Northwest Public Television | Watson_Madge
Man one: --Pretty good shape.
Robert Bauman: Okay.
Man one: Okay. I'm up. I'm rolling.
Bauman: Okay.
Man two: I’m rolling.
Bauman: Okay. All right. Well, why don't you go ahead and say your name just for the record first?
Madge Watson: Madge Watson. When I came, I was Madge Shardlow.
Bauman: And what was your last name?
Watson: Shardlow.
Bauman: How do you spell that?
Watson: S-H-A-R-D-L-O-W.
Bauman: Okay. Thank you very much. My name's Robert Bauman, and I'm conducting an oral history interview with Madge Watson. Today is July 17th of 2013, and the interview's being conducted on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. And we'll be talking today about your experiences working at the Hanford site. So I wonder if you could tell me first how you came to Hanford, what brought you here, how you heard about the place, and when that was.
Watson: I came in '48, and I was graduating. I was in my senior year at Washington State, Pullman, and I had my degree in bacteriology and public health. And they recruited on campus, and all they would say is, we can't tell you what you're going to be doing. It's very secretive. But you have just the background for it. So it kind of left you wondering what I was doing, but you had to have the FBI clearance and a medical test and all of that. But before long, I got the letter asking if I would like to work here and what to do. And so I said I'll start on the 1st of July. That was '48, and that was the year the Columbia flooded, and it really flooded, and they had put up the dike here. But I don't think I had ever been in this area before. I grew up in Spokane Valley, and we always went up in the mountains when we had time off. So I came down thinking, I'll try it for a year and see how I like it. And so I came down by train, and friends who lived in Kennewick met another girl who had the same degree I did and was coming down just for the summer, and took us to the George Washington Way hiring center there to check in. But you couldn’t—the bridge was washed out of the Yakima, so you had to go over Bombing Range Road, which was just a dirt road, and over the old bridge on the Yakima. Came in, and they said, well, housing is really scarce, because we've used all available housing for people who have been affected by the flood. But they took us out to North Richland to a barracks that had not been used in I don't know how long. It was so dirty, you couldn't believe it. They dropped us off, and they said, you go over here to get your meals—an enormous place there. But we get busy and cleaned up the room that we were assigned to, and went over to get something to eat for lunch and walked into the biggest room I had ever seen. And I didn't see another woman in there. And the girl I was with was blonde and very striking, and there were all these calls, and we thought, what are we into here? [LAUGHTER] So we went back and packed up our bags, our suitcases--we didn't have much--and hitchhiked back into town and went to where they had brought us out from and said, we really don't like it out there. [LAUGHTER] Do you have anything else? Not realizing that people were waiting months to get into town at that time. And they said, who hired you? And we said the right answer. So they found us housing just in back of where the Federal Building is, right away. And coming out of school, it was fine, because everybody was in together, and it was just a regular room with one bed and one dresser and a shower and a bathroom on each floor—it was two stories high. So we settled down and caught our bus and went out to work and found out we were in the water treatment plant for 100 F, and the man who was our supervisor--and I can't think of his name--but he had developed the systems that were used for water treatment in cities. All the new ones were using his design. And so we walked in, and he said, we've got a couple of college graduates, and let us loose on equipment we had never seen before. [LAUGHTER] Washington State didn't have that type of equipment. And so we worked on it, and it was very basic chemistry, so it wasn't anything that was difficult at all. But they started having trouble with the screens clogging up. And so they looked through the files at anybody that had any biological training. They put about six or seven of us in a separate room, gave us microscopes and books, and we learned about diatoms and all of the plankton that might follow screens, and worked on that for several months. And when that project was finished, I was asked if I would like to work in the fisheries building. Well, my mother and father and I all liked fish. I thought that sounded like a good place. So my first supervisor was Jared Davis. He was an entomologist, again, from Washington State. And caddisflies were his specialty. But what they were doing out there is wanting to know what the effect of the reactors that were running would have on the river, especially the fish. They were concerned about that. So we got out there, and it was the winter of '49, I think it was. It was so cold that when we went down to the river to take an area and get all the various things that were in the water off. If you took the rock out of the water, it froze immediately, so you had to do all your gathering under the water there. But I learned so much, because Jared was a good teacher. And it was very interesting, because the fisheries part had been there for several years. Dr. Foster, Dick Foster, was in charge of that. He'd come from the University of Washington. And to know exactly what was happening on the river from the many reactors that were taking the water in and coming out radioactive on some of the things, they had to go through all the different stages of plankton, the insects, the algae, all the various things that were in the river. And so it was really exciting. I brought a greeny that shows--I would like to show you. It wasn't very fancy at all. It was just a Quonset hut, and in between that was a counting—where you could do your counting of your samples. And then on the other side was another Quonset hut with a greenhouse behind it. And they were just getting started. Everybody was new. I would say practically all except the top people had just come out of school. They'd been in the service, and they were really anxious to get going. There was very little known about the effect of radiation on anything at that time. So it was all brand new, and if there was anything known, it was classified, and you had to get it out of the classified material on it. So we did everything. We had places where we grew the things in the lab, where we could have a controlled experiment. We sampled up and down the river. We had a boat that had a driver that could take us out on the river. We could set nets. We could get plankton nets. We could do all kinds of things like that. So every day was new and different, and everything you did led to something else that you wanted to try and find out why. What was doing what was happening? And so what I'm really trying to get across to you is how everybody came so enthused. They had studied in school. They were going to put this to use now, and it was really a very interesting, exciting place to work. I even learned to drive a weapons carrier that you had to double clutch. [LAUGHTER] I'd never thought I'd have to--
Bauman: When did you have to drive that?
Watson: We sampled in areas up and down off along the shore out deep. We tried everything, so at that time, they would never let it--when I looked at the job, I know my adviser said, Madge, if you go with--GE was running it—you won't find that you're handicapped by being a woman, that you will have your chances, and it was certainly true. I had every chance to do everything that anybody else did.
Bauman: Were there many other women working in the fishery area?
Watson: In the fisheries area, there weren't many. But as time went on, more and more came, but—no, there weren't actually. There was Jared and Ray Kupi and, of course, Dick was in charge of it. So they had the regular fish runways that you see. They had ponds outside that were there.
Bauman: So it was a fairly small group of people.
Watson: It was. It was. In fact, the lab that we had would be about 20 feet long and about eight or nine feet wide. We had a hood at one end, and we had Bunsen burners out everywhere. And I remember that one of the men that was there was—I had hair that was very long, and he was sure I was going to go up in flames. [LAUGHTER] So I would braid it or do something with it to keep it out of the way, because we were just learning and experimenting as we went.
Bauman: And so clarify, where was the location of these Quonset huts that you--?
Watson: They were not at the main building at 100 F that biology had started up. But they had been put up very early to try and figure out, because everybody was concerned about what effect it would have on the salmon there. I brought along an interesting article on Dick Foster's talking about it, and it has the layout of the place. I don't know if you want to try and get pictures of that eventually or not.
Bauman: Maybe we could after.
Watson: Yeah, afterwards.
Man one: Before you answer the next one, would you tip your glasses just a hair? If you just lift them up on your ear just a little bit like this way.
Bauman: Just sort of down a little.
Man one: So they tip down just a little bit. I don't want them to be uncomfortable for you.
Watson: No, they aren't.
Man one: I don't want you to feel like you have to move in a funny way. I'm just getting more reflection than I want.
Watson: Reflection than you want, sure.
Man one: That's great. Thank you so much. Sorry about that.
Watson: Sure.
Bauman: No problem. So let's talk a bit about the area. You talked about first arriving and the situation with the housing. What were your impressions of Richland and the Tri-Cities in those early days here?
Watson: It was really fun. Living in the dorm, they had so much trouble losing people because of the dust storms, and it was pretty primitive conditions all right. But they put on classes every night, because there was no recreation here for anybody. So I took accounting. I took fly tying. I took hat-making. All kinds of different things. But you only stayed in town about two weekends out of the whole year. People didn't have cars then, which would seem so strange to my grandchildren. [LAUGHTER] But they didn't, but everybody had an FBI clearance. So where you worked, they would put up—the ones with cars would put up where they were going. And you signed up, and then you went with them. So I went in every direction there was from here going places, all with people that--
Bauman: So how did you get to the site? Did you take buses then? Is that how you got to and from the site?
Watson: Yes. You got up, and you had a bus that cane by and took you to—there's still the bus transfer station there, and it was much, much larger, of course, at that time. And you got on there, and it was really interesting, because there were so few women going out to the areas that very often the men would stand aside and let the women on first. I'm sure that doesn't happen anymore. [LAUGHTER] But it did then.
Bauman: And so you mentioned having security clearance. Obviously, security was a very important part of the Hanford site.
Watson: It was.
Bauman: I wondered if you'd talk about that a little more and any issues with that.
Watson: I'll go from the very first when, of course, the FBI went out and asked neighbors, and a neighbor called my mother and said, the FBI called about Madge, but I didn't tell them a thing. [LAUGHTER] But we had safety meetings one week. We had security meetings the other week. It was really drilled into you that you did not talk about what went on out in the plant and what you were doing. And I really realized that just this year when my daughter was asking me, Mom, you never talked about it. And I realized when I could, I hadn't. Evidently, it just was instilled so much into me not to talk about it. I've been with you all these years, and I didn't even know some of these things that you did. But she knew the people, because the people that you worked with became fast friends, and they truly were fast friends.
Bauman: Now, the people you worked with, did they come from all over the United States?
Watson: They did. They truly did. I worked this little Quonset hut that had the greenhouse, eventually. The next year, my husband-to-be, Don Watson, came, and he was a fisheries biologist, and they evidently, when they knew we were going to get married, they asked if I'd like to go work in the building next door. So I did. And it was very interesting work too, because they were just starting up, and we went out and went all over, even up to Saddle Mountain taking plant samples and doing the same thing that I'd done before there. And then you probably know of Leo Bustad who came. We had had biochemistry together in college, but he used a sheep as an experimental animal. And the place for that was just in back of where the Quonset was with the greenhouse. And so he needed bacteriological work done when he did postmortems on the animals. And so I got an autoclave and microscope and everything for working. And it was interesting, because there had been a close collaboration between Kadlec Hospital and here, out in the area. And so they did blood work every couple of weeks on everybody to--not that often. Maybe once a month. And so you got to know them. But it was good. You didn't have to have everything here. You could get the auger that you needed, the various dyes, and things like that from the hospital. So all the different groups worked together very well.
Bauman: And so Kadlec would do blood tests on everyone regularly? Is that what you're--
Watson: I assume it was Kadlec that did it. I really don't know for sure now whether they had—they came out to the area. You didn't go in there. They came out to the area, and you just did that. But I know that we worked very closely with Kadlec, and some of the people that worked there were the staff of the hospital too there, so it was very much a collaborative effort.
Bauman: Now you mentioned your husband was a fisheries biologist. Did you meet at work then?
Watson: We did meet at work. He took me fishing, and I caught a fish with a fly I tied myself, and we were married within five months. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: So I imagine that most of the people you knew in Richland were connected to Hanford, in some way, worked there.
Watson: They were. And every kind of things you got out on the bus. The first time when I got on the bus, I sat down in an aisle seat, and one of the fellows said, do you play bridge? I said, yes. He said, good. Turn around. And out comes the boards they had that would fit between the seats on the aisle there. And so you always had the seat waiting for you there to do that.
Bauman: I wonder if you could talk about maybe what were the most rewarding parts of the work you did or maybe some of the most challenging aspects of the work.
Watson: I worked with a series of people. After I had worked there and worked with Leo and then with Dr. Berry on another part, I went up to the main offices, and I worked with Dr. Porter, Dr. John Porter. He was growing algae, single cell algae, to do the biochemistry using radioactive materials on there. And it was really interesting, because I learned an aspect—I'd had the medical part, but I hadn't had it using it as experimental. And in all these, it was like being in grad school. You were paid for what you were doing, but you learned so much with everything. You learned. And I think all of us just felt challenged.
Bauman: So how long did you work at Hanford, and at what point did you stop working there and why?
Watson: When I was expecting my first child, then I stopped working. And I did not go back, but I have, over the years, used so much of what I learned. I was interested in League of Women Voters, and that was at the time the Clean Water Act was doing. And I handed out petitions, and I set up—I attended the meeting on the Columbia as a representative from the local league, and then was asked to set up one on the Snake and on the Yakima River, where we got all the users of water. And since my father and mother had a fruit and vegetable farm that was irrigated, I certainly knew the farming end of it. And what we were trying to do is get people together to understand water and the uses of the water. And one of the things that I was proudest of was the fact that it was the first time an Indian nation had accepted and taken responsibility for attending. At that time, their attorneys and their biologists were non-Native American. But today, it's very different. But we got people to talk in that way. The Yakima River, which at the time, was the dirtiest river in the state, we even had a meat processing plant that the water was taken in, and effluent went right back out into the river at the time. So a lot has been accomplished. But it takes time with everything.
Bauman: Was your interest in the Clean Water Act connected to the work you had done at Hanford then?
Watson: Yes, because I'd really gotten interested in the water, and, of course, my husband continued to work out there. He started in '49 doing the salmon counts, the red counts in which are the nests in the river. And nobody else could stand to be in a plane where they put the tip down and just circled around as you counted with a little clicker, the reds, to count them. And so he did that for over 40 years. So I had many different interests in water.
Bauman: Sure. So when you worked the site in the fisheries area, did you find any significant impact from Hanford, other—on the river or on the fish?
Watson: They thought it was going to be temperature, but it wasn't temperature. It was the chromium that they put in to—I think it was to stabilize the equipment that was in there. And that's what it was. And so we ran a bunch of tests on different levels of chromium and what would be toxic and would not be toxic.
Bauman: That was the sort of major finding you had.
Watson: That was. And the change in temperature was enough that they found that some of the bacteria that affected the fish were more—with the warmer water it was much harder on them.
Bauman: So what year was it then? You said that you were expecting your first child. What year was it?
Watson: That was '55.
Bauman: '55, okay. So I was going to ask you, I know an event that a lot of people were here at the time remember President Kennedy visited in 1963 to dedicate the N Reactor. I know you weren't working at Hanford Site anymore, but obviously it was something that the people in the community were very interested in, so I wonder if you have any memories of that.
Watson: I do. I lived on Butternut Street at the time. We had 50 preschool children on that street. So two of us mothers took our children and headed out to see it. And if you could see the number of cars—and so we thought we were being really clever tying a band on the antenna, on the car radio antenna. Well, so did everybody else. We looked and looked for our car [LAUGHTER] when it was through. But it was a fun time.
Bauman: Is there anything, any major events, other dignitaries visiting, or sort of incidents or anything that sort of stands out during your time working there that you remember?
Watson: Well, you did meet just about everybody, because there were so few when I was there that they came through looking to see what was being done. So you got to meet them. But those--what really stands out in my mind is how everybody cooperated. It really was a fun way to do it.
Bauman: Yeah. I'm going to shift a little bit and ask you a bit more about the community of Richland. You mentioned being involved in the League of Women Voters. And you also served on the city council. I wondered if you could talk about that, about what led you to get involved and what the community of Richland was like in the '50s and '60s.
Watson: Well, I said I was interested in League of Women Voters, and the first mayor was very interested in getting it. And one of the things that I did after I was not working out here any longer was I helped the school to establish a program that the principal said I've got children who've had all kinds of help in reading, and they still can't read, and they're smart as can be. And what's happening? So five of us went together and found a program, Slingerlands, and we spent an hour each day with one child, and it's using all the senses and figuring out which sense the child uses to learn to read, and a lot of repetition. And one child I had was dyslexic. But there's all different kinds of reasons for it. We just didn't know. And one of the gals there said—I had been asked if I would serve on the planning commission. And I had been doing this for about five years, and she said, Madge, I think you can make more of a difference there. So I did do that for six years, but in that time, I had always been interested in water, and so I was asked to serve on the state board on water. And I did that for a while. So everything kind of intertwines in what you do.
Bauman: So what time period was that then that you served on the planning committee and city council member?
Watson: Well, it must have been late '60s, early '70s. And then I was on the city council. I was appointed to the council, and then served a two-year term on it too. And then I decided that was enough meetings.
Bauman: That was good? [LAUGHTER] Now was your service on the state water board around the same time then?
Watson: Yes.
Bauman: One of things, obviously, happening with Richland is it was a government town obviously, when you first moved here, and that changed at some point. I was wondering if you wanted to talk about that at all? Do you have any memories of that or anything that stands out about that?
Watson: Before it became--when it was a government town, you couldn't get a house until you had children. And so we were in the George Washington apartments just next to the Uptown there for five years. And then went up to a ranch house. And that was heaven. [LAUGHTER] And then when they sold the houses, we bought it, and after several years, decided we liked the area. But we built a home just in back of Jason Lee School.
Bauman: So when the federal government gave you the option to purchase, then, was when you bought the home?
Watson: Mm-hmm. Yeah. It certainly was a very generous offer.
Bauman: Were there any--in the '50s, late '40s into the '50s, you mentioned there wasn't a lot of entertainment.
Watson: No.
Bauman: Were there any community events? At some point, Atomic Frontier Days started at some point. Any things like that?
Watson: Yes, I can remember the parades when the children were just really small that they had those. When you get that many people together, there were the mountaineers. There were all these different groups that did things together on the weekends. So there were activities, but there just weren't that many cars around. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: So I wonder if overall you could—what your thoughts were about the years that you worked at Hanford, what it was like as a place to work, your assessment of that.
Watson: I really didn't have any--I had grown up on the farm, and we worked on the farm. And all the time I was in college, I was a teaching assistant, because they didn't have any graduate students to do it, so I was doing that in chemistry. And so I don't have a lot to compare it to. But it was a very friendly place, and everybody knew somebody either through work or through where they lived. But there truly wasn't much to do. There was a movie theater, but it wasn't very big. And there weren't many places to eat.
Bauman: Is there anything I haven't asked you about that you would like to talk about or a memory that you haven't shared yet that you think would be good to share?
Watson: When I was looking through the material that I had in there, what really struck me was how long the friendships have been and how steadfast they have been. And it really--nobody had family here. So we were each other's family, and so you really got to know people in a way that I don't think you do in most places.
Bauman: Well, thank you very much for coming and sharing your memories and your experiences.
Watson: You’re welcome.
Bauman: I really appreciate it.
Everett Weakley: And there I worked in the lead process for years. And then I moved over later—
[VIDEO CUTS]
Douglas O’Reagan: My name is Douglas O’Reagan. I’m conducting an oral history interview with Everett A. Weakley on January 13th, 2016. Interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. And I will be talking with Everett, or Ev—would you prefer Everett, or--?
Weakley: Just—yeah, Ev or Everett. Either one.
Douglas O’Reagan: Okay. About his experiences working on the Hanford site. Okay, well thanks for being here. So—you were just telling me while we were having some camera issues—I’d love to hear about sort of how you got involved with the Hanford site, what you were working on that brought you here, and then your sort of early years, what you were working on here.
Weakley: Well, they came up to University of Idaho and recruited people. And I was one of the ones they recruited. So I came down here, and they put me on work at the tritium program extraction process. So I was a process control engineer at that time.
O’Reagan: Do you know why they recruited you? Were you working in physics?
Weakley: They were after engineers, especially chemical engineers at that time.
O’Reagan: I see. Did you know anything about nuclear science specifically?
Weakley: Oh, no. We didn’t know squat. [LAUGHTER] Of course. Because we were up at University of Idaho. But it was a lot better than being drafted and sent to Korea.
O’Reagan: How much were they able to tell you about the job before they hired you?
Weakley: Very little. Very little. They didn’t tell us what was going on. They came down here and they put some people—engineers in this job, some in this job. I was selected for tritium extraction.
O’Reagan: Mm-hmm. Could you tell me about your first experiences on that job? What sort of the first month or two like? Do you remember?
Weakley: Well, they put us on shift work. I think it was called XYZ shift. And it was only five days a week, but it was—changed. So they were going 24 hours a day, but only for five days. It was a glass line at that time. Tritium was extracted and then you had to send it—you had to pump it out through palladium windows—that’s the way they got the hydrogen out, and the tritium and the deuterium. And then we had to collect those in glass containers. It was all hooked up to the system. And then we were designing one for a metal one. So I went in on the metal designs also. And most of that work was done in the shops down in—oh, what do they call it—the old Hanford site. They had a lab—or a place down there, and they did most of the work—construction work. And then they assembled it all. It was interesting work, actually. Because they kept me out of the Korean War, also, so I was happy about that. I didn’t want to go over there.
O’Reagan: Part of what we’re trying to get an idea about is sort of—what was it like working on the Hanford site? Is there anything that sticks out to you about the way things worked? Or the structure, or anything like that?
Weakley: Well, since I was a single guy, they put us in the dorms. They ran out of dorms, so they put us—there was two dorms that were down in the women’s dorm area. So they put us in one of those dorms down there. I remember there was a—what the heck street was that? Anyway, those women’s dorms were right close there, too. And then we’d go up and eat at the Mart, which is still here, but it isn’t called the Mart now. And we’d walk through this field of—I think they were prunes or plums or something like that. And you’d go through there and you’d get attacked by the birds. [LAUGHTER] They would actually attack you during the daytime. So it was a lot of things going on. For dorm club, we’d go down to—oh, the Blue Mountains, and we’d go up to Mount Hood, and hunting and fishing was always what I did. It was a good place. Lot of people. It was interesting, because everybody was new, had come in. It was quite the exciting time to see all these people from all over the United States.
O’Reagan: Did you live in the dormitories long?
Weakley: Oh, let’s see. I lived in there until I got married in ’53. Then we got a B house on Van Giesen Street—one end of it. And I wasn’t the oldest tenant, so I could not buy that anyway. I wouldn’t want it anyway. And then they started selling houses; I got a H house, south end of town and had to remodel that. Had to dig out the basement and all that. By that time, I had several children, so I kind of had to make room for all these kids. Took out the chimney. My wife did not like the coal-burning stove down there to heat the place. So we put in electric baseboard heat. Swamp coolers on the windows. Re-put new—took the chimney out. Had to put new roofing on. All that sort of thing. And later on, we moved to where we are on Pike Avenue now. Then we had more kids. [LAUGHTER]
O’Reagan: Keep you busy.
Weakley: That’s right.
O’Reagan: What was life like in Richland in the ‘50s?
Weakley: Well, it was kind of—there was always something to do. Mainly, down along the river in the park. We’d go down there for entertainment in the evenings. There’d be dances. And then I took up square dancing, my wife and I. So that was in different places, but mainly at the end, it was down in the—what do they call it, down there now? At the park. Oh, community house. It’s still going. I think this is their last year. We used to be on what’s now a hole in the ground, on the south end of that building, was where they used to have a structure. That’s where we danced, it was in that. And they had a kitchen in there; everybody’d bring food. It was a nice time. Had a lot of fun.
O’Reagan: So you said—do you feel it was easy to get integrated into the community, to be a part of the community at that time?
Weakley: What do you mean?
O’Reagan: Well, I’m just thinking in terms of your—you’ve been describing a very interesting social scene that people can get into. I’m just thinking, there were a lot of new people coming into town. How—you yourself, of course, experienced this—what it was like to be a new resident in Richland.
Weakley: Well, mainly you were in dorms. So, you were all right out of college. Here you are, a bunch of college kids, here—men, and then college women right next door to them. So there was a lot of dating going on. Then we’d go over to Pasco, to the Elks Club at that time. And on Friday nights, they always had a fish dinner. We’d go over there and dance and eat. That was a good time. That was ballroom dancing, it wasn’t square dancing. That was later.
O’Reagan: So returning to your work for a minute, I guess to some degree you’ve done this, but could you sort of describe a typical work day, and did that change over the long course of time that you were working there?
Weakley: Well, when I went out there, I had to work shift work. XYZ shifts. You’d work daytimes, evenings, and nighttime. I didn’t like that too well. Then when I went to 300 Area, I was all daytime, which I liked.
O’Reagan: How much did the work you were doing change as you got these successive promotions, as you got the new jobs?
Weakley: Here?
O’Reagan: Yeah. I mean, when you were an engineering assistant, was your—I’d assume—if only because it’s decades earlier—how different was your work than when you were principal engineer or senior principal engineer?
Weakley: Well, the added responsibility, of course. And I spent a lot of time in the old reactor fuel and then I wrote a lot of documents on how to—the canning process. And that’s probably in here—I’m pretty sure it is.
O’Reagan: I noticed here, it says that you are an expert on fuel manufacturing environmental issues. I wonder what—when did that become a priority? The environmental issues, was that something that was always part of your work, or did that develop over time?
Weakley: Environmental issues—you worried about what was going out the stacks, especially in 313. We had slug recovery—we’d take the aluminum—the ones that were reject—and they would dissolve the aluminum cans off in caustic, and they always had this exhaust going out. If you didn’t watch it, it would suck out quite a bit of moisture with it, and that would have caustic in it. We had trouble with the women walking by—their nylon hose would disintegrate. And they didn’t like that. I don’t blame them. And you could feel it—you could feel it on your face. They had to fix that up, of course.
O’Reagan: Were safety issues or the environment ever something you were concerned about working there?
Weakley: Oh, yeah, I was always worrying about—And then at the 306 Building, making fuel elements for the N Reactor, I was involved in that—a lot of things. I had to make trips to the aluminum companies that made aluminum products for us. Bought them back east, and some of them in California. So I did a lot of traveling, going to these different places, trying to get improvements made in aluminum ore, and later on, Zircaloy-2. That was Wah Chang made that down in Oregon—made Zircaloy-2 for us. That was interesting. So you’d take a drive down there and visit their plant. And then you’d go to these other places and visit those plants.
O’Reagan: These were to get components for the fuel manufacturing?
Weakley: What’s that?
O’Reagan: Were these trips to get components for the fuel manufacturing?
Weakley: They were making components for—
O’Reagan: I see. How much—let’s go with this. Could you describe the ways in which security and/or secrecy impacted your work?
Weakley: Well, you couldn’t talk about what you were doing, and we knew that. I made a lot of trips—I went to National Lead Company in Ohio at Fernald. That’s the ones that we would get our uranium cores from, for the old reactors. Then I’d go down to Mallinckrodt in Weldon Spring, Missouri, and that’s where they started making the billets that they’d send up to—on Lake Erie. There was a place that’d take the big billets and make smaller billets for the N Reactor. So I was always traveling around. Then at the same time, I was going down to the Savannah River plant and checking on what they were doing, because they had the same people. Like me, engineers that were busy and they’d get together and compare notes, and try to get the lower prices on some things. Especially aluminum components for the old reactors. Nothing much you could do about the Zircaloy: it was pretty well fixed. The only plant I never go to was the one that made the braze rings for the N Reactor fuel. That was back in—and it had beryllium in it. And I never had gone to there. I don’t know—I just plain missed it for some reason. I don’t know why.
O’Reagan: Was it easy to communicate with all the engineers and workers at these plants, or did the secrecy ever sort of inhibit that?
Weakley: Oh, no. If you’re buying, say, Zircaloy stuff, you go right down here in Oregon and talk to them. And that’s what we did.
O’Reagan: Okay.
Weakley: Same way back east on the aluminum plants. Did a lot of traveling. My wife didn’t like that, I don’t think, but we had to travel a lot. And it was old airlines at that time. [INAUDIBLE] had an airline to go to Spokane. You could catch a plane from there, it takes six hours to get into—now takes just a few hours.
O’Reagan: Was it unusual that you were traveling that much? Did other people also travel that much from the Hanford site?
Weakley: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, a lot of people were traveling. It’s hectic now. I won’t get on an airplane anymore, so heck with them. [LAUGHTER] I’m retired; I don’t do that.
O’Reagan: Do you feel the security or secrecy of the place changed much over the decades?
Weakley: Oh, yeah. When I started here it was really secret. They didn’t want the Russians to know anything about making tritium. But the secret got out, because somebody in Savannah River—or down at Oak Ridge probably told them. So nothing we could do about it.
O’Reagan: Right.
Weakley: But oh, yeah, they tried to keep it secret.
O’Reagan: What were the most challenging and/or rewarding aspects of your work at Hanford?
Weakley: Ooph! That’s a tough one.
O’Reagan: It’s a big question. Any particular times that you were working on a project that was really stumping everybody? Any real challenges there that stick out?
Weakley: Well, there’s always challenges to make things safer and better, and don’t dump stuff out into the atmosphere, or down the drain out to the ponds. Because at that time, they ponds along the river. And it discharges—a lot of stuff went into that pond. They tried to clean that stuff up, but—oh, yeah. When you have time to go through this, you will find a lot of things in here that I worked on.
O’Reagan: Is there anything in there that you’re particularly proud of having accomplished? Or that sticks out?
Weakley: Well, I lasted the whole—until I got laid off. [LAUGHTER] That’s an accomplishment—I didn’t get crapped up with anything.
O’Reagan: Did you like your job?
Weakley: Oh, yeah, I liked it. Oh, sure. It was a challenging job. I wrote a lot of manuals. That’s one of the things I did, a lot of manual writing when I was out there. There are still some of those around on the processes of lead-dip canning process, and co-extrusion process. I did a lot of writing.
O’Reagan: Have the Tri-Cities changed much in your time living here?
Weakley: Oh, yeah.
O’Reagan: And how?
Weakley: Oh, yeah, since I came in ’50? Oh, yeah. There’s a lot of changes. They couldn’t even allow the blacks to live in Kennewick. They had to go over in Pasco, for instance.
O’Reagan: Right.
Weakley: So we didn’t see too many blacks, actually. Now towards the end, they started hiring some people in that were blacks. I had no problem with them.
O’Reagan: Yeah, we’re trying to get a sense for how the community has changed over time. I know that’s a vague question. That’s certainly an interesting point about the demographics of it. Anything else about sort of the social life, the number of things going, anything else like that that sticks out to you on how the community’s changed over the decades?
Weakley: Well, I always had been hunting and fishing. So when I came here, I took up hunting and fishing again. Some of the people that I—I belong to the Rod and Gun Club—joined that many years ago, and I still belong, even though I got rid of my guns last year. I don’t go out and dig goose pits in the middle of the winter anymore. That’s too cold. I didn’t like to eat geese, anyway. [LAUGHTER] But I had a lot of good trips hunting down the Blues and up north of Spokane, up in that area.
O’Reagan: One of the things—well, okay. Let me go to this one next. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and/or living in Richland during the Cold War?
Weakley: Hmm. That’s an odd one. Well, for one thing, we couldn’t announce what we were doing anywhere. If you could, you made sure you didn’t. If they said, hey, you’re from Hanford. But it didn’t bother me on traveling too much. Because I’d usually go on to aluminum vendors or Zircaloy-2 vendors. Or I’d go to Savannah River plant, which has got the same restrictions as we have. And it was a free exchange then when you went there or you went to National Lead at Fernald. It was free exchange with the people there. So that was just like being at work. So I had no really problem with it. I didn’t really like traveling that much. But there was nothing I could do about it.
O’Reagan: You were mentioning your collaboration people at Savannah River. Can you tell me more about that?
Weakley: What’s that?
O’Reagan: You were mentioning your training people at Savannah River, is that right? Or just trained people who eventually were at Savannah River?
Weakley: No, they were—I met one of them. But they sent people up in tritium extraction. Because they built that plant for tritium. The guy that was running the tritium extraction plant was one of them that I trained. And the last trip I made down there, I met him and went into the tritium extraction plant with him and talked to him. He gave me a tour of what it was like. It was a lot different than what we had out here, of course. Then they shipped their stuff again to Oak Ridge.
O’Reagan: Okay. So, I’m also interested in how people commemorate their community, how people celebrate the history, or try to remember the history. I understand that you’ve been involved in some of the historical groups around here. Can you tell me something about that? Why you thought that was important, why you got involved with those groups?
Weakley: Are you talking about the Richland Rod and Gun Club, for instance?
O’Reagan: Well, them and also the B Reactor Museum Association and so on.
Weakley: Well the B Reactor Association, I was one of the earlier ones, before they got the Indians out there. It was interesting, because I was on the ground floor with them. In fact, I was in a meeting this week with them. I still belong to them. Just like the Rod and Gun Club, I still belong to them, even though I don’t—got rid of all my guns because I don’t go out and dig goose pits in the wintertime anymore. So it was interesting.
O’Reagan: I always find that there’s an awful lot of things that I don’t know that I should be asking. What could you—what would seem important or interesting that you might want to talk about, or think might be worth discussing that I might have not thought to ask? Anything that comes to mind?
Weakley: Hmm. Not right off the top of my head, it isn’t.
O’Reagan: Sure, that’s fine.
Weakley: [LAUGHTER]
O’Reagan: Yeah. We’re just trying, as I said—we’re most interested in getting a feel for life in the Tri-Cities throughout the Cold War, up to the near present. And just how things have changed over time. What it was like to be a worker on the Hanford plants, how work on the Hanford plant changed over time, what it was like living in the community and getting to know people. So really, a broad set of things, but there’s always questions I don’t think to ask.
Weakley: Okay. Well, you might have some ideas when you go through this later on. They gave me this, had my payroll number on it and all that. My service dates, 6/19/50 is when I came here. And payroll number 51500 was pretty easy to remember, thank goodness.
O’Reagan: As you went through this, did anything—
Weakley: Huh?
O’Reagan: As you started reading through this again, did any memories leap to mind? Did anything about it sort of jog any fond memories or any surprises?
Weakley: Well, we always had surprises. We never knew what was going to happen. Item—let’s see, what is that? Item four.
O’Reagan: Mm-hmm.
Weakley: I would ship pyrophoric uranium Zircaloy chips and fines back to National Lead. And we had surprises there, because they were supposed to use metal pallets. Somebody brought in wooden ones. And they put all these things that we had full of concrete and chips and fines in it, and they had to take them over across the street into a building. And when they did that, they heated it up and it broke one of the containers, and it caught fire on the shipping containers. They weren’t supposed to use shipping containers. That was a hell of a mess to clean up. Because we had a fire, had to clean all that up then. But we actually shipped the stuff back there and they recovered the uranium and reused it.
O’Reagan: Well, I think that’s the written questions I have here. There are certainly a lot more interesting stuff here. Again, if anything comes to mind you would like to speak about, we would love to hear a bit more. Also, it mentions here that your historical knowledge of site activities, particularly in 300 Area, has been extremely valuable in the preparation of the RCRA and CERCLA documents and planning. Could you tell me anything about that initiative?
Weakley: Whereabouts are you?
O’Reagan: It’s number five, sub-point A.
Weakley: Oh, okay. I did a lot of document writing and preparations of these RCRA and CERCLAs documents and planning. And I worked with—what’s her name? Michelle Gerber?
O’Reagan: Mm-hmm.
Weakley: I worked a lot of work with her, as she was a kind of historian. You’ve probably met her, of course.
O’Reagan: I know the name, but I haven’t actually met her, I don’t think.
Weakley: You haven’t met her?
O’Reagan: I don’t think so.
Weakley: Amazing. I’m surprised you haven’t met her yet. Anyway. She needed a lot of work. I would find things in 300 Area when we were cleaning out for the old reactors, getting 313 cleaned out. We would find movies. I’d ship that out to her, and then she made a CD out of it, I think. It showed the canning process, which had never been done before. It was—
O’Reagan: Do you think the history of your job is going to be well-preserved? Do you think the records are still there that can reflect on your times, your work? That is again, sort of an open-ended question here. I’m just trying to think through how people will remember this time in history, and sort of the work that you were involved in. You’re mentioning you found this film and were able to get it out there. But probably some materials didn’t make it out, for security reasons or whatever else, or just weren’t preserved. Do you feel that people have an accurate memory of the time as you look through?
Weakley: Well, most of them, I think, do. I always rode a bicycle around, between the buildings out in 300 Area. I would collect lead parts that I’d see laying around and get rid of them—or pick up anything else. So that I would ride those into the building. [LAUGHTER]
O’Reagan: I saw—I was out at the DoE’s artifact collection—historical artifact collection. They have some bicycles out there that I guess were what you were describing, people traveling around the site. Was that common?
Weakley: What do you mean?
O’Reagan: You were using bicycles to get around the site?
Weakley: Well, it was in our area. Oh, I used it all the time. And it had a basket in the back wheels. I’d put something in there—I would collect lead brick or something like that, and put it where the lead’s supposed to be and kind of clean things up. Well, it was a pretty good-sized area, 300 Area, so if you had to go down to the south end for some reason, you wanted to get there and get back.
O’Reagan: Right. Okay. So as I said, I think these are the questions that we had prepared, sort of the general ones here.
Weakley: You might have some questions when you—well, you can use anything you want out of this write-up.
O’Reagan: Yeah, I think this will be a great help. This has been very interesting from my perspective here. We certainly thank you for your time. Yeah, I think that’s at least our first set of questions. But maybe if anything occurs to us, or to you, maybe we could send follow-up questions? Would that be okay, if any questions—
Weakley: Oh, yeah, you can always get ahold of me if I’m around. I don’t go travel too far since I’m 88.
O’Reagan: All right. Well, thanks very much. We appreciate your time.
Weakley: Oh, she’s still back there.
O’Reagan. Yeah.
Weakley: [LAUGHTER]
Camera man: Whenever you’re-
Robert Franklin: Ready?
Camera man: We’re ready for you, yeah. Do your thing.
Franklin: Okay, let’s, yeah, let’s go. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Barbara Brown Taylor on January 6th, 2017. The interview is being conducted at Clark Place in Moscow, Idaho. I will be talking with Barbara about her experiences growing up at the Hanford Site and her father’s experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us?
Barbara Brown Taylor: Barbara Brown Taylor. B-A-R-B-A-R-A, B-R-O-W-N, T-A-Y-L-O-R, no hyphens.
Franklin: Great, thank you. So let’s start from the beginning. How did you come to the Hanford Site?
Taylor: In 1943, my father was hired from a company—wait a minute, take that off. In 1943, my father was hired to be the landscape architect in a new city. What an exciting thing for a landscape architect, what kind of an exciting job! We came from Illinois. I don’t know if he was the sole architect, but I do remember some of the things he did. That’s how I came here.
Franklin: And how old were you when you came?
Taylor: I was eight.
Franklin: And so the city that you’re talking about, that would have been Richland?
Taylor: Richland.
Franklin: Richland, Washington.
Taylor: And we didn’t know, of course, what it was. It was just a new city in the desert, had something to do with the war.
Franklin: Were the Alphabet Houses being constructed at that point-
Taylor: Yes.
Franklin: Or did you arrive before—okay.
Taylor: Well, he arrived in ’43.
Franklin: Right.
Taylor: The houses were being built. And my mother and brother and I lived on a farm in Illinois until my father wrote to us and said, the house is ready. So at that time, you signed up for a house, the men did the work there. As soon as it was ready, you could bring your family. It didn’t have any glass in the windows, but it was ready.
Franklin: Wow. That seems like a pretty crucial component of—
Taylor: My mother thought so. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Yeah, especially with the winds that would blow.
Taylor: Absolutely, absolutely. It was covered with dust.
Franklin: So your father, then, would have worked with Albin Pherson, the head architect for the—
Taylor: I assume so. He didn’t talk about the people he worked with. I never met another landscape architect there. He was very busy all the time, because he had a crew that supplied the grass seed and rented—not rented, lent out the lawn mowers and shovels and all sorts of things. As I remember him saying, there was an instruction sheet, which he put out. Somehow the government decided you couldn’t just have a city built on sand with nothing in the yards. Maybe you couldn’t keep people there. I don’t know the reason. But they hired these crews of men who worked on supplying the needs to do a lawn. And as I remember it, you had to have a lawn. If you couldn’t do it with what the city gave you free, then you had to pay somebody to put your lawn in. Because after a certain amount of time, you had to have a lawn.
Franklin: Mm.
Taylor: Not necessarily flowers, just you had to have grass.
Franklin: You had to have grass. What other kinds of work did your father do besides planning out yards and lawns and things like that?
Taylor: Well, he did that for churches and schools. There were only two churches, a Catholic church and a Protestant church. The government built two churches. That was it. And he would landscape those. Any public buildings that needed it—library—there were a few things like that. It was very sketchy and basic at the beginning.
Franklin: Mm-hm.
Taylor: So I think he landscaped whatever was there. I think that’s why they brought him.
Franklin: Tell me about growing up in wartime Richland. Where did you go to school, did you go to church, you know, what was the atmosphere like there?
Taylor: Well, I was eight. And we came here in June, and September was the first day of school. And I went to Lewis and Clark Grade School, which was right up the street of Locke. I lived on Casey Street in an A house. I walked up to school. And that first day, the teacher said, I want to know where all of you are from. Give your name and tell us where you came from. So one at a time, we got up, gave our names. I said Illinois. One of my new friends said New Jersey. Somebody else said Texas, somebody else said Colorado. And I thought at the time, I don’t think this has ever happened before. I don’t think the first day of school, people are from somewhere else. And I’ve always remembered that, how interesting that was to see all those new kids make new friends. When you’re a kid, as long as you’re with your parents and you feel love in a family, it’s great to have new adventures. [LAUGHTER] I don’t think my mother liked it at all! But, you know. That’s one thing. The first year, perhaps a little longer, but the first year, there were no telephones in homes. And as I recall, if the wife was going to have a baby, they would issue her a phone for the period just before she had the baby. So she could call the doctor, her husband at work, whatever. But the minute she had the baby, they came and took the phone out. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Wow. [LAUGHTER]
Taylor: And there was a phone that first summer on many telephone poles. The kind that just hangs up. You could go there and make a call, free. But you had to find one to do that, because there just wasn’t that accessibility to phones.
Franklin: How would you know who to call? Would you get an operator when you—
Taylor: You’d get an operator, of course. You always got an operator in those days.
Franklin: Sure, and then they would connect you to another telephone on a pole on a different street? Or how would—
Taylor: No, no, you probably wouldn’t get a call back. I don’t remember ever walking down the street and hearing a phone ring. [LAUGHTER] It was an out kind of thing. Let’s say you wanted to call your grandmother in Illinois or something. You might get to use it.
Franklin: Oh, okay, I see. It wasn’t an in-town—
Taylor: No, not really. I don’t think so.
Franklin: And what did your mother do?
Taylor: My mother was a homemaker, but she had been a registered nurse. And she went back to that when I grew up and was off to college.
Franklin: And were your parents still in Richland at the time?
Taylor: Mm-hmm.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Taylor: Here’s the thing. I don’t think that the government intended to keep the city. As I remember, we were going to live there as long as we needed to. When the war was over, you’d all go back to wherever you came from or somewhere else. But they didn’t build that city to keep. The wood was not the best, the floors were pine and splintered. Those little prefabs—I didn’t live in one, but they were tiny.
Franklin: I live in one.
Taylor: So you know.
Franklin: They’re very tiny.
Taylor: You know what I mean. They were built out of cardboard—I mean plywood. Plywood was new in those days. And they built them so fast that I remember going to that school up the street, to Lewis and Clark, that first year. And there’d be one when I’d go to school, and when I came back there’d be three.
Franklin: [LAUGHTER]
Taylor: So during the day I was going to school, the men were slapping those things together. It was interesting [LAUGHTER] seeing, ooh, we have a new house, we have a new house.
Franklin: What do you think your mother did not like about living—you mentioned that she wasn’t too happy about moving there?
Taylor: Oh, she was from Illinois—they were. And Illinois is a green, beautiful state with woods. And Richland was sand. It was sand. So when we moved in, there was no glass in the windows, which they said they’d put in pretty soon. And the yard was all sand. My mother would look out the window with no glass in it, and almost cry. I was eight, and I looked out the window and saw the little girl next door playing in the sand in front of our house. And I remember yelling out the window to her, stop playing in our yard! Stop digging our yard! She was digging a hole in our yard. And my mother put her head against the wall and said, Barbara, we don’t have a yard! [LAUGHTER] Which was very true; we didn’t. As soon as the work really got going with planting the grass everywhere, I remember my father going out—there were things called tract houses, which had been there before the Hanford place was built. Some of them were abandoned, because the government had bought them. They were abandoned, and here were rose bushes and lilac bushes and things that people had had in their yards. Since it now belonged to the government, my father had permission to go and get them. And he would. He took his trailer and he went out there and dug them up himself and brought them in and put some of them at the libraries, and some of them at the churches, whatever. That was one reason we had nice shrubs. Because he would do that.
Franklin: Where was your father stationed during those war years?
Taylor: Where did he live?
Franklin: Where did he work, where was his office, where did he work out of? Or was he just kind of a roving—
Taylor: No, it wasn’t freelance in any way. There were government buildings. There was probably a landscaping building with a parking lot full of lawnmowers. One of his crew was in charge of the lawnmowers. They were probably locked or fenced or something. He had some kind of a building, maybe a hutment—I don’t know what kind it was. I didn’t see him at work. I saw the results of his work.
Franklin: Yeah.
Taylor: And he also had trucks and drove around in a truck and worked out of his truck, too. The crews, of course, did the work. He was the manager at the time, after he landscaped all the buildings and how they were going to look, ultimately. And he turned the papers over to his supervisors, and they did the work.
Franklin: How did your father get started with landscaping architecture?
Taylor: Well, at the University of Illinois, just before I was born, he graduated in the architecture department, which at that time had the landscape architecture program in it. So he really was an architect with a specialty in landscape architecture. He was just out of college in 1929 when the Masters Tournament golf course was being built. He was very fortunate to know a man named Bobby Jones who designed the—he was an architect, designed the Masters Tournament—built the course. And he hired a bunch of just-out-of-college men like my father. My father and mother had just gotten married. They went to Augusta, Georgia, and my father worked on that golf course. He did some of the—what’s that white part?
Franklin: Sand trap?
Taylor: Sand trap.
Franklin: I’m not much of a golfer.
Taylor: He worked on the sand traps, designing them. And had little models—plaster of Paris models. I wish I had one today, because we always had them around the house. Which my father had gotten when the thing was built. Then they didn’t need those anymore. So he had done that for a few years. By the way, the Masters Tournament golf course was built in 1929. My father told me the money to build it was in escrow. The people who had given the money to build this beautiful golf course had their money tied up in a way that the stock market couldn’t touch it. So that’s why they could build such a beautiful thing in 1929.
Franklin: I see.
Taylor: And ’30, I think. Anyway, that’s what he did. Then during the war, he had a harder time because who was landscaping anything? Not very many people. And he got a job with the government in the CCC program—he was a supervisor in Illinois in the woods where they had workers that were building roads and bridges and beautiful little stone—what do you call that? Well, stone bridges, I guess. And I remember those days, I was very little, like four or five. But I remember that he would take me to the woods and show me what he was doing. So he had that job, and that was a very steady job, because the CCC supported a lot of people during those days. That would have been the ‘30s. Then when the war came along, there were some military plants. One was at Kankakee, and we were there for a year or two, where my father was in charge of all the grounds for the whole plant. I think it was at that time that he was approached to come to Richland. Because they were building Hanford. And they had to build the city, even if they weren’t going to keep it. They had to build it. And hired him to do it. There weren’t that many landscape architects in those days.
Franklin: Sure.
Taylor: So I think the word must have gotten out that there was one available.
Franklin: And how long—so your father, did he stay working for Hanford, for the government after the war ended?
Taylor: Yes. A lot of people stayed. I don’t think that the government people understood the idea of a sense of place, where people make their home somewhere and they’re very reluctant to let go of it, even if it has pine floors and is not very up-to-date with everything. Their kids were now in school. They had a job. And it was far enough from the cities—some people liked that, and wanted to stay. It’s right on the edge of the Columbia River, which is one of the most beautiful places in the world. So, my father joined them and wherever there was a job that he could get—because he also had many drafting skills and things like that. There was also a program called the as-built program. I think that was in the ‘50s. But Hanford had been thrown up so fast that there hadn’t been good blueprints of what they did. They hired my dad to run a little office with lots of blueprint machines. And he and some other people would go out and look at the buildings and draw, you know, make sketches of what was really there.
Franklin: Mm-hm.
Taylor: The measurements and all that. And then the idea was now the government knows. Now the firetrucks can go to the right place. Because there were places nobody knew what they were, you know?
Franklin: Sure. Yeah, no, I’ve heard of that program before. And, like you said, it was very necessary.
Taylor: It was very useful, very useful. Then, about that time, 1955, ’56, people were building golf courses again. They hadn’t been all through the war. I don’t think there was one built—but I don’t know that. But they were building them, and Richland wanted to have a golf course and Kennewick wanted to have a golf course—just nine holes. And they hired my dad to design these. Interestingly enough, my father was very generous, and he accepted the jobs even though they weren’t going to pay him. They agreed to give him memberships in the clubs to cover what they should have given him for a salary. [LAUGHTER] Because that’s all they had to offer. And he wanted to see golf courses there. So he built one in Kennewick, and he built one in Richland. He also built Columbia Park, which is all along the river, maybe one of the longest parks in Washington. I don’t know.
Franklin: Really?
Taylor: But it’s very long, and it’s very narrow—some places only 20 feet.
Franklin: Mm-hm. And when you say built it, he—
Taylor: Designed it. He had a good arrangement there, because a lot of the woodsy part—he was very fond of Russian olive trees. And a lot of those were already there, all along the river. So all he had to do was built driveways and parking spots, camping spots, and smooth out the rough places. Make a road—because there’s a road the whole length of it.
Franklin: Yeah, that’s a very widely used park in town. It’s a great park.
Taylor: He loved doing that. I don’t know what they paid him for that. Much later, he built the Memorial Gardens, along the west edge of Richland, which is a cemetery. I have a picture in there of my parents. They gave them a pair of plots instead of paying them. Because they didn’t have the money to pay them. My father wanted a cemetery there. So, I think he was very generous. He was very community-minded. He was on the Benton County Planning Commission for many years. Encouraging parks, encouraging more and more landscaping and making it a more livable town. It needed to be kept up; the work that was done at the beginning needed to be continued, because there were a lot of people who lived there. And he could see the need for that. He told me once, if you live in a desert, you need twice as many trees. And I don’t think everyone agreed with that. Some of the businessmen thought, there’s some land; we’ll build on it. But my father hoped he could get parks in there. And he had to go through the council—Benton County Council—to get those parks approved.
Franklin: Sure. How long—did your parents stay in Richland for the rest of their lives?
Taylor: They did.
Franklin: Okay.
Taylor: They did. I wanted to tell you that my father died of liver cancer. And we always thought it was the plant. Because when he was in the as-built program, he had to go and inspect the buildings. And one day, he came home and told my mother that the little badge he had to wear had gone off. Lit up, made a noise, and that meant he had been overexposed to something. They had taken him into a safe room, made him shower, given him different clothes, sent him to the doctor. And within a year, he was dead. He had liver cancer. And he never drank. We knew it was not that kind of thing.
Franklin: Sure.
Taylor: And a lot of people had that happen. It hasn’t been added up, I don’t think. But there were a lot of people like that.
Franklin: Sure. And what year did he pass away?
Taylor: 1966.
Franklin: 1966.
Taylor: He was 64 years old.
Franklin: Oh, okay. And you mentioned that you had grown up there and then eventually went to college. What year did you leave Richland to go to—
Taylor: 1953.
Franklin: Okay. Right. So I’m wondering if you could tell me a little more about growing up in Richland. Did you stay in that same A house for the time that you were there?
Taylor: Yes, yes, until I went to college and got married a year or so later. My parents lived in that house. And then it became possible for residents to buy houses.
Franklin: Right, in 1958.
Taylor: They could buy the ones they were in and they could also buy ones nobody wanted. So they bought theirs. And they bought a little one on the other side of town as an investment, which they rented out. A lot of people did that.
Franklin: Right, right. I wonder if you could tell me about what you remember about the coming of the commercial—like the Uptown and kind of how Richland transitioned a little bit after the war. To start to become more of a normal town, but still totally government-owned and controlled.
Taylor: Yes, I can tell you that. I thought Uptown was great. There was a theater there! There were stores there, which we hadn’t had much of before. My father was very busy trying to get a park in the spot where that was. And writing things for the Tri-City Herald. And going to the Benton County meetings, trying to encourage a park in that spot. It was quite near a school and the school had a big yard. But there was George Washington Way, was right between where he wanted the park, where Uptown is. And the businessmen just, you know, they had the power and they got it. I always enjoyed it, because I was just a kid. I was in high school at that time.
Franklin: Sure.
Taylor: Didn’t realize how ahead of his time my father was. Because he loved trees, he loved building a better environment for people. Considered himself a conservationist. Also considered himself an urban planner, because that’s right in that—he didn’t have degrees in that. But I don’t know that there were degrees at that time. He just built on his education as he went along and did a lot in those fields.
Franklin: Do you remember the day when people found out about what had been produced at Hanford, or what was being produced at Hanford?
Taylor: Well, I was nine.
Franklin: Sure.
Taylor: What did I know? I was nine. I saw—we took the Walla Walla Union Bulletin paper. I was sitting on the front lawn, and the paper came. And said something like, the war is over. It was our bomb. Something like that.
Franklin: Mm-hm.
Taylor: And I looked at it. With my nine-year-old understanding, I thought, does this mean we’re leaving? Does this mean the end of Richland? Of course, I didn’t know. I remember that paper, I just don’t remember the exact words of the headline. My parents kept it for a long time, and a lot of people did—kept that newspaper that came out. And of course, I didn’t know what the place was for anyway, except something about the war. And we had lived at Kankakee, and that was something about the war. But my father didn’t seem like the kind of person that would be working in chemistry or in physics or anything like that. By the way, my father grew up in a Quaker family.
Franklin: Oh.
Taylor: And he was very pacifist.
Franklin: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: I think he would not have been in any kind of a job that had to do with hurting people. But he didn’t know what it was for. He didn’t know it was a terrible bomb that was being built. And he had a good job. I mean, coming out of the Depression, if you could get a good job, you took it.
Franklin: Right, right, yeah. No questions asked. What do you remember about civil defense? Drills and things like that in kind of the early part of the Cold War?
Taylor: Well, I remember getting under the desk. I don’t remember much other than that.
Franklin: Did you ever feel any fear or anxiety about living so close to Hanford, something that might have been a potential target in the case of aggression?
Taylor: No. I think a lot of kids might have. But my parents were not the kind to let us worry. And years later, my mother told me, Barbara, we didn’t know that America was going to win. We had no idea. We had been through the First World War, we had been through the Depression. We knew bad things could happen. And here was the country fighting on two fronts, two parts of the world. We were not having you worry. Because we never knew whether we would win. So we didn’t tell you much. When the newspaper came, we got it, we read it, we read the cartoons to you. You listened to Charlie McCarthy, and the Great Gildersleeve. All those humorous shows, Jack Benny. All those things that never touched on the war.
Franklin: What about later, though, during the Cold War? When you would have been in high school or starting to get a little bit older and maybe hearing more about the kind of conflicts that the US was involved in?
Taylor: Well, I did have an interesting situation. After I married, my husband joined the Army, because there was a draft. And his grades were not as high as they should have been. He was going to Eastern, to college—Eastern Washington College in Cheney. His grades were not as good as they could have been, so he decided to join. Because they promised him an electronics job. He didn’t have to a frontline military person.
Franklin: Mm-hm.
Taylor: And he wanted to be in electronics. So he joined in 1957. And our little boy was born in ’59. I went to Germany a few months after that. My father said, don’t take that baby over there. Because he had been through the Second World War and he knew how bad things could be. And there was a wall.
Franklin: Right.
Taylor: And there were all those things. And we were--I don’t know how many miles from the wall he was. And he didn’t want me to go. That was one of the few times I ever saw him cry. So we went, we stayed there two years, had a wonderful time going to places even though we didn’t have any money. But it was dangerous. The Army told us, you must keep several days’ worth of diapers, food, clothes, all your papers—you must keep them in one place. Because some morning, a truck may pull up in front of your house—an Army truck. And they’ll say, come and bring your things. And we had to get in the truck—they warned us this might happen—and we’ll drive to France. They had places of protection and more food and care for the children and all that. But it’ll be in France.
Franklin: Sure.
Taylor: If something happens with the wall.
Franklin: Do you think your parents might have felt anxiety during the Cold War, living in Hanford in kind of a—I mean, now knowing what was being produced there and that it might have been a target for retaliation?
Taylor: Well, they never said so. They never said so; they didn’t want to worry us. That’s the kind of parents they were. They protected their children. I think there were a lot of young people who had parents like that. I don’t remember anybody saying they were scared.
Franklin: Sure.
Taylor: They were busy going to school. We never felt like we didn’t have a future.
Franklin: Did you ever come back to Richland? I’m assuming you probably would’ve come back to visit your family, but did you ever come back to live there again?
Taylor: Yes, my husband and our children came back to live there for a short time when he got out of the Army, he happened to be—it was 19-early-60s and it was hard to get jobs. He got a job there inspecting pipes. The kind of pipes that had nuclear things going through them. And they were welded. He got jobs inspecting the welding. He didn’t like that kind of thing, and so he went on and did other things. He had a degree in industrial arts. He did some drafting for a while. And then he became a police officer in Pullman.
Franklin: Okay.
Taylor: So that’s how we ended up back in Pullman and raised our kids there. So I only went back to Richland a few years. Wanted to go back to Pullman. I really had a good time in college there, and I liked having a university. There wasn’t any Tri-Cities center at that time—Tri-Cities branch.
Franklin: Sure. And then you mentioned that you worked at WSU as well.
Taylor: 27 years, yeah. From 1967 to 1995. From 1967 to 1995, I was a full-time secretary at WSU. And felt very good about it. I loved working at a university. I went to school along with it, which was great because I had not quite finished college. And so I took a lot of classes.
Franklin: Is there anything else that you’d like to—that we haven’t touched on, that you’d like to talk about? About your father or Hanford or Richland or your own life?
Taylor: Well, Richland was a very safe place for children at that time. As I look back, I didn’t appreciate that. We could get on our bicycles and ride anywhere in town as long as we were home for dinner. We could go to friends’, we could go to school, we could be in summer programs. They always had summer activities for the kids. And I think a lot of the amenities that a city has, even though it was a small town—actually we called it a village. It was known as a village. But I loved that. The freedom. And now, of course, you can’t just tell a kid, just be home for dinner. But they did. I could go to the movies on Saturday. There were two theaters and they had double features all the time. I always felt free to do whatever. I think it felt safe to do that. Another reason might have been we were very middle class. I never saw a black child when I was in school.
Franklin: Sure, because African Americans weren’t allowed to live in Richland.
Taylor: They were not allowed to work there. I don’t think that was an open policy, but they didn’t. They lived in Pasco.
Franklin: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: And they were not really given jobs at Hanford. I didn’t know about different races. I was a child. It was a middle class town, and you had to have a job to have a house.
Franklin: Sure. And everybody worked for the same employer.
Taylor: Absolutely, at the beginning, they did. Everybody did. I remember my mother saying when they first moved there, rent was $27 a month. And it was an A house. $27 a month. Which was very reasonable for the time.
Franklin: Well, that included pretty much full service, too, right?
Taylor: I think so.
Franklin: The government delivered coal and--
Taylor: Water.
Franklin: Changed the light bulbs, and—
Taylor: I don’t remember that part. I think my father probably would have done a lot of those little things, but—
Franklin: Okay.
Taylor: I think they probably would. But I remember the electricity and the water were included.
Franklin: Richland has such a unique history of being this government constructed and owned town for 15 years. And I’ve always found it interesting to hear people’s experiences, like yours, about how safe and free they felt in a town that was so entirely unique in terms of its—like you said, it was middle class. Everyone who was there had a certain income—
Taylor: Had a job!
Franklin: They had a job. But the government also owned and controlled who could live in that community. So it’s a community of safety, but it seems to be of not the traditional freedoms that we associate with any other kind of community or anything like that. It’s always stuck out to me, in looking at Richland.
Taylor: Well, perhaps an adult would see that. To me it was just feeling safe.
Franklin: Sure.
Taylor: I don’t know that I felt unsafe in Illinois. I was in the kind of family that were very caring, that always put our care first. I had very good parents.
Franklin: I’ve had—a couple other times when I’ve interviewed people that have grown up in Richland, one thing that they’ve mentioned is that at some point they were struck how there were no old people, really.
Taylor: Yes, yes.
Franklin: And I wonder if you could talk—was there a moment when you realized that everybody was either children or young adults for the most part?
Taylor: The only people who were there who were old were grandmothers and grandfathers who came to visit or lived with them. I mean, really. I was aware of that. Very much so.
Franklin: And so did anyone in your extended family ever come to Richland to visit? Or how did you keep in touch with them, with that barrier there?
Taylor: Well, in those days you only talked on the phone if somebody died. You didn’t call the family back east, wherever it was. Because it cost money. And you just didn’t do it. There were letters that you would write and then send one to one member of the family, and they would send it to another, and they would send it to another. In that sort of round robin thing. I knew other families that did that. But my grandmother—my grandfather had died young. My grandmother had no money. In those days, a woman might be a housewife, a homemaker, a farmer’s wife, and end up with nothing.
Franklin: Sure.
Taylor: No income, no savings. She had two daughters. So she would travel by train from Illinois to stay with my aunt for a while. And then to Washington to stay with my parents for a while.
Franklin: Okay.
Taylor: That was common in those days, that an older person would live with you. I had lots of people I knew whose grandmother lived with them, or grandfather lived with them. Or Uncle Joe who was just not quite right. Families took in family. That was not unusual.
Franklin: Right, to have a multigenerational household.
Taylor: Right.
Franklin: Like that.
Taylor: So I thought it was perfectly natural. And it was natural. I got to know my grandmother very well and learn things from her that I wouldn’t have if she hadn’t lived with us.
Franklin: Sure, sure. Well, and a lot of families, psychologists and a lot of research points to that being very beneficial, too.
Taylor: Right.
Franklin: And it’s how most of the world lives.
Taylor: She had no money, absolutely none.
Franklin: Sure, sure.
Taylor: My parents paid everything.
Franklin: Because she wouldn’t have had a job.
Taylor: I don’t think she ever had a job except butter and eggs.
Franklin: Well, she worked, certainly, right, and probably worked very hard.
Taylor: Oh, she worked on the farm, I’m sure. But it’s not the kind of work that was paid. And that would have been before social security. Because that started just about the time I was born.
Franklin: Right. And even then, women got much less than men did.
Taylor: And still do.
Franklin: Yes. [LAUGHTER] What would you like future generations to know about growing up in Richland during World War II and the Cold War? And about the work that your father did?
Taylor: Well, I think the jobs our parents had—especially fathers, because most women were homemakers. I think that meant a lot to kids. I wouldn’t say that it was a caste system, but I was very aware that a girl named Betsey had a father who was a doctor, and they had a nicer house. I don’t know how the housing worked, but all those number houses, they had one of the better houses that was a single-family house, and on a hill, and just nicer. And I was a little jealous that my family wasn’t that wealthy that they could have a better house. So that’s very normal for kids, I think, to be aware of where their family is in the scheme of things.
Franklin: Mm-hm.
Taylor: I came from the Midwest. I thought my parents were middle class, middle-educated. They both had degrees, but not graduate degrees. We lived in an average house. I was very middle. [LAUGHTER] I don’t know what else to say. But there were people who had a little more money. They were managers, they were doctors, they were professionals. And I think we were aware of that. And I think they were aware of that, the kind of cliques. High schools have those.
Franklin: Oh, yeah.
Taylor: You know, that’s all there is to it. There’s always going to be the athletes and the wealthier kids and the smarter kids and whatever. But I graduated from Columbia High School in 1953 as Barbara Brown. I loved high school. We had choruses, we had bands; we had various kinds of activities like that. And I was in the choir for four years and loved it. Just loved it. There was a teacher named Harley Stell, S-T-E-L-L. And it’s Harley. He was hired right out of college, about 1950, to start a music program, a vocal music program, and he did. Trios, chorus—I think it was called a chorus. And I sang with them and made some really good friends with them for four years. We sang at graduation. I’ll never forget that. Which was a wonderful experience. He added a lot to the school. Because music is an enrichment that students need.
Franklin: Yes.
Taylor: So they started with very basic classes. Just first to eighth grade, and then they kept adding these things. Which is what all towns do, but it was starting, as I was in high school, starting to be a normal town. And people stayed because this is where their roots were now. I think that was quite a shock to the government, that we wanted to buy our houses. We wanted to stay there.
Franklin: Right, because like you’d mentioned earlier, the community was from all over the country.
Taylor: That’s right.
Franklin: And no one knew anyone else when they came.
Taylor: But that’s a sociological fact.
Franklin: Sure.
Taylor: I think, as I said, a sense of place. A sense that this is where we are, let’s stay here and do the best we can with what we’ve got.
Franklin: Right, right. Yeah, that’s really fascinating. Thank you. Well, I just want to thank you for interviewing with us. As someone who lives in Richland, I’d like to thank you for your father’s work—
Taylor: Thank you.
Franklin: For bringing green and trees and things to Richland. Because it helps break up the heat and the sage brush.
Taylor: Well, it’s a pile of sand. That’s what it was to begin with.
Franklin: Yeah.
Taylor: We had terrible windstorms. We had a fire one year way out in the desert. And I remember that everybody—cars came through the streets and said everybody move to the east side of town, down by the river.
Franklin: Wow.
Taylor: That was frightening.
Franklin: Yeah, I bet.
Taylor: But this fire was going faster than a man could run.
Franklin: Wow.
Taylor: It was coming from the big hills over there, the Rattlesnake hills. It came pretty close. I remember that very well; I must have been ten, something like that. I remember that the wind used to cut your legs. Girls wore dresses then; they didn’t wear pants like they do now. Walking home from school, the wind and the sand would cut your legs. Little tiny cuts. And you’d feel like to go hide behind a tree, but you’ve got to go home.
Franklin: Right. Wow.
Taylor: And that was really painful.
Franklin: I bet.
Taylor: They said there was something called a jackalope out in the desert. Nobody ever saw one.
Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Usually just taxidermists make those.
Taylor: With big ears. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Well, Barbara, thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.
Taylor: I want this to be about my dad. So please emphasize that.
Northwest Public Television | Silliman_Ken
Camera man: I'm recording.
Robert Bauman: All right. So I'm going to get the formal stuff out of the way first, and then we’ll talk. My name is Robert Bauman, and I'm interviewing Mr. Ken Silliman. And today is July 2nd of 2013. Interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. And I'll be talking with Mr. Silliman about his family's history about growing up in Kennewick and about his memories of the area and the impact of Hanford on the area and so forth. So Mr. Silliman, I'm going to start by just asking you to talk a little bit about your family and how and why they came to Kennewick.
Ken Silliman: Well, my mother's family was Case, and the Cases came in 1894 to the state of Washington. They came to Goldendale and then down to the Prosser area. And my granddad homesteaded then on Rattlesnake. When my mother and dad got married in 1914, Dad farmed a section of Grandpa's land for a year. And then he went out to the Weller Ranch and leased that. And he farmed that I believe until 1928 as close as I can figure. Couldn't afford to farm any more on dryland wheat on Rattlesnake, so he eventually took a job at Farmers Exchange. And that's how we got down to Kennewick. And then bought one of the partners out in '34 and the other one in '43, and we've had it since then.
Bauman: Okay. And so you moved into Kennewick in the 19--
Silliman: 1930.
Bauman: 1930, Okay. And then you were born in Kennewick?
Silliman: Yes. My brothers were all born on Rattlesnake. I was born in Kennewick in 1931.
Bauman: Okay. And what sort of memories do you have of Kennewick as a young boy growing up? What sort of community was it like? What sorts of things did you do for fun?
Silliman: Well, it was a very, very small town. Even in 1940, it was probably a little under 2,000 people. If anything happened in town and you got in any kind of trouble, well, your parents already knew about it by the time you got home. I learned to swim in the Columbia River and the irrigation canal there. Kennewick was very small. 10th Avenue was the boundary line of it on the south, Olympia on the west, and just past Gum Street on east. So there wasn't much town here.
Bauman: And so was it mostly an agricultural area then?
Silliman: Definitely, definitely ag. Both fruit and dry land wheat. Dry land wheat controlled a lot of the money that was spent in the area in that.
Bauman: Okay. I want you to talk about Farmers Exchange a little bit. I know your--was it your grandfather or your father who bought part of the business?
Silliman: My father.
Bauman: Your father.
Silliman: Yeah. Carl Williams and Alfred Amon, who were two dryland wheat farmers, started it either in '23 or '24. I can prove both dates there. [LAUGHTER] They came in towns, started--Alfred was mayor in Kennewick four different times. I believe it was in four different decades. And Carl Williams I believe was one of the trustees for WSU a period of time there.
Bauman: And so initially, what sorts of things did Farmers Exchange do?
Silliman: Well, it started as a livestock trading outfit. Trade horses for pigs or chickens for cows or just whatever you wanted to trade there. And then they got into the feed business a little bit to feed their own livestock and to sell a little bit. Got into garden seeds just a little bit. They were located right behind Washington Hardware on what at that time was Front Street. It's now Canal Drive. And our livestock pens were between us and Washington Hardware. They finally decided that, the city did, they did not want the livestock there a half block off Kennewick Avenue. So we moved our livestock down to behind Church's Grape Juice there on some leased land. And then when that Dad bought Alfred out, the last partner in '43, he couldn't go out and trade livestock and run the store, too. So we did away with the livestock at that time. Other than we still given into chickens, and rabbits, and wild turkeys, and things like that yet.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER] So did you help out at the store when you were growing up?
Silliman: Oh, sure. I worked the store. I was small for my age, so I didn't start right away there. And at that time the feed was all 100 pound bags except for wheat. It was in catch weights, which was just whatever would fit in the bag. It could be 125, 130, 120 there in that. Yeah, I worked there as a kid. But when I say how long I've worked there--which is 59 years--I don't count when I worked there as a kid because I probably wasn't worth much.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER]
Silliman: But also of course we know we worked in the orchards there. So we cut asparagus after the war started. They let us out early. They started school late so that we could go out and cut asparagus in the morning. Then we'd have to go to school some on Saturday to make up that time.
Bauman: Hm. Interesting. So what was school like in Kennewick in the 1930s, 1940s?
Silliman: Well, it changed considerably from the '30s to the '40s. They built the new high school in Kennewick in '36. And the first graduating class was '37, one of my brothers that I was later in business with was in that class. And I started first grade in the fall of '37 there. But very, very small. You knew everybody until about '43. Then things went nuts. People have asked us, didn't we resent all of a sudden, the class was just being overflowing and having to use extra rooms and storage buildings and stuff like that. We didn't think about that too much. Just more kids to play with. And a lot of those kids that came in the '40s are still my very, very close friends.
Bauman: Growing up, do you remember any community celebrations, picnics, 4th of July parades, any of those sort of community events?
Silliman: Oh, yes. We're right on 4th of July right now. And they always had a big to do it at the Keewaydin Park there. The Brandland wheat farmers would normally maybe make one round around outside of their field to make sure their machine was working. Then they'd take a break and come to the to-do downtown here. And then right after that, they'd usually start harvest there. Then there was the Gape Festival in the '40s I would guess, '46, '47. I remember that one specifically. They had two different entertaining groups. They had Spike Jones here and Jack Teagarden. And when Spike Jones sent them their contracts, there was two different contracts. And there were different amounts of money. So they took the cheaper one. So he put on the same show for three days in a row. That was right in the street there in the 200 Block on Kennewick Avenue. But some of the other Grape Festivals were held up around Keewaydin Park in that. We used to have rodeos up where the high school, Kennewick High School is now in there.
Bauman: And so you were born in 1932?
Silliman: '31.
Bauman: '31. And so you, when you were growing up, in the Great Depression, did you have a sense that there was an economic depression going on? Or as a young kid, were you not really fully aware of this?
Silliman: I probably wasn't fully aware of it. We had a great big garden. We had a couple milk cows. We had chickens. We were pretty self-sufficient there on it. I got a new pair of shoes usually the start of school, new pair of overalls. So I was doing fine, yeah. Probably the folks were having to scrape and stoove for it.
Bauman: So going back to talking about the Farmers Exchange a little bit more, you mentioned that your father was partners with--
Silliman: He went to work for Carl and Alfred. Then in '34, he bought Carl out. And he and Alfred then were partners until '43 when Alfred wanted to go run his cherry orchard. And so Dad bought him out there. Things were simpler then. They wrote the contract with an indelible pencil and half a piece of paper and tore the bottom half off. And I still have that contract.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Didn't have a roomful of attorneys there--
Silliman: [LAUGHTER] No, no.
Bauman: --to do the contract. So you mentioned one thing you noticed when, at some point, in the 1940s, suddenly there were a lot more students in schools in Kennewick. I wonder if you could talk about any other changes you noticed or impact the Hanford site on the town of Kennewick?
Silliman: Well yes, there was a lot of things. Avenue C went from the Old Grain Bridge to Benton Street and then as Columbia Avenue down to the river. And that was houses, basically. All of a sudden, any space that had a place where you'd put a trailer or any building that you didn't have rain coming through it was rented out. I remember one time, I think it was in '43, that we lived at 603 North Everett which was down by the river about half a block off the river. And we were out in the yard on a Sunday. This car drove by several times, a little coupe with a man and woman in it. And finally the man got out and came and said, do you know any place we can rent a bed and bath there? We've lived here for a week just in our car and we just can't find anything. My dad said why don't you sit down and have some iced tea. And I'll call around, surely I can find something. He came out about a half hour later and said you're right, there just nothing for rent in Kennewick. He said you might as well stay with us until you find something. And they lived with us for about a month. He was an engineer from the East Coast and his wife.
Bauman: Right, so it impacted your family directly, at least--
Silliman: Oh, yeah. And the schools and everything else there. The road, when the workers would come home there at quitting time, the roads would be so full you couldn't even get on Columbia Avenue and that. I remember Newman's Grocery, finally they had—most of the groceries closed at 6 o'clock. He started a second grocery on the corner of Benton and Kennewick Avenue. It was a cash and carry rather than a charge and fill your order for you. But he had stayed open late so the Hanford workers could get back and get some groceries there. Entertainment, I remember the folks would take their car over Saturday sometime and park on Kennewick Avenue, leave their car there. And then they'd go over in the evening and people would walk down street and visit. And women would sit in the cars and men would walk up and down the street and visit to different guys. It was a different time.
Bauman: You mentioned more students in school. Were more schools built then?
Silliman: Well, not right away. My favorite thing to do as a little boy was to go with my dad when he was trading livestock. And he'd go to Wallula, or Pasco, or Connell, or Benton City, or Richland. And I always had to ask him, when we crossed the river, whether we were going into Benton City or Richland because they were both very, very, very small towns there. I think Richland had a store in it run by John Dam, if I recall right. And his daughter was our sixth grade teacher there, Geri Dam was her name.
Bauman: So you did occasionally—you did go to the other towns sort of in the area at times?
Silliman: Oh sure. We came up to football games. Kennewick, Pasco, and Richland--Pasco and Richland kind of fought back and forth. Pasco of course was a railroad town and that. But we had friends in Pasco and we had friends in Richland. And we competed against some of them there.
Bauman: Mm-hm. So any other changes or ways that the sort of significant growth seemed to affect Kennewick at all, if you can remember? Obviously it changed some of the business practices. They stayed open later, at least—
Silliman: That grocery store did. Yeah, mm-hm. Things were just chock full. Everything was chock full. For instance, there was a place called Camel's Cabins right at the base of the old Green Bridge. And I've heard stories that at times, he had some CCC camp type places there with boards up about four foot and then canvas over the top. He rented those for eight hours at a time. You moved in, ate, slept, got out so the next family could come in there.
Bauman: Wow.
Silliman: So like I say, everything was just chock full.
Bauman: Right, right. Now, do you remember--so you were born in '31. So you were about 12 years old in '43 when the Hanford project started. I guess, first of all, do you remember--going back to 1941, when the attack on Pearl Harbor-- do you remember--
Silliman: Oh certainly.
Bauman: --that sort of thing. And do you have any memories from that? And then when did you find out about something happening out at Hanford?
Silliman: Well you never knew what was happening in Hanford. If you asked somebody what was happening out there, they said they're building Wendell Willkie buttons or nylon stockings or something like that that you couldn't get a hold of. But of course, everything like sugar and shoes were rationed.
Bauman: And when did you find out what was going on at Hanford? After the war ended, after the bombs?
Silliman: Yes. You just did not hear what was going on. And if somebody did say anything, they weren't there very long. Yeah.
Bauman: You just knew there was some sort of big project that people were working on?
Silliman: Yes, that's all we knew, was a big project.
B. Yeah. And so going back, do you remember finding out about World War II itself, the attack on Pearl Harbor?
Silliman: Oh yeah. As I recall, it was on a Sunday. And it affected me because my brother Clint, who was working for J.C. Penney's up in Palouse, he enlisted right away with the caveat that he be able to bring his stuff home before he went in. So he got to be home for Christmas. So that's the last Christmas he was home for a number of years.
Bauman: Right, so your family was impacted very immediately.
Silliman: Mm-hm. Yeah, all three of my brothers were in World War II.
Bauman: And so then what about yourself? What happened with you after finishing high school? What did you do from that point on?
Silliman: Well, I had grown up with a friend that lived down in the garden tracts with me there. His name was Bill Bryce. We'd gone all the way through--we played together before school. Went to school together. Walked back and forth to school together. Went to college together. Roomed together in college. Then when the Korean War broke out, they weren't giving deferments to begin with. So I enlisted and he sat it out. And finally they gave deferments there. So he went ahead and completed his college there and then went to University of Washington. That was at Central. And then he went on to the University of Washington and got his masters. And then did his service and put in his career with Boeing. In fact, he was responsible for writing the Boeing contract out here a number of years ago when Boeing was doing the computer service out here. He was the sales manager.
Bauman: And then what point did you come back to Farmers Exchange?
Silliman: When I got out of the service, I was considering a job with Fairchild Camera Corporation. I was in a RB-36 reconnaissance bomber outfit that used a lot of cameras. My job was to run the shop to repair and service those. And I got offered a job there. But it would've been travelling. And by this time, I married while I was in the service. And my brother came back to South Dakota where I was stationed at Ellsworth and said, would you like to come back to the store? And that's what I always want to do all my life. So I took him up on that. And when we got out, my wife I came back here and went to work. And I've been there ever since.
Bauman: And what year was that?
Silliman: That was 1954. And Clint and I and Dad were in partnership. Them we bought Dad out shortly after that. Then Clint and I were in partners until '81. His son was going to buy him out, and then he backed out. So I bought him out. And then they shut down Hanford. [LAUGHTER] And boy, did it have an effect on us through the '80s. Just almost busted us.
Bauman: Really?
Silliman: Yeah.
Bauman: Hm. So again, more impact related to Hanford?
Silliman: Oh yeah. And Hanford still has a big impact on us. We didn't realize, some of these people that traded with us had been trading with us for a number of years. We didn't know what they did. To us, that's Old Joe, you know? And in '81 when they started laying all those people off, Old Joe was coming in and saying hey, I make sure the family gets the feed and stuff they need. I’ll send you a check, I'm going to Texas or somewhere else and see what I can find. So it really had an effect on us in the '80s. Some of the layoffs since then haven't had as big effect. But they still affect us.
Bauman: Yeah, so it definitely says something about the economic impact that-
Silliman: But there's been more diversification since then.
Bauman: Mm-hm, mm-hm. And since 1954, a lot of grown in Kennewick?
Silliman: Considerably.
Bauman: Changed quite a bit from 1954. What are some of the biggest changes that you've seen since 1954 in Kennewick? Obviously the size is one of them, right?
Silliman: The size, the selection, the competition. You know, every time they open a big box store, they handle something that we handle there. But we find we can compete with them through service and other ways. And we've had to change. We started off trading cattle. Now we trade lawn mowers and power equipment there. We still have the feed. We still have the garden supplies. We've enlarged that. But you wouldn't recognize the store from what it was when I was a boy. We've also bought other buildings around us and expanded there.
Bauman: But still in downtown Kennewick?
Silliman: The same location. Other than the one move that we made there in '39 from behind Washington Hardware up to where we are now.
Bauman: Is there anything I haven't asked you about or that you haven't talked about in terms of, especially in terms of say, growing up in Kennewick or any stories or events that really stand that you think you'd really like to talk about?
Silliman: Well during the buildup of Hanford--we'd always had dust storms here. But during the build up of the Hanford, all the ground was been worked. And we had dust storms--you might as well just close everything down because you couldn't see, you couldn't drive there. It was just really bad. Obviously, part of it was from the dryland wheat farmer. But a lot of it was just from everything building up on that. We were offered some land to collect a debt one time. And my brother and I went out and looked at it and decided it was too far out of town and the town wasn't building that way. And so we said no, we couldn't use that for payment for the debt. That land was at 395 and 10th Avenue in Kennewick which now has got a whole bunch of businesses and PUD and that there, so--
Bauman: Probably a pretty valuable piece of property.
Silliman: Yeah. And you know everything built west to begin with. The city was able to--when Columbia Center came in--was able to slip in there and take a road, make it city property and get that in the city of Kennewick. But now it's building to the south in the downtown area. I've seen it go up and down and up and down. At one time I thought it was going to be just not livable down there. But it's changed again now. New storefronts, the businesses are filling the downtown area. When we came home in '54, my wife was not from here. So I took her around the Tri-Cities. And we start grading the areas. We graded Pasco as the best shopping area in the Tri-Cities. 4th and Lewis just had all sorts of stores around it. Good shoe stores and good clothing stores and that. Richland was nice and clean up there too. Not as many stores though. We rated Pasco first, Richland second, and Kennewick a very--downtown Kennewick a very poor third. We had J.C. Penney and that was about it. And that has changed. I would rate now Kennewick maybe as the top of the older areas there.
Bauman: The downtown?
Silliman: Yeah.
Bauman: What would you like for someone who maybe decades from now might be interested in watching your interview or something and learning more about Kennewick or about the Tri-Cities or that sort of thing, what do you think is most important for them to understand about the town of Kennewick that you grew up in the 1930s and 1940s?
Silliman: Well, it went from a strictly farm community. Everybody was either involved in farming somehow or dealing with farmers and that. And were the orchards were have been torn out. Now there's houses where the biggest grape vineyard, Concord grape vineyard was in the world. It's now buildings there. Those grapes are gone. So it's just entirely changed. The Tri-Cities is become a metropolitan type area there. And what are they, fourth or fifth in the state as far as there? You got Tacoma, Seattle, Tacoma, Spokane, and then maybe the Tri-Cities? Good place to live.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Yeah. Well, do you have any other things that you'd like to talk about or think would be important to talk about?
Silliman: Not that I can think of.
Bauman: Great. Well thank you very much--
Silliman: You bet. It's been my pleasure.
Bauman: --for coming in today and doing the interview.
Silliman: I'm sorry I didn't have more on Hanford. Oh, there used be a boat that went up the river to Hanford. I believe it's called the Hanford Flyer. And a number of years ago when the Tri-City Herald was repainting one of their buildings and striped the paint off, I noticed on the building, on the east side of the building, there which--and this building is just south of their main building. It had a sign up there for the Hanford Flyer.
Bauman: It was still on the building?
Silliman: Yeah. But they covered it of course when they repainted.
Bauman: Do you have any idea what years the Hanford Flyer was in operation?
Silliman: No, I do not. I meant to ask Tom Moak about that, if he had some information.
Bauman: And so what did it take up?
Silliman: I believe it took mail. And it would take passengers and freight up.
Bauman: That's a great story, and that it was still on the building after all those years.
Silliman: Yeah. There used be a couple horse troughs there in downtown Kennewick too, but they're all gone too. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: Great. All right. Well Mr. Silliman, thanks very much.
Silliman: Thanks for having me, Bob.
Ronald Palmer: Yeah.
Robert Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Ronald Palmer on October 26th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus on Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Ron about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us?
Palmer: Ronald A. Palmer. R-O-N-A-L-D; A for Alan, A-L-A-N; Palmer, P-A-L-M-E-R.
Franklin: Great. So, tell me how and why you came to the area and to work for the Hanford Site.
Palmer: I came to work at the Hanford Site to work on glass for immobilization of radioactive waste. I came here in 1979, November, and worked in the 222-S Building out in the 200-West Area.
Franklin: 222-S. Is there another name for that building?
Palmer: It was next to the REDOX building. It was the laboratory that supported REDOX in the early ‘50s.
Franklin: Okay. And what drew you to—or how did you become a glass person?
Palmer: My technical background. Went to Alfred University in Alfred, New York. Earned a degree in Glass Science. My first job out of school was in Jersey City, New Jersey working for Metro Containers, a firm that made glass jars for beer bottles, mayonnaise jars—those kinds of things. As a quality control engineer, I mainly broke things. I got interested in why glass broke, why and how it fails, and in order to learn more about that, I went to graduate school and did a dissertation on fracture and failure of glass. My thesis advisor at the University of Florida was Larry Hench. Dr. Hench had been the chair for the National Academy of Sciences on what it is we thought we should do with radioactive waste. Turns out, if you put a glass guy in charge of figuring out what to do with nuclear waste, glass gets involved. So I wound up talking with the folks at the—the company running Hanford at that time was Rockwell. They asked me to come out and work on the glass project then.
Franklin: How long did you work on the glass project?
Palmer: I worked on the glass project for just a couple years. Then the funding for that disappeared, and I joined the Basalt Waste Isolation Project, the repository project that was going on at the time.
Franklin: Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Palmer: At the time, the Department of Energy was looking for an underground repository site to permanently dispose of the radioactive waste. There were other sites involved, but the basalt project was one looking at the geological formations underneath the Hanford Site as a place to store the radioactive waste. The basalt flows, which are basically the lava flows left over from the Cascade volcanoes. We built a laboratory in 2221—I’m sorry—2101-M Building in the 200-East Area. It had been a big warehouse and we built a laboratory there with electron microscopes, spectrometers of various types. We were basically a geochemistry laboratory. We were looking at the properties of the basalt rock underneath, in the formation underneath the Hanford Site and the relationship of the properties of those rocks with the glass compositions that we expected to make. So we did some experiments that involved glass and the rock, and simulated ground water, those kinds of things.
Franklin: You mean storing glass in the rock, or--?
Palmer: Well, the glass was expected to be the waste form. So, when you dispose of the waste, you put the waste form—which, what they’ve eventually done is they make the glass and they pour it into stainless steel canisters. The design we used were two foot in diameter by ten feet tall stainless steel canisters. So with the glass in there, you expect, after several thousand years—[LAUGHTER]—the canister has become compromised, and you worry about the reactions between the water, which may come in to the repository, and the glass, and the rock.
Franklin: And so what did you find about that situation? Or can you describe a little bit more the work or the results of that work?
Palmer: We were looking at ways to perhaps slow down the in-flow of water into the repository. One suggested method was to backfill the holes that you’d drill into the ground to put the canisters with a bentonite clay. The water would come in, and it would first see the clay, and the clay would have a tendency, when it gets wet, to swell, and to slow down—if not stop—the in-flow of the water, and therefore extend the life of whatever waste form you’ve put into the ground. So--
Franklin: Okay—oh, sorry.
Palmer: So we looked at various options that we might design into the repository to minimize the eventual damage that you will expect to have happen from water coming into the repository.
Franklin: So that clay, then, would kind of act to plug the leak of—
Palmer: Yes.
Franklin: Interesting.
Palmer: The term we used for that would be engineered barriers.
Franklin: Engineered barriers.
Palmer: So you’d basically find materials that would help keep the water out, and design that—that would be an integral part of the repository design.
Franklin: And were these results adopted here on the Hanford Site or elsewhere, or--?
Palmer: The repository program—the basalt project continued, I think, until 1987. Let’s see. The original Act of Congress that was involved with nuclear waste was in 1982. And that provided for the investigation of three different repository sites. The basalt site underneath the Hanford facility; a formation of a material called tuff outside of Las Vegas, which is called the Yucca Mountain site; and they were looking at various salt formations in Texas and New Mexico and Louisiana and other places as a third potential site. By 1987, they had determined that it was too expensive to look at all three. It’s not cheap to do that sort of research. And they narrowed it down to the Yucca Mountain site outside of Las Vegas. So at that time, I think the other repository sites’ projects disappeared. I was gone from the project by then. I left the project in 1984, so—
Franklin: Oh, okay. And where did you go when you left?
Palmer: I went to—I was out of the nuclear waste business and went to 3M in Minnesota.
Franklin: Okay. And what did you do there?
Palmer: I did research on new glass compositions. In particular, a material called bioglass, another topic of research for my former professor, Dr. Hench. He invented a material called bioglass, which chemically bonds to bone in the body. And as now, it’s being used as a dental material. Not as a solid piece, but as a powder to help with the bone’s—recession of your bones if you’ve got gum disease and that sort of thing. You can place a powder of the bioglass, and then it will help the bone grow back a little bit.
Franklin: Oh, wow, interesting.
Palmer: It’s also being used in toothpaste to help fight gum disease and that sort of thing. So. But I did a little bit of that work for 3M, but not—I also worked on some composite materials that they were designing.
Franklin: So now you’re kind of back in dealing with—later on, you returned to dealing with radioactive—nuclear waste. So can you describe that transition back?
Palmer: I joined West Valley Nuclear Services—there’s a site that’s now called the West Valley Demonstration Project thirty miles south of Buffalo, New York. And I spent 15 years there. During that time, we tested a mockup of a glass melter and how we would run the process. And then built the actual melter and closed that in a hot cell where no one would go to work on it inside. So we had to make sure that the melter would operate remotely without having to send someone in. The West Valley site had only one tank of radioactive waste, compared to the 177 here at Hanford. So it was a fairly straightforward project. We were able to determine the chemistry of the waste in the tank, and that made it easy to just design one glass composition that we used. We made glass—we made radioactive glass from 1996 to 2002. And made 275 canisters—the canisters being two foot in diameter by ten feet tall. And those canisters are now stored—they remain at the West Valley site. Eventually they’ll go into a repository, assuming some repository is eventually made.
Franklin: So did it take six years to vitrify—or sorry, I guess I should ask you—that process is vitrification, right?
Palmer: Yes.
Franklin: So that’s the right word to use?
Palmer: Yes.
Franklin: Okay, so it took six years to do that for one tank of waste?
Palmer: We designed the process to be small and relatively slow. To fill a canister when everything was up and running smoothly was about two-and-a-half days. Whereas the facility running at Savannah River right now—Defense Waste Processing Facility, DWPF, they fill a canister in less than a day. At the Savannah River site, if I remember correctly, had 53 underground storage tanks. So they’ve got quite a bit more than we had at West Valley. And also a variety of compositions, so they had to change the glass composition as things went along. They’ve now made over 4,000 canisters since 1996.
Franklin: Wow. So then it does really depend on the chemical makeup of the tank as to what type of—
Palmer: Yes.
Franklin: So which is why, I guess Hanford’s waste poses a problem in that aspect.
Palmer: Yes, yes.
Franklin: Because of the unknown nature of—
Palmer: Yeah, and at Hanford there’s also a wide variety of compositions in the waste tanks. So the glass compositions can be very different. So you really need to know what’s coming in from the tank the next day in order to make the right mix of raw materials to make the right glass composition. And it’s tricky. Also, if you have to go from one composition to another, you have to know what you have in the tank before you add the new stuff, because the composition is going to change. It’s hard. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Do you think that vitrification is the right choice for Hanford’s waste, given its myriad of compositions in the tanks?
Palmer: When Dr. Hench did his analysis of materials to use to immobilize waste in general, glass is clearly the most versatile. There are other waste forms. There are crystalline ceramic waste forms, there are composite waste forms—a wide variety of things that you can use to immobilize the waste. But the processes for those waste forms are much more complicated. It would be very difficult to, say, design a—one of the waste forms is called a tailored ceramic, where you design crystalline components of the ceramic to immobilize specific radionuclides and that sort of thing. It’s hard enough to do for one composition, but to do for 177 compositions, that would have been very difficult. The glass is clearly the most versatile. Is it durable enough? The expectation is that the glass—the waste form in the repository will stay—the radionuclides are supposed to stay within the repository boundaries for 10,000 years. That’s the bureaucratic boundaries that we have to design for. Some people say, yeah, it ought to be a million years. But who would believe us if we predicted a million years? [LAUGHTER] We have trouble believing ourselves when we’re predicting 10,000 years because it’s tough to run that experiment. From the standpoint of glass lasting that long, there are some researchers out there that have been looking at archaeological glasses that maybe may have been in the ground, say, 1,000 years. And try to look at what glass composition—what the glass started out as. In fact, somebody has done an experiment where they’ve excavated the dirt around the glass object and analyzed what is in the dirt that might have come from the glass leeching out and that sort of thing. They’ve also discovered in shipwrecks in the Mediterranean, glass bottles, amphoras, those kinds of things that have been at the bottom of the ocean for 1,000 years. And you can still drink wine out of them. [LAUGHTER] So we like to think if the folks 1,000 years ago made glass that lasts at the bottom of the ocean for 1,000 years, maybe we can on purpose design glass that will last for 10,000 years.
Franklin: Interesting. Why was there the shift—so you started to—you came to work in glass immobilization, and then you said the funding for that program ended. Why was there that shift there in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s?
Palmer: Well, if I remember correctly, the project I was working on was sort of under the table. [LAUGHTER] If I remember—the Pacific Northwest Laboratories—this was before it was a national laboratory—had the responsibility of developing the glass waste forms. And what we were doing was just a very small project compared with what was going on at Battelle Northwest at the time. I think somebody caught us doing that, and they said, you shouldn’t be doing that; that’s Battelle’s job. So they found something else for me to do.
Franklin: Oh, right. So Hanford’s vitrification plant is in the news a lot and is kind of plagued by cost overruns and delays. Being a vitrification expert, is that kind of—I mean, I’m not looking for you to criticize them or anything, but is that kind of the norm? Should we have been prepared for how complex this process is? Do you think maybe that that wasn’t communicated or are there actual kind of real problems with the processes being instituted here, in terms of efficiency and actually handling the mandate?
Palmer: I’m a little surprised it’s taken this long. I was back here after we finished the work at West Valley, I came out to the Project that was—let’s see, Bechtel had just taken it over along with—it was the Washington Group then. And I came out—the Washington Group was the organization that was running the West Valley Project, so we were brother organizations. So I came out to work with some of the folks in the group to try to put together procedures, figure out what we expected to have happen over the project. So I remember coming back here and I think I still have a bumper sticker that says Glass in 2007. [LAUGHTER] I probably got that in 2003. So I’ll hang on to that. For it to have gone out this long, I don’t know. I do know for having spent a lot of time at West Valley, the West Valley Site, instead of—well, here the Hanford Site is 570 square miles. The West Valley site is 200 acres. [LAUGHTER] The Department of Energy folks, who were our overseers, were right down the hall. They’re not miles away as they are out here. West Valley’s also in the same time zone as the DOE headquarters in Washington. It’s not 3,000 miles away and three time zones away. I think geography means a lot. [LAUGHTER] When you’ve got the folks you’re working with and have to solve their problems, when you’ve got them down the hall and you can talk to them day in, day out, it makes it so much easier to get the job done. And then when they can call their folks in Washington where things have to get done in a relatively straightforward manner, I think that helps quite a bit. So it’s the fact that Hanford is so big and it’s so far away from the people who ought to be thinking about it more. But they’re in Washington, DC—what do they care about what happens in Washington State. It really—it’s not primary in their minds. So you sort of get sent to the back of the room.
Franklin: Oh. How does that compare, though, with—you said the Savannah River site has created about 4,000 canisters. How long has that process—has there been similar delays or situation there? How come that process is kind of up and underway—or can you describe—I guess my question is, can you describe the similarities or differences between what’s being attempted here and what’s being attempted at another large site like Savannah River?
Palmer: Savannah River always seemed to have priority over Hanford. Probably because it’s closer to population. And the environment around the Savannah River Plant is a lot wetter--[LAUGHTER]—than the desert out here. So if the tanks leak out here, they leak into the desert. If they leak at the Savannah River Site, they leak into the Savannah River, which feeds several million people. So the Savannah River Site did get more attention in the early days. They’ve done a very nice job getting their plant up and running. We worked closely with them when I was at West Valley. We talked with them all the time in terms of their day-to-day almost troubles and tribulations. We designed—the melters were designed a little bit differently and the canisters were a little bit different. The West Valley canisters had a large mouth and it was a 16-inch opening. Pretty easy to hit the hole with the glass coming out of the furnace. The Savannah River canisters had a much smaller diameter hole and that led to different processes for welding the material shut. But we could compare notes in how you’d do that and how the melters worked. We were operating in parallel, I think—let’s see, if I remember right, Savannah River started their process up in March of ’96 and we started in June.
Franklin: Okay, so you were doing the same thing at the same time.
Palmer: Right.
Franklin: So they’ve vitrified a lot of their waste, but there’s still no current long-term repository. Waste is still being stored at individual sites, waiting. So really, that’s kind of the other step of this process, right, is finding a—or what are your thoughts on that situation, on the—do we need one or two major long-term repositories to kind of collect all the waste in one area, or is better to keep it spread out at its separate sites?
Palmer: It’s going to be wonderful when we get all the liquid waste out of the tanks and immobilized somehow. I’d like to think that—I’m a little prejudiced—that glass is the answer to that. And now that we’ve got the tank empty at West Valley and the material in glass, and Savannah River will get there eventually—they might be halfway through? I’m not quite sure how long they’re going to take to get it done. But it’ll be nice to have those canisters of high level waste somewhere, and the high level waste out of the ground. And with any luck it’ll happen here at Hanford, too. There’s no rush to get those canisters of glass into the ground. We expect that they’ll be stored safely somewhere in some kind of a building, some kind of a structure, that will keep the water out, keep the animals away and whatever else. So you kind of hope that that’s going to happen. And if there—there’s talk about reopening the Yucca Mountain project again. It was always kind of funny—everybody complains that they shut it down a few years ago, and that that was a political action. Well, picking Yucca Mountain was a political action in the first place. In 1987, when they decided to go to just one repository, if you look at the state of Nevada versus the state of Washington versus, say, the state of Texas, Nevada has the least number of representatives in Washington. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Ah, a-ha.
Palmer: So it basically was a political act to create that there. So it doesn’t bother me that it was a political act to have shut it down. It may be reopened again. Harry Reid, who’s the senator who asked President Obama to shut it down—Harry’s retiring. So maybe it’ll reopen. I remember, maybe 25 years ago, I went to a PTA meeting, the New York State PTA meeting, and the national president was there. She was from Las Vegas. And I asked her about Yucca Mountain. She said, you and I need to talk. [LAUGHTER] She was not happy about Yucca Mountain, and she was amongst those who were really fighting against even looking at the site. There was a—let’s see. When I was in Minnesota, it was about 1985, I believe, the Department of Energy was looking at a potential second repository. They were looking, first of all, at those sites out west. And then they started to look at granite formations, say, in New Hampshire. The Canadian Shield, which is outstate in Minnesota. So there were folks agitating in Minnesota—oh, my god, they’re going to bring nuclear waste here. And I remember going to a meeting of the local congressman and hearing people shouting about it. And I sort of—on the way out, I mentioned to him, I said, why don’t you just let DOE come in here and discover that it’s really not the place to put it? One of the main things you need to worry about is how do you get all the materials that’s elsewhere to the repository? And the weather in Minnesota in the winter’s not so good. [LAUGHTER] It would make it difficult to bring material in. And in addition to the weather interfering with construction of the facility to begin with. So there were a lot of good reasons not to put it in Minnesota. So it was just a lot of fun to watch the action going on with the anti-nukes, locally, and as well as the people who might have been more in favor of it. I also remember there was—one of my colleagues at the basalt project was back in Boston. I think he was at MIT, giving a talk about the repositories. And he said he noticed some of the kids in the back were sort of dozing off when he was talking about repositories in Nevada and Washington and that sort of thing. And then he suddenly mentioned that—maybe in New Hampshire. And he said—the kids sat up and paid attention all of the sudden. It’s up the street. [LAUGHTER] In New Hampshire. Yeah. So it gets people’s attention when it’s close at hand.
Franklin: It’s a real nimby issue.
Palmer: Yes.
Franklin: How did the work at Hanford—your work at Hanford—kind of inform your later work? Because you started your private sector career at Hanford, right?
Palmer: Yes.
Franklin: So how did that inform your later work?
Palmer: One of the most important aspects of handling radioactive materials is a quality assurance program where you—those of us were doing research on the basalt project, our first thought was how do you do quality control, quality assurance on research? How do you ensure that your experiments are right? Because you’re supposed to be investigating unknown things, so maybe quality control, quality assurance, is too much controls on your process. When it first was imposed on us, we were very concerned about how we can do that. But then we talked to the folks who were quality assurance experts, and they said, oh, what we really have to do is control the process. Control—make sure if you’re using a particular instrument, a spectrometer, whatever, make sure it’s been calibrated, make sure it’s working properly, make sure you have standards to compare against your unknowns. So the quality assurance aspect of it actually made our work a whole lot better. We had to think about it a little harder, but that’s okay. [LAUGHTER] In fact, when I moved from here to 3M and did research there, I kept those thoughts in mind: okay, I need to do research on new materials, on new products, that sort of thing—but how do I set up my experiments so that I know I’m getting the right answers? Or defensible answers, if not the right answers.
Franklin: Where at least you know the process is defensible.
Palmer: And that turned out to be an important part of my work at West Valley. So learning that quality assurance was a good thing has been a big help to my later career.
Franklin: Can you describe Hanford as a place to work?
Palmer: [LAUGHTER] It’s a different place. It was first very strange to get out here and you see people on the corner waiting for the bus and everybody’s wearing a badge. That was a—coming, especially from a college campus—that was a very different experience. I guess I got used to it, but I wasn’t happy with the atmosphere that that sort of creates—having to wear a badge and that sort of jazz. And I remember when I was at 3M, there was somebody coming in and wanted to make everybody at 3M—I worked in their research facility in St. Paul, which was several dozen buildings. They wanted everybody to wear—somebody was coming in proposing that everybody at 3M wear a badge, for corporate security and that sort of thing. My opinion of that was that would change the atmosphere of the research park. Later in my career, I worked for Corning, Incorporated in Corning, New York, and they’ve taken it to an extreme, I think. [LAUGHTER] When you get up from your desk, you’re supposed to turn your computer off. Because even the guy next to you isn’t supposed to see what you have on your computer screen. And you have to wear a badge, and you need the badge to go from building to building. Or from parts of the building to other parts of the building. It created an atmosphere that I wasn’t happy with. I felt that it’s necessary at Hanford, where you’re working with hazardous materials all the time. But I wasn’t—I thought that in a corporate world, I thought it was a little bit of overkill. But the folks at Corning, Incorporated have decided that—[SIGH]—they need to have everybody keeping their mouths shut whenever they needed to keep their mouths shut. Although if you go out at night and you sit in a bar, and you listen to the guys talking at the table next to you, you might find out some things that you—[LAUGHTER]—you wouldn’t find out hanging around the quarters of the research park. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Right. What were the most challenging and/or rewarding aspects of your work at Hanford?
Palmer: Most challenging, I think, was—some days, getting to work. Taking the buses out to work. Although that, eventually, once you get used to it, you get reading done on the bus. There was—for a couple of years, I lived in Kennewick, and I took a van pool. So I would get up in the morning walk to the corner, and pick up the van, and spend an hour and then spend another hour at the end of the night, coming home. At the time, I subscribed to two magazines: I subscribed to the New Republic, which was weekly, and on the left side of the political spectrum, and I subscribed to William F. Buckley’s National Review, which was every two weeks, and on the right side of the political spectrum. I was obscenely well-informed. [LAUGHTER] Because I read them cover-to-cover, because I had the van pool time day in and day out. I worked with a lot of interesting folks. And I’m spending this week here getting together with some old friends. Since we were done making glass at West Valley, a number of those folks are out here now. And about a dozen of us got together last night, and it was a lot of fun to see some folks that I hadn’t seen for ten years or so.
Franklin: Oh, that’s great.
Palmer: The aspect of working on a project that the whole world thinks they know about—oh, nuclear waste. One of the things—the most common comment you get is, do you glow in the dark? And it doesn’t matter—that happens at technical meetings, that happens at PTA meetings, that happens on planes going back and forth. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: It happens to me every time I go to a conference. At least once. Somebody thinks that they’re the first person that thought of that joke.
Palmer: Yes. [LAUGHTER] So it does make for interesting cocktail party conversation. Because everybody has an opinion.
Franklin: Yeah.
Palmer: And—why don’t we just put it on a rocket and send it? Well, rockets never explode, right?
Franklin: No!
Palmer: [LAUGHTER] And even before Columbia and Challenger had their problems, I went to a meeting in Cocoa Beach, Florida down the street from the Cape, and remember talking to someone who worked at Cape Canaveral for a long time and some of the tests that they did. They had one rocket that they called the Titusville Express. Titusville is the next town over, and the rocket went up and hung a right, and fortunately went over the city of Titusville into the water. But that’s not what it’s designed to do. So if you put radioactive materials on those kinds of things, you’re going to make a mess in the water someplace or wherever it comes down. So one of those—a glib, easy answer to—the further away you are from the project, the more answers you have to solve it. That’s true in a lot of different ways. People have—oh, we can solve that problem. It’d be easy; just do this. Ah, well, no. [LAUGHTER] So that makes a lot of fun. And now, as we’ve been talking about now writing a book on the history of this topic, and it’s a lot of fun digging in the background and trying to figure out how people 100 years ago were treating radioactive materials. As they started to understand that, yeah, we ought to take into account time, distance and shielding and those kinds of things. It took a while for them to figure that out, and people got hurt, and died from not knowing.
Franklin: Right.
Palmer: And in some cases, though, I’m finding as I read more, there’s a lot of cases where they did know, but they just left the door open [LAUGHTER] on the cyclotron, that sort of thing. Some of the guys who were working on that were basically cowboys. They just treated it like your standard, old—oh, whatever’s going on in the laboratory, and okay. The stream of electrons in the cyclotron, if they left the door open, somebody was getting irradiated, but they didn’t think—you couldn’t feel it, so what’s the big deal? But you need to keep that door closed. It’s kind of funny to read about the people who—smart people, gone on to get wide renown in physics and that sort of thing—but they left the door open on the cyclotron because they didn’t figure it was a big deal. Or they were just careless.
Franklin: Right, or maybe had a sense of invulnerability--
Palmer: Yes.
Franklin: --when it came to their own mortality.
Palmer: Physicists have a way of thinking they’re invincible.
Franklin: Were there any major events that happened if the Tri-Cities while—I guess you only lived here for five years?
Palmer: Yeah.
Franklin: Were there any major events in the Tri-Cities when you lived here that stand out to you?
Palmer: Mount St. Helens.
Franklin: Oh.
Palmer: It was May 18, 1980. And we had been watching—over the previous year, we would be able to see some of the minor eruptions that had been going on. And I think—if I remember right—it’s 160 miles from here. It was Sunday morning when it happened, and somewhere around 8:00 or something like that. My wife and I were in the grocery store. We were way in the back of the grocery store, and a friend came in and said, wow, did you see what the mountain did this morning? And—no. We’d been inside whenever it happened, and came out and you see these puffy clouds. It kind of looks like cauliflower. The ash falls in like pockets. That day everybody basically stayed inside, because our cars outside got covered with dust. I talked to a friend who went to work that day and took the bus out to the 200-West Area. And he said you couldn’t see the front of the bus from the back of the bus inside the bus.
Franklin: Wow.
Palmer: So it was a dusty day. They had just bought a new fleet of buses that were all air conditioned. The ash chewed up the air conditioning. So we didn’t have that new fleet of buses that summer, so we all rode un-air conditioned buses that summer. And a lot of people wore the face masks for most of the summer going out on the bus during that summer.
Franklin: Oh, wow. So how—did that impact the work at Hanford at all?
Palmer: I don’t know that it impacted the work to speak of. It certainly woke us up to Mother Nature’s power. I remember there was someone here who had—a photographer—who had been going back and forth to Seattle, and he would stop at the St. Helens area and take pictures. He’d gone over the Saturday before. I saw him give a presentation on this afterwards, so this is all secondhand sort of thing. He stayed—he decided he’d stay the night on the south side of the mountain. He took some wonderful pictures the day before from that particular angle. The next morning, it blew, and when it blew, he was facing south, away from the mountain. He didn’t hear a thing. Because the explosion went north and all the sound and all the ash went north. He was talking to somebody and the guy said, look around. He turned around and he could see the plume going off. And he went back to the same places where he’d taken pictures the day before, and had the same picture as the explosion is going on. So it was quite an opportunity for that guy to get those kind of photographs.
Franklin: No kidding.
Palmer: Then the police were coming through, chasing people out. You got to get out of here. Because the snowcap was melting and the floods—the Toutle River, I believe, was being overflowed. He had to get out of there in a hurry, although he kept stopping every once in a while, taking pictures. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: As any good photographer would.
Palmer: Yes. And the cop would come and say, you’ve got to get out of here. And I remember we—later that summer, my father came out to visit. My father was an eighth grade science teacher. So we had a good time taking pictures and collecting ash for his science class and that sort of thing. We drove around the south end and came up Interstate 5 and saw the destruction from the flood, and drove over to where the Toutle River had washed out some small bridges. And you could see where—the river had gone down to its normal level, but you could see it was ten foot up on the banks, and then there was a mark about ten feet up in the trees above that where the water level had been. So it was mighty powerful.
Franklin: Do you have any memories of the social scene or local politics or other insights into Tri-Cities life?
Palmer: We were part of the Jewish community—Temple Beth Shalom. It’s a small temple. There’s not a whole lot of Jewish folks here. But they had been here along—from virtually the beginning of the Project. The temple was founded in 1950. When we were here around 1980, there were still people who were part of that founding organization.
Franklin: Wow. I’m sorry, where was that located?
Palmer: Thayer Street, south of Lee.
Franklin: Okay.
Palmer: I haven’t been there for a while, so it’s—and I understand they’ve remodeled it. So I’m not sure I would recognize—I think I would recognize the building if I were to drive down it, but I haven’t done that yet. I may do that later this week. There were quite a few interesting people who were part of that organization. There were chemists and engineers who worked out at the Site, and were also part of that organization. There were doctors in the local community who were part of that congregation. And I still have friends who are part of that here, and I expect to see them this week. We didn’t do a whole lot of other things. I was—it was just my wife and I when we came out here. We had a son—my wife’s named Ellen Goldberg Palmer. My son was born here. My older son, Michael was born August of ’82. So he has roots here, but I don’t think he’s ever been back. [LAUGHTER] So one of these days, we have to bring him back and see where he was born and that sort of thing. We later had a second son born in Minnesota. So my sons are connected to the two biggest rivers in the continent. One the Columbia, one the Mississippi. Although neither of them really remembers having been near them. They were both raised in Buffalo, so they don’t remember much about either Minnesota or Washington State. We were very much involved with the synagogue. There were also quite a few mixed marriages. I’m not Jewish. We decided we’d raise the kids Jewish, but that’s all right. That wasn’t a problem. But there were a lot of other mixed marriages as part of the synagogue. Because of the wide range of beliefs of the synagogue, it was always an independent organization. There are a variety of Jewish movements—the two major ones are Reform and Conservative. Reform being a little more liberal; a Conservative rabbi would never have married my wife and I, because they just don’t believe in that—in intermarriage. And we had some trouble finding a Reform rabbi that would do that. But the synagogue remained independent for many years. Until something—it was never clear to me exactly what happened. We took a vote and it was always 50/50, and they decided not to affiliate with either the Conservative or Reform movement. But then somebody decided, we really need to do something. So they had another vote, and it went Conservative. So they needed to have—they felt they needed to do something with the Sunday school and have some sort of official imprimatur of one of the movements. And that caused a split. [LAUGHTER] Especially among those of us who were mixed marriages. And we had a meeting a couple of weeks later in our house, mainly because we hadn’t had enough money to buy furniture for the living room yet, so we had a place where we could have lots of people meet and have chairs around. We actually created another synagogue for those of us who felt we should be more liberal than the conservative end of it. And that went on for a couple of years. I think it’s consolidated again. But I don’t know exactly what the status of the synagogue is now. So even amongst small congregations, you can have big divides. There’s a joke that somebody told me. They sent a Jewish astronaut to the moon to establish a community. And they ask him, why two synagogues? And he said, well, that’s the one I go to, and that’s the one I wouldn’t go to on a bet. [LAUGHTER] So you can always expect—three Jews in a room, you’ll have ten opinions. [LAUGHTER] But politics? I don’t remember much about—I wasn’t much involved in that. I was too worried about day-to-day working and family life. Because I was new at both. I didn’t worry too much about other things. But, yeah, Mount St. Helens was the big one, and our relationship with the Jewish community. That was the two big social parts of our life while we were here.
Franklin: Okay. Could you describe the ways in which security or secrecy at Hanford impacted your work?
Palmer: Not very much. The work we were doing was publishable. We did have to worry a little bit about the composition of the waste. I think some of that might have been proprietary. Because knowing what was in the waste would give information about what was in the material that created the waste, which was for plutonium to make bombs. So I think some of that information might have been proprietary. I didn’t have to worry about it because I didn’t work on that part of the business. I do remember, at the Battelle library in the 300 Area—which was a wonderful place to go; the books there were—it was just a fun place to look around—there was a room down the hall that you had to have special permission to go in that had a lot of the processing information that was proprietary. And I always wanted to go in there, but I don’t think—my clearance wasn’t high enough. We had Q clearances then, and I don’t think they even have that anymore out here.
Franklin: Yeah, not to my knowledge.
Palmer: But the secrecy aspect didn’t affect me very much.
Franklin: How has the attitude towards nuclear waste disposal changed from 1979 until now? Both within the industry and without?
Palmer: I think a lot more people know about it than before. Especially because of the national hullaballoo over Yucca Mountain. People worry about that a little more than they—they probably didn’t know they had to worry about it. [LAUGHTER] and suddenly there’s a big squabble over it, so, gee, maybe I should worry about this. The other facility that’s been in the news lately is the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, New Mexico, WIPP. About two years ago there was an accident there. It was a small explosion underground and they needed to figure out exactly why it happened and now what can they do to prevent it from happening again. So I don’t think it’s up and running just yet. They’re still sorting out new procedures and that kind of thing. But, yeah, people are hearing about it more. I don’t remember anybody really—I mean, if I talked with old friends about nuclear waste in 1979, they’d say, say what? They really didn’t know what was going on and they had no idea of where the materials were located. But nowadays, they do worry about it more. There are folks with the nuclear power plants, we all know that there are the spent fuel being stored at all the nuclear power plants and folks are starting to be aware that—is this the right thing to do? There may be—it seems to take time for people to want to solve problems. [LAUGHTER] It’s just—it’s like the kids in the MIT classroom. Okay, that’s Washington State, I don’t need to worry about it. You know, wait a minute, it’s in New Hampshire; maybe I do need to worry about this. And if you suddenly realize that, yeah, that nuclear power plant down the street? Okay, there’s no radioactivity coming from it, but there is this other stuff that maybe can cause a problem.
Franklin: There’s spent fuel being stored there in the area that wasn’t designed as permanent storage for it.
Palmer: Right, right.
Franklin: How has the approach to nuclear waste disposal changed from 1979 until now? Or has it?
Palmer: I don’t know that it has. I’d like to think we’re smarter about it. I’d like to think that we have better solutions for it now than we did then.
Franklin: Such as?
Palmer: The immobilization processes. Eventually we’re going to have to ship the materials from one place to another. They’ve done tests on shipping casks and designed them so that they’re not going to fail. And there are folks who are still working on new designs for shipping, say, spent fuel—I’m sorry, I think it’s called used fuel now—from reactors where they’re stored now to—there may be some intermediate storage facility, or some permanent storage facility. I suspect that we may eventually go to some kind of an intermediate storage facility. And where that would be is a hard question to answer. They’re now looking at the process of siting a repository at—I forget exactly what the buzzword is for it, but it’s basically an informed—that’s it—informed consent of the community. For instance, in order to site the WIPP project at Carlsbad, New Mexico, they basically got buy-in from the community. From the mayor to the chamber of commerce, to the local citizens. There are other folks in the state of New Mexico who would rather it not have been there. But they live in Albuquerque, and that’s a couple hundred miles away. So now you worry about, what do you define as community? Is it the people who live in Carlsbad? Is it the people who live in New Mexico? Is it the people who live in the Southwest? So the concept of informed consent is absolutely necessary. But defining it is very hard to do.
Franklin: Right. Because you don’t always get to choose—as a project planner you don’t always get to choose who has buy-in or who feels like they should. You don’t get to exclude some people just based off of your own—they get to choose whether or not they feel—
Palmer: Yeah, and in the past, we’ve done horrible things where we just ignored people. There are places in the Southwest where they had uranium mines. And downstream from the uranium mines were the Navajo. There were—I’ve read somewhere, I’m assuming it’s true—is that there was never cancer in the Navajo Nation until there was uranium mill tailings nearby, coming in the water supply from upstream. The informed consent, will hopefully help us not ignore some people who ought to be part of the process.
Franklin: Right. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and/or living in Richland during the Cold War?
Palmer: We tried. We tried really hard to do the right things. I do remember—hmm—early ‘80s, Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 as President. He was a little more hawkish than Jimmy Carter before him. I got promoted to a manager’s position, and I got invited to—the vice president of the Site, who every once in a while got new managers together to give them a little lecture and welcome to management. [LAUGHTER] And I remember him saying something about—yeah, Reagan’s going to put us back to work. We’re going to build more bombs and do all that sort of thing. And I think I said at that point to myself, I got to get out of here. [LAUGHTER] Because if that was going to be the attitude—I mean, cleaning up the mess is one thing; building new stuff that goes boom in the night? Nah, I didn’t want any part of. And that was—some of the reputation that those of us who worked at Hanford is that, you know, yeah, we want to make more bombs. No, a lot of us are here because there’s a mess to clean up. And we were chemists of all kinds of varieties who wanted to know: okay, what is it that we have to do to make this not a problem anymore? And it’s a good intellectual problem to try to solve, and an engineering problem to solve. And we don’t want to make new things that disrupt the community. We want to take care of the mess.
Franklin: What about the—there’s kind of an inherent contradiction in there, though, right? In that you find joy in solving the problem and fixing the problem, but without the bombs—without the desire to make the bombs, we wouldn’t have the waste to clean up, and you might not have come here. You’re certainly—your life, part of your life’s work is encapsulating waste, which—there is waste from energy plants, but you seem to have spent much more time dealing with waste from production plants. So I understand maybe not wanting to see new—more new waste being produced, but that’s kind of an interesting relationship that I think you have with waste.
Palmer: Yes. I wasn’t around to make the decisions in the first place. I’d like to think that I’m around to make some personal and professional decisions now. Let’s say, when you go to the grocery store, you have these plastic bags. I—in the back of my car—I always have with me the reusable fabric bags when I go to the grocery store.
Franklin: Yeah, me too.
Palmer: So I don’t create the mess in the first place. I think that may be one thing that I’ve learned, looking at the history of what we’ve done with radioactive materials and radioactive waste, specifically, is that we could have done better if we’d have just thought about it a little bit. There’s new problems all the time coming on. There’s new industries coming on. Genetically designed organisms—genetically engineered organisms, those kinds of things. There’s nanomaterials. All these are new industries, and we hope that they’re thinking about the potential for problems. Having worked a little bit with some of the folks in the nanoparticle business, they were looking at those problems from the beginning. When they’re designing their materials, especially in the ceramics field. I know people who were there, at the beginning of designing new materials, and they were absolutely looking at potential harm that the materials might do.
Franklin: Do you think that same kind of forward-thinking was there at Hanford, during the World War II or Cold War, but that the importance of the initial mission overweighed concerns about the legacy of nuclear waste?
Palmer: Yeah, they were in a hurry. So cleaning up garbage was, at best, a second thought. They got it out of the way, and put it somewhere where it wasn’t going to bother anybody for a while. They’ll worry about it later. And it took them a while for later to show up. They suddenly noticed—I think it was about 1973, when they noticed, oh, there used to be 100,000 more gallons of waste in that tank than there is now. I wonder where it went. That was also the time when organizations were created to look at environmental issues. The EPA was founded in—what, I think it was about 1970? It was one of Nixon’s—
Franklin: That sounds about right.
Palmer: One of the good things that Nixon did. EPA and OSHA for that matter. I remember doing things as an underground in the laboratory that you cannot do now. I mean, using benzene to clean glassware. Not going to happen now, but it happened in the ‘60s as a routine thing. That’s how you cleaned the glassware, was boil it in a pot of benzene, because it did a nice job of cleaning the surface of Pyrex.
Franklin: Oh, yeah, I’m sure it did.
Palmer: [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Wow.
Palmer: Yeah. That was another thing, is that I probably got exposed to more dangerous materials working in a chemistry lab than I did working in a radioactive lab. [LAUGHTER] I know we took care of doing things in 222-S. Although there were some laboratories I didn’t really want to go into. [LAUGHTER] But you learn how to do good science and good laboratory experiments from the folks—the woman who worked with me as a lab technician, Sadie Kunkler, had been there since before I was born [LAUGHTER] in that laboratory. She started working there in 1950. So she had 30 years of experience of how to work in a laboratory, and how to—
Franklin: This was here at—
Palmer: At Hanford, in 222-S. She taught me a lot, an awful lot, in terms of how you work in a laboratory. There were parts of laboratory experiments that I was not competent to do. [LAUGHTER] But she was very, very good in the laboratory in terms of making sure things were clean. And when you’re doing experiments where you’re trying to measure small amounts of material being leeched out of a glass with water, everything needs to be clean. The water has to be pure. If you’re looking at dissolving glass, it’s mainly sand, silica. If you know anything about the dust that’s in the air, it’s also sand. So your materials—in order to do a proper experiment, you need to keep the dust out. Otherwise, your experiment is not going to be a—
Franklin: Well, you have to purify your water, too, so there’s no silica in the water.
Palmer: Right, right.
Franklin: Is there anything that I haven’t asked you about that you’d like to talk about before we—?
Palmer: We covered a lot of stuff that I hadn’t thought about in a long time. [LAUGHTER] Thank you.
Franklin: Yeah, thank you.
Palmer: I’m going to be talking to some other old friends this week, and I will—I think you know some of them. Steve Buckingham is one who’s been part of this program. Michael Kupfer is another one that I worked with at 222-S. I hadn’t—I called him yesterday, and he wasn’t sure who I was—again? What? We haven’t talked in—I haven’t talked to him in over 30 years. So, we’re going to get together and talk some more. And I’d like—Mike was here and had some very interesting experiences in the lab, working in glass and other projects. I think he might have some interesting things to say. There was one thing I think that actually got me the job. Working with glass at high temperatures is a tricky thing to do and one of the crucibles that you use is platinum. When I was in graduate school, somebody in the laboratory was making glass and used, as a centerplate in the furnace, silicon carbide. Silicon carbide can take the heat okay. But if you happen to drip a little bit of glass on the silicon carbide centerplate and have it next to the platinum crucible, the platinum crucible will dissolve. What happened in this particular case, the guy left the crucible with glass in it in the furnace, and he came back several hours later and it was gone. You allow the furnace to cool and you take out the centerplate, then you can see a ring of platinum that had been the crucible. It was now part of the centerplate. When I came out to Hanford, and went out to dinner with the folks who were interviewing me, they mentioned that they had a problem—they weren’t sure what happened. They had a bunch of—maybe half a dozen crucibles on a centerplate. And some of them dissolved. They caught it before they were all disappeared, so I eventually got to see it. But some of the crucibles had been eaten away. Because I had that experience before, my response was, oh, you used the silicon carbide centerplate. And they said, yep. And I think that got me the job. The fact that I had had that experience and so—that was the kind of experience they were looking for. Someone who would not make that mistake. Because those little platinum crucibles are, you know, 1,000 bucks a piece or more.
Franklin: Yeah, that’s not a cheap material to work with.
Palmer: [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Kind of a happy accident, huh?
Palmer: Yeah. Well—a happy experience for me to have that available in my list of things that I’ve done.
Franklin: Yeah, especially during an interview. Well, great, well thank you so much, Ron. It’s been a great interview.
Palmer: It’s been good, thank you.
Franklin: Okay.
View interview on Youtube.
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.
Robert Franklin: I’m ready here.
Tom Hungate: We’re ready.
Franklin: We’re ready, okay. My name is Robert Franklin and I am conducting an oral history with Edward Milliman on July 6th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Edward Milliman about his experiences working at the Hanford site and living in Richland. So I guess the first place to start is the beginning. So why don’t you tell me how you came to Hanford and to Richland?
Edward Milliman: From 1960 until ’67, I worked for General Electric and Douglas United Nuclear. I got laid off in ’67, so then I went to Montana, Bozeman area. Ran a couple of ranches there for a couple years. Went up to Cut Bank, Montana. In fact, it was winter for Montana. And 40 below there in the winter was nothing. The only way you could get to town, which was 20 miles away—they would start their D8 Cat up with the blade on it, and blade through all the way to town. And town was a grocery store and a tavern. Some of them old cowboys there, they’d get snowed in all winter.
When spring thaw come, they and their hired help would all come into town and come into the saloon there, the bar. And I noticed every time I would go in there, one fellow was always there. If you left late at night, he was still there. And I asked the bartender, which was from Longview, Washington. He said, no, we just lock him in. He just stays here, and if he drinks anything through the night, the money’s always to the side there. And those old cowboys would come in, and they would get all drunked up.
That one guy would say—and the bartender told me—see them two old fellas? And they must have been 70, 75. He said, stay away from them, just leave them alone. No matter what happens, leave them alone. Don’t say anything. Pretty soon their voices started getting loud, and I started paying them some attention. He said, that was not your calf. That was my calf that crawled through the fence and I just pulled him back. You’re a liar! And them two old fellas jumped up and went to knocking each other around and down on the floor. And they weren’t kidding. They were really hitting knuckles to each other. And pretty soon, the bartender took a bar towel, a wet bar towel on them. They got up, and sat there and sopped the blood up on their nose and their lips. They sat there, having a drink, and they started laughing. The bartender said, you know, neither one of them’s ever had a cow or a calf in their life. They’re wheat farmers. And he said, they’re just so glad to see each other, they beat the devil out of each other every year. [LAUGHTER] And he said this happens every spring.
And pretty soon, he said, now just sit still, man. It ain’t over yet. I said, my goodness. So pretty soon, he said, you hit me harder than I hit you. No, I didn’t. Smack, bang, down they went again. [LAUGHTER] And that finally ended it. Anyway, just some of the funny things that happened to me. Then I came back and put an application in for Battelle.
Franklin: In what—
Milliman: 1970. They hired me on January the 5th, 1970. I was working for a doctor, Dr. Alfred P. Wehner, which happened to be during the war a fighter pilot for the Germans. He joined the Luftwaffe, the Hitler Youth. His father was SS. He’s also written a book, From Hitler Youth to United States Citizen, which I probably have the second autographed copy.
But we were doing all kind of bioassays and lifespan studies using—mainly then it was hamsters, Syrian golden hamsters. We were making them—we would put them in these exposure chambers. They were introduced to nickel oxide in this one particular chamber. The next chamber would be cobalt oxide. And then also we went on to introduce cigarette smoke to them. You’d put them in a tube and plug them into a Hamburg-2 smoking machine which had 30 cigarettes on this turn. And the machine would take a puff off each cigarette and blow it in the chamber. They had no choice but to inhale it. And asbestos exposure. And at that time, all we had on was a lab coat and a little white paper face mask. [LAUGHTER] At that time, they didn’t know the dangers—really bad dangers of asbestos.
Then in 1974, Johnson and Johnson talcum powder exposure. That lasted for two years. In the meantime, all the employees out at 100 F, where we were located, they moved into the new Life Science Laboratory here in 3000 Area. But we couldn’t leave, because we had animals on exposure. Weren’t allowed to move them. So I was out there at 100 F until 1975, ’76.
And then I moved into town. I think it was ’77, we went out on a two-year asbestos concrete exposure. Of course, by then, they had us pretty well suited up in fresh air and respirators and all this stuff. Then I moved over—that was over at the annex. Then I moved into the Life Science Laboratory, which we used to say, we’re stuck one story down in the ground in a rat-infested hole. Which—all we had was rats and mice down there.
They had four macaque monkeys, and they were doing dental implants on them. We had this one comrade down there that—he was kind of a strange fellow. He would go into the monkey room, the macaques’. They had them in—there was four: it was three males and one female. If you’re mean to an animal, there’s no second chance or anything. If they catch you mistreating an animal, you’re out the door right now. They’ll escort you out and you’re finished. Well, when you went in the monkey room, these macaques—they’re only set up, oh, about two, three foot. When you’d come into the room, they would hang onto the bars on their cage. And Dan would come up and smash their fingers and tell them to get back, get back. They tell you, don’t let them get ahold of you, they’ll pull your arm right out of the socket, they’re that strong. And I’ve seen them get ahold of a chain and pull a half inch eyebolt right out of the concrete. They’d put their feet against the wall, and—anyway. This one male macaque which was the dominant one there, he would turn around real fast when Dan would come in and throw his posterior up in the air, which in monkey language, that’s insult, that’s a challenge, come on. Anyway, Dan kept doing that, and being mean to him, and kicking the cage, and making him get back. Always had a safety man looking through the glass at you, all the time when you’d go in there.
Dan was washing the floor out, and he got too close. And he dropped the hose, and he took a step forward to pick the hose up. That macaque reached out and got him by the front of the coveralls and pulled him up against the cage, and drew his fist back like a human, and he Dan so hard—[LAUGHTER]—through the bars of that cage, he knocked him out. And the safety man run in, and all the rest of the macaques were all standing up looking, hey, what you doing? And they pulled Dan out and took him to first aid. Dan come back, he had most beautiful black eye I’ve ever seen in my life. And his nose was kind of pushed over to the side a little bit from the swelling. Our supervisor called Dan in and said, you must be careful. Don’t let them get ahold of you. Okay.
Well, about two weeks later, Dan was in there. It was his turn to go in. He was in there washing the floor out, and feeding them. [LAUGHTER] He got too close. That monkey reached out and got Dan by the head of the hair and chun-kinged him into the bars and knocked him out again. Well, the safety man, he says, I run in and pulled Dan back out and took him to first aid. And now Dan come back, now he’s got this black eye that’s starting to turn green, because it’s healing up. And now he’s all bandaged up around his head. He got stitches in his head. The boss called him in again. Dan, you got to be careful. Stay away from them things. Okay.
About two weeks later, Dan went in there, and to check their water, you had about a six-foot galvanized pipe. And it was crossbar—across the upright bars on the thing, and then there was a divider there. You’d go in, you’d take that pipe, and you’d stick it against the water nipple to make sure that they were getting water. This little female macaque, she would grab the pipe and poke it on there and shake her head, yes, it’s okay. That’s how smart they were.
Well, Dan got to that big old male monkey—macaque—and he stuck the pipe in there. And the safety man told us later, he said, I knew exactly what was going to happen. Because you could sit there and see in that macaque, he’d kind of sit there and think about that, watching Dan put that pipe through there on the other cages. He grabbed the pipe, pulled it out of Dan’s hand, chugged him in the belly and folded Dan over, put the pipe over the crossbar there, and romped down on the end of it. Hit old Dan under the chin and knocked him out again. And the safety man, he said, I was laughing so hard, I couldn’t—I had to crawl in on my hands and knees and pull Dan out of there. Here comes Dan back, he’s still got bandage on his head, he’s still got a black eye, and now he’s got stitches in his chin. [LAUGHTER] And the boss called Dan in, and said, Dan, I’m going to have to pull you out. Them monkeys are killing you. [LAUGHTER] That’s just some of the humorous things that’s happened there. I guess it wasn’t humorous to Dan, but—and we all kidded Dan so bad, he left. He finally retired. [LAUGHTER]
And then we got—after the asbestos concrete exposure and went to LSL-2 down the basement, then they got a lot of contracts from the NCI and a lot of organizations. There were probably eight or ten exposure rooms in that basement. They designed these special chambers for our inhalation studies. Dr. Owen Moss designed the chambers. And I designed a device to generate particulate matter, which I have a patent on. There were four control rooms that controlled those eight or ten rooms. They were using my device to generate indium phosphide. It was a component they use in computers and chips and things like that. Opening day, two-year contract, about $25 million. And me and this other employee, we were their technicians. They had finally computerized the readouts on all these chambers, and they had 1,200 rats in all these different chambers. This chamber got 10 micrograms per liter, this chamber got 20, 30, and on down the line. There were 1,200 rats in all these different chambers. They were generating this delivery system.
I was 200 feet away from where this stuff was being delivered to the animals. I’m sitting in the control room all comfortable. Started that thing up, and started generating that indium phosphide. I was looking at the computer, checking the different levels in the chambers. You had ten minutes before T-90 to get up to 100% of the target. The other fella asked me, how’s it doing? I’m tweedling knobs and regulating air flows and stuff, and I’m watching the computer. And one of the last readings I seen was that it was 65% of the target.
And it exploded. And it blew me and him out the door. I’m glad the door wasn’t latched—it was closed, but didn’t lock. Blew us into the hallway. The indium phosphide and the smoke come rolling out of the ceiling. We slammed the door shut, grabbed some tape and sealed the door. All the other technicians down the room in the control room, they stuck their heads out and hollered and hit the panic button, which was one button on all these control rooms. When you hit the panic button, it shut everything down that they were exposing. They broke the barrier and went out through the sterile, which costs a lot of money to clean up, because that was all a sterile area. They couldn’t come my way, because the fumes and the dust. Look in there, and it was the most beautiful violet flame. That stuff was burning. And I’m sitting here looking at it. [LAUGHTER]
Buddy, he got his fresh air on and everything, running for the fire extinguisher and put the fire out and we sealed the door again. And then they called the fire department and they evacuated the whole building. Nobody asked us if we were okay. They would just walk up and say, what did you do? [LAUGHTER] It just blew up! Anyway, the PR people got ahold of us right away—public relations people. They said, you will not say anything—an explosion, or the dang thing blew up. [LAUGHTER] Okay, but it did. You can’t say that. It killed all 1,200 of those rats from the concussion.
Franklin: Wow.
Milliman: And it went and blew out—went through the heap of filters, went through the scrubbers, and out into the air. Which they kind of glossed over. When I read it in the paper, anyway, it was—it said two scientists had previously been in the room. No one was there when it—the incident—happened, is the way they put it.
Franklin: Wow. So, I guess rolling back a little bit—no, I guess we’ll keep going, then we’ll roll back. So, what year did that happen, the incident? This incident, with the—what did you call it, the indium?
Milliman: Indium phosphide.
Franklin: Indium phosphide.
Milliman: Yeah. Gosh, that must have been late ‘80s or early ‘90s. Because I retired in 1996.
Franklin: And you had worked for Battelle from 1970 to 1996?
Milliman: Yeah, yes.
Franklin: Okay.
Milliman: Yes. Worked for the same doctor, same scientist. Until very later on the started having some heart trouble and he retired. But we’re still good friends, we stay in contact. Many, many—I think the worst exposure I was ever on was CS2. It was a teargas with a disabler in it. We got the contract from the Army. Even though you had protective gear on and fresh air, you would take your outside protection off, and you had a pair of coveralls on underneath. If you’d walk out into the hallway, everybody would shun you like you had the plague, because that stuff just stuck with you. One time, some got into my fresh air mask somehow. I plugged the area, and it gave me a full shot in the face. Down I went. Safety man pulled me out and went and got a wet towel. They had a compound that kind of nullified that stuff. It was Triton X-100. He soaked that towel in that Triton X, and I got it on my face. Of course, you don’t even know where you’re at. The disabler is like a bad dream. It just—your hand will fly up and slap you in your own face, and you got no control over anything. It only lasts for a little while, but it’s very effective, I can tell you. [LAUGHTER] It—gosh, it just burns your eyes, you can’t breathe, your throat constricts, and you’re disoriented.
Franklin: Do you know when this was? Do you remember when this was?
Milliman: That must have been in the ‘80s, too. Probably the late ‘80s. We had so many chemical exposures going on, just one after another. These were all lifespan studies. And they figure a rat lives—a rat or mouse—can live a couple of years. Their lifespan is two years at the max. I have a stack of papers eight inches high of all the disclosure of what we were getting exposed to, and we had to sign we were aware of what the exposure would do. There were so many chemicals, like 1,3-butadiene and propylene. And next time you open a bag of Lay’s potato chips or any kind of a—the bags are all puffy and look like they’re plump full—I mean—full. [LAUGHTER] Ha, the last thing they shoot into that plastic bag before they seal it up is propylene, a preservative. And all these contracts that we received were to see if they were—they were all potential carcinogens, and we were testing the effects of them to see if they were carcinogen. That was the main thing that I did for 26, 27 years on all these inhalation exposures. Franklin: So, can you tell me about propylene? Is it a carcinogen?
Milliman: I didn’t get to read the report on that. They would mostly debrief us after the exposure was over. And of course they’d write a scientific article about it. I’m not sure whether it was or not—it probably was because—gosh, methyl methacrylate, a lot of things they use in the carpets, 1,3-butadiene, propylene oxide, methyl methacrylate, and—it just goes on and on and on. Everything that’s in this room—potential carcinogen. A lot of the glues they put into the carpets and the dyes and stuff. A lot of the household cleaners—the chemicals and stuff they put in them—they’re—everything you do is bad. Everything you buy is bad. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Right. [LAUGHTER]
Milliman: Yeah.
Franklin: So let’s roll it back a little bit. Where actually—where were you born?
Milliman: I was born in Washtucna, Washington.
Franklin: Oh, okay, that’s right. And what year was that?
Milliman: 1938.
Franklin: 1938.
Milliman, November 15, 1938.
Franklin: And how long—did you grow up in Washtucna?
Milliman: I don’t even remember being there. Then my parents moved from there to Spokane, out in Moran Prairie.
Franklin: Okay.
Milliman: My father was a farmer and he was also a steam engineer. We left Spokane—he had a small farm there—we left Spokane in 1947 and moved to Benton City. And he had a farm there. He worked for the Benton County road department. Then, before that, they had—the old prison camp out at Horn Rapids. Him being a steam engineer, he hired onto the Morrison-Knudsen construction company and he fired the boilers for the whole complex out there at the old prison place. Which, there was no prisoners there, but they’d converted it into almost like a small community for the construction workers. They had all the barracks and the hutments and—just like a small town there for a while. It’s all gone now, but—
Franklin: Those were construction workers at Hanford?
Milliman: Yeah, and they—
Franklin: In the late ‘40s, early ‘50s?
Milliman: Yeah, this was in the ‘50s. Most of them were working building railroads up—and construction work.
Franklin: So then you went to school—so you said ’47, you moved to Benton City?
Milliman: Yeah, I started third grade in Benton City. Then I graduated in 1956.
Franklin: Then what did you do after you graduated?
Milliman: Went up to work—went up to Seattle and hired on for Boeing at the Renton plant. We were making—we were working on the KC-135 tankers. They had me working the plumbing bays, tying down the bladders and the pumps and everything for the KC-135s. Then one day, after I was there about two months, the boss called and said come with me. Okay. So he took me over and he said, now you’re an electrician. [LAUGHTER] So went to school for that, and we wired up the tankers from the nose back to where they joined the wings on. And then—its assembly was from the nose back to where they put the wings on; no wings yet. And they were on tracks and when it would come time to move, they would just roll it down and another one would come into position. They would just—in one end, out the other. And one day I happened to look over and thought, what is that? That’s not a tanker. They said, well, that’s the first commercial jets—passenger. The first six were Pan-American—for Pan-American Airlines. We built six of those. And then the next one was American and Qantas and all of the foreign companies. But all a 707 was at that time was a KC-135 tanker with the fuel base taken out, and the boom and everything on the back for refueling. And they made that—[LAUGHTER] Boeing made a fortune off a government expense building those KC-135 tankers and doing all the design work and the engineering on them. And then they just simply made the 707 out of that tanker. After I was there a couple of years, in one part of the hangar, they started putting this big black shroud up from the ceiling to the floor. The rest of the crew says, what’s going on over there? The boss wouldn’t say anything, just shut up and mind your own business. These guys started walking around in suits with their dark glasses on inside the building—sunglasses. And they’re all leaning a little bit to their left. I got up close enough look and said, oh, this guy’s got a hog leg in there—he’s got a pistola. They were Secret Service. What they were doing there was building Air Force One. A 707—the first one.
Franklin: Wow.
Milliman: They picked six of us, and they assigned one of those Secret Service guys to two people. And he would follow you wherever you went—even to the bathroom. And I would—being me, I’d tell them a joke, and he’d just stare at you. [LAUGHTER] The boss’d call us in the office. You leave those guys alone. You don’t speak to them, you answer their questions, and that’s all there is to it. Well, I said, they haven’t got a sense of humor. [LAUGHTER] You especially—[LAUGHTER]—knock it off. Okay. If you came out of that shrouded area to go to the tool room to get a tool, a pair of footsteps right behind you. The guy’d say, what are you doing? Why do you need that? Ask you all kinds of questions. He’d look and check it all out, follow you right back in again. You go eat lunch, the guy’s sitting there looking in your lunchbox and seeing what you’re eating. Hey, want a sandwich? [LAUGHTER] Oh, oh, oh, back in the office, the boss shaking his finger at you. I left there in—I started getting homesick. I wanted to smell the sagebrush again and the cottonwoods in the springtime and all that fuzz they put out and everything. Then I came home and courted my girlfriend and got married. Then I went to work for General Electric in 1960. I had two boys and a girl. Was living and moved into Richland at that time, and then moved back to Benton City, which was my home. I’d been there all my life.
Franklin: How long did you live in Richland for?
Milliman: Probably two years.
Franklin: Where did you live in Richland?
Milliman: Oh. Marshall Street. Don’t remember the exact address, but it was on Marshall. I’d come in on Van Giesen. Moved from there, rented a place there, and then moved to Benton City and bought a home and raised the kids up. Got them up through high school. They graduated there. Then, like I say, went to Montana for almost three years. Then back home for Battelle.
Franklin: What did your wife do when you worked at Hanford?
Milliman: She—just a homemaker. She worked at grocery store, checker. And we got a divorce in—gosh—imagine that. I can’t even remember. The kids all got married. They had kids. Then I remarried. Wife’s a registered nurse, works here at Life Care Center in Richland.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Milliman: Very talented person. And she will come home and tell me strange stories that happens there. Like this one fellow was in this motorized scooter. And he was just dying for a cigarette. Nobody would give him a cigarette. So he got in his motorized scooter and he escaped out the door. He went down to the corner to the 7-Eleven store and buy him a pack of cigarettes. Now, this guy is on oxygen. And he come back, and he lit up. My wife, Christine, said she heard, my goodness! That man’s on fire! She said they all rushed out the door! [LAUGHTER] And the guy’s on fire, and they got the fire out. It melted the plastic right into his face. And she says, every time I look at him, I can hear that. That man’s on fire! And he’s still there. Then they have—she says that one person in particular keeps calling the Richland police and telling them that—hey, they kidnapped me. They’re holding me against my will. [LAUGHTER] And she says the police show up with their hands on their guns. She says, I just put my hands up and say it’s a false alarm. About the third time he calls, they’ll say, well take his phone away from him then. [LAUGHTER] Some of the funny things that happen in life.
Franklin: So when you worked for—what did you do when you worked for GE and Douglas United?
Milliman: We were metal handlers, which meant they were canning up six an agent uranium slugs for the reactors. A metal handler, all he did was they had—you’d stand in front of this hydraulic machine that the metal carrier, after they got—dipped those things in the hot aluminum and silicon, inside of aluminum can, then the guy who had a pair of tongs, he’d come over and he’d put them in these two baskets. And the baskets would drop into the water, come up, and drop again. And then the basket would turn towards you, and my job was you pulled slugs out. They had a metal container around them. You had to scrape the aluminum and silicon off the metal can. And then you took out the uranium slug that was clad in aluminum and put it in the pallet. The process went on like that all day long. Then I moved back to final inspection. The lights were so bright in this cubicle we had. And you would look at the welds—they had to weld endcaps on these slugs and you had to look for pinholes and voids.
I did that for a year or so, and then I went to final inspection, which we were radiographing, x-raying the slugs for voids and stuff. Beside the station there where we were radiographing these slugs, there were about 30 autoclaves, just—they stood up about this high above the metal floor. There’s 200-pound hydraulic door that closed on those autoclaves, and what they would do, they would load 60 of these slugs—these uranium slugs—in a basket. They had little round cylinders, and you’d put the slug in so they wouldn’t bump against each other. You’d put six in the basket, and they’d get an array of six baskets, which were 240 slugs. They all had a hole in the basket through the center. They would load this—put this big steel rod down through the baskets and they’d put a pin in the bottom. And the crane would come overhead and pick that whole stack up and lower it down into the autoclave. Then the operator would give the signal, close the door. Then he had a pipe—there was a handle sticking out, and he had a pipe he’d stick under a big cheater bar. And he would pull that door shut and the locking lugs would all come out and lock the lid on there. Now, on the end of that pipe on the door was a round hole. Underneath of it was a hydraulic device that had a pin in it. And the pin had to come up and go through that hole in the handle before he could ever bring it up on pressure. He’s looking at his control panel, okay, this one’s okay. I’m going to bring it up on tremendous pressure—steam pressure.
We were radiographing our slugs, me and this other employee. Pretty soon the floor started shaking. What? Earthquake? What? And then we seen the operator. He got up and he started walking over towards this one autoclave. His head come up, and his head come up and he looked like a giraffe. He looked like his head was this high above his body. He looked, and he just turned and started to run, because he could see that door on that autoclave shuddering. And that pin had just barely touched the edge of that hole and give him the signal that the door was locked, which it was not. And that thing just worked that door around until it got past the locking lugs.
The hinge pin on that 200-pound door was two-inch solid steel. It snapped that like a toothpick. It blew the lid off, and blew it up through the roof and stuck it right in the monorail—the crane rail, and just bent a big U and stuck right there. The steam pressure on that started firing those baskets and those uranium slugs—it was just like a cannon barrel. You know—zoom—boy.
Me and this other fellow jumped onto this steel table. And the workers that were on the outside of the building, they said they seen those baskets and those slugs go 80 feet above the building and then they came back down through the roof, back down on us. And these things were hitting—dropping all around us. And of course me and him were under the table. People scattered. It just happened to be that this was right at shift change. The other crew was coming in; we was getting ready to leave. And right in the middle, that thing went through the roof. What was—after the slugs kept raining down, after they stopped, me and that fellow underneath there was on our hands and knees and we started laughing—just giggling insanely. [LAUGHTER] You know what, because you can hear these things hitting above you on that table—ba-ding, ba-ding.
Then the criticality alarm went off. And that wasn’t funny. We thought, uh-oh. One of those slugs ruptured and we’re all crapped up. And that’s what they—crapped up. And then they told us that it was a false alarm—which seemed kind of strange. Criticality alarm going off.
But the bad thing about working back then for General Electric and Douglas United Nuclear was they picked six or eight of us—I think there were eight of us—and they took us out of the 313 Building where we were canning slugs up. They took us over in this Butler Building, they called them. A tin—kind of a tin shack. Went in there, and all this fancy equipment in there and a great big, long, open-front hood. What are we doing here? We had a supervisor, his name was Paul Rhoades. They called him Dusty Rhoades. He said, you guys have been picked—[LAUGHTER]—for guinea pigs. [LAUGHTER] Well, yeah, what’s new? [LAUGHTER] They had designed a process to can up thorium. And thorium is a white powder; it’s just like flour, like a sandy flour. It was for the atomic subs, and they used that on the front face of the reactor in the sub as a biological shield, because thorium oxide is not radiation-wise as hot as uranium slugs.
Franklin: But they were the fuel element?
Milliman: Fuel element, yeah.
Franklin: But they were safer.
Milliman: Instead of uranium, it was thorium. Instead of a uranium slug, it was thorium oxide. Thorium oxide is a bone seeker. Cancer of the bones and stuff. Once, when we first started out—now, we’re working in this open-faced hood, and we’re pounding this stuff in the can. You got a—oh, it’s a rod about this big around with a flat on top. And it comes on a conveyor belt to you. The scale is weighing it out on an electronic scale. And these are little tin cylinders. You take it and you got a funnel thing here and you put the aluminum can in and lock it down. Pour the thorium oxide into the can and then pound it in there. You had a mark on that tamping bar that you had to put it down, get it to that mark, or else it would cause a variation in the quantity that was in there. You had to put it all in, or no go. There were six of us pounding that stuff into those cans.
Now, you had a pair of white coveralls on, you had your surgeon gloves on, taped at the wrist, and you had a leather glove. No respirator, no anything. You just—the glass came down about nose-high. And you were working with that stuff, and it was just a white fog in front of you. Now, when they’d blow the whistle for you to go to lunch, what we would do was we would—and we were—that powder would be all the way up to your elbows. You could see it on your coveralls. You would brush your coveralls off, and then you would take the leather gloves off, and you would take the tape off, and leave your surgeon gloves inside there in the trash. And then we would all come out of there and walk over to the step-off pad, and all six of us are getting out of our coveralls and—I thought, man, that stuff’s got to be going airborne.
Then we’d take the Scintran. We’re okay, no bad stuff on us. They would take us down, when we first started out, once every two weeks to the Whole Body Counter. They’d scan us from head to foot. Then it got to be once a month, and then once every two months. They pulled me out of there and they said, you eat a lot of fish? No, why? They say, you got a high zinc content in you. And I didn’t think much of it at the time.
But I got my dose reconstruction back here in 2012. I was contaminated with thorium oxide, which turns into some exotic thing, so they say. And they had the audacity to tell me I picked it up in the 1960s during atomic testing. And it just happened to be thorium oxide, which—anyways. [LAUGHTER] I turned the claim in, which was denied. But for the other three cancers, I got compensated for that. Two basal cell carcinomas and one other cancer that is pretty common in a male—prostate cancer. They compensated me for that, which—it doesn’t make up for your health now. But I just got examined the second. In fact, the Cold War Patriots, which I’m very proud of—to be a member of—they found the asbestos in my lungs when they gave me my—every three years you’re allowed a complete physical. They go over you from head to foot, and they picked up the asbestos in my lungs.
Franklin: Wow.
Milliman: And then the second, they told me because of that, they told me I have COPD and lung capacity is at half. Which makes it hard to do anything.
Franklin: Oh.
Milliman: Went to Cancun—my wife and I—on vacation. They got a mile-and-a-half zip line there—1.7 miles. Of course, the towers—the different towers you got to get on. [LAUGHTER] Take me a half-hour to get onto the top of the tower. Run out of steam before you get there. It’s been an interesting life; it’s been an interesting career. While we were in canning up thorium oxide, they had—they were all plywood walls, and they had that—it was like crepe paper insulation back in the days when they built those back in the ‘42s and ‘43s. And sat there, and I happened to look at the wall. They had painted the wall with a white epoxy paint. I got to looking at the wall, and, man, that thing’s blowing bubbles. I told the guy, and he looked over and said, how come that wall’s bubbling? I don’t know. So we come out of the hood, got cleaned up and went over there. Was looking at the wall and that epoxy would blow a bubble and then pop. What’s going on here? Well, little did we know there was a welder on the outside of that tin building. And he was welding us up some gas manifold pipes, and he set that insulation on fire. We had a big exhaust fan up in the attic and it was whipping that up—the flame up through there—and it was blistering that plywood epoxy paint. And the boss come over and said, what are you guys doing? Get over and get to work! He said, what are you doing? I said, well, we’re looking at the wall here. He’s looking and he said, how come that’s bubbling? [LAUGHTER] He says, do you see any smoke? He says, no. And they have where they’d plugged—patched the plywood with the—you’ve probably seen it—little square there, a diamond-shaped thing in the plywood where they’ve patched a hole in. One of them popped out. And he looked and he said, uh-oh, I see some fire. Now, you guys just stay here. He went and locked the door! He stepped out and locked us in there! And then he pointed to the back, which—it was a step-off pad off the back, a concrete area they had roped off. We could go out there and stand. And here come the firetruck. He missed the place, he backed up and come, and the other guy’s still welding. He don’t know he set the building on fire. And they chopped a hole in it, put the fire out. Boss sent us to lunch. We come back, never missed a lick. Just went right back to work again. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Wow. [LAUGHTER] That’s—
Milliman: That was kind of sad. One of the sad things was I was watching the TV and they detonated the smokestack out at 100 F. I thought, man, that was right beside the building we were working in.
Franklin: Do you remember any Navy officials ever coming to inspect the process--
Milliman: Navy?
Franklin: --you were working on?
Milliman: Navy?
Franklin: Yeah, because you said you were making these slugs for the nuclear submarines.
Milliman: Yeah. And we didn’t know that until after we got—we did two different sessions over there, two different years. Never seen any Navy personnel—of course, we were just—we were just the employees, and not privy to that. But with Battelle, that was different. When the sponsor—NCI or any of the dignitaries from the companies that we had a contract with, they would all come and talk to us. I can remember, we got called in the office—a good friend of mine that worked there with me and his name was Gary Ell. The sponsor—and he was the head hog, I mean over everything—he was in the change room with us. And when we’d first seen him, about a year before that, he was huge. He was a very large man, almost a beast. When he come the second time, I swear, he must have lost 200 pounds, because he looked normal, you know. And he was in the change room with Gary and I, and we were suiting up getting ready to go into one of the sterile zones. And Gary said, I bet I know what—well, first the sponsor said, hey, what do you think, guys? I lost about 200 pounds. Yeah. Gary said, you know what? This guy’s name was Joe. He said, I bet I know what Joe’s thinking about right now. I said, what? He said, I bet he’s thinking about a big chocolate milkshake. [LAUGHTER] The guy had some choice words for us. And next thing you know, we were sitting in the boss’s office and he’s shaking his finger at us. [LAUGHTER] If you couldn’t put some humor into the situations we were in, it wasn’t worth being there, because—
Franklin: Right!
Milliman: [LAUGHTER] But it’s been very rewarding for me, all except the—like I say, back then they didn’t know what asbestos—the danger of that, and the potential carcinogens.
Franklin: Right.
Milliman: But been very rewarding.
Franklin: Do you—were you working onsite, or do you remember when they started to bring the spent nuclear—the submarine reactors back--
Milliman: No.
Franklin: --to be buried onsite?
Milliman: We had nothing to do with that whatsoever. We were just making the fuel for them. We never got—weren’t privy to what happened afterwards.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Milliman: But we didn’t know that was for the atomic subs until—it was quite a while after they finally told us, hey, you’re canning up fuel for the atomic subs.
Franklin: Kind of interesting, though, to think that you canned that fuel and then now Hanford is the repository for all of the spent reactors. That they cut them up and buried them in the same place.
Milliman: Yeah. A friend of mine, he just retired. He was working out there for CH2M Hill and a bunch of other contractors. His job was to go sample the burial grounds after they dig them up. He had a lot of interesting stories to tell about that. One thing that—[LAUGHTER] This was during the ‘60s. If you recall, in the paper, Hanford put out a news blurb about any of the duck hunters. They were checking thyroids on ducks, and they wanted you to bring your duck heads in—their neck and their head, so they could check them. And they come up with some strange reason why they were doing this. Well, a friend of ours, he brought this big old mallard duck in. That thing was so hot, he ought not have been anywhere near that thing. They grabbed him and scrubbed him down until his skin was bleeding. Those ducks were going out to the cooling ponds out in the Area, which weren’t screened over at that time. And ducks were dabbling down at the bottom, picking up strontium-90 and all these radioactive elements. And then that guy’s got that duck in his hand and put the Scintran up there and that thing went nuts. And they scrambled and suited up. And they never did come out with why they were doing that until later on. It finally came out that those ducks—you know, they see a big pond out there, they go out there and dabble around in it and get crapped up.
Franklin: When did they finally start screening those, do you remember?
Milliman: Oh. No, it was—that must—they had them all screened over by—probably by ’75. If I recall, it was about that time. But that friend of mine said, boy, they scrubbed me until I was bleeding. Oh, they went to his home, also.
Franklin: Oh, wow.
Milliman: And they tore up the carpets, furniture—everything. Because he come in the house, hey look at this duck I got you. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Right. So later, when you worked for Battelle, you said that you had done that animal testing, and you introduced animals to nickel oxide and cobalt oxide. Why those two chemicals? Were those used at Hanford, or did those have other applications?
Milliman: Other applications: commercial. Most of the testing was manufacturing-type applications, like the asbestos concrete exposure that I was on. That was the sawdust off of transite pipes. When the craftsman would saw the pipes to length, he’s inhaling that transite pipe dust, and he don’t know there’s asbestos in it. Most of the—well, in fact, all of the contracts we got were to test whether they were potential carcinogens.
Franklin: Wow, that’s really—so when you were doing cigarettes, then, was it—when you were doing this, was it known that they were—obviously, most people, like, knew, but was it a stated fact, federally, or—
Milliman: Not at that time, no.
Franklin: Or did your research help lead to that?
Milliman: Yeah. We got that contract from the National Cancer Institute. Later on, for Battelle, they did a—maybe it was Liggett and Myers. They were doing a cigarette exposure, which was very hush-hush. Nobody would tell you a thing about what went on in that room. Even the technician was sworn to silence. Because of the manufacturer of that product, not because there was anything sneaky going on; they just didn’t want it to get out before they finished the study. And also expose them to diesel exhaust smoke.
Franklin: Oh.
Milliman: We went over to Kennewick one time, right there on the main street. We set up an air sampler on all four corners. The asbestos content in the air was higher than it was in Johns-Mansfield’s where they’re putting these asbestos bats together for insulation for homes. The reason for that, it was coming off the break rooms. There was asbestos in the break rooms. And the cars going by kept that stuff fanned up. You walk down the street, you’re taking on asbestos. And then we went to all the food stores around and bought different liver—hog liver, beef liver, chicken liver. Dashed that down, went to the chemical analysis of it. [LAUGHTER] I would never, ever—I never liked it anyway—but I would never, ever eat liver. There was Dibestrol and growth inhibitors, hormones, heavy metal. [LAUGHTER] No liver for me! [LAUGHTER] But that—all these things they’ve been pumping in all these animals, in these feed lots and everything, Dibestrol and growth stimulators and hormones, left a residue in the liver, which is the collecting point of everything—your filter. And then people are eating that and they’re ingesting it and it’s sticking with you.
Franklin: Yeah. Wow. Were you working—you were working onsite when JFK visited in 1963. Did you go to the dedication at the N Reactor?
Milliman: Yes, went out to see him, yeah.
Franklin: What do you remember about that?
Milliman: I can remember him saying, boy, you have a hot country here. And he was pulling on his—here. That was a thrill, to see the helicopters, there he comes! And they said, no, that’s the decoy. And then they finally came in and landed. It was just blistering hot that day. People were passing out in the crowd. It was—you couldn’t see the ground for the people, I mean, there was hundreds out there. It was very hot. But that was kind of a thrilling thing to see the President. Big to-do about it, of course.
Franklin: Were there any other events or incidents that happened at Hanford while you were working there that—or at Battelle that stand out to you, besides the couple explosions you mentioned?
Milliman: Just minor humorous things that had happened. One time, they brought all these Japanese dignitaries. Now, our aerosol physicist was named Douglas K. Craig. And he was a very proper person. He called me an illiterate savage. But that was early on in my career. When I hired in, he was the—I worked for the doctor, the German. And Douglas K. Craig was the aerosol physicist. The doctor got the contract; the aerosol physicist was responsible for the outcome and the design and everything. Me being an old country kid at that time—his speech and his manner, and being so stiff and prim and proper, you know, kind of made me chuckle. I proved him wrong a couple of times. And he would say, but that cannot be! That cannot be! [LAUGHTER] Well, it is! [LAUGHTER]
Anyway, I endeared myself to him by just using common sense, and he and I got to be—he’d come and ask me, he’d say, how would you do this? And all it was was common sense—an uncanny knack of figuring out how to generate all these exotic chemicals we were using. The one thing I do remember, before the asbestos exposure ever started, they had this huge cylinder, and it was—it had this tube with a plunger in the bottom. And they’d put the asbestos in there and screw it in the bottom of this big column. And it had the air jets going in. It would suck the asbestos—you had to maintain the concentration within 10% for six hours. Which—pbbt—there went the asbestos in the chamber. So the engineers—aerosol physicists, they worked on this thing for months. We were about ready to lose the contract. And they finally gave up on it. And I asked them, I said, hey, what are you going to do with that generator? And they said, well, we’re going to junk it, bury it. Can I play with that thing? Humph! Yeah, sure, Mr. Einstein, go ahead.
By the time I got done, that asbestos generator was this tall, and by chance, I found out you had to pack that stuff into the tube and tamp it down—13 grams in exactly seven inches. I turned that thing on, and I couldn’t find an aggregate that the air jets wouldn’t—I didn’t want the air jets to blow in there and send that stuff out. I tried pieces of gravel, and I tried little kid’s jacks—I cut them up and put them in there, and they’re rattling around on top. And everything got dull. I even took some screws and cut them in half and dropped in there.
Anyway, I was sitting there one day trying to—I thought, boy, you’re a dummy if you can’t figure this out. And I had a bunch of crucibles, and the lids sitting on the shelf there. And I thought, ceramic, ceramic, I wonder. So I took the crucible lid and put it in a paper towel and took a hammer and beat it up. And I took those pieces and I looked and I said, well, that one looks about right. I picked up four of them and I dropped in that tube and that stuff started rattling around. They never did get dull.
The first—we were shooting for 24 micrograms per liter. And the first sample I took was 23.9. And I thought, wow! So I got ahold of the aerosol physicist and he come over. And I had all my data; I’d been taking samples of that all day long. And he come over and he says, what is this? No, that can’t be! Yeah, it can be. I said an illiterate savage like me, I’ve got enough brains to figure this out, you know that? Dr. Douger. [LAUGHTER]
Anyway, we got the contract. He would walk around me and look at me and he said, but you have no—you have no education, you know. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, well? All mine come from common sense. And that would infuriate him. But went up to his office one day, why, fellow technician, and he had a rock as a paperweight there. It was kind of a U-shaped rock. And I said, Doug! He said, you’ll address me as Dr. Douglas K. Craig. Doctor will be fine. That’s okay. Douger, where’d you get that rock? [LAUGHTER] Lay some of this hillbilly stuff on him. He said, why? I said, you know what? Where’d you get that? And he said, well, my walk down at the river one day. [LAUGHTER] I said, my gosh. Don’t you agree? And my partner, he said, oh yeah. He went right along with me, you know. He said, why? What? I said, do you know what that is? That’s a left-handed Indian throwing rock! He says, what? Oh my! An artifact? And I said, yeah! See how it fits your hand? I said, the Indians throw them and knock them jackrabbits over. And he said, oh my! And he took it away from me. He was looking at it, and—[LAUGHTER]—he put it there and said, wow. I’ll cherish that. An artifact. Wow! And he was talking to himself.
About that time, the other scientists come in, and they knew we were a couple of jokers. And he come in—his name was John Belue. And John heard what we were doing, and when we come out of the office, he said, you better hope he never finds out. [LAUGHTER] What that junk of rock. And I said, my goodness, maybe we ought to not play that joke on him.
But Dr. Douglas K. Craig and I ended up being good friends. He finally—he moved down to California and went to work for another research outfit. And he would call me up. And he’d say, Edward, my friend! And when he’d start that, I knew he wanted to know something. And when I got the device that I patented, the calls were coming in from all over the world—foreign companies, research outfits—because the device they had on the market was the Dust Right Speedmill. And it was very unstable way of generating any kind of particulate or solids. And it would break down. Very poor performance on them. When I made that device, all you had to do was pour the powder in. Two working parts, two bottle brushes, one spirally wound like an auger, the other was flexible brush. And it was just in a—you’d pour the—it had a Lucite—I made it on my kitchen table one night. About a year later, after I got the patent on it, I checked in to see what they were selling them—Battelle Development Corporation made a nice design and stainless steel and--$15,000 a pop. For two bottle brushes. I got one silver dollar for the patent and taken to supper, and that was that.
Franklin: [LAUGHTER]
Milliman: [LAUGHTER] So, they’re making money hand-over-fist on me. But a lot of people calling for reprints. I had to write a technical report on that, and they published it. I didn’t bring one of them copies with me, but I got calls from all the world—scientists wanting to know about it, how—I say, well you can make it yourself on your kitchen table. And there’s the boss, whopped me on the head, don’t tell them that! Sell it to them, you dope! [LAUGHTER] But that was probably the highlight of my career, was the—just common sense. Now, the scientists and the doctors—12, 13, 15 years of college education. But they don’t teach them anything about common sense. And that’s all I ever worked on, was—being a farm kid, having to repair your own machinery, things like that. It wasn’t hard to figure out how to endear myself to the company by just using common sense.
Franklin: That’s great. Just a couple more questions, I guess, until we move on to the stuff you brought, which I’m really excited to have you narrate. Do you remember—how did—sorry—do you remember any impact from large nuclear incidents on your work, like Three-Mile Island or Chernobyl? Because you would have been working for Battelle at that time. Do you remember any particular impact of those incidents on your work or kind of the attitude of the work or people here?
Milliman: I remember reading it in the paper, and wondering how much of that stuff was going around the world in the airstreams. Probably paid more mind to Chernobyl when it blew its stack. Now, when Mount St. Helens blew up, I was in Yakima. I was going up and going camping. I spent the night in Yakima. I woke up, I thought it was too early and went back to sleep. I woke up, and I thought, my goodness. Did I sleep all day? It’s getting dark out. And I turned the radio on, and—uh-oh. I took off for home, and I just beat that dust cloud down to Benton City. Most of it went over the top of us, like, end up at Moses Lake and Spokane and—but we got the contract for exposing hamsters to Mount St. Helens fly ash. And if you looked at the fly ash under a microscope, it looked like—it was kind of crystalline, and it was—it looked like a little kid’s jack they play with, but a million spikes sticking on that thing. It looked like a sandbur. And that stuff, when you inhaled it, just cut your lungs up to pieces.
Franklin: Oh, I bet. Wow. How did the atmosphere surrounding the Cold War affect your job or your life? Did you notice anything, or can you recall anything?
Milliman: A lot of contracts from the Army. A lot of contracts. And, like I say, one of them was the CS2 with the disabler in it. A lot of activity that nobody would say anything about. They’d say, hey, what you guys working on? What you fellas working on? Blank stare and walk on, you know. You’d better not ask them anymore. But a lot of activity from the Army. Didn’t seem—I don’t think I ever saw any Navy personnel; if I did, they weren’t in uniform. A lot of strange people around that time coming and going.
Franklin: What about living here, living next to Hanford and all the activities? Did you ever feel like maybe you were safe because of all the Army attention here, or maybe you were not safe because Hanford might be a target if a war ever broke out?
Milliman: I always thought about it being a target, being there were quite a number of reactors out there. You thought, well, if they’re going to hit something, it’ll probably be Hanford. Never lived in any fear of it, but when they start all this down-winders stuff in the papers—contamination from Hanford, that did make me kind of wonder. It didn’t make me feel ill-at-ease, but it just—you didn’t know what you were inhaling. You didn’t know what was coming down the ground that the cows were eating and you were drinking your milk, which ended up being a big deal in later years. My children never thought much about it, either. My brothers and sisters did, and they all moved away to different places. I told them, hey, you can’t outrun the air currents. That stuff’s coming down all over. Especially during the atomic testing, when they were—
Once they sent me to—Battelle sent me to University of Davis to represent them. This was—I’d only worked there about a year-and-a-half, two years, maybe, at the most. They sent me down there and little did I know they—[LAUGHTER]—They sprung me as their guest speaker. I didn’t know anything about it. Boss of mine set that up. Boy, I thought, my goodness, what in the world am I going to talk about? And I thought, you got to put some humor in this thing. Because I’m shaking. I’m young and dumb and I said, whoo! And all these people sitting there watching me, all the dignitaries and the—I said, well, we’re doing research with hamsters. And most of these were all hamster people. It was a big hamster research convention there. I said, the first thing you have to do, as you all know, is you got to get them loose from your finger. [LAUGHTER] Those are the bitingest animals in the world. Everybody thinks they’re so sweet and cuddly, until it latches onto your finger.
And I can remember when we were making them—introducing them to cigarette smoke—of course they had the smoking dogs out there, too, which are famous, you know, every time they mention the—and those dogs were addicted. They’d fight you for a cigarette. You’d open the cage and they’d jump right in your arm and stick their head in the mask. You know, put the cigarette in and light it up, boys! But I can remember many times those hamsters latching on and locking their jaws up and biting you right through the fingernail, right to the bone. You’d have to take the handle on the pair of tweezers and jack his jaw open to get your finger back out. If the boss knew this he’d kill me. We had this one particular hamster, he didn’t bite you—I mean, he’d go after you. He’d bite you every time you—most of them, they’d bite you once and let it go at that. But this one he’d bite you ever time you got near him. And he’d just defy you. Pick me up, I’m going to bite you. Well, me and my partner said, what do you think? Well, I’m tired of him biting me. I hope he’ll pretty soon. Maybe he’ll die. He wouldn’t die. So we grabbed him one day, got him by the scruff of the neck and we took him by the side cutter and cut his teeth off. And after that, he’d chomp down on you, and hey, can’t bite, you know! Well, for the rest of his life, we had to soften up his food and feed him so he wouldn’t die. He couldn’t bite you. But we said maybe we ought to not done that.
Those hamsters—what actually—the asbestos hamsters were the only ones that would do this. Their water nipple hung above their head, and you had a big water tree you’d put on the cage. And that’s how they got their water. They’d take their finger and stick in that water nipple and sit in there and let the water run on them. We’d sit there and watch through the window. And of course, they’d make a terrible mess. Because we had them on these racks, and we had absorbent pads underneath of them. In the morning when we’d take them out, we’d have to roll that pad up and put it in the garbage. Well, they’d just flood that thing. Their tray had a lip around it. It was an awful mess to clean up. So we got to watching them—we’d look through the window at night. And there they are, they’re taking their finger and sticking it in that water nozzle and letting the water coming down there and they’re showering and shampooing and shaving. We’d go in there and quit that, quit that. They’d all quit, and the minute we’d leave, there they are with their finger in the water nipple taking a shower.
Franklin: And it was only the asbestos ones?
Milliman: Only the asbestos animals did that.
Franklin: Interesting. Do you think that was maybe like some kind of neurological--?
Milliman: I think it was the fibers tickling them and itching them.
Franklin: Oh.
Milliman: Because that stuff was all over them.
Franklin: Right. Interesting. So, anybody else have any questions?
Emma Rice: Yeah. Minor clarification. When you worked at Battelle, what was your job position exactly?
Milliman: Started—hired in just as a—well, for Battelle, it was just technician.
Rice: Technician. Because you went from being a metal handler to—
Milliman: Yeah, from General Electric, they called us a metal handler.
Rice: Mm-hmm.
Milliman: Then they made me the inhalation specialist. And then things kind of slowed down, so I kind of got demoted back to a technician again, and that’s when we went into the control rooms and each of us had an assigned control room that we ran. Many, many different chemicals would go through them control rooms that we were generating. Everything potential carcinogen. I like that word. Potential carcinogen. [LAUGHTER] Formaldehyde—that’s some bad stuff, too.
Franklin: So, should we do the pictures now?
Hungate: Okay. I’m going to stop now.
Franklin: Okay.
Hungate: Change—
[NEW CLIP]
Milliman: “About air pollution except the U. S. Patent Office which has awarded a patent to the Department of Energy for a device that will ‘deliver uniform concentrations of dust for a long period of time.’ It was developed by Edward E. Milliman at the Pacific Northwest Laboratory operated for DOE by Battelle Memorial Institute. People, however, need have no fear as the dust is used in research to test the potential health effects of dust compounds when inhaled into the lungs of laboratory animals. Some of the tested dusts have talc powder, CS2, and Mount St. Helen’s ash. The prototype of the unit cost is about $50.00, and the number is 4,424,896 – if anyone cares.”
Franklin: So this was the device you invented that then they were selling for—
Milliman: Yeah.
Franklin: $15,000?
Milliman: 15,000.
Rice: Do you want me to take some of these smaller ones?
Milliman: Yeah. Now, this is how you make a hamster smoke cigarettes.
Franklin: And that’s you?
Milliman: That’s me, 1970. Boy, I had a lot of hair.
Franklin: [LAUGHTER]
Milliman: There’s 30 cigarettes in this turn, and it will take a puff off of each cigarettes, and then it rotates, and there’s 30 hamsters in these tubes. They have no choice. The smoke comes down through this column here. They have no choice.
Franklin: I forgot to ask you—did you ever smoke cigarettes?
Milliman: Yes, I did.
Franklin: Okay.
Milliman: After we took the lungs out of these animals, I put the cigarettes in the garbage can and never smoked since.
Franklin: Wow.
Rice: [INAUDIBLE]
Milliman: This one of the exposure chambers. This is where they—each rat—
Hungate: Whoops, just one second, we’re getting quite a bit of glare.
Milliman: Okay.
Rice: Can you hold it from the top? See if you can hold it flat. There we go.
Franklin: There we go. That looks good.
Milliman: This is the exposure chamber, designed by Battelle. Rats and mice and hamsters were all individual in each compartment. And then I think they would a couple hundred critters. The—whatever you’re going to make them inhale comes down a pipe and goes into the top and it’s exhausted out the bottom. The doors are glass, so you can watch—observe the animals.
Franklin: Wow.
Rice: Was this just for smoking—the cigarette smoke—or was this--?
Milliman: No, any kind of chemical.
Rice: Any kind of chemical.
Milliman: Vapors, dust—any kind of compound.
Rice: Okay. Next one?
Hungate: It’s the smoker.
Rice: The smoker, yeah. That’s what I was thinking.
Milliman: And that’s how you load a hamster into a smoking tube after you get him off your finger. Now, you can see here that the one—he’s saying, uh-oh, I’m next. And it was also the asbestos exposure. This is all the protection we had on. Just a white paper face mask.
Franklin: Wow.
Milliman: And this is one guy that—this is what they do. You take them apart, all the way from his nose, all the way down. Take samples, everything, make slides, and it goes to histology, pathology.
Rice: New one. Here.
Milliman: This was what your lungs will look like if you inhaled Mount St. Helen fly ash.
Franklin: Wow. So what is the lighter one there on the—
Milliman: NEFA is Nickel Enriched Fly Ash, which has a high content of nickel in it. And the one on the far right is a normal lung.
Franklin: Okay. Wow.
Rice: And the one on the middle is also—
Milliman: That’s nickel-enriched fly ash. The one on the far left is just fly ash.
Franklin: What was the level of exposure here to get this?
Milliman: Probably 25 micrograms per liter. It is equivalent to what a human breathes. Everything was scaled down hamster-size compared to a human.
Franklin: So if you just were walking around and breathing it—
Milliman: Right, correct.
Franklin: How would that compare to, say, cigarette smoking?
Milliman: Cigarette smoke is a long-term thing. Nickel-enriched fly ash is short-term—that does the damage right away. There’s no long period to it. Cigarette smoke, the latency period on that is years. People smoke for years.
Franklin: I guess, like—the damage that’s done, is that equivalent to a certain number of years of smoking?
Milliman: No, this—
Franklin: Or is it kind of a different—
Milliman: This is different here. The lifespan after you inhale this stuff, everyday compared to a cigarette, is very, very short. Cigarette you last quite a bit longer.
Hungate: So on that—I’m just a little curious—so was that fly ash from—
Milliman: Mount St. Helen’s.
Hungate: But it’s not after the explosion, because that’s dated ’77 and the explosion was in ’82.
Milliman: Well, see, they stored this stuff up and we didn’t do the exposure until after that thing blew up. Now these lungs here were probably some of the preliminary stuff. Because they were testing volcanoes from around the world.
Hungate: Oh, so, yeah.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Hungate: So this was just volcanic fly ash, as opposed to—
Milliman: Yeah.
Hungate: --Mount St. Helens.
Franklin: Oh, okay. So that explains the date.
Rice: Do you have another one?
Milliman: This was the asbestos concrete exposure. Now, this was probably in ’78. And you can see here they finally started figuring out that asbestos was bad for you. Compared to white paper face masks, this—
Franklin: Right. Now you have a full-body, looks like you have a respirator mask.
Milliman: Yup. We had rubber overshoes on, Tyvek protective clothing, and respirator.
Franklin: Wow.
Milliman: This just to have to be around exposure chamber there. These were with hamsters also.
Franklin: Wow. That’s great.
Milliman: And we are smoking rats. [LAUGHTER] We’re doing the physiology on it. That’s a graph machine, it’s like a lie detector. We’re doing the testing on their respiratory rate, their heart rate. Everything’s sterile. To get where I’m at right there, you had to shower and shave and disinfect and be fully protected. That’s to keep us from giving them disease. It’s not to protect us from the animals. It’s to protect the rats and the mice and the hamsters.
Franklin: [LAUGHTER]
Milliman: Here we’re doing the same thing. This is when you go red, you’re on actual exposure from the contractor.
Franklin: So—oh, so there were different color suits for—
Milliman: Yeah.
Franklin: Okay. So red would be when you were directly working with chemical—with the particulates?
Milliman: Not necessarily, but that’s what they wanted from us. There was no difference in—other than the color of the—everything’s sterile and sanitized.
Franklin: Is that so that other people working would know that you would be—
Milliman: Yeah.
Franklin: Okay.
Rice: There’s just these. Do you want to talk about those at all?
Milliman: [LAUGHTER] This is one of the funny things that happened to me. Girlfriend and I were over at the Black Angus in Pasco. We were sitting in the booth and we were eating our supper, steak and mushrooms, and having a fine time. Started getting quiet. I’d already paid for my bill and ordered a cup of coffee and we were sitting there drinking a cup of coffee. Got awful quiet. So I got up and there was nobody around. So we went to go out the door—we guessed everybody left—so we started to go out the door. Well, the door’s locked, we can’t get out. I went in the kitchen hollering, hey, hey, let us out! Bartender gone, kitchen gone, nobody’s there. I got on the pay telephone and called 9-1-1, and I said, hey, we’re locked in the Black Angus. Said, what? [LAUGHTER] Are you playing a joke? No! We want to go home! I got to go to work tomorrow! [LAUGHTER] So they said, what’s your phone number there? So I give them the phone number, they called the place next door. The next door place called us. Phone rang, I picked it up. Yeah, we’re here. He called back, they said, they’re in there. So they figured what happened was we hid in there and we were going to rob the place but we couldn’t get out. So they called me back and they said, well, okay, we’re coming down. I said, don’t come with the police dogs and the guns and stuff and the sirens, because I got to go to work tomorrow. [LAUGHTER]
So they—here they come. We were sitting there waiting on them, and there was a little console there and there was some kind of video machine that she and I were trying to figure out how to play. And all at once I told her, don’t move, keep your hands on the table. She said, why? I said, I smell a cop. And slowly, both of us turned our heads, and there were three heads peeking around the door at us. They came in, and they all had their hands on their guns. Whoa, fellas. Get your hands off that hog leg, you’re making me nervous. I’ve been shot once and it ain’t fun. They really questioned us. How’d you get in here? Said, well—they had this manager with them. And he said, you pay for your supper? And I said, yeah, and left a tip. If you keep on being mean to me, I want my tip back. And I kept looking to one police officer, one that came back from Montana and worked at the Bon Marche before they opened up. Me and him were in there as a security guard. He was moonlighting because he was a Pasco cop. And I kept looking at him, I said, Archie Pittman? Archie Pittman? And he looked mad! He said, what are you doing here? I said, just eating supper. And he said, okay, guys, I know him. Let him go. But that come out in the paper said, they knew businesses was hard up for patrons but they didn’t think they was going to lock them up just to keep them! [LAUGHTER] And this is my old friend—I was in the Cub Scouts, I think it was? Me and my old Poncho. Old lifelong friend.
Franklin: That’s cute.
Milliman: That’s the box elder tree my brother dove behind to—
Hungate: Dodge the bullets?
Milliman: Dodging a bullet.
Rice: There you go.
Milliman: Great.
Franklin: Well, thank you so much.
Milliman: Well, I hope I didn’t make a fool out of myself—
Franklin: You did not.
Milliman: Or bore you to death.
Franklin: No, it was really exciting. It really was! You have some great stories.
Hungate: He’s a story teller.
Milliman: Man, please behave yourself. Don’t lay that hillbilly stuff on them. [LAUGHTER]
View interview on Youtube.
Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Roger McClellan on September 2nd, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Roger about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. So, Roger, best place to begin is the beginning. So, when and where were you born?
Roger McClellan: I was born in Tracy, Minnesota, out in the prairies of southwestern Minnesota. Tracy, a little town of 3,000 people. My father was a blue collar worker. My mother came from an agricultural family. They were part of a generation in some ways contributed to but also, their lives were substantially influenced by World War II. They, in some ways, were saved economically. So my father went away in 1942 and I would faithfully write every Sunday evening to him at an APO address in New York, and wonder where he was. In summer ’43, he came home and said, hell, I was up in Canada building an air base on Hudson Bay, Churchill. Up with the polar bears and the Eskimos. And got another job at Hanford Engineering Works, Pasco, Washington. So in two weeks, I’m going to catch the train and be off. And maybe if I can find a place to live, your mom will come out and join me.
Franklin: So—sorry—what year were you born?
McClellan: 1937. January 5, 1937.
Franklin: And do you remember when your father left for HEW?
McClellan: Well, he, as I said, he spent ’42 and ’43 in Canada working on an air base. That construction company ended up being engaged at Hanford. So he came out in ’43, in the summer, and lived at Hanford, the construction town. My mother soon joined him when they found a small trailer they could live in. She worked in the commissary at Hanford. And then in the summer of 1944, they came back to Minnesota. My brother and I had lived with our grandparents on a farm for a year, and my sister with an aunt. So we got on the train and headed out to the state of Washington on a new adventure in the summer of 1944.
Franklin: Wow.
McClellan: And then that fall—we lived for the summer in Sunnyside, Washington. I remember well an eight-plex apartment, if you will. Pretty exciting. You’d go to the end of our street, take a right, go a half mile, and there was an honest-to-God Indian teepee with an Indian that lived in it. That was pretty exciting for young kids.
Franklin: I bet. Was that one of the Navy homes?
McClellan: No, that was a part of the Hanford complex, that they had built some housing in outlying areas while they were constructing new homes in Richland. So near the end of August, my father came home one day and said, hey, they finished a new group of houses in Richland, and we’re going to be moving down next week or two. Neighbors would drive us down, I’m going to come in off of graveyard shift and I’ll be at our new home, and you can meet me there.
Franklin: And what kind of home was it?
McClellan: Well, we said, well, where is it? He said, well, it’s a three-bedroom prefabricated house, a so-called prefab.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
McClellan: And it’s on 1809 McClellan Street. And my kid brother and I jumped up and down and said, gee, on our own street! [LAUGHTER] So we later learned that, you know, many of the streets were named for individuals in the Corps of Engineers. So McClellan was in the Corps of Engineers, a one-block-long street, up in the—I guess, what? Southwest side of Richland.
Franklin: Yeah. I live a stone’s throw away from—I live on Stanton.
McClellan: Yeah, okay.
Franklin: In a two-bedroom prefab.
McClellan: So we did just as he said. The neighbors drove us down and we got to the new house. The door was open, we went in, and there was my dad, flaked out in the bed. He’d come home from graveyard shift and welcomed us to our new home.
Franklin: Are you related to General—is there any family relation to General McClellan?
McClellan: Well, only speculation. Probably one of my more noteworthy traits is procrastination. And as you may recall, General McClellan had some problems with procrastination.
Franklin: Yeah, as a US historian, I’m very well-versed in—[LAUGHTER] Especially the first three years of the Civil War. Yes, he certainly was.
McClellan: And he also liked the libation, and I think we shared a similar taste there.
Franklin: And luster. [LAUGHTER]
McClellan: But he was short of stature; I’m tall of stature.
Franklin: Yeah, he looked good on a horse.
McClellan: But I don’t know. I’ve done a little bit of digging and I found, you know, a cluster of McClellans there in Kirkcudbright in Scotland. We actually have a Castle MacLellan. It’s more of a large manor house than a castle. But interesting.
Franklin: What did your father do at the Hanford Site?
McClellan: Well, my father initially worked in construction and then very quickly as they started to assemble the operational workforce, he went to work as a patrolman. You know, part of the, what today we call, security force. Of course, worked for DuPont. He moved quickly from there into what was called the separations department or operation. That was the unit that we learned later was involved in separating out the product, plutonium, from the irradiated fuel elements containing uranium. So he spent most of his career, actually, working in the PUREX facility.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
McClellan: Earlier he had some time in the bismuth phosphate separation plant. And then in the RADOX and then PUREX was ultimately the big workhorse separations facility for the Hanford operations.
Franklin: And how long did your father work at Hanford for?
McClellan: Well, for his total life then. I think he passed away age 62. My mother, very soon after we came to Richland, went to work in the food services facility at Marcus Whitman Elementary School, which was where we were going to school. So I do remember in the third grade, seeing my mom in the cafeteria as we went through and picked up our lunches. She was a very ambitious lady, very intelligent. She got her shorthand and typing in quick order and then went to work and became the secretary of the principal of Columbia High School. She always commented she was pleased that one of the students in the class, I think of 1948, a noteworthy graduate was Gene Conley. The trivia question is, who is one of the athletes that played for two different sports teams in terms of major sports? And that’s Gene Conley, Col High graduate who played for the Boston Red Sox and the Boston Celtics, and earlier here was a student at Washington State University.
Franklin: Wow, interesting.
McClellan: So my mother spent basically her career as a professional administrator.
Franklin: Did she work at Hanford at all?
McClellan: No, she really always kind of focused on wanting her family.
Franklin: Right.
McClellan: And she really didn’t want that extra travel time. So she worked for a period of time at the United Way or Community Chest, and then back into the school system and was the administrative assistant or secretary to a number of principals in different schools in the Richland school system.
Franklin: So, tell me about growing up in Richland in a government town, and in a prefab, and how that--
McClellan: Well, I think growing up and—obviously, growing up is a unique experience. [LAUGHTER] For everyone. But we had come from a small town in Minnesota. Everybody knew everybody else. Everybody was from there.
Franklin: Right.
McClellan: Many of them had two, three, four generations living in the area. Coming to Richland was totally different environment. Everyone was from somewhere else. There were a number of people from Utah, a number of people from Colorado, Denver. Turns out all of those were connections back to DuPont, and DuPont’s operation of facilities in those areas. And there were quite a number from the Midwest and a few from Montana. Areas where there was not a lot of industrial activity. People could be recruited. Like my father, in terms of married, three children, why, he was lower down in the draft order. So, that was prototypical of many of the people. My classmates would be families of two, three, four, five kids and their fathers, in some case were blue collar workers, in some cases were engineers. New kinds of professionals that I never had experience with, even as a little kid, and later when I’d spend summers with my grandparents on the farm in Minnesota. Yeah, the professionals we came in contact with were our family doctor, the farm veterinarian, the lawyer, the banker. So Richland, one of the interesting aspects was the extent to—as a young kid I had fellow students whose fathers were engineers or chemists. In fact, one of my classmates, class of 1954 from Columbia High School, his father was W.E. Johnson.
Franklin: Oh!
McClellan: He was the top guy running Hanford for many years for the General Electric Company.
Franklin: Yeah.
McClellan: The other thing that’s unique is that no one owned their own home.
Franklin: Right.
McClellan: You rented your home. DuPont left soon after the war ended. DuPont had been brought in because they were really a unique company. Not only were they large, but they, because of the nature of their business, producing explosives, they were in the business of designing, building, and operating facilities. That was a unique set of activities. So, as I say, you’re working with building and manufacturing explosives. You want to know that your facility—
Franklin: Right, and I imagine, too, that there’s a culture of safety in DuPont in dealing with such—
McClellan: Oh, absolutely.
Franklin: When your product is explosive and—
McClellan: Yeah. And many years later I would actually have interactions professionally in terms of DuPont, and that safety culture was present and continues today. But that was also present at Hanford. And then that ability, as I say, to make modifications in the design as new information came available.
Franklin: And do that in-house, too.
McClellan: Yeah, that was all done in-house. Then we euphemistically said that changed from DuPont to Generous Electric. General Electric was the prime contractor, and sometimes we’d refer to them as Generous Electric. Of course, they operated on a pass-through basis. It was federal dollars. That’s the other thing I think unique in terms of Richland and Richland school systems. There was no private property. So there was no private tax base. So the dollars for the Richland schools flowed through, let’s say, line of dollars that came from Washington in terms of appropriation—authorization and appropriations, and were ultimately administered by the Richland Operations Office of the Atomic Energy Commission. So if you’re in the Richland Operations Office and you’re involved in overseeing the expenditure of dollars, your kids are going to the Richland schools, you’re certainly not going to slice some dollars off the budget for School District 400, Richland. Your kids are going to be impacted. So the schools were, quite frankly, extraordinary quality. I don’t think I fully appreciated that at the time.
Franklin: [LAUGHTER] I don’t think any of us do at the time.
McClellan: Yeah. So as I told someone, even recently, you know, I’m still working off the vapor left in the fuel tank that they started to fill when I went to Marcus Whitman, then Carmichael, and Col High, and then headed off to Washington State University.
Franklin: Wow. What else can you say about growing up in Richland that might be different from a lot of other people’s experiences in a normal—
McClellan: Well, I think at that time, in Richland, there was an element of kind of the long hand of Washington in planning communities. There was an interesting intersection of class, if you will, more based on, are you an hourly worker or are you a monthly payroll? So-called non-exempt and exempt payroll. And there was a recognition that there was an element of status associated with education. But overlaying that, at the intersection was the fact that when we moved from 1809 McClellan Street to 1122 Perkins, we lived in a B house. Now, that’s one of the things that’s a little different. I mean, the houses had alpha-numbers on them. A houses, B houses, one-, two-, three-bedroom prefabs. So a B house was a duplex, two bedrooms on each end. But on Perkins Street, we could look across the street and there were two L houses. Those were two-story and four bedrooms upstairs; living room, dining room, kitchen downstairs. They were pretty spiffy. So here you have this strange junction of somebody who was an hourly worker was not at first bat going to be assigned an L house to live in.
Franklin: Right.
McClellan: You were a manager. The manager that lived across the street, ultimately, would become the chief engineer for the Hanford Project. That was Oren H. Pilkey, P-I-L-K-E-Y. A senior. And he was an engineer. Grew up in Texas, trained as an engineer at Texas A&M, and then gone off to work for Chicago Bridge and Ironworks. Had a lot of experience. So I remember well—you know, I’m kind of a tall, even in those days, skinny kid, and I was playing out in the front yard, and I saw this black Ford sedan drive in to the L house that had recently become vacant, and out hopped four people. They weren’t too unusual, except they were short of stature. The two adults were about five-foot-four, and the kids were under five-foot. We soon became good friends. Ultimately, Oren Pilkey was one of my scout masters and a mentor.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
McClellan: He encouraged me in terms of mathematics, engineering, physical sciences. A love and appreciation for the outdoors. But I did many Sunday afternoon kind of engineering, or learning experiences in his study at his home. I remember doing one of those. It was a calculation of pressure in a large tank, what the pressure would be involved in lifting the lid on the large tank. Only many years later did I learn that was the double-walled steel tanks at Hanford that he was overseeing developing. On that particular occasion, I actually could best his son, who was my classmate in high school, Walter Pilkey. Walter would go on to become a very distinguished engineer and professor of Engineering Science at the University of Virginia. His older brother, who was my good friend also, Oren Pilkey, Junior, went on and very distinguished career in marine geology, was a Washington Duke professor of geology at Duke University. So, I think that kind of segueways back in terms of the educational environment. I think there was a lot of inspiration, if you will. As a young kid you could see people who were successful, and you soon recognized success was tied to education.
Franklin: Right, I suppose it’s knowing so many people from so many different places. I guess I could imagine maybe that people in Richland were aware of a wider world than, say, someone in a small town in Minnesota or Arkansas might be.
McClellan: Well, I think that’s true. And I think they each brought their own culture. I mean, I recall our next door neighbors in Sunnyside. They were from Oklahoma. Even as a seven-year-old, I kind of knew a bit about the Dust Bowl and whatever, and the Okies. I was admonished by my parents, we’re not supposed to call them Okies. That’s a little bit of a derogatory term. But I still remember an experience, going with my mother, and she of course had her troop of three kids. I was seven, my brother was five-and-a-half and my sister was four, and we were going downtown Sunnyside to mail some packages and shopping. The lady next door had her troop of three kids about the same age, except she had a newborn baby. So we went into the Sunnyside post office and mailed our packages and came out, and the baby started to squall. And so the lady sat on the steps of the post office in Sunnyside and opened her blouse and started to nurse her baby. Well, that was not quite what you would expect in Tracy, Minnesota. Little bit different culture. So you had different cultures. Again, my friends, the Pilkeys, their mother had gone to Hunter College in New York. Very well-educated lady. We would very frequently take trips to the public library on Sunday afternoon to pick up a new collection of books. If you went to her home, why, there’d be a book on almost every table. She was an avid reader. And that encouraged us to do the same.
Franklin: That’s very interesting—sorry. Go ahead.
McClellan: Well, so, I think the difference in everybody being from somewhere else was something that kind of pulled things apart, in terms of a community. On the other hand, the fact that everybody was in some way involved with Hanford brought people together. And overlaying that, in those days—the late ‘40s—was the element of secrecy. You didn’t really know what was going on. Things were compartmentalized. Many years later, I was taking a graduate course at what was then the WSU Joint Graduate Center. In a sense a predecessor of—
Franklin: Right, pretty much right here.
McClellan: WSU. So the individual teaching that was Doctor Lyle Swindeman, who was an environmental scientist at the Hanford Laboratories. And we were going through each of the different AEC facilities around the country: Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, Shipping Port—whatever—as to what they did, how they managed environmental activities. It was really rather remarkable in terms of the early 1960s, when I took that. One of them we focused on, of course, was Hanford. That particular evening, we had a flow chart for the PUREX facility. I came home and I was doing some homework at the table. My father came home from a swing shift and sat down with a cup of coffee, and we’re chatting and looking at what I’m doing. And he said, what the hell are you doing? Those are classified! [LAUGHTER] I said, no, no, look up there. It’s unclassified. He said, no, I think that’s classified. That’s what we’re doing all the time. So there was this little bit of a conflict there. He was not absolutely convinced that I had the unclassified version of the flow documents for the PUREX facility.
Franklin: Well, that makes sense, too, right, because he would have come to Hanford during World War II when secrecy was paramount. I mean—
McClellan: Oh!
Franklin: If you said anything about your job, you could easily be on the next train out.
McClellan: Oh, absolutely. And the other is elements—I recently had a conversation with some people in terms of plutonium workers at Hanford, which my father was one of those. Ironically, many years later, I would be studying plutonium. I was involved in the first meeting that gave rise to the US Transuranium and Uranium Registry. My father was enrolled in that. And I continue today to have an interest in plutonium toxicity and what we do to protect the workers, which, in my opinion, was remarkable in terms of at Hanford. Part of that is you have a bioassay program. Well, what’s bioassay? One of the elements of the bioassay program is that you collect samples of urine periodically, you analyze them for radioactivity, and then using very sophisticated models, go back and project—estimate—what exposures an individual may have in terms of internal deposition. Well, it was classified as to what people did, but now I can understand, if I had just gone down the street and taken a look at which addresses had a gray box on the front doorstep, which was the urine samples that were being collected, I could have identified who were the prospective plutonium workers at Hanford. I don’t know if the Soviets had anybody doing those street checks in Richland or not, but they could have identified who were the plutonium workers pretty readily.
Franklin: Interesting. I just wanted to come back to something, and say that it’s remarkable to hear you talk about the impact of the mixed income neighborhood you lived in, and that you identified that we lived in this mixed income neighborhood from the B house next to the L. Because that was, as you might know, that was Pherson—Albin Pherson—the man who designed the Richland village. That was his idea. That was one of the things he pushed through, was having mixed income neighborhoods, so that you didn’t have a total segregation of people by class.
McClellan: Yeah. Yeah.
Franklin: It’s interesting to hear your views on that and how that affected you.
McClellan: Yeah. No, there was that element of kind of a utopian plan community approach. I don’t want to go too far on it. There’s a book out there, it’s got a corruption of the word plutonium in it, written by an individual who puts herself forward as an academic historian. I’m not certain where she got her degree, what her credentials, but I can tell you the book is filled with hogwash, as my grandfather would say. Absolute, unvarnished hogwash. I don’t know where she got a lot of her information—it’s misinformation, as she tries to contrast and compare Richland, the Hanford Site, with Mayak in the Soviet Union. I’ve studied both of those; I know both of them quite well. And I also know the outcomes, in terms of health of workers at both those sites. She’s totally off base. I always like to call that to people’s attention. They say, have you read the book in its entirety? I say, I’ve read pieces of it, but I really don’t want to waste my money buying it.
Franklin: I see. So, you graduated in ’54, correct? From Columbia High.
McClellan: Right.
Franklin: And then you went to WSC.
McClellan: Right.
Franklin: So what did you go to study at—
McClellan: Well, we have to back up a ways.
Franklin: Oh, okay, let’s do that.
McClellan: There’s an interesting event that occurred. I’m going to be a little bit vague in this because I may not remember the specific dates. But 1948—using the royal we—the US detected airborne radioactivity on the west coast of the USA. That was not surprising; we knew that the Soviets were building a copycat facility to Hanford. When we detected radioactivity in the air, specifically radioiodine, iodine-131, that was a very good—not just clue—but we knew they were processing radioactive fuel.
Franklin: I’ve heard that their first facility was almost an exact copy of the one in the 300 Area, except instead of being horizontal, it was vertical. Do you know anything about—
McClellan: I’m not really knowledgeable of the absolute details of theirs, but again, the key element is that what they were doing is they were taking refined uranium fuel—
Franklin: Right.
McClellan: --creating a reaction, in terms of neutrons and producing plutonium-239.
Franklin: Right. We knew they were doing the same thing that we were doing.
McClellan: Exactly. And when we detected radioiodine in the air, we knew they were processing that fuel. Now, the key is how much plutonium were they producing? That’s what we really wanted to know. And somebody said, well, gee, they’re doing just what we did at Hanford. They’re processing green fuel. Well, what do we mean by green fuel? Green fuel is freshly irradiated uranium oxide fuel with plutonium in it. And were now, rather than letting that cool down for a period of time, so the short live radionuclides decay off, were processing it almost immediately because we want the plutonium. That’s what happened in terms of Hanford when the first processing, I think late in 1944, early 1945, to produce plutonium to go to Los Alamos. So, somebody said, well, gee, if we know there’s x radioiodine in the air, what we want to know is y amount of plutonium. Well, why don’t we just repeat that big experiment? So that was Operation Green Run. That was the code name for what would ultimately be the largest—to my knowledge—release of radioactivity from the Hanford Operations. A planned experiment that went astray. They took the freshly irradiated green fuel, chopped it, added the nitric acid. I have reason to go back through the dates—my father was probably involved in that crew. And then the radioiodine started to come out the stack. But Mother Nature didn’t cooperate. We had a major meteorological inversion, and, basically, fumigated, quote, the Inland Empire with short-lived iodine-131. It has an eight-day half-life. That would create controversy over whether there were ill effects related to that. As it turned out, in terms of those releases—that was highly classified—but it led to a real push in further work at Hanford on radioiodine. They started a major study. That study involved feeding radioactive iodine to sheep each day. And along the way, they decided, gee, you know we always have this possibility of exposures on the site. Why don’t we maintain an offsite flock of control sheep? Ah, that sounds like a good idea. Who could do that? Well, gee, why don’t we have the Richland schools do that? I can’t go through all the details, but I’m reasonably certain there were discussions at rather high levels. Rather surprisingly, the Richland School District started a vocational agriculture program. I was one of the early students in that program. The school farm was located right across the road from where the WSU Tri-Cities campus is located today.
Franklin: Oh, right.
McClellan: We had a large tract of land, and in fact, if you were enterprising as I was, you could sublease a piece of that land. I actually had the sublease on the ten acres right at the corner of Jadwin across from the WSU campus where I grew corn and alfalfa for four years that I was in high school. I also had several orchards and a vineyard for two years. But that school farm maintained the offsite control sheep for the big Hanford radioiodine and thyroid cancer study that was being conducted. What was particularly important out of that is one of the people that WSU recruited was Leo K. Bustad. Leo K. Bustad was a veterinarian. He had been a distinguished military veteran. Had spent a significant portion of his military time in World War II in German prisoner of war camp, which substantially influenced him. He came back to WSU and pursued a master’s degree in nutrition and a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine degree. When he received the DVM and the nutrition degree, he was an ideal candidate to recruit to Hanford for involvement in the studies on radiation effects. I first, then, met Leo Bustad when he was a Hanford scientist and periodically would stop by the school farm and check on the status of those offsite control sheep. So, he encouraged me in terms of veterinary medicine. My friend, Oren Pilkey, across the street encouraged me in engineering. When I headed off to WSU—or WSC—1954, I actually enrolled as an engineering student. I took engineering. I took economics. I took pre-veterinary medicine. And then I decided to go down the pathway of veterinary medicine. That led me, then, to seek summer employment. [LAUGHTER] And so I was employed as a student at Hanford for three years—’57, ’58, ’59. And then Leo twisted my arm to come back as a full-time scientist in 1960, when I received my Doctor of Veterinary Medicine degree. [37:40]
Franklin: Wow. We should note that Bustad is also one of the most well-known or prodigious WSU alumni in terms of his contributions to veterinary medicine and, you know, there’s an entire hall named after him on campus.
McClellan: Well, Leo is a wonderful remarkable individual. I can relate many, many stories with regard to Leo. But one of those—I’d just finished what was probably my first major scientific manuscript on the metabolism of strontium-90. Strontium-90 is an alkaline earth element. Behaves very much like calcium. So it’s readily absorbed in the GI tract, goes to the skeleton. Radio strontium, strontium-90, is a beta emitter, radiates then the bone and the bone marrow. So you’re concerned for those effects. So we were studying strontium-90 in miniature pigs. So I had finished this manuscript on metabolism of strontium-90 and gave it to Leo to review. Leo said, I’ll read through it tonight, come back tomorrow, and we can talk about it. So I came in the next day, and he said, well, this is really good. But there’s kind of a little bit of a problem with a few aspects. I said, oh, what’s that? He said, well, rather surprised there’s only one author. I knew, uh-oh. Boy, I goofed. I said, oh, well, this was just a draft, Leo. He said, well, I hope so. I thought I had quite a bit to do with the design of that experiment. I said, what else? He said, well, it’s got some statistics in here. You and I aren’t statisticians. Maybe we ought to have somebody else review this. I said, who do you have in mind? And he said, Carl. Turns out that he was sort of the top statistician at Hanford. I said, we don’t to waste his time then. He said, oh, I’ve already called him up. He’s expecting you in his office at 300 Area at 4:00. And he said, we’ll have to have it wrapped up by 7:00 because I’m going to be home for dinner at 7:30. Sure enough, I went in and we spent three hours—a wonderful experience. Very junior scientist and here’s one of the leading statisticians in the world, in fact. So I said, what else? And he said, well, we need some good editorial advice? I said, well, what are you thinking about? He said, well, what about Phil Abelson? I said, Phil Abelson, the editor of Science magazine? And he said, yeah! I said, well, we’re going to need some connections there, Leo. He says, we got them. He’s a Cougar! He picked up the phone and called Phil Abelson. And introduced me to Phil on the phone. And that was the beginning of a lifetime association that I had with Phil Abelson.
Franklin: Who also has a building named after him on campus.
McClellan: Yeah. And many years later, I was the president and CEO for an organization called the Chemical Industry Institute of Toxicology from 1988 to 1999. And Phil Abelson was on my board of directors. So Phil and I were lifelong friends. I was very pleased, many years later, when I was recognized as a Regent’s Distinguished Alumnus at Washington State University to actually—I knew that Phil was also an alumnus, but I didn’t appreciate he was the first Regent’s Alumnus in terms of Washington State University. And then as I went down the list further, Leo Bustad was on that list. So I’m very proud in terms of that lineage.
Franklin: That’s great. As a side note, your name was so familiar to me in the beginning because I did a project for them—for University Communications for a historical timeline and had to find pictures of all the Regent’s Distinguished—what year were you a Regent’s Distinguished—
McClellan: Golly, I think 2007, maybe.
Franklin: Okay, I think I found your picture somewhere and put it up on the website.
McClellan: Yeah.
Franklin: It’s funny. So, wow. You got all three degrees at Washington State?
McClellan: No, no, I only received one. It’s always interesting, particularly if I’m appearing in the court room. They’ll say where did you get your bachelor’s degree? I say, I don’t have one. You know, plaintiff lawyers spend a lot of time on that. I went to WSU at a time period when you could actually gain admission with the appropriate number of credit hours after two years. So I ended up going to Washington State University and completing my only degree, a Doctorate of Veterinary Medicine, in six years, and graduated in 1960.
Franklin: Wow.
McClellan: So I was 23 years old. I later—kind of on a lark—took a Master’s in Management Science—an MBA in an executive program—at the University of New Mexico. I received that degree in 1980. That was a lot of fun, because, again, it was multidisciplinary. There were engineers; there were chemists, physicists, social scientists, physicians, lawyers. I’ve alwys enjoyed that kind of interdisciplinary environment. I had that in terms of that program at Robert O. Anderson School of Management at University of New Mexico. And then later I had the good fortunate that the Ohio State University recognized my career in comparative veterinary medicine and awarded me an honorary Doctor of Science degree, which I’m very proud to have received.
Franklin: So you said—you mentioned that you worked three summesr at the Hanford Site and then were brought on at Bustad’s urgings back to Hanford. So how long did you stay at—so you graduated in 1960 and then came back to—
McClellan: Yeah. Well then I actually—I planned to stay two years until my fiancée, Kathleen—Kathleen Donnegan—graduated from Washington State. Then we’d have kind of free range. One of my understandings with Bustad when I came to Hanford is he would make certain I could visit all the schools around the USA that I was interested in potentially going to to pursue a graduate degree. He said, I won’t get you to Perth, Australia, the other one you’re considering, but I’ll get you to those five in the US. And he did live up to his bargain. Leo was a great mentor in terms of encouraging me to do lots of different things and always push yourself to the limit. He signed me up—I think the second year I was at Hanford, I was 24 years old, and he asked me to keep a day open. As I recall, it was in March ’62. And I said, well, Leo, we need to fill in the calendar; what do you have in mind? He said, well, I signed you up to give a seminar at the University of Washington on bone marrow transplantation in miniature pigs. [LAUGHTER] It was pretty heavy. But he was reassuring. As I was getting my slides together, he said, Roger, remember when you talk to that group of people, you’re going to know more about the subject than anybody in that room. That’s great advice to a young student—young scientist—to have confidence. That if you’re well-prepared, you could go before a pretty formidable audience, because you should know more about that topic than anybody in that room.
Franklin: Right. How was it, coming back to Hanford after it had been privatized? I’m sure you probably—your parents lived—
McClellan: Yeah, actually it was—when I was at WSC, my parents bought their home. So I saw those activities. And then, when I was employed, I was in the Hanford Laboratories. That was a remarkable institution, organization. The individual that headed that was H. M. Parker—Herbert M. Parker. The biology division within that was headed up by Harry A. Kornberg. Leo Bustad reported to Kornberg. I reported to Bustad. I was on a very short reporting line, if you will. Mr. Parker reported to W. A. Johnson. So I knew Herb Parker personally. I’d had the opportunity to give one of what were sometimes called the Parker seminars—individuals would be invited to give a seminar for Mr. Parker and a very small group of people in Parker’s office and library in 300 Area. Those were always with some trepidation. You couldn’t turn down that invitation, because people maneuvered to get them. But that was a pretty august audience they had at the laboratories—H. M. Parker listening to your presentation and having questions.
Franklin: That sounds like a very encouraging workplace.
McClellan: Oh, it was!
Franklin: [INAUDIBLE] of research discipline and hard work.
McClellan: And hard work was rewarded. I remember in 1962, I had a call from Mr. Parker’s office to come in. A little bit uncertain. Leo Bustad had kind of gone out on a limb in terms of encouraging me to go to an international meeting in England at the International Congress of Radiation Research. I initially took in my travel schedule and Leo took a look and said, gee, this doesn’t look very good, Roger. And I said, what do you mean? I’m going to the meeting for a week, I’m going to take a week’s vacation. It’s going to be just a month or so after I’m married. He said, oh, no, no problem with that. I’d like you to spend a lot more time there. There’s a lot of people I want you to see and meet. So he said I’ll draw up a revised schedule. So I came back the next day and he had a schedule that was four weeks! I said, holy cow! I said, Leo, this isn’t going to fly. I mean, it certainly won’t get by Mr. Parker. And he said, what do you mean? I said, well, you don’t know the saying. There’s a saying around the lab with the working troops that if you’re gone two weeks, you’re gone forever. I said I don’t want to tempt fate. He said, oh, Herb’s bark is always a lot sharper than his bite. He said, I think he’ll approve this. He thinks you’re one of our rising stars. So sure enough, Herb Parker approved it. And then just the week before I’m going to this meeting, I get a call from Mr. Parker’s office. And I thought, uh-oh, he’s going to personally tell me he’s changed his mind. So I went into his office, and seated in the outer room, the door to the strong room, if you will, open. And Mr. Parker, a rather large individual, came out with his kind of limp handshake. Hello, Roger, great to have you here. Come on in. And then, you’re probably wondering why I’ve invited you to my office today. And I said, well, I am. [LAUGHTER] He said, well, we have a program here. I like to recognize people for their contributions, and it’s a rather private matter. And he gave me a little black leather case, and it had a nice little commemorative statement in there. Then he reached into his coat pocket and he pulled out an envelope and he said, and there is a monetary award that goes with this. I’m sure that’s going to be useful on that very prolonged trip you have planned to Europe. [LAUGHTER] So, Herb could have a—he was an outstanding scientist—also had a very wry, British humor. He certainly encouraged me to become involved in activities in radiation protection. I’m very confident I would never have become a member of the National Counsel of Radiation Protection and Measurements if it had not been for the encouragement that Herb Parker and Leo Bustad gave me.
Franklin: Could you speak a little—just for people that might not know—could you speak a little more about Herb Parker and his work at Hanford. Since you knew him personally, Herb Parker’s working at Hanford and his importance to Hanford.
McClellan: Well, Herb Parker was trained as a radiological physicist in England. Very bright individual. Did some seminal work in radiological physics, particularly related to treatment of cancer, and what we call [UNKNOWN] dose curves. He developed these to estimate the radiation dose that would be delivered to a tumor, if you will, from an external x-ray beam. One of the people that he learned of and came in contact with was Dr. Cantrell at Swedish Cancer Institute in Seattle. So, he joined Cantrell to continue his work. And then World War II came along and Herb got pulled into the Manhattan Project. He was a part of a group of individuals trained primarily in physics, some in chemistry, and brought together initially at Oak Ridge. They were to be sort of the liaison between the operations, the medical community, and assuring the safety of workers. That coded, if you will, as health physics. That was done in part because no one wanted to use the term radiological in terms of this particular activity, because of the secrecy during World War II. Later, Herb would express profound dislike for that term, health physics. I agree with him. I would think it probably was a useful placeholder for a time period. So Herb was one of that early group, and he was assigned to Hanford, I think. If memory serves me, he came to Hanford in August of 1944. I said I came in September to start the third grade in 1944. And Herb had a key role in the overall design and management, ultimately, of the program in terms of radiological protection of the Hanford workers, and you could go more broadly, protection in terms of chemical agents. And not protection just of workers but the total environmental program. In my opinion, the program that Herb Parker really provided the leadership for was one of the foremost programs in terms of environmental and worker protection that was ever put in place in prospective way. Evidence of that, Mr. Parker—and it was Mr. Parker; he did not have an earned doctoral degree—set about writing with Cantrell kind of a handbook, if you will, on radiation protection. What is it? What is radiation? What does it do to the body? He wanted to see that distributed to the appropriate workers at the earliest possible date. It ran into some difficulties in terms of clearance, but it ultimately was released on January 5th, 1945. My eighth birthday. [LAUGHTER] So it’s easy for me to recall. That document is an extraordinary exposition on what we knew about radiation then. And many of the basic concepts that were outlined by Cantrell and Parker in that document are still applicable today.
Franklin: So he’s really a major leader in health physics.
McClellan: Yeah, and I would say, Herb would probably—he would prefer radiological protection.
Franklin: Radiological protection.
McClellan: Yeah, and I see it as that big picture of protection of workers and the environment from agents, whether the agents were working, processing, in terms of the whole chain of radioactive materials, uranium to plutonium fission products, or whether we’re talking about chemicals. My career, in fact, has been punctuated—I’ve been involved in radiation throughout my career, but I’ve also spent a very large portion of it dealing with chemical agents.
Franklin: How long did you work at Hanford Labs?
McClellan: Well, as I said, I came back as a permanent scientist 1960. I was very fortunate, I think, working under the leadership of Leo Bustad and Harry Kornberg and Mr. Parker, to be advanced very early to rank Senior Scientist. I soon put the graduate program sort of on the side and pushed ahead. In 1964, Leo came to me and said, you know, they’re pushing on me again to come back to Washington, D.C. on a special assignment. I’m not really enthusiastic about it because my kids are in school. But I think I’m going to suggest they take a look at you. What do you think about that? And I said, well, gee. That sounds like an interesting opportunity. So, first thing you know, I’m on my way to Washignton, D.C. and a series of interviews. We reached agreement that in October 1 of 1964, I’ll go to Washington, D.C. Well, then, all of the sudden, things started to change in the summer, basically, of ’64. The decision that General Electric is going to leave, that total operation is going to be fragmented. Sometimes I refer to that as the disparaging phrase of, maintaining employment in the face of absence of a product. Because it was pretty clear we had enough plutonium-239. We didn’t need Hanford any longer to produce any more. General Electric ran a very efficient operation. So, General Electric headed out, and they start to look at firms to run different pieces of the operation. It became known that the laboratories would be managed as a separate enterprise, and very quickly we learned that was going to be Battelle Memorial Institute from Columbus. For those of at Hanford, it didn’t take much time in the library to kind of determine that, gee, this seems to be upside-down. We ought to be taking over Battelle, not Battelle taking us over. But that’s the way it was. So I was interviewed by Sherwood Fawcett, who had been announced as the first director of what would become the Pacific Northwest Laboratories. The outcome was predictable. They said, we want you to join the Battelle team. We seem to have this problem: you’re leaving before we arrive. So I said, well, that’s just the way it is. [LAUGHTER] And he said, well, maybe we could delay your departure. I said, well, perhaps we could talk to the people in the AEC and see if they’d be agreeable. But Dr. Fawcett said, well, what would they have to do with it? And I still remember telling him, they had something to do with everything that goes on here. They certainly will have a say. Well, they were quickly agreed. So it was agreed that I would become a Battelle employee. So as I recall, January 4th or thereabouts, 1965, I walked out the door on Friday evening and threw my GE badge in the box and came in on Monday morning and picked up a Battelle badge, and that Friday I headed out on a leave of absence to join the division of biology and medicine at the Atomic Energy Commission in Washington, D.C.
Franklin: Wow.
McClellan: So the next phase is after not quite two years in Washington. I spent—I was then strongly encouraged to go to Albuquerque, New Mexico to run a research program on inhaled radioactivity that was operated by the Lovelace Foundation for Medical Education and Research, a part of a triad of a medical research institute, a private medical clinic and a hospital. And in that role, running that program, I essentially competed with Hanford in terms of a very significant research program that Bill Bair pioneered in leading at Hanford. So while I was gone from Hanford, I in a sense remained connected, certainly scientifically. And as a competitor, but a very friendly competition.
Franklin: [LAUGHTER] And did you ever come back to work at Hanford after you went to New Mexico?
McClellan: Well, I never came—well, I came for a couple weeks in the summer of ’66 and sort of bid my farewell. Wrapped up a few things. And I continued to publish some papers interrelated. I came back many times in terms of the Hanford Symposium that became a regular feature. And then I had the opportunity, more recently, to serve on the Scientific Advisory Committee for the US Transuranium and Uranium Registry. Which, ironically, I was involved in in some of the early activities initiating it in 1966. Now we’re 50 years later, celebrating the 50th anniversary of a landmark program started by group of occupational physicians, Dag Norwood, one of those small contractors in the privatized acitivites at Hanford. Then that later went over to Washington State University, and today is maintained and operated as a piece of the Washington State University College of Pharmacy.
Franklin: Yup. When you were at Hanford Labs, what kinds of work were you—you mentioned work on pigs, bone marrow—what other kinds of work were you doing?
McClellan: Well, we had a major study that Leo was wrapping up on the effects of radioiodine in thyroid cancer in sheep. I did some ancillary studies related to how we translated those results to people, to humans. One of the key pieces of work that I did—and it really fit into a bigger picture with many people involved, but—we looked at the effects of x radiation of the thyroid gland and compared that to the protracted beta radiation of the thyroid from ingested or inhaled radioiodine. That showed that the protracted radiation exposure was much less effective in causing damage to the thyroid. So that was a very important piece of work. Another major study that—the primary one I had responsibility for was one that involved miniature pigs given strontium-90. They received their strontium-90 dose each day. We had three generations of pigs. Not because it was a study of genetic effects, but that’s the way in which we could introduce additional animals into the study. It ultimately involved over 1,000 miniature pigs, essentially studied for their total lifespan. And the endpoints were the development of bone marrow discrasias, bone marrow cancers, leukemia, and a development of bone cancers. So that study continued after I left. I think, in total, it represented a very important contribution. A key finding, again, was the importance of dose rate delivery. When radiation dose is protracted over time, it’s much less effective in causing damage and causing cancer. Another key study that was done during that time period linked back to Operation Green Run. We essentially simulated a part of that in a study in which we fed radioiodine—iodine-131 to dairy cows. We followed the thyroid in radioactivity in dairy cows. We collected samples of the milk—we milked them. And then we had a group of volunteers that drank that radioiodine-contaminated milk, elements of it. And then we monitored their thyroids. So you could put together this total picture of a contamination event in terms of iodine-131. What’s happening in terms of the cow’s thyroids accumulating iodine, what’s happening in terms of the iodine-131 in the milk, and then what is happening in terms of concentration of radioiodine in the human thyroid for people ingesting that. That was a very valuable set of data to help us understand what happened in terms of Operation Green Run. It was an extraordinarily valuable piece of information we could use in terms of assessing what was happening post-Chernobyl and post Fukushima.
Franklin: What did that data show, as to contamination in humans?
McClellan: Well, it basically—key message out of that is if radioiodine is released in the event of a reactor accident, you really want to focus on what you can do to control it. You can control it multiple ways. One way is you simply take the cows off of any pasturage. You put them on the stored feed that doesn’t have radioiodine in it. And you make very certain that you simply stop the milk in that supply line. So in the case of Chernobyl, I was able to go to the Ukraine the fall after the Chernobyl accident and do some work there, reconstructing what was going on.
Franklin: Oh, wow.
McClellan: We could see—and I think has been subsequently borne out—in many areas the Soviets were very effective of limiting the exposure of populations. Part of that was cut off that contaminated milk supply. The other that came out of that was something we had a clue to, and that is that the stable iodine intake is very important. If an individual is in what we call a goitergenic diet, low on stable iodine, then they’re going to take up much more of the radioiodine and get a higher radiation dose, as well as, I think there’s a synergistic interaction between the goitergenic thyroid that low in terms of iodine intake, and it’s pushing to do its best, if you will, limited iodine. So that’s combination of living in an area that’s goiterogenic and being subjected to radioiodine is bad news.
Franklin: How would someone naturally have a low iodine intake?
McClellan: Well, very difficult in the USA—or in most advanced countries. Because one of the things we do is we introduce iodine in the flour.
Franklin: And what about iodized salt, also.
McClellan: Salt, yeah.
Franklin: Okay. So--
McClelland: Okay. But in certain areas, you know, in the Ukraine and Belarussia, at the time of the Chernobyl accident, things were not working well politically. Areas that had subsidized practices in terms of iodized salt, iodized flour—that was gone. They were reverting back to the old ways of flour being produced from wheat grown in these low iodine areas.
Franklin: So they’re bodies would have been much more naturally attuned to be grabbing that iodine and storing it?
McClellan: That’s right. Yeah, that’s exactly—
Franklin: Wow, that’s really fascinating.
McClellan: So the people most at risk were those people living in those goiterogenic areas. In fact, that pattern was well-studied in terms of people knowledgeable of thyroid and thyroid disease.
Franklin: So did you know this about—you knew this about the iodine, then, before Chernobyl happened and were able to identify it, or this came about as a result of Chernobyl?
McClellan: Well, what happened is Chernobyl kind of confirmed our fears, if you will. An individual by the name of Lester van Middlesworth at the Univeristy of Tennessee in Memphis was a major figure in studying thyroid and thyroid diseases. Leo Bustad and van Middlesworth were very good friends. I later became friends with van Middlesworth. He understood this, alerted him to this. In fact, our study that I referred to of radioiodine in cows—cows’ milk—we actually studied the influence in a small supplemental study of changing the iodine intake of the cows. So we knew—we understood that picture then. But it was after Chernobyl that, I think, Lester van Middlesworth was a key figure in pointing out these were the areas that were going to be at risk in the Ukraine, Russia, and Belarussia.
Franklin: Wow. The cows that were used for the study, were those cows—were those someone’s cows, or were they cows at the Hanford Labs?
McClellan: Oh, no, we purchased the cows. We purchased the cows at the open market. It was kind of fun. We actually had a much bigger experiment planned early on. We were going to grow and have the pastures and contaminate them and so on. But that was a multimillion dollar experiment to get shrunk down to something you could finally do. Kind of an interesting sideline is, as I told you, I came to Hanford as a summer student. I was fortunate that I fit into a program that was designed primarily for engineers. There were 100 individuals in the program in ’57. I think there were 95, 98 bona fide engineers. There was a graduate student from Wyoming and me, a veterinary medical student. But I had a—and Leo had an enthusiasm for bringing in students. So when I came back and was a permanent staff member, we regularly recruited students. So I can recall when we were planning the cow study, Leo and I had a set of resumes and applications in front of us. Leo pulled out one, and he said, I think this guy is really our guy. His name was Eugene Elafson. And I said, oh, I spotted him, Leo, and I knew you’d probably pick him out. He said, why is that? And I said, because he’s from Stanwood, Washington. That’s where you grew up! He’s another Scandinavian. And he said, oh, Roger, I knew you’d see through that. But remember, this guy grew up on a dairy farm. We need somebody to milk these cows this summer. [LAUGHTER] So we had Gene Olafson, who later was onto a very successful career in veterinary medicine. It was one of the students working with us that summer.
Franklin: How did you get the volunteers to ingest the milk? Did they know of—
McClellan: Oh, they knew that they were ingesting—in fact, they were all, as best I recall, the individuals were all professionals within the radiation protection unit at Hanford.
Franklin: Okay.
McClellan: So today, whether we would have allowed them to be subjects of their own experiment, I don’t know. But I want to assure you that the radiation doses they received were extraordinarily small.
Franklin: I was just curious.
McClellan: Yeah.
Franklin: You don’t hear about human subjects, generally, you know?
McClellan: Well, we went through a time period where there was a lot of attention given in terms of work done under the auspices of the Atomic Energy Commission and using radiation and radionuclides in human subjects. During that time period, this study was one which the people—by then, Battelle was operating the laboratories, but they had go to back and pull out all the records. I recall very well the day I received a call from an attorney with the General Electric Company and said, I’ve read your papers in which you’re a coauthor reporting these students with five volunteers at Hanford. What can you tell me about them? But turned out, our scientific papers published in the open peer reviewed literature were one of the best pieces of information that one could use to readily calculate the radiation exposure the individuals and show that it was what I would call de minimis.
Franklin: Okay. That’s really interesting. When did you finally retire? Or have you retired?
McClellan: I’m not really retired. I’ve transitioned. I think my career is one of Hanford and studies on ingested radionuclides. A very important part of Hanford that I think should be emphasized is we were involved in what I would call issue-resolving science. We were trying to develop science so that we could resolve issues, solve problems, create information that could protect workers, protect the environment. I’m concerned that we’ve, over the years, science has changed in many quarters. Now sometimes I accuse some of my fellow scientists of being engaged in issue of perpetuating science: can we keep this going until my career’s over, or my graduate students’ careers are over. And even sometimes a bit of, will this arouse enough concern on the part of the public that they’ll fund what I want to do? The year that I was involved at Hanford, it was issue resolving science. The problem, the issue, it wasn’t a random walk through the scientific thicket, trying to find something interesting.
Franklin: Why do you think that’s changed?
McClellan: Well, I think we always have tension, and sometimes the tension—we can simplify it by talking about basic versus applied science. I think that’s an artificial distinction on it. Some of the most basic, fundamental findings in science have been serendipitous findings that came out of applied science. I really am not an enthusiastic of the view that the best and the brightest can go into the laboratory and just sit down and they’ll have some great thoughts about what comes next. Some of this, I think, comes out of the high energy physics community, where there is a bit of that. I’m a strong believer, particularly in the use of public funds. That public funds should be used for science, in which we do have issues, and we want to obtain information that’s going to help us resolve those and use the science for the benefit of society. I think we sometimes get a little quite frankly maybe a little pompous as scientists that we know what the issues are and if the public would just listen to us more and give us more money, why, we’ll solve all the problems. That’s not really the way the world works. I think that science if a very vital part of the whole society. But it has to be a part of it, and it has to be interlocked and working with the other elements of society. I also think that many times we find scientists getting so wrapped up in their particular discipline that they fail to appreciate that most of these issues are so complex, they’re not solved by one scientist, one discipline. They’re really solved by a team of people. That becomes very challenging, because systems, in terms of reward, are not always designed to reward teams of people.
Franklin: Right.
McClellan: We focus on rewarding individuals. I would say, I think, at Hanford, in the time period that I had extensive involvement, there was a teamwork orientation and a balance of recognizing the value of the individual but the value of the individual contributing his part of the team to solve a problem.
Franklin: Do you think—do you feel, maybe, that the Cold War had an impact in how science was connected, or that kind of teamwork or purpose-driven science happened, especially in the period you’re talking about, in the early, the heightened tensions of the Cold War versus this kind of post-Cold War world?
McClellan: Well, I know there was a purpose. In terms of talking nationalistic.
Franklin: Right.
McClellan: I mean, we were in a war. But now we’re in a new war, the Cold War. We knew what the Soviets were doing; they knew what we were doing. I think there was a battle on—I think the other part of that that influences this is that if you go back to the tremendous contributions of science, in terms of World War II, to winning that war, and certainly in many different ways—but we can go into the whole issue of RADAR. Things were done in communication, things were done in aeronautics in terms of physiological suit design.
Franklin: And so on.
McClellan: Yeah. Development of antibiotics. All of that, the whole field of nuclear energy. My personal view is that nuclear energy has both benefited from those origins, but it’s also had a heavy burden to bear. [LAUGHTER] I can relate to the fact that I’m visiting here in Richland and I’m going to go to a football game, and that football game, my grandson’s going to be playing in one team from western Washington, and they’re going to be playing the Richland High School Bombers, and their symbol is a mushroom cloud.
Franklin: Proud of the cloud!
McClellan: Unfortunately, many people, when you talk about nuclear power and its role in meeting our societal energy needs, their first image is that mushroom cloud. Their second image is envisioning thousands of deaths in terms of people who were killed in the two atomic bombings in Japan. What they fail to appreciate is that in fact radiation is not very effective in terms of producing cancer. It is really a weak carcinogen. That being said it has a bad rap. It doesn’t get as much of a good rap, probably, as it should in terms of its value in diagnostic purposes in terms of human medicine, nor diagnostic purposes—treatment purposes in terms of ccancer. Radiation is still one of our most effective tools in terms of cancer treatment. But all of that is sort of overwhelmed in the public view. So I continue to be a very strong supporter, enthusiast, wearing my hat as a citizen, I think, with special knowledge of radiation, as to what we should be doing in terms of trying to meet our energy needs. I think nuclear power has a key role. We’ve amply demonstrated that we can handle it and control it. We have had serious accidents—Chernobyl, Fukushima—but I think we can also learn from those.
Franklin: Right. So I hate to—
McClellan: I think we’ve gone well over.
Franklin: We’ve gone for a bit. But I hate to [unknown] but I have an interview here in just a bit. But before you go, is there anything else we haven’t talked aobut that you would like to get off your chest?
McClellan: No. Well, there’s probably about another hour-and-a-half.
Franklin: Well, we’d—I’d be happy to schedule a follow-up interview with you. There’s still several questions that I haven’t asked you.
McClellan: Oh, I think there’s a whole area that we ought to go into. Because I think—I mean, I know I sound pompous, but—I think I know it probably better than anybody else. This would take us down the line of radio accidents, inhalation of radioactivity, workers and worker exposure. Really the basis for much of the work that Bill Bair and his colleagues did at Hanford. And then the work we did at Albuquerque, initially with fission product radionuclides and then with plutonium. And then worked on it at the University of Utah with injections of plutonium, strontium-90, radium, in the beagle dogs. And then the study at UC-Davis that involved ingested strontium-90 and injected radium in dogs, and that links back to the studies with miniature pigs here. Those studies collectively provide a major portion of our knowledge of internally deposited radionuclides. The part that’s fascinating out of that is when we look at our human experience, in terms of the USA, I think we can be extraordinarily pleased with the fact that we did have effective radiation protection programs that go back to Herb Parker. So if there were effects, injuries, they’re extraordinarily rare, very localized. On a collective basis, I think we—we have ample evidence—we did a good job. On the other hand, I tell you that we have evidence post-Cold War that Mayak, the Soviet, was a very different situation. In fact, we did the studies in dogs because we didn’t have human experience. And we never expected to get it. What it turned out is the Soviets at Mayak got the experience that we never thought we would see and we never wanted to see. Their human subjects, accidentally exposed, demonstrated that our dogs were great models; i.e., workers at Mayak were exposed at levels that did produce an excess of lung cancer, an excess of liver cancer, an excess of bone cancer. The lung cancers and liver cancers were really remarkably predicted from the dog data.
Franklin: Wow.
McClellan: Once you took into account two factors—one major. The dogs were clean living. They didn’t smoke, and they didn’t drink. Smoking does cause lung cancer.
Franklin: Yeah, it does.
McClellan: And some plutonium exposure adds to that. Drinking in huge quantities can cause liver damage, and liver cancer. Exposure to plutonium increases it further.
Franklin: Interesting. Well, that was great. And I would love to—we’d love to—
McClellan: So we’ll figure out some other time when we can continue into these others. Then after you’ve looked at what you’ve got here and how much of it’s useable—
Franklin: Oh, there’s a lot of it. Thank you so much. That was great. And I had a great time.
McClellan: Well, my pleasure.
View interview on Youtube.
Douglas O’Reagan: First off, would you please say and spell your name for us?
Maxwell Freshley: My legal name is Maxwell Freshley, F-R-E-S-H-L-E-Y. Not many people around here know me by that name. I go by Max.
O’Reagan: Okay, thanks. My name is Douglas O’Reagan. I’m conducting an oral interview history here on January 11th, 2016. This interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. And I will be talking with Mr. Freshley about his experiences working at the Hanford site. To start us off, would you tell us maybe some of your life up, before you came to this area?
Freshley: Well, I was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. I graduated from the University of Portland in 1951 with a degree in physics. I was offered a tech grad position on the site here. At the time, it was operated by General Electric Company, and this was—I started work here in June of 1951. Okay. So I guess prior to coming here, my having been raised in Portland, and that’s where I went to school, my extended experiences were rather limited. That’s kind of what happened. So I came here in June of 1951, fresh out of school, I wasn’t married at the time. First place I lived was in the Army barracks in north Richland. I can’t tell you about how long I lived there, but while I was living in north Richland in the barracks, I did not have a car. So being kind of isolated out north was a bit of a challenge. So as soon as I could find somebody who would loan me some money, I bought a brand new Ford and that solved a lot of my problems. And then sometime during that first year, I was moved to one of the dorms in Richland. I think the dorms were located on Lee Boulevard. It was close to—I’m calling it a drugstore. But it was kind of like a Payless. I don’t think that was the right name at that time. But they had a restaurant—they served food in this drugstore. So that’s where I would eat.
O’Reagan: Had you heard about Hanford before you came here?
Freshley: Not really. I really hadn’t heard about it. It was all secret, you know?
O’Reagan: Right. Were you aware of the sort of connection with the atomic bomb before you got here?
Freshley: I’d have to say I was not. Although while I was still going to school—still in school—when was the Nagasaki ignited?
O’Reagan: ’45, I believe?
Freshley: ’45?
O’Reagan: I think so.
Freshley: That—oh, okay.
O’Reagan: It was the very end of the Second World War.
Freshley: Yeah. Well, I might’ve heard of that. Yeah.
O’Reagan: What was your first impression of Richland and this area?
Freshley: [LAUGHTER] First impression was living in the barracks out in north Richland-- [LAUGHTER] was not too great. Of course, my first impression was it was darn hot here, coming here in June. It was very warm. My future wife and her mother brought me to Richland from Portland and dropped me off. [LAUGHTER] So things kind of went from there.
O’Reagan: Sure. So we were going to ask about where you were living, but we already addressed that to some degree. What was life like in the barracks?
Freshley: Oh. I would say very basic. Of course, in the dorm rooms that were assigned, you always had a roommate that you lived with. So I became, of course, very familiar with my roommates. When I moved from the barracks to Richland, I had a different roommate. So I made acquaintances with two people like that. They were both scientists, so we got along really well. In fact, one of them is still living in Richland.
O’Reagan: What kind of work did you do at Hanford, and where on the site did you work?
Freshley: Well, first of all, I worked in 300 Area in 3706 Building. I was—they assigned me a position in the Graphite Group. We were studying graphite, the moderator in the reactors. One of the things that was going on at the time—and I can’t tell you what reactor it was—but the graphite core was swelling. It was—I don’t know if it had come in contact yet with the upper shield, but it was growing. I was assigned to two people in the Graphite Group. We went and extracted samples of graphite from the core of this reactor. The thing that they had set up to do that, of course, was already here. So we were extracting samples—core samples. What the purpose of my job was to determine the annealing temperature of the graphite, so that if they raised the temperature in the core to a point where graphite annealing started occurring, then the core would shrink back and not interfere with the top shield. So I think they were looking for somebody—[LAUGHTER] I won’t say it. But anyway, I was assigned the position or job of taking these graphite samples and investigating the annealing temperature. What we used was a Fresnel diffractometer. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of that, but interference rings from this interferometer would be displayed. It was my job to count the rings. It was a very tedious job. I’m sure that these two fellas didn’t want to do that, so they found me, and I did it. These rotations were—honestly I can’t remember whether they were three months or six months, but you would rotate from one position to another. I don’t remember if you could choose your positions—your rotations—I guess it probably depended on whether or not there was something available or not to go to. So I fulfilled my position in the Graphite Group. I didn’t want to stay in the Graphite Group, so I moved on.
O’Reagan: Before we move on, I have a quick question for you. This is a little bit off-script, but I have an undergraduate degree in physics.
Freshley: Uh-huh.
O’Reagan: I was reading a while back that when you started heating up the reactors, it caused that expansion to go back, and that sounds like what you’re describing.
Freshley: Mm-hm.
O’Reagan: But what is annealing?
Freshley: It’s heating to a temperature where the damage caused by the neutron radiation would be annealed physically. So the core would shrink back. But you had to get it up to a certain temperature, and you didn’t want to overheat it, because if you get it too hot, then the core—the graphite would oxidize. That would not be good. But I think the cores were enclosed in an argon atmosphere, as I remember.
O’Reagan: It just surprised me, of course—I expected you get something hot, it expands. But now we’re saying you get it hot and it shrinks!
Freshley: Yeah, that’s right. But when you’re looking at the diffraction rings on the interferometer, you can tell by the movement of the rings when you are reaching the annealing temperature. So either they—and I can’t honestly remember the details here, whether the rings did not move as fast, or whether they might have even changed direction.
O’Reagan: Interesting.
Freshley: So I had an early experience with a graphite-moderated production reactor.
O’Reagan: What was it—you said you moved on from graphite to something else?
Freshley: Oh yeah. My second assignment was in the metallurgy laboratory in 234-5 Building. 234-5 Building now is known as—god. Hm. Plutonium—it’s the one that you read a lot--
O’Reagan: Plutonium Finishing Plant?
Freshley: Pardon me?
O’Reagan: Is it the plutonium finishing?
Freshley: Yeah, Plutonium Finishing Plant where the plutonium buttons were received and machined to a hockey-type shape. Well, they were—actually, they were reduced to form the metal, and I was not involved in that. But I was in the Plutonium Metallurgy Lab, which was at one end of the Plutonium Finishing Plant. I don’t think there are many or any people left around who know of that. I can’t think of anybody that I worked with during that period who’s still around. But we had a Plutonium Metallurgy Lab, and my manager was a very nice fella. This, now, was in the early ‘50s. One thing that he wanted me to do—and I don’t think that what I did was original research, because I think all of the original research was probably done at Los Alamos, which was the renowned weapons facility. He wanted me to investigate the low temperature phase changes in plutonium. So what I did—and that’s important because phase changes in plutonium or any metal creates a dimensional change. And a dimensional change is not something that you want in a weapon or a bomb, because it interferes with the efficiency of the bomb. So here I was, fresh out of school and didn’t know from up. Anyway, I put together what’s called a differential thermal analysis apparatus. Are you familiar with that?
O’Reagan: I know the individual terms.
Freshley: Okay. [LAUGHTER] So that’s what I did. I ran low temperature phase studies on plutonium—pure plutonium to detect these low temperature phase changes, which were very—since they were low temperature, they were very difficult to pick up, because there wasn’t much energy exchange during the phase change. Then, since that was not something you would want in a weapon or a bomb, small alloy additions were added to the plutonium to stabilize the low temperature, so you didn’t have these low temperature changes. All of this at the time was quite classified, which make it extra interesting, I guess. But when I went out to 234-5 Building in the plutonium lab, we were—there were three or four of us—we were assigned a car. So we had a car that we could go back and forth in, to work. That made it pretty nice, because we didn’t have to ride the bus and all of that. Then—this is something else that I doubt very much that anyone knew about at the time. It was the fabrication of plutonium parts for artillery shells. We cast plutonium in what was known as the 231-Z Building. We didn’t do it in the 234-5 Building. 231 was just across the street. In that building, I was not involved in the casting or the machining, but the parts were machined in that building. Then they were brought over to 234-5 Building in the Plutonium Metallurgy Lab. Because plutonium would oxidize and so on—so my job was to produce pure nickel coatings. But I don’t mean coatings like were attached. We used bismuth, which has a low melting temperature and it’s stable, to machine the exact replica of the plutonium part. Then, my job was to make—with electroplated nickel onto this bismuth—and then the bismuth was melted away. My job was to enclose the plutonium parts in nickel. So I had to do that in a vacuum. At first I had to do the electroplating. Then I had to put the nickel—what—the nickel cover, if you want—on the plutonium part, under vacuum, and solder a seal around the edge to make it—so it wouldn’t contact the air. And then it wouldn’t be as—you wouldn’t have to worry so much about contamination. But it had to be done in an atmosphere where, after the nickel part was put on the plutonium part, I sealed it with the vacuum and then it was not contaminated. The interesting part about that—one of the interesting parts—is that we were doing this for the Livermore National Lab, who was also at the time at a weapons facility. There were two: Los Alamos and Livermore. We were doing this for Livermore. As soon as the parts were finished, and I finished them, there would be a representative from Livermore waiting for the part. These parts, at times, were handed off, out the back door of 234-5 Building to this individual, who then took them to town, to the airport. I presume then, they were flown to Livermore. These tests at the time were conducted in the South Pacific—Eniwetok Islands. I never knew anything about the results. [LAUGHTER] Or what happened. But I suspect that these days we have artillery shells with plutonium weapons involved.
O’Reagan: When you were working on all these—all these different processes, what sort of team were you working—were you working mostly on an independent sub-project, or did you have other people you were sort of working with day-to-day?
Freshley: Well, when I did the differential thermal analysis, it was me. And when I was enclosing the plutonium parts in these nickel shells, that was pretty much me. Yeah. The group was small. I would guess—let’s see, there was—oh, three, four, five—I suspect there were less than ten people in the whole group. The machinist—there were two machinists—I guess I shouldn’t say who they were, but—they did very well—one of them did very well in the Tri-Cities. He had a big vision and—
O’Reagan: I ask, because some of what you’re describing sounds—at least to my sort of ignorant ears—like applied chemistry as well as applied physics. Did you have a chemistry background, or was that not really necessary for what you were working on?
Freshley: I did not have a chemistry background other than what you normally get in a four-year program. I did not have a metallurgy background, either. You know? So that all took—I had to get acquainted with that aspect of the world, and I found it to be very interesting. Later on in my life, I was sorry that I probably hadn’t taken metallurgy.
O’Reagan: How much were you instructed specifically what to do versus sort of innovating yourself or figuring stuff out as you go?
Freshley: Well, I’m sure that my manager—he had a degree from Montana School of Mines in Metallurgy. He was a very nice person. He—I’m sure I got instruction and help from him, because I needed it. Here’s this 21-year-old kid, just out of school, doesn’t know metallurgy from up. But I guess I was successful and it worked out.
O’Reagan: Okay. Let’s see. Could you describe a typical workday within those first—you worked there for a long period of time overall, is that right? How long were you working at Hanford overall?
Freshley: Overall?
O’Reagan: Yeah.
Freshley: [LAUGHTER] I started in 1951 and I retired in 1993. Then I consulted for a period after that. So you figure out the years. The first 14 years were with GE, then Battelle came in ’65, and I transferred to Battelle. I had the choice at that point to transfer to either Battelle or Westinghouse. Westinghouse was focused on the FFTF, and the development of that reactor. But I chose Battelle.
O’Reagan: Why did you choose Battelle?
Freshley: I don’t know. I think they were interested in things that I found fascinating. So I switched to Battelle, and have never been sorry. [LAUGHTER]
O’Reagan: So when you were describing—is that amount of time that you were describing up to the end of your time at GE? Or was there still more that you were working on at GE before, or subsequent to—you were describing the different plutonium products.
Freshley: I haven’t gotten to the end of GE yet. [LAUGHTER]
O’Reagan: Okay, great. I’d love to hear more.
Freshley: Yeah. And then I got out—I was moved—I got into other things besides plutonium metallurgy. I might say that one of the—while I was at the plutonium lab, one of the technicians was working in a glovebox—do you know what a glovebox is?—that exploded. And it totally, totally contaminated the lab with plutonium. So we spent—the group—spent a lot of time decontaminating that room, and everything in it. We were successful enough that the walls were repainted to secure the plutonium contamination and everything. But then—I don’t know why I changed—but I stayed in 234-5 Building, and maybe—I don’t know, three, four, five years, possibly. Then I got involved in light-water reactor fuel development. That’s where I basically spent the rest of my career. In the late ‘50s, PRTR was under construction. We did—in those days, you were given—at least, in my case, you were given a lot of flexibility to do new things. That was really neat. Then—I didn’t write down the date, but in the late ‘50s, PRTR was under construction, and there was the second International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy. We contributed to that publication—there were several publications. I didn’t get to go to the conference, but we contributed to that. Then I got involved in plutonium recycling in thermal reactors. I don’t know if you read this morning’s paper: there was an article there about a plutonium fuel—well, it’s called MOX—mixed oxide: plutonium oxide and uranium oxide, a mixture of fuel. This was at Savannah River, and they were building—or are supposedly building a facility for fabricating mixed oxide fuel for light-water reactors. But there have been some problems there, and it’s way behind schedule and over cost or whatever. But that doesn’t affect me. So I’m not involved in that. But anyway, I got involved in, like I say, fuel development—plutonium fuel development for light-water reactors. We had the liberty of doing a lot of different things. One of them was—oh, when we—at first, we found diluents for the plutonium. We irradiated and tested many diluents for plutonium. It had to be diluted—I mean, you can’t use pure plutonium. So I got into that, and we conducted lots and lots of testing of different diluents for plutonium in the MTR and ETR in Idaho—Materials Test Reactor and the Engineering Test Reactor in Idaho. There was a lot of that, and the post-radiation examination was done in the 324 Building, where the major contamination still exists that they have to remove. It’s in the ground, and it’s a major decon project right now with whoever the contractor is, I don’t know. Anyway, we did a lot of testing in MTR and ETR with diluents. We developed a plutonium aluminum alloy spike enrichment element for PRTR. That was one of the activities. An aluminum plutonium spike element—excuse me—is only for spike enrichment in the core. These are spaced around for different neutronic effects. And the reason—it’s a difficult concept, and I don’t know how we got started on that, exactly, because the coefficient of thermal expansion of aluminum with a little bit of plutonium in it is a lot different than the Zircaloy cladding in which it is enclosed. So there were problems with that. Then—ah, let’s see—then I got into recycling the plutonium in thermal reactors, and that was a major government initiative to dispose of plutonium that was no longer needed. So we made mixed oxide fuels of different types. One of the types that seemed attractive at the time was a vibrationally compacted mixture of plutonium and uranium. That is a difficult thing to achieve, because we had to make plutonium—mixed oxide shot, and we vibrated it into the long rods. I remember setting up a shot tower in the basement of 326 Building to make uranium shot. That didn’t work out too good. We didn’t put any plutonium in 326 Building.
O’Reagan: Is this still the late ‘50s or have we gotten into the early ‘60s yet?
Freshley: Well this would be the late ‘50s. Well, we’re getting into the ‘60s, though, yeah. We did irradiation tests of aluminum plutonium spike elements in PRTR. I can’t remember what the plutonium concentration was, but then we started working on VIPAC, or vibrationally compacted fuel. It seemed like it would have advantages, because you’re not working with the small centered pellets. You can just pour the fissionable material into the tubes and VIPAC—vibrationally compact—it. So that—we did a lot of work on that, on VIPAC fuel, because we thought it would have an advantage fabrication-wise. But it had disadvantages, too, of course. You couldn’t compact it to the density that you would get with the centered pellet. There was another concern about it, and that is: fuel elements and reactors, the cladding fails from time to time. Still does. I think they suspect that there is a cladding failure in the Columbia Generating Station now. We needed to look at how they would perform with a cladding rupture. So we performed a test in PRTR in what was known as the Fuel Element Rupture Test Facility, FERTF. We were brave.
O’Reagan: It sounds dangerous!
Freshley: We put together a test element. The elements in PRTR were 19 rod clusters—I forget how long, but quite long. So what we did--we were adventuresome—we put a mixed oxide fuel element in PRTR, but first we drilled a hole in the cladding. John Fox, who you’ve interviewed, still can’t imagine that we did something like that. [LAUGHTER]
O’Reagan: This probably couldn’t happen today [INAUDIBLE]
Freshley: Oh, no. No way. Anyway, in 1966, we had that experiment in PRTR, and everything was going pretty well until they started cycling the reactor power a little bit. Well, from then on, things went from bad to worse. The cladding failed, but I mean, other than the small hole that we had drilled in it, it ruptured for over quite a distance. When it did that, it swelled, and it came in contact with the pressure tube of the FERTF. It caused that to fail also. So this made a horrible mess in PRTR. The reactor was shut down for I don’t know how long during the cleanup and the recovery from that. I can’t remember—I have some pictures if you’re interested—whether or not we were operating with fuel melting at the time. Because we wanted to get as much heat out of the element—or out of the rods as we could. Now, uranium melts at a little over 2,800 degrees centigrade. So we did a lot of work with not only VIPAC fuel—fuel melting in VIPAC fuel, but also in pellet fuel. Of course, you don’t do that sort of thing in real life. In a commercial light-water reactor—I don’t know what the maximum operating temperatures are in the uranium pellets, but it’s a long ways from melting, I guarantee you.
O’Reagan: So did you get the data that you wanted from this rupture test?
Freshley: [LAUGHTER] Yeah, don’t do it. Yeah, and that was kind of actually the end of VIPAC fuel interest. It would definitely not have been commercially viable to have something like that going on in a power reactor. Of course, we learned what the rupture behavior—probably the worst case of what a ruptured VIPAC fuel might do in real life. So that was kind of the end of VIPAC fuel elements. But it was interesting! A really interesting thing to work with and try and develop. We had various—came up with various schemes for compacting UO2 and MOX with using a Dynapac machine, which is a high-energy compaction machine, to form particles. The ideal particle would have been a sphere in a varying size range, so you can maximize the density during VIPACing. But it didn’t work out. And I didn’t get fired. [LAUGHTER] But there were a lot of experiments. Also with looking at the transient behavior of VIPAC fuel, we even conducted some tests in a test reactor. You are placing pure PUO2 particles next to the cladding. Then doing a transient power test on that to see what kind of behavior you would get: how the PUO2 particle would behave. This was done in a reactor in Idaho called SPERT—I can’t tell you what the acronym stands for right now, but it was an interesting exercise. Had some—maybe the reactor was in San Jose; I’m not sure. Anyway, I had some companions who were working for GE; we worked together on that sort of thing. But then, this would have been in 1975, ’76. The light-water reactor power industry wanted to go to higher burnups. That is, leave the fuel in the reactor longer, so they would have longer times between maintenance shutdowns. At the time, the maintenance shutdowns were probably a year or less. So what happened when they went to higher temperatures and higher burnups, the fuel column in—these are ten or 12 feet long rods—would shorten. The fuel column, then, would shrink—would settle. So that caused a great deal of consternation in the light-water reactor power industry, because they had these voids, then, at the top of the fuel columns. Something we called the irradiation-induced densification occurred. So then there was a big effort, commercially, to find solutions to that, so we had—there was what was called a fuel densification program to solve this problem. The fuel industry—let’s see, how was this—they could not tolerate the core shrinking, and then that led to an understanding, or an investigation of N Reactor densification—just the neutron activity. But then they wanted to go to higher burnups. So they started leaving voids in the pellets to accommodate the fission products associated with the high burnup. That didn’t work out to well, either, because of the column shrinking. So that’s when we launched, or got into looking at the fuel densification behavior. The fuel vendors, then, came up with adding materials into the fuel—god, I can’t think of the name now—that would disappear on the high temperature centering of the pellet, leaving voids—controlled voids in the pellets. And they do that today. So the High Burnup Effect Program was a big program here at the lab for quite a long period of time. As a result of that, the fabricators reduced, by using—I can’t think of the name—reduced the density to accommodate the fission—oh, then they put in pore formers. And we, as the lab, were instrumental in coming up with suitable pore formers that would disappear upon centering, during the centering process, to leave these voids in the fuel pellets to accommodate the fission products. As a result of that, this proved to be very satisfactory. It resulted in a stable fuel column and the achievable burnups were increased significantly. You’re probably aware of the fact, now, that the Columbia—the reactor, generating—the Columbia Generating Station, now, can go on a two-year cycle. Meaning they don’t have to shut down for maintenance every year; they can go two years. So the achievement of satisfactory high burnup in reactor fuel was made. All of the other reactors, now—light-water reactors—use that technique. And in fact, as a result of that, the NRC—the Nuclear Regulatory Commission—has imposed a requirement that they test the thermal stability of centered pellets by exposing them to a heat treatment so they don’t shrink any more. Or the shrinkage would be very small. So we were instrumental in coming up with this out-of-reactor thermal test to test the stability, if you will, of the pellets.
O’Reagan: You mentioned working with the light-water reactor industry. Were you working with different groups outside of the Hanford Site and outside of Battelle at that point, or was it still focused within the company?
Freshley: I would say that the company, Battelle, the lab, was instrumental in these investigations. EPRI, the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, was a partner. In fact, they were kind of the driving force helping us put together a joint program where we had seven other contributors—financial sponsors to this program. We had meetings frequently on the progress of this effort. These seven sponsors came from all over the world: Japan, France, England—of course, the commercial operators in the United States were members. So we had this rather large, difficult to manage international program to develop these advanced fuels for high burnup.
O’Reagan: So this wasn’t classified, or was it more of a sharing agreement with [INAUDIBLE] Not classified then?
Freshley: No, it wasn’t classified. Well, maybe there might have been some—not security, but because the seven sponsors of this program were—they were paying money, you know? And contributing, and they wanted to protect their interests.
O’Reagan: More like trade secrets, then, rather than—
Freshley: Pardon?
O’Reagan: So, more like trade secrets, then, rather than confidentiality.
Freshley: Yeah, but I’d say, most of the—in the United States, the utilities that were operating light-water reactors contributed to this. Another contributor or sponsor was Germany. I can’t remember all of them. That made it real interesting. We had these technical reviews and meetings all over the world. So that made it kind of neat.
O’Reagan: Yeah.
Freshley: Yeah. But the program was very successful. I think I have some documents that describe it, if you’re interested.
O’Reagan: Yeah, absolutely.
Freshley: Okay. And then—I’m not covering this too well—I thought my notes would be more complete but they’re not. [LAUGHTER] Then I got into—this was late in my professional career. There was a reactor in Savannah River, and I didn’t—I can’t tell you the name of it—that produced tritium for thermonuclear weapons. It had to be shut down because of safety reasons. So I got involved in what was called tritium target development for light-water reactors. Because you need tritium for a thermonuclear device. What we did was, the way we did it, we irradiated lithium metal—I shouldn’t say irradiated; we exposed lithium metal to a neutron environment in light-water reactors. The idea being to generate tritium, the gas. Well, what happens is lithium is a metal similar, maybe—low-melting, kind of—to aluminum. It’s not compatible with many cladding or enclosure materials. So we exposed lithium to neutrons to form tritium. In doing that, you had to—because the tritium is an isotope of helium, you had to tie it up some way and contain it. You didn’t want it to get out of the cladding, because we were using zirconium cladding. And then inside of this target, we used a getter for the tritium to collect the tritium and try and keep it enclosed. In fact, I’ve learned recently that there are some commercial reactors back east that have tritium target elements in their cores now to produce tritium for thermonuclear devices.
O’Reagan: I imagine that’s something the government wouldn’t want other places to be doing then.
Freshley: Well, probably not, yeah. You can google tritium production and you’ll get information on the process—well, I don’t know about the detail of the process, but information on producing tritium in light-water reactors. Then as I was nearing retirement, I got out of that and was taken over by a couple other people. But it was interesting, and so that’s kind of—I enjoyed doing this sort of thing a lot. Exploring and testing and so on.
O’Reagan: Was the tritium work also unclassified then, or was that back to the classified world?
Freshley: I think it was in the classified world, perhaps, at the time. Although the lady who currently manages that project at the lab here gave a talk on these elements, these targets, and some of the latest things that they were doing. This was a while back, that she gave this talk. But there were parts of the talk she could not discuss. These parts that she couldn’t discuss are unknown to me and foreign to me, because a lot of that has happened since I retired. See, I retired in ’93—1993. That was—what—25, 26 years ago.
O’Reagan: When you moved from GE to Battelle, did you ever notice any sorts of differences in your work experiences in sort of general terms?
Freshley: No, not really. They were the same people involved, in my case. The big difference is that under DoE at the time—I think it was DoE, maybe AEC—we did not earn credits for service. So 14 years, I didn’t get any—[LAUGHTER]—credits for service which would help my pension, until Battelle came. Then that changed. I do get a GE pension still, but it’s not very much.
O’Reagan: Let’s see. Are there sort of—one thing I’m interested in is how working on Hanford—people’s experiences changed over time as the decades went on, how things changed. Anything sort of leaps to your mind in those regards?
Freshley: Well, one thing that comes to mind to me is things that you do if you’re in the lab and so on, are a lot more regulated now than they were back in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Can you imagine opening the door and getting somebody a plutonium part that he takes off with and goes to Livermore?
O’Reagan: Yeah.
Freshley: You don’t do that.
O’Reagan: Right. Let’s see.
Freshley: So things are a lot more regulated now. And I would say a lot more sophisticated, too. I am aware of the fact that AREVA, here, the fuel fabricator, has developed since my time some very sophisticated models on fuel performance. We didn’t have models like that in those days.
O’Reagan: Interesting. One of the things we’re also trying to get at, which is why a lot of this has been very useful, is what was done on the Hanford site that was sort of innovative or hadn’t been mastered elsewhere? Because you hear sort of both sides of the Hanford legacy, and a lot of these are harder to get at without having classified sources. So the unclassified versions people could tell us about are very interesting.
Freshley: Well, I would say, that except for my time in the plutonium laboratory, things were pretty much unclassified. The development of these different fuels—fuel materials—and testing them and so on. I would say that was pretty much unclassified.
O’Reagan: Interesting.
Freshley: Now, I’m sure that AREVA here has some proprietary interests in their fuel modeling these days. But I’ve seen some of it; it’s a very sophisticated code and model.
O’Reagan: What was it like living in Richland, let’s say the ‘40s and ‘50s first and ask for the later parts afterwards.
Freshley: Well, I can tell you my experience.
O’Reagan: Yeah.
Freshley: First, as I said, I lived in the Army barracks. Then I moved to the dorms that were on Lee. This was before I was married. I was here for a year before I got married, and then when I got married, we got access to one of the Gribble apartments. I don’t know if they’re still there on Gribble Street? I think, maybe, Kadlec has taken all of that over now and destroyed all of the old buildings. But they were two-story apartments. They were really nice. Then after that, we lived in that apartment for five years, my wife tells me. And then we bought a ranch house. It wasn’t a purchase from the government; it was after the ranch houses and the other government houses were sold off by the government. This fella was in a position, a management position, in DoE—I think it might have been AEC at the time. And we bought this ranch house from him on Burch Street in Richland. We paid him $10,000 for it. And then from there—we lived there for a few years, and then we bought a house on Howell. And from Howell, we built a house in Country Ridge. That’s where we live now. We’ve lived there for 20—over 25 years.
O’Reagan: Interesting. I was just thinking back on the timeline there. I know for a long time people couldn’t buy houses in Richland. So I guess you got your first place not too long after you were allowed to?
Freshley: Oh, I think it was very soon. I can’t remember his name, but he was in some management position in DoE and wanted to sell his house. So we bought it from him and got the title and made some changes and so on. Yeah, it was among the first government houses that were sold privately.
O’Reagan: Mm-hmm. What was life like in the community around there? Do you remember any sort of community events?
Freshley: Yup. Town Theater was there. Actually showing movies, of course. Mm, I don’t know how to answer that. I would say it was pretty normal. Did a lot of outdoor activities, a lot of snow skiing at Tollgate—I don’t know if you know where Tollgate is.
O’Reagan: I’m new to the area.
Freshley: Oh, are you? Okay. It’s in the Blue Mountains. A lot of boating activities. We had a canoe and enjoyed that. Things like that.
O’Reagan: Great.
Freshley: Pretty normal, I would say. Wouldn’t you?
O’Reagan: Sure.
Freshley: [LAUGHTER]
O’Reagan: Did you ever feel like the sort of larger scale politics of the day ever impacted your life whether—Cold War security issues or changing Presidents or any of that?
Freshley: I can’t relate to that. I was not politically inclined like some people you know. [LAUGHTER]
O’Reagan: Sure. Let’s see. This is sort of a similar question, so we don’t have to go into too much detail. Any memories of the social scene, local politics, or other insights into life in the Tri-Cities over the time you lived here?
Freshley: Over what time period? Oh.
O’Reagan: In the time you lived here.
Freshley: Well, like I said, I’m not politically oriented, so if there were these things happening, I was pretty isolated from them.
O’Reagan: Okay. Could you describe any ways in which security and/or secrecy at Hanford impacted your work?
Freshley: No, I really can’t, except 234-5 Building, every time you went out there, you had to have your badge and security. I think even in the Plutonium Finishing Plant, there probably—I think there were—additional security requirements.
O’Reagan: What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford or living in Richland during the Cold War?
Freshley: [LAUGHTER] Well, I wouldn’t know how to answer that. I would say, from my experience, it was very normal. I guess if there were security requirements and things like that, you just kind of got used to it, and you didn’t—it wasn’t something that stood out. I think that’s true.
O’Reagan: Okay. So what haven’t I asked about that I should ask about? What else is there I should be asking about?
Freshley: Well, how do I answer that? I don’t know. I think we’ve covered my experience pretty thoroughly. [LAUGHTER]
O’Reagan: Well, we don’t have to dwell on it if nothing comes to mind.
Freshley: No.
O’Reagan: It is an open-ended question.
Freshley: Well, what happened, after we bought our ranch house, the government didn’t come around and change our light bulbs anymore. [LAUGHTER]
O’Reagan: Oh, really? Did you have to—how much of a transition was that once you sort of became a homeowner? Was it--?
Freshley: Oh, it was a good transition, from my standpoint. You could do things—like we made modifications to the house. It was our house. It wasn’t controlled by the government—or owned by the government. So that made a big difference. You had a lot more freedom and so on in what you did and how you did it.
O’Reagan: All right. Well, thanks so much. This is very, very interesting, very useful.
Tom Hungate: You’re rolling.
Robert Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history with Dr. Roderick Coler, retired MD, on June 1st, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Dr. Roderick Coler about his experiences as a doctor in the Tri-Cities area during the Hanford time.
Roderick Coler: Right. And you can—everybody calls me Rod.
Franklin: Rod? Okay, great. Everybody calls me Robert.
Coler: Yeah. Robert.
Franklin: So, Rod, as an early medical specialist in Kennewick, how did you come to Kennewick as a place to practice?
Coler: I heard about Kennewick remotely from patients when I was in the Veterans Administration Hospital Residency Program in Portland.
Franklin: In Portland, Oregon?
Coler: In Portland, Oregon.
Franklin: Okay.
Coler: And I was dating a ward secretary by the name of Thelma who later became my wife. She said that we should go where you’re needed.
Franklin: Okay.
Coler: So when I got a call from Dr. Ralph deBit who was one of the early general practitioners here—he suggested that I drive down and have lunch at the old Kennewick General Hospital. So Thelma and I drove down, but the car stalled when we got to Umatilla. I went out and started hitchhiking so we wouldn’t be late for the lunch. Nobody picked me up. So Thelma said, get behind that bush! [LAUGHTER] And I went and hid behind a piece sagebrush. She went out and stuck up her thumb, and the first car that went by picked us up and took us to the Kennewick General Hospital for lunch and I was on time. My first experience in Kennewick. Looked pretty rustic. But the five general practitioners here needed an internal medical specialist, and I was finishing that specialty. So I was welcomed. They provided me with an office, and the first three months’ free rent. It went smoothly from there on out. I came to practice where I practiced for 58 years.
Franklin: 58 years. And that was in 1947?
Coler: And that was 1948. Mm-hm.
Franklin: Okay. Great. So when you said Kennewick was very rustic, can you kind of elaborate a little more on that?
Coler: [LAUGHTER] There was just a main street, Kennewick Avenue, and 1st Avenue. And after that, the avenues weren’t very well traveled. But there were a number of houses around, and it looked like a comfortable place to practice. And the old Kennewick General Hospital certainly needed some medical supervision and a medical specialist. So I was happy to look at this as a place to come. It kept me in the West. I was from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Franklin: Okay.
Coler: That is my place of growing up. And I wanted to stay in the West.
Franklin: Why is that?
Coler: I don’t know. There was a certain sense of adventure when you’re in your 30s and you’ve had three years of service in the Air Force, and you’ve come back, and you want to settle down, and you’re through with your training, but you don’t want the big city, even though Portland is a lovely town. But it would be a slow place for an internist to get started.
Franklin: Why is that?
Coler: Because so many doctors just stayed. After their training program in Portland, they just stayed on in Portland. Because it felt like home and felt comfortable. But Thelma said, go where you’re needed. So we came down at the invitation of these five general practitioners. And Dr. Ralph deBit is a piece of history in himself.
Franklin: Can you—oh, sorry, go ahead.
Coler: So we decided then after seeing two or three more places that—Kennewick and the Tri-Cities was the place we wanted to practice.
Franklin: Great. What other places did you visit?
Coler: Well, I went over on the coast where I ran into three days of straight rain, over on the Portland coast. [LAUGHTER] The Washington coast was desolate. And I found the dry side was much to my liking.
Franklin: Interesting.
Coler: Mm-hm.
Franklin: You mentioned that you’d been three years in the Air Force. So were you a doctor in the Air Force?
Coler: No. No, I went into the Air Force as part of weather training. The Air Force was gearing up for a much longer war—this is World War II—gearing up for a much longer war. They wanted to keep a cadre of young men available to train. So they put me in a year of mathematics at University of Washington in St. Louis to study pre-meteorology, which was all mathematics, up through higher numbers. A lot of things that I never would need or use. But then I went out and took six months of weather forecasting, weather observing, and became a weather observer, which was a non-commissioned officer position. So they kept telling me that you would get your rank in the military after you got to your base of work. But I kept being assigned around to training stations and finally I ended up in Coral Gables and had a wonderful time exploring the Everglades, because I only worked eight hours a week out there. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Wow.
Coler: As a weather observer. So I was very happy to have that experience, even though I never was commissioned as an officer, which they had promised me would be at the end of my training.
Franklin: Interesting. Great.
Coler: I still have specimens that I’ve collected from the Everglades, down there. Snakeskins, different plants. And I attended a course in botany of the Florida peninsula while I was there. And it got me interested in the out-of-doors.
Franklin: Interesting. So, returning to your work at Kennewick, what exactly—forgive my ignorance and maybe some of the ignorance of the people watching this later—what is an internalist exactly?
Coler: So an internal medical specialist is someone who specializes in the skin and its contents.
Franklin: The skin and its contents, okay.
Coler: From the standpoint of the diagnosis of diseases and their treatment which are not orthopedic and not surgical. But that includes everything from infectious diseases to degenerative diseases. And it generally doesn’t include childhood diseases, although I saw some very interesting cases.
Franklin: Such as?
Coler: Such as malaria—in Kennewick. Not from the mosquito biting up here, but the mosquito bite carrying the malaria virus down in Central America, and then the patients coming home and coming down with fever here. Fever, chills and anemia.
Franklin: Wow.
Coler: And finding the parasite in their blood.
Franklin: Wow.
Coler: We had a good lab at Kennewick General Hospital.
Franklin: So you mentioned early on that you came and you worked with—sorry, can you mention the doctor that brought you up again?
Coler: Dr. deBit, Dr. Ralph deBit.
Franklin: Ralph deBit. And can you elaborate, maybe, on the state of medicine in Kennewick when you came here in ’58?
Coler: In ’58, the five general practitioners were very busy and they wanted an internal medical specialist to refer the difficult or diagnostic problems to. There weren’t too many doctors in those days who were willing to move to the smaller communities. They all seemed to want—the specialists wanted to stay in Portland and Seattle, Spokane. But I was very happy to come to Kennewick, and they were very happy to send me their difficult cases. [LAUGHTER] Because in those days, generalists, or general practitioners as they were called—we don’t have any more today. It’s called family practice today, and it requires a much more rigorous training period than it did in the days of the old GP. But the GPs would take care of something like—would see something like 20 patients a day. And maybe four new patients every day. So they didn’t spend much time with them. If it wasn’t evident what the patient suffered from and what the treatment was going to be, then they were happy to refer the patient to somebody who would deliberate a little more.
Franklin: Okay. So how did—did you see patients from Hanford?
Coler: Yes.
Franklin: Okay. Can you talk a little bit about working with patients who worked at Hanford?
Coler: So HEHF, or Hanford Environmental Health Foundation, had a cadre of doctors which saw patients who worked at Hanford. When I came to town, Hanford workers had to go to that doctor first, and then if the problem was elaborate or detailed or difficult, such as active tuberculosis or a desert fungus infection like coccidioidomycosis, then they would send the patient to me.
Franklin: You kind of laughed a little when you said that last one.
Coler: Well, because that disorder is a fungus infection of the lungs that’s only seen in the Sonoma Valley of California or other desert areas in the United States.
Franklin: Wasn’t there an outbreak of that recently up here? They closed a bunch of county parks in Washington?
Coler: I’m not aware of that, but may be true. Yeah.
Franklin: Okay, interesting. I guess fungus and desert isn’t something that I would assume would go together.
Coler: Well, that’s right, because you’re thinking of something that grows in moist areas.
Franklin: Right.
Coler: Like a toadstool, yeah.
Franklin: Right.
Coler: But this was a fungus that is blowing in the wind.
Franklin: Okay.
Coler: And if you pass through and drive through those areas when the wind is blowing that particular fungus in the air, you run a high risk of catching one of those desert fungus disorders.
Franklin: I imagine then that they like loose sandy soils.
Coler: Yes. Loose sandy soil that blows, yeah. We didn’t have any up here, but they would come in from California.
Franklin: Okay. Interesting.
Coler: Yeah.
Franklin: So the Hanford Environmental Health Foundation—can you talk a little bit more about that? Do you know much about its origins, or if it’s still around today?
Coler: Well, when the Hanford operation got going, they immediately put in a medical service. They had a superintendent, and they had a cadre of three or four doctors who saw the patients who worked at Hanford. So generally, these were well patients. Generally, they had rashes or they had emotions, or they had injuries from falling, scrapes and wounds, and occasional pneumonia. And sometimes patients would come to work there, because the workforce, remember, during World War II, even at the end of the war, was chosen from people who couldn’t find a job elsewhere, frequently. The country was well-employed, and to find labor and to find the lower jobs, below supervisory jobs at Hanford was difficult. We got patients from the deep South, patients that had migrated in and who sometimes had not been found eligible for work in the war effort elsewhere.
Franklin: Okay. Just going to refer to some of your notes here that you brought me.
Coler: Mm-hmm, sure.
Franklin: So, here we go. I had a question here. So as a part of your 53 years practicing medicine, did you treat families who reported to work at Hanford, and what were your experiences with them and overall feeling towards the work at that site?
Coler: Generally, these were healthy patients. Hanford Environmental Health took care of the workers out there, but their families frequently had to seek medical care in the general practitioners and specialists who were out in the community. So we had good surgical help, and we had good diagnostic help. So I was not a pioneer in any sense of the word, but it was interesting, because I knew I was seeing unusual cases that never would be seen by me if I had stayed in the big city.
Franklin: Can you—without compromising any personal or medical information, can you talk a little more about some of those unusual cases?
Coler: One time I was called up to Kahlotus—I was called up north of Richland to see a woman who was in a stupor. The doctor could not hear a heartbeat. I went up on my afternoon off, on the call, to see her in consultation. Went in to find a woman lying down, weakened, hardly able to talk, and whose heartbeat I couldn’t hear with the stethoscope. I presumed that she had a pericardial effusion. That is, fluid was impacting—fluid in the heart sac was impacting the heartbeat and preventing the heartbeat from being heard, and from being effective in creating circulation by the heart. So I asked for a trocar, which is a big needle, and as I was about to insert it under the ribs, I felt something hard poking me on the other side. I looked down and it was a gun. And her husband was there in the emergency room, and he said, if she dies, you die. She was already very weakened and very—looked like she was on her way into shock and dying. And I plunged the needle through there with a little Novocain, and drained the fluid from the heart sac. And the heart began to beat again and the blood pressure came up and the pulse rate came down, and she woke up. The husband put his gun away. But those were the wild West days.
Franklin: Wow.
Coler: This was in the Prosser Hospital Emergency Room. Yeah. [LAUGHTER] So that’s one. But I have many. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Please.
Coler: Another one was—a patient ran in the front door of the old Kennewick General Hospital—didn’t wait to go through registration. Ran up the stairs and jumped into a bed and said, call Dr. Coler, call Dr. Coler. So the nurse called me and said they had this hyper excitable patient with a pulse rate of 160 and tremulous and pale and sweating, and we don’t know what’s wrong with him, but he jumped into bed and said to call you. So my office was across the street from the old Kennewick General Hospital. So I ran over there, ran upstairs to find the patient exactly as the nurse described. I figured that the only thing that would do that was that he was on some kind of a stimulant, metamphetamine, but in those days we didn’t have that problem. Or, he had a rare, very rare tumor of the adrenal glands, which was secreting too much adrenaline. Now, the nurse laughed at me, because she knew from her medical studies in nursing that nobody ever sees a case like that. I mean, there’s one per state per every ten years in the United States. [LAUGHTER] I mean, it’s rare. But I drew blood from the—I had the laboratory draw blood for the tests. And then I gave him an antidote for epinephrine. And his pulse rate came down, and he quieted down. We went to x-ray, saw the outline of a tumor near the adrenal gland. And where the adrenal gland would be near the kidney. And I got Bobby Luxon—Robert Luxon, who was a very dashing surgeon in town, to see him. And they operated on him here and removed the biggest adrenaline-secreting tumor that had ever been seen in the state of Washington, according to University of Washington records.
Franklin: Wow.
Coler: So that was an interesting case.
Franklin: How big was the—
Coler: It was fist-sized.
Franklin: Wow.
Coler: A fist-sized tumor.
Franklin: That’s amazing.
Coler: Now, somebody would say, well, how did it get that big without having symptoms in the months leading up to it? Well, in the months leading up to it, he didn’t squeeze it to put the adrenaline into the blood stream all at one time. He was being treated for hypertension, and spurts of hypertension, but nobody suspected when he came to me—or when the nurse called me to see him—that he could have an adrenaline tumor. Rare.
Franklin: Yeah, sounds like it. That’s really—that’s really amazing. Any other interesting stories?
Coler: Interesting cases?
Franklin: Yeah.
Coler: Let’s see. Something unusual was happening every three or four months in the practice. But now that’s kind of faded away. Except for the bizarre anemias—pernicious anemia—saw two cases the first month that I came to town. And I was amazed, because I thought, this is a center for pernicious anemia. Or maybe it has something to do with Hanford radiation. But it was simply that Dr. deBit had saved up two cases to wait ‘til I came to town, and then he sent them to me to make me think that this was a haven of unlikely and unreasonable diagnoses. [LAUGHTER]
[W. E. JOHNSON[EM1] ]
Franklin: Part of—one of these points in your notes here mentions W. E. Johnson, who worked for GE and then was the Atomic Energy Commissioner. We actually have a collection of his files on the project.
Coler: Mm-hm.
Franklin: So I think it’d be great if you could talk about this bit here about W. E. Johnson.
Coler: He was a much-respected administrator. But I saw him in his decline.
Franklin: Okay. Yeah, it says here he suffered from progressive dementia?
Coler: Yeah, he had a progressive dementia problem, yeah. He one time got on his horse and rode out across the country, not knowing where he was or how far he had gone. Maybe after he had gone about seven or eight miles, he was lost. Didn’t know where he was. So he simply had the good sense to put the reins down on the horse’s neck and let the horse go back to the barn for feeding and rest, and take W. E. Johnson with him back to the ranch. But they had a ranch up north of Richland.
Franklin: Mm-hm. Yeah, I’ve seen pictures of that ranch. I’d heard of his love for horses, but I had not heard of that particular story.
Coler: Mm-hm.
Franklin: Did you ever see him as a patient or—
Coler: Yes, yeah. I saw W. E. Johnson as a patient on a regular basis at the end of his career.
Franklin: Okay. And that would have been when he was beginning to suffer from progressive dementia.
Coler: Yes, dementia. And we tried some medicines that were popular at that time, but nothing helped. Yeah.
Franklin[EM2] : So you raised your family. Did you have children when you came to Kennewick?
Coler: No.
Franklin: Okay.
Coler: No, I was engaged to Thelma Cook from Portland. We were married soon after I came to Kennewick. Went back to Portland, had a nice wedding—colorful wedding, nice family. Then she and I settled in to Kennewick and she, being a secretary, managed the secretarial services of my office. And without that, I probably would have gone broke. [LAUGHTER] Working 18 hours a day, gone broke. But she was a—she had a good business head and made the practice pay. We raised four children here. I have three daughters in Portland, and I have Clark Coler, who is chief of staff at the big hospital in Portland.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Coler: Yeah. Yeah.
Franklin: So what was it like—I guess sometimes people talk or you hear about kind of the shadow of Hanford over the Tri-Cities. What was it like to raise a family in—being kind of somewhat connected, seeing Hanford workers, but raising a family in these communities in the Cold War? Were there any events, or anything that was unique to the Tri-Cities that kind of stands out to you?
Coler: No, it was a good rural area to raise children. They were well-behaved, and joined the clubs at the high school. And came up through the system here. They’re all quite successful. I’m very proud of three daughters, employed and married in Portland, and Clark, at the Swedish Hospital in Seattle.
Franklin: Oh, great. That’s wonderful. How much—seeing Hanford patients, you must have had some idea of the work at Hanford. Did you have a pretty good idea of what was happening at Hanford? Or what was your knowledge and your thoughts and opinions about the work at Hanford?
Coler: When we tried to recruit doctors to come to the Tri-Cities, they knew that the radiation was surveyed, and patients would be—and people would be safe here. But the wives had this abject fear of radiation. They didn’t want to raise their children within 50 miles [LAUGHTER] of a reactor, because they had heard that you could have babies with small heads or you could have deformities, and that it would be a terrible place to raise a family. I remember having two or three medical doctors and their families and their wives come over, and I would take them on a tour of the Kennewick General Hospital to recruit doctors to come here. And the doctors were very enthusiastic. Over luncheon, they were talking about how interested they would be in coming—a growing community, and practicing medicine here. And we were able to supply them with offices and get them started, even though there weren’t any clinics—everybody was in private practice. This was before the Richland Clinic accumulated their staff from the existing doctors in Richland. But the wives were afraid of radiation. One time, when I had three doctors and their wives come over from Seattle to see about moving here to practice when they got through with their training, a windstorm came up and we had a dust storm off the Horse Heaven Hills. And in those days we had dust storms spring and fall. But it was such a beautiful clear day when we began, and by the time we were finished with the meal, you couldn’t see 40 feet outside the window! [LAUGHTER] Because of the blowing dust. I got thank-you letters from those doctors—those three doctors, but I knew that their wives had canceled any possibility of their coming.
Franklin: Kind of an echo of the termination winds—
Coler: Yes, the termination winds, right.
Franklin: Wow. That’s interesting to hear about that so much later.
Coler: Yes.
Franklin: I like to ask about events—big events that happened in the Tri-Cities. And one that always seems to—usually left an imprint on people’s minds was President Kennedy’s visit in 1963. Did you—were you able to go see President Kennedy, or did you hear about the visit?
Coler: Yeah, I heard about the visit, but I was on duty in the emergency room that day. And we had so many visitors who came and needed help with their heat exhaustion that I was busy in the emergency room and didn’t get out to Hanford to see him.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Coler: But I was well aware of his presence.
Franklin: Right.
Coler: And it was in the newspaper. Of course, a big picture of Kennedy.
Franklin: And his presence probably caused you some extra work then.
Coler: Yes. People that weren’t used to the heat just filled the emergency rooms when we had a special day, such as the boat races. When we had the boat races, people would come from out of town and they weren’t prepared for our heat.
Franklin: Oh. And so that would be kind of a yearly—
Coler: Yes.
Franklin: A yearly influx.
Coler: So we’d have two doctors on-call for the emergency room.
Franklin: Okay, makes sense. I see here that you have left your mark at the Kennewick General Hospital in terms of a medical center in your name?
Coler: Yes.
Franklin: Can you tell me a little about that?
Coler: They named the first medical center where doctors could practice the deBit Building. That was a place where doctors could come right out of training and, without sinking a lot of money into building or renting an office, they could be put to work and see how they liked it. The organization, the hospital, would then benefit from them admitting their patients who needed to be hospitalized into that institution, as well as having staff meetings and having all of the positions filled for the hospital board. The hospital board at Kennewick General was made up of non-hospital people. But I served on it for a number of years and could advise them on medical matters.
Franklin: Okay. And I see that you also—there’s also a Rod Coler Center for Senior Health—
Coler: Yes.
Franklin: At Trios as well?
Coler: Yeah, yeah. So they named that building after me simply because I was here a long time, and I’m still around.
Franklin: Right! [LAUGHTER] Well, I imagine it would have something to do with the quality of work that you performed as well.
Coler: Uh-huh.
Franklin: In some of my preliminary notes here, it talks about the poor—you’ve talked a bit about the excellence of deBit and a couple other doctors that you worked with, but I’ve also heard that there was, in general, kind of a poor standard of medical care in the area when you arrived.
Coler: Yes.
Franklin: Was that to do—
Coler: This had to do with surgery. We had a surgical problem at Kennewick General. It was quite evident soon after I came to town and began to read charts and look at records and do consultations that the surgical services were poor and sometimes not very well diagnosed and treated. So I predicted that the Kennewick General Hospital would close by the state reviewing our records at Kennewick General if we didn’t do something about that. So Dr. deBit, again, made me chairman of a committee to go through the charts of all the doctors for the previous couple of years. It was quite evident who was causing the mayhem at Kennewick General Hospital. [LAUGHTER] He was soon moved on.
Franklin: Ah.
Coler: In those days, you couldn’t take away his license to practice, because you would be sued for preventing somebody from working—from interfering with work. We didn’t want a lawsuit against us. So we were able to move him along. But each hospital that looked into the records of that particular surgeon refused to take him, too. So he actually had to retire.
Franklin: I see.
Coler: Yeah.
Franklin: Kind of a forced retirement.
Coler: Yeah, a forced retirement.
Franklin: Interesting.
Coler: But we had—in Robert Luxon, who came to town about a year or two after I did, he was an excellent diagnostician for surgical conditions and also an excellent surgeon. So our reputation was saved, and Kennewick General went on to become quite a good surgical center and referral center for surgery. As was Richland, and Pasco. Dr. Ray Rose in Pasco was an excellent surgeon and diagnostic man. He’s passed now. He’s gone. But he was a close friend of mine and we did many mountain hikes together.
Franklin: That’s great. I guess the last thing I’d like to ask you about is I see that you live in a historic Kennewick home. Can you maybe talk a little bit about your home and its importance in the history of Kennewick?
Coler: The home on Canal Drive was built out of town of Kennewick in 1914. And was the home of a gentleman who was a salesman and trader. He built his home. And when my wife spotted that house, we were living—when we were married and were living downtown Kennewick, we drove by it one day and she says, turn in here. And I said, why? She said, just do it. Turn in here. So I turned in the road that led across the field that came to the old house on Canal Drive. It was just west of Yelm Street—Yelm, Y-E-L-M. It sat by itself; there were no other houses when it was built out west of that. But she spotted that old home and we pulled in and I went to the door and knocked on the door, thinking this is crazy. You just don’t knock on a door and ask somebody who comes to the door, do they want to sell their house. That’s not the way it’s done! [LAUGHTER] She said, I want to live in that house! Knocked on the door, an old man came to the door, and when I asked him he said, yes. He said, in two months I need to move to Chicago to be near my children, and I would be very happy to sell you this house. At that time, he thought that maybe the house might be worth $20,000. This would be with—this was three acres of land on Canal Drive and an old house that had three bedrooms, and a second floor, and a large kitchen which most farm houses did not have in those days. When that house was built in the 19-teens, 1915, 1914, kitchens were small. But that house had a generous kitchen. My wife fell in love with that house. So when we came back to talk to that man, he had turned it over to a realtor. And now the price was $40,000.
Franklin: Ooh.
Coler: [LAUGHTER] And he was selling—but it took me a long time to pay that off. Yeah. We had to borrow the money and pay the bank to buy the house. But raised four children in that house now.
Franklin: And you said—
Coler: And we were the third owner.
Franklin: Okay. And you still live in the house today?
Coler: We still live in that house today.
Franklin: I bet it’s worth a bit more than $40,000.
Coler: Yes. Well, the land is.
Franklin: Yes.
Coler: Now, several people said—oh, it’s a beautiful place overlooking the Columbia River and on a knoll above Canal—above the river, and above the park. We would need to—many people say that they would take down the house and build an apartment building there on it. Because it’s right next to the apartment buildings at Yelm Street. But we like that old location—I do, and I don’t know what my children will do with it when I’m gone. So I’m 91. My father lived to 101. So I have a chance to go on for a few more years.
Franklin: Yes, you do.
Coler: Yeah. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Well, Rod, thank you so much. This has been a great interview and I’ve really enjoyed talking with you.
Coler: You’re welcome, Robert. I really enjoyed this myself. Thank you.
Franklin: Great. Thank you.
Northwest Public Television | Bush_Bob
Robert Bauman: I’m going to have you start just by saying your name, first.
Robert Bush: Okay, my name is Bob Bush.
Bauman: My name is Robert Bauman, and we're conducting this interview with Robert, or Bob, Bush on July 17 of 2013. And we're having this interview on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. And we'll be talking with Bob about his experiences working at the Hanford site. And so I'd like to start just by having you talk about how and when you arrived at Hanford. What brought you here?
Bush: Okay. During World War II, I was overseas. My parents were in the area, both of them working. My brother was also here in Pasco High School. When I came home from the service to Southern Idaho, Korean War broke out. Wages were frozen, and so I was looking to better myself. And I applied by mail. I was interviewed by telephone. And I came up here in 1951 to the accounting department, General Electric Company. They were the sole contractor. And for 15 years, in construction and engineering accounting, which was separate from plant operations at that time. And from there, my accounting career followed its path through several successive contractors. From GE to ITT, Atlantic Richfield, to Rockwell, and finally with Westinghouse. When I retired, I was with Westinghouse for one month.
Bauman: You said your parents were here during the war. When did they come out?
Bush: It was '43. 1943 and '44, my mother worked for the original postmaster of Richland, Ed Peddicord. And my dad was a carpenter. Built some of the first government houses called the Letter Homes. They were here about two years, I think. And then they went back to Idaho, I believe.
Bauman: Okay. And what part of Idaho?
Bush: Twin Falls, Idaho. Where I graduated from high school.
Bauman: Okay. What were your first impressions upon arriving in the Tri-Cities?
Bush: That's kind of interesting, Bob. Because I came up ahead of my wife and two--year-and-a-half old, and three-and-a-half-year-old sons. About two weeks ahead of them. And so I found a Liberty trailers to rent—the housing was nonexistent. And I found a Liberty trailer, which means it had no running water, no bathroom. It was like a camping trailer, basically. I sent for them. A brother-in-law who had graduated from high school went directly into the Korean War. He drove them up as far as Huntington. I went on a bus to Huntington and met them, came back. And as we came onto the Umatilla side, and I said, that's Washington. Well, there was no green and everybody was disappointed. But that's the first impression. I mean, there wasn't a bridge over the river in Umatilla. It was a ferry. So you drove around the horn at Wallula. Things were just really different.
Bauman: So you said you had a trailer. Where was--
Bush: In Pasco on a front yard of an old pioneer home, where Lewis Street crosses 10th. That was the end on Lewis Street at 10th. And from there west was called Indiana. And there was about three homes on there. And it just quit. And roughly across from the present day Pasco School Administration Building, which was a Sears building. Across the street there was where this home was. I mean, things have just—in the whole area—have changed so much.
Bauman: And how long did you live there then?
Bush: Until I was called for housing in Richland, which was six months. That was in June, no air conditioning. And finally got into an apartment building, a one-bedroom before with two little boys that slept in the same crib. It was still, basically, wartime conditions. Weren't any appliances for sale and you had to stand in line to get a refrigerator. It was a different world. But we were young, so we could take it.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER] And was this in Richland then, the apartment?
Bush: No, that was in Pasco. After that trailer, that was only about two weeks. And then we want into this apartment, the one-bedroom. Then we moved next door to a two-bedroom in a five-plex. And then in December, six months later, I got the first--I got a housing call from the housing office in Richland, which sat where the present day police station sits. And the lady offered me—she said, you could have it Saturday. It was a prefab. It had already been worn and pulled out. And I kind of hesitated. I said, I've already got something in Pasco. Well, she said, I could let you have a brand new apartment. That apartment was brand new. It was so clean. My wife, who was very fastidious, she didn't even have to clean cupboards. And the apartments have now been torn down by Kadlec for that newest building. And in fact, this morning I just went by and took a picture of Goethals Street, which is vacated. And it was quite a pleasant move to come out of a trailer into—a non-air-conditioned cinder block building apartment into a nice, brand new apartment with air conditioning, full basement, and close to work. And at that time, my office was downtown in the so-called 700 Area, which is basically where the Federal Building is--where the Bank of America is was the police station. And that's Knight Street, I believe. From there north to Swift, and from Jadwin west to Stevens where the Tastee Freeze was, that was the 700 Area confines. Probably about 22 buildings in there. The original thing prior to computers, everything was manual bookkeeping or accounting with ledgers. And they came out with a McBee Keysort cards, and it was called electronic data processing. It was spaghetti wire with holes in the boards, that type of thing. That building had to be a special airlock building. And that's the Spencer Kenney Building beside the Gesa Building. That building is built especially to house equipment. And they just went from there. And I moved around my office. And after 15 years, I went into what they call operations. I was onsite services, which—did that for 17 years. And that was probably the better part of--second better job that I had, I guess. The transportation and everything, onsite support services. The whole point there. That job took me all over the plant. I established inventories. I took some of the first inventories of construction workers' supplies and tools and shop equipment, rolling stock. My name was Mud. They thought so much of me they gave me a desk in the corner of a big lunchroom. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: So you did work at various places then?
Bush: Yes. Well, yes. My very first location was in North Richland, then called North Richland Camp, where the bus lot was--the maintenance shops. I'm trying to establish a point up there—what's over there today? There's a big sand dune on your left going by the automotive shops, past the bus lot, where the bus lot was. Opposite that sand dune on the other side of Stevens was a bunch of one-story temporary buildings. That was North Richland Camp. And that's where my first accounting job was there for two or three years. I had been there—I came there in June. And in January of '52, had 22 people along in my department that I worked in. I was a junior clerk at that time. Took me four years to get onto the management roles, but I did. But anyhow, in that room they came in there six months later. After I'd only been here six months, AEC, predecessor to the OA. The AEC has taken over more management, more responsibility. So we're going to be laying off a lot of people. I had only been here six months. And so others grabbed straws and went different places. I always said either I was too ignorant or lucky, I don't know what. But I just sat still and it panned out for the better. I didn't get laid off. I moved from there. But I went downtown to the 703 Building, which stood where the Federal Building is now. There's a building to the rear that the city owns called 703. That was the fourth wing. 703 was the frame construction, the three floors. And the later years, they added a fourth wing out of block building. Made it more permanent. That's why it's still standing today. Now, that was my second location. And then I got on the management role in '55, which meant I went exempt and no more pay for overtime. And went out to White Bluffs site—town site, and that's where the minor construction was located. Minor construction, it's the construction people that are specially trained in SWP, radiological construction work, as opposed to run-of-the-mill construction. And they're the ones that had never had any accounting at all for any equipment, supplies, materials or otherwise. And that's where I had the lunchroom office experience. It so happened that they established--I brought an inventory procedure and established that first inventory during a strike. We had to cut government-owned tool boxes. But still, the workers thought they were private. And we had to cut locks in order to take inventory. And then we feared for our lives when they came back. Pretty rough day sometimes.
Bauman: What timeframe would that have been you were out?
Bush: That was 1955 to '56. A couple of years there, and then another person took over from there and I went into budgeting at that point, from accounting to budgeting. And I did that for--until 1963. And then I moved out to the so-called bus lot, which it was. 105 buses and all that. And I was out there for 17 pleasant years, budgeting, billing rate—Because we were the supplier of all plant services. So we had billing rates to the reactors, and the separations, and the fuel prep, and--whoever. The AEC, everything. We billed them, just as if we were like plumbing jobs. And that I enjoyed. That was probably my most productive period. And from similar work to that, I moved over—Let’s see, I was around when the Federal Building was built, but I didn't get into it. That was built in '69. I didn't get down there until 1980. Went down there a couple of years. And then they moved us out to Hanford Square where Battelle Boulevard intersection is. And I was there--I retired from that location in 1977. My wife and I retired the same week. I've been retired 26 years now at the end of this month.
Bauman: Was your wife working at the Hanford Site as well?
Bush: She worked after the kids were grown, like most stay-at-home moms do. She stayed until the daughter was of age, and then she went to work for a credit union, which was the government credit union, which was merged later on with Gesa. But that was an interesting job. They worked two hours a day, three days a week. Because it was all hand done, no mechanization. And then she got a job offer from the department in the central stores and purchasing department. She worked there eight years. In 1986, the income tax law changed a lot of things for all of us, effective in 1987. It meant that partial vesting was--IRS has to rule on all things like that. And that meant that if you had 10 years to vest pensions, once you pass the 50% point, whatever the vesting period is, then you were partially vested. And so she had 8 years out of 10. So she got 80%. But she had only worked eight years, so it wasn't a very large accumulation. Because I got my full. Of course, I'd been here 37 years I think it was, however that works out. 36.
Bauman: I want to go back and ask you—when you were talking earlier about that period in '55, '56 when you were working out at White Bluffs town site. You mentioned radiological construction?
Bush: Oh, that—those construction workers worked under what they called SWP, Special Work Permit, which meant radiological. They had to wear--the clothing was called SWP clothing then. Today, they call it something else. But they worked under those conditions, so therefore they were subject to different rules. Whereas, construction workers on brand new construction weren’t then—they didn't have any of that to contend with. But once a plant went operational, it became radiologically SWP. This is not an anti-union thing. It's just a demonstration of how things were in those days. They had some old buses that--the original buses in town were called Green Hornets. And they were small. They had chrome bars that went right across the middle of your back. And for 35 miles, that was not very comfortable. When they got the newer buses that you see today, like Greyhound has for instance, they relegated those to the construction workers at White Bluffs. Well, since GE guys worked up at White Bluffs, we had to ride those, too. So all the office workers in the warehouse--GE employees rode one bus. The electricians rode another bus. Pipe fitters rode another bus, even though there were only two or three of them. It was really a segmented-type thing. As close to anything radiological that I came to when I conducting one of those physical inventories—we would be out--all of the construction materials were stored outdoors on the ground. I mean, like stainless steel. 308 stainless steel was pretty high-priced stuff. But the sheets were stored outside on pallets. Well, one sheet is worth thousands and thousands of dollars. So we had to lay down on the ground and count the sheets to do the inventory. This one day—the only time I came close to any contamination, we went back and boarded the buses that evening from White Bluffs. And we saw the guys on the dock there chipping with a chisel and hammer. That meant they were chipping out flakes of contamination. So we asked what was going on. They said, well, we're next door to F and H Areas. And F Area had coughed out something they said. And so I said, well, my crew was outside today on the ground. And if they coughed out because all the--some construction workers could drive their cars. That's the only people. Plant operations people all had to ride buses. No parking lots. So anyhow, those cars were all impounded. Had tape around them. They couldn't go home. And some of the guys, they had to take off their shoes, leave them, and be issued safety shoes in lieu of it. And I said, well, we were on the ground, too. So they proceeded to take us all off the bus and surveyed us with a wand. And they only found a few flakes on our back. And so we were allowed to go home. But that's as close as I ever came to getting contaminated. It's still scary.
Bauman: Yeah. Obviously, Hanford, a site where security was prominent--
Bush: Very tight security, yeah. I was telling the young lady here that across the roadway on Stevens, as you near the 300 Area, there was a real wide barricade, probably eight lanes that you had to go through. And everybody had to stop, including buses. And the guard would get on the bus, walk down the aisle, and check every badge. And at that time, AEC had their own security airplanes. That was the purpose of the Richland Airport was for AEC security in the beginning. They had a couple Piper Cub-type airplanes. And one day we're on a bus going out to work in the morning. And all of a sudden, a plane just zoomed on by. Somebody had run the barricade. The plane goes out, lands in front of them, stops them, and that's how they got apprehended. Another incident of security, yeah, that's the subject? Many years later now, after 1963, and I'm in the transportation assignment. Airspace was off limits to all airplanes over Hanford because they had army artillery guarding it in the Cold War and all that. And a private plane had violated the space. And the AEC planes had forced it down. And once they're down, they can't ever take off. So after a week or so, they sent a lowboy trailer out there, loaded the small airplane on it, proceeded to come down what's the highway and now Stevens. And down where Stevens today, 240 and all that intersection is, there was only two lanes on the road then, not six. But at that juncture there, there was a blinking light. And they had to turn right to go to the Richland Airport. And this guy, the truck driver pulling this low-boy, he had never pulled an airplane before. And he didn't allow for that pull. Well, that blinking light clipped off a wing. And then he got time off. It was not really his fault, that pilot in the beginning. But there's a lot of—I guess full of interesting stories like that on security.
Bauman: Great. Did you have special security clearance to work at Hanford at the time?
Bush: Which?
Bauman: Any special security clearance?
Bush: Oh, yeah. I had Q clearance, which there's one higher than that, that's top secret. But Q clearance meant you could go into any and all areas. And because the nature of my job, I had that my whole time I was out there. Once you have it, they would tend not to take it away from you because it's quite expensive investigation to get it in the first place. I might mention something interesting in that regard. When I first came to work in 1951, why, the PSQ is Personnel Security Questionnaire. And it's about 25 pages long. And you had to memorize it, because every five years, you had to update it. Well anyhow, I filled that out, and you give references. And I have, in the Twin Falls area, a farmer that had been a neighbor farmer in Nebraska, where I was born, to my parents. I gave him as a reference because he had known me all my life. And that would be higher points. About a year or two later--I guess probably a year later I had gone back down to Twin Falls to visit the in-laws and I went and saw this farmer, family friend. The first thing he said to me, Bobby, what in the world did you do? [LAUGHTER] The FBI had come out to his farm and piled on the questions. And I hadn't told him ahead of time I'd given a reference. So they really did very, very tight security. It's probably tighter than it was when I was in the Air Corps.
Bauman: You mentioned riding a bus out to work.
Bush: Yeah, everybody rode it, except those few construction workers in that minor construction area. They were permitted their cars. I don't know why, but no one else drove cars on the plant. Everybody rode on the bus. The bus fare was--of course, it was subsidized. It was a plant operation, like anything else is. To make the liability insurance legal, they charged a nickel each way on the bus, which later on got changed to a dollar or something. But many of the years, we'd ride the bus 30, 35, or 40 miles to work for a nickel. The nickel was just to make it legal. From those old green buses, they came up with some--I forget what they're called. More like Greyhound buses. And then in 1963, the year I went out to the transportation, they bought a fleet of Flxibles. And that's F-L-X. There's no E in it. That's the same kind of flat-nosed bus that the bus lines used today. And they were coaches, not buses. They had storage underneath. And so we had quite a suggestion system on the plant. And you would get monetary award or mention. And somebody said, well, instead of running mail carrier cars delivering mail to all the stops on the whole plant, load the mail onto the now available storage bins on these buses. And that was a pretty good suggestion award, monetarily, to somebody. And they did that. Took it out to a central mail station out there, and then dispatched it.
Bauman: You mentioned different contractors you worked for over the years--
Bush: Uh-huh. The story behind that for the record is that General Elec--well, DuPont built the plant. That's who my dad worked for. And GE came in '46, I believe. And they were here until the group I was in--they phased out in groups. I was the last group to go out. [COUGH] Excuse me, in 196--'66. When the GE phased out, they had a dollar a year contract. Like Henry Kaiser and rest of them did during the war, for the good of the country. But they trained an awful lot of people in the infancy field of nuclear engineering. General Electric trained all those people here and then they opened up the turnkey operations in San Jose and Japan. But anyhow, AEC was still AEC at that point. And then, their wise decision--instead of one contractor, they would have nine. And so there were--the reactors was one. Separation plant was another. Fuel preparation at 300 Area was another. The laboratories, which is today basically Battelle. Site services. The company doctors formed a foundation called Hanford Environmental Health Foundation, which is the MDs that gave the annual exams. And the computer end, it was now getting into the infancy of that, computer sciences corps, we had the first contracts on that. So all together, there were nine contractors. And the portion that I was with went to ITT. They bid, came in and bid. I helped conduct tours of the facility for the bidders. Because I knew all about it and knew the ins and outs on some of the monetary parts that their accounting people would have questions on. We'd walk through shops and all that. Well, anyhow, ITT got the site support--site services. And we had that for five years. And austerity set in in the '70s. Well, '70. They said, we got to get site services' budget down to less than $10 million. And it probably was 13 or 14, I don't remember now. So my boss and another analyst, like myself, sequestered--talk about sequester. We sequestered ourselves in the then new Federal Building for about a week. Almost 20 hours a day, whittling and whittling and working on a budget. And there was only one conclusion. We had to cut everything in half. Went through all that sweat. Went up with our president, Tom Leddy, went upstairs to an AEC finance office, presented our whole case. And the man turns around and says, well, it doesn't make any difference, Tom. Your contract's not renewed anyhow. And so now, Atlantic Richfield, an existing contractor for 200 Areas, somehow the separations plant contractor that is an oil company owned, can all of a sudden manage a site service. And so they did absorb us. But politics were still around in those days. And there were three of us analysts. One had got transferred by ITT up to the new line--newly established Distant Early Warning Line from Russia up to Alaska. So that left two of us. And we waited around. We waited around and never got an offer. And they said, no, we can do it all without you. We don't need you. How come it took so many people anyhow? On a Friday afternoon, the man that I did budgets for saw me in a restroom. He said, you got an offer yet? I said, no, no. I'm working under the table with somebody else. Well, he says, if they don't hire you, I'm going to hire you. And so he went downtown, and about 4 o'clock, I got a call from the man that told me they didn't need us. Said they'd been kind of thinking. So I went over Atlantic Richfield under those. [AUDIO CUTS OUT] And so I'm not mad, not knocking—knocking them, that's just the way things were. And then Rockwell came to town. When they laid off everybody on B-2, I'm trying to think of other--in the community, something might be of interest for the history project. Back into the '50s. Those same green buses, they had, oh, four or five of them that ran in town like a modified transit system. I don't think they had that many riders, but it did. And also, the plant buses ran what they called shuttle routes. And those buses went into Richland on probably six routes and drove around the neighborhoods and picked up workers on the three shifts. And that's why up in the ranch house district, there was the bypass you'll see between homes. The pathways that go clear through lots. Blocks were so long that they had to provide a quicker route to the bus stops. Now, those rides were free because they were shuttle buses. When you got out to the bus lot, you paid your nickel, or a pass, whatever it was.
Bauman: I wanted to ask you about accounting in terms of equipment practices. Were there a lot of changes during the time you worked at the Hanford site? Computer technology come in and change things?
Bush: Oh, yeah. For sure. In the beginning, as I mentioned earlier, all accounting was open ledgers and hand posted. Adding machine tapes at the end of the day trying to balance them all out. And we had that until--let's see. 1970s—I think it was 1977, we got our very first taste of it. Every other desk in a group of about 20 people in cost accounting that I was in. There was cost accounting, general accounting, and so on, property management. But anyhow, we had about 20 people. Every other desk had a monitor. Well, they referred to them as a computer. But they were just the monitor. And down at the end of our building was one printer. And everything was on floppy disk. Every program was on a floppy disk. Nothing was built-in because it was just the infancy. The big computers were down in the Federal Building. And a sub-basement below the basement was specially built for that. But back to our office. Across the hall from us, we had two small computers that are--to me, they're about the size of portable sewing machines. And I can't even remember the names of them because they don't exist today but they were the computer locally. So we wanted to run our work order system, we would phone down to the guy down at the other end of the building, insert the floppy disk from work system and wait. Well, I've got somebody's inventory. You have to wait. Because there's only one place to load up down there. So finally, you would put the floppy disk in. And then, you'd run it, which meant it'd run through it and print. But then you'd have to say, now print it. And they got one printer for the whole building. And so it's pretty interesting. Whereas today, I've got a laptop that I can virtually do everything with. But we graduated from hand posted ledgers right into computers. We didn't have anything in between. All of the reports that came out, came out on--referred to as IBM runs because everything was IBM. It was on paper that's about 18 inches wide with all these little perf marks on it to feed it. And you'd get one report and it would be about that thick. It was not that much information, but it's just so much printing. It's even hard to remember after 26 years how antiquated that is compared to today. But prior to that, it wasn't even the PCs. They called everything a PC. Or, was PC compatible. Because prior to that, the only electronic data processing nickname was spaghetti wire. I'm not very conversant in it, but it was some kind of a board that had a bunch of holes in it. They put wires in it and that went to certain things. But all it did was sort things. It didn't actually calculate them.
Bauman: I wanted to ask you a little bit more about the community of Richland. What was that like in the 1950s? I know it was a government--
Bush: In the town? I guess I didn't cover that area. Everything—all houses were owned by government. We rented them. My wife and I and family, we came after the days of free everything. When the coal was free--all the furnaces were coal fed. Some people would convert them later on to oil. But anyhow, they were coal burning. However you got the coal, whether it was government days or you bought the coal from the courtyard, which is down at the end of what's now Wellsian Way. There was a coal yard where that lumber yard is. And that's why those railroad tracks that are abandoned and rundown, that's where the coal cars came in. And I can add something a little bit later about coal cars and the plant. But anyhow, we rented from the government. For example, that brand new apartment that I mentioned moving onto first was a two-bedroom, full basement. Steam heated because--I'll digress a little bit. All the downtown 700 Area, including the Catholic church, central church, the hospital, all 700 Area, including those new apartments, and all downtown shopping area were steam heated by a steam plant, which was located where the back door of the post office is today in that small parking lot. And that one plant furnished steam for everything. Well, back to this new apartment. The steam pipes ran through this full basement. And our kids played—there wasn't any yards. There was just apartments. And they would play in the basement because they were quite small. But they can remember today the pop, pop, pop in those steam pipes. And the rent for that two-bedroom apartment was higher than any other house in town. It was $77 a month. And the reason it was $77 instead of $70 was because it included $7 for electricity. Nobody had electricity meters yet. Even in that new place. So when they did put in electricity meters in all homes later, which had to be—during that time, the year we were there, which is December '51 to December of '52, sometime in that period of time they put the meters in. They took off $7 off the rent because now we're going to pay—and their theory is it was $5 for a one-bedroom place, whatever it was. $7 for a two-bedroom and $10 for a three-bedroom for electricity in those days. And nobody had electric heat, of course. And then, later on they put in water meters. And again, they had to come into your home, invade your home, and put in something. So it was strictly government prior to—well, another—and when I lived in the rental, if something went wrong with the plumbing, they would send out a plumber, but you paid for it, though. But later on when I went to the tall two-story, three-bedroom duplex houses, or called A houses, that was our first house after that apartment. And as I remember, I think the rent was--they had rent districts with low, medium, and high in the more desirable parts of town. And we were on Hop Street across from uptown district where Hunt Street is and Jefferson Park. And I think our rent for that was like $47 because it was not a brand new apartment. And later on, we—I was on the housing list. And you applied and months or years later, you'd rotate up to move into a nicer place or a different location. But in the meantime, up came an F house, which is a two-story single family, kind of a Cape Cod-looking type of house. And that came up on the housing list. However, the caveat was that you had to cash out the present owner who had made some improvements. He had converted the coal to oil, they put in a clothesline, which nobody had clotheslines, and something else. So cashed him out for—I believe it was $750. And if I do that, I could have it, so I did. We lived in that place for 19 years. Our daughter grew up there and got married out of that home. And that's the only home she ever knew. [LAUGHTER] And we were there until 1977 when the real estate market in Richland was—this is community wide. The housing prices were moving 18% a year, about 1.5% a month. And I thought well, I don't need to be setting still. I mean, if I cash out here, and went on. So we sold that home. I listed it. Calder, my father, was very ill. We were going to Spokane. I listed it. A man came by, looked it out. What were you asking? I said, oh, about 17. He shook his head. And I said, too high? He says, no, 27,000. [LAUGHTER] Just to show you how bad things were. And so it sold right away. What are you going to do now? And I said, well. Would you want to try a mobile home? I know a jewel. And in those days, real estate men did not sell mobile homes. But this couple had bought their first house from him, or something. And it was somebody retiring out of postal, wanted to go back to Montana. Never smoked in it, never had any pets in it, no kids. It was the Cadillac of mobile homes. We were there two years, but that was long enough. Then we moved into the house that I'm still in. I'm widowed now for five years. The house we're in now, we've lived in that longer than in any other place. [LAUGHTER] But the community just has changed so drastically. South Richland. People say today they live in South Richland. We lived in South Richland, which was south of the downtown shopping district to the Yakima Bridge. That was South Richland. What is now South Richland out there was Kennewick Highlands. So it depends on who you're talking to today.
Bauman: Yeah. Do you remember any special community events, parades, any of those sorts of things during the '50s and '60s?
Bush: Community events?
Bauman: Yeah.
Bush: Yep. Back in GE days, they had Atomic Frontier Days. And they were a big thing. Had beauty queens in it, rode in the float, and all that. Down at the—[COUGH] excuse me. For Atomic Frontier Days down at the lower end of Lee Boulevard, which is still the same shape today. They set up booths all on there. And it was a really big event. Before we had the hydro races even. People look back fondly on that. Talking about community, again, my mother, I said, worked for the post office, which—it stood on the corner of Knight Street, where it touches George Washington Way. There's some kind of a lawyer office building there today. And the old post office is the Knights of Columbus building on the bypass highway. But she would have to take the mail and go over to where the Red Lion Motel is today, at the Desert Inn, a frame building, winged out basically the same. And that was referred to as the transient quarters. And that was for upper management that were going through and it wasn't really a public motel, per se. But she would have mail for these big wigs over there. So she would have to go over there and have a badge to even go in the front door of that Desert Inn. Talking about badges, something humorous on that. We didn't wear things around our neck in the beginning because it was like a little pocket-sized bill fold. It was a little black bill that had your pass, your badge in it. And at every building you went into, you just pulled it out, flashed it to the guard. It usually was a lady security employee. There were guards in the building, but the person on the desk was a security clerk. But you'd just automatically—you’d open it like that and flag and put it back in your pocket. Every building you went into. Downtown, 700 Area, that first building I've referred to. One day I went into a restaurant and I just did that automatically [LAUGHTER] because it's just so automatic. Then they graduated to having the thing around your neck. And then also, if you worked in the outer areas, you had to wear a radiation badge in addition to your security badge. There was two types and one of them was a flat. And I don't know the difference. One's for beta and one's for alpha. I don't know. And one of them was a pencil shaped. And that's what they called it. And the other one was a flat badge, which was carried in something around your neck. And in all the areas I worked, and the places I described laying on the ground that happened and all that, my RAMs, they call it, never accumulated in my working life to be a danger. I had some, of course. Everybody does in the background. But I never accumulated to a danger point. There were people, some smart aleck people that would take their badge and hold it over a source at work so they could get some time off. Because if you got--what was the phrase? Anyhow, if they got contaminated, they put them on a beefsteak diet. And they stayed home. And they come every day and took a urine sample and all that stuff. But they had a life of riley. So that was nice. But the guys got canned that did that. But they would purposely expose their pencil so they could stay home.
Bauman: So did all employees have those, either the pencil or--
Bush: Only those that worked in reactor and separations areas, yeah. I mentioned these departments. Actually, the first department is Fuel Preparations Department, FPD. The present—the 300 Area--most of the buildings have now been torn down that you don't even see them there. But the north half roughly was fuels preparation department headed for the reactors. They took uranium and encapsulated it in cans, like can of peas in just so many words. And the south half of that 300 Area was a laboratory area, the predecessor of Battelle. So the fuel was prepared there. And it was machined and canned and sent as nickname slugs to the reactors. Then, the reactors loaded into all those little tubes. And then from the reactors, they come out the backside into those cooling pods and all that. And transported in casks to the 200 Areas, which are the separated area, separations. And the reactor area on the face side was not that dangerous. The 200 Areas only work on what they called the canyons, PUREX and REDOX, and those kind of buildings. But those cells were very, very hot. But you had to be measured no matter where you were. One of our site services was a decontamination laundry, called the laundry. And all clothing--I mentioned to you before SWP. Well, SWP, radiologic exposure employees wore whites. Carpenters and truck drivers and all that that didn't work around reactors wore blues. And so they were sorted. And we had different billing rates for that laundry because the blues only had to be laundered and dried. Whereas the others had to be laundered, dried, and decontaminated, checked in separate washing machines. And then workers wore—in the beginning, wore World War II-style gas masks for our air supply before they invented a moon-type suit. [LAUGHTER] But they wore gas masks. And the mask would come back to this mask station, which was part of the laundry. And they took the masks, and they'd take away the cartridge. They'd put the mask in dishwasher machines, in racks. That's how they would wash them. And then they would get them a new filter and package them up. Sanitize them and package them up like medical supplies would be in. I can't think of any other unusual operation out there like that.
Bauman: I want to change gears just a little bit. President Kennedy visited the site in 1963.
Bush: Yep, 1963.
Bauman: I was wondering--
Bush: When they did that, they let all the schools out. And for the first time, non-workers were allowed to go in cars out there. It was a grand traffic jam, but it was quite a deal. And he landed his Air Force plane up at Moses Lake—at Larson airbase at Ephrata, whichever you want to call it. And then helicoptered. And of course, like it is today, there were three or four helicopters. And you don't know which one he's on and all that bit. And here, everyone is gathered out the N Reactor area, which is a dual-purpose reactor. They captured the heat from the reactor, put it through a pipe through a fence to the predecessor to Energy Northwest, which was called Whoops. This was a big deal, a dual-purpose reactor. And N stood for new reactor, really. Anyhow, he comes in and they got a low-boy trailer. They fixed up down in the shops where I worked—my office was. And then built a podium just precisely for the President with him emblem and the whole bit. So I was privy to get to see some things like that. But anyhow, that was the stage. And it was a long low-boy, so it accommodated all the senators and all the local—Sam Volpentest, the guy credited with HAMMER, those type of people. Glen Lee from the Tri-City Herald, you name it. So the helicopter comes in, blows dust over everybody. But anyhow, my wife and kids and all schools were brought out there. And I don't know how many thousand people were out there in the desert. And you could see President Kennedy. He got up on the stage. You get close enough, you could get pictures. Then, that same year in November, he got assassinated. So that was a busy year.
Bauman: Do you remember any other special events with dignitaries like that? Or other--
Bush: Well, I could go way back to World War II. I wasn't here, but I have a family connection on it. All over United States, they had war bond drives for various reasons to help. Build a ship, build an airplane. The one that happened here is not the only one. But they took so much money out of all the paycheck of Hanford workers, which included my dad as a carpenter. And the money they collected bought the B-17 Bomber, which was named Day's Pay. And that bomber—they had a bomber out here, a B-17, so that people could see it, but it wasn't the same one. On the Richland High School wall there's a mural. And that's a rendition by a famous artist of Day's Pay in formation. And so I can say that my parents contributed to that. And that's the story behind that one bomber. Every worker out there, construction or operations, they donated a day's pay.
Bauman: I wonder, what was the most challenging part of your job working at the Hanford site?
Bush: As an accounting person, my most challenging part was learning government-ese. [LAUGHTER] How to deal. And in that vein, that took a long time. But once you learn it, there is a way in the US government, period. As I'm sure there is in certain corporations. Later on, when I mentioned that I went down to the federal building for my--finally got located in that building, there was another fellow and I were old timers in accounting. And that year, they had five college grads, accounting grads come in. They hired five at one time. And they ran them by Marv and I for exposure. This is how things are done. This is how the contacts are. And our basic job was to squire these young fellows around and introduce them to certain counterparts and now DOE. Now, this is how you make appointments with them. This is what you do. This is what you never do. And likewise, with senior management. And it paid off because of those five, all four of them became managers or supervisors, and one of them became my manager within two years. Today, that same man is the comptroller at Savannah River Plant. [LAUGHTER] And so I like to feel that I contributed to them being—partially to them being successful. And so that's a reward. But probably the most difficult thing coming from a private—I worked for Colorado Mill and Elevator, which means I worked at a flour mill district office as a bookkeeper. And that's a small town deal in Twin Falls. To come to work for the government where some of your family despises you because you work for the government, but you had to fight that as well as learn how the government operates.
Bauman: You mentioned earlier, you were talking about coal being used for heat in Richland. You also said you wanted to talk about coal fires going up at the site.
Bush: Oh, what?
Bauman: Coal fires?
Bush: Oh, yeah. Interestingly, the midway power station, substation at midway, is one of the reasons they built Hanford where they did because the Grand Coulee Dam had just been completed and an electricity producer—a major producer. And they put the midway substation down there. That basically was built to furnish huge amounts of power to Hanford, for the reactors, everything. Which in total—because I processed vouchers, I know it was 32 megs. Which today doesn't sound like much, but the whole plant bill was 32 megs when everything was operating. But if the power were interrupted, they had to have a backup. So every area had a huge diesel-powered--like water pumps, where they could pump the water from the river instead of by electrically. They had to be able to pump it because it was critical. Because all the water for the whole plant was taken in at intake water plants near the reactors along the river. The 200 Area water is piped to them in a huge line as raw water until it gets to their place. The backup is these coal-fired steam plants, is what I was trying to say. It got about 30-some cars of coal a day rolled through Richland past the cemetery. In the beginning, the railroad came down from the north, from Vantage area down along the Columbia River. There's a railroad bridge across the river, Beverly I think it is. And it came down to below the 100-B Reactor area. That's where the line ended. And then a plant had its own railway incidentally. It had a 285 mile-long rail line, high line and low line. Then, they built--in 1950, the year before I came, they built the line that we see today that comes from Columbia Center into Richland, by the cemetery. And it ends at the old bus lot area, where that railroad car Columbia Center into Richland, by the cemetery. And it ends at the old bus lot area, where that railroad car rebuilding outfit is now, there is a roundhouse that it's rectangular in shape. But some 30 cars of coal a day came in here to supply because those plants were—they actually operated the steam plants. They didn't start them up from cold. They just ran constantly.
Bauman: I wonder if you could provide sort of an overall assessment of how Hanford was as a place to work. What was it like as a place to work?
Bush: It was a great place for me. I came out of an area that was the agriculturally-oriented. And the Korean War started. Wages were frozen, you weren't going to go anywhere. I came up here and I got a new start, like pioneers did. I visualized that's what farming pioneers did the same thing. And it opened up a whole field for me, a big corporate field. And it's just been a great place to work. And it was not dangerous to me. I'm not afraid to drink the water here. I'm asked by a nephew in Hermiston constantly, how do you drink the water? And I said, well, it comes out of the river. How can it come out of the river and that plume’s out there? There's so many false stories around here. But working at Hanford, I think, by and large, almost all employees would tell you the same thing. It was a great place to work. The pay was decent. Maybe you didn't get rich, but it was decent. It's in a nice area to live in. When we came back in the '50s, or in the '40s, and before that even of course, shopping was pretty much nonexistent. They went to Yakima, or Spokane, or Walla Walla. That I didn’t—we didn't experience that too much by 1951 because by that time, the Uptown shopping district was built. And there was a men's store. And there was four women's stores. Because GE was the prime contractor, there was an appliance dealer that handled GE-Hotpoint appliances. We got employee discounts when we worked for GE. We also got 10% gasoline discount when we worked for Atlantic Richfield Hanford. But we just grew with the times. And it's just such an entirely different area now than it was. Just the world is different, too.
Bauman: Is there anything that I haven't asked you about? Is there anything you would like to talk about that we haven't talked about yet?
Bush: Now really, work-wise at Hanford, I think I’ve pretty well-covered it. I'll repeat myself. My first 15 years was construction engineering accounting, which is an entirely different field than operations accounting. Operations accounting concerns itself with the reactors and separations and the site services that support them. But I learned a lot by working at Hanford. My family, three adult children live here, are retired here. My oldest son went on Medicare this year. [LAUGHTER] And that kind of puts you in your place quickly. But it's been a good enough place that they stayed in the area. And of the six granddaughters, grandchildren, four of them are in the area. And that's kind of characteristic with a lot of the Tri-City families. They stay or come back.
Bauman: Well, Bob, I'd like to thank you very much for coming and talking to us today. I really appreciate it.
Bush: It's been my pleasure.
Tom Hungate: Okay.
Robert Franklin: You ready, Tom?
Hungate: Mm-hm.
Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with George Boice on July 15th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Mr. Boice about his experiences living in Richland. So why don’t we start at the beginning, that’s the best place. When and where were you born?
George Boice: I was born in Ellensburg. A third generation native of the state of Washington. My father and my grandmother were born in Cle Elum.
Franklin: Oh, Wow.
Boice: We came through this—the tribe came through this territory and crossed the White Bluffs ferry in 1885. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Wow.
Boice: And went up to the Kittitas County area. And then we came back later. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: What year were you born?
Boice: ’37.
Franklin: ’37. Did your family work at all at the coal mine in Roslyn?
Boice: Yes. [LAUGHTER] Short answers. My grandmother’s brother, Uncle Tony, was a mine rescue worker up there at Roslyn.
Franklin: Okay.
Boice: You go up to Roslyn, that is interesting. Ever been there?
Franklin: Yes, I have.
Boice: 27 cemeteries. Just neater than all get out. [LAUGHTER] The different ethnic groups up there. They talk about one Fourth of July, the Italians were going to raise the Italian flag in the main street there. Some of the local citizens took a dim view of it. And some wagons were turned on their side and the Winchesters came out, and the sweet little old lady got out there and got everybody calmed down before the shooting started. [LAUGHTER] But the flag didn’t go up. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Wow. So what brought your family down to the Hanford area?
Boice: My—[LAUGHTER] When they started Hanford—Dad was a firefighter in Ellensburg, had been for a few years. And when they set up Hanford, the first thing they did for a fire department was pick up the retired fire chief out of Yakima. Well, he goes around to the local fire departments and starts hydrating citizens. [LAUGHTER] So, Dad came down here in ’43 as the ninth man hired at the Hanford Fire Department. Always claimed that half of them had been canned before he got there. [LAUGHTER] So he went to work in ’43—June of ’43 at Hanford. We were still there at Ellensburg, and we didn’t come down here ‘til summer of ’44.
Franklin: Oh, wow.
Boice: And they were still moving prefabs in, and unloading them with rapid shape.
Franklin: Did your father commute at this time, or did he live on—
Boice: Uh-unh. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Where did he—do you know much about his living quarters or where he lived?
Boice: Yeah, there were barracks.
Franklin: So he lived in the barracks?
Boice: Oh, yes.
Franklin: Okay. Did he come back to visit at all?
Boice: Oh, yeah.
Franklin: Okay.
Boice: Wasn’t but—hell, by the time you get up to the Hanford area, it’s just over the ridge. [LAUGHTER] So he’d come in every couple of weeks.
Franklin: Okay. How many siblings do you have?
Boice: One of each—one brother, one sister.
Franklin: Older, younger?
Boice: Oh, yeah. My brother was born in Kadlec in September of ’45. My sister was—well, they bracket the war. She was born about a month before it started—or right after it started. She was born in December of ’41.
Franklin: Okay.
Boice: And he was born September of ’45.
Franklin: So can you talk a little more about your father’s job at Hanford? What did he—did he talk much about what he did, or—
Boice: [LAUGHTER] Oh, yeah! You know. The place is building up, it’s trying to erupt. You’ve got construction going all directions. Trailer house fires. He talked about them [EMOTIONAL]—how quick people died in them damn trailer houses. They’d go up in a matter of seconds. And there were acres of them. But yeah, it was—And the amount of nothing to do. I mean, you had time to work and then there was really no recreational facilities. He worked at a grocery store for a while in his off hours stocking milk. He said it was not unusual to work a whole shift with a forklift or a handcart walking out of the stack and filling the same slot behind the counter there. We came over twice to visit him at Hanford.
Franklin: Before you moved—
Boice: Yeah.
Franklin: --in ’44. Okay.
Boice: You drive across the Vantage Bridge, and somebody had gone through with a grader and graded out a dirt-slash-gravel road. And we drove around and down, and across the Hanford ferry into Hanford. Because you could get into Hanford; it wasn’t restricted—the town. Everything else was. So getting in and out of Hanford was no trick. Getting out of the surrounding area was. So my mom and I and my grandfather went down there.
Franklin: Wow. And where did you stay? Did you just go for the day?
Boice: Well, we didn’t—when I was there, we didn’t stay. We just went for the day and went home.
Franklin: Okay.
Boice: But Mom talks about going down and staying overnight. [LAUGHTER] She says she was not warned. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Warned about what?
Boice: To keep everything you wanted nailed down.
Franklin: Oh.
Boice: She got up in the morning and somebody stole her girdle. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Wow. So when your family moved in summer of ’44, where did you move to?
Boice: 17-1.
Franklin: 17-1?
Boice: That was the lot number and the house number. It is now 1033 Sanford.
Franklin: Ah.
Boice: It’s on the southwest corner of Sanford and Putnam.
Franklin: Yup. I live right by there.
Boice: We went in there and it was—they had—you can’t describe to people how they had come in there and just dozed the farmland over, staked out streets and planted houses. And hauled them in on trucks and set them down. We were fortunate—I didn’t realize how fortunate it was—in the fact that we had only come about 100 miles or so—we came in a truck. We had our stuff. Mom had her piano. And I can’t tell you how many times women would come up and bang on the door, can I play your piano?
Franklin: Really?
Boice: Strangers off the street. Just because it was there, and it was—so we had all kind of musical stuff. Everybody could play better than Mom could. But we had the piano.
Franklin: Wow.
Boice: And she had her houseplants. It was different. But there was no trees in Richland. There wasn’t three blades of grass! [LAUGHTER] You’d come in, you got a garden hose and a plastic nozzle. You hosed down your lot and it immediately became a slick, slimy mud pile. Great for kids to play in! Man, we could slide in that mud across there—it was really cool! And then when it dried up, why, it reticulated like a picture puzzle. So we’re picking chunks up and stacking them up and building houses. And Mom gets up and she’s just madder than a wet hen, so we had to put the lawn back together. [LAUGHTER] But the hose nozzles were so interesting, because when you had a plastic nozzle, but you couldn’t get anything else. There was a hardware store here, eventually, but they didn’t handle stuff like that. This was a war going on. And the ingenuity that went into lawn sprinklers would just boggle your mind! The cutest one I remember was some guy took a chunk of surgical tubing—he got a bent pipe for an uppensticker. And he stretched his hunk of surgical tubing over the end of it, turned the water on, and it was not efficiently watering his area, but he could flail water all over a half an acre! [LAUGHTER] That was one of the cuter ones. There was also no shade and no air conditioning.
Franklin: Right.
Boice: Coming down in a moving truck, Dad brought his carpenter tools, he brought his bench, and he set to work building an air conditioner. Now, this was the dog-gonedest thing you ever saw. He got some burlap sacks and set out there with scrap lumber in the backyard on his workbench just creating shavings out of boards. Fill these burlap sacks with wood shavings for the pads for his air conditioner. He got a motor out of I-don’t-know-what. It was an appliance motor out of something. And he whittled out this propeller out of a two-by-four. And he cranked this thing up and it sounded like a B-29. [LAUGHTER] But it would blow sort of cool air, which raised the wrath of the neighbors. Number one was the racket he was making. Number two was we had air conditioning. So immediately, guys come out of the woodwork in all directions. Guy next door was a sheet metal worker. He came home with parts to make a much better, more efficient fan that was quieter. [LAUGHTER] So they set to work building him one. [LAUGHTER] We made air conditioners—you come up with a motor, and they would come up with an air conditioner. And we would deliver them on the back of my little red wagon. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Where would you put that? Like, would that just go in the window?
Boice: We put it in a window.
Franklin: Oh, okay. And how would you attach it to the house?
Boice: Ingeniously! Most often, they would just build a rack underneath, a shelf on top, and set it up on top there. A houses, you wanted to put your air conditioner—at least about everybody did—set it at the top of the stairs where it would blow out the upstairs and cool your downstairs. They were reasonably efficient. The one thing about all the homemade air conditioners—very few of them, if any, had a recirculating system. So you had to use fresh water. This had two sides to it. You didn’t crud up your water system with alkali by reusing your water. But you did have to go out there and keep moving your hose where it drained out to water your lawn.
Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Wow. What kind of house did your family move into?
Boice: Well, originally we had a three-bedroom prefab. Prefabs come in three sizes and five colors. And a bunch of very ingenious kids on Halloween 1944 went out and stole the damn street signs. The buses coming back off of swing shift had no earthly idea where they were going. They wandered around town, because all the houses looked alike! [LAUGHTER] Then after a while—oh, let’s see, we moved in in August, and about the following spring—because we started out school at Sacajawea and then at Christmas vacation they changed us to Marcus Whitman. But up there on Longfitt, thereabouts, I was coming home from school and here sits the roof of a prefab right out in the middle of the street. Apparently, this guy was sleeping and a windstorm come along and picked up his whole roof and set it out in the middle of the street. Thereafter they had a crew of carpenters going around fastening the rooves of the prefabs down a little tighter.
Franklin: Because at that time, right, they had flat rooves.
Boice: Flat rooves.
Franklin: Correct? That kind of overhung a bit, something that the wind could really easily—
Boice: Oh, yeah.
Franklin: --grab ahold and pop off. Do you remember when they got the gabled rooves that they all have now?
Boice: No, I don’t, because I was—I think after we left, but I wouldn’t bet heavy money on it. We moved off the prefab in ’45.
Franklin: Okay.
Boice: And into an A house on Swift. I don’t recall when they put the gabled rooves on.
Franklin: Okay. So what did your mom do? Did she work at Hanford at all?
Boice: No.
Franklin: No?
Boice: She was a stay-at-home mom.
Franklin: Stay-at-home mom?
Boice: It was such an interesting place. The buses ran every 30 minutes. No charge, just go out and get on the bus. One of my main jobs was—because there was no mail delivery, everybody in Richland got their mail general delivery. So I’d take the bus, go downtown, get off at the post office, check the mail, go down to the grocery store—and there was only one—that was a brief period, but then there was only one grocery store at that time. And that’s where that ski rental shop is—kayak rental shop on the corner of Lee and GW?
Franklin: Mm-hmm.
Boice: That was the grocery store. The one and only. Shortly thereafter, Safeway opened up on the corner of—southwest corner of Lee and Jadwin. So things picked up. And then there was—they come up with the community center grocery store—whatever you want to call them. There was one at Thayer and Williams, which was the Groceteria. Garmo’s was out there on Stevens and Jadwin—no, Symons and something-or-other. The south end of town was—oh, nuts. He was the one that survived—Campbell’s. Campbell’s grocery store. He specialized in fresh fruit and stuff, and of the whole pile of them, he was the one that really come out of it in good shape. But the fourth one is now the school office, up there by Marcus Whitman. That was a grocery store.
Franklin: Okay.
Boice: But you go down, you do your post office work, and then you go and get your groceries, and if you’re lucky you get ten cents. Next bus home. You know where the Knights of Columbus Hall is out on the bypass?
Franklin: Mm-hmm.
Boice: That used to be—originally that was the Richland post office.
Franklin: Mm-hmm.
Boice: It’s up there at Knight and GW, I think. There wasn’t a whole bunch of shopping centers. The Richland Theater was in existence. The drug store next door to it was there. After a while, the big brown building, which was everything, at that time, when it opened up it was CC Anderson’s. Then there was the dime store, and, oh, we were hot and heavy then. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Can you tell me a little more about your dad’s job? What would a typical day or a typical week look like for someone who worked on the fire department?
Boice: On the fire department, there is no such thing as typical. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Yeah.
Boice: It was wild. In the beginning, they opened up—they were on shifts. Like everything was on day shifts, swing shift, graveyard. In our neighborhood, after my brother was born, we moved down to Swift and McPherson. Dad had come into town by that time. If you go behind the Richland Theater, you look real close, there’s two B houses back there. One of them’s a real B house and the other one ain’t. You look at the B houses over here, and the other one that ain’t is over here. And you look real close at the driveways. That was the original fire station that the City of Richland had going. That was the fire station when Hanford came in. Then they built a fire station on Jadwin in conjunction with the housing building and a couple other things, right across from the 700 Area, which is what they wanted, was coverage on that 700 Area. So that was the downtown fire station. And when they opened that up, why, then Dad came up out of Hanford.
Franklin: Okay.
Boice: He wasn’t too long there, and they opened one up Williams off of Thayer, in behind the Groceteria and a little service station up there with a small satellite fire station. Two trucks and one crew. Dad was there for years and years and years.
Franklin: How long did your dad work for Hanford or the government here?
Boice: Like I say, he came in in ’43 and retired in the early ‘70s.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Boice: Rode her right on through.
Franklin: So what did he do when the community transitioned in ’58?
Boice: They bought him!
Franklin: The City of Richland did?
Boice: Yup, the City of Richland bought the outstanding time and he rolled right over.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Boice: [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: So can you talk a little bit more about growing up here? You said you went to Marcus Whitman and then to—and then what other schools did you go to?
Boice: Well, like I say, there was no shade.
Franklin: Right.
Boice: And very few radio stations. With a good shot you could get in Yakima, Spokane, and Walla Walla, and that was about it. So we sat around in the shade, and my mother read us stories. [LAUGHTER] One of them was a book we picked up in Walla Walla about Sacajawea. She read us the entire story of Sacajawea and the Shoshones and the Lewis and Clark Expedition, et cetera, et cetera. And in ’44, they opened up Sacajawea School. Now, as everybody does, they did their darnedest to convert us kids to saying Sah-CAH-jah-wee-ah. It didn’t take. [LAUGHTER] Because there was already Sacajawea State Park and everybody was using the term Sacajawea. But Sah-CAH-jah-wee-ah—they tried. They gave it their level best. It didn’t take. But the time that they were doing this, Miss Jesson was a teacher there was giving us the thumbnail sketch about Sacajawea. She did a pretty good job—well, you know, she told you what she knew. And she made mention of the fact that she was married to a trapper, but they didn’t know what his name or anything about him. I says, his name was Toussaint Charbonneau. He got her off a wolf man of the minute carriage for a white buffalo robe. My status went up. [LAUGHTER] And the teachers wanted to know where in the cat hair I learned that. Well, Mom read us the book. But I’ve always liked Sacajawea School. Just kind of a kinship. We went—in ’45, they opened up Marcus Whitman. We went there ’45 was all, because when they broke for the summer, we were over by—we moved. By the next fall we were over in the area where I could go to Sacajawea again. But we were going to Marcus Whitman when Roosevelt was shot—died. So that was the event of the time. You watched the transition of one President to another. The flag ceremony—the whole thing—it was interesting for a kid.
Franklin: I bet. What do you remember about during the war years that kind of focus on secrecy and security? How did that affect your life and your family’s life?
Boice: You didn’t talk to nobody about nothing! [LAUGHTER] I mean, that was just the words. You didn’t talk about—if somebody asks you what your dad does, you talk about something else. It was so interesting here in the last year, I think—time goes quicker now. A whole bunch of us from that neighborhood on Swift went to a funeral—this boy’s mother—well, yeah—Bill’s mother’s 100th birthday, after the funeral they had a sit-down dinner. I happened to sit down at the table with the whole kids of the old neighborhood. And we’re talking about all this stuff, and the secrecy, and the ones you watch out for—this girl over here. Yeah. She didn’t share the secrets with the neighbors when they were talking about who’s got butter on sale. They didn’t tell her anymore. She fried her food in butter. So no one would tell her where the butter sales were when it was available. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Was there any mention of the work going on at Hanford at school that you can remember?
Boice: The one thing of what was going on, and it wasn’t the work at Hanford, because nobody talked about that. But when the Japs were sending over the firebombs—
Franklin: Yeah, the balloon bombs.
Boice: Yes. We were told to write no letters, tell nobody, because they didn’t want it to get out how blinking effective they were.
Franklin: Right. The fear of these bombs from the sky—
Boice: They were hitting, and they were working.
Franklin: Yeah.
Boice: You guys are in the right position to find out. But there was a rumor going around that a balloon-loaded Jap had landed out there in the area and they caught him and bundled him up and carted him off before they did any business. Okay, la-di-da-di-da. There’s rumors about one thing and another. And four or five years ago, CNN or one of these, they were talking about the weather balloons. They showed the colored pictures taken out here at Hanford of the balloons landing in the BPA lines and burning up. [LAUGHTER] End of speech, end of story. [LAUGHTER] But I was surprised to find out that something had happened. There was no soldiers attached or anything else, but there was an incident.
Franklin: Yeah, we’ve—there are a couple confirmed reports of—we actually did an oral history with a gentleman whose father had been a patrolman and had seen one of the balloons land and had to chase it down and didn’t realize right away that it was—had explosives attached to it. The others—there’s a couple reports of them touching down onsite. And there was a family that was killed in Idaho where they were picnicking and a balloon came down.
Boice: Idaho or Oregon?
Franklin: I think it was—oh, that’s right, maybe it was Oregon.
Boice: K Falls.
Franklin: Yes.
Boice: You go to the museum in Klamath Falls had the—or when I went through it—I was working down there twenty years ago or so—they had a big display of the family that was picnicking and the kids went to prod on it, and it went off and killed a girl.
Franklin: Yeah. Were there—when you were—so we’re still in the World War II era and we’ll definitely get to the Cold War in a bit—but were there any kind of—what do you remember about like emergency procedures in school? Was there anything special, kind of drills or something during World War II?
Boice: You mean the duck-and-cover?
Franklin: Yeah, that kind of stuff. Was there any duck-and-cover during World War II?
Boice: Oh, yeah, oh, yeah. Of course—my kindergarten days—now, man. Lived across the street from the college there at Ellensburg, and firebombs were to be worried about. But I was covered. I had a bucket full of sand and a shovel, and it was there on the front porch. When the firebomb came through there, I was going to put my sand on it. So we were prepared. God help us if it landed any place else. [LAUGHTER] But the beginning of the war when I was a kid in Ellensburg was so funny, because we were living right across the street from the college and everything was just the standard college. And the war started, and immediately, there’s all these people running around here that can’t count. Hup, two, three, four. Hup, two, three, four. I wasn’t even in kindergarten, and I knew about my ones! [LAUGHTER] And there was—you go across the street and around the corner, and there was this one half basement room where I could stand there and watch the guys play shirts-and-skins basketball. And the next time I looked, here’s a skeleton of a single engine aircraft, and a guy instructing people on how to make dead stick landing. Now, of all the damned things for a four-year-old kid to remember, dead stick landings was what he was talking about. And they had this thing skeletonized where they could show the internal workings of all the aeronautics.
Franklin: Wow.
Boice: But in Richland—oh, yes. Duck-and-cover fire drills. But they never talked about nuclear, because it was yet to be discovered. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Right, right. So Ellensburg then quickly became inundated with—the state college there became a training area?
Boice: Oh, yeah. Just that fast.
Franklin: Wow. In your notes here, I also see you mentioned about the heavy military presence and the olive drab everywhere and the cops in Army uniforms.
Boice: [LAUGHTER] It absolutely was. Richland was strictly OD. I think they only had one bucket of paint. But all the vehicles were olive drab. The buses were, on today’s standards, I’ll call them a three-quarter size school bus painted olive drab. The vehicles were anything they could scrounge up, because I remember two GIs in a ’37 Chev coupe, and I know today some farmer had taken the trunk out and made a pickup box out of it. But they scrounged this thing up someplace, painted it OD, and here’s the MPs running around in a ’37 Chev pickup. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: [LAUGHTER] A homemade pickup?
Boice: Yeah. It was years later that I found out—Dad didn’t say anything about it, and he certainly knew—that it was simple, because the war was going on. Everything was prioritized. But they had unlimited supply of uniforms. So they put the cops in soldiers’ uniforms; the firemen were in Navy uniforms. The firemen stood out and were very easily recognizable, but you couldn’t tell the soldiers and the cops apart, because they all had the same stuff on. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Wow. A couple oral histories we’ve done with people that were children in Richland, a couple of them mentioned their fathers had taken them onsite somewhat clandestinely. Did your father ever take you onsite into a secured area?
Boice: No.
Franklin: Did you ever get access to any of that some way?
Boice: No, I did not go to any secured area.
Franklin: Okay.
Boice: I was raised running in and out of fire stations. To this day, when I go through the door of a fire station, my hands go into my pockets. You’re allowed to touch nothing. Because you leave fingerprints. [LAUGHTER] It’s just a genuine reflex.
Franklin: Yeah! So you said that you went to Sacajawea, then to Marcus Whitman then back to Sacajawea. Then where did you go to high school?
Boice: We went through all of the—I’ll call it the school construction. They couldn’t build schools fast enough in Richland.
Franklin: I bet.
Boice: We had double shifts. Now they have these temporary quarters—whatever you call them. But we had hutments. Sacajawea had six hutments out there. They built the hutments, and then they went to double shifts. So you went to school at 8:00, and at noon they marched out, teacher and all, and our class marched in, and we went home at 4:30 or 5:00, something like that. So we went through all of that, and then in ’49, they opened Carmichael. A brand new junior high school, man, this is cool! And I was in the seventh grade in Carmichael and I are still the proud possessor of ASB cord 001, 1949, Carmichael Junior High School. The first one they ever gave out. [LAUGHTER] And that was neat, to have a real hard-built school. It was—oh, we had class. After three months, we moved to Kennewick. The Kennewick school system—
Franklin: Your family did, or--?
Boice: Yeah!
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Boice: Dad stayed in Richland, but they were selling off. And if you didn’t have priority, the houses went to the guy that was there first. And in that A house, we were in second, so we were not in line to buy the house.
Franklin: Right.
Boice: So, Dad got a piece of property in Kennewick and we moved to Kennewick. And what a school system mess.
Franklin: Why?
Boice: They were behind. They couldn’t get money quick enough. They couldn’t build stuff fast enough. They had the red brick building—forget what it was called. It had been a high school at one time, and they pressed it back into service. It was so overcrowded you couldn’t believe it. But they finally built the high school that’s there now. It opened in ’52, I believe. ’51—yeah, class of ’52 was the first one to graduate—’52 or ’53. Graduated from Erwin S. Black Senior High School. And it was Erwin S. Black Senior High School one year. Because he was the school superintendent, and they built the school—they named the school in his honor because he had gone to bat and made trips back and forth to Washington, DC to cash some money to use for the school system. Then they got in a shooting match with the Tri-City Herald. [LAUGHTER] And Erwin S. Black and the schoolboard got run out of town, and they chiseled his name off the front of the school. But for one year it was E.S. Black.
Franklin: And then it just became Kennewick High School.
Boice: It became Kennewick High School.
Franklin: Can you talk a little bit more about this disagreement between Erwin S. Black and the schoolboard and the Tri-City Herald?
Boice: It was several things. One of them, there was a book—and I can’t recall—Magruder? McGregor? Somebody. It was a history book, and it mentioned communism. And that was brought up and made a big deal. This was back in the McCarthy era.
Franklin: Right.
Boice: That was brought out. And there was a lot of talk—Black was a certified building inspector, and he inspected the construction of the high school. It was said by a lot of people that it wasn’t up to standards; that the concrete wasn’t what it should have been. And I don’t know what the specs were. I wasn’t into concrete work at that time. I have been later. But I know when we were hanging the benches in the ag shop, where you would put a concrete anchor in the wall ordinarily and it would hold, they didn’t there. And they had to through-bolt through the wall to get to things to hang. So there was—and transfer of equipment and stuff—this was swapped for that, and that was swapped for this—and I don’t remember that, and the only guy I know that did know has died. [LAUGHTER] But one of the kids that graduated from Erwin S. Black, one of the few that was in that class, worked with him off and on and was aware of what went on.
Franklin: When you said that there was a book that mentioned communism, did it mention it in a favorable light, or did it just make a mention to communism?
Boice: More or less, it just made a mention.
Franklin: Okay.
Boice: I was on the—oh, we had the open house at the school, and I was one of the tour guides. Yeah, I showed them the book and what it had to say. And I don’t recall anything drastic.
Franklin: So then did you graduate from Kennewick High School?
Boice: No. [LAUGHTER] The military had a hell of a sale. Anybody that enlisted by the first of February got the Korean GI Bill of Rights. And those that enlisted afterwards didn’t. So I drug up in January and joined the Air Force.
Franklin: Oh. Without graduating.
Boice: Without graduating.
Franklin: Okay. Interesting.
Boice: So I served my illustrious military career in a photo lab in Mountain Home, Idaho. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: And how long were you in the Air Force?
Boice: Two years.
Franklin: Two years, and then you were discharged?
Boice: Yes, yup, yup.
Franklin: When you were in school, you mentioned being in school during this McCarthy era, one of the real hot points of the Cold War. Can you talk a little bit about the civil defense procedures and kind of the general feeling of that time as it related to—because I imagine with Hanford so close, and now knowing what was being produced there, that would have been a likely target. It’s a major part of the nuclear weapons stockpile. So can you talk a little bit about that time and just the general feeling?
Boice: Well, you knew what was going to happen—or what they said was gonna happen. It was the duck-and-cover thing. And we had drills. A lot of what they said what was gonna happen—now they talk about getting into water to modulate it. Then, it was one of the things that they didn’t want you to do. Because we had the irrigation ditch that was running right alongside of the schools. But then they didn’t want you to get into it. So, it’s changed. They had the civil defense procedures—Radiant Cleaners, they’re in Kennewick. They had panel delivery cleaner trucks. They were rigged for emergency ambulances. They had fold-down bunks in them; they could handle four people. [LAUGHTER] It was taken serious.
Franklin: Did you feel any particular sense of worry, or did it not seem to really affect you, your daily life or your psychological—
Boice: It never bothered me ‘til years afterwards. When they talked about the Green Run, where they turned a bunch of that stuff loose, just to see what it would do to the citizens and count the drift on it. The people that had—the down-winders, and the people that had the thyroid problems. My sister was one of the first rounds that went to court over that.
Franklin: Really?
Boice: Because she was—we moved into Richland. She had her third birthday in the prefab, when they were still practicing how to build this stuff. And then we moved in on a farm where the alfalfa grew, the cow ate it, gave them milk, and everything was recycled and nothing went over the fence. And so it bothered me, then, that they used us as guinea pigs. But the other hand, they really didn’t know what in the cat hair that they were doing in a lot of cases. The nuclear waste? You’ve heard about the radioactive rabbit turds.
Franklin: I have.
Boice: You have?
Franklin: Yes, I have, but why don’t you mention that?
Boice: I was working with Vitro out here—’72, I think it was. The radioactivity, of course, is settled on the sagebrush. And the rabbits went around eating the leaves, just leaving fat, dumb and happy, and concentrating everything into the rabbit turds. And they were contemplating taking the top six inches of about two or three sections and burying it. Only they couldn’t decide where they had to build the hole. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: When you—you mentioned just a minute ago that you were on a farm, and you had the cows that would have eaten the tainted alfalfa—was your milk ever tested? Or did anyone ever come and--
Boice: Nah. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: test your—Were you ever tested for—or your family, anybody in your family, ever tested for radiation? Because I know that they, at one point, had those Whole Body Counters that they would test—some children in Pasco were tested through those machines?
Boice: You ever been through a Whole Body Counter?
Franklin: I have not been through a Whole Body Counter.
Boice: Depending on where you’re at, there may or may not be a—they’re kind of a joke. Now, when I was working here at Vitro, we went through the Whole Body thing, and they were serious. I mean, before we got cleared out, we went through the chamber, and we were counted. I went to work in South Carolina. They—as far as I was concerned—were very sloppy with their radiation handling and their checking and their radiation monitoring. We had a hand-and-foot monitoring station where we was going in and out of. You stick your hands in and they check it, and your feet were there at the same time. Well, this one time, I come up pretty hot, so I found an RM. I says, that machine gave me a bad reading. Oh, he says, that machine’s no good anyway. Come around to this other one over here and we’ll check you out. Well, if the blinking thing’s no good, why in the cat hair are we using it?! [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: So, just a second ago, you mentioned you were working for Vitro?
Boice: Uh-huh.
Franklin: What is or was Vitro?
Boice: What was Vitro? Okay. Vitro Engineering—and I don’t know how many times the name changed hands. But these guys were the ones that laid out the City of Richland—laid out the Hanford Projects. These were the strictly insiders. There was pictures on a wall of my grade school buddy’s dad, who I remember being a surveyor in Richland there. And these guys—this has gone on forever, and they were a pretty dug-in organization. To the point that they were not really aware that there was a world outside the fence. They’d heard about it, but they weren’t too sure it existed. [LAUGHTER] But I ended up at Vitro, and we did the Tank Farms that they’re having problems with, the hot tanks? We were in on the modification of that farm. We surveyed in there quite a bit. Whenever they show the pictures on TV, they always show you the evaporation facility. They show you that same picture. Warren Wolfe and I—I say Warren and I—it’s a little—our crew brought that up out of the ground, and we modified the tank farm, and we laid out the construction on that building from the ground right through the top.
Franklin: Okay.
Boice: And I was very fortunate, because all my surveying experience to that point was with the railroads and pipelines and longline work. Construction surveying was new to me. And I got throwed in with an old boy that was good at it. [LAUGHTER] And I learned a bunch working with him. And rolled right over, later on, into Hanford, too. We got in on the end of that—[LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Hanford II?
Boice: Yeah.
Franklin: Oh, as--T-O-O. And which building was this that you and Warren Wolfe and your crew built?
Boice: All I remember is the evaporation facility.
Franklin: What was your specific job at Vitro? Were you a surveyor?
Boice: I was a surveyor. I was an instrument man. You get in the hot zones—we got inside the Canyon Building on several different occasions. And you got suited up, and I was instructed very specifically and emphatically to touch nothing, because anything that got crapped up, they kept. And we couldn’t get the instruments crapped up. But that stuff was so hot that the paper—the Rite-in-the-Rain books have got a specific paper there that has pitch in it or something—it attracts radioactivity like a sponge. And when they kept the notes, then one of us would stay inside and the other guy would get out in the clean zone, and we’d have to transcribe all the notes, because that book was so hot that they wouldn’t let it out of the area. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Wow.
Boice: There was some weird stuff going on.
Franklin: Any other—
Boice: Yeah, but there’s some I ain’t gonna talk about. [LAUGHTER] Okay. We came so close to having a nuclear disaster, it wasn’t even funny. We were good. We were awful good. And we were fast. And we were set up out there on an offset, and Rosie the labor foreman come over. Somebody said you needed a shot here for a hole for a penetration into the tank. Man, we whipped that out and figured the pull and what it was gonna take. Swung over there, put a distance and an angle, drove the stake in the ground. I figured that Warren checked it, and away we went. We come back in a week or so, or a few days later, we were back in that same farm. And Rosie comes over there and he says, would you guys check that again? Because these guys was digging a hole there and they’re supposed to hit a tank. And we checked it. And I lied, and Warren swore to it. [LAUGHTER] We forgot we was on a ten-foot offset. So they’re digging clear to one side of this tank, and just good solid dirt. Had we been just half as screwed-up as we were, they would have gone right down the edge of that tank with a core drill. And we’d have had ooey-gooeys all over the place. They talked to us. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Kind of a happy accident, right?
Boice: Yeah, we were—I’ll never forget Warren’s work. He’d come back with the boss and he says, name me one guy in this world ever got through this life being perfect. He says, always pissed me off, he’s a damned carpenter. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: So you went to—you joined the Air Force, you went to Idaho for two years. When you came back—or what did you do after that? Did you come back to Richland after?
Boice: We were living in Kennewick.
Franklin: Living in Kennewick.
Boice: And I was working at the Washington Hardware Store. And this kid—we were working on cars in my buddy’s garage. And this guy comes through and he’s surveying for the Corps. And he talked that they were setting up a photogrammetry section. Well, heck, that’s what I was doing in the service. So, I beat feet over to Walla Walla to sign up to lay out photo mosaics. And they say, we haven’t got enough work for fulltime at that job. Are you a draftsman? No, I are not a draftsman. He says, would you take a job surveying? You bet. I became a surveyor. [LAUGHTER] And we worked from the mouth of the Deschutes River to Lewiston, Idaho. The first thing was the mouth of the Deschutes to McNary Dam—we mapped from the water level to the top of the bluffs by hand.
Franklin: Wow.
Boice: And then we went through, starting in ’58, and we inventoried the railroad. Now, when you inventory a railroad, we inventoried a railroad. Everything they possessed was put down. First, you go through and you measure and put stations—mark station markings on the rails. 80 miles of them. Then you go back and you reference everything the railroad’s got. Ties, spikes, tie plates, rails, joints, joint bars—if the fence moves, how far did it move, from what to what? If the rail changes, if there’s an isolation joint in there, you put that in. When you come to a switch, you measure everything that’s in the switch facility. You go—everything that that railroad has got. You become very, very familiar with railroads. [LAUGHTER] And then we went ahead, and we built railroads clear up to Lewistown. We handled a railroad layout real heavy. When they—are you familiar with the Marmes men?
Franklin: Yes.
Boice: Luck of the draw, I was on that. Because we were the—call it the resident survey crew in that area.
Franklin: Oh.
Boice: And we were babysitting construction. Make sure they got sticks out ahead of them, make sure that things are checked out behind them. They’re putting in a detour, why, check that out. They’re building a bridge, make sure it’s set up right, and check it out when they get done. So, first they call up and they say, there’s a guy down here at the mouth of the Palouse River thinks he hit something, and he wants an elevation on this cave, see where the water’s gonna come when they raise the water behind Lower Monumental, I believe.
Franklin: Yeah, I think that sounds right.
Boice: Is that the dam? So we went down there and run him in an elevation, painted it on the cave face. Happily on our way. Well, they hit pay dirt. [LAUGHTER] They dug up bones. So we were called back. They wanted—because the drillers were in there then doing sub-cell drilling of what’s down there. So we got to come in there and locate their holes so they know where what is. That was interesting. The whole thing. Now that the world has got into this Ice Age floods and stuff, I wish so heavily that I knew then what I know now. Because the layers that they went through were very definitely visible. This thing had been covered in various floods. But it was so interesting, the stuff that they found. Because it became an international incident. One of the coolest cats in the whole joint was Pono the Greek. And Pono run the sluice box. He had been all over the world. When the girls dug everything out, then they took the dirt to Pono, and he washed it down. Pono found thread of somebody’s sewing. Then they found the needle. And that to me was so cool. They had this needle that looked for all the world like a darning needle. How in the blazes they cut that eye in there! This was a really heads-up organization. [LAUGHTER] Interesting. Very interesting.
Franklin: Yeah, that was a very significant archaeological find.
Boice: I’ve got to go back some day and talk to that doctor. At an anniversary of something, we’re down here at Columbia Park, and he was talking and I showed up there with the historical society doing something-or-other. And I talked to him for about five minutes. He mentioned the fact that he wanted to see the guy that painted that elevation. I said, well, you’re looking at him. [LAUGHTER] It was—I got to go talk to him. Because one of the things in their report—they talked that the ditch was dug with a Cat. Now, I ain’t saying they’re wrong, because I didn’t see any digging when I was there. But just—as you’re going up and looking at a hole, and in those days we had looked at a bunch of holes—we were inspectors. They were going behind the soils guys. And it just to me had all the appearance of somebody that dug a ditch with a dragline. And I always figured it was a dragline in there, and somebody said it was a Cat. I don’t totally agree with him. But the bones were so interesting. They said that the one thing about the site was there had been somebody living on it forever. Just, the further down you went, the more primitive they became, ‘til you got past the layer of the Mazama ash, when Crater Lake blew its top. And they went past Mazama ash and suddenly things looked pretty sophisticated. That’s where the needle came from and a few other things. It was neat. I’d have liked to spend more time with them.
Franklin: Yeah. I’m sure you heard about the dam failing and the site flooding after they—because they created the protective dam around the shelter, and that failed and let water in.
Boice: It didn’t fail! The SOB was never built to hold! When they brought us down there to check these drill holes out, the drillers—we had other stuff to do that morning, and we didn’t get down there until 10:00. The driller had a half-a-dozen holes in. I’m talking to this old driller, and he says, they ain’t never gonna keep water out of that thing, because there’s a layer of palm wood down there and it’s gonna leak like a sieve. But they did it anyway. And we’re down there checking on settlement pins and a whole bunch of other stuff when the water’s coming up. But we’re all on the radio, and it’s like a big one-party line—you can hear what’s going on no matter where. And they’re putting in pumps, and the more pumps they put in, the more water they sprayed out, but noting changed. [LAUGHTER] So it’s a lovely fishing pond. But interesting: it was shortly thereafter that I quit the corps and went to Alaska. Within a year-and-a-half, two years, I’m up there doing the same thing, only instead of spotting holes in the ground, we’re spotting oil wells. And sitting in a warm-up shack, talking to a driller, and he made mention of the fact that they had spudded oil wells. Now, when they spud an oil well, they get in there with an oversized auger, like you’re setting telephone poles. And they go down there through the mud and the blood and the crud ‘til they get to solid rock. And then they bring in the drills. And he says, we have yet to spud a well here that we didn’t get palm wood. And that has always sat with me. Now, when they’re talking about global warming—if there has been palm trees growing at the mouth of the Palouse River, and palm trees growing at Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, it’s been a lot warmer than people are willing to talk about. [LAUGHTER] Just boggles my mind that there is palm wood in Alaska as well as Marmes Rockshelter.
Franklin: Wow, that’s really interesting. So you were—Marmes, then Alaska. When did you come to work for Vitro at Hanford?
Boice: That was a pretty short season. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: At Hanford, or in Alaska?
Boice: At Vitro. Oh, at Alaska I worked for various contractors. But Vitro—we didn’t philosophically match. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Ah.
Boice: Their minds were all inside the fence. And I’m too antagonistic. [LAUGHTER] If we had a problem—thou shalt not speak bad of Vitro. And we’re laying out penetrations on top of a tank. And they’re all done. Radius and angle—which radius is—and they had them at different stages there, and other people had been doing them. And this tank had been there for quite a—not quite a while, but every once in a while someone would come in and set some more holes, set some more holes. Well, they didn’t continue their circle around—nobody closed the circle. So by the time we get there ‘til the end, we have to figure out by adding up each and every hole all the way around the circle at every different radius to get the dimensions to where we’re at. Where if the guy had closed out his circle, you could have backed him out and been out of there in about a tenth the time. So I happened to make the statement, I said, Vitro drafting strikes again. And I was a marked man. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: How long in total, then, did you work out on the Hanford site?
Boice: Well, in ’56-’57, or ’57-’58, they were doing a lot of military work out there. And we did the roads up Rattlesnake—was in on that. The road up Saddle Mountain. A lot of RADAR sites. You’re aware of the Nike sites on—
Franklin: Yup.
Boice: --the north side of the river over there?
Franklin: Yup.
Boice: Been there, done that. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: So—that wasn’t for Vitro, was that when you were with—
Boice: That was the Corps.
Franklin: Okay.
Boice: And we also did a lot of work up at Moses Lake.
Franklin: Okay.
Boice: All the runway extensions up there, we were in on. They throwed us in the clink. They did not like our very presence.
Franklin: Why?
Boice: Apparently Moses Lake had two different structures. There was the Strategic Air Command structure up there, and there was the Military Air Transport Service. I didn’t know the difference. Les was—we were doing some mapping work. And the three of us were just gonna run some levels out to the next site we were gonna work at. And we took off the BM—benchmark—at the control tower. And we get about two turns out across the flight line there. And a bunch of guys come out, like a changing of the guard or something. Two or three of them stopped to talk to Kirby and George. The other five come out along, and they walked, just formed a circle around me, and they wanted to know if I wanted to go with them. They had submachine guns and a whole bunch of other stuff, and I said, heck, there’s nothing I’d rather do! [LAUGHTER] So they called up Walla Walla and they verified our existence. Then we had to go through security and get badges to—and we’d been working on that thing off-and-on for months. But we just hadn’t stepped in the right zone.
Franklin: Oh, wow.
Boice: [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: They were just kind of waiting for you, then, to—
Boice: Just different—different bunch of stuff.
Franklin: Right. When you were in school in Kennewick, so after the—or even just after the word was out about the Hanford site, after August 6th, 1945, when you were in school, did they teach anything about Hanford history? Was it—
Boice: Go back to August 6th.
Franklin: Okay.
Boice: What a day. [EMOTIONAL] What a wonderful day! I’d been down at the Village Theater—now the Richland Theater. I don’t even remember what was playing. But we came out, [EMOTIONAL] and the bells were ringing. The church down there, they were ringing their bells. And everybody was whooping it up—the war was over! And I’ll never forget, some gal in there alongside the street, she had half a dozen kids with garbage can lids and a parade going, and they’re banging and clanging. And the festivities that the war was over. And then we went back and they came out with the thing and Truman said, It’s the Atomic Bomb, and that’s what we’ve been building. And Mom went over and talked to the lady next door. She mentioned the U-235. And the gal says, they didn’t talk about that, did they? And she’d been keeping files, and her husband had been working on it. And neither of them would ever admit that they knew what the other one was doing. It was that tight. And the security in Richland. The FBI knew everybody in town, because it was not uncommon—it was a regular thing that they would come around and they would talk to you, and ask about him. And then they’d go talk to him and ask about you. It was just—it was what was going on. We didn’t know why. Well, after that—yeah, after it came out what was going on out there, then we knew what was there. But until Truman come out and said, here’s what was going on, we didn’t know.
Franklin: What about V-J Day? Was that a separate kind of a big celebration?
Boice: Yeah.
Franklin: Was that as big as the news of the bomb drop? Or was the bomb drop more of a pivotal moment here in the—
Boice: Well, the V-J Day, the end of the war, was the big day. That’s the celebration that I’ll never forget.
Franklin: Can you talk about it?
Boice: June—you heard about Harry Truman, didn’t you? When he come out to Hanford?
Franklin: No.
Boice: [LAUGHTER] The head of security was a guy by the name of McHale. And Dad worked pretty close with him with the fire department because everything was safety and security and if you had a problem, see McHale. Now, the guy had taken—he was pretty much high up in intelligence—but he had assumed the position of a first sergeant. And Sarge McHale was the guy. No matter what happened, Sarge McHale. Harry Truman did a fantastic job, and made his reputation just going from plant to plant—the Truman Investigating Committee, cutting down waste. And I guess he did a heck of a job. But he come out to Hanford and demanded to be let in.
Franklin: Sorry, was this when he was Vice President or President?
Boice: He was a senator!
Franklin: Senator—Senator Harry Truman. Okay.
Boice: And he comes there and demands to be let in. And of course, the guard says, McHale! And McHale comes over there and meets him head-on. He says, I’m Senator Truman, and I demand to be let in. McHale says, I don’t give a damn if you’re President of the United States; you ain’t coming in here. And he didn’t. Well, years later, and I believe it was when they were dedicating the Elks Club in Pasco, Truman was back up in this area. And he was President. And he come out to Hanford and he looked up McHale. And he said, uh-huh, you son of a bitch, you didn’t think I’d make ‘er, did ya? [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Wow. That’s a great story. [LAUGHTER] But thank you. So after the war was over, was what went on at Hanford taught in school? Was there mention of the work at Hanford that built the bomb? Was that part of the curriculum here in town?
Boice: The local lore.
Franklin: The local lore, but nothing in the school at all?
Boice: Not that I recall.
Franklin: Okay.
Boice: Everything was—there was a terrific amount of pride. The Atomic City, the atomic this, the atomic that. The first barber shop quartet come to town, when GE left—no, DuPont left, GE come in, four guys come in from Schenectady, New York with a barber shop quartet. First ones I ever saw. And they were the Atomic City Four. And the next one were the Nuclear Notes. [LAUGHTER] But there was an atomic pride, all over the area. Then there was the people that thought we should be ashamed of it. That we had built this device that killed a whole bunch of people.
Franklin: Now, were these people in the community? Or people outside?
Boice: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Franklin: And this was right at the time—
Boice: Oh, no, no, no. This is--
Franklin: Later?
Boice: Last week? [LAUGHTER] Last few years ago, yeah.
Franklin: Okay.
Boice: I got my—I’m still behind Hanford.
Franklin: Okay.
Boice: Screwed up and all. Back to Vitro for a little bit. Like I say, they were—the organization that literally purchased and built the city of Richland—now, at that time I was flying, and I was flying out of the Richland airport. And there was an old geezer out there called Norm. Norm flew the bench. He was always on the bench out in front of the airport, there. And if somebody just going up to burn up some hours or play, why, Norm was willing to go along. I saw Norm and I hauled him around and then I went back to work for Vitro. And Pritchard brought this guy through—it was Norm! Norm had been the head of real estate when the entire city of Richland and the whole Hanford Project was bought. He was in charge of it. And he retired and trained his successor, who died. And he trained the next guy, who died. So they had Norm on a retainer. Just to ride dirt on real estate. Quite an interesting character!
Franklin: Yeah, I bet. I think I’d kind of like to return about something we were just talking about a minute ago, where you were talking about people that—especially in the later years that have been critical of Hanford. I’d like to get more of your feelings on that. On how you feel about that, or kind of what part of their argument or their viewpoint that you don’t agree with.
Boice: They were talking about—well, first there was the Richland High School and their bomb insignia. It was felt that they were making a big deal or prideful about this terrible event. And I always go back to a group from Japan that came over and were very critical of Richland for the same thing. And the gentleman who was interviewing them or was talking to them, when they got done, informed them in no uncertain terms, that we were invited very unceremoniously into that war, and we’re sorry if you didn’t like the way we ended it. [LAUGHTER] You get to researching, I’d like to bring up, why didn’t they drop the bomb on Tokyo? Because there was nothing left on Tokyo to injure. If you read about Curt LeMay and the Strategic Air Command and the bombing of Japan, he had eliminated that thing down to—the B-29 was supposed to be a high altitude bomber. And it wasn’t as great at it as it was advertised to be. But they had eliminated the defenses. And they made the B-29 into a low-level trucking company, and they were just hauling stuff over and unloading it. And the firebombing of Tokyo—the movies they showed us in the Air Force was something to behold. I mean, they—it was so much worse than what happened at Nagasaki or Hiroshima, either one. He was told to save two or three targets—clean targets. And when they come over there with the bombs, then they used these clean targets and saw what they could do. Of the four devices—the four nuclear devices, we used—was it four or three in World War II?
Franklin: Are you referring to—
Boice: All but one of them came from Hanford.
Franklin: Yeah.
Boice: The first one at Los Alamos was plutonium. And then Hiroshima was Oak Ridge.
Franklin: Yup.
Boice: And then Nagasaki was plutonium.
Franklin: Yeah.
Boice: But there’s those that—and there were at the time, there was a big discussion on, should we demonstrate to them what this thing could do? And the big argument was, what if it doesn’t do? What if you drop it and it don’t do nothing? [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Interesting. Can you speak to—or do you remember anything about the Civil Rights era in the Tri-Cities?
Boice: [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: There were reports of—you know, it’s known that Kennewick was kind of a sun-down town, and that many minorities were forced to live in East Pasco. And that during the war—
[NEW CLIP]
Franklin: There had been a sizable African American population at Hanford, but that after the war many of them left. So I was wondering if you could speak to the Civil Rights action you might have seen or you might have observed or anything in the Tri-Cities?
Boice: Well, I was up in Lewiston when their civil rights march come through. But it was well-advertised. People knew what was gonna happen. And I was at the hardware store, and there’s a black cement finisher I’d worked with building houses in Pasco. I says, Leroy! You gonna come march on Kennewick? He said, [AFFECTED DIALECT] shee-it. I wantsta live in Kennewick just about as bad as you wantsta live in East Pasco. [LAUGHTER] They had a march on Kennewick—a bunch of people that—I am told, because I was living in Lewiston, and I was in Lewiston at the time. But there’s a group out of Seattle and a group out of Portland come up to Pasco, and they marched across the bridge. They marched down Avenue C, up Washington Street, down Kennewick Avenue. And Kennewick yawned. Nobody particularly cared. They got to the Methodist church, and the groups come out and says, you look hot. Come on in and have some lemonade. They sat down at the church, had lemonade and went home. And that was the civil rights march in Kennewick. But there is—when I was there growing up, there were no blacks in Kennewick. There were blacks in Pasco, and there were no blacks in Richland. With the exception—the guy that run the shoeshine parlor at Ganzel’s barbershop lived in the basement, and they tell me that there was two black porters at the Hanford House. And that was the total black population of Richland.
Franklin: Wow.
Boice: But they were not welcome in Kennewick. It wasn’t that big a deal when I was walking down Kennewick Avenue when a couple of black guys—they were bums, hobos—come walking down Main Street, you might as well say. And a cop pulled up and says, the railroad tracks are two blocks down that way. They go east and west. Either one will get you out of town. And they went to the railroad track. I always figured that the blacks wanted to move to Kennewick because they couldn’t stand to live next to the blacks in Pasco. [LAUGHTER] And if you want to get right down to it, well, all that hooping and hollering they do right now, you go down to Fayette, Mississippi, which is 98.645% black, and all the blacks in Mississippi can live in Fayette and nobody cares. Go down to Van Horn, Texas, which is all Mexicans, and they can all live in Van Horn, Texas, and nobody cares. But you let half a dozen white guys go up in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and they just have yourself a storm. Why, these are a bunch of white separatists! If everybody else can live together, why can’t the whites?
Franklin: Interesting. Some might say they were kind of starting a separatist movement up there, I think—claiming their own territory, and—
Boice: So what?
Franklin: Well, living together communally is often different from claiming that you don’t—aren’t subject to the law, the jurisdiction of the United States.
Boice: Nobody said that they weren’t subject to the law.
Franklin: Well--
Boice: They kept trying to integrate Prudhoe, but he kept getting cold and going home.
Franklin: Oh, in Alaska?
Boice: Yeah!
Franklin: Yeah.
Boice: They had a heck of a time keeping Prudhoe integrated. Because them black people do not like cold weather! [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: I don’t think a lot of people like cold weather.
Boice: It was a big joke when we went down south there, to work at Savannah River. Because—hell, we’d come out of here and it was Thanksgiving. It was cold. We got down there, of course, if you’re traveling you’re gonna get nightshift. We left having the cold weather here at night down there. And I says, that’s okay, you’ll get yours come summertime when it heats up. But surprisingly—and I was really surprised that they didn’t take the hot weather any better than we did. I mean, it was miserably hot, but they were just as big a problem as a rest of us.
Franklin: I imagine it’s quite a bit more humid down there, though, with the—when it gets hot, you know. Because the heat with the humidity is—
Boice: Yeah, it is.
Franklin: --much worse than the dry heat.
Boice: Yeah, yeah.
Franklin: Is there anything that we haven’t talked about that you’d like to mention? Or any question I haven’t asked you that you think I should—
Boice: I don’t know what it would be. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Yeah, we’ve really gone—really jumped all over the place. It’s been great. Anyone else have any questions?
Hungate: No, the only question—you said you’d done some work with the railroad. What railroad?
Boice: Name one. [LAUGHTER]
Hungate: All railroads? Union Pacific, all the different--?
Boice: Yes. Right now they’re talking about the oil trains, and their problems with them tipping over? I wonder how long it’s gonna take them to get to the problem. In the beginning, railroads were 39-foot rails bolted together. Measured mile after mile after mile of it. Then in about, oh, the middle ‘60s—’67, thereabouts, ’66—when they were putting in the SP&S, that’s now the BN—the Burlington Northern on the Washington side. They went with quarter-mile steel. And the first question that we had as surveyors—because you’re constantly working with the expansion and contraction of steel—was how are they going to control that in long rails? Because if you’re working on railroads very long, first thing you realize is do not sit on the joints in a hot day. You get your butt pinched! [LAUGHTER] When those tracks expand. So we brought this up and the first thing they told us was, well, they’ve got special steel and it’s only going to expand sideways. Well, that story lasted about as long as it took when they started putting it together. Because when they started—they’d set up a factory down here, if you’ll call it that. Brought in 39-foot un-punched rail, and just rolled her off, welded her together and ground down the joints and put her in quarter-mile sections. They were very particular when they put it in at the temperature that they laid that down on, where before—you know what a creeper is? Okay, it’s a kind of a hairpin device that you put over the rail so that it will slide less. But in the old days, the 39-foot rail very seldom saw any creepers. When they put that quarter-mile steel together, you saw a lot of creepers. Now they have gone to ribbon rail. They welded the quarter-mile steel together. You drive down to Portland, and you look at that rail, and you’re gonna go a long ways before you see a joint. There at Quinton and Washman’s dip—which don’t mean a thing to you guys—[LAUGHTER] about a mile post from 120-whatever, they have got a creeper on each—alongside of each and every tie. I mean, they were using creepers like they were going out of style. To me, the expansion’s the thing that they got to worry about, but then they should have figured this out because they’re running it. But it’s a factor. You got to factor it in when you’re doing a pipeline, when you’re doing a railroad. When we were doing the pipeline, Maurice Smith of British Petroleum, who was the head pipeline engineer, I had lunch with him. [LAUGHTER] It ain’t like we sit down at a specified lunch—he dropped in at the chow hall I was eating and sat down at our table. So we got to talking about it. And that was the question I brought up, was how are you going to handle the expansion in the steel? And he says—he admitted it was a heck of a problem. And that you got to run as many Ss as you can so that it’ll take up and accordion itself. And when you’ve got a long straight stretch, it’s gonna give you problems. [LAUGHTER] Because it’s gonna go someplace. And that’s the thing that—after they started the quarter-mile steel, a couple of years later, we had a hot summer. The article in the Tri-City Herald called it the long, hot summer, where we had over 90 days of over 90-degree weather. But they were cutting chunks out of that railroad to keep her on the road bed. And at that time, when the SP&S was having these problems, the UP was laughing at them. They said, we tried this stuff in Wyoming. It didn’t work. And they’re using 39-foot stuff, and it was just whistling down the road. But now I see that they’re using the ribbon rail like everybody else. I can’t see how it’s gonna work, but the they’re doing it. [LAUGHTER] It ain’t my role! [LAUGHTER] The other one was the Camas Prairie. And that starts out, oh, about ten miles above Ice Harbor Dam, thereabouts, breaks loose, and goes clear up past Lewiston, up into Grangeville, Idaho. That’s a crazy little river.
Franklin: That’s the one that they filmed that Charles Bronson movie.
Boice: Breakheart Pass?
Franklin: Breakheart Pass, yeah.
Boice: Yeah, that was done up there. You get into railroad history—this area is knee-deep in it. Vollard was the great character in that. He started out with a little portage railroad around Idaho Falls and that area. And then he got the Walla Walla line—I call it the WWWWW&WWW line—Walla Walla, Waitsburg, Washtucna and Washington Wail Woad—which was a money maker. But he ended up getting a lineup from Portland out here. And then when they started building the Northern Pacific, they were building from both ends, and he was hauling Northern Pacific rail over his tracks and taking it out in railroad stock. By the time they got connected over in Montana, he owned a sizable chunk of the railroad. [LAUGHTER] And it was—you get into that railroad history, and it’s just takeover checkers. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Great. Well, thank you so much, George.
Boice: Okay! [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: It was a pleasure talking to you. And, yeah, thanks for coming in today.
Boice: All righty. Write if you find work! [LAUGHTER]