Robert Franklin: And do you like to go by Robert or by Bob?
Robert Parr: Bob.
Franklin: Okay—
Parr: If I get going too far, Robert is usually a buzzword that causes me to refocus.
Franklin: Okay. We will have to put out your full legal name when we introduce you.
Parr: Okay.
Franklin: But then I’ll refer to you as Bob from then on.
Parr: Yeah, okay.
Franklin: Okay, you ready Victor?
Victor Vargas: Yeah.
Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I’m conducting an oral history interview with Robert James Parr on November 17th, 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 name?
Parr: My last name is spelled Parr, P-A-R-R. My first name is Robert, R-O-B-E-R-T. My middle name is James, J-A-M-E-S.
Franklin: Great, thank you. Thanks, Bob. So tell me how and why you came to the area to work at Hanford.
Parr: I graduated from WSU itself in 1973 with a degree in police science and administration.
Franklin: In Pullman.
Parr: Pullman, the big campus. And after I graduated, I went into work into law enforcement. I ended up in the late ‘70s working for the State of Washington State Liquor Control Board, long before cannabis, as an enforcement officer. It was a good agency, both regulatory and criminal enforcement. So it was—no day was the same. But when I looked at it, the pay and benefits weren’t what I thought they would be. And then I noticed—I saw an ad in I believe it was either the Seattle Times or Seattle Post Intelligencer that Atlantic Richfield Hanford—ARCO—was looking for people to work for them in their uniformed security group called the Hanford Patrol. So I checked it out, and I found out that their pay was much better than I was working for the state. So I went and interviewed with them at a hotel—I think it was the Doubletree, or is the Doubletree now at Southcenter in Renton, Washington. So I did the interview, and I noticed that everyone else being interviewed, we were all ex-military or law enforcement. So I took the interview, and then they offered me a job. I had previously applied with ARCO, and of course at that time the transition occurred, so it was now Rockwell Hanford. So they offered me a job starting in—I interviewed, I think, sometime in the December timeframe, and then right after New Year’s they offered me a job starting to work in February 1980. So I was married at the time, so we moved over to Tri-Cities, got an apartment, and I had done my physical and all the screening before. And then I started to work for Rockwell Hanford in February of 1980. My initial employment—my initial job was with Hanford Patrol. So, they had their own—they called it an academy, and it was at what is the 1100 Area, which used to be—one of the activities we did at the 1100 Area was the bus lot. Because we had buses onsite. So at the office where the buses were dispatched from, about the back third of it was the Hanford Patrol Training Academy. It wasn’t much, but that’s where I went to work, and initial training was about seven weeks. While I was there, I received my—I already had had a clearance from the Department of Energy—security clearance. So my security clearance showed up, and since I had a security clearance—many of my peers in this class—there were about 20 or 30 of us—didn’t have clearances, so they were work approvals, what we called WAs. But I had my Q security clearance, so I went right to work. My first assignment was in 200-West, 200-East, and 100-N. So I worked out at the north end of the site for a couple months. And then I got reassigned to 300 Area, which was a composite area of—we did fuels production and research there. So it was the contractors—we had Rockwell providing security and fire services and transportation. United Nuclear was operating fuels production for the N Reactor at the north end of 300 Area. We also had Northwest National Labs, Battelle Memorial who was operating in there; they had several facilities. And then Westinghouse Hanford was doing fuel production and research for the Fast Flux Test Facility, which wasn’t online yet, but almost was nearing completion. So I did that for—I was there for quite some time. And then about less than six months after I showed up, I got promoted. The Hanford Project, the uniformed security and protection onsite hadn’t really adjusted to changing times in society there. They issued us revolvers, and that was when revolvers were starting to be phased out. Automatics, or a more modern sidearm, was being issued. So the big change in technology was their alarm systems. Westinghouse Hanford had led the way. They actually wrote the software. We were using computer-operated security system at 300 and 400 Areas, 400 being Fast Flux Test Facility. So I got to get in on the ground floor of that. I participated in the acceptance test process for both 300 and 400 Areas. We brought the system online. It was state of the art. Westinghouse had gone out and found the best equipment and the best systems, and then wrote their own software for the system. So it was much beyond the old analog systems we used to have onsite. Many of the alarm systems at that point, particularly ones at the Plutonium Finishing Plant were technology from the ‘50s and were probably installed in the ‘60s. And here it was the ‘80s—and the mid-‘80s by now. So we did that, and eventually Rockwell, they also put in a similar system at Plutonium Finishing Plant. But they had a problem: the people that they hired to write their software were two guys in a garage. And it didn’t go well. God bless them for trying, but it didn’t go well. So they ended up buying the Westinghouse software and then they had their software people come in and make some adjustments to it based on their equipment. So they were similar systems. So I got qualified to operate all of them, and shortly thereafter I got promoted again. So now, instead of being a supervisor in an alarm facility on a rotating basis, I was now the coordinator responsible for all four rotating shifts, first at 300 Area and eventually at Fast Flux Test Facility. So I did that until 1993. During that time, Department of Energy was also ramping up its efforts on security, trying to be a little more professional and coming into a more modern era. So they had developed a central training academy down at DOE Albuquerque, at that field office. So they came up to Hanford, and they had developed a training program to teach supervisors on security forces how to train their employees. So I took it, and that worked good. But I was also—when I first moved to Tri-Cities I was on Coast Guard Reserve and I drilled at Station Kennewick, a small search and rescue. It’s the navigation station. So I drilled there, but the Coast Guard started downsizing in the Reagan administration. So I shifted over to the Army National Guard, and shortly after I joined the National Guard, they sent me to a school to learn how to be what the Army called an instructor. So all of the sudden I had two pieces of paper—one from the Department of Energy and one from the Army—saying I was an instructor. Well, in 1993 I was offered a job at Plutonium Finishing Plant with the training department. So in the fall of ’93, I left Safeguard and Security, the Hanford Patrol, and went to work at Plutonium Finishing Plant as a—you could call it instructor, but the official job title was Training Specialist. And then they went through several changes, so I think I’ve been a technical instructor, I’ve been a senior training specialist, and so four or five different job title changes; same job. At Plutonium Finishing Plant, they hadn’t quite—they had a vacancy, so they put me in it, and initially my manager’s idea was, well, you can assist someone on a key training project. So I got assigned as the second instructor on several training projects. And then one day, he walked in—the manager walked in, and he was looking for one of the employees that I was paired up with on one of the projects. And he said, well, where is he? And I said, I don’t know. He said, well, are you running that class today? And I go, what class? Because my peer and I hadn’t even talked about it. So next thing I know, I was now the person responsible or person-in-charge at Plutonium Finishing Plant. And it was a program we set up in response to a finding: when you have an event in those days, they would investigate it and then they would figure out what the corrective actions would be. So the finding, the corrective action, was that we would start a training program at Plutonium Finishing Plant for person-in-charge. So we mirrored it after a similar program at FFTF. And next thing I know, I’m running a training program, and we’re putting all the supervisors—the workforce supervisors in the plant are going through it so they can learn how to perform work at the plant. Almost all our work at the plant was done in either procedures or work package. Work packages were usually maintenance- or construction-related. So I got to be the—my title soon became the PIC-meister. Because not only did I have to coordinate their training, but I also had to develop their certification and qualification. So I did that much of the time I was there. And then other programs started going my way. I also ended up teaching Safety Basis. Because at a DOE facility, it’s somewhat similar to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission-regulated facility, an operating commercial reactor. But their idea is that the Safety Basis is those documents, those commitments that have been made on how the plant can be operated. In other words, to a non-commercial DOE facility, it’s your operating license. So every time we proposed an activity, we had to look—or sometimes even a construction or maintenance package, we had to ensure it was within the Safety Basis. So I ended up teaching that course. So pretty soon my work focus seemed to be emergent training. Anything we had an event or an incident, where training was needed the day before yesterday, it ended up on my plate. So that’s what I did. By that time I was in the Army National Guard, and then after 9/11 happened, the 27th of September that year, I got a phone call at work telling me to come in. So I cleared work as fast as I could, came home. My eldest daughter was living with me. She fixed a boxed lunch for me, and I got in the car and I started driving towards Fort Lewis. And that first time I was gone sixteen months. Then I was home and I left again for a year-and-a-half. Went to Iraq twice. And then I came back, and in between that, there was all kinds of little three- to four-week taskings from the Army. And then in 2008, I left for four months, and came back for three months, and then I left in—January 2010, I got a phone call, and the phone call was, Sergeant Major, are you going to be on the plane tomorrow? I go, what plane? Well, you’re flying to Afghanistan tomorrow. Well, thanks, could you send me a set of orders? So they faxed a set of orders, and I walked up to my manager and said, I’ve got to leave. And that was about 9:00 in the morning, and by—before 11:00 I was turning in all my keys, my security badge and everything, and I was leaving. And then I didn’t come home for two years. And I came back, and by that time, President Obama was President of the United States. He used stimulus money to many federal agencies. And the Department of Energy took it, but their approach was a little bit different. While in the Army, we used some of it, but we hired companies to come in to do work for the Department of Defense. Whereas DOE used the approach of having their contractors hire more employees. So I came back and the stimulus money was running out and they were overstaffed. So the next—they offered a voluntary reduction of force, a layoff, early retirement. So I asked my management what my retirement’s worth. And they—so I drove down to, I think it was Stevens Center, not far from WSU Tri-Cities. And I walked in and they went over my retirement with me, and god bless them, they gave me credit for time served. Not like a jail sentence, but my time on active duty with the National Guard. So I raised my right hand and said, I’ll take it. And I left, and my last day was the end of September in 2011. And I had four years of great veteran’s benefits through the VA bill. So I took my veterans benefits and came back to WSU Tri-Cities this time. No athletic eligibility so the university couldn’t screw with me much. And I got another degree.
Franklin: And what’s your degree, what was that degree in?
Parr: The second degree is a Bachelor of Arts in Social Science. So I got to take all those cool classes that—the first time around, I declared my major the first year. And in the early ‘70s, once you declared your major, your goose was cooked, you took what they told you. They offered you a very narrow pathway. So the second time around I got to take fun things like economics and lots of psychology and some English courses. A lot of history. So I think I developed into a better-educated, much broader person.
Franklin: That’s really fascinating.
Parr: Yeah.
Franklin: Good to see someone come in the social sciences, too, as a historian. So I see here on some of the notes Emma had written up that your father worked at Hanford as well?
Parr: My father was an Army officer. Hanford started out as an Army project. Corps of Engineers and the DuPont Corporation, which was quite a corporation back in the day. It still is. But they did a lot of work for the government in the ordnance field. And the Navy used the approach—because the Navy was heavily involved—not heavily—but involved in the Manhattan Project, and they were doing some of the uranium research. So the Navy ran it through their Ordnance Corps. The Army ran it through the Corps of Engineers, but the Corps of Engineers didn’t have all the resources. So one of the things was, because at the time Hanford was believed to be a viable target in the event of total war. So initially we sided—my father was Coast Artillery which later became Antiaircraft Artillery. So my father was one of the officers that was detailed here temporarily to site the guns. And they did some site work, and eventually that siting work, when they put one of the Nike systems—the missiles, to ring the Hanford Site and I believe around Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane. Some of the siting work that they had done in the ‘40s was used to site the missiles when, I believe, they were being placed in the ‘50s. So my dad was here temporarily. He was one of a lot—a lot of Army personnel came and went. I think people get the—we even had MPs here. We of course had antiaircraft artillery which later became air defense. So for many years there was a heavy Army presence here. It wasn’t totally—it wasn’t like you’d see an Army uniform everywhere, but Colonel Matthias was the commanding officer. And a very unique approach, because his approach was that—and Dad told me about it—his approach was that he was the commanding officer, and he was responsible. Later, when I came back to work here, I didn’t see that same attitude with the Department of Energy. Because one of the things I noticed is—I worked for a lot of contractors. First started looking at ARCO, then it was—when I came here it was Rockwell Hanford, then it was Westinghouse Hanford, then it was Babcock & Wilcox, which a lot of people think of them as the maritime boiler company, but they’re also heavy into the nuclear business. A great company to work for. They were only here for a year. And then it was with Fluor. Then eventually when they broke up all the little contracts, I worked for a company called NREP, which was the training contractor—one of the training contractors onsite. And then eventually after I left, after I retired, NREP went away and they consolidated back. One of the things that I noticed about DOE is a contractor will be—of course they don’t screw with Battelle. It’s hard to screw with those guys because they do great work for a lot of different things, and they’re on the cutting edge of so many different technologies and they’re so important to our national wellbeing. But DOE would start beating up on the contractors. So you know that contractor’s probably going to be on its way out. And Department of Energy over the years—god bless them. They’re great Americans. But they can’t seem to make up their mind how they’re going to run. Sometimes it’s—when I first came here it was five or six principal contractors, and then they went to one big contractor, and then they broke it down again, and then they subcontracted out a lot of work, and then now they’re bringing it back.
Franklin: Do you think that has to do with the fact that DOE—higher-ups in DOE are subject to political appointments?
Parr: Not only the political appointments but also the budget process. But I don’t see that constant shifting—you see it in other federal agencies, cabinet-level agencies, but not the extent that DOE does it. It’s almost like, well, we can’t do it. And then oftentimes, I’ve known—I think one of the things that’s responsible for a lot of—for some of the problems—we didn’t have a lot of problems—but some of the events we had out at Hanford were directly related to the field office, Department of Energy Richland. They’re great people and everything, but sometimes I think the guidance they gave, and oftentimes the funding for the program was stopped at the end of the fiscal year, we were told, don’t spend any more money on it, leave it as-is, do something else. Well, that’s kind of what happened at the PRF explosion. But it wasn’t DOE—it wasn’t the field office’s fault? Strange.
Franklin: Can you talk a bit more about that event? That was in ’97?
Parr: Mm-hm.
Franklin: And you were working at PFP—
Parr: I was in a training group. It occurred on a weekend. So got to work, and you could actually see the—some of the—you had to know what to look for, but you could see the external damage to the facility. And of course, I had been involved in training the shift supervisor. I was at his oral board when he qualified as shift supervisor, because I supported oral—one of the things I got assigned with was supporting the oral boards. So I was at his oral board, and I’d known him for several years, and I thought he was probably one of our better shift supervisors at Plutonium Finishing Plant. But I had—I noticed, as we did it, and then they came looking for the training packages, well, we never—we did initial training on operating of PRF, but it got stopped, they withdrew the money from it. So I don’t even know where the training packages were. But they were concerned—and I noticed that our emergency response to the event was flawed. We didn’t respond well. We hadn’t trained on it, and we hadn’t really devoted a lot of time and effort to emergency preparedness. It hadn’t been a focus. So I got involved in the corrective action. I ended up teaching. We now instituted a drill program at the plant. So I got involved in the drill training program. In other words, how to train people that are working the drills. Many of us were ex-military, so we understood how to run a drill. No big thing. But we had a formal training program. I ended up adding some material to the PIC training program. So there were a lot of corrective actions, and eventually we demonstrated readiness to go back to work. But the issue still was we were told to stop working at PRF. So it just—and we didn’t really devote—we should have devoted time—we should have had the resources to look back at that and figure out what the hazards were that were still remaining in PRF. But we were told not to spend any more money on it. So when it’s the end of the fiscal year and you’ve got no Costco to charge activities to, you don’t work.
Franklin: Our project’s grant funded.
Parr: [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: We’re a subcontractor, so I understand. Can you talk a bit about—so you would have been at Hanford during that—and I think on patrol during that transition period when the Cold War ended and when production wrapped up and we shifted into this new phase. I wonder if you could talk about that transition.
Parr: Well, the big transition initially was—and the one was much harder to discern—was the transition from the Carter administration to the Reagan administration. All of the sudden—it was much easier to see in the National Guard, because all of the sudden, new equipment started showing up and you started getting money to train with and send soldiers to schools. But here at Hanford we started getting new equipment. That’s when we—security had pretty much done—we’d upgraded all our alarm systems. But then we started getting money for communication systems, Hanford Patrol’s initial entry training started changing. And I noticed it elsewhere onsite, because we went from kind of a standby mode as far as defense work then, to actively producing material. Really significant change. And that went on for several years. As the Reagan administration ended and we went into President Bush’s administration, the level of effort kind of reached its maximum, as far as funding for defense work. And then I remember when the wall came down, we kind of backed off defense work. And then, okay, stop that, we’ve got enough plutonium. We closed down PUREX. FFTF was going away because they decided that that type of reactor wasn’t going to be it, even though we had received funding from the Japanese to do work. And they couldn’t find research work for FFTF, so they started shutting it down. Even though it was, at the time, it was probably the most modern reactor the Department of Energy had. But we had never, never gone to the idea of making a dual-purpose reactor and producing power. We’d done the engineering studies for it, we’d done some of the preliminary design work, but we never installed them.
Franklin: I thought N Reactor was.
Parr: N Reactor was, but we were going to do that to FFTF. So we’d actually—there was actually a piece of ground at the Fast Flux Test Facility where they were going to do that. And the engineering and preliminary design work had been done. So we kind of shifted from that, and it’s as if we were struggling for a national energy policy—where are we going to go?
Franklin: Interesting.
Parr: So we kind of—and the N Reactor—when Chernobyl went, the N Reactor, I believe, was in a fueling outage—its annual outage. So then we began to look at the fact that the N Reactor was a unique reactor. Very effective, very economical to run. Washington Public Power Supply System had built their generation plant next to it. But the political—Chernobyl caused a lot of—well, obviously, it was a severe blow to the Soviet Union. And the Ukrainian people are still having to deal with it. But the ramifications and fallout from any event in an industry, and nuclear’s probably one of the more visible ones, causes a ripple effect elsewhere. And our ripple effect was we never—we did the engineering analysis, but I think the political outcry was a little bit too much to reopen—or resume production at the N Reactor. Then also we really didn’t need any more plutonium; we had sufficient for national defense. So it kind of became the issue. There’s a lot of politics. So let’s go into that for a minute. Let’s talk red and blue states. Red being the party—a red is a Republican state; a blue state being a Democratic state. We are a blue state. Both US Senators come from the other side of the mountains. In this area we have one voice in Congress that speaks for us, the local congressman. So when even Spokane, which is Republican, too, when it begins to turn against this industry and this area, then politically it becomes no longer viable. Then of course we had—the congressional delegation from Oregon was speaking out against it. So it becomes politically unviable.
Franklin: Right, right. It was kind of—Chernobyl kind of kicked off like a perfect storm to just kind of hurt the nuclear industry and Hanford.
Parr: And then—I believe it was 2000—there was an event in Japan, a criticality at a production facility. And that also caused a wave of consternation. Although it was interesting, because one of the subjects I instructed at PFP was criticality safety. And we were very diligent about it. We did refresher—everyone got a—you got your initial site training and then because you worked at PFP, we had a PFP specific class talking about the risks we had for criticality safety. And then we had an annual refresher course. So we looked at what was going on in the industry, using the lessons learned, and some of the changes in process we were doing to plan. It was usually a one- to two-hour refresher class every year. So we looked at all that. But when the Japanese had their event it was kind of interesting. Some of the experts—or the people I depended on to give me advice on what to put in the training event—were criticality safety experts from Northwest National Labs. And all of a sudden, I’m calling someone—well, he’s not here. Well, where is he? Well, he’s in Japan. Then I realized, okay. So, some of our top people in our industry from right here at Hanford went over to deal with the issue.
Franklin: Interesting. You worked for a lot of different contractors. That’s always kind of a—it’s interesting to me how, you know, because we say Hanford Site, but that really obscures the organization of the site and the work. I’m just wondering if you could talk a bit more about that—shifting between contractors like that, and how that affected the mission of the site, how that might have affected employee morale, and how it kind of affected you personally.
Parr: Well, I think that the big transition—because I got here after Rockwell had come in. So I’m working for Site Safeguard and Security. And I get my paycheck from Rockwell. But I work at 300 Area, which in those days—United Nuclear was about 10 to 15% of the puzzle. Because I knew—I saw what our funding was for security services coming from. But most of it came from Westinghouse Hanford, Northwest National Labs, Battelle Memorial. And I noticed that, working with their security staffs from all four companies, that they were very—Northwest National Labs was very, very different. The people they had working their security programs were security professionals. They were very much into assets protection. Not only people, but information and also property. So assets protection was very big for them. One of the things that I—the first thing that struck me was when I went to work at 300 Area, they’ve got a book—a three-ring binder—and it’s got every one of their facilities with a floorplan and a description of what’s there, is there any special nuclear material there, are there any classified document storage areas? You know, what is the security force protecting? Incredible. No one else had one. Westinghouse was pretty much on the same level. Very much an administrative security. Had great programs. If you needed—if something unusual happened and you needed their management’s approval on it to get it, you were talking on the phone with those people and usually within three to five minutes, they’d be calling you. Incredible. They had a different mindset. They were building FFTF at the time, and they were very much—their corporate and company philosophy was very much on operating reactors. Because they built reactors, they built reactor vessels themselves, so they were very much into that commercial power production. They were a large government contractor, not only for DOE but other agencies. They did a lot of defense work. They did a lot of work for other federal agencies: Department of Treasury, Department of the Interior, Department of Justice. So there was a big mindset of meeting the customer’s needs. Westinghouse was very employee oriented. Of course they were only about 1,500 employees, whereas Rockwell was several thousand more. So it was very interesting working for Rockwell but being in a Westinghouse Battelle UNC facility. So I kind of—we kind of felt like orphans. It’s like—no, I’m very serious. Each one of the contractors had their own company newspaper. So, Rockwell, we’d get it two or three days later. Westinghouse, the day it was published, it was brought by our building, too. Even though everyone that worked in that building except for the janitor—the custodial staff—was a Rockwell employee, Westinghouse delivered it. They reached out to us. And then when they ran the big—at that time, and that’s when DOE field office went to one big contractor—of course Battelle had their own thing. So that didn’t change. But all of the sudden, it’s like the management of my own group was very—they worked in a Rockwell facility at the north end of the site. They weren’t too happy. But we didn’t have any problems making the transition, but they did. There was a lot of turmoil—not a lot, but a significant amount of turmoil in the north end of the site, particularly in Safeguard and Security, because all of the sudden Westinghouse had a successful program and they went out there and they weren’t impressed by some of the programs they found.
Franklin: So that’s the reason, then, for some of that turmoil or hard feelings?
Parr: Oh, yeah. Westinghouse, you didn’t want to lose control of special nuclear material. That’s really a bad thing. And Westinghouse’s standard, how they did their administrative program and their controls, was much more developed, much more thorough. So when they moved in—so now they’re taking over Plutonium Finishing Plant, which had a large amount of plutonium back in the days. They weren’t—it was kind of a shock to Westinghouse. Oh, we’ve got all this—before it was just fuel components. Now they’ve got weapons grade material that’s designed for ultimate defense work—the end use being defense work. So there was a little turmoil there, but then in about six months it all kind of evaporated. And then employees were actually sad when Westinghouse left. Because Westinghouse was much more attuned to employee communication, employee benefits. Rockwell—it was kind of interesting. I remember one time I had to go to east. This is where Rockwell Hanford’s corporate office was. I go out there and I’m walking around and I look, and in all these offices—even in cubicles—because there was some offices, but there was also cubicle land. You’d walk out and you’d see pictures of the B-1 Bomber which was a Rockwell aircraft, when Rockwell still made aircraft. And I’m looking around, and down at Westinghouse, everyone was an ex-Navy nuke or ex-commercial power nuke. But out at Rockwell, they were all refugees from when the B-1 program got canceled, so Rockwell moved all these engineers out here. So it was a very different mindset: the aviation versus naval nuclear and the commercial nuclear industry.
Franklin: Interesting. So you said Rockwell was the aviation.
Parr: Yeah, North American Rockwell, the old aviation company. Probably the most famous aircraft that—I’m sure that they made other ones—but the one that comes to mind is the P-51 Mustang. That was their biggie.
Franklin: You’ve mentioned of the older security systems that were still in place in the 80s and you said analog. Can you give me an example of an analog security system?
Parr: Well, it was a system where the point of where the actual, shall we say, sensor, whether it’s a magnetic or whatever, when contact is broken it sends—you lose connectivity, so it would send a signal and it would—the little mechanical panel would go red and make an audible tone and go red. So kind of a dated technology, whereas--
Franklin: How would you track that from a central area?
Parr: Well, it’d be hardwired, usually to a facility that would be nearby.
Franklin: Okay.
Parr: At PFP, the alarm facility—the central alarm facility was a little wooden building—no, I’m serious—
Franklin: I believe you.
Parr: --that was near the main entry point into the plant.
Franklin: Okay.
Parr: But a more modern system would—you could actually, you’d get—the signal would—you could actually query the signal to see the strength of signal and is it because the system—there’s a power problem? In other words, is there a problem with the system, or is it an actual alarm? So you could query it back. And there were no microwaves, there were no—they were usually—their presence detectors were very limited in capability and obviously, no cameras—or very few cameras.
Franklin: So like CCTV would have been a big introduction.
Parr: So when they did install CCTV, there was—the fuels production facility was the first one to bring it online. They actually had—you could see the entry point into the secured area, you could see the hallways, you could see the primary rooms where the primary points of value were. And then on the perimeter, they normally had fixed cameras, pan-tilt zoom, but then they also had cameras with low-light capability, with flood lights on them. So it was much—and then there was actually a perimeter fence line and security system. Although at the 300 Area it was kind of dicey, because we were retrofitting a security system into an area where there’d been none. So there was some areas you couldn’t put a double fence line, so we ended up with a single fence line, supplanted with motion detectors—microwave motion detectors. And then they also had a fence that was monitored. They called it a taut wire system, because it was a weapon that if it ever were touched—and sometimes by small animals or tumbleweed—we seem to have some of that out here at Hanford—it would go off. So you’d take a look on the camera, see what it was.
Franklin: Oh, okay, yeah I bet that would help you reduce a lot of false alarms.
Parr: One year after a fire—we seem to have fires out at—well, range fires at Hanford are not unknown. But we had one fire, and I can remember at FFTF that the debris from the fire kept plugging up our perimeter system for several days thereafter until we got a work crew in there to actually pick up the debris and partially burned pieces and the full tumbleweeds. Because the fire would generate a lot of heat in the air, so not only do you have debris from the fire itself, but you also have debris being moved by the air currents. And the way the wind was blowing off Rattlesnake Mountain.
Franklin: Did you—sorry, I’m just looking over some of my notes here, and I wanted to ask you about—oh, shoot. It says here that in the 1980s, you helped during an anti-nuclear protest at the Federal Building?
Parr: Oh, I remember that. No, I didn’t do it. I was on duty that day. And what we’d done is, in the ‘80s we had anti-nuclear protests. And we believed that one was going to be big. So Safeguard and Security and the Hanford Patrol being the uniformed service, they pulled a lot of us in to work that day, and then they took key people—and they actually had buses from Site Transportation, they were going to take care of the demonstrators. Because once they crossed onto the Federal Building property, that was DOE’s area of responsibility, no longer the city’s. So anyway, there’s about—there weren’t that many protestors, perhaps 20 or 40 at most downtown. So there were all these people, and we probably had 50 to 70 people staged and ready to go. Get the buses, put them on the buses, and take them to the federal magistrate. Then all of the sudden, there’s a call come out. There’s people without badges inside West Area at the north end of the site. And apparently—we’re down—I think I was at either—I can’t remember if I was at the 300 Area in the alarm facility or 400 Area—but I’m listening to this, and all of the sudden the frequency’s going crazy—patrol’s primary operating frequency—and then the second frequency, the tactical frequency, is getting busy too. You can hear the voices on the radio, a little bit of stress going on. And we’re all laughing like hell, because, you know, hey, that’s where the weapons-grade material is. Aren’t we protecting that? Of course, we were heretics. We’re giggling, you know. It’s funny because it’s not happening to us; it’s happening to someone else. Because we had additional staff at 300 Area and we had additional staff at FFTF because it’s an operating reactor at the time. So apparently what the demonstrators had done is they walked in from Highway 240, and West Area isn’t that far in. They’d walked in, hopped over the outer fence, a single fence line in West Area—hopped over the fence line in West Area and they’re marching towards—and of course, unless you know West Area, the big, tall, long buildings all look alike. They’ve all got stacks and water towers. You can’t tell the difference between one of the old canyon buildings—one of the old production facilities—and PFP. So, all of the sudden, they’ve got protestors in West Area, but all their resources, except for the bare minimum, are downtown. But then it gets even better. When they got the protestors, they put them on a bus, and they thought they’d just being going to the district court in Kennewick. No, took them to the federal magistrate, out of town.
Franklin: Wow.
Parr: Yeah. So, it was kind of funny. But we had gone and—the funny thing was, because of the—they actually, in those days, most of us wore tactical uniform, camouflage or whatever. But the people who were actually going to detain and transport the protestors all had to be in full uniform, you know, pants and shirt and badge. So it was one of the better events.
Franklin: I interviewed a gentleman a while back who worked at PFP who talked about when they would load the product up, and there would be very heavy security and people that almost looked like they were in black ops, or like very—I was wondering, were you ever involved in any of that or did you—
Parr: The Department of Energy had a courier program, and they were based, I think, at Albuquerque at the time. And they usually had a transport vehicle and escort vehicles. They were specially trained to protect the shipments. There’s other ways to move things, but usually once a weapon is produced, it’s turned over to the military, and their transport is their responsibility. But components—whether it’s plutonium or whatever—would usually be transported by the courier group. When they took all the material out—and that happened while I was—probably most of it was done while I was in Afghanistan. It was the same courier group. They had extremely good communications, so it’d always be known where they were, and there were contingency plans in case there was an event. And I don’t think they ever—other than a mechanical failure of a vehicle, I don’t think they ever had an event. And of course protestors were always fixated on, you know, the media was always fixated on the white train. Yeah, okay. [LAUGHTER] I’ve never seen one, but—[LAUGHTER]
Franklin: What were the most challenging and rewarding aspects of working at Hanford?
Parr: The most rewarding one was—I think the people. When I worked in training, I got to know everyone—almost everyone in the plant would come to one of our training events. Some groups needed—the higher-risk job, the more training you got. So it was working with the people. And then some people, it was just a paycheck. But the employees who took pride in their work and enjoyed their work, those were always the fun people to be with. Not that they were there for fun, but just, it was very rewarding to work with them. Now I’m retired and I still see some of them around the community. So it’s always fun to see someone that I spent—you know, worked with. I still see the vice president of the Steel Workers’ Local, because I worked—I got to work closely with him. So to see those people, and to see their successes and to do that. The difficult part, sometimes, was employees who were just there—or people who were just there for the paycheck. Or struggling through personal issues. Being able, trying to help them, or to get—a shift, a work crew doing a work package, they’re people. And the strength of any group is always at the level of the lowest performer. So the performers who were struggling, those were the tough—or the ones who were—sometimes you get cynical. People get emotional. And dealing with the cynicism. I think one of the toughest things I ever had was—I wasn’t involved in the project; I was training, but I wasn’t the trainer for that particular project, but I was doing some other training. They worked hard, they were staging the materials—I think it was the Pencil Tank Reduction at PFP. They were about to take the pencil tanks, clean them up, reduce them in size, and then shift them off to scrap. And they were making hard to get the materials to write the pre-procedures to do the job, get their training in order, and get ready to go. In the aftermath, when Department of Energy said, well, we’re not going to do that right now. But materials had already been—a considerable amount of resources had been pushed in that project to get it ready to go. But then Department of Energy said, well, no, we’re not going to do that. We’re going to take that money and we’re going to use it for something else. Planning at Hanford is always one of our toughest things. Has been for years. There’s so many things we did that—where it never came off, or things changed. Not too far from here are the bus lots at 1100 Area. And the parking lot’s at 300 Area. We spent a lot of money—or the government spent a lot of money improving those parking lots, making sure they had the good drainage and so on and so forth. Improving the bus lot and making it a much safer, much more efficient operation. And then we canceled bus service. A couple years later, I know that our local law enforcement—I think Richland Police Department—used it for a pursuit driving course, that piece of ground, and now it’s gone commercial. But all the things we do, and then all of a sudden—boom—we never realize the full value of what we had spent money on.
Franklin: You kind of—I’m sensing from that and the comment you made earlier about the lack of energy focus—maybe do you see kind of a lack of focus at Hanford or kind of surrounds some activities at Hanford?
Parr: I think when Congressman Foley—Tom Foley—was speaker of the House, and he was from—let’s see, we’re four, I think that’s 5th Congressional District, in Spokane. Speaker Foley—and this was probably about the time of the Chernobyl issue and all of that—Speaker Foley proposed, in a public statement, transitioning Hanford from Department of Energy back to Corps of Engineers. And knowing a lot of engineers, Army engineers, they’re great people and they do great things. And I looked at that, and I go, I don’t think that’s the right move. But now looking back on it, and having worked with the Corps of Engineers in both the reconstruction of Iraq, before we withdrew, and then a lot of the work—there’ve been some mistakes—a lot of mistakes in Afghanistan and Iraq. But looking at some of the work they’ve done there, I hate to admit it, but I think Tom was right. We should have switched. Because I think the Corps of Engineers is a lot more focused and a lot more planning. Because they don’t look at—oh, we’re going to—I think the Corps looks at the long-term: five, ten, fifteen, twenty years. And looks for a strategy. Whereas I see Department of Energy, particularly—and I know the field offices are all different. What I saw in DOE Albuquerque was different than DOE RL, was different than DOE Rocky Flats. I think the Department of Energy field offices, particularly Richland, focused on the near-term, not the long-term. The near-term being this fiscal year and maybe next. But I see that in working with Northwest National Labs, I noticed they were always looking at where we’re going to be in four, five years. And I think—because with the Army I got to support a couple projects. Then I was in Afghanistan. We were doing something and I needed some reach-back capability. So unofficially I reached back to Northwest National Labs to give me help with something in Afghanistan that I was encountering. And it took me a couple days to find the right person and then get him up on a secure—I’m not Hillary. So I used a secure—all my emails were in a secure system—and to reach out and get that information, so how we could be more effective in Afghanistan. So I saw that kind of work, and I see—dealing with them and watching what they’re doing, they’re looking at the—they look at, they forecast out in the future. What’s it going to be like in ten, 15, 20 years? What’s the end state? I think RL has gotten, or particularly in my time, they were in the survival mode, reacting, rather than planning. I think one of the key losses we had—we had the DOE RL manager one time was a guy by the name of Mike Lawrence. And later he left, but I noticed when he left—I think Mr. Lawrence was—he planned, he looked at things. He tried to anticipate where the federal budget was going and what the program was going to be. And I think after that, it became a more reactive group. And now I continue to watch, and I watch them—we were spending money—apparently taxpayers were spending money on upgrading the Federal Building, because they’re the primary occupant there. And then they said, no, we’re going to move our office—move our staff out to the Stevens Center Complex, which is right off—between George Washington Way and Stevens. So we’re going to move out there. So you figure, oh, okay, that’s going to cost a little money. And then what’s going to happen to the contractor employees there? Well, they’re going to just—the taxpayer owns the Federal Building, but the Stevens Center is leased facilities. So I can’t—I can’t figure that one out. God bless them, but I can’t figure it out.
Franklin: Yeah, we exist in a similar thing here at WSU. Our project is in a leased facility and it seems to be the way that—I would agree with you that that is—there’s more focus recently on our near-term solutions, especially here in Richland, but ignoring the long-term solutions. Maybe because the long-terms are scary. I don’t know. But—
Parr: You’ve got to—what do they say in the Army? Oh. Embrace the suck.
Franklin: Yeah. Is there anything we haven’t talked about that you’d like to cover?
Parr: Well, it was interesting being at Hanford Patrol initially and watching them come from a more security force that was designed just to check badges and check classified repositories and respond to alarms, become more a professional force. It was really exciting watching their training group. When I first came here, they’d get up and read a manual and that was your training. Their firearms training was superb. Best I ever had. Probably better than anything I’ve seen, even in—I would put their marksmen up against the best of the best. Whether it’s HRT and the Bureau. I definitely think they can out-shoot the Ranger, but—not criticizing the Army Rangers—but their people can out-shoot Army Rangers. And perhaps, Force Recon in the Marine Corps. I think they’re up there with the more elite organizations. And I think that firearms training was incredible. They took people who couldn’t shoot, and they teach them theory and technique and then work with them and find the faults and get them to correct it to that point. I’ve never seen anything like that in any law enforcement academy or any military training. It was incredible. But the rest of it, there was no lesson plans. Training is always analysis, design, development, implementation where you get up and teach it, and then evaluate it to see if the training took. I didn’t see that in Rockwell’s training program for the Safeguard and Security team force. But eventually to see them as, when Westinghouse took over, they started putting those standards in. And I think Department of Energy did it nationwide. So I think watching that change and transition was exciting. Was great stuff. It was an exciting place to work. And right now they’re tearing down the Plutonium Finishing Plant where I spent, what, 17, 18 years of my life—except for some trips elsewhere. But to see it come down, but then to realize what we achieved there. I was there the day a button caught fire, a plutonium button. That was exciting. Because we were testing out the security system, and—why do we have employees taking off their clothing on camera? What’s going on here? And then call up to building emergency, is something going on inside the plant you kind of should let us know about? And why is the fire department coming? And then watching it go through things, and then eventually watching the cleanup process, stabilizing plutonium, and seeing where that goes. So I’m glad I had the opportunity to come in today to talk a little bit about what it was like to work at Hanford. I remember when he had buses and then we didn’t have buses because they decided we didn’t need them anymore. And then watching the density of vehicles on the highways going up to work onsite. I can remember when they decided that—there’s a four-lane road; Stevens is a four-lane divided highway out to the Site. You know, when you’re doing remediation and you’re constructing the Vit Plant, there’s a lot of trucks and trailers with heavy loads that are in the right-hand lane. So then somebody came up with the bright idea of—and they’re slower-moving. So we’re going to have that traffic in the left-hand lane going northbound, and everyone going, they’re driving the speed limit or those going beyond the speed limit would drive in the right-hand lane. Excuse me? Really? Really. And then there was a thing where we decided to put—you know, how far it is from this place to this place. And we’re going to do it both in the English system and also in metric. Good idea, that makes sense, because a lot of the world is metric. Makes a lot of sense. So then they put the signs up, and they put—the letters are about that high in a 55-mile-and-hour zone. So how close do you have to be to read a sign that’s got letters that are about two inches high, going about 55 miles an hour? Excuse me? [LAUGHTER] And also that’s now—isn’t that kind of like a visual impediment to traffic safety?
Franklin: Yeah, seriously.
Parr: The other one is right up on Stevens in the 300 Area. You’ve got 300 Area—I can’t remember the name of the street. It comes out and goes onto Stevens—we used to have our own highway system out there, so that’s called Highway 4 South. So the traffic is going west onto a north-south—onto a road that’s in the right-hand side is going north. But you want to turn left and to head back into town. So they put a stop sign on a wooden post right at the stop line. Well, that’s right on the edge of the traffic—it’s right on the traffic lane. So about every week or so, low lights, not well lit, you get weather, so all of a sudden, about every, once a week, you’d see the stop sign about ten meters over with the pole broken off—the big four-by-four wooden post. So I remember one time, I go, jeez, that’s not very bright. So I put in a safety suggestion. So they thanked me for my safety suggestion. Rockwell Hanford gave me a little product worth 50, 60 cents. Thank you! Okay, but we’re not going to do that, and we’ve already considered it, and it’s safe. And I got that, and I was working shift work. So I’m going home about 7:00 in the morning. And there’s the stop sign over there, the sign sheared off again. So all of the sudden—it never get installed again. They painted a stop sign, they painted stop letters, they moved the sign back. [LAUGHTER] But my suggestion wasn’t going to—so that was kind of fun.
Franklin: Well, thank you so much, Bob.
Parr: Yup.
Franklin: I really appreciate you coming in and giving us a slice of it.
Parr: You know, thank you for doing this, because the Manhattan Project was such an important piece in our history. And being—I’ve been taking a history course and being a former—retired National Guardsman, and the son of a World War II veteran from the Pacific Theater, and seeing the carnage that was Okinawa, and then realizing what the invasion of Japan would have been. I think that puts it all in perspective. And then the work we did—and for me, as a veteran, the big night was the night the wall came down in Berlin. Because that didn’t only put my weekend job in perspective, but it also put the work we’d done out at Hanford. So I think we—the work they do at the national labs, and when we had a criticality safety lab onsite, the work that they did at those facilities—just incredible. I just wish we could have kept FFTF and done power production there. Beautiful reactor. I mean, it had an availability rate of almost 100%. Oh. So. But it’s all about people.
Franklin: Yeah. Great. Well, thank you so much.
Parr: Well, thank you for having me.
Franklin: Yeah. Don’t forget your coffee there.
View interview on Youtube.
Laura Arata: That’s the more comforting way to look at it. [LAUGHTER] Oh, are we ready?
Man One: Yup.
Arata: Oh, okay, so we're ready to get started. If we could just start by having you say your name and then spell it for us.
Vanis Daniels: Vanis Daniels, V-A-N-I-S, D-A-N-I-E-L-S. And that’s the second.
Arata: Thank you. My name's Laura Arata. It's November 14, 2013 and we are conducting this interview on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. So I wonder if we could just start by having you tell us a little bit about when you first arrived at Hanford, who you came with, where you came from, that initial experience.
Daniels: Oh, boy. I arrived, well, let's say I arrived in the Tri-Cities. My dad came here in '43 and worked here off and on until '51 when he moved the family here. Now, between the time he first came here in '43, he, my uncle, and cousin of ours helped pour the first mud that was poured to start the B Reactor. And then, after that, he worked here off and on until '51, when he brought the family out. And I was just a little—barely a teenager when I came here in '51. I was a sophomore in high school. I was supposed to graduate in 1954. At that time, you had to be 17-and-a-half years old in order to graduate from high school. Well, see, I was just turning 16. So then when I got ready to graduate, the vice principal came to me and he says, you can't graduate. I said, why can't I graduate? He says, you're not old enough. I said, oh? What's that got to do would graduation? He say, you're only 16. You have to be 17-and-a-half years old to graduate from high school. Well, it didn't make any sense to me, you know, if I got the grade point and all that and able to graduate. And he say, well, let me ask you a question. And I said, yes? He says, if you graduate, what are you going to do for the next year and a half? I said, I don't know. He say, you're not old enough to get a job. Nobody's going to hire you. He say, so you're just going to be whiling away your time. I said, well, I guess. He says, I'll tell you what, I'll make a deal with you. He say, you come back to school next year. He say, because you're not going to be doing anything. He say, you can come as many hours as you want to. If you can find you a little part time job or something like that, you're free to leave to go and work. And you don't have any restrictions on you, you know, as far as having to be there every day. I told him, okay. So that's what I did. But that's when I really started appreciating school. Because up until that point, I had been an A student, but where I came from--I came from Texas, by the way. I was born in a place called Terrell, Texas, but that's all I know about it. We moved to East Texas, which is a little place called Kildare, which is right out of Texarkana. I personally lived in Oklahoma during those eight or ten years that I was there, and then back to Texas and then to the Tri-Cities here.
But being from the south, I went to an all-black school, segregated. And I didn't know anything about interacting with other races. And when I came here, nobody gave you a—I wouldn't call it a crash course, but I'd say interaction—it has a name for it—But anyway, they just threw you into the school with everyone else. And you had to learn to adjust. Well, that can be kind of hard. And it can also be kind of devastating. So my grade point dropped, but not to the point where I didn't graduate. And I see some kids right now that I went to school with that--I see them every once in a while--and if they hadn't been there to sort of support me, hold me up, I might would have fallen all the way through the crack. I might would have dropped out of school altogether. But they were—let's see, one retired from Franklin County. I don't know what the other three girls did as far as work go. But for some reason, they sort of took me under their wing, and I guess boost my morale or whatever you want to call it. And I was able to transition in and go on and finish school. After I finished school, I tried for ten years, 12 years really, to get a job at Hanford. And for some reason, they didn't want to hire me. I went to Seattle, tried to get a job at Boeing. They didn't want to hire me. I have, later in life since I retired, I learned why I didn't get a job at Hanford or Boeing, as far as that go. The people that I thought would be my biggest asset became my biggest enemy as far as getting a job. Because when you're asked for references and you put people down, I asked them if I could put them down, I let them know that I was putting them down for references and all this stuff. But the things that they put down there hindered me from getting a job rather than helping me get a job. And I learned this since I retired. But needless to say, I worked construction. I finally got a job--an interview--for Battelle. Meissinger was his name that interviewed me. And I must've gone out there for an interview the better part of a dozen times. And every time I'd go, he'd tell me, well, we don't have anything right now. In June of '66, he called me for an interview and I went out. And I'm working every day, working construction, when you leave work on construction, that's when your pay stop. I had a wife and a kid by then. And I went out one evening because he told me, he said, I'll stay here until 7 o'clock. You get of work, you come out. I told him, okay. So I got off, went home, took a shower, when out, talked with him. And I think he was about to tell me that he didn't have a position, ‘til I told him, I said, let me tell you something. I said, now, if you're not going to hire me, tell me now because I can't keep making arrangements, taking off work and all that stuff, coming out here just to sit and talk with you. I need a job. He says, just a minute. I don't know who--he left the room. He went and talked with someone. When he came back, he say, when can you come to work? I don't know. Whenever you want me to. He said, can you come Thursday? I told him yes. So I went out on Thursday.
They interviewed me, gave me a permit, which was a red badge at the time, to go to work. I started as a janitor in the 3706 and 3707 building in the 300 Area. They transferred me from there to Two East and Two West. From Two East and Two West, they gave me a job in what was called Decon at the time. We did all of the glassware, all of the pigs--which is not a literal pig. It's a iron cast. You know, you can get the gallon, half gallon, or quarts. And it contains radioactive waste on the inside. The pig is just to shield the radiation. And we handled all of the hot water from the 300 Area. So I worked in there for two and a half years or so. And we took care of all the waste, did all the filter changing and everything in 300 Area. From there, I went to 100-F, to inhalation toxicology. And inhalation toxicology is just a matter of inhaling and exhaling is what it is. But I worked with the dogs, which at the time, Battelle was doing an experiment on the effect that cigarette smoke had on the human body. We worked with beagle dogs because at that time, they said that the closest thing to a human’s physique was the beagle. A grownup beagle weighs anywhere from 15 pounds to I think the heaviest one we had was probably 47 pounds--which is a wide range for a dog, but the human anatomy is also a wide range. 15-pound dog would be equivalent to 130-pound man. A 47-pound dog would be equivalent to 350-pound man. And every three months, we sacrificed a dog. And we did everything from blood, urine, feces, muscles, tissue, everything. We learned everything we could about cigarette smoke on what effect it would have on the dogs. The dogs smoked two packs of cigarettes a day. Now, we had dogs that got addicted to cigarettes. And they were just like humans, chain smoke if you allowed them to. Then you had dogs that could not stand smoke, period, and they would fight it all the way through. But you had to give them the equivalent of two packs of cigarettes a day. Okay, we had hamsters that we shammed with cigarette smoke. We also did plutonium on them to see what effect it would have on the organs, on the inside of the body. And I worked in there until I got kind of fed up with supervision at the time because we weren't getting the raises that we should as far as finances go. And when you got a family you got to take care of, $2 just don't get it. So meanwhile, I talked with supervision and they say they didn't have money for raises. But yet and still, they're turning back money every year to DOE, which was set aside for raises. They just weren't giving it out. Well, at that time, they had what they call merit raises. And I worked second shift. I very seldom saw my supervisor. And so I asked him, I say, if I very seldom see you, I must be doing a good job. Because otherwise, you should be here checking on me to see what I'm doing. I later learned that one of the guys that worked in my department had told him that he had to recheck all of my work every morning when he came in, to make sure that I was doing it right. Well, see, that wasn't his position. He's an employee like I am. The other thing is that if the supervisor had just used a little bit of common sense, he would have known the man was lying. Because when you pull samples, the minute you pull the sample, it starts to decay. Now you would have had some variation in my results and his results if he's going to run my sample the next morning to tell me that I'm not doing it right. And he's getting the same results I'm getting. Something's wrong with this picture. Well, anyway, as it turned out, I told him I couldn't work for them if that's the way there were going to do things. So I quit.
The day I left from out there, I went home and I was sitting at home. And thinking, boy, I just quit my job. I got to get me a job. I went up to my sister's house and my brother-in-law was home. And I said, what are you doing home? He say, today is Veteran's Day. And also, it used to be Election Day, the 11th of November. And he say, I'm off. And so we sat round and talked for a few minutes. He say, would you be interested in leaving Hanford and going to work someplace else? He didn't know I'd quit. [LAUGHTER] I say, why, sure. He say, I got a guy you need to go and see. He told me where it was and everything. And the next day, I went looking for it. I drove right by the office and didn't find it. I went back and when he came in from work, I said, I--he say, you passed right by it. He says, it's a little building. I says, okay. The next day I went, the guy that became my supervisor wasn't in. But the secretary knew who I was when I got there. So I didn't get to see him that day. But the next day, they told me what time to come back. I went back, I walked in the door. He say, so you're looking for a job. I say, yes, I am. He says, come on back here in my office. So we went back to his office and, meanwhile, he's talking and asking me some questions. He's saying, I know your brother-in-law real well. He say you’re a heck of a nice guy. I say, he did? You say, yeah. When we get in the door and he closed the door, he say, you got the job if you want it. But I got to go through the motion of interviewing you. I says, okay. So I worked there at the Tank Farm in Pasco, which we distributed petroleum products, fertilizers, and fire retardant for forest fires. And I worked there just two or three months shy of 16 years. I went back to Hanford after that and went to work for Westinghouse. From there, Bechtel took over. I became supervisor. I worked in every area out there, decommissioning all of the buildings, the outer buildings, the 105s, tore down the 103s, basins. You name it, we did it. Took care of all the asbestos, worked in the asbestos department of the Tank Farm. They're talking about, now, where the tanks are leaking and all that stuff. We took care of all the above ground asbestos and stuff there for them. And I worked there until I retired in '97.
Arata: What year was this that you quit your job, your first job with Battelle?
Daniels: In '71.
Arata: And so then, what year was it that you went back to work at Hanford for Westinghouse?
Daniels: '89.
Arata: Okay. Well, it sounds like you had quite an array of jobs between all those sites.
Daniels: I've done some more besides that. [LAUGHTER] I owned my own restaurant for a little while in Spokane out at Airway Heights. I went in the service. I was at my basic training in Fort Ord, California. When I finished my advanced basic, I had run into a captain. I didn't know him, but I knew his family from Pasco. And I was talking to him and I had been home on leave and I had seen his mother. And I was telling him that she was doing fine, I'd just seen her and all that stuff. And when I finished my advanced basic, he was there and he ask me, he says, I got several places you can go if you want to, he said. Which ones do you want? I could've gone to a special forces in Chicago. I didn't think I wanted to go there. It get too cold there for me. [LAUGHTER] I could've gone to Presidio in San Francisco. I don't like San Francisco. I could've gone to Germany. I didn't want to go at that time. I could've gone to Fort Lawton, or I could've gone to Fort Lewis. I chose Fort Lewis. So I went there. And I liked Fort Lewis for some reason, although we were in the field most of the time. But I'm an outdoor person anyway. We got transferred from Fort Lewis to Germany. At the same time, the Vietnam War was breaking out. They took all of our officers and sent them to Vietnam. They took all of the personnel that had six months or less left to do, they extended them a year and sent them to Vietnam. All of them that had a year or better to do went to Vietnam. I had eight months left to do, so I didn't have to go. But they sent me from Germany back to Fort Lewis. And I trained the Milwaukee National Guard because they had activated them to take the 4th Division's place when they sent them to Vietnam. And I was sent back to Fort Lewis to train the Milwaukee National Guard. Once I got them trained, I got discharged. Three weeks after I got discharged, I got drafted again. [LAUGHTER] But I didn't have to go. I didn't have to go. For some reason, they decided they didn't want me. And those were some of the jobs I've had and some of the things I've done.
Arata: Wow, there's about a million things I want to ask you about but we have to start somewhere.
Daniels: Well--
Arata: I wonder if we can talk a little bit about kind of some of your early memories when you first arrived in the Tri-Cities area. And particularly, I'm interested in what your housing situation was like that and where you lived and what the community was like at that time.
Daniels: Okay. When we first arrived in the Tri-Cities--coming from east Texas, where you got greenery all around you, you know, it's like the west side of the state of Washington--and coming here to the desert, you just sort of get a sickening feeling. [LAUGHTER] To tell you the truth. But if you were black, you lived on the east side in Pasco, where I still--well, I live northeast Pasco, now, but that's by choice. Anything west of Second and Lewis in Pasco, well, it wasn't off limits—it was off limits as far as houses go. The banks or anything would not loan blacks money to buy homes. The finance company—which, at the time, Fidelity Savings and Loans was the biggest one in the Tri-Cities--would loan you money to buy an old, raggedy car with interest rates so high. But that's beside the point. When we came, my dad tried to borrow money to buy a house. He couldn't get any. He found a house and the lady that owned the house sold it to him on a contract. And she let the bank, BV, whatever you call them, hmph. Anyway, he paid his payments to the bank. So, therefore, I guess they would be the proprietor or whatever you call them. And in the agreement was that if he was three days late with the payment, they could foreclose on it and take the house. And the house was less than $10,000 at the time. They never took it, of course. But then he would always make sure that it was paid on the date that it was supposed to, if he had to haul me out of school long enough for the bank to open to go pay it and then go on to school. But other than that, kids are kids. And kids aren't prejudiced. We all played together. We had baseball, we did
Basketball, we had BB gun wars, which I don't know why some of us didn't get our eyes shot out. But we didn't. [LAUGHTER] And, let's see, you couldn't live in Kennewick if you were black. You didn't live in Richland because that was government and you had to work for the government in order to live out there. Well, up until probably '49, I think Mr. Newborn went to work out there in '49, which was the first black as far as know that ever worked in processing at Hanford. They only thing, blacks could work construction out there and help build it, but they couldn't help operate it, which—it still baffles me to this day, but that's just the way it was. Signs of the times, I guess you would call it and ignorance on a lot of people's part, as far as that go.
Arata: So you graduated from high school, then, in Pasco.
Daniels: Mm-hmm.
Arata: Do you remember about how many students were in your high school and approximately how many of you were black versus the white students?
Daniels: Okay. There were—let’s see—three? The high school was built for 600 kids, I think, 500 or 600 kids. And the day that they opened the doors, it was already overcrowded as far as that go. And that's the Pasco High School they got there now. I was the first graduating class out of that school. There were 107 or 108 of us in the graduating class. And I think there's probably 25 or 30 of us that I know of. In fact, I just saw seven or eight of them a couple of weeks ago. One of our classmates passed away.
Arata: Do you recall any specific incidents, anything that stands out to you about your time. I'm curious, particularly about high school, because you've told us all these great stories about it--where race was an issue at Pasco High School when you were attending there.
Daniels: Yes. There were maybe, at the most, 13 black kids when I went to high school. Most of them were underclassmen. There was a couple or three upperclassmen. We had football players, basketball players and stuff like that that were starters, what you might want to say were the star of the team. When they would have homecoming, the football players got to escort the queen and her court and all that stuff. Black kids couldn't do it. They wouldn't allow it. Some of the kids have since told me and another friend of mine that passed away that whenever one of them--because I was small, so I didn't play basketball or football--but anyway, if one of them turned out for football, they tried to do everything they could to hurt them. They didn't want them on the field with them. They didn't want to play with them. If any of the black kids got any type of award or anything, it was never given to them during assemblies or anything like that. If it was white kids, they made a big to-do of it and he got it on stage, came up before the whole school and got it. Black kids, they gave it to him as he was leaving school one evening or something like that. But this is faculty doing this. This is not the kids doing stuff like this. My vice principal and my shop teacher I ran into one day, oh, years after I graduated from school. They were hunting agates. And I stopped and was talking to them. And they actually apologized to me for some of the things that went on. The vice principal told me, he says, I am so sorry. He said, there are things that went on that I dare not tell or divulge--two reasons. First of all, I had a wife and kids that I had to support. And if I told them anything that was going to advance you, then I'd be looking for a job. He say, and I am sorry, but the community as a whole, well, it's like the council now, you know. They tell you what to do and you more or less jump and do it. Or like the government, which I think we all ought to vote everybody up there out, but that's beside the point. [LAUGHTER] It's just the way it was. And then I could understand their positions, because if you've got a wife and kids that you've got to support, you got to look out for them and you in the process of whatever you're trying to do. Now there's another way that it could have been done. But at the same time, they probably did what they knew to do. And that's one thing I never fault anyone for. If you don't know how to do something or to do something, then I don't fault you for not doing it. Now my brother, which you will interview next week, is probably the first black to have a job in a department store in the Tri-Cities, or at least in Pasco, I know. Well, he'll tell you about it. I won’t try to tell you about him. [LAUGHTER]
But those are some of the things that we encountered. We walked every day from the east side of Pasco to Memorial Park, which was the only swimming pool in town within the last year. And at that time, there was probably 5,000 to 7,000 people in the whole of Pasco. They had one swimming pool. You got 80,000 to 100,000 people in Pasco now. You got one swimming pool. [LAUGHTER] Doesn't make any sense at all. But we walked over there every day to play baseball and go swimming if we wanted to go swimming. There weren't any park other than Sylvester Park and Memorial Park was the only two parks in town at the time. Later, they put the Boat Basin in down there at Pasco. But when we didn't have any place to play, other than going over there, then we started making our own baseball diamonds in vacant lots and things. And as the lots would be developed, they would—well, naturally, they'd run us out because there wasn't enough room for us to play. So one evening, we didn't have any place to play baseball and we wanted to play baseball. Two blocks from my house, where I grew up at was Kurtzman Park. Well, actually, it's a block and a half. But it was just a vacant field. And we took shovels, a bunch of my friends and me, and we went out there and we cleared all the tumbleweeds out, took the shovels and kind of levelled it off, and started playing baseball. A lady named Rebecca Heidelbar happened to come by there and see us. I don't know exactly what period of time, how long we'd been playing there. And she stopped and asked us if we had a park that we could play in. We told her no. We told her the only park was Memorial Park. She says, mm-hmm. And she talked to us for a minute. She left. Well, we later learned that she was an attorney, her husband was an attorney, her mom was an attorney, and her dad was an attorney. And that was Judge Horrigan and his wife, and then their daughter Rebecca. And then she had married an attorney. So she came back and asked us to get as many kids together as we could and she would meet with us. And she did. And she went to the courthouse, found out who the land belonged to where we were playing. She helped us to draft a letter to Mr. Kurtzman, which she found out lived in Seattle and ask him to donate enough land for us to have a baseball diamond. Well, it took him the better part of six months to answer us, but he get back to us because I suppose he had to look into the legal aspect of it. He got back to us and told us that he could not give any land to a special interest group or persons. He would donate six acres of land to the city if they named the park after him. That's how Kurtzman Park came into an existence. And there's a letter someplace that we wrote him with my name right on the top of it. But in the process of this, we got the land donated to us, the city of Pasco, as far as the city go. The only thing they did to get that park in there was they gave some used pipe that they had laying around out there at what we call the Navy Base, which is out by the airport. And the black parents went out there and broke all this pipe apart and everything, took it down to the park, actually took shovels--we took shovels--dug the trenches for the water system down there, put the pipe back together, put the water system in. The city did seed it. They did plant the trees. And they keep it up. But the Kurtzman building has a park right in the front of it that myself, my cousin, Mr. Louzel Johnson put up, free of charge, right where U-Haul is on Fourth Street and Pasco now, used to be a brick place where they made brick blocks, your cinder blocks. And they donated the blocks. We did the labor and put it up. At first, they named the park Candy Cane Park. And then we had to let them know that you can't do that. That park got to be named Kurtzman or else we don't have a place to play because that's the only way he would donate it, so that's the way we got that. Where Virgie Robinson's Elementary School is now, on Wehe and Lewis Street, used to be what we call the lizard hole because you get off and then had toad, frogs, and all that stuff down in there. And we'd we go down in there and get those frogs and stuff out of there and bust them because that's what we did. [LAUGHTER]
Arata: Just to clarify this, I just have this great mental image in my head of this group of kids running around playing baseball. Was that integrated at all? Were most of you African Americans? A little better sense of--
Daniels: Well, what we did was, like I say, we lived on what we called the East side. There was a bunch of white kids that lived over there. Right on the north side of Lewis Street was enough white kids that they had two baseball teams. We lived on the south side of Lewis Street. We had one baseball team. And we played each other every day. [LAUGHTER] Yeah. We had a lot of fun. We played each other every day. In fact, one of the kids--I haven't seen him in years--but I was catching. And he threw a ball. He threw that ball so hard it--because I was using a board for the plate--and it hit that board and hit me right there. And I later had to have a hernia operation. [LAUGHTER]
Arata: The scars of childhood.
Daniels: Oh, yeah. We had a lot of fun. We played, like I say, we did BB wars and all that stuff again. I don't know why we don't have eyes out or something, but none of us ever did. Used to dig holes, tunnels. And I know you've probably read here in later years here, where kids are digging tunnels on the beach and all that stuff and then they collapse on them and they suffocate and stuff. I don't know why that didn't happen to us either because we'd dig as far as we could underground. [LAUGHTER]
Arata: Wow, there's so many things I want to ask you about. If we could go back to your time at Hanford just a little bit. So you did have a bunch of different jobs over the broad course of time. Could you talk a little bit about sort of security, or secrecy, or safety, things like that? Did any of those things have a major impact?
Daniels: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Now security was at a point where that certain buildings, certain areas, you couldn't go in if you didn't have the clearance to go in them. One of the things that they especially emphasized was paperwork—security or classified documents and things. And documents was classified, like secret, top secret, and they had another one. But anyway, the way you knew which one was which was the border that was around it. Like, I think secret had a blue border. Top secret had a red border around it. Now, if you went in any building, and you saw that document laying anywhere unattended, you were to report it, stay right with that document until somebody of authority came and picked that document up. It wasn't supposed to be laying around any place. Again, if you didn't have the clearance, you weren't allowed in the buildings. They didn't allow you, even if you had the clearance, unless you had business in the building, then you wasn't supposed to go and fraternize and all that stuff, like, well, like first instance, my brother. The only time I went to see him or he came to see me was if there was an emergency at home and he got the message, he came and told me or vice versa. See, you just weren't allowed to do it. You were allowed in your work area to do your work and that's it. I worked all over. So I had a Q clearance. And I had a clearance for everything but the arms room. Now in the arms room, you needed a Q, but you also needed a chip. I didn't have the chip. I worked in the arms room, but I had to be escorted to the building. And then once I got to the building, I could go all around in the building, but I couldn't come out until my escort came and got me to bring me back out of the building. So there were security, and I can remember, for instance, where that DOE--which is what we call them now--actually right where Jackson's is now, down here on George Washington Way, it was a tavern. And DOE actually put people in there to watch and talk with people that worked at Hanford, got off work, stopped in to have a beer and stuff like that, just to see if they would divulge anything that was going on out there. So it was pretty hush-hush. You couldn't go past the wire barricade unless you had business out there. Again, like I say, there's not an area or a building I don't think I haven't been in. But that was because I worked all over the place. ‘Til this day, there are still areas out there that still classified. You know, they're declassifying it and cleaning it up. And I don't know how many acres they got now, but—no, I'll take that back. The only place I never did go was up on top of Rattlesnake. And I didn't want to go up there, because I'm afraid of snakes. And my brother-in-law helped put the telescope up there. And he say when they were digging and getting ready and there was plenty rattlesnakes. I said, I'm not going up there. And so I never went. [LAUGHTER] But any area out there that you can name, if you didn't have any business in there, then it wasn't a good idea to go. I can remember working, and you would look up--and they had environmentalists--and you'd look up and you'd see one way out across the desert someplace. And what in the world are they doing? Who are they? You had to go and get your supervisor or someone, or if you was in a vehicle, you went and you challenged that person. If they didn't have a badge, then they had to go with you. You held them some kind of way until they was identified, in some way or form. You just didn't walk around out there. When the Army was out there, they would do drills and stuff. And they would come in and several times—they finally had to kind of curtail that because we had guards out there that carried weapons. And some of them almost got shot, scaling over walls and going over fences and things like this. It was an exercise, but you going the wrong direction and in the wrong place without proper identification, so they had to sort of curtail that because you don't want anybody to get hurt.
Arata: Right. I wonder, I know it's a little bit before your time working at Hanford, but JFK visited in 1963.
Daniels: Well, that was before I started out there. I helped put the railroad spur in that he was supposed to come in on because he was supposed to come in by train. We finished the spur the day before he dedicated the steam plant the next day. It was so hot until I decided I wasn't going. So I didn't go. My brother took my mom and dad out to the dedication.
Arata: Did you ever wish maybe you had gone, braved the heat?
Daniels: Yeah, now I do. But back then, I didn't. I was sick of the heat.
Arata: Sure. I guess when you think about overall and through all your different jobs, maybe you could talk a little bit about how Hanford was as a place to work overall and if there were sort of any aspects of your jobs that were more challenging or more rewarding than others? Anything that stands out?
Daniels: Probably the worst part of working out at Hanford was the fact that when you worked inside the buildings, they had what we called recirculated air. You didn't get any fresh air. So it was always just sort of ho hum. You know, I always felt kind of drowsy all the time when I worked inside. Other than that, I think everything I did out there I really enjoyed. And I enjoyed being a supervisor. Although, if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't have the job. But I had everything. All of the crafts worked for me. And that's electricians, crane operators, rigors, laborers, RCTs, the whole ball of wax. I was in charge of taking down all of the holding tanks, which, if you watch TV and you see this deal on there. This guy says he worked at Hanford for 21 years and now he's under this health care and they come out and visit him. If you watch it, you'll see three great big tanks in the back while that is on. In every area out there, they had those tanks. I took down all of those tanks in all of the areas out there and cleaned them enough that all of the metal was shipped to Japan. And that's the first time any metal, that I know of, was shipped of off the Hanford site to go anyplace except for the burial ground. But in the process of doing that, we started out doing it the way they that our RCT and everything said that we were supposed to do it. We cleared I don't know how many pounds and shipped them down here to Pasco. From Pasco, they went to Seattle and was put aboard ship. Well, before they left the Hanford area, they were surveyed to be cleaned. We shipped them down to the 1100 Area. When they left the 1100 Area, they were surveyed again. They shipped them down to Pasco. When they left Pasco to go to Seattle, they were surveyed again. When they got to Seattle, before they put them aboard ship, they were surveyed again. Got to Seattle, getting ready to put them on board ship, and they found I don't know, I'll say ten milligrams on one corner of one piece of metal. They stopped it right there. Everything that they hadn't loaded aboard ship they sent back to Kennewick. All of it. I was on my way home when it was on a Friday evening. And how they knew where I was, I have no idea, but they found me. I was in the Towne Crier down here in Richland. Guy came in. He say, I've been looking for you. I said, what do you want with me? He say, you got to go to work in the morning. I say, no, I don't. He say, yes, you do. He say, I got to have RCTs. You need to go and get ahold of Ray Jennings and get some riggers and O’Reilly, get some riggers, and crane operators, and all that stuff and we got to be out there are 8 o'clock in the morning. Says, oh. So anyway, we got it all done. I drove up out there probably at 7, 7:30 or so. We all gathered around and everything. Pretty soon, here come a guy that I've never seen before. He came in. He got out of the car, he came over, he spoke to everyone. He say, who's in charge of this project? I said, well, I guess I am. He said, well, I don't need you to guess. He say, either you or your aren't. I said, well, I'm in charge of this project. He said, come over here. He says, you haven't done anything wrong according to the RWP. He say, but we found some contamination and we can't have that. He say, so today, you are going to go step-by-step through everything that you did in order to release this metal. I told him, okay. So I call my RCTs, I get my riggers and everything. We get a panel out. And we lay it out for him. And you got to lay it out in feet, every square foot, you know, is a square. And then there's a certain amount of time that you should take to go over that square foot. And he watched us. He says, you're doing everything right if that's the way you did. I say, that's the way we did it. Well, I got the RCT head supervisor there. I got the rigger supervisor and everybody saying, well, this is the way we do it. He says, okay. He says, but how do I know—and I'll give you a for instance on what I'm talking about here—when you cut a piece of metal with a torch, you get something like the rim of this glass, where the metal actually rolls as it melts. He say, how do I know it's not contaminated underneath there? I say, well, I guess I really don't, except the instruments that we use is supposed to detect anything a quarter of an inch deep. He say, that's not good enough. He say, because some of that slag is better than a quarter of an inch. He said, have you ever heard of a Ludlum? Well, now, there's none of us out there that ever heard of a Ludlum, which is a radiation detector machine. We'd never heard of it. He says, well, that's what I want you to use. He was from Washington, DC, the Pentagon. [LAUGHTER] I said, uh-oh. But anyway, he says, I'm going back this afternoon. You will not survey or ship anymore metal off of here until I am satisfied that it's clean. I told him, okay. He went back to Washington, DC. This was like on a Wednesday. On a Monday morning, I had eight Ludlums. I'd never seen the things before. So I give them to my RCTs. And they had instruction with them. And the two kids live in Kennewick now, they read the instructions and everything, tried them out and everything. And then they became the instructors to teach other people how to use the Ludlum. Battelle has a program where that they have to certify all of the machines that are used on the Hanford site. Well, they didn't get their hands on these. So I'm working. I get a call from Battelle. And they tell me, say, Vanis, I understand you've got some machines out there that didn't come through us. I said, I don't know who they came through. But I said, they sent them to me. I said, so I got them. And I'm using them. You can't use them because they're not certified. I say, that's not what I was told. So I tell them exactly what I was told, who told me, where I got them from and everything. You got to bring them in here. I said, nope. I'm not bringing them in there. I say, I was told by the head from Washington, DC what to do. And that's what I'm going to do. Anyway, I had to go down and sit on their lap and talk with them, get them to understand that, hey, you can buck whoever you want to up there. I'm not going to do it. Well, anyway, they finally got it all squared away that they weren't going to get these machines and that I was going to use them because they had been overridden by Washington, DC. So then I got to get all that metal and everything cleared and it went to Japan. And one of things I can remember he told me before he left that evening, he say, you're doing a good job. But the thing I don't want is for one of my grandkids to get contaminated sitting up working on a computer where you have sent some contaminated metal and they made computers out of and sent it back over here. That was an interesting one. [LAUGHTER]
Arata: I can imagine. And what year would that have been?
Daniels: That would've been in '95 or '96.
Arata: Okay. Well, I wonder if we could just wrap up. Obviously, the Cold War in this time period, kind of a very conflicted legacy. Most of my students were not alive during that time. So they have sort of a limited window into it. So I wonder of you could just tell us a little bit about, in your experience, living through and working at Hanford during much of this time period of the Cold War, just maybe what changed over the course of time, if anything in terms of—like I know the NAACP eventually came to Hanford at did some good work later on. Sort of what that experience was of living through that change.
Daniels: Okay, one of the things that happened was in '68, I believe it was, about that time anyway, I was working in the 325 Building and Decon at the time. And I saw this gentleman, oh, for the better part of a week walking around. In the building, he'd always nod his head, you know, speak. I'd speak, go on about my work. Whatever he was doing, he'd go on about it too. My supervisor, one morning, told me, he stays, I need you to stay here, answer the phone. He say, take any work orders that come in. He say, and if you need to go and estimate a job, you know how to do it, go do it. I got to go to a meeting. I'll be back. I says, okay. So he went on to the meeting. And when he came back, he says, I told you something was going to happen. He say, heads are going to roll around here. I said, what are you talking about? He says, remember, they got all these blacks out here. I say, yeah. He say, 90% of them are janitors. I say, yes. He say, that guy that's been walking around in this building? I say, yes? He say, he's head of DoE. He's from Washington. And he's been observing all of the jobs, the people that are doing the jobs, the people that are in the jobs, the education that the people have, and the whole ball of wax. And he just told us that we got three weeks to start transferring some of these people into some of these jobs. He say, because you can't tell me you got that many black people out here and don't none of them have enough sense to do anything but janitorial work. He say, I know better. [LAUGHTER] So that's when they started diversifying and sending people to all different jobs and all that stuff. Because before then, most of them were janitors, I think. I got a cousin that worked in a lab, one supervisor, one operator—that was about it. Everybody else mostly were janitors. But, again, see, you're looking at an area when they start hiring blacks out there. Most of them had been here since the early '40s. They had worked construction out there and all that stuff. But none of them had ever been able to get a job in what I call production. They hired them all. They hired them as janitors. They were already elderly people. And when I say elderly, some of them may have been as young as in their 40s. But most of them only worked ten, 12 years, and they retired. They were that old. Some of them didn't want to do anything else except janitorial work.
A whole bunch of the younger people actually went on and became Teamsters and electricians and pipefitters and all that stuff. But that was the first time that a lot of the blacks had ever had a steady job in their life. And they, in the run of a year, they probably made is much or more money than they ever made in their life because they had a steady job. You got a paycheck 52 weeks to the year, with a vacation, which they had never had before. So they didn't want to branch out per se, a lot of them didn't, because I know some of the people that I worked with, many have gotten in 12 years out there and they retired. They just weren't interested in killing the world at their age. They just weren't interested in it. We first went to hot standby they call it. In other words, hot standby is when you redo everything, you rebuild everything. You get it ready to go if you need to go back into production. Then they go from what they call hot standby they downgraded it to just cold standby. When they did that, then after about six months we went in, we start draining everything. This is all the oils, all the antifreeze if you had antifreeze, whatever you had that was liquid, we start draining all this stuff out of all the equipment and everything. You started taking out all the electrical stuff. And they had spent millions and millions and millions of dollars upgrading all this stuff. You've got engines, diesel engines just in case you had a nuclear attack or something to that effect that once the electricity went off, the engines kicked off and kept the reactors running. One of those engines is longer than this building is this way, and they rebuilt them all. And the only time they started, they just started them up enough to make sure that they were working and they shut them off. We drained everything out of all those engines, and then they took them out, and when I left they were still in the buildings. I think they've since sold them to someone, but that means that you can't start it back up. If you want to, you've got to put all new stuff in.
Well, in 1943, when they built the B Reactor, when they started it, 13 months it was online. Try to build a reactor today. 40 years from now it won't be online. Because the government took and they put all of these entities into place. And it's a safety precaution as far as that go. But see they didn't put any restrictions on these people. And that's just the ecology, ERDA, all those people, they don't have any restrictions on them. And you get all of these in--if I hit you on the toe, don't holler ouch too hard--but young people are the worst in the bunch because the only thing they know is what they read in a book. And the book is just a guideline for you to use this up here, because there's no two things out there that's ever going to be the same. And DoE put young people in positions out here to tell people that have been working and doing this job for 30 and 40 years and they tell them what to do instead of coming out there asking some questions and trying to learn? Because the book don't tell you nothing. Do you cook?
Arata: I do.
Daniels: Okay. You go get a recipe, you fix the food exactly like the recipe says. It's not always good to you. But now if you are allowed to put your flair into it, then it's good, right? That's the same thing with a life. That's just the way life is. You've got to learn, and you do it by trial and error. And they don't have any business out there. I had a guy, 27 years old or roughly there, shut one of my jobs down. He did not ask the questions that he should ask. He just saw it and shut it down. You're not going to do this and you're not going to do that. Well, when you're talking to a rigger that's been rigging for 40 years, he know when he's in danger and when he's not. He didn't live that long by being stupid. Well anyway, it all comes down to not putting a barrier around where he was working. Well, he's got to be able to see the rigger down here, up here, and then he signals the crane operator. Well, if you can't see the rigger down in that hole, you can't signal the crane operator. And he shut my job down because this guy didn't have a barrier between him and the hole where he could look down in there and see the rigger. They shut it down. I had to go to a critique. And we talked about it and the rigger told him, he says, you don't have a clue what you're talking about. He said, you just shut a job down, he say, and you've got all these suits sitting up in here and making all this money and the job's still not done. But those are the things you have put up with, too.
Arata: Absolutely. Well, sir, is there anything else that I haven't asked you about, any final stories you'd like to share?
Daniels: I don't know. Maybe he got something he want to ask me. You got anything you want to ask me? I am just here. Just ask me whatever you want to ask me, and if I know, I'll tell you. If I don't, I'll say I don't know.
Arata: I guess my one sort of follow-up question, we've heard from a couple other interviewees about having some definite run-ins with the KKK. Did you ever have any experience with the KKK in the area?
Daniels: No, I never did. Now I do have a friend in Kennewick that tells me that they used to have meetings right up here on Jump-Off Joe. But no, I never ran into any. If I did, I didn't know who they were. Never had that experience, because we still might be fighting if I had. [LAUGHTER]
Arata: I think that covers all my questions. I want to thank you so much for coming and sharing your stories and experiences with us. I really appreciate it.
Daniels: My brother, he's got probably--let's see, I worked out there about 15 years all total and I think he's got 36 or 37 or 38, so he can probably tell you a lot more than me.
Arata: We'll get him next week. We're looking forward to it. Well, thank you so much, Vanis.
Daniels: Okay. You're welcome.