beans. We tried beans, we tried—I can just give you a repertoire of everything we raised. We didn’t do all that at one time. We raised sweet corn, we raised sugar beets, we raised potatoes. We were into potato growing—my husband loved to raise potatoes. Let’s see, sugar beets. Asparagus. We had 80 acres of asparagus once. So, we—can’t think of anything else. Wheat. We’ve had wheat off and on. I can’t think—and hay. Mainly, here in the last years, we’ve been mainly hay farmers. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Okay. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Because potatoes were always a big gamble. And we had a very bad year one year and almost had to go into bankruptcy. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Is that because of weather or— </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Because of circumstances. We had two circles of potatoes, and they had out this chemical that they claimed if you sprayed it at a certain time, that it would set your potatoes so they didn’t put on any more small ones—undersized, which paid you nothing. That you’d get bigger growth on the potatoes that were already set underneath the vine. It was MH-30, was what it was. So we tried that, and they sprayed it on on the hottest day of the year, I think. It was very hot that day. In two days, our potatoes were dead. Yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: So you literally could watch them perish. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Yeah. Our field man came and he said, Don, the potato vines are dying. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Wow. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Because it was a salt solution, and they had no warning on their label that you should not spray over a certain temperature. And other people had used it and came out fine. But not us. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Wow. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: But what was there we harvested. It was pretty sad. And then that was the year we got a rainstorm. We had wheat and we had a really hard rain. Then next day was like a pressure cooker. And all that wheat sprouted in the head. So it was feed wheat. It was not marketable. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Wow. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Just—you know, one of those years. [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Yeah. Where nature seems to be throwing everything at you. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Yup. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Yeah. I grew up on a farm. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: This year seems to be that way, too. [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: I grew up on a farm as well. My mom still farms. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Really? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Then you know what I’m talking about. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Yeah, I’ve heard lots of stories. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: When things start going wrong they just sort of escalate, you know? But potatoes, you had—at that time, you had $1,000 an acre into potatoes before you ever put a harvester in the field. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Wow. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Yeah. So— </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: I guess that explains the switch to hay. So you said that you had done—the people—I’ve read that the people in that Bend area had tried wheat in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and kind of gave up. But you guys also tried wheat. Did you try that with irrigation or did you try to— </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Oh yeah. We had nothing dryland. Everything was irrigated, everything we farmed. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: And how did the wheat do, besides that one awful year with the pressure cooker? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Well, you’d better expect over 100 bushel of wheat or—you know, I’m not as up on yields now as I was then, because my son farms our operation since my husband died. I always kid him I’m on a need-to-know basis. [LAUGHTER] I have to ask questions if I want to know—[LAUGHTER]—if I really want to know the nitty gritty about things, and then sometimes he gets sort of upset with me. So I’m saying 120 bushel—120 bushel is not unheard of, and over. Depending on the variety of wheat, you know. The year, the weather, everything. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: So you said that right now you’ve pretty much just reverted to planting hay now—growing hay. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Until this past two years. And the hay farmer’s in a world of hurt out there now after that port slowed down over in Tacoma. Sort of ruined the foreign markets. And then, too, our dollar’s been so strong, those people that depended on—I guess that were our markets, they went elsewhere when they weren’t getting their shipments. So you have to work to get those people back buying again. And there is hay stocked all over the basin. We’ve got hay from two years ago we haven’t sold. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Wow. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: And this year we have had rain, rain, rain on about every cutting which makes it feeder hay. My son had an offer the other day of $60 a ton. You got $150 into it to break even. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Wow. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: So you take your licks and walk on, hopefully, if you don’t get your financing cut off. [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Yeah. Did you spend a lot of time in nearby communities, in Eltopia? Were you involved in any organizations there, or social groups, or church groups or anything? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Oh, yeah. Yes. I belong to St. Paul Catholic church. We actually built that church, the people that moved in there. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Oh. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Yeah. The people of that area, we built the St. Paul Catholic church at Eltopia. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: How large was Eltopia when you moved there? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Oh, the town of Eltopia? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: [LAUGHTER] Ooh, not very big. There had been a bank there once. There’d been—well, when we first moved in there and we had no refrigeration and I had a new baby, there was a Streadwick that opened a little store there. And he carried milk and bread, thank heavens, because I could buy milk from him. Because I couldn’t keep milk without it going sour for more than a day or so at a time. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: There was a who? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: A Stredwick. His name was just Stredwick. There was a Stredwick family that owned a filling station on the old highway there. And Millie, she was a widow, but she had a pack of kids, and she was the switchboard operator in Eltopia. If you wanted to make a phone call in the beginning, you had to go to Millie’s house to make the telephone call. Because we had no phones. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Oh, wow. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Or if you received a call, they’d have to come out and tell you that somebody was trying to get ahold of you. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: And how far away was that? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Well, about the same distance as getting the water. A little bit closer, but not much, because we had to go right into the town of Eltopia to get to her house. She lived in Eltopia. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Wow. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: I would say there wasn’t more than 150 people, or less, in Eltopia per se. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Where did the children go to school? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: They started in Eltopia, my two oldest. But then we—they decided school districts. You either were going to go to Pasco or you were going to go Connell. We were—the dividing line was Fir Road, which was one more road to the south. Well, no, it’s more than one for me, but Eltopia West is the main road now that comes off of 395. It’s one road over from Eltopia West—Fir Road—was the dividing line. If you lived on the left side of Fir Road, you went to North Franklin School District, which was Connell. If you lived on the other side, you went to Pasco. So we went to Connell. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Okay. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Mesa—they built a grade school in Mesa, they built a grade school in Basin City. That’s all North Franklin. Then they had a grade school in Connell, then they built a junior high and a high school. So my kids all went through—finished. Some of them completely went through the North Franklin School District. The two oldest had a few years there in Eltopia. There actually was an old high school in Eltopia. But they closed it down, too. We used to have dances down there. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Oh really? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: The floors went up, and the floors went down, but we had an orchestra that did the playing. In the middle of the music they’d just stop. [LAUGHTER] We’ve laughed about that. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Wait, why did they stop? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Just decided to stop! [LAUGHTER] And you’d be dancing away, all of the sudden the music just stopped. I don’t know. Probably had too much to drink. Everybody had to bring their own bottle, you know. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Really? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Yeah, oh, yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: And who put these dances on? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Well, we sort of had a—hmm, I don’t know. Don’t remember that. Just—I don’t know—we didn’t have an association, particularly. It was just our local group around there decided, you know, like New Year’s Eve or something, is about when—it wasn’t all the time. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Was the high school being used at that time, or was it just kind of an empty— </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: No, no, it was going downhill. And that’s what I said—the floors were warped because the roof had leaked. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Oh, my. Wow. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Yeah. And so you had to watch your step. [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: I bet. So were these adults-only dances? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Yes, yes, yes. Yes, it was adults only. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: That’s great. That’s really interesting. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: We were involved—I had a 4-H club. Don coached Little League—yeah, Little League, down in Eltopia. We had a team, because our boys played on that. We were big boosters of Connell High School, because all our boys—Clint played—my one son played in the NFL for nine years. The other boy was the one we thought was going to be the NFL player. But he wanted to farm more than play football. He’s the one that’s farming my place now. But our boys all participated in sports up there, so we were big sports boosters. Don helped build the bleachers. The old—we used to have our games down there in the—well, it was in the town of Connell. Since then it’s all moved up by the high school. But he helped build the bleachers into the side of the hill. He had a trophy case built for them. And then the boys went to CBC, both Clint and Curt. And we donated there, the foundation or whatever it is. Still do—Clint still supports that. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Did you or your husband go to college? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Don did for a year. He was going to be an engineer. I went to college at night school for a while, but I never got a degree, no. I came out of a high school in Portland that you learned bookkeeping, shorthand, and so when you graduated, you also had a degree—you had English and a language and everything else—but you could go out and get a job. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Oh, okay. Yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: And then they had Benson at that time for the boys where they learned how to—you know, like shop and things like that. And then they did away with that; we don’t have those kind of things anymore. Big mistake. I think we should still have those type of—because some kids are just not college material. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: To be able to go out and work and do something when you come out of high school. Because kids nowadays, they need work. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Right. To have a trade or at least to have—maybe have post-high school schools that are geared for trade instead of— </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Yeah, instead of—because when you come out of high school now, what do you have? You don’t have a trade of any kind, or a skill of any kind. Except supposedly your brain, and then you got to go on to another four-year school, and you’re still—if you want to really amount to anything, that isn’t adequate now either. And then we wonder why we have such high debt for these kids that are—[LAUGHTER]—you know, trying to get a college education or get a trade or whatever. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Yeah. Oh! How did you meet your husband? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Uh-oh. [LAUGHTER] Do I have to tell you the true story? [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Well if it’s racy or saucy, then yes. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Well— </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: For the good of history. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Okay, well-- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: I’m just kidding. Whatever you’re comfortable with. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Well, every year in Portland at the beginning of the football season, they would have sort of a roundabout where each high school came and played a quarter or something against another one of the other teams. I had been a cheerleader at my high school. This is since I had graduated, and I’d started to work. I went to work at 16 for the Soil Conservation Service in Portland. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Oh, really? Okay. Wow. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: So, my girlfriend and I decided that we were going to go to this celebration—the football thing—that night. So I took a bus and I got off the bus where I was to meet her. And Don and a friend were standing there on the corner. He was enrolled at the—is it University of Portland is the Catholic school down there, or Portland U? No, it’s University of Portland, yeah. Anyway, he’d just started college there. So he tried to strike up a conversation, and I—my mother told me never—[LAUGHTER]—Don’t do those kind of things. I’m just kidding. But anyway, I wouldn’t talk to him. I walked across the street to meet my friend, and we had to walk back in front of him to get back on the bus to get to where we were going. He says, why don’t you let us give you a ride? And I said, no. I said, we’ll just take the bus. So we did. We got on the bus. So they ran around, got in their car, and they followed our bus over to the stadium. Later in the game, I went down and was sitting on the bench with my friends from my high school there. And around the corner walks Don. That was the beginning of the end. He said, well, as it turned out we had a mutual acquaintance—my girlfriend did. So we went to the dance at Portland University that night with them. And that was the end of me ever dating anybody else. Next day, he called me and—[LAUGHTER] So. And it was ironic because my son, Clint, you know, played for Mouse Davis down there, and years later he played in that stadium. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Oh, wow. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: [LAUGHTER] I call that sort of ironic coincidence, that years later we came back to the place where we actually engaged in a conversation that night. Anyway. So it was a pick-up, I guess you’d say. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Yeah. Sounds like he was pretty persistent. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Well, he wasn’t very talkative. But I was impressed. He was pretty good-looking. [LAUGHTER] I liked what I saw. So anyway. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: That’s—aww. And was he drafted, then? You said he was in the Air Force. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Yeah, he was in the reserve. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Okay. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: And he got—it was the Korean situation, and he got called up. So we were married just as he—right after he got called up, his commander was gracious enough to give him a couple of days off to have a honeymoon for—what did we have? Three days or something, when it was supposed to be boot camp. He happened to then be stationed at the Portland—there in Portland, for almost a year. And then he got orders to go to Nashville, Tennessee. So we up and moved. I went with him. Didn’t have any children then. We went to Tennessee for less than a year, I think, before we came back. And when we came home, we went to Condon, Oregon and Don went to work for a wheat farmer there. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Oh, okay. So he was drafted in Korea, but didn’t—he never— </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: He never served overseas, no. He never had to serve overseas. He was a lineman—supposed to be his—whatever, what do they call it? His MO, or whatever? It was supposed to be—oh, I don’t know—what’s the second in command? I don’t know. Anyway, they found that he had been a telephone lineman at one time, so that’s what he ended up being, was a telephone lineman. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Do you—when you were homesteading out there, did you have any run-ins or—well, not run-ins is the right word, but interactions with Native Americans who would have inhabited that area long before? Did you ever see, or were you ever aware of-- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: No, there was nothing. The only thing, we found a couple of arrowheads on our place once. No. Some old sheep camps, we found some things in that, but there was no—no, there was no indication of any— </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: From earlier settlement days. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: No. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: How has farming changed over the years for you? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Oh, my gosh. Well, what are we talking here? ’54 to—is that 60-what? ’62 years? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: 60 years, yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Phenomenal, I guess, would be my word. Equipment-wise. Everything now if possible is circles, for irrigation. Tractors are—how many times bigger should I say than what we started out with? My son owns a quad-trac, which—I don’t know, what are they? $280,000 or $300,000-some-odd and it’s monstrous. You have GPS now; everything is—you plant by that. I guess—I don’t really have a word to—I guess express how much it’s advanced. Planters are all—well, just like we planted some beans this year, trying to find out something else besides hay to plant. This guy just pulls into field we had with timothy hay, and you don’t have to disc, you don’t have to do anything. He just sets down, and he’s got things that open it up to plant the seeds, so you don’t have to worry about the wind problem you used to. It used to be, we had horrendous winds and dirt. You’d plant a crop, and you’d pray that you didn’t get one of those winds or it’d be gone—the seed would be gone. A lot of replanting back in the old days. We could look towards block 15 and see this wall of dirt coming at us. Yeah. One of the windstorms hit 90 miles an hour here. It blew down the drive-in screen in Pasco. It blew the side out of a block building. And we were in that tent. My husband said, load the kids up, we’re going to town. We’re not going to be here when it goes down—if it goes down, is what he said. So we loaded up the kids, drove to town, spent the whole day in town. As the day—as the sun started to set, the wind went down and we headed back out there and didn’t know if there would be anything left of everything we owned in the world because it was all in that tent. And it was still standing. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Wow. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: But he had a pretty hefty crossbeam—is that what you call it, the main deal at the top? But he said it put a permanent bow in it, though. That wind against that canvas. So he took that thing down and put up a four-by-six by himself. How he did that, I don’t know. But he says, not going to have that happen again. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Wow. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: And then we had just a few incidences of some of the things that happened out there. We had a winter that first winter when we still in the tent. My husband was doing land-leveling. He got this D7 Cat and he was out working for other people, leveling their ground. That day, it was a beautiful day, that day. When he got off the Cat, he started home, and for some reason he turned around, and he drained that Cat. Because there was no antifreeze. We didn’t have antifreeze in it. That night, it dropped to 19 below. I don’t know—we’ve never, ever had that happen again. Don stayed up all night. We had a wood stove in that tent, and we had an oil stove. He had both of them cranked up as high as they would go. The next morning, he reached over, and we had packing cases for cupboards. He reached over for the coffee pot, and when he got it, it was all slushy, after he—and it wasn’t that far away from the stove. [LAUGHTER] And sagebrush—he was burning sagebrush in the wood stove. That puts out a hot fire. So decided it was time to move. And I was working at the Bureau then, so we were entitled to one of their Quonset huts down there. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Oh, okay. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: So we picked up and moved that day. And it was wonderful not to have a roof flapping in the breeze, and it had running water, and I had wall—baseboard heaters, and they paid the bill. You could be as warm and toasty as you wanted. So I was in seventh heaven. [LAUGHTER] We lived there until—well, then I got—while I was working there, I got pregnant with Curt. And the Bureau wrote us a little letter, saying, you have not proved up on your land. You had to put in 12 months out of 18 to establish residency. And said, if you don’t move back on your unit, you’ll forfeit it. We didn’t have a house, didn’t have anything. So went to town, and started tearing down—we called them Navy homes. I don’t know. Somebody said they were Victory homes or something. They had a lot of them in Pasco, they had a lot in Kennewick. He and his dad went in there and they tore—we got enough money from the bank to tear down a section of that housing, and used all the materials out of that for our house. When we moved in, the eaves weren’t boxed in, the sub-floor was the roof, like, slats. So the dirt just settled between the slats. And we had no running water again, because we didn’t have a well. And I found a rattlesnake in my closet one day. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Oh my. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: [LAUGHTER] Came home from town, and I walked in to take off my blouse and hang it up in the closet. And I heard this noise, and I thought—out of the corner of my eye—I thought, there’s a snake. But it had curled up on top of a suitcase. We had no bathroom—we had an outhouse. Had no bathroom, and he found his way into our bedroom there, and the light—the sun was coming through the bedroom window, and he was sunning himself. He’d crawled up on this suitcase in an old army hat that Don had laying on top of the suitcase. And he was telling me, you’d better back off. I screamed, I said, there’s a rattlesnake in here! And Don says—he didn’t believe me, he thought I was having pipe dreams. He told everybody afterwards I made a new door out of the bedroom, which I did not. But anyway, he grabbed a weed fork and killed it. Believe me, we stepped out of bed gingerly for a while, thinking where you find one, you usually find two. But we could see where he’d come up through the—we had the sewer pipe laid for the bathroom that was not in. And the kids had been out there playing in the dirt with their trucks and stuff. He had a piece of tar paper thrown up against it and some dirt that he’d thrown up against it. Well, they’d knocked that down and that snake found that pipe, and he decided that was a nice cool place to be in. Yeah. We had quite a—in fact, we have a big rock bluff behind my farm unit there to the east. And the people at the Bureau called that Rattlesnake Mountain. In the spring, they’d go out there, and when they’d come out of their dens they’d kill a lot of snakes. So we encountered rattlesnakes off and on quite a bit. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Wow. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: We were pretty worried with our kids that they might get bitten. We actually went to town and got a kit—not the normal kind—it had a hypodermic needle or whatever. Whether I could have used it [LAUGHTER] I don’t know. We had to keep it in the refrigerator. But just in case, because we were a long ways away from a doctor. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Right. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: But anyway, didn’t happen. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: That’s good. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier; Yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: And now how—when, roughly, was your house built? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Well, it was built in stages. [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: When did it— </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Well, right as Curt was born, which was 1957. ’57. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: And is that still the same—is that house still out there? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: It is. Only we’ve added on to it. You’d never know what part of it is built out of. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: It’s all bricked. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Oh, wow. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Yeah. I have a fairly nice home. It’s nothing luxurious or anything, but it’s very comfortable. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: And you have roads out there now? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Oh, yeah. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, we’d better have. But that was something, when you didn’t have any roads, I’ll tell you. They were putting them in, but they were just the bases. I remember one day, our neighbors across—that turned out to be our neighbors across the road on Holly Drive—we saw this truck with all of their stuff loaded on it pull in over there. We thought, wow, are we getting a neighbor here? But they pulled in and dropped off a bunch of stuff and then took off again. So we jumped in our car and we followed them to find out who they were, and were they going to be our neighbors, and whatever. Because we were excited that we had another human being that was going to be that close to us. That was Johnsons. Were our neighbors for years and years. They both since have passed away. Don and I were probably eight to ten years younger than the majority of the people that settled out there, because they were World War II veterans, many of them. So we’re losing them one by one. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Yeah, most of them are—well, just lost one down the road here. He was 93, I guess. Year before last. He was a bomber pilot in World War II. Flew 70-some-odd missions, and made it through. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Wow. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: That’s really incredible odds. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Yeah. Yeah, it is. I did his eulogy at the church, and—those guys really—anyway, yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: So working out at Hanford, you would have been privy to—you would have known what was produced there. Did you ever feel—how did you feel about making your living off the land so close to Hanford? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: I never worried about it. Some people tried to prove, or think that they got thyroid cancer, whatever. But I—working in the monitoring, I knew they were monitoring the milk. They monitored milk, anybody that was dairying out there. Plus, they had instrumentation across the river. They were monitoring the river itself. However, you never knew what the figures were. I mean, I—yeah. But I really never worried about it. But maybe out of ignorance, in a sense. Not really, it’s not like, I guess, Chernobyl or something, where you had—although you had reactors out there. But a lot of them were not even active at that time, even. But there were a few, wasn’t there the—was it Fast Flux? I don’t know. I worked on that project, trying to save that Fast Flux Facility. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Really? So in the ‘80s, then? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Yeah. Who was the commissioner? Yeah, I got involved in that. That was a travesty that they ever destroyed that, simply for the fact that medical isotopes—they had no idea what they could have engineered from that reactor that would have helped in the medical field. The dream was the guys that knew—he since has died, too. He moved to Portland. That if you had cancer, you’d go in, and you’d sit down, and they’d do, I guess, an injection. Sort of, probably, like chemo now, but in 15 minutes you’d be out of there. The possibility was there to make medical isotopes. If you know what medical isotopes are. I’m not a scientist, but because of the way the Fast Flux—it was one of a kind in the world, I think. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Mm-hmm. How did you become involved in the committee to save it? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: I don’t remember who got me into that. [LAUGHTER] I don’t remember. Claude Oliver, for one, was active in that. Wanda Munn, who is still alive, and she’s still—yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Yeah, I’ve— </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: I know Wanda and I talk to her quite often and she was very active in that. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Yeah. She was very supportive. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: I just went down to the office and did what I usually do, you know. Write thank-you letters for donations and filing and that kind of stuff. But I was very interested; I thought it was a very good project that our government—all the money that had been expended thrown down the toilet, to put it bluntly. I see in the paper they’re going to use one of the warehouses they built, though, to store the sludge or something. Did you see that? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: I didn’t. I do know that our collection that we manage—the Department of Energy’s Hanford Collection, which is a historic collection of artifacts and archives gathered onsite that document history, and that’s actually stored in one of the Fast Flux Facility warehouses. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Is it? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Yeah. We’re moving everything out, but I go up there once or twice a week to do work on the collection, yes. It’s one of those warehouses that was built for Fast Flux. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: I hadn’t read about storage of waste. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Yeah, sludge or something. So they can—I don’t know—something about the tanks, they can put it in there? Something that had been built for the Fast Flux reactor. So at least maybe something’s being—[LAUGHTER]—what should I say? Salvaged. But anyway. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin:Um, what do you recall about living in the Cold War—during the Cold War era? Especially—was there any sense of danger or even pride living so close at Hanford or working at Hanford, given its role in the US nuclear weapons arsenal during the Cold War? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Well, all that was sort of over with when I was out there. No, it was a job, and it was money. [LAUGHTER] Better money than I could make anywhere else. And the people were great to work with, and they were always interested in what we were doing out there. You know, you would have thought being of the scientific community and whatever—completely different ideas than being a farmer. But you know what? It’s interesting—there’s always a bit of farmer in everybody. Have you ever realized that? I mean, guys particularly. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Well, I grew up on a farm. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: I know that’s what you said, but it seems like no matter what they’re line of work is or whatever, there’s always this curiosity about farming and what to do and whatever. I used to have a lot of questions. They always treated me very well. I really hated to quit out there. Because I enjoyed the people. I enjoyed getting away from the farm, and the worries and the whatever. I could go to work and have a different scenario for the day, you know? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Right, right. So when you were out there, you—all of the children were with your husband? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: No, I hired a babysitter. She had to come to the house, because I couldn’t get five kids up—I had to leave at like seven in the morning, something, to be to work. We started earlier than 8:00. What was it? I don’t know what time I had to leave, but she had to come to the house and get the kids dressed and whatever. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Was that a— </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Don was not a babysitter. [LAUGHTER] He had better things to do, you know. No, I had to hire someone to come in. And sometimes you wondered if—that’s when I finally decided that I needed to quit and come home, because there’s a fine line there about whether you’re really—how much are you contributing here, when you have to pay someone to look after your children, cost of getting to work, better clothing—had to dress better—you know, all these things you got to factor in. It was better when I did come home, because my husband—he liked conversation and people. So he sometimes got sidetracked at the neighbors’ and stuff when I thought he should have been home doing some things. So when I finally came home for good, it was better. Things improved. [LAUGHTER] In my eyes, anyway. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Okay. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Well, it was lonely out there if you were—he just liked, as all farmers do, they like to talk a lot. They still get together. We’ve had some restaurants up there at the corner, and that was the gathering place every morning, the coffee shop and all the BSing that goes on. They’ve come and gone. So now we have a small Mr. Quick’s up there, and some of them still meet up there. Yeah. Got to compare notes, you know. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Oh, yeah. Yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: A lot of things to talk about, I’m sure. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Yup. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: How—you mentioned, especially when you were growing some of the other crops, maybe not the hay, but like the corn and potatoes—how—did you rely on migrant labor at all? Or have you noticed--? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: We did in asparagus, but they really—the families we had I don’t think were migrant. They came from California every year. We furnished housing for them. When amnesty was declared, that’s when we tore out the asparagus. The next year, it was—well, they got better jobs, they stayed in California, they didn’t come back. The people we were getting were not—well, that’s when they also made the deal that if—before, you paid by what they cut a day. I guess you’d call it piecework. They could make good money. But then they said, okay, if they don’t cut enough to equal so much an hour—and I forget what the minimum wage was or whatever it was—then you’ve got to pay them that. So you had to keep track of both things. Well, then you started getting people that would start at the top of the road, and they’d get to the bottom of the road, and then they’d sit down on their box or whatever they had down there and smoke a cigarette. They didn’t care if they made—yeah. They got paid so much no matter what. The caliber of people changed drastically. We got a crew leader or something out of Texas to bring us people, and that was not good. So we just decided to tear it out. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: That’s when you went to a more mechanized--? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Well, yeah. Just planted other crops. When we lost the sugar beet industry here, that was hard, because that was a very, very dependable cash crop. That hurt. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: What happened to the sugar beet industry? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Well, they decided to pull the factory at Moses Lake out of here. So we had no place to ship the sugar beets. I think, took acres and stuff back to Idaho. So we lost our sugar beet industry here. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Is there anything that I haven’t talked about that you’d like to talk about? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Well, I don’t know. I don’t know what it would be, except that I think at the end of my composition in that book that I gave you there on the block, I just said I was so grateful for the opportunity that we had here. I think this probably was the last—what do I want to say—the last land that was opened up for development, like the Columbia Basin, the last project. We raised five great kids. They learned how to work. I’m proud of all of them. I just felt, being a city girl, my mother-in-law particularly didn’t think I’d ever make it, but I did. [LAUGHTER] It was a great opportunity. A lot of people didn’t stay. There were a lot of women that—it was hard. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: It was hard out there. We had a couple of suicides. You’d get—yeah. I don’t know what else to tell you. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Did your parents stay in Portland? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: My dad had died early in life. My mother, yes. I was an only child. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Okay. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: She lived in Portland, yes. And-- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: What did she—oh, sorry. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: That’s okay. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: What did she think about— </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Oh. [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: --your going out to homestead in—I’m sure she thought it was— </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Not too much. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: --kind of the middle of nowhere. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Not too much. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Did she ever come out? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. She came up. She always came up whenever I had a baby and helped me. In some of the rougher years, so she knew what was actually happening. Of course, you know how you feel about your kids. You don’t like to see them—think that they’re being—what should I say—deprived. [LAUGHTER] And Don’s folks were very helpful. They—his dad came up and helped us many a time work on the house. She’d come up and do the cooking, since I was working. I’d come home to a meal, which was great. She made the best cinnamon rolls. My kids have never forgotten that. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: [LAUGHTER] Yeah, she—anyway. Yeah, they—we also were in sheep. I guess I forgot to say that. We all had a—I used to do the lambing. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Oh, wow. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Yeah, we bought a bunch of old ewes, which was not the best idea. But that’s all—his dad and Don went together and bought this bunch of old ewes. And so we lambed—I think we had lambs for—or we had sheep for—what? I don’t know, maybe five, six years. We never were much of a livestock people. My husband, when he was young, his dad went to some auction or something, came home with some milk cows, and Don got the job of milking the cows. He says, I’m never having a milk cow, and we never did. [LAUGHTER] We had a guy actually delivering milk out to the farm, come to think of it. And he left a big supply everyday with the boys I had. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Wow, yeah, I bet. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: I ended up with four boys and one daughter. My daughter’s a school teacher here in Kennewick. Has been for umpteen years. And Brett works at Battelle, my youngest. Curt and Clint and Chris—Chris is my oldest—they all are in the farming deal out there. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: And Clint’s a local politician, right? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Oh, yes. Yeah. He thinks he has to try to make a difference. But anyway, it’s a rough go. But he’s determined—stubborn. [LAUGHTER] No, I admire him for his, I guess, bravery, because it is—you do have to be brave. You take a lot of flak, I’m going to tell you, and a lot of—after he loses, which he has, takes him a while to recover. It’s a rejection, is what it is. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Yeah. That’s understandable. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: And then he takes a bit to regroup, and turns around and comes back for another go at it. And I tell him, I said, I don’t understand you, Clint. [LAUGHTER] Anyway. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Well, great, well, thank you so much, Alice. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: I probably talked your leg off. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Nope, my legs are still here. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Well, I don’t know what else I could tell you. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Did anyone else have any questions? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Oh, I could—I guess I should have told you, I did a lot of tractor work. I was not just a housewife. I ran almost every piece of equipment, except I never ran the stacker or—but I drove tractor. Did cultivating. Never rode a—I never ran a potato harvester, of course, but I worked on enough of them sorting potatoes. You know when you’re digging in the field? I’ve eaten a lot of dirt in my day. [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Tom Hungate: Did you ever notice a difference, was there a boys’ club that you kind of had to work through? Or was it just you were a good worker and so you were accepted as a worker on the farm? Or there weren’t enough people even to judge you as a woman out there working on a farm? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Yeah. Most all the women out there—not every woman worked in the field, but the only one that I worried about judging me was my husband. [LAUGHTER] Which, sometimes—[LAUGHTER]—I would pull something that wasn’t—I mean, do something that wasn’t too good. We had a big windstorm one night, and I thought I had to go down—we did have wheel lines at the far end of our place, down in—well, it sloped down pretty readily there. And those wheel lines, if you don’t block them, will take off in the wind and tear them all up. So the guys headed down there, and I thought I had to go down and help. Well, the first thing I did was run over the pipe that hooked into the main line. [LAUGHTER] I got told, why don’t you just go to the house? Because I hadn’t helped the situation any. [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Emma Rice: Another thing I was kind of thinking, did you have anything else to add about being kind of a working mom in the 1950s and ‘60s— </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Rice: --to watch over your own [INAUDIBLE] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Well, funny you ask that question, because I have granddaughters now that are—well, I have two granddaughters that are CPAs. One just moved—she was working out here on the Project, and she just moved to South Carolina. And I look back on the days when I was working, and they never come again. You’ve lost some of the years of your kids’ life. As things happen, when they learn—when they walk, when they—first time they do something. And not being—and I remember I came home, and I was so tired. I gave my best at work, and there wasn’t a whole lot left over at the end of the day. And I know I was cranky. [LAUGHTER] And I just think sometimes—I’m sort of like my granddaughter, I kept wanting to—each time I got a promotion, it was—how do I want to put that? Not a feather in my cap, but made me feel worthy—more worthwhile, or whatever. I enjoyed working, I admit that. But I just look back on it now as—I’m going to be 85—August. I think, was it really that important? And I wish, maybe, some of our younger generation had the benefit, maybe, of my years later on the road. That’s just my— </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Rice: Yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: But I have thought about that a lot. Whether I would have done it any differently at the time, because we needed the money. But sometimes we get—we forget what’s most important in our life. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: I agree. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Rice: Yeah, great. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: So what we might do now is—we’ll maybe have you kind of narrate some of these, some of the items you brought along. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: Where you go across it, when I was— </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Right. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: But with these—this is hay we’ve laid down, and I thought it was quite—yeah, there. I thought it was sort of a neat view of how things look now, compared to that other slide you’ve got there. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Franklin: Right. Yeah, no, that’s really— </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> Didier: So I don’t know if you want me to bring in that picture or not, so you— </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX146332551"> </div> Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri-Cities Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:10:43 Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 300 Area Fast Flux Test Facility (FFTF) Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1954-2016 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1954-1960 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Didier, Clint Didier, Don Didier, Curt Didier, Chris Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Alice Didier Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Kennewick (Wash.) Pasco (Wash.) Eltopia (Wash.) Connell (Wash.) Agriculture Irrigation Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 07/12/2016 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2016-08-12: Metadata v1 created – [J.G.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. Description An account of the resource An interview with Alice Didier conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Relation A related resource <a href="http://hanfordhistory.com/collections/show/15">Alice Didier Oral History Metadata</a> 300 Area Connell (Wash.) Eltopia (Wash.) Fast Flux Test Facility (FFTF) Hanford (Wash.) Hanford Site (Wash.) Kennewick (Wash.) Pasco (Wash.) https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fcc1c5b0c760d1762a7a35a41a36954e0.jpg 351007d7be79050d9e63f8cc203ca4ac Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Bauman Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Andrew Reisenauer Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Bauman: Let's start, if we could, by just having you say your name, and then spell it for us. Andrew Reisenauer: My name is Andrew Reisenauer. Last name is R-E-I-S-E-N-A-U-E-R. Bauman: Thank you. And my name is Bob Bauman. Today's date is November 6, 2013. And we're conducting this interview on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. So I wonder if we could start by you just telling us about how you came here? How you came to work at Hanford? What brought you here, and when? Reisenauer: During 1950, I was a student at Washington State University, on campus at Pullman. And I was invited down here as a summer employee for the summer of 1950. I went back to school and graduated in '51, and came right back to Richland. During that year, 1950, I worked at the health department for the City of Richland. At that time, an employee of General Electric, of course. And it involved sanitation inspections around Richland, milk supplies up in the valley-- Yakima Valley and Moses Lake area. Just general safety and sanitation involved in all the transition of the workers from the old town sites of Hanford, Richland North-- North Richland trailer park area-- and also the development of Richland. Because at that time, the uptown shopping district was all under construction. Restaurants were being opened. Generally just everything that involved sanitation and health. Mosquito control was just being started. That was under our control. There's a huge influx of people, you've got problems with sanitation and food supplies. Food supplies particularly, when you're dealing with 50,000 people. You've got to supply them with tons and tons of food coming in daily. For instance, the milk supply-- that's something that you can't ship for great distances, like you can other products. The Hanford Engineering Works shipped in dairy farms, supported dairy farms. They built milk supply plants in Sunnyside and Moses Lake. They subsidized the farmers to bring in large numbers of cattle. I mean, you don't just dump people in and don't have-- in a place like this, where there's small towns and very, very scattered population. The sanitarians from the Richland area were inspecting all the dairy farms all the way up through Sunnyside and up into the Moses Lake area, just to give us a decent supply of fresh produce. There's any number of those kind of things that went on during the areas when all the people are transitioning from town site of Hanford and into the North Richland trailer park, which had 2,500 trailers or more out there. With bathhouses and laundry facilities for those people were built in to separate housing or block areas, so that you got all the sanitation facilities have to be supplied, have to be inspected. You've got a brand new school out there, John Ball School, which was just nothing but a quonset hut put together. And along with all the schools that were being built in the City of Richland, we were training food handlers, for instance. Food handler classes, and making sure that the inspections got into the schools. And there's just a wide, wide variety of environmental problems. Bauman: Sounds like a pretty challenging job. Reisenauer: Well, even water supply. Because all the water supply in Richland and North Richland was furnished by wells. The treatment plant at Richland wasn't built until '55 or so. So you had well after well. And a lot of these wells were recharged by recharge basins with Yakima River Valley water, and Columbia River water. Places like just west of here. That little valley over toward just west of George Washington Way. There's still a couple wells in there that are being part of the Richland water supply. A lot of that water was being pumped out of the Columbia River into the basin above the wells. The wells are probably 75 feet deep. And they were using that as the method of cleaning the water, keeping the fish and everything else out of the wells. There's the area along Wellsian Way was all recharge ponds. Because there's a number of wells among the buildings down there. They're still being used. But the recharge basin has been closed, when they discontinued the irrigation water through the City of Richland. Few people know that there's a tunnel underneath Carmichael High School, for instance, that supplied irrigation water, and water to those recharge basins. Bauman: Yeah, I didn't know that. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: So when you were here, then, in 1950 as a student, right? You were-- Reisenauer: I was just a summer employee. Bauman: Right. What sorts of things were you going out and inspecting? Reisenauer: Oh yes. I inspected a lot of the restaurants. I was a bacteriology and sanitary engineering student up at Washington State. Bauman: Sounds like a great experience, then? Reisenauer: Oh, yeah. Learned a lot. Very applicable to my studies up there. Bauman: So you did that in the summer of 1950, you went back to school? Reisenauer: I went back to school. And then, when you came back here to work-- Came back right away after graduation. Bauman: And working for the health department again, or--? Reisenauer: The health department, yes. I stayed with the health department until 1956 or so, shortly before the transition the town into a normal town. Bauman: And during those years working for the health department, what were the biggest challenges you had? It sounds like there were a lot of challenges. What were the most challenging parts for the health department? Reisenauer: Probably keeping up with the necessary state requirements for inspecting dairy farms and restaurants. At that time, we were also building the new swimming pool up on the hill. There was an original swimming pool in the old town site of Richland, down in Howard Amon Park. It was built very close to the river. And it was small, and it was not a safe pool, because it transitioned water between the river and the swimming pool. When the river was high, it leaked like I sieve. So it had to be replaced. There's things like that, just innumerable-- Bauman: How large was the health department? How many employees are we talking about? Reisenauer: There were probably-- well, there's also with the health department, they had the school nurses that were—there was probably seven, eight school nurses. And there were like three sanitarians, and the health officer. Bauman: And what was your job title after you graduated college and came back? Reisenauer: Sanitarian. That was the job title. Bauman: And so when that transitioned to being an independent city, right? Reisenauer: Yes. Bauman: What did you do at that point? Reisenauer: The health department was turned over to Ben Franklin County Health District. I left the health department, because they had the personnel. They had hired personnel into their department to take over. I moved out into the area as a chemist, and worked with the geochemistry outfit out there. Wells, drilling new wells out there. Tracking contamination through the wells, of radioactive contamination and stuff like that. Bauman: And so where would these wells drill, then? Reisenauer: Excuse me? Bauman: Where were the wells drilled? Different places on the site, or--? Reisenauer: Oh no. I'm talking about the wells out on the Hanford project, for the facilities out there. And we did a lot of soil chemistry work, along with that. Soil chemistry, soil physics. Bauman: And you said you would sort of measure a contamination also, as part of your work? In the soil and water, or--? What? You measured contamination? Is that one of the things you did, also? Reisenauer: Well, the contamination out there was radioactive. But a great deal different than tracking contamination for the wells in the city. Bauman: So how long did you do that, then? How long did you work as a geochemist? Reisenauer: The job transitioned from geochemistry into actually the groundwater modeling area, where we were doing—we built computer models for the movement of groundwater contamination throughout the [INAUDIBLE]. Where's the water moving from, and where's it move to? And how much contamination is being carried along with it? We developed these groundwater models, such that we were starting to apply them through-- when Battelle took over, we started moving this type of thing into-- looking at county and problems and things all over the United States. I modelled groundwater movement in Brookhaven, New York, upstate New York, Nebraska, Florida, all over the United States. But it all started here. Bauman: And did you find significant contamination of groundwater? Reisenauer: Oh, yes, as far as-- it'd go through the soil down here. Nothing significant that I know of ever moved to the Columbia River. It stayed pretty close to the production plants out there. There's still a lot of that going on out there now. Bauman: So did you work in different areas of the site, then? Reisenauer: Yes, yes. Bauman: Just measuring different places on site? Reisenauer: Yeah, I started out there in 200 West area. But then when I moved out of there into the 300 area, my office moved downtown, up in the federal building, and then back out here to Battelle when Battelle buildings were built. Bauman: I want to go back to when you came here in 1950 as a student. What was the town of Richland like at the time? How would you describe the place? Reisenauer: Well, it's kind of still like a frontier town, somewhat. Everybody that was here had come from somewhere else. People were very, very friendly, because they didn't-- came here and not-- everybody was sort of new. The town site, of course, was being run by General Electric. Everything-- you've probably heard that story before. You can never tell from one day to the next what you're going to be doing the next day. You could plan, but you couldn't continue your plan most of the time because something else would crop up. Bauman: And when you first came here, what sort of housing did you have? Reisenauer: Well, when I came in '50, I lived in a low-level wooden barracks with the construction workers near the Camp Hanford army camp. And when I moved into town, I was in one of the two-story barracks buildings. Because I was single at that time. And shortly after, well, about September the next year, I acquired one end of a ‘B’ house. Which, I got married that year, so I acquired in-town housing. Bauman: Was there much to do here in Richland in the early 1950s? Reisenauer: What we did in the 1950s-- I had a very large backyard behind the house. And when I started having children that was the main playground in the neighborhood. But the different organizations around town, like the medical division and production, some of the other places like that, had ball teams, softball teams. We had softball teams, we had volleyball teams. There was not a whole lot to do, unless you made it up yourselves. Of course, I did a lot of fishing and stuff like that, hunting. Bauman: So Hanford was a place where-- a lot of security was a part of working at Hanford. Did that impact you at all, in terms of your work? Reisenauer: Oh, yes. I had a clearance for moving around out in the area, what they call the forward area. And I had my badge and my pencils and all that sort of thing, if I get into radiation zones or something like that, I had all the-- Bauman: Did you ever have to wear any protective clothing for safety, in terms of certain aspects of your job at all? Reisenauer: Very seldom. One or two times I would get into that type of thing. Bauman: And so how long did you work at Hanford then? When did you-- Reisenauer: 39 and 1/2 years. Bauman: So '89, '90, somewhere in there? Reisenauer: What? Bauman: So 1989, 1990, somewhere in there you retired? Reisenauer: Yeah, I'm 89. Bauman: No, I mean, what year you retired? Reisenauer: What year did I retire? I retired in '88. But I stayed on with one of the subcontractors for another year and a half, two years. Bauman: And you started working for GE. What other contractors did you work for? Did you work for Battelle? Reisenauer: Just Battelle. [INAUDIBLE]. Battelle took over the Hanford laboratories. I went with Battelle. Bauman: So for a good part of the time you were working there, the focus was on production. And at some point, that started to shift to less production, and then cleanup, I guess. Did the shift in mission impact your work at all? Reisenauer: Not really. I was far enough away from the production that we continued doing just exactly the same. Just right on. Bauman: President Kennedy came in 1963 to dedicate the N reactor. I wonder, were you there that day? Do you remember that at all? Reisenauer: Oh yes. Yeah. Bauman: And what do you remember about his visit, or that day? Reisenauer: Well, I could take part of the family out into the area. It was a huge crowd out there. Bauman: I wonder, what was the most challenging aspect of the work that you did at Hanford? And maybe what was the most rewarding part of what you did? Reisenauer: When I was working with the health department, just keeping the day-to-day things that had to be done this day for that day, because you couldn't really plan tremendous-- very far in advance as to what you're going to be doing. And when I was working with the geophysical part of the-- the geochemistry part of there was developing the mathematics and the computer programs to be able to track water movement, and the contamination. That was a brand new area just being developed nationwide. And we built the first groundwater models ever heard of in the United States, to be able to do that work. Bauman: Did the technology change over the years, in terms of-- Reisenauer: Oh, yes. Bauman: --measuring that sort of thing? How did that change? Could you describe that at all? Reisenauer: Well, being able to incorporate the large amount of data that's necessary, and to develop the technique to get the right kind of data that's necessary for that. For instance, one of the last jobs I did was to develop a groundwater model for an area in the middle of Nebraska. A naval ammunition depot had been built there. Covered an area of about 75 square miles. And the soils and area were quite similar to the Hanford project here. So my models were very applicable to that area. But when I went and looked at the area to find out whether-- they knew they had explosives like RDX and TNT and degreasing agents that they'd contaminated into the groundwater. And the idea was, where's it moving, how fast is it moving, which way is it going? Trying to just to gather that data. And one of the hardest parts was trying to develop a computer system back there to be able to run it. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: Were there any events or incidents, things that happened during your time working at Hanford that really stand out to you? Reisenauer: I guess I'm not quite clear as to what you-- Bauman: Like if there was anything that happened-- it could be something humorous, or something that happened during your time working there that just has always stuck in your mind as a really unique thing that happened while you were there. Reisenauer: While I was working in the chemistry lab, doing some testing on some of the waste, the old PBP process, we were looking at every batch of waste that came out of there. I was working, trying to get an analysis about a strontium that was being put out to the groundwater, or put out with all the old cribs. I'm using the fuming nitric acid in this process. A bunch of samples that were radioactive in the hood. And while I was by pipetting some of this from fuming nitric acid into these test tubes, one drop of that fell off and hit a cellulose test tube that was in the hood. I had instant fire. Radioactive samples in this hand, fuming nitric acid in this hand, and a fire in the middle. What do you do first? [LAUGHTER] Bauman: Put the fuming nitric acid back there. You put the sample down here. Then you take care of the fire. [LAUGHTER] Reisenauer: One very few humorous incident-- in that same laboratory, one of the other chemists was trying to analyze a particle-- particle analysis on some well samples, dirt samples. And one of these required putting a spot-- well, they say, 10 or 20 grams of soil-- putting it into a solution of essentially vinegar. And then he was going to shake them overnight on this shaking table. This shaking table was built like a rotary. And the border would force it one way, and the clutch would give out. And the spring would bring that back, so it would rock back and forth. You got to shake this all night. He set it all up. We were just ready to move out of the laboratory, and catch the bus into town. We were just checking ourselves out. This thing was shaking away just fine. And all of a sudden a spring came loose. This thing is started around like a centrifuge. And it started throwing those bottles, this small bubbles, all over the lab. He had 24 bottles on that thing. And we were down behind the benches, ducking bottles. When the final, last one finally came off, I says, now what do we do? He says, we go home and clean this up tomorrow. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: And no one got hit by any flying bottles? Reisenauer: No, nobody got hit by flying-- there was only three of us in the lab at that time. Bauman: As you look back over your, what'd you say, 39 and 1/2 years working at Hanford-- how would you overall assess your time there? How was it as a place to work? Reisenauer: Well, it was a very pleasant place to work. Early on, we had a lot of freedom in how we approached things. And you can point out where things needed to be done, and follow up and try to get funding for those particular projects. And usually you didn't have any trouble doing it, because there was so much that we needed to be known that wasn't known. Bauman: Is there anything that I haven't asked you about yet, in terms of your work [INAUDIBLE] for the health department, or working as a geochemist, or any of the things you did there that we haven't talked about yet that you'd like to share, or think would be important to share? Reisenauer: I can't think of anything. We've pretty much covered most of it along the way. Bauman: Well, I want to thank you very much for coming in today and talking with us. I appreciate it. Reisenauer: Yeah, well, I hope I contributed a little bit to your-- Bauman: Thanks for that. Reisenauer: --your project. <a href="https://youtu.be/4eyjWy-hwng">View interview on Youtube.</a> Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1950- Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1950-1988 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Andrew Reisenauer Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Nuclear waste Nuclear waste disposal Description An account of the resource Andrew Reisenauer moved to Richland, Washington in 1950 to work on the Hanford Site. An interview conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by Mission Support Alliance on behalf of the United States Department of Energy. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 11/06/2013 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fc4211ec6a53281a6318043beb7f6bf4d.JPG cdd2118310627db7445aa6f6790e0c89 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F1bd3aca714e3e33a9ea3bebd16a631ae.mp4 622c42fc03f7b13d72bae927f5091fb8 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Victor Vargas: Yeah, we should be good. Robert Franklin: Ready? Vargas: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin and I am conducting an oral history interview with Ann Roseberry on January 25th, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Ann about her experiences growing up in Richland. And for the record can you state and spell your name for us? Ann Roseberry: Yes. Ann Roseberry. A-N-N R-O-S-E-B-E-R-R-Y. Franklin: Great. Thank you so much. Tell me how you came to Richland. Roseberry: Well, I was born here. Franklin: Okay. Roseberry: I was conceived here. My folks met after the war. Dad had been active in the Air Force and came here to work for GE. Mom was recruited by General Electric, so she came out from Chicago. When she got here, he was a personnel manager for GE, and he gave her her first day orientation, and promptly asked her out to dinner. So that was 1948. Franklin: 1948. Roseberry: Yeah. Franklin: I was going to say that probably wouldn’t fly with the human resources department nowadays. Roseberry: I’m fairly certain not. So they married in 1950, and I was born in 1951. And just grew up here, yeah. Franklin: Okay. And where did you live? Or where did your parents live in Richland? Roseberry: Okay, they lived at 710 Stanton, which was a precut. Stanton is a little two-block street that runs perpendicular to Lee. So we had a two-block walk to Marcus Whitman Elementary. Franklin: Mm-hm. Yeah, I live on that street, too, as you know. Roseberry: Yeah. Franklin: So what was it—so you, then, would have been about seven when Richland was privatized. Roseberry: Yes, yeah. Franklin: So what do you—what can you recall about those—your early childhood or those early years? Maybe from your own experiences or what your parents told you about that early Cold War era, government-owned era of Richland? Roseberry: Yeah. Well, in regard to the 1958, I remember Mom and Dad talking about showing me a piece of paper that they were buying the house. As a seven-year-old, it wasn’t terrifically meaningful to me, but I understood that it was to them. That same year, my youngest sister was born and we added a room onto our house, the precut. So those actually have more primacy in my recollection than the thing that meant more to Mom and Dad. Franklin: Sure. Roseberry: But I do remember that. And I probably, at the time, said—because children do—oh, how much does the house cost? And Mom would have replied, we don’t ask those questions, dear. So just one little example of a culture of secrecy that I’ll—yeah. We—I guess my elementary school years, in some way were both peaceful—the idyllic, small town family life—but punctuated by the air raid drills, where we would get under our desks or go out into the hall and line up against the hall in a sort of a crouching position. Or now what we would call pose-of-a-child in yoga. But as flat on the ground and as taking up as least space as we could. Franklin: Mm-hm. Did you ever do the kind of drills with the evacuation routes, where the families would drive out to a spot in the desert? Roseberry: Yeah. We did once, but the school children were bussed. So as we were—I actually have a fairly strong recollection of that, because it was terrifying. That I was alone on the bus. And I remember counting on my fingers, where’s Mom, where’s Dad, where are my sisters? Trying to sort of get a mental picture of where they were. Because even though we knew it was a drill, we were in a bus by ourselves being driven somewhere. So, we never went out as a family in our car. Franklin: Okay. Roseberry: Yeah. Franklin: What did your mother do for GE? Roseberry: She came out—her training was as an x-ray technician. So, she came out and—I won’t get all the timing of this right, but at one point, she worked for early Kadlec. And then went out to the Project and she was x-raying samples. What they were samples of, I’m not clear. But samples. But inanimate samples. I remember her talking about her work environment and that the badges, they were also radiation detectors and would indicate when the human body had had enough. But she said that she also had frequent x-rays of her hands. And she said that—the term was hot—hot hands—when she had hot hands, it meant that she had had enough radiation and she had to not do that work for a while. So. Franklin: Radiation from the handling the samples, or radiation from the x-rays? Roseberry: I think from the samples. There are a lot of things where—we were raised in a culture of don’t ask questions. So often, if I would have asked a question, she would have said, well, they were samples. And that would have been the end of the discussion. So, rocks, pieces of equipment, I don’t know. But something that for some reason she was x-raying, but they would have been giving radioactivity, yeah. Franklin: Hmm. Do you know where your mother worked on the Site? Did she talk about the Area? Do you know if she worked at 300, 200? Roseberry: I don’t know. When Dad was out onsite, he was at 200-West. Franklin: Oh, because he was still personnel manager at that time, or--? Roseberry: Well, I don’t think so. When we would ask him what his job was, he would just say a manager. And that’s really all I know. In probably the last maybe 10 or 15 years of his working career, he was transferred into the Federal Building. And what he said then was that he was writing or editing technical reports. And he did have a master’s in English, so that’s credible. But I don’t actually know that that’s what he was doing. In the earlier years, it was just, I’m a manager. So questions like that, that a child would ask, we were given an answer and we just accepted the answer. Franklin: Sure, sure. Did he have any other technical training, besides a master’s in English? Did he have any training that would fit to be more site-specific? Like, production-specific? Roseberry: I don’t think so. When he was talking about the later years and technical reports, he made the comment that scientists and engineers, their work often needed editing by someone who had a better understanding of the English language. So—and he was a published author; he was a skilled writer. So all of this is very credible to me, but I just don’t really know that he was doing that from the ‘50s through the ‘80s. Franklin: What kinds of work did he publish or write? Roseberry: Fiction, primarily. Fiction. He had a book that came out right before Pearl Harbor, Bobbs-Merrill, and he had just started on the author promotion tour when Pearl Harbor was bombed. So pretty much the next day he went and signed up and served stateside in—it was then the Army Air Corps, because he had had an injury. And almost literally to his dying day, that—he felt embarrassed that he hadn’t gone overseas. He felt that he hadn’t really quite done what he should, because he hadn’t been overseas. But then after retirement, he published a couple more fiction books and wrote some family histories, but mostly it was—he was a fiction writer, yeah. Franklin: Okay. You mentioned that your mother talked about her work environment. Did she ever talk about the gender makeup of her environment, or her experience of a woman working out onsite? Roseberry: She talked about a couple of men who she worked with right in her unit. And very warmly. Very—it clearly was a comfortable work environment for her. I’m interpreting from what she said that they were older than she was. She was in her mid-20s and very cute. But a very modest woman. Raised in the Midwest, small town in Iowa. So her comments came across as if they were avuncular or fatherly to her—warm, but not anything uncomfortable for her. Yeah. So that’s about all of her comments. I know she was back and forth between Kadlec and the Site during those years. She would have worked roughly from 1948 to 1951. I was born in March of ’51, and possibly she had to quit work before that because she was working with radiation. Franklin: Are you the oldest? Roseberry: I’m the oldest. Franklin: Okay, so after you were born, she stopped working to be your full-time— Roseberry: Yeah. There were three of us, so she stayed home until the year I turned 13, I believe. And then she went back to work part-time x-ray at the Richland Clinic, which is no longer a clinic. But—and then she worked through until retirement. Franklin: Okay. Roseberry: Yeah, yeah. Franklin: Can you tell me about growing up in the prefab neighborhood? Because it’s slightly—from what I understand they’re slightly different than the Alphabet House neighborhoods in terms of not only the character of the houses but the income levels of the residents. Roseberry: Yeah. We were—some of what I will tell you, to give a caveat, is my recollection. And I was a child at the time, so I had my own lens. But in our particular neighborhood, which is to say the one block, every person who lived in that neighborhood had a family member employed at the Project or at the Site. And in those years, it was all the men. The women were home. So across the street was an electrician, next door was Hanford Patrol, next door the other side, was—I don’t know what he did; I know he was a craftsworker. So in our block, all the other families were crafts families, except for ours. That was a very strong distinction, was—you were management or you were the crafts. And what I was told was that in our part of town, there was a conscious desire to mix within a neighborhood so that there would be some management people and some crafts people. In the block up, where you live, we didn’t know as many people. One of the high school teachers lived there at the time. It was close enough that we were allowed to trick-or-treat there. But we—within our own block, we were in and out of houses and borrowing a cup of sugar, and that kind of thing. But it was a very small one-block neighborhood for us. Franklin: Interesting. How long did your parents live in that house? Roseberry: Mm. From 1950 until 2013. Franklin: Oh, wow. Roseberry: Yeah. My dad died at the end of 2004. And Mom stayed in the house until 2013. She had a series of falls. And after the last one, she said, I think it’s time for me to move. So we got that to happen, but—and she was—she had three other friends from the early days who at that time were still living in their homes. Only one with her husband; the other women had been widowed. But for her, this was not an unusual situation, that you would move into a house and you would live there your whole life. At some point, when I was in late elementary school, I know that Dad got a promotion at work. And this would have been before 1958. And so at that time, he was offered the chance to move to a different neighborhood to what would have been considered a nicer house. I remember our talking about that, and I just spoke right up and said, well, I don’t want to move. I like my school. I like my neighborhood. And so he didn’t accept the move. And I don’t remember now where it was. I just remember that to me it seemed really silly. Well, this was our house. Why would we move? This was home, yeah. Franklin: Do you know if the—you had mentioned that separation between trades—crafts people and managerial. Do you know if that ever caused any tension with neighbors and things like that? Roseberry: Yes. Not in our neighborhood, not among—this was a neighborhood where in the summer, Dad would cook hamburgers outside on the fireplace he built, and the neighbors would come over and have hamburgers. Or they’d come over and have watermelon, or they’d come over for the fireworks. So none of that happened there. But in the school environment, very much so. There were times where it would come up within the schoolroom. And fairly laterally, I want to say the early ‘60s—at any rate, there was a significant strike out at the Project and another one threatened. That was the time I remember most clearly that there were enough people out on strike that management were being placed in various locations. So Dad was driving a bus during that time. The buses came right into the neighborhoods, so he had a half-a-block walk to get the bus that took him to work. And I remember very distinctly getting into it a little bit with another girl. So—might have been fifth grade—I don’t remember the year, but there were lines drawn. Because her father was in the crafts and he was also—had some position of responsibility in one of the unions. And we didn’t fight, and we weren’t enemies, but we were just never close again. It wasn’t—this discussion happened and the lines were drawn, and we never quite managed to get back across again. But there were some neighborhoods—there were some neighborhoods in the ranch houses where the mix of people who lived there was such that, yeah, it was an issue in the neighborhood. In one case, a family—the same family where the father had quite position of responsibility, and the neighborhood lived across the street from a family where the father was a high-ranking PR person for the Project. And you felt it. You felt it; it wasn’t fighting, but it was tension, I mean—yeah. Franklin: Sure. Do you remember what that series of labor movements was about? Roseberry: I do not. Franklin: Okay. Roseberry: I do not. And I wish that—because the memory is so clear, I’ve wished that I’d gone back to research it to find out what it was. I remember Dad saying that his concern or management’s concern was that this would be a disruptive enough situation that we would lose—we would no longer have federal funding. And so the other thing that’s unclear to me now is, the strike would have been against the contractor. But of course, all of the contractor money was federal money. So there was real concern that jobs would be lost. I do remember that. Franklin: Did you ever—given that up until Richland was privatized, you had to work for Hanford to live in Richland—did you ever lose friends or notice people—had people that you knew that left during that time because they lost their jobs at Hanford? Roseberry: No. And that is a really interesting question to me. I don’t remember ever losing any friends for that reason. And I don’t remember until high school that families were moving in from some of the other secret cities or Savannah River. I remember a family coming in from Savannah River. It isn’t that it didn’t happen. I don’t remember it, and there was no one in my close circle who left. And I really don’t remember much influx. My high school years would have been ’66 to ’69. And there were several families that I remember then. Franklin: Did you go to Richland High School? Roseberry: Mr. Franklin, that would be Col High. Franklin: Col High. Sorry. Roseberry: That would be Col High. This is essential for accuracy. Yeah. Marcus Whitman, Carmichael, and then Col High. Franklin: Col High, right. You’ll have to forgive me. Roseberry: I do forgive you, but I will correct you, of course, because this is so important. Franklin: Point taken. Would that be the Col High Bombers? Roseberry: Yes, that would be the Col High Bombers. Franklin: Okay. Roseberry: Yeah, yeah. Franklin: And how long—then did you leave Richland shortly after graduating? Roseberry: Mm-hm. I left in the fall of ’69. I went to Cheney for my undergrad degree, and went through in three years because I had two sisters behind me. Then went to Michigan for my library master’s and then came back and my first job was in Yakima. So— Franklin: I’m wondering if—you may have been too young for this next question, but I’d like to see what—if you remember. You know, Richland, up until the mid-60s or late-60s was primarily, almost exclusively white. Roseberry: Yes. Franklin: Due to housing restrictions on African Americans and other minorities, they had to live in East Pasco. And although African Americans were employed by the Hanford Project, they couldn’t live in Richland— Roseberry: Houses—right, right. Franklin: --at that time. So I’m wondering if you could speak to that, having observed—or if you observed discrimination or any civil rights attempts to address it. Roseberry: Yeah. So in elementary school, at my elementary school at Marcus Whitman, there were two African American families who had children in the school. In second grade, I had a birthday party, and I’d invited people from school. And I remember this very clearly. We had added on the living room, so we’d set up card tables in the living room. And I had invited my friend Kathy Baker. And she didn’t come. And I remember going to the front door watching for her, and wondering why she wasn’t coming to the party. The Baker family is African American. Her mother is still here, Mrs. Baker. I remember—and I asked Mom, why didn’t Kathy come to the party? And in some way, Mom would have said, maybe she didn’t feel comfortable because she’s—in those days, we would have said Negro. And that wasn’t disrespectful. Sorry, I remember this really clearly. And it just made me so sad. She was almost my best friend, and she didn’t feel she could come to my birthday party. My folks were very—whatever opinions they might have had to the contrary, we were raised that race was not an issue. It was not a matter of discussion; it wasn’t—it was an irrelevant thing. I look back now—hold on, I’ll get hold of myself. I look back now and I think of family names that we would have heard. But in our family, nobody ever said, this name tells you that their family came from Russia or Ireland or Germany or—that was not a—we didn’t know to make those connections. It just wasn’t discussed. So, the issue of race was, it just, it wasn’t present in the way we were raised. I didn’t really question in grade school that there were only two families. When I got to junior high, as it was then, I remember two Hispanic families being added. That was at Carmichael. And I may be forgetting somebody. By high school, another African American family and a Chinese family. But at one time—and I’m not sure I could do it right now—but I counted that in my growing up years, we had nine families of color in Richland. So we had some African American families, one Chinese family, and I think maybe by high school three Hispanic families. But I didn’t know that was unusual. I just didn’t know that was unusual. Franklin: Sure. The children—the African American children that you went to elementary school with, they were allowed to live—the family was allowed to live in Richland? Roseberry: Mm-hmm, yeah. The Bakers lived over—it’s an area of town just on the other side of Duportail. I’m so bad with directions. There was a little market there, Dietrich’s Market, that’s now Minute Mart or something. But they lived in that neighborhood. And I think Mrs. Baker is still in the family house from those days, too. Franklin: Oh, wow. Roseberry: Yeah, mm-hmm, yeah. Franklin: Great. Thank you. Do you remember any later civil—like, any of the later civil rights actions in Kennewick and Pasco, or did you not—have you not connected much with— Roseberry: I was not—no, I was not connected. We didn’t really have any family friends in Pasco or Kennewick. One exception, a friend of my dad’s in Kennewick on Canal Drive. But the world was very small. You knew people from school, where parents of other children—more strongly in elementary school of course, and then you knew people from your church. And in the people I knew, everybody went to church. Everybody belonged to a church and they went to church. And so we belonged to Central, to CUP. So, that’s how I met children from other parts of town, because I would meet at church. But we didn’t—in the early days, very actively encouraged to stay in Richland. Shop in Richland, go to a doctor in Richland. Not go out to dinner in Richland because there really weren’t many options. But you lived in Richland, you did your business in Richland, and you socialized in Richland. After 1958, I suspect the message wasn’t quite so strong. But still strong. Franklin: Probably because it had been ingrained. Roseberry: It had been ingrained, uh-huh. And there was still—even after Richland re-formed as a First Class City, all of that secrecy and deliberate attempt at isolation was still very present. Because we were in a very strong part of the Cold War. So the secrecy did not—and the fear—did not go away once Richland re-formed as a city. But no, I was unaware of those. In high school, a man named Duke Mitchell, who has come back—homecoming king? Anyway, one of those dances where someone is king and queen and there’s an election, and he was. So in some ways, you could say that this community was not— Franklin: And I’m sorry, who was this? Roseberry: Duke Mitchell. Franklin: Is that CJ’s son? Roseberry: CJ’s oldest, yeah. Franklin: Okay. Roseberry: So he had a very strong position of leadership in the high school. Liked and respected. I couldn’t really answer adequately about how it felt or how it was. I can report that, yeah, he was held in acclaim. He was class president, too. I—once I left, I left. I just remember strongly that he was very well-liked and respected. And certainly one of the first things I did when I came back to Richland to be the library manager here was to look him up and say, I need you on the library board. But he could speak to that better than I can. Franklin: Okay. Did you ever feel—you talked a bit about the duck-and-cover drills that made you kind of feel the fear of being separated. What about later, as you grew up and entered adolescence or early adulthood and knew more about what was being produced at Hanford. Did your feelings toward—what were your feelings toward Hanford? Did they change at all from when you first found out about what was being made there and--? Roseberry: I never went negative. Partly that is because my dad was—even postwar, he felt that the work that was being done there was patriotic. He still felt that it was protecting the United States. A personal characteristic of his was loyalty. So, he would have valued, in a patriotic way, and defended the Project until the day he died. So that did not occur for me. And I was never afraid in a way that you would be about something that you could do something about it. When we were very young, and maybe into pre-adolescence, I remember that he would try to teach us from the ground what planes were overhead so that we could identify them. Because it was, plane: Russia is going to bomb us. That was our default response. I got as far as being able to distinguish between a small plane, like a Piper Cub, or a B-52, or a jet. I never got—but even those distinctions, if you were—I’m the eldest. I was, I mean, day one, take care of your sisters. So I’m out on the street with my sisters, maybe walking over to the school grounds to play, and a plane goes overhead. And first I look up, try to decide if they’re in danger or not, and then look down, okay, there they are; they’re safe. And it’s not something that woke me up in the middle of the night, or I had emotional problems with. It was just part of where we were. And, again, how did we know that that wasn’t everywhere? So, learn to distinguish. But it was actually pre-adolescent. It was third grade, and we were being taught about the half-life of plutonium. I would say that my strengths have always been on the verbal, not the quantitative side. But even in third grade, I could do the numbers on that and realize that no amount of duck-and-cover was going to save any of us if we were—nuclear bomb fell. But that was, for me, a little bit like, huh. Okay, well, maybe we’ll get bombed, and maybe we won’t. So it wasn’t a fear moment; it was like, hmm, do you guys think we can’t do these numbers and figure it out? But it was really more a moment of clarity than fear. And we just never—living in Richland and reading only the local paper—although Mom and Dad always subscribed to the Spokesman Review, so we did have a paper that wasn’t local. Lots of magazines. But having very limited even television access, news like that just didn’t show up here. And it just—if we weren’t hearing it at home, and we weren’t hearing it at school, we just wouldn’t have heard anything anti. Really, the first time I kind of went, oh, people are upset about this was at Cheney, so that’s late ‘60s, early ‘70s. I took a class called environmental geography. Anyway, one of the field trips was here to Hanford; another was to some of the bunker silver mines in north Idaho where there was, in fact, damage from something that was manmade. And so then I started getting it. But not here. Not here. Franklin: Thank you. Did the neighborhood or Richland change perceptibly after it became a First Class City to you? Did you notice any changes? Roseberry: Mm-mm. Not to me. Franklin: Did the fabric of—or I guess, did the fabric of the neighborhood change while you lived there after it incorporated? Roseberry: Very little. I think that from 1951 to 1969, on our side of the street, the house at the corner of whatever that is and the house at the corner of Stanton and Lee, those houses had changed out once in 18 years. I don’t think any of the others had by the time I left to go to Cheney. In the mid- to late-‘70s, there were some deaths on the street and some houses changed out. But I think just those two. And those were precuts, the much smaller house. So the one up by Lee, that changed out pretty quickly. They needed a larger house. And the one on the other end, it was retirement or something. But only those two, yeah. Franklin: When did you come back to Richland? Roseberry: I came back on May 15th of 2006. That was my—I got here on May 14th. I threw stuff in my car, drove to Mom’s, unloaded the car and started that Monday. And May 16th—I remember it very clearly because May 16th was the day of the bond election for the new library building. And it passed. So those dates are just really clear for me. Yeah. Franklin: Right. And since that time you’ve been working at the Richland Public Library. Roseberry: Mm-hm, yeah. Franklin: Tell me about your involvement in promoting Hanford history and that kind of thing. Roseberry: Oh! Okay. Well, I really started with meeting Ron Kathren—Dr. Ron Kathren. He has been, for a long time, a library supporter. And I met him on May 16th—the evening of May 16th. The polls had just closed; it had been declared that the bond had passed, and we were walking out to the parking lot together. And I offered him a carrot, my go-to snack, and he accepted. So pretty much it was friendship at first sight. And he started coming into the library and just chatting with me. He’s an excellent teacher among other things. And there was something about his love of Richland and the value he places on the scientific work that had been done here that just—it created or it caught a spark in me. And then I just started thinking about it more and thinking about my parents’ generation having been pioneers of a sort. And this is no disrespect to the people who were here farming at all. But they left the Midwest, the East Coast, and they came out probably on trains and got off to a desert that had no trees. They moved into tents, or if they were lucky, trailers, and then barracks, essentially—dorms. They did work that they had no idea what they were doing. And in the early days, they couldn’t tell their families where they were, what was going on. They just seem extraordinarily brave to me. So the environmental situation that they had to deal with—against—and the work they were doing created this bonding among them that is really phenomenal. They feel that at some level they all care about each other, still. Because they were on this great adventure and venture. Then the more I learned about the science and technology and creativity and innovation that went into that, I just got fascinated. Just got fascinated. And the people who made that choice and stayed, they have a strength that I think is uncommon. And they were—we now look at that and we talk about the effects of an atomic bomb and nuclear waste, which—I’m not stepping away from that. But for them, to have been doing something that they thought was not only very important but maybe vital to the survival of the country. If you can just understand that mindset. I just admire them very much. And they’re a generation that did not complain. Did not complain. You still—no matter how much you probe with my 92- almost 93-year-old mother, she will not complain. She will not say anything bad or—she just won’t. And that’s very, very common among her friends. So I just—I think the combination of the science, but also the creativity that fueled that science, I think that’s what it was. Just started fascinating me. And I also, as a librarian, I understand that the kind of history we have here is singular. We’ll find similarities with Oak Ridge and Los Alamos, but there are three secret cities in this country. Arguably three secret cities in the world. We’re not regular. And I kind of started embracing being weird and finding the ties that we do have with those other secret cities at every possible level: the level of education, the fact that we still expect our garbage to be picked up in certain ways, that we are used to a very sturdy, robust infrastructure—we just have a lot in common. It seemed to me from a history point of view that there was some pretty important history stuff. As the public librarian part of my job—not just my interest, my job—was to collect the stuff, to protect it, to wait for WSU to be ready to have the Hanford History Project, so we could have a real, live, professional archives. And I don’t know, it just—somehow out of respect and admiration, it started being important to me. Franklin: Great. Roseberry: Yeah. Franklin: What would you like—I think you’ve already covered this somewhat, but I’d like to ask it again. What would you like future generations to know about living in Richland during the Cold War and what was done here during the Cold War? Roseberry: Wow. Respect the science. Respect the creativity. Respect the strength of the people who were here. I might say plan ahead. One of the stories Dad told was—so, context. We were in Portland. My husband and I were living in Portland, and each year in Portland, Nagasaki Day is not celebrated, but noted. Franklin: And why is that? Roseberry: The people draw chalk outlines of bodies on the ground in memory of what was left after that bomb, that there would be sort of a—just a charred outline on the ground, because the body had been so thoroughly incinerated, that’s all that was left. Franklin: Sure, sure. I—sorry, but why Portland? Or why does that happen? Is there a special reason? Is it like a sister city relationship? Roseberry: I don’t know. I just—from having lived in Portland for 30 years, I would say, that’s just Portland. I don’t have a good—I don’t have a good answer for that. Franklin: Sure, sure. I was just wondering if there was a deeper connection. Roseberry: Not that I know of. Franklin: Okay, sorry. Roseberry: But at any rate, Mom and Dad were in town, and we were walking, downtown Portland in the city hall area. Dad asked what they were, and unthinkingly, I told him the truth. Never seen him so angry. Never saw him as angry as that. He was saying, we were saving lives, we were saving American lives. Very, very, very angry. When he calmed down a little, I said, you know, people are concerned about the waste, Dad. This aside, there’s a legitimate concern about the nuclear waste. And the reason I laugh, you’ll understand, is he said, well, for Pete’s sakes. They only built those tanks to last 20 years and look how long they’ve lasted! So for future generations, I would say, maybe a 20-year tank for nuclear waste when we already understood the aforementioned half-life—maybe add that element into your future planning, yeah. So, yeah, I mean, 20 years, the life of radioactive material: not a really good match there. Franklin: Some disconnect, perhaps, between science and then the administrative side of-- Roseberry: Exactly, exactly. Franklin: --of legacy waste commitment. Roseberry: And the difference between getting federal funding to, in their hope, finish a war, end a war, and in their hopes, defend the United States, and—oh, huh, yeah, well, now we want to fund something else. We don’t want to fund this. So it’s pretty big picture, but, yeah. Franklin: Oh, hey, we’re going to need a lot more money for many hundreds of years to come to manage the— Roseberry: Right, yeah. Franklin: Yeah, that’s a tough sell. Roseberry: it’s a tough sell. It’s a tough sell. Garbage cleanup. It’s a tough sell. Franklin: Yeah, it is. Everybody wants it, but nobody wants to do it. Roseberry: But nobody wants to do it. So, yeah, I guess, not a question I’ve thought about, but probably that’s what I’d say. Franklin: Great. Is there anything that we haven’t covered that you wanted to talk about? Roseberry: I don’t know. I have said—maybe a little bit about the hierarchy in Richland, because from a point of view, it has the worst of a military reservation, an academic community, and a company town, where in those environments, at some level hierarchy is all. So even in the later years—I think this is changing—but the division, if you will, between management and crafts or the trades. I think, I hope, that Richland has grown so much, benefitting from people who weren’t born here, that some of that is being mitigated, but—and feel free to eliminate this if it’s in somebody else’s story. But GESA Federal Credit Union was GE Supervisors’ Association. And my dad was one of the founders of that. I have his passbook; it’s number four. But it was only for supervisors, period. Period. So about a year later, I think—I think GESA was founded in 1954, I think. At any rate, approximately a year later, HAPO was founded. So if you were not a GE manager, you could still join a credit union. And now both of them are very, very strong, very community-minded. But lines like that were drawn. And there were some sort of informal, unspoken rules about what kind of car you could drive, according to your status at the Project. And so my dad, not being a scientist or an engineer, was maybe sort of middle. So we had—growing up we had Dodges, kind of a medium. And then, at one point, I was gone, but he got another promotion and he and Mom bought an Oldsmobile, because that was okay. Whereas when I was in grade school and junior high, that—there were people above him in the hierarchy who drove Oldsmobiles. And so that—there’s some big car stuff in this community that sometimes is at the base of—people who weren’t born here or grew up here, they observe things, but they can’t decode them. And there’s no way in the world they would ever be able to decode them. The other thing where there was a hierarchy—and I don’t know that I really have an opinion about it—but certainly, in second grade, I remember actively and clearly, we were given standardized tests. So starting in second grade, we were tracked, according to what they called ability. So in second grade, we took the Stanford-Binet, which was considered a measurement of IQ. And so the result of that, partly, was that even though when I graduated high school—that would be Col High, yeah—I graduated high school, 676 people in the graduating class, but I only really knew a fraction of them. Because even in grade school, we were ability-tracked. That continued through junior high and certainly at high school, there was advanced this and honors this. The focus on academic ability—very, very strong here. So I think for children who were perceived to fall into that, you could not have had better college prep. You could not have. We—my first formal researched-with-citations research project was in fourth grade. We were writing from very early on. We were being taught research skills from very early on. And when I left and went to Cheney, I found that that was not the norm. So the school system here is very, very focused on that. And I benefited from it; my sisters benefited from it. So, I just—I have this niggling sense that that could have been improved or fine-tuned, but because I benefited from it, I wouldn’t be a very credible voice on that. But the whole concept of hierarchy: just so strong here, yeah. Franklin: And you think still to this day? Roseberry: To a certain extent. I think more so in the people who are still here who were here in the very early days. Which now would be the ‘50s, because I think most of the people who would have gotten here early ‘40s to build the Project, they’re gone. And the people who arrived just post-war, like my folks, they’re dwindling, you know. They’re dwindling. But the people who came early-ish, I mean strongly in the Cold War era, like in the ‘50s, a little bit. Because that was the Project environment. Franklin: Right, and there’s a real difference to authority, too, among those. And kind of a—one thing I’ve noticed is a belief in corporate benevolence, and that you’ll be taken care of with—the hard work and things will be rewarded in a corporate environment. That struck me as more present here, I think, due to the nature of the contractor relationship. Roseberry: I think so, I think so. That—so for that generation, they had world-shaking events, okay? My folks lived through the Depression. My folks both were of an age to understand what Pearl Harbor meant. But I might suggest that my generation, the Boomer generation, had the first conviction that there was not only not corporate benevolence, there was not government benevolence. The World War II generation, they were patriotic. They were responding to those calls from President Roosevelt. My generation, particularly here, learned very early that, um, duck-and-cover wasn’t going to work. That there remains a question, many questions, about the assassination of President Kennedy. That the Vietnam War was not exactly about protecting democracy. So I agree. There’s more acceptance, respect for an authority figure, yeah. Franklin: Yeah. Roseberry: Yeah, I think so. Franklin: Even—you mentioned some big events and kind of betraying of trust. I’d like to ask you about how you think maybe people’s reactions to the Green Run fall into that. Because that happened pretty early on in ’49. But a purposeful release of dangerous material that seems to be accepted by the community as something that happened and maybe shouldn’t have, but did nonetheless. But to outsiders is shocking. Roseberry: It’s shocking. Franklin: And a betrayal of trust, because it’s not a corporate—it’s the government. It’s supposed to be— Roseberry: Right, yeah. And I did not know about that until after I came back in 2006. Franklin: Oh, okay. Roseberry: None—information about the Project, any of the science, any of the politics—not in the Richland school system. Not there. And in our family, not discussed. Ever. Ever, ever. So I did not know that. Franklin: Sure. I forgot to ask: did you go to see President Kennedy? Roseberry: Yes. Franklin: Or did your family go to see President Kennedy? What was your—what do you remember about that day? Roseberry: Okay. So, it was very hot and windy and dusty. And we were out in the middle of the desert, okay? However, we were just thrilled beyond any belief. He was—and just my family—but he was a beloved president. People did trust him. They followed him. People—I don’t think during his presidency, you would ever have heard him referred to as Kennedy. It always would have been President Kennedy or the President. Always, always. And partly that was then. But he, as a person and a president, people liked him, they cared about him. Here, we were so—we so completely understood that we were isolated, that that was on purpose, that for someone that important to come here was just—it was amazing. It was just amazing. And we were just thrilled. We all had to submit a security clearance paperwork. Mom just handed to me the papers for my youngest sister who was about seven, yeah. So I remember filling this out—no, she wasn’t even seven. She was more like five, she was more like five. So I filled it out, and there was a space called Membership in Subversive Organizations. And, you know, I thought about—I took this really seriously, and— Franklin: And that was a voluntary thing that you would fill out, or that’s--? Roseberry: No, we would not be allowed onsite. Franklin: No, I mean, that was a form given to someone to fill out, so they would trust that you were being honest about your membership in a subversive organization? Roseberry: Right, right. Franklin: Okay. Roseberry: And I put in that, yes, the only organization she was part of was the CUP Sunday school. But she was a member of that organization. But, I mean, what, to express rye amusement at the vagaries of life, but filling out a security clearance form for a little tiny girl, but we did, and we took it seriously. So we went as a family—I think I got off track, but we went as a family, and it was a big deal. But it was windy, and the wind was blowing up the sand. And it was hot. And the helicopter came in and blew up more sand. But, no, we were just thrilled. Just thrilled. The most important, the most famous person we had ever seen. And, oh, it was big. It was big, yeah. Franklin: Cool. Well, did you have anything else you wanted to add? Roseberry: I can’t think—you know, Robert, I could go on for a long time, but that’s—you’ll talk to other people and they’ll either confirm or deny, and— Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Roseberry: But you know, so much was family-centered. And then your school and then your church. Those were the circles. Oh, I guess just one other note and then you should probably just turn the equipment off, but—I don’t know if you’ve heard this or not, but Richland did not appear on any maps or on any road signs. So that piece of understanding that we were secret and that the government didn’t want people to be able to get here, they didn’t want people to know where we were or what was going on. That was—there was just sort of this combination of you just sort of accepted it, and then you’d say, hmm, I wonder why that isn’t true of Pasco and Kennewick. But even a question like that, the answer would be, well, Richland is different. Franklin: Yeah. Roseberry: Yeah. Franklin: Well, thank you Ann. I really appreciated your talking today. Roseberry: You’re welcome. Oh, I’m really happy to. I’m sorry the Kathy Baker story got me. Franklin: No, it’s okay. I appreciate it. Roseberry: But you know, it’s funny, we were so young, but I just remember I just kept going to the front door, watching, where’s Kathy? Where’s Kathy? Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:09:01 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317 kbps Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1988-2006 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Bobbs-Merrill Dietrich Mrs. Baker Duke Mitchell Ron Kathren Kennedy Kathy Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Ann Roseberry Description An account of the resource An interview with Ann Roseberry conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 01-25-2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2018-31-1: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. 1954 Clinic Cold War General Electric Hanford Houses Kennedy Kennewick Los Alamo Los Alamos Market Organization Organizations River Ron Kathren Savannah River School Sun War https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F0e8ec1acfacc64c93a4185af1960afd1.JPG ba0753bebe4a5e9196d61a13dd7642d3 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F4deb5256e218f3c0425866921dafc55e.mp4 9c9701135b3936f46666e429fb158abd Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Barbara Brown Taylor Location The location of the interview Clark Place in Moscow, Idaho Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Camera man: Whenever you’re- Robert Franklin: Ready? Camera man: We’re ready for you, yeah. Do your thing. Franklin: Okay, let’s, yeah, let’s go. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Barbara Brown Taylor on January 6th, 2017. The interview is being conducted at Clark Place in Moscow, Idaho. I will be talking with Barbara about her experiences growing up at the Hanford Site and her father’s experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Barbara Brown Taylor: Barbara Brown Taylor. B-A-R-B-A-R-A, B-R-O-W-N, T-A-Y-L-O-R, no hyphens. Franklin: Great, thank you. So let’s start from the beginning. How did you come to the Hanford Site? Taylor: In 1943, my father was hired from a company—wait a minute, take that off. In 1943, my father was hired to be the landscape architect in a new city. What an exciting thing for a landscape architect, what kind of an exciting job! We came from Illinois. I don’t know if he was the sole architect, but I do remember some of the things he did. That’s how I came here. Franklin: And how old were you when you came? Taylor: I was eight. Franklin: And so the city that you’re talking about, that would have been Richland? Taylor: Richland. Franklin: Richland, Washington. Taylor: And we didn’t know, of course, what it was. It was just a new city in the desert, had something to do with the war. Franklin: Were the Alphabet Houses being constructed at that point- Taylor: Yes. Franklin: Or did you arrive before—okay. Taylor: Well, he arrived in ’43. Franklin: Right. Taylor: The houses were being built. And my mother and brother and I lived on a farm in Illinois until my father wrote to us and said, the house is ready. So at that time, you signed up for a house, the men did the work there. As soon as it was ready, you could bring your family. It didn’t have any glass in the windows, but it was ready. Franklin: Wow. That seems like a pretty crucial component of— Taylor: My mother thought so. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah, especially with the winds that would blow. Taylor: Absolutely, absolutely. It was covered with dust. Franklin: So your father, then, would have worked with Albin Pherson, the head architect for the— Taylor: I assume so. He didn’t talk about the people he worked with. I never met another landscape architect there. He was very busy all the time, because he had a crew that supplied the grass seed and rented—not rented, lent out the lawn mowers and shovels and all sorts of things. As I remember him saying, there was an instruction sheet, which he put out. Somehow the government decided you couldn’t just have a city built on sand with nothing in the yards. Maybe you couldn’t keep people there. I don’t know the reason. But they hired these crews of men who worked on supplying the needs to do a lawn. And as I remember it, you had to have a lawn. If you couldn’t do it with what the city gave you free, then you had to pay somebody to put your lawn in. Because after a certain amount of time, you had to have a lawn. Franklin: Mm. Taylor: Not necessarily flowers, just you had to have grass. Franklin: You had to have grass. What other kinds of work did your father do besides planning out yards and lawns and things like that? Taylor: Well, he did that for churches and schools. There were only two churches, a Catholic church and a Protestant church. The government built two churches. That was it. And he would landscape those. Any public buildings that needed it—library—there were a few things like that. It was very sketchy and basic at the beginning. Franklin: Mm-hm. Taylor: So I think he landscaped whatever was there. I think that’s why they brought him. Franklin: Tell me about growing up in wartime Richland. Where did you go to school, did you go to church, you know, what was the atmosphere like there? Taylor: Well, I was eight. And we came here in June, and September was the first day of school. And I went to Lewis and Clark Grade School, which was right up the street of Locke. I lived on Casey Street in an A house. I walked up to school. And that first day, the teacher said, I want to know where all of you are from. Give your name and tell us where you came from. So one at a time, we got up, gave our names. I said Illinois. One of my new friends said New Jersey. Somebody else said Texas, somebody else said Colorado. And I thought at the time, I don’t think this has ever happened before. I don’t think the first day of school, people are from somewhere else. And I’ve always remembered that, how interesting that was to see all those new kids make new friends. When you’re a kid, as long as you’re with your parents and you feel love in a family, it’s great to have new adventures. [LAUGHTER] I don’t think my mother liked it at all! But, you know. That’s one thing. The first year, perhaps a little longer, but the first year, there were no telephones in homes. And as I recall, if the wife was going to have a baby, they would issue her a phone for the period just before she had the baby. So she could call the doctor, her husband at work, whatever. But the minute she had the baby, they came and took the phone out. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Wow. [LAUGHTER] Taylor: And there was a phone that first summer on many telephone poles. The kind that just hangs up. You could go there and make a call, free. But you had to find one to do that, because there just wasn’t that accessibility to phones. Franklin: How would you know who to call? Would you get an operator when you— Taylor: You’d get an operator, of course. You always got an operator in those days. Franklin: Sure, and then they would connect you to another telephone on a pole on a different street? Or how would— Taylor: No, no, you probably wouldn’t get a call back. I don’t remember ever walking down the street and hearing a phone ring. [LAUGHTER] It was an out kind of thing. Let’s say you wanted to call your grandmother in Illinois or something. You might get to use it. Franklin: Oh, okay, I see. It wasn’t an in-town— Taylor: No, not really. I don’t think so. Franklin: And what did your mother do? Taylor: My mother was a homemaker, but she had been a registered nurse. And she went back to that when I grew up and was off to college. Franklin: And were your parents still in Richland at the time? Taylor: Mm-hmm. Franklin: Oh, okay. Taylor: Here’s the thing. I don’t think that the government intended to keep the city. As I remember, we were going to live there as long as we needed to. When the war was over, you’d all go back to wherever you came from or somewhere else. But they didn’t build that city to keep. The wood was not the best, the floors were pine and splintered. Those little prefabs—I didn’t live in one, but they were tiny. Franklin: I live in one. Taylor: So you know. Franklin: They’re very tiny. Taylor: You know what I mean. They were built out of cardboard—I mean plywood. Plywood was new in those days. And they built them so fast that I remember going to that school up the street, to Lewis and Clark, that first year. And there’d be one when I’d go to school, and when I came back there’d be three. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Taylor: So during the day I was going to school, the men were slapping those things together. It was interesting [LAUGHTER] seeing, ooh, we have a new house, we have a new house. Franklin: What do you think your mother did not like about living—you mentioned that she wasn’t too happy about moving there? Taylor: Oh, she was from Illinois—they were. And Illinois is a green, beautiful state with woods. And Richland was sand. It was sand. So when we moved in, there was no glass in the windows, which they said they’d put in pretty soon. And the yard was all sand. My mother would look out the window with no glass in it, and almost cry. I was eight, and I looked out the window and saw the little girl next door playing in the sand in front of our house. And I remember yelling out the window to her, stop playing in our yard! Stop digging our yard! She was digging a hole in our yard. And my mother put her head against the wall and said, Barbara, we don’t have a yard! [LAUGHTER] Which was very true; we didn’t. As soon as the work really got going with planting the grass everywhere, I remember my father going out—there were things called tract houses, which had been there before the Hanford place was built. Some of them were abandoned, because the government had bought them. They were abandoned, and here were rose bushes and lilac bushes and things that people had had in their yards. Since it now belonged to the government, my father had permission to go and get them. And he would. He took his trailer and he went out there and dug them up himself and brought them in and put some of them at the libraries, and some of them at the churches, whatever. That was one reason we had nice shrubs. Because he would do that. Franklin: Where was your father stationed during those war years? Taylor: Where did he live? Franklin: Where did he work, where was his office, where did he work out of? Or was he just kind of a roving— Taylor: No, it wasn’t freelance in any way. There were government buildings. There was probably a landscaping building with a parking lot full of lawnmowers. One of his crew was in charge of the lawnmowers. They were probably locked or fenced or something. He had some kind of a building, maybe a hutment—I don’t know what kind it was. I didn’t see him at work. I saw the results of his work. Franklin: Yeah. Taylor: And he also had trucks and drove around in a truck and worked out of his truck, too. The crews, of course, did the work. He was the manager at the time, after he landscaped all the buildings and how they were going to look, ultimately. And he turned the papers over to his supervisors, and they did the work. Franklin: How did your father get started with landscaping architecture? Taylor: Well, at the University of Illinois, just before I was born, he graduated in the architecture department, which at that time had the landscape architecture program in it. So he really was an architect with a specialty in landscape architecture. He was just out of college in 1929 when the Masters Tournament golf course was being built. He was very fortunate to know a man named Bobby Jones who designed the—he was an architect, designed the Masters Tournament—built the course. And he hired a bunch of just-out-of-college men like my father. My father and mother had just gotten married. They went to Augusta, Georgia, and my father worked on that golf course. He did some of the—what’s that white part? Franklin: Sand trap? Taylor: Sand trap. Franklin: I’m not much of a golfer. Taylor: He worked on the sand traps, designing them. And had little models—plaster of Paris models. I wish I had one today, because we always had them around the house. Which my father had gotten when the thing was built. Then they didn’t need those anymore. So he had done that for a few years. By the way, the Masters Tournament golf course was built in 1929. My father told me the money to build it was in escrow. The people who had given the money to build this beautiful golf course had their money tied up in a way that the stock market couldn’t touch it. So that’s why they could build such a beautiful thing in 1929. Franklin: I see. Taylor: And ’30, I think. Anyway, that’s what he did. Then during the war, he had a harder time because who was landscaping anything? Not very many people. And he got a job with the government in the CCC program—he was a supervisor in Illinois in the woods where they had workers that were building roads and bridges and beautiful little stone—what do you call that? Well, stone bridges, I guess. And I remember those days, I was very little, like four or five. But I remember that he would take me to the woods and show me what he was doing. So he had that job, and that was a very steady job, because the CCC supported a lot of people during those days. That would have been the ‘30s. Then when the war came along, there were some military plants. One was at Kankakee, and we were there for a year or two, where my father was in charge of all the grounds for the whole plant. I think it was at that time that he was approached to come to Richland. Because they were building Hanford. And they had to build the city, even if they weren’t going to keep it. They had to build it. And hired him to do it. There weren’t that many landscape architects in those days. Franklin: Sure. Taylor: So I think the word must have gotten out that there was one available. Franklin: And how long—so your father, did he stay working for Hanford, for the government after the war ended? Taylor: Yes. A lot of people stayed. I don’t think that the government people understood the idea of a sense of place, where people make their home somewhere and they’re very reluctant to let go of it, even if it has pine floors and is not very up-to-date with everything. Their kids were now in school. They had a job. And it was far enough from the cities—some people liked that, and wanted to stay. It’s right on the edge of the Columbia River, which is one of the most beautiful places in the world. So, my father joined them and wherever there was a job that he could get—because he also had many drafting skills and things like that. There was also a program called the as-built program. I think that was in the ‘50s. But Hanford had been thrown up so fast that there hadn’t been good blueprints of what they did. They hired my dad to run a little office with lots of blueprint machines. And he and some other people would go out and look at the buildings and draw, you know, make sketches of what was really there. Franklin: Mm-hm. Taylor: The measurements and all that. And then the idea was now the government knows. Now the firetrucks can go to the right place. Because there were places nobody knew what they were, you know? Franklin: Sure. Yeah, no, I’ve heard of that program before. And, like you said, it was very necessary. Taylor: It was very useful, very useful. Then, about that time, 1955, ’56, people were building golf courses again. They hadn’t been all through the war. I don’t think there was one built—but I don’t know that. But they were building them, and Richland wanted to have a golf course and Kennewick wanted to have a golf course—just nine holes. And they hired my dad to design these. Interestingly enough, my father was very generous, and he accepted the jobs even though they weren’t going to pay him. They agreed to give him memberships in the clubs to cover what they should have given him for a salary. [LAUGHTER] Because that’s all they had to offer. And he wanted to see golf courses there. So he built one in Kennewick, and he built one in Richland. He also built Columbia Park, which is all along the river, maybe one of the longest parks in Washington. I don’t know. Franklin: Really? Taylor: But it’s very long, and it’s very narrow—some places only 20 feet. Franklin: Mm-hm. And when you say built it, he— Taylor: Designed it. He had a good arrangement there, because a lot of the woodsy part—he was very fond of Russian olive trees. And a lot of those were already there, all along the river. So all he had to do was built driveways and parking spots, camping spots, and smooth out the rough places. Make a road—because there’s a road the whole length of it. Franklin: Yeah, that’s a very widely used park in town. It’s a great park. Taylor: He loved doing that. I don’t know what they paid him for that. Much later, he built the Memorial Gardens, along the west edge of Richland, which is a cemetery. I have a picture in there of my parents. They gave them a pair of plots instead of paying them. Because they didn’t have the money to pay them. My father wanted a cemetery there. So, I think he was very generous. He was very community-minded. He was on the Benton County Planning Commission for many years. Encouraging parks, encouraging more and more landscaping and making it a more livable town. It needed to be kept up; the work that was done at the beginning needed to be continued, because there were a lot of people who lived there. And he could see the need for that. He told me once, if you live in a desert, you need twice as many trees. And I don’t think everyone agreed with that. Some of the businessmen thought, there’s some land; we’ll build on it. But my father hoped he could get parks in there. And he had to go through the council—Benton County Council—to get those parks approved. Franklin: Sure. How long—did your parents stay in Richland for the rest of their lives? Taylor: They did. Franklin: Okay. Taylor: They did. I wanted to tell you that my father died of liver cancer. And we always thought it was the plant. Because when he was in the as-built program, he had to go and inspect the buildings. And one day, he came home and told my mother that the little badge he had to wear had gone off. Lit up, made a noise, and that meant he had been overexposed to something. They had taken him into a safe room, made him shower, given him different clothes, sent him to the doctor. And within a year, he was dead. He had liver cancer. And he never drank. We knew it was not that kind of thing. Franklin: Sure. Taylor: And a lot of people had that happen. It hasn’t been added up, I don’t think. But there were a lot of people like that. Franklin: Sure. And what year did he pass away? Taylor: 1966. Franklin: 1966. Taylor: He was 64 years old. Franklin: Oh, okay. And you mentioned that you had grown up there and then eventually went to college. What year did you leave Richland to go to— Taylor: 1953. Franklin: Okay. Right. So I’m wondering if you could tell me a little more about growing up in Richland. Did you stay in that same A house for the time that you were there? Taylor: Yes, yes, until I went to college and got married a year or so later. My parents lived in that house. And then it became possible for residents to buy houses. Franklin: Right, in 1958. Taylor: They could buy the ones they were in and they could also buy ones nobody wanted. So they bought theirs. And they bought a little one on the other side of town as an investment, which they rented out. A lot of people did that. Franklin: Right, right. I wonder if you could tell me about what you remember about the coming of the commercial—like the Uptown and kind of how Richland transitioned a little bit after the war. To start to become more of a normal town, but still totally government-owned and controlled. Taylor: Yes, I can tell you that. I thought Uptown was great. There was a theater there! There were stores there, which we hadn’t had much of before. My father was very busy trying to get a park in the spot where that was. And writing things for the Tri-City Herald. And going to the Benton County meetings, trying to encourage a park in that spot. It was quite near a school and the school had a big yard. But there was George Washington Way, was right between where he wanted the park, where Uptown is. And the businessmen just, you know, they had the power and they got it. I always enjoyed it, because I was just a kid. I was in high school at that time. Franklin: Sure. Taylor: Didn’t realize how ahead of his time my father was. Because he loved trees, he loved building a better environment for people. Considered himself a conservationist. Also considered himself an urban planner, because that’s right in that—he didn’t have degrees in that. But I don’t know that there were degrees at that time. He just built on his education as he went along and did a lot in those fields. Franklin: Do you remember the day when people found out about what had been produced at Hanford, or what was being produced at Hanford? Taylor: Well, I was nine. Franklin: Sure. Taylor: What did I know? I was nine. I saw—we took the Walla Walla Union Bulletin paper. I was sitting on the front lawn, and the paper came. And said something like, the war is over. It was our bomb. Something like that. Franklin: Mm-hm. Taylor: And I looked at it. With my nine-year-old understanding, I thought, does this mean we’re leaving? Does this mean the end of Richland? Of course, I didn’t know. I remember that paper, I just don’t remember the exact words of the headline. My parents kept it for a long time, and a lot of people did—kept that newspaper that came out. And of course, I didn’t know what the place was for anyway, except something about the war. And we had lived at Kankakee, and that was something about the war. But my father didn’t seem like the kind of person that would be working in chemistry or in physics or anything like that. By the way, my father grew up in a Quaker family. Franklin: Oh. Taylor: And he was very pacifist. Franklin: Mm-hmm. Taylor: I think he would not have been in any kind of a job that had to do with hurting people. But he didn’t know what it was for. He didn’t know it was a terrible bomb that was being built. And he had a good job. I mean, coming out of the Depression, if you could get a good job, you took it. Franklin: Right, right, yeah. No questions asked. What do you remember about civil defense? Drills and things like that in kind of the early part of the Cold War? Taylor: Well, I remember getting under the desk. I don’t remember much other than that. Franklin: Did you ever feel any fear or anxiety about living so close to Hanford, something that might have been a potential target in the case of aggression? Taylor: No. I think a lot of kids might have. But my parents were not the kind to let us worry. And years later, my mother told me, Barbara, we didn’t know that America was going to win. We had no idea. We had been through the First World War, we had been through the Depression. We knew bad things could happen. And here was the country fighting on two fronts, two parts of the world. We were not having you worry. Because we never knew whether we would win. So we didn’t tell you much. When the newspaper came, we got it, we read it, we read the cartoons to you. You listened to Charlie McCarthy, and the Great Gildersleeve. All those humorous shows, Jack Benny. All those things that never touched on the war. Franklin: What about later, though, during the Cold War? When you would have been in high school or starting to get a little bit older and maybe hearing more about the kind of conflicts that the US was involved in? Taylor: Well, I did have an interesting situation. After I married, my husband joined the Army, because there was a draft. And his grades were not as high as they should have been. He was going to Eastern, to college—Eastern Washington College in Cheney. His grades were not as good as they could have been, so he decided to join. Because they promised him an electronics job. He didn’t have to a frontline military person. Franklin: Mm-hm. Taylor: And he wanted to be in electronics. So he joined in 1957. And our little boy was born in ’59. I went to Germany a few months after that. My father said, don’t take that baby over there. Because he had been through the Second World War and he knew how bad things could be. And there was a wall. Franklin: Right. Taylor: And there were all those things. And we were--I don’t know how many miles from the wall he was. And he didn’t want me to go. That was one of the few times I ever saw him cry. So we went, we stayed there two years, had a wonderful time going to places even though we didn’t have any money. But it was dangerous. The Army told us, you must keep several days’ worth of diapers, food, clothes, all your papers—you must keep them in one place. Because some morning, a truck may pull up in front of your house—an Army truck. And they’ll say, come and bring your things. And we had to get in the truck—they warned us this might happen—and we’ll drive to France. They had places of protection and more food and care for the children and all that. But it’ll be in France. Franklin: Sure. Taylor: If something happens with the wall. Franklin: Do you think your parents might have felt anxiety during the Cold War, living in Hanford in kind of a—I mean, now knowing what was being produced there and that it might have been a target for retaliation? Taylor: Well, they never said so. They never said so; they didn’t want to worry us. That’s the kind of parents they were. They protected their children. I think there were a lot of young people who had parents like that. I don’t remember anybody saying they were scared. Franklin: Sure. Taylor: They were busy going to school. We never felt like we didn’t have a future. Franklin: Did you ever come back to Richland? I’m assuming you probably would’ve come back to visit your family, but did you ever come back to live there again? Taylor: Yes, my husband and our children came back to live there for a short time when he got out of the Army, he happened to be—it was 19-early-60s and it was hard to get jobs. He got a job there inspecting pipes. The kind of pipes that had nuclear things going through them. And they were welded. He got jobs inspecting the welding. He didn’t like that kind of thing, and so he went on and did other things. He had a degree in industrial arts. He did some drafting for a while. And then he became a police officer in Pullman. Franklin: Okay. Taylor: So that’s how we ended up back in Pullman and raised our kids there. So I only went back to Richland a few years. Wanted to go back to Pullman. I really had a good time in college there, and I liked having a university. There wasn’t any Tri-Cities center at that time—Tri-Cities branch. Franklin: Sure. And then you mentioned that you worked at WSU as well. Taylor: 27 years, yeah. From 1967 to 1995. From 1967 to 1995, I was a full-time secretary at WSU. And felt very good about it. I loved working at a university. I went to school along with it, which was great because I had not quite finished college. And so I took a lot of classes. Franklin: Is there anything else that you’d like to—that we haven’t touched on, that you’d like to talk about? About your father or Hanford or Richland or your own life? Taylor: Well, Richland was a very safe place for children at that time. As I look back, I didn’t appreciate that. We could get on our bicycles and ride anywhere in town as long as we were home for dinner. We could go to friends’, we could go to school, we could be in summer programs. They always had summer activities for the kids. And I think a lot of the amenities that a city has, even though it was a small town—actually we called it a village. It was known as a village. But I loved that. The freedom. And now, of course, you can’t just tell a kid, just be home for dinner. But they did. I could go to the movies on Saturday. There were two theaters and they had double features all the time. I always felt free to do whatever. I think it felt safe to do that. Another reason might have been we were very middle class. I never saw a black child when I was in school. Franklin: Sure, because African Americans weren’t allowed to live in Richland. Taylor: They were not allowed to work there. I don’t think that was an open policy, but they didn’t. They lived in Pasco. Franklin: Mm-hmm. Taylor: And they were not really given jobs at Hanford. I didn’t know about different races. I was a child. It was a middle class town, and you had to have a job to have a house. Franklin: Sure. And everybody worked for the same employer. Taylor: Absolutely, at the beginning, they did. Everybody did. I remember my mother saying when they first moved there, rent was $27 a month. And it was an A house. $27 a month. Which was very reasonable for the time. Franklin: Well, that included pretty much full service, too, right? Taylor: I think so. Franklin: The government delivered coal and-- Taylor: Water. Franklin: Changed the light bulbs, and— Taylor: I don’t remember that part. I think my father probably would have done a lot of those little things, but— Franklin: Okay. Taylor: I think they probably would. But I remember the electricity and the water were included. Franklin: Richland has such a unique history of being this government constructed and owned town for 15 years. And I’ve always found it interesting to hear people’s experiences, like yours, about how safe and free they felt in a town that was so entirely unique in terms of its—like you said, it was middle class. Everyone who was there had a certain income— Taylor: Had a job! Franklin: They had a job. But the government also owned and controlled who could live in that community. So it’s a community of safety, but it seems to be of not the traditional freedoms that we associate with any other kind of community or anything like that. It’s always stuck out to me, in looking at Richland. Taylor: Well, perhaps an adult would see that. To me it was just feeling safe. Franklin: Sure. Taylor: I don’t know that I felt unsafe in Illinois. I was in the kind of family that were very caring, that always put our care first. I had very good parents. Franklin: I’ve had—a couple other times when I’ve interviewed people that have grown up in Richland, one thing that they’ve mentioned is that at some point they were struck how there were no old people, really. Taylor: Yes, yes. Franklin: And I wonder if you could talk—was there a moment when you realized that everybody was either children or young adults for the most part? Taylor: The only people who were there who were old were grandmothers and grandfathers who came to visit or lived with them. I mean, really. I was aware of that. Very much so. Franklin: And so did anyone in your extended family ever come to Richland to visit? Or how did you keep in touch with them, with that barrier there? Taylor: Well, in those days you only talked on the phone if somebody died. You didn’t call the family back east, wherever it was. Because it cost money. And you just didn’t do it. There were letters that you would write and then send one to one member of the family, and they would send it to another, and they would send it to another. In that sort of round robin thing. I knew other families that did that. But my grandmother—my grandfather had died young. My grandmother had no money. In those days, a woman might be a housewife, a homemaker, a farmer’s wife, and end up with nothing. Franklin: Sure. Taylor: No income, no savings. She had two daughters. So she would travel by train from Illinois to stay with my aunt for a while. And then to Washington to stay with my parents for a while. Franklin: Okay. Taylor: That was common in those days, that an older person would live with you. I had lots of people I knew whose grandmother lived with them, or grandfather lived with them. Or Uncle Joe who was just not quite right. Families took in family. That was not unusual. Franklin: Right, to have a multigenerational household. Taylor: Right. Franklin: Like that. Taylor: So I thought it was perfectly natural. And it was natural. I got to know my grandmother very well and learn things from her that I wouldn’t have if she hadn’t lived with us. Franklin: Sure, sure. Well, and a lot of families, psychologists and a lot of research points to that being very beneficial, too. Taylor: Right. Franklin: And it’s how most of the world lives. Taylor: She had no money, absolutely none. Franklin: Sure, sure. Taylor: My parents paid everything. Franklin: Because she wouldn’t have had a job. Taylor: I don’t think she ever had a job except butter and eggs. Franklin: Well, she worked, certainly, right, and probably worked very hard. Taylor: Oh, she worked on the farm, I’m sure. But it’s not the kind of work that was paid. And that would have been before social security. Because that started just about the time I was born. Franklin: Right. And even then, women got much less than men did. Taylor: And still do. Franklin: Yes. [LAUGHTER] What would you like future generations to know about growing up in Richland during World War II and the Cold War? And about the work that your father did? Taylor: Well, I think the jobs our parents had—especially fathers, because most women were homemakers. I think that meant a lot to kids. I wouldn’t say that it was a caste system, but I was very aware that a girl named Betsey had a father who was a doctor, and they had a nicer house. I don’t know how the housing worked, but all those number houses, they had one of the better houses that was a single-family house, and on a hill, and just nicer. And I was a little jealous that my family wasn’t that wealthy that they could have a better house. So that’s very normal for kids, I think, to be aware of where their family is in the scheme of things. Franklin: Mm-hm. Taylor: I came from the Midwest. I thought my parents were middle class, middle-educated. They both had degrees, but not graduate degrees. We lived in an average house. I was very middle. [LAUGHTER] I don’t know what else to say. But there were people who had a little more money. They were managers, they were doctors, they were professionals. And I think we were aware of that. And I think they were aware of that, the kind of cliques. High schools have those. Franklin: Oh, yeah. Taylor: You know, that’s all there is to it. There’s always going to be the athletes and the wealthier kids and the smarter kids and whatever. But I graduated from Columbia High School in 1953 as Barbara Brown. I loved high school. We had choruses, we had bands; we had various kinds of activities like that. And I was in the choir for four years and loved it. Just loved it. There was a teacher named Harley Stell, S-T-E-L-L. And it’s Harley. He was hired right out of college, about 1950, to start a music program, a vocal music program, and he did. Trios, chorus—I think it was called a chorus. And I sang with them and made some really good friends with them for four years. We sang at graduation. I’ll never forget that. Which was a wonderful experience. He added a lot to the school. Because music is an enrichment that students need. Franklin: Yes. Taylor: So they started with very basic classes. Just first to eighth grade, and then they kept adding these things. Which is what all towns do, but it was starting, as I was in high school, starting to be a normal town. And people stayed because this is where their roots were now. I think that was quite a shock to the government, that we wanted to buy our houses. We wanted to stay there. Franklin: Right, because like you’d mentioned earlier, the community was from all over the country. Taylor: That’s right. Franklin: And no one knew anyone else when they came. Taylor: But that’s a sociological fact. Franklin: Sure. Taylor: I think, as I said, a sense of place. A sense that this is where we are, let’s stay here and do the best we can with what we’ve got. Franklin: Right, right. Yeah, that’s really fascinating. Thank you. Well, I just want to thank you for interviewing with us. As someone who lives in Richland, I’d like to thank you for your father’s work— Taylor: Thank you. Franklin: For bringing green and trees and things to Richland. Because it helps break up the heat and the sage brush. Taylor: Well, it’s a pile of sand. That’s what it was to begin with. Franklin: Yeah. Taylor: We had terrible windstorms. We had a fire one year way out in the desert. And I remember that everybody—cars came through the streets and said everybody move to the east side of town, down by the river. Franklin: Wow. Taylor: That was frightening. Franklin: Yeah, I bet. Taylor: But this fire was going faster than a man could run. Franklin: Wow. Taylor: It was coming from the big hills over there, the Rattlesnake hills. It came pretty close. I remember that very well; I must have been ten, something like that. I remember that the wind used to cut your legs. Girls wore dresses then; they didn’t wear pants like they do now. Walking home from school, the wind and the sand would cut your legs. Little tiny cuts. And you’d feel like to go hide behind a tree, but you’ve got to go home. Franklin: Right. Wow. Taylor: And that was really painful. Franklin: I bet. Taylor: They said there was something called a jackalope out in the desert. Nobody ever saw one. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Usually just taxidermists make those. Taylor: With big ears. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Well, Barbara, thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure talking to you. Taylor: I want this to be about my dad. So please emphasize that. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:46:41 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317 kbps Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Albin Pherson Bobby Jones Harley Stell Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1943-1953 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Barbara Brown Taylor Description An account of the resource An interview with Barbara Brown Taylor conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 01-06-2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2018-31-1: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. Relation A related resource <a href="http://hanfordhistory.com/collections/show/27">Barbara Brown Taylor, Oral History Metadata</a> 1955 Bull Cat Cold War Hanford Houses Kennewick Park River School Street War https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F73092d11e38acf02e3f9139b59ff29ad.JPG 855dc47ad850f54f3f4a02b434262fd0 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F433d0cbcf01c6525d92c4404f0e21d8e.mp4 b708f88df97c4cbe45941c20fca189c6 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Bernal Femreite Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Bernal Femreite on June 12, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Bernal about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Bernal Femreite: Bernal Femreite, known as Bernie Femreite. The spelling is B-E-R-N-A-L. Last name is F-E-M-R-E-I-T-E. Franklin: Great, thanks a lot Bernie. So, tell me how and why you came to the area to work for the Hanford Site. Femreite: Well, during university, I was determining where to go to work and what kind of work I wanted to do. And the last—about in graduate school, I became very interested in nuclear energy. At that time, Hanford was still a very viable part of the weapons program. Most of the reactors were still running in the late ‘60s. They had a big program here and a lot of very interesting work for engineers. I was a metallurgical engineer, so everything about the Hanford fuel production was intriguing. And beyond that, I had read about everything I could about the Manhattan Project. The whole thing was fascinating to me. The fact that they went from a theory and some practical experiments to full-scale production in such a short time, under wartime conditions, obviously, that whole thing was very intriguing to me. So, long story short, I had—at that time, engineers coming out of university had a lot of opportunities. So I had a lot of choices. But I was particularly taken with the choice to come here with Douglas United Nuclear at the time. So I took that position and began as what they called process engineer in the 300 Area, where we were producing fuel for the K Reactors, C Reactor, D, and N, N Reactor. We were using the standard process at the time, which was encapsulating the uranium for exposure in the reactors. And we were—my job was, I was charged with developing a new, better and faster process for doing that. So I spent most of my time in what became known as the Small Pilot Plant in 300 Area. And we were producing a new method of encapsulating the uranium slugs that was faster and more reliable. Franklin: How was the old—I wonder if you could walk me through the steps of the old process and how your new process was different. Femreite: Well, the old process was what you might call a canning process. We had pre-formed aluminum jackets that came in, basically, the shape of a cylinder with a cap on one end. The uranium slugs came in milled to a certain diameter. They had a whole through the center for cooling, additional cooling. And then that was inserted inside this aluminum can, which we call cladding. And the whole thing was dunked under what we call a eutectic alloy of aluminum and silicon. That has a relatively low melting point. That would just flow in and form a bond between the uranium and aluminum. And they put a cap on the upper end, and then machine off the excess material. Then they would put on, ultrasonically, they’d weld on a small aluminum fin, which we called a leg, which gave the fuel slug some clearance between the tube that it would go into and the reactor, would allow the water to run past it. Franklin: Right, so that water could go around the entire— Femreite: Yeah. Franklin: Yeah, I’ve seen those. Femreite: And through the center. Franklin: Yeah, there are kind of fins on all sides. Femreite: Yeah, you’ve seen them, probably at the N Reactor—or the B Reactor Museum, if you’ve been out there. Franklin: Yes. Femreite: There are some examples of those. That was called the AlSi process, and it referred to the aluminum-silicon alloy that was used to bond— Franklin: Is that spelled how it sounds, A-L, S-I? Femreite: Yup, mm-hmm. It’s capital-A, L and then capital-S, I. So it stands for—it’s aluminum-silicon. It’s the scientific nomenclature for aluminum and silicon. And that process was developed and used for a long time. It had some disadvantages in that it had some byproduct, or leftover product waste that had to be disposed of. So there was the—AlSi would become—well, it would become fairly radioactive from being exposed to the uranium in—small amounts of uranium would be dissolved in it. So that was kind of a hard thing to deal with. Franklin: Can I ask how—what was the process for disposal of that spent product? Femreite: Well, I don’t know that part. Our job was to get the job done, and other people dealt with the disposing of waste. We can tell from what we’re finding in the papers today about the disposal of waste here, was there was a variety of methods, including just plain old burial someplace. Franklin: Yeah, the 300 Area, if I remember correctly, had some interesting waste footprints in the ground. Femreite: It does. And the area surrounding it as well. North of there they had burial pits. They had a waste pit over to the, it’d be the west side, towards what now is the Areva plant. And there were different places. Franklin: So this AlSi process, was this the original process used? Femreite: As near as I can tell, that was the original process. Now, they, in the early years, I read a lot of the classified documents as a young engineer when I first got here to understand some of the history. And they had experimented with different alloys and different heat treatments and things like that over the years, and finally settled on what I was familiar with, as the new engineer on the block, so to speak. I was chartered with developing what was called the hot die sizing process, which was to take the uranium slugs and basically extrude a coating of aluminum onto the slug. Franklin: Like using— Femreite: We used—we put them through what was called an extrusion die. And we’d start off with a small can shape of aluminum. That would sit in the die, and then the uranium slug would come down on it, and we’d basically squeeze the slug through the die, almost like toothpaste—although it was solid. And that would bond the aluminum to the uranium slug. Once it was bonded that way, all we had left to do then was to put a cap on the end. And then that the cap had to be bonded as well, so in order to do that, we used specialized heating coil. And we put the end of that fuel into that heating coil under pressure. It was called induction heating. That would bond that cap to the slug and to the other aluminum. So it was a much simpler process; it basically had no waste, except maybe some aluminum that would be machined, just to dress it up. And of course that aluminum was recycled, so. It was faster than the AlSi process. So my job, for most of the time I worked there, was to develop that, and also to solve any technical problems that came up in the existing AlSi process. So the AlSi process was still big, because that’s how the factory was set up. And we developed our hot die sizing process on a pilot scale. Then we moved the pilot line into big production facility and ran it in parallel with the big production facility and kept track of cycle times and quality. We were trying to prove that on an industrial scale, this was going to be an improvement to the AlSi process. I should mention that that whole thing sounds quite simple. But in the end, it was complicated. Each one of these fuel elements went through a very tight quality control process, where every single one went through an ultrasonic defect device—detector for defects in the fuel. That was all done with ultrasonic sound. Franklin: Huh. How did that work, exactly? Femreite: Well, the sound was transmitted through the cladding onto the uranium, and you get a certain pattern if there’s a good bond there. If there’s a bad bond, you get a completely different pattern from the ultrasonic sound. And so you could detect any, what we call, unbonded areas. You had to have a good bond on every part of the surface, because if you didn’t, you’d get a hot spot in the reactor. And that would, basically, cause the fuel to melt at that point—the cladding to melt at that point, and it would leak. We didn’t want leakers in the reactors because then that led to contamination in the water that flowed through those. Franklin: And you might have to shut the reactor down, too. Femreite: Yeah, if you got enough—if there were enough leakers in there to where you were getting high radiation readings on the discharge side of the reactor, they would have to shut it down, discharge that fuel, put new fuel in. That was not very efficient, and it was time consuming and fairly expensive. Franklin: Yeah. Femreite: So the quality control part of the process was very stringent. Franklin: So where was the uranium machined? Where was it formed into the— Femreite: That came out of a plant in Ohio. Franklin: Okay. Femreite: I think—I forgot the exact name of the plant, but I think it was Fernald. They came in by train in big wooden, pretty strong wooden crates. And then the aluminum was purchased on the market from various suppliers. We had a tight specification on which alloy and dimensions and quality and all that. So the aluminum was pretty generic, but it had to meet all of our specifications. Then the uranium, of course, came from Fernald and that was a single source. Because that was all government-run. Franklin: So was the hot die sizing process a success? Femreite: It was, yeah. We produced, on that parallel line, we produced most of a reload for one of the K Reactors. At that time, K West and K East were twins. So you didn’t know which reactor your load was going to go into. They determined that out there. So that fuel did go into the K, one or both of the K Plants. Franklin: Right. Femreite: So yeah, it was an improvement. And they would have—I believe they would have continued on that path and retired the AlSi process, but about that time, they determined that they weren’t going to run the K Reactors anymore. C had already shut down, or was preparing to shut down. So there wasn’t going to be demand in the business reason to change their method. And if they had—at that time, I think they had just put the Ks on standby, in the event that they might need to get back into producing plutonium. But they were already getting plutonium out of N Reactor and it was still running. So the demand for plutonium dropped, and so they began to phase things out. If they had needed to ramp production back up, it would’ve been fairly simple to start everything back up, because it sat there, basically, on reserve for quite a little while. Franklin: So, and what timeframe was that, when— Femreite: Well, it was late in the history of Hanford. I began work here in 1967 after graduating university. And so that was basically about a three-year deal, before things started to ramp down. So about 1970, they were threatening layoffs and reduction of staff and that kind of thing, simply because they just weren’t going to produce that much fuel. Franklin: Right. Where did you go to university; where did you get your bachelor’s? Femreite: University of Idaho. Franklin: Okay. Femreite: Mm-hm. Franklin: So are you from the area? Femreite: I’m from north Idaho. Franklin: Oh, okay. Femreite: Yeah, mm-hm. Franklin: So then in 1970, you transferred to Exxon, right? And went into commercial fuel production. Femreite: Yes. Franklin: And how—I wonder if you could talk about that transition and how that industry was different or similar, you know, how the work was related. Femreite: Yeah. The work there was—first of all, it was all what you would call private enterprise. So Exxon was in business to produce fuel for big commercial power plants. At that time, there were—I don’t know the exact number, but some 20 to 30 nuclear power plants operating in the United States producing electrical power. Those were built mainly by General Electric and Westinghouse. And in Europe, craftwork union was doing the same thing, and there were a lot of power plants in Europe. So Exxon decided they were going to get into this in a big way, even though they were an oil company, they knew that they were really an energy company. So they decided that they could build fuel and supply it to these power plants in the US and in Europe. So they began the business here, largely on the basis that there was a lot of technical know-how here. They knew that they could recruit from Hanford, which was basically winding down, and they had the access to Battelle. And Battelle had a huge amount of knowledge, collectively, about all things nuclear. So Exxon came in and bought land inside the City of Richland city limits and got all the permits and built the plant. So when I started work, it was a piece of sand out here on Horn Rapids Road. And we had offices downtown, rented offices downtown. There were only just a handful of us. So I had the good fortune of coming in on what they call the ground floor. Exxon—by the way, Exxon was called the Standard Oil of New Jersey. It’s only in later years that they rebranded themselves. And so the plant—the business out here began as Jersey Nuclear, just an offtake of Standard Oil of New Jersey, and that’s how they began. I have a picture of their business sign here if you want to keep that. So that was, for us that had worked there for a long time, the sign was pretty significant, because it was the very beginning of a long-standing business. At any rate, they were a taxpaying business in the City of Richland, and everything was commercial and they had to meet all of the standard safety regulations and all that that any industry does. So they began from, like I said, a flat piece of sand to building a plant out here that could produce this fuel for these power plants. That fuel, as a process engineer and as a metallurgist, that fuel was far more complicated in its design. Franklin: And why was that? Femreite: Well, the fuel for Hanford was, as I explained earlier, just a slug that was a uranium slug, we called them, that was encapsulated in a cladding and then tested and put in the power plant. But the fuel for commercial plants—and you’ve probably seen displays around the Tri-Cities and different places—are individual pellets about the size of a pencil eraser, more highly enriched than the fuel for the plutonium reactors. And it’s encapsulated in a pretty exotic alloy, zirconium alloy. So each tube, then, produces heat and a lot of it. So they have to be made to extreme precision and very high quality. You have to build them with a very robust process, and then you have to test them under very robust conditions to make sure that they’re going to produce and perform the way they’re supposed to. So the whole thing was quite interesting. And over the years, what we called the nukes, the nuclear engineers, who were experts on how to load these power plants with different kinds of fuel, they came up with a lot of different designs. Basically all the same design in terms of outward appearance. They were tubes with uranium pellets in them. But they varied the sizes and the enrichments and all that kind of things to get better performance in the power plant. So that whole thing was pretty challenging for all of us. Franklin: You had mentioned that Exxon, Jersey Nuclear, Standard Oil, New Jersey Nuclear, Exxon, had drawn—or one of the decisions to put it here was the availability of knowledge of the nuclear industry. Did a lot of former Hanford workers go to work for New Jersey Nuclear? Femreite: They did. Franklin: Okay. Femreite: Yeah, there were quite a few. And there were a lot of—well, not a lot, but quite a few scientists from Battelle that were retained, you know, under contract. They helped us build the first reload, as an example. Our first reload went into a power plant by the name of Big Rock Point and Oyster Creek. So they kind of held our hands to get that first delivery made. To start from zero requires a whole lot of stuff, because you have to come up with all your procedures and all of your quality documents and methods and processes and you have to train your staff. So it’s really quite a complicated enterprise to bring something from zero to fully functional business. Franklin: And how long did you stay with that company? Femreite: Well, I retired there 30 years later. Franklin: Oh, so in 2000? Femreite: Yes. Mm-hmm. Franklin: And did your job change at all during those 30 years? Femreite: Yes, mm-hmm. Yeah, I started out as a process engineer, individual contributor. And the last five years I was the vice president of manufacturing and the Richland plant manager. So I managed to work my way through the organization. Franklin: Yeah. Femreite: But it was all very challenging and all very gratifying work. In that 30 years, we replicated the Richland plant in Germany. Mainly because—well, I should back up. We delivered a lot of fuel in the United States and quite a bit of fuel overseas. Overseas, there was a huge tariff on the fuel because it was imported. Germany kept saying, well, you know, if you guys want to beat this import deal, you should just build a plant over here. And we can facilitate that, and suggest a place that’s suitable for that kind of business. And they did. They struck a deal with what, by then, was called Exxon. We duplicated—replicated this plant in a small village in northwest Germany, and began supplying Europe from that plant. We took all the best technology from the Richland plant that we had developed up to that point, and we had developed a lot of it, and then transferred it to Europe in that little—what I call a little—Lingen plant. It was actually a sizeable plant in what was a very friendly village there. So that was quite remarkable, too, because we had to recruit people that didn’t know what nuclear even meant to come to work there. But they were all crafts of different kinds: welders, machinists, and other crafts that’d come through the trade schools or industry in Germany. So we put together a very successful operation over there. And so that, then, basically, put an end-run on the tariffs. And it was good for their economy and good for our business. So it turned out quite well. Franklin: How did the fortunes of what is now Areva respond to kind of the ups and downs of the nuclear power industry, at least domestically? I know that—I feel like there’s been some downturn in that industry or has come under a lot of criticism in the past few decades. Femreite: Yeah, well, yeah, there is a lot of bad publicity, which is unfortunate because it’s a clean—it’s basically a clean energy. It doesn’t produce any greenhouse gases and all that kind of thing. But the bad publicity with Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and all that puts it at a real disadvantage, and there’s a lot of public opinion against it. But as a business, we just carried on. Despite the publicity, there was still demand for electricity. And that didn’t go away. [LAUGHTER] So the utilities that ran the power plant just said, well, we’ll do everything we need to do to keep our plants safe. But we have to carry on, because people want their light to turn on when they go home. So it wasn’t quite as remarkable a result as some people might think, from a business standpoint. But there are becoming fewer and fewer power plants because the ones that were built a long time ago are getting old or are so old they had to be closed down. So there are fewer. Although the Nuclear Regulatory Commission keeps saying that they’re prepared to license some new plants, improved plants—what they would call improved plants. But basically just from a business standpoint, it was fairly stable. The hardest part of meeting the market was to meet the power plants’ schedules, because they have, as you might know, just like the plant up north here, Energy Northwest, they closed down about every two or three years to refuel. When they do that, they want their fuel then and then only. So you have to run your business to kind of match up with the refueling schedules of these various plants. Franklin: Right. That makes sense. And so you went back to Hanford in 2001, right? Femreite: Yes, after I retired, I was asked to participate in a, oh, I don’t know what the—you might call it a short study, about a month’s study, of industry experts that they assembled to figure out why they were having so much trouble in the K Plants, getting the fuel out of the basins and dried and stored. They developed a process to do that, and basically it took the old residual fuel in the basins out there, put them through a drying process and encapsulated them in a very strong container. And that’s stored out there in the 200 Areas. Franklin: What is the drying process? What is that doing? Femreite: It’s basically a vacuum. They put it in a big chamber and run a vacuum on it for a long time—a relatively long time. Franklin: And why is that done? Femreite: Well, they want the fuel to not corrode any further. Franklin: So how is the fuel being stored? Femreite: It was being stored in the water pools at K East and K West. So they were stored underwater in 30 feet of water, as a shield. It was spent fuel, so it was hot, radioactively hot. Well, thermally hot, too. And that was stored in those pools and had been for years by 2001. I was familiar with those plants because I worked out there when I began in 1967. Because I’d go out there a lot to consult with the engineers that were running my pilot—my new fuel through their plant. Franklin: Right, well, you might’ve even have helped to make some of that fuel that was in the basin. Femreite: Oh, absolutely, yeah, sure. I should digress a little bit. When I first came here in ’67, I was out at those plants and for my own pleasure I interviewed a lot of the old-timers that had worked there through the war. And I was always fascinated by the fact that they didn’t know what they were actually doing there, because it was secret. It was all compartmentalized. So you could talk to a person who worked on, like the front face of K Reactor, and he’d tell you that that’s all he knew at that time; he didn’t know what went on anywhere else. [LAUGHTER] And furthermore, they couldn’t talk about it. So that whole thing was very intriguing to me. But, anyway, back to our topic, I was one of, I think, about 12 people, so-called industry experts, that were called in to understand why things weren’t going well out there, and they weren’t meeting anything close to their schedules that they were supposed to dry this fuel and store it. So they brought in experts in almost every field. A lot of them were safety experts, regulation experts, and things like that. I went there as a manufacturing expert. So we spent, I think, two weeks there. I determined very quickly that they were not running that as a what I call a manufacturing process, which it really was. They were running more as an engineering process. So I wrote a report about that at the end of my little short tour of duty there and left it with the management. Then I went on a trip, a vacation with the family after that. Well, I got back and my phone was ringing of the wall. They said, Bernie, you need to come out here and help us figure this out, because we think that we have all this advice from all these people, but this seems to be the real key to getting this straightened out. So I then went to work under a contract, and basically taught them what’s called a constraint management manufacturing. Which we used in our own plant. And what that means is that any process—you can name almost any process: human process or manufacturing process, or almost any process—and you can find what’s called a bottleneck. You can put together any scheme of sequential operations. One point in there will be what’s called a bottleneck, or what I call a constraint. The real secret to making that all work is to zero in on the constraint and figure out if it can be made better or not. If not, manage the constraint and everything else pretty much takes care of itself. And so I called it constraint management. It’s called different things. In order to—so you’d identify the constraint, and then you put in modifiers that support the constraint. You put in what’s called queues, upstream and downstream, which a queue is just simply a place to store things that you either going to process or that you have processed. And then everything else pretty much runs itself. And they had a serious constraint out there, but they weren’t managing it; they were trying to—a group of engineers that were making charts everyday, trying to schedule everybody for every hour of the next day, to get them to do what they were supposed to do. [LAUGHTER] And it wasn’t working out. So I taught them how to do constraint management and what we call process control. Just in a short time, it just started working great. And in fact, the constraint turned out it wasn’t the constraint that they thought it was, because once we focused in on it, they got smart about how to run it, and it moved the constraint further downstream. So that became the new constraint down there, and then we started managing that as the constraint. So anyway, long story short, it put everything put together very well. Their production levels went, like, improved by three or four times. And I think they ended up actually beating their endpoint schedule before by implementing that method. Franklin: Oh, wow. Femreite: So it was pretty gratifying. And I got a lot of calls about how well that worked, and they were quite happy with it. So that was very successful for them and very gratifying for me. Franklin: How long were you on that project? Femreite: I was there for—that only took us about three months. Franklin: Oh, okay. Femreite: Yeah. They wanted me to stay on and work as a consultant there, but I told them, look, I’m retired. My job now is to stay retired. So I declined to do that. Franklin: Was that the last time you worked out at Hanford? Femreite: That was the last time I worked there, yeah, mm-hmm. Franklin: Great. Well, we’ve got to most of my questions. I do have a couple more just quick ones. I’m wondering, was Richland—I know you came to Richland after the town had been turned into private ownership. But I’m wondering if Richland was still, at that point when you arrived, if there was anything remarkable or unique about it, or what your impressions were compared to where you had grown up? Femreite: Oh, definitely. You could tell that it was still very much a government town. There wasn’t a lot of infrastructure here, compared to what we’re used to now. Columbia Center was just desert, for instance. There wasn’t anything out there. The government housing had just, as you said, turned back to civilian ownership, just a few years prior. The housing around town was still largely what had been built for the war effort or after the war. Franklin: Did you live in an Alphabet House when you arrived here? Femreite: I lived in what was called a Richland Village house, which was government construction. Richland Village was just north of Safeway, that whole area in there. Those were all mass-produced government houses. They weren’t really called an Alphabet House. I could’ve been in an Alphabet House very easily, but it just turned out that the Richland Village was a good choice for renting. I wanted to buy a home, but I didn’t want to do that immediately upon arrival here. I kind of wanted to get the lay of the land. So we rented what’s called a Richland Village home at the time. At that time, that whole place was run by one business. One business owned all those houses and rented them out, and were wanting to sell them to individual owners. So a lot of them are rented, and I’d say maybe half of them had maybe been sold to individuals at that time. But as you drove around town, it was largely still the government-built houses that you saw. Very few new construction. And the furthest, the northern extent of Richland at that time was where the 7-Eleven is on G-W Way down here, on Saint. In fact, that area where the 7-Eleven is and Washington Square Apartments was a drive-in theater. [LAUGHTER] It was still operating. [LAUGHTER] And the houses on Harris—there were no houses between G-W Way and Harris Street. But at the time we came here, Harris was being developed as a new upscale development. So all those homes along Harris there that are along the river were upscale houses. To get there, there was one street over to Harris, I think it was the street that goes past the 7-Eleven now, and you went across the desert to this strip of land along the river where these homes were being built. I was explaining to your colleague a while ago, this campus was one building, and it was called the Graduate Center. Franklin: Yes. Yeah, it’s what’s now the East Building of our campus. Femreite: Yeah. So, yeah, it was still kind of a frontier town in my opinion at the time. It was quickly changing. We saw a whole lot of changes in the time we’ve lived here, that’s for sure. Franklin: And where did you end up—I’m assuming you ended up buying a house. Did you end up living in Richland? Femreite: I did. Our first home was what I’d call a starter home, just off of the boundary of the Richland Village. There was a string of little, three-bedroom two-bath places that had been built and we bought one of those. Later on, there was a new development further north. I don’t recall if it even had a name, it just—a lot of nicer homes, bigger homes. Split-level and that kind of thing. So we ended up going there, moving there later on. And then I was asked to go to Germany, so we sold that and went to Germany. And came back and lived in a similar house in that area. Then Exxon asked me to go to Idaho Falls. We went down there and ran a secret weapons project that I never talked to you about earlier. But Exxon was asked to go down there and run what was then a secret project, military project. Then when we came back, we moved to a home on Harris Avenue and lived there until I retired. Franklin: Oh, okay. I’m wondering if you could describe the ways in which security of secrecy at Hanford impacted your work while you were there? Femreite: Well it made—you had to be very, very conscious of it. I had proper clearance to where I could get almost any kind of classified document that I wanted, and I needed to, because there was a lot of science developed there that was Top Secret. So as a practical matter, every engineer there had a fairly sizeable safe. And we kept all of our documents in that safe. Including documents that we had checked out to use or to read or whatever. And then our own writings, our own documents, were sent to a classification officer before they were published and he gave them their appropriate classification level. So at the end of the day, you made sure that everything that was classified was in the safe. And then patrol would come around in the evenings and odd hours, just to see if there was anything left that shouldn’t be. Or unattended. You could not leave a classified document unattended; you had to have it with you. If you left it on your desk and walked out, that was a no-no. If you were going to go somewhere, you locked it back up. Franklin: Did you ever run afoul of— Femreite: No, I never did get a security infraction. I knew people that did. Franklin: That’s good. Did you ever have something that you had authored become classified to where you couldn’t use it again? Femreite: Well, I could use it, but others couldn’t. Uh-huh. Yeah, I had several things that were classified. Mm-hmm. Franklin: My last question is, I’d like to ask you what you would like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland during the Cold War? Femreite: Well, the Cold War for people of my age was very concerning. I was raised in the period where they were teaching students to duck under their desks. [LAUGHTER] As a civil defense exercise. There was a lot of information and publicity, or maybe even propaganda, about the threat of nuclear war. A lot of films got shown in the schools about what nuclear war was about, and what atomic bombs were like, and what you might be able to do to protect yourself, or might not be able to do to protect yourself. And then there was, of course, the headlines about tensions between Russia and the United States. Cuban missile crisis and all that. So it was very disconcerting. As a child, or an adolescent, I was worried about it, as were my colleagues about the same age. And then as a young engineer, working here, it became clear that there was a lot of very high technology being developed and that was important to our health and safety as a nation. It was guarded very well. People were quite dedicated to their work here. That was always very gratifying to me, that people weren’t taking it lightly; they knew what their responsibilities were and how important it was. So for anybody looking back on it, I think they can just be grateful that there were a lot of folks that had a very high principles and very high expectations and were very capable. And, you know, now, in retrospect, there are quite a few workers who were essentially overexposed. At the time they didn’t know it, and neither did management, but in retrospect you see reports of people, a lot, that have lasting diseases and that kind of thing, from the exposures they took here. So, those folks are heroes. They laid their life on the line for the rest of us. They’re every bit as much a hero as the people that were fighting the war, I think. Franklin: Great, well, thank you, Bernie, for coming in and talking to us about your career. Femreite: Yes, it was my pleasure. Thank you. Franklin: Okay. Awesome. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:50:37 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317kbps Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Bernal Femreite Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) B Reactor National Historic Landmark (Wash.) Hanford Atomic Products Operation Description An account of the resource Bernal Femreite came to the Hanford Site to work for Douglas United Nuclear. He worked in the 300 Area, and at many of the Hanford reactors. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 6/12/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Language A language of the resource English Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operated under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who were the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F206452690c8885d2fd3e2569f534c285.JPG 466ec2396ffb6f5e3897b77412c7231f https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F05fbc818de7c9ff8a2d133d46e686b4d.mp4 1092ddd880390c6414afc6d74a7556c3 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Betty Norton Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Betty Norton on August 28, 2017 The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-City. I’ll be talking with Betty about her experiences growing up in Richland. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Betty Norton: Betty, B-E-T-T-Y. My maiden name was Bell, B-E-L-L. And a lot of this is because of my dad. And last name is Norton, N-O-R-T-O-N. Franklin: Okay, great. Thanks, Betty. So, tell me, how and why did you come to the area? Norton: Because my dad came. At the time, we were--well, we started out in Tennessee, and Dad was working for DuPont. Well, he got transferred to Kankakee Ordnance with DuPont in 1942 in October. So we were there about 18, 20 months or so. And then the guy kept telling Dad, you need to go out to Hanford. Well, he’d heard about that scary place out in the desert and everything. And, no, he wanted no part of it. We were from Tennessee and Kentucky and Arkansas. Beautiful country. And he wasn’t about to get that much farther away from family. So, the guy kept insisting, though, and he kept saying, Cecil, I think you need to. So finally my dad said to Mom, well, it sounds like he knows something that we don’t. So, maybe we’d better do it. So Dad got out here. 24 men. Reading my dad’s book, which is absolutely fascinating. He wrote some things--”The things I remember and some I don’t remember” by Cecil Bell. And I think part of it is probably things he didn’t remmeber. But anyway, he and 23 other men were in one sleeping car, coming from Kankakee out to here the first day or two of February of 1944. So they all ended up pretty much being very good friends over the years. One of the guys even was in the other half of our A house, which was on Stevens Drive. In fact, it’s the big one right now across from where the old Sacajawea School was. It now has the big six white pillars and the brick front. Franklni: Oh, yeah, I know that one, yeah. Norton: That’s now, the Catholic priest lives ther,e I believe. Or at least he did for years. So that’s the house, we moved into the south end of it. And Mom and I didn’t get there until June. And my two younger brothers and I, we spent probably a couple of months in a hotel in Kankakee because they took our furniture, but then it was stacked up so long that our furniture didn’t get there until June. So we spent all this time in a hotel. Mom and, I was the oldest at ten, and two younger brothers which was heartbreaking for Mom. So when she found out it was still going to be another month, probably in May, then we hopped on a bus and took off back to see, to Arkansas, to see her folks. I can remember, Mom was holding my little brother, and then my other brotehr and I took turns sitting on a suitcase in the aisle, and the other one got to sit in the seat next to Mom. So anyway, we got out here mid-June. And I was reading in Dad’s book, and I didn’t realize it, but they gave him a house plenty early, this big A house at 1221 Stevens. They came with a refrigerator and a stove. Nothing else. But they gave the men, there were three things: a bed, a chair, and a dresser. And that was the furniture he lived with from probably early in April or something like that, till we gt here in June. So, I had often wondered about that, and then I was going through my dad’s boko last night and I came across that. I’d always wondered, you know? Our furniture was sitting back there. But of course the trains were used for troop movement. So, got here, and of course there wasn’t a blade of grass or tree in sight. And of course we’re from that beautiful green country back there. And ther ewere no rugs on the stairs. There were three kids in our half of the A house with wooden stairs. And two, one of the men that came out, they were in the other half with two kids. ANd I thought, later, after having my own four kids, my mother must’ve cried a million tears back there with all of the dust, the sand, the noise, living in a house with somebody else with kids racing up and down stairs all the time. But they stuck it out and then lived here--he died in September of ‘88 and she followed him six months later in March of ‘89. But I stayed here, married a guy that was working out on the Project after he came back from the army. And we had four kids. Then they had five granddaughters. Ten great-grandkids and now I have four great-great-grandsons. So we’re all still here after--ever since June of ‘44. So I remember a lot about growing up but not too much. It was a fun time. You never had to worry about--well, we never even thought about worrying about bad goings-on or anything. I think we were probably in especially safe town, if nothing else. But I remember playing out from daylight to dark, never having to worry about going home. You went in if you got hungry. Other than that, you played outside all day. I remember the mosquito sprayers. And I read on--some gal, many years ago, probably 20 years or so ago, started something--I don’t know if you’ve heard of it from Col High--from Richland High--the Sandstorm? Franklin: Mm-hmm. Norton: Okay. About--that is an absolutely fantastic thing to have grown up with all these years. There is so much history brought through. The kids start one subject, and then everyone, from all over the world actually can chime in. And I just wish I had thought to find out just how many people she has on her list, because we get things from China, from Japan. In fact, I have a cousin teaching at a university in Japan. But her dad was hte one that laid out, according to this, Georgia Koda, laid out the Uptown area and then helped draw up the plans and build the Carmichael. And my brother was the first ASB president there, Cecil Bell, Jr. And then he went on to be ASB president at Col High--Richland High. Richland High, it’s a hard thing to break. Franklin: That’s okay. Norton: You knew who I was talking about. Franklin: Yeah. The first time I heard it, I was not familiar, but I’m a seasoned-- Norton: Right, but you’ve heard it a few times now in the years, I’m sure. Right. Uh-huh. So, you know, we ran in the mosquito sprayer. We didn’t know anything. We stayed out and played Annie Annover, throwing balls over houses. Loved going down to the park, to the little swimming pool. I could still remember how cold that Columbia River was, because they just piped that straight into the pool down at Howard Amon Park. ANd you got in line, and I think they blew a whistle when it was time for you to get out. So everybody got out of the pool, ran to the back of the line, visited, until they blew the whistle again, and then the next group of people--because you could spend your day just going in and out of the pool, freezing all the time when you were in it. That was one of my favorite things. You could ride the buses, go where you wanted to. We could ride bikes. It was just a fun time. Like I said, I’m sure Mom cried a million tears with all the dust and all of that. But we lived in that house, then, from June of ‘44. Then in ‘49, my dad was supervisor. He was in--it was a machinist. And he got all kinds of upgrades. Well, he was a backhills country boy, and his dad was a horseshoer. What’s that? Franklin: I thought they called it-- Norton: A blacksmith. A blacksmith. Franklin: yeah. Norton: Uh-huh. So Dad knew all that stuff. So when he came out here there were, even in Kankakee, there were a lot of things that he culd do because he knew tempering the fires and all that stuff. So he did real well there working on things that no one else was used to doing. When he came out here, it was the same kind of thing. In fact, it was funny, he came out here before they had any tool sofr him to be a machinist. So they had all these little whelels and wires and whatever they were, motors, that had to be fixed, but he didn’t have any tool.s So he wrote Mom a letter describig everything he needed and sent it to her with money. And then she went and bought it and mailed it back. So he was here working on the Project with tools sent from Kankakee, Illinois, because this big million dollars worth of Plant didn’t have the tool sfor him to work with for awhile. So I always thought that was one of the funny things that happened. But he was real good at inventing-type things. So he did really well. He was in the steam power plant down there, and he was head over that. He knew when they dug the streets and put in pipes, water pipes, he felt at the time, it was the wrong thing because they were only going to be here five years. So he said, oh, they didn’t have to put sand down for all these big pipes and everything. Well, of course they started wearing out. Well, then they would start having leaks, and the bills for people would go up in the air. And I remmeber reading one, well, what he would do is, he would hae a pretty good idea from seeing where the spike would be on the charts that they had, so they could go and dig down there. And he said eh usually could find the broken pipe, no more than two digs. One took him five digs before they could find it. And then the old hotel at the time, all of the sudden, the guy came comlaining--he was the manager--came complaining to Dad because his electric bill had just spiked all of a sudden. All of a sudden, just outrageously. So Dad went back and looked at all the charts to see, and it was about 2:00 in the morning every day, this thing would just jump skyhigh. So he said to the guy, I dont know what’s happening at 2:00 at your hotel, but something is. So the guy said, well, I’ll find out. He went down, and the guy that was supposed to be cleaning all the floors and stuff, mopping them, he found it was a lot easier to hook his one-inch pipe into the big 700 gallon tank that was for the whole hotel, because he’d been using the little 200 pipe that was meant for the kitchen. And so he was using the big one, that made it a lot faster, easier. So the hotel guy set him straight on that so he could no longer do that. He did that. He worked the steam plant for a long time. In fact, he was there-- Franklin: And this was like the steam plant for the City of Richland. Norton: Uh-huh, right. Blew the whistle everyday at noon. Was one of the things he got to do for many years. In fact, somewhere in this book, I should’ve written that down instead of marking it. But when the plant was finally torn down in ‘65 or--no, it must’ve been much earlier than that. So, anyway, he was doing that. So then after that went down, though, then he went out to stores. So then he spent the rest of his time out there. Franklin: When you say went out to stores, can you-- Norton: That was the big stores building out on, just as you’re coming out into the Project where they used to have all the buses around down there and everyhing, I think. Franklni: Okay. Norton: Yeah. So he was there until he retired in February of ‘75 when he turned--but he felt that when people needed something for something that broke down, they needed it immediately; they didn’t want to have to wait and get it on a list. And so Dad would let them come in with their list of what they needed, pick it up, get the order filled, and take it. Well, this went on for a few years. It wasn’t their rules, but the guys that were in charge never said anything because Dad got along so well with all thepeople and had no problems with them. Got everybody satisfied and happy about it. Well, then he mentioned a name, but I don’t remember it and I wouldn’t say it. But he was just a couple of months or few months or minutes or so before Dad retired in ‘75, a new guy came in and he was going to have it his way. People were going to have to send in an order and in three or four days, it woudl get to them. Well, Dad knew this would not work. So he finally told the guy--oh, and then they came in and took out--there were two telephones, so people could call right to the desk and get the things that they needed ordered and get them out. Well, then one day, some guys came in and started to take the phones out. And Dad said, you’re not going to take those phones out. And they said, well, it’s an order. ANd he says, no, you don’t. So anyway, I guess, he talked to Mr. Big and told him, said, you’re not taking those phones out until I leave in two more weeks. If you want to ruin it after that, you can ruin it. But this is what people need. And this guy says, that’s not according to the rules. And Dad says, well, you either leave those phones when I leave or you get rid of me at the same time. So, they left the phones in for the two weeks till Dad lft, and then after that, they went back to this where people had to send in their list they wanted, wait till it could be fixed up several days later. So he was glad to get out of there by that time. He was a very special person. I would say he’s probably one of the most-liked people here. He got along with people all the time from when he started. That was why he got his first job with DuPont. Because he was friendly with a little lady that ran a grocery store there, and she knew the big guys. Well, Dad and his brother-in-law had gone over there and visited in the store. And that’s when he met my mother. So, when they were just about to give up on ever finding a job, she said, well, you take this over to--and I think the name was Brown--over in employment. You come back tonight and you get the letter that I’m going to write you, and you take it to this guy and only this guy. And Dad worked from then, 1932 or so, until ‘75 without ever losing a day’s pay. And was liked by everybody. He really, like I said, he could fix anything. So he fixed little motors that nobody had been able to figure out. He could--there was one section in here on something when they needed something with a sharp point, well, the metal wasn’t--whatever they do with it, tempered right or something. Well, he knew how to temper it right because he’d been shoeing horses with his dad ever since he was ten years old or so. So he told the guy Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:55:47 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 9987 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview Steam Plant Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 80 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Betty Norton Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Betty reflects on moving to Richland from Tennessee when her father (Cecil Bell) moved from working with Kankakee Ordnance to Hanford in February 1944. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 8/28/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. hanford site steam plant https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F1f3f2ad4eabfdc6465a8afa210779012.jpg 269c664e01e416ed126dfd99c1175b8c https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F7daa69ce21ddcd39044ef6f3581c873d.mp4 9cadf5113faa28298003da2a0f4ba0f5 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Bauman, Robert Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Rickard, Bill Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Northwest Public Television | Rickard_Bill Robert Bauman: Turn the microphone on here. Man one: Yeah. Bauman: Okay. Man one: Go ahead and just get comfortable. And whenever you’re ready. Bauman: Okay. All right. We're going to go ahead and get started. I need to put my glasses on so I can see what I’m doing here. So if we could start first by just having you say your name and then spell your name for us. William Rickard: Okay. My name is William H. Rickard Jr. W-I-L-L-I-A-M H. R-I-C-K-A-R-D Junior, J-R period. Bauman: Thank you. And my name's Robert Bauman. Today's date is December 4, 2013. And we are conducting this interview on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. So maybe we could start by just having you tell us a little bit about your background--where you're from, when you came to Hanford, what brought you here, that sort of thing. Rickard: Okay. Well, the first time that I ever heard the words atomic bomb, I was rifleman in an infantry company for the Chinese combat command in a place in China called Chihkiang. Chihkiang was a dirt airstrip. There were about 100 soldiers there. Our main duty was to guard an ammunition dump at an airfield. In August, 1945, I'd been in the Army for 15 months. I was 19 years old. The captain called us together and said that United States Air Force had dropped a bomb in Japan. It was an atomic bomb. Of course, I was extremely glad that the war was over. It was a few days later, I stood on the same airstrip and a Japanese airplane flew in. Only I'd been in the Army in January, February, and March, and April along the Burma Road in China. During that stay in Burma, slept on the ground every night. Kept my M1 rifle with me all the time. When I got to China, I got a bed for the first time in four months. So Chihkiang duty was pretty soft compared to Burmese duty. And when they dropped the atomic bomb, I knew I would be going home. Well, they had a point system in the Army. I think you needed 65 points. And you got points for combat experience and so forth. Well, I was one point short. So guess what. I got assigned to a military police company in Shanghai, China. For six months, I was an MP in Shanghai, which is probably more dangerous than my stay at Chihkiang. But anyway, I finally got home. Like most veterans did, I used the GI Bill to get a degree. I graduated from the University of Colorado in 1950 with a degree in botany. And I got a job at the University of Colorado at that time installing weather stations in the Front Range. While I had a job, I decided to go to school some more, and I wanted to be a high school teacher so I could teach botany and biology. Well, I graduated from Colorado in 1950 and got a master's degree in 1953. And then I decided, well, maybe I ought to think of teaching in college. So I applied for a research assistant appointment at Pullman. So in 1953, Barbara, my wife, and I went to Pullman. And there I graduated in 1957 with a Ph.D. with Dr. Daubenmire. The first job I got was as assistant professor of biology at New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas, New Mexico. But it was a part time teaching job. The other part was a field research job at the Nevada Test Site. And the purpose of my work at the Nevada Test Site was to study the impacts of atomic explosions on the botanical aspects of the Nevada Test Site—Yucca, Frenchman Flat and Jackass Flat. I worked there for four years and saw the last above ground explosion, which was during the operation of Project Hardtack and Plumbbob. While I was at the Test Site, I met Jared Davis, who was working at Hanford. He was in the biology department and he offered me a job at Hanford. So I moved to Richland in 1960 and was employed by the General Electric Company. At that time, most of the interest was on developing peaceful uses of atomic energy. And one of these was to use nuclear explosion to dig a harbor at Cape Thompson in Alaska. And part of our job there was to get baseline data on the biota of the Arctic, and also to measure how much radioactivity had already been deposited by the years of nuclear testing by the United States and Russia. So that was the start of that. And I worked up there for a couple of summers. And I worked with Jerry Davis there, and Wayne Hanson, Don Watson, and Roy Nakatani, and Leo Bustad, and Frank Hungate. Frank was my boss for a while. And Jared Davis was the boss. But my real interest at Hanford was, although I did the uptake of radioactivity from soil to plants, I was really interested in perhaps getting a part of the Hanford site set aside as a kind of a research park. Had lots of help from various people that thought this was a good idea, particularly Rexford Daubenmire at Pullman and Herb Parker, who was manager of the Hanford Laboratories. We conceived the idea perhaps establishing Rattlesnake Mountain as a research natural area. And with the help of other people, particularly Benton County Commissioner at that time, and the building of the Highway 240 from Richland to Vernita Bridge, that set Rattlesnake Mountain apart from the rest of the site and offers a good excuse to--since it was primarily a buffer zone, that this would be a good place to establish the reserve, which eventually turned out to be the Arid Land Ecology Reserve. Which in 2000, was turned over to the Fish and Wildlife Service as a part of the Hanford Reach National Monument. So most of my research activity was done on ALE Reserve after the work we'd done in Alaska. Bauman: And so what sorts of work were you doing at ALE Reserve? Rickard: Well, the first project we started on was the impact of cattle grazing on shrub steppe. And we did that in conjunction with the International Biological Research Program--yeah, International Biological Research Program, which was divided up into various sections. One part was grasslands of North America. And the ALE Reserve is representative of sagebrush steppe vegetation in the Northwestern United States. There were other sites in New Mexico, Kansas, Colorado, Montana, North and South Dakota. And that lasted for several years. Then as time went on, I got older. And most of the work that I did was then associated with environmental impact statements. Even did the first environmental impact statement from what was the WPPSS plant at that time--the Basalt Waste Isolation Program. And I finally retired sometime. I don't know. Can't remember. I was 65 years old. But while I worked for the General Electric Company, I also taught school at an Army barracks down where the bus lot is today. And I taught the first class in plant ecology. And among my students over the years was Lester Eberhardt, Dick Fitzner, and Dennis Dauble, and Brett Tiller, president of Environmental Assessment Services. So for 30 years, I've taught as an adjunct professor at Washington State University in the Tri-Cities. Bauman: And where was that located again, when you first started teaching at the Army? Rickard: It was an Army barracks. That was the building that was the beginning of the WSU campus. One of my first students was Les Eberhardt, Dick Fitzner, which later were killed in an airplane accident in the Yakima Firing Center. But over the years, many people that worked at Hanford had taken my classes. Bauman: I want to go back, if we can, to when you were talking about your work in New Mexico, at the Nevada Test Site—it’s interesting. What sorts of things did you find in your research there? Rickard: Well, one of the first things that--these were small explosions—ten to 40 kiloton range, maybe up to 100. And they fired them one a week. Of course, when you watch one of these things from ten miles away, from a shot that's on a tower, maybe 500 or 600 feet off the ground, first thing you'd see is just a flash of light and then as the ball forms, it's just a whole mess of colors--purple, orange. And then it disappears and a whole lot of activity, just a massive amount of activity. And then things catch on fire. There's creosote bush, yucca trees a mile away just ignite like kitchen matches. And then the cloud develops and the big stem and the mushroom cloud. But the vegetation just disappears. It's just cooked. But even after a few summers, the surviving vegetation comes back. And the physicists at the test site that made these things, people from Los Alamos and Livermore, about the only thing they noticed that after a year or two after the explosion, that the ground was bare and then it would get green. And that was a big surprise to the physicists. But was quite common to plant ecologists, because the plant was Russian thistle. It would blow across the landscape, scatter seeds, and the first invading plant was Russian thistle. Just like at Hanford, where you plow up a field and leave it, what do you get? Russian thistle, and then a whole lot of other plants come in. And in time, it would recover because most of the radioactivity wasn't at the site, it was gone. It went someplace else. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: Hmm. Interesting. And then your work in Alaska-- Rickard: Yes. Bauman: What sorts of things did you find in your research there? Rickard: Well, the main thing there was my colleague, Wayne Hanson, he was interested in the food chain of American Eskimos, and the fallout from nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific and Russia and various places. The northern hemisphere got most of the fallout, and in heavy fallout areas, with rain, like in Arctic Alaska. And the flora there was occupied--a great part of it was lichens and mosses, which were the food of caribou. Radioactive fallout comes down with rain and snow. And if you have a long lived plant, it keeps accumulating on the leaves until the leaves drop. And then they hit the ground and decompose, and cesium and strontium, which are about a half-life of 30 years, eventually get into the soil and then can recycle. In Alaska, the mosses and lichens, they don't die right away. And they keep accumulating radionuclides, and builds up so that it has very high levels of radionuclides as compared to trees that drop their leaves, grasses that die. And lichens are an important food of caribou in the wintertime. So they accumulated large burdens of radiocesium. And then the people, the diet of the American Indians and Eskimos of Alaska consisted of caribou meat. So the people had higher levels of radiocesium than people in the United States. That's a health physics concern, which is like Ron Kathren, that's their job. Bauman: Yeah. So you talked ALE a little bit, and your involvement in that. And you mentioned Benton County Commissioner. Do you remember a Benton County Commissioner who was-- Rickard: I don't remember his name, but he loved wildflowers. And at that time, the county was interested in building a road from Prosser to Vernita Bridge. They wanted to go through Snively Canyon. But the Department of Energy didn't think that was a good idea. But we had to convince the county that it wasn't a good idea. And the county commissioner, he decided that he ought to side with the Department of Energy. Bauman: So what was it about—why the desire to create ALE, I guess? What was it about the area that you thought was-- Rickard: Just the desire to create a natural area, probably dates back to the days of Theodore Roosevelt setting apart National Forests and National Parks. And we have nice National Parks in the country--Mount Rainier in Washington, and Olympic, all representing mostly forested areas. Rocky Mountain National Park, Yosemite. But nobody was interested in saving sagebrush, sagebrush grass habitats. This was primarily because sagebrush was not viewed as a useful resource. In fact, it was a pest. And rangeland managers thought it was a good idea to get rid of it. And when the first travelers crossed southern Idaho, they burned it because it provided fuel. But they hated it because it didn't provide any food for their cattle or sheep. So it was then regarded as a pest. And every Bureau of Land Management started campaigns to get rid of it. But before you got rid of it, we had to understand if it had any good. But this was a tough sell. You're not going to sell this, that keeping it has any benefits. But it's also wise if you have a resource that you can destroy it, or at least you ought to understand how it works. It's been here a long time, and learn the mechanics that has enabled it to stay this way. And the biggest threat to the shrub steppe was people. When Lewis and Clark came here, there was several resources in Washington State that people could use right away. One was the fish, one was the forest, the other was grass. So it's no surprise our first white people in Washington used the grass. They brought in cattle and sheep. Then came the magnificent discovery of the plow that now you plow up this stuff and raise crops. You could even raise more crops with irrigation. So it started to disappear. Half the sagebrush steppe in Washington disappeared by 1914. So this resource was getting smaller and smaller. So at least some of the people think that, well, maybe we ought not get rid of it all. And the Hanford site was an unusual opportunity to do this, because people who were farming were moved. This is the first time in history that a productive, cultivated land was converted to a lower use instead of a higher use. Higher uses are urban areas, places like Hanford, industry. Lower uses are cattle grazing. But the highest use of all is probably research and education. So here we have an opportunity where we had towns completely destroyed, abandoned productive fields that are now allowed to go revegetate by themselves. And they have. For the last 70 years it's been slowly changing back to what it would be, but it's been impeded by a lot of alien species that came with agriculture. Among these are cheatgrass, Russian thistle, and others. So it's important to have a place where you can just monitor the changes that take place over time. Bauman: I want to also ask you about something that you're involved in, the National Environmental Research Park? Rickard: Yes. Bauman: Could you explain that, what that was? Rickard: It was the national--all the DOE sites--not all, but most of them--belonged to the National Environmental Research Park. Oak Ridge, Savannah River, Hanford, Los Alamos. I think those are the--and Savannah River, yeah. And the purposes of the park was just to serve as places where we could do ecological research in different kinds of ecosystems. Bauman: So there are scientists at each of those places and parks? Rickard: There were scientists at each--it was never as popular at Hanford as it was with the other parks, partly because ALE Reserve had already been set aside acting as a National Environmental Research park before the other sites. Idaho is also a member. The Department of Energy, as far as I know, decided not to support that, but did support ALE. Bauman: We're going to go back to when you first came to work at Hanford, 1960. Had you been here before? Rickard: I was here--I went to Pullman in '53. And I'd been to Richland. Bauman: What were your first impressions of Richland, have you thought-- Rickard: Well at the time, I thought it was kind of--a lot of other places in Washington I'd rather be. [LAUGHTER] I think it was in August when Barbara and I--we got here in September. No, in '53, Barbara and I drove down from Pullman to Celilo Falls because I wanted to see Celilo Falls before it got covered up by a dam. We stopped in Pasco, and it was 112. [LAUGHTER] 112 degrees in the shade. We decided this wasn't a real nice place. Of course, we'd been at Indian Springs, Nevada, too. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: So what about when you came back in 1960 then, what did you think of the place? Rickard: Well, I was impressed, really, mainly with the people. When I worked at the 100-F Area, the first couple of days I stood by the 100-F Reactor and thought that maybe in a few years that this reactor would be closed down and that there'd be Russian thistle growing around the edge of it. The N Reactor closed in 1965. So in the five years that I was here, the F Reactor wasn't working anymore. I thought that was probably a good thing. Bauman: So you worked initially for General Electric? Rickard: General Electric, yeah. Battelle came in '65. Then I joined Battelle, so I was one of the first people. Bauman: So did you work essentially sort of in different places all over the site? Rickard: I did. I was on the ALE reserve at the old Army camp. At the buildings there for ten years, perhaps. I was at 331 Building. When I retired I still worked as part time for Battelle—PNNL then. And in other years, I've worked with the--what was the—NORCUS program. It was a DOE-sponsored, program where faculty and students from the campus here, could be assigned to PNNL and work. And I did that for a number of years too. And many of the graduate students that we had came through the NORCUS program to PNNL. And we had students from all over the country that spent summers here at Hanford working on ALE. We had graduate students that worked on elk. The first studies of elk on the Hanford site were done by graduate students. They had people studying small mammals, bald eagles, deer, coyotes. I don't know how many graduate students from the University of Washington, Montana, Oregon State that over the years actually got master's and doctorate degrees through what was then NORCUS programs. Bauman: So it was a teaching place as well? Rickard: Teaching program too, yeah. Bauman: Wanted to ask you--President Kennedy visited this site in 1963 to dedicate the N Reactor. Do you have any memories, or were you there when he was here? Rickard: No. I remember when he was here, but I didn't go to the celebration. I think I was probably out of town or maybe assigned to someplace else in the '60s. Bauman: I wonder, of the different kinds of work that you did at Hanford, the different projects you worked on, what was sort of the most challenging thing that you worked on, and maybe the most rewarding part of your work? Rickard: Oh, I think probably the most rewarding part was the working with students, working with the actual people. And then I think the day that the Arid Land Reserve appeared on the map. Bauman: Sure. Rickard: That was probably the-- Bauman: And what about the most challenging aspect of your work--was anything that— Rickard: Oh, I never found them particularly challenging. I just took heart--I think one of the professors at Washington State told me, research is about 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. So, it's work, but it's enjoyable. And there's always some satisfaction in learning something you didn't know before, no matter how small it is. I don't imagine it's nearly as important as somebody that discovers a cure for cancer or heart disease or something. But it's pleasant when you can just discover something that you didn't know before. Bauman: So when you look back at your years working at Hanford, overall, how would you assess Hanford as a place to work? Rickard: I think it's been a good ride. I liked teaching, but I enjoyed the research more. I'm more of a researcher rather than a teacher. But I think they belong together. Bauman: Is there anything that--event or incident or something that happened when you were working at Hanford sort of stands out in your memory that-- Rickard: Oh, I think the thing that probably stands out, not in a good sense, but it was when Les Eberhardt--[EMOTIONAL] [VIDEO CUTS OFF] Rickard: I'm sorry about that. Bauman: That's fine. No problem at all. Okay. So I just have one or two more questions. One was, I wanted to ask you about--so you started in 1960. Rickard: Yes. Bauman: I wonder what sort of changes you saw take place at Hanford--either in technology or in what was being done. Rickard: Oh, there's been lots of advances since I started. Certainly computers, GPS, DNA analysis. All these things advanced field research. DNA is very useful now in plant taxonomy. A recent case about the White Bluffs bladderpod. Perhaps you know about the White Bluffs bladderpod, an endangered species. Argument whether it's a real species in danger or whether it's just a variety of a more common species of bladderpod. So I think probably Endangered Species Act has a great deal to do with the desire of people to protect rare endangered species. And certainly, the Arid Land Ecology Reserve does that very well. It preserves samples of native vegetation, and the impacts that people have had on the natural environment. Particularly in Native American people and their view of the environment is much different than the people that want to use the environment. So all these technological advances have helped answer these questions. Bauman: Obviously, at some point, the mission at Hanford shifted to cleanup from production. Did that start happening while you were working at Hanford? And if so, how did that impact what you were doing, or did it? Rickard: Well, Hanford has a long history of recognizing that particularly the production reactors were releasing radionuclides into the river and to the ground. And there was a great deal of concern of whether these radionuclides and associated toxic metals really had an impact on the river and the biota that use the river. Over the years, the number of Canada geese that nest on the islands has been well documented. During the years the reactor operations, geese populations increased. Populations of bald eagles increased. Populations of deer decreased. Populations of quail increased. Even though with the closure of the reactors, some animals have not increased. When you got people work--there was no hunting. There was no grazing. There was no farming. But some of the animals continued to go down. Two of these--one was the sage grouse. Another one was the sage sparrow. These animals, the birds, depend upon sagebrush. Sage grouse eat sagebrush. Sage sparrows, they nest in sagebrush. Although you can destroy sagebrush by plowing or burning, burning has always been a part of the shrub steppe. It always takes out the shrubs. In time, the shrubs comes back. It burns, the shrubs disappear. And if the area is very large, the amount of fire is very small. So that there are substantial populations of sage sparrows and sage grouse that as the sagebrush returns by itself, they move back. Got down to the point where you have a small amount of sagebrush and if it burns, it takes years to come back. And even though at Hanford, it wasn't destroyed by farming anymore, fires have been a tremendous impact. So the number of acres of mature sagebrush today is very small. Not because it's been plowed, but simply because we had a lot of wildfires. And the sage grouse disappeared in 1960. The sage sparrow is nearly there now. So the sage grouse is now up for consideration to be an endangered species. It might be a good idea to restore sagebrush to Hanford, or sage grouse to Hanford by planting sagebrush. Bauman: So I guess one last question then. In your years of studying the ecology of the area here, what was sort of the most significant impact of the Hanford site on the ecology of the area? Rickard: Well, land use on the Hanford site, it's been different. It's different. There's no place else in Washington that ever supported plutonium production. It's the only place where productive land has ever been stopped agriculturally. I think it's important just for us to keep watching and monitoring and reporting this as time goes by. I think that's the future of it. It'll be cleaned up. But we've got to decide what to do next. And in my opinion, I think probably that if we were really interested in saving sage grouse, for example, on the Hanford site, that the best use would be a commercial nuclear power plant. Occupy a very small area. Develop the rest of the land back to habitat suitable for sage sparrows and sage grouse, and use it for recreational purposes. I don't think that the public is going to go for farming or things like that. So a combination of industrial facilities with wide areas of natural habitat would be the most likely use. That's my opinion. Bauman: Well, is there anything that we haven't talked about that you would like to discuss, or anything I haven't asked you about? Rickard: I think I'm pretty well exhausted. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: Well I, want to thank you very much for coming in today and sharing your experiences. Rickard: Well, I certainly appreciate your help here. Bauman: Thank you very much. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:42:32 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 194 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 100-F Area Reactor N Reactor F Reactor Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1960-2013 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1960-? Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Davis, Jerry Hanson, Wayne Watson, Don Nakatani, Roy Bustad, Leo Hungate, Frank Parker, Herb Kathren, Ron Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Bill Rickard Description An account of the resource An interview with Bill Rickard conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Subject The topic of the resource Hanford (Wash.) Hanford Site (Wash.) Hanford Nuclear Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013-12-4 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2016-07-22: Metadata v1 created – [RG] 100-F Area Reactor F Reactor General Electric N Reactor Richland (Wash.) https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fcf048689636f43deed4c23ae7d4d4d14.jpg dc383eed74d4438fdac9c7ad9c068eca https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F3841380e69217cef6aa70840d8479a53.mp4 e48c0d6128bcde0bbba8a20ce7f31cef Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Bauman Robert Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Tyler, Bill Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Northwest Public Television | Tyler_William Robert Bauman: Now you can give it right back to her? William Tyler: Yeah, I plan on it. Man One: Exactly. All right, get this off your face there. Bauman: Does your daughter live here in Richland? Tyler: She lives right across the street from me. Bauman: Oh, does she? Oh, there you go. Well, you can really give it to her then. [LAUGHTER] She can't avoid you. Tyler: Well in fact, we work together at HAMMER. Man one: I’m rolling. Bauman: All right. Well I think we're ready to get started. So let's start by having you say your name and also spell it for us. Tyler: My name is William T. Tyler. W-I-L-L-I-A-M, T, T-Y-L-E-R. Bauman: And you go by Bill? Tyler: Bill, yeah. Bauman: All right. And today's date is August 28th of 2013. And we're conducting this interview on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. So let's start, if we can, by maybe having you talk about what brought you to the area. When did you come to work at Hanford, and what brought you here? Tyler: We came out here on vacation from Oklahoma in 1947 to see my dad's brothers and sisters. And we were going to stay for a week or so. And my dad applied for a job here and got it, and we stayed. I thought it was the end of the world. This was not a pretty place in 1947. But I went in the Navy in 1950, got into the nuclear program and came out here in 1955. Went to work at Hanford. Worked as an HPT until '82, I believe. And then I went into management in health physics. Bauman: So HPT, you mean health physics technician. Is that was HPT is? Tyler: Uh-huh. Sorry. Bauman: That's okay. So how old were in 1947 when you came on vacation? Tyler: I think I was 15. Bauman: Okay. What sort of job did your father get? Tyler: He worked in transportation. Bauman: And you already had aunts and uncles who came here? Tyler: Yeah. Bauman: So you said you thought this was the end of the world. What do you mean by that? What are your first impressions of the place? Tyler: [LAUGHTER] Well, my first impression is we got here July the 5th. And my aunt and uncle had a little cafe on downtown Kennewick, on Kennewick Avenue. And it was about 104 degrees out. And we were driving down the street looking for it. And my dad says, man, I wouldn't live here if it's the last place in the world. And back then there was not a lot of trees. There was in Kennewick, and a few in Richland. But every time the wind blew, it was dusty and the tumbleweeds flew, and a lot of dust storms. In fact, they call them termination winds. Because everything was booming out in Hanford and every time the wind blew, people didn't like that and they'd just pick up and quit. So they called it termination winds. Bauman: Do you know when your aunt and uncles came here? Tyler: My aunt was born here in Kennewick. My uncle came out here in '37, '38, somewhere along that area. Bauman: Oh, okay, so you'd had relatives here before the Hanford site. Tyler: Oh yeah. Bauman: And so when your family first came in 1947 and you dad got the job and stayed here, where did you live? Tyler: We lived in Kennewick for a year. And then we got a house in Richland in 1948 at 635 Basswood. Bauman: That was a government home then? Tyler: Uh-huh. It was ranch house. And we moved in Thanksgiving Day of '48. And my future wife moved in next door the same day. I didn't know that was my future wife, but it turned out to be. And I still live on Basswood. Different house, but-- Bauman: So did you go to high school here then? Tyler: I went to Kennewick. I started in Kennewick because that's where we lived and I didn't want to transfer. So I rode the intercity bus every day to Kennewick and back. I graduated in 1950 and then somebody in Washington wanted me to join their services. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: So how would you describe, outside of your first impression, how would you describe the community of Richland in late '40s, early 1950s? Tyler: It actually—it was a very good place to live. I didn't realize it at the time. It was smaller, much smaller--probably 5,000 people in each of the cities. It was a good place to live if you could ignore the wind blowing and the dust storms and that sort of thing. But it kind of grows on you. I know I wouldn't live anywhere else. Bauman: In those early years when you were here in the '40s and '50s, do you remember any particular community events that stand out in your mind? Tyler: Yeah, Atomic Frontier Days, the Grape Festival in Kennewick, and then the fair. Nothing big or spectacular, but it was something to do. Bauman: Can you describe Atomic Frontier Days a little bit? What sorts of things-- Tyler: Well, normally they had a queen and a parade of course. And it was just kind of a—I don't know how--just a parade and kind of a get together type thing for the people that lived here. Bauman: So let's talk about your work a little bit now. You said you started working in '55. Tyler: ’55. Bauman: So can you talk about who you worked for at time and a little bit more detail about what sorts of work you did? What area of the Hanford site you worked in? Tyler: Okay, I started February the 22nd, 1955. And my first work assignment was 200 West Area tank farms. And then I went up to the REDOX facility which was a separations facility. A couple months later, then I went to U Plant. And then I went to T Plant, which were all separation facilities. And then I went over to PUREX in December of 1955. That was prior to startup. We started up our first spiked run was I think March or April of '56. And I worked there until '62 I believe. When I worked there, we also was switched with the 100 Area HPTs, or RCTs, or radiation monitors for exposure reasons. Because they got a lot more exposure than we did, so we would switch with them. And I got to work in all the 100 Area reactors except N when they were running, and some of the 300 Area. Bauman: So just about everywhere? Tyler: Yeah, I worked basically in every facility out here except 234-5. Bauman: And so was GE the contractor? What contractor did you work for? Tyler: GE. They were the prime contractor. And they left here in '66 I believe. Then Rockwell and Westinghouse and Fluor Daniel and MSA. Bauman: So as a health physics technician, what exactly did that mean? What sorts of things did you do on a daily basis? Tyler: Well as you know, there was a lot of contamination, radiation. And our job was to set the dose rates if people were going into a radiation area. We would go in, set the dose rates, stay with them. Got to make sure that the dose rates didn't increase while they were in there. We surveyed them out when they were done with the GMs and alpha detectors to make sure they didn't take any contamination home with them. And that was our prime responsibility. We maintain control of personnel exposure rates and their contamination, if they had any, and made sure that everything was as clean as we could get it. That's the short and sweet version. Bauman: Yeah. And you did that, obviously, at all these different areas you worked at on the site? Tyler: Everywhere, inside, outside, burial grounds. Bauman: Were there ever any incidents while you were doing this where people did have excessive exposure or anything along those lines? Tyler: Yeah, there was a lot of them. When GE came here--well, they were the prime contractor. Back in those days, you really couldn't talk about your job. You could say that you worked at Hanford and that was pretty much it. But yes, there was a lot of good memories and bad memories. Some really high exposure rates almost on a daily basis, because everything was running. And what will go wrong probably does. And it was very interesting work. It was something different every day. It's the kind of job that you look forward to doing and working. I did. I really enjoyed it. Bauman: So what was the process or procedure if someone had an overexposure? Tyler: Well, you had your dosimetry, which—Battelle read that. So you know what they got. And that's the record that's with you forever. At that time I think we worked--[PHONE RINGING] Shit. We worked under a 50 millirem per day limits, or 300 a week. And sometimes you would exceed that. But we were issued dosimetry everyday when we came to work. And you had a film badge which was read I think once a month. But they kept a running record of your exposure. That's why when we, when 100 Area radiation monitor--[PHONE RINGING] Hello. Can I call you back, Ian? Okay, thanks. Sorry. I don't know how to turn it off. Bauman: So we're talking about the dosimeter-- Tyler: Yeah, they kept records of all your exposures. And then every month they would send you a copy or let you know what it was. But if before the end of the year was out, if you were running short of exposure, then they would transfer people--particularly the radiation monitors--to different areas. And they what they were doing was using our exposure instead of--and letting their people cool down a little bit. It was just a way of equalizing the dose rates to the personnel. And it worked good in theory. And there was some--and I probably shouldn't say this—but there was some little minor ripples in the water, because people accused the other people of hanging back and now I got to come save you, that sort of thing. But it was all in fun. Everybody knew how serious the job was. And that was just part of their job. Bauman: And so how long did you work as a health physics technician then? Tyler: I think until 1982 and I went into management in health physics. At that time, they called us managers. And I was the manager of East tank farms until 1988. And then I transferred over to the West Area environmental group and took that over. My responsibilities were all of the outside radiation contamination areas. Burial sites. '89 I retired. Came back three months later and went to work in the environmental restoration part-time. And I did that until 1995. And then when Bechtel came in, I left there and went back to health physics side and become a evaluator at HAMMER for radiation protection, which I still do. Bauman: So you still work for-- Tyler: Two to three days a week. Bauman: So you mentioned earlier the sort of secrecy of some aspects of Hanford. Obviously secrecy, security were a very important part of. I wonder if you could discuss that at all, any ways that impacted your work? Tyler: GE had a very rigid plan of how they wanted things to go. And security of course was top secret. If you went—and a few people did--they go down and have a beer at the bar and they get to talking. And you never know who you're talking to you. And there was cases where people didn't have a job the next morning. Because security would overhear them. And you were pretty much done. So people didn't talk about their job. They didn't even talk about it with their family. Security was very strict. When you—well, for instance, when you go to work in the morning or if you're on shifts, same thing. You would catch the bus at the bus lot. Get on the bus, go through the barricade at the Y. If I was going to PUREX, we'd go up, pull in to the front gate of PUREX. You'd get out, off the bus. Go through the badge house. Pick up your dosimetry. Go out. Get back on the bus. The bus would pull inside the gate. Get back on the bus. Go down to PUREX. Get off the bus. Go through their badge house. And they would check your lunch bucket and all that. And then go into the building. And then in the evening, just reverse that process and back out again. So they were very strict. If you drove your car, you could not drive it past the main gate of East Area. You parked outside. And when you could drive inside, security would check the glovebox and the trunk and whatever was in the car. So it was very regimented. Bauman: I wanted to ask you about, in 1963 President Kennedy visited for the opening of the N reactor. I wondered if you were there and have any memories of that event at all? Tyler: I was not there because I was on shift at that day, or I probably would have been. Bauman: Mm-hm. Obviously, one of things that happened with Hanford is the shift from focus on production to focus on clean up. And I wonder if that shift impacted your work in any way? Tyler: Yes. Like I said before, I was the manager of East tank farms. And my office was at Semi Works, which is in 200 East Area, which was a pilot plant for PUREX. Semi Works was running. We were doing strontium cesium runs. But then when the edict came out that we were going to phase out and clean up, one of the first facilities--well I think it was the first facility—that we started tearing down was Semi Works. And D&D did the work. But we shut it all down and demolished the building and just imploded it in place. Built a dirt berm over it, cleaned it up. Most of the cells and the tanks are still in place, but they're full of grout. And then there's concrete over it. And what we did was tear down—this was approximately a three-story building with three stories underground. So when we tore down the building—it had a lot of piping and columns—we tore down the building and left the west wall standing. And we filled everything we could get inside like the basement and concreted it in place. And then we undercut the west wall. And this is probably four foot thick. And got a couple of Caterpillars and chains and hooked it over the top of the west wall. Pulled it down over like a lid. And then dirt berm over it, and there it is. And the stack that was there—the exhaust, the big stack—they imploded that and laid her right alongside the building. One guy did that. We deconned it first, and he came in, and a dynamite expert told us where we was going to put the stack and put a stick out on the end in the ground like they do now on the TV. And laid that stack right down on that stick, all by himself. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: So that definitely did make for significant changes then, the shift from production? Tyler: Very significant, because that was kind of pilot test for all the other anticipated deconning and decommissioning they we're going to do, which is still going on. Bauman: Let's shift now and talk a little bit about HAPO. I wonder--I know you've been involved with them quite often. I wonder if you can talk about your involvement when you became involved in HAPO and how that came about? Tyler: Well let's see. First, HAPO was a GE acronym which stands for Hanford Atomic Products Operations, which was the name of GE's part of this. GESA, which is another credit union down the street, was the General Electric Supervisors Association. GE was very particular about their managers or supervisors were a step above the blue collar worker. And I think they still maintain that. If you were a supervisor, it's white shirt and tie. And you don't fraternize with--So when the credit committee wanted to get started, that's the name they chose, just HAPO. And it's '53. And I was looking at one of the early--the record book. And I think there's five or six of the charter members of the first—that I worked with that were radiation monitors just like I was. But I never joined HAPO until my wife was--she likes C First. And I never joined HAPO until I think '71. And then a friend of mine that I worked with talked me into getting on the committee that approved loans, credit committee, which I did. And then I got invited later to go on the board of directors and got voted in and been there ever since. I really enjoyed it. It's a great credit union. Bauman: So is it the board of directors then, primarily is it either current or former Hanford employees? Tyler: No. It used to be when we were federal, you had to work out here to join HAPO. And then they relinquished or changed the bylaws so that anybody could join HAPO. If you give them $5 and signed up, you were a member for life. But initially it was you had to work here to join. Bauman: And you said you didn't join until '71. What led you to decide to join at that point? Tyler: The guy I carpool with, one of them, convinced me that I should do that. [LAUGHTER] And I didn't like C First. I never did like C First. But my wife liked them because you got at the end of the month, you got all of your checks back. And she liked that. But I joined HAPO and started my own checking account. And then she finally joined shortly after I did. And now the rest is history. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: So, I know you weren't part of the formation of the credit union. But I wonder if you can talk about it a little more? If you know more, were the employee unions at Hanford involved in the credit union, establishing that? Tyler: Yes. Bauman: And anything you can talk about that? Tyler: Helen Van Patten was one. GESA started it first. And then the blue collars said well, we got to have one of those. The first store was down by the Spudnut Shop. I think we had one or two employees. And everything was in a ledger, handwritten. Joe Blow borrowed $25. It was very basic. But fortunately, it kept growing and membership increased. Bauman: So the unions saw it as a way to provide credit union opportunities-- Tyler: Right. Bauman:--for blue collar workers or laborers or whatever? Okay. So I want to—going back to your work at Hanford, what are some of the more challenging aspects of your work, and maybe some more rewarding aspects of your work? Tyler: That’s a good question. Probably one of the most challenging was the responsibility when you're out on a hot job where the contamination levels are great and the radiation levels are great, and you have a whole crew of people. It challenges you to--it's always in the back of your mind that something's going to happen and I'm not going to see it, or I'm not going to catch it. And somebody's going to get overexposed. And that's always in the back of your mind. Because--and I have to beat my own drum here for a bit—radiation monitoring and health physics now, whatever they are, it's a very challenging job. You're responsible for--you're taking care of people. And they trust you. And they expect you to look out for them. And it's a lot of responsibility, but most everybody accepts that gladly, because they know how important it is. Because you're responsible for--you could get somebody really overexposed, and who knows what the consequences are? As far as rewards for that, I think is the satisfaction of when the job is done, that you knew you did your best job. Nobody got hurt. Nobody got overexposed. Nobody got contaminated. And the job got done. Bauman: Were there any events or incidents or anything, sort of unique things that happened during your time working at Hanford that sort of really stands out to you? Tyler: When I first hired in, like I said, I went to REDOX. One of the problems they had shortly before I got here was they had a ruthenium—they ran some ruthenium and they played it out in the stack. And then it broke loose. And it kind of went out in the desert and on the ground. And you had ruthenium chunks of—it looked like white paper that built up on the inside the stack and then finally broke loose and fluttered out and went everywhere. And one of my first jobs with a GM and a walking stick was walking out through the desert and finding these things. Little specks, big specks, didn't have any trouble finding them. [LAUGHTER] They were very hot. And I remember we used the KOA cans from T Plant, which were little round cans, metal cans about that big around, about this high with a snap-on lid. And that's what we put them in, with dirt for shielding. And then buried them. But there's been a lot of incidents of hot burials from PUREX. I remember some where we used a burial string. We used a locomotive, a whole bunch of flat cars. And then at that time, they'd build big wooden boxes. And I recall one big one that had enough lumber in it to build two B houses. Huge—it sat on two flat cars. And we put it in, and we took readings over the top of the tunnel as it went out of the tunnel towards the burial ground. And it read greater than 500 R. And as you know, 500 R for an hour is a lethal dose rate to 50% of the people, 60%. And then you go down the railroad track behind B Plant, pull it across the highway which patrol barricaded the road. So you pull the string across the road and then back it into the burial ground. And then you had to sink—this box was built on skids. And a big long steel cable lay on another flat car, three or four flat cars away from it. So you would pull that. And you would pull it down into a burial trench. And the Cat would be down there ready. And the train would back up and they would grab that cable, put the eye on. Hook it to the Cat. And then the Cat skinner would pull the cable off. And the train would move up until the boxes sit here and the cables here. And the Cat's down here pulling. And then we'd get up to the--and there was a dock where you could slide it off. And you would turn that box and pull it in. Pull it down into the trench, down to the other end, wherever you wanted it. Unhook the Cat. Leave it. Pull the Cat out. And then they would backfill that box. And that's the way they did the burials. And it worked great except when the box collapsed unexpectedly. Bauman: Then not so great. Tyler: Yeah, that's not a good--that happened once or twice. Bauman: During your years working out there, were you ever concerned about your own safety, health, protection, in any way? Tyler: Well as stupid as it may sound, no. I never was. Because I always figured I knew what I was doing. And I received some very good training in the Navy, which helped. But I never worried about it. I always trusted me. Bauman: Were you a member of a union when you were working at Hanford? And what union was that? And I guess, what sort of relationship did the union have with management here at Hanford during the time you were here? Tyler: Good and bad. [LAUGHTER] I used to be chief steward for the radiation monitors. I went through two negotiations. And after the last one, I decided I didn't want any more of that. Chief steward's a thankless job, but somebody's got to do it. Bauman: What does that mean exactly? What—chief steward-- Tyler: Well, you're the union rep plant wide for all of the HPTs. And I had this grandiose idea that I could just change everything. It's a great idea, but it doesn't work. It's a job that somebody has to do. And it's a job that is thankless. Because somebody's always mad at you. Whatever you do, in some of the people's eyes, you could always do better. And it's just not a good job. [LAUGHTER] But I enjoyed it. You learn a lot. And you learn both sides of the fence--how the company thinks and how the union thinks. And then you try and compromise. Bauman: Were there ever any times you were here where there was a strike or any sort of-- Tyler: Two--'66 and '76. Bauman: And were those sort of across the site? Tyler: Yep. And in '66, after we settled the '66 strike, GE left. Bauman: Was that one of the reasons they left? Tyler: Yeah, well, they had planned to leave. And then that's when--because when GE was here, they were the only contractor. And then when they left, they kind of broke it up into the 200 Areas and the 100 Areas. And it's always been different contractors, not just one prime contractor. Bauman: Do you remember what some of the key issues were in '66 and '76 in terms of-- Tyler: Wages. Wages were always the key issue. Well, I take that back. '66 or '76 was, they were going to do away with the buses. And that was a key issue for everybody. It didn't happen, but it was a--that was when they spent all the money redoing the bus lot. And then a couple years later, they did away with the buses anyway. But we did get air conditioned buses. Before we had old buses, the old green buses. Well like the ones sitting down at-- Bauman: The CREHST Museum? Tyler: Yeah. Those were some of the newer ones. The older ones were international buses that looked like a truck. Cold in the winter and hot in the summer. But they worked. When they did away with the buses, see, that did away with a lot of jobs in the bus lot. Maintenance, everything there, which was a lot of people. Bauman: So part of that was about jobs and issues of transportation? Tyler: Mm-hmm. Bauman: Anything I haven't asked you about that you'd like to talk about or that you think we should talk about? Tyler: Well, we've covered pretty much every--well, we've covered pretty much everything I think. I don't really know what you're looking for. Bauman: Just your experience. That's why I wonder if there's something that you experienced some event or something that I haven't asked you about yet that you think would be important to— Tyler: Well. When I retired, I took the first early out and then got bored to death and came back. When I was in the environmental group in West Area, a good friend of mine was an environmental manager outside the site. But he talked me into coming back part time and become a waste shipper and a waste handler. Which was--I'd never done it. I knew what it was. But I finally relented. I enjoyed it. It's entirely different. Because I was kind of burned out on radiation protection, and I wanted to do something different. Didn't want to retire, but I wanted to do something different. So I went to the classes and become a certified waste shipper and a waste handler. And we took care of all of the sites outside of 200 East, 200 West. All the burial sites, all the drilling sides, the river, pretty much everything. And it was very interesting. Until '95, when I decided I didn't like the contractor. [LAUGHTER] And I went back to health physics. Bauman: Most of the students I teach now were born after the Cold War ended. Obviously most of your career, the Cold War was going on during most of the time you were working at Hanford. So I'm wondering what you think would be important for young people today and people in future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War? Tyler: I'm trying to remember. We had the strike in '66. And there was almost another strike four or five years later. In fact midnight was the deadline when we were supposed to go on strike. And at 11:30, we got a notification that the President had put a stop to the strike because of the situation with the Cold War thing. And I think that's the first and the last time that ever happened. But as far as-- Bauman: So then about 1970 or so? Tyler: Early, yeah, '71 or '72 maybe. No, it was before that, because I was still on shift. It was probably '68, '69 maybe. But as far as the Cold War, it's still going on in different forms—my personal opinion. You look back at history--and I've lived through a lot of it--nothing has really changed. Like what's going on now, and the Bible says there'll be war and rumors of war. And that's correct. Because whatever our President does—whatever he does is going to be wrong in a lot of people's eyes. It's kind of like if you don't do it, you should have. And if you do do it, you shouldn't have. [LAUGHTER] It's a different type of cold war. Instead of—we used to worry about Russia. And I'm not too sure that—maybe we should still be worrying about Russia and a lot of other countries that--Things have changed. But they haven't—the basic things that caused the Cold War hasn't changed. There's all kind of weapons. I don't know. Bauman: All right. I think that's all the questions I have for you. Tyler: Okay. Bauman: I want to thank you for coming in today. Tyler: Thank you for having me. Bauman: Pleasure to talk to you. Tyler: Good. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:47:27 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 244 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 200 West Area U Plant T Plant 100 Area 300 Area 200 East Area Tank Farms Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1947-2013 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1955-1995 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Kennedy, John. F Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Bill Tyler Description An account of the resource An interview with Bill Tyler conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Subject The topic of the resource Hanford (Wash.) Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Nuclear weapons plants--Environmental aspects--Washington (State)--Hanford Site. Nuclear weapons plants--Health aspects--Washington (State)--Hanford Site Region Nuclear weapons plants--Waste disposal--Environmental aspects--Washington (State)--Hanford Site. Nuclear waste disposal Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013-8-28 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2016-07-18: Metadata v1 created – [RG] Bechtel Building 200 East Building 200 West General Electric GESA (General Electric Supervisors Association) HAMMER HAPO (Hanford Atomic Products Operations) Reduction-Oxidation Plant (REDOX) Richland (Wash.) T Plant Tank Farms U Plant https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F482a9fe8af3a5584b2466b9e4084da93.mp4 44a30f23746c53a6ea7287aa443ab156 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F246206de477347a3c79fc8f80c19bf0b.jpg e7d3130df0dd990982909b39fd3f84a7 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Bauman Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Bob and Dianne Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Northwest Public Television | Taylor_Diane_Bob Man one: Okay Robert Bauman: All right. Good to go? Man one: You ready? Man two: We're ready to go. Bauman: Okay. All right, well, we'll get started. And I'm going to start first by having each of you say your name for us. Make sure we have that on there. So go ahead. Bob Taylor: My name is Bob Taylor. Bauman: All right. Dianne Taylor: And I'm Dianne Taylor. Bauman: And Dianne is spelled with two Ns? Dianne Taylor: Two Ns, yes. Bauman: Okay, great. And my name's Robert Bauman, and we are conducting this interview on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. And today is June 10th of 2015. And so, if we could start maybe, start, Bob, maybe, with if you could tell us a little bit about your family and how they ended up coming to the Tri-Cities area and when that happened. Bob Taylor: My father was employed by the US federal prison system. He went to work as a guard at McNeil Island in 1934 for the Department of Prisons, the US Bureau of Prisons--there, I'm finally saying that correctly. And he started off as a guard and was employed at McNeil Island from 1934 actually until he retired in 1955. But the real story to talk about is how I happen to be sitting here. And in the early stages of the creation of the Manhattan Project and what was developing here with the acquisition of all the lands for Hanford, very early in that process, the US Army went to the Bureau of Prisons and contracted for a minimum security type prison camp to be constructed here in the Richland area. The purpose of that being the minimum security prisoners would be farming the lands and the orchards that were being acquired by the Manhattan Project, but would have no men available to take care of the fields and the orchards. And so the Bureau of Prisons contracted with the Department of the Army on behalf of the Manhattan Project to maintain those fields out in Vernita, White Bluffs, all in this area. And they agreed—they, the Department of the Army--agreed to build a, what they call, prison camp. It turned out to be right out on the bend of the Yakima River right near Horn Rapids Dam. And they constructed buildings, facilities, kitchens, dining areas, administration buildings, and the facilities to house and support approximately 250 federal prisoners who were brought in in early 1944 to take care of the agricultural needs of this area. And my father, who was at that point then had been with the federal prison at McNeil Island and had become a senior guard, was chosen to come over here and become superintendent of this camp. The name of the camp is Columbia Camp. And that's a little story in itself. The people in Washington, DC, were out here and didn't quite know the geography. They knew the Columbia River was here somewhere nearby, and even though the Yakima is a much smaller river, they didn't realize it. And so they named this federal prison camp Columbia Camp simply because they were on a river and they thought they were on the Columbia River. That's how it came to have the name Columbia Camp. Anyway, they started bringing the prisoners in in early 1944. And as I say, they typically for the next three and a half years, had about 250 prisoners on site at any given time. I think the number in the various information files I have, there were probably more like 700 prisoners rotated through this area. But the facilities were actually to hold about 250. So my dad took over as superintendent of the prison camp. He came here in early 1944, and initially they had—and I have many pictures of the whole camp, the buildings, and also the housing—there were initially 16 Quonset huts that were built out there for the initial officers and their families to move. At the time he came, those were the first. We moved in here actually on D Day, 1944, June 6th, in the middle of a major windstorm. And my mother who was born and raised in Western Washington, to arrive here in those kind of conditions—I don’t have to say that we had no air conditioning, and fans weren't even really very available. We moved into a Quonset hut. We ultimately, by the next spring, they—the Army, the prison—built eight more fancy housing. They brought in prefabs, the basic 609 square foot prefab that everybody in Richland is familiar with, of which there are still hundreds of them. That was the new fancy housing, and my dad as superintendent was able to claim the first one in the row next to the administration building. So in the next spring, then, we moved into a prefab. Again, I have lots of pictures, family pictures, of our housing. The kids, we were bused into Richland. Initially we all went to Sacajawea the first year we were there. And then when Jefferson grade school opened in the fall of '45, we all went there, switched over to there. We had a couple of older kids—family, kids in the camp—that went to high school at what was then called Columbia High School. My mother was a teacher, actually ended up teaching at Columbia High School part of the time that we were here. So as families living at Columbia Camp, we were bused into town, pretty much bused back home. And we played. As kids we played in the heat of the summer and cold in the winter and just pretty much in the desert surrounding the camp out there. The camp itself existed from early 1943. In early 1947, they started—they, again, the US Bureau of Prisons and the US Army--started writing back and forth corresponding about the continued need for the maintenance of the orchards and the fields and ultimately decided that it wasn't necessary anymore. And some of those fields ultimately were left to go, and others were maintained I guess in other ways. In the files that I have, my dad's files, I've got a tremendous amount of correspondence between he and the officials in Washington, DC. The Department of Army, I've got synopsis of what all was done during those period of years. I have interesting files about prisoners and some of their experiences in managing them as agricultural workers, how they got them to work every day, how they kept them fed every day. There's a lot of material in the files that I have of my dad's about that sort of thing. There's a lot of information about the contract itself between the US Army and the Federal Bureau of Prisons as far as payment of fees and expenses and also the type of crops that were harvested in volume and in prices and that sort of thing. It makes for very fascinating reading to have this kind of information available to me about what went on out there. Then ultimately in the fall of 1947, I think we were about the last to leave as a family. We left in November of '47. And basically the place was abandoned. I have, again in the files, there's information about dismantling the camp and sending knives and forks to Leavenworth and dishes to somewhere in Arizona. So there's a lot of very detailed information about the camp. But the long and the short of it is that the camp existed for those three and a half, almost four years. And very, very, very few people anywhere even know about it. The families, the other families, were rotated to different jobs. Three or four of the families went back to McNeil Island. Others went to Arizona, Leavenworth—other federal prison camps. And everybody just went their own way, and nobody was left here to even be a historian for what all went on. And thanks to my mother, who keeps all these documents and records and letters, and even—there’s a lot of letters between my father and my mother when he first came over here, where he's giving examples of daily life here in Richland in 1944 that are just fascinating reading. And the cost of a rental house that the government was charging for people and the cost to buy a refrigerator, things like that. So it's really fun for us to be able to come and sort of make some of this information available as to what Columbia Camp was all about over many, many, many years in Richland, because nobody was here to contradict that statement. A lot of people said, oh, it was a prisoner war camp. And ultimately, finally, that got changed. There was some documentation. At the present time, out at the day camp, there's a kiosk out there with a few pictures and a commentary posted out there, a little parking lot that you can drive to that gives just an extremely brief summary of what Columbia Camp was. There's a picture of a man, a far distant picture of a man standing in front of the administration building. Cannot guarantee it, but I think it—I'm pretty sure it's my dad. He was the superintendent of the camp, so his picture's out there in that kiosk for anybody that wants to go out there and look. But that's what Columbia Camp in a nutshell was all about. We have many, many, many pictures of the camp, the buildings, the dormitory buildings, the kitchen, the administration building, the power plant, the steam plant. And then we ourselves have taken pictures recently from some of those same positions, including the foundation of the steam plant that we've got so we can supplement a lot of what I've been talking about. Well, everything that I've been talking about we can supplement with pictures, and letters, and documents, and correspondence, and files. Dianne Taylor: Memories. Bauman: Yeah, right. So really interesting, and so first of all, let me confirm that there are still rumors out there. I've had students tell me, wasn't there a prisoner of war camp? Dianne Taylor: Really? Bauman: Oh, yeah. Bob Taylor: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bauman: Or, wasn't a Japanese internment camp here? Bob Taylor: That's what-- Bauman: No. Dianne Taylor: Mm-mm. Bauman: So this is great to--one great thing about interviewing you is to clarify that for people as well. Dianne Taylor: One of the things that I'd like to bring in, because we didn't know about this for so long. Dad would not talk about his prison experiences. He was a loving, wonderful, wonderful father and grandfather and wonderful father-in-law. But this was never discussed. It wasn't until he died and I'm going through all of their things because Bob's an only child that I find all of this stuff. So Bob's mother's in a nursing home. She's quite elderly. We find this stuff. We get so excited over these pictures. Of course, she thought we were crazy to move to Richland anyway because her memories are not the Richland it is today. So we went, took all these pictures. And all she did was she took them from me, put them down in her purse. And I said, well, Mom, this is exciting. We found all dad's stuff, and we want to talk about it. No, it's secret. She would not talk about it. It was secret. And this is in 19--when did she die? Bob Taylor: Well, this was in 1995, I think, that we-- Dianne Taylor: It was so ingrained in her, the secrecy of their lives, that even after all that time, she couldn't talk to us. So we took the pictures. I said, mom, I've got to have the pictures. And we took them back. But I think that's when it really hit me what their lives must have been like living here at that time. Bauman: Right, that even that, which was only tangentially connected to Hanford-- Bob Taylor: Exactly. Dianne Taylor: Yes. Yeah. Bauman: Was very secret, right? Dianne Taylor: Yeah, absolutely. Bauman: So let me ask you a few questions. So first of all, what was your father's name? Bob Taylor: Harold E. Taylor. Bauman: Harold Taylor, okay. And your mother's name? Bob Taylor: Doris C. Taylor. Bauman: Okay. And so it was the three of you when you--well, your father came initially, and then you and your mother came. Bob Taylor: Right, in June. Bauman: In June of '44. And you mentioned the dust storm. Bob Taylor: Termination wind. Bauman: So, and you said that it could hold about 250 prisoners at the camp at once. Bob Taylor: Yes. Bauman: So it was minimum security. So what sorts of--but they were federal prisoners. Bob Taylor: They were. Bauman: So what sorts of crimes would these men have committed? Bob Taylor: The vast majority of federal prisoners were not necessarily minimum security, but they were white collar crimes. In some cases bank robbers would sometimes fit into the category, depends on the nature of the individual. But bank robbers weren't necessarily restricted from ever being in the so-called minimum security camps. And, see, we went back to McNeil Island, where my dad then took over the minimum security part of McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary. And so some of these same prisoners went with us back over there. That's kind of an aside, but it's part of explaining to you, or answering your question about minimum security and who qualified. I'll finish that answer first. A lot of them were conscientious objectors. And in fact there's correspondence in the files where prisoners would be sent here to Columbia Camp, but they were always—the conscientious objectors—they were always being monitored, talked to, perhaps convinced that it would be to their best interest if they would revoke their claim to being a conscientious objector and go back and join the Army and basically reinvent themselves in society. And there's a few prisoners did that. We've even got in those boxes, we've got a couple letters that one or two of them wrote to my dad personally thanking him. He's gone back, he's gone in the Army. He feels better about himself. So we've even got that kind of stuff in the file. Anyway, then, just as an interesting aside, when you talk about minimum security versus the hardcore inside the walls type, like at McNeil Island, state prisoners—murders, that sort of thing—of course they're maximum security. But any white collar crime, including—might not sound like white color crime—but bank robbery, that sort of thing, there can be any number of-- Dianne Taylor: In those days. Bob Taylor:--forgers. There can be any number of kind of people that aren't really hardcore criminals, but they've made mistakes. They've done things bad. But they know that they're decent people. And these are the people that, even on McNeil Island, again, same as here, they would stay in a minimum security area and do the weeding, doing the gardening, doing the orchards, doing the fields, like over there like they were doing here. My dad, as superintendent of the camp at McNeil, we had kind of a beautiful estate, ranch home estate with about an acre and a half of rockeries and gardens and rose trellises. And we had five--as a kid, I never mowed the yard. I had five prisoners that—we did, the family did—that took care of our yard and our place. It was kind of a strange childhood that I had. But that's what minimum security means, that they could be trusted. They were called trustees, as a matter of fact. Bauman: And so about how large of a staff was there working at the camp? Bob Taylor: Here at Columbia Camp, there were 24. 24 with families, and then there were another ten to 12 that lived in Prosser, Benton City, some of them right here in Richland that would come to work. So there was less than 40 total staff, 24 of whom were on site with families. Dianne Taylor: Tell him the story that you were telling me about Dad writing a note about getting these guys to come in on Sunday for roll call. Bob Taylor: Oh, it was one of the notes, one of the memorandums to his officers in the files that I read. It's something to the effect—no, I guess it was a memo to the entire camp, to the prisoners and the officers. And it's just kind of a tongue-in-cheek, that it seems to be hard to get prisoners to make bed call or duty call or account for themselves on the weekends. And it was just kind of an interesting, the way he wrote that even on the weekends, they still, after all, are prisoners and have to account for themselves. They actually only had I think it was three escapes. Nobody actually ever fully totally escaped. They had three that walked away, but they were caught along the river on the way to Benton City. So that was part of the minimum security idea is that they weren't particularly threats. They knew they just needed to serve their time and get out. And so they weren't trying to break out. Dianne Taylor: And where could they go? That's the desert. There's no transportation. That's one of the stories Dad did tell me about two of the guys walking to Benton City. And of course they didn't get there because there's nowhere to hide. Bauman: And so how old were you then when you came here? Bob Taylor: My birthday's in July, so I was six years old when we moved here in June. And as I said, it was D-Day. And then just turned seven in July, and then I was ten when we left in late '47. Bauman: Okay. And so what was that like as someone roughly between the ages of seven and ten living out here in the camp in initially a Quonset hut? Is that right? Bob Taylor: Initially in Quonset hut and then in a prefab. Well, first of all, six-to-ten-year-olds don't really think about hot and cold. The only thing that we were ever really cautioned about by our parents is it's a little problematic to go running around in the desert barefooted. There were rattlesnakes. Never got bit by one. Saw a few. But we had the swimming hole right there at the bend of the river for summertime, spent a lot of time in the swimming. The pictures you can see the two rows of Quonset huts. It was kind of, I call it a parkway, which wasn't necessarily what you would call a bunch of grass in 1944. But nevertheless, there was a grassy strip, two street, two roads for cars, and the Quonset huts and in the middle grassy strip that that's where we played our soccer and mostly soccer that we played there as kids. And we were either in the river, out there in that strip, or just wandering out in the desert barefoot. And with our bicycles, there's a picture I've got showing me standing beside a tree that was very near our house that I crashed into and cut my head open. That sort of thing as living here as a kid. We were typical kids, even though we were--in fact, my entire life growing up was always subject to prison service. We lived on McNeil Island, which was, when we went back, I mean, my grade school and my high school years, I went to school in Lakewood Tacoma, Clover Park High School. But we still lived on the island. We had to catch a prison launch back and forth every day. As kids growing up, none of us ever had the typical life experience of just walking to the store, walking to the theater. We didn't live on Swift and could walk down to the Village—to the theater. We never had those kind of experiences. Speaking of the theater, we did get to come into town. Our parents would carpool or whatever, and we'd come into town to the Hopalong Cassidy, Tom Mix movies on Saturday afternoon at the Village Theater here in Richland. But it was never anything we could ride our bike to or walk to. Bauman: Yeah, I was going to ask you about that, about getting into town and how often you were able to do that. And what was the town of Richland like? What sorts of memories do you have? Bob Taylor: Well, I mean, you've got all the pictures as a historian. You know what Richland basically looked like in 1944, 1945. It was like that. I mean, we came into school. The first year I said we went to Sacajawea. The second year, we from then on went to Jefferson. We would become friends with kids in the class and do things with kids in the class, but it was always more difficult. I was in Cub Scouts. My dad would have to drive in to make separate arrangements to go, and to some of the other kids out there as well, to come in to the Cub Scout meetings. One of my memories, and I'm not sure why, but one of my memories was one of the girls’ parents had--and I don't quite understand it now, but her parents had—I can't say they owned, but maybe they did—a large enough piece of ground that she could ride her horses. And I remember some of us—and it was like right here. It was straight north from Jefferson that we would come out of town, although not very far, and ride horses out here in the open prairie. And it might have been right here. I don't know. But we were able to socialize to some degree with the kids in town. But again, one of the things that I have to say, it's like my mother. Even as kids, talked about secrecy. We were instilled with absolutely every bit of that, just like the adults. We absolutely were. And it was just a way of life, so we didn't question it. We didn't try to violate it. We just--everything was secret. Bauman: So you didn't talk to anyone about the camp at all really? Bob Taylor: Just that we lived out there. And that was all. Bauman: Right. So did you know what Hanford was, what was going on? Bob Taylor: No, not until the bomb was dropped and the paper headline right here in Richland. That's when we knew what was going on. The road now as you go out there is not the same road it was then. What is Horn Rapids Road, which comes across—wherever we are—comes across, that was the road that we came in on. So we came in a little further north into Richland than we do now, where the intersection is. And so right at that corner right there was the beginning of the trailer camp where so many people were living and so many of the kids in school with me were living in the trailer camp. And there was a wire fence along the road, and so we just knew we were outside the fence, and something was going on on the other side of the fence. But we didn't know what it was—until the article came out in the paper. Bauman: You mentioned, so, the prisoners, would they get transported, then to different fields-- Bob Taylor: They were bused. Bauman: --to different farms then? Bob Taylor: There were like, I think as I recall in reading the files, there were sometimes as many as ten different gangs or groups, for lack of a better term, that were bused out to the various sites. And that's part of what's in my dad's files is just the logistics of taking--they called it dinner then--lunch out to feed everybody at lunchtime, and just the difficulties of that sort of thing in running this prison camp. Because some of them out in Vernita, for instance, they basically had to leave with the lunch service right after breakfast to get it out there. Because the road, the road was not great going out to Vernita from here. The road that we drive now and think nothing of was basically just a dirt road in those days going out there. Because the road, the paved road, bent south and went to Benton City when you go out that way. So yeah, there were a number of different orchards. I can remember clearly the—what are now all the Richland ranches on Cottonwood and Birch and Cedar, all those where all the Richland ranches were ultimately built in 1948. All of that was cherry orchards. And we always had one or two crews harvesting the cherries, for instance, right here in town. And a couple times my dad brought me out and actually I helped them pick cherries. So that's just one of my memories is picking cherries in what is now that major housing part of Richland. Bauman: Right. Now, so, in 1947, when the camp closed and you left, I assume maybe your mother was probably happy about going back to the west side? [LAUGHTER] Bob Taylor: Extremely, yes, extremely happy to get back to the cool west side, yes. Dianne Taylor: She was a tiny, tiny, lovely lady, a teacher. Heart and soul a teacher, and totally supportive of Bob's father. But she wasn't happy to be here at all. [LAUGHTER] And she was very, very happy when they finally left. Bauman: You mentioned she taught at Columbia High School. Dianne Taylor: Yeah. Bauman: What did she teach? Bob Taylor: English, primarily English. And she was in charge of the journalism one school year. Dianne Taylor: She had to quit teaching, though, because of her duties as--and the words are official hostess of the camp, which is really interesting. She organized bridge activities, social activities, to keep the wives that were thrown out here in the middle of the desert happy. Because of course they weren't working, very many of them. So she worked that first year at Hanford, and then she quit and was kept busy keeping activities going on for the women and children. Bauman: That’s very interesting. Were there a lot of children around your age you were able to play with? Bob Taylor: I'm trying to remember. There were, of my own specific age that were my closest friends, there were seven of us that were either within one grade one way or the other. I think there were some older kids that came into high school. Our bus—I think there were about a total of 12 or 14 of us rode the bus into town. There certainly weren't two kids in every household of the 24 officers that worked there. Some of them were more senior and kids were grown and gone. Bauman: So did you have your own bus, then, that would just take a group of kids from the camp? Bob Taylor: I guess, yeah, we must have, that there was just a bus that came out and got us and took us back into town. There was nobody else to pick up. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: And do you remember how you felt about first of all coming here? Do you have any memories of that, and then when you left in 1947? Bob Taylor: I certainly had no--at age six, everything in the world was exciting to me. I think I mentioned earlier heat and wind, that sort of thing didn't really mean much of anything to me. I have no recollection of being upset about being here, other than knowing that my mother was upset about being here. I liked it here. I had good friends. I was kind of disappointed to go back to McNeil Island. Three of my closest friends at camp that were out there too--let's see, Kenny and Jerry and— Dianne Taylor: Were they out there then? Bob Taylor: Yeah. There were, I think, five of us actually went back to McNeil Island. So, at least I wasn't--had my friends going back there with me, which made it better. And then we had a very--from a prefab in the desert, we went back to a fairly palatial estate that we lived on because of my dad's position, so I liked that. And then that next year I started junior high at Clover Park. And so starting then I went back to--I rode the boat to Steilacoom and caught the bus to school. And then I was off on a whole ‘nother part of my life. I think I'd say I was probably happy to be leaving, but not the way my mother was happy to be leaving. Dianne Taylor: Well, I think it was a pretty idyllic childhood for kids like this. They've got the free reign of the desert, within reason. They've got the swimming pool. Nobody was worrying about jumping into the Yakima River. And they had friends, and they'd go into the movies. We've got a picture of Bob--we think it's Bob--with his buddies. There was a picture in Richland years ago at the post office there was a little museum. Bauman: A kind of display. Dianne Taylor: Yeah. And there's a picture of the kids outside the Uptown--not the Uptown, the old Village Theater. And we're pretty sure he's there. But the stories he would tell me, running around, riding their bikes, it was-- Bob Taylor: I just think of it as fun and unique. I really do. Dianne Taylor: What about the stories about Dad and the baseball field? They had a baseball field there for the prisoners, for their recreation. Bauman: Oh, at the camp. Bob Taylor: Well, that was their big activity on the weekends. They had a very nice ball field. Again, there's pictures of it outside of the administration building. And my dad was a good guy. For somebody in 1934 to survive starting as a prison guard at McNeil Island, those were tough times. Those were really tough times. I don't mean living as a family, my mom and dad. I mean just as a human being who felt some degree of emotion about people. Prison guards anywhere in any prison in 1934 were really tough, mean guys. They had to be. But when he came over here, he really--and it shows in his correspondence--he really had a lot of humanity and caring. And he ran a really great camp here and has lots of letters saying so from people, from superiors. What started me on that was just her idea about the baseball. He wanted to make sure that they had sporting activities to do things with over the weekend. Bauman: Recreation and entertainment. Bob Taylor: Yeah. Bauman: I find it very interesting neither of your parents really talked about this stuff, but they kept-- Dianne Taylor: Yeah, oh yeah. Bauman: --the photos and the documents that you didn't even know. Bob Taylor: Yeah. We didn't realize they had all that. Dianne Taylor: And Dad would talk about it a little bit. It wasn't like he never talked about it. But he told me the story one time about the prisoners escaping, and he talked some of these things. But it wasn't something that you talked about very much. It was once in a while. I mean, like every few years there'd be a comment. But Mom didn't talk about it at all, other than the teaching, which of course she loved to be a teacher and loved doing that. But it was a very, very quiet non-discussed part of their lives. Bauman: Are there any other either events or things that happened that were humorous or special things, memories that stand out in your mind about your years here? Bob Taylor: One of my major memories actually was the very first summer we were here. And three or four six-year-old boys never, ever, ever, ever got in trouble. But for some reason, we chose to go into the crawl space underneath our Quonset hut. I mean, there was no foundation in the sense you’d think of a foundation. But there was a raised floor and so there was space under there with snakes and bugs and spiders. And my parents never specifically told me, don't ever go down there. You'd sort of think that was understood. But three of us, one hot, hot, hot day, we thought, well, it was just boiling hot outside. It was boiling hot in the Quonset hut. Those things are not fit for human habitation without air conditioning. And so we got the smart idea it might be cooler down there in the crawl space. So we got down in the crawl space, and then for some reason some guards--I say guards—some of the men came around doing some kind of a check of the housing. I don't know what they were necessarily—but here we were, little boys where we were pretty sure we weren't supposed to be, and the adult men walking around sounded like we just knew they were looking specifically for us to get us in trouble. That's kind of silly, really, but it was a big thing for me as six years old to be down there where I'm pretty sure I shouldn't be and knew what kind of trouble I was going to be in when they found us. The other thing is the coming into the shows in the afternoon and standing in the line outside the theater. And, as I say, Tom Mix, and Hopalong Cassidy, and whoever else, the Saturday afternoon shows at the theater. I remember going to those a lot. Dianne Taylor: One of the fun things that we go out to there. We hadn't been there for a few years, out to the camp. It's just kind of fun to walk around and realize what was there--the families, the men—brought together from all over the country for one purpose. And they fulfilled their purpose and kept the orchards going and the fields, and then they left. And to me there's a lot of kind of neat spirit and ghost—ghost isn't the right word. But there's a sense that there was something really interesting, good happening here—good or bad depending on the way you looked at it. But it's just an interesting place to go and walk around out there. You should do it sometime. Bauman: Yeah. And a unique place. Dianne Taylor: Very unique, very unique. And it's fun to walk around, and we think we found the kitchen. So I'm thinking about the guy making the good cinnamon rolls. He was there. And you think you found where Dad—where the office was. Bob Taylor: Yeah, I'm pretty sure I can identify where the administration building was. But the various cement foundations or partial foundations that are still out there can pretty well match up with the pictures that we have from back then. Bauman: Well, great. Maybe this might be a good time, then, to sort of end this part, unless there's something we haven't talked about yet that you'd like to in this part of the-- Bob Taylor: Well, I've covered the things that I certainly, the bullet points that I had in mind that I wanted to cover. There's probably always more things to talk about. Part of it is sitting and having the box and going through and pulling a piece of paper might remind me to say something else. But I feel comfortable right now in saying that anybody watching this interview is going to know a whole lot more about what Columbia Camp was about than they knew before. And that's the main point of what we're trying to accomplish here. Dianne Taylor: There were no fences at Columbia Camp. Bob Taylor: Right. Dianne Taylor: There were no fences. Bob Taylor: Right. Bauman: Right. And these were all male prisoners, right? Bob Taylor: Oh yeah. Bauman: Yeah, well, maybe this would be a good time to end this part, and then we can look at some of the photos and have you comment some of those. Dianne Taylor: I wish that they had shared it with--Bob's mom and dad had shared it with us sooner, because there would be so many more stories and so much more understanding. Man one: Okay, so I'm going to give this. Why was it located--I mean, I know it was located for the orchard support and stuff. But why where it was? Ever hear why it was located? Bob Taylor: I don't specifically know, other than it was near Hanford. It was on the river, which helped with the infrastructure. It was away from this burgeoning 1,500 population big town of Richland. Man one: And yet kind of remote. Bob Taylor: And kind of remote. I mean, it was remote for those days. Bauman: Like you said, escaping was tricky because-- Bob Taylor: Yeah, it was far enough. Dianne Taylor: Yeah. Man one: It was Alcatraz in its own way. Dianne Taylor: Well, it was. It was, because it was--I mean, can you just imagine being out there and trying to escape? And how are you going to get water? It's the true desert. Bob Taylor: I guess the real answer is, if you realize that Hanford took everything from here north and they weren't going to go across the river, and here's Richland, and down there is Benton City, and this is the Yakima winding out there and just kind of a nice little bend in the river of the Yakima. Bauman: I love that they call it Columbia Camp even though it's not-- Dianne Taylor: Isn't that funny? Man one: I know, it's great. Close enough. Bauman: They didn't know their geography very well. Dianne Taylor: Yeah. We know it wasn't Bob's father because there were guys from Washington out here long before that. But it's kind of interesting. Man two: Well, [INAUDIBLE] will bring that light around, put it behind that camera if it'll reach. If it won't I'll bring--or just unplug it and I'll move this cord. Dianne Taylor: What you doing? Bob Taylor: Just got one minor issue. I'm just seeing if anything's-- Dianne Taylor: Yeah, this guy had no clue what it's like to be raised in the city, because he started-- Man one: The stories that you tell remind me of this other guy I knew that had grown up--his father was in the Navy. And he grew up on Midway, I think. Midway or Wake Island where it was a mile this way, and it was two miles that way, and that was it. Bob Taylor: Yeah. Man one: And as a kid, he loved it. Down at the beach, having a good time, going to the movies, all he wanted, soda pop and all that stuff. But the parents were going crazy. [LAUGHTER] Bob Taylor: Oh yeah. Dianne Taylor: Well, when we got this little note from Bob's mother--there's pictures in there of the women of the camp. And if you watched at all the Manhattan Project TV show that was on for a while, these gals are—it's the same women. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:45:43 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 189 kbps Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1944-1947 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Harold E. Taylor Doris C. Taylor Kenny Jerry Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Bob and Dianne Taylor Description An account of the resource An interview with Bob and Dianne Taylor conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 06-10-2015 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2018-31-1: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. 1955 Dam Hanford Manhattan Project Park Quonset hut Quonset huts River Road School Sun swimming Theater https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F157eb8cc8ada403d8f472d5c48788511.jpg 9d72ff516906fcb85e78925a8663e892 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F0472090f713e05ebf58314e205876e9a.mp4 218d716c6219eb2bb404d57fdee92c83 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Bauman Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Bob Bush Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Northwest Public Television | Bush_Bob </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Robert Bauman: I’m going to have you start just by saying your name, first. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Robert Bush: Okay, my name is Bob Bush. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: My name is Robert Bauman, and we're conducting this interview with Robert, or Bob, Bush on July 17 of 2013. And we're having this interview on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. And we'll be talking with Bob about his experiences working at the Hanford site. And so I'd like to start just by having you talk about how and when you arrived at Hanford. What brought you here? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: Okay. During World War II, I was overseas. My parents were in the area, both of them working. My brother was also here in Pasco High School. When I came home from the service to Southern Idaho, Korean War broke out. Wages were frozen, and so I was looking to better myself. And I applied by mail. I was interviewed by telephone. And I came up here in 1951 to the accounting department, General Electric Company. They were the sole contractor. And for 15 years, in construction and engineering accounting, which was separate from plant operations at that time. And from there, my accounting career followed its path through several successive contractors. From GE to ITT, Atlantic Richfield, to Rockwell, and finally with Westinghouse. When I retired, I was with Westinghouse for one month. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: You said your parents were here during the war. When did they come out? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: It was '43. 1943 and '44, my mother worked for the original postmaster of Richland, Ed Peddicord. And my dad was a carpenter. Built some of the first government houses called the Letter Homes. They were here about two years, I think. And then they went back to Idaho, I believe. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: Okay. And what part of Idaho? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: Twin Falls, Idaho. Where I graduated from high school. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: Okay. What were your first impressions upon arriving in the Tri-Cities? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: That's kind of interesting, Bob. Because I came up ahead of my wife and two--year-and-a-half old, and three-and-a-half-year-old sons. About two weeks ahead of them. And so I found a Liberty trailers to rent—the housing was nonexistent. And I found a Liberty trailer, which means it had no running water, no bathroom. It was like a camping trailer, basically. I sent for them. A brother-in-law who had graduated from high school went directly into the Korean War. He drove them up as far as Huntington. I went on a bus to Huntington and met them, came back. And as we came onto the Umatilla side, and I said, that's Washington. Well, there was no green and everybody was disappointed. But that's the first impression. I mean, there wasn't a bridge over the river in Umatilla. It was a ferry. So you drove around the horn at Wallula. Things were just really different. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: So you said you had a trailer. Where was-- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: In Pasco on a front yard of an old pioneer home, where Lewis Street crosses 10th. That was the end on Lewis Street at 10th. And from there west was called Indiana. And there was about three homes on there. And it just quit. And roughly across from the present day Pasco School Administration Building, which was a Sears building. Across the street there was where this home was. I mean, things have just—in the whole area—have changed so much. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: And how long did you live there then? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: Until I was called for housing in Richland, which was six months. That was in June, no air conditioning. And finally got into an apartment building, a one-bedroom before with two little boys that slept in the same crib. It was still, basically, wartime conditions. Weren't any appliances for sale and you had to stand in line to get a refrigerator. It was a different world. But we were young, so we could take it. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: [LAUGHTER] And was this in Richland then, the apartment? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: No, that was in Pasco. After that trailer, that was only about two weeks. And then we want into this apartment, the one-bedroom. Then we moved next door to a two-bedroom in a five-plex. And then in December, six months later, I got the first--I got a housing call from the housing office in Richland, which sat where the present day police station sits. And the lady offered me—she said, you could have it Saturday. It was a prefab. It had already been worn and pulled out. And I kind of hesitated. I said, I've already got something in Pasco. Well, she said, I could let you have a brand new apartment. That apartment was brand new. It was so clean. My wife, who was very fastidious, she didn't even have to clean cupboards. And the apartments have now been torn down by Kadlec for that newest building. And in fact, this morning I just went by and took a picture of Goethals Street, which is vacated. And it was quite a pleasant move to come out of a trailer into—a non-air-conditioned cinder block building apartment into a nice, brand new apartment with air conditioning, full basement, and close to work. And at that time, my office was downtown in the so-called 700 Area, which is basically where the Federal Building is--where the Bank of America is was the police station. And that's Knight Street, I believe. From there north to Swift, and from Jadwin west to Stevens where the Tastee Freeze was, that was the 700 Area confines. Probably about 22 buildings in there. The original thing prior to computers, everything was manual bookkeeping or accounting with ledgers. And they came out with a McBee Keysort cards, and it was called electronic data processing. It was spaghetti wire with holes in the boards, that type of thing. That building had to be a special airlock building. And that's the Spencer Kenney Building beside the Gesa Building. That building is built especially to house equipment. And they just went from there. And I moved around my office. And after 15 years, I went into what they call operations. I was onsite services, which—did that for 17 years. And that was probably the better part of--second better job that I had, I guess. The transportation and everything, onsite support services. The whole point there. That job took me all over the plant. I established inventories. I took some of the first inventories of construction workers' supplies and tools and shop equipment, rolling stock. My name was Mud. They thought so much of me they gave me a desk in the corner of a big lunchroom. [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: So you did work at various places then? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: Yes. Well, yes. My very first location was in North Richland, then called North Richland Camp, where the bus lot was--the maintenance shops. I'm trying to establish a point up there—what's over there today? There's a big sand dune on your left going by the automotive shops, past the bus lot, where the bus lot was. Opposite that sand dune on the other side of Stevens was a bunch of one-story temporary buildings. That was North Richland Camp. And that's where my first accounting job was there for two or three years. I had been there—I came there in June. And in January of '52, had 22 people along in my department that I worked in. I was a junior clerk at that time. Took me four years to get onto the management roles, but I did. But anyhow, in that room they came in there six months later. After I'd only been here six months, AEC, predecessor to the OA. The AEC has taken over more management, more responsibility. So we're going to be laying off a lot of people. I had only been here six months. And so others grabbed straws and went different places. I always said either I was too ignorant or lucky, I don't know what. But I just sat still and it panned out for the better. I didn't get laid off. I moved from there. But I went downtown to the 703 Building, which stood where the Federal Building is now. There's a building to the rear that the city owns called 703. That was the fourth wing. 703 was the frame construction, the three floors. And the later years, they added a fourth wing out of block building. Made it more permanent. That's why it's still standing today. Now, that was my second location. And then I got on the management role in '55, which meant I went exempt and no more pay for overtime. And went out to White Bluffs site—town site, and that's where the minor construction was located. Minor construction, it's the construction people that are specially trained in SWP, radiological construction work, as opposed to run-of-the-mill construction. And they're the ones that had never had any accounting at all for any equipment, supplies, materials or otherwise. And that's where I had the lunchroom office experience. It so happened that they established--I brought an inventory procedure and established that first inventory during a strike. We had to cut government-owned tool boxes. But still, the workers thought they were private. And we had to cut locks in order to take inventory. And then we feared for our lives when they came back. Pretty rough day sometimes. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: What timeframe would that have been you were out? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: That was 1955 to '56. A couple of years there, and then another person took over from there and I went into budgeting at that point, from accounting to budgeting. And I did that for--until 1963. And then I moved out to the so-called bus lot, which it was. 105 buses and all that. And I was out there for 17 pleasant years, budgeting, billing rate—Because we were the supplier of all plant services. So we had billing rates to the reactors, and the separations, and the fuel prep, and--whoever. The AEC, everything. We billed them, just as if we were like plumbing jobs. And that I enjoyed. That was probably my most productive period. And from similar work to that, I moved over—Let’s see, I was around when the Federal Building was built, but I didn't get into it. That was built in '69. I didn't get down there until 1980. Went down there a couple of years. And then they moved us out to Hanford Square where Battelle Boulevard intersection is. And I was there--I retired from that location in 1977. My wife and I retired the same week. I've been retired 26 years now at the end of this month. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: Was your wife working at the Hanford Site as well? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: She worked after the kids were grown, like most stay-at-home moms do. She stayed until the daughter was of age, and then she went to work for a credit union, which was the government credit union, which was merged later on with Gesa. But that was an interesting job. They worked two hours a day, three days a week. Because it was all hand done, no mechanization. And then she got a job offer from the department in the central stores and purchasing department. She worked there eight years. In 1986, the income tax law changed a lot of things for all of us, effective in 1987. It meant that partial vesting was--IRS has to rule on all things like that. And that meant that if you had 10 years to vest pensions, once you pass the 50% point, whatever the vesting period is, then you were partially vested. And so she had 8 years out of 10. So she got 80%. But she had only worked eight years, so it wasn't a very large accumulation. Because I got my full. Of course, I'd been here 37 years I think it was, however that works out. 36. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: I want to go back and ask you—when you were talking earlier about that period in '55, '56 when you were working out at White Bluffs town site. You mentioned radiological construction? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: Oh, that—those construction workers worked under what they called SWP, Special Work Permit, which meant radiological. They had to wear--the clothing was called SWP clothing then. Today, they call it something else. But they worked under those conditions, so therefore they were subject to different rules. Whereas, construction workers on brand new construction weren’t then—they didn't have any of that to contend with. But once a plant went operational, it became radiologically SWP. This is not an anti-union thing. It's just a demonstration of how things were in those days. They had some old buses that--the original buses in town were called Green Hornets. And they were small. They had chrome bars that went right across the middle of your back. And for 35 miles, that was not very comfortable. When they got the newer buses that you see today, like Greyhound has for instance, they relegated those to the construction workers at White Bluffs. Well, since GE guys worked up at White Bluffs, we had to ride those, too. So all the office workers in the warehouse--GE employees rode one bus. The electricians rode another bus. Pipe fitters rode another bus, even though there were only two or three of them. It was really a segmented-type thing. As close to anything radiological that I came to when I conducting one of those physical inventories—we would be out--all of the construction materials were stored outdoors on the ground. I mean, like stainless steel. 308 stainless steel was pretty high-priced stuff. But the sheets were stored outside on pallets. Well, one sheet is worth thousands and thousands of dollars. So we had to lay down on the ground and count the sheets to do the inventory. This one day—the only time I came close to any contamination, we went back and boarded the buses that evening from White Bluffs. And we saw the guys on the dock there chipping with a chisel and hammer. That meant they were chipping out flakes of contamination. So we asked what was going on. They said, well, we're next door to F and H Areas. And F Area had coughed out something they said. And so I said, well, my crew was outside today on the ground. And if they coughed out because all the--some construction workers could drive their cars. That's the only people. Plant operations people all had to ride buses. No parking lots. So anyhow, those cars were all impounded. Had tape around them. They couldn't go home. And some of the guys, they had to take off their shoes, leave them, and be issued safety shoes in lieu of it. And I said, well, we were on the ground, too. So they proceeded to take us all off the bus and surveyed us with a wand. And they only found a few flakes on our back. And so we were allowed to go home. But that's as close as I ever came to getting contaminated. It's still scary. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: Yeah. Obviously, Hanford, a site where security was prominent-- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: Very tight security, yeah. I was telling the young lady here that across the roadway on Stevens, as you near the 300 Area, there was a real wide barricade, probably eight lanes that you had to go through. And everybody had to stop, including buses. And the guard would get on the bus, walk down the aisle, and check every badge. And at that time, AEC had their own security airplanes. That was the purpose of the Richland Airport was for AEC security in the beginning. They had a couple Piper Cub-type airplanes. And one day we're on a bus going out to work in the morning. And all of a sudden, a plane just zoomed on by. Somebody had run the barricade. The plane goes out, lands in front of them, stops them, and that's how they got apprehended. Another incident of security, yeah, that's the subject? Many years later now, after 1963, and I'm in the transportation assignment. Airspace was off limits to all airplanes over Hanford because they had army artillery guarding it in the Cold War and all that. And a private plane had violated the space. And the AEC planes had forced it down. And once they're down, they can't ever take off. So after a week or so, they sent a lowboy trailer out there, loaded the small airplane on it, proceeded to come down what's the highway and now Stevens. And down where Stevens today, 240 and all that intersection is, there was only two lanes on the road then, not six. But at that juncture there, there was a blinking light. And they had to turn right to go to the Richland Airport. And this guy, the truck driver pulling this low-boy, he had never pulled an airplane before. And he didn't allow for that pull. Well, that blinking light clipped off a wing. And then he got time off. It was not really his fault, that pilot in the beginning. But there's a lot of—I guess full of interesting stories like that on security. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: Great. Did you have special security clearance to work at Hanford at the time? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: Which? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: Any special security clearance? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: Oh, yeah. I had Q clearance, which there's one higher than that, that's top secret. But Q clearance meant you could go into any and all areas. And because the nature of my job, I had that my whole time I was out there. Once you have it, they would tend not to take it away from you because it's quite expensive investigation to get it in the first place. I might mention something interesting in that regard. When I first came to work in 1951, why, the PSQ is Personnel Security Questionnaire. And it's about 25 pages long. And you had to memorize it, because every five years, you had to update it. Well anyhow, I filled that out, and you give references. And I have, in the Twin Falls area, a farmer that had been a neighbor farmer in Nebraska, where I was born, to my parents. I gave him as a reference because he had known me all my life. And that would be higher points. About a year or two later--I guess probably a year later I had gone back down to Twin Falls to visit the in-laws and I went and saw this farmer, family friend. The first thing he said to me, Bobby, what in the world did you do? [LAUGHTER] The FBI had come out to his farm and piled on the questions. And I hadn't told him ahead of time I'd given a reference. So they really did very, very tight security. It's probably tighter than it was when I was in the Air Corps. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: You mentioned riding a bus out to work. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: Yeah, everybody rode it, except those few construction workers in that minor construction area. They were permitted their cars. I don't know why, but no one else drove cars on the plant. Everybody rode on the bus. The bus fare was--of course, it was subsidized. It was a plant operation, like anything else is. To make the liability insurance legal, they charged a nickel each way on the bus, which later on got changed to a dollar or something. But many of the years, we'd ride the bus 30, 35, or 40 miles to work for a nickel. The nickel was just to make it legal. From those old green buses, they came up with some--I forget what they're called. More like Greyhound buses. And then in 1963, the year I went out to the transportation, they bought a fleet of Flxibles. And that's F-L-X. There's no E in it. That's the same kind of flat-nosed bus that the bus lines used today. And they were coaches, not buses. They had storage underneath. And so we had quite a suggestion system on the plant. And you would get monetary award or mention. And somebody said, well, instead of running mail carrier cars delivering mail to all the stops on the whole plant, load the mail onto the now available storage bins on these buses. And that was a pretty good suggestion award, monetarily, to somebody. And they did that. Took it out to a central mail station out there, and then dispatched it. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: You mentioned different contractors you worked for over the years-- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: Uh-huh. The story behind that for the record is that General Elec--well, DuPont built the plant. That's who my dad worked for. And GE came in '46, I believe. And they were here until the group I was in--they phased out in groups. I was the last group to go out. [COUGH] Excuse me, in 196--'66. When the GE phased out, they had a dollar a year contract. Like Henry Kaiser and rest of them did during the war, for the good of the country. But they trained an awful lot of people in the infancy field of nuclear engineering. General Electric trained all those people here and then they opened up the turnkey operations in San Jose and Japan. But anyhow, AEC was still AEC at that point. And then, their wise decision--instead of one contractor, they would have nine. And so there were--the reactors was one. Separation plant was another. Fuel preparation at 300 Area was another. The laboratories, which is today basically Battelle. Site services. The company doctors formed a foundation called Hanford Environmental Health Foundation, which is the MDs that gave the annual exams. And the computer end, it was now getting into the infancy of that, computer sciences corps, we had the first contracts on that. So all together, there were nine contractors. And the portion that I was with went to ITT. They bid, came in and bid. I helped conduct tours of the facility for the bidders. Because I knew all about it and knew the ins and outs on some of the monetary parts that their accounting people would have questions on. We'd walk through shops and all that. Well, anyhow, ITT got the site support--site services. And we had that for five years. And austerity set in in the '70s. Well, '70. They said, we got to get site services' budget down to less than $10 million. And it probably was 13 or 14, I don't remember now. So my boss and another analyst, like myself, sequestered--talk about sequester. We sequestered ourselves in the then new Federal Building for about a week. Almost 20 hours a day, whittling and whittling and working on a budget. And there was only one conclusion. We had to cut everything in half. Went through all that sweat. Went up with our president, Tom Leddy, went upstairs to an AEC finance office, presented our whole case. And the man turns around and says, well, it doesn't make any difference, Tom. Your contract's not renewed anyhow. And so now, Atlantic Richfield, an existing contractor for 200 Areas, somehow the separations plant contractor that is an oil company owned, can all of a sudden manage a site service. And so they did absorb us. But politics were still around in those days. And there were three of us analysts. One had got transferred by ITT up to the new line--newly established Distant Early Warning Line from Russia up to Alaska. So that left two of us. And we waited around. We waited around and never got an offer. And they said, no, we can do it all without you. We don't need you. How come it took so many people anyhow? On a Friday afternoon, the man that I did budgets for saw me in a restroom. He said, you got an offer yet? I said, no, no. I'm working under the table with somebody else. Well, he says, if they don't hire you, I'm going to hire you. And so he went downtown, and about 4 o'clock, I got a call from the man that told me they didn't need us. Said they'd been kind of thinking. So I went over Atlantic Richfield under those. [AUDIO CUTS OUT] And so I'm not mad, not knocking—knocking them, that's just the way things were. And then Rockwell came to town. When they laid off everybody on B-2, I'm trying to think of other--in the community, something might be of interest for the history project. Back into the '50s. Those same green buses, they had, oh, four or five of them that ran in town like a modified transit system. I don't think they had that many riders, but it did. And also, the plant buses ran what they called shuttle routes. And those buses went into Richland on probably six routes and drove around the neighborhoods and picked up workers on the three shifts. And that's why up in the ranch house district, there was the bypass you'll see between homes. The pathways that go clear through lots. Blocks were so long that they had to provide a quicker route to the bus stops. Now, those rides were free because they were shuttle buses. When you got out to the bus lot, you paid your nickel, or a pass, whatever it was. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: I wanted to ask you about accounting in terms of equipment practices. Were there a lot of changes during the time you worked at the Hanford site? Computer technology come in and change things? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: Oh, yeah. For sure. In the beginning, as I mentioned earlier, all accounting was open ledgers and hand posted. Adding machine tapes at the end of the day trying to balance them all out. And we had that until--let's see. 1970s—I think it was 1977, we got our very first taste of it. Every other desk in a group of about 20 people in cost accounting that I was in. There was cost accounting, general accounting, and so on, property management. But anyhow, we had about 20 people. Every other desk had a monitor. Well, they referred to them as a computer. But they were just the monitor. And down at the end of our building was one printer. And everything was on floppy disk. Every program was on a floppy disk. Nothing was built-in because it was just the infancy. The big computers were down in the Federal Building. And a sub-basement below the basement was specially built for that. But back to our office. Across the hall from us, we had two small computers that are--to me, they're about the size of portable sewing machines. And I can't even remember the names of them because they don't exist today but they were the computer locally. So we wanted to run our work order system, we would phone down to the guy down at the other end of the building, insert the floppy disk from work system and wait. Well, I've got somebody's inventory. You have to wait. Because there's only one place to load up down there. So finally, you would put the floppy disk in. And then, you'd run it, which meant it'd run through it and print. But then you'd have to say, now print it. And they got one printer for the whole building. And so it's pretty interesting. Whereas today, I've got a laptop that I can virtually do everything with. But we graduated from hand posted ledgers right into computers. We didn't have anything in between. All of the reports that came out, came out on--referred to as IBM runs because everything was IBM. It was on paper that's about 18 inches wide with all these little perf marks on it to feed it. And you'd get one report and it would be about that thick. It was not that much information, but it's just so much printing. It's even hard to remember after 26 years how antiquated that is compared to today. But prior to that, it wasn't even the PCs. They called everything a PC. Or, was PC compatible. Because prior to that, the only electronic data processing nickname was spaghetti wire. I'm not very conversant in it, but it was some kind of a board that had a bunch of holes in it. They put wires in it and that went to certain things. But all it did was sort things. It didn't actually calculate them. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: I wanted to ask you a little bit more about the community of Richland. What was that like in the 1950s? I know it was a government-- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: In the town? I guess I didn't cover that area. Everything—all houses were owned by government. We rented them. My wife and I and family, we came after the days of free everything. When the coal was free--all the furnaces were coal fed. Some people would convert them later on to oil. But anyhow, they were coal burning. However you got the coal, whether it was government days or you bought the coal from the courtyard, which is down at the end of what's now Wellsian Way. There was a coal yard where that lumber yard is. And that's why those railroad tracks that are abandoned and rundown, that's where the coal cars came in. And I can add something a little bit later about coal cars and the plant. But anyhow, we rented from the government. For example, that brand new apartment that I mentioned moving onto first was a two-bedroom, full basement. Steam heated because--I'll digress a little bit. All the downtown 700 Area, including the Catholic church, central church, the hospital, all 700 Area, including those new apartments, and all downtown shopping area were steam heated by a steam plant, which was located where the back door of the post office is today in that small parking lot. And that one plant furnished steam for everything. Well, back to this new apartment. The steam pipes ran through this full basement. And our kids played—there wasn't any yards. There was just apartments. And they would play in the basement because they were quite small. But they can remember today the pop, pop, pop in those steam pipes. And the rent for that two-bedroom apartment was higher than any other house in town. It was $77 a month. And the reason it was $77 instead of $70 was because it included $7 for electricity. Nobody had electricity meters yet. Even in that new place. So when they did put in electricity meters in all homes later, which had to be—during that time, the year we were there, which is December '51 to December of '52, sometime in that period of time they put the meters in. They took off $7 off the rent because now we're going to pay—and their theory is it was $5 for a one-bedroom place, whatever it was. $7 for a two-bedroom and $10 for a three-bedroom for electricity in those days. And nobody had electric heat, of course. And then, later on they put in water meters. And again, they had to come into your home, invade your home, and put in something. So it was strictly government prior to—well, another—and when I lived in the rental, if something went wrong with the plumbing, they would send out a plumber, but you paid for it, though. But later on when I went to the tall two-story, three-bedroom duplex houses, or called A houses, that was our first house after that apartment. And as I remember, I think the rent was--they had rent districts with low, medium, and high in the more desirable parts of town. And we were on Haupt Street across from uptown district where Hunt Street is and Jefferson Park. And I think our rent for that was like $47 because it was not a brand new apartment. And later on, we—I was on the housing list. And you applied and months or years later, you'd rotate up to move into a nicer place or a different location. But in the meantime, up came an F house, which is a two-story single family, kind of a Cape Cod-looking type of house. And that came up on the housing list. However, the caveat was that you had to cash out the present owner who had made some improvements. He had converted the coal to oil, they put in a clothesline, which nobody had clotheslines, and something else. So cashed him out for—I believe it was $750. And if I do that, I could have it, so I did. We lived in that place for 19 years. Our daughter grew up there and got married out of that home. And that's the only home she ever knew. [LAUGHTER] And we were there until 1977 when the real estate market in Richland was—this is community wide. The housing prices were moving 18% a year, about 1.5% a month. And I thought well, I don't need to be setting still. I mean, if I cash out here, and went on. So we sold that home. I listed it. Earl, my father, was very ill. We were going to Spokane. I listed it. A man came by, looked it out. What were you asking? I said, oh, about 17. He shook his head. And I said, too high? He says, no, 27,000. [LAUGHTER] Just to show you how bad things were. And so it sold right away. What are you going to do now? And I said, well. Would you want to try a mobile home? I know a jewel. And in those days, real estate men did not sell mobile homes. But this couple had bought their first house from him, or something. And it was somebody retiring out of postal, wanted to go back to Montana. Never smoked in it, never had any pets in it, no kids. It was the Cadillac of mobile homes. We were there two years, but that was long enough. Then we moved into the house that I'm still in. I'm widowed now for five years. The house we're in now, we've lived in that longer than in any other place. [LAUGHTER] But the community just has changed so drastically. South Richland. People say today they live in South Richland. We lived in South Richland, which was south of the downtown shopping district to the Yakima Bridge. That was South Richland. What is now South Richland out there was Kennewick Highlands. So it depends on who you're talking to today. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: Yeah. Do you remember any special community events, parades, any of those sorts of things during the '50s and '60s? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: Community events? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: Yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: Yep. Back in GE days, they had Atomic Frontier Days. And they were a big thing. Had beauty queens in it, rode in the float, and all that. Down at the—[COUGH] excuse me. For Atomic Frontier Days down at the lower end of Lee Boulevard, which is still the same shape today. They set up booths all on there. And it was a really big event. Before we had the hydro races even. People look back fondly on that. Talking about community, again, my mother, I said, worked for the post office, which—it stood on the corner of Knight Street, where it touches George Washington Way. There's some kind of a lawyer office building there today. And the old post office is the Knights of Columbus building on the bypass highway. But she would have to take the mail and go over to where the Red Lion Motel is today, at the Desert Inn, a frame building, winged out basically the same. And that was referred to as the transient quarters. And that was for upper management that were going through and it wasn't really a public motel, per se. But she would have mail for these big wigs over there. So she would have to go over there and have a badge to even go in the front door of that Desert Inn. Talking about badges, something humorous on that. We didn't wear things around our neck in the beginning because it was like a little pocket-sized bill fold. It was a little black bill that had your pass, your badge in it. And at every building you went into, you just pulled it out, flashed it to the guard. It usually was a lady security employee. There were guards in the building, but the person on the desk was a security clerk. But you'd just automatically—you’d open it like that and flag and put it back in your pocket. Every building you went into. Downtown, 700 Area, that first building I've referred to. One day I went into a restaurant and I just did that automatically [LAUGHTER] because it's just so automatic. Then they graduated to having the thing around your neck. And then also, if you worked in the outer areas, you had to wear a radiation badge in addition to your security badge. There was two types and one of them was a flat. And I don't know the difference. One's for beta and one's for alpha. I don't know. And one of them was a pencil shaped. And that's what they called it. And the other one was a flat badge, which was carried in something around your neck. And in all the areas I worked, and the places I described laying on the ground that happened and all that, my RAMs, they call it, never accumulated in my working life to be a danger. I had some, of course. Everybody does in the background. But I never accumulated to a danger point. There were people, some smart aleck people that would take their badge and hold it over a source at work so they could get some time off. Because if you got--what was the phrase? Anyhow, if they got contaminated, they put them on a beefsteak diet. And they stayed home. And they come every day and took a urine sample and all that stuff. But they had a life of riley. So that was nice. But the guys got canned that did that. But they would purposely expose their pencil so they could stay home. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: So did all employees have those, either the pencil or-- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: Only those that worked in reactor and separations areas, yeah. I mentioned these departments. Actually, the first department is Fuel Preparations Department, FPD. The present—the 300 Area--most of the buildings have now been torn down that you don't even see them there. But the north half roughly was fuels preparation department headed for the reactors. They took uranium and encapsulated it in cans, like can of peas in just so many words. And the south half of that 300 Area was a laboratory area, the predecessor of Battelle. So the fuel was prepared there. And it was machined and canned and sent as nickname slugs to the reactors. Then, the reactors loaded into all those little tubes. And then from the reactors, they come out the backside into those cooling pods and all that. And transported in casks to the 200 Areas, which are the separated area, separations. And the reactor area on the face side was not that dangerous. The 200 Areas only work on what they called the canyons, PUREX and REDOX, and those kind of buildings. But those cells were very, very hot. But you had to be measured no matter where you were. One of our site services was a decontamination laundry, called the laundry. And all clothing--I mentioned to you before SWP. Well, SWP, radiologic exposure employees wore whites. Carpenters and truck drivers and all that that didn't work around reactors wore blues. And so they were sorted. And we had different billing rates for that laundry because the blues only had to be laundered and dried. Whereas the others had to be laundered, dried, and decontaminated, checked in separate washing machines. And then workers wore—in the beginning, wore World War II-style gas masks for our air supply before they invented a moon-type suit. [LAUGHTER] But they wore gas masks. And the mask would come back to this mask station, which was part of the laundry. And they took the masks, and they'd take away the cartridge. They'd put the mask in dishwasher machines, in racks. That's how they would wash them. And then they would get them a new filter and package them up. Sanitize them and package them up like medical supplies would be in. I can't think of any other unusual operation out there like that. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: I want to change gears just a little bit. President Kennedy visited the site in 1963. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: Yep, 1963. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: I was wondering-- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: When they did that, they let all the schools out. And for the first time, non-workers were allowed to go in cars out there. It was a grand traffic jam, but it was quite a deal. And he landed his Air Force plane up at Moses Lake—at Larsen airbase at Ephrata, whichever you want to call it. And then helicoptered. And of course, like it is today, there were three or four helicopters. And you don't know which one he's on and all that bit. And here, everyone is gathered out the N Reactor area, which is a dual-purpose reactor. They captured the heat from the reactor, put it through a pipe through a fence to the predecessor to Energy Northwest, which was called Whoops. This was a big deal, a dual-purpose reactor. And N stood for new reactor, really. Anyhow, he comes in and they got a low-boy trailer. They fixed up down in the shops where I worked—my office was. And then built a podium just precisely for the President with him emblem and the whole bit. So I was privy to get to see some things like that. But anyhow, that was the stage. And it was a long low-boy, so it accommodated all the senators and all the local—Sam Volpentest, the guy credited with HAMMER, those type of people. Glenn Lee from the Tri-City Herald, you name it. So the helicopter comes in, blows dust over everybody. But anyhow, my wife and kids and all schools were brought out there. And I don't know how many thousand people were out there in the desert. And you could see President Kennedy. He got up on the stage. You get close enough, you could get pictures. Then, that same year in November, he got assassinated. So that was a busy year. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: Do you remember any other special events with dignitaries like that? Or other-- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: Well, I could go way back to World War II. I wasn't here, but I have a family connection on it. All over United States, they had war bond drives for various reasons to help. Build a ship, build an airplane. The one that happened here is not the only one. But they took so much money out of all the paycheck of Hanford workers, which included my dad as a carpenter. And the money they collected bought the B-17 Bomber, which was named Day's Pay. And that bomber—they had a bomber out here, a B-17, so that people could see it, but it wasn't the same one. On the Richland High School wall there's a mural. And that's a rendition by a famous artist of Day's Pay in formation. And so I can say that my parents contributed to that. And that's the story behind that one bomber. Every worker out there, construction or operations, they donated a day's pay. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: I wonder, what was the most challenging part of your job working at the Hanford site? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: As an accounting person, my most challenging part was learning government-ese. [LAUGHTER] How to deal. And in that vein, that took a long time. But once you learn it, there is a way in the US government, period. As I'm sure there is in certain corporations. Later on, when I mentioned that I went down to the federal building for my--finally got located in that building, there was another fellow and I were old timers in accounting. And that year, they had five college grads, accounting grads come in. They hired five at one time. And they ran them by Marv and I for exposure. This is how things are done. This is how the contacts are. And our basic job was to squire these young fellows around and introduce them to certain counterparts and now DOE. Now, this is how you make appointments with them. This is what you do. This is what you never do. And likewise, with senior management. And it paid off because of those five, all four of them became managers or supervisors, and one of them became my manager within two years. Today, that same man is the comptroller at Savannah River Plant. [LAUGHTER] And so I like to feel that I contributed to them being—partially to them being successful. And so that's a reward. But probably the most difficult thing coming from a private—I worked for Colorado Mill and Elevator, which means I worked at a flour mill district office as a bookkeeper. And that's a small town deal in Twin Falls. To come to work for the government where some of your family despises you because you work for the government, but you had to fight that as well as learn how the government operates. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: You mentioned earlier, you were talking about coal being used for heat in Richland. You also said you wanted to talk about coal fires going up at the site. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: Oh, what? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: Coal fires? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: Oh, yeah. Interestingly, the midway power station, substation at midway, is one of the reasons they built Hanford where they did because the Grand Coulee Dam had just been completed and an electricity producer—a major producer. And they put the midway substation down there. That basically was built to furnish huge amounts of power to Hanford, for the reactors, everything. Which in total—because I processed vouchers, I know it was 32 megs. Which today doesn't sound like much, but the whole plant bill was 32 megs when everything was operating. But if the power were interrupted, they had to have a backup. So every area had a huge diesel-powered--like water pumps, where they could pump the water from the river instead of by electrically. They had to be able to pump it because it was critical. Because all the water for the whole plant was taken in at intake water plants near the reactors along the river. The 200 Area water is piped to them in a huge line as raw water until it gets to their place. The backup is these coal-fired steam plants, is what I was trying to say. It got about 30-some cars of coal a day rolled through Richland past the cemetery. In the beginning, the railroad came down from the north, from Vantage area down along the Columbia River. There's a railroad bridge across the river, Beverly I think it is. And it came down to below the 100-B Reactor area. That's where the line ended. And then a plant had its own railway incidentally. It had a 285 mile-long rail line, high line and low line. Then, they built--in 1950, the year before I came, they built the line that we see today that comes from Columbia Center into Richland, by the cemetery. And it ends at the old bus lot area, where that railroad car Columbia Center into Richland, by the cemetery. And it ends at the old bus lot area, where that railroad car rebuilding outfit is now, there is a roundhouse that it's rectangular in shape. But some 30 cars of coal a day came in here to supply because those plants were—they actually operated the steam plants. They didn't start them up from cold. They just ran constantly. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: I wonder if you could provide sort of an overall assessment of how Hanford was as a place to work. What was it like as a place to work? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: It was a great place for me. I came out of an area that was the agriculturally-oriented. And the Korean War started. Wages were frozen, you weren't going to go anywhere. I came up here and I got a new start, like pioneers did. I visualized that's what farming pioneers did the same thing. And it opened up a whole field for me, a big corporate field. And it's just been a great place to work. And it was not dangerous to me. I'm not afraid to drink the water here. I'm asked by a nephew in Hermiston constantly, how do you drink the water? And I said, well, it comes out of the river. How can it come out of the river and that plume’s out there? There's so many false stories around here. But working at Hanford, I think, by and large, almost all employees would tell you the same thing. It was a great place to work. The pay was decent. Maybe you didn't get rich, but it was decent. It's in a nice area to live in. When we came back in the '50s, or in the '40s, and before that even of course, shopping was pretty much nonexistent. They went to Yakima, or Spokane, or Walla Walla. That I didn’t—we didn't experience that too much by 1951 because by that time, the Uptown shopping district was built. And there was a men's store. And there was four women's stores. Because GE was the prime contractor, there was an appliance dealer that handled GE-Hotpoint appliances. We got employee discounts when we worked for GE. We also got 10% gasoline discount when we worked for Atlantic Richfield Hanford. But we just grew with the times. And it's just such an entirely different area now than it was. Just the world is different, too. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: Is there anything that I haven't asked you about? Is there anything you would like to talk about that we haven't talked about yet? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: Now really, work-wise at Hanford, I think I’ve pretty well-covered it. I'll repeat myself. My first 15 years was construction engineering accounting, which is an entirely different field than operations accounting. Operations accounting concerns itself with the reactors and separations and the site services that support them. But I learned a lot by working at Hanford. My family, three adult children live here, are retired here. My oldest son went on Medicare this year. [LAUGHTER] And that kind of puts you in your place quickly. But it's been a good enough place that they stayed in the area. And of the six granddaughters, grandchildren, four of them are in the area. And that's kind of characteristic with a lot of the Tri-City families. They stay or come back. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: Well, Bob, I'd like to thank you very much for coming and talking to us today. I really appreciate it. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: It's been my pleasure. </div> Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri-Cities Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 1:02:19 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 3068 kbps Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1951-2013 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1951-1977 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Volpentest, Sam Kaiser, Henry Leddy, Tom Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview General Electric Atlantic Richfield Rockwell Westinghouse 703 Building F Area H Area 300 Area 200 Area 700 Area WPPSS HAMMER N Reactor 100-B Reactor Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Bob Bush Description An account of the resource Bob Bush moved to Pasco, Washington in 1951 and later moved to Richland, Washington. Bob worked on the Hanford Site from 1951-1987. An interview conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Pasco (Wash.) Grand Coulee Dam (Wash.) Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2016-05-17: Metadata v1 created – [J.G.] Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 7/7/2013 100-B Reactor 200 Area 300 Area 700 Area 703 Building DuPont F Area General Electric H Area Henry Kaiser Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, 1917-1963 N Reactor Richland (Wash.) Washington Public Power Supply System https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F4550fdc413dc83be66111b1f46565f48.JPG cdadd3e83c0c3187276f5e7e8afc64cf https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F1583c61c6744d42545aae8cd7b5f497a.mov 045fb4b829211772af34664992cc239c Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Bauman Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Bob Bush Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Northwest Public Television | Bush_Bob Robert Bauman: I’m going to have you start just by saying your name, first. Robert Bush: Okay, my name is Bob Bush. Bauman: My name is Robert Bauman, and we're conducting this interview with Robert, or Bob, Bush on July 17 of 2013. And we're having this interview on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. And we'll be talking with Bob about his experiences working at the Hanford site. And so I'd like to start just by having you talk about how and when you arrived at Hanford. What brought you here? Bush: Okay. During World War II, I was overseas. My parents were in the area, both of them working. My brother was also here in Pasco High School. When I came home from the service to Southern Idaho, Korean War broke out. Wages were frozen, and so I was looking to better myself. And I applied by mail. I was interviewed by telephone. And I came up here in 1951 to the accounting department, General Electric Company. They were the sole contractor. And for 15 years, in construction and engineering accounting, which was separate from plant operations at that time. And from there, my accounting career followed its path through several successive contractors. From GE to ITT, Atlantic Richfield, to Rockwell, and finally with Westinghouse. When I retired, I was with Westinghouse for one month. Bauman: You said your parents were here during the war. When did they come out? Bush: It was '43. 1943 and '44, my mother worked for the original postmaster of Richland, Ed Peddicord. And my dad was a carpenter. Built some of the first government houses called the Letter Homes. They were here about two years, I think. And then they went back to Idaho, I believe. Bauman: Okay. And what part of Idaho? Bush: Twin Falls, Idaho. Where I graduated from high school. Bauman: Okay. What were your first impressions upon arriving in the Tri-Cities? Bush: That's kind of interesting, Bob. Because I came up ahead of my wife and two--year-and-a-half old, and three-and-a-half-year-old sons. About two weeks ahead of them. And so I found a Liberty trailers to rent—the housing was nonexistent. And I found a Liberty trailer, which means it had no running water, no bathroom. It was like a camping trailer, basically. I sent for them. A brother-in-law who had graduated from high school went directly into the Korean War. He drove them up as far as Huntington. I went on a bus to Huntington and met them, came back. And as we came onto the Umatilla side, and I said, that's Washington. Well, there was no green and everybody was disappointed. But that's the first impression. I mean, there wasn't a bridge over the river in Umatilla. It was a ferry. So you drove around the horn at Wallula. Things were just really different. Bauman: So you said you had a trailer. Where was-- Bush: In Pasco on a front yard of an old pioneer home, where Lewis Street crosses 10th. That was the end on Lewis Street at 10th. And from there west was called Indiana. And there was about three homes on there. And it just quit. And roughly across from the present day Pasco School Administration Building, which was a Sears building. Across the street there was where this home was. I mean, things have just—in the whole area—have changed so much. Bauman: And how long did you live there then? Bush: Until I was called for housing in Richland, which was six months. That was in June, no air conditioning. And finally got into an apartment building, a one-bedroom before with two little boys that slept in the same crib. It was still, basically, wartime conditions. Weren't any appliances for sale and you had to stand in line to get a refrigerator. It was a different world. But we were young, so we could take it. Bauman: [LAUGHTER] And was this in Richland then, the apartment? Bush: No, that was in Pasco. After that trailer, that was only about two weeks. And then we want into this apartment, the one-bedroom. Then we moved next door to a two-bedroom in a five-plex. And then in December, six months later, I got the first--I got a housing call from the housing office in Richland, which sat where the present day police station sits. And the lady offered me—she said, you could have it Saturday. It was a prefab. It had already been worn and pulled out. And I kind of hesitated. I said, I've already got something in Pasco. Well, she said, I could let you have a brand new apartment. That apartment was brand new. It was so clean. My wife, who was very fastidious, she didn't even have to clean cupboards. And the apartments have now been torn down by Kadlec for that newest building. And in fact, this morning I just went by and took a picture of Goethals Street, which is vacated. And it was quite a pleasant move to come out of a trailer into—a non-air-conditioned cinder block building apartment into a nice, brand new apartment with air conditioning, full basement, and close to work. And at that time, my office was downtown in the so-called 700 Area, which is basically where the Federal Building is--where the Bank of America is was the police station. And that's Knight Street, I believe. From there north to Swift, and from Jadwin west to Stevens where the Tastee Freeze was, that was the 700 Area confines. Probably about 22 buildings in there. The original thing prior to computers, everything was manual bookkeeping or accounting with ledgers. And they came out with a McBee Keysort cards, and it was called electronic data processing. It was spaghetti wire with holes in the boards, that type of thing. That building had to be a special airlock building. And that's the Spencer Kenney Building beside the Gesa Building. That building is built especially to house equipment. And they just went from there. And I moved around my office. And after 15 years, I went into what they call operations. I was onsite services, which—did that for 17 years. And that was probably the better part of--second better job that I had, I guess. The transportation and everything, onsite support services. The whole point there. That job took me all over the plant. I established inventories. I took some of the first inventories of construction workers' supplies and tools and shop equipment, rolling stock. My name was Mud. They thought so much of me they gave me a desk in the corner of a big lunchroom. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: So you did work at various places then? Bush: Yes. Well, yes. My very first location was in North Richland, then called North Richland Camp, where the bus lot was--the maintenance shops. I'm trying to establish a point up there—what's over there today? There's a big sand dune on your left going by the automotive shops, past the bus lot, where the bus lot was. Opposite that sand dune on the other side of Stevens was a bunch of one-story temporary buildings. That was North Richland Camp. And that's where my first accounting job was there for two or three years. I had been there—I came there in June. And in January of '52, had 22 people along in my department that I worked in. I was a junior clerk at that time. Took me four years to get onto the management roles, but I did. But anyhow, in that room they came in there six months later. After I'd only been here six months, AEC, predecessor to the OA. The AEC has taken over more management, more responsibility. So we're going to be laying off a lot of people. I had only been here six months. And so others grabbed straws and went different places. I always said either I was too ignorant or lucky, I don't know what. But I just sat still and it panned out for the better. I didn't get laid off. I moved from there. But I went downtown to the 703 Building, which stood where the Federal Building is now. There's a building to the rear that the city owns called 703. That was the fourth wing. 703 was the frame construction, the three floors. And the later years, they added a fourth wing out of block building. Made it more permanent. That's why it's still standing today. Now, that was my second location. And then I got on the management role in '55, which meant I went exempt and no more pay for overtime. And went out to White Bluffs site—town site, and that's where the minor construction was located. Minor construction, it's the construction people that are specially trained in SWP, radiological construction work, as opposed to run-of-the-mill construction. And they're the ones that had never had any accounting at all for any equipment, supplies, materials or otherwise. And that's where I had the lunchroom office experience. It so happened that they established--I brought an inventory procedure and established that first inventory during a strike. We had to cut government-owned tool boxes. But still, the workers thought they were private. And we had to cut locks in order to take inventory. And then we feared for our lives when they came back. Pretty rough day sometimes. Bauman: What timeframe would that have been you were out? Bush: That was 1955 to '56. A couple of years there, and then another person took over from there and I went into budgeting at that point, from accounting to budgeting. And I did that for--until 1963. And then I moved out to the so-called bus lot, which it was. 105 buses and all that. And I was out there for 17 pleasant years, budgeting, billing rate—Because we were the supplier of all plant services. So we had billing rates to the reactors, and the separations, and the fuel prep, and--whoever. The AEC, everything. We billed them, just as if we were like plumbing jobs. And that I enjoyed. That was probably my most productive period. And from similar work to that, I moved over—Let’s see, I was around when the Federal Building was built, but I didn't get into it. That was built in '69. I didn't get down there until 1980. Went down there a couple of years. And then they moved us out to Hanford Square where Battelle Boulevard intersection is. And I was there--I retired from that location in 1977. My wife and I retired the same week. I've been retired 26 years now at the end of this month. Bauman: Was your wife working at the Hanford Site as well? Bush: She worked after the kids were grown, like most stay-at-home moms do. She stayed until the daughter was of age, and then she went to work for a credit union, which was the government credit union, which was merged later on with Gesa. But that was an interesting job. They worked two hours a day, three days a week. Because it was all hand done, no mechanization. And then she got a job offer from the department in the central stores and purchasing department. She worked there eight years. In 1986, the income tax law changed a lot of things for all of us, effective in 1987. It meant that partial vesting was--IRS has to rule on all things like that. And that meant that if you had 10 years to vest pensions, once you pass the 50% point, whatever the vesting period is, then you were partially vested. And so she had 8 years out of 10. So she got 80%. But she had only worked eight years, so it wasn't a very large accumulation. Because I got my full. Of course, I'd been here 37 years I think it was, however that works out. 36. Bauman: I want to go back and ask you—when you were talking earlier about that period in '55, '56 when you were working out at White Bluffs town site. You mentioned radiological construction? Bush: Oh, that—those construction workers worked under what they called SWP, Special Work Permit, which meant radiological. They had to wear--the clothing was called SWP clothing then. Today, they call it something else. But they worked under those conditions, so therefore they were subject to different rules. Whereas, construction workers on brand new construction weren’t then—they didn't have any of that to contend with. But once a plant went operational, it became radiologically SWP. This is not an anti-union thing. It's just a demonstration of how things were in those days. They had some old buses that--the original buses in town were called Green Hornets. And they were small. They had chrome bars that went right across the middle of your back. And for 35 miles, that was not very comfortable. When they got the newer buses that you see today, like Greyhound has for instance, they relegated those to the construction workers at White Bluffs. Well, since GE guys worked up at White Bluffs, we had to ride those, too. So all the office workers in the warehouse--GE employees rode one bus. The electricians rode another bus. Pipe fitters rode another bus, even though there were only two or three of them. It was really a segmented-type thing. As close to anything radiological that I came to when I conducting one of those physical inventories—we would be out--all of the construction materials were stored outdoors on the ground. I mean, like stainless steel. 308 stainless steel was pretty high-priced stuff. But the sheets were stored outside on pallets. Well, one sheet is worth thousands and thousands of dollars. So we had to lay down on the ground and count the sheets to do the inventory. This one day—the only time I came close to any contamination, we went back and boarded the buses that evening from White Bluffs. And we saw the guys on the dock there chipping with a chisel and hammer. That meant they were chipping out flakes of contamination. So we asked what was going on. They said, well, we're next door to F and H Areas. And F Area had coughed out something they said. And so I said, well, my crew was outside today on the ground. And if they coughed out because all the--some construction workers could drive their cars. That's the only people. Plant operations people all had to ride buses. No parking lots. So anyhow, those cars were all impounded. Had tape around them. They couldn't go home. And some of the guys, they had to take off their shoes, leave them, and be issued safety shoes in lieu of it. And I said, well, we were on the ground, too. So they proceeded to take us all off the bus and surveyed us with a wand. And they only found a few flakes on our back. And so we were allowed to go home. But that's as close as I ever came to getting contaminated. It's still scary. Bauman: Yeah. Obviously, Hanford, a site where security was prominent-- Bush: Very tight security, yeah. I was telling the young lady here that across the roadway on Stevens, as you near the 300 Area, there was a real wide barricade, probably eight lanes that you had to go through. And everybody had to stop, including buses. And the guard would get on the bus, walk down the aisle, and check every badge. And at that time, AEC had their own security airplanes. That was the purpose of the Richland Airport was for AEC security in the beginning. They had a couple Piper Cub-type airplanes. And one day we're on a bus going out to work in the morning. And all of a sudden, a plane just zoomed on by. Somebody had run the barricade. The plane goes out, lands in front of them, stops them, and that's how they got apprehended. Another incident of security, yeah, that's the subject? Many years later now, after 1963, and I'm in the transportation assignment. Airspace was off limits to all airplanes over Hanford because they had army artillery guarding it in the Cold War and all that. And a private plane had violated the space. And the AEC planes had forced it down. And once they're down, they can't ever take off. So after a week or so, they sent a lowboy trailer out there, loaded the small airplane on it, proceeded to come down what's the highway and now Stevens. And down where Stevens today, 240 and all that intersection is, there was only two lanes on the road then, not six. But at that juncture there, there was a blinking light. And they had to turn right to go to the Richland Airport. And this guy, the truck driver pulling this low-boy, he had never pulled an airplane before. And he didn't allow for that pull. Well, that blinking light clipped off a wing. And then he got time off. It was not really his fault, that pilot in the beginning. But there's a lot of—I guess full of interesting stories like that on security. Bauman: Great. Did you have special security clearance to work at Hanford at the time? Bush: Which? Bauman: Any special security clearance? Bush: Oh, yeah. I had Q clearance, which there's one higher than that, that's top secret. But Q clearance meant you could go into any and all areas. And because the nature of my job, I had that my whole time I was out there. Once you have it, they would tend not to take it away from you because it's quite expensive investigation to get it in the first place. I might mention something interesting in that regard. When I first came to work in 1951, why, the PSQ is Personnel Security Questionnaire. And it's about 25 pages long. And you had to memorize it, because every five years, you had to update it. Well anyhow, I filled that out, and you give references. And I have, in the Twin Falls area, a farmer that had been a neighbor farmer in Nebraska, where I was born, to my parents. I gave him as a reference because he had known me all my life. And that would be higher points. About a year or two later--I guess probably a year later I had gone back down to Twin Falls to visit the in-laws and I went and saw this farmer, family friend. The first thing he said to me, Bobby, what in the world did you do? [LAUGHTER] The FBI had come out to his farm and piled on the questions. And I hadn't told him ahead of time I'd given a reference. So they really did very, very tight security. It's probably tighter than it was when I was in the Air Corps. Bauman: You mentioned riding a bus out to work. Bush: Yeah, everybody rode it, except those few construction workers in that minor construction area. They were permitted their cars. I don't know why, but no one else drove cars on the plant. Everybody rode on the bus. The bus fare was--of course, it was subsidized. It was a plant operation, like anything else is. To make the liability insurance legal, they charged a nickel each way on the bus, which later on got changed to a dollar or something. But many of the years, we'd ride the bus 30, 35, or 40 miles to work for a nickel. The nickel was just to make it legal. From those old green buses, they came up with some--I forget what they're called. More like Greyhound buses. And then in 1963, the year I went out to the transportation, they bought a fleet of Flxibles. And that's F-L-X. There's no E in it. That's the same kind of flat-nosed bus that the bus lines used today. And they were coaches, not buses. They had storage underneath. And so we had quite a suggestion system on the plant. And you would get monetary award or mention. And somebody said, well, instead of running mail carrier cars delivering mail to all the stops on the whole plant, load the mail onto the now available storage bins on these buses. And that was a pretty good suggestion award, monetarily, to somebody. And they did that. Took it out to a central mail station out there, and then dispatched it. Bauman: You mentioned different contractors you worked for over the years-- Bush: Uh-huh. The story behind that for the record is that General Elec--well, DuPont built the plant. That's who my dad worked for. And GE came in '46, I believe. And they were here until the group I was in--they phased out in groups. I was the last group to go out. [COUGH] Excuse me, in 196--'66. When the GE phased out, they had a dollar a year contract. Like Henry Kaiser and rest of them did during the war, for the good of the country. But they trained an awful lot of people in the infancy field of nuclear engineering. General Electric trained all those people here and then they opened up the turnkey operations in San Jose and Japan. But anyhow, AEC was still AEC at that point. And then, their wise decision--instead of one contractor, they would have nine. And so there were--the reactors was one. Separation plant was another. Fuel preparation at 300 Area was another. The laboratories, which is today basically Battelle. Site services. The company doctors formed a foundation called Hanford Environmental Health Foundation, which is the MDs that gave the annual exams. And the computer end, it was now getting into the infancy of that, computer sciences corps, we had the first contracts on that. So all together, there were nine contractors. And the portion that I was with went to ITT. They bid, came in and bid. I helped conduct tours of the facility for the bidders. Because I knew all about it and knew the ins and outs on some of the monetary parts that their accounting people would have questions on. We'd walk through shops and all that. Well, anyhow, ITT got the site support--site services. And we had that for five years. And austerity set in in the '70s. Well, '70. They said, we got to get site services' budget down to less than $10 million. And it probably was 13 or 14, I don't remember now. So my boss and another analyst, like myself, sequestered--talk about sequester. We sequestered ourselves in the then new Federal Building for about a week. Almost 20 hours a day, whittling and whittling and working on a budget. And there was only one conclusion. We had to cut everything in half. Went through all that sweat. Went up with our president, Tom Leddy, went upstairs to an AEC finance office, presented our whole case. And the man turns around and says, well, it doesn't make any difference, Tom. Your contract's not renewed anyhow. And so now, Atlantic Richfield, an existing contractor for 200 Areas, somehow the separations plant contractor that is an oil company owned, can all of a sudden manage a site service. And so they did absorb us. But politics were still around in those days. And there were three of us analysts. One had got transferred by ITT up to the new line--newly established Distant Early Warning Line from Russia up to Alaska. So that left two of us. And we waited around. We waited around and never got an offer. And they said, no, we can do it all without you. We don't need you. How come it took so many people anyhow? On a Friday afternoon, the man that I did budgets for saw me in a restroom. He said, you got an offer yet? I said, no, no. I'm working under the table with somebody else. Well, he says, if they don't hire you, I'm going to hire you. And so he went downtown, and about 4 o'clock, I got a call from the man that told me they didn't need us. Said they'd been kind of thinking. So I went over Atlantic Richfield under those. [AUDIO CUTS OUT] And so I'm not mad, not knocking—knocking them, that's just the way things were. And then Rockwell came to town. When they laid off everybody on B-2, I'm trying to think of other--in the community, something might be of interest for the history project. Back into the '50s. Those same green buses, they had, oh, four or five of them that ran in town like a modified transit system. I don't think they had that many riders, but it did. And also, the plant buses ran what they called shuttle routes. And those buses went into Richland on probably six routes and drove around the neighborhoods and picked up workers on the three shifts. And that's why up in the ranch house district, there was the bypass you'll see between homes. The pathways that go clear through lots. Blocks were so long that they had to provide a quicker route to the bus stops. Now, those rides were free because they were shuttle buses. When you got out to the bus lot, you paid your nickel, or a pass, whatever it was. Bauman: I wanted to ask you about accounting in terms of equipment practices. Were there a lot of changes during the time you worked at the Hanford site? Computer technology come in and change things? Bush: Oh, yeah. For sure. In the beginning, as I mentioned earlier, all accounting was open ledgers and hand posted. Adding machine tapes at the end of the day trying to balance them all out. And we had that until--let's see. 1970s—I think it was 1977, we got our very first taste of it. Every other desk in a group of about 20 people in cost accounting that I was in. There was cost accounting, general accounting, and so on, property management. But anyhow, we had about 20 people. Every other desk had a monitor. Well, they referred to them as a computer. But they were just the monitor. And down at the end of our building was one printer. And everything was on floppy disk. Every program was on a floppy disk. Nothing was built-in because it was just the infancy. The big computers were down in the Federal Building. And a sub-basement below the basement was specially built for that. But back to our office. Across the hall from us, we had two small computers that are--to me, they're about the size of portable sewing machines. And I can't even remember the names of them because they don't exist today but they were the computer locally. So we wanted to run our work order system, we would phone down to the guy down at the other end of the building, insert the floppy disk from work system and wait. Well, I've got somebody's inventory. You have to wait. Because there's only one place to load up down there. So finally, you would put the floppy disk in. And then, you'd run it, which meant it'd run through it and print. But then you'd have to say, now print it. And they got one printer for the whole building. And so it's pretty interesting. Whereas today, I've got a laptop that I can virtually do everything with. But we graduated from hand posted ledgers right into computers. We didn't have anything in between. All of the reports that came out, came out on--referred to as IBM runs because everything was IBM. It was on paper that's about 18 inches wide with all these little perf marks on it to feed it. And you'd get one report and it would be about that thick. It was not that much information, but it's just so much printing. It's even hard to remember after 26 years how antiquated that is compared to today. But prior to that, it wasn't even the PCs. They called everything a PC. Or, was PC compatible. Because prior to that, the only electronic data processing nickname was spaghetti wire. I'm not very conversant in it, but it was some kind of a board that had a bunch of holes in it. They put wires in it and that went to certain things. But all it did was sort things. It didn't actually calculate them. Bauman: I wanted to ask you a little bit more about the community of Richland. What was that like in the 1950s? I know it was a government-- Bush: In the town? I guess I didn't cover that area. Everything—all houses were owned by government. We rented them. My wife and I and family, we came after the days of free everything. When the coal was free--all the furnaces were coal fed. Some people would convert them later on to oil. But anyhow, they were coal burning. However you got the coal, whether it was government days or you bought the coal from the courtyard, which is down at the end of what's now Wellsian Way. There was a coal yard where that lumber yard is. And that's why those railroad tracks that are abandoned and rundown, that's where the coal cars came in. And I can add something a little bit later about coal cars and the plant. But anyhow, we rented from the government. For example, that brand new apartment that I mentioned moving onto first was a two-bedroom, full basement. Steam heated because--I'll digress a little bit. All the downtown 700 Area, including the Catholic church, central church, the hospital, all 700 Area, including those new apartments, and all downtown shopping area were steam heated by a steam plant, which was located where the back door of the post office is today in that small parking lot. And that one plant furnished steam for everything. Well, back to this new apartment. The steam pipes ran through this full basement. And our kids played—there wasn't any yards. There was just apartments. And they would play in the basement because they were quite small. But they can remember today the pop, pop, pop in those steam pipes. And the rent for that two-bedroom apartment was higher than any other house in town. It was $77 a month. And the reason it was $77 instead of $70 was because it included $7 for electricity. Nobody had electricity meters yet. Even in that new place. So when they did put in electricity meters in all homes later, which had to be—during that time, the year we were there, which is December '51 to December of '52, sometime in that period of time they put the meters in. They took off $7 off the rent because now we're going to pay—and their theory is it was $5 for a one-bedroom place, whatever it was. $7 for a two-bedroom and $10 for a three-bedroom for electricity in those days. And nobody had electric heat, of course. And then, later on they put in water meters. And again, they had to come into your home, invade your home, and put in something. So it was strictly government prior to—well, another—and when I lived in the rental, if something went wrong with the plumbing, they would send out a plumber, but you paid for it, though. But later on when I went to the tall two-story, three-bedroom duplex houses, or called A houses, that was our first house after that apartment. And as I remember, I think the rent was--they had rent districts with low, medium, and high in the more desirable parts of town. And we were on Hop Street across from uptown district where Hunt Street is and Jefferson Park. And I think our rent for that was like $47 because it was not a brand new apartment. And later on, we—I was on the housing list. And you applied and months or years later, you'd rotate up to move into a nicer place or a different location. But in the meantime, up came an F house, which is a two-story single family, kind of a Cape Cod-looking type of house. And that came up on the housing list. However, the caveat was that you had to cash out the present owner who had made some improvements. He had converted the coal to oil, they put in a clothesline, which nobody had clotheslines, and something else. So cashed him out for—I believe it was $750. And if I do that, I could have it, so I did. We lived in that place for 19 years. Our daughter grew up there and got married out of that home. And that's the only home she ever knew. [LAUGHTER] And we were there until 1977 when the real estate market in Richland was—this is community wide. The housing prices were moving 18% a year, about 1.5% a month. And I thought well, I don't need to be setting still. I mean, if I cash out here, and went on. So we sold that home. I listed it. Calder, my father, was very ill. We were going to Spokane. I listed it. A man came by, looked it out. What were you asking? I said, oh, about 17. He shook his head. And I said, too high? He says, no, 27,000. [LAUGHTER] Just to show you how bad things were. And so it sold right away. What are you going to do now? And I said, well. Would you want to try a mobile home? I know a jewel. And in those days, real estate men did not sell mobile homes. But this couple had bought their first house from him, or something. And it was somebody retiring out of postal, wanted to go back to Montana. Never smoked in it, never had any pets in it, no kids. It was the Cadillac of mobile homes. We were there two years, but that was long enough. Then we moved into the house that I'm still in. I'm widowed now for five years. The house we're in now, we've lived in that longer than in any other place. [LAUGHTER] But the community just has changed so drastically. South Richland. People say today they live in South Richland. We lived in South Richland, which was south of the downtown shopping district to the Yakima Bridge. That was South Richland. What is now South Richland out there was Kennewick Highlands. So it depends on who you're talking to today. Bauman: Yeah. Do you remember any special community events, parades, any of those sorts of things during the '50s and '60s? Bush: Community events? Bauman: Yeah. Bush: Yep. Back in GE days, they had Atomic Frontier Days. And they were a big thing. Had beauty queens in it, rode in the float, and all that. Down at the—[COUGH] excuse me. For Atomic Frontier Days down at the lower end of Lee Boulevard, which is still the same shape today. They set up booths all on there. And it was a really big event. Before we had the hydro races even. People look back fondly on that. Talking about community, again, my mother, I said, worked for the post office, which—it stood on the corner of Knight Street, where it touches George Washington Way. There's some kind of a lawyer office building there today. And the old post office is the Knights of Columbus building on the bypass highway. But she would have to take the mail and go over to where the Red Lion Motel is today, at the Desert Inn, a frame building, winged out basically the same. And that was referred to as the transient quarters. And that was for upper management that were going through and it wasn't really a public motel, per se. But she would have mail for these big wigs over there. So she would have to go over there and have a badge to even go in the front door of that Desert Inn. Talking about badges, something humorous on that. We didn't wear things around our neck in the beginning because it was like a little pocket-sized bill fold. It was a little black bill that had your pass, your badge in it. And at every building you went into, you just pulled it out, flashed it to the guard. It usually was a lady security employee. There were guards in the building, but the person on the desk was a security clerk. But you'd just automatically—you’d open it like that and flag and put it back in your pocket. Every building you went into. Downtown, 700 Area, that first building I've referred to. One day I went into a restaurant and I just did that automatically [LAUGHTER] because it's just so automatic. Then they graduated to having the thing around your neck. And then also, if you worked in the outer areas, you had to wear a radiation badge in addition to your security badge. There was two types and one of them was a flat. And I don't know the difference. One's for beta and one's for alpha. I don't know. And one of them was a pencil shaped. And that's what they called it. And the other one was a flat badge, which was carried in something around your neck. And in all the areas I worked, and the places I described laying on the ground that happened and all that, my RAMs, they call it, never accumulated in my working life to be a danger. I had some, of course. Everybody does in the background. But I never accumulated to a danger point. There were people, some smart aleck people that would take their badge and hold it over a source at work so they could get some time off. Because if you got--what was the phrase? Anyhow, if they got contaminated, they put them on a beefsteak diet. And they stayed home. And they come every day and took a urine sample and all that stuff. But they had a life of riley. So that was nice. But the guys got canned that did that. But they would purposely expose their pencil so they could stay home. Bauman: So did all employees have those, either the pencil or-- Bush: Only those that worked in reactor and separations areas, yeah. I mentioned these departments. Actually, the first department is Fuel Preparations Department, FPD. The present—the 300 Area--most of the buildings have now been torn down that you don't even see them there. But the north half roughly was fuels preparation department headed for the reactors. They took uranium and encapsulated it in cans, like can of peas in just so many words. And the south half of that 300 Area was a laboratory area, the predecessor of Battelle. So the fuel was prepared there. And it was machined and canned and sent as nickname slugs to the reactors. Then, the reactors loaded into all those little tubes. And then from the reactors, they come out the backside into those cooling pods and all that. And transported in casks to the 200 Areas, which are the separated area, separations. And the reactor area on the face side was not that dangerous. The 200 Areas only work on what they called the canyons, PUREX and REDOX, and those kind of buildings. But those cells were very, very hot. But you had to be measured no matter where you were. One of our site services was a decontamination laundry, called the laundry. And all clothing--I mentioned to you before SWP. Well, SWP, radiologic exposure employees wore whites. Carpenters and truck drivers and all that that didn't work around reactors wore blues. And so they were sorted. And we had different billing rates for that laundry because the blues only had to be laundered and dried. Whereas the others had to be laundered, dried, and decontaminated, checked in separate washing machines. And then workers wore—in the beginning, wore World War II-style gas masks for our air supply before they invented a moon-type suit. [LAUGHTER] But they wore gas masks. And the mask would come back to this mask station, which was part of the laundry. And they took the masks, and they'd take away the cartridge. They'd put the mask in dishwasher machines, in racks. That's how they would wash them. And then they would get them a new filter and package them up. Sanitize them and package them up like medical supplies would be in. I can't think of any other unusual operation out there like that. Bauman: I want to change gears just a little bit. President Kennedy visited the site in 1963. Bush: Yep, 1963. Bauman: I was wondering-- Bush: When they did that, they let all the schools out. And for the first time, non-workers were allowed to go in cars out there. It was a grand traffic jam, but it was quite a deal. And he landed his Air Force plane up at Moses Lake—at Larson airbase at Ephrata, whichever you want to call it. And then helicoptered. And of course, like it is today, there were three or four helicopters. And you don't know which one he's on and all that bit. And here, everyone is gathered out the N Reactor area, which is a dual-purpose reactor. They captured the heat from the reactor, put it through a pipe through a fence to the predecessor to Energy Northwest, which was called Whoops. This was a big deal, a dual-purpose reactor. And N stood for new reactor, really. Anyhow, he comes in and they got a low-boy trailer. They fixed up down in the shops where I worked—my office was. And then built a podium just precisely for the President with him emblem and the whole bit. So I was privy to get to see some things like that. But anyhow, that was the stage. And it was a long low-boy, so it accommodated all the senators and all the local—Sam Volpentest, the guy credited with HAMMER, those type of people. Glen Lee from the Tri-City Herald, you name it. So the helicopter comes in, blows dust over everybody. But anyhow, my wife and kids and all schools were brought out there. And I don't know how many thousand people were out there in the desert. And you could see President Kennedy. He got up on the stage. You get close enough, you could get pictures. Then, that same year in November, he got assassinated. So that was a busy year. Bauman: Do you remember any other special events with dignitaries like that? Or other-- Bush: Well, I could go way back to World War II. I wasn't here, but I have a family connection on it. All over United States, they had war bond drives for various reasons to help. Build a ship, build an airplane. The one that happened here is not the only one. But they took so much money out of all the paycheck of Hanford workers, which included my dad as a carpenter. And the money they collected bought the B-17 Bomber, which was named Day's Pay. And that bomber—they had a bomber out here, a B-17, so that people could see it, but it wasn't the same one. On the Richland High School wall there's a mural. And that's a rendition by a famous artist of Day's Pay in formation. And so I can say that my parents contributed to that. And that's the story behind that one bomber. Every worker out there, construction or operations, they donated a day's pay. Bauman: I wonder, what was the most challenging part of your job working at the Hanford site? Bush: As an accounting person, my most challenging part was learning government-ese. [LAUGHTER] How to deal. And in that vein, that took a long time. But once you learn it, there is a way in the US government, period. As I'm sure there is in certain corporations. Later on, when I mentioned that I went down to the federal building for my--finally got located in that building, there was another fellow and I were old timers in accounting. And that year, they had five college grads, accounting grads come in. They hired five at one time. And they ran them by Marv and I for exposure. This is how things are done. This is how the contacts are. And our basic job was to squire these young fellows around and introduce them to certain counterparts and now DOE. Now, this is how you make appointments with them. This is what you do. This is what you never do. And likewise, with senior management. And it paid off because of those five, all four of them became managers or supervisors, and one of them became my manager within two years. Today, that same man is the comptroller at Savannah River Plant. [LAUGHTER] And so I like to feel that I contributed to them being—partially to them being successful. And so that's a reward. But probably the most difficult thing coming from a private—I worked for Colorado Mill and Elevator, which means I worked at a flour mill district office as a bookkeeper. And that's a small town deal in Twin Falls. To come to work for the government where some of your family despises you because you work for the government, but you had to fight that as well as learn how the government operates. Bauman: You mentioned earlier, you were talking about coal being used for heat in Richland. You also said you wanted to talk about coal fires going up at the site. Bush: Oh, what? Bauman: Coal fires? Bush: Oh, yeah. Interestingly, the midway power station, substation at midway, is one of the reasons they built Hanford where they did because the Grand Coulee Dam had just been completed and an electricity producer—a major producer. And they put the midway substation down there. That basically was built to furnish huge amounts of power to Hanford, for the reactors, everything. Which in total—because I processed vouchers, I know it was 32 megs. Which today doesn't sound like much, but the whole plant bill was 32 megs when everything was operating. But if the power were interrupted, they had to have a backup. So every area had a huge diesel-powered--like water pumps, where they could pump the water from the river instead of by electrically. They had to be able to pump it because it was critical. Because all the water for the whole plant was taken in at intake water plants near the reactors along the river. The 200 Area water is piped to them in a huge line as raw water until it gets to their place. The backup is these coal-fired steam plants, is what I was trying to say. It got about 30-some cars of coal a day rolled through Richland past the cemetery. In the beginning, the railroad came down from the north, from Vantage area down along the Columbia River. There's a railroad bridge across the river, Beverly I think it is. And it came down to below the 100-B Reactor area. That's where the line ended. And then a plant had its own railway incidentally. It had a 285 mile-long rail line, high line and low line. Then, they built--in 1950, the year before I came, they built the line that we see today that comes from Columbia Center into Richland, by the cemetery. And it ends at the old bus lot area, where that railroad car Columbia Center into Richland, by the cemetery. And it ends at the old bus lot area, where that railroad car rebuilding outfit is now, there is a roundhouse that it's rectangular in shape. But some 30 cars of coal a day came in here to supply because those plants were—they actually operated the steam plants. They didn't start them up from cold. They just ran constantly. Bauman: I wonder if you could provide sort of an overall assessment of how Hanford was as a place to work. What was it like as a place to work? Bush: It was a great place for me. I came out of an area that was the agriculturally-oriented. And the Korean War started. Wages were frozen, you weren't going to go anywhere. I came up here and I got a new start, like pioneers did. I visualized that's what farming pioneers did the same thing. And it opened up a whole field for me, a big corporate field. And it's just been a great place to work. And it was not dangerous to me. I'm not afraid to drink the water here. I'm asked by a nephew in Hermiston constantly, how do you drink the water? And I said, well, it comes out of the river. How can it come out of the river and that plume’s out there? There's so many false stories around here. But working at Hanford, I think, by and large, almost all employees would tell you the same thing. It was a great place to work. The pay was decent. Maybe you didn't get rich, but it was decent. It's in a nice area to live in. When we came back in the '50s, or in the '40s, and before that even of course, shopping was pretty much nonexistent. They went to Yakima, or Spokane, or Walla Walla. That I didn’t—we didn't experience that too much by 1951 because by that time, the Uptown shopping district was built. And there was a men's store. And there was four women's stores. Because GE was the prime contractor, there was an appliance dealer that handled GE-Hotpoint appliances. We got employee discounts when we worked for GE. We also got 10% gasoline discount when we worked for Atlantic Richfield Hanford. But we just grew with the times. And it's just such an entirely different area now than it was. Just the world is different, too. Bauman: Is there anything that I haven't asked you about? Is there anything you would like to talk about that we haven't talked about yet? Bush: Now really, work-wise at Hanford, I think I’ve pretty well-covered it. I'll repeat myself. My first 15 years was construction engineering accounting, which is an entirely different field than operations accounting. Operations accounting concerns itself with the reactors and separations and the site services that support them. But I learned a lot by working at Hanford. My family, three adult children live here, are retired here. My oldest son went on Medicare this year. [LAUGHTER] And that kind of puts you in your place quickly. But it's been a good enough place that they stayed in the area. And of the six granddaughters, grandchildren, four of them are in the area. And that's kind of characteristic with a lot of the Tri-City families. They stay or come back. Bauman: Well, Bob, I'd like to thank you very much for coming and talking to us today. I really appreciate it. Bush: It's been my pleasure. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:02:19 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 256kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 200 Area 300 Area B Reactor 700 Area N Reactor Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1951-1977 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1951-1977 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Ed Peddicord Tom Leddy Glen Lee Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data mov Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Bob Bush Description An account of the resource Bob Bush moved to the Tri-Cities in 1951 to work on the Hanford Site. An interview conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 07-17-2013 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mov Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2017-13-11: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Pasco (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) 1955 200 Area 300 Area 700 Area 703 Building B Reactor Battelle Cat Cold War Dam Desert DuPont Energy Northwest F Area FBI General Electric H Area HAMMER Hanford Henry Kaiser Hunting Kennedy Kennewick N Reactor Park PUREX River Savannah River School Street supplies War Westinghouse https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fd24bb8f61d5a3ab812b92b65fdb12fb3.JPG 4603d9664f2a0077ae96546b4e6df8ea Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Bob Ferguson Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Robert Ferguson on December 21st, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Bob about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Bob Ferguson: Yes. Robert, R-O-B-E-R-T. Louis, L-O-U-I-S. Ferguson, F-E-R-G-U-S-O-N. Franklin: Great, thanks. So tell me how and why you came to the area to work at the Hanford Site. Ferguson: Well, I was in the Army. I had spent three years in the Army and I was at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. And a friend of mine stopped by that was sort of at the end of my obligation, and his father had worked here. His name was Fred Boleros. And he told me about GE here at Hanford. So, it was my first job when I applied when I left the Army, was with GE at Hanford. They accepted my application, and that’s how I happened to come to Hanford. Franklin: Okay. And what was the job that you applied for? Ferguson: Well, I came under a program called the—[LAUGHTER]—bear with me. Franklin: That’s okay. Ferguson: Can you cut, can we cut, or you’ll cut? Franklin: We can edit. Ferguson: We’ll edit? Franklin: After the fact, yes. Ferguson: Okay. Emma Rice: Tech grad something? Ferguson: Yeah. The tech grad program. It was the tech grad program. It was a program to—for GE to find out what your interest was as well as their interest in you. So, anyway, I signed up for that, and I had three assignments with that. One in operation, one in reactor physics, and one in radiation testing. My permanent job—my first permanent job with GE was as a reactor physicist at C Reactor. But we did physics work—at each of the reactors, there was an onsite physicist and an onsite engineer. We rotated to all of the different eight reactors in the course of our assignments during relief work. But I was permanently assigned to C Reactor—C Reactor Physicist. Franklin: C Reactor? Ferguson: C Reactor. Franklin: Okay, and where is that located in relation to B, D and F? Ferguson: Well, as you probably know, the first reactors were B, D and F. And then HDR and then H, and then C Reactor in K-East and K-West. So C Reactor was one of the newer reactors, before the K-East and K-West design. And it was collocated with B Reactor in what was called the BC Area. They were right next door to each other. Franklin: Okay. And was that based off of the same design as the B Reactor? Ferguson: It was a different design. Higher power level and a little different fuel design. And because it had a higher power level, it had also a higher flow rate. Franklin: Of water? Ferguson: Of water, right. Franklin: Great. And how long did you work as a reactor operator? Ferguson: Physicist. Franklin: Reactor physicist, sorry. Ferguson: Right. Well, actually I was asked—I guess because of my interest in operation—I was asked by GE management to go into their management program, which was an accelerated management program. And so that took me into operations. And so to accelerate the learning process, they had a school in the evening that they sent us to. But also, we had supplemental crews. For each of the shifts, there was a supplemental crew that went from each of the reactors, in the case of outages or in the case of startups, where they needed extra people. So you learned in the supplemental crews, all of the operation of all of the reactors in a very short period of time. So from there, then, I was assigned as a shift supervisor at B Reactor. So I was an operating supervisor at B Reactor. In fact, I was the youngest of shift supervisor that GE had at the time. Franklin: Oh, wow. Where were the classes held for the management program? Ferguson: Well, there were two kinds of classes. There were—WSU had—actually there were—WSU and some of the other western universities had a program here. But they were technical programs, and then GE in the same facilities, in what—the old barracks area, near where the DOE headquarters is now, the RL headquarters, in that area. But they no longer exist. They were in huts. Franklin: Oh, okay, Quonset huts. Ferguson: Quonset huts, yeah, yeah. Franklin: World War II— Ferguson: Right. Franklin: Had you gone through any other—before you took the tech grad program with GE, had you had any training in nuclear physics or anything? Ferguson: Well, I had a degree in physics, and I’d also spent a year at Redstone Arsenal at Huntsville, Alabama in guided missiles. So, there was a lot of related work in the guided missile field to the nuclear field as well. Franklin: And were you in the Army because of the Korean War? Ferguson: No, I went into the Army from—I was graduated. Went to Gonzaga University and graduated in ROTC, and had a commission. And because I signed up for the guided missile program, I had a three-year commitment then, rather than just two years of active duty. Franklin: Okay. Ferguson: But it was—we were on alert in my junior year of the Korean War. And then the Korean War, fortunately, was over in my last year. So, I was able to miss that. Franklin: Yeah. Can you describe the B Reactor as a place to work? Ferguson: Well, it was—actually, a fascinating facility. I don’t know, perhaps, if you’ve been there. Franklin: I’ve been able to take the public tours. Ferguson: But the operation of the reactors were fascinating. You can picture that there’s eight reactors operating 24/7, seven days a week. At that time, there was pressure for more plutonium for the Cold War. It was during that period of time when there was a lot of tension with Russia. It preceded, actually, the Cuban Missile Crisis by a few years. But anyway, there was intense pressure for production, so we were—GE was very sensitive about the time operating efficiency of the reactors and the power level of the reactors. B Reactor, when it was first designed was designed for 250 megawatts. And when I was last in the control room, we were operating over 2,000 megawatts. We used to—in order to get more power, we used to—Bonneville would lower water from under the dams so our inlet temperature was lower. The operation of the reactors—they went once through the reactors, and so they had to keep the outlet temperature below boiling. And so you wanted the maximum delta t across the reactor, you could get so the lower the inlet temperature, the higher the power level you could get, maintaining a safe margin in the outlet temperature. But also at that time, we were experimenting—I participated both in the physics side as well as the operations side—in the use of flattening of the pile. And by flattening, I mean flattening the flux so you could get more power level, or better distribution and more production, in any one cycle. And so we used—we experimented with splines, which were boron designed things that would go under the process tubes, and you could jack them in actually from the front face of the reactor in order to flatten the flux of the reactors. We also did poisoning at that time of the reactor. A temporary poisoning, so we could start the reactors up at a higher power level. Because the operation of the reactors was very complicated, because you had different temperature coefficients that affected the reactivity of the reactor. So you had a positive graphite temperature, but that was—the graphite would heat up over time. And so that would increase the reactivity, and you had a negative temperature coefficient—fast reactor coefficient. And then the coefficients would change as the amount of plutonium occurred in the reactor. And so the operation of the reactors were really dictated by the design coefficients, but, more importantly, by the discovery of xenon and iodine, which shut the reactors down when Fermi was here. That was—they didn’t even know about the xenon absorption of neutrons at that time. And so when the reactor was first started, it shut down. And they had originally—perhaps you’ve heard this story, that originally the reactor was designed for about 1,500 process tubes. But then DuPont doubled it to 2,004 in order to—for safety margins—and they needed all of that safety margins to override the xenon. But anyway, when you’re at steady state operation, and then you shut the reactor down, then the buildup of iodine that then decays into xenon, and xenon is a poison. So if you were operating at full power and the reactor scrammed, you had a very short period of time in order to bring the reactor up to power level. Otherwise, you were down for 30-hour outage. So that meant that you lost production during that period. So we basically devised what we called quickie plans. This was especially true—we were experiencing a lot of ruptures at that time because we were pushing the envelope of the design of the fuel. It would rupture, and then we’d have to get rid of that, because they’d been once through on the water, the radioactive material would go directly into the river. So anyway, when we had a rupture, we would need to get it out of the reactor. But you only had a few minutes. At that time because of the power levels we were operating at, we only had about 15 minutes to recover. And that meant planning a crew in the rear and the front, and alerting the people in the powerhouse, because you had to bring the water pressure down. But you had to keep plenty of water on the tubes, because otherwise the temperature—outlet temperature would be very high. So you had a very difficult time to valve on the front. So I would go—I would basically stay in the control room and have a supervisor in the front and rear. And then when we shut the reactor down, we would do all of this valving, kick the rupture out, and then restart. And you’d have to restart the reactors to about two-thirds of the power that you were at, otherwise you’d go sub-critical, and you’d be down. So it was a very delicate challenge to start it up to a power level that you could—without running out of rods, then, because also the higher power level, the more reactivity you had. So, it was a—it’s something that I learned in physics, because that’s what the physicist did. He calculated all these transients. So when I went into operations, it was sort of natural for me to be able to manage this kind of thing. Franklin: Interesting. And so—that’s also, like, kind of real-world application of all of that physics that you had learned, right? Ferguson: Right. Franklin: How did—I think it’s hard for people who—especially younger people—to imagine doing all of that without digital technology. It’s always been something that’s really fascinated me. And I’m wondering if you could speak to that or if you’ve ever thought about that at all, that the kinds of—maybe you could talk a little bit about the kinds of equipment you had to work with, and the limitations of using the analog readouts in the control room. Ferguson: Well, that’s a very good question. The reactors had to be operated when you started them up—what we called a blind startup, because we didn’t have instruments that told us how subcritical we were. So, you had to—the physicist would calculate the reactivity coefficients for the operation, and depending upon the precursor operation, would determine exactly what the startup conditions were. But because we couldn’t measure the subcritical condition of the reactor, we had—we pulled to about—well, it’s called 100n hours subcritical, then pulled into that. But we had people at a PC manually, if you can imagine, manually counting the count rate as we approached criticality. Because if you pull too many rods out, you can get into a fast period, which will shut you down. So we had to do all this manually. And you probably, having seen the control room—you had 2,004 process tubes. Each one of those tubes was monitored for pressure on the inlet and temperature on the outlet. But those gauges had to be manually moved and adjusted by a crew in the front of that panel—the panellette, that whole 2,004 panel in the control room, right to the right of the control panel. Anyway, you had a whole group of people on startup in ladder-like things that would roll those gauges, instrument man on the rear, but he had to keep the gauges within a range, or you’d trip. So as the water pressure came up, you had to roll all of those. But this was all done manually. And then we had ways of—we had devices that calculated the power level, but it was very deceptive. So those of us that had been trained in physics could basically do a lot of those calculations in our head on the power level. Because what I’ve experienced—I’m sure others did, too—that if an instrument failed, say a flow instrument failed on one side of the reactor, it would indicate you’re only at half of the power level that you’re actually at. So you needed to look at other instruments, and you learned to look—like there was an instrument called a Beckman instrument, which monitored the radioactivity on the rear face. So by walking the control room and looking at all these different instruments, you could check one against the other. But it was all very, very, very, manual. And we did our physics calculations on Marchant calculators, you know, the calculators you punch. Franklin: Oh, yeah, yeah. [LAUGHTER] Ferguson: We did all our physics calculations on those at that time. And they were just introducing the IBM 650. GE had a computing facility where we would punch the cards and get some central computing for some of the physics work that we did. And that’s also where they kept track of the production in the reactors. If you could imagine keeping track of eight reactors with 2,004 tubes—there were more than that in the K reactors—but the six older reactors. And keeping the production in each one of those tubes was a function of the flow through that tube and the reactivity and the temperature of each one of those tubes. So you had to keep track of how much plutonium was being produced, because if you leave the fuel in too long, the buildup of plutonium-240 builds up. And so weapons-grade plutonium is about 6% to 10%. So we were operating at getting really pure weapons-grade plutonium. Something below the—at least 10% of 240, because it was—in the early design of the bombs, they found that if plutonium-240 spontaneously fissions, it creates a background. And if it’s too high, it’ll get a premature detonation of the bomb beforehand. So that’s why we had to manage the production. And that’s why there were frequent shutdowns. Unlike commercial reactors, where you operate a long time. And that’s why people confuse—plutonium that’s produced in commercial reactors has a high 240 content which is not good for weapons. Franklin: Oh, interesting, okay. So you’re saying—I just want to paraphrase so that I can make sure I understand. So you’re saying that it was the nature of the weapons process that the fuel would only be in there for a short period of time in order to get—and it’s plutonium-240—which one is the-- Ferguson: Is low. 239 is the weapons grade. Franklin: 239 is the weapons-grade. Ferguson: And 240 is the low grade. Franklin: Right, so that you wouldn’t build up too much 240. So— Ferguson: And that required a frequent charge and discharge of the reactors. Franklin: Right, so in some way, then, the energy reactors by nature are just not really meant for weapons. Ferguson: They’re the opposite of that. You want them to run. The Energy Northwest reactor which I was responsible for building—it was called BNP2 at the time. But they recently set a record of running for over two years without a shutdown. Franklin: Because you also want—when you’re producing energy, you want a reliable output of energy— Ferguson: Right, fixed, right. Franklin: You don’t want to be starting and stopping and have that kind of fluctuation in the grid. Ferguson: Right. Franklin: That’s really—I think that’s a good basic point to have established for anyone who’s doing research on that. Ferguson: But an interesting subset of your question about instrumentation. Rickover, in the nuclear navy, who relied on analog instrumentation and ways of measuring things. Because he wanted people to really run the reactor all the time. He didn’t want any risk of that. So it was a transitional period in the nuclear business. And some of the instrumentation that was designed to detect neutrons was very new at the time. Even the badges that we wore, at that time, did not detect neutrons, both fast and slow. And so we had to do experiments on the front face of the reactors to be able to predict what dosage you’d get from neutrons, rather than alpha, beta, and gamma. Because it was not known then exactly the biological effect of neutrons on the human body. Franklin: Given that the reactors ran, most of the time they had 24-hour shifts, I’m wondering if you can describe to me kind of an average day as a nuclear physicist operating the B Reactor. Ferguson: Well, it depends—well, let me answer that by, when you—at that time, you couldn’t drive your car out to the Site. So you came to the 700 Area, and there was a—lights up there that indicated which reactors were running. And that told you, if you were a supplemental crew, which reactor to go to. But anyway, to answer your question, if the reactor is operating normally at full power, it’s very—typically, you’d go in and you had about a 15- to 20-minute transfer process from one crew to the other. We kept a detailed log of the activities during our shift. You’d do a—we would typically do a count of the uranium slugs that were stored in the front face so that we’d keep materials accountability. So we would make sure that from shift to shift, there was a transfer of accountability for the slugs that were there. There was a transfer of any ongoing activity that would be taking place. But during normal operation, we had two operators in the control room and then a chief operator. And then the other operators would be picking fuel up out of the basins. That was all done by hand. If you’ve seen the reactor, the fuel would come out, go down in chutes. But all of those fuel elements had to be picked up by hand through the water—through 20 feet of water, put in the buckets, and then those buckets would be transferred under water over to a station where the railcar would come in from the 200 Area, all underwater. And then that bucket that contained the radioactive slugs would be, then, taken by railcar over to the 200 Area where it would be reprocessed. So, that—typically, then, you’d do maintenance work that could be done when the reactor was running. And then you had a daily routine of walking through the whole reactor. It’s very interesting; you could—Robert, you could tell, after you’d been there for a while, by the sounds if things were okay. If there was a shrill sound where the water pressure coming through, the water flowing through the reactors, and all of the different fans had different sounds. So you walked the reactor—always walked, went to the rear—in the rear of the building is a little place with a lead glass shield that you could look through to see the rear face. So you’d check the rear face for any anomalies, for leakage, or anything like that. And then you’d have your—we always had a health physicist on each shift. He had his rounds to check on the radiation levels in different areas. And different areas were controlled depending on whether there was radioactive material or contamination in the area. We had step-off pads, where you’d go from one area to another. Dual step-off pads, if you had a highly contaminated area. And the people—some of the crew would sort laundry as well. Because we went through a lot of laundry, because you had to change into what we called SWPs, special material when you came on shift. So anyway that would be rather routine. Now, during an outage, or during a startup, then you have a beehive of activity. The place that we—the shift supervisor had total control and authority over the running of the reactor. So even the manager and other people that were there for startup, they would have to leave, because of the intensity of the operation during startup. So, if it were an outage, you went into—you were doing charge/discharge. So you have a front face crew and a rear face crew, and you’re doing a lot of physical work. The charging machines would—you’d have to load them up by hand—load the slugs by hand. So it was—it’s hard to explain the level of activity that was going on during an outage. Because we would have maintenance. We would have some maintenance on the process tubes that had to be removed because they were leaking. So we’d have to—the maintenance people would come in and remove those. So it was very, very, very—it’s like a huge manufacturing operation. Franklin: Right. Ferguson: But a lot by hand. So the dichotomy between—you’ve got a very sophisticated—you get no sound from the reactor itself but a lot of sound from everything that runs the reactor. Franklin: The water and the electronics and everything. Ferguson: Right. And the reactors were cooled by—inerted by gas by helium and carbon dioxide. And so one of the auxiliary rooms was a place where you controlled mixture of the helium and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of the reactor. Because you could change the reactivity by changing the temperature of the graphite. You could heat it up with CO2 and cool it off with helium. Franklin: Interesting. So how long did you work as a reactor physicist—nuclear physicist and shift operator? Ferguson: Well, nominally about two years as a physicist and about two years as an operating supervisor. So it was about 50/50 while I was here. I’ll tell you, interesting story. Probably we don’t want to put it on television, but—on September 27th, 1960, I was—it was a Tuesday, and I was starting the reactor up. And I got a call that my wife’s water had broken and she was on the way to the Kadlec Hospital to deliver our second girl. So it was the first time in history a reactor went critical the same time a woman went critical. [LAUGHTER] I could tell you exactly where I was standing in that reactor out there when that happened. I’ll always remember that. And Kadlec Hospital at that time was just Quonset huts, as well. Franklin: Right, yeah, wow. Thanks for sharing. [LAUGHTER] Where did you—I’m assuming you guys lived in Richland while you worked out at Site, right? Ferguson: Right, yeah. Franklin: And so you lived in Richland during—so you would have lived in Richland, then, while it was a government town and then also during the transition. Ferguson: When we first came here, the government owned the town, and we lived in a B—I was going to say B Reactor. [LAUGHTER] Okay. We lived on Kimball—1524 Kimball in a duplex. Franklin: Okay. Ferguson: And then the second home here was a ranch house. But then, while we were there they sold. And when we were first here, GE provided coal. We had coal for our heat and lightbulbs. Those were all provided. I think we paid $47 a month rent at that time. And then the town was sold off. And our neighbors had the right to buy the B house. Franklin: Because they had been there longer than you? Ferguson: They were one of the original occupants. And so then we rented from them. So we were here during that transition. Franklin: Can you describe that transition? What you remember, or your thoughts on it? Ferguson: Well, it was very interesting. When we first came here, there was—and one of the reasons that the road system is the way it is is because of the security in the town. There was only one road in at the time and one road out. And that’s the way—you had to be cleared in order to live and work in Richland during that time. And so we—you know, we had a bus system that picked us up. We had a—during that time as well, those of us that worked in radiation levels, every month we’d have our urine sampled. And so the people that worked there set their bottle out by the front door to be picked up and monitored. So then as the town—after the town was sold off, then, there was more interest in changing the—upgrading the buildings, painting, and more things like that. So you could see the evolution from a government-owned town to private ownership. More and more attention to yards and things like that. So we—my wife and I—my family experienced that transition. And we left—came here in 1957. I left here in ‘61 to go to Argonne. And then we came back in 1972, and the town had totally changed, then. When we came back, we looked at a couple of houses in Meadow Springs and the realtor told us it would be pretty iffy to buy there, because that may not go. And there was a dirt road at that time between that and Columbia Center. Columbia Center didn’t exist when we were first here. We came back, and here’s Columbia Center. So having left here and come back, we’ve seen this transformation of the Tri-Cities. Rather remarkable. Franklin: Right. And how come you left Richland in ’61? Ferguson: Well, actually I was in the control room of B Reactor when we heard about an accident in Idaho called the SL-1 accident. Franklin: I’ve heard about that. Ferguson: It was a military accident that killed three military people. Anyway, it’s kind of a long story, but I’ll make it pretty short. Part of the accident investigation indicated that there was no one AEC organization responsible. The reactor was designed at Argonne in Chicago at Argonne National Lab, but built and operated by the Army at Idaho. And they Idaho office wasn’t responsible; Chicago wasn’t responsible for making sure. So anyway, I was recruited by AEC to go to work up with the AEC to set up the safety program for what was then called the Second Round reactors. These were commercial reactors that were built to encourage the development—commercial development of nuclear power. But Argonne had a lot of reactors at the time, both at Idaho, as well as at Argonne. Both thermal reactors, research reactors and fast reactors. And so anyway, I was recruited because they were looking for people with actual physics and operations experience to work in safety. And so, shortly after I was there, I was sent to Oak Ridge School of Reactor Technology for an accelerated program in state-of-the-art safety. But then we—anyway, then we did a review of all the reactors under Chicago. And those were reactors at Idaho, reactors at Santa Susana in California, Atomics International reactors. And then we had commercial reactors at Piqua, Ohio and Hallam, Nebraska. And—oh, there were two other ones, anyway, that were funded by the AEC, but privately owned. But the safety responsibility was the AEC. So anyway I went back there because of the emergence of the need for people with actual operating experience. There were only two places: that was Savannah River and here at Hanford. Franklin: Right. And up until that time, you had not worked with commercial reactors; you’d only worked on production. Ferguson: Yeah, there were no—no, that’s correct. Franklin: So can you describe that transition? How was that for you? Even though you would have had operating experience, like we talked about earlier, the operation of the commercial reactor is almost opposite. The purposes are very different. And so I’m wondering if you can describe that transition. Ferguson: Well, it’s also a cultural transition. And one of the difficulties in the development of commercial nuclear power was because of this cultural issue. Some of the utilities were oversold on the ease with which nuclear power could be used to produce electricity. And so they didn’t understand the need for the training and the quality assurance and the rigorous of operation. And that led to some accidents in the early days, because the utilities really were not sensitive to that. Admiral Rickover was even worried that the private sector, the commercial sector, was not able to manage nuclear. And he was afraid that they would have accidents. And that’s why he built and operated Shippingport, which was one of the first commercial reactors, but it was built by the Navy. But anyway, it was a cultural change. And after the SL-1 accident, it was really a wakeup call even within the AEC for the need for rigorous oversight, rigorous design review, design construction, and operation. The need for safety at all of those areas from the time you procure a piece of equipment, to its built, to its put in operation, and then maintained. All of that was new to the industry. So I actually lived through that transition, I guess, if you would call it that. Because GE was—and DuPont were very rigorous in their safety. Very rigorous. Because people didn’t really know much about nuclear power at that time, or nuclear energy. Franklin: So you’re saying some of that safety-consciousness kind of came over from the folks involved in production, who then went on to commercial. Ferguson: Right. Franklin: I’ve—when talking to people similar to yourself who’ve been in the industry, very familiar with nuclear production and power, I’ve often heard that the nuclear industry is one of the most tightly regulated and safe industries, or focused with safety. And I’m wondering how you feel about that statement, how you would respond to that. Ferguson: Well, it is, because of the potential or the risk. Even though the commercial, there has been no deaths in the commercial nuclear industry in the United States, the potential is there as well. I can just give you a little feel for that. Three Mile Island was a very bad accident, but nobody was hurt. I was there. I was—fifth day of the accident, I was in the control room of Three Mile Island. It was really a bad accident, but nobody got hurt. On the other hand, I was at Chernobyl after that accident. That was a very, very bad accident. A lot of people were killed in that accident. People don’t really understand that—going back to your question about the rigorous safety requirements—Russia did not have a requirement for containment for their reactors. So, Chernobyl had no containment. You couldn’t build and operate that kind of a reactor in the United States. So, one of the issues that emerges from the rigorous safety criteria is the difficulty in transition to new instrumentation, for instance. Because you had very prescriptive regulatory requirements, it was more difficult, basically, to introduce new design, new equipment. And it’s one of the difficulties of the nuclear industry, unlike cars where you’re changing them often, it’s very expensive to build one. And then it’s hard, as innovation and changes take place, it’s hard to introduce those in the course of the licensing. So our licensing system has changed somewhat. You used to have to have two permits for commercial reactor. A permit to build it, and then another permit to operate it. Now those are combined into one, because you wouldn’t want to spend all the money to build a reactor and then not be able to run it. And for the antinuclear community, they used that as a way to stop the operation—or the startup of a lot of reactors. That caused a lot of expense, too. So anyway, it’s been a dynamic change, but not as rapid as your iPhone and changes like that, which can be made very quickly. Franklin: Wow, thank you. Really illuminating. I really like that you mention that there was a cultural transition into the commercial reactor, and I assume, there, you’re talking about dealing with utility companies, but I’m also wondering, was there—did you also work with—because you mentioned fast reactors. Did you also work with scientists and people from the university side of operations when you moved into commercial power? Ferguson: Oh, yes. Franklin: And was that also part of the cultural shift? Ferguson: Well, for instance, going into Argonne—Argonne was where the nuclear technology started. I mean, Argonne came from Fermi’s work in Chicago, basically. All of those scientists went to work at Argonne. And they didn’t like to be—scientists don’t like to be regulated or overseen. And so that’s the reason that the reactor—many of the reactors that Argonne worked with were put in Idaho, in a remote area, where you could do a lot of experimentation away from a big city. So that’s where the series of reactors called the BORAX Reactors, where you could actually explode them—pull into a fast period and cause a prompt critical. But you could do that in Idaho because it was so remote. But anyway, it was always a certain amount of tension between research. And one of the current issues right now, there is so much regulation in commercial reactors, it’s hard to introduce any new technology. For instance, Bill Gates is investing in a reactor being designed in China. And he would do that here, but he went to the NRC and it’d take him 24 years to get a permit just to build it here. So, the rigorous licensing process also inhibits development of new technologies. And we don’t really today have a good answer for that. We need to have an intermediate step where you can work on new reactor designs that are not ready for commercial operation yet but need to be run. Because unless you can do experimental work, you can’t develop anything new. Franklin: But that experimental work is held up by the regulations— Ferguson: Of the regulations, right. Franklin: Do you think the public has an inadequate understanding of nuclear technology in general, and nuclear power specifically? Ferguson: Well, there’s a lot of work has been done with respect to why people fear nuclear which is really very safe, statistically. The probability of being hurt by a nuclear accident is essentially zero. Yet, people will get in their car and they’ll drive their car. So there’s a lot of psychological fear. And a lot of that fear, we think, comes from the use of nuclear technology for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In other words, the notion of equating weapons with nuclear power. And that has continued to this day, because many people don’t understand here at Hanford the difference between commercial waste and waste from both the Second World War and the Cold War. It’s a very different issue, but people think of it all as one. And one of the problems is that with the evolution of the organization that manages that. I mean, I worked, when I was head of the FFTF project, I worked for the AEC, I worked for ERDA, and I worked for the Atomic Energy Commission in the same job. And so you can understand then. And that—the weapons program is still in the Department of Energy. I’m a big advocate of removing it, because—and removing the waste from the commercial—to create a separation. As long as they’re managed together, how do you expect the average person to believe that they’re not one in the same thing? Or that the issues are not one in the same thing. So that fear of nuclear is real. And there’s been a lot of work done about why people fear it when it is not really unsafe. And generally you find that the people that work with nuclear are very comfortable with it. And the farther away you get, the more fear there is. For instance, here at Hanford, people are very used to working with it. We have clean water. You go over to Seattle, they want to tell us how to—why to be afraid here at Hanford. Well, we live here. We drink the water, we eat the fish. We’re not fearful of it, because we’ve lived with it. We know it. So a lot of that is proximity. Franklin: Yeah, thank you, I appreciate you expanding on that. It does give it a troubled reputation, doesn’t it? Since the birth of nuclear energy is related to death and bombings and then was a very visible part of our very large stockpile of nuclear weapons. Ferguson: And it still is a threat with the proliferation. And it’s a huge threat. Franklin: And to have a peaceful arm of that, though, I think to some people maybe they confuse both heads of that same— Ferguson: That’s not unnatural that they would do that. The other thing that’s happened, you know, we had—Three Mile Island happened right after Jane Fonda’s movie, The China Syndrome. And then we had Chernobyl. And then we had the accident in Japan. So these big accidents get a lot of publicity. And there’s a lot of fear that comes from the reporting of that, which isn’t always accurate. Because the nature of reporting is to make things dramatic. And so it gets dramatized in the public. So it probably will take generations to—people to address that. Franklin: Right. Because certainly our current—where we get our current energy from is also a problematic source of energy, in terms of its political and human and environmental costs. Ferguson: Right. The irony is that 20%, nominally, 20% of our electricity comes from nuclear. 70% of the carbon-free generation—70% comes from nuclear. And so there is no way the country can ever meet its goal of carbon emissions without a greater use of nuclear power. Because solar and wind are both intermittent. You can’t store them. For instance, if you had to rely on them during the cold weather we just had—we had no sun, it was cold. Where would you get your energy? Where would you get your energy? And the other thing that people really don’t understand is that both wind and solar are nuclear energy. Their source is nuclear energy from the sun. The sun—and the earth gets all of its energy from radiation from the sun. Yet people don’t think of that radiation as bad radiation. They think of that as good radiation. And other radiation, from nuclear power, is bad radiation. Franklin: Interesting, I don’t think I ever thought of it quite like that before. But it’s very true. Ferguson: All of the weather comes from absorption of energy from the sun in the oceans, creates the wind, picks up the moisture, delivers it. That’s where we get our hydro power. Solar power—all of that is nuclear energy from the sun. The sun is our source of nuclear energy. Franklin: Well, even in a way then oil is also from the sun, because it’s decomposed carbon matter— Ferguson: Originally— Franklin: Originally. Ferguson: No, really, it preceded the sun in the sense that it was a part of matter when it was created at the Big Bang. Franklin: True. So I’d like to go back—tell me about coming back to Richland to work on the FFTF. What brought you back from Argonne to Hanford? Ferguson: Well, the people—the assistant manager at Argonne for the AEC I had worked with there—and he became the manager of the Richland Operations Office. And then another fellow I had worked with there, Alex Fremling, became his deputy. And so they asked me to come back. They were having a lot of difficulty with the management of the contracts here. And I’d had a lot of experience in project management at Argonne in both high energy physics and reactor projects, and a lot of experience in contracting. So anyway, I came back and I was originally head of contracts. And then shortly after that I was made technical director for the Site. That was at a period when—or at a time, in 1972, when 106-T leak occurred. That was the 105,000-gallon leak that really was the first major leak of radioactive material from the tanks. And it’s the first time the public then became aware of the real problem here at Hanford. And so I was on the investigating committee for that event. And we went back to—Dixy Lee Ray was Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and then subsequently our governor. But we asked for a supplemental appropriation--$20 million supplemental appropriation to start building double-shell tanks. So that’s when we started building the double-shell tanks, thinking that there would be a solution fairly soon. And I can take you all the way back to when I was with GE, I did some—one of my jobs there, I measured some—the radiation level in some of the tanks, because as early as that time, GE was concerned about leaking tanks. Because the radioactive material in the tanks stratifies. The radiation level is different and it creates a temperature stress in the tanks. So we were—as early as then, we were worried about tanks leaking. Now—that was 1958, ’59. Here we are in 2016 and we’ve got leaky tanks and no solution. [LAUGHTER] Not much progress. Franklin: Sadly no. Ferguson: Anyway then FFTF was in trouble from a cost and schedule standpoint. So I was asked to set up the FFTF Project Office. And the manager of Richland went back to Washington, and he became head of nuclear energy in Washington. His deputy became manager here—Alex Fremling became manager here and so they—we’d all worked together. And so they asked me to set up the FFTF Project Office. Franklin: Okay. Ferguson: And that’s when—in 1973—I stayed here until 1978 and then Jim Schlesinger, the chairman of—Secretary of Energy for DOE asked me to go back and take over the nuclear program in Washington. Franklin: And what do you feel like you got accomplished from ’73 to ’78 on the FFTF Project Office? Ferguson: We built the most remarkable fast reactor test facilities that’s ever been built. At the time that I was asked to take it over, there was a member of the—Bill Anders—who was the astronaut that went around the moon the first time. Anyway, he was a member of the AEC. But he helped me get the project office set up based on the way NASA set up their offices: decentralized. But he told me that the FFTF was far more difficult technical job than putting a man on the moon. So the development of the technology that we developed and demonstrated with FFTF was really incredible. And a lot of that technology’s now being given to Japan—to China—for their new development program. A lot of the sodium technology, the fast reactor technology. So we accomplished a lot. But it didn’t—and then it got killed. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right, right, it did. I wonder if you could talk about that. What happened to the FFTF? Ferguson: Well, at the time FFTF was built, the policy of the United States and the Atomic Energy Commission was to reprocess and have breeder reactors. And so that you would take the fuel from commercial reactors, reprocess it, take the plutonium out of it, use that plutonium for fuel for fast reactors. So essentially, by using fast reactors, you have basically an unlimited supply of energy. So that was the policy when FFTF was built. Clinch River was to be a commercial demonstration plant at Clinch River in Tennessee. Clinch River was killed when Carter came in. Carter killed the breeder program because he thought that—first of all, he didn’t think nuclear was going to be here to stay, and he didn’t want to—thought reprocessing would facilitate the spread of nuclear weapons around the world. Because when you do reprocess, you can use that same technology to extract plutonium for weapons. So it was killed for that reason. And Carter was pushing coal at the time, saying we had, essentially, an abundant supply of coal. And so he thought that nuclear really wasn’t going to—it was a last resort, as he put it. Because of our lack of reprocessing, we have influenced the design of Yucca Mountain for the deep geologic storage. Because at the time that the Nuclear Waste Policy Act in 1982 was set up, there was a conflict between those that wanted to reprocess and those that didn’t want to reprocess. So Yucca Mountain is designed for retrievability. It’s designed for permanent storage of defense waste, but retrievability of commercial waste. So at some date in the future, it could be reprocessed. Because about 90% of the energy value is still in fuel once it’s discharged from a commercial reactor. So anyway, that decision has affected a lot of subsequent issues that the country has faced. Franklin: How come the program didn’t come back under Reagan? Ferguson: Well, in January of 1982, I was asked to participate in a—that’s when Reagan was president, and George Bush, Sr. was his vice president. And he called a meeting that I was invited to, to discuss what was going on in nuclear at that time. And at the time, I was head of WPPSS. And the cost estimate—this was post-Three-Mile Island. The cost estimate for plants was going up, they were having delays. And so Reagan called this meeting from executives to find out what could be done with nuclear. Well, as a result of that meeting, then, we were instrumental in getting the Nuclear Waste Policy Act started which he then proposed as a way of dealing with commercial nuclear fuel. Because up until that time, there was no solution to commercial nuclear fuel. So—and there still isn’t. Franklin: Oh, okay. Ferguson: There still isn’t. Because Obama killed—or tried to kill the Yucca Mountain project. But we stopped him from doing that. I was one of the principals—law suit that the courts ruled that he didn’t have the authority to do that. But he stopped it. So now there is no solution, yet, to what to do with commercial fuel. So commercial fuel is now stored all over the United States at all of the reactors. Franklin: Right, right. How did you become involved with the WPPSS project? Ferguson: Well, I was recruited out of Washington. Franklin: So you’re just back and forth from here to Washington and then back. Ferguson: Well, people that had known about my success in building FFTF and turning that around—and it turns out Senator Jackson was one of those. And so when I was recruited, I’d been in the government 20 years, and I was still pretty young. I didn’t want to leave the government, because I had no retirement. I wasn’t old enough to retire. Anyway, Senator Jackson told me that if I would come out and solve the WPPSS problem, he would make sure I got back in the government. Well, a long story short, I came out and I did solve, I think, the WPPSS problem. But I also had open heart surgery and ruined my health and then Senator Jackson died. So I never went back into the government. He died and I never had a pension. So—[LAUGHTER] so that’s what WPPSS did to me! But anyway, I was recruited—going back to your question—there was a national recruitment because of the difficulties WPPSS was having building the plants. Franklin: And how long did you work at WPPSS for? Ferguson: Three years, ’80 to ’83. Franklin: Okay. And what did you do after that? Ferguson: I started up a company, R.L. Ferguson and Associates, a consulting company. And we sold that to SAIC. And then I started up another company, Nouveau Tech. And we acquired a nuclear waste facility that’s out here, now it’s called PermaFix Northwest. We acquired that out of bankruptcy from ATG. And then in 2007, I sold that to PermaFix. And since then, I’ve been writing books and consulting. Franklin: So you’re still not retired. Ferguson: No. I’m still consulting. Franklin: Still consulting. But still on— Ferguson: And I’ve written two books on the nuclear waste issue, so— Franklin: Okay, great. Well, which two books are those? Ferguson: Nuclear Waste in Your Backyard: Who’s to Blame and What to Do About It. And the first one was called—I can’t remember the name of it. Something about Obama and Reid wasting money. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Ah. Tell me about your involvement with the Tri-Cities Nuclear Industrial Council, TRICNIC, which later became TRIDEC. Ferguson: Well, after I left WPPSS, I was asked to be the chair of TRICNIC. Because I was kind of in a period when I was trying to recover for my health. And so Sam Volpentest was the executive vice president, and Glen Lee was publisher of the paper then, and Bob Philips was the president. And they would ask me to be the president of TRICNIC. And then because of the need to diversify the economy in the Tri-Cities, we merged TRICNIC with the Tri-City Chamber, and that became then TRIDEC. And so I was the first president and chair of TRIDEC, when it was formed. And Sam stayed on until his death. He worked up until he died. And then Gary Petersen took over his place to head up the Hanford part of TRICNIC. Franklin: I wonder if you could talk about working with Sam Volpentest. Ferguson: There’s been a whole book written about that. [LAUGHTER] Did you read it? The godfather? Franklin: I have, yeah, The Community Godfather by C. Mark Smith. Ferguson: Much of my life is in there. Franklin: Okay. Ferguson: [LAUGHTER] But anyway, no, yeah, he was one of those remarkable people that you know in your lifetime. He worked right up until he died. I told a story at his funeral—a eulogy—I said, you know, the clock was set right after 5:00 because he wanted to put in a final shift before he died. [LAUGHTER] So he died right after 5:00. [LAUGHTER] But Sam was very devoted to the Tri-Cities and the economic development of the Tri-Cities and spent his whole life on behalf. But he was probably largely responsible for my—or one of the reasons for taking over WPPSS, because he was close to Senator Jackson. I had worked with him in the community on FFTF as well. When I took over FFTF, we not only—the prior head of the nuclear in Washington had testified it would be completed for $187 million. But we didn’t—not only couldn’t you complete it, we ran out of money that year. And Sam was instrumental in TRIDEC—or TRICNIC was instrumental in getting a supplemental appropriation to keep FFTF. That’s one of its early, early almost-deaths. So I started working with Sam in the community at that time. So then when I left WPPSS, I was asked to get more involved. Franklin: Great. I’m wondering if you can remember or can tell me about any kind of notable events or incidents that happened at Hanford while you were working out there. I think you would have been gone for the JFK visit, which was in ’63, but if there were any other— Ferguson: Right, I was at Argonne then. Franklin: But if there were any other notable events or incidents that happened at Hanford while you worked there. Ferguson: Oh. Other than the leak? 106-T leak? Franklin: Pretty notable. Or maybe in general in Tri-Cities history, or any—did you ever go to any of the Atomic Frontier Days parades or anything like that? Ferguson: No, I didn’t, no. I’m trying to think of—well, 10,000 people marched in support of keeping WNP-1 alive. Have you ever seen that picture? Franklin: Yes. Ferguson: 10,000 people, can you imagine that? Franklin: Yes, yeah, that’s— Ferguson: Supporting nuclear power? Where else in the country could you do that? Franklin: Not too many places. Ferguson: Well, I’m trying to think, what--? Franklin: It’s okay if you don’t. Ferguson: I really—I can’t. Franklin: It’s one of my stock questions. Ferguson: Oh, okay. Franklin: You know, in case something pops up. Ferguson: Right. Franklin: So, I guess—let me look over this. Ferguson: Probably told you more than you want to know! Franklin: Yeah, we’ve covered quite a bit. And I just have kind of one last question that’s kind of a wrap-up question. But I’m wondering what you would like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland in the Cold War. Ferguson: Well, I think it would be very important, and I think it’s even important for this generation to understand the circumstances under which people operated the reactors. There’s been a lot of public criticism about the fact that we discharged waste into the ground. And people just, I think, don’t understand the pressures and the circumstances. The major thing people should understand is that Hanford was very carefully chosen because of the potential risk of an accident or even discharge of radioactive material. The selection of Hanford is unique in the location. The 200 Area, it’s unique in the sense that under the site is a layer of caliche, it’s like cement. Overlaying on that is sand. And they looked up on this as basically a way to hold up the radioactive material and they put it in the ground. And so it wasn’t just people being careless or anything like that. There were the pressures and unknowns. People didn’t know a lot about nuclear, but there was an incredible safety record in spite of all of that. So anyway, I think the big disappointment I have is that the waste hasn’t been take care of, and it’s mostly a political issue than a technical issue. It could have been taken care of a long time ago, but it’s terrible. It’s an issue that has become politicized. Franklin: Right. Because sites with smaller amounts of waste have been able to encapsulate—begin or even in some cases finish encapsulation programs like West Valley, Savannah River—have been able to deal. Ferguson: And most of our waste out here doesn’t really have to be vitrified, either. It’s high activity, because of where it came from, by law. It came from reprocessing. But it’s high-level waste, but it’s low-activity waste. And so if you remove the cesium from it, you could basically secure the waste in a cementaceous form and send it to Texas. About 80% of the waste could be done and we wouldn’t even have to build a vit plant. So it’s been—the design of the Vit Plant was wrong from the beginning. The Hanford waste is unique from a lot of different wastes, in that it’s such a mixture of so many different kinds—it’s not homogeneous. So the design of the Vit Plant, rather than have multiple facilities to treat separate kinds of waste, they basically have a pre-treatment plant where they want to treat all of the waste to make it in a consistent form to feed into the melter. Well, the pre-treatment plant is what’s stopping everything. So there’s been a lot of—you know, I’ve lived through about three or four different starts of the Vit Plant. So, I’ve seen it, and it’s very frustrating to see how political it has become, and a lack of science-based decisions that are made. Franklin: Yeah, I’ve seen some of the bumper stickers, I forget exactly what they say, but I’ll paraphrase here: Vitrification in 2007, or Hanford Vit Plant. You know, 2007 or 2004. And then we’re—it’s 2016 and we’re still waiting. Ferguson: Still waiting. Still no— Franklin: Perhaps—as you said, perhaps for a plant that is not the best approach— Ferguson: Right. Franklin: --to the problem. Well— Ferguson: Sam Volpentest predicted before he died that the Vit Plant would never be built because of the cost. And now you’re seeing it being questioned because of the cost. People are saying, why do we have to spend this kind of money? Because it’s—about $3 billion comes here every year for Hanford, including Battelle. But it’s a huge amount of money. It’s like the WPPSS plants. People used to say, well, we have to build them no matter what. Well, they got too expensive and the need for power went away, and so they didn’t get built. So there comes a price when things are not affordable. And there’s not really a risk to the river. The waste needs to be treated and cleaned up, but there’s no risk, really. There’s no health risk. The flow of the river is so great, any material gets in there is so diluted you can’t even detect it. But that’s not a solution. Right after 106-T, Battelle did some studies for us, just what-if studies. And we said, what if all the waste went in the Columbia River? Well, downstream, it wouldn’t be a problem. It’s so dilute. Not that that’s—I’m not advocating that at all. But it just shows you that the risk to the health and safety of the public is not—does not demand what we’re doing with the waste out there. It doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be taken care of. I’m just—because at one time Sam and I faced some members of Congress who wanted to put a fence around Hanford and not do anything with it. Just leave it there. [LAUGHTER] So, anyway. I’ve been there, done it. Franklin: So at least we’re away from that solution. Ferguson: Well, I hope we’re not going back there. But when the price gets so high, people away from here and the demand for money in the budget gets so tremendous, it’s—strange things can happen. Franklin: They sure can. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Well, Bob, thank you so much for coming in and interviewing with us today. Ferguson: Okay, Robert. Franklin: I really appreciated it. Ferguson: I hope I didn’t cover too much for you. Franklin: You did a great job; we touched on a lot of really great things. So thank you. Ferguson: Okay. Franklin: All right. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:14:41 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 200 Area 700 Area C Area B Reactor Vitrification Plant Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1957-1961 1972-today Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1973-1978 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Fred Boleros Admiral Rickover Alex Fremling Bill Anders Clinch River Sam Volpentest Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Bob Ferguson Description An account of the resource An interview with Bob Ferguson conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 12-21-2016 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2017-01-12: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. 200 Area 700 Area Atomic Energy Commission B Reactor Backyard Battelle C Area C Reactor Cold War Department of Energy DuPont Energy Northwest Hanford Mountain NASA Quonset hut Quonset huts River Savannah River School VIT Plant War https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Ffe9a50c1a35bab2152ff15c70337877a.docx 7fae046e4f5288229ccf98b57dc5da3f https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F549de1a1ba468072a9400e9179f229a8.JPG b10024e6e3b4b98104d826d85c756ada Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Bob Heineman Location The location of the interview Richland, WA Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound 0:00:00 Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history with Robert Heineman on July 6, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Robert about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Bob Heineman: My name is Robert Heineman. H-E-I-N-E-M-A-N. Franklin: And Robert’s spelled just like “Robert”? Heineman: Robert. Franklin: R-O-B-E-R-T? Heineman: Just like yours, yup. Franklin: Okay. But you prefer to be called Bob? Heineman: Yeah, sure. Franklin: Okay, so we’ll use Bob for the rest of the interview, then. Heineman: Okay. Franklin: If that’s okay with you. Okay. So, Bob, tell me how and why you came to the area. 00:00:47 Heineman: Well, I went to school at Washington State University and majored in police science because I took one of those classes as a general university requirement, and I was fascinated that policemen would actually go to school. So I went through and I got done. I was married very early and had a baby, so I had nothing else to do but schoolwork and take care of the baby while my wife worked. So I graduated when I was 20. And I really wanted to be a police officer or a sheriff’s deputy. But graduating at 20, I was too young to go to work. So I stayed in school and got my master’s degree, and then graduated. Franklin: And what did you get your master’s degree in? Heineman: In police science and administration. Franklin: Wow. 0:01:40 Heineman: And then I came back to the Tri-Cities, because I had nothing left except the end of my thesis and I could do that here at WSU Tri-Cities. My mother got an office looking out over the river where I could work on my thesis. So that’s how I got back to Richland. Franklin: And that’s when it was the Joint Center for Graduate Education, right? Heineman: Yes. Franklin: Or as they would call it, the GE College of Nuclear Knowledge. Heineman: Yup, exactly. But-- Franklin: But you had—sorry. So you had pre-existing connection to the Tri-Cities before you came back after going to WSU? 0:02:21 Heineman: I did. We moved here—my father moved here to work at the Site when I was about three or four years old. Franklin: Do you remember what year that was? Heineman: That would’ve been 1954 or 1955. Franklin: Okay. Heineman: So we lived in a government house on the west side of Richland over on Cedar Street and then moved over—when they sold the houses, we moved over to a house actually on the river, which was great for a little kid, when I was in third grade. And my mother was going back to school to get her master’s degree in librarianship. And she was working at the library in the 300 Area at Hanford. And my father had come here to apply his physics degree from the University of Michigan. Most of the plutonium production work was pretty well staffed at that time, because it was after the war was over. So he decided he wanted to go into breeder reactor research. So he was instrumental in designing some of the cores for the early breeder reactors, and was the project manager for the Plutonium Recycle Test Reactor, the PRTR, and was always very proud of having participated in the design of the core and then managed the design and construction of the overall reactor in early operations. And then when he was finished with that, he moved over to FFTF and worked there for years for GE, and then transferred over to Battelle when Battelle took over that part of the work. And so he spent the rest of his career either in breeder reactor research or safety analysis for the breeder reactor research. 0:04:37 So I have a whole generation before me that was Hanford before me. It was really just kind of happenstance that I came back, because I wasn’t old enough to go to work as a police officer. So while I was finishing up my master’s degree and applying to various places, a job came open on Hanford Patrol. I was living with my father-in-law and he handed me the advertisement and said, gee, maybe it’s time you got your own house and moved, you know, go to work, son. [LAUGHTER] So I did that. 0:05:21 Franklin: Wow. So just to back up a little bit—and thank you for talking about your father. That’s a really interesting career trajectory of breeder reactor research. Your mother, though, she also worked onsite, correct? Heineman: She did. She worked in the 300 Area library, which was the technical library for the whole Hanford Site. And then after she went back to school, she came back to the library, and the decision was made by, at that time, I think it was the AEC and Washington State University, actually in cooperation with the University of Washington and I think maybe Oregon State? Franklin: Yup, yup. That’s all correct. Heineman: To develop a joint center for graduate study. One of the things they wanted to do was to build a big, new library. They would take the reading room from the Hanford Site, the public reading room, and take over that function for the Department of Energy, then AEC. And so they asked her if she would be willing to be the interface on the design and construction of the library that turned out to be the library here at WSU Tri-Cities. Franklin: Wow, okay. 0:06:48 Heineman: So she said, sure, I’d be happy to do that. So she was the primary contact. Then when they got ready to open the library, they asked her if she would run the library. So she did that until she retired. And got to help with the design of the new WSU Tri-Cities library, and was really proud of that. She worked for Brian Vollett at the time. She put everything she always wanted in a library into the design, and they gave everything that she wanted to her. So she worked there until she retired. Franklin: Oh, that’s great. Our offices were in that library for kind of the first year-and-a-half we were here, and I’ve always really enjoyed spending time in there. So that’s really interesting to know. Heineman: Well, she really, she really loved helping the students. I mean, when you would sit down and talk to her about her day, all she would talk about was who came in to see her, what they needed for research, how she could help them. She really enjoyed it. 0:08:01 Franklin: That’s great. Heineman: Yeah, it was cool. Franklin: We need more library—well, we have lots of great librarians. But that’s a great quality in a librarian. Okay. So, to go forward again, you heard about this job as a Hanford patrolman. Heineman: I did. Franklin: Okay, and so you applied. 0:08:19 Heineman: I did, and I got the job. When they took me around to interview with people, they didn’t have anybody actually on Hanford Patrol that had a degree at all, much less a master’s degree. So they were all very excited that they had somebody that was the new model for what they could do for security at Hanford. So that was pretty invigorating for me. Franklin: Did you feel a lot of pressure, though? Because I imagine you’d be going in, there’s a lot of guys who had a lot of years of experience, and kind of, you’re this young guy with a master’s degree in police science. Did you feel any pressure or anything? Or out of place? Heineman: I was actually a little bit. But more I was just fascinated by the whole thing, because most of the people that worked at Hanford and almost all of the people in security or patrol had started during the war. Franklin: Oh, wow. Heineman: So they were 50 to 65 years old. And there weren’t any young people anywhere. In all the interviews I went to, they were all 60-plus and had all this experience and they were so expert at what they did, you know? That part was sort of awe-inspiring. But I didn’t really feel uncomfortable; I was just sort of awestruck by the whole situation and the people. And they offered me a job, and I went to work. So that was pretty cool. Franklin: That is cool. I bet you heard lots of great patrol stories. Heineman: Oh, yeah. Franklin: From the war. 0:12:13 Heineman: More than I could ever tell, yeah. Yeah. I think the folks who worked here during the war and in the post-war years up to when I went to work in the early ‘70s had been through an awful lot of things. The folks in security were—people were a little nervous about them, but at the same time they were pretty much revered because of the effort to keep everything secret during the production years. There were a lot of people that had security clearances at a pretty high level, but the security people, of course, most of them, had access to almost all of the information associated with production of plutonium. So I think people were a little bit standoffish from the security and the patrol folks, but at the same time, there was a lot of respect for what they did. It was a much different world than it is today in that way. Franklin: Interesting. Did you start out as a patrolman? Heineman: I did. Franklin: So how did that—was it like what you had expected, going through school and learning all—going all the way through your masters in police science? Heineman: Not a bit. Franklin: Not a bit? Heineman: Not a bit. Franklin: I’m wondering if you could describe that discrepancy there. 0:11:46 Heineman: So I had always wanted to be a police officer. And honestly, I really wanted to be a King County sheriff’s deputy. In that role, then, your primary role is law enforcement. So most of the education that I had dealt with the basics of law enforcement, investigative techniques, crime scene investigation and all those kinds of things. We didn’t do hardly any of that here. Our primary job here—we had some law enforcement functions because we were deputized Benton County sheriffs, and I believe they still are. But if we had what I would call pure law enforcement functions to be taken care of, we would call Benton County, and they would send deputies out to perform those functions. We did investigate thefts; we investigated areas where there might have been violations of the law regarding classified information and the control of it; we did basic traffic enforcement and those kinds of things. But anything beyond that, we would call Benton County to take care of it. Our function was to keep the Site safe and secure. And in that sense, it was completely different than anything I had ever expected to do. 0:13:22 When I came to work, there were only two other young people on Hanford Patrol, and there were only about a hundred Hanford patrolmen anyway. The other two young people had come in six months before me. Everybody else had been hired during the war or shortly after. During the layoffs in the late ‘60s, they got laid off, many of them. And then when they needed to staff up again, they rehired those same people. So everybody was 58 to 65 when I came to work. Boy, they had a lot of—as you said, a lot of stories, and they had a lot to teach me. But it was mostly about what’s going on on the Site, what are we trying to do, what are we trying to protect, and how do we do that? And then if things went wrong, our job was to go get involved and resolve that. Franklin: Interesting. So how long did you stay as a patrolman? Heineman: Three months. [LAUGHTER] 0:14:38 Heineman: Yup, in three months, I went through basic training all by myself, because, as I said, there weren’t any other new people. So I had three instructors and I spent about six weeks going through basic training. All our classroom instruction, all our firearms instruction, all of that was three-on-one. It was a marvelous opportunity for me. And then I graduated from their basic training after six or eight weeks, and then got assigned to go work with patrol crews in all the different areas at Hanford so that I could get an understanding of what was going on. First in the 100 Areas where the reactors were and where they were producing plutonium and how all of that happened. And then in the 200 Areas where they separated the fuel into plutonium and uranium and waste. And then finally, when I was ready to work all by myself, then they put me in the 300 Area, and I split my time between 300 Area and FFTF, which was under construction at the time. So we had this big construction site security challenge that we had to fulfill. 0:16:12 Then after three months, they called me up and said—the context is that in 1972, the year before I went to work, there was a very significant terrorist attack at the Munich Olympics. By ’73 or early ’74, they had realized that those same terrorists might be interested in diverting plutonium. And it created a huge concern for the government and so they began to expand their security capabilities. One of the things that the company I worked for, Atlantic Richfield Hanford Company, needed to do was to add a couple of professional security people. In those days, they called us security agents. And they had just lost somebody, and so they needed a new security representative that would be responsible for education and enforcement of all the rules related to classified information and plutonium production and control. They asked me if I wanted to go do that. So I said, yes. 0:17:43 Then shortly after I got hired as a security agent, the other person that was working as a security representative retired. My boss was about 64, and sort of struggling with costs, budgets, some of the more basic business aspects of doing work here. So a year-and-a-half after that, they decided that they needed a new security manager. So then all of the sudden, out of the blue, I was the security manager for Atlantic Richfield. And it just sort of, it was like January of ’75, I guess. And I was just barely out of school. I thought, I don’t know if I can do this. I went out and I interviewed with the guy that I would work for, and I said, I don’t know if I’m ready for this or not. He said, oh, you can do that. Franklin: Wow. That is quite a— Heineman: Bing, bang, bang. Franklin: Yeah. [LAUGHTER] 0:19:00 Franklin: That’s a really interesting tie into—I never would’ve put the ’72 Munich Olympic terrorist, that PLO offshoot, into increased security at Hanford. I mean, I can understand their desire to want to probably obtain plutonium for probably a dirty bomb, because they probably wouldn’t have the capability to make their own weapon. But that’s a really fascinating tie-in to the Cold War. To kind of these world events. Heineman: Right. Well, the Munich Olympics event had an effect worldwide on people’s view of what the bad guys were willing to do with their automatic weapons and their willingness to kill people. Those folks, those terrorists, they were willing to die. That was foreign to the country at that time. We weren’t used to people being willing to die for their cause. It had a profound effect on the nuclear industry, and especially the plutonium and uranium production capabilities in the United States. It lasted for—as we talk a little more, you’ll see that it lasted for another 20 years and drove the expenditure of billions of dollars in security upgrades across the AEC, then ERDA, and then DOE production complex. I was lucky enough to come in at the head end of that. So I was right in the middle of the whole thing, and it was really fascinating. Franklin: Wow. So how long did you stay as—so—well, I don’t want to ask how long. What was your primary job as security manager? Obviously, you took the job, you got the job, right, was promoted to security manager at Atlantic Richfield Hanford. 0:21:00 Heineman: So, my primary goal, I would say, was to work with the production managers and the research managers and the folks that were involved in the 200 Areas where we were taking the spent fuel from the production reactors and converting it into plutonium and uranium. My primary objective in those days was to try to help them understand the risk of what at the time seemed to be a pretty outlandish threat, and convince them that there were controls that needed to be put into place on the people, the production processes and the information in order to assure that Hanford was the last place that those terrorists would want to go at the United States production complex. If they wanted to go attack the production complex and divert plutonium or uranium or obtain classified information, my job was to work with all these production and information control managers and convince them that we wanted to look like the very last place those terrorists would go if they decided to try and get some information or material. Franklin: So you— Heineman: And— Franklin: Oh, sorry. Heineman: And it was not an easy task. They didn’t understand; they didn’t really believe that it was real. They didn’t fight me, but I spent the bulk of my time in their offices with their staff talking about the history, talking about the risks, showing them how easy diversion might have been in the old days before we put in all of the security upgrades that we did. And then trying to convince them that it was appropriate to take a big chunk of the money they had to produce plutonium and spend it on security. Franklin: That’s interesting. Interesting for several reasons. So you basically had to kind of bring this threat home to them, to make it real for them, whereas they might have thought you were maybe making a mountain out of a molehill. You know, oh, this happened so far away. Heineman: That’s exactly what it felt like. Franklin: It’d never come here, and kind of blinders on. But the money to increase these security upgrades and security systems came out of their—like they had to spend the money out of their budgets? Heineman: Sure. Franklin: Is that where some of the resistance came from? 0:24:10 Heineman: Hanford would get a set amount of money every year. And the whole funding situation, even in those days, was very complex. But the bottom line is, Hanford was only going to get so much money. Their primary job was to produce plutonium. I mean, that was the goal. It was like—like, General Motors: the goal is, how many cars can you put off the other end of the line? And anything you do other than building cars takes away from how many cars you can produce. Since Hanford, its primary mission was to produce plutonium, it produced 80%, plus or minus, of the nation’s plutonium stockpile. Anything that they couldn’t spend on plutonium production seemed like a diversion from their primary mission. It really was so new, actually, to the whole world that people were willing to die for their cause, it was very difficult. Very difficult. But I was a young guy; I had a lot of energy, a lot of emotion. I was awed by these folks and very respectful. And I think that helped me a lot, over the security folks that worked for some of the other contractors that were older. So I just put in as much time as I had to to work with them and help them understand. And help me understand what the challenges were going to be from their side. If we started putting additional controls in place, how was that going to affect their ability to produce plutonium and spend as much money as they could on that primary mission? Franklin: So, really—it does seem so simple that this would be a concern to us today, but really this was kind of the—you were working in the kind of formation of this idea of how international terrorism could—the idea that terrorists in one place could affect people internationally and that they would use a global supply chain in order to cause havoc or to get material to attack civilians indiscriminately. That’s really—I mean, it sounds so, I guess, maybe 40 years later, we’re much more inured to that kind of thinking, or we see that so much on the news. Heineman: Sure, if you remember, and maybe you can’t, but in those days, when you went to get on the airplane, you showed them your ticket. That’s all there was. Franklin: I do! Heineman: Right? Franklin: It’s been a while, it’s getting further and further, but— Heineman: There was just none of today’s mentality that there need to be some basic controls in place to protect everybody. 0:27:23 Franklin: I’m wondering if you can give me an example of a control that was instituted that affected the way in which people produce plutonium, or one of the controls that you instituted in the process to keep materials safer? 0:27:39 Heineman: Sure. There’s lots of examples. I mean, in later years, I had the opportunity to manage projects that put an awful lot of hardware in place to do that. In the days when I went to work, between the city of Richland and the plutonium storage vault, there was the barricade, the Wye or Yakima Barricade that was no fences on either side; it was only controlling cars. There was a hog wire fence around each area with a gate and a badge house. But it doesn’t take very much to go through a hog wire fence. There was another hog wire fence around the separations plants or the Plutonium Finishing Plant. And inside that, nothing. The doors weren’t even locked. In the summer, at the Plutonium Finishing Plant, which had 47 exterior doors, two-thirds of those doors on both levels were wide open at night because it was so hot and they couldn’t air condition it. So that’s all there was in security. So over the next 15 years, we put an awful lot of hardware in place. We spent, honestly, billions of dollars to design and procure and construct barriers and detection technology, to hire additional guards, to set up special tactical weapons teams. We procured boats and canines and helicopters. We bought some of the best weaponry available anywhere in the country. We put controls over the production statistics so that if there was any indication that we didn’t have the amount of plutonium at the end of the process that we predicted at the beginning, that we could stop and go figure out why. Franklin: Did that also extend to the publication of the amount produced? Heineman: Yes. That has always been classified. Franklin: Oh, okay, okay. Heineman: And was classified all the way up to the end of production. Franklin: Okay, okay. 0:30:50 Heineman: There is a lot of production data on—open source data out on the internet. But even today, my ability to talk about how much we produced or how much we could produce from a given amount of fuel is limited by the regulations on classified information. I cannot share that. But there is a lot of information in the open literature out there now about that. But in those days, that information didn’t exist, and it wasn’t tolerated. If we saw little bits of data beginning to appear somewhere, our job was to go figure out where did it come from. Was it accidental, or was somebody actually sharing that data, and what did we need to do about that. So we had a lot of control over production data, over production processes, classified information, the hardware side of security. I think at one point when I was safeguards and security director, we had something over 450 Hanford patrolmen. And that compares with about 80 to 100 when I went to work. So we really went through a huge hiring spree. And our physical standards for those folks and the training that we provided for those folks, the equipment we supplied to them, was by 1980 or ’85 was just orders of magnitude improved over when I went to work. Franklin: Wow. Hanford was also a pretty early adopter of CCTV and computer alarms, correct? Heineman: Yes. Franklin: Was that part of—were you responsible for those upgrades as well? 0:33:02 Heineman: Yeah, after about a year-and-a-half as security manager, the contract changed for the production areas on the Site. Atlantic Richfield decided they didn’t want to be in the war business anymore. They didn’t want to be associated with plutonium; they wanted to focus on oil and chemical. And the contract was secured by Rockwell, which had operated the Rocky Flats site for a number of years in Colorado. When Rockwell came in, they asked me if—we were right in the middle of the recognition that we needed to do big things, and we were going to have to go spend a lot of money on upgrades. They asked me if I would be what, in their terms, was the safeguards project manager. And so I worked for two different people: I worked for the safeguards and security director, and I worked for the chemical processing director that had all of the reprocessing plants and the Plutonium Finishing Plant. He was the one that truly controlled the resources. So on one side I worked for the guy that was responsible for the technical aspects of security, and on the other side I worked for the guy that had the resources and the plants that we were trying to protect. It worked very well. It was a marvelous experience to work for both of them. And gave me quite an opportunity to interface with the plant managers in a very different way than I ever had when I was purely security. Franklin: Did you find it was easier to rationalize the upgrades and the expenditures at that point to security? Heineman: I think so, maybe partly because of the organizational set up. But partly, too, because a couple of years had gone by and there were other things happening in the world. The plant managers and their staff were reading about that in the paper; they were beginning to understand. So the job got a lot easier then. I think, the other thing that really helped was that the field office manager for the Richland operations office had this philosophy that he wanted to be—he wanted Hanford viewed as the hardest place to go to if anybody wanted to steal plutonium or classified information. And he worked very hard with headquarters—I think we’d just transitioned from the AEC to the Energy Research and Development Administration, ERDA. And he worked very hard with the folks back at headquarters to convince them to go talk to Congress and set up a discreet funding process for the security upgrades that was outside the production budget. Franklin: Ah. Heineman: So all of a sudden, I had access to tons of money. [LAUGHTER]—that I didn’t have to talk from the plant managers’ budgets. Franklin: Oh, okay, yeah. Heineman: And over the seven, actually, eight or nine years that I did the project manager job and the safeguards and security director’s job, we probably spent somewhere between one and two billion dollars, independent of the production budget to go design and construct and operate all those physical systems. Franklin: Such as? 0:37:30 Heineman: Well, the standard protection for a vital area in the Department of Energy today would be several layers of security outside that vital area, but then a double-perimeter fence with a goodly distance in between, with barriers on top of the fences to slow people down, alarm systems between those fences. Closed-circuit television cameras observing the whole area and activating immediately if you had an alarm so you could see instantaneously what was there, with a central alarm facility that was watching all of that. A space between the inner fence and the facility itself that was protected. This superior patrol force with the best of the best assigned to the plutonium facilities. Alarms around the entire exterior of the production plant. Alarms throughout the inside of the production plant that detect motion or heat or vibration or a variety of other things. Patrolmen on the inside of the plant looking out to keep people away if there is an attack, not respond too late to get them. And then a similar set that everything I just described, around the perimeter of the actual production area and the actual storage area. So you had eight to ten different layers of barriers, alarms, surveillance capability and response capability before anybody could ever even get to the door into wherever the plutonium was. And that’s a lot of money. [LAUGHTER] It’s a lot of money. And quite a bit of the funding that we had went into hiring, training, equipping and retraining our patrol force so that we had the best of the best available to respond if we did have a problem. Because it does you no good at all to know the bad guys are there if you can’t resolve that situation in your favor. Franklin: Yeah. Did the training of Hanford Patrol change—how did it change from when you had signed on in ’73 to what you’re describing now when Rockwell took over? You mentioned you went through like a three-month class. Did that expand, was there—I imagine all this would need new training as well. 0:40:50 Heineman: It was six to eight weeks, and the bulk of that was classroom training and just classified information and that kind of thing, and some of the basic production processes. Probably 50% of it was firearms and other similar training. By the time I left that part of the business in ’87, our basic training class, people had to have a background to begin with that was probably equivalent of what I had when I finished basic training. But we were able—we paid enough money and we were attractive enough to folks that we could hire them with that to begin with. Then we gave them anywhere from three to four months of dedicated training. And they had a minimum of two weeks and up to eight weeks a year of retraining, depending on what job they were assigned to. So for our tactical response folks, they were in training two out of twelve months a year, being retrained and optimizing their abilities to respond both individually and as a group. Of course, with the advanced weaponry and equipment capabilities that we provided to them, that in itself required a fair amount of additional training and retraining every year so that they could stay proficient in the use of that weaponry. Franklin: Yeah, wow. For example in the 200 Area where I imagine there was a lot of these new hardware and controls went in because of the storage and separation, were the alarms and CCTVs, were those managed centrally, or were they monitored in each facility, or was there a central facility—how did that work? Heineman: Yes, yes and yes. Franklin: Yes, yes, and yes? 0:43:13 Heineman: Each of the production facilities had its own control center. So the Plutonium Finishing Plant had one, the Plutonium-Uranium facility, PUREX had its own facility. FFTF had its own facility. And then we had a central alarm facility between the 200 Areas that both received duplicate signals independently of the local ones, and monitored how things were going on at each of the production facilities. In the early days, we even had a third level, which eventually we decided was superfluous, which was down in the basement of the Federal Building, that sort of monitored all of that. Franklin: Yeah, I could see how that—how would that third level respond to an emergency, being all the way out there, how would they have detected something that those first two levels wouldn’t have detected? Yeah. Interesting. Heineman: It was mostly information control down there. Franklin: Oh, okay. 0:44:35 Heineman: And it gave them a direct access to—back in the early days, senior site management both for the government and for its contractors were all downtown. None of them lived way out here in the Site. So it gave them information and the ability to monitor stuff from down in the city of Richland that they otherwise would’ve relied on people to tell them instead of see directly. But it was about that same time that we shut that center down that by then I think it was the Department of Energy who said, you know, you contractor management teams, you really need to be out there where the action is and close to your folks and in control. So everybody began to move from the city of Richland out onto the Site. Which, actually, as a support service employee was very helpful to me, because they were now close to the reality of the day-to-day and it was a lot easier for me to deal with them. Franklin: Oh, yeah, I imagine. Well, great, that’s so interesting. So I see in 1980 you became safeguards and security director? Heineman: Yes, 1980. Franklin: So describe that. It seems like you got more responsibility, then, right, with Hanford, not only Hanford Patrol, but also fire and emergency preparedness and nuclear safeguards? Heineman: Yes. Franklin: So was that kind of a similar work, just kind of monitoring all of the different emergency and security possibilities onsite? 0:46:31 Heineman: Yeah, my job really changed a lot between being in charge of security or the projects to do the upgrades, when I went to safeguards and security director. Because we did, we had Hanford Patrol, Hanford Fire. We had site-wide emergency preparedness. Safeguards, which was the accounting for the plutonium and other nuclear materials. And then the professional security folks that had been years before. And so I had chief of Hanford Patrol that ran Hanford Patrol. I had the chief of the fire department who ran the fire department. That wasn’t my job anymore. [LAUGHTER] So probably the closest thing to what I’d done before that I was still in charge of was emergency preparedness. Because it was fairly small and the senior managers on the Site really looked to me individually when something went wrong to take charge and organize and run things for them. I mean, they had the final decisions on a lot of stuff. But the rest of it, I was managing professional managers that were in charge of patrol and security and fire. And I didn’t do that anymore. So I could give them advice. I could help them decide how to respond to different kinds of both management and technical challenges in a consultation kind of environment. But my primary job was securing funding for the additional upgrades we wanted to do, which we were by then doing both, not just for security, but the Hanford Fire Department. All the old Hanford fire equipment from World War II was falling apart, breaking down. We’d take three brush trucks to a brush fire out in the desert, and one of them would make it. [LAUGHTER] So probably— Franklin: Really? You guys were still using World War II-era equipment— Heineman: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Franklin: --in ’80? 0:49:05 Heineman: Absolutely. In fact, there is a road that goes up Rattlesnake Mountain to get to the top. If we had fires on Rattlesnake Mountain or anywhere north of there, sort of like the Silver Dollar fire or the big fires before that, most of the fire vehicles couldn’t go up that road. It was too steep. And they wouldn’t make it. Either they couldn’t make it at all because they weren’t powerful enough, or they’d break down on the way. So we put a fairly substantial amount of money into upgrading all of the fire equipment on the Site, too. And up until that point, we were buying excess equipment. When something would break down and we’d need a new brush truck or a new fire engine or a new ambulance, we would go out on the government’s excess list—[LAUGHTER]—and get stuff that had already been used, mostly used up, someplace else. And we decided we couldn’t keep doing that. So we worked with the government and we worked with our companies to secure funding to go through and upgrade all of that equipment. And we began upgrading training and all the other stuff to go with it. So at that point my job was almost entirely securing funding, being the liaison between the security and fire functions, security and emergency services functions and the production management, interfacing with the Department of Energy on where we wanted to go years from then. It was a very different job than I’d ever had before and very enriching. I mean, it was—it really was—it was something I was very proud to be able to do, and something I think, between myself and the management team I had, that we did very well. Franklin: Wow. And you were also still in charge of nuclear productions safeguards and securing that production information, right? Heineman: Yes. Franklin: And making sure that every bit of plutonium was accounted for from what would be possible to generate. 0:51:39 Heineman: Right, and in fact for a number of years, we hadn’t really had much production going on after the Cold War was over, most of those production processes were either phased out or phased way down. Then under Ronald Reagan, there was a decision that we needed to increase our nuclear capabilities. We moved forward with, again, we spent a ton of money upgrading both our production capabilities and our security capabilities for restarting the PUREX plant to process K Basin, K Reactor fuel that was in storage in the basins and separate out the plutonium and uranium, restart the Plutonium Finishing Plant to purify the plutonium, and restart what was called the UO3 plant to process the uranium from the fuel. Franklin: And before that, these had all been in shutdown mode? Heineman: Pretty much in standby, yeah. Franklin: So not taking a lot of security resources then? I mean, still a basic level, right, but not in active use, so much easier to monitor when they’re in shutdown. 0:53:10 Heineman: Actually, in some ways it’s easier; in some ways it’s harder. Because you don’t have active operations going on, but you still have the presence of the materials, both in the process and in storage. The decision to deactivate plutonium production was always a political decision, both when they slowed it down at the end of the Cold War, and then—I’m not sure I remember which president, Jimmy Carter, maybe—decided that we weren’t going to produce nuclear material anymore. It was always a political decision that had to be executed in days or weeks, leaving a huge amount of material still inside the chemical processes at the various plants. Because it takes a long time to process a batch from one end to the other, and they never gave us enough time to do that clean-out. Franklin: Right, they just wanted you to turn off the lights, lock the door— Heineman: Just stop. Franklin: Yeah, send everybody home. Heineman: Just stop. Franklin: Which is where we get the K Basin spent fuel. 0:54:40 Heineman: The K Basin fuel, all the material that was held up and in storage at the PUREX plant. The Plutonium Finishing Plant had—there are some articles, I don’t remember the numbers now—but there were some articles that we published publicly on how much and how many different varieties of plutonium types of products were at PFP, the Plutonium Finishing Plant at the time we couldn’t process anymore. A wide variety of different kinds of materials, each one with its own unique safety and security challenges. A lot of it. [LAUGHTER] And so in some ways, it was actually harder form a security standpoint to control things during the shutdown days than it—or suspended operation days—than it was during the production days. Franklin: Interesting. Yeah, I mean, I guess that makes sense. There’s less eyes on it. It’s got lots of safety issues of just sitting there. Yeah, okay, thank you. 0:56:08 Heineman: The whole McCluskey room event was purely a function of being directed to shut down a process without having the time and the resources to come back and clean that system out. I don’t remember, frankly, what the instigator was for that particular shutdown in the americium recovery facility, but it was down for a long time and ultimately resulted in a chemical reaction and an explosion. There are examples like that, not as public and not as dynamic maybe, across all of Hanford. In the reactor areas, in the separation areas, in the finishing areas, in the lab areas in 300 Area. Just tons of examples there. Franklin: Hmm. Wow. So when production is restarted, then, and they were kind of bring back up PUREX and PFP, and UO3, did your job change significantly, or did it kind of feel like the Cold War days again? 0:57:32 Heineman: Yeah, it felt like going back to the ‘70s and very early ‘80s. Mostly in the ‘70s. There was a high degree of esprit de corps across the whole Site. People were focused on a common mission. Everybody was rowing the same direction. We were excited that the government had provided enough money to hire the people and to get the processes upgraded to restart. There was a real energy and an enthusiasm again that had been missing for a number of years. That was really fun. Franklin: And your job still stayed mostly the same through those years in the ‘80s, then, safeguards and security director? 0:58:31 Heineman: Right. I left that job in 1987. Westinghouse—again, DOE had rebid the contracts and they went to a single site contract. So what had been run by eight different contractors became the responsibility of Westinghouse Hanford Corporation. Westinghouse had their own safeguards and security director at the time they won their contract. I told them I still wanted to work for them even though they already had somebody to do the job that I had, and they had me consolidate the emergency preparedness programs from the eight different contractors into one. So I spent about a year doing that job. And then my world changed yet again. [LAUGHTER] And I started doing something completely different. Franklin: Which was? 0:59:39 Heineman: They called me and said they thought I’d gotten that done to their satisfaction. They were having difficulty because they were now in charge of radiological control, health physics, radiation protection technicians, all those functions. They were now in charge of radiological protection for the whole Site. Which was bringing together a whole bunch of people that had never worked together, that had different systems, different processes, different procedures, different regulations. The poor manager that was trying to manage all that was really struggling. They had decided that they needed somebody to come in fresh, and so they asked me if I would go do that. And I tried to explained to them I didn’t know anything about radiological protection. I wasn’t a health physicist. I’d never been an HPT or an RPT. I really didn’t know much about it. And they said, that’s not what we need you for. We need you to go create a well-functioning organization. They asked me to go do that, and I did that for the next seven years. That was a very rewarding job. Franklin: How so? Heineman: In two different ways. First, again, I was responsible for supplying support and services to all the individual plant managers. So it gave me a chance to reacquaint myself with all of them and some of the newer ones, and to be talking on a different plane than security about what we could do different, what could we do better, where were they frustrated with the support that they were getting, where was I or my folks frustrated with the way they were doing business that might have involved risks, radiological risks we didn’t need to take. So there was a whole new relationship between myself and all the plant managers across the Site. And the other one was that the business agent for the HPTs, health physics technicians, sometimes called radiation protection technicians, was a young, very forward-looking person. He and I really teamed up and resolved an enormous number of management labor problems between radiation protection management and the bargaining unit, RPTs, HPTs. He and I were so in sync with each other over what was best for everybody that there almost was just not a problem that came up that we couldn’t resolve, working back together with the people in conflict. Franklin: Do you remember his name? Heineman: John Jeske. Franklin: John Jeske. 01:03:10 Heineman: And John is still employed at the Site. In fact, when the Site—we sent John over to Idaho late in my radiological protection career. We sent him over to the Idaho site to find out what was going on in this new program, safety—shoot, I can’t remember what we called them. But let’s call them safety stewards, where a union representative would be appointed from every facility. That sole job was to be the safety representative for all the folks that worked there. Something that prior to that time had always been the job of the safety manager or the safety professionals. We gave a job just like that to a union person. That’s what they were doing at Idaho. He came back and was able to sell that concept across Hanford. When he was approaching the time where it was time for somebody else to become the business agent for the RPTs, he decided to start up and run that kind of a program across Hanford. And has been doing that until just this last year when a new person took over that job. So John has—he’s always been ten years ahead of his time. He’s just an amazing person. Franklin: That’s great. Well, I have two questions—or, I guess a comment and then a question. I’ll start with the question. Did that—radiological control management, did that include environmental control as well, or was it just health physics? Heineman: No. Franklin: Just human—okay, so worker-oriented— 1:05:31 Heineman: Yeah, environmental was a completely separate discipline with a different set of skills and capabilities. I mean, obviously, radiological protection is out there to protect the environment as well as the people. But it was strictly from a radiological contamination perspective. Franklin: Did you find quick acceptance from the RPTs and health physicists that you were asked to manage, or was it kind of a—did you have to kind of grow—because you’re obviously coming at this from not their profession. So, would you find a pretty quick acceptance to your management, or did you have to kind of grow into that role and kind of earn their trust? Heineman: It took a fair amount of growing, I would say probably a good two years of the seven. I was accepted much more quickly by the bargaining unit representatives than I was by the professional staff. The professional staff didn’t understand why they would have a boss that didn’t have a background or know anything about their business. They didn’t understand that I would let them do that job and make those decisions. And it took quite a while for them to begin to trust in that. The bargaining unit folks were pretty—as I said, they were in a lot of conflict and having a lot of trouble as the previous manager was trying to merge all these different cultures and procedures. Franklin: These are the eight different contractor units we’re talking about? 1:07:20 Heineman: Right, of those, probably four had radiological protection folks. And so the rank-and-file employees, both bargaining unit and non-bargaining professionals at the non-management level, they were not very happy with their management. And my job in the safeguards and security business from almost the get-go had been to create people that had capabilities they never had before. And to equip them with materials and logistical capabilities that they’d never had before. So it was a builder’s job. It wasn’t a manager’s job; it was a builder’s job. So when I went into radiological control, I kind of had that same attitude, that the most important people in the organization were the ones that had the instruments in their hand, just like the ones with the guns in their hands or the firehose in their hands. It wasn’t the managers. It was the people that were going to protect things. And they were really resonated to that. So it was pretty easy for me to connect with the HPTs and the non-management professional people. The management team took a little while. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] That’s interesting. Heineman: Yeah. Franklin: But that kind of makes sense. So during this time while you were doing this or a little before, you were also responsible for shutting down the B Canyon, and upgrades for the waste encapsulation for cesium and strontium. Heineman: That came after—that was the next— Franklin: That came after, oh, okay. Heineman: The next big change in my career. Right. Franklin: The next, okay, then let’s go there. 1:09:19 Heineman: So—[LAUGHTER] one of the five reprocessing plants at Hanford which separated the fuel into its constituent parts was B Plant. Very similar to PUREX but built in the early ‘50s instead of later like PUREX was so it wasn’t as technically capable. And really never got used for separating fuel. Franklin: What was it used for? Heineman: B Plant was built—there’s a long story associated with how the reprocessing plants advanced from T Plant, which was the original one, to REDOX, which was a dramatic new technology over in West Area. And then from REDOX to PUREX. And B Plant was kind of built right in the middle of there. It was almost unnecessary from the beginning, because REDOX and then especially PUREX—PUREX was able to process the fuel from all of the production reactors all by itself. Even though the original design was we needed six reprocessing plants, by the time it was built, the technology had advanced and it did the job all by itself. Franklin: But it was also producing a different finished product—or, no, sorry, that wouldn’t go to the PFP. Sorry, never mind. Heineman: No, everything from all five or six or those reprocessing plants was supposed to go to PFP. Franklin: PFP, okay. Heineman: And then PFP converted this less-enriched plutonium solution over to the final product, either plutonium powder or plutonium metal. That we then sent to the weapons facilities. Franklin: Right, but PUREX as an extraction process was able to handle the different fuels coming out of all the different reactors. 1:11:24 Heineman: All of the reactors. So it basically just made all the other four obsolete and prevented the construction of the other one that was going to go up in East Area. So B Plant got the job, because it was there, it was online, it was proven using cold chemicals. It was ready to go, but we didn’t need it. So the government realized that we had a huge amount of uranium in the tanks that went with the tank waste when you extracted the plutonium from the fuel. And the idea was that we could take uranium and pull it out. So they gave that mission to the third reprocessing plant over in West Area, which was U Plant. And the key question for B Plant, then, became how can you contribute? And about that time, the temperature of the liquids in a number of the waste tanks was becoming hot. The tanks were actually boiling, and there were huge safety concerns developing about how are we going to control this wild combination of chemicals in liquid in these tanks. So they redesigned the process inside of B Plant. Didn’t involve a lot of physical changes, but the chemical processes, to take waste that was sluiced with high pressure water jets out of the higher heat tanks, and through the chemical process separate out the cesium and the strontium, which are the two radionuclides that contribute the most heat. So they would remove the cesium and the strontium and then put the waste back in the tanks, subsequently, much reducing the heat load in those tanks. Franklin: Right, making the tank safer. Heineman: So they began to do that and they realized that they needed a way to store the cesium and the strontium. Franklin: Right, because these are very dangerous radionuclides for human health. 1:14:10 Heineman: Yeah, they’re high radiation radionuclides. That is, they have a very short half-life, so they’re giving off tons of radiation. That’s what generates the heat, and the radiation is pretty dangerous all by itself. So they built the Waste Encapsulation and Storage Facility, WESF, on the end of B Plant. And its job was to take the cesium and convert it to cesium chloride, a powder, and the strontium and convert it to strontium fluoride, a powder. Load those powders into double-thick stainless steel capsules about 30 inches long and about this big around. And you had one welded shut inside of another welded shut. And then store those capsules under 20 feet of water, which both kept them cool, so that the capsules didn’t melt, and protected the people in the facility from the radiation. Franklin: Yeah, I’ve heard about this facility before. Heineman: It’s a fascinating facility. And it’s still operating and still has all 1,930 capsules in the pool cells. It’s a beautiful facility when you turn the lights off, because you got a beautiful blue Cherenkov radiation glow. It’s gorgeous. But the sooner they can find a way to dry store those capsules, the better, because they’re—in my mind, once I went over and understood them better, I really believe they were one of the highest risks anywhere at Hanford. Franklin: More so than the tanks, or equal— 1:16:23 Heineman: Oh, yes, in terms of human health, as opposed to the environment, way, way worse. Way, way worse. We used to joke that if you had a capsule sitting in an empty field and it hadn’t melted yet from the heat inside, you couldn’t get within 100 yards of it, no matter how fast you ran, because you would die before you got there of radiation poisoning. Franklin: Wow. 1:16:54 Heineman: These capsules—and you can find, I think, some of the data on the ‘net on their radiation levels. Honestly, by now, I’ve forgotten the numbers. But they’re easily the most radioactive things anywhere at the Hanford Site. They contain a third of the—in these, just these 1,930 capsules, they have a third of the radioactivity of the whole Hanford Site. In one little set of pool cells. They’re just amazing, amazing things. And now they have a project going they pretty well completed the design. The heat transfer is the problem: how do you put them inside a dry capsule, or a dry cask and not have them melt inside? Because someday you might have to open that cask, right? Franklin: Sure, sure. 1:17:58 Heineman: So they’ve pretty well completed their calculations, and thy have a project to move those things from the pool cells, where if they ever got uncovered, you’d have a disaster, to dry storage where they could live for a long time without hurting anybody. So anyway I was doing this radiological control job, and things were sort of starting to run pretty flat. Everything was going good. B Plant had been—once they terminated the cesium and strontium recovery process, it had been sitting there in a standby condition for, oh my goodness, 20-plus years. And for the staff just to keep it safe, to keep the utilities and the other stuff, to keep it from falling apart and harming the environment, my recollection is it was about $35 million a year for a stay-safe condition. And another $10 million on top of that to operate WESF and keep the capsules safe. Franklin: Well, I imagine B Plant, processing all that cesium and strontium, it would be pretty hot itself. 1:19:39 Heineman: Yeah. It needed to be controlled. And so they were beginning—the cleanup mission was beginning in earnest then. And they realized that there was a lot of stuff they couldn’t do because they were having to put $35 million a year into the B Canyon. And it was giving them nothing except a safe condition. And they decided if there was some way to clean it up, isolate it from the environment so that you wouldn’t have any leaks or anything, and basically take all the people out, they’d have $35 million they could go use to clean up other stuff. And so they called me up and said, we don’t really have any money— Franklin: That’s a great way to start a— 1:20:38 Heineman: Yeah, it was a great conversation. The vice president that called me, his name was Ron Bliss, and he was another one of those guys that was always ten years ahead. But he called me up and he said, there’s kind of a no-lose thing here. We’ve got this facility that’s costing us $35 million. We don’t have a lot of money to put into cleaning it up. But would you be willing to go over there, kind of investigate what the money’s being spent on, how it’s being spent, see if you can’t find a way to convert the workforce from babysitters to cleaner-uppers, and see if you can get us out of this $35 million. So I said, I don’t know anything about that either, but sure, I’ll go over there. So I went over, and fairly quickly realized that there was quite a bit of money going in there for the effort that was truly required for safety. A lot of it was just carryover from the production days, and nobody’d ever really looked at, does all this stuff still need to be done? And so I began putting some information together and some different approaches. And the deputy manager for DOE’s Richland office came out to our facility one day, and I think he and my boss, the vice president, had talked a little about how he could help. So he came out. His name was Lloyd Piper. And he had a bunch of get-out-of-jail-free cards in his wallet. Franklin: You mean like from Monopoly? 1:22:30 Heineman: Yeah. Yeah. Except he’d had them made for him, with his name on it. Franklin: Oh, okay. Heineman: And it said, one get out of jail free card, on one side, from Lloyd Piper. And on the other side it said something like, if you don’t strive you never achieve, or something like that. So he came out and met with me and my team. He said, I’ll tell you what, he said, I’m going to challenge you to try to get this done in three years. And I’ll give you access to x amount of additional money on top of the $35 million a year, because I know you’re going to have to go separate WESF which used all the B Plant utilities: power, water, all that stuff. Franklin: Oh, so you’d have to get separate utilities out to it. 1:23:26 Heineman: Right, because WESF still needed to be functional. He said, so I’ll give you this amount of money or access to that much money if you need it to do that separation. But I’d like you to try to get done in three years. In three years, let’s see if we can’t have WESF separated, and nobody working at B Plant at all. And we said—and he handed out these cards. And so we said, ah, hell, sure, it’s free, right? Get out of jail free. So we took that challenge on and over the next—it took us about six months to do the detail planning. We put together various task teams and at the end of the six months, we had a plan. We had to hire a few more people that we didn’t have at B Plant that we needed. We had a lot of piping work to do, because we had to flush the entire system, as you said. The residual cesium and strontium was pretty high radiation levels and we needed to clean the inside of the canyon out. So we had to hire a few additional staff, and mostly craftsman. Over the next three years—the original challenge was out the gate in ’98. And we did that. We did that. We got it done, and we put a padlock on the front door. We found jobs for all but two of the 150 people that worked there. Franklin: Wow. Heineman: So we didn’t have a big layoff, and the $35 million went to like $500,000. The cleanup was completed for about $100 million less than the long-range plan for environmental cleanup of B Plant. So we saved that $100 million in addition to making the $35 million a year go away. Marvelous opportunity. It was really terrific. Had a great relationship with the DOE folks here and with the DOE folks at headquarters. So we did that and B Plant has a padlock on it today and WESF keeps operating and doing its thing and everything’s cool. Franklin: Oh, that’s great. You should be really proud. 1:26:09 Heineman: Yup. Yeah! We were. It was a great team. We had people that did some stellar things, that came up with some incredible solutions to what seemed to be intractable problems. We had—the team got along so well, we really had a good time. Franklin: Wow. So after B Canyon shut down, you switched to your last job on site, right? Heineman: Right. Franklin: Which was— Heineman: Wasn’t supposed to be my last job, but it was. Franklin: Okay. [LAUGHTER] The beginning of decommissioning the PFP, right? I’m wondering if you could talk about, why’d you come over to PFP? 1:26:51 Heineman: Well, we were about three months from putting the padlock on B Plant, and the rest of it was just sort of, kind of the last few things. And we’d found jobs for almost everybody in. So I felt like I was pretty well done. PFP had been shut down by the government. It was in its cleanup mission, which was really critical. As I said earlier, there were a lot of different kinds of materials, some of them not very stable left at PFP when they said shut down, because we didn’t have time to do anything, we just had to stop. So it was a fairly fluid situation in terms of trying to keep everything safe. But they had made some errors and had three what are called criticality violations over about a two-week period where employees had done things that were prohibited by criticality preventions standards. The government stepped in and said, stop. You can’t do anything. You can’t move anything. They even had to get special permission from the government to move bags of used laundry. It was a terrible situation. And they had been in that mode for about nine months, and had tried twice to upgrade their operations, prove to DOE that they could do it better than they did it before DOE shut them down, and failed. And so I start thinking, well, what’s my next challenge going to be? And I thought, well, I don’t know what I’m going to do next. But I went to my boss, who was by then the president of Babcock and Wilcox, B&W Hanford Company. And suggested to him that since we didn’t really know what I should do next, the guy that had finished up putting a padlock on PUREX was available. So I suggested that he come over and do the final three months at B Plant and that I go over to PFP and help the plant director there with upgrading all the operations and procedures and things and trying to convince DOE to give us another chance to restart the cleanup operations. And so I went over there in June of ’98 and thought I would be there six to nine months, until we could get it restarted. And by then I would find something else fun to do. And I retired from there in 2012. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: 14 years later. Heineman: I never got out. That’s right. That’s right. Franklin: So what happened? What turned what you thought would be a six-, nine-month job and took the rest of your career out there? Was it something about the job that made you want to stay, or was it the job so big that you felt like you couldn’t walk away from it? Heineman: I think it was both. The Plutonium Finishing Plant is easily, easily the most interesting place that I’ve ever worked at Hanford. Franklin: Why is that? 1:30:50 Heineman: The variety of processes, the degree of control that’s needed over the process, the procedures, the people, to be able to do work safely and avoid a really serious problem. The history of the facility, the nature of the commitment of the people who worked there. There was nobody that worked at the Plutonium Finishing Plant that couldn’t, based on seniority, have transferred out and gone to work someplace else. And there were a lot of people that transferred over to the PFP, didn’t like it because of all those controls, and turned around and left. But the people who stayed were people who were really committed and really good at what they did, and very willing to accept controls because they understood the safety implications and why it was necessary. The whole place is just the most fascinating production plant I could ever imagine. So that was certainly part of it. The people, the quality of the people and their commitment was part of it. Part of it was, frankly, the personal challenge, because there was not one day that things ran steady in trying to clean up that Plutonium Finishing Plant. Not one single day, from the time I went to work until I went home at night, went the way it was supposed to. Dynamic, exciting, energizing, making a contribution. I just never, never felt a desire to go do something else, and frankly as I looked around at the cleanup activities in other areas, nothing compared in complexity and importance to PFP. Franklin: What were some of the milestones that were accomplished while you were at—sorry, was your job managing the decontamination—or what was your specific job at— Heineman: Until— Franklin: At PFP. 1:33:40 Heineman: Until CH2M Hill took over the contract fairly recently at that time, I think I spent three-and-a-half years with CH2M Hill. But up until the time that they took over the contract, I was variously the deputy director for PFP or the senior project manager for cleanup. I had a variety of titles, depending on the organizational structure. But I was typically the number two guy at PFP, and responsible for, I would call it, the strategy of how to go about cleaning it up as quickly as possible for the least amount of money in a safe way. The director, then, was responsible for all the crews that made that happen, once the plan was laid out. So he managed all of the folks that worked in the plant; I managed the people that strategized and designed the cleanup processes. As far as major milestones, I think those are, as I look back now, they seem fairly obvious; they weren’t obvious at all at the time. But there were, let me just say, 15 completely unique kinds of plutonium compounds left in the plant. Some of them liquids, some of them powders, some of them metal. All different kinds with different qualities and characteristics. One by one, we took each of those types of plutonium from whatever condition they were in at the time we shut it down, to the point that they were a stable material that could be containerized and stored without risk of a chemical reaction or causing other kinds of problems, like fires, et cetera. So, there were like 15 mini-milestones as we completed—because every one of those 15 needed a different process to convert it from this unstable form it was in, into something that we could put it in a can and be confident it was safe for the long-term. We could talk about some of those kinds of processes, but each one of those processes had to be designed, had to be proven in the laboratory with small quantities, had to be constructed, operated, and then we’d claim victory on that particular product. So there were 15 little mini-milestones. 1:37:15 But the completion of the plutonium stabilization mission, to me, was huge. Because it gave us material that we could store safely, that we could ship across country. Because we couldn’t—if we’re going to clean up and shut down PFP, we couldn’t have all this plutonium in there. So we had to ship it someplace. It had to be safe to ship. So getting all of that stabilized and put into the vaults, waiting to be shipped across the country, either to Rocky Flats in Colorado, or mostly to the Savannah River Site in South Carolina—huge. Huge, from a safety standpoint, a money standpoint, manpower, the type of mission. Because that was very technical, very research-intensive. We needed plutonium chemists. We had all kinds of capabilities that we would never again need at PFP once that was done. So that was a really key point. The next key milestone was easily when the last of the plutonium was shipped offsite. When we shipped the last safe, secured transport vehicle—they’re high-security shipments to move plutonium—when we loaded and watched the last of these shipment vehicles leave PFP for Savannah River, knowing we now had no more discrete plutonium anywhere in the plant—we had residual contamination in the pipes, the ventilation ductwork and stuff we were going to have to go clean up—but the product was now gone. That was another major milestone. Franklin: You kind of closed out the whole—I mean—it was the last shipment. Heineman: That was the end of the production mission, yep. Franklin: Yeah, that was the actual end of the production mission. Wow. That’s really something. With the 15 different processes, did it get easier as time went on? I imagine the first couple would be, you know, you’d be doing something new here. Did it get easier? Heineman: They were all completely unique. Franklin: Really? Okay. Tom Hungate: Sorry—oh, I’ve just got to change the battery. Franklin: Oh, okay. Hungate: Yeah. Heineman: We’ll take a break. [VIDEO CUTS] Hungate: Sorry, you can go whenever. Heineman: I think we were talking about those 15 types of plutonium? Franklin: Yes. Yes, we were. Heineman: And each one of those was so entirely different from another that I wouldn’t say it got easier or harder. Each one started out as a material that we would need the scientists for characterize for us: what’s the safety risk, what are the bad things that could happen, what causes that to happen, what do we need to do to it so that it’s safe and stable and can go in a can? And every one of them was different. So, for example, one of the largest quantities we had to deal with was—I think we had 4,000 or 4,500 liters of relatively rich plutonium nitrate solution, which was the product of the PUREX plant. Franklin: Yes. 1:40:54 Heineman: Late in the PUREX process, we installed an oxide conversion line where—we didn’t want to ship that liquid by truck across the Site anymore because of the safety dangers—so we converted that liquid into powder before we took it over to the Plutonium Finishing Plant. But prior to that being installed, there was all this plutonium nitrate liquid that had been sent over to PFP. And PFP actually generated a fair amount of plutonium nitrate liquid in the plutonium reclamation facility. When you had product that didn’t meet specification, we had to burn it or dissolve it in the PRF and dissolve it in nitric acid. And then that would be the head end of the PFP processes to create metal or powder. So we had 4,000 or 4,500 liters of plutonium nitrate solution. Well, you can’t ship it. It’s not safe. The containers had to be vented because they create pressure, they generate hydrogen, because of the acid inside. So you have hydrogen being generated inside these enclosed containers. Franklin: Hydrogen’s very explosive. 1:42:31 Heineman: Absolutely. And it’s just a bad situation, unless it’s for a short-term. So we had to design processes that would take that plutonium nitrate liquid and turn it into a stable powder, plutonium oxide. We couldn’t use the massive plutonium production processes. There wasn’t near enough material to be able to do that. So we had to build a new process. Franklin: Well, I mean, it was also to clean those processes up in the first place, so why would you want to run a crew— Heineman: Yeah, we had crews in there doing clean-out of all the gloveboxes and everything at the same time that we were trying to stabilize all these types of plutonium. Franklin: So you basically had to scale-down the refinement process and create—like, create a scaled-down version for each type of plutonium. Heineman: Yes. Yes. Franklin: Wow. Heineman: Yes. Franklin: And do all this in the PFP. Heineman: At the same time crews were cleaning out the rest of it. Franklin: Wow. 1:43:37 Heineman: So, it led to an amazing series of projected plans and milestones and then accomplishments when we got each one done. We just started filling the vaults up with all this stabilized material getting ready to ship it. Franklin: It’s easier to see now why that cleanup mission took so long. Heineman: Oh, my goodness. Franklin: I mean, I’d never known about that specific aspect of it. And that seems—very important work, but also very time-consuming, too. Heineman: And I neither remember, nor do I know if I can talk about, how much plutonium, in terms of stabilized kilogram product we produced. But we probably did get to talk about that in some of the interviews and articles that were generated during that process, probably have some of that data in it. But let me just say, it was an enormous amount of plutonium. I would guess that there wasn’t that much plutonium in one place anywhere in the United States. Franklin: Wow. Heineman: We had to get it all stabilized and packaged and shipped out of here if we were going to clean up the plant. Franklin: Wow. That’s really fascinating. I’m definitely making a note to look to see if I can find out that number. So, after these 15 processes—after this 15 different types of plutonium were done, when did that finish, by the way? When did the last shipment go out? Do you remember? It’s okay if you don’t. I was just curious. Heineman: I don’t, actually. Franklin: That’s fine. 1:45:35 Heineman: You’d think that would be burned in my memory, but it was just another step in the process, as I say. It’s easier looking back to pick out what some of those key milestones were than to remember. I remember we had the public and politicians out. We did speeches, we did all kinds of things. So it’s out there in— Franklin: Oh, sure, sure. Heineman: Yeah. And the folks in CH and MSA communications should be able to very simply—from their archives, should be able to very simply pull out some of the briefings and things we gave to the press on quantities and dates and all that kind of—I mean, it’s all out there. I just don’t— Franklin: Oh, no, sure, I understand. Heineman: My mind’s too full. Franklin: No, I understand. And we work for MSA, so it’d be easy for me to get ahold of that. Okay. So what else happened in that time you were out there? 1:46:46 Heineman: Since you work for MSA, one of the best sources for that kind of data that’s still out at the plant is the business manager at PFP. Franklin: Okay. Heineman: Her name is Julie Widney. She and I managed the two groups that did all the planning and we created almost all of the presentations and briefings and things. So she still has all that in her files. If you said, what were the major types, how much plutonium was in them, when did they get done? She’d just send you a little summary of that. Franklin: Oh, that’s great. I actually made a new contact at CHPRC when we had our initial problems with the interview. I found Tanya Reyes— Heineman: Oh, did you? Franklin: --in Pop Fone. And we had a really interesting conversation about what they’re doing at—because they’re doing that mini-documentary about— Heineman: I have no idea what they were doing. I thought it was you guys. Franklin: I know! But it was actually really great, because it opened up a new source of information, and she’s talked to people out at Site. So it was very interesting to hear about what they were doing— Heineman: Did you explain to her, by the way, what happened? Franklin: Yeah, because she was confused, because she was confused because she didn’t know about us. So she thought she was scheduling you for something and then you didn’t show up to that; you thought it was us. So she was also very confused. But it made sense how the confusion happened. As soon as I got to talking to her, I was like, everything makes sense now. You got caught in the crossfire of two different worlds, two different projects. Heineman: Well, I just didn’t understand it was two different things. Franklin: Yeah, it was just really funny. It was a very good conversation, though. Okay, so anyway. So, you do the 15 different types, and then was there any other major milestones out at PFP besides those, the last shipment and the cleanup of these 15 types? 1:48:48 Heineman: Well, sort of like finishing the cleanup of all the material was a major milestone that was supported by a milestone for each of the 15. So the cleanup of the facility itself, which obviously was completed for the Plutonium Reclamation Facility and for the Americium Facility, what they call the McCluskey Room. The cleanup was completed for each of those and there’s a milestone associated with when they said this is now ready for demolition. But the main plant, the 234-5 Building, has a whole series of sub-milestones associated with cleaning out various geographical portions of the plant. There were three different laboratories inside the main PFP facility. There were three different primary production process areas. There were a lot of storage and support areas that needed to be cleaned out. You had—I don’t even remember the number anymore. I thought I would never forget, but—gloveboxes. There were x number of gloveboxes, hundreds and hundreds of gloveboxes. Franklin: Mm-hmm. Stacked on top of each other—or not— Heineman: Yeah, sometimes they were some-four high. But mostly the production ones were long. And the material would move from liquid at one end, and then go through a whole series of things, all the way down the line until you had plutonium oxide powder or plutonium metal at the other end. So you had all those gloveboxes that all had to be cleaned out inside, through the gloves. Then they had to be isolated from the work area somehow, and cut up, and separated from ventilation and piping and everything, and all the instrumentation, and then removed. So all of those things, like cleaning out the analytical laboratory was a milestone. And when it was done, there were no gloveboxes. It was virtually clean. Franklin: I just realized, we’ve been talking about cleanup so long, I—how does one—I understand removing these things and putting them in, like, ERDF, like solid waste. But how does one clean up, like, contaminated ductwork? Is there a special chemical process that one uses to neutralize the radiation, or how does—what exactly does “clean up” mean? Heineman: So, let’s talk about a piece of ventilation ducting. Franklin: Okay. Heineman: There were a few areas in the ventilation ducting just like the drain lines and sewer lines in your house that have a tendency to collect material as it goes through. Franklin: Sure. 1:52:31 Heineman: And in the case of ventilation ductwork, it’s going through as an airflow. And at certain points in the way the ductwork is designed, it would collect material. It’s generally distributed in a fine layer on the inside of the entire duct. But there were some areas that had enough plutonium that it was of a criticality concern, which means you could have an uncontrolled reaction if you added water or you consolidated it into a particular form or configuration. So we had to go into those—and you find that by using instrumentation that measures the radiation being emitted through the wall of the ductwork. We would have to go in and remove those concentrations of plutonium and that was all almost by hand. You would penetrate the duct under tight radiological control so that you didn’t lose plutonium into the environment or your workspace. And you would go inside, and with various tools and instruments, remove those deposits of plutonium, package them, and prepare them for disposal. The bulk of the ductwork simply had this fine deposit of plutonium, which might have a lot of plutonium, but it’s over 250 feet of ductwork. When you break it down into removable sections that will fit in the disposal boxes, it’s a small enough amount of plutonium that you don’t need to do anything except cut the pieces of pipe out so they’ll fit in these boxes. And then ship those boxes, when it was operating, down to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant out of Carlsbad, New Mexico. Which is where the majority of the waste from PFP has to go because the law says over a very small amount transuranics—of which plutonium is one—transuranic material has to go to WIPP. It cannot go into ERDF or any of the onsite burial grounds. So it has to be very dilute in order for us to send it over for onsite burial in the ERDF facility. So, all of that ductwork would be measured, cleaned out if it was needed, then they would separate it into sections using giant plastic sleeves, and then cutting inside the sleeve. Franklin: Oh, wow. Heineman: And then tying off the ends and putting it in a box. Then you’d go back and do the next section. Franklin: And the workers, of course, would be wearing full radiological— 1:56:02 Heineman: Completely outfitted in protective clothing, often two layers. Respirators, hoods, everything. Franklin: Wow. That sounds really challenging to perform even basic labor in that kind of suit, in those suits and in that environment. Heineman: As I mentioned earlier, there’s a reason I never left PFP. And it’s because it’s such fascinating work. And the people that do it, they’re like nobody else at Hanford. They are so inventive and so capable of operating in such a highly controlled environment that I just have nothing but respect for those folks. They’re just amazing people. It is just a struggle, everyday, to make progress when you have to do the work under those controls. But the downside is somebody has an accident and gets contaminated or, god forbid, an uptake, inhaled or whatever, you just can’t afford that. Just can’t afford it. So, a simple thing like removing 50 feet of ductwork turns into one to three months’ worth or work and a bunch of burial boxes. And when you take that and you start thinking about what you have to do to clean out and cut up a glovebox that might be 50 feet long and eight feet high, or 15 feet high, because it’s a double-layer box—when you start thinking about expanding the challenge to something like that, where you’re actually cutting sections out of this box, always having to keep it contained, and using that machinery inside that plastic containment, it’s just incredibly challenging. Franklin: Because they’re stainless steel, right? Heineman: Yes. Franklin: Yeah, we have one in our collection, which was never used, but it’s eight feet tall, it weighs about 10,000 pounds, had to come in with a really big forklift. Heineman: I think that one originated at FMEF and went to PFP and we never ended up using it. So we sent it down as kind of a demonstrator. Franklin: Yeah. And it’s great. It’s one of the best things in the collection. But now, thinking, all right, how would you be inside a facility and cut that thing up when it’s hot, radiologically hot—you need heavy equipment to move that thing. People can’t— Heineman: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Franklin: It’s not like ductwork, which is very— Heineman: Oh, no. Well, even the ductwork is super-thick stainless steel. So even the ductwork needed machinery, hoists, and lifts and all kinds of stuff, just to handle a five-foot piece that would fit—actually those boxes are only four feet long, so—wow. Franklin: Yeah, wow. That’s amazing. That’s such an intense job. Yeah, I can see why you would stay so long. So, you ended up retiring in 2012. Heineman: September of 2012. Franklin: September of 2012. Heineman: Yeah. Franklin: And what—was it just time to go, or--? Heineman: It was. Franklin: Yeah? Heineman: Yeah, I’d been at it long enough. Franklin: 39 years, right? Heineman: I was a month short, I guess, of 40. Franklin: Wow. Heineman: Yeah, I went in September and I think October was my anniversary date. Franklin: Yeah, that’s what I have here. Wow. That’s really—that’s quite a career out there. Heineman: I loved every day of it. Franklin: Yeah, I bet. It sounds really fascinating. 2:00:22 Heineman: And who would ever have the opportunity to do such a wide variety of things as they let me do over that period of time? I mean, it’s just, even today, it boggles my mind that they would give me that opportunity, you know? It was really fun. Franklin: Yeah, you really moved around and managed some really like amazing projects. So I just have one kind of final reflective close-out question, and that’s, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and/or living in Richland during the Cold War? Heineman: During the Cold War? Franklin: Yeah. 2:01:05 Heineman: Well, the Cold War was ending as I went to work. It was that post-Cold War environment that I came into, which was a huge transition for all the people that were here. So the perspective that I have on the Cold War and the attitudes and that sort of thing are what were held by the people that I was working with when I came to work. As I said, there were very few young people; it was mostly people that start work here after the war or afterwards. Even if they’d been recently hired, it was because they were re-hired, not starting. And I guess I would say those folks were beyond proud of the contribution that they had made. I think they were distressed that the government was beginning to make decisions not to use their talents and these amazing facilities to continue doing what they’d been built for. I think they were afraid of what was to come. Partly on a personal level: what’s that going to mean to me as far as my job and my welfare and the welfare of my family? But partly, it was just a complete unknown regarding this Hanford Site and everything it had always stood for, and it was never going to be the same again. What it was going to look like was never clear. What cleanup meant was never clear. It evolved over decades. The first ten years after we shut everything down, I’m not sure we even understood the scope of everything we were going to have to do to clean up the Site. But those folks were very proud, and concerned, and I think a little fearful of what the future might bring. If that’s what you were asking. Franklin: Yeah, I mean, it’s just, you know, that’s a very understandable and very human reaction to these very large events and the role that Hanford plays in them, and how Hanford’s fortunes are tied to politics and to international events. Yeah, I’m guessing—I want to ask you kind of a follow-up that’s not on my sheet but kind of directed towards your experience, and that’s, so you started kind of at the draw-down of the Cold War, although there’s that Reagan kind of blip. But then you spent a large, majority of your—at least half of your work in the cleanup area. I wonder how you felt about—what are your thoughts on cleaning up all the waste generated because of this Cold War mission and where—just your thoughts about that. I don’t want to put anything into your mouth. 2:04:29 Heineman: Well, it gave me a great career, so, from that perspective, I’ll never think badly about the Site and the opportunities that it provided to me. But in hindsight, using information that the government and the Army would never have had access to, I think nobody would ever make the kind of investment in manufacturing if they understood even 10% of what the cost of cleanup would be. And it’s not just monetary, either. It’s in terms of human beings and the environment. I think it’s a real dilemma now. The advantage they had is they had no idea. And if they did, cleanup defined in the context of 1950 or 1960 would be very different than cleanup in 2000 or 2020. And in fact, cleanup as defined—cleanup of the Hanford Site and the end of that cleanup is incredibly different, incredibly more complex, incredibly more costly than we ever envisioned in the first 20 years of the cleanup mission. We had no idea where society was going to go in its values, where science was going to go and its ability to detect and predict and all those—just amazing. And I think it’s pretty hard to judge people in 1940s or even late ‘30s by today’s standards. So I’m hesitant to do that. But if we were facing an equivalent question today, we would never have built Hanford. Never. Franklin: Interesting. Maybe because we knew—we have a greater understanding now of the long-term costs and risks. Heineman: Yes. Franklin: With building that—with producing that kind of material. Heineman: But we wouldn’t have had to do it in a couple of years. We wouldn’t have had to do it with technology that was being upscaled from a lab to a 570-square-mile production complex. So it couldn’t ever happen again. But we would never do it again. I know that. Franklin: Interesting. Well, Bob, thank you so much. That was a really thoughtful—what’s the word I’m looking for?—reflection. And thank you so much for coming in and interviewing with us. Heineman: Sure, it’s fun. Franklin: I had a great time. Heineman: It’s fun to go back and think about it again and kind of put a little different perspective on how I think about things, too, so I appreciate the opportunity. Franklin: Well, great, thank you so much. I think this interview’s going to be very interesting to a lot of folks, so I appreciate it. Heineman: Cool. I hope it’s helpful. Franklin: Well, great. All right. Heineman: All right, thanks. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 02:08:13 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 10303kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 300 Area, PFP, PUREX, 100 Area, 200 Area Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1951-2018 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1972-2012 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Bob Heineman Description An account of the resource Interview with Bob Heineman for the Hanford Oral History Project. Bob talks about his parents work at Hanford, his education in Police Science, and his work on Hanford Patrol. View the interview on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmQWfstxiTY">YouTube</a> Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 7/06/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. 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This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fed25944dab4903146b0422e355ce7f2d.jpg 4c5ec9de7b2c58b0a02aa1b112e4fdb8 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fbac10c255985e6bd8454dc3880c7a868.mp4 0536d4ccbf8f9f6ffa0583d6596b8741 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Bauman, Robert Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Petty, Bob Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Bauman: Okay. All right. My name's Robert Bauman. And I'm conducting an oral history interview with Mr. Bob Petty. Today is July 10th of 2013, and the interview's being conducted on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. And I will be talking with Mr. Petty about his experience working at the Hanford site. So, Mr. Petty, if it's okay with you, I'd start with how and why you came to Hanford, where you came from, and when. Robert Petty: My mother and father came from Arkansas. My dad came in August of '43, my mother in 1948. And I was born and raised here, born in 1948. And I--well, I'm retired from the Department of Energy. I first started working out here at the age of 11. Bauman: Okay. Petty: My father was in transportation. He would put me in the trunk of his car. And since his brother, my uncle, was a security patrolman, would wave me on through, or wave my dad on through. And this went on for several years. And my dad kept me hidden for those two years. And on numerous occasions, kind of a funny type of note, people had hit deer and killed them. Of course, my dad being the back woodsman that he used to be, stopped and put the deer in the car. And one particular time, I was in the trunk with that deer. And I am screaming, I want to go home, I want to go home. Well, we didn't go home. But I was a laborer. Helped build WNP out here for the nuclear plants, and decontamination and decommissioning of numerous reactor facilities. Pump houses, power stations, and things of that nature. There were some good times and some bad times. The controls that what I would expect I don't think were in place. And starting in 1971, we started doing D&D, and I was allowed to go anywhere I wanted, with the exception of in the reactor facility itself. And we did go into some potential hotspots. And at no time were we told to wear a mask or have a dosimeter. And at no time—all I had was just a badge that had Bechtel on it. And so nobody ever told us to--you know, working around the asbestos—of which I have asbestos-related disease—that you need to protect yourself from not only asbestos, but from potential chemicals, maybe radioactive contaminants and things of that nature. And so I eventually went to work for the Department of Energy in 1990? '91? '91. And I retired as a management analyst due to my health. And then shortly thereafter, I went to work as a senior technical advisor for CH2M Hill. Bauman: I'm going to ask you to go back a little bit- Petty: Sure. Bauman: And go back to the stories first of as an 11-year-old, your dad taking you out to the site. So he was in transportation? Petty: Yes. Bauman: And do you know--so he came during the war, correct? Petty: Mm-hm. Bauman: How did he—from Arkansas. Do you know he heard about Hanford--? Petty: Well he--my dad originally was in the Civilian Conservation Corps in central Arkansas. And he had heard about this place out in the desert. And when he got here, I do remember him telling me--he passed away in '82, that, oh my god, what have I got myself into. It is hot. There are windstorms that you just couldn't believe how bad they were. And so he came up here. My mother and father were married at the time. And my mother did come out several times, and then went back home, and eventually settled out here later. And so he was a truck driver, then a bus driver. And then after my mother moved out here, she worked out here from '48 to I think about 1950, working next to a hot box. And she became contaminated. And she eventually died of lung cancer, bone cancer, skin cancer, and multiple myeloma. But when she was contaminated, she was pregnant with me. And I am involved in litigation over this. But trying to prove something is not easy. Bauman: Where was she working at the time? Petty: She was working in the 3--I think the 300 Area. I don't remember which building it was. I am not positive the location, but I think it was there. Bauman: And what was her job? Petty: I really don't know. No, I couldn't say that for sure. My mom has been dead for a number of years. And so there's a lot of questions you don't get to ask that you would like to have asked. Bauman: And you were born in '48? Petty: Yes, November of '48. Bauman: And did you have other siblings? Petty: Yes, I have three sisters. Four sisters, one is gone. So I have three remaining sisters. And one now works at Oak Ridge, and I have two that live—one in Pasco, one in Kennewick. Bauman: And when your dad first came to work here, he came basically by himself? Your mom would come visit sort of, and then-- Petty: Yes, yes. Bauman: And did they have any kids at that point, or it was just the two of them? Petty: No, no. My oldest sister wasn't born until June of 1944. But my mother had went back home, then came back numerous times. Bauman: When your mom was working here, and you said she had symptoms of being exposed, did she know what she was working with at the time, do you know? Petty: Not really. And now there are procedures in place where if a woman is pregnant or think they may be pregnant, they're not allowed to go in any potential hotspots. That was not the case back then. Bauman: So your father would basically sort of smuggle you, I guess you could say, into the site? Petty: Lack of a better word, yes. Bauman: With the help of your uncle. Petty: Yes. Bauman: So what would you do when he got to work with you, then? What did you do during-- Petty: My dad originally started out as a house mover. And one of my particular jobs was I'd get underneath the house and cut the piping loose, take all the asbestos off of the piping, snakes, cats, dogs, dead or alive, indifferent. And odd jobs around that he thought I could do, and so—oh yeah. Bauman: So what houses were you moving? Petty: Back in those days, most of them were structural wood buildings from the Hanford site to whoever wanted to buy them. Bauman: So houses that were on the Hanford site, had been there prior to the war? Some of the older houses? Petty: There may have been several, but most of them were either on-site or from Camp Hanford. Bauman: Oh, okay. And so his job was to move those off. Petty: Right, correct. Bauman: You crawled under— Petty: And there are many, many of those still around today. Bauman: And so how long did you do that? Petty: Up until after my dad passed away 1982, I decided to sell the remaining equipment and what we had. I didn't want anything to do with that portion of the business. And so from then, I started going back to school. And I have numerous college degrees. And so eventually I went to work for the Department of Energy. Bauman: So when you were 11 and 12 and out onsite helping your dad, were there other workers there who knew you were there? Petty: My dad tried to keep me isolated. There were the people around, and they knew what was going on. But they didn't say anything. And there was kind of some camaraderie—you scratch my back, I'll scratch your back. And so they didn't say anything. Bauman: So you were born in '48. Did your family live in Richland, then? Petty: Yes. Originally came to Pasco, lived in Sunnyside, then shortly moved on to Richland. Bauman: And where in Richland did you live in the '40s and '50s? Petty: I think it was 1311 Marshall. Bauman: And what was Richland like at the time as a sort of place to grow up? Petty: Richland, since August of '43 through December of 1958 I think it was, was a government town. And they came in and said, you're going to do what we tell you to do. And since this is a government town, secrecy was of utmost importance. And I didn't remember a whole lot about that per se. But I do remember numerous times where we had to duck and cover in grade school. And we had drills and things of that nature. But on the whole, I do remember Richland being very hot, maybe because there were hardly any trees. And there was so much construction going on around Richland, new homes being built. Bauman: My sense is that people, workers, families, came from a lot of different places. Was that sort of true? Did you experience that the families that you knew, friends growing up, that they had come from all over the United States? Petty: My dad did tell me when he first came out here there were people from all over the nation, just about every state in the union. And the men stayed in the men's barracks and the women stayed in the women's barracks even though they may have been married, until their name came up for a house. And times like that were very tough on my mother and father. And I do remember meeting numerous people when I was young telling me that they were from maybe New York or Connecticut or something like that. Yeah. Bauman: And when you were growing up, do you remember any special community events, parades, any of those sorts of things in Richland? Frontier days? Petty: I do have pictures of parades. And I have a book from Richland--or Hanford, Hanford Days, Richland Days, I think it is. And it shows parades in there also. And I do have several pictures of parades that we had here in town. And so those were good times. Played Little League baseball, we formed a baseball team and didn't do very well. But on the whole, I think pretty much the only thing we did was--well in summertime—was go swimming. They had a small pool in Howard Amon. But for the most part, we didn't do very much. Bauman: Okay, let's talk more about the work you did at Hanford. When did you start working at Hanford? Not with your father, but-- Petty: I first started in earnest--I became a laborer in the local laborers here in town. And went to work at FFTF back around '70, the early '70s. And some things that went on, I won't say on camera, because they're not very nice. And when FFTF was first started, it was projected to be about $79 million in costs. And that particular job, being a cost plus contract, ended up being almost $800 million, which you see today, in fact. And my job was just basically a laborer. A broom, shovel, hammer. Bauman: During construction--? Petty: Yeah. And it was not uncommon at all to have six or eight laborers on a one-man job. That was very common. Bauman: And that was--you were working for what contractors? Petty: Working for Bechtel, Chicago Bridge & Iron. Yes. I think Mellon brothers. Bauman: And that was in the early 1970s. Petty: Yes. Bauman: And then earlier, you had mentioned going places--you said you were allowed to go sort of anywhere, no dosimeter. Could you talk a little bit more about that, like what sorts of places you were talking about? Petty: A lot of the buildings that you see--or have seen in the past, you'll see pictures of them, many times there was as much below ground as there is above ground, like in the water treatment facility, for instance. We would go down below ground and take out all the scrap iron and stuff like that, all the wiring, all the piping. There were wells, numerous wells around those sites that we went in. And they had a thick brass shaft. We would go down into the well and cut that off and scrap the brass out. And there were numerous of those around. Bauman: And this was sort of all over different places on the site? Petty: Yes, yes. And so subsequently, the--I was young, but--and then when I became a laborer, and we pretty much just had the free run of all the facilities, with the exception of the reactor itself. And at no time did I ever think I was in danger. I was born here, lived here, raised here, and worked here. I have no problems going out there today. Bauman: Now I know, especially during the war and early Cold War years, security obviously was very tight. You had to ride in the trunk of your dad's car to get through. When you were actually a laborer, was there still a lot of security? Did you have to have any special clearances, anything along those lines? Petty: There was security, but since my dad was a private contractor, no. Although you had to go through a checkpoint—several checkpoints in fact, entering and leaving. And they would check your vehicle for maybe any contraband, drugs, weapons, or alcohol. And if your car did not have a sticker on it, it had to be searched. But since my dad at times had special privileges, was not. And so here's a little story that—I put myself through school. And I was working weekends, but working full-time here. And I gave a tour to a group of senior citizens from Boston. And I got everybody on the bus, and a little old lady with a cane sat up next to me and we got to talking. And she says oh goody, I want you to take me out and show me where the cowboys can shoot the Indians. And she actually believed that they did that today out here. And she asked me what kind of work I did. And I says, well, this is a former nuclear weapons plant. Well, what do they do out here? Well I said, they made plutonium production for nuclear weapons. And she got up and moved to the back to the bus. And that paradigm has not changed in many people's minds. And so they still have a perception of if they get anywhere near here, they may become contaminated. Potentially, maybe yes. But highly unlikely. Highly unlikely. And so I had the perception when I worked out there I'm not going to get contaminated, or I'm not going to get sick or something like that. Well, I was wrong. But I have no compunction about going in places like that. Bauman: So you worked for Bechtel. And then in '91 you moved to DOE? Is that right? Petty: Yes. Bauman: Okay. And what sorts of work did you do there? Petty: I started in procurement, since I have a procurement degree, working contracts. And after three years there, I moved to the different side of the house. Worked on environmental safety and health as a management analyst. And I was more of a technical person, wrote, maybe, technical reports, read them, made recommendations to the assistant manager, who was the boss of my director. And although I have numerous college degrees, I am not a scientist or anything like that. I'm more of basically just a paper pusher. Bauman: When you were working out at the site, were there ever any sort of events that stand out in your mind or things that happened? Fires, or anything--incidents like that, I guess. Petty: I was involved in a very serious accident in which my dad was demolishing and standing too close to a building. And I don't know if you've seen a very, very old silent movie where a silent film screen star was standing in a building and the entire wall just came over on top of him. But he was standing in the doorway, and it missed him. And that's what happened to me. The entire wall came down, and I was standing right in the doorway, and it missed me with the exception of one of the beams had come down and caught me on the head. And I have permanent damage as a result of that. There was a very large fire here which I think covered about 240,000 acres at one time. On national news, people had the perception of this is going to be the end of the Tri-Cities if something goes wrong. Well, nothing was going to go wrong. And there are too many protections in place, and these buildings are too well-fortified to have anything escape. Bauman: The incident where the wall fell down around you, how old were you at the time of that event? Petty: I was about 15--16, something like that, yeah. Child labor laws weren't very stringent then. And so I think people got away with a lot more than they should have. Not only with work environment, but it's also--if I can put this very delicately--men living in men's barracks and my mom living in the women's barracks, and there was a barbed wire fence separating them. And my dad told me that the only way that they had relations was through a barbed wire fence. And during the day, they didn't see each other very often. But they would go to dances, and maybe occasionally a vacation. But I don't remember any of those. Petty: Did your dad have any other stories about his time here before your mom was here permanently? Bauman: You know, I remember when my mom came up--well, she went back home numerous times in the '50s. And everything she cooked was fried. Fried everything. And she would take the grease and make into gravy, and I thought that was the best food in the world. But now my veins kind of cringe. And that was the way—predominantly, I think, a lot of the diet that people had back then. But I do remember catching several rattlesnakes out here when I was young, at a young age. Which—I don't remember playing with them, I do remember catching them. And I would just let them go. Bauman: President Kennedy visited the Hanford site in 1963. Petty: Correct. Bauman: The NPR. I wonder if--you would have been 15 at the time, roughly? Petty: Yes, I was 15 at the time. At the time I seen him, he was maybe 40 feet away. And of course my mom thought he was the best-looking man she'd ever seen. And I thought it a very, very interesting, very cool, you know, I get to see the President of the United States. Which he wasn't the first--or he was the first, but he was not the last. But overall, I thought John Kennedy was very, very likable. Bauman: What else do you remember about that day or him being here at the time? Petty: When he first arrived, I looked out there and I'd seen a mass of people. And I do remember first thinking, all these people can't be here for the president. But they were. And I really didn't grasp the ramifications of maybe his political influence being the president. And I really wasn't interested in that type of thing when I was growing up. And it kind of dawned on me that this is important. He's a very important man, one of the most important men in the world. And so that had kind of a profound effect on me, and I eventually went into--took government courses in school. Bauman: Any other times when you were working there at Hanford that you remember dignitaries coming, or other presidents or anything like that? Petty: We were working on-site one particular day. And somebody was using a cutting torch, and we had started a fire. It was during the summertime. And tremendous amount of cheatgrass around. And I do remember we had started a fire, and it got out of control very quickly. And I thought the building that we were working on was done. But luckily, we got the fire department there in time. And it had consumed several acres and a portion of the building that we were working on, but we ended up saving it. A little scary. Bauman: About when would that have been, roughly? Petty: '72. Yeah. Bauman: And what area of the site might that have been? Petty: That was 200 West, I think. Yes. Bauman: Overall, how would you describe Hanford as a place to work? Petty: In the '40s, '50s, '60s, there was a mindset that it was just a job. And even when I worked out here in the '70s and '80s, I felt it was just a job. And then when I went to work for the Department of Energy, the mission had changed from nuclear production to cleanup. And so to kind of put it in perspective, my grandfather worked out here, my dad worked out here, his brother—in fact all his brothers, all his sisters, all their kids, my sisters. And people have the perception of, well, I'm from here. All my relatives worked out here. Well, you owe me this job. Well, that's not true. And when I worked at DOE, the manager came in one day and we had an all-employees meeting. And he said, all you employees are very well-educated, make very good money, have numerous college degrees. We do not owe you a job. And that's true. And I feel that's the same way here at Hanford. We do not owe them a job. Most of those people are very well-educated. And so in the next 20 years, things are going to be ramping down, probably more so than they are now. And today's paper said that one firm here in town was going to be reducing their staff by 90%. And I think people need to become aware well, the well is going to run dry. It was good while it lasted. And I made very good money here. And I knew my time wasn't going to be here forever. But people I think need to change their paradigms, and I certainly changed mine. And we had some very, very good times out here, and a few bad. And since we have changed to environmental cleanup, everything we do is scrutinized. And from if you spill a quart of gasoline or paint, it has to be written up and you have to make a report. Just to give you an idea of--very, very stringent. Bauman: When did you notice that change? Was it when it shifted from production to cleanup more, or was it--? Petty: I think I first started to know the change about 1988, I think it was, when they first--what happened at Chernobyl. I think that was a major turning point. And then they seen the similarities between Chernobyl versus the N Reactor. Although I don't think that could have happened at the N Reactor. And I think from that point on, from the point they shut it down here at the N Reactor, they started to focus more on environmental cleanup. Bauman: I want to go back a little bit and ask you a little bit more. One of your first jobs was working FFTF? Petty: Mm-hm. Bauman: That became somewhat of a controversial facility, to a certain extent. Petty: Very much so. Not so much--well, it was a cost plus contract. Not so much during the construction and operation. In the initial operation it actually was never really used. There wasn't a whole lot of controversy. But the controversy came later when the government wanted to shut it down. And that's a tremendous amount of money just to let loose of. And it could have done a lot of good. But the government finally decided that it would be best if they shut it down. And a great number of people think it was political, which it may have been. I don't know. Although I'm going to keep my thoughts to myself, and I'm not going to say anything about that. Although when they did shut it down, I do remember doing a number of correspondence with different people from Washington, DC, here at the Hanford site and at DOE here regarding to the FFTF. Bauman: I wonder for--you said things have changed, obviously, at Hanford site over the years. And I wonder for future generations, people 20 years from now or 50 years from now, what would you like them to know about working at the Hanford site, what it was like? Petty: Well going back to 1943 when the site was first picked, this isn't something they had ever done before. And their number-one priority, number-one goal, was to end the war. And now their number-one priority is to clean up this mess. This isn't something they'd ever done before, either. This is the largest cleanup project in the world. And subsequently, I think that a lot of this new areas that they're going into is how do they clean up these certain types of chemicals or radiation or contamination. And there's so many things that they don't know and they don't know how to treat. They've never done it before, like the Vitrification plant. This is never something that they've done before. And they say it's going to work, take this liquid sludge and turn it into glass logs. It'll probably work, yes. But it's not something they've ever done before, and I think generations down the road need to realize that we cannot stop plutonium production. There are many, many environmental groups out there, but other countries in the world, all over the world, are now getting nuclear weapons power plants, the potential to produce nuclear weapons. It is not going to stop. And if we stop producing plutonium, uranium, for weapons, nuclear power plants for nuclear or electricity production, then if we're not moving ahead, then we're falling behind. And we are falling behind now, at least in my estimation. And so I think we need to change the paradigms of our youth that this can be a good thing, or it can be a bad thing. And if we make it safe enough, with the controls in place, there should be no problems. Bauman: Is there anything that I haven't asked you about that you think would be important to talk about, or any other memories from your experiences working here that you-- Petty: No. Bauman: --want to share? Petty: Have you been on-site before? Bauman: Yes. Petty: Okay, so you kind of understand what's going on out there and the history portion. I do hope that the B Reactor museum comes to fruition, because I think we need to leave a legacy for our children and our grandchildren and generations farther down. And I think it's extremely important not to forget that, but also be respectful and mindful of what we did and hopefully never, never, ever again. Bauman: Well thank you very much for-- Petty: Sure. Bauman: --coming in and talking to us today. We really appreciate it. Thanks a lot. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:37:49 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 250 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 300 Area Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Kennedy, John F. Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1948-2013 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Bob Petty Description An account of the resource An interview with Bob Petty conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Subject The topic of the resource Hanford (Wash.) Hanford Waste Vitrification Plant (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Hanford Site (Wash.) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013-7-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2016-07-19: Metadata v1 created – [RG] 300 Area Department of Energy Housing Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, 1917-1963 Richland (Wash.) Secrecy Vitrification Plant https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Feedc5fccd193a378981173beb0d0136a.jpg 118fe6ae90840ec1411e82c29ac1adf4 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F60c1c02414a925fb0ebfa6b3b6ba31b5.mp4 9918c042c46673ef73b3220ee13b9fb1 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Bauman, Robert Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Shea, Bob Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Northwest Public Television | Shea_Bob Robert Bauman: --start. So let's start, first of all, just by having you say your name and spell it for us. Robert Shea: Okay. Yeah. My name is Bob Shea. Bauman: And can you get the last name spelling? Shea: Oh, S-H-E-A. Bauman: Great. Thank you. And my name is Bob Bauman, and today's date is November 13th of 2013, and we're conducting this interview on campus Washington State University, Tri-Cities. So maybe if we could start by having you talk about when you and your family arrived here at Hanford, and talk a little bit about maybe your first impressions of the place. Shea: Well, my dad came over here in early March of 1943 from Missoula, Montana as a construction carpenter. And then my mother, and brother, and I came here after school was out in 1943 from Missoula, Montana. And we arrived, interestingly, the night of—or the morning, very early morning, of June 20, 1943 in the Pasco train depot there. And the reason I say it's quite interesting, because that day happened to be my dad's birthday, my mom and dad's anniversary, and Father's day. [LAUGHTER] So it was kind of a big day. But about two o'clock in the morning--and I might mention that, to me it was fascinating, because I was ten years old there in June of 1943. And when we arrived at the train depot there in Pasco, it was really in the middle of the night, and there were probably upwards of 2,000 people milling around; military—Army, and of course Navy personnel, I suppose, from the Pasco Navy base, and construction workers. There were little what we would call taco stands today around. Anyway, very interesting, very interesting. Just milling around. So anyway, Dad took us out to, at that time, the Hanford construction town site, which occupied the village area of Hanford, what was Hanford at that time. And in the middle of the night. Dad had brought over a very small trailer house, handmade trailer house. And that's what he'd been living in. And at that time, the trailer court for the Hanford construction workers was very primitive. They had put in most of the wash houses and most of the streets, but there was still a lot to be done. And so anyway, we made do. And to begin with, the trailers just sat out in the sun, so to speak. But it wasn't too long before the government realized that they should maybe put some canopies over the trailers to shield the trailers so they'd be more comfortable in the summertime from the heat of the sun, and keep some of the snow, and ice, and all off during the winter. So they put up canopies. I think the government had the idea that they would not allow anything as far as living quarters in the trailer portion of the Hanford construction site there. But it wasn't too long before they realized, with the number of children and so forth, they were going to have to allow some leeway there, and let the people build small little extensions to the trailer or whatever. And in our case, that was very important, because the trailer the mom and dad had was very small, maybe 21 feet at the most. And so we built a little lean-to establishment behind the trailer, which was very, very comfortable for my brother and I. By the way, my brother's five and a half years older than I am, so he went to work almost immediately. He was, what, 15 and a half, something like that. And he went to work immediately for one of the construction companies in their kitchen. I think he started out as a dish washer. And he worked there, I think, most of the summer of 1943. But at any rate, we had a nice, comfortable, well insulated with all sorts of Celotex that we are able to get--and it was very roomy, and comfortable. It was great. It served us very, very well. So that gets us established there at Hanford, and then of course the rest of the summer, for me, was roaming around, getting acquainted with various things to do, and not to do that I did anyway. And to begin with, the swimming facility—which was very important at that time for the construction workers, as well as the people in the trailer court—was in the river, just over the bank, so to speak, from what was beautiful downtown Hanford, which consisted of one gas station and maybe two little stores. But anyway. But it wasn't too long before they realized that that might not be too good of an idea to have that swimming area down in the river, because some of the fellows, especially--there were a lot of young men there working in construction. And some of them decided that it'd be kind of a challenge to swim across the river, and some of them were getting into trouble. I don't think there were any drownings, but there were some problems. And so it wasn't too long before they went what I call across the highway to the south of the trailer court about, oh, it would've been a good strong mile, I suppose, from the river. And they dug out some beautiful swimming areas, big ponds, with nice berms and all, to hold the water. And then they brought the water in from the river, and flooded those areas, and kept them in good shape. And so we had a nice, sandy bottom, and diving boards, and very, very nice. Very nice. So I've rambled along a little bit. Maybe you have a specific question that has come up or something. Bauman: You mentioned that you did some things that were okay for you to do, and maybe some things that you weren't supposed to do. Any stories from--that you want to share? Shea: Well, you know, maybe—well, I don't think of any right off hand. I might mention that—I'm sure I wandered off some, and probably worried Mom and Dad. But everything was wide open. And the good—at least from my point of view as a youngster there—there was never any problem for me as a little kid roaming around. And I I'll get into some of the detail later. But they went into the barracks of the white guys, as well as the barracks of the black fellows. And keep in mind that this is 1943. This is segregation. Right or wrong, good or bad, it was segregated. And there were black barracks. There were white barracks. And there were very, very few black children. But they had kind of a segregated area there in the trailer court for that also. But never any problem. And I spent a lot of time in the black barracks. One of my little sidelights as an entrepreneur out there, a ten-year-old entrepreneur, somewhere I got tied in with the Cloverine Brand Salve people. And I would get these tubes of Cloverine Brand Salve. And I think there are ten or 12 in each carton. And I would go to the black and the white barracks both on Sunday afternoons, and sell that salve. And boy, they just gobbled it up. They loved it. And so I made a few dollars that way. I shined shoes, which was quite--that was quite an activity for kids my age. We had little shoeshine kits. We'd carry them around, and if the guy wanted a shoeshine, $0.25 for a good shoeshine. It was a way to make money, and we enjoyed it. And maybe I'm jumping ahead, but anyway, when school started in the fall, of course, it was during the war. They had a shortage of teachers. They had a shortage of room there at the site to begin with for the school kids. And so we only went to school half-day, which was pretty tough to take as a kid, [LAUGHTER] but we managed to do it. So that gave us a lot of free time for activities, playing or making a few bucks doing whatever. So anyway though, during that summer of '43, got acquainted, and by the end of the summer, the trailer court was in great shape, and it was being added to daily. You might be interested in the--I forget exactly, but for about every 25 or so trailers, there was what we called a wash house, which--in the front of the building, or wash house, there would be an area with washtubs where the ladies could wash clothes. And then immediately across the street there were huge areas to hang clothes. No clothes dryers at that time. And so there were facilities for hanging the clothes and drying the clothes. And there was a lot of good weather, and for the most part, the clothes dried even during the winter. It wasn't too bad. But anyway, the wash house, the laundry facilities were in the front. And then on either side--on one side was the ladies’ toilet facilities, showers, and so forth. Then on the other side, the men had toilets, showers, sinks for shaving and all. And that would accommodate quite a few. And as I recall, it was around 20-25 trailers for each wash house. And of course, people could use any of the wash house facilities anytime they wanted to, if they walked around the trailer court, or whatever. Plus, as far as toilet facilities were concerned, there were portable--what we would call portables today. They were wooden. But they would accommodate people, too, and they had the female and the male outhouses, or portable toilets. And another thing very, very important there, throughout the barracks areas, throughout the whole trailer court, there were many, many water barrels. And that's really what they were. They were wooden barrels. I imagine they were an outgrowth of whiskey barrels of bygone days. But they had wooden barrels supplied with ice and water. Very clean. Everything was clean. And by the way, the portable toilets were kept very, very clean, and taken care of, in great shape. And the water barrels—and all the water barrels had salt distributors. The little distributors of salt would have little pills of salt, if you felt you needed salt. And I might add now that in the trailer court, I don't know how many there were, but for every, I would guess, 100 or so trailers, they had an icehouse, probably a building of 15 feet by 15 feet, something like that, well insulated, and then filled with ice. And the people from the trailer court could go get the ice anytime they wanted, all they wanted. No charge. And you could go and help yourself. Now you might say, well, why ice? Why not just turn the refrigerator on? Well, at that time, there weren't--all the trailers, most of them were very primitive. Very few electric refrigerators or electric heat. And so the ice went into the ice chest, of what we call an ice--a refrigerator that was cooled by ice. So it was great. And that, I might add right here, that that free ice was very important to me, because one way of making some dollars, or making some money as a kid out there--well, I guess I need to back up for a second. Virtually all hot water and heating throughout the whole Hanford town site, that in 1944 consisted of about 52,000 people--but all of the heating of the water, heating of the wash houses, heating of the barracks, and all, was done by steam—steaming. So that meant that there had to be quite a few large steam generating facilities throughout the whole Hanford site there to heat the water to produce the steam. Well, that was coal fired, and most of that coal came from up near Cle Elum. Roslyn was a big coal producing area there. And they would--the train loads of coal were brought in from Roslyn. But the steam plant was important to me because I could go there, and I could borrow a wheelbarrow. And I could take that wheelbarrow to the icehouse. And I could fill it with free ice. Then I could go to the grocery store, and I could buy Coke, or Pepsi, or whatever they happened to have, put it on that ice, and then push it down to where the buses--and I say buses in quote. We can talk about that later, if you like. But when the buses with the construction people would come in from the outer job sites every night for the guys living in the barracks and in the trailer court--and I would sell that Coke or Pepsi that had been on ice to the men. I think I bought it for something like a nickel a bottle. They didn't have cans at that time. A nickel a bottle, and I sold it for a dime. So a pretty good deal. Bauman: That's a good profit. [LAUGHTER] Shea: Good profit, good profit. Yeah. So anyway, that tells you about the icehouses. It tells you about the wash houses. And of course those wash houses, it was kind of interesting, because every morning, there would be--it was kind of like an anthill. You’d see the ladies walking over, and the men walking over, and shaving, showering, whatever, taking care of their needs for the morning, there, to begin with. So it was good. The government--or we could say the Corps of Engineers, because the Corps of Engineers really ran Hanford. That was their thing--they bent over backward to help people enjoy to the degree possible the living quarters, and they wanted to keep the people there to work. And so they had a lot of activities for the kids. We had tumbling, and then, as I mentioned, swimming. They had softball and all sorts of things. And of course we could work. The older kids—well, bowling at that time, which it still is to some degree today—bowling was very, very, very widespread throughout the whole country. And there were several bowling alleys there at Hanford. And the older kids, like 14, 15, 16, they didn't do the shoe shining and the selling the pop, and some of these other less important jobs. They were pin setters. Because at that time, you didn't have the automatic pin setters in bowling alleys. So they would go and set pins. And they apparently made good money setting pins and all. Plus, as I mentioned, by the time the kid was 15, they could work in the cafeteria, or what we called mess halls, really. I suppose the mess hall term came in from the military, there. But they were huge dining areas. We'll put it that way. So anyway, I'll stop for a minute, see if you have any questions. I'm kind of rambling here. Bauman: No, that's all great stuff. You said something about the buses. Do you want to talk about the buses a little more, and describe them a little bit? Shea: Yeah. Really, the transportation that was provided for the workers from Hanford out to the various areas, and in some cases, I suppose they had to go upwards of 15 miles, maybe 20 miles or so, were kind of glorified cattle cars, really. I mean, for the time, it was good. But they were wooden benches in these—actually, they were semi trailers that had a tractor, a truck tractor, attached. And they would haul, I suppose, 30-40 workers. And the poor guys, during the summer, they'd pull in to where they--kind of the disembarking area there, and those poor guys, I mean their tongues were virtually hanging out, because I mean, they'd come through this very hot ride in this very hot vehicle. And that's why they really sucked up those iced Cokes, and all. So anyway, but that's enough of—Actually, I might add that the grade school aged kids, grades one through eight, they went to school there at Hanford. But the high school age, nine through 12 there, they were transported into Richland for their high school years. And they rode those cattle cars too. They had buses, or anyway, transportation to and from. And it was pretty crude. But they got in. Bauman: So could you talk about the school a little bit? You went to school at Hanford town site, and could you talk about that a little bit, what that was like? Shea: The white building that is still out there, kind of shot up and beat up, which was really the Hanford high school, that's where the--they had, I don't know, probably eight, ten, 12 classrooms. And that's where I attended fifth and most of sixth grade, there in that school. But then they also had a many Quonset huts outside the school, immediately adjacent to the school. And they had a lot of classrooms in those Quonset huts, too. So I don't know how many, all told, kids that they would have had in the school. It had to be hundreds, but I don't know how many hundreds. But there were a lot. Bauman: Was it close enough for you to walk to? Shea: Oh, yeah. In my case, it was a piece of cake. I only lived about three blocks from--what we would think of today as blocks. And it was real simple. And they named the streets like Egypt, and such as that. I happened to live on Egypt Street--Egypt Street, and I guess it was actually the second block. And the trailer space number was 20. So my address was E 2-20. But now some of the kids, though, that would have been a pretty good hike for them. Some kids, I suppose, had to walk upwards of a good mile. A good mile. And no buses at all at that time for the school kids and all. The teachers, bless their hearts, I'm sure they did the best they could. But they had both morning and afternoon sessions. I imagine by the end of the day, they were pretty tired cookies. But they did as well as they could, and they were well respected, and taken care of. And basically it was the three Rs at that time. Bauman: Were you morning or afternoon session? Shea: I forget. At least one year, either the fifth or sixth, it was morning. Because that gave me all afternoon to go. But the second year, or one of the years, I don't remember if it was morning or afternoon. But anyway. And I'm not so sure, I don't remember, it could be that after one semester, they flipped us, also. If you had been going morning, maybe then they switched to afternoon, or vice versa. I'm not sure. I think maybe that happened, in case there was some reason that they thought it was better for the kids to be turned around there. Bauman: So the high school building was there, and you mentioned a gas station, maybe a couple of grocery stores. Were there a lot of buildings still from the Hanford town site, still there? Or had some of them been torn down? Shea: I think for the most part, those that had been--were there to begin, they retained them, like a gas station and a couple of small stores. But the Corps of Engineers, I suppose under contract, had--there in the trailer court, there were probably three very large grocery stores. And I remember, I believe at least one large grocery store over in the vicinity of the barracks, where the people out of the barracks could go if they wanted to get food, or maybe some clothing, this type of thing. And of course those stores were well stocked, well stocked, but just jam packed. And so you had, just as everywhere out at Hanford, you had long lines, whether it was a post office, which was general delivery, or stores, or whatever. In fact, some kids made some money standing in line for people. They would go and stand in line for Mrs. Jones at the grocery store, and when Mrs. Jones got her groceries, they'd come over, and naturally the kid had moved up several spaces. So anyway, there were all kinds of interesting things. I'd like to go back just a minute to the dorm--the barracks and the grocery store there, and the mess halls, although they were fantastic. The food was excellent that served the people, and the mess halls provided, if the guys wanted them, lunches to carry out to their worksite, so that they didn't have to prepare them, which would have been pretty tough in the dormitories. But the mess halls served excellent food. And actually, the people from the trailer court were welcome anytime they wanted to go to the mess hall. And I think, if I recall correctly--I don't know about the breakfast and lunch--but the dinners were a great big whopping $0.35 apiece per person. And that was family style, and you could eat all you wanted. Mom, and Dad, and my brother and I went to--I can remember at least two or three times going there for Thanksgiving and/or Christmas dinners. And, oh, excellent food. Excellent. And I'll have to tell you a little story there. The one experience, we went, and of course it was family style. It was just benches to sit on, and wooden tables. I think at Thanksgiving and Christmas, they did put a tablecloth on. But the one time we went, one fellow sitting across from us, obviously living in the barracks or someplace, didn't have his family with him. Anyway, during the time that Mom and Dad and my brother, and I were sitting there having our dinner, he consumed five pies. No meat and potatoes, the only thing he had besides that was coffee. He had five pies. Now these weren't huge pies. But they were pies. And he just took his time. And that's all he had. That was his dinner. And you could do that. It was family style. You could have all you wanted, and just go for it. Well, again, I've been rambling. Can I-- Bauman: Did you and your family eat there fairly regularly, or was there more special occasions that you would go to eat at the mess hall? Shea: The only times I remember are maybe three or four times there at Thanksgiving or Christmas. There may have been other times. Sunday afternoon, Dad might have taken us over there. I don't really remember that, no. Mom was an excellent cook, and unbelievable what those ladies were able to do with their limited facilities. Again, most of the trailers were very small, very crude. By today's standards, they would have been just shacks. But they did great. However, there were some manufactured trailers, and even with inside toilet facilities and all. But that was very rare there in the trailer court. Bauman: So you were about ten years old when you were there? Shea: I was ten in April of 1943, and we got there in June of 1943. So I was ten in two or three months, yeah. Bauman: So did you have any idea what this big project was, why your dad had come out here to work? Shea: No. Bob, at that time there were just a handful of people who really knew what was going on. And most of them didn't have a great idea. I mean they'd been told that it was--well, just for an example. A man that I later worked with on the Hanford project, he had come here as an expert in radio communication. And it was he and the crew that he had that put an antenna up on Gable Mountain. And he was told that, okay, this is, of course, super-secret, and one day, we will tell you more. And he said that before B Reactor went online, they came to him and said, okay, now B Reactor is going to go online because of thus, and thus, and thus. And we don't have any idea what it will do, if anything, with the radio communication, radio waves. It may be nothing. But be alert to the fact that, you know, you're the man. And so he said, but when it went online, no problem, no change. But anyway, that was interesting, what he had to say. I don't know if the name Robley Johnson means much to anybody anymore, but he was the official photographer. And he was a young man. And he was all over that place taking photographs and all. And later, I got to know him pretty well in the 1950s, when he had his photography shop here in Richland. And he shared some things that he thought was real interesting. But even he didn't know what they were doing, but so few did. And I suppose the few that did, they'd have said nothing. And of course the old Desert Inn Hotel here in Richland that basically was on the ground there where--what is it, Hanford House, or whatever they call it now? Anyway, it housed a lot of very famous people. But again, most of them were there with code names, now. Bauman: Do you remember when you found out what was being built out at Hanford? Shea: Kind of interestingly, in, I guess it was August of 1945, Dad decided he needed a few days off, so we took a vacation. Went over to the Seattle area, actually up to Everett, and then back down to Auburn and visited some people. And as we were going down, I guess, the old 99 Highway, Dad had the radio on, and it said, hey, you know, guess what? Across the mountains at Hanford, this is where the material for the second bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki came from. That's where we learned. So when we got back over here, though, then there was a lot of—all sorts of interesting things brought out. So that's how we found out. Bauman: So how long did you live in the trailer, then? Shea: Okay, we lived at the Hanford construction town site there from June 20th of '43 until--I'm not sure of the exact date--late March, 1945. And by that time, they moved everybody out of Hanford, all the barracks, the trailer court, again, anticipating that something could happen, and we would have been downwind from the B Reactor. And so then, yeah, we dispersed. And people--many of the people--were able to move directly into Richland that went to work in operations. They moved directly into Richland. But not everybody. They weren't able to house everybody. My dad went to work in operations from construction there. But we had to find a place, and we wound up in a house with a couple of other families down in what we know as Columbia Park today. Where the gazebo is today, that's where the house was. And so we lived there from end of March until--it was early July, I guess, when we got a house in Richland, and moved into Richland. And the family lived in that house--I mean, Mom and Dad--until in the 90s. So they lived there for better than 50 years. Bauman: It sounds like, for someone who was ten, 11 years old as you were, that living in the construction camp was quite an adventure in many ways. Shea: It was. It was a wonderful opportunity. I'm 80 years old, and as I look back on my life, two--we'll call them adventures, or two opportunities, let's put it that way, that I have always praised the Lord that I could enjoy--one, being a kid out there at Hanford, and the other, believe it or not, to be able to go through the United States Marine Corps Boot Camp. That was a great, great opportunity for me. I loved it. In both cases, I loved it. And as a take-off on that question, if you don't mind, that first summer of '43 there, one of the things that I enjoyed the most was going across the river and climbing around, and hiking around the bluffs. I called it my playground. And the thing--they had a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week ferry. That ferry never stopped. It was not a big ferry. It was a tug-pushed barge that would hold four or five automobiles. And it just went back and forth, back and forth. And it didn't cost anything. Again, it was free for the employees. And the kids would go down there, and we'd cross the river, and go hiking on the bluffs, and chase rabbits, and kill rattlesnakes, and had a good time. So that really was great, though. I don't know if you wanted to take time or not on that—I brought a piece of aluminum, though. You know, that's kind of unique. But anyway, it's a piece of aluminum that came off of an airplane. One evening—toward evening, it was five, six, seven o'clock. One of the aircraft from the Naval training center there in Pasco, it was a dive bomber, had come around from the south, and the bluffs, of course, were across the river to the north, at very low altitude. And the engine was sputtering some. And, I mean, pretty obvious it was in trouble. And they were able to clear the bluffs by a couple hundred yards, maybe, 400 or 500 feet. But then it crashed and it burned. And so some of the men went out and got souvenirs. And the instructor and the student pilot were both killed in that crash. But it was unfortunate, but it was kind of interesting that they came through there. Bauman: And this is when you were living at the camp there? Shea: Yeah, right. And it just came right over the Hanford site there, the Hanford town site. We didn't see many of the planes from Pasco, there. I suppose a few that we saw came in on a cross-country training flight. But, talking about airplanes, we have to talk about the big airplane yet. We have to talk, I would hope, anyway, about Day's Pay. Now first of all, I want to correct something that--the idea that Day's Pay landed at some airstrip out at—oh, boy, the little town site to the west of Hanford— Alice: White Bluffs? Bauman: White Bluffs? Shea: --White Bluffs. Some would have you to believe that. But Day's Pay, when it came in, when it was flown in, it landed on the highway about a mile west of the school there. It landed, and there was plenty of room. It made a great landing strip: it was straight, and no hills, or whatever. It landed there, and then taxied up to the school, within 100 feet of the school, and parked, cut its engines, and they got out and did their thing. They christened it. There was a lady there that christened it. And they had their ceremony. And then it started up, taxied back to that highway strip, and took off to the west. And so that's where Day's Pay landed and took off. And for those who are not familiar with the Day's Pay thing, the reason it was named Day's Pay is all of the construction workers there at Hanford, building what we know as the Hanford Works, donated a day's pay to buy that B-17 bomber. And so anyway. Bauman: Yeah. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about when you went to work at Hanford then. When was that, and what sort of work did you do there? Shea: Can we come back to this other for a minute? Bauman: Oh, yeah, sure. Shea: Before we finish it? Bauman: That’s fine. Shea: Yeah. Again, praise the Lord, I was able to—right after finishing high school in 1951, and by the way, I graduated from Columbia High School in Richland. Well, it wasn't immediately after that. I had to get healed up from a broken ankle first. But by August of 1951, I was able to go into construction work, and I went to work helping build the 100-C Area, which was right adjacent to 100-B. And so that's where I started my construction work. And I worked there until September of 1952, at which time I started college. And so the rest--the several years after that, then, I would work in the summers, or if I had a real good job, I would work in the summer and maybe a winter quarter, or spring quarter, or whatever, in construction. So, my term, I helped build 100-C, helped build PUREX. And then in the mid-50s, I helped build--I don't know how many thousands of yards of concrete I hauled from the batch plant to the 100-K East and West basins, when they were putting the basins in, which was an excellent job. And I made good money, and was able to go back to school there after about six months. Then after that, after I got my degree, then I went into teaching. But as things would have it, I went to work back at Hanford in 1967. At that time, it was for what they call ITT/FSS. And they had the fire department security and several other responsibilities. And I went to work there for a couple of years. Then after that, actually, I didn't work at what is known as Hanford Works until the BWIP Project. And most people are not aware of what is called the BWIP Project. BWIP, B-W-I-P, stands for Basalt Waste Isolation Project. They were going to at least check on the feasibility of going down into the basalt under the Hanford site, and have storage for nuclear waste in containers. But politics being as it was, that didn't happen. BWIP and several other projects that they were experimenting with throughout the United States, went to Yucca Mountain and died, or at least is still dead. It may come back. But anyway, I went to work on the BWIP, but that didn't last long, because they abandoned that job. And then it wasn't until about 1983 or 1984 that I went back to work at what we'd call the Hanford site. And off and on there, and working on the two commercial sites that—Eventually, in 1996 I retired. So all told, if that's of any interest, I spent about ten years working at what we would call Hanford, in operations or construction. Bauman: Okay. Shea: Yeah. Bauman: Mm-hmm. Of the different sort of jobs and places at Hanford site that you worked, was there a job that was sort of the most rewarding, that you found the most rewarding, enjoyed the most, or one that was sort of the most challenging or difficult? Shea: Well, going back to August of 1951 there, yeah, I went to work in construction. And I was working through the union driving a truck. I mean I'd had some experience in that during high school. And so I was driving a flatbed truck, and one day I went to the boss, and I said, Charlie, I really appreciate this job. And I said, could I maybe drive a dump truck, or get some experience? Oh, sure, Bob, yeah, we'll fix you right up. So he said, go out--see that Euclid out there? This is a huge—to me, a huge piece of equipment, diesel powered, and it would haul about ten yards of dirt, and all. He said, yeah, go climb on that Euc, and take it over here to this power shovel, and work with them today. And anyway, I went out, to make a long story short, I finally got it started, with some help from some other guys, because I'd never driven diesel before. But this was the largest earth-moving equipment that they had out there at the time. And so I operated the Eucs for about a year, and I loved it. That was the most interesting part, I think, of my construction. And of that work, the most important and most interesting was we—right down to the north from the B Reactor there, we put in a new, I guess they'd call it to siphon, to draw water out of the Columbia River. We had to go about 100 yards out into the river, and built a levee for them to eventually put and lower the pipe--after it was welded, lower the pipe down to the floor of the river. And so hauling dirt out to the end of that, and you had to back the whole way and dump the earth, that it was quite a challenge. So I enjoyed that. But the other very interesting thing really didn't have anything to do with the Hanford site. It did have to do with what we know today as--well, what we knew then as unit number two, which today it's known as, what, Power Northwest? Bauman: Energy Northwest. Shea: Energy Northwest. Their number two unit out there, I was the welding inspector on all of the welding, and all for the structural steel that went on top of the reactor building, including the overhead crane. And that was very—I had never done that type of work. I had never walked steel before, and I haven't walked steel since then, and I never will walk steel again. But that was very interesting, very interesting. And it was very important work. And it was all nuclear grade welding. And so it was very fascinating. Even though that wasn't technically connected with the Hanford site, it was on the Hanford site anyway. Bauman: Sure. Shea: So it was very good. I don't know if you had-- Bauman: I have a question about when you actually, then, moved to the town of Richland. What was that like? What was Richland like in the late 1940s then? Shea: Very, very good question. It was very different, and I suppose that was true also of Kennewick and Pasco. It was a melting pot—people from all over the country—which is true at Hanford, too. Very interesting. Lot of people had come up from the South for the construction. Some people came up from the South and all to work in operations. And people like us had come in from Missoula, Montana. They'd come in from all over the country, South Dakota, North Dakota, all over. And it was true at Hanford, and it became true, really, at Richland, too. Many of these people, especially out of the South, had worked at that time—1943, even during the war years—had worked for maybe $1 a day. And they came to Hanford in construction out there, and laborers were making, I think, about $1.10 an hour. This was great. Many people moved into Richland, ourselves included. Mom and Dad had never owned a home. It had always been a rental home in the almost 20 years that they'd been married. They were provided nice houses, all the coal was furnished. They had to pay for their own phone, they had to pay for their own electricity. But I think the water and sewer was provided, all the coal. It was great. It was a new world. It was a new world for a lot of people, including the Sheas. And Dad appreciated it, Mom appreciated it. And they took very good care of things, and I don't think they took advantage of anything. But they enjoyed it. It's kind of interesting, I think—Alice and I share this every once in a while. Along toward '47, '48, in that frame, maybe '49 too, it was not uncommon that a neighbor might come to you in Richland there, and say, well, you know, it's been nice having you as a neighbor, you know, and we wish you well, and all that. We're being reassigned. And you would ask, reassigned? Oh, you're going to go to do a different job. Yeah, I'm getting a different job. Well, as it turned out, several plainclothes FBI agents lived with their families in the city of Richland, there, because at that time they were checking pretty carefully about communists. And of course it wasn't too long after that McCarthy in the US Senate, with McCarthyism there, and all, and the big communist situation there, as far as seeking them out. So that was kind of interesting. And there were, unfortunately, some families, the dad would be approached, and just say, okay, pack up, you're out of here. Your kids aren't behaving as they should be, or maybe they were a drunk. In other words, it was pretty tight, pretty tight. And it was kind of interesting, too, until probably 1950 or maybe even later, there was kind of a police headquarters, which was really government control. But the headquarters there. And they had police officers throughout the city, but nothing real heavy. But if—and this happened to us--if people come out of town would come, relatives from podunk corners, or wherever it was, would come to town. And they'd stop, and they'd say, well here's a police headquarters, we'll check and see where the Sheas live, because we're confused. And they would just be escorted. If they stopped with the police, there, the police would escort them right to our home, and they would say, do you know these folks? And, well, yeah. This is Uncle George, or whoever. Oh, okay, that's fine. You know them. That's good. We weren't sure what the deal was. So we brought them over. So that was kind of interesting. Bauman: Wow. Yeah. Very tight security. Shea: Tight security, yeah. Tight security. And I think that lasted pretty much until the mid-50s probably. Bauman: So, in terms of security, then, when you started working there in the 50s, did you have to have special clearance? Was there training about security, too, when you worked there? Shea: You had to fill out some paperwork. In construction phase there, it was pretty loose, not much. But in 1955, when I went one summer, when I was off from college, I went to work for what was known at that time J.A. Jones Construction Services. And I was going to be working some in D and DR, and F Areas. And I had to qualify with a Q clearance. So I got a Q clearance there in 1955, and I had it restated later, too. In fact, when I retired I had a Q clearance. Not too many had it at that time. For some reason they'd lowered the standard some. But yeah. So it was tight. It was very tight. And you've probably heard about the aircraft, the patrol aircraft that flew--the main reason for the Richland airport was to accommodate the half dozen Piper Cubs, really, that were constantly doing surveillance work over the Hanford site for, well, all of the 40s, and probably, I would guess, until 1954, '55, or maybe a little bit before that. After the Army moved in, anyway, and there was tighter security there. But the security was tight, yeah. Very tight. Bauman: Do you have something else you want to get back to that we were talking about before? Shea: We could go back to Hanford. But I might mention one thing, for anybody that's kind of interested in sports. This is kind of off, but anyway. There at Hanford, and after that, they had a MP, or Military Police Detachment of US Army personnel. And they were--of course, most of them were pretty young men, and all. And they had some good teams, softball teams and all. But a little sidelight, one of the men, one of the MPs, after he got out of the Army, there in late 1945, he went to various colleges around the area, and universities, and tried to get a football scholarship. He’d played a little high school football, and all. And so they all said, well, no, thanks, but we're in pretty good shape. So, okay, well, that's fine. So he decided, well, I'll just go back home. So he went back home to Illinois. And then in 1947, he reappeared in the Rose Bowl, and he was the quarterback for Illinois. And they proceeded to beat UCLA, something like 45 to 14. But his name was Perry Moss. And he'd been a GI MP out at Hanford. So I thought that was kind of interesting. Going back to Hanford, there. I might--two things I might mention that were very significant, and very important, not to me or my family, but I'm sure that many of the guys in the--and some of the guys in the trailer court, probably, some of the fathers, and maybe older boys—they had some excellent baseball leagues out there. Again, black leagues, white leagues. But the baseball field they had out there rivalled any major league ballpark in the nation at that time, other than the seating. There was only seating for about 6,000, I think it was. But the grass was perfect. They maintained it. And lighting was excellent, because most of the games were played at night, when the guys would come in after work. Excellent, though, and a lot of great baseball, a lot of great baseball was played there. And then I guess it would be just absolutely wrong not to mention something about the auditorium, or I guess that's what the main name for the huge building that they put up virtually overnight. That's not quite true. But really, within two or three days, they put up this huge building that they called the auditorium. It had a regulation-size gymnasium floor, and no seating such as that, except around the perimeter. But they had many dances, big dances. They brought the Globetrotter basketball team in. And I'll have to ask Alice to help me with the name of the--what was the band leader? Alice: Kay Kyser? Shea: Kay Kyser. Brought Kay Kyser in. And to this day, as far as I know, the grand piano that they brought in for Kay Kyser to use is still in what I know as Carmichael School. Alice: Chief Joe. Shea: Huh? Bauman: Chief Joe—Chief Joseph? Shea: No. Carmichael. Alice: Yes, Chief Joe. Shea: Okay. [LAUGHTER] Anyway, the one on Lee Boulevard at the top of the hill. That building. Anyway. I guess that, unless you have other questions-- Bauman: I was just going to ask you, did you get to attend any of the baseball games, or the auditorium, stuff in the auditorium at all? Shea: A couple of the baseball games. Since they were at night, Mom and Dad kind of rode herd on me a little bit there. But I did go to a couple of baseball games. And there was one ceremony there, too, that they brought a pilot and maybe one or two of his crew in who had to been taken prisoner by the Japanese. They'd been shot down, and they'd been taken prisoner by the Japanese, but they were able to escape. And so for one of the war bond drives, they brought them in to talk to the people. And they had a big ceremony there, and it was in the evening. And speaking of war bonds, or war savings bonds, and such as that, that was a big thing. That was a big thing there at Hanford, and for the kids as well as the adults. And so it was very well contributed to, really, or bought. A lot of war bonds there. So anyway, that was good, a good way to save money. Alice: What about seeing the fellow, the gentleman who had been shell shocked, and how they dealt with him? Shea: Oh. Yeah, that was the only really sad thing that I remember from Hanford days. And then, it was a passing thing. But one evening, near me was all of a sudden a congregation of several of the, we'll call them police officers, there at Hanford had formed a ring around--and I'm talking about ten or 12 of them--around this fairly young man. And as it turned out, he had been in the service, probably in Europe. And he went bonkers. And after—well, excuse me—he had come to Hanford and went to work. But that evening, he kind of went bonkers, and so these police officers just had to kind of slowly move in on him, and get him under control. And I think they cuffed him and took him away. But that was sad, because it was obvious that he thought that these were Germans that he was fighting. These were bad guys, and he was going to get all he could. That was sad, but anyway, those things happen. So I don't know if you have any other questions about Hanford, there, or--oh, excuse me. I just thought of one thing. One wonderful, wonderful thing there at the Hanford town site--well, let me back up. You're probably all aware of the fact that in 1943, when the government moved in, they really took over three little villages: Richland, Hanford, and White Bluffs. And Hanford and White Bluffs are, I think, separated by, what, six miles, or something like that, of highway. But between Hanford and White Bluffs—and I suppose on either end, west of White Bluffs, and east of Hanford, too—orchard, after orchard, after orchard of just wonderful fruit: peaches, big Bing cherries, pears, apricots—wonderful fruit. And we had the opportunity to go out and pick there--during the summer of '43, go out and pick, and get cherries. And another thing, the track houses, the farm houses that had to be abandoned, many of us went out and cut sod out of their lawns, and put the sod around our trailer, and watered it. It was great. It was great. And many of the houses that had been farm houses, they were taken over by the upper military of the Army Corps of Engineers. And they lived there, several guys in a house. But one thing that I understand is that every year the railroad would bring in--excuse me. Unless it was a bad winter and the apricots were frozen, they brought trains in to load up with apricots to send all over the country—LA, Texas, New York, and all, because those were the earliest apricots in the country. And they were wonderful apricots, too. So they hit the market, unless they got frozen off that winter, which I guess was very, very rare. Apparently that area around Hanford and White Bluffs, the air currents, or whatever, during the winter, carried fairly mild air temperature-wise, and so anyway. But that was interesting. Bauman: So it sounds like a lot of the farm houses were still there, and the crops. Shea: They eventually—probably in the late 40s—they cut all the orchards down, and so none of them existed. You can see a lot of stumps, but no orchards. And then interestingly, probably by 1948, you'd have never known that there was any barracks, wash houses, nothing. It was completely leveled. And today, it's just a few little asphalt strips that you'd see where the various streets were, and all. But yeah. That's it. Bauman: So was it just that first summer of '43 that you were able to pick the apricots and cherries and stuff? Just that first summer? Shea: Yeah. No, I'm sorry. I beg your pardon. No, no. '43 and '44. I beg your pardon. But not '45, because we were out of there by March. But all of that summer of '43 and '44, it was great. And again, I think it's important to remember that virtually all of 1944, that Hanford town site was the fourth largest city in the State of Washington, about 52,000 people, men, women, and children. Yeah. That fruit was wonderful. Bing cherries the size of quarters. Wonderful, wonderful fruit. Bauman: Well, is there anything you haven't had a chance to talk about yet that you’d like to still, that we haven't been able to talk about yet? Shea: Let’s see. As it relates to the bond drives, and all, here's a--my mother saved this because my little fat face was in it. But they had what they called The Sage Sentinel newspaper out there, and this is just an example. This is from June of 1944. It just showed some of us kids. They had bought war bonds, and they had a little blurb there about that. Bauman: Okay. We can probably get this on film. Shea: Or you might want to make a copy of it, or whatever. You're welcome to, if you'd like. Bauman: All right. Well, I want to thank you very much for coming today and-- Shea: Well, my pleasure. Bauman: --sharing your stories and memories. Shea: My pleasure. Bauman: I really appreciate it. Shea: No, it's my pleasure. So thank you. Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:14:48 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 230 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview B Reactor 100-C Area 100-B Area D Area DR Area F Area Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1943-2013 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1951; 1967-?; 1983/1984-1996 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Johnson, Robbley Moss, Perry Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Bob Shea Description An account of the resource An interview with Bob Shea conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Missasion Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013-11-13 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2016-07-21: Metadata v1 created – [RG] Subject The topic of the resource Hanford (Wash.) Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) 100-B Area 100-C Area B Reactor D and DR Reactors F Area Housing Plutonium Uranium Extraction Plant (PUREX) Richland (Wash.) https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F7f6d2722f96af5759ce34d284e17ceb3.jpg 2e6c63401f341726a5d00d80c6b894e0 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F35192d6fa7246bcbeafa4d77f812dca4.mp4 5118fbd730bbe880f6366cbc5584f62f Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Bauman Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Bob Smith Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Northwest Public Television | Smith_Bob </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: I'm going to start by just maybe having you state your name first. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: That's Robert Lee Smith. I usually go by Bob. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: Okay, and my name is Robert Bauman, and I'm conducting an oral history interview with Bob Smith on July 16th of 2013, and the interview's being conducted on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. And I'll be talking with Bob Smith about his experience working at the Hanford site. So I thought we'd start today by just asking you to talk about how you came to Hanford, how that happened, when that was, and what brought you here. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Well, it had to happen about 1951. My Kansas National Guard unit got called into federal service during the Korean War, and we wound up at Fort Lewis. So one day, a friend and I were hitchhiking into Yakima, and this car, Oldsmobile station wagon--looked like a brand new one--pulled up to give us a ride. So we got to asking him questions about, well, gee, you must have a nice job to afford a car like this. Yeah, I've got a pretty nice job, he says. Well, what do you do? He says, I'm a guard over at the Hanford Atomic Works. I says, well, where's that? He said, oh, it's 80 miles down the road. We weren't bashful about asking questions, so we says, well, how much do you make? He says well I make $100 a week. $100 a week? Wow. I had just left Pittsburg, Kansas at a job at $30 a week as a clerk typist. So I thought to myself, I want to check that place out. So eventually I did. I wound up as a clerk when they were building the K Areas, not making $100 a week, but I was making $60 a week. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: And did you have any idea of what Hanford was at the time? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: I had read a short article in the newspaper, I think, over at Fort Lewis, something about they had atomic energy work going on here, and it was secret, and it got my imagination, my curiosity up. I thought, I'm going to have to check that place out. So I eventually did. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: And what were your first impressions of the place when you first arrived to work? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: I thought it was a real nice place. I got here on June 8th in 1953. And the weather was nice and clear and really nice. I saw the Rattlesnake Mountain off of the site, back over there, and I thought, man, that's really pretty. We didn't have any mountains like that back in Kansas. So I was living at the dormitory, so I would run out in the morning and catch a bus, take me to the bus lot, and then from the bus lot I'd go out to 100-K Area. So anyhow, I was very impressed with the area around here. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: And so what was your first job? What sort of job were you doing? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: It was a clerk typist out of 100-K Area, when they were building the K-East and K-West Reactor. It was back in 1953. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: And so which contractor? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: General Electric. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: General Electric. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Yeah, General Electric Company. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: Okay, and you said you lived in a dormitory when you first came? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Yes, mm-hmm. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: And where were those at the time? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: It was where Albertsons Grocery Store is now on Stevens--Stevens and the Lee Boulevard. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: And it was an all-men dormitory? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Well, it had a W-21, which stood for Women's, but there were two dormitories in there that had men in them, but they started with a W because eventually they thought they would be women's dorms. But they had more men than women, I guess, so I wound up in W-21. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: And how large was the dorm? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Just like any college dormitory, actually--two story, stairs on the outside you could go up, as well stairs inside--typical college-type dorm. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: And how long did you live in the dorm then? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Well, I lived in the dorm until I got married in 1954. I got married in May of '54, so. While living there, they eventually transferred me up to M-1 dormitory, which is up close to Jadwin and Symons, something like that. Because—for some reason, maybe they had sold their area to Albertsons. I don't know. But I eventually moved up there. So I was there about a year. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: Okay. And then after you got married, where did you move at that point? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Well, we got an apartment over in Kennewick, but we were only there for about week before our names came through. We had put in for a house to rent in Richland, because it was still a government town at that time. And we got a B house at that time at 1413 McPherson. So being over this one bedroom basement apartment in Kennewick only lasted about a week, so we moved into the Richland B house. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: And what were your impressions of Richland at the time? What sort of community was it? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: I thought it was real nice. It had the downtown section and also the uptown. The uptown section was fairly new at that time. But I thought it was very good. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: And you mentioned Richland was a government town. Do you remember any special community events--parades, any of those sorts of things during that period? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Not too many—being a government town, why, you did the job that you had to do. Well, they did have this music group that had opera singers and plays that you could go to and take part in choruses, singing. So I did join the Richland Light Opera Team for maybe one year and did a little singing there. But that was only for a few months, until I met my wife, and then I lost interest in singing. [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: And at some point, Richland I guess, gains independence, I guess, or whatever you want to say. Do you remember anything about that period and that process at all? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Yeah, that was around 1957 when that happened. And being in a B house, which meant there was a family on each side, the people that were there ahead of us had the opportunity to buy the house, but they didn't want to buy it, so they asked us if we wanted to buy it. Well, didn't have enough money to buy anything, so we said, no. So they went ahead and bought it, and we just stayed there. The rent for the General Electric time was $37.50 a month, and we continued paying that for about a year, and then it went up to about $50 a month. But that was still pretty reasonable at that time. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: So you mentioned you started as a clerk typist in the K Area, right? At some point you moved in to Health Physics. Is that right? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Yes. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: How did that happen, and when did that happen? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Well, by the time my year was up as a clerk typist, I had a chance to move into a job at a little bit of pay. The job was called field assistant, but it was half clerical typing job, and the other half of the day would be radiation time-keeper following J. A. Jones personnel around, minor construction, keeping time on them—radiation time in radiation zones to make sure that these construction workers didn't receive more than 300 MR in a seven-day period. Because in those days, although we had dosimeter pencils, they were not the self-reading kind where you could just look up at the light. What they would do is at the end of the day, you would drop your badge and pencils in a rack, in this case, 200 West Area and then go home for the night. Well, they had what they called pencil girls that would come out on swing shift, and they would collect these badge and pencils, and they would read these pencils. They had a manometer upstairs above the guard house, and they would stick these pencil in the manometer. It would read how much radiation it had collected. Then they'd put them back with the badge and put them back in the rack. So the next morning when you came, you'd pick them up again. Well, my time as a radiation time-keeper was up to me to keep track with pencil and paper about how long they could stay in the radiation zones, depending on how high the radiation dose was. As a radiation time-keeper, we'd accompany radiation monitors--they called them Health Physics Technicians--everywhere the construction guys went. And they would tell us the reading, and we would calculate how many minutes they could work in that zone. And then when they would leave that zone and go to another one, then we'd calculate that. So we did that for the full eight hours a day. Well, at least four hours a day. Half the day I might spend as a clerk typist writing up construction schedules for the--we had a General Electric engineer and also a J. A. Jones engineer. So they would write up the schedules, and I would type them up for the first half of the day, and the second half of the day, I would go keep time on the guys in the radiation zones for about half a day. So I did that from 1954 to 1959, and then I had a chance to transfer into radiation monitoring, which I did. And I worked in that job from '59 until I retired in '93. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: Oh, okay. And so when you moved to radiation monitoring, what did that mean in terms of your sort of everyday job? What sorts of different things would you be doing? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Well, we would go with the operations personnel, like operators or maintenance people, and accompany them on jobs and find out how much radiation was in the area, and then go in there with them and stay with them, in a lot of cases, as long as they were in the zone. And then sometimes we could set the job up if the radiation was not going to increase or decrease, then we would leave the job. But oftentimes we would have to stay with them because they would move from one place to another. So we were kind of following construction people and operations engineers—everybody that had to go in a radiation zone. We'd either go ahead of time and check the readings off and take smears--some floor smears and air samples and that sort of thing--to make sure they were within the limits of a the Hanford project. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: So you worked in various places throughout the site. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Yeah, I worked at--eventually over the period of time, I was in that job at all nine reactors at the Hanford project. And also I worked three separations buildings, PUREX 200 East Area, D Plant in 200 East Area, and also at the REDOX. When I was a radiation time-keeper, partly I kept time on the construction people because they were building a crane viewing room in the REDOX, so I did work there also as part of my job as a time-keeper. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: And I imagine, given the number of years that you worked there, that were a number of contractors that you worked for over the years. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Yeah, General Electric left about 1965, so about that time I had a chance to transfer over to the 200 Areas at an outfit called Isochem had the contract. And they only did that for about a year or two, when they left and turned their work over to Atlantic Richfield. And Atlantic Richfield did it eventually until Westinghouse eventually took over. In between those periods there, I also worked at Douglas Labs, which is out on North George Washington Way. And I did the same type of work, except I also was taught how to irradiate TLD badges because TLDs took over the place from film badges. So I would issue these badges for all workers for Douglas Labs, which was, at that time, probably less than 100 people. And I worked at that from about '73 until '76, when Exxon bought the building for Douglas Labs, and then I worked for them for about another couple three years. So actually I was gone from the Hanford project for about five years there, roughly--two and a half for Exxon, and two and a half for Douglas Labs. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: Okay, okay. Now, at some point, the mission of the site changed from production to clean up. Did that impact your job in terms of radiation monitoring in anyway, and if so, how so? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Yeah, some things did, all right. About 1987, all the reactors were shut down except N Reactor. And then they decided to shut N Reactor down '87. But they still had a lot of fuel elements left in the basement at N Reactor. Sometimes they would ship those few elements over to K Areas for storage. But they needed to be processed to make plutonium. Even though they were going to quit making plutonium, they should've dissolved these fuel elements and got rid of them. Instead they just let them store in the K areas for several years. And that was too bad, because eventually K Areas had to get those fuel elements out of there and send what's left of them over to T Plant, what they call T Plant now, for storage of some of the stuff that's left. So it made a difference in the kind of radiation monitoring you did. You didn't have to go into operating reactor buildings. Eventually, I transferred into what they call a D&D group, which was Decontamination and Decommissioning, which meant I went around to all of the old shut down reactors with operators. Well, they were called D&D workers at this time. We would go with them and make sure that there was no radiation around, take smears of the floor. About the only thing left in them would be radon, so we'd check for that. Sometimes we'd run onto a rattlesnake in these old shut down buildings. And one that really surprised once--we went to 105 C Reactor, and we saw this rattlesnake curled up underneath an old maintenance room. And the operator said, darn, the last time I killed rattlesnake, the environmentalists really got on to me. I says, okay. Well, it was on Friday afternoon, so I said--we had a radio, of course. So I said, I'll go out in the radio car and radio the office and see what the supervisor wants to do. So I did, but the supervisor had left early to go to town, so the assistant was there. I say, what do you want us to do with this rattlesnake? We hadn't killed him yet. [LAUGHTER] And I took a camera with me from the pickup. And he says, well, use your own judgment. Well, our judgment is we're going to run into that thing again in a month from now, and I didn't want him to be surprised and bite me. So I took a shovel in with me, and I handed it to the operator and says, do you want to kill him, or do you want me to do it? He says, I'll do it. So he took the shovel and whacked the head off of this thing. So after a few minutes there we got ready to leave. He scooped up the head on a shovel and carried the tail with his hand. And he went on outside to C Reactor, and he threw the tail over the roadway out into the desert. But the head, he laid down on the concrete there in front of the entrance to C Reactor. He says, let me dig a hole here to bury this head. We didn't want a coyote or something to eat that head and die of rattlesnake poison. So while he was digging that hole, one of the other D&D operators, who had a safety-toed boot on, took his boot and gradually moved it up towards that head, and this was after that thing had been killed for about ten or 15, 20 minutes. And that snake, much to our surprise, his head came up about six inches off the ground, came down, and his teeth had latched around fangs on that guy's boot and snagged the top of it for about an inch. And man, I'll tell you, the three of us looked at each other and says, did you see what I saw? We had never seen that before or heard of it. So that surprised us to no extent. So anyhow, that was one of the exciting jobs. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: That’s quite a story. What a surprise. Yeah, wow. So I was going to ask you--you were involved with a lot of radiation monitoring. So if a worker was exposed too much, their pencil or whatever showed--what happened at that point then for the worker? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Well, we had a limit of 300 MR per seven-day period, and as a radiation time-keeper, when the worker reached that point, why, we would go in and pull him out of the zone and tell him, that's it for the week--300 per week. Also, we had a limit of 50 MR per day to start with. So whenever they reached 50 for that day, we would pull them out. The next day they'd go in for another 50. But they would do that until they got 300 in a seven-day period. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: In reading the information from an interview you did ten years ago or so, it talked about that you had been involved in creating a tube that was uses to pinpoint the area of contamination. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Yeah, we had what we called a P-11 probe, a Geiger counter. And what we did was, in a process of surveying our people, this P-11 probe was about two, two and a half inches in diameter. I think I've got a copy of it. Anyhow, I would lay this piece of paper down on whatever was contaminated. If it was the bottom of a shoe, we would survey that shoe and find the hottest spot on that shoe, and then we would mark it, a pencil mark around the P-11 probe. So it was a round circle for the hottest spot. And then I would—in my days as field artillery in the army, I used to be work on fire direction center. So we would be fire forward and fire backwards. I thought, well, maybe I could use this P-11 probe like that. So I got the hot spot, and then I would move the P-11 probe down, and then I would draw a circle around it--below it. And then I would go back and find the hot spot and move it to the right, and move it until the radiation went away. Then I would draw a circle around that. Then I would take it up above and do the same thing there and off the left-hand side. So when I got through, I had a spot in the center of it about the size of your thumbnail, and that would tell us where the hotspot was on the bottom of the shoe or whatever you were decontaminating. So that saved you some time in decontaminating. Like on the bottom of a shoe you'd use sandpaper or emery cloth, something like that to clean it off, or masking tape or duct tape. So that kind of helped me anyhow—just tools of the trade. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: Right, and when did you develop that? What time frame would that have been? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Probably around 1970. At that time, I was going over to CBC. I used to be an awards chairman for the Health Physics Society years ago, and my job was to contact the instructor for a nuclear technology class for the CBC and find out who we could give a scholarship to--$500 or something like that. So this guy called me up one day. He says, Bob, we need to have somebody in your group to come over and give radiation monitoring classes to our students because they were learning how to be operators in the reactor buildings or radiation technicians. I said, sure, I could do that. He had gotten his experience from the Navy. He was a Health Physics technician, or they called them something else in the Navy. And he says, we need somebody over here to help them out and teach them. Could you do that, or could you find somebody? I says, yeah, I could probably do that. So I contacted my manager, and after six months or a year, they give me permission to go over there and do that about once a month. So I would go teach you one or two hours in the morning and another one or two hours in the afternoon. So that's what I thought about this thing here, which I had done out of work--finding little hotspots and then bringing them down to a small area. So that's about the time that I was doing that, and so I passed it on to the students so they would know, too. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: So it was sort of the teaching the students that led you to sort of thinking about that and developing that process? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Yeah, some of those students--in the summertime we would hire maybe five or six of them to come out at N Reactor as interns for the summer, because we were shut down for about a month or so for all the repairs and stuff. So we'd hire some of these students to come out and go around with us and learn jobs. So that at the end of that summer, if the company wanted to hire some of them, they could hire one or two or all six of them. So that kind of worked out good for both of them. And then they shut that teaching job down several years ago because the contractors at Hanford quit hiring people because we were starting to shut down reactors and laying people off. So if there's no need for them, then they quit teaching it. But then here, about two years ago, they started up that program again. I don't have anything to do with it. But they do teach them now three jobs, either a radiation operator type job or health physics technician type job or as an instrument technician job. They can go three different ways, so that's a good program at CBC right now. It's kind of like nuclear technology. It's a two-year program. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: And about how long did you teach classes? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: About ten years, from about 1970 until about 1980. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: Mm-hm. And in reading about this, it sounded like you also were instrumental in developing a scholarship program at CBC? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Yeah, I noticed that we always had white persons. There was never any blacks, and not even many Latinos either. So one day I asked Larry, I said, how come we don't ever have any Afro-Americans in here? He says he didn't know. So I went to the guy in charge of Afro-Americans over there hiring people, and he says he didn't know. And I thought, well, probably the reason is they were just like I was when I was getting out of high school. I didn't have any money to go to college. So I says, maybe we should start up--maybe the college could do something. So I thought, well, we ought to have an auction. So we had an auction there at CBC, and we had all the kids in the class bring things to donate and put out to sell. And we advertised it, sent information around to a bunch of companies. And I met about seven or eight companies to see if they wanted to donate equipment for it, which they did. But the day of auction came along, and I don't think we even had six people show up to buy anything. So, I says, well, we'll leave this equipment here, and CBC can have an auction some other time and maybe they'll collect more money, which they did. However, we had a guy that was pretty high up in the company for Westinghouse, and he was attending meetings over there. And one day I went to the building over there, and I saw all these, three or four or five other companies, not Westinghouse, that had plaques up on the wall that they donated $5,000 from one company, $10,000 for another company for scholarships. And so one day, we had a fellow that was pretty high up in Westinghouse stop by our building out there for a safety meeting one day. I says, we're going to have an auction, and it would be nice if Westinghouse could donate some money towards this thing and hire these minorities. So he took that information into the vice president of Westinghouse, and they okayed it. And I says, it'd be nice if we had four $1,000 scholarships to give to these kids. So they came up with that for that year. However, the next year, they came up with $28,000 for scholarships. So that was--the guy who was in charge of all safety for Westinghouse at the time sent me a note and said this was coming off. So that made me feel pretty good that Westinghouse did do that because all these other companies had done something. But they followed through with it, which was great. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: So you worked at Hanford from the 1950s into '93. Is that what you said? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: With some years in between there when you weren't. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Right, from about--well, at Hanford from '53 until '93, but I was a radiation monitor from '59 until '93. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: Did the technology change quite a bit in terms of radiation monitoring over those years, and if so, how did it change? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Well, yeah, they got better instrumentation down at--Battelle did some of our reading of our badges and this sort of thing. So their instrumentation got better as the years went along. And the same with our Geiger counters. They went from the old style to ones with P-11 probe. Nowadays, I'm not sure they even have a P-11 probe. It might be two long probes that they could use either one for beta, gamma and alpha. Before, we just had the P-11 probe for Geiger counter, and for an alpha meter, we had the probe for alpha--two separate ones. So yeah, the instrumentation did change. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: I was also going to ask you during years--well, Hanford was obviously—emphasized security, and I was wondering, especially when you started in the 1950s, what that was like in terms of security? Did you have to have special clearance? When you went to the site, did you have to go through special security or anything along those lines? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Yeah, I did. When they originally told me, while I was still the Army, there would be several weeks for them to check on my clearance, I thought, okay, several weeks. Well, as it got closer to discharge time, I thought, man, they haven't contacted me, so I better go down to Fort Lewis and check on civil service jobs. So I did, and I had qualified for two jobs. One was a warehouseman because I had worked six years in a grocery store, and the other job was a billing, clerk typist, in the transportation department. So I stayed there from December of '52 ‘til June of '53. But I got so tired of driving the fog and the rain over there around Fort Lewis and Seattle-Tacoma area that I just got sick of it. I had an old 1940 Ford. The heater didn't work, and the defroster didn't work either. So I'd have to drive about half way out and scrape the ice off the outside and the inside. And one day, I was cleaning out the back of it, and I saw all this mold in the backseat. I said, holy cow, the thing didn't warm up enough to dry that out. So finally I decided, well—I was kind of disgusted with General Electric for not notifying me. So although I didn't want to go back to Kansas because my mother and stepfather didn't get along too good. They fought like cats and dogs, and under no condition, no way did I want to live in the same house with them. So put off of going back there. I could have gone back to Pittsburg, Kansas, where they had a four-year college there. I could have lived at home, but I didn't want to stay there. So finally, I thought, well, I'm going to write General Electric a note. I didn't cuss them out or anything, but I wrote some wording on there that said, I thought you guys were honest in your estimations of how long it was going to take for this, but it's been so long. You said several weeks, and it's been several months. So I put that letter and mailed in my outbox at Fort Lewis, Washington. And when I got home that night, I found a letter in the mailbox from the General Electric Company and it said, from Zane Wood. He says, Bob, you've waited long enough for a job. We're ready for you now, so you can come on over. So I says, okay, I'll give my boss two weeks’ notice and come on over, so I did. But I was--clearances took an awful long time in those days. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: And when you started working, did you drive your car on site? Were you able to do that, or did you have to take a bus, or how did that work? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: No, they had bus service around Richland that you could take buses down the sort of streets, and then you'd catch--we were leaving at the B house, so a bus would come by within about a block, so I'd catch my bus there, take it to the bus lot, and then we would get on the bus that went to K Area. And so I would get in there, pay a nickel for a ride out and a nickel to ride back home, and this was 1953. So I did that until I went into the radiation time-keeper job, and we had buses to 200 West Area then, all the areas, but you still just dropped a nickel in when you went in and a nickel when you came out. So I caught the buses there also. So mainly buses--they didn't get rid of the buses until about a year after I retired. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: I know President Kennedy visited the site in 1963 for the N Reactor dedication. I wondered if you were here at the time, and were you on the site that day? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Yeah, I was here at that time. I had two boys and a girl, so--and the wife. We loaded up in my station wagon and drove out to N Reactor and was there for his talk. And that was--I think there was about 40,000 people out there, too, so it took us an hour to get out of there with so many people. But that was an interesting time. I also went to Battelle one time when President Nixon came out here to dedicate something to Battelle. So I was able to see both presidents that way. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: Do you have--were there ever any events that sort of stand out in your mind, period of time working there, or any incidents of any kind or accidents or any sort of events that stand out in your mind from your years working at Hanford? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Well, one thing that kind of surprised me—about the time I was to retire in 1993, I used to go over to B Reactor whenever they would have out-of-the-country people for a tour of B Reactor. My manager at that time said that he would like for me to be in on the tours because I used to work there when it was an operating reactor. So in case they ask him, well, what was is equipment used for or that one, I could tell them a little bit about it. So I went over there once with about five or six Russians, and they wanted to look at B, so they were looking around there. So finally, one of them spoke up and said, well, since you're about to retire here in a few months, what's your lifetime radiation exposure? I says it's 66 rem. And he says, aha! Mine's 600. I knew—I figured they took a lot more radiation. I thought to myself, man, you must have been at Chernobyl or something. But they took a lot more than what we were allowed here at Hanford. Our limit—official—was 5 rem per year, to not include more than 3 R gamma. But they had a lot more over in Russia. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: What were some of the more challenging aspects of working at Hanford? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Well, sometimes as a radiation monitor, you were the only person that knew much about radiation and contamination on a job, so it was up to us. We had a limit of 15-mile per hour speed limit on wind. So it was always up to the monitor to decide whether or not to shut a job down or not. And I thought, man, that's a big responsibility, because some these jobs are pretty important. So I carried around a wind gauge underneath the seat of the pickup. And I thought, well, if necessary, I'll get that wind gauge out. Because it got so I could take a look at sagebrush, a light piece a sagebrush. I would take the wind gauge out and watch when the wind blow to see when that sagebrush would roll. And I thought, well, that thing's going to roll maybe 17 mile an hour, and the bigger piece of sagebrush would take a little more wind. So I had this wind gauge out at one job, and the wind was 16 miles an hour, so I shut the job down. Well, that went over like a lead balloon with the rigging supervisor. We were on a diversion box, BX tank farm. And he says, I'm going to call up your boss, Bob. So he did, and my boss came out. By then, the wind had stopped, but I hadn't said anything about you could go back to work. And he says, Bob, how come you shut the job down? I says, well, it says on RNWP 15 miles an hour. Here's the wind gauge--16. He says, well, it doesn't look like it's blowing now. I says, well, it's not. As far I'm concerned, they can start working again, so they did. But every once in a while, you would be challenged. Once again I was challenged. I was working with the D&D group. We were at 100 K burial ground. Sometimes the waste in the burial ground will either travel down deeper, or sometimes they could go up, or they can go to the left or to the right over a period of time. And we had a car—we had one monitor that would drive this SUV-type instrument around where it has radiation detectors on the front bumper. And he would drive over to the tank farm. Whenever it would have a spot above the limits, like the limits on the tank farm are maybe 100 counts a minute above background. Well, whenever he hit this limit, why, it would alarm. So they notified our group that they needed to go in and lay some more dirt down, so they did. They were doing this job, putting more dirt on top of the other dirt. And this engineer--they were running out of money for these truck drivers to do that. And he says to my boss in radiation monitoring, he says--we have to radiation monitors checking the tires of these trucks that were coming and going. And says, why not check every truck coming in and out, going in and out? Why not every other truck or maybe only two tires instead of all four? And I said, no, we can't do that. Because we had run into exactly that same problem at N Area once. It wasn't me, it was another radiation monitor. He had decided on zone that I'm going to start checking every other truck. Well, one of these trucks came up with hot tires from the N Area place, and he tracked contamination down the highway a ways, and that's not good. So I says, well, I'm not going to do that. So the engineer was so mad, he went up to my supervisor. And I guess my supervisor took word over to the manager of radiation protection for all of the 100 Areas at that time. And somewhere there, my supervisor had told me that, Bob, don't survey every tire, just survey some of them. And I was so mad at that, I said to myself, I can't do that. We go through a certification program that you don't compromise the situation. So I was all set to go back to work, but I was going to check all four tires. And just before I left, my supervisor came back and said, our top manager says, keep doing it the way you have--surveying all four tires, so we did. So once in a while, you'd run out of money on a job, why, upper management wants to change things, and you can't do that if you're—why, I had resisted that. I figured I might get laid off or fired or something, but it didn't come to that point, thank goodness. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: So then, what were some more rewarding aspects of your job and working at Hanford? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Well, one rewarding thing was the scholarships that the Westinghouse came up with. And the other rewarding job was just you knew in your own mind whenever you were doing something right, and there was always a temptation to take shortcuts, but a good monitor never did. Because we had friends did try that, and they got into trouble so. One time I got to note from two former operators I used to work with, and he said--I had been long retired since then, and they were working as ministers, and they sent me a note that said they had appreciated my job as radiation monitoring, that I was different than some of the others. Some of them seemed to not try to get along with other people, operators, and tried to be too rigid. And they thought that I had tried to do the right thing. So that made me feel pretty good, that even though you sometimes wonder, I thought that I did a good enough job. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: So overall, how would you describe or assess Hanford as a place to work? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: I think it's a real good place. There are times when some people think that Hanford is—because it's got the most contamination the country, probably because we also made most of the weapons for Hanford, probably 65% or so of all the source of the bomb’s material. And I thought that people were trying to do badmouth the plant here too much. They also tried to badmouth Hanford DOE—or AEC, they called it in those days. But I didn't see it that way, because they were always trying to follow rules and regulations, and I thought they did a good job, and I thought Hanford overall did a good job. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: My students now, some of them anyway, were born after the Cold War ended. So they have no memory of the Cold War. They don't know much about it. I guess especially for people who are that young that really have no memory, what sorts of things would you like them to know about Hanford or working there? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Well, I think they need to know that, like I do, that I thought that Hanford did a good job of controlling radiation and the spread of it, because that was my job was to be one of the monitors out there watching these things and following the rules and regulations. So since I had a job in controlling it, I knew what was supposed to happen and what did happen. So I got to feel like most all the percentage of the time, Hanford did a pretty good job of it. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: Is there anything I haven't asked you about that you'd like to talk about or any specific memories, things that you'd like to talk about that you haven't talked about yet? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Well, yeah there's one of them that kind of bothered me a little bit. Back in 1966, we had a strike here at Hanford. And being in the radiation monitoring group—that was a union job. So we went on strike for about six weeks. During that time, I worked as a kind of a electrician helper down in California. California could not get enough electricians to work in their jobs. All their local people were busy, so they called around the country to get other electricians. Well, they wanted 20 from Hanford, but they could only get ten. So they says, okay, we'll take five instrument technicians and five radiation monitors, since we all belong to the same union. However, those radiation monitors have to have worked around electricians for at least a year, so they could help out as a helper. So my union steer called up one day and said, Bob, do you want to come by and drop your name in the hat and see if it gets drawn out for five guys to go down to Californian? I says, sure, so I did. And luckily enough I did, so I was down there for, well, it was a six-week strike. The first week we just stayed home. The next five weeks I worked down there. Well, when I got back—we would get these bottles, urine bottles, because they wanted to bring everybody up to date. Well, I'd been gone for six weeks, so I put my urine bottle out in front for the truck driver to pick up. Well, he picked it up, but a couple, three days later he came back again with some more of them. So I asked, well, how come I got some more urine bottles here? He says, well--he shouldn't have told me this because he's just a truck driver—but he says, well, I've had to redeliver several extra bottles around to different people. Because there was one guy over to 234-5 Building, where they were making plutonium buttons, that had gotten into an incident and gotten real contaminated. And they think that the bottles were washed—for me to do my sample in—well, mine were washed in the same batch that his were, and they cross-contaminated to my bottles. But that's just a rumor, they don't know for sure. Well, I did get notified by my manager at that time that I was giving an extra 5 rem of radiation because of those urine bottles. And I called him up and I says—Bill McMurray was my manager. I says, Bill, I wasn't even here at that time. How can I get that? He says, well, Bob, Battelle had done a lot of updating of their equipment, so maybe they got more sensitive equipment now than they did six weeks ago. I said, okay, Bill, whatever. But anyhow, they put that on my record, and it's been there ever since. They wouldn't take it off. So that kind of miffed me a little bit. That's one of the things you learn to put up with. [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: All right. Anything else that you'd like to share, any other stories or memories? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Well, let's see. Not offhand. Things went pretty smooth, as far as I was concerned. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: Well, I want to thank you for coming in today and sharing your stories and your experiences. I appreciate it. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Well, you're welcome, my pleasure. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: Thanks. </div> Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri-Cities Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:52:37 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 224 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview K Area 100-K Area 200 West Area PUREX 200 East Area D Plant 200 Area N Area 100 Area K-West Reactor N Reactor 105 C Reactor C Reactor B Reactor Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1953-2013 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1953-1993 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Bob Smith Description An account of the resource An interview with Bob Smith conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 7/16/2013 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2016-06-24: Metadata v1 created – [J.G.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. Subject The topic of the resource Richland (Wash.) Hanford Site (Wash.) Hanford (Wash.) Nuclear weapons plants--Health aspects--Washington (State)--Hanford Site Region Nuclear instruments & methods 100 Area 100-K Area 105 C Reactor 200 Area 200 West Area B Reactor C Reactor D Plant Hanford (Wash.) K Area K-West Reactor Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917-1963 N Area N Reactor PUREX 200 East Area Richland (Wash.) https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F42af466f014b615aae8ad77bcb4e6927.JPG 697aa5d799157fbcf33e7ff2b8b8cab9 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Carlos Leon Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: All right, red light’s on. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Carlos Leon on October 5, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Carlos about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Carlos Leon: Carlos Leon. That’s my full name; never got a middle name. C-A-R-L-O-S L-E-O-N. Franklin: So, Carlos, when and where were you born? Leon: I was born in 1953 in Toppenish. Toppenish Memorial Hospital. Franklin: And what had brought your family to Toppenish? Leon: Oh, golly. My grandparents were all born in Mexico. My dad in Texas; my mom in Kansas. And then my ma’s parents moved to Toppenish early ‘40s. Then my dad’s parents moved while my dad was in the service. When he moved back, he moved back to Toppenish. Then making a long story short, that’s where they met. Franklin: And were both of those families in agriculture? Leon: Yeah, they worked the fields. They worked the fields. My grandparents, my parents and stuff, they worked the field. My dad had a trucking firm that, you know, so we hauled potatoes and peas and all kinds of produce. And that was our summer job, working out in the fields, or in the orchards and stuff with my mom or something like that. So we were always--we were always busy. So a lot of the times, really, though--like when you worked, like the potatoes. It’s hot, middle of the summer, and you’d work basically as soon as the sun rose till 10:00 in the morning. All these rows of sacks of potatoes up and down the rows and stuff and everything else. And they’d put them on the trucks, and that’d be the end of the workday. But it was a long and hot workday type of thing. So we got the afternoon as kids to really actually be kids, too, at the same time. Franklin: And is fieldwork what brought your grandparents out of Mexico? Leon: Well, my-- Franklin; Did they ever talk about it? Leon: Well, my grandfather on my dad’s side worked in the salt mines in Kansas. You’ve heard of the famous salt mines of Kansas, Lands, Kansas. And then my grandfather on my dad’s--my grandfather, my dad’s father worked the railroads in Texas. So my dad grew up in Georgetown, Texas. So that was--yeah, so, he has a couple sisters, so they eventually moved to I think Montana it was, and then eventually back to Toppenish, Washington. Franklin: What was it about Toppenish that drew your family there? Leon: Oh, golly. Well, agriculture, really. My mom’s family settled in, I guess, migrant cabins at the Golding farms in Yakima. It was the biggest hop ranch in the world at one time. I don’t know if it still is or not. So they had cabins and stuff there and eventually they had to sell the house about four blocks away. I didn’t know my grandfather. I was three years old when he died. But my grandmother, his mom, lived with us and nine kids and then my other grandparents lived only like four or five blocks away. So we were very close and they all knew each other real well. All my aunts and uncles, actually, from both sides of the family know each other. Yeah, it’s really seamless in a lot of ways. So we had a big family and so, yeah, I was very fortunate. We didn’t have much, but we had a lot at the same time. Franklin: Mm-hmm, a lot of family members and family gatherings, relationships. Leon: Oh, yeah, oh, yeah. And it was Mexican culture, also. So you know, my grandparents didn’t speak any English, so. Hence you heard me speaking Spanish at the Sacajawea thing, Heritage Days. Franklin: Oh, that was really wonderful. The kids were like-- Leon: Oh, I enjoy that tremendously. Franklin: They really dug that. Leon: I give credit to my parents on all that. My parents were very outgoing and they stressed education and they stressed making people comfortable. That was the biggest thing, really. Franklin: Did they--did your parents want you--I know a lot of times with immigrant families, the children are often not taught their parents’ language; they want them to learn the language of their adopted country. Leon; Well, no, you know, my parents never really said one way or another. My older brother and my younger brother, Rudi, after me, like the first three boys, we kept it fairly, whatever. But the thing is, we were never educated in it. We didn’t read it; we didn’t write it. We spoke to our grandparents with it, and it was all around us with our extended family and stuff, people that visited my parents and that type of thing. So, you learn the, what do you call it, the morays, the norms, of the culture. With the fiestas and that type of thing. And I grew up with the food and when I went to college, I told people, I had to learn how to use a fork. I really did. Because it was just tortillas. And to this day, gimme a tortilla and beans and some rice, and I’m happy. You know, in a way, with my kids and stuff, I see them eat kind of like--cool, watching them eat with their hands and stuff. So there’s part of that there. They aren’t going to have the full meal deal that I had growing up, but with my aunts and uncles are still around and my brothers and sisters, they impart quite a bit. And I’m really proud of that. I’m really really proud of that. Franklin: Was there already a--how large was the Latino community, or was there already a Latino community when both sides of your family moved up to Toppenish? Leon: There was quite the Latino community. But really nothing like it is nowadays. You know, now it seemed like 75% of the town is Hispanic. Up and down the Yakima Valley. Or something like that. There was a large community, but it wasn’t like the influential that you have now, it seemed like. When I went to--when I graduated from high school, a handful of Hispanics that graduated with me. And I think two, maybe three--I’m just thinking--African Americans and that was really the--that was it back then. I graduated in 1971. But that was it. I never felt like I wasn’t part of the town. Franklin: Right. And you said you went to college. Leon: Mm-hmm. Franklin: And where did you go? Leon: Oh, for--[LAUGHTER] that’s a long story. But to make it short, when I graduated from high school, I went to Eastern in Cheney, and got tired of school after about three years. Kind of like basically, when you go to college, you meet the world. You meet kids that have a lot of money, or kids that don’t have much. Kids that want to be away from home, kids that are longing to be back home, and have a different kind of relationship with their parents. To me, it was all normal. I just kind of like--anyway, but living on a shoestring, kind of like eventually on your own kind of gets to you a little bit. So after three years and stuff, that’s where, ad in the paper, reactor operator? Sure, why not? Franklin: Really? You answered an ad in the paper. Leon: Ad in the paper. Franklin: Do you remember--a paper in Cheney? Leon: No, no, I was actually, during the summer, it was a Tri-City paper. I think it was my uncle that called and said, hey, there’s an ad in the paper for--and I saw it. I think it was in the Yakima Herald also. Kind of blurry about that. And interviewed with Paul Vinther. I don’t know if you’ve met-- Franklin: Really? Leon: Uh-huh. Franklin: Oh, yeah, I’m very--yeah, he has the Hanford Retirees. Leon: Paul, oh, yeah. Franklin: And he trained reactor operators. Leon: A long time ago. He’s a physicist by trade. Anyway, it’s funny, in talking with him--very, oh, man, talk about a larger-than-life personality. I mean, here, look, here I am, a 21-year-old kid, look at how small I am. I mean, barely weighed 120 pounds, maybe, at that time. I’m a lot heavier now, type of thing, but think about that. And, you know, he’s a big man. So he had this big, booming voice, great personality, just kind of like--and, heck, I can’t even remember the questions he asked and stuff. It wasn’t very long after that that they gave me the job offer. And so-- Franklin: What did you know about Hanford when you took that interview? Leon: Oh, golly. Well, I guess a couple things. You know, I remember the Kennedy thing, because that was covered; that was in the news. That was everywhere. I mean, eastern Washington, are you kidding? I mean, the President of the United States?! I know the Herald and the Tri-City really covered it at that time. But also the Yakima paper, Toppenish--that’s what we got, the Yakima Herald, all the time. And I remember that. And then driving truck for my dad in potatoes, like going to Othello, we’d be driving out 240. And so you’d see these stacks. You’d see these buildings, see the vapor coming out. And it was just kind of like--you know, now, you’re thinking about it, as I’m looking out. And I know the area so well that I was actually looking, at actually B Reacotr, you know, the one that was the closest to see that. But going on up, you’d see the processing coming out of the 200 West. And I know the story on when I’m on the bus is kind of like, back in those days and stuff, if you pulled over like for a flat tire or something like that, the Hanford Patrol would be right there, almost immediately, seeing what--if there’s something wrong somewhere, hurry up and fix your tire and move on. Because it was really, really secret, still. Franklin: Yeah. Leon: You know, I mean, highly sensitive and all that stuff. So that as my--and then I knew a lot of smart people worked there, I guess. I mean, that’s what it comes down to because all these scientists and all that type of thing. They used to have a school day when they’d have, you know, two or three kids from each school from all over the areas would go and tour Hanford, and they’d show them all that type of thing. So I had a couple friends that did that, and whatever, I wasn’t one of the smart kids. So they went and they’d tell, whatever, that they were picked and all that stuff. Franklin: But then here you are, 21, you got a job offer as a reactor operator. Leon: And I had no idea what I was getting into. Franklin: Well, what did you get into? Leon: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: What was that like? Leon: Well, come down to it, first thing was that they, you know, saw how much they were going to pay me. $184.84 a week was my--and I’m going, whoa. I mean, nobody’d ever paid me that much for anything, whatever. Franklin: What kind of wages were your parents earning, or what would’ve been the prevailing wage in like driving truck at that time? Leon: my dad didn’t pay me. Franklin: Oh, sure. Leon: My dad didn’t--his trucks and I got room and board. Put gas in and paid insurance for my car and that type of thing. Franklin: Sure, I mean, how did that compare to what you might have earned back in Toppenish if you were working? Leon: Oh, heck, I’d’ve be a millionaire almost type of thing. Oh, I’m not kidding! That was--$184, that’s like $4.50 an hour in 1974. And, really, when I first came here, my brother had already started to work out here, my older brother. And so we found a place in Pasco, like an old hotel set up to stay there until I found something, whatever, until we found something. And just a block of I guess would be south of the Uptown, there were some apartments, and I found them-- Franklin: Those little one-story apartments? Leon: Yeah, the one-story, the Anthony Apartments it’s called, whatever? Franklin: The what apartments? Leon: I lived 1209. 1209 George Washington Way. Franklin: Oh. What did you call them? Leon: Anthony Apartments, they were called at the time. And I don’t know who--I can’t remember the owner’s name. But anyway, so we stayed there, lived there for actually the whole four years that I actually worked as an operator at N. So me and my brother moved in there, $200 a month. And so he covered the first month, because he’d been working and he had money, and I hadn’t gotten paid nothing yet. And then eventually--but no cable, no phone, you know, any of that type of thing. Because we--you know. I got in trouble with the no phone business with work. My shift manager--I got sick, and I didn’t call. And this was at the, oh, probably been working three or four months or something like that. So, I was gone--I was not at work for a couple, two days. And I got on the bus, and got to work a couple days later. He was really mad at me because I didn’t call. Well, I don’t have a phone, Cliff. And he said, well, go to a payphone, whatever, that type of thing. And at that time, I didn’t have--I’m trying to remember the phone number of the control room or his number, just kind of like--that was like--but whatever. It was a year before I got a phone. You know, really. Franklin: Wow. What did your older brother do? Leon: He worked, actually, just with finance. That’s what he wanted to do and stuff, so he worked in the finance part. He never went into the reactors or nothing like that. Franklin: What was your first impression when you showed up for your first day? Do you remember? Leon: Oh, I remember my first day. My first day? My first bus ride. Remember, you caught the things, so they’d give you the instructions on how to catch the bus. I didn’t know about the shuttles at the time. I ended up catching the bus right across the street on George Washington Way, eventually, when I got on shift. But I ended up on the bus ride and we were just passing--just before we were going to pass the 200 East Area. Of course, I didn’t know the 200 East Area, but I know now, that’s just why I’m telling you. Anyway, passing 200 East Area. The bus was pulling over. And I was kind of like, oh, this must be the reactor or something like that. But there was some commotion and stuff Well, there was a guy three or four seats in front of me, because I was close to the back, he was having a heart attack. I’d never seen anything like this. So they escorted him off and a patrolman came on out and stuff. So they left and then the bus drove off. They left him standing there with the patrolman and they took care of him or whatever. But it was nothing like nowadays with the EMTs and all that type of stuff. It’s totally different. And kind of like, okay. It was just--and then I, you know, like showed up in front of the admin building and I got off. I didn’t know anybody. And walked in, and there was the admin building, and they had told me just to go up the stairs and the corner office and there was Dottie, Vinther’s secretary. Big old smile on her face and everything. You know, so welcomed me and every thing, and talked about her guys, because she just loved the operators. And then eventually got escorted into the 105 Building. And the 105 Building for N is huge. Huge, compared to, you know, the B and the rest of the other reactors. Got introduced to whatever shift manager of the shift that was on at the time and everything, and all the various other people. It’s kind of like, lost. And then Larry Haler came on, too, the same date that I did. Franklin: Same exact day? Leon: Yeah, same day. Franklin: Wow. Leon: And so we kind of hung around together and asked--gave each other a lot of blank looks a lot. You’ll have to ask Larry what he remembers. But it was a blur, basically, it’s what a blur was. And we were basically assigned to work back in the fuels area to package fuel and that type of thing. That’d be our first thing of learning being a reactor operator. Franklin: So it was all on-the-job training. Leon: Ohm es, I did not take one single classroom. It was just, this is the books, read the books. And it had all the systems and all that type of stuff. And then--I was--to go forward a little bit, eventually I was assigned to shift. And I was, looking back on it, I was very fortunate to be put on the shift that I was on, B shift, is the shift I was on. Got A, B, C, and D. Franklin: And why was that so fortunate? Leon: Ah, because of the individuals. And I guess, I guess, maybe if I would’ve been on A shift, C or D, I would’ve--but I got to meet other guys on the other shift and got to know them, too, don’t get me wrong there. But B shift was just the characters that were there, but at the same time, the character that they gave me, I guess that’s--and I was telling Tom earlier, it was kind of like, those guys helped me grow up. I was 21 years old, and I was bulletproof. And the next youngest guy on my shift was 45 years old. Franklin: Oh, wow. So they were, a lot of them were kind of like father figures almost? Leon: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. They had kids like me and older, type of thing. And so--yeah, I guess you could say, they probably knew me much better than I knew myself in a lot of ways. But it was--they really wanted me to learn, and learn right. That was the one thing that I’m very, very thankful for. Because, boy, I tell you, if you did anything wrong, if you went one way or--against what you should actually be doing, it’s just kind of like, you don’t put your finger into a socket for electricity. Well, you don’t walk into a radiation area unless you know what you’re going to face. And it’s that type of thing. And they’re very, very, very good--not the operators; the HP techs--we called them RMs at the time, radiation monitors; we didn’t call them HP techs--all the shift managers, the guys in maintenance. On and on, I mean, I could name them. I tell everybody, like the last scene of the Titanic, you know, where the camera’s going, you see the barnacled ship and then eventually it gets into its glory, the grand staircase. I can close my eyes and walk in to the 105-N. And there, Duke Anthony’s in there, you know, Granva Philips’ office, there’s Bob White’s in there, and there’s Cliff Young, shift managers’ offices, right off the back, you walk through. And then the INC shop over here, the entrance into the N, and then walk over here, walk in and stuff, closing my eyes. And I see Bob Stees, my first control room supervisor, Dale Tahyer, my other one. Oh, golly. Then all of the various operators: Ralph Hagensic or Nels Kass. Chet Regal, Claire Miller. Howard Sidig. I mean, just--you know, it’s just so clear. Right now as I’m talking to you, I can see their faces. I can recognize their voices. Even--that was my crew. That was my crew. And in the back, Nellie and Kenny and John. And then these--you know, the mechanics would come in. And the INC techs, the electricians, Jack Black--no, Jack White, Mike Black. Rodney Brown. All these different people that would come in. Harold Petty, the 105 supervisor in the power side and stuff. And Harold would always make, on the last night in graveyard, would always make us breakfast. Just give him a couple bucks and big old pancakes and bacon, it was kind of like--I mean, for a kid that never had had that type of stuff before, it was just kind of like, wow! This is amazing to me. It just, you know, all the various foods, stuff that people brought for lunch. We had this great big, actually, big kitchen at 105-N. And gas stoves. This was before microwaves and that type of thing. So they had these big gas stoves and stuff, and people would cook and bring their lunches and stuff, and see what the heck, all the various sandwiches and stuff. I was really fascinated by egg salad. I’d never had egg salad and someone gave me half of an egg salad sandwich. I was going, wow, this is really amazing. And then, you know, on a break, here’s a guy that was--looked like an apple, you know, he’s cutting it and eating it type of thing. And I’m like, what’s that, Cecil? Kohlrabi’. Kohlrabi is the way you see it now. And he said, you’ve never had it? I said, no. How would I know? So he cut off a piece and gave it to me. Took a bite of it, tasted like a dirty radish. But I like radishes and dirt don’t bother me any, so. So every once in a while, I--whenever I see kohlrabi I think of this guy, Cecil Moss. Really, a good guy. Really a good guy. Like I said, I had a really good time with all of these different people and stuff like that. I’m rambling, aren’t I? Franklin: No, it’s great. Did you work when you first started, did you work with anybody from the Manhattan Project days? Were any of your coworkers-- Leon: Oh, yes. Franklin: From-- Leon: Oh, yes, in fact, oh, yes, in fact, a physicist at B, but my first visit to B was a guy--again, all the reactors were shut down. So all the keys to all the reactors were hung in the control room in a little cabinet in B and stuff. One of the older gentlemen that was there, one of the guys that helped do the training or went along with it was Ralph Wallen. He actually has a narration on that, it’s W-A-H-L-E-N. Anyway, so, he has like a story that he’s written that you can actually get online. They actually have it. And he talks about that. Anyway, so, one time when I was the extra man on shift and that type of thing, he said, you wanna go over to B? I said, sure! So, again, this was, had to have been, I’d had been there at least a year then. It had to have been ‘75. Got flashlights and stuff and got in the car and drove on over to B. He unlocked the gates and everything. So we went into the, down the hall. No power anymore. I think I remember it being cool. And shined a light on the front face and stuff. Whoa. I said, that’s more tubes than N. You know, by that time I knew what--but, looked a lot, looked very, very similar. Said, is that the C elevator there? Yeah, that’s the C elevator. I mean, so all of these different things there, they were very, very similar. And I think one of the ways he really wanted me to see this, because I could go in there and not worry about any kind of exposure. And learn about it. And not too years later that I really realized that that’s what he was doing. Because I’d see something and I’d explain to him. The ball hoppers, even up on top and that type of thing. And then went into the control room, and how much smaller it was. Then we actually walked across the slats in the fuel pool. It was dusty, and everything, so I don’t ever remember--and I know we didn’t survey ourselves. Nothing to survey--supposedly. Like it is now, I tell you. But that was my first experience with somebody that really actually told me. But then Howard Sidig who was on my shift, he was only on my shift for about a year-and-a-half. He was getting to be retirement age. But he used to be an operator, and he was one of the original operators for B. He’s long dead now and stuff, but he is a good father for me. I got to know him outside of work and stuff through the church and everything. And him and his family and his wife, Rosemary. Very, very--oh, just endearing, endearing people. So he actually showed me--you know the certificate at the tour center that shows that people were part of the war effort, that they gave to various operators, I guess? Or to whoever--whatever. I was visiting Howard and he went on up to--he said, I gotta show you something. And beaming, he has this certificate. I’d never seen it before. I read it and stuff, helping out the war effort, blah, blah, blah. His name was on it. He was very, very proud of it, you know? That was the mentality. Well, yeah! You know? And they helped end a very cruel part of our history. So he was very, very proud of that. And I looked at it and said, whoa. He said, there aren’t very many of these. Okay. Apparently there aren’t. To have--I don’t know how many were handed out during--and that type of thing. And then there was also another individual--well, actually two. Archie Stark, who was in the fuel-handling in the back, and then George Madison, who was actually a supervisor, and both of them were B Reactor people. But again, I’d ask them questions, but I forget half the answers about that type of thing. But, you know the biggest thing that they would say is, ah, you wouldn’t have existed, you couldn’t have handled all that hard work back then. Oh, you know. They would always kid me with that. But growing up in the family that I did, you know, helped me. Like I told you about my parents, to treat people with respect and that type of thing. But I have a thick skin. You know, when you grow up with nine kids, seven boys, especially, you do. And so, man, they want to banter? Okay, here I am! I banter right back. And just, yeah, whatever, I just loved it. I loved it. Growing up with it all. So, I don’t know, you want me to show you some things or whatever? I brought something with me. We’re not at that point in our conversation? Franklin: Why don’t you show me at the end? Leon: Okay. Franklin: Then we can get like a stand or something to put it on. We could then do that--that way the camera doesn’t have to refocus. Could you describe a typical work day as a reactor operator? Leon: A typical work day. Franklin: Yeah. Leon: Well, I can tell you a typical work day, maybe about three or four different typical work days, if you get down to it, because there was lots of aspects to it. One o the--probably the first aspect was, if you’re like in the back, in the fuel pool and you’re actually packaging fuel. Or you’re actually part of the refuel process. In, you know, when they were pushing the fuel out, you could either be on the discharge or the charging elevator. Or you could be out back in the fuel pool. We actually had three positions. Or I was never--they would never let me operate the charge machine; you need some experience in that. But other than that-- Franklin: Is that what pushes the fuel through? Leon: Pushes the fuel through. It’s a great, big, you know, 55, 60-foot long elevator on steel platforms that they had that actually would get--and we’d make charges already. And that’s another story. When it comes to a typical day, it really is hard for me to tell you what a typical day was, because so much changed. And then it depended what shift you were on, if you were on graveyard, swing or days. All of those things made a difference as far as what a typical day was. But to really get down to it, you know, like if you were a fuel handler, you were in the back. You are actually packaging the fuel and putting them into canisters and the canisters, you’d be putting them in order in the fuel, in those canisters and then lowering them into the pool. When you discharged the fuel, you’re seeing the images of the fuel coming out and hitting the trampoline and into the carts. They actually had track--they had carts where you’d get, I think, three tubes in each cart. And then travel on out, and then come on out and they’d dump it into baskets. So everything would be into the baskets. So then you’d eventually, when everything started up and stuff, well, you had all these baskets of fuel. You actually had to let them cool a little bit longer than--you know, you don’t start packaging them right away. But you had to do rearranging. You had to make sure that everything was arranged and stuff, and if any pieces that fell out, you’re looking for them. It’s an accountability issue, make sure that we had everything. So the fuel pool--and that was different, N Reactor’s was a really long fuel pool. It didn’t have a grate across it like ethe other reactors did. It was just a pool, and you actually had trolleys that traveled the length of the fuel pool. And, oh, that was a--oh, golly, talk about memory. That was a source of fun for me, let’s put it that way. They had no idea. They had these big old tongs and stuff that would hang to pick things up and that type of thing. And you’d bring it all the way up to the top and stuff. But it had a faster or slow motion going. I would hit the jog button, and I’d hit the travel button and that sucker would sped up. Not like it went really, really fast, but it would go a little bit faster to get to the other end. And then as soon as I’d hit that, I’m telling you, George Madison, who was my supervisor at the time, he’d be on one end, and, you know. I got this idea during graveyard and stuff, going really fast. Eeee. And it was in a big enclosure, and echoed like crazy if you really wanted to make it echo. Well, hey, here’s my chance. So I go in there and I hit it and I go, GEEEEEEOOOOORRRRRGGGE! And go running. And then I said, no, I’m going to say GEEEORRRRGE! It just echoed like crazy. And George was just doing this thing, whatever. So those types of things, just little by little, all of these various things. You know, it made it enjoyable. It made it enjoyable, a break in the monotony of a lot of the things. And you know, I was just a good target for them all. They would always say something or whatever like that. Especially because my age. More than anything else because my age. Because I’m kind of like-- Franklin: You were kind of young, young buck? Leon: Oh, golly. And then of course they wanted, when I was on long chains, we had four days off, four-and-a-half days off, whatever. I’d head to Portland or Seattle or Spokane, visit friends and this and that or whatever like that. 21, 22-year-old kid, coming back, like, oh, yeah, what’d you do? Oh. Franklin: Right-- Leon: Oh, I’d embellish a lot of the time, whatever. But it was. It was, in fact, especially from Portland or Seattle I’d stop by at home and say hi to the folks and stuff and then head back to Richland. But they just thought I just lived a wild life sometimes, kind of like--yeah, I guess I did. In some respects, I did. Franklin: Were your parents or family concerned about you working at Hanford? Leon: No. Not really. Not really. They were--I guess, you know, tell them, what do you do? Oh, I’m a reactor operator. I operate a nuclear reactor. When I first got here, it was like, I was driving a borrowed car. One of the guys from the reactor had a car that he wanted to sell. ‘68 Toyota Corolla. Franklin: Wow, that’s one of the first ones. Leon: I mean, a little box. A little box, yellow box, what it was. Franklin: Those are very collectible nowadays. Leon: Oh! You know. 500 bucks. And he said, you could probably go to HAPO and get a loan. You know, I mean, who’d give a kid a $500--so I went over to HAPO. You know, at the time, you could only be--since I was a union or whatever, hourly employee, I could only go to HAPO. GESA was for the managers and that type of thing. That’s the way it was divided. So I went on over there, and I got a $500 loan. And I had to--my payments were like $75 a month. So they worked it out so that I could pay my rent and still live and that type of thing. First time I drove it home, my mom was just beaming, really proud, kind of like, it’s just nice--I mean, you’ve got to think about it, as far as our upbringing not having much money and stuff. My parents, they just struggled to provide for us. And we, of course, you being a kid, you don’t really realize how much they’re struggling. And anyway so she was just beaming and happy and feeling it’s so nice to see that you have some money in your pocket now, mojo. And your car and on and on. Just--yeah, no, no, my parents weren’t really, say, like scared of, what, or apprehensive. What was apprehensive though was like I had my next-door neighbor there in Toppenish--because you know to get a clearance they filled out all this paperwork. So one of my neighbors said, in Spanish, you know, what kind of job do you have? I had some guy come talk to me and ask about you, type of thing. Don Santiago was his name. So it’s really kind of funny. There was nothing--it was a job, and it provided, and it provided very well. It provided very well. Franklin: Yeah. And how long did you--how long were you a reactor operator? Leon: I was a reactor operator for four years. I was certified for two-and-a-half during that time. Going back to your typical workday type of thing, The typical workday in the control room, it really--a reactor operator likes it boring. Franklin: Sure. Boring and predictable is good. Leon: Boring and predictable and everything steady state is a great thing. It’s a great thing to have, really, you know? It gets a little tiresome or whatever like that, especially during graveyard. But you know, like I said, there was always--we were always talking. We were always talking. Anyway, so a typical day, depending on whether you were at the nuclear console, whether you were at the A console where you had all the turbines and the steam generators or the BN console where you have your dunk condensers and your rad monitor thing and stuff. But you always had duties; you always had something that you were doing. So if you were the fourth person, you were on relief. So you had other surveillances to do and on and on and everything. But if you had an emergency, like a scram, or like I say, some abnormal happened, whatever. Temperature here too high or steam generator levels getting too high or whatever like that, you know, open up a blow-down valve, and how long, how’s the chemistry looking and that type of thing. All of these various things. So there was always something. There was always something. I love--at the same time, though, I love startups. Startups were fun. Yeah. I learned a lot. That’s where a lot of the guys, you know, when I was telling you about being hands-on. A lot of the guys would let me [LAUGHTER] manipulate, under instruction, bringing up the turbines to full speed from 1800 to 3600. And you know, pull rods in and out. One experience I had was putting on what’s called dump condensers, heating up dump condensers. Because the way N Reactor was designed was that it sent steam over to the Hanford Generating Plant, but it also had dump condensers so that if you had a load rejection where something happened to those turbines and stuff, N Reactor could take the steam and actually dump it and actually continue running. So you had raw water going through the tubes on those dump condensers. And they’re huge. Oh, heck, I’d say they’re like 15 feet across, 30 feet high, whatever like that, and hanging. It was--they’re massive. They were massive. But anyway, you have to open up a little bit of steam to heat up the tubes. I got a lesson in water hammer. Very classic thermodynamics thing. The power operator called my shift manager and said, hey, the control room is making the condensers move. Because you get the water hammer in those dump condensers, it would move. We were talking about two or three inches. And make noise and everything else. So Cliff, about 6-foot-4. Hey, saying, look who in the BN console, said, are you learning, Carlos? Yeah. I’ll put the steam on a little bit. Said, you know what water hammer is? Uh, no? [LAGUHTER] So, he sent me to the power side and went with and talked to the--Harley was the guy that was on the power side. And so he had one of the operators. So called on the radio, I’m standing by this dump condenser and stuff. Said, okay, open up the steam valve on it. He opened it up just a little bit more. Next thing I know, that dump condenser went fwrrrrr and really just sloshed and really just made this thunder sound. I learned about water hammer, and I respected water hammer, and I’m--I know now when I tell people and said, you don’t want to water hammer pipe. When I teach fundamentals and that type of thing. I mean, you--no. It’s not a--it scares you. It scares you to no end. Franklin: Yeah, I bet. Leon: So those are the type of things that you kind of like, you--again, whether somebody would teach you that way now, I don’t know. But I doubt that was the way I was taught, you know? Like, even one other thing, I had quote-unquote the pleasure of seeing and experiencing was being on top of the reactor. And I was--we were getting to start the reactor again from a shutdown. So one of the things that we had wanted to do was check all of the ballhoppers to make sure they were all cocked and loaded. So we had a tool and stuff to cock it and load it and that type of thing. So I was up there doing that type of thing. Well, they had to a surveillance on the fog spray. On the fog spray, we had on each side, eight big risers which fed the reactor. And anyway, so these fog sprays were on top, on the top on the inside. In case there was an accident or a pipe break or something like that, the fog sprays would come on and actually rain down onto those pipe spaces, so none of the fission products would come out. And so they called and said, hey, we’ve got to test the west side fog spray. I never seen them before, type of thing. So they turned on two diesels to go into those sprays. Oh, golly. I jumped from one side to the other. It was so loud, and I thought I was going to get sucked in. Just because, you would drown. You would drown. When somebody says fog spray in a nuclear reactor, they mean fog spray. It’s not a mist. You know. It’s like a waterfall times ten. I mean, it was--and so, not only is it raining down like that right next to you, I was probably from here and that was five feet away. And you could just feel that, you know, air going that way. Oh, man. [LAUGHTER] And Ralph Hagin said, who happened to be the operator when they started it, I called him and I hear him over the phone saying, are they on? Yeah, Ralph, they’re on. Then next thing, you hear him just laughing and laughing and laughing. Okay. Oh, man. That scared the heck out of me, I tell ya. But those are the type of things that you--I guess, later on, it’s a story to tell, but at the same time, it’s also a lesson learned, because now I can tell. I can tell people. [LAUGHTER] When you hear this word in a nuclear reactor, fog spray, believe it. Franklin: Yeah. Yes. Leon: So those are the type of things that-- Franklin: What did you do after you were--what was next at Hanford for you after being a reactor operator? Leon: Oh, well. I actually wanted to go back to college. In 1976, they had a strike. So I spent all my money living off my savings and stuff to go back to school, so I didn’t. And then I ended up, then, in 1977, I actually took a trip around the world. I actually got a leave of absence, they actually gave me a leave of absence, to take a trip around the world. It took me ten weeks, and I was gone. I went with a singing group. And had a--well, the thing is, to be able to do this, it cost $3,400. So in February, when they found out about it, we were leaving in June which is when the thing was supposed to be going. It was a group that I had met through this other, another friend. So how am I going to get the money? Anyway, so, my friends on B deferred working overtime to let me work overtime. Franklin: Wow. You mean at N. Leon: At N. Franklin: Yeah, okay. Leon: They deferred. Because you were on a schedule type of thing, you know, you’d sign up for overtime. So they didn’t sign up and let me. So for my shift I got a chance to work a lot of overtime. When you work overtime, you come in ahead of shift. You got double time for the shift you came in on and your own shift. And I worked a lot of double-doubles. I--thinking about it nowadays, later on, I was very appreciative of it, but think about that, kind of like, you know, these guys wanted to work overtime, too. But at the same time, it’s kind of like, wow. Anyway, so guess what? Six weeks later, I had enough money. Franklin: Crazy. Leon: So yeah. It was $3,400 and it was well worth it, and it was well worth--because I’m saying, I can’t put a price on the friendships. At all. Oh, well, why was that story? But anyway, a story comes up. One of the guys in the back, Adolphus Nelson--we called him Nellie--he invited me and my brother to his house for dinner one evening. And, okay, never been to any place like this before, anybody to their home or whatever. He lived in Kennewick. Went over to his house, and wife made this real nice roast beef dinner with potatoes and stuff. We had good conversation and everything else. And then, you guys ready for dessert? Dessert? These are Okies, they’re from Oklahoma. Anyway, so, Fae was her name, brought out this pie. Sucker was this--it’s like, whoa! Banana cream pie. Got a slice. Oh, I thought I was in heaven. I’d never had banana cream pie before. I’d never had banana cream pie like that since. And it was just kind of like, aw, man. I just kind of like gushed over it. I told Nellie about it and stuff. And a couple weeks later, he said, hey, Carlos, got something for you at lunch time. Come on back. So I go back there. Guess what? A piece of banana cream pie. Oh! So yeah. I don’t know why I brought that up. Just kind of like it--it was just a story. Like I said, there’s stories like that. There’s lots of, yeah. There’s a lot of things that, oh, golly, my mind just races like crazy. Communications of things. There was a guy named Tommy van Lear that was--I knew him as our steward and then eventually he was a shift manager and stuff. Just the craziest guy. Just the craziest guy. He would--at that time, there were like, you could say, you could do a lot of things over what they called the announcement within the reactor. You could pick up the phone and dial--I don’t remember what it was, 7-1 or whatever. And then you paged somebody. And he would dial that and everything else when he’d come on shift. And this was on graveyard or--he was on graveyards when nobody was around, the management wasn’t around type of thing. And he’d go, no friggin’ in the riggin, no pokin’ in the passes. I just kind of went, oh. Tommy’s here, Tommy’s here. And the other thing that I remember was a guy named--oh, golly. Anyway, last name was Pease. He was what they called a chief. He worked in the power side in 184 Building. So they would always have diesel oil coming in. So you’d always hear him--he was just a Texan. Got a load of Texas tea coming in, a load of Texas tea. So everybody knew they had to go, whoever was assigned, to make sure that it was unloaded. Eventually, some manager didn’t like the way he was announcing that and stuff. Was kind of like, we’re more professional than that. So it just kind of like, took away that--Charlie Pease was his name. But anyway, those are the type of memories that still echo. And then--so you’re making me remember these things that I’ve forgotten. Oh, golly. I’m going to cry. Franklin: Aw. So how long did you work at N Reactor for? Leon: I worked at N Reactor for four-and-a-half--actually, five-and-a-half years total. Because after I--I went to college I went to Pacific University in Oregon and graduated with a degree in science. Plain science; a bachelor’s degree in science. Franklin: Just, science. Leon: Science. I got 30 hours of physics, math, chemistry and biology. Franklin; What were you studying when you were at Eastern? Leon: More the sciences, that’s where I had most of my credits. That’s where I had most of my credits, so when I transferred over and transferred my credits, those were ethe credits that stuck out. So I said, I’ll just do it that way. And having now, quote-unquote the background that I had, the work background that I had. But you know, in reality, you think about that--a lot of people think--I guess, whatever, I live two lives with work. Okay, I know the left brain stuff of reactor operating and thermodynamics and all those other things. But my other part of my life is kind of like I’m playing guitar and goofing off and doing all these other things that I like doing. Creative type of thing. I write songs and that type of thing. So, that’s what I bring to the--you’ve seen me with my tours and stuff. Franklin: Yeah, no, you’ve very-- Leon: But that’s what I like doing. Franklin: Did you come back to Hanford after you graduated? Leon: Yes, I did, uh-huh. I worked there for about a year-and-a-half in the training department and teaching new operators in fact that came on that are real good friends of mine, really, when it comes down to it. A lot of them that came afterwards. In fact, one of them is actually Mark Jensen. Franklin: Oh! I just saw Mark yesterday. Leon: Mm-hmm. Franklin: Wow. Leon: And so, it’s--and Larry Haler had gone into training. It was a natural fit, really. It was a real natural fit, because training had changed. Three Mile Island had happened. So that was during the time when things were actually changing in training, to the point that we’re where we are now, really. That was just the infancy part of it. Of course, with the opportunity, having the degree, and being at N, and then having, I guess, two things. Going back off to college, and then having that thing with the trip around the world just made that travel bug even bigger. There was--what do you call it? I can’t remember. Nuclear News magazine they used to have all the time, we used to get it. And it’d be in the shift manager’s office and stuff and I’d read it. There was an ad for General Electric for--and so I submitted an application with General Electric in nuclear. This was the same time that the first WPPSS plant was being built, Number 2. And that was a BWR, GE BWR. So one of the managers was visiting and stuff and called me and asked if I wanted to interview and stuff so I did. Lo and behold, guess what the question that he asked me about, just to see what my background was and stuff? He asked me a water hammer question. [LAUGHTER] Oh, that was easy. Kind of like-- Franklin: You were like, I got this. Leon: Oh, yeah. Right now. Golly, divine providence. There is a god! And that’s where I got on with General Electric. The thing that he promised me at that time--didn’t come to fruition--but to certify on their BWR6 line and then have like a two or three year assignment in Spain. And doing that in Spanish. Oh, boy, as soon as he said that. Oh, yeah. And then they ended up canceling the plant. That was during the time when--that’s when nuclear was out of vogue after that. So, yeah, but that came back in ‘89 at Columbia. Worked in the control room and did all kinds of things, corrective actions and stuff. Franklin: That would be Energy Northwest. Leon: Yeah, Energy Northwest. And then, now, I’m with the Vit Plant. You know, people still ask me, well, what do you do? I teach reactor operators. I teach people how to run nuclear reactors. Even though it’s not a nuclear reactor, it’s so much simpler just to say something like that than try to explain what I do. But being an instructor is--I’ve just gotten to enjoy it. Whether I know something about a certain subject or not, eventually I’m--I tell, like people at the Vit Plant, well the first time will be a little boring maybe a little bit more rough type of thing. But the second or third time, no prob. Because you do, you get more comfortable and you know the slides and you know the subject matter. And knowing your audience is probably the biggest thing. Franklin: Yeah. When you started at N, were there a lot of other--were there any other Hispanic/Latino workers? Leon: Oh! Golly. Let me tell--okay, well, now you really are going to make me cry. I was the first person in my family, anybody related to me, to get a college degree. I have cousins and stuff that, they have PhDs and masters and all that type of stuff. I’m very proud of them. But I was the first one. But well when I got on, you know, I didn’t really realize it, but one of the things that--this was at the very beginnings of equal opportunity, EEO. I really didn’t realize it until after I had been there maybe six months that they’re really pushing me to get certified. And they went out of their way a lot to make sure that I saw certain things on a startup, shutdown, and that type of thing, and make sure that I held over, or came out early, and all these different things. It was really kind of against what the union was--you know, the guys that are around, and other shifts. Again, this is where I was really fortunate with my crew. Because my crew, like, they knew me and they kind of like picked up on this. Without even saying certain things. They had a lot of--whatever, I just kind of like--so, in the last, I’d say month and a half before I actually did get certified, I was really actually working quite a bit to learn various aspects. To make a long story short, I was the first Hispanic ever to certify. Franklin: At N Reactor? Leon: At N Reactor. Franklin: Oh, wow. Leon: There was other Hispanic workers, but none in reactor operations. So, I didn’t try to make a big deal out of it. I didn’t know how to handle it, let’s put it that way. More than anything else, I didn’t know how to handle it. Would I handle it differently now? Probably, in a way. And then also, it was really unsaid. It was really unsaid in a lot of ways. But you could sense it. So when went through my--to get certified, you actually took a written test, very comprehensive. And then you had a walkaround and it’d be a full day type of thing, a shift. Walk you around and asking you how does this work, how does that work, can you put this on, can you shift this, can you do that, type of thing. Do you know what a water hammer is? And then be in front of an oral board of three people that would ask you all types of questions. Which was a piece of cake. When they asked me--when I went to the board, I was nervous. But at the same time, I was kind of like, they can’t ask me anything. I was that confident, by that time. And so the day that I got my certificate, a photographer came in and took pictures of me and my shift manager and my control room supervisor and another operator, me standing at the board. And I’ve got that picture. I’m going to show you later. Standing on the board and talking like I’m communicating somewhere. Yeah, it was a real proud day. It was a real proud day for me. Whatever, thinking about it. Like I say, I had no idea how to deal with it, because nobody--I had nobody to really I guess talk to about it, type of thing, really. Franklin: Right, you-- Leon: The only thing I was really being harassed about or people were talking about, the other guys on my shift that like a couple of electricians, hey, first time you sit on that nuclear console all by yourself, I bet you it scrams. [LAUGHTER] It shuts--it only took the second time for me to sit there that it scrammed, really. But the thing that really--other that the guys would say was now you’re really going to get paid. Because basically my pay went up almost $200 a week, just like that. Franklin: Wow. Leon: The following week. And that was just for getting certified. That was my incentive. You can talk about-- Franklin: That’s a good incentive. Leon: --incentive, you know, a spiritual incentive, a moral incentive, and all these different things, kind of like whatever. But for a poor kid from Toppenish, and going through the college things that I did? Boom. You know, all of a sudden, here I am, almost $400 a week, just like that. And it was just incredible. It was just incredible. So I mean, that’s why I look back in retrospect, you know, the guys, especially Cliff Younghands. I can’t catch him, you know? Golly. He was a great guy. Without him, I can really say--[EMOTIONAL]--without him, I wouldn’t be--I wouldn’t have learned like I learned. There’s no way. Franklin: That’s wonderful. Leon: I mean, all the other shift managers were great. And they probably had other guys under their wing and that type of thing. But there’s just something about Cliff that he took a real interest in me. He wouldn’t let me--he’d give me a little rein to goof off here or there, that type of thing. But he’d come in, and he’d quiz me. And he knew his prints forwards and backwards and inside out. There’s only about three or four other people that I knew at N Reactor that knew them like that. And that really taught me a lot. Taught me a lot of discipline. There’s a time for everything. He, Cliff, had the respect of all the other guys, too. And then later on when Cliff got off of shift and stuff and working in training and doing all these other things, he actually signed my certificate. And I’m proud that he had signed my certificate. Because he was--of all the individuals that I got to know--when it comes to operating and being disciplined for it, trying to encourage--I try to encourage a lot of other operators, like at the Vit Plant itself, you have new commissioning techs that are coming in, try to encourage them, and I think of Cliff while I’m doing it. Franklin; Yeah. He was like a real mentor to you. Leon: He very, very much was. Very, very much was. You know? And you know, over the lifetime, you can count how many people in your hand that really mentored you in some way. You know, whatever. When it comes to that discipline of bearing down and learning. You know, kind of like, do everything that you can. He turned his back on some of the things that I kind of liked that I shouldn’t have done to go into the reactor, to learn. Because I know with him I was learning and that type of thing. I don’t know if I should say in front of the camera or not. [LAUGHTER] But, you know, I have--I think my lifetime exposure was like--I’m kind of thinking like 14 or 15 R lifetime exposure in those short years that I worked. But I know that I probably had more. Because when we were shut down, and graveyard, I’d walk into the--I’d dress down and go into the zone. But I’d leave my dosimeter and stuff hanging in the lunch--and I’d spend two or three hours walking around, learning the reactor. Franklin: Wow. Leon: I mean--and I knew whatever, to stay away from certain things and that type of thing. But I didn’t want to--my exposure was when we were refueling and doing things and that type of thing. You know, what--nowadays, I’d be in trouble like crazy. Maybe I’m going to get in trouble saying this, I don’t know. Franklin: No, no, don’t worry. Leon: But those are the--that was what it was. That’s where that real concern. Like I say, that was just--it just started with Cliff, though. It just started with him. All of those other operators and stuff were--they were right there, making sure that I was learning things and being safe. And doing it correctly. From top to bottom. From top to bottom. And that’s why I said like, oh, boy, never in their wildest dreams would they ever think that B Reactor would be open the way it is for tourists. Franklin: Do you mean the--the guys that taught you were who were old timers? Leon: Yeah. And that’s what I say. Like I say, when I close my eyes and I see al these guys and I see their names and stuff, I’m just, yeah, I’m very, very proud. I’m very, very proud to have been a part of Hanford history. But more important, making friends with who I made friends with. The sad part is, I’ve gone to too many funerals. And memorial services and--but at the same time, that’s part of life, and that’s just something that--it’s my makeup now. It’s my makeup. And that’s part of my story and stuff. There’s a lot of things that happen, I mean, that will--that I won’t tell you. And they’re going to die with me. A lot of things died with them. And it’s not necessary. And that scares--that’s the way I look at it. You know, being a historian, you know, you want to get into all of the facts and that type of thing. And there’s a lot, yeah. Franklin: Well, that’s kind of a great segue way into my next question, which is, could you describe the ways in which security and secrecy at Hanford impacted your work there? Leon: [SIGH] Security and secrecy. Well, since it was my first job, really come down to it, besides driving truck, I just took it as the norm. I just took it as the norm. Being in the control room wasn’t so much secret or quote-unquote secure. Because you could just walk right--back then, you could just walk right in. You’d open up your lunch bag or your pack, whatever you’re--whatever, and look in, lunch, close it. Come through. You’d already gone through the Wye Barricade, so why--I guess. It was a different kind of security. And secrecy? The only real secret was held by the scientists or the plant manager or the guy who does the fuel calculations on how much plutonium was being generated. We all knew we were making plutonium. We all knew how much exposure everyone was getting, that type of thing. But how much was being processed and being shipped and that type of thing? That was really the only secret. The security of everything. But, no, I never really--the stories, the old stories about whispering and that type of thing? That was when they were building the B Reactor in the early days. By the time 1974 came along, it was a secure area, more than it was a quote-unquote secret area. That was all in the 200 Area with the plutonium finishing Plant and how much they were processing. That was really what, come down to it. We just made electricity and plutonium at N. Franklin: What were the most challenging and rewarding aspects of your work at Hanford? Leon: The most rewarding? Franklin: And challenging. Leon: And challenging? Franklin: Yeah. Leon: Well, the most challenging is actually learning how something so big works. All of the stuff that’s--all of the different things that make a reactor work: the water, the steam, the electricity, the design and on and on and on, I mean, it just kind of like--wow. Who put this thing together? That was--and challenging? That was challenging. Franklin: That was challenging. Leon: That was challenging. And what was the other? Franklin: Rewarding. Leon: Rewarding. [LAUGHTER] Ugh. I’m getting too old for this, Robert. Rewarding was, it was the friendships. Without a doubt, that is top to me. And hopefully, when I talk in front of the crowd, in front of the front face of the reactor, is that I’m talking for these guys, the people that came before me. That’s what I want to really--yeah, I talk about myself. But I want their personalities to come out. Franklin: Yeah. Leon: You know, some of the stories I say, and some of the voices I use in describing things, what would Ralph say? What would Nells say? And that type of thing. And that’s where, you know, whatever, that’s top. That’s really, really top for me, it’s that I--without a doubt. It afforded me to be able to have a quote-unquote good lifestyle I guess, too, because of the pay. So, yeah. Franklin: So my last question is what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland during the Cold War? Leon: [SIGH] Wow. Wow. Well, 1974, when I started, in July, Vietnam hadn’t been--the last troops to Vietnam hadn’t left yet. Nixon resigned a month after I started. And it was still the AEC. It wasn’t ERDA and it wasn’t Department of Energy yet. I guess in talking with the guy who’s in charge of fuels, the guy’s name Bob Firster, and he just died just a couple years ago in fact, and got really, really just the most nice, straightforward guy. He would talk about the fuel to an extent. Because he had the high clearance and all that stuff. And you’d talk to the guys in the control room, it’s kind of like, we had no idea how much nuclear arsenal, power, whatever that the Soviet Union had at the time. So it was kind of like a race of the two big bullies on the block. There was no backing down from any of the individuals, any of the guys in my control room, any of my crew, any of the other crews, kind of like we were there for national defense. Without a doubt. And that’s what I think kept this place going. They were very, very, very proud individuals. And so I guess that instilled--that’s what instilled in me, that type of thing. You know, like when I was growing up, Toppenish would play Richland High School in basketball. Because there weren’t very many communities. Richland had to play somebody. They had to beat up somebody; they might as well beat up Toppenish. They would put their green and gold bomb smackdab in the middle of our court. And they’d come. Yeah, but they were good. So I guess maybe when you talk about, when it comes to it, you know, eventually, you could see why they were so proud. They got their “proud of the cloud” type of thing. And it permeated. It permeated the whole Tri-City area. I think that’s probably what--the Cold War was something that I remember, you know, when I was in grade school and going through junior high and high school. I guess, just this just magnified it, my awareness of it. Because they were always experimenting and stuff. They had what’s called a subtle facility to irradiate different other things to see what they could produce and that type of thing. So it was a long, long, long line of history. I got to say that I am very, very proud to have been part of that. Good, bad, indifferent, it’s what it is. Franklin: Yeah, yeah. Well, great, Carlos, thank you. Why don’t we take a couple minutes to look at the photos you brought? Leon: Okay. Sounds like a deal. [VIDEO CUTS] Leon: If I wasn’t the first, I’m pretty close to it. Franklin: Well, you’re definitely the face of a changing workforce. Leon: Well, yeah, and I could’ve talked about the women and stuff, too, back when they first came on. Because that’s when they came on, too. In fact, you should--have you ever interviewed any of the operator women? Franklin: A few, yeah. Leon: Martha Coop or Leslie Jensen? Franklin: Leslie--I think we’ve interviewed Leslie Jensen. Let me get those names from you, though and then we’ll-- Leon: Okay. Franklin: And then we’ll follow up with them. Because I’m always trying-- Tom Hungate: Okay, I’m just-- Franklin: Are we good? Leon: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. Leon: I don’t know. Whatever. Hungate: So, tell us what we’re seeing. Franklin: Yeah. Leon: Oh, this was my second certificate--or, no, the original certificate when I got certified. Emil Leitz. Franklin: Oh, that’s Larry’s father-in-law. Leon: Larry’s father-in-law, uh-huh. Roy Dunn. Franklin: We’ve interviewed him. Leon: So this was the certificate that was hanging on the wall out there. So, yeah, it’s just something that just--that’s part of the picture that’s what’s called the BN console and as you go around, it’s the A console. And so, yeah, when I left, I made sur that I took it with me. Franklin: Oh, that’s great. Leon: And then, this right here, they’re the pictures that I was saying on my--on the day that I got qualified, there’s Emil Leitz and Dave Ferguson, my shift manager, handed me my certificate. Franklin: Ah, yeah, that is solidly in the middle of the ‘70s, isn’t it? [LAUGHTER] Leon: Oh, you just love that, don’t you? Okay! And then there’s my--and this right here is-- Franklin: It’s nice to see you have good consistency with your look. [LAUGHTER] Leon: Yeah, yeah, that’s--yeah. And here I am at--and this is the nuclear console. There’s me and that’s operator, Claire Miller, and that’s Dave Ferguson in the back right there. Anyway, so, yeah, I mean, I could talk about all of these different--like the meters and stuff that you’re seeing But this is the picture that-- Franklin: Wow, look at that computer. Leon: Where I was sitting in front of the AA console. They had me pose like I’m talking. And I have this picture up in my wall at work with my certificate and stuff, my old certificate, I had them laminated. And so people walk into my office and they look at it, kind of like, is that you? Where is that? Is that B Reactor? Because they have a hard time equating that type of thing. Franklin: It’s so--I mean, I’ve only ever seen the B Reactor control room. That’s so much more involved. Leon; Oh, definitely, much more. Just because you had to have--you had recirculation pumps there. There’s a primary system and secondary system. Franklin; Right, it was much more complex. Leon: Oh, yeah. You’re talking 1600 pounds of pressure on the primary side. So, yeah, it was a whole different bag. And like I said, like, lo and behold, no way that I know they were going to set me up for life the way that I know it, as far as what I know, technically. Franklin: Right, right, yeah, a lot of technical knowledge. Leon: Anyway, so, I made a copy of this. I have a card at home somewhere. But anyway, this was just the membership card of the union that I belonged to, the Nucleonics Alliance. And if you look at it, this is a charter member card, when they actually, you know, formed that part of the union. Franklin: Oh, cool. Leon: It’s still kind of like ethe Hanford Works thing or whatever. But I was a charter member. Franklin: Wow. Leon: And this probably is something that--I wish I--I probably should’ve printed it color, but this was sat the Gaslight Tavern. Franklin: Yeah. Leon: ON George Washington way? Franklin: Yeah. Leon: every swing shift, the last night of swing shift, we’d get off and we’d show up. We’d call ahead of time, to the Gaslight. Every shift did this. Franklin: That was nice of you guys. Leon: Every shift did this. But we’d call in ahead of time, and say, well, 20 guys are going to show up at 1:00. They close at 2:00. So, wondering if we could get pizza. Of course, the kitchen was closed by the time we got there. But the cook, before he left, would make up, like ten pizzas or something like that. So, the bartender would then, you know, about 12:30 put them all in there. By the time we got there at 1:00, the pizzas were ready. And of course, the beer was cold. So this was part of the group that I took a picture of. And so in fact, a couple guys from the Hanford Generating Plant back there. This guy back there this is Billy Johnson. We used to call him Billy White shoes back then, whatever. Here’s a couple HP techs and stuff. Ben Garrity, he’s still around. Dale Thayer’s back there. There’s Walt Like, he’s a little German INC tech. But, oh, oh, golly, and talk about the end of shift, 1:00 in the morning, we had one hour. Not only did we consume all that pizza, boy, but I tell you we downed a lot--those guys taught me how to drink beer. I had no idea that you could drink that much beer! I mean, even in college. These guys were old hands. They were old hands. Franklin: Wow, that’s great. Leon: Anyway, so that’s what I have. Franklin: Thank you, Carlos. Leon: That’s what I brought. Franklin: Oh, those were wonderful. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:30:12 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 9986 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview N Reactor B Reactor 200 East 105-N PFP Vit Plant Energy Northwest Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1953 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1974 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Carlos Leon Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Carlos Leon talks about the hiring process, the friends and mentors he had while working in the N Reactor. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 10/05/2018 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F282d79133f3fbaf20d1606a0a84e5aa6.jpg dd42e807bf426e60ed9a74ef24c02b08 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F16628f955b4b4836f11e22e38ba79262.mp4 0108b922f11ed437013cd0c242fe4e38 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Bauman, Roberts Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Roberts, Carol Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Carol Roberts: I think I’ve talked to every organization in town about the history of this place. [LAUGHTER] Robert Bauman: Probably. Man One: Whenever you’re ready. Bauman: Okay. Man One: So, I’ll go ahead and start rolling. Bauman: Are you ready? We’ll go ahead and get started? Roberts: I’m ready anytime you are. Bauman: All right, great. Man One: We’re rolling. Bauman: Okay. Well, let’s start by just having you say your name for us. Roberts: Carol B. Roberts. Bauman: Roberts, okay, great. Thank you. And my name is Robert Bauman, and today is June 30th of 2015, and we’re conducting this interview on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. So I wonder if we could start the interview by just asking you what brought you and your family here, and when did you come, and why did you come to Richland? Roberts: Well, my dad worked for DuPont in Denver, Colorado. He was an electrician, and I understand he was one of the very best. So when this came up, DuPont asked my dad to come out here. Well, my mom wasn’t happy about that, but then of course—[LAUGHTER] He came—he drove out here in his own car. They gave him tires and stuff like that. Because it was wartime, and things were rationed. But he could take his own car and he had his gas coupon. And he left the day after Christmas. Well, he got a site picked out—picked out a site for our house. When it was ready, we came out here and we landed at Wallula Gap—only it was Wallula Town at that time--to change trains. And we were supposed to go all the way into Kennewick. But my dad was waiting in Wallula—he couldn’t wait for it. And it was June the 20th, 1944, that we landed here. But my dad picked us up, had cost $5 tip to the porter to get us off the train. Because we were supposed to land in Kennewick, you know. I don’t know how they ever explained how five people disappeared—[LAUGHTER]—from that train. Anyhow, he was sent out to the B Reactor first. Of course, he landed in Pasco, and Pasco didn’t know anything about it. But he finally managed. He was one of the few—well, I don’t know—people that weren’t higher up that had a Q clearance to go to all the areas. That’s how my mom and sisters and I got here. And then when my husband got home from the service, after—well, it was in October after—he was with the Occupation Forces in Czechoslovakia. And he came home October the 21st, 1944, and went to work for DuPont. And that’s how we got here. Bauman: And, so what were your parents’ names? Roberts: My parents’ name was Bubnar. B-U-B-N-A-R. It’s Ukrainian. Bauman: What were your parents’ first names? Roberts: It’s Ukrainian for drummer. Bauman: Oh, okay. Roberts: So, I’m always such a cut-up, I’ve decided that my name Carol Catherine Bubnar means—Catherine is pure—and Pure Song of Delight Champion. Bauman: That’s a good name. Roberts: Yeah. Bauman: Sounds good. Roberts: It’s as good as any. Bauman: So your dad came out here in December ’43, right? Roberts: Right. Bauman: So there’s about six months between the time he came and you came. Roberts: Oh, yeah. Bauman: So was he able to write to you, and did he describe the place at all? Roberts: Well, he came home once and told us that—I think it was probably April that he came home and told us what was going on. And he told my mom that as soon as they decided that our house was ready, that they would come in and move all of our furniture. And we, including the dog, was to move into the hotel in Boulder—we lived in Boulder—and move into the hotel. All expenses paid. So we were there three weeks when my mother got the notice to be in Denver at a certain time, have the dog crated—[LAUGHTER]—you know, all that sort of stuff. And we got on in Denver at 4:00 on—well, let’s see, it took us two and a half days. And we landed here on the 20th. So that was about 17th or 18th, that we left Denver at 4:00. Well, we weren’t allowed off the train. And the porter was very good about bringing cards, to play cards and stuff like that for us. But they only served two meals. One was between 6:00 and 8:00 in the morning, breakfast. And 4:00 to 7:00 at night for dinner. But this wouldn’t hold kids. They get hungry in between. Well, I’ve always had an idea. So I said to the porter, if you’ll let me off—because they used to sell sandwiches and stuff in the depot station there—I’d go buy some egg salad sandwiches and stuff for the kids. And he hemmed and hawed about it, and we came up with $5. And that was a lot of money back then. So he turned the other way and I slipped off out of the car, got some food for the kids. And I don’t know whether I would have that kind of bravery today. But I sure didn’t want those kids hungry. [LAUGHTER] So, anyhow, like I say, we got here, and our house was supposed to be ready. Well, when we stepped out of the car, and our feet—dust all over the place, all over our shoes—my mom started to cry. She didn’t want to come anyway. And she says, Johnny, you have brought us to a lot of places—because we lived in coal camps—he was very well, because electricians were very rare then. Anyhow, we went in, the lights weren’t on, the water wasn’t on, and so we had to spend three days in the trans court until it got ready. Well, that didn’t suit my mom either. She always wanted to go back to Walsenburg, where her mother and brother and my sister were buried. And she wanted to go back, and that’s all she talked about. Then all of the sudden one day, she said, no, I don’t want to go back to Walsenburg to be buried. I want to be buried here! And I want to be cremated. So that settled that. We didn’t have to worry about anything else. But then my dad was offered a job out in Hawai’i as an electrician after the war, getting Pearl Harbor back in shape and all that sort of thing. And he would be there for two and a half years. They would pay him, oh, a quarter of what his salary was, send my mom a quarter to live on, and the rest they would deposit so that when the two and a half years was up, he would have the money plus interest. I don’t remember, I think interest was only about 1% or something like that, which is better than what we’re getting now! Bauman: Yeah. [LAUGHTER] Roberts: And my mom said absolutely not. She wasn’t going to be by herself. We were all able—my sisters and I, except for my baby sister—we were all able to take care of ourselves and help mom. But no. My mom didn’t like change at all. So he just stayed here until he got sick. He had cancer of the lung. And of course, he was given benefits. He died ‘65. Anyhow, it was something like 25 years after he died that they notified me that we had money coming. It was $75,000 for me and my one sister that was living. That was so much fun, not having to worry about taxes, and just spend it any way you wanted to. You didn’t have to budget for it. So all of my grandkids and all of us, whole family, I divided the money up. And I don’t know what my sister did with hers. But it was a fun time. Bauman: Now, was cancer a result of working at Hanford then? Roberts: That’s what they said, that it was—yeah. Whatever it is that caused the cancer. But it was funny how we had an expo over at the—it’s the Red Lion Kennewick now. We was going around to the different vendors, and I came to this one and I saw this picture of the Day’s Pay. And I said to the girl that this was what—my family here. And she asked me about my dad, and she said, I think he’s eligible. So she took the information and first thing you know, they called me and told me all about this. It took three months to get the money. But I just couldn’t understand how my dad, he always said, I will always take care of you—that how he could manage even after all these years to be sure. But it’s been a good life here. We’ve had change and stuff like that, but we never had to worry about money, because everybody had a fairly good job. I don’t remember that we had all this homelessness and stuff like that that we have now. Bauman: Now, when you came here, you and your mom and your sisters came in 1944. So how old were you when you came? Roberts: 22. Bauman: Okay. And how old were your sisters? Roberts: Well, Dorothy was four years younger than me. So I was 22, she was 18. And then my sister, Evelyn, was six. She was my folks’ afterthought. Bauman: And then—you were married already, right? Because your husband was in the service. Roberts: Yes. I got married after I finished nurses’ training. You couldn’t marry and be in the nursing class if you were married. But I didn’t take the certification test in Colorado, because I knew I was going to be coming here. When I got here, I fully intended to work as a nurse, but my dad had never been happy with that decision. And he says, they really need teachers. And so I got my emergency teaching certificate, and I didn’t have a steady class—I was a substitute in various places. Then after the war, they told me I had to get my teachers’ certification. Well, I wasn’t about to go through all that. I didn’t want to teach, and besides that, my sister became very ill. And I was taking care of her two kids plus my two kids, and I just said no. And I’ve just been doing everything but collecting a paycheck. [LAUGHTER] I’ve spent—I’ve got 8,000 at the Kadlec Auxiliary, and I should have more, but I kind of got involved in some other things. I’m a 70-year member of the Girl Scouts. And I’m on the Library Foundation Board. And then, of course, Kiwanis. I have been a Kiwanian for 24 years, and I have been their newsletter editor for that long. I didn’t intend to do that, but somehow or another—it was supposed to be temporary, but you know, temporary isn’t spelled right. [LAUGHTER] It means—you have to have to spell everlasting instead of temporary. But it’s something for me to do now, because I can’t do all the active things. I can’t climb stairs and all that sort of thing. And I don’t hear well. Well, somehow or another, the warranty has run out and there’s no place to buy extra parts. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: So, when you father came to work in 1943 and you came in 1944, did you have any idea what sort of work he was doing? Did you know what he was doing at Hanford? Roberts: All we knew was he was an electrician, and that was it. And he absolutely refused to talk about anything at work. He did—I don’t know what kind of an invention it was—but he invented something, and DuPont paid him for it, and they got the patent, whatever it was. I have no idea what it was, only that he that he got—I think it was $8. That was a lot of money. My husband had invented something, too, and DuPont bought it. But he only worked for DuPont for ten months, and then of course, GE took over. But he only worked for DuPont ten months when he got home from the service. Bauman: Your husband? And what sort of job did he have? Roberts: He was the chief power operator for the N Reactor. And his only boss was in Washington, DC. He was in charge of everything—the power house. And then he got sick. He worked for them for 32 years, and then he passed away. He had cardiomyopathy, which was very new 32 years ago. They didn’t know very much about that. But now, they know all about it. They know a lot of things. Bauman: Right, right. So, when did you find out what was being made at Hanford, or the role that Hanford was playing in the war? Was it after the atomic bombs were dropped? Roberts: Uh-huh. And that was something else. We—my mom and dad and I were out in Grandview picking peaches when the bomb was dropped. And of course, we were out in the orchard when the woman who owned the property came out and told us to get off her property, that we were nothing but murderers. And we had no idea what she was talking about. My dad tried--and she says, take those peaches with you. My dad tried to pay her, but she said, no, I won’t take blood money. So we came home, turned on the radio, and of course, we knew then what had happened, that they had dropped the first bomb. And then we were—the fire sirens alarms were supposed—the first stations were supposed to turn out when the Japanese surrendered, but they didn’t surrender, as you know. And then they dropped the other bomb. And they still didn’t surrender. So they—the higher ups, Truman and all of them, they didn’t know what they were going to do. Because they only had two bombs. But they weren’t going to let the Japanese know it. But finally, on the 14th of August, the Japanese surrendered. And the official surrender was signed in September, making the total war over with. And MacArthur signed the papers. Well, I don’t know if you wanted to know that, but that’s what I remember. Bauman: Right. So what was the community of Richland like in 1944, 1945? Roberts: Well, I’ll tell you. We had a bunch of alphabet houses that had been built. And there were no paved streets. And sometimes you’d go someplace and when you wanted to come back, there was no street there. They had done something else. There were very few houses, track houses as we called them, left. Everything had been torn down and made room for the government houses. And there’s one on George Washington Way—it’s as you enter town and it’s on the left-hand side. And it’s just been newly painted and everything, and it has a little bit different—they put a porch and stuff on it. So it’s a little bit different, but it is one of the original houses. I wrote a history of all the houses that were left. Bauman: Where was your house, the house that you moved in to? Roberts: We lived—my dad picked out 316 Casey. That’s—oh, I don’t know how to tell you where it was, but it was on the corner of Comstock and Casey. Bauman: Okay. Roberts: And he had a lot of—my dad was raised on a farm, and he never got over it. So, there was a lot of vacant space. And they gave him permission to go out into the area to dig up plants and trees and stuff from what was left over from those people who had moved out of the area. He had a persimmon tree that he was very proud of. But it never bore any fruit. What he didn’t know was that it had to be pollinized. He had to have two. And he grew roses. He belonged to the Rose Society and everything like that. But when we first came, where the Richland Village—the Richland Theater is now—Players Theater—was the Richland movie. And I’ll never forget that movie after the bomb had been dropped. The Song of Bernadette was being played, and I wanted to see that in the worst way. We got into the movie, and was watching it when all of the sudden, the lights went out. There was plain darkness. Well, we just knew the Japanese had sneaked over! [LAUGHTER] And had done something to us. Well—very orderly, they were nice—the manager told us to leave the building. We left the building, and waited, only to find out it was lightning that had—[LAUGHTER]—the Japanese had nothing to do with it. [LAUGHTER] We had a treaty with the Wanapum—Johnny Buck—with the Wanapum Indians that he could go through the barricade to Gable Mountain, and do whatever they had to do. And he identified all the members as tribe members with him. And he made sure when he left that he had the right number going back. It was one of the few treaties that the US ever kept with the Indians, or so we were told. But there were just a lot of things—little things—that doesn’t creep up in history, but makes history interesting. Bauman: Right. Roberts: That here we were, breaking treaties, but we did manage to keep one of them. Now that they’re—when they’re talking about removing the Nike missiles from the top of the Rattlesnake Mountain. And some of us said no, and others say, yes, let it go back. The Indians didn’t want it there—I should say Native Americans now, but it’s easy to keep the vernacular in historical content. So, what else? Bauman: So, there was a theater here, how about shopping? Was there a place to go shopping in ’45? Roberts: No. They had—where the John Dam Plaza is, on the other side was a store called the John Dam Grocery Store. And they—the government—wanted him to take over and furnish, but he didn’t want to go through all the red tape and all. But they built, oh, just construction thing all down—at the time, when government took over, George Washington Way was called Benton. Yeah, they had the grocery store, and then they had the beverage store right next to it. And on the corner, they had the post office. And we had to go get our own mail—they didn’t deliver, of course. [LAUGHTER] If we wanted to go do any shopping—real shopping—we had to go to Kennewick or Pasco or Walla Walla. But you had to have a C gas stamp, too. If you used your C gas stamp, you were grounded until the end of the month, when you got your new stamps. And then, of course, we paid for meat with red stamps, and canned goods with blue stamps. And you had shoe stamps, and sugar stamps, and, I don’t know. I still have a partial ration book in my collection. So that was kind of interesting. But I remember one time, I went to the store for my mom. And I went on the bus, and they dropped me off, I got what we wanted, went up to the cashier. And she was—well, she wasn’t exactly friendly. [LAUGHTER] And I handed her this $10 bill that my mom had given me. And she said, I want so many blue points and so many meat points, whatever. And I said, yeah, and I handed her the ten and was getting my book. And she said, I said! I want! And I said, okay! And I tried—I got the stamps out and picked up my things and left, only to find out that I still had the $10 bill when I got home. [LAUGHTER] Well, I’m one of these people that money doesn’t mean very much to me. As long as I can have enough to buy food and buy a toy for my grandkids, I’m okay—and pay what bills I have. But I didn’t know whether I wanted to go back up and give her the $10, or whether I should keep it. Well, I finally decided I’d just keep it and put it in the church collection the next Sunday. And that’s what I did. And I don’t know—I hope she didn’t get in too much trouble, being $10 short on the cash register. Bauman: Right. Roberts: And then they would get shipments of things through the day. One of them was towels—bath towels. Well, my dad, he didn’t have a bath towel. And so he went up to buy one, stood in line, because he knew they were there. When he got there, there was no towels—they’d all been given away. So the next day he did it two or three times. Finally, the cashier, or whoever was dispensing them, felt sorry for my dad, so she put one under the counter. So when he got in line, he got his. And he lived in the woman’s dorm, which is now the Yakima Federal and Loan. After the government gave up, it became the Saddler Hotel, and now it’s the Yakima Savings. See? I’ve watched it grow. Bauman: You have! Well, before we started talking, you showed me a photo of Uptown Shopping Center. Do you remember any of that, when it first opened, or being constructed? How did that change things in Richland? Roberts: Oh! It was great. We had some place to shop! That little bit in the middle—that was J.C. Penney’s. And, boy, that was really coming uptown, you know. And then they got other things in there. I can’t remember the stores, all the little stores that was there, but I know there was a restaurant. John Dam’s Plaza was called the Volunteer Park before the government took over. And the Women’s Club took care of it. They mowed, they watered, the dug holes for the trees. And so part of that is still probably about 100 years old. [LAUGHTER] And I’m very proud of it, because I belong to the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, too. But the fact—we didn’t think about sprinklers, I guess. They didn’t think—well, we didn’t have them, maybe, sprinklers. But they toted hoses and, like I say, mowed the lawn with a hand mower. No, there’s no power mowers then. We got—where the Allied Arts is was where they dispensed grass seed and lawn mowers and hoses and everything for everyone to keep up their yard. And then the garbage—we didn’t put the garbage cans out, they came and got them and emptied them and brought them back. And then they also furnished the coal, and just before winter would set in, they’d fill our coal bins in the basement. And we didn’t pay—we paid rent, but it included water and all that we pay now. I can’t think of anything else. But, oh, they took the rent out of the paychecks. When my husband came home, we lived in a B house on Marshall. And they would dump the coal in, and one time they left the window open where they dumped it. And we got overextended with mice and had to get that taken care of—set traps and stuff. Because—oh, I don’t know that we had the rat poison stuff that they had today. Well, they don’t even have the—well, they do have rat poison, yeah. Bauman: You also mentioned Day’s Pay a little bit earlier, and you showed me a photo—you’re in the [INAUDIBLE]. What can you tell me about that day? What do you remember? Roberts: Oh, I wrote a paper on how—you know, they had the barricade, and you couldn’t go out into that area. The Day’s Pay was—the money that was collected by the carpenters—all employees were buying war bonds, but the carpenters wanted to do something more. So they decided to buy an airplane. Well, they raised $300,000 for the plane. So when it was getting ready to be sent over to Europe, it stopped here. They lifted the barricade. We couldn’t take cameras or anything in, but we could go in. My dad managed to get my sisters—and my mother wouldn’t go, she just wouldn’t go—and I in to watch the ceremony. And then I remember, oh, those—[LAUGHTER]—those pilots, they were so handsome in their uniform—watching them. And then they got in the plane, and they took off. They lowered their wings to say goodbye to us, and sailed off into the wild blue yonder. It was a magnificent—awesome sight. That great, big plane, up there against—and it was a hot day. It was July the 20th, 1944, and it was a hot day. I don’t know if it was a 100 degrees like it is today. But it was hot. And watching it against the blue sky. Well, it made 26 missions over Europe. And every member of the crew received the oak leaf cluster. Then the plane, after the war, they took it to Arizona, and was there. And then of course there was the Enola Gay that dropped the bomb. And they decided that they were going to bring both planes to Richland, and have them on display—a parks type thing. But by the time they got theirselves moving, they had destroyed the planes. So that ended that dream. [LAUGHTER] Although, the Miss Tri-Cities boat for the boat races, they kept it. [LAUGHTER] But it was an awesome sight. I can still see that plane up there with blue sky. Bauman: You mentioned the boat races. Do you remember any special community events in the ‘40s and ‘50s, things that happened that brought the community together, or--? Roberts: Well, Richland had what they called Atomic Frontier Days. And then Pasco had—I don’t know what they called it. And Kennewick had one. And they each had their own—Kennewick’s was the Grape Festival, I think it was. Can’t remember Pasco. I’ll have to think on that. And I know Sharon Tate was Frontier Queen one year, and she was also the Autorama Queen. And my daughter was the runner-up on that. And I was very unhappy with that. I didn’t want her to be, but I didn’t want to deny her, either. All the sponsors of the girls paid for their dresses, except Buick, which was sponsoring my daughter. I had to pay for her dress. And that didn’t suit me very well. My Scots ancestry—still shows. I laugh at my grandson, Craig. I’ll say, well, I don’t think so, it costs so much. He says, Grams, why are you worrying about money? [LAUGHTER] So it’s just, I don’t know, genetic I guess. I heard this story that my great-grandmother was so tight that if she had an orange, she would peel the orange, give the orange to my grandmother, and then she, herself, would eat the peel. She wouldn’t throw it away. And then she lived in—this was in Scotland, at the Gatehouse for the Fleet River. There was about ten families that lived there, at the Gatehouse for the Fleet River. And they would get an ox bone and then the first one would boil it for so long, and then they’d pass it on down. And then it was somebody else’s turn to have it first, and like that. But they didn’t always buy ten new oxtail bones. Bauman: I want to ask you about one other event that happened, that was when President Kennedy came in 1963 to dedicate the N Reactor. Did you attend that event at all? Roberts: Oh, yeah. Bauman: And what do you remember about that? Roberts: Only that I thought it was a lot of malarkey, just because Kennedy was there, and everybody didn’t really come to see the opening of the reactor. They came to see the President. And he came to see—or to dedicate the reactor. And I—oh, I don’t know—I think sometimes that we put too much emphasis on things that we shouldn’t do. But I was working as the bookkeeper in the Girl Scout office, and I had to take time off to do that. So we were closed during that time. But I don’t know, I wasn’t impressed. And then GE asked my husband to be the chief operator of the N Reactor. So that’s how he got there. He started out as a coal handler at 100-F, and worked up to B operator, we called him. And then he became chief operator. And his only boss was in Washington, DC. Bauman: And you—when we were talking earlier, you mentioned there had been four generations of your family that had worked at Hanford. Your father, right? Roberts: My father, my mother, my sister—she worked the switchboard—then my son, yeah, and my husband, and my granddaughter Cori worked for Battelle, and my daughter-in-law worked for—well, she just retired. And I think that’s all of them. But there’s four generations there. I never did work in the area. I just worked being nosey all around. A know-it-all. Bauman: I wanted to go back and ask you, you mentioned that when you first came here, your mother wasn’t especially happy about the place. What was your first impression of the place, do you remember what you thought of the place? Roberts: Oh, I thought it was the start of a big adventure. I really did. But what do young people know? [LAUGHTER] And we were only supposed to be here five years, and then it was supposed to be all over. But somehow or another, the birth of the atomic age created a lot of things that they thought they could use and carry on. And a lot of people did go back home after the bomb was dropped. But we didn’t. My dad was happy with his job, and Mom had kind of, well, settled in a little. And I think she decided, when Dad—when she wouldn’t let Dad take the Pearl Harbor job, that she’d better do something. But Kadlec Hospital—I can remember when it was built, and they moved the hospital from Hanford to Richland. And it was kind of across the thing. One wing was for the dental offices and stuff, another wing was for the pediatrics, another wing was general, and then they had the one wing for psychiatric. But they only had one bedroom in it. So they didn’t figure people were going to lose their minds. And then it was in—I think it was in 19—oh, shoot. It had to be—I was president of the auxiliary ’84 to ’86, so it had to be ’82, when the hospital was opened, built. And it was three stories. But the top story was used for years just as storage, because they didn’t have enough beds. But one story that we really enjoyed was— Somebody was sleeping in the beds. And we didn’t know who it was. But we do know the bed was left unmade, and there was no sugar or crackers and stuff in the NICU thing. Every morning, it was empty. Well, they never did catch who it was, but it was about three weeks before it finally ended. But we thought it was funny—[LAUGHTER]—that we couldn’t catch him. And we were sure it was a man. [LAUGHTER] And another time, it was about 11:30 at night, and I was working the emergency shift. And this man come in, and he wanted to go upstairs to visit his girlfriend who had just had a baby. And I said, well, I’m sorry, but visiting hours are over. And he says, it’s my girlfriend and my baby, and I get to see it anytime I want! I says, I’m sorry. And about that time, another auxiliary come up and she said, if you’re so sure you want to see it, why didn’t you marry her before the baby got here? Well, of course he threw a holy fit. And I had, since I was president of the auxiliary, I had to talk to her and say we can’t say those kind of things. But my grandson, Craig, he and his mother had been in an automobile accident down here on—oh, well, it’s Jadwin, down there, and McMurray. And he was in the emergency room waiting to be checked out, to see if he was okay. And here I was, and he heard this guy say he was going to drop a bomb on us if he didn’t get to see. And poor Craig, when he saw me, he said, Grams, are they really going to—[LAUGHTER] I said, no, he isn’t. But he was only about, oh, eight years old, and it really sounded something. So I have a lot of stories like that. Bauman: How long were you with the auxiliary—or how long have you been with the Kadlec Auxiliary? Roberts: 34 years. I got 8,000 volunteer hours. And I was the gift shop whatever. And I was also the printer’s devil, as they called me: I helped the printer with printing all the manuals and stuff. And one thing that we did was—AIDS first came on the scene and we first started talking about it. The Public Health wanted a manual to have classes to show how to take care of these patients. So somehow or another, Kadlec print shop got involved, and we made—Tony, the printer and I, we made 1,700 manuals, saved the Public Health $30,000 for materials. We did a lot of good work. But I sometimes did have an emergency thing, and Tony’d call me up in the middle of the night—it wasn’t the middle of the night, but 7:00 or 8:00 at night. And I’d go down and I’d help him get it done. Bauman: So you’ve been here since June 20th of 1944, so 71 years now. How has Richland been as a place to live? Roberts: Well, I grew up in coal camps. So it was different. I didn’t have to carry in coal, I didn’t have to carry in water. But my dad always made sure that we had electricity in the house we were living in. I never did feel that I was needy or anything. I mean, my sisters and I had a great time doing whatever we wanted. Maybe it was hard on my folks, I don’t know. But my dad always had a job. He never had to go on WPA or anything. But he did go away a lot to jobs other places. And we stayed where we were for a while. But, I don’t know, there was all kinds of things, like explosions. I remember one of my dearest friends, her father was in an explosion, and they had to leave. And then we had a lot of foreigners. Especially the—and they were called Mexicans, not Hispanics—Mexicans that were there. And they didn’t speak English. So we learned, even how to swear in—[LAUGHTER]—in Mexican. The equal rights things still weren’t—they hired these people—the blacks—to work in the mine, but they couldn’t live in the camp. They had to live across the railroad. And one of my dearest friends was the cutest little black girl—pigtails, and all. And we were in fourth grade, and we’d walk home together. But she couldn’t come in to my house. And so I’d walk with her to her house, but I couldn’t go in her house. But her mother always had big chunks of bread and jam—they couldn’t afford butter. And we’d sit on the porch and eat it. And the porch was as clean—you could use it without having a plate under it. But we got along real well, just that way—not going into each other’s house. But I think about it now—at the time we never thought anything about it, we just knew it was a rule. And then here, we had the black side and the white side. They had fountains where the Hers and His beauty shop, right across the street from there—they had fountains, and one was labeled Negro Only. And then before they opened up the Parkade and all, government would bring in top-notch entertainers, like Kay Kaiser. And they brought in Marian Anderson. But she couldn’t stay at the [INAUDIBLE] quarters because she was black. And she had to stay in a hotel in Pasco, because Kennewick didn’t allow them, neither. Kennewick—you were caught on the street after 6:00, you were arrested if you were black. So, I don’t know. We’ve come a long ways, yet we’ve got a long way to go to really [SIGH] understand each other. Bauman: You’ve seen a lot of change in Richland, I imagine, over the years. Roberts: Oh, yeah, oh, yeah. Bauman: A lot of growth, obviously, of the population— Roberts: Yeah. I was thinking about the barber shop, Ganzel’s, and how everybody—their chairs were always full of the people getting their hair cut. But I cut my husband’s hair, and my mom cut my dad’s hair. So, we didn’t have to worry about barber shops. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: Well, was there anything else that you want to share with us? Any— Roberts: Well, I don’t know, it seems to me like I’ve been talking your—[LAUGHTER]—talking so much, I don’t know what I’ve said. And it’s all kind of not falling in place. One thing, probably, is Central Church. Bauman: Oh. Roberts: How it was called the United Protestant Church. There were 14 cooperating church sponsors. And the Sunday school was held in the Sacajawea—which is torn down as a parking lot now—Sacajawea School. And the church was held in the high school auditorium. Then we needed a church—the Catholics needed a church, too. And it was the one time the two denominations worked together with the government to build the two churches. It was interesting. I was on the board that was part of the negotiations. Of course, the churches were just typical army style churches. And now look what they are. [LAUGHTER] You never know. And then, they started the school and then—they did, the Catholics—and then they built a convent for the nuns who taught the school. We did that. Oh, and then high school—the schools, we had—when the government took over, we had two schools: the high school, and an elementary school—elementary to the eighth grade, and then high school to graduation. Well, after the government took over, the school became—[LAUGHTER]—I say a saloon. You could go—anyway the blue laws in Washington said that women could not sit at the bar. And so we had to sit at—not that I ever was in there—I use we—our family was teetotalers—my dad, everybody. They had to sit at the table. And they couldn’t be served unless they were sitting at the table. But they weren’t even supposed to be in there, unless they—so that was kind of unusual. And then Howard Amon Park. They had—the government—had changed it to Riverside Park. And it stayed Riverside for a couple, three or four years. And it was Howard Amon Park before that. And the family, as well as a number of other people wanted the name back to Howard Amon. And they changed the name. But when the floor came along, there was a gazebo that they band concerts on Sunday. And when the flood came, it inundated the swimming pool and took the gazebo away. They couldn’t have the swimming pool because it was contaminated. That’s when they built the wading pool. Bauman: Oh, okay, sure. Roberts: I don’t know. There’s a lot of stuff, I could talk all day, I guess. [LAUGHTER] I’m just proud of what we’ve accomplished. But I was proud of what we accomplished in the coal camps, too. We were very close, and there was a lot of funny things that happened in the camp. But we all—the teenagers, we were all together. We didn’t separate to different groups. And then when the gypsies came to camp, that was something else, again. We were very, very sure that one of us was going to get taken away with—the gypsies took kids. But my thought always was, they’ve got so many kids, why do they want any more? Why do they want to take somebody else’s? But you know kids. They think things that other people don’t. Unless you have something else, I— Bauman: Yeah, this has been very interesting, very helpful. You have a lot of memories about Richland. Roberts: And I have a lot of papers that I’ve written. I have written a paper, and it won first place, grand prize in a creative writing contest. It’s called Modern Pioneers. And it tells about all the things that women did in Richland, and to bring it into modern world with Pat Merrill being the first mayor of the city. And—oh, what’s—[INAUDIBLE] who worked with—to develop the bomb. But she was hoping they wouldn’t find it. Then [INAUDIBLE] she designed the reactor. So women—if it hadn’t been for women, we wouldn’t have got anywhere. And then I wrote a very short history of how the Manhattan Project came about. And it, too, won first prize in a creative contest. The judge commented that even when he read the first paragraph, he knew it was going to be the first. [LAUGHTER] And so, I don’t know whether I won legally or not. [LAUGHTER] So, that’s it. Bauman: Great. Well, thank you very much for coming in today, and for sharing your stories and memories about Richland. Roberts: Oh, one thing I want you to know. Have you seen the book Nuclear Legacy? Bauman: Yes. Roberts: I think we need to get that back in schools, because it does tell how we came about from the Indians, and then the Russian side—the kids writing about that. But I think it’s one of the best books that we’ve got on the whole history. And I got a lot of them. I even have Einstein’s—[LAUGHTER]—books, and Heidelberg. I got into an argument with Tom Powers, the author of the book. He came here mostly, I think, to sell books. But anyhow, I suppose, he said that we did not need the atomic bomb. That it was this and that. And he made a couple comments and it—[SIGH]—we were all there listening, and I challenged him on what he said. But, do you know, when the Germans took over in Belgium, we knew that something was going on. But we got it first. And Hitler decided on the V-bombs—what was it called? Something. I can’t remember the name, now, but he thought they had enough power to go across the channel to London and bomb them. So that’s it. Bauman: All right, thanks very much. Hold on a second, we’re going to need to take care of your— Man one: Microphone. Bauman: Your microphone off. Roberts: Okay. Man one: Yeah just a little—you can put it down by the desk. Roberts: Okay. Man one: Thank you. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:05:04 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 252 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview B Reactor N Reactor Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1944-2015 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Carol Roberts Description An account of the resource An interview with Carol Roberts conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2016-05-16: Metadata v1 created – [RG] Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015-6-30 Subject The topic of the resource Richland (Wash.) Hanford (Wash.) Hanford Site (Wash.) Hanford Nuclear Site (Wash.) B Reactor DuPont General Electric Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, 1917-1963 N Reactor Richland (Wash.) https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F64422e015afd6bb006b595400e645c1c.JPG bf75b261e2b75becbf2be621e89efa72 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F1dd18530d8068508b6d8fed49e87ab2e.mp4 6bba4faf1df15a9c196d5923a31d04a7 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Charles Davis Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I’m conducting an oral history interview with Charles Davis on December 19th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Charles about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Charles Davis: It’s Charles Davis. C-H-A-R-L-E-S D-A-V-I-S. Franklin: Great, thank you very much. So tell me how and why you came to the area to work for the Hanford Site. Davis: Back in 1977, I got out of the Army and I was working at Fort Lewis as a civilian. And it was a just-barely-over-minimum-wage job with no benefits, and I was looking for employment. And one of the employment people suggested I try out for Hanford. And it was Rockwell at the time. I came over and interviewed for Hanford Patrol and was hired. Franklin: Okay. And when did you start at Hanford Patrol? Davis: Well, I started working for Rockwell in August of 1978. And I went through the training for Hanford Patrol starting in January of 1979. Franklin: Okay. And what did you do for Hanford Patrol? Davis: Well, I was a patrolman. I worked most of the time out of the 300 Area until the 400 Area got its own headquarters. And then I was one of the people that moved to the 400 Area. Later on in 1980, I believe, I became one of the first four AMS—Alarm Monitoring System—lieutenants. Franklin: Okay. AMS stands for Alarm Monitoring System. Davis: Monitoring System. Franklin: And so that was the electronic system, then, that, like, was monitored at a central location? Davis: Well, there were several of them. One of them was around 234-5Z in 200 Area. That was the first one. And then around the 324 complex in 300 Area. And around the protected area at the 400 Area, Fast Flux Test Facility. Franklin: Okay. So we—a couple weeks ago I did an interview with Bob Parr. Davis: Mm-hm. Franklin: Do you know him? Davis: Yes, I do. Franklin: He also worked as—and he mentioned the development of this system and how it changed—or kind of changed some of the tasks of the patrolmen. Or how—I think he mentioned that before, Hanford Patrol was kind of antiquated in its security systems, and I was wondering if you could talk about that switch from the older system to this alarm monitoring system and how it changed your job. Davis: Well, before the Alarm Monitoring System went in, everything was visual. You had to be onsite and looking to see something happening. After the AMS system came in, there were several different systems around each of the Areas. There were microwaves, motion detectors, there was the Israeli fence, which was a taut wire fence. If you stretched it this way or to crawl through it, it set off an alarm. If you cut it, it also set off an alarm. Franklin: And it was called an Israeli fence? Davis: Israeli fence, because the Israelis were the ones that developed that technology. Franklin: Oh, okay. Interesting. Would that get triggered often by wild animals or tumbleweeds or anything, or was it pretty— Davis: The microwaves did, yes. Franklin: Yeah? Davis: And there were also cameras surrounding the protected areas. And if you got an alarm, the camera would come on automatically. For that particular location. They also—the cameras rolled through the security screens, so you’d see everything in a—I can’t remember the timeframe—two or three minutes. But if an alarm went off, the cameras automatically focused in on that particular location. Franklin: Interesting. Davis: They also had cameras on the inside of Dash-5. Franklin: Okay. Davis: And in fact, the first time we were out there training on the system, they had a problem. They had a plutonium container break, and it crapped up quite a bit of the backside and main hallway in Dash-5. Franklin: Oh, wow. Was there—were you near that area, or were you just in the building? Davis: Well, the place where the alarm monitoring system was located, the control room was in a separate building. Franklin: Oh, okay. Davis: But it was within the protected area. Franklin: Right. But you’re saying though, that—it’s interesting that when you were training on that system, in that building there was like a pretty serious accident— Davis: Yes. Franklin: --that occurred. Okay. And I guess you probably would have been pretty new on the job still, then, or--? Davis: Well, I’d had two years on Hanford Patrol-- Franklin: Okay. Davis: --but only a month or two as an AMS lieutenant. Franklin: So kind of describe for me the—you know, your average workday, both as a patrolman and then later as an AMS lieutenant. Davis: Well, the patrolmen were security for the Site. So most of the time, we were at a fixed location, at a gate or at a barricade like the Y barricade or the Yakima barricade, and we checked badges of people coming in. Franklin: Okay. And then what about as an AMS lieutenant? Davis: That was mostly sitting in the control room, monitoring the system. Although the systems weren’t fully operational for a while after the four of us were promoted to lieutenant. So we assisted the shift lieutenant and did whatever they needed. Franklin: Hm. How come the systems were only installed in those select areas? Davis: Because those were the protected areas. Franklin: Protected areas, okay. Davis: Right. Franklin: So what designated a protected area from a non-protected area? Davis: Mostly it was where plutonium was stored, and that had other classified information. Franklin: Okay. And how long did you work on the AMS system? Davis: Up until I got out of patrol in August of ’82. Franklin: Oh, okay, so just for a couple years then? Davis: Yeah. Franklin: And then what did you do after leaving AMS? Davis: I became a nuclear process operator. Franklin: Okay. Davis: And I worked at Dash-5. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Oh, okay. And what is a nuclear process operator? Davis: Well, I was hired to do terminal clean-out. And there were two production lines at Dash-5: the A line, which was the original one, and then the C line. We were going to be doing terminal clean-out, or getting it ready to be destroyed, for the A line. And they figured there was somewhere around 3,000 grams of plutonium in the system, and we would get about half of it out. And that was based on a non-destructive assay. And it turned out we got over 5,000 grams out, and there was still about 1,500 left in it. Franklin: Oh, okay, so there was kind of more than double the original estimate. Davis: Right. Franklin: Wow. And was that plutonium usable, or was it in a form that was not usable? Davis: It was scrap—powder and mixed in with other chemicals. It was all collected, put in little plastic jars about this tall, and stored. It could have been sent through the Plutonium Reclamation Facility and reused. I can’t remember if any of it was or not. Franklin: Okay. To give, I think maybe our future viewers and myself an idea—how much is 5,000 grams of plutonium? Like what size, what amount would that be? Can you compare it to something? Davis: Well, a plutonium button usually runs around 2 kilograms or 2,000 grams, and it’s about the size of a hockey puck. Franklin: Right, right. Which is why they’re sometimes called pucks. Davis: Right. The scrap we were getting out was mixed with other stuff, so it was—the volume was a lot larger. Franklin: Oh, okay, okay. So there were 5,000 grams of plutonium mixed in with a lot of other— Davis: Right. Franklin: Okay, I see. And how long did it take to do the terminal clean-out of the A line? Davis: Well, we were also cleaning equipment out. And the whole thing lasted well over a year. Franklin: Okay. And then what did you do after that? Davis: Well, then we went on to removing a vacuum system. There was a vacuum system throughout the facility that people used for various processes. And one of the things they used for, at the beginning, was if you had some extra solution, they kind of sucked it up and so it disappeared. Well, it didn’t really disappear. It went into the piping and kind of sat there. And these were about six inch in diameter pipes. And in some locations, they were half-filled with various stuff. Chemicals mixed in with plutonium. Kind of like a salt cake. Franklin: Okay. So kind of similar to the waste tank scenario, then. Davis: Exactly. Franklin: There’s stuff in there from the process and no one really knew the exact elements and concentrations of chemicals and things. Davis: Correct. Franklin: Wow. Davis: And we took the piping out, pipefitters cut it, the operators bagged it and lowered it down, and then it went into storage boxes. Franklin: And then I assume those were disposed of in like a solid waste landfill, or--? Davis: I’m not sure where they ended up. Franklin: Sure. This—what you’re describing sounds a lot—similar to what’s going on there today, in terms of the tear-down and demolitions of the buildings. Davis: Right. Franklin: I’m wondering if you could talk about kind of the protective measures that you and your coworkers worked in and the kinds of safety equipment that you used then. You don’t have to compare it to now if you don’t know the current—but I’m just kind of curious as to how—what the kind of precautions and kind of culture of safety was then. Davis: Okay. Well, of course, whenever we were on the backside of the operations side of Dash-5, we were in SWPs. Which are canvas overalls. Franklin: Okay. Davis: And whenever we were working in a glovebox, we taped up with surgeon gloves. All the gloveboxes had lead-lined gloves in them. And if we were doing anything that might be—might cause a puncture in the gloves, we wore either canvas or leather gloves over them. Franklin: Okay. Davis: When we were taking the vacuum system out, we would build plastic greenhouses around the area that we were working in to control contamination, in case something happened. We went in usually with two pairs of coveralls, and respirators. Sometimes we only used air purifying respirators, and sometimes we used power air purifying respirators. Franklin: What’s the difference? Davis: The powered ones had battery packs and it was forced air. So you always had a positive airflow through your mask, so if anything happened, the air went out, rather than when you were breathing in, it could get around the edges of your mask and be pulled in if you didn’t have a good enough seal. Franklin: Oh, okay, okay, I see. And I assume you wore dosimetry equipment—the personal-- Davis: Yes, all the time. Franklin: What kind do you remember? The badge kind, or--? Davis: Every once in a while we used the pencils, but not very often during terminal clean-up. Later on, I worked on the RMC line when they were producing plutonium buttons, and then we wore the pencils also. We also had dosimetry on our ring finger. Franklin: Oh, the finger dosimeters. Davis: Right. Franklin: Okay. Davis: And those were changed out monthly, both the badge TLDs and the ring ones. Franklin: Interesting. And—great, thank you. And so where—when you finished with the A line, and then you moved to the piping. Davis: Right. Franklin: How long did the piping take to— Davis: Again, over a year. Franklin: Oh, over a year, okay. And then— Davis: And some of the piping was over the office side of Dash-5. Franklin: Oh. So how did you handle that situation? Davis: Again, we built big plastic greenhouses. Franklin: Okay. Davis: And fortunately we didn’t have a problem. We never lost containment or anything. Franklin: So that building was still producing—or what was the purpose of the 245—sorry—it was the-- Davis: 234-5Z. Franklin: 234, what was the purpose of that building? Davis: It turned plutonium nitrate solution into plutonium buttons. Franklin: Oh, okay. So it was like a plutonium processing— Davis: Right. Franklin: Okay. And was that still in active use when you were removing the piping and the A line? Davis: No. Franklin: Oh, okay. Davis: However, after we stopped, they—because of the buildup during the Reagan years, they revamped the RMC line and started using it again. Franklin: Okay, so you’d already taken out the A line, you’d taken out some of— Davis: Well, the A line actually—when we finished with it, it sat there for another 25 or 30 years, and it just was removed within the last two or three years. Franklin: So what did you do with it, if you didn’t—you were just cleaning it, instead of removing— Davis: Right. Franklin: Oh, okay, okay. Was it used again after you cleaned it? Davis: No, because they took out all of the equipment. Franklin: Right. But the C line was still in use. Davis: Right. Franklin: Okay, interesting. So you removed the piping over the offices, and then what happened? What did you move on to? Davis: Then we moved on to revamping the RMC line. Franklin: Okay. And what is the—do you remember what RMC stands for? Davis: Remote Controlled and then C is just like A, B, C, D. Franklin: Oh, okay. And what was the purpose of the RMC line? Davis: To change plutonium nitrate into plutonium buttons. Franklin: Okay. So you said you revamped it. So what— Davis: Well, it was sort of mothballed. Franklin: Okay. Davis: So some of the equipment had to be replaced. Some of the leaded glass windows had to be replaced. Franklin: And that’s that really thick glass. Davis: Right. They were inch-and-a-half to two inches thick. And the reason they had to be replaced was you couldn’t see through them. Because of the radiation, they got fogged over. So it was the operators’ job to prepare the area for the boilermakers to go in and actually do the window change. Franklin: Okay. Davis: You know, union rules. Because it was a pressure vessel, the boilermakers had to do the work on that. That was a pretty dangerous job, because some of these hoods were powder hoods. And if you think of talcum powder, that’s what the plutonium powder was like, so it had a tendency to fly all over. Fortunately, we never had any skin contaminations on any of the window changes. A good pre-job planning, and everybody knew what they were doing. Franklin: So, when you went in to those hoods, there would have just been powder from the processing in there. Davis: Right. Franklin: Okay. Wow, that’s—so then you were able to change the—or to prepare it—how would you—did you remove the powder, or--? Davis: As much as we could. But you could never get all of it. And even though the hoods are negative pressure, when you’re disturbing them, there’s a chance for the powder to come out of the hoods. Franklin: Sure. And how did you handle that exactly? Davis: Well, we built greenhouses—plastic greenhouses—around them. The people that went in were on supplied air respirators, so it was even more than the powered air purifying. The supplied air, there were large tanks of air inside and hoses that went in, connecting to the mask. And they—people had escape packs, little five-minute emergency bottles, so in case something happened they could still get out. And when we were doing changing the powder hoods, we wore the two pair of coveralls plus a plastic suit. And these plastic suits were made by the plastic shop up on the third floor of the building. So it was a pair of trousers that went up about mid-waist—mid-chest. And then like a parka that went over the top. And then they got taped to the coveralls, and then gloves over them, so there was—you were completely encased in this plastic. Which made it awfully warm, too. Franklin: I would imagine—yeah, that was going to be my next question. How was it to work in that? I imagine your dexterity is somewhat compromised, and your vision is somewhat compromised. What is it like to work in that kind of suit? Like, I’m imagining you just—your body feels different. Davis: Mostly hot. Franklin: Mostly hot? Davis: When you get out of there, you usually could wring sweat out of your underclothes. Franklin: Really? Davis: Yup. Franklin: Wow. Were there any instances of people ever overheating in that? Like, having exertion and not— Davis: Not that I recall. Franklin: Oh, okay, but just very hot and humid. Davis: Yeah. Franklin: And then what about trying to manipulate tools with so many layers of gloves on, on the fingers? Davis: Well, we wore surgeon gloves as the inner protecting. With the surgeon gloves, there’s not a problem. Franklin: Sure. Davis: At least not for me. I wore as tight of surgeon gloves as I could, rather than having really loose ones like some people did. With the canvas gloves, it was a little awkward. Franklin: Interesting. Davis: The people taking—like taking the bolts off of the powder hood and stuff, it wasn’t that much of a problem, because they were usually wearing gloves anyway. You know, boilermakers. So they’re used to it. Franklin: Would the boilermakers also need—I imagine they would also need the same level of protective equipment. Davis: Oh, yeah, everybody that went in it wore that. Franklin: Oh, okay. So that was a basic level of training no matter—union job—because they had to have different groups of people, like pipefitters to deal with pipes, right, boilermakers to deal with—okay. Davis: Right. And like on the A line when we were removing equipment, the operators didn’t remove the equipment. Didn’t disassemble the equipment. Millwrights disassembled the equipment. The operators would seal them out of the gloveboxes. Franklin: Okay. And then would you move the equipment, or would teamsters be needed to move the equipment? Davis: No, we could move the equipment. Because it was contaminated. I mean, it was obviously inside the hood, so it was contaminated. Franklin: Right, right, right. Okay. So after the RMC line, where did you move to next? Davis: I also—while we were working on that, I was also working up in the Plutonium—PFP—PRF, Reclamation Facility. Which is the six-story building that’s attached to 234-5. Franklin: Okay, and that’s the one that’s coming down—no. Davis: It’s, I think in the process right now. Franklin: In the process of coming down right now, okay. And what did you do in the PRF? Davis: That was also refurbishing it to be used. Franklin: So this was during the Reagan— Davis: Right. Franklin: The Reagan buildup. Davis: Right. Franklin: And describe refurbishing. Davis: Changing out piping that was old. It looked like when they shut it down people just walked off so there were tools left inside. The system used nitric acid, tributyl phosphate, in the process. And we would find things like pliers that had been left in nitric acid for a year or two and were sometimes almost as sharp as knives, because the acid would eat away. Franklin: Wow. Davis: And we’d seal that stuff out. We were replacing pumps and— Franklin: So, like, literally, it looked like they had just walked off-- Davis: Yup. Franklin: --the job one day in the middle of work. Davis: Right, just— Franklin: Did you ever figure out why that was? Is that actually what happened, or--? Davis: I think it was, well, we were never going to use this again, so we’ll just leave it. Rather than taking time to clean it up and— Franklin: Do you know how long it was from when they had stopped work to when you went into start refurbishing it? Davis: No. Franklin: Oh, okay. Do you have any guesses, based on— Davis: Probably about ten years. Franklin: Oh, okay. So it had been a fairly— Davis: Yup. Franklin: So there probably was dust everywhere, and— Davis: Yeah. The PRF had six floors. The top two were just small areas where the top of the columns were. The other four floors had gloveboxes in them where the operations was conducted. And from the control room, which was up on the fourth floor, depending on what exactly they were doing at that particular moment, they’d get out their procedure and run through it. You needed an open valve, whatever number it was on the first floor, and closed valve on the second floor and so on and so forth. Franklin: Okay. And so how long did you work refurbishing—how long did the refurbishing work take on PRF? Davis: I can’t remember. Probably six to eight months. Franklin: Oh, okay. To get it back ready for operation. And how many men would be working on a project like that? Davis: [LAUGHTER] That’s a good question. There were quite a few. Franklin: Oh, okay. Davis: Not just men. Men and women. Franklin: Sorry. People. Davis: We had women nuclear process operators. Franklin: Oh, okay. And when—were there women nuclear process operators when you started? Davis: Yes. Franklin: Okay. And so what happened after the PRF was refurbished? Davis: I moved out to shipping and receiving at Dash-5. Franklin: Seems like a pretty different job change. You know, a shift. Davis: It was shipping and receiving radioactive material. Franklin: Oh, okay. So still handling—but this time handling kind of the finished product instead of cleaning it up. Davis: Right. Once they started making buttons in the RMC line, they had to go someplace. Franklin: Right, okay. Davis: And that’s what we were doing. Franklin: And can you describe shipping and receiving? What was an average day like in shipping and receiving? Davis: I don’t know if there was really an average day. When we had a shipment going out, the shipments were sent on SSTs, Safe Secure Transports, which are semi-trucks that are specially designed to transport nuclear material. Franklin: And what does the special design consist of? Davis: The tractors were armored. The trailers had anti-tampering devices, so to speak. If you look at a regular semi-truck trailer, walls are about this thick. Walls on these were this thick. And I don’t know all of the devices they had in those, but they—if somebody tried to hijack them, it would have been virtually impossible. Somebody said that they had a foam device that if the trailer was tipped over or if it was opened without keys, the foam would come in and solidify around the containers inside. And the trucks were driven by special couriers who were armed. They usually had one to two SUVs traveling with the truck, full of armed men. And I don’t remember ever seeing any women in that group. Franklin: Okay. And how often would a delivery take place? Davis: I can’t remember any frequencies. Franklin: Now, what about receiving? Is that when you would intake the solution to make buttons? Davis: Right. Franklin: Okay. And describe that process. Davis: The PUREX plant in East Area was operating at that time, and they separated the plutonium out of the fuel rods and turned it into plutonium nitrate solution. These were shipped over to Dash-5. Most of the time in 55-gallon drums that had inner containers that were about six inches in diameter and two-and-a-half to three feet tall. That’s because that’s a criticality safe configuration. And you certainly didn’t want a criticality to happen. Franklin: Right, so that way you could put two drums next to each other—or near each other, and there would be enough space in between the— Davis: Right, that and the shape of the container’s cylindrical, no more than six inches in diameter. So you wouldn’t want to just put it in the bottom of a 55-gallon drum, because that would not be a critically safe configuration, and you could get a criticality. Franklin: Interesting. I wonder how they figured that out. Davis: Hopefully not through trial and error. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Some things are better figured out not through trial and error. So how long did you work in shipping and receiving? Davis: About two years and then I moved to the burial grounds and Central Waste Complex. Franklin: Before we get to that, what was your job in shipping and receiving? Were you just like a clerk, or--? Davis: No, I was an operator and we loaded the containers. Franklin: Oh, okay. So you unloaded probably at the receiving end and then— Davis: Right. Franklin: I heard from somebody else—I interviewed somebody that worked there and they said the guards on the transport trucks were not a friendly bunch. Did you ever have any interactions with them? Davis: No. Franklin: Or was it just strictly business? Davis: Strictly business. Franklin: Okay. Davis: The—never mind. Franklin: No, no, no, no, no, go ahead. Davis: It flew out of my mind. Oh, I know what I was going to say. Some of the SSTs were driven around completely empty. And some of them were full. Franklin: Right, probably to— Davis: So that just because there was an SST on the road, people wouldn’t know whether it was loaded or not. And even if it was loaded to the maximum that they could carry, compared to a regular semi-truck, they were light. Franklin: Oh, right. Light in load. Davis: Lightweight. Franklin: Lightweight. Interesting. I could see how that is kind of a good counter-espionage tactic. Davis: Mm-hm. And the other thing that we did in shipping and receiving was monitor the vaults where they had both plutonium buttons and plutonium powder in the vaults. And every once in a while, they would come in and take containers out to assay it, just to make sure nobody’s sneaking it out in their lunchbox, I guess. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: And that’s where the can monitoring units were, right? In the vault? Is that where those were employed? Davis: Yeah. Franklin: Okay, we have a couple of those in our collection. And I’ve seen the—you go into the vault and they’re all kind of strategically-arranged around so you don’t have a criticality incident. So you monitored those as well? Davis: Right. Franklin: Did you ever perform any of the assays, or was it--? Davis: Well, there were people that actually performed the assays. But operators including myself were the people that went into the vault, take the containers, and put them in the assay machines. Then they’d do the—and then we’d put them back. Franklin: Was there—anyone ever sneak, that you know of—sneaked—seems like a very risky thing to do for a very small amount of material. Davis: There were monitors on the exits, and you couldn’t have gotten through. In fact, the monitors would go off if somebody had, like, radiation, iodine, x-ray. Franklin: Oh, okay. Davis: You know, downtown. And they’d come out to work and the monitor—alarm would go off. Franklin: Interesting. And so there’s a pretty tight level of security, then, at the Plutonium Finishing— Davis: Yeah. There had to be at least two people whenever you went into the vault. Franklin: Oh, okay. And then there was checks on entry and exit as well. Davis: Right. And remember the AMS system? Franklin: Yeah. Davis: There were cameras in there so they could see what you were doing. Franklin: Was that the same at the other places you worked at? At the 234-5Z and other places? Was the security system similar, was it pretty high— Davis: Well, the shipping and receiving building was inside the 234-5Z compound. So it was part of that. Franklin: Oh, okay. And then what about when you were working in kind of the refurbishing or cleanup? Was there also pretty tight security presence there as well? Davis: Not as much. Franklin: Okay. Probably because there’s no finished product there. Davis: Right. Franklin: So then you said you went out to the burial grounds. Davis: Right, and Central Waste Complex. Franklin: Central Waste Complex—and just describe that. What went into the burial grounds? Davis: Anything they wanted to get rid of. Franklin: Okay. Davis: Low-level waste. Franklin: Low-level. Solid? Davis: Yes. Franklin: Okay. Davis: When they started back in the ‘40s, it was back your truck up to the edge of the burial ground and throw whatever was on it into the ditch. So you had drums and boxes every which way, you know, laying on top of each other. By the time I got there, they were stacking them neatly and doing recoverable storage—if anybody ever needed to get whatever they buried out again. Franklin: Okay. So much more like—I don’t even know how to describe it. But not just like a dump anymore, but in case they accidentally sent something to the disposal that they needed back— Davis: Right, or wanted to get back to reprocess it later. Franklin: Oh. So what kind of system kept track of that? Like, how would you—how would somebody come and get something back? Davis: There was paperwork on everything that we put in there. And the paperwork was saved, so if somebody was looking for something, we buried such-and-such item in 1987. They could look through and find out where it went and the position in the trench, how far from the front or the back. Franklin: Oh okay, so it was still being buried in the ground. Davis: Right. Franklin: And so would you fill those when they got full? Davis: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. Davis: They, in fact, every so often, they would—as we went from one end of the trench to the other, and when there was a certain number of feet of items that were being buried, they brought bulldozers in and covered the boxes and drums. Franklin: Okay. Now, what would the process be if somebody needed to get something that was buried by bulldozer out? Would they have to excavate and then— Davis: Yeah. It never happened while I was there. So I’m not sure how they would do it, exactly, but they’d say, well, it’s x number of feet from the beginning of the trench, and that would be right here, and I guess we’re going to have to dig a big hole and try to get it out. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: And so how long did you work at the burial ground for? Davis: Up until ’91. Franklin: Okay. Davis: So another couple of years. Franklin: Okay. Davis: And Central Waste Complex is a series of buildings that they stored radioactive waste in, rather than burying it. Franklin: Oh, okay. So that’s different from the burial grounds, then? Davis: Well, the people doing the operations were in the same group. Franklin: Okay. But the burial—so the Waste Complex, was that—that’s not tank waste, or is that? Davis: No. Franklin: Okay, that’s just other types of waste. Davis: Right. There were 13 buildings that were 4,000 square feet and they had just built those when I got into burial grounds. And there were four more buildings built after that. The biggest one was 56,000 square feet if I remember correctly. Franklin: Wow. Davis: 12 of the original 13 buildings, we received waste from 100-H Area. Franklin: Okay. Davis: And that was from one of the trenches out there that they sent water from the reactors out and let it settle. And they were—it was mixed waste. Radioactive and chemical waste. Franklin: Oh. So how would that—so then that got into the soil, I— Davis: Right, so then they were digging up the soil, putting it in 55-gallon drums and then sending it to Central Waste Complex with the idea that it would eventually be reprocessed to separate the radioactive material from the chemical material. Franklin: Wow. Did that ever happen? Davis: No, not to my knowledge. Franklin: Oh, okay. So they just—oh, sorry, go ahead. Davis: The original containers were 55-gallon drums. And they started getting pinhole leaks from the chemicals that were in there. So they repacked them in 110-gallon drums. And some of those started getting leaks. So they repacked them in plastic drums, bigger—even bigger. Franklin: Any leaks on those? Davis: Not by the time I left. Franklin: Okay. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: But those were stored aboveground then, in these buildings. Davis: Right. Franklin: Probably, I guess, for easy— Davis: Retrieval. Franklin: Retrieval and— Davis: And for monitoring also. Franklin: Yeah, I was going to say, that’s—I mean, that’s obviously how they knew there were leaks in them, which is good. Someone was monitoring them. And so then the other buildings mostly just stored waste that needed to be monitored and retrieved at a— Davis: Right. Franklin: Okay. So what did you—where did you go after the burial grounds or the Central Waste Complex? Davis: I actually stayed in burial grounds but I went exempt. I went into administration. Franklin: Oh, okay. Davis: And I was there until 1996 when I was asked to move to T Plant. And then I was the building administrator out at T Plant. Franklin: And— Davis: Building administrator is the guy that orders supplies, makes—coordinates moves of people into or out of the plant and things like that. Franklin: And what was the T Plant doing at that time? Davis: They were decontaminating equipment. Franklin: Okay. And the T Plant was one of the canyons, right? Davis: Right. Franklin: And it was one of the canyons where things were remote controlled because of the radioactivity? Davis: Right. Franklin: Okay. Davis: In fact, it was the original processing facility. Franklin: Right. So that was undergoing cleanup at the time—or a form of cleanup. Davis: Well, they were decontaminating equipment from other places, plus whatever was in there. Franklin: Okay. And so what—so kind of describe—well, so—sorry. So, they’re bringing in equipment from other places in there to also decon— Davis: Right. Franklin: So that was kind of a decontaminating location? Davis: Right. Franklin: So how long did that work take? Davis: As far as I know, they’re still doing it. Franklin: And where did that take place? I imagine that the canyon itself— Davis: In the canyon. Franklin: Oh okay. Davis: The cells where the processing took place was below deck. Franklin: Mm-hm. Davis: And each cell had a concrete cap on it that could be removed by a crane. And these were probably six feet thick. Franklin: Wow. Davis: And they were stair-step so you could make a good seal. And the processing—the decontamination stuff took place on the deck. Franklin: On the top. Davis: Right. Franklin: Of the—okay. And so I imagine the people that were in there were in full— Davis: Right. Supplied air respirators. Franklin: I guess that makes sense, right, because if you’re decontaminating something and it gets crapped up, I mean, you’re already in a pretty hot place. Davis: Right. Franklin: As far as radioactivity goes, so you’re not going to wreck a place that has no or very little radioactivity. Davis: If— Franklin: what kinds of equipment would you be cleaning up? Davis: All sorts. Franklin: From what—from other canyons, or--? Davis: Yeah, I’m not sure where it all came from. Franklin: Oh, okay. But from other buildings onsite. Davis: Right. Franklin: Because at that point it was decontaminate—there was no processing anymore, right? Davis: Correct. Franklin: It was just decontamination. Davis: There is a pool on the north end where, when I got there they had fuel elements in that came from offsite. I’m not—back east some place. Franklin: Okay. Davis: Sea-something? Seabrook? Someplace way back east, like on the coast. And while I was there, they built a new facility in East Area that they stored the reactor—irradiated reactor fuel from N area. They also took the stuff out of the T Plant pool and moved it over there, too. Franklin: Oh, okay. Davis: If you want to talk to somebody that had a really interesting job, talk to one of the crane operators that worked at T Plant. Franklin: Yeah? Okay. Do you know anybody? Davis: I’d have to think on their names. It’s been—[LAUGHTER] Franklin: 20 years? Davis: Not quite. About 15 since I got laid off. Franklin: And so—how long did you work at—how long were you the building administrator at the T Plant? Davis: Up until I got laid off in 2003. Franklin: Okay, so you worked for about 25 years— Davis: At Hanford, right. Franklin: At Hanford, okay. And what did you—were they just drawing down operations then— Davis: Yeah. Franklin: Or were you just kind of a senior person and they were like, well— Davis: There were 300 people laid off the same day I was. Franklin: Oh, okay. Davis: So it wasn’t like, just you. Franklin: It wasn’t personal? Davis: No. Franklin: But were operations kind of dwindling, then, at that point? Davis: Yes. Franklin: So a lot of the work scope had been accomplished. And then what did you do after you were laid off? Davis: I worked for the Washington State Patrol. Franklin: Oh, okay. So kind of back to patrol. Davis: Right, as a—I was a commercial vehicle enforcement officer. Franklin: Interesting. And that’s at the waystations? Davis: That’s one of them, yeah. I worked down at the Plymouth waystation. And then I got promoted to CVE-02 and went into compliance review, which is investigating trucking companies. And then I went to be the lead worker at the interior detachment for our district, which is from Yakima to the Idaho border. Franklin: Okay. How long did you do that for? Davis: 11 years. Franklin: Oh, okay, so you just retired from that as well? Davis: Yup. Franklin: And then how did you get involved with the B Reactor Museum Association? Davis: Well, that was something that I was kicking around for a long time to get involved with. And last April I finally said, let’s do it. So my wife and I joined. Franklin: And why? What was the interest there? Davis: Preserving B Reactor. These buildings and processes out there just fascinate me. Franklin: How so? Davis: Just because of the at-the-time-cutting-edge technology that was being developed. I mean, obviously, you look at what we have today compared to what it was in 1944, but back then it was just amazing. And the facilities—just—I just find them amazing. Franklin: What other buildings or processes do you wish could be saved or would have been saved on the Hanford Site? Davis: I think they should save T Plant, because it was the first production facility. Franklin: Right, because I mean, it’s also kind of groundbreaking in that way. And you can’t really tell the story of B Reactor without that other half. Davis: Right. Franklin: And what else—are there any others? Davis: Let’s back up just a second on T Plant. Franklin: Sure. Davis: Back in the 1960s, after they shut down the processing there, they cleaned up the canyon enough so that they invited the families of workers to come out, and they had some sort of function in the canyon. Franklin: Wow. That is really interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that before. How did you hear about that? Davis: Some of the operators, when I first went into operations, were at T Plant when that happened. Franklin: Wow. Davis: And if it could be cleaned up that much so people could actually get into the canyon, I think that would be fantastic. Franklin: I think I agree—I agree with you. That would really—goes a long way into telling that story. Because otherwise, it—you know, what happens to the fuel after we irradiate it? Davis: Right. And I think the 400 Area, the Fast Flux Test Facility would be a good addition, too. Franklin: Why is that? Davis: Because it was a sodium reactor. Sodium-cooled reactor. Franklin: Yeah, it’s a fascinating piece of technology. A couple weeks ago we interviewed the guy who patented it, Eugene Astley. And it’s a very—a shame that that reactor didn’t get to kind of live up to its fullest potential, being shut down so quickly after it was created. Can you describe living in—your thoughts on living in Richland—I guess I should ask, did you live in Richland when you worked at Hanford? Davis: Yes, most of the time. Franklin: Most of the time. What was it like living in Richland during the Cold War and then the shift to not the Cold War and the rise of environmental consciousness? Davis: I don’t think it was very different than anywhere else. Franklin: Okay. Davis: I wasn’t there when it was a company town where you had to be working at Hanford, before you could live in Richland. Franklin: Sure. Davis: Those type of questions, I’m sure you asked my wife. Franklin: Yes. We usually do ask, you know, anybody who was there at the time. Did you ever feel an immediacy to the Cold War, kind of living and working in a site that was producing material for the US nuclear weapons arsenal? The fact that Hanford might have been a prime target— Davis: Yeah. Franklin: --for Russian bombing. Or knowing what the work was contributing to, do you have any feelings about that, good or bad? Davis: Well, we realized that Hanford might be a target. But we—at least I thought it would probably be other places before Hanford, because anything we produced there, it would take so long to get into the system. Franklin: Oh. Davis: I was more worried about somebody trying to steal plutonium or technology than somebody dropping a bomb. Franklin: Is there anything else that I haven’t asked you that you’d like to talk about? Davis: Not that I can think of. Franklin: Okay, well, Charles, thank you so much for coming in and interviewing with us today—participating in the interview. You’re not interviewing anything. But thank you. You gave a lot of great detail about some of the cleanup and refurbishment. And I really appreciate that; I think that was really interesting work, kind of working at this pivotal time between kind of the shutdown of the Carter administration and then the uptick in the Reagan administration is really interesting and not really—a story that hasn’t been told really well yet at Hanford. So I really appreciate you shining a lot of light on that. Davis: Okay, thank you. Franklin: Great. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:51:51 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317 kbps Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1977-today Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1978-2003 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Charles Davis Description An account of the resource An interview with Charles Davis conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 12-19-2016 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2017-29-11: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. 2-East Area 200 Area 300 Area 400 Area B Reactor B Reactor Museum Association Cold War Fast Flux Test Facility H Area Hanford Plutonium PUREX supplies T Plant War https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fec6c8f7c3bbb31f56925babeecf6b4ea.mp4 f93d3a58c920203a28c20c15faa00ad6 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F88cdb1fa45ad2f4e200b759062e541f1.JPG 42ba19f559413681d72de561bf6a41dd Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Christina Robison Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound 0:00:00 Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Christina Robison on January 11, 2018. I need to fix that there. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Christina about her experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for me? Christina Robison: Yes. Christina Robison. It’s C-H-R-I-S-T-I-N-A. R-O-B-I-S-O-N. Franklin: Okay, thank you. So, tell me how you came to the Hanford. Tell me how you came to the area, and then how you began work at Hanford. Robison: Sure. Well, we came from--well, I grew up in California. But we had moved—my mother had remarried and we moved to Huntsville, Alabama, where my stepfather worked for Rockwell International on the space shuttle. Franklin: Oh, wow. 0:01:00 Robison: Yeah, he was a supervisor on the space shuttle there. His name’s Racy Storm. He’s since passed away. But Rockwell asked him if he’d be interested in transferring. And it’s kind of funny, because they gave him three different states to choose from, and my mother picked Washington to come to, because it had four seasons, was her reasoning behind going. So, I was only 15 at the time. He took the position with Hanford and we moved here to the Yakima area. He started working, you know, right away when we moved here. And then followed by that was my stepbrother, also worked. He worked at the REDOX labs, 222-S labs. And then my sister got a job as a nuclear process operator at the PUREX facility. Franklin: Oh, wow. Robison: And following that, probably a year, year-and-a-half after she started working, I graduated from high school and then got my job out at Hanford. So it was kind of a family affair. Franklin: So what did your father do—or, your stepfather, sorry—do out at Hanford? 0:02:08 Robison: He was an engineer. I couldn’t tell you for sure exactly what kind of engineer, but he was an engineer at Dash-5, at PFP. I know he could—they’d call him in the middle of the night, from what my mother tells me, and he could recite procedures from memory. He would tell them what page to look on, and which section it was. Yeah, he was a pretty smart man. Yeah, so he kind of started, I think, a lot of the family’s careers out at Hanford. And that’s how mine started. Franklin: Do you know what he did on the space shuttle? Like, I’m just wondering how that experience translated to plutonium processing. 0:02:48 Robison: Well, I don’t know--I probably couldn’t tell you a lot about what he did at the space shuttle. I actually had an opportunity to go look at the space shuttle and actually board the space shuttle, but I was 14, and wasn’t interested. So I missed that opportunity of a lifetime. So, yeah, that was disappointing when I looked back on it. And he told me I would regret it, and I did, and do. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Well, you know, hindsight is 20/20. There’s a lot of--when I interview-- Robison: Yeah-- Franklin: Oh, sorry-- Robison: No, well, when you’re young, you just--you don’t realize the significance of something. And I didn’t, and so I didn’t go. Franklin: Yeah, it’s just a fact of life. So, it was kind of a family--it became a family affair then, that kind of work. And tell me how you got hired on at Hanford. 0:03:39 Robison: Well, I had originally applied for a custodial position. When they actually called me to come to work, the gentleman on the phone--I don’t recall his name--asked if I would be interested in being a D&D worker, and that stands for decontamination and decommissioning. I recall my sister telling me that was a horrible job and not to accept it. But I asked him why, because I had applied for custodial; I had not applied for D&D. And he had told me that they needed their quota of women. And so I accepted. Wanted the job. So I accepted. Franklin: What led you to accept the job when your sister had warned you about it? And I guess--let me back that up a second. Why did she say it was--do you recall why she said it was such a terrible job? 0:04:32 Robison: Well, D&D—this was in 1983, and D&D then was one of the lowest paid positions on the Hanford Site. It was a relatively new, for lack of better term, new craft. And you had to do some really dangerous work. And a lot of hard work. You know, we, D&D, did a lot of other crafts’ work in radiation zones. So, it was, from her experiences being a nuclear process operator, being one of the crafts out there, you know, the knowledge that she had of D&D, it was just not—it wasn’t one of the top ranking jobs, you know, on the Site. I chose to take it because I wanted my foot in the door. I wanted to work. I was extremely independent person; I still am. I wanted to have a job and move out of Mom and Dad’s house. So I accepted it. And I thought I could move on to different positions once I was out there. Franklin: Right. Had you thought about going to college at all, or did you--were you kind of focused straight on working? 0:05:52 Robison: I was focused only on working. I had always—I’d worked since I could, since I was 11, baby-sitting, and had no interest in going to school. I was extremely glad I’d graduated high school and was out. I just wanted to be in the workforce and start making my own money and paying my own way. Franklin: Cool. So tell me about entering this world, this D&D world, as part of a quota. Like, I guess, I’d like to know about the kind of social aspect of being a woman in a male sphere, but also if you could talk about the kind of work that was happening. 0:05:31 Robison: Okay. Sure. Well, D&D is like what it says, it’s decontamination and decommissioning. So as far as what it was like, you know, I was a 19-year-old, young girl, fresh out of high school, the only thing I’d ever done was waitress. So it was a bit of a shock, going to work at Hanford. I really didn’t have a clue about what was involved and what to expect. It was truly a man’s world. I was surrounded by men, and being young you’re a little bit interested in that, but it was a bit of a culture shock as well. So, I had quite a bit of adjusting to do. And as far as the work, you know, again, the only thing I’d ever done was waitress and go to high school, and within six months, I was climbing scaffoldings and running jackhammers. So it was quite the change. But I really enjoyed the work. In D&D, then, and I believe even probably it’s true today, because they still have the D&D craft out there, you were successful every day. Every day brought a new challenge and once you’ve finished decommissioning or cleaning something up, you got to move on and do another project and do something different. So it was really enjoyable. Franklin: Wow. What kinds of buildings did you work on, and areas? 0:08:04 Robison: Well, I’ve been in probably every building on Site, except for N Reactor, K, PUREX and a bunch of the facilities in the 300 Area. D&D has touched a lot of the areas out there. So, we could decommission a change facility, a change room, meaning we’d go in and cut it, essentially demolish it. We did asbestos abatement in all of the reactors. We did fuel storage removal--fuel storage—the fuel rods from the reactors, cleaned out all of those from all the basins in all the reactors. We tore down buildings. I don’t know, you name it, we probably did it. Jackhammered, took up railroad ties. It was a lot of fun. I mean, I enjoyed it. Franklin: So was your job similar to the remediation today, where it was just to take the building down to slab? Robison: Yes. Yeah. It was probably a lot like what it is today. Only more sophisticated, because technology’s so far—so much more advanced than it was in the ‘80s. But-- Franklin: What was the monitoring environment like when you started with D&D? I assume there was a radiation protection-- Robison: For personnel, monitoring? Franklin: Yeah. Well, like the radiation monitoring. And what’s changed from then till today? Robison: Well, I couldn’t tell you a lot about what’s changed; I don’t really do radiation work anymore, so I don’t go into any kind of zones. But we had dosimetry then. We had air monitoring. You know, it would be set up on us or that would surround us to monitor the air. So I don’t know that the monitoring has changed significantly from when it was in the ‘80s. I think it’s pretty much the same, but I really haven’t been involved in that. Franklin: Sure. You mentioned that it was kind of a culture shock, and it was a real—it was a man’s world, or like a boys’ club. Robison: Mm-hmm. Franklin: I kind of want you to expand on that a little bit, if you could. How did people initially treat you, and did that change over time as they got to know you, or, like, what kinds of attitudes--the spectrum of attitudes that you encountered? Robison: Well, I think that they were—it was probably wide-ranging. You know, again, I was young, so--a lot of the people that I worked with were young. I don’t know then that I could tell a lot of difference on how I was treated. You know, reflecting back for the age I am now and my life experiences, I know that there were times that I was treated less than a human. But at the time I didn’t realize that. That was just kind of the way it was. Franklin: Sure. Are there any notable memories or moments or people that stand out from that time? Robison: Well, moments—when you asked me about, you know, the way things were back then in terms of how women were treated, one of the memories that I have, and a lot of women that I worked with could attest to this, was the dress-out procedures when you’re coming out of a radiation zone. Then, some of the companies, men didn’t have to wear modesty clothing. And being a D&D worker, that was one of my jobs, was to undress as individuals were coming out of the radiation areas. So, it didn’t faze them at all to walk around in their underwear. You know, as a young girl, that was a bit—I didn’t quite know what to expect from that. So you just do your job and keep moving forward. Today, it’s different. I mean, I know they have modesty clothing. Franklin: Sure. Robison: So that doesn’t happen. Franklin: Did you—forgive me if this is too personal, but did you also have to walk around in your underwear? Robison: No, I wore modesty clothing. Franklin: Okay. 0:12:27 Robison: So, yeah. I had a T-shirt and shorts. The problem was that if they became contaminated while you were in the zone, and it did occur on occasions, you didn’t get to keep those. So that was part of the reason a lot of people didn’t wear modesty clothing, because if it got crapped up, is what they called it, they’d lose it. That was just money out of their pockets. So a lot of people weren’t willing to do that. But, no, I would wear shorts and a T-shirt. Franklin: Sure. Robison: Yeah. Franklin: When you started, were there separate facilities for men and women? Like, restroom facilities and-- Robison: Yes. Mm-hmm, yes, there were. Uh-huh. Franklin: So, you mentioned a couple times when we were talking earlier about the 183-H-- Robison: 183-H, yeah. Franklin: --project. I’m wondering if you could talk about that, because you had that—we’ll put that picture online, but that picture of you in the gunk, I guess, is the best way to-- Robison: Yeah. Franklin: I’m wondering if you could talk about a project in your work on that and what you accomplished. 0:13:24 Robison: Well, so, the 183 solar basins, I believe there were four of them in total. And two of them were filled up—well, the basins were constructed a lot like a pool would be where you have a shallow end and a deep end. The muck that was in these could range anywhere from a foot in the shallow end all the way to six or seven feet deep in the deep end, at the back part of the solar basin. And all of this muck came from the 300 Areas, places that would generate chemical wastes and wouldn’t have any place to put them. They were in a liquid form. So the material, evidently, was trucked out to the 183-H solar basins and placed there for, essentially, the liquids to volatilize off, to vaporize. Well, that happened over a number of years, of which I wasn’t there. But when we did go and D&D went to clean these solar basins out, what was left of course was the muck. The stuff was just really strange, because if you--it’d be a hard surface, and then when you stepped through it, it would just liquify. It was very different. And then we didn’t—because of the depth of some of this muck, they couldn’t really put a piece of equipment in there to clean it out. It was such a large basin that if you put a backhoe or something in there to try to lift this muck out, it would’ve just swallowed up the equipment. So they put people in there, me included. And we wore protective chest waders and plastics over the top of us, and mind you, this was in 100-degree heat. So it was very hot. And we used buckets, five-gallon buckets, and we literally bent over and picked up a bucketful and filled up drums. I would expect we probably filled up about 5,000 drums at that time. Franklin: Of 55-gallon? Robison: Of 55-gallon drums, uh-huh. Franklin: Wow. Robison: Yeah, it was a long project. It was one of the places that I was stationed at for any length of time. But, yeah, it was quite the project. But I have a lot of good memories from there. It was a good crew that I worked with and good managers. Again, the technology wasn’t available then like it was today. I’m sure they would’ve done it differently today and taken more precautions for their workers. But at the time, it was all manual labor. It was all very physical. Franklin: Well, at the time, too, Hanford was still producing, right? Robison: Yes. Franklin: Its primary job in there--because I assume this would’ve been sometime in the mid-’80s, late ‘80s? Robison: Yeah, I want to say I was probably—I think I was probably out there about ‘86, ‘87, yeah. Franklin: Okay, so still in production. Robison: We were still in production, yeah, at the time. Franklin: And so cleanup not--I mean, obviously, a priority, because they have D&D, but certainly not the major priority it is today, right? 0:16:51 Robison: Right. No--yeah, it’s definitely more of a priority today. I mean, Hanford’s in environmental cleanup status. But I would like to say that even though we were in production and--because I kind of feel like Hanford gets a bad rap sometimes when they really try to do a lot of good, too. But DOE was actually in environmental restoration back in the ‘80s when I worked there, because that’s essentially what D&D was. It was decontaminating and decommissioning. So they had already begun doing cleanup activities in the ‘80s. At least when I started. And they, obviously had probably started even before I arrived. Production was their focus at the time, but they did think about the environment. They had started the steps towards cleanup. And, keep in mind in the ‘80s when I hired on, a lot of the regulations didn’t exist. There were none of the regulations that governed Department of Transportation and Shipping. And none of those regulations were there. But DOE was taking—had the stance to start doing some environmental cleanup. And they knew they needed to do something. And I was happy to participate. Franklin: Awesome. Robison: Mm-hmm. Franklin: Where else did you work doing D&D? Robison: Again, all over the Site. You know, I worked in 200 East area and 200 West area. I was stationed at Dash-5 for a while, the PFP building that they’re currently trying to bring down to slab. Let’s see. At semiworks, although I couldn’t tell you a whole lot about that facility. I didn’t work out of that building very long, but it was alpha contamination there. Where else was I at? Franklin: Were you at REDOX? 0:18:50 Robison: I was, when I first hired on that’s where I was stationed. My very first--that’s where I learned to climb a scaffold, and that’s where I first learned to use a jackhammer, and that’s where I first learned how to take up railroad ties and railings. Franklin: Wow. Robison: Yeah, did quite a bit there. There was nobody in the facility at the time. I mean, other than us. It wasn’t being utilized. But, yeah, so REDOX--I had been there, worked, again, at PFP. D&D, we didn’t stay in one place for any really long length of time, because new projects would come up and so we’d have to go work out of this shed, or—a little bit like construction work, I suppose, where those guys have to go to motel to motel. I just went from building to building. Franklin: Yeah, like, the opposite of construction, really. Robison: Right, except we got to tear it down, yeah. Franklin: Yeah, yeah, okay. That makes a lot of sense. How long did you do D&D for? Robison: I was probably D&D for about seven years. Franklin: So through the ‘80s? 0:20:00 Robison: I wanna say--yes, all the way through the ‘80s until about 1990. And then I worked in the powerhouses that no longer exist. Franklin: For the reactors, right? The reactor power? Robison: The steam power--the coal-fired powerhouses. Those powerhouses used to supply steam to the production facilities, like PFP or PUREX. Franklin: They’d use those old steam lines that still—did they use the old steam lines that are still all in the 200 Area? Robison: Yes, those are still operational. Franklin: Wow. Robison: I was called a power operator. So, I did do some work in the main powerhouse where they actually fed coal into boilers and created the steam that supplied energy. Franklin: They were still using coal in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s? Robison: Yup, yup. Franklin: Wow. Robison: Yup, they were. Franklin: That’s always struck me as--I don’t know if it’s--it’s not irony, but the fact that the energy and the steam to supply nuclear--this high-science nuclear processing was coming from coal, you know. This very basic energy source plays a role in creating a very technical scientific energy. Robison: Yeah. Well, you know, I guess in hindsight, you look back on it and it is kind of—again, technology’s just so far advanced today than what it was then, but, yeah, it’s-- Franklin: What was it like working with coal? I mean, did you get regular shipments? Robison: Yup! Franklin: And did you have to wear special protective gear and-- 0:21:41 Robison: No, didn’t really have--unless you were right up in it. They’d provide you with paper masks if you didn’t want to breathe in the coal dust. But, yes, the coal was brought in by rail and poured into hoppers. It went up a conveyor belt and fed the hoppers, and those hoppers in turn fed the boilers that were down below. Again, I didn’t operate those that much. I ran the filter plant which supplied the drinking water for the Hanford Site. But, of course, you know, you’re around it all the time, so you pick it up. Pick up different things here and there. Franklin: And which powerhouse and filter plant did you work at? Robison: Both. I worked at both of them. Franklin: Which reactor area? 0:22:21 Robison: Well, so, 200 West area would’ve fed PFP, REDOX, T Plant, U Plant--any of those that required heat or--and then East Area, of course, fed the Tank Farms and PUREX and all the other facilities that were in operation at the time. Franklin: The water--the purification, that came from the river, right? So would that use one of the river pumphouses? Robison: Yes. Franklin: Okay. Robison: The water—in fact, it’s still being used today. Franklin: That’s the one by B Reactor, right? 0:22:54 Robison: Yes, mm-hmm, yup. That pumps raw water from the Columbia River. DOE has a water right to be able to do that. It pumps the raw water up to the 200 West Area now--because East Area’s filter plant is closed up. But the West Area still produces the drinking water, and sanitary water, in probably close to the same fashion as I did back in the early ‘90s. Franklin: Oh, wow. That’s really interesting. I’m wondering if you could talk about--when Hanford got the order to shut down, you were working there, right? Robison: I-- Franklin: With the switch from production, when they got the order to stop production? Were you-- Robison: Yeah, I don’t--I don’t remember the date they did that. I actually couldn’t talk very well to that. I don’t recall it, so--of when it actually happened, I don’t remember. Franklin: I was just--I was going to ask, because I’m wondering if you remember kind of the general mood of the community or of your coworkers, how people dealt with that switch. Was it a big deal, or did the work continue on? 0:24:09 Robison: Well, what I recall, which isn’t very much--I left the Hanford Site in 1993 and went to work for Department of Ecology, so I don’t recall a lot. But I know the Tri-Cities—and I was living in Yakima. The Tri-Cities went through booms and busts quite frequently. A lot of it dealt, or was a result of whatever happened to be going on at Hanford. So when there’s big layoffs, Tri-Cities would plummet, housing would plummet. And then when it was up and running, things were really good. So, as far as when they actually made the shutdown, I want to say that that happened a little bit later, after I had left the Site. Franklin: Okay. Robison: Yeah, sorry, I couldn’t really talk too much to that. Franklin: That’s okay. So what kind of work did you do for the other DOE, ecology? Robison: For Department of Ecology? Franklin: Yeah. 0:25:07 Robison: Well, when I originally left in ‘93, I hired on as a hazardous waste inspector. And then I moved to underground storage tanks. I did that for about 16 years. Franklin: So were you still working—and was that Hanford Site, Hanford underground storage, or was that different? Robison: No, I actually went to work for the Yakima office. Franklin: Oh, oaky. 0:25:26 Robison: So, the Yakima office, or central region of Washington, actually does regulate, even today, does regulate underground storage tanks at the Hanford Site. But the nuclear waste office that’s here in Richland regulates everything else at Hanford. So, when I left, I left the Hanford Site, essentially. I hadn’t been here for about 16 years. Franklin: Okay. But your work was still connected to the Hanford Site? Robison: Yeah, in a roundabout way it was, because the Department of Ecology regulates them. So my interaction with the Richland office wasn’t that frequent. Being from the Yakima office, we regulated different things, and Hanford wasn’t among them. Franklin: Okay. Robison: But I always had stayed in contact with Hanford. I’d been out here long enough and knew quite a few people. And then in 2009, I just decided to come back. So I’ve been back to Hanford since then. Franklin: Why did you decide to come back to work for MSA? 0:26:36 Robison: Well, because the amount of things that you can learn working at the Hanford Site are infinite. It’s a continual learning cycle every day you come to work. So it’s challenging, and I just knew that I would enjoy playing that role again, and being part of Hanford. Especially today because they’re doing cleanup and the restoration work. I wanted to be part of that history. Franklin: Yeah, because you had kind of started doing that. Robison: I started it when they were in production and had a really good time while I was out here. Franklin: So you’re currently environmental compliance officer, right? Robison: I am, mm-hmm. Franklin: The eco—yeah. And so, part of your job is ensuring regulations are met, right? Or being followed on the Site. 0:27:28 Robison: Yeah, it’s a little bit like consulting work, only MSA’s comprised--well, we take care of the infrastructure of the Hanford Site. So we make sure everybody else keeps running, essentially. We take care of the roads and the grounds and the water and power and all of that. So, my job is to help those organizations that supply, or that provide that support for infrastructure that make sure that they comply with all the regulations. So I deal with all kinds of stuff, whether it’s water or solid waste. I deal with hazardous waste; we deal with air requirements. Just about everything that’s environmental, my job is to make sure that they follow those rules and regulations. Franklin: Okay. So, I would imagine that includes working with a lot of tradespeople. Robison: Yeah, from time to time, I do, mm-hmm. Franklin: I’m wondering, in terms of regulations, how have things changed from when you started doing D&D work, kind of this ground-level, to where you are now? Robison: Oh, immensely. Franklin: How has work on the Hanford Site changed? 0:28:36 Robison: Immensely, because none of them really existed when I started in ‘83. You could kind of do whatever you wanted. They’ve come a long way, and I have to tell you, from the time I left in 1993 till I came back to work at Hanford in 2009, the change at the Hanford Site has just been—it’s been huge. It’s been significant. They’ve accomplished a lot. And they did so following all the rules and regulations. So there’s a lot out there now. Good example of that would be, in 1983, people were still dumping their waste oil that they’d removed from their cars down storm drains that fed straight to the Yakima River to the Columbia River. And today they don’t do that anymore. And that’s a result of regulation and saying not to do that and education, yeah. So it’s changed significantly. Franklin: So, wait, out on Site, people were dumping--? Robison: Well, yeah, well--they used to use waste oil for dust suppression. Of course, that’s not done anymore. Franklin: Right, to spray it down and then of course you’ve got waste oil all in the--which is going to get into the water. 0:29:49 Robison: Yes. And in groundwater. But we’ve learned so much from the ‘80s to today that--and it’s always evolving. Regulations are always changing as you learn new things, you know, more studies. I mean, you’re a historian, so if you were to study the history of regulations, every year they learn something new through technology or something, and so regulations change. That’s part of my job, is keeping up with those changes and helping the organizations out there implement those. Franklin: Right. Because the status quo today is only today’s status quo; it’s not the environment that you would’ve worked at in the ‘80s. Robison: Yeah, it was very different in the ‘80s. Franklin: So you mentioned that the D&D work initially there, it was great because you always felt like you were accomplishing something. Do you feel the same way today with your current work? 0:30:49 Robison: I do. Probably it’s--you know, I don’t get to see daily changes like I did in D&D. But I do, because I’m playing a small role in the overall picture of the Hanford cleanup. And that matters to me, it means a lot to me. Franklin: Great. Let’s see here, da, da, da. Okay. I’ve gone through all the fun--I have some stock questions. I’m just wondering if I had missed anything. Robison: Okay. Franklin: But we’ve really covered a lot of really great stuff. Robison: Well, I probably didn’t make much sense, and-- Franklin: No. Robison: I was trying to make sense. But you know, you get a picture in your mind, and getting it out of your mouth is-- Franklin: No, you’re doing great. And I do understand that, though. So you always lived in Yakima when you worked at Hanford. You’ve always lived outside of the Richland area, outside of Tri-Cities? Robison: I lived in Tri-Cities for a few years. Franklin: Okay. 0:31:41 Robison: Just prior to taking my job with the state. So that would’ve been in 1993. So I lived here from--I think I moved to the Richland area, I want to say, around ‘91. So I lived here for about two years. But, yeah, primarily in the Yakima area. Franklin: What sort of housing did you live in in Richland? Did you live in an Alphabet house or anything like that, or did you live in a newer-- Robison: I did. I actually bought a prefab when I lived here. It was a small three-bedroom. I just—I loved it. I was a single mom, and it was perfect for my son and I. Yeah. Yeah, I loved it. Franklin: I lived in a two-bedroom when I first got here, a two-bedroom prefab. Robison: Did you? Franklin: It was small. [LAUGHTER] Robison: Yeah, they’re notably--well, it’s less than 1,000 square feet. What is a prefab, like 900 square feet or something? Franklin: A three-bedroom, yeah. 0:32:43 Robison: I remember, I was doing--I had a boyfriend at the time, and we were--I wanted to do some remodeling because they had put--they had completely covered the entire house in brown paneling. So it was very dark, which, you know, for a small house, makes it even smaller. So I wanted to pull--we pulled--I wanted to pull all the paneling off and paint, or just paint the paneling. My boyfriend convinced me, let’s pull the paneling off. And it was sea blue plywood underneath of it. It was no insulation, no drywall. It was just plywood that had been painted a sea blue. It was horrible. So we quickly put up drywall and painted. Franklin: Wow. Yeah, those weren’t--I know if you know much about the history of those, but they weren’t meant to be any kind of permanent housing. Those were from the Great Depression, just relief houses. Robison: Yeah. Was that true for all of them? For the A? Because I remember an A house--I lived in an A house--it was a two-story-- 0:33:43 Franklin: No, those were built to be permanent houses. Those were built with like Douglas fir and they were constructed by an architect out of Spokane who--and DuPont demanded that they provide quality housing. But they couldn’t build the Alphabets fast enough, so the Army Corps kind of forced DuPont into bringing in all these prefabricated units. They didn’t want them, but they gave the prefabs to more blue collar-type folks. And the Alphabets were more for managers or white collar. Robison: Wow! Franklin: So there’s definite quality—because I live in an A now. There’s a definite quality difference. Robison: Wow, no, I had no idea. Because the quality of the house I was in was not good. Franklin: Yeah, they’re basically plywood. Robison: And that’s about all it was, was plywood that had been painted sea blue. It was—yeah, it was, oh my gosh, I got to get drywall up pretty quickly, because—yeah. But I still--I’d love to, when I was living there, I would’ve loved to known who’d owned it before me and when it was actually built. I never researched it. Franklin: What was the address? Robison: 803 Winslow. Franklin: Oh, okay. I used to live almost right next to there. Robison: Is that right? Franklin: It was 804 Stanton which is just like two blocks. Robison: Yeah, I think I-- Franklin: Two blocks down. Yeah, I know that neighborhood very well. 0:35:04 Robison: I’ve driven by there—when I worked for the state, I would have to come to the Tri-Cities, because I was underground storage tanks. So I regulated a lot of the gas stations—well, I regulated all of them for all of central Washington, including Benton County. And so I would go by my old house and I couldn’t hardly even recognize it. I had big, huge maple trees and they’re gone. Somebody took them all out and---yeah, but I would’ve loved to have known who lived there. Franklin: Oh, interesting. Robison: --back when they were in production. I had no idea about the quality of construction was so different, though. Franklin: Yeah, they were really meant--they were Depression era; they were meant for families in the Tennessee Valley—or, they were built by that Tennessee Valley Authority to just get people in houses and in relief communities. Yeah, it’s a very interesting socialist beginning of these--you know, yeah. They’re really meant for people who were in hard times. Robison: Wow, that’s interesting. Franklin: The fact that there’s so many of them--because you know that that neighborhood, it’s all--you know. Robison: It’s all prefab. Franklin: One-bedroom, two-bedroom, three-bedroom, two-bedroom, two-bedroom. And then you go in the Alphabets and it’s like A house, A house, A house, F house, A house, B house. Robison: Yeah. That’s true, yeah. Wow, interesting. Franklin: Yeah, I could tell you tons about them. I know too much. I’m wondering if you could describe the ways in which security or secrecy at Hanford impacted your work. 0:36:35 Robison: Well, as far as secrecy, you know, we weren’t allowed to talk about anything. Security was really tight. Yeah, even in ‘83. It was really tight. Any sign of incident when you were inside the 200 East or 200 West Area, it was a total lock down. And they didn’t care if you were just getting off work. Gates were locked, and everybody stayed inside the gates. You were not allowed to leave. That was same true for—not leaving all the facilities, because they weren’t all high security facilities—but places like PFP were. And so you were searched going in and you were searched coming back out. That was just a daily occurrence; that’s just kind of the way that they were—they were pretty secure. All the badges checked every day. You weren’t allowed onsite without one. Everybody had to have a clearance. If you didn’t, you had a worker’s clearance, a W badge, and you weren’t allowed to do a whole lot. You could come to work and do some things, provided they weren’t inside any kind of secured areas. Franklin: Did you ever, like, forget your badge? Just like accidentally left it--? Robison: Oh, yeah. You had to bring Spudnuts if you forgot your badge. Franklin: Really? 0:37:51 Robison: Yeah, you had to bring doughnuts, yes. You’d be issued a temporary badge, but you’d be restricted as to what you could do for that day. Franklin: And everybody knew you and your crew-- Robison: Oh, you got harassed, yeah. You got harassed because, you know, when you couldn’t go into zones or do the job that you were supposed to do--and this wasn’t just true for D&D, it was for all the crafts, for everybody--you know, it impacted everybody else. They had to work that much harder because they were a man down, because that person forgot their badge. So, oh, yeah, you were harassed, yeah. Franklin: That’s funny. Robison: Yeah, I remember having to bring Spudnuts, yeah. Franklin: A Richland institution. Robison: Yes, mm-hmm. Franklin: Oh, I just had something on the tip of my brain and now I can’t-- Robison: About-- Franklin: Oh! Could you drive onto Site at that point, when you started work, or did you get bussed in? Robison: Yes. Well, you could do both. Franklin: Okay. 0:38:42 Robison: You could do both. I actually--I forgot, I probably should’ve mentioned, I did live in the Tri-Cities after I first hired on. I lived here for a couple of years. I lived in the Brass Lamp Apartments. What street was that on? Was that Van Giesen? I can’t remember. Anyhow, that’s how I was able to pick up Spudnuts out of--because I lived in Richland, so I would go pick those up. But, yeah, you could drive your car or take the bus, and I did both. Hated the bus. Franklin: Why? Robison: Hated, hated, hated the bus. Franklin: Really? 0:39:18 Robison: Oh, yeah. I didn’t ever--I tried hard not to ever have to. When I had to work shift schedule, the A, B, C, D, shift schedule, I took the bus a few times. Because it took forever. It’s slow. I hated the bus. Franklin: There wasn’t any like fun camaraderie on the bus-- Robison: No. Franklin: --with the people? Robison: No, no. Franklin: Oh. Must’ve been for a different--because I’ve--some of the older folks I’ve interviewed that you could only take the bus out there, they had special tables where they would play cards on the bus, and they had these very kind of fond memories. Robison: Oh, is that right? Franklin: Yeah, these very fond memories of the bus. Robison: No, they didn’t have any of that when I-- Franklin: Picking them up outside their house and dropping them off. Robison: Yeah, no, not when I took the bus. It was boring, everybody slept, it was--no, I hated it. So I drove myself a lot. Just--yeah. Franklin: Interesting. What about--I’m wondering if you remember, you know, how the community or you dealt with major international events, such as, I guess the first one I’d like to ask about is Chernobyl. Because you would’ve been working onsite at that time. Robison: Yeah, that was, when, I want to say ‘86? Franklin: Yeah. Robison: Is that when that happened? Franklin: Yep. 0:40:36 Robison: You know, there was concern, even on the parts of all the staff, on the Hanford Site. It was a long ways away. I think the talk, which was probably among just the general populus, was is the cloud going to come over to the United States? And then, is Hanford going to blow up? I mean, yeah, that was pretty scary. I remember receiving security briefings from our supervisors and managers about, you’re still not to talk to anybody about things. And then some reassurances that, we’re fine, we’re not going to blow up over here. And of course we didn’t. But, yeah, I do actually remember Chernobyl. That was a scary time. Franklin: I bet. And then just a couple years later, the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War pretty much ended. Robison: Ended. Franklin: Kind of in a—you know, not so much a bang, but kind of a whimper or a fizzle. And I’m wondering if you could talk about how that may have affected you or the community, you know, to have this decades-long conflict, and the whole reason, really, for all this activity at Hanford is now kind of gone. 0:41:55 Robison: Yeah, and the Berlin--you know, I’m probably not one of the better--yeah, probably not very familiar with that. I mean, I don’t recall the mood of the people. It wasn’t something I stayed focused on. Franklin: How did you feel? Robison: You can probably scratch that part right out of the interview. Pbbt. Franklin: Sure. Well, how did you feel about it, though, because I imagine that--you were aware, right? How did you--or, what did you see that Hanford would do after that? Robison: You know, I didn’t—I don’t know that I gave it a huge amount of thought, but--because, again, even in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s, environmental wasn’t real concept then. So I don’t know that I’d be very good at telling you what my frame of mind was at the time. I was in my 20s. Yeah, probably, you could scratch that part from the interview. Franklin: No, it’s-- Robison: Aaaahh, cut! No. Franklin: We all experience things differently and often when-- Robison: I honestly--I mean, I remember watching the Berlin Wall fall and all that on TV, but I don’t--I really don’t remember what my mood was or what my thought processes were then, so-- Franklin: It’s fine. You know, it’s one of those events that maybe grows more—or we think about how significant it was later, you know? Or people that didn’t experience it and lived through it maybe attribute more to it than people that--where that was just life for a while. Robison: Yes, yeah. Franklin: Don’t worry about it. What was I going to ask? Shoot, I had another question. Robison: I know when you were out on the Site, you were talking about wanting to know more about Affirmative Action. Franklin: Yes, that was actually my next—yeah. I’m wondering if you could tell me about that. Just, how--yeah. How it played out for you and for others, and how it changed the workforce. 0:43:53 Robison: Well, for me, I didn’t realize it at the time that that’s why I was being hired, was that it was part of Affirmative Action. You know, being 19, I just—it didn’t cross my mind. All I cared about was getting a job, but I actually attribute my entire career to this day to that affirmative action, to that one phone call, because I wouldn’t be sitting here today after 30-plus years doing environmental work, had it not been for that affirmative action. So, my whole career is based on it and I’m appreciative of it. I know that there’s some controversy that surrounds Affirmative Action and whether it really did any good, or does it play any role anymore. And I guess I’m living proof that it does, or that it did. Did it work for everybody? Probably not. But it did for me. And so I’m glad that it was around. Franklin: How did the workforce change that you noticed from when you started to--did it really open up a lot of positions for women, did you find yourself over time working with more and more women and minorities? 0:44:58 Robison: You know, truthfully, I did not. And there’s still, in my opinion, there’s still a considerable amount of men on the Hanford Site, as compared to women. That could just be, there’s people that worked out there for 40 years and a lot of people that have worked out there for 30 and 40 years. So, could just be that that new workforce just hasn’t been able to inch their way in. I mean, I do think that Affirmative Action has certainly helped, because I think that there’s women in their careers today that, like myself, that wouldn’t be there without it. There’s other minorities that are in their careers today that wouldn’t be here without it. So, do I think that there’s some room to grow still? Absolutely. But I think it’s coming along. I certainly saw a lot more changes off the Hanford Site when I worked for Department of Ecology than I do on the Site. Life outside of Hanford’s a very, very different place. It’s much more sophisticated and--what’s a good word? It’s more--it’s a more diverse world off the Hanford Site. Franklin: How is Hanford less sophisticated than the outside? 0:46:37 Robison: I think that Hanford--that they could--and maybe it’s because I’m not involved in some of the more newer technologies like what they have at Tank Farms, so I’m certainly not an expert at speaking at it. But in my own little world of environmental and where I’m located, I think that there’s easier and better ways to do things, but process and procedure’s so ingrained on the Hanford Site that everybody’s afraid to deviate. And I think that that’s not a good thing. I think finding new ways and new alternatives should be a goal. Franklin: Right. Robison: But, you know, they’re getting there. They’re coming around. I mean, they have recycling programs today that they didn’t use to have in the ‘80s. They’re getting caught up. But it is more diverse offsite than it is working on the Site. Franklin: I’ve noticed that, too. It’s-- Robison: Yeah. Just don’t use that in the interview. I want to keep my job. Franklin: Well, no, I think-- Robison: I don’t want DOE to get upset with me. Franklin: Oh, I don’t think—I mean, that’s of levels so far beyond. Maybe that’s something that they still need to hear. I think it does matter, too, by profession. I’m a subcontractor in the cultural resources department, and that department is majority-women. And I find, in the work I’m in, in archives, male archivists are a minority. Largely because librarianship and archives has commonly been a woman’s profession. Robison: Yeah, yup. Franklin: Which is—and I think maybe a lot of these trades, crafts, D&D, you know, have been--there’s that disparity--I mean, it’s hard to over-- Robison: To overcome that, yeah-- Franklin: Decades, years--I mean, decades of-- 0:48:40 Robison: And you’re absolutely right. I mean, a lot of the crafts out there has traditionally been men’s jobs and women just don’t enter those fields. Excuse me. They’re more into the professional, you know, environmental-type work that I do. And there are several women that work out there. It’d be good if they could recruit or try a little bit harder to have more diversity. I don’t just mean women, I mean the minorities as well. But again, I think that’s coming. I mean, I could see that coming even before I retire from the Hanford Site, just because the workforce out there is a much older workforce. They’ve been there for thirty-plus years. All the contractors know that a big retirement’s coming for a lot of different people out there. That’s when I think that the diversity and the changes will start to occur. And maybe some changes in procedures and processes that will help make a big difference. Franklin: Yeah, that really struck me when I meet a lot of folks out there, there are so many people, oh, I started here in the late ‘70s/early ‘80s, late ‘70s, you know? Robison: They’ve been there for a long time. Franklin: And they’ve endured all these contractor changes. And it seems maybe it’s a result of having so many contractors that they just keep the people that know how to do the job, because the new contractor needs that expertise and so-- Robison: Oh, yeah, I mean--well, you know, DOE just recently sent out a request for proposals and new acquisitions. So even my company, Mission Support, is having to rebid. Franklin: Oh, I know, we’re a subcontractor of MSA. Robison: Yes. Franklin: And this is funded by MSA. Robison: Yeah. So whoever gets the contracts, it would be crazy for them to just bring in a whole new workforce. You couldn’t do it. Franklin: No. 0:50:36 Robison: I mean, Hanford is truly a unique operation in what they deal with daily. You do have skilled people, you do have to have knowledgeable people about what they’re doing, or things would be really, really bad out there, could be really bad. So it would be good, and I think that they’ve got a plan in place where they start training some--bringing on some newer people so that the ones that are still there could get them trained up on how they do their jobs. It is a unique set of skills that’s required to work out there. You have your basics and then you have to kind of learn the way Hanford does things. And that’s not, you know, trying to diss them or something. It’s truly because it’s unique. They have to handle things a certain way. Franklin: Right, there’s unique challenges, there’s unique regulations. Robison: It’s chilly in here. Franklin: It is, I’m sorry. There’s a lot of-- Robison: He’s freezing, too. Franklin: We turned the heat--they keep this room unheated when it’s not in use. We turned the heat on earlier in the day, but, I’m sorry, it takes a little-- Robison: Oh, it’s all right. It’s just why I’m kind of like grinning because it’s a little chilly. Franklin: No, I know. I have my coat on, too. Because it’s cold! So, yeah, because there’s a lot of institutional knowledge that may leave soon. Robison: Yes, they’re already starting to leave. Franklin: Yeah, I’ve noticed that. 0:52:00 Robison: Yeah, that’s a true statement. And Hanford needs that knowledge. What you’re doing, I think, is just, it’s phenomenal. I think it’s really great that you’re going to capture, obviously not all of the history, but some of it. Franklin: Going to try. Robison: So that you know, kind of, where we came from and where we’re going. I mean, I just think that’s great. And they need that at Hanford as well, because things like with what just happened at the PUREX tunnels. If some of those individuals had been gone, we wouldn’t have known what was in there. Hanford’s really good at documenting everything, but I just think having the people there--you got to capture that knowledge somehow. Franklin: Hanford’s also done so many things that aren’t documented. A lot of burials, for example, were not well-documented. Which is why they find things every now and then, right? You know. You’ve probably found stuff-- Robison: Yeah. Franklin: --that wasn’t supposed--I’ve always found that to be interesting, too. Hanford’s really good at documentation on some things, and then-- 0:53:09 Robison: And then others maybe not so much. Well, I think that was probably more in the ‘40s and ‘50s when things were quite, you know, really secretive. One of the things I like to give Hanford credit for, for knowing—for accomplishing what they did in such a short amount of time—in less than two years built an entire nuclear reservation. That’s pretty impressive. And not having any knowledge on how to deal with the waste and the cleanup. You know, to me, they’ve done phenomenal at addressing the issues that were done back in the ‘50s and ‘60s and figuring out how to deal with them today. I think they’ve, so far, they’ve done a--they’re trying to do a good job. I realize it’s slow, but it is a big task. Franklin: Well, and also the processing waste wasn’t a priority for Hanford for a long time. Robison: Correct. Franklin: It was production. They had quotas and so many of those folks came from regular industries, from chemical industries, where they’d processed the waste in the way they knew how. They pumped it in tanks, they stored it. Robison: Yeah. Or dumped it on the ground. Yup, yup. Franklin: In the ‘40s, that’s what you-- 0:54:26 Robison: That was an acceptable--well, they didn’t know what environmental harm, you know, would come of that. I mean, and again, that’s a good example. In the ‘80s, environmental rules, regulations, didn’t really exist that much, where today, they do. At least now they’re addressing them. Franklin: Right. I guess it’s funny, as a child of the ‘80s, it’s amazing to see how far we’ve come in just my lifetime. I mean, in terms of like you said, in ‘83 when you started, you just couldn’t do that kind of work now. You wouldn’t suit up and go into the solar basin-- Robison: Right, and-- Franklin: And use five-gallon-- 0:55:07 Robison: And use buckets to muck muck into drums. No, they’d find something more sophisticated to--and keep the workers out of harm’s way. But, you know, again, the technology just didn’t exist like it does today. So they have, in my opinion, they have come a long ways. I mean, Hanford has. And when I left in ‘93, all the reactors were still in process of being shut down and cleaned up. When I came back in 2009, almost all of them had been cocooned. So in that 16 years, that was an enormous amount of work. So I thought that was really impressive. 300 Areas is completely changed. For cleaning up literally a radioactive site, I think they’re doing pretty good. Franklin: Have you been out to B Reactor since it’s become a national park? Robison: Yeah, briefly. Yeah, a couple times. I actually was stationed out at B Reactor, so, like I said, we did fuel storage-- Franklin: Oh, during D&D? 0:56:11 Robison: Yes, during D&D. And we did asbestos abatement in all of the reactors. So I’d been in B Reactor a number of times. In fact, I could show you where my changeroom was at in there. Franklin: Oh, wow. I’m wondering what your thoughts are on B Reactor being a museum. Robison: Oh, I think that’s awesome. I think it’s one of the coolest things that DOE said that they wanted to do. I just think that having--preserving that history to show the contributions that those people made and that all the scientists, and even the government, made to the war efforts, I just think is phenomenal. I think it’s really cool. Franklin: Cool. Robison: Yeah. Franklin: So my last question is a big open-ended question. And so, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War? 0:57:11 Robison: The amount of commitment and patriotism--and that seems like kind of a corny word to young people today, but--I just think that the people that worked here during the Cold War and even today are really just out there to do the right thing, and to give their small contribution, to make this country better. I’d like for them to know and learn or come to appreciate the level of effort that was put into what they accomplished out here in such a short amount of time. To me, it’s awe-inspiring. Franklin: Well, great. Is there anything else that you’d like to add? Robison: No. I can’t really think of anything. Franklin: Okay. Robison: It was easier to talk to you out at my office than right here. Franklin: Sorry! Well, I hope it was still enjoyable. Robison: Yeah, no, it was. It was. I’m thrilled to get to be a part of this. I really am. Franklin: Yeah, the imposed environment of the studio can sometimes change things. But for continuity reasons and things, we like to have a-- Robison: Mm-hmm. Franklin: Also the sound is--we have good sound. Robison: Do you? Franklin: Soundproofing. And lights. Well, thank you, so much, for coming-- Robison: Thank you for having me. Franklin: --and talking about everything. And you know, and thank you for doing what you do in continuing to do environmental work. It’s a good mission. Robison: Oh, you’re welcome. I really do thoroughly enjoy it. Again, I feel like I get to play a small role in a really huge picture, but it’s my role; it’s my contribution. I love history and happy to do it. Franklin: Well, now you’ve helped our collections two ways. By first helping with the lamps and now by doing an oral history with us. Robison: Yeah. Franklin: So your imprint there. Robison: And you can count on my continued support. I’ll keep looking for stuff for you. Franklin: Good. Please do. Tom Hungate: Okay. Franklin: Awesome. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:59:29 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview B Reactor Plutonium Finishing Plant Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Christina Robison Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Christina talks about her career as one of the first women to do "D&D" (decontamination and decommissioning) work at the Hanford Site. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 01-11-2018 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operated under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F8530dda398fb0c9e8a7decd68d4d3758.jpg 3142adf019d9de516b8f2a4add7fa436 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F616a067d52fab2686c04cbe6e6a6912b.mp4 240981a59517bb87ea7cccdfd57c3fca Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Bauman, Robert Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Michell, CJ Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Northwest Public Television | Michell_CJ Whenever you're ready. Whenever we're ready, OK. All right, I guess we're good to go. OK. All right. [LAUGHTER] Robert Bauman: All right, let's start by having you say your name, and spell it for us. CJ Mitchell: All right. CJ Mitchell. And actually there's a Junior on the end, and that's CJ, no periods. It's initials only. M-I-T-CH-E-L-L, and then of course Junior, J-R. Bauman: All right, thank you. And my name's Robert Bauman, and today's date is October 30th of 2013. Mitchell: It's my mom's birthday. Bauman: Is it really? Mitchell: Yes. Bauman: Hey. Mitchell: [LAUGHTER] Bauman: And we're conducting this interview on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. So CJ, if we could start by just having you talk about when you first came to Hanford and what brought you here. Mitchell: Well, I came October 3, 1947. And I was 16 years old at the time. And in the early years, in 1943, my relatives, primarily my uncles and also my father-in-law, and others from my community down in Northeast Texas came to work on the Manhattan Project. And, of course, then I came here in '47, and that's the start of the Cold War. Yeah. Bauman: And you know how your relatives heard about Hanford? Mitchell: Yes, and I was a young kid I guess at that time, but anyway I remember people coming to the community and talking about, and trying to identify people to come out here to Hanford. And actually they gave them a number. And when they got to Pasco, they matched up that number. And then when they got there, they found out it was another forty miles out to Hanford. Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Was that DuPont, then, that people from-- Mitchell: I would think it was DuPont doing that time. I'm not sure, because I was young, I don't remember exactly what it was, yeah. Bauman: Right. And so you arrived here, as you said, in 1947 as a 16-year-old. What were your first sort of impressions of the place? Mitchell: Well actually it was really interesting, because when I first came--and I got here at nighttime, which most people will tell you that--but anyway, came into Pasco, and there was five of us. I had two first cousins, myself, and then two other people from my community. And we didn't actually come out here the first day. We went to East Pasco, because my relatives live there. And we slept in a little tent about maybe five--it wasn't even five feet. One uncle had a trailer on one side, the other one had a trailer on the other side with a little--I would say it's a little porch in between. And of course our tent was just out at maybe 20 feet away, out in the yard. That's where we slept at night. We visited during the day, and then crawled in there at night and slept. Bauman: How long did you sleep there? Mitchell: We were there for about, actually about three months. Because when I first came, I got a job working right up over the hill here, up on the trailer park, right up on North Richland right here, on the east side of George Washington Way. But they didn't have the barracks ready at that time. So we would catch a bus in the morning and ride out here until they got the barracks ready. And my first job was working in the--for every trailer they had a washhouse. There was no indoor plumbing. So all the homes, they had a washhouse, where they did the laundry and where they went to the bathroom. And so that was my job, helping complete those. Bauman: Oh, okay. So you lived in East Pasco-- Mitchell: Just for a couple of months, and then we were able to move into the barracks when they got the barracks finished. And that experience was that—well, it was only $1.40 a week to live there. And that included daily maid service and clean linen once a week. And so that was pretty good. At the mess hall, for lunches--when we'd go to work, for our lunch we could get a lunch box for $0.50. And that included a couple sandwiches, maybe an orange, an apple. Maybe a slice of pie or something. Yeah. Interesting stuff. Bauman: What sort of were the working hours? What sort of hours-- Mitchell: Well, actually, we worked eight to ten hours a day and then a half day on Saturday. And so I think I was making like $1.30 an hour. And I think, like $65.00 a week was big money. Because back in East Texas I could make like $25.00 or $30.00 a week. And I was working in a sawmill. A little portable sawmill. Yeah. Where they made cross ties. Interesting work. Bauman: Now what was the town in East Texas that you-- Mitchell: It was a little place called Kildare. K-I-L-D-A-R-E. All it was there, it was maybe like four little businesses and a train station, and just a crossroad. Dirt roads, no pavements. No. Everybody walked. Bauman: So when you came in '47, what was the racial situation here, were things segregated? Mitchell: Well, they had discrimination. You couldn't eat there, and the bus station in Pasco. And everybody lived on the east side, and I think there was a few people lived there maybe just west of the underpath and up on 1st or 2nd Street right in there. Course I was, you know I didn't get involved because I was working. But that was what the situation was, yeah. Bauman: Did that surprise you at all, or—the sort of segregation? Mitchell: Not coming from East Texas. Because I grew up in a segregated world. So that wasn't a surprise to me. Bauman: Was the workplace segregated also, when you moved up to live here as well? Mitchell: Well, yeah, actually the crews were segregated. The labor, and mostly general labor, that's what I knew about, was general labor. But I think me being a young guy, they put me over with the plumbers. And what I was actually doing, when they put the joints together, they did sorting in those days, and you had to--they called it bell holes, where you'd have room to work around those, and put those together. That was my job, to dig those bell holes. Bauman: Oh, okay. And so how long did you do that work? Mitchell: Well, I did that work about three months. Because what happened--I came in October, and really, I got homesick. And if you've never been homesick, you don't know what I'm talking about. It's really--and then at the end of I think in January, I went back home. I went back to Texas for--I'd been here about three months and man, I was so homesick I went back. And then I came back in the spring of 1948. Right about the time they had the big flood. And then, after that, when I came back then, and also lived in the barracks at that time, but I helped build the ranch houses there in Richland. Yeah, built those ranch houses there. And I also worked on the 100-H reactor. Helping build the 100-H reactor at that time. Bauman: So what brought you back in '48? Was it the opportunity for work? Mitchell: Just the work. Knowing the work and the pay. It's just that, well, I had to get over the homesickness. I went back to the East Coast, see. Came back because I knew the work was here, and that's what I did. And then I stayed until after the big cold winter in 1949 and '50. And then in that maybe like February or March, somewhere in there, it was three of us. We pulled a single wide trailer from North Richland to San Francisco, because one of the guys had a sister living there. And then as we were going to California, pulling this trailer, we got down around Williams, California, in Northern California there, and somebody wanted to know if we wanted to stop and pick cherry blossoms. I never thought, you know—we'd never heard of a job picking cherry blossoms. And so then we didn't pick cherry blossoms. We went on into San Francisco, and we didn't get any work there right away. And one of men and myself--we went back to Texas. And then the other gentleman, he went into the military. And then that's when I got back there, in 1950. That's when my wife--my wife was my high school sweetheart. I married her, and we went to Chicago for the next 15 months. And then I came back to the Tri-Cities in 1951. And then I worked on McNary Dam. Moved out to Hermiston, Oregon and worked in construction there, and then in the spring of 1952, I came back to Pasco, worked on the blue bridge, helped that. And the construction on the irrigation canal, irrigation project coming down through the basin. That was my job when I came back in 1951. And then, after that, then I worked on, built the 100 Ks. The 100-K East and West. I worked on that, and then I worked in helping build the PUREX facility in 200-East Area. And then in the spring of 1955, I went to work for General Electric. That was in the fuel preps department in the 300 Area. Bauman: 1955 was it? Mitchell: 1955. And that's when I was working there, and that's when I got out of construction. And then when I got into the fuel preps area, well, they had locker rooms and showers and lunch rooms. And the work there, we had a break. I never heard of a break before. [LAUGHTER] So my job on the production line was to take two fuel elements, and put them in a basket. And they would go down in some aluminum Al-Si. And when they come out, another person would take those two and take them to what we call canning and get them canned. Take them over to get canned and then take them to the quench tanks cooling area. And I did that. Now, in the locker rooms there was a bulletin board, and on this bulletin board, that's where all the job postings were. And those were gotten by seniority. And every Monday morning was when you selected. And I noticed, nobody ever turned those jobs down. So I said, there's got to be something out there better than what I'm doing over here. And then I started thinking, well, you better get something between your ears. I'd go to college in those days. And by that time I had a wife and three children. That's when I decided, well, I better get going. So I'm embarked upon a night school program and I went to night school for 14 years. I didn't know if I'd ever get a degree or not. But I played basketball, just pick-up basketball, and one of the guys that was an engineer out there, he played some basketball. And he said one of things you can always have, math and chemistry. So I didn't know if I'd get a degree or not, so I studied math and chemistry. And through that, I was able to work my way out of that into—out as a technician, and then later on in the human resources. And I just started that program and I stayed with it. 14 years. Bauman: So I want to go back, a little bit, to when you were talking about working fuels prep. Mitchell: Sure. Bauman: Did you have to wear special equipment to do the job you were doing? Mitchell: Yeah you had to have coveralls. You had to have special coveralls, to wear that, and shoe covers. You had to wear those, yeah. Bauman: That was to protect you from anything splashing? Mitchell: Protect you, yeah, protection. And you had to wear of course safety goggles, you had to wear those. Bauman: Right, right. And you said that was with GE. Mitchell: Yeah, that was General Electric. Bauman: General Electric. Mitchell: Yes. Bauman: And so how long did you work that? Mitchell: I worked General Electric until 1964. Not that particular job, but what I did as a result of going to school, I did several jobs there. And one of the jobs that I had there was I worked as a person that drove a forklift—could unload fuel elements and help the guys put them on the truck to take to the reactors once they had gotten what we called canned. And also we had a couple little warehouses where we stored things. And we would have certain fuel elements in there, just bare uranium elements there. During that time they started what they called the big extrusion press for the fuel elements to go to the N Reactor, when they were going to build the N Reactor. So actually I hauled the first fuel elements, they were billets, to be put through an extrusion press for the N Reactor. And they did that in the 306 Building. Interesting work. And I had gone to probably 15 interviews before I even got a job, and on my 16th interview I came in on a swing shift and my boss says they would like to interview you over in the 327 Building. And of course out of courtesy, I went there. I didn't expect to get anything because that was pretty disappointing, that many times and nothing. And so once I got over there and talked to the gentleman over there and I got back to my workstation, about an hour later he came back and he said, well, you're going to have that job over there. And when I went over—the job I was working in was a bargaining unit job, a union job. And they had like three classifications. They had a C, a B, and an A. One-two-one was the ratio. And when they hired, you moved up. If they laid off, you moved down. So I was a C operator. I was caught in the sling here. So when I got the chance to go over to the 327 Building, I had to give up my seniority there. And I took a $17.00 a week pay cut, to take that job and take a chance on it. And they could've laid me off the next day. But I took that job, and really I've never looked back since. Turned out to be a great move for me. Bauman: Yeah. And so how much longer did you work at Hanford, then? How long did you work there? Mitchell: Well, I worked there at—in fact, when I got over into the radio metallurgical part where they do an examination on radioactive fuels, studying the whole why they had ruptured in the reactors and dissolving samples for research, things like that. And then I worked for a gentleman named Mike McCormack, who was really a legislator in this area. And he was a chemical engineer by profession. And he had designed some of the casts that they transported elements in. They had a situation where they wanted to bring in a swing shift. And they talked about that, in the meeting he says, if any of you folks are going to school or want to go to school then we don't have to go identify other people that has to come and go in shift. My hand went up. It was the only hand went up. And then the next week they decided they weren't going to have that shift. But one since my hand went up, they set up a special shift for me to go to school. That gave me a chance to make some extra time at Columbia Basin College. And I worked a swing shift, and then Mike McCormack being a chemist--I would come in early on swing shift and he would teach me, he taught chemistry with me during that time. Actually one the best jobs I've ever had was in that group, even though moving up to human resources and all that was great. But just the whole environment there was one of my special places in my career. And then when I got into human resources, that was when the civil rights movement started. Also, just prior to that, there was a job in the 325 Building doing some research. We were studying what happened out in space capsules, there were certain parts of the capsule that would freeze up. And so they developed these uranium oxide pellets to place in there so it would take care of that situation. And I was able to go over into the 325 and work one-on-one with the guy that was doing that research. So I helped do that. And the way I got that job, I had more math and chemistry than anybody in the lab that didn't have a degree at that time. And so I got selected for that. And then just by my going to school and my other community work, when the civil rights movement started, I got an opportunity to go into human resources. And then I ended up getting a degree in business. So I'm half technical, half business. So it turned out a great career for me. Bauman: And how long did you work in human resources, then? Mitchell: Oh, 20, 30—the last 28 years I was there, in human resource. Did a lot of hiring of those science and engineers. Orientation of new staff or putting in 401(k) programs. Did a lot of things. Bauman: And which contractor contracted? Mitchell: That was General Electric until Battelle came in, 1965. Battelle came in, I worked for them. Bauman: Yeah, okay. I want to go back a little bit, first to when you initially came back in '47 as a 16-year-old, and you said you were living in a tent. What was that like? What was East Pasco like at the time? Mitchell: There was no indoor plumbing over there. The streets were all dirt. Yeah it was pretty--it wasn't very good. It was kind of like back in East Texas. Because we just had dirt roads, we had no pavements or anything then. Did a lot of walking. And so yeah, it was like that there. Looking back. Bauman: And then you moved to the dorms, right? Mitchell: And then we moved out here to the dorms. And that was an experience. Because I'm 16 years old, and these guys—I never heard swearing and things like I had heard in that. I know my head was going like this all the time. Because I'm telling you, these guys, they were something else. And on Sundays, I would try to get some kind of a ride back into East Pasco where my uncle and his wife lived, and then that would get me away from that. And then there was also some other people that we knew each other from there and so we would go there too. So I'd ride over with them and come back. Bauman: And then you mentioned you had gone back to East Texas and you and your wife got married. And then you went to Chicago. Mitchell: Chicago for a couple of summers. Bauman: Now, why'd you go to Chicago? Mitchell: I had a brother had lived there. He'd been military and he lived there in Chicago. And I had stopped there during the time when I first came to Washington. And the way I got there, I knew where he was. And when we left home, I don't know, I did some things that maybe were maybe kind of silly when I was growing up. But in Texarkana, we were all getting ready to come to Washington. And I got off the train and I went--they used to have these phone booths where you could go in to have your photo taken. And so when I got back on the train, and on my way to come through Saint Louis, come into Saint Louis and that way you came around Saint Louis, Chicago Minneapolis, Saint Paul, and then around the northern part here. Well, I lost my billfold or something in there. And so my one uncle gave me money and I got off the train in Chicago, and my ticket, and I went and stayed with my brother. And stayed with him for about a month. And then I went back to Texas. I worked at a punch board factory. You know, you made punchboards. In the old bars, used to have where you'd go and punch a board, and punch on punchboards. Well, they were making punchboards, down on Michigan Avenue. Well, I got enough money to get back to Texas and maybe work a few more weeks and get some more money to come back. And so I got off the train in Chicago because I lost my billfold. And then I worked there for three or four weeks. Got enough to get back home and then came back again. And then in the summer of '48 when I was coming back to start working on the ranch house in Billings, Montana. I got off the train to get a newspaper. I looked up and the train's gone, leaving. So I ran the train down, caught the train. So just about the time I'm getting on the train I hear a guy yell, well if you can't make it, you can go home with me. I caught the back of the train. Worked my way up through all the cars. And then finally the guys on the train said, God, what's wrong with this kid, I'm sure they said that's the craziest kid I've ever seen. But anyway, because you know, my jacket was there, my coat was there with my ticket and everything. But I caught up. [LAUGHTER] But then of course I learned. But that's what happened. And then I came back, yeah. But then going to Chicago was--I played baseball. We didn't have baseball in school, but I played with the men teams back in Texas. And I loved baseball. And when we got married and went to Chicago, well then I knew there was always jobs in Chicago. Whether you liked the job or not, there's jobs there. So we went there. And we stayed there, and our oldest son was born there. And I would go out to Northwestern University out at Evanston, and try out for baseball. I was pretty good at it. I could hit and I could run. My arm, I couldn't throw very well. But I could hit and I could run. But anyway, I just thought well, maybe—you know, 19 years old, you still have it in you. And then I realized, after being there for a while and going to a lot of the games--and I saw the big name players at Comiskey Park and Wrigley Field. And they had double headers in those days. And you could see all these players. And I got to see Jackie Robinson, and Don Newcombe, and Bob Feller, and Joe DiMaggio, and Ted Williams. I got to see all these big name players which I was fascinated by. And of course then I was working for a smelters, and I had a fairly good job. But then I got to thinking, well I know where there's fresh air, and I know where the work is good. And so we came back. And she went home and stayed with her father down in East Texas for maybe like a couple of months while I got situated here, and then she came here. And then we've been here ever since. Great experience. Bauman: And when you came back then, where did you live? Mitchell: When I came back here, that's when I came back and I lived in East Pasco. But I worked on McNary Dam, I moved out to Hermiston where I could be six miles away. Just go down and come back. I always believed in living close to work, and so that's what I did. And then in the spring of '52, that's when I came back. Worked on the blue bridge, helped build that. Irrigation canals out here, and then-- Bauman: And did you move back to the area here, through then? Mitchell: Yeah, I moved back to Pasco. And I lived in Pasco then until 1955. Because when I went to work for General Electric in 1955, then you could get housing in Richland. Your name would go on a list and you could get housing. And that's when it really, really took off for me. Really took off for me. Bauman: And was housing readily available then? I mean, as an African American? Was that difficult? Mitchell: Well if you could get GE out—you couldn't buy a house. I couldn't buy a house in Richland because I was black, you know, from real estate people. And that was as late as 1965. But back then it was the government homes, and if you worked you could get a home. And so it didn't matter. It wasn't up to them, then. It was up to General Electric then. And I rode the bus back and forth to work, $0.10 a day round trip. $0.05 a day. I could walk up to the bus stop, catch a bus, and go to work. And then in the outer area, the construction in outer area, they paid you isolation pay. They paid you $4.00 a day to go out there doing construction all the way out there. 300 Area, you didn't get anything, but way out there, and then the crafts got more. Interesting. Those days are gone forever though. Bauman: So when you did go to buy a home then in Richland, did you experience some difficulty? Mitchell: Oh yeah. It was tough. The guy, he just flat told me, said because you're black, we won't sell you a house. I can't take a chance on my investment. And so then of course, at that time, there was like the NAACP and other groups wanting to come in and get involved and I said no, I'll take care of it myself. I said well, my kids live here, my kids got to walk down these streets. I'll take care of it myself. And I just let it go. And then there was a gentleman by the name of Everdy Green had a real estate company. He called me up and he says well, he said I hear you're having problems getting a house, and I'll sell you anything you want. And I said yeah, I know you will, because your prices eliminate me. I said the level of your homes, what they cost, I said I'm just making a weekly salary. I can't afford one of your homes. And the interesting thing about that--and I never knew I'd be in real estate. And once I got into real estate I ended up selling Everdy Green's home. Yeah. Ended up selling the home that he owned. And he was the guy, but--it's interesting. And then, where I live now--I just live on Spring down here, right down the street here--first night I was there I picked up the phone, phone rings, some guy said, this is the Ku Klux Klan he said, and you're next. That was what I got on the phone. And so I just called and reported it. But nothing ever happened after that. But that's what happened to me. Bauman: Right. Were there other incidents where people opposed you sort of moving in, or-- Mitchell: Well no, but I heard later on from Ron Kathren, when Ron Kathren bought his house. The one who lives on the street. It was kind of interesting. But the place where I was turned down was in Beverly Heights. Beverly Heights is where Fred Meyer is, and up on the hill, that's the area. Well later on, even years later, I went up and there's a home for sale by owner. Up there, a house. And then I knocked on the door, and when he saw I was black, he just slammed the door. He says, go over there, there's some houses over there. Point prefab area. But you know, you run into that. And then I had one person that worked with me in the laboratory. He says, I don't have to worry about that. He said I don't have to worry about this. Said I'm white, said I don't have to worry about that kind of stuff. It's just been interesting, it's just been an interesting experience, a real interesting experience. But what it is, I just let it roll off and keep moving. That's how you have to do it. Can't change things. Bauman: A little bit earlier you mentioned civil rights movement. Were there organizations, NAACP and other organizations, here in the Tri-Cities area? Mitchell: Yeah, there was NAACP, and there was one guy by the name of McGee. And sometime he would be kind of like a one-man walking picket. He was a real fighter, and everything like that. But I wasn't as involved as a lot of people, because I was working all the time. But I knew things was going on, and I did my share. Where I've lived I've always been involved in community. I was on a planning commission, and things like that. All that. Bauman: In Richland? Mitchell: Yeah, oh yeah. Bauman: And about when was that? Mitchell: About 1969, '70. Back in those days. Bauman: And what did you think of that experience? Mitchell: Yeah, it was an interesting experience. It really was. But you know, I made the motions on a planning commission to put the infrastructure into Meadow Springs area of South Richland. And I went to work the next day and out in the 300 Area was a 3760 Building which they just tore down recently, in the last few months. Was called a technical library, up in the upper area. I walked in one morning, there was a guy named Guthrie, G-U-H-T-R-I-E, named Guthrie. I don't know what his first name now was, but anyway, he was kind of a loud guy in the community. But anyway, he cornered me and he said, 'bout all the what it was going to be, paying the taxes, what it was going to cost and all that. And I said, well I don't know who you are, but my philosophy is that if you're going to have a good community, you've got to make it a good community. And it's going to be no better than the people that live in it. And that's the way I left it. And then he got on the city council for a while, and he was kind of a different guy. But pretty soon he just kind of faded away. I don't know where he is now. He was the same way--because when I was in the lab, I was in charge of employee benefits. Had some responsibilities there. And he was a little different there too, because he just wanted you to give him the money and he would buy his own ticket to get his own benefits. He wasn't interested in regular benefits like everyone else. But you get some of that. Learned a lot. Bauman: So I know at some point you got into officiating, doing sports officiating. Mitchell: Yeah, in 1964. Well, a little earlier than that they wanted me to get into officiating but I was going to night school; I was trying to get finished up. And there was a gentleman they said, well they had no African American people in officiating spots, you know, here. And the guy who came to me was working as a garbage pickup person in Richland. The garbage pickup person, his name was Johnny Singleton. And there was a guy in Pasco by the name of, I believe it was Jim Pruitt. Big, tall, about 6'6" African American guy. And Singleton, by him being on the garbage truck crews, like they'd pick up garbage. And they dumped it by hand then, instead of the sophisticated stuff they got now. But anyway, talked to him about somebody getting into sports. Refereeing sports. And of course my kid was already playing little league here at that time. And so he thought about me and Pruitt. And so the three of us, we started out. And of course when I got in it, because I'd been around baseball, my curve just went up. It just went like that. And I was in the Pac-8 in two-and-a-half years. I didn't even know I was that good. In the first year I worked, they picked me for the little league playoffs, but they said we don't let first year people work in that. But there was never a year when I officiated sports that I wasn't picked for some playoffs like that. And then all that got me into American Legion, then into--actually I worked pro ball before I went to that two-and-a-half years, year and a half. I had been down to Kennewick working one day, one morning, and I came home about 4:00 and the phone rang and it was a guy from the Tri-City Braves at that time. Ever hear of the Pro Ball Club? Bauman: Yep. Mitchell: He says get out here at 6:30, you got double header. So I go out there and I work double header. So the guy I was sitting in the room with, his name was Biddick. His name was B-I-D-D-I-C-K. I'll never forget his last name. And he was telling me about how to do it, and he said well, he says if the catcher has to reach out a little bit, he says just go ahead and call that a ball. He said, because the fans will get on you. I said well, listen I don't know who you are, I said, but what I’ve been taught is if the ball hit the strike zone any place, whenever it hits the strike zone, it's a strike. I don't care where it goes beyond that. And I said, and that's what I'll do, they may not have me back. And there was a guy by the name of Ted Sizemore. Ted Sizemore, University of Michigan. He was a catcher. He ended up as a second baseman for the Dodgers. But he was a catcher at that time. And I worked that game, and in the Tri-City Herald the next morning, Ted Sizemore says the best balls and strikes game they had ever had called, since he had been there. And then, and I know I'm jumping way ahead, but way back in 2000, when I was inducted into the NCAA Hall of Fame in Chicago, when I got up to talk and I was telling them about, I said my first game was behind a guy by the name of Ted Sizemore. And his wife happened to be in the audience. Bauman: Really? Wow. Mitchell: His wife was in the audience. And I didn't know it but his wife was in the audience. And that was pretty interesting. Bauman: That’s pretty amazing. Mitchell: But then, well it just turned to gold. I could run. I could run, I just enjoyed it. And I don't know why, later in years we call it you've got to be in the place when lightning strikes, whatever it is. You've got to be when lightning strikes, there's your opportunity. But I was working, taking a half day's vacation to work a game with Columbia Basin College. That was my second year. And the guys from the Pac-8 in those days was there watching some players. And after the game was over, one of the guys came over to the car and he says you ever thought about coming to work in the Pac-8? And I says, well I'd love to someday. He said, well what I did, he said, we watched you work the bases. Your focus never left what you were doing. We watched you work the plate. Your focus was always there. And he says, well you're really better than some of the guys we have up there. And I said, well I'd be happy to try it. What I know about it, I never been there before. But anyway, that's how I got there. Bauman: And how many years did you do-- Mitchell: I did it for 30, I did it for 36 years in the whole Pac-8 team. And then I evaluated umpires until they went to the Pac-12. I would go from here. I wouldn't go evaluate officiants—I wouldn't travel. But I would just go to WSU, my wife and I, until they went to Pac-12. Then I thought well, it's time for somebody else to do it. And I did a lot, overall I got 21 World Series under my belt. And two Olympic. I worked Olympics in '84 and '88. And I worked the first games, when they were demonstration sports for the Olympics. I worked ball and strikes on the first game ever in [INAUDIBLE] Colorado in '78. It was turning to gold, still getting it. I was at SeaTac this past weekend for hall of fame. Bauman: I saw that, the legion, yeah. Mitchell: I've always been involved. And right now, the one guy that was in the Pac-10 with me, there was nobody taking care like Columbia Basin College doing that. So we incorporated it. We own that, and now run it administratively. We just own that association. I'll take care of that. But Hanford's been good. The Tri-Cities has been--I call it virgin territory. And for me, traveling around—when I did get into human resources, well I would travel to different schools for science and engineers. And I got into that just by, the guy was going to go WSU and he says they had three schedules for interviews, and they only had two. And he says, you know how to talk about the lab, come on. So I go to WSU, and they've got three schedules. Two starts at 8:30, one start at 9. Well my training was sitting in with one of the other interviewers for 30 minutes—that was my training. Then you're on your own. And of course, then I end up doing all that. And then when I was out going to different place like Purdue, Michigan, Wisconsin, Donald, Stanford, and all those places. I always picked up a local newspaper, would start to look at what the economy was kind of like. And for the last 60 years, the Tri-City has been as good as any and better than most. I had opportunities to leave, but I wouldn't leave. Good place to raise families. The schools were good. And my wife was very active in--she stayed on top of things within the school boards, and the city council, and all that stuff. She was a real tiger there. But she always did her homework. And so we just always been involved. And I always encouraged other people to get involved, but it's hard sometimes to get them to do anything. But I always taught my kids to try things. Because you can always come back to nothing. And Art Linkletter, I heard him years ago say, if you're ever going to get any place, do anything, you got to take some chances. Got to stick your neck out. I never forgot that. Bauman: I was going to ask you, so you worked construction-- Mitchell: Sure. Bauman: --and then fuels prep, and then eventually human resources. Mitchell: You bet. Bauman: Of those three sorts of different kinds of jobs you had in Hanford, was there one that was sort of more challenging than the others, and maybe one that was more rewarding? Mitchell: They all were reward--I'll tell you, moving on to the research lab where they did examinations of the fuels and radiometallurgy, where they studied things, like what happened and why they failed and all that—that was tremendous. But the one thing that got me out to get me the exposure was human resources. And what happened there is, I went in one day and I had been doing what are called employee benefits or whatever. Administration and all that stuff. And I went and asked my manager for the job. And he said, you think you can handle that job? I said yeah, I've been doing it all the time. I said yeah, so he said okay, so he gave me a chance at it. And of course the people that was involved around it that I worked with, I didn't get any help there. But there happened to be a guy by the name of Bob Steiken, he was working in payroll—he was in payroll at a different building. And he was the guy that coached Little League baseball, and all the kids playing sports. And had a relationship with him and everything, and I'd get some information from him. I'd consult with him once in a while. And then also there was a guy by the name of Dick Dibble. And he was an attorney, and he had been a professor over on the coast. And he was an expert in group dynamics. And when they had the civil rights movement, they wanted—you would go and talk about the civil rights things and things that happen. And during that time, I would talk about my experiences. I would talk with groups about my experience and things like that. And then he was the guy they wanted, come on, and then I'd go and talk things like that. And he says, you know how to talk about this. Come on, we want to hear about your experience and all that stuff, like, talk about that. And then he taught me group dynamics. How to handle groups. For example, if when there's good information going, don't shut it off. If it wanes, redirect it. You know, he taught me group dynamics. And I watched and I learned. And I always pick people's brains. I sit and I'll listen all the time. I'd sit and I'd listen to staff meetings, whatever meeting. And then when they got ready to put in the 401(k) program--actually, I was doing employee benefits at that time. And then we'd go back to Columbus, and we got to go back to Columbus headquarters and learn about things, and we'd present and all these things. And then, the guy that was in payroll, and then we had employee benefits, and then there was industrial relations--that was all part of human resources. Well the guys in employment over there, they were in charge of us going round to the different groups in the lab and explaining these benefits, when they were going to sign up for their 401(k)s. And the guy that was in charge there was kind of a different kind of guy. He never helped me at all, he never helped me do anything. And they brought in another lady to help us out, and she was just like high school, and they taught her everything. But they never taught me anything. So now, when we're getting ready to go, we doing these seminars and these presentations and everything, well, he would do all the presentations and that. So I told my wife, I said, I know what he's going to do is later on, he's going to put me on the spot. I knew it was coming. And so what happened was, was that we went to the 200 Areas, and he made the presentation, oh, the first about 11:00, and then over the noon hour. And then we go to 200 West. He doesn't say anything to me about it. Get out group together, and he explained all that, and then he said CJ's going to do this one. I did it. I was ready. When I got done, there was two questions. Two questions, all. And on the way back, and we were about 200 Area, right where they built the Vit plant now, she looks over and she says, gosh CJ. She said, golly, you did good. And she said, there was only two questions. I didn't say anything. I just rode in back. But I knew he was going to put me on the spot. But I was ready. But I was ready. And so I always got my homework done. And that's why standing out there today, I was out there ten minutes before you. I was standing out waiting. Bauman: I know. I was going to ask you, I'm a little worried your mic is going to get caught there. If you could put your arm on the other side there, yeah, put your arm above the cord. There we go. As long as it doesn't-- Mitchell: It's been a great, it's been a great, great, great thing. And another thing is, is that when my oldest son--when my son now that's a judge, when he got out of Washington State and he was going to law school, and he was going to pass the bar and all that. One of the guys in my office there, one of the payroll guys there, was talking about how tough it was to pass the bar and all that. And we had a guy at Battelle in contracts that never did pass the bar. And he was in contracts, and what he was telling me really, oh, what he was telling me really, he's probably never going to pass the bar and all that kind of stuff, I didn't even worry about that. And then when our oldest son went to the Air Force Academy. And he went to Air Force Academy. But my wife was on top of everything, all the time. And one of the girls that--the girl, Anne Roseberry, down at the library, you know who she is? Bauman: Yeah, sure. Mitchell: Well she was a classmate of my oldest son. And her dad was a liaison for the Air Force Academy. And he asked her after school one afternoon, who are some of the young boys down there who would be worthy of maybe recommended for the Academy? And Duke was one of those guys. And he did. And then Greg, my second son, he went to Naval Academy. He went to Naval Academy prep school, but he didn't like it back there and he came back. He came back, went to CBC for a couple of weeks, and came home one day and threw his books away and told his mother, he said I'm not going back. He left, and he was gone for about three weeks, and he called up one day and she say, where are you? And he said I'm at the University of Puget Sound. He'd gone over, walked down, got him a scholarship, and she said, what made you go there? And he said I looked at their schedule and I saw they were going to Hawai’i next year. So one of his friends, Cary Randall, from Richland was over there too, so he had a chance to go there. And then my third son who's a fireman in Seattle, he went to Washington State University, when he could play. He could play baseball, or football, or basketball. But that was one kid that was anti-everything. He was going tell them how to run the program when he got over there, so they just told him to get lost. [LAUGHTER] They just told him to get lost. But he's doing well in Seattle, doing well. But anyway. And then my daughter, who's a sweetheart. And then Cameron, the one that was high school--Cameron, the judge, was a high school All-American in football and baseball. He was a first team All-American in football. And he still doesn't say much. He never did. Never did say much. But one thing I learned from kids is that we create all of our--most of our problems. For example, my uncle that lived here, the first one up in Pasco there. We went over one afternoon, and we were right about Road 68. Where Road 68 is now, coming home. And Richland and Pasco was playing one of these big rival games. And they wanted to buy hamburgers on the way home. And I said we're not going to buy hamburgers, we don't have any money. All you guys want to do is eat, we don't have any money to buy hamburgers. Well I get home, and I'm probably there ten minutes. And I'm walking through the house. You guys got to get ready, we got a ball game, if you don't go, we’ll leave you here. So he went to his mother, he says, I don't understand. He says, dad says we don't have money to buy hamburgers. He said but we're going to a basketball game. He said it takes money, he'll buy us anything we want once we get there. So if he'd never said that, I'd have never heard that. But it just tells you to be careful what you say. You create a lot of your own problems. I learned that. I observed that and paid attention to that. And also, he was always on the honor roll, and I told my wife, I says, God, he's always on the honor roll. I don't see him studying, how is he doing this? I'm wondering if he's cheating. So she told him about it, she said he says no, no, I study when I go to bed at night. He said when I go to my room at night, he said, I study. And he was the same way, he was same way all the way through. And he was an academic Pac-10 guy. And well when he got out of school, Buffalo wanted him to come back and run back [INAUDIBLE]. So he wouldn't. He said, I'm not that big, so he went to law school. And he was the same way there. He would just study, study hard. All the time, he always did. And so, here he is. But it's just been a nice, it's been a different road, all different, but very good. And my youngest son, Robin, my youngest son has got potential--I think--to make more money than all of them put together. If he could get it all together. I think he's got potential to make more than all of them together. Because his mind, the way he does things, and how he can put it together. And where the others are just completely different. Bauman: I wanted to ask you a couple more questions about your work at Hanford. First of all, did you have to—when you were working out there--did you have to have special security clearance, or-- Mitchell: Yes, you do. You have to have security clearance. Yeah, and it was very secret. All the time, secret. You just didn't talk about what you did. But you had to have security clearance all the time, yeah. Always security clearance. And also, during the early years, in the laboratory you had what they called--they had some pencils, they were the ones that could detect radiation, and that kind of thing. Very interesting work. Actually for me, very good work. Looking back at it, and how you had to go. But that break thing made me soft. I'd never heard of a break. I'll tell you, that was something else. I got so soft I couldn't--God, that was the worst, you know, physically. Bauman: I was going to ask you also about President Kennedy came in 1963 to dedicate the N Reactor, I was asking about that. Mitchell: Yeah, you bet. Took my whole family to that. I had some 35 millimeter slides for a long time, I think I've still got them around someplace, when he came during that time. That was a great experience, yeah. Bauman: Do you have any specific memories of what the day was like, or-- Mitchell: Yeah, it was very hot. It was very hot, and lot of people went out and lot of people had car problems out there on that day. And what they did to get us out there, what they did--to make room, they had taken the graders and pushed back a lot of the sagebrush and stuff so we could go, a lot of people could get out there. It was a great thing. They came in by helicopter, oh, from Moses Lake. And that was really an interesting day. Bauman: You certainly have been in the Tri-Cities a long time, and seen a lot of changes. I wonder what some of the changes you've seen. Mitchell: The changes I've seen is in well, the racial situation has changed a lot. Of course you're never going to completely get rid of that, but it's changed a lot. Because I know there were times when you couldn't do things. They tell the stories about Kennewick. I don't know all about those things like that, but I know—with the troubles that I had. But one of the things that really was tough, my uncles that lived in East Pasco, with the relative citizens over there--before I moved to Richland, we had a group called the East Pasco Improvement Association, where we would clean up vacant lots and trash and try to get things cleaned up on our own. The streets were not paved, but my uncles, after I moved to Richland, they would go to city council and they would just get completely ignored there. And they were trying to get sewer—get sewer and pavement and things like that over there. And then, the people used to live in Pasco, as you go on the underpath, all to the right and to the left, hey lived all—especially to the right—all the way down to A Street, they lived all the way there. And then the city commercially pushed those people all the way from the railroad tracks, all the way out to right where Kurtzman Park is now. They pushed those people all the way back out there, and all the way through. They had people all the way down in there, there were people who lived in there. So they pushed them out of there and pushed them back farther out. But they went through a hard time on there, trying to get their water and sewer, and getting the streets and all that paved, and that sort of thing. And then of course, as far as the schools were concerned in Richland, my kids didn't have a lot of trouble. But--the schools were excellent--but what happened is, my wife, she always went to PTAs, she stayed involved. We got them into scouts, Little League programs, all organized stuff. And so they had a chance to participate. And we also, when I first came to Richland, you had to fill out an application and tell what religion are you. When I put down Protestant, well in about a day or day and a half, the people from Richland Baptist Church—just right down here on GW Way—my kids grew up in that church. And that's a Southern Baptist Church which say they were not racially happy to have you there. But you know what, they treated us good there. We went there, we learned a lot, a lot of things you learned there, a lot of things were different. As the kids got older, people kind of thought maybe my son wanted to marry some of their daughters or something. But anyway, I learned a lot there and I went there and everything and it turned out good. Of course, because I wanted the kids to be able to participate where they live. I didn't want to drive back to East Pasco every Sunday or something. Soon as I get out of school, I'd run there. No, I want them to participate where we are and where we live. And that turned out good in that way. And we lived down at 100 Craig Hill when we first moved to town, and then we moved to 612 Newcomer. That was right after I couldn't buy the house that I ended up at Newcomer, ended up there. And then we could walk. They hadn't had that development down where Safeway and all that is there. We used to walk down, the kids walked across that field to church right there. And so I wanted to be able to go to church and they would participate with the people they go to school with and they see every day. Bauman: After you moved in and got your house in Richland, did you see Richland start to open up a little bit more? See more African Americans at all, or-- Mitchell: Yeah, it did open up a little bit. Especially, well see, when the government owned it—I think there was a guy named Fred Baker and Fred Clardy when I moved. But anyway, because other people moved to Richland. Mr. Wallace did, Mr. Rockamore moved there, the Burns moved there, because they got jobs. And then as things developed in long about '65, and when I bought my house in '76 down here, then the Burns bought a house, then some other people bought. The Browns, CW, and those guys, they bought homes and that. And CW and Norris Brown, in fact they were from my hometown. And their dad and my dad worked on the Texas Pacific Railroad together. And that time when we moved to Hermiston in '51, to work on McNary Dam, well that dad worked over there too. They went to middle school over there. When the middle schools came over here to play these guys, those guys just literally tore them apart. So when Mr. Brown moved back and they started working here, well they got a job for Mr. Brown so those kids could go to school over here and play basketball. And they also were in the trailer court. They lived in the trailer court, the Brown boys did. And they went to John Ball School. There was a little elementary school up here called John Ball, and that's where they went to school—elementary school. Then from there, they moved to Hermiston, played and then they come back, and then they went to Richland High, and all of that. That's how we all got back over here. We moved around where the work was. And so it turned out that they'd done well. I think we've done well, considering the opportunities. We just moved ahead. You can't change things. So you have to make the best of what it is. And that's what we tried to do. Bauman: So overall, how was Hanford as a place to work for you? Mitchell: Well for me, it was all right. Course, construction, you know, guys, I just do my job. I didn't get involved in talking about what the government was doing and all that kind of stuff, I didn't worry about the politics, I just did my job. And I tried to learn as much as I could learn, and I always paid attention to what's going on, what they doing, and how they're doing it and everything. And I always just paid attention, that's what I tried to do. Bauman: Is there anything I haven't asked you about that you think would be important to talk about, that we haven't talked about yet? Mitchell: What now, anything-- Bauman: Is there anything that I haven't asked you about yet-- Mitchell: Oh, let's see. No, no I don't think so. I think you're okay, and if you think of something you can always call me or something. Well, I've gone through all of it, and I didn't see any blood at the end. And I think people know when I walk down the street, I think people are not going to bother me. In fact, speaking of that, I coached baseball. I didn't coach the Little League, but I coached the next one, they call it Pointer League, 13, 14, all the way up through Legion, back in Legion. I coached that, and was very successful at it. And what I would do is, when I would work the games at Washington State or wherever I was, at night I'd make notes of what happened, what they did, how they did it, and in what situations they did that. And then when I coached, I had winning teams here. Turned out everybody wanted to play for me. I took them to California, and to state tournament, which they hadn't been before. And so it got so that if I wanted to go for walk, I had to go down by the river. If I'm walking down the street, screech! Mr. Mitchell, you need a ride? No, I'm fine. Pretty soon, screech, you need a ride, Mr. Mitchell? That's a good feeling, to be able to walk and people want to stop and give you a ride. That's a good feeling. So you just never know, you just do the best you can, do what you know to do, and do it right. I never felt like holding grudges, or anything like that. Don't have time. Don't have time for that. I'd get it done. The one thing, I would never make a social worker too good. The reason being is that nobody ever gave me anything—I mean anything. And for those people that can't work, they can babysit or do something for those that can work. And I know that people, if they have to, they can--and I was going to Seattle the other day, my wife and I, there was people picking apples, Saturday morning. It was cold. Sunday, they were picking apples. As long as there's work, you can go do it. I just think nobody have to give you anything. You got health and strength, you can go work. You can go do stuff. Just get out of your way and give you opportunity and make it out there and go get it. And to think about we have to bring people from Mexico in to do all of our work and harvest all our crops. You got to do it because we don't want to do it I guess. I guess Americans don't like to work in the field, do that straining of work. And the other thing is, Dr. Bauman, if we could get people to officiate sports--and I don't care what sport it is—we could solve unemployment problems. Kids keep coming. There's no downsizing. The least you're going to make in any kind of a youth sport, like AAU or middle school basketball, is about two to three times minimum wage per hour. You're going to make somewhere between 20 and 30 bucks an hour, just officiating basic sports. Just going down here at 4:00 in the afternoon on Saturdays. And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to do all of that. And it's out there. And everybody says, we don't want to do it. In the clinic, we teaching clinic, and the guy says, well, what do you think is the worst thing about it? Well, maybe I'll make a call or something that costs the game, some parents are mad at me, angry at me. I said well, just think about when you're learning to drive a car. When you first started driving a car, you weren't very good at it. But as you got better at it, you learned. Your parents let you drive it to the store, and then pretty soon on GW Way, and pretty soon you drive to Pasco and Kennewick, pretty soon the freeway, and pretty soon you get pretty good at it. Then you can go to Seattle and drive on the freeway in the city. And I said, you have to do it a step at a time. That's how you do it. So to me, there's no such thing as an excuse. My grandfather says that—on my mom's side, because I don’t know my grandfather on dad's side--he said, there's no such thing as excuse. He says, in Cunningham, killed can't, and whipped couldn't until he could. He said there's no such thing as an excuse. And I know. I kind of like that, because you can always do something. If you can't do it, like I said, you can babysit for somebody that can do something. And I get after people all the time. There was a guy at Richland, his son played basketball. Couple years ago, three years ago now. Good ball player, 6'6". And his dad was a big guy, he played pro-basketball or something. And he says, I'm kind of a guy that like to stay back. I said, what? He said, I kind of like to stay back and stay out of things. I said, well I think you ought to move up, not stay in back. I said. That's the problem. I said, get up here and see what's going--get in the middle of things, and see what's going on. That's how you get there. And I learned one thing, Dr. Bauman—if you go to someplace all the time, you don't have to say anything to anybody. But after a few times, somebody's going to stop you and talk to you and ask you a question, because they figure must interested because you came. And they going to stop and ask you a question. And I sit and I’ve observed it all the time, and I look at people and I say, well. Of course it's easy for me, maybe. But for them it's probably hard. But if you just get out and participate, you just get out and see what's going on, it can do a lot for you. It can do an awful lot for you. Bauman: I want to thank you very much for coming here today and talking to us. Mitchell: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Bauman: Always good to see you. Mitchell: Yeah, it's always good to see you. Bauman: Thanks very much. Mitchell: It's a great community. And the other thing about opportunity, just get out of my way, I don't expect anybody to hand me anything. Just move over, I'll get it. And I always told my kids that. And they know how to talk to people, they know how to tell you if they disagree without calling you a bunch of names—without calling you a bunch of names and throwing a fit. They can disagree. And the other thing I wanted them to learn to do was to get up in front of a microphone and say thank you. That sort of thing. Yeah. Well, I got plenty to do-- Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:00:29 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 188 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 300 Area 200-East Area 200 Area 100-H N Reactor 325 Building Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1947-2013 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. ca1948-1965 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. McCormack, Mike Kathren, Ron Dibble, Dick Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with CJ Mitchell Description An account of the resource An interview with CJ Mitchell conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013-10-30 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2016-07-21: Metadata v1 created – [RG] Subject The topic of the resource Hanford (Wash.) Hanford Site (Wash.) Hanford Nuclear Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) 100-H 200 Area 200-East Area 300 Area 325 Building 3760 Building DuPont General Electric N Reactor Plutonium Uranium Extraction Plant (PUREX) https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F46718f8d2b200c1c3b4ec42c71009a29.JPG 7f4ae434c4a7a90a4a89297e7d171285 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Cliff Groff Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound 0:00:00 Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Cliff Groff on August 10, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Cliff about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Cliff Groff: G-R-O-F-F as in Frank is the last name. Franklin: Okay. And your first name? Groff: C-L-I-F-F as in Frank. Franklin: Okay, great, thanks, Cliff. So, tell me, how and why you came to the area to work for the Hanford Site. 0:00:38 Groff: Well, I came to the area because I came to work for the newspaper here. I came here in 1966. And I worked for the paper for approximately nine years. Franklin: And which paper was that? Groff: The Tri-City Herald. Franklin: Okay, great. Groff: But don’t hold that against me, please. People don’t like the Herald for different reasons. But I did work on it. I was hired as the Sunday editor of the paper. So it means I worked on the news desk all those years. In fact, we moved here from Santa Maria, California, where I was the news editor of that paper. That’s why I got hired. Franklin: Okay. 0:01:26 Groff: For a couple of years, I did some odd jobs. Principally in PR, public relations. And then in 1977, I got hired by Arco to work out at Hanford as a specialist to write operating procedures. That’s what I did. During that 17 years there, I became not only a writer of them; I became a manager of them. When I retired, I was a senior engineering writer, that’s what I was. Franklin: Okay. And so what kind of procedures did these cover? 0:02:21 Groff: Well, what we worked with—we were hired—I was hired in 1977, a year after McCluskey got injured in the Dash-4 project, when he had the americium and acid explosion. And everything was shut down, and they determined that the operating procedures were not—that the engineers couldn’t write them very well. And they wanted to hire people with a background in journalism and English, which I have. So that’s why I was hired. In the job, we would interview operators, process engineers, and supervisors, and we converted standard operating procedures into what were called job performance aids—JPAs. This was based on human factors engineering, which came out of what the Air Force did with their training of their pilots. So I learned a lot about human factor engineering and actually took a lot of classes later on that the company had me do. 0:03:48 Franklin: Okay. So basically, if I can summarize this right, your job was to kind of translate what the engineers—how the engineers felt the process should be done to the process that would actually do the process, because there was kind of a breakdown in communication before, between the engineers and the technical employees. Groff: That’s right. The engineer would write long, essay-type instructions. My job was to convert and write in short declarative sentences, called command language. We had to use very few verbs—we had a verb list. So that’s what we had to instruct the operators to know what we were talking about. And it worked. We converted thousands of SOPs into JPAs. And then they found that the—we had illustrations, very extensive. So then we converted the JPAs into P-O-Ps, POPs, plant operating procedures. So that’s what we were doing when I retired back in 2000. I don’t know what they’re doing now. Franklin: Do you have an example of a successful SOP to JPA that stands out in your mind? 0:05:17 Groff: You know, I worked at all the Tank Farms and I managed a group of engineering writers. We probably did thousands of them. We had to deal with—I worked at PUREX, for example, at the head end control. We had to deal with the panels, that’s what we did. We had to instruct the operators into what the buttons and the bells and whistles meant. Tank Farms, same thing. Also we did the—I worked also at the processes where they converted—well, let me see. At this point, I’m confused, so do you want to stop the camera for a minute? And I can remember something here. Isn’t that awful? I can’t remember. I worked at all the plants; that’s all I can tell you about. Franklin: Sure, sure, that’s fine. Are we ready to roll again? Groff: Oh, is it stopped? Oh, that’s good. Hungate: [INAUDIBLE] Franklin: We’re good. We can edit that out; don’t worry. So in doing this, did you have any background in the technical knowledge behind these processes? How— 0:06:45 Groff: Well, I had to learn on the job. I did a lot of studying. Well, in high school and college I took a lot of science. I wasn’t a science major. I took additional classes at CBC. I took classes in pre-calculus math, chemistry, so I could understand the processes. And I knew how to read blueprints which I had to read a lot of those to understand the processes. So it was, for me—besides I was training other people, I was learning myself about it. Franklin: Oh, wow. Groff: You know, one interesting thing, I was thinking about something. You know we got this eclipse coming up? Franklin: Yeah. 0:07:40 Groff: Everybody knows about that. Well, there was one, I think, in 1975 or ’76, somewhere, we had an eclipse. And this very good friend of mine who worked for me, we walked out on the coal pile to watch the eclipse that was then. So I think that’s one interesting thing that we did. My office was very near the coal plant. I know that there were coal-fired plants at both East and West. My office was located in East. Franklin: Oh, wow. And how big was this division that you were in? Groff: The division? Franklin: Yeah, or your group, the people that-- 0:08:29 Groff: Well, we were highly—there was a lot of, oh, what I call—stop again. Bureaucracy. Very bureaucracy. And I was in research and engineering division, and that was broken down into different process engineers that worked at the different plants. My group, basically, was about 40 people. We consisted of engineering writers, illustrators, secretaries, and the clerk that took care of that. Once we wrote them, we had to have them test it, called user tests. We had to have all sorts of sign-offs, quality assurance, as I recall. The plant manager has to sign off on our procedures. They could not be issued without half-a-dozen signatures on that, including mine, as the engineering writer. 0:09:45 Franklin: What was the most challenging aspect of this work? Groff: Well, we had to know from—the Department of Energy had massive volumes of information and one of the things that we had to study was the SARPs. These were when we had to ship information, these were special—damn. I didn’t know you were going to ask that. Franklin: You said they were SARPs? Groff: Yeah, there were SARs and SARPs and we had to learn what those meant. They were rules written by the Department of Energy, and we had to incorporate our knowledge of SARPs into operating procedures when we were going to ship them. So that was the most challenging for me, was learning the bureaucratic system of the Department of Energy. Franklin: Right. Yeah, I bet. 0:10:54 Groff: And our operating procedures, we had guidebooks that told us how to prepare them, all the different parts of it. The introductions—we had to incorporate safety features into it for the operators. There was a lot of training we had to do that had to be trained as we did in radiation and criticality and alarms. We had to know how to suit up to go into rad zones. I did, I knew how to do that. That was a long time ago. We had to learn how to put on the suits, especially to go into the canyon building upstairs. We had to have a mask on us, gloves. And that was a very challenging thing, too, because I had to go up and observe things so I could write my operating procedures. That was just one aspect of it. 0:11:59 Franklin: Were you allowed to take recording instruments in, like a tape recorder or a pencil and paper? Groff: Well, paper and pencil is just about the main thing I had to do. Because you had to worry about if something got radiated, you’d have to lose it. One of the things you didn’t want to do is wear your wedding ring. Because if it got radiated, it’s goodbye wedding ring. They’d get rid of it, being low level waste then. Franklin: Did that happen enough that that was a real worry for people? 0:12:35 Groff: Well, it must’ve been, because they talked about it. But it’s been a while since I thought about suiting up. We were trained every year on how to do that, how to suit up to go into a rad zone. And going into the Tank Farms, we had to wear things over our shoes and laboratory coats, and as I recall we wore things over our hair. It was very interesting, all those—we had to suit up for the different process buildings. And I worked at all of them. And all the Tank Farms. 0:13:22 Franklin: Wow. So you really got to travel pretty much all over the Site. Groff: In my job, yes, I was everywhere on the Plant. Franklin: What kind of clearance did you have? 0:13:33 Groff: Ultimately, I had a Q clearance, was the high level one. That helped me get into a couple of buildings. One of the plants, we stored plutonium. I had to go in there to do some assessments and I had to go in and I had an armed guard with me. I had radiation protection people, and other managers. I had to go in there and it took about nine or ten people to escort me. And, we had what I call Z Plant, Plutonium Finishing Plant. I had to have a clearance to go in there and observe and study the gloveboxes which is where they did the plutonium work. Now, these plants I think are mostly torn down now, decommissioned. But when I worked there, we were actually producing plutonium. PUREX was actually working. So it was interesting work for me. 0:14:45 Franklin: Great. Are there any other ways in which security or secrecy impacted your work? Groff: No. Franklin: Okay. Groff: No. I was examined—well, when I first went there I had to fill out a personnel security form, a PSQ, for the FBI to investigate my life. And they had to check my life all the way back to when I was in college. And when I was in service, which I did for two years, active duty. I had to remember where my duty stations were and my eight years in reserve. So they had to check everything. Plus, I had to name my relatives, my family members to check into, including my mother-in-law and my father-in-law. So it was very extensive. But I was proud to get that FBI clearance. 0:15:45 Franklin: I would imagine so. I want to move, now, to—and thank you for sharing so much about your work. I want to move to something that I think is really interesting, and that’s the creation of the Hanford Family and your involvement. And I’m wondering if we could start from the beginning of that. How did—what was the Hanford family and how was it started, why was it started? Groff: Well, we started because there was an awful lot of activity against us. Organizations like HEAL out of Spokane and of course in Seattle they had the organization that Gerald Pollet had, America Northwest or something. They were always pounding on us. And we wanted some recognition that what we were doing was good for the country. And that’s why we organized it. I think we felt that we were besieged. I know I felt that way. And I felt we should fight back. And for about five years, that’s what we did. We organized and our leader was Mike Fox, who was an incredible engineer. We had a lot of other help; Larry Haler, for example; Bob Drake, who’s a county commissioner; me; Ruth Nelson managed our office. And we just sort of grew and we just sort of started, we sold caps that said Proud of Hanford and our bumper strips and things. 0:17:41 Franklin: What were the ways that these groups like HEAL, which stands for Hanford Environmental Action League, right? Is that— Groff: That’s exactly what it was. Franklin: What were the ways that HEAL and Gerald Pollet’s group that you felt— Groff: Heart of America Northwest. Franklin: Heart of America Northwest, that’s right. 0:18:03 Groff: Well, they would constantly get in the media and write stories about us. So what we felt was, we were going to have to get in the media and rebut or refute what they were saying, and that’s what we did. I remember one time we went to Spokane and Wanda Munn, who was interviewed by—well, I forget which—it was one of the channels up there. We were there to support her in a debate. And then a bunch of us went to Seattle to also go to a debate. There was always movements to close us down. That’s what they wanted to do. Shut everything down, oppose the Hanford Project. And like I say, we felt that we were under siege. We only lasted for about five years, but we did communicate our message a lot, wrote letters to the editors, raised money, we had rallies. A couple times we went to the state capitol and had a rally there, and I was proud to be the master of ceremonies and introduce everybody. And we did get in, I think we did get in to see Booth Gardner, who was the governor at that time. And we were always going—people that opposed us—Wyden, Representative Wyden of Oregon, did not like us, was always coming out against the Hanford Project for something. And Brock Adams was the senator as I recall at that time. We tried to get these people to support us instead of constantly opposing us. So that’s why we got organized. 0:20:10 It was five years of pretty exciting times, being able to speak in favor of things like PUREX, the N Reactor, which we thought was a valuable resource, dual action, dual purpose. N Reactor produced plutonium and power. Which was your pictures—President Kennedy was here when that was operating. He was here to speak on that. So we were proud of what we were doing, and that’s why we say we are proud of Hanford. Of course, now everything’s gone out there, and that’s the way it—you know. As I have always known, all good things have to come to an end. And that did. 0:21:03 Franklin: What did you feel that you accomplished with the Hanford Family? Groff: Well, I think we accomplished giving our message out. And a couple other things follow after that. Ray Isaacson and I organized the Energy Communities Alliance, which is still in effect. We got together, we met in Denver with people from Denver. There was a nuclear project there. North Carolina. Franklin: Denver is Rocky Flats, right? Groff: Rocky Flats. We met with people from there and organized that, the ECA. And I was proud to be one of the first vice presidents of it. 0:21:49 Franklin: And what did the ECA do? What was its mission and what did it— Groff: Again, it was to get the message out that energy—that the cities can defend themselves. That’s essentially what we did. and we organized Benton County and Kennewick, Richland, was in that, as I recalled. Benton City. And that’s what we did, was to organize a group. We were advocating for nuclear power. That’s what we did. And we were different cities that were part of the Manhattan Project originally. We felt that was an important message to keep going with. So that’s what we did. Franklin: And how long were you involved with the ECA? 0:22:46 Groff: Oh, just a couple of more years. I was on the Kennewick City Council when I went back there. Ray Isaacson was on the Benton County Commission and he represented Benton County. I basically represented the cities when we organized the ECA. And I understand they’re still in effect today even. Franklin: Yeah, they’re actually meeting in Richland later this month. Groff: Yeah, I heard that. I’m very pleased with that. Franklin: Yeah, I think a lot of the attention now has shifted to the Manhattan Project National Historical Park and how the cities— Groff: Yeah, the B Reactor. Part of that. Franklin: Yeah, and how the cities can support that. 0:23:27 Groff: But I think that’s what we did. That was what we were trying to do was say, we did something for this country. And we’re proud of that. We used to argue with people about World War II and the bomb. You know, well, in my case, personally, it saved my dad’s life. He was in the Air Force, and a lot of men had to go from Europe to fight in the Pacific. And I think it saved hundreds of thousands of American lives and Japanese. We used to debate that with people on the peace—the people who were, what I call a peacenik. I don’t mean to be insulting. Franklin: No, no, that’s fine. Groff: Anyway, that was my personal opinion. 0:24:18 Franklin: Sure. Sorry, excuse me. In your opinion, what do you think—why do you think people misunderstood Hanford? Groff: Well, I think it was a lot of things. 12 Island—things happening at the other reactors, like 12-mile Island, which my understanding is that it simply proved the backup systems worked. And Chernobyl. Well, I read a lot about that. And my understanding is that Russian engineers took out the backup systems and they were testing something when that happened. I am a retired member of the American Nuclear Society, and that’s where I got a lot of information on the technical side. I’m not an engineer. I was a journalist, a writer. I knew how to do good English. I can string words together. One of the things I said, the most difficult thing is, people have trouble just producing a simple, declarative sentence. And that’s what we had to do in our operating procedures. Anyway, I think we did good things. Franklin: Do you think those skills helped you in your work with the Hanford Family? Your journalistic skills and— 0:25:50 Groff: Oh, I think so. That, and I was apolitical science minor. And of course, later on, some things happened. We organized, we were part of the organizing of the Hanford Speakers Bureau. Mike Fox was a big part of that. I was in that. I had to have extra training to be a part of it, and I would actually go out on behalf of Hanford, the Project, to talk about radiation, waste management. I was proud of the things that we did. I think back on it, and I think we did good things. Of course, Hanford is gone. And that’s, like I said, all good things come to an end. Franklin: Was there ever any points of agreement that you had, that Hanford Family had with groups like HEAL or Heart of America Northwest? 0:26:54 Groff: I don’t think so. I think we fundamentally disagreed with them. They didn’t like what we were doing. We felt like we were doing the right thing. When I think about it, I know the newspaper in Spokane always supported HEAL’s comments. The newspapers in Seattle were always working with Gerald Pollet’s organization. Of course, now he’s in the legislature, as is Larry Haler, which I think is interesting. Franklin: Yeah. Groff: Both Haler and I ran for the city council in Richland in 1989. He won in Richland; I won in Kennewick. I served two terms and I’m pleased with that. It was on the basis of my work in Kennewick that I helped to organize the ECA. Franklin: Oh, shoot, I had a question and just slipped out of my mind. Groff: I hope I’m making some sense. 0:28:03 Franklin: Oh, yeah, very much so. When did the Hanford Family—well, actually, before I ask about the end, you mentioned earlier that you did fundraising. What did you use those funds for? Groff: Well, we had an office that we opened up on George Washington Way. We bought office equipment. We had to have a telephone line; we had to pay for that. And that’s where much of the money went for. And of course we would buy caps, have caps produced. We’d sell that to raise more money. At the end of it, we gave money—we gave furnishings to an organization known as the Columbia Basin Shrine Club. And I believe that much of the money, I think, went to the American Nuclear Society, the local chapter. To the best of my memory; that’s what I recall. Franklin: Sure. Were you supported at all by the government—by the Hanford contractors? Groff: No. Franklin: Oh, okay. Do you know how they felt about the Hanford Family? Formally or informally? Groff: I don’t think they cared one way or the other about what we were doing. Or if they did, they didn’t tell us. 0:29:34 Franklin: How did the Hanford Family come to an end? Groff: Well, we just sort of ended. We just sorted of stopped. We didn’t do anything else. For a couple of years, a bunch of us, we’d get together who were left, we’d get together for lunch. Everybody now has pretty much passed away. Like Mike’s gone. And people like Ruth Nelson, who was a key player in this when she ran the office. She was there every day, managing the office. Franklin: Mm-hmm. You kept working at Hanford after the Hanford Family kind of stopped being active, right? And so you worked, during the ‘90s, during that—right after the Tri-Party Agreement was signed, and the focus on Hanford shifted. Groff: That was one thing. We were asked to support the Tri-Party Agreement, which we did. In fact, I recall a few of us did drive to Pendleton, Oregon and there was a meeting there and we did support that. We did ask to support that. Yeah. 0:30:58 Franklin: How did your work change after the Tri-Party Agreement, your Site work? Groff: Well, for me, nothing. Franklin: Really? Groff: No. I did the same thing. I started writing operating procedures, creating manuals, information manuals. And that’s what I ended up doing through three different contractors. Arco and Rockwell and Westinghouse. And also, one thing I was thinking about, when I was at Hanford, I was on the safety commission that we had. I was chairman of it, and I produced some interesting safety films for video tape, which I enjoyed doing. I got to do a lot of stuff. Franklin: Oh, that’s great. Groff: With my acting ability. I was in the Richland Players at that time. I was on the council. And was very active just being—doing a lot of stuff, getting to perform. Franklin: You said training films. These were for the contractors? Training films for— Groff: Yes it was. I did three of them that were all safety-oriented. I naturally performed in all three of them. And they were produced at Battelle. Franklin: Okay. 0:32:28 Groff: The company gave me some money, about, oh, $8,000 to $10,000. That’s what it cost to do. And I wrote the scripts, and we went out, picked locations, and filmed them. So I wish I had copies of those left, but I don’t. I enjoy watching me in them. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] I think we—I’ll have to check our collection for those. It’d be fun to see if I can spot you. Groff: Yeah, there were three safety films. What I was in was the accident prevention council, the APC. I was a member and then I was promoted to chairman of it. And as part of that, I actually attended safety meetings with the president of the company. At that time, it was Paul Lorenzini, was our president. And I really liked him. He was—In one film, if I can retain this, the first one I did, I did a pratfall. Which I was stage trained to do. We filmed that at the Federal Building. And when we showed him, his safety people, he said, well, weren’t you injured doing that? I said, no, sir, I enjoyed doing it. Didn’t hurt me a bit. Well, I think he thought I was a little wacky, but that’s—being a little actor like that, a ham, he enjoyed that. So they had me do two more of those. 0:34:10 Franklin: Oh, that’s great. How did the mood of the community change when the production was shut down at Hanford and it moved to cleanup? Groff: Well, I honestly don’t—I don’t know if I can answer that. Franklin: Okay. Groff: I guess the people just accepted that’s what was going to happen. We were decommissioning and things. I felt bad about it. I thought we should’ve been doing more. 0:34:46 Franklin: When you were on the Kennewick City Council, and you served two terms, you engaged in a fight over wind turbines. Groff: Oh, yes, I did. That was something that—some of the money that we had helped fund that. It was about—there was a proposal to put wind turbines on Rattlesnake Mountain. That annoyed me, because I thought wind turbines were just totally ugly. And I did a lot of research calling—there were several sites in California: Altamont Pass, Tehachapi. And I would talk to people. I got a whole bunch of information, technical information, on why we shouldn’t have wind turbines. And I was in debates around the city and I won that one. I went, that’s one thing I’m proud of. We did stop the installation of wind turbines on Rattlesnake Mountain. Now I understand that the Indian tribes are dealing with that now. I guess they feel—it’s a good place for them. But I used to look up there at that mountain, you know, the highest—3,000 feet, the highest point without vegetation. I thought that was kind of interesting. And why ruin it with wind turbines? So I did, I led that fight. 0:36:19 Franklin: Great. And you retired, you said, in 1999, 2000? Somewhere in there. Groff: 2000, yeah. I worked 17 years there. Franklin: Great, well, we’ve covered just about everything. I just wanted to ask you just a couple more questions. So Chernobyl, obviously, was a major event worldwide but it also had some pretty big ramifications here in Tri-Cities. Groff: Well, they tried to compare it to the N Reactor. That’s one of the things that were used against N Reactor, and 12-Mile Island. 0:37:05 Franklin: And how did you—how did the Hanford Family and others deal with that? I’m wondering if you could kind of describe the dialogue or the kind of battle? Groff: Well, actually, we dealt with it—we were members of the American Nuclear Society. All of us were, kind of had dual memberships. We felt that the ANS did come out with a lot of good information on what actually occurred at Chernobyl and 12-Mile Island. Those were major, major events. I think it hurt this area. Franklin: Did you find the public to be pretty accepting of that information? 0:37:48 Groff: I think so. I think the Tri-Cities, we were in a lot of newspaper stories here and in Seattle, Spokane. And we were on TV a lot, too. Larry and I and Mike were interviewed a lot, talking about our side of it. So I think—and I think we had community support. They’re the ones who would come out to the rallies. Once we got people who came out to the rally when we had it. I think we actually had two of them when we went to the state capitol in Olympia. Well, we had to get some busses, three buses. And that’s where a lot of the money went, to hire the buses. We had a lot of—it was excitement for people. It was for me. I’ll admit it. I was excited. I felt like we were doing something. We were part of something. An important part of something. 0:39:57 Franklin: Yeah. I kind of—off that statement, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War? Groff: Well, I think we did our duty. I think we were important to the country. I think that’s the main thing. Hanford contributed in history as part of the Manhattan Project, and I think people should realize that what we did was vital to the nation, to the nation’s security. I think that’s the important thing. We were important to the security. And that’s why I was proud to work there. 0:39:46 Franklin: Yeah. Well, Cliff, thank you so much for coming and sharing about your career and your work with the Hanford Family. I really appreciate it. Groff: Well, thank you for the opportunity to do that. Franklin: Yeah. Groff: Like I said, I hope I made sense. Franklin: Yeah, no, you have. It’s been a really wonderful interview. Is there anything else you’d like to add before we conclude? Groff: No, I can’t—all I can say is thank you, and thank Wazzu for doing this. Well, I think I mentioned, I was an on-air talent a long time ago for fundraising for Washington State University, and I’m proud of that. Very proud. Franklin: I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that we’re generously funded by the Department of Energy through MSA. So, I want to thank them too. Groff: Okay. Franklin: Well, great. [VIDEO CUTS] 0:40:45 Groff: SAR is safety analysis report. We had to incorporate those into our procedures. Franklin: And what was that you were saying earlier about the evaporator crystals? Groff: Yeah, we had evaporator crystallizers. It was some of the last projects that I recall working on. There was one in East, one in West. Yeah, evaporator crystallizers, that was— Franklin: And how did you help with those? Groff: Writing procedures for the operators. I remember going out and climbing up the stairs. They were—the stairs were these three where you looked through like grates. You know what a grate is? Franklin: Mm-hmm. 0:41:39 Groff: You look down. Me with my agoraphobia, I did that, climbing around those buildings. You know those process buildings were 1250 feet long, about five stories deep, and I could walk up and down those stairs and it wouldn’t bother me a bit. Franklin: Wow. And just a minute earlier off-camera, you mentioned that you were the only non-engineer at that time to pass the engineering test. 0:42:13 Groff: Yeah. That was—in our group, the process control engineers, all of us had to take Phase I. Phase II was they had to study a plant that they’re working at, like B Plant was just where I worked out, WESF, PUREX, C Plant, T Plant, U Plant. The test was on all the aspects of that plant. And I picked that for B Plant WESF and passed it. And I got a certificate, I’m the only one—the only engineering writer that did that, that actually studied enough about it to know what went into that plant. Franklin: Wow. That’s really impressive. Groff: It was impressive and I—my manager at that time, Blaine Barton, who was the group manager, he told the guys, he said, you know, here I am a journalism guy, and I did that. And he thought it was quite an impressive achievement. And I didn’t mention it, but she did. But at home, I still got the certificate. It’s been framed. Franklin: Oh, that’s great. Well, Tom, thank you for that question. Hungate: Yeah. Franklin: That was a good one. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:43:37 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 9987 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview The Tri-City Herald ARCO Tank Farms PUREX Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 58 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 23 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Cliff Groff Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Cliff Groff was a reporter for the Tri-City Herald before becoming a writer for the Hanford Site. He started writing as an operations procedure specialist and retired as the senior engineering writer. In addition to working as a writer for the Hanford Site Mr. Groff also served two terms on the Kennewick City Council and was a member of the Richland Players. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 08/10/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. 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This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fa47502c08171bf80f5b805fefabd2e46.jpg 1dcfd89b533e26e399b9d34554899883 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F6660f59b710ac080c60889fce79ca005.mp4 7c1924e452a95fb176cdede01fe84200 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Bauman Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Curt Donahue Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Northwest Public Television | Donahue_Curt Camera man: Rolling here. I'll set this while you do your-- Bauman: Okay. We'll go ahead and get started. I'm going to start by just having you say your name and then spell it. Donahue: Oh, okay. It's Curt Donahue. It's C-U-R-T D-O-N-A-H-U-E. Bauman: Thank you. And my name's Robert Bauman. Today is August 7th of 2013. And we're conducting oral history interview with Mr. Donahue on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. And we'll be talking about Mr. Donahue's experiences working in the Hanford site. So I'd like to start maybe with having you talk about how you came to Hanford, what brought you here, when you came, and that sort of thing. Donahue: Okay. In 1944, my father was out of work, and we lived in White Salmon, Washington. And the superintendent of schools was receiving a job here in Richland as the principal at one of the schools and asked my dad if he was interested in having a custodian job here. And he was. He wanted any job. So we moved here in September of 1944 and lived in one of the original houses. I was nine years old, and I tell people now I used to roam the streets of Richland before they were streets. It was a very unique period to grow up and a unique town to grow up in. There were so many things that we were able to do that kids just can't do today. So when I graduated from high school, I went to work in the 700 Area to begin with. And, after a few months, transferred out to the 300 Area and ended up working really all over. I was in regional monitoring and then radiation monitoring. Bauman: So let's talk a little bit first about your years growing up here. You mentioned that there were sort of things that kids could do here that— Donahue: Yeah, we— Bauman: Do you have any stories or memories about that? Donahue: Yeah, one of the things that I remember most, and that was to be able to sleep outside. Just take a blanket and a piece of canvas and roll up in the backyard and sleep outside. The only hazards were the mosquitoes, and sometimes I'd wake up with an eye shut and a fat lip. And then there was a stream from an irrigation flue that ran along Wellsian Way. And my wife doesn't believe me, but there used to be a lake there. And there was a wooded area right where the flue emptied. And it was kind of a pool there and a sandy beach. And several of my friends and I would go camp overnight there, three blocks from home. But we were off in another world, and we really enjoyed having that freedom. Bauman: So this is near Wellsian Way? Is that sort of near where Fred Meyer is now? Donahue: Yeah. Where Fred Meyer is right now is actually the spot that had the sandy beach. And we would bring potatoes from home and bury them in the sand, build a campfire over them, and then have a potato snack before we went to sleep. [LAUGHTER] It was a lot of fun. Bauman: And you said you moved into one of the early homes. Where was that, what complex? Donahue: That was on Fitch, right on the corner of Fitch and Douglass. And the people that lived in the other end, the Browns, actually had the first option to buy, but they chose not to, so my parents bought the house and remodeled it and lived there for a good many years. 38 years, I think. Bauman: So what schools did you go to then? Donahue: I went to Lewis and Clark. In fact, that's where my dad was a custodian in those early years. And then I also went to school at Bethlehem Lutheran in Kennewick a couple of years. And my freshman year of high school, I spent at Concordia Academy in Portland, and then came to Columbia High School in Richland for the last three years. In fact, we're having our 60th anniversary this year. Bauman: So '53? Donahue: '53, yeah. Bauman: How big was the class, do you remember? Donahue: I think the class was 159. I know I graduated 59th out of that group. I was kind of in the middle. Bauman: Other memories of Richland at the time? Were there community events, any sort of special events that you remember? Donahue: Yeah. Atomic Frontier Days, of course, was our big event every year. And the church that I went to, the youth group usually put together some kind of a float. Sometimes it was maybe dressing up in something patriotic and riding on the back of a flatbed truck. But it was fun, and the people enjoyed it. And also, there was a group called the Mini Singers, and I was a member of that group and put on concerts every year until I outgrew it and was no longer considered a Mini Singer. When your voice changes from soprano to tenor, you are no longer invited. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: My sense of Richland at the time, especially in 1944, there's still wartime--'45, that there were people coming from all over the United States to work here. Is that your experience growing up? Donahue: Oh, yes. Yeah. Every other classmate was from a different state, and it made for interesting living. They all had stories. Some of them were worth retelling, [LAUGHTER] and some of them were not. Bauman: Let's talk about your work, then. You said you started basically right after you graduated high school, working at Hanford, 1953. Donahue: Yeah. Actually, in August of that year, I got hired on. I worked in the reproduction shop in the 700 Area. My first job was a back tender on an ozalid machine. And that merely meant that when the ozalid prints came off that machine, they'd come out in a continuous sheet, so you'd have to trim each one, fold it up, and package it according to the orders. So you had to be rather speedy to keep up with the machine. And I managed to work my way through several different promotions in there and got to run a good number of the machines—Photostat machine, offset printer, things that we don't use anymore, really, because of the new reproduction facilities. Bauman: So what sorts of things were you printing up there? Donahue: It was configurations of equipment that was being built out at the project, buildings, and a lot of floor plans and that sort of thing. You really didn't have time to look at what it was, other than here’s the edge of it, cut it, and fold it up and keep moving. Bauman: I want to go back quickly to before you started working there. Growing up here, how much did you know about Hanford and what was going on there? Donahue: We knew nothing until they dropped the bomb. And then the Villager newspaper had that massive headline, and the word got out what was going on here. And there was a parade leaving town. There were, I guess, a goodly number of people who wanted no part of it or were afraid of it, essentially. Bauman: So your recollection is a lot of people left at some point after that. Donahue: Yeah. Bauman: But by the time you went to work in '53, obviously, you knew what was-- Donahue: Oh, yeah. Yeah, we did. Bauman: So you said you started the 700 Area, and then at some point, you moved to the 300 Area? Donahue: 300 Area, and a group that was called regional monitoring. And the function there was to gather samples of vegetation, water, soil, and air samples and bring them back to the lab. So all we did was drive around the country, collecting samples and bring them back. Bauman: So you would get samples from various parts of the area? Donahue: Yeah. One route might be picking up water samples in all of the 100 Areas. Another route would be vegetation samples along the highway from 300 Areas to Two West. Soil samples in most anywhere. And then we'd do, with a Geiger counter, monitor about a 100 square foot area plot, here and there. And if we found large radioactive particles, we’d scoop them up in an ice cream cup and bring them back to the lab for their analysis. Bauman: So at that point, it’d go to someone else who would do the analysis? Or were you involved in that analysis? Donahue: I'm sorry. I didn't hear. Bauman: After you brought it back to the lab, that would go to someone else? Donahue: It would go to the lab. Yeah. We were not really part of the lab, other than we were the collectors. So we didn't know what the results were. Bauman: And so if you detected something that seemed to suggest that there was something present, you would scoop it up and-- Donahue: No. On one trip—it was a cross country trip through the sagebrush. And on my way to Rattlesnake Mountain, and an eagle, a golden eagle, jumped up alongside of me and got about five feet off the ground and right back down, and running, and it turned in front of me, and I hit it. And it was injured, so I killed it and brought it into the lab, and they did an autopsy on it and gave it back to me, frozen. And so I had it mounted. It was a 59 inch wingspan. Beautiful bird. It was a shame to have hit it, but I didn't know why it wasn't getting off the ground until they gave it back to me. It had a whole rabbit in its stomach. It was a little too heavy [LAUGHTER] to lift off the ground, I guess. Bauman: Too much weight. [LAUGHTER] So about how many people were, in terms of number of people, were involved in going out and giving this monitor? Donahue: As I remember, about 15, I think. Bauman: And so how long did you do that? Donahue: Oh, almost two years, I think. And then I went into radiation monitoring. Bauman: Okay. And so with the radiation monitoring, what did that involve? Donahue: Dress up and tail a pipe fitter. Make sure it's okay where he's at, what he's doing, that he doesn't get over exposed. And just keep monitoring that process. And that was primarily what I did in the Hot Semi-Works in the 200 East Area. And then the last months that I worked there, I was going school at CBC and wanted to be on a rotating shift. And so then I monitored for the mobile x-ray crew. And we might end up anywhere in the area to x-ray something that they were interested in. Bauman: And so your job was to make sure that people didn't too much exposure? Donahue: To set up a barrier, and we'd find out what it is we're going to x-ray. And the technician would say, well, I'm going to have to use this much amperes and so on. And so I'd get an idea of, really, how far away do we need to keep people? And we'd set up that kind of a barrier and then do the job and get out of there, go do another one somewhere. It was interesting. Bauman: Yeah. And were there dosimeters or something that you would check out? Was that part of it, as well, or--? Donahue: I had a—I don't remember the name of the instrument now. That's a long time ago. It read rads, rather than millirads as a gauge. And so that's the tool that was used to monitor that operator and myself. And also would walk the perimeter to make sure that we had the level as low as we needed to. Bauman: So this was in sort of mid to late 1950s? Donahue: Yeah. I left in November of 1957. I got caught in an ROF and, having just got into radiation monitoring, I was in the lower 10%, and that's about—I think I was the last one in that group to be laid off. Bauman: And what did you do, then, after that? Donahue: I went into fraternal life insurance for a short time over in Olympia and applied at Boeing. And because of the time I spent monitoring for mobile x-ray, I got on as an x-ray technician in the Boe-Mark tank shop. And then worked my way from there through engineering. And then my last assignment before I retired was the engineer operations manager for Commercial Avionics Systems. Bauman: And that was all at Boeing and-- Donahue: Spent 36 years there. Bauman: So during your time in radiation monitoring, was there ever an incident where someone did—was exposed to too much or anything along those lines and sort of incidences? Donahue: We had a problem—excuse me. At the Hot Semi-Works, there was a rupture in one of the lines going to tank farm. And so they brought in a big drag line to dig that up and connect to it and get a loop around the other side of where the break was. And I was monitoring that, and—it was a TP instrument that I was trying to think of earlier—and had it on a probe, a 30 foot probe. And I was halfway down in the hole, monitoring every scoop that the drag line brought up. And he finally brought up one that meter went off scale, and I come scrambling up out of the hole to get to where I could get a reading to determine what exposure I had and what the people up around it had, because there was 15, 20 people watching this excavation. And when I come running up out of the hole, they went running away. I was in the office, I think, for two weeks after that. Just kept me out of any more exposure for that length of time. Bauman: Right. And was that sort of the practice if someone had been exposed, they had to stay-- Donahue: Yeah. Depending on what level of exposure you got, I knew guys who had to sit for a couple of days was all. And some had even longer than I did. Those things happened in that kind of business. And you deal with it the best way we know how. Bauman: Yeah. Obviously, secrecy, security were very much a part of Hanford. Did that impact you at all? Donahue: Well, security was, I think, very good, and you were checked everywhere you went. And by the time I was working out there, there wasn't so much secrecy anymore. Processes were, and it didn't seem like any one person knew the whole process. And the kind of work that I did, I was not interested in the process. I was interested in keeping somebody safe and myself safe. So processes weren't high on my priority list. Bauman: Did you have to have special clearance to-- Donahue: Oh, yeah. I had a secret clearance. Bauman: In terms of getting on the site, did you drive your own car? Did you take buses? Donahue: No, drove cars and Jeeps and Dodge Power Wagon. I had the distinction of getting a Dodge Power Wagon stuck twice. Once because of a coworker told me, oh, you can get through there, and got about 15 feet into this wash that soaked to the running boards. It took two of those large Mack wreckers to lift that thing out of there. And then the other time was down by Horn Rapids. In the wintertime, the ground had frozen and then had thawed, so there was about an inch of thawed mud on top of the ice, and you could not get any traction at all. And it had to drag it out of there. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: What you would say were sort of the biggest challenges in working at Hanford for yourself, and what were some of the best rewards about your job there? Donahue: I think the challenge was—particularly the jobs that I had on the project—were one of being alert to whatever radiation aspects, whatever exposure you were getting. Make sure you were alert to it so that you knew how to deal with it, how to handle it. And, of course, out on the project, when you're running around with a Geiger counter out in the sagebrush, you're pretty alert for rattlesnakes, too. And some of us had those experiences. But I guess I never considered what challenges we were facing. I have a very healthy respect for radiation, radioactive material. I was never afraid of it. And I think that the guys I worked with had the same attitude. Bauman: And so the most rewarding part of working there, then? Donahue: I think that when you took a guy into a cell in Semi-Works or a PUREX facility, and you brought him out, and you could tell them that, hey, you didn't get anything significant today. And the thanks that they showed and displayed, thanks for watching my back, so to speak. That was the most rewarding. That, and just the people you worked with. I can't recall anyone I worked with that I had really dislike for. Everybody was fun to be around. Bauman: A lot of the students that I teach now were born after the Cold War ended. Obviously—you were working at Hanford in the 1950s, which was, really, in many ways, the height of the Cold War. I wonder if you have any thoughts about that in part for people who were born post-Cold War, things that you think would be important for them to understand about that period and working at Hanford during that time? Donahue: I don't think people who were born really do understand. We grew up having the fear—in fact, the day that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, we lived in White Salmon, and we went to church in Hood River, Oregon. And that toll bridge that we crossed, the toll taker told us that we had just been attacked. So on the way back from church, as a six-year-old, I'm looking downstream, afraid they're coming up the river. And that's kind of what we lived under for the next several years. And, of course, when those wars with Germany and Japan were ended, and it wasn't very long and we were into the Cold War. And lived again with, get under your desk, and this is what you do, and we practice it. And then the whole time working out here, well, until Gorbachev became the Premier of Russia, we lived under that threat. And so that was just the way you grew up, and I don't think people who have lived since then or even were real young in those latter years can really comprehend what that was like. And would I live that way again if I needed to? Yes. It was a time when everybody pitched in and did their part. Bauman: I wonder if there are any other incidents or events or humorous things that happened during your time working at Hanford that sort of stand out to you? Donahue: Yeah. The night after we found out the Russians had launched Sputnik, the x-ray technician and I, at the time that we were told it would be passing over, we stopped and got out where we were away from light, and we saw it going across the sky. And I just remember the eerie feeling to be able to look up there and see something that people had put up there. And it was working. And what did that mean? Where are we going to go from here? And of course, we've gone a long ways from there. And fortunately, we caught up and passed everybody. That was probably the thing that I would say stuck out most as a happening. Bauman: Sure. And then how would you overall sort of assess Hanford as a place to work during your years there? Donahue: I'm sorry. Say again? Bauman: How would you assess Hanford as a place to work? How was it as a place to work? Donahue: Oh, I was happy there. If I hadn't gotten laid off, I'd have retired there, I'm sure. I think it was a good place to work. I had fair management, and I thought I was paid a fair salary for what I was doing. I was very happy there. And I was disappointed to get caught in that kind of a situation, but I understood that it was seniority, and so you just roll with the punches and deal with it. Bauman: Is there anything that I haven't asked you about or that we haven't had a chance to talk about yet that you'd like to? Donahue: Hm. I have to tell one story. We were about 11 years old, I guess. The superintendent of schools at that time was Mr. Fergen, and his youngest son was the same age as me, and they lived in the house next door to the first house we lived in, one of the original homes, just east of the laundry dry cleaners. And Truman and I would wander, like I said, the streets before they were streets. And he was just wild about animals and plants and that sort of thing. And that's what he ended up doing in life, too. He studied biology. And one day, we were wandering around, and here was an irrigation ditch that had pretty well run dry. There was a dead muskrat. And he got so excited, and he picked that muskrat up, and he cradled it like it was a little baby, took it all the way home, and I thought, Truman, you're nuts. You have no idea what that thing's been—the next day at Lewis and Clark, he had it on a cart with the principal and going around to each classroom and giving all kinds of details about how the muskrat lived, and showing them their teeth. And I just—blew me away. I thought when he got home with that thing, his parents were going to tell him to throw it in the garbage can. [LAUGHTER] Here he showed the whole school! Bauman: Good story. Donahue: Ah, there's lots of other stories. My first job was selling newspapers in the cafeteria. And the cafeteria is the old buildings right across from the Federal Building. And I'd sell a Spokesman Review, and there were a number of men who would, when they finished reading their paper, as they went out to get on a bus or on one of the stretch cars, would give me the paper back, resell it. So it was kind of fun. Bauman: This was a cafeteria for Hanford workers? Donahue: Yeah. There were some big shots in there that would, because they had these stretch '42 Chevys, I think they were, that they'd piece together, and they had about four doors, five doors on each side. And some of these guys rode those, so you knew they were pretty much up there. And I believe that one of my customers was Enrico Fermi, because he was here incognito, and when I see pictures of him, I guess one of the guys that gave me my paper back. You don't forget those guys. Bauman: So what year would this have been around when you-- Donahue: Well, that would have been in '44, early '45. Bauman: Shortly after you got here. Donahue: Yeah. And then about mid '45, I got a paper route of the whole south end. Then I was in the big money. Right? [LAUGHTER] Bauman: So what paper was that? Donahue: Spokesman Review. Yeah. I earned enough to buy a brand new Columbia bike, and I used that for the next several years, delivering papers. That was a proud moment. Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Sure. Well, I want to thank you for coming in today— Donahue: Certainly. Bauman: --and sharing your experiences and memories. I appreciate it. Donahue: I'm glad to be here, and it's fun to reminisce, too. So it's been fun for me. Bauman: Good, great. Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 700 Area 100 Area 300 Area 200 Area Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:34:00 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 207kbps Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1944-1957 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1953-1957 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Curt Donahue Description An account of the resource An interview with Curt Donahue conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013-8-7 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2016-04-22: Metadata v1 created – [RG] Subject The topic of the resource Hanford (Wash.) Hanford Site (Wash.) Hanford Nuclear Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) 100 Area 200 Area 300 Area 700 Area Boeing Nuclear weapons plants--Environmental aspects--Washington (State)--Hanford Site. Richland (Wash.) Secrecy https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F5a7f0be5bf62e7a272f5cf9e90bc30b2.jpg ec69668cfd105a3844bc1dfc036df261 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F66986ea49c777b4977889b8a654cf444.mp4 6007493e41305ba6e1266b686800d020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Laura Arata Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Dale Denham Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Northwest Public Television | Denham_Dale </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Laura Arata: I feel ready. I think Dale feels ready. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Dale Denham: Yeah. Are you going to ask me some questions to begin with, or just-- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Arata: I sure am. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Denham: [LAUGHTER] We're here, huh? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Arata: If we could just start by having you say your name, and then spell your last name for us, please? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Denham: Okay. Dale Denham. D-E-N-H-A-M. I always let people know it's like the denim jeans. Can't forget me. [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Arata: Thank you. My name's Laura Arata. It's December 12, 2013. We're conducting this interview on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. So if we could just start, I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about when you came to Hanford, why you came to Hanford, and what you knew about it at the time. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Denham: Well, maybe it's better if I tell you when I first came in 1947. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Arata: Please do. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Denham: But as a young person, came with my family because my dad was invited to come up here and start a radio station. And Dad was in the radio business since the '20s. And his buddy says, boy, this is just a golden opportunity, and dad said, oh no. The war's over and this place is going to fold. Obviously, he was a bit wrong, but he had been through the Depression and all those kind of things. So we came. My sister and I would come up on the train and spend weeks, because they had a couple daughters. And they moved in in '47 and stayed here 'til '57. So the station today is KONA, but at that time it was KWIE. And it began in that period, and so we made lots of trips. But they lived in Kennewick, so I really didn't spend much time in Richland. They brought us out to see the barricade out here on Stevens, and the bypass to even get to the 300 Area. And at the time, their studios were being built, and so they were doing things in the Hanford House, which is today the Richland Red Lion. So I had some introduction to the Tri-City community. But I came as a graduate student, 1961, as part of a fellowship from the Atomic Energy Commission, which was in Health Physics. And it turns out I was in the first class of graduates of master's degree from the University of Washington. There were like ten of them, ten of us. We came and spent the summer here in '61. I got married that summer also. And we became acquainted with the site by--much like they did most of the engineers, they moved us around on site, kind of give us a familiarity with all the different aspects of health physics, which was radiation protection, basically, for the people and the environment. And so that was my introduction to the place. But while I was here, the opportunity to get a master's, because they didn't have a master's program at UW at the time, because we were the first class. And while we were here during the summer, a program opened up to get a master's by going back for the second year. So I went on back to University of Washington and was able to get my master's. Matter of fact, I was studying rheumatoid arthritic patients looking for ways to use the reactor there at the university to evaluate the gold in these patients, because gold was not a cure for the disease, but it could slow it down and at least make people so they could--so I worked with two individuals. I collected all their urine, because we were looking for activation techniques. And it took me most of the year because the opportunities were great to look to the future, but we didn't have all the technology yet. I was doing a lot of my work using a single channel analyzer and looking at different photo peaks, energy, gamma ray energies coming off of these radionuclides, because we're all full of sodium, and sodium has a very high energy activation product, sodium-24. And so that was a real issue. And I had to try different ways is to subtract that material, or that impact that we would see on the scans. But that was the beginning. And so I completed the degree. And then my wife had been born in Long Beach, California. Her grandmother was still down there. And so got the opportunity to go to Lawrence Livermore Laboratory--it was called Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at the time--in Livermore, California. So went down there and spent seven years--no, five years--and then came back up here. She developed some real allergy issues. And the kids were still young, small, a couple years old. So it was a good opportunity to come back. We knew what the area was like. We had spent the summer here, which is a tough time. And of course we remembered--I remembered from my childhood all the dust storms and the running out to grab the laundry to bring it in because it was getting dusty. But I just thoroughly enjoyed the sunshine. And my parents, Dad was from Baker City, Oregon, and mother was from Boise, Idaho. So it made sense, in one sense, that they might select to come here. But Mom didn't get along too well in the heat, and so this was not a favorite place. So that was probably part of the equation, too, that they chose not to even go any further, even though their friends were very successful here and sold out, and bought the station in Hood River and then retired, which is what they all did. So that was my introduction and coming to Hanford. And I served in a variety of departments--I mean, by name, but they all were basically radiation protection, health physics, mostly applied. In other words, I was dealing with how to take air samples, where to take air samples, how to take river samples, how to measure them, what to measure them for. I got into the environmental arena, which was really my long-term interest. And so I was involved in the late '60s in the water monitoring portion of the Hanford program, where I looked at the water in the schools, took water from the public schools, water from the wells, drinking water. We sampled water from the river directly. We monitored the river by passing it through detectors. And this was a period when most of the reactors were operating, so there was plenty of activity, and a real challenge to trace that. Where did it go? How was it going to impact the public? But I worked primarily in the 300 Area until I retired from Battelle in '95. Oh, by the way, that's who I came to work for, was Battelle. And I spent all my career up to that point with Battelle after I'd come back from Livermore. And I took the certification exam in health physics and became a certified health physicist, a diplomat of the American Board of Health Physics. I served on the board for that--certifying other individuals coming along. I taught some of the classes here. We started here when this was the graduate school, the graduate center, long before Washington State University became a part of the community. And so I had a lot of involvement in that arena. I just really enjoyed the field because it was broad enough that we could be concerned about x-rays and radiation that you would get externally from contamination, or get it on your body, in your body, so internal evaluation. But I was primarily interested in keeping the environment clean, which was--And I have to mention Herb Parker because he was really the father of the radiation protection, radiation safety here at the site. And Herb called me up one day--this was in the early '70s--and said, I've got an opportunity for you. I think that you would make an excellent candidate to make this move. And I said, well, I wasn't interested in moving. Well, he says, I think you should come over to my office and let's chat. Well, he had a job in an environmental organization called Radiation Management Corporation. He was a consultant to them, and they were in Philadelphia. And I'd always lived all my life on the west coast, so I wasn't very enthused. But I went, I listened. He sent me back for an interview. I went in December, just about this time, a horrible time to go back there. It was crummy weather. It was wet, dark, I couldn't see anything. But it was a little company, and they were about to grow with the nuclear industry to supply environmental monitoring support for the nuclear power reactors up and down the east coast. So I turned them down. But two years later I got another call and says, gosh, we really need you, and here's an opportunity. You better come. So by '74 I did take advantage, moved back there. And then I think it was Jimmy Carter that desired not to reprocess any fuel, and so the nuclear industry, the nuclear power industry dropped off—well, at least began its diminished increased places, increased sites, increased utilities going with nuclear. So that led to the need—we had too many people, grew fast, but then--And matter of fact, my original boss here, Bob Junkins by name, hired me in '67, and I worked with him for almost two years before I moved to the environmental. I was in the criticality safety, nuclear safety business in that time. And my whole role was to develop a criticality safety manual that we could use to audit and evaluate the users of nuclear material here on the site—Battelle's portion of the site. And that led me--then, with that environmental interest, I moved into the environmental monitoring portion in the late '60s. And that's what set me up for that. I went to Philadelphia, but I had to go find something else. And unfortunately, in that time period, I also got divorced back there in Philadelphia. And my children moved back to the west coast, to Bainbridge Island. So it was now, where do I go? Fortunately, there were lots of jobs. I didn't have any problem finding a job. But I chose to go back to Livermore because I was familiar with the territory and the people. And so I went back there. But it was only a couple of years, because I met a gal that I had dated in high school. And she ran into my sister, and my sister gave me an address. I wrote to her, and she called me up and says, what are you doing for Christmas? I said, I'm taking the train to go see my kids. Well, why don't you stop here and see me on the way in Salem? And we both went to Willamette University. That was where our degrees were from. And I'm still married to her today, 35 years. And we've had a great time here at Hanford. When I did retire, I moved—well, I helped--because she was Vice President of United Way. And so I took on the role of the listener as the United Way representative volunteer at the Reemployment Opportunity Center. This was 1995, when we had some 5,000 layoffs. I was part of that, only I wasn't a layoff. I took a voluntary retirement, early retirement. And through that I discovered that there were other positions available on the site, and Bechtel Hanford had come in as the environmental restoration contractor. And golly, I was involved in all that sort of stuff. So it was a perfect opportunity to send a note—I knew the head of the department from my health physics background and membership—and was offered that opportunity to go to work for them. So I spend another eight years with them. And then to finish my career, so to speak, I retired from them in '06, and then I got a call from Battelle, said, we're doing all these calculating the radiation risks of former atomic energy workers, and we really need some help. Could you do this for us? And that was nice because I did it at home. I would come to meetings with Battelle. And one of my close friends, the two of us kind of worked together, which was great, because we were working at home. I had to buy a new computer and all that because I needed access to much more sophisticated equipment than I had, because I was just a little email and that sort of thing. My exciting things that happened here, my work in the nuclear—criticality safety—that was one of my first papers, major papers, because while I was at Livermore I studied the transuranics, which meant the materials that were heavier than uranium, uranium, neptunium, plutonium, americium, curium and so on up the chain. And I got very familiar because I was working with a group of chemists in California as their radiation safety person, where they were trying to come up with these heavier elements. And so I got to know most of that material. And when I got up here and the criticality safety, because that was a concern too. We knew that some of these materials could go critical with the right conditions. So that gave me an opportunity to use that background that I had in knowing these materials, and then to put together, really, a summary. I evaluated the fire safety aspect, the explosion aspects, the radiation—internal as well as external—aspects. So that was one of my real highlights. And that came right at a time when I took the exam to become certified in health physics. The next the set of the exciting things were the working with the environmental, where I got involved with nuclear power reactors and in helping develop criteria for their environmental monitoring programs. You see, we went from Atomic Energy Commission, AEC, to ERDA, Energy Research and Development Administration. That was in '74. And then we became the Department of Energy, and that was about '77, '78. So I went through that period, so I was working for all three agencies, so to speak, just because one followed the other. I think my document that we finally issued on how to use environmental monitoring—that is, what techniques and so on—were recommended by what was called ERDA at that time, but became the DOE position for all the sites. And the way we handled that was, we went out as teams and visited Oak Ridge and Savannah River and Chicago. And we even went to some of the power reactors, or the early--not so much power, but the early development reactors, Idaho, testing, and checking out how they were doing things so that we could then look at a composite and gather the folks. We held a couple of workshops where we brought in folks from all these other sites and said, you know, here's what we see that ought to be the basic criteria. So that was a great opportunity to explore and see other sites. So I visited many of the DOE sites, Los Alamos and Livermore, as all part of that, too. So I had a wonderful time and experience in a whole variety of things, handling these transuranic materials that not a whole lot was known. And you came to know these things by working with them, working on developing shielding, because these materials also—not only external radiation but also neutron radiation, which you get primarily from accelerators, or from particular radionuclides that do give off neutrons as they fission. And so those were areas to explore and develop. But what a great place to have to have worked, to have had my time, and I really don't want to leave the community. We've enjoyed--and my wife, I thought, who really was--after she finished school at Willamette, she stayed there in Salem and went to work. And she's always been in the social services side of things. And she came here, and she headed up Girl Scouts, she headed up Red Cross, and then got involved with United Way. So we ended our careers here, so to speak, but a great place that we have enjoyed. And of course it's far different today than when I came 60 years ago to visit, because the agriculture and all those other things that have occurred as part of the site. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Arata: All right. That was a wonderful overview. I'd like to back up for just a minute to when your father first came here to start this radio station. I know you said he lived in Kennewick, but-- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Denham: No, he didn't. It was my father's best buddy. Yeah. They both were in Portland radio stations. Dad, and his name was Clarence McCready, but we called him Mac. And he chose to come, and brought us along to come and see. But Dad refused to come and be a part of the team. Dean Mitchell's the name I can think of right now. He was—and Dean Mitchell, I think, is still in the community, I think he's still alive. And I believe he goes to Kennewick United Methodist Church over there. I hope to see him because I'm going to be speaking at that church here in a couple weeks, actually about three weeks, in January. But I know I linked up with him because I had a lot of pictures from all this development of the radio station that my family—not my own personal family, but our very close family friends. And we only celebrated Easter and Fourth of July with his family. So you can see, we would come up here and be up here, and in a good time of the year, spring. Summer was hot, but these were occasions. Yeah, so my family never did move up here. But they came to visit when I finally settled here in '67. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Arata: Visited. Okay. So do you recall any impressions of the community at that time from your visits, what it was like to be here? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Denham: Well, the things I remember--and even as a graduate student, the rest of the guys--there were four of us came together--no, three of us. Three of us who had all gone to Willamette together--went to UW for our first year, and then all came here, and then went back to UW to complete that program--they all lived in Kennewick, but I lived here in Richland. I couldn't pass up the nickel each way bus. And I lived in on Gribble Street, which is now where Kadlec has taken over those what were two-story apartments and one-story fourplexes. And that's where I lived that summer in '61. And the bus came right down our street, hopped on for a nickel, and whether I went out to our areas or the 300 Area, because we spent one day a week during that time in the 300 Area in classes in the library, because that was an opportunity for us to learn more about the site, and about the profession and the field. So we had people tell us about instrumentation, told us about environment, told us about the various things that were related to radiation instrument development, and different kinds of survey instruments, and so on. And that was a nice part, because coming back a few years later--well, I left here in '62, finished my degree, and didn't come back 'til '67, so I was gone for five years. The bus system was still here, but the rates were different, and I wasn't using the bus then. And I went to work for Battelle, and my office was in the Federal Building. So I was able to walk to work. And I'm a busser, a walker, and I've been that all my life. I did that in Portland. So it was a logical step for me. The fact that I could get around--I was not much of a commercial--I didn't buy a lot of stuff. And so to this day we're not much consumers. And so it was great. There were a few places. I bowled, you know, I played tennis, golfed some, took advantage of the things that were available right here. I had a cousin--couple of cousins still in Baker City, Oregon, so we'd go down for weekends to go down and see them. And he was a dentist, so he took care of my dental needs early on. But once I settled here with my wife and family, it was no longer making those kind of trips for that purpose. We still had the friendship and relationship. I enjoyed just the—well, I guess I wouldn't say I enjoyed the heat, but yet I liked lots of sunshine, and the people. Enjoyed working with the people. And that was a tough part of retiring. And of course, I took care of part of that by volunteering over at the Reemployment Opportunities Center, which was over in Kennewick. And at that point we had moved out to the Village at Canyon Lakes. It was brand new, building that community and retirement. And so I thought, well, we'll get in on the ground floor. We'll be there and get acquainted, and so on. But then the opportunity with Bechtel, but clear out at the north end of the site. And after two years of that long commute, we moved back to Richland. But the opportunities here for my interests, and the opportunities on the job, because I didn't just stay right here, because I was working for Battelle, and we did a lot of—I suppose you would call it contract research because that was Battelle's primary activity. But yet it really took me to visit other sites and to see how we could improve what we were doing right here. And I think that that opportunity—I didn't have to go somewhere else. Yes, I did interview for jobs along the line, along the way during the time. I interviewed at Los Alamos. I interviewed at Rocky Flats and so on. But this was home, so to speak. And so it was a good place to stay. It wasn't—30,000 or so population. And the population of Richland, today I'm not sure what it is, but I don't think it's doubled in all this time. But the boundary where Yakima came in to the Columbia there was kind of the southern end of Richland. There was Richland Y and so on. But I lived essentially all my time within that confines. And of course now there's many homes and developments south, and yet still part of the incorporated portion of Richland. So yes, this was a delightful place, and it still is for me. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Arata: We've heard lots of fun stories about card games and checkers games and different kinds of things going on, on these buses. Do you have any fun stories? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Denham: Well, yes. I tell you, what I used the bus for was sleeping. Being a newlywed and having all these classes and riding the bus every day, I would often take a nap on the way home. And often I'd end up at the end of the bus. Rather than getting off at my stop, I would discover, oh, I missed the stop, so I got a little walk in. [LAUGHTER] But yeah, there were card games on the buses. I was not a bridge player, and that was one of the—I played at pinnacle and hearts. And we played on the job. My goodness, we kept our scores on the blackboard in the office. Yeah, we played hearts. And there were other games, I'm sure, but that's what I remember the most. And I remember, also, we were conscious of our walking hour, keeping track of our weight and all. So we would walk over—after lunch we'd walk over and check our weight at the medical, go weigh on the scales. And I was never a smoker, but one of the guys in the group, even the leader, was a heavy smoker. But one of the guys who was roughly my age--and matter of fact, he went back to grad school, and that opened the door for me to step in and take his job in the environmental in the late '60s. So that was ideal. And that was another thing. We were paying attention to those things that now the society is beginning to look at. So we looked for those kinds of things. I think the working environment was great. In my later years here, before I left Battelle, it was altogether different, because now the opportunities within Battelle were more in the research arena. And that wasn't my forte, it was not my capabilities, not my interest, in going out and trying to obtain contracts and so on. So I found it--and that's—when the opportunity to retire early, I just took advantage of it. My wife had a good job, and so she became my sugar mama to take care of me, take care of us. And we had no children living here. Our children were all grown by then. And so our needs were different. But I missed the people. But yet I was interacting every day, because I was there usually half a day. But some days I'd be there all day. And I kept the hot water hot so I could make cocoa, or soups, or whatever people who were coming to find jobs and to look. We did mock interviews and all that sort of thing. So it was a continuation of that people interaction that I really enjoyed. And of course, when one does retire, a number of my friends have said the same thing. And yet today I don't know how I have time to work, because I'm plenty involved in the community. And so that's part of--my wife and I joined the Gideons, and so that's been one of our major activities in our retirement, that we've served as presidents of the local camps on a geographic basis, and also area directors. And we have a state convention coming up this next spring, so we're heavily involved in that. So we have enjoyed that aspect of life here. And we have a daughter in Olympia, and we have a son—well, a daughter and family in Olympia and same in Portland. Otherwise the kids are south of Eugene and Cottage Grove, and then a son and family in Albuquerque. Neither of the sons—both have PhDs—and neither are involved in the nuclear business. Both of them engineers. One basically what I would call a—well, one's a civil engineer with water interests. And the other is involved in materials engineering, works for Ball Aerospace, so has a lot of involvement in things that I might have had an involvement in, but not from the nuclear standpoint. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Denham: Yeah, the things I remember—like I say, we had activities with other families right here. We were involved in the church. We got involved in the church. I'm in a different church today, but that's where we raised our kids. So it was a good community environment. In terms of what else did I do, well, I think I mentioned I had the children, and we did things with them. We camped. And I wasn't a fisherman or a hunter, so those things weren't part of my interests here in the community. But I remember we would do the sledding and so on when the conditions were right, the snow and Carmichael Hill, because we lived not far from there, we'd walk over there, and swimming pool. Back in the very early days--and let me go back to that for just a moment. Because when we came, McNary Dam wasn't here. So we had to take a ferry to cross from or Oregon to Washington, or we had to take the Bridge of the Gods back, 40 miles out of Portland, and then take that route. And we'd usually come over Satus Pass and come into Kennewick that way. Today you can take Highway 12 and 14 in all the way to Vancouver on the Oregon side--I mean, on the Washington side, excuse me. So that was interesting because this was a free-flowing river. There weren't any dams in that area. And so riding that ferry in a fairly narrow portion of the river was—and these are one- or two-car type ferries. I mean, this wasn't a big ferry like you see out of Puget Sound. And it was difficult to reach the shore. Sometimes you'd get close and you'd have to back up and try again. And then I watched all the highways come in over the Horse Heavens. Because it used to be you could stay on the Oregon side and come around through Walla Walla that way. So it was a whole different—and it took longer. The roads weren't as nice. And so I watched the—several times they've rebuilt the highway over the Horse Heavens. Because we have family in Portland, we go down there every month or two with grandkids. They're about to finish—well, the last one is in his senior year in high school, and the other's in college. And all the rest of our grandkids, except the ones in Albuquerque, are all over 21. So our involvement with them is a lot different than when they were younger. So yeah, it was a different place just because of the getting around. And we didn't have a public transit. We didn't have—in those early days right here. But we had the Hanford buses. And you can see the one down there by the Crehst Museum. And that's what I rode much of the time, up until when I chose my work with Battelle. By then, going out on the site, it was about $50 a month to ride the bus then. It was more expensive. And then I did go through some periods of spending time out on the site, where I'd spend a couple weeks for some activity, work-related, and I would end up being able to take a government car. And I worked in the Federal Building, so it was convenient. We had a motor pool there. So that’s some of the background. I don't know if there's other things that you were hoping to talk about, or remind me of. [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Arata: I think I just have couple more questions. One thing I wonder if you could talk about, obviously much of your career at Hanford spans the Cold War period. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Denham: Mm-hm. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Arata: So of course security was a very important concern. Can you talk a little bit about how that impacted your career? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Denham: Well, it certainly did. And I was fortunate in the sense that I had the Atomic Energy Commission fellowship. In order to get that and apply it at the University of Washington, I had to get security clearance. So I was cleared, and that happened when I went to Livermore. Right after I finished grad school, I arrived at Livermore. And because I had a clearance, I was assigned those facilities to be radiation safety person. I know that you know the name Ron Kathren, or have come across Ron Kathren. And Ron Kathren became my officemate there. He didn't have the clearance. So I got to be in places and work things that he wasn't able to—well, he was eventually, I mean, he got the clearance also. And of course, late in my career—like when I went to Philadelphia, I didn't need a clearance back there. And when I came back, yes, I had to get my clearance re-instituted in Livermore, because Livermore is still very much involved with weaponry, or at least the development of materials. And so yes, clearance. But fortunately, I didn't have an issue, and because I had had it really at the beginning when I went to grad school, that didn't impact me. And some of my site visits at Oak Ridge, I had to have special clearance to get into some of the places. One of the things I didn't mention, and I should, I got involved in the decommissioning. And of course, that was the activity with Bechtel Hanford. But the other thing I got involved in was what we call development of an emergency assessment resource manual. We called it HEARM, and they called—because I was working with some gals, too, that was my harem. But it was Hanford Emergency Assessment Resource Manual. Well, our sponsor at DOE headquarters began to see the utility of that at some of the other DOE sites. So we went to Livermore, we went to Los Alamos, we went to Oak Ridge, we went to Savannah River. We developed those same manuals for these other sites. And basically what it was was an identification of the--a safety assessment. And DOE was forcing all to look at the safety of their business. And if something went wrong, how bad could it be? So that's what this manual was, was to identify the facilities and the materials. It was structured originally about radiation, but it became clear that there were also hazardous chemicals and other materials that needed to be of concern. And if they had an explosion, if they had a venting, they had a situation, where would that stuff go? So we developed this. We looked at site boundaries. How far to the site boundary, in what directions, look at wind speeds, all of that. So we combined all of that into a manual so that we could use that here at Hanford, called the Unified Dose Assessment Center, UDAC. And that provided a tool so when an emergency occurred, we knew we had an indication of how bad it could be. We could flip to the page that was Building XYZ, and we could say, ah, this really is not likely to be any kind of an issue. Or just the opposite, that it was an ABC, it was the top priority, the most hazardous materials on the site handled in that building. And what were the projected, from the safety assessments, for the actual use of those facilities? And so that was an exciting kind of thing, because we got into sites where they had more security need than what I had to do for those. And so yes, we got into those. Matter of fact, some of the materials that we developed were basically classified information on how much material is in this building, where is this building relative to the site, and so on. So those kind of things we had to tone down, we had to talk about and find ways. And they became, essentially, not top secret, but at least they were less. And so we provided not only these manuals for right here, but also DOE headquarters got the same copies. So whenever something was going wrong, they're evaluating what's happening out here, or from Livermore, or from Sandy, or Savannah River, or one of the other sites. So yes, that was the emergency management aspect. And Battelle, that was one of the things that I moved from that development into working with the—Battelle had a contract for the 60 nuclear power plants to do emergency exercises. And I even got involved with my wife with the Red Cross, because Red Cross would get involved in emergency exercises, especially for the supply system here. And I remember Mesa School was the first one. And so I got a couple of my health physics buddies, and we would go and be the consultants. Because the farmers would come in and say, well, what should I do? My cows are out there on this potentially contaminated ground. What do I need to do? This was just--these were what-if type exercises. So that was an aspect I guess I just had passed over and forgotten all about. So even had an involvement with my wife indirectly because of that. So with these nuclear sites, I got involved as an evaluator to go out either for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or DOE, and evaluate these exercises. So I was involved not in developing those exercises, but evaluating and being there on site. And also, as a result, I got to go to the Kennedy Space Center and involved in a couple of spacecraft launches that had nuclear materials. And so that was exciting, paid to go. And also got involved in many cancellations. You know, weather didn't turn out right, we'd get thunderstorms or a rain, and you'd have to wait it out for a few more days. Those sort of things. Galileo, I think, was the one major one that we were sending heat sources, radioactive sources into space, so if they were to have aborted—not for reentry, but on the launch, that's why we were there, to take air samples, you know, we were teams spread out. So there's another aspect I'd forgotten about. [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Arata: Very cool. You had this multiplicity of great jobs, it sounds like, throughout the course of your career here. Is there anything that stands out as being the most challenging or the most rewarding? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Denham: Well, I think the challenge came later in the career when—as I mentioned, that Battelle was going off in a research wing, and that wasn't where my expertise and my capabilities were. And so a challenge to—if I'm not going to stick around, what am I going to do? Because nuclear power was obviously diminishing with time, especially when you get up in the 90s, and so on. So that became one of the challenges, if I were to retire, what would I do? I was young enough, late '50s, I didn't need to retire that early. And the other side, the side as I shared, I think sort of the three or four major things that I was involved in that I very much enjoyed, one—and I haven't shared this directly—I was involved with Joe Soledad. And I don't know whether you've interviewed Joe, but I know Joe's been interviewed. I just don't know who were involved. But Joe was developing all the criteria to evaluate all these radionuclides that had been released here in Hanford, had been released at other sites, or could be—weren't necessarily all released, but I mean, if they got into the environment and got into people, what kind of doses could those--Well, I was involved with Joe as my mentor. I developed the numbers that went in—in other words, I looked at the decay schemes of each of those radionuclides and then built the numbers that would go into the equations. I didn't develop the equations for how much got into the human body, but I developed if you had radioiodine, or you had strontium, or you had cesium, or you had plutonium, what could that mean inside the body? And so that was a great opportunity that I had developing those, because those became—and still used today—all that environmental pathway stuff that Joe had developed is still in use today, used by the EPA, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Yeah, they've added more materials and modified things a bit. But the modifications are more related to, now, more knowledge about some of those decay schemes and so on, but that impact. So that was one of the exciting things. The criticality safety manual. I get the manual done, and I got to move on to something else, because once you've developed the manual, unless you're using it--yes, I was. I was out evaluating criticality safety. I was auditing, basically. Oh, that was, yeah, I could do it, but it was more fun to go out and get involved in the environmental monitoring, choosing which sample, where to sample, what to analyze those samples for, and then write the report to show what this means impact-wise for the site. Going from there, then, into developing what should an environmental monitoring program look like, either for a nuclear power plant or a place like Hanford. That was that exciting and thrilling, and I felt I made a contribution. And then to jump over into, now you understand that stuff, and now relate that to emergency preparedness and evaluating emergency preparedness. Did you take into account? I will have to say, because I was involved in a course, and I've forgotten what the course was called, but it was at the Nevada test site. And we were there--and I think it was only Hanford person there at the time. That's when I was involved in emergency preparedness. And this was a course to really walk us through scenarios and situations, and see the mistakes we could make. We could walk over a wire on the ground that we shouldn't have because it was live, or could've been live, and not recognizing that. You're taking an action for what you see in front of you, but then missing out on something that you shouldn't have done as part of that. And that became part of our evaluation, when we looked at mistakes they would make, not take an air sample, or take it where it shouldn't have been. You should have taken it over here instead of over there, you know, those kind of things. So was able to use all that background and material that I had had as part of my career. I feel like, yes, had I started over today, I think I would've probably gone the environmental, but more from an atmospheric and understanding weather. That was an interest as a kid. I've watched—this is before television—and I would pay attention to the thermometer and what was going on. Is it going to snow tomorrow, or that kind of thing. But otherwise, no, it was great. And the courses and the opportunities afforded by this diverse kind of a field, that when I came, and when I was a health physicist, I didn't know what a health physicist was, but I think I have a pretty good idea today. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Arata: So obviously, a lot of my students now were born after the Cold War. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Denham: Right. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Arata: They don't really understand that time period. Is there anything you'd like for future generations who may be watching this video to know about what it was like to work during that time period and contribute to that effort? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Denham: Well, obviously, one of the things, being here in Hanford, was because we had all these reactors operating, which meant that there was always contamination going into the river, contamination going into the ground. Reprocessing was occurring, but was stopped at a time period. So then we had to—and of course, today we still hear about whether it's from the west side or else around the country. Even our own family ask questions. What about the leaking tanks? What does that mean? And from my perspective, I have an idea what that means. And I think I look at it in a lot different mindset, because I know that yes, it's of concern, and it should be. But on the other hand, it's not going to kill me. It's not going to give me a dose that I won't want to stay here, I won't want to live here. And because, like I said, in the older days, when all the reactors were operating and so on, we had a lot more radioactivity to deal with. But Joe's equation--Joe Soledad--those pathway formulas and equations and so on that we used, we proved with that that hey, yes, there is material out there. It's of low consequence to you and me as residents of the community. And I think that that was probably a kind of thing that we—the scientists, let's say, the science side--were not very successful in communicating that to the public. And I don't think we are today. Because I can remember one of my daughter's friends, when they had the different kinds of sweeteners, and they would say no, we're going to cut those off. And so when her dad worked in the grocery business, he could bring that stuff home, and no, I don't think we want to use that. Again, uninformed about those kind of things. And I think that's the aspect—that we get a bug, a thought of what an impact could be, and yet we don't know the whole story. And I know I tried, but on the other hand, that wasn't my role particularly. But I was aware. And I think that, looking today, we look at so many more things today in terms of hurtful environmental impact kinds of things. I'm thinking just the environmental movement, if you will, because our daughter-in-law is very much involved there, and her daughter is now in college and looking in that same arena. The other daughter-in-law down in New Mexico, that was one of her areas of interest. And she studied bugs and insects and that sort of thing. Today she's not using that, because she's really into health and doing private yoga and exercise training. But the Cold War meant that--well, that's where it was nice when I got to go the other sites, because that allowed me to kind of see, and to put all this together as an understanding of the whole package, and not just what's happening in Hanford or what's happening at Oak Ridge or whatever, to be able to realize that probably some choices—I mean, the making the choice here of Hanford, I think, was a wonderful choice. Choosing this remote location--it's not so remote today, but I think it was an excellent—from all the material, all the information we knew at the time. And yet places like Savannah River, where you've got all kinds of groundwater and all kinds of those kind of issues, maybe that wasn't such a good place, where the ability of stuff to move would be greater than a place like this. And I think what we saw, and what I remember just from the public, my own families—our own families would ask questions, which was very reasonable. And I think the understanding—and we've been watching—I'm digressing for a second, but we've been watching the Presidential wives series on television, so we're going back over the history and seeing some of the things that were going on as this whole business developed in our lifetime, things that we didn't realize, because some was top secret, not shared. And of course, I was perfectly happy to work in a closed environment, where you didn't share everything you did. For someone today, I think that the question aspect of business, and for the future, is always question what you're doing, how can it impact the environment, how can it impact people, how can it impact you yourself? Cellphones, all kinds of things that we use and are in use daily, but do we really know what the long-term impacts of these devices are? I think for the moment we feel quite certain that we're not creating monster issues that become-- But I like the environmental movement, because I kind of put my life together around that, an interest in seeing that we're doing the right things to keep us safe, and yet not say, you can't do that. And of course, the environmental impact statement business. I was involved partly in that too, in helping develop those. I guess my last one that I was involved in was in Tennessee, for the Tennessee Valley Authority, because they were going wide with lots of nuclear. And that was in the '90s, as I recall, when I went down there and was involved. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Arata: Is there anything I haven't asked you about that you'd like to tell us about? Any other stories that stand out? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Denham: Well, of course, we did have accidents. We had things that—yeah, I got involved in a cleanup in the 300 Area, where an underground pipe had broken. And this was americium, was a principal nuclide that had gotten into the ground. And we ended up digging that all up. But just chasing it, deciding where to sample, and digging up and then discovering, oh, the pipe is all corroded. So yes, everything that went down that drain. And so those kinds of things, I really enjoyed those, because you were evaluating a condition that was really an unknown. And I think that's part of what the environmental restoration contract--the Bechtel work that I was involved in, we were doing some of that, too, because we were making measurements and then determining, did those measurements give us what we need to know so that we can take the appropriate steps for remediation? And so I think that aspect, so to speak, of research piece might have been--if I were to start again, I might be more interested in research. But at the time, I was more interested in what we need to know so that we can take the right steps to move forward. I think that those are my observations. I was an enthusiastic worker. I just loved the opportunity and the people to work with. And we did a lot of group things. You know, I can remember back in the old days, Ron Kathren and I would have an equation on the blackboard we were trying to solve, and then leave it up there for a while with getting more information to make things fit. You took the information you had. And I was successful, probably published about, I don't know, 50 different papers in Health Physics Journal. And I also was involved in the Society for Radiological Protection in the British Isles. I gave two different presentations over there in the '80s and '90s, which is always nice to go and experience others. I had even looked at that as a possible exchange. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Denham: And as a result of those visits, I got invited to go to the Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna and work on an environmental plan with folks from all over the world. And we had interpreters, because we had Russians, and we had Canadians, and we had French and Germans. And so on—all that was nice. And they paid my way, and I got to spend--matter of fact, I made two trips in the same year on that activity. I had a third one, but the Department of Energy wouldn't allow me to go on the third one. So that adds to your enjoyment, your understanding and working with people who have come from different places, and yet have similar issues and problems, and how are you addressing—especially when we're trying to write a manual, an international manual that would be used wherever, in developing countries as well as advanced countries and so on, to protect people in the environment. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Arata: Is there anything else at all? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Denham: Not that's coming to me at this point. [LAUGHTER] I'm just delighted to have had this opportunity to share with you, even though it's very uncoordinated. [LAUGHTER] I certainly rambled. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Arata: No, that was wonderful. You gave us some great details. That’s always exciting for us to hear about. And I want to thank you so much for sharing with us. We really appreciate you taking time out. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Denham: Well, Laura, it was a pleasure sharing with you and getting to know you. I wish you well in your— </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Arata: Thank you. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Denham: --future work and finishing your PhD. I never got there. </div> Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri-Cities Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:06:42 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 5261 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 300 area. Bechtel Hanford Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1947-2013 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1961-1995 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Parker, Herb Kathren, Ron Soldat, Joe Carter, Jimmy Junkins, Bob McCreedy, Clarence Mitchell, Dean Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Dale Denham Description An account of the resource An interview with Dale Denham conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 12/12/2013 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2016-05-24: Metadata v1 created – [J.G] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Nuclear weapons plants--Environmental aspects--Washington (State)--Hanford Site. Nuclear weapons plants--Waste disposal--Environmental aspects--Washington (State)--Hanford Site. Nuclear instruments & methods Richland (Wash.) Kennewick (Wash.) 300 Area Battelle (Wash.) Bechtel Hanford Kennewick (Wash.) Livermore Los Alamos Oakridge Richland (Wash.) Savannah River https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Ff382a23fcd038452449b8e5f06182749.JPG 3e67685eee00cd52b35ca73813a2bb88 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Dan Ostergaard Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Dan Ostergaard on December 7th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus on Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Dan about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Dan Ostergaard: Okay, my full name is Daniel Vernon Ostergaard. The last name is spelled O-S-T-E-R-G-A-A-R-D. Franklin: Okay, and your first name? Ostergaard: Dan. I go by Dan. Daniel, D-A-N-I-E-L. Franklin: Okay. Great. When I was doing that boilerplate, I almost said December 7th, 1941. Ostergaard. Me, too. Well, that’s in my—I still live World War II. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Oh. So, tell me how and why you came to the Hanford Site. Ostergaard: Okay. I got interested in photography in junior high school in Kennewick. And back—that would have been, well, I graduated from high school in ’65. Franklin: So you’re from the Tri-Cities, then. Ostergaard: Right, I grew up in Kennewick. Franklin: Okay, and when were you born? Ostergaard: December 27th, 1946. Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: So, I got interested in photography kind of through the chemistry class. I was a lab assistant, and the guy who was doing the yearbook needed somebody that’d shoot pictures. And I had done a little bit of stuff with my mom’s help at home, so that just sort of got the ball rolling. Did the usual school stuff, graduated Kennewick High School. And in high school, shot pictures for the yearbook. We had kind of a unique situation where the yearbook actually provided us the facilities, but they actually bought the pictures from us. So we were in essence a little business. Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: We had our accounts down at the local drug store that had a photo counter. And it was a real good training thing. We were given assignments—the yearbook advisor was named Mr. Shields, and he said, I need a one-column-wide picture about four inches high and I want four faces in it. I don’t care what they’re doing. I just want four faces. They won’t buy the book unless their face is in it. So that was kind of the direction we were given, and it was up to us to figure it out. And after I finished high school, went to CBC. In high school, I also worked at a portrait lab named Dave Studio in Kennewick, in the back processing film and prints and doing all the things you do. And continued that at CBC. I had my own stuff shooting on the side. And then I went to WSU in Pullman for two years. Through that time, I had worked two summers for the Hanford photo group. One summer in the Federal Building, and one summer in 300 Area in 3705 Building. It was Vietnam era. I enlisted, went in for two-and-a-half years. Got an early out when they were winding down. I called up my boss, Lance Michael, and I said, hey, I’m getting out of the service; you got any work? And he kind of said, when can you be here? I said, in a month? Okay, you’re hired. That was the interview. Of course, I’d interviewed for two summers prior, in essence. [LAUGHTER] So I started doing lab tech work, just kind of whatever was needed to be done. The reason that was so attractive, because the Hanford photo group was like Disneyland. There was everything there somebody with my background could aspire to want. We had the ability to do all the photo processes. We had very competent photographers. They were hired mostly out of Brooks Institute down in Santa Barbara. We called them Brookies. The lab people sort of saved the Brookies a lot, we thought. [LAUGHTER] After I got out of the service, we had just opened up the photo lab in 3706—they’d moved it from the old wood lab building at 3705. Went over there, and then just kind of evolved into doing higher, higher level things. The photo group had three different photo labs at the time. One in the Federal Building, one in the basement of the ROB, the Battelle building, and then one in 300 Area. They had all evolved for a specific purpose. The Federal Building lab was to keep the AEC/DOE people connected. The ROB lab was just directly for supporting Battelle at the time. They had just gotten the contract in, I think, ’64. Franklin: What does ROB stand for? Ostergaard: Research Operations Building. Franklin: Research Operations Building, okay. Ostergaard: Yeah, and then 300 Area, we did all kinds of things. And this was all pre-computer era. So we had—different labs did specific things. The color was done initially in the Federal Building. The ROB was pretty much black-and-white and copy work. And we did big enlarging and things like that. So some things, the jobs had to move back and forth to each lab’s specialty. So we actually had a courier who started at the Federal Building, picked up stuff and dropped off on the way out. Camera man: I need to interrupt this. I don’t think this is moving. I don’t see any numbers changing or anything. Ostergaard: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Really? Jillian Gardner-Andrews: Oh no. Camera man: It’s bothering me. [VIDEO CUTS] Franklin: …records digital, so I don’t— Camera man: Well, keep going. Let’s—I guess-- Ostergaard: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: He’ll get better a second time. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: So you’re saying that each lab had its own specialty— Ostergaard: Right. Franklin: And that there was a courier. Ostergaard: Right, right. And because each lab was separate, and there wasn’t a computer, the cloud, or anything like that, everybody had their own numbering system. Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: Which has led to complications to this day. Franklin: Tell me about it. Ostergaard: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: I process a lot of photos from onsite and it’s always very confusing as to why some are stamped 300 Area, why some are stamped Battelle, why some are stamped 700 Area, and this is—I want you to go into this in detail for me. Ostergaard: Okay, so, well, we’ll do that numbering thing then. If you see anything like with a 2-digit and then like an A or a B or a C and then three digits afterwards, those are from the ROB lab. Franklin: Sorry, two-digit, ABC, and then three numbers? Ostergaard: Yeah, the idea—first of the year, they would start out at A, and then run with the numbers, you know, the first two digits? So you could look at that. The first two was the year, always. And the second one was just an arbitrary A, and then if it ran through 999, they went to B and upward. The Federal Building numbers started out pretty much as four-digit numbers. And that was a carryover from the GE photo lab days. Some of those things I still never have figured out what they did. And then 300 Area just started out with the year, 7, 8, whatever. And then generally they’d run four digits. It got to be later on they would run five because they were running out of space. And then in 1992, we had our own computer system written, so it kind of linked up. Those dates always started with the first of the year and then the month, you know, 01. And then there was three digits after that. So by looking at those numbers, if you see an 89 blah, blah, blah, you’d know that was shot in 1989. Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: So that was some of the numbering systems. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: And then there were other—we supported some of the metallurgical labs and things who had their own thing going on also. So we supported a lot of specialty labs in the 300 Area, doing things then. So we would process film for them, make prints, and give them back everything. We were doing fuel studies where they would take fuel pins from bundles that had been through the reactor process, and in the 327 Building, section them remotely—because they’re screaming hot—and usually those things were about the diameter of a pencil. So they’d slice that across. And then through periscopes, using 70 millimeter film and Hasselblad cameras is actually shoot like an aerial mosaic of that thing at 75x or 125x magnification. We would process that film, print it on a machine printer 2x, and then literally mosaic them together. So you’d end up with like a large pizza. And that would show the cladding and then what had happened to the fuel inside. These things were fairly important. They spent a lot of money making them, so— Franklin: Right. That sounds like very technical work. Ostergaard: Well it was, yeah. We had at all levels. From the PR thing to the technical part. And you supported a lot of engineers for reports. We did a lot of what would be promotional stuff now for people to go back to DC and whatever, for pushing their project to get funds. In addition to—and then of course just reprinting. Negatives were in the file. And that was the other part of the problem with the negatives, is they were retired, not in any systematic order, they were just—when the lab ran out of space, we’d box up five cabinets’ worth of negatives, send them off to storage—you know, with the transmittal. But still—and then it got complicated—well, you know, I say, all this sounds silly, but it was all at the time very rational. You can’t judge—[LAUGHTER] They were doing good, actually, for what they were doing. But the specific photographers tended to work out of specific labs. Because we usually had seven or eight full-time photographers going at that time. And some of these guys were more specialized in technical things, and some of them were more people-oriented. And so, you had to kind of assign the right type of personality to the job. You didn’t want to assign a technical person to go out and shoot a PR thing somewhere. That would get you in trouble. [LAUGHTER] They just weren’t groomed for that. Franklin: Right. Ostergaard: [LAUGHTER] We had—along those lines—you know, the thing we had a difficulty with in hiring is we would—we were looking for pretty high-end lab tech people, too. So a lot of these folks would be coming out of Brooks with all this money they’ve spent training, and they couldn’t get a photo job. So we would hire them, but we’d caution them all the time—this is not going to lead to a photo job. We’re hiring you to do this technical thing. A few of them evolved over, and it was very frustrating for some folks who—I’m not doing what I want to do. But we already have—you know. So there’s always that line [LAUGHTER] of doing that. And again, back then, we were self-contained. The security was much tighter—I don’t know if you’ve went out to Energy Northwest lately or anything, or if you’ve ever been there, where they’re looking under your car with mirrors and all kinds of things. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, our security was pretty tight. Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: The photographers, on the badge, they had the areas listed in a grid, the areas they had access to. So it was pretty tight, and we were playing TSA going in the gates at that point. We got so you just put your lunch in a plastic bag and just walk by and hold it up. It wasn’t metal detectors, but it was security. So that led to interesting things. The 300 Area lab was the largest, and we probably had the most people of any of them. We did pretty much our own maintenance. These were all chemical processes that needed to be maintained. So there was a great deal of quality control work going on, of running test strips and reading them and adjusting the chemistries. And just the simple things of inventory. We had a phenomenal—we had pretty much one person, that’s all they did was inventory. You know, ordering stuff, seeing that it was in, and then basically rotating the stock, so that we were using the oldest first. There was a lot of stuff going on. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: So you worked mostly at the 300? Ostergaard: Right. Franklin: Okay, and then how many people worked at that operation? Ostergaard: Probably, 20, 25. Franklin: Oh, wow, okay. Ostergaard: Yeah. And the ROB was smaller—I’d say it was about four. Franklin: Oh, okay. Ostergaard: And the Federal Building, they did the color and they could also—everybody could do black-and-white; that was just by default. And that was probably more like a dozen. And then there was a video—motion picture group down there also. At probably the height of everything, we were probably running 62 people. And during FFTF construction, we were doing a shift-and-a-half, basically. Franklin: And that would just be documenting the construction? Ostergaard: Oh, yeah. And then all the other stuff. Because everything that had to do with FFTF was a huge project. It wasn’t just building the facility you see, the white dome out there. There was a high bay in 300 Area, all kinds of research on—oh my god, it was huge. And so there was people busy all the time doing that. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Okay. Did you have much contact with the video people? Ostergaard: Not a whole lot. Franklin: Oh, okay. Ostergaard: That was kind of a different world. Franklin: Oh, okay. Ostergaard: There was also kind of the contention—not necessarily nasty—between the labs. Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: There was always a bit of tension there, that—ah, them dummies they screwed up again, so we got to run down there. There was a lot of that stuff going on. Franklin: Like kind of like a friendly competition? Ostergaard: Pretty much. Mostly friendly. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Mostly friendly? Did you know anybody that worked at the other labs or in the video group that’s still around that might want to talk to us? Ostergaard: Let me think that through. Franklin: Okay. We just--our collection—sorry, go ahead. Ostergaard: No, I was going to say—yeah, I’m just thinking. Because I think Bud Mace is gone. Don Brauer’s gone. Yeah, it’s really thinned out. Thinned out everywhere. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: As happens. We have several hundred videos in our collection. Ostergaard: Right. Franklin: So it would be interesting to talk to somebody about that. Why they filmed certain—because some of them are very interesting films of processes and—so it’s kind of— Ostergaard: Oh, yeah. They were highly technical. We had a technical person who was just in charge of doing extremely technical things. He was out of RIT. And he did some fabulous stuff. I always enjoyed hanging around Roland. Franklin: RIT? Ostergaard: Rochester Institute, yeah. And, again, it was—we had to support ourselves. There was no FedEx in the day. And not getting something done because something broke was not an excuse. That was not acceptable. So you always had at least two or three ways of getting something done. That was—and we always did come through; we had a reputation for that. Franklin: How long did you work at the 300 Area lab? Ostergaard: Pretty much—well, the last year—it was probably 25, 30 years straight. Franklin: So you started in ’72, right? Ostergaard: Yeah. Franklin: So you would have gone into the early—late ‘90s, early 2000s. Ostergaard: Something like that. Well, there was a migration. Everything wound down. As things closed down, the ROB lab was closed first. Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: We moved that activity out to 300 Area. Franklin: And do you know roughly when that was? Ostergaard: Oh, I hate telling it wrong. ’78, something like that. And as things tightened up a little bit more, we actually closed down the Federal Building lab, which was on the third floor. Much to the happiness of the computer people, because there were leaks on the third floor out of all these processors. We had catch pans and stuff under everything. Franklin: Oh, the chemical— Ostergaard: Oh, yeah, these are all wet processes. Nothing digital there. Franklin: And do you know when the Fed— Ostergaard: God, again, that’s just kind of murky. It’s— Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: You know, the big change happened for us when the contract changed in about ’87 or ’88. Franklin: And that was from Westinghouse— Ostergaard: Well, we were actually Battelle. Franklin: You were Battelle, okay. Ostergaard: Right. And the contract changed—consolidation, they liked to call it. We ended up getting transferred over to Boeing. Most of the service groups went as a package to Boeing. And then when Boeing came out and Lockheed came in, then we all were moved to Lockheed. So, as it wound down, we had a couple of pretty big layoffs where you just feel like a survivor the day it’s done, when they lay off twelve people in your group and there’s four of you left. Stuff like that. [LAUGHTER] So we kept plugging away out there, and then they finally found enough money to make us go digital. Franklin: That’s good—I was going to ask about that. What year was that? Ostergaard: Let’s see, I’m trying to think of what machines we were using. We were in the Apple side of the world at that point. And, you know, 7200 Mac or something was pretty jazzy at the time. [LAUGHTER] You know? So again, those dates are just—I could probably do some thinking on that, but I’d just hate to say something specific. But as we wound down, then they decided that we were too big of an expense to be in 3706. So we ended up moving down to the Snyder Building. This was under Lockheed. And set up shop down there. And of course, I was always—by that time, I had migrated my work into more doing archival stuff. I kind of just created that, in a way. I got tired of people asking for stuff that I knew we had, that nobody could find. Franklin: Right. Ostergaard: And so I just started—in the time when I didn’t have anything better to do, I just literally started going through the drawers. And that kind of got me the bug. [LAUGHTER] So my intention was to make a three-ring binder with Hanford’s 100 greatest pictures. That was my first goal. Well, that pretty quickly evolved into about 35 or 40 binders— Franklin: Yeah, I was going to say, that’d be kind of— Ostergaard: Yeah, well you didn’t realize what you were up against, you know. So you get to the point where you say, okay, I’ve got enough stuff here to make a collection of each of the reactor areas. So there’d be the 100-B book, there’d be the—you know. And do that. And then as a spin-off I would do aerials. Wherever I’d had enough stuff to organize, I would make another binder. And then, oh, about around 2000, when Hazel Leary was head of the Department of Energy, she was due in for this great opening up of all the information. And they started a project at DDRS— Franklin: DDRS? Ostergaard: Yes. And that worked out of the library there at 300 Area. They had, I think, five or six derivative de-classifiers. And they had a couple of students out there. Their goal was to scan 100 negatives a day. And they would arbitrarily take a storage box—have you ever seen a storage box? A real Hanford box? Franklin: No, I don’t know if I’ve seen a Hanford box. Ostergaard: Okay, well, most of these things early on—most everything was four-by-five negatives. So it was a half-cubic-foot box about yea high with a top that comes off. And then inside, there’d be rows, and there’d be a manila envelope with glassines, mostly, where there’d be a date and stuff written on them. And that was kind of—you got the date range to and from. And they started out and they did about 55 boxes. I don’t know how they were necessarily selected. But they did that. And the first box they did, they came down to us and wanted to see how they were doing. We had a higher-end scanner than they did. They were running off $150 scanners at the time, which was basically trash. Franklin: Yeah, really low DPI. Ostergaard: Yeah, you see some of those things now, those really crappy looking things. That was out at that project. Franklin: Like 400k-size image files, if you’re lucky. Ostergaard: Yeah, right. Franklin: We get requests about images that people find online and they’re like, do you have a higher version of that? And I was like, that was scanned in 2002. Like, you know, sorry. Ostergaard: Well, that’s the disconnect now. And they keep talking about getting me out there to help put some of that to bed and maybe leave a better trail than we did. It’s—yeah. [LAUGHTER] It’s an art to find some of that stuff. Franklin: I bet. Ostergaard: And you can’t do it—I don’t know what the mechanism is—I’ve been out of there now two-and-a-half years. So I don’t know if there’s anything in place. But I had pretty much, at the time, looking for things, I had the ability to request boxes endlessly. And so what I would do was I would get out my notebooks and stuff with all the transmittals and all my little notes I had made on the side. I had hand-written sheets for every time I’d order a box. And this went on for years. I would note the box and the date, and then I would look for what I wanted. But then anything else that was interesting in there, I would go ahead and make a note of it so I could backtrack a little bit. And that’s what I hope—that stuff hasn’t been disrupted too badly that it can’t get in there and say, this is golden. It looks awful, but this will really save you. [LAUGHTER] So, that takes a lot of dead-ends, but it also leads you to discoveries. And there was always the push to put more stuff into iDMS. My project for four years, one of the clerks, name of Bonnie Campo and I, pretty much, we did 20,000 a year into ARMIS, the database at the time. The selection process—that was my call. We’d literally start going through the files, and anything to do with helping the site be cleaned up, remediated, construction—all that was golden stuff. So that was the selection process for that. And then if I found—and I kind of took it upon myself—there were some culturally significant things, I’d put those in, too. So I would scan them, I’d transfer them to Bonnie, she would upload them with appropriate information. So we did 20,000 a year, so we did 80,000. Franklin: Wow. What do you—can you expand on culturally significant things? Ostergaard: Well, things like back in the ‘50s, where they would have pensioners’ dinners. They celebrated the employees. They weren’t disposable. They were treated with much more respect—this is all my personal stuff. [LAUGHTER] But it was celebrated more. And then also, up until ’58, ’59, the City of Richland was a company town. Franklin: Yeah. Ostergaard: Basically owned by GE. And they documented all kinds of cool stuff. So, a lot of that would go in. And just things like the first house being sold. And things like that. And then just the culture—the pictures of the safety prizes. If everybody—the thermoses and things. And then probably not socially appropriate things anymore of get some gal up on a ladder for Friday the 13th holding a broken mirror. And just stuff like that. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Any idea where those—where do those pictures live now, or those negatives? Do they— Ostergaard: Oh! It’s all at 3212, the newest records— Franklin: Oh, okay. Ostergaard: Yeah, that’s pretty much where everything is, that I know about. And I’ve tried the damnedest to find everything. It gets to be a challenge. [LAUGHTER] But those first ones they did, that was where what we dubbed the DuPont Collection came out of and the GE Collection. Those first five boxes were the D numbers, the P numbers. Those were, of course, the most interesting ones, and that caught my eye right now. And then ultimately when they were asking, what could we do—national archives, they want stuff from us; we’ve never given them anything. And by that time I’d kind of rescanned a lot of the what I call the D numbers, the DuPont ones, just because they were very, very useful. Franklin: Is that what the D stands for, then, on that? Ostergaard: Okay, okay, let me go through that. There’s a set of numbers—or prefixes. D stood for Determinant, of all things. I found down, when the CREHST Museum was still operating, I had enough leeway, I would go down and kind of mine their resources. And I found the memo one day that directed from somebody in Delaware that they wanted this thing photographically copied, and it set the parameters for each eight-by-tens of each shot and to show construction progress. So there was the P number which was progress. D was determinant. There’s a few Es, which were emergencies. That wasn’t used too much. There was S for safety. And there was M for meteorological. I think I got them all. And the D ones—well, of course the P is progress, and what they generally did for—I mean, down to outhouses almost. They would shoot every couple of weeks or whenever something significant happened, shoot that. So you can combine those into collections of a particular building being built down to small little workshops and things. I found that memo down there, and then I found the part that is really the key to that thing, is there were—since everything was automatically classified at some level, just by nature of it existing, it was classified. And they had to move these around to get things made or whatever. So since it was classified, there had to be a transmittal for every time it moved. So here were these onionskin sheets that listed a set of numbers. And it said, okay, this was D such-and-such, taken on such-and-such a day, and this is what it was. That was just part of the security routine. So there was the marker that described that image by default. Franklin: Right, yeah, the metadata kind of— Ostergaard: Right, exactly. Franklin: Produced in an ancillary process to— Ostergaard: Right, so I kind of went, oh, how about this! [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah, that’s something. Ostergaard: So I handwrote some notebooks just so I could find that stuff easier. And—oh, also, what happened—there was a lady before I ever—I never even met her, name of Flo. She was the archival records genius lady. She could find anything. Flo Unterhagen, I believe her name was. And there was somebody in the ‘70s had taken all of those DuPont negatives. They looked kind of like—from the surface—like they’d kind of lived a rough life. Like they had probably just been thrown in boxes and stuff. And somebody organized those into the storage boxes, each with an individual manila envelope and the number on the outside, and that was about it. But somebody had organized that. Somewhere in the ‘70s, near as I can tell. And then the other—the GE ones were dubbed the Flo Five. Those were very significant. Because that was building up to the Cold War stuff. So that was the second project that I suggested to them. The first one was actually what we dubbed the Settler Collection. When I was doing my work for getting those 80,000 in there, I kept coming up with pictures of people prior to Hanford. Franklin: Right, the residents in the towns of White Bluffs and Hanford. Ostergaard: Right, so I kind of got the bug at that point. And some of the folks I knew—Annette Heriford, I knew her from—she worked in the photo group. Franklin: Really? Ostergaard: Oh, yeah! Franklin: I didn’t— Ostergaard: Yeah, Annette, yeah. Franklin: We just recently got the collection of Harry Anderson. Ostergaard: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: A lot of his photos and things. Ostergaard: Good old Harry! [LAUGHTER] Franklin: But we’ve been going through those, and I know that he worked with Annette and with the White Bluffs and Hanford Reunion-- Ostergaard: Right. Franklin: Organization. Ostergaard: So I went to the last five or six of those things, and almost was accepted. But I did work for the government, so that automatically made me suspicious. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Oh, right. Ostergaard: Harry was a piece of work. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: I’ve heard! Ostergaard: Yeah, one time, on one of the tours, we all went out on a bus. And I come out, and what I did—I had the van, the photo van, and I had some composite, big map things I’d made. We had the ability to mount and laminate and everything. So I would show up with the van, would hang these things around the side of the van just as talking points for these people, and that would get the conversations going. They’d start to look at that and go, oh, well there’s my place, and then off you go. Cool stuff. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: That’s really neat. Ostergaard: And so Harry was out there one day, had the van, and he was trying to—he said, you know, you’ve got a van here, how about we go over here and look at something? And I was going, ehh, I’ve got to get back to town. It’s like, I don’t want to get loose with Harry! [LAUGHTER] Get in all kinds of trouble. But, yeah, he was something else. Franklin: And he also worked for— Ostergaard: He was a security type. Franklin: The Project. Ostergaard: Yeah, oh, god, yeah. Well the rumors I’d hear was he’d hang around in bars, basically, and if people were talking too much, get them called in for—he was something else. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Wow, he was one of the—it’s just so interesting that he’s this transitional figure between White Bluffs and then— Ostergaard: Yeah. Well he was in the right position, and probably rogue enough to— Franklin: Yeah. Ostergaard: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: And then you said Annette worked for the photo group, okay. Did you she work for your photo group? Ostergaard: She was down in the Federal Building. And so we always got along real well. She was a stickler. I’d show her stuff, and boy, if she thought that date was wrong, she was on your case like—[LAUGHTER] But so when they said, what can we give to the National Archives? I said, well, I’ve been collecting up these images, and I know a lot about them. And there are about 200 of them. So, we did the whole process as a trial thing, and pulled retired negatives out of our files to them and kind of learned the whole process. And it got a lot of nice press, and that’s what they wanted. They were making progress. And that went so well, they said, well, what next? And I said, well, we’ve got all this stuff DuPont shot. We’ve pretty well got it all scanned into our files. We’ve kind of got all the information out of it we’re going to need. So, we went ahead then and retired those over there. Which, again, was great for everybody concerned. It’s nice to kind of get them over there. I think it was five boxes, six boxes. And then the third series we did was GE—kind of the same thing, again. So we got a little more sophisticated each time. And then also the ability of iDMS to take file sizes got better each time. We were kind of held down to, oh, ten-meg JPEG compressed at first. And they would only take JPEGs. And then by the time we got to GE, it was like, well, pretty much just send us anything you want. Which was just the evolution of the whole thing. So I was making pretty good-sized scans. Franklin: And is that how—so, I’m a little confused. Did you send the originals to NARA, or did you send the scans to NARA? Ostergaard: No, they didn’t want anything to do with digital; they wanted the physical stuff. Franklin: But you scanned the originals and put them into iDMS. Ostergaard: Right, yeah. Franklin: Oh, so is that still in iDMS, to your knowledge? Ostergaard: Yeah! If you get ahold of somebody who can get you to the collections, it’s under the GE collection or the DuPont collection. Franklin: Because we have access to iDMS. Ostergaard: Okay, now it’s not—things are hardly ever taken out of iDMS, so you do a D number or something, you might come up with the old, nasty scan, you might come up with the one we put in. Franklin: Okay, I’ll make sure to look at the file type and size. Ostergaard: Yeah, because that’s—it’s a quirky thing to use. ARMIS, its predecessor for photos, was much better. And what we did a lot of—the folks—and this is what I learned—when they were doing their initial work on the DuPont stuff, they were making their best guesses to what it was they were looking at. Because they didn’t—they just had a negative and an envelope. And so a lot of those were way off. So Bonnie and I—if you had spare time, you’d just go, show me everything from 1952 or something. And they migrated all the stuff over from the Battelle system into ARMIS system. Of course, the things never fit the right boxes. And so we kind of just reworked the information—we had the ability to do that. Put structure in the structure box, and maybe leave the title. Because a lot of times they would write the title with the structure in it. So, it was—again, it was kind of an art form. [LAUGHTER] To define stuff. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right, I’m totally aware. Ostergaard: You’re finding that out. Franklin: Well, I’ve been in archives for a little while, so I’ve seen— Ostergaard: Oh, yeah. Well I had the big battle with the GE thing. They wanted to change the filename around to suit their system which then totally destroyed the providence of the damn negative. It just—ugh. [LAUGHTER] So, every time you do a move, you lose something, pretty much. Franklin: Oh, yeah. Ostergaard: And what we did for GE by then—security—we’d kind of gotten really in tune with security folks and their concerns. They wanted to know what we’d sent off. A lot of times, they were more concerned about the envelope than the negative. Franklin: Right, because the envelope has the information and description. Ostergaard: Right. By the time we got down to the GE stuff, I was overscanning the negative. I was scanning—put it on the flatbed and scan outside the boundaries of the actual negative itself. So they could see whatever had been written in the boundaries. I wasn’t cropping or doing anything like that. I was all about giving you the whole package. Franklin: Right, because you can also crop that out later. Ostergaard: Later, right. See, that’s what—you can’t put it back. I’ve always looked at is as me being the intermediary in this process, for somebody like me 30 years from now. I don’t want to box them in—I learned that real quick. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: It’s so refreshing to talk with somebody who understands-- Ostergaard: Yeah. Franklin: The basics and things like provenance and— Ostergaard: Yeah. Because things tie together later. Franklin: Yeah, they do. And you need that if you’re coming at it without that institutional knowledge. Ostergaard: Oh, my. Well, then, the other thing, I’m sure you’ve discovered it by now, is like the DuPont final report. The four-volume— Franklin: [inaudible] Ostergaard: Oh, boy. Okay, DuPont published, probably in February or March of ’45, what they called their final report. It’s four volumes, 1,500 pages where they do an incredibly good job of describing what they did without saying a damn word about what they did. Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: Or what it was for. Franklin: Right, that sounds— Ostergaard: That thing is—that, and Groves’ diaries if you can stand—not Groves, Matthias’ diaries—those things. But I’ll get you the Hanford numbers for those DuPont things. Because that is a treasure trove. Once you get in there and start reading, you realize they did everything for a purpose and a reason. Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: It was—and a lot of it—and then there’s some very miscellaneous other reports that link pictures to things that are—but that DuPont report gives you an incredible insight. Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: Into what they did. Yeah, that’s—when I finally discovered that, I was going, oh, my god. It was so fun over the years, you kept having these—oh my god, I know what this is for. [LAUGHTER] It just evolved, you know, more and more into me doing archival things and less and less the other. Of course, I carried a big footprint around because I had all these negatives attached to me. And so we moved to Snyder, we actually had to have the floor reinforced where these—these are great big fireproof safes. So to get them down there—and I had them all fitted in, and then we were there for several years and then they wanted to move us to the Garlick Building over here. And so they’d give me a room to put stuff in, and then as we got it over there, the movers got all the cabinets moved in there, and then the powers that be decided, no, we don’t want to file the negatives here. We want to use this room for storing our junk or something. So, that was rather traumatic that day. [LAUGHTER] So I ended up putting my stuff in moving boxes around the hall in various places, and I was still working out of them. What I did when I was unloading the drawers, I color-coded each file cabinet. I had a number for each cabinet, and then a little chip of paper that corresponded to that. And then I would start a drawer one, box one, drawer one, box two, right on down the row. Finally, after a year or two of that, they ended up moving me down to the 712 Building, which is now where they’re building the new—across from the Richland Library where they’re building the new City Hall. That was the original records place, built in ’51 or ’52. It was just a big concrete bunker, basically. [LAUGHER] Which is a really cool place. So I ended up getting moved into there in some space. The print people—the union print shop was still there at the time, so it was me and them. And I loved that place; it was just Hanford from the ‘50s. It hadn’t changed a bit. We stayed in there, and of course that was a very expensive building to maintain because it was all full of asbestos and that kind of stuff. So that’s when we ended up getting moved to 3212 and they were building 3220 to store the collection. So that’s where I got out there with all my stuff again. So I had, like I say, this huge footprint carrying these negatives around. [LAUGHTER] And that was a great place to work for an archivist. It was in the back of the building, back with all the pipes and everything. Nobody bothered you; you were just back there doing your thing. It was great. Franklin: And so how long did you—you don’t still work out there? Ostergaard: No. Franklin: No, and when did you finally retire? Ostergaard: Well, they asked me to leave two-and-a-half years ago. One of those. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: One of those early retirement, or kind of--? Ostergaard: Yeah, it was like—hi? You’d walk in there, the human resources lady is there. Like, okay, I know what this is. It’s like, okay, don’t blow it. [LAUGHTER] Just make nice. Nothing good will come out of anything other than being nice. So that was two-and-a-half years ago. So what you’re seeing me now doing is volunteer work. I got connected up with Colleen and stuff. And I still thrive on doing this stuff. That’s why I’m doing it. Franklin: Great. Ostergaard: I love access. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah. And so you still have your clearance and everything to get in there? Ostergaard: Nope. Well, see, that’s all B Reactor, see, it’s open to the public. Franklin: Oh, okay. Ostergaard: I’ll do it again coming up this year. The Russians come over for their reactor inspection tour, PPRA, yearly. That’s a treaty that we signed with them in late ‘90s, I think it was. We inspect each other’s reactors to see what’s happening and make sure that, one, we’re not making plutonium, and two, they are because they’re dual-purpose reactors, what they’re doing with it, apparently. So I was doing that for five or six years before. And I found it quite fascinating. It’s something you have to be respectful and careful. We duplicate the picture we shot the year prior for their report they make. If the building still exists. And now it’s getting down to a little bit of 100-K West and B Reactor. So I’ve really—the PNNL folks like it because I’ve done it enough, they—Battelle knows me; the Russians know me. And everybody likes that uniformity. So that’s a fun thing to do, for me. And that one, again, you get a temporary badge where we’re going. I truck along. And do different pictures real quick for them, and then we have a final banquet where they sign the report and everything. That’s always quite interesting. Franklin: Oh, yeah, I bet. Ostergaard: It’s really cool. They love to toast everything. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yes, they do. Ostergaard: It takes a while. Franklin: Yeah, I’ve been to Eastern Europe. Toasts are a way of life. Ostergaard: Oh, god. So anyway, I’m still doing that and I’m looking forward to doing more of that. Franklin: That’s really great. How did you get involved with BRMA, the B Reactor Museum Association? Ostergaard: Well, it was kind of after I quit working out there regular. These guys, I was aware of them, you know. And so one of them called me up and said, you know, we’re looking for something. And everybody’s always calling me, looking for something. He said, you know, you ought to join. And I said, well, I probably should just to keep my hand in things. So that’s kind of how I became connected with it. And it’s really neat to sit in a room where there’s twenty guys who really knew their stuff. It’s something else, to have that ability. So I’ve been doing that. And then of course, I hear of things coming down the road and kind of watched the national park thing develop, and getting involved with Colleen. Every once in a while I have to remind her: you got something coming up, do you need pictures? Oh, yeah. [LAUGHTER] But that was the way out there. We always, especially when we were working for Lockheed. Lockheed was working on getting the MSA contract. So they were in the full PR, look how good a company we are, you should have us do the contract thing. So we were doing all kinds of stuff, back, again, ten years ago, things weren’t as tight as they are now. So our display group was actually making all kinds of display stuff for Lockheed Corporate under Linda Goodman. She grew her outfit quite large, but we went along for that ride. So we had people to go just do nothing but do displays and take them out. That was not a Hanford-related thing, but it was—we kind of had the ability to do all kinds of stuff. Which has always be exciting to be involved with something like that. Franklin: Right, to make some things from site-specific to like more PR. Ostergaard: And of course everything couldn’t be done fast enough. And you learn there that when they want it, they want it, but they don’t think they want it. So you have to sort of manage your managers in a way. You have to be ready to—well, they haven’t asked yet, but you know they’re going to want. You just learn after you get— Franklin: How was the transition to digital photography for you as a photographer and someone that works—and an archivist—I’m kind of curious as to how you’ve managed that transition. Ostergaard: Well, for some reason it was much harder than it should have been to get the digital equipment. Somehow it got involved with the printing people and how much elaborate stuff they go through to buy equipment. And we had people high up go, how in the hell is this taking so long? You just go buy some computers. But it’d somehow gotten into somewhere where you had to write things of why this would be good, and—ugh. It just drug on interminably. So we did—on the computer part, we had—the film scanner was always kind of a difficult thing, because they just weren’t that good at the time. And we’d always kind of prided ourselves in doing good things, exceptional things. Well, that’s when the thing I should mention of the evolution of film sizes. Four-by-five was kind of the standard from the ‘40s. When I came out there, I had to have the fortune, through our little business arrangements at the high school—I was making money, actually—and I needed a camera to shoot. Because they weren’t giving me anything. So I ended up buying a Hasselblad of all things in 1965. Franklin: That’s an expensive—for a high schooler-- Ostergaard: The list price was 600 bucks. Franklin: Yeah, that’s like a car. Ostergaard: And the local photo camera down there, the guy, he knew I was looking for one and I was a regular. He said, well, he said, you know, if you can keep your mouth shut, I’ve had this Hasselblad way too long here in my inventory. He said, it cost me 435 bucks. I’ll sell it to you for my cost to move it. So I got it at a discount. I still have it. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Wow. Well, those are cameras that you—I mean, you pass those down. Ostergaard: Oh, god, yeah. So I’ve still got all the stuff. So I was kind of primed up and then I started working summers out there. And then you see all the real—the stuff you see at magazines here, it is in front of you. So as it evolved, when I went out there, they weren’t shooting Speed Graphics, they were shooting Linhof Technikas. Big, huge, gorgeous cameras. Heavy as—and then there were view cameras, too, because of just the technical stuff that they did. And then it kind of evolved into two-and-a-quarter roll film, which was principally a Hasselblad with a set of lenses. Everybody had one. Everybody pretty much had a Technika setup, they had view cameras, and they had the Hasselblads. And 35 millimeter was considered miniature, and it was only for shooting slides, pretty much. And that kept on, and some of the illustrator types in Battelle wanted to have that editorial look so they would go shoot black-and-white. So they’d get the grain look and all that stuff. But the thing of choice was two-and-a-quarter roll film. And then of course it evolved from black-and-white and then the color started slipping in there. They were shooting some color sheet film, and it seemed like the preferred way at that point was transparencies first. And there are still some of those floating around in the files. And then it would move over into 50/50 black-and-white. Sometimes they’d go out and shoot black-and-white and color at the same assignment if they had the time. Sometimes you were moving around, you couldn’t do that. But they still wanted black-and-white prints versus color, because color was considered premium cost. So to make it look like you were not wasting money, you had it done in black-and-white. I’ve had people tell me that I don’t care what it costs, but I don’t want it to look like I spent any money. [LAUGHTER] You know, you’re out there, you just roll with whatever—and that’s part of the key to my being there so long, was I was quite flexible in going with whatever. You could do—so anyway, it evolved into roll film. And then we finally, on the digital thing, when we finally got this block of equipment, I think they bought two Nikon D1s. Which, probably your cell phone now would—[LAUGHTER] But we had all the Nikon stuff, so it was a natural to go with that, because the lenses still were compatible. And that was the beauty of that. We always were Nikon out there, just because we had massive amounts of lenses and everything. Franklin: That’s why I always buy Canons, because I just inherited Canons. Ostergaard: That’s what you do. There’s no sense in reinventing the wheel there. So that’s kind of how that evolved. And you can see that. And also you can see the quantities of negatives shot increase with the smaller film. Sheet film, you’re pretty—there’s a lot of work involved loading holders and processing and everything. And then when you get to roll film, well, hell, there’s twelve on a roll. So you shoot them all. Franklin: And then now in the digital age, you’re just limited by— Ostergaard: I’ll go out to B Reactor, you figure that’s 300 shots, easy, without even thinking about it. And you give somebody 25. Franklin: Yeah. Ostergaard: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: It’s a different—which is also I think a challenge for archivists moving forward is— Ostergaard: Oh, I know. Franklin: The amount of stuff we produce in the digital world is greater. Ostergaard: And how much of that stuff I’ve been giving you—well, I’ll give you the raw and what I gave the customer, but then here’s the other 250 which I can’t bring myself to throw away, unfortunately. [LAUGHTER] You just never know. Franklin: So, did your parents work for Hanford at all? Ostergaard: Nope! [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Okay, so you were the first one. Ostergaard: Well, what happened—all my uncles and ultimately my dad, they were all in the service in World War II. This is all from Nebraska. They had had a rough time in the Depression. They’d lost the farms. They were traveling around before the war, picking fruit, doing whatever. They’d been out here before the war. My grandma’s sister was out here with—and they had her—the family farm they had was a typical chicken and eggs and fruit and alfalfa—everything, a truck farm. And so after the war, they all decided that it was time to get out of Nebraska. So in all their travels they had decided this was the good spot to go. I was born in ’46—essentially ’47, and I think they came out in ’48 and settled right when the Cold War was starting to ramp up. So there was plenty of employment. The family had always been carpenters and the like, and Dad, he had carpentry experience and working in lumberyards and stuff. It’s kind of my joke out of Caddyshack is he ended up right in the lumberyard. Of all the places you could work in here, he never made an attempt to get on at Hanford. He was working various lumberyards around and wholesale hardware and stuff like that. My other uncle did get involved in it, so. But, yeah, so that’s how it come to be. And Mom, she finally—she was secretary for First Lutheran Church. And again there, you’ve probably picked up, there was—then especially—sort of an animosity against Richland from Pasco and Kennewick. Franklin: Can you talk about that a little bit? Because that’s—I think that’s very interesting. Ostergaard; Well, you know, the perception was—especially because Richland was a company town at first. They were renting these places, in essence. So GE was the landlord. Everybody worked—Pasco, Kennewick, they were their own. So it’s like, well, they need a lightbulb changed, they just call somebody up and the company come change the lightbulb. Just all that kind of stuff. Locally, I totally, growing up in Kennewick, benefited from Hanford bigtime. Because a lot of Hanford—specially the doctor level and stuff, they didn’t live in Richland. They lived in Kennewick and Pasco, and they wanted their kids as well educated as the kids in Richland. So there the push was, boy, you have good schools in the Tri-Cities. That was just the accepted thing. So a lot of my contemporaries then, their fathers worked out here. So there was just a different set of expectations that went along with all that. Franklin: So that kind of—the middle-class and upper-middle-class affluence sort of Richland-- Ostergaard: Oh, yeah, it spilled over. Big time. But I benefited totally from that environment and just those expectations: you were going to go to college, you were going to do this, you were going to— [LAUGHTER] Franklin: But so you’re saying there was maybe some resentment that GE and the government took care of people in Richland— Ostergaard: Oh, yeah way past— Franklin: And there was this idea that they were freeloading or something— Ostergaard: Yeah, and that was just probably a jealousy or something. Dad, he worked in the lumberyard in Pasco. And in summer, he’d have to come up and help fill-in—there was a lumberyard up here on Van Giesen. Where Boehm’s Chocolate is—or was. There was a lumberyard in there at one point. So he hated to come up here. He said, they expect so damn much and they don’t want to pay for anything. He called them smashers—for atom smashers. Franklin: Oh, okay. Ostergaard: Damn smashers! God, I hate them! [LAUGHTER] Franklin: That’s really—I’ve not heard that before. Ostergaard: Well, that was his term. Franklin: Right, I like that. Ostergaard: And of course at that time, Richland had a really, really good basketball team. Art Dawald was the coach in that era. So there was a—boy, that was kind of the high school sports thing. And then Pasco and Kennewick had a giant rivalry in football. And that game was the only day game they played, and that was always on Veteran’s Day. That was a big deal, big time. Franklin: Can you describe growing up in the Tri-Cities in the Cold War and how—being so close to Hanford, but living in Kennewick or Pasco, was there any kind of fear that Hanford would have been a prime target if the war were ever fought? Ostergaard: Oh, yeah, we were totally afraid of the Russians. [LAUGHTER] There was not necessarily anything nasty out there, it was more the Russians. We had, probably not as intense as Richland with the duck-and-cover stuff. I don’t think we were ever scrambling under desks or anything. We didn’t have any air raid sirens; I know Richland did. They brought those things in from World War II and set them up around town here. So we had our instructions. And I know one time—I wish I had one of these things. They were flying around in airplanes one time throwing out little pamphlets to—What Should You Do— Franklin: Like civil defense pamphlets? Ostergaard: Yeah, right, yeah! It was just— Franklin: That’s an odd way to distribute that. Ostergaard: God, I know it. But I wish to hell I had one! Because I found one stuck in a tree. But, no, and unfortunately, it was hyped up enough at home—lived in a wood frame house. And in the night the wind would get to blowing and banging against the house and stuff. And there were several times I convinced myself that it was a bomb going off. It was serious stuff. You were totally into it. Franklin: Was there ever any worry that you knew in the communities—Kennewick, Pasco—of the environmental aspect of Hanford— Ostergaard: No. Franklin: Or any kind of— Ostergaard: No. That just wasn’t happening yet. Franklin: Okay. Even though—I mean, because the Green Run was in 1940— Ostergaard: I mean, nobody knew of that until—not even heard of it until probably 20 years after it happened when the Down Winders got going. Yeah, I’ve sat there thinking about 1954, November. Where the hell was I that day? The wind was coming out of—so you start thinking about it then. But, yeah, like I say, for me, I was kind of proud of the place. I still am. Of what had happened and everything. So I’ve benefitted—[inaudible] but have benefitted greatly from the whole business. We had one couple of Christmases ago, the family got together. And my brother, he’s working sheet metal contract out there—foreman for that. And his two sons, they were working down at Hermiston in getting rid of the mustard nerve gas and stuff. Franklin: Oh, right. Ostergaard: And I going, damn, World War II’s still been good to this family. We’re still working because of it. [LAUGHTER] Which is, you know, true! Franklin: Yeah, yeah, there’s legacy aspects of weapons production. Ostergaard; Totally. And of course back then the science thing was big. I remember in 1957, the International Geophysical Year and all this stuff we got handed at school. It was something to be—technology was just to be treasured. In this environment especially. Franklin: What are some of your memories of any—some of the major events in the Tri-Cities? Like did you go to any Atomic Frontier Days parades? Or did you—what about Kennedy’s visit or Nixon’s visit? Ostergaard: Okay, well, let’s see, Atomic Frontier Days—that was still when Richland was—we didn’t go to Richland. That was, no, we don’t go to Richland. [LAUGHTER] We were much more Kennewick and Pasco oriented on that. I missed the Nixon visit because I was in the service. And the Kennedy visit was ’62, ’63? Franklin: ’63. Ostergaard: That one, Jesus. I was probably—well, I was 16. I just wasn’t conscious of it at that point. It just wasn’t something you did. I do remember they had Eisenhower come out in ’54 to dedicate McNary Dam. And they ran school buses—loads of kids—down to see it. My folks wouldn’t let me go because they didn’t like him. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Were your folks Democrats? Ostergaard: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: [LAUGHTER] Oh, hardcore. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: But like FDR era, Progressive New Deal-era Democrats or--? Ostergaard: Yeah, kind of. They were just like—[HISS] Republican. So there was that type of thing going on. I became aware of—fortunately, in high school, I had some very good instructors who made us politically aware. And so I knew all about Magnusson and Jackson and how all that works. The more I find out, the more interesting that gets. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah. Yeah. Could you describe the ways in which security or secrecy at Hanford has impacted your work? Ostergaard: Oh, yeah. Well, that’s just what you did. It was just an expectation. You go out there and here’s all these guards and all this stuff. You just played the game. I’d never considered it, necessarily, a burden. It was tedious and ponderous at times, but you just—you do what they say. They make the rules, they can change the rules, they can enforce the rules or not enforce the rules. You’re powerless, so you just go along. It’s real simple. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War and then afterward? Or just your kind of experience at Hanford? Ostergaard: Well, first thing I’ve kind of learned is you can’t judge anything from the past in light of how you judge things today. That is the most—people kind of, especially Pearl Harbor and the activities around then—we were sort of caught flatfooted. And then some of the things that went on—internment camps and things like that. It’s just like, you got to go—okay, we didn’t know what the heck was going on. We didn’t know if they were going to land in Portland the next day or something. And so you react. And some of those reactions weren’t the best in the world. But you can’t end up—of that. And then the same thing with the environmental stuff out there. You can’t call any of those folks dumb or not caring, because all the stuff I’ve seen and all the images and stuff, everybody was doing the best of their ability with what they had. And so there wasn’t any just slipshod, they-don’t-care—except maybe the Green Run or something, but—[LAUGHTER] But you kind of look at some of that as an overzealous—because, again, it’s all driven by fear, or unknowns. Just for that not to be forgotten. And also that those people were as smart or probably smarter than we are, I think, as far as thinking things through and making do. Because that’s always been my contention with the construction camp and everything. You have those ’43, ‘44, ’45—they didn’t—if you were draft age, you weren’t there unless you had some real specialty. They recruited out of the southeast. And they didn’t want to recruit workers from the industrial—shipbuilding and all that, take those away. So they were down in the south where there was workers available. And all these people had just survived the Depression. And they knew how to make do. And they came up here and continued to make do. So that’s kind of my thing, is just that whole—and it’s unfortunate that such a great amount of energy and everything was expended on something that had such a nasty result. But—[LAUGHTER]—it’s just— Franklin: What about later in the Cold War though? The ‘50s through the late ‘80s, and kind of that mass of—because a lot of conversations about Hanford, there’s the World War II Hanford, but then there’s the larger, much larger mission but with not such a dramatic conclusion to it, right? The Cold War kind of made 20,000 nuclear weapons around and then just kind of fizzled out. Ostergaard: Yeah, the Cold War ramp-up thing was like—I just caught probably the tail end of that. But kind of—I got wandering here a little bit—but I always think it’s just so cool to be part of this process where all these things were happening. And being somewhat of an insider of it, I have a whole different perspective of things. If you say radiation, I go, well, okay, what kind and how much. Not, radiation?! Now, I’d be that way with nerve gas from Umatilla—which way do I run? [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Nerve gas is nerve gas no matter which way you look at it. Ostergaard: That’s right! So I have just always been kind of a—had a little better understanding of what was going on and realized there are phenomenal risks still out there. And when you’re working with guys who, in the day we were doing in-tank waste tank inspections by putting a Hasselblad on a rig, shooting argon on the lens to keep it clean, button this thing up in plastic, and dropping it down a riser and rotating the camera, shooting pictures with a strobe inside to see the tank walls. Franklin: Wow. Ostergaard: Now they do it digital. Franklin: Yeah. Ostergaard: So that was some of our specialists who just—that’s what they did. And I got involved in—always in the after thing of all that stuff. I would be handling the film and processing things. Franklin: Was that done for all of the tanks? Ostergaard: Oh, god, yeah. I did-- Franklin: That’s such a laborious— Ostergaard: Oh, totally. Franklin: I mean, that’s necessary work, but that’s such a laborious technical process to go through that. Ostergaard: Oh, yeah. I went through—for an outside contractor, went through and basically did all the single shell tanks that we could find. Everything I could find on each one of them. Of course that stuff was in essence obsolete now because of age and whatever. Yeah, it was fascinating stuff because it was just so scary—or so potentially bad. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah. Yeah. Ostergaard: Yeah, that was just a really—just in technical—I want to throw in a little pitch. The environmental stuff for the photo lab, we—back when I first came there, pretty much everything went down the drain. And again, it’s photo chemicals. And then in—when was it? When the Hunt Brothers kind of tried to corner the silver market there for a while, our boss, Les Michael—we had massive amounts of fixer we were generating. So he, on his own initiative, started reclaiming silver. We had a whole setup out there. We used an electrolytic process. So we were kind of ahead of that curve by our own doing. We were actually scraping—you know, we were doing the whole thing. And then as it got tighter and tighter, we started doing whatever is deemed proper at the time. So we had that running pretty tight. There was one time we—the state—we were actually functioning like a photo lab like you’d see in Seattle or Portland or anywhere else. Pretty much doing the same rules, because it’s just all the same stuff. They had some state inspector come in, and they were—since we were Hanford, we were kind of targeted, I think. We ultimately, one time, ran parallel processes on all the waste streams coming out of our processes, running typical batches of film. The state people brought in their sets of jugs and stuff to collect. And since the Hanford people didn’t quite trust and vice versa, they were doing a double set. And then they sent this stuff off, spent horrific amounts of money that proved we were doing everything right. [LAUGHTER] We weren’t really getting pats on the head. Everybody was just glad it was over. Whoops. So, we were doing a good job. Franklin: Cool. Ostergaard: And the cool thing about that, too, is our negatives are still hanging in there really well as far as process. I’ve had that question before: well, aren’t your negatives getting old? And blah, blah, blah, blah. Some lady from somewhere back east, one time, and I was very nice about it. But I said, well, no, our negatives are wonderful. They’re not fading. They’re not, because one, we had the budget and everything to do everything correctly. So everything was thoroughly washed, thoroughly fixed, everything. And also they’ve all been stored in human conditions. They haven’t been in a CONEX box or anything. They’re out where people are. And we’re in a desert; there’s no humidity. Everything-- Franklin: Yeah, that’s really good for long-term. Ostergaard: Yeah, so everything’s fine. We do have—I think they got them out now—I went through and did a study on nitrate-based negatives. And I found you do all your work and mostly early ‘50s and mostly it was Ansco and it may be a few DuPonts and stuff. I found about 1,100. And you could just—in a storage box—you could just open the box up and sniff and tell. Oh, there’s something in here. So I went ahead and kind of made the guys—I think they pulled them out eventually. But that nitrate thing, especially at the Hanford environment, what do you do with them? Fortunately they’re scattered all over the place so there’s not a critical mass of them. And what the archive folks were doing with them is they were pulling them out and freezing them. But here, if you have a whole freezer full of nitrate negatives, you’ve created a waste. So it’s a double-edged sword. [LAUGHTER] But we had our share of 90-day storage pads and saving film to recycle and the yearly contract and we had our ion exchange column. We were doing everything. It was good. Franklin: That’s good. Is there anything that I haven’t asked you about that you’d like to talk about or mention? Ostergaard: Oh, I’m sure there will be 20 things the minute I walk out the door. Franklin: Well, thank you so much, Dan, I really appreciate it. It’s really illuminating to hear you—to get some of that information on the photos and your perspective on Hanford, having not only worked there but also having seen so much of the history from the photo side. Ostergaard: Yeah, great. Well, like I say, I didn’t want it to end. I was just having way too much fun. Franklin: Yeah, I bet. Ostergaard: And it was, the more—like you—the more time you invest and the more time goes on, the more you start to make connections of things. It’s just like, wow, this is just—I’m just getting good! [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah. Well, thank you so much. Ostergaard: Okay, all righty. Franklin: All right. Ostergaard: Great. <a href="https://youtu.be/fTjZHnejr9Q">View interview on Youtube.</a> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:13:04 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 300 Area 327 Building 700 Area B Reactor Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1946-today Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. ~1970-2014 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Mr. Shields Lance Michael Bud Mace Don Brauer’s Bonnie Campo Groves Matthias Colleen Linda Goodman Art Dawald Kennedy Nixon Eisenhower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Dan Ostergaard Description An account of the resource An interview with Dan Ostergaard conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 12-7-2016 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2018-26-2: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. 1954 300 Area 327 building 700 Area B Reactor B Reactor Museum Association Battelle Boeing BRMA Cold War Dam Department of Energy DuPont Energy Northwest Hanford Kennedy Kennewick Organization School War Westinghouse https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fb04e035b1c8928176dadb5a42646cc81.JPG d741c436a87a4df782ed4afe3b9f60b6 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F25b95c192b96464279627aadd09cf21d.mp4 9f530d60f6f74bc722817bb2999877a3 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Daniel Barnett Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin and I’m conducting an oral history interview with Daniel Barnett on July 13th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Daniel Barnett about his experiences growing up in Richland and working at the Hanford site. So the best place to start, I think, is the beginning. So why don’t you tell me where you were born and what year. Daniel Barnett: I was born in Aberdeen, Washington in 1938—August 13th. Franklin: Okay. Barnett: And when the war started, my dad was working for the Harbor Patrol in Seattle as a patrolman. He heard that they were hiring over here, so he came over here and they hired him almost instantly because he already had the security clearance and everything. Franklin: Ah. Barnett: So he called my mom and told her that he had a job over here and to get herself packed, because he was gonna get her. But when she moved here, she couldn’t move to Richland. It wasn’t even on the map at that time. They took it off the map and everything. She had to move to Prosser. Franklin: Okay. Barnett: And later on when they finally got a prefab built, we moved into a prefab at 1011 Sanford. Franklin: Where was your father from? Was he from Washington? Barnett: He was from Oregon. All my family is from Oregon except for me. My dad said he couldn’t get across the border fast enough. Franklin: So being from—what drew him to Hanford? Was it the pay? Barnett: I think so. Well, he was originally—he worked at a plywood plant, then he went to work for Harbor Patrol. He had asthma, which the wet climate apparently irritated. So he had a chance to get over here, so he moved over here. Franklin: Okay. So the climate played a— Barnett: Yeah. Franklin: --big factor and wanted the dry and the sunshine. Barnett: Well, probably the pay, too, because the pay was good for those times. Franklin: Right. And how long did your family live in Prosser before you moved? Barnett: We were there about a year, I think. I don’t remember truthfully—I was only about five when we moved there. And I was there probably about a year. I just vaguely remember moving to Prosser. Franklin: Right. Okay. And you moved—so you came over in 1944— Barnett: Yeah. Franklin: --right? And so you would have moved to Richland in 1944? About there? Barnett: Oh—I think we actually—Dad came over, I think in ’43. A year later, in ’44 we moved over. Franklin: Oh, okay. Barnett: Because I remember ’45 when they announced the war—dropping the bomb on Japan, and Mom told Dad when he come home, I know what you’ve been guarding! [LAUGHTER] Because he didn’t even know what he was guarding at the time. Franklin: Right. Wow. Did your dad talk about his work much? Or maybe [INAUDIBLE] Barnett: He worked as a patrolman until they sold the town and then he became a painter. Franklin: A painter? Barnett: Yeah, he was an artist so then he became a painter and painted the houses and the buildings in Richland. Because when the government owned Richland, if you had a paint job needed done on the house, you called them and they come in and painted it. You didn’t hire somebody from a company to paint it. The government did it. Franklin: And was he a patrolman onsite the entire time until they sold the town? Barnett: Yeah, yeah. Franklin: Okay. Was he assigned to a specific area, or--? Barnett: No, just general patrol. He talked about patrolling the fences, taking their Jeeps and going down the length of the fences and checking them out, and all that sort of stuff. But just a general patrolman, not any special area. Franklin: Okay. And you said that your—what did your mother do when she first got here? Barnett: Oh, she was just a housewife. She eventually went to work as a waitress. And then finally she got on to work at Hanford. She worked with Battelle for about 29 years as a lab tech. Franklin: Oh, wow. Do you know which lab she worked in? Barnett: Well, she did—where they did testing on the animals. Though at that time they were testing marijuana on chimpanzees and different types of animals. She did the test work on the meat from the animals. Franklin: Oh, wow. Barnett: So I don’t know exactly—it was—again, probably wasn’t supposed to be told, so she didn’t say much about it. Franklin: Did she have any schooling beyond— Barnett: Just high school. Franklin: Just high school. And what about your father, did he--? Barnett: He was just high school. Franklin: Just high school as well. Where did your mother waitress at? Barnett: Well, the first place she had was O’Malley’s Drug Store which now is a—what do you call it? A Tojo Gym? Where they teach different martial arts? Franklin: Oh, okay. Barnett: It’s down on Williams, right off of Williams. That’s what it is now. Franklin: Okay. Barnett: O’Malley’s Drug Store eventually closed, moved up to Kadlec. And a lady bought it from him, and now she’s down there on George Washington Way. Franklin: Okay. Barnett: And right by O’Malley’s Drug Store used to be a Mayfair market. So I sold newspapers out at the lunch halls at Hanford. Sold—well, I don’t remember—but I think it was the Columbia Basin News to start out, because that was the first newspaper of the Tri-Cities, was the Columbia Basin News. Then they bought them out and became the Tri-City Herald. But I remember selling—give you an idea, you can figure out how much time, because I remember one of the headlines was—one of the union leaders had been arrested by the government. And I don’t even remember who it was, it’s been so long ago. But I remember that was one of the headlines of one of the newspapers. Franklin: What about—do you remember the Richland Villager at all? That was a local paper. Barnett: Yeah, but it wasn’t very much. It was very small. Franklin: Okay. Barnett: I delivered the Seattle P-I. Franklin: Seattle P-I? Barnett: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. And you said your mother started waitressing at Malley? At O’Malley’s or Malley’s? Barnett: At O’Malley’s. Franklin: O’Malley’s. And then did she waitress anywhere else in Richland? Barnett: Not that I know of. From there she went out to Hanford. Franklin: And that was when pharmacies or drug stores as we know them now, they used to have lunch counters. Barnett: Yeah, yeah. Franklin: Right. And so they would go there and they were more of like a café-slash-pharmacy. Barnett: Yeah. The one up on Thayer, I think it was Densow’s at that time. That had a heyday lunch counter in it, coffee shop. It closed up and now I think it’s just pharmacy. Franklin: Mm-hmm. Barnett: But where the south end—what do you call it? You know when you get down here, you sit and try to remember things and you get kind of jumbled up—Salvation Army building is now on Thayer was originally the Mayfair Market. Franklin: Okay. And what did they sell there? Barnett: Well, that was the grocery store. Franklin: Grocery store, okay. Do you remember—so you said you moved into—what was the address on Sanford? Barnett: 1011 Sanford. Franklin: And do you remember what kind of prefabricated house it was? Barnett: It was three-bedroom. Franklin: Three-bedroom prefab, okay. Barnett: No, I think it was two-bedroom, because my sister was just a little baby then. Franklin: Okay. And did you share a room with your sister? Barnett: Probably with my brother. Franklin: Oh, so how many siblings— Barnett: Had three kids. I had an older brother. We were about five years apart. Franklin: Oh, okay. So an older brother, you, and then a younger sister. Barnett: Yeah. Franklin: And then how long did you live at 1011 Sanford? Barnett: I don’t really remember, but it must have been three or four years, because as soon as they got the A houses built, we had a chance to move into one. And we moved immediately to one. Because we had three kids, and a prefab’s kind of tight for three kids. Franklin: Yeah, yeah. I live in a two-bedroom prefab. And it’s—with just my wife, and it’s pretty— Barnett: Well you know why they’re called prefabs. Franklin: Tell me. Barnett: They were built by a company, brought in in two sections and then put together. They were prefabricated. Franklin: Yeah, the prefabricated engineering company out of Portland. Barnett: And nobody could figure out why they put that little square door in the back other than to throw the garbage out it. I don’t know—have you ever heard of Dupus Boomer? Franklin: Yes. Barnett: He made some cartoons about that backdoor. Franklin: Right, and that the rooves had a tendency to fly away. Barnett: Yeah. Franklin: And they had to put— Barnett: Well, in 1955, they did. They had two of them blow off. Franklin: Yeah, those are great cartoons. Barnett: Like “Pa wants a bathtub.” [LAUGHTER] Franklin: So tell me a little more about growing up in Richland. Which schools did you go to? Barnett: Well, the first school I went was Carmichael. And that was probably a mile-and-a-half away. We walked to school. Nobody thought anything about it. There wasn’t any buses. There was a bus system in Richland, but it was run by the government. It was a little old bus that you could pick up in two places in Richland to go downtown and go to a movie and come back. But no buses hauled you to school. There was high school buses that hauled people. They picked them up in the Horse Heaven Hills on farms and brought them to Hanford—I mean to Col High—it’s Hanford now. But, no, I walked to school real regular, didn’t think about it, nobody had any panic about walking to school. Everybody did it because it’s normal. Franklin: And do you remember—so you would have been going to—was it Carmichael—growing up right in the early Cold War. What do you remember about civil defense? Duck-and-cover, air raids. Barnett: I don’t remember doing that. Franklin: Really? Barnett: I don’t know whether we did or not, but I don’t remember doing that. Franklin: Do you remember knowing what was being made at Hanford? Did you ever have any fear—how real did the Cold War seem to you? Barnett: Well, the Cold War affected me quite a bit because I was in eight years during the Cold War—in the Air Force. Franklin: Right. Barnett: The security was a lot tighter. I mean, there was—you couldn’t go out to Hanford without having your security badge checked. Now you can drive clear to the Area and before you go in the Area have your badge checked. Franklin: Right. Barnett: But then, there was a badge check when you got on the buses, the badge check, when you got out to your area, and then again they checked your badges when you left the area. Franklin: Right. Barnett: So it was—the security was real tight. Franklin: Mm-hmm. But what about when you were growing up, when you were a kid in school? Did you ever have any special fear or pride in what was being made at Hanford? Barnett: Nope. It was—like I said, nobody knew what they were doing out there until they dropped the bomb. Then they found out they’d been protecting part of the atomic bomb. Franklin: Right. Barnett: But I had no fears about it. I went down the irrigation ditch—there used to be an irrigation ditch that ran through town that started—it had two, three ponds on Wellsian Way that were the settling ponds for Richland’s water system. And we used to go there and swim in them. One of the ponds they eventually made a juvenile fishing pond. And the irrigation ditch runs from there, clear down to where the hospital is, down in front of the hospital, several ponds down through the hospital and then under—well, through the Uptown district, one of them went through the Uptown district, and one went to the Columbia River. And wasn’t until ’48 that they finally put a pump in there, because in ’48 when they built the dam—they built the dike, rather—the irrigation ditches plugged up. So they had to put up a pump station in so they could pump the water irrigation ditch up into the river. We used to fish in that. We used to go down there and slide down—slide over where the pump was, because it was all slick and slimy. We’d put on an old pair of jeans and go down there and slide into the water. I mean, that’s things kids then. Nowadays they wouldn’t even think about it. My mother told me when I could swim 25 feet, I could go in the river by myself. Mainly because you didn’t go to the river too often in the winter; you went in the summer. And there’s not a place in the Yakima, if you can swim 25 feet, you can’t get back to the shore. So I spent all my—most weekends and spare time at the Yakima River playing around. Franklin: Wow. What about—maybe you could talk a little bit about the growth of Richland and kind of the building of some of the major hallmarks, like the Uptown and the— Barnett: Well, the Uptown was built—the rest of it closed up, but originally the Uptown—as you come into Uptown off to the left—that was a big theater. And we used to have a big matinee. The Spudnut’s shop has always been there. I can remember going to the movie on a Saturday and the lineup for the movie—I think it was 20 cents for a movie then. But it was clear past the Spudnut shop. We used to watch the owner there making the Spudnuts while we were waiting to get into the movies. Franklin: Has that been in its same location-- Barnett: Yeah. Franklin: --in the mall? Barnett: Spudnut’s has been there ever since it started. They originally were out there in Kennewick. If you go in there and pick up their menu, they have a little story about where they started. They started out there in the Wye. Franklin: That’s great. And what else about it? Because Richland kind of developed out towards-- Barnett: Well, Newberry’s was on the other end of the Uptown district. That was kind of a department store type. I think the only one I saw was about 15 years ago, and that was in the Dalles, Oregon. I don’t even know if they exist anymore. The downtown district, every year we had different contests for the kids. They had marble shooting contests and bubblegum blowing contests—all kind of contests to keep the kids’ interest. Franklin: Right. Barnett: At that time, the—what is it? The Allied Arts, or was that in the Atomic Frontier Days? Franklin: Can you talk maybe a little bit about the Atomic Frontier—do you remember going to the parades? Barnett: Yeah. They had a lot of the old western movie stars come to the Atomic Frontier Days. Franklin: Like—do you remember any names in particular? Barnett: No, I don’t. Like I say, a kid doesn’t retain names like that. He hears them and doesn’t retain them. But my dad, apparently, knew a couple of them, so he visited with them. It started out as just a celebration of Hanford and stuff. And then it worked into the Allied Arts show. Franklin: Okay. And do you remember any particulars of those celebrations, like the parade—the floats, or— Barnett: Well, there wasn’t any parade. There wasn’t any parade, and where Howard Amon Park is, there used to be a swimming pool. You know where it makes a turnaround? Well, there off to the right there used to be a swimming pool. And right now, they still got the old children’s swimming pool there, but then there was a regular swimming pool in the water. And in 1948 when the big flood came, it filled up full of water and they ended up breaking it up and burying it and building the Howard Prout pool. But we used to go down there and swim just about every day. And we’d go to the other end of the park and pick peaches, because it used to be a peach orchard. Because there were orchards all over town. Where Jason Lee was—the old Jason Lee—that was a cherry orchard. Where Densow is, that was a cherry orchard. Carmichael had an orchard. There was orchards all over town. Because this was an agriculture district at the time the government bought it and moved in. Franklin: Were you in any clubs or— Barnett: I was a boy scouts. Franklin: --organizations? Boy Scouts? Barnett: Yeah. We had—one that sticks in my mind the most was we had one of our young scouts drowned at the Uptown. That’s the one I mentioned. He went on an inner tube, fell in the water and drowned. That was in ’48. And actually, the water where the hospital was, the irrigation ditch you got there, that was 15-foot deep at that time. Franklin: Wow. Barnett: That backed up so much, they—that’s when they built what they called the America Mile, the dike. They called all the earthmovers from Hanford out to Richland to build that dike. Because when they started, the water was lapping over the edge to go into the houses. And they poured that thing in about 24 hours. Franklin: Wow, that’s amazing. Barnett: Now, the George Washington Way was closed to all civilian traffic, and these great big earthmovers were just going down the road, 30, 40 miles an hour. Franklin: Wow. What other kinds of activities did you do in Boy Scouts? Barnett: Oh, built models. Car models. You whittle them out, put the wheels on them, all that, have races with them. Went on trips. Just normal Boy Scout stuff. Got a little more sophisticated, but just the normal Boy Scout stuff then. Franklin: Right. And so after you went to Carmichael, did you then go to Richland High? Barnett: Col High. Franklin: Col High? Barnett: [LAUGHTER] It was Col High then. Franklin: Oh. Barnett: They changed the name because there was a Col High downstream on the Columbia that had had the name before Richland High was called Col High. So they changed it to Richland High instead of Col High. Franklin: Oh. But was the mascot always still the— Barnett: All the bomber. Franklin: --bombers? Okay. So the Col High Bombers? Barnett: Yup. Franklin: Okay. And when did you graduate high school? Barnett: 1957. Franklin: And then what did you do? Barnett: I went in the Air Force. I think about two months after I got out and I went in the Air Force. I already spent 27 months in the National Guards. I got in the National Guards when I was 16, and when I went to sign up for the Air Force, the squadron commander of the National Guards was—he got shook up because he enlisted me when I was 16. [LAUGHTER] So they changed the date on my discharge papers from the National Guards. So according to my discharge papers from the National Guards, I’m 78 right now. Franklin: Oh. Barnett: Those days, they did things like that, nobody thought anything about it. Franklin: Wow, yeah. Barnett: Because if you were warm they took you into the military then. Franklin: Right. [LAUGHTER] And what did you—describe your time in the Air Force. Barnett: Well, of course there was basic training. The first place I went was Westover, Massachusetts—that’s Springfield, Massachusetts. And that was a total culture shock for me, because I grew up in a comparatively small city. And Springfield then had over 100,000 people in it. Franklin: Right, and I guess, too, at this point you would have completely grown up when Richland was a government— Barnett: Yup. Franklin: --still was all government space. Barnett: Yup, they sold it while I was in the Air Force. Franklin: Can—actually I guess maybe we can back up a little bit. What strikes you, maybe looking back on that, or— Barnett: I watched them build the Alphabet Houses. And there wasn’t one or two people on the houses; there was five or six building these houses. And they seemed to go up overnight. One of the things that I don’t know is fact or not, but knowing the government it probably was—is they were supposed to build half basements for a coal fire furnace, a coal bin, and two tubs, and place for a washing machine. The contractors screwed up on some of them and built a full basement. And the government found out about it and made them go back in and seal half the basement with dirt. [LAUGHTER] Typical government. Franklin: Were your—granted you were a kid at this point, but was your sense—were people happy— Barnett: Oh yeah! Franklin: living in a government-controlled and -owned town? Barnett: Nobody thought anything about it. There was very little crime. Because at that time, there was only about two, three ways to get out of Richland. So there was nobody causing any big deal. And if you got in a whole bunch of trouble—you didn’t live in Richland unless you worked at Hanford. And if your kids got into too much trouble, they told the parents, you calm them down or go find another job. So it was stopped. Franklin: Right. Did you—was Richland mostly a white community at that time? Right? Were there any other— Barnett: Yeah, there was—one, I think there was only one black community in Richland—Norris Brown. And I think they lived in Putnam. Franklin: Okay. Barnett: I remember we had a basketball game in Sunnyside. And Sunnyside wasn’t gonna let them play on their court. And we told them, fine, we’ll just get up and leave. So we all started to get up and leave and they finally broke it and gave in and let them play on the basketball court. Franklin: How did you know this family? Did you go to school together? Barnett: Yeah, I went to school with them. Franklin: Oh okay, and did you play basketball? Barnett: No! I’m not a sports—I had my first surgery on my knee when I was about 13, so— Franklin: Oh, wow. Barnett: I’ve never played any sports. My sporting then was hunting and fishing. Franklin: But you kind of heard about this story? Barnett: Oh, yeah. We all know them. Went to basketball games. Then there was sock hops and at noon they taught dancing in the lunchrooms for kids that wanted to learn how to dance. Franklin: So do you know what the patriarch of that family would have done at Hanford to be able to earn a place at Hanford? Because mostly from what I’ve heard, mostly African Americans had to live in Pasco. Barnett: Yeah, because they wouldn’t let them live in Richland—I mean Kennewick. Franklin: Yeah, in Kennewick. So how did—do you know any particulars as to how that family was able to live in Richland? Barnett: I think it’s just that the government—that they had to be equal on them, and they just hired them and they went to work out there. I don’t know any particulars on it, but that’s basic what it was. Franklin: Oh, okay. Barnett: They were in a government town, and there was no way that anybody could refuse—and there was nobody that complained about it. Franklin: Right. Barnett: Again, the government controlled it. They said, if you don’t like it, goodbye. Franklin: Right. And they would—they called the government for pretty much anything you needed on the house, right? For coal? Barnett: Right. Lightbulbs, chains, coal. But coal was delivered once a—I don’t know whether it was once a month or once a week. But coal was automatically delivered. And like I say, if there was anything major done, you called the housing department. They came in and fixed it. Franklin: I think sometimes for outsiders looking in, it’s kind of striking to hear about the government completely owning this town and controlling the lives of the people and having that much control on people’s freedoms and responsibility. But from the people I’ve talked to who grow up in Richland, they have very fond memories of it. Barnett: Yeah, there was no restrictions on the normal freedoms. There was restriction on if your kids got into trouble, because, like I said, the patrol would go up to the person that had the kids that were causing the problem and said you either straighten your kids out or you go and find another job. Which, to me, made common sense. And so it was actually pretty decent. Franklin: Did you ever get any sense from your parents that they felt, maybe, restricted, not being able to own their own home or do any of their own repairs, or did they just— Barnett: No, not then. I think—that was just after the Depression—I think they were just happy to be able to get a home. Franklin: Right. Interesting. Because, you know, for some people looking outside, you could look at that level of government control—because we have these big debates about the role of the government in society today, and it’s kind of interesting to hear about it. Barnett: Well, there was no control where the government come in and said, you do this and you do that and you do this. As long as you didn’t get into trouble and you did your job, and were a normal person, there was nobody ever complained about it. I remember I was back behind where the Racquet Club is. I was hunting ground squirrels with a .22 one day. And at that time, nobody had any problems with it. And one of the Richland patrol people came and picked me up and brought me back to the patrol station. And he called my dad. My dad come in and he says, what’s wrong? He says, we caught your boy shooting .22s at such-and-such area. He said, well, is he aiming at the road? Said, no. Said, did he shoot it at anybody? Said, no. Then what the hell are you bothering me about? I mean, that’s just how it was in those times. It wasn’t any of this, oh my god, he’s got a gun. It just was normal. Because I had my first rifle when I was about—I must have been about eight years old. And we used to go out and go rabbit hunting. Franklin: Did you ever spend much time in Kennewick or Pasco—in either of those--? Barnett: Not really. My wife was born in Pasco. Franklin: Okay. Barnett: I never spent much time in it because I had no reason to. I mean, it wasn’t the case of I was afraid to or wary about it—just I had no reason to. All, everything I needed was in Richland or around the Richland area. Franklin: Why did you first have to get surgery on your knee at 13? Barnett: Well, my knee locked. I didn’t find out until about 25 years later that the doctor had actually not fixed it. Because what they found out was there was a meniscus cartilage—you know in your knee? And mine was oblong and it had broke in half. And it had slipped between the joint and it had locked my knee so I couldn’t straighten it out. So I’d have to pick it up, lay it across the other leg, and pull it and pop it back out. But that was the first—I was accident prone. I had a radical mastoid when I was about 15. By the time I got out of high school, I probably had 100 stitches in me. I mean, if it happened, I did it and got it happened to me. I was playing baseball, jumped over a fence, and landed on a guard rake with the thongs up—four thongs in one of my foot. Franklin: Ouch. Barnett: Weird things like that are always happening to me. One time, when I was in school, I reached up to open a door and a kid slammed it and put my hand through the window, sliced across this way. And I looked at it, bleeding, and I closed it up and went to the nurse’s office. The nurse got all panicky. She called my mom, and I could hear my mom say over the phone real loud, again?! And the nurse must’ve thought she was the hard-heartest old lady there ever was, but my mother was just used to it. Franklin: Yeah, right. Barnett: And I didn’t do things out of the way to have it happen, just—if it’s gonna be an odd thing, it happened. Franklin: Right. Barnett: So I kind of, like I say, with all this mess I got with my knee now, I call it Young Stupid Male Syndrome, a lot of it. I don’t—I get frustrated with it, because I love to garden and I can’t garden anymore. But I don’t get worried or depressed about it, because it’s there and nothing I can do about it, so just live with it. Franklin: Right. So jump back ahead now. So you said you moved to Springfield in the Air Force for basic training, and that was— Barnett: No, I was—San Antonio for basic training, and then to Springfield. Franklin: And that was a big culture shock. Barnett: Oh, yeah. I mean, I drove a vehicle and drove into town to haul officers into town. And here is a town with 100,000 people and I’d never been in anything bigger than Richland, Washington. So you can imagine the shock it was, being in that kind of traffic. Franklin: Right. And then where did you go after that? Barnett: Well, I was there for about a year-and-a-half, two years. Then I went to Thule, Greenland. Franklin: Interesting. Barnett: Top of the world. Franklin: Yeah. And what were you—was that for the—weren’t there bombers stationed— Barnett: No, they had the fueling planes there. Yes, they had SAC planes all over the world at that time. But at Thule they had the KC-135s and the KC-97s that were fueling planes. Franklin: Right. Barnett: So we were there to support them. Franklin: And those were there to refuel the— Barnett: The B-52s. Franklin: --the B-52s that were carrying weapons in case of-- Barnett: Yup, because there was one from every base in the world in the air 24 hours a day. Franklin: Right. And can you talk—what was that like, to be in—and was the base separated from any other communities in Greenland, or did you-- Barnett: It was a base of its own. There were no other communities besides Thule, that’s it. Franklin: And how long were you there? Barnett: Year. Franklin: And what was that like? Barnett: Well, it’s an interesting place to visit, but you don’t want to live there permanently. [LAUGHTER] Let’s put it that way. They have permafrost which is—oh, I guess about two foot down. So in the spring there are all these little beautiful tundra flowers—yellows and whites and all that. And then when they’re gone it’s just green grass and that’s it. And when they went to put a pole in the ground, they put a can—a barrel of oil in the ground, and light the oil, and then dig around that barrel. Because that’s the only way to get down past the permafrost. Because permafrost is almost like concrete. Franklin: Yes, yeah. I’m from Alaska originally, and so I’m very familiar with permafrost. So after Greenland, where did you go? Barnett: Went to Mountain Home Air Force Base. Franklin: And where is that? Barnett: Idaho, Washington. Franklin: Oh, okay. So kind of close to-- Barnett: Yeah, out in Mountain Home. They had B-47s then at Mountain Home. Franklin: Okay. Barnett: I figured out that they actually phased out B-47s because they were built before the B-52s and they figured the B-47s weren't worth keeping around. Franklin: And what did you do in the Air Force? Barnett: I drove. I drove every kind of vehicle you can think of. Franklin: Oh, really? Barnett: Yeah. When I moved to Fairchild from Mountain Home, I was trained to tow B-52s in the back, in the hangars. Franklin: Oh, okay. Barnett: With a five-ton Yuke. Four-wheel drive, five ton, and you had wing walkers on the outside that would guide you, and you would back this thing up, this big B-52 into a hangar. Franklin: Wow. Barnett: They would pull it down to a fueling station or whatever. Franklin: Cool. And then when did you come back to Richland? Barnett: 1965. I got out to Richland and we moved to--I can't remember the address, but it was on Marshall. We moved to a house on Marshall. Franklin: Was it an Alphabet House, or was it a-- Barnett: Yeah, it was an Alphabet House. I remember it most because the neighbors had a monkey. And the monkey kept stealing my daughter's candy from her. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: So you said--wait, so by this point you had a family? Barnett: Yeah, I had--I adopted my oldest boy and I had two children. Franklin: Oh, okay. Barnett: They were all born at Fairchild. Franklin: Okay. And a wife, I presume? Barnett: Yeah. Franklin: And what did your wife do in Richland? Barnett: She was just a mother. But we divorced in about '70. And then I remarried. Franklin: Okay. And what did you do when you came back to Richland? Barnett: Anything I could. I worked at O'Malley's Drug Store for a while. I worked at his house--O'Malley's house, leveled his backyard. I worked at Walter's Grape Juice, I worked at Bell Furniture, I worked at—at that time, it was originally called the Mart, at that big building right next to the Federal Building. At one time, that was a big--what would you call it? They had a cafeteria and a grocery store and all the other—kind of like Walmart. Franklin: Right. Barnett: It was called the Mart at that time. And I worked there in the clippers that they washed the dishes with. And then I went to work for the bowling alley, Atomic Lanes, which was right there where the Jacks and Sons Tavern is. That was a community center and a bowling alley there. And I worked there for about a month, and then they went automatic. So, about that time, I was just about ready to get out—finish high school. And I don't think I had any other job after that, and I went in the Air Force. Franklin: Oh, so--I'm sorry. When you came back to Richland, what did you do? So in 1965. Barnett: Oh, I did everything then. You name it, I took a job. Before—I'm sorry, I got it backwards. Before I went in the Air Force, there wasn't many jobs for people in the—who were kids in Richland. And I worked the bowling alley and I worked down at a dry cleaning outfit. But when I come back to Richland, that's when I had all these other jobs. I worked all these other jobs to keep supplied for the family. Franklin: How had Richland changed in the eight years since you had been gone? Barnett: Well, the Uptown district had--the Newberry's had left. And there was a Safeway store right next to the theater. Right now I think it's a—I don't know, some kind of a multi shop deal. And both of the stores that were there originally are gone. They're now all antique stores. Franklin: Right. Barnett: So it was—when it was built, it was the first big complex for going shopping in Tri-Cities. Franklin: Right. Barnett: And after they built that, they built Highlands. And that was another big complex for shopping. So I worked everything I could, and 19--oh, what was it? [SIGH] About '67 or '68, I went to work at Hanford. I finally got on with them. Because I'd been applying at Hanford for three years. And I finally got to work with them. I won't mention how I got to work for them, because to me, it's kind of a ridiculous deal, and I don't know whether it was prejudice or not. Well, I'll go ahead. Franklin: I was gonna say, now you've got my interest. Barnett: I was--how I'd shop for a job, I'd go out and fill out an employment application, and I'd just distribute--go out all over town and fill out employment applications. And every week, I'd go back and check them. Well, one time, I was filling out an appointment application, and one of the guys I knew, I met him, and he said, hey, there's a new employment office over there at the new Whitaker School. And you might check it out. So I went over there and checked it out and signed up. And three days later, Hanford called me for a job. And I found out that that originally was a minority employment office. Franklin: Oh. Barnett: So I've always had the feeling that somebody didn't look at the records right. They didn't see the C. [LAUGHTER] Because I didn't get hired until I went to there and did an application. Because the government was required to hire a certain number of minority-- Franklin: Right. Well, but you did get hired. Barnett: Yeah. Franklin: So what did you do at Hanford? Barnett: Well, I can say as little as possible, like everybody else. [LAUGHTER] That's a common joke. Of course, it took me about--I couldn't understand it. It took me about three months to get a security clearance. When I was in SAC, I had a Secret clearance. Both my folks worked at Hanford, they had Secret clearance. But it still took me about three months to get a security clearance. And all the time, since I've been on the Air Force, I've lived in Richland, I never could understand the government—why they wasted so much money on a security clearance for me. But when I got out there, I started as a process operator. And started at B Plant. And there was no training at that time. I mean, when you went into a radiation zone, one of the guys that was experienced took you with him. And you dressed like he did, hoping he knew what he was doing, because that's how you dressed. And that's how you learned to dress right. So I started out going into the canyon--I don't know if you knew what the canyons were—okay? We went into the canyons and I helped mixed chemicals in the chemical gallery. And that's where I think I really screwed up my knees, because I can remember—remember, I call it Young Stupid Male Syndrome--I remember throwing a hundred-pound sack of chemicals on my shoulder and going up three flights of stairs with them, rather than wait for the elevator. Young and dumb, indestructible. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Actually, maybe for those who might be watching this who might not be as familiar with some of this stuff as I am, can you describe the canyon? Barnett: Well, the canyon was—well, like I say, the building was about 150-foot wide and about 800-foot long. And it was four stories deep and there was just one--the reason they call it canyon was because it was a gigantic canyon. It went the full length of the building, and they had huge cranes that moved different stuff so they could process the atomic waste. Because in B Plant, they process the nuclear waste. They ship it down to B Plant and we go through chemical stuff to separate the strontium and cesium from it. And that would be sent to the encapsulation plant. That was built about—oh, six years after I went to work at B Plant. They closed up after I'd been there for ten years, and I went to work for Encapsulation Building. But the canyon is an immensely big, empty storage building, really what it is. And I don't know how—or what they're gonna do with them now, because there is some radiation there that you wouldn't believe how hot it was. We took samples of radiation behind lead shields, and then they were so hot that they ended up having the crane pick up the samples and dispose of them, because we couldn't move them. Franklin: Wow. Did you—and so when you came back, your father was no longer working at Hanford, right? Barnett: Yeah, he was still working at Hanford. Franklin: Oh, was he still working—so you guys worked at Hanford at the same time. Barnett: Yeah. Franklin: Oh, wow, that's really interesting. So can you tell me a little bit more about what a—describe in a little more detail the job of a process operator? Barnett: Well, real basically, we were what you might call nuclear janitors. Franklin: Okay. Barnett: We clean up the messes that pipe fitters or millwrights or electricians made. We process all the chemical--mixed all the chemicals and processed—did all the processing of separating the strontium and cesium from the nuclear waste and ship them to tank farms. And that was basically what our main job was. We had a few major accidents. Now it'd be all over the world, about how bad it was and all that. But we just went about our business cleaning it up and went on our job. None of us got an overdose of radiation. We relied on our radiation monitors and they were good radiation monitors. If we were getting too much, they yanked us out of there real quick. So we didn't even think about it. It wasn't the case of being scared of it or anything else. It's like your hazardous wastes that they got, like coming from the hospital, where they work in an x-ray lab, they throw all the gloves and stuff and that. That's called mixed hazardous waste. Well, you could take a bath in that and not get any radiation on you. But according to what the public knew, those things are really highly radioactive boxes. And I think the biggest problem the government had is they didn't tell the people enough about what was really going on after the war was over. Franklin: Oh. Really? Barnett: Yeah, because there would have been less worry about things that were going on then, if they would have known. Because if you don't know anything about radiation, and you hear somebody mentions something is irradiated, you get all panicky about it. The expression for radiation out there was, you get a crap up. You get a crap up, you scrub it off and go about your business. Now, they panic and take you to town and do all that sort of stuff. There, we just scrubbed it off and went about our business. Franklin: Right. Barnett: And I never worried about it. Franklin: Okay. So you said you were a process separator at B Plant. And then you went to the Canyon, and what did you do-- Barnett: Well, I didn't go to the Canyon, I went to 225-B, the Encapsulation Building. Franklin; 225-B, the Encapsulation Building. Barnett: That's where they encapsulated the strontium and cesium. Franklin: Okay. Barnett: We all did a multitude of jobs. We worked on the cells, processing the strontium and cesium. And we worked behind the cells in mixing chemicals and we worked from when they loaded the chemicals for shipment for a long period of time when they were shipping cesium to the radiation plant for irradiating medical waste. And that ended when the guy was what they called recycling the cesium capsules too much. They get real hot. I mean, temperature-wise. And he was setting it in the water for a period of time and taking it out of water and cooling them off and stashing them back in the water. Well, one of them leaked. Franklin: Ooh. Barnett: And so they ended up, the whole place had to have all those capsules moved back. So that was a big fiasco. And again, it wasn't our fault. It was the guy doing the work was stupid enough to not check and see what he was doing. Franklin: Right. Barnett: And that's usually what happens with most—any of the radiation. And if you work with radiation, it's not the guy doing the work, it's somebody that's stupid and doesn't check what he's doing, doesn't follow regulations that causes the problem. Franklin: So did you have any other jobs at Hanford? Or what-- Barnett: I don't know, you ever heard of McCluskey? Franklin: Yeah. Barnett: Well, I was over there when we cleaned—for five weeks cleaning up that building. Franklin: Really? Barnett: Yeah. Franklin: Were you there at the time of the accident-- Barnett: No, no. Franklin: --or part of the cleanup for that? Barnett: Afterwards. They were trying to clean up the rooms so they could go in there and get things squared away. And we spent five weeks there. And to tell you how screwball the government can be, the last week-and-a-half we were there, we finally told our supervisor, look, all of worked on this radiation for 15, 20 years. We know how to clean it up. Quit telling us what to do. Let us go in there and clean it up and we'll get it cleaned up for you in no time at all. So they took a chance. And what they did is we ragged all along the bottom of the building, and we took water fire extinguishers. Because it's americium, and americium is a powder substance, it floats real easy. But it's water soluble--it'll run down with water. So we went in there and sprayed the walls with it real heavy. Then wiped everything down, moved everything that was movable, bagged it up in plastic bags and moved it out. And inside of a week, we had it down to mask only. Before then, we were wearing three pairs of plastic and cooling air and fresh air. Franklin: Wow. Barnett: And we cleaned it up in a week-and-a-half because they didn't want the people that knew what they were doing doing it. And that's the biggest problem with the government: they've always got the bureaucracy up here that knows what's going on, but they never ask the poor guy that’s doing all the work what's going on. I think you've seen that numerous times. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: I think so. [LAUGHTER] Wow, that's really fascinating. So how long total did you work at Hanford? Barnett: 30 years. Franklin: 30 years. Barnett: I had to take a medical retirement in '98. Franklin: '98. So then you were there, then, kind of from the shift from production to cleanup. Right? The production and shutdown. Barnett: No, when I left they were just getting ready to start cleaning things up. Franklin: Okay, so can you maybe talk about the shift from production to shutdown? How did that affect your job? Barnett: Well, I really didn't get in on any of the cleanup, because I left before they did. But I talked to a number of the guys out there that I worked with that were in the cleanup. The biggest problem they had is they put such a limit on chemicals they could use to do cleanup that they had to use things that they claim were not environmentally safe. They had to void all that--like Tide. They wouldn't even let us use Tide to wash the walls down. Now, you use Tide in washing machines. [LAUGHTER] Come on, give me a break. That's a hazardous chemical? And I guess it took them quite a while to get the thing cleaned up. Because, like I say, they didn't start cleaning it up until after I left. Franklin: Right. So what did you do in the shutdown era? Like after '87, from '87 to '98? What was your job primarily? Barnett: They didn't shut down--they shut B Plant down, but they didn't shut 2-and-a-quarter down. 2-and-a-quarter was still processing strontium and cesium. Franklin: Oh, okay, so then you kept in the waste encapsulation. Barnett: Yeah. Franklin: Can you describe a little bit more the process of waste encapsulation? Barnett: Well, strontium is not soluble--not water soluble. And strontium is. And what they had--they had a special process--I don't know exactly the process. I just know what we did. You would take a mixed chemicals with the cesium and you would dissolve it and then you would heat it up to--I think--800 degrees into a liquid. And then you had a machine we called a tilt-pour which would pour seven capsules at a time full of cesium. And then you'd take these capsules and you'd put a sensoring disc in them to make them airtight. And then you'd weld a cap onto that. That'd be welded by a machine. And most then it was computerized. Then that was decontaminated until it was clean. And then it was put into another capsule, and that capsule was also—put a lid on it, but it was soldered on—welded on. And that was moved into the pool cells. Pool cells are 13-foot deep. What you had is a special hole built into the wall with water that you would shove that capsule through. And then the guy on the other side in the pool cell would grab the capsule and pull it out. And he would go to the pool cell that he's designated to go to, and he would shove it through a hole in the wall. And somebody on the other side would grab it and pull it and then you'd put it into its spot. So it was quite a process. And the fear was--you couldn't get that capsule within five feet of the top. Because if you did, you'd get a high radiation alarm. They’d read millions of rads on those capsules. They were hot, no two ways about it. And one thing I've always wondered is why does cesium glow blue when you turn the lights out? Franklin: Wow. Barnett: You turn the lights out in the pool cell, and all these cesium capsules will glow blue. And I've never--I've had somebody say it's something about the speed of light and all that. But I'd like to know the real reason it does that. Franklin: That sounds kind of strangely beautiful. Barnett: It was. It's a blue glow all along the bottom. The strontium doesn't. Strontium is not water soluble and it doesn't glow at all. In fact, I got some strontium in me one time when I had a tape when one of the manipulators--I don't know if I didn't mention--all the work was done from the outside with the manipulators. You know what manipulators are. Franklin: Right, yeah. Barnett: Okay, and all the capsulation, all of the work was done with manipulators from the outside. And it was amazing what some of those guys could do. They could take a little bottle about so big with a little bitty top and they could pick up that bottle, hold it here, and took up the other--the cap with the lid and put it on it. Franklin: Wow. Barnett: I was never that good with it, but there some guys out there who got real expertise with that. It just takes a lot of work to learn to use those things. Franklin: I bet. Barnett: That's one reason my hand's tore up--my hand just didn't take it so much. Franklin: And you said you got strontium on your hand? Barnett: Yeah, I got--I couldn't handle manipulators good because my hand was falling apart on me. So I took all the decontamination of the manipulator. Because that's--a manipulator has to be pulled after so many--I think it's so many weeks, the Mylar coating on it starts deteriorating. So it has to be pulled, decontaminated, and new Mylar sheath put on it. And I was in there decontaminating one of the manipulators, and one of the—well, they were trying new bands that controlled the grips. And one of them broke and sliced my hand. And I got some strontium in my finger. It was about 700 counts. I wasn't too worried about it. But they took me to town and went on all government roads, documented and everything and brought me back. I couldn't work with radiation for about three months until that thing finally deteriorated--worked out of the body. Franklin: Wow. Barnett: But I didn't worry about it. It wasn't enough to do any harm. Franklin: Wow, that's really-- Barnett: See, that's the difference between working with the stuff and knowing what it does, and not working with the stuff. Franklin: Right. Right, I've heard a lot of similar things about-- Barnett: It's like chemicals. I'd rather work at a radiation plant than at a chemical plant. Because if you have good radiation monitors, you're not gonna get an overdose of radiation. But with a chemical plant, look what they have out there now. A guy gets a whiff of chemicals, they all go panic about it. Franklin: Yeah, I see where you're--I see your point. So you said--earlier when you said you would put the cesium in the pools—cesium cans, you couldn't get them too close to something, because they'd get too hot. Sorry--can you-- Barnett: No, it wasn't too close--they're in--oh, it probably was a--well, what would you call it? It was like a cabinet with holes in it. You would drop these in there. And they're spaced out. You couldn't pull them too high. Franklin: Oh, okay. Barnett: If you pulled them sometimes when you're getting ready to transfer them to the pool cell, they would hydroplane and come up. And if you pulled them too fast, they would come up and you'd get a high radiation alarm. You’d just drop it back down and it'd go off. Franklin: Oh, okay. Barnett: That's what it was. Franklin: I got--okay. I gotcha. So-- Barnett: It only takes one time, you remember not to do that anymore. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: [LAUGHTER] I bet. So even though your area—your work didn't change much when most of the plans ordered to shut down. You still probably worked with a lot of people whose jobs might have changed-- Barnett: Yeah. Franklin: --during shutdown. Can you talk about that transition between process--? Barnett: Well, I talked with some of the guys and they were talking about how much work it took to get things cleaned up. Like the area behind the pool cells, that had to be completely decontaminated. And we finally got it down to where it was just one pair and no masks. That took a lot of work. Decontaminating just takes a lot of hand-scrubbing. I mean, it's not a case of, you can put something there and pick it up and get rid of it. You got a scrub a lot of places until it's gone. It takes a lot of work. And I talked to one fella, and he said that they had all the cells that were down to clean—and what they consider clean is no radiation in them. And it is hard for me to believe, because some of those cells were really hot. But I never got a chance on the cleanup. Franklin: How was--so when Hanford was shifting over, how was this change explained by management, or some of the--how was it conveyed, or how did the community take it? Barnett: Management never explained anything to anybody. [LAUGHTER] I don't remember hearing the community complaining about anything, because most of the guys worked out there, and they knew what was going on. So there was no big panic about it. It wasn't the case where some guys didn't work here, they were told this was going on and got all excited because they didn’t know what was going on. Most people knew what was going on. So there was no big panic that I remember. Franklin: Okay. Barnett: We didn't panic with radiation, because we had good radiation monitors. Franklin: Right. Barnett: And that makes a big difference when you're working around radiation. Franklin: So being in waste encapsulation, how did other events--other nuclear accidents around the country or around the world, like Three Mile Island or Chernobyl, kind of affect how your job or how-- Barnett: It made us see how ridiculous--because Three Mile Island actually worked. It was [UNKNOWN] what it was built for. And the moderation they got--radiation they got was not as much as you get flying from here to Denver City. Because you get more radiation from the sun than you do from—what the people at Three Mile Island got. But they blew it up so big, because so many years the government kept radiation such a secret. And that's the reason there's so much panic whenever they say radiation. Of course, there's been some real bad accidents. That one in Japan—that was a horrible thing. But as far as Hanford goes, most of the people that worked at Hanford don't—I guess they're not working around radiation anymore; it's all chemicals. Because they're getting—they get the chemicals and to me, that's the management's problem. Because they're doing something wrong in taking care of the people. The people are doing what they're told to do. If management is telling them, hey, you got to wear this, and they're not wearing it, then that's their problem—that’s the worker's problem. But when the management doesn't do anything about it, that's their problem—that’s management's problem. And I think from what I've heard and read, most of this is a managerial problem. It's not a case that the worker is going out of his way to ignore any safety concerns. Franklin: Right. What about the accident in Chernobyl? How did that--did that affect your job, or-- Barnett: Yeah, it affected it because they shut down N Reactor. And N Reactor, up until then, was as safe as any reactor in the country. It had so many safety pieces on it that you could darn near slam a door and make it shut down. But they shut it down because it was something like Chernobyl. And that's where the big effect was. Franklin: How did--oh, how did security policies change over time? Did they change with the different contractors or in response to different events? Barnett: No, the security’s main thing was basically the same. You had the security guards at like 200 East—well, they left the security guards that you couldn’t get out to Hanford without a security clearance. But that quit because they had the buses, and that stopped. And they had the security guards checking the buses and stuff as you went through. And then typical government, they started screaming about, oh, we're burning too much gas. We can't afford gas! So we'll shut the buses down. [LAUGHTER] So everybody had to drive out. But the guards at the gate checked your badges, checked your cars. If there was anything in it--you couldn’t take cameras or anything like that out there. If the guard knew you, he checked you out whether he knew you or not, because he had to make sure your wife didn't leave a camera sitting in your backseat you didn't know about. Franklin: Right. Barnett: Which happened on occasion. Franklin: Right, I bet. How did your job change with the different contractors coming in? Did it change much, or did you-- Barnett: Well, every contractor that came in, the engineers thought they were gonna remake the world. They would come up with some plan that they saw on a schematic and say, this is the way we want to do it. And we'd tell them point blank, it won't work. We've tried it that way. And they say, oh yes, it will! So we'd spend $50,000 in parts and stuff to put this together, and then it didn't work. And then they went around, well, why didn't it work? Well. The only one I ever saw that was a decent engineer is when he'd draw up a plan to do something, he would go to the millwrights, he would go to the operators, he'd go to the instrument techs and ask them to look at it and see if there's anything that needs done on it. And he had never had any problems. But these that come straight out of school and thought they could reinvent the world were a pain in the butt to us because they cost money and time. Franklin: Do you remember who that good engineer was? Barnett: He left. I don't remember who he was. But he left and went to work for a big company some place. Franklin: Oh, okay. Do you remember President Nixon's visit in--I think it was 1970 or 1971? Barnett: I might have. I didn't see him. I don't worry about politics. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Barnett: He didn't do our place any good or any bad. Just a big political statement. Franklin: How did the Tri-Cities change from when you came back in 1968 until today? What kind of strikes you as major changes? Barnett: Well, there seem to be more, you might say, petty crimes. There wasn't as much as there was before--there was more than there was before, I should say. But the city maintained its equilibrium about the same, because the people have been here for 20 years, and then they sold the city to the town. There was no big change in the government. The police stayed the same. The biggest change was you had to call a painter if you wanted your house painted. And they sold the houses to the people, and that was the biggest change. Franklin: How about, though, since—from when you came back in 1968 until today? Has there been any--has the community changed at all? Barnett: Well, a lot of the businesses have left Richland. They moved out Columbia Center area, or up there in that area. We don't have--you got to go to Columbia Center to find a business. There's a few still there. There's Home Depot and stuff like that down there, Big Lots. But there's not as many as there used to be. And mostly antique shops or stereo shops. Franklin: Right. Barnett: But there's always the Spudnut. It's always been there. Franklin: There is always the Spudnuts, yeah. They're good too. Is there anything else that I haven't asked you about that you'd like to talk about? Barnett: Well, us kids had different ways of playing that nowadays they would just panic about it. We used to have BB gun fights. We’d put on leather jackets and extra pair of Levi's and a hat and go into these orchards like where Densow's was and we'd have BB gun fights. And you haven't really lived until you've had your butt shot by a BB. [LAUGHTER] But nowadays there'd be some big panic about it that you're gonna shoot an eye out. Well, nobody ever shot an eye out because we made sure that we didn't shoot towards the head. [LAUGHTER] When they were building the houses, that's what was amazing, how fast they put these houses up. It wasn't a week or so to get a house started--it was almost a week and they had the thing almost done. And we used to go to different houses and have clod fights. Things like that that you don't dare do nowadays. Franklin: When you had what kind of fights? Barnett: Clod fights. Clodded earth. We'd get behind stuff and throw clods at each other. And the snow then was two, three foot deep. Because I remember building snow forts in my yard three foot high and never have to go to the yard to get snow. So there has been a big change in the weather. And the shelterbelt, that made a big difference, because I remember when we had sandstorms--not dust storms, sandstorms. And my dad would pull his car up in front of the house to keep the sand from blasting the side of the car off--the paint. So there's been big changes. The shelterbelt was one thing the government put in that actually worked. It’s kind of surprising. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: That's great. Is there anything else? Anything else you'd like to talk about? Barnett: Well, not really. Just that the area behind--you know, in West Richland at that time used to be Heminger City and Enterprise. They were two cities then. Franklin: Okay, tell me, were those cities that predated the Hanford Project? Barnett: Yeah. Franklin: Okay, and how big were there? Barnett: Oh, they were just little communities. It was just one run into the other. There was one called Enterprise, one was called--what did I just say? Franklin: Something city. Barnett: Heminger City. Franklin: Heminger City. Barnett: One of the elections went out for voting, they had one of the places that you went to was called Enterprise. Franklin: And how long did those communities last after Hanford came? Barnett: Not very long. I can remember Dad going out to the first town—first little town was Heminger City. And that was right where Cline's computer shop is, it was automobile shop there. And those were all owned by one group--one person. I think it was--Herricks was the name. And she had a little taco stand in one of the places. And OK Tire Shop had part of the one building that they sold tires and did car repair out of. So it was a slow change in West Richland. We had a feed store for a while. But Hanford went on strike and our feed store went down the tubes. They used to have what they called parking lot critter sells. People would bring all their animals, little animals that they wanted to sell in cages. And we would sell them for them and get 10% of the interest. It was a pretty good deal, because a lot of people had pet rabbits and stuff like that and they wanted to get rid of them. Usually had them at the un-boat races. You heard of the un-boat races? Franklin: Why don't you tell me? Barnett: The un-boat races? You ever heard of them? Franklin: Why don't you tell me? Barnett: Well, the un-boat race was you went up to the Horn Rapids Dam, and you put something in. It could not be a boat. It could be a bath tub, it could be inner tubes--it could be anything that you could see above that would float and it could not be called--it was called un-boat race. And there was a prize that they got down towards the bridge that crosses the Yakima there on George Washington Way. Got down about that far, there was a prize who got there first. But they ended up cutting that out because people left too much stuff—garbage alongside the road. They wouldn’t pick it up and take it with them when they were done with it. But that was a lot of fun. We used to stand up on the ridge. Always started about May. And we'd stand there and watch people come down the river on these un-boats. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: That sounds really fun. Anyone else have anything? Okay, well, Dan, thank you so much for talking to us today. I learned a lot of great stuff about Richland and waste encapsulation. I really appreciate it. Barnett: Okay. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:09:22 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 200 East Area B Plant N Reactor 225-B Encapsulation Building Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1968-today Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1968-1998 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Newberry O'Malley Walter Jacks Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Daniel Barnett Description An account of the resource An interview with Daniel Barnett conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 07-14-2016 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2017-08-11: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. 1955 200 East B Plant Battelle Cold War Dam Hanford Houses K-Basin Kennewick Market N Reactor Park River School Sun swimming War https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F0f094d5a53d9f182e7f0e025e2f2b8be.jpg 8c6a9bb1b96c15e52e5e257665176a13 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F0f2c69c8057ad2de89bc821a77371c1e.mp4 a98291ac678ac0e576af292cdf1abeae Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Bauman Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Danny Henry Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 220 kbps Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Northwest Public Television | Henry_Danny </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: My name is Danny Henry. Spelling is D-A-N-N-Y. Middle initial is R for Ray, R-A-Y, Henry, H-E-N-R-Y. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: All right. Thank you. And my name's Robert Bauman, and we're conducting this interview on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities on July 2nd of 2014. So let's start maybe by talking about how and when your family first came to the Tri-Cities. When that was, and why they came. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Okay. Actually, my father first of all came to the Tri-Cities. And he came to the Tri-Cities, I believe it was somewhere around '48. It was in the mid or late 40s. And he actually came out from the South, from Arkansas--Atkins, Arkansas, Polk County. And he was married to my mom at that time, but she stayed back in the South, and he came out to work for the government during the war effort. And he worked out here for some period of time. I don't know how long, but he liked it out here. And so once his mission was done, he went back to the South. And then later years, came back out and found work with the railroad. And then eventually he started working construction. And he became a laborer, and worked construction. Then he came back out to the site, and worked at N Reactor for some period of time. And I can even remember back in the 60s when John Fitzgerald Kennedy came out here, the President, to give a speech about the N Reactor. I was a kid. I think I was probably about seven or eight years old, maybe 10, somewhere around there. And then he decided to stay out here. When he came back out to the Northwest, back out to Washington, decided to stay out here and got work, and then sent for my mom, and she came out. And so they made a life and stayed on. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: Hm. Do you know how he originally heard about Hanford? It's a long way from Arkansas. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: My understanding from my older brother, which is 20 years older than me, he said that he actually received direction from the government, or allowance from the government, and received gas credit, or chips, or whatever, in order to drive out and to show up at the Hanford site at some designated time. And so him and another one of his friends both drove out, and they went to work out here during in the 40s. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: So he was recruited in some way or something, right? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Yes. Yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: So then you were born in the Tri-Cities? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Yes, I was born in Pasco, Washington in 1953, May 7, 1953. And I graduated Pasco High School, went on to college, and graduated from Evergreen State College, and then returned back here to the Tri-Cities and found employment out at Hanford. First of all, it was with Rockwell, and with the fire department. I'll back up a little bit. During the summer of when I was in high school, two summers, I did work out for J. A. Jones at that time in the 300 Area, and I actually worked as a printer, or learned—as a summer job, and learned how to print on these old, offset printers. And did that for two summers. And so when—actually I had graduated from college and came back. While I was at college, I did receive an emergency medical technician certificate through the State of Washington, and so it was a good shoo-in to go to work for the fire department as a firefighter. So let's see. It was Chief Good at that time who hired me. And at that time there was only a few that had EMT certifications. And Chief Good had told me that there was no intention at that time to actually have the fire department respond for emergency care. They had always called the Richland fire department, or Kadlec, or some other emergency services. And so I didn't really see a whole bunch of future in staying there at the fire department. So I heard that they were hiring down at N Reactor for reactor operators, and the pay was a bit better. So I thought that would be a challenge. And so I applied. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: And so you got a job there, then? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Yeah. I started working at N Reactor, I believe it was late 1978, and went into the reactor operator program, and eventually—well, started in the fuels department, and then had the opportunity to get into the certification program for the control room. And decided I would take on the challenge. There was a lot talk back and forth with the other operators. Some was pro and some was con. No, it's not really better to work in the control room. It's better to work in fuels. But I seen a challenge of being able to actually operate a reactor. And I really wanted that certification. And so I did go in the certification program. And after, I think, two years, two and a half years—I think the class started out, I think it was like 24, 26. And the final certified reactor operators, I think there was six of us. I could probably name them. Yeah. And all the other operators dropped out, and they went back to fuels, or they got into the trades, or just left the company. But I stayed on and was certified. It was very, very challenging, very hard. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: Right. And so how long was that training program again? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: The training program, I think it was about a year and a half, two years. With all of the qualifications, you had to be trained on all the different systems. You had to get checked out by the senior operators, and they would ask you questions, and make sure you were proficient in every one of those before you got the sign-off. So you had to complete all of that, as well as take tests, periodic tests, on the systems. And when you had finished all your actual qualifications, then you were allowed to take the eight-hour exam. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: Oh, okay. Hm. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: And so once I had finished up mine, there was testing. And I took the eight-hour exam, and passed the eight-hour exam. I think I probably took about 10 hours to finish it, but that was fine. And passed the exam. And from there, you were then allowed to do a walk through, where a senior trainer would take you out into the facility, and basically ask you anything he wanted to, all the way from the front face, to the rear face, to the confinement valves, to the emergency cooling system, and anything in components or valves, and circuitry, and all of that. And I passed that, and did quite well. I spent a lot of time actually—when I was an operator, the duties primarily was laundry, because there was a lot of SWPs, or radioactive clothing that was used. So someone always had to maintain laundry. And then also some of the duties was housekeeping. Some of the duties was actually patrol, where actually you went through the reactor, and made sure all of the outside systems and everything was in correct alignment, and there wasn't any out-of-spec conditions. So I spent a lot of time out in the reactor. At the time when I was out, I took it upon myself to take prints with me, and actually verify and look at a lot the systems out there, so I knew them pretty well. So that was one of the things that really worked for me when I did my walk-through. I was really ready for that. And I think I scored highest in my walk-through of the three tests. The final test was the oral exam. And the oral exam consisted of a senior person from training, senior person from operations, senior person from nuclear safety. And they all sat on your board. And I think there was one other individual also, I think may have been quality assurance, maybe. And basically they sit in a room like this, and you sit in front of a table, and they ask you questions, and you answer the questions. And they had the choice of asking you whatever questions they chose to, as long as it related to reactor operations, up to and including the electrical distribution systems that powered or brought power to the reactor, as well as the power going out, steam systems, all of the different auxiliary systems part of the plant. But anyway, I passed that exam also, the oral board. And so then I was granted my certification. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: A pretty grueling process. [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: It was, very much. [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: And so how long were you an operator, then, how long did you work? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Actually, as a certified operator—I maintained my certification, I believe, for a year and a half, maybe two years. There was a requalification. I think it was about a year and a half. I did operate the reactor, the nuclear console, the AA console. That probably doesn't mean anything to you, but the water systems, or the actual nuclear panel, where you actually pulled and maintained power, and adjusted power, and also a lot of the air balance systems, and the secondary systems, where the steam was produced and sent over to Washington State Public Power. We sold steam. It was a dual purpose reactor. And worked on all of the panels. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: And so before you were an operator, you worked in fuels, you said. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: So what sort of work did that entail? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: The fuels operation--[COUGH] excuse me—was actually--the fuel that would come, that would be the spent fuel that was discharged out of the rear of the reactor would come out, go down, and go what was called a trampoline, and go into the water, and hit this metal mesh chain type of trampoline to slow it down. These fuel elements were, I think, as I remember, somewhere around 50-60 pounds. So coming out of the back of the reactor, they were there pretty heavy. And so then they would roll down into conveyor carts, and that's one of the duties as a fuel operator, doing charge discharge. You'd basically take the fuel after it went through the cart, move it out, index it, take it out, and then place it in various different storage compartments in the back face of the reactor, or actually in the basin, what was called the fuels basin. And then also--that was the primary job of a fuels operator, yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: And so how long total did you work at Hanford, then? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Total time at Hanford is 35 years. I've been out here 35 years. It's been a long haul. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: Yeah. And so you started in the late 60s? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: '78 or '79. I believe my actual start date was 8/1/1978. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: So you were there for a little while, and at some point the mission shifts to clean up. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Yeah, yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: How did that impact the sorts of things you were doing? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Well, one of the things about being--as an operator, is that you work shift work. And so I actually worked shift work, I think, for like three years, rotating shift, A, B, C, D; graveyard, swings, days. So I never got used to that. I had a family. I was just starting a family and stuff, and I wanted to be able to spend a lot more time with my kids and my wife on normal hours. So I looked for another job at N Reactor, and there was an opening for actually a process standard engineer/nuclear safety engineer. And so I applied for it. I got the job, and was responsible for maintaining standards, process standards, which is day-to-day operations. If there was any changes or deviations to the operations, there had to be approval. There was an approval process. And so I was kind of responsible for maintaining that, reviewing it, and then approving it through the control room, through my management, in order to make any changes to reactor operations. Pretty much that was that job. It was straight days. I liked that. Five days, I was off the weekends. It was great. And there was some other opportunities also during that time in that position. I wanted to mention, I had a very good mentor. His name was John Long, and he was the nuclear safety engineer, or nuclear safety manager, manager of nuclear safety at that time. And John was very instrumental in assisting and helping me, and I really do appreciate his efforts. He's deceased now. But anyway, John helped me quite a bit when I was in that position. There was other opportunities also. I moved from there, and became—actually went into the planning aspects of outages. And so the reactor would run for so long, sometimes there was a planned outage, sometimes an unplanned outage. Unplanned outages usually were because the reactor scram for some reason. Maintenance had to be done, something had to be fixed or repaired. So for the actual planned outages, I became a planner/scheduler, or took a position as a planner/scheduler, and actually planned to do various different maintenance. What that consisted of was drawing out a long-term plan, and when the reactor was down, to manage that plan, and for the systems to be fixed, repaired, coordinated for the least amount of time so the reactor could actually come back up and running. We were being paid. And it was one thing I wanted to mention about N Reactor. There was a lot, a lot of good spirit. The people who worked out there, they really knew that they were on a mission. This was during the Cold War, and we knew what we were doing, and it was just a lot of good spirit. You know, when you'd ride the bus out--by the way, I rode the bus back and forth. And when you'd be on the bus, and the reactor was down, and you'd get past the fire department, and you'd make that last left turn, people would just kind of wake up. And they'd be looking, and they were looking to see if that green light goes on. There was—on the board, there was a green or red light. And someone up front would say, yeah, we're up. And it was just a lot of that kind of spirit of wanting the reactor to run. I really, really liked that. So being a part of the--doing the planning and scheduling, or a position as planner/schedule was a real shoo-in to going to work as outage manager. I then became an outage manager, where actually I managed the outage center. And the outage center basically coordinated, on a daily basis, on a shift basis--there was six of us, and I guess you could say we were kind of elite, we were very picked to run that, because it was so critical to the mission—and your responsibilities was to make sure that things got done as scheduled, as planned, and that you had the craft resources to do them. You coordinated with the operations folks, the fuel folks, the engineering. That was your job, to coordinate all those efforts. A lot of the things that happened in the plant and the repairs actually required that you have engineers in place in case there was questions, technical questions, changes to paperwork that had to be authorized, and so on and so forth. So that was part of the job as outage--primary job as an outage manager is to make sure of that. And you reported directly to upper management, and sometimes DOE. So you were responsible on a daily basis to coordinate and have those meetings, and ensure that work got done and statused at the end of the day. So shortly after that, they announced that—or probably, I guess, maybe about six to eight months in that position--they announced that N Reactor--after Chernobyl--they announced the N Reactor would no longer be on the same mission, and it was going to shut down. So I moved from there to another job. I actually left N Reactor, and went to 200 Area, and worked as a nuclear safety engineer, over for—I'm trying to think right now. I can remember who I worked for. I worked for Arlen Shade. But actually, my responsibilities was over B Plant WESF. And at that time they had just started to bring back the capsules that was basically sent down to--I forget exactly--Decatur, I think. Yeah. And anyway, these capsules, there was some problems with them. But anyway, they were bring them back. And so I was right as part of that. I don't know what happened to that mission, but I served there as a nuclear safety engineer with oversight responsibilities over people at WESF for a period of time. And then after that, let's see. I almost have to look at my resume to think. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: It's really been--it's actually been that long. Of course you're going to be cutting and doing clips and stuff. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: Yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: So I can just-- Oh, by the way I have a--I actually pulled this out. This was actually my certification. Wally Ruff's name over to the right there kind of faded. It must have gotten wet. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: Oh, yeah, huh. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: That's the original certification. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: [INAUDIBLE] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: What's that? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: --the control room on the-- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Yeah. Yeah. So I didn't know exactly what you guys would want, but I just grabbed some stuff. This was my 30-year recognition with Fluor. I don't have a 35. I don't know. They didn't give out a 35-year recognition. I don't know why. Let's see. Where am I? Process standards, senior outage planner, outage manager of nuclear safety, principal engineer. Oh! Yeah. Then after that there was—actually, when I was--as the nuclear safety principal engineer oversight over B Plant WESF, there was a position that came available for a manager for OSHA compliance, OSHA safety and health program. We had previously been benefited, let me say, with headquarters coming out, and they were called the tagger team. And they basically came out to the site, and they went through the whole site, and they were doing assessments. They had a very, very large group, and they assessed the site, with the effort to give feedback to the improvements that needed to be done at Hanford. Well, part of the actions, or corrective actions, was to develop an OSHA type of assessment program that would look at occupational safety and health, industrial hygiene, and in some aspects, I think, fire protection. Anyway, there was a position open, and I did not have the background in occupational safety and health, but I talked to my manager, and talked to my manager, and finally I convinced him to put me in as a temporary position, just as an acting manager. And so he went ahead and authorized that. So I then moved from the outer areas down to 300 Area, and from there, he basically said, okay, Danny, you want this position. You think you can do it? He says, okay, here's a stack of resumes. You have two staff and that's it, and a student worker. Okay, so you need to first of all hire and find some people that are qualified to be inspectors in occupational safety and health, and hygiene. And then you need to have all this done, by the way, and a program developed in four months. And so that was quite a challenge. It was really a challenge. I did hire—went outside and hired some people, and they were good people. We were a very good team. I didn't know about occupational safety and health, but they taught me. I knew I could hire people that were smarter than me. And I actually hired--and maybe for reference, one of the people was Judy Larson I don't know if she still is living. But she was a certified industrial hygienist. She was working for PNNL, and she transferred over. I also hired a student that--well, no, he actually had graduated with a mechanical engineering degree, and he wanted to do fire protection. So I said if he came over I'd get him trained up. And so he came over. And I also hired another individual that was an industrial hygienist—or two other individuals, a Clinton Stewart, and the first occupational safety and health person I hired, his name was Steve Norling. And he would be a good person to interview in the future. I would recommend that you do that. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: How do you spell the last name? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Norling. N-O-R-L-I-N-G. Steve. He's a good guy. He still works PRC. I haven't seen him in a few years, but I think he's still out there. But anyway, we developed a program. We put the program together, hired a contractor to actually help us with the writing of the program, and we set it up. And we actually went out in the site, and first of all, we had to compile all of the buildings, because we were basically responsible for all of the Westinghouse people, and all of their facility. So we had to figure out all of the facilities in the whole site. And then we had to have some kind of system to figure which ones we would go look at first, based upon risk. And so we developed that program, and to make a long story short, the tagger team came back out to check the corrective actions on all of the site, and when they got to us, our program, they had no findings, absolutely no findings, zero findings. And they only had one recommendation, in that we needed to involve the employees more. And so then we transitioned into the Voluntary Protection Program. But that was very outstanding. And that really impressed my management. So then from acting manager, I was made manager of the organization, and proceeded on to continue my career. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: So what time frame was this, roughly, then? [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Oh, let's see. That was May 1991 to September 1992. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: Okay. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Okay. Let's see. From there, I transitioned into basically manager of safety programs assessments, which developed. And basically our mission at that point was to develop baseline hazard assessment programs for facilities. And basically, for each facility that you had operations in, to go and do a baseline hazard of everything, both the occupational safety, industrial hygiene, the nuclear aspects of it, and any other types of hazards, so that for that facility, all of the known hazards of that facility would be known and could be communicated, and basically programs and systems set up in place to keep the workers safe. From September 1992 to February 1994, I worked in that position. And after that, I worked as the manager of the Voluntary Protection Program, or actually manager of Industrial Safety Planning, which consisted of managing the Voluntary Protection Program for Westinghouse and for Fluor Hanford, doing their contract transition. And of course the Voluntary Protection Program is still out here on the site, as you probably well know, and there's different--but I was very instrumental in getting that program off zero. After that, I worked as operations engineer. I transitioned and went back out to the site, to 105 K-East and K-West. I worked as an operation specialist in development of the Canister Storage Facility and the Cold Vacuum Drying Facility out at K-Basins and at 200 East, is where the Canister Storage Building is. And then also K-East and K-West storage facility. I was assigned to the shift office, and worked as an OE, Operating Engineer, basically under the direction of a shift manager. And basically managed the facility's work activities, coordinated those on a daily basis to get work done, assigning work to the craft personnel, releasing work packages during lockout/tagout, and various different aspects of operations for that facility, managing that facility. After that, let's see, that was from 1998 to 2002. And from January 2002 to present, I've worked as a management assessment coordinator. And responsibilities are primarily to develop the Management Assessment Program and Integrated Evaluation Plan database for DOE-RL. And let me explain, that Integrated Evaluation Plan is basically a database that takes RL's assessments and our assessments, and basically puts them together, so we have one integrated plan. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: I see. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: And that effort is to actually benefit, or to alleviate, or eliminate redundancy in assessments, teaming with the site and doing various different assessments, rather than they doing one and we doing the same one. Yeah. So that's currently where I'm at right now. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: So you've had several different sorts of positions. You've worked at N Reactors, and K-Basins, and different parts of the site. Of the different jobs you had, over the 35 years, different places you've worked, what was—was there a specific job or place that was sort of the most challenging and/or most rewarding, that you got the most sense of accomplishment or reward? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Yeah, there was. I would have to say probably the reactor operations was probably, I'd say, number one, because I know there was no other African Americans that had ever certified at N Reactor, and then later on I found there wasn't any others in any of the other facilities of the plants. So I felt very good about that. And it was very challenging. The second area would have been in developing the OSHA compliance program, because that was basically, I knew basically nothing. And I had to go find people in order to work that were much smarter than me, and be able to develop a program that would actually meet the muster of headquarters when they came back out. And it was very challenging. I stayed up quite a few nights thinking about it and worrying about it. And yeah, it was very challenging. But it was a very, very well-put-together program, and it met everything that they were looking for. So I'd have to say those two positions were the most challenging, yes. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: When you were talking about working at the N Reactor, you talked about riding the bus, and the sort of spirit, the sense of mission, I think, in the Cold War-- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Yes. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: So when the Cold War ended in 1989, 1990, did that sort of sense of mission change? Did it shift somewhere? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: I guess I couldn't really expound on that, because what I was speaking of was during the time I was working at N Reactor. And once the Cold War ended, I was at that time working--when did the Cold War end? That was-- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: Well, I guess it depends, right? The Berlin Wall came down in '89. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: When the wall came down. Okay. Yeah. I was—where was I at at that time? Yeah, I was actually up in the 200 Area. I was oversight. I was a part of an appraisal team doing integrated safety appraisals out of the 200 Area. So I had transitioned away from N Reactor some years before that. So I didn't really feel a difference with what I was doing. The real thing that I seen that really affected a lot of the people at N Reactor was when they announced that it was not going to—it no longer had a mission. It wasn't going to be restarted. The reactor was run very hard, run very well, and produced a lot of power, and was very good in its mission. And there was just a lot of pride there. And when that was announced, there were a lot of people that really was hurt by that, because it was a reason to come to work. It was really a reason to come, and a reason to work for something. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: I want to go back to something you talked about early when you started talking. And you mentioned President Kennedy's visit when he dedicated the N Reactor. So do you remember that? Did you-- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: I actually remember that very well. And in fact, it was my father, and my mother, and my sister, and me, and my friend, Ronnie Brown. I haven't seen him in years, but I understand he's doing well. My dad brought us all out to the site, and drove with all of the, what seeming like thousands and thousands of cars, you know, we were just kids, and all the way out to N Reactor. And yes, I definitely remember that. I can remember the helicopters coming in, and the dust flying, and all that. And I didn't know that President Kennedy's hair was red. [LAUGHTER] But on that day, seeing him that close, because me and my friend, we kind of wormed all the way up as close—we were just little tiny kids, so people let us by. And we got up there, and we were able to stand up on—there was like different seating that people had brought. And we just kind of stepped up on one of the little seats that were there, and we had to get our heads up over the crowds. And we could see him when he stepped out of the helicopter, and he walked over to the podium. I can remember that, just like the yesterday. I also remember that day very well because my sister—it must've been over 100 degrees there--my sister was suffering from heat exhaustion. I remember when we actually came back, my mother was taking care of her. She was getting water into her, and everything. That was a very vivid day. That was a very, very, very good day. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: What I also wanted to ask you was, like growing up in Pasco in the 50s and 60s, was it a segregated place? Or was it—what was it like? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Not when I came along. Not actually in the 60s. I hear stories about the way it was, but I don't know. I went to Pasco High School. I went to Stevens Junior High School. It was all integrated. My grade school was Whittier. It was integrated. It just was East Pasco, and it was primarily blacks. But also there was Hispanics and whites all went to that school, but it was predominantly black. Then after, actually, when I finished sixth grade, they divided sixth grade, and then seventh, eighth, and ninth. It was junior high school. I was selected, because of where I lived in East Pasco. I was assigned to go to Stevens Junior High School, which was, at that time, way across town, and nothing, hardly anything around it. So we rode the bus over to Stevens. But prior to that, the majority of blacks, African Americans, Hispanics, basically went to McLoughlin Junior High School. But McLoughlin at that time was what is now Pasco City Hall. That used to be McLoughlin. [LAUGHTER] But my brother goes back, I mean my brother's deceased. And he passed away, in fact, about a year and three months ago. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: This was your brother who was about 20 years older? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Yeah. He actually went—the high school at that time was McLoughlin, which then became City of Pasco. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: Okay. [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: And Whittier was the grade school, junior high school when he went to school. I do have some pictures of him. He was part of the patrol that went out and let the kids across the street and stuff. Yeah, he had the little patrol hat on, and all that. I have all those pictures of him when he was really young. And by the way, my brother, he is 20 years older than me, but he graduated from Pasco High. He then entered the Army--or no, he was drafted. He was drafted, and he actually fought in the Korean War. And he corrected me. Every time I said Korean War, he said, no, it's the Korean conflict. It was not a war. [LAUGHTER] And he served two terms in Vietnam, and was wounded. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: What was his first name? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Thurman. In fact I have a—here—obituary out of the paper. But he had what I consider a pretty impressive military career. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: Yeah, 20 years of active service. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Yes. Two terms in Vietnam, a very unpopular war. Me growing up in the 60s, it was, gee, I've got a brother that's overseas fighting, with all the racial strife and stuff here in the United States. But he was very proud of his country, and he was willing to go and do whatever he was assigned to do. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: And so you had an older brother, and how many other siblings did you have? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: I had a sister. I actually had a half-brother and a half-sister, that—they didn't live here. They lived--Margie lived in Wichita, Kansas. And my other brother, half-brother, lived in--I think he lived in Wichita, Kansas, too. I didn't really get to know him that well. I got to know Margie pretty well. Then I had my sister, Marilyn. She graduated from Pasco High School. A teacher for 34 years in Yakima. She just retired about three years ago, I think. And still living in Yakima. But she taught school. And those were all of my siblings. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: So would you say that Pasco, Tri-Cities was a good community to grow up in? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Yeah, I think so. I really think so. No, I don't have any--I have to just--not so much the community as much as pointing back to my parents. I think I had very--I've seen other people, my friends with different parents and stuff. And I think I had some pretty good parents. My dad was very industrial. He worked construction as a laborer, but he had rentals. And he had--and of course, I came along much later. But he had houses and rentals, but he worked construction. And him and his best friend, Mr. Louzell Johnson. He was a bricklayer. My dad was a laborer. They kind of was a team. And they worked, and they built a lot of houses throughout Pasco, Kennewick, and Richland back in the 50s and 60s. And he worked on a lot of the dams on the Snake River. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: Oh, really? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: The building of a lot of the dams. And I can just remember--well, I can remember my mother talking, and also my dad. And on Sundays we would take drives, and he would take us way out to where the dams were being built, and stuff like this, for something to do on Sunday for the family. And I didn't pay any attention to it really. But I can remember. I can remember. Those were very good times. My mother, she worked at the Navy base that was in Pasco. Have you heard— </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: Yes! </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: --that there was a Navy base there? She worked in the laundry at the Navy base. And then we came along, my sister and me, and so she just stayed home and took care of us, and my dad worked. But I spent a lot of years painting, and fixing hot water tanks, and unplugging sinks when I was a kid. I was very cheap labor. [LAUGHTER] So I learned to do that stuff really early in life. So that's pretty much my parents. They were very good people. Anybody you ask, they were very good people. There’s the obituary of my mom. I didn't get the obituary of my dad. I didn't find it. I have it somewhere, but there's this picture here. Anyway, go ahead. I just—I’m kind of rambling. So you can--it's a good thing you're editing this, and you can cut out all the-- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: Are there any other events? You talked about the JFK visit. But any other events that sort of stand out in your mind from growing up, or from your years working at Hanford? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: You know, I can't really--not really. Not really anything that really, really stands out. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: So overall, then, in looking back at your 35 years working at Hanford, how do you assess it as sort of a place to work? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Overall, I'd say that Hanford, for me, it's been a very good place to work. I was given opportunity. You know, I had opportunity. And anyone that's going to achieve anything in life, if they prepare themselves, and when the opportunity comes, they step forward and they take it. I mean you can't much ask for much more than that. My dad gave me some advice, of course, when I first started working out there. You know, he said, make sure you keep your eyes open, and you watch everything around you. And do not worry about if there's people against you, because God will always put one person there for you. And I always remember he told me that. And so I think about that, that different times during the time I worked out there, the people that have been there, that have assisted me and mentored me, and helped me to continue to do better work, a better job, and basically to feed my family and keep on living, as my mother would say. Yeah. I can't think of any other outstanding--there's been a lot of accomplishments, just small little milestones that have been made in safety and our management's commitment to safety, and our management's commitment to the workers, and making sure that they are heard, and that they're actually dealt with, and talked to, and gotten back to when they have safety concerns. And I guess there's a lot of pros and cons about that. But I see safety as being not just the number one thing at Hanford, but being integrated in all that we do at Hanford, is how I see it. And so I know there's a lot of things—I've seen the media. I've seen there are things that are going on out there that I don't know about. I have not worked in some of those areas. But for all of the areas that I have worked and been in, that has been the primary concern, is safety. And you compare to what we have out at Hanford, compare it to out in the real world, and we have a lot of commitment and concern, and actually management standing up, and taking responsibility for things, and actually dealing with them, trying to correct them, and working to try to make events or things that happen not reoccur. I actually brought a--you can get back to your questions, but I'll forget. But I actually sent off--you know, I seen it on television, and then a fellow employee told me about the Cold War Patriots? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: Oh, yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: And you probably know. I got my little certificate. And I got, actually, the pin. Whoops! I actually got this pin that came with it. And I have it—of course I can't bring my badge in here, because it's a Hanford badge. But I stuck my little pin on the badge, and so I thought that was kind of neat. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: Yeah. Actually, I talked to the Cold War Patriots last week about the project here. Well, I don't have any other questions for you. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Oh, okay! </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: Unless there's something else that we haven't talked about yet, or I didn't ask you about that you think is important, to-- We can--Eric can actually film some of this sort of once we’re done talking. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Eric: Yeah, anything that you showed him we’d want to get photocopied. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Okay, sure. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: They could always integrate that, then, into the interview. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Okay, sure. Sure. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: Anyway, thanks very much for coming in-- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: You bet. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: --and doing the interview. I really appreciate it. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Okay, yeah. You know, if you don't step forward and make sure that you're a part of history, you won't be. [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: Absolutely. So how did you--I was going to ask you, how did you hear about the project? Did [INAUDIBLE] contact you? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Actually, I was at a PZAC meeting--President's Zero Accident Council— </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: Oh, okay. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: --meeting--and there was an individual that works-- </div> Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri-Cities Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 300 Area 200 Area N Reactor 105 K-East 105 K-West K Basins 200 East Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1953-2014 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1978-2013 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald) Long, John Ruff, Wally Larson, Judy Stewart, Clinton Norling, Steve Brown, Ronnie Henry, Thurman Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:52:04 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Danny Henry Description An account of the resource An interview with Danny Henry conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2016-06-1: Metadata v1 created – [J.G.] Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 6/2/2014 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Hanford (Wash.) Nuclear weapons plants--Environmental aspects--Washington (State)--Hanford Site. Nuclear instruments & methods Pasco(Wash.) Richland(Wash.) 105 K-East 105 K-West 200 Area 200 East 300 Area B Plant WESF K Basins Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917-1963 N Reactor Washington State Public Power Supply System. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F7979506dcf39c0bb292c727b9f9b0e0b.JPG 2c7a6cf253f23a1ad1751be3abceed88 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Dave Harvey Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Dave Harvey on February 21st, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Dave about his experiences working on the Hanford Site and helping to preserve the history of Hanford and the Tri-Cities. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Dave Harvey: David Harvey. H-A-R-V-E-Y. Franklin: And D-A-V-I-D? Harvey: Oh, yeah, D-A-V-I-D. Franklin: It’s okay. So, Dave, what is your background and how did you first come to Hanford? Harvey: Well, I got a degree--[LAUGHTER]—oh, gosh, many years ago—undergraduate degree in American history and government in 1970, back at a private university in New Jersey. And then went to—did various other occupations, but then decided to go to graduate school and came out here to Western Washington University in 1973 and was in history. At the end of my two years in grad school, they were just getting historic preservation kind of component. It was mainly just history, government, what-have-you, and the whole cultural resources management, historic preservation—I should call it occupation, for want for a better term—just got going. I mean, the National Historic Preservation Act wasn’t passed until 1966. So it was kind of like the archaeologists had been doing work on cultural resources, mainly—you know, just archaeological, like with the dams out here, with the construction of all the hydroelectric and irrigation water storage dams. So there was a lot of need for kind of emergency archaeology to document before those areas were going to be flooded. So they got into the cultural resources management game a lot earlier than historians, architectural historians, you know, landscape architects and what-have-you. So, initially, I would be on field crews with the archaeologists. In fact, I even went to an actual field school in France at one point. I had a lot of interests in archaeology and I got on some digs and so forth. But more and more, my interest and focus was on the built environment and dealing—especially out here in the Northwest, and of course Hanford’s a perfect example. You have this continuum. Besides the prehistory you have the early settlement and the agricultural landscapes. And everything is much more intact. There’s a lot of public land, so there’s a lot of opportunity to go out and document, because federal agencies are required, under National Historic Preservation Act, to—they’re supposed to be proactive to document. All the cultural resources, whether it’s prehistoric or on the built environment, you know, houses, cabins, agricultural remains, and landscape. It’s just really fascinating. So that’s another attraction for being out here in the Pacific Northwest. And after I got my master’s and then—boy, that was in 1975. Ever since, kind of went back and forth between the built environment and archaeology, but I would say the last 35 years has mainly been dealing with the built environment. Franklin: And when you say built environment, could you define that term for us? Harvey: It would be any aboveground structures. And that could be early settlement remains. You know, there’s that fine line. When you come to an old farmstead, homestead, and it’s dilapidated, let’s say there’s just remains. Well, you’re going to use archaeological, maybe, techniques as well. But essentially you can document it and do—go to the historic record to get your information. So it’s basically, you know, that’s the built environment. But it can be like the government homes in Richland. Let’s say you have over 3,000 government homes. That’s the built environment. And I had a lot of experience documenting those just here in Richland. But out at Hanford, once again, it’s also the industrial Cold War era, Manhattan Project era buildings, and what they call the recent past, which more and more is no longer recent. But at one point when I was working documenting out here for the Pacific Northwest National Lab—that’s what brought me over to the Mid-Columbia, to Richland back in 1993—you know, the Cold War era was basically just ended, and there was a big movement to document these properties before they disappeared. Because technology today—well, even back then, but much more so today—things change so rapidly that you’re going to lose these significant properties and so forth. Yeah. Franklin: Great. So then, the built environment can encompass anything from a single structure to an entire town or— Harvey: Yup. Franklin: Like the Alphabet Homes, to many even thousands of structures connected to a historical event or a historical period. Harvey: Mm-hm. Franklin: Right? Harvey: Correct. Franklin: Okay. So how did you get—why did PNNL bring you out, or why did you come out in ’93 to— Harvey: Well, I had been in Seattle. In fact, I had worked as kind of a consultant, freelance, like a lot of archaeologists had done for decades. But there was a need for historians, architectural historians, to document, as we were saying, about the built environment. So I had projects in Alaska, all over Washington, Oregon, California, and then I found out through the State Historic Preservation Office that the Department of Energy—well, actually Pacific Northwest National Lab, Battelle Memorial Institute that operates the lab—was looking for cultural resources specialists but more dealing with buildings and structures. Because they had archaeologists. This was in 1993, so I applied and my wife and I moved over from Seattle. Franklin: What attracted you about working on the built environment, architectural environment, in Hanford? Or in the Tri-Cities? Harvey: Well, initially, I don’t know if—I think I gained that appreciation after being here for a while. It sure was quite a transition, especially back in the 1990s. And you could talk to my wife about that. But seriously, it was quite different. I mean, I think today, it would be a much larger community and there’s a lot more things to offer. But at the time, it was quite different. All of the sudden, you’re out here in the shrub steppe environment, and I was so used to the [LAUGHTER] marine, wet environment of western Washington, western Oregon. So it took some transition, but I wouldn’t want to leave now. Franklin: Was it also a cultural or political transition, as well, coming from Seattle, doing cultural resources work there versus doing cultural resources work here? Harvey: Oh, yeah! Extremely. And I guess you could say, the Big Sky country. I should actually backtrack a little. One of my quarters when I was doing my masters at Western Washington was with the Bureau of Land Management in south central Montana, south of Billings. I was stationed out of Billings. So I did have some connection with that type of environment, with, you know, the arid west, so-called. But it was definitely a transition. It was a cultural and [LAUGHTER] political. It was just so different. But I think occupationally, you know, it’s—yeah, I think—well, actually, there had been times, like I even worked a project in central Oregon for a half a year back in the ‘80s, the 1980s, where it was kind of a shrub steppe—that was more of the high desert. So I kind of knew what I was getting into, but I think not so much about Hanford. That was a big transition. Yeah. Franklin: Had you heard about Hanford before you had accepted— Harvey: Yeah, and to be honest, I said, gosh, why would anybody want to live—[LAUGHTER] I’ll be honest, because after living in western Washington, it was—the transition—I didn’t appreciate at the time like I do now. And just the wide open spaces and the—I mean, and I’m also looking for personal reasons why we like it over here just from recreational—and so forth. Because we do a lot of hiking and bicycling and so forth. So, yeah, there was a lot of transition going on there. I’m glad we took it. Franklin: Good. What did you first start working on when you came in the early- or mid-‘90s for Battelle? What were some of your projects? Harvey: Well, it had to deal with kind of the Manhattan Project/Cold War era industrial properties. A lot of the concrete block buildings. And of course there’s a lot of prejudice against that, meaning, gosh, how are these significant? You get that question all the time. And of course, we’re looking at the unbelievable scientific contributions, what was going on in these properties during the Manhattan Project and early Cold War. And Hanford was one of the—produced over two-thirds of the plutonium for the country’s nuclear arsenal during the Manhattan Project/Cold War. And all these outbuildings and—I shouldn’t even say outbuildings. But it was kind of—we had to document them because the Department of Energy wanted to tear them down. A lot of them were contaminated, and so they—and part of the Tri-Party Agreement to clean up Hanford, there was this big movement—I think that’s why they needed somebody who had experience with the built environment—with building structures. And there was, I’ll have to admit, a steep learning curve, because I hadn’t worked, necessarily, with these type of buildings. But I caught up pretty quickly. And the scientific and technology, and the unbelievable challenges of what took place. I’m still learning to this day about the Manhattan Project and so forth. And now of course with the National Historic Park, it’s pretty fascinating, and just the contributions. Franklin: What kinds of resources did you use to document those industrial landscape? Harvey: Oh, boy. There were a lot of—a wealth of material, archival material, at the Department of Energy and the different contractors. It wasn’t just in one central location; they did have the central files. And that’s changed over the years, where you can get this material. Of course a lot more is available today than back in the ‘90s. And historic photos. And at that time, of course, you could talk to a lot of long—unfortunate—long-time residents and people that worked out there that unfortunately are no longer with us, but we got to talk to them. Especially a number of the early settlers or immediate descendants of the early settlers. And that was pretty fascinating. Franklin: So you were doing, then, the pre-’43 agricultural documentation as well as the Manhattan Project. Harvey: Yeah. I was remiss; I didn’t mention that. Yeah, and that was—I came kind of at the perfect time, because a number of these people unfortunately are no longer around. But we got to talk to them and their stories were documented, fortunately. Just the contributions. It was just—and that’s the whole part of the removal of over 1,500—it was more like 1,500 families, as well as the Wanapum Indians up at Priest Rapids. Just becoming exposed to this, it was really—I’d never—see, I wasn’t able to or wouldn’t have had the good fortune of being able to be exposed to that over—if we had stayed in Seattle. Yeah. Franklin: And so where—in the timeline of remediation or removal of the buildings, when did your work often happen? Was it right before the building had been— Harvey: Yup. Franklin: Was there ever an outcome where your work had revealed that a building was— Was there ever an outcome where your work may have changed the decision to remove or tear down a building? Harvey: Pretty much no, unfortunately. Most of the buildings since then have been removed. But we were able to document them and also get the artifacts. A lot of the industrial artifacts, we tagged and got them removed. Or if they were too large to remove or going to be too contaminated for storage, then we were able to document them. Photo and— Franklin: So you’re talking now about the Hanford Collection. Harvey: The Hanford Collection, which you’re in charge of. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: So can you—what was your involvement with that? Were you there at the beginning of when that was being set up? Harvey: Yeah! Franklin: Okay, so can you tell me how that came to be, within the Department of Energy? So, politically and then what steps you took to document artifacts and bring them in? Harvey: Okay. And I don’t think I answered fully your original question. Franklin: Oh, sure, sorry. Harvey: Let me finish that. No, that’s good, that’s great. We documented the buildings, like you said, prior to being demolished. Because the ones that had been determined eligible—and a lot of them, you know, for the National Register of Historic Places, being federal facilities, this is a federal agency, Department of Energy, which is required under the National Historic Preservation Act. Because they—the Department of Energy, as a federal agency, was required to document and basically take into consideration any properties of what we call historic properties, properties that are listed or determined eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places. So they had to take into consideration that these properties—they could go ahead and remove them, demolish them, or modify them. But if they’re found eligible, and then— Now, fortunately we’ve been able to save B Reactor and a lot of the artifacts from that era from some of the other reactors ended up there. But of course that’s only one of the nine reactors. But on the others—so this all kind of all of the sudden there was a dilemma here, because you’re going to have to go through this extensive documentation process for each building, almost, or at least ones that have been determined eligible. So that’s—we got into the whole Programmatic Agreement where we had a group of buildings that we’ve—no longer eligible—or I should say we determined not eligible so we didn’t have to do much documentation, if at all. Others were eligible but not really significant. And then we had a third group, really significant that required more extensive documentation. That’s kind of in a general sense. So this Programmatic Agreement was with other contractors, other cultural resource management specialists. I won’t go into all that, but that was kind of signed, I think in 2002. A programmatic agreement with DOE and State of Historic Preservation Office. And that kind of streamlined the whole process. Now, as part of that, you had mentioned about the industrial artifacts. That was kind of an offshoot of that, because these are just as important sometimes as the buildings themselves. And it’s not—it could be signs, it could be instruments. It’s not necessarily just big pieces of industrial equipment. So anyway, those—then we would go in and tag these. So it kind of made us aware—at least, at the moment, don’t touch these, and then we’ll decide later on, if they end up being contaminated or if DOE can’t remove them, then at least we’ve made record of it. Franklin: Right, right. How many buildings do you estimate that you were able to perform this documentation of, and/or the artifact removal? Harvey: Well, see, there were a thousand buildings that ended up—but because there was this streamlined, you know, the Programmatic Agreement, we didn’t have to go to each building. We went to a lot of them. But we—some had already been documented, some—if it was just kind of a generic—let’s say Butler Building, corrugated metal or something like that, might have to just take a picture or something like that. And we did visit—like I said, there was other cultural resources specialists for the other contractors: Bechtel—well, there was Westinghouse and then Bechtel—and so there were a number of other contractors. And then part of the—I would say, the largest productive outcome of this whole effort was this book, The Manhattan Project Cold War Era Facilities, that kind of outlines and chapters on each significant--whether it’s military operations, the reactors, the chemical separation plants in the 200 Area; the 100 Area, you have the fuel manufacturing. There were all these chapters done on Site security, and research and development. And there was—I think Tom Marceau was the lead editor, I think it was with Bechtel, and there were about seven or eight of us were coauthors of several of the chapters. Franklin: Okay, thank you. Harvey: Yeah. Franklin: Did you directly participate in the efforts to—any efforts at B Reactor—because I know it was a Historic Engineering Landmark, right, and then it’s gained kind of more recognition— Harvey: It became a National Historic Landmark. Franklin: National Historic Landmark. Did you participate in any of that? Harvey: Some of the research. There was a whole—you know, B Reactor Museum Association, which I’m a member. There were a lot of other people that did a lot more work than I did out there. There was a lot of work to do out here. [LAUGHTER] And that was a great success. We’re also looking to kind of preserve landscapes within the new national historic park—Manhattan Project National Historic Park. So we did some background research that have led to realizing—like out at the White Bluffs-Hanford town sites, it’s a larger area of significance than what’s actually strictly in the park. Franklin: Right, because the park, as of right now, just includes the landmark and not any—not actually any feet around it. Harvey: Right, and those are the pre-’43, like we were talking about. And you have canals—irrigation ditches, you have remains from the ranches and farmsteads and actually the foundations for some of the buildings. But it goes way beyond the actual little communities of White Bluffs and Hanford. And then there’s a pumping plant out there on the Columbia. So it’s—yeah—and that’s what we’re kind of—that’s what we’re facing now. There is, I guess, I think a lot of agreement, especially Department of Energy, that that boundary should be expanded, when we’re telling the story out there. Franklin: Are there any buildings that were remediated that you really wished had been saved for this kind of—something like a public park or for the public to view? Harvey: Yeah. We don’t have anything in the 300 Area, which was the fuel manufacturing. That’s too bad, because you had Building 313, Building 314 and a lot of other labs and so forth. They were all just—they’ve all been removed. Franklin: Why are those important? Harvey: Well, that’s where some of the first fuel was manufactured. Before the cores were made into what they call slugs, and then they were transported up to the 100 Area reactors for irradiation. So they were both built in ’43, ’44. So, yeah, it’s kind of too bad that one of those at least wasn’t preserved. But they were pretty contaminated in the walls, underground. But at least we did get to document them. But there’s not much left in the 300 Area from the era, yeah. Franklin: Are there any buildings that are still up that have been selected for remediation or are in the remediation pipeline that you wish were saved for their historic value? Harvey: Well, T Plant has an active—is part of the park, but that has an active role right now in cleanup out there in the 200 Area, chemical separation plant. I think that’s what your question is, right? Something that’s still standing now? Franklin: Yeah. Harvey: Well, some of the reactors are left, but they’re going to be mothballed except for B Reactor. I think the issue is more that we’ve got about five, six pre-’43 buildings. Now, the bank is pretty much going to be stabilized, the White Bluffs bank, First Bank of White Bluffs. But we do have some—the Hanford High School and Bruggeman’s warehouse and the Allard pumping plant, you know, they could use a lot of work. So at least efforts should go, because we really need to tell that story about the people that were sacrificed—they had to remove for the war effort. Some of the sons that were overseas and they’d gotten note from the parents that they were no longer here, because we had to leave. Yeah, so that will tell that side of the story, which is really important. Franklin: What about any other reactors that you feel are historic—because I know some reactors are kind of very similar to others, right, like D and F are pretty similar to B. But what about N or FFTF? Harvey: Well, N would’ve been really decent. That was the last one, and it was the dual generation, could produce steam for electricity as well as plutonium. That would’ve been—yeah, I would have liked to see that one preserved. Because that was the one where President Kennedy came out in ’63 and dedicated. And then I think you had just mentioned the Fast Flux Test Facility. And that was completed in 1982 and that was determined eligible in the ‘90s. Once again, the recent past. Franklin: Breaking that 50-year—so-called 50-year rule. Harvey: Yeah, because it was found to be of exceptional importance. Franklin: And why was that? Harvey: It was probably the cornerstone of the peaceful usage of nuclear energy, because it was the breeder reactor program, that I think began in the Carter Administration for commercial fuels. It was pretty significant for that. I mean, that’s why it was determined eligible. And we went in—a lot of these, I remember we went in and took videos and so forth. We have extensive documentation as well as photo documentation. But—and to be honest, I haven’t been out there for a good while. I believe some of it’s still standing. But I don’t know—there aren’t any plans to stabilize it. I think it’s going to eventually be totally demolished. Franklin: Yeah, I believe so, too. How long did you work doing cultural resource work at Hanford PNNL? Harvey: Through 2005. Franklin: Okay. Harvey: And then I went into—I had my own consulting firm for a couple years. I actually worked in Katrina for four months for FEMA. So just—in fact, I remember coming back here in 2006 and helping, I think it was Washington Closure at the time, to document more, or finalize the artifacts. What was going to be preserved or—and then we kind of were eliminating, once again, the artifacts that were either too contaminated or too large to preserve. So I had some work on that. And then I went with an environmental consulting firm in 2007, oh, through 2013, 2014, I guess. And since then, I’ve been pretty much on my own again, at my own consulting firm. Franklin: And are you still working on Hanford-related projects? Harvey: Yeah, in fact I have a contract with Battelle, actually through another environmental consulting firm that has a kind of a master services agreement with Battelle. So through that kind of agency or—I was able to get this job with Battelle. And it’s good, because there’s several properties on the Battelle campus that they want to document—they wanted to do this Section 106, National Historic Preservation action compliance work. And the main campus, which is a perfect example of mid-century modernism, I’m working on right now. Another facility in the process of wanting to demolish, so I did the—basically, guiding them with their cultural resource compliance regulations that they have to comply with. Franklin: Which facility is this? Harvey: That’s the research technology lab, the RTL. Franklin: Ah, that’s right. That’s the one you contacted me on. Harvey: Yeah, it used to be the Donald W. Douglas Labs, constructed in 1996. Douglas United—I should say the Douglas Aircraft Company and United Nuclear kind of did a joined venture and constructed that. They had it until ’71 and then Exxon purchased it and then Battelle purchased it in 1982. It was to do a lot of work on fuel fabrication, the technologies behind that research. Franklin: And so how—do you think that mid-century modern, kind of corporate campus environment will be maintained there at Battelle, or— Harvey: That’s the aim. I think they would like me to write up a management plan, kind of a maintenance guide on. You know, because they’re going to be kind of a repetitive type of maintenance things. They don’t want to have to come back every time to the State Historic Preservation Office or go through the whole process. So if we come up with a guide where certain activities that they have to maintain, whether it’s keeping the existing color palette or replace-in-kind, then they don’t have to come back to go through the whole compliance thing. So we—they realized that it is eligible. It hasn’t been formally determined eligible for the register and now I’m going through that process now. The RTL was found to be an example of commercial modernism. It was constructed, like I said in—actually, it was completed in ’67. So we’re in the process of mitigating that now. And with a memorandum of agreement outlining the stipulations to mitigate the property before it’s—Battelle sells it and/or demolishes it. Yeah. Franklin: Do you find a resistance in some circles to preservation of the modern or buildings constructed in the ‘60s and on, especially associated with the modernist style of architecture? Harvey: Oh, yeah! I mean, when I came on with Battelle in ’93, it was even more resistance. Frankly, even with the Department of Energy, which today is not resistant. But, yeah, there’s—we used to call it the giggle factor. [LAUGHTER] They’d say, you want to preserve that? Is that eligible? Why do you have to look at it? And then sometimes with corrugated metal buildings, we might have to go through the process to at least do minimal documentation. And there could have been, you know, with the National Register of Historic Places, under criterion A, if something of significant event or research occurred in that facility, that kind of outweighs, let’s say, its commonness or common construction, which is actually under criterion C. And that can happen. Franklin: Sure. Harvey: But it has to be integrity. Property does have to maintain its physical integrity to be eligible as well. But yeah there’s always resistance, and we find in the long run, if you comply, it’s a lot more inexpensive, you know, less headaches. Franklin: And it’s also more—correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s also more inexpensive to retrofit an existing building, usually, than it is to tear down a building and then move the materials out and then bring in new materials and construct something. Harvey: In most cases. Now, when you have contamination, radiological contamination, there are issues that certain buildings may be—current owners can’t find a new buyer who could retrofit it possibly, because all the sudden they’re inheriting this type of legacy. [LAUGHTER] You know. So that—and we faced that out at Hanford all the time. In some cases, it’s legitimate, and in some cases, it’s just a way—they want to demolish it and move on. Franklin: Well, I think that—would you say that the PFP is a good example of that, perhaps a building—Plutonium Finishing Plant—perhaps a building that is of exceptional significance, but is too contaminated to preserve in the traditional sense of preservation? Harvey: Oh, right. Yeah, we did document as much as we could, but we couldn’t get into certain areas when we were inside. But we did take a lot of pictures of the gloveboxes and the fascinating technology that went on there. Yeah, in that case—I mean, a lot of legitimate concerns. And I think in many cases, in a lot of the buildings and structures like out in the 300 Area, it was underneath the facilities, there was a lot of—in the pipes, there was a lot of contamination. There wasn’t any fear of us walking inside in street clothes to document it. Franklin: Interesting. Can you tell me about your involvement in documenting the Alphabet Houses of Richland? Harvey: Yeah, we—in fact, I live in a Q house. Constructed [LAUGHTER] in 19— Franklin: Did you move into an Alphabet House shortly after you—when you arrived in Richland? Harvey: Yeah, in 1993, we moved into a B duplex, down by Jefferson Park by Jefferson Elementary School. Those were constructed during the Manhattan Project from ’43 to ’45. And then a year later we purchased—you know, we were renting—we purchased a Q house up further north. I guess you’d say kind of the northeast extension of what we call the Government Home district, just south of Newcomer on Harris, and that was constructed in ’48, the whole neighborhood: Harris, Hetrick and Davison, that neighborhood there. So that’s when I became fascinated, what are these government homes? Alphabet Homes. And I did a lot of reading, and then in 1995, there was a history conference here. A friend of mine who’s an architectural historian, a colleague in Seattle, she grew up here over on Horn, just a few blocks from where my wife and I are living now on Harris. And at the time, she came over and her parents were still alive. So we decided to coauthor a paper on just the government home, focusing mainly on the Manhattan Project when Albin Pehrson, the architect that DuPont hired to kind of design—he’d had a lot of experience in some federal housing projects back in the ‘30s, but he also was one of the architects from the Davenport Hotel. He was out of Spokane. He had kind of a varied resume, so to speak, work history. So it was fascinating, the struggles that he had with the Corps who wanted just the minimal—very minimal. People think—actually our architecture style is called minimal traditional style. There are some classical elements to—architectural elements to the Q and R and S houses and so forth, and the M houses. But the Corps really didn’t—I mean, they would have just as soon had everybody live in barracks. And Du— Franklin: Well, and I think the As—is the A the two-story duplex? Harvey: Yes. Franklin: I think the As especially reflect that stripped-down, very basic— Harvey: Yeah. Franklin: --housing with very little ornamentation. Harvey: Oh, I know! And they’re even—the Qs and Rs—of course the S is two-story, has a little more features, architectural detailing. But—so that really got me going, doing this paper, and did kind of a follow-up then on the late ‘40s. And then you’re getting into more of the suburban ranch-style houses with the later Alphabet homes: the Ts, U, V and so forth. So it’s kind of interesting to see how the town did change and adapted more to suburban tastes as we get into the postwar period. You know, garages were built; no longer had the car compounds where people had shared parking, off the street but behind. And you used to be—access for service vehicles—delivery vehicles in the back. But now everybody has fences and so forth. You can still see places that have those car compounds, that still exist in some of the government home areas. So that’s kind of my introduction to the government homes. Since then—you know, of course there have been a lot of tours. CREHST—the CREHST Museum led tours for a while, and there’s other people involved. In fact, I think this month—next month in March, there’s going to be a tour of one of the government homes. Franklin: Were you involved at the CREHST Museum with the tours? Harvey: Well, the individual, Richard Nordgren, he does a lot. He and I talked extensively, and I gave him some information. Because I learned a lot from him as well. No, I never was actually part of the tours. I’ve given kind of informal—and then all this kind of led to the establishment of the National Register Historic District for the Gold Coast—it’s Gold Coast Historic District, which is about 200 homes. Does not include my neighborhood, because a lot of the houses across the street have been changed for people wanting better views of the Columbia River. Because I’m across—I’m on the west side— Franklin: That also, though, doesn’t include, I’ve noticed, some of the—how do I put this—some of the more blue collar homes, like the duplexes, the As and Bs, but also the—I live in a prefab, a two-bedroom prefab which was brought in kind of against Pehrson’s wishes— Harvey: Oh, right, about 1,800 of them, I think, yeah. Franklin: Yeah, and they were used primarily more for blue collar workers than white— Harvey: Yeah. Franklin: So I’ve noticed even there in the historical record there’s more of a focus on these kind of—the upper end of the Alphabet Houses. Harvey: Right well, see, I think initially Pehrson wanted a mixture of management and operation employees who lived there, involved in the operation. But what happened was the ones that were closed to the river, and that’s how they got the name Gold Coast, because the management personnel, the upper end, during the—well, in this case it would be when some of the homes just at the end of the war or postwar, they wanted these preferred locations. So, Pehrson’s kind of utopian view, mixture, didn’t really hold much water for long. [LAUGHTER] There was a mixture of housing types, but I think in the long run, it didn’t bear that much—he wasn’t able to keep that intact. And what happened after the war, of course, and then with our neighborhood, you got a lot of the professional occupation, the doctors and dentists moved in. And that’s another reason it was called the Gold Coast. And for the area just south of where we are. And now, to answer your question, yes, because a lot of the more blue collar were more in the central part and southwest. I guess we had to pick an area where you had to have at least 60% intact of what we call contributing. There was a lot of leeway: you can replace the windows, but you had to keep the dimensions. Because our house is pretty intact. We have all the original dimensions. We have different window material. So there was kind of that, and I think we ended up about 65% of the 200-plus buildings were found to be contributing. So, like I said, you usually have to have at least 60 in district. Franklin: Did you work on that nomination? Harvey: Yeah. Franklin: Oh, okay. So how did you—did you survey each house? Harvey: Well, we had—a lot of volunteers went out. We took pictures of every home. In fact, it was all over the city, not just what became the Gold Coast. But I helped write up the context, the historic context, and reviewed the statement of significance. I mean, a city—there were a lot of people involved. So I kind of assisted on that. Franklin: Did you find the homeowners to be pretty amenable to the effort to list on the national register? Harvey: Yeah, because, well, you see, national register’s more of an honorary. Unless they were going to use some type of government funds for restoration of their homes. Then they have to go through Secretary of the Interior guidelines for architectural detailing and documentation and so forth. To keep within certain attributes, to keep the original architectural integrity as much as possible. But otherwise, it’s mainly honorary. There aren’t that many funds available now. But it also—it’s mainly like if the federal government wanted to come and put a highway through or something. Then, if it’s a historic district like that, then they have to take into consideration, hey, this is a national registered district. Now, local landmarks would have a lot more teeth, like you have in the city of Seattle, you have a lot of neighborhoods that are historic districts that are landmarks. That’s a lot more stringent. And Portland—I mean there’s a lot of communities. Spokane would be the nearest to us. Well, I shouldn’t even say that. I think maybe Walla Walla and Ellensburg. And you can see economic revitalization goes hand-in-hand with—all of the sudden people take pride in, they’ve got a historic home. Now, we did a survey—I remember, we had a public meeting with the State Historic Preservation Office, we had the city, and I would say 85% were not in favor of a local landmarks ordinance. They liked the idea of a national registered district because it was honorary. But basically if you have a house in there, you can change it right now. The chance of it ever getting de-listed, someone would actually have to make an attempt to contact the keeper of the register or the State Historic Preservation Office— Franklin: And change a bunch of houses—change enough houses to—it would actually have to be a concerted effort— Harvey: Yeah, and to actually get it de-listed. Now, who knows, maybe in the future there’s enough chance—now some people, I have noticed, though, have tried to keep the style of homes that are in the Gold Coast District, so that’s good. Franklin: So when you were talking about local listing, is that the same as a certified local government? Harvey: No, that’s—CLG—there’s a lot of benefits to be a CLG—Kennewick is—because they get these grants, block grants, to restore—maybe take off the exterior corrugated metal that was really popular to put on nice brick facades—you know, this was a popular thing back in the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s. And now they got to—and if you go on through downtown Kennewick, it’s an amazing success story. Franklin: Right, where a lot of that restoration has happened down there. Harvey: Restoration—and you have to follow Section 106 guidelines and Secretary of the Interior guidelines. And I was on the design review board for about five years. So that would be the benefit of being a Certified Local Government. And you have to maintain historic register of properties and so forth, yeah. So that’s different, yeah. Franklin: Did you find that, overall, the people that—when you were working on the national register, the people who lived there in the Alphabet Homes knew and appreciated the history of the Alphabet Home and generally wanted to—wanted to preserve that kind of history? Harvey: Yeah, I think most people even today. I’m trying to think the date when this happened. I think, gosh, it must have been at least ten years ago. Yeah, yeah. We had the State Historic Preservation come over for a meeting and I was on the State Advisory Council on Historic Preservation at the time. So we had them come over and there was a public—we had our public meeting which included the Gold Coast. Yeah, I think there is a lot of—the level of government, they came around. [LAUGHTER] The city government. Franklin: What about the neighborhoods that have traditionally been more renters or lower income, like a lot of the neighborhoods—thinking about where I live in more central Richland that is mostly As and Bs and then prefabs. Harvey: Right. Franklin: I’m wondering—did you—was there ever any surveys made of those? Harvey: Mm-hm. Franklin: Do you think they have a—do you think there’s a historic district to be made there, or there’s enough that it has historic integrity? Harvey: Well, I think we did look at some other areas of the city but that didn’t reach that 60% plateau. And that’s why we picked kind of the area—and then we had kind of that whole theme, that so-called Gold Coast theme. But there are a lot of other cities, communities, across the country where you have so-called blue collar neighborhood or industrial neighborhoods or neighborhoods in transition from industrial—now maybe people coming in and restoring the lofts and so forth, where you do have a lot of pride in that. And you have like automobile rows—they’re looking at Columbia Drive over in Kennewick as part of that. So I think you could still— Franklin: That’s the old state highway, right? Harvey: Pardon? Franklin: That’s the old state highway, Columbia Drive? Harvey: No, that’s the one through the park. This would be—maybe it’s not Columbia Drive is not the right term. It’s just adjacent to the downtown Kennewick, the historic downtown Kennewick partnership. I thought that was Columbian Drive, but-- Franklin: I could be wrong. Harvey: Yeah, yeah. Franklin: You’ve lived here a lot longer than I have. Harvey: [LAUGHTER] But they have a so-called automobile row or stretch, so they’re trying to appeal to that and put in signage that’s more kind of complementary to that era. But I think there are areas all across the country where you have the so-called blue collar, but you might have a higher degree of rentals. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be maintained, but in some places they’re not, so-- Franklin: Sure, oh, and, well, that’s just-- Harvey: Probably, I mean your neighborhood. Franklin: That’s part of the economics of the people that own them versus the people that live in them. If you rent, you have less impetus to do a lot of home improvement. If you’re looking at it as a money-making property, you have less impetus to invest in that thing long-term for its aesthetics and its historical integrity. Harvey: Yeah, that is definitely true. Now, of course if you get into apartment buildings—yeah, that’s different. And you have those in central Richland, in some communities, we have a large apartment building could be eligible for the register, and it’s still all renters in those buildings. Franklin: Sure, yeah. Harvey: Yeah. Franklin: Yeah. Ah. Sorry, I’m trying to think. We’ve covered a lot. Harvey: Yeah, yeah, this has been great. Franklin: So what do you currently—so, right now you said you’re currently working on the Battelle campus. Harvey: Right. Franklin: Is there anything that we haven’t talked about that you’d like to mention? As it relates to Hanford history or Tri-Cities history? Harvey: Well, the more recent development, when President Obama signed the establishment for the Manhattan Project National Historic Park which takes in Manhattan Project properties here and the pre-’43, as we mentioned, as well as selective properties in Los Alamos and Oak Ridge. And I got to—I was chosen with Tom Marceau here at Hanford, both of us went back to Washington, DC for the Scholars’ Forum. Which was real big—and you had scholars and people working in cultural resources, historic preservation, at all three sites there as well and of course Department of Energy— Franklin: Who else was a part of that? Harvey: And the National Parks Service. Excuse me? Franklin: Sorry, who else was a part of that forum? Harvey: Oh, gosh. [LAUGHTER] Trying to think of something—the names—the Atomic Foundation, Cindy— Franklin: Cindy Kelly. Harvey: Cindy Kelly. Because she worked here for a number of years, both with one of the contractors and with the Department of Energy. So she’s been very active with the Atomic Heritage Foundation in DC. And, oh, Ellen—Ellen’s last name—she’s out of Los Alamos. Ellen McGehee, she was there from Los Alamos. The Oak Ridge folks, I did not know as well. Franklin: Were there anybody who had authored any works on Hanford—Bruce Hedley or John Finley? Harvey: Yeah, thank you. In fact, John Finley and Bruce Hedley, both from University of Washington were there. They actually were the ones that set up—they commented—they were kind of the commenter on my presentation back in 1995 when we did the government homes. So that’s when I first met them. And then John—they both have written a number of books on the Atomic Frontier, the Atomic West and Hanford. Excellent books. Franklin: What about—was Kate Brown a part of that? Harvey: And Kate Brown was there. I’m glad you keep mentioning these names because—but also we were expecting the author—he wrote little landmark books on the Manhattan Project and the building of the bomb. Franklin: Brian Sanger? Harvey: Well, there was Sanger. He wasn’t there, but he was supposed to be. But there was another gentlemen—ah, can’t think of the name. You keep telling me these names and I’ll remember. But—and then there was the Park Service, a member of the-- Franklin: Who chose the people to be present at this Scholars’ Forum? Harvey: Well, I think each of the three communities submitted names. Franklin: Okay. Harvey: Colleen French with the Department of Energy submitted Tom’s name and myself, and we were accepted. Franklin: Oh, great. Because I’m just kind of—you know—there’s some people that have renown or certain reputations here, and Kate Brown’s is often a name that’s used—doesn’t always have polite adjectives coming after her name is mentioned or her book is mentioned. So I was kind of curious if you knew how she became involved with that forum. Harvey: No. Franklin: Or if there was any kind of cross-currents or anything—any kind of—how were the proceedings of the forum? Harvey: Oh, I was going to say—there was—I mean, we looked at it as the National Historic Park, there’s many stories to tell in the Park Service. Some people wanted it to be a celebratory-type thing. You know, we built the bomb and helped end World War II. And others saying, you know, no, it should be—it’s more of a commemoration. Let—the Park Service is good at establishing the parameter, the context, and then the visitors make that decision. There’s an internment camp—in fact, this was just the 75th anniversary of the internment of Japanese Americans, and there’s an internment camp in eastern California, near Bishop, I believe. And once again, that’s kind of—they’re telling the story that some might say was not a most glamorous part of American history. Franklin: Sure. Harvey: But we’re showing it. And when we talk about Monticello, we talk about the slaves. So the Park Service is really good. And that’s kind of—we struggled with that kind of—the type of themes that we should be—how the Park Service should be telling the story. Franklin: Can I ask how you personally came down on that issue, whether the park should be one that’s more celebratory or— Harvey: No, I— Franklin: Or one that’s— Harvey: I think just a commemoration. I think each—you know, it’s a lot of significance. We all know about the negative aspect of the Atomic Age, but it is one of the most significant events of the 20th century, by far. And it’s had great technological benefits. It also led to a Cold War and now—which [LAUGHTER] is still—with the spreading of nuclear arms is one of the—oh, I would say, one of the most dangerous things occurring in international politics. Franklin: Yes. Harvey: And as well as the contamination aspects, too. Of cleaning up the legacy. Franklin: Of course, which is still ongoing. Harvey: Which is here at Hanford. But at other places, too. You realize you had workers in a lot of Manhattan Project, early Cold War facilities that all of the sudden they’re realizing—Department of Energy—wait a minute, these people were also, I guess you could say fighting in the Cold War. And now you know, they didn’t have any protections at the time, and are we going to care for these people? Yeah, yeah. Franklin: Right I’d like to ask you something that might be controversial, and if you don’t want to answer— Harvey: Okay. Franklin: I’m fine with that. But, this is a question I don’t have—really feel like I can ask very often. There’s a lot of rhetoric, especially here, that—often-repeated rhetoric that dropping the bomb was necessary to ending World War II. However, most historians agree that dropping the bomb was not necessary to avoid the invasion of Japan; in fact, the Japanese had wanted surrender, were willing to agree to let the emperor abdicate as long as we wouldn’t kill the emperor, and that the bomb was dropped to intimidate the Soviets into more concessions in Eastern Europe. But Truman, over the course of his life, inflated the number of American lives that the bomb would save, and he didn’t even mention it saving lives until 18 months after the bomb was dropped. So with that in mind, do you agree or disagree with the statement that dropping the bomb— Harvey: Well, I see both sides. I mean, you talk to people whose sons were onboard ships going to Japan, ready for the invasion. And so it might be hard to convince that family [LAUGHTER] that the bomb wasn’t a good thing. Also, supposedly—I can’t remember the number we had—50,000 soldiers that were prisoners of war. Supposedly they were all going to be—if we invaded the mainland, they were all going to be killed. And so you hear that, and you say, well, it was a good thing. And also, but at the same time, you do a lot—especially Leslie Groves and others figured, oh, the expense was unbelievable expense at the time. And to justify, maybe we needed to drop this bomb, and quickly, before there was peace. And then I’ve heard about Truman, 18 months later, to kind of more justify. And there was a lot of cover-up on the after-effects of nuclear fallout, for want of a better term, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for the people that were exposed to it, and generations after that. There was kind of a lot of hush-hush. I mean, obviously, the word got out. Franklin: Right, it’s kind of hard to hide that. Harvey: Yeah, in fact, I went to the signing when we were back for the Scholars’ Forum back in DC, and Sally Jewell, who was the Secretary of the Interior at the time, I think her mom was one of the first nurses that went over there. Franklin: Oh, wow. Harvey: Yeah. So where I come around personally—I know General Eisenhower (who became President Eisenhower), he wanted to have a demonstration. Take contingent or—the government of Japan at the time, the military figure, take them out on a boat and show that okay, we’re going to drop—do the dropping of the bomb. Franklin: Kind of like a peaceful demonstration— Harvey: Right. Of course, at the time, we didn’t know what was going to happen after you drop it. It could have been a chain reaction, you know, you read a lot of—so, believe me, I’m not ducking the issue. I really—I can see both sides. A lot of historians feel it was necessary. But then you read the side that it was kind of to show the Soviets we meant business. And also to justify all the expense during the war. Franklin: Sure, it would’ve—could’ve been seen as this major boondoggle, had all this money been spent on something that had never been— Harvey: Well, right. Franklin: --never been used. Harvey: But I’ve heard Truman didn’t lose much sleep over his decision. Franklin: Sure, sure. Harvey: In fact, I think even Oppenheimer went and met with him, and I guess he—you know, it’s too bad what happened to Oppenheimer, his loss of his security clearance. Which eventually I think he got back later. But it was that whole kind of Red Scare during the ‘50s. Franklin: Yeah. Well, thanks, Dave. I guess what I’m hearing from you is that it’s complicated. Harvey: Yeah. Franklin: Which I think like any good historical issue worth discussing, we often have to leave it with, well, it’s complicated. Harvey: Well, I’d like to actually— Franklin: There’s no easy line. Harvey: --to do more research on it, personally. That’s why this profession’s great. I tell my wife I learn something new everyday, not necessarily just in my profession, either, but even so. You can say that about many professions, but being in the history and architectural history field, just pick up something new to read everyday or research angle. Even stuff that I’m doing now, I’m learning more about the history of the area. Franklin: Well, you know, Dave, thank you for all of your efforts in preserving the history of Hanford. Harvey: Well, thank you. Franklin: And I think we’re all excited to see—the national park coming in really is a game-changer in a lot of aspects, bringing in a lot of legitimacy. And we’re all very excited to see where that goes and hopefully the park boundaries will increase and it’ll really get kind of—you know, the park service will have that space to tell that kind of complicated story— Harvey: Well, you know, it’s the heritage tourism. It’s a boon. That’s why there’s so much support—bipartisan support throughout the state, not just here. But I think—and there’s that Atomic Trail, where people go visit these sites now. It’s— Franklin: We found something that democrats and republicans can agree on. [LAUGHTER] Harvey: Yes, one of the few things. Franklin: Well thank you so much, Dave. Harvey: Thanks, Robert. Franklin: Yeah, my pleasure. <a href="https://youtu.be/C9bRLrIWLWc">View interview on Youtube.</a> Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview Pacific Northwest National Laboratory B Reactor 200 Area 100 Area 300 Area 314 Building 313 Building T Plant D Reactor F Reactor N Reactor FFTF (Fast Flux Test Facility) PFP (Plutonium Finishing Plant) Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1993- Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1993- Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Dave Harvey Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Historic preservation Nuclear reactors Conservation and restoration Description An account of the resource Dave Harvey moved to Richland, Washington in 1993 to work on historic preservation of the Hanford Site. An interview conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by Mission Support Alliance on behalf of the United States Department of Energy. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 02/21/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. 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This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F63597890b84a4bfcdd0fa256e4c9c15d.jpg ffb070bd2b52785563acbfaadfe10742 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fa9b2de3cbe40e470ac71fb166d655fb8.mp4 5cf2ec6e1c33811ff74fe4b4f0fb6cb1 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed David Chambers Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with David Chambers on July 5, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. We will be talking with David about his experiences working on the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? David Chambers: Is David H. Chambers. D-A-V-I-D. H. C-H-A-M-B-E-R-S. Franklin: Great, thanks, David. And do you prefer David or Dave? Chambers: David or Dave, either one. It’s immaterial to me. Whatever’s easiest for you. Franklin: Okay, great. So, tell me, how and why did you come to the area to work for the Hanford Site? Chambers: Well, when I first graduated from college, I taught school for a while. I taught school in Pasco. I went back to the University of Wisconsin – Stout branch, but I was from Wenatchee, Washington. And the Tri-Cities was kind of an up-and-coming community, so I ended up teaching school here. And then I quit teaching school and went to work in engineering for Boeing Aircraft Corporation. There were just too many people in Seattle, so I wanted to get back over here, and got an opportunity to go to work for Battelle Research Laboratories and so I took the job. Franklin: Okay. And what did you do at Battelle? What was your job there? Chambers: I was called a senior engineering technical person. Franklin: Okay. And that sounds kind of vague, so I’m wondering if you could unpack kind of what your job duties were and what kinds of projects you worked on. Chambers: Well, we did a little bit of everything. The first four or five years I worked for Battelle, it was out in the 200 West area. 221-T, head end. And we did what’s referred to as simulated reactor explosion tests. Franklin: Really? Chambers: And what we did, we had a containment vessel and a little reactor core inside of it. And we vaporized high levels of uranium, plutonium, et cetera, different radioactive material, and put it in the reactor and looked at the metals that would withstand it and the coatings we would try to use to utilize to protect stuff, and the chemicals and washes to clean it up after an explosion. So that’s what I did for about four or five years. Franklin: And what kind of work came out of that? Did that lead to changes in reactor design or things used to clean up? Chambers: Well, I’m sure that it did, because stuff was utilized at Chernobyl and also at the Three Mile Island. Basically, sodium hydroxide, NaOH is the best thing we found to wash them down. And after it was washed down to the bottom of it, we collected samples, and run those samples through liquid nitrogen so we could cool it down and put it into little 500-mililiter bottles. And then we set it in the computer that was in a whole room at that time, with air conditioning, naturally, and analyzed it so we could see the drop in the radiation as the time went on. Franklin: Wow. How did your previous work prepare you for this job of testing—reactor explosion tests? Chambers: Well, it didn’t, really. We had a lot of high PhD people that were actually analyzing all the stuff, and there were several of us that basically just did the experiments and stuff. The computer analysis went to the PhD people that analyzed it and looked at it and wrote all the paperwork. At that time, you know, we were kind of bitter enemies with Russia, and yet they were able to get that information somehow and utilize it. And I don’t blame them. Battelle put it out and maybe charged people for it. It was a government-funded program, looking at ways to protect people. That’s what it was for. We didn’t have much protection at all; we had a pair of surgeon’s gloves we put on our hands. That was about it, you know. And a white lab coat. So that was basically what we used. Filled those little bottles with the white surgeon glove, set it over, so. Franklin: Wow. How much shielding was between you and the simulated reactor in these reactor explosion tests? Chambers: There was a lot of shielding there. There was concrete walls, plus the reactor core was steel and metal and stuff and what-have-you. And all the atmosphere was protected because all of the velocities of air went through all kinds of filters and stuff before it was ever released to the atmosphere. And the liquid went into those tanks that are out there now that everybody’s worried about. So any of the chemicals and stuff that we washed down, any of the cleanup that we did on the stuff that we utilized in it, all went into those tanks out there. We also had canisters that we set around, positioned, in the containment vessel at different altitudes, different spaces. And they had little carbon filter systems in them, and we’d switch them on and pull the air through them, and then we’d check the little deals. So, again, over a period of time, we’d do like maybe 15 minutes after it happened, maybe 45 minutes, maybe an hour-and-a-half. Utilization time to see how it dropped off over the periods of time. And it was through—they had these little round canisters, if I remember right, I think they had thirteen of these, each one had like thirteen of them in it, and so we could turn them on individually. So pull air through them, and then look at the radiation content and see the slope that it went down over a period of time. Franklin: Interesting. Chambers: And then we had another facet out there that we utilized. We had a separate building outside of 221-T head end that we had a reactor core in it and put waters in that and had two shields in it, metal shields, and used high pressure nitrogen stuff between the two of them, so that as they heated up the water and put it under tremendous pressure, it wouldn’t blow. When it released the pressure, then it would blow. And we did that along with the other—to see what damage, and what would happen when one blew. One time, in fact the last time we utilized that, they made a little mistake and got the pressures and stuff a little bit too high, and the walls on the reactor, that simulated reactor were six inches thick, and when it blew it split it. And not only that, but it blew the frame back in the concrete and sucked the walls in on the building and lifted the roof off of it. We had a neutron generator sitting out to measure stuff. I don’t know where it went to. Nobody that I know of has ever been able to find it. And it was a tremendous thing—the steel—tremendously heavy. And that volume of water and steam and everything went out of that place, and I don’t know where that neutron generator—we looked and looked and looked for it. Never could find it. I don’t know they ever did find it. Franklin: You mean, it— Chambers: It just went somewhere. Franklin: It flew away. Chambers: It flew away or disintegrated, I don’t know. And that was—we weren’t supposed to talk about that for a long time, and so I never did tell anybody. Several years thereafter, I had a good friends that I fished and hunted with, Bob Cullowith[?], he was the head engineer on the FFTF, so he understood. We were hunting—this was, oh, 25 years after it happened—and I told him about it. So our manager, Gordon Rodgers was a skier and Bob Cullowith[?] would go up to Bluewood skiing. And one day he was sitting next to Gordon on the bus. He mentioned that to Gordon and Gordon said, well, I guess it’s time we can talk about it now. At the time it was supposed to be secret; nobody’s supposed to know it. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] That’s a great story. So to your knowledge it was never found? Chambers: No. We looked and looked and looked for it. We had an RM out there always onsite. Irving Winters was an RM, really a nice fellow. They call radiation monitors something different now, but at that time they were RMs. Went out with Geiger counters and everything. We looked all over that country for it; I don’t know where it went to. Franklin: Wow. Chambers: To this day, I don’t know whether anybody knows where it went to. Franklin: Wow. That’s sure a good thing that no one was standing where that neutron monitor was. Chambers: Oh, why, no, we wouldn’t let anyone out there, because it blew out with tremendous force and velocity. Well, as I say, it pulled the sides in the building and lifted the roof. A tremendous deal. And that reactor core is a pretty good size, and it was mounted in steel and stuff, six inches thick, as I say, and it split it and blew it clear back against—broke the mounting brackets and blew it back against the concrete. And our manager was really upset at that, and I don’t blame him. Because they just made some mistakes. A lot of people think you can’t compress water. But they found that you really can, and when it blows, it blows with tremendous force. In fact, they did a test somewhere, I think maybe Idaho or somewhere, where an engineer was doing that and then it got too much pressure and it blew and just disintegrated him. Franklin: Wow. Chambers: And that’s been several years ago, 40 years ago or so. So that—water compressed can end up being pretty dangerous. Franklin: That sounds like some pretty—I mean, obviously this work would have really big impacts on safety and knowing how to construct better reactors. But this sounds like pretty dangerous—there’s definitely some hazards involved with this testing. Chambers: Well, I don’t think there was really hazard that way. The hazard we were subjected to was the chemicals and the radiation back in the samples that we took, and taking the little air samplers apart. They were little stainless steel deals that we put charcoal in them and filters of a different kind in them. And again, we had a little deal we stuck in our pockets, a little dosimeter, they call them. But if you got too high on them, guys would leave them in their lockers, so that they wouldn’t send you home or whatever, you know? And if you thought you were getting too much of it. So that’s basically the exposure problem was what really was dangerous to us, as far as the reactor core and stuff—we were away from it, we were back in the building when it blew or standing off to the sides and back of it, and watching it when stuff like that happened, or in labs. Franklin: Would you be watching it through like shielded glass or CCTV or—? Chambers: When we vaporized the radioactive material, we were watching it through lead glass. Very thick lead glass. Franklin: So, when guys would get too much dose and get sent home, would they be sent home without pay? Is that why they would leave their dosimeter? Chambers: No, I— Franklin: Because you’re the first person I’ve heard that from, and I— Chambers: I think they were all paid, as far as I know. I don’t think anybody lost any pay. They just sent them to do something else or sent them home or something, what-have-you, so they wouldn’t lose pay. If you got overdosed. Like McCluskey, out there, he was paid all that time. Franklin: Sure. I guess I’m just struggling to understand why someone would intentionally leave their—overexpose themselves over the limit just to keep—there are other guys that could do that job, right? Chambers: Well, you know, a lot of the knowledge at that time wasn’t where we are now. A lot of this stuff they didn’t know back then. You can’t blame them, because it was a job and it paid good. They didn’t know the dangers then that they do now. They know a lot more—like asbestos is a good example. Every pipe we had out there, everything was insulated with asbestos. Well, they didn’t know the ramifications of asbestos, you know, 70 or 80 years ago. World War II, every ship that was built had asbestos all through it. But they learned. Franklin: It’s a great insulator. Chambers: Yes. Fabulous. But very deadly if you—you know. Even to people at home, from the clothes that you take home. The women washed them and stuff, you know, they’d get the fibers and breathe it in their lungs, like coal dust, you know? 100 years ago they didn’t know what coal dust would do, and now they—so a lot of those, a lack of knowledge. Franklin: Mm. You also alluded earlier that this had been a pretty high point in tensions with Russia during this part of the Cold War. Do you think that might have played into the attitude of just wanting to get the job done? Chambers: I think so. I think that they were accept—very acceptable to utilizing our knowledge when it came to cleaning up the reactor and stuff. They had to when Chernobyl happened. I think, if you look back, a lot of our people went over there. A lot of Battelle people went over and helped them, because—that was actually in Ukraine. Chernobyl’s actually in Ukraine; it isn’t in Russia, you know. And lately I’ve been seeing some specials on TV showing the beautiful city that they had there and all the amusements and stuff, it’s just sitting there in ruin, because they can’t go to it now because it’s so highly radioactive. But their reactors, you know, were vertically cooled, which means that the cooling water’s all on the bottom. So they got a hot spot and bubbled the water, so the top of the reactor didn’t have any cooling water. Where ours are horizontally cooled. We got the cooling water up here as well as down there, so we don’t have that problem. Different philosophy of making a reactor. Franklin: Sure, sure. So what did you—so after the reactor—you mentioned you worked at the 221-T head end doing reactor testing, and then you looked at different chemicals for cleaning up. What did you do after that project? Chambers: I went down to the 300 Area and went to work in Robert Marshall’s—that was the manager. I worked directly for a PhD by the name of Gerald Kulcinski. And he actually, I told a young man later, the smartest individual that I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing. And you see him on television every now and then on Discovery Channel, A&E and they’re talking about him. Because he left here and went to University of Wisconsin and he’s in charge of the fusion reactor—the old reactors are fission. What we’re trying to develop now is fusion, where you get 100,000-degree plasma and you can keep it going and contain it. Well, we can get to 100,000 but to keep it going and contain it is different, and that’s what they’re working on. He was kind of in charge of that. Went all over the world to do that kind of stuff, and he’s a professor at the University of Wisconsin. I think now retired, but he talks about now what’s energy on some planet out there and if we could get that energy from here we could run this world for a lot of years and stuff. They’re way out there in this stuff. Franklin: So what was he doing when you went to work out in his lab? Chambers: We were doing metallurgical research. We were taking various types of metal that we were trying to fiddle with or mend or develop or what-have-you, and putting them in reactors around the country, different levels of radiation and then bringing them back to the lab and seeing what kind of damage they sustained. And the way we would do that, we would thin them down with a variety of ways and then put them in electron microscope so we could magnify stuff and see stuff several thousand powers magnification and then look at the damage that the metal sustained. Franklin: And what was the purpose of that work? Chambers: Well, again, to try to develop metals for different things and to try to develop metals that the reactor wouldn’t harm, and to make all kinds of stuff out of, I guess. Stainless steel now has become widely used in all kinds of cookware and knives. When I was a kid, you never thought of having a knife blade, a pocketknife blade, made out of stainless; they were carbon steel. Now they’re all stainless. Franklin: Hmm. So was stainless steel one of the metals to come out of that work that had high applicability for all these different scenarios? Chambers: Well, I’m sure it was. I’m sure Battelle had a lot of work, because they’re a very competent company in a whole lot of different areas. People don’t realize what kind of research they do and a tremendous amount of developments in everything come from Battelle. I think it’s a very, very good company, my personal opinion. Franklin: Were there any tests of metals that stood out to you in that work? Chambers: Not really anything; it was just a combination—and you’d put them in the reactor at this level. At University of Washington, I took some samples over to their reactor, put them in at their level, downtown Seattle and people didn’t realize in Seattle they had a reactor right downtown Seattle with Dixy Lee Ray running it. Very brilliant lady, you know? And we’d send them everywhere and then bring them back and, say, thin them down and just look at what happened. Of course, one of the things that took place when we did that, our lab became very contaminated. Because some of the metal was thicker, so we had to thin it down to start with. Well, I bought a little milling machine with a magnetic base on it and then glued the samples to a piece of carbon steel with epoxy resin and superglue. And then planed them down with a horizontal milling machine. All of those particles and everything went into the atmosphere in our lab. And then, we’d put them in a little holding device and used high current and various acids to spray against it with the current and to thin them, etch them down, until you could finally see some light. And then we put them in the microscope. So all of that atmosphere was what we breathed. It was just in the room. So it became a very contaminated lab. You can understand why. But, again, we never thought anything about it. It was a job; we just did it, you know? Franklin: Were you wearing respirators— Chambers: No. Franklin: --or anything? Any kind of protective--? Chambers: We didn’t have anything on but our street clothes, like this. Or you could change into a pair of coveralls if you wanted to. Most of the time, we didn’t. But I think I’m probably the only one left alive. My compadre, Jack Humason, a great friend of mine, he and I both worked straight for Gerald. He died about a year ago. Had cancers through the bone marrow and all in his blood and stuff, and just fell over dead, went in the hospital. One of the guys I hunted with, Jones is his name, Maxwell Jones, I read in the paper here three or four months ago that he ended up back in Tennessee doing stuff. And he died. And he’s quite a few years younger than I was, and so was Jack. So I’m lucky. I don’t smoke and I’m not a drinker or anything. Unfortunately, I’ve got bad COPD from all that stuff. Franklin: Wow. Yeah, it’s amazing, I can imagine that just a little—what you’d be inhaling would be a really effective—a cocktail of different— Chambers: That’s correct. Franklin: You know, because you’re getting all these samples in from all these different reactors and these different types of metals and milling them and everything. Chambers: Well, yes, and of course the acids and stuff that we were utilizing basically to thin the metals down with the current, the fumes from that that you were breathing, that didn’t do your lungs any good either. Of course, that’s what’s, again, more of what’s in those tanks out there that they’ve got to find a way to drain those tanks and solidify that material. Unfortunately, our vitrification plant is a long way behind time. Franklin: Yeah. Well, it seems like, just from what you just described and talking with other people, it seems like it’s that mix of things that are in the tanks that seems to be a lot of the problem. There’s all these different chemicals and all these different solids and, you know, it’s like a grab-bag. Chambers: Yes, there’s everything under the sun in those tanks and what-have-you. Of course, the acid content and the strong NaOH, that’s what causes the tanks to etch away, leech away and stuff. And you know what an acid will do; pour it on metal, and it’ll eventually burn right through it, you know. Unless you got—if they’d have built the tanks out of stainless to start with, it’d been far better off. But, again, it was knowledge, lack of knowledge. They didn’t have any idea. We had a war to win. When they did this stuff, or when they started doing it. And then we had a cold war for years that we were worried about everything, so we had to do stuff. Now, you wonder if you could win a war now. With the attitude that’s in this country now, it makes you wonder if you could do the things that you did. You couldn’t do the things that they did back then. Franklin: Yeah. So how long did you work at the metallurgical research lab? Chambers: Well, that was over five, about six years there. I had about eleven years in at Battelle. Franklin: Okay, and then you left Battelle? Chambers: Yes. Franklin: Okay, and why did you leave Battelle? Chambers: Well, I had a business going. I had the last year or two, couple of years I was with Battelle, and then I finally went to that full-time. Franklin: Ah, and what business was that? Chambers: I owned Water World Marina, Incorporated at Pasco Boat Basin. Franklin: Oh, okay. So you retired at Battelle to go full-time with your boat business. Chambers: That’s correct. And then I ended up having, oh, about, oh, I don’t know, at the most probably ten or twelve people working for me for—I was in that for 25 years. Franklin: Oh, wow. And so then you sold that as well? Chambers: Yes, that’s correct. Franklin: So you’ve been retired for a while. Chambers: Yeah. Well, I retired and my buddy bought me out, and then not long after that, why, he called me up and said, Dave, would you please come down and go to work for me, you know? Help me out? I need some help, you know. So I said, okay, I’ll do that, I’ll help you out. Franklin: Yeah, it’s hard to stay retired, I’ve noticed. I interview a lot of retired people. Hard to stay retired. When you worked for Battelle, did you live in Pasco the whole time, or did you ever live in Richland? Chambers: No, I lived in Kennewick. Franklin: Oh, Kennewick. Chambers: At the time. I live in Pasco now, but all the years that I worked for Battelle Research Laboratories, I lived in Kennewick. Franklin: Oh, okay. And so you would do the commute every day out to the— Chambers; Yes, that’s correct. And to start with, another thing I don’t understand, we’d drive to the bus lot in North Richland, right off of, basically a continuation of George Washington Way and a couple other streets went together, and had a big parking lot there. And then you get on the buses and ride out to 2-West. And I never could understand why in the world they got rid of those buses, because it kept a lot of cars off the road, and a lot of—one bus carrying 50 or 60 people is a whole lot more economical than a bunch of cars driving out there. Franklin: Yes, yes, it is. Chambers: I couldn’t understand why they got rid of them. It was something you could relax, both going and coming from work. Franklin: Sure. Yeah, I’ve heard that from a lot of people who rode the buses how much they like them. It sure does seem to make a lot of sense to have them. Chambers: No, it didn’t make a lot of sense to get rid of them. Franklin: I think I just have a couple other questions. Yeah, I have two more questions. I’m wondering if you could describe the ways in which the security and/or secrecy at Hanford impacted your work. Chambers: Well, I don’t really think that the secrecy or the security impacted it, except that you didn’t take the stuff home with you. You didn’t advertise to everybody what you were doing, and we were beyond a war, in the Cold War. During World War II, people didn’t even really know what they were doing out there, most of them. There were people in the know that did, but the vast majority of them didn’t know. Well, when I went to work there, everybody knew what you were doing. People downtown didn’t know a lot of the stuff and weren’t privy to the writings and stuff that were going on out there. That went strictly to the government or to some organization. And Battelle does a lot of private company research. And that’s probably more secretive than government research, because if you’re doing research for a company and they paid you a lot of money, they most certainly don’t want a competitor to get that knowledge. So that’s probably more secretive than the government work was when I was out there. And then I can understand why. So I don’t think it impacted what we did at all, except that you were limited on what you could take out there and what you could bring home. You couldn’t bring anything home unless you had clearance to do it. And you most certainly couldn’t take any kind of weapons out there. And dope was prohibited. People maybe tried to take it in and stuff, but I didn’t see any of that in our groups at all. And a lot of our groups, not many of them even smoked. I don’t smoke, and Jack Humason didn’t smoke, and Gerald Kulcinski didn’t, and Homer, our manager didn’t smoke. Very few people. Some of them smoked pipe, and some of them smoked cigarettes. But there were more people that didn’t smoke, even back then, than did. So. Franklin: Interesting. Well, that’s—I mean, good for them. Chambers: Yes, yes. Good thing I don’t, as bad as my COPD is. When I went through the impairment evaluation—started on the deal against the DOL in October of 2012. So it’s been almost five years. And had my impairment evaluation last August. They put you in a little room, and put all connected up stuff, and then they put you on a bicycle with stuff on you. And I had, my lungs got an 86% impairment with my lungs with all that stuff and what-have-you. So I have to breathe inhalers all the time. And then I have a heart that beats fast, because of the oxygen transfer, there are no blood vessels shut down or anything for the oxygen transfer. So I have to take medicine for that, so. Franklin: Oh, wow. Chambers: So it catches up to you after a time. But fortunately, I’ve lived for 82 years, you know. And to say, I don’t know of anybody—there may be one or two still alive that worked out there, but I don’t know, most of them are gone. Franklin: Yeah, well, it seems like you were really in contact—close contact with a lot of different types of material and different ingestion pathways for chemical and radiological materials. Chambers: Yes, we were. Both places. In the 2-West area, doing the experiments there, and then the metallurgical stuff. Yes. And especially—the chemicals are probably the worst things. Radioactive material does damage to you; it cooks you from the inside out. But the acids get into you, and we used sulfuric acid and nitric acid and picric acid. Picric you have to be very careful of. It’ll get in here, and it doesn’t burn immediate—it gets down and then burns from the inside out. It’s a very dangerous thing. And then we used some ether and stuff and what-have-you. And you have to be careful with ether, because if it crystallizes and then you twist the cap off, it’ll explode. So you have to be very careful with ether. Franklin: Jeez. Chambers: Ether, highly explosive. And we used some of that. In fact I found some of it down in the lab in 221-T, heading downstairs, and it was setting up there, in the bottom been sitting there for a long time with crystallization on them. So I called them and they took it out in a container somewhere and blew it up, I guess. Franklin: Wow. Chambers: So. Franklin: That’s really scary. Chambers: But you don’t mess with it, you know. You just leave it alone, you know? As long as you leave it alone, you’re okay, and get people in there that know how to handle it. Franklin: Wow. So, David, my last question is kind of a reflective question, and that’s, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War? Chambers: Well, I think, the thing is to know that we had a job to do, because the world was, at that time, was in a very dangerous situation with China and Russia both. Plus, North Korea. And the bugaboo now, again, is North Korea. And we had things we had to learn and stuff we had to do. And it’s hard to realize, for young people to visualize what the world was like then with Russia developing all kinds of stuff. Shot France’s powers down. When we really—to start with, had a plane that would fly above their missiles. But then they developed a missile that’d shoot them down. So we had to do some utilization there to free him and trade him, you know, to get him back. And Russia was developing stuff. And they had weapons that would blow us to pieces, and we had weapons that would blow them to pieces. And it was just a dangerous situation that we were trying to de-escalate, cool down, and so we just kept doing stuff. It was a job to do, and you had to understand that the world was a different situation then than it is now, and it’s becoming that situation again now. With North Korea and Iran and now Putin in Russia again, and China’s trying to build up islands in the South China Sea. So it looks like we’re heading down that same road again. So. Franklin: Great, well, David, thank you so much for your really great stories and interesting—you had a very interesting jobs out there. Chambers: Well, I think I did. Franklin: Yeah, you did, and I appreciate you taking the time to tell us about them today. Chambers: Well, then, as I say, you know, Battelle was the main instrumentation in this. And you read in the paper what they’re doing all the time now, so I think that’s a wonderful company to have here, and they do a lot of very fine things, I think. Maybe some people don’t like them, but I think they do a wonderful job, and I’m glad we’ve got them here. Franklin: Oh, good. Yeah, they have their hands in a lot of different— Chambers: That’s correct. Franklin: A lot of different stuff. Chambers: And even security, going into airports and stuff. A lot of people don’t realize where that came from; that came from Battelle. Franklin: Yeah, yes, it did. Chambers: You know? And we looked at some IUDs that were put in women in different parts of the world. Intrauterine devices to stop pregnancies. And then analyzed them. And you find that women in different parts of the world destroy those IUDs at different rates. Maybe it’s from their diet, diet and food or what they eat or what-have-you. But just interesting things. Very interesting things. Franklin: Yeah, that is very interesting. Well, thank you. Chambers: You’re welcome. Franklin: Okay. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:33:34 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 221-T Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with David Chambers Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource David Chambers worked for Batrelle in the 200 Areas An interview conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by Mission Support Alliance on behalf of the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 07/25/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. 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This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F4a35f372f4b52570ee849e45d2d5926a.JPG cffa87237eafbc5227c6dc8eb9c913cc https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fd244e6972247b281ea3b84e454b5d96e.mp4 67e666aad21ba00e26e7fb583d01d4b9 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed David Criswell Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an interview—an oral history interview with Dave Criswell on July 20, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Dave Criswell about his experiences growing up in the Tri-Cities and working at the Hanford Site. So, Dave, the best place to start, I think, is the beginning. Where—why don’t you tell me when and where you were born. David Criswell: Born in Portland, Oregon. [SIGH] I guess there’s nothing wrong with 1937. We moved to the Tri-Cities the first time, Dad and I drove up here after midnight, January 1st, 1948. We only lived in Pasco for all of ’48 and part of ’49, and then we moved up to Hungry Horse, Montana. We returned here in spring/summer of 1953. I entered Pasco High School as a junior. The school was brand new that year. They’d just opened the doors for us. So I graduated in 1955. I don’t recall how I ended up being selected as part of a program to become an engineering assistant, was the program, in 1955. They were conducting night classes that we had to take. At the same time, during the day, we would work in the labs out at Hanford in different labs. I started off, because I wasn’t 18 yet—my birthday didn’t come until October; I got hired in September. So 17-year-olds couldn’t work on the Hanford Project. So, Richland, being a government town, and DOE ran everything, including the city library, there was myself and a couple, three other 17-year-olds went to work in the library until we were old enough. And then we were assigned to labs out at Hanford. I was assigned to a chemistry lab in 325 Building. We were separating radioisotopes, from I know not where, to see how efficient the process was that they were using for separation out there. I can’t even remember the names of some of the materials that we were separating. The one that I can remember is ruthenium, I think it was. But day in, day out, taking samples and running them, cooking them down, putting them on filter papers, and then that would go to a lab for reading. Some point in time within first year or so I worked, I was transferred out to 222-S, another chemistry lab, doing the same thing. I suspect that maybe whatever I was running the analysis on was a little fresher than the stuff we had in 325 Building. It must’ve come from right there in the 200 Area. But the same thing. The only thing that—real memory that I had was when I graduated from high school, I wasn’t—I didn’t have—I wasn’t as tall as I am now. I graduated at 5’7.5”. Franklin: Wow. Criswell: And weighed 135 pounds. Went to work out there in September of that same year, ’55, and I was 6’0” and weighed 135. Tired. Man, I was tired. I don’t even know if I ate when I got home, I was so tired. Going to bed was the most interesting thing I had. But at some point in time, in the period of time that I was working at 222-S, apparently had another growth spurt. Because every day you could drive out to the gate of 2-West and then you go through the badge house. And you would then climb on a bus that would take you to whatever events inside of 200 West you were going to. We were going to S, so that’s where we went. And one day, I got off the bus and something knocked me to my knees, and I fell out of the bus. I brought a box with me, and in that is a report that said that they thought maybe I was inattentive, that I had hit my head on the bus, and fallen on the ground. Well, it didn’t dawn on me until years later, maybe even when I read that doggone memo, that the reason I hit my head is I’d had a growth spurt, and all of the sudden I was too tall to go through that bus door without hitting my head. Co-worker said I didn’t throw a shadow on a sunny day, I was so skinny. And ended up being about 6’4” at some point in time early on. Uh— Franklin: Oh, sorry. Criswell: I could not get a hang of chemistry. The night school was difficult for me. I hired a tutor to try and help me; I still couldn’t get the hang of it. They determined I probably wasn’t going to work out in a chemistry lab. And they transferred me into tech informations in 300 Area. If you’re not familiar with that old building, that was the one just inside the south gate of the 300 Area on the west side of the road. That had the plant’s library; across the hall, it had the security files. Documents were stored over there. I didn’t have anything to do with that. Basically, I was putting books on a shelf. I also had the job of traveling all over Hanford. When somebody would have a safety meeting, they would occasionally call us and ask us to bring a film that they had heard about, or asked if we had a film that they hadn’t seen. So, I traveled all over. Franklin: So kind of like a AV, audio-visual, tech? Criswell: Yeah, that’s exactly what it was. Only, I was using 16-milimeter projector. Old-fashioned stuff. I don’t even know if you could find one of them today. Franklin: Oh, we actually—our declassified—not declassifying, but getting ready for public release, some of the materials in the Hanford Collection, and we had to purchase a 16-milimeter projector to view some of the old movies. Which could possibly be some of the old movies that you showed. There’s some about safety, and there’s some of the promotional ones produced for Hanford. Criswell: We had some Walt Disney flicks. We had one that—Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. I think that was The Ventriloquist. Franklin: So, wait, so, these weren’t—these were like movies and shows? Criswell: Some of them were. They were movies. They dealt with safety things. Franklin: Oh, okay. Criswell: They dealt with security, with reinforcing the security, you know, you can’t do this, you can’t do that. I learned early on in the early days if the film broke, I had to take it downtown to a little Quonset hut behind the old Federal Building and they had plant photographers down there. There was a photographer down there that knew how to splice the films. Anyhow, they determined if I was going to keep coming down there, that I needed to have the equipment to repair those things and keep the stuff going and they wouldn’t have me running downtown all the time. So I ended up learning how to do that and take care of my own films. I did that for a couple, about two-and-a-half years. And someplace about 1958 I guess, I ended up being offered a job. I had a coworker that he was married, he had kids, and both of us were offered the job. I wasn’t—I didn’t have the expenses he had. And I told our manager—we were both in there at the same time—told our manager that he had to take a job, and I could wait for the next one that came along. And he said, no, you don’t understand; there’s two jobs. The metallography lab needs a tech in 326 Building and they also need a tech down in 306 Building. So both of us got a job about the same time, transferred out. The other tech’s name was somebody by the name of Ray Beauchamp. And he ended up, a lot of his photography work in metallography ended up being in national competition. And he won a number of awards. He also had the privilege of polishing moon rocks that came back from one of the moon trips. I think that’s probably on display out at one of the Battelle buildings out there, even today, I would guess it’s still there. But he had a lot of notoriety. And I worked inside the fence. I was working on materials that were of nuclear nature before they went into the reactor. And then you end up with things being even more irradiated; you had higher dose rates on the stuff that came out. The work that I did in the lab in 306 Building was to see what the material looked like before it went in the reactor. It was a base study, basically. And then when they came out of the reactor, they took it to another facility in the 300 Area called 327 Building, Radio Met—radio metallography. And they cut up the slugs that they got out of the reactor and they looked at the integrity of the cladding on the different types of slugs they were getting out of there. They’d section them, pass the sections into the next cell. They’d sand on them, pass them into the next cell. They’d sand them down even more, ultimately getting a mirror finish polish on them, then they could put them onto the cell that the metallographs, old photograph metallographs. The technicians that worked over there, I was amazed at what they were able to do with everything that was being handled by manipulators inside of two feet of them, or four feet. I don’t know how thick those walls were, but it was amazing what they could do. I was doing the same thing, hands-on. It took me a while to learn how to put a polish on there that I could photograph without having scratches. [LAUGHTER] That was the secret. You also couldn’t round it off; you had to have it essentially flat. The higher the magnification goes, the flatter it has to be; otherwise, you don’t get very much in focus. So I worked there until, let’s see, I guess that would’ve been August of 1961. I took a vacation and I took a honeymoon at the same point in time, and when I came back, I had a new job. That job just kind of morphed into the job I retired from. It was a materials testing facility down in the 314 Building. Again, in the material that we were using there, it was all cold, new materials that they were going to be using in reactors. Their concern was, how far could a crack grow before it became critical and it went full-length? If this happened, then, essentially the reactor was done, you know. So they wanted to know how big a crack could it grow before—and the water would then be coming out, how much water would they lose before they could determine that they had to shut it down, pull that part out, replace it? They wanted to know what kind of a warning sign they were going to get. Franklin: And this was for the fuel slug that would go in? Criswell: No, because you’re not running water through the fuel slug, per se. It’s not going to leak. You’re talking about process tubes. Franklin: Oh, okay. Criswell: Probably the first—I don’t know if we did anything on the K Reactor; I think that was in another facility. I didn’t have anything to do with that. I know there was another facility that was testing graphite. But K Reactor and N Reactor, those two had process tubes that they put the slugs into. They were both water-cooled. Franklin: Okay. Criswell: So they wanted to know if they were going to be able to determine when things were getting anywhere near the critical point, and they could shut it down, pull the process tube, and then start it up again. We also developed inspection probes for the reactor in 300 Area, what they referred to as PRTR. Let’s see, Plutonium Recycling Test Reactor. And here, again, they wanted to know from our inspections, what we could determine as far as wear and tear on the process tubes. So, we were actually sitting right on the faceplate of the reactor, with the access port open, running our inspection probes down. One had a camera that took 16-millimeter images of what we determined was down there. And the other one was an inspection probe that sensed the space between the process tube and another tube. And I didn’t really understand all of the process in PRTR. Anyhow, at that point in time, my wife and I had at least one child, and I don’t remember exactly what the date was, but I came to work on a Monday morning and was told to report to PRTR. I was amongst the first that they suited up. Over the weekend, a test that had been in the reactor failed. And in turn, that test caused damage to the two tubes that the test was inside of. Damaged those, and water was released and it went right down into the very lowest level of that reactor, the bottom shield. And they dressed us up, put all kinds of monitoring equipment on us. Anyhow, went through what looked almost a porthole in a sub, and it was only probably about four feet high, to go through. Gave us a mop and a bucket and told us, one at a time, we were in there mopping up as much as we could in 20 seconds, and we had to be out of there. I have no idea to date what my dose was on that. Anyhow, I spent two more days over there, but never went back down there. They determined we had too much dose and we were sent back to our labs. That was the end of PRTR. They never did bring that thing back up for operation again, as far as I know. Franklin: How long did it operate, do you know? Criswell: I got married in August of ’61. And got a letter from President Kennedy in October of ’61. Had to report to Fort Lewis the day after Thanksgiving in ’61. I got out in August 1st of ’62. Reported back to Hanford, and when I got back there, we were building the inspection probes to inspect. So, I don’t know if PRTR was operating at that point in time. It might’ve been close to that point in time. And anyhow we finished it up, and we probably spent maybe three or four outages where they’d—every time they’d have an outage where they’d pull fuels out or do something or whatever, then they’d give us two or three days to go in and inspect. It was twelve on, twelve off for us, for the techs. And they had the top shield had two rings that they could rotate. By rotation of the two rings, they could get us to the center and to the outer of all the process tubes. The inner ring would actually rotate and go all the way to the outside and all the way to the inside. The outer ring would rotate around, so they could—they’d set it up for us and they’d have the thing open for us when we got there, and we’d just start running stuff. Anyhow. Franklin: What did you go to Fort Lewis to do? Criswell: In 1961, Jack Kennedy was having problems with Russia and the Cubans. We were also involved in the Vietnam War at that point in time. My service dates include the Vietnam process, but I had nothing to do with that. We didn’t really know what the heck was going on. There was more secret over there that, what was going on, that we just didn’t understand. One of the strange things was that I got assigned to an amphibious truck outfit out of California. Know what the DUKW is, it’s a floating deuce-and-a-half truck. You can sink it with an M-1. Just fire at the waterline, it’s going to sink. [LAUGHTER] When I got over there, the day after Thanksgiving, there was nobody there to receive us; we spent Friday, Saturday, Sunday sitting around in a bunkhouse, essentially, waiting for somebody to show up. Finally, Monday, we started getting processed. But the strange thing was, after things got up and operational—I was the only one that had ever worked at Hanford. They gave me the job of explaining how to avoid radiation. I found it really strange. Here I am, a Spec/2, an E4, and I’m giving a lecture on how to avoid radiation. Basically, if you’d double your distance from your source, you divide the radiation exposure by four. That was a real handy thing, if you just get yourself as far away as you can in the shortest period of time. That was the message we had to give everybody. Our company was picking up duffel bags and equipment from other companies that had been brought in. We were loading them onto a MATS aircraft over at McChord Air Force Base, loading a great big aircraft with all kinds of stuff. Anyhow, we never saw the troops get on them when we were loading their material. Strange thing was, in July of ’62, we were told we’d be going home August 1st. And no explanation. Nothing. We still didn’t know why we were there, outside of we were loading troops onto airplanes to go to Berlin. Anyhow, much later, I had a friend who was a mess sergeant, and at that point in time, he worked—when he wasn’t in the military, he worked as a tech for Bell Telephone. He quit that job and he went to a company, Collins Electronics, down in Texas. Next thing I know, he’s in Vietnam installing new avionics in military aircraft. And I found out later, he was all over the world installing new communication electronics. Ultimately, he’s got plaques on his walls referring to him as Colonel—I’ll stop the last name—Colonel. Anyhow, he told me, good grief, that had to have been in ’71, ’72, nine, ten years later. He said, do you know what you were over there for? I said, no, not really. Basically what it was is the Russians had been in the habit of rotating a division into East Berlin, or East Germany, and the old one would go home. In ’61, they rotated a second—no, good grief, mind block—rotated another group in there and didn’t send one home. So now they got two. At the same time, the Russians are moving missiles into Cuba. Jack Kennedy, if he was still alive, you wouldn’t want to play poker against the man. What I found out, and I don’t know what the date was, but I have in the past ten years, I have seen confirmation of what I was told about three different times, different people. Some of them were military talking to our news people. But Jack Kennedy, I think it’s a little jet, I think it’s a B-47, a little—actually two pod jets hanging from the wing, small jet engines hanging from the wing. They got one sitting in the tarmac in front of Boeing Museum of Flight in Seattle. We had well over a thousand of those things. The term I was told was thousands. You can see pictures of those things lined up in the desert down in Arizona. They’re waiting to become beer cans. Jack Kennedy ordered all those things loaded up and he sent them all to Russia. I may be in trouble for this, but it’s a story that not very many people have heard. But it’s true. It happened. He sent them all up. Plus, they knew that all of our subs, basically, they didn’t know exactly where they were, but they knew we had them, they knew the numbers. And they knew that our missiles were capable of making the trip. They could actually see all of the jets headed there. They knew they could take out a lot of them, but they knew they couldn’t take all of them out. They knew they were going to get hit, and they were going to get hit hard. The Russian leadership blinked. They got on the phone and they called Kennedy and they told him, you turn those planes around. Turn them around now, and we’ll pull out of Cuba. We’ll take the division out of Germany. Things will go back to the way they were. And they did. And August 1st, we went home. But never a word as to why we were there; never a word as to what the heck was happening when they released those planes. I didn’t know why I was asked to tell people how to avoid radiation. Didn’t have a clue. So, came home, went back to work, and same organization, group, I was with when I left. That was still GE. I was still with GE. Franklin: So were you—when you got pulled to Lewis, were you in the Guard? Criswell: No, I was active Army. Franklin: Oh, you were active Army. Criswell: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. But the whole time you were active Army you were stationed at— Criswell: I could’ve been there until August 1st or if the Russians didn’t call Kennedy, I probably wasn’t coming home. Franklin: Right. Had you—so were you in the Army before you got called up to— Criswell: Yeah, I’d spent six years in National Guard. Franklin: Okay, all right. Criswell: Pasco National Guard. Franklin: Okay. Criswell: When my six years were up, which was probably about April of ’61—I think someone was unhappy with me leaving, and they put my name in there. Strange thing is, at the point that I got released from the Pasco National Guard, they were an amphibious truck outfit. So my MOS was a key personnel as a filler for an amphibious truck company from California. It made sense why I ended up there. I mean, quotation marks around my name. It had to stand out, you know? I don’t know how many of us there were nationally. I don’t think there were that many of us. I think there was truck drivers that were pulled in to help fill, mechanics to help in the shop, what-have-you. I was one of the few people that came in, I think, that knew anything about an amphibious truck. You know, how you have to take care of it and what-have-you. It was interesting time, but I’m glad, maybe, they didn’t tell us what the heck was going on, because then, you know, I think it would’ve put a whole new light on why we were there, and something for us to really worry about, I think. They basically kept us like a bunch of mushrooms. [LAUGHTER] So definitely kept us in the dark. But anyhow, once back here, went back to work for the same company, the same actual group. They had developed or were in the process of putting together the probes to inspect the reactors. That just morphed into all kinds of different things over the years. One of the engineers that came to work, he was new, he was hired from Boeing, he was interested in fatigue cycling. Franklin: What is that? Criswell: Cycling is, there’s thermal cycling—the reactor heats up, it cools off when they shut it down for a period, heats up, cools down, and you’re talking about a lot of heat. You’ve got mechanical cycling where you have load changes. Everything that’s built probably has a fatigue starter in it someplace. Either something in the manufacturing, in a casting, in the machining. Things happen when you’re making parts. They wanted here, again, to see how long—we actually put together a system where we were fatiguing process tubes that had a little slot machine partway through it. Then we had to put endcaps on it. Then we had to pressure cycle each thing. Something like the reactor. You got water pressure going through there, and then they shut it down. We were doing this cold. And ultimately, the crack would grow. And the first problem we ran into is the crack was growing, but then it was leaking. The crack didn’t go all the way through, initially, but once it got growing, it went all the way through. So we were having oil squirting out every which way, on this end was oil. And we could pressure to, I think, 2,000 psi is what this machine could do. We weren’t getting that high. So we had to come up with a way of keeping it from—keeping the oil. So we figured out a way to patch the inside of it with a thin piece of material, yet it was flexible enough that it wouldn’t hurt the integrity of the load cycling. Ultimately, we figured out how to make this thing grow until it blew. And then, I mean, you had gallons of oil all over. After the first one, where it was just squirting like that, then we have to have it turned toward the measuring device which is optical. When it blew, I’m on one side of what we’re doing, and the engineers are on the other side. Anyhow, they didn’t know how to turn the thing off. It had a second part to the system that would replenish the oil that it was losing to expansion. It was an air-operated pump that would just put more fluid in there. Anyhow, they couldn’t turn it off, and I had to duck underneath the stream to get around. Then I had to mop up all the oil. So the next thing was to come up with a hood that we could do the test in that had a glass that we could look through, but when it blew, the oil would just drain back into a bottle. Instead of—oh, I had a mess in that basement. I had to clean it up. That was one of the tech’s jobs. Well, ultimately, ended up the company that made that first piece of equipment, electronics, the machine that would cycle the oil pressure, was an MTS corporation out of Minneapolis. And we ended up with a lab in the basement at 326 Building, we had ten different machines that went—one machine, I built. It was a 1,000-pound machine. And we had machines, the rest of them, MTS built, and they went up to a half-million pounds. Some were 100,000, 50,000, 20,000, 10,000-pound machines. The whole idea of all these machines was to take a chunk of metal that they were planning on using in the reactor or find out which one they could use in building the reactor. They would fatigue it, and they’d fatigue it different speeds, they’d fatigue at different temperatures, and different environments. Replicating what environment the part might see if it was being used in a reactor. So ultimately, we ended up having to send a whole bunch of polished specimens just like the ones we were testing in 326 Lab to the reactor. I had to polish all of these things, and we’d put them in a stack, and we had to separate them so we could keep the fluid flowing between them to keep them cool, and we sent them over to a reactor. They would irradiate these for a period of time until they got a certain exposure rate, then they’d send them back. We’d take the top off, we’d extract certain specimens out of there, and then we’d put new ones back in, and then we’d send—it was, you know, just constantly. But then we had a collection of irradiated materials so that we could compare the radiation damage to the same materials as we were testing in the labs. This allowed them to get a good idea of what they could expect for the mechanical integrity of the material once it was irradiated by the reactor. Franklin: And what kind of material was this again? So this wasn’t fuel, this was— Criswell: No, this was structural material. Franklin: Okay, so, like a process tube? Criswell: Maybe a hanger that held up pipes, or maybe it’s the support for the reactor vessel. I don’t know what parts they were looking at; I have no clue. I just know that we went through maybe a couple dozen different types of materials. There’s 314 stainless; I remember that. 316 stainless. Maybe there was, there’s Hastelloys and Inconels. They refer to them as superalloys. These are all high temperature materials that are designed to operate at high temperatures. Franklin: Was there anything—did you come across anything surprising in the tests? Anything that was unexpected? Criswell: I just ran the tests. Franklin: Right. Criswell: I’m the one that—in doing the fatigue cycling, you’d cycle it, to begin with, a large number of cycles, maybe 20,000 cycles. It might run a week, and then I’d open up the—turn things off, open up the furnace door, put a microscope in there and measure how far the crack had grown. Franklin: Okay. Criswell: And the idea was to get about a twenty-thousandth—twenty-thousandths—0.020 of growth. As it would begin to grow longer and longer, then the fatigue cycle would become shorter and shorter. So finally, I’m down to where I’m measuring these things a couple, three times a day. And every time I’d open up, maybe this doggone thing is running at 1200 degrees F. And I open it up; I’ve got to get in there and measure that thing. And my eyes, I mean, I don’t know what—numerous times a day, I’m opening this thing up, and I’m putting a microscope in the furnace door, and I’m measuring how long that crack is, get the furnace door closed, get it back up to temperature and start the cycling again. And I did this—oh, good grief—probably from 1965, and I was still doing fatigue cycling to the day I retired in 1999. Franklin: Wow. Criswell: Some of it, with GE and Battelle, in the early days, and Westinghouse—Westinghouse, we basically fixated on the structural materials. Battelle, when I worked two times with them, they had a different charter that they worked under. The government allowed them to test materials for small companies that had questions about what they were doing. That was probably more interesting than when I was working for Westinghouse, because Westinghouse, day in, day out, everything was the same. The only thing different was when they finally got the materials back from the reactors and they sent me over to 324 Building and we set things up in there to start running tests on their irradiated material. There was problems in that process. You’re looking through four feet of leaded glass at a test frame that’s probably two, three feet from the glass. I guess the only thing that made things work is, with my height I’m able to get up—at the top, the lead glass is tilted. It’s not vertical; it’s tilted looking through the cell wall. I’m having to look down through there to get as vertical a sight on the crack that’s growing as I can. Otherwise, every plane of glass in that window—that’s not a single pane; it’s multi-paned—would give me a little bit of—it would-- Franklin: It would bend the image, right? Criswell: It would distort the image. Franklin: Because of refraction. Criswell: Yeah, refraction or—I wasn’t getting a clear image. And that was, oh man, just a real learning process. The whole idea of the polishing before they went into the reactor and became irradiated—I put a mirror finish on them. The last polishing that I did had to be vertical to the crack’s growth across it. The idea being that when you opened the thing up, and you shined a light down from the top, the image that you’re looking at is black. You don’t see the light. But if there’s a crack growing, then the crack would show up as a white line. You can measure from the initiating point, there’s a machined notch in the specimen, so you measure from here to the crack tip. We did this for a couple, three years, over a 324 Building. For whatever reason, I guess money ran out, for that program. Battelle is a little more interesting. I was able to run tests on aircraft parts, ship—One of the problems, going clear back—not that I had anything to do with Liberty ships, but if you remember clear back in the early ‘40s, they were sending ships out that they were making as rapidly as they could for the Second World War. They’d run into the North Sea, and all of the sudden, the ship is floating—what’s left of it is floating in two halves until they sank. They rapidly developed a test called a nil-ductility drop-weight. They determined that the problem was in the structural material of the ship and the weld material that they were using to weld the plates together with. Strangely enough, my dad worked during the Second World War part-time—well, actually he had two jobs. One with Bonneville Power and one eh worked for a period of time for a shipyard in downtown Portland, and he was of small enough stature, they were sending him in between a double hull of a ship to weld. I don’t know if he was working on Liberty ships or what. But anyhow, the nil-ductility test, they would weld with a very brittle weld material. About a two-inch bead on top of a plate and then we’d cut a notch in that. And then you could, at different temperature, drop a given weight a given distance, so that you have how many foot-pounds you hit it with. If it didn’t break, that was fine. So you make things get colder until it breaks all—I think just the one side; that was a break. Some of them would break part-way across; that wasn’t a break. If the break arrested itself, fine. But if it would go all the way across, then that was a failure. So you’d end up going back to where you keep dividing things in half on the temperature until you found out where it would break and where it wouldn’t break. And then the temperature it wouldn’t break was nil-ductility. But I did run tests on ice breaker, I think it was the Polar Star, I think is the one, we said, a big chunk of this Polar Star, my gosh, that thing’s thick. The idea is that they would ride up on the—they didn’t cut and break it; they would ride up on it, and the weight of the ship would bust the ice. They didn’t know the history of what material was in there, but they wanted to make sure that they didn’t have any material from the Liberty ship era in it. I mean, the Polar Star was old enough, I guess, they had to worry about it. I’ve done testing on aircraft parts. Again, I mentioned earlier that you can impart a crack starter into a finished part. If it’s a threaded part, you can get this if, say, the coolant material is interrupted for just a second. Well, then, you’re going to get a hot spot. You can turn and make sure you can get the stuff going again, and you can start it again, but chances are, it isn’t going to break immediately, but over 1,000 cycles, this crack is going to grow more and more and more through this thing, and then it’s going to break duct-ally over here on this part. And that’s the part that broke last. This part over here, I mean, if you look at it under high enough magnification, it looks like a bunch of waves have washed up on the shore, each one making another line on the shoreline. You can actually go backwards through those waves to where is the smallest part, and you can find that there was a hot spot there, or there’s a piece of carbon there that was embedded in the material at some point during its manufacture. In the early days when I was in metallography, we had to use metallograph. Probably the highest you could go without having image problems was, say, 200, 250x. It would go to 500x; you could probably go to 1,000x, but you’re only going to see just a very, very small part of what you’re looking at. You’re not going to see—because getting a flat surface that doesn’t have any curvature at all. So the era of the electron microscope came in and that allowed us to not only not have to polish it; you could look at a fractured surface, I mean, something that has been pulled apart, and you can actually see down into the fractured surface. That allowed us to take a look at broken pieces, you can look at those benchmarks, you can look, and if there’s a piece of material— In one case, a copper part was actually failing and it was catastrophic when it failed. Copper, pure copper, is something—you might as well be looking at a blank wall: there’s nothing there to see. I mean, you can polish it and there’s nothing there to see. It’s strange stuff. Anyhow, I’m down to the tip where the crack is at. We had to break it apart. This stuff, in order to form it, they had formed it using a thermal weld, or explosive weld process, where you put two plates going different directions, and then you hit it with an explosive charge. This thing, they kept breaking them. What we found was, I noticed something that looked completely different. In this whole thing, there was one piece that looked different. Electron microscope, again, you can zero in on one item, hit the button, and basically, it’ll melt a little piece of that, and it will tell you what you’ve just melted. It will tell you that, okay, this is carbon, or this is iron, or this is, in this case, it was phosphate. You know, phosphate’s part of the explosive. There’s a material, a copper material, it’s called phosphated copper. They can use that as a spring material in making copper parts where they want flexibility, but they also want to keep contact. I don’t know if it’s what they use in, say, a flashlight where they make contact with the back of the battery. Excuse me. But anyhow, it’s something like that. But the problem with phosphated copper is that it’s also extremely brittle. I knew that from some exposure I’d had years before. When I found that, I went to the engineer, I says, this is the problem. And the end result was they were able to tell the customer, okay, you’ve got to find another way of fusing these together that doesn’t use phosphate. I told you that parts that are machined or, the one I’m thinking of is they were basically putting a serial number on every part, and then these were being used in some sort of a structural event. For some reason, these things were breaking. What we found was that if they had a part that had a 1 laser-etched on it, or a 7 with a vertical line on it, or a 9 with a vertical line on it, an L, F, Es, anything with a vertical line on it, these things didn’t last any cyclings at all. They’d break. We noticed that, say, a Z, we could cycle a Z for almost forever. What would another letter be? Ss. They didn’t break. Franklin: X. Criswell: A zero, that’s a round zero, it didn’t break. So our suggestion was that they change their laser. If they’re going to keep using a laser, instead of having vertical lines, that a 7 would have an angular line on it. Nines, maybe a circle, like a 9. Stay away from vertical lines. It was a simple one, but, you know, it was an answer we were able to give them. We actually did testing for a little mom-and-pop company down in Irrigon, Oregon. He got the license to build a gimballed trailer hitch for fifth wheels. A standard trailer hitch didn’t allow for any torqueing. If you’re going over a curb someplace. If you’re backing into a parking place and you’ve got two different levels, you know. You tried to unhook, you’re going to have a problem. They actually came up with a gimballed trailer hitch; they had the license for it. But they wanted to know, how many cycles would this take? We were able to tell them, hey, you know, with the exception of maybe a farmer carrying 50,000 pounds of hay on a flatbed trailer, you’re probably not going to have a problem. If it’s just an RV trailer, I wouldn’t worry about it. I actually did testing for Ti Sports. They came to us. They had developed a new welding technique, and they wanted to know how good it was or wasn’t. So we compared a lot of their old welds to their new welds. And found the new weld was significantly better than their old weld. Franklin: And what product was this for? Criswell: Ti! Titanium. Titanium bikes. Franklin: Titanium bikes. Criswell: Expensive bikes. Apparently one of the problems that they’d had with the early ones was that the weld technique left something to be desired. So they developed a new one, and it was much better. Battelle was interesting, because there was always something new coming in the door. Franklin: It says here that after you retired, you took up a part time job at Battelle as a security escort? Criswell: That wasn’t with Battelle. Franklin: Oh, okay. Criswell: That was with a couple different companies. When I retired, essentially, November 1st, I took that day off. It was my first retirement day. I went back to work on November 2nd, half-time. I worked Monday through Wednesday noon. [LAUGHTER] They were setting up a new lab. Somebody remembered I’d worked in the metallography lab years earlier. The tech specialist that was setting up the metallography in that lab retired. They needed somebody else, and somebody’s memory remembered me. So I’m working part-time before I retired in there, and then I’d go back to my lab and do some testing, if it required. And they were bringing in somebody new. But the facility I was going to be working in, it was going to be a secured facility. It had special requirements, everything. By the time I was asked if I’d mind going full retirement, which was in April—It was financial situation, they had a lady who also had worked in metallography and she was still young, they wanted her to continue in that respect. But the lab was going to be secured. We were taking pictures. In my case, I was using a copper penny to check out how things were working. Totally new metallograph, it was all digital, I mean, it was much different than anything I was used to. So having to set this thing up so it would work with computers. Oh, man. The only thing significant there that we found, and I did find, what was going to be a security problem, made a suggestion, and they got excited. We had to go out and find something new that was going to meet security requirements, so I guess I did my part. [LAUGHTER] Knowing what they have to do in a secured facility—every time an engineer or a scientist writes a paper, before it can be released, it has to go for review. It has to be—it can be unclassified or it’s given a classification. If it has given a classification—number one, in ’99, when I retired, things were being transmitted by the internet—no way were they going to transmit anything via the internet, if it’s classified. At least, not when I got out of there. You know, if they had to transmit someplace else, it was hand-carried if it’s here on Hanford. If it’s got to go to somebody that’s working on the same program at another facility, you’re going to have a courier take it; it’s not going via US Mail or it’s not going via the internet. So this is the way things work. Before I retired, I did some escort work with foreign nationals. They could work in certain facilities, but they couldn’t go elsewhere. So after I retired, full retirement, April of ’99, my wife saw an ad in the paper, anybody that still has their clearance or can get a clearance may have a part-time job for you. And my wife saw to it that I signed up for that. [LAUGHTER] I was put back to work out at Dash-5, construction work out there. Construction craftspeople, temporary, they’re not going to go to the trouble of getting them all a full security clearance. Each security escort can escort up to five. If you’ve got two, though, you need to have two escorts, and then you can escort up to nine. Because if one person has to go to the head—you know. So we always had a few extras. But if somebody’s got to go to the tool room or if they got to go talk to somebody, they have to have—the escort has to escort them to that point, be with them full time, escort them back. You can’t leave nine people short, so. Just keeping, making sure they didn’t wander off making trouble someplace. We have to be aware of where the radiation areas are. We can’t go there. So did that for another eight years. Took another short time job with—kind of with Battelle again. That lasted for about five, six months. Then I’ve been retired since then. Franklin: Finally retired? Criswell: Yeah. To say the least, I kind of miss it. I guess one of the things that—they sent me to a couple of short courses on something called failure analysis. Again, why things break. It kind of fit in with what I was doing, only I was the reason things were breaking. I mean, I was getting paid good to break things. Who could argue with that? You could hire an eight-year-old to break things for you. [LAUGHTER] But that half-million-pound machine we had, an interesting one. They sent the actuator back to the factory and set it up so it would high rate. I forget what the rating would travel at, but it would break things up to 500,000 pounds in the blink of an eye. Or you could do it slow. It would go either way. You had control over how that machine worked. We were doing work for, I guess, Areva at that point in time. We were doing some testing for them. But, again, Battelle was interesting. I do miss it. I was kind of hoping I could be summer relief or something like that after I retired. But they brought in—matter of fact, the gentleman I recommended for the job ended up getting it. I hope he isn’t too mad at me. I think that was one of the—it bothered me. He was a long-time Westinghouse employee. When I retired in ’99, I think he might still have been working for Westinghouse. Or—but anyhow. He had either four or five weeks of vacation. And he was a tech specialist. I guess they hired him as a tech specialist. So he could keep his vacation. Shortly after he was hired in, Battelle determined they needed to tighten up on finances or some darn thing, and they saw fit to reduce him back to a technician, and he lost some of his vacation, I understood. That didn’t go well. He wasn’t happy about that. He’s a good man. I recommended him, because he’d worked with MTS equipment. He knew it. And I knew him to be a self-starter. You weren’t going to have to hold his hand and have somebody there with him full-time; he was going to work. One of the people that put a name in for the job, I didn’t know him, never heard of him. And the other one was a tech specialist, but he hadn’t worked with that kind of equipment, either. And I didn’t know whether he was a self-starter or not. So Mike got the job, and I guess Mike is still there. Good grief. 17 years later? Franklin: Yeah. I have a couple questions I’d like to return to some stuff you said earlier, if you don’t mind. Criswell: No. Franklin: When you mentioned you moved to Tri-Cities January 1st, 1948 at midnight—why does that stick out to you so strongly in your mind? How do you--? Criswell: Well, the family had a get-together. They were in Portland to celebrate New Year’s Eve. After that, Dad and I climbed in the car and drove to Pasco. Franklin: Why? Criswell: Because he had a new job up here. Franklin: Oh, okay. And what did your dad do in Pasco? Criswell: He went to work for a company called Empire Electric. Empire Electric had a shop, a storefront, there on Lewis Street about three, maybe four, doors west of the corner building there on, let’s see, that’d be the northwest corner of 4th and Lewis. That corner building in 1948 and up through ’61 was a drugstore. Can’t think of the name of the drugstore, but it was a drugstore. Anyhow, Dad worked there for a year—better than a year, anyhow. He got the— You know, I don’t know what Dad did for them. I really don’t. Dad was kind of a public informations officer. When the opening came up, up at Hungry Horse, Montana, he took the job up there as public informations officer. We were there for, oh my gosh, we moved up there in February. I’d never seen so much snow in my life. And cold, my gosh, it was cold. But it wasn’t as cold as it got. I actually saw 40-below when I was still in grade school. I had to put on the skis and I actually skied down to the grade school. It was downhill from our house. I mean, when it got 40-below, it was clear. I mean, it was so clear, it was beautiful. Because what humidity was still in the air was coming out as little sparkles. It’s amazing. But I hated it. My grandmother on my mom’s side was into knitting, and she knit us kids, out of wool, probably some of the first facemasks. She found a pattern for these things. They had a mouth, they had a place for your nose, and two eyeholes. At 40-below, the tears from your eyes froze to the wool. You might want to turn this off. By the time I got to school—you can edit it. I’d have a wad of snot hanging on that wool, and it’s frozen. And my mouth, breathing around here, I got a lot of moisture around here. This probably wasn’t snot, probably vapors. But, ugh, terrible. It got worse. Franklin: I was going to say, I grew up in Alaska and I remember some really— Criswell: So you know what I’m talking about. Franklin: Cold. Oh, yeah, where you— Criswell: Did you have a wool one, or did they finally come up with those nice nylon ones that slick them? Franklin: No, we had the nice nylon. But still, you’d get the—you’d go outside, and you’d feel the heat being sucked out of your nose and your mouth as soon as you open to breathe, you just feel the moisture being pulled out of your face. It’s cold, yeah. Cars won’t start, usually. Criswell: Oh, yeah, so you know exactly what I’m talking about. Franklin: Yeah, I don’t miss those days. Criswell: Hungry Horse was interesting. Summer times were great. Get the fishing pole and go fishing. Summer time was that. Excuse me a second. Franklin: No worries. And so when you returned, spring/summer of ’53, what was your family—did your mom work at all this whole time, or was she a housewife? Criswell: Housewife. 1953, the job up in Hungry Horse was done. President Truman had come through, dedicated the dam. My dad actually wrote the speech. Public informations officer, he wrote the speech, he knew the information about Hungry Horse. Anyhow, I do remember, I was either in the eighth grade or I was in high school, going to school in Columbia Falls at that point in time. We went down to where the railyard went through Columbia Falls. Train’s stopped, Truman’s on the back platform on the train, he talks to the crowd out there. I mean, all the kids in school went out there. And then he climbed in a car and up to Hungry Horse he goes. So, that’s one of the memories. When Dad came back down here, he had a job as, again, kind of a public informations officer for Franklin County PUD. Franklin: Oh, okay. Criswell: That was ’53. In 1960, Dad, Mom, and the rest of the family packed it up and went to Springfield Municipal Utilities. He actually sold himself the job of being the director for Springfield Municipal Utilities and down there, that was water, sewer and electric. Franklin: And where is— Criswell: It wasn’t part of the city. They were a municipal utility that was separate from the city. Franklin: Are you talking about Springfield— Criswell: Springfield, Oregon. Franklin: Oh, Springfield, Oregon, okay. Criswell: He held that job until he retired in 1960. I forget exactly when he retired. But he was there—no, went there in ’60. 1980 he retired. So he held it for 20 years. Franklin: Wow. Criswell: And then he ruined the family name; he took a job as a—oh. [LAUGHTER] Kind of a political job. Lobbying! The Oregon State Legislature. [LAUGHTER] We kidded him about taking that job. Franklin: Getting into politics. Criswell: Yeah. [LAUGHTER] Anyhow. Franklin: So— Criswell: About the only job Mom had is, both Mom and Dad were involved with what is now the Water Follies. In the ‘50s and ‘60s, it was the Pasco Water Follies. And the races were down at Sacajawea Park. Dad was president of the Pasco Water Follies for a period of time, and I think Mom—I forget if she was the treasurer or the secretary, I forget which. Maybe both at one point in time or another. But they were heavily involved in the Pasco Water Follies. I’m pretty sure that Dad came up here only once to watch the Water Follies after they became the Tri-City Water Follies, and he saw the new boats running. I don’t think he enjoyed them as much as he did the old thunder boats. That’s the part I always enjoyed. You go down there in the Columbia and the thunder boats are running five in a heat, it almost felt like the ground you were standing on was shaking when they were going by. That’s the part I really miss. I know the new ones go a whole lot faster, but. There’s just something about the old boats; they were special, as far as I was concerned. I knew John Owsley. He had the Pasco Boat Basin. He was probably responsible for the sleds they use at the Tri-City Water Follies. I know he was building them. He built a couple small ones, probably for the Pasco Water Follies. Ultimately, he ended up building kind of a three-point sled that he thought would go faster out there in the river to get to the crashes a little bit quicker. The whole idea was you didn’t have to haul somebody up over the transom of a boat to get them in; you basically just float them onto the back of the sleds that he was building. I thought that was pretty good. I know that when I was in the service there in ’62, came home on leave, and things were pretty tight for the wife and myself. John gave me a job. I guess somebody complained about not having any railings on the docks down there. He gave me a job to build railings on there for him. I did that on leave one time, and he was in the process, I think of building that three-point step one at that time. But things are different today, I’ll tell you. Franklin: Yeah. How did you meet your wife? Is she from the area? Criswell: Oh, that’s another one of those stories. [LAUGHTER] Strange you should ask that one. Somebody else asked me that question here, this past week. I blame it on a Pasco police officer. I was going to night school, oh, I don’t know what I was taking. A number of different night school classes I took over at CBC. I was taking another one. I was working, trying to get myself up to a decent grade point average. But I wasn’t having a whole lot of success. I had a C over there. But anyhow, part of my problem was that in 1960, early ’61, I was baching it, cooking for myself, studying. I get into the studying, I’d burn my dinner. Didn’t have the money to replace it. Decided it’d be cheaper for me if I went down to—it was the Payless Drug on the corner of 4th and Lewis. Payless Drug, they had a lunch counter down there, they cooked dinners down there. I’d get myself a supper; I’d sit there at the counter and study. Anyhow, I was doing that. One evening, police officer—and I mentioned to whomever I was talking to this week, I want to go over to Pasco and find out this police officer’s name. He had kind of a walking beat in downtown Pasco. He was an older gentleman. And he came up to me, he says, Dave, I got a couple of tickets for you. Whoa, what the heck? I’m working at Hanford; I don’t get tickets. I’ve got to be careful. I look at him real strange. Tickets? What kind of tickets? What’d I do wrong? He’s messing with me. He says, well, these are kind of special tickets. I said, what kind of ticket? He said, they’re tickets to the policeman’s ball. These two are for you. I said, I’m not going with anybody! Who am I going to get? He says, I’ve been drinking coffee here. He says, you’ve been watching that little lady over there. He says, you go ask her to go to the policeman’s ball. So I did. And I’d been cashing my checks here, and she’d been cashing my checks. She knew how much I earned. Didn’t pay any attention to what my name was. I had to always take my check downstairs and get it approved by the owner of Payless Drug at that point in time. I think his name was Tom Bishop. Yeah, it was. Tom Bishop. So Tom knew my family. Knew it wasn’t any problem with me getting my cash checked. So he’d initial the check, I’d take it back up, and this little gal would cash my check. So I asked her out. She said yes. Good grief. Next month it’s going to be 55 years. My wife and I have hardly ever been parted. Only when I went over to Fort Lewis. That didn’t last long. We moved the trailer that we were living in over there. A few trips where they sent me to school to learn something, one thing or another. That’s been our—[LAUGHTER] So I need to find out the officer’s name so I can blame him by name. Or thank him. Franklin: Yeah, Officer Matchmaker? Criswell: Yeah. He real did me a real favor, I’ll tell ya. Franklin: Aw. Criswell: But I would like to find his name. I have no idea what his history was or what happened. But after 55 years, I assume by this time, that he’s deceased, unfortunately. I wish I woke up to that question 30 years ago. Franklin: Is your wife from the area? Criswell: She’s born and raised here. Born in Lady of Lourdes Hospital. My two natural-born children were born in Lady of Lourdes Hospital. I don’t know—I know in the early part of my wife’s—they had to—I guess they had to get over to that hospital in a—I guess they had to cross the river in those years in a ferry boat. Franklin: Okay. Criswell: They had a little boat that ran back and forth across the Columbia. Franklin: Wow. Criswell: I’m not too sure what year the old green bridge got built. But I do know in the early days. Another strange piece of information was that my great-grandfather moved to the Northwest from Michigan, I guess. And he went to work in a lumberyard, lumber mill in north Idaho, a place called Harrison, Idaho. His job was training the horses and seeing to the horses’ needs that went out into the woods to pull the logs back in. And my grandmother, when she became of age, she worked in the millinery shop there in Harrison, Idaho. My wife and I have determined, at the same point in time, her grandmother’s family is living in Harrison, Idaho. I think her grandfather, her great-uncle, and an uncle were working in the woods logging up there. So, both of our ancestries have got connections to Harrison, Idaho. A couple, three years ago, my wife and I went up there with my wife’s sister, and we were looking for gravesites. And we found a couple of my wife’s family members in the Harrison graveyard, up on a hillside, up above Harrison there someplace. And still couldn’t find my great-grandfather. Turns out that Coeur d’Alene has two graveyards. And my sister looked in one, but didn’t look in the other one. My sister lives up in Sandpoint. And could not find our great-grandfather. Anyhow, on one of our trips up there, I took the time and went over to the other graveyard and found a gentleman mowing the lawn. He got off, went into the office, came back out, got a book, looked in the book, took us over and he pointed right at a gravesite where my great-grandfather was buried. Turns out that my first name is great-grandfather’s last name. And I always thought that Engelbert Humperdinck’s name was all made up. I never heard of anybody named Engelbert in my life, so I thought that was all a stage name. Turns out, my grandfather’s name was Engelbert David. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Sounds like that should kind of be reversed. Criswell: Yeah! Thank goodness I didn’t get hung up with Engelbert. But I believe my great-grandfather came to this country—he was an immigrant—he came to this country from Austria. I’m not too sure what year he came here. I don’t know how old he was. My great-grandmother and one of my great-aunts, apparently, died during a measle epidemic. I have no idea what year that was. But anyhow, Engelbert David packed up his one remaining daughter and apparently a girl that she was friends with, maybe family friends, and apparently they had problems. Maybe lost some family members also. So he brought the two girls out to Harrison, Idaho. I think, two things make me believe that maybe Engelbert David—he apparently changed his name sometime after my grandmother grew up, he remarried. Now his name on the tombstone is Egbert David. This is quite common. David is probably a frequent name of people who are of Jewish faith. And living in Austria, in probably the late ‘30s, or maybe even early ‘30s, things were not too favorable to the Jewish religion. I think that might’ve been the reason for the migration. And maybe the reason for changing the name at some point in his life. But my dad’s father, my grandfather, was blind at the time. My youngest years, almost totally blind by the time I remember him. He was a radio operator for the railroad—telegrapher for the railroad. And then he went to work in the merchant marines, was in the merchant marines when the Second World War blew up. And then he was in the Pacific. But his eyesight got so bad he couldn’t see to write anymore. And he couldn’t read the messages that had to be sent. So they had to release him. So I grew up—Grandpa Criswell was kind of funny. Let’s face it, in some ways he was a bit bigoted. I do believe that he was bigoted toward the Jewish faith. I’m sure my dad and his brothers ribbed him incessantly about some of his bigoted views. But they were all a bunch of cards, as far as I was concerned. They were some of the funniest things they ever came up with. But anyhow, he couldn’t see my dad and his brothers laughing at him, unfortunately, but maybe he would’ve changed his mind with time. But strange things. So I really don’t know that much about Great-grandfather. My grandfather lived to be 101. My grandmother lived to be four hours short of 102, deceased a few months later. Literally, if she’d lived to midnight, she would’ve lived to be 102. But aunt and uncle moved them down to Florida when they were in the 80s. I think my uncle was figuring they only had a few years to live. That didn’t happen. My grandfather, when he was packed up and ready to leave, he didn’t want to go. They were flying him down to Florida. Uncle Hank worked for the United Airlines. He’d made arrangements for them to fly. Probably made arrangements then to fly them first class. The story granddad got was that all the coach seats were full; they’d have to seat them in first class. Of course they got real good treatment, so granddad didn’t mind traveling anymore. But when he was getting ready to leave, he didn’t want to fly. Visited him just before he left. And I asked Granddad, I says, why don’t you want to fly? Because it’s a great way to travel. He tells me, straight-faced, they fly so high you can’t see the ground. I’m thinking to myself—I’m polite—I was thinking to myself, Granddad, you can’t see the ground you’re standing on. You know? I don’t understand why—you know. One of my uncles was coming by to take him down to see the Rose Festival parade. Oh, that’s cool. Well, we’re not going to the Rose Festival parade; I'm upset. Why? Well, they’re taking us to the warehouse that they decorate the floats in. What’s the matter with that? You don’t have to stand there for hours to watch. You can’t see anything. His reason for not liking the warehouse versus standing on the street is he doesn’t get to see any of the pretty girls. He hasn’t seen a pretty girl for 50 years. [LAUGHTER] Well, I don’t understand him. Anyhow, that’s my granddad. Franklin: When you—[LAUGHTER] Thank you for that. You started work at Hanford, were you still living in Pasco? Criswell: Oh, yeah. Franklin: Did you ever move to Richland, too, or did you live in Pasco the whole time-- Criswell: No. Franklin: --you worked at Hanford? Criswell: My wife and her family lived in Kennewick. But when Helen and I first got married, before we got married, I was living in a little studio apartment there in Pasco. And we found a single-wide 50-foot mobile home. We figured this’ll hold us for a while. We set it up on a lot there in Pasco. Right across the highway from the outdoor theater there. Anyhow, that was supposed to hold us for a few years. Well, we moved in and a few months later, we ended up having to pack it up and move it over to Olympia. And then we moved it back to Pasco when we got out in August. So we lived in Pasco. While we were in the service, my wife knows that she was expecting our first. Anyhow, after we moved back, we discovered that our single-wide mobile home and an infant—we were wall-to-wall toys within no time at all. We found somebody who decided that their house was too big for them to care for any, and they were willing to make a deal on it, and we took their house. So that was—then we moved to Kennewick. I guess, basically, we either lived in Kennewick or just outside of Kennewick now for a number of years. It’s been— Franklin: One of the things— Criswell: Excuse me. Franklin: Oh, no, that’s okay. There’s kind of several big events or things that happened in the Tri-Cities during the ‘50s and ‘60s. One of them is—it’s kind of commonly known that Pasco, especially east Pasco, was one of the only places that African Americans could live when they first came to Hanford during the Manhattan Project, and then was one of the only places they could buy property, up until, you know, civil rights legislation kind of forced some changes. I’m wondering if you could speak to any of that, or if you ever noticed segregation or witnessed that, or kind of your experiences living in Pasco during that time? Criswell: Well, I lived in Pasco in ’48-’49. I guess I never noticed it. I wasn’t old enough to understand those things, I guess. ’48, I would’ve been 11. ’49, probably living in Montana by then. Yeah, we moved up there in February of ’49, so. Anyhow, by the time we moved up there, didn’t seem to notice anything. Moved back to Pasco in spring of ’53, summer of ’53. Junior in high school. There was students that were black. Some of them I got to know. There weren’t very many. Yeah, it was strange. But when I was a kid going to Portland, I didn’t—this wasn’t something that I saw in Portland. I didn’t know it; I didn’t understand it. My wife, however, she went to Kennewick schools. Kennewick was one of the cities that, I guess, on the Kennewick side of the bridge, the old green bridge, there was some sort of a sign over there. I never recognized it as being there, but it told our black population that they needed to be out of Kennewick by sundown. Both my wife’s family and my family, that’s not the way we were brought up. My wife’s family were essentially farmers, lived on the outskirts of Kennewick and went to Kennewick schools. My wife’s family lived just on the west side of Kennewick. The only way to get to Pasco was across that old green bridge, so you had to go through Kennewick. My wife says that they had people to come from Pasco that would help her family on the farm. They were blacks, black people, Negro, whatever term is politically correct, socially correct. I don’t want to offend anybody. But their family, their kids grew up, their kids played on her farm. If they ended up picking until sunset to get the crop in, the family, kids all went out and they slept in the barn, or the extra bedrooms, or I guess my wife and her sister, bedroom was probably in the basement of the little house they lived in. So the families that were working on the farm worked and then they slept down there. But they all ate together. Somehow my wife grew up, didn’t know that there was a problem, didn’t understand the difference. Franklin: Do you remember the civil rights demonstrations in Kennewick? I think it was 1963 or 1964 when the NAACP— Criswell: I didn’t. At that point in time, I’m out at Hanford working. Franklin: Sure. Criswell: Went to work out there in August, no September, of 1955, I hired in out there. I was working with colored people, black people. There Fort Lewis, I met a gentleman who didn’t end up in my company, but while we were there on Friday, Saturday and Sunday before the troops came back to Hanford—they were all gone for Thanksgiving. Anyhow, he played for pro ball for, I think, the New York Giants. Big man. Told great stories. Great stories. He entertained the few of us that were stuck in that barracks for the weekend. You know, they stuck us in that barracks over there, it was empty, it had the cots, the mattresses were folded up, no blankets. There was no coal for the furnaces, no hot water. Having had experience with Fort Lewis, I became—I don’t want to say a leader, but definitely I knew what the heck to do to get around things. So I had three or four of the other gentlemen that were stuck there with me—that may have been the one from New York Giants; I don’t really recall. I had my sleeping bag, so I was all right. But anyhow we needed to get heat. So I told the guys, let’s find some boxes. And after dark, we went down the line and found some barracks that had kindling. We found barracks that had paper. We found barracks that had the coal. Anyhow, we took anything we could find. I knew all about those barracks. We got a fire lit. We knew we had to take turns watching that fire through the night and we had hot water in the morning. We had heat in the barracks through the weekend; we just had to keep watching that fire. All of us ended up having a fairly decent weekend; it could’ve been miserable because there wasn’t anybody else there to help us. They threw us into that barracks and, adios, we got the weekend off. That’s the last we saw of them. Well, we got the fire lit, and we had power in the day rooms, so we had television and we had a pool table. I guess maybe we shared some of the coal with the day room so it’d have heat. Monday morning here they come back and we all got to take physicals and we all end up getting busted up and going different places. Franklin: Did you go to the N Reactor dedication when President Kennedy came to— Criswell: N Reactor. No, I didn’t. I don’t know why. Probably because I was working. [LAUGHTER] And sometimes, they didn’t even want me taking a vacation when I needed one. They let me know they would remember that. If I insisted on a vacation, they couldn’t stop me, but they’d remember it. You know, getting a raise was—My dad was here for that. Because Dad was part of the—what’d they call that group of power companies, public utilities? He was part of that. At one point in time, he was president of BWIP. Of the contributors or whatever-the-heck they called that group. Anyhow, he was one of the—he was up here for that. He sat in the audience. He was up here for all the BWIP meetings that they would hold. No, that wasn’t BWIP. BWIP, Basalt Waste Isolation. No, he was one of the, I guess they call them stakeholders. The electrical utilities that signed on for—but anyhow, he was here for that. And for all of the meetings they had here for that. He was here when the president came up for the dedication. Seemed to me that was Kennedy, wasn’t it? Franklin: Yeah. He came for the dedication of N Reactor in September of 1963. Criswell: Okay, well, I know where I was. If that was in late ’61 or spring of ’62, I was over at Fort Lewis. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: No, it was September of ’63. It was just about two months before the assassination. Criswell: September of ’63, okay. Well then, okay, yeah, I remember that all too well. Yeah. Franklin: One of my last questions is one a little earlier, probably, when you were going to school, but when you were here in Pasco or in Hungry Horse do you remember doing lots of civil defense things? Because that would’ve been right during the height of the Cold War. So what can you tell me about civil defense? Criswell: I don’t think Hungry Horse they were worried about it. They never did anything like that up at Hungry Horse. Franklin: What about here in Tri-Cities? Criswell: I’m trying to think about Tri-Cities. Pasco High School, brand new school, graduated, second graduating class from Pasco High. I don’t remember anything special about it. I really don’t. And I don’t—after I graduated and then the Russians started playing around like they did in—that’d have been late ’61. Yeah, late ’61, that’s when they pulled all of us in. And then in ’62, and ultimately they sent us all home when they talked the Russians into pulling everything out of Cuba. But it was a strange time. Franklin: Did you ever feel any sense of urgency or fear, living so near to Hanford? You know, knowing what was being produced, how it was contributing to the nuclear weapons stockpile? Criswell: Well, when I was over there at Fort Lewis in—it would’ve been ’62, probably the early spring of ’62—I am a lowly Spec/4. That’s the equivalent of a corporal. I got called into the office and I was told I was going to give a class on irradiation and avoiding irradiation, minimizing exposure to radiation. And they had me a book and I had no clue as to why they were giving that to me. I didn’t have a clue. They didn’t tell us nothing over there! I mean, hey, we were a bunch of mushrooms. Anyhow, I had to give the company I was part of a breakdown on, you know, how to avoid radiation. Basically what the difference was between contamination and radiation. There’s a lot of people don’t understand that today. You double the distance, you reduce your exposure by four. That’s one of the big things. Get the heck away from it as fast as you can. You don’t know where it’s at, but distance from the source is big. I had no reason why I’m giving this class. The only reason I understand now why I’m giving a class is I worked at Hanford. [LAUGHTER] That’s it. I didn’t know what I was talking about. [LAUGHTER] So that’s why I had to give this thing. So I did my best. And that’s the last I ever heard of it. We never had another seminar on it. There was never anything else about it. Franklin: Interesting. Criswell: It was a strange, strange period of time. But I don’t think anybody really understood what the period was. Nobody in the military told us, really, why we were there. Nobody told us a thing. We were a bunch of mushrooms. It just didn’t make sense. Didn’t make any sense. But, you know, number of years later, I was told why things happened the way they did. And Kennedy, if Kennedy was born today, you wouldn’t want to play poker with the man. He pulled the ultimate bluff on the Russians. Every B-52, and we had a thousand, or more than 1,000—I think they’re B-52s, the lightweight ones? Or are those B-47s? Franklin: I think those are B-47s. Criswell: Okay, B-47s. Lightweight. They got two engines hanging on a pod on either side, on the wings. And they’re all small, lightweight bombers. Had thousands of those things. And to my knowledge, they’re still all lined up in the desert, down there in Arizona, unless they made beer cans out of them. But sometime, probably the early part of ’62, Kennedy pulled the ultimate bluff. He wanted the second division pulled out of East Berlin. He wanted the missiles out of Cuba. And he told the Russians—no, he unleashed all those B-47s at the same time. And the big ones. All of our big ones. The Russians could see them. There wasn’t any questions. The Russians could see that they weren’t going to be able to stop them all. They knew that they were going to get through. We were going to lose a lot of planes; we were going to lose a lot of crews. But we were going to have one big mess. I forget who the heck the Russian was at the time. He got on the phone with the Kennedys, he says, turn those planes around. Turn them all around. He says, we’ll pull out. We’ll get the stuff out of Cuba. The extra division will go out of East Berlin. And that’s the way it went. But we, at Fort Lewis, we didn’t hear a dumb thing about it. It wasn’t until years later that a friend of mine told me what the heck had happened. Kennedy pulled the ultimate bluff. You don’t want to play cards with a guy like that! But if I’d known, I think I’d have—I don’t know what the heck you’d do. Franklin: Is there anything that I haven’t asked you about that you’d like to talk about before we conclude the interview? Criswell: The only thing I can say is my career at Hanford was interesting. I did a lot of different things. I’d still like to be working out there. I’d still have a ball working out there if I could. Unfortunately, I had a senior engineer PhD do a number on me. Franklin: What do you mean by that? Criswell: He lied. Franklin: Okay. Criswell: Okay. He wanted to come into my lab, he wanted to set up a series of tests. At the point in time, I was telling management that we’ve got to get new controls for the equipment we’re operating. These things are getting old, they’re unreliable. I knew this machine would fail. I couldn’t predict when, I couldn’t figure out why. I referred to it as a ghost. I mean, one time it does something wrong, and the next time you go to look for it, it isn’t there, it’s working perfectly okay. But you can’t trust it no more. This PhD insisted that I use this particular machine. There’s another one sitting alongside of it that would’ve done the job. He wants to use this machine. I tell him, no. This machine is flaky; it can’t be relied on. He tells me before I leave his office, before we run any tests, your fault, the machine’s fault, I’m going to get you. So, either the first or second test, I’m sitting there. We run a block of cycles, we take a reading. Start it up again, run a block of cycles, take a reading. It’s at high temperature, what-have-you. So I’m tilted back against the cupboard, waiting for the cycles to end. All of the sudden, bang! Doggone thing fails. Oh, by the way, I told the engineer that I directly tied to that, hey, this isn’t a good machine, you don’t want to use it. But he insists on using it. Anyhow, he goes running to my manager. It’s all my fault. He lived up to his word. And my manager accepted it. Franklin: Wow. Criswell: So I didn’t get a raise. And that would’ve been January 1st of ’99. I didn’t get a raise. So I wrote a letter, put it in my file that, no, this wasn’t my fault. And I had told him it wasn’t my fault. But I tried to keep the thing going, work to make sure that things ran properly, but I needed some support from management. I didn’t really get the support I wanted until after I left. Franklin: Right. Criswell: When they brought in the gentleman that replaced me, then they replaced all the electronics. But if I can figure out what—each one of these electronic things has got a whole bunch of drawers in it, and it’s got a whole bunch of pieces in each one of the drawers. If you can figure out what controls what, and it stays broken, then you can fix it. But when it goes back and forth, no. That’s when I call it a ghost. It didn’t work. So, anyhow, they kind of promised me that if things worked out, I’d get a raise in July, mid-term, mid-year. Anyhow, that didn’t happen. So I decided, well, I’ll be 62 in a couple more months and then I can retire. And I did. But I came back half-time. I’d probably still have been out there. I don’t know how long I would’ve worked. Hey, I enjoyed the work. It was interesting, and I was good at it. But unfortunately I couldn’t get the backing to replace the equipment when I needed it. And I ended up taking the hit. Unfortunately, this particular engineer, scientist, ended up causing problems for others. I guess, maybe, I’m kind of happy or proud about one thing. The gentleman I recommended to take my job ended up with it, and he’s still there. Franklin: That’s good. Criswell: I picked a younger man who, I’m assuming he’s still there. That’s been a lot of years. Franklin: Maybe you should call him up. Criswell: I probably ought to. I know that—I talked to him a few times since they moved out of the building we were in and moved downtown. That was one of the things they did, was they had to leave the basement that I was in. And they asked me about moving this big piece of equipment, this half-million-pound machine, how are we going to get that out of there? I told them how it was done. Anyhow, I don’t know what went wrong. But they had that—I suspect I know one thing. They had to back the semi down a ramp to the basement of the building. And if they got cockeyed or if the wheels are sitting in the hole, the deck on the flatbed is going to be canted. So they have to lay this huge frame down on its side. They have to get it over to where there’s an elevator that goes up to the half level that it’s got to go out of. But when I was there, they did this. They had to support this huge frame using railroad ties. And I’m there to watch, make sure that they don’t do anything wrong. All of the sudden, I hear this really screwy noise. And I go out in the hall. They’re out in the hall with a chainsaw cutting creosoted railroad ties to length to prop the elevator bed at a half-level between the floor level and the exit level. Because it won’t support the weight of this machine. So they got to support it there, and then they got to put a ramp going out. So anyhow, there’s this blue fog going down the hallway. I mean, this is—railroad ties with creosote on them, they’re cutting them with a chainsaw out in the hall of the building. [LAUGHTER] Stinky poo mess. But they got it out. This is when I was there. And they take it over to 324 Building. And they lift it up, they sit it on the ground upright, they take the lid off of 324 Building, the roof off of it. They take the shields off of 324 Building, they set them on the ground. And then when they got access to the hot cell in 324 Building, they go over there and they pick this machine up and they lift it up, over, and they set it down inside of the hot cell in 324 Building. They’re going to do some low level work. They wrap it with plastic and everything else. And then, later on after they finish doing whatever testing they were going to do, they pick it up again to go through the reverse, they bring it over and they set it down. Some other point in time, they take that thing—they’re making another lift on it, and anyhow, it crashes down. The actuator on that thing is about three feet in diameter. It generates 500,000 pounds of force using 3,000 psi of oil pressure. And it crashes. No, that’s upright, yep. Anyhow, yeah, they got it sitting off the ground over at 324 Building, outside of the cells, getting ready to make a lift. And all of a sudden, the cable comes loose from the drum on the winch on the crane. And this huge doggone frame drops a foot or two, down onto the ground. Anyhow, one of our engineers is looking around behind, he’s headed back to 300 Area proper. He looks behind him, and he can see the cable of the load cell going up, coming back down, going up, coming back down. And then pretty soon it just falls to the ground. It’s come off the drum on the frame. So anyhow it’s sitting there on the ground. And now the riggers have got to go through about four months of writing reports on why they dropped this thing. So anyhow, they lift it up, they finally lay it back down, and they get it over to our lab and they lift things back up, and they put it back in our lab. We make sure it’s nice and clean, it’s okay for use. When they get ready to take it out of that lab—this is after I’ve left—and they’re putting it onto a flatbed truck, instead of using a crane to move this thing with, they’ve got—they haven’t hired the riggers. They went out and hired a tow truck company. [LAUGHTER] They’ve got a flatbed truck sitting there by the rollup door, and it’s going down here, and apparently it’s tilted to the side. And they’ve got nothing on there to keep this thing on there. Anyhow, instead of lifting it, they’re dragging it up an I-beam incline on rollers. They’re using a tow truck in front of the semi that’s going to haul this thing over to the new building where it’s going to be installed at. So they get it up through the rolling doors and onto the flatbed truck, that apparently is at an angle. One of the gentlemen that’s watching this, he says, all of the sudden they get it out there, off the I-beam that it’s been pulled out on, and this thing starts to roll sideways off the flatbed truck. And it falls off and crashes. Well, this huge actuator is really quite a delicate piece of equipment. Number one, the rings inside of this piston—I don’t know how many are in there; I’ve never seen the inside of one of these things. But the cylinder itself is coated with silver. It’s got a silver plating in there. And the silver in this case is there for additional lubricant, besides having the—it’s a paraffin-based hydraulic oil is what they’re using, so very specialized. But when it lands on its side, you’ve got all the weight of that piston going to one side. And you’ve got seal rings in there, you’ve got wiper rings in there, to keep the oil inside of the things, so that it doesn’t leak oil very much. And then there’s a provision for oil that does get by the seal rings to go out and go back to the pump. That’s about that big around. Well, when this thing smashed down, it dented those seal rings. It dented everything in that doggone thing. Well, they sent it back to the factory, but—no, they didn’t! No, they did send it back to the factory. I’m getting mixed up, because I wasn’t there. I’m trying to remember everything. But they did send it back to the factory, but it was to make sure the columns in the load frame were vertical. I don’t know if they rebuilt the actuator or not. I really don’t’ know, but I don’t think so, because it came back, it’s leaking oil badly. Because the seal rings in there and everything are flattened on one side. I mean, you’ve got tons of force, wham. And if it came off the bed of the truck, that bed’s got to be four, five feet in height. So to my knowledge, it’s still leaking today. But that was a pretty special piece of equipment, and I wish to heck—like I said, I wouldn’t mind going back to work. [LAUGHTER] I enjoyed it. They’ve got new electronics now. To my knowledge, everything’s working fine. Franklin: New stuff to play with. Criswell: This is kind of specialized equipment. The old stuff, the old bald ones, the old Instrons, they’re not—you just program to do one thing. One thing. It’s either to travel a certain distance at a certain rate or you could tell it to increase the load at a certain rate. Either way. If you’re increasing the load, when the specimen starts to break, it starts to travel faster to keep up. So for most testing, when you’re testing something like this, you want to have this thing traveling at a certain ram rate. This way the load goes, and when it starts to yield, it bends over, and then it starts to drop off and it’ll fail. So this is the way it’s supposed to work. MTS will do it any way you want it to do. It’ll control the speed of the actuator; it’ll control how fast you load something. But when it starts to break, and if you’re under load control, it’s supposed to keep loading so many pounds per unit of time. When it starts to fail, then it isn’t keeping up, so it speeds up. This thing can go really fast. And then it can control load, displacement. It can also control—you can use something called an LVDT where it opens, it’s on the deflection of the specimen you’re trying to break. So there’s different ways of breaking things. But anyhow it’s all closed loop. You tell it you want it to go so many pounds per unit of time, it’ll do it. You tell it you want to go one inch in an hour, it’ll do it. But only one of those things can it do at the same time. And if it’s leaking oil, it isn’t going to keep up. So anyhow they’ve got a mess. They can’t keep up with it now I guess. My recommendation was they send it back. I don’t know. That’s an expensive process, plus they’ve got to get that actuator out of there. Franklin: Well, Dave, thank you so much for sitting down and talking with us today. I really appreciate it. Criswell: Yeah, it’s a good thing you caught me before my mind’s completely gone. Franklin: Yeah. No, you had so much to say. I mean, it was a great interview. Criswell: Yeah. Franklin: I appreciate you sharing your knowledge. Criswell: The equipment was great. It really was great. You program it right, it’ll do what you want. But like I said, when you’ve got a ghost in your electronics, it works most of the time, but one split second it goes haywire, whatever you’re doing is gone. And some of these things, you’ve got to be real careful of. Franklin: Yeah. Well, thank you very much. Criswell: You betcha. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 02:17:59 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 300 Area PRTR 222-S K Reactor Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with David Criswell Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Atomic Products Operation Description An account of the resource David Criswell worked at various facilities in the 300 area including separations labs and the PRTR. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. 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Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Douglas O'Reagan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Del Ballard Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Del Ballard: I’m not accustomed to this, so you get what you get. Douglas O’Reagan: All the better, all the better. Sometimes we get some rehearsed answers, that is fine. But all the better if somebody gives me something that they haven’t exactly honed their exact phrasing on. Ballard: We just put together one for the BRMA history—history of BRMA. That was all written out, so it was—but I’m amazed at how much insistence they have at no corrections, no—[LAUGHTER] Pretty trying. O’Reagan: Okay, great. So let’s start off here. First of all, would you please pronounce and spell your name for us? Ballard: Well, my first name is Delbert L. Ballard. Leo for center. D-E-L-B-E-R-T, B-A-L-L-A-R-D. And I go by Del, commonly. O’Reagan: All right, thank you. My name is Douglas O’Reagan. I’m conducting an oral history interview here on February 18th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Mr. Ballard about his experiences working on the Hanford site, living in this community. First of all, can you start us off just—walk us through your life in sort of a brief term before you came to this area. Ballard: Well, I was raised on a dryland wheat farm in Montana, so I know what work is all about. And I was a student in a little high school that was only seven of us in our graduating class. So I was sort of a country boy, and went to college at Montana State University. And I graduated from there in 1951. Just prior to that, the General Electric Company, of course, had been there to do interviews. They were scoping for—recruiting for engineers and I was a civil engineer graduate. There was other recruiters through, too. I had an offer from a San Francisco shipyard, and another from the Soil Conservation Service in Montana. But I wanted to get a job with GE. So I’d had the interview, but no really positive award or recognition that they were going to give me an offer. They were interviewing a large number of people. So graduation day came around and I still hadn’t gotten a letter from GE. But the mail came that morning, and lo and behold, there it was. So I was really pleased at that. So my initial job right out of college was coming to Hanford and working for General Electric Company as a rotational training—in the rotational training program. They had hired that year, the previous year, actually ’49, ’50 and ’51, they had hired about 300 or 350 tech grads. And I was one of the later ones getting here; I didn’t get here until July. So most of the good jobs were assigned. But in the rotational training program, my first assignment was a rather mundane assignment to the transportation department. Next one was a more interesting job with the inspection department. That was over in the shipyard in Bremerton. At that time, Hanford was undergoing I believed what they called the Korean expansion. The Korean War was underway and in full force at that time when I got out of school. As a matter of fact, I thought I was going to be drafted, but I tried to enlist and—I’m diverting here a little bit, but—tried to enlist in the Air Force to be a pilot, but my eyes weren’t good enough, so I got rejected for that. [LAUGHTER] So when I knew that the GE job was a deferred job, I thought, well, that’s an alternate I’d just as soon pursue. So anyway when I got here on the rotational training program, that’s what it was. Individuals were assigned to different locations for training purposes and for filling job needs. The second assignment was, as I said, inspection department in the shipyard in Bremerton. At that time, they were fabricating—the shipyard was fabricating the biological shield blocks for the C Reactor. It was one of the expansion efforts at Hanford, increasing the production capacity. So that was an interesting job over there at the shipyard doing inspection and learning a lot about inspection techniques and components and so forth. Another month after that, I was rotating around the Seattle area inspecting other components that were being manufactured for the C Reactor. C Reactor, as you know, was the one that was built right alongside of the B Reactor out at Hanford. It started up in ’53, I believe. But out of the rotational training program, I was assigned into construction area out in the 300 Area. They were fabricating laboratories for building the laboratories out there. Radiochemistry, radiometallurgy, pile tech, machine shop, and a library at that area of the Hanford—300 Area was just under construction. So I got assigned to help in the field engineering in that job. It was an interesting project. I learned a lot there in that job. And from there I went into other project engineering work, including in later years, the K Reactors were under construction and I was involved in laying up the graphite of that reactor, K East Reactors. I stayed in project engineering with GE all my life—or all my employment time was with GE. They left here in ’64. Yeah, Battelle came in ’65. Two of the projects that I followed after K Reactors, one of them was the critical mass lab in the 300 Area, which was a facility for evaluating critical shapes and sizes for plutonium missiles. It was a research job, research facility. That project was a lump sum construction and plant forces for the completion of putting the process equipment in. The next job I had was the High Temperature Lattice Test reactor in the 300 Area. That’s a reactor that probably hasn’t gotten much publicity. It was a small graphite reactor. But that was a job I was very proud of, because I was the sole project engineering function at the time. The design was done by an organization that was just brought on as GE was being phased out. It was the Vitro Engineering Company. They had a detailed design of the job, and the construction was done lump sum, and then J. Jones did the reactor installation. I can tell quite a bit of detail about that reactor, if you’re interesting. [LAUGHTER] But it was an experimental facility also for evaluating different lattice spacings for graphite moderator reactors. It was electrically heated—it operated up at 1,000 degrees centigrade, so that graphite, looking through the peepholes in the reactor, you could see white hot graphite, which is sort of an interesting thing to see. But that project was not large in comparison to today’s funding levels. But it was a three- to four-million-dollar project. I finished the job and closed it out with less than $200 left on the books and no overrun. [LAUGHTER] So I got a commendation for that job, which I was quite proud of. But from there, then I diverted into other project engineering jobs. One was in Idaho Falls. We had a test facility over there, putting in test loops in the engineering test reactor. That was closer to reactor operations type work. We had to modify an operating reactor. But that was some of my interesting project years before I got into jobs later on, which was the FFTF and the FMEF. Fuels and Materials Exam Facility. I always make the statement that every project, or every job that I worked on up until the FFTF was completed and put into operation. Every project after FFTF was shut down and closed down before it was completed. [LAUGHTER] So that was kind of a breaking point for me. Hanford, of course, reached its peak in production, and I can talk something about that as far as reactor operations is concerned. But I wasn’t really in operations, I was in engineering, and had jobs all over the Project. So I never was tied down to one location. It was interesting. So I had an interesting career in a lot of different projects. I enjoyed my work, and had a good time and a good married life and I can go into that, too, if you wish. O’Reagan: So you say you were with GE this whole time? You didn’t switch over to different contractors as they came in? Ballard: Well, yes—no. I just with GE until they left. O’Reagan: I see. Ballard: And then Battelle came in ’65. So I was with Battelle for ’65 until ’70 when Westinghouse took over the Breeder Program. Initially, Westinghouse was just brought in for the Fast Flux Test Reactor, to manage that. And I happened to be working on a development job. That’s one I haven’t mentioned yet. [LAUGHTER] When Westinghouse came in, I was assigned—that was my first manager job. I had a group, or a section in the 321 Building in the 300 Area, and a job which was identified as the hydraulic core mockup. And we designed, built and operated models to evaluate the design configuration for the FFTF. So we built water models to look at a lot of different features: the reactor vessel arrangement, and the core arrangement and the structure. And the inlet planning and outlet planning. We built several models. The two biggest ones were the inlet model, which evaluated the sodium distribution in the inlet planning and feeding characteristics for the fuels channels. I worked on that job for seven years. And then during that time, of course, FFTF came under construction. Our group actually influenced the design which was being done by Westinghouse back east. There was a lot of the features in the arrangements and shapes of the vessel and the flow distribution and the core that was determined by that hydraulic core mockup test facility. Then when they started putting the reactor together, I was assigned to construction out in 400 Area. I spent the whole year inside the reactor vessel, helping the engineer put the parts together. One of our humorous comments about FFTF was, from our perspective was FFTF, do you know what that stands for? Yeah, it sounds for feel, file, to fit. [LAUGHTER] Fill all the tight tolerances and all the arrangements necessary to make everything fit and throw it together. It was well-engineered and well-designed, but it was still—engineering problems had to be resolved in the field. So that was another interesting project. Following that, then I spent seven years on the FMEF, the Fuels and Materials Exam Facility, designing and coordinating the design—the management of the design, which was done by an off-plant architect engineer. And there, again, that was a project that was not completed. It was shut down when the Breeder Program was curtailed. So, following that, I could go into more details where we did for various and sundry work, but it was all toward the new mission for the Hanford site, which was cleanup, starting in that field in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. I retired, officially, in ’89. But I worked consulting for four years after that. So my career actually spanned from 1951 to 1994. O’Reagan: How disappointing was it when FFTF got canceled? Ballard: Pardon me? O’Reagan: Was it disappointing when FFTF got canceled? Ballard: It was very discouraging, yes, that they were going to close it down. When they drilled a hole in the core support structure, like drilling a hole in my heart. [LAUGHTER] Matter of fact, I’ve got some pictures to show that I was the last person in the FFTF vessel before they closed it up and started it filling it with sodium. Matter of fact, after that closure—after the photograph that I have, I’ll be happy to show you—they had an accident with the fuel charging machine which went up to the top of the travel and the upper limits which failed and it dropped down on the core and broke some of the components that I was so—[LAUGHTER]—proud of getting installed properly. Core support structure. And we had to go in there and do some repairs. But then I, after that, I left the FFTF and went to work on the design of the FMEF. [SIGH] O’Reagan: Did life sort of change day-to-day when you switched these contractors? How different was it working for these different companies? Ballard: The only change that I could see was the difference of the color of the paycheck. [LAUGHTER] As a matter of fact, when we transferred from—let’s see if I can remember which contract that was—was it GE to Battelle or Battelle to Westinghouse? I don’t remember, but the end of that day, we were terminated and I happened to be at a party down in one of the local pubs which I didn’t very often frequent. But somebody said, who do you work for? And I said, at the moment I’m unemployed. Because that was the day we left one contractor and started with the next one. But the transitions were quite smooth, I would say. I mean, of course, policies changed and your managers changed. At one time, in a two-year period when Westinghouse came in, I think I had 13 different first level and second level managers above me change without in those two-year period. So there was a lot of personnel changes. But a lot of us working closer to the ground floor, there was very little change. O’Reagan: So, let’s back up a moment. What were your first impressions of Hanford and the area? Ballard: Well, I came here in the summer—it was in July. I got here on July 3rd of 1951. I was assigned to the barracks out in North Richland—women’s barracks as a matter of fact. That’s when all the dormitory rooms were filled up in Richland for the men’s dorms. So I was assigned out there for my quarters. The next day, I learned that you didn’t have to drive the buses around, you could ride the city buses or the plant buses. Plant buses, to ride to the area was five cents, and city buses, I don’t remember whether they were five cents or free. I rode that bus the next day that I went to work, and it was 105 degrees that day. And I thought, my lord, what have I gotten myself into? [LAUGHTER] This is horrible temperature! But I was young and willing to accept anything that came my way, so I guess I didn’t think it was too serious a problem. O’Reagan: How aware were you of the mission of Hanford before you came here? Ballard: Very little, probably. I knew that it was working on the war effort, but at that time, nobody really—well, yeah, I guess it was known they were producing plutonium or weapons for atomic weapons, but as far as the details concerned, I knew very little. As any engineer—young man right out of college might be. Because I didn’t know what the plant—the structure was. But they gave—they told us and we got the information from the co-workers and the other students. It was quite interesting, because all the youngsters that were working, everybody—not the majority of people, but a large percentage of them—were fresh graduates. The older bunch were the 30- and 35-year-olds working on the site. That’s when I met my wife shortly after that in ’53. But we were married in ’53. But I met her in ’52 at a social that was put on by YWCA, Young Women’s—YWCA organization. They had church-sponsored dinners one night a week and that’s where we met. So we’ve been married for 62 years now. O’Reagan: Were there a lot of those sort of social events? Ballard: A lot of those that happened. As a matter of fact, the organization—I was the third set that the president and the secretary of that organization got married. [LAUGHTER] She was the secretary when I was the president of the organization. [LAUGHTER] Which was sort of comical, I guess. O’Reagan: What sort of things did you and your wife do in your spare time in the ‘50s and ‘60s? Ballard: Well, I guess bridge playing was one, and social events. We went—there was—they had a group that she was involved in called the Fireside Group that had functions and went camping and things like that. But we played a lot of bridge then. O’Reagan: Where did you live? Ballard: Well, I was living in the dormitories, of course, when we were married. I lived in North Richland in the women’s barracks for a short time until the rooms became available in the dormitories in Richland. That’s where I was living when we got married. Of course, housing was another whole story. You had to put your name on a list to get a house. They were all assigned by the government. All the housing was, of course, controlled and owned by the government. So you had to get your name on the waiting list to get a house. We were fortunate; we got a duplex, a C house up on Wright Avenue. I got that assigned in less than a month before we were married. So when we were married, we had a two-bedroom duplex house up there available. That’s where we moved in and lived there until 1957 when the government decided to disperse the property. They started selling vacant lots in 1957. We were a junior tenant in the duplex, so we couldn’t make an offer on the duplex. The senior tenants had the right to buy the duplex. So I was quite aggressive in my ownership philosophy, decided to buy a lot. We purchased the lot on Newcomer, the first property that was sold. And we built a house. I started building in March of 1958. As a matter of fact, we built—our house was the third privately built house in Richland. We had a house and were living in it before Richland was incorporated. They incorporated the city in July of ’58. That was of course the second official designation as a corporation because Richland, of course was a corporation—I mean an incorporated city before the government took it over in ’43. We built that house and I have pictures that I brought of the fact it was one of the first ones in Richland. And we’re still living in the same house. I don’t know what that says, but [LAUGHTER] I guess stability for one thing. O’Reagan: Were you involved in local politics at all? Ballard: In what? O’Reagan: In local politics at all? Ballard; No, not really. They asked me a few times if I wouldn’t run for the city council, but I never did. No, I’m not a politician. I didn’t want to get involved in that. O’Reagan: So you described a number of different jobs you were doing over the first two decades or so that you were here? Could you walk us through, at least for one of those, what was sort of an average work day like? Ballard: Well, let me see. There was one—I guess all of them were similar in a lot of respects. I was doing—on those jobs, I was doing project engineering. And that meant the coordination of, and the I guess you’d call it management, although there was, of course, the organization like GE, there’s so many levels of management that comes through that it’s a little hard to say you managed it, because you have so much supervision and overhead actions that are taken on a project, for example. But on most projects, the engineer—the project engineer would write the project proposal based on what the technical department would have as input for a required facility, for example. Like the high temperature lattice test reactor, the physics department had specified the programs that they were involved in would want to look in more detail at the lattice spacing in graphite reactors, for example. So they would write a document which would specify what their objective was and what their basic criteria was for that facility. And project people would issue—maybe take that and issue an order for another group to do the detailed process—conceptual design, or do it themselves. We’d do it sometimes on small projects. We had projects all the way from modify one laboratory all the way up to a whole facility. So it’s hard to describe the same process for all of them. But it was office work, engineering work. Some of the times I was in a design group where we actually doing detailed design work. But most of my work was in the project engineering field where we were seeing the work done by others. Or specifying details or managing the people that were doing the detailed design work. But it was office work, and of course when construction started, that’s when the project engineers were more in control, because they were directing the contractors as far as the field work was concerned. It was always an interesting job, an interesting challenge, I thought, preparing contract bid packages. Office work, lots of times the projects were out in the field, of course, out in the Area. We’d drive government cars to go to work. That was an advantage. Of course being in engineering rather than operations where you had more control of your time from the standpoint of individual management. Because we’d use government cars for transportation. We didn’t have computers in the early stages, obviously. When they came out with DSIs, Don’t Say It In Writing, that was a big move, too. [LAUGHTER] But certainly a lot of progress and a lot of technology changes over the years. O’Reagan: How much were security or classification a part of your work? Ballard: Well, it was certainly in overview all the time. All the documents, if a job had classified work on it, you had to get the documents classified, and follow the restrictions for those particular elements or documents, whatever’s involved. Most of the time, of course, construction was not too rigidly controlled or administered, I guess. In later years, because the, for example, research work was not really high classified. Most—a lot of it wasn’t. But it was something that was always there. Of course the badging was always—I remember one time incident I had which was funny—rather humorous. I was in a meeting out in one of the hundred areas, in a back room in some building and we were having a discussion. All of the sudden a door burst open and two patrolmen came in and said, where’s Del Ballard?! I’m over here. [LAUGHTER] Hey, come with me! They took me by the arms and whisked me outside and outside the badge house. I said, what’s going on? What’s the problem? They said, you don’t have a badge! I said, what do you mean I don’t got a badge. I looked at it and it was somebody else’s badge—name on it. They had given me the wrong badge! [LAUGHTER] So they were, I guess, vigilant in their control. But some of the times you thought it was a little overreach. It was always there, that’s for sure. O’Reagan: You mentioned a couple jobs not necessarily at Hanford—I think you said Idaho Falls at one point, or other locations around? Ballard: Yes, we had a project—I guess I sort of skipped over that—in the Engineering Test Reactor in Idaho Falls. The fuels people here—research people—wanted to do some testing in the Engineering Test Reactor with certain issues or problems that they were trying to develop from the fuel technology. So we put in two high pressure loops over there. Again, I was the project person on it. I didn’t do the design work, I did the procurement and the construction management. Philips Petroleum was the operating contractor over there at the Engineering Test Reactor. So I went over there and saw that those loops were completed and put in place and in operation. It was in 1958. I spent, well, most of that year over there, back and forth. My wife was really unhappy, because that was the year that we had started our house. So I had—coming home on weekends and trying to keep that sorted out. Because we had a foreman working with the carpenters building the house. So it was kind of stressful for her. Yeah, and then I had to go back for the next year after that for some cleanup work on the project. It was another project that was managed by Hanford, but installing a reactor over there. O’Reagan: I’m curious how sort of insular Hanford was, versus how much it was common for people to get advice from outside of the Area, or to travel to different facilities and learn what they were doing, or share what you were doing with others? Ballard: Well, I think that’s probably more prevalent in the technical field than it is in the construction area. Yeah, there certainly was in a nuclear complex, there was—and we did have travels. I did visit some other sites. Occasionally the laboratories on some of the projects we had. But most of that was done by the technical department, not the engineering department. O’Reagan: How much has the community changed, and in any particular ways during the time you’ve lived here? Ballard: Well, it’s gone from a small community to a much higher-traffic area than it used to be. But the people say it’s still pretty mild. Of course I’ve traveled to Los Angeles quite a bit; I had relatives in Los Angeles. And I’d grow accustomed to that mainly down there too. But it’s still—the Tri-Cities is still a nice place to live, I think. It doesn’t have a lot of the big city hubbub that other places do, but it certainly has changed a lot from what it was when I came. My wife came in 1944. Of course that was when it was sand and dust piles and no trees and no grass. It was a lot like that when I came, too, although it was developing. But the first few years that the Manhattan Project workers were here, they had some pretty rough goes. Of course the government would operate a city was an entirely different situation than we have now with private ownership and private management of the company—or local management of the company there. When the government operated the city, it was—you’ve heard these stories before, I know. Even lightbulbs were changed by the employees of the government. [LAUGHTER] So that was a big change. But when we got married we were renting from the government but as soon as they sold the houses we built our own and were on our own. So we’ve lived pretty much as a private city in all of our married life. So that hasn’t been a major change. O’Reagan: Anything else—nothing else in particular I’m fishing for here—did anything else come to mind, as far as changes in, I don’t know, spirit of work at Hanford or changes in the communities? Ballard: Well, the government management of the Hanford site has certainly undergone lots of changes, much as our society has, I think, over the last 50 years. When GE operated the plant, I felt and a lot of us felt that the program was defined in general in scope and the contractor was given a block of money and there they went. They did the job. They didn’t have the oversight or the detail management or the daily exchange as much with the government, I think, as they do now. I think that’s been a change in philosophy or change in detail of management more. A lot of it is because the public’s been more closely involved. Like the different committees that are involved in the oversight with the DoE that they didn’t have at that time. Of course when the Manhattan Project started, it was even further away than that. Nobody outside the Project knew what was being done. They were building the atomic bomb and nobody knew was done except the organization involved in it. Now, anything the government does it’s public knowledge and has 100 different reviews over a period of a decade before they get anything done. [LAUGHTER] O’Reagan: Of course all these decades we’re talking about here are during the Cold War, and nuclear weapons are wrapped up in a lot of that and nuclear power. Was that ever something that was on your mind, or that were you aware of? Or was that just something that was going on far away? Ballard: No, I think the Cold War and the conflict with Russia was well-known because of all the cautions and concerns about the atomic weapons and people—during the crisis that peaked in the early ‘60s and we were in hard conflict with Russia. A lot of concern about what might happen. It was a different era and there was a lot of awareness of the potential that there could be a nuclear conflict. O’Reagan: Did it ever impact your life, or your wife’s life more or less directly? Ballard: Well, I don’t think we—we thought we were protected, we thought we had the national security to take care of it. And I guess we didn’t really worry about it—it was something you didn’t really dwell on, I don’t think. Although they told the students and the kids—some people did build bomb shelters. My neighbor, Dr. Petty, they had one at their house under the lawn in the front yard. When they built the house, they put in a bomb shelter. O’Reagan: [INAUDIBLE] Ballard: Nobody knew about it but them, but I knew about it. [LAUGHTER] O’Reagan: Did you ever see the inside of the shelter? Ballard: I never was in it, no. But I know it’s there. O’Reagan: Let’s see. So I guess we’ve sort of covered this. Could you describe the ways in which security and or secrecy at Hanford impacted your work? Ballard: Well, I guess from the work that I did in the engineering specifications and drawings and documents that related to projects, we had to worry about the classification on them. You had to worry about the access—access to different projects at different facilities. Of course you had to have the right clearance. So it was a restraint on work in some respects. But it wasn’t a major impact, I don’t think. O’Reagan: In more recent years—well I guess I don’t know how long—you’ve been working with the B Reactor Museum Association and other groups interested in the history of the local community. Can you tell me how you got involved with that and sort of the history of that? Ballard: Sure can. I retired in ’89. And then as I said, I went back to work on a part-time basis. But during that period, the Environmental Impact Statements had been written, and the mission at Hanford was changing from production to cleanup. All the documents and all the philosophy that was being disseminated was, we were going to tear everything down and dispose of everything in the Project. I was the representative to the Tri-City Technical Council. It was a group of only local affiliate—all local agent—sections or groups from the technical society’s engineering—civil, mechanical, electrical, nuclear, women’s organizations—all the technical organizations had what they called a Tri-City Technical Council. And we met monthly and addressed the issues for technology dissemination or issues that might affect the community from what we might recommend or so forth. From that group, we learned—we knew what the DoE was getting into, transition-wise into the cleanup of the site. They were going to tear everything down. And we said, well, we don’t want that to happen to some of these historic facilities. The B Reactor, for example, was the world’s first production reactor. And it was very consequential from the history, both of our nation and the world, as far as that. And also the kick-off for nuclear power. So we said, we ought to do something about that. So we formed a committee. I was one of the people of that committee. And we met in July of 1990, was our first meeting. We talked about an organization and how we might form a group that would lead toward the preservation of B Reactor. We decided to form an association. So we had an attorney draw up our bylaws and we formed an organization called the B Reactor Museum Association. We got our state corporate action—I forget what word they use to describe the initiation of the organization in January of 1991. But I consider the organization being formed in 1990. And our objective was to educate the public about the historical significance of B, and to do what we could to preserve the reactor, to see that it was preserved. To gain access and to develop exhibits and so forth for the exhibits. So that was where we started, was way back in 1990. And all during the decade of the ‘90s, we were meeting and fighting with the Department of Energy because they had milestones after milestones that were established on the cleanup and disposal of all the reactors. B was put into the list later on, but it was always on the list for cocooning, as all the reactors would be. We got those milestones extended over the years. And finally, with persuasion and meeting with legislators, Sid Morris and I met with Sid Morris and—I don’t remember the year now, but it was one of the first times that he was sympathetic for the theme that we preserve the historical relic. And of course, later on Doc Hastings. We had many meetings and persuasions with all the legislators. Of course, Cantwell and Murray got on board over the years. It later progressed into the fact that we want to have a study to see if the Parks Service could preserve it. One time during the late ‘70s, I believe it was, several people thought that the REACH would be the only chance of preserving the B Reactor. They would be the ones that would sponsor the tours and provide for the access and so forth. I said, no, I said, I don’t believe that. I said, I think we want to get the Parks Service involved because I don’t know that even the REACH is going to have the muscle to do it. So we got meetings with the legislators and we got a study authorized for the Parks Service study. That was after two or three years of trials and tribulations. It was finally approved. When the Parks Service first came out—you’re probably aware of the fact that they didn’t have—they just had Los Alamos as the sole main site for the park. And we said, that would never sell. It had to include all the sites: Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and Hanford. So they revised their study and made it a three-site park. It was eventually approved and then later legislation—Doc Hastings and Cantwell got the park legislation authorized. BRMA of course has been involved—has been the agency chipping at their heels all the way through all this. [LAUGHTER] We finally got credit for it. For many years, they didn’t really recognize BRMA as the organization that made it happen, but I think we had an awful lot to do with what made it happen. O’Reagan: Were you ever associated with any of the other local history-related groups? Ballard: Well, yes. We were affiliated with the CREHST museum. We worked with them and the REACH also. But we were the ones that were pushing—BRMA—the B Reactor specifically. We still have a lot of partnerships. We had memorandums of understanding with DoE and the CREHST and with—I guess we don’t have one with the REACH but we still meet with them. Matter of fact, they’re working on this new exhibit for the Cold War exhibit. Of course they’ve got—there’s four of us from BRMA that are on those meetings, but there’s a lot of other community leaders involved, too, obviously. And that was what happened is we were the—BRMA was the organization that was in the trenches early on. But later on, the whole community and the region and the legislators all got on board. So there was a lot of emphasis and support for getting it preserved and getting it converted, or made into a national historic park. Have you seen the plaque out there at B Reactor that says we’re the ones that initiated the plan to preserve it. So, yeah, I’m quite proud of that. I was one of the founding members of the organization. O’Reagan: Why did it matter to you? Ballard: Well, it’s important, I think, to preserve the history. It’s a significant part of the nation’s history. And if it’s going to be educational for the—a good place for the students, the young kids to come up and learn what the nuclear industry’s all about. I still say—and I’ve said for twenty years—that—I don’t know how many years down the road it’s going to be, but I think nuclear power’s going to be a major source of energy. Commercial electrical as well as all the other fields—medical and research. It still has an important place to play in our total nation’s history, I think. And we need to know how it started and what problems it caused. Let’s not generate those again. O’Reagan: What would you— Ballard: So that’s the story that’s going to be told in the park, and I think a lot of people—that’s some of the emphasis. People come out and see the comments in the paper, all the negative comments. Well, that’s true, but the story’s still there and needs to be told. O’Reagan: What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford or living in Richland during the Cold War? Ballard: Well, I don’t know. It was a challenge, I guess. The success—I’m glad that we developed the bomb rather than Hitler. Like how Fermi said, he said when he was working on fission in Italy in the late ‘30s—the 1930s, yes. He always said he was eternally grateful that he didn’t learn how to control fission then. He said if he had have, Hitler would have started the war with them, rather than us ending the war with them. So I think they need to know what the conditions were at the time that the Manhattan Project was built and what the world was undergoing at the time. O’Reagan: What else should I be asking about? What else is there that we should discuss? Ballard: I don’t know! I think I pretty well spilled everything I know. Unless—I don’t know. I could mention about my—as you know, I was not here during the Manhattan Project. It was over when I came in 1951. My wife and her family was a different story. They came with DuPont in 1944. So her dad was a DuPont employee and he came out here at that time and saw the conditions in employment problems that they had at that time. He was a machinist and had actually directed the tech shops out there for many years. So he probably—that family has more history of the Manhattan Project than I do. Mine is just history. It was—I’ve had an interesting career and I guess I’ve enjoyed it here and it’s been a wonderful place to live. I think it will continue to be if we have people that keep our city from growing into something that it shouldn’t be. [LAUGHTER] But I guess I don’t have any new subjects to talk about unless you have new questions. O’Reagan: I think—that’s my list for now, but thank you so much for being here. Ballard: Well, it’s been a pleasure. O’Reagan: All right, great. Tom Hungate: I had a question. O’Reagan: Please. Hungate: One of the jobs you had—you had a wide variety of jobs; all of them sound fascinating to me. Ballard: Oh, they’re interesting, yes. Hungate: One caught my ear, because I’ve seen these. Tell me what it was like when you said you worked on the K Reactors to lay—you said you were laying up the block. Tell—describe what that process was. Ballard: Well, I wasn’t involved in that deeply as a lot of the fellows were. I can’t remember his name right now, but the primary engineer that had the graphite technology. That graphite was machined in the 101 Building. Well, actually the old reactor’s was in the old 101 Building in White Bluffs. They built a new building, the 2101 Building in the 200 East Area which was specifically for the graphite machining and layup—test layups. Those blocks were built to very tight tolerances. The graphite came in in square blocks from the manufacturers and they had to be machined to the final configuration. Those tolerances were very, very tight, like plus or minus two mils or five mils at the most. The blocks were basically four-and-three-quarters inches by four-and-three-quarters inches by 40-some inches long—the main block. After they were machined to very close tolerances, they were test stacked in the 2101 Building, laid up ten tiers to be sure that the tolerances of the assembly were precise. And from there they were packaged on pallets in sequence that they would go in, in reverse sequence, so when they took them off they were ready to be stacked up. And then they were shipped—brought into the reactor vessel, lowered down into the open process area in the center part of the core and pulled off the pallets and just stacked, piece by piece. There’s pictures available that you see of the old reactors. There may be some of K Reactors too, I don’t know, but show inside the reactors when they’re laying up with the blocks. Of course everybody’s in whites. Your cleanliness control’s very important. And of course, obviously, sequence was very, very important, to have all the blocks in there. But from my perspective, I just watched—I wasn’t doing the work, I was just part of the process that was putting them in there. It was very closely controlled and very temperature controlled—well, no, I don’t know about the temperature. The building was under limited temperature control. But the cleanliness was strictly controlled, and the workers of course had been assigned with each pallet that came in, they knew where it went and how it was to be laid. But that was the same process that was used in all the reactors for graphite layup. But that’s amazing, the way they built those things. You have all the penetrations, like—I can’t give you the numbers. K Reactors were bigger than the old original reactor. The original reactor had 2,004 process tubes. You probably all know the story of that, too. [LAUGHTER] But what I started to say was, the alignment of the holes in the blocks, of course, had to line up with the holes of the penetrations of front and rear faces precisely when they put them in. So it was like putting a watch together on a 40-foot-square [LAUGHTER]—40-foot cube. Very precise work. O’Reagan: Were there any mistakes? Ballard: Pardon? O’Reagan: Did you ever see any mistakes? Ballard: Well, no, but if there were they were corrected as they went, because they had two or three levels of inspection verified that they were going in properly. There may have been some, I don’t know. I was not in direct control of that job. I was more on the K Reactor, I just was in oversight. I don’t remember what my position was at that time, but—the B Reactor, for example, you know what happened there when they started it up? It died because of the xenon poison. They didn’t have enough neutron flux levels to override that poisoning effect. That’s when they had to add the additional fuel channels outside the original 1,500 that they had that the physicist said was adequate to drive the reactor. So that was an interesting job. They had to—the later reactors, they had more knowledge of what the requirements were. So the design wasn’t—it didn’t create a problem on initial startup like B Reactor did. O’Reagan: We were trying to outline or highlight—what sort of innovations came out of Hanford, what sort of inventions did you see—what new knowledge or techniques did you see created at Hanford? Ballard: Well, there again, you need to talk to the physicists and chemists and people that were in the fuel design areas. There were so many changes made to the fuel designs. They went from—of course these were only applicable to the graphite reactors the modern fuel originally were eight inches long when the distortion that occurred in the graphite, that was because of the structure change due to the radiation in the graphite. The channels were distorted to the point where some were so crooked that the eight-inch channel—the fuel wouldn’t go through the channel. SO they went to four-inch people—four-inch long fuel assemblies in some of those bad channels. And then of course another knowledge was the design of fuel assembly, you went from strictly external core where they just had an annulus of water around the outside cooling the fuel assembly. It went to a center core; they had internal cooling—a flow channel through the center of the element. But as far as the physics of the elements, they went from totally natural uranium, originally 238, all naturally derived with 0.7% 235. They went to some enrichment in the reactors to increase the power level. But there was physics changes all along, as far as being able to control and just knowledge of impurities and what the effects were in the nuclear physical—the physics involved in the reactor. But of course, then the Breeder Program, we didn’t talk about that. There’s a lot of advancements made there. FFTF was a marvelous machine and it produced a lot of new information from greener technology. That FFTF was—I spent ten years on development—seven on development and three on construction, so. But I wasn’t—I’m not a physicist and wasn’t into the technology as much as the people—I was more into construction, design and construction. O’Reagan: A lot of knowledge there, too, that you—hands-on knowledge. Ballard: Well, I always pride myself on being able to fix problems. We had a lot of things on assembly or putting the stuff together that just—problems or interferences or arrangements that weren’t thought of in design that we were able to resolve in the field, and that’s why I got into—I’ve been building houses for Habitat now for the last 15 years. [LAUGHTER] It’s a little different from putting reactors together, but I get a lot of comments from the instruction people in Habitat. This is not a reactor; we don’t need to have those tolerances. [LAUGHTER] But I say if you make it right, it looks a lot nicer and it goes together better. O’Reagan: All right, I guess that’s the list of questions I’ve got. I guess we’ll end it once again. Ballard: Okay, well, appreciate. <a href="https://youtu.be/-GxJwHtD_CQ">View interview on Youtube.</a> Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview C Reactor B Reactor 300 Area K Reactor K East Reactor FFTF (Fast Flux Test Facility) FMEF (Fuels and Materials Exam Facility) 321 Building 400 Area 2101 Building 200 East Area Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1951- Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1951-1994 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Del Ballard Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Civil engineering Nuclear reactors Breeder reactors Description An account of the resource Del Ballard moved to Richland, Washington in 1951. Del worked on the Hanford Site from 1951-1994 and was influential in the formation of the B Reactor Museum Association. An interview conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by Mission Support Alliance on behalf of the United States Department of Energy. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 02/18/2016 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F9b10d9b58437486ee4cc1650b8118b29.JPG ec91cca70202c2f3af686cb3c2b19dc1 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Dennis Armstrong Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: Okay. Are you ready? Dennis Armstrong: Go for it. Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Dennis Armstrong on May 24, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Dennis about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. For the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Armstrong: Dennis A. Armstrong. A-R-M-S-T-R-O-N-G. D-E-N-N-I-S. Middle initial A. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Okay, great. So, Dennis, how and why did you come to the area to work for Hanford? Armstrong: Well, I thought about what kind of answer it might take to really answer that, and it probably goes clear back to high school days. Franklin: Okay. Armstrong: I did something along with four other friends. Went to an open house that the Washington International Guard had in Spokane, and ended up joining the group. Franklin: Okay. Armstrong: Got assigned into a aircraft maintenance group, and learned how to like airplanes. At that time, Washington Air Guard was a fighter squadron. Very close-knit group of wonderful people that I was proud to be associated with for six years. Reason that kind of influenced why I came to Hanford is because all through my four-and-a-half years at Washington State University Pullman in mechanical engineering, I had it in my mind that I was going to go to work for somebody making airplanes. And in my senior year as campus interviews were underway, in those times, it was not unusual for almost all the big companies to come to campus to do interviews. Not so nowadays. But at that time, I picked out aircraft companies. And I got some pretty good offers. Know airplanes, know how they work, know how they get put together. And I got even some exceptionally good salary offers. I showed them to my advisor, and he said, Dennis, you’re a pretty independent thinker. Just to tell me you did it, go talk to at least two or three other companies besides aircraft people. So, I go up to look at the campus interview schedule, and I picked out two, three companies, including a scheduled interview from General Electric. Not knowing whether GE made toasters or waffle irons or what, to wherever I was going to be interviewed from, I went in kind of blind, and found out it was a representative from Hanford. Franklin: Ah. Armstrong: It happened that in my work at the Washington Air Guard in the maintenance shops, I enjoyed metalworking, including—well, I was primarily doing sheet metal work and aircraft structure work. And we had a couple nice lathes that I enjoyed working with. Just nothing else, to learn how to work them. And I ended up getting a job at the department of mechanical engineers, two years running, as senior laboratory instructor in the machine shop. So, expanding on that, I did a special senior project on machinability of metals. So that came up in the course of my interview with Doug Tilson, who was the representative from GE. And he says, I’ve got exactly that job right now. I need a candidate for it. We want to hire people into our tech grad program, they called it. And yet I’ll promise you a machining research job, first assignment, if you choose to come with us. So they sent me a letter, and not quite the high salary I had from the aircraft people. But I showed these to my advisor, and he said, that’s a given. Take it. So I went back and it happened that in the dorm that I had lived in, I had a couple friends whose parents had worked at Hanford, so I knew a little teeny bit about it. Never been here. One time, one of them had brought me over to Richland, before I ended up accepting the GE offer. That time—of course, GE was still the predominant employer at Hanford, and I saw nothing of what really going on at Hanford, but I’d learned a little bit about Richland and kind of liked it. And having grown up in Spokane, I thought, why on earth do I want to go to Los Angeles and work for North American Aviation on airplanes, when I’ve got something right close in Washington State? And they offered me a job that was right in a piece of line of work that I had enjoyed, and wrote them a letter and said I’ll take it. And, well, I went through a couple questions, like, tell me more about this machining research job. And they said, well, we looked at your paper and I’ve even shown it to the people doing it, and they would like to have you come, but that’s about all we can tell you. Okay. I showed these papers to my advisor and he says, that’s a given. Take it. Franklin: So, sorry, I’d like to just ask, that’s the second time you’ve said that and I wrote that down because I wanted to explore that further. Why did your advisor feel that that was a given? Armstrong: Oh, he went on to say, I’ve been in the aircraft industry. Very structured engineering. You’re an independent thinker. Get in with some company that’s not quite as structured as the aircraft industry is. And I had no way of knowing other than to listen to him. And then couple that with the fact that here I had an offer close by. Home was still Spokane. And kind of pieced it together and my advisor knew those links and kind of felt that this would be a good placement for me. Franklin: And were you from Spokane originally? Armstrong: Yes. Franklin: Okay. Armstrong: And that’s how I ended up in the Washington Air Guard in Spokane, because I’d gone to high school in Spokane and wheat farming country south of Spokane. Franklin: Yup. Okay. So describe coming to Hanford. Armstrong: Well, I show up, and here there’s 50 other brand new hires and we all report into the building. I forget the number downtown; it was in the old 700 Area. It was GE new employee processing. I would find out I was the only one that had been already named to an assignment. They had the greases on the skids and I was given a badge and said, tomorrow morning, you’ll report out to this place out at the edge of the Earth called 200 West Area, to a building called 231-Z. I had no clue what that meant. Or even what the assignment was yet. But they described and spent all the rest of the balance of that day in terms of processing me in and getting papers signed and all this stuff that goes with orientation. Next morning, a fellow named Tom Nelson, who was supervisor of metallurgy development, eventually became Battelle, but for General Electric, metallurgy development operation in 231-Z building, he came downtown, picked me up, took me out 231-Z building. And I met a fellow there who I was assigned to to do a project. His name was John Rector. I learned that I was to produce a document on a machinability state of the art of machining plutonium metal. I’d, of course, never heard of plutonium metal before. I got my Top Secret clearance at that time. And they took me over to 234-5 to the production line and I saw what the whole purpose of Hanford was all about, in making parts. At that time, we made weapon pieces here. Not commonly advertised today, but it was not secret then. And still isn’t. But— Franklin: What kinds of weapon pieces were made? Armstrong: The plutonium core for the thermonuclear devices. Franklin: Okay, and so before—how long had Hanford been making weapon pieces? Armstrong: The history goes—of course, you well know from your study of the origin of Hanford—was to make plutonium metal to be sent to Los Alamos for assembly into the Nagasaki weapon. Franklin: Right. Armstrong: They continued to make them at Los Alamos up until like ’49, 1949, at which time this famous 234-5, or now called Plutonium Finishing, that was the name given to the plant later. That was built solely for the purpose of converting plutonium nitrate to metal. And metal—they call them buttons, the product—buttons into cast pieces and machined pieces for the weapon cores. And that started in like 1949, ’50, here at Hanford. And then a few years later, they built a parallel plant at Rocky Flats. Yet I think in the early years, best I knew, Hanford made three-quarters of the production, and Rocky Flats a little less than a quarter. Still Los Alamos made a few, but the stockpile was primarily made at Hanford. And then the balance started shifting a little more to Rocky Flats, until mid-‘60s when all the production went to Rocky Flats. Well, anyway, back to my pathway. Here I was, being told to learn all there is to know and put it down in a document on machining plutonium metal. And they had had a fella out from General Electric Schenectady who was a machining expert, and he had just left to go back to GE. And he was concentrating on traditional big production, like tooling forces and horsepower to make cuts. I walked through the production line, and they wanted emphasis on accuracy. Not what the program was gearing toward. They wanted emphasis on surface finish. And I turned around the program being done by metallurgy research people, and ended up putting out a document on how to get the finest surface finish we can be able to do with the lathes they had in 234-5 Building, which happened to be some of the finest that existed in the world. So, I wrote that document. It happens to still be classified. I’ll never see it again. Yeah, that leads me to a thought on classifications at Hanford. I didn’t understand it at the time, but now I do. I used to think weapon design was the big secret; it really wasn’t. It happened that Hanford production rate was the big secret, and manufacturing technology was right behind it. So, we physically protected manufacturing technology higher than the design of the devices. Which is what you see nowadays in how close is Iran to making one? And you can betcha they’re farther ahead than our politicians think they are. Anyway, enough said. I put in four months writing that document, got published, and a fella, name of Les Brecke, who ran the production line in 234-5, invited me to come over and spend an assignment there. Still on the GE tech grad program. I had a friend that had wanted me to come and spend an assignment with the K Reactor design group, too. And I thought, well, I’ve been in one thing. I think I’ll take the K Reactor design group. And I did that. Down 762 Building, through the winter, so I didn’t have to go out to Hanford during the winter that first year. And I participated in designing a flexible horizontal control rod for the K Reactors. Was eventually fabricated and put in. At that time, operating problems with the reactors was secret. You actually got one of these flexible rods in your inventory at the museum backup storeroom. And I’ve got one of the three whole pieces of bonded carbide to go in it, because I ended up making those pieces later. I’ll get to that in a second. That was a fun assignment in terms of really designing a product and getting it approved and getting through design approval from the rather rigorous design approval process. So then I talked to Les Brecke again and said, do you still want me? And he said, absolutely, I’ll take you any time you can get here. And I ended up as my third assignment, then, in the GE tech grad program of going to production line at 234-5 Building. Two—oh, go ahead. Franklin: Sorry, I just—for those that may not be—including sometimes myself—who may not be well-versed in the numbering system— Armstrong: Oh, that. Franklin: What is—so earlier you said 231-Z and that— Armstrong: 231-Z was an original building that DuPont built to process the plutonium nitrate. And when that was moved over to the PUREX and then 234-5, which I’ll describe a little more later, the 231 Building was turned into a metallurgy development laboratory. And that eventually became a branch of Battelle when GE diversified. Franklin: And so 234-5, does that have a more common name? Armstrong: Well, the more common name is Plutonium Finishing Plant. Franklin: Okay, so that is the PFP. Armstrong: PFP. Yeah, that name, interestingly, wasn’t coined until after the weapons mission. Franklin: Okay. Armstrong: The original, it was just called 234-5 or Dash-5 or Z Plant. Never had a word name associated with it. It held a special clearance to even get in the door, you had to have—it was kind of a soft top secret clearance, called a blue tag clearance. You got a model of one of these badges there in your museum. Today, no one carries that clearance anymore, but that’s what it was, was access to weapon data processing. Franklin: Okay, my last question, what year did you come to Hanford? Armstrong: Oh! 1963. June of ’63. Franklin: You came in 1963. Armstrong: Yes. Franklin: Okay, I just wanted to establish that. Armstrong: And that was, I guess going clear back to the beginning of the story, when I joined the Air Guard when I was still in high school, that was like the 1958 timeframe, see? So all through my WSU timeframe, I was in the Air Guard, thinking of going to work for aircraft people and it wasn’t until ’62 or so that I started in the interview process to eventually take permanent employment. And then the pathway that I described, the interview from the General Electric Company here. It turned out to be here, but I didn’t know it at the time. Franklin: Gotcha, okay. Armstrong: So here I am, now, in the, it was called weapons manufacturing operation. Franklin: And this was with Les— Armstrong: With General Electric Company. With Les Brecke. Franklin: With Les Brecke, okay. Armstrong: So we did two things. We were the receiver of the plutonium button, which is the finished plutonium chunk coming from a simple term called the button line, which is part of the production in this Z Plant, or 234-5 Building, across the wall into the machining. Or first, casting. We casted this. It’s a metal just like you can cast and pour any other—lead, brass, bronze, iron. The process is quite similar. Casted into a shape, machine it to a final product, goes through inspection and package it and send it to the assembly plant. Franklin: And where was the assembly plant? Armstrong: They went first to Rocky Flats in Denver, and then down to Pantex in Texas where the final assemblies were all put together. Franklin: Right, right. Okay and so—sorry, go ahead. Armstrong: My job—the name of the group was called weapons fabrication, and my job was to overview the machining. They had just bought the set of very fine lathes that didn’t quite work as good as they thought they should. First job was figure out why. It was a kind of a combination of electronics problem and hydraulics problem that I think I solved because we made them work. So through ’63, ’64, ’65, I was in charge of those lathes pumping out parts that went to inspection. And then eventually shipped. I enjoyed it. I really did. I didn’t realize how good a job it was until it was all over. And one of the saddest things I had to do in the course of my career, we had set—we were setting with literally a five-year top secret plan of production, how many parts we were going to make every month for five years. And it went to zero overnight. Franklin: Mm. Why was that? Armstrong: : Political. Politics. Franklin: What year—when was that? Armstrong: Mid-’65, late-’65. I can’t tell you the politics of it. But the idea was save some money by shifting all the production and casting and machining over to Rocky Flats. Close down Hanford production. So that hit the newspaper and we were in one of the first major cutbacks at Hanford. It happened that the person I’d worked with in 231 Building, John Rector, had a hobby doing manufacturing in his basement. Of course, it wasn’t but the first weekend I was over to house, seeing what he was doing. He was doing stuff in his basement that was beyond a lot of capability of big production shops. He came to me and said, we’re out of a job. I was promised a position in the maintenance group. I didn’t quite know how I wanted to do that. I’m sure I could’ve negotiated something into design engineering. But John said, been my plan someday to start a full-time business. And if you want to partner with me, let’s do it. We did, and we operated out of his basement for three or four months while we built Western Sintering Company. It’s over on Stevens Drive, still running today. So I turned in my resignation to GE and we started Western Sintering Company. I enjoyed it. I truthfully enjoyed the independence of a small business for seven years. I’m still good friends with the people that run it today, including the family. I left under good pretense. And the reason I left was Atlantic Richfield, the employment relations fella named Bill Watson came to me and said, we need an engineering manager for East Area/West Area. Oh. Well, you’ve been selected to be the first offer. Oh, interesting. I’d never mailed out a resume or anything. I was selected by some friends, that when the opening was there, they scrubbed a bunch of names and came to me and said, the job is yours if you want it. And I took it. So I became the engineering manager of East Area and West Area, plant engineering. Franklin: What was so attractive about the job that you wanted it? Armstrong: Working with people. I think I saw this particularly in the production line in 234-5 Building. I was frequently being the fabrication engineer of a production operation where we had rotating shifts with five different supervisors. I was the guy that ended up as shift relief now and then. We had the finest operators that existed at Hanford. They were all hand-selected, good people. And I enjoyed working with them. They were all good to work with. So I thought, here I got a chance to work with engineers. At first I was put into a group that had about eight engineers. And then I took over from Walt Engels, who had chosen to retire under the Atlantic Richfield shingle, and took over a larger group of close to 75 people, including planning engineering for each of their established operating plants. At that time, we were still running PUREX and B Plant and 234-5. You asked about the Plutonium Finishing name to Z Plant, and that was done as kind of a last ditch, after our weapons mission was done. Rename the plant, try to get some other business here. And we did several projects. We did a couple plutonium fabrication test ingots for the Navy. And we did some plutonium heat source things for NASA. And we took in half a dozen jobs in that plant. We even made the first of the sabot units for the Army, the ones they fired over in Iraq. Those happen to have been secret when we made them. But then later they come out, the uranium sabot units for the artillery shells for tank cannons. Anyway, that was the approach to naming it Plutonium Finishing, as advertising capability out to the world that we could handle plutonium. It really was no other capability. But the bottom line, there wasn’t very many people who wanted to go out and hire that kind of work done, either. Franklin: Right, especially with the Cold War being over. Armstrong: Yeah. Franklin: Yeah. Armstrong: It wasn’t until five or six years later that the plutonium uranium mixed oxide fast reactor fuels business came into play. Otherwise that would’ve been a natural for takeover by that building. But it wasn’t understood then. So, at Western Sintering, like I say, I enjoyed it. We made our own machinery. Franklin: And what did you primarily make? Armstrong: Small mechanical parts, cold compaction of metal powders into shape. And the sintering process is a furnace to diffusion bond the cold compacted metal powders into a finished structural piece. In terms of things common folk think of, little gears, little bushings, little bearings, little—and I say little because we were somewhat limited by size. The bigger the part, the bigger the press. We had made our own up to 200 ton, and that could make a part of about two-to-three square inches of surface area. Otherwise, little parts can make them pretty fast on the small ten-ton press. We actually made some ten-ton presses for the nuclear fuels industry. Primarily Westinghouse and General Electric and even Areva out here. Back then, they were Jersey Nuclear. And we sold 34 of those things around the world, including four of them to India, and two of them up to Canada. Pretty well established a name in terms of a good operating machine for that particular industry. As I say, Atlantic Richfield came to me and offered me the job of plant engineering manager, which I took. At that time, the B Plant fuels—excuse me, the strontium cesium encapsulation plant was just in final design stage and not working very good. It happened that Les Brecke had been assigned over to that building, and here I was, previous good stand with him, and suddenly I’m in charge of making his equipment that didn’t work work again. Which we did do, as a group, a team. Ended up packaging the whole inventory of strontium cesium capsules that’s now in the reservoir. It’s been sitting there for 50 years now. 40 years. Anyway, however. So, at that time, Atlantic Richfield was pretty good a contractor to work for. I’d even rank Atlantic Richfield a little higher than General Electric in terms of wanting the people to understand they worked for Atlantic Richfield. Had good relations there. If they’d have stayed a contractor, I’d probably have stayed there. It happened that they chose ten years as the contract limit, and Rockwell, new contractor, and couple things happened at Rockwell outside of Hanford. The B-1 bomber went down the tube when Jimmy Carter canceled the project. And another parent company they had, called Atomics International was doing reactor research to eventually build some gas-cooled reactors. That was pretty much down the tube. So Rockwell sat there with two sources of their own people. They brought in quite a few to Hanford. And I was told that my job would be replaced by one of them. And I could go to project management, which I did. And I didn’t care for the project management, because I enjoyed the design work, and particularly the kind of design work we were doing which was plant troubleshooting. Every week we’d have a plant managers’ meeting of all the different site plants. Whoever’s in trouble, I could solve it and—I could put my team onto it and solve it. That’s the way we were set up to do it. And I laugh at the current problem of the PUREX tunnel collapsing, because I had exactly the same issue happen back in the ‘70s. It happened that there were a bunch of low level waste disposal units called cribs. There were stacked Douglas fir timber underground, meant to be just a big void space to send low level liquid waste. People out monitoring the desert where these cribs were came back with a report over the weekend that one of these cribs had collapsed, not far from the story of the PUREX tunnel last week. And so I’m at the plant managers’ meeting and this is the big flap for the week, why did this happen and what are we going to do about it? So I came back and put one of my good civil engineers on it. He came back in about ten minutes and said, good news and bad news. Good news, I know why, and bad news, every one of them’s going to collapse. Oh, tell me more. Well, these were stacked Douglas fir timber. You’ve got about 40 years on untreated timber and then it’s going to be weak enough to rot away and they’ll collapse. Okay, what are we going to do about it? Well, we’re going to fill up the holes. So that was our carryover to the plant manager. So we eventually came up with the process to slurry up sand and pump it down every one of these holes and we eventually breached some of them. Problem was, you see, the rodents would get down into a hole and then they’d eat the strontium salts that were in this low level waste. They’d come up and the rabbits would eat the rodents, and then the coyotes would eat the rabbits, and then you’d have hot spots around the desert. And that was bad news. So we ended up vacuuming the desert. That was a legend to live down. [LAUGHTER] Anyway, I thought about the PUREX tunnel, because I knew how that one was made. And I thought, surely, those timbers are rotted away. And that’s exactly the same story. The only answer was fill it with sand. And then what are you going to do about it? Of course, plan that’s somewhat out in the newspaper is fill them with slurry and probably a grout mix. Franklin: Well, it’s all—the PUREX tunnel it’s all solid waste, right? Armstrong: No, there’s no waste in there at all. Franklin: Or it’s contaminated solid objects. Armstrong: That’s right, that’s a good way to put it. The object of the design at PUREX Plant, in the earlier fuel separation plant, REDOX, T Plant, B Plant, whenever a failed big vessel or big pump would have to be disposed of, they’d put it on a railcar and drag it out to near the desert, drag it out to the burial ground and bury it. Actually time consuming plus potential for accidents and exposure. So the idea at PUREX Plant was build a tunnel at the head end of the plant. And then it got a failed pump, failed tank, you buy an old railroad car that’s junk, put the pump on it, and send it down this railroad tunnel for somebody to worry about someday. There’s no waste in there, other than whatever residual was on the contaminated equipment. But there still could be some pretty high level stuff. Franklin: Because of what it— Armstrong: What it was handling, sure. Franklin: But no solid—but no actual— Armstrong: No actual waste like we think of waste in the waste tanks, or waste like the strontium cesium capsules in B Plant. Franklin: Did you see the infographic that Washington State Department of Ecology had put out of the tunnels? And it had the railcars, but inside the railcars was a green goo? Armstrong: I didn’t see that. Probably wouldn’t have got impressed with it. I personally don’t like the state being a regulator. I think it should’ve been kept as a federal agency. But that’s my own opinion that they wouldn’t care for today. I don’t think the state’s got any business being in the business. Enough said. I won’t—that’s not a popular area. Franklin: That’s good. Armstrong: Ha! You can edit that out. Franklin: Well, I mean, you know, it’s just an opinion. So you had worked on these cribs and filled them up with— Armstrong: A slurry of sand. Franklin: Were these constructed similarly— Armstrong: No. Franklin: --to the PUREX tunnel? Armstrong: They were a hole in the ground with—I forget what they were, like, 20-foot long timbers stacked just to make a big void space, and then a roof over the top and six, eight foot of dirt on top of it. Franklin: Oh, okay. Armstrong: The whole idea was to get a big void space down underground to pump low level liquid waste. But over years of pumping low level waste in, it accumulates to high level waste, and that’s why it was bad to have the rodents down in there eating these salts. Franklin: Sure. Armstrong: So, anyway, with Rockwell coming in, and me going to project management, I had another group of people come to me, namely the Washington Public Power, we would like you to come with us. We’re building five nuclear power plants. And I said, well, I’ll be there. And so I took a job in project management of what was called the equipment qualification, namely to prove everything in the reactor was going to—everything safety-related was really going to work during every credible accident. We had about 20,000 electrical mechanical pieces of equipment that we had to have definitive proof it could stand an accident scenario. So, I’m still involved in Hanford and watching it, but yet direct employment left when I left Rockwell. Franklin: Okay. But still obviously related. Armstrong: Well, still nuclear power plant, as opposed to waste management area. Or production in the early years. Franklin: And how long were you with WPPSS? Armstrong: 18 years. Franklin: Okay. So you kind of saw, then, the full—the rise and fall, I guess one can say. Armstrong: Oh, yeah, in fact, even in organizational dynamics, this was a tough time. Organization staging for—I guess if you think of plant construction, you need one craft for some time, or one set of engineers for some period, and another set of engineers for another period. We had organizations that were struggling with trying to keep their mission alive. When Don Major, who was our general manager then, was trying his best to say, this organization’s got to phase down, because this one’s phasing up to finish the plant. But the thing that I saw my pathway pretty clear—I was kind of middle management through my whole career path, and here middle management at Washington Public Power Supply System, we could see a clear pathway to make that plant work. Something bothers me about the Vit Plant. People working on it aren’t going to see it work in the lifetime of the people working on it. That’s why I don’t like the idea of the state being involved in it. That should’ve been a small demonstration plant; could’ve been finished five years ago and working. If it worked good, we’d build two, three more of them. Franklin: Mm. Instead of building one— Armstrong: State kept insisting it’s got to be so big that once we turn it on, we’ll run all the waste through it and be done. They ended up building it so big that they couldn’t control the design process and still don’t know when it’s going to run. May never run. Franklin: Yeah. Armstrong: There are other ideas on what to do with waste. Some of them still being explored to maybe speed it up. But I—Savannah River has a waste evaporator and a waste melter. The titanium industry’s had titanium vacuum melters for years. We could’ve made one here. Franklin: Savannah River’s also partway through their vitrification process. But there, though, it’s easier because the chemical—they only used one—they used less chemical separations processes than we did. Armstrong: Yeah. Franklin: So they have much less complicated— Armstrong: Yeah. Franklin: --waste. Armstrong: I understand that, too. You know, this is one of the things that even took me a long time to digest when I had plant engineering group over the Tank Farms and PUREX and REDOX and those, that each one put out a different product in terms of the waste composition. The process to handle it was somewhat different. But even in the years I was there, we were running the T Evaporator and the S Evaporator, and then the A Evaporator was built just after I left. They were all one mission: take the waste out of the tanks. It was done before I got there to take all the strontium and cesium out. That was done very quietly and successfully. So getting stuff out of the tanks was not a big deal. They knew how to do it. And suddenly it’s got to be reinvented. Even running the S Evaporator and T Evaporator, they were different processes, but we took a lot of water out and made a lot of space in the tanks. Some of them, they gained a little too much space and they had to put water back in to cool it down. But that’s part of the learning process. Franklin: It was meant that liquid waste would go in the tanks, right? So now that it’s been largely solidified, doesn’t that make it harder to access the waste via the existing pipes— Armstrong: Well, it sure does. Franklin: --liquid material— Armstrong: It sure does. In the first campaign of—effectively what was in there was liquids, yet a lot of stuff had settled out over the years. As they were extracting the product out of the tanks, they had some kind of pumps to get the liquid out and then some devices they called sluicers which would spray the tank bottoms, loosen up stuff so they could slurry it up and pump it on into B Plant so they could process. Still they cleaned the tanks out tolerably well. Yet the evaporator process included a type of pump called a salt well that we made in my plant engineering group, where we would literally put a well casing not far from what you see out in the desert for farming—put a well casing down in the tank so you could sift away from the salt product and get the liquid back out and send it to the evaporators. So every one of the tanks went through the salt well campaign of extracting liquids to try to get it solid. So this leaves a little different product to get out of there now. At that time, the idea was remote shovels and stuff like that to dig it out. That, I think was demonstrated doable. Yet concurrently, we had almost the same game that they got now. I’d get a call over the weekend, this tank’s potential leaker just got a high drywell indication, what should we do? And we’d come up with a plan to route piping and pump it over to another tank. And we think that one’s good so we’ll try that one for a while. Yeah, that one seems to be holding it. And then we had a big master chart—this was before computers could take care of things to count for you—we had a big chart of which tanks were suspected leakers, known leakers, possible leakers, and three or four other categories of maybe they’re okay or maybe not. We got space here but not there. [LAUGHTER] Same game that you read about in the paper today. But a little different product to have to handle, I do admit that. My own desires, and yet I was current plant operations/plant engineering, and Don Woodrich, in another group was long-range planning, what are we going to do with this stuff eventually? At that time it was dig it out, put it in casks and take it someplace. No one wanted it. Franklin: That’s a hard sell. Armstrong: Yeah. Franklin: What years was that? Armstrong: That was in the mid-‘70s. Because I left Rockwell. Rockwell came in in, I guess I’m going to say, the early ‘80s. That’s when I left and went to Washington Public Power. Franklin: How—so you were with them, with Washington Public Power, kind of until its ending— Armstrong: Well, through—I actually got caught in layoff. They wanted a headcount and they wanted dollars, and we now the four plants were put in first a construction delay and eventually a termination. It was clear that we had too many people. And the general manager had had a stroke and they hired a new guy. He come in and said, get me a list of the high dollar people in engineering, because we’re going to contract out a lot of this business. I was one of the higher paid engineers or managers, and I got hit with a layoff in the mid-‘90s. Franklin: So what did you do after leaving WPPSS? Armstrong: Retired. [LAUGHTER] Armstrong: I chose it to be an early retirement. And I’ve been active all along in the leadership of American Society of Mechanical Engineers. So I spent a lot of time there; still do. Franklin: Great. Let’s see here. You’ve answered a lot of my questions, but I have a few more. What were the most challenging and/or rewarding aspects of your work at Hanford? Armstrong: Oh, early years, like I mentioned, being selected to go into the weapons production group. That wasn’t a group you got into very easily. The best operators and the best supervisors that existed at Hanford. We had a final mission: make parts, put them in a box and ship them. I worked there for over four years for Les Brecke, who was a tough one to work for. Never missed a single shipment. Franklin: Wow. And what about the later years? Armstrong: Atlantic Richfield years, same story. I had a wonderful group of people. I had five subsections in my plant engineer group, specifically one for each plant. But I had them all structured so if they knew I was in some trouble someplace with whatever it be, I could draw from one group and put it into another group to get through a complicated problem. And we had some issues with evaporators and with—the Tank Farms were a constant headache. Even PUREX, when they started to shut it down and then ramp it up for what was to be the last run, I somehow—the production manager’s name was a fella named Chuck Malady, and I ended up being his ghostwriter for letters that went to, it was Energy Research and Development Administration, now DOE. I wrote two letters from the president of Atlantic Richfield to DOE, then ERDA: please, let us run PUREX one more time. We’ll be done with that N Reactor fuel forever. Twice the answer came back, no, can’t do it. Please don’t ask again, because Jimmy Carter wants no more waste in the waste tanks. Instead, they let the fuel rot away in K Reactor basins. We were campaigning, let us run PUREX. We could’ve done it and been done with it. It would not have added that much waste. But that was the decision made at the presidential level. It probably cost this country a hundred billion dollars, and we’re still not willing to admit it. They still haven’t got the mess cleaned up. We had PUREX ready to go to do it. Franklin: Right, right. Interesting. Thank you. What are some of your memories of any major events in Tri-Cities history? I guess, for example, were you around for President Kennedy’s visit? Armstrong: Yeah, in fact—[LAUGHTER] it’s kind of comical because I was working in the production line, and the message that came out was essential operations must continue, but non-essential people will be released to go to President Kennedy’s visit. And there’ll be buses to bus you down there. Les Brecke had maintained we were essential, so we weren’t going to go. And then he had a change of heart the last day, said, well, I want to keep my operators busy, but Armstrong and two or three others, you can get on the bus and go. So I was way back in the last row with the last bus that came in. I watched from way back, afar. It was fun to see it. Franklin: Yeah. Do you remember President Nixon’s visit? Armstrong: Oh, I do, but I actually didn’t—I wasn’t here. I was traveling someplace. So I didn’t get in on the festivities. Franklin: Any other major events in Tri-Cities history, plant shutdowns, startups, that kind of stand out to you? Armstrong: Well, certainly the contractor changes. Even one of the comical parts with General Electric, I worked directly for this Les Brecke, and he had a rather seriously assembled dossier on every one of his people. I forget who it was that came out, it might have been George Saylor from General Electric, who was high up in the employee relations group. He says, your secretary tells us you’re not going to release your files. You must turn them in! That’s GE property. That’s not your property. Everyone will start with an empty folder when Atlantic Richfield comes in. Actually, it wasn’t Atlantic Richfield; it was an interim company called Isochem, who was a rather short-lived vendor. They were supposed to build an isotope separations plant. Never did. And then Atlantic Richfield got that contract assigned to them. Interesting style then. But anyway, bottom line is, that was kind of a comical thing. I sat out on the outside of the row and then George Saylor comes out. I was outside of his office. My office was from here to the wall from his, and I could hear him arguing, you must release your employee files because those are GE property. Not yours. Well, he eventually had to. [LAUGHTER] So we started with an empty binder on everyone. But I think he kept a few things out of there. But that was kind of an interesting thing. Another fun one that happened, still with Les Brecke—I mentioned I’d been active all along in ASME in local and national activities. Well, it happened that another fella in 234-5 Building came to me and said, hey, I see you just moved to town. Would you help us with our local section meetings? I said, oh, yeah, sure. What do you want me to do? Well, here’s ten names. You call these ten members and remind them of our next meeting. I can do that. So I put the list in my drawer and come a week before the meeting, I pull it out and start calling people. Get down about four names, and there was a boss’s boss’s boss on the list. Me, little guy on the totem pole, going to call him? I’ll skip his name. And then I call the rest and then I put the list back in my drawer. Next day, I said, hey, I promised Marv I’d call these people. I guess I’ll do it. So I called him up. He answers the phone himself. Hugh Warren here. Oh! I wanted to remind you of our ASME meeting coming up this week. Oh, yeah! I got that notice. I’m going to be there; put me down. And he remained a lifelong friend, forever. Franklin: Wow. Armstrong: And the comical thing that happened is, he says, where do you work? I said, 234-5 work. I work for Les Brecke. Oh, I’m coming down there this afternoon; I’ll stop by and say hello. So, my office door was within viewing door of Les Brecke’s office door. And in comes boss’s boss’s boss, said hello to me and we talked a few minutes and he left. Pssht! Brecke comes out, what was Warren doing down here? [LAUGHTER] Armstrong: Oh, he just popped in to say hello. Enough said, anyway. It was just kind of a comical event. There’s probably hundreds of examples like that through the years. Like I say, when I had the plant engineering group, I had wonderful people working for me. Some of them unfortunately were older than I was and we read about one every weekend now. They’re passing away. Franklin: Yeah, that’s true. What was it like living in Richland—so you would’ve moved here after Richland had become privatized. What was it like living in Richland in that area of the Cold War in the ‘60s and ‘70s? Armstrong: I can’t say that there was anything spectacular. Downtown—well, I had an apartment when I moved in to Richland across from the old Kadlec Hospital. It was one block to what was called 700 Area. They were just building the Federal Building and knocking down all the old Federal Building offices. So I had one—that K Reactor design group assignment was in 762 Building, which I’d walk half a block from my apartment into the gate on the north end of the 700 Area and walked two buildings to my—I didn’t know much about what else was going on down there, other than that it was most of design engineering for the whole site. I was specific to the K Reactor and we were in one building. You talked about Kennedy; even going back to high—excuse me, college, I had an interesting experience with him. I lived in a dormitory the first couple years. And I guess it must’ve been like 1959 or ’60, it was a Saturday, and I was on phone duty. We had one phone come in to the dorm. You’d answer it and then call a room of somebody. Well, they were holding what they called a mock political convention. I wasn’t going to go to it, but in comes this call from somebody. Hey, we’re the State of Massachusetts and we got a big deal guy here, and he’s senator, and we’ve only got two people to represent our state. Send people over here! So I could put out a message on the public announcement through the whole dorm, and then my shift was coming to the end. I decided—we gathered three or four other people and we went over to the gymnasium to be part of the Massachusetts convention for this political convention. The famous senator was John Kennedy. We sat around, the eight of us, around the room—around the circle. Oh, thank you so much for you folks participating in this important political activity. He signed my program. And did I save it? No. Franklin: So he was actually at WSU? Armstrong: Yeah! Franklin: Wow, I didn’t know that. Armstrong: In fact, I think the yearbook that year has got his picture and I’m in the shadow in the background of it or something. But I didn’t save that program that had his signature on it. He signed them all. So then, years later, he’s president, and I’m in 762 Building in the K Reactor design group. Right next to my office was the resident office of the FBI. So, I probably knew it, among the first three or four at Hanford that Kennedy had been shot. Because they came over and—we knew the FBI guys, and they knew us. I could stand in their doorway and listen to their radio chatter. Of course, we assembled in the hallway to try and learn what was happening from the FBI chatter coming in on the radio. It was a whole story that was just emerging on the national news. So kind of a close couple paths crossings there. Franklin: Yeah. That’s really interesting. Thank you. I think that might be the most detailed—one of the more detailed Kennedy visit stories I’ve ever got, you know, from an interview. Armstrong: Yeah. Franklin: So, I guess, in closing— Armstrong: In fact, the neighbor down the street from me was a fellow named Swede Holmquist who was safety director for all of Hanford under DuPont, GE, appointed by Matthias to be safety director. Franklin: Oh, wow. Armstrong: He brought home a lot of stuff when he retired, which I have some of it now. Which you’ll get someday. But meantime, I’m going to enjoy it. Franklin: Sure. Armstrong: Including the press release notebook on the Kennedy visit. Franklin: Oh, wow. Armstrong: Thick notebook. Franklin: Wow. So in closing, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War? Armstrong: Well, it was serious business. And I took it that way. I had very high security clearance. I took it serious. I’ve had the opportunity to talk to students in the university environments. This is my advice to them. If you get involved in either corporate security activity or government security activity, take it serious. I did. And there’s stuff I couldn’t tell you today that I was involved in. Mostly, interestingly enough, on manufacturing technology. One time the highest level security thing we had at Hanford was production rate. You can read about it in the paper right now how many devices we made. I wouldn’t have dared told you that in the ‘60s. Franklin: Sure, but that manufacturing technology, though, is still very much— Armstrong: Yeah. Franklin: Because of the danger of nations making-- Armstrong: Yeah, people picking up on how to do it. Franklin: Yeah. Yeah. Armstrong: And even though what we did 50 years ago was probably different than what they do today. I was down at the University of Nevada Las Vegas a month ago, and I met a fella that was doing the laser work on the stockpile proof-of-reliability. He knew where I’d come from. I’d been through the whole test site. They took that job serious, too. But there’s been more released on what they did than ever will be released on what Hanford did. And yet even—I meet people around the country, everybody knows about Oak Ridge. Not very many people know what happened at Hanford. And I think it’s an important thing to tell, and this is why I’m excited about seeing the B Reactor elevated. And I’d go so far as to include the other facilities. T Plant’s an important part of the whole story. Franklin: Oh, sure. I mean, the fuel doesn’t pop out of B Reactor and then just go to Los Alamos. Armstrong: In fact, when I was plant engineering manager, one thing Rockwell did when they first came to town—there were seven people, and I’ve got a picture of all seven of them, that had like 35 years of total experience going back to DuPont. They were all given a Rockwell 35-year gold watch. Two of them worked for my group. One of them was kind of a simple story; he worked at Remington—excuse me, DuPont at Salt Lake, came up to Hanford. The other had an amazing story. I held a staff meeting when I gave out these two watches to the people. Had all my people and anybody else who wanted to come. And I said, Max Yeats, I want you to—he did not know what I was going to do. I said, I want you to tell us all where you were on a certain date in 1942 or ’43, like that. I didn’t know you knew that date. Well, I know the whole story, and you’re going to tell us right now, what happened that day and forth. Well, I haven’t talked about that much. Well, you can tell it, or I’ll tell it, because I know it. And he said, okay. I went to work for Remington Arms in Kansas City. I was in charge of tooling. Machinist background, mechanical engineering graduate. One day I was called in to the boss’s office, and told I was selected for a special corporate assignment. They knew nothing about it, I was supposed to take it. What do you want to do? And he said, I don’t know, I guess I’ll take it. What would you do, you were a kid out of school, worked for six months for DuPont? So he said, here’s an envelope; open it when you get home. You’re off now. Go home. Got home, told his wife—new wife, opened the envelope: Report to Dr. Do, University of Chicago in two days. Dr. Do was code name for Fermi. He went into Fermi’s office and said, go to that meeting room, get some other people, we’ll come in and talk. He learned the whole story of what was going to happen. And his mission in being taken in to Chicago was he worked on making the fuel for the Chicago Pile. And then there were six of them sent from Chicago to Hanford, and he was project manager on construction of B Plant. Not the reactor, but the fuel separations plant. And his whole career, he stayed as this senior, strong, individual contributor, including working for me, 40 years later. Franklin: Wow. That’s quite a story. Armstrong: And that’s never documented anyplace. Franklin: Yeah, the plants really seem to suffer from a lack of documentation and just awareness. The reactors get all of the— Armstrong: Yeah, yeah. And, you know, he’d have been a wonderful person to have in your interview system, see? So I can tell the story about him now. All that came out as a result of Rockwell saying, we want to do something for the old-timers that are here. And they selected, it happened that they had some gold watches that said Rockwell on them, and they had them all in a—I gave the watches out at my own staff meeting, but then later they all assembled in the famous PUREX conference room for a group picture. And I went with them on that. I’ve got a copy of that picture with the seven people. Franklin: That’s really neat. Well, Dennis, thank you so much. It’s been a really great interview. Armstrong: Well, I could probably talk for an hour and two hours. I’m getting hoarse here, but I enjoy the history. I think you know that Don Sorenson and I both kind of partner in researching what we can. He’s two lightyears ahead of me and yet I’ve got stuff he’d enjoy having. I kind of got hooked on it when I cleaned out Swede Holmquist’s house. I wish I’d’ve saved more, but unfortunately, he’d brought home boxes full of historical papers, put them in his basement under a window where the sprinklers were running, and I opened up these boxes and they were all moldy. I didn’t want to kill myself. Including a big, thick white binder on the collapse of the second PUREX tunnel. I opened up, looked at the pictures and threw it in the dumpster. And probably that was the only one that existed. Yet that report might be in the library someplace. But it’s so hard to find stuff in the library. Don’s got access to more pictures. He has thousands of pictures. And his son collects pictures of Richland. Kind of an interesting tie. Franklin: Yeah, his Vintage Tri-Cities Facebook was just in the paper the other day. He likes a lot of our Facebook posts. That’s when I first found out about him. Armstrong: Yeah. Yet I’ve got some safety plaques that—I’ve got one 1944 from the National Safety Council to Hanford, 1944. And I’ve got 1945. I’ve got three bronze plaques that Holmquist lugged home. And I’ve got one that Kennedy gave the Site. In fact, have you been to the Nevada Test Site Museum? Franklin: I have not. Armstrong: Worthwhile going and see what they’ve done there. I’ll sign your travel authorization if you want to go. It won’t mean much when the dollars come, but. I’ve been there a number of times. In fact, I went again when I was—the student conference I put on in the University of Nevada. When the afternoon was quiet, I’d go over to the museum. Well, on an earlier visit, I’m standing inside the library. They’ve got a public reading room in addition to the museum tour. They’ve got this plaque hanging there, John F. Kennedy presents to the Atomic Energy Commission Sites. Docent walks up to me and says, isn’t that neat? You ever seen one of those? I said, yeah, I’ve got one hanging just like it in my room! Oh, you do? [LAUGHTER] I suspect it was a case where one had been given to each site. So probably half a dozen of those exist; I might have one of two that remain. I don’t know if Oak Ridge’s still exist. But these bronze ones, you’ll get them someday. In the meantime, I offered to give Connie a couple of them once. And I said, only one condition: you hang it in the museum. If it’s going to go in a filing cabinet, you can’t have it. And as you’re aware, museums don’t take things with conditions. Franklin: That’s true. Armstrong: Unless it’s a loan to special purpose. So it’s still hanging in my room. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Well, Dennis, if there’s other—if you think of things later on that you want to talk about, we’d be happy to schedule another interview with you. Armstrong: Or my experience might even be more broad than a lot of other folks. So if you get into an area where you want to amplify something, I’m on recall. I’m happy to do it for you. Because I think preserving the history is critical to the good work that so many thousands of people did at Hanford. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Paul Tibbetts and probably half a dozen of the crew with the first missions. Every one of them said the same story. People ask them, would you do it again? And the answer is, we were young Army officers, we were described a problem, we saluted and we did it. It wasn’t our position to challenge it. I kind of feel the same way, having been involved in production at Hanford. Didn’t bother me I participated in making many thousands of warheads. We only used a few of them, and those are the ones that I know got shot down in Nevada. And I learned later which ones got shot, because in my last year or so I was by I guess seniority, I was declared to be the authorized shipper of the final product out of Hanford. So every one of the shipments, including— I remember one time, the couriers would show up at the backdoor at 234-5. We’re here to take today’s shipment. Okay, sign here. And you got them. So they got sent down to Rocky Flats on a railroad car. It had a code name, Redwood car. It was always kind of parked up in the West Area shop area. Nobody knew what it was, unless you knew what it was. It was a US Mail car. It was painted just, US Mail No entry. I said to one of the couriers, hey, I want to see the inside of your railcar. Oh, yeah, come on up! No problem. Oh! I’ll be up. He took off with the load, and I went and got a car and took off. I got to be in the vault there that was normally off-limits to GE people. They closed the door and a guy sitting at each end of it with a machine gun, and off they went to Rocky Flats on a railcar. So anyway, those are fun little stories. I could probably have a thousand more. But I had fun during my career and I’d do it again in a heartbeat. I really would. Franklin: Good. Well, Dennis, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Armstrong: Well, thank you for putting the time into it and the effort. I think it’s a good program. Franklin: Well, good. Thank you. Thank you for contributing. <a href="https://youtu.be/K5g1SgVQMS8">View interview on Youtube.</a> Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 700 Area 200 West Area 231-Z Building 234-5 Plutonium Finishing Plant K Reactor 762 Building PUREX Z Plant B Plant REDOX T Plant WPPSS (Washington Public Power Supply Systems) Tank Farms N Reactor Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1963- Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Dennis Armstrong Description An account of the resource Dennis Armstrong moved to Richland, Washington in 1963 to work on the Hanford Site as a Mechanical Engineer. An interview conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by Mission Support Alliance on behalf of the United States Department of Energy. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 05/24/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Spokane (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Mechanical engineering Plutonium industry Plutonium--Metallurgy Nuclear industry Nuclear weapons industry Nuclear weapons plants Nuclear power plants Radioactive waste disposal https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F40dfecfcfb14b42ffd68426733942f40.jpg ed6e594965bb469d8310a1facdddd049 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Dennis Brunson Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: All right. We are ready. Dennis Brunson: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I’m conducting an oral history interview with Dennis Brunson on October 18, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Dennis about his experiences working at the Hanford site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Brunson: My name is Dennis, D-E-N-N-I-S, Brunson, B-R-U-N-S-O-N. Franklin: Great. Okay, so the best place to begin is the beginning. So when and where were you born? Brunson: I was born in LaGrande, Oregon. Franklin: Okay. Brunson: In 1943. Franklin: And how did you come to Washington? Brunson: My family moved my junior—beginning of my junior year of high school to LaCrosse, which is up towards Pullman. Franklin: Mm-hmm. Brunson: My dad was a foreman on a cattle ranch. Franklin: Hmm. Brunson: That’s where I— Franklin: Was your dad in the cattle business for most of his— Brunson: Yeah, he was a farmer and we owned a meat market in eastern Oregon. That’s how I got up here. Franklin: Okay. And then you went to high school in LaGrande? Brunson: No, in LaCrosse. Franklin: In LaCrosse, sorry. Brunson: I married my high school sweetheart, who was a year ahead of me. I was a football player, and I had some success at playing football, and had been given an offer to play football at Columbia Basin College in Pasco, back in the day when they had an outstanding football program. On my way to that end, I damaged my neck severely in a football game—my last football game in high school, and I could no longer play football. But I was already—had plans to go to CBC, and I followed through. So I came to CBC, and I took a class there that was a special class that Boeing had initiated, basically, to produce illustrators for Boeing Company in Seattle. They didn’t have near enough technical illustrators. So I went through that program and found that there was a pretty high need for illustrators, and they used them here at Hanford as well. So my wife worked for General Electric, and her boss at the time and my future boss played golf together. We had planned on going to Seattle to start my career over there, and ultimately, I was hired to come to work at Hanford as an illustrator for Vitro Engineering Company. Franklin: Okay. And so what kind of projects did you work on while in this first job at Hanford? Brunson: Okay. I did a lot of—because I was an illustrator and artist, I was put in the piping department, which was a large section, because they were retooling the Hanford site at that time to process chemicals. My first job, basically, was as-built drawings. I would go into zones where the pipefitters had recreated the new version, and I would go in and follow blueprints to make sure that what went on the final drawings was the way it was built. And oftentimes, there were things that the designers couldn’t see. So they would get someone like me to go in and sit and draw all these things out, and double-check and make sure that it was as-built. That wasn’t always an easy task, because some of the zones we were in were very hot. And we would have to draw with coveralls on, and head gear, and gloves. It was a slow process. Franklin: How would—so obviously, all that gear can be cleaned, but what you’re drawing on, then might also soak up radiation as well? Or--? Brunson: Well, there was a possibility that you could be contaminated, and they were very careful, which I was thankful for. I always had a radiation monitor with me. If something in the atmosphere was airborne, he knew about it, because he had an indicator. We would get out of there. That happened a few times, but it wasn’t all that bad. Franklin: What kinds of—did you work all over site doing these as-builts, or is there any building or buildings that come to mind? Brunson: Well, in the 200 Area mostly is where I did that. In the T, U, and B Buildings, I think they were, at that time, they were retooling the Canyon buildings, or some of the cells for processing thorium. That’s what, basically, what we were doing. When I wasn’t doing as-built drawings, I worked as an illustrator and a design draftsman. I was trained well to do that, and I really enjoyed it. Franklin: When did you start this first—when did you start at Hanford? Do you remember what year? Brunson: Yeah, it was 1964. Franklin: 1964. And how long did you work as an illustrator and doing the as-builts? Brunson: For that—during that phase of my career, it was two years. Franklin: Okay. Brunson: I worked there two years, and then I went back to my wife’s family farm, and we leased one of my father-in-law’s ranches and tried to make a living raising wheat and sheep and cattle and all of that. Franklin: What was the reason for that change? Or, why—why did you— Brunson: Why’d I leave Hanford and go back to the farm? Franklin: Yeah, why-- Brunson: Well, it was an offer that I couldn’t refuse. My father-in-law was having health issues, and he came to me and said, hey, I need some help. So we did what we had to do. Franklin: Okay. Brunson: And we tried to make a living, but—you know, I was glad that I had a connection at Hanford. Because in 1970, we came back and moved to Richland and started with WADCO Corporation as a technical illustrator. Franklin: WADCO. And what does—do you remember what WADCO stands for? Brunson: Well, it depends on who you were talking to. It was Westinghouse Advanced Development Corporation, but the locals here called Wild Ass Development Corporation. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Brunson: Because they had a way of getting things done. Franklin: Ah. Brunson: My reason for being there—I was hired as an illustrator, because they had taken over the FFTF design and management. It had been in thought process for several years prior to that. They took over, and there were services that were provided to the contractors here. But they had a difficult time—Westinghouse, or WADCO had a difficult time getting what they needed in the timeframes that they were being asked to deliver. So they had to go out and get some service people of their own to keep that flowing. That’s how I came in. I was the first illustrator they had. Franklin: First illustrator. And I noticed a lot of the material you brought in today—which we’ll show some of that later—I noticed a lot of that pertains to FFTF. Brunson: Yes. Franklin: So it seems you were married to that—that was a large part of your illustrator, or graphic design work, was for that reactor. Brunson: Yeah. When I started with the WADCO, and when I—that melded right into Westinghouse—it was the same parent company; they just changed the structure. I went from there until Boeing took over. That was 17 years. Franklin: Okay. Brunson: So I did that for 17 years. That’s the reason I have—my very first job at WADCO was another gentleman and I were asked to go down to Safeway and buy a 50-pound sack of flour. We went out to the desert, and there was a post out there where the center of the reactor core was. This was before they scraped anything away. We made a big giant X in the sand, and made it nice and tidy so that from an aerial photograph, it appeared to be a giant X. X marks the spot, for this—that was prior to the—for the first excavation. So that was the first thing that we did—I mean, that was noteworthy. The next day or two after they had photographically recorded that, they came in with the earth moving equipment to start the lay-down of the bottom of the reactor. Franklin: Wow. Brunson: And so that’s something that I did [LAUGHTER] that was unusual. Franklin: So you were there right at the genesis— Brunson: In the beginning. Franklin: Yeah. Literally at the center of the— Brunson: Center of the project. Franklin: Center of the reactor. So what other kinds of work did you do in that 17-year span for WADCO? Brunson: Well, I started out as an illustrator, and we worked night and day, seven days a week. Forever and ever and ever it went on. It was a wild ride. But we produced visual aids, slides and viewgraphs, and posters for poster sessions. And a lot of them. In addition to that, we also created an ongoing report of activities because we were building something new that had never been done. So we had, in addition to the graphics department, we had photographers and editorial staff, and the typing pool, and all of the support that is required to put out reports—technical reports. It was a large group. We were asked to create a history as we went along. That was—we were part of a national lab, and it was—that was something you had to do. It’s in record form somewhere, if our computers can read it. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: I believe a lot of that material is actually in hard copy in our collections. Brunson: Yeah. It is, yeah. Franklin: I’ve gone through a lot of FFTF boxes. Brunson: Yeah. Franklin: So you were the first person in this department, then. So how big did this department end up becoming? And did you take a supervisory role? Brunson: Yes. At one time, we had around 25 people in that particular graphics department. I started out as an illustrator, and then was promoted to senior illustrator, and then supervisor, or art director. And then in a short while, I was promoted to manager of media services, which included the graphics department and photography and audio-visual, which was one tight group. As time went on, over a few years, I was assigned other management in the communications department. And that’s what I did. Then when we—after 17 years, when Boeing came to town, things—when we went into Boeing, I worked—managed several departments. The photography, audio-visual, motion picture group. So anyway, I’m getting off track. Franklin: No, not at all. Brunson: That’s kind of the trail that I had through the process. The entire time that we were working there, I’ve seen other groups that they provided a service, but were never considered, or they never felt like they were part of a team. That was the one nice thing about that graphics and photography departments—you were part of a team. We were involved with just about everything that went through the company. We were appreciated by the management, because they’d have been in trouble without a good group of people who were cooperative and willing to work every night, and into the wee hours of the morning, and still come back the next day and smile about it. And it was fun. You have to remember that people like in those kind of service departments, by and large, they’re people that are getting paid good money to do their hobby. Franklin: Right, right. Brunson: So the photographers loved it. They loved the challenge of going into a hot zone and taking pictures. It was something they looked forward to. It was something they could learn from, and create new techniques to do a good job. So that’s a pretty good base for contented employees, if you can have that. We were fortunate that most of us were about the same age, and we had fun, we had potlucks, we did all the things, we were rewarded for our efforts by the company, by the management. So it was a feel-good—we felt good that we provided service. I brought here 40 years of samples of work that we did that is proof. Franklin: Right. Brunson: And it’s something that the people who were in those type jobs can take this to a potential new job, say, this is what I do, here it is. And it’s something that you can look at and see. Most all of us retired or are retiring from that line of service—everybody’s gotten older, of course. And now everybody runs the computer. That’s the way it—that’s how it worked for us. Franklin: Right. Yeah, a lot of your material—a lot of those materials are in the Hanford Collection. Brunson: Yes. Franklin: And are identified as being very historically valuable. So I think that’s a testament to you—to the work of your group. Brunson: Yeah. Well, the models—you have so many fantastic models in your collection. And I don’t know that you have more than what I saw in the walk-through the other day at the open house. Franklin: Mm-hmm. Brunson: I suspect that you have more of them somewhere, because there was a lot of them that we produced. Franklin: Well, what’s in the collection right now is everything that’s been identified to be put in the collection. If there’s models somewhere else, they just aren’t part of our collection, so the DOE hasn’t put them in the collection. Brunson: Yeah. Franklin: I hope there are, too, because they’re very—they have their own preservation challenges, but they’re very engaging. Brunson: Yup. Franklin: People really like the models. So you worked for Westinghouse for 17 years. Brunson: Mm-hmm. Franklin: So that would have been from ’70 to ’87. And then saying ’87 is also significant, because that’s our kind of shutdown of production year. Brunson: Mm-hmm. Franklin: So who did you work for, or—describe that transition to your new— Brunson: From Westinghouse to Boeing? Franklin: Yeah. Brunson: That was—in my eyes, I was very, very disappointed that we went to work for Boeing. We were given away to Boeing as part of the contract. Boeing was given all of the services: photography, video, graphics, printing, publication services—those were all part of the deal. Westinghouse gave—Westinghouse and Boeing partnered. The Westinghouse part of it, they took a bunch of labs from Battelle—or gave some to Battelle—I’m sorry. Battelle had a wonderful photography department and graphics department. They, along with the Westinghouse services, were all given to Boeing. Boeing—it was Boeing Computer Services—and the manager there wasn’t all that familiar with what we provided for the site, and wasn’t all that interested in finding out. He didn’t last very long, but the new management came in and they provided—they were good. They were a good company to work for at that time. But they—because of that, people like myself—I went there as a manager of the graphics department, and was quickly asked to go work and put out a big fire at the publications, printing and reproductions services group, which was a large group. So I was there for a year, managing that group. When the manager of photography and video, which was 65 people—professionals there, he decided to retire early, so I was asked then to go take care of that group, which was a challenge. I really liked it. It was a real good challenge. We had several large groups throughout—down this part of Hanford. We were asked, basically, to reduce that by half, as far as the square footage and all that. So we did a lot of consolidating and all that. And at the same time that that was going on, we were sort of downsizing. It’s when the digital world suddenly was upon us, and we were challenged. We had one of the nicest color labs, in the Federal Building, that was in the Northwest. It was fabulous. And we had the large black-and-white lab in the 300 Area. Franklin: Sorry, can you just describe what a color lab and a black—you mean for reproduction or for photographs? Brunson: For photographs. Franklin: Okay. Brunson: It was quite complex. And what I guess—I can give you an oversight of that, but it would really be great if you can get someone—Dan Ostergaard or someone like that—to sit in this chair and give you a real version of the macrographs and things that they did, as it relates to fuel—the nuclear fuel production. It was a whole new world, and it was an unusual world that they lived in. But by and large, we had photographers—and this was a collection of probably ten really high quality, well-educated technical photographers that provided service for the site. That included hot cells. We had permanent staff in the 200 Area that provided really hard work, as far as recording things in cells where they were doing testing and what-have-you. We had a couple guys that flew aerials every week. They would fly and take pictures of the development of our—whatever was happening on the site. We had—the black-and-white lab was in 300 Area, and they produced all of the negatives, they processed, they did a lot of the printing. They did color printing as well in the small scale. But in the Federal Building, we had a full-blown color printing process that went on there. You could do photographs that were six feet wide and 40 feet long. We had that ability. That work was done mostly for public relations type activities. I mean, that was—they did a lot of macrographs, and that’s—you take a fuel pin, or a piece of fuel—carbon—put it under a million-volt electron microscope, and enlarge that pin up to like four feet wide, and it’d be done in sections. We had folks in the lab that would cut all these things apart and put them back together. It’s kind of hard to describe unless you have a picture of it. But they ended up being this big macrograph that they would then re-photograph and reduce down, and that was—they used that for the research on what happens to nuclear fuels when it’s irradiated. Franklin: Oh, okay. Brunson: So it was a technical process. Photography and graphics both were the last people in the line when something had to be—a report had to go in, or somebody was getting on an airplane to go to D.C. or Virginia, or Europe or someplace for a critical meeting. They’d change and change and change right up to the last minute, and then dump it on us. And our challenge was to produce something that met their needs in the remaining wee hours of the morning. Franklin: Mm-hmm. You mentioned it earlier, so I’d like to go back to it—can you describe—because the digital revolution, right, affected us all in terms of our computer use, but I imagine especially it would have affected the photography and graphic arts departments. Brunson: Yes. Franklin: So I’d like you to kind of talk about those—that change. That whole transformation of that technology. Brunson: That was a process that we all went through, depending on what seat we were sitting at the time. I’ll start with graphics. In the graphics department, we had assigned a young lady the job of gathering the data for our first computer systems. She was looking at things on the PC side and on the Apple side. At that time, the Macintosh had software that was user friendly. We all—we went that way with the Apple—Mac. Franklin: In many cases, they’re still often the— Brunson: Understand. Franklin: --computers of choice for graphics and audio-video. Brunson: Certainly. But what we ran up against, especially with Boeing—Boeing saying, no way, we’re not going to go with anything Apple. You can kiss your Apples goodbye, because we’re not going to go that route. But they didn’t have the software development on the PC side that met our needs. So we’d keep putting them off and putting them off. I know some of their departments now are all back on that side of the fence. But that went on in the graphics side, but on the photography side, it was a real struggle, because our photographers came from the old school—film—and fortunately we had a few guys who were advocates for the digital end and helped us stumble through that. It was a rough journey. But it changed everything we did. We—a group of 75 people—there are now zero photographers at Hanford that we know of—that I know of. They’ve all went by the way of—they’re extinct. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right. And the technology now is—you might not get the same—always the same quality— Brunson: No. Franklin: --but now that everyone has a camera for most purposes that you can document a lot of the history out there. Yeah. So how did—so on the graphics side are you talking mostly about CAD software? Or is that—what kinds of software did you— Brunson: Well, we used— Franklin: Did you use for the graphics software? Brunson: We used FreeHand and Photoshop and those types of Illustrator-type softwares. [SIGH] I’m drawing a blank here. You can cut this out, I guess. Can we stop just a sec? Franklin: Yeah, sure, of course. Brunson: Okay. Get my head on straight. Franklin: Yeah, no worries. Brunson: Where I was going. Ask me the question again. Franklin: I was just—what kinds of software did you primarily use in the— Brunson: Oh, okay. In the graphics side. Franklin: In the graphics process, yeah. Brunson: It was, on the Mac side, it was FreeHand, was our base—when I was heavily involved with it, that was the base. On the PC side, we used Corel Draw, and we used Illustrator and those were kind of the basic ones that I was familiar with. Franklin: When did you feel—because computer power has almost exponentially increased since the invention of the microchip. So when did you finally feel, from a professional standpoint, that these computer technologies were on par or had surpassed a lot of what had been done, then, by analog technologies? Or did you ever feel that it was that way? Brunson: Yeah. When I was at the end of my career—I left there in 2008—by about that time, we were overcome by good technology. Before that, some of the new guys that came in who were really well-trained, it was—they made computers do things that you wonder, how in the world did they do that? You were kind of glad you were getting old. [LAUGHTER] I’ll give you just a brief—at one point when I was with Lockheed, I was asked to go to work on a proposal in the Washington, DC area for the FBI. We were there most of the summer, about 35 days, 40 days, I guess. Franklin: Wow. Brunson: I had familiarity with—a lot of experience with FreeHand. So the last thing I was told before I left was, oh, by the way, they don’t use Macs. They use Corel Draw on PC. I looked at him and I said, I’ve never done any Corel work. Well, you better get started! So I’m getting on, packing my suitcase to go put my life on the line in Virginia or Maryland. So I had a real learning curve, the first week there. And I made it. I got so that I really liked the program. But it was—everything’s about the same, except it’s a little different. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right, you might—the basics are probably pretty easily transferrable, but there’s the details and special features. Brunson: Yup, that’s exactly it. Franklin: So how long did you work for Boeing, and when did Boeing transition? It went from Boeing to Lockheed? Brunson: Boeing to Lockheed. Franklin: And when did that— Brunson: I think that was nine years later—I think I worked for Boeing for nine years before Lockheed came to town. I think. [LAUGHTER] I have it written down somewhere. Franklin: Right, no, that’s understandable. And you worked there until May 2008? Brunson: 2008. Franklin: Can you talk about the—so you worked for Westinghouse—Westinghouse Hanford, Boeing, Lockheed Martin—can you talk about the—I mean you talked a little bit about the attitude between the change in contractors, but was that a—was there kind of like a culture change as well? Brunson: Oh. Franklin: And did your group have to kind of readjust, or were you sheltered from the larger storm of contractors, contractor change? Brunson: Well, we—in a group like—in some groups it was no problem at all, no hassle, nothing to worry about. In our groups, we worked at a level in the company where we were part of—we were part of all the stuff. So when we lost our mothership so to speak, there were hurt feelings and there was a lot of unknown canyons to go down, as far as—we worried about it. We worried about it, that these changes breaking us up and tearing us apart, and it always seemed to do that to some extent. The Lockheed was different than the others—Lockheed Martin—because they were still tied to Lockheed Corporate. There was a Hanford and a Corporate. And half the stuff that we did, we were working for Lockheed Martin Corporate, but we were here. It was—there were a lot more challenges for our organization, and it was more contractor-supported than it was Hanford-supported. I was kind of the Hanford guy. Franklin: Right. Brunson: For years. I was an art director, where most of the old Hanford numbers—everything would come to me, and we would then, you know, get it done, and get it filed correctly and all of that. But there were times, like when I went to work for on this FBI proposal, that that was purely Lockheed Martin. Franklin: Okay. Brunson: So that gave people like me a chance to learn other things and do other things, and it made a better person out of all of us, because we got to do things that—we were tied to the Hanford fence previously. So I don’t know if that answers your question or not. Franklin: Yeah, I think that answers it really well. Brunson: But you have to remember, whenever a contractor came in to take over, there was a proposal. You know, the Department of Energy or AEC or whoever we were at the time, they said, hey, you guys have been doing this work for x number of years. We want to see whether we can get it done cheaper. So every time that happened, every time somebody else took over the contract, there’s things that were lost that we were used to. Whether that was good or bad—most of the time you thought it was bad, because that’s not the way it’s always been done. Just fear of change. There was a lot of downsizing that went on. So groups that had had 65, 68 people in them, suddenly they were down to 20. That meant people went somewhere else to work. So there were layoffs. Franklin: Right, because as you mentioned, a lot of the point of this bidding and contracts was to get the work done at the lowest price. Brunson: Yeah. Franklin: So there’s an incentive there to cut costs when and where you could. Brunson: Yeah. When we transferred—I’d been at Westinghouse 17 years, and I provided quite a bit of work for the proposal. My manager, who was [UNKNOWN], she was the manager of technical communications at the time—she went back to Pittsburgh and worked for almost six months as part of that team. I took her job during that timeframe. We were so excited that we won—we won the bid—and come back and find that—sorry, guys, you’re not going to be Westinghouse anymore; you’re going to Boeing. That was very disheartening to those of us who had been branded with the Circle-W on our butt. We were disappointed and feelings were hurt. Franklin: Right, right. Brunson: It caused all kinds of trauma for a lot of people for a short time. Franklin: Speaking of branding, for work done on the—did each contractor have its own kind of corporate branding that it used on all its own publications, used at Hanford? Did you have to learn a whole new set of corporate graphic identity each time? Brunson: Yes. Franklin: Okay. Brunson: Oftentimes—and there were also—Department of Energy had their own branding, if you will. So there was always a little muddy water about the use of logos and the use of the fonts that were used, the different kinds of fonts, and the colors, and all of that. It was an interesting journey. I’ll put it that way. Franklin: Brand identities, almost sacred. Brunson: Well, it was. Westinghouse, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin all had extreme control on their—they had someone at headquarters that had an eye on everything we did, because we were always getting our hand slapped. You can’t do that. Franklin: Well, let me tell you, it’s the same here. Brunson: Yup. Well, that’s-- Franklin: Everyone’s interested in preserving their brand identity. Was the majority of your work—or I guess maybe can you describe the balance of your work—was it public, for public consumption, or private consumption, or a mixture of both, the work that you did at Hanford? Brunson: It depends on at what phase of my career. Franklin: Okay. Brunson: There were times in the early part of the career that everything that I touched went into a report or a presentation for the site. Franklin: Okay. So for internal consumption? Brunson: Internal. As time went on, some of that—at that time, most of it was, you know, you had to have a Q clearance to be there to begin with. Most everything was pretty private because, on FFTF, that was a new technology and we didn’t do an awful lot of sharing with the public. But then, as time went on and you started doing other things in the career path, you got to do things that were more fun. Public presentations and work for the science centers and things like that, and displays and what-have-you. Franklin: Did your group do work for the Hanford Science Center? Brunson: Yes. Franklin: Okay. How involved were you with the Hanford Science Center? Brunson: As required. We had projects that we would work through. There were several contractors that provided the same service. FFTF, we did a lot of models, as you already know, for FFTF because it was all new. It was new technology, it was a new thought process, and it was new. We had a lot of visitors from throughout the world. We developed the Science Center in the 400 Area out at FFTF that ultimately became the CREHST museum. They moved that building down, downtown. Franklin: Was that the same building that Allied Arts is in—that’s the former CREHST, right? Brunson: No, that’s—CREHST is just a couple notches down. Franklin: Sorry, I’m pretty new to the area. I moved here after CREHST had closed down. So the CREHST building, though, is a former site building? Brunson: It was built on at the 400 Area on a little ridge overlooking the reactor. Franklin: Oh. Brunson: It was put up in a hurry, and we built beautiful displays in there. You could go off—you could drive out there without a badge, and you could go in and go through the Science Center, the Visitors Center, we called it. FFTF Visitors Center. And it told the entire story; we had visual presentation, we had like six projectors that showed these—you could sit through a 30-minute 35-millimeter slide presentation with sound and all that. Franklin: Wow. Brunson: So that was—and that’s where most of those models were ultimately ended up. Some of them were actually in the reactor building itself, where visitors would come in and you could use—you couldn’t go in there because it was hot, but you could look at this model and they could point out various activities that were going on. Franklin: Did you do any work at all at the CREHST museum? Brunson: Personally, I did not, but our staff did. Franklin: Okay. Brunson: Mike Reisenauer did a lot of work for the museum down there. He built a lot of displays at Lockheed Martin. Franklin: Right, because I know that some of the items in our collection from that CREHST Museum were donated by Lockheed Martin. So that’s why I thought there might have been a— Brunson: There were a lot of the things that were in the basement there, which you never got to see, but there was a lot of material that we had created for other displays in the Lockheed Martin Center. We had a building out at the Richland Airport that was—we had a complete model shop in there. Franklin: Oh, okay. Brunson: And that’s where a lot of that stuff was manufactured. Parts—I wasn’t—I never did work in there, but we were—we managed that. It was what it was. Franklin: Right. Brunson: It was as required, we did it. Franklin: Right, right. Is there anything else that I haven’t asked you about that you’d like to mention? Brunson: Well, one of the things that I thought about in coming out here was that in the beginning, prior, you know, in the 50s—the 40s and the 50s, there were very few illustrators. There were very few technical illustrators who knew what to do. There were a few, but on the Hanford site, that often was—that type of work was performed by sign painters. That was a whole new world. It was—a lot of the big visuals back in those days were done by the sign shops. There were a number of sign painters at Hanford. I never did find out how many there were, but each area had two or three or maybe about as many as five sign painters. Franklin: Yeah, we have a lot of signs in our collection. A lot of hand-painted signs. Brunson: Yeah, but a lot of them—I mean 99% of them—weren’t painted on a board or on a piece of metal. They were painted on a tank or a wall or a series of pipes. They became pretty crafty. Sometimes there was a little head-butting that went on between the crafts, you know—you guys can’t do that. Well, yeah, we can. Look, we did it. Well, you’re not supposed to. Well, no, you’re not supposed to. So there was some near-issues with union—or labor and non-labor activities. But the early sign painters were really good artists. The ones that we formatted—or that we faced with, they were really good artists. They were hardly ever recognized as such. Franklin: When did that profession—when did the sign painters start to kind of fade away on the Hanford site? Brunson: Well, they still have them, but now they all have the digital—everything’s digital, and vinyl cutting. I mean, it’s kind of like a graphics shop now. Franklin: Well, I imagine that would’ve been folded kind of into graphic design. Brunson: Yeah, but it never—to my knowledge, it’s never ever—you know, there’s these guys, the ones with x’s on their stomachs and those that have zeros on their stomachs. To my knowledge, they’re still a separate entity. Franklin: Interesting. What kinds of tools did you use as an illustrator when you were doing these drawings and things? What kind of—did you have access to a pretty wide array of tools, or what? Brunson: Well, yes, we did, for the time. At the time, we did. In the early days, we had typesetting machines that had—it was the black-and-white film and we had fonts that were big, and you’d spin it around—if you were spelling something out, you’d spin it around, and then you’d expose it, and it would be exposed to a tape that was going through a photo bath which was all self-contained. It would come out the other side in these long strips—you might have 50 feet of it. There was always problems with the process, too. But we would dry that—or it would come out and it would dry. Then we’d put it through a machine that was a waxer. It would wax the backs of it. Then we’d put it on our drying boards—big Hamilton drying boards, with a long straightedge on it, and we’d cut out all these letters. Then we’d lay them up on the board a line at a time, and clean them up, and then send it to photography to have a photomechanical transfer, which was a black-and-white print. So, a-ha, here it is. Or you could get that same—like the film that I have over here, that is a clear photo—it’s a positive, film positive. And then you can either lay that over another graphics that was airbrushed, or you can paint the back of it, and that was the one that we found on the shelf back on our tour through there of the interim K storage—an illustration. That was an evolution. We went from doing airbrush drawings that was very, very time-consuming. I brought my airbrush and some of the tools. And it was kind of a one-time deal. Back then, to be an illustrator, an artist, you had to be an illustrator and an artist. You couldn’t fake it. You had to know what you were doing. So if you made a boo-boo, you were in trouble. And if somebody who was a good illustrator, but they were clumsy and sloppy, they didn’t last very long, because you couldn’t afford to have him redo it and redo it, you know? So that took a lot of pretty good artists out of the picture, because they couldn’t do what was required of them. Franklin: Right. Well, this sounds like it would be a great time to take a quick break and set up to view some of the materials that you brought. Brunson: Sure. Franklin: To kind of illustrate—literally—your work. Brunson: Okay. Franklin: So we’ll just, we’ll shut it off and then we’ll— [VIDEO CUTS] Brunson: Well, I’ll give it a shot. I’ve done this a few times over the years for schools and what-have-you where I have the thing in my—I have a big studio, I have it all laid out. It’s kind of awkward this way. But basically, an illustration is done—or was done at that time—our client, an engineer, would contact us and come in with the stack of drawings where they needed an illustration done, and what they kind of wanted as the end product. And what we would do is assign it to an illustrator, and he would start by doing a rough pencil sketch after looking at the blueprints to say, is this kind of what you want? Yes, that’s what—he’d come back, and after an initial rough, and then he would start ploughing through all the data. Basically, its drawings were to scale and oftentimes a cutaway to show how it worked. But it had to be accurate, and it had to be the right scale, which was kind of a unique part of the job that we did. The way we would ordinarily lay it out would be we would use all the tools we had in our tool chest to lay it out and to draw it. We would use mechanical pencils. This is a pencil sharpener. We would lay out the drawing, we would ink it then, with—once it had been approved, we would transfer it to product that was—or paper or vellum that was of high quality, or even Mylar. And then we would ink it with fine pens that would—haven’t used these for several years. [LAUGHTER] But they were varying size ink pens. Very accurate and very easy to work with. These have been around for a long time. I’ve owned this set since the early ‘60s. Franklin: Wow. Brunson: But when the illustration was laid out and done, and the engineer took a look at it, we would ask him to tell us what he wanted on a copy—a blueprint copy, to put the words on it that he wanted on it, the title. And in the beginning, the titles were normally put on with a paintbrush. Franklin: Mm-hmm. Brunson: And oftentimes red tempera paint, like we used to use in grade school, you know. It worked easy and it went down well and it looked nice. Any really fine illustrations—I should say the fonts and the wording, oftentimes if it was really important, we would use this setup, which is a template that has an indentation, and we would put one of these type of pens into a little bug. This is called the bug. And it would line up in the track. We would follow this—it’s difficult to show on here, but the line would—you would follow the lettering—I don’t know, is this going to show or not? But it would—you’d be producing a—it would be—you’d lay it on—let’s— Camera man: Can you move it around? Franklin: Maybe we can—can you flip this part of it? Can you put this over there? Brunson: Do what now? Franklin: Hold it like that. But like—maybe hold it like that so they can— Brunson: Well, yeah, that’d be wrong, but that’d be putting it down below. It’s difficult. Ultimately, what it amounts to is that you’d have a—it would be laying down on a surface, and—[LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah, sorry, we’re not really set up for the visual displays. Brunson: But anyway, this— Camera man: If you don’t mind, maybe I’ll just get closer. Maybe that will work. Emma Jo Rice: Okay, perfect. Maybe flip it and tell him to use that? Or what do you think? Camera man: Let’s try just to get closer to it. Rice: Okay. Camera man: So I have to—just a second here. Yeah. Move that out of the way. Okay. Brunson: That do it? Well, this, basically is a stylus that follows the shape of the letter, and above up here, a pen would be laying down the letters one by one. You’d move this around until you developed a sentence or a word, a callout. So this was—it looks awkward, and it looks like it’s time-consuming, but it isn’t. In reality, it goes real quickly. And there’s—sometimes there’s boo-boos, if you aren’t watching yourself, you’ll misspell something. It’s easily done. But that was one of the—this was a nice advance, because we used to do it all with a red sable paintbrush. That’s how we’d put the lettering on the illustrations. So this type of information was giant leap forward. Then once we started getting photo paper, that enabled us to—technology just kept advancing this about as fast as we could keep up with it. And we’d buy stuff, and before the year was out, it was obsolete because something else had come along. So thank goodness, it enabled us to provide a better end product. This was just basically an illustration of—we have a photograph, a colored photograph, of one of the illustrations that shows this. I don’t know what more to say about it than that. Franklin: Okay. No, that’s great. So maybe now we’ll—do you feel comfortable, now that we’ve shown this, do you want to move on to the photographs? Brunson: Sure. Franklin: So what we’ll do then is you’ll sit where I’m sitting, I’ll kind of come around to the side. We’ll get the music stand up, get it focused on the stand, and I’ll come and bring some of our materials over here. And then we will-- Rice: Does that go down any more, or just tilt it? Camera man: That works. Rice: Okay. [INAUDIBLE] Brunson: I don’t even know who that was. Rice: I think that should be okay. Brunson: Can you— Rice: It’s actually positioned—it seems so simple, but it’s really [INAUDIBLE] What do you-- Brunson: Yeah, that’s— Rice: If you want to— Brunson: No, we can— Franklin: [INAUDIBLE] to where you’re at. Rice: Sure. Franklin: Oh, no, I’ll just be behind. Rice: Okay. Franklin: Right here. Okay. Are we ready? Camera man: Yeah, yeah. Let’s go ahead. Franklin: So this is—why don’t you describe this illustration first. What it was, where we would have found it. Brunson: Okay. This was part of the fuel development activity that was an ongoing process at Hanford for nuclear fuel. I picked this one out because it was an attractive illustration. Franklin: Mm-hmm. Brunson: There were techniques that were used on this work where I—in this particular way of putting lettering on. You’ll notice the lettering, that the callouts that identify it and the title on this, those were all—this was about a 32 x 40 inch illustration. It was a black-and-white cutaway illustration in perspective. And it was then transferred onto an illustration board, and it was airbrushed. Franklin: Okay. Brunson: Which was a time-consuming process. This whole—an illustration like this would probably take a week, a week-and-a-half to do. And it maybe changed several times during that whole process. This was an advanced technique, because prior to using these type of tools, this was often done with a paintbrush. Franklin: Wow. Brunson: Which didn’t have the same sharpness and same quality. This is a very attractive illustration. Franklin: It is. Brunson: And it’s very well done. It was, again, an airbrushed illustration. Franklin: So then, just to reiterate, the lettering on this illustration was put on there by the same method that you demonstrated there with the stylus and the guide. Brunson: Yes, that is correct. Franklin: And so that allows, I imagine, for a lot of kind of quality control over, and consistency— Brunson: Yes. Franklin: --throughout the illustration not to distract from the information being presented. Brunson: And the bad thing about doing the lettering on something like this: after you’ve already done all of this, and spent a week in that process, to have a boo-boo with the paintbrush or a bug, it was a disaster. You had bad dreams about things like that-- Franklin: Oh, jeez. Brunson: --if you’re an illustrator. Franklin: So one of the next ones, kind of a personal favorite of mine, one that’s in our collection of the FFTF, I’d like you to talk about this publication. Were you in charge of the design of this? Brunson: Well— Franklin: Oh, here, can we— Brunson: I wanted to see what was in it. Franklin: Oh, okay. Brunson: And see—I didn’t even—yeah, these were— Franklin: Did you do the cover of this? Was this part of your group, or--? Brunson: Yes, yes. Yeah. Franklin: Okay. So kind of describe if you can remember, kind of the thought that went in—this is a very kind of futuristic-looking, digital—but with this kind of realistic photo dropped on it. So kind of maybe describe the kind of the thought process behind this cover. Brunson: Well, it—I didn’t personally draw this—or lay this out. David Beckley, I think, was the illustrator that did, and he was very, very talented. This was in celebration of the first three years of FFTF in operation. It was kind of a bragging tool, if you will. It had—there was—one, it was expensive to do. Back in those days, it was expensive to do something like this. And it borderline pushed the edge for what was legal to do, as far as colors and all of that. Franklin: Oh, okay. Brunson: But internally—this, of course is an aerial view of the FFTF Reactor that we put in there. Same illustration. And basically, went through and set all sorts of—oh-ho, there’s an illustration that I did. Well, not only did I do it, but nearly every other person that worked on the FFTF project had some dealings with this, because it changed so many times. But this is an illustration that I did. There was another illustrator who did this little section, this building here, Ron Wick, who retired recently from Supply System. He helped with that, and I did everything else. We submitted it, and it won an international award. Franklin: Wow. Brunson: But it was—this was just basically a recap of the construction milestones and the various activities as they were being—these major components as they were being installed. So it was a classic—this brochure won an award as well. Franklin: Oh, okay. Brunson: For that time. Franklin: Yeah, it’s very visually appealing with its photos. Was the cover—was that done with—was that a—did computers create this cover, or was this kind of analog reproduction of kind of a digital—I guess that’s— Brunson: Yeah, it looks digital, doesn’t it? Franklin: Yeah, it looks kind of very Tron. Brunson: This is probably the third or fourth version, and I think those kind of things evolved. This was a good product. We were all proud to be part of that association. Franklin: Okay. So the next one is another one that we mentioned. We’ll see how we can get this to stay. Might have to come and—oh! All right. Wow. Brunson: Well, that’s pretty well— Franklin: Yeah. It might make it there for a minute. Actually, I’ll probably-- Brunson: We could probably—well that—I think that shows it pretty well. Franklin: Yeah, it sure does. So why don’t we talk about that—so this is the illustration that you said won an award. Brunson: Yeah, it did. And it was done—this was drawn and, of course, like I said, we did so many variations of this drawing. It was inked and this part here, the building itself, was a film positive. It was a giant, clear film with black lines on it. And then we painted on the back of it with acrylic. Franklin: Okay. Brunson: And it was kind of what Disney’s cartoons did. That’s where we kind of developed this thinking of that aspect. It made life a lot easier. It was so much faster than airbrush. Franklin: Okay. Brunson: So this is kind of a step up from airbrush. This was 32 inches wide by 40 inches long. It’s actually out of that proportion. This is an illustration of this core that was also 40 inches long. Franklin: Oh, wow. Brunson: And these were 40 inches long. And we did all of these illustrations, time and time again. The background here was done with opaque watercolor. And then this unit was laid on top of that. That’s how it was done. It was—at that time, that was kind of the state of the art. Franklin: Right. Sounds like there’s a lot of different techniques that go into this, different processes. Brunson: And this was all done with sponge. I mean this part down here was just a sea sponge and various colors of dark and light paint. Franklin: Oh, wow. Brunson: And the sky—the actual original, the sky was a little nicer than it is here. But that’s, of course—that’s kind of the setting. So this was in Nuclear Engineering as their centerfold of the year— Franklin: I’ll show that cover real quick. Brunson: --for International Nuclear Engineering. Franklin: Oh, that means you’re top billing right there, the FFTF Foldout. Brunson: Yeah. I was always proud of that. We all were. Rice: That’s a hand-painted title? Franklin: So this is a hand-painted title here? Brunson: Yeah, this is a paintbrush. Red sable brush. You just hand-lettered to make sure that you’ve got it. You lay it out on a piece of paper so you know exactly the center of it and where it’s going to be, and then go in with a light pencil and pencil it in so you had your spelling correct. Because it’s pretty—I’ve even misspelled my name a few times, when you’re concentrating on doing it. So that’s just me. So it was laid out in pencil and then you just hold your breath and start painting, after you’ve scribbled on a piece of scrap for a while to get the feel. If you didn’t do that every day, it was kind of pot luck. Franklin: Right. Brunson: And down here, again, these were done with the bug. Franklin: The stylus? Brunson: Yeah, with the stylus. Rice: So why were some of the titles hand-painted? Brunson: Well, one, they were large. Rice: Mm-hmm. Brunson: You know, some of them were this tall on these illustrations. There wasn’t really any other way, at that time—that we had—that you could create that. Rice: Mm. Brunson: So that was just part of the timeframe. Franklin: That one’s great. Rice: That’s awesome. Franklin: So let’s do—talk a little bit about this. Brunson: Yeah, this was interesting. This—Hank Krueger was one of our cartoonists for years out there. Had a very distinct style and a personality that was—it was great. He was really a character. The Hanford News was, like it says, serving the Hanford family. It came out once a week, and it had all sorts of information in it regarding the state of Hanford. This was a Christmas—it was actually security—it was a security statement about where’s your badge? Franklin: Yeah! Brunson: I’ve kept this for years and years. I’ve shown it a lot. So it always tickles me to see it. Because everything about it has something to do with safety. And that’s how you could justify doing something like that. Franklin: Mm-hm. Brunson: Because an illustration like this doesn’t happen overnight. It took a little—it costs a little to do that. But the Hanford News, for years, the whole back page of it was ads. It was kind of like the free ads that are in the Tri-City Herald today, you know. So there was always a lot of interest in buying a boat or duck decoys or an end table or something. Consequently, it kind of distracted from the work being done on Fridays. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Brunson: So they normally wouldn’t produce—they wouldn’t hand it out until quitting time on Fridays. Franklin: Oh, okay, right, yeah, that makes good sense. So here we go. This might be a little small, but here we have some of the ads here. Right, so cars for sale, wanted. And these were all for—did it cost to, or were these all free ads? Brunson: These were all free ads. Franklin: Oh, okay. Brunson: But you had to be on site. You know, for sale, and wanted, and trade, and free, and commuter pools. So it was a great service. Franklin: Right. Brunson: And all the contractors got it. So it was a great deal. Franklin: Right, yeah, I can imagine that this would have been important. Brunson: But that was part of what we did as well in the graphics department. Rice: [INAUDIBLE] the next one? Franklin: So, here we go. So this photo has you in it right? Brunson: Yeah, that’s me. Franklin: Over on the, second from the left? Brunson: Yeah, I’m the non-president male. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, this is a picture of the president of Westinghouse Hanford Company. His name was Al Squires. This is the team that we finally pulled together after years of actually working on it, the Final Safety Analysis Report. FSAR. It was a major, major activity regarding the safety of the operation of FFTF. Franklin: Wow. Brunson: It was a big job and a lot of people supported it. We had a special activity where they thanked us and gave us cake or something. [LAUGHTER] This was the team that was in charge of the management of it. Franklin: So—this one? Rice: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. Rice: [INAUDIBLE] Franklin: Yeah. This is kind of different. Brunson: Yeah. Franklin: And all of these—all of the things we’ve scanned—all of the items Dennis brought, and then others we’ll make available with the interview on our website. So why don’t you tell us a bit about—this seems a little bit different from— Brunson: Well, there was a time when the PRTR Reactor building in the 300 Area, it was the Plutonium Research Test Reactor. It was a little domed building in the southeast part of the 300 Area. They decided this would be a great place to do work on the Star Wars activities. They were actively pursuing this when we got a new President, and it all went down with one big flush. But during that timeframe, we had a lot of illustrators that got to do some neat drawings about potential activities in space. So it was indeed a Hanford— Franklin: Project? Brunson: Project. Franklin: So the new President you’re talking about, would that have been—so it was George HW? Brunson: No, it was before that. It was back in the Carter days and times like that. Franklin: Oh, okay. Okay, so this predated the Star Wars—Reagan’s STI. Okay, but this was some of the-- Brunson: Yeah. We got excited about it for a while, but we just—it didn’t pan out. So that’s— Franklin: That’s pretty exciting. Rice: Yeah. Franklin: Pretty exciting picture. So this here—let me— Brunson: I don’t know if you can see that—no, that’s-- Franklin: Summary Description of the Fast Flux— Brunson: This is called a HEDL-400. HEDL was Hanford Engineering Development Laboratory. Franklin: Okay. Brunson: We were basically in charge of the Fast Flux Test Facility. Franklin: Does 400 correspond to the area? Brunson: It is—well, I assumed that it did. It was the 400 Area. But inside, that’s—this is the—that’s the negative for that FFTF—the big one— Franklin: Oh, okay! Rice: Cool! Brunson: And they handed this to me in celebration. That was in 1981, when this was produced. Pat Cabell was the editor-in-chief, and I was sort of his whipping boy. Doing illustrations for all of the—and putting the book together. Are you able to see that? A lot of the illustrations in here, I did a lot of these illustrations. And a lot of us in the groups did them. But this is the interim decay storage facility that you have an illustration for over here. Franklin: Right. That’s right here, yeah. Brunson: This was the black-and-white version of that. Franklin: Okay. Brunson: That illustration that you have was done with the film positive and we painted on the back of it. Franklin: Okay. Brunson: I put a six-foot-tall cowboy down here in the corner to show scale. Franklin: That’s how large this is. Brunson: Yeah. Franklin: Okay, great. Brunson: So this basically is the bible of FFTF, as far as how it’s constructed and how it was finalized. It’s kind of an as-built. Franklin: Okay. Oh, great. Do you have the Ron Kathren— Rice: Oh, yeah, yeah. Franklin: Yeah. That might be a good one to—I don’t know if we want to go through every single one. Brunson: No, that wasn’t my intent. Franklin: No, but we will make all of those available. Rice: Did he go into detail about how that whole thing was produced? Franklin: This one? I believe so. Brunson: Yeah, pretty much. Franklin: The airbrush and the— Rice: I didn’t quite catch that. I know the other ones— Franklin: So, how do you—Husco--? Brunson: Huscoubea. Franklin: So this is kind of Tri-Cities history, and-- Brunson: Yup! Franklin: WSU Tri-Cities, but also Hanford, in the way of the Joint Center for Graduate—so why don’t you talk a bit about the Huscoubea and your contribution to— Brunson: Yeah, this was—there was a fellow who—his name was Trent—who worked at WSU. Frank Trent was his name. He was a maintenance guy, and he was an artist. He was asked to come up with a critter that was part husky, part cougar and part beaver. They were initially going to use it for the first graduation—the diploma—as kind of a logo. And he struggled with it, and then he came to me and said, hey, can you help me? So I came up with a black-and-white version and they liked it. So he then came back later and they had me do an oil painting of it. So this is part of an oil painting that’s a little bit larger—I mean, shows the river bank, and the river in the distance and all of that. Franklin: Mm-hmm. Brunson: And it hung here at the college for years, and I think somewhere it’s still hanging. I hope. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: And so here’s another. Brunson: Oh, yeah. Franklin: We’ll have to come up here—and so—a little more. This is Professor Emeritus Ron Kathren who’s been interviewed by us, and Herbert Parker Foundation, long-time health physics professional and proud Coug, holding the oil painting of the Huscoubea on our 20th celebration, which I think would have been in 2008 or 2009. Brunson: Yeah. Franklin: So this was the final painting, then. Brunson: That’s the painting. Franklin: --that was done. Brunson: It hung in this building upstairs, as you came in. For years and years it was there. Yeah. I used to come out here for art classes at night and on the weekends. It was—it always hung there and I was always so proud of it. It was an unusual illustration. Franklin: Yeah. It’s probably maybe the most unusual college mascot-- Brunson: [LAUGHTER] Rice: Yeah. Franklin: --I’ve ever seen. Brunson: It didn’t last for long. Franklin: Okay, so this will be our last one here. Both of them? Rice: Well, the hand drawing probably. Franklin: Okay. Rice: I don’t know if it will show up, though. Oh, okay. Franklin: It looks like it will. So this obviously isn’t a final, right? Brunson: No, that’s considered a rough. Franklin: Okay. Brunson: That was—we did an ongoing—that was a main—a big part of our activity at Hanford in the graphics department was safety and security. Franklin: Right. Brunson: And it kept a lot of people employed, because they’re always wanting something new to—it was very—they were real serious about safety and security, which is great. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah, when you’re dealing with nuclear reactors. Brunson: Yeah. Franklin: Yeah. And the Hanford safety record is very well-documented. Okay, well that’s great. And—that, yeah. So, Dennis, thank you so much for coming. Brunson: Well— Franklin: And sharing your story and walking us through the process. Brunson: This was fun. Franklin: Oh, great. Well, thank you. Brunson: I could probably keep this up for a couple hours! [LAUGHTER] If you didn’t have something important to do. <a href="https://youtu.be/pXttl755HyE">View interview on Youtube.</a> Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 200 Area T Canyon B Canyon FFTF (Fast Flux Test Facility) 300 Area Hanford Science Center 400 Area PRTR (Plutonium Reclamation Test Reactor) HEDL (Hanford Engineering Development Laboratory) Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1964- Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1964-2008 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Dennis Brunson Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Technical illustration Radioactive waste disposal Nuclear reactors Description An account of the resource Dennis Brunson moved to Richland, Washington in 1964. Dennis worked on the Hanford Site from 1964- 2008. An interview conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by Mission Support Alliance on behalf of the United States Department of Energy. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 10/18/2016 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. 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Relation A related resource <a href="http://hanfordhistory.com/collections/show/12">Oral History Metadata</a> https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F6b4db4212c37a7652631b305e2cbff9a.jpg 0651c8b24a396c46ba1ed5ace42bbf05 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Donald Baker Location The location of the interview Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I’m conducting an oral history interview with Don Baker on April 5, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Don about his experiences working on the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Don Baker: My name is Donald E. Baker. It’s spelled D-O-N-A-L-D, initial E., last name B-A-K-E-R. Franklin: Great. And do you prefer to go by—I should’ve asked you before—Don or Donald? Baker: Don is fine. Franklin: Okay. Baker: Either one, I’ll respond. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Okay. So, Don, tell me how and why you came to the Hanford Site. Baker: Well, I had heard very little bit about Hanford. But early in the school year, June of—well, it was probably March or April of 1951, an interviewer from Hanford came to the University of Idaho. And I was a graduate student there at the time. I was interviewed for work over here, and then eventually ended up hiring on. I reported for work in Richland on early June of 1951. Franklin: What was your graduate degree in? Baker: My graduate degree was in chemistry. I was part of a group of probably over 200 recent graduates that came in that year, hired on with General Electric. General Electric was the contractor at that time that was in charge of the entire Hanford Project. Franklin: Wow. Okay. Did you have any idea—did you interview for a specific job at Hanford, or--? Baker: No, I didn’t. At that time, really, there was not a lot known to the general public, because it still was a very classified operation that they were running here. So, I just assumed that with my background in chemistry that I would find some interesting work here. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Baker: And I certainly did. Franklin: Yeah. Did you have any other job offers, or had you interviewed in any other places before you--? Baker: No, I really was interested in knowing more about this. This would probably have been my first preference, and definitely after I knew more about it, I knew that I had made a good choice. But the conditions here were, shall we say, a little rustic at that time as far as living conditions. When I reported here, I was offered living accommodations in a barracks-type dormitory building in north Richland. I was there for approximately, oh, maybe two or three weeks. During that time, we were given orientation, lectures and so on. And at the end of that two or three weeks’ time, I was offered to do some work in off-site inspection. Now, offsite inspection was a group of engineers that were following contracts where equipment was being built for Hanford. Quite a ways away from chemistry, but nevertheless, it sounded like an interesting opportunity for me, because it could give me an opportunity to see just what the real world was like, as far as how equipment was fabricated. So, after being here for only about three weeks, I packed my bags and was off to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to a plant that was fabricating approximately one-cubic-foot containers for some work here at Hanford. This was in a foundry-type place where heavy vessels were fabricated. This particular company was known for their huge beer processing vessels that the tanks were made for making beer that were glass-lined. They were made out of carbon steel, and then they would go into a huge furnace where a glaze was put on the inside of the tanks. That was quite a ways away from the type of work that Hanford was requiring them to do. They were making approximately a one-cubic-foot vessel to extremely tight specifications that the people found hard to believe or understand when they first started the job. It was a stainless steel tank that had an off-center pipe in it. It was made to very tight specifications, dimensionally to within one-thousandth to three-thousandths of an inch. And it had a special fitting on the top to connect to equipment that it would be used on here at Hanford. It had to be leak-tight so that it would only leak approximately one cubic centimeter in 30 years. That’s tight. And also, cleanliness specifications that were really unheard of. After the container was fabricated, it would be fired in a huge tank-like furnace with hydrogen present. That would turn this into a shiny metal vessel. From that point on, it could not be touched with bare hands. This was really, really difficult to impress on the people that were fabricating, because they were used to handling anything with whatever old leather gloves they had. Because there was to be no fingerprints or anything like that on there, and it was to be completely clean. Well, that went well, because as soon as they figured the inspectors that were back there would reject anything that they saw was handled without white gloves, they caught on in a hurry, and we had no trouble from then on. The job was completed, and they did an excellent job on making these containers for us. The next assignment that I had after that—that was about three months that we worked on that particular contract. I then went to an aluminum company in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They were making aluminum process tubes that would be used in the reactors out here. It was really interesting to me to see the way that they proceeded to make these. They would start out with a billet of aluminum, oh, maybe three or four inches in diameter, with a hole through it. By successively pulling that aluminum through dies, they would reduce it from the original dimension down to a process tube that was approximately an inch-and-three-quarters in diameter and roughly 42 feet long. Not only was it a long tube, it had ridges at about 4:00 and 8:00 to support fuel that would go in there and allow for water circulation all the way around the fuel. So as they would draw this, these little ridges would gradually go down until they were exactly where they were. And also there could be no twist in this, so if the ridges were at 4:00 and 8:00 at one end of the tube, they needed to be at the same location at the other end of the tube. But they were very experienced in dong this type of work, and they proceeded to do a fine job for us. After the tubes were inspected and approved for shipment, they would slide like a cardboard sleeve over the outside to protect them, and then these were placed in long wooden boxes. Now, we hear a lot about recycling, but at that time, it wasn’t in everybody’s vocabulary. But they needed some wooden boxes and somebody out here at Hanford said, you know, we had had some previous orders of these tubes, where are the boxes? And they said, oh, these boxes have been surplused and somebody comes in and they have an auction out there and bought them all up. Well, it turns out that the very boxes that we needed were in a surplus yard out in West Richland. The people here, recycling on their mind, contacted that person, bought them back from him after he had bought them here, shipped them to the plant that was manufacturing the tubes back in Pittsburgh and they loaded them up. Then they had to go in a special rail car. Normally, boxcars have side-opening doors. This had to have an end-opening doors on it, so that the tubes, forty-some feet long could be put in this 50-foot box car. Then a bulkhead was built in the end of the railcar in there so the load could not shift. It was stacked to probably about eight, nine feet high in the boxcar and shipped out here and unloaded out here on the plant. So it was interesting to see how they proceeded to do this. This would’ve been in 1951. Interestingly, that was about the time that commercial household aluminum foil came onto the market. It was much in-demand, especially for the holiday season in December there. The employees and people of this plant could buy a thing of aluminum foil at the company store there when it wasn’t available commonly in the supermarkets and so on. But some of these things, you know, we take for granted now that they’ve just always been there. But this company was making all kinds of things, including process tubes for use at Hanford. Franklin: Interesting. Baker: Then, after that project was completed in three or four months, I think, that we were there, I was assigned to another one in Ohio. The process tubes on the reactor go in through a steel tube that is called a gun barrel. This gun barrel is approximately, I would say maybe seven or eight feet long. It had stepped areas on it so that radiation could not stream out of the reactor; it would be stopped by the steel, different intervals long there. Again, this was something that had to be made to within at least a one-thousandth to three-thousandths clearance on every dimension. It was made of steel. The company that had the contract to make these could not fulfill their contract. They failed, and the contract had to be taken away from them. They were months behind, and they had created a huge pile of scrap and that was all to show for their experience. So the contract was canceled, and it was given to another company that was doing work exclusively for the US Navy. In fact, they even managed to get some of the special tooling that was only available that belonged to the US Navy, and it was applied to our job. They put the job—they got busy on it and came through beautifully, and they were able to use these. Because the construction, really, it was essential. They couldn’t put the process tubes in the reactor that was being built at this time until these components were in place. So, it was pretty straightforward once they got the right people working on the job. Again, they came through and provided what we needed out here. So, this pretty much takes care of my first year of employment here. I came back to Hanford, and I was at that time, I still did not have my security clearance. So I was assigned, though, to the B Reactor area and worked with an engineer there on an efficiency study for the power plant. Some of these seem a ways away from chemistry, but, nevertheless, we did do chemical analysis on the combustion products from the coal plant. They were looking for just small improvements on the efficiency, because coal was a big expense for here as far as producing steam. The steam was needed to heat the facilities out there, but it was also used as part of the high pressure pumping system for the reactor. They had an electric motor, and on that same drive shaft was a steam turbine. So if the electric motor lost its power, the steam turbine would pick up the load and supply high pressure water to the reactor until it would get cooled down. So it was a backup for loss of electric power as well. So I worked at that, and about six weeks after I started in on that project, my security clearance came through. That’s what I’d really been waiting for and I got notice of that in the morning, and in the afternoon, the engineer I was working with, my manager, took me over and showed me B Reactor for the first time. And, of course, I was quite impressed with what I saw. It gave me a chance, too, to see where some of these components that I had observed being made across the country, where they were being used out here at Hanford. So after we finished the steam plant study—and by the way, we found out that they were doing a good job as far as the operators. There wasn’t much that we could uncover that would improve their operation. The thing that really made a difference was with the quality of coal that they were buying. If they bought coal that was of low quality, cheap, they didn’t get good results from it. So that was kind of what we learned from that. But at least we knew that no further improvements could be made as far as we could tell. After that, I spent some time, oh, three or four months with the reactor operations group. Then, I was offered an opportunity to do work on graphite research. Graphite had become a really, really big problem. It was going to be limiting the life of the reactors, and they could see that that was exactly where things were headed. This was, again, in 1952. So, they had two large groups of people, a graphite research and a graphite development group, that were studying what to do with this problem. Meantime, DR Reactor had been built, because they could see its lifetime was fast approaching end-of-life, and the plan was that they could then just switch the water plant when D was shut down over to DR and just move on from there. Well, as it turned out, with all this intensive effort, they found ways that they could minimize the expansion that was incurring in the graphite. Up ‘til that time, they had been keeping it nice and cool with helium atmosphere, you know, and everything. As it turned out, the graphite was really being damaged more by those low temperatures than allowing it to go a little higher in temperature. Because every time a fission reaction would occur, a very energetic neutron, over 2 MeV neutron would be generated, and this would interact with the atoms in the graphite and cause it to swell. So by operating at a little higher temperature, you began to relieve some of these problems. But there was a tremendous amount of research that went into there. We would be putting—I was then with a group that would be putting samples in the reactor, taking them out at six weeks to two month intervals, and measuring them in the 300 Area laboratories, then returning them back to the reactor. This way, we were able to learn a lot about what was happening and how to make the reactor measurements so that we could improve the operating characteristics of the plant. In addition to physical measurements, expansion and so on, they measured the conductivity. This was one of the areas that I got pretty heavily involved with. How well the graphite would conduct heat determines, to a large extent, what the temperature’s going to be in there. So, typically, the traditional method was to take a large cylinder of graphite, put a heater in it, and measure temperatures in it as a function of power input and all that. So, it was about that time that somehow or other, I ran across some work that was being done at a US Naval research laboratory in San Francisco area. So I contacted the physicist down there and asked him about it. He invited me down there. He says, I can’t tell you exactly how or what we’re doing with this, but he says, I can show you our equipment and you can take it from there. So, it was a different approach and exactly what we needed to measure the thermal conductivity of graphite from the reactors out there. What they used was putting a pulse of heat into a very small piece of graphite, smaller than the size of a dime. They would put a pulse of heat in there and then measure how fast that heat pulse traveled through this thin sample. From that, you can derive the thermal conductivity. Just what we were looking for. We were able to build equipment that would go into, from the front face of the reactor, go into an opening in the reactor where the process tube had been removed. The saw would rotate 90 degrees and remove a plug of graphite from the inside of that graphite channel. Then we would take that into our lab, slice it up into pieces, and we could tell exactly how the conductivity was changing from the area where the cold processing tube was in contact with the graphite, to out to the edges of the graphite blocks. This provided us a lot of data that hadn’t previously been available. So we built the equipment here to do that type of measurement. They were using flash tubes as the pulse heat source, but it was flash tubes that would be used for aerial night photography. So these were pretty powerful flash tubes. But approximately a year after we started using that technique, lasers were developed. Then we started using pulse lasers, which were a big improvement. From then on, it was pretty much a standard way of measuring conductivity on small samples. In fact, because that capability was available here, one of the things that had been done was to recover a large amount of technetium. Now, technetium is not available in—normally, it’s an element in the periodic table—I don’t remember just which number, now—but all of it that ever was available, if it was, had since decayed. I think it has about a 4-million-year half-life. Very long half-life. But it is a fission product, and they were able to process enough fission products to come up with technetium that could be converted to the metal. And one of my engineering friends out there worked on this project for quite a while. So we got to talking one day, and I said, what are the chances that I could get small piece of that technetium? He said, just fine, we could make that available to you. So, I was able, then, to report for the first time the thermal conductivity of technetium and report it in the literature. So, I really had some interesting assignments along the way. Much of the work on graphite was documented in a book called Nuclear Graphite. It was compiled, edited, by Dr. Richard Nightingale, brought together a lot of information on radiation damage in graphite material. This led into—well, I’ll go back a step there. Battelle came on the scene in 1965. So my employment then changed from General Electric to Battelle. Franklin: Because you had been working at Hanford Labs, right? Baker: Yes. I was working at Hanford Labs at the time, so that part of it went to Battelle, the research side of it. We continued to do graphite research until about 1968 or ’69. At that point, Westinghouse was given the contract to do some preliminary work on the Fast Flux Test Facility. We had a pretty good handle on the graphite problems at that time. There were still, though, questions on materials for using them in a much higher flux environment in the Fast Flux reactor. So we were assigned the task of doing some testing with boron carbide. Now, boron carbide is another interesting, very high temperature material. It has a melting point of about 2,350 Celsius. Incidentally, the graphite—to go back a step there—is made from petroleum coke and petroleum distillates, some of the byproducts of processing petroleum. When it’s just in the form of coke, it’s similar to the charcoal that we might use in our barbecue. But if it is mixed with other carbonaceous products, made into graphite, and then heated up to 2,700 to 2,900 degrees Celsius in electric furnaces, it will turn it into this material that is used for electrodes in electric furnaces. Electric furnace melting is common in the steel industry. When it came time to produce all the graphite that was needed for the reactors out here, already in industry there were a lot of people who knew a lot about graphite, because they had been in the process of making this into electrodes for many years. So then we—to get back—we moved into the boron carbide research, and work was done at testing facilities in Idaho. The problem with boron carbide is that it produces a helium—an alpha particle, a helium atom for each neutron that it captures. Boron-10 is an excellent absorber of material to use in controlling reactors. But it does have the disadvantage that it produces gases. So, the boron carbide is made in the shape of small pellets about half-inch in diameter. When they’re processed, some of the helium is retained in the crystal structure of the boron carbide pellet, but the rest of it is released into the steel pin that contains it. So, eventually it pressurizes the pin and limits how long a control rod will operate. So, our assignment was to figure out under what conditions the helium gas was released and what improvements could be made to make the boron carbide control rods last as long as possible. There was also another thing that was unknown at that time, and that was if a tube should fail, and if there was sodium flowing past it, would it wash out the boron carbide pellets that was in there or not? Well, we actually set up an experiment to do that. With some facilities back at Westinghouse in Pittsburgh, they were able to flow sodium over a simulated failed pin and we could examine what happened. So, this was the type of work that involved high temperature materials that turned out to be the career that I worked on. It was chemically related, but very materials-oriented. I found it to be a fascinating career to be associated with. It really was something where there were a lot of problems and a lot of challenges. So we were able to supply the answers to a lot of that. So that worked pretty well continued up until the mid, oh, about 1986 or so, when I became involved in a group that was doing experiments in the FFTF. There was a need for information on fusion energy at that time, as to what kind of materials could be used in what they called the blanket of a test machine that was being designed. So, we were able to work with Canadian scientists and Japanese scientists on coming up with a design of an experiment that would be placed in the FFTF. This was probably one of the most difficult, most challenging experiments that I had in my whole career working at Hanford, because the experiment was fully instrumentated so that you could follow everything that was happening, and yet it had to be completely failsafe, so that if the experiment failed, the reactor could continue operating without shutting down. We succeeded in designing the experiment. The Canadian scientists were extremely helpful in designing part of the tritium recovery, because tritium is what we were producing in these tests. Every bit of tritium had to be recovered. We had a large glovebox, it was about 12 feet high with multiple glove ports. We’d reach in at different levels and operate valves and equipment inside of it. Many challenges, and it operated absolutely perfectly the whole time, and it provided a lot of data. Battelle was responsible for compiling, reporting the data at many conferences. The experiment continued until, and an experiment was in place when Hanford received the orders from the Department of Energy that the FFTF had to be shut down and we had to terminate our experiments at that time. But it seemed like we really got a lot of important information as a result of the experiments that were done. It turned out to me to be an exciting career to be involved with. So that kind of summarizes quite a few years of interesting work at Hanford for me. Franklin: What was the tritium used for when that was being created? Baker: The tritium eventually was used for the weapons program. But it was more of a byproduct of a material that was being used for control rods. Because control rods were used in all the reactors out there. Since it could build up pressure inside of the tubes, we needed to know how much. There even was some work that we were involved with in putting a metal sintered—like an escape valve—on some of the pins so that as the gas would be produced, the helium could be released without allowing sodium to go back in. But it was not highly successful and we gave up on that after not too much experimental work. But the combination of sodium being a reactive metal, as it is, we had a lot of challenges, too. Oh, another interesting part of the graphite work that we did was, in addition to looking at dimensional changes that were causing the graphite to expand and contract, in some cases, too, after a certain point, it would contract. So, you had peaks and valleys in a channel through the reactor. They tried to go in and bore that hole out so that it would be easier to slip a process tube through. And in some cases, they were successful, but the graphite, after it’s irradiated becomes extremely hard. They had to use carbon tools to even kind of—we use carbon tools all the time in the laboratory; otherwise, metal saw blades just wouldn’t do it. We had to use diamond blades to cut into it, it was so hard. But we also were interested—once they learned to use a gas mixture: a mixture of CO2 and helium to adjust the temperature. This was the key to controlling the expansion that was limiting the life of the reactors. Once we started using that, then we needed to know, in a radiation field, will carbon dioxide react at a different rate with carbon? Because at a high temperature, CO2 plus carbon will produce carbon monoxide. So we put together our own high-radiation-level cobalt source in the 300 Area. I went out looking again, it was the recycle route. We found a surplus tank that had been used for—was going to be used for some separations processing work, but it was no longer needed. It was about eight feet in diameter and approximately 15 feet tall. We found a building in the 300 Area where we could dig a hole that deep. In fact, we dug it a little deeper than that, and managed to prepare a tank-type facility to make Cobalt-60 irradiation source. The tank was just about even with floor level; went down 14 feet. Filled with water, and had a barrier all the way around the top of it. Filled with distilled water, because we didn’t want to have some of the corrosion products that will happen if you have aluminum in contact with mineral water. But loading it with cobalt was another challenge. We started out with about 15,000 curies of cobalt, which gave us a pretty good source. But it wasn’t what we really needed. So over approximately three or four years, we were able to increase that to 630,000 curies of cobalt-60. That is a lot of cobalt-60. At that time, it was probably the fifth largest cobalt facility in the United States. It had produced radiation levels of approximately 17 million roentgens per hour. It was—without the water shielding over it, the radiation would’ve been lethal in fractions of a second. But, with 14 feet of water shielding us, we could look down at the blue glow, and we would have our experiments suspended above that would go down into one- or two-inch tubes, right down to within an inch or two of the cobalt. The cobalt rods were approximately 16 inches high. The cobalt was made locally, out in the K Reactors. Transporting it was another interesting challenge. We would ship it in from the reactor area in a lead-filled container cask. The container—the cask would be located down into the water, the lid removed, the cobalt elements would be placed into it, the lid would be placed back on the container, it would be brought to the surface of the water, then with all that—it was approximately 40 inches in diameter—with that much lead around the cobalt, we could approach it and they would put very secure bolts in the top of it. But then, it would be removed from the water, and we had an eight-hour time limit to get it from the 100 Areas down to the 300 Area and into water again. Because there were limits on how much heat could be absorbed in the lead shielding. So we had a crane capable of lifting several-ton cask that was set up ahead of time. A section of the roof on this building was removed, the cask would be lowered down through the roof, down into this water-filled tank that we had. We remotely took the cap off, took the cobalt-60 elements out, and we had our own cobalt-60 source for examining materials to see what the effect of gamma radiation would have on the materials. Quite interesting. Whenever they had that shipment, patrol cars would be stationed at each railroad crossing, and the patrol cars stopped the trains while the trucks went through. Franklin: Wow. Baker: But it was planned in advance, and everything worked fine. Franklin: What kinds of materials were you testing next to this cobalt thing for gamma radiation exposure? Baker: We were testing such things as camera lenses, for example. But mainly its justification was to see whether the cobalt—the gamma radiation would enhance the reaction of carbon dioxide with the graphite. Would there be more reaction going on as result of the gamma radiation present than not? What we found was that it wasn’t really significant; it was primarily a temperature-controlled reaction. So we already were aware, pretty much, of what the limitations on the graphite temperatures would be. We had thermal couples to measure—and there were thermal couples also that were built into the graphite moderator stack at the time the reactor was built to measure the temperatures. But on one occasion, we did make a periscope—one of the other engineers that was working in this graphite group made a periscope that fitted into the front face where a process tube had been removed, and it matched up against the seal where this gun-barrel-type-arrangement that penetrated into the graphite stack was. That slid in there, and the light, the glow from the graphite went down a series of mirrors, was reflected back to the other one and back again. So we had a periscope that we could physically use an optical pyrometer and measure the temperature of the graphite using that kind of a device. It was probably the first time—first and only time—that we were able to look into an operating Hanford reactor. But the engineer that was involved with that was a very talented individual. He came up with something that no one else had thought of doing up until that time. Franklin: Wow. And what year would that have been? Baker: That was probably in abut 19—somewhere in the late 1960s. Franklin: Late 1960s. Wow, that’s really quite amazing. Baker: Yeah. No, it was probably earlier than that. Probably early ‘60s. Probably around 1960, ’62, something like that. Franklin: Oh, wow, okay. So cobalt, then—cobalt’s a gamma emitter, correct? Baker: Yes, it is. Franklin: So 14 feet of water, then, was enough to blunt the gamma rays, to be able to observe that? Baker: Yes, it was, mm-hmm. It absorbs that radiation. It’s an ideal material because you can look down there and see what you’re doing. You have to have long tong manipulators to work with things, but it has a very penetrating gamma ray that’s emitted, I think it’s around 1.5 MeV. So it’s a very energetic, very penetrating ray. Some gamma rays are—beta particles, for example, do not penetrate like a gamma ray would. But it has a short half life; as I recall, it’s something around five years? 5.7 years, I’m not sure of that. So, half of it would decay. After we’d made the final really big load, we had 630,000, that was pretty much maxed out, as far as the amount of cobalt in that facility and they just continued to use it, probably for at least 25 years after that, exploring effects of gamma radiation on various materials. Franklin: Because then after a certain point, so much of it would’ve been decayed that it’s— Baker: Yeah, a certain amount of it would be decayed. But it still was being used at a time when they started to—well, I guess the cobalt had been removed; the facility was there when they were cleaning up Hanford. Now that facility’s been completely removed, the building and all traces of it, now, I think are gone. But it was used for quite a while. Franklin: That glow you were talking about, that’s what’s called Cherenkov’s radiation? Baker: That’s is the—that’s the name. It’s due to the interaction with the structure of the water, the absorption produces a blueish glow. Have you ever seen that? Franklin: Not naturally, no. I’ve seen photos of it. Baker: It’s beautiful. Now, I think that the reactor, possibly, at WSU, it is a form of a trigger reactor, is it not? And I think that there probably is a similar glow with that, with the reactor that’s over at the Pullman campus. Franklin: Oh, wow. I’ll have to—maybe I’ll get the chance to see that someday. Baker: Sometime when you’re over there, it would be interesting to drop by and have a look at that facility. Franklin: Yeah, it sure would. So you said that you worked on this project with the cobalt and everything at FFTF up until the mid-‘50s, right? And then what did you do after that, after the project— Baker: Well, it was about 1969 when it went into the boron carbide work. The boron carbide work continued until 1986. At that time, I became a part of the group that was doing the design for the joint experiments with the Canadian and Japanese scientists on blanket materials, absorbent materials, for use in the FFTF. That’s when we started designing that facility. I think what made this work so interesting was that usually we were in on the design phase of it. And then followed it through from the fabrication of the experiment, getting all the approvals, safety approvals and so on, actual construction, inserting the experiments into the reactors, starting them up, and collecting the data. So we could see, from start to finish, how the project went. I think this had a lot of value, because that way there was feedback. You could see how you might have done a project in a different way, and it would suggest other ways of doing things. I think, many times, a designer may not have that privilege of being able to see the end result and knowing whether the decisions made in the design were the best ones to make. So I found that that was really an exciting part of doing the work to see something through from start to finish. Franklin: You’ll have to forgive me because I’m not a—I just want to make sure I’m following and understanding everything correctly because I’m not a nuclear scientist. When you say blanket materials, what is a blanket material? Baker: A blanket material is the material that was proposed to go around a fusion energy machine. Now, fusion energy has been—its advances have been very slow and very difficult to come by. But right now there is a fusion machine that is being built in France. But they need to confine a plasma to get the fusion of deuterium and tritium, or various elements at the low end of the periodic table, to fuse together to release energy. The fission energy comes from the process of fissioning elements at the high end of the periodic table. In fusion energy, the work that is being done, they are proposing that there would be an intense field of neutrons present, and that some of these neutrons could be absorbed in what they call the blanket. The blanket was the area immediately surrounding where the fusion is taking place. So we were just doing materials, evaluating them, to serve as materials that could surround—that would be in the area surrounding a fusion energy device, and absorb these neutrons, thereby making some tritium that could be circulated back into the fusion machine so it could be making some of its fuel. Products typically—lithium, when you bombard lithium with neutrons, you will produce tritium from that. So many of the materials that have been proposed have followed the use of lithium. So the work that we were doing in FFTF was examining potential materials that could be used in a fusion apparatus. Franklin: So that’s not shielding, then, that’s materials to help, I guess in a way, moderate the reaction, but capture that tritium to recycle back into the— Baker: Exactly! That’s a good way—it would be a way of producing more fuel that could be used to fusion, yes. Franklin: Because fusion is bringing the atoms together, right, which produces an immense amount of energy— Baker: That is true. Franklin: So is that blanket material there also there to capture that enormous amount of energy? Or is that just to capture the other atoms made by this fusion? Baker: It’s more, I think, to capture the neutrons to provide a feedback of process for fuels to make more tritium atoms to put back into the process to keep it going. Franklin: Oh, wow, wow. Baker: So that was the purpose of working on those materials for that. Franklin: Oh, that’s really fascinating. So now we’re just—France, you said, is building the first fusion reactor. Baker: Yes. There are other nations—I’m not sure which nations now are involved, but France has been behind this for a long time. Interest by the United States lagged for a little while, oh, probably ten, 15 years ago. They had cut back some on the support for that. But then some advances were made, and it looked like it was really something that the United States should be involved with, so they are still a participant in the fusion energy research that’s going on. Franklin: How long did you work on this blanket material project with Canada and Japanese scientists? Baker: Well, it went from 1986 until, I believe the FFTF reactor was shut down in 1992. So that six-year period was when we were working with the Canadian and Japanese scientists. The Canadians had much experience in tritium work, because they use heavy water reactors. The heavy water reactors do produce some tritium in the process. So some of us took classes up there in how to safely handle and capture tritium. What the Canadians came up with, their contribution to this project was that in the FFTF, when we would be irradiating these materials and making tritium, we would be able to adjust the temperatures and look at how fast the tritium was released from the material, depending on the temperature and what other gases were present. This sort of information. All of the tritium that was produced, it had to be—it was swept out of the reactor, a helium line went in with extremely high—less than one part per million of impurities in the helium, because we didn’t want any activation of any impurities in the gas to be swept out of the reactor. And that gas, the sweep gas, that went down over the samples, came back out, went into all the instrumentation that was in this large glovebox. So, we had to capture all of the tritium that we made. None of it escaped to the outside at all. So the Canadians came up with highly efficient materials that were combination of zirconium and some other elements to capture that tritium. They would actually form hydrides or trihydrides as a combination that they would react with and tie it up so that it was a stable compound. It would—since the tritium has a very soft beta emission, we would typically have maybe a couple thousand curies of tritium in a tube that was approximately an inch-and-a-quarter in diameter by about 12 inches long. But it was completely shielded; you couldn’t detect any information on the outside of the capsule, yet it contained huge amounts of tritium. But it was all captured, and that’s what the glovebox—it contained all of the materials, the chemical materials, that were needed to capture the tritium. Franklin: Wow, that’s interesting. So the hydrogen would be able to sweep up, basically, the tritium and become tritium-laden, then? Baker: Yes, that’s right. The helium— Franklin: Helium, sorry. Baker: The helium would sweep out all the tritium. In some cases, if we used a little bit of hydrogen mixed in with this ultra-high-purity helium, then we’d be able to sweep it out much faster. It seems like the materials would react with our samples and we would sweep it out so we would see rapid releases of tritium from the material. Which was important information to have, because if you’re going to extract this from a fusion machine, you might want to know how to get it out of your compounds faster. So those experiments continued on, then, until FFTF shut down. And then I worked for about three more years after that on instrumentation for the waste tanks out at Hanford. Much of it was involved with that tank that would periodically release bursts of gas. Franklin: The burping tank. Baker: The burping tank, yes. That was instrumented, too. They had various kinds of gas instrumentation installed right there at the tank. The controls for it were in a trailer park right next to the Tank Farm fence. So we had continuous monitoring on that. I was involved in some of the operation and maintenance of the helium gas analysis equipment. Franklin: Oh, wow. Baker: So I worked on that until I retired then. Franklin: And you retired in 1995? Baker: ‘95, yes. Franklin: So, what, 44 years. Baker: 44 years I had worked out there. I can think of nothing in the way that I really want to change. I always felt that we were working very safely. I feel that we really had a good knowledge of what we were doing at the time. Franklin: Sure. I want to come back to a couple things you mentioned earlier. Maybe just ask you more about the social/cultural aspects of living in Richland. So when you mentioned you’d moved into a dorm for your first few weeks here in north Richland, which I imagine—those were dorms for the Hanford construction camp, right? Baker: Yes, they had used some for that and some for other workers, because all of the housing, even in downtown Richland, was controlled by the government. So you got on a list and you got high enough priority, then you could move to a more desirable location. So by the time I came back after traveling around the country for a year, I’d moved up on the list and was eligible for a dorm in downtown Richland. These dorms were built on Jadwin between Swift and—what’s the next street north of there? Not Symons. Franklin: Williams? Baker: Williams, yeah. The dorms were located in that general area there. And then there were some other dorms for the women employees that were down approximately where the Albertson’s store is now. Franklin: Right, right. We have photos of those. Baker: Those were the two locations fro those. I was in the dorms for only, oh, maybe about three years. Or, not the dorms. Yeah. The single dorm rooms. And then I was able to get an apartment on Gribble Street. There were some apartments along there, and I rented an apartment there for a while until I then later bought my own house in Richland. Franklin: Your dorm—so, were there mess halls that went with the dorms, or were you—did they have kitchens? I’m wondering if you could describe the dorms for me, kind of how that living arrangement worked. Baker: The dorms were single occupancy rooms. You know, as a matter of fact, there may still be one of those in use in the City of Richland. Franklin: I’ve heard there’s one off Jadwin. Baker: On Jadwin. It is—where is that, I can see it— Franklin: Someone told me— Baker: It’s on Van Giesen. Franklin: Van Giesen, right, right. Baker: I think it’s on Van Giesen between George Washington Way and Jadwin. Franklin: Yeah, they said it’s by the 7 Eleven. Baker: Yes, there’s a 7 Eleven on the corner of Jadwin and Van Giesen, and about halfway down that block, on the north side is one little building. I think it still may have rooms for people that rent that just want a dorm-type room. Franklin: Interesting. I drive that way home everyday. I’m going to see if I can find it. Baker: I’m going to look again, too. Look and see if it’s not still there. Franklin: Because those would’ve been the Alphabet House dorms, right? I think they were the J— Baker: No, I think they were—even—they were mostly—Ms and Ws. There was an M-1, M-2, M-3. I lived in M-5 for a while. And the women’s dorms were similarly numbered W such-and-such. Franklin: Right, the Army gets very creative with its naming system. Baker: And there were some restaurants and cafeterias in Richland. One of the cafeteria-type operations was on that corner, just across from where the Federal Building is right now, at the corner of Knight and Jadwin. It was on the southwest corner. They had a large eating facility in there. But that was pretty much the way that—the dorms were all right. One of the things that I do kind of remember there, you know, you’re going to have a mix of all kinds of people in a dorm like that. Well, one of the occupants decided he was going to make some homebrew. So he brewed up this and then put the caps on it and everything. He had his own bottle capper. And then he put them under his bed in the room. Well, this tends—especially if you haven’t processed it right, it will generate some CO2 gas. Franklin: Yeah, it will. Baker: In the middle of the night, these started going off, almost simultaneously, more than one. So as the cap would blow off, the beer would come out, it would soak all the bottom of the bedding. When you walked down the hall, you would think that you were in the local tavern, because it really smelled of—so, he could no longer hide the fact that he was making some homebrew in his dorm room. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Wow. Did you say—you mentioned that there would be all kinds of people in there. So was it a mix of blue and white collar workers or people of all different jobs? Baker: Yes, it was. It was kind of a mix of blue and white collar, mm-hmm. It really was. Franklin: And it would’ve been all single men, right? Baker: All single men. And single women. Some of the women worked at the hospital, they worked in the schools in Richland. But, yeah, that’s pretty much the way it was. Franklin: I wonder if you could describe to me your first impressions of Richland, coming in in June of ’51, coming into this government town where there was no private property and everything was government-owned. Baker: Yeah. Well, it was really foreign to my way of thinking. But it seemed like—there was real effort, once the property was sold. People could buy their homes and businesses were encouraged to come in to make it more normal. But it was not—it was unusual circumstances to be in. And you really didn’t have the freedom of choice, shall we say, as to what you could do. You knew that if you were in the government housing that you were only qualified for certain types of housing, depending on how long you’d been here, your marital status, whether you were single or married, whether you had children. If you had more children, then you were entitled to a house with more bedrooms. People just kind of adapted to what the conditions were at that time. There really were a lot of young people at the time that were living here that were attracted to this area. They were a very enthusiastic group. There were a lot of social activities, groups that even to this day still exist. There was a ski club that was very popular with the young people. Sometimes they would take off for, especially a three-day weekend. We could get on a train at Pasco, go to Spokane and switch to another train, and go over to Missoula, Montana and ski at Big Mountain at Whitefish. We would arrive over there about 5:00 in the morning and go out and have a full day on the slopes for a couple days. Then jump on the train, get back in. That first day back was kind of rough, though, because we were getting in early in the morning and have to get to work at 7:30 in the morning. But it worked out fine. Other times, there were bus trips, chartered buses took us to Sun Valley for skiing, some of the mountains up in Canada. It was really a lot of fun. Border crossings were fairly simple at that time. You’d come back and they weren’t supposed to—they were only supposed to bring a certain amount of alcoholic beverages back from Canada because of the alcohol laws in the State of Washington at that time. So when we’d be coming back, typically, a border security officer would step inside the bus and look and say, well, did you have a good time up here? Yeah, we had a good time. Okay. That was the end of it. They wouldn’t check to see whether everybody was within the limits allowed or not. But you never knew when they would check. But the security was very much unlike how it is now as far as border crossings. Franklin: Yeah, kind of a different time, huh? Baker: Yeah, a different time. Franklin: You mentioned there were a lot of young people. Did that strike you, that there weren’t a lot of established families at Hanford? That most people here—because you had to work at Hanford to live in Richland. Baker: Yeah, that seemed—but I think—the town was pretty full. It was an unusual condition, but it seemed like there was always so much going on with this group of people, that they made things happen for themselves. I recall—this was back in probably the early ‘50s, we had an engineer join our group working on the graphite. He was from the Boston area. That man continually complained. There’s nothing to do, there’s this, there’s that, I don’t have, I can’t go to see the latest operas, I can’t—and we said, you know, there’s a lot to do here—and there was. But he complained so much, people reminded him occasionally: well, you can always go back. And certainly, sure enough, he only stayed here about three years. He couldn’t take it. He was the type of person that needed that big city environment to exist. It just wasn’t the place for it. And so he left. And the area was probably better because we didn’t have him around complaining. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Wow. Was the Uptown finished by the time you got here? Baker: It was underway—it was just kind of being developed, yeah. The stores were going in and they were gradually—but it was about that time when the Uptown was being developed. But there was a lot of—still, a lot of sagebrush around. Even when some of the ranch houses were built out on the west side along the bypass highway right now, they would frequently run into large groups of rattlesnakes that would be locally in one area. They would have to get rid of them. There were some things here, you know, that you wouldn’t expect. But rattlesnakes were— One of the things that they had to be careful even in the 300 Area, if some of the buildings had a crawlspace underneath where the maintenance personnel would have to climb under there to work on waterlines and steam valves and other things, and they had to be extremely careful, because there was—Well, one time right in 306 Building, I was working out there one evening. Working late. I was on the second floor, and the only other person was a janitor who was working on the first floor. All of the sudden, I heard this scream, and I thought, what is going on?! Did somebody break in and attack that janitor? I knew it was the janitor. She was absolutely panicked. She was up against the wall in one of the restrooms that was downstairs. The entrance to the restroom door was within two feet of the outside door. A rattlesnake had come in from the outside and made its way into the restroom. She went in to empty the waste basket; she picked it up and she was facing this rattlesnake. She froze and just let out this scream. I went down there and saw what was under control, and she couldn’t hardly talk. So I said, well, we have a way to handle such situations. Don’t worry. We called the person that really—when this sort of thing happened, there was always somebody in the power plant there—the steam plant, that could help out. The person was really an accomplished snake handler. He came over with a plastic bag inside of a wastebasket. He approached the snake, put the wastebasket and plastic bag over it, gently pulled the plastic bag up around it, captured the snake in the plastic bag, and proceeded to walk out the door with this rattlesnake. The last that ever happened. But, oh, that janitor and I, we often joked about that incident. But at the time, you know, it was very serious. Franklin: Oh, sure. Baker: But the outcome was fine. [LAUGHTER] The snake was returned to its desert environment. Franklin: Right, right. Well, I mean, they were—they did predate humans here, so— Baker: Oh, yes, yes, and there were a lot of snakes. Well, in fact, I belong to a mountain climbing group that typically every January 1st would climb Badger Mountain. They still do. On January 1st. One year, we went out there, and it was kind of a warm sunny day. We were all surprised to see a rattlesnake sunning itself out on a rock on the top—very top of Badger on that January 1st day. So, I couldn’t believe it, but I actually saw it happen. So you do have to be a little careful, I think, to this day, climbing Badger, not to venture off too far from the trail into areas unless you have high boots on and are prepared for encountering a rattlesnake. Franklin: Wow. No thank you. Baker: Me, either. Franklin: What other kinds of social activities did you partake in in Richland? Baker: Well, one of the activities that I really got involved with was what was then called the Richland Opera Group. They put on one or two Broadway-type productions. I usually worked behind the scenes: sound, lighting, that part of the stage group. But I appeared, I think, in two shows in a walk-on-type situation as part of a crowd scene. I think that was in Fiddler on the Roof, was one of them. But anyway, that was a really good group of people. In fact, it happened to be the place where I met my wife. She was playing in the orchestra at the time. So there were activities if one wanted to—you really didn’t have to search very hard to find interesting things to do. There was no lack of things for me to do. I didn’t have the feeling at all like the Bostonian, that I needed to get out of town to find some entertainment. Franklin: When did you meet your wife? Baker: Pardon? Franklin: When did you meet your wife? Baker: It was probably in the late ‘60s. First she was frequently playing in the orchestras and I was working on the shows. So that was the place where we met, was through the light opera group. Very—it was a fun group and entertaining group. You never were quite sure how the shows—there were some shows that involved a lot of children, like The Sound of Music, they would double cast the show, because in one case I remember just about two weeks before the show was scheduled to go on, the measles—there wasn’t all the vaccines then, and one of the kids in the group caught the measles. But they were over it by the time the show was ready to go on stage for the audience. It was something that—always some surprises along the way. Franklin: Right, kind of shook everybody up. Did you ever buy an Alphabet House or live in an Alphabet House? Baker: No, I didn’t. I had considered it at the time, but I bought one of the newer houses, then, when I finally got around to buying. I lived in the apartments down there for probably about eight years or so, and I thought, oh, this is kind of stupid. I might as well be living in a house of my own and I could do what I wanted with it. So that’s what I did. I got busy with that and became a homeowner. But there were still the interesting things, a lot going on if anybody wanted. I got involved with amateur radio operations, became a part of that group, and served with some emergency communications preparations groups. To this day, the amateur radio operations are a part of the emergency center that we have in south Richland down there to serve as a backup. Because in many times, they will have the equipment battery operated or even generator operated power sources that can be used for emergency communication. Because I think a lot of people feel overconfident with their cell phones nowadays, but cell phones, after all, also require electricity to run. Franklin: They do, indeed! Baker: Oftentimes, the amateur radio can get through when other communications may fail. It was part of the technology challenge, I think, of some of these things. I went ahead and studied and progressed through the range of licenses that you can get to be licensed. Had my own station and so on. I get busy with other things like my work. But still, I am a licensed operator and have some equipment to get on the air with that. Franklin: Oh, cool. Baker: Yeah, it’s—like I say, the things—it seemed that I tended to move toward the more technical aspects of even the recreation and the social, where it was the technical side of the light opera shows that I participated in. But I always found—I never lacked for something to do. I always found something that was interesting to do. Franklin: Did this radio service start out as a civil defense measure? Baker: Well, it dates back a long, long ways, where the certain frequencies were set aside more for experimentation so that operators could come up with new equipment, new developments, antenna improvements and that sort of thing. So continuing to this day, there are certain frequencies that are set aside. As times have changed, and we’ve gone more to digital communications, there is a digital mode of communications that I’m working on right now to try to get that on the air that involves very little power. If you could imagine something two to three watts, barely the amount of power that it takes for a nightlight, and use that power on a transmitter to talk to Europe, is I think something that I want to do. And it’s being done all the time right now. But that’s the sort of things—you know, again, there are people that continually work on contesting to see how many others they can talk to, whereas others are looking at the equipment, and how to improve what we have. So, there’s something there, even if you want to, you could do digital TV. There are some frequencies set aside for amateur radio experimenters in that field as well. Franklin: Oh, cool. [VIDEO CUTS] Franklin: --company? Baker: The Savanna River—oh, yeah, the company that was— Franklin: In Milwaukee— Baker: A.O. Smith. They’re the ones that make the water—I think to this day they, they make glass-lined water heaters. They used to. Franklin: You’re saying A-O or ale? Baker: A. O. Letter A, O, Smith, S-M-I-T-H, was the company. The other—Alcoa was the company in Pittsburgh that I referred to. Franklin: I’ve heard of—Alcoa’s a big company. Baker: Oh, they’re big. Yeah, generally they went to experienced contractors that they knew could do the job for them, they would do a good job. Franklin: Oh, sure. Baker: You know. And some of them were difficult— Franklin: We ready? Okay! Just a couple more questions. I’m wondering if you—I want to ask you a couple milestones in Tri-Cities history. Do you remember any of the Atomic Frontier Days parades or Richland Days parades, and did you go to any of those or— Baker: Oh, maybe a few of them. It seemed like the Atomic days parades didn’t last too long. It seemed to quickly became a Tri-Cities area event. Then with bringing the boat races in and so on, it was something that was more that the whole Tri-Cities event. Again, it was perhaps an unfortunate event. I was working with radio operators, again, providing emergency communications at one of the boat races. This was probably back in the late ‘60s, perhaps. Unfortunately, there was a lot of drug activity going on at that time. I was attached to a Red Cross first aid group. Someone in a group came and asked for help from the Red Cross that someone had crawled under a car, and somebody else had jumped on the hood and had come down. The person had a head injury from this person jumping on the car. The Red Cross person evaluated the situation right away and wanted to call an ambulance for help. The friends would not agree to this, because the person was on drugs. They said, if you call them, he’s going to be charged with drug usage. They held off, probably for at least a half an hour. They finally relented and said, well, maybe we’d better just take a chance and call and have it checked out. And they did. But after that, the boat races never had the attraction for me. I was really disturbed by the action of some people that would endanger the life of a friend just to protect them from a drug charge. I never participated in any more radio activities with the boat races. That was the end of it for me. Franklin: I’m wondering if—do you remember the JFK visit in 1963 to dedicate the N Reactor? Baker: Yes, I do remember that time. It was very exciting to have the president here for that. Franklin: Were you there that day? Baker: I did not go out to it, but we saw the caravan moving out. It moved right past the 300 Area and went out to the dedication ceremony. But, yes, that was an exciting time for the Tri-Cities, for sure. Franklin: What do you—what about, were you here for President Nixon’s visit, as well? Baker: I don’t recall much of that. But as a part of my amateur radio activities, I had attended a Northwest convention in Seaside, Oregon. They have one of those every year. We had a speaker there that had been the radio person on Air Force One for several presidents. I think he had served in that position for over 30 years. He told us that he was on the flight that took Nixon to China the first time. Franklin: Oh, wow. Baker: And he said that he got a call in the middle of the night. He said, Air Force One has to be ready to go all the time. Any time you want to go. He got a call late in the evening and they said, be ready to go, we’re leaving in something like two hours. And we’ll be at the airport or wherever it was supposed to be. And he said, well, what kind of clothes shall I take? Can’t tell you. Anything I need to do? Just be there. Even the person that will be on the plane with the president didn’t know where they were going until he was on the plane with the president and discovered that they were going to China. That’s how secret that particular operation was. But he traveled with several of the presidents and he had some really interesting tales, as you can imagine someone that served that long, and had an interesting job. Franklin: Yeah. I wonder if you could ruminate, maybe, on the Chernobyl accident and how it affected the community here and how people—or how you reacted to it and how others in the community reacted to it. Baker: Well, we were really—we didn’t know that much about the Russian reactors. We knew that they had graphite-moderated reactors, the same as we had. There was a great concern, because one of the topics that I did not mention earlier was that in the process of graphite being damaged by neutrons contacting the atoms in the graphite crystalline structure, sometimes the atoms would be displaced. Graphite has a crystalline structure, a layered structure. So sometimes atoms would be displaced, and this would eventually cause some of the overall expansion that we were seeing. These atoms, as the temperature was increased, could return to a more stable lattice position, and in the process release energy. This energy was called stored energy. Now, there was an incident in stored energy that happened at wind scale. It only went for a small area in the reactor, and then it kind of self-propagates for a while, and then it terminates, depending on the conditions. But we knew that there was a chance for one of these temperature excursions. I believe that, well, it was related, too, to the Chernobyl incident, because they had some temperatures that went up quite high in that incident, and undoubtedly some of it was as a result of graphite damage—the energy being released. So we had monitored that situation in Hanford reactors for a long time. So some of these samples that we would take out of there, we knew that there was very little concern at that time of releasing stored energy, because we had raised the temperatures enough in the reactor that this was no longer a problem. It’s only when the graphite is operated at a low temperature that stored energy becomes—can become a serious problem, and one that you have to be aware of. So the Chernobyl, we were aware of what was going on. But it had a little different dimensional situation. It had some unfortunate design characteristics that weren’t—looking back now—the best thing to do in the design of a reactor. But there was great interest here in seeing whether we would have any problems related with graphite. And it turned out we didn’t have to do anything differently than we had been doing for years before that. Franklin: But this stored energy, if enough of it was in the reactor, could cause—could release enough heat where the reactor itself could overheat? Baker: Definitely. That is the case, yes. Franklin: I see. Baker: There was a small reactor, I think a Brookhaven reactor, and that was an air-cooled reactor. So it didn’t operate at high levels for a long time, but nevertheless, it was definitely a concern with the people reacting that, because it’s the low temperature, long time periods that will cause that stored energy-type damage. Franklin: Interesting. Wow. Baker: Yeah. Franklin: One of my last questions. So, you were—I think your career is really remarkable because you came here in this kind of early ‘50s when the construction’s ramping up, and then you saw the eventual draw-down and probably the fight to save the different reactors, N and FFTF, and you were still working here when the decision was made to shift from production to cleanup and that whole mission changed. I’m wondering if you could describe your overall feelings and recollections on that shift between cleanup and how it affected you and how it affected your coworkers, the people you worked with. Baker: Yeah. Well, I think that we could see that with the shutting down of the reactors that the place would be entirely different. It was hoped by many people that there would be more power generating facilities built here by Energy—WPPSS at that time. But that wasn’t to be. I think many of us were encouraged to see that something that should’ve been done much earlier in the way of processing the waste was finally going to be recognized and people could move forward with that task. The approach that they’ve taken has been a long one and a very costly one, but they are making progress to converting that waste from a liquid form to a solid form for storage, and I think everyone is very happy to see that happen, wants to see it proceed as quickly as can be. But as far as the research opportunities, even though there were budget uncertainties along the way and as we see the reactors were shut down, it seems like there was always something else for us, a next step to see in the way of the research side. Like the FFTF work, and Battelle was steadily increasing their staff on research and doing other types of research, both government and private. So it still seemed like a good place to work and be and this area has so much to offer. It really does. And so most of us didn’t give too much thought in moving immediately because we were afraid that the place was going to just deteriorate and go back to sagebrush. We could see that there was more ahead for the Tri-City area and stayed here and enjoyed it until now. Franklin: So are you saying that there was a general feeling, at least among some of the workers, that the cleanup—that dealing with the waste problem should’ve been tackled earlier on in the cycle? Because you said you were happy that something which should’ve done earlier was finally being done. Do you think there was a general feeling that that should’ve been handled earlier on than kind of waiting—making that the main focus should’ve happened earlier--? Baker: I think a lot of people felt that way. Because everybody knows that there was a finite lifetime to these tanks, and they were well beyond their designed expectancy, you know, that they would be a suitable place to store waste. So I think that they were really wanting to see this proceed. The facility that they’re designing out there is extremely complicated. Savanna River has been vitrifying waste for quite a while, but on a smaller scale. It will be good to see the facilities out here finally end up producing solidified waste for storage, because it definitely needs to be done. We can’t keep it in the liquid form forever like that, without expecting deterioration in the tanks and so on, the very sorts of problems that we’re experiencing right now. Franklin: Sure. I wonder, how did you—living and working at Hanford through so much of the Cold War, did you ever feel an immediacy of the Cold War on your work, or did you ever feel that your work was linked to different events in the Cold War? How much of a presence of that was in your life? Baker: Not really a lot—we didn’t really think too much about that. Our focus was more short-term, perhaps, solving the problems at the time. The one of getting the graphite expansion, which was limiting the life of the reactors, was a big, big effort to solve that. So on a day-to-day basis, I don’t think that the result of this and its tie-in with the Cold War—didn’t seem to have a big impact on the people that I associated with. Franklin: Mm. And my last question, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland during the Cold War? Baker: I think that they should know that, personally, I felt that I was working in a very safe environment. I did not feel that I was endangering my health in any way during that time. Sincerely, they had very ambitious schedules going on to meet, but nevertheless, it was always done with safety in mind. I think that bears it out, because we have had excellent safety record here. So I feel that I was probably safer working here than in some industrial environments. I really do. Franklin: Well, Don, thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time— Baker: You’re welcome. Franklin: --to come and talk to us today. Baker: Yeah. Franklin: Great. <a href="https://youtu.be/oHe1y9saIWg">View interview on Youtube.</a> Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview B Reactor D Reactor DR Reactor 300 Area FFTF (Fast Flux Test Facility) 100 Areas N Reactor Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1951- Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1951-1995 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Donald Baker Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) West Richland (Wash.) Chemistry Nuclear reactors Radiation Description An account of the resource Donald Baker moved to Richland, Washington in 1951. Don worked on the Hanford Site from 1951-1995. An interview conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by Mission Support Alliance on behalf of the United States Department of Energy. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 04/05/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. 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This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F1d5969a330cb013c8521d026d6a68ce7.jpg ff47ac81d5d3ce2033875e79427a831e https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fa095b818f272c3b2d8dd709637b8ca33.mp4 f43df0e60028bddc39358f58d28dc8cc Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Bauman Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Donna Jackson Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX97109745"> Northwest Public Television | Jackson_Donna </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX97109745"> Robert Bauman: Okay. Why don't you go ahead and state your name first. Donna Jackson: My name is Donna Jackson. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX97109745"> Bauman: Okay. And my name's Robert Bauman and Donna Jackson will be telling us some stories. Today is July 16, 2013 and this is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. So at this point I'll turn over to you Donna, and go ahead and tell your stories. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX97109745"> Jackson: Okay. I'm going to tell you a story about John and Mary. They and their four kids lived in the Midwest. They had family working at Hanford and came west to join them in 1946. Now when there is a housing shortage, private citizens try to fill the need and make some money. John and Mary found housing at what is now called Columbia Park. A man named Garst had a cherry orchard and he put up tents and shacks to rent. Mr. Paulson had a farmhouse just west of that and he divided his land into Paulson’s Plats and built small houses on it to rent or sell. The businesses that were in that area at that time were Wild Bill's Garage, Sherry's Groceries, and there was a drive-in theater and a tavern. John and Mary bought one of Paulson's three-room houses and they bought three extra lots for a total of $1,600. Actually, it was a two bathroom house. There were three rooms, plus a small bathroom with a shower stool and sink, but built on the outside of the house was a small concrete block washroom with a laundry tub, space for a washing machine and a toilet. You had to go outside to get to it, but actually this turned out to be quite convenient. When more of their family arrived in the area, they set up tents and they had a toilet available for their use, and it was handy for the kids, too, because they didn't have to come in the house. There were about eight houses in Paulson’s Plats and several of the families living there wanted to grow a garden and tried, but it just didn't work. The canal was south of them and so much water seeped into their yard that nothing would grow. Now John and Mary lived there two years before the big flood of 1948. Being right on the river they were flooded out. They moved into a tent on what is now Highway 12. Each morning they would get up and look over to see what things were like where their house was. One morning, they found their very own icebox had floated loose and right up to the bank below where they were camped. John fished it out, cleaned it up, and they could use it again. During this time, they would go to a washateria. They would wash their clothes and hang them on the bushes to dry. Mary would rent an iron long enough to press three shirts, which would get John through a week's work. Nothing else would be ironed because of the cost of renting the iron. Now when they were there in Paulson’s Plats, there was ice delivery for their icebox. But there wasn't any ice delivery in town because nobody was allowed to go into town, no deliveries of any kind. As Mary said, they just didn't, but they were afraid people would blab about what was going on. Well the water finally receded and they went out to check their house. There were big holes in the walls, the wood flooring had come off and washed down the river, presumably into the Pacific Ocean. The kitchen floor didn't come loose because the wood stove was heavy enough to keep it in place. Mary's dad and the Red Cross came to help put in new wallboard and flooring so they could move back into their house. Another problem during the time of the flood was getting to work at Hanford. At that time, the bridge across the Yakima was down at river level, and during the flood, no one could cross it. John had a ride that would take him going up across the Horse Heaven Hills and around. One day, he missed his ride and had to fly to work. He walked a mile south to the airport, and for $3 could catch a plane that would take him across the river. A shuttle would meet the plane and then take the folks on out to work. When John and Mary got back into their house, they had a problem with drinking water. They had a 100 foot well and after the flood, the water was not drinkable. John pumped the well out and poured a gallon of Clorox down it. He repeated the process nine times before the water was safe to drink. One weekend, the family went on a road trip the Yakima. Mary left her purse at a stop and they didn't miss it for ten miles. They were absolutely sick when they figured it out. They had to go back and get it since all their ration coupons were in it, as well as their money. It added another 20 miles to their trip, and they didn't think they had enough gas to get home and the gas stations wouldn't sell to them after hours. Well, they went back, got her purse, and headed to Richland and sure enough, they ran out of gas. They sat there bundled up and cold and finally a trucker stopped. He was going to get gas someplace because they would sell to trucks after hours and he said he'd come back and help them. When he finally returned, he said give me your container and I'll get you some gas. Well there was a problem, they didn't have a container. The only thing they could think of was John's rubber boots. The trucker put 10 boots full of gas in their car and they made it home. One of Mary's friends, who lived in Richland proper, took in boarders and cooked meals for three people that lived in Sunnyside. They went home on weekends, but part of the deal was that they gave her part of their ration coupons. This friend also had a small coupe to drive. There were shortages of everything, and when someone heard there was a line somewhere, everyone got excited. They never knew what would be for sale, but it didn't matter. She would drive through the neighborhood tooting her horn and the women would come out and jump into the car. Sometimes some would even hang onto the running board. They would get in line, and then find out what was for sale. It didn't matter, they would buy it and if they didn't need it, their friends did. What is now Columbia Center was a garbage dump. When you shop there today, you sometimes think it still is. One family gathering place was Howard Amon Park, which had a swimming pool. The family would have a picnic ready, and when Dad got home from work, they would head for the park. Mom would stake out a picnic spot and Dad and kids would head for the pool. They would wait in line, oh, 40 to 50 minutes. You could be in the pool for 30 minutes, and then everybody got out and a new group got in. Obviously, there were more people than would fit in the pool. The community celebrated Richland Days on Labor Day weekend for a few years. This changed to Atomic Frontier Days with parades and celebrations, and then this was combined to make the Benton Franklin County Fair. In 1949, the government was building the dam at Umatilla and they condemned the land in the Columbia Park area and bought everyone out. John and Mary were able to get a three bedroom prefab in Richland and they paid $37 a month rent. In their block on Snow Street, the government paid for everything but the rent. The trash trucks came right to your back door where the garbage cans were in a little shed and took them from there. There was one lawnmower for the block, a reel-type push mower, not that there was much gas. There was one phone outside on a pole for the block. The housewives could call housing for mousetraps, they were brought out and baited. Then you called housing to collect the traps and the mice. When they bought their ranch house, the monthly payment was huge, $76. It was nearly double what their rent had been and they didn't know if they could afford it. The house cost $10,500 and if you committed to stay there for a certain length of time, the purchase price went down $800. They gladly made that commitment. When there was a wedding, you gave a lot of thought to what would make a nice and useful gift. At one particular wedding, Mary and a friend with together and bought a nice pair of salad tongs. Then to make it more special, Mary wrote a poem to go with the gift. “Life is a salad, carrots for sunshine, onions for tears, cucumbers and celery for peace through the years, tomatoes the acid that sometimes make way into the tranquility of the day, radishes and peppers for garnish and frills, next comes the lettuce for paying the bills. Toss together with love for the dressing. May your bowl of salad have God's richest blessing.” Now you remember John and Mary had to promise to live in the house for a few years to get a reduced price, they lived there the rest of their lives. Then I have another story about Dick and Liz. Dick and Liz lived in Tennessee and Dick worked construction. This work provided a nomadic way of life for this family and their three small children. Dick would get a job, the family would pack up and move to the newest location. As soon as they could find a place to live, Dick would be off to work. It was Liz's job to settle the family, locate the grocery stores, the church, and make friends with the neighbors. They would stay six months to a year and then they would move to another job. They worked in Nebraska, Oklahoma, Michigan, and Tennessee. Liz was tired of moving around, she had a dream. She dreamt of a yard where she could grow flowers, she dreamt of living in one place for the rest of her life, not starting over every few months. Well, Dick went to Memphis one day and when he got home he showed her his train ticket to Hanford, Washington. He had been given a job on a construction crew at Hanford and they gave them a train ticket to get there. He and Liz talked and the next day he got on the train for Washington State. When he arrived in Pasco, he was met at the train station and given a ride directly to the job site and put to work. Well, Liz saw her dream of a home and permanence fly out the window. Again she had to make travel plans. Where on earth was Hanford, what would be there, where would they live, would they have schools, would there be any kind of civilization? Washington State was 3,000 miles away. Well, Liz didn't question the arrangements, her place was with her family and her husband was the provider. She would go where he was working. Liz made arrangements to bring the children out to Hanford. She had to make choices, what she could take with her and what she had to leave behind. She had a friend who worked for the railroad and he helped her as she packed her linens and their dishes and clothes. One large item she couldn't leave behind was her treadle sewing machine. She needed it for making and mending clothes. Her friend from the railroad helped her to get her belongings shipped, and then took her and the children to the station and put them on the train for this place, clear across the country, called Hanford. The trains were used both for civilian passengers and for military transport, they were crowded with soldiers. Before Liz left, her friend took her aside and warned her not have anything to do with the soldiers on the train, it might not be safe. Liz got on the train and was surrounded by soldiers. Many were just teenagers, 17 or 18 and very homesick. Others were young family men who had left their wives and children behind. They were delighted to see Liz and her children, and they couldn't do enough for them. The trip was much easier than anticipated—until they neared their destination. The train came across the Blue Mountains and was nearing Pendleton, Oregon when it stopped in the middle of nowhere. Was this Hanford? No, but there was a train derailed in front of them, they could go no further. They sat on the train for eight hours. Even though it was October, the passenger car was soon stifling since the noon-day sun was glaring down on them. People opened the train windows and soon they were covered with dust and soot. Finally, the track was cleared away and they got the Pendleton, but the train to Pasco was gone. Liz didn't know how they'd get the rest of the way or even where Pasco was from Pendleton. She didn't know how she could get in touch with her husband; she didn't have a cellphone, of course. The passengers were told there was a school bus about ready to take the kids home from school and they could get to Umatilla on that. Their train tickets would be honored. Liz wrote out a telegram to Dick and asked a porter to send it for her and she handed him $0.50. He said, not enough, and reached over and took $1.00 out of her hand, and then he never sent the telegram. Well, Liz and the kids were first in line to get on the school bus and then were told they had to go in and buy tickets. They went in the depot and they were told their train tickets were okay after all, but they were now last in line to get on the bus. But they did get on. They climbed on the bus with schoolkids, Liz carrying the baby. The bus was packed to capacity, but a man who had a seat stood and let Liz sit down. As a school children were dropped off, seats became available. Liz's kids thought they were going to Kenny-wick and the school children all laughed at that and taught them the name of the town. They got to Umatilla and were eventually put on a bus to Pasco. Well, Dick hadn't gotten any telegram, but had heard about the bus situation and was there to meet them and Liz wondered where they were going to sleep that night. Imagine her relief when Dick had told her he had just that day got a three bedroom prefab for his family and it was furnished. The furniture was minimal, but functional. There was one double bed and the necessary number of single beds for the children, there was a table and six chairs, a couch and a chair, a stove and an icebox. The only linen was one comforter for the double bed. There were no curtains, no trees, no grass, no flowers, but you know, it really didn't matter. They were in a house, they were together again as a family. They went to bed that night, the children were covered with their coats and Dick and Liz used the comforter, and the next day things got much better. All the things she had shipped arrived. They had dishes and pans and linens and clothes and even her sewing machine. Soon there were curtains at the window, trees, grass, and flowers took while longer. They were cared for in their little house. If the house needed painting, it was painted for them. If the furniture broke, it was replaced. If the light bulbs burned out somebody came and changed them. Dick's job was to work construction. Liz's job was to care for her husband and family. Everything they did was as a family. Neighbors would come over in the evenings; they’d put the children to bed and play pinochle. One night they decided to go out to a movie so they asked a neighbor to stay with the children, and Dick and Liz went to their first movie in Hanford. The first scene in the movie was of a fire burning in a fireplace, and that scene is etched in Liz's mind today. She can't remember anything else about the movie. Now their house didn't have a fireplace, but all she could see was their house on fire. She spent the entire movie worrying about her family and just knew her house would be gone when they got home. Well, her house and children were just fine, but she really didn't want to go to any movies after that. Few people had cars, and the Richland bus system was free and everyone used the buses. When some of the mothers wanted a chance to clean house without children underfoot they used the bus system. They would put the kids on the bus and let them ride to the end of the route and back home so they could cleanup house and maybe have a cup of coffee. Well they started going to the church and the second time they went, Liz was asked to teach Sunday school. She agreed and taught Sunday school most of the time for the next 45 years. One day she went to call on someone who had visited their church. There was a friendly Great Dane in the yard and when she knocked on the door, he came and stood patiently beside her. When the lady of the house invited her in, the gigantic dog walked in the house with her. He went in the kitchen area and curled up in the smallest area as a Great Dane can curl up in. After the visit, Liz started to leave and the owner of the house said don't forget your dog. Liz's reply was, that's not my dog; I thought he was your dog. Well, they shooed the dog outside and he wandered down the street until he came to his own home. There are stories of people not being able to find the right house when they come home. I expect the dog knew his house, he just wanted to meet the neighbors. Liz's dream had come true. She had a house and some permanence. She did have to move one more time, but that was only a couple miles north to a ranch house. She had lots of flowers in her yard, she raised her children and has been part of the same church family for 45 years. Dick passed away a few years ago, but Liz is still comfortable in her home. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX97109745"> Bauman: That's great. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX97109745"> Jackson: Those are my stories— </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX97109745"> Bauman: Thank you. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX97109745"> Jackson: --from friends who grew up here. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX97109745"> Bauman: I think that's great to just end it there. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX97109745"> Jackson: Okay. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX97109745"> Bauman: I don’t--asking questions I don't think would-- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX97109745"> Jackson: Okay. </div> Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 251 kbps Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri-Cities Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:21:10 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Donna Jackson Description An account of the resource An interview with Donna Jackson conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2016-06-06: Metadata v1 created – [J.G.] Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 4/16/2013 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/format Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. Subject The topic of the resource Hanford(Wash.) Pasco(Wash.) Richland(Wash.) Hanford (Wash.) Pasco (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F9929b6d8d9a06ce53f2c9de05d80f158.JPG e9e0a5bfad333a32a583659be9800d7f https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Ffad5af57705d4852e40bd30af70ea14a.mp4 5b9fdfc06f213cf89162c1795cd0a77c Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Donna Whiteside Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound 0:00:00 Robert Franklin: Ready? Tom Hungate: Yeah, we’re ready. Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Donna Whiteside on April 25, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Donna about her experiences working at the Hanford Site. For the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Donna Whiteside: Donna Whiteside. D-O-N-N-A. W-H-I-T-E-S-I-D-E. Franklin: Great. Thank you very much, Donna. So tell me, when did you first come to the Hanford area? Whiteside: 1953. Franklin: Okay. And I know you weren’t working then. Whiteside: Uh, no. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Okay. So can you tell me a little bit more about why you came to the Hanford area? 0:00:46 Whiteside: My dad had a brother-in-law who worked for DuPont, as a matter of fact. And he got him out here from eastern Montana. And Mom and three kids came later. We did not move into Richland right away, because we had to be put on a housing list. So we lived in three different places, as I remember, in West Richland. Franklin: Okay. Now, but your brother-in-law wouldn’t have worked for DuPont in ‘53. He probably worked for GE. Whiteside: Well, he came out with DuPont. But, yeah. Franklin: Came out with DuPont and then stayed during the Cold War expansion of the Site. And then eventually you moved into an A house, right? Whiteside: Yes. The summer before I started kindergarten. Franklin: Okay. And do you know what year that was? Whiteside: ‘53. Franklin: ‘53. Whiteside: It was ‘53, yes. Franklin: And how long did you live in the A house for? Whiteside: Until I was a senior in high school. Franklin: Okay, and what year was that? Whiteside: 1965. Franklin: So your family purchased the house. 0:01:43 Whiteside: Yeah, they were the senior renters, so they had the first opportunity to buy the A house, which they did. Franklin: Okay. Did they convert, or-- Whiteside: No. The A houses, one half had a full basement; one had a half basement. We had the half basement part. So the first thing my mom and dad did was dig out the rest of the basement, take out the coal furnace, and make a TV room and half bath downstairs. Franklin: Okay. And then what about the other half of the A house? Whiteside: We rented it. Franklin: Oh, okay. Whiteside: We rented it. Franklin: And so tell me, what was it like growing up in a--what do you remember about growing up in a government town? 0:02:20 Whiteside: It was great. It was very, very safe. You could walk home alone after dark knowing nothing was ever going to happen to you. It was just, you know. Every so many blocks, there was a little park that you could go and play in. There was a grocery store, a drug store right at the end of this park. It was just fun! Franklin: Because these were designed to be very, almost utopian kind of communities by the architect, with those kinds of things in mind. Whiteside: Mm-hmm, it was, yeah. Franklin: The parks and the kind of decentralized shop—there were stores in each neighborhood and everything. And were your parents, overall, happy with the quality of the housing, or--? Whiteside: I think so. I think so. Franklin: So you said you lived in that house until you graduated. How long did your parents stay in the house? 0:03:12 Whiteside: We all moved when I was a senior in high school. My dad passed away when I was young. But we all moved out to north Richland the year I was a senior in high school. I didn’t graduate until ‘66. It was the first part of my senior year that we moved. Franklin: Oh, okay. And why did you move? Whiteside: Because my mother wanted to. And our house had been sold to a couple that lived across the street on the same street we did. And they did convert it into one house. Franklin: Oh, okay. And did you move into newer construction, then? Whiteside: Brand-new house. Franklin: In north Richland. Whiteside: Brand-new house. Franklin: Like a ranch style? Whiteside: Yeah, sort of. But it did have a basement. Franklin: Okay, okay. So you said your father passed away pretty early. Whiteside: He was 35. Franklin: Oh, wow! Can I ask how he-- Whiteside: He either had a fishbone or chicken bone get caught in his throat. Franklin: Oh, my. Sorry, I’m not laughing, that’s just such a-- Whiteside: No, no, no, no. I understand. He actually bled to death is what happened. Franklin: Wow. Was he alone when this happened, or--? Whiteside: He stayed home from work, which was very unusual for my dad to do. My mom did not work. So she was home with him. Franklin: Okay. 0:04:18 Whiteside: The weird part about this was I was coming home from school—I was at Carmichael at the time, which was then a junior high rather than a middle school. An ambulance came down the street and, I said to the gal that I was walking home with, my mom’s in that ambulance. And she was. And she stuck her head out the door and said what was going on. So I just continued on home. Franklin: Wow. What did your father do for General Electric? Whiteside: He was an assistant engineer. But what he did, I have no clue, because nobody what anybody did, you know? [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right. And after your father passed away, did your mother go work as well, or--? Whiteside: Um. Yes, but not right away. Franklin: Okay. Whiteside: She got Dad’s VA and his social security and all of that stuff. The VA is what put three kids through college. Franklin: Oh wow. Whiteside: Yeah. Franklin: So your father was in World War II then. Whiteside: Yes, he was. Franklin: Okay. Whiteside: Yeah, he was. Franklin: And so, you left Richland, then, in the late ‘60s, mid-to-late-’60s? Whiteside: Yeah, I went to college. Franklin: And where’d you go to college? Whiteside: The first term, I went to Bellingham. Franklin: Western Washington? Whiteside: Yes, Western. Franklin: And then where? Whiteside: Then I came back and went to CBC, and then I graduated from Eastern in Cheney. Franklin: Okay. And you got your degree in social work. Whiteside: Yes. Franklin: Right, with a minor in psychology. And tell me how you came back to work for Hanford. 0:05:40 Whiteside: Well, I interviewed for several different jobs in the social work field. Besides wanting me to have a master’s degree, they wanted five years of experience. Well, I could’ve gone back to school and gotten the master’s degree, but I still would lack the five years of experience. I had an uncle on Patrol at the time, and he said, why don’t you send in your application or get ahold of—whoever, I don’t remember even who it was I needed to get ahold of. But that’s what I did. And at the time, they were hiring minorities, and they considered women minorities on Patrol. Franklin: Sure, because women would’ve probably been very underrepresented-- Whiteside: Yes. Franklin: --in the patrol force. Whiteside: Yes. Franklin: And so--okay. So you send in your resume, and can you walk me through the process as how you got on? 0:06:28 Whiteside: Well, I went down to have—I went down to the Federal Building, in the basement, because that’s where Patrol headquarters was at the time. I interviewed with the assistant chief, whose name was Paul Beardsley. Next thing I knew, I was on Hanford Patrol. I do have to tell you, though, at the same time I was also offered a job as a Sunnyside policeman. Franklin: And how come you chose Hanford Patrol? Whiteside: Well, I figured I would probably be safer than I would in Sunnyside. And the chief in Sunnyside had a few concerns about the fact that I was a female and that I’d have a male partner and things could get out of hand with his wife or whatever. You know. Just because we’d be on night shift together. So I said, okay, I’m just going to go to Hanford. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Sure. That’s—given the time, the era, that would be a possible--a concern that a male chief would have. I guess we’ll put it that way. So you came on in what year? Whiteside: January of ‘74. Franklin: Okay. and were there other women working at Patrol at that time? 0:07:37 Whiteside: I was like the fifth one hired. Franklin: Okay. Do you know around what time the first woman was hired for Patrol? Whiteside: I think they were hired just prior, like sometime in late ‘73. Franklin: Oh, okay, okay. Whiteside: Because we all had to go through x amount of training and some of them were still in training when I started. Franklin: Oh, okay. And so, describe working for Hanford Patrol. What were your expectations and did it meet them, and how was it—some of the challenges you might have faced? Whiteside: Well, the biggest challenge was being a female. Franklin: Okay. 0:08:12 Whiteside: They had to convert dressing rooms. They had to convert restrooms. They had to remodel men’s uniforms so women could wear them. Franklin: Was that already being done by the time that you came on? Whiteside: Yeah, it was, it was. Franklin: How were you received by your male colleagues and then the Hanford workers at large? Whiteside: Most—most of the patrolmen were fine with it. A few of them—you know, you don’t need to be here. You need to be at home. Franklin: Ah. Were they older patrolmen that had that--or was it just maybe-- Whiteside: Most of them were older. Franklin: --that’s just how they had been brought up? Whiteside: Most of them were older. A couple of them was due to their religion. Franklin: Ah. Whiteside: Enough said. [LAUGHTER] I mean! Franklin: Sure. No, that’s fine. Whiteside: Enough said. Franklin: Yeah, right. And what about the employees at large? Did you ever receive any kind of criticism or anything from them? Whiteside: No. No. Franklin: You were just another-- Whiteside: I was just there. Franklin: You were just there. 0:09:21 Whiteside: But I will tell you, I would meet some of them in public, and they’d look at me and they’d say, you look familiar. I should know you. And I’d say, yeah, and if I put on a uniform, then you’d know who I was, wouldn’t you? [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right. And were you firearms trained? Whiteside: Yes. Franklin: You carried a gun? Whiteside: We carried .38s at the time. Franklin: Oh, wow. Whiteside: And we had to qualify with .38s, shotguns, and M-16s during the day and at night, at least once a year. Franklin: Wow, M-16s. Whiteside: Uh-huh, M-16s. Franklin: So fully automatic weapons. Whiteside: They were, but we didn’t shoot them fully automatic. Franklin: Okay. Whiteside: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Wow, that’s quite, that’s very--that’s impressive. Whiteside: And I was usually the last one to qualify. Franklin: Yeah? 0:10:05 Whiteside: Because my mindset was, we can’t use these until you’ve tried everything else in the world, you cannot draw a gun and use it. And it’s like, then why do I have to learn how to shoot these stupid things? But I did. Franklin: Okay, right, right. Yeah. But your service piece would’ve been a .38. Whiteside: Yes. Franklin: Right? Whiteside: Yes. Franklin: Where were you stationed out of for patrol? Whiteside: Mostly out in the outer areas. I was headquartered out of 2-East and that covered East Area and al the 100 Areas. Of course, all the reactors but N Reactor were down at the time. But there was still a few checks that we had to make on the back shifts. Franklin: On the what shifts? Whiteside: Back. Graveyard and swing. Franklin: Oh, graveyard and swing, okay. Whiteside: Yeah, and of course weekends. Franklin: Wow. Okay. And what were some of your regular duties, besides the checks? Did you-- Whiteside: We had to let people in and out the gates. We had to check classified files. There were various gates and things that we had to check. You know, just being alert. Franklin: Just being alert? Whiteside: Yeah. And that’s sometimes really hard on graveyard. Franklin: Oh, I imagine. I imagine so. Whiteside: There was a tower on the river at N Area that was manned also. Franklin: Did you ever man that? 0:11:18 Whiteside: Oh, yeah. Because you rotated. Most of the time you rotated every two hours, unless you were at a barricade, and then it was like four hours. Franklin: What was the most unusual thing that you saw working on patrol? Whiteside: I can’t say there anything very unusual. It was pretty—it was pretty much like night watchman work. Other than letting people in and out of the gates and checking the files and stuff, it was pretty much just routine. Franklin: I guess that’s good that—I guess unusual on patrol is probably a bad thing, usually, right? Whiteside: Yeah. Yeah. Franklin: Was there ever any kind of humorous or anecdotal incidents that you saw while doing these duties? Whiteside: Well, I can tell you what happened to me one time. Franklin: Okay. 0:12:00 Whiteside: Once I got my Q clearance, I had to go with various patrolmen—and it was usually on the backshifts, so I would know all the checks. Because being the youngest person, seniority-wise, I could be sent to 300 Area, to 400 Area, to the Federal Building, to 2-West or whatever, to cover for vacations. So I had to learn all of the outer area stuff. We went into a building in West Area, I think it was 222-S, I’m not sure. But it was an S building; that’s all I know. The file we had to check was in a zone where we had to put on a lab coat and shoe covers. So, I followed the patrolman into the change room. Well, it was the man’s change room. And somebody looked at me and said, you have awfully long hair to be a guy. And I said, well, I’m not a guy. And he said, well, then you’re in the wrong change room. Anyway. I continued with my lab coat and shoe covers and we went and checked the file and we came back out. The patrolman said, now, you go in there and you drop off your shoe covers and your lab coat and then meet me on the outside. So I went through the women’s change room on the way out. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Oh, thank you. And so how long did you work as the watchman, night thing--? Whiteside: I was on patrol for eleven-and-a-half years. And then I went to the PUREX building and helped with the special authorization badges and the security. Then I went back to 100-N. Franklin: So that whole first eleven-and-a-half year chunk, was it pretty much the same kind of duties? Whiteside: Yeah, it was. Franklin: Considering that you didn’t train for patrol work in college, was there anything about patrol work that surprised you or stuck out to you in any way? Whiteside: Not really. Franklin: No? Whiteside: Mm-mm. Franklin: Did you find it pretty satisfying to do, given that it wasn’t something that you had trained for initially? Whiteside: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. And so then you said you went to PUREX. Whiteside: Mm-hmm. Franklin: And what did you do at PUREX? Was that work different from the-- 0:14:02 Whiteside: It was like clerk work, but they also had one section of the building, you had to have a special badge to get into. So all the people that wanted badges for that area, the paperwork was sent to me. Franklin: Okay, and then-- Whiteside: Then I sent it to the manager of that section for him to sign off on. Franklin: Okay. So it was much more of a cler--still security-related, but more-- Whiteside: Right, but more clerical. Franklin: More clerical. Whiteside: Yeah. Franklin: And did you enjoy that work more or was it nice to be in a single spot or-- Whiteside: Well, it was day shift. Franklin: Oh, yeah. Was-- Whiteside: It was day shift. Of course, on the last couple years of patrol, I was on days, too. But, yeah, it was just—you knew it was Monday through Friday and-- Franklin: No covering for vacations. Whiteside: No covering for vacations. [LAUGHTER] Any of that kind of stuff. Franklin: How many people worked at the PUREX facility at that time? Whiteside: You know, I really don’t know. Franklin: Okay. Whiteside: I really do not know. Franklin: I guess, by that time, though, you had a pretty good idea of what was happening, what was going on at Hanford, what was being made, and why. 0:15:05 Whiteside: Yeah, I guess it got a lot more open, you know, than it had been when I was growing up. Franklin: Sure, sure. And how did you—did you feel safe working at Hanford? Whiteside: Oh, yeah. I mean, I grew up here. Didn’t bother me at all. Franklin: Okay. Even from the kind of--you know, because Hanford wasn’t isolated from political or international incidents. So did any of the events in the Cold War ever cause you to worry, you know, or did you ever sense a kind of heightened sense of anxiety? Whiteside: Mm-mm. Franklin: Okay. Whiteside: Nope. Franklin: And so you said, after—how long did you work at PUREX for? Whiteside: You know, I don’t know for sure. Because the last five years was PUREX and then it was back to N Area. And I can’t tell you where the division came. Franklin: Oh, sure. By the time you worked at PUREX, were the attitudes towards female employees in security and patrol, had they largely changed by then? Do you think people were more used to seeing females in the-- Whiteside: Oh, yeah. They were. Franklin: --in those kinds of roles? Whiteside: Because we had female lieutenants and all of that by that time. Franklin: Do you ever think about it or does it ever surprise you how kind of quickly that change happened, from no women in that workforce to women being kind of commonplace or not out of the ordinary? Whiteside: Well, I guess, being there, it really didn’t. Franklin: And so you said for the last part, you went to work at N Reactor. Whiteside: Yes. Franklin: And what kind of job was that, what kind of duties? 0:16:34 Whiteside: Basically I worked for the security guy at N Area. I was in charge of all the keys for all the 100 Areas and for Rattlesnake Mountain. Franklin: Oh, okay. Whiteside: So if somebody needed a key, they had to come to me to check it out. Franklin: Did you approve those requests, or--what was that process like? Whiteside: Well, if they needed the key—I can’t remember exactly, but probably the guy or the woman that was ahead of that had said, okay, so-and-so needs a key to get in here. Of course, we’d have to call the locksmith if we were shorthanded on keys or whatever then. Franklin: What were the kinds of reasons that people would need keys, especially to go up to like Rattlesnake Mountain or into a reactor that had been shut down? Whiteside: Just for safety checks, more or less. Franklin: Safety checks. Whiteside: Yeah. Franklin: Same with Rattlesnake? Because was that facility still active when you were doing patrol? Whiteside: No, it wasn’t. Franklin: Okay. 0:17:29 Whiteside: It was still there. And it could’ve been made active, but it wasn’t. But it’s quite a facility. Franklin: Why don’t you tell me a little bit about it. Whiteside: It had sleeping quarters; it had a kitchen; it had big meeting rooms. Because that was where all the important people would’ve gone, if something had happened at Hanford. Franklin: Right. Whiteside: They would’ve bussed them up there. But it was a neat building. It really was. Franklin: So you went inside of it? Whiteside: Oh, yeah. Franklin: Was that part of your patrol duties? Whiteside: Well, no, that was not. One of our checks, if you worked in the 300 Area was to go up there and check the gates. But since I had the keys, just before I quit--I got to retire when I was 42 years old--we, a bunch of us, decided we wanted to go up there. Because I had the keys, we got the okay to go. Franklin: Oh, okay. So this was kind of like before you retired kind of checking it out kind of thing. Whiteside: Yeah, yeah. Franklin: Okay. Did you socialize mostly with people from--that worked at Hanford? Whiteside: We did, because my husband and I were both on the same shift. Franklin: Oh, so did your husband work patrol as well? Whiteside: No, no. He ran N--he was one of the shift managers at N Reactor. Franklin: Oh, okay. So you kind of worked together for the last-- Whiteside: Well, we--no. When I went back to N, he’d retired. Franklin: Oh, okay, okay. 0:18:49 Whiteside: Westinghouse was coming in and the benefits he would get from UNC were better than those he would’ve gotten from Westinghouse, and he was 62 years old. Franklin: Oh, okay. Whiteside: So it was an optimum time for him retire. Franklin: Sure, yeah, a little earlier retirement and-- Whiteside: Yeah. For the most part, we worked the same shift. So our family, essentially, was the shift you were on. Because you had long changes together, you had days off between swing and days together. So we did a lot of things with them. Franklin: You say your family, you mean like your work family? Whiteside: Yeah, yeah. Franklin: Okay. So the people you socialized with were the people that were on the same shift. Whiteside: For the most part. Franklin: Would you say that was pretty common throughout-- Whiteside: I think it was. Franklin: --all the shift people, like graveyard people were associated with the graveyard people? 0:19:35 Whiteside: I think so. There were some straight day people that we did things with, too. But for the most part, if you wanted to do anything in the middle of the week, it was with the people that you were on that shift with, because we all had that day off. Franklin: Sure, sure. Whiteside: You know. Franklin: That makes sense. And did you meet your husband working out at the Hanford Site? Whiteside: I met my husband when his daughter and I started kindergarten at Spalding. Franklin: Oh, okay. So your husband was-- Whiteside: 23 years older than me. Franklin: Okay! And how did you become involved with your husband? Were you working out at the Site at the time? 0:20:04 Whiteside: yes, I was. I got my clearance, and the night that the patrolman took me to N Area to show me the checks, he told me that he thought Bob Whiteside was the shift manager. And I said, well, did he used to live in Richland and he’s got two kids and he moved back to Sunnyside and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah? And of course, the patrolman didn’t know. So he went into his office and he was not there. So, another guy--I don’t remember who it was--took me around and showed me the various parts of N Area. When we got back to Bob’s office, he was there. And somebody had told him that I was looking for him. Of course, he admitted later, he had no clue who I was. To me, he looked the same as my friend’s dad, 20-some years before. But I didn’t look the same to him, of course. [LAUGHTER] I mean, you know? Franklin: Well, sure, yeah. So that’s when you kind of I guess reconnected with him. Whiteside: Yeah, it was. Yeah, it was. Franklin: And then you guys started dating at some point. Whiteside: Mm-hm, yup. Franklin: Interesting. And so you retired when your husband did, right? Whiteside: No, I worked for three more years. Franklin: Oh, you worked for three more years. Whiteside: Yeah, yeah. Franklin: Okay. And that was that split-time between PUREX and N. Whiteside: And N, yeah. Franklin: So why did you choose to retire from Hanford? 0:21:28 Whiteside: He wanted to sell our house. We had an RV and he wanted to travel and see part of the country. And I was all for it. Franklin: Okay. Whiteside: So we did that. Our house sold and we moved into the RV and covered most everything on our side of the Mississippi. Franklin: Oh, wow. Did you live in an Alphabet—the house you sold, was it a newer construction? Whiteside: It was new. It was on Spengler, right across the street from the 7-Eleven that’s on Spengler. Franklin: Oh, okay, gotcha. Whiteside: And you know what used to be where the 7-Eleven is? A drive-in theater. Franklin: Oh, wow. Whiteside: Yeah. Franklin: Interesting. Yeah, kind of a shame that those went away. Whiteside: Yeah, they were fun. They were fun. Franklin: Yeah. I’ve heard. It’d be nice if they could come back. They’re almost extinct now. Whiteside: They are, yeah, and that’s too bad. Franklin: Yeah. And so eventually, though, you came back to the Tri-Cities, obviously. Whiteside: Yes. Franklin: And why did you choose to come back to the Tri-Cities? Whiteside: Bob always knew that eventually, I wanted to come home. Franklin: Okay. 0:22:26 Whiteside: And I wanted to come home with him, not after something happened to him. So in ‘05, well, can we move home now? And he was 80 years old at the time. He said, yeah, it’s time. He was from Sunnyside, so essentially he was home, too. So he said, okay, you better call a realtor. So I did. And we bought a house. Franklin: Okay. And did the rest of your family still live here in the area? Your mother and-- Whiteside: My mother did, yes. My sister and the oldest of my brothers were in Spokane. One was in Salem; one was in [UNKNOWN] California at the time. Franklin: Okay. And so is your husband still with us, or is he-- Whiteside: No, he passed away almost five years ago. Franklin: Oh, okay. And so what have you been doing since you came back? 0:23:13 Whiteside: I volunteer at the cancer center; I volunteer at the book room at the library. I do all the cards for the local Goldwing motorcycle chapter. I wear about three hats at church. I belong to the Cancer Guild. Franklin: So you’re keeping busy in retirement. Whiteside: I keep busy, yes, I do. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: As just about every retired person I know seems to be more busy than when they worked. Whiteside: Oh, believe me, it’s true. It’s true. Franklin: Were you—I’m wondering, this is probably going back a ways, but do you remember when JFK came to dedicate N Reactor? Whiteside: I do. I do. Franklin: Did you go out-- 0:23:52 Whiteside: I was not let out of school. My parents didn’t want me to get out of school. But I knew he was here. Franklin: Oh, okay. Did you have friends that went to see him? Whiteside: I probably did, but I can’t remember. Franklin: Okay. Were there any other events or incidents that happened in the Tri-Cities or Hanford that happened when you were a child or later on when you worked at Hanford? Whiteside: No. Just regular stuff. Franklin: Okay. What would you like future generations to know about living or working--living in the Tri-Cities and working at Hanford during the Cold War? 0:24:31 Whiteside: Well, I still think it was a very, very safe place. I think that perhaps, if it wasn’t DOE at the time, whatever it was, it would’ve been a little bit more open with what was going on. I think there would be not quite as many negative thoughts, ideas, whatever, about Hanford and Los Alamos and Oak Ridge and all of those. Franklin: So you’re saying, then, that that level of security is kind of—there’s been a legacy cost associated with that. Whiteside: I think so. I think so. Franklin: In terms of people’s maybe mistrust of nuclear. Whiteside: Well, you fear the unknown, and it was unknown. I mean it really was. Franklin: Sure, sure. And then when releases did happen, they were very hushed—you had to kind of pry that information out of them. Whiteside: Yeah, you did. Yeah. Franklin: The level of mistrust grows from the unknown, I guess. Whiteside: Yes, it does. Franklin: Well, Donna, is there anything else you’d like to mention before we close up today? Whiteside: I don’t think so. Franklin: Okay, well, thank you so much-- Whiteside: Thank you. Franklin: --for coming in and interviewing with us. Whiteside: You bet. Franklin: Okay. Great. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:25:39 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 9980 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview Hanford Patrol 2-East 100 Areas East Area 300 Area 400 Area Federal Building 2-West West Area 222-S PUREX 100-N N Reactor Rattlesnake Mountain Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 71 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 24 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Donna Whiteside Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Donna Whiteside reflects on moving to Richland when her father moved the family from Montana. Donna worked as a patrolman working graveyard or swing before taking other security related positions until she retired and traveled for sometime in her RV. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 04/25/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fe96772868bcbb27fc792d8ce071d7ad8.jpg 1edcf090a52c05e2abb84031af5e6bdb https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F7e4463a8a3acaf49a721532d344d9f3f.mp4 6f741c1244f024accff8b1403feeae12 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Bauman, Robert Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Lewis, Doris Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Northwest Public Television | Lewis_Doris Robert Bauman: [LAUGHTER] And, yeah, I'm sure it will be. Man One: Yeah, I am too. Doris Lewis: Because I think I've forgotten more than I remember. Man One: Me too. Lewis: [LAUGHTER] Miriam: So mom, I won't chime in unless you ask me to. Lewis: Yeah. Miriam: Okay? Lewis: Okay. Man One: Going here. Bauman: Okay, we’re good to go? Man One: Yeah. Lewis: Well-- Bauman: All right. Lewis: --see, you were born in-- Miriam: 1958. Lewis: Yeah, October. Miriam: Why don't we let them ask the questions? Bauman: We'll go ahead and get started, yeah. Lewis: Okay. Bauman: So let's go ahead and get started. And first I'm going to just have say your name for us. Lewis: Now? Bauman: Yeah, go ahead. Lewis: My name is Doris Lewis. Bauman: And my name is Robert Bauman. And today is August 14, 2013. And we are conducting this interview on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. So let's start by having you tell us about how and why you came to this area. Lewis: Okay. I came to this--I got married in Seattle. I got engaged back in Minnesota and I came out west. And we were married in Seattle in--what was it? Miriam: 1944. Lewis: Yeah, 1944--December 5, 1944. Miriam: So can I--Mom, but you came out here--you guys were waiting to get married for Dad to get kind of a good job. Lewis: [LAUGHTER] Yeah. Miriam: And so he got a job out here, right? Lewis: Yes. Miriam: When did he get the job out here? Lewis: Well he got the job--let's see. We were married in--he got the job in '43. Miriam: So you didn't even have your house when you moved out here. You came to Seattle, got married, and then moved into your house here? Lewis: Yeah, we moved into a one-bedroom prefab, of which I have a picture. Miriam: So you came out here because Dad got a job here. And that was what allowed you guys to get married. And that's when you moved here. Lewis: Yeah. That's why I moved here, yes. Bauman: And so what sort of job did your husband have? Lewis: He was a photographer, a patrol photographer. Bauman: And his name was? Lewis: Walt--S. Walt--It's Sam Walter Lewis, but everybody knew him as Walt. Bauman: And so he got a job working as a photographer at the Hanford site? Lewis: Mm-hm. He was on patrol here, working on patrol. But he was a photographer. Bauman: Oh okay, so working for the Hanford patrol? I see. Okay. What was Richland like when you came here in 1944? Lewis: Well, Richland was still being built when I came here in 1944. And they put up prefabs to get housing up quickly. And since we were a couple, we got a one-bedroom prefab. It was on Sanford and Symons--a lot different today. And the sidewalks were that macadam. And asparagus was growing up on the sidewalks, as I remember, right across from our prefab. I have a picture here of myself sweeping off the porch-- Bauman: That's great. Lewis: --of the prefab. You may have it. Bauman: We'll film that later. Yeah, that's great. Lewis: Mm-hm. So anyway, that was my first home here. And it was really darling. I bought yellow chintz with blue figures on it. And one of the women here helped me make drapes. People were very friendly. And she not only helped me, she just made the drapes. [LAUGHTER] And we used to get together and have parties. And we formed a community. It was a lot of fun. Bauman: Mm-hm. And I'm guessing there must have been people coming here from all over the United States? Lewis: All over, from every--the people I saw a lot of happened to be Southerners. And they were really warm and friendly. Bauman: And you said your first house was-- Lewis: A one-bedroom prefab. And it was darling. It had a living room. And then it had a curtained off area for the kitchen and bathroom and bedroom. And it was adequate for a couple. Bauman: And how long did you live there? Lewis: You know, I don't remember. Not too long. So we moved into a two bedroom for a while. I've lived in every house in Richland. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: So when you first came here, you talked about it being a very friendly place, very friendly community. Were there things to do, entertainment, places to shop, those sorts of things? Lewis: Oh. They still had--big bands came here. And Hanford was still running. I went to their house, open house, where they served meals and stuff. They were still serving meals. And they served family style. The waiters came in with huge plates of food and put them on the tables, a lot of food. And they still hand entertainers come in. There were some big time bands. I don't remember now who they were, but they were notables. They were a lot of fun, too, because everybody was friendly. You danced with whoever asked you. And my husband was taking pictures. So I didn't get to--he didn't help me. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: So it must have been quite a bit different than Minnesota, or Seattle. Lewis: Oh, yeah, quite a difference, yeah. Bauman: I've heard people talk about the heat and the dust and the winds, you know, the termination winds. Lewis: And the place was dug up. So we'd have terrible sandstorms. And I would come home at night to my house and the couch--you know, these were prefabs. So they're not too well built. I come home to my house and my couch was covered with sand. You couldn't see the pattern on it. And then we had to sweep out. [LAUGHTER] We were young. And it didn't matter. We took everything in stride. Bauman: Do you remember any community events or anything like that would go on in Richland at the time? Lewis: I'm sure there were. I don't remember. I'm sure there were. Bauman: Yeah. I understand that there was not a synagogue at the time that moved here and that you and your husband were involved in-- Lewis: Yeah, there were about 12 of us, eventually. And we got a group together. We held services every Friday night in our homes. And we formed a Jewish community. Yes. As I say, there were only 12 of us. I don't know when we built the--we built the synagogue when Jerry was-- Miriam: There was the 60th anniversary recently. Lewis: Huh? Miriam: Recently, there was the 60th anniversary. Lewis: Yeah. Bauman: So sometime in the 19--early '50s. Miriam: Yeah. Lewis: But we opened the synagogue when Jerry was about two or three, I think. A Seattle architect, a Jewish architect, drew up the plans--didn't charge us. And we had Meyer Elkins, who was--he supervised the building. He worked for AEC. And he was in charge of our synagogue building. We hired an architect from Seattle, and I cannot remember his name. But he was a very good architect. And our original synagogue has been enlarged to twice its size. There was an addition put on that was as big as the original building. Now I don't know when that was, either--I mean the date. Bauman: Right. Miriam: All right, can I ask a question? Mom, how did you guys raise the money to build it? Lewis: How did we raise the money? Miriam: And how many more--you were 12 originally, but how did the congregation grow? Lewis: Well, it grew. There were 12 of us that built it, the synagogue. We pledged to pay over a period of years. And the bank loaned us the money. And now what did you just ask me? Miriam: Just--there were 12 of you to start with, but when the synagogue was built, did people start hearing of it and start coming? Sorry, I'm-- Lewis: Yeah, well I don't know. I don't know when--it took a while to build it. And once they built it, then we had regular services every Friday evening and Saturday morning. And we celebrated holidays there. The synagogue was a central point for us. That's where we held all our activities. That's where we met. And that's how we really functioned. Bauman: And you said there were 12 initially. Do you remember any of the other individuals who were involved early on? Lewis: Any what? Bauman: Any of the other people who were involved early on? Lewis: Oh yeah, well most of them are dead now. Bauman: Sure. Lewis: There was Meyer and Tilly Elkins. And Meyer was a--he was a builder. He was an engineer. But he did building. And he supervised the building. And I'll tell you, it was perfect. [LAUGHTER] He was very, very concerned about every detail. We have a good, solid building. And if it weren't for these dedicated people, we wouldn't have had anything. Because we pledged the money for it, which at that time seemed like a lot of money. You couldn't do it today. And I don't remember the amount, but I think it was only about $16,000. I'm not sure of that. Miriam: So mom, who were the rest of the 12 people? Lewis: Now that's a good question. Miriam: The Francos. Lewis: The Francos. Miriam: So that's Bob and Eileen Franco. The Kahns? Were the Kahns? Lewis: Well yeah, Herb-- Miriam: Herb and Albert-- Lewis: --took charge of the financing, took charge of the banking. Miriam: So that's six out of the 12. Who were the--oh, the Goldsmiths. Were the Goldsmiths? Lewis: Yeah, I don't think they were early, no. I'm trying to remember. You know, I don't remember. Miriam: That's something my brother could probably actually give you the information on. Lewis: Well it might be in the book. Miriam: No, this is Kennedy. Lewis: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I don't know what Jerry remembers. But he was, I think, about two years old when they built it. Miriam: But we can ask Jerry. Jerry can give them the information about the rest of the 12 people. Because I'm sure he will know. Bauman: That's fine, yeah, sure. Lewis: Okay. Bauman: I was going to ask you then, obviously, your children were born here? Lewis: Who? Bauman: Your children were born here. Is that correct? Miriam: Yeah. Lewis: Oh, you--Miriam was born here and Jerry was born here. Bauman: And how was Richland as a place to raise a family? How did you experience that? Lewis: It was a wonderful place to raise a family. Because families were very important. And we got everything for free. They needed people here. And they did everything to keep us. Because it was a population that moved in and moved out. Many of them came, looked around, and left. They wouldn't stay. [LAUGHTER] But I think it was a very nice little community. We loved it here. We made friends, and we had activities. And we were busy. And then, of course, I had a job. I was a secretary. I worked first it was still under DuPont until I think '45 when GE came in. Bauman: And what part of the Hanford site did you work at? Lewis: Well I worked down--I was downtown then in the Ad Building. And I worked for--I can't remember what--Overbeck was one of the fellows. I was one of the top secretaries here at that time. Bauman: And how long did you work? Lewis: I worked a long time. [LAUGHTER] I quit working when my son was born. And that was in '55. And I quit for six or seven years. And then I came back to work again. And I worked part time for a while. But secretaries always had jobs. They needed secretaries. And I was an experienced one. They used to say if you knew a typewriter from a washing machine, they'd hire you. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: [LAUGHTER] And what did you think of working at Hanford? How was your experience or your experiences working there? Lewis: What did I think of working there? Bauman: Yeah, how was it? Lewis: I liked it. It was interesting work. I didn’t know--I wasn't engineering knowledgeable. I didn't really know what they were doing. But it was a big secret. And in August 1945--I think that was when the first bomb was dropped. I remember working in the Ad Building there. And all the managers, everybody was on edge, waiting to hear the outcome of the dropped first bomb. Yes. Bauman: Is that when you first knew what was going on, what had been happening at Hanford? Lewis: Yeah, it was all very secret. And it didn't get out. Very few people knew what they were doing. Because very few people--it was a new art, or whatever you call it--a new technical thing. And they never knew, until it went off, if it was going to work. I worked for W. P. Overbeck. I worked for Vic Hansen from DuPont. He was one of the managers, a very good man. But he was only there for about six months after I hired in. Bauman: So when you first came for your jobs at Hanford, what did you know about the place? Were you just told it had something to do with the war effort? Lewis: We weren't told anything. I don't remember them--we knew we were working for the government and that it was very secretive. And that's all we knew. And I wasn't educated enough to know what we were doing. Now, some people may have surely knew. But as I say, engineering was something I didn't know anything about. But I learned some things. And I helped the wheels go around. Bauman: Yeah, did you have to get a special clearance to be able to work at Hanford? Lewis: Yeah, I had--we wore security badges. And before I quit, I got a top security clearance, because I'd been here a long time. And I worked for some of the top fellows. G. G. Lale--I can't remember what he was, but he was assistant to the man that was in charge. I think W. E. Johnson was in charge then. I'm not sure. Things are jumbled together for me. Because I'm so old I can't remember too accurately either. Bauman: You're doing great. [LAUGHTER] You're remembering a lot. Lewis: [LAUGHTER] I don't know. Bauman: So your husband working for the Hanford patrol as a photographer. How long did he work at Hanford? Lewis: He worked here a long time. And then he finally quit and went to Oregon--Gresham, right outside of Portland, and established his own business. That was a dream of his all his life. He wanted to have a studio, photographic studio, so he bought one. But however, he didn't look closely enough at it. And he spent a year trying to build a business. But he never could accomplish one that would keep us. And I was supposed to join him in about three months, quit my job and join him. But in three months’ time we knew that he needed my financial help. So I stayed on. And we visited back and forth. And he finally quit and came down here. And he got a job here as a photographer. Bauman: I wanted to ask you about President Kennedy's visit in 1963. Lewis: Yeah, that was--we went out. It was a hot, hot day. It was when the Dual Purpose Reactor--it was a D Reactor--was being dedicated. And Kennedy--it was a very hot day out in the desert. And there was a big crowd--I don't know, 40,000 50,000--a lot of people. And a friend of mine and I--Bonnie Goldsmith. They were here early. And we took our kids, Philip and Jerry, but-- Miriam: Not me. Lewis: Not you, no. And they were what, about five or six? Miriam: No, it was 1963. They were seven or eight. Lewis: Yeah, and they immediately ran around, got lost. We had to find them. But Kennedy spoke. He was the most impressive, the most glamorous man I think I've ever in my life seen. And he was a marvelous speaker. It was just a pleasure to sit down and look at him and listen to him. He was fantastic. And he had this magic wand that started the reactors at D Area. But this desert—I think there were 40,000, 50,000 people there. And it was a hot, hot day. And the cars were--length of cars there. I remember--when was D activated? I can't remember the date. But everybody spoke. It was a wonderful, wonderful affair. And it was so impressive that waving the wand started the reactor. So it made both electricity and the others. Bauman: And your husband took some photos that day? Lewis: Mm-hm. He took photos. And we have some of the photos in this book there. The information is there. My son gathered it all together. He published not very many of these. He just did--something that he wanted to do. So you may look at it, because the pictures and the information on there are much more accurate than what I'm giving you. [LAUGHTER] I don't remember a lot. Miriam might remember stuff when she started school here, too, that might be of interest. Okay? Miriam: Well he can ask the questions, and if he wants to ask me I'm sure he will. Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Well I was going to ask are there any other major events that happened while you were working at Hanford that you recall or-- Lewis: Oh, well no doubt there were a lot of major events. But I don’t—I mean, if you ask me the question, I could answer specifically. But as a whole, the work went on daily. The scientists were working on it all the time. And when they dropped the bomb in, what was it, August? Was it August? Bauman: August, uh-huh. Lewis: Everybody was waiting. We didn't know what they were waiting for. But they were waiting. The top fellows knew that the bomb was going to be dropped. And we did get the information, finally. It was terrible, really. It was a terrible thing to do. But they felt that they really saved lives by dropping that bomb. Because they stopped—I mean, they weren't winning, they weren't losing. It was a very iffy situation. And that, of course, stopped everything. It was terrible. Bauman: I was going to ask you—Richland initially was a government town, federal government. At some point it became an independent-- Lewis: They sold the houses to the inhabitants. Bauman: So were you able to buy your house at that point, then, buy a house? Lewis: Yeah, we bought--what was the first house we bought? I think it was a B house. Miriam: Was that the house where I was born? Lewis: Yeah, it was a B house. Miriam: Yeah. Lewis: Two-bedroom house, a duplex. Bauman: And do you remember, were people in Richland excited about the possibility to do that sort of thing, to have independent-- Lewis: Do they have what? Bauman: Were people in Richland excited about being able to buy their own homes, be sort of independent? Lewis: Oh, yeah. By that time they will permanently implanted here. And the job was going to go on. [COUGH] Excuse me. And they sold the houses for pittances. Especially the expensive houses were real bargains--the prefabs not so much, because they didn't cost much in the first place. But I think I was living in a B house then, a two-bedroom duplex. And I bought the whole house. And we rented out the duplex. And I lived there for a while. And then we sold it and bought a ranch house. [LAUGHTER] I've lived in, I think, every house here. I lived in a B house, in a ranch house, and in a--what else? In our house. Miriam: I don't have the letters memorized. [LAUGHTER] Lewis: Yeah, right. Bauman: Is there anything that we haven't talked about yet, anything that-- Lewis: I kept upgrading myself. Miriam: In terms of history, probably not, although you did ask about--Mom, I was just curious, because this is of course what I like to know, where did you grocery shop and stuff when you first came here? Lewis: Well we had a Keiser's store, a grocery. Miriam: When you first came here in '44? Lewis: Well you know, I don't know what we had then. We had a Keiser--we had grocery stores. I think Safeway was here then. Miriam: Oh, really? Lewis: Yeah, right. Miriam: Yeah, I was just curious. Lewis: Mm-hm. I don't remember a lot. But I think there was plenty of shopping. Miriam: Mm-hm. Were you happy with the schools you sent us to? Lewis: Yes, I was active in the schools. And my relationships were very good. Our teachers were excellent. They were dedicated, because they came out here in the middle of nowhere. [LAUGHTER] What did you think about your teachers? Miriam: Well I just thought--this is my impression, is that because there were so many scientists here that education was a value and that I remember that school levies, when I was growing up, because I born in 1958, the school levies always passed. Nobody considered that they shouldn't be spending public money to support education. And I always thought that was because of the heavy concentration of really highly educated people that came here. Bauman: So what schools did you go to then? Miriam: I went to Jefferson Elementary, Chief Joseph Junior High, and Richland High School. And my brother--Jerry went to Jason Lee to begin with. Mom, do you remember? Jerry didn't start at Jefferson. Lewis: No, he didn't. Miriam: Jason Lee? Lewis: I don't remember. Miriam: I think so. Anyhow, he started a different school and then went to Jefferson when we moved to the neighborhood where we-- Lewis: Lived. Miriam: --Grew up. And where Mom still lives. Bauman: And so, those elementary schools must have been pretty much new when your kids started there, or close to. Lewis: Yeah. Jefferson was just built, I think. It wasn't very old. Miriam: Yeah, I don't know. Bauman: And just given the influx of population suddenly, all these young families, there had to have been a new school being opened that served the population there. Anything else you can think of that either one of you--we haven't talked about, or--? Miriam: Well just that I think, Mom, you never thought that you would come out here and spend the rest your life here. [LAUGHTER] Lewis: No, never. I never thought that. And it was away from my family, and from friends. However, we managed. We went back to Minnesota every summer. [LAUGHTER] Our families were there. Miriam: But I want to come back a little bit to the synagogue. Because as a very, very tiny minority here, we families banded together to build the synagogue, it was a very, very strong community. And still, it's not as strong now in that same way, but these people were all like additional parents, or like aunts and uncles to all of us. And my mom was called Aunt Doris. My dad was called Uncle Walt. That was how we addressed the parents in those families, us as children. And that it's interesting to have this group of Jews wandering in this particular desert. [LAUGHTER] Because it really has a very, very--it's a microcosm of the whole Richland thing, where you have people coming from all over and creating a very strong, very close community, because they are away from all of the places they came from. And our Jewish community reflected that same phenomenon. Bauman: Absolutely, yeah, right, thrown together from all these disparate areas. Lewis: As time went on, we never intended--at first, we intended to move back to Minnesota when this job was finished. It was never finished. Bauman: [LAUGHTER] It just kept going. Lewis: Yeah, so we stayed on. And it was our home. We loved it here. I love it here. Bauman: That's a similar theme I get. A lot of people who I've talked to come here thinking they'll stay here for a little while and then end up staying for 40 years or 60 years or however long. [LAUGHTER] Lewis: Yeah, right. A little while became forever. Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Right, right. Well I want to thank you very much for coming in today. Lewis: Yeah, I'm afraid I wasn't much help, because my memory's so bad. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: This was terrific. Lewis: But it was fun. It was a wonderful experience. We loved it here. I still do. Bauman: Well thank you again. Appreciate it. Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:32:53 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 239 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview Ad Building D Reactor Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1944-2013 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Lewis, Sam Walter Elkins, Meyer & Tilly Overbeck, W.P. Lale, G.G Johnson, W.E. Kennedy, John F. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Doris Lewis Description An account of the resource An interview with Doris Lewis conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Subject The topic of the resource Hanford (Wash.) Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Richland (Wash.). Public Schools Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013-8-14 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2016-06-22: Metadata v1 created – [RG] Ad Building D Reactor DuPont General Electric Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, 1917-1963 Richland (Wash.) Secrecy https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fc3fa2945a233debbf97729f37ac460ce.JPG dd1b10256a2b922e96d8e6590c70ede7 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Douglas Alford Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Douglas Alford on January 22, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Doug about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Douglas Alford: Madden Douglas Alford. Now you want me to spell it? Franklin: Yes, please. Alford: The last name? Oh. M-A-D-D-E-N. D-O-U-G-L-A-S. A-L-F-O-R-D. Franklin: Great, thanks. And you prefer to go by Doug, right? Alford: Yes. Franklin: Okay, great. So, Doug, tell me how you came to work for the Hanford Site. Alford: I came in 1951. Franklin: Okay. And how did you hear about Hanford? Alford: Pardon? Franklin: How did you hear about Hanford? Alford: Well, I went to school at Central Washington in Ellensburg. Franklin: Oh, okay. Alford: And so I was familiar with it. Franklin: Where are you from originally? Alford: Well, I was born in North Dakota. Franklin: Okay. And when did you come to Washington? Alford: I came to Washington in 1934. Franklin: Okay. Why did your parents come to Washington? Alford: My dad was a farmer. We had three years of no crops whatsoever. Dust blowing. It was a lot worse than—you’ve heard about the dust blowing here at Hanford, but it didn’t hold a candle to what we had in North Dakota. Let’s see. Well, my dad sold the place for $1600. It was a section of ground, but that’s all he got. So, when we came out, we came over with two cars. The lead car was a Model T Ford, and he was a relative of my mother. And then we followed him and we came over the Rocky Mountains. It was just a gravel road at that time. Franklin: Wow. Alford: It was quite a trip. We were in the second car, so there was a lot of dust. Every once in a while, we’d lose him ahead of us. But [LAUGHTER] we’d back off a little bit and we’d find out he was there. Franklin: How old were you when you made the trip? Alford: About—I left about when I was seven years old. Franklin: Okay, so you were born in—what year were you born? Alford: ’25. Franklin: ’25, okay. Wow, that sounds like quite a journey, driving from North Dakota. Where did your parents settle when they came to Washington? Alford: It was Kirkland, Washington. Franklin: Oh, okay. And what made you choose Central Washington College? Alford: What year? Franklin: Why did you go to Central Washington? Alford: Well, I was in the Navy prior to that. I just—I had always planned to go to college, so. I think that was in 1946. Yeah. Franklin: Okay. Alford: ’46. I think I started at college and didn’t like it too well and I quit after a quarter or two. And then went back the next year and finished my degree in chemistry. Franklin: In chemistry, right. And then you—when did you come to Hanford? What year did you come to Hanford? Alford: That was 1951. Franklin: And what did you do? What was your first job at Hanford? Alford: The first job—I had about ten or twelve lady laboratory technicians that I was supervising. I think I did that about three years, three or four years. It didn’t appeal to me after a while. Franklin: Yeah? Alford: I thought there might be something a little better. Franklin: Okay. And what did you move on to? Alford: Well, I quit Hanford and worked—a friend of mine up in Prosser on a farm. But that was supposedly a year-round job, and it didn’t pan out that way somehow. So I called my friend, Fred Clagett. He was the mayor of Richland at that time, but he also worked in personnel at Hanford. And I told him I’d like my job back, but I don’t want the same one. And he said, that’s fine, and he even gave me a raise. Franklin: Wow. Alford: But I did spend a little time reading pocket books and things like that until my clearance came. That was customary for most everybody coming in. You just sat there and read and had to wait for your Q clearance. Franklin: The Q clearance, right. Alford: Yeah. Franklin: So what job did you hire back in as? Alford: In engineering—an engineer. I guess they call it an Engineer I or something like that. That was much more appealing to me. I had that on one of those write-ups I had. I don’t know whether you have it or not. Franklin: I do, yeah, it says that you worked in the 300 Area. Alford: Yeah, that’s the 300 Area. Franklin: What kind of duties did you do as an engineer there in the 300 Area? Alford: You know, I might have to have one of those myself to remind myself. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Sure, yeah. Okay. There you go. Yeah, that’s all right. Visual aids are encouraged. So it says here you worked doing cold pilot plant work and the recovery of uranium from simulated solvent extraction products, which contained urinal nitrate hexahydrate. Alford: Yeah, that was the first job. Uranyl nitrate—when you brought the slugs in from the—or the fuel elements in from the 100 Areas, we’d dissolve them in nitric acid. We’d always—so they’re mainly the uranium slug. We took the solution, the uranium solution and put it in a calciner at a pretty high temperature, and we’d come out with uranium oxide. That was the—we were just testing what temperatures we needed to run that and things like that. Franklin: So you’re basically trying to recapture the uranium, during the process— Alford: Yes. Franklin: So you could probably re-put it in other fuel? You could refuel it. Alford: Yeah, it could be reused—the uranium could be reused. And then we also ran cold operations in a little bit of a pilot plant, to separate—trying to separate the strontium and cesium out of the solvent-extracted waste. The solvent extraction is a number of steel columns. The first one, the waste stream from the first one contains all the fission products. Downstream, the different columns, we’d get the strontium, cesium isolated there. Franklin: What was the purpose of isolating the strontium and cesium? Alford: They’re a fission product, a long-lived fission product. So for one thing, Oak Ridge was looking for cesium-137 for medicinal work, actually. But they’re both long-lived isotopes. We figured we had to get rid of them later on so we could isolate them. They’re a really—in the waste stream. There’s more work downstream. We moved from—that was in the 300 Area, and then we moved to the 200-East Area, what we called the hot pilot plant at that time, semi-works and we just continued the pilot scale work that we were doing in the 300 Area, just on a slightly larger scale. But that, at the semi-works, we were on actual PUREX waste stream that contained the strontium and cesium. Franklin: So you were receiving the waste as it was exiting the PUREX plant— Alford: Yes. Franklin: But you weren’t extracting all of—you weren’t using all of the waste, right, just a portion of the waste? Alford: No, just a very small portion of it. Franklin: So that’s how a lot of that strontium and cesium ended up in the waste tanks later on. Alford: Yeah. Franklin: Because you couldn’t—so, when you would extract it, you said you used to the cesium—Oak Ridge wanted the cesium. What was the strontium used—was it just extracted because it was so radioactive, or did it have an application? Alford: Well, we extracted it because it’s a long-lived—it’s a 90-year half-life, and it’s something we just simply had to—I think it’s still stored out at Hanford, probably, in large lead casks. There’s a lot of strontium and cesium in the tanks out there also. But from the pilot plant at the semi-works, I moved to B Plant. That’s a full-scale operation. We ran around the clock. We had four shifts. I think—I don’t remember exactly how many—but anyhow, my part of that one, I was writing the—I had several engineers and a couple technicians, and we wrote the—took the procedures from the other research and engineering people in the building. They told us how to do it, but then we put it into operating procedures for our operators. That’s what I did; it’s called Process Control. We wrote the operating—that was a—I guess I was—well, I moved from there to the manager of B Plant operations. Franklin: So, B Plant was effectively a copy of T Plant, right? It was a Manhattan Project era canyon. Alford: Yes. Franklin: What process were you operating at the time? What were you processing at B Plant? Alford: At B Plant, we had large-scale solvent extraction columns. They were just enlarged from the pilot plant. It was initial pilot plant in the 300 Area, then semi-works was upgraded a little bit, and then B Plant was big, steel columns. And you got solution—aqueous solution going in and organic solution going in, and they were pulsating. This is how we’d separate one from another—one isotope from another. Franklin: What isotopes were you separating in B Plant? Alford: Well, we weren’t actually—just separating the waste stream. Finally getting the plutonium out of the—to send to the—well, the Plutonium Finishing Plant, that’s the one that they’re having trouble with right now. Franklin: Yeah, 234-5. Alford: Yeah. Franklin: So in B Plant, you were separating plutonium. You were taking this solution in, and then separating the plutonium out from the waste stream. Alford: Yes. Franklin: Okay. And you did this—this was all done remotely, right? Alford: Right, yeah. Franklin: I’m wondering if you could talk about that a bit. What were the challenges in doing this work remotely? Alford: Well, the cover blocks sit over the cells. We’d have about five cells, and you’ve got cover blocks over each cell, several. I think about three cover blocks: one on each side and a middle one. Those cover blocks weigh about 70 tons each. Franklin: Wow. Alford: And then it’s all stainless steel piping in the processing cell. And then we have a big gantry crane that moves over. The crane operator, when he gets—if we have to make a rooting change in the cell, he removes the cover blocks, and he has remote—we have remote connectors on every—we call them jumpers, that’s the solution transfer pipe from one to the other. And he’d make that whatever transfer or connection we needed, and then cover blocks go back on. That was the—we were always, of course, in a down period when that happened. Franklin: What do you mean, a down period? Alford: Well, I mean, we weren’t operating when the cells were open. Franklin: So you said that each cover block weighs 70 tons? Alford: Yeah. Franklin: So that’s concrete—those are concrete blocks, right? Alford: Well, they were—I’ve forgotten how big they are now. I think they’re seven feet thick and I’m not sure how wide. Franklin: That’s huge. Alford: The cell was about—well, one cell was probably 20 feet or so. 20 by maybe 15 or something. I don’t remember exactly. Maybe 10 by 20. I can’t remember that. Franklin: That’s okay. So I imagine that in that area, you would be on the other side of a thick concrete wall, sampling and observing the process. You wouldn’t actually be in the gallery, right? Alford: No. Franklin: Because it was too radioactive in there. Alford: Right. Franklin: How did the operators see—did the operator have a direct line of sight on what he’s doing, or how did you shield the crane operator from the radioactivity? Alford: Well, the crane operator, he had lead shielding underneath him and whatnot. He had lead shielding all around his cab. Our operators, they would have to go in to take process samples routinely. At that time, they were getting more exposure than we liked. That’s where I devised a sampler that reduced their time in there. I applied for a patent on it, but they told me that I used vacuum so that invalidated the—I can’t imagine why. But anyhow, it did the job for the operators. They still call it the Alford connector. Franklin: Oh, that’s cool. I’m wondering if you can describe this Alford connector. What did it look like and how was it an improvement over the existing sampler? Alford: Well, the only thing that it improved, it took a lot less time to take the sample, so they weren’t exposed—they weren’t in the canyon as long as they would have before. Franklin: Would the block have to be off for them to take the sample? Alford: No, they have—the blocks are all on, and we were operating at that time. But you have to take successive samples to go to the analytical lab, and that’s where these ladies were working. Franklin: Oh, right. So how would—if the blocks are on and the stuff is in the cell and it’s connected by a jumper, how would you get a sample out? Where was the— Alford: Well, the sample port is built in. There’s an entryway in the cell cover block itself. It’s not a straight line; it’s a curved line to reduce radiation. But I think that’s— Franklin: That’s really interesting. Alford: There is one little—when I moved in from process control to the manager of the plant, I could always—a little bit of a smell in the office, and I couldn’t figure it out. And, I don’t know, I asked somebody what it might be. Well, it turned out to be, the crane operator, in order to come back down out of that crane and change clothes and go to the bathroom—well, he had to urinate. And this thing ended up in my office. He didn’t run right in the office, but that was the smell that I heard. Franklin: Oh, wow. Alford: It took us a while to uncover the problem there. [LAUGHTER] The crane operator didn’t admit it, but— Franklin: It’s a waste stream of a different kind, huh? Alford: Yeah! [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Oh, man. Okay. So what were some of the challenges of working in B Plant? Alford: Well, one of the things that, even when I was process control, but more often when I became manager, I’d get more night calls than I wanted. If we have a stream that’s—if you have a waste stream going out and the radiation is higher than it should be, or when we dump the acid, some of the acid waste into the tanks, it’s supposed to be neutralized before it goes to the tank. Occasionally, the guys would fail to neutralize it, and we’d get a little bit of a burp out in the Tank Farm. Well, we had normal problems with operators and engineers—nothing unusual, I guess. They weren’t— Franklin: I imagine, all that shielding and not being able to directly see what was going on, was that challenging? To have all of that shielding between you and what was actually happening there? Alford: Yeah. We had to depend on—we had a lot of control instruments. You know, just like, they’re reading all the—on the graphs—I can’t remember now what exactly we did, I mean. But the chemical operators, they’re on the outside. They’re not in the area of the canyon. There’s probably a six-foot wall between them, between them and the canyon. So they weren’t in a radiation zone. But the only ones that—we had to send samplers in every so often. I had a boss that was pretty persnickety. He was—at least occasionally one of my supervisors would call him instead of calling me first. And then he’d call me, and then I’d have to pretend like I knew about it. It was a little bit of a game that we played. But he’s what I’d call a perfectionist. I know when I had to write monthly reports every month, I thought I had the perfect report one time, but he called me and told me I had the wrong year. It was right after New Year’s, and I still had the—so I missed that, even. But he was a real good boss. Franklin: What kinds of things were you sampling for, when you’d take the samples? What was the purpose of the samples? Alford: The what? Franklin: What was the purpose of the samples? You’d talked earlier about taking samples. Why’d you need to take samples periodically? Alford: Well, the whole process is lined out, different columns are supposed to be a certain composition if the thing is running like it should, the flow sheet. If it’s off-standard or something, we want to know about it to correct it. That’s mainly the reason for the samples. Franklin: Oh, okay. Alford: Occasionally, if we couldn’t get the right—well, occasionally the lab technicians that we’d send the samples to, they’d have a problem or so, and we’d have to re-sample the tank and re-sample the columns and so forth. Franklin: What was the most rewarding aspect of your work at B Plant? Alford: The most rewarding? Franklin: Yeah. Alford: I guess the people. I had a real good bunch of people and we got along very well and they were very dependable. And I learned a lot along the way. Let’s see. After B Plant, I went to the PUREX plant. Franklin: Okay. Alford: And at that time, at the PUREX plant was where we had the first cesium leak in the Tank Farm in the 2-West area. That was really the first—these are million-gallon tanks, and it’s hard to measure an inch difference. An inch drop can be quite a few gallons in that tank. Franklin: Yeah. Right! Alford: But anyhow, that first leak, we went to—my engineering assistant, he carpooled with me. And he told me, I think we got a problem over in 2-West. I told him, I don’t want to hear about it now. But I heard about it the next morning. Franklin: I bet. Alford: And then my boss, Bill Harley, and I had to go down and talk to the, at that time, the AEC people. In the course of the conversation, I mentioned to them that this is probably just the tip of the iceberg and it’s inevitable that there’s going to be more. And we found out that we’ve had a lot—even in the double-shell tanks now. We haven’t ever had anything out of the double-shell tanks, but a lot of the single-shell tanks are giving us problems. That’s one of the things we’re trying to get things into the double-shell tanks, and there’s even some talk maybe of building more. I don’t know. A lot of it is politics, probably. Franklin: Yeah. So this leak you’re talking about in 200 West was in the single-shell tank? Alford: What was that? Franklin: The leak in 2-West was in a single-shell tank? Alford: Yeah, they all—2-East and 2-West were all single-shell initially. I’ve forgotten the time, but we went to double-shell tanks for additional containment. And now we’re trying to—we’ve got an evaporator running and we’re trying to move the solutions from the single-shells to the double-shell tanks. Franklin: Right. Alford: And that’s one of the things that the vitrification plant is supposed to go, but that’s why behind schedule and way over budget and so forth. Franklin: Sure is. Alford: Yeah, it is. Franklin: Yeah. I’d like to talk a bit more about the tanks. Were they intended to be long-term storage, or was there any thought given to long-term storage in the early years of Hanford production? What was the discussion about the waste problem when you started at Hanford? Alford: Well, the main emphasis at the time that I worked there, we were trying to get enough plutonium down to Rocky Flats to build a bomb. We didn’t really—had we been able to do it over again, there’s a lot of changes we probably would’ve made. But we probably did some things like when the slugs would come in on the train cars from the 100 Areas, we’d always dissolve them at night. Because there’d be a little bit of a nitric acid cloud, and we could—that’s one of the things that we had to shut the PUREX plant down, eventually. We did shut it down. We only had about probably three or four, maybe five months of processing, and we’d have processed all the fuel. But then the AEC in Washington, DC said shut it down. So that’s what we did. I kind of lost my train of thought for a minute there. Franklin: That’s okay. That’s fine, we can move on. I’d like to go back in time a little bit and ask you—so you came to Hanford in 1951, right? Alford: Mm-hmm. Franklin: So at that time, Richland was all—it was still a government town, when you moved here, right, and GE ran the town services. Alford: Right. Franklin: Where did you live when you first got here? Did you live in Richland? Alford: Yeah, we lived in Richland. Two-bedroom prefab. If I remember correctly, it was on McPherson Street. I don’t know if that’s still here or not. Franklin: It is. I used to live right—when I first lived here, I lived in a two-bedroom prefab myself, on Stanton. Alford: Is that right? Franklin: Which is very close to McPherson, yeah. Alford: Yeah. They were all Alphabet Homes. Franklin: How long did you live in the two-bedroom prefab? And how many people—did you have a family at the time? Alford: Oh, yeah. We had two kids, Christine and my son that’s—he passed away here, three, four years ago—at that time, and then middle-aged son, he was on the way. That’s why I decided that it might be better to work at Hanford than work at the farm, which wasn’t quite as reliable. Franklin: Oh, right. Yeah, you had a family to take care of. Alford: Yeah. Franklin: What was your wife’s name? Alford: Beverly. Franklin: And what did she do when you lived in Richland? Was she stay-at-home, or did she work as well? Alford: No, she stayed home. She was a very good homemaker. I have to hand it to her that I’ve lived as long as I’ve lived because she’s really a good, healthful cook. Franklin: Oh, good. Alford: She cooked— Franklin: What did you think about Richland when you first moved into town? I assume it was probably the first time you’d ever lived in a government town. What struck you as—what stands out? Was there anything that struck you as odd or different about Richland when you moved here? Alford: Well, I can’t think of anything—the one thing, when I needed anything in the way of hardware, to repair something, I always had to go to Pasco at that time to get it. And then when I came back in ’54 from that one year of farming, we moved into another house, and I don’t remember what it was. But we eventually moved to Pasco not long after that, because it seemed like everything we needed was in Pasco. There just wasn’t much available in Richland at that time. Franklin: Right, you’re saying that kind of the commercial sector was lacking. Alford: Yeah. Franklin: Yeah. And then did you stay in Pasco for the rest of your time at Hanford? Alford: Yeah, then we lived in Pasco for—I don’t remember now when we moved to Pasco, but, yeah, we were still there and we moved around a few times. But we’re— Franklin: How did you—I assume when you first came to Hanford, you had to take the bus out. Did you take the bus out to work? Alford: Yeah. Franklin: Can you talk about that? What was that like? What kind of schedule did it run? Alford: I worked on the day shift all the time that I was out there. I didn’t have shift work to do. But the buses were good. They had a lot of people that played cards on the way out and on the way back and whatnot. But I didn’t get involved with that. But it was a chance to get caught up on some reading and things like that. But later on, I started driving, because I would, quite often, be in a meeting that was still going on when the buses left. So I either had to get out there and hitchhike or—I had a government car quite often. But many times, I finally just decided just to drive and then I could—because it seemed like we were in a lot of meetings and my boss, he was pretty good, but he had a staff meeting, he’d always have it at 11:00, so that people couldn’t hold over. Franklin: How has the Tri-Cities changed since you first moved here? Alford: How what? Franklin: How has the Tri-Cities changed since you first moved here? Alford: Oh, boy. It’s just—it’s more recent, the change I’ve seen, really has picked up the pace. It really—I can’t say, except the growth here in the past ten years has just been phenomenal. Franklin: Were you working—you were working out onsite when President Kennedy came to visit. Alford: Yes. Franklin: Did you go to see him? Alford: Yes, I did. Franklin: And did your family come as well? Alford: And I think my wife and I came. I can’t—but not the kids. The kids were in school. Franklin: Okay. What do you remember about that day? Alford: Well, I thought he did a nice—he was a very, very good speaker. I always liked him; he was a Navy man just like I was. Franklin: Oh, okay. Alford: He was a good democrat. Franklin: Okay. So I guess we’ll go forward again. Thanks for—I’m always interested about the social aspects of Tri-Cities in the past. So you were at—we talked about the tanks, and then the leaking. And then you were at PUREX plant when it shut down, right? Alford: Mm-hmm. Franklin: So after PUREX plant shut down, you went to work for the Basalt Waste Isolation Project. Alford: Yeah. There’s a little story there that— Franklin: Okay. Alford: I probably—I don’t—when the leak—when we went downtown, there was a meeting with DOE—DOE, you know, runs the show. I don’t know if this—heads have to roll when something happens. Franklin: Right. They sure do. Alford: The supervisor on the 2-West Tank Farms, we had to walk him off the plant. My Tank Farm manager had to walk him off the plant. And I’m not going to name names, but—and then my Tank Farm manager, I don’t know how exactly he—he got sidelined. You might also—I got sidelined. I moved from an operations manager to a staff manager on a slightly different job. The operations—it was, you might say, a slight downgrade. But my boss, Bill Harley, I think he—I forgot what happened on him right now. Anyhow, quite a few of us got penalized one way or the other. I don’t know if this is something that it should go into the records or not. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Well, I think— Alford: It’s just one of those things that happened. Franklin: Sure. Alford: Anyhow, I went to the staff manager for a while but I don’t know how long I was in that now, but it was just administrative work. Then I moved downtown to the Basalt Waste Isolation Project. That was pretty interesting. The problem there, we were testing the basalt in Gable Mountain to see if it would be a suitable location for highly radioactive waste casks. Solidified casks. Due to the high radiation that would be, the tunnels had to be self-supporting. We couldn’t use timbers because they wouldn’t hold up. So we took core samples of the basalt to see if it was under stress. When we pushed the two-inch core sample out of the gun, it would just pop off like checkers, and that told us that it was under stress, and it would never work. At that time, I had a talk with my boss about whether we should just ‘fess up to the fact that it’s no good and we might as well not waste any more taxpayer money, but that was the wrong thing to say, too. So it wasn’t long after that, I was, I think, in the basalt project. I think probably a couple, three years. And I also at that time, I was downtown, and I used the kind of flexible hours and I was starting to farm. And so early in the morning I’d make the rounds of circles to see if everything was all right. Then I’d call my friend that I later on worked for to tell him it’s fine, and then I’d go to work. And I would be able to—I got my time in, but I got a little bit different hours than some of the others and it worked out pretty well. After a couple, three years on that, I decided to retire. It was after kind of—you might want to edit this out, too. My boss sent me out to talk to the psychiatrist. I called him the shrink. He happened to be—after he was the head of the—superintendent of Pasco Schools, I think. But anyhow long after that I decided to go farming full-time. When I didn’t have a long commute to Hanford, I suddenly found myself with a lot of spare time. Along with the spud farming and so forth, I decided to put a vineyard in, a wine grape vineyard in Block 1. We did that—I think that was 1982 that I retired. ’82, yeah. We put the first half of the vineyard in in 1983 and the second half in 1985. We got crops and we didn’t intend to stay in business, but I had Dr. Clore, my consultant at that time. When we got a crop, the varieties and the yields and whatnot established on the vineyard, that’s when we decided to sell it. That’s what our original plan was. It was located along the river, a good location, but I had grown spuds prior to that, but it was a little too rocky for spud-growing, so that’s why we put the vineyard in. Franklin: What did you do after you sold it? You just retired full-time? Alford: Yeah. I retired and I farmed full-time, spuds and corn and wheat, down in Oregon a little bit. But most of it around here. And then the wine grapes. Franklin: Okay. Oh, sorry, were you going to say something? Alford: Pardon? Franklin: Oh, nothing, never mind. In what ways did the security or secrecy at the Hanford Site impact your work there? Alford: Did--? Franklin: How did security and secrecy affect your work at the Hanford Site? Alford: Well, we had to, one thing, if our filing cabinet wasn’t locked, security would make the rounds, and if it was unlocked, they would call you at home and you—we didn’t have to immediately go out, but the next morning we had to out and verify that everything was the way it was. When you’ve got four drawers and they’re not all secret documents, but there’s enough there that there’s no way that I could remember what was—but we managed to get by it. Franklin: Did that ever happen to you? Alford: No. Franklin: Oh. Alford: No, but another thing that’s a little bit humorous that happened to be at B Plant was, I would find orange peelings on my desk sometime when I’d come in. And we finally tracked it down. I had the shift people to keep an eye out, and it was a raccoon that came in and floated around and got in the waste basket. [LAUGHTER] That’s where he— Franklin: That’s pretty amazing. All that security and the raccoon was just kind of moving in there as he pleases. Alford: He was—I don’t know what kind of clearance he had or not. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Did you ever encounter any snakes? Alford: Not that I can recall. Franklin: Okay. Any other ways that secrecy or security impacted you when you were working there? Alford: No, I don’t think so. I was pretty careful not to bring stuff home. Because it was—Patrol—I very seldom brought work home. I never brought anything home, you know, that required a Q clearance. Franklin: Okay. It says here in your bio that at times you accompanied the personnel department on trips to universities to interview students to work at Hanford. Alford: Yeah. Franklin: I’m wondering if you could talk a bit about that. What kinds of people were you looking for? Alford: Yeah. We usually, I would go as an operations-type. But the personnel office, they’d invite maybe an engineer, they’d invite me and a manager or something like that. We were looking at third-year kids, mostly. Most of my—I can’t remember every—University of Colorado and University of Wyoming and Brigham Young University, and Utah State were some of them. I guess there were others. But if a student looked like a reasonable hire, we’d bring him in for an interview. And then somebody—but there were only third year students, so—I’ve forgotten now. There’s—I can’t recall just exactly how that intervening year, that subsequent year, how we handled that. But the personnel department would keep in touch with these students that looked good to us. But we didn’t have the authority to hire anybody in, but we were just scoping— Franklin: Did you ever get asked any strange questions by students, or did they ever ask you things you couldn’t talk about? Alford: They what? Franklin: Did they ever ask you any strange questions, the students, or— Alford: Oh, they may have. But I can’t recall. In Salt Lake one time, I was interviewing in the morning, and I went out to lunch—you know, it’s right on the leeward side of the Rocky Mountains. We had quite a snowfall. Oak Ridge, I had to go there a couple of times. I think I’ve forgotten—anyhow, the place we stayed at—these trips are all set up for us—the place I stayed at, they had a flood or I’ve forgotten what the deal was now, but I had to eat down in the basement. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: That doesn’t sound like too much fun. My last question is, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War? Alford: Would you repeat that? Franklin: Sure. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War? Alford: Well, our main—I may have mentioned, I think—my main goal was to beat Germany to the bomb. Well, I can’t answer your problem directly, I don’t think. The fact that we could build buildings and we could do things—if you have a real goal in mind, a lot of times, the politics have to come separate. That’s kind of the way it was when I worked out there. We could do—even on reactors, it took us ten or fifteen years just to get the paperwork and the licensing and things like that. The Frenchmen could do all that in five years, and we knew that. But still—if we could get rid of the paperwork, it saves money and gets the job done much quicker. Franklin: Okay. Well, Doug, is there anything else that you’d like to say before we close the interview? Anything else you haven’t mentioned or I haven’t asked? Alford: No, I think you’ve done pretty good job. Franklin: Okay. Alford: Sparking my memory, but I just—I’ve kind of lost a lot of my memory now. I’m getting on in years. Franklin: No, thank you so much for interviewing with us. You’ve had a really remarkable career, and I appreciate you taking the time to share that with us today. Alford: Thank you very much. I’ve enjoyed it. Franklin: Good. Okay. Yeah. Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 300 Area 100 Areas 200 East PUREX B Plant Plutonium Finishing Plant 234-5 Building Tank Farms 200 West Basalt Waste Isolation Project (BWIP) Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1951- Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1951-1982 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Douglas Alford Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Ellensburg (Wash.) Pasco (Wash.) Chemistry Nuclear reactors Reactor fuel processing Description An account of the resource Douglas Alford moved to Richland, Washington in 1951 and worked on the Hanford Site from 1951-1982. An interview conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by Mission Support Alliance on behalf of the United States Department of Energy. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 01/22/2018 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F625501bb1d309fbc72c0ef6c857e385b.jpg 40fb9578fe56897b898570da94fcafae https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F8548fc8ad4d8525fda13bc9b417db24e.mp4 d131d527da053244e0edaf7710e5a5e9 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Bauman Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Edith Hansen Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Northwest Public Television | Hansen_Edith Woman one: Always ready. Man one: [INAUDIBLE] [LAUGHTER] Woman one: Sounds like my father-in-law. Woman two: [LAUGHTER] We won’t go there, then. Woman one: [LAUGHTER] Robert Bauman: All right? Man one: Nothing wrong in there. Feel free. Bauman: All right. Okay. We're going to get started if that's okay. Can we start by having you say your name first and spell it for us? Edith Hansen: Oh. Right now? Bauman: Yes. Yeah. Hansen: My name is Edith Hansen, and E-D-I-T-H, H-A-N-S-E-N. Bauman: Okay. Thank you. And today's date is August 28 of 2013. And we're doing this interview on the campus of Washington State University-- Hansen: I'm a little hard hearing. Bauman: Okay. Should I scoot closer? Yeah? Man one: Yeah, absolutely. Bauman: Okay. I'll scoot closer, if that's all right. How's that? Is this going to be better? Are you going to be better--? Hansen: Yeah. Bauman: Okay, great. So let's start by just having you talk about your family and how and when they came to the area here. Hansen: Well, I wanted to start back--[LAUGHTER] Bauman: Go ahead. Hansen: And in 1875, this was nothing but a cattle range. And there were just--nobody lived here, just a person who had a lot of cattle. And he was the postmaster for the whole area. And in 1878, Ben Rosencrance bought him out, or bought out the area around the mouth of the Yakima River. And he was a stock man, too. And he bought the 16 sections at $0.50 an acre. In 1883, the Northern Pacific Railroad completed their line from Spokane to Ainsworth. And Ainsworth was what they called Pasco at that time. Now the Federal Homestead laws were established in 1888. Now Ben and his wife married on November the 3rd, 1880, in Pendleton. And their honeymoon was the ride from Pendleton to the ranch. Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Hansen: And they operated a stock ranch. And if they wanted any groceries, they had to go to Walla Walla for store. Coffee they bought in 50-pound sacks. And they went about once a year. And fabric was $0.05 a yard, and they bought it by the bolt. [LAUGHTER] And the missus--that was her honeymoon. [LAUGHTER] And there was no house. I don't know just what kind of a structure they lived in, but it was pretty minimum. And she never saw another white woman for six months. Now he--when that law went through, the Federal Homestead law went through, he filed for 1,700 acres. And he had timber claims and mineral claims. And [LAUGHTER] he just signed up for everything. Well, one man was unhappy with him and didn't think that that was fair because there was no timber in this area. And so he rode his horse over to Walla Walla to protest. [LAUGHTER] Well, Rosencrance found out that he was going over there and report him to the authorities because there was no forest--there wasn't no trees. So they went down to the river, and they dug up a bunch of willows and transplanted them. [LAUGHTER] And I don't know what kind of a housing arrangement they had, but it wasn't much. But they moved it up there and put those willow trees in there. [LAUGHTER] And they called that their forest. Anyway. [LAUGHTER] Oh, she washed clothes and draped them over the sagebrush. [LAUGHTER] They didn't have any clothes lines or anything. And so but anyway, they were set for when the authorities came down to see their forest, they could see the willow trees. And I never did hear just what kind of housing they had. But it was pretty minimum. Now after they'd been here a while, she said they should have a school. And she talked Mr. and Mrs. Harry Van Horn to come and homestead. And they picked out some land that they didn't build, or they gave it to them. I don't know. But anyway, she talked them into coming here because Mrs. Van Horn was a school teacher. And she thought there should be a school teacher in this area. And she was paid $1 a day to be a teacher. And the kids all came of their own expense, either with a wagon or a sled. In the wintertime they used a sled and came to her house. And they would bring their own chair or stool--whatever they were going to sit on [LAUGHTER] because she didn't have things for them to sit on while she was teaching them. Let's see. Oh, in 1883, the railroad was building the railroad bridge across the Columbia. And they had a lot of people here come in for construction of this bridge. It was a pretty big deal to put this bridge clear across the Columbia. And they were noted for gambling and saloons. And Pasco got a really bad reputation. [LAUGHTER] My mother's grandfather over in Germany heard about it. [LAUGHTER] And they didn't want him to raise his family near that Pasco [LAUGHTER] wild town. And now there was a family, and that was Amy and Alex McNeil. And they came in 1883, and they wanted to build a house with lumber. And they had to go to Bickleton to get lumber. There was nobody selling house lumber. But they built their house. And what they did were they were panning for gold. And by this time now, they could buy groceries in Ainsworth or Pasco--I mean all one place. But they didn't have to go to Walla Walla for their groceries anymore. Now the Clements came in early, too. That was an early family. And their daughter was married to a Bauer, and he died. But that's when the Clements settled in this area. Let's see. Oh, the post office was established in Richland in 1905. And in 1903, the Timmermans came here. And there was a--Walter Timmerman is the one who ran the ferry from Pasco to Richland. And his father and his uncle came and helped him set up the line over. So they had a ferry at that time. And they had rates to ride on the ferry. If you had sheep, they were $0.01 a sheep. [LAUGHTER] If you were having pack animals, they were $0.25 for a ride. If a person road on a horse, that was $0.50 from Pasco to Richland. And then a team in a wagon or a buggy was $1. And then later on they had automobiles and trucks. And they were $1 each. Now those were some of the earliest families that settled in this area. Now my grandfather Bremer was living in Seattle. And the only work he could get in Seattle was down on the waterfront. And so every morning, he would get up and go down to the waterfront and hope that somebody was unloading a ship or loading a ship. And that's where all the men were. And my grandfather quite often got work because he was a big man and strong. And that's what they wanted to load these ships up or to unload them. But he hated that rain. And standing in that rain, sometimes for quite a while before somebody chose him to work for them, was real disgusting. And so he read in the newspaper that there was a man over in Kennewick, and he wanted his family, who were living in Seattle. They had a wagon. They had a team and eight children. And they advertised for a driver. Now there was a really bad winter that winter. And there was no highway. And of course, there were no restaurants and no cafes or anything built along the way. And so they had the eight children in this wagon. And of course I imagine some of those older boys probably were walking because [LAUGHTER] I don't know that the team could handle everybody in the wagon. But anyway--and they had to stop and cook their meals for those kids and themselves. So Grandpa said he would do that. He wanted to see what was over here in eastern Washington. And so they started off. And he didn't keep a diary, or didn't write down just what they did every day. But the winter had been really bad. And the snow was melting, and it was making streams across the trail. And so they would have to stop and shovel in dirt so they could get the wagon through. And then once in a while there were trees that were down. And they had to cut limbs off and drag those tree limbs and get the road clear so they could get that wagon through. I don’t know how--it would've been interesting if he could have told us how long it took them. But you know, you have to feed those kids three times a day and then fixing the road on your way over--it wasn't easy. And then when he got up to the pass and he came over the pass, all the area around Ellensburg and that area, the farmers were out, and they were farming. And the sun was shining, and they were getting ready for crops and things. He said, this is heaven. [LAUGHTER] He's never going back to Seattle! [LAUGHTER] And things went much better once they got over the hill. And they got that family delivered to Kennewick. And then he got a hold of his wife, probably--I don't know whether they had telephones or not. But maybe they just wrote. But anyway, he got hold of her and said, you're going to buy tickets on the railroad, and you're coming in to Kennewick, and I'll pick you up in Kennewick. So then they came to Kennewick. And about that time, Rosencrance, the man who had bought all that land, he wanted to get some irrigation going because he knew this was good land and all he needed was water. So he put in the water wheel. And that was in 1894 that they built that water wheel. And Grandpa got a job on finishing it up. It was in construction when he arrived. But he worked to finish it up and then get the water--I don't believe I put down how much. But anyway--oh, what happened to my pictures that I brought? Bauman: Oh, they're right here. I'll bring them. Oh, it’s okay. Hansen: Thank you. Hmm. Now you've probably all seen the picture of the water wheel. That was the first irrigation in this area. And well, this is the original picture. And my mom had that. And a lot of people borrowed that, and they've enlarged it. And they're all over. You've probably seen a half a dozen pictures. But the people, when they enlarged it, they took all the people off. And I have here a list of all the people who are standing on this bridge. And by that time, my grandmother and her kids were all standing on the bridge. It was 16 feet wide and 32 feet high. And it had a capacity of 320 gallons per revolution. And so it dipped down in the water and get this 320 gallons and lift it up to the top and then put it into a ditch. And the ditch would take it to the farmers that were going to use it. Bauman: And where was the water wheel? Hansen: Now they quit being in the lady's house for school. There were more people moving into town--moving into the area and buying farms. And so they built a school. And it was located out--well, now the highway from Kennewick to Richland, just before you get the turnoff to Richland, it was in that area. And my mom went to that school. And they had school from October ‘til March because the kids worked in the fields the rest of the time. But they could be spared during the winter months. And if they got any kids that were graduating from 7th or 8th grade, then the school—I mean the state would send tests from Olympia. And they had to take those tests and see if they'd learned at this little country school enough to be ready for high school. Now about this time, there was a Thad Grosscup, who was a lawyer in Seattle. And somehow, he found out that this was really good country and good farming country. And so he was a lawyer for big railroads over there in Seattle and he had quite a bit of money. He bought 1,800 acres. It's about eight or nine miles out of Richland. And he wanted to build a canal. And I don't know who built that dam, whether he built that dam or whether—but anyway, the dam created the water to go in the ditch. And so he had people out there building this ditch because he wanted to irrigate those 1,800 acres. And my grandfather and his boys went out to make this ditch and to help with it--get this farm going. And my mother went to cook for the people that were working on this place--the farm. Now the railroad bridge was finished in 1889. And before that--before 1889, they didn't have a way to get the railroad cars from the Pasco area across the Columbia. And so they used a steam ferry. They'd run a few cars on the steam ferry, go across the river, put them off, come back and get some more. And so you could see that it was a real aggravation for the railroad [LAUGHTER] to move a whole train that way, but they did it. But then they finally got that bridge finished. And then they could run the cars across the Columbia. And that was a big deal. Now about this time, there were so many farmers coming in and buying up land, and, well, all along. And we were in Yakima County at this time. And Yakima County said, we're getting too big--too many people. And so we're going to divide it. And so they broke off a piece on the lower end here. And they were going to—they kind of thought of Benton. But they said they couldn't do that because the post office said, you can't--well, it was Benton for a couple of months. We became Benton County, and then they tried--anyway, the state said you couldn't have, because they had another section, and it was too close. And they said you couldn't name it that. But anyway, they had quite a time. They named it three different times. But it finally became Benton County. Let's see. Oh, in 1907, they decided that this was a good place to raise pheasants and quail. And so they brought in starters and turned them loose. And nobody was supposed to shoot them in 1907. But in 1908, they said there'd be foul for them to shoot. Now 1907 was the first automobile in the area. And the population had doubled. And they had more kids in the school. So they put in a second floor in the schoolhouse. In 1908, they got telephone service. In 1909, that was the first Richland Bank. And in 1912, they built the new high school. Now Amon came in about this time. And he bought most of the land from Rosencrance. Rosencrance had been running cattle and stuff. And Rosencrance is the one that built the big wheel and started the irrigation. And when that irrigation got started, why, then people came in to farm. And finally in 1905, they decided they could call it Benton County. [LAUGHTER] They had quite a time on the name. And there was a man named Raditz. And my grandfather was Bremer, and they built a hotel in Richland. And it had 20 rooms, and it was 30 by 60 foot. And they had a feed stable and a hardware store, and a post office was in the grocery store. And they bought bonds for a new schoolhouse. And the river traffic was lively. And they had daily service from Kennewick to Priest Rapids. Let's see. Amon bought Rosencrance out and sold ranches and stuff. And--oh, wrote my notes in a hurry and can't even read my notes. Bauman: It's okay. Hansen: [LAUGHTER] Anyway, Richland was growing. And I have a picture here of Richland about that time. And this was the John Dam Grocery store. And this was Murray's Hardware store. And this was Van’s, which was a confectionary--sold pop and ice cream in a little store. Now let's see. I think when Amon bought out Rosencrance, that was the end of the water wheel. They didn't use it after that. Amon, he went for gas pumps. I think I read we got our telephone in 1908, and the Richland Bank in '10. I think I read that. Now in 1915, oh, my dad came in here from Iowa. And of course, he wanted to farm and wanted to be with farms. So he got a job out at the Grosscup's ranch. Grosscup was the lawyer over in Seattle. And he had a son, but he wasn't a farmer. He came over here and lived [LAUGHTER] kind of to keep him out of his father's hair in Seattle. [LAUGHTER] But anyway, my dad got a job with him. And so he wasn't too long till he was managing the work crew that were farming out there. And Mom—they had asked her when they got the ditch built and all this farming under control, they asked her to stay on as cook. So she was the cook, and they built quite a large house for all the employees that were working with them. Thad and his family had a nice home. And Thad didn't do any farming. He just kind of--he was there. [LAUGHTER] He was out of the hair of the people in Seattle. But my dad was running the farm, and my mom was cooking for all these. And they got married. And they lived on in the big building. They had quite a few people working for them--working there. Now my dad worked for Grosscup for a number of years. And then he finally bought a piece of property. He bought, I think it was 60 acres. And then he started farming for himself. He took the lower 60 acres. And Grosscup was selling off to other farmers, too. He sold several pieces. Now I think that that was the things that I thought might be interesting to bring you up to when there were more people in Richland. Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Right. Can I ask you, what kind of crops did your father grow on his land? Hansen: Well, he raised hay. And that shows them putting the hay in the haystacks. And that's the way they did it. And they had these great big haystacks. And there were quite a few herds of sheep up the valley--oh, Lind or up in there. And they would take their sheep in the summer to the forest. And they could let them run in the forest. But in the wintertime, they would come down and bargain for the hay. And they would bring their herd in, and they would feed it right out of the haystack. And I don't know how my mother did it, but my mother could figure out how many tons of hay there was in a stack, so many feet long and so high, with an oval top. And they'd been in there. The hay had been sitting all winter, you know. And then they'd bring the sheep in there and feed them. And then you got the fertilizer on your land, too, because they'd eat the hay and leave the fertilizer on the land. It worked real well. And then when your hay was all gone, they'd go to another neighbor and buy his hay, and the same thing--they feed it there. So that's what a haystack looked like. And now my dad was from Iowa. So he had to raise corn. And he raised corn for his chickens. And you can see that the corn really did well. And then later, when asparagus came into this country, why, then he plowed up a lot of his land and put it into asparagus. We had 16 acres of asparagus. Now almost everybody in Richland had asparagus. But they had an acre or an acre and a half. And dad had 16 acres. But anyway, he'd go down to Kennewick and get some fellows that didn't have work and bring them out. And Mom would feed them. [LAUGHTER] And they would work for him through the asparagus season. Now you know we have good-looking buses now. And now this is the kind of bus that we had for when I started the school. I started in 1930 going to school. And this is the kind of buses we had. Bauman: And where was the school? Where was the school? Hansen: In Richland. We all came to Richland. And I think I have some pictures. Oh, this is a picture--this was when my mom was going to school. And this is the entire Richland school at the time my mom was going to school. And there was a vessel got frozen into the ice. And it was wintertime, and they couldn't get it out. And so the teacher thought it'd be a good trip for the school. And so this was the whole school. And you can see some of them are little, and some of them are big. And that's my mom in the plaid coat. [LAUGHTER] But that was their day tour. Now, I don't have a date on this. But my dad's brother is on here, and my mother's brother is on here. And this was the Richland baseball team. And this man bought land from Grosscup, and he lived across the street from us. And we knew everybody in Richland. Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Hansen: Now, this is the school that I went to school in. This is Richland, and eight grades in this building. Now this picture, this shows the Methodist church. And this is the grade school, and this is the high school. And you can see, we didn't have fancy streets at that time. This was my graduating class, class of '42. Now there's 12 pictures. But two--the picture was taken before we graduated. When we actually graduated, there were 12 in my graduating class. Now this was the high school. And this was everybody that was in the high school at that time, and I don't see a date on there. But I think probably in the '30s, maybe '40s. Now and this is another one. And this was 1940. And this is the whole Richland school. And that were the things that I thought might be interesting. Now did you have some questions you were going to ask me? Bauman: I do, yeah. I wanted to ask you about the school--going to school in Richland. What was it like going to school in Richland? And do you remember any teachers in particular? Hansen: Oh, yeah. I should have brought the picture with the teachers. [LAUGHTER] Hansen: We had eight people in our building. And the eighth-grade teacher was the principal. So that was the staff. The complete staff was eight when I went to school. Bauman: What about churches? What church did you go to? Hansen: I showed you the picture of the Methodist church, and that was the big church. We were Lutherans, and we had a little bitty church. And [LAUGHTER] they were teaching--having the minister in German and things in connection with the church in German. But my mom just really worked it over with my grandfather. [LAUGHTER] She said, you ought to be teaching in English. And then the kids would get something out of it because they were getting English in school. And but anyway, it was a tiny church. And I really think the Catholics all went to Kennewick. And I think that that's about what we had in the way of churches. Bauman: I asked you about your farm. Did you have electricity on the farm or a telephone? Hansen: We got electricity in 1938. Before that, we had carbide. Do you know carbide? Bauman: Mm-mm. Hansen: Well, it's a gas. My dad went down to Kennewick. And the man said, now, don't let anybody touch this but you. You need to do this. [LAUGHTER] And my mother run it all the time. But you put this product in water, and it created a gas. And we had three bedrooms upstairs. So we had three gas deals up there. And we had a light in the living room and the dining room that was with the gas. [LAUGHTER] But they didn't think a woman could handle the—[LAUGHTER] But they didn't know my dad. My dad was a farmer. He wasn't [LAUGHTER] a gas man. Mom took over the gas. But in 1938, the electricity came in. And that was wonderful. We started off with, we bought a refrigerator. And then we had, of course, the electric lights. And then we got other appliances after that. Bauman: And what about a telephone? Did you have a telephone at all? Hansen: [LAUGHTER] Well, they put in a telephone back many, many years ago. But when my dad would want to call—make a phone, there would be some neighbor women visiting on the telephone. And he got so mad, he took it out. [LAUGHTER] Hansen: We only had it for a year, I think. And he got so mad at the women visiting on the telephone [LAUGHTER] that we never had a telephone until later on, my older sister had problems. And she moved in with her two children. And of course, she put in a telephone, so that they had it. That would have been in the '40s. Bauman: Uh-huh. And when you were growing up on the farm, did you have any particular chores or responsibilities? Hansen: Oh, we all--when we hayed, we all hayed. Mom ran the team. And well, Dad mowed it and got it raked into shocks. And then when it was the way he wanted it to be in the haystack, he'd give it a few days to cure in this shock. And then we would bring the team out. And Mom ran the team. Mom had the team. And dad would put his fork in the shock and put it on the sled. And then we kids, 7 and 8, we had our own little rake. And if he didn't get all of the little pieces picked up, we would pick them up and put them on the sled, too. And then Mom would drive it to the haystack. And Dad would crawl up on the top of the stack. And Mom ran the derrick--ran the team--hooked the team up to there. And then there were chains on this sled, and they would, when she ran the derrick, the chains would come up together. And then they'd swing it up there on the top of the haystack. And then when Dad got it just where he'd want it, then he would call her to stop the team. And then we kids would pull the--there was a rope came down. And when he got it where he wanted it, then we'd pull on that rope. And then the chains would come off and it would drop on the top of the stack. And then we'd go get another load--another load, another load. [LAUGHTER] And then, of course, we fed the chickens and took care of the chickens. And we had turkeys. I mean, we'd just have ten or 12 turkeys and just let them run loose. Bauman: Do you remember any community events--picnics, special community celebrations or gatherings at all? Hansen: Well, there was the Grange in town. And a lot of people went to the Grange. But my dad was not much of a joiner. And so he didn't ever join the Grange. But we had friends that would come. And we would go up to the dam when they were fishing. And he would spear fish. And then we'd can the salmon. And we bought an old house. I think it was built in about 1902 or '04--something like that. Wasn't much of a house. But anyway, one of the first things they did was they built a great big concrete porch. And Mom bought a piano for the girls to learn to play the piano. And we had a lot of dances at our house. The porch was wide enough and long enough you could get three square dances going--circles going on the porch. And the piano was in the living room. And we opened the door so they could hear the music. And then they did other dances, too and played cards--lots of cards. Had neighbors in lots of times for cards. Bauman: Now you graduated high school in 1942? You graduated high school in 1942? Is that correct? Hansen: Yeah. Bauman: And then the Federal government came in the following year to build the-- Hansen: Yeah. We hadn't heard one word about it. But I guess they'd already picked the location. But anyway, when we graduated, we didn't know anything about the Project. And so it was when we went to college that we got letters. And it was at Valentine's Day when all the farmers got--the farmers were out there preparing their land, making ditches, planting stuff when they got the notices to move out. And that was a real jolt when they moved the people out. But my dad didn't have to move because he lived eight miles out. And that was the Grosscup Ranch. And Grosscup was the lawyer from Seattle. He had it all worked out. And [LAUGHTER] they said it would take them too long to go through the rigmarole that the lawyer would put them through. So they just left that, and anybody that had bought land from him got to stay. Bauman: And so your parents stayed there on their land through the war and all that? Hansen: Yeah. Bauman: And where were you in college? Hansen: I went to college in Ellensburg to be a teacher. And I graduated--well, I didn't graduate. They had lost so many teachers in the Army that they would take us at three years. So I went out to teach at three years of college. And then I would go back summer school to finish up. So I got my degree. But the war was over by the time I got my degree. Bauman: And how long did your family stay on their farm? Hansen: Lyle? When did we sell the farm? Lyle: Well, [INAUDIBLE], early '70s, I think--early to mid '70s. Hansen: What did he say? Bauman: He said, early to mid '70s--1970. Hansen: Well, [LAUGHTER] I was the seller. [LAUGHTER] Hansen: But I didn't even remember what--but anyway, Dad got bad and died. And Mary moved in with her kids and took care of Mom. And then my mom had to go to a nursing home. Mary had stayed for a couple of years. That was my older sister. Anyway, we finally decided that [LAUGHTER] my husband and my sister's husband had to keep going down and things kept going wrong with it. And so we talked my sister into moving into town--the third sister. And we sold it. Bauman: Who were some of the people who lived nearest you? Who were some of your neighbors when you were growing up? Hansen: Well now, I pointed out, the McCarthys. They lived right straight across from us. Now they just bought a little place. They must have had five or ten acres. But my dad had about 60, didn't he, Lyle? Lyle: Yeah, that's what you said. Hansen: Anyway, he really farmed. But McCarthy was kind of retired. The Grosscups--they lived on their place for quite a while. And he became a county commissioner, I think. He wasn't a farmer. But he knew a lot of people. And they sold a big piece of land to--well, they sold off several pieces of land. Anyway-- Bauman: So how would you describe Richland as a place to grow up? Hansen: Oh, it was great. Yeah. We had a real good time. And we knew everybody. Anyway, when the farmers had to leave, a lot of them were really upset. I mean, they had put money into their homes and built their farms up. And they had asparagus planted. And they had cherries planted and everything, and they had to leave it all. And they looked for farms, but farms were pretty hard to come by. An awful lot of people were unhappy. But they thought it'd be nice if we could get together and see our old neighbors. So we arranged with Prosser. Would Prosser let us use their park as a get-together? So for several years, anybody who had lived in Richland could come to up there. And they sent out letters so people could visit with their old neighbors and tell about their new farms. But they were all over the state of Washington, and some went in to Oregon. But anyway-- Lyle: Mom, tell them about-- Hansen: --after four or five years going to Prosser, Richland decided that it'd be okay for us to come down and stay in one of their parks. And so then we had these get-togethers. And in fact, we still meet. But now [LAUGHTER] we're down to about eight. Bauman: Yeah. I spoke with Bob Fletcher. Hansen: Oh, you talked to Bob? Bauman: Yeah. And he talked about you getting together, yeah. Did you have a-- Lyle: That's what I was going to bring up. Bauman: Oh, okay. Lyle: That it was still going on. Bauman: Right. Lyle: Old Richland. Bauman: Yeah. Hansen: Yeah. I see Bob once in a while. Bauman: Yeah. I want to thank you very much for coming today. I really appreciate it, for coming and sharing your memories. Thank you. Hansen: Did you have any other questions you wanted? Bauman: I think I'm good. Do you have anything else you want to add--anything-- Hansen: Well, that's all the notes. I made those notes this morning. And [LAUGHTER] I didn't get everything in. Bauman: Well, thank you very much. Hansen: But I mean, I think probably my family is about the only one, you know, way back. Bauman: Yeah. Hansen: Because my mother was only about four years old when they came from Seattle. But there were a lot of people came in the '30s. And then there were a lot came in the '40s, too. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:48:43 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 216 kbps Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site ~1925-today Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Ben Rosencrance Mr. and Mrs. Harry Van Horn Amy and Alex McNeil Clements Bauers Thad Grosscup Raditz Grosscup McCarthys Bob Fletcher Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Edith Hansen Description An account of the resource An interview with Edith Hansen conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 08-28-2013 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2017-04-12: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. Cat Dam Kennewick Railroad River https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fadf573f6b16463a33ec6849c49d23ebc.jpg 12432b847d8976b43edbd4ed179f1df6 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F6fb28b74865c59fa983d59478c172fcb.mp4 4fc0bcd83000ceedee84a5c50d7f1d95 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Bauman, Robert Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Daniels, Edmon Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Northwest Public Television | Daniels_Edmon Edmon Daniels: [WHISTLING] Robert Bauman: Okay. All right. I guess we're ready to start. Daniels: Okay. Bauman: Okay. Let's start by having you state your name and spell your last name for us. Daniels: Edmon Leo Daniels. D-A-N-I-E-L-S. Bauman: And my name's Bob Bauman. And today's date is November 20th of 2013. And we're conducting this interview on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. So wondering if we could start by having you just tell us when you arrived in the area here. What brought you here? Daniels: Well, I arrived in '51. 1951. And my parents was here. So the family moved here. Bauman: And did they come for jobs at Hanford, or--? Daniels: They came--my father came in '43 when he heard about the Hanford Project. And my mother joined him in '44. Bauman: And what sorts of jobs did they have at Hanford? Daniels: Well, at that time, it was just construction. And my mother worked in the mess hall and cleaning up the barracks. Bauman: So how old were you in 1951 then, when you came up? Daniels: 1951. You know, that's the deal. I never tell my age. [LAUGHTER] I was in grade school. Bauman: Okay. So, what are your first memories of arriving here as a young person? Daniels: Well, as a young kid, you're just in a new place. And memories are just meeting people. But, I guess it was—there was quite a few relatives here at that time. Just meeting them. Because I really didn't know--I hadn't been around my father that much at a young age. He left when I was just--wasn't that old. And my mother left after that, so. It was just really just being with them more than anything else. Bauman: And so where did you migrate from? Where had you been living before? Daniels: Texas. The eastern part of Texas. Bauman: Okay. And so, your parents were here. And were there other family members as well? Daniels: Well, I had uncles here and some aunts. One aunt, I think, was here. Yes. And cousins. Bauman: Okay. So where did you live and what school did you go to? Daniels: Grade school, I went to Whittier. And went to junior high--it was junior high then, it's middle school now. I went to junior high--that was the only one junior high in Pasco. And one high school at Pasco. And then I had a few classes at CBC. Bauman: Okay. So what was Pasco like, growing up in the area in the '50s and '60s? Daniels: Well, growing up, I tell people it's the best place in the world to be because you could do things. And, as a kid, you do whatever you want to do. There was no restrictions whatsoever. Then as you get older, you find that there are restrictions. [LAUGHTER] But as a kid, you just go and enjoy playing. And that's what we did. My father told me, I want you to play and have fun. Because when you get older, you'll start working and you'll work longer than you ever played. And I thank him for that because he was definitely right. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: So, in terms of Pasco itself then, you remember any specific or special community events or things happening at the time? Daniels: Well, the only thing we had--and that was probably any place, Pasco, Kennewick, or Richland--was baseball. We had summer baseball. There was no, like we have now, AEU basketball or anything like that. We played baseball in the summer. And my father'd been an old baseball player. He was my first sort of like coach, was my father. So that's what we did during the summer. In the wintertime, we just threw snowballs at each other. [LAUGHTER] Yep. Bauman: With Pasco at the time, was it racially integrated, or? Daniels: Yes it was. It was. We live on the east of town, which is on the east side of the railroad tracks. And, boy, it really wasn't—because all blacks live on the east side of town. But the house we lived in, there was four houses on the street, and we were the only black family on the street. But as a kid, that doesn't bother you because, man, kids are kids. We just had fun. And I was the youngest kid on the block. So, it was just like going down the street and saying hello to everyone, not worrying about color or anything like that. Bauman: What about community institutions like churches? Were there churches in the area growing up, or? Daniels: Yes. There was two churches right around the corner from us. A Baptist church and a Methodist church. And my mother took us to the Methodist church. That was the church I got married in. Oh, I think all my family got married--no, just my brother and I got married in that church. Bauman: And what's the name of the church then? Daniels: St James-- Bauman: St James. Daniels: --Methodist Church, yes. Bauman: Okay. So you grew up then , from 1951 on, in Pasco. And at some point you started working at Hanford? Daniels: Yes. And I was working--well, I was working at--well, I first got an interview for Hanford, oh boy, I think it was like in '62. '61 or '62. At the old 703 Building, as a clerk typist. And everyone then, you had to take a typing test. And it's funny, my grandkids always wonder, what is a typewriter? [LAUGHTER] Yep. So I was supposed to go to work, and then I got called into the service. So I didn't go to work at Hanford until '66. Bauman: Okay. And when you did start in '66, what area were you working with, what sort of jobs? Daniels: 300 Area. 300 Area. I worked in the mail room. The old 3706 Building. Bauman: Oh, okay. And how long did you work there then? Daniels: I worked in the mail room, I think it was maybe--I worked there from '66 to '68. And then I went into the operations department. Bauman: Okay. And where on site did you work in terms of operations? Daniels: Operations, we worked all over. Our main building was 325, but we worked at Two East, Two West, 100 F, all over. And all of the 300s. Bauman: Okay. And what sort of tasks or jobs did you have in the operations department? Daniels: Operations was all the buildings. Taking care of the fans and all of those things. And just making sure the building was temperature-wise okay. Bauman: Okay. And how long did you work in operations? Daniels: I worked in operations for--well, in operations I worked 38 years in operations. But from operations I went into [INAUDIBLE] work. But it was still the same department, just different. Bauman: Okay. And so which contractor or contractors were you working for? Daniels: Battelle Northwest. Bauman: Okay. The whole time it was-- Daniels: Yes. Bauman: Okay. So in the work you did at Hanford, did you have to have special safety training of any kind? Daniels: Yes, yes. Lots of safety training. Mask and the PCs, protective clothing and all that. Lots of work with protective clothing. Bauman: So when you say protective clothing, what sorts of things are you talking about? Daniels: Well some jobs, we would go in, we would have to cover up all parts. No skin showing whatsoever. Have two pair of pants, two pair of shoes. Well, not--pair of shoes, rubbers, and then maybe the rubber covers over those. Masks, and the whole works. The rubber gloves. We went into some very hot areas. Bauman: So you have to have a dosimeter or something? Daniels: Yes. A dosimeter. And extra dosimeters also. Bauman: Did you ever have any incidents during that time where you had exposure, or? Daniels: Well mostly--well, you always got some exposure. But I know most of the time that we would be working, if there was four or us or ten of us, we'd have so many RCTs around us that if your badge went off, they would just evacuate the whole area. Well, the room you was working in. And find out exactly what was what. The exposure. And then, you might go back in. Bauman: Okay. And so, was it pretty common for you to--so you did it all over the site, right? Different buildings? Daniels: Yes. Yes. All over the site. Bauman: Okay. Of the work you did, what was the most challenging part of it? Was there some aspect of what you did that was the most challenging, or? Daniels: Well, the most challenging part is when you get completely dressed with everything, and I'm looking at you, and I can't tell who you are or who he is. So we tape our name on our back. And that way, if I needed something from John, I'd see if he'd turn around and I could see. Okay, John, I need this. That was the most challenging thing. And then, confined space area. That's very challenging. It didn't bother me, but some people could not go into a confined space. They'd sort of tear the room up. That happened to one guy. [LAUGHTER] He did tear the room up. But he was--we wasn't even--he was at the whole body counter and they closed the door. And at that time they did not have the TV cameras to watch the people. And all they heard was banging, banging, banging on the door. The guy just went crazy. Claustrophobia. So after that they put the cameras so they could check on the people that was inside. But it never bothered me, but some people couldn't take that at all. Bauman: Right. And when you started working there, was there bus transportation out to the site still, or-- Daniels: No. There was bus transportation for us, but we always reported it to 300. And then we would get the van or a truck and go to the other areas. Bauman: And go from there. Daniels: Yes. Bauman: Okay. During your time working out there, were there any sort of incidents or bizarre or strange things that happened? Or something that's sort of memorable that stands out in your mind? Daniels: Boy. Nothing, really. There was things that happened, but it was nothing that so traumatized me that--no, not really, no. Bauman: So in Hanford site, the mission changed at some point, right, from production to clean up. Daniels: Yes. Bauman: Did that shift happen while you were working out there, and did that impact-- Daniels: Most of the cleanup started right after I left. I always tell them that when I left, the guys couldn't keep up with everything so they had to start tearing the buildings down because I was gone and the work couldn't get done. [LAUGHTER] So it's a good story. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: It is a good story. [LAUGHTER] How was Hanford as a place to work, overall, as you look back at your time working there? Daniels: Well, it was really great because you made, at that time--I don't know how it is now--but that time, you made more than most anyone else, you know, in—probably in the U.S., doing that kind of work. And it was probably the only place that that kind of work was going on. So it was a great place to work. There was some people that you worked for that wasn't so great, but you just did your job. And, like I said, eight hour days, ten hour days, and then sometime--I remember one time, I went to work Friday morning and I worked all the way until Monday afternoon when I went home. Now, I wasn't working all that time, I just had to be there. So I could go to the office and—I don’t want to say—sleep. I could go to--but they had to have one of us there, and I was the only one available at the time. So a payday like that is not bad. When you're getting double time from 8 o'clock Friday up until Monday at 4:00, 5:00, or whatever time you get off. You make darn near two weeks’ pay in a weekend, so can't complain about that. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: And were your parents still working there when you started working? Daniels: No. My father retired right after I started working there. And my mother worked there--I don't know how many years she worked out there. But when they closed the old Hanford down, then there wasn't any jobs for black ladies. So she didn't work there anymore. But my father worked construction there. He always tell me that him and my uncle poured the first mud--concrete--for D Area and the 300 Area, really. So they was sort of pioneers of their time. Bauman: Right. During this time--'50s, '60s--were there civil rights activities going on? Daniels: Yes, there was. There was lots of civil rights activities going on. Even here in the Tri-Cities. They had a march over in Kennewick. And even in Pasco because--well, just like it had been all the time. If you were black, you could not buy a house on the west side of town. They would show it to you. But at that time, houses were very cheap. So if a house was $10,000, they would show the house to you, it might be $16,000. So eventually most of them just lived where they were. And then, some of my cousins moved to Richland later. Bought some very expensive houses. I think they was like $5,000 or $6,000. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: Was there like a NAACP or other organizations here locally, do you know? Daniels: Yes, there was. NAACP was there. E. M. McGee, he was the president of the NAACP. And he moved next door to us when I was a kid. And then, eventually, he went to work out at Hanford. Bauman: And then, when you were going, like say, to Pasco High School and stuff, did whites and blacks--was it fairly interracial there? Or was there maybe racial-- Daniels: Well, at that time, we went to school together. The only time it was really interracial was when you were in grade school. In grade school, I can remember going to other kids' homes, because, like I said, you're a kid. And we would go in and the parents would fix us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. And they would be the same thing if they came to my house. As you get older, you started separating. But I still have a couple friends that we have been friends--females—we have been friends over 60 years. And we're still friends. It never--we were just friends. And that's the way I love it about that. It didn't matter that she was white and I was black, we were friends. And we're still friends. Bauman: And how about the Hanford--working at Hanford itself? Daniels: Well, when I started working out there, I think I was the youngest black person out there. I had some cousins working out there. My uncle worked out there. He was an older gentleman, but he worked in the biology department. My uncle had a college degree. But he was working at a job that probably a 15-year-old could do. And, I don't know, but some people say his supervisor didn't even have a high school education. But, my uncle was a school teacher when he was younger. He worked out there, and a couple of my other cousins worked out there. But they didn't get hired until they was older. So they did not get--they may have put in--I don't think my uncle put in 20 years out there at the Hanford project. And my cousins, they put in maybe 22, 23 years. Something like that. Bauman: I was going to go back and ask you about your parents. They came during the war in '43, '44. Did they live in Pasco, or did they live in the barracks out— Daniels: They lived in the barracks. My father said when he came, they slept in tents because there was--I think he said there was maybe one barracks that was built. They slept in tents. And you can imagine, they went that it wasn't very many people there, and maybe in two months, there was 50,000 people there. They built that place very fast, because they had to. And the strange part about it is--everything was segregated by gender and by race--and my parents would tell me things that they couldn't tell other people. But they told me later that it was really segregated, they even had different mess halls. The blacks eat in this mess hall, the whites--and then, I think if you worked graveyard, you may have ate in the same mess hall. But it was just really weird because I took my father out there one year, and he was showing me where he lived and where my mother lived. And all I see is tumbleweeds. And he knew where everything was. Where the baseball field was, and everything. And here's the funny part. My mother and father, like on weekends if they wanted to get together, they would catch the bus to go to Yakima because they could not get a motel at the Pasco, Kennewick, or Richland. And here's the ironic part. They could get a room in Yakima--an Oriental guy gave them a room in Yakima. And what are they building out there? Something to go over. And he told me that, and I said, man, that's crazy. But that's the way things work. Just really weird. But it was just strange. But out there, my mother, she cleaned barracks and worked in the restroom. The restroom? [LAUGHTER] The lunch room, the mess hall. Lunch room or restroom! But she said that they had the black rooms. And here's a part that no one ever tells. They had barracks just--barracks set up just for some homosexual guys. And no one--I tell people that, and no one--my mother said that was the best barracks to clean up because they were so clean. But it was so bad, and you can imagine that--okay, I'm over here. There's a big 10 foot fence to separate the men's from the ladies’. And she said it got so bad that they would go in--and a couple of ladies went in, and guys in there, I guess tried to attack them. And so they would have to send someone in to the barracks and get all the guys out before the ladies could go in and clean. But these things wasn't told because--well, everything out there was secret. But my parents told me later. And I would tell people about this, nah. I said, well I don't think my parents would lie to me. As I got older, they told me lots of things that happened out there. You think about it, it's a strange way to live. I'm married, but I can't go--well, they had it sort of like a day room where you could go and talk to your wife. And at a certain hour, say goodbye and go back across the fence, and go to your barracks. Maybe that's why they had such long marriages. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Did they stay there then, through the rest of the war? In the barracks, do you know? Daniels: Yes. And then they moved, I meant the trailer camp out there. Bauman: Oh, okay. Daniels: And then, my parents, they moved to Pasco. Bauman: Pasco. Daniels: Yes. Bauman: Do you know how much money your parents were making at the time, and during the war? Daniels: Well, I looked it up. And this is really weird. Because my father was working in Utah when he heard about the Manhattan Project. And it was $0.90 was--I think was like the lowest wage. $0.90 an hour up to $1.00. And I think they made like $1.00 an hour, which was lots of money. My mother made, I think it was $.050 an hour. So, if my father was at a $1.00, so they made $1.50 an hour. That was lots of money. Because I just visited one of my cousins who is 91 years old. And he said that he was working for $5.00 a week. And a week wasn't Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday—you worked half a day on Saturday. So he wasn't getting $0.50 a day. So you can imagine my parents making that amount of money. Which is—and that's what drew so many people here was the wages. And electricians made I think like $1.25 an hour. Well $1.25 an hour when you think some guys, it takes them all week to make $5.00. [LAUGHTER] And they worked more than eight hours a day. Lots of time, they worked 12 hours a day. And so, money-wise, my parents was probably rich. [LAUGHTER] Yes, indeed. Now--well, at that time I think minimum wage, if you had a job that paid you minimum wage, was $0.25. I think that was passed in 1939. So, $1.00 an hour at that time was quite a lot of money. Bauman: Right. So your dad heard about it, got a job, and then your mother-- Daniels: Yes, my mother joined him later. Yes. Bauman: Probably, as you said, making a lot more money than they could have in east Texas. Daniels: Probably making more money than they could have in any place in the U.S. [LAUGHTER] Yep, any place in the U.S. Bauman: So I asked you about the most challenging part of working out--what was the most rewarding part about working in Hanford for you? Daniels: Well, I think it was one of those deals where you didn't have to worry about next week. You--it was somewhere, like if you got a job, you knew you could have that job would last your lifetime. And that's what it did. I never missed a payday all through my working life. And that's good. That's very good. And you get paid vacations. Holiday pay. [LAUGHTER] You know, I always tell people, I say I never went home tired. Even--we would work, like I said, I worked that whole weekend. I wasn't tired when I went home because I was able to go and sleep until they would call me. So, to have a job like that is very rewarding. Bauman: Mm-hm. You talked about some of the segregation when your parents were there in '40s during the war. By the time you start working there, very different? Daniels: Well, not—it was very different then. But it was still lots to be--because we had--there was no electricians, pipefitters, or anything like that. Like I said, my uncle who had a degree and he was working for someone—my brother said the guy had an eighth grade education. I don't know. But things like that, why, you couldn't get up. And females were the same way. I remember when there wasn't any females in management or anything else. And there was only one—I remember when I started, there was one lady janitor in the 300 Area. And they had rules then—even when I worked in the supermarket—that females didn't get paid the same as the males, because they said they was restricted to how much they could lift. So thank goodness we have come a long ways from that. Bauman: Did you see some changes, then, take place during your time working there? Daniels: Yes, I seen lots of changes take place. One of the biggest changes was Dr. Wiley became—over all of Battelle. And then when the lady came and she became the president. I guess you could call it the president. But they called it the director of Battelle. We had a meeting once of all the people who had worked there 25 years or longer--35 years or longer. And I was there and they had a dinner for us. So the lady came over who was the director. She said, well, Ed. She said, you've been here quite a while. She said, you've probably seen lots of changes. She said, what's the biggest change you've seen? I said, the director's a lady. And she just fell out laughing. [LAUGHTER] She came over later, she said, the director's a lady. All right. [LAUGHTER] I said, yes, I can remember when there wasn't one lady who was exempt, that was monthly. I said, so there's half of the changes that have been out there. Lots of them. I mean, for the females and for the minority workers. Bauman: Is there any aspect of your work at Hanford or living in the Tri-Cities that we haven't talked about yet that you think is important to talk about? Daniels: Well, I tell people from all over--I have relatives all over--and I tell them the best place in the world to live is in the Tri-Cities. And I've been around a few places. And you could buy a house here. Like you go down and you see a house for $250,000. And a house, let's say in parts of California, who is probably as large as this place here. [LAUGHTER] It maybe cost that much money. Me personally, I will never leave here. I will stay here for the rest of my living days. I love to go and visit. But I always tell people, if I'm driving back from California, when I get up on the hill over there and I can see the lights, that's, [SIGH] "I'm home." [LAUGHTER] Yep, it's a beautiful place. Beautiful place. Bauman: Well, I don't think I have any more questions. But I do want to thank you for coming in today— Daniels: Hey, my pleasure. Bauman: --and sharing your experiences. I appreciate it. Daniels: My pleasure. Bauman: Thanks a lot. Daniels: You bet. Northwest Public Television | Daniels_Edmon Edmon Daniels: [WHISTLING] Robert Bauman: Okay. All right. I guess we're ready to start. Daniels: Okay. Bauman: Okay. Let's start by having you state your name and spell your last name for us. Daniels: Edmon Leo Daniels. D-A-N-I-E-L-S. Bauman: And my name's Bob Bauman. And today's date is November 20th of 2013. And we're conducting this interview on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. So wondering if we could start by having you just tell us when you arrived in the area here. What brought you here? Daniels: Well, I arrived in '51. 1951. And my parents was here. So the family moved here. Bauman: And did they come for jobs at Hanford, or--? Daniels: They came--my father came in '43 when he heard about the Hanford Project. And my mother joined him in '44. Bauman: And what sorts of jobs did they have at Hanford? Daniels: Well, at that time, it was just construction. And my mother worked in the mess hall and cleaning up the barracks. Bauman: So how old were you in 1951 then, when you came up? Daniels: 1951. You know, that's the deal. I never tell my age. [LAUGHTER] I was in grade school. Bauman: Okay. So, what are your first memories of arriving here as a young person? Daniels: Well, as a young kid, you're just in a new place. And memories are just meeting people. But, I guess it was—there was quite a few relatives here at that time. Just meeting them. Because I really didn't know--I hadn't been around my father that much at a young age. He left when I was just--wasn't that old. And my mother left after that, so. It was just really just being with them more than anything else. Bauman: And so where did you migrate from? Where had you been living before? Daniels: Texas. The eastern part of Texas. Bauman: Okay. And so, your parents were here. And were there other family members as well? Daniels: Well, I had uncles here and some aunts. One aunt, I think, was here. Yes. And cousins. Bauman: Okay. So where did you live and what school did you go to? Daniels: Grade school, I went to Whittier. And went to junior high--it was junior high then, it's middle school now. I went to junior high--that was the only one junior high in Pasco. And one high school at Pasco. And then I had a few classes at CBC. Bauman: Okay. So what was Pasco like, growing up in the area in the '50s and '60s? Daniels: Well, growing up, I tell people it's the best place in the world to be because you could do things. And, as a kid, you do whatever you want to do. There was no restrictions whatsoever. Then as you get older, you find that there are restrictions. [LAUGHTER] But as a kid, you just go and enjoy playing. And that's what we did. My father told me, I want you to play and have fun. Because when you get older, you'll start working and you'll work longer than you ever played. And I thank him for that because he was definitely right. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: So, in terms of Pasco itself then, you remember any specific or special community events or things happening at the time? Daniels: Well, the only thing we had--and that was probably any place, Pasco, Kennewick, or Richland--was baseball. We had summer baseball. There was no, like we have now, AEU basketball or anything like that. We played baseball in the summer. And my father'd been an old baseball player. He was my first sort of like coach, was my father. So that's what we did during the summer. In the wintertime, we just threw snowballs at each other. [LAUGHTER] Yep. Bauman: With Pasco at the time, was it racially integrated, or? Daniels: Yes it was. It was. We live on the east of town, which is on the east side of the railroad tracks. And, boy, it really wasn't—because all blacks live on the east side of town. But the house we lived in, there was four houses on the street, and we were the only black family on the street. But as a kid, that doesn't bother you because, man, kids are kids. We just had fun. And I was the youngest kid on the block. So, it was just like going down the street and saying hello to everyone, not worrying about color or anything like that. Bauman: What about community institutions like churches? Were there churches in the area growing up, or? Daniels: Yes. There was two churches right around the corner from us. A Baptist church and a Methodist church. And my mother took us to the Methodist church. That was the church I got married in. Oh, I think all my family got married--no, just my brother and I got married in that church. Bauman: And what's the name of the church then? Daniels: St James-- Bauman: St James. Daniels: --Methodist Church, yes. Bauman: Okay. So you grew up then , from 1951 on, in Pasco. And at some point you started working at Hanford? Daniels: Yes. And I was working--well, I was working at--well, I first got an interview for Hanford, oh boy, I think it was like in '62. '61 or '62. At the old 703 Building, as a clerk typist. And everyone then, you had to take a typing test. And it's funny, my grandkids always wonder, what is a typewriter? [LAUGHTER] Yep. So I was supposed to go to work, and then I got called into the service. So I didn't go to work at Hanford until '66. Bauman: Okay. And when you did start in '66, what area were you working with, what sort of jobs? Daniels: 300 Area. 300 Area. I worked in the mail room. The old 3706 Building. Bauman: Oh, okay. And how long did you work there then? Daniels: I worked in the mail room, I think it was maybe--I worked there from '66 to '68. And then I went into the operations department. Bauman: Okay. And where on site did you work in terms of operations? Daniels: Operations, we worked all over. Our main building was 325, but we worked at Two East, Two West, 100 F, all over. And all of the 300s. Bauman: Okay. And what sort of tasks or jobs did you have in the operations department? Daniels: Operations was all the buildings. Taking care of the fans and all of those things. And just making sure the building was temperature-wise okay. Bauman: Okay. And how long did you work in operations? Daniels: I worked in operations for--well, in operations I worked 38 years in operations. But from operations I went into [INAUDIBLE] work. But it was still the same department, just different. Bauman: Okay. And so which contractor or contractors were you working for? Daniels: Battelle Northwest. Bauman: Okay. The whole time it was-- Daniels: Yes. Bauman: Okay. So in the work you did at Hanford, did you have to have special safety training of any kind? Daniels: Yes, yes. Lots of safety training. Mask and the PCs, protective clothing and all that. Lots of work with protective clothing. Bauman: So when you say protective clothing, what sorts of things are you talking about? Daniels: Well some jobs, we would go in, we would have to cover up all parts. No skin showing whatsoever. Have two pair of pants, two pair of shoes. Well, not--pair of shoes, rubbers, and then maybe the rubber covers over those. Masks, and the whole works. The rubber gloves. We went into some very hot areas. Bauman: So you have to have a dosimeter or something? Daniels: Yes. A dosimeter. And extra dosimeters also. Bauman: Did you ever have any incidents during that time where you had exposure, or? Daniels: Well mostly--well, you always got some exposure. But I know most of the time that we would be working, if there was four or us or ten of us, we'd have so many RCTs around us that if your badge went off, they would just evacuate the whole area. Well, the room you was working in. And find out exactly what was what. The exposure. And then, you might go back in. Bauman: Okay. And so, was it pretty common for you to--so you did it all over the site, right? Different buildings? Daniels: Yes. Yes. All over the site. Bauman: Okay. Of the work you did, what was the most challenging part of it? Was there some aspect of what you did that was the most challenging, or? Daniels: Well, the most challenging part is when you get completely dressed with everything, and I'm looking at you, and I can't tell who you are or who he is. So we tape our name on our back. And that way, if I needed something from John, I'd see if he'd turn around and I could see. Okay, John, I need this. That was the most challenging thing. And then, confined space area. That's very challenging. It didn't bother me, but some people could not go into a confined space. They'd sort of tear the room up. That happened to one guy. [LAUGHTER] He did tear the room up. But he was--we wasn't even--he was at the whole body counter and they closed the door. And at that time they did not have the TV cameras to watch the people. And all they heard was banging, banging, banging on the door. The guy just went crazy. Claustrophobia. So after that they put the cameras so they could check on the people that was inside. But it never bothered me, but some people couldn't take that at all. Bauman: Right. And when you started working there, was there bus transportation out to the site still, or-- Daniels: No. There was bus transportation for us, but we always reported it to 300. And then we would get the van or a truck and go to the other areas. Bauman: And go from there. Daniels: Yes. Bauman: Okay. During your time working out there, were there any sort of incidents or bizarre or strange things that happened? Or something that's sort of memorable that stands out in your mind? Daniels: Boy. Nothing, really. There was things that happened, but it was nothing that so traumatized me that--no, not really, no. Bauman: So in Hanford site, the mission changed at some point, right, from production to clean up. Daniels: Yes. Bauman: Did that shift happen while you were working out there, and did that impact-- Daniels: Most of the cleanup started right after I left. I always tell them that when I left, the guys couldn't keep up with everything so they had to start tearing the buildings down because I was gone and the work couldn't get done. [LAUGHTER] So it's a good story. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: It is a good story. [LAUGHTER] How was Hanford as a place to work, overall, as you look back at your time working there? Daniels: Well, it was really great because you made, at that time--I don't know how it is now--but that time, you made more than most anyone else, you know, in—probably in the U.S., doing that kind of work. And it was probably the only place that that kind of work was going on. So it was a great place to work. There was some people that you worked for that wasn't so great, but you just did your job. And, like I said, eight hour days, ten hour days, and then sometime--I remember one time, I went to work Friday morning and I worked all the way until Monday afternoon when I went home. Now, I wasn't working all that time, I just had to be there. So I could go to the office and—I don’t want to say—sleep. I could go to--but they had to have one of us there, and I was the only one available at the time. So a payday like that is not bad. When you're getting double time from 8 o'clock Friday up until Monday at 4:00, 5:00, or whatever time you get off. You make darn near two weeks’ pay in a weekend, so can't complain about that. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: And were your parents still working there when you started working? Daniels: No. My father retired right after I started working there. And my mother worked there--I don't know how many years she worked out there. But when they closed the old Hanford down, then there wasn't any jobs for black ladies. So she didn't work there anymore. But my father worked construction there. He always tell me that him and my uncle poured the first mud--concrete--for D Area and the 300 Area, really. So they was sort of pioneers of their time. Bauman: Right. During this time--'50s, '60s--were there civil rights activities going on? Daniels: Yes, there was. There was lots of civil rights activities going on. Even here in the Tri-Cities. They had a march over in Kennewick. And even in Pasco because--well, just like it had been all the time. If you were black, you could not buy a house on the west side of town. They would show it to you. But at that time, houses were very cheap. So if a house was $10,000, they would show the house to you, it might be $16,000. So eventually most of them just lived where they were. And then, some of my cousins moved to Richland later. Bought some very expensive houses. I think they was like $5,000 or $6,000. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: Was there like a NAACP or other organizations here locally, do you know? Daniels: Yes, there was. NAACP was there. E. M. McGee, he was the president of the NAACP. And he moved next door to us when I was a kid. And then, eventually, he went to work out at Hanford. Bauman: And then, when you were going, like say, to Pasco High School and stuff, did whites and blacks--was it fairly interracial there? Or was there maybe racial-- Daniels: Well, at that time, we went to school together. The only time it was really interracial was when you were in grade school. In grade school, I can remember going to other kids' homes, because, like I said, you're a kid. And we would go in and the parents would fix us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. And they would be the same thing if they came to my house. As you get older, you started separating. But I still have a couple friends that we have been friends--females—we have been friends over 60 years. And we're still friends. It never--we were just friends. And that's the way I love it about that. It didn't matter that she was white and I was black, we were friends. And we're still friends. Bauman: And how about the Hanford--working at Hanford itself? Daniels: Well, when I started working out there, I think I was the youngest black person out there. I had some cousins working out there. My uncle worked out there. He was an older gentleman, but he worked in the biology department. My uncle had a college degree. But he was working at a job that probably a 15-year-old could do. And, I don't know, but some people say his supervisor didn't even have a high school education. But, my uncle was a school teacher when he was younger. He worked out there, and a couple of my other cousins worked out there. But they didn't get hired until they was older. So they did not get--they may have put in--I don't think my uncle put in 20 years out there at the Hanford project. And my cousins, they put in maybe 22, 23 years. Something like that. Bauman: I was going to go back and ask you about your parents. They came during the war in '43, '44. Did they live in Pasco, or did they live in the barracks out— Daniels: They lived in the barracks. My father said when he came, they slept in tents because there was--I think he said there was maybe one barracks that was built. They slept in tents. And you can imagine, they went that it wasn't very many people there, and maybe in two months, there was 50,000 people there. They built that place very fast, because they had to. And the strange part about it is--everything was segregated by gender and by race--and my parents would tell me things that they couldn't tell other people. But they told me later that it was really segregated, they even had different mess halls. The blacks eat in this mess hall, the whites--and then, I think if you worked graveyard, you may have ate in the same mess hall. But it was just really weird because I took my father out there one year, and he was showing me where he lived and where my mother lived. And all I see is tumbleweeds. And he knew where everything was. Where the baseball field was, and everything. And here's the funny part. My mother and father, like on weekends if they wanted to get together, they would catch the bus to go to Yakima because they could not get a motel at the Pasco, Kennewick, or Richland. And here's the ironic part. They could get a room in Yakima--an Oriental guy gave them a room in Yakima. And what are they building out there? Something to go over. And he told me that, and I said, man, that's crazy. But that's the way things work. Just really weird. But it was just strange. But out there, my mother, she cleaned barracks and worked in the restroom. The restroom? [LAUGHTER] The lunch room, the mess hall. Lunch room or restroom! But she said that they had the black rooms. And here's a part that no one ever tells. They had barracks just--barracks set up just for some homosexual guys. And no one--I tell people that, and no one--my mother said that was the best barracks to clean up because they were so clean. But it was so bad, and you can imagine that--okay, I'm over here. There's a big 10 foot fence to separate the men's from the ladies’. And she said it got so bad that they would go in--and a couple of ladies went in, and guys in there, I guess tried to attack them. And so they would have to send someone in to the barracks and get all the guys out before the ladies could go in and clean. But these things wasn't told because--well, everything out there was secret. But my parents told me later. And I would tell people about this, nah. I said, well I don't think my parents would lie to me. As I got older, they told me lots of things that happened out there. You think about it, it's a strange way to live. I'm married, but I can't go--well, they had it sort of like a day room where you could go and talk to your wife. And at a certain hour, say goodbye and go back across the fence, and go to your barracks. Maybe that's why they had such long marriages. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Did they stay there then, through the rest of the war? In the barracks, do you know? Daniels: Yes. And then they moved, I meant the trailer camp out there. Bauman: Oh, okay. Daniels: And then, my parents, they moved to Pasco. Bauman: Pasco. Daniels: Yes. Bauman: Do you know how much money your parents were making at the time, and during the war? Daniels: Well, I looked it up. And this is really weird. Because my father was working in Utah when he heard about the Manhattan Project. And it was $0.90 was--I think was like the lowest wage. $0.90 an hour up to $1.00. And I think they made like $1.00 an hour, which was lots of money. My mother made, I think it was $.050 an hour. So, if my father was at a $1.00, so they made $1.50 an hour. That was lots of money. Because I just visited one of my cousins who is 91 years old. And he said that he was working for $5.00 a week. And a week wasn't Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday—you worked half a day on Saturday. So he wasn't getting $0.50 a day. So you can imagine my parents making that amount of money. Which is—and that's what drew so many people here was the wages. And electricians made I think like $1.25 an hour. Well $1.25 an hour when you think some guys, it takes them all week to make $5.00. [LAUGHTER] And they worked more than eight hours a day. Lots of time, they worked 12 hours a day. And so, money-wise, my parents was probably rich. [LAUGHTER] Yes, indeed. Now--well, at that time I think minimum wage, if you had a job that paid you minimum wage, was $0.25. I think that was passed in 1939. So, $1.00 an hour at that time was quite a lot of money. Bauman: Right. So your dad heard about it, got a job, and then your mother-- Daniels: Yes, my mother joined him later. Yes. Bauman: Probably, as you said, making a lot more money than they could have in east Texas. Daniels: Probably making more money than they could have in any place in the U.S. [LAUGHTER] Yep, any place in the U.S. Bauman: So I asked you about the most challenging part of working out--what was the most rewarding part about working in Hanford for you? Daniels: Well, I think it was one of those deals where you didn't have to worry about next week. You--it was somewhere, like if you got a job, you knew you could have that job would last your lifetime. And that's what it did. I never missed a payday all through my working life. And that's good. That's very good. And you get paid vacations. Holiday pay. [LAUGHTER] You know, I always tell people, I say I never went home tired. Even--we would work, like I said, I worked that whole weekend. I wasn't tired when I went home because I was able to go and sleep until they would call me. So, to have a job like that is very rewarding. Bauman: Mm-hm. You talked about some of the segregation when your parents were there in '40s during the war. By the time you start working there, very different? Daniels: Well, not—it was very different then. But it was still lots to be--because we had--there was no electricians, pipefitters, or anything like that. Like I said, my uncle who had a degree and he was working for someone—my brother said the guy had an eighth grade education. I don't know. But things like that, why, you couldn't get up. And females were the same way. I remember when there wasn't any females in management or anything else. And there was only one—I remember when I started, there was one lady janitor in the 300 Area. And they had rules then—even when I worked in the supermarket—that females didn't get paid the same as the males, because they said they was restricted to how much they could lift. So thank goodness we have come a long ways from that. Bauman: Did you see some changes, then, take place during your time working there? Daniels: Yes, I seen lots of changes take place. One of the biggest changes was Dr. Wiley became—over all of Battelle. And then when the lady came and she became the president. I guess you could call it the president. But they called it the director of Battelle. We had a meeting once of all the people who had worked there 25 years or longer--35 years or longer. And I was there and they had a dinner for us. So the lady came over who was the director. She said, well, Ed. She said, you've been here quite a while. She said, you've probably seen lots of changes. She said, what's the biggest change you've seen? I said, the director's a lady. And she just fell out laughing. [LAUGHTER] She came over later, she said, the director's a lady. All right. [LAUGHTER] I said, yes, I can remember when there wasn't one lady who was exempt, that was monthly. I said, so there's half of the changes that have been out there. Lots of them. I mean, for the females and for the minority workers. Bauman: Is there any aspect of your work at Hanford or living in the Tri-Cities that we haven't talked about yet that you think is important to talk about? Daniels: Well, I tell people from all over--I have relatives all over--and I tell them the best place in the world to live is in the Tri-Cities. And I've been around a few places. And you could buy a house here. Like you go down and you see a house for $250,000. And a house, let's say in parts of California, who is probably as large as this place here. [LAUGHTER] It maybe cost that much money. Me personally, I will never leave here. I will stay here for the rest of my living days. I love to go and visit. But I always tell people, if I'm driving back from California, when I get up on the hill over there and I can see the lights, that's, [SIGH] "I'm home." [LAUGHTER] Yep, it's a beautiful place. Beautiful place. Bauman: Well, I don't think I have any more questions. But I do want to thank you for coming in today— Daniels: Hey, my pleasure. Bauman: --and sharing your experiences. I appreciate it. Daniels: My pleasure. Bauman: Thanks a lot. Daniels: You bet. Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 30:04 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 195 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 200 Area 300 Area Building 703 Building 3706 Building 325 Building 100F Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1951-2013 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. ca.1966-2006 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. E. M. McGee Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Edmon Daniels Description An account of the resource An interview with Edmon Daniels conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013-11-20 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2016-05-19: Metadata v1 created – [RG] Subject The topic of the resource Hanford (Wash.) Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.)--Social conditions. 200 Area 300 Area Building 100F Building 325 Building 3706 Building 703 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fddb4db3c62c60689139f55445db0af3b.jpg 98b8ca0aa60801a6fe319d88a15c2b43 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Edward Beck Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Edward Beck on July 31, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Ed about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can state and spell your full name for us? Edward Beck: Edward D. Beck. Last name is B-E-C-K. Franklin: And Edward? Beck: E-D-W-A-R-D. Franklin: Okay. Beck: Do you need my middle name? Franklin: Sure. Beck: Domenic. D-O-M-E-N-I-C. Franklin: Thanks. And you prefer to go by Ed? Okay, great. So, Ed, tell me how and why you came to the area to work at the Hanford Site. Beck: Well, I graduated from the University of Utah in 1973. Mostly worked in Salt Lake City doing various things. The year I graduated, there weren’t too many jobs in environmental biology, which was my degree. For a while, I worked for the state health department and then I went to work for the University of Utah in research. I later went to work for the Department of Public Safety; I was the University of Utah’s first industrial hygienist. And I started that job in March of 1981. I was starting a family; I got married in ’73. When our last child was born, it was my daughter, we were still living in Salt Lake City and she came down with a case of e. coli. Probably, we think, from an undercooked hamburger at a fast food restaurant. It was a really severe case: she spent 90 days in the hospital. It was really, really hard. I could go into a lot of detail. But I thought that I just—I had a lot of financial pressure. I was fully insured, but medical insurance was still a quagmire in those days, too. And so I decided that the best thing to do—state employment is not top dollar. And so I started looking around for where I could find another job that would make more money. I was working at the University of Utah—had been working up there for several years as the industrial hygienist—and the Department of Energy had a bunch of beagles up there that they were doing research. They were feeding beagles plutonium and americium, you know. Then they would sacrifice them and see what was cooking inside, cause of death, and what that radiation really did to the beagles. So, there was a guy named Dr. Edwin Wrenn, he was the head of the program for that. He was an MD, PhD. He was in charge of that program. So I would go up there and I would work, I would do his health and safety as industrial hygiene. All of the sudden, I guess you’d say, his department, the department of radiobiology was sacrificed to bring in new money, more money, for research in genetic engineering and stuff. So I think Huntsman came in, the Huntsman center for cancer, and there’s a bunch of other researchers they brought in with more money. So they did away—they dissolved the department of radiology and they started—they had to get rid of the beagles. The beagles had been living in kennels that were on cement, and the cement was contaminated from all their droppings. So the thing we were doing, we were cutting up the ceramic and trying to keep everybody from being exposed. And we were shipping it to a place called Hanford. Gosh, I’d never seen that before. At the same program, they also had a bunch of rooms that they were doing radiation research on, and they used to—they did several experiments there with the beagles and several types of what they called deep body, looking at the bodies to see where this stuff was located in their organs. They had some metal rooms that were built with battleship steel before the first atomic bomb so they were completely clean. That didn’t mean much to me at the time; I thought, well, that’s all well and good. But these buildings had to be torn down, too. And they were also sent to Hanford. They make up—right now Battelle has this—or they did when I retired—they have this center, actually, I wouldn’t call it a center. It’s a suite where people go and they sit for 30 minutes and they have these sensors go over their bodies and they see where they have any radiation deposited deep in their body. It’s a very sensitive thing. This battleship steel from before World War II was a very, very scarce commodity in the ‘80s. I mean, they were making all this stuff, or—DOE was more interested in, and Battelle was more interested in the battleship steel than anything. So it was shipped to Hanford and it now comprises all the shielding on that building that they’re still using today. Franklin: Ohhh. Beck: So that, you know, Dr. Wrenn, he was a little—he felt bad that his department had been sacrificed— Franklin: Do you know how to spell his name? Beck: W-R-E-N-N, I think. His name was Edwin. We kind of formed a good relationship because he was called Ed and I was called Ed, so, you know. When I was assigned to the hospital up there to do safety and health, I did a lot of work for him. They also worked with pigs. The department of artificial organs was there. You know, Barney Clark, they put the artificial heart in him, he was the first one ever, and they did it at the university. I was working there when they did that. But I used to go and measure all the noises, all the noise levels from the beagles in the kennel when they were feeding them. I made people put on hearing protection, because it is deafening. Absolutely deafening. Well over OSHA standards. The pigs were, too. You’d pick up a pig and they’d squeal. You can ask anybody at WSU who works with livestock how much noise a bunch of livestock can make in a building. To me, that was very surprising. But Dr. Wrenn told me, he says, you know, if you’re looking for a job, he says, you’ve had all this experience here, and he says, you might want to apply at Hanford where we’re sending all this stuff. It’s federal and I know they use a lot of people like you. Since you’re looking for a job, that might be a great place to apply. So I did. I did some research on it, and we didn’t have computers in those days really. I remember I was collecting—I was getting MSDSs—Material Safety Data Sheets for the university over a computer. Kind of like a fax machine and it was really primitive compared to what we’ve got today. So, I did some research and I applied with Hanford Environmental Health Foundation. I found out that they were doing all the occupational safety and health for the Hanford Site. So I sent my application in, and they sent it back and flew me out for an interview. That’s how I got here. Got the job, and I worked for—I started work August the 14th of 1989, and I’ve been here ever since. I worked for a lot of different contractors. Franklin: Sure. Beck: When HEHF went out of business, it was kind of a—it was a situation where they wanted to cut costs, I believe. And there’s a lot of politics involved in these situations. So they eliminated HEHF’s contract and they gave it to someone who, I guess, could do the work cheaper and better and that kind of stuff. So then I went to work for other contractors out in the area. But when I first came here in ’89 we were still making plutonium. It was not soon after that, though, that the Site was shut down and they started cleanup. Actually, when I interviewed, they were telling me that was coming. N Reactor was still operational and stuff like that. But they were saying that the handwriting was on the wall that they weren’t going to be making any more plutonium. Franklin: But they still knew that they would need you, though. Beck: Well, they did. Franklin: I mean, they were still actively hiring even though production was shutting down. Beck: Because they knew it was going to be a cleanup site, and any person who knew anything about Hanford, and I did, knew that they would need a lot of industrial hygiene folks. And there were a lot of people who were here that were industrial hygienists already. They’d been here from the beginning. I go to church with several—with at least one, whose name is Alan Lilly, and he was here before I was. Franklin: What was his name? Beck: Alan Lilly. I think I’ve given his name to the woman that I talked to about this interview. I think she might’ve called him already. She asked me for names of people I knew. Franklin: Yeah, we’re always trying to work those personal referrals because those are very generative. Beck: So, when I came here, HEHF did all the industrial hygiene. Not the safety part, but the industrial hygiene for the entire Hanford Site, all the contractors. Franklin: Can you explain that difference to me and anybody who might be watching? Beck: Well, safety and health, I guess you could look at as one big overall. It’s like “medicine,” right? You’ve got a pediatrician, you’ve got a brain surgeon. So as I see it, safety and health is kind that banner of “medicine.” And then underneath it, you’ve got health physics, which is closely allied but still different with usually different degrees. Then you have industrial hygiene and then you have like safety professionals. Industrial hygiene would be exposure to things like noise, particulates, vapors, solvents, those kinds of things. There’s light, various different types of light. Laser. Lasers can be—I was the laser safety officer at Battelle before I retired, for about five years. So there are a lot of things that you can be exposed to on the job that the industrial hygienist would measure. We usually did that with sampling pumps. It was very difficult at Hanford, because you always had the possibility of contamination. Franklin: Radiological contamination? Beck: Yeah. You’d collect it with your sample. Like, for instance, suppose that you were working in an area where there was a particulate that you wanted to collect. You’d have these little plastic jobbies called cassettes that you’d put on the end of a sampling pump. They’re connected by tubing and they’re attached to the person’s lapel. So they’d go in and they’d do their work and you’d collect, you’d pull air through that. And that gives you an approximation of what their exposure is. And OSHA requires that kind of sampling. That’s the basis for the exposure limits for OSHA for many chemicals. If it’s a particulate, you do it with a cassette and filter. If it’s a solvent, you do it with what’s called a sorbent tube. At the time, you did it with a sorbent tube. Things have really changed; they’ve got a lot of very, very nifty ways to sample now they didn’t have back then. Noise, you do with just a regular microphone and a recorder that records the noise levels. All those pumps have to be calibrated with class 1 calibration, so it’s very accurate. Then you’d send it to a lab. You’d take those cassettes and whatever tubes you used, and you send them to the lab. They have to be analyzed, but you can’t send them to any lab if they’re contaminated, because you’d spread radioactive contamination where they’re contaminated. So, we couldn’t use just any industrial hygiene lab. So that was what 222-S was for. That’s one of the things they did. They did the contaminated samples. People that worked at Hanford in industrial hygiene, and people that work in other radiological companies that do sampling, we had to find ways around—if you wanted to know if a sample was contaminated radiologically or not, you can’t tell just by looking at it. Franklin: Sure. Beck: So what you do is you collect two samples side-by-side, which the people working for General Electric probably didn’t have to do. One sample would do, because they were sure theirs wasn’t contaminated. You’d collect two samples side-by-side and you’d send one over to the rad—radiological people. They’d scan it doing a slow scan to see if they could detect any radiation on the filter. If they detected radiation on the filter, or if there was any contamination, then it would go to 222-S lab. If they didn’t detect any radiation on the sample, then you could send that out to another lab. It was actually checked three or four times before it went offsite to make sure nobody made a mistake, because DOE had already seen what they could do to laboratories when contaminated samples were sent. And people said, gee, we didn’t know. I even saw that while I was working at Battelle before I retired. But there were a lot of things that happened, too, where everybody’s going, wow, how’d this happen? So, anyway, that’s the basis for industrial hygiene and that’s really what we did at the Site. We also did sampling for a lot of the power plants that were onsite. There were coal-fired power plants. Franklin: Still in operation? Beck: No. No, no, no. They took those down. Those were shut down; they didn’t operate—I think it was about three or four years after I got here. I can’t remember exactly when those were taken down. But there were—1970 was when OSHA came into being. I graduated from college in ’73, and EPA came along not long after that. EPA had some requirements for power plants, for coal-fired power plants. DOE had to comply with those. They had an air quality program in the State of Washington and we had to comply with those. So we had to do what was called isokinetic sampling. You’d have to actually climb the stacks, those big smokestacks, and do sampling. You’d have to put samples in stuff, sampling apparatus. We used glass lines with—you’d put grease on the fittings on the lines to make a seal, and we’d go up there and sample those. Usually, we were a couple hundred feet up. When the wind was blowing, it was cold. And those things would move back and forth so you couldn’t always keep your glass tubing together. If that glass tubing came apart because the wind was blowing a bit and those things were moving, you know, you’d have one over here and one over here and this would move in a different, you know, so it would pull it apart. You’d have to start the sampling all over again. So we had to pay careful attention to how we did that. Franklin: How would you get up there? Beck: We climbed ladders that probably weren’t OSHA compliant. They didn’t require the fall protection then that they do now. We did everything that was required for safety. But stuff progresses over years. You know, you get better and better at it. That’s one of the things I didn’t like so much. I’ve climbed those towers and it didn’t scare me being up that high, but it did—when wind blew, boy, it was cold. It was not a good place to be. And you couldn’t pick the day you sampled, necessarily, for wind. Franklin: Oh, yeah. Beck: Not always. You’d try. But they couldn’t predict the weather as well as they can now. And Battelle used to predict all the weather on the Site, you know. They still do as far as I know. They had a lab out there. A building where they had Battelle meteorologists, they were there 24/7. I think they still might be; I’m not sure. I think they might have a lab 24/7 doing weather forecasting and stuff. Franklin: Wow. Beck: Just in case they have an incident or something like that, they know where the plume might go or know where fires might go. I think that, as I remember, that was probably a really, really good thing we had that going on when we had the big range fire out there. You probably heard about that. Franklin: Do you want to talk a little bit about that? Beck: Well. I was working out in the 200 Area. HEHF had dissolved and I had went to work for Waste Management. Waste Management had a contract out at Hanford to do many things. They day of the accident that started that fire, I was out at 200 West. I was out not too far from T Plant. I was out by the Yakima gate, kind of facing the Yakima gate, and I was inspecting a chemical storage, I guess you’d say, I don’t know what you’d call them, but they’re like the storage boxes that you see on trains that go back and forth that got the doors that open. We were putting a lot of chemicals and stuff in there, and as I remember, the painters were kind of complaining when they opened the door, they’d get chemical odors. So we were taking a look to see how we could collect samples and see what they were exposed to. And I heard the accident. I heard the collision that actually started that fire. And I heard this pop or bang. It was a distant thing. I looked—you know, you can’t see anything from the distance I was at. But not long after that, fire started. Later I heard that it was probably caused by that accident that I heard, that’s how fire got started. So when the fire really got going, I think I was out there the day after. It’s been a long time ago; hard to remember exactly when the days I worked. But I didn’t work out there for very long, because they closed the Site down and only the required people were out there. So when the fire finally was done, we all went back to work out there, and it was very different. There was nothing but dust and I guess you’d say ashes. The fire had come really close to the place I had my office. I can’t remember the number on the building. But it had come really close and actually some of those buildings had been scorched. I mean, they got really hot. They kept the fire—DOE had done some really good things. They had a lot of fire alarms around the buildings, and they put big rocks everywhere to keep the contamination down. Because when the wind blows, if you have any radioactive contaminant, it blows around. Franklin: Right. Beck: So you could almost pick the areas that had some ground contamination out there, because they were full of big rocks. Around Tank Farms, there’s big rocks. I mean, they’re everywhere. Like beds of rocks. So when the wind blows, it really stops the movement of any contamination. You’d have the RCTs that would go around with their meters, and that’s all some of those guys did was just constant surveys to see what the contamination was going. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the stories about the tumbleweeds being contaminated. At the time when they started to burn those tumbleweeds and the smoke was radioactive, they soon figured that out and quit burning the tumbleweeds. Almost all the mice had radioactive. They actually had some people from Battelle that used to go out and collect animal specimens on Site. They would come in and analyze them and they would tell them what the contamination levels were. But you’ve probably heard that story, I would suspect. Franklin: A little bit, yeah. Beck: Yeah. Well, those, when I went to work for Battelle, I was supporting those people that used the firearms to go out and collect some of the animals. Franklin: Oh, okay. Beck: Yeah. It was— Franklin: I’m wondering if you could tell me a little more about that. Beck: Well, some of that might not—might be classified still. I’m not going to say much. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Okay, sure, sure, sure. Beck: There’s things I’ll be very careful with in this interview, because I had a security clearance for many years. I don’t keep up with what has been declassified and what’s still classified. Franklin: Perfectly understandable. Beck: But things that are common knowledge, like the collecting the specimens, deer, rabbits, things like that and all kinds of plant stuff, that was done probably from the 1940s. But it was done much better in later years. I don’t know when they really started collecting those samples. You’d have to do research on that. But it was definitely going on when I went to work for Battelle. I think it was 2000— Franklin: And you were seeing or hearing reports of even then collecting specimens that were radiologically hot? Beck: Yeah, well, they would go out and see what they could find. Let’s see. That’s probably not classified. We had a situation with Hanford. I was still working at HEHF at the time. So it would be before I went to work at Waste Management, which I think was 1999. Not too sure; I think it was. They had a hydrogen sulfide smell out around Tank Farms. Tank Farms had odors for a long time. If you worked out there—we did a lot of sampling around Tank Farms. You’d pick up stuff in the air all the time, even in the old days. That’s because the risers—this might be my own personal opinion. I don’t know how much fact there is to this. But over the years, I always picked up this reason for why they never could put those exhaust stacks up in the air. Because if you were to put some high exhaust stacks up in the air from those tanks, you’d dissipate a lot more of those, and people wouldn’t smell it, and it wouldn’t be a problem. But to do that, you have to change your air quality permits, and that’s pretty tough to do and it would pretty hard to get the State of Washington to buy off on it. It’d be pretty expensive, because you got to put special filters. I mean, even now, those tanks, those underground tanks, they have special filters on the exhaust so that they can keep the contamination level down. You don’t stop the vapors, but you can certainly stop radioactive particles. Well, anyway, so they shut the entire Site down because of that hydrogen sulfide smell out at Tank Farms. And everybody was on, I believe they went to airline respirators or actually SCBA respiratory protection. As an industrial hygienist, you’re also very involved in respiratory protection, because you choose the respiratory protection, you make sure the mask fits. It’s all got to be to OSHA spec. You know, DOE, because they’re a government agency, they really aren’t under OSHA requirements. They’re like the Army. They’re like the Forest Service, the Parks Service. They’re really not governed by OSHA. OSHA was a law that was mostly just for people that weren’t government. I mean, you can’t tell somebody who’s in the Marines that he’s got to wear hearing protection because his rifle makes too much noise. I mean, that’s probably not going to go, because the Marine needs to hear his buddies, right, and he’s not going to put on hearing protection to save his hearing. I mean, you can see the Army operates a bit different. Franklin: Right. Beck: So most of the military and most of the government agencies are exempt from OSHA. DOE didn’t have a lot of their own standards, so they rolled over and accepted OSHA, a lot of the exposure limits and so on and so forth. But it wasn’t up—when I first came here, it was a little—It became more formalized as we rolled along, but in 1989, they were still doing pretty good on it, but there was a lot of things that they just weren’t required to do. So they later wrote those things in. But at any rate, we had this smell out at Tank Farms. This is a long story, but I’m getting to this— Franklin: No, no, no, no. Beck: This contaminants. It’s a story that I’ll never forget. So, they put us on 24/7 shifts at Tank Farms. All of HEHF’s industrial hygienists had to work graveyard and daytime as did all the other health and safety people. We all went on. That had not been the case. There were a few health and safety people that worked staggered shifts, but most of us worked day shifts. So we found ourselves out at Tank Farms. Myself and another industrial hygienist who worked for HEHF who now works at Battelle, [LAUGHTER] we were riding around in a car and going from place to place at Tank Farms and taking chemical measurements all night long. Everybody was—it was kind of crazy. There was SBCA respirators. And then they stepped down, a few people were allowed to wear cartridge respirators that you can still take the vapor out of your breathing zone, but if it’s at a certain level then you’ve got to go to the airline because it’s considered to be dangerous. Well, that’s what OSHA says, anyway. They’ve got these exposure—these limits. Well, went out there one night, and I’m walking through one of the facilities out in Tank Farms. And I see this big—there’s a pop machine and a candy vending machine in this area. I see this big V shape cut out of the concrete. It’s gone. I hadn’t seen that before. I said, gee, I wonder what happened. So I started asking people, how’d that happen? And they said, well, what happened was we found that the mice were going here and running along the wall. You know where the wall and the floor come together, you’ve got that 90-degree bend straight up and down. Well, they had mouse dropping and urine and it was hot. Then they found that a mouse—later on they found that a mouse had gotten up in the candy machine and there was contamination in the candy machine. So the candy machine gets removed. That’s going back to what I was telling you about the contaminated animals. Yeah, you just knew, if you dropped something on the ground at Hanford, you almost never picked it up. If you dropped any pen—I don’t know how many ink pens the government bought for people, but ballpoint pens, they were laying on the ground a lot of places. You knew why they were there. You just couldn’t be sure, when you picked them up, if you did pick them up, they were clean, and you didn’t want to do that. Because when you go out of a zone, you’d have to survey out. If you contaminated your hands, it was a big deal. So if you dropped something on the ground, rather than pick up the pen, you would prevent further contamination. That was part of the training, that you don’t be picking up things that could be potentially contaminated. So we didn’t pick up— I mean, it was a well-known fact that the tumbleweeds and stuff that grew in a lot of places at the Hanford Site—because there was ground contamination—would become contaminated and they’d have lot of radioactive isotopes up in the tumbleweeds. They first thought that they’d go around and they’d reduce the fire hazard by burning the tumbleweeds, so they picked them up in a truck, you know. They had this truck, I think that was—I don’t know how they burned them; I can’t remember exactly. I think they actually embedded some sort of a truck or designed one so they could keep the tumbleweeds in this truck, keep the sparks from going and causing other fires. Everything is required to have a survey—everything out there that goes into any type of a zone is required to be surveyed. As I remember the story—you’d have to talk to somebody who remembers it better than I do—but the RCTs were surveying that operation in that truck, and they found that, lo and behold, the smoke was coming from the tumbleweeds, and any particulates made by those tumbleweeds were radioactive. So I don’t think that burning of tumbleweeds lasted very long. So we don’t do it anymore, I’m sure. But anyway. Franklin: Yeah, now, when I’ve been out there, I’ve just seen them, they get piled up in the ditches and along the fence lines. Beck: And usually hauled away. Franklin: Usually—yeah. Beck: They put them in the landfill and usually bury them. You know, it’s—you just assume that if there’s one contaminated—if you just find one, say, in 100 acres, you would assume that potentially you could have more. So they just all get collected and buried. Franklin: Sure, and you don’t know where they came from, so. You know? It’s the nature of the beast. Beck: And the same with the animals. We used to laugh about it a lot. How do you keep a jackrabbit from staying on the Hanford Site? He’s eating vegetation that may be contaminated, may not. So anything he takes in gets bioaccumulated, stored in his body, you can probably find it. Now this little bugger, he wants to hop over, maybe he even swims the Columbia River, I don’t know. But suppose he gets somewhere. I don’t think that’s a serious issue, but I think it’s one that they’ve been watching. They’ve always watched. Franklin: Sure. It makes sense. I’d like to ask you about the history of the HEHF as you know it. How long were they in existence before you joined them? Beck: A long time. I came to work in ’89, and they were the medical group in 1969 when the McCluskey accident happened. You’ve probably heard of that. Franklin: Yes. Beck: Okay. Those were the docs that treated him. They used chelation therapy? Franklin: Which is? Beck: Which is they give you IV. IVs of salts that will go out and grab onto certain chemicals in the blood. They do that for heavy metals, too. It doesn’t necessarily have to be radioactive. There are people who might have mercury or lead or something in the blood, and they can do that sort of therapy. What it does is it makes chemical complexes. They get it out of the blood and it’s excreted. So that was pretty successful, as I understand it. Never had been done before, that I was aware of. At least that’s what I was told at HEHF. You know, I told the young woman that I talked to on the phone that I scheduled this interview that they used to have lead-lined bathtubs. For accidents. And the McCluskey was the first one who was ever, I think, put in a lead-lined bathtub. Those were located about, I don’t know, a couple hundred feet behind Kadlec. In a—you probably heard of that before? Franklin: Mm-hmm. Beck: Well, I was the guy—I was one of the industrial hygienists used to go in there, because the bathtubs were made of lead. You want to make sure there’s not a lot of lead contamination. You do get oxidation of lead, right ? Franklin: Sure, yeah. Beck: So we’d go in and we’d do what we call swipe samples and we’d have them analyzed for lead and make sure there was no excess lead dust, or not a lot. See, the medical staff or the people being treated to be exposed to. So I used to go in that facility once or twice a year. And so did a lot of other HEHF employees. But I’d never see that facility before, but I’d actually seen the bathtub where McCluskey was—I think it was the bathtub where he was actually treated. But they had these bathtubs and they put the person in it and they’d try to decontaminate him. And the people that did the decon—decontamination—they had the lead that would shield them while they did the work. And they wouldn’t—they’d take turns to limit their dose. They’d move around. So HEHF was here in 1969 when that happened. We had our 65th, I think, anniversary when I was still working for them. Which would’ve been prior to—I don’t know, exactly. That may not be right. I don’t know how long they were here. Maybe it was Battelle had their 65th anniversary when I was working for them. I was working for Battelle when they had their 65th. I don’t know how long HEHF was— Franklin: Okay. Beck: You’d have to research that out. But they soon—I started to work in August 14th of ’89. When I went to work for Waste Management, there were few of us left. Soon after that, the contract was put out for bid, and somebody else won the contract. So then HEHF went out of business. I mean, there’s other people to do the contract, but I actually gave several names of employees that still live in the area to that woman I talked to. She’s hopefully trying to get them to come in for interviews like this, or maybe even meet them for lunch. They meet every month on the fourth or third Thursday for lunch. Franklin: Oh, okay. Beck: A lot of the people that have been worked for HEHF longer than I did. I really didn’t work for them that long. I worked for them for ten years. But there were some people who worked a long time. They’re still here. Franklin: Maybe we can come and give them a presentation. Beck: Yeah, I really think those guys—I don’t know about the docs. I think the docs that actually did the McCluskey treatment stuff, they may have passed already. I don’t know where those guys are. I never met any of them, other than just when they’d come back to visit HEHF after they’d retire. You know, they’d come in the office and I got to shake hands with them and that, but I didn’t know— Franklin: You didn’t work with them? Beck: Didn’t work with them. Franklin: What—oh. Sorry. What other types of activities and people did HEHF employ, besides industrial hygienists? Beck: They employed doctors, and most of the docs were occupational physicians; they specialized in occ med. That’s a specialty usually—at the University of Utah, when—I took some graduate classes for industrial hygiene and we were in the division of occupational medicine, which is a part of family and community medicine at most medical schools. So almost everybody that goes to medical school does a rotation through family medicine and they get probably three months’ worth of rotation through occ med. These docs would’ve specialized in it. There was a guy named Dr. Culkeeny, for instance. He was—I still consider him a great guy and one of my best friends, and I don’t know—he comes back from time to time. But he was a retired Navy physician that worked on aircraft carriers, nuclear powered aircraft carriers. He was a very, very knowledgeable doc. Those were the kind of people that they went after and tried to find. When I first came to HEHF in 1989, we had, I think it was either a one-star or two-star general that became the head of HEHF, and he was an MD. He was a medical doctor. He came from the Air Force, I think. His name was Dr. Neider. He’s retired now. I think he’s still living here in the area. I know that there’s a guy that I worked with at Battelle that married his daughter. So I think he has grandkids and I think he’s still in this area. But, gosh, I haven’t seen most of those people. There’re some of those people that work for HEHF working for the medical contractor now. They’re physicians’ assistants. I think my exit exam when I left PNNL when I retired—everybody gets an exam, you know, when you quit or when you retire you get an exam on record to see if there was anything wrong with you. Actually, one of those PAs did my exit exam so I had a good time telling her, a lot of reminiscing of old times. Those lunches—there was a lot of reminiscing at those lunches about what we used to do and some of the outrageous things we used to have to do on site that we thought, like climbing those stacks. Ha. Got to tell you, that was a—it wasn’t a high point in your day when you had to do that, but it had to be done by somebody. So we were the ones that—some of us; not everybody. Franklin: So it sounds like the nature of your job was largely having a lot of a presence out on site, being—not a lot of lab work, but a lot of going out in all different times of the year and sampling—what were some of the challenges of a year-round position like that? Beck: Well, the weather. We’d work out in, it’s going to be 108 degrees next Friday. Like I told you, Trench 84, very interesting trench. It’s a burial trench out in the Area. I worked out there when I worked for Waste Management. This is just to point out how the weather really affects things. The heat out there, when you’re in that trench, we measured just a temperature off an ordinary thermometer of 114, 115 degrees And it was a trench they’d dug out with Euclids, which are those big earth-moving machines, that you just drive and they just keep digging the—and then they drive up and they put it on top. And then they’d move those big reactor components from all the nuclear ships that they deactivated, and move them in there. They never cover them up—they’re going to cover them up at some point in time, but they have to leave them uncovered so that the people that are part of the treaty, the Russians, number one, can fly over with their satellites and still count those reactor components. Because that’s how you prove they’ve taken the ships out of service. That’s part of some treaty; I was never sure which treaty. They even had to be painted specific colors so that the satellite can see them. But it got so hot out there in the trenches that you couldn’t paint them, the reactors, until—as a matter of fact, we tried to paint them in April one day and the paint was drying so fast, it was popping off. It wouldn’t stay on the reactors, it was that hot. Franklin: Wow. Beck: It wasn’t that hot. It was like 90-something degrees, but it was—they were black underneath. They had kind of a black tarp covering on them. So when you prepped those—and we had professional painters, you know, who would go up on scaffolds and try to paint those things. They’re huge. Wouldn’t fit—one of those probably would be a challenge to fit in this room. They move them with big cranes, Lampson cranes. If you’ve ever seen one of those, you ought to—that’d be something to really televise, for this show, I think, as part of the history. Because they move them out—they close all the roads on the weekends and they put these big trucks, I don’t know how big these trucks are, but they weigh like 200 tons or something like that. Franklin: Oh, wow. Beck: And they’re contaminated. So they put them on these trucks and they truck them out and put them in that trench. Push dirt underneath them. And they’ll be buried there for—yeah, that’s Trench 84. It’s a well-known trench. I don’t think it’s classified or anything because everything that we used to work on—used to have to have a security clearance to work in there. Franklin: Pretty sure the cleanup tour now goes right by—I’ve seen that. I’ve seen what you’re talking about. Beck: You’ve seen those big things? Franklin: Yeah, they’re huge. Beck: And some of them are bigger than others because some come out of cruisers, some come out of destroyers. But they’re huge. Franklin: They’re huge. Beck: And they’re very hard to paint. Franklin: Yeah and there’s many of them. Beck: They are very hard to paint, let me tell you. Franklin: Oh, I imagine so. Beck: But anyway, it was a 115 degrees down there one day. You have to send people out to work for 20 minutes and then they come in and rest for 30. Because they’re in their anti-Cs. Franklin: What’s that? Beck: Well, it’s anti-contamination clothing, usually a pair of coveralls, and then some, like, a plastic suit or—I guess the way you describe the suit—actually, the name of the suit escapes me. But you sweat. Boy, do you sweat. You wear another pair of shoes. You wear your boots and then you wear plastic over-shoes over that. Then you wear a coveralls and you tape it around the bottom and you wear your other—so you’ve got about two layers, sometimes three. Your rubber boots, you’ll have that much water in your shoes from your sweat. Franklin: Wow. Beck: It’s icky. [LAUGHTER] I’m going to tell you, when I first came here in ’89, it was hard to get used to. It really was. And I have a little sensitivity to heat exhaustion and heat stroke now from the Hanford Site, because sometimes even the safety people—you wouldn’t realize it; it sneaks up on you. You just, before you know it, you’ve got a headache, you’re feeling sick to your stomach, and that’s heat exhaustion. Heat stroke comes later. But you want to stop it before it ever gets there. That’s one of the bigger challenges. Then in the winter, you freeze. It’s really cold. The wind blows like crazy. There are days you can’t collect samples. As an industrial hygienist, the wind’s blowing like 40 miles an hour, I guarantee you, your samples will be worthless. So you don’t sample it. Do you stop work? Well, OSHA says you should know what your employees are getting exposed to. But how do you do that? And actually, I think, when the wind starts blowing, usually more than ten miles an hour, we would not collect samples, because if you’re outside, it can blow dirt in picked up with the wind that these guys weren’t creating. They’re still exposed to it, but it really kind of, what you’d say, salts the sample and makes it maybe a little higher than what it should be. They also had to shut down any heavy lifting. They used these big cranes on the Hanford Site. Since I was a certified safety professional and a certified industrial hygienist, I did safety—I did IH and safety both, and most people did. I mean, there are some safety people out there that just do safety and don’t do industrial hygiene, but I think most IH folks used to do both. I’ve done both on my career of 31 years, safety and health, I’ve done both. So you’re doing the lifts out there with these big cranes, and usually you’re—well, you’re lifting all kinds of things. But hey have these leaded drums that they put waste in, other isotopes in and plutonium. They weigh 5,000 or 6,000 pounds. They lift those up. Well, if the wind’s blowing more than ten miles an hour, all lifts are canceled. There’s a reason for that. They get swinging. Do you want to try to stop 5,000 pounds of—whatever you pick up can be moved in the wind, and you just don’t want to have— So, lightning. When lightning comes close, within 30 miles, a lot of that stuff gets shut down because those cranes are just lightning rods. But it goes inside. So you have a lot of things—I mean, there’s a lot of people that put up with lightning. I mean, in the Midwest it’s worse than here by far. So a lot of people deal with lightning. But our winds, if you’ve ever seen the wind blow around here, it can get to be a big deal. I remember the first year I was here in 1989, I came in August. That November or sometime, I think before Thanksgiving, we had winds that knocked down all the trees down in the park along the river, tore up signs and everything. I remember sleeping that night in my house, the same one I’m living in now, and I thought the roof was going to come off the house. The winds were like 85 miles an hour. Franklin: Wow. Beck: I mean, you went up to the Area the next day, and boy, there was a lot of changes. That’s how the contamination really moves. [LAUGHTER] Could potentially go off-site. Franklin: Sure. Beck: Anyway. Franklin: Wow. Earlier, before we started the interview, you were also telling us about how the shift from providing large drums of water to bottled water and I wonder if you could talk about that briefly. Beck: Well, I’ve already mentioned one of the biggest challenges we have in the weather realm is the heat. And heat exhaustion and heat stroke is a big-time deal; it can be very serious. It’s like the Army used to find, if you didn’t have good food and good boots, everybody gets calluses on their feet, the Army doesn’t go very far. If they get sick and they’ve got dysentery, bad water, bad food, the enemy doesn’t need to fight you, right, because you’re done. You’re pretty much done. Same thing when you’re working in the workforce like that. You take out half your workforce with heat exhaustion, heat stroke. And it takes a while to recover. And sometimes, it takes IV therapy, if they’re really, you know, if people are really sensitive and they’re like I am. I’m 66. I have to watch what I do. Not only have I been sensitized out there at the Site, but I also have to watch what I do now because the older you get, the less your body cools itself. I mean, there’s lots of things that are different. So you’ve got to be smart about what you do. So we used to have to try to prevent heat exhaustion, heat stroke. Hydration is key. But when you’re in all those layers of anti-contamination clothing, right, and you sweat a lot, not only is it key, it’s crucial, in my opinion. So there was a time when I came out here in 1989 that we were accomplishing this, the hydration part, by having 5-gallon containers of chilled water with ice in it. We had to make sure it wasn’t contaminated; it was clean; that there weren’t any viral-borne illnesses or anything that people would get, because that’s bad, too, and people don’t want to drink it anyway. So we had these containers that were purchased that were used for nothing but that. They were sanitized every day at the end of shift with a Clorox solution—chlorine solution. They were rinsed and they were put in an area that was clean to dry. Turned upside-down, sitting on things, so they would air dry. And then in the morning, way early in the morning—some of these shifts, because it was hot, we’d alter the shifts and you’d start work at 6:30, maybe 6:00 in the morning, maybe even earlier. And then you’re done earlier in the day, and that also helps. Franklin: Oh, yeah, I bet. Beck: For those of us that had to drive out there 35 miles, it wasn’t terribly helpful. Because that means you have to get up at 3:00 in the morning to get out there. That was the other thing in the summer: your schedule changed a lot. But at any rate, they had some of the craft that were union employees that would fill these things up with ice and water and monitor them all day, and would also sanitize them and clean them at night. And they’d do other things in the day, but that was part of their duty. It’s very difficult; you got 15 people working in an area doing something and you’re trying to count these 15 people and make sure they’ve had enough water, enough fluid. How do you do that? It’s kind of hard, because you’re—to not get too complicated and take too long, if it’s a contaminated area, you can’t do that anyway. Because they’re on a respirator and they’re not allowed to eat and drink. So that’s a big problem. So a lot of times, they have to take breaks and they have to maybe take off the outer layer of their anti-Cs, they have to survey out, then they get to go sit and cool down. Now, a coffee break takes about 45 minutes when you do that. Because they get their clothing off, they get surveyed to make sure they had no contamination, then they get to go sit and drink the water. That’s always kind of hard to say, well, how many cups has this guy had, how many cups have you had? Because you’ve got to have so many ounces in so many hours. Franklin: Sure. Beck: But when bottled water came, we eliminated the cost of those jugs and the ice—because it had to be ice that was drinkable. We still kind of gave them drinkable ice, but we got the bottled water, we just put all the bottles in kind of like a big plastic tub with ice in it, let them cool down. Each guy, each individual would go and get six bottles of water and write his name on it or whatever, however many bottles. And we would count the number of bottles he drank and he would, through the safety officer on the Site, he would require that those people bring the bottles to you, and show you that they’ve—you couldn’t stop them from pouring it on the ground the moment you saw them, but if you saw them doing that, they were done working. Franklin: Right. Beck: They just were. Because if someone goes down in a contaminated area, if they pass out or they get sick, then you got to have the Hanford Fire Department come in and pick them up. It’s just—it’s a huge issue and there’s lots of risks to that. People get hurt. You want people making good decisions. You don’t want people feeling light-headed and not feeling good. That’s going to happen anyway, maybe, because it’s just so blasted hot. You want to try to get them as good as they can be. So bottled water, as a safety person, I thought bottled water was one of the coolest things that came around. It really made our job a bit simpler. And I think overall for the safety and health of the people that worked out there, they could have as many as they wanted; we didn’t restrict the bottled water. But, golly, I mean, we absolutely knew for a fact that that guy was really at low risk, or lower risk, for heat exhaustion because he’d had all the water he needed. Franklin: Right, you were able to measure it, basically. Beck: Yeah, you could measure it instead of just guessing at it. How much—did he drink the entire cup or did you drink half of it and throw it away? That was kind of important. Franklin: So you said in ’99, HEHF was shut down. And then you moved to Battelle shortly after that? Beck: Well, HEHF was shut down, and I had to have a place to go to work. Because my job was going to end. I think what happened there was that most of the contractors thought HEHF was too expensive. I mean, they were each given $2 or $3 million a year for health and safety, I think. What you had to pony up from your contract was proportionate to the employees you had, right? And each time a doc examines somebody and they each got to handle a physical, you know? Say there’s 12,000 or 15,000 employees onsite. I don’t know how many there ever were. I know that Battelle themselves employs around 4,500 workers. But if you have that many employees, and they’re all getting exams, it’s constant money. They all thought that they could do it different and cheaper. So HEHF, their contract was put up for bid and somebody else won the contract. Then there’s other people that left. They were using their own physicians, putting them on the records. So I’m not sure exactly what happened, but the crux of the matter was they started doing their own industrial hygiene and safety and they were hiring on people. They actually hired many of the HEHF staffers. We were kind of at a premium because we’d been here a while. We had our clearances already. Security clearance costs—I don’t know, they told me once it used to cost $10 grand for a year. I mean, they have to maintain it. They check on it every year. I had a Q clearance. I don’t know if that’s similar to what the politicians who’ve been in the news recently with the election have. But, you know. They check. They check all the time. So if you have all those things already done and your training’s already done, you don’t have to be trained and receive all the rad training. I mean, you have to have the annual refresher but you don’t have to go for the two-week course. That costs a lot of money, to send people for a two-week training. Then, wow, we get this person and he’s actually been out here and he knows where T Plant is, and he knows where this is? And you might have an idea where things are buried where other people have forgotten, okay? Give you an example, those tunnels that just collapsed? We knew they were there. For a long time. And I believe that used to be classified. Obviously they’re not because they’re in the news. But we used to walk across them all the time; we knew they were there. How anybody could’ve forgot they were there and let them deteriorate is—but anyway. Another story. So I needed a place to go to work, so I first went to work for Waste Management. Probably of all the contractors, HEHF was the very best at it, and that was the very best job I ever had. I was devastated to see that job go. I really was. Because it was the—when you go to take graduate courses in industrial hygiene, it’s the cat’s meow to have occupational health nurses, and occupational docs and industrial hygienists and safety people all over the gamut, all going in and talking about John Smith who’s got this problem, how do you think he got it? And then going out and sampling for it. Man, that was good. It was just like graduate school, just like—a lot of companies work—well, anyway, that ended. And so I went to work for Waste Management. I think Waste Management was probably the second best company at Hanford I ever worked for. Franklin: Why was that? Beck: Management. The manager I had was—he was fabulous. I just can’t say enough about him. He was—his name was Gordon Meaney. He was a great guy. He was a great guy. Then I worked—something happened with the politics. There again, these contracts out at Hanford, they’re all full of intrigue and drama and politics and whatever you want. Follow the money, you know, but. Fluor Hanford wasn’t getting along with Waste Management for some reason. So they swallowed up Waste Management. We didn’t get choices; we were Fluor Hanford employees. I mean, we had a choice: go find another job or work for Fluor Hanford. Because Waste Management was done. Maybe they’ve come back to the Site; I haven’t paid much attention. Franklin: Do you remember when that was? Beck: Oh. Franklin: You got notes? Beck: Well, I just have some information here. If you’ll pardon me, I can’t remember dates really well. Franklin: No, that’s totally fine. Beck: I know the date that I started, I stopped working for— Franklin: It’s not a crucial thing if you can’t remember it. Beck: Oh, I can. I worked for Waste Management until November 15th of 1999. November 15th of 1999, I became a Fluor Hanford employee. So, it was in the late ‘90s that they had this little problem with Fluor. I don’t know what it was. I used to kind of think I knew, but the years have gone by, you know? It’s not the most important thing I ever thought about, but it happened. So I only worked for Waste Management for a year. I worked for Fluor Hanford for a year. And then Fluor Hanford was probably the worst job I ever had. I worked for other companies that had worse management but I don’t know when. I mean, I’m not trying to trash them; I’m just saying. I was matrixed out in the area to six different projects. I read about it this morning before I came, because I sent my letter of resignation, I sent it by email. The human resources specialist that I sent that to wrote me an email back saying, why are you leaving? So I wrote this discourse why I was leaving. I was matrixed to about six projects; I had three different managers I was responsible to. It got so bad, I mean—I want to say this nicely. There were managers that would schedule meetings at the same time, or maybe I’d have a meeting from 1:00 to 2:00 and this guy wanted a meeting from 1:30 to 2:30 or whatever. They would write me nasty letters and put on my evaluation that I didn’t attend meetings. But I had conflicts. These managers, it’s like the current political administration, if you’ve been noticing what’s been going on in Washington, DC. They were warring against each other. I was absolutely amazed. I said, look, guys. I’m matrixed to all these projects. If you guys want to have a meeting with me, I’m more than willing to attend but I can’t be two places at once. Well, where’s your loyalty? Do you have a loyalty to this plant, this project, or what? What do you mean loyalty? I’m going to lose my job one way or another. After a while, I just said, you know? So I applied for Battelle. It was a job that was in town. No more driving. I mean, I didn’t really mind the drive out there. But they actually drove me from the Site, the bad management and their attitude. Gosh, a nine-hour day was not enough for them. I had to do ten hours a day, four days a week. When I went to work for Battelle—I retired at Battelle, so. When I worked for Battelle, things changed a bit on my safety and health slant, because I was the first industrial hygienist for the University of Utah. They were in research, laboratory research. Well, Battelle is laboratory research, too. So they hired me for my experience in laboratory research. Franklin: Mm. So you kind of ended your career where you started. Beck: I ended my career where I started. Much happier. Battelle had good management for the most part. Franklin: What types of projects did you support at Battelle? Beck: I supported—I don’t know how they’re organized now; I haven’t really kept up with it since I left. But Battelle had different directorates. My last directorate where I retired from was NSA, or the national—NSE, excuse me. The National Security Directorate. NSA, the National Security Administration, after 9/11, that’s where they got most of their money. Working there, working for Battelle, you know, I’d heard that most of the money was in NSD. From time to time, everybody at the will of the government goes through budgeting crises at the Site, particularly Battelle. I was energy science and technology directorate. ESTD was the one I first supported. They were more subject to losing money through the budget. So I was working, the day of 9/11, I was working, still supporting ESTD and I was over in PSL when the—actually, I was home when I heard that 9/11 occurred, you know, the planes and everything. I was in PSL when that tower collapsed. Franklin: Wow. Beck: And I was with a bunch of ESTD people, and they said, man, this is obviously terrorism. We were all talking about it. And they said, wow, now would be the time to change directorates, because I’m never going to get—National Security Directorate’s going to get a lot of bucks. So I changed and went to work for the National Security Directorate and, boy, did we ever get money. So they do all kinds of research. NSD is almost completely classified. There’s some things that aren’t, but by and large, that’s all I can tell you. Don’t mean to be cloak-and-daggered, but I don’t know what’s—because I would go in to do inspections and some things would be covered with cloths and sheets and I would be told, you can’t see this. My clearance, I had a Q clearance, it wasn’t even high enough. Franklin: Oh, wow. Beck: So, I mean, there’s some of those things. But the Energy Science and Technology Directorate does research into load handling for the power grid. They’re really famous for that. They’re working on battery technology. When I worked at the University of Utah in the early ‘70s, I actually—I worked as a research specialist until I started working for the Department of Public Safety where I was the industrial hygienist. My boss there was the chief of police for the university police. So before that, I worked for a project that was funded by a government agency called ERDA. Any of you guys heard of ERDA before? Franklin: Energy Research and—yes. Beck: Energy—yeah. Franklin: I know the acronym. Beck: It was DOE but not on steroids. Franklin: Right, they were pre-DOE, right? But post-AEC. Beck: Right. And I was working on a sodium sulfur storage battery. The military was funding it. Ford Motor Company was funding it for electric cars. The military was really interested in having a good storage battery where they could have electric motors in tanks. They could mount tank offensives and stuff without making noise. Like when you fire those big diesels up? Oh, the element of surprise is not there. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right. No, it’s very different when a Chevy Volt goes down the street than even a regular car. Beck: I drive a Prius and I have to be very careful in parking lots because people don’t hear you. Because I’m totally electric when I get rolling. After I back out and I’m just going really slow, I’m on total battery power. And unless I’m making noise going across the asphalt, I can sneak up on people. And they look up and you actually scare them. You know? Franklin: Yeah, that’s happened to me. Beck: You have to be really careful. Well, anyway, so, they have five different directorates at Battelle. Battelle used to do research on water going through the dams and the fish. They used lasers to do that research. They have special things that they’ve built to simulate dams and they made special little floats that are smolts that they run through the—and they did these different aeration things and they had these lasers that they can actually see what was happening to these smolts. Because it takes pictures, so many frames a second, with the laser beam. I mean, it’s pretty cool. That sort of stuff’s not classified. When I worked there, I was the laser safety officer there for about five years. So I inspected all the lasers, made sure as best I could that we were operating them correctly and safely. There was one time in DOE that DOE had eight or ten accidents within a couple years where people had damaged their eyesight, lost their eyesight or were otherwise injured from lasers. So they got a really big deal on laser safety. They actually sent me from Battelle to Stanford. DOE has a lab at Stanford. And they gave us additional laser safety training. Franklin: Oh, wow. Beck: So they use a lot of lasers at Battelle. They use it at NSD, too. NSD, they use lasers for classified stuff, too. So if you’ve ever wondered how our drones are so accurate. Chk chk. [LAUGHTER] And that’s enough said. Franklin: No, and they are very accurate. My last question is what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War and cleanup? Beck: Well, I’d like to go back just a step further. I’d like to go back pre-, say, World War II, say. During World War II and just after. The men that worked here at Hanford were absolute heroes. Because when you look at the history and you look at the exposures—try to document and calculate some of the exposures of these guys. They were every bit as brave, and, man, they were—I mean, B Reactor and some of the things that were done, they didn’t know if some of those things were even going to work. They didn’t know how they were going to work. They knew a little bit about radiation, but they didn’t know the doses they were going to receive. And they didn’t have any way to measure it like we do now. So I’d like people to remember that, boy, those veterans that worked and made the plutonium—whatever you consider about the atomic bomb, the two that were dropped—the people at Hanford that made the plutonium for the second bomb, they were heroes. Those guys really gave. And after that, during the Cold War, there was more of that. You know, McCluskey was hurt in ’69 and there was a lot of injuries and a lot of exposures. We’ve got beryllium exposure, sensitization of beryllium from machining triggers and from the rods that went into the reactors that got beryllium on them in some places. And there’s all kinds of other illnesses that these guys have gotten, right? That they got protecting our country and they got by ending, by winning the Cold War, essentially. I’m a member of Cold War Patriots, and I think they’re right on. Wasn’t so much my generation, but the people that worked back in the ‘50s and ‘60s and ‘70s, those are the people that really won the Cold War, in my opinion. And when the wall came down, when the Soviets—that wall came down, that was—I have no doubt that was a direct result, at least in partial of what was done here at Hanford and at Oak Ridge and at Lawrence Livermore and all the DOE labs. There’s 12 of them. You know, there’s more research, I think, done in most of the DOE labs than the rest of the universities put together, realistically. Most of those, most of these DOE sites are associated with major universities. It’s quite phenomenal what the Department of Energy and these labs and the Hanford Site and other places have done. I mean, yeah, there’s contamination and there are things that happen. But, man, there was a lot of stuff that was done that needed to be done and was done. I’m just—it’s kind of cool to be associated with it, actually. And it wasn’t a big deal, actually, from ’89 to when I retired in 2010 or 2011, it’s not a—we did a little. But it was those people before ’89 that were really, really—I think every time I go somewhere and I tell people about Hanford—where’s Hanford? What did you guys do? I’m on an airplane or I’m telling a relative. All my relatives in Denver think, you know, hey, you glow in the dark. Well, you talk with them about it and most of those people—the only thing they have, the only conception they have is how inhumane the atomic bomb was. I’ll give you, it’s a wicked weapon, but—they probably shouldn’t have killed—I don’t know. But those guys did what they were told. They did the very best they could, and there were some great, brilliant people that did this. There’s brilliant people working on these DOE sites today. They certainly get marginalized by the people in Washington, DC that don’t even know what’s going on. I’ll get a little political here, and I’ll tell you that I read an article recently that when the current administration came in, the guy who’s the head of the Department of Energy, they went out in Washington, DC, the head office of the DOE, they reserved all these parking places, and they got everybody ready to give these people that they thought from this administration would come to get all kinds of information, to get information on what do you guys do? Because the previous administration had done it, the administration before that had done it, the administration before that had done it. [WHISPERING] Nobody even showed up. [FULL VOICE] So the camera can hear me, nobody even showed up! It’s disgraceful. I’m sorry? [LAUGHTER] Franklin: No, no, that’s okay. Beck: I just say, you guys don’t even—you’re voting on a budget, you want to cut DOE’s budget. You don’t even know what the labs do! I mean, if you’ve got an opinion, that’s okay. But be informed. They didn’t even show up; it was like, well, we know exactly what you guys do and it’s nothing and it can be done away with. It’s just crazy. I think the future is in these small nuclear reactors, these pod reactors. I do not think solar and wind is going to replace coal-fired power plants. If we’re really going to have an energy renaissance, if we’re really going to get on a good energy program, we’re going to have to get on nuclear energy. It’s the only option. There are some people that will have some cold showers and they’re going to figure that out. I really believe that. So I think DOE, well, DOE labs, these labs that they have, the 12 of them are the ones that are going to make that happen and happen really well. And I think it can be done safely. I don’t know why people are ignoring the Department of Energy, it just—it baffles me. But, see, I’m one of the outspoken people that believes in nuclear energy and everybody else, I mean—I get people that just—[LAUGHTER] They’d like to beat me up, frankly. So, any other questions? Franklin: No, thank you so much, Ed. You know, I did have one other question and I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask—what did your wife do the whole time that you guys were here and that you were working out on Site? Beck: Hmm. Well. She raised the family. Did a great job. This is our 44th year of marriage. We’ll be married 44 years August the 18th. I’ll tell you one funny thing about coming here. When I got the job, and I said, you know, this is a really good job. The reason it was, I got a 50% salary increase when I came here. Franklin: That’s pretty significant. Beck: That’s from working at the University of Utah. It’s a little bit, deals with the risks that were here, but they also paid very well. So I said I think we ought to go. So we sold our house and everything. Well, we came for the house hunting trip. We had—[LAUGHTER]—so I get the family in the van, and I drive them from Salt Lake City. And we come down over Cabbage Hill, Cabbage Mountain which is by Pendleton. Wow, this is beautiful! This is just beautiful! We go out through the wheat fields, you know? I-84. Wow, this is nice, this is nice. Then I turn on 82. We go across the Columbia River. Oooh, this is good! Look at that dam! Look at the water! Then we come up to Kennewick, and she says, where are the trees? She says, where are you moving us? She says, there’s nothing green! And I said, well, when they flew me for the interview, I says, it’s green from the air. I says, they’ve got lots of corn fields and stuff. And then I—I didn’t know much about the place, so the house hunting trip, I rented—I stayed at the Motel 6 in Pasco. You’re on fixed income, they give you so much money for a house hunting trip. I shouldn’t have done that, but I thought, Motel 6, usually they’re pretty good. Not a really good area, and we got in the van, and the sun came up the next morning going to get breakfast in the hotel and she says, gee, I hope there’s a better part of town. So we ended up over by the mall. We bought—we’re living in the same house that we lived in, we bought that house in ’89, we’re still there. She raised our three kids, they went through high school here, they went through college. One went to WSU, one went to UW, and the other one was an National Merit scholarship winner and he got his choice of where he wanted to go, so he went to Arizona State. Then he got his PhD from University of California San Diego. Franklin: Wow. Beck: So. We had two transplants in that time because of our daughter having e. coli, she lost the use of her—she had destroyed her kidneys, and that’s another long story. But I donated a kidney in ’90 and then my wife donated one in 2003. So that’s basically what she did. She did home hemodialysis for six years after my daughter rejected my kidney. Until she was in good enough health that we could do the transplant, give her a kidney. That’s what I was going to tell you about health insurance. It was—this is an off—you know, I don’t know if you want to stop the camera, but this is, I think is kind of important for the where we came from and where we are now. I was at the University of Utah and I chose this program for insurance called the Preferred Provider Program. I mean, it started, it was new, they were starting all kinds of things back in the ‘80s. This is in ’81. So FHP had just come on. FHP I think is still in California. But for a while, FHP was our insurer, then I chose this Preferred Provider Program. And I thought, well, in the state of Washington there was no—you could not exclude previous illnesses. What do they call that now? Tom Hungate: Pre-existing. Franklin: Pre-existing condition. Beck: Pre-existing conditions. The law in Washington with all the insurance was no such thing as a pre-existing condition. And they paid well. Well, at the University of Utah, I was on a preferred provider program. When my daughter got sick, she spent 90 days in hospital, 30 in intensive care. The doctor that took care of her was from the medical school there. He was a specialist. He was a nephrologist. Because she started losing—hemolytic uremic syndrome can destroy your kidneys, and it did destroy hers. I was deeply in debt to that man, because he wasn’t one of the preferred providers on that program, and I didn’t know it. He was the only game in town. He was the only guy that could take care of her. He was on faculty at the University of Utah and he was insured through the same—he felt so bad. He says, I do not believe what’s happened. This is back in ’85—well, actually, ’87. He says, I don’t believe this could be happening in our country. How could this be? He says, you owe me this much. Because the insurance company wouldn’t pay because he had to sign up on the dotted line, you know? So he wrote off that entire amount of money I owed him, which was lots. Franklin: Wow. Beck: And so—and I had a lot of other expenses, too. I almost declared bankruptcy. So then this job—I started looking for another job because I had to pay off the bills. And we came to Washington State. One of the reasons I came here—I was interested in working at Hanford and I had a lot of experience to give them, but also they pay high salaries and there was no pre-existing conditions on their health insurance. And to move anywhere else would’ve been suicide, economic suicide. There was a time everybody was telling me, well, you ought to divorce your wife and if you do that she’ll be able to get medical assistance from the state. They were telling me to do that. I said, no, I’m not going to do that! But that was—there were a lot of people that were thinking and probably did do that to solve the—and then they’d just live with their wife, anyway. They were divorced, but— Franklin: Sure, to get—to be legally single. Beck: Anyway. That’s another—I think that’s kind of important. So, when my daughter lost her kidneys, use of her kidneys, we’d been living here for about ten years, she had about 10% left. We were told when we went over to children’s hospital for a physical that she had to have a transplant. So then I donated and I was working at HEHF at the time. So I donated, and since it was my daughter, the medical insurance covered her because it was a pre-existing condition and it paid for my hospital stay and my removal of my kidney, you know, and all of that. It was just so much better system. And then she rejected mine, and so she was on dialysis for six years and she was such a young age, she was in grade school at the time, that my wife wanted her to have a really normal, as normal a childhood as possible, and not have to go to a dialysis center with adults where the prognosis is not that good, and most of them are—you know, this is a little girl, she’s just seven or eight. So she went to Children’s Hospital and learned how to do dialysis herself. They trained her at Children’s to do dialysis on our daughter. We installed a dialysis machine in our basement. I got a water softener, I can put out a stream of water like that, still. You don’t need one like that, but I went over to Pasco to their dialysis center and I asked the engineer there, I said, what kind of water softener did you use? Because they said, you’re going to have to have a really big softener to do this, because it’s a lot of water. I paid the big bucks, we got it put in the basement and my wife dialyzed her four times a week for six years. Franklin: Wow. Beck: And that’s pumping blood through a filter. It’s not just pumping water. They have a type of dialysis where you can fill up a sack inside, but we actually did it, blood dialysis. That’s what she did when she was here. She couldn’t work. Franklin: Sure, no, that makes sense. Beck: But that was a good thing because Hanford paid so well. And I’ve never been in debt since. Franklin: Wow, that’s great. Beck: So, I don’t know, I’m pretty emotionally attached to this part of the country. Franklin: No, there’s a lot of good reasons for that. Well, Ed, thank you so much for coming and taking the time to interview with us today. Beck: You’re welcome. Franklin: Okay. <a href="https://youtu.be/cy9XisqownE">View interview on Youtube.</a> Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview HEHF (Hanford Environmental Health Foundation) N Reactor 222-S Laboratory 200 Area 200 West T Plant Tank Farms B Reactor Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1989- Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Edward Beck Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Kennewick (Wash.) Pasco (Wash.) Animals in research Industrial hygiene Radioactive contamination Radioactive waste disposal Nuclear reactors Description An account of the resource Edward Beck moved to Richland, Washington in 1989 to work at the Hanford Environmental Health Foundation (HEHF). An interview conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by Mission Support Alliance on behalf of the United States Department of Energy. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 07/31/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F9ad3a90fc43d92e9610d6107002bd0ea.JPG 608989d427c45abccfa52c4a12dd91e9 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Edward Milliman Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: I’m ready here. Tom Hungate: We’re ready. Franklin: We’re ready, okay. My name is Robert Franklin and I am conducting an oral history with Edward Milliman on July 6th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Edward Milliman about his experiences working at the Hanford site and living in Richland. So I guess the first place to start is the beginning. So why don’t you tell me how you came to Hanford and to Richland? Edward Milliman: From 1960 until ’67, I worked for General Electric and Douglas United Nuclear. I got laid off in ’67, so then I went to Montana, Bozeman area. Ran a couple of ranches there for a couple years. Went up to Cut Bank, Montana. In fact, it was winter for Montana. And 40 below there in the winter was nothing. The only way you could get to town, which was 20 miles away—they would start their D8 Cat up with the blade on it, and blade through all the way to town. And town was a grocery store and a tavern. Some of them old cowboys there, they’d get snowed in all winter. When spring thaw come, they and their hired help would all come into town and come into the saloon there, the bar. And I noticed every time I would go in there, one fellow was always there. If you left late at night, he was still there. And I asked the bartender, which was from Longview, Washington. He said, no, we just lock him in. He just stays here, and if he drinks anything through the night, the money’s always to the side there. And those old cowboys would come in, and they would get all drunked up. That one guy would say—and the bartender told me—see them two old fellas? And they must have been 70, 75. He said, stay away from them, just leave them alone. No matter what happens, leave them alone. Don’t say anything. Pretty soon their voices started getting loud, and I started paying them some attention. He said, that was not your calf. That was my calf that crawled through the fence and I just pulled him back. You’re a liar! And them two old fellas jumped up and went to knocking each other around and down on the floor. And they weren’t kidding. They were really hitting knuckles to each other. And pretty soon, the bartender took a bar towel, a wet bar towel on them. They got up, and sat there and sopped the blood up on their nose and their lips. They sat there, having a drink, and they started laughing. The bartender said, you know, neither one of them’s ever had a cow or a calf in their life. They’re wheat farmers. And he said, they’re just so glad to see each other, they beat the devil out of each other every year. [LAUGHTER] And he said this happens every spring. And pretty soon, he said, now just sit still, man. It ain’t over yet. I said, my goodness. So pretty soon, he said, you hit me harder than I hit you. No, I didn’t. Smack, bang, down they went again. [LAUGHTER] And that finally ended it. Anyway, just some of the funny things that happened to me. Then I came back and put an application in for Battelle. Franklin: In what— Milliman: 1970. They hired me on January the 5th, 1970. I was working for a doctor, Dr. Alfred P. Wehner, which happened to be during the war a fighter pilot for the Germans. He joined the Luftwaffe, the Hitler Youth. His father was SS. He’s also written a book, From Hitler Youth to United States Citizen, which I probably have the second autographed copy. But we were doing all kind of bioassays and lifespan studies using—mainly then it was hamsters, Syrian golden hamsters. We were making them—we would put them in these exposure chambers. They were introduced to nickel oxide in this one particular chamber. The next chamber would be cobalt oxide. And then also we went on to introduce cigarette smoke to them. You’d put them in a tube and plug them into a Hamburg-2 smoking machine which had 30 cigarettes on this turn. And the machine would take a puff off each cigarette and blow it in the chamber. They had no choice but to inhale it. And asbestos exposure. And at that time, all we had on was a lab coat and a little white paper face mask. [LAUGHTER] At that time, they didn’t know the dangers—really bad dangers of asbestos. Then in 1974, Johnson and Johnson talcum powder exposure. That lasted for two years. In the meantime, all the employees out at 100 F, where we were located, they moved into the new Life Science Laboratory here in 3000 Area. But we couldn’t leave, because we had animals on exposure. Weren’t allowed to move them. So I was out there at 100 F until 1975, ’76. And then I moved into town. I think it was ’77, we went out on a two-year asbestos concrete exposure. Of course, by then, they had us pretty well suited up in fresh air and respirators and all this stuff. Then I moved over—that was over at the annex. Then I moved into the Life Science Laboratory, which we used to say, we’re stuck one story down in the ground in a rat-infested hole. Which—all we had was rats and mice down there. They had four macaque monkeys, and they were doing dental implants on them. We had this one comrade down there that—he was kind of a strange fellow. He would go into the monkey room, the macaques’. They had them in—there was four: it was three males and one female. If you’re mean to an animal, there’s no second chance or anything. If they catch you mistreating an animal, you’re out the door right now. They’ll escort you out and you’re finished. Well, when you went in the monkey room, these macaques—they’re only set up, oh, about two, three foot. When you’d come into the room, they would hang onto the bars on their cage. And Dan would come up and smash their fingers and tell them to get back, get back. They tell you, don’t let them get ahold of you, they’ll pull your arm right out of the socket, they’re that strong. And I’ve seen them get ahold of a chain and pull a half inch eyebolt right out of the concrete. They’d put their feet against the wall, and—anyway. This one male macaque which was the dominant one there, he would turn around real fast when Dan would come in and throw his posterior up in the air, which in monkey language, that’s insult, that’s a challenge, come on. Anyway, Dan kept doing that, and being mean to him, and kicking the cage, and making him get back. Always had a safety man looking through the glass at you, all the time when you’d go in there. Dan was washing the floor out, and he got too close. And he dropped the hose, and he took a step forward to pick the hose up. That macaque reached out and got him by the front of the coveralls and pulled him up against the cage, and drew his fist back like a human, and he Dan so hard—[LAUGHTER]—through the bars of that cage, he knocked him out. And the safety man run in, and all the rest of the macaques were all standing up looking, hey, what you doing? And they pulled Dan out and took him to first aid. Dan come back, he had most beautiful black eye I’ve ever seen in my life. And his nose was kind of pushed over to the side a little bit from the swelling. Our supervisor called Dan in and said, you must be careful. Don’t let them get ahold of you. Okay. Well, about two weeks later, Dan was in there. It was his turn to go in. He was in there washing the floor out, and feeding them. [LAUGHTER] He got too close. That monkey reached out and got Dan by the head of the hair and chun-kinged him into the bars and knocked him out again. Well, the safety man, he says, I run in and pulled Dan back out and took him to first aid. And now Dan come back, now he’s got this black eye that’s starting to turn green, because it’s healing up. And now he’s all bandaged up around his head. He got stitches in his head. The boss called him in again. Dan, you got to be careful. Stay away from them things. Okay. About two weeks later, Dan went in there, and to check their water, you had about a six-foot galvanized pipe. And it was crossbar—across the upright bars on the thing, and then there was a divider there. You’d go in, you’d take that pipe, and you’d stick it against the water nipple to make sure that they were getting water. This little female macaque, she would grab the pipe and poke it on there and shake her head, yes, it’s okay. That’s how smart they were. Well, Dan got to that big old male monkey—macaque—and he stuck the pipe in there. And the safety man told us later, he said, I knew exactly what was going to happen. Because you could sit there and see in that macaque, he’d kind of sit there and think about that, watching Dan put that pipe through there on the other cages. He grabbed the pipe, pulled it out of Dan’s hand, chugged him in the belly and folded Dan over, put the pipe over the crossbar there, and romped down on the end of it. Hit old Dan under the chin and knocked him out again. And the safety man, he said, I was laughing so hard, I couldn’t—I had to crawl in on my hands and knees and pull Dan out of there. Here comes Dan back, he’s still got bandage on his head, he’s still got a black eye, and now he’s got stitches in his chin. [LAUGHTER] And the boss called Dan in, and said, Dan, I’m going to have to pull you out. Them monkeys are killing you. [LAUGHTER] That’s just some of the humorous things that’s happened there. I guess it wasn’t humorous to Dan, but—and we all kidded Dan so bad, he left. He finally retired. [LAUGHTER] And then we got—after the asbestos concrete exposure and went to LSL-2 down the basement, then they got a lot of contracts from the NCI and a lot of organizations. There were probably eight or ten exposure rooms in that basement. They designed these special chambers for our inhalation studies. Dr. Owen Moss designed the chambers. And I designed a device to generate particulate matter, which I have a patent on. There were four control rooms that controlled those eight or ten rooms. They were using my device to generate indium phosphide. It was a component they use in computers and chips and things like that. Opening day, two-year contract, about $25 million. And me and this other employee, we were their technicians. They had finally computerized the readouts on all these chambers, and they had 1,200 rats in all these different chambers. This chamber got 10 micrograms per liter, this chamber got 20, 30, and on down the line. There were 1,200 rats in all these different chambers. They were generating this delivery system. I was 200 feet away from where this stuff was being delivered to the animals. I’m sitting in the control room all comfortable. Started that thing up, and started generating that indium phosphide. I was looking at the computer, checking the different levels in the chambers. You had ten minutes before T-90 to get up to 100% of the target. The other fella asked me, how’s it doing? I’m tweedling knobs and regulating air flows and stuff, and I’m watching the computer. And one of the last readings I seen was that it was 65% of the target. And it exploded. And it blew me and him out the door. I’m glad the door wasn’t latched—it was closed, but didn’t lock. Blew us into the hallway. The indium phosphide and the smoke come rolling out of the ceiling. We slammed the door shut, grabbed some tape and sealed the door. All the other technicians down the room in the control room, they stuck their heads out and hollered and hit the panic button, which was one button on all these control rooms. When you hit the panic button, it shut everything down that they were exposing. They broke the barrier and went out through the sterile, which costs a lot of money to clean up, because that was all a sterile area. They couldn’t come my way, because the fumes and the dust. Look in there, and it was the most beautiful violet flame. That stuff was burning. And I’m sitting here looking at it. [LAUGHTER] Buddy, he got his fresh air on and everything, running for the fire extinguisher and put the fire out and we sealed the door again. And then they called the fire department and they evacuated the whole building. Nobody asked us if we were okay. They would just walk up and say, what did you do? [LAUGHTER] It just blew up! Anyway, the PR people got ahold of us right away—public relations people. They said, you will not say anything—an explosion, or the dang thing blew up. [LAUGHTER] Okay, but it did. You can’t say that. It killed all 1,200 of those rats from the concussion. Franklin: Wow. Milliman: And it went and blew out—went through the heap of filters, went through the scrubbers, and out into the air. Which they kind of glossed over. When I read it in the paper, anyway, it was—it said two scientists had previously been in the room. No one was there when it—the incident—happened, is the way they put it. Franklin: Wow. So, I guess rolling back a little bit—no, I guess we’ll keep going, then we’ll roll back. So, what year did that happen, the incident? This incident, with the—what did you call it, the indium? Milliman: Indium phosphide. Franklin: Indium phosphide. Milliman: Yeah. Gosh, that must have been late ‘80s or early ‘90s. Because I retired in 1996. Franklin: And you had worked for Battelle from 1970 to 1996? Milliman: Yeah, yes. Franklin: Okay. Milliman: Yes. Worked for the same doctor, same scientist. Until very later on the started having some heart trouble and he retired. But we’re still good friends, we stay in contact. Many, many—I think the worst exposure I was ever on was CS2. It was a teargas with a disabler in it. We got the contract from the Army. Even though you had protective gear on and fresh air, you would take your outside protection off, and you had a pair of coveralls on underneath. If you’d walk out into the hallway, everybody would shun you like you had the plague, because that stuff just stuck with you. One time, some got into my fresh air mask somehow. I plugged the area, and it gave me a full shot in the face. Down I went. Safety man pulled me out and went and got a wet towel. They had a compound that kind of nullified that stuff. It was Triton X-100. He soaked that towel in that Triton X, and I got it on my face. Of course, you don’t even know where you’re at. The disabler is like a bad dream. It just—your hand will fly up and slap you in your own face, and you got no control over anything. It only lasts for a little while, but it’s very effective, I can tell you. [LAUGHTER] It—gosh, it just burns your eyes, you can’t breathe, your throat constricts, and you’re disoriented. Franklin: Do you know when this was? Do you remember when this was? Milliman: That must have been in the ‘80s, too. Probably the late ‘80s. We had so many chemical exposures going on, just one after another. These were all lifespan studies. And they figure a rat lives—a rat or mouse—can live a couple of years. Their lifespan is two years at the max. I have a stack of papers eight inches high of all the disclosure of what we were getting exposed to, and we had to sign we were aware of what the exposure would do. There were so many chemicals, like 1,3-butadiene and propylene. And next time you open a bag of Lay’s potato chips or any kind of a—the bags are all puffy and look like they’re plump full—I mean—full. [LAUGHTER] Ha, the last thing they shoot into that plastic bag before they seal it up is propylene, a preservative. And all these contracts that we received were to see if they were—they were all potential carcinogens, and we were testing the effects of them to see if they were carcinogen. That was the main thing that I did for 26, 27 years on all these inhalation exposures. Franklin: So, can you tell me about propylene? Is it a carcinogen? Milliman: I didn’t get to read the report on that. They would mostly debrief us after the exposure was over. And of course they’d write a scientific article about it. I’m not sure whether it was or not—it probably was because—gosh, methyl methacrylate, a lot of things they use in the carpets, 1,3-butadiene, propylene oxide, methyl methacrylate, and—it just goes on and on and on. Everything that’s in this room—potential carcinogen. A lot of the glues they put into the carpets and the dyes and stuff. A lot of the household cleaners—the chemicals and stuff they put in them—they’re—everything you do is bad. Everything you buy is bad. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right. [LAUGHTER] Milliman: Yeah. Franklin: So let’s roll it back a little bit. Where actually—where were you born? Milliman: I was born in Washtucna, Washington. Franklin: Oh, okay, that’s right. And what year was that? Milliman: 1938. Franklin: 1938. Milliman, November 15, 1938. Franklin: And how long—did you grow up in Washtucna? Milliman: I don’t even remember being there. Then my parents moved from there to Spokane, out in Moran Prairie. Franklin: Okay. Milliman: My father was a farmer and he was also a steam engineer. We left Spokane—he had a small farm there—we left Spokane in 1947 and moved to Benton City. And he had a farm there. He worked for the Benton County road department. Then, before that, they had—the old prison camp out at Horn Rapids. Him being a steam engineer, he hired onto the Morrison-Knudsen construction company and he fired the boilers for the whole complex out there at the old prison place. Which, there was no prisoners there, but they’d converted it into almost like a small community for the construction workers. They had all the barracks and the hutments and—just like a small town there for a while. It’s all gone now, but— Franklin: Those were construction workers at Hanford? Milliman: Yeah, and they— Franklin: In the late ‘40s, early ‘50s? Milliman: Yeah, this was in the ‘50s. Most of them were working building railroads up—and construction work. Franklin: So then you went to school—so you said ’47, you moved to Benton City? Milliman: Yeah, I started third grade in Benton City. Then I graduated in 1956. Franklin: Then what did you do after you graduated? Milliman: Went up to work—went up to Seattle and hired on for Boeing at the Renton plant. We were making—we were working on the KC-135 tankers. They had me working the plumbing bays, tying down the bladders and the pumps and everything for the KC-135s. Then one day, after I was there about two months, the boss called and said come with me. Okay. So he took me over and he said, now you’re an electrician. [LAUGHTER] So went to school for that, and we wired up the tankers from the nose back to where they joined the wings on. And then—its assembly was from the nose back to where they put the wings on; no wings yet. And they were on tracks and when it would come time to move, they would just roll it down and another one would come into position. They would just—in one end, out the other. And one day I happened to look over and thought, what is that? That’s not a tanker. They said, well, that’s the first commercial jets—passenger. The first six were Pan-American—for Pan-American Airlines. We built six of those. And then the next one was American and Qantas and all of the foreign companies. But all a 707 was at that time was a KC-135 tanker with the fuel base taken out, and the boom and everything on the back for refueling. And they made that—[LAUGHTER] Boeing made a fortune off a government expense building those KC-135 tankers and doing all the design work and the engineering on them. And then they just simply made the 707 out of that tanker. After I was there a couple of years, in one part of the hangar, they started putting this big black shroud up from the ceiling to the floor. The rest of the crew says, what’s going on over there? The boss wouldn’t say anything, just shut up and mind your own business. These guys started walking around in suits with their dark glasses on inside the building—sunglasses. And they’re all leaning a little bit to their left. I got up close enough look and said, oh, this guy’s got a hog leg in there—he’s got a pistola. They were Secret Service. What they were doing there was building Air Force One. A 707—the first one. Franklin: Wow. Milliman: They picked six of us, and they assigned one of those Secret Service guys to two people. And he would follow you wherever you went—even to the bathroom. And I would—being me, I’d tell them a joke, and he’d just stare at you. [LAUGHTER] The boss’d call us in the office. You leave those guys alone. You don’t speak to them, you answer their questions, and that’s all there is to it. Well, I said, they haven’t got a sense of humor. [LAUGHTER] You especially—[LAUGHTER]—knock it off. Okay. If you came out of that shrouded area to go to the tool room to get a tool, a pair of footsteps right behind you. The guy’d say, what are you doing? Why do you need that? Ask you all kinds of questions. He’d look and check it all out, follow you right back in again. You go eat lunch, the guy’s sitting there looking in your lunchbox and seeing what you’re eating. Hey, want a sandwich? [LAUGHTER] Oh, oh, oh, back in the office, the boss shaking his finger at you. I left there in—I started getting homesick. I wanted to smell the sagebrush again and the cottonwoods in the springtime and all that fuzz they put out and everything. Then I came home and courted my girlfriend and got married. Then I went to work for General Electric in 1960. I had two boys and a girl. Was living and moved into Richland at that time, and then moved back to Benton City, which was my home. I’d been there all my life. Franklin: How long did you live in Richland for? Milliman: Probably two years. Franklin: Where did you live in Richland? Milliman: Oh. Marshall Street. Don’t remember the exact address, but it was on Marshall. I’d come in on Van Giesen. Moved from there, rented a place there, and then moved to Benton City and bought a home and raised the kids up. Got them up through high school. They graduated there. Then, like I say, went to Montana for almost three years. Then back home for Battelle. Franklin: What did your wife do when you worked at Hanford? Milliman: She—just a homemaker. She worked at grocery store, checker. And we got a divorce in—gosh—imagine that. I can’t even remember. The kids all got married. They had kids. Then I remarried. Wife’s a registered nurse, works here at Life Care Center in Richland. Franklin: Oh, okay. Milliman: Very talented person. And she will come home and tell me strange stories that happens there. Like this one fellow was in this motorized scooter. And he was just dying for a cigarette. Nobody would give him a cigarette. So he got in his motorized scooter and he escaped out the door. He went down to the corner to the 7-Eleven store and buy him a pack of cigarettes. Now, this guy is on oxygen. And he come back, and he lit up. My wife, Christine, said she heard, my goodness! That man’s on fire! She said they all rushed out the door! [LAUGHTER] And the guy’s on fire, and they got the fire out. It melted the plastic right into his face. And she says, every time I look at him, I can hear that. That man’s on fire! And he’s still there. Then they have—she says that one person in particular keeps calling the Richland police and telling them that—hey, they kidnapped me. They’re holding me against my will. [LAUGHTER] And she says the police show up with their hands on their guns. She says, I just put my hands up and say it’s a false alarm. About the third time he calls, they’ll say, well take his phone away from him then. [LAUGHTER] Some of the funny things that happen in life. Franklin: So when you worked for—what did you do when you worked for GE and Douglas United? Milliman: We were metal handlers, which meant they were canning up six an agent uranium slugs for the reactors. A metal handler, all he did was they had—you’d stand in front of this hydraulic machine that the metal carrier, after they got—dipped those things in the hot aluminum and silicon, inside of aluminum can, then the guy who had a pair of tongs, he’d come over and he’d put them in these two baskets. And the baskets would drop into the water, come up, and drop again. And then the basket would turn towards you, and my job was you pulled slugs out. They had a metal container around them. You had to scrape the aluminum and silicon off the metal can. And then you took out the uranium slug that was clad in aluminum and put it in the pallet. The process went on like that all day long. Then I moved back to final inspection. The lights were so bright in this cubicle we had. And you would look at the welds—they had to weld endcaps on these slugs and you had to look for pinholes and voids. I did that for a year or so, and then I went to final inspection, which we were radiographing, x-raying the slugs for voids and stuff. Beside the station there where we were radiographing these slugs, there were about 30 autoclaves, just—they stood up about this high above the metal floor. There’s 200-pound hydraulic door that closed on those autoclaves, and what they would do, they would load 60 of these slugs—these uranium slugs—in a basket. They had little round cylinders, and you’d put the slug in so they wouldn’t bump against each other. You’d put six in the basket, and they’d get an array of six baskets, which were 240 slugs. They all had a hole in the basket through the center. They would load this—put this big steel rod down through the baskets and they’d put a pin in the bottom. And the crane would come overhead and pick that whole stack up and lower it down into the autoclave. Then the operator would give the signal, close the door. Then he had a pipe—there was a handle sticking out, and he had a pipe he’d stick under a big cheater bar. And he would pull that door shut and the locking lugs would all come out and lock the lid on there. Now, on the end of that pipe on the door was a round hole. Underneath of it was a hydraulic device that had a pin in it. And the pin had to come up and go through that hole in the handle before he could ever bring it up on pressure. He’s looking at his control panel, okay, this one’s okay. I’m going to bring it up on tremendous pressure—steam pressure. We were radiographing our slugs, me and this other employee. Pretty soon the floor started shaking. What? Earthquake? What? And then we seen the operator. He got up and he started walking over towards this one autoclave. His head come up, and his head come up and he looked like a giraffe. He looked like his head was this high above his body. He looked, and he just turned and started to run, because he could see that door on that autoclave shuddering. And that pin had just barely touched the edge of that hole and give him the signal that the door was locked, which it was not. And that thing just worked that door around until it got past the locking lugs. The hinge pin on that 200-pound door was two-inch solid steel. It snapped that like a toothpick. It blew the lid off, and blew it up through the roof and stuck it right in the monorail—the crane rail, and just bent a big U and stuck right there. The steam pressure on that started firing those baskets and those uranium slugs—it was just like a cannon barrel. You know—zoom—boy. Me and this other fellow jumped onto this steel table. And the workers that were on the outside of the building, they said they seen those baskets and those slugs go 80 feet above the building and then they came back down through the roof, back down on us. And these things were hitting—dropping all around us. And of course me and him were under the table. People scattered. It just happened to be that this was right at shift change. The other crew was coming in; we was getting ready to leave. And right in the middle, that thing went through the roof. What was—after the slugs kept raining down, after they stopped, me and that fellow underneath there was on our hands and knees and we started laughing—just giggling insanely. [LAUGHTER] You know what, because you can hear these things hitting above you on that table—ba-ding, ba-ding. Then the criticality alarm went off. And that wasn’t funny. We thought, uh-oh. One of those slugs ruptured and we’re all crapped up. And that’s what they—crapped up. And then they told us that it was a false alarm—which seemed kind of strange. Criticality alarm going off. But the bad thing about working back then for General Electric and Douglas United Nuclear was they picked six or eight of us—I think there were eight of us—and they took us out of the 313 Building where we were canning slugs up. They took us over in this Butler Building, they called them. A tin—kind of a tin shack. Went in there, and all this fancy equipment in there and a great big, long, open-front hood. What are we doing here? We had a supervisor, his name was Paul Rhoades. They called him Dusty Rhoades. He said, you guys have been picked—[LAUGHTER]—for guinea pigs. [LAUGHTER] Well, yeah, what’s new? [LAUGHTER] They had designed a process to can up thorium. And thorium is a white powder; it’s just like flour, like a sandy flour. It was for the atomic subs, and they used that on the front face of the reactor in the sub as a biological shield, because thorium oxide is not radiation-wise as hot as uranium slugs. Franklin: But they were the fuel element? Milliman: Fuel element, yeah. Franklin: But they were safer. Milliman: Instead of uranium, it was thorium. Instead of a uranium slug, it was thorium oxide. Thorium oxide is a bone seeker. Cancer of the bones and stuff. Once, when we first started out—now, we’re working in this open-faced hood, and we’re pounding this stuff in the can. You got a—oh, it’s a rod about this big around with a flat on top. And it comes on a conveyor belt to you. The scale is weighing it out on an electronic scale. And these are little tin cylinders. You take it and you got a funnel thing here and you put the aluminum can in and lock it down. Pour the thorium oxide into the can and then pound it in there. You had a mark on that tamping bar that you had to put it down, get it to that mark, or else it would cause a variation in the quantity that was in there. You had to put it all in, or no go. There were six of us pounding that stuff into those cans. Now, you had a pair of white coveralls on, you had your surgeon gloves on, taped at the wrist, and you had a leather glove. No respirator, no anything. You just—the glass came down about nose-high. And you were working with that stuff, and it was just a white fog in front of you. Now, when they’d blow the whistle for you to go to lunch, what we would do was we would—and we were—that powder would be all the way up to your elbows. You could see it on your coveralls. You would brush your coveralls off, and then you would take the leather gloves off, and you would take the tape off, and leave your surgeon gloves inside there in the trash. And then we would all come out of there and walk over to the step-off pad, and all six of us are getting out of our coveralls and—I thought, man, that stuff’s got to be going airborne. Then we’d take the Scintran. We’re okay, no bad stuff on us. They would take us down, when we first started out, once every two weeks to the Whole Body Counter. They’d scan us from head to foot. Then it got to be once a month, and then once every two months. They pulled me out of there and they said, you eat a lot of fish? No, why? They say, you got a high zinc content in you. And I didn’t think much of it at the time. But I got my dose reconstruction back here in 2012. I was contaminated with thorium oxide, which turns into some exotic thing, so they say. And they had the audacity to tell me I picked it up in the 1960s during atomic testing. And it just happened to be thorium oxide, which—anyways. [LAUGHTER] I turned the claim in, which was denied. But for the other three cancers, I got compensated for that. Two basal cell carcinomas and one other cancer that is pretty common in a male—prostate cancer. They compensated me for that, which—it doesn’t make up for your health now. But I just got examined the second. In fact, the Cold War Patriots, which I’m very proud of—to be a member of—they found the asbestos in my lungs when they gave me my—every three years you’re allowed a complete physical. They go over you from head to foot, and they picked up the asbestos in my lungs. Franklin: Wow. Milliman: And then the second, they told me because of that, they told me I have COPD and lung capacity is at half. Which makes it hard to do anything. Franklin: Oh. Milliman: Went to Cancun—my wife and I—on vacation. They got a mile-and-a-half zip line there—1.7 miles. Of course, the towers—the different towers you got to get on. [LAUGHTER] Take me a half-hour to get onto the top of the tower. Run out of steam before you get there. It’s been an interesting life; it’s been an interesting career. While we were in canning up thorium oxide, they had—they were all plywood walls, and they had that—it was like crepe paper insulation back in the days when they built those back in the ‘42s and ‘43s. And sat there, and I happened to look at the wall. They had painted the wall with a white epoxy paint. I got to looking at the wall, and, man, that thing’s blowing bubbles. I told the guy, and he looked over and said, how come that wall’s bubbling? I don’t know. So we come out of the hood, got cleaned up and went over there. Was looking at the wall and that epoxy would blow a bubble and then pop. What’s going on here? Well, little did we know there was a welder on the outside of that tin building. And he was welding us up some gas manifold pipes, and he set that insulation on fire. We had a big exhaust fan up in the attic and it was whipping that up—the flame up through there—and it was blistering that plywood epoxy paint. And the boss come over and said, what are you guys doing? Get over and get to work! He said, what are you doing? I said, well, we’re looking at the wall here. He’s looking and he said, how come that’s bubbling? [LAUGHTER] He says, do you see any smoke? He says, no. And they have where they’d plugged—patched the plywood with the—you’ve probably seen it—little square there, a diamond-shaped thing in the plywood where they’ve patched a hole in. One of them popped out. And he looked and he said, uh-oh, I see some fire. Now, you guys just stay here. He went and locked the door! He stepped out and locked us in there! And then he pointed to the back, which—it was a step-off pad off the back, a concrete area they had roped off. We could go out there and stand. And here come the firetruck. He missed the place, he backed up and come, and the other guy’s still welding. He don’t know he set the building on fire. And they chopped a hole in it, put the fire out. Boss sent us to lunch. We come back, never missed a lick. Just went right back to work again. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Wow. [LAUGHTER] That’s— Milliman: That was kind of sad. One of the sad things was I was watching the TV and they detonated the smokestack out at 100 F. I thought, man, that was right beside the building we were working in. Franklin: Do you remember any Navy officials ever coming to inspect the process-- Milliman: Navy? Franklin: --you were working on? Milliman: Navy? Franklin: Yeah, because you said you were making these slugs for the nuclear submarines. Milliman: Yeah. And we didn’t know that until after we got—we did two different sessions over there, two different years. Never seen any Navy personnel—of course, we were just—we were just the employees, and not privy to that. But with Battelle, that was different. When the sponsor—NCI or any of the dignitaries from the companies that we had a contract with, they would all come and talk to us. I can remember, we got called in the office—a good friend of mine that worked there with me and his name was Gary Ell. The sponsor—and he was the head hog, I mean over everything—he was in the change room with us. And when we’d first seen him, about a year before that, he was huge. He was a very large man, almost a beast. When he come the second time, I swear, he must have lost 200 pounds, because he looked normal, you know. And he was in the change room with Gary and I, and we were suiting up getting ready to go into one of the sterile zones. And Gary said, I bet I know what—well, first the sponsor said, hey, what do you think, guys? I lost about 200 pounds. Yeah. Gary said, you know what? This guy’s name was Joe. He said, I bet I know what Joe’s thinking about right now. I said, what? He said, I bet he’s thinking about a big chocolate milkshake. [LAUGHTER] The guy had some choice words for us. And next thing you know, we were sitting in the boss’s office and he’s shaking his finger at us. [LAUGHTER] If you couldn’t put some humor into the situations we were in, it wasn’t worth being there, because— Franklin: Right! Milliman: [LAUGHTER] But it’s been very rewarding for me, all except the—like I say, back then they didn’t know what asbestos—the danger of that, and the potential carcinogens. Franklin: Right. Milliman: But been very rewarding. Franklin: Do you—were you working onsite, or do you remember when they started to bring the spent nuclear—the submarine reactors back-- Milliman: No. Franklin: --to be buried onsite? Milliman: We had nothing to do with that whatsoever. We were just making the fuel for them. We never got—weren’t privy to what happened afterwards. Franklin: Oh, okay. Milliman: But we didn’t know that was for the atomic subs until—it was quite a while after they finally told us, hey, you’re canning up fuel for the atomic subs. Franklin: Kind of interesting, though, to think that you canned that fuel and then now Hanford is the repository for all of the spent reactors. That they cut them up and buried them in the same place. Milliman: Yeah. A friend of mine, he just retired. He was working out there for CH2M Hill and a bunch of other contractors. His job was to go sample the burial grounds after they dig them up. He had a lot of interesting stories to tell about that. One thing that—[LAUGHTER] This was during the ‘60s. If you recall, in the paper, Hanford put out a news blurb about any of the duck hunters. They were checking thyroids on ducks, and they wanted you to bring your duck heads in—their neck and their head, so they could check them. And they come up with some strange reason why they were doing this. Well, a friend of ours, he brought this big old mallard duck in. That thing was so hot, he ought not have been anywhere near that thing. They grabbed him and scrubbed him down until his skin was bleeding. Those ducks were going out to the cooling ponds out in the Area, which weren’t screened over at that time. And ducks were dabbling down at the bottom, picking up strontium-90 and all these radioactive elements. And then that guy’s got that duck in his hand and put the Scintran up there and that thing went nuts. And they scrambled and suited up. And they never did come out with why they were doing that until later on. It finally came out that those ducks—you know, they see a big pond out there, they go out there and dabble around in it and get crapped up. Franklin: When did they finally start screening those, do you remember? Milliman: Oh. No, it was—that must—they had them all screened over by—probably by ’75. If I recall, it was about that time. But that friend of mine said, boy, they scrubbed me until I was bleeding. Oh, they went to his home, also. Franklin: Oh, wow. Milliman: And they tore up the carpets, furniture—everything. Because he come in the house, hey look at this duck I got you. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right. So later, when you worked for Battelle, you said that you had done that animal testing, and you introduced animals to nickel oxide and cobalt oxide. Why those two chemicals? Were those used at Hanford, or did those have other applications? Milliman: Other applications: commercial. Most of the testing was manufacturing-type applications, like the asbestos concrete exposure that I was on. That was the sawdust off of transite pipes. When the craftsman would saw the pipes to length, he’s inhaling that transite pipe dust, and he don’t know there’s asbestos in it. Most of the—well, in fact, all of the contracts we got were to test whether they were potential carcinogens. Franklin: Wow, that’s really—so when you were doing cigarettes, then, was it—when you were doing this, was it known that they were—obviously, most people, like, knew, but was it a stated fact, federally, or— Milliman: Not at that time, no. Franklin: Or did your research help lead to that? Milliman: Yeah. We got that contract from the National Cancer Institute. Later on, for Battelle, they did a—maybe it was Liggett and Myers. They were doing a cigarette exposure, which was very hush-hush. Nobody would tell you a thing about what went on in that room. Even the technician was sworn to silence. Because of the manufacturer of that product, not because there was anything sneaky going on; they just didn’t want it to get out before they finished the study. And also expose them to diesel exhaust smoke. Franklin: Oh. Milliman: We went over to Kennewick one time, right there on the main street. We set up an air sampler on all four corners. The asbestos content in the air was higher than it was in Johns-Mansfield’s where they’re putting these asbestos bats together for insulation for homes. The reason for that, it was coming off the break rooms. There was asbestos in the break rooms. And the cars going by kept that stuff fanned up. You walk down the street, you’re taking on asbestos. And then we went to all the food stores around and bought different liver—hog liver, beef liver, chicken liver. Dashed that down, went to the chemical analysis of it. [LAUGHTER] I would never, ever—I never liked it anyway—but I would never, ever eat liver. There was Dibestrol and growth inhibitors, hormones, heavy metal. [LAUGHTER] No liver for me! [LAUGHTER] But that—all these things they’ve been pumping in all these animals, in these feed lots and everything, Dibestrol and growth stimulators and hormones, left a residue in the liver, which is the collecting point of everything—your filter. And then people are eating that and they’re ingesting it and it’s sticking with you. Franklin: Yeah. Wow. Were you working—you were working onsite when JFK visited in 1963. Did you go to the dedication at the N Reactor? Milliman: Yes, went out to see him, yeah. Franklin: What do you remember about that? Milliman: I can remember him saying, boy, you have a hot country here. And he was pulling on his—here. That was a thrill, to see the helicopters, there he comes! And they said, no, that’s the decoy. And then they finally came in and landed. It was just blistering hot that day. People were passing out in the crowd. It was—you couldn’t see the ground for the people, I mean, there was hundreds out there. It was very hot. But that was kind of a thrilling thing to see the President. Big to-do about it, of course. Franklin: Were there any other events or incidents that happened at Hanford while you were working there that—or at Battelle that stand out to you, besides the couple explosions you mentioned? Milliman: Just minor humorous things that had happened. One time, they brought all these Japanese dignitaries. Now, our aerosol physicist was named Douglas K. Craig. And he was a very proper person. He called me an illiterate savage. But that was early on in my career. When I hired in, he was the—I worked for the doctor, the German. And Douglas K. Craig was the aerosol physicist. The doctor got the contract; the aerosol physicist was responsible for the outcome and the design and everything. Me being an old country kid at that time—his speech and his manner, and being so stiff and prim and proper, you know, kind of made me chuckle. I proved him wrong a couple of times. And he would say, but that cannot be! That cannot be! [LAUGHTER] Well, it is! [LAUGHTER] Anyway, I endeared myself to him by just using common sense, and he and I got to be—he’d come and ask me, he’d say, how would you do this? And all it was was common sense—an uncanny knack of figuring out how to generate all these exotic chemicals we were using. The one thing I do remember, before the asbestos exposure ever started, they had this huge cylinder, and it was—it had this tube with a plunger in the bottom. And they’d put the asbestos in there and screw it in the bottom of this big column. And it had the air jets going in. It would suck the asbestos—you had to maintain the concentration within 10% for six hours. Which—pbbt—there went the asbestos in the chamber. So the engineers—aerosol physicists, they worked on this thing for months. We were about ready to lose the contract. And they finally gave up on it. And I asked them, I said, hey, what are you going to do with that generator? And they said, well, we’re going to junk it, bury it. Can I play with that thing? Humph! Yeah, sure, Mr. Einstein, go ahead. By the time I got done, that asbestos generator was this tall, and by chance, I found out you had to pack that stuff into the tube and tamp it down—13 grams in exactly seven inches. I turned that thing on, and I couldn’t find an aggregate that the air jets wouldn’t—I didn’t want the air jets to blow in there and send that stuff out. I tried pieces of gravel, and I tried little kid’s jacks—I cut them up and put them in there, and they’re rattling around on top. And everything got dull. I even took some screws and cut them in half and dropped in there. Anyway, I was sitting there one day trying to—I thought, boy, you’re a dummy if you can’t figure this out. And I had a bunch of crucibles, and the lids sitting on the shelf there. And I thought, ceramic, ceramic, I wonder. So I took the crucible lid and put it in a paper towel and took a hammer and beat it up. And I took those pieces and I looked and I said, well, that one looks about right. I picked up four of them and I dropped in that tube and that stuff started rattling around. They never did get dull. The first—we were shooting for 24 micrograms per liter. And the first sample I took was 23.9. And I thought, wow! So I got ahold of the aerosol physicist and he come over. And I had all my data; I’d been taking samples of that all day long. And he come over and he says, what is this? No, that can’t be! Yeah, it can be. I said an illiterate savage like me, I’ve got enough brains to figure this out, you know that? Dr. Douger. [LAUGHTER] Anyway, we got the contract. He would walk around me and look at me and he said, but you have no—you have no education, you know. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, well? All mine come from common sense. And that would infuriate him. But went up to his office one day, why, fellow technician, and he had a rock as a paperweight there. It was kind of a U-shaped rock. And I said, Doug! He said, you’ll address me as Dr. Douglas K. Craig. Doctor will be fine. That’s okay. Douger, where’d you get that rock? [LAUGHTER] Lay some of this hillbilly stuff on him. He said, why? I said, you know what? Where’d you get that? And he said, well, my walk down at the river one day. [LAUGHTER] I said, my gosh. Don’t you agree? And my partner, he said, oh yeah. He went right along with me, you know. He said, why? What? I said, do you know what that is? That’s a left-handed Indian throwing rock! He says, what? Oh my! An artifact? And I said, yeah! See how it fits your hand? I said, the Indians throw them and knock them jackrabbits over. And he said, oh my! And he took it away from me. He was looking at it, and—[LAUGHTER]—he put it there and said, wow. I’ll cherish that. An artifact. Wow! And he was talking to himself. About that time, the other scientists come in, and they knew we were a couple of jokers. And he come in—his name was John Belue. And John heard what we were doing, and when we come out of the office, he said, you better hope he never finds out. [LAUGHTER] What that junk of rock. And I said, my goodness, maybe we ought to not play that joke on him. But Dr. Douglas K. Craig and I ended up being good friends. He finally—he moved down to California and went to work for another research outfit. And he would call me up. And he’d say, Edward, my friend! And when he’d start that, I knew he wanted to know something. And when I got the device that I patented, the calls were coming in from all over the world—foreign companies, research outfits—because the device they had on the market was the Dust Right Speedmill. And it was very unstable way of generating any kind of particulate or solids. And it would break down. Very poor performance on them. When I made that device, all you had to do was pour the powder in. Two working parts, two bottle brushes, one spirally wound like an auger, the other was flexible brush. And it was just in a—you’d pour the—it had a Lucite—I made it on my kitchen table one night. About a year later, after I got the patent on it, I checked in to see what they were selling them—Battelle Development Corporation made a nice design and stainless steel and--$15,000 a pop. For two bottle brushes. I got one silver dollar for the patent and taken to supper, and that was that. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Milliman: [LAUGHTER] So, they’re making money hand-over-fist on me. But a lot of people calling for reprints. I had to write a technical report on that, and they published it. I didn’t bring one of them copies with me, but I got calls from all the world—scientists wanting to know about it, how—I say, well you can make it yourself on your kitchen table. And there’s the boss, whopped me on the head, don’t tell them that! Sell it to them, you dope! [LAUGHTER] But that was probably the highlight of my career, was the—just common sense. Now, the scientists and the doctors—12, 13, 15 years of college education. But they don’t teach them anything about common sense. And that’s all I ever worked on, was—being a farm kid, having to repair your own machinery, things like that. It wasn’t hard to figure out how to endear myself to the company by just using common sense. Franklin: That’s great. Just a couple more questions, I guess, until we move on to the stuff you brought, which I’m really excited to have you narrate. Do you remember—how did—sorry—do you remember any impact from large nuclear incidents on your work, like Three-Mile Island or Chernobyl? Because you would have been working for Battelle at that time. Do you remember any particular impact of those incidents on your work or kind of the attitude of the work or people here? Milliman: I remember reading it in the paper, and wondering how much of that stuff was going around the world in the airstreams. Probably paid more mind to Chernobyl when it blew its stack. Now, when Mount St. Helens blew up, I was in Yakima. I was going up and going camping. I spent the night in Yakima. I woke up, I thought it was too early and went back to sleep. I woke up, and I thought, my goodness. Did I sleep all day? It’s getting dark out. And I turned the radio on, and—uh-oh. I took off for home, and I just beat that dust cloud down to Benton City. Most of it went over the top of us, like, end up at Moses Lake and Spokane and—but we got the contract for exposing hamsters to Mount St. Helens fly ash. And if you looked at the fly ash under a microscope, it looked like—it was kind of crystalline, and it was—it looked like a little kid’s jack they play with, but a million spikes sticking on that thing. It looked like a sandbur. And that stuff, when you inhaled it, just cut your lungs up to pieces. Franklin: Oh, I bet. Wow. How did the atmosphere surrounding the Cold War affect your job or your life? Did you notice anything, or can you recall anything? Milliman: A lot of contracts from the Army. A lot of contracts. And, like I say, one of them was the CS2 with the disabler in it. A lot of activity that nobody would say anything about. They’d say, hey, what you guys working on? What you fellas working on? Blank stare and walk on, you know. You’d better not ask them anymore. But a lot of activity from the Army. Didn’t seem—I don’t think I ever saw any Navy personnel; if I did, they weren’t in uniform. A lot of strange people around that time coming and going. Franklin: What about living here, living next to Hanford and all the activities? Did you ever feel like maybe you were safe because of all the Army attention here, or maybe you were not safe because Hanford might be a target if a war ever broke out? Milliman: I always thought about it being a target, being there were quite a number of reactors out there. You thought, well, if they’re going to hit something, it’ll probably be Hanford. Never lived in any fear of it, but when they start all this down-winders stuff in the papers—contamination from Hanford, that did make me kind of wonder. It didn’t make me feel ill-at-ease, but it just—you didn’t know what you were inhaling. You didn’t know what was coming down the ground that the cows were eating and you were drinking your milk, which ended up being a big deal in later years. My children never thought much about it, either. My brothers and sisters did, and they all moved away to different places. I told them, hey, you can’t outrun the air currents. That stuff’s coming down all over. Especially during the atomic testing, when they were— Once they sent me to—Battelle sent me to University of Davis to represent them. This was—I’d only worked there about a year-and-a-half, two years, maybe, at the most. They sent me down there and little did I know they—[LAUGHTER]—They sprung me as their guest speaker. I didn’t know anything about it. Boss of mine set that up. Boy, I thought, my goodness, what in the world am I going to talk about? And I thought, you got to put some humor in this thing. Because I’m shaking. I’m young and dumb and I said, whoo! And all these people sitting there watching me, all the dignitaries and the—I said, well, we’re doing research with hamsters. And most of these were all hamster people. It was a big hamster research convention there. I said, the first thing you have to do, as you all know, is you got to get them loose from your finger. [LAUGHTER] Those are the bitingest animals in the world. Everybody thinks they’re so sweet and cuddly, until it latches onto your finger. And I can remember when we were making them—introducing them to cigarette smoke—of course they had the smoking dogs out there, too, which are famous, you know, every time they mention the—and those dogs were addicted. They’d fight you for a cigarette. You’d open the cage and they’d jump right in your arm and stick their head in the mask. You know, put the cigarette in and light it up, boys! But I can remember many times those hamsters latching on and locking their jaws up and biting you right through the fingernail, right to the bone. You’d have to take the handle on the pair of tweezers and jack his jaw open to get your finger back out. If the boss knew this he’d kill me. We had this one particular hamster, he didn’t bite you—I mean, he’d go after you. He’d bite you every time you—most of them, they’d bite you once and let it go at that. But this one he’d bite you ever time you got near him. And he’d just defy you. Pick me up, I’m going to bite you. Well, me and my partner said, what do you think? Well, I’m tired of him biting me. I hope he’ll pretty soon. Maybe he’ll die. He wouldn’t die. So we grabbed him one day, got him by the scruff of the neck and we took him by the side cutter and cut his teeth off. And after that, he’d chomp down on you, and hey, can’t bite, you know! Well, for the rest of his life, we had to soften up his food and feed him so he wouldn’t die. He couldn’t bite you. But we said maybe we ought to not done that. Those hamsters—what actually—the asbestos hamsters were the only ones that would do this. Their water nipple hung above their head, and you had a big water tree you’d put on the cage. And that’s how they got their water. They’d take their finger and stick in that water nipple and sit in there and let the water run on them. We’d sit there and watch through the window. And of course, they’d make a terrible mess. Because we had them on these racks, and we had absorbent pads underneath of them. In the morning when we’d take them out, we’d have to roll that pad up and put it in the garbage. Well, they’d just flood that thing. Their tray had a lip around it. It was an awful mess to clean up. So we got to watching them—we’d look through the window at night. And there they are, they’re taking their finger and sticking it in that water nozzle and letting the water coming down there and they’re showering and shampooing and shaving. We’d go in there and quit that, quit that. They’d all quit, and the minute we’d leave, there they are with their finger in the water nipple taking a shower. Franklin: And it was only the asbestos ones? Milliman: Only the asbestos animals did that. Franklin: Interesting. Do you think that was maybe like some kind of neurological--? Milliman: I think it was the fibers tickling them and itching them. Franklin: Oh. Milliman: Because that stuff was all over them. Franklin: Right. Interesting. So, anybody else have any questions? Emma Rice: Yeah. Minor clarification. When you worked at Battelle, what was your job position exactly? Milliman: Started—hired in just as a—well, for Battelle, it was just technician. Rice: Technician. Because you went from being a metal handler to— Milliman: Yeah, from General Electric, they called us a metal handler. Rice: Mm-hmm. Milliman: Then they made me the inhalation specialist. And then things kind of slowed down, so I kind of got demoted back to a technician again, and that’s when we went into the control rooms and each of us had an assigned control room that we ran. Many, many different chemicals would go through them control rooms that we were generating. Everything potential carcinogen. I like that word. Potential carcinogen. [LAUGHTER] Formaldehyde—that’s some bad stuff, too. Franklin: So, should we do the pictures now? Hungate: Okay. I’m going to stop now. Franklin: Okay. Hungate: Change— [NEW CLIP] Milliman: “About air pollution except the U. S. Patent Office which has awarded a patent to the Department of Energy for a device that will ‘deliver uniform concentrations of dust for a long period of time.’ It was developed by Edward E. Milliman at the Pacific Northwest Laboratory operated for DOE by Battelle Memorial Institute. People, however, need have no fear as the dust is used in research to test the potential health effects of dust compounds when inhaled into the lungs of laboratory animals. Some of the tested dusts have talc powder, CS2, and Mount St. Helen’s ash. The prototype of the unit cost is about $50.00, and the number is 4,424,896 – if anyone cares.” Franklin: So this was the device you invented that then they were selling for— Milliman: Yeah. Franklin: $15,000? Milliman: 15,000. Rice: Do you want me to take some of these smaller ones? Milliman: Yeah. Now, this is how you make a hamster smoke cigarettes. Franklin: And that’s you? Milliman: That’s me, 1970. Boy, I had a lot of hair. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Milliman: There’s 30 cigarettes in this turn, and it will take a puff off of each cigarettes, and then it rotates, and there’s 30 hamsters in these tubes. They have no choice. The smoke comes down through this column here. They have no choice. Franklin: I forgot to ask you—did you ever smoke cigarettes? Milliman: Yes, I did. Franklin: Okay. Milliman: After we took the lungs out of these animals, I put the cigarettes in the garbage can and never smoked since. Franklin: Wow. Rice: [INAUDIBLE] Milliman: This one of the exposure chambers. This is where they—each rat— Hungate: Whoops, just one second, we’re getting quite a bit of glare. Milliman: Okay. Rice: Can you hold it from the top? See if you can hold it flat. There we go. Franklin: There we go. That looks good. Milliman: This is the exposure chamber, designed by Battelle. Rats and mice and hamsters were all individual in each compartment. And then I think they would a couple hundred critters. The—whatever you’re going to make them inhale comes down a pipe and goes into the top and it’s exhausted out the bottom. The doors are glass, so you can watch—observe the animals. Franklin: Wow. Rice: Was this just for smoking—the cigarette smoke—or was this--? Milliman: No, any kind of chemical. Rice: Any kind of chemical. Milliman: Vapors, dust—any kind of compound. Rice: Okay. Next one? Hungate: It’s the smoker. Rice: The smoker, yeah. That’s what I was thinking. Milliman: And that’s how you load a hamster into a smoking tube after you get him off your finger. Now, you can see here that the one—he’s saying, uh-oh, I’m next. And it was also the asbestos exposure. This is all the protection we had on. Just a white paper face mask. Franklin: Wow. Milliman: And this is one guy that—this is what they do. You take them apart, all the way from his nose, all the way down. Take samples, everything, make slides, and it goes to histology, pathology. Rice: New one. Here. Milliman: This was what your lungs will look like if you inhaled Mount St. Helen fly ash. Franklin: Wow. So what is the lighter one there on the— Milliman: NEFA is Nickel Enriched Fly Ash, which has a high content of nickel in it. And the one on the far right is a normal lung. Franklin: Okay. Wow. Rice: And the one on the middle is also— Milliman: That’s nickel-enriched fly ash. The one on the far left is just fly ash. Franklin: What was the level of exposure here to get this? Milliman: Probably 25 micrograms per liter. It is equivalent to what a human breathes. Everything was scaled down hamster-size compared to a human. Franklin: So if you just were walking around and breathing it— Milliman: Right, correct. Franklin: How would that compare to, say, cigarette smoking? Milliman: Cigarette smoke is a long-term thing. Nickel-enriched fly ash is short-term—that does the damage right away. There’s no long period to it. Cigarette smoke, the latency period on that is years. People smoke for years. Franklin: I guess, like—the damage that’s done, is that equivalent to a certain number of years of smoking? Milliman: No, this— Franklin: Or is it kind of a different— Milliman: This is different here. The lifespan after you inhale this stuff, everyday compared to a cigarette, is very, very short. Cigarette you last quite a bit longer. Hungate: So on that—I’m just a little curious—so was that fly ash from— Milliman: Mount St. Helen’s. Hungate: But it’s not after the explosion, because that’s dated ’77 and the explosion was in ’82. Milliman: Well, see, they stored this stuff up and we didn’t do the exposure until after that thing blew up. Now these lungs here were probably some of the preliminary stuff. Because they were testing volcanoes from around the world. Hungate: Oh, so, yeah. Franklin: Oh, okay. Hungate: So this was just volcanic fly ash, as opposed to— Milliman: Yeah. Hungate: --Mount St. Helens. Franklin: Oh, okay. So that explains the date. Rice: Do you have another one? Milliman: This was the asbestos concrete exposure. Now, this was probably in ’78. And you can see here they finally started figuring out that asbestos was bad for you. Compared to white paper face masks, this— Franklin: Right. Now you have a full-body, looks like you have a respirator mask. Milliman: Yup. We had rubber overshoes on, Tyvek protective clothing, and respirator. Franklin: Wow. Milliman: This just to have to be around exposure chamber there. These were with hamsters also. Franklin: Wow. That’s great. Milliman: And we are smoking rats. [LAUGHTER] We’re doing the physiology on it. That’s a graph machine, it’s like a lie detector. We’re doing the testing on their respiratory rate, their heart rate. Everything’s sterile. To get where I’m at right there, you had to shower and shave and disinfect and be fully protected. That’s to keep us from giving them disease. It’s not to protect us from the animals. It’s to protect the rats and the mice and the hamsters. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Milliman: Here we’re doing the same thing. This is when you go red, you’re on actual exposure from the contractor. Franklin: So—oh, so there were different color suits for— Milliman: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. So red would be when you were directly working with chemical—with the particulates? Milliman: Not necessarily, but that’s what they wanted from us. There was no difference in—other than the color of the—everything’s sterile and sanitized. Franklin: Is that so that other people working would know that you would be— Milliman: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. Rice: There’s just these. Do you want to talk about those at all? Milliman: [LAUGHTER] This is one of the funny things that happened to me. Girlfriend and I were over at the Black Angus in Pasco. We were sitting in the booth and we were eating our supper, steak and mushrooms, and having a fine time. Started getting quiet. I’d already paid for my bill and ordered a cup of coffee and we were sitting there drinking a cup of coffee. Got awful quiet. So I got up and there was nobody around. So we went to go out the door—we guessed everybody left—so we started to go out the door. Well, the door’s locked, we can’t get out. I went in the kitchen hollering, hey, hey, let us out! Bartender gone, kitchen gone, nobody’s there. I got on the pay telephone and called 9-1-1, and I said, hey, we’re locked in the Black Angus. Said, what? [LAUGHTER] Are you playing a joke? No! We want to go home! I got to go to work tomorrow! [LAUGHTER] So they said, what’s your phone number there? So I give them the phone number, they called the place next door. The next door place called us. Phone rang, I picked it up. Yeah, we’re here. He called back, they said, they’re in there. So they figured what happened was we hid in there and we were going to rob the place but we couldn’t get out. So they called me back and they said, well, okay, we’re coming down. I said, don’t come with the police dogs and the guns and stuff and the sirens, because I got to go to work tomorrow. [LAUGHTER] So they—here they come. We were sitting there waiting on them, and there was a little console there and there was some kind of video machine that she and I were trying to figure out how to play. And all at once I told her, don’t move, keep your hands on the table. She said, why? I said, I smell a cop. And slowly, both of us turned our heads, and there were three heads peeking around the door at us. They came in, and they all had their hands on their guns. Whoa, fellas. Get your hands off that hog leg, you’re making me nervous. I’ve been shot once and it ain’t fun. They really questioned us. How’d you get in here? Said, well—they had this manager with them. And he said, you pay for your supper? And I said, yeah, and left a tip. If you keep on being mean to me, I want my tip back. And I kept looking to one police officer, one that came back from Montana and worked at the Bon Marche before they opened up. Me and him were in there as a security guard. He was moonlighting because he was a Pasco cop. And I kept looking at him, I said, Archie Pittman? Archie Pittman? And he looked mad! He said, what are you doing here? I said, just eating supper. And he said, okay, guys, I know him. Let him go. But that come out in the paper said, they knew businesses was hard up for patrons but they didn’t think they was going to lock them up just to keep them! [LAUGHTER] And this is my old friend—I was in the Cub Scouts, I think it was? Me and my old Poncho. Old lifelong friend. Franklin: That’s cute. Milliman: That’s the box elder tree my brother dove behind to— Hungate: Dodge the bullets? Milliman: Dodging a bullet. Rice: There you go. Milliman: Great. Franklin: Well, thank you so much. Milliman: Well, I hope I didn’t make a fool out of myself— Franklin: You did not. Milliman: Or bore you to death. Franklin: No, it was really exciting. It really was! You have some great stories. Hungate: He’s a story teller. Milliman: Man, please behave yourself. Don’t lay that hillbilly stuff on them. [LAUGHTER] <a href="https://youtu.be/h3TfrARrCto">View interview on Youtube.</a> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:31:58 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 3000 Area 313 Building N Reactor Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Edward Milliman Description An account of the resource An interview with Edward Milliman conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 07-06-2016 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2018-29-1: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. Relation A related resource <a href="http://hanfordhistory.com/collections/show/23">Edward Milliman, Oral History Metadata</a> 3000 Area 313 Building Battelle Boeing Cancer Cat Cold War Department of Energy drinking General Electric Hanford Kennewick N Reactor Safety Street War https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F2503d544b8a14f97e9770f99ea4ae31e.jpg 690baf02cd982d16be454fa61515735b https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fada0dbf6496cc12da553f06e46e92b9e.mp4 59164a7708c88cbb1d22ef43bc311024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Laura Arata Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Edwin Cheyney Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Northwest Public Television | Cheyney_Ed Laura Arata: Plus, if you make him mad, he's got a cane now he can smack you with. Ed Cheyney: Well I got one I’m not doing with. Arata: Nice. Man: I guess it just-- Arata: That would be our first on camera cane dueling. Cheyney: Right. [LAUGHTER] Man: Okay, whenever you're ready. Arata: Okay, we’re ready to go. All right. So if we could start out by having you say your name, and then spell it for us? Cheyney: Sure. My name is Edwin Cheyney. C-H-E-Y-N-E-Y. It's also been pronounced chee-nee, with the extra Y in it. I was corrected many years ago that you're pronouncing it wrong. [LAUGHTER] Arata: Really? So you learned about it, too? Cheyney: I said, I didn't care, as long as it didn't get any worse. Arata: Fair enough. My name's Laura Arata. Today is November 12, 2013, and we're conducting this interview on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. So I wonder if we could start off by just having you tell me a little bit about when you came to Hanford, and what that first experience of coming to Hanford was like, and why you initially came here. Cheyney: Okay, well, first of all, at that time, I was going to Spokane Technical and Vocational School, which is now Spokane Community College. And basically, the only way you could get out of class time is to go interview. Well, I was on—it’s three and a half years, and so, I was on the, actually, the last few months of my course. And this guy says, hey, let's get a carpool going, and go down to Hanford. Well, where's that? And he says, well, they're looking for employees. I think it was 13 at that time, for a special program with General Electric. So we get down there, and the first thing, and we got here early, at seven o'clock promptly. We were all escorted back into a room that had separate booths, and we were given time tests from seven o'clock till 12 noon. We were tested on about every kind of conceivable test that I could imagine, but it all related to my field of electronics and instrumentation. So anyway, it was about two weeks later. The ones that were in the carpool with me said they already got their rejection notice. And my teacher--I wasn't one of his favorite ones--and he just says, came to me, and says, well, you'll get yours. And I said, well, I'm sure I will. A month later, I get a call from my grandmother. I was living in Spokane and taking care of two of her apartment houses. And she says, you've got a registered letter. So I went to my teacher, and I said, I need to take my grandmother to the bank. He said, I've never heard of that one before. [LAUGHTER] So he let me go, and I got there, and I had a registered letter from General Electric. I really got excited. And it says, offered me a job. And I went back to the school. I plopped it down to the teacher, and says, well, there, I got my letter. He says, so what? And just turned his head. So, well, that's fine. At least I got proof. And I went to my two other instructors from previous years. They stopped everything. He said, look it. He's the only one out of the whole school's that's been offered a job down in Hanford. I still didn't know what I was getting into. [LAUGHTER] But I figured it was worth it. And we had to agree to the fact to go to three and half years more to CBC to special programs that GE selected. And that was no problem either. And then we worked only an eight hour shift, except on weekends, we could work overtime if that case came up. So basically, that's how I got in the front door. And it's sort of interesting that when I first came down here, my mother wanted to make sure that I got in a decent environment because I'd never cooked or anything. And so, GE, they'd recommended the best place where most go is the Statler Hotel. Well, I thought, well, let's go there. Well, we went in there, and my mother, of course, with me. When she saw the three gals there wearing mini-skirts and the whole thing, she almost ripped my arm off, says this isn't the place for you. I didn't see any problem with it, but she immediately took me up to the parish house, and says, is there somewhere decent that I could live? And she introduced us to this woman that was very motherly, very heavy set, very good cook. And said she'd board and room me. Well, of course, I got out on the project. There was lots and lots of indoctrinations that this is classified work, and you're not to discuss anything whatsoever. And the home then I was staying in, her husband was one of the managers out at D Reactor. And so first thing, he asked me, he says, what do you do out there? I says, I just work out there. He says, I know you can't describe anything, but he says, you can at least say your title. You're not getting yourself in trouble with that. I says, well, are you sure? He says, I wouldn't put you on the spot. And I says, I'm an instrument and control technician. And so, he didn't push me any further. And the one thing, before I left the neighborhood of Spokane, the FBI was checking up on me. And I had neighbors say, what kind of trouble are you in anyway? And I says, what do you mean trouble? And they says, the FBI was out checking on you. And I go, that's great. He says, what's great about it? I says, I think they're interested in me. [LAUGHTER] So that's basically how I got in the front door. And I started in the 300 Area, basically the canning lines. And with GE, you were only in a spot roughly three months to six months, and they rotated you because they wanted you to get the full feel of the different expectations that they had of you, and the way you could handle your so-called position, as far as instrument control calibration of all kinds of instrumentation, which, to me, I found really exciting because it was a new challenge. There was never, seemed like there was never a day that it wasn't something different. And I like that. And the challenges were quite different. And riding that bus for a nickel a day. You couldn't afford to drive anywhere. The only thing is, those buses didn't have air conditioning or anything. And when it started, when they moved me to the K Reactor--first it was B, C Reactors. When you had 100 degree weather, it was no fun after a shift, getting on the bus about 4 o'clock. It's good and hot and everything. About all you could do is just sit there and bear it. I usually just closed my eyes, and just figured, well, I'll get home pretty quick. And I just figured, well, it's good for a common cause. Also at that time, the salary was real good for someone that was just out of a tech school. My dad had a master's degree, was teaching five solid subjects, and the superintendent of schools at Hogan, Montana. And the first year, because I was living with the landlady's, their home, she also made use of me, and took me to grocery stores to help her carry stuff. And she took me to Zale’s and talked me into buying a men's diamond ring, which that's the last thing in the world I was really interested in, but I got talked into it. Well, I go up to see my dad, and he sees that. And he says, is that real? And I says, of course, it's real. But I says, it was stupid that I bought it. And I took it off, and said, you can have it. And he said, well, what kind of money are you making? At that point in time, I had made a little over $2,500 more than he'd made. And that really changed his whole attitude about tech school because when I graduated from school, I had to be in his classes, and I took lots of insults. And when he asked me when I graduated, what are you going to do? I says, I'm not sure yet. And then, when I told him I was going to tech school, he says, you just will be a grease monkey. Well, that changed his whole attitude, that maybe--He says, I just can't see why and how they can pay you that kind of money. I says, Dad, they pay you for what you can do with your hands, too. And from then on, he had a whole different feel about it. So that's getting off of what I was doing in Hanford. But going to the different sites, like I said, the challenges were always different. And I think the thing that really impressed me the most is the feeling of the power and energy that was going on. And especially when I was given the tour to go, first, up to the water treatment plant. That was massive enough. I was told could easily take care of the whole city of Los Angeles. And they showed me a wet well, and in it was all these lights with no insulation or anything. And they're on. I says, how come they don't short out? He says, in pure water, there's no conduction. And the mass of water that was going down through the pumps, and through the reactor core itself, the ground just vibrated. I'd say it was at least a good two city blocks, if not longer. You just feel the rumbling. And it's just a massive power. And you go in the reactor area, you just hear all this rushed water. Another thing that was impressive, you look outdoors at this big million gallon tanks of boiling water coming right off the reactor. It could be 100 degrees outdoors, and it had a 200 foot plume at least. And it really made me think, especially in later years when you start realizing what all is going on. It was a graphite core reactor, the same kind of reactor that Chernobyl had. They were foolish in what they were doing. They weren't using nuclear engineers or physicists, and doing all kinds of dangerous experiments. But they reminded me that when I went in to watch, and a lot of times we referred to it, we're controlling a nuclear bomb. And when the operations, especially at operations, they start pulling rods, waiting for things to go critical, it got real exciting, real quiet. And they had two to three guys watching everything, all the instrumentation to see when things were starting to go critical. And it just really amazed me how smart they were, and how careful they were in their operations. And at the same token, it made you well aware that we're really controlling something really massive. And later, roughly, I'd say about every six months or so, they rotated you. They moved me to the K Reactors. Now those were the two world's largest producing plutonium reactors. And that was even more exciting. And of course, a whole lot bigger, and a whole lot more things going on. And eventually, I don't know if it was because of my interest, or my attitude or what, they gave me the opportunity to go into the irradiation testing group, which was a whole lot more involvement. And that was going into, I won't go into a whole lot of detail. They were putting, I'll say samples, into the core of the reactor during operation for different tests for Atomic International, NASA, and there was a few others. But they had a lot of instrumentation, monitoring, and analyzing what's going on. Of course, because being rotated around, actually, what happened then was I just became journeyman, and General Electric announced that they're phasing out. That was a real scary thing for the simple fact they were laying off thousands of people, not hundreds. And being that I was on their special training program, they had an agreement with the union, only take a certain percentage of us to lay off. And go off, like, they lay off 2,000 workers, they might take three or four of us. But when it got down to the last two weeks at General Electric, I was down into the last group. Now when they put me on that status, then they immediately transferred me out of the K Reactors down to the canning lines. And that's where they actually had, oh, what do I want to say, molten metal for sealing the canisters for the fuel for the reactor. And so, when you knew when you were down there that you were on your way out--Well, on Friday, the last Friday of the second week of GE, I got my lay-off notice. Well, this probably about does it, but I put in my name. I thought, well, I want to stay nuclear. I put in my name for the nuclear bomb testing down in Nevada. I immediately got results back. We'd like to hire you, and the only thing is, they're offering me basically the same salary, but I had to move myself. And I thought, well, to heck with that. The following Monday, so I got a notice on Friday, the following Monday, my supervisor comes to me, and he says, how would you like to work for Douglas United Nuclear? I says, I'd love to work for Douglas United Nuclear. He says, well, you'd be doing the same thing you're doing. And so, tear up your lay-off notice. So I stayed with Douglas United Nuclear. And not to go into a whole lot of details of the same thing, it wasn't long they announced shutting down more reactors. The handwriting was on the wall. You aren't going to be here very long. And so, I put my name in with Battelle Northwest, and I put my name with KEPR TV station, because at school I had earned a commercial FCC license, so I could go that way. I thought, all right. I'll get out of government. I'll go into this. Well, it was on a Thursday night. I got called by both Battelle and by KEPR. And I said, well, I wanted to—to Battelle, I told them I wanted to just check into this one job first. Well, it turned out real quick that that didn't have anywhere near what to offer that Battelle. So I went to Battelle. It was through Battelle, then, I got into a whole lot more avenues of the nuclear field. And they moved me everywhere where they felt that they wanted me or needed me. I worked--first, they were going to move me out in the areas, or that's what they promised me, and the first day on the job, they put me in the 300 Area again in the fabrications department. Well, Battelle's in everything. And the next thing, I was assigned on an engineer. He basically gave you a schematic, or a drawing, of what he wanted, and you had to from there, get everything you need, put it together, wire it up, test it, and turn it over to the engineer. Well, that was really exciting because it was a whole different challenge, including making your own printed circuit boards, which I'd never done. Basically, it's a photographic process, and I've always been interested in that. And so, it wasn't long—they wanted, the engineering department then wanted me, and moved me down to the sand castle. And of course though, when they have a contract that ends, so does the job. But in the meantime, they had the computer lab at the sand castle for the FFTF mock up. And I guess, my understanding was the first time they ever had analog digital computers working together to simulate FFTF. That went great until Governor Dixy Lee Ray came down and removed that job, that responsibility from Battelle. Well, I got moved out into the 300 Area again, and different labs, and HTLTR, PRTR, and all the different ones. But again, every one of them was exciting. Every one was a different challenge. Well, in the meantime, there's a gentleman that got hurt at home. And he worked out at the 200 Areas, and that was top secret work. And so that required having more checks on me. And then when you were approved, you had a blue tag on your badge. The only thing that I really feel comfortable disclosing was the fact that, again, it was really exciting. The big thing was that they assigned you to specific cells only. And no one had the same cells, and no one was-- basically, I was told because this way, you'll never try to put things together. You just do your job, and mind your own business. And that's fine with me. And then, as soon as this gentleman was able to come back to work, then I was put on with, they asked me if I'd like to work at the weather station. That's out at the 200 Areas also. That, I was to work on the telemetry stations. I thought that's really neat because it had weather stations at a 65 mile radius that I traveled every day, checking stations, and setting them up for monitoring radiation, temperature, wind speed, and et cetera. And the only thing is, it was a great adventure, watching, or being at the different areas. And that's when it came to my light, I didn't realize that during the time I was out in the 100 Areas, I don't know when because I never saw it, that they had Nike missile sites. And where that refreshed my memory is when I was out a K Areas one night, on graveyard shift, and I was with a gentleman. And we were outside, and we had just got through with, they had stack flow monitors to see what kind of effluents are going through, to make sure we're staying within limits. And he says, you know, it was really sort of funny. One night, he wouldn't say who, and I can see why, inflated a big air balloon, a weather balloon, and tied a flashlight to it, and set it up. Well, after it went up so far, next thing, a big—I think two military jets came flying over to see what the heck that was flying in the air. So some people had ways of—no one wanted to be identified on that one because they did have missile sites. I found that one out on my weather stations out at the Wahluke Slopes, but they pretty well destroyed everything. And I thought this was really, really, was pretty well covered and protected. Which thank God it was, but we weren't aware of that stuff. So it was full of excitement. And I never knew what I was going to be stuck with the next day. The only thing is, like with Battelle, and that's while I was doing the weather stations, I was watching--one of the sites I had was right out on the Hanford site, and it was right out there where they were starting up Whoops, and they were digging this massive, massive hole in the ground. And we had to set up a weather station there. And so I got really interested in that, and basically, I thought, you know, I've always wanted to see something like this being built from the ground up. So I put my name in there, and three months later I was hired in, and spent the last 27 and a half years there. But that's basically in a nutshell what I was involved with. [LAUGHTER] Arata: Sounds like you were involved in a lot of different jobs, and I wonder--you mentioned that you worked at B, C, and K Reactors. So I wonder if you could talk just a little bit about what maybe some of your different jobs there were. Whatever you're comfortable with. Cheyney: Oh, sure. Well, especially in the B, C Reactor Areas, like I say, while I was going to school, you weren't allowed any overtime. But on weekends, you were. Another interesting thing when you're back home, if they wanted you, like, for a reactor goes down, they call you up, you say yes, they send a person out in a car. They pick you up, and take you out there, and they also bring you back home. Some of those jobs, I actually was out at the plant for two days at a time. But one of them, like in the B, C Reactor, especially now that we can go visit and everything, it brought back the recollection of the reactor had gone down, and they were doing repair of thermocouples. That's temperature measurement. And you had to go to the rear face of that reactor in a wetsuit, and, of course, PCs under that, and go in there, and go behind where those tubes are, pull out this little two conductor wire, and take and cut it, splice it, and basically bond it together, and then solder it there. And here you've got water's dripping from 100 feet up. You're trying to heat this thing up enough to make it bond. And then call the control. Now are they getting an indication? And then, of course, you'd have to re-insert it back down into the well it was in. That was one of the things I'll never forget because it was so dark back there and everything. You did not want to be claustrophobic. You could easily touch the back of the wall with your back, and you'd have the tubes in front of you. Of course, the interesting thing there is before anyone ever goes in there after a shutdown, they discharge all those tubes down into 15 feet of water, and you see all this blue going down there below you. That never bothered me either, other than thank God, it's down 15 feet under water. Well, in the K Reactors--the B Reactor, I just had a lot of general routines of, like in the powerhouse, there's all kinds of instrumentation for controlling those big boilers. Of course, that was coal fired. And the water treatment facilities, measuring the pH of the water, and the chemistry that goes into it. And then K Reactors, I got to go in. Now they were putting in the high speed scanning system for measuring temperature. And instead of using thermocouples, they used RTDs. And they were going into, I think it was about the second year I was at K Reactors, that again, they shut down to replace all those. Well, again, I get called, I come out there. It's at midnight. I'm well over 100 feet up in the air running these thermal bulbs down through in between the tubes while there's another guy riding the elevator down to the point of what tube it was to be installed into. And it was sort of relaxing up there. It was interesting, but it just seemed like forever. Another incident—of course, as soon as you finish your college requirements that they put on, I was immediately put on D shift. And it just--I didn't like shift because it was one day a week, swings, days, and graveyards on a continuous cycle. I was with the technician this one day. We were up in full operation at this point in time, but they were wanting to check—they were having problems. And so, he and I were assigned to go into the control room. They had—I won't give the exact number; I'll say there was well over 3,000 pressure gauges called panel gauges. They're monitoring the pressure of the water of the tube itself, and that's 3,000 plus. And this panel, you're in the control room, you hear all this click, click, click, click. And they're all moving. If anything, if any one of them goes over pressure or under pressure, immediately, it dumps that whole complete plant. Everything comes through a massive—you hear lots of equipment slamming shut, and the control rods drop. Well, anyway, I guess I was still considered a trainee at that time. We had to change out one of those little pressure gauges. Behind the panel, it's all full of tubing and wiring. They're all in series with each other, so that means if any one's interrupted, it dumps everything. So to get around that, to replace a gauge, you had to take, you had jumpers. So you put a jumper, and you jumper off that gauge. And then when you're all ready to try to dismantle, and pull it out and put another one, you pull the jumpers out of it. Well, the gentleman that was taking me through this, showing me and telling me how careful, as soon as he pulled the one jumper, boom. The plant went down. [LAUGHTER] Oh no. I don't know what color I turned, but I know that he says, oh no. He went out, he says, we did it, we did it. They says, hold on. They had to check it. And it turned out it was something else, but it happened at the same time that we pulled that jumper. So there was times that it made you plenty nervous because you don't make anyone happy if you dump the plant. You don't get fired, but the embarrassment of it—you try to take a lot more pride in it than that. And so, that's basically, sort of in a nutshell the B, C Reactors. It's really interesting to go out there and look at it now. I certainly encourage anyone that has the opportunity. It brings back a lot of memories. The biggest thing I remember is you go in the control room there, the first one that they let off. You go in the control room there, it looks like a little dinky space. It didn't seem that dinky to me then. But if you go into the K Reactors, it looks like a gymnasium compared to that, as far as the size of the control room and the equipment that was there. So a lot to compare it with, but the things that just always impressed me was you could feel from the tremor of the grounds and everything, that there was massive power. And it had to be to generate that much heat, and have that much steam coming out of those millions of gallons—I don't know exactly what. The only thing that disturbed me, and I questioned it at the time, riding the bus, going past the 200 East Area, a lot of times, the winds would bring down that brownish plume. And it'd come right in the bus, and your nose would burn. And I'd say, isn't that bad for you? Why is it on a big stack, and it's coming down here? Oh, nothing to worry about. Well, thank God, I don't think I ever got anything from it. There was a lot of things that went on that you could question, but you probably wouldn't get much for an answer. In fact, when I—I get bounced around on things—when I was doing the weather system for them, in the winter time, we were given snowmobiles because we did Rattlesnake Mountain, and the whole bit. And so they had their own trailer with the snowmobiles. Well, I had to go into the Two West Area, and immediately, this one guard, he must have been new. He says, pull over there, and don't go anywhere. Well, this is new. And he comes up, he says, sir, I hate to tell you this, but you can't be bringing your recreational vehicles in here. I said, sir, would you mind reading what's on those snowmobiles, and read what's on the trailer? It says property of the Atomic Energy Commission. He looks at it. He thought it was crazy. He says, well, I'm sorry. [LAUGHTER] So you're all the time being tested. But in general, I always considered it probably one of the greatest experiences. I'm really thankful to the good Lord that I worked 44 and a half years. I'm not trying to brag, but I was never unemployed. They kept me plenty busy. Arata: It sounds like it. It sounds like you had many different jobs. Cheyney: Well, with instrumentation and monitoring everything under the sun, temperature, pressure, level, et cetera. Even one, that reminded me—not to go on and on and on—but in the 300 Area, while I was down there, they sent me to the so-called bursting facilities. And I thought, now what the heck's that? Well, we'll find out. And I go there, and they had these different cells, and they had high pressure systems. And they take different materials of piping, and they hook up all these apparatuses on both ends. And they put it in a cell, and put on all kinds of monitoring equipment to test pressure, temperature, et cetera. And what they do, when they get ready to test, you get out of there, you go back in the control room, and they run up until that pipe virtually breaks open. And again, for studies. But they had a lot of studies going on before they ever used a lot of material. So it was, like I say, always exciting. I enjoyed it, but you never knew what you were going to be assigned with. And it seemed like they didn't mind sending me around. Arata: Sounds like it. I wonder if I could have you talk just a little bit about starting in the '60s, and then having this great 44-year career unhampered. Certainly, the technology changed a great deal in that time. Could you talk a little bit about what sorts of technology changes you encountered working there? Cheyney: Well, sure. It's sort of interesting. When they first put me out in the 300 Area, of course, I was assigned with different technicians almost every day. And anyway, this one technician—and you've could sense when right off the bat, well, you're a fresh one from out of school, so you probably don't know much or anything. And I was given this elderly gentleman, and he takes me to his own little shop area he had. As a matter of fact, it happened to be where the bursting facilities was, and he says, what do you know about recorders? I says, well, I was thinking of electronic recorders, a magnetic tape type recorder. I says, well, if you're talking about magnetic tape recorders, I says, I think I know quite a bit about them. What do you got? He says, well, what do you know about recorders? What do you know about L&N recorder? And I says, not a thing! Can you show me what you're talking about? He brings out this great, big, heavy, old chunk of iron. It's an L&N recorder. It has a galvanometer movement in it. I knew what that was. But I thought, what do you with that piece of junk? I'd use it for a boat anchor. [LAUGHTER] But I didn't say that because I knew it would disrupt him a lot. He says, do you know how to calibrate—or wind your own resistors for the bridge that it requires for it? I says, no. You give me a formula, and I'll work it out. He said, great. So he gives me what values he wanted. Okay. So then he hands me this spool and this wire. He says, all right, make your own resistor. I said, what is this? [LAUGHTER] He says, you've got to make your own resistor. So I kept going down on wire until I got exactly the resistance, cut it off, then I had to treat it and the whole thing. I just followed along with him. And I make these several spools of resistors, and put it in. And then he had me taking, apply a signal to see where the galvanometer would move, and the whole thing. I thought, now just how antiquated can this get? [LAUGHTER] He didn't like it too well or anything, but I thought, I could learn something from everybody. And it was really interesting because as I got out into the K Reactors, well, now they had all, at this time--that time--they had vacuum tube amplifiers. And yes, they had their own bridge circuits and stuff, but you didn't go winding your own resistors or anything. In fact, it all came from the factory pre-certified and et cetera. And so, I saw a big change there in the counting type equipment, and the measuring of temperature. Things changed tremendously. Now in the pneumatic end, that's air-driven instruments, which I never really was fond of. I liked electronics. It was a lot faster. Air-driven, even though that is very accurate for monitoring pressure, and the whole thing, is very slow. You make a move. You wait. Electronics, it's right there. And that was a big change I've seen. And of course, as they got—especially like that K Reactor—so much more massive and everything, they had to be a lot more sophisticated. And so, I could see one heck of a change. And poor old B Reactor was about as old-fashioned as you could get. But it amazes me how they handled the whole thing from the ground up, and we didn't have any major catastrophe. They did have at K Reactors—and I didn't realize the possible danger I was in—they did have where the core did catch on fire. And at least with the monitoring equipment they had, it was where they could respond fast enough to start changing control rods. But it took them a while to get that out. But at least it wasn't like Chernobyl. Chernobyl, they had no chance. In fact, we had videos of--and I'm jumping clear into--where we were shown videos. The fact that when they cut off all the safety systems, they apparently had no knowledge of how fast, when a chain reaction starts, how fast could it be when it goes critical. Because it totally blew everything up, and that's with a graphite core. And unfortunately, people think that, like Energy Northwest out there, that has water as a moderator. There's no graphite whatsoever, a whole different thing. And graphite does burn. And the sad thing is, understand, I've heard that there wasn't a single person that was around Chernobyl that was trying to save the area that is alive today. At least, thank God, we do have a lot more safety concerns. But I don't know if I've totally answered what you're looking for, between the difference, but it was a massive difference. Of course, then when I went over to Energy Northwest, the equipment, as far as recorders, they didn't even have vacuum tubes. Everything's solid state. Pretty much, the current state of the art, or even making changes to be more current, to the more current methods. So it always gave you a different challenge. But I like the changes. And I learned real quick. No matter who, you learn from everyone. And I know my first supervisor, he was sort of like a dad, and he'd, after about two weeks there, he called me in. And he says, I see that you were really raised strict. I says, why do you say that? He says, you don't let anyone disturb you, but you don't come back with any smart aleck remarks. I says, everyone's got something to offer, good or bad. I says, I'm not here for that. I'm here to learn, and I'm here to carry out what you want me to carry out. It was always exciting. And I have no regrets. In fact, most thought that I would never even quit. I quit when I was 66. I figured, well, maybe I should take time out to enjoy life. And I'm glad that I did. I don't miss it. I never tried to think about retirement, or play it into my mind until, I think it was about--well, the last day, I even went out, worked regular assignments until the last four hours. And then, finally, my boss says, well, come on in. There's no use to go any further. And I thought, well, now I can lay everything down, and walk out that gate, and I won't feel like I'm in a pen. [LAUGHTER] It was a great experience. Arata: It sounds like it. I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about the K Reactor shut down. And I understand there was some talk of maybe starting it back up, and that ultimately didn't happen. Since you worked there-- Cheyney: Right. Well, I heard mostly about that, of course, when I was away from there. And I thought, it was really, really a disappointment. It was really sad. In fact, I think it was pretty much getting into that process when I was down at Battelle. And they were doing some tests out there, and I got to go with an engineer. He wanted me to go out there and help with some equipment. And going in there, everything's stone cold. Everything's stone quiet. Such a massive structure doing absolutely nothing. I thought, what a waste. And what are they going to do? Like I said, I didn't hear a whole lot about it, but it came and really hit home when I went in there, and they're worried about rodents and everything else. That isn't the reactor that I saw. And the excitement that was behind it has just, all is dead. And going back through some of the corridors, and into one of the areas they were experimenting with, just hardly could see around. They had some test equipment. I didn't question exactly what are they monitoring. I'm sure a lot they're looking for, is there any possible contamination concerns or anything? But speaking of contamination concerns, it's just like when any of those reactors had what they call a rupture. That's where a fuel element breaks open, and the material’s going out into that water stream. And what they do is they immediately divert it to, they had a big open area, a pit area where all that high contaminated water went into. And guess what's out there in the winter time? Ducks are swimming in that hot water. And I thought, I wouldn't eat anything around here. [LAUGHTER] But I think there's quite a bit that substantiates all that. In fact, Battelle's doing a lot of research in animals and stuff, and even the materials that they've, the feces material and everything is, like, up in the 5R range, which you wouldn't even want to be near that. And I thought, they've got a lot to learn out there of studying the habitat around there, but I wouldn't want to eat anything. [LAUGHTER] Again, I'm off on another subject. [LAUGHTER] Arata: That's okay. So overall, I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about any aspects of your work that you found the most challenging, and sort of the most rewarding. Or just overall, how Hanford was as a place to work during the time you were there. Cheyney: Well, during the time I was there, as far as—I was really impressed with General Electric. They always gave me a feeling of a positive attitude. Also, a very strong feeling that you don't talk about your exact work because it's for the security of the country. And at the same token, I think where it became more rewarding and more relaxing to me is actually when I went to work out at, at that time, Whoops. And at that time, seeing all of the things that go into making a plant, you learn to respect things different. When I went to terminate from Battelle, they says, why in the heck do you want to go there? They're never going to ever operate. I says, well, I'm young enough yet. I want to see what I can learn out of it, and if it don't work--They says, if it don't work, come back here, we'll give you a job. I thought, I bet you will. [LAUGHTER] But I think maybe they were sincere, but I found it really rewarding there. I got involved with--and I never dreamt that I would—is working with robots, going into highly radioactive zones to do monitoring, and to observe what's going on, like steam leaks or anything. So you're not putting anyone in any danger. Out of that, I was surprised, I got an award from, I can't think of the name right now, from the company that was behind it. It was back east, and they sent a plaque awarding me that I contributed to something that basically made things safer, that didn't expose man to. And yet, I found it really exciting because I've always been excited about cameras, and this was working with cameras and with remote control of a little robot. And I made quite a few improvements, and so, I considered maybe that was one of the highlights. It was rewarding. I wasn't expecting anything. I just enjoyed that they let me go on it. And I also worked—I wore two hats in the last years at Energy Northwest, in that I volunteered because they couldn't get anyone else that would go there to write procedures. There was five originally that volunteered, and we all five took on the challenge. And inside of a couple months, it was down to two of us. It ended up, it was down—it was basically myself. And the main reason is, is because you're writing the instructions for that technician to go out and perform a function. If that causes anything like dump the plant, or any kind of danger, you go before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and you may be serving time. Well, to protect myself, I always went before engineering, and discussed, and made them put their name on the dotted line with me that, yes, this is right. This is the only way to go about it, or the best way to go about it. And it was rewarding to me from the standpoint that if they needed an extra hand, they'd pull me right off of that, and I was back out on the plant. So I got away from it, just continuing. Like I say, the challenges seemed to never end. And I really, for a while, thought, I don't know, maybe I won't quit. They always teased me that I would be there when they shut the lights out. Well, I'm glad I didn't because getting away from it, as I get older, different medical issues. But I'm still blessed with the fact that I can get around. [LAUGHTER] Arata: Mm-hm. Is there anything that I haven't asked you about, that we haven't had a chance to hear you talk about that you'd like to share? Any other humorous incidents? Or just anything that stands out in your mind from that time? Cheyney: Well, it wasn't a humorous incident, but one thing that GE pointed out, well, I guess it was an incident as far as, and of course, it was to teach everybody a lesson, is this one gentleman saw this real neat tool in his eyes. So he decided he'd take it home with him. It turns out it was a contaminated piece of equipment. And so, when they detected that it was missing, all they had to do was they got out their radiation monitors. They had an approximate idea. They could go right to his doorstep. And they went in, and they cut out chunks out of his carpet. Everywhere he'd been in his house, they were cutting out samples. And so I think it was a lesson well learnt. Keep your hands off of it. [LAUGHTER] In a way, I thought it was sort of funny. It's not really funny, though. But taking that kind of, obviously, carelessness, at least it really hit home. It isn't worth it. Arata: All right. So I wanted to ask you, for general purposes, most of my students were born after the Cold War. They don't remember this time. So what would you like, sort of, that generation or future generations to know about working in Hanford, as this very important aspect of America's place in the Cold War, and winning the Cold War? Cheyney: Well, I think the main thing is, the big thing is, I'm just trying to figure out how to put it. You shouldn't be afraid of nuclear. If you really know all the facts behind it, and all of the precautions behind it, it is one heck of a rewarding career. And it is something that I think I'm probably a whole lot healthier, and a whole lot that I know that have never had anything to do with nuclear, and yet, my whole life, basically, has been out there. And it definitely is rewarding in regards to the financial side. Well, I can relate it to my older son, when he was graduating, I says, well, what are you going to do? Because I'd never heard him discuss anything. He says, I'm going to be an instrument tech. I said, where'd you get that idea? [LAUGHTER] And he says, well, I want to do what you did, and I want to make the money you've made. And he went to Perry Tech, and he did real well. And I even, through my supervision, of course, was instrumental, and got him on a few outages out here. But he went on down to the only place where you got a permanent job. But again, instrumentation, the same, similar type of equipment for different purposes down at SCH, where it was making silicon wafers for all these integrated circuits. All the latest technology, it's a Japanese firm. They're very stern, very strict. Well, he had the most seniority and everything there, I think it was 12 and a half years. When it came to lay off and cutbacks, because they're very competitive, he was one of the first ones to let go. Now to try to find work, well, he's been able to get on to outages all throughout the country. So, even though he's had nothing there, right now he's in Raleigh, North Carolina. A month ago, he was down in Florida. And he's getting to see country that I haven't seen, and there's a lot of adventures yet, but he's still dealing with nuclear. It’s definitely, it's nothing to be afraid of; it's something to respect. And I'd say it definitely has a lot of opportunity if a person really wants to make the good money. I know, like I say, it's what you can do with your hands. Of course, you have to use your head too, but there's opportunity that you can really do well. Arata: I want to thank you very much for coming in, and sharing your memories with us. We really appreciate it. Cheyney: Well, I hope I've contributed something that's--I enjoy talking about what I can talk about it. It's left me with memories I'll never forget. And I thank you for the opportunity. Arata: Well, we are very happy to have you. I love your description of standing behind B Reactor, and looking down in those kind of cool, glowing-- Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:50:00 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 203 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview D Reactor K Reactor 300 Area B Reactor C Reactor 200 Area 100 Area Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Ray, Dixie Lee Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Edwin Cheyney Description An account of the resource An interview with Edwin Cheyney conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013-11-12 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2016-05-30: Metadata v1 created – [RG] Subject The topic of the resource Hanford (Wash.) Hanford Site (Wash.) Hanford Nuclear Site (Wash.) 100 Area 200 Area 300 Area B Reactor C Reactor D Reactor FBI General Electric K Reactor Secrecy WOOPS (Washington Public Power Supply System) https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F4b3b39e87ce2507d604a1502d8a7ab60.jpg 770df6b0e7699c07a4956c77fd36fe8a https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F52781766779487f891c66cb12dd10aac.mp4 80f3a4e1bf5e27d53fb0329c79865a7f Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Elaine Davis Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: Are you ready? Elaine Davis: There. Franklin: Better get that closed. Ready? Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Elaine Davis on September 2, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Elaine Davis about her experiences growing up in Richland. So, the best place to start is at the beginning. So why don’t you tell me where and when you were born? Elaine Davis: I was born September 27, 1948 at Kadlec Hospital. I grew up on 1918 Howell in Richland and I went to school at Jefferson Elementary, Chief Jo Middle—Chief Jo Junior High at that time, and Columbia High School. Franklin: And Columbia later became Richland? Davis: Richland High School. Franklin: Yeah, the gentleman I just interviewed also went to Columbia High School. And so, Elaine, we’ve already talked a bit, and I’ve read your bio here that my intern put together, and so you were born here, but your dad, your family didn’t work at Hanford-proper, right, but they worked for the government here? Davis: My dad, I think, worked for the Manhattan Project. He came in March 1944. And my mother came out in June of 1944, after she finished nursing school. And then my brother was born on the 2nd of August, 1944, and he was the first baby born in Kadlec. They didn’t have bassinets at that time; they put him in a dresser drawer. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: How new was Kadlec Hospital at that time? Davis: They had just completed the emergency room and the maternity section. Franklin: Okay. Davis: So my mom was admitted on the 1st, but she didn’t have him until the 2nd of August, 1944. Franklin: So your brother is somewhat of a local celebrity at the time, correct? Davis: Yes, he is, right. He was grand marshal for one of the parades that Richland had, with my mother sitting beside him, and they were the grand marshal. Franklin: I guess he kind of, in some ways he might symbolize—the first birth of the community, right, is something for the community to kind of gather around. Because up until that point, right, there was no one who worked for the Manhattan Project who had any kind of—no one could say, like, oh, I was born in Richland. You know? Davis: Mm-hmm, right. Franklin: Or at least the new Richland that was—is distinct from the— Davis: Because Richland did exist before the Manhattan Project. Franklin: Right, yeah, but most of those people had had to leave and were of a very different—they would’ve had very different lives and memories of Richland than all of the people that would’ve came. Davis: Yes. Franklin: So what did your father do at the Manhattan Project? Davis: He worked—he was one of the—not the first male nurse out on the Project, but one of the first male nurses out on the Project in 1944. Franklin: And— Davis: And— Franklin: Oh, please. Davis: But he didn’t, you know—he didn’t know what was going on. All he knew is he was here as a nurse to help out in any way he could. Franklin: Do you know where he worked in those early days? Davis: He didn’t tell me where he worked. I’m sure it was probably because it was so secretive. Franklin: Right, right. So then he transferred over to Kadlec when it was completed then? Davis: Yes. Franklin: Okay. And what did he do for Kadlec? Davis: He was the administrator for Kadlec. Franklin: Okay. So was he then in charge of like the day-to-day operations? Davis: Yes, he was. Franklin: Okay. And you also mentioned that your mother worked there? Davis: My mother worked from the time I was 13 months old, and she worked until I was in the third grade, when I was about nine. She went to work for Dr. Buren Lee for 17 years and then they started the Richland Clinic. She worked for Dr. Ballmann for 17 years after that. But she continued working until she was 78 years old. Franklin: Wow. Davis: Because of having Alzheimer’s, they had to let her go. Franklin: Right, right. And what did she do when she worked for the doctors? Davis: For Dr. Lee, she was a surgical nurse. For Dr. Ballmann, she was his medical nurse. Franklin: And how long did your father work at Kadlec for? Davis: I’m going to say for maybe a year, year-and-a-half, after Kadlec came into existence. Franklin: Okay. Davis; And then he worked for HEHF when they got the contract. Franklin: When was that? Davis: I’m not really sure when that was. He worked until he was 65 for HEHF as the administrator. Did all the hiring and firing for HEHF. Franklin: Okay. It says here that your father lived in the barracks at one time? Davis: He lived in the barracks for the first three months. And then they lived on Armistead—and I don’t know the exact address—for four-and-a-half years. And then they moved into 1918 Howell, three months before I was born. My mother was out watering the new lawn when she started her labor with me. Franklin: How—sorry. Did your father have any stories or anything about—or your mother—about—well, actually, I guess that’s a good question. So your father came in ’44, and your mother in June ’44. Do you know if your mother worked on the Manhattan Project? For the year— Davis: No, she didn’t. She did not— Franklin: Okay. Davis: --work for the Manhattan Project. But she did tell stories of standing in line for rations, meat rations, sugar rations, coffee rations, when it was 110 degrees and no trees. Franklin: Oh, man, wow. Davis: They would both talk about the terminating winds that people would just leave because it was dusty, so dusty you couldn’t see. And every day, you had to clean out your window sills because of the dust that piled up in the windows. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Wow. Do your parents have any other stories about that time? Anything that sticks out to you that you can remember? Davis: Now, they went and watched Eddie Feigner, the baseball player, was here. They went to a lot of baseball games to watch him, and they did a lot of their own entertaining. They played bridge every week, and rode their bikes an awful lot, played a lot of tennis. Franklin: I see. Oh, that’s good. I mean, you got to stay entertained. Tell me about growing up in Richland, you know, being a government town. I understand you would’ve been young for a lot of that, but during the Cold War, being this government town. Davis: I remember in grade school, we had to do duck-and-cover under our desks. We did that once a week. Franklin: Can you walk me through that process? Davis: You got under your desk and got on your knees and put your hands over your face, and you waited until they said everything was clear. Franklin: And you said you did that about once a week? Davis: Once a week. Franklin: So that means you got—I bet everybody got pretty—was it the same time all the time, or did you just hear the bell and know it was duck-and-cover time? Davis: You’d hear the siren and they’d have you—give you directions to do the duck-and-cover. Franklin: When did you understand, first understand, what was at Hanford or what was being produced at Hanford? Davis: I think that I learned about it when I was about 14, 15 years old. Franklin: Oh, really? Davis: Yeah. Franklin: Okay, and what do you remember about that? Davis: That everything was secretive. Nobody could discuss their jobs, what they were doing, or anything. So there was a lot of secrecy in it. But we didn’t question it. Franklin: Really? So, what did you think about it, when you found out what was being made at Hanford? How did that make you feel, or— Davis: I think it made me, you know—that saved our country. If we hadn’t done it, we might be slaves to the Japanese or to the Germans. Franklin: What about the work that had happened after the World War II, what about the continued—because, you know, when you would’ve found out about that, right, there was still a lot of production for the Cold War weapons arsenal. What about—so, I understand that feeling of in the World War II there’s that feeling you mentioned about being physically at war with other countries, declared war. But what about the Cold War? Is that trickier to draw a feeling about, or how do you—what about the Hanford’s relationship to the USSR and to the Cold War and to the nuclear weapons stockpile? Davis: It was, I thought, was scary, growing—learning about it. There was nothing that we could do as citizens ourselves. It was up to what the government—it was their decision, not ours. I really don’t have anything to comment on. Franklin: Sure. I just—the main reason I ask that question, these kinds of questions is for people—I grew up at the very end of the Cold War, but for myself and for people to come, it’s illustrative, I think, to hear from experiences of people that lived in that time and lived with the fear or the risk or just in that situation. Because it’s so unique. Davis: It is. Franklin: And such an interesting period of time, because World War II is so easily well-defined, and it ended with a lot of joy here and this kind of momentous occasions. Whereas the Cold War had its ups and downs. Davis: Right. Franklin: So that’s why I ask those—not to sort of draw any kind of gotcha moments or anything like that. But to just explore how you felt, or, like, the feeling of the sense of being in that conflict. Davis: I didn’t do a lot of reading, but I did listen to a lot of the news commentators and stuff like that. So just learning about it was an experience to go through. Franklin: Oh, yeah, I bet. So you would’ve found out about Hanford as a teenager, and then do you remember the sale of when Richland became privatized? Davis: Yes, I do. Franklin: I guess you would’ve been about ten. Davis: My dad showed my brother and I the biggest check we’d probably ever see written by my parents when they bought their house for $8,000. He took it with him when they signed the papers so that—we had ownership of our house, rather than the government coming in and changing lights; we changed our own lights, we could do reconstruction or construction—remodeling on the house and stuff like that, where we couldn’t before. So it was a great experience for my brother and I to go with them and to see what the process was in buying the house. My parents’ first house. Franklin: Did life change for you substantially after Richland was—or did you notice changes? Davis: I didn’t notice anything changing. We never locked our house or our cars. The kids in the neighborhood played out in the summer until 11:00 at night and you didn’t have to worry about children missing or being molested. We were a safe place to live and grow up. Our main activity was going to the river and swimming and water skiing everyday during the summer. During the winter, we snow skied. My dad learned to snow ski at 48. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Davis: We taught him. He took a few lessons, but he learned, basically, from my brother and I. Franklin: Wow, that’s really cool. And so you graduated in— Davis: 1967. Franklin: And then what? Davis: Then I went to two-and-a-half years at CBC. And I’m dyslexic, so I could take about 12 credit hours. And then I decided after two-and-a-half years, I could get a job in the Area and my dad said—I said, can you help me get a job? And he says, I don’t want to be owing to anybody for getting a job for you. He says, if you get a job, you’re going to have to get it on your own. So I laid out of school for a year-and-a-half and I worked at Roger’s of Walla Walla in a potato shed. We had no air conditioning. Franklin: Whew. Davis: You inspected the potatoes and they were done then made into French fries. They’d come down the conveyor belt, and you’d pull the potato off that was rotten, or it wasn’t good enough to be used. So you pulled them off. And then you also packed five six-pound bags into a box and put it on the conveyor belt to go into the freezer. Another job was to make the box—the boxes were made, but you had to put it on a conveyor belt down to where it was put into—the potato sacks were put into the boxes and shipped to the cooler. What made me decide to go back to school was, I was working graveyard the whole year-and-a-half I worked there. But I’d worked there three summers and got a job full-time. Two women got into a brawl, biting, kicking, scratching, and I quit that night and said, I’m going back to school. I went back to school and majored in recreation, park administration at Eastern Washington University. It was a state college then. Franklin: Right. Davis: And I worked between my junior and senior year of college for the Richland Recreation Department. And then after I graduated from college, a year-and-a-half after I graduated from college, I got a job, my first job at Exxon. My salary for the whole year was $5,000 a year. Which was low in ’74 when I started. But everything was lower. Prices were lower then. And then I worked for them for four years, and then I got hired in by United Nuclear in 1978. And I worked in document control through many changes of companies until I was laid off in 2005. And then— Franklin: Oh, wow. Davis: 27 ½ years. And then I got a job working for the Richland School District as a bus aide for special needs kids, and just loved it. And I just quit working when I turned 66 two years ago. Franklin: Wow, that’s really—well, it’s great that you really enjoyed your last job. Records control, was that at the Federal Building? Davis: In the Federal Building, when I worked for United Nuclear, I went out and changed the operating procedures for N Reactor and the production of making the fuel rods for N Reactor. And then I worked in all aspects of document control for 25 years. The last job I worked at was procedures. I would take around procedures for safety operations, environmental, and I’d get the signatures from the engineers and that’s what I did. Franklin: And so what did—when you’re doing document control, what would those duties usually consist of? Davis: What would what be? Franklin: Sorry. When you were doing document control, what did that consist of? Like, what were your duties? Davis: Like I said, I retired records, and they were stored in records storage. Then my last job, like I said, was working with the engineers on writing of the procedures. Franklin: Interesting. It’s very similar to what I do as an archivist, is I manage records as well. Although in a different—manage them for research use. But it’s very similar steps, right? You follow a disposition schedule, you file the records in appropriate places, after a certain time you send things to— Did you send things to the National Archives at certain times, or--? Davis: No, we didn’t. I did not. But my group did. Franklin: Okay. How big was your group? Davis: We had about six people in that, in all different aspects. Franklin: How many different contractors did you work for, starting with United Nuclear? Davis: I worked for about four different companies. The last one was CH2M Hill. Franklin: Okay. And so what were the other two? Davis: Boeing. And I can’t remember what the other one was. Franklin: Is it Lockheed? Davis: Yes, Lockheed Martin. Yeah. Franklin: Yeah, I’ve seen their— Davis: It was Boeing and then Lockheed Martin. Franklin: LMSI. Davis: LMSI. Franklin: I’ve seen that on a lot of the documents we have in the Hanford Collection. Davis: Yeah. Franklin: I just—it’s nice to kind of trace that—I’m just going to write that down. United Nuclear Industries, Boeing, LMSI, CH2M Hill. Thank you. That’s very helpful to me, actually. Because it’s not always clear to reconstruct form the documents. So your brother, the famous Ed Quigley, Jr., the Richland-famous Ed Quigley, what did he do? Davis: He has a degree in social—not social work—psychology and sociology as a double major. But he didn’t—he got into the clinical aspect of it and didn’t like it. And then he started taking—his first wife, Chris, was accepted into Dalhousie University in Canada and they moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia. And he started—that’s where he started his clinical work and decided he didn’t like it. So he was really interested in music, and he took guitar lessons and now he is teaching at Ted Brown’s Music Center in Tacoma. He’s been there for 40-some years. Franklin: Wow. Davis: And he just went with us to Canada. We went to Canada for a month. Just got back last week. And he went with us. That’s what he does. Franklin: Oh, cool. Davis: And he lives in a beach house which has got 210 stairs up and down to his house, so anything you bring down and all the garbage has to go back up. Franklin: I bet he stays in pretty good shape doing all that, right? Davis: Yeah, he is. Franklin: Yeah, I was going to say, that would—maybe I should get 210 stairs to my house. Is there anything else that you would like to tell us about your work or growing up in Hanford or your parents? Davis: I can remember, during the time that we were government, if you dialed 0 you got the FBI. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Did that accidentally happen in your new household? Davis: We did! Once! [LAUGHTER] And got in trouble for it. Franklin: Wow. Davis: You know, we lived in a real sheltered community. When I was growing up, there was only one person that—or one family that I knew was divorced. They were a doctor and his wife and their three kids. That was the only divorce that I knew. So we were a pretty sheltered community. If your kids got in trouble, you were out of here. They didn’t put up with it. But I feel blessed to be in a community that was so caring and so carefree with letting us play outside. Now, you don’t let your kids go outside without being chaperoned. Some of my friends have got grandkids, and they don’t let them out of the house, because of the crime situations, child molestations. So I feel pretty blessed that I lived in a community where nobody bothered anybody, but you knew everybody. Franklin: Right, but I suppose a lot of that is due to kind of the single focus of that community being on Hanford employees, right? Davis: Right. Franklin: And the government control of the—the fear of—maybe not the fear of retribution, but knowing that there was kind of something watching over you. Davis: Right, right. Franklin: Which was the government. What about—did you—like the racial situation in Pasco or Kennewick ever make a mark on you, or do you remember any, like the civil rights era kind of stuff in the Tri-Cities? Davis: As a child, or as parents, our parents never took us to Pasco because of the racial situation there. And Kennewick didn’t allow any blacks, either, at that particular time, growing up. They were all in Pasco, on the east side. So we didn’t really go to Pasco a lot, or to Kennewick. We just stayed in our own community. Franklin: Because Richland just excluded—until ’58, you couldn’t live there unless you worked there, and they didn’t hire many African Americans. Davis: No, they didn’t. Franklin: At all, because there was no civil rights legislation to push equal—you know, push away discrimination in housing or employment. As you mentioned, Kennewick had sundown laws that kept African Americans from owning property. What about, is there any other significant events in Tri—do you remember like the Atomic Frontier Days parade? Davis: Yes, I do. That was one of the big things in Richland, was to go to the Atomic Frontier Days. We went every year, and just had a lot of fun. Franklin: How long did those go till? Davis: Now, that, I’m not sure. I can’t remember that. Franklin: Do you remember President Kennedy’s visit in 1963? Davis: Yes. I was let out of school to go hear him dedicate N Area, N Reactor. Franklin: How was—can you talk a little bit about that? How was that? Davis: Lots and lots of people. It was so crowded. It was good to see—that was the first time I’d ever seen a president up close. Franklin: How close were you? Davis: We weren’t right up front, but we were in the midst of the crowds that was out there. And it was a great feeling. Franklin: Wow, that’s great. Any other events in the Tri-Cities’ history that come to mind? Davis: No, I can’t remember a lot about that. Franklin: How did—so you worked for several different contractors and you also worked from production to shutdown to kind of cleanup. I was wondering if you could talk first about, how did your job change with different contractors? Or how was that—did the work situation change at all, or was it pretty constant? Davis: No, you did the—I was doing the same job that I was assigned to. Nothing seemed to change when a new contractor came in. Franklin: So was there kind of a lack of like an organizational culture with each contractor? Davis: Now, when we went—when CH2M Hill came in, we had to apply for our—re-apply for our jobs, and that was real unsettling to everybody. Because you didn’t know whether you were going to be the one that was going to be out on the street or whether you weren’t. So that was a lot of pressure was put on us. Franklin: Wow. I bet. What about, how did your job change at all from production to stoppage of production and then to the cleanup phase? Davis: Now, from production we changed a little bit, but not a whole lot. And then when we went into—I was laid off in 2005. And so I don’t know—I didn’t work with any of the cleanup completely. Like they are now. So I don’t know. Franklin: What kind of—well, but then—since production stopped in ’87, ’88— Davis: Yeah. Franklin: What happened in those years of the ‘90s and up? Davis: Well, N Area was still going. And then when they closed that down, things started changing, document-wise, with that. Franklin: How so? Davis: You had different things that we were given to do that were different from what we were doing when we were in production. Franklin: Could you describe that? Or like maybe some—what was different about them? Davis: I can’t really explain it. Franklin: Okay. Davis: But it was different. We had different things to do and different things to follow during that time. Franklin: Okay. Is there any example that comes to mind? Davis: Not really. Franklin: Okay. Let me see here. How did—can you describe how this kind of element of security or safety impacted your work at Hanford? Davis: You took pleasure in your job, and you were really loyal to what you were doing. You just had a great sense of gratitude for how we were doing it and what we were doing. Franklin: That’s great. What about for your father? Was he ever—do you know if he was ever impacted by security restrictions or safety stuff, or how that affected his job? Davis: That I don’t know, because he didn’t really discuss that with us. Franklin: Right. Davis: His work thing was separate from his family and social life. So we really didn’t hear about it. Franklin: Oh, right, okay. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland during the Cold War? Davis: I think that, you know, we were safe. And then when the Cold War came on, we weren’t as safe, because we didn’t know if somebody was going to send a bomb over and destroy us. Or destroy themselves, because we would probably retaliate. And to think that we could wipe the whole world out by what we were doing. We just didn’t trust each other. And we still, to this day, don’t know a lot about what’s going on either. We know more, but we don’t know everything. Franklin: Mm. Yeah. That is very true. One of the last things I’d like to ask you about is your relationship or your involvement in the B Reactor Museum Association. Davis: We just joined in June, so we’ve had— Franklin: Of this year? Davis: Yeah. Franklin: Oh, okay. Davis: So we’ve had two meetings [LAUGHTER] before we left to go to Alaska. Franklin: Oh, okay. And why did you choose to get involved in that? Davis: We wanted—because we both, both Charles and I worked here, and we wanted to get active in the organization to promote what Hanford’s about and the B Reactor especially. We went on the July 16th thing to B Reactor. It was great. We learned a lot. Just to walk into that face, and see the face of the reactor. Franklin: Was that your first time to B Reactor? Davis: That was my first time. Franklin: Yeah, it’s almost a religious experience in some ways. Davis: Yes, it is. Franklin: To be confronted with that massive, powerful reactor. You said your husband, Charles, worked on Site? Davis: Yes, he did. Franklin: And what did he do? Davis: He worked, to begin with, as a Hanford Patrol. And then he went from there into nuclear operator, and then from there he went into operations at T Plant. He was one of their administrators. He wasn’t high up, but he— Franklin: And how long did he work at Hanford for? Davis: He worked for 24 ½ years before he got laid off. Franklin: Oh, okay, and what years were those? Davis: Okay, ’78 to 2003. Franklin: Oh, okay. Davis: ’80. No, I take it back. 1980 through— Franklin: And—oh, sorry. Where did you guys meet? Did you meet at Hanford? Davis: No. We met square dancing. Franklin: Oh, okay. That’s really great. Did you meet him before you were working at Hanford or after? Davis: No, after. Franklin: Okay, you worked there pretty much around the same timespan. Davis: Mm-hmm, yeah. Franklin: Oh, that’s really interesting. Cool. Davis: You might want to interview him, too. Franklin: Yeah, that would be really interesting. Davis: He wasn’t born or raised here, but— Franklin: No, but that’s—it’s really good to get—one of the things we’ve been looking for is perspectives of those who worked during the later Cold War. Because, you know, it’s such a big event. Davis: Right. Franklin: And then the shift, too, from production to cleanup is a really important shift that will become more historical as time goes on, so it’s good to get the people while they have fresher memories than trying to make them drag out stuff from 50, 60 years ago. Which is—if that’s the best you got, then that’s the best you got. Well, great, Elaine, thank you so much for the information and the interview. Did you want to narrate some of the stuff you brought, or did you just want to donate that to us to scan? Davis: I’ll donate that to you. Franklin: Okay, great. Well, we’ll have that and we’ll put it in the file with your interview and so people can take a look at that, too, to kind of—if they want to see pictures of Ed, Jr., and all the newspaper articles. Well, I mean, I think there’s really something important about a community coming together to celebrate that first new life. That’s so important at the beginning of a community to see that happening, it makes it, I think, a nicer place to live. So that’s really neat. Well, thank you so much. Davis: You’re welcome. Thank you. Franklin: Yeah, watch out for the microphone up above you. Sorry. Davis: Oh! How’d I do? Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:42:39 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317kbps Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Elaine Davis Subject The topic of the resource Richland (Wash.) Hanford Atomic Products Operation Douglas United Nuclear, Inc. Description An account of the resource Elaine Davis grew up in Richland in the early Cold War. Her father came to Richland in 1944 and was an administrator at Kadlec Hospital. Her older brother was the first baby born in the new town of Richland Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 9/2/2016 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project, who can provide specific rights information for this item. 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This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F82c04966c9ad4d75be52520235b0f436.jpg 0cfd3eabf5f6f11bc4ae97cf18f78000 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F5ac81b95ffc5c268e001b40efe232954.mp4 912843de88d1ba96be6a1ee7dfb001cd Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Bauman Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Elizabeth Gladden Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Northwest Public Television | Gladden_Elizabeth </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: Elizabeth Gladden. Capital E-L-I-Z-A-B-E-T-H. Gladden. G-L-A-D-D-E-N. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: Great. Thank you. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: The first year I was there, I was a Feemster. I was unmarried. And then we got married this second year. So my maiden name was Feemster. So the Social Security people told me to keep the F. Originally my middle initial was an E. But to keep the F of the maiden name to keep their records straight. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: Sure. Right. And how did you spell your maiden name? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: F-E-E-M-S-T-E-R. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: Okay. Great. Thank you. All right. And my name is Robert Bauman. And we're conducting this oral history interview on July 7, 2014, on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. So I guess let's start with maybe how you found out about—what were you doing before the war, maybe? And how you found out about an opportunity to teach at Heart Mountain. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: Okay. As I said, Pearl Harbor is the one that started it all. And from there, the Army thought that the Japanese on the west coast would be a danger. And they wanted them moved. And we found out later that that wasn't true, that they really weren't a danger, that California just wanted the Japanese out, and this was a good opportunity to get them out. And I was teaching in Nebraska when Pearl Harbor came along. And then I finished that year, and the next year I moved to a town called Osceola in Nebraska, which was a little better opportunity. And I taught one week when I got a call from the Davis teachers' agency, telling me that they had a good job for me in Wyoming. And it sounded very good because I was getting $1,000 there, and out in Wyoming, I would be getting $2,000. So I just doubled the pay for a couple months' more work. My father thought I was going to the end of the world. But I resigned then at Osceola. I don't think the school board was very happy with me. And I packed up and came out to Heart Mountain. And it was, I think, the second week in September when I got out there. Some of the teachers had gotten there already. The principal and school superintendent had been on the job for several months. And they had tried to get everything organized so that we could be an accredited high school. And then we started school I think the first week in October. Several weeks I was there beforehand, we sorted books and got assigned to our classrooms and got things set out. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: Do you remember what your first impressions were when you arrived in Heart Mountain? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: What? What? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: Your first impressions of the place. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden. Oh. [LAUGHTER] I remember writing the folks and saying that it was all right if you looked up. The sky was pretty and blue, but not if you looked around. No, it was very, very bleak. It was hot. And all you saw were these black tar paper barracks. And you just saw the trainloads of evacuees coming in, and you felt sorry for them. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: What sort of housing did you have there? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: Well, the first year we lived in Cody, Wyoming. There was no gas, so people weren't traveling. So we lived in a—what do you call it? It was a motel. A little motel. And a lot of the faculty lived there. There wasn't enough room at Heart Mountain yet. They had built dorms out there, and some of the single people were out there in dorms. But there were no apartments for the married people at all. And then in the next year, we had a fairly nice apartment, except ours also was not dust-proof. We had lots and lots of dust. But we did have electricity and water and a refrigerator. And all the evacuees had when they arrived was a big room. The rooms varied in size, depending on the size of the family. Some of the rooms were 20 feet long, and some were much smaller. Families varied from six on down to single. They had one lightbulb hanging down from the ceiling, no running water. The latrines and the showers were all outside. There was one for each block. And there were 20 blocks. So it was pretty cold. They said some of the mothers didn't get anything done but bundling up their children and taking them out to the bathroom and back in again. It was pretty, pretty sad. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: And for the single people, were there separate dorms for the single people? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: No, the evacuees were in the same ones, but they had a smaller apartment. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: Oh, okay, I see. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: They say the women went to work immediately, getting sheets and so forth, dividing up the space so they'd have a little privacy. And I guess the latrines at first were just wide open. There was no privacy in them at all. But the Japanese were quite ingenious. They began to do things. They said Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck got a lot of money from tools that the internees had ordered. Some of them were trying to patch up the leaky holes in the barracks and so forth. They had one pot-bellied stove in each room. They didn't do adequate heating jobs, of course. Of course, that's what we had too, up on the hill. We had a pot-bellied stove. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: And so what did you teach then? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: I taught English, and I also had a math class. I taught freshman and sophomore English and Algebra. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: And about how many students did you have in a class? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: Well, several of the classes were quite small. But they never got over 25 or so. They were pretty good. And I would say that the discipline was heaven. We had none of the discipline problems that I had when I got back to Pasco. [LAUGHTER] I think they were all kind of beaten down at that point. They seemed cheerful, but I don't know. They must have thought they couldn't get by with anything, because they very good. And of course the original schools were in the barracks. And there were no desks. They had the long benches that the kids sat in, and they had to do their writing on their lap. And I had an assistant to help me grade papers, which was nice, because I'd never had that before. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: So the whole time you were there, there were no desks? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: Well, just in the barracks. In '43, then, the high school was built. And it was heaven compared to what we had. It went up within a year. But it had a big administrative building--section in the middle. And then it had two big wings on it. And they had a Home Ec department in one section. They had a shop. They had a science department. They had a big gymnasium and auditorium combined. And we had enough textbooks finally. So it was very, very much improved over the first year. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: What about eating facilities? Were there cafeterias, mess halls? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: No, the kids always ate in the mess hall. You see, each block had its own mess hall where they would go, along with their bath facilities. And they would go to the mess hall to eat. I might say that at first there was a little unrest. They claimed they weren't getting the proper food and so forth. But they kind of worked with the administration. And later they didn't seem to complain so much about the food. Then we had a separate cafeteria up on the hill where we ate at noon. And we complained, because the meat was always lamb. I was so tired of lamb when we got through. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: I guess that's what was available in Wyoming. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: Right. Yeah. Well, another thing that's of interest when we're talking about food is that they had their own chicken ranch down at the bottom they put in. And they also had a bunch of pigs down there. And the second year, the late summer, 1945, they took over the land across the street--across the highway—and they put in a huge garden. And they had every kind of vegetable imaginable down there. And the people around Cody said that it wouldn't grow. It wouldn't grow there at all. But we had an abundance of fresh things then. And it was in the fall of 1945—1944, rather—when it got really cold, and they were afraid the potatoes were all going to freeze. So they dismissed school. And they plowed up all the potatoes. And the kids went out and picked up potatoes. The faculty, too. [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: So about how many internees were there? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: We had 10,000 in the camp. And there were times when we had about 10,700. There were 120,000 Japanese that were evacuated. If you had a sixth of a Japanese blood in you, you were evacuated. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: And obviously all the internees were from the west coast. Were they mostly from California? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: All along the coast. They were sent from Washington, along the coast. It went down that were also taken. There is this movie—maybe you've seen it--that is very, very good, number of years ago. And I can't remember the name of it. It's based on a family that was evacuated from over on the coast. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: And so there were some residents there from the Tri-Cities area, right? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: Well, yes. My understanding is that the Columbia River was the dividing line. Everybody west of the Columbia River went. But some people east—and I know there were a couple families in Pasco went, because they were afraid. Sentiment against the Japanese was very, very bad, and they were afraid to stay. And they came back. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: Now did you know these people at all when you were there? Or were these people that you heard about later? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: No, once the war was over, it was over, yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: So for students who were in the high school when they first came to Heart Mountain, but finished high school during the war, were they able go to college somewhere? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: Well, while they were in camp those three years, if they had the resources and they found a school that would accept them, college students could go out, as long as they went east. And we had a number who went out. And also there were a few of the laborers who went out to get better jobs that were allowed to go. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: So you went there in the fall of-- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: In the fall of '42, and left in the late summer of '45. Was there five years--or three years. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: Overall, how would you describe your experience teaching there? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: Well, I would say it's very good. We had a nice social background with other Caucasians. And we knew a few of the Japanese. But somehow we didn't get very—there wasn't an opportunity, really, to get very close to them. I might say that the administration did a great job in trying to get things organized, along with the help of the outstanding leaders in the Japanese community. And they had Boy Scout groups and Camp Fire Girls and Girl Scout groups. And they had dance clubs and everything that would keep the kids busy. And when it got really hot, they dug a great big swimming pool. And the kids went swimming. And then in the winter, they skated there. Some of them had never seen an ice skate before. And they had great fun ice skating. They couldn't get out on the hills, though, to go sledding. They had to stay in camp. Oh, I might say there were about 19, I think, guard stations around the camp. And they were up high, with very powerful searchlights. And nobody could get out without being caught. And as we went in and out the gate, we had to have badges on. And the Army was stationed down at the base. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: You mentioned, when I talking to you earlier, that you had teaching assistants or assistants that helped you, grading? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: Yes, I had two students. They were kids who were already through high school. And they would help grade English papers and math papers. Sakiko Yoshimura and Metsu--Metsuku--Mets--suku—what's her name now? I've forgotten. I saw it in the book. Yeah. Yeah. And we kept track of--one of them went back to Japan the minute the camp closed down. And the other one was a seamstress. And she went to California. And when my daughter and I were traveling one day, we stopped to see her. But we lost track of her later. We don't know what happened. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: Did you ever get a sense, or any of the internees ever say anything? They expressed any sort of disappointment or anger or anything about being in the camp? Or did they not really talk about it? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: No, we were told when we went that you'll never get a job in a private school again. If you go teach those Japs. You're through. And they were crying for teachers when we got out. There's no problem. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: So once the camp closed, then, what happened to you? What did you do? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: Well, when the camp closed--well, school was over in 1945 in the last of May. And all teachers were through. But if you wanted to stay on, and they needed you in some other department, you could go. And I was always interested in hospital work. In fact, that's what I thought I wanted to be when I was growing up, was a nurse. So I went to the hospital. And my husband went to the housing area where they were boxing up the household goods that the Japanese acquired and put them on the train. Incidentally, each one was given $25 a ticket to where they wanted to go, and that was it. But I had a lot of experiences in the high school—in the hospital. And I was so grateful for the opportunity. Being a Caucasian, I got to do things--administer medicine and do things—that otherwise the Japanese didn't get to do. And I remember so well. One of the doctors came in and grabbed me one day. And he said, come here, I need you quickly. Lady's going to have a baby. So I was there and he put out his gloves for me to hold to put them on. I was only woman in the room besides the doctor. And I got to see a baby born. And that was before I had any children. And it was really, really interesting. And another experience, there was a time, there was one of the fellows dying, an older man. And she got me and said, I think you need to see this. So she took me in, and we watched his last breaths. And when he was gone, she says, now we have to take out his false teeth and take him to the morgue. They had a morgue in the hospital. So she says, I want you to go down with me. And so I did. And shoved him in the freezer there. Then we came back to the room to clean it up. And she says, oh, I forgot to put his false teeth in. But she says, you don't have to go with me this time. I'll go down and do it. She was a graduate nurse, of course. And the salary scale, I don't think we've talked about, was very interesting. There were three scales. I was making over $200 a month. And the highest any Japanese internee could get was $19 a month. And some of the nurses got a little upset at one time. But they wouldn't do anything about it. They had set the scale for $19 for professional. And then I think it was $16 for in between. And the laborers got only $12 an hour. They said they couldn't pay the laborers more than the Army--an Army private got. And that was $20 a day, not an hour. $20 a day. So they didn't make much money. That was one reason they liked the work outside, if they could. Get a job on the outside. Because the administration demanded that they be paid the same way as a Caucasian on the outside. The governor of Wyoming wasn't very helpful. He wanted them to be slave laborers, practically, and work for $12 an hour. And the WRA--that's the War Relocation Authority--said no. You have to pay them same as you pay Caucasians. So some of them got some extra money that way, if they could be cleared. I mentioned to you the newspaper. We had a fellow who was trained in journalism. And he immediately started a newspaper. It started within a week I think from the time he got there. He got his staff together. It was an eight page newsletter--or newspaper, rather--that came out once every Saturday. And that kind of kept the evacuees in touch with what's going on in the outside world, as long as rules and so forth in the camp. And he had some pretty good editorials, where he was questioning things. And I do have some copies of those that I'll give you, if you want them. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: Now did those newspapers have to go through-- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: I don't know how much censoring they did. I wouldn't be surprised, but what they had some though. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: Were there radios allowed in the camp to listen to? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: Yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: Get updates on was happening in the world? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: There were always rumors, always rumors. [LAUGHTER] We had a fellow up in the dorm area that got the greatest delight out of starting a rumor and seeing how long it took to get around. Oh, there were rumors about how there were Japanese on the coast, and they were going to invade. There was balloons that were going to be coming over, and so forth and so on. But nothing ever happened. There was never any incident at all. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: Do you have any idea how large the staff was that worked at the camp? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: Oh, dear. I think there were 200 in the administrative area. And teachers--I don't know for a school that size—it was a big high school. We had the eighth grade in the high school, too. So it was a pretty big school. And our classes weren't big. I remember one summer, I taught solid geometry, and I only had about eight students in there. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: And was there a graduation ceremony? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: Oh, yes, yes. When they graduated, there was a big ceremony. We had a big auditorium, as I said, which was also a gym. And it was well used here. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: Was there a church or churches in the camp? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: Oh, yes. The WRA started out with two churches, a Catholic and a Protestant. And the Buddhists wanted their church. And two-thirds of the group were Buddhists. And the WRA refused, but eventually gave in. So eventually there was a Buddhist church, and the Catholic and the Protestant. We went to the Protestant church and got very well acquainted with the minister and his wife and had them over for dinner. Nice couple. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: Do you remember when you heard about the war ending? Or any of that? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: Oh, yes. We were eating lunch in--oh, no, no. When we were eating lunch, it was when Roosevelt was pronounced dead. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: Oh. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: And my husband was down in the lab, because he was always fooling with radios. He was building his own radio. And he came rushing up and said that Roosevelt had died. And this was during the lunch hour. I forget the date. But the war--well, it's an interesting story about how we heard about the war. We were married in '43. My sister was married in '45. And her husband was working at the University of Chicago. And the department--what do they call it? The one where they were-- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: The Manhattan Project, or-? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: Yeah. Well, it's part of the Manhattan Project. And he knew what we were doing out at Hanford, but we didn't know what was going on out here. And so the fellas were in the living room--I remember--and we were out in the breakfast nook at York, Nebraska, at my parents' home. And Stanley--my brother-in-law--came running out to the kitchen and grabbed my sister by the arm and said, come in and listen to this. He said, I want you to hear it. And you tell me what you heard. And she did. And then he said, well, that's what I've been doing. So that was how we know the war had ended. They'd dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. They always said Hiroshima, not "Hiro-SHEE-ma." </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: So now did you and your husband meet at Heart Mountain? Or, how did you meet? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: I met my husband at the University of Chicago. I was there one summer. And we got acquainted. And we corresponded. And he'd come to Nebraska and so forth. Then he ran out of money. He was working on his Ph.D. So he took a job at Whitehall, Montana. And he was there the year that I was at Heart Mountain, the first year. And then he wanted to come down. And of course they gave him a job. And we were married then. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: And so after the war ended, how did you end up in Pasco then? How did that happen? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: Oh, that was when--we stayed in Heart Mountain until almost the end of the summer. And then my husband was interested in getting a teaching job in Washington. So he started applying for jobs along the Columbia River, any big town. And Pasco was the first one that answered his letter and said, we have a science job. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: What were your first impressions of Pasco? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: Terrible. [LAUGHTER] Terrible. It was the last day in August. Very, very hot. We were in what they call the Riverside homes, down the river. Big room. We must have had a refrigerator. I don't remember it. But the cupboards were open. No doors on the cupboards or anything. And of course there was no electricity. I mean, you couldn't buy any electric gadgets. You did your cooking on a range. And if you can imagine that, on the last day of August--then it was then that C.L. Booth, the superintendent, asked me if--or I said, do I have to stay here? And he asked me what I did. And I said, oh, I've been teaching school. And he said, come on up and we'll you a job. So then I taught a year. And then we quit to have our family. And then I went back later. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: And so you already knew about Hanford before you came here, though. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: Yeah, we found out. The end of August, I guess, or in August, whenever that was, when my sister and her husband were there, because they'd just gotten married. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: So what was Pasco like as a community in the 1940s, 1950s? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: Well, we stayed the first night at the new Pasco hotel on Lewis Street. And before we got our Riverside apartment. And it was pretty hot. I wasn't much impressed. My husband always wanted to go to Hawai’i. And he thought, well, we would be on our way to Hawai’i, then. He thought it would be nice to teach over there. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: And so you stayed. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: So we stayed. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: So that would be 70--almost 70 years? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: Yeah, well, it was 70--I figured it was 72 years since I'd been at Heart Mountain. We came to Pasco in '45. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: '45? 69 years, I guess. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: About 20 years. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: ‘45 to now. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: Yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: So if there anything I haven't asked you about-- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: Well I think we’ve- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: --Heart Mountain? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: Well, there was one thing that--the Nisei were subject to draft. And they had to fill out a big form. And they had a couple questions on there that a few of them wouldn't sign. One of them, are willing to withdraw all allegiance to the Japanese emperor? And the other one, are you loyal to the United States? Would you be serving the Army? And there was a committee that formed. And some of them thought their constitutional rights had definitely been tramped on. And that they wouldn't sign, they said, until they were given their freedom back. But the 442nd contingent that you know about, that was so very, very famous, they were all made up of Japanese. And a lot of Japanese took part there. But because of the questionnaire and so forth, and some of them got a little belligerent, they were arrested. And there was one fellow who really wouldn't give in. And he was put in jail for three years I know of. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: So you knew about that, about the questionnaire. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: Uh-huh, yeah. That happened while we were there. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: Were there a number of young men from Heart Mountain who did end up going to the military, joining the Army? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: Oh, yes, yes, a lot of them. Which I think was pretty wonderful. The way they've been treated, that they would actually go. But they were showing their loyalty to the US. They claimed they were still US citizens. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: Well, this has been very interesting for me. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: Well, it's fun to review it. I hadn't thought about it for so long. But it's interesting. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: At some point, when you were here in Pasco, did you ever get to know any of the Japanese-Americans who lived here who had been in Heart Mountain? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: Well, my husband had Jerry Minatoya I think, in class in Heart Mountain. And when he got here, he had him in class in high school. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: Wow. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: There were a number of Japanese families living in Pasco, though. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: Well, I want to thank you for coming in and sharing your experiences and your photos. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: Well it’s been—I'm sorry my voice is so cracky. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Bauman: No, it’s wonderful. Thank you very much. Really appreciate it. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX227730302"> Gladden: You're welcome. </div> Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri-Cities Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:32:00 Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1945-2015 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Booth, C.L.; Minatoya, Jerry Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 226 Kbps Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Elizabeth Gladden Description An account of the resource An interview with Elizabeth Gladden conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2016-05-30: Metadata v1 created – [J.G] Subject The topic of the resource Pasco(Wash,) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 7/7/2014 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. 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Ice Skating Pasco (Wash.) swimming War Relocation Authority (United States) https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F2046a01b468d5806f2eeb9ac74c631f3.jpg 570a52b3830287cda5b3b79dc4b071fd https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F6044cabd932f17cf7e979c559097da63.mp4 707021a797b556cd2c395a8fc8f9fd0b Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Arata, Laura Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Emil, Leitz Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Northwest Public Television | Leitz_Emil Man one: Whenever you're ready. Laura Arata: We’re ready to go? Man one: Yeah, yup. Arata: Okay. So if we just start off, if I could have you say your name, and then spell your last name for us. Emil Leitz: Emil E. Leitz, the last name spelled, L-E-I-T-Z. Arata: Thank you. My name's Laura Arata. And we're conducting this interview on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. The date is November 7th, 2013, already, somehow. So I wonder if we could start just by having you tell us a little bit about how you come to Hanford, when you arrived here, so what your initial experience was like? Leitz: Okay, I came to Hanford after I served my tour of duty during the Korean War. And I had worked for GE prior to going in the service, and they asked me where I would like to go back to work for them. And so I told them I would like to go the Northwest, and they said, well, Hanford is a place where we have some jobs. We'd be glad to place you there. So I came to Hanford. My wife and I were married at the time. We had one child. Hanford, to me, going first on the job, it was kind of old time I'd say. The ride to the area was by bus, but the buses were not air conditioned. They were, in the winter, very cold because the heaters were not very adequate. The assignment to the C Reactor was my choice after I had been here for a while. There were some other engineers who came in when I did. We each went our own ways. The trip, I mentioned, was by bus, but as also, we had to take our own lunches. We didn't have eating—preparation for food out in the areas. I was in the research and development organization as an engineer trying to, at that time, improve both safety and production. Something that was really, really emphasized, the importance for safety here at Hanford. And at that time, they were also wanting to increase production because we were in the big race with Russia to whoever could make the most bombs supposedly was going to be the winner of this Cold War. Well, after I worked for—well, the first assignment I had really at C Reactor was they were trying out a new fuel element, and that would cool the fuel both internal and external to the fuel. And it took a special spacer on the end to mix them. Now a spacer is something that positions the fuel in the reactor. And it would take a special one of these spacers to mix the fuel between the inner and outer cooling channels on the fuel. And it so happened that at C Reactor, once they got their reactor up and charged it, they couldn't get the reactor to run. We had every process tube, 2,003 of them--were monitored by a flow monitor. And that flow monitor, if the pressure exceeded certain limits, it would automatically shut the reactor down. And it just kept shutting the reactor down. And the plant manager, he wanted to abort the whole program. He says, it's common to all of the tubes, we just can't operate the reactors, so the fuel is a failure. And they asked me my opinion, and I said, it could very well be that we only have a very few tubes mischarged without that mixer spacer. Because I had them run some tests that showed that if that mixer spacer's in there, the pressure would be oscillating between the tube. And we couldn't identify at that time which particular tube was causing the problem. So that's what I told my management, and then two days later, the plant manager came into me, he was just livid. He said, you told the people that I was making a mistake in charging the reactor, that I was not controlling it adequately. And he said, I'm going to get your ass. That's just what he said. And I'm going to check every process tube in that reactor, and prove that you’re wrong. Well, they checked them, and they had seven process tubes mischarged. They corrected the charge, the reactor went up—operated perfectly. Never had another scram, so I didn't hear anything more from that manager. So it was kind of interesting point of view about my first assignment, and I got that kind of pressure from some of the managers. Arata: How long did that take, to test that many process tubes? Leitz: Oh, to load the reactor probably took six months or so. Because they would do, as the field became ripe, the old field became ripe--or ready for discharge--they would discharge, it was a couple hundred tubes, and then put new ones in. So that took probably two, three charges ‘til they—when they got--And I don't know when the problem first occurred to having these inadvertent scrams, but when I got there, they were ready to abort the load. And would have really reduced—they had to increase the flow into the reactor, and they could not really get full utilization. Those reactors originally were built for 200 megawatts—I think that's what it was--and they were all operating up around 2,000 then after they got these new fuel elements in and the new flow up. So ten times the power that they originally designed for. So there were really some big improvements. Along with this going on, it was in 1957 in Richland, they were going to sell the homes. They made a big—they were going to get out of the business of having houses, and a lot of the people were pretty leery. Hey, they're going to be shutting this down because most of them knew, oh yeah, we've got plenty of weapons. We really don't need all this plutonium for weapons. And so some people were very hesitant. They offered the homes at 75% of the appraised value of the house if you didn't want the buy-back clause. And if you paid full price, the government would promise to buy it back if something would happen that there was a real economic downturn in Richland. And I found this one guy who says, he was in no way ever going to invest in his buying a house in Richland. And I said, okay. A ranch house is appraised at $10,000, if you buy one, I'll pay you $8,500 for it. So it's appraised at $10,000, and I said, I'd pay you at $8,500. And you buy them in the no buy-back clause, and so that's how I bought my first house. I had been grinning. I couldn't get into one of the government houses, and they were about half the rent I had to pay in a commercial housing organization, which that time was warehousing. So that's kind of an interesting thing as far as living here in Richland goes. People are always a little bit leery about how long could they really want to continue to run those reactors. Arata: All right. Leitz: So the success there at C Reactor--and I was then reassigned to process standards and other jobs. And one night I wanted to start up when they had the approval to build the N Reactor, it was about 1962. I had been here, oh, seven years. They selected me to be what they called the startup engineer for the N Reactor. They had three tests. They had the N1s, which was for physics testing. You had the N2 and N3. The N2 just brought the reactor up in enough power that it could supply its own power for its turbines, and they could back off the boiler. They have a big boiler plant that would generate the steam that normally could drive the turbines. And then they would bootstrap it up. You'd get enough steam, and you'd start these big turbines up, and then you go on up in power. N Reactor was designed for 4,000 megawatts, so I had the job of designing—Now it was unique to any other reactor in the world, and a lot of people say, that reactor just isn't going to run. It's too complicated. It had only 1,000 process tubes, but it also was on recirculation, and no contamination left that plant. It was all--the water just recirculated, and then we didn't release the coolant to the river like all the other reactors that the water would go through the reactor and into the river and still have some radioactivity still left in it, so the N Reactor was a solution for that particular problem. So as they're prior getting ready for writing all those tests and starting of the reactor as assigned training mission aboard the Nuclear Ship Savannah. The Nuclear Ship Savannah was built as part of the Atoms for Peace under Eisenhower. And then that was kind of jointly N Reactor was kind of the same sort of thing, where we would have an Atoms for Peace. We had, instead of just producing plutonium, we also could eventually, if it was approved, add the power generation station. So the original testing of N Reactor went very well, on schedule, and they gave me this little award here, which is the general manager’s award. They didn't give many of these out. And actually, along with that I got a check that was about the size of another month’s pay, so when I was young and needed the money, that was very welcome. Arata: We'll get a picture of that at the end for sure. Leitz: So with that success then, we went ahead and I, during the lifetime of the N Reactor, I worked there a long time. The dual purpose construction was approved in May of 1965, and as a part of that dedication, President Kennedy came out and made a big dedication. And let me see, I think—yeah, 37,000 people came to hear the President speak here the first time Hanford was open up to the public. They had parked thousands of cars out there out in the middle of the desert. Kennedy came in a helicopter. Even though we had watered the ground down, it was just a cloud of dust because it was a construction site, and man, boy, you couldn't even see the helicopter when it was landing. And I had the big job of helping park cars and stuff like that at that time. That’s what it took an engineer to do. [LAUGHTER] It was kind of a fun day for everybody, I think. Arata: Did you get to actually see President Kennedy going over his speech then? Leitz: Yeah, oh, yeah. We got to really see him. Nobody got to shake hands with him, except a very few. I mean, they still have the podium somewhere that he talked from. That's still on display in the museum somewhere. So the first real problem that occurred at N Reactor that they couldn't solve. For some reason, we were having a lot of fuel failures. And some of it was due to equipment problems. Some of it was due to the way they were loading the tubes and that sort of thing. And they appointed me to hit up a task force to try and reduce the fuel failure rate. The fuel failure rate was something like one a month! And when the task force got done and made all these recommendations and they implemented them, we got it down to something like one a month. Now in doing that job, I decided I'm going to do it as a thesis for my master's degree in business. And so it was an operational analysis sort of thing. It was very successful, and I got my thesis paper written and that sort of thing, and that's in the libraries here somewhere. So that was very successful at Battelle. Then I got to be manager of the N Reactor Operations, and I always had to test everybody before they--I was part of a team that tested everybody before they would be certified. N Reactor was the first reactor at Hanford, at least, that certified ladies to be reactor operators. We had two or three ladies while I was manager of operations at the plant that became certified, which I was pretty proud that we didn't have this bias, women against men and that sort of thing. But after I got done, when I was manager I followed every startup personally to make sure they didn't mess up, that they were doing it right. And then I went into managing the safety for all the reactors that were left and fuels and so on and so forth. And the people in the plant operations were always trying to get me to do faster reactor startups. Because if you get the plant started up faster, you get to generate your electricity faster, and they say you could gain as much as a third of a day production by starting up the reactor fast. Well, when they asked me go back in and again--well the fuel failure rate went way up. Going up to better than one a month. And asked me to go again and examine what's going wrong with--how come the fuels are failing? And I said, because you're not really sticking with the original recommendation of controlling slowly and raising reactor power level. And no, no, no, we don't believe that. And so I said, okay, let's arbitrate it with Battelle. Battelle will analyze it. So they came in with their people who really understand stress and strains and all that kind of stuff. And they analyzed it and said that they were reactor startup rates that they were going at put ten times the stress on as a reaction scram would. So once they've, again, got control of their power rates going up again, the fuel failures went way back down again. So that was another one of the ways that I put a success on my career. In fact, we were there for a while. We were so erratic in the way the reactor would shut down and start up--is that the dams—if we would trip off, they would have to pick up the electrical load. And that one of the dams when I went to visit with the Corps of Engineers, back when I was taking some of my reserve training through the Corps of Engineers, I saw a sign, Old Faithful where the N Reactor power was showing. It was kind of interesting. It's interesting that when the first electrical energy was produced, three of the reactors had already been shut down. Now we always felt that N Reactor that N Reactor could just about replace the production of those three reactors. And so we weren't too worried about us getting shut down. But as we operated on through the years, we had all the reactors shut down by 1969, actually--yeah, by 1971, all reactors, including N Reactor, was shut down. And we started the big campaign to get to the Washington Public Power Supply system and/or now the Northwest Electrical Energy to give us better payment for our steams, and with the better rate on steam, we got people to then restart N Reactor under a better contract. So in 1971, after being shut down as a part of all the reactors, we were restarted and allowed to operate. We operated through—okay, and in 1971, when all the plants were down, we had another president visit. The only second president that I know that came to Richland, and that Nixon that came. And he'd give us the old pep talk about how he wasn't going to leave us all in the lurch here in Hanford. That we're going to have people like Pacific Northwest labs and so on and bringing the business, and there'd be plenty for us to do. Well, we did get N Reactor restarted and we operated then through—well, Mt. St. Helens erupted in '80 and in 1980, we had to do some upgrades to make sure that that sort of thing would not interfere with our operation. We got up to where we generated 65 billion kilowatt hours of electrical power, and then in 1987, after that achievement, we were shut down to make some safety improvements to improve our operation, make it more safe. And we never did restart from that. We were kept out. So at that time I was reassigned to the decommissioning work, cleaning up Hanford and being mainly involved in safety with the reactors. I became more involved then with making sure that the effort to decontaminate everything, and it was done within environmental requirements and within safety requirements. You had these big tanks of waste, and there's a potential that just by sticking a probe into a tank of waste, you can moderate the waste such that it could possibly even go critical like a reactor. So we had to examine everything they wanted to do--if they wanted to put a new pump in a tank or if they wanted to move the liquid around, if they wanted to stir the liquid, or if they wanted to use certain chemicals. And what would be your environmental impact? Where do you look for waste from the tanks? A lot of waste is just buried out there. Just if you wanted to get rid of radioactive waste, you go out and dig a hole and you put some waste--and you put it in there. And so recovering all of that and recovering that safely for personnel and for the environment is the job that I ended up doing for the rest of my career. So basically I had what I considered a pretty good career at Hanford. I really thought there were some good challenges, and I thought I made some pretty good contributions to operations at Hanford Project. Arata: Is it okay if I ask a few more follow up questions? Leitz: Pardon? Arata: Can I ask you a few more follow up questions? Leitz: Oh, you bet ya. Arata: That was some good coverage of your time— Woman one: There’s also some water there if you need it. Leitz: No, I don’t need it. [LAUGHTER] Arata: --And your working period. I wonder if you could talk to us a little bit more about on board the Savannah, and how that experience came about? I mean, what your experience on the ship was like and what its mission was? Leitz: Okay. I could talk all day on that, really. But the first thing, we got on in Portland, Oregon. And we went out to the—the first thing I knew it is there a man came aboard the ship, the side, and he took over the control of the ship. He was a harbor pilot. And I didn't realize that. Why is that? And he said, well, because that particular bay going out into the ocean is noted as the graveyard for many ships because that's one of the worst entries into the ocean there as far as being rough and tricky, and it moved around. So you have to have a particular man who knows what's going on in that bay to help to get the ship out. So that was kind of interesting to find out that there are those kind of risks with running a ship. Arata: And how would this come about? How had you gotten the invitation to be on the Savannah? Leitz: Well, based on my experience. They stuck me to be a startup engineer, and they thought and felt I needed special training in high pressure, high temperature reactors. And there was an opportunity to get it, on a ship that used the same kind of a reactor that we had on the N Reactor except it was much, much smaller. It was toy one compared with the N Reactor. Let's see, is there really anything more about that? Oh, what they did is they selected the people on the basis of having one with the reactor at all times during the startup testing. So the four shift managers were selected. My boss's bosses were selected, and I was selected to get that particular training because they felt I would be writing the tests. I need to know about all of it. And they needed to have that experience on every shift. The top man in every shift was also on that ship. So it was kind of interesting, just as a sideline, five of them are Navy men, and I was an Army man, and I was kind of the butt of their jokes. You're going to get seasick, and we're going to all laugh at you. And we get into--after we went through the Panama Canal--and we all took some time off in the Panama Canal in terms of working extra before and after—but after we got to the Panama, we went into the Caribbean, and we did get into quite a storm. That ship was actually taking water over the bow. It would go down and go up and go down and go up. And I was out there watching that bow and then I went in to go and eat that night. And I couldn't find any of those other guys. Couldn't find a one of them anywhere. That was kind of a funny part of it is I was probably the only one, I don't think, that didn't get seasick. But it was a fun trip, and we flew back home from Galveston, then. Arata: What route did the ship take while you were on it? Leitz: Well, it went down the coast of South America in through the Panama Canal into the Caribbean and into Galveston, Texas, yeah. Arata: How long were you aboard? Leitz: 30 days. It was a nice cruise. Really it's one of the best vacations I ever had. [LAUGHTER] Except they had us do a study, but I didn't mind the study at all. Arata: I wonder if I could have you talk just a little bit--you did a lot of work on safety and security. Could you talk a little bit about if you had to where any special protective clothing in what you did or maybe what sorts of standards you set for other people to follow? Leitz: At one time I was a manager, in fact, of first-hand safety, but only safety in the context of security and that sort of thing. At one time, they had a big upgrade at Hanford for security, and I was in charge the upgrading. But as far as personally, I went into the reactor sites many times and had do the special clothing. If there's any chance of air contamination, you had to have respirators on. And to get out of a radiation area, you have to go to two step-off pads. The first one you just get your clothes off on it. And the second one then, they check you in, and you can come on out. But you had radiation monitors check you any time you come out of a radiation suit and instruments, you put your hands and feet on them and a special clothing. Arata: Were there ever any incidents that you recall? Anything either humorous or a little bit scary or anything like that? Leitz: Well, some that aren't too finicky. One of the K Reactors, when they started it, they had a new physicist, and he held a high period. I don't know if you realize, a 30-second period when you're at watts, you aren't really increasing power real fast, but if you keep that 30-second period when you’re up in megawatts, then it's very, very rapid, increasing power. And then it was the startup of one of the Ks, this new physicist had him hold that 30-second period until the reactors scrammed out from these [INAUDIBLE] trips. Now one thing I could mention is that the change in technology has really changed. Back at C Reactor, we didn't know which tube was causing the scram. With the N Reactor, we knew everything going on, every tube. And we used to have to take our data downtown, in an automobile, we'd punch it out on key cards, and we'd take it down and punch those into a computer. And we'd get the limits back, we'd go back to the reactor and say, okay, you can raise power. And then we would go in and get some more limits and back and forth between town and back. And that took a long time ready to start up because that N Reactor, you had instantaneous information. You knew right along just exactly how every tube related to its limit, pressure and temperature. So we went from analog kinds of systems to digital kinds of systems, just the same thing you see in your TVs or your telephones, the same kind of thing happened at the reactors as far as computerization and technology. So that was really an enhancement. Arata: Were there any aspects of your work that you found sort of the most challenging or the most rewarding? You had several different jobs. Leitz: [LAUGHTER] Well, I think the most rewarding was where I faced up a couple managers [LAUGHTER] and won the battle. Arata: During C Reactor? Leitz: But there's some worry to our time in that too, you know, what if I'm wrong? But it turned out all right. And I think that's part of the reason that I was really considered the one man who knew the most about the reactor. I didn't know everything, but I probably knew more than most people about there. Because I started it up, I lived with it to its life, and I got the picture kind of as a reward for when I retired. Arata: Is anything that was the most challenging, maybe to work through in your time at Hanford? Leitz: I think when I think of the operation N Reactor, I think it was the most challenging job I had. Because that one required, like I said, I went with all the startups. And that's when I was a process engineer with the reactor. When they had problems, they'd call us at night and that sort of thing. But with N Reactor, it was kind of more volunteer, but to know—and some of the shift managers were pretty hesitant on their own to make decisions. And I think that was probably the most challenging job was the operation of one of those big reactors—or that single big reactor and knowing when or when not to say, hey, you've got to shut down, or you don't have to shut down. And the controls even at N Reactor on the environmental controls, you can let down water into a crib—into a spill cooler if you wanted to, and even that was very, very--it had to be done without radiation released into the environment. And there's a real, real difference in attitudes over the years of environmental control and making sure you did not release isotopes into the environment. Really had differences in attitudes. Arata: Yeah, I understand that the Chernobyl incident had a big impact on the decision to finally close N Reactor, to not restart N Reactor. Do you have any thoughts? Leitz: Well, N Reactor is a graphite moderator reactor. And Chernobyl when they raised power level fast, their graphite coefficient was different than N Reactor. N Reactor, if you raised the power fast, it would shut it down, it would tend to shut it down. So as you were starting up fast, in R Reactor, you had to pull the rods faster and faster if you heat it up faster in order to keep the activity going up. In Chernobyl, the same thing happened, but their rods weren't strong enough to stop it. And so it kept going up in power until it melted the core. Now at N Reactor, we ran a lot of experiments to try and prove that even if that did happen, we don't think our graphite would have burnt. But to tell somebody you've got a graphite stack over here that burnt, and then we've got a graphite stack over here that's a little different composition and made up a little different way, it won't burn—just one cell. We still believe that we never could've burnt the N Reactor stack, but basically, that's what kept it down. It's shut it down for keeps—it’s the fact that why won't our stack burn? We just couldn't prove our stack wouldn't burn. We put torches on it, heat it up to a tremendous temperature, it wouldn't burn, but is that enough proof that it won't burn? You know, just wouldn't quite buy. So you know about a little bit about Chernobyl, huh? [LAUGHTER] Arata: A tiny bit. What was Hanford like overall as a place to work? Leitz: Well, the real inconvenience is location. Riding the bus back and forth initially, and later, we drove our own car. I actually wore out a little Metropolitan driving back and forth. I kind of enjoyed that little car, but we got to use our own cars. We carpooled and these sorts of things. One thing you'd see in the desert, and I don't know if many, many people are aware of it, but sometimes you see a lot of rabbits killed on the highway. And pretty soon you'd see no more rabbits on the highway, but you start seeing wolves and coyotes killed on the highway. And that's the cycle of what would happen is when there are lots of rabbits, there's a lot for the coyote to eat. And you could just see that cycle at Hanford, over a number of years, the population of each of those would vary. And if the rabbit population goes out, then the other population goes out. When it goes down, it goes down. So it was kind of interesting to see that. Arata: Yeah. I wonder if we could back up just briefly to when you first arrived, if you had any impressions of what Richland was like as a community when you first arrived here? Leitz: Well, the main reaction we had was, man, it’s costing us a lot more to live than those people that have been here for a while because they had a lot of stuff provided to them, coal or whatever. But you know, the rents were half what we had to pay and that sort of thing, but that didn't last forever. And buying the houses was it really turned out to be a very promising thing. We had weather storms, pretty bad. We had termination winds. We had a pastor, one of our pastors at church--the wife was just by herself when the storm had come in the sand would come through her doors. She wanted her husband to stop that from happening. [LAUGHTER] We had a lot of activities for couples and younger people and so on that we don't have now. Sororities, the Army Reserve meetings, and all these sort of things, you know. Nowadays, people don't want the same kind of entertainment as they had back in those days with Richland. So it’s a different style, more thrifty, maybe that's the whole United States. Arata: Did you have sorts of dances or community events, things like that? Leitz: Yeah, had quite a few community events and dances and things like that. Arata: I know at one point you mentioned White Bluffs. Did you go out to the town site at any point during your first few years here? Leitz: Well, we had to drive past it almost every day. [LAUGHTER] Arata: Were there still buildings standing by that point? Or-- Leitz: The foundations in some of the walls and stuff were there, but none of the buildings were really intact. One of the old gas stations--but some of the people, and I didn't get it going, but some of the people did some exploration, which was not allowed. But they did on the old sites. Arata: I just have a couple other things that I wanted to ask you about from reading through your notes. A lot of what I've read about N Reactor talks about zirconium, and I understand this is sort of an innovation at the time. Could you talk a little bit about what it was, and why it was so new? Leitz: Well, zirconium, they needed a process tube. In the old reactors, there was just aluminum, because there was only cold water going through. They’d maybe get, oh, maybe it would get almost to boiling on the outside of some of the aluminum tubes. In the N Reactor you need a process tube that withstood the high temperature, high pressure. And so they developed this new metal, zirconium, that would withstand the temperatures and pressure and so on involved within the reactor, and the fuel was also clad in that. So if we ran on aluminum tube or aluminum fuel outline at the temperature we had to run at, it would have, what do you call it? A fuel failure. And fuel failures, well, I didn't talk too much about them, but there you're opening up the cladding to the uranium and then the uranium fission product took it in. And you’re likely for that to stay in the primary loop and cause high radiation to our workers. In the other old reactors, it would just go on through the reactor. And hopefully most of it would get picked up and they'd have a cooling pond for the water goes too and then the water goes the river. But small amounts of that could get to the river, and I think that's some of things they found with the aluminum tubes. But our zirconium tubes, they were much more resistant to temperature and pressure and so on. Arata: Is there anything that you'd sort of like to pass on, wisdom to future generations? Of course, most of my students didn't live through the Cold War. They were born afterwards and don't really have an understanding of that time. Is there anything that you'd like future generations to know about what that experience was like of living through and working through the Cold War? Leitz: Well, there's a lot of fear of radiation that's not merited, and it's something you have to learn to live with. Just like in our agricultural world, there are a lot of chemicals and stuff that we're using now we didn't use to use. But we have to learn to use them safely. I think radiation, contamination with radiation, there's a big difference between contamination and irradiation. If you go in for an X-ray, you get irradiated, but you don't get contaminated. If you get contaminated, you've actually got the radioactive material on you, and then you, yourself, become a carrier of that. Contamination is a thing that is more to be feared than just the radiation itself, but you have to control the radiation. Just understanding how to best preserve it. Now we haven't learned all our lessons yet on how to control all the fuel and the reactors, for instance. We haven't got a disposal method that--we're still arguing about how we're going to take care of those spent fuel elements and that sort of thing in our commercial reactors. And we have to learn to do that, but I think now—I just read an article the other day in the paper about the dangers we have from just fossil fuels or even the wind machines and so forth. They are not free of environmental problems. And so you've got to learn to live with radiation and, hopefully, that can be reactors, new generation reactors can be a source of power that will eliminate all these problems. Even the possibility of burning the fuel up to where it’s used up rather than create contamination. There are some real lessons to be learned yet. Arata: Is there anything I haven't asked you about yet that you'd like to tell me about? Leitz: Well, I told you about Nixon and the time when all the reactors were shut down. 65 billion kilowatt hours were generated by N Reactor before it was finally shut down. That's a lot of electrical power. At one time we were really the leading reactor insofar as the power generated, but that didn't last long as the new, larger reactors came online. But for a while, we were running the race. We overtook some of the smaller ones. Arata: I understand you were at the closure last year. Leitz: Yeah, last year I went out to closure. [LAUGHTER] That's almost funny because I found out they're going to have a shutdown, so I was trying to go. And this lady called to explain to my wife that--I wasn't home--that I wasn't invited. And she says, well, he thinks he's Mr. N Reactor. He thinks you ought to invite him, and after she talked to him, they invited me to go. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, that’s kind of-- Arata: Well, I want to thank you very much for coming in and sharing your stories with us. We really appreciate it. We'll get some images of your award and you picture now. Leitz: Yeah. Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:39:47 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 197 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview C Reactor N Reactor Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. ca.1955-1987 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Kennedy, John F. Nixon, Richard Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Emil Leitz Description An account of the resource An interview with Emil Leitz conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Subject The topic of the resource Hanford (Wash.) Hanford Site (Wash.) Hanford Nuclear Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Nuclear waste disposal Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013-11-07 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2016-06-21: Metadata v1 created – [RG] C Reactor General Electric Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, 1917-1963 N Reactor Richland (Wash.) Washington Public Power Supply System White Bluffs (Wash.) https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F46791ed421590b711a395ad8efbaf06d.jpg 92c08336667442429afb1c8754d9f1dd Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Eugene Astley Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Eugene Astley on December 5th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Mr. Astley about his experiences working at the Hanford site. And for the record, can you state and spell your name? Astley: Yeah. Eugene Astley. That’s E-U-G-E-N-E, A-S-T-L-E-Y. Franklin: Great. So let’s start at the beginning. Tell me how and why you came to the Hanford site. Astley: I was working in General Electric back in Schenectady in the research labs. Loved my job there, but in 1954—the winter of ’53, really, it was like 30 below, and I decided to walk into work. That wasn’t going to work. Hated the weather. So, when I walked in the building, I walked up to the top, and walked in the boss’s office and said I want to give you a month’s notice. I’m leaving. I cannot stand this weather. Summer’s even worse. [LAUGHTER] So, I was sitting in my office and a couple weeks later, when Dave McGlenagan[?] who’s the recruiter for the laboratory walked into my office and said, are you Eugene Astley? I said, yeah. He said, I understand you’ve given notice to General Electric Company, and there was a notice put out to all subsidiaries and whatnot that they thought this person should be retained in the General Electric Company. We have a project out at Hanford. I said, yeah. I said, you’re not talking about taking me out there in that damn desert, are you? I was raised in Portland, Oregon. I mean, nobody lived in that part of the world. [LAUGHTER] So, he talked me into coming out, and then they explained that they had a group called design, and they were thinking about perhaps adding a new production reactor, which would be the ninth one, I guess. Yeah, the ninth one. And that the physicist who had been in charge of doing—was on this particular design team, which they called a core design, had left. So they wanted me to fill that position. I’d never before worked in any such project or reactor or anything. I told them, I don’t know anything about reactors. And they said, well, you did your master’s degree in studying gaseous diffusion, which is the basis of all the theory we’re using for reactors right now. And you’ll find out, except for terminology, you’re an expert. [LAUGHTER] So I came. And so then I slid into this design group, and then the idea of the production reactor—new one—came along. They asked us to design a concept. We were a group of about eight people. And I was the chief physicist of all the physics on the work. We got going on that. I came on up with the idea that this really ought to be different from the Hanford reactors as we know them, because it ought to be a dual-purpose reactor, one that produced electricity. And I said it’s going to be about 3,000 megawatts thermal, and we can probably produce around 1,000 megawatt electric, which would be a great addition. That’d bring in a lot of income, and it would pay for—more than pay for—the operation of the plant. So you’d be getting your new plutonium free. Of course, GE management thought that was great. So that’s the way it went down. And then about, I think, two years later, when we were well into the design and pretty well doing it, it came to the attention of the Atomic Energy Commission more directly about what exactly would the design look like. As soon as the word dual purpose came out, they said, what do you mean by that? We’re going to produce electricity. Uh-oh! So, it turned out that Bill Johnson and Al Grenager and I were then called back to testify before the DOE—the AEC first and then Congress. Because the democrats were controlling—they thought it was a great idea. Republicans were against any government getting into the power business. They already had too much with TVA and Bonneville. So they were dead set against it. So we testified on what a great thing would be for helping to lower the costs of plutonium. We were still in the Cold War, so we thought it was still needed more. So I came back, and about three weeks later, down came the word that there was a compromise made politically, so that we would be allowed to produce enough power to run the reactor only. But that in view of the fact that things sometimes change, we want you to also design it so that at some later date when they decide producing 1,000 megawatt electrics would be feasible, go ahead and design it as a dual purpose anyway. But design it so that the first operation would be like lower temperature water, 350. Of course, that just blew our mind, because that was absolutely stupid. [LAUGHTER] I mean, because you had to design the thing to operate with 700 or 750-degree water. So that really increased the cost of things and what you could do and what you didn’t have to do. But nobody had ever designed a turbine to run at 350 degrees. Okay? Because the pressure’s so low, you end up with a monster. When you walked—when we finally built that thing, you walked in it, people that had designed turbines would ask, what is that? It had no relationship to anything anybody had ever conceived. You walked in, looked at the turbine, what’s that? [LAUGHTER] And of course at those pressures, the steam you’re producing is very wet, which is also deterrent. And you have to redesign the buckets to collect the water and drain it off. I mean, it was an abortion. And it made it very difficult to design. So it took special precautions, it entered into physics that I had to start designing some new physics and mathematics to handle the damn problem. Because they turned out that—at 700 degrees, if you have a tube burst, then the pressure comes out and wants to blow the stack apart. So, the first thing the engineer said, we got to groove these graphite blocks so there’s a place for the steam to go on out, and then we’ll bleed it out of the reactor and dissipate it in a very large area. But all of the sudden now, from a physics standpoint, now I’ve got neutrons wanting to stream out that way. That had never been handled before, so I had to figure out how to handle that from a physics standpoint. It turned out to be mathematically difficult. We didn’t have—you know, the computer we had was a 650, which was about 1/1000th as much as the computer in your cell phone. [LAUGHTER] I mean, you know? No memory. It was horrible—mechanical-type thing. Franklin: Right. With tapes—the reels. Astley: Yeah, punch cards. Franklin: Punch cards, right. Astley: So then I’d have to get in and say, okay, I’ve put this thing in bucket number 5A, and where am I now? I’m over here, so I should spin the thing this direction so I’ll have a shorter time to get back to the memory spot. I mean, this is by today’s standards, this is below most computer people’s mind, thinking that’s what you’re doing. Actually had to tell the drum which way to spin? Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Astley: You know? Franklin: Yeah. Astley: Anyway, we got that, we finally did design that. It was in dead run for a number of years and produced enough energy to do itself. But of course it got shut down before anything ever came of producing electricity. But that was a good case of where philosophies between the two political parties actually designed a reactor. That’s just—not good? [LAUGHTER] I can understand where—because I was republican also. I can understand where they were coming from, but it still made sense from the standpoint of saving money for the country. Franklin: Right. Astley: You know? Franklin: Yeah. Astley: So I thought it was a good thing to do. And I didn’t think of it in terms of really putting the government further into it. But they were afraid that it would set a precedence for all further government operations and that type of thing. It would be invasive from that standpoint. Franklin: So their opposition was more ideological, and you perhaps had a more kind of practical viewpoint— Astley: Yeah, yeah. Franklin: --on that. How did you solve the problem of the neutrons bleeding out? Astley: I did it by going to cylindrical. At that time, you really had two choices, spherical or cylindrical. I got to looking at cylindrical geometry, and then I remembered from my graduate work that the engineers used cylindrical—I mean their theorists did. And that instead of, in physics where we’re using spheres, you use Bessel functions, and they were using Hankel functions. And I’d never really used a Hankel function. But they’re just as powerful for cylindrical geometry as Bessel functions were spheres. So I used that kind of a mathematical approach and cobbled up some—and then imposed upon it a radial geometry at the same time to make the math work. So it was kind of interesting, because what you did was increase the albedo and lost a lot of neutrons out, which then was important. You know, what did our shielding have to look like, and how much more does that make it that we have to enrich the fuel to be able to sustain the fission? Franklin: Oh. Did the reactor ever operate at 700 degrees? Because I know they put the steam generating station—the WHPSS station— Astley: Well, what they did was they didn’t build the second part of the turbine. Franklin: Oh, okay. Astley: They just built the turbine to be able to do its job. Franklin: Right. Astley: And then later they could come on in with the normal turbine and move the old one back and go with the new turbine. Franklin: And did that happen? Astley: No. Franklin: Oh, okay. Astley: Never happened. It was still politically impossible. Franklin: Do you kind of connect it with that reactor—do you remember JFK—were you present at JFK’s visit? Astley: I’m sorry, I didn’t get that. Franklin: I’m sorry. Connected with the N Reactor, were you present at JFK’s dedication of the steam generating facility—the steam processing facility? Astley: Yeah, I think so. I barely remember that, you know. Franklin: Oh, okay. Astley: That was not part of anything that I designed. I told them what the parameters had to be, but it was up to the engineering part. Different group of people. Franklin: Okay. So, tell me about the Fast Flux Test Facility and how you came to design that. Astley: Okay. Well, then, I had—in 1960 then, I was promoted out to handle all the maintenance and maintenance engineering for the eight reactor operating—operating reactors. At that time, when they pulled me and said they wanted to do that, I said, you know, I’m a physicist. I’m a theoretical physicist, in fact. I’d done some experimental work, but I really am not a guy who knows much about maintenance. And they said, precisely. That’s your problem. We think you have real management capabilities; you need to learn more about other things. [LAUGHTER] So they said, it’s our opinion that to a certain extent the pressures on the reactor manager are so hard to never shut the reactor down, and when it does shut down to get it back on its feet, that the maintenance tends to be a little bit more crude than we would like. And we’d like to have a little more technology put into it. So that sounded a little more interesting. [LAUGHTER] But I ended up with like 1,000 pipefitters and millwrights and machine shops and stuff like that that I was in charge of. That was my first experience with dealing with the union. Franklin: Okay. Astley: Which was a broadening experience, certainly. Franklin: I bet. Any notable experiences when dealing with the union? Astley: Not good ones. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Astley: They—one of the problems there again was politics. The unions were very strong with the democrats. So if you were tried to get hardnosed and have a strike, you just—the top management got a call immediately from the president or vice president, that type of stuff, saying, we understand that, you know, what you’re trying to do, shut down our production? You can’t do that; give them what they really want. That was their sort of philosophy. So they ended up with a lot of—which was very difficult for me, because I was also then working with these people. And when you up in the front face when a tube failed—leaked—then you had to pull off some big bolts on the thing that held the tube in. And then you had to pull the tube out, so the union argued that handling the tube was pipefitter work, but handling the big phalange was millwright. So you had to have both kinds of people up there at the same time, taking radiation, when one guy would have been able to do it. Then of course, they say, well, we’re all suited up, so we’ll just wait while the other guy does his thing. So he had 50% work. So those kind of things went on, that it made it difficult from a management standpoint, because we had very strict rules about how much radiation people could take. You had a daily limit and a yearly limit. So one of the problems I had was trying to manipulate the forces so that I didn’t ever overexpose people. The front face had a lower radiation level than the rear face. So the front face would be like ten MR per hour, and the rear face might be 200 or 300. So that was also a logistical problem that was—I don’t know how many people thought about those kind of things, but those are important, you know? We had a three-R limit for everybody, so, the problem was then that when we got to the point that it looked like maybe we’d either have to hire some people, then I went over from another manager running the reprocessing plants, I could borrow some of his people to even out the radiation exposure. Franklin: Wow. Astley: So it was those kind of problems at that level that were very difficult, and later on were even more difficult, because it turned out that there was a—they redesigned the tubes, which had little—a round tube with little things on it poking up where the fuel could be centered—not really centered, because you needed more flow on the top than the bottom. But they redesigned those and redesigned them wrong. So they ended up getting them up too close, and the top of the tubes, the temperature of the water was too high so it started to erode all the tubing. At some point in I think it was 1963, we had to re-tube six of the reactors, which was 12,000 tubes. At that time, it took an hour-and-a-half to do one tube. Franklin: Wow. Astley: You know? Franklin: Yeah. Astley: And they said that we can’t do that. You got to get that down to like 30 minutes. So I ended up inventing a device for them that worked real well. When you have aluminum tube, you put a phalange on it. So you can put a gasket and seal it. To do that, the millwrights would go on up with three tools and put the first one in and bang it with a small sledge, which would do it. Then they’d do the second one a little more and the third one. And the problem was that some of the millwrights were very strong, and so the third one they’d really rap it. Those tended to crack. Franklin: Oh. Astley: So they had a lot of time like that. So I invented a—which turned out to be kind of fun, because of the problems involved—but I got the idea that—I’d been studying something, and I read at that time that if you move metal fast enough, it wouldn’t know it’s been moved, so it’d be stress-free. Wouldn’t crack. So there at that time for the weapons program were putting an explosive charge in and blowing a bubble on something. So I thought, hey, why don’t I do that. So I thought, I’ll modify a .45 automatic and have a blank. That gas pressure—which I read up on—was enough then to—if I had a rubber thing back in there, a mole, I could go in and pull the trigger and—shew—you’d have your phalange. 20 seconds, not an hour-and-a-half. So that blew the whole thing apart. We managed to get down to 15 minutes a tube. Franklin: Wow. Astley: That thing—that worked. But then, of course, as soon as I started to talk about this, safety people got involved. And then, even worse, the security people. Because, you said, you’re going to talk about bringing a loaded weapon on board with ammunition? We don’t do that. Only guards are allowed to have weapons. [LAUGHTER] So I think it took me two months to finally persuade whoever all’s involved that I could bring this in. And then it turned it out that I had to have a special safe to put the gun and the bullets—even though they were blanks and all that. And then we had to have a guard, that every time we took it out would go on up on the front face to make sure that somebody didn’t use the weapon somehow or other to kill somebody, or—you know, it was, I mean, little things like that that got to me. Kind of difficult for theoretical physicists to deal with. Really wasn’t—[LAUGHTER]—something--my feeling was, what a bunch of bullshit. I mean, trying to get a job done! And we got it done, and then everything was confiscated and done something with. Franklin: Wait, was there a specific—did you give a specific name to that tool? Astley: I just called it an explosive installing tool. And the word explosive didn’t get me off to a good start. It was very descriptive, unfortunately. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Yeah, I could see how— Astley: And for that I was awarded one share of General Electric stock. Franklin: One share? Astley: One share, right. Franklin: Wow. I assume that’s split into a couple more by now. Astley: I think so. [LAUGHTER] So anyway, there I was out there running maintenance when I got this call. Of course they knew my background, so—in fact, I was in charge of core design before they pulled me from being a physicist to being the supervisor of the core design group. So I had a lot of experience in that area. So they brought me in and Albaugh told me that he wasn’t sure where we wanted to go, but he said, I’ve got kind of a thinking here. He said, I really think that the way things are going, that the next reactor’s going to be a fast reactor—a breeder reactor. And so it sounds just off the top of my head, he said, that maybe that’s something you really ought to take a hard look at in this study. With only two weeks to do, I went to the library. For some reason, all’s I remember is the microfiche or something they called it, I don’t know. But at any rate, started running my eyeballs out on these things where I’d be looking at things that’d been photographed and trying to read about fast reactors. So I finally came to the conclusion that at that time—I found that Oak Ridge, which was the head of all fast breeder reactor stuff and running the Idaho operations, had EBR-I running as a test reactor. They had proposed to Congress that they wanted to build another one called FARET—F-A-R-E-T. About the only thing different about it and ERB-I is that they copied everything, except they changed the lid so they could get in and refuel easier. I thought, that’s a mistake. As long as you’re going to build a reactor, you ought to try to also make it more facile for doing its job of looking at exposure of fuels and materials. Also, it had such a low flux level that essentially what they had was if they had wanted to take ten years, find out what happened to this material in ten years, it took them ten years. It seemed to me that what you needed to do was get the flux up by at least a factor of ten. And then we could get ten years’ worth of experience in one year, and be real serviceable to the industry. So I then came back into Albaugh—this was after about a week—and I said, here’s what I think. But, I said, to go further any more, I think, so see whether this is possible to make something ten times as fast with the technology we got, I said, I really need to put together a concept. I said, I can’t do that by myself. I need an engineer to help me. There’s a guy on your staff that actually worked at Fermi Reactor, which is a fast breeder reactor built by—out of Chicago. Edison? Edison Electric, maybe. Can’t remember what—anyway, the head of that thing wanted to always lead the parade. They built it and didn’t understand the graphite swells as it—so that was a big fiasco, because after about—you know, I don’t know, six months or a year the whole thing cracked apart and couldn’t be run anymore. So I got a permission to do that. Then Albaugh said, well, go ahead and put together three or four people, whoever you need. And he said, but I can’t pay for it; I don’t have that in my budget. So he said, I want you to just go out wherever they are and talk whoever the manager is into loaning you somebody, and they pay for it. And I said, okay. But, he said, remember this is all secret. You can’t tell them what this is for. Franklin: Why was it secret? Astley: Because nobody knew General Electric was going to leave. Franklin: And what year was this again? Astley: That would have been ’64. Franklin: Okay. Astley: I’m sure—maybe they were thinking about it in ’63, I wasn’t in on it. But by the time I got knowledgeable about it, it was like July ’64. Franklin: And that was before most of the employees knew, right? It was still pretty secret at that time. Astley: GE was pulling out, period. Franklin: Right. Okay. Astley: So they were—I think there’s like, maybe three or four people of theirs—a couple at DOE, the highest guy running it and the next guy down. So it was a real super-secret project. So it was kind of awkward to go into a guy a couple levels higher than I was and sit down and tell him I needed to use his—like, Les Finch was an example of what I considered to be the best engineer on the planet that I knew, that I needed him. But I couldn’t tell him what for. You know? [LAUGHTER] It was—when I told Albaugh, I said, I don’t—gee, I’m not even sure that’s possible. I can’t tell him something. He said, well, he says, no, you’ve got a reputation for being the best pirate at the Hanford anyway. So you ought to be able to handle it. [LAUGHTER] And I did. I got together a group of four or five people. They then gave me a couple months. So it took me about 60 days of this group and we came up with a concept. I turned the patent in on it, got a patent on it. Then we actually came up with a design. In fact, I have a thing, it’s about this thick—when I left there they gave me a montage that essentially shows the reactor and all the kinds of parts that we devised. It was a beautiful thing by a designer I had on there that was an incredible draftsman. Did everything in ink, never made a mistake. Franklin: Was that Dennis Brunson? Astley: Beg your pardon? Franklin: Dennis Brunson? Astley: I didn’t get that. Franklin: Was that Dennis Brunson? Astley: No, it was Andy Anthony. Franklin: Oh, okay. Astley: Incredible guy. I mean, he did everything in ink, and he did it once, he did it fast. And he had an incredible ability to visualize three-dimensionally. So he would sit on my meeting, and we’d discuss, and I’d discuss what the core had to look like. Which, I’ve said, okay, we need more room, because that’s the big problem. We’ve got room on the top face of this reactor. And when I was down having lunch one day, I ordered a milkshake, and then I saw her lift up the thing to pull the straws out. What happens then is that the straws fold out. Okay? So you have a matrix of straws, which—I got back thinking about that. That’s a way to get the things apart and still have a dense core. Okay? Franklin: Ahh. Astley: So we designed the core that way. We only had to tilt the tubes like about eight degrees. That gave us a lot of room up there by the time you got up to where you wanted to work. So that was part of the design. That didn’t turn out to be—it wasn’t allowed to go through. The reason was that we were left alone. The head of the—I don’t know—well, I’ll tell you, because, I mean, what can they do? [LAUGHTER] We ended up with a big political problem within the AEC. The guy that was heading the AEC was in bed with Argonne, because they were the breeder reactor. So the fact that we came on in saying we wanted to build a reactor at Hanford and replace the FARET was absolutely objectionable to him. So I was called back to talk to him and explain what we were doing, why we were doing it, why the FARET wasn’t any good and whatnot. So he listened to the whole thing, I go back home. Three days later I get a letter—telegram from him saying stop and desist all work on the FFTF, whether it be private funds or public funds. Franklin: Wow. Astley: Okay? So I sat down with Fred and he said, well, why don’t I see what I can do. So he called his friend who was this guy’s boss, who had—I can’t—I got a moment where I can’t remember his name. Very famous physicist out of California. But he and Fred had been roommates together getting their Ph.D. And Fred’s wife had married his secretary. [LAUGHTER] So he called him up and he said, well, that’s interesting. So he called the AEC—the head of the commission itself, who are a group of congressmen that ran everything. Franklin: Mm-hmm. Astley: One of the congressmen happened to be interested in our concept. So he called us back there and he and Fred and I sat for about four hours talking about what we had in mind. So then we told him about—showed him these facts. And he said, well, I’ll take care of that. So what they did was fired him! Franklin: Wow. Astley: Okay? [LAUGHTER] Then word came down: continue with your work. And gave us a deadline for getting in a proposal and all that kind of stuff. I was left alone, totally, for a year. No guidance from the AEC. We were totally on our own while they were hunting to replace him. So they finally replaced him with Milt Shaw, who was Admiral—was he an admiral then? No, I think. Yeah, he was an admiral then. Admiral Rickover? Franklin: Yeah. Astley: So he came on in then. And then it took him a year, putting a staff together as he thought he needed it, along the Rickover-type thing. It was actually two years into the whole thing where we had finished the preliminary design. I was in the midst of putting out proposals to get the architect engineers in, when I got called back there to meet Milt. Then about two or three weeks later I came back and made a presentation where we were. And he said, no. He said, you don’t understand the problem. And I said, what problem is that? [LAUGHTER] He said, politically it’s very difficult right now to get the money I need to go forward with a prototype breeder reactor. So what I’ve got is this reactor. So I’ve got to make it—we want to make it as close to a prototype breeder as we can. And I said, if we do that, it’s going to sacrifice 90% of its ability to do the kind of work we really want to do for studying materials, which is our proposal. So we won’t be—the flux will be lower, and we’ll be back to looking like a modified or better machine than EBR-I. But I said, that just doesn’t make any sense to me. He said, I understand your technical problems. That hasn’t anything to do with the problem. I can only get so much money. I said, if we do that, we can’t do this reactor for the cost that we’ve pledged to do. I said, I have no idea what it will be costing, but it’s not going to be around $100 million. I said, it could be $200 or $300 million, I think. He said, well, you know, your thinking isn’t important to me; I’ll take care of that problem. So we finally received orders that we couldn’t skew the core. He said, who’s ever heard of a commercial reactor with a skewed core? He said, that doesn’t make any sense to me. You want—I said, it’s only eight degrees. I don’t think that’s going to make a bit of difference. Well, he said, we want the core straight. So, then he said, now, in order to do that, the people who really know how to do that is Westinghouse. You know, the whole background was Westinghouse—his background. So he said, put out a—why don’t you go out for proposals to design the core to at least three different people including Westinghouse. And then he said also take a look at Idaho, which was essentially part of the same group of people. Then said, and throw General Electric in. So I was forced to do that, which meant that we were that back starting at scratch. Two years’ worth of work down the drain. So that went on—I guess that was in late ’67. So by ’68, we had that work done, redoing everything. And then he said, okay, now—the next thing he said is we’re going to have to put all the sodium exchangers and whatnot inside the dome, because that’s what we’ll have to do with the prototypes. And I said, that’s going to make the dome be bigger than any dome anybody’s ever built in the world. I said, we can’t just say we’re going to do that until I get a chance to talk to people, like Chicago Bridge and Iron is probably going to have to do the job, or the Japanese. Don’t want the Japanese, he said! Okay. To find out if they can do this. You’re talking about equipment, and your equipment can only do so big. So I went back and talked to them, and found I was right, that they couldn’t do it. But that they could build a piece of equipment to do it, provided that the AEC wanted to pay for it. So I came back to him, and I said for $50 million they can do it. He said what’s the $50 million for? A machine. You’re handling these huge things, and they got to be cylinders. They don’t have any equipment—cranes and everything. So he said, okay, well, that’s no problem. So that’s the way it went. It kept going that way. In late ’68, I finally hired Bechtel to do a cost estimate for me on where we were. It came out about $455 million. [LAUGHTER] So I wrote a letter to Shaw and told him, the costs on this project are totally out of bounds. I said, every time we turn around, I get instructions from your staff to add this or add that. It just keeps going on and on and on. I don’t know where we’re going, but I said, for my study, we can probably go back to $150 million to $200 maybe, and keep most of the things you want. But, I said, you got to stop your people coming in and asking for anything without having a meeting back there to decide whether this is something we can afford or is really important. I said, you just got to stop everybody coming out there with their gut feelings and druthers. Okay? Well, as you can imagine, that didn’t sit well. I got called back there. He just really dressed me down. [LAUGHTER] Everybody later told me the whole floor evacuated it was so loud, him yelling at me. Franklin: Wow. Astley: So I came back and thought it through. Then I came in by Albaugh, who was the director of Battelle and told him—I mean Saul Fawcett, who was the director. And I told him that I really felt at this point, the costs are so far out of control, and I showed him the letter I got, that we needed to withdraw from the project. Now, this is nowhere in anybody’s record, so I don’t know what you want to do with that information. It caused a meeting, and then finally, Fawcett and Albaugh and I went back to the board of trustees and told them why we wanted to do this, and they gave us approval to do it. We then set up a meeting with AEC. Came back there, and in the meantime, Shaw had gotten so irritated at what I’d done that he decided that I wasn’t under proper control. So in the meeting, he said, what I want to do now at this meeting, see, I want to reorganize like I’ve done down at so-and-so. The laboratory will still be responsible for funding—handling the funds, paying the paychecks—but Gene Astley will then report directly to me, running the lab. So Battelle had nothing to do with any of the technology—anything else—just handling—so he said, you’ll still get your fee, et cetera. And Fawcett finally said, I think I can—if you’d let me say a few words here, I think we can get over this problem immediately. So Shaw said, yes, okay. He said, we’re formally asking you to find another contractor to run the project. Shaw said, you can’t do that! And Fawcett said, why can’t I do that? He said, because that’s not what I want. And he said, furthermore, why do you want to withdraw? He said, we have a tax problem. And we felt that—my understanding—I’m not sure whether we did or didn’t. But at that time, we were a not-for-profit. Not a non-profit, but a not-for-profit. There’s a distinction. You can—you’re allowed to pay people bonuses and things of that nature, but—so then he also said that it’s not entirely clear to us that that’s in keeping with the Battelle will. So then Shaw said, okay, fine. He said, that’s it. We’ll find one. But he said, no matter who we find I want to reserve Gene Astley for—if it turns out to be Westinghouse or GE or whoever, that he then be available for those outfits to hire him so he could continue to—so even though he got really pissed at me—[LAUGHTER]—he still wanted me. And Fawcett just stood up and he said, I’m sorry, but Gene Astley—we have other needs for him, and he is not going to be available. So that ended the meeting. So then they found—and he went to his office—Shaw—and immediately called Westinghouse, and didn’t go out for bitter or anything. Just turned the whole project over to Westinghouse. Which is very irregular. Franklin: Yeah. Astley: You know? So they sent a crew out there and it was kind of funny, because the guy that took over, he was talking with the paper and he said—they said, isn’t this going to be a problem with a big transfer right in the middle? You resign? He said, never fear. And I won’t name his name, but he says, so-and-so’s here, happened to rhyme—[LAUGHTER]—he got replaced about six months later. So that’s how the FFTF got going. It did turn out to finally be constructed. Its flux level’s very low. I think it might have been just slightly higher than the EBR-II. But it did a lot of work, ran successfully. Never had a problem—safest reactor in the world. They did retain all the safety features. One of them was a very important one. I don’t know whether you care about this, but the fast reactor, you know, if you have—somebody pulls all the rods out in a thermal reactor, the power level goes up pretty fast. But it’s not an explosive thing. It just goes up enough where it melts everything down. Franklin: Right. Astley: It doesn’t really explode. But in a fast reactor, that’s not true. When you pull all the rods out of a fast reactor, the power level goes up in seconds. Franklin: Wow. Astley: Microsecond. Okay? Dynamite takes to the—so it’s faster than a dynamite, okay? So that is a major problem design. So what that means is, mechanically you can’t do a damn thing. Nothing can respond in that period of time. Just to detect it takes you longer than that. You know? Franklin: Yeah. Astley: So the question we had with the FFTF was what do we do about that? It was funny—one winter I came—I went to work and I put up the garage door, and there was water and ice all over the floor. My water heater had been in the corner, put in the garage, and it was so cold, and the door had been open, left a little bit, and it froze the damn thing. So the safety valve went off. And when I got back, I thought, you know, that’s a good concept. So when this thing happens, this huge explosive force—and I had calculations to go on by the Army, who was doing experiments on what it takes to blow up cylinders and spheres and stuff. So I had a lot of data on what kind of explosive force. So I said what we need to do is have a safety valve of some kind, so when that goes off, the first force blows it open. So we’ve destroyed it; the core’s now going to get hot, it’s going to melt down, but we know how to handle that. But the explosive we’ve got to be taking care of. So I said, I don’t know how—how do we do that. Well, this engineer I had came up with a beautiful idea. He said, well, what I can do is design the bolts that hold down the lid so that that force will pass through the elastic limit and they’ll break and the lid will fly off. Perfect safety. And it’s simultaneous, almost. The pressure gets too high, and it blows. Perfect. So then all’s you had to do is design a big concrete container around it with enough volume to take that expansion. And then we had a core catcher down there that we could cool so that we wouldn’t do the China syndrome where it melts down and goes to China, so to speak. So those kind of things were all put into it. We had a couple physics things to go on at those speeds that were esoteric, but that also helped to cut that explosion down. [VIDEO CUTS] Eugene Astley: Coefficient. Camera man: I’m ready. Robert Franklin: Ready. Can you start that from the beginning? Astley: Huh? Franklin: Can you start that story from the beginning? We’re rolling. You were at a meeting with US and Russian reactor designers. Astley: The Russian was up there explaining the fundamental design of their new reactor group, which included the design of the Chernobyl. He explained what they were doing, and it was obvious to me then, you know, that—in our reactors we under-moderated them because then you get a negative temperature coefficient. So the reactor hopes to—tries to shut itself down. Theirs is going to make it worse. Okay, so, I can’t get up and say anything about this, because if I do, one of the—they say, why are you doing that? Well, I can say, you know, to have a negative temperature coefficient. But I’m not allowed to help them. And furthermore, if you under-moderate, you increase the production of plutonium. And the fact that those physicists didn’t figure that out, it blows my mind, you know? Fermi figured that out. [LAUGHTER] So anyway, in this meeting, then I stood up to ask them a question. And immediately, the guy that’s standing behind him walks up and takes the microphone. Now, this guy gave a speech in really quite good English. And he says, I’m sorry, we’ll let you know that although he can speak English pretty well when he’s practiced it to give the English speech, he really doesn’t understand English very well. So I will interpret for you. So, he answers my question with nonsense. He doesn’t know anything about anything. [LAUGHTER] And so there was no exchange. And then later we had a meeting where you have some drinks and you can mingle around and I hunted this guy down again. And immediately this same guy shows up. So he’s going to conduct the conversation between us. Franklin: Right. Astley: Anyway, later on, that was the Chernobyl. And it had the positive temperature coefficient. Of course it went blooey. You know? Our reactors weren’t like that, but very difficult to explain that to public. Gain any believability. So the scatter was still there. Then we whittled down the reactor. But there was no radiation, because even those reactors were—all our commercial reactors were built with negative temperature coefficients. It’s a safety problem. Everybody in the commercial world was either trained here at Hanford or back at Westinghouse at [UNKNOWN]. So that was sort of long ingrained to us to try to make it as safe as you can be. And that you don’t want to melt something down. That’s an economic problem, not a safety problem. But that’s never been—we’ve never been able to convince people that have a gut feeling that it’s an atomic bomb. And those are the people who prevail. Because those words are much more receptive to get attention of the public. Franklin: Yeah. Astley: Then I guess, as maybe you’re a historian of a type? Well, here is the thing that I think, if there’s one thing in my life that still peeves me—when I got moved from GE, I had a Super Secret clearance. Not just the Q, but one above it. Because I knew how much plutonium we were making and how many caps we were making, bombs we were making, that kind of stuff. And so I had gone out of the library when I had this N Reactor, and looked for—searched things. And I saw some stuff by Fermi. And so I got two of his workbooks, brought them back and started looking. And he had a couple of ideas—particularly one that helped design the control rods, because a control rod is so black. You know, it absorbs all of its neutrons in about that much. And we didn’t have any diffusion—[UNKNOWN] didn’t work for that. And he had some ideas about how he might approach that and how he did approach it. And then he went on to talk about a bunch of other things. You know, ti was all his own handwriting. And he’d scratch out and say, dumb idea. Now, he’d go on and it was a beautiful thing to read. So, when I went to GE, I tried to check those out and take them into Battelle, to take them. But I had lost my clearances. Said, you can’t have them. But if you get a clearance—so when I went over there, I applied for clearances and got them. Six months later, I go back, but some kind of a thing came out from AEC that a certain date type things were no longer considered classified, so burn them. So they burned. Franklin: They burned Fermi’s personal notebooks? Wow. Astley: That irritates me. Franklin: Yeah, that irritates me, too. Especially because I’m an archivist. Astley: Yeah! Franklin: I deal with people’s personal matters and archival material. That’s really a tragedy. Astley: Yeah. But you know, one of the geniuses of our time. Wouldn’t have probably made it without his help, his guidance. You don’t preserve something like that? It’s pretty irritating. Franklin: Yes. What year—when exactly did you come off the FFTF? You said that Westinghouse took over FFTF; were you off the project then when Westinghouse came on? Astley: The which Franklin: Sorry, when— Astley: Oh, when they were breaking up? Franklin: No, you mentioned you were designing FFTF and then Westinghouse— Astley: Took over. Franklin: Were you off the project then? Astley: I asked to get off the project, and— Franklin: Okay, and what year was that? Astley: Probably early ’69, I think. Franklin: Okay. Astley: And so it just happened that the guy that was running the other department, a big one, decided—he was a statistician of note in the world, and that’s really what he liked, and it was really distracting. He didn’t get enough time to work on his own stuff. So at the time that I became available then, a friend who also knew this was going on, and so there was a spot for me to move on, still reporting to him. So I took over, applied theoretical math, applied theoretical physics, world economics, that type of stuff. It suited me pretty well. Franklin: And that was at Battelle? Astley: At Battelle, right. Franklin: Okay. And what other projects did you work on after FFTF? Astley: Well, then I left Battelle in ’71 and joined Exxon Nuclear. Franklin: Oh, okay. Astley: And became vice president of Exxon Nuclear making fuel. Plus a lot of other things. And during that time, then, I started up the Exxon Nuclear centrifuge program, and also the laser enrichment program. I had both of those. And both of them did very well. The centrifuge project got enough so that we actually bid and won a contract with—I can’t remember whether it was still AEC or—I’m a little confused on timing between AEC to DoE. Can’t tell you. Franklin: Yeah, sure. Astley: One of those guys asked three different organizations to bid on making 50 centrifuges at a cost, fixed price contract and deliver them to Oak Ridge. So they could determine whether or not somebody other than Oak Ridge could make something or [UNKNOWN]. So we bid on it, fixed price. Built them, delivered them within six months. That was our first large [UNKNOWN] They were then put into Oak Ridge and into their cascades, and they were running—they ran for a whole year when they decided to then implement the next stage, which was to build 5,000 of them. In the meantime, Boeing and Goodyear were still negotiating with AEC. And saying that, hey, these are too developmental. No way can we built at cost. So they came out with a new bid. We bid on it. We were the only ones that had any manufacturing experience on centrifuges. We put on a fixed price bid again for the 5,000. And Goodyear and Boeing finally gave up on bidding the 50 and had the same problems with bidding 5,000. Then they opened up the bids and we were eliminated on the basis that we didn’t have manufacturing experience. That we were Exxon, we were chemical engineers, et cetera, whereas Boeing and Goodyear were hardnosed mechanical people. So we were knocked out of that bidding. So my project was shut down. Which was rather hard to take. Since we were, at that time, still at—our centrifuges we made for them up running well, gave them no problems. They started up, they were never shut down in that year. And we had better statistical data than Oak Ridge did on the ones that they had had made. So that knocked us out of that. At that time, we—and I had already gone to the board of directors of Exxon and sat in their thing and got approval to go forward with a $1.5 billion project. Two phases--$900 for the first phase and the rest for the second phase to build an enormous centrifuge phase, which would then put Exxon into the commercial enrichment business, instead of the government. And our prices were going to be 30% lower than theirs, which I thought was a good thing for the American public. But it wasn’t. Franklin: Why wasn’t it? Astley: Because President Carter was in charge. I had a friend of mine who was on—a good friend—who was one of his cabinet. I asked him one day, I told him how we’d got cut out. And I said, I can’t understand that. I mean, what’s wrong? What made that decision? Couldn’t have been [UNKNOWN] And he said, well, don’t tell anybody—and he’s died since, so he’s not in jeopardy—but he said, I sat in the cabinet meeting and it was explained to us by the head of the AEC at that time what the situation was. And they felt that they wanted to work—they were going to award us the contract immediately, but contingent to negotiate with the other people. So then Carter said, who did you say? And they said, Exxon. And he rams his—bam! Exxon’s already controlling the damn energy of the world, I don’t want them meddling in the reactors also [UNKNOWN]. Find some way to disqualify them. That’s what really happened. There’s no record of that. Franklin: Yeah. Astley: So it’s not very—I guess you’d call that the height of hearsay. And then about four months later, they shut down the laser plant. And we came in at that point, the boss offered the AEC to continue to operate that, since it was very promising. And it was going to make [UNKNOWN] like 30%. You know, that’s even better than centrifuges. And he offered to operate the plant for a dollar a year, just like DuPont did at the beginning, and continue the thing. And then he said, when the plant first gets on its feet, I’d like to be paid back for the $80 million I’ve invested in this in the operating profits. AEC said, no. We don’t want you involved in this. So they went and said, [UNKNOWN] buy out all your equipment for ten cents on the dollar and we’ll transfer it down to California. Because they’re also experts on lasers. So they shut that down. And a lot of politics involved behind the scenes on this whole nuclear business, which it seemed to me that I had a little black cloud that way. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah, there’s kind of a common thread running through a lot of your stories. Astley: Yeah! But that was really the—to try to explain how that laser enrichment worked is a little difficult. Franklin: I’m sure. Astley: For somebody that isn’t technically trained. Franklin: That would be me. Astley: Yeah. That’s all. But that was a beautiful project. But I had already gotten—and then I also had already gotten [UNKNOWN] to go forward with the first step of a fairly large prototype for $50 million. So I had the total board behind me. And in fact, when I went in front of the board of directors at [UNKNOWN], I was supposed to give a thirty minute talk. Because I had to go to the board because I was asking for $1.5 billion. If it had been less than a billion, I could have gone to the management staff instead. That would have been too small for Exxon to worry about at the board level. The only company to do that. In fact, they’re allowed to round their income tax off to the nearest dollar. I think probably things have changed, but—anyway, during that, at the end of an hour and a half, and I’m still talking about this project. Finally, the chairman puts up his hands. Fellows, he said, we’ve kept Mr. Astley here for an hour and a half. He was only supposed to be thirty minutes. I don’t think any more questions we’ll learn any more. And he’s told us everything; we should have enough information at this point whether to go forward with this. And [UNKNOWN] who’d just come back from being Treasurer for whoever was—I don’t remember who it was then—Ford, maybe? Ford, probably. Yeah, I’m sure it was Ford. He’d taken a leave of absence to be Treasurer and came back. He’d just—finally he says, you know, to the chairman, he says, Mr. Chairman, we have enough information to go forward. Let’s show these goddamn AEC people how private industry can do the job. [LAUGHTER] So I got my money. But it didn’t prove to be a giant sinkhole for Exxon. But those kind of things were going on that made my life interesting. Franklin: Yeah. When did you leave Exxon? Astley: I left Exxon in ’83. They were going direction—they wanted to get out of the nuclear business. And they didn’t mind continuing the fuels business because we had such a good reputation for—I think we bid on business since at least ten years. Never had a fuel failure. Anybody who ever produced, which nobody else in the world could claim. And we knew how to make fuel. I was heading up the fuel plant here in Richland at that point and the one in Langer, Germany. But I had other projects going which were very successful and they shut those all down to concentrate simply on fuel. So I’d sort of worked that, and about that time I got a call from Sandvik and they, [UNKNOWN] he said, I’m retiring, and I’d like to talk to about taking over for me. And so I did. It sounded like a good [UNKNOWN], you know? I guess my feeling was it was going to be a lot more fun to be a big fish in a little puddle. So I went in ’83 and retired from there in ’91. During that time, here’s the technology that we—you know, at that time, Sandvik was building nuclear fuel tubes from zirconium for three different companies. Babcock, Wilcox Combustion and Exxon. So that was a direct application of nuclear information. Because the design of all that came from having worked for Hanford [unknown]. And so during that time, it became obviously that the world was shrinking and that there was too many people looking for too few fuel tubes. So I put the company into titanium. And I found out that the aircraft people were moving strongly toward titanium tubing for all of their jets. So I started that as a diversification. And I told Sandvik that I thought within five to ten years that we were very likely to have no more work. I said there’s got to be consolidation. And I thought, ten, twelve years, French bought out Exxon—or Germans began it and they bought out the Germans. And now the group was French, running that plant there. And exactly it happened, so Combustion Engineering was bought by Germans, I think. I can’t remember who. So all of our customers were no longer, so we had no zirconium. So all we did was titanium. And while I was there, I was glad that personally the titanium golf shaft, utilizing nuclear energy technology. Franklin: What is that? Astley: Golf shafts? Franklin: Yeah. Astley: You know, golf. Franklin: Oh! Astley: And when I came in, 99% were using steel. And there were people trying to make using fibers which weren’t very successful. So I introduced titanium and got—the guy I made a friend of, the chairman of TaylorMade who had invented the metal clubs—got him interested in taking a look at titanium heads plus then matching them with a titanium shaft. And got his whole staff there to agree that this shaft was better than anything in the market. But it jumped the price of shafts. I had to charge $18 a shaft. They were paying 50 cents. So that was a big change. And I managed to get that settled in. He said, hey, we’re in a big fight. A driver costs somewhere between $90 and $100. And if you try to get over $100, suddenly they start shying away because they’re pretty much the same. They claim different. But at any rate, I said, well, that’s not what you want to do. I said this gives you the chance to have something that’s uniquely different. So instead of just charging for $18, I mean $99, make your clubs sell for $199. Because you have something to sell. And he said, yeah, he said, you should have been my marketing manager. I said, well, I am, I’m trying to sell you titanium. But anyway, I went out to dinner with him and at the end I said, okay, you’re really enthused about this. So I said I need an order from you. And he said what would you like to have your order start with? And I said, I’d like to start with at least 25,000 shafts the first year. And I’ll give you an exclusive for the first year. So he pulled over a napkin from the bar sort of thing, and he writes on it, I agree to buy 50,000 shafts from Sandvik special models at $18 a shaft with exclusive rights for one year, signed his name. So I took that back to—only way you could do this would be private industry. Go back to my [UNKNOWN] and say hey, here’s the order I just got. He’s a Mormon, doesn’t drink. He said, this looks like a stain on a cocktail napkin to me. And I said, yeah, that’s where I got the order. So he photographs it or something and puts it in. But I imagine if I had been trying to do something at the AEC, that might not have flown. Franklin: Right, yeah. Astley: [LAUGHTER] They’d have at least 15 regulations [UNKNOWN] Franklin: And they’d need it in triplicate, too. Astley: Oh, yeah, right. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: I wonder if you could talk about living in Richland during the Cold War. And working at Hanford during that time. You’ve mentioned some previous experiences with Russian scientists. I was wondering if you could talk about how the Cold War affected you and your work and your family. Astley: I think it really didn’t affect us a lot. I lived in north Richland and I built a home there. I think the thing that was interesting was that, first of all, of course, by ’54 there was enough of Richland. So what we used to call the termination winds were not so severe anymore, because we had all the trees and the houses. So it was a little bit more protected. So that didn’t—although even then, we had some pretty fair gust storms compared to now—really bad. And at that time, you didn’t have all these fancy windows. They were all sash windows, so they leaked like a sieve. So every time we had a dust storm, the inside of the house was covered everywhere with a little layer of dust. And I would say that perturbed my wife. [LAUGHTER] And all the other wives. Because that meant a lot of work, you know. It wasn’t as if you just go in and dust something. I mean, the whole damn place had to be vacuumed. All the windows, everything that had a surface. And it wasn’t a minor thing. You could write your name in everything. Fraknlin: Wow. Astley: So that was something, I think, that certainly most of the females probably had to do the work. The kids didn’t care. I think they were kind of oblivious of everything in terms of the Hanford experiences. So I didn’t see much effect there. But in 1960, then, I guess they were probably DoE by then but I’m still not sure. But they then decided to, with the Corps of Engineers, to sell the town and get out of being <a href="https://youtu.be/GBNkByNJDys">View interview on Youtube.</a> Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview N Reactor Fast Flux Test Facility Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1954- Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1954-1991 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Eugene Astley Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Nuclear reactors Nuclear power plants Breeder reactors Description An account of the resource Eugene Astley moved to Richland, Washington in 1954. Eugene worked on the Hanford Site from 1954-1991. An interview conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by Mission Support Alliance on behalf of the United States Department of Energy. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 12/05/2016 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fd03ed5496b28bc5658b6cedbb7811a1c.jpg cdf4ad783592d80ab92e4e8de08a9132 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fd07e75b7aa3d6bdc185fd241f7c3d1c0.mp4 f04f6245b14fb6b4a256f244212221ba Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview O'Reagan, Douglas Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Walkley, Evelyn Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Douglas O’Reagan: First of all, will you please pronounce and spell your name for us? Evelyn Walkley: Evelyn Walkley. E-V-E-L-Y-N, W-A-L-K-L-E-Y. O’Reagan: All right, thank you. My name is Douglas O’Reagan. I’m conducting an oral history interview on February 18th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be speaking with Ms. Walkley about her experiences around this area—around the Hanford area and the Tri-Cities area over the 20th Century. Well, thanks for being here. I understand you moved here when you were just a little girl. Walkley: That’s correct. My family moved here in late 1943. So I was ten years old and in the fifth grade. And my father was a journeyman carpenter, so he was recruited to come out for the Hanford Project. Told not to bring his family, because there wasn’t housing. But he brought his family. O’Reagan: Do you remember anything from your life before moving here? Walkley: Yes. We came from Oklahoma and I remember being on a small farm there. The year, or a year-and-a-half before we came here, we had lived in Leadville, Colorado for a few months. Again, my father was working on some—actually, it was a training facility for the Army, I think, up in the mountains of Colorado. I remember being there, and I was in the fourth grade. Very, very crowded school, and you shared your desks and you did not throw away a piece of paper unless it had been written on margins, front side, back side, because the supplies were in short supply. O’Reagan: What were your first impressions of—was it Pasco you moved to? Walkley: Yes. I can remember us driving up—we came over the hills of Pendleton and at some point, hit the Columbia River. I can remember, as a fifth grade kid, knowing that Washington was the Evergreen State. We were getting very close to Washington and I couldn’t figure out where the trees were—how—where is this? We came in to Pasco on a very hot Sunday. We spent the day trying to find a place to live. And there wasn’t one. So that night, my parents parked by the city park in Pasco. We were pulling a trailer and somehow or other, they could raise the lid on this and my parents slept in this trailer. My brother and I slept in the car. That’s where we spent the very first night. No, I take it back: that might have been a Saturday. And then the next day, we went around looking for a place. We found out about this trailer park that is roughly in the area of 10th and Clark in Pasco. Essentially, this was an alfalfa field, and if you had a trailer you could park there. We did not have a trailer, so we pitched a tent that we had brought. The first week we lived in that tent, and there was just a ground cover. My dad started to work. At some point in the next few days, he was able to build a floor and the sides part way up this tent, and then rafters to make it so that you could stand up in it. We lived in that tent for a year. After the year, they were able to buy a little cabin on this place. Of course, none of this—we must have had electricity, but I know that we did not have running water. But at any rate, then they pulled the tent over beside this cabin, and my parents then basically—the cabin was our living room, kitchen, and my parents’ bedroom, and my brother and I slept in the tent. When we were all in the tent, my dad had built double bunkbeds. My parents slept down and my brother and slept up. Because we were all in this 14 by 14 tent. So it’s pretty cozy. O’Reagan: How did the weather treat you? I would think that would get pretty hot and cold in the seasons. Walkley: It was. It, I believe, had some sort of a cook stove. And probably that’s what my mother cooked on. I can remember pretty clearly us being newly in this tent and my parents going to get groceries. And during that time, there was wind blowing. When they came back, everything was covered with sand. I can remember my mother just setting down and crying. She hated it; she wanted to go back to God’s country. But you’d learn to live with sand. Now, it was much better once we had a floor. I can remember my mother bringing in clothes from the clothesline and that they were frozen—and it was kind of freeze-dried. But she’d bring them in, and they’d thaw, and somehow or other dried. But it was—if the wind blew, the wind blew, and the tent flapped all around. And if it was cold, it was cold in the tent. And if it was hot, it was hot in the tent. But other people in this trailer park, and other people in the whole area were in similar circumstances. We did not use our car at all while we were here, because the gas rationing points went to whoever my father carpooled with to get to Richland and Hanford. So any place we went, we walked. So you walked to the movies, standing in line. You walked to the grocery store, which, at that time, downtown Pasco was centered in 4th and Lewis, and just two or three blocks around from that. So we walked all of those places. Walked to school. I went to Longfellow School, which—I don’t know how far that was, but I’d walk on 10th Street, and they were building homes to the west side of 10th Street. When the wind would blow, that sand would come off of there, and would just beat against your legs. I can remember that being a stressful time, because there wasn’t any concern about air pollution. And I’m sure that watering trucks were not available to them, and they were building homes as fast as they could. That was because, essentially, the homes in Pasco ended about 10th Street. So it was—when I think about it now, I think it was really pretty primitive and we were sort of poor folks. But then, so was everybody else. And this was all for the war effort. It was—I think the country was 100% into the war effort. Way different than Vietnam and Korea. So we were saving aluminum foil off of pieces of gum. I’m sure we turned it in to someplace. I never knew where that aluminum went to—probably the trash. O’Reagan: What did you do for water? Walkley: Oh. We must have carried water from some central faucet. I don’t really remember the carrying the water. But I know we didn’t have any running. I think we did have an electric light. I don’t remember any other electric appliances. We may have had them. I was a ten-year-old kid. I didn’t pay attention. But I know that we did not have any indoor plumbing. There was a wash area in the facilities that we used for at least the first year. The second year, I think we maybe had a washing machine of our own. You just carried water, heated it on a stove. Hot water tanks are really nice to have in a home. And running water. O’Reagan: We haven’t spoken to very many people who lived in Pasco in this era, so this is really, really fascinating stuff. Can you tell us about any of the other people who lived near you, or any of the other children you met? Walkley: Most of the other children that I recall early on were native children. They had grown up here. I think that most of the people that I recall in the trailer park were adults. Because they probably heeded don’t bring your families. I know that my parents recruited an aunt and uncle to come up. My uncle worked out on the Hanford Project someplace; my aunt worked at what’s called Big Pasco, which is the big warehouse areas on the river in Pasco. That was all an Army supply depot. My aunt said they had everything from sewing needles to tanks that came in there and were dispersed out. My cousins were older. The place where we lived, that had essentially been an alfalfa farm. I remember my parents talking about our landlords, which were—Fosters was their name—that he had to grow alfalfa and hay to feed his horse. And he had to have the horse because he needed something to help him till the ground. So this just seemed like, stop both of those things and you’re better off! And they did, because they were renting out. I have no idea what we paid to have this tent area. The area in the trailer park—most of the trailers were homemade. There was one Spartan trailer there. I think, maybe, the CREHST Museum had a Spartan trailer. It was aluminum siding and curved front windows. It was a mansion. There was one of those. But I have no experience with the camps that were in Richland and with all of the servicemen that were in Richland. I was a kid, and we didn’t get to Richland, because we were walking. It was—like I say, my mother hated it. She couldn’t wait until the war was over and we could go back to God’s country. But she did find out in 1945, when we did go back for a year and a half that God’s country was economically depressed. So we came back here permanently then in 19—late ’46 or early 1947, and have been here ever since. But as—I believe that the windstorms were worse then, just because of the farming and the construction that was going on. I don’t know that the winds were any worse. But it was a lot dirtier then than it is now. Part of it is different farming practices, not as much construction. And then the people that—when there’s construction sites, now, they’re running water trucks back and forth. And they weren’t doing that in 1944. O’Reagan: Were you still living in that cabin when you moved back, or did you move somewhere else? Walkley: No, when we moved back, we actually moved into a basement apartment that was on 3rd Street in Pasco. I don’t remember the number, but it was north of what is now Pasco City Hall. At the time that we moved there, it was Pasco High School plus a junior high school. We were about three blocks from there, and at that point, then, I was in the seventh grade. Like I say, that was Pasco High School and Pasco Junior High School. Then at some point, my parents purchased a home that was out in the middle of nowhere, and essentially it was—there was no housing around it. This was on Brown Street in Pasco, and from Henry to Court, except for their house, there were no other houses. 5th Street to 10th Street, there wasn’t—and that house had just been—I don’t know when the house was built—pre-war, I’m sure. And it was old. They purchased that in probably 1948 or ’49. And essentially there was just a dirt road—two-lane road going to the house. And then it was kind of normal life. O’Reagan: Was your father still a carpenter throughout this time? Walkley: Yes, he was doing carpentry work until he retired in like 1968, something like that. And in the meantime, they had purchased a little farm on Road 68. It still is a little farm on Road 68. But he was watering and taking care of a few acres of concord grapes while he was also doing carpentry work. O’Reagan: Can you tell us about going to school at, you said, Pasco High? Walkley: Yes. So when we moved back, I was in the seventh grade, and went to the high school, because the junior high was there and, at that time, the north wing was just being built. So you could tell by that that Pasco was really still quite small. My husband and I were in school together, but we did not actually start dating or anything until after we were out of high school. But he actually was a native born, one of the few in the area. His mother actually was born in Walla Walla and he was actually born in Walla Walla, but they lived west of the—what was Central Pre-Mix. It’s somebody else now, but the gravel pit that’s out on West Court Street. They lived on the river where Court Street takes a right angle turn and goes away from the river. So I would say he was part of the downriver people, because their well had to have been Columbia River water. But, like I say, he was a native. His parents had a Chris Craft indoor—not indoor—inboard motorboat—I don’t think I’m using the right term. But at any rate, the government came and said, we want to use your boat. Because they were doing sounding on the Columbia River, and the boat that they had, that apparently was a five horse outboard motor, would not hold the current. So we want to requisition your boat. So apparently my husband’s dad said, well, you can have the boat, but not without me. So he went to work in his boat. And if it was good weather, they did surveying—sometimes in the river and sometimes not. I think if the weather was really bad—and I don’t know whether he went to work or not—but at any rate, at that time, there were really just two big boats on the river, his and I think Havstad’s, which—the Havstad House was what’s now called the Moore Mansion, that’s by the Blue Bridge. So he was—his—my husband’s parents, Glen and Elvira Walkley, were natives. He was PUD commissioner for years and years and active in the community. But let the government use his boat during the war time. O’Reagan: If you were describing your education, your time in high school to students today, what would be different? Trying to get an idea for what life was like. Walkley: Different—that’s the like of automobiles. There was one student that I can recall in the whole high school that would come to school in a car. My husband would also come to school in a vehicle, partly because of the distance that he lived, and he was involved with sports and so there was nothing like an activities bus. But I can remember being in the third floor of that building in the home ec room and looking down and see him coming in. And sometimes he rode in a Cushman scooter, and he’d get off and take off sheep-lined leather clothing, if it was cold. Sometimes he would come in a pickup, and sometimes he would come in a truck, because he was a farm kid. Once in a while, he would come in his folks’ Cadillac. And none of us—most of us—just didn’t know about Cadillac cars. The big fishtails on them. But otherwise, people walked to school, or the kids way out in the country rode the bus. It never—for one thing there would not have been the cars available, and you would not have been able to afford them if they had been. I think that’s probably the biggest thing. Of course, the idea of cell phones—we wouldn’t even have dreamt about that. But our communication was talking to one another. O’Reagan: I guess you still covered—you say you had home ec—I guess you covered the same classes though. Walkley: I was on a track for going to college. But I was taking—the other thing, probably is they’re doing more advanced studies than we ever did. The highest math that I ever had was solid geometry and trigonometry. We didn’t have any calculus. The other thing is the role of girls. There was one other girl in those two upper math classes; and physics class, I think there were only two girls. Now I’m sure it’s just not that way. Plus, the classes are much bigger. Now, the chemistry class—because I think a lot of people must have had to take chemistry—it was pretty well covered, but not physics. I have a story about college. I went to what was then the College of—Washington State College. I went there for two years and then got married, so went a year at Occidental in Los Angeles, and then finished up at what was then the College of Puget Sound, which is now University, like WSU is a University. My major was economics and my minor was geology. When I was at the University of Puget Sound, one of the requirements was a summer geology trip on the San Juan Islands. I was the only female in this geology class. My husband was in the Air Force. They politely told me that if I would not go on that trip, they would not require it. The reason was they had no facilities for a female on that trip. One weekend campout that we had, they wanted to know if my husband could come. Oh!—I was dumb—I said, sure. You know, is it okay if he comes? Yes, we would like him to come. So he didn’t have duty, and so he came and we slept in the back of our station wagon. And, again, I was so unaware that I didn’t realize they wanted him there as a chaperone because I was the only female in this geology class. That’s something absolutely unheard of—I mean, that sort of thing would not happen today. O’Reagan: That’s really interesting. Was it your ambition, initially, to go to college? Did your parents have thoughts about you going to college? Walkley: It was my idea to go to college. My parents, I don’t recall them ever encouraging it, or ever really discouraging it, except that I was so excited when I graduated, because one of the things was I got a $50 scholarship. Well, the economics of things was the $50 wasn’t going to let me go to college. So I did work for a year after high school, and saved money. Because the first year that I went to Pullman, I went there with just about $1,000. And that got me through that first year at college. I must have made enough money in the summer that I could go back the second year. That’s also unheard of now. I think my mother would send me $2 cash a week, so I could—I had $2 cash: I was rich. And even at college, very few students had cars. For one thing, there wasn’t parking, and for another thing, you just didn’t. A few must have, because I know I carpooled with somebody to go and come. But that was different. I happened to be at WSU when Bing Crosby’s twins were going to school there. They had a car, and they would park in front of the library building. Was some sort of a Ford convertible. And they would set there, and I’m sure they were chick magnets, because of their name. But very few students had cars. O’Reagan: So you transferred from Washington State College to Occidental, you said? Walkley: Yes. O’Reagan: Why did you transfer? Walkley: I transferred there because my husband was going to college at California Institute of Technology, Caltech, who’s part of the LIGO system. And that’s where he was going to school. So we lived in student housing on the Occidental campus, and he commuted. But he was a year ahead of me, because he didn’t have to—he didn’t stay out the year that I did. He graduated, and then he was in the Air Force ROTC after—late summer, he was called into the Air Force. We were in Ohio for a while and then he was stationed at McChord. So that’s why I finished up at the University of Puget Sound, which was, like I said a college then. O’Reagan: So was he called up for the Korean war at that point? Walkley: We were between wars at that point. My history is foggy, but it was—I wish I could remember when the Korean War was. O’Reagan: ’55, I think. Was this the ‘50s, the ‘60s? Walkley: I know that he served two years. His ROTC class was one of the last that their commitment was two years. He was an engineer. The Air Force had really wanted to try to recruit pilots, but Caltech let the Air Force know that, no, we’re producing engineers and scientists and those kind of folks. You’re better to use them in that than to train them as pilots. So he went in as an engineer and had two years, and then after that, there was no Air Force reserve here. So he would just go to Fairchild during the summer for some training. But there was a period of time that he was on a 24-hour notice that if they’d call him up, he had 24 hours to report someplace. So that might have been Korea. That would have been in the ‘60s. But I hate to kind of show my ignorance of history. O’Reagan: I’m a historian, I get dates wrong all the time. Walkley: [LAUGHTER] O’Reagan: So when you were assigned to go to college, was that just to better yourself? Was it because you wanted to get a job out of it? Walkley: I don’t know that I had any lofty reasons. I think it was because I thought that this was what you should do. Neither one of my parents were college graduates. But I had seen my parents working on the farm before the war, and I guess I thought that that’s just what I needed to do to be able to support myself. Now this was before women’s liberation. It was all before that. And then ironically as it turned out, about the time that my husband was getting out of the Air Force, this opportunity to farm what had not been a historical family farm—they had purchased—and Van’s folks, he and his sisters had purchased this farm, because they had had ground at the Eltopia area, which was the Bureau of Reclamation came in because of Grand Coulee Dam, and they chose to not keep any land there. So in a tax-free exchange, they turned the money into buying the place that we farmed. Well, that opportunity to farm came up, so we did a 180-degree turn, and instead of him being an engineer and building highways, which is what he did before the Air Force, we started farming. And did that for 57 years. O’Reagan: What did you grow? Walkley: When we moved to the farm, it was all dryland. And this farm was east of Ice Harbor Dam, about five miles. It was all dryland, and so we grew dryland wheat. Because of the farm program, you couldn’t grow all wheat—so we would grow barley and/or rye. In the mid ‘60s, that part of agriculture was fairly depressed, and so my husband had the idea that we’d start watering things. So we started irrigating supplemental, just. And then over the years, we kept adding to this irrigation system. So when the farm was sold in late 2013, half of our acres were irrigated and half was still dryland. So all of that was my husband doing, but we turned a piece of land that was barely giving us a living to something that was really a pretty good diversified farm. O’Reagan: Why don’t we pull open a map here and see if we can—just get my chair forward here. See if we can get a view of where we’re talking about here. Walkley: Okay. O’Reagan: Okay. Walkley: Okay. All of this really dark area is probably the Snake River Vineyard, and we were next door to them. So Highway 124—got to get my glasses focused here. O’Reagan: Sure. Walkley: So basically, our farm was here. And then we wind around some. And then here, this section right in here was not us. Oops! That was a little too much. And so we pumped out of the river at—that’s the spot where we pumped out of the river. So basically, we’re—and this corner section. And then all of this was really hilly, sandy area. So that’s where we farmed. And the dam is here and Charbonneau Park is right in this area. O’Reagan: That’s a lot of territory. Did you have to get help in farming all that? Walkley: The first few years, when it was all dryland, we only had help during harvest time. Once in a while, we’d hire somebody just temporary, just doing tractor work. Mostly, my job was chasing parts and cooking for the harvest crew. Once in a while, I’d have to drive tractor for a couple of weeks. This was not anything I really enjoyed doing. And then also bookwork. I did the bookwork for the farm all the time, including the taxes. And I did that until—well, basically, our daughter had a major stroke in 2007, and this took a lot of time with her rehab. So some of our taxes, I had to have a CPA do during some of that time—some I still could do. So I was the bookkeeper and the cook. O’Reagan: Did other people farming around you grow the same things you did? Walkley: They did at first, but about the same time we put in irrigation, so did the neighbors. After a year or two of having potatoes, the neighbors then—I think they weren’t selling—then basically went into Snake River Vineyards and concord grapes. And then on the other side of us, it for a long time was still the same—it was either rangeland or the same sort of farming. And then Broetje Orchards went—well, Broetje Orchards and AgriNorthwest. AgriNorthwest, the area that they had out there actually started with some local farmers in Eureka, and that was called K2H. And then it was AgriNorthwest. They went into—virtually everything, then, that they farmed was irrigated. It definitely changed the landscape, changed the economics of it all. A lot of the ground that we would irrigate, we would rent out. Only when it rotated to wheat or maybe soybeans, then, if it was potatoes or a sweet corn or alfalfa hay, we rented that out and then just did the watering for it. We took care of our irrigation system, the sprinklers, and managed all the water. O’Reagan: Where did you learn to farm? Was this knowledge you had from your parents? Walkley: No. Van had—when his parents had had land in the Eltopia area, that was dryland wheat farming. So he knew about that. My experience was on a small farm in Oklahoma that was basically a subsistence farm. We had enough cows that we could sell milk to the PET milk company, and a few acres of orchard so we could sell apples. But it was 50 acres of very diversified sort of farming. So that did not give me a lot of experience with over 5,000 acres of dryland wheat farming. My husband knew how to do this, and he was very smart. So we’d go to growers’ meetings and somehow or other, we made it. [LAUGHTER] O’Reagan: That’s interesting. I’m interested in how people develop their farms, learn new techniques, that sort of thing. Was the Growers’ Association a big deal in the area? Walkley: Yes. We were involved with the Washington Association of Wheat Growers on a county level. And the County Extension puts on programs. We belonged to the grange. There’s educational things. Visiting with the neighbors. We had to learn how to take care of the ground, because western Walla Walla County, at least where we were, was really lots of sandy loam. Similar to some of the Horse Heavens. So you have to treat that gently, or it’s going to blow away. So we learned, we did different things. One year I can remember, my husband went to Christmas tree sales lots the day after Christmas. He loaded up a truck with Christmas trees. We put those out on sand hills to try to hold it down. We’d spread straw for years and years and years on sand hills. And in fact, when we sold the farm, that was still something that we were doing to try to hold down sand hills. We were also using straw in tracks that the sprinklers make. So you’re using straw in dryland and irrigated both. But back to the wartime, I’m just thinking about how that was. Of course there was various kinds of not just gas rationing, but shoes—I mean leather, and other things. The attitude is so different now. We were content to not be able to buy as many bananas as you wanted, because if they had bananas in, you were limited to buying six of them, for instance. We were all in the same boat. I don’t recall of there being complaints about this. I don’t know if some of those shortages—how people would react to them now, when we’re used to so much abundance. But that’s just what you did. And as for what was happening at Hanford, that was on our radar. We knew it was secret—you know, my dad was just building things. And in fact, he did a lot of building not out on the Project, but in the City of Richland. So some of the older warehouse buildings and things would have been buildings that he worked on. As a ten-year-old, this just did not faze me a lot. When we moved back, the flood of 1948 certainly affected us. My mother at that time was working in Richland, and she was able to take the train from Pasco to get to Richland. And then she stayed there for the week, and then get back again, because the highway bridge—which was the old green bridge, which is gone—that was flooded. And the road through Columbia Park that was the main road, that was flooded. So you couldn’t get there from here. I can remember it all because then I was having to take care of the little strawberry patch that we had. My father was, maybe at that point then, doing construction in Pasco. I don’t recall him having the trouble getting to work that my mother had. But much smaller population center. Schools, much smaller. It was just a very interesting time. I think you all are doing a great job with this project, because the people that really did know about Hanford and everything that was going on, you’ve got to get them interviewed before they die off. Because we’re getting to be pretty old! [LAUGHTER] To have lived through this. O’Reagan: Were you ever interested in local politics of the area at all? Walkley: Well, only to the extent that my father-in-law was an elected PUD commissioner. When we were really in the political realm, then we were living in Walla Walla County, and so divorced from the Tri-Cities politics. Of course, nobody asked me my opinion, so nobody gets the benefit of my years of wisdom. [LAUGHTER] O’Reagan: Were you aware of the down-winders controversies? Were they in your area? Walkley: Yes. We were well aware of those. I sometimes do wonder if—now my husband had—in 2000 was diagnosed with lymphoma. And lymphoma, they think, has multiple causes, and maybe it’s multiple triggers that have to trigger at the right time. I wonder if that had anything to do with drinking Columbia River water. I don’t know, and it isn’t anything that I would pursue. What happened with the iodine releases and the winds, I’m not part of that. I did wonder when Mount St. Helens blew, why there wasn’t a better forecast of where those clouds were going. Because I thought, Hanford area should have had a lot of information on the winds and where things go. So it was surprising that, say, Ritzville and Pullman and various places didn’t know after it blew that—okay, because of the conditions, this is what you’re going to be getting. That was a surprise to me. Way off the subject. O’Reagan: No. Did that impact your life? Walkley: It impacted it only peripherally. The clouds were certainly something that I’ve never seen that kind of a cloud before. We didn’t have a lot of ash falling on us for some reason. My daughter was home that weekend, and driving back to Pullman for her was a real experience, because the ash was bothering her visibility. As it turned out, every morning they’d get news, well, don’t go to class this day. So she didn’t need to be there for a week, but she didn’t know that at the time that she’d left home. So it affected her that way. What was usually a two-hour, two-and-a-half-hour drive took her five or more. When she did call that she was there, she really sounded like she’d been through a stressful experience. But then it’s not very often that a volcano blows its top and does its thing. O’Reagan: During all this time, in the background there’s the Cold War going on and a lot of the fear about nuclear exchanges and all this. Was that ever something that impacted your life or your family’s? Walkley: Only that if I would go to, say, a state meeting of a group that was anti-nuclear, I could indicate that no, we’re not—as the crow flies—not all that far from the Hanford Project. We’re able to grow crops and not glowing in the dark. And also say things like, when you have tanker trucks driving up and down I-5 that’s carrying liquefied natural gas—have you thought about what kind of a hazard that is? We listened to the fire department radio when the railcar blew up in the Wenatchee railyard and devastated that area. If that train had been in the tunnel, or in Seattle when that happened, the devastation would have been unbelievable. So there are just risks and hazards all over. To our knowledge, this was an area that they were mitigating the risks. I think at the very first, in 1945—I don’t even know that the scientists knew all of the risks, because they were learning, too. But as they learned of the risks, they were taking steps to modify. Probably we’re living in one of the safest areas. O’Reagan: You say you raised children here, too? Walkley: Yes. Two children, a boy and a girl, both graduates of WSU Pullman. My daughter still lives here. My son lives in Missouri. O’Reagan: Did they go to high school around here? Walkley: They went to school in Burbank. Grade school and high school. And then both went to Pullman right after high school and graduated. My son graduated in 1980, and at that—so he decided he needed to get out in the world of work and took a job with a—actually, at that time it was called Allis Chalmers, Combine Division. So he was still involved with the farm. He was in the experimental section of combines. Then met and married a Missouri girl and she had roots in Missouri, so that’s where he’s been since college. My daughter graduated in 1982, and she worked for—started out with the Farmers’ Home Administration. It’s morphed into part of the Farm Service Agency. She was making farm loans. But in 2002—she moved various places in the state, but in 2001 she managed to get back to working at the Farm Service Agency in Pasco and was helping some on the farm. Then in 2002 she, as she said, quit a good-paying job for longer hours, less wages—what’s not to love? So she was, as she said, following Dad around to learn farming. So she was our main combine driver. But we had other employees at the time, but she was the combine driver and was at the staff meeting every morning at 7:00 and was probably going to be in a position to take over the farm until she had a major stroke in 2007. And that changed those plans. O’Reagan: Okay. So we’re also interested in the agricultural history of the area and among that, you said you were near one of the vineyards of the area? Walkley: Right. The Snake River Vineyards, which is the concord grape vineyard. That’s, again, just east of Ice Harbor Dam. I understand it’s one of the largest concord grape vineyards in the world that’s under one ownership. You know, if you look on maps, the whole Columbia Basin is called the Great American Desert. But with water, this magic elixir, you can grow anything in these soils. The amount of diversified agriculture in the Columbia Basin is astounding, if you really would see what all is grown there. There’s things that I don’t even know about. Very, very minor crops that maybe are major in the world. I really think of the Columbia Basin as a breadbasket that is feeding the world, parts of it. We have a really rich agriculture base. The big driver for that change was Grand Coulee Dam, which was power for the Hanford Project, and flood control some, and irrigation. That was really—I see that as a driver a lot for the economic—what’s happened to our area, in its growth. Certainly a big driver is Hanford, but there’s also a huge driver with the agriculture. I don’t even know everything that’s grown there. But I expect that there’s a hundred different crops grown in this area, very productively. I think that our yield of potatoes per acre is better than Idaho’s. At one time there was this saying, well, a good Idaho potato’s grown in Washington. And then Idaho potato people didn’t like that. But there certainly is potatoes and sweet corn and field corn and seed corn and peas and lentils—well, lentils are more Palouse. I think we don’t, maybe, give agriculture or farmers the recognition that they have for what they’ve done for this area. O’Reagan: Did you ever—were you sort of sticking with crops you knew and had expertise in, or did you think about changing crops for ones that were more profitable at different times? Walkley: Oh. My husband was always trying different things. Sometimes we were just before our time. I know that he grew some hard white wheat one year. We had to haul it someplace special, not in the area, to market it. We experimented with various things. We grew buckwheat for a year or two. We grew soybeans. In fact, when we grew soybeans, the Farm Service Agency and the crop insurance people had to get through—well crop insurance mostly—run through some hoops, because there was no history of soybeans here. We’ve grown canola. And so my husband was always trying something new. That was just his nature. He was really the driver of what turned that farm into dryland and to diversified. Because as I said, he was very smart and he was always thinking of, how can we do things better? We had older equipment, so it was hard to put GPS on some of them, but we were able to. And we had one fella that worked for us, started working for us in 1974. When we were trying out some GPS, my daughter said, Guadalupe will just hate that. He is not going to want to do that. Guadalupe loved the GPS, because, he said, now I can watch the equipment better, and I don’t have to worry about where I’m going. So the employees embraced it, too. I’m sure that if my husband was still alive, for Christmas he would have purchased a drone. But—yeah, he was very smart. O’Reagan: Can you tell us about some of your workers? Walkley: We’ve had all sorts of workers over the years. Like I said, first it was just during harvest that we would have extra workers. Some fellas worked for us—they would come back, year after year. At one time there was three Pasco High School teachers that drove combine for us during the summer. They—every year—would come back. Part of that was because of my cooking. But they seemed to enjoy working for us. Guadalupe, as I say, started working in 1974. When I sold the farm, he was still working for us. He liked to work, and he liked to work for us. Trying to think of some specific kind of workers. Our foreman was from Texas. He was from an area in Texas where they mostly speak Spanish; so was Guadalupe. I know when our last set of employees—people that are still working there—one is from Mexico, with a green card; he’s legal. But a fair amount from Texas. And they started out as migrants, picking asparagus. Then settled down and are full-time folks in Pasco. I think you asked me something else. I’m trying to think what it was. O’Reagan: I think that was—the most recent question was just sort of about the workers. I guess we could branch out from that to—were there any sort of big changes or trends or—you were telling sort of the history of agriculture around there. Anything that comes to mind. Walkley: Well for our farm, and the biggest change that affected me was we went from three combines and three drivers and various truck drivers and me cooking for all of them to one big combine and hauling our grain out by semi. So I still did cook for the combine driver, because it was Nannette, and later my grandson. But it wasn’t the same. Early on, when we were running three combines and all of these trucks, I took a hot meal to the field at noontime. So I had figure out how to keep things hot and how to keep things cold. The combine drivers would eat while the truck drivers were greasing the machines. Then the truck drivers would eat. And if one was at the elevator, you just waited out there until they got back and ate. Wherever they were in the field, I needed to find them and I needed to be there at 12:30 to have that lunch ready for them. That all changed. Early on, the combine drivers would stay out on the farm, and I was feeding them three meals a day. Later on they didn’t do that. I will say that for truck drivers, my husband found that our very best truck drivers were females. Part of that is because they would listen; you could teach them. Because they knew they didn’t know how to drive these trucks. Now, found out that the boys—now, they didn’t know how to drive the trucks, either, but they’re not going to admit it, and they’re not going to listen. The best truck drivers, typically that we had, as a generalization, were females. They’re easier on the equipment, and they’re teachable. And some of them spoke at my husband’s memorial service. As did some of the fellow workers that we had. To me, the driving truck was the worst job on the farm, because you had to park the truck so that when the combine was emptying, chaff wasn’t blowing back on the combine. Because early on, there were no cabs on these, and no air conditioning. My husband, who was driving combines said, I’m eating that dust all the time. I am not going to eat it while I’m unloading. So the driver always had to be parked just right. The truck driver’s just always getting in trouble because they weren’t parking just right, or they were getting stuck. I’m sure that some of these poor truck drivers would just do their best, and they would be stuck, and they’d have to call the combine. There was the times that my husband could, maybe, dig a little or put a thistle underneath a tire, get in and drive that truck out after this kid had been working and working, trying—and it must have just—if it would have been me, it would have just made me gnash my teeth! But that happened more than once. One of the girls that drove truck for us, at his memorial service said, I got stuck, and she said, I didn’t want to get stuck. I knew not to do that. But I got stuck, and Mr. Walkley had to come over and help me. And he came over and I was just so worried about it, he was going to be so mad at me. He came over and he said, do you know how to not get stuck? Don’t drive. And she said, that was the end of it. And he got me unstuck, and it was all okay. [LAUGHTER] But living on a farm is just—it is also very different from someplace else. Especially when you live there, because you’re always on the farm. Something comes up in the middle of the night. You’re just there, and you handle it. Once we got irrigation, there was a lot of things. My husband would get up in the middle of the night and go out and check the sprinklers. Or he’d get up and look in the bedroom window. We had a pressure gauge, and if that pressure wasn’t what he thought it should be, go out and check the farm and see what’s going on. So it’s a 24/7, 365 job. At least it was for us, because we lived on the farm. O’Reagan: Well, there’s always a lot that I don’t know the right question to ask. Walkley: [LAUGHTER] O’Reagan: What should I be asking? Walkley: Oh! I have no idea. [LAUGHTER] O’Reagan: We’re interested in-- Walkley: You’re supposed to be guiding me. O’Reagan: Sure. Walkley: Because we’re really digressing into farm and farming history. Which is different than the Hanford Project. And so I don’t know the right questions, either. O’Reagan: Well, so, we are interested in Hanford and the impact Hanford had on the community, but that’s not the only thing we’re interested in. We are interested in the agricultural history of the area. We’re interested in what it was like living in or around the Tri-Cities throughout this whole period. Day-to-day life, or how things have changed. Walkley: Yeah. In day-to-day life, because of the rationing, and us choosing to put our car up on blocks, we walked everyplace. We went to the movies a fair amount, which is, in a way, kind of surprising to me. But when you went to the movie, you had to stand in line. And the line could be a block or so long. But I remember standing in line, but a bus coming up with the Italian Prisoners of War that were here, that were housed in the Big Pasco area. They didn’t have to stand in line. They just went on in as a group. I could understand that, but yet—[GRUMBLES] And the entertainment was going to the movies. Now, I think for the military that was here, there was a USO building on the north side of the big park in Pasco. They would have things going on there. And I know in Richland, there was all kinds of actors, for instance, that came and entertained the troops and the folks that were working there. But that wasn’t part of our life, because we didn’t live in Richland. But I can just remember walking, doing a lot of walking everyplace. Doing without certain things—now, we never went hungry or anything like that. But there were frills you just didn’t have. Somehow or other, you entertained yourself. Partly because—I know for my dad, he probably put in long hours of working. You go home, you eat and you go to bed. The next morning, you get up and eat and go to work. But for a kid, for thinking about going to a Playground of Dreams or going here for entertainment, walking the malls for entertainment—that just wasn’t part of our life at all. I can just remember kind of playing out in the dirt. Because there weren’t a whole lot of lawns, and I know where we were living, there wasn’t. There was the remnants of the alfalfa field. Later in high school, my friend and I would—I didn’t realize it, but we were essentially babysitting her little sister. She lived in a regular house on 10th Street. At that point, we were living out in this house in the middle of nowhere, it seemed like. But to go from my place to her place, we’d have to drag her little sister’s stroller through the sand. Just that—of course, we didn’t have—there was no television. We had radios, you’d go to the movies, and that’s where you’d get a lot of the news, because they would run a newsreel first—before the main. There’d be a newsreel and there’d be a comic and maybe even a sing-along with a little bouncing ball, and you’d all sing. That is totally unheard of. Have you gone to a movie where you’ve—the whole people are singing something? O’Reagan: No. Walkley: And the words are on the screen with a little bouncing ball. But the newsreels—that’s where we got our information—video information, anyway—about the war, and what was going on. I remember listening to Edward R. Murrow and Walter Winchell, who was talking to “North and South America and all the ships at sea.” I can remember December 7, 1941, and us being glued to the radio. Probably it was a battery-operated radio. When I was a kid in Oklahoma, we did not get electricity until maybe 1939 or 1941. So we had no electricity, no running water, no indoor bathrooms. The house was eventually wired and we’d come home from school looking to see if the meter was on the meter base, which meant we had electricity. You had to pay for a minimum of kilowatts, whether you used them or not. We would watch that. And the minimum, as I recall, was 35 kilowatts. You use 35 kilowatts in half an hour now. But we had a fixture with two lightbulbs in the living room, and a matching fixture in the bedroom with one lightbulb. And this was brilliant! I mean, we could see so good! I remember those two light fixtures. I don’t remember what was in the rest of the house. Later, we had an electric-driven cream separator that was very tall. It was as big as I was. You had to crank it first to help get it started before you could switch it on to electricity. I just remember my job was cleaning the innards of this cream separator. If you’ve never done that, that is a hateful job. But something that everybody ought to have to do at some point, is clean an electric cream—now I liked putting it together. It’s very interesting, very fascinating. I liked taking it apart and putting it together. I disliked washing it. But that’s not anything you want to know. Agriculture-- O’Reagan: I also understand that unlike Richland and also in a lot of ways unlike Kennewick, Pasco had a more diverse population in a number of ways. Was that ever something you experienced? Walkley: Yes. We did. We had some Japanese families. And because, as I understood it, the line that divided whether or not the Japanese had to go to internment camps was the Columbia River. So the Japanese in Kennewick were taken to internment camps. The ones in Pasco were not. But the Japanese area in Pasco, their businesses and where most of them lived close to their business, that was off-limits to the military. The first meal that we had when we came to Pasco was at the M and M Café, which was down by the underpass in Pasco. And it was run by the Japanese. First time in my life I’d ever had oyster crackers. But that area was—and I’m not even sure if the military was here at that point—but later on, that area was off-limits to the military. Now, some of these were second generation Japanese, and they were no threat to this country. They were fine, upright people. There were a few blacks in the area, and basically they were in the east Pasco area. They were—my understanding—very discriminated against in Kennewick, but allowed to be in Pasco. We had a black student in my high school class, and he was one of the class officers. His name was Duke Washington. He was a very good football player, and in fact played football for WSU—College at that time. As I understand it, when they were going to play some team in the South, the WSU coach was told, don’t bring that boy with you. But the coach said, we’re bringing him—and they did. And he was a star football player. Now, I—again, I was young and ignorant—I think I was unaware of a lot of things—I don’t know that he was discriminated against. I expect that he was. But I don’t recall a lot of blacks being in our high school. And there should have been, for the number of black people that lived in east Pasco. So I don’t know whether they weren’t welcome in school—I’m not sure what that was really all about, because I was not aware enough of what was going on in the community to know that. That’s probably another difference between when I was a student, and students now. Because I think that students now—probably a lot of it is social media—they know what’s going on in their community. I thought I knew what was going on, but I don’t think I did. So all of this awareness of social things—I think that’s very different than it was when I was in school. And then we didn’t learn things in high school that students are learning now. Because I know I never had any calculus. O’Reagan: All right. Well, that’s all fascinating stuff. Anything else that leaps to mind before we wrap it up? Walkley: Oh, I’ll probably think of oodles of things when I go home. O’Reagan: Well, we’re certainly open to follow up discussions. That oftentimes leads to even better discussions once people have time to think about what else there is to say. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:24:53 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 249 kbps Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1943-2016 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Evelyn Walkley Description An account of the resource An interview with Evelyn Walkley conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016-2-18 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2016-08-5: Metadata v1 created – [RG] Subject The topic of the resource Richland (Wash.) Richland (Wash.)--Social conditions. Housing Richland (Wash.) https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fedf7236819f3117076a04483382863fc.JPG 801d3189701089821afade8c44ed0a3a https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F46e26fcabd0ae0e47f6875a5987ed284.mp4 838f33e480e051227c99777ef102fc38 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Douglas O’Reagan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Everett Weakley Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Everett Weakley: And there I worked in the lead process for years. And then I moved over later— [VIDEO CUTS] Douglas O’Reagan: My name is Douglas O’Reagan. I’m conducting an oral history interview with Everett A. Weakley on January 13th, 2016. Interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. And I will be talking with Everett, or Ev—would you prefer Everett, or--? Weakley: Just—yeah, Ev or Everett. Either one. Douglas O’Reagan: Okay. About his experiences working on the Hanford site. Okay, well thanks for being here. So—you were just telling me while we were having some camera issues—I’d love to hear about sort of how you got involved with the Hanford site, what you were working on that brought you here, and then your sort of early years, what you were working on here. Weakley: Well, they came up to University of Idaho and recruited people. And I was one of the ones they recruited. So I came down here, and they put me on work at the tritium program extraction process. So I was a process control engineer at that time. O’Reagan: Do you know why they recruited you? Were you working in physics? Weakley: They were after engineers, especially chemical engineers at that time. O’Reagan: I see. Did you know anything about nuclear science specifically? Weakley: Oh, no. We didn’t know squat. [LAUGHTER] Of course. Because we were up at University of Idaho. But it was a lot better than being drafted and sent to Korea. O’Reagan: How much were they able to tell you about the job before they hired you? Weakley: Very little. Very little. They didn’t tell us what was going on. They came down here and they put some people—engineers in this job, some in this job. I was selected for tritium extraction. O’Reagan: Mm-hmm. Could you tell me about your first experiences on that job? What sort of the first month or two like? Do you remember? Weakley: Well, they put us on shift work. I think it was called XYZ shift. And it was only five days a week, but it was—changed. So they were going 24 hours a day, but only for five days. It was a glass line at that time. Tritium was extracted and then you had to send it—you had to pump it out through palladium windows—that’s the way they got the hydrogen out, and the tritium and the deuterium. And then we had to collect those in glass containers. It was all hooked up to the system. And then we were designing one for a metal one. So I went in on the metal designs also. And most of that work was done in the shops down in—oh, what do they call it—the old Hanford site. They had a lab—or a place down there, and they did most of the work—construction work. And then they assembled it all. It was interesting work, actually. Because they kept me out of the Korean War, also, so I was happy about that. I didn’t want to go over there. O’Reagan: Part of what we’re trying to get an idea about is sort of—what was it like working on the Hanford site? Is there anything that sticks out to you about the way things worked? Or the structure, or anything like that? Weakley: Well, since I was a single guy, they put us in the dorms. They ran out of dorms, so they put us—there was two dorms that were down in the women’s dorm area. So they put us in one of those dorms down there. I remember there was a—what the heck street was that? Anyway, those women’s dorms were right close there, too. And then we’d go up and eat at the Mart, which is still here, but it isn’t called the Mart now. And we’d walk through this field of—I think they were prunes or plums or something like that. And you’d go through there and you’d get attacked by the birds. [LAUGHTER] They would actually attack you during the daytime. So it was a lot of things going on. For dorm club, we’d go down to—oh, the Blue Mountains, and we’d go up to Mount Hood, and hunting and fishing was always what I did. It was a good place. Lot of people. It was interesting, because everybody was new, had come in. It was quite the exciting time to see all these people from all over the United States. O’Reagan: Did you live in the dormitories long? Weakley: Oh, let’s see. I lived in there until I got married in ’53. Then we got a B house on Van Giesen Street—one end of it. And I wasn’t the oldest tenant, so I could not buy that anyway. I wouldn’t want it anyway. And then they started selling houses; I got a H house, south end of town and had to remodel that. Had to dig out the basement and all that. By that time, I had several children, so I kind of had to make room for all these kids. Took out the chimney. My wife did not like the coal-burning stove down there to heat the place. So we put in electric baseboard heat. Swamp coolers on the windows. Re-put new—took the chimney out. Had to put new roofing on. All that sort of thing. And later on, we moved to where we are on Pike Avenue now. Then we had more kids. [LAUGHTER] O’Reagan: Keep you busy. Weakley: That’s right. O’Reagan: What was life like in Richland in the ‘50s? Weakley: Well, it was kind of—there was always something to do. Mainly, down along the river in the park. We’d go down there for entertainment in the evenings. There’d be dances. And then I took up square dancing, my wife and I. So that was in different places, but mainly at the end, it was down in the—what do they call it, down there now? At the park. Oh, community house. It’s still going. I think this is their last year. We used to be on what’s now a hole in the ground, on the south end of that building, was where they used to have a structure. That’s where we danced, it was in that. And they had a kitchen in there; everybody’d bring food. It was a nice time. Had a lot of fun. O’Reagan: So you said—do you feel it was easy to get integrated into the community, to be a part of the community at that time? Weakley: What do you mean? O’Reagan: Well, I’m just thinking in terms of your—you’ve been describing a very interesting social scene that people can get into. I’m just thinking, there were a lot of new people coming into town. How—you yourself, of course, experienced this—what it was like to be a new resident in Richland. Weakley: Well, mainly you were in dorms. So, you were all right out of college. Here you are, a bunch of college kids, here—men, and then college women right next door to them. So there was a lot of dating going on. Then we’d go over to Pasco, to the Elks Club at that time. And on Friday nights, they always had a fish dinner. We’d go over there and dance and eat. That was a good time. That was ballroom dancing, it wasn’t square dancing. That was later. O’Reagan: So returning to your work for a minute, I guess to some degree you’ve done this, but could you sort of describe a typical work day, and did that change over the long course of time that you were working there? Weakley: Well, when I went out there, I had to work shift work. XYZ shifts. You’d work daytimes, evenings, and nighttime. I didn’t like that too well. Then when I went to 300 Area, I was all daytime, which I liked. O’Reagan: How much did the work you were doing change as you got these successive promotions, as you got the new jobs? Weakley: Here? O’Reagan: Yeah. I mean, when you were an engineering assistant, was your—I’d assume—if only because it’s decades earlier—how different was your work than when you were principal engineer or senior principal engineer? Weakley: Well, the added responsibility, of course. And I spent a lot of time in the old reactor fuel and then I wrote a lot of documents on how to—the canning process. And that’s probably in here—I’m pretty sure it is. O’Reagan: I noticed here, it says that you are an expert on fuel manufacturing environmental issues. I wonder what—when did that become a priority? The environmental issues, was that something that was always part of your work, or did that develop over time? Weakley: Environmental issues—you worried about what was going out the stacks, especially in 313. We had slug recovery—we’d take the aluminum—the ones that were reject—and they would dissolve the aluminum cans off in caustic, and they always had this exhaust going out. If you didn’t watch it, it would suck out quite a bit of moisture with it, and that would have caustic in it. We had trouble with the women walking by—their nylon hose would disintegrate. And they didn’t like that. I don’t blame them. And you could feel it—you could feel it on your face. They had to fix that up, of course. O’Reagan: Were safety issues or the environment ever something you were concerned about working there? Weakley: Oh, yeah, I was always worrying about—And then at the 306 Building, making fuel elements for the N Reactor, I was involved in that—a lot of things. I had to make trips to the aluminum companies that made aluminum products for us. Bought them back east, and some of them in California. So I did a lot of traveling, going to these different places, trying to get improvements made in aluminum ore, and later on, Zircaloy-2. That was Wah Chang made that down in Oregon—made Zircaloy-2 for us. That was interesting. So you’d take a drive down there and visit their plant. And then you’d go to these other places and visit those plants. O’Reagan: These were to get components for the fuel manufacturing? Weakley: What’s that? O’Reagan: Were these trips to get components for the fuel manufacturing? Weakley: They were making components for— O’Reagan: I see. How much—let’s go with this. Could you describe the ways in which security and/or secrecy impacted your work? Weakley: Well, you couldn’t talk about what you were doing, and we knew that. I made a lot of trips—I went to National Lead Company in Ohio at Fernald. That’s the ones that we would get our uranium cores from, for the old reactors. Then I’d go down to Mallinckrodt in Weldon Spring, Missouri, and that’s where they started making the billets that they’d send up to—on Lake Erie. There was a place that’d take the big billets and make smaller billets for the N Reactor. So I was always traveling around. Then at the same time, I was going down to the Savannah River plant and checking on what they were doing, because they had the same people. Like me, engineers that were busy and they’d get together and compare notes, and try to get the lower prices on some things. Especially aluminum components for the old reactors. Nothing much you could do about the Zircaloy: it was pretty well fixed. The only plant I never go to was the one that made the braze rings for the N Reactor fuel. That was back in—and it had beryllium in it. And I never had gone to there. I don’t know—I just plain missed it for some reason. I don’t know why. O’Reagan: Was it easy to communicate with all the engineers and workers at these plants, or did the secrecy ever sort of inhibit that? Weakley: Oh, no. If you’re buying, say, Zircaloy stuff, you go right down here in Oregon and talk to them. And that’s what we did. O’Reagan: Okay. Weakley: Same way back east on the aluminum plants. Did a lot of traveling. My wife didn’t like that, I don’t think, but we had to travel a lot. And it was old airlines at that time. [INAUDIBLE] had an airline to go to Spokane. You could catch a plane from there, it takes six hours to get into—now takes just a few hours. O’Reagan: Was it unusual that you were traveling that much? Did other people also travel that much from the Hanford site? Weakley: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, a lot of people were traveling. It’s hectic now. I won’t get on an airplane anymore, so heck with them. [LAUGHTER] I’m retired; I don’t do that. O’Reagan: Do you feel the security or secrecy of the place changed much over the decades? Weakley: Oh, yeah. When I started here it was really secret. They didn’t want the Russians to know anything about making tritium. But the secret got out, because somebody in Savannah River—or down at Oak Ridge probably told them. So nothing we could do about it. O’Reagan: Right. Weakley: But oh, yeah, they tried to keep it secret. O’Reagan: What were the most challenging and/or rewarding aspects of your work at Hanford? Weakley: Ooph! That’s a tough one. O’Reagan: It’s a big question. Any particular times that you were working on a project that was really stumping everybody? Any real challenges there that stick out? Weakley: Well, there’s always challenges to make things safer and better, and don’t dump stuff out into the atmosphere, or down the drain out to the ponds. Because at that time, they ponds along the river. And it discharges—a lot of stuff went into that pond. They tried to clean that stuff up, but—oh, yeah. When you have time to go through this, you will find a lot of things in here that I worked on. O’Reagan: Is there anything in there that you’re particularly proud of having accomplished? Or that sticks out? Weakley: Well, I lasted the whole—until I got laid off. [LAUGHTER] That’s an accomplishment—I didn’t get crapped up with anything. O’Reagan: Did you like your job? Weakley: Oh, yeah, I liked it. Oh, sure. It was a challenging job. I wrote a lot of manuals. That’s one of the things I did, a lot of manual writing when I was out there. There are still some of those around on the processes of lead-dip canning process, and co-extrusion process. I did a lot of writing. O’Reagan: Have the Tri-Cities changed much in your time living here? Weakley: Oh, yeah. O’Reagan: And how? Weakley: Oh, yeah, since I came in ’50? Oh, yeah. There’s a lot of changes. They couldn’t even allow the blacks to live in Kennewick. They had to go over in Pasco, for instance. O’Reagan: Right. Weakley: So we didn’t see too many blacks, actually. Now towards the end, they started hiring some people in that were blacks. I had no problem with them. O’Reagan: Yeah, we’re trying to get a sense for how the community has changed over time. I know that’s a vague question. That’s certainly an interesting point about the demographics of it. Anything else about sort of the social life, the number of things going, anything else like that that sticks out to you on how the community’s changed over the decades? Weakley: Well, I always had been hunting and fishing. So when I came here, I took up hunting and fishing again. Some of the people that I—I belong to the Rod and Gun Club—joined that many years ago, and I still belong, even though I got rid of my guns last year. I don’t go out and dig goose pits in the middle of the winter anymore. That’s too cold. I didn’t like to eat geese, anyway. [LAUGHTER] But I had a lot of good trips hunting down the Blues and up north of Spokane, up in that area. O’Reagan: One of the things—well, okay. Let me go to this one next. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and/or living in Richland during the Cold War? Weakley: Hmm. That’s an odd one. Well, for one thing, we couldn’t announce what we were doing anywhere. If you could, you made sure you didn’t. If they said, hey, you’re from Hanford. But it didn’t bother me on traveling too much. Because I’d usually go on to aluminum vendors or Zircaloy-2 vendors. Or I’d go to Savannah River plant, which has got the same restrictions as we have. And it was a free exchange then when you went there or you went to National Lead at Fernald. It was free exchange with the people there. So that was just like being at work. So I had no really problem with it. I didn’t really like traveling that much. But there was nothing I could do about it. O’Reagan: You were mentioning your collaboration people at Savannah River. Can you tell me more about that? Weakley: What’s that? O’Reagan: You were mentioning your training people at Savannah River, is that right? Or just trained people who eventually were at Savannah River? Weakley: No, they were—I met one of them. But they sent people up in tritium extraction. Because they built that plant for tritium. The guy that was running the tritium extraction plant was one of them that I trained. And the last trip I made down there, I met him and went into the tritium extraction plant with him and talked to him. He gave me a tour of what it was like. It was a lot different than what we had out here, of course. Then they shipped their stuff again to Oak Ridge. O’Reagan: Okay. So, I’m also interested in how people commemorate their community, how people celebrate the history, or try to remember the history. I understand that you’ve been involved in some of the historical groups around here. Can you tell me something about that? Why you thought that was important, why you got involved with those groups? Weakley: Are you talking about the Richland Rod and Gun Club, for instance? O’Reagan: Well, them and also the B Reactor Museum Association and so on. Weakley: Well the B Reactor Association, I was one of the earlier ones, before they got the Indians out there. It was interesting, because I was on the ground floor with them. In fact, I was in a meeting this week with them. I still belong to them. Just like the Rod and Gun Club, I still belong to them, even though I don’t—got rid of all my guns because I don’t go out and dig goose pits in the wintertime anymore. So it was interesting. O’Reagan: I always find that there’s an awful lot of things that I don’t know that I should be asking. What could you—what would seem important or interesting that you might want to talk about, or think might be worth discussing that I might have not thought to ask? Anything that comes to mind? Weakley: Hmm. Not right off the top of my head, it isn’t. O’Reagan: Sure, that’s fine. Weakley: [LAUGHTER] O’Reagan: Yeah. We’re just trying, as I said—we’re most interested in getting a feel for life in the Tri-Cities throughout the Cold War, up to the near present. And just how things have changed over time. What it was like to be a worker on the Hanford plants, how work on the Hanford plant changed over time, what it was like living in the community and getting to know people. So really, a broad set of things, but there’s always questions I don’t think to ask. Weakley: Okay. Well, you might have some ideas when you go through this later on. They gave me this, had my payroll number on it and all that. My service dates, 6/19/50 is when I came here. And payroll number 51500 was pretty easy to remember, thank goodness. O’Reagan: As you went through this, did anything— Weakley: Huh? O’Reagan: As you started reading through this again, did any memories leap to mind? Did anything about it sort of jog any fond memories or any surprises? Weakley: Well, we always had surprises. We never knew what was going to happen. Item—let’s see, what is that? Item four. O’Reagan: Mm-hmm. Weakley: I would ship pyrophoric uranium Zircaloy chips and fines back to National Lead. And we had surprises there, because they were supposed to use metal pallets. Somebody brought in wooden ones. And they put all these things that we had full of concrete and chips and fines in it, and they had to take them over across the street into a building. And when they did that, they heated it up and it broke one of the containers, and it caught fire on the shipping containers. They weren’t supposed to use shipping containers. That was a hell of a mess to clean up. Because we had a fire, had to clean all that up then. But we actually shipped the stuff back there and they recovered the uranium and reused it. O’Reagan: Well, I think that’s the written questions I have here. There are certainly a lot more interesting stuff here. Again, if anything comes to mind you would like to speak about, we would love to hear a bit more. Also, it mentions here that your historical knowledge of site activities, particularly in 300 Area, has been extremely valuable in the preparation of the RCRA and CERCLA documents and planning. Could you tell me anything about that initiative? Weakley: Whereabouts are you? O’Reagan: It’s number five, sub-point A. Weakley: Oh, okay. I did a lot of document writing and preparations of these RCRA and CERCLAs documents and planning. And I worked with—what’s her name? Michelle Gerber? O’Reagan: Mm-hmm. Weakley: I worked a lot of work with her, as she was a kind of historian. You’ve probably met her, of course. O’Reagan: I know the name, but I haven’t actually met her, I don’t think. Weakley: You haven’t met her? O’Reagan: I don’t think so. Weakley: Amazing. I’m surprised you haven’t met her yet. Anyway. She needed a lot of work. I would find things in 300 Area when we were cleaning out for the old reactors, getting 313 cleaned out. We would find movies. I’d ship that out to her, and then she made a CD out of it, I think. It showed the canning process, which had never been done before. It was— O’Reagan: Do you think the history of your job is going to be well-preserved? Do you think the records are still there that can reflect on your times, your work? That is again, sort of an open-ended question here. I’m just trying to think through how people will remember this time in history, and sort of the work that you were involved in. You’re mentioning you found this film and were able to get it out there. But probably some materials didn’t make it out, for security reasons or whatever else, or just weren’t preserved. Do you feel that people have an accurate memory of the time as you look through? Weakley: Well, most of them, I think, do. I always rode a bicycle around, between the buildings out in 300 Area. I would collect lead parts that I’d see laying around and get rid of them—or pick up anything else. So that I would ride those into the building. [LAUGHTER] O’Reagan: I saw—I was out at the DoE’s artifact collection—historical artifact collection. They have some bicycles out there that I guess were what you were describing, people traveling around the site. Was that common? Weakley: What do you mean? O’Reagan: You were using bicycles to get around the site? Weakley: Well, it was in our area. Oh, I used it all the time. And it had a basket in the back wheels. I’d put something in there—I would collect lead brick or something like that, and put it where the lead’s supposed to be and kind of clean things up. Well, it was a pretty good-sized area, 300 Area, so if you had to go down to the south end for some reason, you wanted to get there and get back. O’Reagan: Right. Okay. So as I said, I think these are the questions that we had prepared, sort of the general ones here. Weakley: You might have some questions when you—well, you can use anything you want out of this write-up. O’Reagan: Yeah, I think this will be a great help. This has been very interesting from my perspective here. We certainly thank you for your time. Yeah, I think that’s at least our first set of questions. But maybe if anything occurs to us, or to you, maybe we could send follow-up questions? Would that be okay, if any questions— Weakley: Oh, yeah, you can always get ahold of me if I’m around. I don’t go travel too far since I’m 88. O’Reagan: All right. Well, thanks very much. We appreciate your time. Weakley: Oh, she’s still back there. O’Reagan. Yeah. Weakley: [LAUGHTER] Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:33:02 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 300 Area 306 Building B Reactor N Reacor Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1950-today Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1950- Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Michelle Gerber Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Everett Weakley Description An account of the resource An interview with Everett Weakley conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 01-13-2016 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2018-31-1: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. 300 Area 306 Building B Reactor B Reactor Museum Association Cold War Hanford Kennewick Mountain Mountains N Reactor River Savannah River Street War