Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Alice Didier on July 12th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Alice Didier about her experiences working at the Hanford site and homesteading outside of—Connell?
Alice Didier: Eltopia.
Franklin: Eltopa.
Didier: Eltopia, yeah.
Franklin: Eltopia, okay. So why don’t we start at the beginning. Where were you born?
Didier: I was born in Portland, Oregon.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Didier: I was a city girl. Met my husband, who was born in Condon, Oregon, and he came from wheat farming country. However, his dad was not a farmer; he ran a machine shop in Condon. However, Don worked on many of the farms up there in Condon. We were married in 1951, and Don was in the service. He was in the Air Force. So after he was discharged, we came home to Condon. Our dream was to have something of our own—a farm, or—you know—mainly a farm. But the ground in that area was way too expensive for us to ever dream of owning anything. So we had the—we decided to make a trip to Canada. We went all the way to Prince George looking for land to buy, because they were encouraging American citizens to come up there and settle. Well, after that trip—before that trip, Don got an inquiry, or got a letter from the—I don’t really—it was the Bureau of Reclamation? I don’t know. It was if you were a veteran, you were entitled to throw your name in the hat, and if your name was drawn, you might have an opportunity to draw some land up here in the Columbia Basin. On a whim, he filled that out and mailed it before we left. And we were very glad we did because Prince George was a pole thicket up there. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: It was a what?
Didier: A pole thicket.
Franklin: A pole thicket.
Didier: My goodness gracious, if you had to clear that land it’d take you forever and a day. Plus—what is—peat? It had a peat—you couldn’t burn it, because you’d burn off everything that was worth—of value to farm. So you had to clear everything by hand.
Franklin: Oh, wow.
Didier: So, anyway. Very glad that when we got back, he had sent this in, and he was informed to come for an interview in Connell by a board of people that would determine if we were qualified. You were supposed to have assets, I think, of $1,500. I don’t remember what the qualifications were. But we did not have—we did not meet the qualifications. But we decided that we’d bluff it through. [LAUGHTER] So we came up in the fall of 1953. To Connell. I was eight-and-a-half months pregnant with my daughter. First thing I did was look up the name of the doctor in the phone book in Connell, because I thought I might not make it back to Condon before she appeared on the scene. But anyway, didn’t work out that way. But they took Don out in a Jeep, and bounced over hill and dale, and showed him the land that they had laid out that was available for drawing at that time. Not everything was available at the same time. So he picked out our farm unit. I had never—I didn’t get to see the land. I didn’t have any part of that, because I didn’t want to chance taking a trip in the Jeep in my condition. February of ’54, his dad and Don loaded up—we bought this Army tent, and he loaded up everything we owned in the way of furniture and moved up to our unit. It was nothing but rock, sagebrush, rattlesnakes—[LAUGHTER]—and, yeah, sagebrush, I said sagebrush. A lot of sagebrush. All of that had to be cut and burnt—cleared, in other words, in order to farm anything in the area that we picked out. Some land around there had been farmed—wheat farmers had tried their hand at raising wheat in that area, small areas. But not enough rainfall. And there were sheep camps in there. They had been running sheep, some of them. When Don brought me up, he pulled up on this—we had to come in from Eltopia; there were no roads built. So we had to come over hill and dale to get out to our farm unit. And he pulled up, and he said, this is it. And I said, this is it? I mean—[LAUGHTER] there was nothing there, period. It was sort of a shock.
Franklin: And you hadn’t seen it before this?
Didier: I had not seen it before then.
Franklin: It had been purchased sight unseen by you?
Didier: Yes, yes. And he and his dad had preceded my coming up there to drop our stuff off and build a wooden floor and side—what would you call it? Sidewalls. Sidewalls for the tent. So they had it pretty well constructed. Anyway, that was the beginning. [LAUGHTER] Don had borrowed from a farmer in Condon a small little D4 Cat, I think it was. We hauled that up here. And he and his dad had built a scraper, a small scraper, to put behind it. So Don started developing a piece of land behind where we had pitched this tent. My daughter was three months old when we moved up here. Let’s see—October, November, December—four months old, I guess. And my son was about a year-and-a-half, or less than two. So we took up residence in our tent. [LAUGHTER] And when we finally got our power, we had a refrigerator. Like I said, I had a Sud Saver washing machine that you could dump the water. We had two tubs out front—laundry tubs, like there used—women used to have in their house. So I’d save the wash water, and I’d save the rinse water, because we were hauling every drop of water. It was pretty precious. You reuse it a couple of times. Maybe not the most sanitary, but that was the—[LAUGHTER] That’s what we had to do.
Franklin: How long did it take from when you moved in to when you got power?
Didier: I’d say two weeks at the most.
Franklin: Oh.
Didier: Big Bend came in and dropped power in. But we still had no roads. We had a little ’51 Oldsmobile and we had a water trailer, and we had to go into Eltopia to the railroad—there was a railroad well. And we’d fill there. It took a half a tank of gas to get down to the well and back with a tank of water. Yeah. And we had no neighbors. There were no neighbors. It was just Don and I out there. Over the hill was a couple. She was an English war bride. And they had settled in there before we did. And then we had another couple to the south of us. But we were the only people in that whole area. It was pretty dark at night, I’m going to tell you. There were no lights. There was nothing. It was black.
Franklin: Wow. So how fast did the land clearing go?
Didier: Not very fast.
Franklin: Not very fast?
Didier: Because we didn’t have any money. We used a big Noble blade and cut the sagebrush. Then we’d have to go out and pile it by hand in big stacks and burn it. Don managed to level off, I think—well, I don’t know, what was it? 14, 15 acres was the first—because in those days, there were no circles. It was all either you had hand line—irrigation hand line, or you had to level the ground to a grade that you could put in a ditch and use siphon tubes—rill irrigation, they called it. And Don didn’t want anything to do with the hand lines. So he was leveling it for rill irrigation.
Franklin: And so you used real irrigation?
Didier: We did.
Franklin: And how do you spell that?
Didier: R-I-L-L.
Franklin: R-I-L-L. We did a previous oral history where someone mentioned that and we didn’t—
Didier: Know how to spell—
Franklin: No one at the Project had heard of that and we weren’t sure how to spell it.
Didier: Really?
Franklin: So it’s R-I-L-L—
Didier: Mm-hmm.
Franklin: --irrigation. Thank you so much. Can go back and fix some transcripts.
Didier: [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: So it’s—just will you explain that again? That’s when you lay down—where you grade—
Didier; You have to grade the land so that the water will flow from the top to the bottom.
Franklin: Okay.
Didier: You know, enough of a grade so that the water will flow down the—well, you put ditches from the head ditch up here that carries the main body of water. You would back up to that with ditch shovels and make ditches every so far through your crop. That’s where you would set the siphon tube and the water would go from the top to the bottom. When it reached the bottom, then you’d pick them up and move on down. You could only set so many at one time, depending on how much of a head of a water you had—or how many feet you had coming down the ditch.
Franklin: So that’s a much more labor-intensive type of irrigation. I imagine, probably an older type of irrigation, as well.
Didier: Right, but not maybe as labor-intensive as packing that hand line. That’s work. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: And what would the tubes be constructed out of usually?
Didier: Aluminum.
Franklin: Aluminum tubes, okay.
Didier: Yeah.
Franklin: Okay.
Didier: And there’s a picture, I think, in that magazine I gave you from International Harvester, showing me priming one of those tubes.
Franklin: Oh, okay, great. Wow, that’s great.
Didier: You had to learn how to do that. You had to learn how to give it a deal like this and flip it over quick so you didn’t lose your prime. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Wow.
Didier: A lot of people didn’t know how to do it in the beginning and they’d suck on it, if you can believe that, to get the water running. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Kind of like siphoning gas?
Didier: Yeah, only—the water was much cleaner than later on. I mean, after more—we actually, on this end of the Basin, reuse the water that comes in up north. So a lot of it’s recovered—what is that lake up there that—there’s a lake—I can’t remember the name of it right now. So, that was our first—and our first venture was to plant some hay. There was nobody to buy what you raised. We had no markets then. So I remember the hay that we baled—we finally got it baled and it sat out there until the hay grew up over it, because there was no sense picking it up; we didn’t have anybody to sell it to. [LAUGHTER] So it wasn’t a very productive, I guess, in the beginning, as far as producing money. So I went to work at Camp Hanford.
Franklin: Do you remember what year that—
Didier: No. Well, it’d be—okay, ’54 we moved up here. It was probably during ’54. Because we had to eat.
Franklin: Right, you needed some cash coming in.
Didier: Yeah.
Franklin: Hay wasn’t going to cut it.
Didier: No.
Franklin: So what did you do at Hanford?
Didier: I was a secretary. I was interviewing people for jobs out there.
Franklin: All kinds of jobs, or--?
Didier: You know, that—I didn’t work there a whole long time. That was a long trip for me, clear from Eltopia.
Franklin: I imagine.
Didier: I had to drive that every day. I don’t remember. Not all kinds of jobs, I’m sure, because I’m not versed in scientific things, you know. I’m not sure it was Camp Hanford, so I don’t know what did Camp Hanford do? They were—it was long before all this Project stuff started out here in—I think it was—wasn’t that a military type of camp? Camp Hanford?
Franklin: There’s a few different things that are referred to as Camp Hanford. There’s the actual Camp Hanford, as it’s oftentimes noted as the camp where the construction crews lived. Then there was—there were a couple—there was a military camp--
Didier: I think that was it.
Franklin: --called Camp Hanford as well, where they—when they had the military stationed there for—
Didier: But I wasn’t interviewing for military; it had to be civilian people they were hiring or stuff. I wasn’t military. Because I was not in the military and whatever.
Franklin: Right. So you said you were a secretary, but then you said—didn’t you do something with the whole body counter?
Didier: That was for GE.
Franklin: For GE, okay. So in the beginning you worked at Camp Hanford, secretary/interviewer.
Didier: And then I went to Bureau of Reclamation in Eltopia. They had a construction office there.
Franklin: Okay.
Didier: So I went down and applied for a job there, and I was so happy when I got a job, because I didn’t have to go very far to go to work. They were still completing canals and doing work. So I worked down there for a while. And then I decided, I guess, that I guess that I needed more money—or that we needed more money. So I went out—I applied to go to work at GE. And the first job I had was for Roy Lucas in tech shops. That was 300 Area. All my jobs that I held during that time that I worked out there were all for GE. It was just as GE was phasing out. And I forget who the next contractor was that came in, but GE—yeah. I left just as GE was—they were changing over.
Franklin: And you said you worked for Roy Lewis at—
Didier: No, Roy Lucas.
Franklin: Roy Lucas.
Didier: Lucas, L-U-C-A-S.
Franklin: At the tech shops?
Didier: Tech shops. He ran—it was like machining.
Franklin: Okay.
Didier: They did machining. They had these tech shops—T-E-C-H—tech shops. And then I went to work for—well, there was a little incident between there. I got pregnant again. So I had to take a leave of absence, and my youngest son was born in 1960. So I think three months after he was born, I had taken a leave of absence, I came back, and I got a job at the Whole Body Counter—I think that was next—with Frank Swanberg, where they did all the testing on people that were working out there with their dosimeters or whatever they were wearing. They did a lot of testing on people that had worked out there for their levels of radiation exposure. Then I got a job—I got a promotion and went out to 300 Area again, and I went to work for Ward Spear. I don’t remember the name of that. They were all scientific people there. The papers I typed up were horrendous, with all their equations in them. [LAUGHTER] Then I worked for the boss of that whole group and he eventually became the CEO of Battelle, Ron Paul.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Didier: You know Ron Paul, or have you heard of him?
Franklin: I’ve heard the name, yeah.
Didier: Yeah, he was—I can understand why he was promoted to what he was. He was one of the best bosses I ever worked for, let’s put it that way.
Franklin: And why was that?
Didier: Very well organized. Never, ever last minute, I got to have this like ten minutes ago. No. He was always—I don’t know—just was a very personable man. Yeah, I really liked him. And then I got another promotion and I went to work for Art Keene in radiation monitoring.
Franklin: So kind of back to radiation monitoring.
Didier: Yeah. And he was head of the whole group that supervised the Whole Body Counter and whatever work—you know, all the people that were doing the monitoring out there. And that’s when I decided that I’d better call it a day. I had five children, and I was driving—I was spending ten to ten-and-a-half hours a day—well, ten hours, I guess it was—for eight hours of work out here. I mean, it took me—we still were not financially doing that well, so I hopped car pools. I had three car pools by the time I got to work at 300 Area. I had to switch and pass go. [LAUGHTER] And then had one more switch, I think. I can’t remember, but anyway.
Franklin: Wow.
Didier: Yeah.
Franklin: So then you moved back to the farm.
Didier: I went back to the farm, and that’s when things started to pick up, and our markets were better, and you had more choices of what to raise.
Franklin: Do you know what year that would have been?
Didier: Well, Brett was born in 1960—oh, gosh. I think he was two, something? Probably 1962 or ’63.
Franklin: And so you said things had kind of improved, at least market-wise by that time?
Didier: Right, well there were more variety of crops to raise.
Franklin: So what were you—so you started with hay, so what were you expanding out into?
Didier: Well, we raised—in the beginning—well, we tried beans. We tried beans, we tried—I can just give you a repertoire of everything we raised. We didn’t do all that at one time. We raised sweet corn, we raised sugar beets, we raised potatoes. We were into potato growing—my husband loved to raise potatoes. Let’s see, sugar beets. Asparagus. We had 80 acres of asparagus once. So, we—can’t think of anything else. Wheat. We’ve had wheat off and on. I can’t think—and hay. Mainly, here in the last years, we’ve been mainly hay farmers.
Franklin: Okay.
Didier: Because potatoes were always a big gamble. And we had a very bad year one year and almost had to go into bankruptcy.
Franklin: Is that because of weather or—
Didier: Because of circumstances. We had two circles of potatoes, and they had out this chemical that they claimed if you sprayed it at a certain time, that it would set your potatoes so they didn’t put on any more small ones—undersized, which paid you nothing. That you’d get bigger growth on the potatoes that were already set underneath the vine. It was MH-30, was what it was. So we tried that, and they sprayed it on on the hottest day of the year, I think. It was very hot that day. In two days, our potatoes were dead. Yeah.
Franklin: So you literally could watch them perish.
Didier: Yeah. Our field man came and he said, Don, the potato vines are dying.
Franklin: Wow.
Didier: Because it was a salt solution, and they had no warning on their label that you should not spray over a certain temperature. And other people had used it and came out fine. But not us.
Franklin: Wow.
Didier: But what was there we harvested. It was pretty sad. And then that was the year we got a rainstorm. We had wheat and we had a really hard rain. Then next day was like a pressure cooker. And all that wheat sprouted in the head. So it was feed wheat. It was not marketable.
Franklin: Wow.
Didier: Just—you know, one of those years. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Yeah. Where nature seems to be throwing everything at you.
Didier: Yup.
Franklin: Yeah. I grew up on a farm.
Didier: This year seems to be that way, too. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: I grew up on a farm as well. My mom still farms.
Didier: Really?
Franklin: Yeah.
Didier: Then you know what I’m talking about.
Franklin: Yeah, I’ve heard lots of stories.
Didier: When things start going wrong they just sort of escalate, you know? But potatoes, you had—at that time, you had $1,000 an acre into potatoes before you ever put a harvester in the field.
Franklin: Wow.
Didier: Yeah. So—
Franklin: I guess that explains the switch to hay. So you said that you had done—the people—I’ve read that the people in that Bend area had tried wheat in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and kind of gave up. But you guys also tried wheat. Did you try that with irrigation or did you try to—
Didier: Oh yeah. We had nothing dryland. Everything was irrigated, everything we farmed.
Franklin: And how did the wheat do, besides that one awful year with the pressure cooker?
Didier: Well, you’d better expect over 100 bushel of wheat or—you know, I’m not as up on yields now as I was then, because my son farms our operation since my husband died. I always kid him I’m on a need-to-know basis. [LAUGHTER] I have to ask questions if I want to know—[LAUGHTER]—if I really want to know the nitty gritty about things, and then sometimes he gets sort of upset with me. So I’m saying 120 bushel—120 bushel is not unheard of, and over. Depending on the variety of wheat, you know. The year, the weather, everything.
Franklin: So you said that right now you’ve pretty much just reverted to planting hay now—growing hay.
Didier: Until this past two years. And the hay farmer’s in a world of hurt out there now after that port slowed down over in Tacoma. Sort of ruined the foreign markets. And then, too, our dollar’s been so strong, those people that depended on—I guess that were our markets, they went elsewhere when they weren’t getting their shipments. So you have to work to get those people back buying again. And there is hay stocked all over the basin. We’ve got hay from two years ago we haven’t sold.
Franklin: Wow.
Didier: And this year we have had rain, rain, rain on about every cutting which makes it feeder hay. My son had an offer the other day of $60 a ton. You got $150 into it to break even.
Franklin: Wow.
Didier: So you take your licks and walk on, hopefully, if you don’t get your financing cut off. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Yeah. Did you spend a lot of time in nearby communities, in Eltopia? Were you involved in any organizations there, or social groups, or church groups or anything?
Didier: Oh, yeah. Yes. I belong to St. Paul Catholic church. We actually built that church, the people that moved in there.
Franklin: Oh.
Didier: Yeah. The people of that area, we built the St. Paul Catholic church at Eltopia.
Franklin: How large was Eltopia when you moved there?
Didier: Oh, the town of Eltopia?
Franklin: Yeah.
Didier: [LAUGHTER] Ooh, not very big. There had been a bank there once. There’d been—well, when we first moved in there and we had no refrigeration and I had a new baby, there was a Streadwick that opened a little store there. And he carried milk and bread, thank heavens, because I could buy milk from him. Because I couldn’t keep milk without it going sour for more than a day or so at a time.
Franklin: There was a who?
Didier: A Stredwick. His name was just Stredwick. There was a Stredwick family that owned a filling station on the old highway there. And Millie, she was a widow, but she had a pack of kids, and she was the switchboard operator in Eltopia. If you wanted to make a phone call in the beginning, you had to go to Millie’s house to make the telephone call. Because we had no phones.
Franklin: Oh, wow.
Didier: Or if you received a call, they’d have to come out and tell you that somebody was trying to get ahold of you.
Franklin: And how far away was that?
Didier: Well, about the same distance as getting the water. A little bit closer, but not much, because we had to go right into the town of Eltopia to get to her house. She lived in Eltopia.
Franklin: Wow.
Didier: I would say there wasn’t more than 150 people, or less, in Eltopia per se.
Franklin: Where did the children go to school?
Didier: They started in Eltopia, my two oldest. But then we—they decided school districts. You either were going to go to Pasco or you were going to go Connell. We were—the dividing line was Fir Road, which was one more road to the south. Well, no, it’s more than one for me, but Eltopia West is the main road now that comes off of 395. It’s one road over from Eltopia West—Fir Road—was the dividing line. If you lived on the left side of Fir Road, you went to North Franklin School District, which was Connell. If you lived on the other side, you went to Pasco. So we went to Connell.
Franklin: Okay.
Didier: Mesa—they built a grade school in Mesa, they built a grade school in Basin City. That’s all North Franklin. Then they had a grade school in Connell, then they built a junior high and a high school. So my kids all went through—finished. Some of them completely went through the North Franklin School District. The two oldest had a few years there in Eltopia. There actually was an old high school in Eltopia. But they closed it down, too. We used to have dances down there.
Franklin: Oh really?
Didier: The floors went up, and the floors went down, but we had an orchestra that did the playing. In the middle of the music they’d just stop. [LAUGHTER] We’ve laughed about that.
Franklin: Wait, why did they stop?
Didier: Just decided to stop! [LAUGHTER] And you’d be dancing away, all of the sudden the music just stopped. I don’t know. Probably had too much to drink. Everybody had to bring their own bottle, you know.
Franklin: Really?
Didier: Yeah, oh, yeah.
Franklin: And who put these dances on?
Didier: Well, we sort of had a—hmm, I don’t know. Don’t remember that. Just—I don’t know—we didn’t have an association, particularly. It was just our local group around there decided, you know, like New Year’s Eve or something, is about when—it wasn’t all the time.
Franklin: Was the high school being used at that time, or was it just kind of an empty—
Didier: No, no, it was going downhill. And that’s what I said—the floors were warped because the roof had leaked.
Franklin: Oh, my. Wow.
Didier: Yeah. And so you had to watch your step. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: I bet. So were these adults-only dances?
Didier: Yes, yes, yes. Yes, it was adults only.
Franklin: That’s great. That’s really interesting.
Didier: We were involved—I had a 4-H club. Don coached Little League—yeah, Little League, down in Eltopia. We had a team, because our boys played on that. We were big boosters of Connell High School, because all our boys—Clint played—my one son played in the NFL for nine years. The other boy was the one we thought was going to be the NFL player. But he wanted to farm more than play football. He’s the one that’s farming my place now. But our boys all participated in sports up there, so we were big sports boosters. Don helped build the bleachers. The old—we used to have our games down there in the—well, it was in the town of Connell. Since then it’s all moved up by the high school. But he helped build the bleachers into the side of the hill. He had a trophy case built for them. And then the boys went to CBC, both Clint and Curt. And we donated there, the foundation or whatever it is. Still do—Clint still supports that.
Franklin: Did you or your husband go to college?
Didier: Don did for a year. He was going to be an engineer. I went to college at night school for a while, but I never got a degree, no. I came out of a high school in Portland that you learned bookkeeping, shorthand, and so when you graduated, you also had a degree—you had English and a language and everything else—but you could go out and get a job.
Franklin: Oh, okay. Yeah.
Didier: And then they had Benson at that time for the boys where they learned how to—you know, like shop and things like that. And then they did away with that; we don’t have those kind of things anymore. Big mistake. I think we should still have those type of—because some kids are just not college material.
Franklin: Yeah.
Didier: To be able to go out and work and do something when you come out of high school. Because kids nowadays, they need work.
Franklin: Right. To have a trade or at least to have—maybe have post-high school schools that are geared for trade instead of—
Didier: Yeah, instead of—because when you come out of high school now, what do you have? You don’t have a trade of any kind, or a skill of any kind. Except supposedly your brain, and then you got to go on to another four-year school, and you’re still—if you want to really amount to anything, that isn’t adequate now either. And then we wonder why we have such high debt for these kids that are—[LAUGHTER]—you know, trying to get a college education or get a trade or whatever.
Franklin: Yeah. Oh! How did you meet your husband?
Didier: Uh-oh. [LAUGHTER] Do I have to tell you the true story? [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Well if it’s racy or saucy, then yes.
Didier: Well—
Franklin: For the good of history.
Didier: Okay, well--
Franklin: I’m just kidding. Whatever you’re comfortable with.
Didier: Well, every year in Portland at the beginning of the football season, they would have sort of a roundabout where each high school came and played a quarter or something against another one of the other teams. I had been a cheerleader at my high school. This is since I had graduated, and I’d started to work. I went to work at 16 for the Soil Conservation Service in Portland.
Franklin: Oh, really? Okay. Wow.
Didier: So, my girlfriend and I decided that we were going to go to this celebration—the football thing—that night. So I took a bus and I got off the bus where I was to meet her. And Don and a friend were standing there on the corner. He was enrolled at the—is it University of Portland is the Catholic school down there, or Portland U? No, it’s University of Portland, yeah. Anyway, he’d just started college there. So he tried to strike up a conversation, and I—my mother told me never—[LAUGHTER]—Don’t do those kind of things. I’m just kidding. But anyway, I wouldn’t talk to him. I walked across the street to meet my friend, and we had to walk back in front of him to get back on the bus to get to where we were going. He says, why don’t you let us give you a ride? And I said, no. I said, we’ll just take the bus. So we did. We got on the bus. So they ran around, got in their car, and they followed our bus over to the stadium. Later in the game, I went down and was sitting on the bench with my friends from my high school there. And around the corner walks Don. That was the beginning of the end. He said, well, as it turned out we had a mutual acquaintance—my girlfriend did. So we went to the dance at Portland University that night with them. And that was the end of me ever dating anybody else. Next day, he called me and—[LAUGHTER] So. And it was ironic because my son, Clint, you know, played for Mouse Davis down there, and years later he played in that stadium.
Franklin: Oh, wow.
Didier: [LAUGHTER] I call that sort of ironic coincidence, that years later we came back to the place where we actually engaged in a conversation that night. Anyway. So it was a pick-up, I guess you’d say.
Franklin: Yeah. Sounds like he was pretty persistent.
Didier: Well, he wasn’t very talkative. But I was impressed. He was pretty good-looking. [LAUGHTER] I liked what I saw. So anyway.
Franklin: That’s—aww. And was he drafted, then? You said he was in the Air Force.
Didier: Yeah, he was in the reserve.
Franklin: Okay.
Didier: And he got—it was the Korean situation, and he got called up. So we were married just as he—right after he got called up, his commander was gracious enough to give him a couple of days off to have a honeymoon for—what did we have? Three days or something, when it was supposed to be boot camp. He happened to then be stationed at the Portland—there in Portland, for almost a year. And then he got orders to go to Nashville, Tennessee. So we up and moved. I went with him. Didn’t have any children then. We went to Tennessee for less than a year, I think, before we came back. And when we came home, we went to Condon, Oregon and Don went to work for a wheat farmer there.
Franklin: Oh, okay. So he was drafted in Korea, but didn’t—he never—
Didier: He never served overseas, no. He never had to serve overseas. He was a lineman—supposed to be his—whatever, what do they call it? His MO, or whatever? It was supposed to be—oh, I don’t know—what’s the second in command? I don’t know. Anyway, they found that he had been a telephone lineman at one time, so that’s what he ended up being, was a telephone lineman.
Franklin: Do you—when you were homesteading out there, did you have any run-ins or—well, not run-ins is the right word, but interactions with Native Americans who would have inhabited that area long before? Did you ever see, or were you ever aware of--
Didier: No, there was nothing. The only thing, we found a couple of arrowheads on our place once. No. Some old sheep camps, we found some things in that, but there was no—no, there was no indication of any—
Franklin: From earlier settlement days.
Didier: No.
Franklin: How has farming changed over the years for you?
Didier: Oh, my gosh. Well, what are we talking here? ’54 to—is that 60-what? ’62 years?
Franklin: 60 years, yeah.
Didier: Phenomenal, I guess, would be my word. Equipment-wise. Everything now if possible is circles, for irrigation. Tractors are—how many times bigger should I say than what we started out with? My son owns a quad-trac, which—I don’t know, what are they? $280,000 or $300,000-some-odd and it’s monstrous. You have GPS now; everything is—you plant by that. I guess—I don’t really have a word to—I guess express how much it’s advanced. Planters are all—well, just like we planted some beans this year, trying to find out something else besides hay to plant. This guy just pulls into field we had with timothy hay, and you don’t have to disc, you don’t have to do anything. He just sets down, and he’s got things that open it up to plant the seeds, so you don’t have to worry about the wind problem you used to. It used to be, we had horrendous winds and dirt. You’d plant a crop, and you’d pray that you didn’t get one of those winds or it’d be gone—the seed would be gone. A lot of replanting back in the old days. We could look towards block 15 and see this wall of dirt coming at us. Yeah. One of the windstorms hit 90 miles an hour here. It blew down the drive-in screen in Pasco. It blew the side out of a block building. And we were in that tent. My husband said, load the kids up, we’re going to town. We’re not going to be here when it goes down—if it goes down, is what he said. So we loaded up the kids, drove to town, spent the whole day in town. As the day—as the sun started to set, the wind went down and we headed back out there and didn’t know if there would be anything left of everything we owned in the world because it was all in that tent. And it was still standing.
Franklin: Wow.
Didier: But he had a pretty hefty crossbeam—is that what you call it, the main deal at the top? But he said it put a permanent bow in it, though. That wind against that canvas. So he took that thing down and put up a four-by-six by himself. How he did that, I don’t know. But he says, not going to have that happen again.
Franklin: Wow.
Didier: And then we had just a few incidences of some of the things that happened out there. We had a winter that first winter when we still in the tent. My husband was doing land-leveling. He got this D7 Cat and he was out working for other people, leveling their ground. That day, it was a beautiful day, that day. When he got off the Cat, he started home, and for some reason he turned around, and he drained that Cat. Because there was no antifreeze. We didn’t have antifreeze in it. That night, it dropped to 19 below. I don’t know—we’ve never, ever had that happen again. Don stayed up all night. We had a wood stove in that tent, and we had an oil stove. He had both of them cranked up as high as they would go. The next morning, he reached over, and we had packing cases for cupboards. He reached over for the coffee pot, and when he got it, it was all slushy, after he—and it wasn’t that far away from the stove. [LAUGHTER] And sagebrush—he was burning sagebrush in the wood stove. That puts out a hot fire. So decided it was time to move. And I was working at the Bureau then, so we were entitled to one of their Quonset huts down there.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Didier: So we picked up and moved that day. And it was wonderful not to have a roof flapping in the breeze, and it had running water, and I had wall—baseboard heaters, and they paid the bill. You could be as warm and toasty as you wanted. So I was in seventh heaven. [LAUGHTER] We lived there until—well, then I got—while I was working there, I got pregnant with Curt. And the Bureau wrote us a little letter, saying, you have not proved up on your land. You had to put in 12 months out of 18 to establish residency. And said, if you don’t move back on your unit, you’ll forfeit it. We didn’t have a house, didn’t have anything. So went to town, and started tearing down—we called them Navy homes. I don’t know. Somebody said they were Victory homes or something. They had a lot of them in Pasco, they had a lot in Kennewick. He and his dad went in there and they tore—we got enough money from the bank to tear down a section of that housing, and used all the materials out of that for our house. When we moved in, the eaves weren’t boxed in, the sub-floor was the roof, like, slats. So the dirt just settled between the slats. And we had no running water again, because we didn’t have a well. And I found a rattlesnake in my closet one day.
Franklin: Oh my.
Didier: [LAUGHTER] Came home from town, and I walked in to take off my blouse and hang it up in the closet. And I heard this noise, and I thought—out of the corner of my eye—I thought, there’s a snake. But it had curled up on top of a suitcase. We had no bathroom—we had an outhouse. Had no bathroom, and he found his way into our bedroom there, and the light—the sun was coming through the bedroom window, and he was sunning himself. He’d crawled up on this suitcase in an old army hat that Don had laying on top of the suitcase. And he was telling me, you’d better back off. I screamed, I said, there’s a rattlesnake in here! And Don says—he didn’t believe me, he thought I was having pipe dreams. He told everybody afterwards I made a new door out of the bedroom, which I did not. But anyway, he grabbed a weed fork and killed it. Believe me, we stepped out of bed gingerly for a while, thinking where you find one, you usually find two. But we could see where he’d come up through the—we had the sewer pipe laid for the bathroom that was not in. And the kids had been out there playing in the dirt with their trucks and stuff. He had a piece of tar paper thrown up against it and some dirt that he’d thrown up against it. Well, they’d knocked that down and that snake found that pipe, and he decided that was a nice cool place to be in. Yeah. We had quite a—in fact, we have a big rock bluff behind my farm unit there to the east. And the people at the Bureau called that Rattlesnake Mountain. In the spring, they’d go out there, and when they’d come out of their dens they’d kill a lot of snakes. So we encountered rattlesnakes off and on quite a bit.
Franklin: Wow.
Didier: We were pretty worried with our kids that they might get bitten. We actually went to town and got a kit—not the normal kind—it had a hypodermic needle or whatever. Whether I could have used it [LAUGHTER] I don’t know. We had to keep it in the refrigerator. But just in case, because we were a long ways away from a doctor.
Franklin: Right.
Didier: But anyway, didn’t happen.
Franklin: That’s good.
Didier; Yeah.
Franklin: And now how—when, roughly, was your house built?
Didier: Well, it was built in stages. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: When did it—
Didier: Well, right as Curt was born, which was 1957. ’57.
Franklin: And is that still the same—is that house still out there?
Didier: It is. Only we’ve added on to it. You’d never know what part of it is built out of.
Franklin: [LAUGHTER]
Didier: It’s all bricked.
Franklin: Oh, wow.
Didier: Yeah. I have a fairly nice home. It’s nothing luxurious or anything, but it’s very comfortable.
Franklin: And you have roads out there now?
Didier: Oh, yeah. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, we’d better have. But that was something, when you didn’t have any roads, I’ll tell you. They were putting them in, but they were just the bases. I remember one day, our neighbors across—that turned out to be our neighbors across the road on Holly Drive—we saw this truck with all of their stuff loaded on it pull in over there. We thought, wow, are we getting a neighbor here? But they pulled in and dropped off a bunch of stuff and then took off again. So we jumped in our car and we followed them to find out who they were, and were they going to be our neighbors, and whatever. Because we were excited that we had another human being that was going to be that close to us. That was Johnsons. Were our neighbors for years and years. They both since have passed away. Don and I were probably eight to ten years younger than the majority of the people that settled out there, because they were World War II veterans, many of them. So we’re losing them one by one.
Franklin: Yeah.
Didier: Yeah, most of them are—well, just lost one down the road here. He was 93, I guess. Year before last. He was a bomber pilot in World War II. Flew 70-some-odd missions, and made it through.
Franklin: Wow.
Didier: Yeah.
Franklin: That’s really incredible odds.
Didier: Yeah. Yeah, it is. I did his eulogy at the church, and—those guys really—anyway, yeah.
Franklin: So working out at Hanford, you would have been privy to—you would have known what was produced there. Did you ever feel—how did you feel about making your living off the land so close to Hanford?
Didier: I never worried about it. Some people tried to prove, or think that they got thyroid cancer, whatever. But I—working in the monitoring, I knew they were monitoring the milk. They monitored milk, anybody that was dairying out there. Plus, they had instrumentation across the river. They were monitoring the river itself. However, you never knew what the figures were. I mean, I—yeah. But I really never worried about it. But maybe out of ignorance, in a sense. Not really, it’s not like, I guess, Chernobyl or something, where you had—although you had reactors out there. But a lot of them were not even active at that time, even. But there were a few, wasn’t there the—was it Fast Flux? I don’t know. I worked on that project, trying to save that Fast Flux Facility.
Franklin: Really? So in the ‘80s, then?
Didier: Yeah. Who was the commissioner? Yeah, I got involved in that. That was a travesty that they ever destroyed that, simply for the fact that medical isotopes—they had no idea what they could have engineered from that reactor that would have helped in the medical field. The dream was the guys that knew—he since has died, too. He moved to Portland. That if you had cancer, you’d go in, and you’d sit down, and they’d do, I guess, an injection. Sort of, probably, like chemo now, but in 15 minutes you’d be out of there. The possibility was there to make medical isotopes. If you know what medical isotopes are. I’m not a scientist, but because of the way the Fast Flux—it was one of a kind in the world, I think.
Franklin: Mm-hmm. How did you become involved in the committee to save it?
Didier: I don’t remember who got me into that. [LAUGHTER] I don’t remember. Claude Oliver, for one, was active in that. Wanda Munn, who is still alive, and she’s still—yeah.
Franklin: Yeah, I’ve—
Didier: I know Wanda and I talk to her quite often and she was very active in that.
Franklin: Yeah. She was very supportive.
Didier: I just went down to the office and did what I usually do, you know. Write thank-you letters for donations and filing and that kind of stuff. But I was very interested; I thought it was a very good project that our government—all the money that had been expended thrown down the toilet, to put it bluntly. I see in the paper they’re going to use one of the warehouses they built, though, to store the sludge or something. Did you see that?
Franklin: I didn’t. I do know that our collection that we manage—the Department of Energy’s Hanford Collection, which is a historic collection of artifacts and archives gathered onsite that document history, and that’s actually stored in one of the Fast Flux Facility warehouses.
Didier: Is it?
Franklin: Yeah. We’re moving everything out, but I go up there once or twice a week to do work on the collection, yes. It’s one of those warehouses that was built for Fast Flux.
Didier: Yeah.
Franklin: I hadn’t read about storage of waste.
Didier: Yeah, sludge or something. So they can—I don’t know—something about the tanks, they can put it in there? Something that had been built for the Fast Flux reactor. So at least maybe something’s being—[LAUGHTER]—what should I say? Salvaged. But anyway.
Franklin:Um, what do you recall about living in the Cold War—during the Cold War era? Especially—was there any sense of danger or even pride living so close at Hanford or working at Hanford, given its role in the US nuclear weapons arsenal during the Cold War?
Didier: Well, all that was sort of over with when I was out there. No, it was a job, and it was money. [LAUGHTER] Better money than I could make anywhere else. And the people were great to work with, and they were always interested in what we were doing out there. You know, you would have thought being of the scientific community and whatever—completely different ideas than being a farmer. But you know what? It’s interesting—there’s always a bit of farmer in everybody. Have you ever realized that? I mean, guys particularly.
Franklin: Well, I grew up on a farm.
Didier: I know that’s what you said, but it seems like no matter what they’re line of work is or whatever, there’s always this curiosity about farming and what to do and whatever. I used to have a lot of questions. They always treated me very well. I really hated to quit out there. Because I enjoyed the people. I enjoyed getting away from the farm, and the worries and the whatever. I could go to work and have a different scenario for the day, you know?
Franklin: Right, right. So when you were out there, you—all of the children were with your husband?
Didier: No, I hired a babysitter. She had to come to the house, because I couldn’t get five kids up—I had to leave at like seven in the morning, something, to be to work. We started earlier than 8:00. What was it? I don’t know what time I had to leave, but she had to come to the house and get the kids dressed and whatever.
Franklin: Was that a—
Didier: Don was not a babysitter. [LAUGHTER] He had better things to do, you know. No, I had to hire someone to come in. And sometimes you wondered if—that’s when I finally decided that I needed to quit and come home, because there’s a fine line there about whether you’re really—how much are you contributing here, when you have to pay someone to look after your children, cost of getting to work, better clothing—had to dress better—you know, all these things you got to factor in. It was better when I did come home, because my husband—he liked conversation and people. So he sometimes got sidetracked at the neighbors’ and stuff when I thought he should have been home doing some things. So when I finally came home for good, it was better. Things improved. [LAUGHTER] In my eyes, anyway.
Franklin: Okay.
Didier: Well, it was lonely out there if you were—he just liked, as all farmers do, they like to talk a lot. They still get together. We’ve had some restaurants up there at the corner, and that was the gathering place every morning, the coffee shop and all the BSing that goes on. They’ve come and gone. So now we have a small Mr. Quick’s up there, and some of them still meet up there. Yeah. Got to compare notes, you know.
Franklin: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Didier: [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: A lot of things to talk about, I’m sure.
Didier: Yup.
Franklin: How—you mentioned, especially when you were growing some of the other crops, maybe not the hay, but like the corn and potatoes—how—did you rely on migrant labor at all? Or have you noticed--?
Didier: We did in asparagus, but they really—the families we had I don’t think were migrant. They came from California every year. We furnished housing for them. When amnesty was declared, that’s when we tore out the asparagus. The next year, it was—well, they got better jobs, they stayed in California, they didn’t come back. The people we were getting were not—well, that’s when they also made the deal that if—before, you paid by what they cut a day. I guess you’d call it piecework. They could make good money. But then they said, okay, if they don’t cut enough to equal so much an hour—and I forget what the minimum wage was or whatever it was—then you’ve got to pay them that. So you had to keep track of both things. Well, then you started getting people that would start at the top of the road, and they’d get to the bottom of the road, and then they’d sit down on their box or whatever they had down there and smoke a cigarette. They didn’t care if they made—yeah. They got paid so much no matter what. The caliber of people changed drastically. We got a crew leader or something out of Texas to bring us people, and that was not good. So we just decided to tear it out.
Franklin: That’s when you went to a more mechanized--?
Didier: Well, yeah. Just planted other crops. When we lost the sugar beet industry here, that was hard, because that was a very, very dependable cash crop. That hurt.
Franklin: What happened to the sugar beet industry?
Didier: Well, they decided to pull the factory at Moses Lake out of here. So we had no place to ship the sugar beets. I think, took acres and stuff back to Idaho. So we lost our sugar beet industry here.
Franklin: Is there anything that I haven’t talked about that you’d like to talk about?
Didier: Well, I don’t know. I don’t know what it would be, except that I think at the end of my composition in that book that I gave you there on the block, I just said I was so grateful for the opportunity that we had here. I think this probably was the last—what do I want to say—the last land that was opened up for development, like the Columbia Basin, the last project. We raised five great kids. They learned how to work. I’m proud of all of them. I just felt, being a city girl, my mother-in-law particularly didn’t think I’d ever make it, but I did. [LAUGHTER] It was a great opportunity. A lot of people didn’t stay. There were a lot of women that—it was hard.
Franklin: Yeah.
Didier: It was hard out there. We had a couple of suicides. You’d get—yeah. I don’t know what else to tell you.
Franklin: Did your parents stay in Portland?
Didier: My dad had died early in life. My mother, yes. I was an only child.
Franklin: Okay.
Didier: She lived in Portland, yes. And--
Franklin: What did she—oh, sorry.
Didier: That’s okay.
Franklin: What did she think about—
Didier: Oh. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: --your going out to homestead in—I’m sure she thought it was—
Didier: Not too much.
Franklin: --kind of the middle of nowhere.
Didier: Not too much.
Franklin: Did she ever come out?
Didier: Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. She came up. She always came up whenever I had a baby and helped me. In some of the rougher years, so she knew what was actually happening. Of course, you know how you feel about your kids. You don’t like to see them—think that they’re being—what should I say—deprived. [LAUGHTER] And Don’s folks were very helpful. They—his dad came up and helped us many a time work on the house. She’d come up and do the cooking, since I was working. I’d come home to a meal, which was great. She made the best cinnamon rolls. My kids have never forgotten that.
Franklin: [LAUGHTER]
Didier: [LAUGHTER] Yeah, she—anyway. Yeah, they—we also were in sheep. I guess I forgot to say that. We all had a—I used to do the lambing.
Franklin: Oh, wow.
Didier: Yeah, we bought a bunch of old ewes, which was not the best idea. But that’s all—his dad and Don went together and bought this bunch of old ewes. And so we lambed—I think we had lambs for—or we had sheep for—what? I don’t know, maybe five, six years. We never were much of a livestock people. My husband, when he was young, his dad went to some auction or something, came home with some milk cows, and Don got the job of milking the cows. He says, I’m never having a milk cow, and we never did. [LAUGHTER] We had a guy actually delivering milk out to the farm, come to think of it. And he left a big supply everyday with the boys I had.
Franklin: Wow, yeah, I bet.
Didier: I ended up with four boys and one daughter. My daughter’s a school teacher here in Kennewick. Has been for umpteen years. And Brett works at Battelle, my youngest. Curt and Clint and Chris—Chris is my oldest—they all are in the farming deal out there.
Franklin: And Clint’s a local politician, right?
Didier: Oh, yes. Yeah. He thinks he has to try to make a difference. But anyway, it’s a rough go. But he’s determined—stubborn. [LAUGHTER] No, I admire him for his, I guess, bravery, because it is—you do have to be brave. You take a lot of flak, I’m going to tell you, and a lot of—after he loses, which he has, takes him a while to recover. It’s a rejection, is what it is.
Franklin: Yeah. That’s understandable.
Didier: And then he takes a bit to regroup, and turns around and comes back for another go at it. And I tell him, I said, I don’t understand you, Clint. [LAUGHTER] Anyway.
Franklin: Well, great, well, thank you so much, Alice.
Didier: I probably talked your leg off.
Franklin: Nope, my legs are still here.
Didier: Well, I don’t know what else I could tell you.
Franklin: Did anyone else have any questions?
Didier: Oh, I could—I guess I should have told you, I did a lot of tractor work. I was not just a housewife. I ran almost every piece of equipment, except I never ran the stacker or—but I drove tractor. Did cultivating. Never rode a—I never ran a potato harvester, of course, but I worked on enough of them sorting potatoes. You know when you’re digging in the field? I’ve eaten a lot of dirt in my day. [LAUGHTER]
Tom Hungate: Did you ever notice a difference, was there a boys’ club that you kind of had to work through? Or was it just you were a good worker and so you were accepted as a worker on the farm? Or there weren’t enough people even to judge you as a woman out there working on a farm?
Didier: Yeah. Most all the women out there—not every woman worked in the field, but the only one that I worried about judging me was my husband. [LAUGHTER] Which, sometimes—[LAUGHTER]—I would pull something that wasn’t—I mean, do something that wasn’t too good. We had a big windstorm one night, and I thought I had to go down—we did have wheel lines at the far end of our place, down in—well, it sloped down pretty readily there. And those wheel lines, if you don’t block them, will take off in the wind and tear them all up. So the guys headed down there, and I thought I had to go down and help. Well, the first thing I did was run over the pipe that hooked into the main line. [LAUGHTER] I got told, why don’t you just go to the house? Because I hadn’t helped the situation any. [LAUGHTER]
Emma Rice: Another thing I was kind of thinking, did you have anything else to add about being kind of a working mom in the 1950s and ‘60s—
Didier: Yeah.
Rice: --to watch over your own [INAUDIBLE]
Didier: Well, funny you ask that question, because I have granddaughters now that are—well, I have two granddaughters that are CPAs. One just moved—she was working out here on the Project, and she just moved to South Carolina. And I look back on the days when I was working, and they never come again. You’ve lost some of the years of your kids’ life. As things happen, when they learn—when they walk, when they—first time they do something. And not being—and I remember I came home, and I was so tired. I gave my best at work, and there wasn’t a whole lot left over at the end of the day. And I know I was cranky. [LAUGHTER] And I just think sometimes—I’m sort of like my granddaughter, I kept wanting to—each time I got a promotion, it was—how do I want to put that? Not a feather in my cap, but made me feel worthy—more worthwhile, or whatever. I enjoyed working, I admit that. But I just look back on it now as—I’m going to be 85—August. I think, was it really that important? And I wish, maybe, some of our younger generation had the benefit, maybe, of my years later on the road. That’s just my—
Rice: Yeah.
Didier: But I have thought about that a lot. Whether I would have done it any differently at the time, because we needed the money. But sometimes we get—we forget what’s most important in our life.
Franklin: I agree.
Rice: Yeah, great.
Franklin: So what we might do now is—we’ll maybe have you kind of narrate some of these, some of the items you brought along.
Didier: Where you go across it, when I was—
Franklin: Right.
Didier: But with these—this is hay we’ve laid down, and I thought it was quite—yeah, there. I thought it was sort of a neat view of how things look now, compared to that other slide you’ve got there.
Franklin: Right. Yeah, no, that’s really—
Didier: So I don’t know if you want me to bring in that picture or not, so you—
Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin and I’m conducting an oral history interview with Daniel Barnett on July 13th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Daniel Barnett about his experiences growing up in Richland and working at the Hanford site. So the best place to start, I think, is the beginning. So why don’t you tell me where you were born and what year.
Daniel Barnett: I was born in Aberdeen, Washington in 1938—August 13th.
Franklin: Okay.
Barnett: And when the war started, my dad was working for the Harbor Patrol in Seattle as a patrolman. He heard that they were hiring over here, so he came over here and they hired him almost instantly because he already had the security clearance and everything.
Franklin: Ah.
Barnett: So he called my mom and told her that he had a job over here and to get herself packed, because he was gonna get her. But when she moved here, she couldn’t move to Richland. It wasn’t even on the map at that time. They took it off the map and everything. She had to move to Prosser.
Franklin: Okay.
Barnett: And later on when they finally got a prefab built, we moved into a prefab at 1011 Sanford.
Franklin: Where was your father from? Was he from Washington?
Barnett: He was from Oregon. All my family is from Oregon except for me. My dad said he couldn’t get across the border fast enough.
Franklin: So being from—what drew him to Hanford? Was it the pay?
Barnett: I think so. Well, he was originally—he worked at a plywood plant, then he went to work for Harbor Patrol. He had asthma, which the wet climate apparently irritated. So he had a chance to get over here, so he moved over here.
Franklin: Okay. So the climate played a—
Barnett: Yeah.
Franklin: --big factor and wanted the dry and the sunshine.
Barnett: Well, probably the pay, too, because the pay was good for those times.
Franklin: Right. And how long did your family live in Prosser before you moved?
Barnett: We were there about a year, I think. I don’t remember truthfully—I was only about five when we moved there. And I was there probably about a year. I just vaguely remember moving to Prosser.
Franklin: Right. Okay. And you moved—so you came over in 1944—
Barnett: Yeah.
Franklin: --right? And so you would have moved to Richland in 1944? About there?
Barnett: Oh—I think we actually—Dad came over, I think in ’43. A year later, in ’44 we moved over.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Barnett: Because I remember ’45 when they announced the war—dropping the bomb on Japan, and Mom told Dad when he come home, I know what you’ve been guarding! [LAUGHTER] Because he didn’t even know what he was guarding at the time.
Franklin: Right. Wow. Did your dad talk about his work much? Or maybe [INAUDIBLE]
Barnett: He worked as a patrolman until they sold the town and then he became a painter.
Franklin: A painter?
Barnett: Yeah, he was an artist so then he became a painter and painted the houses and the buildings in Richland. Because when the government owned Richland, if you had a paint job needed done on the house, you called them and they come in and painted it. You didn’t hire somebody from a company to paint it. The government did it.
Franklin: And was he a patrolman onsite the entire time until they sold the town?
Barnett: Yeah, yeah.
Franklin: Okay. Was he assigned to a specific area, or--?
Barnett: No, just general patrol. He talked about patrolling the fences, taking their Jeeps and going down the length of the fences and checking them out, and all that sort of stuff. But just a general patrolman, not any special area.
Franklin: Okay. And you said that your—what did your mother do when she first got here?
Barnett: Oh, she was just a housewife. She eventually went to work as a waitress. And then finally she got on to work at Hanford. She worked with Battelle for about 29 years as a lab tech.
Franklin: Oh, wow. Do you know which lab she worked in?
Barnett: Well, she did—where they did testing on the animals. Though at that time they were testing marijuana on chimpanzees and different types of animals. She did the test work on the meat from the animals.
Franklin: Oh, wow.
Barnett: So I don’t know exactly—it was—again, probably wasn’t supposed to be told, so she didn’t say much about it.
Franklin: Did she have any schooling beyond—
Barnett: Just high school.
Franklin: Just high school. And what about your father, did he--?
Barnett: He was just high school.
Franklin: Just high school as well. Where did your mother waitress at?
Barnett: Well, the first place she had was O’Malley’s Drug Store which now is a—what do you call it? A Tojo Gym? Where they teach different martial arts?
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Barnett: It’s down on Williams, right off of Williams. That’s what it is now.
Franklin: Okay.
Barnett: O’Malley’s Drug Store eventually closed, moved up to Kadlec. And a lady bought it from him, and now she’s down there on George Washington Way.
Franklin: Okay.
Barnett: And right by O’Malley’s Drug Store used to be a Mayfair market. So I sold newspapers out at the lunch halls at Hanford. Sold—well, I don’t remember—but I think it was the Columbia Basin News to start out, because that was the first newspaper of the Tri-Cities, was the Columbia Basin News. Then they bought them out and became the Tri-City Herald. But I remember selling—give you an idea, you can figure out how much time, because I remember one of the headlines was—one of the union leaders had been arrested by the government. And I don’t even remember who it was, it’s been so long ago. But I remember that was one of the headlines of one of the newspapers.
Franklin: What about—do you remember the Richland Villager at all? That was a local paper.
Barnett: Yeah, but it wasn’t very much. It was very small.
Franklin: Okay.
Barnett: I delivered the Seattle P-I.
Franklin: Seattle P-I?
Barnett: Yeah.
Franklin: Okay. And you said your mother started waitressing at Malley? At O’Malley’s or Malley’s?
Barnett: At O’Malley’s.
Franklin: O’Malley’s. And then did she waitress anywhere else in Richland?
Barnett: Not that I know of. From there she went out to Hanford.
Franklin: And that was when pharmacies or drug stores as we know them now, they used to have lunch counters.
Barnett: Yeah, yeah.
Franklin: Right. And so they would go there and they were more of like a café-slash-pharmacy.
Barnett: Yeah. The one up on Thayer, I think it was Densow’s at that time. That had a heyday lunch counter in it, coffee shop. It closed up and now I think it’s just pharmacy.
Franklin: Mm-hmm.
Barnett: But where the south end—what do you call it? You know when you get down here, you sit and try to remember things and you get kind of jumbled up—Salvation Army building is now on Thayer was originally the Mayfair Market.
Franklin: Okay. And what did they sell there?
Barnett: Well, that was the grocery store.
Franklin: Grocery store, okay. Do you remember—so you said you moved into—what was the address on Sanford?
Barnett: 1011 Sanford.
Franklin: And do you remember what kind of prefabricated house it was?
Barnett: It was three-bedroom.
Franklin: Three-bedroom prefab, okay.
Barnett: No, I think it was two-bedroom, because my sister was just a little baby then.
Franklin: Okay. And did you share a room with your sister?
Barnett: Probably with my brother.
Franklin: Oh, so how many siblings—
Barnett: Had three kids. I had an older brother. We were about five years apart.
Franklin: Oh, okay. So an older brother, you, and then a younger sister.
Barnett: Yeah.
Franklin: And then how long did you live at 1011 Sanford?
Barnett: I don’t really remember, but it must have been three or four years, because as soon as they got the A houses built, we had a chance to move into one. And we moved immediately to one. Because we had three kids, and a prefab’s kind of tight for three kids.
Franklin: Yeah, yeah. I live in a two-bedroom prefab. And it’s—with just my wife, and it’s pretty—
Barnett: Well you know why they’re called prefabs.
Franklin: Tell me.
Barnett: They were built by a company, brought in in two sections and then put together. They were prefabricated.
Franklin: Yeah, the prefabricated engineering company out of Portland.
Barnett: And nobody could figure out why they put that little square door in the back other than to throw the garbage out it. I don’t know—have you ever heard of Dupus Boomer?
Franklin: Yes.
Barnett: He made some cartoons about that backdoor.
Franklin: Right, and that the rooves had a tendency to fly away.
Barnett: Yeah.
Franklin: And they had to put—
Barnett: Well, in 1955, they did. They had two of them blow off.
Franklin: Yeah, those are great cartoons.
Barnett: Like “Pa wants a bathtub.” [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: So tell me a little more about growing up in Richland. Which schools did you go to?
Barnett: Well, the first school I went was Carmichael. And that was probably a mile-and-a-half away. We walked to school. Nobody thought anything about it. There wasn’t any buses. There was a bus system in Richland, but it was run by the government. It was a little old bus that you could pick up in two places in Richland to go downtown and go to a movie and come back. But no buses hauled you to school. There was high school buses that hauled people. They picked them up in the Horse Heaven Hills on farms and brought them to Hanford—I mean to Col High—it’s Hanford now. But, no, I walked to school real regular, didn’t think about it, nobody had any panic about walking to school. Everybody did it because it’s normal.
Franklin: And do you remember—so you would have been going to—was it Carmichael—growing up right in the early Cold War. What do you remember about civil defense? Duck-and-cover, air raids.
Barnett: I don’t remember doing that.
Franklin: Really?
Barnett: I don’t know whether we did or not, but I don’t remember doing that.
Franklin: Do you remember knowing what was being made at Hanford? Did you ever have any fear—how real did the Cold War seem to you?
Barnett: Well, the Cold War affected me quite a bit because I was in eight years during the Cold War—in the Air Force.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: The security was a lot tighter. I mean, there was—you couldn’t go out to Hanford without having your security badge checked. Now you can drive clear to the Area and before you go in the Area have your badge checked.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: But then, there was a badge check when you got on the buses, the badge check, when you got out to your area, and then again they checked your badges when you left the area.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: So it was—the security was real tight.
Franklin: Mm-hmm. But what about when you were growing up, when you were a kid in school? Did you ever have any special fear or pride in what was being made at Hanford?
Barnett: Nope. It was—like I said, nobody knew what they were doing out there until they dropped the bomb. Then they found out they’d been protecting part of the atomic bomb.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: But I had no fears about it. I went down the irrigation ditch—there used to be an irrigation ditch that ran through town that started—it had two, three ponds on Wellsian Way that were the settling ponds for Richland’s water system. And we used to go there and swim in them. One of the ponds they eventually made a juvenile fishing pond. And the irrigation ditch runs from there, clear down to where the hospital is, down in front of the hospital, several ponds down through the hospital and then under—well, through the Uptown district, one of them went through the Uptown district, and one went to the Columbia River. And wasn’t until ’48 that they finally put a pump in there, because in ’48 when they built the dam—they built the dike, rather—the irrigation ditches plugged up. So they had to put up a pump station in so they could pump the water irrigation ditch up into the river. We used to fish in that. We used to go down there and slide down—slide over where the pump was, because it was all slick and slimy. We’d put on an old pair of jeans and go down there and slide into the water. I mean, that’s things kids then. Nowadays they wouldn’t even think about it. My mother told me when I could swim 25 feet, I could go in the river by myself. Mainly because you didn’t go to the river too often in the winter; you went in the summer. And there’s not a place in the Yakima, if you can swim 25 feet, you can’t get back to the shore. So I spent all my—most weekends and spare time at the Yakima River playing around.
Franklin: Wow. What about—maybe you could talk a little bit about the growth of Richland and kind of the building of some of the major hallmarks, like the Uptown and the—
Barnett: Well, the Uptown was built—the rest of it closed up, but originally the Uptown—as you come into Uptown off to the left—that was a big theater. And we used to have a big matinee. The Spudnut’s shop has always been there. I can remember going to the movie on a Saturday and the lineup for the movie—I think it was 20 cents for a movie then. But it was clear past the Spudnut shop. We used to watch the owner there making the Spudnuts while we were waiting to get into the movies.
Franklin: Has that been in its same location--
Barnett: Yeah.
Franklin: --in the mall?
Barnett: Spudnut’s has been there ever since it started. They originally were out there in Kennewick. If you go in there and pick up their menu, they have a little story about where they started. They started out there in the Wye.
Franklin: That’s great. And what else about it? Because Richland kind of developed out towards--
Barnett: Well, Newberry’s was on the other end of the Uptown district. That was kind of a department store type. I think the only one I saw was about 15 years ago, and that was in the Dalles, Oregon. I don’t even know if they exist anymore. The downtown district, every year we had different contests for the kids. They had marble shooting contests and bubblegum blowing contests—all kind of contests to keep the kids’ interest.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: At that time, the—what is it? The Allied Arts, or was that in the Atomic Frontier Days?
Franklin: Can you talk maybe a little bit about the Atomic Frontier—do you remember going to the parades?
Barnett: Yeah. They had a lot of the old western movie stars come to the Atomic Frontier Days.
Franklin: Like—do you remember any names in particular?
Barnett: No, I don’t. Like I say, a kid doesn’t retain names like that. He hears them and doesn’t retain them. But my dad, apparently, knew a couple of them, so he visited with them. It started out as just a celebration of Hanford and stuff. And then it worked into the Allied Arts show.
Franklin: Okay. And do you remember any particulars of those celebrations, like the parade—the floats, or—
Barnett: Well, there wasn’t any parade. There wasn’t any parade, and where Howard Amon Park is, there used to be a swimming pool. You know where it makes a turnaround? Well, there off to the right there used to be a swimming pool. And right now, they still got the old children’s swimming pool there, but then there was a regular swimming pool in the water. And in 1948 when the big flood came, it filled up full of water and they ended up breaking it up and burying it and building the Howard Prout pool. But we used to go down there and swim just about every day. And we’d go to the other end of the park and pick peaches, because it used to be a peach orchard. Because there were orchards all over town. Where Jason Lee was—the old Jason Lee—that was a cherry orchard. Where Densow is, that was a cherry orchard. Carmichael had an orchard. There was orchards all over town. Because this was an agriculture district at the time the government bought it and moved in.
Franklin: Were you in any clubs or—
Barnett: I was a boy scouts.
Franklin: --organizations? Boy Scouts?
Barnett: Yeah. We had—one that sticks in my mind the most was we had one of our young scouts drowned at the Uptown. That’s the one I mentioned. He went on an inner tube, fell in the water and drowned. That was in ’48. And actually, the water where the hospital was, the irrigation ditch you got there, that was 15-foot deep at that time.
Franklin: Wow.
Barnett: That backed up so much, they—that’s when they built what they called the America Mile, the dike. They called all the earthmovers from Hanford out to Richland to build that dike. Because when they started, the water was lapping over the edge to go into the houses. And they poured that thing in about 24 hours.
Franklin: Wow, that’s amazing.
Barnett: Now, the George Washington Way was closed to all civilian traffic, and these great big earthmovers were just going down the road, 30, 40 miles an hour.
Franklin: Wow. What other kinds of activities did you do in Boy Scouts?
Barnett: Oh, built models. Car models. You whittle them out, put the wheels on them, all that, have races with them. Went on trips. Just normal Boy Scout stuff. Got a little more sophisticated, but just the normal Boy Scout stuff then.
Franklin: Right. And so after you went to Carmichael, did you then go to Richland High?
Barnett: Col High.
Franklin: Col High?
Barnett: [LAUGHTER] It was Col High then.
Franklin: Oh.
Barnett: They changed the name because there was a Col High downstream on the Columbia that had had the name before Richland High was called Col High. So they changed it to Richland High instead of Col High.
Franklin: Oh. But was the mascot always still the—
Barnett: All the bomber.
Franklin: --bombers? Okay. So the Col High Bombers?
Barnett: Yup.
Franklin: Okay. And when did you graduate high school?
Barnett: 1957.
Franklin: And then what did you do?
Barnett: I went in the Air Force. I think about two months after I got out and I went in the Air Force. I already spent 27 months in the National Guards. I got in the National Guards when I was 16, and when I went to sign up for the Air Force, the squadron commander of the National Guards was—he got shook up because he enlisted me when I was 16. [LAUGHTER] So they changed the date on my discharge papers from the National Guards. So according to my discharge papers from the National Guards, I’m 78 right now.
Franklin: Oh.
Barnett: Those days, they did things like that, nobody thought anything about it.
Franklin: Wow, yeah.
Barnett: Because if you were warm they took you into the military then.
Franklin: Right. [LAUGHTER] And what did you—describe your time in the Air Force.
Barnett: Well, of course there was basic training. The first place I went was Westover, Massachusetts—that’s Springfield, Massachusetts. And that was a total culture shock for me, because I grew up in a comparatively small city. And Springfield then had over 100,000 people in it.
Franklin: Right, and I guess, too, at this point you would have completely grown up when Richland was a government—
Barnett: Yup.
Franklin: --still was all government space.
Barnett: Yup, they sold it while I was in the Air Force.
Franklin: Can—actually I guess maybe we can back up a little bit. What strikes you, maybe looking back on that, or—
Barnett: I watched them build the Alphabet Houses. And there wasn’t one or two people on the houses; there was five or six building these houses. And they seemed to go up overnight. One of the things that I don’t know is fact or not, but knowing the government it probably was—is they were supposed to build half basements for a coal fire furnace, a coal bin, and two tubs, and place for a washing machine. The contractors screwed up on some of them and built a full basement. And the government found out about it and made them go back in and seal half the basement with dirt. [LAUGHTER] Typical government.
Franklin: Were your—granted you were a kid at this point, but was your sense—were people happy—
Barnett: Oh yeah!
Franklin: living in a government-controlled and -owned town?
Barnett: Nobody thought anything about it. There was very little crime. Because at that time, there was only about two, three ways to get out of Richland. So there was nobody causing any big deal. And if you got in a whole bunch of trouble—you didn’t live in Richland unless you worked at Hanford. And if your kids got into too much trouble, they told the parents, you calm them down or go find another job. So it was stopped.
Franklin: Right. Did you—was Richland mostly a white community at that time? Right? Were there any other—
Barnett: Yeah, there was—one, I think there was only one black community in Richland—Norris Brown. And I think they lived in Putnam.
Franklin: Okay.
Barnett: I remember we had a basketball game in Sunnyside. And Sunnyside wasn’t gonna let them play on their court. And we told them, fine, we’ll just get up and leave. So we all started to get up and leave and they finally broke it and gave in and let them play on the basketball court.
Franklin: How did you know this family? Did you go to school together?
Barnett: Yeah, I went to school with them.
Franklin: Oh okay, and did you play basketball?
Barnett: No! I’m not a sports—I had my first surgery on my knee when I was about 13, so—
Franklin: Oh, wow.
Barnett: I’ve never played any sports. My sporting then was hunting and fishing.
Franklin: But you kind of heard about this story?
Barnett: Oh, yeah. We all know them. Went to basketball games. Then there was sock hops and at noon they taught dancing in the lunchrooms for kids that wanted to learn how to dance.
Franklin: So do you know what the patriarch of that family would have done at Hanford to be able to earn a place at Hanford? Because mostly from what I’ve heard, mostly African Americans had to live in Pasco.
Barnett: Yeah, because they wouldn’t let them live in Richland—I mean Kennewick.
Franklin: Yeah, in Kennewick. So how did—do you know any particulars as to how that family was able to live in Richland?
Barnett: I think it’s just that the government—that they had to be equal on them, and they just hired them and they went to work out there. I don’t know any particulars on it, but that’s basic what it was.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Barnett: They were in a government town, and there was no way that anybody could refuse—and there was nobody that complained about it.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: Again, the government controlled it. They said, if you don’t like it, goodbye.
Franklin: Right. And they would—they called the government for pretty much anything you needed on the house, right? For coal?
Barnett: Right. Lightbulbs, chains, coal. But coal was delivered once a—I don’t know whether it was once a month or once a week. But coal was automatically delivered. And like I say, if there was anything major done, you called the housing department. They came in and fixed it.
Franklin: I think sometimes for outsiders looking in, it’s kind of striking to hear about the government completely owning this town and controlling the lives of the people and having that much control on people’s freedoms and responsibility. But from the people I’ve talked to who grow up in Richland, they have very fond memories of it.
Barnett: Yeah, there was no restrictions on the normal freedoms. There was restriction on if your kids got into trouble, because, like I said, the patrol would go up to the person that had the kids that were causing the problem and said you either straighten your kids out or you go and find another job. Which, to me, made common sense. And so it was actually pretty decent.
Franklin: Did you ever get any sense from your parents that they felt, maybe, restricted, not being able to own their own home or do any of their own repairs, or did they just—
Barnett: No, not then. I think—that was just after the Depression—I think they were just happy to be able to get a home.
Franklin: Right. Interesting. Because, you know, for some people looking outside, you could look at that level of government control—because we have these big debates about the role of the government in society today, and it’s kind of interesting to hear about it.
Barnett: Well, there was no control where the government come in and said, you do this and you do that and you do this. As long as you didn’t get into trouble and you did your job, and were a normal person, there was nobody ever complained about it. I remember I was back behind where the Racquet Club is. I was hunting ground squirrels with a .22 one day. And at that time, nobody had any problems with it. And one of the Richland patrol people came and picked me up and brought me back to the patrol station. And he called my dad. My dad come in and he says, what’s wrong? He says, we caught your boy shooting .22s at such-and-such area. He said, well, is he aiming at the road? Said, no. Said, did he shoot it at anybody? Said, no. Then what the hell are you bothering me about? I mean, that’s just how it was in those times. It wasn’t any of this, oh my god, he’s got a gun. It just was normal. Because I had my first rifle when I was about—I must have been about eight years old. And we used to go out and go rabbit hunting.
Franklin: Did you ever spend much time in Kennewick or Pasco—in either of those--?
Barnett: Not really. My wife was born in Pasco.
Franklin: Okay.
Barnett: I never spent much time in it because I had no reason to. I mean, it wasn’t the case of I was afraid to or wary about it—just I had no reason to. All, everything I needed was in Richland or around the Richland area.
Franklin: Why did you first have to get surgery on your knee at 13?
Barnett: Well, my knee locked. I didn’t find out until about 25 years later that the doctor had actually not fixed it. Because what they found out was there was a meniscus cartilage—you know in your knee? And mine was oblong and it had broke in half. And it had slipped between the joint and it had locked my knee so I couldn’t straighten it out. So I’d have to pick it up, lay it across the other leg, and pull it and pop it back out. But that was the first—I was accident prone. I had a radical mastoid when I was about 15. By the time I got out of high school, I probably had 100 stitches in me. I mean, if it happened, I did it and got it happened to me. I was playing baseball, jumped over a fence, and landed on a guard rake with the thongs up—four thongs in one of my foot.
Franklin: Ouch.
Barnett: Weird things like that are always happening to me. One time, when I was in school, I reached up to open a door and a kid slammed it and put my hand through the window, sliced across this way. And I looked at it, bleeding, and I closed it up and went to the nurse’s office. The nurse got all panicky. She called my mom, and I could hear my mom say over the phone real loud, again?! And the nurse must’ve thought she was the hard-heartest old lady there ever was, but my mother was just used to it.
Franklin: Yeah, right.
Barnett: And I didn’t do things out of the way to have it happen, just—if it’s gonna be an odd thing, it happened.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: So I kind of, like I say, with all this mess I got with my knee now, I call it Young Stupid Male Syndrome, a lot of it. I don’t—I get frustrated with it, because I love to garden and I can’t garden anymore. But I don’t get worried or depressed about it, because it’s there and nothing I can do about it, so just live with it.
Franklin: Right. So jump back ahead now. So you said you moved to Springfield in the Air Force for basic training, and that was—
Barnett: No, I was—San Antonio for basic training, and then to Springfield.
Franklin: And that was a big culture shock.
Barnett: Oh, yeah. I mean, I drove a vehicle and drove into town to haul officers into town. And here is a town with 100,000 people and I’d never been in anything bigger than Richland, Washington. So you can imagine the shock it was, being in that kind of traffic.
Franklin: Right. And then where did you go after that?
Barnett: Well, I was there for about a year-and-a-half, two years. Then I went to Thule, Greenland.
Franklin: Interesting.
Barnett: Top of the world.
Franklin: Yeah. And what were you—was that for the—weren’t there bombers stationed—
Barnett: No, they had the fueling planes there. Yes, they had SAC planes all over the world at that time. But at Thule they had the KC-135s and the KC-97s that were fueling planes.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: So we were there to support them.
Franklin: And those were there to refuel the—
Barnett: The B-52s.
Franklin: --the B-52s that were carrying weapons in case of--
Barnett: Yup, because there was one from every base in the world in the air 24 hours a day.
Franklin: Right. And can you talk—what was that like, to be in—and was the base separated from any other communities in Greenland, or did you--
Barnett: It was a base of its own. There were no other communities besides Thule, that’s it.
Franklin: And how long were you there?
Barnett: Year.
Franklin: And what was that like?
Barnett: Well, it’s an interesting place to visit, but you don’t want to live there permanently. [LAUGHTER] Let’s put it that way. They have permafrost which is—oh, I guess about two foot down. So in the spring there are all these little beautiful tundra flowers—yellows and whites and all that. And then when they’re gone it’s just green grass and that’s it. And when they went to put a pole in the ground, they put a can—a barrel of oil in the ground, and light the oil, and then dig around that barrel. Because that’s the only way to get down past the permafrost. Because permafrost is almost like concrete.
Franklin: Yes, yeah. I’m from Alaska originally, and so I’m very familiar with permafrost. So after Greenland, where did you go?
Barnett: Went to Mountain Home Air Force Base.
Franklin: And where is that?
Barnett: Idaho, Washington.
Franklin: Oh, okay. So kind of close to--
Barnett: Yeah, out in Mountain Home. They had B-47s then at Mountain Home.
Franklin: Okay.
Barnett: I figured out that they actually phased out B-47s because they were built before the B-52s and they figured the B-47s weren't worth keeping around.
Franklin: And what did you do in the Air Force?
Barnett: I drove. I drove every kind of vehicle you can think of.
Franklin: Oh, really?
Barnett: Yeah. When I moved to Fairchild from Mountain Home, I was trained to tow B-52s in the back, in the hangars.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Barnett: With a five-ton Yuke. Four-wheel drive, five ton, and you had wing walkers on the outside that would guide you, and you would back this thing up, this big B-52 into a hangar.
Franklin: Wow.
Barnett: They would pull it down to a fueling station or whatever.
Franklin: Cool. And then when did you come back to Richland?
Barnett: 1965. I got out to Richland and we moved to--I can't remember the address, but it was on Marshall. We moved to a house on Marshall.
Franklin: Was it an Alphabet House, or was it a--
Barnett: Yeah, it was an Alphabet House. I remember it most because the neighbors had a monkey. And the monkey kept stealing my daughter's candy from her. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: So you said--wait, so by this point you had a family?
Barnett: Yeah, I had--I adopted my oldest boy and I had two children.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Barnett: They were all born at Fairchild.
Franklin: Okay. And a wife, I presume?
Barnett: Yeah.
Franklin: And what did your wife do in Richland?
Barnett: She was just a mother. But we divorced in about '70. And then I remarried.
Franklin: Okay. And what did you do when you came back to Richland?
Barnett: Anything I could. I worked at O'Malley's Drug Store for a while. I worked at his house--O'Malley's house, leveled his backyard. I worked at Walter's Grape Juice, I worked at Bell Furniture, I worked at—at that time, it was originally called the Mart, at that big building right next to the Federal Building. At one time, that was a big--what would you call it? They had a cafeteria and a grocery store and all the other—kind of like Walmart.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: It was called the Mart at that time. And I worked there in the clippers that they washed the dishes with. And then I went to work for the bowling alley, Atomic Lanes, which was right there where the Jacks and Sons Tavern is. That was a community center and a bowling alley there. And I worked there for about a month, and then they went automatic. So, about that time, I was just about ready to get out—finish high school. And I don't think I had any other job after that, and I went in the Air Force.
Franklin: Oh, so--I'm sorry. When you came back to Richland, what did you do? So in 1965.
Barnett: Oh, I did everything then. You name it, I took a job. Before—I'm sorry, I got it backwards. Before I went in the Air Force, there wasn't many jobs for people in the—who were kids in Richland. And I worked the bowling alley and I worked down at a dry cleaning outfit. But when I come back to Richland, that's when I had all these other jobs. I worked all these other jobs to keep supplied for the family.
Franklin: How had Richland changed in the eight years since you had been gone?
Barnett: Well, the Uptown district had--the Newberry's had left. And there was a Safeway store right next to the theater. Right now I think it's a—I don't know, some kind of a multi shop deal. And both of the stores that were there originally are gone. They're now all antique stores.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: So it was—when it was built, it was the first big complex for going shopping in Tri-Cities.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: And after they built that, they built Highlands. And that was another big complex for shopping. So I worked everything I could, and 19--oh, what was it? [SIGH] About '67 or '68, I went to work at Hanford. I finally got on with them. Because I'd been applying at Hanford for three years. And I finally got to work with them. I won't mention how I got to work for them, because to me, it's kind of a ridiculous deal, and I don't know whether it was prejudice or not. Well, I'll go ahead.
Franklin: I was gonna say, now you've got my interest.
Barnett: I was--how I'd shop for a job, I'd go out and fill out an employment application, and I'd just distribute--go out all over town and fill out employment applications. And every week, I'd go back and check them. Well, one time, I was filling out an appointment application, and one of the guys I knew, I met him, and he said, hey, there's a new employment office over there at the new Whitaker School. And you might check it out. So I went over there and checked it out and signed up. And three days later, Hanford called me for a job. And I found out that that originally was a minority employment office.
Franklin: Oh.
Barnett: So I've always had the feeling that somebody didn't look at the records right. They didn't see the C. [LAUGHTER] Because I didn't get hired until I went to there and did an application. Because the government was required to hire a certain number of minority--
Franklin: Right. Well, but you did get hired.
Barnett: Yeah.
Franklin: So what did you do at Hanford?
Barnett: Well, I can say as little as possible, like everybody else. [LAUGHTER] That's a common joke. Of course, it took me about--I couldn't understand it. It took me about three months to get a security clearance. When I was in SAC, I had a Secret clearance. Both my folks worked at Hanford, they had Secret clearance. But it still took me about three months to get a security clearance. And all the time, since I've been on the Air Force, I've lived in Richland, I never could understand the government—why they wasted so much money on a security clearance for me. But when I got out there, I started as a process operator. And started at B Plant. And there was no training at that time. I mean, when you went into a radiation zone, one of the guys that was experienced took you with him. And you dressed like he did, hoping he knew what he was doing, because that's how you dressed. And that's how you learned to dress right. So I started out going into the canyon--I don't know if you knew what the canyons were—okay? We went into the canyons and I helped mixed chemicals in the chemical gallery. And that's where I think I really screwed up my knees, because I can remember—remember, I call it Young Stupid Male Syndrome--I remember throwing a hundred-pound sack of chemicals on my shoulder and going up three flights of stairs with them, rather than wait for the elevator. Young and dumb, indestructible. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Actually, maybe for those who might be watching this who might not be as familiar with some of this stuff as I am, can you describe the canyon?
Barnett: Well, the canyon was—well, like I say, the building was about 150-foot wide and about 800-foot long. And it was four stories deep and there was just one--the reason they call it canyon was because it was a gigantic canyon. It went the full length of the building, and they had huge cranes that moved different stuff so they could process the atomic waste. Because in B Plant, they process the nuclear waste. They ship it down to B Plant and we go through chemical stuff to separate the strontium and cesium from it. And that would be sent to the encapsulation plant. That was built about—oh, six years after I went to work at B Plant. They closed up after I'd been there for ten years, and I went to work for Encapsulation Building. But the canyon is an immensely big, empty storage building, really what it is. And I don't know how—or what they're gonna do with them now, because there is some radiation there that you wouldn't believe how hot it was. We took samples of radiation behind lead shields, and then they were so hot that they ended up having the crane pick up the samples and dispose of them, because we couldn't move them.
Franklin: Wow. Did you—and so when you came back, your father was no longer working at Hanford, right?
Barnett: Yeah, he was still working at Hanford.
Franklin: Oh, was he still working—so you guys worked at Hanford at the same time.
Barnett: Yeah.
Franklin: Oh, wow, that's really interesting. So can you tell me a little bit more about what a—describe in a little more detail the job of a process operator?
Barnett: Well, real basically, we were what you might call nuclear janitors.
Franklin: Okay.
Barnett: We clean up the messes that pipe fitters or millwrights or electricians made. We process all the chemical--mixed all the chemicals and processed—did all the processing of separating the strontium and cesium from the nuclear waste and ship them to tank farms. And that was basically what our main job was. We had a few major accidents. Now it'd be all over the world, about how bad it was and all that. But we just went about our business cleaning it up and went on our job. None of us got an overdose of radiation. We relied on our radiation monitors and they were good radiation monitors. If we were getting too much, they yanked us out of there real quick. So we didn't even think about it. It wasn't the case of being scared of it or anything else. It's like your hazardous wastes that they got, like coming from the hospital, where they work in an x-ray lab, they throw all the gloves and stuff and that. That's called mixed hazardous waste. Well, you could take a bath in that and not get any radiation on you. But according to what the public knew, those things are really highly radioactive boxes. And I think the biggest problem the government had is they didn't tell the people enough about what was really going on after the war was over.
Franklin: Oh. Really?
Barnett: Yeah, because there would have been less worry about things that were going on then, if they would have known. Because if you don't know anything about radiation, and you hear somebody mentions something is irradiated, you get all panicky about it. The expression for radiation out there was, you get a crap up. You get a crap up, you scrub it off and go about your business. Now, they panic and take you to town and do all that sort of stuff. There, we just scrubbed it off and went about our business.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: And I never worried about it.
Franklin: Okay. So you said you were a process separator at B Plant. And then you went to the Canyon, and what did you do--
Barnett: Well, I didn't go to the Canyon, I went to 225-B, the Encapsulation Building.
Franklin; 225-B, the Encapsulation Building.
Barnett: That's where they encapsulated the strontium and cesium.
Franklin: Okay.
Barnett: We all did a multitude of jobs. We worked on the cells, processing the strontium and cesium. And we worked behind the cells in mixing chemicals and we worked from when they loaded the chemicals for shipment for a long period of time when they were shipping cesium to the radiation plant for irradiating medical waste. And that ended when the guy was what they called recycling the cesium capsules too much. They get real hot. I mean, temperature-wise. And he was setting it in the water for a period of time and taking it out of water and cooling them off and stashing them back in the water. Well, one of them leaked.
Franklin: Ooh.
Barnett: And so they ended up, the whole place had to have all those capsules moved back. So that was a big fiasco. And again, it wasn't our fault. It was the guy doing the work was stupid enough to not check and see what he was doing.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: And that's usually what happens with most—any of the radiation. And if you work with radiation, it's not the guy doing the work, it's somebody that's stupid and doesn't check what he's doing, doesn't follow regulations that causes the problem.
Franklin: So did you have any other jobs at Hanford? Or what--
Barnett: I don't know, you ever heard of McCluskey?
Franklin: Yeah.
Barnett: Well, I was over there when we cleaned—for five weeks cleaning up that building.
Franklin: Really?
Barnett: Yeah.
Franklin: Were you there at the time of the accident--
Barnett: No, no.
Franklin: --or part of the cleanup for that?
Barnett: Afterwards. They were trying to clean up the rooms so they could go in there and get things squared away. And we spent five weeks there. And to tell you how screwball the government can be, the last week-and-a-half we were there, we finally told our supervisor, look, all of worked on this radiation for 15, 20 years. We know how to clean it up. Quit telling us what to do. Let us go in there and clean it up and we'll get it cleaned up for you in no time at all. So they took a chance. And what they did is we ragged all along the bottom of the building, and we took water fire extinguishers. Because it's americium, and americium is a powder substance, it floats real easy. But it's water soluble--it'll run down with water. So we went in there and sprayed the walls with it real heavy. Then wiped everything down, moved everything that was movable, bagged it up in plastic bags and moved it out. And inside of a week, we had it down to mask only. Before then, we were wearing three pairs of plastic and cooling air and fresh air.
Franklin: Wow.
Barnett: And we cleaned it up in a week-and-a-half because they didn't want the people that knew what they were doing doing it. And that's the biggest problem with the government: they've always got the bureaucracy up here that knows what's going on, but they never ask the poor guy that’s doing all the work what's going on. I think you've seen that numerous times. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: I think so. [LAUGHTER] Wow, that's really fascinating. So how long total did you work at Hanford?
Barnett: 30 years.
Franklin: 30 years.
Barnett: I had to take a medical retirement in '98.
Franklin: '98. So then you were there, then, kind of from the shift from production to cleanup. Right? The production and shutdown.
Barnett: No, when I left they were just getting ready to start cleaning things up.
Franklin: Okay, so can you maybe talk about the shift from production to shutdown? How did that affect your job?
Barnett: Well, I really didn't get in on any of the cleanup, because I left before they did. But I talked to a number of the guys out there that I worked with that were in the cleanup. The biggest problem they had is they put such a limit on chemicals they could use to do cleanup that they had to use things that they claim were not environmentally safe. They had to void all that--like Tide. They wouldn't even let us use Tide to wash the walls down. Now, you use Tide in washing machines. [LAUGHTER] Come on, give me a break. That's a hazardous chemical? And I guess it took them quite a while to get the thing cleaned up. Because, like I say, they didn't start cleaning it up until after I left.
Franklin: Right. So what did you do in the shutdown era? Like after '87, from '87 to '98? What was your job primarily?
Barnett: They didn't shut down--they shut B Plant down, but they didn't shut 2-and-a-quarter down. 2-and-a-quarter was still processing strontium and cesium.
Franklin: Oh, okay, so then you kept in the waste encapsulation.
Barnett: Yeah.
Franklin: Can you describe a little bit more the process of waste encapsulation?
Barnett: Well, strontium is not soluble--not water soluble. And strontium is. And what they had--they had a special process--I don't know exactly the process. I just know what we did. You would take a mixed chemicals with the cesium and you would dissolve it and then you would heat it up to--I think--800 degrees into a liquid. And then you had a machine we called a tilt-pour which would pour seven capsules at a time full of cesium. And then you'd take these capsules and you'd put a sensoring disc in them to make them airtight. And then you'd weld a cap onto that. That'd be welded by a machine. And most then it was computerized. Then that was decontaminated until it was clean. And then it was put into another capsule, and that capsule was also—put a lid on it, but it was soldered on—welded on. And that was moved into the pool cells. Pool cells are 13-foot deep. What you had is a special hole built into the wall with water that you would shove that capsule through. And then the guy on the other side in the pool cell would grab the capsule and pull it out. And he would go to the pool cell that he's designated to go to, and he would shove it through a hole in the wall. And somebody on the other side would grab it and pull it and then you'd put it into its spot. So it was quite a process. And the fear was--you couldn't get that capsule within five feet of the top. Because if you did, you'd get a high radiation alarm. They’d read millions of rads on those capsules. They were hot, no two ways about it. And one thing I've always wondered is why does cesium glow blue when you turn the lights out?
Franklin: Wow.
Barnett: You turn the lights out in the pool cell, and all these cesium capsules will glow blue. And I've never--I've had somebody say it's something about the speed of light and all that. But I'd like to know the real reason it does that.
Franklin: That sounds kind of strangely beautiful.
Barnett: It was. It's a blue glow all along the bottom. The strontium doesn't. Strontium is not water soluble and it doesn't glow at all. In fact, I got some strontium in me one time when I had a tape when one of the manipulators--I don't know if I didn't mention--all the work was done from the outside with the manipulators. You know what manipulators are.
Franklin: Right, yeah.
Barnett: Okay, and all the capsulation, all of the work was done with manipulators from the outside. And it was amazing what some of those guys could do. They could take a little bottle about so big with a little bitty top and they could pick up that bottle, hold it here, and took up the other--the cap with the lid and put it on it.
Franklin: Wow.
Barnett: I was never that good with it, but there some guys out there who got real expertise with that. It just takes a lot of work to learn to use those things.
Franklin: I bet.
Barnett: That's one reason my hand's tore up--my hand just didn't take it so much.
Franklin: And you said you got strontium on your hand?
Barnett: Yeah, I got--I couldn't handle manipulators good because my hand was falling apart on me. So I took all the decontamination of the manipulator. Because that's--a manipulator has to be pulled after so many--I think it's so many weeks, the Mylar coating on it starts deteriorating. So it has to be pulled, decontaminated, and new Mylar sheath put on it. And I was in there decontaminating one of the manipulators, and one of the—well, they were trying new bands that controlled the grips. And one of them broke and sliced my hand. And I got some strontium in my finger. It was about 700 counts. I wasn't too worried about it. But they took me to town and went on all government roads, documented and everything and brought me back. I couldn't work with radiation for about three months until that thing finally deteriorated--worked out of the body.
Franklin: Wow.
Barnett: But I didn't worry about it. It wasn't enough to do any harm.
Franklin: Wow, that's really--
Barnett: See, that's the difference between working with the stuff and knowing what it does, and not working with the stuff.
Franklin: Right. Right, I've heard a lot of similar things about--
Barnett: It's like chemicals. I'd rather work at a radiation plant than at a chemical plant. Because if you have good radiation monitors, you're not gonna get an overdose of radiation. But with a chemical plant, look what they have out there now. A guy gets a whiff of chemicals, they all go panic about it.
Franklin: Yeah, I see where you're--I see your point. So you said--earlier when you said you would put the cesium in the pools—cesium cans, you couldn't get them too close to something, because they'd get too hot. Sorry--can you--
Barnett: No, it wasn't too close--they're in--oh, it probably was a--well, what would you call it? It was like a cabinet with holes in it. You would drop these in there. And they're spaced out. You couldn't pull them too high.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Barnett: If you pulled them sometimes when you're getting ready to transfer them to the pool cell, they would hydroplane and come up. And if you pulled them too fast, they would come up and you'd get a high radiation alarm. You’d just drop it back down and it'd go off.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Barnett: That's what it was.
Franklin: I got--okay. I gotcha. So--
Barnett: It only takes one time, you remember not to do that anymore. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: [LAUGHTER] I bet. So even though your area—your work didn't change much when most of the plans ordered to shut down. You still probably worked with a lot of people whose jobs might have changed--
Barnett: Yeah.
Franklin: --during shutdown. Can you talk about that transition between process--?
Barnett: Well, I talked with some of the guys and they were talking about how much work it took to get things cleaned up. Like the area behind the pool cells, that had to be completely decontaminated. And we finally got it down to where it was just one pair and no masks. That took a lot of work. Decontaminating just takes a lot of hand-scrubbing. I mean, it's not a case of, you can put something there and pick it up and get rid of it. You got a scrub a lot of places until it's gone. It takes a lot of work. And I talked to one fella, and he said that they had all the cells that were down to clean—and what they consider clean is no radiation in them. And it is hard for me to believe, because some of those cells were really hot. But I never got a chance on the cleanup.
Franklin: How was--so when Hanford was shifting over, how was this change explained by management, or some of the--how was it conveyed, or how did the community take it?
Barnett: Management never explained anything to anybody. [LAUGHTER] I don't remember hearing the community complaining about anything, because most of the guys worked out there, and they knew what was going on. So there was no big panic about it. It wasn't the case where some guys didn't work here, they were told this was going on and got all excited because they didn’t know what was going on. Most people knew what was going on. So there was no big panic that I remember.
Franklin: Okay.
Barnett: We didn't panic with radiation, because we had good radiation monitors.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: And that makes a big difference when you're working around radiation.
Franklin: So being in waste encapsulation, how did other events--other nuclear accidents around the country or around the world, like Three Mile Island or Chernobyl, kind of affect how your job or how--
Barnett: It made us see how ridiculous--because Three Mile Island actually worked. It was [UNKNOWN] what it was built for. And the moderation they got--radiation they got was not as much as you get flying from here to Denver City. Because you get more radiation from the sun than you do from—what the people at Three Mile Island got. But they blew it up so big, because so many years the government kept radiation such a secret. And that's the reason there's so much panic whenever they say radiation. Of course, there's been some real bad accidents. That one in Japan—that was a horrible thing. But as far as Hanford goes, most of the people that worked at Hanford don't—I guess they're not working around radiation anymore; it's all chemicals. Because they're getting—they get the chemicals and to me, that's the management's problem. Because they're doing something wrong in taking care of the people. The people are doing what they're told to do. If management is telling them, hey, you got to wear this, and they're not wearing it, then that's their problem—that’s the worker's problem. But when the management doesn't do anything about it, that's their problem—that’s management's problem. And I think from what I've heard and read, most of this is a managerial problem. It's not a case that the worker is going out of his way to ignore any safety concerns.
Franklin: Right. What about the accident in Chernobyl? How did that--did that affect your job, or--
Barnett: Yeah, it affected it because they shut down N Reactor. And N Reactor, up until then, was as safe as any reactor in the country. It had so many safety pieces on it that you could darn near slam a door and make it shut down. But they shut it down because it was something like Chernobyl. And that's where the big effect was.
Franklin: How did--oh, how did security policies change over time? Did they change with the different contractors or in response to different events?
Barnett: No, the security’s main thing was basically the same. You had the security guards at like 200 East—well, they left the security guards that you couldn’t get out to Hanford without a security clearance. But that quit because they had the buses, and that stopped. And they had the security guards checking the buses and stuff as you went through. And then typical government, they started screaming about, oh, we're burning too much gas. We can't afford gas! So we'll shut the buses down. [LAUGHTER] So everybody had to drive out. But the guards at the gate checked your badges, checked your cars. If there was anything in it--you couldn’t take cameras or anything like that out there. If the guard knew you, he checked you out whether he knew you or not, because he had to make sure your wife didn't leave a camera sitting in your backseat you didn't know about.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: Which happened on occasion.
Franklin: Right, I bet. How did your job change with the different contractors coming in? Did it change much, or did you--
Barnett: Well, every contractor that came in, the engineers thought they were gonna remake the world. They would come up with some plan that they saw on a schematic and say, this is the way we want to do it. And we'd tell them point blank, it won't work. We've tried it that way. And they say, oh yes, it will! So we'd spend $50,000 in parts and stuff to put this together, and then it didn't work. And then they went around, well, why didn't it work? Well. The only one I ever saw that was a decent engineer is when he'd draw up a plan to do something, he would go to the millwrights, he would go to the operators, he'd go to the instrument techs and ask them to look at it and see if there's anything that needs done on it. And he had never had any problems. But these that come straight out of school and thought they could reinvent the world were a pain in the butt to us because they cost money and time.
Franklin: Do you remember who that good engineer was?
Barnett: He left. I don't remember who he was. But he left and went to work for a big company some place.
Franklin: Oh, okay. Do you remember President Nixon's visit in--I think it was 1970 or 1971?
Barnett: I might have. I didn't see him. I don't worry about politics.
Franklin: [LAUGHTER]
Barnett: He didn't do our place any good or any bad. Just a big political statement.
Franklin: How did the Tri-Cities change from when you came back in 1968 until today? What kind of strikes you as major changes?
Barnett: Well, there seem to be more, you might say, petty crimes. There wasn't as much as there was before--there was more than there was before, I should say. But the city maintained its equilibrium about the same, because the people have been here for 20 years, and then they sold the city to the town. There was no big change in the government. The police stayed the same. The biggest change was you had to call a painter if you wanted your house painted. And they sold the houses to the people, and that was the biggest change.
Franklin: How about, though, since—from when you came back in 1968 until today? Has there been any--has the community changed at all?
Barnett: Well, a lot of the businesses have left Richland. They moved out Columbia Center area, or up there in that area. We don't have--you got to go to Columbia Center to find a business. There's a few still there. There's Home Depot and stuff like that down there, Big Lots. But there's not as many as there used to be. And mostly antique shops or stereo shops.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: But there's always the Spudnut. It's always been there.
Franklin: There is always the Spudnuts, yeah. They're good too. Is there anything else that I haven't asked you about that you'd like to talk about?
Barnett: Well, us kids had different ways of playing that nowadays they would just panic about it. We used to have BB gun fights. We’d put on leather jackets and extra pair of Levi's and a hat and go into these orchards like where Densow's was and we'd have BB gun fights. And you haven't really lived until you've had your butt shot by a BB. [LAUGHTER] But nowadays there'd be some big panic about it that you're gonna shoot an eye out. Well, nobody ever shot an eye out because we made sure that we didn't shoot towards the head. [LAUGHTER] When they were building the houses, that's what was amazing, how fast they put these houses up. It wasn't a week or so to get a house started--it was almost a week and they had the thing almost done. And we used to go to different houses and have clod fights. Things like that that you don't dare do nowadays.
Franklin: When you had what kind of fights?
Barnett: Clod fights. Clodded earth. We'd get behind stuff and throw clods at each other. And the snow then was two, three foot deep. Because I remember building snow forts in my yard three foot high and never have to go to the yard to get snow. So there has been a big change in the weather. And the shelterbelt, that made a big difference, because I remember when we had sandstorms--not dust storms, sandstorms. And my dad would pull his car up in front of the house to keep the sand from blasting the side of the car off--the paint. So there's been big changes. The shelterbelt was one thing the government put in that actually worked. It’s kind of surprising. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: That's great. Is there anything else? Anything else you'd like to talk about?
Barnett: Well, not really. Just that the area behind--you know, in West Richland at that time used to be Heminger City and Enterprise. They were two cities then.
Franklin: Okay, tell me, were those cities that predated the Hanford Project?
Barnett: Yeah.
Franklin: Okay, and how big were there?
Barnett: Oh, they were just little communities. It was just one run into the other. There was one called Enterprise, one was called--what did I just say?
Franklin: Something city.
Barnett: Heminger City.
Franklin: Heminger City.
Barnett: One of the elections went out for voting, they had one of the places that you went to was called Enterprise.
Franklin: And how long did those communities last after Hanford came?
Barnett: Not very long. I can remember Dad going out to the first town—first little town was Heminger City. And that was right where Cline's computer shop is, it was automobile shop there. And those were all owned by one group--one person. I think it was--Herricks was the name. And she had a little taco stand in one of the places. And OK Tire Shop had part of the one building that they sold tires and did car repair out of. So it was a slow change in West Richland. We had a feed store for a while. But Hanford went on strike and our feed store went down the tubes. They used to have what they called parking lot critter sells. People would bring all their animals, little animals that they wanted to sell in cages. And we would sell them for them and get 10% of the interest. It was a pretty good deal, because a lot of people had pet rabbits and stuff like that and they wanted to get rid of them. Usually had them at the un-boat races. You heard of the un-boat races?
Franklin: Why don't you tell me?
Barnett: The un-boat races? You ever heard of them?
Franklin: Why don't you tell me?
Barnett: Well, the un-boat race was you went up to the Horn Rapids Dam, and you put something in. It could not be a boat. It could be a bath tub, it could be inner tubes--it could be anything that you could see above that would float and it could not be called--it was called un-boat race. And there was a prize that they got down towards the bridge that crosses the Yakima there on George Washington Way. Got down about that far, there was a prize who got there first. But they ended up cutting that out because people left too much stuff—garbage alongside the road. They wouldn’t pick it up and take it with them when they were done with it. But that was a lot of fun. We used to stand up on the ridge. Always started about May. And we'd stand there and watch people come down the river on these un-boats. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: That sounds really fun. Anyone else have anything? Okay, well, Dan, thank you so much for talking to us today. I learned a lot of great stuff about Richland and waste encapsulation. I really appreciate it.
Barnett: Okay.
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.
Douglas O’Reagan: Okay. My name is Douglas O’Reagan. I’m conducting an oral history interview with Maynard Plahuta on Thursday, I guess it’s—sorry, what is the date today?
Plahuta: 28th.
O’Reagan: Is it the 28th? Okay. April 28th, 2016. This interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be speaking with Mr. Plahuta about his experiences working on the Hanford site and living in the Tri-Cities. To start us off, could you please pronounce and spell your name for us?
Plahuta: Yes. It’s Maynard Plahuta. Maynard is M-A-Y-N-A-R-D, and Plahuta is P-L-A-H-U-T-A.
O’Reagan: Thank you. Just to start off, could you tell us a little bit about your life before you came to the Tri-Cities?
Plahuta: Okay. Well, I was born in a little old farming community in Wisconsin—a little dairy farming community. Big population of 200 people. Then I grew up there on the farm most of the time and went on to college. Went to the University of Wisconsin, first got my undergrad work, and then later I went back and got my master’s in business administration. In between those two times, I worked for General Motors, the AC spark plug plant in Oak Ridge—not Oak Ridge, I’m sorry—Oak Park, Wisconsin, which was the Titan missile program for the Air Force, the guidance system—the gyro system. So then I went back to grad school and then joined up with the Atomic Energy Commission and was assigned out here at Richland.
O’Reagan: What attracted you to the AEC?
Plahuta: Well, I think part of it was the interest in kind of science and industry and all of that sort of thing. The people from Argonne Lab at the Chicago Operations office came to interview at the campus there. I and another fellow were invited to then go back to Argonne for a further interview, and I was one of the two that was selected to join. At the time, I didn’t know where I would be located. They asked, well, if you had a preference. We aren’t going to pick particular places, but if you had a preference, list the three sites that the Atomic Energy Commission was at that I would enjoy. So I said, well, of course, the first one was at the Argonne Lab, close by home there. And I don’t remember which I put second or third, but it was either Richland, Washington or Schenectady, New York. I ended up being in Schenectady for a while basically. But I was assigned out here at Richland, and it was interesting because he says, well, you know, this is not the western—this isn’t the Evergreen State. And I said, well, I learned that by looking up a little more information on Hanford out in the desert. So I came out here with the idea that probably these assignments would be for one year. Because we were on what they called the technical and administrative intern program. So, I was selected on that intern program, and said probably be there a year, and probably no longer, because we’ll probably assign you somewhere else. Well, I came, and I was here until ’71 and then I went back to Schenectady for four years, and came back and was here ever since.
O’Reagan: What sort of jobs were you working on then?
Plahuta: Well, initially—my graduate work was in labor relations and in personnel management and that sort of thing. At that time, they didn’t call it human resources, they called it personnel management. So I was, first year out here, probably in the personnel department for about a year. And then that’s when the whole diversification program started here in 1963 or ’64. And I was assigned to look at the unique use permit and work for a fellow by the name of Paul Holstead who had the responsibility for all the lab operations as far as the Atomic Energy Commission was concerned. That was very interesting. So that was all start of this whole arrangement with Battelle being selected to operate the Pacific Northwest Lab. Now, at that time it wasn’t called a national lab yet; it was just Pacific Northwest Lab. And they had that particular use permit, which is no longer in existence, but it was a real ideal situation. And then that led into what they called the Consolidated Lab where they could do private work as well as the government work and all of that. So I administered that contract, then, for a few years, or until I went back to Schenectady. Then I was back in personnel management in Schenectady, though—labor relations area, under Rickover’s program, and that was very interesting. Then I came back here again in ’65 and was in personnel for a while but then back at the laboratory for a while. And I worked on that for—oh, gosh, quite a few years, because I had a total of 35 years in. But most of the time was with the laboratory, but then later on, I was asked to take over the responsibilities for the DOE—at that time was already DOE—and the site infrastructure. You know, the roads, the utilities, the sewer plants, the warehouse buildings, the railroads, the—all the utilities, just like running a whole city. It was not the operations of those infrastructure; it was more the capital improvements and the projects that needed to be done. Either new roads or new utilities or whatever it might be. That was for—I don’t know—four, five, six years. That also included some of the relationship with the tribes in the cultural resource programs and that sort of activity. But then the other manager asked us, jeepers, you know, I would really like to set up something we never had here at Richland before. That was sort of a governmental relations program. So he asked if I would be willing to do that. So the last—oh, probably about the last six years of my career, I was in what they call governmental-congressional relations, dealing—almost daily basis with congressional staff. Primarily congressional staff, some within the state government as well, and the local government, particularly in those sorts of things. So I retired doing that job in ’98.
O’Reagan: Great. Let’s back up. Could you tell us about this diversification program?
Plahuta: Yeah, yeah. That was really interesting, because what the idea was—that is when General Electric decided not to continue with their contract. Up until that time, General Electric had one contract for whole site operations. So the idea was two-fold. GE was not particularly interested in continuing doing that particular work, and the community was going through—yes, they still are—the diversification and further economic development for the community. So, there was a big effort there to break up the whole big contract into—I think it was five or six different segments. It was all up for bid, and various people were bidding for it. The laboratory, though, was separated as one of those segments. That was the first one to be authorized, and Battelle came in then operations in July of ’65. But up until—during that whole year, I was kind of working on part of the bid package going out and working on that. But not extensively. But then after the bid was accepted from Battelle, and they put an operation in, it got into this matter of doing this. The diversification program itself was dependent much on what these bidders would propose to supplement the economy here in the Tri-Cities. In fact, that’s how this WSU campus—you may be aware—was part of one of the contractors’ business, that they’d build this facility. Up until that time, GE had a little building down where the bank is—the National Bank down there by the Federal Building—and that wasn’t built either yet—to service the program that they established, their educational program, which is very unique because there wasn’t really any nuclear engineering classes in universities—or very few. So they really brought tech people in and really gave them a good background and education in nuclear operations and so on. Now, I said the Federal Building wasn’t built then. It was built then. It was in the process of being built when I came out here in ’63. So that diversification was the spinoff of a lot of new types of business here in the Tri-Cities. I mean, Exxon Nuclear, which now later is now part of AREVA out here at the site, the fuel fabrication. That started out a spinoff from some of the activity there. There was just a great amount of enthusiasm at that time, because, I think, there was worries that the government will fold up and the city will kind of dry up and blow away so to speak. So that was a very interesting period. There was some very interesting discussions, very interesting foresights of what might happen. A number of those didn’t survive. There were some things—isotope development was one at that time that was a little bit ahead of its time, I think. But there was—the airport was improved by that. What’s now the Red Lion in town, but the Hanford House, it was called then, I think it was—no, Desert Inn. The Desert Inn at that time was a brand new building they put up at that time. So it was a different time, and rather unique type of activity that was going on in this community at that time.
O’Reagan: Were these discussions going on in the newspapers, or just sort of hand-shake meetings?
Plahuta: Well, they were pretty well open discussions about what they wanted. And there was quite a bit of publicity about the fact of what some of these contractors—potential contractors were offering. That was exciting for the people, because some of these were new developments. Like the whole campus here, an original building that was part of one of the contractors’ bids. And the hotels and the stockyards over in Wallula over there, that was another one. And, gee, I can’t remember all of them, but there were a number. I know the isotope development thing—the isotope separations, I could really say, was one that didn’t quite make it. But anyway, it was a period of time when people were looking forward into the future and what might come, and looking at different types of work, and not so dependent just on the government here. Now, of course, we’re still quite dependent on the government here, and that’s been—what, 30 years—oh, more than that. That was 1965, so that’s been a long, long time ago. But a lot has progressed, obviously, from that time. I remember coming here—I wasn’t married at the time. I met my wife here. But, gee, if people wanted to go shopping, they’d either go to Walla Walla or Yakima or something. You know, there was nothing here. The mall out there wasn’t developed. It was—very little here to—and about the restaurants, you’d go over to Prosser to the Red Barn or something if you wanted a good meal. You could always find a hamburger shop here or something like that, but it was quite different then. Of course, my wife grew up here. She was only five years old when her parents came from Schenectady, New York with GE. She can remember—gosh, when hardly anything was going on, and families would just get together because they were from—god, all over the country. So many of them didn’t have any family here, so they created their own families, so to speak. But, yeah, that diversification effort was a great effort. There was much success, much success. I think a lot of what was learned there has been helpful and useful for the community. And I do have to give a credit, though, to Battelle and some of the forward-thinking that they did on what their operations were, very successful. And this Consolidated Lab which most people even in this community don’t understand or recognize, but it was very unique. There was a fellow that was with GE, went over with Battelle, of course, when they took over, by the name of Wally Sale. He was their finance director. Tremendous guy. He and Sam Tomlinson and the DOE—or AEC—I call it DOE, but it was the AEC then—were both very, very instrumental in getting this unique idea established and working there, where it was a fair amount of discipline and very good audit-type processing and very excellent means of determining that everything was legitimate, so to speak. That the accounting was very precise. It was a unique situation.
O’Reagan: So you were still working with the AEC while you were working on that?
Plahuta: Yeah.
O’Reagan: Okay. So they were—even though they weren’t sort of a bidder, or in direct—
Plahuta: No, no.
O’Reagan: They were still involved—
Plahuta: Yeah, they were the organization or the entity that was accepting these bids and proposals going out and diversify the area. That was—I should also mention, that was a lot to do with some of the local community leaders here, though, too, was pushing this idea with the government that, no, we got to depend on more than just the US government to keep this economy going. So there were guys like Sam Volpentest and others—Bob Philips and other people—who were working closely with our two senators. They were actively involved. Magnusson and Jackson—Scoop Jackson and Maggie. Very, very obvious. And they both held very high level positions in the government at that time. I mean, they were—there was some thought for a while about Scoop Jackson even running for President. So they both were elevated in the structure of the politicians in the DC area. So, there was a great support there from our local state senators, particularly.
O’Reagan: Mm-hmm. Right. So, while we’re still in this early period—you said you’d done some research before you got here. Did it match your expectations?
Plahuta: Well, yeah. I didn’t really have a whole lot of expectations, really. I mean, I knew that eastern Washington was quite dry, but I didn’t know quite a lot about it. I can remember, I was interested in geography when I was in elementary school, even, and knowing the Plains and the desert area, generally, and the wheat-growing area here, and that sort. But not too much—very extensive. Yeah, I think I surprised the AEC people out of Argonne when I says, well, yeah, I realized it was dry and a desert. They said, well, jeepers, most people think of Washington as just being green, you know, the Evergreen State, and don’t even think about it possibly being a desert out there. And when I would talk to some of my friends back in Wisconsin as I was going out, the common words were, oh, you’re gonna be out there in the mountains and you’re gonna be out there in the greenery and all the evergreens. I say, no, no, I’m gonna be out there where the wheat grows in eastern Washington. Really? So I think that’s a misconception a lot of people in the eastern US have of Washington—eastern Washington, you know. They’re correct on the western side, but not on the eastern side. Yeah.
O’Reagan: What sort of housing did you live in when you got here?
Plahuta: Well, I roomed with a fellow by the name of Holland St. John. He was a teacher at Chief Joe Junior High here, and the tennis coach there. So I did that until I met my wife and got married, and we then lived in a B house—you know, the government B house, the famous [UNKNOWN], with the landlord on the other side—very friendly people, people originally from Tennessee, I believe they were. Just great, great folks to be with. We rented that until—because we got married in ’67—until I went back to Schenectady. And then when we came back, I bought a home here in North Richland. Now, currently live in a house that my wife basically grew up with. It was an H house. We remodeled the whole thing so it doesn’t look anything—all that was remained the same was the four outside walls and one wall inside. And we added on. Anyway, it was one of the government homes that I was originally renting an H house with this roommate. And then when we got married, I rented a B house. And the original H house was—Holland St. John was one of the fellows, and the other guy was Sherman. We had the three of us, three single guys who were using that part where they—again, the landlord was on the other side. Wonderful people. That was kind of unique, because when I first came and went looking, I thought, this A house, B house, that are for rent. I was like, oh, what’s an A, B or an H house, C house? But it didn’t take long to figure out, okay, that’s just the nomenclature that was being used for these various types of homes.
O’Reagan: Right. How did you meet your wife?
Plahuta: It was actually through church. There was group in our church—it was the Christ the King Catholic church, and it was a singles group. That’s how I met her. So we got married and we’ve had four children. They’re all grown adults now, of course. And we have seven grandkids. Six of them are girls, and finally the one that came along is a boy—the last one. But my two daughters—two of my daughters live here in town with their family. And I got a son in Seattle and another one just south of Portland in Tualatin—suburb of Portland. They all—I’m very proud of—they all went on through college. One has got a PhD, the other two of them got a master’s degree. One—and probably the one that’s doing the best, financially, has got just a master’s degree. But the three girls and a boy, and my son has got his master’s out of Purdue in engineering. My one daughter, the youngest one, has got her degree out of Gonzaga in engineering. The other one’s got her PhD in gerontology and the other’s got her master’s in early childhood development. So they’re all doing well. So I’m quite proud of them—of course, as most parents are. You know how they are, parents. They always think their kids are the greatest in the world. So anyway, that’s kind of where I came from—Wisconsin, and all the way out to the west coast and had not been really in the northwest prior to coming out here. I had been in California and some of those areas, but not in the northwest. You know, it’s an enjoyable place to live. But as a lot of people, as you know, here, some of them came for just a short time and they remain here forever. I married here. So that’s probably the same for me. Yeah.
O’Reagan: Part of what we’re trying to document is sort of the social life around the area, too.
Plahuta: Oh, yeah.
O’Reagan: Were church activities sort of a large part of your social life at that point?
Plahuta: Yeah, quite a bit. And I was also involved, though—that was before I even met my wife, Yvonne. The little town I grew up in was quite a little interesting town as far as baseball. The area back there in these little towns would have their teams, and they’d play each other. So I was most familiar with baseball, and I had played baseball as a kid. So I helped one of the fellows who, just by coincidence, was also from Wisconsin, from the Milwaukie area. And he was coaching his kids in Little League baseball. So I helped out on that. Then later on, when my kids got going in the youth soccer program and that was when youth soccer first started, I was quite active in getting it into the high schools and so on, because that was not very popular, not really—like the case of much soccer in the area. So I’m on the Hanford High School support team—what do you call it? The—hmm, I can’t think of the title now. But anyway the supporters have their support efforts to keep them going. So the social life was pretty much tied in with the church, but not exclusively. Then we—there’d be these events we’d have. We’d go over to the coast or do things together, as a group—hiking. Not as much hiking, probably, as visiting various locations and sightseeing and that sort of thing. So that was kind of pretty much—but the housing was interesting, too, because you hear these stories of people going, and when they get home from work, the earlier days, before my time, going into the wrong house because they got the wrong place. But I can understand that. I mean, it was quite unique. My wife has some interesting stories about how she grew up and talking about what was family life. Their family was way back in New York. They went back once when she was about five or—no, I think seven, she said. And she had, at that time, four sisters—I mean four siblings, and another one with her mother on the way in her pregnancy. And took all the—tied into the car and drove all the way back. Spent more time going and coming than they did back there. But it was a case where she—in the case that they got to know your neighbors well, it was friendly, it was safe, everybody—kids all played out. Where we’re living now, we’ve got just that little funny park in front of our place over by the river there. Her father was an accomplished skater, so he decided when he had an opportunity to get the house along the river here, that’s the one he wanted to take it. Not realizing that not too many winters where there’s ice on the snow. But he was the state champion in New York City on ice racing. So he’s got quite a bit of medals and stuff. So she talks about the farm—I mean, the families that would get together on holidays and whatever. It was just a different type of lifestyle. I didn’t experience that myself, but it’s interesting just hearing her talk about those things.
O’Reagan: Yeah, we’ll have to bring her in at some point. We’re trying to get as many people who sort of grew up here for that as well.
Plahuta: Yeah.
O’Reagan: Okay.
Plahuta: Yeah, she was only five years old and she came in ’47.
O’Reagan: Okay. Yeah, we’d definitely like to interview her at some point. Okay, so let’s see. You were working on the diversification stuff and then you went back to Schenectackey—Ss-
Plahuta: Schenectady.
O’Reagan: Schenectady, yes. And then you came back in—I have it written down here.
Plahuta: ’71.
O’Reagan: ’75.
Plahuta: ’75, I mean. I left in ’71. April of ’71, back in ’75.
O’Reagan: And at that point you were working on the—let’s see here—the DOE site infrastructure stuff, or was that later?
Plahuta: Well, that was much later. I was on the laboratory stuff.
O’Reagan: Okay.
Plahuta: It was shortly after. About the first year or so was more in the personnel and that area. But then when this whole diversification effort came forward. I think my master’s degree in business and all this kind of led into—and I did have quite a bit of educational experience in contract management and contract administration, too. I have that—I don’t know if that played a role or not, but it helped me, I know, in terms of—and it was a whole new type of contract relationship that this Consolidated Lab and the use permit and all that had. So it was unique and interesting just from that standpoint alone. So yeah, at that time up until ’71, it was there, and then came back, worked in the personnel area, in the Rickover program. That’s an interesting story, too, because Rickover was a unique individual, very unique. But his staff was made up of military men, contractor people, and DOE or AEC at that time. And there was no distinction. I mean, you would have a contractor person right along with you and so on. He considered it all just one. It was very unique, in terms of the contractor and working relationships. But yet, what was so familiar—you could have these working—I shouldn’t say one by one, it would be even offices or something. But yet, he was very instrumental in saying, I don’t want any social activities between you. So as much as going to the cafeteria at noon, there was a section where the AEC people sat, and another whole section where the contractor people sat. And the military guys could be with either one, but they would—the military people were associated with AEC office—the civilian people. So in that office, there was no distinction whether you were military or a civilian. But in the contactor side, of course they were all civilians.
O’Reagan: Is that an anti-corruption effort, or--?
Plahuta: Well, yeah, and I guess avoiding any kind of potential conflict of interest and friendships, so that you got pretty soon with somebody, well, I’ll do you a favor, and vice versa. Very, very, very strong on that sort of thing. But yet, he himself seemed just one team. It was just like a football team—you’re the receiver and you’re the lineman. You’ve got different jobs. It was unique, and there’s some interesting stories about Rickover, too, but I won’t get into those. But those are very interesting times.
O’Reagan: Did you ever get to know any of the contractor people?
Plahuta: Oh, yeah. You would know them on the business side. Definitely. Oh, yeah. You’d work with them every day. Some more, because if it was in your area of responsibility, certainly, you’d be working with them. But, boy, not socially. There was no—I mean, that was a voodoo if you had any social-type activities with the contractors. That was not to his liking. That makes sense, I mean, it would just avoid any possible conflict of interest and that sort of thing. It was an interesting time. But it’s kind of like a lot of people say. I went into military, I’m glad, but I’m glad I’m out. It’s kind of that sort of same analogy. But it was a great experience.
O’Reagan: What was Rickover’s title?
Plahuta: Rickover? Admiral.
O’Reagan: Admiral, okay.
Plahuta: Admiral Rickover, yeah.
O’Reagan: So what was his exact sort of authority within the—
Plahuta: He headed up the whole nuclear navy.
O’Reagan: Oh, I see.
Plahuta: He was really up there. And in fact, when—I think—which President was it? Maybe it was Kennedy—no, it wasn’t Kennedy, it was after. Anyway, when he was giving some kind of address somewhere, he recognized—I know, I’m Rickover’s boss, but really we’re all—Rickover’s my boss. And that happened with Schlesinger, too, when he was appointed the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, when he was there. He says, oh, yeah. And he made the same kind of remark. I don’t know if it was those exact words. But Rickover was a very powerful individual in terms of his authority. He was kind of all by himself, because, again, the nuclear navy was unique, and so he was a brilliant man. There was no question about it. He would pick just the top-notch-quality technical people that he could to run his program. The safety was so important to him. The wellbeing of all the military people, and the people who were in the submarines and that sort of thing. So he was really great. But he had a unique way of operations, there was no question about that. He was a strong, strong individual.
O’Reagan: So this period you were working in personnel is also, I understand, the period where you started having more women and minorities being hired on at the Hanford area.
Plahuta: That is true. There was a big emphasis—the period—and following my part of the end there, but in that timeframe of particularly on the college campuses and recruiting minorities and women, which is good. But there was extreme interest in finding qualified minorities and women. There was certainly emphasized that it was—and that’s great. I mean, I go back and think in my thesis for my master’s degree in business administration, and I made some statement then, makes me sound almost like an anti-feminist now. But I was saying we really got to get more women into the technical side, but I wasn’t thinking far enough. We really think a lot—we don’t have many women technicians and stuff. So I was—at that time—thinking, oh, gosh, that they could be technicians. And not even thinking about being engineers, you know, getting their PhD in engineering. But at least, let’s—so I started out just—it wasn’t a matter of discrimination, where I said they should be technicians, because there were no—but I said, jeepers, let’s work on that. I had much of my emphasis—because my emphasis in my PhD was the shortage of technical people in the country. That was after Sputniks and some of those things going. We really needed development, work hard and see what we can do to get the people interested in getting into the math and sciences and that area. Some people kind of looked at me, you want women to be technicians or something? Yeah, but—you know. Now, I think, boy, I’d be discriminated—I mean, not discriminated, but considered, yeah, you’re very limited in your scope. You should be much broader than that. Yeah, that was a time when the Sputniks went off and these others, and we were quite behind and Kennedy wanted to get to the moon. And that, though, when I was in, was quite a bit later than that. Not quite a bit, but somewhat later, and the emphasis on trying to get minorities and women as much as we possibly could.
O’Reagan: Mm-hmm. So it didn’t—how—did it shape your work on personnel at that point, I guess--?
Plahuta: Well, I don’t know if it shaped it so much, but back to my word of emphasis, to see if we really seek out qualified people. And not that they needed, necessarily, to have had extensive training, but look at their overall education experience and how well they were doing in school. In other words, that they were capable of picking up some of the technical. And whether they had that already knowledge was not quite as important as looking at what’s their basic—I don’t know, I guess I could say basic intellect—but their ability to really take on some of these things. It was not hard to find that. I mean, that doesn’t—I don’t want to imply that the women or minorities didn’t have that. They certainly did. But I think a lot of them, maybe themselves, didn’t realize that they really could do that, that there was no reason why they couldn’t.
O’Reagan: I was speaking with a reactor operator in a previous interview who had a degree, I think, in forestry or something non-sort-of-nuclear, but was still able to become a reactor operator. Was that sort of common that you saw, too, people moving into new fields to get on the Hanford site?
Plahuta: That was not unusual, no. And that was particularly true—and I noticed you talk I was being on—with Rickover’s submarine program—we would hire then people who—and that happened out here awful lot—who had gone through the nuclear navy and were nuclear operators. We had a number of those people that didn’t want to stay in the Navy, but we hired on his staff—on Rickover’s staff—in our local office there at Schenectady. Now, that was a small office. The office was not very big. It was relatively small. But we hired a number of those people, and they were good, because they—and many of them had not gone to college yet. They got out of the Navy, they went to college, and then came back. I mean, I remember recruiting two or three or four of those types. And we recruited basically around northeast area, because we were in Schenectady, in some of the schools around there. Plattsburg, up in northern—which is a civil engineering school up in norther New York, and a number of areas there where we would find students who—not a lot of them, but who had gone back after they got out of service and didn’t want to make it a career, and got their degrees. Some would be in the technical fields; some would not be, necessarily. But most that we hired had degrees in some form of engineering or science or whatever.
O’Reagan: Okay. So you were working with the nuclear navy program after you got back from Schenectady—pronouncing it again.
Plahuta: No, it was at Schenectady I did the nuclear program.
O’Reagan: Oh, I see, I see. Okay.
Plahuta: It’s at Schenectady. So I was here, then went to Schenectady for four years—not quite four years—three-and-three-quarters. And then back here again. And that’s when the diversification effort came about, when I came—no, no, no, I’ll take that back. That was back when I got back into some of the other Battelle work again, after I came back. The diversification was prior to going to Schenectady.
O’Reagan: Okay. So then were you working for Battelle or were you still working for AEC?
Plahuta: No, I always worked for the government, always. It was AEC, and then a short period of time, it was—what did we call it, even? There was a two-year period between AEC and Department of Energy. Research and Development Administration, I think. Yeah, that was what it was called—Research and Development Administration. And then it became—Congress passed it and developed the Department of Energy. And when they developed the Department of Energy, it expanded a little bit and took in, like Bonneville Power out here was part of that, and a number of activities like that. More than just atomic energy, and that’s when it got a little more involved in the laboratories and other forms of—quite a bit. Whether it be climate—today it’s climate change, or climate sciences, as it’s called, and other types of activity. More than just the nuclear itself. But there’s a misconception, when I say nuclear itself, this, as you’ve probably learned and know, that there’s all kinds of work that dealt with biology and the uptake of radioisotopes and all of that sort of thing. And we had the animal farm out here with the smoking dogs and the miniature pigs—miniature swine, and all of that activity. And then when I was administering the Battelle program and the Pacific Lab, I was also involved in a lot of interagency work. So I was—in fact, one of my responsibilities there was working with all the other agencies in the interagency agreements. And that meant that works like NASA and National Science—although they didn’t have a lot—the NRC, and EPA and others would have work done at the lab. And that would be not DOE work or AEC work, but it was their particular responsibility. But they had the capability and knowledge out here to do that. So there was a lot of that. In fact, I was involved in the whole setup of the LIGO facility out here, working with the National Science Foundation. And they had no knowledge of this—had to kind of guide them by hand as to what kind of arrangements they would have between the two agencies for them to use the Department of Energy land out here and their facility and all of that sort of thing. So from very early on, I spent somewhat—a fair amount of my time working with the National Science Foundation to getting the establishment of the LIGO facility out here. That was rather a long interesting experience, too, and all the unique things that went on doing that. So I just have this—even though I’m not a scientist or engineer by training, I have this kind of innate interest in science and engineering. That was what was so exciting about administering the lab contract, to see the whole variety of activity that goes on out there at the lab. And even, I think, the majority of the citizens of Richland and Tri-Cities do not understand, fully, the broad spectrum of knowledge and exposure to all elements of the nature of science and technology that’s available out here to the lab, and what all these experts they have in those all wide spectrum of activity.
O’Reagan: In your experience, how kid of secretive was any of this work? Was it all kind of out there? Was it kind of compartmentalized?
Plahuta: Well, there was a lot of secret-type stuff, but there wasn’t as much of that, I don’t think—now, I didn’t get involved too much in the production—in the plutonium production. Because the laboratory wasn’t so directly involved in that. That was the big load from the local office, was producing the plutonium, getting that back, and doing all of that sort of thing. The lab was supporting that, and doing that in the nuclear aspects of nuclear science, but there was a lot—an awful lot of work that was not secret. Now, they also were, though, heavily involved in many of the secret-type stuff. That relates primarily to their strong capability in detection—detecting things. I mean, you’re probably aware that the first moon rocks that came from the moon were here at the site, at the lab, to analyze those, to look at them, what was all made up of? The very first, first exposure to the moon rocks was right down here that Federal Building, anywhere in the United States that they were shown. That was quite a deal, too. So they have this tremendous capability. The labs were one of the first—this lab—the first to detect that Saddam Hussein had used chemical warfare for the Kurds back there, and that was way back time. Tremendous, and some interesting stories of how they collected some of this stuff and how they got these samples. I don’t know if we want to get into it. It was really, really interesting activities in that sort of stuff. Some of the things—it’s not classified anymore, but the people out at the lab or some of these guys would go over to Hong Kong, and they’d just brush against somebody to get a hair off of somebody that [UNKNOWN] just get a sample. Or a little dust and dirt came off their shoe, they might pick it up or something. Just the most minute quantities of things, and being able to analyze and determine. This laboratory out here was the first to decide how big the bombs are that China was dropping, to get the size of those through the air samples and all of that. There’s just this broad knowledge, or capability, I should say, in detection activities out here. It’s just amazing. And they’ve kept that up in the same way with their radioisotope program—the medical isotopes program. So much of that that many people don’t realize of all the spinoffs and benefits that have come from the knowledge that they gained. The first CD was developed out here at the lab. Much of that. I’m really interested in reading, now, Steve Ashby’s reports bimonthly in the Tri-City Herald about some of the activities going on at the lab. And I miss that. I used to get real knowledge about what they’re working on. Of course, it’s been 18 or 20 years since I’ve done that, but that was always fascinating, some of this advanced science and some of this stuff that was really—and a lot of it was development and a lot of it wasn’t. But they’d run into some dead-ends. They’d later on pick it up again, somebody would discover something else, and they’d finally go forth with it.
O’Reagan: When did it become a national lab? Do you remember?
Plahuta: God, I don’t remember the year that was. God, I should know that.
O’Reagan: I’m sure we can look it up.
Plahuta: Yeah, we can look it up.
O’Reagan: Was that while you were working?
Plahuta: Oh, yeah, yeah. It was—god, why should—because that was a big event. And we were pushing quite well at the time to try to get that done. Yeah. Golly, that just escapes me. I’ve got to—now that you mention it, I’ve got to go back and check that out and see when it was.
O’Reagan: What was involved in that?
Plahuta: Well, it was basically—I don’t want to call it a political decision, but it was basically, I think, recognizing the scope of activity that the labs were involved with. There wasn’t a great urge by the Washington, DC people or any to readily accept that title. I mean, it means a lot. So it was really a lot of background in what their involvement, and what type of work were they involved with, and what depth were they involved with and what types—and really focusing a lot on the basic science and that sort. And that’s where I think this lab was a little later than others, because this lab, up until the later times, was more of a support lab on production activities and not quite so much in basic. Now there was some basic on the real basic physics and something to deal with reactor operations. But they evolved and grew into this more basic science in a broad spectrum. I think that was one of the criteria. Now, I wasn’t involved in that decision at all. But my understanding is one of the criteria of establishing is that they got a well-established basic science capability. It’s not just specialized in one area or something. That’s where I think this lab was one of the later ones to be recognized as a national lab, because they built that up. And one of the things, too, that there wasn’t much knowledge of, because the production was such a secret thing, that that didn’t get much publicity or get papers written about it, and so on. So unfortunately the people that were working on that didn’t get the opportunity to have their findings and whatever presented to the whole world at national conferences and things like that. And that was also true, by the way, in Rickover’s program. Rickover was very cognizant—he was so afraid that the communists had this and that. So that was one of the real issue—there was basically almost the technical people at the capital laboratory, the Knolls Atomic Power Lab in Schenectady, almost unionized because they really felt that they were being shortchanged. They couldn’t give papers at technical conferences and stuff because Rickover was always afraid that you might reveal something that was highly secret about how to run a reactor and all that kind of stuff. So I think some of that same sort of information or background was kind of holding this lab back, because they just didn’t get the publicity in the scientific world, that their discoveries and their knowledge and their experiments and so on were well-known. And I think that helped, because the people in DC who were more knowledgeable of that found that to be a quality that was great for being recognized as a national lab. But a national lab, again, was the idea with broad spectrum of research. So that’s my take of it. You may talk to somebody else and they probably have a whole different presentation in terms of why or how and what was all involved. But just being on sort of the sidelines when that happened, that seemed to me to be what was the key point in helping determine. But there was some political push, no question. I mean, Maggie again, and Scoop—I think that was when they were on, and some of those. Why are you shortchanging us out there in the northwest? And we don’t have—that was the other thing, there was no national lab in the northwest. There was Livermore down in California, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge and Brookhaven. But why are you guys leaving us out in the north? And that was more form—not the science or technology, but, well, don’t treat us as second class citizens. Our lab up there is as good as yours. So there was some of that out there, too.
O’Reagan: Did it impact your work, when it changed?
Plahuta: No, I don’t think so. Well, I shouldn’t say that. One of the things that did happen in that regard—and I mentioned earlier about these interagency agreements and the capabilities of the lab—that stimulated more of that. Because I think being—once you’re recognized as a national lab, it just goes along with the credibility that might be associated with the work they’re doing. So I think that resulted in more of this interagency work with the various other government agencies. What it also did—and that was probably the most key element—is bringing in the tie with universities and so on. That was really—and locally, here, that was one of the interests of the people with the lab. They would really have liked to get more—and by the fact being recognized national lab, allowed the universities, and particularly some of the ones heavily involved in the science and engineering, would tend to favor going to a national laboratory. And the research that they were doing in cooperation with the lab itself was more significant, more meaningful to them. So I think that was probably one of the biggest benefits of becoming a national lab. Yet Battelle as an organization back in Columbus and others, they had a good reputation already of working closely with universities and so on. I mean, they were a research organization. And I think that also helped, too, because Battelle was operating this, and so the people who made these decisions realized that you have a topnotch research company—foundation there, that that’s their whole world. So I think that also helped in getting it. And certainly the lab pushed for that. There was no question about it. They wanted to be recognized as a national lab. So there was a combination of these things, I think they all kind of helped and worked together and made it happen.
O’Reagan: So when was it that your work with PNNL shifted over to the next role?
Plahuta: Oh, yeah. Well, let’s see. That was probably in more the early ‘90s. Where—yeah—because—yeah—early ‘90s is when I start going in there. So most of my career was with PNL and some of the labor relations. But early ‘90s, when I got into the infrastructure deal and doing all of that, and then later the last five years in the congressional and governmental relations activity, yeah.
O’Reagan: Could you tell us about the infrastructure work?
Plahuta: Yeah, that was quite interesting. That was frustrating. And by frustrating I mean, there was always—well, let’s not fix it until it’s broke. Oh, gosh, we used to have some—because it was still working. And particularly that was more emphasis as the role of the site here of not producing plutonium anymore—well, then do we need to keep it? Let’s see if it can limp along. Well, what it ended up, in my opinion, a lot of times, we paid a lot more by trying to fix things afterward. We didn’t really have a good preventative maintenance program. Finally got sort of a preventative maintenance, but—it was tough. Because there was always this thing—there was always a great need of doing this thing, and jeepers, we can’t use the dollars there; it’ll still work for a while. I didn’t have the responsibility for the day-to-day operations of it. That wasn’t mine. Mine was the upgrades and the capital equipment and all that. Whether we need a new fire station or whatever it may be. And jeepers, the thing was just limping along on a thread, and something would break. But then we ended up spending a whole lot more. That was somewhat frustrating. And the guys that I worked with on the contractor side had the same experience. But some managers were a little more cognizant of the need to do that than others. And safety—the way we could get things done—[PHONE CHIMES]—was safety more. Because if we could show that there was safety-related issues that went along with it, it was easier to get it appropriated or funded, rather than say, well, it’ll still go along. And that’s the way we often would get something funded, was, could show that we really don’t want to jeopardize the safety of the employees or the workers and that sort of thing. But it was not simple. It was pretty difficult. It was always kind of bucking the tide for funding.
O’Reagan: Right. That reminds me—so, you were still working at PNNL when the—
Plahuta: Well, I wasn’t at PNNL; it was DOE.
O’Reagan: Right, yeah, okay. But back during the time when sort of the reactors were shutting down and the transition to sort of amelioration and cleanup got started. Is that correct?
Plahuta: Yeah, but that most of the time was with PNNL, still. But it was in ’89, is when the real decision was made. So it was shortly after that that I got into the infrastructure and that’s where it became hard then. Because we weren’t operating with the mission anymore. Yet you knew darn well that cleanup is going to be here for a long, long time, and why not get these things going so you don’t spend twice as much starting all over new, with something when you could just really do some work at that time to keep this thing alive? This thing, being—whether it be a sewer plant or whether it be a steam plant or fire station or electro distribution system or a railroad or whatever it might be. Because, at least I could see, it was cheaper because cleanup’s gonna last for a while and you need this infrastructure whether your mission is producing the plutonium or whether it’s cleanup. Soon we got some of the people saying, yeah, you’re right. But the guys who were doing the cleanup then, too, saying, oh, god, we’ve got so much work to do, we can’t afford to do this. It’ll last another year or two. Let’s fix it next year or upgrade it next year. The evaporator out there is a good example. They finally did it. But there was things earlier they probably could have done to increase its capability and do a better job. And finally they say, yeah, I guess that’s right, we should do it now because we’ll need that thing for god knows how long yet.
O’Reagan: What was it like living in this area around ’89 when the shift happened?
Plahuta: Well, it was a surprise, I think, to a lot of people. Kind of like, oh, gosh, here we go again. That’s when this whole activity—and I wasn’t involved in, but with the B Reactor Museum Association really got its birth when they were saying, we’re shutting down the reactors and going there. But the attitude was, or the feelings was that, jeepers, it was just doomsday basically. And not fully understanding the scope of work that needed to be done in the cleanup area. It was very little attention being paid to the depth of that need at the time. I don’t think there was much knowledge—excuse me—or basically understanding of how important and significant that’s going to be. So it was a change in times, it certainly was.
O’Reagan: Do you think a lot of—or were people sort of in your area worried about their jobs? Or was that, you felt, sort of separate from the plutonium production?
Plahuta: Well, I–yeah, I wasn’t too involved in that sort of aspect. But, yes, the community had a concern. And that kind of coincides with the big problem out there that’s now Energy Northwest, but the shutdown of those new power reactors. So that kind of came together at the same time, and that was really a shock for the community. It was—you know, a lot of people would leave and say, jeepers, I got to go find something else before I don’t have a job at all.
O’Reagan: Right. So in the last couple of years before retirement, you were working on the congressional relations?
Plahuta: Yeah, yeah, about five years.
O’Reagan: Can you tell us about that work?
Plahuta: Yeah, about five years prior to retirement. Five, six—something like that. I don’t remember exactly when. That was very interesting, too, and you got another scope of how things got done. I got to a point where I was having daily discussions with particularly Patty Murray’s staff and prior to that, Doc Hasting’s staff—staff members. Not that much with the senators or the congressmen themselves, but primarily their staff, and working with them. And somewhat with the state offices, but not extensively. And then more with the local communities—the mayors—the Hanford communities group there. That was quite regularly—and the emphasis that we placed then, I’m not sure still exists, but really wanted to tie in closely to having the local government—the mayors and commissioners and so on—knowledgeable of what’s going on out here at the site. So there wouldn’t be these sudden surprises. That was the role that John Wagner at the time was interested in, and that’s when he asked me if I would be willing to—it was a new position he was establishing. He just wanted to maintain a close relationship with what’s going on at the site, and I don’t know if that’s—I shouldn’t say—I don’t know if it’s the case now, but I don’t think it’s quite the same as what John had in mind and what I did for those five, six years. So when I left, then, they kind of—when I retired, it kind of was sitting in just ebbs there—ups and downs—and it’s probably back more to that way. I really don’t know.
O’Reagan: Sure.
Plahuta: But shortly after that, too, then, I got on the Hanford Advisory Board. So I had kind of a knowledge about what was going on at the site. So I was very active in the Hanford Advisory Board for quite a few years—for like 15 years or so. But I got so much involved in the B Reactor thing that I said, gee—I didn’t feel like to just go to the meetings and not really contribute a whole lot. So I thought I’d just give up and retire at that point in time, and I found someone who I know real well who’s capable to take my place. I was representing the county most of the time—sort of an alternate representative for the City of Richland first, but then later for the county most all the time. I wanted to be sure that—and I did find someone who was very, very, well-involved and informative to take my spot there for the county commission now.
O’Reagan: So Okay. So before we move on, can you tell me—what was the Hanford Advisory Board?
Plahuta: Oh, that was established—gosh, I can’t remember exactly when, but it’s made up of about 30 different entities—representatives of those entities. It’s statewide and it includes some of the Oregon people, the tribes are on it, most of the government—city governments and county governments are represented. There’s total—like I say, about 31. They’re a formal advisory group to the Atomic Energy—Atomic Energy? I’m really going back now—to the DOE to uncover and discuss various elements of ongoing work. And you probably see quite a bit in the paper that the Hanford Advisory Board meets on a monthly basis—no, I shouldn’t say that—about every other month. But then they’ve got committees underneath of it like the Tanks Waste Committee and the River Plateau Committee—there’s five different committees. I chaired a couple of those committees a couple times, and vice chair and so on. And they provide some advice—written advice to the—and it’s—oh, I shouldn’t say it’s just DOE. There’s three parties to this. It’s the State Ecology Department, the EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, and DOE. So the three agencies are involved in this. They provide—can be anything regarding to the Vit Plant out here now, the tank vapor things—so many different activities. They write formal advice and discussion. It represents all sides, basically. Those that are pro/con, what are the proper words, or whatever you want to say. But it’s a wide representation of the general—not local community necessarily, but the state concerns. And there’s people from Seattle on that, from down in Salem, Oregon, and around the area. That’s been in existence—gosh, I don’t remember when—it was probably around ’90 or something like that, ’91. It’s been—maybe not that long—but it’s been quite active for quite some time.
O’Reagan: That reminds me—I meant to ask, when you were working on the site infrastructure, you mentioned some work with the tribes and cultural resources. Can you tell us about that?
Plahuta: Yeah. I personally didn’t get too directly involved. I had a person working for me by the name of Charles Pasternak—he has since died. He was very, very knowledgeable. He was an archaeology-type thing, too, but he was a forensic expert-type thing, and was very, very closely working with the tribes. Well-respected by the tribes. He was invited into some of those longhouse ceremonies and that sort of thing. So he worked on that. He was the one that was the primary person for me. I got into a lot of the discussions and so on, but for the day-to-day activities, he was really tops. And would work with the SHPO office—the State Historical office in Olympia on stuff—on these writings and stuff. So it was interesting. But I didn’t get daily involvement there. I had enough in my other hands to take care of. But he was just ace number one on doing that. So I got familiar with the process and the operations and what the issues were and that sort of thing. But that was informative for me. He was sort of a mentor to me, to be honest, though, in that respect. Yeah.
O’Reagan: Do you know sort of how—one of the things I’m also curious about is the development of cultural resources and local efforts to preserve culture, preserve memory. On the DOE side, I know, today that’s done through a contract with the Mission Support Alliance. Do you happen to know when that sort of contracting began, or was DOE sort of also contracting while also working on it?
Plahuta: No, DOE was working primarily at the laboratory out here at Battelle. That’s where—and that’s partly how I got into it, I think, although I wasn’t administering to Battelle Lab at that time. But that all function was under the laboratory. It was after I left that Mission Support Alliance came into existence here. And then they took over a lot of that support type activity. But, no, the laboratory, and Jim Shatters was involved, Mona Wright was involved out there for the lab. Paul Harvey was—not Paul Harvey—Dave Harvey was involved in some of that out there, along with the history. And Michele Gerber on the historic—the Hanford history type stuff. So that was all with Battelle. And then that moved it, I think, when Mission Support Alliance—and that was after, basically, after I left. So that was there. But, no, there was quite an interest—not as much as there is today—again, that’s a fault, I can say, of us who were in the department at that time. We really weren’t on board extensively on the history protection stuff. Although the contractor, Battelle out there, and others were doing that. But I don’t think DOE was following. And then that’s when I discovered that, gosh, we really have a responsibility here. And that’s when I hired this Charles Pasternak who came over from GSA and had been doing that sort of thing down in Phoenix, Arizona. So I said, we really need—so I hired him. And as I say, he was—that was his livelihood so to speak. And that’s when I think we began then to pick up on that sort of thing. I had an extreme interest in doing it and I got to know Mona Wright real well at Battelle. Tom Marceau was involved in that out there. And Tom can give you the whole history there with the laboratory at that time.
O’Reagan: What sort of day-to-day work—was it Charles Pasternak?
Plahuta: Pasternak, yeah.
O’Reagan: What sort of work was he doing? Do you know?
Plahuta: Well, it was this whole cultural resources area. He was, as I say, an archaeology type and that was his training. So he did all of the work a lot with SHPO up there when we got into some of these areas where they needed—we needed to know the 106 process, and all of that sort of thing. So Charles was our main person to follow that. But I had the interest, also, of John Wagner, the manager, even though I wasn’t playing that congressional role at that time. Because he, too, I think, recognized that we needed to do a little bit more there. And in fact—I don’t know if you’re familiar—but he’s one of Cindy Kelly, who’s with the Atomic Heritage Foundation---he’s one of the board members there. He had really an extreme interest in preserving the history. As much as he tried, he couldn’t get headquarters people—they always told him, John, you go back and tell them we’re not in the museum business. And that’s what the people here would be hearing all the time. But John himself was really interested in doing all that. I sat in meetings with him at headquarters where he’d really push hard. And they’d push back, that’s not our—it was their responsibility, but they’d just, yeah, okay, but we don’t want to spend a lot of time on that. So that was—but locally, I think we did well. I think we did very well at pushing that along and I got to give contract—credit to people like Tom and Mona and others out here on the contractor site who even pushed us a little bit sometimes. Which was good. That’s necessary.
O’Reagan: Could you sort of sketch out for us your idea of sort of the history of efforts to commemorate the site or the work that was done on Hanford? In terms of, up through the B Reactor Museum Association--?
Plahuta: Yeah. Well, my interest was, again, as I learned more about it, was let’s preserve this history of this site, because it’s very unique. It’s really unique. And I had to avoid sort of a conflict of interest of joining BRMA while I was an employee of the department. So I was interested, though, in knowing what they were doing and I was in agreement with them and was very supportive when I could be in some of their activities. But shortly after I retired, then—not immediately, but not too long after, I did join as a member of the B Reactor Museum. That was in—well, quite a while later, because it in 2005, so it was quite a while later that I actually joined them. That was—the more I learned and found out about the uniqueness of the B Reactor and its history and its knowledge and its importance, I really, really got heavily involved. And that’s eventually, here, like a year and a half ago—I finally got off the Hanford Advisory Board because I was spending so much time—more time on that—and not feeling I was really contributing a whole lot. I mean, I’d make my comments and so on at the general meetings, but with regard to drafting formal advice and all that, which I was quite active in earlier, then jeepers, get somebody else who has the time and so on, and I’d devote more time to the B Reactor Museum Association. But, again, I’m, as well as my interest in science and technology, although not being trained in that area, I’m sort of a history buff. As a kid on, I could list the order of the Presidents of the United States, I remember. Zing, zing, zing. I can’t do it any longer. I’d have to stop and think about it, get it mixed up a little bit. But history was another area that I was kind of interested in. I like to read a lot of history books and that sort of thing. I think that was stimulated by my second year in college in a class I took from a history professor who was just interesting. And what I found so interesting about him is he said you can read the book, but let me give you some stuff, some of the trivia-type stuff that he knew about some of the personalities and some of the things that he had learned through his research and understanding about the true natures of some of these people and what unique features or attributes they had. That, I think, stimulated my interests even more. But it was in existence prior to that as well, but it just enhanced it a bit. Yeah.
O’Reagan: What sort of stuff has BRMA worked on in the time you’ve been with them?
Plahuta: Oh, gosh. We have done extensive amount of work on some of the modeling to bring up some of the models that we have out there that can describe and portray better the actual activities in the instruments and the equipment in the area there itself. We did that. And of course our big effort was to make it a national park. That’s where most of our time, and that’s where I really got involved with and again working with the other two sites, Oak Ridge and Los Alamos with Cindy Kelly back in American—I mean the Atomic Heritage Foundation. We’d have monthly phone calls on proposing various kind of language that we’d like to see in the act and working with the Congress. My experience working with congressional staffers helped a little bit there, I think, but so did Cindy, who—and I first knew Cindy, basically when she was in DOE—worked for DOE in the headquarters in the cultural resource area and all of that area. So that’s how I got to know Cindy. And then later on, we kind of met again, then, when we were working on the B Reactor. So the biggest contribution, I think, was the effort from the very beginning. B Reactor was—not B Reactor, but the BRMA association—B Reactor Museum Association—was established formally in ’91, but was actually in ’90 or so when it began to formally—and how that all happened was that there was in existence here at the time—we called it the Tri-Cities or maybe they were Richland—I don’t know—Technical Society. And that was made up of all the various tech—whether it be electrical engineers, or civil engineers, the chemical engineers, nuclear engineers, the health physicists and so on. They had this net group where there was things in common and commonality. When the announcement was made that they were going to get out of the production business and was going to start cocooning the reactors, the guy says, god, we got to preserve B. The history that goes with it. And I wasn’t part of that, then. But they organized a committee then to discuss further. And that’s when they decided to establish this organization, the B Reactor Museum Association, with the sole purpose to preserve for future generations the history and preserve the facility itself for public access and—for preservation and public access. Well, our mission is basically accomplished by getting it into the National Park. That was really keen. And we still have interests; we want to go along and develop the park and do all of those additional types of things and perhaps even taking on efforts to preserve a bit of the history of T Plant as well. Because that is identified in the park, and of course the pre-Manhattan Project history there with the farms and that sort of thing. But that’s been the key emphasis all along, was to preserve and make it public access to B Reactor. So there was a lot of work and working with the Department of Energy and others to clean it up and get it in shape where you could have these tours. I think it was 2009 or something when they started the tours—the more public tours. But I was involved earlier in that. There was still tours, but the tours were maybe for special groups or activities or maybe a college chemistry class or physics class or something would be coming to see it. Or some of the elected officials or could be any special tours, I think. And then it got gradually working into recognizing that there would be—in fact, when I left in ’98, there was just a memorandum of agreement type between the BRMA organization and Westinghouse the contractor and DOE, what the roles and responsibilities would be. At that time, BRMA would be willing to provide docents—volunteer docents at the time, and do that sort of thing for these various tours. So I was sort of a tour coordinator then, to find out what audiences—there would be a difference between someone who was real knowledgeable about the reactor, and others who knew nothing about it—want to know what the audience would be so we’d pick the right type of tour guide and a person who was more familiar with it, who were comfortable with those kind of tours. So there got to be a fair number of those. But then it formally established, then, when the DOE started saying we will offer these public tours. In 2009 is when it really blossomed into much more greater things, when they announced the public tours and so on. These others were more tours where people would request and ask for them, we’d try to fit them in. And there were fair number—it got to be a fair number of those, and I think that’s what convinced DOE that we need to do something, maybe more publicly. And more recognition of its responsibility in Historic Preservation Act—you know, the Department’s responsibility there. So that’s what we did. But our efforts were then to, as I say, get the thing cleaned up, get it presented well, and have some of these displays and some of the models and someone that works close with Cindy Kelly at the Atomic Heritage Foundation who had this interest and this whole establishment she has, that foundation to preserve many of the history aspects of the Atomic Energy Commission and Department of Energy and its role in the Manhattan Project. So that was kind of where our focus was, was the preservation and public access and the models that help educate. And also, and we’re pushing more on that now, is educating students and so on. And we’re holding more and more tours for students, all the way down to the fourth grade, but particularly interested in high school and college students that want to learn more about that. That’s where we’re focusing more now, on interpretation and education and emphasis more on the T Plant. BRMA does the B Reactor Museum, doesn’t necessarily relate to the T Plant, but still, that all was part of the Manhattan Project. So our focus is more on the Manhattan Project itself and all of its elements. Which, T Plant is included—the first separations plant. Again, amazing plant and amazing work that’s been done there to get it initiated and started and working properly right off the bat, working. So that’s kind of the background there on my involvement. It’s been—the last three, four, five years has been heavily involved in primarily the effort on the Manhattan historic—the Manhattan Project Historical Park, to get it established, along with the other two sites. Some of the others in DOE, as well, the Dayton Project had decided not to really join pushing on that, but they—and we had meetings yesterday again with some of the Parks people to have things—a commonality—basic common understanding of the whole project and kind of presented the same way at all three sites. But then each site taking on its own specific role, ours being the specific—the development of the plutonium and B Reactor. Los Alamos, more like the weapons development and that sort of thing. Oak Ridge is supplying the enriched uranium and those aspects. They all have a more defined role in the broader picture of the Manhattan Project.
O’Reagan: Right. Did you ever get any sort of security—when you were making these models, I know there was a lot of sensitivity about export control and classification and all that, especially with models. Did you ever get any sort of push back on that?
Plahuta: Not on the models. But what we did do, and that was a surprise, even to the local DOE, I guess they knew about it, but they should have—the reactor graphite that was left over, we claimed that. And thanks for thinking of Gene Woodruff, one of our members who’s a graphite expert, and I mean Gene can go and say, oh, that was made at Union Carbide. Scratch this one—that was made somewhere else. That guy. And I remember working with DOE in the laboratory—Gene was one of the top experts in the world. Again, we’ve got experts here—people don’t recognize—of the world. When there would be these international meetings or [UNKNOWN] Gene Woodruff was a guy to go all over the world talking about the qualities and the purities of graphite and how it’s made and all of that sort of stuff. He’s just top-notch. So anyway, Gene and a guy out at the lab—gosh, I forget his name right now, right off the bat—worked with our people in DOE headquarters’ national security to get us the—or to give us the excess graphite was there with the restrictions that it should be used for souvenirs and that we’re not to resell it. Of course, now there’s not quite the problem, but we didn’t want the Iranians or others to see how this graphite was made and all the purity and all that kind of stuff. Although I don’t understand, because you could still probably decide that if you had a souvenir made out of a piece of that graphite, anyway. But anyway that was—they just didn’t want a big block of this stuff given—sold or anything to someone. So we said, ah, well, we won’t—chop it up or use it in pieces or whatever. So we made that graphite model and that was done going through the whole national security system that said it was okay for us to have that, rather than dump it out here at ERDF—out in the disposal facility. So we got all of the remaining what we call old reactor—that’s the B, D and F—that’s the same type of graphite that was in those original three reactors. We got that as well as some processing tubes and we’re in the process of determining how we make souvenirs for the tours that come through in the park. And reminder, we already have what we call—we have these boron balls, too, that are used in the process to help scram a reactor if you need to. We’ve got those, and we’ve got the process tubes. So we also sell a little vial of these boron balls, and we collected the dust that we did when we made our graphite model and putting that into little vials. So it’s rather unique to this site. We’re looking at other ways to use some of these and what kind of doodads or gadgets can we make for souvenirs. Because we find that working with the Parks people is—oh, yeah, people, there’s something unique about the site, they’d like to take a souvenir back. So that may be some of our support, maybe, to keep continuing and give us our source of income there that—we’re not a great achiever of gathering a whole lot of money, but it does—and we work more on these models and stuff, working with Cindy Kelly and others on grants and that sort of thing to get our money to build these—make these various videos that we’ve made and these vignettes that goes along with when you’re visiting out there and that sort of thing. So that’s gonna be kind of emphasizing with the Parks people how we can best do this and how we can get that accomplished.
O’Reagan: Can you tell me about coordinating with the other sites?
Plahuta: Yeah. That’s—we’ve had several meetings with the other sites. There’s, again, another entity. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the ECA, the Energy Communities Alliance? That was established by the former city manager here, Joe King, who established that. And that—I’ll just talk a minute what that is. That’s made up of the sites where DOE has locations: Savannah River, Oak Ridge, Brookhaven—you know, all nine sites or so, that would go forth in more of a lobbying effort to DOE headquarters on funding and what the needs and the issues and problems are there, as far as the local communities. And many of these were in common. I mean, there were particular areas might be unique to one site or the other, but the others would all support that. But then also there’s things in common that they really wanted to get DOE to recognize that they got to pay attention to. So that was established quite some time ago. The other communities, then, kind of had a basis on which to start on this national park. And particularly Oak Ridge and Los Alamos. So we would get—the three of us would often have—and Cindy Kelly with Atomic Heritage Foundation would kind of coordinate these—it was almost on a monthly basis—telephone conferences. We’d be talking where we are and how we’re going and what we need to do. And so that was very helpful and it was a cooperative effort. It wasn’t a, well, we want that and you can’t have that. It was a system that we all want to work together. And we met last July again down in Los Alamos for a meeting on those three sites plus one or two of the other Energy Community Alliance sat in on some of that. We’re meeting again in August in Denver. This time at Denver because that’s kind of a convenient among the three sites, and it’s also where the interim superintendent of the National Park’s located, so that she can be here. That’s Tracey Adkins and she was here in fact yesterday. One of our local what we call our parks committee that’s not—made up basically the elected officials of the community here, the four mayors, the county commissioners of Benton, Grant and Franklin County, and then there’s, besides elected officials, there’s the Visit Tri-Cities, TRIDEC and BRMA is on that. We’re more of an advisory group than we are to the mayors. But the committee is an administrative committee and that’s where I and John Fox and BRMA and Visit Tri-Cities and others sit on for short-term. I guess I call that the working group who gets the work done and so on. And then we get with the mayors and so on. It’s kind of either up or down, you know, that sort of thing. But anyway, the working with the other communities has been a very cooperative effort, and we meet now on phone calls once in a while—not quite so frequently, though, not once the legislation has passed. But we meet like once a year or so, just—and now with the Parks, too. It was formerly just with DOE, but with the Parks people actually present and with the interim superintendent of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park. So it’s a good relationship and I think it helps in the overall park and the Parks people are interested in working with the communities, too. They’re very—I find working with the Parks service very, very interesting and informative and they’re people who are very willing to listen and learn and likewise we try to exchange information and we learn what they’re process is and I think it’s been a very, very good relationship. And I want to give credit to Colleen French here at the local office has been extremely supportive of BRMA and all of the activities and go out of her way to have—like when we had the November 12th event out here raising the National Parks flag at the site and working with them. She’s been just tremendously helpful in getting that accomplished.
O’Reagan: What’s my question here? Could you give me an idea, if you know, of the sort of size of BRMA over time?
Plahuta: It’s small. That’s our real problem. It’s like most organizations, I find, you don’t find a lot of younger people joining. And that’s a—I think that’s kind of typical of our whole society now. Today, most of the mothers and fathers are both working, they’ve got the kids in school, they’re in soccer, they’re in baseball, they’re in football. Their time is very limited. And I find that in a number of organizations I’m in. So our group is very small. It’s—we only have about a total of about 70-some members. But our active members are probably 20 or something like that. And we have a fair number of people who are not in this community. They’re people who lived here or worked here before. One of the assistant general managers for DOE is still a member, living down the—not Los Alamos—but Los Alamos area and also a couple of them down in the WIPP site down in New Mexico. We find ourselves, I think—and we’re looking right now—what should the mission of BRMA be? And we’ve kind of—a couple of us got together the other day on—had a bottle of beer and sat in Hank Kosmata’s backyard on his patio and just kind of brainstormed a bit. I think we’ll say, for the next three, four, five years, however long, until the park is fully established, we’ll be working extensively with them on assisting in the interpretation activities. We want to emphasize more the education and working with particularly the high school, college kids but also the younger ages. We want to do more emphasis on the T Plant, which is a very key element in this whole process of plutonium and getting the plutonium that was needed for the weapons program. So those—kind of those three are the main activities we want to focus in and decide whether we morph into some other organization. Because the Parks are really interested in developing at each of these sites what they call Friends of the Park, and that’s a common thing among all national parks. It’s sort of a group that supports that local park and assists the Parks Department. And the Parks Department is not a wealthy department. They are very limited funding to all parks. They’ve got extreme backlog on the maintenance of all their activities. So they rely heavily on volunteer work, they rely heavily on these funding process of Friends of the Park, and they have a formal structure in developing it and authorizing and so on, because they, again, want to be sure that there’s precise accountability and all of that sort of thing on that if they’re gonna be associated with them. So we’re working this local community on this parks committee and so on of hoping we can establish that soon. Now, there’s a lot of competition so to speak there, because we’ve got a lot of other things in the community we really want to support. We want to support the REACH organization—they’re looking for funding. We’ve got the aquatic center, you’ve got the performing arts center, you’ve got all of these things. But nevertheless, there’s some people that don’t have to be members of this community that are interested in the Project history of the Manhattan Project and all of that, that you can get various grants and forms and that sort of thing from others. That’s something that we will probably eventually just go out of existence, because we don’t have a lot—I mean, I’m kind of the young kid on the block, actually in our organization, and I’m nearly 78 years old. We got a guy that’s the youngest kid—he’s 65! We call him the little kid brother. We’re losing people. The last two years, we’ve lost the remaining people who were there at startup of the reactor. So the history is kind of disappearing with them in some respects. That’s why I was interested, particularly these interviews that you’re doing here with some of these old-timers and some of the guys that were here, so we get that recorded, and we know what’s there and it’s so important. Of course, as you know, working with you on some of our early recordings that we had with some of our original people that are very, very informative and useful in terms of researchers or anybody that wants to use that information.
O’Reagan: So there’s also ways been a lot of interest among the public in the sort of more negative side of Hanford’s history. Has the down-winders and those sorts of groups influenced the telling of the history in your opinion?
Plahuta: Well, you know, we want to be accurate with our history. And we want to tell all sides of the history. That’s been sometimes a little bit of a problem internally, because, well, gosh, those guys, they just dump. But I say, that’s history. We’ve got to learn what the issues were and what the problems were. And the same—we get some people when the Parks people decided to have a few of the Japanese people sit in on the scholars’ group. I’m not at all opposed to that. I think we got to tell history. History’s got to be told accurately. And it’s important—we may not agree with some of that stuff, and we may not agree with their opinions or thoughts, but it’s only precisely true that we need to reflect what that history and what those events were. So I personally am not opposed. But there’s the real strong advocates in nuclear and there’s the anti-nuclear. We’ve got to show that as existing. We’ve got to recognize that. But I don’t think it’s given us any problem—the answer to your question—I don’t think it’s been an issue that creates difficulties or that we found is interfering with whatever we want to do. We’ve got to recognize it, we address it, and we think we try to address it in a very educational basis, in a very precise basis, and not in an argumentative or conscientious-objector-type—well, that’s not the right word either. But we just don’t want to be contrary to them necessarily. Just understanding that they’ve got a different point of view.
O’Reagan: Have you sort of followed that controversy in your time living in the Tri-Cities?
Plahuta: Yeah, to some extent. I can see both sides. I think we need—particularly, I can see the need to reflect on what effect it had upon the Japanese. I really think that’s essential. Some of our people don’t agree with me. They say, well—they’ll say, yeah, that’s true, but, boy, if we hadn’t done what we needed to do maybe a lot more would be dead. That’s true, too, there probably would have. We’ll never know for certain, but—we hear of people and know of people that had probably saved their lives by the fact that they didn’t have to go and invade Japan. We’ve got some of our own members who kind of fit in that category. But I’ll never forget Terry Andre tells the story when she was at the CREHST museum when it still existed and an elderly Japanese person came in one day and asked her: Are you an American? She said, yes, I’m an American. Oh, thank goodness. He put a big hug around her. She kind of says, well, what’s that? She says, I would not be alive today if you had invaded Japan, he said. Because I was trained in our—I think it was equivalent to the boy scouts—which we were to be suicide-type defenders. And we were supposed to be carrying these bombs, burying us in the sand, along when the Japanese invaded, and blow ourselves up and try to get as many American soldiers as we could—or Allied soldiers as we could. So that’s one side of the story. The others you hear, but people have really suffered when they dropped the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So those stories need to be told, and that understanding has to be there so that there’s the pros and cons. And another interesting thing is, when we had the docent training by the Parks people, they were saying, try to not reflect your own opinions. Give them the facts—that yes. And they did some role playing talk about when someone says, well, should we have dropped the bomb? And they were playing with all the different ways you might address that particular question. And try to say, if they took one position kind of say, well, that’s true, but did you think about this or something. Let them decide themselves, but bring it more forth. And I thought that was excellent type comments that the Parks’ interpretation people and their docents, particularly did the training, bring forth those sorts of thoughts. I’m in agreement with that.
O’Reagan: You mentioned this sort of pro- and anti-nuclear folks. Has that sort of politics gotten involved in the interpretation of Hanford’s history, do you think?
Plahuta: I don’t think it’s got involved in the interpretation. Now, there’s people who will be critical of the fact that either one side or the other hasn’t been displayed enough. And that’s an emphasis that I really respect the Parks to—I think they mentioned, they got issues in the North and South War—the Civil War. The things down in Andersonville, Gettysburg—these—and the Arizona, and they really understand how best to portray that. They’re the nation’s storytellers, and they really want to hone in on the fact that we aren’t going to try to change anybody’s mind; we don’t want to argue with them; we just want to presents the fact more and let them decide. But maybe if they’ve got one position, just kind of let them know what some of the other people are thinking, too, and vice versa. So I don’t really see it as an issue or a problem. It’s something we’ve got to address and it’s something that got to be recognized, but we’ve got to do it thoughtfully and doing it with some knowledge of where we’re coming from and how we present that.
O’Reagan: Mm-hmm. And you said that’s equally true for sort of the local health impact as well as the Nagasaki and Hiroshima?
Plahuta: I think so. But again, that’s my opinion. I think there’s a lot of advantages and there’s a lot of disadvantages. I mean, I keep coming back to some counterpoints and that is the whole medical isotopes, and the medical radiation program and so on. I mean, there’s over 20 million radioactive diagnostic procedures in the United States every year. And there’s a likewise amount throughout the rest of the world. There’s not as many therapeutic, but almost. That’s the positive side. Now, there’s the negative side—that, gee, if you get exposed to it, that’s not good either. So, like most issues, nothing is clearly right or wrong. There’s pros and cons and I think we got to stop and think about those, and each person make up their own mind to where they may fit in that spectrum.
O’Reagan: How have the Tri-Cities changed in your time living here?
Plahuta: [LAUGHTER] It’s been significant. I see the major growth in housing. Gosh, when I came here south of the Yakima River, there was nothing—none of that whole area. West Richland was small and didn’t go out. The shopping, as I said earlier—there was hardly anything here to do in that sense. The amenities of living in the community, the education of WSU here and various arts performing type groups—just—it’s almost like day and night in that sense. I just—just amazing me, and I’ve been here a little over 50 years. It was kind of like a sleepy town almost when you first come—when I first came, I should say. Pasco was the biggest, I think, town at that time. Of course, it’s got its history with the railroad and all of that sort of thing. The growth of the housing and you wonder, how could more people keep coming in? Where are they coming from, and where’s all this activity—what’s this base? It’s amazing. But I think the biggest thing I noticed is the shopping and the industry broadened quite a bit. I think most people don’t realize how many small businesses we really have in this community—various outgrowths, spinoffs of some of the lab work and some of the other activities. I think we had one golf course here at the time when I came over in Pasco. We’ve got a lot of that. The water sports. I mean, it’s—and the surrounding areas, the wineries and all the vineyards. Yet the one other thing I remember when I first came and we first married, we used to go out and pick cherries or whatever where all houses are now. We still go out to some of the places to pick some peaches and stuff, but a lot of that stuff—and pears—you hardly see around. I can think back in those early days that we did all that. We go now in French’s out there where they have you-pick for peaches I think is one of the most popular places in town in the summertime when it’s peach time that they’re just so busy out there. But it’s changed. It’s just—but you know, a lot of the cities and so on—we’re getting people moving from the rural areas into more the urban areas, and we’re no different, I think, than some of the other major cities much bigger than we. But we’re staying—following kind of that same pattern.
O’Reagan: Mm-hmm. Okay. So as we sort of wrap up here, there are probably—I don’t know—particular stories that leap to your mind from your time working at Hanford or living in the area, or any other sort of stuff I haven’t asked about that’s worth sharing?
Plahuta: Yeah, I don’t know. I think one of the things that comes to mind is my involvement early with the kids in the community in the sports area and then of course, when my own son got into some of that with working with them. The other thing that kind of comes to mind, I said, I remember Christ the King Church, but like everything a growing—I’m involved in the building committee and making that church bigger, tearing down the old government-built building, all on volunteer-type work tearing down, basically. And things of that that you tend to think of not necessarily unique to me, but for a lot of the members of this community, where you saw so much volunteer-type effort, community effort, where family didn’t have their own personal family right nearby. And I saw that. My wife can speak a lot more to that, but I saw that early in ’63 still existed, where you saw this sort of social-type gathering of—and I don’t think we see that quite the same anymore here in this community. If it is, it’s more like kind of an organized structure, or organized stuff. It’s not just like somebody drops by or you get a bunch of families together and oh, let’s have a Christmas party, or let’s have this, that or the other thing. That’s kind of what I witnessed early, and not to the extent—as I say again—as my wife did in her family. But I saw that, and I see that kind of disappearing here. Some of the interesting things at work is like—I mentioned briefly earlier about the moonrocks coming back, the smoking swine—I was heavily involved in when they decided not to have the—I should say the smoking beagles and the swine. The swine is one of the closest animals that’s similar to a human. Their skin and all that. So there’s so much testing on radiation effects. A lot of these swine that was just evolutionary and helped the whole medical field. Well, we excessed those, I remember, in the process of excessing, where should we give it to? And it ended up—I was quite heavily involved in that—we gave it to the University of Minnesota, because they had quite an extensive program on heart development and heart surgery and stuff like that. They could utilize these swine and they had made a good proposal how they would care for them and continue in breeding them. Leo Bustad was the guy that developed those, like a full-grown was 150 pounds, was close to a human being, and all those sorts of things. And I think back about those sorts of things, about uniqueness, again, of science, of technology, developing these animals so that they—and there, again, you’ve got the other side of those people that are—oh, gosh, you shouldn’t be sacrificing animals. There’s validity to that. And then you look on the other hand—but look at all the benefits you get on that, and you can do it in a humane way, and all of that. So those things. Some of the stuff, I can’t describe now. I was not heavily involved in classified stuff, but there was some of the work out at Battelle that once it’s unclassified, it’s just unbelievable some of this stuff that you learn through that sort of thing. Those things often come to my mind, but I still—taken the oath that I’ll keep those to myself. That’s about all I can say about—but I wasn’t heavily involved in that. I didn’t have a super—I had a Q clearance. That’s another interesting story. When I was hired by DOE, they said, well—at that time you had to have a Q clearance before you could ever come on work and it took about three months to get this Q clearance processed. So I was home back in Wisconsin for about a month, just waiting for the clearance, because I wasn’t going to drive all the way out here and for some reason to find out that, well, we can’t take you. I mean, I had no reason to believe that, but I just had to wait out the process. So that was, again—and that was difficult in hiring early on when we were recruiting college kids and stuff. That was when we still needed that—that everybody needed—well, not everybody, but 95% probably of the DOE and AEC—it was AEC then. People needed a Q clearance before they could get on board. Well, people are anxious, they don’t want to wait around three months. They’re looking for a job. So that was one of the difficulties that comes to mind when I talk about out those sorts of things. But there’s a lot of fond memories and associations with people that you’ll always have. And some unique activities that occurred. And, again, I keep thinking about working with Wally Sale at the Consolidated Laboratory and how unique and different that was and how innovative his approach—and he’s the one that really is the creator of that concept. So anyway, it’s been—it was an enjoyable career.
O’Reagan: All right, well thanks so much for being here.
Plahuta: Yeah, you bet. Thank you. And I appreciate--
Douglas O’Reagan: Okay. To start off, would you please pronounce and spell your name for us?
William Cliff: Yes. I’m Dr. William C. Cliff. W-I-L-L-I-A-M, C is the middle initial, and Cliff, C-L-I-F-F—
O’Reagan: All right.
Cliff: --like a mountain cliff.
O’Reagan: Thank you. My name is Douglas O’Reagan. I’m conducting an oral history interview with Dr. Cliff on May 5th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University’s Tri-Cities. We’ll be speaking with Dr. Cliff about his experiences working around the Tri-Cities community over the 20th Century. To start us off, could you tell us a little bit about your life growing up before you came to this part of the world.
Cliff: Yeah. I was actually born in Idaho, and then we moved around to Oregon and then to Utah. And then got married in 1969 in Colorado. Took a job with NASA in Huntsville, Alabama, and that’s where we moved to and we lived there for about six or seven years. There were about seven of us that were from around the United States that were hired to work on a special project at NASA. That gave us quite a bit of fun. It was electro-optic systems and we worked on those. And of course we worked into other things while we were there at NASA as well. Huntsville—if you were raised in the West, Huntsville’s a little bit different. For the first years I was there, I never had an American boss. All my bosses were the old Peenemünde group. The Germans--Von Braun, Stuhlinger, Geissler, Horne, Dahm, Krause, and so on. Very nice people, very knowledgeable people. We went down and I got to work on a lot of electro-optics—laser systems for probing the atmosphere and for looking at fluid flow. After which, I got—was over our physics and chemistry experiments in space and was in charge of the first commercial product in space, which was monodispersed latex spheres. So got involved in an awfully lot of things, and finally got involved in the shuttle. Worked on the heat transfer for the solid rocket boosters and the external tank. So my working time seems like it almost started there just about the time of the shuttle and then sort of ended just about the time the shuttle ended. So I guess it was fate.
O’Reagan: What time frame was that?
Cliff: Well, about 1970—well, the shuttle started taking design back in ’69, ’70, ’71. That’s when I was running the code for—of course, we were doing a lot of other things, too. Like I say, seven of us were hired to work on a special electro-optics project for measuring the wind fields near the launch vehicles. Because the last decision made before launch is, do I have an atmospheric window? So that was sort of important, too. As a young scientist—engineer space scientist, you had all the toys you’d ever want. Because by this time, NASA had become very popular to the American people. And in 1969, with the Apollo-11 launch liftoff and landing on the moon and returning, NASA could do no wrong. As with many times in history, there’s a gloried agency within the United States. At that time, of course, NASA took over. Von Braun, the head of it, could do no wrong. So as a young scientist, I had every conceivable toy you could imagine: laser Doppler systems, probability density analyzers, I had a Mach-3 wind tunnel that I could use at my discretion. We really had a lot of fun for a young engineer.
O’Reagan: So what brought you to the Tri-Cities?
Cliff: Well, the Tri-Cities was very interesting. We had a child, Christina, in Huntsville, Alabama. And before she got school aged, we wanted to come back to the West. Both my wife and I were from the West. It’s just like salmon returning. You want to come back, same place. So we looked around, and I happened to call out here. It looked like I was first going to go to Boulder, Colorado and do some work for NOAA. But I called a friend out here at the Hanford site, and he knew that I did a lot of wind characteristics for NASA. And he said, what would you think about moving out here? I said, well, that sounded like it might be kind of good. So they flew me out, I gave a presentation on laser Doppler velocimetry, which we really were the heads of in the world at that time, at NASA. They had some very, very good people. So I gave a talk on that out here. Chuck Elderkin said, when can you be here, in two weeks? I said, no, no, I’ve got some payloads I have to still get ready for. So signed up to come up here and work for Chuck Elderkin and Chuck Simpson and Bill Sandusky and a lot of these really interesting people in the atmospheric world. And as I mentioned, I think this was the largest atmospheric complex in the United States, because you had to worry about a release going downwind. So you had a huge amount of sensors in this area. And in fact, in my work, in dealing with some of the correlation work that we did, we had seen the work that had been done out here as well. So I was very interested in this area and interested in the people that were in this area that had done so much scientific work. So anyway, we were hired to come, and my first job was actually representing Battelle at--I think it was called ERDA at that time—in Washington, DC. So my first six months on the job, roughly, were actually in DC. We moved all of our equipment and cars and stuff out here, and then went to Washington, DC to live for—actually it turned out to be—shoot. I want to say—many months, and then came out here to take the actual job out here. I told my wife, I said, now, I’m not sure what you’re going to think about it. Said, you’re not going to see many trees. And she got out here and she says, I never want to leave. So, one of those people that this was her ideal site. Been very happy ever since then, and she sort of built up—every time I’d go on a trip, she’d buy another horse. So ended up building a little house with a barn and horses, and each—I remember one in particular that was kind of interesting. I got on a plane—I did quite a bit of overseas work. Got on the plane and they gave me an envelope. And it says, To Daddy. I thought, it’s going to open up and it’s going to say, please come home, Daddy. Well, I open it up and it says, here’s the horse you’re going to see at the barn when you come back. So anyway that was the life of the person traveling.
O’Reagan: Where did you buy this—where were you living?
Cliff: Well we were living in a place called Hills West at the time when we came in. This area’s really interesting because it has ups and downs in prices of houses. So we found that it was easier to build than to buy at that particular time. So we built a house in Hills West. Then we were living there, and I was doing quite a bit of overseas work. When we were here, we also then were trained by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for reactor operator licensing exams. In fact, the Unit Two out here—I was the lead examiner for the first group of people that ran the Unit Two reactor here at Hanford. So that was kind of fun, too. So for a few years, I spent about half my time going around to different BWRs around the—boiling water reactors—around the country. But I still think my favorite one is the one that’s right here. Got to do a lot of different projects over time. The Canadian government wanted us to blow up some pipelines near Calgary to see if they were accidentally or purposely ruptured where the flow would go. So we went up, and my job was to measure the fluid velocity coming out of these ruptured pipes, which were probably three or four feet down, and they’d rupture and it’d just come up out of the ground. So that was kind of an interesting one. We had one where a fellow named Jim Grier who—great manager—did one with Shell Oil Company to look at taking the mud—the drilling mud from the seas and then putting it back down on the bed. So when you’re drilling for oil you get all these muds and things, and now you got to get rid of them. So we had a big project here to look at how you made them into briquettes and then put them back on the seafloor.
O’Reagan: This was all working for Battelle?
Cliff: Yeah, yeah. You had the opportunity to do a lot of different kind of unusual things. And one I mentioned that we started to look into was one of the commercial companies wanted to know how you could take strawberries and make them stand up so you could cut the tops off. So we did a little short project on looking at how you’d use the calyx as a drag device. The calyx, you know, the leafy part which is good for Scrabble. To look and see how you could control the position of the strawberry using a converging fluid system. Anyway, that was kind of interesting.
O’Reagan: Do you remember what year you came to the Tri-Cities?
Cliff: 1976, I believe.
O’Reagan: Great. And you mentioned a couple of names—Chuck Eldritch, something, something like that?
Cliff: Elderkin. Chuck Elderkin. Chuck was really the person that hired me. I came out and interviewed with Chuck. He was one of the nicest people I’d ever met. In fact, I thought this is really strange. The people at Tri-Cities are very, very nice. But coming in and interviewing for a job, I didn’t expect this guy to take his family and me out for ice cream at night. So he was such a nice man.
O’Reagan: But he was a well-known climatologist?
Cliff: Yeah, yeah. Him and Chuck Simpson and there’s Bill Sandusky. I think Bill Sandusky just retired from the Atmospheric Sciences Department. And they ran the Atmospheric Science Department. There’s another fellow named Ron Drake that was there as well. But it was very prestigious organization there at Battelle.
O’Reagan: One of the things we’re interested in finding out is what was created, what was invented, what was discovered out there on the site? It sounds like climatology was cutting edge out there.
Cliff: Oh, I think so. I mean, you really had to have your game plan in place, in case something happened. We’ve all heard of cases where the down-winders were saying something happened and we were affected. So you’ve always had a very good Atmospheric Sciences Department out there. I was trying to think of some of the other names that were extremely interesting to me. Coming out of NASA, I had heard of this group and these people, so I was very excited about coming. And then, like I say, we went to Washington, DC and we had one child and two golden retrievers, and to live in DC for a little while. And if you ever have a thought it was tough to find a place with a child, think about two golden retrievers and who wants to let you stay in an apartment with two golden retrievers and a child. Anyway, we had quite a bit of fun. And then we had to drive all the way across the United States. My wife would fly between stops, and I would pull our boat and the dogs and catch up with my wife, Nell, and Christina our daughter, as we came across. So it was kind of an exciting time for us. I don’t think I’d have the energy to do it again. [LAUGHTER]
O’Reagan: You said your wife really liked it when she got here. What was your first impression?
Cliff: Well, I was born in Idaho and lived in Utah, so this was very familiar kind of territory to me, and I loved it. In fact, one of the first things I did was get in my car, and I just drove out through the Area and up through by Othello and up by all those little lakes and the backwater, look for fishing areas, and go down and talk to the fishermen and stuff. So for me, this was an ideal location. And it turned out for my wife it was an ideal location. She could do all the things that she wanted to do with the animals. And I could do everything I wanted to do with the fish—and the steelhead and the salmon. Loved fly fishing for the steelhead up here. Probably one of the most significant events in that was that my father was out fishing—he loved to fly fish, too. And I told him, as you go down this river, I said, look over your shoulder, split those two big rocks right there, and when you do you’ll have a steelhead on. And he goes down there, and bang, this huge steelhead comes on. Just—he said he never had a fish fight like that in his life. He said, but one thing, Bill, I had to take him the extra step. So anyway, it’s been a wonderful area for us, and like I say, we’ve had a lot of people over. The work really became significant for us in 1989. US Customs Intelligence Service, Eleanor Lusher called Ed Fay at the Department of Energy and asked if someone would write a couple of articles, one on hafnium and one on zirconium. Ed asked if I would do it. So I wrote these two training bits for Customs, sent it to them. Next thing I know, I got a big beautiful plaque from the Customs Intelligence Unit head at New York. And then Bill Wiley liked that so well, he gave me one, too. So that got us sort of started. And then in ’94, US Customs and I began training. Congress approved a budget to do Weapons of Mass Destruction training for the non-weapon states of the former Soviet Union: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, and Slovakia. So that sort of started us off. And the first thing we did, we did border assessments to find out what they could do at a border and what they couldn’t do. And we found one location that if they had—if the smuggler went across the border down a ways, they couldn’t chase him because they had no gas. So some of the places were pretty rough. But then we went back in the countries and we did the training based upon our assessment at the borders. Then things just sort of took off from there. We began training more and more and more countries, going overseas. One of the problems that we had was when we went overseas—I actually carried a suitcase that was filled with strategic metals, if you will, to show and do training on. But it was very, very heavy. And we couldn’t carry any radioactive material with us at all. And we couldn’t—they didn’t have any trucks or things to pull something through, and there were very few radiation detectors. So we decided that we had to find a place where we could have trucks, cars, set up exercises just like you would have at a real field position, and be able to use real radioactive material, and specifically weapons-grade uranium and weapons-grade plutonium. Because these are two items that, without them, you don’t build a nuclear weapon. At the same time, back then, most smugglers and customs officers around the world were afraid of them, thinking that they’re highly radioactive. When in fact, through your training you find out that the weapons-grade materials are the least radioactive materials that you’re going to be working around for most of the time. The industrial isotopes are the rough ones, so to speak. So we got the Pentagon, Harlan Strauss, we got the Department of Energy, of course, with us. We got the State Department, Pat O’Brien, Non-Proliferation Disarmament Fund. We selected the HAMMER site as the site where we could do all of these things. So there were actually four groups of people putting out customs—trying to think. Customs—there were actually a couple different people that we worked with. But we put these four agencies together, combined them together, and came out and set up the training. We looked around, where could we do the training? Well, it just turns out that the HAMMER site was just being developed, and it was the ideal place. We drove through the HAMMER site, Customs, State and the Pentagon and I, and we saw a little building out there that is actually a rest stop. But it looks exactly like a border crossing in a third world country. We said, this is it. This is the place we got to do. So we then teamed up with HAMMER, and from that time forward it was all a wonderful partnership. In fact, people coming in could not tell the difference between if you were a PNL person or a HAMMER person. I remember one time, Nikolai Kurchenko, a Russian, the head of the Russian delegation came in and he had this beautiful Russian hat. And I thought, oh boy, oh oy, I wonder if he’s going to give it to me. Well he didn’t. He gave it to HAMMER. And I thought, oh man. But anyway, that’s been a wonderful relationship to where PNL and HAMMER worked together and you wouldn’t—couldn’t tell one from another. So that—in September of 1997, HAMMER did the dedication of the HAMMER site. At that dedication, we had Hungarians and Slovak Customs all in full uniform, for the dedication. That was the first class we had. And the classes have sort of continued ever since. So it was sort of a remarkable marriage, I would say, of the two groups.
O’Reagan: What does HAMMER stand for?
Cliff: Hazardous Material Management and Emergency Response Training Center. It’s actually the Volpentest HAMMER Federal Training Center. That’s the nice thing about HAMMER, is you can do things there that you really can’t do anywhere else in the world. And that is, we’re able to bring out the weapons-grade plutonium from PNNL, weapons-grade uranium, put it in trucks and cars and pass the through the portable monitors and have the people respond, pull them into what we call secondary and do the searches. But it’s with the real thing. And like I said, the first few years, some of the people were very much afraid of going up against those materials, thinking that they’re highly radioactive when in fact they’re not. But even the Russians—the [INAUDIBLE] wouldn’t let the Russians use their materials to train on. So we had—I think the Russians were here four times for the actual training at HAMMER. And then we actually ran a rail test, where we had a railroad train go by the 300 Area here. It carried the special nuclear materials. And when I say special nuclear materials, I mean the weapons-grade plutonium and uranium-enriched and the isotope 235, and uranium-233. So those things that are fissionable that you can make the weapon out of. Anyway, it was kind of interesting because the train test, the Russians wanted us to evaluate one of their portal monitors. These are large monitors for looking for radioactive material. I think it’s the only time that test has ever been run. In the end, we’ve had over 60 countries out there, at HAMMER. As you know, we took a little tour the other day and saw all the different facilities that have been built, and the State Department has built three really nice facilities for the training. The very first training that we did at HAMMER, we actually had phone lines to each participant coming out of the ceiling. Of course, now, in the new buildings and stuff, you got good simultaneous interpretation, the headgear, and you can do it in the field as well if you want to. Normally, in the field we do consecutive translation. But it’s a wonderful facility. As we’ve gone around the world, we’ve seen how people smuggle things and we’ve built traps that look like how the smuggler does it and then we train the people on how to find it. Kind of exciting.
O’Reagan: What had been your jobs, your involvement in each stage of this?
Cliff: My involvement?
O’Reagan: Mm-hmm.
Cliff: Was I was the manager of the program. We called it Interdict RADACAD. Interdict for the interdiction of materials, commodities and components associated with the development or deployment of a Weapon of Mass Destruction. And then RADACAD for Radiation Academy. Well, you can imagine what happened on that—people immediately picked up RADACAD and that’s what it became known as. And one I forgot to mention, Terry Conway was the main customs officer we dealt with. He came out, and he was the one that thought up the term RADACAD. So that term actually belongs to him. But I’ve gotten calls from people in Washington National Security Council and people say, what does this RADACAD mean? What does it stand for? So we made it to very high parts of government and actually got to be a line item there for training. Andrew Church at State Department in the—I want to say in the training area there—Andrew’s specific area—he’s the one that actually sent most of the countries, or a lot of the countries to us. Department of Energy has sent a lot of countries to us. The Pentagon, with Harlan, sent quite a few to us. But they always came in as a joint effort, if you will. Andrew Church, Export Control Cooperation, ECC, and the State Department, is probably the first group that actually provided funding out and spread it—it would go through Customs to go to us. And he’s—Andrew’s still there. He’s still a good sponsor, living sponsor, if you will. Oh! Now that we’re talking about it, can I bring this out?
O’Reagan: Yeah, please.
Cliff: This is kind of a cute little storyboard. Of course, you probably can’t see too much of it. But this actually shows one of the classes from Azerbaijan that came to visit us. My wife probably has had 40 separate nations at her home where she would spend three days preparing food so they have a banquet at the house. Some of the nations have been there to the house more than once. So this is the Azeris here giving my wife a souvenir. She got so many souvenirs that she had to build a case there at the house to put all the various souvenirs in. Ali here was a boxer for the Azeri Olympic team.
O’Reagan: And then he went into radiation safety?
Cliff: Customs, yeah. [LAUGHTER] Went into customs. Yeah, it’s interesting, the people that come and take the training, when they go back home, and then we go back and visit them in maybe six months or so, they will have moved up in the organization. Getting a certificate from RADACAD was a very, very big thing for most of these countries. It actually meant almost an instant advancement. This is when the missile came in that you saw the other day, the SCUD missile which is on loan to us from the State Department. Some of the exercises that they’re doing.
O’Reagan: Could you tell us a bit more about the SCUD missiles for the cameras?
Cliff: Got a call one day from a friend there at the Non-proliferation Disarmament Fund, said, Bill, do you want to have a missile out there to look at? And I said, sure! And then all of the sudden, one day it shows up out there, and the driver said it was the strangest thing he’d ever picked up. He said he went over to—I guess by the State Department where they had it, and he said I wonder who’s going to be driving that. So he drove it out here and brought it out to HAMMER for training. And—oh shoot, one of the pictures I think I brought with me—I know I’ve got it over there some place—is Bill Gates. Bill Gates came through and toured the Hanford site, and the last stop was there with the missile. So I’ve got a picture there with Bill Gates and I, looking over that missile. Kind of a fun toy.
O’Reagan: Do you know how the State Department got the missile?
Cliff: It was provided by the Soviet Union.
O’Reagan: And the fear was that that would be—somebody would try to drive that out of the Soviet Union?
Cliff: Oh, now that one is one that’s been cut up, as you could tell. It’s been set up as a demilitarized system, so it cannot ever be used. In the United States, however, there was one that did come into the United States legally, supposedly, and demilitarized. And my understanding was that another one came in that Customs took and they had the paperwork from the first one and it was drivable and everything else. So you’d think how could something like that every go through a country? But they can. So I’m not sure where that missile is right now, but Customs took it over and if they did all the paperwork right and demilitarized it, the person probably got it back. Let’s see. I thought maybe one of these we were holding—oh. Harlan Strauss. Oh, missile components. Anyway, this is sort of a fun one. And then Customs gave us this plaque here from the Northwest Laboratory for the Interdict Training Program, 2004. Now the nice thing about this is we continuously got letters from customs officers saying it’s the best training they’d ever had in their career. So when people walked out of the training, they actually felt comfortable. And you’d always ask them, well, what’s going to happen if someone comes across and your radiation alarm says you’ve got plutonium. They say, I’m going to stick right there and handle it. Years ago, they’d say, I’m going to take off running as fast as I can. So just that little bit of knowledge is very helpful. We have had people, of course, that just don’t like any radiation. Some people contend that a little bit of radiation has made the human species actually better, if you will. And that if you have a small amount of background radiation, it’s more healthy for you than none. It’s called hormesis, so it actually—your body upregulates itself to take care of itself a little bit better.
O’Reagan: How is HAMMER run? What is sort of the organizational structure of it?
Cliff: Well, HAMMER actually is a training facility that’s headed by Karen McGinnis, who does a wonderful job of making sure that the site needs are met. It’s actually set up for the Hanford cleanup to give all the specialized trainings so that the person in the field is safe. That’s pretty much it. It has, I think, about 50,000 man days of training a year. Every person on the Hanford site there that deals with radioactive materials is actually trained right there on the HAMMER site in the radiation building, the one that we took a tour of the other day. Volpentest certainly was a forward-thinker, in knowing that you needed to have something like this for the Hanford site, and knowing that it’s going to be a major cleanup facility.
O’Reagan: Do you know much about Volpentest’s role in getting all of this organized?
Cliff: Volpentest was the key person with the willpower and the tenacity to—my understanding is that he thought the project up, he fought in Washington, and he fought in Washington, and he fought in Washington. And I wish I could remember his words one time when—at HAMMER—not a dedication, but like ten-year anniversary. He said something about, they said what was so hard? He said, just again, and again, and again, you just had to be persistent to do it. And then finally, he got it and it’s, like I say, it’s the best training center in the world. You can do things out there at HAMMER that you can do nowhere else. We have brought in containers, we have fiber optic scopes to look behind walls, you can bring the special nuclear materials out there, and you can drive through the scenarios. And we mock-up. We mock-up our international seizures. In fact, one that we were accredited with in May of ’99 was a Bulgarian seizure where a fellow had gone out of Romania and up into Turkey and was coming back through Bulgaria, Josef Hanifi. He got to the border there and the Bulgarians had just been out training at RADACAD. They noticed that he seemed a little bit nervous. So they questioned a little bit and finally they sent him over to secondary. So they moved him to secondary. The car was perfectly clean. Nobody should be driving that car; it was way too clean. They found—a screwdriver was the only piece of equipment in the entire car. They were about ready to let him go, and apparently then he offered them a bribe. They said, no, no, we got to find it. So they started looking and they found a little piece of paper with a star on it, which was a Kurdish separatist group. So they said, okay, now we’re going to look a bit more. And the next thing they found then was what we call a passport. This is a piece of paper that gives the isotopic items that are in an element. It always goes with the material. When you get something that’s very sensitive, whether it’s radioactive or not, you’re going to have this spike assay, or what we call a passport, with it. And if you find it, the other stuff is there. So here it was and it said uranium-235, and said 99.99% uranium-235—which we train everybody, if you see that, you know that’s at least a partial. You do not enrich uranium to that amount. But now they knew what they were looking for. All their sensors—none of their sensors would work. I mean, the handheld radiation devices weren’t going off. Then finally the guy remembered the screwdriver, and he picked up a tire pump. The tire pump was like one he had but it was heavier. So he looked at matched them up and pulled it apart. And sure enough the compression cylinder inside the pump had been pulled apart and a lead pig—when I say lead pig—a lead isotope holder—radiation holder—they pulled it out and it had uranium-235 in it when they pulled it apart. It’s a great example to show that uranium-235 is easily concealed. Because you put it in there. One of the pagers that I brought with me that are used all around the world for detecting radiation was laid actually up against it and it still showed zero. Trying to reach around, see if I can open this up. This is the one we saw the other day. This particular one is my favorite. We’ve distributed thousands around the world. There’s actually several makers of these. This particular one is Sensor Technology. But you just turn it on, and then you wear it. As soon as it turns green it’s ready to pick up any radiation you’ve got. Very, very sensitive, and yet—this water bottle is just about the size—about like that was the lead pig that was in the container. So put it on the outside and if you press the button there—[DEVICE BEEPING] Reads zero. You’ve always got a little bit of gamma background radiation, but it read zero. And then of course as you pulled it open, pulled the top off and expose the little amount of radiation, then the thing goes wild. So that was one of the seizures that we were accredited with. And in fact, the customs officers that made that seizure were brought to the United States and brought out to HAMMER again to give a little talk to everybody on how they did it. So it was kind of interesting. We had a couple of other seizures, too, that were quite interesting. The Bulgarians, when they first were over here the first time they actually made another seizure. So they were extremely dedicated.
O’Reagan: Had there been any particular—I don’t know—international politics or sort of big events that have shaped what people are looking for at HAMMER, or HAMMER’s mission? I’m thinking like—as the world’s sort of security concerns change, has that changed what HAMMER is looking for?
Cliff: Well, HAMMER, of course was really set up to handle the cleanup of the Hanford site. But the society area, if you will, has been a blessing for the world of bringing people in for training. Just going back in history, in December 14th, 1994, Josef Wagner, who is well up into the nuclear world in the Czech Republic, was actually caught by a man named Kamil Klozerski, the second command of the criminal police in the Czech Republic. And he was carrying with him 2.72 kilograms of 87.7% enriched uranium, which is almost weapons grade. That sort of set the tone for the world, I think. Because that had been brought down from Moscow by train, by car, and gone through a lot of different country border crossings, and it sort of showed the world that there really wasn’t any way of catching or stopping it at that time. So after that, you began seeing the portable monitors, began seeing the radiation detectors and things of that nature start cropping up. In my mind, there was sort of a changing segue way, I guess, for the world. Now the United States, I guess, lacked behind a lot of the other countries in putting up portal monitors and stuff because we sort of consider ourselves isolated. But as recent events have shown us, of course, we’re not. So the United States then took up and protected all of its borders with these large portal monitors. And if you walk off on the plane and you look very carefully, your customs officers will be carrying something like this. Normally, it’s just called a personal radiation detector. This particular model is called a pager from Sensor Technology. So the United States is doing a real good job with its people and getting its people trained for detecting radioactive materials. There’s been several seizures around the world. I guess maybe I’ll leave it at that. There’s been less than what we call a significant quantity, bag quite a bit that has actually been seized. We know that a lot of nations and a lot of groups who’d like to have the material. So as we talked about the other day, if the IAEA says that if a country has eight kilograms of plutonium, you could not discard the fact that they may have a full-up weapon, or 25 kilograms of uranium-235, or eight kilograms of uranium-233. So that’s sort of the baseline, so for nuclear smuggling, we always compare that. There’s been 18 seizures since 1992 of weapons-usable material. And when we say weapons-usable, we mean greater than 20% enriched uranium-235 or plutonium. So there’s not been a lot. And there’s a lot of equipment out there to try to stop it. But as we saw with the Bulgarian seizure, certain things can be fairly well-masked. A lot of times, people will ask, well, hey, a small number of grams you found, like in the Bulgarian seizure, you’re not going to make a bomb out of that. And the answer is yeah, that’s correct. Normally what happens on a smuggling operation, they’ll give you a very small amount of material, and if it’s good material, they’ll give it to you to take and analyze. And then they’ll say, we’ve got three more kilograms or five more kilograms back there. So when you see the small ones, they become very important, because that’s what people are trying to push and say, this is a sample. We had a case out here where zirconium—which is non-radioactive, but is used in reactor systems—smuggler sent us a small piece that we analyzed, and it was really, really nice zirconium. A customs officer was embedded with him and he was saying he was from Iraq and he wanted to buy it for Iraq. So it went on, and they’d give us another piece, and it wasn’t quite as good, but it was still good nuclear-grade zirconium. So eventually, customs arrested him, and he had five tons of zirconium there waiting to go to Iraq. It was stored in the World Trade Centers. I went back and looked at it. It was kind of interesting. Oh, I had one other—I got another picture over there some place where I showed two—that Eleanor Lush, who we talked about that actually the program started with, her and another person using a piece of our equipment to look at roofing tar from Venezuela. It was suspected that something was hidden in the roofing tar. Why are you buying roofing tar from Venezuela, which probably the cost of shipping it is as much as the material’s worth? So here at PNNL, Dick Papas and Jim Skorpik had built some equipment—some acoustic equipment—to look and find chemicals that—actually it was originally developed for looking at chemical weapons. And in this particular case, it was for looking through this tar keg to see if somebody had accidentally hidden a rubber ball in the middle or something. But anyway, we worked on several cases. [DEVICE BEEPING] With customs. And it was always kind of fun. I was called in on one case where I was able to go and testify, was the first to testify for the US government against some smugglers. So it was kind of interesting, back in Brooklyn. Anyway we had sort of a fun life. The HAMMER site, like I say, sort of came as a godsend for doing this. They were built up to handle and move materials around in a method—and they’re on the Hanford site, so you can actually use the radioactive materials. And of course we used not only the weapons-grade which we talked about several times, but we also used the commercial items, because those are ones you’re going to find most often. That is the cesiums, cobalts, things of that nature. We have those in the training as well, and the people have to identify what they are.
O’Reagan: You mentioned testifying—was that because--just as an expert witness?
Cliff: Yes.
O’Reagan: Or were you actually involved in--?
Cliff: No, no, just as an expert witness. Yeah, no, no just as an expert witness on what we had analyzed.
O’Reagan: How has your sort of day-to-day work changed over the time that you’ve been working at HAMMER?
Cliff: Oh, not—I’m just pretty much retired and I get to do the fun things I want to do, and I get to do kind of an outreach and talk to the people that we’ve with over the years, the various agencies: the State Department, the Customs and Border Protection, and the Department of the Defense and Homeland Security. I really don’t do much anymore. If a class comes in, I’ll maybe give a talk on nuclear smuggling and maybe a couple of other little talks.
O’Reagan: When did you retire, or start to retire?
Cliff: Pardon?
O’Reagan: When did you start to retire?
Cliff: 2011.
O’Reagan: Okay. What was your sort of day-to-day before that?
Cliff: Well, when we had the classes, of course it was—phew—early morning to late afternoon, but it was a labor of love, setting them up and getting all the people. When the training went on, I one time, somebody asked, well how many experts do you use? And I counted up, I think on one class, 27 that you would run into. 27 different experts you’d run into in that class. We had people from Oak Ridge, for instance, Steve Baker would come down and that’s where the uranium enrichment was, and so he would talk about uranium enrichment. We had the MSIC people come in—Missile Space Intelligence Command—come in and they’d talk about some of the missile systems that we had. So I guess I really wouldn’t call it work; it was kind of fun. And then HAMMER is even more fun. I go out there and it’s sort of like a large family that you blend into. My wife keeps saying now, when are you going to really retire? I think that day is coming pretty soon.
O’Reagan: You mentioned going around looking for fishing spots when you first got here.
Cliff: Yes!
O’Reagan: Is that a big hobby of yours?
Cliff: Yes, I love to fish. To me, this was a very interesting and exciting area because I went up there in the desert area where these—all of the sudden, there’s water and there’s fish in these lakes. I watched the people catch them and how they did it. I’d go down and talk to them. So then we’d begin doing that, and got with friends, and we’d walk into a little lake called Virgin Lake, which is about a mile walk-in, so there’s not a lot of people. Haven’t been there lately, though. But, yeah, I love fishing, and my dad took my brother and I out. I think—I think he said we were either three or four when we first started going out and going fishing. I remember him buying these old bamboo fly rods, which would be very expensive now. And I remember walking and holding the tip down, snapping the tip off on the ground. My dad said, no, no, Bill, you have to hold it up. So that was in Idaho, when we lived in Idaho. I guess I’ve been sort of lucky: I’ve always found something that was fun to do. Even when I went down to NASA, I remember they came out looking, like I say, for seven of us from around the United States to work on a particular project. It was kind of a thrill to be able to go down and sort of play and have all the toys you ever wanted as a young engineer. It just seemed like my life said, well, here’s the next thing, here’s the next thing. So I guess the next thing probably is we’ll maybe settle down even more. Maybe one day do a full retirement. Although I still like talking about nuclear smuggling and talking with the people. When I was in the Czech Republic, and actually it was December of ’95, and we were talking with the criminal police there. So I spewed out all we’d heard, about Josef Wagner and any co-conspirators and stuff. And they said, oh, well, we thought we were going to tell you about that. No. But it was interesting because they were really into it. And when the breakup of the Soviet Union occurred, I said, what have you noticed? He said, well, people think they’re free. But he says, people think they’re free to do whatever they want, so we’ve seen an increase in murders and really hard crime. Which I never thought about, because under the dominant rule, nobody dared do anything. Then after they broke up and were free, they could do all these different things. So the criminal police actually had their hands more full, I guess. The Josef Wagner case was just a very special case.
O’Reagan: How have the Tri-Cities changed in the time you’ve lived here?
Cliff: Oh! More people in my fishing spots! Yeah, the Tri-Cities have gotten many more people. In fact, we live up on Keene Road, which is part of Richland, going toward Yakima there. The traffic has gotten almost unbearable at rush hour. I mean, it really is amazing. When we built our house, 1990, Keene Road was a little two-lane road that did this. As you drove along the road, and if you come up over this rise, you’d see our house. But the house would look like it was a stick figure, just looked like—because you would look through one octagonal window, straight through to another octagonal window. So it looked like there was no depth to the house. It was a very strange feeling. And then the next thing you know—whoom—then they came and bladed out the road, made it a four-laner, and the first thing happened was they cut it a little too steep at the end of our driveway, so our driveway went like that. And I had to call them up because it snowed and I said, I just slid into the road. So they came back and fixed it. City of Richland has been very good. But we’ve certainly enjoyed it, like I say, we’ve had a pretty good life here.
O’Reagan: Have you followed local politics at all?
Cliff: A little bit, but not too much. I mean, the national politics have been something interesting to watch, kind of fun to watch. I always watch the news and hear the people say—it’s a very fun thing to be watching and going over. Anyway, I don’t get involved in politics very much.
O’Reagan: Okay. Let’s see. I guess that’s most of our sort of preset questions here. Anything else that comes to mind that I haven’t thought to ask?
Cliff: Hmm. I’m just trying to think of some of the fun little projects that we’ve done in the past and the people who we’ve worked with. Seems like we’ve always had some—well, it was kind of interesting, because I used to do quite a bit of research. When I was at NASA, we built these large laser systems for what they call a coaxial laser system—for actually looking at wind for probably 20 kilometers out or so. Very, very accurate. And when I came here, one of the first things I did was I went back and I got with our old NASA people and set up a program to scan San Gorgonio Pass with an airplane flying over and taking the wind velocity measurements, so you could see. And now there’s large wind turbines down there—wind turbine farm and stuff. And that’s what we wanted to assess, was how deep did that maritime layer go as it came down from the coast. So that was sort of fun, as it led to the stuff we did at NASA with the laser Doppler systems. But we did it out here at PNNL. And then I got to work with a fellow named Jim Davidson. He was over our national security back then, and probably one of my very favorite bosses, if you will. So with him, I got to be—my training—the Nuclear Regulatory Commission training—and with Jim, I actually became one of the US advisors for the International Atomic Energy List, which is now the Nuclear Suppliers Group. So all those things you wanted to keep away from Russia and China, there was a thing called CoCom, which was NATO plus Japan, minus Iceland. And we’d meet in a secret place in France and in England and go over all these lists. So one of the jobs that I had with Jim was to work on that International Atomic Energy List, to be sure that we’d try to keep special things away from Russia, so that they couldn’t reprocess materials, or they couldn’t do this, or they didn’t have that, per se. So that was actually kind of fun. And I think that I probably enjoyed Jim as much as anybody that I’ve ever done—he’s retired now. I think I mentioned, he’d be an interesting one to talk to because he gave perhaps the best tour I’ve ever had of going out through the Area and dealing with the old reactors. Anyway, he got us involved in a lot of very interesting, interesting things. Oh, one—do we have time to bring over a picture?
O’Reagan: Yeah, sure.
Cliff: Maybe we can take it. This is just a short picture of some of the things that go on at the HAMMER site in training. These are many of the people who are involved in the training. This particular picture, I think was interesting because we’re holding an eight-kilogram ball of Tungsten, which has the same density as plutonium. As a result, you can see how small that is. So if you’re smuggling, if I’m smuggling drugs, I’m going to have a large area. But for smuggling nuclear materials—the special nuclear materials, you don’t need a lot of space. Where with drugs, you’re going to smuggle it and you’re going to have it where you’re going to have take it open, put it back in, take it open, put it back in. With weapons of mass destruction, you may only make one carry. So it may be completely sealed up. Maybe welded. But the size of the materials that you’re going to be dealing with don’t have to be a lot. Not going too much detail, this is over in Holland, when we were in Holland. You see the big Dutch shoe, there. I don’t know if you can see that or not. Oh, this is nice. This is where we—one of the buildings that was turned over to HAMMER from the State Department. Karen Nicola. Oh, shoot. Jim Spracklen. Jim Spracklen was at DoE for a long time and he really was a blessing for HAMMER. He just has been so supportive of everything at HAMMER. Of course there’s the missile again. Paul Van Son was the State Department person. I believe that this one was where they handed over the State Department building that we took a tour in the other day. So, yeah, at the signing of the turnover here, this is Karen McGinnis, who’s the head of HAMMER, the director of HAMMER, who’s very, very supportive of all these activities.
O’Reagan: Do you know how she became director of HAMMER?
Cliff: No, I don’t.
O’Reagan: We’ll have to see if we can get her in and ask her.
Cliff: Yeah. I’m not sure if I want to show that one too much. This is a picture down in Mexico where we’re putting on a little bit of training for the Mexican National Police. They loaned me their gun. So I look like I know what I’m doing. Anyway, that was some Weapons of Mass Destruction training that we did. This is the interesting picture, to me. This is Eleanor Lusher. This is the lady at Customs Intel in New York that actually started us getting involved in the training aspects of it. And that’s the roofing tar from Venezuela that we went up to inspect. This is an ultrasound system that was put together by Dick Papas and Jim Skorpik at PNNL to evaluate if there was things that were accidentally being left inside of the roofing tar. Roofing tar is an ideal thing, because you can’t go through with an x-ray or anything. So if there’s something inside of it, you can hide it very well and it can get through. Except if you’re using an ultrasound system. Ultrasound goes right on through it. So it’s really kind of interesting. But anyway that’s one of the few pictures we have of Eleanor. And Eleanor, I believe, retired this year—in fact, at the first of the year. But she was central in bringing us a lot of cases. Remember the case we talked about in New York and stuff? That’s where we got it from. Now, I should point out—that’s one of the interesting things that we’ve done over the years. We’ve worked for a lot of different sponsors. We began working with Eleanor here at Customs back then. Of the thousands of customs people that we’ve dealt with, they’ve all been the nicest people you could ever imagine. So, one after the other after the other, very, very nice people to work with. So I guess I take my hat off to Customs and training their people to deal with people on an everyday basis. This is a picture by the missile that’s out there. That’s Bill Gates. He came in. He’s actually kind of excited about seeing the missile. He was actually excited about old Von Braun stories that I told. Anyway, kind of cute. Did you get that picture?
Camera woman: Yeah.
Cliff: Good. During the training, we use a lot of different types of material—training material. This particular one here is actually put out by the Department of Energy, Dr. Noel Medding. If you want to know everything about radiation in a single sheet while you’re eating, this was an ideal training aide. We always tell people at your Thanksgiving you can put this down in front of you and say, well, when Aunt Martha takes her mammogram, she’s going to be receiving so much radiation. And if the conversation dies down, you’ve got something to talk from. This particular one is a radiation playing deck. We always say it’s a field training manual for radiation. It has four chapters, thirteen pages in each chapter, for a total of 52. So each one of them actually gives you a different item on radiation. You didn’t get one the other day.
Camera woman: What’s that?
Cliff: That’s for you.
Camera woman: Oh. Thank you.
Cliff: We also built some other cards which don’t have very many left on, but rather than having hearts, diamonds, clubs and spades as your suits, you had missile, chemical, biological and nuclear. So you had your four Weapons of Mass Destruction as your primary suits. In fact—see if I can open this one up. So each one of these, you’ll deal with the different technologies associated with them: missiles, or chemicals or biologicals. Like this one here says Nuclear Terrorism. If terrorists have it, they will use it. Oops. Well. One of the things we do train on—this is going to be hard to see—the Man Portable Air Defense Systems. Man PADs. We heard about those an awful lot. Two things when we say weapons of mass destruction, we also normally cover Man PADs and we cover radiological dispersal devices—in other words, just casting radioactive material around. Can cause quite a bit of economic damage. Well, maybe I left it in the bag. Oh, for crying out loud. I could have searched that all day long. Okay, here you go. Here’s my two favorite cards. Of course, we have the card with the picture of the SCUD missile coming in. And then we have a card—this is Pat O’Brien, State Department, the one that’s helped with all the buildings. And he and I are over there in Poland, and this is one of the SCUD missile engines that they left in Poland. Most of the SCUDs were destroyed in these countries. State Department let them keep a couple of engines and a couple of missiles, you know, for the museums. That’s kind of embarrassing, huh? This one—special nuclear material signatures. It says gamma and neutron—tells you what plutonium has, and what uranium has. Plutonium has gamma and neutron you’re going to detect, and uranium is going to have the gamma you’re going to detect. But if you play it left-handed, like a left-hand person would, then what you’re going to see is going to be the little nuclear weapon. If you play it like a right-hand person would be, you’d see spades. Okay, these are very special, so be sure and don’t lose them. The cards turned out to be probably one of the best training aids that we had. Because people—you give them this big book, or you give them this disc, people end up not looking at them.
O’Reagan: Mm-hmm.
Cliff: Then the Field Exercise building, which you were in the other day. This actually came as kind of a surprise to me. We’d worked on getting the State Department to support that for a long time. And the State Department always wanted to support it—the Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Fund. But we finally got them to build the building. Then they were going to dedicate the building, and they said Bill, you got to come, you got to come, Bill. And the reason they wanted me to come was because they put my name in there saying—dedicating the building to me. So now I have to make a big deal out of it.
O’Reagan: That’s great.
Cliff: Anyway. You get it all?
Camera Woman: Yup, got it.
Cliff: This is a nice one, because here’s Sam Volpentest. Sam, who as we mentioned, was the thinker behind the HAMMER site. And so there he is, and there I am, showing some of the different sensing units that we have. Remember we talked about the Bulgarian seizure and the people that made that seizure noted around the world? Anyway, there they are. There’s two of the three guys. The other guy had retired. But they came out and gave us a talk. Here’s Jim Spracklen and I. Like I say, Jim is one of them that’s been behind this program forever and now runs the RADACAD program. Really, really a good guy. This is the Dutch. This is Pat O’Brien, and he’s the one that built the Port of Entry Building that we saw the other day, NDF. And he’s the one that sent—oh, just say he’s one that’s provided a lot of the support tools. If we look at it, Customs provided people for training. The Pentagon provided some funding and selected the nations. The State Department provided all kinds of training materials, so all of those—most of those Conex boxes, the big Conex boxes you saw out there, and a lot of the equipment out there were originally purchased by the State Department for our group program. Then this one here is just one of the storyboards. Let’s see what else we got here. Paul Van Son. Of course the famous picture of the missile coming in. The missile was kind of a cute story. I came in, and somewhere or other the local news found out about it. So they had the missile and we were trying to put it into a little building out there. I never even thought about this, but—it was Tri-City Herald, and they had the people there. Next thing I know is they’re cornering me and turning me around to talk to me. Next thing I knew, I turned around and one of the ladies jumped up on the missile and was riding the missile. So it was kind of cute. But they didn’t know if they would be let to do that or not. So this is kind of nice, because you’ve got a nice picture of Sam Volpentest in there. Earlier, we had one of Karen McGinnis, the director of HAMMER. Patty Murray. The HAMMER site’s had all the political people out there, it seems like, for a long time. They stop in. Very supportive.
O’Reagan: Well we can hopefully maybe get a scan of these at some point. If you could maybe bring back in another time, we could get our intern team to scan copies of these. Then we could have a version of them.
Cliff: Yes. You certainly can.
O’Reagan: Great.
Cliff: Well, let me just say, this is one of my favorite ones. This is an Army program for the 120 millimeter Abrams M1 Tank Cannon. And this was a special—very special projectile that we built at PNNL and fired, actually, down at Socorro, New Mexico. But this is what we call a streak camera picture. Normally, when you take a picture you open the shutter and you open it and you get a shot. In this particular case, you got a shutter that’s open and you strip the film across. So depending on how fast you strip the film across, you get a different picture coming out. But the projectile there is going at like a mile a second. So you got to do something pretty fast. So anyway that’s one of my favorite pictures. And this is the only time that this—you can sort of see that the projectile is still exhausting out of here, sort of like a rocket exhaust. And this is the first time that this had ever been accomplished. In 1989. So VAGAS stood for Very high burn rate per pellet And Gas Assisted System. So it was sort of an acronym. You can tell it’s not spelled like the normal Vegas. But I love this picture and in fact I had to run around looking—I had to take this out of my house to bring it in.
O’Reagan: Great.
Cliff: I told my wife, she said it was okay.
O’Reagan: All right, well, thanks so much for being here.
Cliff: Hey, thanks for inviting me. You guys didn’t think you’d get bored to death like this, probably.
Robert Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin, and I am conducting an interview with Linda Davis on May 26th 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. I will be talking to Linda Davis about her experiences growing up in Richland, and her father’s experiences coming to work on the Hanford site. So, Linda, let’s start at the beginning. Why don’t you—you were mentioning earlier, with some of those items you brought which we’ll view later—you were showing us pictures of growing up and your father’s photo when he came here. So I guess why don’t we start with your father coming here.
Linda Davis: My dad had been working in Kansas on I think it was a CCC project. And it came to an end. And they were told very little. Go to Washington. They’re like, right. [LAUGHTER] But my parents had always wanted to get the heck out of Kansas, so they found that this was their escape. And it was during the Depression, so jobs were tough. My dad came out. He was supposed to be coming out with a bunch of friends, and my brother got sick, so he ended up coming out later. He had to—he hopped box cars to get here! [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Wow!
Davis: He rode the rails and hitchhiked. And he got here a few weeks after his friends—a couple weeks after his friends did. They all got the management positions, and he got to be Joe Blow. [LAUGHTER] But he came out in February, March of ’43. He had been working cement. They sent him out with some other guys. They drove all over the whole reservation looking for the right rocks and gravel and sand to make the cement to start pouring B Reactor footings. After he did that, he was there when they poured the footings and that was always one of his—he was always very proud that he was there when they did the footings. Briefly, he was sent over to the extrusion and he was one of the first ones to actually run the machine to extrude the plutonium. Then after a short term there, he went back to B Reactor and became a nuclear operator until he retired.
Franklin: Wow.
Davis: And he was first here in a tent.
Franklin: Okay.
Davis: They supplied these big tents with a stove in the corner. And he says those really weren’t that bad. Then they, quote, moved him to barracks. And he says, those were the pits. They had gaps in the wood. There was just one layer of wood and gaps. So you learned really early on—you woke up in the morning, you shook your head, you wiped your eyes off, because you’re either removing snow or sand. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Wow.
Davis: And he says when he got here off the train, he says, there was as many people getting on the train to leave. And he says, the sands would come in and people were missing their families, and they were leaving in droves. My mom and the kids did not come until fall of ’43. There was no housing at that point in time. They went and lived in Yakima and my mom got a job and dad would commute on his long changes to Yakima to go visit the family. The rest of the time, he’d go stay in the barracks. And when he first got here with some of his friends, they had long lines for the showers. They were like, oh, we don’t want to wait in these stupid shower lines, we’re in a hurry. So him and his friends went—they’re from Kansas, streams there are shallow and warm. They went, there’s this great big river, so they ran down and jumped in the river. And jumped right back out! [LAUGHTER] He said it was so cold! They went and stood in line after that.
Franklin: That’s a great story.
Davis: And my dad played poker and he was well known for his poker playing here. We thought he used to—was just bragging, until when he died and people were coming in and they were going, wow, was he one wicked poker player. They used to be able to play poker on the buses.
Franklin: Really?
Davis: Yeah, you know, an hour ride, they had these little tables they’d set up towards the back and they played poker.
Franklin: Wow.
Davis: He could earn almost as much money playing poker as he could working. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Wow, that’s great. So how long was it before your mother and—so you weren’t born yet at the time.
Davis: No! [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: So how long was it before your mother and the rest of your family were able to move to the Tri-Cities?
Davis: They stayed in Yakima for about a year and a half. And then they moved—their first house was a A house on MacPherson, which was just finished and they ended up having to go to a hotel the first night, because it was freshly painted, and it made them all sick because it was still wet. [LAUGHTER] They were kind of unusual because they had their own furniture that they had brought from Kansas. Most people came and they had—everybody had the same bed, dresser, everything was supplied. But they had a lot of their own furniture that they brought from Kansas. So they would have been here—let’s see, he came out in ’43, ’44—early ’45 is when they got their first house--
Franklin: Wow.
Davis: --in the Tri-Cities. During that time, Dad had commuted back and forth.
Franklin: Wow. And you said that your mom was working in Yakima. What kind of work was she doing?
Davis: She was a receptionist in a doctor’s office.
Franklin: Okay.
Davis: She was telling me—oh, just a few years ago, she was telling me that she was working, and people had been displaced and all the, quote, riffraff was coming in, and people looked really down on the people like them who were coming in. She was working in a doctor’s office, so nobody really thought about it, so they were a lot of times just talking, and some ladies got real snippy about, well, you got all this riffraff coming in and these lowlifes and stuff. And she just looked up and said, oh, well I’m one of those. [LAUGHTER] But they were really looked down on, because people didn’t know why they had been displaced. And they didn’t know why all these people were coming from all over the country.
Franklin: Right, because they hadn’t—
Davis: Nobody was allowed to know anything. So there was a lot of anger, and a lot of looking down their noses at people that had come into the Hanford Project.
Franklin: Do you think maybe some class conflict? Or maybe people they had perceived as Dust Bowl type people--?
Davis: Dust Bowl type people, because a lot of them came—Kansas, Oklahoma supplied a lot of the workers out here, because the word had gotten around, go to Washington, go to Washington. They didn’t know why, just go to Washington, you’ll find a job. You’ve got crummy farming, a lot of them just packed up and left. And they showed up. Then the, quote, natives of the area who had felt that they had been here for a significant amount of time really did look down on all these strangers coming in. It was—they would look like refugees to them. Because a lot of them came with homemade trailers and, literally their own tents if they couldn’t find a place to live.
Franklin: And they hopped boxcars.
Davis: And they hopped boxcars to get here! [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Wow, that’s really interesting. So, earlier you mentioned that your family had lived in a lot of different houses early on or kind of gone all over. So can you talk about that? Those early years of being in Richland.
Davis: You were assigned houses by what kind of job you had and how many children you had. You could apply to get a different house. And for all sorts of different reasons—my mother liked to move, I think, because a lot of it—she always liked to move. And Dad went along with it. They lived in ranch houses, F houses, A houses—they sneakily got into an H house, which they didn’t qualify for. You couldn’t—weren’t supposed to get into any housing unless it’s written out by the government that you could. They traded with somebody who wanted something—they wanted like the A house. They were in an H house and Mom and Dad said, oh, we’d like the H. So they traded without telling the government.
Franklin: Ooh.
Davis: That lasted six months. [LAUGHTER] Then they had to move again. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: So the H houses were bigger then? I’m not quite up on all of the—
Davis: They have a basement; they have one floor. They were probably better made. They were nicer houses than like the A. But the one people were having more kids or something. I can’t remember why they wanted to change. But Mom and Dad sneakily did it, then they sneakily had to slink out [LAUGHTER] when they were told they had to leave.
Franklin: Wow. Yeah, one thing I’ve heard around here is that basements in those early years were pretty rare.
Davis: What basements you had, like in the A houses, B houses, F houses, they were dirt. I’ve been in them when they hadn’t been changed yet. It’s basically a dirt floor, you walk down the stairs and then you’re there. Then there’s like this raised cement block area. Well, that’s where they’d dump the coal into. They would come with these trucks and dump the coal in. You just had enough room to go down there and shovel coal. They were pretty gross. [LAUGHTER] But I remember Mom and Dad, though, said everything was supplied. You had no utilities, they brought your coal—you had to call and ask for a lightbulb to be changed. You were not allowed to do it yourself. [LAUGHTER] Totally government.
Franklin: Yeah, that’s a lot like here. You have to put in a facilities request to do that.
Davis: Yeah, well, they had to—she goes, a lightbulb? Like, we can’t change your own? Oh, no. But she says they were really Johnny-on-the-spot.
Franklin: Really?
Davis: Yeah. They’d call and say, you know, lightbulb in the bathroom burned out. Oh! We’ll be right there!
Franklin: Wow, so it would have been a whole department of people.
Davis: There was a whole department of people who were doing that. If you were not working at Hanford or what they called support, like supplying the oil and changing the lightbulbs, a grocery store, pharmacist or something, you were not allowed to live here.
Franklin: Right.
Davis: And if you were, like, married and your husband—one of their friends that happened—dropped dead of a heart attack, she was given 48 hours to leave with her kids. They were kind of severe at times. But it was super safe. Kids could run and play. If your kid got in trouble, you could lose your job. That was—I remember my dad always holding that over my brothers. [LAUGHTER] If you get in trouble, I can lose my job and we’ll have to leave.
Franklin: Wow.
Davis: So kids were good; they didn’t have a choice. If you had a kid who became a juvenile delinquent, then you could lose your job and given 24 hours to leave town.
Franklin: Did you know of any incidences of that happening?
Davis: My parents talked about it, but I didn’t have names or—you know. Just somebody that they knew, their kids had been a real pain—and he ended up I think keeping his job, but he had to move to Kennewick. He couldn’t stay in government. He managed to beg and plead and keep his job, but he had to leave town.
Franklin: So they were not only kind of controlled the work site, but they also really controlled the fabric of the community as well.
Davis: To the point where they had—after leaving Richland, and living elsewhere and now in Kennewick, you realize the layers are like military layers. And it’s taken a long time for that to kind of break down. You had your echelons, just like in the military. They even went so far as to tell people, you are in this job and you’re in this job, and you’re not supposed to communicate. They may have grown up together in some Podunk place in the Midwest, known each other since childhood, but, all of the sudden, oh, you’re not supposed to talk to each other? [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Right, so kind of like that difference between commissioned officers—
Davis: And a non-com.
Franklin: Non-com.
Davis: Yeah. Oh, you’re more of a commissioned, you’re too high up and you can’t talk to the lower echelon.
Franklin: Right, scientists don’t talk to janitors and so forth.
Davis: Yeah.
Franklin: That’s really interesting. Did your mom work after—
Davis: Yes, she worked at Dr. Ellner’s office, urologist here in town. She worked there for—I don’t know—from the time I was about nine, eight—I guess I was about eight when she started working there. So that would have been ’62.
Franklin: Okay. And so then you would be born in ’54.
Davis: Mm-hmm.
Franklin: ’54. Okay.
Davis: Part of that big baby boom.
Franklin: Yeah. And how many siblings do you have?
Davis: Three.
Franklin: Okay. And were any of them—did any of them move to Richland from—so your parents came, your father came out in ’43, and then your family came out in the fall. When were your siblings born?
Davis: They were born all in Kansas.
Franklin: Okay.
Davis: And so they were born in ’37, ’40, and ’41.
Franklin: So you’re the real baby of the bunch.
Davis: Oh, yeah. I was the surprise. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Ah. I think we all are in some way.
Davis: Oh, I was—my mom was 41, so yeah, I was a shock.
Franklin: Wow, yeah, that is quite a surprise. So tell me—then you would have been born then when Richland was still a government town.
Davis: Right.
Franklin: So tell me about growing up, like maybe from your earliest memories on. What was it like to—do you have any early memories of before—while Richland was still a government town?
Davis: Yeah, I have a lot of memories from really early. My brother and I seem to both have the brains from early, early. The other two go, I don’t remember anything then. [LAUGHTER] They don’t really remember anything until after they’re five! One of the things that always struck me was, as a kid, driving through town and they had that asbestos siding that you had a green house or this dark reddish house. They all kind of looked the same. I know my sister one time accidentally ended up in the wrong house after school. And one of Mom’s best friends came in and found some guy sleeping in her bed. He was on leave from the Army and he had gotten in the wrong house. But they all looked the same. And people had the same furniture.
Franklin: Right.
Davis: So my sister went in and says, like, the living room furniture, I think, was all the same. And she says, she came home, put her papers down and then went out and played. Then came back later and went, Mom keeps moving the furniture! [LAUGHTER] She says she has no idea which house she went into.
Franklin: Wow.
Davis: Yeah, they had basically—I remember the green and the red. There might have been—and then there was some blue. And then they had like a cream color with them. So like the A houses would have been light colored on the top and then the red on the bottom. Or cream and—there was like three choices. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Right. It’s like the Model T. You can get it in black or black.
Davis: Right. Yeah, this was—and you didn’t have a choice what color it was. And I guess when they first moved in, besides the paint being wet, they literally handed them a ten-pound bag of grass seed and said, plant your yard! Have fun! [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Wow. That’s great. So, how about any memories that stand out from your early childhood or early life in Richland? I remember, earlier you mentioned that before we started taping, that your family had bought one of the first commercially available houses.
Davis: Spec home.
Franklin: Spec home. What year was that?
Davis: 1960.
Franklin: Okay, so you would have been about six years old then.
Davis: Right. That was just before I was six, yeah.
Franklin: And what was that like, to be in one of these?
Davis: You—
Franklin: New, new, new homes.
Davis: Because of the class thing going on, I was not considered—and then shortly after they started building this North Richland area—I always felt like I didn’t fit in. I didn’t fit in with the kids in the, quote, government houses.
Franklin: Okay.
Davis: My house was basically a ranch house. We had hardwood floors instead of tiles. And we had a one-car garage, ooh, ahh. [LAUGHTER] But it really wasn’t—it was just a three-bedroom ranch. One bathroom and a one-car garage. And then all the scientists and the people making more money and the doctors started building into North Richland. And I didn’t fit in with them, either, because they went, oh, you’re in that little house. It was kind of like feeling like you didn’t fit in anywhere. Because I wasn’t in a government house, and a lot of the government houses were way bigger than the house we were in.
Franklin: Huh.
Davis: But I remember saying—one of the first memories in that house was—they’d moved us in—oh, they’d never allow it nowadays. Moved us in, we had no water. So the firemen came and hooked up to a fire hydrant about a block and a half away. [LAUGHTER] And then it ran into a garden hose, and it was February, and like below zero. So you always had to have water running in the bathtub to keep the little garden house. And if froze up, all the neighbors would come out and jump up and down on it, breaking the ice up. But nowadays you wouldn’t be able to move into a house without full running water.
Franklin: Right, right. Wow. That’s fabulous.
Davis: And then when we were first there—we were the very first ones sold. The others were having open houses. And we’d be sitting there having like a family get-together, and people start walking in our house. Oh, this one’s not open! No. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: And then that of course touched off a boom, though, right, in house construction in Richland.
Davis: Right. North Richland, I remember we used to sit at our kitchen table and look out and watch all the houses going up, and here are all the—for years, you could see new houses and hear hammering every morning. North Richland just really took off because everybody started building their own.
Franklin: Right.
Davis: A lot of people went ahead and bought their original house from the government, but my parents—I don’t know, they fell—my dad fell in love with this house. My mother hated it. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: How long did they live at that house?
Davis: We lived there 13 years.
Franklin: Okay. So they really do like to move around a lot.
Davis: That’s like mom’s record, yeah. Her last move was with us and she had to live with us ten years without moving before she died. [LAUGHTER] But generally, about—when my siblings were growing up, they got used to moving every six months to a year and a half. And they went to every single school in Richland.
Franklin: Wow. Well, I guess they know a pretty big cross-section of the community, then.
Davis: They were always—when you talk to different people, they’re like, oh yeah, so-and-so, and I go, oh yeah, my parents were their neighbors. And somebody else would say, oh yeah, they were their neighbors, too. Like Garmo who owned one of the grocery stores. All these different people, they were their neighbors at some point in time. Probably Johnson, who was the photographer for the area. He was a good friend and I’m still in recent contact with his daughter.
Franklin: Right.
Davis: But pretty much, if you lived in Richland for any length of time, my parents were your neighbor at some point. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: That’s great. So when did your father retire from Hanford?
Davis: I was married, so—when did he retire? I got married in ’74, so I’m trying to remember exactly. ’75 or ’76, something like that.
Franklin: Oh, wow, so he was on—did he have any gaps in employment, or did he work onsite since 1943?
Davis: He worked onsite that whole time.
Franklin: Wow, and so what did—
Davis: Except for the six-week strike they had. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Oh, well tell me about that.
Davis: I don’t even remember what it was about. I was in junior high. They had a strike which my dad was not in favor of, but he wouldn’t break union line. So he was on strike. During that time, he says, oh well, I’ll make the best of it, so he built a family room onto our house. [LAUGHTER] And got hooked on soap operas.
Franklin: Wow.
Davis: He used to make fun of Mom wanting to watch her soap opera, and then when he went back to work, he’d come home from work and go, what happened with—[LAUGHTER] But they were only on strike for like six weeks.
Franklin: And do you remember what the strike was about at all?
Davis: I don’t remember what it was about. Like I say, it was in junior high. It was—
Franklin: Do you think you can give me kind of a date range so we could try to find something about that?
Davis: That would have been in the late ‘60s? Somewhere in—yeah. It wasn’t a very long strike, but it was the first one that I know of that they had. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Was that site wide, do you remember?
Davis: Yeah, it was site wide. I wish I remembered what it was, but in junior high you don’t pay attention to stuff like that. Yeah, Dad’s on strike, well, so is everybody else’s dad, so—
Franklin: All you know is that he’s camped out on the couch watching soap operas.
Davis: No, he was busy building the family room.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Davis: He literally put a whole addition on the back of the house. So that’s what he was doing during his six weeks.
Franklin: Still worked. So you mentioned that he had been kind of a construction guy and then had worked at the separation plant, right, and then worked in the B Reactor. So what other jobs did he have?
Davis: He went from B Reactor, when they closed it down, then he went to K. And then he kept saying, oh, I sure hope they don’t ever send me to N. That’s where he ended up. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Yeah?
Davis: He was always—he liked his B Reactor. Just the way the others were set up and they were different, he liked his B Reactor.
Franklin: He got comfortable—
Davis: But he ended up at N Reactor anyway. That’s where he retired from.
Franklin: Oh, wow. And what did he do at—
Davis: He was a reactor operator. He was—yeah, from after construction, he was a reactor operator.
Franklin: So it seems like a really big career jump, from construction to—
Davis: Yeah, but they didn’t—nobody knew what they were doing exactly.
Franklin: Right.
Davis: So it’s learn-as-you-go. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Yeah, I bet.
Davis: My dad—I remember him—it was really neat to go on the B Reactor tour, because it was probably the 70s before he ever even talked about what it looked like or anything. I never knew what it looked like. But he started—in the 70s was able to start feeling comfortable—I mean, it wasn’t classified or anything then. But the guys had just been used to not talking about it.
Franklin: Well, yeah, I mean secrecy.
Davis: But he started describing the panels and stuff. And there was this office behind him, and he says—during World War II—he says, the crazy Italian in the silk suits sat back there. And then he’d go get crapped up, is when they’d get contaminated and they’d have to take his silk suits away and burn them. I didn’t realize it until after Dad was gone, when he was talking about the crazy Italian in the silk suits, that was Fermi.
Franklin: Yeah.
Davis: Sitting behind my dad! [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Wow, that’s amazing.
Davis: But he never said his name. He never said his name. Just the crazy Italian in the silk suits.
Franklin: But, of course he probably would have known his name.
Davis: Oh, during World War II, they didn’t.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Davis: So that’s how—I think they just referred to him as the crazy Italians with the silk suits. Because they literally did not know their names. He was the guy who sat back there, and he’d go into places they weren’t allowed to go to. And he wasn’t really supposed to, but he’d go in and tinker. Then they’d check him for radiation and go, eh, those clothes—I remember, one of my early memories is being in grade school and my dad getting off the bus, because everybody rode the buses to work. They were just like clockwork and super on—I mean super on time. And I remember coming out of the house, and my dad’s getting off the bus in the afternoon and—I guess I was heading to school. He’s coming down—my dad was only five-foot-six. And he’s got a pair of pants that he’s holding up around his armpits, and a shirt that’s probably was past his knees rolled up to his—and clomping along in these shoes that don’t fit. He had gotten crapped up at work.
Franklin: Oh.
Davis: And he ended up—one of his friends who was like six-foot-six had some extra clothes. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, he’s like, you know, when you get your clothes crapped up, you lose your clothes.
Franklin: Right.
Davis: Even your underwear. [LAUGHTER] So he’s coming home with—[LAUGHTER] I still remember—luckily we only lived like a half block from where the bus dropped him off. But I thought, that had to be a little uncomfortable at work, walking around like that.
Franklin: Yeah, no kidding.
Davis: Trying to hold these. Yeah, Trawler, he was six-five, six-six. He was a tall guy, skinny. But Dad was only five-foot-six. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Wow, that’s a great story. So there’s some—a couple of the big events that we always ask people about and one of them is Kennedy’s visit to the N Reactor in 1963. Did you—were you—
Davis: Both my parents were working.
Franklin: They were both working, so—
Davis: [LAUGHTER] I didn’t have any way to get there. I wanted to go, but my parents, oh, it’s going to be a big crowd. They didn’t like crowds.
Franklin: Right.
Davis: So, yeah, I didn’t get to go. They were both working. So I heard about it from my friends. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Your friends who went?
Davis: Yeah, I had friends who went.
Franklin: Awesome.
Davis: And they still remember it, and I’m going, oh, I didn’t get to go.
Franklin: Ah, you were busy. So any other major—any other big events that kind of stick out at you in Richland, growing up in Richland or maybe even a little later?
Davis: Ah, let’s see, what were the events? They always had their fire parade, their fire prevention parades. That was when you were a kid and you got to decorate your bike and ride down the road.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Davis: G Way, and they had—when I was really little, there was like Frontier Days or some other parade that we had. And then one of the big thrills was in the spring, they would bring in, quote, well, we’d call them travel trailers now, but they were the early mobile homes that were like eight-foot-wide and 12 feet long. And they’d set them up in the Uptown Richland parking lot. You’d go look through them and go, oh, aren’t these cool. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: They brought them up for sale?
Davis: Yeah, you know how they do car shows now in parking lots? Well, they’d bring these little mobile—[LAUGHTER] little dinky mobile homes. Which nowadays, I says, my fifth wheel’s bigger [LAUGHTER] than these, quote, homes that you’re supposed to live in.
Franklin: I could imagine for some of the people who had been here in the early days that those might have given them some flashbacks to the trailer camps or—
Davis: Yeah, my parents didn’t live in the trailer camps, but they had a lot of friends who did. And one of my best friends, her parents had built—they had no place to live, so they built their own trailer and lived down at the Y. It was a homemade, and it was really little with three kids. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Wow. That’s amazing. So did you end up staying in Richland, then—did you ever move out of the Tri-Cities?
Davis: We went to the Chicago area, and we were gone—I didn’t leave until I got married.
Franklin: Okay.
Davis: My husband went to Pullman for a year and then we went to Chicago. We were gone about nine years and then came back and raised our kids here.
Franklin: Oh, okay. And so what brought you back to the—
Davis: Family. My parents were here, my dad’s health was failing, and I had just lost my father-in-law. So we kind of wanted the kids to get the chance to know their grandparents, because my husband’s parents were both gone. So, family. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Oh, wow.
Davis: And good memories of being growing up here.
Franklin: Sure, sure.
Davis: Versus Chicago. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: So, what would you—is there anything you would like future generations to know about growing up—like kind of the experience growing up in Richland, or what it would have been like to be so close to Hanford? To help them understand what that would be like.
Davis: Growing up with my dad, the guys and women who worked out there, they were proud of what they did. Yes, bombs, they all agreed, the bomb is nasty. But in the long run it probably saved millions of lives on both sides. Because Japan was willing to fight ‘til the last man, which would have been millions of more lives lost. And if they would have gotten the bomb first, we’d be speaking Japanese. [LAUGHTER] I think there’s an overall pride—and my husband and I were just talking about this last year, that what was accomplished at Hanford would never be able to be done today. Back then, the old—they had all the signs, loose lips sink ships. My husband says, well, it’d been sunk long—they couldn’t have even gotten the first thing done before it would have been out in the open. Nowadays I don’t think they could pull it off. And people knew they weren’t supposed to talk about it. My dad—my mom said when they were living in Yakima, my dad, he had read about the reactor—splitting the atom in the Collier’s magazine before the war. They were going to go get the magazine and look it up. They never got around to it. Found out if you asked about that magazine, you were fired.
Franklin: Wow.
Davis: So they learned not to say anything. They handed some uranium around and my dad by the weight, he said, it wasn’t very big but he knew by the weight what it was. And he started to say something, and his boss says, don’t. And later he says if you would’ve said it, I would’ve had to have fired you on the spot. I mean, you just knew that if you said anything—so he whispered it to my mom one night, under—they were sure that there were microphones everywhere. So even though they were living in Yakima, he would put a pillow over them. And he says, I think we’re making the bomb.
Franklin: Really?
Davis: And my mom kind of went, pfft. Sure you are. [LAUGHTER] And then my mom didn’t know—said they didn’t really know what it was until my brother came home from school and all the kids and everybody was going, we dropped the bomb, we dropped the bomb.
Franklin: Wow.
Davis: But I think there’s a pride in what they did. It was very secretive and when you realize that everybody was doing their little part, and they didn’t know what the other parts were. I mean, it’d be like trying to tell somebody to put a car together. Here, you have this screw, put it somewhere—and only that one. And you don’t really know what’s going on. It was really amazing what they pulled off.
Franklin: Yeah.
Davis: And I think they—all the men and women who worked out there were really proud of what they did. And I think it went on to their families to feel proud of what they did. Yeah, the bomb’s not a nice thing, but where we would have been without it?
Franklin: Right. What about later in the Cold War, after, and all the other things that were produced—all the other bombs that were produced? Do you think that added or ever shifted and change, or—especially in the late 60s with the protests?
Davis: Yeah, in the ‘60s, my dad used to get to work with Dixy Lee Ray periodically and they’d sit and talk. And he always kept saying, you know, we’ve kept it so quiet and we keep it so hush-hush. He says, we’re past that point now, we need to educate people on nuclear power and get away from the—people, and I still talk to people, especially not from around here, when you’re in other states, they cannot separate power from bomb. To them, it’s all one thing. There is no power, it’s just a bomb. And it’s like, no, you can have nuclear power and not have a bomb. And he kept saying, we need to educate—and I remember learning stuff about it in school here. Cousins and stuff back east, they never learned anything about it. They knew nothing about nuclear power, nuclear fission—nothing. [LAUGHTER] I think the sad part is that they didn’t do more educating, they just—they lived too long in that shroud of secrecy, and didn’t spread the knowledge.
Franklin: Right. So you think, maybe it was—even though everybody knew after ’45 what was—and that they were continuing to produced, there was maybe a missed opportunity there.
Davis: And throughout the ‘50s it was still—you didn’t talk about it.
Franklin: Right, the fear, the specter of international communism.
Davis: Right, even though war was over with the bombs, everybody knows about it, it still was a hush-hush. Yeah, I think they missed an opportunity on education. And people just grew up fearing it and not understanding anything about—hey, this could be a decent power source.
Franklin: Right.
Davis: Taking Chernobyl out as a factor. [LAGUHTER] That was a poorly designed—
Franklin: There’s also Three Mile and other—certainly when a lot of people on the East Coast found about nuclear power first—
Davis: Yeah, they learned about it when it wasn’t—sometimes it was a poor design to start with. Well, when we lived in Chicago, there’s the Indiana Dunes. They were trying to build one on the Dunes. They didn’t even have any bedrock to sink it into. And we’re going, you know, they’re dunes? They kind of like, don’t stay put? [LAUGHTER] When we left there, they were still trying to do it. And we’re like, that doesn’t even make sense. So then there was a lot of stupid mistakes, too, that—yeah, you got to think about all the safety part.
Franklin: Right. But it seems kind of hard sometimes to separate the secrecy even from the—there’s so much [INAUDIBLE].
Davis: Do you know, through even the mid ‘60s there was still tremendous secrecy. Mid and late ‘60s. You still, living here, felt like, you know, it was hush-hush.
Franklin: But I imagine with the government owning the town until the late ‘50s that certainly you would keep that element of—that kind of vibe alive.
Davis: Yeah, and pretty much the same people who were here when the government released the town—when I graduated from high school, what, were there 9,000 people in Richland? That was in ’72. So a good chunk of those people were ones who were still here from World War II.
Franklin: Right, and you lived in Richland the whole time, from when you were growing up, when you were born.
Davis: Mm-hm.
Franklin: So did you ever go to the other two cities much?
Davis: Oh, yeah! Downtown Pasco was one of the best places to shop!
Franklin: Oh really?
Davis: Oh, it had the classy stores!
Franklin: Really?
Davis: Oh, yeah. It was a major trek, but you’d go to downtown Pasco to go shopping. Well, that was a big day shopping, because they had the fancier ladies’ stores, they had shoe stores, they had the pet shop!
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Davis: And they had a big drug store, and furniture stores and you could spend a whole day in, quote, Downtown Pasco! [LAUGHTER] That was a classy place to go. And then the old downtown Kennewick was—that was more functional. It had Penney’s and Sears and stuff, you know. Not Sears—what was it? I can’t remember the name of the store. But when you needed fireplace stuff or a stove or something.
Franklin: So like a Woolworth’s or something like that.
Davis: Yeah, but there were several stores. And there was the hardware store that’s still there.
Franklin: Yeah, the—
Davis: Kennewick Hardware is still there. It was there when I was little. I think one of the big things you remember is like going there in three feet of snow because our stove had caught fire. We had to buy a new stove. Back then you could leave your kid in the car, and I was tired of going in and out of stores, and sitting there in the car. I was probably about four. Mom was just inside, you know, ordering a stove and we got a chinook. Within like the time that they took them to order their stove and come out, I watched the snow leave. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Wow.
Davis: Totally fascinating. It was gurgling and stuff, but wow. That’s one thing about this area, you get chinooks. When you talk about it in Chicago, they go, huh? [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Yeah. Wow, that’s really interesting. Did you have any friends from the other cities, or did you mostly—
Davis: My parents’ best friends moved to Kennewick, which was my sister’s best friend—it started out with my sister’s best friend who they lived kitty-corner from us when I was born, and then our parents met and became best friends, and then her younger sister and I are best friends, and we’re each other’s kids’ godparents. But they—when I was about three or four, they moved to Kennewick to a new house. [LAUGHTER] And then he commuted. He had to drive out to work because he couldn’t—the buses didn’t go to Kennewick; they were only in Richland.
Franklin: So there was still a lot of inducement, then, to stay in Richland.
Davis: Yeah, you didn’t have to get that second car, because you’d just walk—most of the guys didn’t walk more than a block or two to get to the bus.
Franklin: Wow.
Davis: I mean, these buses were everywhere.
Franklin: Yeah, at the project offices, we have a map—I think it’s from the very early ‘80s but even then they were still running buses, and yeah, they’d go all—
Davis: They go everywhere and nobody walked more than two blocks from their house to a bus.
Franklin: That’s [INAUDIBLE].
Davis: So you only had to have one car. Even when my mom was working, she got the car to go to work and Dad rode the bus. Wasn’t any problem.
Franklin: Right. I bet that would help instill a certain sense of camaraderie, because you’d ride the bus with these guys, and it’s not like today when you get in a car and you’re kind of in this bubble—you have a radio, but you’re kind of in a bubble. Whereas in a bus, everyday, you--
Davis: Well, we lived there, where—the change between the government town and the newer part of town. So you had people like Dad—you’ve got nuclear operators, you had janitors and you had the scientists, all on the same bus. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Wow.
Davis: I mean, everybody rode the bus. When the bus would come, there’d always be five or six guys standing out down there. And a bunch would get off and a bunch would get on.
Franklin: So after the changeover, it was still the site that operated all the buses.
Davis: Mm-hm.
Franklin: Did they have to pay for that, or was that just a perk?
Davis: That was just—yeah, they just paid for it. I mean, the government paid for it—nobody else could ride the buses, only the workers and they only went to and from work. They weren’t for like the families to go shopping or anything. It was just for the workers. And, yeah, they just got on the buses and they knew they were going to be there.
Franklin: When did bus service start in the area for other people living in Richland?
Davis: It had to have been after—as soon as they started building houses.
Franklin: Okay.
Davis: Because these guys had to get to work—
Franklin: Right. Oh, no, sorry—
Davis: And most people back then, you had tire vouchers and stuff—you couldn’t like get tires overnight. You couldn’t even get bananas without a doctor’s prescription. [LAUGHTER] My siblings were skinny, so Mom always ended up with a prescription for bananas.
Franklin: Wow.
Davis: Yeah, they had to write doctor’s prescriptions. So getting a second car wasn’t even really an option. So they started the bus service really early, just getting these guys out to work as they started building the home.
Franklin: Wow. So you brought in some documents and things. Would you like to—
Davis: Where’d we put them? [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: I think it’d be really interesting to get those on video and to have you talk about some of those.
Davis: All right. They’re not super exciting. This is my dad’s birth certificate. The City of Miller which never was officially a city, in Lyon, Kansas. My father’s records were in the courthouse along with three generations of family records, and it burned down when he was about seven. So he had no birth certificate. And not too long after he started working here, they asked for his birth certificate—that he needed to get it. And he says, I don’t have one. So this is his newer birth certificate that they issued in May of ’42. He came in February so to May he had to get it. They sent an FBI agent out who interviewed his father, his uncle who raised him—his mother died when he was born so his uncle raised him—and his aunt. And they also used an insurance policy that was issued when he was 20 to verify that he was him.
Franklin: Wow.
Davis: So not everybody has all these affidavits and stuff at the bottom of their birth certificate, but this was from the FBI being able to verify. My great aunt was like, that was the weirdest thing. [LAUGHTER] Because back there, you just don’t have government people.
Franklin: Right. So they would have been out to the small town in Kansas, then.
Davis: Out in the middle of nowhere.
Franklin: To ask questions about her nephew.
Davis: That was one thing growing up in Richland. You were so used to the FBI coming to your door at least once a month, because everybody had different cycles for their clearances. They would always come to your door and ask, are they part of your—do they drink, do they do that? We talked to them all the time. It was never any big deal, because always somebody in your neighborhood was renewing their certification—their clearance. When I lived in Chicago, they came about somebody who was going to work for the Tennessee Valley Authority. It was my neighbor. My neighbors all slammed the door in their face. I talked to the guy, I opened the door, and I go, oh, yeah! It was security clearance. He goes, you’re the first one who’d talk to me. [LAUGHTER] I says, did it all the time when I was growing up.
Franklin: Wow.
Davis: But it scares a lot of people.
Franklin: Yeah.
Davis: But I think they thought it was a little—because the war’s going on, they don’t know what’s going on and here’s these FBI people wanting to know about my dad. I think they’re going, what’s he doing?
Franklin: Yeah, is he a spy?
Davis: Yeah, did he get in trouble? And they’re not allowed to tell them anything. So they thought it was very, very strange when these suited men showed up.
Franklin: That’s great, that’s a great story. And it’s great to have the documentation here to—
Davis: You’ve already seen a million flood pictures.
Franklin: Well, that’s still a pretty—very scarring event for a lot of people, I bet.
Davis: Yeah, this was the flood of ’48. It came within a few blocks of where my parents were living at the time. Don’t ask which street that was back then, because they moved so much. But this was just a family picture of the Flood of ’48 that was so devastating. And then they put the dyke in.
Franklin: Right.
Davis: Here is—well, this one’s tiny. This is just a picture of any summer day in Richland. Everybody had kids. Most the families were young, so there was lots of kids. It was just—even when I was growing up was the same way in the ‘60s. There was kids everywhere. Riding bikes and running between houses, and you came in when the street lights came on.
Franklin: And I imagine not a lot of elderly people in Richland, right? And so that must have—because you would have had grandparents, but they would have been far away, or they wouldn’t be living in town. Whereas in Kennewick and Pasco people might have more extended families living near them.
Davis: Right. My grandmother came here to live with Mom and Dad not too long before she died. But, yeah, grandparents—if you were retired you couldn’t live in Richland.
Franklin: Right, right.
Davis: If you were not working for Hanford, you didn’t live there. So, yeah, there weren’t old people and most of the construction workers who came were young and all had young families.
Franklin: Wow.
Davis: So there were kids pouring out of every house.
Franklin: Yeah.
Davis: So this is—how many kids are in just—this is Mom and Dad’s front yard. And the kids played ball together, they ran and played tag. There were no fences, so all the backs of the yards were like one big yard.
Franklin: Wow. And probably still not a lot of trees at that time.
Davis: Not really.
Franklin: And when—can we look at this photo on the back?
Davis: This was 1948. So that’s only three years after the war. So, yeah, the trees are still—if you look around, you don’t see any trees.
Franklin: Right. Wow.
Davis: And here’s another one. This one would be—let’s see. This’d be ’46. No trees. There’s a bush. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: And this is one of your sisters?
Davis: This is my sister. Yeah. First day of kindergarten. But what I brought it for was the A house. See, they had the dark color on top—this one, I’m guessing, is probably the red one. And then the cream. They were all like that, they were all bicolored. We had cream and then one of the other three choices. You had green, red, and blue. That was it.
Franklin: Right.
Davis: The government supplied the paint. This is the house that I grew up in on Newcomer. It was the first spec house sold. We’re still getting our water lines.
Franklin: Wow.
Davis: And my dog, Tippy. This isn’t the garage anymore; somebody’s changed it out. But we had—it was really fresh and new.
Franklin: And this was 1960?
Davis: ’60. Yeah, February of ’60 is when we moved in.
Franklin: Wow.
Davis: Mom says January of ‘60. I always think it was February but oh well. Halfway through kindergarten, I had to change schools. My siblings went, so? Because they had to change schools all the time.
Franklin: Yeah, not a lot of sympathy for you, I bet.
Davis: And this is my dad getting an award for what they called the Christmas Tree, which was the front of the reactor that had lights—indicator lights on it. I don’t know if it says exactly what he—just came up, yeah.
Franklin: He’s D. D. Smith?
Davis: Most people called him D. D. or Smitty. His named was Derald.
Franklin: Derald.
Davis: Derald. Like Gerald but with a D. Let’s see. Yeah, he was considered a pile operator. $185 was his award, which—like I said, that was a lot of money.
Franklin: A couple weeks’ wages, probably.
Davis: At least two or three weeks’ worth of wages. So that was a really big thing. Yeah, something about modifying the lights or something so they were easier to read. Apparently they thought it was a good idea. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Wow. Do you know when that was? Was that during the war? Was this—
Davis: Since my dad never looked any different over a 40- or 50-year period, I’m not sure what date is on this. What was funny is on the back, I found my friend’s dad’s name on it. [LAUGHTER] And I went, oh! I’m kind of guessing this might be the ‘50s?
Franklin: Okay.
Davis: Early ‘60s? I’m looking at the ties.
Franklin: No, that’s good.
Davis: They had a paper that came out of the Areas. That was in that paper—the Area paper was a little fold-up.
Franklin: Yeah, we have a bound collection of a lot of the Hanford GE News and a lot of that. Let’s see this here.
Davis: 1944. This is my dad’s card for the International Union of Operating Engineers.
Franklin: Okay.
Davis: And that was December of ’44.
Franklin: Wow.
Davis: So this is still during the war.
Franklin: Yeah!
Davis: And this is the other part of the same thing, the International Union of Operating Engineers. Came out of Spokane. Got stamped; I guess for going to meetings. No, his dues, his dues and going to meetings.
Franklin: Makes sense.
Davis: Whoops. This isn’t for my dad; this is for my grandmother. I need to go show Kadlec this. [LAUGHTER] My grandmother got cancer and was in Kadlec Hospital for six weeks before she died.
Franklin: Okay.
Davis: Here’s the total of her bill. $386.15.
Franklin: Wow.
Davis: The operating room cost $8.
Franklin: Wow.
Davis: Anesthesia was $10. It cost more.
Franklin: Wow.
Davis: Lab, dressings—yeah, and she was there for six weeks before she died.
Franklin: Six weeks.
Davis: And that’s her bill. This bill was—yeah, written on the day she died.
Franklin: Okay. And what date was that?
Davis: 1946.
Franklin: Oh, okay. So she moved in, then, pretty soon after the war ended?
Davis: Yeah, and she moved to—
Hungate: And it’s billed through DuPont.
Davis: Yup. Oh, even I—I didn’t even notice that. DuPont.
Franklin: DuPont.
Davis: I don’t know of many people still have a bill from 1946.
Franklin: No. That’s a very interesting bill, though.
Davis: What is this one? Oh, this is just really bad pictures that they took—every year they had to have their pictures renewed. [LAUGHTER] That was—that had to have been a windy day, because his hair’s sticking up all over.
Franklin: Right, well, like you said earlier, they had thousands upon thousands of men to process.
Davis: Yeah, it’s like while you’re at work, and it’s just like get your picture taken, click, and you’re done.
Franklin: And this, on the front it says GE so—
Davis: Yeah, that would have been from after GE took over. I’d say from that picture from the ‘60s.
Franklin: Wow.
Davis: What’s this one? Just a few little odd things I found in Mom’s—oh, just—from February of 1942, The University of Kansas School of Engineering and Architecture, Engineering Defense Training Program from—his certificate.
Franklin: Wow.
Davis: Yeah, this is—I’m not sure exactly what they taught him, or—he never talked about this. I knew nothing about this until I found this just this last week.
Franklin: Wow, interesting.
Davis: So I have no story to go with this, other than the date and it’s my dad.
Franklin: Right. So then he would have came out here very shortly after getting this, right?
Davis: Mm-hm.
Franklin: Interesting.
Davis: Like I say, when they told him to come out, they didn’t tell him why or anything. Just go to this place in Washington that you’ve never heard of.
Franklin: Yeah, we have a job for you.
Davis: And you’re going to have trouble finding it on a map, even. [LAUGHTER] This is just a—it’s got—it says N Reactor Plant Dates—Data. Just about—I think it was a reference for them when they were working.
Franklin: Okay.
Davis: It’s pocket size.
Franklin: Right.
Davis: So I think it was just a—yeah, decontaminating, water treatment—I think it was just a little reference thing that they kept in their—on their person.
Franklin: Wow.
Davis: And then my dad was trying to get my uncle to move out here from Kansas. [LAUGHTER] And he wrote a letter describing wages, jobs. So, trying to get down to there. Let’s see. “They want patrolmen pretty badly. The pay isn’t as much as I make by about $18 a week.” But my uncle was single, never married, so it probably wasn’t any problem to him. And he says, “However it isn’t bad. You start at $58 a week.” [LAUGHTER] It says, a week. And after 30 days, after you’ve passed that, you move up to $60 a week. And then after six months you get $62.50 a week. Yeah, they were looking for patrolmen and firemen and a lot of the other stuff. And he asked—my uncle was in World War Two, and he asked if he had any training in anything specific that might be used out here. But my uncle stayed back in Kansas and eventually became a—because of being ex-military, he became a postman. Not a postman, a postmaster.
Franklin: Okay.
Davis: A postmaster in a little town. But he never did come out. I just thought the pricing—just thought it was interesting, because 58 bucks a week.
Franklin: That would have been—that’s a good chunk of money back then.
Davis: For my uncle, for what he was making in Kansas it would have been a whole lot of money. [INAUDIBLE] Oh, meals at the cafeteria average $0.75. It’s just littered with little stuff like that. He was trying to convince my uncle to move back out here.
Franklin: Right, wow.
Davis: What’s this? Oh. This was in a Kansas City Times in 1947. “Growing Town of Atom Plant Workers Is a Distinctive Sort of Community.”
Franklin: Mm.
Davis: So, that was kind of—you know. This is what, when people released—after the war’s over, people are starting to hear, now, what the heck was—[LAUGHTER] going on, and how different our towns were from towns that had been around for 100 years.
Franklin: Right. And that it’s completely government controlled and—
Davis: Yeah, and plants were far from town. You know, Dad would usually spend an hour on the bus going out to work, and we were in North Richland.
Franklin: Wow.
Davis: Yeah, but I think this is what my uncle had cut out and sent to him.
Franklin: Cool.
Davis: From Kansas. And the highest birthrates in the nation. [LAUGHTER] Because everybody was young. I was part of that major boom. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Yeah. Wow, that’s neat. That’s neat that he saved that.
Davis: And my sister says—we were talking and she said, yeah, when you went to school, you stood up on the first day of school and said where you were from. Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas. When I went to school, we had all been born here. There weren’t any outsiders, I guess, because we were all born here.
Franklin: Right.
Davis: But during the war, everybody stood up and said where they were from. Because everybody was from somewhere.
Franklin: Right.
Davis: She says, there was a few—once in a while you’d run into somebody who says, oh, I was born here. And they’re like, oh. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Yeah, oh, you’re an original!
Davis: Oh, you’re really strange! You didn’t come from the Midwest? Because that seems to be the biggest proportion came from the Midwest. Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Arkansas.
Franklin: And Texas, too, there was a huge—but that’s definitely where they were pulling lots of people from.
Davis: And it was mostly by word of mouth as their job tended to—go to Washington. What are we going to do? Can’t tell you. Because I don’t know.
Franklin: Take this train to a place you’ve never heard of.
Davis: Yup. Any other questions?
Franklin: No, I think that was great. Thank you so much for sharing. I learned a lot of things that I didn’t know about, growing up here.
Davis: Oh, I probably—going to think of a million things driving home, I’m sure. Oh, I should have said—[LAUGHTER]
Douglas O’Reagan: First of all, would you please pronounce and spell your name for us?
Stanley Goldsmith: Stanley Goldsmith.
O’Reagan: Okay, thank you. My name is Douglas O’Reagan. I’m conducting an oral history interview with Mr. Goldsmith here on March 21st, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Mr. Goldsmith about his experiences working at Hanford. Okay. Could you tell us about your childhood up through—just briefly tell us about your life up through college and entering the Manhattan Project.
Goldsmith: At Hanford here, or at Los Alamos?
O’Reagan: Before that. Your life before the Manhattan Project. Where were you born?
Goldsmith: Virginia. Norfolk, Virginia. In 19—March 25th, 1924.
O’Reagan: Can you tell us about your life before the Manhattan Project? Up through college?
Goldsmith: Well I—
O’Reagan: Why don’t I move closer, that might—
Goldsmith: I was raised in Norfolk and went to Virginia Tech to take—to get a chemical engineering degree. I entered Virginia Tech in 1941, and I graduated in 1945.
O’Reagan: And then you entered the Army, is that right?
Goldsmith: After graduation, I was drafted into the Army, and assigned to the Manhattan District of Engineers. Eventually, after waiting in several different places for my clearance, I wound up at Los Alamos, where I worked from 1945 to ’47—1947.
O’Reagan: Did you just find out about what the goal was once you arrived?
Goldsmith: Yes. After I got to Los Alamos, we were told what the objective was, and all about the problems. This was different than the other nuclear sites were. This mission was kept secret.
O’Reagan: What element of the project did you work on at Los Alamos?
Goldsmith: At Hanford?
O’Reagan: At Los Alamos.
Goldsmith: At Los—I worked on processing the uranium-235 for the first atomic bomb.
O’Reagan: What did that involve?
Goldsmith: That involved converting uranium oxide that had been enriched with 235. That involved processing it from an oxide to a fluoride so it could be reduced to a metal. And then machined into the shapes they needed for the bombs.
O’Reagan: Were you figuring out your process as you went?
Goldsmith: No. The process had been pretty well established. This was more like just individual laboratories processing individual amounts of u-235 to get it to the point where it could be reduced to metal.
O’Reagan: Who did you work with?
Goldsmith: What?
O’Reagan: Did you work with anybody?
Goldsmith: Yes.
O’Reagan: Who else was in your lab?
Goldsmith: That was a long time ago. Let’s see. There was Al Drumrose and a Purcell—I don’t remember his first name. There were two other—well, maybe a few other more people. But I guess I just don’t recall the names.
O’Reagan: So what brought you to Hanford?
Goldsmith: What got me to Hanford? I left Los Alamos to get a graduate degree in chemical engineering. When I graduated, I got a job here at Hanford as a nuclear—as a reactor engineer.
O’Reagan: How did you hear about the job?
Goldsmith: Well, I knew about Hanford, and I sent out letters of inquiry about positions that may be open here and at other sites. And I got the position here in 1950.
O’Reagan: So you wanted specifically to work at Hanford or other sites—what was—did you have specific goals of what you wanted to do?
Goldsmith: Well, I liked what Hanford had to offer. So there was no question about that. They satisfied what I was looking for.
O’Reagan: What were your first impressions of the area?
Goldsmith: Well, it was shocking to say the least. It was like out in the wilderness. And when I arrived in 1950, General Electric operated the whole site, including the housing and all of the utilities and so forth. They assigned me a house that—I don’t remember what the rent was, but it was very inexpensive. And then in 1960—let’s see, it was about 1960—between ’61 and ’65—they divided the work at Hanford among several—among four or five contractors. One of them operated the laboratory, one of them operated the nuclear reactor, and one the separations plant. I stayed with the laboratory.
O’Reagan: Could you walk us through an average day when you first—say in 1950 or ’52—what sort of work were you doing?
Goldsmith: What sort of work?
O’Reagan: Mm-hmm.
Goldsmith: The average day—you want me to start back there?—is that my worksite was located about 20 miles from Richland. You could take a bus operated by the plant, or you could drive. But you had to go through an entrance gate—entrance—not a gate, but a station. And then we had to show our passes—badges. Then we went out to the site where we were working. In this case, at that time, I was working at F Reactor. As a reactor engineer, I rotated positions at the different reactors. So the work was—you asked me about the work—the work was, I thought, extremely interesting. And I felt very fortunate in that I felt like I was on the forefront of a new technology. By the time I got up here, there was a lot of emphasis on the peaceful use of nuclear power. I got involved in work for improving the nuclear fuels that was currently being used. This was because I was with Battelle then, and Battelle had a joint contract with the DoE where they could use part of their facilities—well, the major part of the facilities were for DoE work. But they also had a contract which they called 1831, and that was for doing private work for industrial corporations involved in nuclear work. I spent a lot of time on that, trying to—my group was trying to improve the performance of the fuel. Wanted to get higher powers. So that the fuel—we could produce fuel at a faster rate—I’m sorry, produce plutonium at a faster rate by increasing the power of the reactors. I worked as a reactor engineer for about four years. Then I took the position of manager of nuclear fuels research and development. We worked on developing or designing nuclear fuels, analyzing the fuels that had been used in the reactors to see what improvements could be made. Let’s see. We had a lot of interactions with the commercial fuel designers. As I mentioned, there were two contract billers. And this was done on the 1831, which allowed Battelle to use some facilities that were DoE’s—some facilities on the plant in their private work. So I’m trying to think about the timing, now. The main—after working on DoE projects for about five years, I worked on a private project that was sponsored—that was funded by Exxon—they’re now called Exxon Nuclear. They were interested in getting into the nuclear business, because they had a lot of claims on land that have uranium. They wanted—they decided to utilize those claims. Get the uranium, then processing it for use as nuclear fuels. So at that time, I think there was only one Exxon employee involved in this. They took over part—a major part of that, as Exxon Nuclear—took over a major part of Battelle. We were moved out of the buildings that DoE built, and we were located in Uptown in Richland in the industrial—just completely isolated from the other nuclear work that was going on. We designed a nuclear fuel for Exxon Nuclear which evolved into their first commercial fuels. During that time, Exxon Nuclear began to have their own staff. But we stayed with them until about 19—early 1970s, we worked with them. And then their own employees could take over from then. After that, I worked on fuel cycles. On seeing if we could design different types of fuels with different types of materials, like thorium, on the fuel cycles. And we—let’s see. This was work for DoE. And we continued that work—my group continued working for DoE. They were working on the nuclear reactor regulation, on NRC. We had projects with NRC. Our main project was DoE. And here again, I was telling you--[COUGH] Excuse me. I was still involved in nuclear fuel development. We did a lot of work for NRC and also for DoE. This was on helping them understand and approve their review of new nuclear fuels in reactors—nuclear fuel design. So we were working on both sides of the street: with the regulatory side, and the DoE development side. And then in 1980—excuse me just one minute—I should have jotted these dates down. In late 1980s, I worked on a DoE program on nuclear fuels—on nuclear fuel cycles, where we were looking at different way of utilizing the nuclear fuels so that they would last longer and that they would be safer. Then after that, I was assigned to Battelle Columbus, because I had worked through this project. It turned out quite successful. And Battelle Columbus had a contract with DoE to perform research on finding a nuclear repository—nuclear burial site. I was the Battelle manager of that program for about four years. We looked at the—examined the potential nuclear sites in New Mexico, Louisiana, Georgia, and here at Hanford. This program went on for about four or five years, and then DoE selected the Nevada site at Los Alamos—not Los Alamos—at Las Vegas for the site to bury the spent nuclear fuels. That program lasted for quite a while, but I left it in 19—after four years, because I didn’t want to move down to Texas, which was one of the sites that was being considered. So I moved back here to the Hanford. I worked on miscellaneous programs after I came back to Hanford. A lot of them had to do with the nuclear fuel cycle and the nuclear waste disposal—nuclear waste treatment and disposal. And I did that type of work for about four years, and then I retired in 1987? 19—yes, in 1987. And I left Battelle, and went to work for an environmental engineering company in Washington, DC, who was working on the same sort of thing. They were technical support contracted to DoE headquarters. So I was there until—let’s see. I was there until about 1994. And then I had to just—I still continued to work even though I was retired from Battelle. I had actually moved back to Battelle and was hired by Battelle as a consultant so that I could retain my pension and the salary for the job. That went on until about 1992. And finally, I retired for good. [LAUGHTER] So, that’s a very brief and sketchy description of what I did here at Hanford. One thing that—a little sideline you might be interested in. You asked about what Hanford was like. When I first came to work here, there were very few facilities that could be used at Hanford. I was not—I didn’t need anything special to do my work; I didn’t need a specially designed building structure. But I did do work on design and that work was done—the group was assigned to the Hanford High School. [LAUGHTER] Let’s see, where else? As I said, I had worked at most of the reactors that were operating at that time. Oh, there’s one thing that—I want to back up a little bit until about 1975. I got in—my group got involved in plutonium recycle. This was a program that DoE sponsored, a fairly large program, in which we were trying to recycle the plutonium that was not being used in bombs. Plutonium—to show that it could be used in nuclear power reactors. And we actually had a plutonium recycle test reactor built here onsite to test the fuels, the mixed oxide. We called it mixed oxide fuel because it’s plutonium and uranium oxide. And the reactor, which was the PRTR, Plutonium Recycle Test Reactor, was designed specifically to try to test, get information on mixed oxide fuels. Let’s see. I moved around a lot. After about five years on that program, I moved on, I think, to working for Exxon Nuclear, to assist them in their program. Now, Exxon Nuclear was so sensitive about their work being exposed by DoE that they moved many of the facilities that they used at Battelle, they moved them to different sections. We had offices at the old—what was it—the woman who had all of this fabric stuff? It was in Richland, it’s right in downtown Richland. And we took the top floor of one of the buildings that had already been built. And of course, there, we only did calculations because they had no facilities for taking care of irradiated material. That was an interesting time, too, when we were off on our own, so to speak.
O’Reagan: They did that because they were afraid of the Department of Energy taking their knowledge?
Goldsmith: Well, they were concerned there would be some link—crossover—inadvertently, perhaps. The DoE could claim that some of the work done by Exxon Nuclear was done by DoE. And they didn’t want that to happen, so they completely isolated themselves.
O’Reagan: Did that hurt your work?
Goldsmith: Did that work?
O’Reagan: Did it impact your work, being isolated like that?
Goldsmith: I’m sorry?
O’Reagan: Being isolated, did that impact your work? Did it slow your work, or did it cause any problems?
Goldsmith: No, it didn’t cause any problems. We were able to move our whole group out into the new facility in downtown Richland. So were other groups—nuclear physics group, and the other groups that went into the fuel cycle. But that was an interesting time, because we were really developing commercial nuclear fuels. The design that we had come up with was the first nuclear fuels that Exxon Nuclear had marketed. They marketed to—I’ll think of that in a minute. But anyway, we got involved in—since I mentioned earlier that there were very few Exxon Nuclear employees involved in this program—that we actually got involved with the Exxon Nuclear people who went out to market their product. That was at the time when we ran into some very interesting commercial situations.
O’Reagan: What makes one nuclear fuel better than another nuclear fuel?
Goldsmith: Well, they were made primarily from uranium, and they were oxides. They were made into compressed pellets. Now, some of these were different—some of these were specifically made for boiling-water reactors, and others were for pressurized-water reactors. There was a design difference in the two reactors. One of them—the power level was about the same, but the design of the fuel and the way it was structured was different. That made a difference in the fuel for the two types of reactors. After we got involved in working for Exxon Nuclear, when our contract with them expired, we became very much involved in working only for DoE and NRC. I think I mentioned that to you. We—oh, we had contracts—my group had contacts with practically all the commercial nuclear fuel design people, and we provided them design support, and we did testing for them. So we were pretty much involved in the nuclear industry by then.
O’Reagan: How secretive or how classified was your work?
Goldsmith: After—when I moved to Hanford, the classification was almost—was very slim. It was very lax, because with the dropping of the atom bombs, then all of that came out, what the bomb was made of, and some ideas what the design of the bomb was. So by that time, it had pretty well leaked out, the security was relaxed on that, also. So that wasn’t—that was no longer a big problem. There were still some residual problem in security. In fact, the Russians, of course, wanted to get into the nuclear industry business. They wanted to know—well, this backed up into the weapons program—Cold War program. They wanted to know what powers we read our plants at—how many megawatts. And they actually took measurements of the Columbia River and calculated from that what powers we were obtaining. So that was when the Cold War was going on.
O’Reagan: How did you hear about that?
Goldsmith: Hear about what?
O’Reagan: The Russians testing the waters.
Goldsmith: Oh. I think we had—our security people kept an eye on what was going on with the Russians. And this is one of the things they found out.
O’Reagan: Let’s see. What was life in the Tri-Cities like back in the 1950s and ‘60s outside of work?
Goldsmith: Well, it was pretty plain in a way—several. Because there weren’t many things to do. There was only one theater, and there may have been one or two grocery stores, and I think there was one real estate agent. That was the case with most of the various businesses. There was maybe one, or two at the most. There was not much in the way of entertainment. I mentioned that we had one theater. People—the workers at the plant—developed their own entertainment—sources of entertainment. They formed all kinds of different clubs. One of the most popular club was the bridge club—competitive bridge. We played that in one of the commercial buildings that had an open space that we could use. Another was the Richland Little Theater. And then there was a Richland opera—Light Opera, also. And there were—of course, golf was a big activity, because there were already several different golf courses. So that was taking off. There were other activities like that where you had to build them yourself. You may have gotten a little support from DoE, but you couldn’t depend on it. So we had to make our own source of entertainment and relaxation.
O’Reagan: Did you play bridge? What was your entertainment?
Goldsmith: Yeah, I got involved in playing bridge. This was duplicate bridge. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that, but that’s a form of bridge that is competitive. It’s still—it’s played in such a way that everybody—each couple gets to play against another couple, and they rotate during the evening, so that other couples play the same cards. The competitive part comes in as to who comes up with the best score at the end of the evening. [LAUGHTER] And that was quite controversial. Particularly when a man and woman were partners—they would—they had no shame, or no hesitant to getting into arguments at the bridge table. So that was a big deal. Even now there’s a lot of bridge clubs that are playing here—duplicate bridge is what it’s called.
O’Reagan: Where did you live throughout your time at Hanford, or in this area?
Goldsmith: What’s that?
O’Reagan: Where did you live? Did you move houses?
Goldsmith: Yes—well, yeah. At that time, they were building houses like mad. I lived in one of the government houses in Richland—old Richland. Then I moved into what they called a ranch house. Those were a government house that was one story, and it had three bedrooms. There was some furnishing that came with these houses. The rental on it was very nominal. And as I recall, we were provided—many of these houses, or most of them were heated by coal. DoE actually—at that time, it was actually GE who ran the town—provided free coal. They would come around periodically and dump a load of coal for you to use in your houses.
O’Reagan: Sounds dirty!
Goldsmith: Huh?
O’Reagan: Sounds dirty! Seems like it would get you messy. All the—dumping the coal, is there a coal dust that would come up?
Goldsmith: What’s that?
O’Reagan: When you burned the coal, would it be dirty? Would it make a lot of smoke, I guess?
Goldsmith: Not too bad. They must have used a hard coal that gave out less smoke. I don’t know that—it wasn’t like an industrial company where they had large facilities that generated a lot of steam, a lot of smoke. This was kind of dispersed. So we didn’t have an air problem at that time. We had—now the other thing that they did to make life easier—we had our own transportation—public transportation system. You could ride on the buses that they had for free. So that was to make life easier for the employees.
O’Reagan: Must have been a lot of buses?
Goldsmith: What?
O’Reagan: Must have been a whole lot of buses.
Goldsmith: Well, most of the buses were actually used to go out to the Area—to take the workers out to the Area, because there’s where you had a lot of people to be transported. The civilians, or the private people, had—many of them had their own cars. So didn’t use the bus.
O’Reagan: Was it different when you were working on commercial energy compared to when you were working for the Department of Energy?
Goldsmith: Yes, there were quite a lot of differences. We were able to produce fuel designs and produce developmental fuels in a much shorter time than DoE, because there was a lot of paperwork involved in going through the DoE process. In fact, one of the DoE people at headquarters who was in charge of reactor development said he was very upset because he couldn’t—he was in charge of the fast reactor, the FFTF. And they were struggling to try to get the thing going. He was very upset because he couldn’t understand how we were able to get fuel for Exxon Nuclear, and they were still struggling. They’d been struggling for a long time. [LAUGHTER] So he wanted to know what we were doing. Well, what it was, we didn’t have to jump through all the loops that you did.
O’Reagan: Was it finding the uranium, the procurement that was the problem? Or just write paperwork?
Goldsmith: No, the problem that DoE had was that they had a bureaucracy that kind of controlled things. And that always slows things down. It took them about twice as long to develop the fuel for the Fast Flux Reactor than it did us for the commercial reactors.
O’Reagan: Hmm. Let’s see. Have the Tri-Cities changed much in the time you’ve been living here?
Goldsmith: Oh, yeah. It’s been amazing how it’s grown. The Tri-Cities now is like a normal city. The nuclear influence is much less, because we have so many other businesses now involved for our economic base. As I had mentioned earlier, there were usually one kind or maybe two types of business or entertainment or something like that. When the commercial people came in, they opened as many stores as they wanted, or that were needed. So that was one big thing. Another big thing was the housing development, the real estate. I remember up until 19—let’s see, about 1965, GE was in charge of everything, including building houses. [COUGH] Excuse me, I’ve got a cold. When they opened up the lands, part of the land, surrounding territory was owned by the Department of the Interior—it was government owned. And then they made those available to the public for building houses and other types of structures. The demand for these things was great enough, so the building was really at a peak. Now, even now, you take a look at the housing—the amount of housing that’s going on, and take a look at the commercial businesses, like drive down George Washington Way, you see all these new businesses or restaurants or that sort of thing. So it’s really changed. Richland was all on this side of the Columbia River. That was one of the boundaries for Richland. But then the Columbia River curved around, and there were—on the other side of the river, there was nothing but sagebrush. But some entrepreneurs had bought land there, and then when they started to build, they had lots of land to build on. That was no problem. There’s a whole new part of Richland that’s on the other side of the river that wasn’t there until probably about 1965 or so. That’s when it started. So there’s been a growth of industry. The highways have been developed. There’s new industry that’s come in. So we’ve developed quite a good industrial base now, and it’s still growing.
O’Reagan: Are there any—to ask an open-ended question, are there any moments or stories that come to mind that you think are worth telling about your time working at Hanford?
Goldsmith: Well, I told you about how we had, early on, we had offices at the Hanford High School. That was—we made a lot of fun of that, when anyone called you at the high school, we said this is the Goldsmith class of ’41-’42. There was a lot of—amazing amount of work that was done on animals to use those as some of the basic studies for the effect of radiation on animals. Now we don’t have any of those studies going on. But let’s see. I’m trying to think of something that is unusual. A lot of it was—practically all of it was unusual.
O’Reagan: How about something mundane, but it’s still kind of unusual? Or maybe a day in the life later on in your work?
Goldsmith: Well, I mentioned the general public had to develop their own recreational activities. We have—I don’t know—we have a lot of parks and fields. Like some of those baseball parks are very good. I didn’t appreciate how good they were until—I have some relatives who live in Maryland, and we visited them, and we went to see their children’s baseball game. But they had just an open field, nothing like we have. So that’s been—the recreational things have improved quite a bit. Of course the boating is still a big deal. I really—as I said, there was so much growth going on that it’s hard to pick out any one area. Excuse me. The recreational areas have increased. You know, we’ve grown more; we’ve built at least two new golf courses, and these were very good golf courses. Then the other thing is some of the building of private homes around the golf courses. That has been—we live in a community there that probably has—what would you say, Joyce, about 800 people? Something of that sort. And it’s very nice. There’s two such communities. One of them is called Canyon Lakes, where we live, and the other is called Meadow Springs. That’s been developed—highly developed. We both have very nice golf courses.
Joyce: After you retired, didn’t you work with the people from Israel, the First Defenders?
Goldsmith: Oh, yeah, that was an interesting little program. That was after I retired, and I was re-hired. Battelle got a program from the State Department to help—to develop ways for the First Defenders on a terrorist site could make a better determination of what happened. And they did this on a worldwide basis. Mainly, underdeveloped countries, but one country that they had and they were anxious to get involved because they had firsthand information—they were anxious to get Israelis involved. Because they had a lot of first defenders. The program consisted of sending a team of people over to Israel and tell them what the program was about. And then Israel was to send about 20 people over here for a month. And then we were using the training—the HAMMER facility to do the training. I got involved because when the Israelis came over, they asked me, since I’m Jewish, they asked me if I would help trying to make them feel comfortable and so forth, take care of their dietary laws. And again, they were very pleased. And it was fun, it was interesting to see how they had become sensitized to terrorism. For instance, they stayed at one of the hotels out there. It’s right outside of Columbia Center Mall. And early morning, a bus would pick them up and take them out to the HAMMER site. After about two or three days, the bus driver said—no, someone said are we going to take any different routes? And the bus driver thought they meant for sightseeing. But they didn’t want to establish a pattern for terrorists to see what their schedule was. So they finally got him to change the route out to Hanford itself. But that was interesting, because the view of the Israelis who had been submitted to so much terrorism and the view of the other countries that we trained but who had not been submitted were completely different. Like night and day. So that was interesting experience. They show you the difference between our view of being careful about terrorism. As I said, these people were housed—excuse me. These people were housed in one of the hotels close to the Columbia Center—close to the Columbia Center Mall. They would go into the mall, and they were appalled to see that people were allowed to go in and out of the mall carrying all kinds of backpacks and all kinds of packages where it’s not being inspected. Because in Israel, they inspected anyone who was carrying a package of any sort. And they would be examined. So that was an interesting insight on how the different countries treat terrorism.
O’Reagan: And the training was about how to respond to a nuclear accident, or a crisis?
Goldsmith: Well, this program was called the First Defenders. And these people were doctors, they were scientists, they were firemen and so first. They were a mixture of who would come to the site where an attack had been made. That’s why they called them the First Defenders. They—let’s see, what was I going to say? They were very—the ones that were really involved in anti-terrorism were very conscientious and good about it. We had some interesting things that arose as part of this program. As I said, there were nations from all over the world that were involved to a certain extent. And we had the Indians, from India, coming over, spending a month. They were put up in the Hanford House—Red Lion Hanford House. They got a call one day from someone at the Hanford House wanting to know if we could talk to these people about how to keep the shower curtains inside of the showers, because they would keep them out and they would flood the whole area. So there were strange incidences like that. I’m sorry, Joyce?
Joyce: About when Bill Wiley was here and you worked at Hanford Battelle in Quality Assurance. Did you share any of that?
Goldsmith: The quality--?
Joyce: Uh-huh.
Goldsmith: Bill Wiley was a very—I think he was very influential and left his mark on the site, because he wanted to develop this environmental molecular laboratory, the rows of buildings out there, the new rows. And that opened up a whole new set of doors for Battelle to grow. They went into more basic stuff. Up to that time, we mainly focused on working on problems with nuclear reactors and nuclear fuels. But this was completely different from that. This was basic science that these laboratories allowed us to get involved in. And it’s opened up a whole new area. I think Battelle, and Hanford in general, has benefited from it, because they get a lot of extra programs that they wouldn’t have before.
O’Reagan: Were you involved with these basic science programs?
Goldsmith: No, I started in nuclear fuels and nuclear reactors most of the time I was here. But I didn’t get into any of the basic science programs.
O’Reagan: Did you want to say anything about this Oppenheimer letter, maybe introduce it for us?
Goldsmith: He was a very nice guy, and he was very considerate, and everybody liked him. He was very friendly—friendly in a reserved way. He didn’t go around smacking people on the back, but you knew he was warm and he remembered names. After the peace was declared, I think it was that later date in 1945? No, not 1945. At any rate, after the war was over, and things settled down, he sent out a letter to some of the people who worked on it that thanked them for their effort. And he sent me one of those letters. And I’m very impressed with it, because he knew what I was doing. Because he could mention that in his letter. I’ve been very proud of that letter. That’s what that is all about. It may not be much to many people, but to people who have been involved in the nuclear industry, I think it has some impact.
O’Reagan: Did you ever meet any other Los Alamos or other Manhattan Project veterans who weren’t from the Hanford site when you worked at Hanford?
Goldsmith: When I went to Hanford did I ever--?
O’Reagan: Meet any other people who had been at Los Alamos?
Goldsmith: No, there are not too many people here, just a few people here. I’m hoping—I’d like to know—I wanted to put something on Facebook about seeing how many people from Los Alamos who actually worked on the bomb still are around. Because I don’t think there are too many. I was—I got my degree when I was 21, so—and then I immediately went to work and have done that since then. But I’ve lost track of most of the people. I think they’re probably dead by now. [LAUGHTER] But if there’s something that comes up from that, I’d like to see.
O’Reagan: All right, well thank you so much.
Joyce: Thank you.
Goldsmith: You’re welcome. Thank you.
Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I’m conducting an oral history with Jerome Martin on June 1st, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Jerome Martin about his experiences working at the Hanford site and his involvement with the Herbert M. Parker Foundation. And you—just wanted to use your legal name to start out with, but you prefer to be called Jerry, right?
Jerome Martin: Yes, I do.
Franklin: Okay.
Martin: Jerome’s a little too formal. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Right. Just for the technical purposes. Sure. No more, we will not mention the name—
Martin: Okay.
Franklin: Again. [LAUGHTER] So for the record, you did an interview with the Parker Foundation sometime in 2010.
Martin: I believe it was earlier.
Franklin: Or possibly earlier. And some of the Parker Foundation videos, as we know, were lost. And so this video is an attempt to recapture some of the information that would have been in that oral history, but also add some other information, and also to give you a chance to talk about your involvement with the Herbert M. Parker Foundation. So just as a introduction to whoever views this in the future. So why don’t we start in the beginning? How did you come to—you’re not from the Tri-Cities?
Martin: Not originally.
Franklin: All right. How did you come to the Tri-Cities?
Martin: Well, a little quick history, I got my bachelor’s degree at San Diego State College and then I was a radiation safety officer at San Diego State for about three years. Then I had an opportunity to go to the University of Colorado in Boulder, where, again, I was a radiation safety officer and on the faculty of the physics department. After several years there, an excellent opportunity came up for me here at Hanford with Battelle, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. So I moved here in 1976, and had a great opportunity to work with many other more senior people here at Hanford that had been here since the beginning. One of those, of course, was Herbert M. Parker. He was former director of the laboratories under General Electric, and then retired, but stayed on with Battelle as a director. I had a few opportunities to interact with him, and was quite impressed. I have heard stories about, he was a rather demanding taskmaster. And I could kind of imagining myself trying to work for him, but it would have been a challenge.
Franklin: What do you feel is important to be known about Herbert M. Parker for the historical record?
Martin: I’ve had an opportunity to review many of his publications. They were quite professional and very well researched, and in many cases the leading authority on several topics. So I was very impressed by his publications. I didn’t have a direct opportunity to work for him, so I don’t know about his management style or other things. But that was the thing that impressed me the most, was his publications.
Franklin: What topics did Dr. Parker write on—or do his research?
Martin: His early professional career was in medical physics. He was at Swedish Hospital in Seattle for many years. Then he was called upon, as part of the Manhattan Project, to set up the safety program at Oak Ridge. He did that for about a year or so. Then he was called upon to do the same thing here at Hanford. So he came here and established the entire environmental safety and health program for Hanford. Of course he had all the right background to be able to do that, and he was able to recruit a number of really talented people to help him with that. So I think Hanford ended up with what could be known as the best environmental safety and health program, among all the early AEC and then DoE laboratories. One of the things that impressed me most by that program was the record keeping. And I had an opportunity to work on that in later years. But the way the record keeping was designed and set up and maintained was quite thorough. It was designed to be able to recreate whatever may have happened according to those records. It turned out to be very valuable in later years.
Franklin: Who instituted that record-keeping? Was that Parker?
Martin: I don’t recall the name of the individual that set it up, although I know Ken Hyde was involved very early on. He may have been at the very origin of it. But I’m sure Parker certainly influenced the rigor with which that program was established. In later years, John Jech was manager of the record keeping program, and then my good friend, Matt Lyon, was the manager of that. I worked with Matt, then, on American National Standard Institute’s standard for record keeping. We incorporated into that standard virtually all of the fundamentals that Parker had established initially.
Franklin: The first name was John—
Martin: The second manager of records was John Jech. J-E-C-H.
Franklin: Do you know if he’s still living?
Martin: No, he’s not.
Franklin: And what about Lyon?
Martin: Matt Lyon passed away about ten years ago, as did Ken Hyde.
Franklin: What’s that?
Martin: Ken Hyde—I think they all three passed away about ten years ago.
Franklin: Okay.
Martin: Yeah, give or take.
Franklin: So you mentioned that the record keeping was designed to recreate an incident as it happened. Do you know of any such—or can you speak to any such times when that record keeping system was crucial into a safety issue?
Martin: The one that comes to mind is one of the more I guess infamous incidents here at Hanford. It occurred just around the time I arrived here in 1976. It was sometimes called the McCluskey accident out at the 231-Z Building. There was an explosion in a glovebox that resulted in very significant contamination of Mr. McCluskey by americium-241. And the response to that incident, and then all the following treatment of Mr. McCluskey was very well documented. In fact, those documents then became the basis for a whole series of scientific papers that described the entire incident and all the aspects of it. So that was one major case where excellent record keeping was very valuable.
Franklin: Excellent. And what—I’m just curious now—what happened to Mr. McCluskey?
Martin: He survived for about ten years after the accident. He initially had very severe acid burns and trauma. But he was very carefully treated for that. The americium contamination that he had was gradually eliminated—not eliminated, but reduced substantially. He survived for another ten years after that incident even though he had heart trouble. I know several people that assisted in his care, and it was quite remarkable what they were able to do and what he was able to do.
Franklin: Wow. Did he ever go back to work?
Martin: No, he was 65 at the time of the accident.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Martin: So he kind of went into medical retirement at that point. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Right. Yeah, I can imagine. So you said you came in 1976.
Martin: Right.
Franklin: And what did you—what was your first job, when you came to Battelle?
Martin: Well, I worked in what was called the radiation protection department, later called health physics department. My first assignment was called ALARA management. ALARA stands for maintain our radiation exposures as low as reasonably achievable. I would monitor the exposure records of Battelle workers, and watch for any that were the least bit unusually high, and then look for ways that we could reduce those exposures. And I monitored other things like average exposures and the use of dosimeters and things of that nature. The overall assignment was to generally reduce the workers’ radiation exposure.
Franklin: How successful do you feel that the department was in that effort?
Martin: I think we were very successful, and it went on for many years, even after I had that assignment. I remember one time, looking at a report that DoE put out annually on radiation exposures over all the major DoE facilities. Those average exposures, highest individual exposures, and things of that nature. Battelle and Hanford had among the lowest averages of all the other DoE facilities. So, I believe it was a very effective ALARA program here at Hanford.
Franklin: Do you know if that report was ever made publically available?
Martin: Oh, yes.
Franklin: Oh.
Martin: Yeah, those are published every year by DoE.
Franklin: Oh, great. I’ll have to find that. Sorry, just scribbling down some notes.
Martin: At one point, Battelle had a contract with the DoE headquarters to actually do the production of that report each year.
Franklin: Okay.
Martin: And I was involved in the production of it—oh, three or four years, as I recall.
Franklin: Okay. So you mentioned that you had moved on out of that program or department, so what—
Martin: Right. Well, I started getting involved in management at kind of the bottom level. I was an associate section manager, and then I got an assignment as section manager for the radiation monitoring section. I was responsible for all the radiation monitors—or as they’re now called, radiation protection technologists—the radiation monitors for Battelle and two other of the contractors here at Hanford. It was kind of ironic that I was located in what used to be the 300 Area library, and my office was on the second floor. And my office was the former office of Herbert M. Parker, when he was director of laboratories.
Franklin: Wow!
Martin: It was an honor to have that space, and recall memories of Mr. Parker.
Franklin: Wow, that’s great. And how long did you do that for?
Martin: I did that two or three years, and then another opportunity came along in 1979—no actually, it was ’79, but I guess I’d been on that management job for about a year and a half. In September of ’79, which was about three months after the Three Mile Island accident, we had an opportunity to make a proposal to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to provide support for their staff in emergency planning work. At that time, NRC was making a big push on all the power plants, all the nuclear power plants across the country to enhance their emergency planning programs. So we began about a ten-year project with NRC to supplement their staff. The NRC established the requirement for annual emergency exercises at each of the nuclear power plants, where they had to work up a scenario, and then they would activate their emergency response staff to demonstrate that they would know how to handle that accident scenario. We served as observers. We had teams of observers with the NRC staff. We did a total of 800 of those exercises over a ten-year period.
Franklin: Wow.
Martin: So we had a lot of staff out there, doing a lot of travel.
Franklin: Yeah. So that would have been—so you said for power, would that have been for all of the power reactors in the United States?
Martin: Yes. There were 103 plants at the time.
Franklin: Wow. Did you do any in foreign countries?
Martin: I didn’t personally, but we did have some staff that went to a similar kind of program with the International Atomic Energy Agency, and visited foreign nuclear power plants. Some in France, that I recall.
Franklin: Wow. So you said 103 power plants?
Martin: In the US, yeah.
Franklin: Wow.
Martin: Actually, that was the number of reactors. There was a fewer number of plants, because many of them are two or more reactors at a site.
Franklin: Oh, okay so the 103 is the number of reactors?
Martin: I believe that’s correct. At that time.
Franklin: How did Chernobyl affect your field and your work?
Martin: That’s an excellent question, because that was in this period. Of course, the Chernobyl accident happened in 1986, and I was working directly with NRC at that time. I was project manager on that NRC contract. When Chernobyl happened, there was an immediate reaction, and NRC had to study the Chernobyl accident as well as we could, and then determine what could be applied to US power reactors by way of improvements and emergency planning. One of my managers, Bill Bair, was part of a US delegation led by DoE and NRC to actually visit the Chernobyl area shortly after the accident, interact with the Russians, and do lessons learned that was turned into a series of DoE and NRC documents that tried to extract as much useful information as we could from Chernobyl and apply it here in the US.
Franklin: Right, because if I’m not mistaken, the design of the Chernobyl reactor—there were reactors of similar design in the United States.
Martin: Not exactly. The Chernobyl reactor had no containment vessel. There were a few reactors in the US that also did not have containment vessels, but they had other safeguards. The N Reactor was one of those. Unfortunately, I would call it an overreaction of the US government to a reactor with no containment. Severe restrictions were put on N Reactor, and some re-design was required that ultimately led to the end of N Reactor. It’s interesting to note that at that point in time, which was about 1986, 1987, N Reactor had generated more electricity from a nuclear reactor than any other plant in the world. So it’s unfortunate it came to an early demise.
Franklin: And—sorry, my ignorance here on the technical aspects. You said some of them don’t have a containment vessel. What does a containment vessel look like and what role does it play, and why would there would be reactors with one and without one?
Martin: Well, N Reactor went back to the early—the late ‘50s, I believe when it was designed. It was designed similar to the other reactors here at Hanford that were intended for production of plutonium. But N Reactor was a dual purpose, in that it also generated 800 megawatts of electricity. But it had a similar kind of design to what you see out at B Plant, for example. So it didn’t have the same kind of containment vessel that other modern pressurized water reactors or other nuclear power plants have that is designed in such a way that if there is reactor core damage, any radioactivity released can be contained and not released.
Franklin: Okay.
Martin: Or released in a very controlled fashion.
Franklin: I see. Kind of like a clam shell that kind of covers the—
Martin: Well, it’s basically—yeah, in many cases a spherical kind of containment.
Franklin: Okay. Excellent. So after—obviously the demise of N Reactor, ’86, ’87, is kind of the end of operations—or I should say of product production—product and energy production on the Hanford site. So how did your job change after that? And what did you continue to do after the shutdown?
Martin: I wasn’t directly affected by N Reactor shutting down. And the other production reactors had been shut down before that, so I wasn’t really directly involved in that. But I had yet another opportunity came up that turned out to be really a challenge for me. The Pantex plant in Amarillo, Texas is the primary assembly and disassembly facility for nuclear weapons. At that time, it was managed by a company called Mason and Hanger. Mason and Hanger had that contract for many years, and DoE challenged them to rebid the contract. So Mason and Hanger reached out to Battelle for assistance in teaming on environmental health and safety. So my manager talked me into being involved, so I went down to Amarillo and visited the plant and worked with the team there on the proposal that had to be presented to DoE. And we won the contract. Of course in the fine print it said I then had to move there.
Franklin: Ah!
Martin: But it turned out great. By that time, my family was pretty well grown, kids were through college. So we moved down to Amarillo, and I went to work at Pantex. We really enjoyed that. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Amarillo’s a very nice town, a lot of nice people. The work at Pantex was very challenging. I enjoyed that very much, too.
Franklin: Great. So how long were you at the Pantex plant?
Martin: Well, I was manager of the radiation safety department down there for three years, which was my original contract obligation. During that time, we were very closely scrutinized by the Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board, which was an organization established by Congress to be a watchdog over DoE. Their method for watching DoE was to watch the contractors very closely. So they would scrutinize everything we did, and then challenge DoE if they found something. They pushed us in a way that was good, because one of the things they promoted was professional certification. I’m a certified health physicist, certified by the American Board of Health Physics. At the time at Pantex, I was the only one we had there. But the DNFSB pushed us to add more, so I got more of my staff certified. There was a similar program for technicians called the National Registry of Radiation Protection Technologists, and at the time, we had two of my staff that were registered with NRRPT. Again, they pushed us to promote more training. By the end of that three-year period, I think we had ten of our technologists registered and certified. So we really improved the credentials of our staff. We instituted some new programs, again, related to ALARA radiation reduction. Probably the most interesting or challenging day of my life occurred down there in 1994. We were working on disassembly of the W48 program. The W48 was a tactical weapon used in—that was deployed in Europe—it was never used. But it was a very small, cylindrical nuclear weapon designed to be shot out of a 155 millimeter howitzer, which is amazing just to think about. But the plutonium pit in this device was surrounded by high explosive. It turned out to be rather difficult to disassemble this particular design of nuclear weapon. It also turned out that the plutonium pit had a relatively high dose rate, compared to others. So the workers were getting some increased exposure to their hands in the process of working on this. So we were concerned about their extremity dose. So we worked up a method for doing a classified videotape of the disassembly operation, so that we could study each step in the process to find ways to improve worker safety. Providing shielding, remote tools, things of that nature. The process on this was to take the plutonium pit and high explosives and put it in liquid nitrogen bath for a period of time. Then bring it out and put it in a little tub-like, and pour hot water on it. The HE would expand rapidly and crack off. And for the most part, it worked very well. Well, there was this one particular pit that we were working on when we were doing the videotape for this study. Apparently the HE wasn’t coming off the way it should, and so they had to repeat this process over and over. They brought it out of the liquid nitrogen, poured hot water on it, and the plutonium—the cladding, the beryllium cladding on the plutonium pit actually cracked, due to the severe temperature change. The workers who were working on this were trained very carefully that if that cladding on the pit ever cracks, get out of there fast, so you avoid a plutonium exposure. So that happened. One of the technicians heard an audible crack and saw it on the surface of that pit. And they all evacuated immediately. They got just outside the door of this special facility, and they called our radiation safety office, and fortunately my three best technicians were standing there by the phone. They said, pit had cracked. And so they got over there as fast as they possibly could. They recognized the danger of having an exposed plutonium pit, and how that can oxidize and cause severe contamination very quickly. They decided to put on respirators to protect themselves, but they didn’t bother with any of the other protective clothing because they wanted to save time. So they made an entry where the cracked pit was, still there with the water bath on it, and the video shooting this picture. They took samples right on the crack and on the water and all around it. They managed to take that plutonium pit and get it into a plastic bag and then they doubled bagged it and then they triple bagged it and sealed it up. Then they came out. Of course, the samples revealed that there was indeed plutonium contamination coming out of that crack, but they had contained it very quickly. When we made a later entry to retrieve the video tape that was still running, and we looked at the timestamp on it. From the time the crack appeared until they had it in the bag was seven minutes.
Franklin: Wow!
Martin: That’s about as fast as you can possibly expect a response team to come in and secure a situation like that. And so, following that, of course we had the incident debriefing, and I had to chair that. But we very carefully went through and recorded every little thing that happened from the time they were working on the disassembly to the time they exited. Got that all documented, and then the videotape of course documented all of that. The scrutiny by Department of Energy, the Amarillo office, the Albuquerque office, Headquarters, any number of others—we had a lot of attention that day. It was a long, hard day at the office, but very exciting. Following that, we had to debrief many other investigation committees and others. But we had that videotape to rely on, and that just was invaluable. That’s my—that was probably the most exciting day of my life, down there. [LAUGHTER] Got a follow-up to that. That W48 weapon was designed by Livermore. They came in at a later time and did a post-mortem on that cracked pit. And when they did, we discovered that the amount of plutonium contamination there that was available for distribution had it not been contained, would have totally just made that facility useless. I mean, extremely expensive clean-up, if it ever got done.
Franklin: Not just the room, but the entire facility?
Martin: Well, mainly that room.
Franklin: That room.
Martin: But it was a very big room, and a very valuable room, specially designed. But the quick response of our radiation safety technicians and getting that contained saved that room and millions of dollars in expense.
Franklin: Wow. And so this was a weapon that was the size of a howitzer shell?
Martin: 155 millimeters.
Franklin: Wow. And what is the—I don’t know if you know this—but what’s the explosive power of that—is it—I guess it could be—
Martin: Well, it’s just like the atomic bombs used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, about 20-kiloton fission device. The plutonium pit is designed to implode and cause a super-critical reaction.
Franklin: But fired out of a howitzer, instead of—
Martin: Fired out of a howitzer, perhaps 20 miles or something. And then you can somehow coordinate the careful detonation of this--
Franklin: [LAUGHTER]
Martin: --device. It boggled my mind.
Franklin: I guess that’s best that that was never ever—
Martin: There’s quite a large number of different nuclear weapons. Many of them were tactical weapons used in Europe—or deployed in Europe during the Cold War. Many other more modern ones are part of Polaris missiles and other large bombs that can be deployed by B-52s or B-2s.
Franklin: Sure.
Martin: Yeah. There’s quite a wide range of different models and designs. I didn’t know that at the time, but it’s fascinating. I remember one day standing in one of the disassembly rooms, and they had this nuclear weapon in a cradle standing there on the floor, and they had the top off of it. And I could just look down in the top of it. I couldn’t touch it, but I could look in there and just see the engineering in one of those things was just amazing. Just beyond belief.
Franklin: I bet. I can only imagine.
Martin: Yeah. But I’ve gone off on this nuclear weapons story and departed from Hanford.
Franklin: It’s okay.
Martin: Maybe I should come back.
Franklin: I think that’s a very interesting story. I certainly—I’ve also, like I said, heard of plenty of bombs—ICBMs, missiles, but I’d never quite heard of a howitzer-type fired weapon. But also just the fact that your team and your field was able to prevent a really nasty incident is pretty amazing.
Martin: Right.
Franklin: It speaks to your profession and your skill.
Martin: Well, like I mentioned, the professional credentials. Two of the three technicians who responded were certified by NNRPT. And they had the right kind of training, knew what to do, did it very well.
Franklin: Great.
Martin: I had an opportunity a year later to nominate them for a special DoE award for unusual—not heroism, but effective response. And they won the award that year.
Franklin: That’s great. So how and when did you leave Pantex?
Martin: Well, the first time, was in ’96—no, I’m sorry, in ’93—and I had a special appointment back at DoE headquarters in Germantown. So I went back there for two years to work with the branch of DoE that was like an inspector general—the internal inspection branch, if you will. Very similar in scope to what the DNFSB—Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board—was doing. Scrutinizing all the DoE operations at the national labs and other facilities, and trying to always make improvements.
Franklin: Wow.
Martin: So I worked with the DoE headquarters staff on many different audits that we did at other DoE labs. At the time, I specialized in dosimetry, both internal and external dosimetry, and other operational health physics parts of the program.
Franklin: Wow. So when did you come back to the Tri-Cities?
Martin: Well, I had a couple other interesting assignments in there. After DoE headquarters, then I went back to Pantex for three more years. And then another opportunity came up on an old facility near Cincinnati that needed to be decommissioned—decontaminated and decommissioned. And I went to Oak Ridge first, worked with the Foster Wheeler Company on the design of what became the largest radon control building that had ever been done. I was the radiation safety officer for that project at Oak Ridge in the design effort. And then we moved to Cincinnati for a year and I worked at the Fernald facility in actually building this radon control facility. What we were trying to deal with were these large concrete silos that contained residual ore material from the Second World War. They have to go back to—when the Manhattan Project was trying to bring together the necessary uranium in addition to the plutonium that was produced here at Hanford, they were using a rich pitch blend ore that was coming from what was then called Belgian Congo in Africa. It was shipped from there up the Saint Lawrence River to a facility near Niagara Falls. And then it ended up being processed to extract as much uranium as possible. But there were these residuals. They ended up in these concrete silos near Niagara Falls, New York as well as this Fernald facility, just outside of Cincinnati. So we had three big concrete silos that—I don’t recall—they must have been 80 feet in diameter and 50 feet high. So they held a lot of uranium ore residuals. It contained a fair amount of radium, which gave off radon gas. This facility was located not too far from a residential area. So it became a greater concern for getting it cleaned up. We put together this radon control facility that had these huge charcoal beds and you could pipe—you could take the head gas off of this silo, pipe it into these charcoal beds where the radon would be absorbed, and then the clean air would circulate. So you could fairly rapidly reduce the concentration of radon inside the silo to much lower levels. In the process, the charcoal beds got loaded up by absorbing radon. There came a point where you had to heat up that charcoal to drive off the captured radon. We devised a clever scheme with four different beds where we could kind of keep one of them recirculating on all times and have the other three working.
Franklin: So you say drive off the captured radon, where would it be driven off?
Martin: Over to the next charcoal bed, which hadn’t yet been completely saturated.
Franklin: Oh! But then eventually you still have charcoal that—
Martin: but it decays with a 3.8 day half-life, and that was built into the plan, too.
Franklin: Oh!
Martin: [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: But if it was to escape, right, it would get people very—it would contaminate or get people sick, or--?
Martin: Well, it was pretty carefully designed not to—
Franklin: Oh, but I’m saying that radon—
Martin: Oh, if it escaped from the silo. If there was no control of it—a certain amount of radon was escaping from the silo. For the most part, it’s a light gas, it just goes up and the wind blows it and disperses it. So it was very difficult to even measure anything offsite. But there was that concern there that we were dealing with.
Franklin: But if enough of it was released at once, then there might have been an issue?
Martin: Like if the whole roof of the silo was suddenly removed and it all came out, that could be a problem, yeah.
Franklin: Interesting. I didn’t realize it had such a short half-life.
Martin: Yeah. So I did that, what amounted to ten years of offsite assignments. About that time, my wife and I got tired of moving. So we came back to the Tri-Cities, and our kids are here. I came back to work at Battelle for another few years before I retired.
Franklin: When did you come back to Battelle?
Martin: I came back in 2001.
Franklin: Oh, okay. So then you worked for—it says you retired in 2006.
Martin: I retired about four years later. And the last major project I worked on was also very interesting. It was the project for customs and border protection. It was to install radiation portal monitors at seaports. This was shortly after 9/11, and there was a concern about dirty bomb material being imported by any means. We had one part of the project dealt with seaport, another part airports, and a third part postal facilities.
Franklin: Wow.
Martin: So I worked on the seaports part, and I had the Port of Los Angeles was my assignment. Another one of us had Port of Long Beach, which is right next door, which are the largest seaports on the West Coast and have the largest number of shipping containers coming in. So we devised a method for monitoring those shipping containers as they were unloaded and making sure nothing was coming in that way.
Franklin: Did—oh, sorry.
Martin: Very interesting project.
Franklin: I don’t know if you can speak to this, but was anything caught by these monitors?
Martin: Yes. But not dirty bomb material.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Martin: Turns out they were so sensitive, they would detect any kind of elevated background radioactivity. For example, kitty litter is a little bit elevated in background. Any kind of stone product, and there are various granite and other stone products imported from different places. Those had a high enough background activity that they would trigger our monitors. So we would run all these containers through a set of monitors, and any that triggered that amount would then be sent over to a secondary monitor, where they’d examine it more carefully, verify what was actually in the containers, sometimes inspect them.
Franklin: So recently our project staff got a tour of some of the facilities at HAMMER. And I believe we saw one of those monitors. Would that have been the same?
Martin: Mm-hm. Big yellow columns?
Franklin: Yeah, that they run it through.
Martin: Yep, that was the one.
Franklin: So you helped design—
Martin: We helped design—oh, I didn’t really get involved in design. That was done by some real smart people out here at Battelle. But I was onsite trying to get them installed.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Martin: And tested.
Franklin: Wow. That’s really—that’s fascinating.
Martin: Yeah, it was. I had a chance to do a lot of fun things when I worked at Battelle.
Franklin: Yeah, it sounds like it. Sounds like maybe I need to go get a job over there. Maybe they need a traveling historian. So, where—what have you been doing since you retired?
Martin: Well, for about five years, I worked for Dade Moeller, which is kind of a spinoff company from Battelle. And they had a major contract with NIOSH—National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health—as part of an employee compensation program for radiation workers. Initially, the way this was set up was we got the actual radiation exposure records for former employees and examined their measured radiation exposure, and then did some other calculations that would tend to take into account anything else that they might have been exposed to but was somehow not measured on the dosimeter and many other factors to kind of add up their maximum possible radiation dose. And then that was compared—this is where it got a little complex. There are many different types of cancer that can be caused by radiation at a high enough level. Some types of cancer can be caused by a radiation level lower than some others. So it depended on what type of cancer the individual had as to which—how we measured their maximum possible radiation exposure to the likelihood that that cancer was caused by radiation. We did a careful calculation using probability and determined that if their cancer was at least 50% probable that it was caused by radiation, then they were granted an award. Well, we did that for several years in a very careful, scientific way that was well-documented. Then it became political. A lot of former workers, then, applied for another category within this overall compensation program that they called Special Exposure Cohort. Which meant that it didn’t matter how much radiation exposure they had, if they had the right type of cancer, they could get the award. And it’s kind of degenerated that way. But for many years, I think we did it right. I also had an opportunity to work on another part of that project where we did what we call the technical basis documents, where we reconstructed the history of how radiation exposure records were developed and maintained at each of these different sites. Every one varied a little bit. I did the one for the technical basis document for Pantex in Amarillo, because I was familiar with that. But I got to do several other interesting sites, one of which was Ames Laboratory in Ames, Iowa. Going there and interviewing some of these old-timers and looking at their old records, I found that there was a chemistry professor at what was then Iowa State University. He was called upon by the Manhattan Project in 1943 to help them improve their methods for extracting uranium metal. The old process that had been used by the Curies and other early scientists was really quite inefficient. But this professor developed a method used in a calcium catalyst that was very effective. He was able to purify uranium metal much quicker and in larger quantities. The story was that he would have to get on the train every Sunday afternoon and go to Chicago for the meeting with the Manhattan Project and report on the progress of his research and so on. One week after successfully isolating an ingot of uranium metal, he took it with him in his briefcase. Went into the meeting with Manhattan Project and clunked it on the desk, and passed it around. He said that this is a new method for producing substantial quantities of uranium metal. All the scientists around the table kind of poked at it and scratched it and so on and didn’t believe it was really uranium, but it was. And they finally decided that he had made a great breakthrough, so they sent him back to Iowa and said, make a lot more, fast. And he did. So he had the material they needed, then, for the Manhattan Project.
Franklin: Wow.
Martin: Interesting story.
Franklin: Yeah, that’s really fascinating. So how did you become involved with the Parker Foundation?
Martin: About ten years ago—almost ten years ago—my friend Bill Bair and Ron Kathren and a couple others on the Parker Board invited me to participate. Matt Moeller was chairman of the board at that time—invited me to participate, and I just joined in, and found it very rewarding. I really appreciate what the Parker Board does in the memory of Herb Parker and in the sense of scholarships and other educational programs. So it’s a pleasure to contribute to that.
Franklin: Great, great. You moved in 1975 or ’76?
Martin: I moved here in ’76.
Franklin: ’76. And you mentioned children. Were your children born here, or did you move here with them?
Martin: My oldest daughter was born in San Diego, and my younger daughter was born in Boulder, Colorado.
Franklin: Okay.
Martin: So they were six and eight, I think, when we moved here.
Franklin: What were your impressions of Richland in the mid-70s when you moved? Did you live in Richland or did you--?
Martin: We did. Yeah, we lived just a few blocks from WSU here.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Martin: In North Richland. It was a very different community, but one that I came to know and respect. Because at that time, education was really paramount in the minds of parents and the school system. And my wife was a teacher. So we really took an interest in that. My kids got a really good education here in Richland. Went to Hanford High, and then did well in college. One of the main features of Richland at that time, I think, was a superior education program. Some of the other history of Richland with old government housing, and then we got a new house, and things like that are entirely different, but also very interesting.
Franklin: And is that what you kind of are meaning when you say it was a different community? I guess I’d like to unpack that a little bit more. How—in what ways was it different?
Martin: Well, a large part of Richland was originally government housing, and you only had to drive through town, you could see all the evidence of that. And then on the north side of Richland, they had opened up—beginning in 1965, I believe—development of newer private housing. We got here just in time to get in on a new house, and worked out fine for us.
Franklin: Great. Was there—being next to a site that was primarily involved in product production, plutonium production—was there a different feeling about the Cold War in Richland per se than anywhere else you had lived in the United States at that time?
Martin: There definitely was different feelings about the Cold War and living anywhere near a nuclear power plant. I remember when we were working with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission at many different reactor sites around the country. In many cases we would have public meetings to introduce the local folks to what we were trying to do to improve the emergency planning. There was a lot of concern about living anywhere near a nuclear power plant just a few years after TMI. I tried to explain to people how I live within 30 miles of nine nuclear power plants. But I understood radiation. I understood the risk, and I understood what could go wrong or how to deal with it. And it didn’t concern—didn’t bother me that much to live here. I found that to be generally true of a lot of people in Richland that were part—working at Hanford and were well-educated. They understood the risk and they could deal with it. Whereas many other people were just afraid. And I attribute that to what I call now about a 71-year deliberate misinformation program on the part of mass media to scare people about radiation.
Franklin: I like that. I’m writing it down. How do you feel that the—do you feel that the ending of the Cold War changed your work at all? I guess the reason why I ask—
Martin: It did.
Franklin: --these questions about the Cold War is because it was the impetus for much of the continued production of the material.
Martin: Yeah. I was in Germany in 1988, just before the Berlin Wall came down. I was also there in Berlin in 1984, and we actually crossed through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin on a special tour.
Franklin: Really?
Martin: It was quite amazing. I was in Berlin for a meeting of the International Radiation Protection Association. I took my whole family; it was a tremendous adventure for them. But we were able to be part of a special US Army tour that went through Checkpoint Charlie. I think they did this once a week. And we had a little tour of East Berlin while it was still under the control of the USSR. We visited their Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and they had a little ceremonial changing the guard there. And we visited the square in Berlin where Hitler had burned the books that one night in 1939. And then we visited a huge Russian war memorial, and there was a building there where the Germans had surrendered in 1945. There was quite a story about that. But I was really impressed with this huge Russian war memorial. There were five mass graves that each held 100,000 soldiers. It was done in kind of the Russian style, with statues and other honorary symbols to clearly show their respect for the lives of all those soldiers. But that was an impressive sight. But I was there again in 1988 just before the Berlin Wall came down, and you could kind of see the end of the Cold War coming. So it was a great opportunity that I had, working for Battelle, being able to travel like that, and do many exciting things.
Franklin: Did you get to ever talk or meet with any of your counterparts on the Russian side?
Martin: Yes.
Franklin: After the Cold War ended. And what was that like, to finally work with what had been considered the enemy?
Martin: It was quite unusual. I was scheduled to go to Russia a week after 9/11. It almost got canceled, but I managed to go. I was giving—they were having a conference for young scientists and trying to introduce them to international concepts of radiation safety. So I gave my paper and four others that we did to that group. It was located at what was the Russian equivalent of Los Alamos, their design facility. There weren’t very many Americans had been in there up to that point. So I was watched very closely. [LAUGHTER] And not allowed to see much, actually. But it was a very interesting exchange. The papers I was presenting were prepared in both English and Russian. And then we also did what they called a poster presentation, where we had a big poster with diagrams and everything—again translated to Russian. So we were able to put these up at this conference for these young scientists. They, I think, got a lot out of it because it was in their language so it was easy for them to understand. Working with an interpreter was a new experience for me. I would give this oral presentation, so I’d say one sentence and the pause. The interpreter would repeat that. I’d say the next sentence, and—kind of an awkward way to do an oral presentation.
Franklin: I can imagine.
Martin: But their hospitality was very good. This was in 2001. So the Cold War had been over for quite a few years. But we were trying to establish better relations. I think it was quite effective in doing that. I had another opportunity to work with Russian scientists on an NRC program, again where NRC was trying to provide training to their equivalent Russian inspectors for nuclear power plants and explain to them some of the ways that they did inspections, things they looked for, how they documented findings and things like that. We had four Russian inspectors and their interpreter come over from Moscow. I was their host in Washington, DC, and we worked with them there with the NRC headquarters for a week, providing training. And then we brought them out to Idaho to the Idaho National Lab, north of Idaho Falls, and went to a large hot cell facility at Idaho. A hot cell is where they have a heavily shielded enclosure with mechanical arms that do things on the inside. It was quite a sophisticated facility and somewhat unlike what the Russian counterparts were used to. But it was a good learning exercise for them. We kind of went through a demonstration of how we would do an inspection—a safety inspection. So, I had those kind of opportunities to interact with Russian scientists and found that very exciting. Very interesting.
Franklin: Did you find that there was anything that you had learned from them at all? Or do you feel that the US was much more advanced in radiation protection and health physics?
Martin: Well, I kept my ears open when I was talking to them, but they didn’t reveal much. [LAUGHTER] So, we didn’t pick up much that way.
Franklin: Sure.
Martin: We were trying to help them.
Franklin: Right. Were you at Hanford during the Russian visit to Hanford when they toured the Plutonium Finishing Plant?
Martin: No. That was after I retired, I think.
Franklin: Okay, just curious.
Martin: I heard about it of course.
Franklin: I’m sure. That must have been a pretty big deal from the standpoint of both countries. Is there anything that we haven’t covered that you would like to talk about?
Martin: I think there’s one thing I remember from when I did this interview the first time that I wanted to mention.
Franklin: Sure.
Martin: I’ve been talking about all the varied experiences I had, and excellent opportunities over the years. But I think one of the perhaps most impressive things that I was able to do was to be able to hire several good people into my organization. I won’t mention names, but there were several that I call superstars that are now leaders in the field. I was able to bring them in right out of college or from another job, and hire several really good people that certainly enhanced our program, and then gave them great opportunities to grow and expand. Like I say, they’re now leaders in the field. That was one of the most rewarding parts of my job.
Franklin: That’s great. Maybe you can give me their names off camera and we could contact them.
Martin: I think they’re already on your list. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Oh, okay, good.
Martin: But I’ll do that.
Franklin: Well, good.
Martin: We’ll do that.
Franklin: They should be. Tom, did you—
Tom Hungate: No, I’m fine.
Franklin: Emma, did you have anything?
Emma Rice: No, I’m fine.
Franklin: Okay. Well, I think that’s it. Jerry, thank you so much.
Martin: Well, that was fun. Did we stay on target?
Franklin: I believe we did.
Martin: I wandered a little. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: That’s okay.
Martin: There’s some stories there that might be interesting.
Franklin: I think the stories help keep the oral histories—they have a human-centered focus and they’re interesting for people to watch.
Martin: I hope so.
Franklin: And I think there might be a couple things that merit some more research in there that personally, for me, I’d like to find out some more about.
Martin: Oh, okay.
Franklin: Especially the howitzer thing.
Martin: Oh, yeah. [LAUGHTER]
Hungate: One thing I’d just like to ask—
Martin: Sure.
Hungate: You’ve been involved in a lot of things over a broad range of time and experiences and I just kind of wonder what you would feel is the one—maybe the item or two that you’ve worked on that will leave the most lasting impact?
Martin: The most lasting impact.
Hungate: Or that you wished had been developed more that didn’t quite complete, you’d like to see more work done on it, it was either defunded or it was—
Martin: Well, I’m thinking of several different things now. I’ll just have to think it through. The work we did with NRC to improve emergency planning on nuclear power plants I think was very effective. And that’s still being maintained today. Work we did with DoE at Pantex on nuclear weapons. You mentioned the end of the Cold War, that’s when many of these tactical nuclear weapons in Europe were brought back and declared obsolete, and so we were doing a massive disassembly operation on those. I learned a lot about nuclear weapons and found it fascinating. We implemented some methods at Pantex that I think are still in use in the maintenance programs that they do now. But we were able to, I think, substantially improve on radiation safety at Pantex. Certainly to the point where we were finally blessed by DNFSB and DoE. I think the quality of that program has been maintained. There’s several other projects that I’ve worked on over the years, but I guess there’s no one thing that stands out that I would be concerned about that it was defunded or ended or somehow went downhill. I’m sure that’s happened, but I haven’t kept track of everything.
Franklin: Being as nuclear power and nuclear weapons have different objectives, and you mentioned this retirement of a lot of nuclear weapons, do you feel that nuclear weapons still have a role to play in security—
Martin: I do.
Franklin: You do?
Martin: Yes. Because the Russians still have a lot of them, China has some, the French and English have a few. It’s what I call the mutual deterrent, which is a term that’s been used. It just means that we don’t ever want to use one again, but if any one of those countries had some kind of an unbalanced advantage, it could be used. So if we have this mutual assured deterrence, it keeps that in balance. So it’s important to maintain that stockpile.
Franklin: Interesting. Thank you.
Hungate: Okay.
Franklin: Great.
Douglas O’Reagan: My name is Douglas O’Reagan. I’m conducting an oral history interview with Everett A. Weakley on January 13th, 2016. Interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. And I will be talking with Everett, or Ev—would you prefer Everett, or--?
Weakley: Just—yeah, Ev or Everett. Either one.
Douglas O’Reagan: Okay. About his experiences working on the Hanford site. Okay, well thanks for being here. So—you were just telling me while we were having some camera issues—I’d love to hear about sort of how you got involved with the Hanford site, what you were working on that brought you here, and then your sort of early years, what you were working on here.
Weakley: Well, they came up to University of Idaho and recruited people. And I was one of the ones they recruited. So I came down here, and they put me on work at the tritium program extraction process. So I was a process control engineer at that time.
O’Reagan: Do you know why they recruited you? Were you working in physics?
Weakley: They were after engineers, especially chemical engineers at that time.
O’Reagan: I see. Did you know anything about nuclear science specifically?
Weakley: Oh, no. We didn’t know squat. [LAUGHTER] Of course. Because we were up at University of Idaho. But it was a lot better than being drafted and sent to Korea.
O’Reagan: How much were they able to tell you about the job before they hired you?
Weakley: Very little. Very little. They didn’t tell us what was going on. They came down here and they put some people—engineers in this job, some in this job. I was selected for tritium extraction.
O’Reagan: Mm-hmm. Could you tell me about your first experiences on that job? What sort of the first month or two like? Do you remember?
Weakley: Well, they put us on shift work. I think it was called XYZ shift. And it was only five days a week, but it was—changed. So they were going 24 hours a day, but only for five days. It was a glass line at that time. Tritium was extracted and then you had to send it—you had to pump it out through palladium windows—that’s the way they got the hydrogen out, and the tritium and the deuterium. And then we had to collect those in glass containers. It was all hooked up to the system. And then we were designing one for a metal one. So I went in on the metal designs also. And most of that work was done in the shops down in—oh, what do they call it—the old Hanford site. They had a lab—or a place down there, and they did most of the work—construction work. And then they assembled it all. It was interesting work, actually. Because they kept me out of the Korean War, also, so I was happy about that. I didn’t want to go over there.
O’Reagan: Part of what we’re trying to get an idea about is sort of—what was it like working on the Hanford site? Is there anything that sticks out to you about the way things worked? Or the structure, or anything like that?
Weakley: Well, since I was a single guy, they put us in the dorms. They ran out of dorms, so they put us—there was two dorms that were down in the women’s dorm area. So they put us in one of those dorms down there. I remember there was a—what the heck street was that? Anyway, those women’s dorms were right close there, too. And then we’d go up and eat at the Mart, which is still here, but it isn’t called the Mart now. And we’d walk through this field of—I think they were prunes or plums or something like that. And you’d go through there and you’d get attacked by the birds. [LAUGHTER] They would actually attack you during the daytime. So it was a lot of things going on. For dorm club, we’d go down to—oh, the Blue Mountains, and we’d go up to Mount Hood, and hunting and fishing was always what I did. It was a good place. Lot of people. It was interesting, because everybody was new, had come in. It was quite the exciting time to see all these people from all over the United States.
O’Reagan: Did you live in the dormitories long?
Weakley: Oh, let’s see. I lived in there until I got married in ’53. Then we got a B house on Van Giesen Street—one end of it. And I wasn’t the oldest tenant, so I could not buy that anyway. I wouldn’t want it anyway. And then they started selling houses; I got a H house, south end of town and had to remodel that. Had to dig out the basement and all that. By that time, I had several children, so I kind of had to make room for all these kids. Took out the chimney. My wife did not like the coal-burning stove down there to heat the place. So we put in electric baseboard heat. Swamp coolers on the windows. Re-put new—took the chimney out. Had to put new roofing on. All that sort of thing. And later on, we moved to where we are on Pike Avenue now. Then we had more kids. [LAUGHTER]
O’Reagan: Keep you busy.
Weakley: That’s right.
O’Reagan: What was life like in Richland in the ‘50s?
Weakley: Well, it was kind of—there was always something to do. Mainly, down along the river in the park. We’d go down there for entertainment in the evenings. There’d be dances. And then I took up square dancing, my wife and I. So that was in different places, but mainly at the end, it was down in the—what do they call it, down there now? At the park. Oh, community house. It’s still going. I think this is their last year. We used to be on what’s now a hole in the ground, on the south end of that building, was where they used to have a structure. That’s where we danced, it was in that. And they had a kitchen in there; everybody’d bring food. It was a nice time. Had a lot of fun.
O’Reagan: So you said—do you feel it was easy to get integrated into the community, to be a part of the community at that time?
Weakley: What do you mean?
O’Reagan: Well, I’m just thinking in terms of your—you’ve been describing a very interesting social scene that people can get into. I’m just thinking, there were a lot of new people coming into town. How—you yourself, of course, experienced this—what it was like to be a new resident in Richland.
Weakley: Well, mainly you were in dorms. So, you were all right out of college. Here you are, a bunch of college kids, here—men, and then college women right next door to them. So there was a lot of dating going on. Then we’d go over to Pasco, to the Elks Club at that time. And on Friday nights, they always had a fish dinner. We’d go over there and dance and eat. That was a good time. That was ballroom dancing, it wasn’t square dancing. That was later.
O’Reagan: So returning to your work for a minute, I guess to some degree you’ve done this, but could you sort of describe a typical work day, and did that change over the long course of time that you were working there?
Weakley: Well, when I went out there, I had to work shift work. XYZ shifts. You’d work daytimes, evenings, and nighttime. I didn’t like that too well. Then when I went to 300 Area, I was all daytime, which I liked.
O’Reagan: How much did the work you were doing change as you got these successive promotions, as you got the new jobs?
Weakley: Here?
O’Reagan: Yeah. I mean, when you were an engineering assistant, was your—I’d assume—if only because it’s decades earlier—how different was your work than when you were principal engineer or senior principal engineer?
Weakley: Well, the added responsibility, of course. And I spent a lot of time in the old reactor fuel and then I wrote a lot of documents on how to—the canning process. And that’s probably in here—I’m pretty sure it is.
O’Reagan: I noticed here, it says that you are an expert on fuel manufacturing environmental issues. I wonder what—when did that become a priority? The environmental issues, was that something that was always part of your work, or did that develop over time?
Weakley: Environmental issues—you worried about what was going out the stacks, especially in 313. We had slug recovery—we’d take the aluminum—the ones that were reject—and they would dissolve the aluminum cans off in caustic, and they always had this exhaust going out. If you didn’t watch it, it would suck out quite a bit of moisture with it, and that would have caustic in it. We had trouble with the women walking by—their nylon hose would disintegrate. And they didn’t like that. I don’t blame them. And you could feel it—you could feel it on your face. They had to fix that up, of course.
O’Reagan: Were safety issues or the environment ever something you were concerned about working there?
Weakley: Oh, yeah, I was always worrying about—And then at the 306 Building, making fuel elements for the N Reactor, I was involved in that—a lot of things. I had to make trips to the aluminum companies that made aluminum products for us. Bought them back east, and some of them in California. So I did a lot of traveling, going to these different places, trying to get improvements made in aluminum ore, and later on, Zircaloy-2. That was Wah Chang made that down in Oregon—made Zircaloy-2 for us. That was interesting. So you’d take a drive down there and visit their plant. And then you’d go to these other places and visit those plants.
O’Reagan: These were to get components for the fuel manufacturing?
Weakley: What’s that?
O’Reagan: Were these trips to get components for the fuel manufacturing?
Weakley: They were making components for—
O’Reagan: I see. How much—let’s go with this. Could you describe the ways in which security and/or secrecy impacted your work?
Weakley: Well, you couldn’t talk about what you were doing, and we knew that. I made a lot of trips—I went to National Lead Company in Ohio at Fernald. That’s the ones that we would get our uranium cores from, for the old reactors. Then I’d go down to Mallinckrodt in Weldon Spring, Missouri, and that’s where they started making the billets that they’d send up to—on Lake Erie. There was a place that’d take the big billets and make smaller billets for the N Reactor. So I was always traveling around. Then at the same time, I was going down to the Savannah River plant and checking on what they were doing, because they had the same people. Like me, engineers that were busy and they’d get together and compare notes, and try to get the lower prices on some things. Especially aluminum components for the old reactors. Nothing much you could do about the Zircaloy: it was pretty well fixed. The only plant I never go to was the one that made the braze rings for the N Reactor fuel. That was back in—and it had beryllium in it. And I never had gone to there. I don’t know—I just plain missed it for some reason. I don’t know why.
O’Reagan: Was it easy to communicate with all the engineers and workers at these plants, or did the secrecy ever sort of inhibit that?
Weakley: Oh, no. If you’re buying, say, Zircaloy stuff, you go right down here in Oregon and talk to them. And that’s what we did.
O’Reagan: Okay.
Weakley: Same way back east on the aluminum plants. Did a lot of traveling. My wife didn’t like that, I don’t think, but we had to travel a lot. And it was old airlines at that time. [INAUDIBLE] had an airline to go to Spokane. You could catch a plane from there, it takes six hours to get into—now takes just a few hours.
O’Reagan: Was it unusual that you were traveling that much? Did other people also travel that much from the Hanford site?
Weakley: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, a lot of people were traveling. It’s hectic now. I won’t get on an airplane anymore, so heck with them. [LAUGHTER] I’m retired; I don’t do that.
O’Reagan: Do you feel the security or secrecy of the place changed much over the decades?
Weakley: Oh, yeah. When I started here it was really secret. They didn’t want the Russians to know anything about making tritium. But the secret got out, because somebody in Savannah River—or down at Oak Ridge probably told them. So nothing we could do about it.
O’Reagan: Right.
Weakley: But oh, yeah, they tried to keep it secret.
O’Reagan: What were the most challenging and/or rewarding aspects of your work at Hanford?
Weakley: Ooph! That’s a tough one.
O’Reagan: It’s a big question. Any particular times that you were working on a project that was really stumping everybody? Any real challenges there that stick out?
Weakley: Well, there’s always challenges to make things safer and better, and don’t dump stuff out into the atmosphere, or down the drain out to the ponds. Because at that time, they ponds along the river. And it discharges—a lot of stuff went into that pond. They tried to clean that stuff up, but—oh, yeah. When you have time to go through this, you will find a lot of things in here that I worked on.
O’Reagan: Is there anything in there that you’re particularly proud of having accomplished? Or that sticks out?
Weakley: Well, I lasted the whole—until I got laid off. [LAUGHTER] That’s an accomplishment—I didn’t get crapped up with anything.
O’Reagan: Did you like your job?
Weakley: Oh, yeah, I liked it. Oh, sure. It was a challenging job. I wrote a lot of manuals. That’s one of the things I did, a lot of manual writing when I was out there. There are still some of those around on the processes of lead-dip canning process, and co-extrusion process. I did a lot of writing.
O’Reagan: Have the Tri-Cities changed much in your time living here?
Weakley: Oh, yeah.
O’Reagan: And how?
Weakley: Oh, yeah, since I came in ’50? Oh, yeah. There’s a lot of changes. They couldn’t even allow the blacks to live in Kennewick. They had to go over in Pasco, for instance.
O’Reagan: Right.
Weakley: So we didn’t see too many blacks, actually. Now towards the end, they started hiring some people in that were blacks. I had no problem with them.
O’Reagan: Yeah, we’re trying to get a sense for how the community has changed over time. I know that’s a vague question. That’s certainly an interesting point about the demographics of it. Anything else about sort of the social life, the number of things going, anything else like that that sticks out to you on how the community’s changed over the decades?
Weakley: Well, I always had been hunting and fishing. So when I came here, I took up hunting and fishing again. Some of the people that I—I belong to the Rod and Gun Club—joined that many years ago, and I still belong, even though I got rid of my guns last year. I don’t go out and dig goose pits in the middle of the winter anymore. That’s too cold. I didn’t like to eat geese, anyway. [LAUGHTER] But I had a lot of good trips hunting down the Blues and up north of Spokane, up in that area.
O’Reagan: One of the things—well, okay. Let me go to this one next. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and/or living in Richland during the Cold War?
Weakley: Hmm. That’s an odd one. Well, for one thing, we couldn’t announce what we were doing anywhere. If you could, you made sure you didn’t. If they said, hey, you’re from Hanford. But it didn’t bother me on traveling too much. Because I’d usually go on to aluminum vendors or Zircaloy-2 vendors. Or I’d go to Savannah River plant, which has got the same restrictions as we have. And it was a free exchange then when you went there or you went to National Lead at Fernald. It was free exchange with the people there. So that was just like being at work. So I had no really problem with it. I didn’t really like traveling that much. But there was nothing I could do about it.
O’Reagan: You were mentioning your collaboration people at Savannah River. Can you tell me more about that?
Weakley: What’s that?
O’Reagan: You were mentioning your training people at Savannah River, is that right? Or just trained people who eventually were at Savannah River?
Weakley: No, they were—I met one of them. But they sent people up in tritium extraction. Because they built that plant for tritium. The guy that was running the tritium extraction plant was one of them that I trained. And the last trip I made down there, I met him and went into the tritium extraction plant with him and talked to him. He gave me a tour of what it was like. It was a lot different than what we had out here, of course. Then they shipped their stuff again to Oak Ridge.
O’Reagan: Okay. So, I’m also interested in how people commemorate their community, how people celebrate the history, or try to remember the history. I understand that you’ve been involved in some of the historical groups around here. Can you tell me something about that? Why you thought that was important, why you got involved with those groups?
Weakley: Are you talking about the Richland Rod and Gun Club, for instance?
O’Reagan: Well, them and also the B Reactor Museum Association and so on.
Weakley: Well the B Reactor Association, I was one of the earlier ones, before they got the Indians out there. It was interesting, because I was on the ground floor with them. In fact, I was in a meeting this week with them. I still belong to them. Just like the Rod and Gun Club, I still belong to them, even though I don’t—got rid of all my guns because I don’t go out and dig goose pits in the wintertime anymore. So it was interesting.
O’Reagan: I always find that there’s an awful lot of things that I don’t know that I should be asking. What could you—what would seem important or interesting that you might want to talk about, or think might be worth discussing that I might have not thought to ask? Anything that comes to mind?
Weakley: Hmm. Not right off the top of my head, it isn’t.
O’Reagan: Sure, that’s fine.
Weakley: [LAUGHTER]
O’Reagan: Yeah. We’re just trying, as I said—we’re most interested in getting a feel for life in the Tri-Cities throughout the Cold War, up to the near present. And just how things have changed over time. What it was like to be a worker on the Hanford plants, how work on the Hanford plant changed over time, what it was like living in the community and getting to know people. So really, a broad set of things, but there’s always questions I don’t think to ask.
Weakley: Okay. Well, you might have some ideas when you go through this later on. They gave me this, had my payroll number on it and all that. My service dates, 6/19/50 is when I came here. And payroll number 51500 was pretty easy to remember, thank goodness.
O’Reagan: As you went through this, did anything—
Weakley: Huh?
O’Reagan: As you started reading through this again, did any memories leap to mind? Did anything about it sort of jog any fond memories or any surprises?
Weakley: Well, we always had surprises. We never knew what was going to happen. Item—let’s see, what is that? Item four.
O’Reagan: Mm-hmm.
Weakley: I would ship pyrophoric uranium Zircaloy chips and fines back to National Lead. And we had surprises there, because they were supposed to use metal pallets. Somebody brought in wooden ones. And they put all these things that we had full of concrete and chips and fines in it, and they had to take them over across the street into a building. And when they did that, they heated it up and it broke one of the containers, and it caught fire on the shipping containers. They weren’t supposed to use shipping containers. That was a hell of a mess to clean up. Because we had a fire, had to clean all that up then. But we actually shipped the stuff back there and they recovered the uranium and reused it.
O’Reagan: Well, I think that’s the written questions I have here. There are certainly a lot more interesting stuff here. Again, if anything comes to mind you would like to speak about, we would love to hear a bit more. Also, it mentions here that your historical knowledge of site activities, particularly in 300 Area, has been extremely valuable in the preparation of the RCRA and CERCLA documents and planning. Could you tell me anything about that initiative?
Weakley: Whereabouts are you?
O’Reagan: It’s number five, sub-point A.
Weakley: Oh, okay. I did a lot of document writing and preparations of these RCRA and CERCLAs documents and planning. And I worked with—what’s her name? Michelle Gerber?
O’Reagan: Mm-hmm.
Weakley: I worked a lot of work with her, as she was a kind of historian. You’ve probably met her, of course.
O’Reagan: I know the name, but I haven’t actually met her, I don’t think.
Weakley: You haven’t met her?
O’Reagan: I don’t think so.
Weakley: Amazing. I’m surprised you haven’t met her yet. Anyway. She needed a lot of work. I would find things in 300 Area when we were cleaning out for the old reactors, getting 313 cleaned out. We would find movies. I’d ship that out to her, and then she made a CD out of it, I think. It showed the canning process, which had never been done before. It was—
O’Reagan: Do you think the history of your job is going to be well-preserved? Do you think the records are still there that can reflect on your times, your work? That is again, sort of an open-ended question here. I’m just trying to think through how people will remember this time in history, and sort of the work that you were involved in. You’re mentioning you found this film and were able to get it out there. But probably some materials didn’t make it out, for security reasons or whatever else, or just weren’t preserved. Do you feel that people have an accurate memory of the time as you look through?
Weakley: Well, most of them, I think, do. I always rode a bicycle around, between the buildings out in 300 Area. I would collect lead parts that I’d see laying around and get rid of them—or pick up anything else. So that I would ride those into the building. [LAUGHTER]
O’Reagan: I saw—I was out at the DoE’s artifact collection—historical artifact collection. They have some bicycles out there that I guess were what you were describing, people traveling around the site. Was that common?
Weakley: What do you mean?
O’Reagan: You were using bicycles to get around the site?
Weakley: Well, it was in our area. Oh, I used it all the time. And it had a basket in the back wheels. I’d put something in there—I would collect lead brick or something like that, and put it where the lead’s supposed to be and kind of clean things up. Well, it was a pretty good-sized area, 300 Area, so if you had to go down to the south end for some reason, you wanted to get there and get back.
O’Reagan: Right. Okay. So as I said, I think these are the questions that we had prepared, sort of the general ones here.
Weakley: You might have some questions when you—well, you can use anything you want out of this write-up.
O’Reagan: Yeah, I think this will be a great help. This has been very interesting from my perspective here. We certainly thank you for your time. Yeah, I think that’s at least our first set of questions. But maybe if anything occurs to us, or to you, maybe we could send follow-up questions? Would that be okay, if any questions—
Weakley: Oh, yeah, you can always get ahold of me if I’m around. I don’t go travel too far since I’m 88.
O’Reagan: All right. Well, thanks very much. We appreciate your time.
Weakley: Oh, she’s still back there.
O’Reagan. Yeah.
Weakley: [LAUGHTER]
Douglas O’Reagan: Okay. Well, thanks for being here, first of all. To start off, would you please pronounce and spell your name for us?
Sue Olson: Sue, S-U-E. Olson, O-L-S-O-N.
O’Reagan: Okay, thank you. And I am Douglas O’Reagan. I’m conducting an oral interview here as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. It’s February 5th, 2016. This interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. So just to get us started, would you please tell us something about your life before you came to Hanford? Where you were growing up and so on.
Olson: I was born in Claude, Texas. I graduated from Panhandle High School as valedictorian in my class. I went to Texas Woman’s University in Denton, Texas. Then went to University of Texas in Austin, Texas. I was—[COUGH] Excuse me. I was in college in an accounting class at the University of Texas in Austin when World War II was declared. I heard the President declare World War II. So at the end of that year, I took a civil service test as clerk typist and I started working for US Corps of Engineers. I first worked at Pantex Ordnance Plant in Amarillo, Texas, and I had to transfer to Tyler, Texas to an army replacement training. And then after that, I received a teletype that I was to enter in for Hanford. We had received a teletype from a lady who had transferred up here, and she had said, don’t come here. It’s rattlesnakes, sagebrush, and dust storms. [LAUGHTER] So I transferred to the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. And Manhattan Project had three areas—I worked for the army major who was in charge of one of the areas there. DuPont was the contractor there. And at Oak Ridge, I met Robert Olson, who was with me at DuPont. Before I met him, he worked at the University of Chicago to work on the Manhattan Project—he worked on at the University. And he transferred to Oak Ridge; I met him there. We were married there, and then we transferred to Hanford, with DuPont. We arrived here October 1st, 1944.
O’Reagan: What sort of work did you do at Oak Ridge?
Olson: Well, he and I were at DuPont getting ready to work. The work on the Manhattan Project was to develop the bomb. That was what it was for. And he worked at Oak Ridge.
O’Reagan: Do you know what sort of—was he working in chemicals or physics? Do you know what sort of work he was doing there?
Olson: No, because it was all secret.
O’Reagan: I see. And did you say you were also working there as a clerk?
Olson: I worked as a secretary for the Army Major, who was in charge of the X-10 area in Oak Ridge.
O’Reagan: Okay. When you arrived at Hanford, what sort of work did you undertake here?
Olson: Oh, I signed up to be secretary and DuPont was the contractor here for the first year or so. And they sent me out to 200 West Area to be in the stenographic pool. I was the only secretary there. There were several departments, and all the departments brought their paperwork in to me. [LAUGHTER] And I took dictation for all of them who wanted to write letters of any type. Then they sent another girl out—another secretary out, but she couldn’t take dictation. So I did all of that. There were several departments. I don’t remember the names of all the departments, but it was a major process.
O’Reagan: Was it similar to what you were doing at Oak Ridge, or was it a new kind of work?
Olson: It was the same kind of work, secretarial work.
O’Reagan: Right. What was your impression of the Tri-Cities when you arrived? Was it like you had been warned?
Olson: No. [LAUGHTER] We drove along the highway south of town, and Bob looked over and said, there it is. And we could see a few houses. We went to the hotel to check in at the hotel, and the hotel was called the transient quarters. [LAUGHTER] The hotel in Oak Ridge was called the guest house. We were in the hotel about three days. Then we moved into—at that time the houses were assigned to people. There were only the two of us, and so they moved us into a one-bedroom prefab on Winslow Street.
O’Reagan: In Richland?
Olson: Winslow Street in Richland. And there was one street behind that, and behind that street was desert, all the way out to the river.
O’Reagan: What were your impressions of the house? Did you like the house?
Olson: Well, the house was adequate. It was 600 square feet.
O’Reagan: Mm-hmm. Had a question and it went right out of my mind. [LAUGHTER] Okay. So could you tell us, what was an average day at your job? You said you took dictation, but what other kinds of work—
Olson: Typing. In 200 West Area in 1944, it was typing. Except for the people who dictated. One man came in one day and he dictated the evacuation process, which took him several hours to do it. And the evacuation process—if it had ever had to happen—the process was that it would be on buses—cattle car buses. [LAUGHTER] The seats were on the sides of the bus, vertically, not horizontally across as they are in most buses. But there was never an evacuation process. There was preparation for it, if it had happened.
O’Reagan: Interesting. I understand the transportation to get to jobs on the Hanford site was difficult. Did you take buses?
Olson: Well, there were buses. There were buses, yes.
O’Reagan: Was that a long commute?
Olson: Yes. I don’t remember the number of miles, but it’s a long commute from Richland into the West area.
O’Reagan: What was your husband working on?
Olson: He worked on—it was a group of scientists that were—13 or 14 or 15, something like that—and they wrote the separations process. Which was part of the process.
O’Reagan: I guess that was probably a different part of the Hanford site from where you were working?
Olson: No, it was in 200 West Area, too. Yes. And it was a group of scientists who had transferred from Oak Ridge along with Bob.
O’Reagan: Right. Could you please describe Hanford as a place to work? It’s a broad question. Let’s see—what were some of the more challenging aspects of your job?
Olson: Well, that I typed for eight hours a day. I typed or took dictation eight hours a day. No coffee breaks, nothing like that, and everything was confidential. Nobody discussed their job with any other person.
O’Reagan: I would guess you would have had to have had pretty high clearance to be taking dictation on all these sensitive matters. What was that process like?
Olson: Well, I worked in Two West and then I transferred to B Plant, and I went to 300 Area. My next job, I worked for Wilfred Johnson when he was assistant general manager. And I worked in the 703 Building. I had Top Secret clearance there. So I had kept the filing cabinet locked. I took dictation from him. The rest of it was the type you’re making phone calls.
O’Reagan: When did you find out about what the goal of the Hanford site was, to make the weapons?
Olson: When the bomb was dropped, I read it in the local paper.
O’Reagan: What was your reaction?
Olson: I was happy. That the US was going to be safe.
O’Reagan: Right. Do you—trying to think how to phrase—is that your impression of that’s when everybody around you found out as well, or was it sort of a general surprise that the—
Olson: Yes. It was a surprise to everybody, I think. That’s my opinion. Except the men like my husband who were working on it.
O’Reagan: Did you continue working at the Hanford site after the war?
Olson: Yes. I worked there for ten years.
O’Reagan: Did your work change substantially once the war was over?
Olson: Well, as I said, I worked as a secretary in 200 West, and then I moved to B Plant. And I worked in B Plant, and then I went to the 300 Area and was a secretary for the head of metallurgy. And then I had the job as—I was then an executive secretary for Wilfred “Bill” Johnson. And I retired after that period.
O’Reagan: Did the workplace environment change in that time? You mentioned there were no breaks at first.
Olson: Change in what way?
O’Reagan: You mentioned it was very focused work during the war, no breaks, really concentrating to get the job done. Did that become more relaxed eventually, or was it still the same pace?
Olson: Not in the jobs I worked on. Everybody was there to work.
O’Reagan: Interesting.
Olson: No coffee breaks, nothing like that.
O’Reagan: Interesting. How about—can you tell us something about your life outside of work during the wartime?
Olson: We skied. Bob was from Wisconsin. He was a skier. And I grew up in Panhandle, Texas, and I did not ski. But I took lessons. And we skied on weekends.
O’Reagan: Where would you go?
Olson: We went to the closest one, over by—the closest one, which was south of East Richland. Tollgate. We went to Tollgate and skied there. And then we went up to the Snoqualmie Pass, and we skied there when it had only three rope tows. Before they put in any kind of lifts. It was—and I don’t remember the year for that, but—shortly after we got here, we went to Snoqualmie Pass.
O’Reagan: Did the social environment—did life in Richland change for you outside of work once the war was over?
Olson: Well, there were a few more activities, because while the war was going on, there was nowhere to go. [LAUGHTER] We had a friend from Oak Ridge we played bridge with part of the time, and then we skied weekends.
O’Reagan: Did you feel it was easy to meet new people when you moved here?
Olson: Did I feel--?
O’Reagan: I’ve heard some people say that when they first got here, they had a very easy time meeting people; I’ve heard other people say when they got here, they were so focused on the work, they didn’t get to meet as many people—
Olson: Oh, no, no, because we had friends from Oak Ridge who were transferred who were scientists. And people who were at work in that kind of work. So we visited with them, and they—we all had a little group, all the people that came from Oak Ridge. So we had several friends.
O’Reagan: Let’s see. Could you describe any ways in which security or secrecy at Hanford impacted your work?
Olson: Well, of course. [LAUGHTER] No visiting, no coffee breaks—we worked.
O’Reagan: Did the secrecy continue outside of work? I’ve seen in some communities that people feel that they can’t talk about the work, and that sort of gets—someone last week was describing how she sort of felt she had to be on her guard about speaking about her work. She was afraid of that. Did you feel any sort of sense like that?
Olson: We didn’t discuss—we did not discuss work, because we were busy with whatever we were doing—playing bridge or dancing or skiing. So there was no reason to discuss work.
O’Reagan: Sure. When you retired from being a secretary, you mentioned you eventually got into real estate. Is that right?
Olson: Yes.
O’Reagan: Was that right away, or did you have a [INAUDIBLE]
Olson: No, it was not. My husband died in 1974, and so I was at home. I did volunteer work for 20 years. I had no plans to go back to work, but after his death, I decided to work in real estate.
O’Reagan: Will you tell us about your volunteer work?
Olson: Oh, yes, Kadlec Hospital Auxiliary, and Mid-Columbia Symphony Guild, and Girl Scouts. All types of volunteer work.
O’Reagan: Great. What kinds of things did you do at the hospital?
Olson: Volunteer work. I would go down at 7:00 in the morning, and I answered the phone in one of the departments—I think it was the children’s department, that was part of what I did.
O’Reagan: And when you started getting into real estate, can you tell me about that?
Olson: Yes, yes. I took classes at CBC. I studied hard for it, and I passed the test. I started to work for a company called—let’s see—Sherwood and Roberts. They were a company that had offices in this state and California and some other state. I worked for them four years, and then I transferred to other companies.
O’Reagan: Mm-hmm. Did that job change over time? I know the communities started expanding during that period—
Olson: Oh, well, yes, there was more work as the company got larger.
O’Reagan: Could you describe any ways in which you think of the Tri-Cities as changing over the first couple of decades you lived here?
Olson: Well, it got larger. Larger, and they built more houses out past Winslow [LAUGHTER] Winslow Street. Well, of course it changed. There were more activities. Everybody was more—and there were people transferring in and out from large companies. There were a lot of people who came here who had worked for other companies that came here. And some had worked for General Electric or whoever the major contractor was.
O’Reagan: Let’s see. Of course, during a lot of this era, the Cold War is going on as well. Did you feel that that was something sort of just off happening in the world, or was that something that you felt impacted your life?
Olson: The Cold War?
O’Reagan: Yeah, of course, there’s sort of this global conflict going on. There’s a lot of still building nuclear weapons, there’s thinking about use of nuclear weapons. Some people have described sort of a fear during that time, and other people have described they were happy—they went about their work and it didn’t bother them.
Olson: No, there was no fear to me personally. I was happy to see that the US was doing a job extremely well. I hoped it would continue to be good.
O’Reagan: Mm-hmm. Let’s see. This is a general question. How would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland during the period that you lived here?
Olson: I think they should all be very proud of it, because it ended the war.
O’Reagan: Right. Is there anything that you think children growing up today might not know about this period?
Olson: I have no idea whether they know or not.
O’Reagan: Sure. Is there anything you think, beyond—sorry, I have to—trying to think through, just—as people have lived here for some time start thinking back on their lives in the community, how they would like people to think about the history of the local community? I guess you’ve answered that to some degree: we should be proud about the contributions of the time. I guess what I’m trying to get at is—what was different in, say, the ‘60s or the ‘70s, in living in this era than it is today? Anything come to mind?
Olson: I don’t think there was anything different from living in any good community or city.
O’Reagan: One of the local community leaders here—we understand you knew Sam Volpentest—
Olson: Yes.
O’Reagan: --who contributed a lot to the local history. Would you describe your knowledge of his impact, what he was working on when you got to work with him?
Olson: He was a major impact. He saved the Tri-Cities time after time after time. He made contacts in Washington, DC and he kept them. He flew back and forth frequently. Without his perseverance, the Tri-Cities would never have become as good as it had been. He kept sure that Hanford was going, which, at that time, was a main project in the Tri-Cities. And the best one producing.
O’Reagan: I always like to ask—what have I not asked about that I should be asking about? What else should I be asking you about?
Olson: Oh, I don’t know. Nothing else. [LAUGHTER] I think you asked very well, thank you.
O’Reagan: Well, if anything comes to mind, or anything you’d like to expand upon comes to mind, we’d of course love to hear it.
Olson: All right, thank you.
O’Reagan: But otherwise, thanks so much for being here. It’s been very interesting.
Olson: Thank you.
O’Reagan: All right.
O’Reagan: Okay, great. So let’s start off here. First of all, would you please pronounce and spell your name for us?
Ballard: Well, my first name is Delbert L. Ballard. Leo for center. D-E-L-B-E-R-T, B-A-L-L-A-R-D. And I go by Del, commonly.
O’Reagan: All right, thank you. My name is Douglas O’Reagan. I’m conducting an oral history interview here on February 18th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Mr. Ballard about his experiences working on the Hanford site, living in this community. First of all, can you start us off just—walk us through your life in sort of a brief term before you came to this area.
Ballard: Well, I was raised on a dryland wheat farm in Montana, so I know what work is all about. And I was a student in a little high school that was only seven of us in our graduating class. So I was sort of a country boy, and went to college at Montana State University. And I graduated from there in 1951. Just prior to that, the General Electric Company, of course, had been there to do interviews. They were scoping for—recruiting for engineers and I was a civil engineer graduate. There was other recruiters through, too. I had an offer from a San Francisco shipyard, and another from the Soil Conservation Service in Montana. But I wanted to get a job with GE. So I’d had the interview, but no really positive award or recognition that they were going to give me an offer. They were interviewing a large number of people. So graduation day came around and I still hadn’t gotten a letter from GE. But the mail came that morning, and lo and behold, there it was. So I was really pleased at that. So my initial job right out of college was coming to Hanford and working for General Electric Company as a rotational training—in the rotational training program. They had hired that year, the previous year, actually ’49, ’50 and ’51, they had hired about 300 or 350 tech grads. And I was one of the later ones getting here; I didn’t get here until July. So most of the good jobs were assigned. But in the rotational training program, my first assignment was a rather mundane assignment to the transportation department. Next one was a more interesting job with the inspection department. That was over in the shipyard in Bremerton. At that time, Hanford was undergoing I believed what they called the Korean expansion. The Korean War was underway and in full force at that time when I got out of school. As a matter of fact, I thought I was going to be drafted, but I tried to enlist and—I’m diverting here a little bit, but—tried to enlist in the Air Force to be a pilot, but my eyes weren’t good enough, so I got rejected for that. [LAUGHTER] So when I knew that the GE job was a deferred job, I thought, well, that’s an alternate I’d just as soon pursue. So anyway when I got here on the rotational training program, that’s what it was. Individuals were assigned to different locations for training purposes and for filling job needs. The second assignment was, as I said, inspection department in the shipyard in Bremerton. At that time, they were fabricating—the shipyard was fabricating the biological shield blocks for the C Reactor. It was one of the expansion efforts at Hanford, increasing the production capacity. So that was an interesting job over there at the shipyard doing inspection and learning a lot about inspection techniques and components and so forth. Another month after that, I was rotating around the Seattle area inspecting other components that were being manufactured for the C Reactor. C Reactor, as you know, was the one that was built right alongside of the B Reactor out at Hanford. It started up in ’53, I believe. But out of the rotational training program, I was assigned into construction area out in the 300 Area. They were fabricating laboratories for building the laboratories out there. Radiochemistry, radiometallurgy, pile tech, machine shop, and a library at that area of the Hanford—300 Area was just under construction. So I got assigned to help in the field engineering in that job. It was an interesting project. I learned a lot there in that job. And from there I went into other project engineering work, including in later years, the K Reactors were under construction and I was involved in laying up the graphite of that reactor, K East Reactors. I stayed in project engineering with GE all my life—or all my employment time was with GE. They left here in ’64. Yeah, Battelle came in ’65. Two of the projects that I followed after K Reactors, one of them was the critical mass lab in the 300 Area, which was a facility for evaluating critical shapes and sizes for plutonium missiles. It was a research job, research facility. That project was a lump sum construction and plant forces for the completion of putting the process equipment in. The next job I had was the High Temperature Lattice Test reactor in the 300 Area. That’s a reactor that probably hasn’t gotten much publicity. It was a small graphite reactor. But that was a job I was very proud of, because I was the sole project engineering function at the time. The design was done by an organization that was just brought on as GE was being phased out. It was the Vitro Engineering Company. They had a detailed design of the job, and the construction was done lump sum, and then J. Jones did the reactor installation. I can tell quite a bit of detail about that reactor, if you’re interesting. [LAUGHTER] But it was an experimental facility also for evaluating different lattice spacings for graphite moderator reactors. It was electrically heated—it operated up at 1,000 degrees centigrade, so that graphite, looking through the peepholes in the reactor, you could see white hot graphite, which is sort of an interesting thing to see. But that project was not large in comparison to today’s funding levels. But it was a three- to four-million-dollar project. I finished the job and closed it out with less than $200 left on the books and no overrun. [LAUGHTER] So I got a commendation for that job, which I was quite proud of. But from there, then I diverted into other project engineering jobs. One was in Idaho Falls. We had a test facility over there, putting in test loops in the engineering test reactor. That was closer to reactor operations type work. We had to modify an operating reactor. But that was some of my interesting project years before I got into jobs later on, which was the FFTF and the FMEF. Fuels and Materials Exam Facility. I always make the statement that every project, or every job that I worked on up until the FFTF was completed and put into operation. Every project after FFTF was shut down and closed down before it was completed. [LAUGHTER] So that was kind of a breaking point for me. Hanford, of course, reached its peak in production, and I can talk something about that as far as reactor operations is concerned. But I wasn’t really in operations, I was in engineering, and had jobs all over the Project. So I never was tied down to one location. It was interesting. So I had an interesting career in a lot of different projects. I enjoyed my work, and had a good time and a good married life and I can go into that, too, if you wish.
O’Reagan: So you say you were with GE this whole time? You didn’t switch over to different contractors as they came in?
Ballard: Well, yes—no. I just with GE until they left.
O’Reagan: I see.
Ballard: And then Battelle came in ’65. So I was with Battelle for ’65 until ’70 when Westinghouse took over the Breeder Program. Initially, Westinghouse was just brought in for the Fast Flux Test Reactor, to manage that. And I happened to be working on a development job. That’s one I haven’t mentioned yet. [LAUGHTER] When Westinghouse came in, I was assigned—that was my first manager job. I had a group, or a section in the 321 Building in the 300 Area, and a job which was identified as the hydraulic core mockup. And we designed, built and operated models to evaluate the design configuration for the FFTF. So we built water models to look at a lot of different features: the reactor vessel arrangement, and the core arrangement and the structure. And the inlet planning and outlet planning. We built several models. The two biggest ones were the inlet model, which evaluated the sodium distribution in the inlet planning and feeding characteristics for the fuels channels. I worked on that job for seven years. And then during that time, of course, FFTF came under construction. Our group actually influenced the design which was being done by Westinghouse back east. There was a lot of the features in the arrangements and shapes of the vessel and the flow distribution and the core that was determined by that hydraulic core mockup test facility. Then when they started putting the reactor together, I was assigned to construction out in 400 Area. I spent the whole year inside the reactor vessel, helping the engineer put the parts together. One of our humorous comments about FFTF was, from our perspective was FFTF, do you know what that stands for? Yeah, it sounds for feel, file, to fit. [LAUGHTER] Fill all the tight tolerances and all the arrangements necessary to make everything fit and throw it together. It was well-engineered and well-designed, but it was still—engineering problems had to be resolved in the field. So that was another interesting project. Following that, then I spent seven years on the FMEF, the Fuels and Materials Exam Facility, designing and coordinating the design—the management of the design, which was done by an off-plant architect engineer. And there, again, that was a project that was not completed. It was shut down when the Breeder Program was curtailed. So, following that, I could go into more details where we did for various and sundry work, but it was all toward the new mission for the Hanford site, which was cleanup, starting in that field in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. I retired, officially, in ’89. But I worked consulting for four years after that. So my career actually spanned from 1951 to 1994.
O’Reagan: How disappointing was it when FFTF got canceled?
Ballard: Pardon me?
O’Reagan: Was it disappointing when FFTF got canceled?
Ballard: It was very discouraging, yes, that they were going to close it down. When they drilled a hole in the core support structure, like drilling a hole in my heart. [LAUGHTER] Matter of fact, I’ve got some pictures to show that I was the last person in the FFTF vessel before they closed it up and started it filling it with sodium. Matter of fact, after that closure—after the photograph that I have, I’ll be happy to show you—they had an accident with the fuel charging machine which went up to the top of the travel and the upper limits which failed and it dropped down on the core and broke some of the components that I was so—[LAUGHTER]—proud of getting installed properly. Core support structure. And we had to go in there and do some repairs. But then I, after that, I left the FFTF and went to work on the design of the FMEF. [SIGH]
O’Reagan: Did life sort of change day-to-day when you switched these contractors? How different was it working for these different companies?
Ballard: The only change that I could see was the difference of the color of the paycheck. [LAUGHTER] As a matter of fact, when we transferred from—let’s see if I can remember which contract that was—was it GE to Battelle or Battelle to Westinghouse? I don’t remember, but the end of that day, we were terminated and I happened to be at a party down in one of the local pubs which I didn’t very often frequent. But somebody said, who do you work for? And I said, at the moment I’m unemployed. Because that was the day we left one contractor and started with the next one. But the transitions were quite smooth, I would say. I mean, of course, policies changed and your managers changed. At one time, in a two-year period when Westinghouse came in, I think I had 13 different first level and second level managers above me change without in those two-year period. So there was a lot of personnel changes. But a lot of us working closer to the ground floor, there was very little change.
O’Reagan: So, let’s back up a moment. What were your first impressions of Hanford and the area?
Ballard: Well, I came here in the summer—it was in July. I got here on July 3rd of 1951. I was assigned to the barracks out in North Richland—women’s barracks as a matter of fact. That’s when all the dormitory rooms were filled up in Richland for the men’s dorms. So I was assigned out there for my quarters. The next day, I learned that you didn’t have to drive the buses around, you could ride the city buses or the plant buses. Plant buses, to ride to the area was five cents, and city buses, I don’t remember whether they were five cents or free. I rode that bus the next day that I went to work, and it was 105 degrees that day. And I thought, my lord, what have I gotten myself into? [LAUGHTER] This is horrible temperature! But I was young and willing to accept anything that came my way, so I guess I didn’t think it was too serious a problem.
O’Reagan: How aware were you of the mission of Hanford before you came here?
Ballard: Very little, probably. I knew that it was working on the war effort, but at that time, nobody really—well, yeah, I guess it was known they were producing plutonium or weapons for atomic weapons, but as far as the details concerned, I knew very little. As any engineer—young man right out of college might be. Because I didn’t know what the plant—the structure was. But they gave—they told us and we got the information from the co-workers and the other students. It was quite interesting, because all the youngsters that were working, everybody—not the majority of people, but a large percentage of them—were fresh graduates. The older bunch were the 30- and 35-year-olds working on the site. That’s when I met my wife shortly after that in ’53. But we were married in ’53. But I met her in ’52 at a social that was put on by YWCA, Young Women’s—YWCA organization. They had church-sponsored dinners one night a week and that’s where we met. So we’ve been married for 62 years now.
O’Reagan: Were there a lot of those sort of social events?
Ballard: A lot of those that happened. As a matter of fact, the organization—I was the third set that the president and the secretary of that organization got married. [LAUGHTER] She was the secretary when I was the president of the organization. [LAUGHTER] Which was sort of comical, I guess.
O’Reagan: What sort of things did you and your wife do in your spare time in the ‘50s and ‘60s?
Ballard: Well, I guess bridge playing was one, and social events. We went—there was—they had a group that she was involved in called the Fireside Group that had functions and went camping and things like that. But we played a lot of bridge then.
O’Reagan: Where did you live?
Ballard: Well, I was living in the dormitories, of course, when we were married. I lived in North Richland in the women’s barracks for a short time until the rooms became available in the dormitories in Richland. That’s where I was living when we got married. Of course, housing was another whole story. You had to put your name on a list to get a house. They were all assigned by the government. All the housing was, of course, controlled and owned by the government. So you had to get your name on the waiting list to get a house. We were fortunate; we got a duplex, a C house up on Wright Avenue. I got that assigned in less than a month before we were married. So when we were married, we had a two-bedroom duplex house up there available. That’s where we moved in and lived there until 1957 when the government decided to disperse the property. They started selling vacant lots in 1957. We were a junior tenant in the duplex, so we couldn’t make an offer on the duplex. The senior tenants had the right to buy the duplex. So I was quite aggressive in my ownership philosophy, decided to buy a lot. We purchased the lot on Newcomer, the first property that was sold. And we built a house. I started building in March of 1958. As a matter of fact, we built—our house was the third privately built house in Richland. We had a house and were living in it before Richland was incorporated. They incorporated the city in July of ’58. That was of course the second official designation as a corporation because Richland, of course was a corporation—I mean an incorporated city before the government took it over in ’43. We built that house and I have pictures that I brought of the fact it was one of the first ones in Richland. And we’re still living in the same house. I don’t know what that says, but [LAUGHTER] I guess stability for one thing.
O’Reagan: Were you involved in local politics at all?
Ballard: In what?
O’Reagan: In local politics at all?
Ballard; No, not really. They asked me a few times if I wouldn’t run for the city council, but I never did. No, I’m not a politician. I didn’t want to get involved in that.
O’Reagan: So you described a number of different jobs you were doing over the first two decades or so that you were here? Could you walk us through, at least for one of those, what was sort of an average work day like?
Ballard: Well, let me see. There was one—I guess all of them were similar in a lot of respects. I was doing—on those jobs, I was doing project engineering. And that meant the coordination of, and the I guess you’d call it management, although there was, of course, the organization like GE, there’s so many levels of management that comes through that it’s a little hard to say you managed it, because you have so much supervision and overhead actions that are taken on a project, for example. But on most projects, the engineer—the project engineer would write the project proposal based on what the technical department would have as input for a required facility, for example. Like the high temperature lattice test reactor, the physics department had specified the programs that they were involved in would want to look in more detail at the lattice spacing in graphite reactors, for example. So they would write a document which would specify what their objective was and what their basic criteria was for that facility. And project people would issue—maybe take that and issue an order for another group to do the detailed process—conceptual design, or do it themselves. We’d do it sometimes on small projects. We had projects all the way from modify one laboratory all the way up to a whole facility. So it’s hard to describe the same process for all of them. But it was office work, engineering work. Some of the times I was in a design group where we actually doing detailed design work. But most of my work was in the project engineering field where we were seeing the work done by others. Or specifying details or managing the people that were doing the detailed design work. But it was office work, and of course when construction started, that’s when the project engineers were more in control, because they were directing the contractors as far as the field work was concerned. It was always an interesting job, an interesting challenge, I thought, preparing contract bid packages. Office work, lots of times the projects were out in the field, of course, out in the Area. We’d drive government cars to go to work. That was an advantage. Of course being in engineering rather than operations where you had more control of your time from the standpoint of individual management. Because we’d use government cars for transportation. We didn’t have computers in the early stages, obviously. When they came out with DSIs, Don’t Say It In Writing, that was a big move, too. [LAUGHTER] But certainly a lot of progress and a lot of technology changes over the years.
O’Reagan: How much were security or classification a part of your work?
Ballard: Well, it was certainly in overview all the time. All the documents, if a job had classified work on it, you had to get the documents classified, and follow the restrictions for those particular elements or documents, whatever’s involved. Most of the time, of course, construction was not too rigidly controlled or administered, I guess. In later years, because the, for example, research work was not really high classified. Most—a lot of it wasn’t. But it was something that was always there. Of course the badging was always—I remember one time incident I had which was funny—rather humorous. I was in a meeting out in one of the hundred areas, in a back room in some building and we were having a discussion. All of the sudden a door burst open and two patrolmen came in and said, where’s Del Ballard?! I’m over here. [LAUGHTER] Hey, come with me! They took me by the arms and whisked me outside and outside the badge house. I said, what’s going on? What’s the problem? They said, you don’t have a badge! I said, what do you mean I don’t got a badge. I looked at it and it was somebody else’s badge—name on it. They had given me the wrong badge! [LAUGHTER] So they were, I guess, vigilant in their control. But some of the times you thought it was a little overreach. It was always there, that’s for sure.
O’Reagan: You mentioned a couple jobs not necessarily at Hanford—I think you said Idaho Falls at one point, or other locations around?
Ballard: Yes, we had a project—I guess I sort of skipped over that—in the Engineering Test Reactor in Idaho Falls. The fuels people here—research people—wanted to do some testing in the Engineering Test Reactor with certain issues or problems that they were trying to develop from the fuel technology. So we put in two high pressure loops over there. Again, I was the project person on it. I didn’t do the design work, I did the procurement and the construction management. Philips Petroleum was the operating contractor over there at the Engineering Test Reactor. So I went over there and saw that those loops were completed and put in place and in operation. It was in 1958. I spent, well, most of that year over there, back and forth. My wife was really unhappy, because that was the year that we had started our house. So I had—coming home on weekends and trying to keep that sorted out. Because we had a foreman working with the carpenters building the house. So it was kind of stressful for her. Yeah, and then I had to go back for the next year after that for some cleanup work on the project. It was another project that was managed by Hanford, but installing a reactor over there.
O’Reagan: I’m curious how sort of insular Hanford was, versus how much it was common for people to get advice from outside of the Area, or to travel to different facilities and learn what they were doing, or share what you were doing with others?
Ballard: Well, I think that’s probably more prevalent in the technical field than it is in the construction area. Yeah, there certainly was in a nuclear complex, there was—and we did have travels. I did visit some other sites. Occasionally the laboratories on some of the projects we had. But most of that was done by the technical department, not the engineering department.
O’Reagan: How much has the community changed, and in any particular ways during the time you’ve lived here?
Ballard: Well, it’s gone from a small community to a much higher-traffic area than it used to be. But the people say it’s still pretty mild. Of course I’ve traveled to Los Angeles quite a bit; I had relatives in Los Angeles. And I’d grow accustomed to that mainly down there too. But it’s still—the Tri-Cities is still a nice place to live, I think. It doesn’t have a lot of the big city hubbub that other places do, but it certainly has changed a lot from what it was when I came. My wife came in 1944. Of course that was when it was sand and dust piles and no trees and no grass. It was a lot like that when I came, too, although it was developing. But the first few years that the Manhattan Project workers were here, they had some pretty rough goes. Of course the government would operate a city was an entirely different situation than we have now with private ownership and private management of the company—or local management of the company there. When the government operated the city, it was—you’ve heard these stories before, I know. Even lightbulbs were changed by the employees of the government. [LAUGHTER] So that was a big change. But when we got married we were renting from the government but as soon as they sold the houses we built our own and were on our own. So we’ve lived pretty much as a private city in all of our married life. So that hasn’t been a major change.
O’Reagan: Anything else—nothing else in particular I’m fishing for here—did anything else come to mind, as far as changes in, I don’t know, spirit of work at Hanford or changes in the communities?
Ballard: Well, the government management of the Hanford site has certainly undergone lots of changes, much as our society has, I think, over the last 50 years. When GE operated the plant, I felt and a lot of us felt that the program was defined in general in scope and the contractor was given a block of money and there they went. They did the job. They didn’t have the oversight or the detail management or the daily exchange as much with the government, I think, as they do now. I think that’s been a change in philosophy or change in detail of management more. A lot of it is because the public’s been more closely involved. Like the different committees that are involved in the oversight with the DoE that they didn’t have at that time. Of course when the Manhattan Project started, it was even further away than that. Nobody outside the Project knew what was being done. They were building the atomic bomb and nobody knew was done except the organization involved in it. Now, anything the government does it’s public knowledge and has 100 different reviews over a period of a decade before they get anything done. [LAUGHTER]
O’Reagan: Of course all these decades we’re talking about here are during the Cold War, and nuclear weapons are wrapped up in a lot of that and nuclear power. Was that ever something that was on your mind, or that were you aware of? Or was that just something that was going on far away?
Ballard: No, I think the Cold War and the conflict with Russia was well-known because of all the cautions and concerns about the atomic weapons and people—during the crisis that peaked in the early ‘60s and we were in hard conflict with Russia. A lot of concern about what might happen. It was a different era and there was a lot of awareness of the potential that there could be a nuclear conflict.
O’Reagan: Did it ever impact your life, or your wife’s life more or less directly?
Ballard: Well, I don’t think we—we thought we were protected, we thought we had the national security to take care of it. And I guess we didn’t really worry about it—it was something you didn’t really dwell on, I don’t think. Although they told the students and the kids—some people did build bomb shelters. My neighbor, Dr. Petty, they had one at their house under the lawn in the front yard. When they built the house, they put in a bomb shelter.
O’Reagan: [INAUDIBLE]
Ballard: Nobody knew about it but them, but I knew about it. [LAUGHTER]
O’Reagan: Did you ever see the inside of the shelter?
Ballard: I never was in it, no. But I know it’s there.
O’Reagan: Let’s see. So I guess we’ve sort of covered this. Could you describe the ways in which security and or secrecy at Hanford impacted your work?
Ballard: Well, I guess from the work that I did in the engineering specifications and drawings and documents that related to projects, we had to worry about the classification on them. You had to worry about the access—access to different projects at different facilities. Of course you had to have the right clearance. So it was a restraint on work in some respects. But it wasn’t a major impact, I don’t think.
O’Reagan: In more recent years—well I guess I don’t know how long—you’ve been working with the B Reactor Museum Association and other groups interested in the history of the local community. Can you tell me how you got involved with that and sort of the history of that?
Ballard: Sure can. I retired in ’89. And then as I said, I went back to work on a part-time basis. But during that period, the Environmental Impact Statements had been written, and the mission at Hanford was changing from production to cleanup. All the documents and all the philosophy that was being disseminated was, we were going to tear everything down and dispose of everything in the Project. I was the representative to the Tri-City Technical Council. It was a group of only local affiliate—all local agent—sections or groups from the technical society’s engineering—civil, mechanical, electrical, nuclear, women’s organizations—all the technical organizations had what they called a Tri-City Technical Council. And we met monthly and addressed the issues for technology dissemination or issues that might affect the community from what we might recommend or so forth. From that group, we learned—we knew what the DoE was getting into, transition-wise into the cleanup of the site. They were going to tear everything down. And we said, well, we don’t want that to happen to some of these historic facilities. The B Reactor, for example, was the world’s first production reactor. And it was very consequential from the history, both of our nation and the world, as far as that. And also the kick-off for nuclear power. So we said, we ought to do something about that. So we formed a committee. I was one of the people of that committee. And we met in July of 1990, was our first meeting. We talked about an organization and how we might form a group that would lead toward the preservation of B Reactor. We decided to form an association. So we had an attorney draw up our bylaws and we formed an organization called the B Reactor Museum Association. We got our state corporate action—I forget what word they use to describe the initiation of the organization in January of 1991. But I consider the organization being formed in 1990. And our objective was to educate the public about the historical significance of B, and to do what we could to preserve the reactor, to see that it was preserved. To gain access and to develop exhibits and so forth for the exhibits. So that was where we started, was way back in 1990. And all during the decade of the ‘90s, we were meeting and fighting with the Department of Energy because they had milestones after milestones that were established on the cleanup and disposal of all the reactors. B was put into the list later on, but it was always on the list for cocooning, as all the reactors would be. We got those milestones extended over the years. And finally, with persuasion and meeting with legislators, Sid Morris and I met with Sid Morris and—I don’t remember the year now, but it was one of the first times that he was sympathetic for the theme that we preserve the historical relic. And of course, later on Doc Hastings. We had many meetings and persuasions with all the legislators. Of course, Cantwell and Murray got on board over the years. It later progressed into the fact that we want to have a study to see if the Parks Service could preserve it. One time during the late ‘70s, I believe it was, several people thought that the REACH would be the only chance of preserving the B Reactor. They would be the ones that would sponsor the tours and provide for the access and so forth. I said, no, I said, I don’t believe that. I said, I think we want to get the Parks Service involved because I don’t know that even the REACH is going to have the muscle to do it. So we got meetings with the legislators and we got a study authorized for the Parks Service study. That was after two or three years of trials and tribulations. It was finally approved. When the Parks Service first came out—you’re probably aware of the fact that they didn’t have—they just had Los Alamos as the sole main site for the park. And we said, that would never sell. It had to include all the sites: Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and Hanford. So they revised their study and made it a three-site park. It was eventually approved and then later legislation—Doc Hastings and Cantwell got the park legislation authorized. BRMA of course has been involved—has been the agency chipping at their heels all the way through all this. [LAUGHTER] We finally got credit for it. For many years, they didn’t really recognize BRMA as the organization that made it happen, but I think we had an awful lot to do with what made it happen.
O’Reagan: Were you ever associated with any of the other local history-related groups?
Ballard: Well, yes. We were affiliated with the CREHST museum. We worked with them and the REACH also. But we were the ones that were pushing—BRMA—the B Reactor specifically. We still have a lot of partnerships. We had memorandums of understanding with DoE and the CREHST and with—I guess we don’t have one with the REACH but we still meet with them. Matter of fact, they’re working on this new exhibit for the Cold War exhibit. Of course they’ve got—there’s four of us from BRMA that are on those meetings, but there’s a lot of other community leaders involved, too, obviously. And that was what happened is we were the—BRMA was the organization that was in the trenches early on. But later on, the whole community and the region and the legislators all got on board. So there was a lot of emphasis and support for getting it preserved and getting it converted, or made into a national historic park. Have you seen the plaque out there at B Reactor that says we’re the ones that initiated the plan to preserve it. So, yeah, I’m quite proud of that. I was one of the founding members of the organization.
O’Reagan: Why did it matter to you?
Ballard: Well, it’s important, I think, to preserve the history. It’s a significant part of the nation’s history. And if it’s going to be educational for the—a good place for the students, the young kids to come up and learn what the nuclear industry’s all about. I still say—and I’ve said for twenty years—that—I don’t know how many years down the road it’s going to be, but I think nuclear power’s going to be a major source of energy. Commercial electrical as well as all the other fields—medical and research. It still has an important place to play in our total nation’s history, I think. And we need to know how it started and what problems it caused. Let’s not generate those again.
O’Reagan: What would you—
Ballard: So that’s the story that’s going to be told in the park, and I think a lot of people—that’s some of the emphasis. People come out and see the comments in the paper, all the negative comments. Well, that’s true, but the story’s still there and needs to be told.
O’Reagan: What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford or living in Richland during the Cold War?
Ballard: Well, I don’t know. It was a challenge, I guess. The success—I’m glad that we developed the bomb rather than Hitler. Like how Fermi said, he said when he was working on fission in Italy in the late ‘30s—the 1930s, yes. He always said he was eternally grateful that he didn’t learn how to control fission then. He said if he had have, Hitler would have started the war with them, rather than us ending the war with them. So I think they need to know what the conditions were at the time that the Manhattan Project was built and what the world was undergoing at the time.
O’Reagan: What else should I be asking about? What else is there that we should discuss?
Ballard: I don’t know! I think I pretty well spilled everything I know. Unless—I don’t know. I could mention about my—as you know, I was not here during the Manhattan Project. It was over when I came in 1951. My wife and her family was a different story. They came with DuPont in 1944. So her dad was a DuPont employee and he came out here at that time and saw the conditions in employment problems that they had at that time. He was a machinist and had actually directed the tech shops out there for many years. So he probably—that family has more history of the Manhattan Project than I do. Mine is just history. It was—I’ve had an interesting career and I guess I’ve enjoyed it here and it’s been a wonderful place to live. I think it will continue to be if we have people that keep our city from growing into something that it shouldn’t be. [LAUGHTER] But I guess I don’t have any new subjects to talk about unless you have new questions.
O’Reagan: I think—that’s my list for now, but thank you so much for being here.
Ballard: Well, it’s been a pleasure.
O’Reagan: All right, great.
Tom Hungate: I had a question.
O’Reagan: Please.
Hungate: One of the jobs you had—you had a wide variety of jobs; all of them sound fascinating to me.
Ballard: Oh, they’re interesting, yes.
Hungate: One caught my ear, because I’ve seen these. Tell me what it was like when you said you worked on the K Reactors to lay—you said you were laying up the block. Tell—describe what that process was.
Ballard: Well, I wasn’t involved in that deeply as a lot of the fellows were. I can’t remember his name right now, but the primary engineer that had the graphite technology. That graphite was machined in the 101 Building. Well, actually the old reactor’s was in the old 101 Building in White Bluffs. They built a new building, the 2101 Building in the 200 East Area which was specifically for the graphite machining and layup—test layups. Those blocks were built to very tight tolerances. The graphite came in in square blocks from the manufacturers and they had to be machined to the final configuration. Those tolerances were very, very tight, like plus or minus two mils or five mils at the most. The blocks were basically four-and-three-quarters inches by four-and-three-quarters inches by 40-some inches long—the main block. After they were machined to very close tolerances, they were test stacked in the 2101 Building, laid up ten tiers to be sure that the tolerances of the assembly were precise. And from there they were packaged on pallets in sequence that they would go in, in reverse sequence, so when they took them off they were ready to be stacked up. And then they were shipped—brought into the reactor vessel, lowered down into the open process area in the center part of the core and pulled off the pallets and just stacked, piece by piece. There’s pictures available that you see of the old reactors. There may be some of K Reactors too, I don’t know, but show inside the reactors when they’re laying up with the blocks. Of course everybody’s in whites. Your cleanliness control’s very important. And of course, obviously, sequence was very, very important, to have all the blocks in there. But from my perspective, I just watched—I wasn’t doing the work, I was just part of the process that was putting them in there. It was very closely controlled and very temperature controlled—well, no, I don’t know about the temperature. The building was under limited temperature control. But the cleanliness was strictly controlled, and the workers of course had been assigned with each pallet that came in, they knew where it went and how it was to be laid. But that was the same process that was used in all the reactors for graphite layup. But that’s amazing, the way they built those things. You have all the penetrations, like—I can’t give you the numbers. K Reactors were bigger than the old original reactor. The original reactor had 2,004 process tubes. You probably all know the story of that, too. [LAUGHTER] But what I started to say was, the alignment of the holes in the blocks, of course, had to line up with the holes of the penetrations of front and rear faces precisely when they put them in. So it was like putting a watch together on a 40-foot-square [LAUGHTER]—40-foot cube. Very precise work.
O’Reagan: Were there any mistakes?
Ballard: Pardon?
O’Reagan: Did you ever see any mistakes?
Ballard: Well, no, but if there were they were corrected as they went, because they had two or three levels of inspection verified that they were going in properly. There may have been some, I don’t know. I was not in direct control of that job. I was more on the K Reactor, I just was in oversight. I don’t remember what my position was at that time, but—the B Reactor, for example, you know what happened there when they started it up? It died because of the xenon poison. They didn’t have enough neutron flux levels to override that poisoning effect. That’s when they had to add the additional fuel channels outside the original 1,500 that they had that the physicist said was adequate to drive the reactor. So that was an interesting job. They had to—the later reactors, they had more knowledge of what the requirements were. So the design wasn’t—it didn’t create a problem on initial startup like B Reactor did.
O’Reagan: We were trying to outline or highlight—what sort of innovations came out of Hanford, what sort of inventions did you see—what new knowledge or techniques did you see created at Hanford?
Ballard: Well, there again, you need to talk to the physicists and chemists and people that were in the fuel design areas. There were so many changes made to the fuel designs. They went from—of course these were only applicable to the graphite reactors the modern fuel originally were eight inches long when the distortion that occurred in the graphite, that was because of the structure change due to the radiation in the graphite. The channels were distorted to the point where some were so crooked that the eight-inch channel—the fuel wouldn’t go through the channel. SO they went to four-inch people—four-inch long fuel assemblies in some of those bad channels. And then of course another knowledge was the design of fuel assembly, you went from strictly external core where they just had an annulus of water around the outside cooling the fuel assembly. It went to a center core; they had internal cooling—a flow channel through the center of the element. But as far as the physics of the elements, they went from totally natural uranium, originally 238, all naturally derived with 0.7% 235. They went to some enrichment in the reactors to increase the power level. But there was physics changes all along, as far as being able to control and just knowledge of impurities and what the effects were in the nuclear physical—the physics involved in the reactor. But of course, then the Breeder Program, we didn’t talk about that. There’s a lot of advancements made there. FFTF was a marvelous machine and it produced a lot of new information from greener technology. That FFTF was—I spent ten years on development—seven on development and three on construction, so. But I wasn’t—I’m not a physicist and wasn’t into the technology as much as the people—I was more into construction, design and construction.
O’Reagan: A lot of knowledge there, too, that you—hands-on knowledge.
Ballard: Well, I always pride myself on being able to fix problems. We had a lot of things on assembly or putting the stuff together that just—problems or interferences or arrangements that weren’t thought of in design that we were able to resolve in the field, and that’s why I got into—I’ve been building houses for Habitat now for the last 15 years. [LAUGHTER] It’s a little different from putting reactors together, but I get a lot of comments from the instruction people in Habitat. This is not a reactor; we don’t need to have those tolerances. [LAUGHTER] But I say if you make it right, it looks a lot nicer and it goes together better.
O’Reagan: All right, I guess that’s the list of questions I’ve got. I guess we’ll end it once again.
Ballard: Okay, well, appreciate.
Northwest Public Television | Young_John
John Young: R. Young. J-O-H-N R Y-O-U-N-G.
Robert Bauman: All right, thank you. And today's date is October 22nd of 2013.
Young: I'll agree on that.
Bauman: Okay. Sounds good. And we're conducting this interview on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities.
Young: Yeah.
Bauman: So let's start by having you tell me when you came to Hanford? What brought you here? How you got here?
Young: What was that?
Bauman: When did you come to Hanford—to work and Hanford, and what brought you here?
Young: You want the whole story of how I got to Hanford?
Bauman: Yeah.
Young: It'll take me 15 minutes. I wrote a letter up to here after I saw an article in the newspaper saying they were looking for employees. And after that, they accepted me from the standpoint that they would find out whether or not I was qualified. And for the next two months, the FBI and other agencies went through my history and got information from my doctor and so forth. And in early June—well actually, yeah—they finally decided that they would offer me a job. Or they offered me a job.
Bauman: And so where had you been living before you came here? What year was this, also?
Young: What was that?
Bauman: Where were you living before you came here, and what year was this that you moved here?
Young: Oh no, I didn't have any employee but here before.
Bauman: But where did you live before you came here?
Young: Where was I working?
Bauman: Where did you live before?
Young: Oh, I lived in Albany, Oregon. And I worked there as a carpenter because my dad made houses. So anyway, when I found out that I was supposed to arrive on July the 8th, I started from home on July the 7th. I wanted to be sure that I got here. Now, something I should tell you now is that during that spring, the Columbia River was at its highest violation you might say, or amount of water, in history. And it had wiped out parts of Portland. And there were only two bridges on the Columbia River, in the United States. One was the Bridge of the Gods down by Portland, and the other one was a bridge up by Canada.[LAUGHTER] So I didn't have any choice of how to get here. So when I left home, I drove up to Portland on back country roads because the main roads up to Portland were all wiped out by the water. Got to Portland. It was 17 miles east to the Bridge of the Gods. And that was actually a very funny ride because the road I was on the south side of the river and railroad track were the only two things on that side of the river. And I could drive along there and look out over the top of the rails on the railroad, and I could see that the flood two feet below the top of the railroad. Anyway, I got to the bridge safely. Went over the bridge, and I knew that the road on the other side going east from the Bridge of the Gods grows gradually up the ridge on the north of the river and eventually goes over the top of it and go down into the Yakima Valley. And I got about halfway up that ridge when the engine on my car blew out. [LAUGHTER] And fortunately it was right at a little town there that had some place where they could fix my car. So I spent the rest of that day there while they were working on the car. And they got the car ready for me by 8:00 the next morning, which was the 8th. So I drove on up over the top of the ridge down into the Yakima Valley, because I knew that if I could get into Yakima, there's a main road coming from Yakima down here. I got down to the bottom of the hill there, started towards Yakima. And I got two miles, and they found out that there's three feet of water over the river—over the road, pardon. So I turned around, went back. And there was an industrial area there. And I found a guard there and said is there any way I can get down to here. He said oh yeah, go back up to the road to Yakima and then go east. And when you get down, about 30 miles, there's a bridge over the river. So I took it and went in to Richland, getting there about noon on the 8th, which was fine for my getting there. So I ate my lunch, went into the Federal Building--which was only a one story building at that time—and I found out where the manager of personnel--well, new in personnel were. Walked down to his office, walked in his office. And he had about five desks in there. He was on one of them right by the door. And he was busy working on it. So I stood there, I'll say, for over a minute when he finally looked up and saw me. So I reached out my hand to him and said who I was. He stood up. He opened his mouth wide. And he stood there for over a minute, utterly amazed. When he finally got himself together, he said, how in the world did you get into Richland? What had happened was the management of Hanford had concluded that nobody would get into Richland for the next month. And that's why he was so astounded that I got into town. There was a [INAUDIBLE] if you want to call him that and overlooked the fact that I was a westerner. And I can go anywhere in this country that I want to, because I was raised on a cattle ranch down in Central Oregon. And I knew where to go through the, I'll say, backwoods. And that's how I got there. So anyway, their question then became, what are they going to do with me? Because they'd shut down the orientation class for new employees, so I couldn't go to work out in Areas. What were they going to do with me for a month? Now the first thing they did is they got me a room out in the barracks in North Richland. And then they told me to report to the production scheduling office in the Federal Building the next day, which is a top secret operation. And the purpose of that office was to determine which tubes in the reactors should be discharged the next time they had an outage at the reactors. And consider that there's 6,000 tubes out there. They had a new calculation system because they had a calculator which was designed to do that calculation to tell them what the amount of uranium was, or the amount of plutonium was in those process tubes. And such a method of calculating did not exist anywhere else. It was a special calculator designed by Marchand. Well anyway, I spent the next month in that office. I had a copy of the manual for Hanford—it was a top secret copy. And I could read that and find out everything that went on in Hanford in their manual. And then at the end of that month, when they finally opened up their orientation operation, I went through that process. And then I went out to the 100 Areas to go to work. I was assigned for six months at B Reactor as an assistant, well, operator for the reactor. It was a training period. It's a General Electric process. Any time the General Electric Company—at that time anyway—hired a new employee that had an education, they would put them out into one of their operations or many of them to give that person training on what to do in the job that they're going to get. And when they got through with the six month part that I was out there, they then assigned me to day work out in the 100 Areas. And I spent the next 17 years out in the 100 Areas as a senior engineer, one of the few that they had out there. Now I had to earn that title of senior engineer. But I was working on increasing the productivity of the reactors, reducing the cost of operating reactors, reducing the amount of radiation well, affecting workers out there—things of that type, for 17 years. At the end of the 17 years, they started shutting the reactors down. So I resigned. Went to the 300 Area and joined several organizations down there. [LAUGHTER] You know, there's so many of them floating around there, it's funny. And I spent 33 years mainly working in the 300 Area. But what I did was such things as licensing nuclear reactors, seven of them on the east coast of the United States. Congress had decided that all of the nuclear power plants in the country should be licensed. And the AEC, when they got that, they said well, you should work in the East because we don't want any bias. So those seven reactors are spread all away from Florida clear up to Minnesota. And after that, that was just a typical action for, oh, about one year. I was still an employee here. And if you want to know what I've done for the rest of that 30 years I spent at Hanford, I've got it listed here if you want it.
Bauman: Sure.
Young: This is something that I've had. I filled it out as appropriate just so I could answer questions of the type that you've made. And if you want to make a copy of this--
Bauman: Oh, sure. Yeah, we can do that afterwards, yeah. That’d be fine.
Young: But you see there's—oh, what is it--about 15 boxes all in there. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: I want to go back to when you first arrived in the area in 1948. Is that right?
Young: What did I do?
Bauman: You first arrived in the area--
Young: I just arrived in '40--well, you mean in the Northwest?
Bauman: No, I mean in the Richland, Hanford area.
Young: In Richford, yeah.
Bauman: What sort of housing did you have when you first arrived?
Young: There were in Hanford at that time, large buildings--some of them still exist--which had multiple rooms for people. And some of those buildings could hold as many as 25 people. And I was single. It was very handy from midtown. It's not out in the sandy places they talk about in this article. [LAUGHTER] But that sand, he talks in there so much—a couple of times anyway—actually was not Richland. Except for little locations where one building might be built. Most of Richland was grassy. And if you're in Richland, you're not getting any sand blowing around. And if you read their article there, they talked about the sand when there were on construction locations. Well that's normal throughout the whole state of Washington. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: So what your first impressions of Richland when you first got here?
Young: When I first came in? I got a story for you that you're going to wonder if you want to publish it. I, like I said, drove into Richland on the 8th of June and got my lunch. Ate my lunch, went into the office there. And I guess I told you that this fellow said how in the world did you get into Richland? So from that time on, I was working. And I was working out in 100 Areas. The first six months, I was working at B and D Reactors. And my position was assistant shift superintendent. See, they had shut B Reactor down for, must have been four years because they wanted to keep it available in case they had to get some more plutonium for the military in a hurry. And that was the only time I was on shift. After that, my work was what you might call typical engineering. You can call it nuclear engineering if you want to, but it's general types of engineering—reducing operating costs, increasing production, reducing the radiation doses to employees, those types of things for 17 years. Ended up as a senior engineer.
Bauman: Of the different sorts of jobs, different parts of the Hanford site that you worked on, was there something that you found most challenging, most difficult, and/or something that you found sort of most rewarding about what you did?
Young: I don't understand your question.
Bauman: Well, you had at least a few different jobs. You worked in the 100 Areas, right? And then you worked the 300 Area. Where there certain things that you did that you found sort of more challenging, or more difficult than others? And were there certain aspects or certain jobs that you had that you really found especially rewarding, that you really enjoyed a lot?
Young: The main difference was that when I was working in 300 Area, the reactors were reactors of the types that were used everywhere else in the United States. The Hanford reactors were very specific reactors because their only purpose was to produce plutonium. Whereas the other reactors in the United States were primarily built to produce electricity. It's a different design. And it also had more, shall we say, more opposition by the public. [LAUGHTER] Yeah. And that's a subject that you might want to address, because the people who are supposed to be the experts on radiation generally refused to use the information which says that low level radiation is beneficial. That makes a lot of difference. That low level radiation is so beneficial. In my case, I got 15,000 radiation dose. All of it was low level radiation. There might have been some high level in there, but I can only tell you what the badge has, you know? [LAUGHTER] And that's something that you might want to mention in your articles if you publish them. There are numerous people here, particularly in Hanford, that refuse to recognize that fact that low level radiation is beneficial. And like I say, there are scores of documents that say that low level radiation is beneficial.
Bauman: You talked about your badge. I wonder if could talk about safety at Hanford? Did you have to wear any special clothing equipment of any kind to do your work? What sorts of ways was safety sort of part of what you did?
Young: Well, I was cleared for every type of limited information. I got that when I told you I went into that one office on the first day. That was a top secret operation. And top secret gives you access to anything, assuming you had a need for it. I spent—let's see, how long were we in Oak Ridge?
Woman one: One year.
Young: One year, yeah. I spent one year in Oak Ridge on a committee which had somebody for every one of the AEC outliers, you might say. And the purpose was to determine where to protect their materials could be manufactured if somebody needed them. In other words, if you want high level radiation dose or something. I was dealing with people from every one of the major AEC outsides. But I would have ranged all in the various types of work that involve radiation. For instance, I was a manager at preparing environmental impact document for fusion reactors. And that document was presented in a meeting to the international fusion organizations in Germany.
Bauman: About what time period was that? Do you know?
Young: Oh, my. Let's see. That must be about 1990.
Bauman: During your years working at Hanford, were the any events, incidents, events, special occasions, things that sort of stand out in your mind from your time working at Hanford?
Young: You mean the reactors involved?
Bauman: Oh, could be, yeah.
Young: Yeah, we head one out in the 100 Areas. For essentially all of the reactors, when they milk the reactors, they—of course the reactors are made out of graphite. They ran tests on graphite and so forth, and they learned that they could operate the reactors with a fairly low temperature of the graphite. You get too high temperature and you know you might hurt the material. And as we started raising the power levels of the reactors out there, the graphite started expanding. And the result was that in some of the older reactors like B Reactor, the graphite expanded enough that it pushed the shields off the outside of the reactor. Well, push them apart you might say. And the result was that the radiation inside of the reactor was leaking out through the crack at the top of the far side wall on the reactor. And there was a line of radiation going out that crack out through the wall in the far side of the reactor and then up into the air. And the result was that there was about a 20 mR radiation dose on the ground outside of the reactor. And that's one thing I worked on. They went back into the files of the DuPont people. And by checking through those files, they discovered that if we raised the temperature of the graphite, the expansion would stop. And if you go too low, the graphite would reduce in volume. And so we had to go through a special study to try to figure out what this would do to the reactor. And the result was—you see, the normal tube in the reactor was straight through the reactor. But when the graphite started expanding, the tube went up in arc and came back down because the highest temperature graphite was in the center of the reactor. So we figured out what was the proper temperature of the graphite—of actually of the gas in the reactor. And we ended up with the top tubes in the reactor going in, going down, going up, going down, and coming back up and going out the back. That's the type of things you ran into doing something like those reactors. And by doing that, it sort of drove the people replacing process tube on the reactor having to figure out how to get the tubes in the [INAUDIBLE]--[LAUGHTER]--through the reactor. If we had not done that, eventually the reactor would have fallen apart. In other words, if we hadn't figured out what was causing the problem—because this reactor would just keep expanding, and finally that outside shield would fall over. Or we'd have to somehow rebuild the shield up there to keep it in place. That's just a typical job that you'd have. You might spend six months on that. I had another one. I was working with a fellow who is an expert on water purification. And see, we were cooling the reactors with Columbia River water. It had to go through the water plant to clarify the water to get the sand and what have you out of it. And when they first designed the reactors, DuPont had discovered that if you did not have the right concentration of materials in the water going through the reactor, the tubes were bending up into two inside the reactor. And in order to prevent that happening, they were use the sodium dichromate in the water on the reactors. One part per million or something like that, but it's still, we're spending about, well, over $1 million a year buying that material. And I was working there with a fellow who was an expert on operating water treatment plants. And we got together and looked at this sodium dichromate that was used as we said--and we were buying that by the railroad car load. And I think the total cost was a $1.4 million a year for that one material as I remember it. And we looked at the price of it. And we looked at the price of buying the two components for making that material. And we had enough equipment in the water plants that we could make that material, the sodium dichromate. So we bought the chromate and the sodium, and we cut the costs in half from about a $1.4 million down to $700,000 a year. So we saved $700,000 a year. That's the type of things you work on. All types of things you get involved in. For instance, when they built the reactors back in World War II, there was a shortage of steel. So many of the pipes, particularly the ones underground, were not made out of metal. And when you heat and cool the other types of pipes, they start leaking because they crack open. So we had to figure out how to solve that problem or reduce the amount of sodium dichromate getting into the Columbia River. We worked it out, reduced it considerable. Those things get a little complicated. I don't want to go through all the detail. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: So it's involved a lot of problem solving? Your [INAUDIBLE] anyways right, problems with the reactor or whatever you would work on solving those issues.
Young: What was that?
Bauman: If there were problems with the reactors, then you would work on solving some of those issues, work on solving the problem.
Young: Yeah. In other words, you have really two plants there. One was a water plant to provide the water to the reactor. And then the reactor was the other plant. Now what you do with the water, what you get out of that, is just how you get it back into the Columbia River with a minimum of radiation. And you know, that raises an important thing that I haven't mentioned it to people here in the Tri-Cities. I kept records on what the radiation was in the Columbia River. And when we were running the reactors out there, we were running, you might say, tons of radioaction into the river. Yet the amount of radioactivity in the Columbia River here at Richland was essentially zero. It had disappeared you might say, or bee diluted if you want to put it the other way during the travel of the water from out there by the reactors into here. And when I see these articles in the newspaper about they're worrying about the fact that there's radiation out there in the 200 Area and it will leak out into the ground seven miles or something like that from the river, I'd be willing to bet that there wouldn't be much radiation getting down to Richland. And the other thing is that it would be low level radiation, which is beneficial if it does get down here. I don't know if you want to put anything like that in what you publish because the nuclear engineers don't want it to be published.
Bauman: Overall, how was Hanford as a place to work?
Young: What was that?
Bauman: Overall, how was Hanford as a place to Work what did you think of Hanford as a place to work?
Young: Well to me, that was a typical job, In other words, I had to travel 35 miles to get to my work. But people do that all over the country. It was an interesting job because we were working on increasing our knowledge of the subject. It's different than running one of these dams out here where you're generating electricity you know. All you're doing there is pushing a button once in a while. But by doing the right things out there, we saved millions of dollars. And we also reduced, you might say, the effects of radiation on anybody by making sure they didn't get any high radiation doses. But the most important thing about it is that we were, you might say, at war with the rest of the world. As long as we had to make that plutonium and reap you might say, keep Russia at a distance. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: Is there anything I haven't asked you about in terms of your work at Hanford that you'd like to talk about?
Young: Well no, other than the fact that once I went to work in the 300 Areas, I worked all over the United States. Because I happened to be, you might say, an expert on nuclear reactors. A good example is that the government decided they wanted to have every nuclear reactor, I'll say described, to be sure what it is and how much radiation so forth is involved. In other words, if they did that, they licensed them. And that was quite an interesting job, because I worked on seven reactors back on the East Coast. And of course, I worked for one year in Oak Ridge. And that involved all of the AEC facilities.
Bauman I want to thank you very much for coming in today and sharing your experience with us. I really appreciate it.
Young: Well, always glad to be helpful.
Bauman: Thank you very much.
Young; I would like to see the facts published in your story that low level radiation is beneficial.
Bauman: I'm making these, we're making these available for anyone to look at, the [INAUDIBLE] stuff. Thanks again, appreciate it.
Jerry Yesberger: I go by Jerry Yesberger, Jerry, J-E-R-R-Y, and then Yesberger, Y-E-S-B-E-R-G-E-R.
Robert Bauman: All right. Thank you. My name's Robert Bauman, and today's date is December 9th of 2013. And we're conducting this interview on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. So Jerry, let's start maybe by having you tell us when you first arrived in the area, what brought you to Hanford?
Yesberger: Okay. Well, I was born and raised in Colorado. Went to University of Denver, and I graduated with a BS degree in 1950. And let's see here. Then I worked for a short time in Colorado, mainly because I wanted to come back from the state of Washington—to the state of Washington. I was in the service from '43 to the end of '45. And I spent some time in the Seattle area and everything, and I really liked it. And so when I got back to Colorado, I applied for jobs with State of Washington and everybody. Then there was an opening at Hanford. And at that time, everything here was General Electric company, as you probably already know. There was no contractors other than GE, and they ran the community. And everything—there wasn't anything other than GE here. And my first job at Hanford, which lasted about five years, was in the public health department, which we had most of our activity concerned for the community here, rather than the site, although there were some activities during that that we were asked to perform, such as—oh, I can remember that I'd been out to the site for some things to do with health matters and so on that I was asked to do the work on, and I did. And after about four, four-and-a-half years, the city became a city away from General Electric company, and I wanted to stay with Hanford. So I applied—well, I don't remember how exactly I got there, but the radiation protection department in Hanford Laboratories at that time. And again, this was a time when everything was one site. There was no contractors other than General Electric—offered me a job in radiation protection. And my radiation protection time lasted an awful long time, because I retired in early--oh, gosh. Say, it was 19—but anyway, I had 36 years' service. [LAUGHTER] And my first job was out here in the 300 Area, and GE at that time gave new people an awful lot of training. And I was trained as a health physicist. And I spent, oh, gosh, the first few months training. And I spent, oh, gosh--they had a project here called 558 Project, and what it did was go through the old reactors, all of the old reactors and replaced the tubing in the reactors. And each one of these assignments lasted, oh, three to four months. So we started out in B Reactor and finished there. And my job was I had a crew of radiation monitors working for me, and we worked shift work, because there was a big, big construction job. And it took about three to four months in each of the old reactors out there to go through these, replace the tubing, and so on. So I followed those from B to C Reactor to 100-DR to 100-H to 100-F doing the same thing, essentially, because we went through there. And then following that time, I went back into 200 West Area, where I worked on projects and so on. And rather than work--I didn't have radiation monitors work for me then, but I had always assigned projects myself to work on. And I did that in the--I have worked in every area on the project out here, with the exception of FFTF. I did not work, and I did not have an office there. But every other area I had an office and these things. So it was kind of really a broad orientation program and so on. I want to back up just a little bit. In the service, I was in the Coast Guard. And this was from '43 to '46. And I was a pharmacist's mate, and again, the training was real, real good. And the last year or so, I was on a ship, USS Aquarius, and it was an attack cargo ship. And our job was to take troops. We had Marines that we had aboard, and we had training to have them land on something. And boy, they really trained us. To make a long story short, we got an assignment, and we knew we were going to move our ship. But we didn't know where or what for. But it turned out it was that they were preparing to invade Japan with troops. And I never saw so many ships in my life, where we all had troops, and we were ready to train. And we practiced getting on these landing barges, and, of course, I was a medic, so I had to go in with the troops. But I never had any real active duty due in that time, prior to that time, because I was always out doing these other things. But we were ready to go in, and so we had actually moved into where we would make our move, and guess what. The Nagasaki bomb was dropped. Well, of significance there is the plutonium on that bomb was made at Hanford. So that was really an interesting aspect of it, and I've always been so, so, so, so interested in that aspect of the thing. Well, shortly after that, the war was over, and everybody was discharged. And then that's when I came back and went from there, like I said, prior to this. But I thought that was an interesting aspect of this whole thing. So I worked for the General Electric Company for about five years in radiation protection doing all of these things I've been telling you all about. And again, I had very, very, very good assignments. Probably my most treasured assignment was I was the health physicist for biology, out in the 100-F Area. And I spent a year out there, and that was because of all the animals--the pigs and the dogs and everything, and my job was to write radiation procedures for them to do where the monitor and I had radiation monitors reporting to me out there during that time. Well, following that—I don't know how this developed, but the Atomic Energy Commission, which it was at that time, got my name, and they asked me if I would be interested in federal employment. So in the 1st of January, 1960, I switched jobs from the General Electric Company to the Atomic Energy Commission. And my job, there it turned out that I was a headquarters person, because we were doing what they call compliance inspection of people that are used in the state of Washington, Alaska, and Washington. Anybody that had a license for radioactive material, they had to be inspected. I was one of these inspectors. And it was a very, very interesting job. It involved a tremendous amount of travel, however. And we were always—when I went up to Alaska several times to inspect people, and there were only for us in this whole division, by the way. [LAUGHTER] So there was only two of us that made any inspections. And so I liked it. I like it, because I like people. But I worked at that, and it turned out that we were called Region 8 Division of Compliance, and it consolidated with Region 5 in California. So I didn't want to go to California. So I was offered a job with Atomic Energy Commission here in the Richland operations office, and I stayed there until I retired for my service. But I was with—most of this time, by the way, where I was transferred, I was in the health and safety division at RL. And at that time, there was no—we had one manager for this whole site at Hanford. We didn't have, like they do now, one on for the 300 Area, and all this kind of stuff. So we had our own health and safety division, so our entire--everything we did was associated with Hanford. And so that's where I finished my career in 19--with the federal government. I did work, however, two years after retirement for a company called MacTech, and they were a contractor to DoE to work on specific problems and so on. And I worked with them for a couple of years. And I also worked on the employee compensation program for about a year, and then finally retired. That's kind of it in a nutshell. I hope I didn't confuse you.
Bauman: No, no. I do want to go back and ask a couple of questions. So when you first came to Hanford in 1950, what was your first impression of the area?
Yesberger: Well it was a shock. Number one, I had never been in eastern Washington in my life. I got a job offer, and I thought it might look like Seattle, but it didn't! [LAUGHTER] So that's my impression. But I wouldn't trade this area for the whole state of Washington now. I love it. We raised our family here, and I'm a big booster of it.
Bauman: When you first arrived, where did you live?
Yesberger: Well, my first housing was a dorm for about three months, and then we moved into a B house, which was a duplex. And we lived right across from Lewis and Clark School here in Richland, and we lived in there for a year or two. Then they sold the houses here, and a fellow that I worked with down here, he didn't want to stay here, so he was living in a ranch house, which I bought. And I'm still there. [LAUGHTER] And we live on Torbett here in Richland, and we've been here ever since. We had one child that was born in Denver, and then our other three, and we finally had a girl, which I was so happy for. I love girls. [LAUGHTER] And she lives here, by the way. And she's the only one that lives here, and she's a special education teacher for the handicapped at Richland School. That's what she got her degree in. And she loves the work, but I couldn't do it.
Bauman: Do you remember how much you paid for that house?
Yesberger: We paid about $6,500. We sure did. And prior to that, they furnished the oil, the painters, everything that was here was done for us.
Bauman: Do you remember what your rent was on the B house?
Yesberger: Yeah, it was about $30 a month.
Bauman: $30 a month.
Yesberger: Yeah!
Bauman: Do you have any other memories of the community in the 1950s, what it was like at the time?
Yesberger: Well, yeah, somewhat. One of the things that mystified me was that we lived in Richland, but blacks could not live in Kennewick. They would not rent to--you couldn't buy a house in Kennewick if you were black. And that always, I thought, was unreasonable, because we had several blacks that worked with us in the AEC here that were wonderful. And I still don't have any--I love them all. I like everybody.
Bauman: So when you were AEC, they weren't doing the hiring of African Americans there?
Yesberger: No, they hired them. Oh, yeah, AEC, there was no question on that with the government, but boy, you couldn't live here. And we had several blacks in our division, and it worked out great. No, the community--do you live--I mean, do you folks live here? Well, when we got here, there was nothing north of Van Giesen. Nothing. And so boy, did we see that grow.
Bauman: Yeah, I imagine you’ve seen a lot of change and growth.
Yesberger: The week we got here—well, let's see. It was about--I lived here for about, well, maybe three months in the dorm, until we got housing for my wife in that B house. And it was great, the idea of that housing.
Bauman: Yeah. What was the dorm like?
Yesberger: I didn't have any problem. Of course, I missed my family. We had a boy at that time living in Colorado, and he now lives in Snohomish. And again, we had the big army camp in North Richland, where we had just thousands of trailers and everything. And that was quite a sight to see.
Bauman: So you said you first job was working for the health department, or public health?
Yesberger: Well, it was the health and safety. Yes, it wasn't the health department at that time, but it included their functions.
Bauman: What sorts of things—that first job, what sorts of things did you do?
Yesberger: Well, we used to do all kinds of inspections, of course. But restaurants, schools, the water department in Richland, just broad health things that required health overviews. So that was the job.
Bauman: You were working for GE, right?
Yesberger: Yes.
Bauman: How many people were working in the health at that time?
Yesberger: Oh, we probably had 20 or 25. We had a doctor that was in charge of us.
Bauman: And then you said you went into radiation protection, right?
Yesberger: Yes, from that function. And the main reason is because GE—went to a community, rather than being GE-managed. We had to elect a city councilman. It was a city.
Bauman: Do you remember what your thoughts were about that, about Richland becoming an independent city at the time?
Yesberger: No, I think we all accepted it. It was good. Obviously, when you work like that, you're interested in benefits. And I think that swayed a lot of it for me to stay with GE.
Bauman: Right. So when you moved to radiation protection then, you said you had to have a lot of training at that point?
Yesberger: Oh, yeah.
Bauman: And for the jobs you were doing, did you have to wear special protective clothing at all?
Yesberger: Oh, yes.
Bauman: Can you describe that? Sort of what sorts of things you had to wear.
Yesberger: Well, basically, they're just white coveralls as the one here, and they're still using the same white coveralls out there, just like we did.
Bauman: How about security at Hanford? What was that like when you first came?
Yesberger: Well, I think it was very tight. It was very tight. They really stressed security and safety. Safety was—in my estimation, my experience, General Electric was the most, the best contractor I ever worked for in my life, because they had emphasis on safety and health and really stressed it, you know. Much better than possibly they did in later years.
Bauman: So was there sort of ongoing training for safety?
Yesberger: Oh, yes. Very, very, very, very--GE was very safety-conscious, and they were so good to their employees. You never read anything about anything happening in the newspaper or anything like that. They got it to their employees right away, and it was a pleasure. And the rest was a pleasure too, but not like--I miss GE.
Bauman: And you talked about, was it the 558 project?
Yesberger: Yeah.
Bauman: With changing the tubing. So what was your job? I know you went to each different reactor as they did that. What sort of things were you doing for that?
Yesberger: My particular job was I was what they called the radiation supervisor. And so I had about eight radiation monitors with me all the time during each outage, and we went from one to the other. And their job was everything had to be monitored just like they do now, in and out of the areas, and move it, and take it to disposal areas, and everything.
Bauman: So was it monitoring the employees’ exposure rates?
Yesberger: Yes, monitoring the employees and the jobs that they're doing, because we had to develop the radiation work procedures, which they were working at. And this would vary during the whole outage. And they were very tight at first, and there was any grinding or anything or heat or anything, you had to have special requirements for that.
Bauman: So of the different jobs you had and the different parts of the site that you worked at, was there a job or something you did that you found the most challenging, and/or something that was the most rewarding of the things you did at Hanford?
Yesberger: Well, probably the most rewarding job I ever had here was Hanford, was I was here with Richland operations office, and during the americium accident in 1955, I think it was, and my job, at that time, was--as a matter of fact, I got involved in that particular incident at about 5:00 in the morning after it happened at 4:00. And I went out with the doctor, a fellow by the name of Dr. Breitenstein, and he and I went out and met Mr. McCluskey out in the area, before they got me into the decontamination center. And my job was really I represented RL in the whole aspect of the care of that patient during the months and months that he was here. Because he was confined, couldn't leave, and everything. And my job was to--as a matter of fact, I came right out to see him every single morning that he was in there, and we became very, very, very, very good friends. And it turned out I was a pallbearer when he died. [LAUGHTER] And it was a rewarding experience, because to begin with, he was such a great guy, and he accepted all of this and was never down, but he couldn't hardly see. He was grossly contaminated. And my job was to keep people at RL down here, the Richland operations office informed of what the situation was with him, and to notify headquarters, keep them informed, because it was a real significant accident, the worst we've ever had at Hanford.
Bauman: So you mentioned that he had suffered probably with his vision. What other sort of injuries or--
Yesberger: Well, what happened, he had put his hand in this glovebox out in 234-5 Building, and it exploded, and came out and hit him in the face. So he was just so grossly contaminated, and he had to have a radiation monitor with him every hour that he was down there. And I became so familiar with that accident and everything, and I felt it was the most rewarding for me to have something like that to do.
Bauman: Do you remember about how long he had to stay hospitalized?
Yesberger: Well, yes. He was down there for probably a year. A year. We got hot food. It was provided to him by Kadlec Hospital down here, and he had a nurse with him down there at all times. And his wife was living down there with him also.
Bauman: And where was he then? Was he at the hospital, or was he-
Yesberger: Well, there was facility at the back of Kadlec Hospital, which is no longer there. And this facility was called Emergency Decontamination Center, and he was there. They had beds and everything in there, showers and everything. And it was a specific facility for that case, to tell you the truth. And it's since been torn down, which I think was a mistake, myself, because if you ever had another one, you couldn't have been a better facility for it.
Bauman: You mentioned you were in close with him, and were a pallbearer at his funeral. How long did he live?
Yesberger: He lived about, I think, about three years. And then he died of a heart attack. It wasn't radiation. But he certainly had radiation in him that would cause cancer if he had lived too much longer.
Bauman: Are there any other incidents or sort of unusual events that happened when you were working at Hanford that kind of stand out in your mind at all?
Yesberger: Well, I happened to be a trained accident investigator, and I had to go to school and learn all this kind of stuff. And I probably investigated more accidents than anybody ever has at Hanford. But we’ve had fatalities, and we had big spreads of contamination. We had several things that cause it, plus, we also responded to off-site accidents. And I had what we call a radiological assistant team that reported to me, and I went out on those where there were trucks that would spill radioactive material, where there was--this is kind of a little odd. I probably shouldn't even mention it, but you'll appreciate it. But we had a truck of uranium billets overturn on Lolo Pass, and these billets weigh 15, 20 pounds, but there's hundreds of them in this truck. Those things went all over the highway up here in Montana. I responded to that one. And one of the things that I was never trained on was guns. But, well, we were up there probably about a week recovering all of those billets that spilled over, because they all had to be accounted for. It was very strict on that. But we were out from town out on this pass someplace, and somebody had to sit in the truck with a gun at night to make sure nothing came, if anybody came from the highway or anything like that. Well, they gave me a big shotgun. I don't even remember what kind of gun. I couldn't have shot that damn thing if I'd had to! [LAUGHTER] And I still can't! [LAUGHTER] But that was kind of humorous. But we couldn't have the guy that could shoot be there all the time. So we all spent about three or four hours a night out there by ourselves.
Bauman: How long were you out there?
Yesberger: We were out there a couple of weeks. But I responded to lots of--the worst probably the most one that I responded to as the team captain was we had a spread of contamination at the University of Washington at the reactor. And I actually, again, there was some plutonium that came from Hanford that they were analyzing up there, and there was a spill. And the reactor at the University of Washington was greatly contaminated with plutonium. And I had a team. I had three or four people that went up with me to respond to that, and we were there two or three weeks there helping them get that all in, and we did. We got it all cleaned up, but there was some minor depositions. But boy, if that thing would happen now, the way it's anti-nuclear, it would be horrible. But this happened to be in spring break when all of the kids were away. So we lucked out on that on that thing, but we all had to wear protective clothing that two or three weeks while we were doing that. But I was the team leader on that particular accident.
Bauman: Do you remember what the time period was when that happened? What year that might've been?
Yesberger: Oh, gosh, I can't remember that. But I responded to probably 30 or 40 spills and so on that were all over the country in Oregon and Washington. And then we had spills in Oregon that we had to go down to, because at that time, the state didn't have people for that function to overlook at that. So we did their work for them. And I did that for, like I say, about four or five years.
Bauman: So did you usually respond if it was like material that had come from Hanford?
Yesberger: No, it could be anything.
Bauman: Could’ve been anything, okay.
Yesberger: Could be anything. I loved the job, and I loved the people, because I like people. But it was so much travel. I was always gone from Hanford.
Bauman: So that was probably one of the more challenging aspects for you is just all the travel.
Yesberger: Yeah, it was. We had young children, and it seemed like I couldn't go out and come back, there wasn't a million things broke. [LAUGHTER] So that's the way it went.
Bauman: I wanted to ask you about President Kennedy's visit in 1963, if you went to that that day. Do you have any memories about that?
Yesberger: Well, I got two memories. I got a call after that article was in the paper from the Seattle--no, she was from, I think, a public relations firm down here, one of them, that asked me about it. So I told them everything I knew. So I told them about this one friend of ours that happened to get up and shake Kennedy's hand. Well, of course, they were interested more in that than were what I had to say. [LAUGHTER] So the big article in the paper, he gives his report. He didn't even mention my name. [LAUGHTER] No, I didn't care. But my son-in-law was there when they called too, and they quoted him in the article and everything. But poor me. No, I wasn't looking. I wasn't really looking for my name to be any place. [LAUGHTER] Yes, I was out there. It was, of course, it was in the fall when he was here, not long before he was assassinated. But it was such a hot day, and I think all of Richland went out to it. There was just car after car going out to that area, and some of them boiling over from the heat and all this kind of stuff. But it was a very, very excellent program.
Bauman: So as you look back at your years working at Hanford—how many was it? Thirty--
Yesberger: Gee!
Bauman: [LAUGHTER]
Yesberger: Yeah.
Bauman: Something like that?
Yesberger: About 36. It was 36.
Bauman: Well, as you look back at those 36 years, overall, how would you assess Hanford as a place to work?
Yesberger: Well, I thought it was excellent and very safety-conscious. It couldn't have—in my aspect—been a safer place to live in my life than I did here at Hanford. And like I say, I worked in all the reactors. I worked in the separation plants and everything, and it was interesting. I think it was rewarding, the fact that you could clean up stuff. So it makes me real--we had such excellent facilities out here at that time. But all those buildings are gone and torn down, and they could've been used for so many things now. And I think that was a really big mistake. But they didn't ask me. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: Well, is there anything I haven't asked you about that you think would be important to share or talk about?
Yesberger: Well, you know, I don't know. I think you might want to look at my submittal in the Parker Foundation on that thing and see what I said at that time and the answer to their questions and so on. It went well. And I just feel so fortunate to have been here all this time and be so lucky and still be here. I'm the luckiest guy in the world, and I'm very happy that I was at Hanford. I've got several awards while I was here for my work. One of them I do want to show you, because I'm really probably real pleased, but I was elected a fellow in the National Health Physics Society. I received awards, several from—I was president of our local chapter of the Health Physics Society. I received several awards from those people. I was really well thought of while I was here at Hanford. And I was real pleased.
Bauman: So were you involved in the Parker Foundation as well?
Yesberger: Yes, I've been on it since--I still am.
Bauman: Do you want to talk about that, like how you got involved with that?
Yesberger: I was asked to join it by Dr. Bair, who is still there. And I know you know about Ron Kathren. Everybody knows Ron Kathren. Well, I play cribbage with Ron Kathren every Wednesday at my house now. We play cribbage. I just think he's such a great person, and such a great health physicist, that I was so lucky to know him. And they asked me to join, and I've been real active, until this business with my wife, which I took a leave of absence. And I haven't been able to go there, because I can't leave my wife. But I still pay my dues and go there, and it's been a good organization.
Bauman: Well, I want to thank you for coming today in this cold weather and coming and letting us talk to you. And then maybe we could get a shot of your award that you brought in.
Yesberger: Oh, okay.
Northwest Public Television | Pasch_Myles
Robert Bauman: Okay. All right. My name's Robert Bauman. And I'm conducting an oral history interview with Mr. Myles Pasch, today June 11th, 2013 and we are conducting this interview on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities, and I'll be talking to Mr. Pasch about his experiences working at the Hanford site. So good morning, and thank you for being willing to have me talk to you today and be our first subject in this project. Appreciate it.
Myles Pasch: Welcome.
Bauman: So what if start by just having you tell me how and why you ended up coming to the Tri-Cities area to work at the Hanford site. How did that come about?
Pasch: Well I come about, my mother was working here when I got out of the Army in '45. Why, she already had a job lined up for me out here, and so come out here to take that job that they--the job actually didn't materialize, but I start working with the electrical distribution as a lineman's helper, because of the experience in the Army. I was a communications system in the Army, and so I started out in the line distribution as a ground man for the line gang, and about six months later why the Corps of Engineers turned the telephone system over to DuPont and with the telephone experience I had, they--I mean if you put me in the telephone system and I worked in there then until I--until my retirement. And various jobs from cable splicer helper, to cable splicer, to lineman and supervisor of the installation and maintenance crews, and then supervisor's office. Finally end up in engineering section by the time I retired.
Bauman: So you worked in a lot of different places, but mostly on electrical and phone.
Pasch: Just about all of it on phones. Phones, phones, and phone lines.
Bauman: And what sort of job did your mother have when you arrived?
Pasch: She was in the T Plant, 221-T Plant cleaning instruments and that from the separations group when they--vessels that they had to use for transferring materials and so forth and she was cleanup on that.
Bauman: Oh, okay. And when had she begun work here?
Pasch: She began work there when they went into production. She worked at Hanford during construction in the mess hall, and then she transferred to DuPont and started working soon as--right after they went into production instead of construction. My dad also worked there. Both in construction and in--and he went into patrol, the Hanford patrol, when they went into production.
Bauman: And do you know how your parents ended up coming here for work?
Pasch: I really don't. I was in the Army at the time that they did come out here, and so I'm not sure how--other than I know they were living in northern Wisconsin. There wasn't much going on there, and so I know that they tried to find something in the war industry to work on, so they applied for and came out here to Hanford.
Bauman: And did both of your parents continue working at Hanford after the war also?
Pasch: Yes. Fact is, I think my dad retired in '52. My mother retired when DuPont phased out and they went to General Electric. She phased out with DuPont, but Dad stayed in until 1951, actually, when he retired.
Bauman: Right. So you said you initially worked for the Army Corps of Engineers and then DuPont?
Pasch: No. I worked for DuPont when I hired on in July of '45, but the Corps of Engineers was running the telephone systems at that time rather than DuPont, and they turned the telephone systems over to DuPont in January of '46, and at that time I transferred right over to the telephone section and worked there until retirement.
Bauman: Okay. So what might a typical work day have been for you back in the late 1940s early 1950s? What sorts of things might you have done in a typical workday? Where might you have gone on the Hanford site?
Pasch: Well, we had to go wherever they needed telephone service, and it was installation of the wiring, telephones, and maintenance of them. And so wherever they needed telephones, we went. I worked in the outer areas all the time, very little in the 300 Area. Most of my work was in the two East-West, and the 100 Areas, wherever they needed a telephone repaired or put in, why, there's where we worked.
Bauman: How large of a crew or group did you work with usually, would be out there doing telephone repairs?
Pasch: Usually there was about eight or ten men on the telephone installation and repair group, and there was anywhere from one to four cable splicer crews going splicing cable. Especially when they really start opening up in the late '40s early '50s, and they start increasing the size and that of the telephone systems.
Bauman: So I imagine over the 37 years--is that how long?
Pasch: Yes, 37.
Bauman: Imagine over the course of those 37 years the telephone systems changed quite a bit.
Pasch: Yes, we started out with--when the Corps of Engineers had it, they started out with common battery switchboards with operators on them in each area, and each area had a 100 or 200 line switchboard, whatever they needed. And when they turned it over to DuPont, though, they'd already had installed a automatic switching station. So right after they turned it over to DuPont, why it switched over to automatic switching stations and the operators were taken off the project. And then it wasn't many years later they had to increase the size of that. They went from a Strowger switching system to a North Electric all relay switching system. And just in the--well not what, in the early '80s or late '70s, why, they switched over to a computer-controlled switching system, which is what they are still using out there now is a computer-controlled. But they went from say 100 lines in each area to several thousand lines and now, and the increase in people and buildings that were put in during that time. During that period of time. When I first started there, there was only three reactors and the East-West Area each had a separations building, but the only one that was actually in use was the 221-T Plant.
Bauman: So were some of those buildings more challenging to work with install or fix phone lines?
Pasch: Yeah, some of them we had to get special permits, special clothing, monitor buttons, and pencils, and badges to go into them. Probably only allowed 30 minutes in some spots. They were restricted to how long you could work in there and so forth, because of the radiation.
Bauman: Mm-hmm. So did you have a radiation monitor or some sort when you did that?
Pasch: We had a radiation monitor. Our badge was a radiation monitor. Whenever we went into an area, why, we got a couple of pencils that you put in your pocket that rated different types of radiation. Some buildings they had to have even another different pencil in your pocket in order to work there. Because there was different types, different radiations.
Bauman: And, so you mentioned you worked in T-Plant? In there as well?
Pasch: Oh, yes, I worked--fact is that was one of our most challenging ones. We went there to work, and you had to drive dressed in double protective coveralls and boots, and gloves, and hoods, mask, and then when you went out, you had to strip all that and you couldn't drag your tools out with you. They stayed, either stayed or got thrown away. So in that one you were very limited on how long you could work in the canyon. That was in the canyon itself.
Bauman: Yeah. Now for the site itself, when you first started working at Hanford site, given high security and secrecy, did you have to get a special security clearance, or--?
Pasch: I had a Q clearance all while I worked there. I had a Q clearance, which allowed you into everything except top secret buildings. The only thing about Hanford there is a need to know basis. You never learned anything about anything else that was going on except if you were doing it. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: When you first started, were you--how did you get to Hanford? Were you able to drive your own vehicle or did you have to take the bus?
Pasch: We took a bus out. You could drive your own vehicle off the area, park it outside the fence and that, but most people rode the bus out. They had bus transportation to all areas.
Bauman: And did that continue for most of the time that you worked at Hanford, or did that start to change?
Pasch: That continued. Most of the time I worked at Hanford, except the last few years and I was manager or supervisor of the business office. I was working in the 700 Area in the Federal Building. Was then based in there. So at that time I no longer had to ride buses out. But then the last three four years I worked, I was back out in the areas again, but of course I was driving company car out for instructing people on the new telephone systems. They'd set up meetings and I'd go out and instruct them on how it worked and what they could--what they could use of the communication systems. There was a lot of stuff they weren't allowed to use by DOE because it was expensive and unnecessary. So some of the things that they could have had and used, why, they weren't available to the plant operations. Some of the top management had them, but a lot of the systems was not available to the regular—most of the divisions.
Bauman: Now because of the security at Hanford, and secrecy, were there any sort of special phone--concerns about communication, using telephones. Was there any special security or anything like that, related to telephones?
Pasch: They always stressed security. That, talk and sink your ship, and so forth and that, to keep people from talking, and of course they had monitoring systems that they--the FBI had one set up in one of the buildings there where they could access any phone in the plant if they had the need to monitor to see if anything was going on that shouldn't be going on. And they then recorded them on little old spools of wax. Little drums of wax recordings that they used to use way back when.
Bauman: Really? [LAUGHTER] Wow, that's interesting. Did that impact your work at all, the connections at all, or how you did the telephone lines at all?
Pasch: It just gave us more work. I mean we had to--and that was top secret, we were not allowed to discuss that with anyone that this was set up was there, available to the government.
Bauman: I’m going to shift a little bit now and talk a little bit about the area, the Tri-Cities area. When you first arrived where did you live? And what were your first impressions of Richland or the area here?
Pasch: Well it was--lived in a--with my folks. They'd rented a three bedroom prefab, because they wanted us to come and live with them while I was there. So we lived in that prefab for the first six months, then we moved into one of the B houses down the south end of town. And it was pretty desolate, lot of wind, no trees. [LAUGHTER] And I thought every time the wind blew, why, they'd lose about half their—half their employees would terminate—termination winds they used to call them. [LAUGHTER] And of course the--none of the cities were any too large at that time, and they just grown a lot since. But Richland was all government owned, all the homes and everything was government owned until about '53 they sold the--about '52 or '53 they started selling the houses to the resident who was in the house. And I moved out just before that. We'd moved out and went to Kennewick, so we didn't buy one of the--one of the plant houses.
Bauman: Now had you--did you know anything about the area before you came here? Had your parents told you anything really about--
Pasch: Not a thing. Just come for the job.
Bauman: So what was the community like in those early years in the late ‘40s early ‘50s? Because I would assume most people had come from all over the United States to work. What was that like?
Pasch: They come all from all over from the United States and they--everything in town was government owned. So they had a big recreation building. They had two theaters and they had the recreation building where they would contract some major musicians to come in and play, oh, probably once a month they'd come in and play for a dance there for the people. About the only other--well, we had the bowling alley and one tavern in town. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, the bowling alley and the tavern and two theaters. So a lot of the recreation were just people parading up and down the streets on a Sunday when they weren't working.
Bauman: So there were theaters to go to. Were there any parades or those sorts of events going on in the summer at all?
Pasch: Every year they had parades that the government sponsored. Either parades or art in the park and such as that, that they got started. So there was quite a bit going on, and like I say, every so often they'd get a big band, one of the big bands in to play for the dances. And each department would manage to make a couple of parties every year to keep their people happy.
Bauman: You mentioned the termination winds and often a lot of people came and went. What made you stay and your family stay there?
Pasch: Oh, I guess I liked the job. [LAUGHTER] It was just what I had always had been doing was telephone work. So I liked the job, and the pay wasn't too bad. And we had all—a lot of free time. I mean on the weekends and that, and it wasn't too far to go out to find recreation in the areas. Fishing or boating or just sightseeing. So we enjoyed—and we enjoyed the climate and that here compared to in some other areas we lived in.
Bauman: Not quite as cold as Wisconsin, I guess..
Pasch: Yes. That's--
Bauman: I wonder if there were any major events or things that happened while you were working at Hanford that stand out in your memory. I know President Kennedy was here in 1963, right, to sort of open the N Reactor. I wonder if you remember anything about that or are there any other events that really stand out?
Pasch: That was one time that they even let school out so that school kids could go out there. And our son was in the band, so he was out there playing, and the whole family was out at the N Reactor when President Kennedy was there. Were able to spend the afternoon out there. Fact is, they even got a chance then to take them by the building I was based in at the time, which is out the old BY telephone building. Got to take the family by there, and so we had a family picnic there at the BY building on the way home from the outing.
Bauman: That's probably the first time family members had a chance to be out--
Pasch: That's the first time they were allowed out there at all. I mean if you didn't have a badge you didn't go out there, unless you got special badge to go out into the area. But they had the checkpoints at 300 are and out at--on the highway coming in from the Yakima area--the highway where that highway 24's junctions with it. They had a gate out there, and one out by the--before you got to 300 Area and you had to have a badge to go through there.
Bauman: Okay. And were you able to drive your cars out for that event?
Pasch: You could, but they were inspected. Trunks inside and outside as you went through, and--but you could drive your car out. But most people did use the bus.
Bauman: I wonder if--what would you like future generations to know about Hanford? What it was like to work there. What it was like living in the Tri-Cities, especially in the 1940s and 1950s and those years in early Cold War years.
Pasch: Well, I don't know. [LAUGHTER] That's a--other than the fact, that it was one of the main things that stopped the World War very soon. I mean they saved--people worry about them having killed a lot of people, but they saved a lot lives. And if you look at it in the long run, well, they saved one amount of lives with the production at the Hanford plant.
Bauman: It seems like your work experience in 37 years was generally very good. You liked your job, is that right?
Pasch: Most of the time it was good, yes. It was--there was ups and downs, but it was as a rule it was pretty good. It was a good job and it was a sure job. I mean as long as you did your work and kept your nose clean, why, you had a job for as long as you wanted to stay. I could've stayed on beyond retirement age if I wanted to, but I was ready to go traveling.
Bauman: And how about the Tri-Cities as a place to live? You mentioned you moved to Kennewick in the early 1950s?
Pasch: We moved to Kennewick in 1952, and lived there until 2011. I moved back into Richland, about four or five blocks away from where we first started out in Richland. [LAUGHTER] So I liked it in Kennewick, but it's crowded. We found a real nice location out in Richland that we liked and I built a home there, and we--I moved out there.
Bauman: Well that's really interesting about your work and seeing the different changes right, with the telephone system and changes at Hanford. So you started with DuPont. What other contractors did you work for over the years?
Pasch: Well, DuPont, and General Electric, and ARCO, and Westinghouse, and main one, Rockwell. Fact is, I've spent a lot of time—Rockwell was one of the last ones that I just transferred over to Westinghouse as Rockwell phased out just about the time they were phasing out and combining a lot of the companies. Rockwell went out and I've worked with--or with Westinghouse for just a short time, then just to carry over until they got it--got all their programs going again right. There's a lot of change every five years at least, why, they were changing contractors, and was always a big change.
Bauman: Was there a contract you worked for that you really enjoyed working for maybe more than some of the others?
Pasch: Oh, no. They were all pretty good. I mean they were--had a job to do, and I was working in the same telephone department all the time. We just transferred under different management, and seems like all of those contractors were nice to work for. I mean, they were all—seemed just one as good as the other.
Bauman: Okay. Is there anything that I haven't asked you about? Or any memories that you have of either working at Hanford or living in the Tri-Cities that you think is important to share that I haven't asked you about yet, or haven't talked about yet?
Pasch: Not off hand. I can't think of anything. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: Okay. Well, I really appreciate you coming and sharing your memories and your experiences working at the Hanford site and being a part, especially of those early years at Hanford. I really appreciate it, and thanks very much.
Pasch: Other than being a little nervous, why, I enjoyed it. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: Thank you.
Man two: The only thing I can think of—well you--
Woman one: Last week my daughter came here when we came for the chancellor thing. And she's 15, and they had studied it somewhat in school, but she had some really strange thoughts, and not really positive thoughts about things that had happened here. And I was wondering if maybe you, since you lived through it, if you could make that—the reality of life at that time more real to them?
Pasch: I don't know, it just--there was a lot of restrictions and that, that you had to consider, going through that. And the security involved with it was very strict, but I can see where it was very necessary. Any of that restrictions and the production that they made, like I say, saved a lot of lives overall, if you'd have continued with the war as it was going. Why, it brought a stop to it in a hurry. And I think we should be thankful that it did that rather than carry on for invasion of Japan and whatever would have happened after that.
Bauman: Well again, thank you very much. I really appreciate you being willing to be the first person to be interviewed as part of this. You get all the little nuances of everything so I really appreciate Mr. Pasch. Thank you very much.
Pasch: You're welcome.
Man one: Okay. Stop the tape.
Northwest Public Television | Moore_Samuel
Robert Bauman: My name is Robert Bauman, and I am conducting an oral history interview with Samuel Moore, correct?
Samuel Moore: Right, Samuel--
Bauman: This date is July 9, 2013. And the interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. And I'll be talking with Mr. Moore about his experiences working at Hanford site, living in Richland and so forth. So maybe let's start actually from the beginning, if you want, could you tell me how and why you came to Hanford, how you heard about it, how you got here?
Moore: Okay, I'm going to tell you how I got here. My father was working at a cook in the mental section of Camp Chaffee, Arkansas. And he came home, and he says, there's a better job at Hanford, Washington. So he left and came out. Then he told them that I can't be here without my family. So they put us on, I think it was a troop train, and it stopped in Pasco and set us off.
Bauman: Could you--where is Camp Chaffee, Arkansas?
Moore: It's east of Ft. Smith and that, so.
Bauman: And how old were you at the time?
Moore: About eight. And then we come in--put us off of this I'll call it a troop train, because there was a zillion soldiers on it. And it picks up and they took us to Kennewick to a place called Naval Housing. And that's where they put the people coming in for Hanford workers to stay until a house was available. And we stayed there, and then from there we moved to this nice little square building which had a flat top, set up on stilts. And it was called a prefab at 1300 Totten Street. And that means that we lived at the end house. The telephones were on the telephone poles at the end of the block. So when the phone would ring you were told to answer the phone and go get whoever it wanted who. So that's the way we started in Richland. And we lived there for I don't know how long. And then we moved to different houses around Richland until I graduated from Columbia High School, which was Columbia High School in Richland at that time. Now it's Richland High. And then after that I did a short job with a construction company. And then I went to work for General Electric, running one of their blueprint machines when they were getting ready to build the REDOX Building and the PUREX Building. So I'd go, I was the first one in to warm up the machines and run them for a while. And then after while I got uplined and I could deliver those suckers out into the area. So that was my starting with General Electric then.
Bauman: Okay, so let me go back a little bit. So what year did your family arrive then?
Moore: 19--it was either 1943 or '44.
Bauman: Okay. And your father, was he a cook here also?
Moore: No, no. He'd come out and he was a, as we call them today, rent-a-cop. He was a patrolman out there. And he worked as a patrolman ‘til he retired.
Bauman: And you said that your first job was with General Electric, and what year would that have been?
Moore: About 1953 or 4. Then I went from there, like I say I was in the blueprint sections and all that. And then I had a job—I got a chance to become an engineer's assistant. And then when they were going out and building different things, so that helped me get into the other sections of General Electric and so on. And when that one cut, I transferred into radiation monitoring. And that was when they had the Hanford labs, and the old animal farm was at 100 F Area. So I worked in that group until--I forget what year it was. I'm not good on years and dates. But when they decided they were going to re-tube all of those reactors out there in the hundred areas and so they could put bigger slugs in them and all that stuff, I worked on that until about 1957. And they said, guess what? We're not going to pay you anymore. So I left here. But I stayed with the government job. I went to the Nevada test site and blew all the plutonium up that they made out here. So then I came back to Hanford in 1960. So then I was still in radiation monitoring and worked all kinds of different places, tank farms and everywhere else out there that I could think about.
Bauman: So it sounds like you worked all over the Hanford site.
Moore: All over the Hanford site, that's right, yes, everywhere. And I worked a lot of the times at the burial grounds in 200 West Area. When they would take the big wooden boxes to PUREX and REDOX and they'd fill them. And then they'd pull them up, and they'd put a big long cable on the whole string of cars, and that box was way down that string of cars. And then when they get up to the burial ground, the train and it would coordinate, and they'd pull it back. And as the cable would come around, and when the box got to the trench, the train would stop. And they'd just spin it around and down in a trench. And then we get the honor of riding the bulldozers to set those freights so they could cover them up. That was one of the deals. And the other times I worked in a lot of the tank farms and pulling pumps and putting new bearings in those pumps and all that kind of stuff. It was an experience, believe me.
Bauman: Yeah, I'm sure it was. So a lot of this was with radiation monitoring?
Moore: It was radiation monitoring. And I was in radiation monitoring until 1980-something. And I had a little problem out there, and they wanted me to release some stuff. And I said, uh-uh, not me, it ain't mine. So they said, well we've got this other section over here that you should be in, so I got into the safety part with respiratory protection. And I was trained to repair the breathing air things, like the firemen use. I was trained to do that, fix the PAPRs, and the escape packs, and all that stuff so. And check over places for where they—oxygen levels to where they could go in and work and all that, so that was my last eight years of Hanford, was in the respiratory section I'll call it.
Bauman: And so when did you retire then?
Moore: In 1994.
Bauman: So almost 40 years minus the years that you were with--
Moore: Yeah, yeah. Well as the way I said, when I came back to Hanford in 1960, they told me it was a temporary job, it would probably only last six, eight months. Well, I found out that at Hanford a temporary job is pretty permanent. It only lasted 33 and 1/2 years. It's a temporary job there, so I guess at all turned out pretty good.
Bauman: I guess you could consider that temporary.
Moore: Temporary, yeah. Yeah.
Bauman: So many interesting things that you've worked on. So let's go back to the early years. First, in the 1950s and you talked about radiation monitoring, something with radiation, you did blueprint and stuff, but then radiation monitoring?
Moore: And then radiation monitoring, yeah.
Bauman: Okay, and some of that was with animals? Is that right?
Moore: Well, I went into the animal farm on some certain times, but I wasn't assigned there for anything. The big one I was assigned to was what they called the 558 project, which is when they re-tubed all of the old reactors. And that was, you'd go in and set dose rates for all the people when they're working. And so it was a deal.
Bauman: And now Hanford, of course, is a highly secure site, right, lots of security, secrecy to a certain extent. Can you talk about that at all? I mean, in terms of getting to work or at work, how did that impact you?
Moore: Most of the places where I was, the secure part of it wasn't that strict. But other places like, some of those buildings, yeah, they were really a strict situation. And when I go back a ways, when my dad and we lived in this—I call it the slum house on Totten Street--nobody knew what was happening. Nobody knew. I didn't know what the guy next door was doing, and they didn't know what my dad did. Until I think it was 1944 or '45 when they announced what they were really doing here. And it was kind of a shock, that deal, so. That was my deals of the secrecy out there.
Bauman: Now, did you have to have special security clearance?
Moore: Yes, yes, I did. I had special clearances, yes. I had everything but the very top secret one. And that was real handy because when I left here, I went to the Nevada test site. I had to use the same secret pass. And then the same thing when I come back. It was very, very--what am I trying to say here? I mean, I'm an old guy. I'm just about at the end of the road here. Most of my work, like I say, was the tank farms, and those places, where secrecy was not involved in that. And it was like times when you'd have a spill, you dig it up and prepare it to the burial ground. A lot of that was the work that we did.
Bauman: And you said your first job was at General Electric. Obviously, there are different contractors.
Moore: Yeah.
Bauman: Now, who all did you work for over the years?
Moore: Well, we went to General Electric. Then it went to there was one called Isochem, Rockwell, oh there's a whole slug of them, I can't remember all of them. So it seemed like every time you'd turn around, they were turned over to somebody new. But it was Westinghouse when I decided I would better leave before I had a real problem.
Bauman: So can you talk about what was happening there toward the end that made you want to leave?
Moore: Well, I was, like I say, I was working on the PAPRs and all that kind of stuff. It got to be a real drag, you know. And everybody was doing that then. It got to the point where every time you turned around, everybody was wanting this, and wanting this, and wanting this. You're only one person. And I was a guy that did most all the fixing. So I decided--to my wife, I said--I call her the voice from the other side. She said, what's the matter? And I says, well, before I mess up on one of these pieces of equipment and kill somebody, I think I better retire. So we just decided, okay. And she worked for the Hanford Project, too. And of course she was much better off than I was. She worked for one of the big managers as a secretary. So we just decided that was it. And we had our nest eggs saved up and said, okay, it's retired and we're going to see the world. And we did that until my one eye decides to go bad. Then we had to stop. Other than that, I'd probably been in who knows where.
Bauman: While you were working at Hanford were there any significant events, or sort of, things that have happened that sort of stand out in your mind specifically?
Moore: Yeah, and I was trying to think. It was about 1962, graveyard shift, 233-S, it caught on fire and it burned. And it was a big mess. That's where I wound up with my shot of plutonium in my bones, as I'll say, from that fire. And, of course, back in those days you didn't know what was what, so they worked on it and cleaned it up. And but there's a couple of contamination things that sticks out in my mind. One of them is, we used to bury the material from 300 Area which is, I guess you would call a Westinghouse, Battelle or somebody. And we used to dump them into caissons in the backside of the 234-5 Area. And we had one of those that kind of broke open and messed us up a little bit. Took us maybe six, eight, hours to get cleaned up so we were able to go on our merry way. But those are the only two that really stick out in my mind.
Bauman: Did you miss any amount of work as a result the exposures when you had those?
Moore: Nope. Nope. They just cleaned you up and said go back to work. You all have to remember that back in those days, all of the things that happened in a lot of places, we didn't know. We didn't know what the repercussions was going to be. We didn't know that. Now, this is why we're paying for a lot of stuff right now is because we didn't know how to do all that stuff. But like I say, there's a lot more people that know a lot more about that Hanford stuff than I do. Like I said, it's been many a year since I worked some of those places, too, that I can't remember some of the stuff.
Bauman: Sure, sure. The radiation monitoring group, how large of a group was that? And how many employees do you know, have an idea who worked--
Moore: There was probably about 60 or better. But each company, I think, had a group of their own. The 200 Areas had one big group. The 100 Areas had a group. And then 300 Area had a group, so you put them all together there was probably more than 60-some.
Bauman: Okay, and just to—you said there was a fire in, you think about, 1962. Was it the 200 Area?
Moore: Yep, in the 200, down behind the REDOX Building. That just, poof, was it and it went, so. And I think the reason they had the fire was because somebody had some greasy coveralls and stuff and didn't take care of them the proper way, and the first thing you know, poof, they were on fire.
Bauman: And this was where there was radioactive material?
Moore: Yeah, it was back in the radioactive area, so everything got messed up.
Bauman: And at the time you probably didn't know necessarily everything, but you've had some health problems since then?
Moore: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, but I won't say that my health problem is caused by the contamination that I had or was dumped with. I've had quite a few of those. I've had a melanoma cancer in this ear, and I had a very large contamination that got in that ear and area. So I've had to have some surgery done there, skin grafts and that kind of stuff. But so far it hasn't slowed me up.
Bauman: I'm going to shift gears a little bit here. Were you working here in 1963 then when President Kennedy came to?
Moore: Yeah, yeah.
Bauman: And do you remember at all? Were you there that day?
Moore: No. Well, I was on a project that day, but I was not out where he was. I was one of the, I guess how would I say this, the lower steel, so I took care of the work over while everybody went to that. But yeah, I was here. I came back from Nevada on September 13, 1960, and I worked till '94.
Bauman: And then I wanted to ask you a little about Richland. So other than when you first got here, it sounds like you lived in Richland most of the time?
Moore: Yeah.
Bauman: How would you describe Richland as a community at the time, as a place to live?
Moore: It was very good because at that time, when you were there, you didn't even have to worry about locking doors. I mean, everybody was—it just one big thing. It was a government town and everything would deal like that. And nobody really did—didn't have the vandalism or anything like that around town. And as you probably know that, if you're familiar with Fred Meyer’s on Wellsian Way down there, that was a swamp deal, because that was where Richland got their drinking water. Like I said, I lived in 1303 Totten the very first time and then we moved from there down to on Benham Street. And I don't know how to say this, other than the way I normally say that, but that was down where we called the turd churn. That was the sewage plant down there. Then from there I moved back up to Swift. And then in--I was trying to think when it was, 1963 or so, they did away with the old irrigation ditch that came through Richland and goes underneath Carmichael, because that's where they flooded the cattail place down there for the drinking water in Richland, and let it seep down and pump it up. And they busted everything up and back about then I was reading the Villager, I think it was, the Tri-City paper, and there was a lot for sale on Totten Street. So I bought it and went out and looked at it. It was the old irrigation ditch. And I built a house over the old irrigation ditch, and I still live there.
Bauman: And you—when you first arrived you were a child.
Moore: Yeah.
Bauman: What was it like going to school? I'm assuming that there were people from sort of all over, right?
Moore: All over. Yeah. And you just walk to school. And it was, like I say, there was no buses or anything, you could walk to school. And everybody just seemed to fit right in, you know. Nobody had any qualms whether I was from Arkansas or anywhere else. But like I say when the first house there in Richland, Wright Avenue was the last street in town. And beyond that was one of the most fabulous cherry orchards that there was. And when you were a kid you'd slip over in the cherry orchard and get cherries and take them home to your mother. And she could make you some jams, jellies, or whatever pie, or whatever. But it was a deal. There was quite a group of kids that came from all over the country. And they just seemed to fit in, none of this gang thing or anything like that. They were just, everybody was all buddy-buddy, you know?
Bauman: You mentioned you went to, what was then Columbia High School.
Moore: Yeah.
Bauman: How about elementary and middle school?
Moore: And in elementary school when we moved the one that I really remember was Lewis and Clark down on the south end of town. And I went there until one of the, I'll call them students decided to burn it down. And they burnt Lewis and Clark down. And so a lot of us were told to go up to Marcus Whitman and finish off the year up there. So we did that. And then them from there on Carmichael, the junior high, was being built and I think they opened it up at about a mid-year. And I was one of the ones I went there the mid-year into Carmichael and then over to the high school after that.
Bauman: And so what year was that the Lewis and Clark burned down? Was that like in the late '40s then?
Moore: Yeah. But the funny part of it is, not too many years ago they arrested a fellow down in Portland. And he was laughing about burning the building down. So I guess they couldn't do anything to him, but they found out who burned it down now. Yeah. Well, there was Lewis and Clark, Marcus Whitman, Sacajawea which was right there by Central United Protestant Church was the old Sacajawea school. And then there's Jefferson which is still going. And our fabulous people are trying to shut it down, move it, and do something else with it. But who knows what's going to happen.
Bauman: Do you remember when you were growing up and going to school and living here at that time any community events, parades?
Moore: Oh, yeah! Atomic Frontier Days was a big—the big, big thing. I have breakfast with a group of Columbia High graduates and I can't remember what her name is, but she was one of them that used to run for the Queen of Frontier Days. And there was a couple others. But that was the big thing. And they used to take—Howard Amon Park turned into booths, and just like a big fair down there. So it was things, and then all a sudden they decided to move everything around to the Tri-Cities.
Bauman: And was that in the summer?
Moore: Yeah, that was always in the summer, you know. And then the big hydroplane races, they would come in, but they were the old ones that had the 1,200 or 1,300 horse-powered gasoline engines in them, the noise makers. But that was about the extent of the things. And if we go back I can remember the floods came through and when they build all the dikes that they're tearing down now. But I don't think they got to worry about that, being as the dams are still functioning.
Bauman: Do you remember some of the floods?
Moore: Oh yeah, I can remember the flood deals, when they built the road up to going to the Y. They had to build all that up because you didn't get to Kennewick when the flood was on. Well, it was right up to the George Washington Way road there by wherever the guy that has the petrified stumps down there. The water was just across the street from his house, was right up to the edge there.
Bauman: So I want to go back now to Hanford itself and your work experiences there. You talked about some specific things you did and some specific things. How would you describe Hanford as a place to work?
Moore: Hanford was a real good place to work. It was really good work, and good place to work. Mainly I think because you didn't know everything that was going on. So you knew that you had your section, what you were doing, and you didn't want to make waves or something like that. But to me, Hanford was a good place to work. There was a lot of--I had a lot of good friends that came up through the, I call them the ranks. They were, like I worked in the blueprint and there was guys that drove the mail trucks. We wound up as a real knit group of people there. They work out of the old 703 Building, which part of it's still there. And we used to have Coke breaks and go back there. And everybody put a quarter in the pot and then get your Coke bottle. When it was all through whoever had the bottle that was from farthest away got the kitty. So it was a good place to work, really.
Bauman: And I guess is there anything you would like future generations to know about working at Hanford site?
Moore: Well, I would like everybody to know that where this country really screwed up was when we dropped that bomb and blew up everything. We kept everything too secret. They should have let everybody know what that was and what was happening. Today we would have had a better deal of doing what they're doing today if they'd done that, I think. Now that's my opinion and no one else's, but if they would have just let them know what was going on, and what happened, it would have been a lot better.
Bauman: And then is there anything that I haven't asked you about in terms of either your job at Hanford—or jobs, I should say, at Hanford?
Moore: No.
Bauman: Or living in Richland? That I haven't asked you about, that you'd like to talk about?
Moore: No. Like I say, Richland was a good place to live, though, and Hanford was a good place to work. I mean you did your job, and everybody else did theirs, and everything worked out just fine. There's a lot of things that I'm not too sure of what happened. But a lot of those places they did have things when they were doing experiments for the Navy and all kind of stuff out there. But I didn't get in on any of that stuff at all. It was one of those deals, you go in and you dress out, and most the time the monitors were the first ones and the last ones out. So that was the deal.
Bauman: When you did that, did you wear a badge?
Moore: Yeah, TLD, thermoluminescent dosimeter. So you always had a badge on. I understand that some of the guys used to take theirs and set them aside so they wouldn't get too much radiation, so they would be eligible for overtime. But I wasn't into that overtime route.
Bauman: And so how would you know? How did it register that you had too much exposure? How was that read?
Moore: Well they put it into a meter that would read what the thermo was. And the original ones were--what am I trying to say? Film, there was a film. And they would read the film of what, how much had been exposed to that. And that's how they got your dose rates there, how much you took.
Bauman: And did that change at some point to some other method?
Moore: Yeah, they used the film badges to start with. Then they flipped over and they found out they could use these, what did I call them, thermoluminescent detectors, which is you put at charge on them. And I guess the radiation would discharge the charge. So they'll know how much was used off of it. And then you had pencils that you read, that would tell you, that would read if you were supposed to take, let's say, 50 MR. Well you'd set that when you come out, you'd be there and there was always time keepers. There was a time keeper in that group that was taking how much your exposure was, and how long you had been there, and calculating it to when you should get yourself out.
Bauman: And they would let you know that?
Moore: And then they'd tap you on the shoulder and say, go. So then they’d go out. And then there would be somebody out there that would get them undressed and check them, clean them, and make sure they were all, no contamination on them and either send them to lunch or home.
Bauman: And that sort of procedure--
Moore: That procedure.
Bauman: --throughout the time--
Moore: Throughout the whole time I was there, yeah. Yeah.
Bauman: All right. Well thank you very much. I really appreciate your being willing to come in and talk to us. And very interesting--
Moore: Yeah, like to say, there's things out there that my mind just doesn't pick up on them right now. So probably middle of the night at one o'clock, I'll wake up and say, golly, I should have told him this. But no, that's the deal. But really, Hanford was a good place to work and to me, it's been real good to me. I got a good retirement off of it.
Bauman: All right. Well, thank you very much.
Moore: You bet.
Bauman: I really appreciate it.
Moore: You bet. And seeing now that he's got the shut off, I'll tell you about my week. I took my motor home and went to Ilwaco. You know where Ilwaco is on the Columbia River?
Man three: Yeah, okay.
Moore: On the way over there.
Robert Bauman: Say your name and spell your last name for us?
Sally Slate: Okay. Sally Slate. S-L-A-T-E.
Bauman: Okay. My name’s Robert Bauman and today’s date is August 5th of 2015. We’re conducting this interview at Sally Slate’s home in Richland, Washington. So let’s—if we could, start by having you give us some background information on when you came to the Tri-Cities, what brought you here?
Slate: Well, I was a new graduate from the University of Idaho in June of 1955. I guess I was attracted to this area because I was going with a young man that still had a couple of years of schooling, and I wanted to be kind of close to the University of Idaho for him. Unfortunately, we broke up. [LAUGHTER] But I came as a tech grad for GE. These were three-month assignments where we rotated different assignments. My first assignment was to open up the chemistry lab at PUREX building that was still under construction.
Bauman: And were you familiar with Hanford before you came here? Did you know much about the place?
Slate: Yes, I was, because we have an atomic energy site near southern Idaho, and my father was working there. So I was quite well-informed. In fact, I’d taken some classes in nuclear energy.
Bauman: And had you been to Richland or the Tri-Cities before?
Slate: No.
Bauman: And did you have a first impression when you arrived?
Slate: Well, everybody had told me that I was going to hate it, that it was desolate, sagebrush. I came here and I thought, gee, I’m at home! Snake River’s just around the corner. And [LAUGHTER] sagebrush, I’m well-acquainted with. Potato fields? Yes. And also, I felt very comfortable.
Bauman: So you said your first job was opening up the chem lab at PUREX.
Slate: Yeah.
Bauman: Can you describe what that was like? What that work was like?
Slate: It was doing a lot of dish-washing. Because everything had to be taken out of the boxes, we had to figure out where to put it in the lab, we had to get the equipment set up and tested. There were two or three of us doing that job.
Bauman: And can you maybe explain what PUREX was, for [INAUDIBLE]?
Slate: PUREX is the separations plant that was—the fuel went in on one end of the building and made a continuous run and we got the plutonium and uranium separated at the end. The REDOX Plant, you had to do it in batches. But this was a continuous process, so it was going to be a little more efficient. As I say, it had not been—they were still under construction at the time that I was out there. And unfortunately, when we got here, nobody had Q clearances, and they thought that we needed Q clearances. So they set us in the unclassified library until they finally figured out that, oh, our clearances are all sitting on somebody’s desk and he’s on vacation, and you don’t need a Q clearance anyways, so put them to work! [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: So that was your first job. Where did you go from there?
Slate: Oh. The next job was at the REDOX Plant. It was not really a happy experience. I wanted to be in the lab. As a woman chemist, I don’t think they appreciated women chemists in the lab at that time. It was trying to put together a compilation of all of the procedures that were being done, and trying to classify them so that if we got some kind of an assignment, you had to—okay, we need this analysis done. What procedures do we have available to do it? And it was well before the capabilities of our computer systems and everything now. I just didn’t appreciate that assignment. Then I went into the classified library as an abstractor. Where I had to read all of the classified—we were one of four—reading classified materials that came in. Everything from books to reports and anything generated that came into the library. We had to write a small paragraph about what the—without saying anything classified. We did bibliographies, computer searches. Except it wasn’t a computer search, it was a search of the index cards and made up answered questions that would come in. That was an interesting job. But it wasn’t as fun as being in the lab.
Bauman: And how long did you work there in the classified library?
Slate: Well, that was pretty much—well, that was a permanent position.
Bauman: Oh, okay.
Slate: I worked there until I had been married and was expecting a child. And then they required me to quit.
Bauman: Okay. So you talked about being a woman chemist and it didn’t seem like you were really welcome in the lab, or that they wanted—were there other women chemists around at the time?
Slate: There were a few. There was a couple of others. Actually—let’s see. I’m thinking as the abstractors, the other chemist who was an abstractor was a mathematician. And the other woman was a mathematician. They were drawing the abstractors from the scientific fields, because you could teach somebody to be an abstractor, but you couldn’t teach the scientific part of it as easily.
Bauman: Right. So was it a GE policy that when you were married and—
Slate: Yes.
Bauman: --you had to quit?
Slate: Yes. Five months, period.
Bauman: Oh, you had five months after you—
Slate: After you got pregnant.
Bauman: After you got pregnant, that you could work and then you had to quit.
Slate: That was routine. When I got to working in Idaho for Argonne National Lab, they said I could I work as long as I wanted. As long as I could do the job. Phillips Petroleum says, we think you’re pregnant. Prove it that you’re not. Otherwise, you’re gone. There’s definite bias there.
Bauman: Oh yeah.
Slate: They didn’t want us riding the bus.
Bauman: Okay.
Slate: And I was riding a bus 75 miles each way. Twice a day.
Bauman: Do you know when that policy changed?
Slate: I don’t. Because my next experience out here was in the ‘70s. And by that time, the policy had changed.
Bauman: Sometime in between there.
Slate: Sometime in between.
Bauman: Yeah, it changed. So let’s talk about transportation. You said you had to ride a bus out?
Slate: Yeah.
Bauman: Pretty much every day?
Slate: Here in Richland, we had the buses. They would pick up at specified places along the—in town. Or you could drive your car out to the big bus lot, and leave your car there and transfer to the bus that you were going to be going out into the Area on.
Bauman: Okay. And where was the lot at?
Slate: Oh, go out Stevens, on the left-hand side as you go out Stevens.
Bauman: Oh, okay.
Slate: They’ve transformed it into—part of it was an area where the police are doing training. After they had just redone the parking lot and spent millions doing the parking lot, then they decided, oh, we’ll close the buses down. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: I wanted to ask you about housing when you arrived in Richland. What sort of housing was available, or wasn’t available?
Slate: Well, when you first come, you check into the Desert Inn, which was the only hotel in town. Then you check with the Housing Authority, and the housing office assigns you housing according to your job, and your status—your marital status. And being single, I was assigned to one of the dormitories. And we still see the dormitories around. W-5 was just off of Lee—Lee and Knight. It was definitely a dormitory. It had a house mother. Doors were closed on the weekdays at 10:00 at night. The doors were locked. It was later than that for the weekends. But you had a little room, furnished. If you took the furniture out and put your own furniture in, you couldn’t get their furniture back if you changed your mind. It was cheap.
Bauman: Do you remember how much it cost?
Slate: I don’t. But something--$20 a month or less.
Bauman: And so how long did you stay in the dorm then?
Slate: I stayed in the dorm until—well, I went into a private apartment with a friend. And then we got married and went into a two-bedroom prefab down here.
Bauman: Oh, okay, sure.
Slate: In the south end of town. When those houses went up for sale, we could have bought that house for $1,875. [LAUGHTER] Yeah. We thought it was too small for us, because by then we had two small children. We bought a pre-cut. Three-bedroom pre-cut from a friend. They didn’t want the house, but if they had just moved into the house that they were going to buy, they would have had to remove all of the improvements that they’d put into the house, which included the wall-to-wall carpeting, drapes, electrical for a dryer, a fenced-in backyard. All of that would have had to have been removed. And they would have lost all of that investment. So they bought the house and sold it immediately to us at a slightly higher price to accommodate for their investments.
Bauman: How would you describe Richland in the ‘50s? I know it was a government town, still, when you—
Slate: It was government town, yeah. Everything. The schools were—GE ran it all for the government. Police department, schools—just about all of the—anything that had to do with the town.
Bauman: And did that change significantly when it sort of became its own city, then?
Slate: It was very gradual. They started selling the houses—we became a town in October of ’57? ’57. And the houses were being sold in ’58. Early ’58, we bought our house on Smith.
Bauman: I know one of the events from the community happenings or things was when President Kennedy came to visit in 1963. Were you here then?
Slate: ’63, we were not.
Bauman: Oh, had you—
Slate: We had left. Took a while to wander around to Idaho and Washington, but kept coming closer and closer, and finally said, we got to go home.
Bauman: You talked about having to get a—well, you thought you had to get your Q clearance, then didn’t have to get a Q clearance. What was security like at Hanford at the time? Would that impact your work—I mean you were working in classified libraries, so that part--
Slate: Yeah. You could get into—up to the 300 Area. But there was a barrier there. You couldn’t go through the barrier without a clearance. You had to have at least a Q clearance—or not a Q clearance, a Nil clearance is what they called it, was the beginning clearance. But then to get into the 200 Area, and to get into Two West, you had to have a Q clearance. That was just—you had a badge and it had your type of clearance on it. If you were working around the areas where there was a lot of radiation or potential radiation, then you’d wear pencils, and you might wear a ring. The ring would be checked weekly, and if it showed anything, then they would check your badge. Badges were changed out, I think, on a monthly basis. I never was in a situation where I accumulated anything. You had hand and shoe counters that you had to check into the building and check out of the building—using the hand and shoe counters to make sure you weren’t carrying anything there. Because those would be the two areas that would be most apt to pick up something.
Bauman: So where was the classified library located?
Slate: In the 300 Area. The building is still there. I don’t remember the building number. It was across from 319.
Bauman: And you mentioned—so you got married in—
Slate: In March of ’56.
Bauman: Okay, and did your husband also work at Hanford then?
Slate: Yeah.
Bauman: And what area did he work in?
Slate: He was at Three West Area. The REDOX area.
Bauman: Okay.
Slate: We happened to be riding the same bus together.
Bauman: Is that how you met?
Slate: Actually, we met at the Mart cafeteria. That building on Lee and Knight that has Sirs and Hers Barbershop and had a gun shop in there. But at that time it was a 24-hour cafeteria. There was a drugstore in part of it. And there was a jewelry store up front and a little lounge area, the Evergreen Lounge, in the back. We’d just—I’d just gotten off of my first day of swing shift.
Bauman: Oh.
Slate: And he had just gotten off work. We were in there having coffee. The girl I was with knew him, and knew the other fellow that he was with. But then I discovered that we rode the same bus. Or, rather, I made sure we rode the same bus. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: So how was Hanford as a place to work, then? I know you talked about not really being able to work as a chemist [INAUDIBLE]
Slate: Well, I don’t think it was any different than working anywhere else at that time. Because there were restrictions everywhere. My original plan when going to college—I wanted to be a veterinarian. And after one year of pre-vet being the only girl in the School of Agriculture, I was told there was no way in hell that a woman would be accepted into the School—
Bauman: Oh.
Slate: --of Veterinary Science. And that I needed to choose something else. So, I went into chemistry, which is another love that I had. I was one of two women—first two that had graduated in chemistry in five years from the University of Idaho. And now, you know what percentage of women are. Far more women than men. And the same veterinary school now.
[PHONE CHIMES]
Bauman: Sorry about that. Talking about Richland, I was going to ask you one other question about the town. In terms of entertainment or things to do for fun, what was there in the area in 1955, ’56?
Slate: Well, pretty much the same things that we have now. The Richland Players was a movie house at that time. The roller skating rink was there. We could ride horses—we could rent horses out on Van Giesen. Boating. Pretty much the same mix of things that we have now. At that time, we had the symphony, we had Richland Players, although they were having their plays in the schools at that time. But those were the things—and bowling.
Bauman: So when did you move away from Richland, and when did you come back then?
Slate: Oh. We left in ’58, ’59. We left in ’59—June of ’59. And we came back for good in ’71.
Bauman: Had the place changed a lot in that time?
Slate: Grown! Yes. Not so much Richland. Although it was beginning to grow. But the areas between Richland and Kennewick that used to be grapevines and all kinds of farmland where Columbia Center was getting started and it just—I didn’t know my way around.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Are there any things I haven’t asked you, or anything you’d like to talk about that you haven’t had a chance to talk about yet, in terms of your work at Hanford, or--?
Slate: At Hanford? Of the early years?
Bauman: Yeah!
Slate: I don’t know. I enjoyed it very much. It was very mentally stimulating. And even the recreational things that were here were—because we had the symphony, we had the Richland Players. And it’s good to see that they are growing. If we’d only get our performing arts center.
Bauman: I’m with you on that. [LAUGHTER]
Man three: We’re with you.
Slate: And they’re saying 20, 30 years, and I don’t have that many years left, I’m afraid.
Bauman: Well, I want to thank you very much for letting us come to your home and interview you, talk to you. I appreciate your sharing your experiences with us very much.
Slate: Well, it’s been kind of interesting, thinking back to those days.
Man three: I had a quick question, comment.
Slate: Yeah?
Man three: So when you were in the labs—
Slate: Yeah.
Man three: What would you do? What were you doing in, like the PUREX or the—what sort of thing would you do?
Slate: Oh. Well, the laboratory was an analytical lab. And they were divided into hot sections and cold sections. The hot section would receive the really radioactive materials that had to be handled in big glass-enclosed, with lead—a glass so wide. But I was never involved in that real high level. By the time I got things, it was down to the very low level radioactive materials that we could handle in a hood with ventilation. We wore just a lab coat. I’m trying to think if we even, in those days—I don’t think even at REDOX that I was involved with anything higher than just very low level materials. And we would separate out the plutonium or the uranium out of the fraction that we got, and would pipette it onto steel planchets. Little steel discs. And then the discs would go downstairs to the counting lab, and would be put into the counting lab and they would determine how many counts per minute were coming off of that. That would tell them the amount of radiation that there was, the amount of material that there was in that. We did everything in duplicates and triplicates, to make sure that we hadn’t made a mistake.
Bauman: Right.
Slate: Most everything was done triplicates.
Man three: So you didn’t work in the hot cells because of gender?
Slate: No, no. I didn’t work in the hot cells because I didn’t work in the—I was never assigned to it.
Man three: But that wasn’t a gender-based—
Slate: No.
Man three: I was trying to—
Slate: No, I don’t think it was gender-based at all.
Man three: The other question I had was—so, GE and stuff, if you were five months pregnant, then that was the time to separate.
Slate: Yep.
Man three: Did you have a job to come back to, or that was terminated?
Slate: [LAUGHTER] You had a job to come back to if there was a job available. That was part of the reasoning, they said, oh, that going into the classified laboratory was perfect for you, because there’ll always be a job available. Little did they know that computers were coming along, and computers were going to do all the abstracting and all the bibliography. You’d punch in a question and they’d come out with all the answers of here’s the materials that we have available on that subject. So computers did away with that job.
Bauman: Right. Had your old job been available, would you have had it, or would you have had to reapply?
Slate: I would have had to reapply.
Bauman: Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.
Slate: Yeah, it wasn’t an automatic thing.
Bauman: Right.
Slate: You were expected, as a young married mother, to stay home with your children. At least until they got into school. That wasn’t to say that there weren’t people who went back to work right away. But it was not the usual thing. Of course, I wanted to be able to stay home with the kids. By the time I had three, I had to go to work. [LAUGHTER] By that time, I started looking around and thinking, well, what can I do? I can go back to school and get a job as a teacher. So I got my teaching degree. And I taught school for five years until we decided we got to go home, we got to come back here to Richland. And that’s when I got back into the chemistry.
Bauman: All right, well, thank you again very much.
Man three: Thanks.
Bauman: I really appreciate your time and letting us come in here. [LAUGHTER]
Man one: Okay.
Northwest Public Television | Craig_Philip
Philip Craig: My name is Philip Craig. P-H-I-L-I-P. C-R-A-I-G.
Robert Bauman: Great. Thank you. And my name is Robert Bauman, and we are conducting this oral history interview on June 24th of 2015 on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. So, Mr. Craig, why don’t we have you start, maybe, by just telling us a little bit about your background. Where you came from, how you came to Hanford, and that sort of thing.
Craig: Well my how I came to Hanford started back in high school. I had a high school chemistry class. I liked what I saw. And I knew that the Hanford Project was down the road—I was living in Selah, Washington, and the Hanford Project was very interesting to me. And I even wrote a term paper on Hanford, because I really wanted to work here. So, I went on to Whitman College, graduated from high school in ’56—or ’52, I’m sorry. Graduated from college in ’56, and then went on to Washington State College, then, now Washington State University in Pullman, and did a year of graduate work in chemistry. And at the end of that, I came to Hanford for my very first job. And lo and behold, that was exactly 58 years ago today: June 24, 1957. And it was quite an experience, let me tell you. The first thing that struck me, of course I had to have credentials to get in the building. And in those days, we didn’t have badges like you have today that are on a cord around your neck. We had a little plastic folder with our ID in it, and you’d pull that out of your pocket and flash it open to the guard sitting at the entrance desk. And then you could go on into the building and find your office and take it from there. The most interesting thing, I think, about it all was it was a very formal setting. For years we wore suits, ties, long sleeved white shirts only—couldn’t have colored shirts—and the ladies wore dresses. Far more formal than today’s environment. Security, of course, was very paramount. I mean, we were in the years where the Soviets and the United States was competing. And so the Hanford site, being one of the two principal sites manufacturing plutonium in the United States, the other one being Savannah River, most of the stuff in terms of total production and that sort of thing was top secret. A lot of it was not—it was secret, but security was paramount. I remember in my little office cubby hole—it was a room, it wasn’t just a cubby hole, in abig room—we had a three-drawer file cabinet with a combination lock. And I could take a piece of paper out of that file, put it on my desk and work on it. But if I had to go to the bathroom, it went back in the combination file, locked it, go down the hall and come back and you had to unlock the combination and start all over again. And the very first thing they had me do is they handed me about a three-inch black three-ring binder with a red coversheet, marked secret. This was the PUREX operating manual. Now, PUREX stands for Plutonium Uranium Extraction, and it was the chemical process that is used to take irradiated uranium from the reactors, dissolve it in acid, treat it chemically, and come up with a plutonium nitrate solution. And I had to read this manual in about a week. [LAUGHTER] It was pretty daunting.
Bauman: Now where was your first office? Where on site?
Craig: It was on in the 703 Building, which is about where the Federal Building is today. The last part of the 703 structure—it was a herringbone structure. We had offices coming off a main corridor, and there was about six tiers of those. And the very last one is still standing, and the city offices are in there. But later on, the Federal Building took over.
Bauman: And what was your first job title?
Craig: Physical—let’s see. Physical Science Administrator, I think it was. The other thing about the environment is that you handwrote all your reports, and then gave them to a secretary who typed them. There was no computers. So, it was kind of a laborious process to do that. I needed to check out a government car, which I did in the motor pool, and drive out to the Area to PUREX, and see what was going on most every day, drive back, write the daily report, mark it all secret, send it up a line to my boss. But that government car, let me tell you—it was not air conditioned. So those days were pretty warm. But we got it done. About two months later, after getting into the PUREX part of it, the fellow who was a companion office mate had been handling the plutonium shipments. And he went off to Washington, D.C. for another job. So I got the job of accepting plutonium products on behalf of the Atomic Energy Commission and the US government. So it was a very formal process. The products were in two forms. After the plutonium nitrate left PUREX, it was sent over to what is known as the Z Plant. And in that plant, by a series of chemical operations, it was converted to a metal button about this big and it fit in a tuna fish can. It weighed something close to two kilograms. So that was the first product. The second product were manufactured, machined weapon components. And I won’t talk about the exact details of their size and shape at this point. But nonetheless, Hanford was in the business of making weapon components. So my job was to accept this product and make the shipment, every couple of weeks or so, to Rocky Flats. Rocky Flats was about 15 miles northwest of Denver, and it was the receiving site for the plutonium as buttons. They would take that metal and cast it into weapon component shapes and machine those and so on. And of course the other part was the shapes themselves, they’d go up in pieces themselves, and they would go into an inspection process and eventually assemble parts of the warhead.
Bauman: So when you say—you’re accepting them from the contractor, or--?
Craig: I was accepting these materials from the contractor. I mean, General Electric Company was the contractor, and their job on a cost-plus-fixed-fee contract basis was to run all these processes. And there’s hundreds of people involved in this. But at the end of the line, I had to make that transition from Hanford to the next step. So it was a couple of months into my first job, my buddy left for Washington, and here I am, learning how to actually accept these components. Now, you need to understand that plutonium was very radioactive. It emitted some gamma radiation, but not huge amounts. I mean, you could actually handle it. But it also emitted alpha radiation. And so it had to be contained in some kind of container, like a can. And then you could hold it in your hand. Interesting. It was warm. It was—the radioactive decay—was producing heat. So this can felt like hanging onto a 60 Watt lightbulb. Now, the other part of the business of plutonium is that if you got too much of it together in one spot, you had a criticality event. And of course, the bomb itself was designed to make a lot of it go critical at the same time, and that created an atomic explosion. But the point is that if you’re handling plutonium, it had to maintain a certain degree of separation at all times. In the chemical processing plants, they used different sized columns of chemical solutions and whatnot, depending on what was going on. And that was to maintain this critical geometry, so that you didn’t have any kind of criticality event. And after the plutonium was made into these buttons we called them, and canned in the tuna fish cans, they were stored in a vault. And the vault had pillars of metal rods, and little rings on that rod that you could put a can in. But it maintained the separation. So on shipping day, what we would do is we operators of the plant would go into the vault and take these cans and very carefully put—I don’t remember exactly how many—something about five or six cans in a little red wagon. Just a little kid’s wagon. But there was spacers in there so that these things didn’t get too close. And they’d bring it down the hallway to the room that exited to the building where it then could be handled further. And this assembly area, in this room were birdcages. Now a birdcage is a metal frame that’s about this big, this big, and this big. And in the middle was a metal pot with a lid. And the idea was that you took—one at a time—one of those cans from the red wagon, and you put it in the pot. And then I think the birdcage held like three buttons. Then there was a lid, and a bunch of bolts in places where you could put a wire with a lead seal on the end. And my job was to squeeze the seal closed with an imprint and record, of course, what the identity of those cans were, and the weight, and that sort of thing on paperwork. And at the end of that, I would sign this receipt for this material, and give it to the contractor. The weapon components varied a little bit differently, depending on the size and shape of the weapon component. Eventually, those were a much bigger birdcage, and it contained a couple of pieces of weapon material. The business of shipping, then—I owned that plutonium for maybe 15 minutes [LAUGHTER] before the government. Then I would transfer it to armed couriers, AEC couriers. They were not only armed with side arms; they were armed with machine guns. This was serious stuff. And they would load these birdcages into a truck, and eventually ship that off to Rocky Flats.
Bauman: How often did these shipments--?
Craig: Well, every couple of weeks or so.
Bauman: And so, they were shipped by truck then, to Rocky Flats?
Craig: That was a method used in later years. They didn’t really like shipping by truck that well. We actually had another system that involved—all I’m going to say is it involved rail. Because the exact details was highly classified.
Bauman: And did the amount that was shipped vary significantly, or--?
Craig: It varied, yes. Depends on how the production was going and what the requirements were on the other end.
Bauman: Oh, okay. Sure. And so how long did you do this, then? How long were you--?
Bauman: Wow.
Craig: So I shipped a lot of plutonium.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Yeah.
Craig: The other thing that was kind of interesting—I was explaining to you about the criticality. I hadn’t been on the job more than, I don’t know, a couple of months, shipping. I knew what to do, I knew the whole process, and I knew the sensitivity of it. One day one of these chemical operators who worked for the contractor had gone to the vault, and he came down the hall carrying about five tuna fish cans in his hand, and holding it with his arm like this. Well, that was absolutely high risk criticality event waiting to happen. And he walked in the room, and I said, ooooh. Just stop right where you are. And I instructed one of the other operators, take one of the cans from him and put it in the birdcage very carefully. And we got that shipment loaded and we were on our way. And then I went to the manager’s office—the plant manager’s office. Now, this fellow was like 60 years old. Kind of a salty southerner with—I mean, he was definitely in charge. And I’m 23 years old. Fresh out of college, wet behind the ears. And I gave him a real lecture about safety. And he didn’t like that. He called my boss. And my boss said Mr. Craig was right: you really almost had an accident today. That’s the end of that story. There was more to the whole weapons system. Since I was in the whole process, one of the small cogs—there was uranium coming from Oak Ridge. There was plutonium—some plutonium—and tritium coming from Savannah River. There was high explosives coming from Pantex. And then Hanford plutonium. This all had to be scheduled into what was known as the US master nuclear delivery schedule. It was the weapons document for all the weapons made in the country. It was a top secret document, and representatives from each of these sites got together, usually in Albuquerque, New Mexico, or at the Rocky Flats Plant. And we handwrote this schedule. There was no computers. There was a spreadsheet format, yes. But we didn’t have computers to do all that. Everything had to be balanced. This whole process had to bring all these materials together for processing at Rocky Flats. And so, about once a year we got together to do the master nukes schedule. I found I was pretty fortunate to be a part of that. I was pretty young. But it was a challenge. I had a lot of help, of course. But I was very impressed. One of the things that kind of scared me though was—and let me check on the date. October 22 to 24, 1962. That was the Cuban Missile Crisis. We were in Denver and Rocky Flats to work on these schedules. Now, that was ground zero for the Russians. If they were going to attack the United States, that probably would have been one of their targets. And it was kind of scary working there for those two days. I was very thankful that President Kennedy convinced Khrushchev to back off and no ill things happened.
Bauman: Were you here when President Kennedy came to Hanford in ’63?
Craig: Yes, yes.
Bauman: Do you remember that?
Craig: Oh, I remember that. We got to drive out and see him out at the reactor site. It was quite an experience. I think that was one of the only Presidents I’ve ever seen in person. And it wasn’t long after that, you know, a couple months or less, that he was assassinated in Texas.
Bauman: Do you remember much about that day?
Craig: It was hot! [LAUGHTER] It was still warm when he was here visiting. But it was a big event. There was thousands of people out there in the desert. But it was very thrilling experience to see the President come.
Bauman: Sure. So, you said you were working on the shipment from ’57 to ’72. So did that process change much over those years, other than shifting from—
Craig: Well, yes. In about ’66, we quit making weapon components at Hanford. And the process moved to Rocky Flats entirely.
Bauman: So that part changed.
Craig: Yeah. That part changed. But the plutonium buttons didn’t.
Bauman: And so then in ’72 then, how did your job change? What did you start doing at that point?
Craig: Well, the other significant activity that I was involved with was in 1968. The site was in a state where we had 149 single-shell waste tanks and 28 double-shell waste tanks. Actually, that’s not quite right. There were four short of that on the double-shell. And these were boiling waste tanks. The others were not boiling waste. But it was all liquid, and we were concerned about the integrity of the tanks and the lifetime of the tanks. And so at that time, the Atlantic-Richfield-Hanford Company, ARCO, was the contractor. And two of their engineers, Sam Beard and Bob McCullough and I co-authored a document that was called “The Hanford Waste Management Briefing.” And the purpose of this was to explain the Hanford situation to our headquarters—our AEC headquarters staff, and Congressional staffers who were then going to be funding what is now known as the Tank Farm projects. And this document was a briefing document, and the key—one of the key charts that we were particularly proud of is to try to show people how complex the business of the Hanford waste system was. And this chart shows what happens to a ton of uranium that’s been irradiated and then processed at PUREX, and the wastes that come out of that whole process. And some of it’s boiling waste, because of high levels of radioactivity that are in that particular section of waste, and some was non-boiling. For example, you’re dealing with—for that ton of waste—680 gallons of non-boiling waste and 220 gallons of boiling waste. And in the non-boiling tank, you have 900 pounds of salts, chemical nitrate—nitrates and so on, and about 350 curies of radioactivity. But in the boiling side, there’s 230 pounds of salt, but 300,000 curies of activity. That’s why they’re boiling. And then there was a low-level stream that had like 55,000 gallons of waste that went to a crib—a crib is like a septic tank—tile field—and the swamp, which is just an open pond. There was another 560,000 gallons went there, but their radioactivity was less than a tenth of a curie. I mean, it was just negligible. On the solid side, there was about ten cubic feet of solid waste. There was about 10 million cubic feet—I’m sorry—of gases that came out. And here’s the number that it was radio—a surprise to everyone that it was published. It was secret then, but it’s been declassified since. Out of that ton of fuel came 530 grams of plutonium and four grams of neptunium. So the chemical process that started with a ton of material and ended up with just a very small amount. So it’s kind of like finding a needle in a haystack.
Bauman: Right.
Craig: Because these wastes were boiling, we’d started building—had started building double-shell tanks. A double-shell tank is a steel tank within a steel tank within a concrete barrier. And this diagram in that briefing document showed what a double-shell tank was all about. These were million-gallon tanks. And in those days, it was about a dollar, maybe a dollar and a half a gallon to build those tanks. A million-million half dollars for one of these big tanks. Far, far, less than what they would cost today.
Bauman: Yeah.
Craig: At any rate, we made this presentation to the staffers and the ultimate activity was to remove as much as water as we could from the single-shell tanks so that we ended up with a salt cake that was not going anywhere. We isolated cesium-137 and strontium-90 by another chemical process, carried out in B Plant, to bring those short-lived emitters of radiation to a point where we could encapsulate those in steel cylinders. That was done and they’re stored. I think they’re still stored that way, but I’m not entirely sure. I kind of lost track of what’s happened since. We also built—were recommending that they build four more double-shelled tanks and that’s why the number finally grew to 28 double-shell tanks. And then, of course, it ultimately led to the pretreatment plant that’s in the process out here now, and the Waste Vitrification Plant.
Bauman: You mentioned one of the reasons for doing the report was there were concerns about the integrity of the single-shell tanks. Were some of them leaking at that point, or just concerns that they might leak?
Craig: I think at that point there were some that had displayed a little bit of leakage, yes. There’s other documents that showed some leakage, but, again it wasn’t into the concrete overpack, if you will. There was some, of course, got into the soil column, but it was not a series breach, and it wasn’t any radioactivity that got down into the groundwater. But we were afraid that it would. I mean, 1968, these tanks have been—the initial ones—had been built in 1944! ’45, ’46. So there was some that were approaching the end of life, and those tanks are still there today. And that’s why they’re so concerned about trying to remove some of the waste from these tanks and process it.
Bauman: So, who initiated—was this ARCO or AEC that sort of initiated the study that you helped write?
Craig: Oh, I think it was—collectively, the Hanford folks at engineering—folks on both sides of the contractor and the government were saying, we got to do something about this. Anyway, I think that’s about all I want to say about the creation of that document. I thought it would be interesting for you to look into if that ever showed up in the REACH literature as the kickoff document to get this thing going.
Bauman: Right, right. Yeah. And did you continue to be involved after this report in some of the tank—waste management end of things?
Bauman: Right. So, you were involved with that in—
Craig: I was involved in—
Bauman: About ’85?
Bauman: Right.
Craig: Yes. And then I left the—at that point, this will be—okay, you can go back on. At that point in 1985, I left the government, went private, went to work for a packaging—an engineering and design company that designed high-level waste shipping containers for use on transportation. They started off—their first big project was the Three Mile Island cask, to move that waste. And then from that, I marketed to the government a high-level waste—any kind of high-level waste that could be put into a cask and removed. And then the TRUPACT-II cask for use in transferring transuranic waste, or primarily plutonium waste, from the government sites to the waste isolation pilot plant in Carlsbad, New Mexico. And from there, I got involved on a couple of other organizations. Eventually, in 1991, I went to work for Lockheed. In 1996, Lockheed, along with—well, Fluor Daniel was the primary contractor, but we were on the Fluor Daniel team, and Lockheed was to manage the Tank Farms. So we came full circle, and I helped Lockheed win that contract.
Bauman: Right, you did come full circle.
Craig: So then, Lockheed moved me from—I was then living in Federal Way, and Lockheed rewarded me by moving me back to Hanford and letting me work on the Hanford site in ’96. And I did that until December of 2000. And there I was involved in the new contracting method. Instead of cost-plus-fixed-fee contracting, it was cost-plus-incentive-fee. And what we would do was we would create a document for a scope of work, a performance agreement. And the contractor would say, here, DoE, this is what we’re going to do for you, and here’s how long it’s going to take. And DoE said, okay, if you do that, we’ll pay you this fee, and if you don’t get it done on time, we’re going to cut your fee. And if you don’t do it well, we’re going to cut your fee. And my job was to, at the end of the work performance, was to write up the actual work done in a document to present to DoE that says, okay, pay us the fee. We were very successful in getting our award fee. And then I gave it all up in December of 2000, after 43 years.
Bauman: I wonder if I can go back—and this is really interesting stuff, fascinating career. I wanted to ask you just about the community, when you arrived here in 1957, what was Richland like at the time? Could you talk about that a little bit? And did you live in Richland, or--?
Craig: Oh, yes. Yes. We were allowed to rent from the government a B house—half of a B house on Haupt. This was June 1957. And by then—a couple of months—the government started selling off the town to private citizens. And we were in the first block to be sold. The senior owners in the other end of the B house bought the B house. And at that time, we moved to the other side of town, into a ranch house, because that had been sold to its owner. This is kind of an interesting, because the ranch house that the owner—I mean the resident who was able to buy it bought for like $7,700. And then when we bought the ranch house, I think we paid like $9,500. And of course, those ranch houses today sell for over 100. The town was very—initially of course, it was very caste-oriented. I mean, if you were a contractor, management, you got to live on the river. If you were a lowly government GS-7, you got to live in a B house. And there was a certain level of, you know, if you weren’t in this class, you weren’t part of it, you know. And I think that’s changed dramatically over the years. It doesn’t make any difference who you work for and how much money you make and all that stuff. People have changed for the better.
Bauman: Anything else about the community that stood out to you at the time?
Craig: Well, the first thing that Richland did was they had to celebrate their founding as Richland. They set off a mock atomic bomb, and it was a bunch of fanfare out in the park, and made a poof of smoke that was to represent a mushroom cloud.
Bauman: So, was this at Howard Amon Park?
Craig: Yeah. It was.
Bauman: Anything else that—memories that stand out, either about in community of Richland, or your work—any stories or memories that really stand out to you that you’d like to share?
Craig: I feel confident that this waste document that shows particularly how much plutonium was made, that was a very revolutionary thing. I mean, the idea how much of material you got out of a ton of uranium was—
Bauman: Right.
Craig: Very classified. And to see that declassified and whatnot. It’s—
Bauman: [LAUGHTER]
Craig: Kind of mind-blowing. But there’s the document. And it’s legitimate to talk about.
Bauman: Right.
Craig: Not sure I want it on the local news tonight, but—[LAUGHTER]
Bauman: So I don’t know if you want to talk to us about the McCluskey incident and your involvement in that?
Craig: Well, at the time, I was responsible for the Z Plant operations. And so, one morning, early, about 4:30 in the morning, I get a call from the plant that there had been an accident out of the plant, and I needed to get out there. And so I threw some clothes on and got a government car and went out to the site. What had happened was the plant had been operating on the recovery of americium-241 as part of the reclamation activities. And it was a chemical process. Inside this chemical process were criticalities tanks, small tanks like this, long, inside of a glovebox. Earlier in that summer, there had been a labor dispute, and the plant was on strike. And so the process had been shut down. Well, what was going on was americium was loaded onto the ion exchange medium inside this long column. When the dispute was settled and we had several days of reviews, conducting interviews with the contractor people, are you ready to restart? Have you checked this? Have you checked this? Have you checked this? And finally they were authorized to start. Well, what happened is that when they poured strong nitric acid on that ion exchange column to take, you lose off the americium. The americium had decayed the resin beads of the ion exchange medium ‘til it was kind of an organic gunk. And that acid reacted with it, and that violent chemical reaction blew open that column. It breached the glovebox, and it sprayed chemicals and americium all over Mr. McCluskey. And he was taken to an initial decontamination spot onsite, and then downtown. But my job, when I got there, was to fend off the media. What had happened—as soon as this became knowledge, and the media got hold of it, here they come in helicopters, landing inside the secure area of 200 West. The guards were going nuts. I mean, here’s these people that are not supposed to be there! Eventually, they didn’t do anything but try to manage it and bring them over towards the building, the end of the building, where behind the building walls was this processing cell where everything had taken place. And they were standing there, I was standing there outside talking to the media, trying to explain what happened. And I had an alpha copy machine. I was standing there, showing them that there was no contamination on my feet, there was no contamination around. They were panning everywhere with their cameras, and they found a sodium hydroxide feed tank that had just a little bit of salt cake around the valve on the outside. Non-radioactive, nothing—I mean it was a nothing tank. And they filmed that like it was the biggest thing since sliced bread. And I remember I went through all this and—to find out that it made the national news. But I didn’t get to see it, because I was out there. [LAUGHTER] But it became a non-event. It was not a disaster, there was containment, there was—all the safety things worked as well as they should. The public was never in any harm. But that was a—
Bauman: [LAUGHTER] So, what happened, then, with the room, or whatever, where the incident took place?
Craig: Oh, they sealed that room off right away. And then it remained sealed up until very recently, when they went in and took it apart. And processed it for disposal.
Bauman: Did you know Mr. McCluskey at all?
Craig: No.
Craig: No. He was a chemical operator. I didn’t know who he was, hadn’t met him. But it was one of those things that—
Bauman: Right.
Craig: --Happened.
Bauman: Well, thanks, again for sharing that story. Glad we remembered to do that.
Craig: What was funny about it—I was trying to stand up. I used to be able to do this. I could stand there and hold my foot up and balance. And then I realized I couldn’t do that.
Bauman: Oh, watch the microphone there on your—
Craig: Oh, yeah.
Northwest Public Television | Colley_Robert
Robert Bauman: Okay, great. Let's start by just having you say your name and spell it for us.
Robert Colley: Okay. Robert Gibson Colley. It's—spell--
Bauman: The last name.
Colley: C-O-L-L-E-Y.
Bauman: Okay. Great. Thank you. And my name's Bob Bauman. And today's date--
Colley: Bauman?
Bauman: Bauman.
Colley: Oh, okay, Bob Bauman.
Bauman: And today's date is November 20th, 2013, and we're recording this interview on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. So let's start maybe by having you tell us when you came to Hanford, what brought you here.
Colley: Yeah. I was at Spokane Air Base, and the general came in and he said we're going to have to reduce the Korean Air Force pilots, but we'd like to keep you in Reserve, Ready Reserve, and you'll fly every other weekend for the next 20 years. And we'll guarantee you a job somewhere.
Bauman: Okay.
Colley: And so that was on Sunday, and on Monday morning I came to work here in 1954. And it was about a month before I came to work. And I came to work as—nuclear physics—radiation monitor.
Bauman: Okay. And so how long had you been in the service prior to 1954?
Colley: I came off active duty on Sunday, and came to work here Monday.
Bauman: When did you start in the service?
Colley: Oh, in—when did I start? In 1942.
Bauman: Okay, yeah, oh, in '42, okay.
Colley: Yeah, in 1942. And I had three years of cadet ROTC at Walla Walla.
Bauman: Oh, okay. All right. And so then you came to Hanford in 1954 in nuclear health physics, you said?
Colley: I—
Bauman: Nuclear health physics? Is that where you worked?
Colley: I worked for General Electric.
Bauman: For General Electric.
Colley: Uh-huh.
Bauman: And so could you—what sort of work did you do?
Colley: Nuclear health physics. And after I came here, I went and got my tech degree from inside while I worked there.
Bauman: And what was the area like when you came here in 1954?
Colley: Well it was riding buses to school, and they gave us homes. And we brought our families here. And went to work by bus. Buses picked us up right in front of our house here in Hanford and took us to work and brought us back.
Bauman: And where was your house?
Colley: 1940 Benham. 1940, 41 there. It was a duplex.
Bauman: A duplex.
Colley: An eight-house duplex.
Bauman: Okay.
Colley: And my children started school here that year. A boy and a girl. And they started at Lewis and Clark School just up the street. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: And so working in nuclear health physics, what sorts of tasks did you do? What sort of things did you do at your job?
Colley: Anyplace that anybody worked, we had to be there. And we had to know that the area was clear, the work area was clear, what dose rate they were getting, and set a dose rate for them to work there for a certain length of time.
Bauman: So you were all over the site, then.
Colley: Yeah. I was—in those days, everybody worked all over the site, wherever you were needed. But I actually went into U Plant my first day out on the project, and that was the beginning of U Plant, T Plant, REDOX. And then I went to Dash 5, and then I went to the PUREX start-up again. I was there for two years. Then went back to Dash 5.
Bauman: Okay. So essentially you were setting rates for workers?
Colley: Yes. Uh-huh. We went in and we checked the air. And checked the clothing requirement that these people would wear, and what their mask levels would be. How much--we'd find out exactly how much they were going to take and how much they were allowed to take for any one day. And generally in those days, unless there was something very special where you took a double, why, you normally took 15. And that was it. If it was a very special job where it was dangerous to pull somebody out in the middle of a job because of the radiation level. Sometimes they would take a double. Then they'd go into overtime.
Bauman: So did you have to wear any special clothing or carry special--
Colley: Everything was special. From the time we walked in and changed clothes, we never our clothing again until we took our shower and went home. We wore special underclothes, special--if we lost our clothes due to some spill or something, we could strip down to our underclothes and get out and still be clear. If we went past that, why, then we had a body contamination. And we would normally clean up whoever got contaminated. And depending whether they were working with uranium, plutonium, americium or whatever.
Bauman: Did it happen very often where--were there very many times when a worker was contaminated and you had to clean them up?
Colley: Everyday somewhere. And they had to be cleaned up and nasal smears given before they were left to go home. We had to have them perfectly clean, or we had to keep them and give them more tests.
Bauman: So how would you go about cleaning someone up who had been contaminated?
Colley: Well, if it was skin contamination, why, we could take off a layer of skin. We'd put on--I forget what the name of it was, but we’d put it on and it would take a layer of it off. Until it's a layer perfectly clean. And if they were clean, then they could go home. If they weren't, why, we had to keep them over.
Bauman: And if they had to--if you had to keep them over, what happened? You would run tests, did you say?
Colley: No, we'd just have to keep cleaning on them.
Bauman: Okay.
Colley: I mean, working with this type of thing, there's some spill, something or other, something contaminated or something broke loose or something didn't go right. And everything had to be cleaned right down to no contamination detectable.
Bauman: Mm-hm. And so when someone was contaminated and you were involved in cleaning them up, was it just you? Or was there more than one person?
Colley: Oh, no, no. Depending on whether he was a junior or a senior, and after he got to be senior, why you were always the one to clean somebody up. And the juniors would watch. And so they would be prepared sometime, too, in the future. You went through a six-month training period and preparation so that you become a monitor.
Bauman: And how long did you work then in nuclear health physics? How long were you at Hanford?
Colley: 34 years. Approximately 34 years—just like a little bit--. I went there in--I didn't work there until in January of '55. And I retired in August of '86. I think I figured out about 34, almost 34 years.
Bauman: And that whole time you were in health physics?
Colley: Yep. The only time I was gone was when I was on active duty with the Air Force, once a year.
Bauman: Right.
Colley: Never lost any time. We had a lot of different things happen, but every 15 months, when we had accidents of some sort, spills or contamination levels above level, something like that was always there. Even with fires and explosions and stuff like that. And we--I guess the worst right off the bat was when we had—I can’t think—a place where they mixed in Dash 5. But they had a spill, and had a double. And so they got everybody out in about 10 or 15 minutes. I mean, just real quick. Just walked away. Just left things like they were. And then three of us went back in. We knew each floor exactly. We knew where every crevice was, or where every box or anything was where something might be that might be of value. Most of them might walk away from it and not know it's there. So we had to go back and go through--because we knew all these buildings. We did work down there day after day for years. And we knew where everything was, even if it was just even a change of clothes. We checked everything. And we finally--we were allowed an hour. We were in 1,000 R dose rate. And we were allowed an hour. And we took 100 R. And we were only supposed to take a little bit each day. But it was classified at that time. And no one ever knew how much--except we knew, and the health physics people knew. And we took, in less than an hour, we took 100 R—body. And that's many years of working out there. You normally took three R a year—a whole year.
Bauman: Wow.
Colley: And we took 100 R in less than an hour. But no one was left in the building, and we were very fortunate. Everything that would run was still running. And then they would come in to help shut it down and get things cleaned up again. But they brought us down in patrol cars from the Badge House, and we just had so much time once we got out of the patrol car. And we would be back there at that place. And if we weren't there, they would come to look for us. But there was three of us, and the other two boys are all gone. I was the oldest out of the bunch, but they died young. We never knew for sure whether we would--I never felt anything from 100 R. I didn't feel headache-y or sick or anything. And they allowed me to come back to work the next day.
Bauman: Wow.
Colley: But that was all classified at that time. And nobody--they got it okayed from someplace. But I never had any ill effects from it. I took my maximums every year in all those years, and never had any ill effects that I knew of.
Bauman: Do you know roughly what time period this incident was?
Colley: What?
Bauman: Roughly what year that would have been that that happened, that incident?
Colley: You know, I used to remember exactly right down to the hour. [COUGH] But that seemed like it was '56? '55, '56? Gosh, they've got all the records there, but I--it was fairly soon--no, it wasn’t ‘58. It had to be '60. Because I'd been here a long time then. Got everything back up and going again. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: And you said you didn't experience any ill--
Colley: Pardon?
Bauman: You said you did not experience any ill effects. Did the other two men who were there with you, did they experience any ill effects from that?
Colley: I don't hear very good.
Bauman: I'm sorry. You said you didn't feel sick after that at all. Did the other two men who were in with you, did they get sick at all from that?
Colley: No, not to my knowledge. Never had any ill effects. I've always had pretty good luck. I went through the Air Force Cadets, Army Air Force Cadets, back at the [INAUDIBLE], and pretty good shape and stayed in good shape. And we would fly 50, 60 hours at a time towards the end there. And no ill effects from that, either. Except you get tired and you switch off with crews, you know. And we'd go from here to California or over to China or someplace. Always someplace on the earth.
Bauman: Yeah. Were there any other sort of major incidents that you remember from the time--
Colley: Well we had A 80--about 10 years later, and I was right in the middle, turning people out. The people that were injured during the blast were taken to Kadlec in special rooms. And they were kept there for all--this was when--I'm thinking to think of his name. I can see him, but I can't--he was the one that got hurt the worst. And he was down here, down at Kadlec, for years.
Bauman: Oh, was that McCluskey?
Colley: McCartney, yeah, McCartney. Yeah.
Bauman: I see.
Colley: Yeah. He was just quite a guy. And he was an operator out there. And got him out, and we got him downtown and took the—[LAUGHTER] I can't think of all these names. The thing that we took him downtown in.
Bauman: Ambulance?
Colley: Ambulance. And took it back, checked out it. It was wildly contaminated. And went and buried it. [LAUGHTER] That was what happened to it! But I worked 91 doubles to get that straightened out. We didn't have enough people to keep the place going, and so we'd ask for overtime. And I put in the most doubles that anybody has ever heard of. 91 doubles, straight days. 91 doubles. 16 hours a day. But I'd been used to that in the military, or more. But not that many days at a time. And we finally got back to normal hours. And but this wasn’t ever—but they stopped going more than two and a half days at a time overtime after they got it straight, before they could get back to work.
Bauman: So during those 91 doubles, was it still working on cleaning up after the incident--
Colley: Yeah, mm-hm.
Bauman: With--
Colley: Yeah.
Bauman: Okay.
Colley: Yeah. And they got the point for—they didn't ask for it, they just accepted I'll be there and I was. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: You mentioned that the ambulance, you'd buried the ambulance. Do you knew where it was buried?
Colley: Out there in Two West.
Bauman: In Two West.
Colley: Yeah. But I believe those were about ten years apart. The Dash 5 and the--or the--gosh, I can't remember that name, but the poor fellow that blew up there.
Bauman: McCluskey.
Colley: No.
Bauman: No? Oh, the first one. I don't know.
Colley: The first one. I can’t—it gets away from you when you get up in your 90s. If you don't use them, why, you forget them.
Bauman: Any other incidents that stand out in your--
Colley: Well we had lots of little ones, but they, we could take care of them. They were generally out there. Once in a while, we'd bring somebody down for a cleanup down to the hospital here. But somebody was with him at all times. And never a chance of spreading anything. Of course then homes were surveyed here every so often by the monitoring people, just to check. Just to spot check here and there. Rounds for people that lived here. And once in a while, you'd get something, maybe a bathroom or something room, somebody had come from the project home, well then that started a whole different series of things. Your buses had to be re-checked. Everything had to be re-checked. Never left anything for chance, because it doesn't go away. But once in a while, you'd find a little bit in home. But nothing really drastic, and nobody was ever fired for bringing home the—just something that was overlooked at the time. They bypassed a monitor some way or another. They got--or they touched something and then went into a clean area, and they thought they were still clean and they went home with it. But no, there was always right orders.
Bauman: So you said you worked there for almost 34 years. Did the equipment change over time, the equipment that you used?
Colley: Our detection equipment didn't change. We had the Geiger counters and we had alpha—I'm trying to think of the sampling equipment that we used and the detection equipment, and the air sample stuff, and that. And no, in that length of time, nothing had changed yet. But they changed fairly soon after that, I understand. And got a little more sensitive equipment. And people had more schooling after--things that were brought—when you can find instruments going that can detect this much easier. That's what they brought in later. Real handy. Real nice. But other than that, why, Geiger counters and Junos, and that was the things that they had when they started, and that's the things that we had.
Bauman: And how about when you had to clean someone up, did that sort of process stay pretty much the same?
Colley: Yeah. First you use the normal equipment. If anything higher level, a Juno or alpha, so we'd detect it. And then if it was larger than that, why, they were left out there and cleaned up out there. It wasn't until we got down to the very minor things that we couldn't--it was on skin or in skin, on clothing. But we had just—in real clean rooms. So if there was any on them, we could get it real quick. And I don't recall anyone knowingly took any in home.
Bauman: Right.
Colley: Everybody was pretty respectful of that.
Bauman: So did you have to wear a certain kind of gloves? Do you have to wear a mask or something?
Colley: Yeah. Depending on whether it was fresh air or whether it was a salt mask, depending on what kind of work we were on, they were sealed when we were working in the canyons, in the cells, were sealed down tight. And then we had somebody check us as we came out. And so we never carried anything out. We took some time to--sometimes it took longer to get out than it did to do the job. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: So obviously there are a lot of precautions that were taken, a lot of safety measures. Did you feel then—obviously you--
Colley: I don't remember anybody knowingly took any shortcuts--
Bauman: Right.
Colley: --In order to get a job done.
Bauman: Mm-hm.
Colley: Everything was always in a hurry. Everything was on a schedule. Well, sometimes when you're working with contamination and radiation, it just don't work on schedule. And we'd have to hold. They had people on overtime one way or another, but we couldn't let them go. We'd have to call the job off, till they cleaned it up. And when they got them cleaned back where they could handle it, then turn 'em loose. But we were always with them. I mean, by turn 'em loose, you mean they could go to work, you know.
Bauman: Right.
Colley: Whether it was mechanical or something else, or flow of contaminated material. They had a lot of high-level stuff there. Some of that stuff could--if you get it on you, if you didn't get it off real fast, you could get hurt. There were several times that thought the people were going to get hurt, but it turned out that they came out okay. But they did have it on them, but if they hadn’t have gotten it off of them, why, they would've been in trouble.
Bauman: Mm-hm.
Colley: But it seemed like—if you worked there, stay clean. Stay clean. And never took any shortcuts. A shortcut could cost you your life. I don't remember anybody ever dying from it or anything like that.
Bauman: Given the sort of materials that were there and the job you had, did you feel that Hanford was a safe place to work?
Colley: How's that?
Bauman: Did you feel that Hanford was a safe place to work? Was there--
Colley: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah, sure was. And everybody was built around doing the job, getting the job done. But I don't recall any job that was carried on unsafely. It was caught--right in the middle of some pretty--something semi-nuclear, or whatever, we stopped and took care of it there, and then started back again. But that was the way of life. That was the way you did it. And no one ever considered taking shortcuts.
Bauman: Right. What was the most challenging part of your work at Hanford, and maybe what was the most rewarding part?
Colley: Safety. Keeping people safe and taking care of their internal, external safety. And the contamination, always watching for contamination internally or externally. When you went home at night, you felt okay. But some people took a tremendous amount of radiation. But it was radiation, it wasn't contamination. So you didn't worry about going home or exposing your family to anything.
Bauman: So as you look back over the over 30 years that you worked at Hanford, how was Hanford as a place to work?
Colley: Good. Yeah. Everything was taken care of. They got you to work. They made it so that you didn't worry about coming to work. And that was good, because a lot of people were, you know, had some pretty high--there were some lethal dose rates out there if you had to get around them, and you took very, very small amounts of it. And so you didn't really worry about--I mean the only time was when we had some criticality and some of us would volunteer. But we would volunteer because we were older. We weren't having families. We--well, I don't know. We would take the necessary precautions. We'd back off if something didn't seem right and look at it again from another angle. So if someone took an overdose, it'd be because of too many days of overtime. And they finally got that down to where if you had taken so much dose rate for a number of hours, why, you couldn't take anymore. And it was always within the safe limits. I don't remember anybody getting an overdose of radiation. Except for us that had to in order to find out if our buildings were clear. And there was nobody left in them. To search the buildings, we had to take an over amount. And it was supposed—like in our big building, Dash 5, there were only three of us volunteered. But there's three floors, and we knew before we went in about how much time it would take to go to every room on every floor. So that we wouldn't leave--if anybody fainted, had a heart attack or something like that in getting out would still be there, because nobody's back in that building for two or three days. You were just clicking and clacking away. [LAUGHTER] You just--kind of different sounds, you know, make you feel a little anxious because all the alarms were going, and which alarms are the ones that you're watching for that might be external. And dose rates or contamination or type of things like that. Most of the contamination bells were all around [INAUDIBLE] were going off. And we had to find where that spread was, how bad was it, and what it was going to take to clean it up. And it took quite a while. But they'd give people their maximums and send them home. That's where you got all cleaned up and back to work again.
Bauman: So did you have to have--you talked about safety. Did you have like regular safety training, did they have that at Hanford? Did you have to--
Colley: Yes. Yeah. Everything was safety. And you had special meetings. If you were going to do a special job, say down in one of the cells or something like that, you had training on it, a dry run training in another cell that was clean. So you knew exactly what you were going to handle, how long you were going to handle it, how many people it was going to take to handle that, and which sets of dose rates. They would only take maybe an overtime of—of one overtime--not overtime, but taking a double in exposure. And then if it took 10 people to do that, you just lined up 10 people and dressed them and got them ready, and you got the others out. And so nobody took any extra over what they were supposed to take. And then their badges were red. And they knew right then that's where they were going to--whether they were okay or not, if they were concerned about it. And once in a while, you'd open up something that, in trying to get that job done, you'd open up something else. And then, of course, we were right there, and our instruments were—and we're dressed, too, so our instruments would tell us right there we were taking it from that, right here. And then we could do—tell them they could work two inches, five inches, a foot, two foot, or arm’s length, and then what the dose rate would be. So tried to keep everybody as healthy, as good we could. And it went off pretty good. Everybody felt comfortable with it, anyway. Maybe sometimes--everybody's human. Sometimes they make little boo-boos. But if you caught them, you never let them back in again. You know, some people will just for some reason or another, they just want to get into trouble. And when you find out that person, you get him out then. You never let him go back in. He's a hazard. So he'd be put on a cold job somewhere here on the project, or he's fired. But never played around with him. I don't remember people by name as to any particular one, but--
Bauman: I want to go back. You mentioned earlier that when you first came here and moved into a house, you took a bus to work and it would pick you up in front of your house. How long did you do that? How long did you take the bus to work?
Colley: You know, you think you—that was a big thing for people to drive. And some people didn't even have cars. They'd pick you up. And you got a bus stop real close to your house. They go all through Richland here. And they'd pick you up, they'd bring you back and drop you off back at your house. But it was--gosh, I never did drive to work. I always took a bus.
Bauman: Took the bus.
Colley: But during that--towards the end of that, some people were driving. And depending on where they worked and what job they did and if they had to move around with it. And they could drive to the Project parking lot. And then they had to go over to--well, just like the rest of us worked. No, it was so gradual, that never—and those dates were all so familiar at the time, boy! We were going to be able to drive, and they were going to go take the buses clear off. And that would have been a big day. And I'm trying to think. Just, I can't remember. But they sold the houses in '58. So I know it was--we'll say it was before then.
Bauman: And so did you buy a house then after '58?
Colley: Uh-huh. Yeah. I was allowed one house, an A house. And I'd already been in it for 10, 15 years. I lived in that house 40 years. Or either had it for 40 years. I bought it, and then I kept it a long time. We paid $7,200 for an A house. All told, before I sold it, I built a new house out in Keene Village. And we got $109,000 for it. But needed fixing up a little bit here and there, you know. But really a good house. Very easy to heat and easy to--they were comfortable, nice rooms. And they're all--most all of them are still standing! [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: And do you remember anything else about the community of Richland at the time in the 1950s? Were there any special community events or things like that that you remember?
Colley: Well my spare time was with military. So I didn't have much spare time. Towards the end, I flew to China for 12 years. Every other week, never missed a week. And worked here full-time. But I was flying the old C-141s. That was quite a drop from B-52s and 36s. [LAUGHTER] But it was a mix, good mix. But everything, regardless of where you went, if you--like in Japan, had family there. I had to have somebody go with me because of my job here and my Air Force job. Classification all the time. Never talked about it. They knew that you worked here, and that was good enough. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, it was a lot of classification. Some jobs were, gee, you were afraid to talk to anybody. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: So could you tell your family what you did at Hanford at all?
Colley: No.
Bauman: They didn't really know what sort of job you had?
Colley: As far as my family was concerned, my children were going through grade school here. And my wife didn't work. She just took care of us all. What they read in the papers or from things like that. And they know better than to ask. Because it was classified. But they'd got used to that in the Air Force. SAC was, boy, it was as much or more so than Hanford. But you got so you just lived with that. Gosh you never--but also you remembered a lot of those things for a long time even after you could've maybe talked about them. But this time nobody was particularly interested. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: Was that difficult at all to be working and then come home and not be able to talk to anyone about your job at all?
Colley: No. When you got off the--out of your building, why, we just didn't do it. Once in a while, they'd say, where do you work? And they'd say oh, you know, or something. Try to not answer. But if you did, why, you'd tell them what building you worked in, yeah. And every building had a classification about it. They wanted you to--if you worked in that building, you didn’t have any business talking about it.
Bauman: Is there anything from your experiences working at Hanford that we haven't talked about yet that you'd like to talk about or think you should talk about?
Colley: Oh, yeah. There’s things, things, oh gosh--at the time, there was a lot of things that I would like to have talked about. But now I can't remember anything right off-hand. Anything you'd like to talk about, it was classified. And you'd go to specialty school, special this, special that. And guards. But I enjoyed working there. I worked lots of overtime because I enjoyed the job. My outside interests was the military, and every spare minute that I had, why, I was with that either in Walla Walla--I was base commander at Walla Walla in the Reserve side, recovery units. So I was pretty busy all the time. I was looking ahead to either here or there. And then when I retired from the military, then I had more time to work here doing things, and with my family. Go places and do things. But it all worked out good.
Bauman: Well I want to thank you very much for coming in today and sharing your experiences with us. I really appreciate.
Colley: I'm sorry I can't remember a lot of things. Gosh, it's surprising me. When you stop using it and you weren't supposed to talk about it, then you just disappear it. I mean, unless someone mentions something, and then brings it up to you.
Bauman: Well you did a great job.
Colley: A lot of years!
Bauman: Some really interesting stories, so, appreciate it.
Northwest Public Television | Balderston_Mildred
Robert Bauman: So let's maybe go back. So he was saying we didn't quite get the first couple minutes of our conversation. So if you could just, again, talk about what brought you to Hanford, where you were, and talk about your background, coming from Kansas, and so forth.
Mildred Balderston: Well, I was working at the Remington Arms when I got a call from Hanford for people to come up there, when they were laid off at the Remington Arms.
Bauman: So Remington Arms was in Denver?
Balderston: Denver. And I knew that I was going to get laid off, because they were laying off all these people and just keeping a certain amount. And so I said to my boss, I would like to go to Hanford. He said, that's not a place for you. Just kind of like that, you know. And I thought, okay. It wasn't time for me to leave yet, so I was still there. So a few days later, I said, you know what? I would kind of like to go to Hanford. He said, that is not a place for you. So I thought, well, how am I going to get around this? What am I going to say? So I finally said to him again, you know, I would really like to go to Hanford. [LAUGHTER] I guess he was tired to that. So he said okay.
Bauman: And how did you--going back a little farther--so how did you get the job at Remington Arms?
Balderston: Oh, you put in an application. See, I knew they were coming to town, and they were hiring. And so I put in my application, and I got the job.
Bauman: You had already moved from Kansas to Denver before that.
Balderston: Pardon me?
Bauman: You had already moved from Kansas to Denver before that?
Balderston: I lived in Kansas before I went to Denver, and then when I went to Denver, I got this job, and then I started going to business school, so I could get a better job. And so then I worked in this, I think it was an insurance office, for about a year. And then I put my application in at Remington Arms, and I got hired there, so I quit the dental job. And they had a dormitory for us, and I said, well, I wanted to go to the hotel one night. So they had the Desert Inn. That was our first hotel thing or whatever you want to call it. So I went to that for one night, and then I went to the dormitory. And I lived in the dormitory for probably a year or a little better. And then they were reducing people here, so they made up a single girl's contract to rent a house. So we rented a house. There were several of us in the dorm that lived right in a certain vicinity. So we decided, well, we'll take a house. We got a house, and I think there were four of us to start with in that house. It was a three-bedroom. Then in about a year, one of the girls got married and left. So, we got another one in there. We kept adding to. We got another one in there, and then a year or so beyond that, another girl got married and left. We must have had three of them, because then I went home on vacation. And I had a sister who was a schoolteacher there, and she was kind of disgruntled with her school teaching. And so she wanted to do something different. I said, why don't you go up to Hanford with me? So she got rid of her contract. Just chop-chop. It wasn't any big deal. And she packed, and we came back up after my vacation. I think she made the third of us then, and then we had one more that we had to get. After the fourth one left--no, I guess it would only be the third one, because I was still there--I had four sisters, so as they graduated from school, they started coming up. So finally, we had them all up here, and so I didn't have anyone else in there, which was kind of nice. They got jobs here, and they stayed. And then, well, just one at a time they came, because they graduated—when they graduated, they came up. And so one went away to school, and one found a boyfriend, and she got married, and so she left. So there was just the two of us, and my folks lived in Kansas, of course. And of course, they decided, well, they'll move out here. Well, we asked them, why don't you come out? The rest of the family's here, so come on. So we went back and brought them out. But we couldn't rent a house in Richland. So we had to go to Kennewick. We bought a house there, and then my dad went to work. And that was kind of it. My sister and myself and my mother and my father, and so as time goes on, my father wasn't in good condition. As time went on, he wasn't able to work. And so I think he had a--I was going to say a stroke, but I'm not sure that that was it. And he was in the hospital for a while, and the doctor told them that he would only live five years. Well, he hung on to that five years for five years, and at the end of five years, he knew he was going to die, which he did. But the interesting part about this is he had worked with some people who sell houses and other stuff. And he had made friends with other people. So he goes around to each of these people just before he passed away to say goodbye, which amazed me. I just didn't realize that you do those kind of things. [LAUGHTER] But anyway, he did this. So then that left just my mother and my sister and myself. We had moved to a bigger house, which was kind of nice at the time, and besides, the one that we bought first had a basement. And we were afraid that the folks might fall downstairs, and we wouldn't be home, because we were working. So we moved to this house, a one story house. And so we lived there, and then my mother had problems. And so we decided we needed someone to take care of her. Now do you want all this kind of stuff?
Bauman: This is fine, yeah.
Balderston: Well, if you don't want this kind of stuff, let's go on something different.
Bauman: Okay. Well, I just wanted to ask you about the house she lived in in Richland, that first house. Where was that house?
Balderston: That was on Sanford Street.
Bauman: Okay.
Balderston: It was a--what were those things we had? It was a--
Bauman: Was it one of the alphabet homes or prefab?
Balderston: Similar to a prefab, but I don't think that's what it was called at that time. Perhaps it'll come to me sometime close here, and I can back up a bit and tell you.
Bauman: Well, then I also want ask you about your job when you first came out Hanford. What sort of job was it, and where in Hanford were you working? What area were you working in?
Balderston: Well, when I first came up here, I went out to the 300 Area, I think, for a day. And then a job opened up in Richland, and I went in for an interview, and I took the interview—I mean, I took the job. So then I came back to town, and was there for a number of years. And then I moved around to other people that had job openings. So I kind of went up the ladder a little bit. And I enjoyed all of them. But while I was in the 300 Area, an interesting thing happened. I was taking dictation, and this man had the door kind of closed a little bit, because we weren't allowed to talk about anything when I first came. And so he was dictating, and he said a word that I--it was associated with a plant, but I didn't recognize the word. And so I repeated it, so I'd be sure and get it down right. My goodness, he ran to the door, and he looked out. Oh, we don't say that word out loud. So I thought, well, that probably takes care of my job. I won't have a job. But that didn't—I didn't lose it. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: Do you remember what the word was?
Balderston: I've tried to think of what that word was. I've tried and tried and tried to think what that word was, but it didn't come. It hasn't come to me yet.
Bauman: So when you first came to Hanford, did you know what sort of work was being done at Hanford, what Hanford was being built for, or what was happening out here?
Balderston: What is it?
Bauman: Did you know what was being done at Hanford?
Balderston: Oh, no. It wasn't talked about. We just knew that there was a job at Hanford, and you go out there and do your part. Well, I didn't know for a long time what it was, even when I was out here, because you just didn't talk about those things. You run to the door to see if anyone had heard you. So no. I enjoyed it. I had good bosses; I had good jobs. I really couldn't have asked for anything better. I had worked in an insurance office in Denver, and then I had gone to the Remington Arms, and so I had that experience. But it was a good place to get an experience.
Bauman: Do you remember what your first impressions were of Richland and the area here when you first arrived, what you thought of the place?
Balderston: Well, we came in to Pasco on the train, and that was the dirtiest place I have ever seen. It was just awful. And I thought, oh, I hope Richland isn't like this. So anyway, they hadn’t gotten started working on Pasco by then. And when I got to Richland, everything was kind of in the new stage because of all the new houses, all the new equipment that was available. So Richland was a different story.
Bauman: And so when did you arrive then? Around what time period did you arrive in Richland?
Balderston: I think it was the 14th of August in 19--probably '43. I think it was '43.
Bauman: And what were the dorms like? You mentioned that you lived in the dorm initially.
Balderston: Oh, they were very nice. And then that building next to the building downtown in Richland. What's the name of that building? That brick building—that brick building that they built. And the post office was in one end of it. Well, right across the street was a cafeteria, and that's where we had to eat. And our dorms, the women's dorms were in that same area. The men's dorms were on the other side of Swift, I guess it is. But then we went to this house that they made for the single girls. And we did our own cooking, so we didn't have to go there. But those places can get kind of old after a few meals there. And so we were glad to do that.
Bauman: What sorts of things were there in the area for entertainment in Richland? Were there movie theaters at all or any places to go like that for entertainment?
Balderston: I can't remember of any entertainment. I'm sure there must have been something there they could've done, besides the television. Oh, I think there was some--the high schools had ball, and so I think some of them went to that. And I don't think there was a fat lot of anything there, because we were so busy working. By the time you went to the area, and by the time we would get back, the day was far spent.
Bauman: So when you worked at the 300 Area or some of the other places out on the site, did you take a bus out there? Is that how you got out there?
Balderston: What was it?
Bauman: When you worked out at the 300 Area or some of the other places on site, did you take a bus there? Did you have to take a bus?
Balderston: Oh, yeah. We'd take a bus from where we lived out to the 300 Area. Well, no. We would take it out to the bus depot, and then you'd take a bus from there. So yeah, we took a bus.
Bauman: And you mentioned, talked a little bit about the secrecy—you couldn't say certain things or talk about what was going on or what your work. So do you remember when you found out that there were—what was being made at Hanford? Was it the end of the war?
Balderston: You know, I'm not sure. I can't remember when I found out about that. The thing is, knowing that we weren't supposed to know, it wasn't that important. So we didn't go around asking people, what are we doing? Just go ahead and do it. So I don't know. I can't remember when--it seems like there was a war or something, or people were going to war or something that it came out. But I wouldn't say, because I can't remember.
Bauman: So you said you started working in August of 1943, about? How long did you work at Hanford then?
Balderston: 46 years.
Bauman: Wow.
Balderston: Long time.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER] So when you initially came, were you working for DuPont?
Balderston: Right.
Bauman: And then did you work for some of the other companies that came later--GE and some of the other companies?
Balderston: Yeah, and I worked for—I can't think of that name either. I worked for DuPont. I worked for GE. I worked for—it was a telephone company, I think. It had the name of that, and then there were several others. So I wasn't just with one, but I just kind of went from one to the next you know.
Bauman: Right. So, 46 years, that's a long time. You must have seen a lot of changes take place.
Balderston: A lot of changes.
Bauman: What are some of the changes that you saw--ways the community changed, or Hanford itself changed?
Balderston: Well, actually, they really weren't changes to me. It just seems like we just moved from one thing to the next. And so it wasn't a change; it was just part of the show. So I didn't really realize that there were changes. I guess if I would've taken time to think about it, I would've thought, well, we changed from this to that. It just didn't dawn on me. I just worked, because I had a job, and whatever they told me to do, well, that was what I did.
Bauman: And you mentioned that your sisters came out here and worked also. Did they have similar sorts of jobs and work similar places that you worked?
Balderston: Yeah, they all worked out like at the site or someplace. And my sister that came out with me that was a teacher, she got a job at the—I think it was at the—it escapes me. But anyway, she eventually got a job to go to work for the company, and she was with Battelle for many years and had a good job there. And she really enjoyed it. I guess it was different from school teaching maybe.
Bauman: And did you say your father, also, after your parents moved here, he worked at Hanford for a little while also?
Balderston: Well, he didn't work at Hanford. He worked at one of the schools as a janitor. He had kind of done his thing, but he had to be busy, and so there was an opening, and so he went as a janitor.
Bauman: So overall, how would you describe your 46 years working at Hanford? Overall, how was Hanford as a place to work?
Balderston: Well, I enjoyed it. I didn't go home grumbling or anything. I really enjoyed my time there. And the bosses I had were all really good, and it was a good experience.
Bauman: I did want to ask you about one other thing. President Kennedy came out to Hanford in 1963 to dedicate the N Reactor. Do you remember that at all? Were you here? Do you remember him coming at all?
Balderston: Vaguely. I kind of remember that.
Bauman: And do you remember if you went to see him speak at all, or you don't remember?
Balderston: No, because of the different areas. They didn't cover all of them, and so we didn't--some did, but a lot didn't get in on that.
Bauman: Is there anything I haven't asked you about your years working at Hanford that you want to share or that it's important to talk about?
Balderston: Well, my last bout was 13 years in the 300 Area. That was my last--that's the last place I worked. So no, I was just kind of same old, same old. And so I only worked in the 300 Area and Richland. I didn't go any farther out, so now my sisters--I had two sisters that worked in the area, and they thought they had a hilarious time riding the bus and meeting all these people. So they had a great time. It wasn't something that we just took because there was nothing else to take. So yeah, they had a great time. And so I guess nothing was lost with them.
Bauman: Well, I want to thank you very much for coming in and sharing your story with us and letting me ask you questions.
Northwest Public Television | Copeland_Harold
Robert Bauman: Well, we can go ahead and get started with the interview.
Harold Copeland: Sure.
Bauman: So first I'm going to have you say your name and then spell it also.
Copeland: Yes. I am Harold Copeland, Harold Curtis Copeland, H-A-R-O-L-D C-U-R-T-I-S C-O-P-E-L-A-N-D.
Bauman: All right. And my name’s Robert Bauman and today is August 6, of 2013. And we're conducting oral history interview on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. And so we're going to be talking about your experiences working in the Hanford site. So I wonder if we could start by having you tell me first, how you came to Hanford, when you got here, any first impressions of the place, any of that.
Copeland: My wife and I came here from Denver, Colorado in October 1947. I was working for the Bureau of Reclamation. They were decentralizing their main office, sending people to all the field offices. General Electric came in recruiting and they had received word of this decentralization, looking for engineers. So there were a number of us that thought that's a good opportunity, so we came out here, 1947. We're driving our little three-window Ford Coupe and towing my Harley motorcycle on back. And the first impression of Richland was pretty grim. We came into town and all we saw were these flat-topped, prefab houses. They didn't have their peak roofs yet. And there was dust in the road and not hardly any trees. But we came here. General Electric said there's a job for five years. Well, for the first four or five years, we kept thinking, when do we go back to Colorado? I grew up in Colorado. See, it's a neat place in Fort Collins and I graduated from CSU there, so naturally, it was like home. But after five years, we began to like this place. We had the Columbia River, the Yakima River, had the Blue Mountains, the Cascades, and the ocean, and fishing in the ocean not too far away. So we made it our home for all these years.
Bauman: And when you and your wife first came, what sort of housing did you live in first?
Copeland: They were building houses rapidly. The A and B houses, a lot of those were up and people living in them and prefabs, as I mentioned. Our first few months, we were living with Lee Hall and his son, 700 Sanford, in a two-bedroom prefab. And a wife and I got the small bedroom. She was pregnant when we got here. December 7, the Pearl Harbor Day, but in 1947, our first daughter was born and there was pretty cramped conditions with the baby beside the bed and then a two-bedroom prefab, well, the crying at night. She had not gotten used to sleeping at night. But Lee Hall said he had one bad ear. He says, put her out in the living room and let her cry out there. I'll just turn my good ear down and I won't hear her. So we did and the crying session and nothing happened from it. Finally got the message to Diane that she was supposed to sleep at night, so that was nice. And Lee Hall was so glad to have a woman in the house to do cooking and do furniture. She did curtains and changing paint and putting a woman's touch on the house like women can do that men don't have any idea about. Well, she did that and he was very pleased to have us with us, but they were building the pre-cut houses. And we get in along about in the '48, it was probably in March or April, the pre-cut houses were ready to be occupied. We moved to a two-bedroom pre-cut. Lee Hall was most depressed and dejected because we were leaving and taking all his good drapes away. So we lived at 700 Sanford for several years until about, I think it was 1973, our second child was born. So on the housing list, we were eligible for a bigger house, a three bedroom. We were in a two bedroom. It so happened I was working with the engineer, Verne Hill was his name. And he lived out on Atkins. And he said, they had a housing list. Big board behind the glass, a housing list was posted. You'd go down and apply for housing that became available. Verne told me his next door neighbor was moving, so I applied for that house before it was posted, see? So I was first on the list of eligibility for the house and we got the house at 209 Atkins because of Verne. And it—they were well-built houses, number one grade lumber, and it's been a very durable and good place to live over the years.
Bauman: Where was this housing list that you mentioned? Where was that?
Copeland: They had sort of a housing department located in the vicinity, very close to where the Richland Police Department is, across the street from the Federal Building would be. But they would post this housing list and people that were eligible to move would go in and apply.
Bauman: And how would you describe the town of Richland at the time in the late '40s and early '50s? What kind of place was it to live?
Copeland: Very safe place. Good schools. Good housing. No crime. Everybody that worked at Hanford had had their background checks. They wouldn't hire any criminals or background violators. So we could leave our cars unlocked, we could leave our doors unlocked, and it was a very safe place. The main thing was security for the plant. The plant operation security was very, very strict then, but living conditions were very good. They had 700—420 Wright Street. We rented the house. $38 a month. It's a two-bedroom pre-cut called a U house. And the electricity was furnished, the water, the sewer. They even give you grass seed to plant your lawn, and if you had some maintenance to be done in the house, call them up and they'd come and fix it. The wind blew a lot. There were no ranch houses at that time. And the wind came—they started building the ranch houses. The soil was all very fluffy and stirred up and we would get one of those terminator winds as they were called, the way they would blow dirt into our yard. And there was a terminator wind and there was probably three to four inches of sand blew into our front yard. The way they took care of it was the fire department came out with their tanker trucks and hoses and hosed this off of our lawns. They also learned, they gave you the plant seed, but they only gave you enough seed for just about one quarter of your lawn at a time. When you get it going, then they give you seed for the next section. Trying to water it and keep it growing, the whole thing they learned, was too much for the residents. So it was a very safe, good place to live.
Bauman: Do you remember any community events, any special events sort of things in the community during that time?
Copeland: Community events, the one that comes to mind, there were probably some but I can't think of was the boat races. And it was called the Atomic Cup, which nowadays is not politically correct. They call it the Columbia River, then it was the Atomic Cup for several years. And it used to be a nice place to go and watch the boats, but recent years, they're so crowded and unruly people that I don't have any reason to go down there. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: Let's talk about your work in Hanford then. What was the first job that you had when you first came to Hanford in 1947?
Copeland: Well, my degree is in mechanical engineering and that's what I was doing in Denver with the Bureau of Reclamation. They came out here and I had an engineering job in the--I think they call it the 1100 Building. It was a single story Army barracks type of building. It was in the location of, I would say where the parking lot is now on the lower side of the Federal Building. That was its location. And so I worked there until I got my Q clearance and then I was sent to 200 Area after I got the clearance. After I got to the 200 Area, they were in search of instrument engineers. No college courses taught instrumentation. The one up in Yakima was teaching good technicians and the one up at Milwaukee had good technicians, but no engineering. Well, I'd been in the Navy and my training in the Navy was with electronics gear: radio, transmitter, receiver, sonar, LORAN, and there might have been something else. So I had a lot of this electronic training and I had one semester of electrical engineering at Colorado State. So I transferred over to instrument engineering and shortly after I got to the 200 Area and followed that through all my time there as an instrument engineer.
Bauman: So what sorts of duties did you have then? What sorts of things might you do on a typical work day?
Copeland: Well, I would work with the instrument technicians, help them with their work. If they needed new parts, I would go write purchase orders. If some of the instruments were getting old and wearing out and needed total replacement, I would write orders for those and oversee the installation and help the craftsmen, the instrument techs with calibration. There's one funny story that I just can't forget. Most of my work, some, not all, but most of my works in the 184 steam power plants, which provided the steam for emergency use during outages. And this took place at the N Reactor, at the 184. And he was an instrument specialist. And he was the--what do you call them? The steward. He was the instrument steward for their craft, Jay Lettingham. And we'd gotten all these new Foxborough DP cells in that we were installing to replace some other instruments that were obsolete. There's a much, much better system and we were in this little instrument shop in the 184 Building and I was reading the manual and he was trying to turn the screws and nuts to get it calibrated. And he tried and it didn't work and he tried and it didn't work. And then what he did, well, he said, here, you take these tools. And so I did it and showed him how to do it. He being a steward, see, I wasn't supposed to pick up a tool or touch one, but he had me do it. [LAUGHTER] I thought that was a real amusing situation, but we got along. We worked as a team.
Bauman: Mm-hm. And how long did you work at the N Reactor then?
Copeland: Well, N reactor from about 19--probably '66 to '87. I retired in 1987. But my first work was assigned in the 200 Areas. And I was fortunate. One day, I got in on the startup of the 234-5, which they now call the Plutonium Finishing Plant, but in those days you're probably aware that they named the plants and the facilities in a name that did not relate at all to what they did. See? Plutonium Finishing Plant would have been giving away a secret, so it was 234-5. Everybody referred to it as the Dash-5 Building. I was there on the construction and startup of 234-5, mainly working on heating and ventilation. Had three big air supply filters and washers and fans for the building and it was a real tough ventilation because there were three separate pressure zones. The office zones were the higher pressure and then there was an intermediate zone. And the zone where the hoods and the work was done was the lowest pressure so that all contamination wouldn't flow from the work area to the shops and clean areas. And it was very difficult to get those pressures to be stable and maintained. I got in on the construction and startup of REDOX plant. And then I also got in on the construction and startup of PUREX. Now, part of the PUREX work, I had an office under Webster in the 3000 Area, North Richland, where we were working on design work and approving drawings and specifying the type of instruments to be procured. Then I got to go out to the field and saw them being installed. And I worked for Copeland, R. W. Copeland. That was a coincidence. No relation that I know of, but he was a good guy to work for. He was, I think, Blaw-Knox Construction, if I remember right, that he was in charge of all the construction there. So I got well acquainted with a lot of welders and pipe fitters and electricians, and everybody worked together. It was a very cooperative effort in those days.
Bauman: Your first job was with GE, right?
Copeland: General Electric, yes.
Bauman: And then what other contractors did you work with?
Copeland: Well, it was, I think about 1964. GE's contract was running out. They chose not to want to extend it and so United Nuclear came in and took over the contract for the 100 Areas and I think Westinghouse had a contract. There were several contractors for the 200 Area, so Uniroyal and couple others. I don't remember the name, but anyway, United Nuclear took over the 100 Area, so I worked for them and retired for them. And the plant was down in 19--I got my neat belt buckle. 20 years, 1964 to 1984. So the plant went down in 1984, but I retired in 1987. The neat thing I remember doing there, our maintenance work could only be done when the reactor was down. The reactor running was producing plutonium and steam for the steam plant. That was a money earner, so the downtime was kept at a minimum. When it went down for good and we thought that it was always going to restart, we went in and replaced a lot of tubing and instruments, valves with upgraded material, upgraded design. And we thought—I believe that that plant was in better condition, had better equipment than when it first started up and we always had that hope that—we didn't have any doubt at that time--that it was going to start up again and that all this good stuff in it was really going to run good. But then because of the Chernobyl incident, the politicians shut it down. It didn't make a scientific and engineering gradual shut down, which would have saved a lot of money in handling nuclear fuel and processing it. But they shut her down because of Chernobyl. And I'm not a real good nuclear physicist, but they think it's a two factor or an n factor. You'd have to talk to a nuclear person. But it was designed in this N Reactor so that it would not run away and meld itself like the Chernobyl plant did. It was impossible, but the politicians didn't know that.
Bauman: Obviously, security, secrecy were a big part of the Hanford site. Can you talk at all about how that part of it impacted your work at all in any way or any interesting stories about security?
Copeland: Yeah. Some of the security men would hang out in restaurants or bars. I never experienced this or saw it happen, but I've heard about it. And if the customers in there talked anything between themselves or anyone else about anything, the work they were doing or what was going on out there, they were out the door. And most people knew that and obeyed it very, very strictly. For a long time, my wife and my daughter, see, they didn't know what I did out there. I couldn't tell them. I'd go to work in the morning and come back in the evening and ride the bus. So it was that tight. And another funny story, the kids in school were talking about what does your daddy do out there? Of course, they didn't know. And they'd say, my daddy is making toilet paper. He brings it home and his lunchbox. [LAUGHTER] It was one of the answers that the kid that didn't know what's going on was doing because, I guess toilet paper at the times was not readily available, but there was still always lots of it out at the plant.
Bauman: JFK, President Kennedy came to visit.
Copeland: What's that?
Bauman: President Kennedy came in 1963--
Copeland: Yes.
Bauman: --to dedicate the N Reactor [INAUDIBLE] came. What are your memories of that day?
Copeland: He dedicated the reactor. Well, I was working that day and didn't see it, but my wife and daughter went out and got to watch Kennedy designate. He moved the radioactive wand over the receiver and the motorized shovel, big, earth-moving shovel, scooped the first scoop of dirt out there, so the way I heard about it, he started it up.
Bauman: Okay. Were there any events that sort of stand out in mind from the years working? Any unusual happenings or strange occurrences, sort of, when you were working out at Hanford at that time, or funny stories?
Copeland: Yeah, I think of one that was very amusing. The instrument techs who I worked with, all of them were a bunch of good guys. They would play jokes. They had subtle humor and played jokes on people, harmless type of things, nothing to harm. This occurred in the 221-T, the separations building in the 200 Area, 200 West. And I'd often go over there early in the day, see the instrument foreman, what he was going to assign to the technicians and what was going on, what was to be done that day so that if it involved something that I needed to know, I would be there to hear about it. And one time, we had these ring balance instruments, we called them pen draggers. They had little pens. They would make a mark on a round chart, a moving chart and they were a very small pen with ink in them and made a very small line. And we were having this, I guess, a safety meeting was finished and we were talking to this--they had a secretary. The instrument foreman had a secretary. I think she was Eleanor, but I'm not sure. Well, one of the guys rigged up one of these ink pens, held it about waist height and he had a squeeze bulb with water in it and he squeezed it right at Eleanor. So she became all wet on her front side there and everyone was smiling and giggling and she didn't know what was going on until she looked. [LAUGHTER] You couldn't see the stream it was so fine, see? It was a fine stream. I thought that was funny! Another one in the same building, at quitting time, the guys that have their lunch buckets set on the workbench and when the bell rang, it was time to go rush out and get on the bus and go home. So this one guy, he was especially quick at grabbing his bucket and getting out so he could get a seat on the bus that he wanted. Well, we had a lot of lead bricks. They're the same size as red bricks that we have. This was a lead brick. They put it in his lunch bucket and he came along and grabbed this lunch bucket and all he got was the handle on the top part. [LAUGHTER] That was a funny one.
Bauman: I wonder what you see as were some of the more challenging aspects of working at Hanford were and what were some of the most rewarding parts about working at Hanford?
Copeland: Challenging and rewarding. Well, the challenging, and to a certain respect of keeping the secrecy of the plant, one of the challenging things was the dust storms called the terminators. And the rewarding thing, I think, was the men that I got to work with. They were all good guys, cooperative, pulling together. There was no territorial protection. If somebody knew something that the other guy didn't know, he would share it. That was very rewarding to me. There were different technical problems that I was faced with during the time, which we were able to take care of and never had any bad accidents.
Bauman: And you were there for 40 years--
Copeland: Yes.
Bauman: I imagine you must have seen some changes take place.
Copeland: Many.
Bauman: Either technological changes, or instruments. I wonder if there were any changes that you saw that you thought were important?
Copeland: Yeah, there were a lot of changes. The older instruments in the power houses were--can't remember them. But they ran on a five to 25 psi signal. Then we got these newer Foxborough instruments and then they were three to 15 psi. And before I left, they were going to forward a 20 milliamp electrical instruments and controls. And the computer age was just getting started when I retired. And they would allow computer measurements—I was in the 100 Areas by then, of course—instruments, they would measure pressure temperature and position, could be done with computers, but the control the people had, the men, the operators had to maintain control. They allowed no computer control of the reactor. That was a limit at that time, but that's gotten past that, present day. But we had computer programs on the old IBM cards, punch cards, that punched the little square holes, and there was a giant computer in the basement of the Federal Building. There was a Boeing computer facility and all the cards went down there to be processed and problems and answers, solutions work out from that. That was just the beginning of that age that I just got in on the start of it, but not anymore.
Bauman: The site, of course, at some point, shifted from focus on production to focus on cleanup. I wonder if that shift impacted your work at all, the sorts of things you did?
Copeland: Yeah. Well, to back up a little bit more, at one time, we had nine reactors up and down the river operating. And N Reactor was a first one in the country and maybe in the world that produced power. It was one of the first power reactors, of which there are quite a few of them now. So that was a neat thing, but--give me your question again.
Bauman: Oh, I was asking about the shift from production to cleanup.
Copeland: To cleanup. I got in on a little of that before I started working at N reactor, the other BDF and DNDR were all being shut down and I worked for Wind Chimer, WW Wind Chimer. We were on--I was probably for about a year--helping with some of the cleanup on that and our motto, our mission was, drain and dry the piping and store the mercury. That was our mission that we were doing. The other groups were doing other things, but I know that we were tending to that for the shutdown. And at that time, it was shut down, not that we were not involved in the cleanup yet.
Bauman: But the shutting down of some of the reactors.
Copeland: Mm-hm.
Bauman: I wonder if you could—so in a sense, overall your experience working at Hanford for those 40 years--
Copeland: What about the overall?
Bauman: Yeah, what's your overall assessment of your 40 years working at Hanford? What are your thoughts about--
Copeland: Oh, very proud. Very positive. I'm proud that I was able to work out there and support the Cold War effort. My first job out of college was with Fairbanks Morse, Beloit, Wisconsin where they made the diesel engines for the submarines, the OP, opposed piston engine. So I got to help with the war effort. Then I got the letter from my draft board that said, greetings, you are a selected volunteer, so that's when I got into the Navy. So I got into the Navy parts and then, as I told you I didn't have to get shot at, but I was working during the war time, then out here for the Cold War. So I had those three parts of my life, I think, contributing to the growth and the safety of our nation.
Bauman: I want to ask you about your running.
Copeland: Oh, yes.
Bauman: At some point, you got involved in running. When was that, and how did that get started?
Copeland: Elijah Galloway. Dear, dear friend who’s gone now. He was the Brown Shoe Air Force, that's the Army Air Corps. Before the Air Force—the present day Air Force was formed, the Air Corps was a part of the Army. He said I was part of the Brown Shoe Air Corps. So he flew missions and did things, but one of the jobs where he got started running was CIA, Russia. Both he and his wife got trained. They had probably most of a year of training in Russian and how to conduct themselves as observers, but really getting spy information, but they were just called observers over in Russia. And then he participated in all the Russian parties. They had lots of caviar and vodka and pretty soon he was overweight. And his doctor, when he went to Germany for a checkup or leave, he said, you need to lose weight. So he encouraged him to start a running program, which he did. And he lost weight and he lost weight and whenever he would go out on one of these surveillance programs, he'd just go out walking, then he got to running. He'd count the number of insulators on the power pool, just simple stuff that he could observe while he was out, then there was always a Russian counterpart that was with him and following him. He was a runner. And pretty soon, Elijah got so good he could run out and leave this guy. [LAUGHTER] And so one time, the story he told me, he went out for his run with his counterpart, Russian guy, and he finished his run and then he told the Russian guy, well, let's go out and run your course. Now, I want to run your course. He was too tired to do it. [LAUGHTER] He was a specialist on antennas, jamming and communication, that was his specialty in his work. He had an electrical engineering degree and antennas was his thing. And so he was involved in a lot of that communication and jamming for the US over there. The one amusing thing that was taught to his wife. The Russians would have a big parade. They would have these big wheel movers with the missiles on them and they'd have a big parade celebrating how great we are. And Elijah and his wife, Beryl, would have their trench coats on and have their Leica cameras down at waist high, just barely pointing out between the buttons. And they would take pictures and just the time they'd click, they'd go, [COUGH]. And there were always Russians around spying on them. If they heard a camera click, well, then bad news for them. But they could cover this up with [COUGH]. Just cover it up the click of the camera. That was one of the neat stories that he told me. But from his experience with losing weight, he retired and his home was in San Antonio, Texas. And he couldn't stand being retired. And he'd gone to school with Paul Venter, a name that I mentioned. I think it was probably at Whitworth. I'm not positive, but he knew Paul and he kept in touch over the years and Elijah didn't like being retired and he had this electrical degree and Paul says, why don't you come up to Hanford? There's some jobs here. Elijah came up here, got a job. He was my office partner and I think I already told you part of it, that he and Jerry and I, in my office one day, Elijah said, let's go out on our noon break and go for a little run. Because it had meant so much to him and he felt so much better getting down to a trim weight that he wanted to influence other people to enjoy that same feeling and the euphoria—the endorphins get into your body when you're running to where you just feel like you're just going and can go forever. Of course, you can't, but you have that wonderful, elevated feeling. He wanted to share that with everybody and I wanted to share it with other people too that I have run across in my running years. So that was Elijah. It was about 1972 that this happened and I started running and within a year later, I ran my first marathon. He coached me on how to train for a marathon. It feels good, but don't keep going further than, you know, increasing not more than 10% or a few miles each day. Hold a very strict schedule of gradual training and conditioning. Because if you do try and get too much, you get injured, disappointed, then you quit running. That has happened, so one thing that he taught me and another people. And so we ran the old Cheney Marathon up at Cheney, Washington. And that Cheney Marathon only lasted, I think, about three years and they discontinued it. But the neat thing, I still hold the first place for 50 age division at the Cheney Marathon. No one came along later and beat my record because the marathon was stopped. [LAUGHTER] A lot of other marathons, why, someone else comes along when they turn 60 and they beat my record. That's how I got started running and I'm a advocate of—if not running, I swim or bike or kayak, whatever suits your fancy, whatever you feel good doing, do it, but keep doing something.
Bauman: Sounds like you were running pretty regularly at your last time period working at Hanford.
Copeland: Pretty regular. My routine for many years was up at 4:30. Do my toileting, strap on my shorts and shoes, out the door at 5:00. I'd run 7 miles in an hour and I was back to the house and Evelyn would have breakfast. I'd quick shower and get breakfast and then I'd catch the bus at 6:30, about a two-block walk from my house, catching the bus. That was my routine, seven miles every weekday morning and then six miles at noon with the guys at N Reactor. So I got 13 miles a day, weekdays. Saturday was the long run day. Do 20 or 22 miles. You have to have some long distance training to train your body to learn to burn fat when you run out of glycogen. And the person I did that most with was my dear Chinese running friend, Yao Ming Chein. “Chee-in.” We would meet Saturday and run our 20 to 22 miles. Sunday was a rest day, so I'd ride my bike about 15 miles. That's a different exercise. It rested your running muscles. But Chein, I remember, he would, at one of our wedding anniversary parties, Yao Ming and is wife were there and I was introducing him and he says, Chein, E before I. He says I before E and everything except Chein, C-H-E-I-N. It wasn't C-H-I-N as Chin, but he was Chein. That made a difference to him. So he's still around. He lives over in Bellevue. I talk to him every once in a while. We formed a—a lot of marathoners, you form a bonding, a marathon bonding with these people that you run 26 miles with and you look for them and wonder how they are and if they're not at the next marathon, you wonder if they're ill or accident or anything happened. It's a bond that, it's hard to describe, but it's there.
Bauman: Is there any things that I haven't asked you about in terms of your working at Hanford that you think is important to talk about and would like to talk about that you haven't talked about so far?
Copeland: There's one more funny that I didn't include. We were working at the PUREX plant, 200 East. And this instrument specialist, Web Madison was his name, he--to back up a bit, they needed instrument technicians that could find work and work on instruments. So they were looking for watchmakers, all search the country. Watchmakers would qualify. They knew how to do fine, delicate work. Well, there were a lot of watchmakers out there because there was no training for them early on except, later they had the Yakima, forget the name of it, instrument school and the one in Milwaukee. But Web had tooth problem, teeth all decayed. So he had upper and lower plates, all new plates. Had them built by the dentist, you know, nice. And then the one thing that I'm leading up to, if an instrument needed a part and you couldn't buy it, they could make it and they could build parts that were broken and replace them, they were so good. So Web got his new teeth and he looked at them real close. He built himself a set of stainless steel teeth, a whole set of stainless steel teeth. And one night when he come off shift and through the badge house, the guard always looked at you and looked at your badge and he'd know who you are and he knew who he was. They checked him out. But he flashed those stainless steel teeth at the guard and the guard just about fell over. It was a riot. [LAUGHTER] Another thing they did, they were practical jokers. Another thing they did there to the going off shift, I didn't observe this, but I heard about it. An instrument tech, they were getting ready to go off shift and they called up at the badge house and said, we're going to flush the phone lines. And we want you to unhook your phone, take your phone off and just hold it while we flush the lines. And so he did that and they took some air nozzle and made some noises. It sounded like flushing noises. And then he went up to check out to catch the bus and they really ribbed that guard. What in the world are you doing on the phone. Oh, they had him put it in the basket. They had him put it in the wastebasket. What are you doing in the wastebasket? Practical jokes like that. There are so many of them that—so, good to think about.
Bauman: Yeah. Well, I want to thank you for coming in today and sharing your stories and experiences. I appreciate it.
Copeland: It was my pleasure. I am hopeful and I'm sure that what you're doing will be very educational and important to your students over the coming years. So I want to thank you for doing this work.
Bauman: Well, I'm glad to be a part of it. Thanks again.
Copeland: Mm-hm.
Northwest Public Television | Bair_William
Robert Bauman: Let's start by just having you say and spell your name.
William Bair: Okay. William Bair, B-A-I-R.
Bauman: Great, and my name is Robert Bauman, and today is August 14th of 2013, and we're conducting this interview on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. So I thought maybe we could start by having you first tell us what brought you to Hanford, how and when you arrived here.
Bair: Okay, well, actually it's kind of ironic because I wouldn't be here or anywhere if it were not for the atomic bomb and the plutonium that was produced here at Hanford. I was in the infantry during World War II in Czechoslovakia, and when the war was over in Europe, we were shipped to the Pacific. We had been trained for amphibious warfare, and when problems got tough over in Europe, they shipped us to Europe instead. So we were prepared and trained for Pacific warfare. And we got down to the Pacific, of course, the bombs had been dropped, and instead of going into Japan as an invasion army, we went in as an army of occupation. I have a few things I remember, but I think I should tell people that is when we got down to the Pacific, as far as I could see, there were ships. The ocean was just covered with ships prepared for the invasion--unbelievable. And then when we get into Japan, we had an opportunity to see what they had prepared for us. The division I was in was responsible for destroying a lot of the munitions, particularly naval munitions that had been stored and ready for the invasion. And a friend and I were sent up in the mountains in Japan. We took over a warehouse that was just full of rifles and all kinds of small arms. So the Japanese were really prepared for us. And I think people should know that, that if we had an invasion, if we had to go in through an invasion, there would have been a terrible loss of life from both sides. The Japanese people would have suffered immensely, and certainly the invasion forces would have suffered. So if anybody wants to argue the point for whether the bomb should have been dropped, I'm happy to take them on. Okay, how I got here--after I got out of the service, I went to Ohio Wesleyan University, got a degree in chemistry, and happened to walk by a bulletin board when I was a senior. I read a notice for fellowships in radiological physics. And I really didn't know a thing about radiological physics. I had applied for graduate school at Ohio State University and was accepted there, but I thought, well, I'll just check this out. So I had to take an exam and pass it and was notified that I had gotten a scholarship or a fellowship at the University of Rochester Medical School. What the training really was health physics. It was the first fellowship classes being funded by the Atomic Energy Commission, at that time, for training in health physics. So I took that for the first year and had some summer training at Brookhaven National Laboratory. And one of the professors, Newell Stannard, by name, asked me if I wanted to stay on as a graduate student and, sure, why not? I still had some GI Bill time left, and so I decided to use it, and so I was there working on a PhD until 1954 and then looking for a job. Well, one of my lab mates had worked here, Hoyt Whipple, he worked for Parker and had left there and gone back to Rochester. Turns out, his father was Dean of the Medical School at Rochester, so I thought he had an interest in going back there. But anyway, I checked around. I had an offer at Oak Ridge, another at Yale, and one out here. And actually it wasn't always the positive, the comments I got about here, but they offered more money, and my wife was pregnant at the time, so that made a big difference. And so that's how I got out here.
Bauman: Oh, okay. Now I want to ask a little bit more about that program at Rochester. So this was a fairly new program?
Bair: Yes, I was in the second class.
Bair: Well, the radiation biology was totally new. In fact, when I started that program, they did not have it authorized, and I was in the physiology department at medical school for a couple years until they got it authorized. Now I did receive the first PhD in Radiation Biology there and, I think, in the world. Dr. Stannard always claimed that that was the first one in the world, so I won't argue with him.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER] You said you arrived in Hanford in 1954.
Bair: Yeah, in September '54.
Bauman: And what were your first impressions of the area?
Bair: Well, it was kind of interesting. At first, having come from Rochester, New York and lived in Ohio before that, I was amazed to see the big river here with no trees along the shore. I think my first impression, it seemed impossible. So anyway, it was obviously a company town, and that didn't bother me. It wasn't unattractive. Nothing was really negative about it, I can remember anyway. I think that the most negative comment I took back to Barbara was the fact that—the lack of trees. Her father actually was supportive of me coming here because he had been a comptroller at the General Motors plant in Rochester, New York, so he was a company man. So when he found out that General Electric was operating this plant, why, nothing wrong with that.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER] He approved.
Bair: Right, he approved.
Bauman: So you mentioned Richland was a company town sort of place. What was the housing situation at the time? Were you able to find housing right away?
Bair: Well, no, all the housing was controlled. There were two types of housing. One, certainly, owned by the government, built by government. Then there was another, I think maybe, two developments, one called Richland Village. Do you know where Richland Village is located?
Bauman: Mm-hm.
Bair: That had just been built. It was built, I think, by a private company, but I think underwritten by the government in some way. And so we took one of those. In fact, we didn't have a chance at one of the government houses. But after a year there, we did have anopportunity to move into a B house in South Richland, and we lived there until the houses were sold. I can't remember what year that was, but--and we actually bought the B house and converted it to a single unit because we had, by that time, two boys and another one on the way, I think, so we needed more room.
Bauman: And do you remember how much you paid for that B house?
Bair: I don't, but not very much--$4,000 or $5,000 maybe. I don't know. I think we sold it for $15,000, so we made a little money on it. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: So when you came to Hanford then, what sort of work were you doing? Where were you, and what part of the area were you in?
Bair: Well, I was I trained as a radiation biologist, and so I was hired by Frank Hungate to work with him in cellular level studies. Actually we were trying to understand the mechanism for radiation causing health effects. And so it was really a pretty basic research. It was genetics, mutagenesis kind of studies I was doing. The theory that we were looking into was whether a radioisotope and carbon genetic material, when it decayed, it would become another element. And in that process, whether it would actually cause a mutation. We had no really positive, but we had some very successive results, but it didn't, certainly, make a big impact on the field. And then, after I was there two years--Barb and I'd agreed that we would stay at least two years; that we felt that was had to--you make a commitment. It's got to have some--we weren’t about to jump ship right away just because of the dust storms. I did have an offer from the University of Illinois back in Champaign, and it would be setting up a new program there on the campus. Fortunately or unfortunately, whichever way you want to look at it, Barb and I went back for an interview in August. Have you ever been to Illinois in August?
Bauman: I lived in Illinois for a couple of years, so, yes.
Bair: Oh, okay. Humid, hay fever season--Barb and I were a mess. [LAUGHTER] And so we came back, and I did receive an offer from them. But about that time, the person who was leading the inhalation toxicology program out here at the site died, and so they were replacing him. And since I'd been at the University of Rochester, where much of the pioneering work had been done on inhalation of uranium, things like that, they assumed that I knew something about it. And they offered me the job to stay on and manage that program. Well, with the hay fever situation—it was a good job. I hated to turn it down, in a way, but we did, and so we stayed.
Bauman: Do you remember the name of the person who ran the inhalation toxicology before?
Bair: Ralph Wager.
Bauman: Wager.
Bair: Wager--W-A-G-E-R. He was a physician. I had I met him, but he didn't live much longer after I got here. I think he was a very capable person.
Bauman: So how large was the inhalation toxicology program? How many people were involved in that?
Bair: When I took it over, there was three and a secretary. [LAUGHTER] And I was the only PhD. The other two were--one had a master's degree. I'm not sure the other one did. And then I think that's all. So we started out scratch. These were good guys. Really, I couldn't have been better off. I couldn't have asked for better people to start out a program, even though they didn't have the degrees. Lou Temple had studied histology. He was very good. He would qualify for a lot of pathology work. And Don Willard was a, I think, he was probably a primary chemist, but he was a--do you know the term Rube Goldberg?
Bauman: Mm-hmm.
Bair: Okay, he was a Rube Goldberg. You'd tell him what you wanted, he’d make it happen. He could do all kinds of things with nothing, in the shop or the lab or whatever. And we were inventing new territory. There was no technology, no publications showing us how to develop the technology, to build the technology, to expose animals to highly radioactive materials, which we had to do. And so he was largely responsible for putting all that stuff together. And engineers would look at him and shake their head, the trained engineers, but they couldn't do it. He could. [LAUGHTER] But we had a lot of help from other people on site. There were aerosol physicists working in other programs; they were able to help us. One good thing about the lab at that time was that they really believed in statistics, and they had statisticians assigned to us. And I'd come from the University of Rochester, where they really did preach the value of statistics in doing your research. You talk to a statistician before you start your experiment. You have them involved in designing your experiment, and that way they are way ahead of the game when it comes to interpreting the results. So anyway, that's how we got started. We had a certain advantage, in sense. We had, at that time, a program out there where we had military veterinarians coming in for training programs. So that gave us an opportunity to have an extra set of very qualified hands, and so we had and several veterinarians working with us on the program. And I think that--I can't remember the first one I hired. I think I hired a physiologist, a PhD physiologist. Then I needed a veterinarian because, I think, the military program was closing down. And I had a friend at Ohio State University. He had been a fraternity brother at Ohio Wesleyan, so I called him. He was at the vet school at Ohio State, and I asked him if he had any graduates who might be candidates for a job. Well, he had several, and so I went back to Columbus to interview these guys. And one, Jim Park was, I thought, the best one. He didn't have the best grades, but he was just came across as being the person I wanted. But there was a little bit of a problem, I thought—possible problem. He came from my hometown. And you know, you hire somebody from your hometown, it doesn't work out. The town, probably 8,000 or 10,000 people, word gets around. So anyway, I decided to take a chance. He decided to also take a chance, and it was probably one of the best decisions as a manager I ever made because he worked out very well. In fact, he worked on until he retired. In fact, he just died this last January.
Bauman: It was Jim Park?
Bair: Jim Park, yeah.
Bauman: So what was the home town? Where was it?
Bair: Bellefontaine, Ohio. Do you know that area?
Bauman: I do not know that area. I was born in Ohio, but I don't know where that is.
Bair: Okay, well, it's between Lima and Dayton, right in a straight line.
Bauman: So you said that this group started out very small. How much did it grow during the time that you were--
Bair: Well, during the time I managed that, which was probably ‘til about '68, I know we must have had--I can't remember--maybe ten, 15 people probably. I'd had foreign scientists visiting. I had one from Turkey, another from Japan during that period. That's probably about right.
Bauman: And so, the inhalation toxicology program, I guess, could you explain what sorts of things you were doing? Experiments and studies, whatever--
Bair: Sure, well, it turns out that the most common—the most frequent way people were being exposed on the plant—the workers being exposed on a plant to things like plutonium, particularly, was by inhalation--airborne plutonium in the processing plant and everywhere else they worked with it. And so not much was known about plutonium at the time, essentially nothing, because it's a new element. And there'd been injection studied at Berkeley, California at University California, Berkeley and other places, where they took amounts and injected it into experimental animals intravenously and sometimes just through the skin. These were not really duplicating the kind of exposure that people were having, because the people were breathing it. And so we had to do some research to find out where it goes and what the effects might be. At that time, we--I say we, meaning the scientific community--suspected that things like plutonium would cause lung cancer, but there was no experimental evidence, and no human subjects, there were no human exposures that had ever resulted in lung cancer. The main evidence we had for radiation causing lung cancer occurred in miners, particularly starting in Germany and Czechoslovakia. The hard rock miners were developing lung cancer beginning way back in turn of the century. And it wasn't until the 1920s they finally identified it was radon, the radioactive radon gas. It was causing lung cancer in these miners. So then, of course, with the development of the atomic energy program in the United States, there was a lot of uranium mining going on, and they were already beginning to see evidence of increasing lung cancer in some of the miners down in Utah and places like that. So there was reason to be suspicious, but there was no experimental evidence that it would happen. And so our studies there actually with beagle dogs showed that actually you could inhale enough plutonium to cause lung cancer. And I say enough, because we certainly showed that very small amounts would not do it. You had to reach some--I can't--you want to use the word threshold, but we don't know whether that's right, but some level amount before we would see those kinds of effects occurring. Our first studies were with mice. We actually put radioactive material and injected it into their trachea, and we had no effects there in those cases. As I said, we had the Air Force and military veterinarians on site. One of them was Jack Healey, who was then returned back to Sandia base. And then Air Force was very interested in plutonium for obvious reasons, because they carried weapons around that contained plutonium. And they contracted us to do some studies on the early effects of people inhaling plutonium oxide, the weapons grade plutonium. And they wanted us to use beagle dogs. Beagle dogs were an ideal experimental animal. They had been used at Cornell University in studies there. There was a big study at Utah, in which they were actually injecting plutonium and uranium and thorium into beagle dogs. Down at Davis, California, a veterinary school there, they had a large program using beagle dogs for external radiation. So beagle dogs were an ideal animal for research. So we did sign the contract with the Air Force to start the study with beagle dogs. And I think about two or three years in the study, we found the first lung cancer. And the lung cancer was rather unique because it was rather—it occurred down deep in the lungs where the plutonium was located. Plutonium is an alpha emitter. The radiation from plutonium only travels a few cell diameters. So wherever that material is located, the tissue around that's going to be pretty heavy irradiated. So if you have too much there, you're going to kill the cells. But if you don't have enough there, you're lessening the chance of having the kind of reaction that would result in the cancer occurring down the road. We'd had other findings. We found that one of the early effects of inhaling something like plutonium was a decrease in the circulating lymphocytes. And I don't think we ever have worked out the mechanism for that happening, but amongst all these animals that had a sufficient amount of plutonium would show an early decrease in the circulating lymphocytes. Now I'll just stop here a second. I mentioned Frank Hungate who hired me. He was working there, working at the time, and we had discussions about that and thought, well, maybe this could be used in some helpful way. Thought that if you could use this in some way to knock down the lymphocytes and knock down the immune system in organ transplant people or even treat leukemia patients, it would be worth looking into. So Frank Hungate did develop an implantable blood irradiator that had radioisotopes in it and that you could actually implant into a person and run the blood vessel through it, so you're irradiating on a continuous basis the circulating blood. He had that and implanted it in dogs and in goats. He had had considerable interest from the commissions, but not enough money was put up to take it much further than that. So it never got into clinical trials. Anyway, that's a spin-off from that kind of research. Another we found, too, is that the plutonium was very insoluble, and so it was just like an insoluble metal. And it would accumulate when it was inhaled into the lungs. The clearance mechanism would actually move that plutonium into the lymph nodes. There are a number of lymph nodes throughout the lungs of man, but most of the effective ones are right around the bifurcation of the bronchi. And we found that the concentration of plutonium in these lymph nodes was, after a short time, was much higherthan the concentration in any of the tissue of the lungs. So this was a mechanism to protect the individual because we never saw any primary cancers originating in lymphatic tissue in any animal. So we had thousands of animals in our experiment. So that was a very interesting finding. And while I'm on the subject of plutonium, we also did some studies with plutonium-238, which is another isotope of plutonium. The 239 is used in the weapons, and the 238 is a shorter half-life plutonium. The plutonium-239 has a half-life of about 24,000 years. So, in a sense, it's not very radioactive. But plutonium-238 has a half-life, I think, of something like 80 years. It's very reactive--radioactive. In fact, it's so radioactive that it's hot, thermally hot. And if you take a particle of it—and we did see this frequently—and have it in a plastic, like Plexiglas, it would actually melt down into that, it was so hot. We did experiments with some of those particles, and they essentially melted tissue, but I don't think we ever saw any serious effects of the material. But the interesting thing about plutonium-238 was when you had the same form, oxide form, insoluble form, and animals inhaled it, it did not remain in the lungs or lymph nodes very long. More of it started to become soluble and move to the liver and other tissues like the skeleton. Well, at that time, this is in the early '60s, NASA and the Air Force were using plutonium-238 as a heat source in thermoelectric generators. They use them in space vehicles. They use solar panels for some of them, but this was a source that could be totally contained in a space vehicle. In fact, a number of those out in space are powered with plutonium-238. But they'd had—when they first started that program, they had a failure or two. I think one of them is called a SNAP device. I don't remember what that stands for—Space Nuclear something Program. But it burned up on reentry out in the Pacific, and the fuel at that time was pretty soluble, and it just spread all over the Earth. Everybody inhaled it--very small amounts. It's like fallout from weapons testing. And when we began to show them what the problem was with plutonium-238 oxides, they decided they’d better change their fuel source. And from there, they developed another one. It was actually a ceramic that was almost indestructible. It would withstand high temperature fires. So we did contribute to--our results did contribute to the space program and to the use of plutonium-238 as a heat source in these thermoelectric generators.
Bauman: I was going to ask you about—so, how were these inhalation experiments conducted in terms of the dogs? How were they--how did they inhale the—I guess what were the specifics of that?
Bair: Okay. All right, well, like I said already, we had to develop all this technology. And the important issue—well, several important issues--one, we had to do it without contaminating ourselves, and the second is we wanted to be able to control the amount they inhaled or at least to be able to measure it. First thing, it meant that in order to protect ourselves, we had to do it within a glovebox containment of some kind. So we had to work through gloves and all that kind of stuff. So then first, we started working with rodents, and we started mostly with mice and then rats. We got a plastic cylinder. We had good shops here at Hanford. They would build a plastic cylinder, probably that much in diameter, any height we wanted. And then we'd drill holes all around. The aerosol would be administered at the top, and we had a continuous airflow through it, and the exhaust would go through several different kinds of filters to make sure that none of it got out. Then we found that in order to contain the rats, for example, there was nothing better than the old fashioned Coke bottle. You know what I talking about--the Coke? Okay, well, we cut the bottoms off the Coke bottles, and that expanded area just was ideal for the lungs area of the rats. So we could put the rat in the bottle, put a rubber stopper in the back, and they were totally comfortable and could breathe very easily. And then we just plugged these bottles into these holes in the chamber. And then, of course, we collected aerosol samples during all this time, so we could actually get some idea of how much they were breathing. And then we also collected samples that we could characterize in terms of particle size. And that's one of the findings we did come up with, and we found that the particle size, the size of these particles, had a lot to do where the material deposited in the lungs and how long they stayed there and so forth.
Bauman: So how did that work with the dogs then?
Bauman: And so how long were you involved, then, with the inhalation toxicology, running that program?
Bair: Well, I think about it was about 1968 when Dr. Kornberg moved to another position. Dr. Kornberg had been hired by Herb Parker in 1947 to come here and take over the management of the biology program. This included the health and environmental sciences. And in about 1968, he took another position in the laboratory, and by that time, Battelle had come in and replaced General Electric. And I was fortunate enough to replace Dr. Kornberg as manager of the biology department, and that's when my hands-on research kind of went down the tube.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER]So how large of a department was that then in 1968?
Bair: I don't know. I would say--I think I have it on my cheatsheet, okay?
Bauman: That’s fine.
Bair: Actually, I didn't think about that. Yes, 214 people, or 200 people. And started out with a size of a group, I said here was two, and it grew to about 21 when they left the program.
Bauman: And so you said you weren't really doing research yourself then.
Bair: No, I was shuffling papers then. But I still wrote papers and certainly was working with the scientists who were doing the hands-on stuff, obviously.
Bauman: Yeah, so what sorts of things was the department doing in general?
Bair: When Battelle came in, things changed quite a bit. Before that, almost all of our research was directed toward Hanford production problems. I should mention a few, if it's okay. I think some of the most important work had to do with developing biokinetic models for the radionuclides. We had to develop--the protection was based on dose to people and individual organs. So, they had to develop models to describe where the radioactive materials would go when they went into the body. So a lot of work was done to develop these models. Another big program was in studying the ingestion of radioactive materials like plutonium. It was necessarily to know what percentage, what fraction of the material that you ate and went through GI tract would be absorbed. It turns out that you can eat a lot of plutonium without having very much of it go into your body. I think I tried to duplicate with some material, once, a big chunk before you'd ever have any health effects resulting from it. It's just so insoluble. Then another major program was developing methods to treat people who might be contaminated. We called it decorporation, trying to remove the—particularly plutonium—traces in the body's tissues. It's there. It's staying. You have to go to extreme means sometimes to get it to move out and excrete it. And that's what you want to do because you're reducing the dose in the process. So that really started pretty early on in the early '50s and then by John Blue and several others. Morris Sullivan came on about same time I did, and he kind of latched onto ingestion route of intake, studying the absorption across the gut wall, and also effects of ingestion of radioactive materials. That contributed a lot to the models used today. You'll see his papers referenced in many of the publications. Then the other was, as I mentioned, decorporation. The program was started on a small scale before I arrived, and another scientist, Vic Smith, arrived shortly afterwards. He was from Montana. He was a chemist and still here, incidentally. He went on and started working on that program and was very successful, and it was very important. It really paid off when we had that accident out at the 200 Areas, when a man by McCluskey was exposed to a big dose of americium. Vic Smith synthesized the DTPA, the drug to treat this man. So it really couldn't have been more timely. We had a guy here who could synthesize the drug and tailor fit it to the treatment. And actually today, it is the recognized treatment for any intake, accidental intake of many heavy elements like plutonium.
Bauman: And so you were—you directed the biology department beginning in 1968?
Bair: Yeah, I think it was about that time.
Bauman: How long did you do that, then?
Bair: I'm using my cheatsheet here. I can't remember. Yeah, it's about 1973. Okay, 1973, then it changed. The department was actually--I can't remember if it was still the AEC then or not. I think it might have been. They wanted somebody whose full attention would be paid to their programs here. So--[COUGH] excuse me. Maybe I should take a break and you can edit this out. They wanted somebody, I said, to have a full sense, a full-time responsibility of paying attention to their programs. And so Ed Alpen, who was the director at that time, convinced me that I should be the one to do that. And initially, I actually went back and worked half time at Germantown headquarters. That was not a good time for us. We had two boys in high school and another one in junior high school. It was a tough time for Barbara especially, because I would fly back to Washington, work for two weeks, come back here for two weeks, back and forth, and back and forth for—gosh—over a half a year. And then, finally, I took the position. By that time, they had a replacement for me as manager of the bio department, because I was actually doing, I think, three jobs at the time. And so then I was full-time director of the Life Science program, which included the environmental programs, the atmospheric sciences--everything that they funded. And I did that for several years—for a long time actually. Well, the title changed and some of the other things changed with it, but I did essentially that same job until about 1986, when they reorganized and the Life Sciences Center was formed, and I assumed responsibility for the Life Sciences. And that included toxicology, health physics, epidemiology, molecular biology, did I say toxicology?—some radiological physics. It was a broad-base health, medical program. It included considerable medical research too.
Bauman: That must have been a fairly large group.
Bair: I think I had something like 500 people.
Bauman: And you did that until when?
Bair: I did that until—well, I was trying to retire, but, why, they wouldn't let me retire until they got a replacement. And so I think I did that until '94, I think it was. I should send say something about Bill Wiley. Do you know the name?
Bauman: Sure, yeah.
Bair: Bill Wiley was a biologist. He was a molecular biologist. And I was manager of the biology department at the time, and his supervisor, his boss of that section, was moved to Seattle, up to the Battelle Center at Seattle. Yeah, it was the doings of people back in Columbus, the Indians, somebody over there. So he went over there. So I needed a replacement, so I twisted Bill Wiley's arm to take that job. He didn't want do it. [LAUGHTER] But I finally convinced him, that was the thing to do. And so I really lost a good scientist, but obviously the laboratory at Hanford got a darn good manager, and that worked out well. Eventually, I think he resigned himself to it, and was happy it went that way.
Bauman: So I was going to ask you a few questions. At some point, Hanford shifted from focus on production to focus on cleanup.
Bair: Mm-hmm.
Bauman: I was wondering how that shift impacted the sorts of things you did, or the people who were working with you at all?
Bair: No, I pretty much--I don't remember much of that happening until after I left. I know there was some concern out at the Tank Farm because there was some toxic gases coming off, and they were interested in our helping to try to identify them. But the cleanup hadn't really gotten--at least we were not involved in the--
Bauman: If I go back a little farther, President Kennedy visited Hanford in 1963.
Bair: Who?
Bauman: President Kennedy.
Bair: Okay.
Bauman: I wondered if you had memories of his visit at all—were you here, did you go to that?
Bair: No, I don't really--no, I don't remember much about that time. I can't remember. I remember his coming, but I don't remember--I didn't see him. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: Okay. What do you think were the most challenging aspects of the work you did at Hanford, and then what were sort of the most rewarding parts of it?
Bair: Well, probably the most challenging probably was not the science. It was what you had to put with as a manager. [LAUGHTER] I think I was happier as a scientist than I was as a manager. I probably ticked off a lot of the people who were providing support. Because I was probably not—they probably didn't view me as the most cooperative in many ways. But it was frequently frustrating. I know I had considerable issues with the team at salary time, because people in the salary administration didn't always agree with my assessment of performances of some of my staff. So I had to fight a lot of battles there. I had some successes. One of them I have to tell you about is that during the '60s, we were out at 100-F Area; the biology labs were out there. And during the '60s we were really trying to get new laboratories built in the 300 Areas. And we had everything going great for us, a design and everything, and all we needed done was the final authorization, the money. And it was around Christmas time. I don't remember exactly which year it was now--probably, I can't remember, '68, '69 maybe, '70. The local Kiwanis Club met at our house for a Christmas party. And Sam Volpentest was there. Do you know the name Sam Volpentest? And he came up and said, Bill, how's that new laboratory coming? And I said, it wasn't. I said that Nixon had sequestered the funds. You know the name sequester, that word? I don't think I'd heard it. I'd never heard it before that, or I don't think I've heard it since then until recently. But the money was sequestered by Nixon. Well, Sam said, well, you know, I'm going to be in Washington next week. I'll see what I can do. And I think it was within two weeks, that money was turned loose, and we got our building. He made a believer out of me, and probably a lot of other people though the years. So, I felt that was a success.
Bauman: Any other events that stand out to you as look back at your years at the Hanford or incidents or strange occurrences or unique things that kind of happened?
Bair: Well, I know we had a few threats of a union strike. And since we were way out there, we spent a few nights sleeping on the autopsy table because we had to have somebody there in case something happened. But it wasn't until much later though, that we had any union members, the animal caretakers, I think, not until after we moved in here did they join the union. So most of the people working out there, scientists, scientific staff, were not union. But the craftsmen were, so we dealt with them. We had no problems working with those people. We just had to obey the rules. I remember one situation. We were—well, we talked about beagle dogs. I'll tell you how we got those. At first we tried buying them. And when you buy anything in the government, you have to go out and bid, and the lowest bid wins. Well, I remember one shipment of dogs came in—beagle dogs came in. Those dogs are about that high. They had the longest legs of any beagles I'd ever seen or could even imagine. I don't know what they were called. So we shipped those back. But after a few episodes like that, we decided we had to raise our own dogs, so we developed our own colony. We had three strains of beagles. We got some from Davis, California. Actually, Washington State had a beagle colony over there, I forgot to mention that. And we got another source from I can't remember where else. We had three strains, so we can minimize the inbreeding, and we did have a geneticist down in Portland who would guide us in our breeding program so we wouldn't have any problems that way. Let’s see. What else was I going to mention? I can't remember now what else.
Woman one: Bill, can I ask you something?
Bair: Yeah.
Woman one: So Gary Peterson always tells me to ask you about the alligators out there?
Bair: Oh, jeez.
Woman one: [LAUGHTER]
Bair: Gary was a neighbor. Of course, I knew him when I worked out there too. He was one of the guys I used to bug. Well, there was an aquatic physiologist out there who had gotten some alligators. He was going to do some radiation studies with them. But before he could get started, he left for another job. But while he was there, he did have alligators in the pond out behind the lab out there. It was not too far from the Columbia River. And I think one of them got loose, went into the Columbia River, and some fisherman found it, turned it into a sports' shop downtown, and it was displayed and all that kind of fuss, all that kind of stuff. And then when he left, being a radiation biologist, I knew that nothing was known the sensitivity of alligators to radiation. So I said, well, rather than having them destroyed, I'll take them. So I volunteered to take them, used the same facilities. Except I thought that we ought to beef it up a little bit. So there was a chain-link fence around it, and we had plywood put around also and wired to it. And then, for some reason, those alligators were able to squeeze those boards apart and get loose. Well, there were five of them that had got loose. Three of them were irradiated, and two of them were controls. Well, I talked to, I think, probably Gary Peterson. He was in public relations at the time. And we agreed that it would smart this time, rather than let somebody find them, we will report it to the media. So we did. But at the time, it was not very good because we were still working for General Electric at that time. So that dates it then for us. That night a Vice President from General Electric arrived in town. He got up the next morning and looked at the newspaper. There it was--big headlines--alligators released to the Columbia River by General Electric scientists and all that kind of stuff. And he raised hell. He jumped on W. Johnson, who was the plant manager. He jumped on Herb Parker, who worked for him, and he jumped on Harry Kornberg, who was my boss. So guess who—so I was ordered to put out a search team on the Columbia River until we found those alligators, and we did. I had a crew go out every day. And every week, every Friday, I had to turn in a report. They went to W. Johnson what we did to find the alligators. Well, at that time, the reactors were operating. So water along the shore was still pretty warm from the cooling water, and so the alligators kind of hung along the shore. I think we caught all but two. I think there was one control left and one irradiated. I figured the irradiated one died. But sure enough, in process, I think another alligator crawled up by a fisherman. I can't remember now. But I think maybe by the end of the year, we had gone out. We never found anymore alligators, and so there was still those two missing. And I finally got a note back from Parker saying I could relax the hunt for the alligators. But, you know, in subsequent years, I had calls from people. I had a call from some Wildlife guy over on the other side of the river. That was back--gosh, that must have been in the '80s. He wanted to know what I knew about alligators in the Columbia River. I said “nothing,” and hung up. [LAUGHTER] And then there was another one, I think, more recent than that. I can't remember now. But that's the story of the alligators. Well, actually, it was interesting, also, the alligators were really not very sensitive to radiation. But we did find that the sensitivity varied with the temperature at which the alligators were kept. If you put them in warmer water, the effects were magnified, were increased. So their metabolism had a lot to do with the effects occurring in these cold blooded animals, which no surprise there.
Bauman: So what was the time period when this happened?
Bair: Well, it was the early '60s, so it was before General Electric. So it must have been like '63 probably.
Bauman: I wanted to ask you another question, too, about these inhalation studies. You mentioned earlier that beagles were sort of ideal for this. What made them ideal? Was it their trainability?
Bair: Their size. Their trainability. Because an awful lot of data had been collected by other laboratories on their physiology and biochemistry, diseases, everything. So we didn't have to do all that background work. We had it already--the pathology, everything. All we had to do was to go to the literature. So they were made to order. Another animal would have been more ideal in terms of respiratory tract. Believe it or not, a horse's respiratory tract is more like man's than most of the other species. We looked into getting miniature horses, but, well, that didn't go very far. They were going to be too expensive. I should say--you didn't mention anything about the swine, about the pigs we had out there. One of the early studies out there, of course, was studies on radioiodine. I'm going to mention sheep first. When Parker came here, he knew that there was going to be a problem with radioiodine being released because he'd seen that happen on Oak Ridge. And so he had the experimental animal farm, which was led by Leo Bustad. We haven't mentioned Leo, but I should, because he was a graduate veterinarian from Washington State University, and he was hired here in '48, I think, by Parker. He worked here until the mid '60s, and then he went down to Davis, California for several years, quite a few years. Then he became dean of the Vet School over at WSU. So roundabout--and, in fact, there's a building with his name on it, the vet school. Anyway, his first job was to do studies on the uptake and effects of radioiodine in sheep. And the sheep, because they were raising animals in the area, and there was obvious concern about what would happen if they got into the sheep. There were also cattle. They did a study with cattle. Those were very important studies because there were claims later on from people and farmers, sheep farmers in Utah about sheep being exposed to fallout. While the results from the lab here from Leo’s studies really proved that it was not radiation. They were eating a toxic weed that caused the death of those sheep. The farmers, I don't think they believe us yet. But that's really what happened. We also did studies with pigs, because, as Leo said, you could take the GI tract of a pig and put it next to a GI tract from a man, and you'd never be able to distinguish the two. They looked exactly the same, so they did ingestion studies with pigs. Now, they have developed a miniature pig that would weigh, when it was full size, about 180 pounds. A standard man—a standard man for most calculations, is considered to be 180-pound man. And then he also developed a miniature white pig for skin studies. So he could—white skin is obviously better for skin studies than a normal pig color skin. Anyway, I need to mention those two studies because they were very important.
Bauman: So those were in inhalations?
Bair: They were not inhalation. We did try an inhalation experiment with sheep, with iodine-131 at one time, and only once. A sheep has no control over its bodily functions. It was a mess.
Bauman: So you were involved with that program until about 1968. How long did the inhalation studies continue?
Bair: They continued--in fact, they developed into a very profitable toxicology program, inhalation toxicology program at Battelle, and I think it's just now recently closed down. So it got off to a good start and had a long run.
Bauman: And how about the animal studies in general, how long did those continue? Was there ever any sort of opposition to that from the public at all?
Bair: No, actually, we fared very well. Our veterinarians were very astute about those kinds of situations. Our public relations people, Gary Peterson and his people, they would talk to us before they responded to anything, so we worked together to avoid problems. And we thought we would have, when we moved our dogs into the 300 Area because you could hear them bark on certain days. But we never had a [INAUDIBLE]. None of these outfits got to us, and they were over in Seattle. They caused problems over there--PETA and those people.
Bauman: Obviously security was a very important part of Hanford site. I'm assuming you had special security clearance. I wonder if security impacted your work at all?
Bair: No, it really didn't. I think the first impact was when people came here for an interview. We were interviewed at the hotel. And we never saw where we were working until we got here. Have you ever been out to 100-F Area?
Bauman: A long time ago.
Bair: A long time ago. Okay, well, it looks like a prison. No windows. So first the first thought when you go in there, your first day of work, you know, what am I getting into? But inside it was a really good lab. But that was a first impression. The security, of course, we had the security clearance, and we had to have every paper we published cleared by the security people. Parker, I think, he read everything that we published, and then the security people went over it. The only thing that they objected to was anything that referenced the amount of radioactive material that went into the river, concentrations of radionuclidesin the Columbia River, any releases or anything like that. Because they felt that that was a possible way of somebody finding out how much plutonium was being produced. I don't know how, but I'm sure there were people monitoring the temperature and things like that.
Bauman: You mentioned earlier--you mentioned Herbert Parker. Are you involved with the Parker Foundation, and or have you been?
Bair: Well, I founded it.
Bair: Yeah, I knew Herb from the day I arrived here, and he was a tough manager—really tough. He didn't give you any slack. [LAUGHTER] Things had to be just right, and people who did stupid things had a tough time with him. But he insisted on quality, integrity. He really, really had high standards for everything we get did out there. And he supported our research fully. As I said before, I think he read everything we wrote, so he knew what was going on. He also was a strong supporter of a symposium series that we put together, back in about—it started about 1960. We had an annual symposia in biology and included the environmental sciences, too. He was a strong supporter of that. I worked with him. He was my boss at one time. I worked with him very much in the Institutional Review Board, setting up a human subjects kind of a review. So when he died, I felt that he ought to be recognized in some way, and I knew, of course, that he has interest in education, and so I talked to a couple people at PNNL, the controller of the time, I think it was--I can't remember who it was. [INAUDIBLE], I think—and decided to go in and set it up as a not-for-profit. It wasn't associated with Battelle or anybody else, a not-for-profit foundation. We went to the state and got all that approved and so forth. Then the whole idea was to have an annual lecture sponsored by the Parker Foundation to coincide with the symposia each year. And so we did that for a number of years. Then, when I retired, I felt that there was a good chance that Battelle was not going to be around forever because their contract was limited. And Battelle was helping us fund the lectures, so their money, their support was helpful--very important, actually. So I talked to Doug Olesen, who was head of Battelle at the time and he agreed that there ought to be some way of being sure it was maintained in perpetuum some way. So I talked Jim Cochran, who was--he wasn't called Chancellor, I don't think, was he?
Bauman: Dean, it was Dean.
Bair: Dean, yeah, and I was amazed at his enthusiasm. [LAUGHTER] I thought I was going to have to sell something, but I didn't. And Ron Waters, at the time, was on board. He had replaced me. So we talked to Jim, and he explained, and the rules haven't changed to this day, as far as I know. He told us that we had to get $25,000 before we could actually have it identified as a separate entity within the foundation, and so that was our initial goal. So that's taken off, and a number of other people have joined the board, and several of them have died, of course, through the years. And I'm hopeful that it will continue, because not only for the fact that I want to see Parker continue to be recognized for what he did here, but I think it has an opportunity to provide some real benefits to the WSU and the community. So it's kind of, in a sense, now a dual thing. We have the fund which is associated with the WSU foundation, but then we also have the foundation as a state—whatever the terminology is. So we can operate independently if we need to. If we want to do something that WSU may not want to be associated with, I don't what it would be, but anyway.
Bauman: Most of the students I teach now were born after the Cold War ended.
Bair: Mm-hmm. Probably that’s true.
Bauman: And I teach a course on the Cold War.
Bair: Oh, great.
Bauman: For some of them it's something they did not live through at all. So I wonder if you could talk about, especially in thinking about future generations or even the current young generation, who wouldn't really have lived through the Cold War, what do you think is important for them to know about working at Hanford, especially during this Cold War period?
Bauman: Yeah, if you would.
Bair: Okay. Well, when the Chernobyl accident occurred, we had, at that time, the atmospheric sciences people had a couple of airplanes here. And I heard some indication that that cloud from that accident was coming this direction. So we put those planes up to collect samples all the way down the coast. And since that was part of my program at the time, I had a lot of interest in the possibility of doing that. And I had full support of the people back in headquarters. People downtown here weren't all that enthusiastic about it, but I had support from the people who were paying the bill. And so we got some the first information about the fallout from Chernobyl coming down to the United States here. And then I was involved in meetings in Vienna and also at Chernobyl and looking at the health aspects and predictions of health aspects. I chaired a committee for the DOE at that time of scientists looking at the health environmental aspects of it and put out a report or so.
Bauman: So you essentially worked at Hanford for almost 40 years, roughly.
Bair: Well, I started in '54, and '64.
Bauman: Ended upin like '94, something like that?
Bair: That’s right, '54 to '94.
Bauman: You must have seen a lot of changes take place. I'm wondering, what were some of the more significant changes you saw take place both at Hanford and maybe even in the community of Richland itself?
Bair: Well, I think the biggest change in Hanford, and then I'd say, several ways--maybe I can just start. One change is that when General Electric was here, we had one management, one boss. It was the plant boss, okay? And I’ve looked at since then, can anybody count the number of bosses we have here in this place now? I don't know how they keep track of everything that's going on. It's so spread out and so—So fortunately, I haven't had to deal with any of that, but I've just seen it happen. It seems like it’s impossible. And I mentioned that to Doc Hastings once, and he said, well, it's a lot more complicated now. Well, you know, I think about what could be more complicated than building reactors and producing plutonium and separating it all out for the first time? So anyway. Then the other thing, of course, from the Battelle standpoint, is that the program has diversified. So we've had people doing all kinds of things, and it started during my time. We had big chunk of the artificial heart program at one time, using pigs. In fact, people don't know this, I'm sure, that some of the basic research done for ultrasound--you go in for a ultrasound these days--some of the basic work was really down here by Mel Sycoff, who was a biologist who did work on neonatal and fetal systems, and John Dykeman and Percy Hildebrand, they were the engineers setting up the system. That was the basic work for it. I don't know what happened. I assume Battelle must have gotten some patents and sold them to somebody. Then also some of the veterinarians got involved with the material sciences. People who developed the tooth implants and also implants for joints. They developed a complex metal void system. It was like a metal sponge with lots of holes in it. I can't remember whether it was zirconium or what kind of metal it was now. But so the bone tissue would grow into it, and you wouldn't have to use glue and cements like they use now. Same thing with tooth implants, same kind of system. So the bone would actually grow in. And they had implanted these in pigs. Now can you imagine any human having a stronger bite than a pig?[LAUGHTER] So those really were very well supported tooth implants. So there was a number of outgrowths of the program that paid off.
Bauman: Is there anything that I haven't asked you about or anything you haven't had a chance to talk about yet that you would like to talk about?
Bair: While I was managing these programs, I did get involved in a number of activities off-site. [INAUDIBLE]. Well, I'll mention a couple of them. I got involved in the Marshall Islands situation. You know, the Marshall Islands where they conducted the weapons tests? There was one particular island where they had done these one-point detonations where they did--it was called safety shots where they were just detonating a weapon and spewing plutonium all over the place. It was not a nuclear detonation. It was just a chemical detonation, in a sense. So the Army was involved in trying to clean that up, and so I got involved in chairing a committee that was going to advise them on how they should do that and so forth. So that was a kind of an interesting experience. I got to ride helicopters all around the islands out there and sleep in the admiral's quarters. [LAUGHTER] Actually, they built a dome over one of the craters, after they hauled the contaminated dirt and dumped it in one of the craters. Then they filled it in with concrete. Anyway, I went out there one day in a helicopter and landed on top of it--that dome. So I had some cool experiences that way. And the Marshallese were concerned about their health and the health of their children as a result of being exposed to all that. So the Department of Energy wanted to write some booklets to try and explain to them what the health risks were. And so I, with two other people, Jackie Lee from Los Alamos, and a scientist from DOE, we co-authored three books, one on Bikini, one on Eniwetok, and one on the Northern Marshall Islands, trying to describe in the Marshallese language what the risk was for those people living there and their descendants and so forth, and try to explain what happened. We worked with a missionary from the Marshall Islands. She was a—I can't remember what church. She had translated the Bible into one of the languages out there, so she worked with us. And also we had an editor from here, Ray Ballman, who lives across the river here. He actually has a PhD in French. That didn't make him able to speak Marshallese, but he understood how you translate. And so the book was actually written in Marshallese and translated into English. So we the books actually had the Marshallese language version and in paragraphs below that, the English. I don't know whether it to helped the Marshallese understand the situation or not, but it was, I think, a worthwhile effort and certainly very interesting to work with those people. I have a lot of respect for those Marshallese people who were essentially pushed off their land.
Bauman: What time period was this, 1950s?
Bair: This was--I did this work in the 1980s.
Bauman: Oh, in the 1980s.