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Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Bauman Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Edith Hansen Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Northwest Public Television | Hansen_Edith Woman one: Always ready. Man one: [INAUDIBLE] [LAUGHTER] Woman one: Sounds like my father-in-law. Woman two: [LAUGHTER] We won’t go there, then. Woman one: [LAUGHTER] Robert Bauman: All right? Man one: Nothing wrong in there. Feel free. Bauman: All right. Okay. We're going to get started if that's okay. Can we start by having you say your name first and spell it for us? Edith Hansen: Oh. Right now? Bauman: Yes. Yeah. Hansen: My name is Edith Hansen, and E-D-I-T-H, H-A-N-S-E-N. Bauman: Okay. Thank you. And today's date is August 28 of 2013. And we're doing this interview on the campus of Washington State University-- Hansen: I'm a little hard hearing. Bauman: Okay. Should I scoot closer? Yeah? Man one: Yeah, absolutely. Bauman: Okay. I'll scoot closer, if that's all right. How's that? Is this going to be better? Are you going to be better--? Hansen: Yeah. Bauman: Okay, great. So let's start by just having you talk about your family and how and when they came to the area here. Hansen: Well, I wanted to start back--[LAUGHTER] Bauman: Go ahead. Hansen: And in 1875, this was nothing but a cattle range. And there were just--nobody lived here, just a person who had a lot of cattle. And he was the postmaster for the whole area. And in 1878, Ben Rosencrance bought him out, or bought out the area around the mouth of the Yakima River. And he was a stock man, too. And he bought the 16 sections at $0.50 an acre. In 1883, the Northern Pacific Railroad completed their line from Spokane to Ainsworth. And Ainsworth was what they called Pasco at that time. Now the Federal Homestead laws were established in 1888. Now Ben and his wife married on November the 3rd, 1880, in Pendleton. And their honeymoon was the ride from Pendleton to the ranch. Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Hansen: And they operated a stock ranch. And if they wanted any groceries, they had to go to Walla Walla for store. Coffee they bought in 50-pound sacks. And they went about once a year. And fabric was $0.05 a yard, and they bought it by the bolt. [LAUGHTER] And the missus--that was her honeymoon. [LAUGHTER] And there was no house. I don't know just what kind of a structure they lived in, but it was pretty minimum. And she never saw another white woman for six months. Now he--when that law went through, the Federal Homestead law went through, he filed for 1,700 acres. And he had timber claims and mineral claims. And [LAUGHTER] he just signed up for everything. Well, one man was unhappy with him and didn't think that that was fair because there was no timber in this area. And so he rode his horse over to Walla Walla to protest. [LAUGHTER] Well, Rosencrance found out that he was going over there and report him to the authorities because there was no forest--there wasn't no trees. So they went down to the river, and they dug up a bunch of willows and transplanted them. [LAUGHTER] And I don't know what kind of a housing arrangement they had, but it wasn't much. But they moved it up there and put those willow trees in there. [LAUGHTER] And they called that their forest. Anyway. [LAUGHTER] Oh, she washed clothes and draped them over the sagebrush. [LAUGHTER] They didn't have any clothes lines or anything. And so but anyway, they were set for when the authorities came down to see their forest, they could see the willow trees. And I never did hear just what kind of housing they had. But it was pretty minimum. Now after they'd been here a while, she said they should have a school. And she talked Mr. and Mrs. Harry Van Horn to come and homestead. And they picked out some land that they didn't build, or they gave it to them. I don't know. But anyway, she talked them into coming here because Mrs. Van Horn was a school teacher. And she thought there should be a school teacher in this area. And she was paid $1 a day to be a teacher. And the kids all came of their own expense, either with a wagon or a sled. In the wintertime they used a sled and came to her house. And they would bring their own chair or stool--whatever they were going to sit on [LAUGHTER] because she didn't have things for them to sit on while she was teaching them. Let's see. Oh, in 1883, the railroad was building the railroad bridge across the Columbia. And they had a lot of people here come in for construction of this bridge. It was a pretty big deal to put this bridge clear across the Columbia. And they were noted for gambling and saloons. And Pasco got a really bad reputation. [LAUGHTER] My mother's grandfather over in Germany heard about it. [LAUGHTER] And they didn't want him to raise his family near that Pasco [LAUGHTER] wild town. And now there was a family, and that was Amy and Alex McNeil. And they came in 1883, and they wanted to build a house with lumber. And they had to go to Bickleton to get lumber. There was nobody selling house lumber. But they built their house. And what they did were they were panning for gold. And by this time now, they could buy groceries in Ainsworth or Pasco--I mean all one place. But they didn't have to go to Walla Walla for their groceries anymore. Now the Clements came in early, too. That was an early family. And their daughter was married to a Bauer, and he died. But that's when the Clements settled in this area. Let's see. Oh, the post office was established in Richland in 1905. And in 1903, the Timmermans came here. And there was a--Walter Timmerman is the one who ran the ferry from Pasco to Richland. And his father and his uncle came and helped him set up the line over. So they had a ferry at that time. And they had rates to ride on the ferry. If you had sheep, they were $0.01 a sheep. [LAUGHTER] If you were having pack animals, they were $0.25 for a ride. If a person road on a horse, that was $0.50 from Pasco to Richland. And then a team in a wagon or a buggy was $1. And then later on they had automobiles and trucks. And they were $1 each. Now those were some of the earliest families that settled in this area. Now my grandfather Bremer was living in Seattle. And the only work he could get in Seattle was down on the waterfront. And so every morning, he would get up and go down to the waterfront and hope that somebody was unloading a ship or loading a ship. And that's where all the men were. And my grandfather quite often got work because he was a big man and strong. And that's what they wanted to load these ships up or to unload them. But he hated that rain. And standing in that rain, sometimes for quite a while before somebody chose him to work for them, was real disgusting. And so he read in the newspaper that there was a man over in Kennewick, and he wanted his family, who were living in Seattle. They had a wagon. They had a team and eight children. And they advertised for a driver. Now there was a really bad winter that winter. And there was no highway. And of course, there were no restaurants and no cafes or anything built along the way. And so they had the eight children in this wagon. And of course I imagine some of those older boys probably were walking because [LAUGHTER] I don't know that the team could handle everybody in the wagon. But anyway--and they had to stop and cook their meals for those kids and themselves. So Grandpa said he would do that. He wanted to see what was over here in eastern Washington. And so they started off. And he didn't keep a diary, or didn't write down just what they did every day. But the winter had been really bad. And the snow was melting, and it was making streams across the trail. And so they would have to stop and shovel in dirt so they could get the wagon through. And then once in a while there were trees that were down. And they had to cut limbs off and drag those tree limbs and get the road clear so they could get that wagon through. I don’t know how--it would've been interesting if he could have told us how long it took them. But you know, you have to feed those kids three times a day and then fixing the road on your way over--it wasn't easy. And then when he got up to the pass and he came over the pass, all the area around Ellensburg and that area, the farmers were out, and they were farming. And the sun was shining, and they were getting ready for crops and things. He said, this is heaven. [LAUGHTER] He's never going back to Seattle! [LAUGHTER] And things went much better once they got over the hill. And they got that family delivered to Kennewick. And then he got a hold of his wife, probably--I don't know whether they had telephones or not. But maybe they just wrote. But anyway, he got hold of her and said, you're going to buy tickets on the railroad, and you're coming in to Kennewick, and I'll pick you up in Kennewick. So then they came to Kennewick. And about that time, Rosencrance, the man who had bought all that land, he wanted to get some irrigation going because he knew this was good land and all he needed was water. So he put in the water wheel. And that was in 1894 that they built that water wheel. And Grandpa got a job on finishing it up. It was in construction when he arrived. But he worked to finish it up and then get the water--I don't believe I put down how much. But anyway--oh, what happened to my pictures that I brought? Bauman: Oh, they're right here. I'll bring them. Oh, it’s okay. Hansen: Thank you. Hmm. Now you've probably all seen the picture of the water wheel. That was the first irrigation in this area. And well, this is the original picture. And my mom had that. And a lot of people borrowed that, and they've enlarged it. And they're all over. You've probably seen a half a dozen pictures. But the people, when they enlarged it, they took all the people off. And I have here a list of all the people who are standing on this bridge. And by that time, my grandmother and her kids were all standing on the bridge. It was 16 feet wide and 32 feet high. And it had a capacity of 320 gallons per revolution. And so it dipped down in the water and get this 320 gallons and lift it up to the top and then put it into a ditch. And the ditch would take it to the farmers that were going to use it. Bauman: And where was the water wheel? Hansen: Now they quit being in the lady's house for school. There were more people moving into town--moving into the area and buying farms. And so they built a school. And it was located out--well, now the highway from Kennewick to Richland, just before you get the turnoff to Richland, it was in that area. And my mom went to that school. And they had school from October ‘til March because the kids worked in the fields the rest of the time. But they could be spared during the winter months. And if they got any kids that were graduating from 7th or 8th grade, then the school—I mean the state would send tests from Olympia. And they had to take those tests and see if they'd learned at this little country school enough to be ready for high school. Now about this time, there was a Thad Grosscup, who was a lawyer in Seattle. And somehow, he found out that this was really good country and good farming country. And so he was a lawyer for big railroads over there in Seattle and he had quite a bit of money. He bought 1,800 acres. It's about eight or nine miles out of Richland. And he wanted to build a canal. And I don't know who built that dam, whether he built that dam or whether—but anyway, the dam created the water to go in the ditch. And so he had people out there building this ditch because he wanted to irrigate those 1,800 acres. And my grandfather and his boys went out to make this ditch and to help with it--get this farm going. And my mother went to cook for the people that were working on this place--the farm. Now the railroad bridge was finished in 1889. And before that--before 1889, they didn't have a way to get the railroad cars from the Pasco area across the Columbia. And so they used a steam ferry. They'd run a few cars on the steam ferry, go across the river, put them off, come back and get some more. And so you could see that it was a real aggravation for the railroad [LAUGHTER] to move a whole train that way, but they did it. But then they finally got that bridge finished. And then they could run the cars across the Columbia. And that was a big deal. Now about this time, there were so many farmers coming in and buying up land, and, well, all along. And we were in Yakima County at this time. And Yakima County said, we're getting too big--too many people. And so we're going to divide it. And so they broke off a piece on the lower end here. And they were going to—they kind of thought of Benton. But they said they couldn't do that because the post office said, you can't--well, it was Benton for a couple of months. We became Benton County, and then they tried--anyway, the state said you couldn't have, because they had another section, and it was too close. And they said you couldn't name it that. But anyway, they had quite a time. They named it three different times. But it finally became Benton County. Let's see. Oh, in 1907, they decided that this was a good place to raise pheasants and quail. And so they brought in starters and turned them loose. And nobody was supposed to shoot them in 1907. But in 1908, they said there'd be foul for them to shoot. Now 1907 was the first automobile in the area. And the population had doubled. And they had more kids in the school. So they put in a second floor in the schoolhouse. In 1908, they got telephone service. In 1909, that was the first Richland Bank. And in 1912, they built the new high school. Now Amon came in about this time. And he bought most of the land from Rosencrance. Rosencrance had been running cattle and stuff. And Rosencrance is the one that built the big wheel and started the irrigation. And when that irrigation got started, why, then people came in to farm. And finally in 1905, they decided they could call it Benton County. [LAUGHTER] They had quite a time on the name. And there was a man named Raditz. And my grandfather was Bremer, and they built a hotel in Richland. And it had 20 rooms, and it was 30 by 60 foot. And they had a feed stable and a hardware store, and a post office was in the grocery store. And they bought bonds for a new schoolhouse. And the river traffic was lively. And they had daily service from Kennewick to Priest Rapids. Let's see. Amon bought Rosencrance out and sold ranches and stuff. And--oh, wrote my notes in a hurry and can't even read my notes. Bauman: It's okay. Hansen: [LAUGHTER] Anyway, Richland was growing. And I have a picture here of Richland about that time. And this was the John Dam Grocery store. And this was Murray's Hardware store. And this was Van’s, which was a confectionary--sold pop and ice cream in a little store. Now let's see. I think when Amon bought out Rosencrance, that was the end of the water wheel. They didn't use it after that. Amon, he went for gas pumps. I think I read we got our telephone in 1908, and the Richland Bank in '10. I think I read that. Now in 1915, oh, my dad came in here from Iowa. And of course, he wanted to farm and wanted to be with farms. So he got a job out at the Grosscup's ranch. Grosscup was the lawyer over in Seattle. And he had a son, but he wasn't a farmer. He came over here and lived [LAUGHTER] kind of to keep him out of his father's hair in Seattle. [LAUGHTER] But anyway, my dad got a job with him. And so he wasn't too long till he was managing the work crew that were farming out there. And Mom—they had asked her when they got the ditch built and all this farming under control, they asked her to stay on as cook. So she was the cook, and they built quite a large house for all the employees that were working with them. Thad and his family had a nice home. And Thad didn't do any farming. He just kind of--he was there. [LAUGHTER] He was out of the hair of the people in Seattle. But my dad was running the farm, and my mom was cooking for all these. And they got married. And they lived on in the big building. They had quite a few people working for them--working there. Now my dad worked for Grosscup for a number of years. And then he finally bought a piece of property. He bought, I think it was 60 acres. And then he started farming for himself. He took the lower 60 acres. And Grosscup was selling off to other farmers, too. He sold several pieces. Now I think that that was the things that I thought might be interesting to bring you up to when there were more people in Richland. Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Right. Can I ask you, what kind of crops did your father grow on his land? Hansen: Well, he raised hay. And that shows them putting the hay in the haystacks. And that's the way they did it. And they had these great big haystacks. And there were quite a few herds of sheep up the valley--oh, Lind or up in there. And they would take their sheep in the summer to the forest. And they could let them run in the forest. But in the wintertime, they would come down and bargain for the hay. And they would bring their herd in, and they would feed it right out of the haystack. And I don't know how my mother did it, but my mother could figure out how many tons of hay there was in a stack, so many feet long and so high, with an oval top. And they'd been in there. The hay had been sitting all winter, you know. And then they'd bring the sheep in there and feed them. And then you got the fertilizer on your land, too, because they'd eat the hay and leave the fertilizer on the land. It worked real well. And then when your hay was all gone, they'd go to another neighbor and buy his hay, and the same thing--they feed it there. So that's what a haystack looked like. And now my dad was from Iowa. So he had to raise corn. And he raised corn for his chickens. And you can see that the corn really did well. And then later, when asparagus came into this country, why, then he plowed up a lot of his land and put it into asparagus. We had 16 acres of asparagus. Now almost everybody in Richland had asparagus. But they had an acre or an acre and a half. And dad had 16 acres. But anyway, he'd go down to Kennewick and get some fellows that didn't have work and bring them out. And Mom would feed them. [LAUGHTER] And they would work for him through the asparagus season. Now you know we have good-looking buses now. And now this is the kind of bus that we had for when I started the school. I started in 1930 going to school. And this is the kind of buses we had. Bauman: And where was the school? Where was the school? Hansen: In Richland. We all came to Richland. And I think I have some pictures. Oh, this is a picture--this was when my mom was going to school. And this is the entire Richland school at the time my mom was going to school. And there was a vessel got frozen into the ice. And it was wintertime, and they couldn't get it out. And so the teacher thought it'd be a good trip for the school. And so this was the whole school. And you can see some of them are little, and some of them are big. And that's my mom in the plaid coat. [LAUGHTER] But that was their day tour. Now, I don't have a date on this. But my dad's brother is on here, and my mother's brother is on here. And this was the Richland baseball team. And this man bought land from Grosscup, and he lived across the street from us. And we knew everybody in Richland. Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Hansen: Now, this is the school that I went to school in. This is Richland, and eight grades in this building. Now this picture, this shows the Methodist church. And this is the grade school, and this is the high school. And you can see, we didn't have fancy streets at that time. This was my graduating class, class of '42. Now there's 12 pictures. But two--the picture was taken before we graduated. When we actually graduated, there were 12 in my graduating class. Now this was the high school. And this was everybody that was in the high school at that time, and I don't see a date on there. But I think probably in the '30s, maybe '40s. Now and this is another one. And this was 1940. And this is the whole Richland school. And that were the things that I thought might be interesting. Now did you have some questions you were going to ask me? Bauman: I do, yeah. I wanted to ask you about the school--going to school in Richland. What was it like going to school in Richland? And do you remember any teachers in particular? Hansen: Oh, yeah. I should have brought the picture with the teachers. [LAUGHTER] Hansen: We had eight people in our building. And the eighth-grade teacher was the principal. So that was the staff. The complete staff was eight when I went to school. Bauman: What about churches? What church did you go to? Hansen: I showed you the picture of the Methodist church, and that was the big church. We were Lutherans, and we had a little bitty church. And [LAUGHTER] they were teaching--having the minister in German and things in connection with the church in German. But my mom just really worked it over with my grandfather. [LAUGHTER] She said, you ought to be teaching in English. And then the kids would get something out of it because they were getting English in school. And but anyway, it was a tiny church. And I really think the Catholics all went to Kennewick. And I think that that's about what we had in the way of churches. Bauman: I asked you about your farm. Did you have electricity on the farm or a telephone? Hansen: We got electricity in 1938. Before that, we had carbide. Do you know carbide? Bauman: Mm-mm. Hansen: Well, it's a gas. My dad went down to Kennewick. And the man said, now, don't let anybody touch this but you. You need to do this. [LAUGHTER] And my mother run it all the time. But you put this product in water, and it created a gas. And we had three bedrooms upstairs. So we had three gas deals up there. And we had a light in the living room and the dining room that was with the gas. [LAUGHTER] But they didn't think a woman could handle the—[LAUGHTER] But they didn't know my dad. My dad was a farmer. He wasn't [LAUGHTER] a gas man. Mom took over the gas. But in 1938, the electricity came in. And that was wonderful. We started off with, we bought a refrigerator. And then we had, of course, the electric lights. And then we got other appliances after that. Bauman: And what about a telephone? Did you have a telephone at all? Hansen: [LAUGHTER] Well, they put in a telephone back many, many years ago. But when my dad would want to call—make a phone, there would be some neighbor women visiting on the telephone. And he got so mad, he took it out. [LAUGHTER] Hansen: We only had it for a year, I think. And he got so mad at the women visiting on the telephone [LAUGHTER] that we never had a telephone until later on, my older sister had problems. And she moved in with her two children. And of course, she put in a telephone, so that they had it. That would have been in the '40s. Bauman: Uh-huh. And when you were growing up on the farm, did you have any particular chores or responsibilities? Hansen: Oh, we all--when we hayed, we all hayed. Mom ran the team. And well, Dad mowed it and got it raked into shocks. And then when it was the way he wanted it to be in the haystack, he'd give it a few days to cure in this shock. And then we would bring the team out. And Mom ran the team. Mom had the team. And dad would put his fork in the shock and put it on the sled. And then we kids, 7 and 8, we had our own little rake. And if he didn't get all of the little pieces picked up, we would pick them up and put them on the sled, too. And then Mom would drive it to the haystack. And Dad would crawl up on the top of the stack. And Mom ran the derrick--ran the team--hooked the team up to there. And then there were chains on this sled, and they would, when she ran the derrick, the chains would come up together. And then they'd swing it up there on the top of the haystack. And then when Dad got it just where he'd want it, then he would call her to stop the team. And then we kids would pull the--there was a rope came down. And when he got it where he wanted it, then we'd pull on that rope. And then the chains would come off and it would drop on the top of the stack. And then we'd go get another load--another load, another load. [LAUGHTER] And then, of course, we fed the chickens and took care of the chickens. And we had turkeys. I mean, we'd just have ten or 12 turkeys and just let them run loose. Bauman: Do you remember any community events--picnics, special community celebrations or gatherings at all? Hansen: Well, there was the Grange in town. And a lot of people went to the Grange. But my dad was not much of a joiner. And so he didn't ever join the Grange. But we had friends that would come. And we would go up to the dam when they were fishing. And he would spear fish. And then we'd can the salmon. And we bought an old house. I think it was built in about 1902 or '04--something like that. Wasn't much of a house. But anyway, one of the first things they did was they built a great big concrete porch. And Mom bought a piano for the girls to learn to play the piano. And we had a lot of dances at our house. The porch was wide enough and long enough you could get three square dances going--circles going on the porch. And the piano was in the living room. And we opened the door so they could hear the music. And then they did other dances, too and played cards--lots of cards. Had neighbors in lots of times for cards. Bauman: Now you graduated high school in 1942? You graduated high school in 1942? Is that correct? Hansen: Yeah. Bauman: And then the Federal government came in the following year to build the-- Hansen: Yeah. We hadn't heard one word about it. But I guess they'd already picked the location. But anyway, when we graduated, we didn't know anything about the Project. And so it was when we went to college that we got letters. And it was at Valentine's Day when all the farmers got--the farmers were out there preparing their land, making ditches, planting stuff when they got the notices to move out. And that was a real jolt when they moved the people out. But my dad didn't have to move because he lived eight miles out. And that was the Grosscup Ranch. And Grosscup was the lawyer from Seattle. He had it all worked out. And [LAUGHTER] they said it would take them too long to go through the rigmarole that the lawyer would put them through. So they just left that, and anybody that had bought land from him got to stay. Bauman: And so your parents stayed there on their land through the war and all that? Hansen: Yeah. Bauman: And where were you in college? Hansen: I went to college in Ellensburg to be a teacher. And I graduated--well, I didn't graduate. They had lost so many teachers in the Army that they would take us at three years. So I went out to teach at three years of college. And then I would go back summer school to finish up. So I got my degree. But the war was over by the time I got my degree. Bauman: And how long did your family stay on their farm? Hansen: Lyle? When did we sell the farm? Lyle: Well, [INAUDIBLE], early '70s, I think--early to mid '70s. Hansen: What did he say? Bauman: He said, early to mid '70s--1970. Hansen: Well, [LAUGHTER] I was the seller. [LAUGHTER] Hansen: But I didn't even remember what--but anyway, Dad got bad and died. And Mary moved in with her kids and took care of Mom. And then my mom had to go to a nursing home. Mary had stayed for a couple of years. That was my older sister. Anyway, we finally decided that [LAUGHTER] my husband and my sister's husband had to keep going down and things kept going wrong with it. And so we talked my sister into moving into town--the third sister. And we sold it. Bauman: Who were some of the people who lived nearest you? Who were some of your neighbors when you were growing up? Hansen: Well now, I pointed out, the McCarthys. They lived right straight across from us. Now they just bought a little place. They must have had five or ten acres. But my dad had about 60, didn't he, Lyle? Lyle: Yeah, that's what you said. Hansen: Anyway, he really farmed. But McCarthy was kind of retired. The Grosscups--they lived on their place for quite a while. And he became a county commissioner, I think. He wasn't a farmer. But he knew a lot of people. And they sold a big piece of land to--well, they sold off several pieces of land. Anyway-- Bauman: So how would you describe Richland as a place to grow up? Hansen: Oh, it was great. Yeah. We had a real good time. And we knew everybody. Anyway, when the farmers had to leave, a lot of them were really upset. I mean, they had put money into their homes and built their farms up. And they had asparagus planted. And they had cherries planted and everything, and they had to leave it all. And they looked for farms, but farms were pretty hard to come by. An awful lot of people were unhappy. But they thought it'd be nice if we could get together and see our old neighbors. So we arranged with Prosser. Would Prosser let us use their park as a get-together? So for several years, anybody who had lived in Richland could come to up there. And they sent out letters so people could visit with their old neighbors and tell about their new farms. But they were all over the state of Washington, and some went in to Oregon. But anyway-- Lyle: Mom, tell them about-- Hansen: --after four or five years going to Prosser, Richland decided that it'd be okay for us to come down and stay in one of their parks. And so then we had these get-togethers. And in fact, we still meet. But now [LAUGHTER] we're down to about eight. Bauman: Yeah. I spoke with Bob Fletcher. Hansen: Oh, you talked to Bob? Bauman: Yeah. And he talked about you getting together, yeah. Did you have a-- Lyle: That's what I was going to bring up. Bauman: Oh, okay. Lyle: That it was still going on. Bauman: Right. Lyle: Old Richland. Bauman: Yeah. Hansen: Yeah. I see Bob once in a while. Bauman: Yeah. I want to thank you very much for coming today. I really appreciate it, for coming and sharing your memories. Thank you. Hansen: Did you have any other questions you wanted? Bauman: I think I'm good. Do you have anything else you want to add--anything-- Hansen: Well, that's all the notes. I made those notes this morning. And [LAUGHTER] I didn't get everything in. Bauman: Well, thank you very much. Hansen: But I mean, I think probably my family is about the only one, you know, way back. Bauman: Yeah. Hansen: Because my mother was only about four years old when they came from Seattle. But there were a lot of people came in the '30s. And then there were a lot came in the '40s, too. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:48:43 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 216 kbps Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site ~1925-today Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Ben Rosencrance Mr. and Mrs. Harry Van Horn Amy and Alex McNeil Clements Bauers Thad Grosscup Raditz Grosscup McCarthys Bob Fletcher Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Edith Hansen Description An account of the resource An interview with Edith Hansen conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 08-28-2013 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2017-04-12: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. Cat Dam Kennewick Railroad River https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fdf5707b65c796346957cfed411914d46.JPG 94e537086907f482c5fde0d65917e12f Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Stephanie Janicek Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Victor Vargas: We’re rolling. Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Stephanie Janick? Stephanie Janicek: Janicek. Franklin: Janicek. Janicek: Just like it’s spelled. Franklin: Okay, Janicek. On January 24th, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Stephanie about her experiences growing up in Richland and working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Janicek: Stephanie Anne Dawson Janicek. Stephanie is S-T-E-P-H-A-N-I-E. Anne, A-N-N-E. Dawson, D-A-W-S-O-N. Janicek, J-A-N-I-C-E-K. Franklin: Great. So tell me how and why you first came to Richland. Janicek: My family came to Richland in 1949 when I was seven years old and I was in the first grade. My father had been a Montgomery Ward’s manager in the ‘40s and he managed stores all over the state of Washington. And he was so successful that they wanted to promote him to a regional position where he’d be traveling a lot, and he said I don’t want to do that. So he and another Ward’s manager who decided to be a silent partner talked to officials in Richland and decided that they were going to be the first store to open in Uptown Richland. The area had been set aside, there were no buildings; it was just empty lot. And the downtown area was too small and crowded, so they wanted to develop Uptown as sort of an outdoor mall, if you will. Dawson Richards was the first store built and opened. And it opened in June of 1949. Franklin: What was your father’s name? Janicek: Grover Dawson. Franklin: And was Richards the silent partner? Janicek: Jim Richards was the silent partner. He owned an orange grove and walnut trees in California, and so he was down there. They owned the store 50/50 for many years until my brother bought out Mr. Richards. And he would come up occasionally to see how things were going. But Dad was doing a great job, and everything was going well. Franklin: So tell me more about Dawson Richards store. What kinds of products did it sell? Janicek: Dawson Richards started out as a men and boys clothing store. And they had a little logo of a man wearing a suit and a hat and a little boy with a cap and a coat, because boys wore coats in the old days, you know, when they went to church. It said Dad and Lad. That was one of the early symbols of the store. And so it was a really interesting store, because my father wanted to cater to all the men in the area, most of whom worked at Hanford, regardless of their station in life. And so, for instance, he had two lines of suits; the expensive suits were made by Kuppenheimer and the less expensive were made by Timely. He had two lines of shoes. The good shoes—or the more expensive shoes, rather, were Florsheim’s, and he had Winthrop shoes for the everyday guys. And he did the same with sweaters and pants and shirts and neckties and pajamas and socks and everything you can think of. He also had—because there was almost nothing. Everybody had to go to Seattle or Spokane or maybe Yakima—I don’t know what was in Yakima in those days—to get their clothing. And especially the managers at Hanford. So they were tickled to death that they had a store that they could shop at and be very finely-clothed. And he—my dad—specialized in, oh, talls and shorts and stouts. He catered to every single size, and if he didn’t have your size, he would get it for you. And I remember one of the signs in the store said, OshKosh, because my father carried OshKosh B’gosh overalls. He really wanted to have clothing for everyone. Regardless of their station in life. And it became a wonderful gathering place. People would just come in to talk. My father was very outgoing, and we would have gatherings of high school kids, because he also carried letterman jackets, letterman sweaters. He sold the chenille letters and numbers for the cheerleader and song leader outfits. When Christ the King opened their Catholic school for kids, the students wore uniforms, and my father sold, at very deep discounts, the corduroy pants and white shirts and navy sweaters that the boys wore at the school. He really wanted to provide whatever the community needed and it worked out quite well. Franklin: Okay, great. So there wasn’t—were there any men’s stores or stores of a similar type in Pasco and Kennewick at the time? Janicek: There was—I don’t know how old the Sid Lanter’s store was in Kennewick; I think that was probably there most of the time. I don’t know if it preceded Dawson Richard’s or not. There was a small men’s store in downtown Richland. I might be able to remember the name of it later on. But just at this moment, it is—oh, was it something like Harvey’s or—I don’t recall. But my father’s was such a good sized store that he had wonderful variety. He had Pendleton woolen shirts and jackets, and he had Jantzen’s sweaters and swimsuits. Carried a lot of name brands that people were comfortable with. Franklin: And you said that was the first store in the Uptown area? Janicek: Yes, it was. And the next store that opened was a sporting goods store right next to Dawson Richard’s and it was originally called Frank Barry, which was the name of the owner. And a few years later that was sold and it became BB&M Sporting Goods, which was owned by three gentlemen with the last names of B and B and M. And then some years later they moved up the street. Dawson Richards was on the Jadwin side of Uptown Richland, and they moved farther up the street. I don’t know—is there a—I don’t think there’s a BB&M now, is there? No, it’s gone. Okay. Franklin: I’ve only been here a year, so— Janicek: Oh, okay. Franklin: My memory is— Janicek: Okay. Franklin: I don’t have a long institutional memory. Janicek: And you know, if we had time, and I’m sure we don’t, I could walk you around the entire Uptown area and tell you most of the stores that originally were there. The other oldest store was the Spudnuts shop. God bless them, they’re still there. Franklin: Yes, they are. Janicek: And still the same family owns it. Franklin: And still very delicious. Janicek: Yes, yes. Franklin: So the Uptown was the first commercial—major commercial district in Richland, right? Janicek: Yes, it was. And because they had wonderful, big parking lots all the way around the stores, people could just park and walk all the way around the square and get everything they needed. We had Stanfield florists and Parker hardware, and banks, and there was once a grocery store there, we had a theater—we had—everything you needed, you could get somewhere. And several shoe stores, jewelry, china and silverware—just—they just filled in everything that a person would need so that nobody had to go to Spokane or Seattle to shop anymore. Unless they really wanted to. Franklin: How long did your family own Dawson Richards? Janicek: Let me think. My father sold to his manager, his long-term manager, George Anderson, and George’s family. They bought out my father in the early ‘70s. And the store actually closed—ironically, the store closed in 1999 on its 50th anniversary. Franklin: So it was open for exactly 50 years. Janicek: Yes. And the gentleman who bought it—it’s now a much smaller store. The gentleman who bought it retained the Dawson Richard’s name, which tickled me to death, and he still sells tuxedos and letterman sweaters and jackets. And he also rents out tuxedos for weddings. Franklin: Oh, okay. Janicek: Then there were years when my father bought out the building—oh, I don’t know, bought or rented—the building next to Dawson Richard’s and they opened a women’s department called Lady Dawson. And so from inside Dawson Richard’s, you could just walk through to the ladies’ department. That was successful for a number of years. Eventually, they closed the boys’ department and then they closed the women’s department, and in the end, Dawson Richards was just men’s clothing. Franklin: Was that, probably, just because of competition from larger department stores? Janicek: Yes, we knew when Columbia Center was built that there would start to be more competition. Just a lot of people were going over to Columbia Center and while they were there they did all of their shopping. So a lot of people made a point of coming to Dawson Richard’s for one reason or another, but not necessarily for kids’ clothes. Franklin: Ah, it stopped being the destination in terms— Janicek: Correct. Franklin: Because there was now competition. Janicek: Yes, yes, yes. Franklin: Whatever part of Richland that is. Janicek: Yes. My dad had a policy of hiring as many high school kids as he could to sweep the floors, giftwrap at Christmas and Father’s Day and special events. So it was a really interesting gathering place not only for high school kids, but also they would come home from college and come back to see everybody. You know, if you wanted to see who’s who. And my father’s birthday was on Christmas Eve. And so everybody would come back and anybody who had ever worked at the store and not goofed up too badly, he would hire them just for two weeks. And they would see each other, and it was—and everybody came to see who’s home from college. And they would stand around and sing Happy Birthday during the day, and he’d have cake and punch in the backroom. It was very celebratory. Just lots of fun. A lot of fun to work at Dawson Richard’s or to just hang out there. The girls came in to get the chenille letters and numbers for their pep club and cheerleader outfits. People came in whether they bought anything or not. And he didn’t care, because he just loved people. It was a fun place to grow up. Franklin: Did anything change in terms of the store, Uptown, or—when Richland became a private—yeah, a privately-owned city? Janicek: Not specifically that I can think of. I was in high school at the time, and I remember that Richland became a Model US City. We had a day at Richland High School where a number of the seniors shadowed a Richland official for a day. So we had somebody shadowing the mayor and each of the city council members and the fire chief and the police chief and the city engineer and all of that. And went to—I was the city librarian for a day. And we all went to the city council meeting, in celebration of Richland becoming an independent city. And the other thing that I remember is that we were able to buy our house. Because always we rented. Richland was very much subsidized by the government. We had free garbage and free utilities and—I don’t know if the phone was free, but—just a lot of things that they took care of for us in the good old days. Franklin: Right. But you said they—do you think the attitude was more celebratory, or did the people miss some of those amenities that had been provided for? Janicek: I’m sure that people missed some of the amenities and realized it was going to cost them more money to live than it used to. But they—I think they also appreciated having choices. Originally, when we came, you can’t live in Richland unless you had a job, because everybody rented their house from the government. If you didn’t have a job, you left. So if people went to jail or were alcoholics and just didn’t—excuse me—[COUGH]—didn’t measure up, then they were booted out of town. So there were a lot more choices for people. We—old Richland, no one had a garage, because the city—the government didn’t build garages; they just built houses. And so nobody had an attic. Nobody had grandparents living there. It was all young families. Which was interesting way to grow up. I’m sorry. [COUGH] Franklin: It’s okay, and there’s water right next to you, too. Janicek: Oh, splendid. I didn’t even see it. Franklin: What other kinds of civic activities or business activities was your father involved in? Janicek: Well, as I said, he started out with being on the city council and being elected mayor, because he was very outgoing and because of his experiences as a store manager for Montgomery Ward’s, he was kind of a natural leader. So he was involved for a few years with what later became United Way. He got on the school board in about 1951, and he was there for 13 or 14 years. The people on the school board kind of took turns being the president, but he got involved in a lot of school things. He was a co-founder of the Bomber Boosters. He was instrumental in the first and the second remodeling of Richland High School and the building of the Dawald Gym. And he was one of the schoolboard members who advocated for building Hanford High School, which was very controversial, because a lot of people just wanted all their kids to grow up as Richland Bombers. That was kind of a sacred thing to be in the old days. It was sort of like, those other people, they have to go to Hanford. But that worked out. Hanford was an unusual school, because it was high school, junior high, and grade school—all 12 grades, well, plus kindergarten. Then later, when Sacajawea was torn down and rebuilt up in the Richland Village, then they removed the grade school from Hanford. And then Chief Jo Junior High School had been closed for a number of years, and they remodeled it and reopened it. And then moved the junior high kids out of—I don’t think—I think Hanford is just high school now, and all the junior high kids are back in either Chief Jo or Carmichael, which is what it was when I was growing up. So he was mostly involved in things having to do with kids and families. He sponsored a Little League baseball team, he sponsored and after-high school basketball league for young men who lived and worked around the Tri-Cities, and—what else did he do? Oh, his business sponsored all of the broadcasts of the Richland Bomber football and basketball games. He was very close friends with all of the coaches at Richland High School. In the old days, when the Richland Bombers went to the state basketball tournament, they were driven in cars. And so my dad and the coaches would put a couple of boys in the back of the car and drive over to Seattle. It was a four days, double-elimination, huge tournament at the Hec Edmundson Pavilion at the UW campus. So, he got to know all of the players as well as the coaches. Just loved that—more of getting to know everybody in the community. He just was that kind of guy. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Okay. Well, that’s great. So tell me about growing up in the government town of Richland and what kind of—what your impressions were when you first moved— Janicek: My earliest impressions—we lived in south Richland for the first year and a half. We lived in an F House, which is a single-family two-story. And our street was only one block long—Atkins. My first recollection is that there were no garages, so everybody parked in the street. But everybody—families only had one car. The men didn’t drive to work at Hanford; there were buses that came through. There were three shifts, so Hanford was running 24 hours a day. There were three shifts: the day shift, the evening shift, and the overnight shift or graveyard. So the buses would come through and pick up the workers at corners and guys would all be there with their metal lunch pails and you’d see them going off. And then they’d come back, I don’t know, nine or ten hours later and drop them off, because it was quite a drive to Hanford. So the family car stayed at home, but a lot of them—and most of the mothers stayed at home. Very few women worked; some of them worked at Hanford or in some of the businesses, but most of them didn’t. And a lot of them didn’t drive. So the cars just sat there all day and were only used after Dad came home from work, or to go shopping on Saturday, or to go to church on Sunday. There were a lot of churches in the community, which I thought was kind of interesting. Lots of denominations. My family was Episcopalian, and it was a few years before we got our own church, and so the Richland Lutheran church let us have our services in the basement of their church. So our services were on folding metal chairs with little kneeling pads on the cement floor. It was a little chilly, but it was very kind of them to let us do that until we had our own church. But there were—and we had a lot of Protestant churches called Central United Protestant, Southside United Protestant, Westside United Protestant. But actually, if you asked someone or looked carefully, one of them was more Methodist, one of them was more Presbyterian; some of them, I didn’t know what they were. They weren’t in my neighborhood and I didn’t know kids that went to them until I got to high school. It was a very insular community in a lot of ways. You knew all the kids in your neighborhood, and all the kids in your school, which was—they were neighborhood schools. If you went to church, and most people did, you knew the kids that were in your church. But as a young child, we had no idea what everybody’s father did. We knew that most of them worked at Hanford, but we had no idea whether the father was a truck driver or a manager or a clerk or a—you know, scientist. That was beyond us. We never asked, and nobody ever talked about it. So, the kids in my class—when my class graduated in 1960, there were about 417 of us. And for the most part, if you didn’t ask, you didn’t really know what the other parents did. I knew most of the business community and a lot of those people had kids. People that owned the stores, and groceries and gas stations. One of my best friends in high school was the step-daughter of the man who managed the Desert Inn, which is now the Hanford House. It was neat to sleep over at her house, because she lived in the hotel. [LAUGHTER] And you could swim in the pool, and you had all your meals in the hotel dining room. Franklin: Oh, wow. Janicek: It was really different. Most of the time, there was no public transportation. There were a few years when there was a city bus, and I don’t know—I was young; I was maybe fourth grade, fifth grade, and I remember taking the bus in the summertime to the city library. And I would sit and read books all day in the library, and then I would come home at dinner time. It was one of the things I loved to do, because I was a very bookish person. And then one year, they stopped having the buses. I don’t know whether they—and it only cost—I don’t remember if they were free, or they cost a dime or something, but it was certainly not restrictive in any way. That was fun. I remember just—even as a pretty young kid—that the Richland Community House on George Washington Way had pool tables in the back for the adults, but every Friday night they had square dancing for the kids. So all the kids would go and learn to square dance. There were a number of callers and you’d be there for a couple of hours. That was a really fun community thing to do, and that was a way to meet people who didn’t live in your neighborhood or didn’t go to your school. The town was full of young families with young children. I think the only older people who were there were either highly skilled technical men who came with their wives and either they didn’t have children or the children had already left home before they moved to Richland. Then some of the older couples, the man was in management. A few of the older couples, the women were scientists or engineers or technologists. There were some, you know—we now are learning—some highly skilled women out there that kind of disappeared into the woodwork. Nobody knew anything about them. One of the curious things that I did not realize for many years is how—I don’t know what to say. Almost everybody in the community when I was growing up was—I hate to say it—but they were white. And I didn’t know any—I didn’t know any, any blacks, any Asians, any—well, there was one Hispanic family that went to my high school, two girl cousins, that were in my class in grade school. And then I guess they must have moved to another part of town, because then I didn’t ever see them in junior high or high school. There were a few black families that I got to know, partly because they would shop in my father’s store, and partly because—when I went to Chief Jo Junior High, the PE classes were separate: girls’ PE and boys’ PE, and they had a big curtain they drew down the middle of the gymnasium so that we wouldn’t see each other in our shorts or whatever it was. But there would be a six-week session where we danced. And we all learned how to waltz and, I don’t know, whatever the jitterbug had evolved to in the ‘40s—or in the ‘50s, rather. That’s when Fats Domino and Chubby Checker were coming out, and eventually Elvis. So we were all learning to do the twist and all those things—they were fast and loud. And that was fun, because if you had that in PE for six weeks, you learned how to do that stuff, and you didn’t feel like such a dorky wallflower. There was one boy in my PE class who was black. And so when it was time for the dancing, everybody would choose their partners. And I was the tallest girl in the school and wore glasses until the ninth grade when I was the first person to get contact lenses. But anyway, so he and I were usually left close to the end of who choses who for a dance partner. Which was perfectly fine with me. I didn’t care. I didn’t have any prejudices, any reasons to feel any different about him than about anybody else in the class. And he was actually polite and nice and, you know, dressed nicely and cleaned up. He didn’t talk much; I think he was probably more shy and scared than I was. But it was an interesting experience, because—it was fine with me, you know? We danced, talked a little bit. But it was the only time I ever saw him. I didn’t—I don’t think we had any classes together. So I didn’t run into him very often. Franklin: Did he go to the school with you? Janicek: Oh, yeah, he went to Chief Jo. Well, you have to remember that when I first moved to Richland, there was Camp Hanford that was a military camp north of town. And there was a—at one time Richland had the largest trailer park in the country. And I’ve forgotten now—I think it was 50,000 trailers. I think, for the most part, those trailers didn’t have kitchens or bathrooms, because people ate in—maybe they did. I don’t remember, because I wasn’t in them. But they had big mess halls where people ate and they fed—I mean, they had constant food. They were either cooking or cleaning up all the time because they couldn’t feed everybody at once. And then they had bathhouses in among the trailer camp where people—just kind of like when you go to an RV park, you go to the toilets and sinks and showers. And I don’t know—maybe some of the larger trailers had those things. But I know there were small trailers that didn’t. They looked like campers, with no plumbing and—I don’t even know what they did for lighting. But between the military and the construction workers who lived north of town, there were some black families. And so I have no idea what that fella’s family did. But then we had the Brown family. When I was in junior high and high school, we had two basketball stars. And basketball was as big at Richland High School as it was in the state of Indiana. [LAUGHTER] We were Hoosiers West, maybe, I don’t know. But Norris Brown and his younger brother, CW Brown, were outstanding basketball players. They played on the Richland basketball teams, and they were among those basketball players that my parents and the coaches drove to Seattle for the tournament every year. They were the nicest guys. Now, the—I don’t think there were any black girls in Richland at that time, but there were a lot of black people who lived in Pasco. And so they did their socializing, I think, with people who lived in Pasco. And I didn’t know for many years that Kennewick was a—I don’t know, they call it, now they call it a sundowner town, that all the blacks had to be out by the time the sun went down. Had no idea! But there was a place where kids went to dance on the weekends and it was called Hi-Spot. And they would advertise on the radio, and everybody listened to the radio. That’s how you found out what all the popular music was. And so they would advertise: everybody come to Hi-Spot for dancing and—I don’t know. I never went, so I don’t know, but I’m guessing maybe they had light refreshments there. Anyway, everybody was invited to come. So, Norris and CW Brown went with girlfriends who I’m assuming were from Pasco, and they were thrown out because it was after dark, and this was in Kennewick. Richland was horrified. I mean, number one, we had no idea that Kennewick had these laws. And number two, these guys were our heroes. They were winning basketball games for us, and they, number three, they were extremely nice and polite and good students and—you know, there was absolutely no reason that you wouldn’t want to have them at a teenage gathering. I think—and this is only my person opinion—but I think that that’s where a good deal of the Richland/Kennewick rivalry started. Because the Richland people were so incensed that our heroes were thrown out of town. And that was in the late ‘50s. Let’s see. CW was one or two years ahead of me—two, I think. So that would have been, like, I don’t know, ’56, ’57, ’58. And Norris had graduated, but CW was on the team that in March of 1958 won the state basketball championship, which was just the hugest thing that had happened to Richland, probably since the beginning of time. It was just a really big thrill. And I was at that tournament, and I was at that game. And it was the biggest thing that had happened to me, too. I was so excited for my team. Because always the state had been dominated by all of the Seattle and Tacoma teams, for the most part, and sometimes a couple from Spokane. And so poor little old Richland that was stuck out in the desert and nobody knew about Richland in particular and nobody wanted to go there. [LAUGHTER] What are these kids doing in our sacred basketball tournament? And we won the whole thing. And that was just very exciting. And CW Brown was on that team. Another member of that team was John Meyers. John Meyers was this—he was built like a Douglas fir. He was just big all over—tall and large. And he was the star of my dad’s Little League baseball team. His father was the assistant manager. And he regularly hit homeruns and broke the bat. Regularly. I used to go to a lot of the Little League games, and that was really fun to watch. John Meyers was a star on the basketball and football teams at Richland High School. He played at least two sports—I’m not sure about baseball—but at least he played two sports at the University of Washington where he went for four years, and then he was drafted into the NFL. He played most of his career for the Philadelphia Eagles. So we had a local celebrity. One of several local celebrities that we had. So that was a really—I just loved following sports, and then, I, myself became a Washington Husky. Went with them to the Rose Bowl which John Meyers played in, in January of 1961. And then I ended up marrying a guy from Notre Dame, and so we’re big football fans. [LAUGHTER] We’ve had Seahawks tickets for 19 years. [LAUGHTER] Just was destined to be, I guess. Franklin: Yeah. What do you remember about civil defense in the Tri-Cities? Do you remember going through defense drills at school? Janicek: What I remember—there are two different aspects that I remember. When I was—most of the time, after the first year-and-a-half of living in south Richland and going to Lewis and Clark, we moved to north Richland and I went to Jefferson grade school, and then Chief Jo Junior High and Richland High School, which we always called Col High, and most of us in our hearts, it’s still Col High and not Richland. But we would have air raid drills maybe once a month at Jefferson. And we would—every class would march out into the hallway where we would lie down on the floor next to the wall. We would lie absolutely flat on our stomachs with our head resting on one arm, and I think maybe that was partly to protect our eyes. And then the other hand behind our necks to protect our spinal cord, I guess. I’m not sure that would have done any good if the Russians had actually bombed us. Because we truly believed that there was a good chance that we were going to be bombed by the Russians. We truly did. And so those were serious, civil defense drills. Franklin: You mean we as in you believed the Russians would bomb America, or Hanford specifically? Janicek: Well, we thought that the Russians would bomb America, but that Hanford was a really good target. Because of—by then it was known that we were creating the plutonium for bombs and all of the nuclear activities going on out there. And we thought that, if Russia really wanted to take over the world, that they would want to take out all of the nuclear facilities so that we wouldn’t be able to fight back or build up our defenses to eventually fight back. The other thing I remember—excuse me—[COUGH]—about civil defense is that every so often, we would have drills where every neighborhood was told where to go, get in your car and drive out into the desert to get out of town, get away from Hanford. And they would have those—I don’t remember—maybe once a year. I don’t think we had them more often than that. But you were always cautioned to keep your gas tank at least half full, because there wouldn’t be time to go fill up if we all had to evacuate town. Now, I suspect that there was a second reason for those drills, and that is in case anything went wrong and something blew up at Hanford, like Chernobyl. We had an inordinate amount of faith in our government and our scientists and engineers and our leaders at Hanford, and believed they would keep us safe. And Hanford actually has an amazing safety record. Very few things went wrong and caused any difficulties. But I suspect that if something had happened at Hanford, that those evacuation routes would have—and those evacuation routes were marked for a number of years. Eventually the signs all disappeared. But you knew where your neighborhood was supposed to drive to. Franklin: Interesting. Where was your neighborhood supposed to drive to, do you remember? Janicek: Well, it was long before I was old enough to drive a car: I was in grade school. And I didn’t even know where I was when I was out of town. I didn’t know which way was up, down, or west, or south. I’m guessing, since we lived on McMurray in north Richland, we probably went west. Franklin: Ah. And when we moved up to north Richland, did you also live in an alphabet house, or did you— Janicek: Yes, we lived in a Q house. The houses on McMurray were all Qs and Rs. And they were all three-bedroom, one-story houses with a full basement, whereas the old houses—the old alphabet houses, As and Fs and many of the others—had a half-basement and then a three- or four-foot high wall in the basement of cement blocks, and then there was dirt behind that. And then some people, after they bought their homes, would dig out—it was called digging out—the basement. But we had a full basement, and really nice backyard. Franklin: And is that the house that your parents bought when Richland— Janicek: We were living in that house and then bought it, yes, when Richland sold. One of the tough things about living in Richland is that there was no air conditioning. The houses had swamp coolers, which also were called squirrel cages. They were great, big, huge things that attached to a window and made a lot of noise. It sounded like metal blades going around, very noisy, and water ran through them to cool the air. Well, that made the houses not—it didn’t cool the houses that much, but it made them very humid. So, sometimes, you forgot you were living in a desert or a semi-arid desert, because it was very humid along with the heat, and very uncomfortable. But my father’s store had refrigerated air conditioning. It was one of the first buildings to have that. I’m guessing that the hospital and—well, no, the hospital used to be little funny buildings. I’m guessing maybe the hotel had it, and maybe some restaurants. But, yeah, that was another reason that people liked Dawson Richards, because it was cool inside on hot days. [LAUGHTER] But that was difficult. And we had a lot of summers when the temperature was over 100 degrees. And, like now, we had some winters when it got down far below freezing, down to -10 or even 0 a couple of times. One of the other interesting weather things about living in Richland in the olden days is when you had the big dust storms, or the termination winds as some people called them, you would have great big huge clumps of sagebrush flying through town about five to ten feet off the ground. And one time, a sagebrush—I have never seen this since—a sagebrush as big as a Volkswagen lodged in front of our front door, and we couldn’t get in and out our front door. Because it had blown in and was kind of stuck to the doorknob and whatever we had around the front door. And we couldn’t budge it. We couldn’t grab a big enough piece, or reach in far enough to grab one of the main stems or limbs of the sagebrush to pull it out. So we’d all have to run around and go in and out the back door. But the worst part of the winds, or one of the worst parts, was the dust, because it got in your eyes. And people were starting to get contact lenses. And that was just absolutely murderous, to have all that dust blowing in your eyes and getting behind your contacts. And people would go around with tears running down their faces from--[LAUGHTER]—from how painful the dust was in their eyes. And people wore sunglasses day and night to try and protect their eyes. Of course, as Richland built up and got more civilized and more of the empty lots became houses with yards and grass and trees and flowers, then the dust was not as thick as it used to be. Some of the dust storms were blinding. They were like blizzards. Oh, and that reminds me. My first winter in Richland, the winter of ’49-’50, we had a blizzard that was so bad they would not let any children leave the school until their parents came and picked them up. Well, the dads worked at Hanford and travelled by bus, so it was a while before—I imagine they probably let them go home early to get their kids. I don’t know that, but I’m guessing. And we would all be waiting at the school until the parents showed up. It was not a problem for my parents, because I’m sure in a blizzard they weren’t selling any clothing, so they just came and picked us up. But it was really bad. I just read—the old Richland Bombers have an online Sandstorm. The Sandstorm was the school newspaper, and we have an online Sandstorm that comes out every single day of the year. And it mentions birthdays and anniversaries of people—married classmates—and announces deaths of classmates and also of favorite teachers. Somebody in the online Sandstorm only a day or two ago wrote about—and I never heard this story before, so I do not know if it’s truly true—but wrote about a father who came and picked up his little boy at school during the blizzard, and didn’t have a car. And so they were walking home and they got lost in the blizzard and were found frozen to death the next day. I had never heard that before, but I could believe that, because you could not see anything. Absolutely. It was dreadful. I remember that. I have a real good visual memory, and I remember exactly what that looked like. It was fearful. Franklin: Wow. Janicek: Yup. Franklin: Wow. Janicek: Yup. Franklin: So you said you graduated in 1960. Janicek: Yes. Franklin: And then later on you came back to Hanford? Janicek: Yes, I went to University of Washington for four years. And I developed this passion for Afghanistan. So I decided the only way—and I had spent a summer in Europe and did all of that and had a good time. But I don’t know why, I really wanted to go to Afghanistan. I had studied about it, I had written reports, read books. So I joined the Peace Corps and I said, don’t send me any place but Afghanistan. Well, in those days, you took all the tests and if they decide you were qualified—they’d never had anybody ask for Afghanistan, but they had programs in Afghanistan. So I went through Peace Corps training for three months and then went to Afghanistan. And I taught English in a girls’ high school. While I was there, I met and married my husband, who was from New York and Notre Dame, and I never would have met him if I’d stayed in Richland or even in the state of Washington. So we had this very unusual Afghan wedding that was written about in the paper last year when we celebrated our 50th anniversary. So we came back and he went to graduate school at Purdue. So we lived in Indiana from ’66 to ’78, twelve years. And our three children were born there. And then we lived in Indiana. His parents were in New York and mine were in Washington, and the kids never knew any of their relatives, they never got—and we said, well, this isn’t good. So we want to go one way or the other. There were a lot of reasons why we didn’t want to live on Long Island. It was overcrowded with traffic and polluted air and polluted water, and just a lot of reasons it didn’t appeal to us. So we came out to visit my parents, and my husband interviewed at Hanford and got two job offers. So we ended up moving to Richland in 1978. So for marrying a guy from New York who you met in Afghanistan, I never would have thought that my children would graduate from my high school. But they did. So we had three little Richland Bombers in the family besides their mom. Franklin: And where did you live when you came back to Richland? Janicek: When we came back, we moved into an A house on Thayer. And it was an A house—that’s the two-story duplex—but it had been converted by the previous owner into a one-family house. So we had more bedrooms and more living space and an unusual-shaped yard, and lived on Thayer, a half a block from Van Giesen. Franklin: What did you and your husband do at Hanford? Because you said you— Janicek: Well, he’s a mechanical engineer. So he started out doing mechanical engineering things. He was involved in robotics. He spent most of his career in the Tank Farms and was a design authority for a number of years before he retired. I began as a tech editor. Became a tech writer editor, and then had several stints as a manager of editors and word processors. And we were producing all of the huge reports coming out of Hanford, mostly reporting on cleanup. Cleaning up spills in the ground, cleaning up buildings—goodness. I worked on documents that were 6,000 pages long. Mostly online editing. When—at the height of the publications flurry at Hanford, we had 100 employees in our department. About 50 editors and about 50 word processors. But as time went on, the editors started editing online, and then we didn’t need word processors. Originally we would edit with a red pen, and then the word processors would type in all of our changes. But that morphed into just editing online. I absolutely loved my job. For 27 years, I worked with engineers and scientists and technical people. I felt like it brought me closer to my husband, because I had no technical background at all. But I had very good communication skills and had studied three other languages, and so I have a lot of good ideas about how English should be spoken and written. And really enjoyed doing that for 27 years. Franklin: 27 years. So then you retired in 2005? Janicek: No, I retired—he went to work in ’78; I went to work in ’80. So I retired December 2007. Franklin: Okay. And how many different contractors did you work for? Janicek: Well, when I originally came, we both worked for Rockwell. And in fact I worked on the Rockwell proposal when their contract was up. And that was a fascinating experience, because I got to work with national vice presidents of Rockwell. We spent the last three months at a secret facility in Downy, California putting the proposal together. I got to walk through a mockup of the shuttle—the space shuttle that they had built. Oh, now I forgot the question. Franklin: The different contractors. Janicek: Oh, yes, yes, yes. So after Rockwell ended up—it was a political thing, and Rockwell lost that contract. The contract went to Westinghouse and Boeing. Westinghouse was already here, but they won the larger contract that Rockwell had. And then the computer functions, including the editing and the graphics and all of the communication things were given to Boeing as a subcontractor to Westinghouse. So then my second employer was Boeing Computer Services. And then the next eight years or so later, the contract was up again, and that was when they went to about 13 different contractors, half of them inside the wall so to speak, and half of them outside. And at that time I went to work for—my job was still the same, and all of my management was the same, but it was just a different name on the paychecks for the company that owned us, and that was Lockheed Martin. And I was still working for Lockheed Martin when I retired. Franklin: How had Richland changed from when you had graduated to when you came back and began to work for Hanford? Janicek: Well, first of all, when I came back, a lot of the business had moved to Columbia Center, and there were empty buildings, and aging businesses in downtown Richland. It had spread out a lot in all directions. People were living in West Richland and in South Richland and in North Richland and all over the place. And that’s just Richland. I mean, Kennewick grew enormously; Pasco has grown enormously. So I had to kind of get used to driving and living in a much bigger city. And I have to laugh at myself, because even today, I mostly drive—I have it in my mind, a skeleton of the roads that I used when we lived here, when I first got my driver’s license in high school and drove around the Tri-Cities. And I kind of stick to those roads, because they’re the ones I know the best, and you know, they’re my old favorites. But one of the things I noticed is that a lot of people moved into the Tri-Cities who didn’t necessarily work for Hanford. And so you didn’t have that little small town, we’re-all-in-this-together feeling. You know, when people first came to Richland to work at Hanford, as I said, there were no grandparents, no relatives. We all kind of stuck together because nobody knew anybody; we all came as strangers and we came from all over the country. And so there was a real closeness. And I see that in the older classes that write into the online Richland Bomber Sandstorm every day, the alumni newsletter. By the time my kids were in high school and graduating, a lot of that closeness was gone. You didn’t know everybody in your neighborhood; you didn’t know everybody in your church if you went to church; you didn’t know all the kids in your classroom; you didn’t necessarily know the parents; you didn’t know whether your friends had younger or older brothers and sisters. It just was a lot more socially scattered, I would call it. One of the things I’m pleased about is there’s a lot more diversity in the Tri-Cities now. You have people from all parts of the world, all races, colors, creeds, religions. Which is really good. I have to laugh at my kids, because we made sure they grew up without any prejudices. They have had friends—they’re all adults now in their 40s. They have had friends of all different colors, races, and creeds. It tickles me to death that we succeeded in raising them that way, because it’s only right. What else is different about the Tri-Cities? Well, every day I open the paper and I read about businesses I didn’t know were there. All the years I worked at Hanford, I didn’t have time to go driving around and shopping and looking around. So I—there are dozens and dozens of restaurants I’ve never been to. One of the things that really confuses me is, because the Tri-Cities has grown so rapidly, there are many, many, many neighborhoods that I’ve never heard of the street names before. And when I hear about something being on a certain street, I have no idea where that street is. I have to get out the phone book and hope I can find it on the map. And I’ve also noticed that there are—in the old days, there was a lot more respect for Hanford than there is now. There are a lot of people in the Tri-Cities who are very anti-Hanford. They think either it’s evil or—well, it’s dangerous. That’s always true. We had—when I lived—when I worked at Hanford, we had a really good safety culture. We had safety drills, we knew what all the different sirens meant, whether they meant shelter-in-place or get out and run for your life. What’s going on and what are you supposed to do about it. I think some of that safety culture is lost, because the people who lived and worked here forever have been laid off or have retired or moved on one way or another. We don’t have that close confidence anymore that we’re all doing the right thing for the right reasons, and keeping each other safe. Some of that has been lost, and I see sometimes that people—new hires come in—and I saw this when I was working there—that sometimes new hires would come in, and they wouldn’t take safety as seriously as we thought they should. And, you know, once in a while somebody does something careless that gets them in trouble. There were very strict rules, and I edited a lot of those safety documents about procedures: how you did things, how you had to do things, double-checks and triple-checks on things that sometimes people kind of rolled their eyes and thought, oh, yeah, here we go. But in fact, those things kept you safe if you followed them correctly. Franklin: It only takes one accident to— Janicek: Yes. Franklin: Do you think that that record of safety or the view of safety and the approach to safety changed as Hanford’s mission changed from one of production to a little more kind of opaque mission of cleanup? Janicek: I don’t think so, because the people actually involved in the cleanup or, like me, I was reading about all of the dangers in all of the cleanup as I was editing the documents. I think that a lot of us were always impressed with how dangerous it could be and how close we were to somebody goofing up and causing an accident. And certainly, I think right before we came here was when they had the McCluskey incident where Harold McCluskey was badly exposed. It’s just astounding to me how well they were able to clean him up and keep him alive and how long he lived, and he actually died of a condition that he had before the accident ever happened. And that actually boosted my confidence that they were doing all the right things. I’ve been in buildings—I had a Q clearance for a while—I’ve been in building that were very restricted and—not passwords, but keypads and patrol and safety people and intelligence people and all kinds of things to try and prevent terrible things from happening. Whether it was just luck or whether it was good management, those things, for the most part, didn’t happen. I mean, Harold McCluskey was the only one—there have been some accidents where people have fallen and died or have been badly injured. Or I remember one time when they were cutting into a pipe that they didn’t—either they didn’t have the correct information or they didn’t take it seriously. And they cut into this pipe that was supposed to be empty and harmless, and it was full of hot burning steam. It hit these two guys right in the face. I don’t remember if they lived or not; I’m suspecting maybe they didn’t. But I’ve—that was a few years ago when—I just don’t remember now. Many of us have always been aware of the potential for accidents. Sometimes people coming in from other places, if they didn’t work in dangerous situations before, they had to adjust their thinking or they might get in trouble if they—every once in a while, either a person or a company self-reports that we screwed up and didn’t do something right. And they don’t do that often enough. I mean, we have whistleblowers with personal issues, and we have whistleblowers with true concerns and who have honestly seen something that needs to be corrected. I’m sure it’s very difficult to keep all of that in mind. We recently toured B Reactor, which was a fascinating experience. When you look at that huge, big thing and all of those fuel rods. And if you think about what little, innocent thing could have happened or some switch accidentally flipped and what it could have caused. You know, we all remember Chernobyl. I worked—I was in a volunteer group called the Hanford Family that was formed when they were shutting down N Reactor and it was about the same time that Chernobyl happened. A lot of people were really scared and concerned that the same thing could happen at Hanford. So I became their editor and communications person for this group. And one of the things I did was research and interview an expert and find out why it couldn’t happen here. And one of the things was the difference between boiling water reactors, BWR, and pressurized water reactors, PWR. And what they did at Chernobyl, you couldn’t do here. The reactor would not let you do it or it would shut down. And how these guys had overridden their own safety controls. Again, they didn’t take safety seriously enough or they didn’t understand the principles behind what they were doing and what they were causing. It was a terribly frightening time. But I published this lovely three-fold pink brochure about why Chernobyl can’t happen here, what’s different about our reactors from—and then we were just down to N Reactor and the power reactor, the Hanford Generating Station at Energy Northwest. It was an interesting experience to learn that stuff and to put it in language that regular people could understand and to hand it out at functions. We went to a fair in Yakima; we had a couple of things—big—I don’t know—exhibitions or shows that occurred in the Tri-Cities, and we had our little booth and handed out our information and told people about why that couldn’t happen here. That was an interesting experience. For a non-technical person, I appreciated getting information and putting it into a form that regular folks who didn’t work at Hanford or have any technical background could understand. I have no idea how effective the brochure was. But it was interesting to do. Franklin: Interesting. Did you do any other public relations work when you—at your job at Hanford? Or was that a— Janicek: Well, most of the time, I was editing big reports. I started after a very short period—I worked for several years with the BWIP project—Basalt Waste Isolation Project. That was the concept where we were going to bury the waste deep in the basalt. I first edited and then managed the editors who edited the environmental restoration—no, environmental assessment document and the—oh, goodness. Now I’ve forgotten what it was called. Two different versions, one of them was six volumes long about how we were going to safely contain the waste, and some of it had to do with Nevada, which has since [LAUGHTER] In fact, a lot of the waste was going to go to Nevada, and Nevada shut that off. I did have a very interesting experience. I was on a national committee that worked with DOE orders and directives. It had to do with information management, because Hanford and the other government facilities that did things nuclear had to send copies of their reports to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where they were kept and managed by the government. Some of them were classified and some were not. Most were not. This group would get together sometimes once a year, sometimes two or three times, and go over the DOE directives and bring them up to date on how to manage all this information. And I ended up writing parts of a DOE directive and editing other parts. I think you can still get those online. And I can open that up and see my very own words there. It kind of tickles me to see that. That was a really interesting project. And I got to go see—I got to go to Bethesda, Maryland and see where all of the energy reactors, like the one that we have at Energy Northwest—how they have to report in—I don’t know—I think every hour to let them know that everything’s all right. And I got to sit at this huge, big console where all of these Hanford and Oak Ridge and Argonne in Illinois and WIPP project in New Mexico and the Nevada Test Site and—anywhere there was a reactor, all the lights flashing and the buttons and the hourly reporting in. They actually monitor that to be sure that nothing—there are not going to be any surprises or any Chernobyls. That was kind of an interesting thing to see. Franklin: Oh, cool. Janicek: It was. Franklin: Is there anything that I haven’t asked you about that you’d like to talk about in your interview? Janicek: Oh, I remember the Columbia River floods. Before we had all the dams and maybe even before the dikes were built—I’m not sure when they were built. The year before we moved to Richland, I lived—we lived in Vancouver, Washington. And there was a little community on the floodplain between Vancouver and Portland on the Columbia River called Vanport. When the river flooded, the spring of ’48, the water came up—maybe to the roof lines of those—it was low income housing and I suspect it was for guys who had just gotten out of World War II and were trying to build their lives and they had young families. The flooding was—it was just really terrible. I remember that and the pictures, partly because my father was one of many people who volunteered to patrol against looting. They would go out at night in motorboats. And he had a pistol that he kept for years. [LAUGHTER] We knew where it was hidden, but we never told our folks that we knew. [LAUGHTER] And we never touched it. Because they had to evacuate everybody, of course. And I have no idea whether people died or were injured during that flooding. But one of the memorable aspects of it was that there was a Jantzen Knitting Mill in that same area. And Jantzen’s old logo was of a woman in a one-piece bathing suit and a swimming cap diving. And she was—it was a huge sign and it was on top of the Jantzen building, and when the flooding came, the Jantzen Knitting Mills flooded and she looked like she was diving into the water in the flood. It was just really cool! [LAUGHTER] It was a picture they showed all over the United States. So then the next year, we came to Richland in the spring of ’49 and people were all talking about the ’48 flood and how bad it was. But I remember a couple of floods that were just about as bad after we moved here. At that time, the only way to get between Richland and Kennewick was on what we called the old river road, which goes through Columbia Park now. And so that road completely flooded. You couldn’t get through there. So leaving Richland, you would have to drive south over the hills and there were just—I don’t know, farm roads, probably—and go all the way around to get to south Kennewick and then come back into Kennewick. And even worse if you had to go to Pasco. Because the flooding really messed things up. And then some of those river floods would pick up a lot of trees and limbs from the shoreline, as the—and they would have rattlesnakes on them. For some reason, because of how the Columbia River turns when it gets to what was then called Riverside Park and is now called Howard Amon, a lot of those trees and tree limbs would lodge into the bank and all of the sudden we had rattlesnakes all over the park. So that was kind of interesting. [LAUGHTER] Scary! Opportunity for people to go out and see snakes or capture snakes or get rid of them, because rattlesnakes are serious business. But that was one of the things I remember about some of the problems with climate that we had in the good old days. Franklin: The good old days. Janicek: Oh, goodness. What else do I remember? Franklin: Did you go to any of the Atomic Frontier Days? Janicek: Oh! Yes! Well, especially after we moved to McMurray and I was going to Jefferson School, because Jefferson was right across from the Uptown area and I walked that area every day, knew it very well. And we would have parades for Atomic Frontier Days on George Washington Way. And in the really old days, when there was still a Camp Hanford in North Richland, that parade included—I remember a huge, big—I think it was called Red Dog—looked like a missile or a rocket or something. And then there were some smaller rockets, weapons. And they would haul them through town as part of the parade. And that was kind of fun and interesting to see, because my dad didn’t work at Hanford and wasn’t involved with the military. So that was all new to me and fascinating to see. They had a beard-growing contest. I think the Richland Atomic Frontier Days were usually in August and all the guys would grow beards for the month of August, and they had—I don’t know, some things for kids to do and things for adults to do, and clowns and a few floats. You know, you always had a Miss Atomic Frontier Days, which later became Miss Tri-Cities. That was a rather special event that happened. People would go by and throw candy on all the kids—kids would be there with their tricycles. We would decorate our tricycles with crepe paper strips, or put playing cards in the wheels so they would go click, click, click when the wheel went around and decorate. Sometimes they would decorate up the wagons and put wagons behind the tricycles. So we’d have a lot of tricycles and some bicycles lining the streets of George Washington Way as the parade went by. That was a fun thing to do. Franklin: Neat. Janicek: Yeah. Franklin: Well, Stephanie, thank you so much for talking with us today and sharing your stories about growing up in Richland and working at Hanford. They were wonderfully detailed and I really appreciate it. Janicek: Oh, well, thank you. I love to think back to the old days and just reading the online Sandstorm everyday kind of tweaks my memory and—old teachers and old friends, and like to pass these things on to my kids who grew up in such a different time and they don’t understand about being afraid the Russians were going to bomb you. [LAUGHTER] Some of the other things that went on that led to me being who I am today and led to Richland being what it is today. And I enjoy talking about it, and I realize that because of my father’s position, not as part of Hanford, but very much as a part of a community, that I have a lot of great memories. Because I’m fortunate to have a good memory, I still remember a lot of people’s names, a lot of businesses’ names, a lot of things that went on. When my father was on the school board, there was a little town and school at Mattawa, which—and those people served—that was when they were building Priest Rapids Dam and Wanapum Dam. So the school board, once a year, would get special, special, special permission to drive—they probably were escorted—to drive through the Hanford Site and go out to Mattawa and they would have one school board session that the teachers and the parents could attend who lived at Mattawa because they had no way of getting in to town for it, and that was part of the Richland School District. Now, today, Mattawa’s completely gone. I mean, everybody left and the buildings are pretty much all gone and doesn’t exist anymore. But I always thought that was very nice and very thoughtful that they arranged to be able to go out there once a year to meet with the staff and the families and see—address their concerns for educating the kids. Franklin: Yeah. Neat. Interesting. Well, thank you. Janicek: Welcome. Franklin: Okay. Vargas: That it? All right. <a href="https://youtu.be/js2YwuGWbrw">View interview on Youtube.</a> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:12:24 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317 kbps Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1949-1960 1978-today Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1980-2007 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Grover Dawson Jim Richards Sid Lanter’s Stanfield Parker George Anderson John Meyers Harold McCluskey Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Stephanie Janicek Description An account of the resource An interview with Stephanie Janicek conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 01-24-2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2017-04-12: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. Relation A related resource <a href="http://hanfordhistory.com/collections/show/28">Stephanie Janicek, Oral History Metadata</a> B Reactor Boeing Cat Dam Desert Energy Northwest Event Hanford Kennewick N Reactor Park River Rivers School Sport Sun swimming Tank Farm Tank Farms War Westinghouse https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fe4fc1a4c7495942bf447756ec5e85cfa.JPG d98e592b247db687cb3749711ea3df5b Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Douglas O’Reagan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Mark Jensen Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Douglas O’Reagan: Okay. To start us off, would you please pronounce and spell your name for us? Mark Jensen: My name is Mark Jensen, M-A-R-K, J-E-N-S-E-N. O’Reagan: Great. Okay. My name is Douglas O’Reagan. I’m conducting an oral history interview with Mr. Jensen on March 25th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be speaking with Mr. Jensen about his experiences working at the Hanford site and living in the Tri-Cities. To start us off, can you tell us a little bit about your life before you came to Hanford? Jensen: Well, my mother moved to Richland to teach English at what was then Columbia High School, now Richland High School. She was a single mother with five children. So I started school at Jefferson Elementary in Richland in kindergarten. When I was in third grade, my mother remarried, and I was adopted by my new father. He was a long-time Hanford worker. Anyway, so I grew up in the Tri-Cities. We moved to Kennewick when I went into fourth grade, and I went through the Kennewick School District after that, and graduated from Kamiakin High School in 1974. Went to Washington State University, got a degree in forestry, thinking that would get me out of the Tri-Cities, because there aren’t any forests here. Unfortunately, there weren’t any jobs in forestry. So I came back home to live with my parents, and my dad mentioned that N Reactor was hiring reactor operators. So I applied, and got a job as a reactor operator. O’Reagan: What time frame would it have been that your mother moved here? Jensen: I was five, so that would have been 1961. O’Reagan: Okay, great. Can you tell us about the schooling, the education, the schools in the Tri-Cities as you experienced them? Jensen: Well, I went to Jefferson Elementary, like kindergarten through third grade. It was in an old building left over from World War II. It was probably a grade school built as part of the Manhattan Project. That’s all long since been torn down. Then when we moved to Kennewick, I went to Hawthorne Elementary school there. Building’s still there as far as I know. And then to Vista Elementary, then to Highlands Middle School—Highlands Junior High in those days. Then the Kamiakin High School which was brand new. O’Reagan: What was life like as a kid in Kennewick? Jensen: It was pretty routine, I guess. Went outside and played in those days instead of staying inside for video games. It didn’t matter how hot it was outside, we’d go out and play baseball all day usually, and things like that. Then just going to school during the school year and doing whatever during the summer. When I was growing up, before my mother remarried, she would work in the summer and I was usually babysat by some of her students. After she remarried, then she stopped working during the summer. But I’m fairly certain that one of the reactor operators I worked with at N Reactor was one of my babysitters when I was second or third grade. But anyway. O’Reagan: When you were sort of a teenager, what sort of stuff did you and your friends do for fun around the area? Jensen: Usually, after doing our homework, we’d go outside and play basketball, every day, every night. We had a lighted basketball court. We’d play basketball all day Saturday and Sunday. When the weather was nicer, we’d play baseball or variants of baseball, since there were seldom enough people to make up a couple of teams. We used to go to baseball games—minor league baseball games—in the summer. A variety of different team names. There was a stadium in Kennewick called Sanders Jacobs Field that’s long since been demolished. That’s pretty much what we did, just mess around. Go bowling, things like that. O’Reagan: Do you know what your step-father did at the Hanford site? Jensen: He was a chemical engineer, and he worked at N Reactor and the older reactors designing systems for decontaminating the reactors. When I was in high school, he worked at the Tank Farms in the 200 Area. He was in charge of Tank Farm surveillance, and that was when the tanks started leaking—the older tanks first started leaking. So we got frequent telephone calls in the middle of the night that there was a leaking tank. Sometimes I’d hear my dad say something on the telephone, and the next day I would see that in the newspaper, as a Hanford spokesman said, kind of thing. That was kind of interesting. O’Reagan: So I guess you were aware of the future environmental issues pretty early on? Jensen: Yes. Yeah. O’Reagan: Did that impact your life at all? Or was it sort of in the background? Jensen: It’s just the way things were. O’Reagan: So when you came back and were looking for a job and you first heard about this job at N Reactor, did you—was that something you were sort of excited about? Was it something you were--? Jensen: It sounded interesting. I knew nothing about it. Not too many people knew reactor operators, although there were certainly plenty of them around here over the years. So I had no idea, really, what that job entailed. But it was a job, and it paid pretty good. So when it was offered to me, I accepted it. O’Reagan: What kind of skill sets did it end up requiring you to gain? Jensen: I had to learn a lot about how to operate complex systems, do valving in a precise, controlled manner so it was done correctly. Not so much working with pumps, other than checking to make sure they were running properly. I didn’t have to do maintenance kind of things. Then once I got my certification in the control room, I had to learn how to operate all of the systems, use the controls in the control room to do that, set everything up properly, and what to do in case of an emergency, or a reactor scram, or upset. Try and keep the reactor from scramming, things like that. O’Reagan: What kind of training was involved? Jensen: We started out, once we got into the certification program, we went into what we called phase one training. That basically started off with fundamentals training. We got some math and chemistry. Didn’t hurt that I had chemistry in college. It’s kind of funny—the week or two weeks we had in chemistry, I think I learned more than the two semesters of chemistry in college, because the instructor was so much better for the fundamentals class than the professor I had at college. But it might have also been because I was older and a little more mature. O’Reagan: Was that onsite at Hanford? Jensen: It was onsite at Hanford, out at N Reactor. We had some chemistry, math, a little bit of electronics, things like that. Started learning some of the various systems at the plant. Then we went back on shift for several months. I can’t remember now how long, I mean this is almost 40 years ago, so it’s kind of hard to remember everything. So when we went back on shift, we were given a packet of stuff that we had to study on our own and learn while we were assigned to do other jobs throughout the plant. Then we went back into class, into phase two, and studied more systems, and started learning how things in the control room worked. I can’t remember if there were four phases or three phases, but each time after a phase ended, we had an exit exam. Then we went back to shift, with more stuff to do in between the regular job stuff. At the end of all of the phases, we took an eight-hour written exam. Theoretically, if you failed the written exam, they could fire you. Or they could just reassign you as a non-certified operator. Some people did that after they failed. They just said they didn’t want to continue. But generally they gave you a second chance. Well, I passed the first time, so didn’t have to worry about that. O’Reagan: How long did that process take? Jensen: Started probably in February or March of ’81. I was completely certified in June of ’82. So it was probably about a year and a half for the total process. But they were in a hurry to get people certified, because there were a lot of older operators who were getting ready to retire. So they needed to get people in there and get some experience before they lost too many of the older, experienced operators. So after the eight-hour written exam, we had to study for what we called the demonstration exam. That was in the control room, and an instructor would say, okay, Mark, how do you set this console up for operation? You are going to do this job, show me without actually doing it--because it was in the real reactor—how you would do it. Later on, we had a simulator that was pretty much an exact duplicate of the reactor, and then you could actually do the things in the simulator. But for my demonstration exam, it was just point out what you would do. When we passed that exam, we actually got a pay raise. We went from what we called a Grade 18 to a Grade 21, and got a nice little bump in pay. Then you studied for your oral exam. That one, you went before an oral board. There was a representative from operations, a representative from training, and a representative from nuclear safety. They all had a certain set of questions to ask, and any one of them could come in at any time with follow-up questions. So that—I think that took me six hours. And I passed that, so then I was a certified operator. Except that operations would not sign your certificate until you demonstrated that you could handle the jobs. So when I went back on shift, I was assigned to an experienced operator. So we rotated through various positions in the control room, and I followed him around. Initially, he would do things and tell me what he was doing. Then he would have me do it, but he would tell me what to do. And then when he was pretty satisfied I knew what I was doing, he would just sit back and let me figure out what I was doing. And then he must have told the control room supervisor I was ready, control room supervisor told the shift manager I was ready, and the shift manager recommended that my certificate be signed by the manager of operations. Then I could sit on consoles all by myself. O’Reagan: So was there an influx of younger operators at that point? Jensen: Yes, we had quite a few coming through. My certification class, we had three supervisor candidates, and I think we had seven operator candidates. One of them ended up not completing it. All of the rest passed. Some of them, it took them a couple attempts at the eight hour and maybe even the oral board to get certified. Then right after me, there was another class with a lot of other young people. So we got a lot of young people in there, and then that allowed some of the older operators to retire. I think some of them were hanging around a little longer than they might have wanted to otherwise, just because they knew they would have been shorthanded if they left. O’Reagan: Was this all at N Reactor? Jensen: Yes. O’Reagan: Was it the same training program for all the reactors? Jensen: Well, N Reactor was the only reactor left at the time. They had similar programs at the older reactors. But it evolved over time and got a little more detailed. We had a little more stuff on reactor physics. In the original days, it’s just, this is what you’re going to do, and nobody asked why, because it was all secret. It’s just, do this and keep this needle within this range, or whatever. Later on, you actually started to teach people what was happening. Some of the old operators complained about having some reactor physics stuff in there. Wah, we don’t need this stuff. And they were so good that it’s like, I don’t know that they really did need that. They just knew what to do when something went wrong. But the theory is it never hurts to have too much knowledge. O’Reagan: How many people were working at a given time in the actual reactor? Jensen: In the control room, or—? O’Reagan: That, and also— Jensen: It’s easier for me to say in the control room, but I’ll estimate on the other. O’Reagan: Sure. Jensen: Minimal shift in the control room was three operators and a control room supervisor, but we generally had four. There were three positions that had to be manned 24 hours a day when the reactor was operating. One of them, the nuclear console, where you actually controlled the reactor power level, we rotated two people in and out on that: two hours on and two hours off. If you only had three, then, I think the control room supervisor could give you relief. But you weren’t allowed to be there for more than two hours at a time. The other two consoles, you could be there for the whole eight hours on a shift. After my class and the next one went through, they had enough operators that we could get six or more operators in there, which gave a lot more flexibility, both for giving breaks to people, because it can get hard to keep your focus all night long, particularly on graveyard shift, when the reactor ran itself, pretty much. You’re just looking at things to make sure everything’s normal. That gets hard to do. It doesn’t sound like it would be, but it is. It’s pretty—puts a strain on you. So we had more people to give breaks. And extra certified operators to go out throughout the plant and check things, because they could recognize problems that non-certified operators might not. So, let’s say six of us in the control room, a control room supervisor, a shift manager. They were both certified control room shift manager/operators also. So they could do anything in the control room we could. And on a typical shift, you usually had a couple of electricians, a couple of instrument technicians, three or four health physics technicians—radiological control technicians—we called them radiation monitors in those days. Plus supervisors for all of them. And maybe a handful of millwrights, pipefitters, whatever. Mostly, the maintenance people did their work when the reactor was shut down. There wasn’t very much for them to do when the reactor was operating. But there was always work for instrument technicians. They would come in, and if something wasn’t working right in the control room, we’d call them in and they would tinker with it and try to fix it. Things like that. Day shift, there were a lot more people on there. And then during a reactor outage, much more work going on, particularly or the maintenance people. Because that’s when they were tear pumps down and rebuild them and things like that. So there were probably, on days, a couple hundred people out there. On shift, maybe thirty. O’Reagan: Mm-hmm. So you’ve sort of been doing this, but could you walk us through a day in the life? What would sort of your average day involve? Jensen: Okay. I’d come to work in the morning, a little bit before eight. And if I were assigned to the control room, I would go in and receive a turnover from the operator whose console I was taking over. We had a schedule that rotated us through. So if you’re one or two, you’re on the nuclear console. If you’re three, you’re on the double-A console. If you’re number four, you’re on the BN console, and I do not know what BN stands for. We used to joke that it was short for boring, because it was the most boring of the three consoles when we were at full power. So if I’m going to be on the nuclear console, I’d come in and there’s an operator who’s ready to leave. He gives me a turnover, tells me what the power level is, if we’re going to be raising power, if we’re at full power, we’re just going to hold power, if there’s any areas of the reactor that seem to want to lose power or gain power. So I get the turnover and then I take over. If I was on the nuclear console, I would work for two hours, and the other operator would come in, and I would give him a turnover and he would take over. And then I would usually give breaks to the other operators, unless we had enough other people to give them breaks. Anytime you take over, you’d get a turnover for what’s going on. Worked the nuclear console for two days, then you’d go to the double-A console. The double-A console controlled the reactor pressure and the primary coolant pump speed, and sending steam to the Washington Public Power Supply System. So you had this big console, went around like this and like this, and there were separate sections for each of the steam generator cells. We had six—five operating at any one time. Occasionally we ran with four operating. We never did all six. There was a reason why; I can’t remember what the reason why was. But always had one in reserve. That one was a pretty busy console during startups and shutdowns. I had full power. It was look around, look at all of the drive turbines for the primary coolant pumps and make sure they’re running at the proper RPM, look at the pressurizer level and make sure it’s at 23 feet. Got very busy on a reactor scram—lots of stuff to do there. And after the day on the double-A console, we went to the BN console. That monitored the secondary coolant system, so we had water coming back from the Washington Public Power Supply System. We sent them steam, they sent back condensate to us. Then we had a secondary system to maintain the pressure of the main steam header. So we had to watch that, plus we had to watch the rupture monitor system, which would check the radiation levels in the coolant water outlet from the reactor tubes. There were 1,003 tubes with fuel in them. The system would compare the radiation level between two adjacent tubes, and if one of them was higher than the other, a red light would come on on this panel. Then you’d go over and push the button to reset it. They’re coming on and off all the time. But if we had a rupture, that meant there was a leak in the cladding on the fuel. Usually, it was a little small pinhole; sometimes—and I never saw this—the welded-on endcap would blow off. Uranium, normally, is not very soluble in water, but when the water’s really hot, then it’s really soluble. And we’re running at 600 degrees or so for the coolant water. So if you had a rupture, you could start dissolving the uranium very rapidly. That’s got all of the fission products in it from the uranium atoms that have split, which are highly radioactive. So you could completely contaminate the primary coolant loop. So you needed to catch a rupture before it progressed too far. That was a frustrating job because those lights are coming on and off all the time. You got to look at those, and it was kind of a bad design, because that panel was here, the other panel was over there, and you had to keep looking back and forth. So that’s why we’d call it the boring console. It was pretty boring at full power. A lot of work there, again, on a reactor startup. We had to set things up to control the main steam header pressure, and that was a lot of work. So it was kind of fun, then. But full power, it was kind of boring. After we cycled through, if we had more than four operators, then we’d have two days where we’re—you could either study, because we always had to maintain our certification, and we had quarterly requalification classes and every two years we had to recertify. Or you could just be assigned to go out in the plant and do various jobs, help out—if it’s needed somewhere, help out some of the operators who were still studying to be certified operators, help train them, things like that. And then you just kept rotating through that. If we had an outage, we only had two places manned in the control room. One was the double-A console, and the other one was the communications console. So you kept contact with everybody throughout the plant, and made PA announcements if need be. Just let people know what’s going on. If we were in charge/discharge operations, you might be assigned to work on the charge or discharge elevator, to set it up for refueling the reactor. Or just—if it’s not a charge/discharge outage or we’re already done with that, you might be going in the rod rooms and doing some valving to assist the millwrights who might be repairing control rod issues and things like that. O’Reagan: I saw you had some pictures there. Could you walk us through some of what those are? Jensen: Yeah. Here is a picture. I found this online in the Hanford system a while back, and I was really surprised. That’s me, and I don’t remember posing for this picture. But I am on the charge elevator here. This is the wall, and it’s opposite the reactor and it’s a shield wall and each of these things here are plugs. You can open one up on the elevator side and on the other side, there was a really large elevator called the W work elevator. It actually came off a World War II aircraft carrier for lifting airplanes up to the flight deck. They could pull a plug out there, and they would run a tube through this penetration. Then you would mate it up with the process tube in the reactor. That’s how you refueled. They must have had a photographer up there taking pictures to show other people what goes on there. That was my assignment, and so I obviously posed for this picture, but like I say, I don’t remember doing this at all. O’Reagan: Is that your usual outfit when you were working? Jensen: Yes. Those are called anti-C clothes, or—original Hanford terminology was SWP clothing, for Special Work Procedure. During World War II, you didn’t want to say that this was to protect against contamination, because this is all secret what we’re doing. So you’re doing a special work procedure, so you have to wear the special work procedure clothes. O’Reagan: So that’s a second pair of gloves there? Jensen: Yeah. I would be wearing two pairs of coveralls, a hood, two pairs of gloves and some rubber shoes. And underneath the rubber shoes there’s some canvas booties. So this is not a real high contamination job. If we were actually refueling the reactor, I’d be wearing plastic raingear over that. We used to wear a face shield to keep water out of our face. Later on, we had a hood with a blower unit that provided air so we didn’t suffocate, and that kept water off our face. So that’s about as good as I could get on the elevator. This picture was taken of our crew in the control room. We had started a straight day shift crew. It was so we had more time for training. We worked Monday through Thursday in the control room, and every Friday we had training. And the rotating shifts, when they came in on days, they worked Friday, Saturday and Sunday in the control room, and then during the week they had training. We formed up this brand new shift. They let it out by seniority, and there weren’t that many people who wanted to do it. Some people, strangely enough, really liked shiftwork. So I managed to get on the first crew. And on our very first day working together as a crew, we had what we call a WPPSS turbine trip—the Washington Public Power Supply System bought our steam, and they had two turbines, and one of their turbines tripped. That had happened before, and the reactor had never managed to ride through that without scramming. Well, we kept the reactor from scramming. And I was on this console here—this is the nuclear console. I was controlling the reactor power level. When their turbine dropped off, the main steam header pressure goes up. This is getting a little technical, but— O’Reagan: No, that’s great. Jensen: The main steam pressure goes up high. That sits on top of the steam generators. When the pressure’s high, water doesn’t boil as easily. And when water boils, you get heat exchange. So we are sending hotter water back through the reactor. That is not as good a moderator as the cooler water. So the reactor power went down very fast. So I had to start pulling control rods to make up for that. In low-enriched reactors, like any of the Hanford reactors, when you lose power rapidly, you start building up a fission product called xenon which is a neutron poison. It absorbs neutrons better than anything else. At equilibrium power, we’re making xenon at a certain rate, and it’s destroyed as soon as it’s made by absorbing neutrons. So the net amount of it in the reactor is zero. But if we lose power, we’re still producing it for several hours at the old rate. But we don’t have as many neutrons in there, so the reactor power will go down and it will just make it worse. So you have to pull rods very fast. So that’s what I had to do. My part was to keep the reactor from going down so far that the xenon would take it all the way down. The other operators were working to keep the main steam header pressure from going up too high, because we had a scram trip on that, because you didn’t want to rupture the steam header. The people controlling the primary coolant loop pressure had to do work on that. It was very exciting. But we survived it, and so they took this picture as a commemoration. One of the people involved was on the nuclear console when they took the picture and he didn’t want to be in the picture. So he’s not in there. But I like this, because if you know what you’re looking at, you can actually see that the reactor’s operating. There’s some indications there that the reactor’s at its 4,000 megawatt power level. And it’s one of the few pictures I’ve ever seen where you can tell the reactor was operating. Then, almost a year later, the exact same thing happened again, and I was in the same place. It was really easy the second time, because I knew exactly what to do. So they took a picture again, for all of us. This is the double-A console. Kept these all these years. As long as I’ve got these up here, this is an aerial photo of the N Reactor complex. Let me see. This is the reactor building right here. Make sure I’m not looking at things backwards. This building over here is the Washington Public Power Supply System. You can kind of see over here there’s some lines that go over, and those are the steam lines going over to them. They bought the steam from us and then sent the condensate back after they ran it through their turbines. O’Reagan: How much did you have to communicate with them? Jensen: Frequently. We called them up--any time we were going to do something that might affect the power level, we would call them up, tell them we’re going to do that. If they were going to do something that might affect the condensate coming back, they would let us know. They would give us some numbers. From there, power generation, which we would compile into a daily report, I think that was the basis for how much money they paid us for the steam. Things like that. So we were in constant contact with them. Usually it was the operator on the double-A console who would communicate with the—we called them Whoops in those days. They didn’t like being called Whoops. Now it’s Energy Northwest. But that’s a habit that’s hard to break. I still want to call them Whoops. And we didn’t mean it anything derogatory in those days, but— O’Reagan: When you said that the turbine tripped, would that seize it up? What does that involve? Jensen: I’m not really sure why it tripped. They may have had some valves—steam admittance valves close or something. If they told us why it tripped at the time, I can’t remember. This was 1987 or so. So it was quite a while—almost 30 years ago. The second trip—not sure if it was the same cause or not. I know one time they had a turbine trip and we didn’t survive that one. [LAUGHTER] It was kind of funny. Somebody was sweeping in their control room, and the broom fell and hit a switch and caused the turbine to trip off. So on that reactor outage, they paid for everything we did to get the reactor back up. We had a special charge code. Because it was their fault, so they’re paying for it. O’Reagan: That would, I guess, give the reactor xenon poisoning and they couldn’t start up for a certain amount of time? Jensen: Yes. If we scrammed from full power, theoretically, you could pull control rods almost immediately and override the xenon building up. But we had a mandated one-hour hold if we scrammed from full power. And that’s so that you will make sure it wasn’t a spurious scram. If it’s something that’s actually not working correctly, so it would be unsafe to operate, you can figure that out. And by doing that—waiting that one hour, it gets impossible to start the reactor up. So our minimum downtime from full power was generally about 23 hours—23 to 24 hours. If we could figure out what the problem was and get it fixed, then we started up the next day. If I was something serious, it might take a few more days, or several days, to figure out what the problem is or correct the problem. And then when we started up, it was kind of interesting, because we had the control rods pulled almost completely out of the reactor before the reactor went critical. And then as the power goes up, you’re pushing control rods in, rather than pulling them out to raise power, until you get to a point—it’s called xenon turnaround—where you’ve burned up all of the xenon that was in the reactor, and now the reactor’s making more of the xenon and then they start coming back out. So those were actually really fun. O’Reagan: How often did the reactor scram? Jensen: N Reactor was getting kind of old by the time I was there. Some of the equipment was really old, old technology, and getting a little hard to maintain. We usually had two or three scrams in a particular operating run. I’m not really sure how many, because, again, it’s been so long. We would typically operate for a month. And we were in plutonium weapons-grade production mode, and so we only operated for a month, and then we would shut down and about a third of the reactor. But it was unusual to go an entire cycle without at least one scram. And usually they were spurious ones. The ones that caused a lot of them were the flow monitor system, which was a pretty old system. If somebody slammed a door or something somewhere, the instruments would vibrate, and it would give a false indication of low flow, and the reactor would scram. It only took one of the 1,003 flow monitor devices to cause a reactor scram. So that was kind of touchy there. O’Reagan: And that was automated? Jensen: Yeah, it was automated. You had this big panel with all these 1,003 dials. Normally, we never changed them. If we swapped steam generator cells out—like cell five was out for years until it got re-tubed, and then we put that one in and took another one out so they could re-tube that one. And we had to adjust all of those dials. Oh, that was a boring job—get them all set exactly right, and then somebody has to go through and check them all. If we ran in that mode with that same balance of steam generators, we didn’t have to do that every startup. O’Reagan: In the pictures with the other operators, could you just tell us about one or two of the other folks you were working with? Jensen: Okay. This is Dennis Real. Hopefully he won’t mind that I mentioned his name. He still works at Hanford. He started a little bit before me. This gentleman is Bill Terhark. He was a very, very experienced operator. He was one of the ones that you really wanted to have in the control room when things went bad, because he knew what to do all the time. He had so much experience. He went back to the 1950s, operating—probably operated at every one of the reactors. This is Fred Butcher, Jr. His dad had also been a reactor operator, Fred Butcher, Sr. And that’s me, and this is our control room supervisor, Glen Buckley. O’Reagan: Do you know anything about their backgrounds? Were they also—I guess the one who had most experience probably trained in reactors, but were they all engineers mostly? Jensen: No, no. Dennis had been a paramedic or EMT before he started working at the reactor. I’m not sure about Fred, what he did. Bill had graduated from high school, joined the Air Force, came out of the Air Force, got a job at Hanford. Typically, in the ‘40s and ‘50s, they did not hire engineers to be—and I don’t know what Glen’s job was—or what his background was, before. Most of us, except the older operators had college of some sort or another. When I hired on, they were hiring people usually with a couple years or more of college. O’Reagan: So you were there through the end of N Reactor, is that right? Jensen: Yes. In 1987—well, 1986—I think it was in April, was the Chernobyl accident. Chernobyl, although really was not similar at all to N Reactor, everybody thought it was, because both reactors are moderated by graphite instead of light-water. So everybody looked at graphite—that must be the cause of why Chernobyl blew up. Well, it blew up because it was a really poor design, and it was poorly operated, and they had a really unusual transient situation and then they had a steam explosion that tore the reactor apart. Well, we decided we would make some safety upgrades. They decided we’re going to shut down on January 7th, 1987. Six months of safety upgrades, then we’d start back up. Well, we pretty much knew we were never going to start back up again. They did do all the safety upgrades, spent millions of dollars on them, but—anyway, so we came in on January 7th knowing that this is probably the last day of operation for the reactor, and it was our job to shut it down. I was on the double-A console that day. It would have been nice if I had been on the nuclear console, to be the guy actually putting the rods in, but that was Dennis. So we shut the reactor down. Took about an hour. We still had fuel in the reactor for a good almost two years before we defueled the reactor. Because we were going to start up again. And then finally they said, no, we’re going to defuel the reactor and we’ll go on wet layup. So we still had water pumping through the pipes, keep everything wet. Because if you let it drain of water and then it’s damp in there, then things will start to rust. But if you have water flowing through there, that wouldn’t happen. So we went for a few months where we kept all of the pumps running and stuff like that, but no fuel in the reactor. And then they said, well, now we’re going to go into dry layup. So we drained the primary coolant loop and all the other systems, and then we had big fans blowing hot air through there to keep moisture from condensing in there. The thought was, maybe we’ll get the order to start up again. And then they just said, nope. Pulling the plug. Reactor is abandoned, and it’ll go into decontamination and decommissioning. And it’s essentially been torn down now, and what’s left of it—the reactor block itself—is all cocooned. Just like most of the other old reactors. O’Reagan: What happened to your and the other reactor operators’ careers at that point? Jensen: [SIGH] Well, that was kind of a scary time. People thought we’re going to get laid off. Some people quit and went back to school. I remember one guy went to school and got a doctor’s degree in optometry and became an optometrist. There was some programs to help people with that, some money to help people go to college and get something else. Some people just found other jobs and left. And then I ended up staying. I was getting bored with being an operator at a reactor that wasn’t operating, and there wasn’t even any fuel in the reactor. But we still had all the stored fuel, and they needed somebody to be what they called the criticality safety representative, to work with operations and with the criticality safety analyst to make sure we’re still storing that fuel safely, so we don’t have any inadvertent criticality accident. Not very likely, but it could conceivably still happen. So I got that job, and in addition to that I was doing other stuff that you would call nuclear safety work. So I ended up becoming, to all intents and purposes, a nuclear safety engineer, even though I don’t have an engineering degree. And I’ve been doing that ever since. O’Reagan: Who is that, technically, that you were working for at that point? Was it Battelle? Jensen: No. Initially I worked for UNC Nuclear Industries. That was UNC parts stands for United Nuclear Corporation. They had the contract to run the reactors. In those days, Rockwell ran the 200 Areas for the Tank Farms and stuff like that, and the processing plants. So they ran the PUREX Plant that was extracting plutonium from our fuel. Battelle operates the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and that does research and design. Right after we shut down, DoE announced that they were going to consolidate all of the contracts. Westinghouse got that contract, so I worked for Westinghouse at the time I got into nuclear safety. Westinghouse went through a contract period and then a renewal period, and DoE typically does not renew anybody’s contract—nowadays anyway—more than once. So Westinghouse left, and then they announced a bid for a new contract. The Fluor Corporation won that one, and so I worked for Fluor for several years. They went through—I think they went through two and a half. DoE gave them an extension on the second done until they could get everything in place. And then the contract was won by the CH2M Hill Company, and that’s who I work for now. O’Reagan: Does it make much difference when one becomes— Jensen: WE used to joke the only difference it makes is in the color of the paycheck. It makes a little bit of difference, because you get some upper management coming in, and they have different ideas on how things should be done. We all joke that we have to educate them on how things actually are done. That’s only half-joking because it’s different than anything else. Fluor had some subcontractors who had never done work for Department of Energy before. So they wanted to do things the way you do it in the commercial nuclear industry. And it’s like, you don’t get to do it that way—you do it the way DoE tells you to do it. So we kind of had to educate them. But it’s a little bit different. There’s a little bit of different philosophy every time. O’Reagan: Was there ever any kind of either interest or communication with the commercial sector, in terms of learning or teaching any particular things? Jensen: We did a little bit. I cannot remember the name of the organization, but it’s an organization that compiles knowledge from commercial nuclear reactors all over the country, and the disseminates that to help everybody. We had some people who would go to meetings there, so I guess we became a member of this group. I never was involved in that, but—So we would hear things that happened at other plants and then see if there were some lessons learned that we could apply. But N Reactor was so different than a commercial reactor that sometimes things that happened at N Reactor, they wouldn’t be able to use at a commercial reactor and vice versa. O’Reagan: How secretive was your work? Jensen: Not much. There were a few things—security stuff was classified. But what we were doing was no longer secret, hadn’t been secret since 1945. I had to have a clearance—it was a secret level clearance. Mostly that was just to make sure I was trustworthy and wouldn’t sabotage the plant or something. Very rarely did I actually see any information that was classified secret. O’Reagan: I would assume, though, that the plutonium itself—I guess you didn’t see the plutonium until it got through the PUREX Plant? Jensen: Yeah, well I never saw it. I’ve never seen plutonium. All of that stuff—how it was handled, how it was stored—that’s all part of the security thing, and that was all classified. And would still be, to this day, except we don’t have any plutonium at Hanford—not in any discrete form that you can do anything with, anyway. O’Reagan: So what is it you’re doing again? Could you give us more detail on what you’re doing or what you did subsequent to being a reactor operator? Jensen: I worked in nuclear and criticality safety for N Reactor until we shipped all of the fuel over to the fuel storage basins at the K East and K West Reactors and I moved over there. I worked in criticality safety for that. When they were storing the fuel, that was fairly easy, because they weren’t doing anything. Then they decided they needed to get the fuel out of the basins because they’re close to the river, and the K East Basin had leaked at least once and maybe twice in the past. So the contaminated water gets into the groundwater and eventually gets out to the river. So we needed to get the fuel off the river, so they built a storage facility in the 200 East Area. We had to build a whole system to take the fuel out of the basin and put it in shielded casks and ship it over thee. So there was a lot of work on that, and all of that had to be set up to prevent criticalities. And also nuclear safety, which is more concerned with releases of radiological stuff to the atmosphere. So you need to keep those releases down below certain guidelines that DoE provides to protect the public. O’Reagan: So was this at all part of this amelioration cleanup efforts at that point? Jensen: Yeah, that’s the whole goal that we’re working towards: get all of the fuel out of the reactor basins. So we got it all out of the K East Basin first, and then that’s actually been destroyed—the basin has been completely dug up and destroyed, and the area backfilled. The reactor’s prepared for cocooning, but hasn’t been, because they ran out of funding. So it’s in a safe, stable condition right now. K West Basin is empty of fuel, but it has sludge. I still do some work for 100 K, although mostly I work at the Plutonium Finishing Plant now. They’re going to move all the sludge out, and then they’ll do the same thing to the K West Basin that they did at K East. And basically, all over Hanford, that’s what they’re doing is cleaning things out, and getting them ready for demolition. So I work at PFP now in nuclear criticality safety there, and they’ve got miles and miles of ductwork. Some big pipes and some little pipes that are all contaminated with plutonium, and they have to carefully take all that stuff out. Get enough of that out so they can actually start tearing the building down. O’Reagan: Are there any general ways, whether it’s the type of people working there, or morale, or whatever, that the work at the Hanford site has changed over the time you’ve been there? Jensen: [SIGH] During the operating days, it was fun. Actually fun to go to work and do something that you thought was productive. I mean, you can argue whether you thought we should have been making plutonium for nuclear weapons or not, but the job was very interesting. When the reactor shut down, the morale went down quite a bit, because, for one, people thought they were going to lose their jobs, and two, it’s like, well, even if we stay here for decommissioning, that’s not going to be anywhere near as interesting. And it isn’t. It has its own interesting aspects to it. But mostly, people are pretty professional and here’s a job, we’re going to get all of the fuel out of K East. So people went and worked on that, and we’re going to get all the fuel out of K West, so you work on that. While you’re doing that, it’s satisfying, because you’ve got a goal to work for. PFP—it’s a very difficult job. I think the morale kind of goes up and down. We have successes and then there’s problems you run into. But in a way that’s what makes a job interesting, if there’s problems that you can resolve and get through it, and then you succeed on this task and go onto the next one. But it was a lot more fun to operate than to do what we’re doing now. O’Reagan: How much longer would you guess we’re going to be doing this--? Jensen: I, personally, or Hanford? O’Reagan: Both, why not? Jensen: Well, PFP is supposed to be torn down. It was supposed to be torn down by the end of September this year, but it’s probably going to be about a year off from that. The K Basin—K West Basin has sludge in it. They’re probably going to start removing the sludge in about two years. That’ll probably take about a year to do that and then they’ll start tearing that basin down. There’s still a huge project called Groundwater, where they’re pumping contaminated water, and it’s not just radioactive contamination, there’s a lot of heavy metal contamination in Groundwater. They pump that out, and they run it through processes to take the, like, chromium out of the water and replace it with a type of chromium that’s not as environmentally damaging. That’ll go on for years and years. And then there’s still—all of the old processing canyons are still there in place, and all of those are going to have to be torn down at some point. So, it’s probably decades more work here. And then there’s all the tanks. They’re going to take all the waste out of the tanks and run it through the Vit Plant which isn’t done yet. So years of work left at Hanford. O’Reagan: Interesting. Were you ever interested in the sort of politics of Hanford? Jensen: Not too much. The politics were different. In the ‘80s, it was whether we should be making weapons-grade plutonium or not. Nowadays the politics is more like, which project do we rob from to give to somebody else? And political battles in Congress as to how much funding Hanford gets, and things like that. So I try and stay out of all of that. O’Reagan: Sure. So how about life outside of the work plant? Where were you living—still in Kennewick? Jensen: Yes, I’ve been living in Kennewick since I moved there as a kid in 1965. O’Reagan: Where in Kennewick? Jensen: It’s over near Highway 395 as it kind of cuts through the middle of Kennewick. O’Reagan: How has life in the Tri-Cities changed in the time you’ve— Jensen: The Tri-Cities is a lot bigger. It was pretty small when I first moved here. For several years, it was just slowly growing, and it’s been growing like crazy since. It’s like, they’re always building new schools, and there’s always housing developments under construction. There used to be a lot of orchards in Kennewick, all around. There’s hardly anything now, because they’ve all been cut down and there’s houses there now. Traffic’s a lot worse. O’Reagan: What do you do in your spare time? Any hobbies or--? Jensen: I like photography, I like to take pictures with film, which is old-fashioned nowadays. And I like to develop the film myself. So far that’s all been black and white film; I haven’t tried developing color film yet. And I like to collect old film cameras that I can still find film for and use those. Up until recently, I was playing hockey—adult hockey, which I started when I was 49, started playing hockey. I’m 60 now, so I’ve been doing that for about 11 years. However, I had quit, hopefully only temporarily because I’ve got some medical issues. My doctor said no hockey until this is resolved. And then I hurt my knee the other day, so I don’t know. That might—even if the other one gets resolved, that might be the end of hockey. I like to go to Tri-City Americans hockey games during the season. I got to Tri-City Dust Devil games during the baseball season. Like to go to plays and movies. I decided this year I was going to audition for a play, see if I could get in. I did not make it, but I’m going to try again, coming up later. Probably this summer. So we’ll see. Never done that before, either. But it always sounded like fun. O’Reagan: Any sort of major events or incidents, whether at work or just sort of around the Tri-Cities that comes to mind that are sort of worth commemorating, or worth just sort of mentioning? Jensen: Kind of the interesting thing—back in 1986, reactor was still operating, and do you remember Connie Chung, the news—she came to the Tri-Cities to do a show on Hanford. Everybody at work was wondering who she’s going to interview. And we’re thinking they’re going to interview, like company president, company vice president, or something. And I remember joking that she should interview a reactor operator like me. And everybody laughed. And about an hour later, the phone rang, and it was the producer wanting to talk to me, and they wanted to interview me that night. And I got permission from the company. Turned out, my dad, who, like I said, had worked at the Tank Farms—he had gone to a public hearing on what to do with tank wastes. The Connie Chung crew had gone to the same meeting, because they were getting background information. My dad spoke at the meeting, and they said, oh, we have to interview that guy. When they talked to him, he mentioned that his son worked as a reactor operator. Oh, god, that’d be great, interview them both. So that’s how I got called up. The company gave me permission, and they did it in my house. I told them, it was my son’s third birthday, and I said we’re going to have a birthday party, but you can do the interview after the birthday party. So they said okay. After I got home, my wife sent me out to buy ice cream, I think. And I’m coming back. When she came back, she was all excited. Connie Chung called personally and asked if they could film the birthday party. So they filmed my son’s third birthday party, and then they interviewed my dad and I in my living room, and then—I don’t know, two, three hours of interview stuff, and they boil it all down to about five minutes. But that’s the way that goes. So that was kind of exciting. I was a minor celebrity for a while. O’Reagan: Any other stories leap to mind? Jensen: We had some interesting scrams in the control room. I talked about the two turbine trip ones that were very interesting. The first one, like I said, I had to pull control rods rapidly to compensate for the xenon building up faster than it’s being burned out. I got that all settled out, and the power level wasn’t dropping, and I had forgotten that--when the main steam header pressure goes up, the power level goes down—well, eventually, they’re going to control the main steam header, and it’s going to go back where it’s supposed to be. And the power all of the sudden starts shooting up. So now I’m shoving control rods in like crazy to keep the power level from going up too fast, because we could scram on a high rate of rise. So I got that all settled out. The second time it happened—since I was the most experienced person on the plant on this upset, I got it settled out from the xenon, and I just got my ear open over here, and as soon as I hear somebody say, main steam header pressure’s coming down, I look over and the power level starts to go up, and I tap some rods in, and it was just like routine. Nothing to it. But another time, we had another accident—well, accident’s probably not the right word. We had another upset. We had a new control system—computerized system for controlling valve positioning. The old system we had was very ancient. It was obsolete when they put it in at the reactor, but they got a good price on it, so that’s why they did that. So we had this new computerized system, and there were two cards in the computer that controlled the valve positioning. The primary card, and a backup card. If the primary card failed, you would transfer to the backup card, and it was supposedly a bump-less transfer. The system wouldn’t even know. The primary card had failed, and so it transferred to the backup card, and everything went perfect. Well, the instrument technicians took the primary card out to repair it, and they came to put it back in. Now, this card controlled the steam valves going over to WPPSS. I was on the console controlling all of that, and I remember, jokingly, I said to the guy—the instrument tech and the engineer, when they came in, they were going to go to the rom below the control room where all of that stuff was. They were going to replace it, and I said, you aren’t going to scram us, are you? And the engineer said, trust me. And they went down—and I was just joking, because I figured, no big deal—and they went down and they put the primary card in and they told it to take over. It took over and sent its signal to the valves, but the secondary card did not relinquish control. So all of the steam valves opened up twice as far as they were supposed to. So our steam pressure goes down, and when that goes down, the reactor power goes up. And the primary coolant pressure also goes down, because you’re boiling water really well in the secondary system, that cools the water really well in the primary system, and cold water contracts. So that pressure goes down, and if the pressure goes down to far, the reactor scrams. So I’m fighting like mad with—somebody else came over to help me—to keep from scramming on low pressure. Other people are working over here, trying to keep from scramming on something over here. And other people over here, and the guy on the nuclear console is trying to keep the power level from going up too fast. We’re running around—it was very exciting. Seemed like it took hours. Probably just took a few minutes. We got it all stabilized out, and I’m looking at the primary loop pressure, and it’s kind of fluctuating and bouncing. And right when it’s going—trying to think if it was going up or down. See, if we cool—it had to have been going up. The secondary card cut out, all the valves slammed shut, and we had the exact opposite thing happen. Now, the primary loop gets hot, everything expands, and we scrammed on high pressure. And then about five minutes later, the instrument tech and the engineer come upstairs. They could tell something bad was happening, and they just looked like—it wasn’t their fault, but— O’Reagan: When it actually does scram, is it actually just rods, or—I’ve heard some designs where there’s actually just balls that are— Jensen: Okay. The main system was control rods. And you were going like this, like dropping down from the top. The old reactors had safety rods that dropped in from the top. N Reactor’s rods all came from both sides, and they overlapped. All the rods would slam in with hydraulic pressure. We had some hydraulic pumps that would turn on and pump very high pressure hydraulic fluid into the system, and the rods would shoot in. It would take about a second-and-a-half to go in. And you’d get all these enunciators in the control room, and if you were—mmm, it’s pretty boring here at two in the morning, and then all of the sudden the reactor scrams, you were wide awake. Got adrenaline pumping through and then you’ve got all these things you have to do to make sure everything works correctly on a scram, because it causes all kinds of things. The balls were the backup to the control rods. They had to be 75% in in one-and-a-half seconds. If they went in too slow, there was a problem. If they went in too fast, there was a problem, just because they could be damaged. But if they went in too slow, that’s what the ball system was for. There were hoppers on top of the reactor—I think there were a hundred-and-some reactors. And they were full of boron carbide balls. Boron absorbs neutrons. That’s what’s in the control rods to absorb neutrons. If you had one slow rod, it’s no big deal. If you had two slow rods in one column, you would drop balls on both sides of that rod column. If you had three slow rods anywhere in the reactor, you would drop balls on both sides of each of those three rod columns. Then there was also a thing where you could have a complete ball drop—drop all of the balls. If the reactor power level did not decay below five megawatts in three minutes, I think it was, then you would have a complete ball drop. That happened twice. Once, for real, because we had a scram and the rods didn’t go in at all—this is before I started working there. So there’s a scram trip, the rods did not go in, the balls dropped. And the other one was we were starting the reactor up—getting ready to start the reactor up and going through all of these checks on various instrumentation. The instrumentation that would monitor if the reactor power was below five megawatts in three minutes, they were doing the work on that, and they had a procedure that they would run. There were three channels and they would run it on each channel. That included having a switch to put in a couple of different calibrate positions. Basically, it put a false signal into the system so you could see if it’s responding correctly. So an operator and an instrument tech were doing that. They did channel one and it didn’t look right when they put it in the calibrate position. So they went on to channel two to see if it would do the same thing, and they did that. Well, they put two trips into the system. The reactor—what we called the safety circuit—was not made up, and so the system started timing for five minutes. These two instruments said the power level was greater than five megawatts with the safety circuit broken. When the give minutes went up, all the balls dropped. It was kind of innocuous. There was an enunciator that said, any ball hopper open. So the enunciator goes off, and the operator looks up at that. Any ball hopper open. And then he realized what happened. He told the control room supervisor, and the control room supervisor told me that. He says, I looked up at it. And I looked down. And I looked up again to make sure it was actually on. And then he said a few bad words and then he went and told the shift manager that we had dropped all of the balls. O’Reagan: I heard on the old reactor designs, that had to be actually sort of vacuumed out. Jensen: Yes. They used vacuum—they were steel balls, too. And they used vacuums to suck them up. At N Reactor, we had a valve at the bottom of the channel that you would open up, and the balls would drain into a hoist, and then you would lift them all the way up to the top, and put them in a hopper at the top—a big hopper—and then you would load the individual hoppers. That was a horrible, horrible job, being up there loading those hoppers. It was always hot, you had to wear plastic raingear and an assault mask, which—rubber hugging your face, and it’s hard, physical labor, and wearing the raingear and it’s already 100 degrees up there anyway. It was just miserable work. So nobody liked to do that. When we had that big ball drop, my job was to go down underneath the reactor. You could open up those drain valves remotely. So we had Bill here who smoked a lot and was not allowed to wear respirators, he was operating the control panel. But a lot of times, the valves wouldn’t work remotely. So, me, wearing all of this fresh air stuff, would stand by, but would say, 43 didn’t work. So I would have to go back there, trailing this hose with my fresh air, and go back to 43, and open it manually. It was extremely hot, radioactively, down there. I picked up my entire one week’s worth of radiation. We were allowed 300 millirem of radiation, either in a single exposure or in a seven-day period, and I picked up that entire 300 in less than an hour, going back and forth. And most of the time, I was just standing there, waiting. And I’d go back in there, and I’d pick up quite a bit, and I’d open up a valve and come back, and then I was done and left. Couldn’t work in a radiation zone for seven days after that. O’Reagan: How often did you have the radiation testing? Or was it the hand-and-foot test— Jensen: Oh, any time we came out of a contaminated zone, contaminated area, when we were wearing those SWPs, you have to undress in a proper sequence. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this. We had step-off pads. A red pad and a green pad. And when you get to the red pad, before you get to that, you have to remove all of your outer clothing before you step on the red pad. And then when you get to the green pad, you have to remove all of your SWP clothing before you step on the green pads. So you end up coming out there—well, in the old days when there were very few women working in the Area, you’d be coming out in your underwear. Later on they made us wear a t-shirt and shorts. But I kind of lost track of what we were saying there. Oh, the hand-and-foot counters. And then when you came out, we would step into a hand-and-foot counter or a whole-body portal monitor that would monitor our sides and front and back, to make sure we weren’t contaminated. Then usually we would also be surveyed by a health physics technician who’s got a Geiger counter, and he just slowly goes over, checks your hands, checks the bottom of your shoes, makes sure you’re not—don’t have any skin or clothing contamination. If you do, then you’ve got to get decontaminated. And that happens once in a while. O’Reagan: Was that ever a concern of yours? Jensen: No. I did get a few skin contaminations. I had to hold over once. I got some primary coolant water in my hair, and there was a lot of radon in the water. Radon is electrostatically attracted to polyester and hair. So it latches on, and it’s hard to get off. I just had to wait until it decayed off. After about-- O’Reagan: Did you shave? Jensen: No, no. I washed my hair several times, and then they just said—come back every hour and we’ll check, and after about three hours they let me go home. Usually, skin contaminations wash off pretty easy. If it’s your clothing, you have to wash the clothing. You don’t get to take that home until it’s passed as clean. Sometimes, rarely, stuff would have to get thrown away. But I never had any serious contamination issues. If you’re careful, if you dress correctly, and then when you come out, you undress correctly, then it’s very rare to be contaminated. O’Reagan: Any other sort of stories leap to mind from your--? Jensen: There’s a few things that happened before I was there that were interesting. I don’t know. We had an accident. It was about three—and this one is an accident—it was about three years before I started work. They flushed a tube of hot, radioactive fuel onto the charge elevator, which is not where it’s supposed to go. It’s supposed to go out the back, and fall into the discharge shoots and then go into the basin. There were workers on the elevator when it happened. They got very high radiation exposures. Fortunately, not high enough to kill anybody. But that was just lucky, I think. So, I don’t know. That was the most serious thing I know that happened there. We did have one—before I was certified, we had one really bad accident where we lost all the instrument air to the plant. Almost every valve functions with air—they’re air-operated: air to open, air to close. A lot of pumps are—the pump speeds are maintained by air pressure, things like that. So we had a scram, and it was a very abnormal scram. But we survived it. [VIDEO CUTS] Camera man: Okay, hold it out so we see. Jensen: --piece of fuel out of the reactor, and they pushed all the hot, irradiated fuel out, but we’d done a normal refueling after that shutdown. And, well, now, we’ve got to—we pushed out all the hot fuel, and now we’re going to push out all the un-irradiated fuel and keep it, just in case we start up again. I happened to be walking by when they got the last one out, and they were taking a picture and they said, get over here! Camera man: Oh, so where are you? Are you down in front there? Jensen: I am right there. Camera man: Yep, that’s right. O’Reagan: You’ve got the [INAUDIBLE] gear guy in back. Jensen: So these guys are all dressed up in the gear and they’ve got the fuel with them. I think they’ve got the fuel with them in there. There’s another picture that I don’t have that actually shows them holding the last piece. [VIDEO CUTS] There were two certified operators when I was hired on. I think there had been some more who had left. There was another lady who was in the certification program and then she certified shortly after that. In my class, there was one woman and she did not go all the way through, and then in the class after, there was at least one woman in there. So we had a handful of women certified operators. The very first one hired, I’m pretty sure that would have been Martha Coop. I’m wondering who the guy you talked to was who hired her. Because I’m sure I would know him. I just can’t think of who that might have been. The other one was Leslie Jensen, no relation to me, and I think she was the one who babysat me when I was probably a kindergartener or a first grader. She was one of my mom’s students. O’Reagan: All right. Anything else I should be asking here, any other memories that are worth preserving? Jensen: I’ll probably think things when I get home. O’Reagan: Sure. Jensen: But right now I think I’m— O’Reagan: Great. All right, well that’s been great. Thank you so much for being here. Jensen: You’re welcome. <a href="https://youtu.be/vzYLT2Ds3-Q">View interview on Youtube.</a> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:16:35 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview N Reactor 200 Area Tank Farms WPPSS (Washington Public Power Supply Systems) UNC (United Nuclear Corporations) Rockwell PUREX PNNL (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory) K East Reactor K West Reactor K East/West Basins 100-K PFP (Plutonium Finishing Plant) Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1961- Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Mark Jensen Description An account of the resource Mark Jensen moved to Richland, Washington in 1961 as a child and grew up in Kennewick, Washington. Mark began working on the Hanford Site in 1981. An interview conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 03-25-2016 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2017-04-12: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Kennewick (Wash.) Nuclear reactors Nuclear reactor accidents Chernobyl Nuclear Accident, Chornobylʹ, Ukraine, 1986 Nuclear energy Nuclear power plants Nuclear fuel rods Relation A related resource <a href="http://hanfordhistory.com/collections/show/26">Mark Jensen, Oral History Metadata</a> 2-East Area 200 Area 200 East 200 East Area Battelle Department of Energy Energy Northwest Hanford K Basin K West Reactor K-Basin K-West Reactor Kennewick Manhattan Project N Reactor Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Plutonium Plutonium Finishing Plant PUREX School Sun Tank Farm Tank Farms United Nuclear Corporation VIT Plant War Washington Public Power Supply System Westinghouse https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fe569ea39d2b6ee7a52c2712dfe05f0ad.JPG eb77089662d22082b1f797feab5fac35 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Keith Klein Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Tom Hungate: Rolling. Robert Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Keith Klein on February 7th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Keith about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Keith Klein: Keith Klein. K-L-E-I-N. Franklin: Okay. And K-E-I-T-H? Klein: K-E-I-T-H, yeah. Franklin: Okay, great. Tell me how and why you came to work at the Hanford Site. Klein: Well, I suppose it started as—born in the early ‘50s, and at that time, atomic energy was the stuff of comic books and intrigue and power. It was, you know—whenever the planet was threatened by alien beings, they’d always convene a meeting of the Atomic Energy Commission. So I think in the back of my mind, I always had an inkling that I’d end up somehow dealing with atomic energy. The path that got me here was actually as an Atomic Energy Commission intern in the early ‘70s. One of my assignments as an intern was out here doing FFTF construction, I think in ’73. After that, a series of assignments, most back at headquarters dealing with all aspects of the fuel cycle. Mid ‘90s, I was dispatched to Rocky Flats, and that’s where I gained experience dealing with plutonium and contaminated facilities and the work force and this kind of the field experiences as a deputy manager out at Rocky Flats. One of the obstacles to getting Rocky Flats cleaned up was getting rid of the transuranic waste. So I ended up getting dispatched down to Carlsbad, New Mexico for a six-month stint with the assignment of getting it open and recruiting a permanent manager. Opening WIPP had eluded a number of people and brought in lawsuits. There were a lot of different combination of technical issues, operational issues, regulatory, political, perception, communications issues—you name it. But I guess I impressed the secretary with that assignment, and next thing you know, he asked me to come out here to Richland. That was in 1999. So I came out here as a manager of the Richland Operations Office then and was here until I retired from federal service in 2007. Franklin: Great. Just for those who might not know, could you say what WIPP stands for and what its mission was? Klein: WIPP is the Waste Isolation Pilot Project, and it was the first deep geologic disposal facility in the—well, in the world, really. It’s in a geologic formation, about a half-mile under in salt beds that are several hundreds of millions of years old and have been—just their very existence shows a lack of moving water, because salt being soluble. And of course disposing of nuclear waste and particularly of things—plutonium-bearing waste, transuranic waste falls in that category. Lot of folks afraid about transportation and is it going to leak out and so forth. But the community there was actually very supportive. The scientific community was as well. But of course there was a lot of—you know, this is falling on the heels of nuclear power, a lot of opponents of nuclear power. It seemed like we’re similarly opposed to solving the waste problem. So it had some similar characteristics as the challenges being faced up here. But that was a very big deal for those of us in the nuclear waste community. It was recently shut down for some operational issues. And when it shuts down it shuts down for a few years. But it was key to emptying out this category waste called transuranic waste from sites around the country including here at Hanford and the national laboratories. Franklin: When you came out in the early ‘70s as an intern for FFTF construction, what did you do? Klein: Well, it was FFTF construction. Actually first assignment was dealing with electrical systems then. I was assigned to—it was a Bechtel Corporation doing work out there in the field. I was being mentored by a fellow that was actually in a responsible for the crafts, pulling wire and routing things. So you know that was all part of giving us on-the-ground experience. And this in particular was construction. Later went to a Westinghouse subsidiary that was placing the large vessels, setting the pumps and the heat exchangers and that sort of thing. It was an incredible amount of stainless steel. And quality assurance, obviously, building a reactor is very important. Had to have good records and had to know that things in fact were welded like they’re supposed to be, tested like they’re supposed to be and so forth. And it—of course—you know, then I was part of the AEC Breeder Reactor Program and I think that was what really attracted me to the Atomic Energy Commission, is the idea that a source of energy could make more fuel than it used. And it seemed environmentally benign at the time. I still happen to believe it’s one of the more benign forms of energy, but it’s obviously been beset with a number of challenges in terms of the times—and this comes back to Hanford, actually. The time it takes to do things now and the number of layers and checks and so forth. In the commercial nuclear business, time is money. And the more time it takes, the more costs. And then things getting held up in the regulatory process with interveners, it basically got priced out of the market and became uneconomical. It had also gotten very complicated at the time, and that’s another example. You start adding layers of safety and things like that, you can end up—things getting more complicated and difficult to analyze and manage and deal with. So it kind of collapsed under its own weight there for a while. But there is a new generation of reactors that are coming that are more inherently safe and simpler in a lot of respects. So I think there’s still some hope out there for sources of electrical energy that, in my mind, can be very benign. Franklin: Mm-hm. Thank you. So you came to RL—Richland—in ’99, then, and you were the site—the DOE site manager. Klein: Correct. Franklin: For the Hanford unit. Can you talk about some of the progress you made in that position, but also maybe some of the setbacks as well? Because that’s during this kind of shift into this more modern phase of cleanup, right, where most of the production and reprocessing of fuels had stopped by that point. Klein: That’s a huge topic, Robert. Franklin: Sure. Klein: But it’s actually one I love to talk about because it was indeed a very daunting challenge. I understand you’ve interviewed Mike Lawrence and he signed a compliance agreement out here, the Tri-Party Agreement. But then he left and left it to others to implement that and get the work done. So he made the commitments and everyone else was kind of left holding the bag. John Wagner, I think did his best to get the ball rolling, but I think during that time there was just a lot of norming and forming and trying to figure out things. There wasn’t a whole lot of on-the-ground progress. I learned a lot at Rocky Flats and at WIPP about what it takes to get work done in these kind of environments. That included both technically and in terms of dealing with the workforce and dealing with the contracts. You know, the people that do the real work here are really contractors to DOE. And depending on how the contracts are written and things are incentivized and how much—just the whole dynamic between receiving the money—you have to go out and get the money from Congress, so you have to convince them that you have a plan, you know what you’re doing, you can deliver, that you’re investment grade. And then you have to deliver, because if you don’t, the money will dry up and lots of other problems. So giving this cleanup some focus, some momentum and just making it manageable, if you will, was one of the biggest challenges. Technically, there were two urgent risks—well, there were actually three urgent risks at the time. Of course the high-level waste that I think everybody knows about. But we had about 18 tons of plutonium-bearing materials that were unstable. These were things that when they shut down after the Cold War were left in various forms: alloys, residues, oxides, pure metal. And plutonium can be very reactive and exothermic. So it really needs to be stabilized, lest your—you have some real problems. Recall high school chemistry, you put a little sodium in the water—it’s that type of thing. So dealing with the plutonium—and again, I had the experience there with Rocky Flats—was a second urgent priority. And the third one was the spent fuel that was left in the K Basins. There were about 2,000 tons. That was about 80%, 90% of the DOE inventory that was left in the K Basins. This fuel was prone to oxidizing dissolving. And as a result of that, just deteriorating. So it was losing its integrity and creating a lot of sludge on the bottom. So even the act of moving it would create these clouds and you couldn’t see. The Site had been experimenting with different things to try to package up and dry out this—and stabilize this spent fuel so it could be stored in a dry, inert, stable, stable environment. So that was a second major challenge. And then of course there’s all this contaminated groundwater underlying the Site. Billions of gallons that had been dumped into the soil. You know, the soil here is something called a vadose zone where it’s got this dry sand and gravel mixtures and then there’s—can be basalt layers under that that are relatively impermeable, and you know, the water table that’s about where the Columbia River level is. So the center portion of the Site is built up. But long story short, waste in both liquid forms and then solid forms of waste have been buried in several hundred sites around the Hanford Site. So figuring out what we’re going to do with all those waste sites and with the contaminated groundwater was another set of challenges. And then of course there were, depending on how you count them, 700, 1,500 contaminated buildings out there that needed to be dealt with. This coupled with—right when I came, a legislation had been passed setting up a separate office of river protection to deal specifically with the high-level waste and the high-level waste tanks. So part of my job was helping to get that set up and transferred. Dick French was my counterpart dealing with that. The national lab, PNNL, was also actually under the Richland Operations Office at that time, but after a couple years it was decided similarly that the office of science—you know, it’s such a different focus that it was better off separated out. And from my standpoint, these were all good things, because there’s plenty of challenges to go around. So when I came, I guess my biggest challenges were how do you help manage, mobilize, organize efforts to get confidence that you have a plan for dealing with these things. We had these regulatory commitments, but it’s people that clean these things up. It’s not paper. You can sign anything you want; it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. So this kind of comes down to contracts, understanding the workforce, what motivates them, and basically how to enable them. So my job is one of enabling. I mean, there’s so many smart people out here, it’s intimidating. And impressive and inspiring. And given the latitude, they’ll figure out how to do things. You compare when I came here it was different than it is even now, what, 16, 18 years later. But when I came here compared to like the ‘40s, a world of difference in terms of what it took to get work done. In the ‘40s, they could learn by doing, experiment, play with things, and they didn’t have to get multi layers of permission, or—they didn’t have emails or cell phones or computers. I mean, it was slide rules and hand-written notes and so forth. Which comes back to just how amazing they were. How creative and innovative. Of course, it was under a wartime environment. But contrast that, when I came here—a lot of different regulatory structures put in place—something called the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board to oversee DOE. The Atomic Energy Commission was self-regulating. And when environmental laws were passed, which has led to the Tri-Party Agreement, the Department of Energy was out of compliance with a number of these national laws, like the Resource Recovery—RCRA—and the Comprehensive Environmental Liability—CRCLA. So this compliance agreement, the Tri-Party Agreement was basically—this is how DOE was going to come into compliance with these things. Of course, there’s money that’s associated with that. DOE, like other agencies, lives on an annual budget. So you can’t get multi-year appropriations; you never really know how much you’re going to get from year to year. So to make commitments hoping you’ll get the money is part of the whole dynamic of getting work done here. But back to what it takes to get work done. It’s understanding these different laws and regulations. In my mind, I was fortunate, then, that I had good relationships back at headquarters and the trust and confidence of the leadership. So I was able to basically authorize more things on my signature based on my discretion than, certainly, what can be done today. Unfortunately with problems, you get more oversight and more second guessing and so forth. So it’s kind of success-begets-success. But in any event, my focus—and before you can clean up the buildings, you have to deal with the urgent priorities first: things that can go bump in the night. And again it comes back to the top three at the time were high-level waste and the plutonium, and the spent fuels. So the focus was really on the plutonium and spent fuel until you can get these things out of the different buildings, you can’t take down the buildings, that’s—stabilizing these things more important than—you know, the ground water was contaminated. I mean, the contamination was spreading, but you had to remove the sources, otherwise you’re continuing to feed—you can continue to clean up the groundwater, but there’s still stuff coming in, then you’re just kind of halting some progression but not really cleaning it up. So dealing with these different sources was the focus. But long story short, we had some brainstorming sessions with all the contractor heads, KEA, you know, folks that were working for me—how can we make this a simple, compelling, understandable vision? Make this, our task, more manageable? And what we came up with was basically featured three things. We came to call it the river, the plateau and the future. And said, our job is going to be to transition the central part of the Site into a long-term waste management area. The central part of the Site is where the high-level waste tanks are, the reprocessing canyons, a lot of these burial grounds. I mean, we were going to be here for a long time. And that’s also the stuff that’s farthest away from the river. So if you can sort of encapsulate and stop the hemorrhaging there, then kind of in a triage approach, then, that gives you—allows you to start cleaning up the rest. The second part was restoring the river corridor. And there the idea was to clean this up as good as is practical as we could and to make it available for other uses. So these are the reactors along the river, the other waste sites, burial grounds, the areas around the 300 Area where all the research is taking place and things like that. And the third part, the future, was—I guess I viewed this whole challenge out here as one of managing change and transition. And considering that we have 10,000 folks working out here, they need a future. It’s hard enough to ask someone to work themselves out of a job, but to work themselves out of a job without the prospect of other jobs, so—and that’s not something the DOE, the Atomic Energy Commission or others had a whole lot of experience at or are very good at. We’re a scientific and technical community. And most of us, myself included, is engineers. We go into these disciplines because we like numbers and quantities and we’re typically introverts and that sort of thing. So dealing with something as amorphous as the future is tough. But we convinced ourselves it was important and we had all these resources like the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and university systems and all these smart, talented people. There’s no reason why the things we’re learning here, lessons learned and businesses that could develop around here couldn’t be provided for a good socioeconomic environment here, too. And I think the Department of Energy and its predecessors always wanted to be a good community citizen. So just scrubbing out all the molecules but leaving this place an economic ghost town is not the right thing to do. Certainly, we want to get it as clean as we can, but you want to leave the community whole. And it comes back to the sacrifices that were made here going back to the tribes and the folks that were evicted in order to do this and the people that lost their lives helping to build the facilities and operate the facilities in the early years to produce the weapons material. Certainly the communities paid a price here. So the river, the plateau, and the future was kind of our mantra, and that’s how we organized things. Tried to fashion over the years that followed contracts that did that. But in any event, what I did was I sold—as for meeting with Doc Hastings, he was the congressman at the time. Sat down with him. I remember it very well, I was still—had become a—because of Rocky Flats and Waste Isolation Pilot Plant—I had some experience dealing with elected officials and high level stuff, but it’s still intimidating. You know, it’s like, I’m a freaking engineer. So but went to him with—at his office over in Pasco and laid this out. And he liked it, and we had some very good discussions and a rapport. But he lives across the river from the 300 Area, is where his house is. So he looks down, and he can actually see a lot of these things. And of course he’s committed to the community and Hanford and he wanted to give me the best shot possible as well. And I should say, too, due to my homework before I came in here, I learned about folks like Sam Volpentest and Bob Ferguson and I went around and met them and got their ideas, perception of things, and how things work. So I think I was fortunate, had a lot of good support from different corners. Doc went to bat for us, as did the senators, for the funding. They’ve been great supporters here, appreciative of the history and the challenges that remain. We put in place contracts. I brought a contract type they used at Rocky Flats successfully that’s different than the conventional contracts that the Atomic Energy Commission was used to operating under. The traditional contracts are management and operating contracts. And in that kind of contract, it’s for a certain period of time and the contractor’s pretty much graded by how their DOE counterparts felt about how they were doing. And it was a lot of one-to-one counterparts with the contractors doing whatever DOE said at any particular time. So, it can work well when you’re in kind of a steady environment in a production mode, like churning out nuclear weapons material and operating. But at Rocky Flats what we learned is you need a lot more incentive to be creative and innovative. What worked there was having an agreement with the contractors and the contract type and the regulators about, this is the scope of work that’s going to get done, and as long as we stay within this box, basically—you know, leave us alone. And that was my philosophy in this contract that’s called a cost-plus-incentive-fee contract, CPIF, versus MNO which is a cost-plus-award fee. And the amount of money the contractor makes is tied to how well they do this tangible piece of work that you can actually see and feel. So we have an official government estimate that this is how long it should take based on our historical experience; this is how much it should cost. So every dollar you save bringing that in sooner and earlier, you get to save 30 cents on that dollar. So when you’re talking about contracts that cover, you know, five- to ten-year period, you’re talking about potentially a couple hundred million dollars in fees on the table there. Well, at Rocky Flats, what we learned is, particularly the contractors can share that with the employees, that they can get quite creative about how to do things. And they are able to learn by doing. You know, the envelope is a safety envelope; you can’t do anything unless you know it’s safe. So that’s where we focused our attention, is making sure we had a good safety basis and watching that through facility reps and other things. But basically, not trying to micromanage or giving them the freedom, as much as we could, to do things. And having a very good scope. So that’s what we put around the river corridor contract. The idea there is we’re going to blitz the river corridor. And we need this tangible progress, too, to further build confidence that we can do this. Of course, you can’t demolish buildings and excavate sites unless you’ve got something to do with the waste that’s coming out. So that comes back to things like ERDF and the different disposal grounds in the middle of the site—the energy—Environmental Restoration Disposal Facility—huge facility in the center of the site. So this whole thing becomes a huge chess game of sorts where the different pieces are the money and the contracts and the people and the labor agreements and the different technical pieces that have to fall in sequence before you can do things. And in some way, the icing on the cake is actually taking down the buildings. Because by that time, you’ve had to take the materials out. And you can’t take the materials out unless there’s something you can do with them. So whether there’s plutonium and having the equipment in place to stabilize them and then package it and put it somewhere. That’s basically the plan we had: the river, the plateau and the future. And I think the results, I’m pretty proud, speak for themselves. We packaged up all that spent fuel, got it off the river, from out of the K Reactors into the central part of the plateau. We got all the plutonium stabilized. And that ended up being able to—my successor able to ship that actually offsite to Savannah River. And put in place the river corridor contract, which I think has been pretty widely acclaimed and recognized as being successful. And it meant a lot of good things are happening. The folks dealing with high-level waste and the Waste Treatment Plant I think have had some different kinds of challenges and still dealing with a lot of that. But I think you see excellent progress on the rest of the Site. Franklin: I was wondering if you could speak about the challenge of vitrification as a—I mean, it’s a proposed way to isolate and deal with the waste and it’s been successful at other sites, but seems to have hit snags at Hanford. Klein: Well, this was not my territory. Franklin: Okay. Klein: I know a fair amount about it, so I’m tempted to give you opinion. But I did not have responsibility for that, and so—Kevin Smith is the current Office of River Protection manager and he’d be a better one to talk to about that. But vitrification in general was a form preferred by the state and others for stabilizing some components of the waste out there that’s very highly radioactive. It’s interesting—back in the day, some of the components in these tanks that generate the most heat are strontium and cesium: fission products, versus the actinides. The actinides being plutonium, uranium, those type of things. And there’s not a whole lot of that in this high-level waste. But in the old days, they started taking out the cesium and the strontium so the tanks weren’t generating as much heat so they could put more waste in. And we put—before my time, they put the strontium and cesium into capsules. And they’re stored in a water pool up—attached to one of their processing facilities and that was under my purview. Now the process moving that to dry storage. And I only say that because, you know, in my mind, there are alternative forms for managing these different wastes that they can be used. And with fission products, 30-year half-life, rule of thumb is if ten half-lives—these things reduce to a millionth their radioactivity or less, 10-6, and basically are innocuous at that time. So thirty years, half-life of ten years, that’s 300 years. In geologic time, that’s nothing. So do you really need geologic disposal for things with fission products with 30-year half-lifes? And if you don’t need geologic disposal, do you really need to vitrify the wastes and put them into these glass waste forms? I mean, basically what’s attractive about glass is it’s not as susceptible to dissolution and water and dissolving. So things can stay pretty much contained, is the thought. But even these high-level waste logs, they’re just going into dry storage anyway. You know, I’m a proponent, I guess, for a lot of these different wastes, that dry storage, I think, is the most economical, efficient, and—I think there’s a reasonable chance our civilization will stay intact for 300 years. You can put these things in dry storage casks and things like that, they’re basically tamper-proof and they cool themselves. It’s just keeping people away from them. I mean, I can talk more about vitrification if you really want, but like I said, it’s really not my bailiwick. Franklin: No, that’s fine. So you said your three major challenges were dealing with high-level waste, dealing with unstable plutonium-bearing materials and then the spent fuel. Klein: High-level waste was assigned to the separate office, so that really wasn’t my— Franklin: Oh, okay, so— Klein: --biggest challenge. So it was plutonium and the spent fuel were the two urgent priorities. But the third is really getting on with the cleanup and giving the whole cleanup some momentum and direction and some legs. Franklin: What do you see as the future of Hanford? Because the focuses of the river, the plateau and the future. And the river and plateau seem to have these concrete goals applied to them. The future does seem harder to diagnose or kind of see, because eventually there is an idea that cleanup will be performed. And then so what do you think the future of the Tri-Cities holds after the danger’s mitigated? Klein: Science, technology, engineering and math. I think this is, at its heart, a STEM community. And I think that we are very well-suited to grow that identity. We have a great STEM education that’s getting recognized nationwide [UNKNOWN] leading that. We have, I think, STEM employment opportunities. One of the things—my interests after retiring is running something called Executive Director Tri-Cities Local Business Association. And it’s looking at helping build local businesses with a high-tech nature that can help accommodate transition of employees. I’ve been active in promoting provisions in the DOE subcontracts that encourage the prime contractors to contract out more and better pieces of work to companies. So, I mean, I think there’s always been a good support for small businesses, but oftentimes that can be for janitorial supplies or this little thing, that little thing. There’s basically a huge workforce embedded—we call it in the fence—that does a lot of these other things. I’d like to see more, bigger, better chunks of that work able to go to local businesses that can then use that to develop their resumes. I mean, they’re highly incentivized to perform if—one, this is their backyard, their neighbors; two, you don’t get invited back to the party if you don’t do well. And they’re small and they’re very manageable. I think it would be very efficient. We have a number of examples of companies that have grown out of Hanford business or out of PNNL inventions or the expertise that people develop here that’s applicable to environmental challenges around the globe. So I think capitalizing on the lab and its high-tech things they do. We have BSEL right here and WSU Tri-Cities is a good example of kind of the collaborations. But PNNL is in a number of different sectors, and so the leveraging that more to help grow STEM businesses, employment opportunities, research opportunities I think is good. You’ve got the viticulture and the science of wines that is, I think, grown appreciation. Tourism, things like the Manhattan National Park, where people will come and see and appreciate the remarkable things that were done here. And the consequences, good and bad. But I mean it’s just—the stories to be told, people come here from around the world, I think, to see firsthand B Reactor and learn more about what that meant, what it took to get there. You’ve got the Reach National Monument, you have Ice Age Floods. There’s even STEM tourism. So you’ve got STEM education, STEM employment, STEM entrepreneurship. STEM tourism, I think, could really change—when people think of Hanford, instead of a stigma and high-level waste, oh my god, and the images that are conjured up there, I think are somewhat overblown. But instead of that, thinking of Hanford as science, technology, energy and math. This is the place to come to start a business, to get experience, to find good, smart people. I think it would do a good service for the community. And I think the national park would be one of the crown jewels in terms of STEM identity. Franklin: Great. Speaking of high-level waste, has most of the danger been mitigated, to your knowledge, of the waste that’s out onsite? Or where—yeah, that’s my question. Klein: The urgent risks have. I think, for the most part, the High Level Waste Tank have been interim stabilized, which means they’re—most of the things that are a threat of getting out and leaking, they basically got as much water, liquids, out of them as is possible in the single-shelled tanks. Leaks there, without a source of water, something to drive it further down into the water column or out, is mitigated. Double-shelled tanks are getting old and, of course, that’s a—had some leaks there. But even there, they’re double-shelled, so you can detect it and they can be emptied. Of course running out of space there. But the problem with nuclear waste, again, is until you know what you’re going to do with it, you can end up just moving it around. So the idea is you really need to put it in a better form and move it to someplace where it can be more easily managed or basically almost be semi-maintenance-free. We put a lot of stock into deep geologic repository, Yucca Mountain, that’s what we need to manage this high-level waste. But as I said before, I think, a lot of these can be managed quite safely for as long as may be necessary in dry storage still. So in terms of urgent risks, I think they’ve been for the most—mitigated. Now we’re dealing with more chronic, the longer-term risks and there, I think it’s a matter of being smart and getting a more productive. I think the red tape and the bureaucracy and the second-guessing, it’s almost become like a spectator sport with all the different oversight agencies and folks that are from King 5 over on the west side that seems to—and others, they’re really just focused on I’d say the things that can scare people or that might reflect badly on here but without appreciating it, I guess. I mean, there’s—yeah, there’s some mistakes that have been made, are being made, but the bulk of the people here that are good-hearted, well-intentioned, hard-working—you know, we live here, we drink the water here. If something was acutely dangerous, we’d know and we’d be able to deal with it. So I think things here are a lot safer than we appreciate. Franklin: Do you find that, in general, the public is misinformed about both the nuclear materials production process but also the waste and the dangers of nuclear waste? Klein: I would say, for the most part, the general public is apathetic about it. That there are segments of the public, the media, and others that—with different agendas, whether it be attention or profit or others, that put their own slant on it. But I think that with each new generation of people and understanding the atom that things are getting better. With radiation, you can measure it. It’s very easily detectable. Unlike gasses and chemicals and other things. We as a society put up, well, what are you going to do with the waste? Well, you look at the volumes of waste that are being involved and so forth, it’s really small. But we don’t seem to ask that same question about carbon dioxide and some of these others, yet we’re perfectly content to continue driving our cars and so forth. So I think there is a lack of perspective on these things. In some ways, it’s—the attention to them is important because they’re not going to just go away on their own. I mean, there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done and we need to have the resources to do it, and it’s kind of the squeaky wheel gets greased when it comes to budget things. But on the other hand, those things can get out of hand. So I don’t know what the public thinks, but I do have—[LAUGHTER]—I guess I’m an optimist at heart and think that each generation, like I said, is going to be smarter about—you know, what are the real hazards of these things and what really makes sense in terms of dealing with it? But one of my concerns is the less productive, the more inefficient we become: people with hands-on experience are retiring or dying. We can’t afford to lose that expertise. So I’m very much in favor of getting on with these things while we have these people around that know their way around and can deal with these things. Otherwise, we’re going to be wringing our hands and analyzing everything to death and actually doing less work. So that’s one of my biggest fears about all this stuff getting stretched out and prolonged. Franklin: When you were—it was eight years you were head of—for eight years you were head of DOE RL. How did you deal with the critics? Hanford detractors or critics of the cleanup operation. Were there protests in Richland? I know Mike Lawrence talked about protests, and I’m wondering if you—how did you deal with either the protests or media scrutiny of Hanford? Klein: You have to develop a thick skin. I mean, it still hurts. You feel it personally, you feel a disservice to all the folks that are working out here, putting their heart and soul into this. They get maligned so easily. How do you deal with it? It grates on you. It just kind of contributes to the stress. But it’s like, we’re all people with feelings and it’s—but the media typically focus on what’s going wrong and what’s sexy or what’s—get people’s attention, either sell viewership, readership, whatever. It just comes with the territory. Franklin: Interesting. Thank you. Do you—you mentioned something pretty interesting a few minutes ago and I kind of wanted to get your thoughts on it. I understand that you probably don’t have an intimate—you might not have an intimate knowledge of the oil and gas industry, but do you feel that the nuclear industry has more unfair restrictions on it than oil and gas does in terms of energy production? Because you mentioned that oil and gas production, people don’t think about their emissions from their car the same way they kind of get this emotional response to nuclear energy. And certainly oil and gas producers don’t have to plan for 50, 100, 3,000 years into the future for the byproducts of the product they sell. I’m wondering if you could ruminate on that a bit more, or if you feel like there’s an undue burden on the nuclear power industry that’s not on other forms of energy. Klein: I do think it has suffered unfairly for a number of reasons. Some of which I touched on before. I mean, I’m all for renewables, but I think they can only go so far. And it’s about the economics. I think the strength of our country is a lot about our economy. If you have cheap natural gas or—you know, the regulations on coal don’t take into account the cost of these different emissions, whether it’s CO2 or others, then I think those penalize the alternatives. Things like solar and wind have gotten tax breaks and different credits that I think have helped them come to market. Now you can get very inexpensive solar cells and things. And like I said, I’m all for using those where it makes sense. But from my standpoint, I think there’s still a need for some baseload. I think regionally distributed baseload, like small modular reactors, makes tremendous sense. So that you don’t have these vulnerable interconnected, largescale grids, but local communities could live on that, I think. In some areas of the world, they’re able to use the bypass, the residual heat, for steam, home heating and others. So I think, you look into the future, I think there could still be a very useful role for clean, safe, nuclear power without it being stymied by what about the nuclear waste? I think that can all be managed very well. So for future generations, I think—reducing dependence on fossil fuels and making the renewables—and I would consider nuclear power a renewable source—there’s lots of energy in those big atoms. It can and should be economical. Franklin: Great. Klein: If we get out of the way. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] I’d like to switch topics to the historic preservation angle of your work. And I’d like you to talk about your involvement with preservation and saving of B Reactor from—and where you started. I know it was originally scheduled to be remediated and that was postponed and then eventually, I think due to pressure from B Reactor Museum Association and other groups, it gained a different kind of status, landmark status and things. I was wondering if you could talk about your role in that effort. Klein: Well, you know, nine different reactors operating here along the Columbia River—really, nowhere else in the world is it like that. B Reactor being the first large industrial scale reactor in the world. The DOE office, back under the Office of Environmental Management. And their job is to clean up. DOE does have an historian. So you have a bureaucracy that’s basically goal in life is to remediate these sites and facilities and get the liabilities down, the mortgages down and so forth. There’s a lot of pressure to do that. We’re on a course of cocooning these various reactors, putting them into cheap-to-keep mode where basically you’ve removed all the ancillary facilities and reduced it down to a core building and sealed that up and basically [UNKNOWN] that went through all the regulatory processes. If we seal these up, put these into a mode that’s good for 50, 70 years, keep the critters and people out, and have monitors in it and then we’ll come back and the radiation levels will further decayed by then. And we can dispose of these, finally—these graphite blocks and cores. So we’re on a roll in terms of cocooning these reactors. But the—I guess the people—and you can’t help but work at these sites or go out to these facilities and not be in awe of the magnitude of what was accomplished out here from an engineering and scientific standpoint. I mean, to me, it was just remarkable and first time I went out to B Reactor, it—like most people, as nuclear engineers, it’s kind of like Mecca. It strikes you and it just—really, it just hits a chord emotionally. And certainly the folks at BRMA, the B Reactor Museum Association, and others felt—knew that. I think they were instrumental in raising some community consciousness about it. I had a person on my staff, Colleen French, who is now running the national park, who is communications, and she and I, basically, strategized as to how can we stop this freight train from running over B Reactor, considering that I had a mandate to proceed, basically, and cocoon it like the others. Folks on my staff, to be honest with you, were split. There were some people that saw it as an asset and others not—it’s a liability. Come on, get on with it. I lean towards the wanting to preserve it, and I guess, feel guilty almost taking it down. So Colleen and I strategized as to, how do we give this the best shot possible? So we went back and met with the DOE historian and talked to some others, and basically were able to prepare some memorandum decisions that said that at a minimum, we should give this more time and think this out. At a maximum, we should just bite the bullet and preserve it and do what we can and try to be careful. I mean, you can only spend money for things that—it’s government money. DOE goes to Congress, it’s appropriation and it’s money to x, y, and z. It’s illegal to use it for r, s, and—you know. It’s for this purpose and this purpose only. So it started with, I guess, working with the DOE system and other laws and rules that say, you know, under preservation—there are some preservation responsibilities and others and exploiting those to create room to keep it open until folks could get a better sense of, in general, just the role of the Manhattan Project in history and DOE’s role in preserving that, and working with other institutions, the Park Service and others to formalize that. And of course Park Service is struggling with their own—they don’t have enough money to take care of things they already have. So you get into that whole realm of things. But at least we were able to stop the bulldozers, if you will, or the momentum—the cocooning momentum, at least for B Reactor. Potentially with even T Plant and some other things. And I really give Colleen a lot of credit with how hard she worked, too, to help us put together that strategy and create that opening or stay of execution. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Did you encounter resistance in Washington, DC for— Klein: Oh, yeah. Franklin: --for this idea? How did you overcome that, to help to show people the value of this? Klein: Well, I guess, fortunately, I had enough—what—backing and credit or chits that I could dissent, disagree with my management agreeably and get things elevated to a higher level. So it was, I think, agree to disagree. And I credit with my management back in DC in the Office of Environmental Management with how they dealt with it too. And letting higher powers basically decide this, with the help of the historian and others. And I think that’s—you know, the other thing that I did is I listened to Skip Gosling. Clay Sell was the deputy secretary at the time. He was a history buff. Franklin: So you say at the time, which—what time was this? Klein: This was at the time when we were struggling with, how do we legitimize preserving B Reactor? Franklin: Do you know around what year or years this would have been? Klein: I’m going to guess it was 2003, 2004 timeframe. Franklin: Okay. Sorry to interrupt. Klein: Yeah, no, I just—so much of this is a blur in terms of who was where when. You start dealing with DC, it’s like—[LAUGHTER]—all look alike after a while. You know, I can come at it from different angles, Republicans, Democrats, you know, different folks’ emphasis and so forth. So I’m having a hard time recalling who exactly that was. But I remember Clay Sell and I can easily get back to you on when that was. Franklin: It’s okay. I was just trying to get a general sense. So you said Skip Gosling? Klein: Skip Gosling was the historian that we were working with. Clay Sell was the Deputy Secretary of Energy that was a history buff and who, I think, just, in the end, prevailed and was a decision-maker that enabled preserving this and working with Park Service. Colleen and I had a few different trips back to DC talking to these people and encouraging them—I hesitate to use the word lobbying, because it means something very, very particular, and we weren’t lobbying Congress; it was really within the Department. Although we had, certainly, allies, I think, with Patty Murray and Doc Hastings and others who, again, appreciated the Hanford history and what was done here and its significance. Franklin: Did the Hanford collection—the array of historic objects and artifacts gathered from Site—was that part of your—what you were in charge of when you were heading the DOE or was that a different— Klein: No, it was—I mean, that was under my purview. And we certainly had staff. But I must confess that of all the alligators that were surrounding the boat, that was the least of my—it wasn’t high up. I mean, that wasn’t—just too many other things were chomping at me and having to deal with. But I always felt comfortable—I mean, when you get in these positions, you kind of look at what your people are doing and you trust them in doing the right thing and you try to set a tone and direction and values and that sort of thing. So I was very fortunate—we have a very competent staff in environmental analysis and preservation, conservation. Paid attention to the different rules and governing those things. And they took care of it. They were, I think, good stewards. Franklin: Great. How did you become involved with the REACH Museum? Klein: Ah! At first it was as an ex oficio member of—it was called the REACH Board at the time. I think Colleen actually suggested it to me and them and set that up. I mean, it was an easy fit for me. As long as I was with DOE, I couldn’t be an actual member of the board. So the job was more of advisory and helping them. Of course, by that time, I think my feelings were well known that I did have a soft spot for appreciating the heritage here. Even predating the Manhattan Project, going back to the basalt flows and then the Ice Age Floods. There’s something very special and unique about this area, both the land and the people. And it’s those circumstances and things that gave rise to—I mean, the geology and the setting here is what gave rise to this being a great location for the Manhattan Project and the plutonium production mission. Which in turn brought all these incredible people here and formed a national laboratory that’s self-sustaining and a wonderful thing in its own right. And now lands are getting turned over to the port and being made available for other uses. I think it opens up opportunities for the tribes. But anyway, so the REACH was an easy fit for me to get involved in. And I’m proud to say I’m still—now I’m one what’s called the Foundation. It’s how the management structure of the REACH is set up. But they’ve overcome some very big hurdles. But I think the fact they have is—it’s meant to be, and it’s going to grow and prosper. But we still have some heavy lifts. Franklin: Okay. Is there—sorry. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford? Or just Hanford in general? Klein: I guess I’d like future generations to appreciate both the sacrifice and the significance of what happened here. That goes back to the tribes and what they sacrificed to what the early settlers that were evicted sacrificed, what the men and women involved in the construction, design, that relocated out here sacrificed, and the significance being with what was done. I’m still in awe. B Reactor up and running from nothing to up and running in 18 months, come on! I mean, it’s just—without computers and slide rules. These were adventurers, technologically, engineering, scientifically, and even management-wise. People come together. And at the same time, this is all under—because of threat of war. And creating something where people came and did this remarkable thing and have it used to kill people. There’s so many conflicting things about this to be learned so we don’t repeat the lessons of the past, yet showing what we’re capable of doing when we do come together with enough motivation and incentive and liberties. It’s just remarkable. So it’s a tough one to answer, what do you want people to remember? I just hope they appreciate the whole thing. The sacrifice and the significance. Franklin: Great. Is there anything else that we haven’t talked about that you’d like to mention? Klein: I feel drained. [LAUGHTER] If there’s something in particular that you’re interested in. Yeah, no, I just feel like I’ve been spouting out all over the place here. Franklin: No, it was great. You really touched on a lot of really pertinent topics and it’s really nice to have your interview next to Mike Lawrence—you know, just this kind of documenting this post-production change. I think it’ll be really crucial to help people figure out—this is all part of the same story, and how people figure out, okay, what happened when that singular mission was kind of over, and how did this place kind of find its identity after that, that the whole mission had changed. So thank you. And thank you for talking to us today. Klein: Well, I’m just—it comes back, like the STEM identity. I’m just hoping and optimistic that we can have a future that’s as distinctive and worthy as the significance of our predecessors did out here. Because it really changed the world, when you—it really is mind-blowing in a lot of respects. I’m just grateful to have the opportunity to be a little part of that continuum. Yeah, the fastest eight years of my life. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Well, thank you, Keith. I really appreciate it. Klein: Yeah, you bet, Robert. <a href="https://youtu.be/MAy7K26aMgY">View interview on Youtube.</a> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:09:55 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview FFTF (Fast Flux Test Facility) WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Project) K Basins PNNL (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory) ERDF (Environmental Restoration Disposal Facility) K Reactors ORP (Office of River Protection) B Reactor Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1970- Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1973- Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Sam Volpentest Bob Ferguson Kevin Smith Skip Gosling Patty Murray Doc Hastings Mike Lawrence Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Keith Klein Description An account of the resource Keith Klein first moved to Richland, Washington in 1973. Keith worked for the Atomic Energy Commission and later the U.S. Department of Energy from 1970-2007. An interview conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 02-07-17 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2017-04-12: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Rocky Flats (Colo.) Carlsbad (N.M.) Breeder reactors Radioactive waste disposal Radioactive waste sites Hazardous waste site remediation Columbia River 300 Area Atomic Energy Commission B Reactor B Reactor Museum Association Bechtel BRMA Cold War Department of Energy Flood Floods Hanford K Basin K Basins K Reactor K-Basin K-Basins Manhattan Project Mountain Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Park River Safety Savannah River supplies T Plant War Westinghouse https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F2cc5a9df175464365af258afc976817e.jpg 19a8294780b3335126190a2f93e00cdd Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed George and Marjorie Kraemer Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Victor Vargas: Okay. Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with George and Marjorie Kraemer on December 9th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with George and Marjorie about their experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full names for us, starting with George? George Kraemer: George R. Kraemer and Kraemer’s K-R-A-E-M-E-R. Franklin: Okay. Marjorie Kraemer: Marjorie Kraemer, K-R-A-E-M-E-R. Franklin: Okay. And George is G-E-O-R-G-E? George Kraemer: Yes. Franklin: And Marjorie? Marjorie Kraemer: M-A-R-J-O-R-I-E. Franklin: Great. Thank you. So tell me how and why you—did you both come to the Hanford Site together? Marjorie Kraemer: Mm-hm. Franklin: Okay, so tell me how and why you both came to the Hanford Site. George Kraemer: I was at the University of Wisconsin-- Franklin: Okay. George Kraemer: --in 1955. And I had a friend that was out here. And he told me about all of the deer hunting and the fishing, and all the good things. And he enticed me to come out. Franklin: There wasn’t much of that in Wisconsin? George Kraemer: Oh, yeah. But going out West— Franklin: Oh, right, okay. George Kraemer: --that was new. And so I drove out in April of 1955. I already had a job out here. Franklin: Okay. George Kraemer: And I stayed at the dorms—M-5, as I remember. Franklin: And what was your job? George Kraemer: I was a lab assistant first. Franklin: Okay. George Kraemer: From April of ’55 to May of ’56. And then I transferred to drafting department. Franklin: Okay. George Kraemer: This was at General Electric. And I was in there for—oh, from ’56 to December of ’65. Franklin: Okay. George Kraemer: And then I was asked to take another position. With—it was actually with Isochem. And it was—oh, engineering analyst, shop engineer, I went through all of those where I worked in a shop where they built vessels for Hanford—for PUREX, for REDOX, B Plant, T Plant—must be one more in there. And I did inspection of them. Fantastic job. Did that for—oh, quite a few years. Then in April of ’75, for another two years, I was a shop planner. I planned the activities of the shop—fabrication shop. And then in July of 1977, I was asked to be manager of this facility—of the shops. They had six separate shops, you know, like machine, tool and die, boilermaker, sheet metal, rotating equipment, welding lab, and all that. Franklin: Okay. George Kraemer: A fun job, too. Franklin: Yeah? George Kraemer: I kind of liked that; that was down my alley. Then in April of ’81, I was asked to manage activities of the design drafting group in 200 Areas. And I had—supervising the unit managers, engineering designers, drafters and engineers. Then in April of ’84, I was manager of specialty fabrication design and fabrication engineering support group. Again, this had drafting, designers, checkers, a few engineers. Then Westinghouse came. And I was asked to be the manager of design services which had all the drafting for Westinghouse. Franklin: Okay. George Kraemer: Did that for a number of years. And then--[LAUGHTER]—then my manager was a director, and I told him one day, you need an assistant. I said, I’m going to retire in due time, and I said, you need an assistant. And he looked at me kind of odd. But anyway, six months later he called me up, and he says, would you be my assistant? Had a good job. Nobody reporting to me. I did engineering quality counsel, the PRICE program, and Great Ideas, employee concerns, Native American outreach, the Signature Awards for Westinghouse. I wrote a few speeches, some for the president of Westinghouse. Franklin: Oh, wow. George Kraemer: It was kind of a good job! Then I wrote a little note here, I retired after 36 years on July 31st, 1991. 36 years, 3 months and 19 days, or nearly 9,500 work days, over 106,000 hours at 8 hours a day and over 6 million minutes at Hanford. Franklin: Wow, you really broke that down to the very last second. George Kraemer: But what I’m most proud about, except for that first transfer, all of my jobs, I was asked to take. Franklin: Okay. George Kraemer: I thought that was—said something for me, anyway. Franklin: And Marjorie, how did you come to Hanford? Marjorie Kraemer: Well, he came out, so—[LAUGHTER] And so we were engaged, and I came out in May. And we got married out here. Franklin: May of—would that be— Marjorie Kraemer: 1955. Franklin: ’55, okay. And you guys were married here in Richland, or--? Marjorie Kraemer: Yes. George Kraemer: Oh, in Coeur d’Alene. Marjorie Kraemer: Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Coeur d’Alene, beautiful up there. George Kraemer: Yes. Marjorie Kraemer: I didn’t work that first summer. I came in May. And then I got a job at General Electric in September, in the finance department. Franklin: Okay. Marjorie Kraemer: And I worked in the 700 Area downtown. And then they reorganized—or disorganized, I used to call it—[LAUGHTER]—and split up. And then I had to go out to the 200 Areas for a few years. And then I quit at the end of 1958 and had our children. Franklin: Okay. Marjorie Kraemer: After they—our son was in kindergarten, I went to work for a doctor in town, a pathologist, for ten years. And then I went to work for Exxon Nuclear, Advanced Nuclear Fuels. Which was eventually bought out by Siemens, whom I retired with in 1991 also. Franklin: Oh, wow. And when did you start with Exxon Nuclear? Marjorie Kraemer: 1975. Franklin: Oh, okay, so you spent a significant amount of time— Marjorie Kraemer: Yeah, right. Franklin: And did you also do finance and accounting there? Marjorie Kraemer: Yes, yes, in the accounting department. Franklin: How—did you face any particular issues as being a woman in the workplace from the ‘50s— Marjorie Kraemer: Well, let’s see. Franklin: Especially in that early era, you know, where women were first kind of— George Kraemer: You couldn’t work overtime. Marjorie Kraemer: I remember when I worked out in the areas, in the 200 Areas, women couldn’t work overtime. For some reason. I don’t know if it was a union thing or a company policy or the federal government. George Kraemer: You couldn’t work alone, anyway. Marjorie Kraemer: Right. You couldn’t work overtime. They didn’t want you to work out there then. Franklin: And you couldn’t work alone, either? George Kraemer: Well, in overtime, I remember when I was manager over there, if some of the ladies had to work, we had to have somebody around. Franklin: Like a male supervisor or just a supervisor? George Kraemer: Yeah, somebody. Another worker even. Franklin: All right. Interesting. Marjorie Kraemer: And it was different, living in Richland, because it was a government town. Franklin: Right. Marjorie Kraemer: And you had to—you probably interviewed people where you get on a housing list to get a house. And your name comes up, you go down and you look in this little glass deal where they had the list— George Kraemer: They posted of the new— Marjorie Kraemer: Posted them, and when you-- Franklin: Oh, really? I hadn’t heard that. Could you describe it in a little more detail? George Kraemer: Yeah, we put in for housing as soon as we got here. That was, well, in May. They had a posted board. Every week, they’d put a posting out there on the board and say who was eligible for a house. Finally, being the lowest peons out there, [LAUGHTER] we were eligible for a two-bedroom prefab. Franklin: Oh, okay. I live in one of those now. Marjorie Kraemer: [LAUGHTER] Do you? Okay. George Kraemer: So we got to look at two or three of them. Had to do it real promptly. And we choose one. 706 Abbott. Franklin: 706 Abbott, okay. George Kraemer: In Richland. Marjorie Kraemer: We lived there in town, yeah. It was different, because, well, the house came with appliances. Refrigerator, stove and— George Kraemer: What was it, $26? Marjorie Kraemer: $27 a month or something. George Kraemer: $27 a month or something for rent. Franklin: And how was that comparative to—like, is that a pretty average rent, or was that a pretty good deal? Marjorie Kraemer: Well, it was cheaper because it was government. George Kraemer: It was cheap. Of course, I didn’t make too much money back then, either. [LAUGHTER] Marjorie Kraemer: Of course if something went wrong, you just called up housing and they came and fixed it. Or they gave you a new one. [LAUGHTER] You know, a new stove or whatever. Franklin: Were they pretty prompt? George Kraemer: Yes. Franklin: Like, was the service— Marjorie Kraemer: Yeah, they were. Franklin: --pretty good? George Kraemer: They had a special group, that’s all they did was maintain the homes. Franklin: Okay. And describe that atmosphere of living in a company town where everyone worked at the same place and, you know, it was landlords of the government. I wonder if you could kind of talk about that atmosphere. George Kraemer: Well, every Friday afternoon, The GE News would come out. You’ve probably heard of the GE News. Franklin: Yeah, we have copies of The GE News in our collection. Marjorie Kraemer: Yeah. George Kraemer: It was the local one, and that was reading, and they had the want ads in there, which you always went because people were buying and selling a lot of things in that era. The—like she said, I remember the water. The water was—we had both irrigation water and house water. Two separate spigots there. And that was kind of interesting. That all come with our $26 or $27. Franklin: Wow. George Kraemer: After about, oh, I don’t know how many years it was, we got a—no, we bought that house. That’s right. Franklin: In ’58, when they— Marjorie Kraemer: Yeah, ’58. George Kraemer: Yeah, we bought that house. I think we paid $2,200 for it, as I remember. Franklin: Wow. George Kraemer: They were appraised maybe $3,000 and then they gave you a discount. Franklin: Wow. George Kraemer: And not too long after that, we moved into a two-bedroom—three-bedroom— Marjorie Kraemer: Three-bedroom, precut. George Kraemer: Three-bedroom precut. Franklin: Oh, okay. George Kraemer: That we bought on our own through the realtor. Franklin: Was that one of the newer constructions? Marjorie Kraemer: Well, it was better construction. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: It was better construction? George Kraemer: The prefabs are made out of two-by-twos instead of two-by-fours for structure. Franklin: Okay. George Kraemer: And plywood—quarter-inch plywood on the inside and outside, and some—insulation wasn’t too good in it, but it had a little bit. Franklin: Yeah, the insulation leaves a little bit to be desired. George Kraemer: It’s some sort of paper product, two inches thick. Franklin: Right. Well, yeah, because those were made, originally, for the Tennessee Valley Authority. George Kraemer: Right. Marjorie Kraemer: And they were supposed to not last very long. George Kraemer: Short-term thing. Franklin: Yeah, yeah. And they’re still— George Kraemer: And they’re still in use, yes. Franklin: Still around, yeah. Yeah, mine has been pretty extensively remodeled, but it’s still—still standing. Marjorie Kraemer: I do remember when we first came here that Richland had the highest birthrate and the lowest death rate of anyone in the nation. George Kraemer: We were part of that. Marjorie Kraemer: Yeah, right. Franklin: And it was likely due to the medical care, right? George Kraemer: The medical care, a lot of young people— Marjorie Kraemer: And everybody worked at Hanford and so they—you know, they were younger. There wasn’t any grandma and grandpas around. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right, other people I’ve interviewed have mentioned that, that when they—especially— Marjorie Kraemer: There wasn’t older people, you didn’t see them in Richland. Franklin: Right, there was no one who was retired or— Marjorie: Right, right. George Kraemer: No! You’re right on. Franklin: So it was mostly probably people your age. George Kraemer: Mm-hmm. Franklin: And then children of varying ages. George Kraemer: Yes. Franklin: Yeah. George Kraemer: You talk about the other things went on. We had limited places where we could go out and eat. Franklin: Okay. George Kraemer: Like we had the Mart building. That was a popular place. Marjorie Kraemer: Well, they had a grease— George Kraemer: It had a drug store. Marjorie Kraemer: It had a little diner in it or whatever. George Kraemer: A little dining area, things like that. Franklin: Little greasy spoon type of thing? George Kraemer: Yeah. Franklin: And where was that? Marjorie Kraemer: Well, it was on the corner of where the post office used to be, on that corner there, across the street. And of course it was kind of like a Quonset hut. George Kraemer: Yeah, it was like a big Quonset thing. Marjorie Kraemer: And of course it’s been torn down. George Kraemer: Remodeled, anyway. Franklin: Yeah, yeah. Quonset huts haven’t lasted somehow. George Kraemer: When I lived in the dorms, M-5, for a month? Two months? Before we got married. And I was out here with a friend and she wasn’t out here yet. And then trying to get our food every night, we had to go eat in restaurants every night. It was kind of interesting. Very limited. Franklin: Yeah. George Kraemer: Compared to what you have nowadays. Franklin: Right, or even perhaps where you had come from in—was that University of Wisconsin, is that Madison? George Kraemer: Yes. Franklin: Okay. I imagine a college town would have probably had a little bit more to— George Kraemer: Oh, yes. Franklin: --for, you know. And so what about the night life? Did you ever partake in night life in Richland, or was there much of night life? Marjorie Kraemer: No. We just—we played, you know, cards and things with friends. George Kraemer: Yeah, a lot of cards. We had a couple friends out here already. And then we made new friends pretty rapidly. As I said, we had a lot of cards. Marjorie Kraemer: Played cards. George Kraemer: Camping. Did a lot of camping. I had a ’49 Ford— Franklin: Okay. George Kraemer: --at that instance and timeframe. And the first summer we were here we were about camping every weekend. Franklin: And where would you go, often? George Kraemer: Oh, the Blue Mountains, north above Spokane— Marjorie Kraemer: Mount Rainier. George Kraemer: Mount Rainier, a lot. That’s one of my favorite places. Marjorie Kraemer: White Pass. Franklin: Yeah, it’s really pretty up there. George Kraemer: So that took a lot of our time in the summer. Franklin: I bet. George Kraemer: Winter times were—well, we didn’t go camping. But, again, that’s mostly—we had a lot of cards and games that we played with our young friends. Marjorie Kraemer: And you hunted a lot. George Kraemer: Yeah, I did a lot of deer hunting and a lot of fishing. Franklin: Oh, yeah. Well, you said that’s what brought you out here. George Kraemer: Yes. Franklin: I’m wondering if each of you, starting with Marjorie first this time, could describe a typical work day when you worked out on Site. Marjorie Kraemer: Oh. Well, let’s see. When I worked out in the Area it was a little different than in town, because I had to ride the bus. And of course, I think I got off about 6:00, and of course it was dark. And walked a couple blocks to the bus, and you paid a nickel for each way to go out to the Area, which was about 27 miles. And when you got there in the wintertime, it was dark. And you went in, and I worked in the B Plant, it was. And it was all cement, no windows. So you went in and it was dark. When you came out to go home, it was dark. So you never saw the sunshine until the weekend. Franklin: Wow. Marjorie Kraemer: [LAUGHTER] In the summer, it was awful because not all the buses were air conditioned. George Kraemer: None of them were. [LAUGHTER] Marjorie Kraemer: Oh. Well, we had a few, I think, that were. George Kraemer: Not then. Marjorie Kraemer: Yeah, gosh. You were just soaked, you know, because it was so hot. 100 degrees, riding in this bus. George Kraemer: And they allowed smoking on the buses. That was not good for us that didn’t smoke. Franklin: Oh you guys—both of you didn’t smoke? George Kraemer: No. Marjorie Kraemer: No, no. Franklin: Seems to, probably in the ‘50s, have been more of a rarity than a—or at least, seems like a lot more people smoked then. George Kraemer: True. Franklin: Especially, I can imagine, in the wintertime with closed windows, that would be pretty oppressive. So George, what about you? Describe a typical— George Kraemer: Well, I worked at 2-East for the first nine months or so. And that was like her. Our 222-S lab, no windows in there. Get up early, ride the bus, go to the—where Stores is now, at the big bus lot there. So all of the buses would go into there, and you would get off your bus and take the appropriate 200 Area bus or whatever, 100 Area bus. And likewise, when you came home, you’d come back to that bus lot, get off the buses, and get to your route. Franklin: Was that time on the bus included in your work day? George Kraemer: That was my time. Franklin: It was included in your time. It was not included in your time? George Kraemer: No, it was not included in-- Franklin: Oh, it was not included. George Kraemer: No, no. Marjorie Kraemer: No. Franklin: So that was just considered part of— George Kraemer: Yeah. Franklin: Was that a pretty fast transition though, from catching the bus by your home to go to the lot to then get on the other bus— George Kraemer: It was fast. Franklin: It was pretty efficient? George Kraemer: And the buses were pretty much on time. Franklin: Okay. Marjorie Kraemer: For some reason, I mostly had express buses where we didn’t stop at the bus lot. George Kraemer: Well, later on, yes. Marjorie Kraemer: Yeah. Franklin: Oh, okay. Interesting. And so then you said you’d get on the appropriate bus to the Area, and then—take me forward from there. George Kraemer: Okay. We get on the bus there and I went into the lab, and that was an all-enclosed building again, no windows. And I did, oh, nuclear—not nuclear but radioactive waste disposal and things like that. We’d get a bus from 300 Area about once a week or twice a week and they would—not a bus, a tanker truck. Sorry about that. A tanker truck would come in and I unloaded that into some of our special waste tanks out there. Franklin: Were these the tanks in the Tank Farms, or are these different tanks? George Kraemer: No, that wasn’t the Tank Farm; that was the special area just for the 300 Area waste. Franklin: Okay. And what would you do with the waste? George Kraemer: Well, the tanker truck would back up to a big nozzle, and I’d hook up the nozzles and drain the tanks. Let it drain for an hour or whatever it was, and then go back out and unhook the thing and wave the driver on. Franklin: Okay. And what would be done with the waste at that facility? George Kraemer: It was just stored. Franklin: Just stored. Okay. George Kraemer: Yes. I don’t think we—outside of doing some sampling, which I didn’t do, that was it. Franklin: Would that eventually go into the ground then? George Kraemer: Yes. Franklin: Okay. And that’s when it would eventually go into the single-shell or double-shell tanks. George Kraemer: Sooner or later. Franklin: Sooner or later, find its way there. Okay. George Kraemer: Yeah. And then I transferred into drafting and that was downtown in the 760 Building. Franklin: Okay. George Kraemer: Of course that way I could ride to work or walk to work. Franklin: And that’s like pen-and-table drafting, right? Like on a drafting board. George Kraemer: Drafting board, yes. That was kind of nice, because I could ride bicycle, walk or take the car, whatever. And I’d get home at least when it was daylight. Franklin: That seems like kind of an interesting job shift from handling waste to more of a technical thing like drafting. George Kraemer: Well, yeah, well, what started that, my boss wanted some sketches of flow diagrams and stuff like that. I said, I can do them. I did them, and he was impressed with them, and he says, you ought to be in drafting. And he led the way for me. Franklin: Okay, interesting. What did you go to school for? George Kraemer: Engineering. Franklin: Oh, okay, just engineering in general? George Kraemer: Mm-hm. Franklin: Okay, and Marjorie, did you attend college? Marjorie Kraemer: No, no. Franklin: Oh, okay. How did you gain the training for accounting and bookkeeping? Was it just all on the job? Marjorie: Yeah, on-the-job training. And you could advance back then. Nowadays if you didn’t have a college degree, well, I don’t think you would go as far. Franklin: Sure, yeah. Okay. George Kraemer: Another thing—I also took a lot of classes. GE at this time, they had engineering folks which would give us classes in various subjects. Franklin: Is that over here in the East Building? Or was it different? George Kraemer: I can’t remember exactly where it was. Sometimes—I think it was the Federal Building, I think it was. Franklin: Okay. George Kraemer: Just various things that would help me in my work and help me in my promotions, too. Franklin: Okay. Interesting. That’s kind of a—seems like so much was provided to workers in terms of training and housing, and I think it seems foreign to a lot of workers today to think of a company being that kind of paternal—caring, paternalistic almost. It’s kind of the vibe I get off that era of Hanford’s history. George Kraemer: Yeah. While I was downtown in drafting there, we worked on—I was in the piping squad. We worked on facilities in the 100 Areas, 200 Areas, not 300 Areas then. So I got to know pretty much all the areas. And I went out to visit them on lots of times where you have to go out and see what is really there. You go look at old drawings and it may not be the same. Franklin: Right. Because you’re not looking at the as-builts. George Kraemer: Right. Franklin: You’re looking at the older— George Kraemer: Right, and so consequently, we made a fair number of trips out to the various sites regardless of where they were. Franklin: Okay, so you got, then, to see the whole site pretty well. George Kraemer: I think I did, yes. Franklin: Okay. Marjorie, what was—well I’m going to ask this question of both of you, but we’ll start with Marjorie. What was the most challenging and/or rewarding aspects of your work at Hanford? [LAUGHTER] Marjorie Kraemer: Well, [LAUGHTER] I’m not sure how to answer that. It was a good place to work. And it, you know, paid well. And I guess that’s, you know, the main thing. I wasn’t out for some big career or anything like that. Franklin: Sure. And, George, what about you? What were some of the more challenging or rewarding aspects of— George Kraemer: Well, you know, we went through a lot of companies: GE, Westinghouse, Atlantic Richfield, Isochem—maybe another one in there. But the fact is, I never lost a day of work throughout 36, almost 37 years. I was never laid off. But I think the most rewarding was being recognized for my work. Being asked to take all these promotions. I think that was rewarding, to me. Must be doing something right. Franklin: Right, yeah. Great. Did the nature of the work at Hanford ever unsettle either of you? The, you know, just the-- Marjorie Kramer: Oh, you mean— Franklin: The amount of chemical or nuclear waste or the possibility of— Marjorie Kraemer: Radiation. Franklin: --Soviet attack or anything like that. Did that ever— George Kraemer: Well, you know, when we first moved here, the Army was still here. Marjorie Kraemer: Camp Hanford. George Kraemer: At Camp Hanford. Franklin: Right. George Kraemer: And they had Nike missile sites up on—not Badger, but— Marjorie Kraemer: White Bluffs, out that way, didn’t they, across the river? George Kraemer: Yeah, White Bluffs, and— Franklin: Rattlesnake? George Kraemer: Yeah, Rattlesnake! And you wondered about that. Planes would fly over every now and then. But other than that, as far as being attacked, no. And radiation-wise, I’ve learned to respect it. Franklin: Sure. George Kraemer: I never got involved in any serious things even though I went into some bad places, probably. But I never had—in the various canyons and stuff of the buildings. But never had any problems. Franklin: Okay. And same for you, Marjorie? Marjorie Kraemer: Yeah, and of course I wasn’t out there all that long. But I remember when we used to travel quite a bit. When we would travel and people would, oh, where do you work? And I would never say Exxon Nuclear; I would say Exxon. [LAUGHTER] Because they thought we glow in the dark, probably. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right, that seems to be— George Kraemer: That was very common, regardless of where you went. Like, say, we travel a lot and you stand up and introduce yourself. You didn’t want to say a great deal, because they figured you—they didn’t want to be around you. You glow. Marjorie Kraemer: [LAUGHTER] Some people. Franklin: Why do you think that endures? Because today, even today, that’s— George Kraemer: Ignorance. Ignorance of radiation, like in the paper here and now, they said, we’re the other Chernobyl. No! There’s not that possibility. Franklin: Right. Because our problem is mostly chemical. George Kraemer: Yes. Franklin: It’s not so much nuclear. I mean, there’s radioactivity— George Kraemer: Oh, there’s a lot of radioactivity; there’s no question. Franklin: --but it’s— George Kraemer: But it’s not going to explode. It’s not that type. Franklin: Right, we won’t have a meltdown. At least we can say that much. Marjorie Kraemer: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: What are some of your memories of any major events in Tri-Cities history? I’m thinking of like plants shutting down or starting up— George Kraemer: President Kennedy— Marjorie Kraemer: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. George Kraemer: --came out here. I can’t remember the year now. Franklin: September 14th, 1963. Marjorie Kraemer: 1963, yeah, ’63. Franklin: Or 17th. George Kraemer: Anyway, I was there. We all bussed out to—was that 100-N? Marjorie Kraemer: He was out in 100-N, wasn’t he? George Kraemer: 100-N, or--? Marjorie Kraemer: Wasn’t it? George Kraemer: 100-N, I think, wasn’t it? Franklin: Yeah— Marjorie Kraemer: Yeah, I think so. Franklin: He came to dedicate part of the steam generating— George Kraemer: You know, incidentally, I did the first working drawings, the scope drawings, of the piping of the major process piping of 100-N. Franklin: Oh, okay. George Kraemer: That was a fantastic job. I know one time I did my drawings, got them and they decided, hey, that’s classified, after the fact. I had to go through, collect all of my drawings and everything and then I had to secure my drafting boards and stuff like that. [LAUGHTER] George Kraemer: But we did it. Marjorie Kraemer: And I can remember in the 703 Building when I worked downtown in 19—I think it was ‘55 or ’56—Ronald Reagan came. Because we had the General Electric Theater. Franklin: That’s right! Marjorie Kraemer: And he came through our building and was talking to everybody. Franklin: Did you get to meet him? Marjorie Kraemer: Yes, uh-huh. Franklin: Okay. And did you also? Did he go to the Site? Marjorie Kraemer: No. George Kraemer: I don’t— Marjorie Kraemer: I think you were out in the Area. George Kraemer: I was out in the Area then. I don’t think I—I knew he was here, obviously. He was on—he toured some buildings, but I didn’t get to see him. Franklin: That’s pretty—that’s interesting. I’d heard he’d come, but I hadn’t met anybody who actually really— Marjorie Kraemer: Yeah, he came through our 703 Building— Franklin: Oh, okay. So I imagine that was— Marjorie Kraemer: Where finance was. Franklin: --quite an interesting thing to have a Hollywood celebrity coming to Hanford. And so did you both go to see President Kennedy when he came to dedicate the N Reactor? Marjorie Kraemer: I didn’t get to. Did you? George Kraemer: You were not working at Hanford then, I don’t think. Marjorie Kraemer: Right, no. George Kraemer: But anyway, the whole company [LAUGHTER] all the people were there that could be excused. They just bussed everybody out there. Franklin: Right. And were you one of those people? George Kraemer: Yes, I was one of them people. Franklin: Can you kind of describe that scene? George Kraemer: Well, he was on the podium which was quite a ways away from me there. And he gave quite a talk, you know. Of course the excitement of hearing your President—or seeing your President was kind of interesting. And I really don’t know what he said anymore. [LAUGHTER] George Kraemer: But I thought that was a major highlight. Another one, probably, is when General Electric decided they were going to leave. Franklin: Right. And that was in mid-‘60s, right? George Kraemer: ’65, probably. Franklin: Yeah, that sounds right. George Kraemer: ’66, maybe. Marjorie Kraemer: Yeah, I think so. Franklin: So describe that. How was the mood around Hanford and around Richland? Because General Electric had been so prominent. Marjorie Kraemer: Well, it affected George quite a bit. George Kraemer: Yeah, it affected my pension. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Ah. George Kraemer: Quite a bit. You know, I worked for over 36 years, and for those ten years that I worked under GE, that’s not included in my final pay—pension. Franklin: Interesting. George Kraemer: So I get—I don’t know. Very little a month for those ten years. It’s in a separate pension fund. Franklin: Ah. Why is that? That seems a little— Marjorie Kraemer: Because you were under— George Kraemer: The government works in strange and mysterious ways. And there were lawsuits and stuff like that, trying to get them to include our years in the master plan. Marjorie Kraemer: It was—one of the main reasons was you weren’t 35 yet. George Kraemer: That’s another thing, yeah, I wasn’t 35 yet. That was a condition to get vested. Marjorie Kraemer: That was the cutoff to get that-- Franklin: Right, right. Marjorie Kraemer: --included in your seniority. Franklin: So you could start to invest, right. Marjorie Kraemer: Right, vested. Anyway. Franklin: Wow. George Kraemer: And of course the big thing when Westinghouse came over to retake all of the—together—you know, GE split up and then we had various split-up companies, and then all of the sudden we’re back together again. Franklin: Yeah, it seems like—one other person I interviewed a little bit ago remarked at how the contracting agency, the government doesn’t always seem to know—like, it tries one big contractor, and then it tries to split it up a bunch, and then they go back to one big contractor, and then they want to split it up a bunch. So I’m wondering if you—either you or both of you—can talk about that shifting of contractors and how that impacted your work and your life. George Kraemer: Well, in my case, same job. [LAUGHTER] Same boss, same everything. There wasn’t much new. Different name on the paycheck, obviously. Franklin: But your unit stayed pretty intact throughout the change? George Kraemer: Yes. There were no major reorganizations at first because of the takeovers of the different companies. Franklin: Okay. And, Marjorie, what about you—so you worked initially those first few years, and then later on you worked for Exxon Nuclear, which—was Exxon Nuclear, were they a contractor or a subcontractor, or were they just aligned with— Marjorie Kraemer: They were a private company. Franklin: A private company, okay. Marjorie Kraemer: Yeah, they just made nuclear pellets. Franklin: So they were like a service company for Hanford? Marjorie Kraemer: No. George Kraemer: No. Marjorie Kraemer: No, no, they made nuclear fuels for reactors all over the world. Franklin: Oh, okay. So they weren’t a Hanford company. Marjorie Kraemer: No, they were private. Franklin: So they were just in the same industry— Marjorie Kraemer: But— George Kraemer: Yes. Marjorie Kraemer: Yeah, and so—and it was Exxon. Franklin: Right. Marjorie Kraemer: It was Jersey—called Jersey Nuclear when I first started out. Franklin: Okay. Marjorie Kraemer: And then it was Exxon. And then they changed to Advanced Nuclear Fuels under Exxon. Franklin: Okay. Marjorie Kraemer: And then Siemens bought them in 1989, I believe. Franklin: Okay. Marjorie Kraemer: And I worked for them for a couple years. Nothing really changed. And then I retired with Siemens Corporation. Franklin: Okay, interesting. Marjorie Kraemer: Which was a really pretty good deal, because they have really good benefits. German companies do. Franklin: They are very well-known for that, yeah. [LAUGHTER] Marjorie Kraemer: Yeah, right. Franklin: Yeah, that sounds like a pretty decent deal. Marjorie Kraemer: I think they worked half-time, because when we wanted to call them up in Germany and talk to them about something, it seems like they were either on vacation or they had a holiday. [LAUGHTER] They were never there. Franklin: Any memories of the, like, social scene or local politics, or just any—you know, either before the great selling, you know, the privatization or afterwards in Tri-Cities? Or actually, let me be more specific. I’m wondering if either of you can tell me about some of the protest activity that took place, or if you remember that, in the beginning in the late ‘60s and end of the ‘70s. Both kind of the protests that were pro-Hanford and anti-Hanford. Marjorie Kraemer: No, we never did get involved in any of them. I didn’t. George Kraemer: I didn’t, either. There were no major protests that I really remember. I know one time, there was a few of them along the road when we went out before you get to 300 Area. They couldn’t get out very far then. Franklin: Right. George Kraemer: But I didn’t really take too much interest in them. I figured they weren’t hurting anything. Franklin: So the Tri-Cities up until the late ‘60s was pretty segregated in terms of where African Americans could live. Even though they could work at Hanford, they couldn’t always live in Richland for a while. And I’m wondering if you guys could—did you observe that kind of— George Kraemer: Yes. Franklin: --that Civil Rights action and kind of some of that segregation before the Civil Rights? Marjorie Kraemer: Well, I remember that there were a few blacks—I don’t know what you—blacks going to the high school and stuff when my daughter was going. Well, the Mitchells were here, you know. Franklin: Right, CJ Mitchell. George Kraemer: CJ Mitchell. Marjorie Kraemer: And Cameron Mitchell was in my daughter’s— George Kraemer: Daughter went to school with him. Marjorie Kraemer: And she was good friends with him, you know. Franklin: Right, and he was one of the first— Marjorie Kraemer: Yeah, right, and— Franklin: --people to get someone to sell him a house in Richland. He had a lot of struggle getting that. Marjorie Kraemer: And I don’t know what they did with the housing—government housing—if they gave it to—I guess maybe they didn’t give it to black people. George Kraemer: They had no choice then. Franklin: I believe they had to live in east Pasco until the ‘60s. Marjorie Kraemer: Yes. I don’t think they could live in Kennewick, either. Franklin: No, Kennewick-- George Kraemer: Kennewick was very bad. Franklin: Yeah, they had the sundown. The sundown laws. Marjorie Kraemer: Yes, right. George Kraemer: Yes. When we first moved here, I’d become good friends with an African. And we used to play cards with him, and go places with him. I thought we were well-accepted. Marjorie Kraemer: But he lived in Pasco, didn’t he? George Kraemer: Yes. He did not live in Richland. Franklin: Oh, right. George Kraemer: But—I said it was very plain to us, that—I say, Kennewick was very bad. And they didn’t even want to go to Kennewick, the colored folks. Franklin: Right. Marjorie Kraemer: And they were supposed to get out of town before, like you say, sundown. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah. Marjorie Kraemer: Which is not very nice. George Kraemer: But, you know, it’s not nice to say, but they knew their place. Franklin: Right, well, yeah, they knew where they could go and couldn’t—where they were welcome and where they were not. Yeah, that squares pretty well with the historical record. Thank you for that. Marjorie Kraemer: When our daughter—after she graduated from high school, she went to WSU. And then she graduated from there. She got a nursing degree, and she went to Seattle and worked. And one of her comments once when she called me up, and she says, Mom, we really led a sheltered life in Richland, you know? [LAUGHTER] Franklin: That’s interesting. I wonder if you could unpack that a little bit more. What would have been so sheltered about Richland for her? Marjorie Kraemer: Well, I think, you know, she went to Seattle and got a job. And her first job was in the King County jail. She was a nurse in the clinic. And she saw all these prisoners and— George Kraemer: Not the best clientele. [LAUGHTER] Marjorie Kraemer: Right. And that was one of her comments after she called me up—called me up and said, you know, we really led a sheltered life, after seeing all these homeless people and skid row, and—you know. It’s just different. Franklin: Right, because I imagine Richland would have been a pretty solid middle class, mostly white— Marjorie Kraemer: Right. Franklin: Still is majority, but mostly white, middle class. Pretty safe. If you didn’t work at Hanford, you didn’t live in Richland until 1958. And I imagine after that, it was pretty slow to change where most people who lived here worked at Hanford for— George Kraemer: I think the police had a good—made their presence known, in a good way. Franklin: Sure. George Kraemer: And I think that was the difference between Seattle living and outskirts of Seattle or wherever she lived. Franklin: Well, I imagine it would be in general an easier community to police where you knew everyone worked in the same place. Marjorie Kraemer: Right, right. Franklin: Everyone knew—or a lot of people knew everyone else, and you know it was— George Kraemer: But crime was very low. Franklin: Sure, sure. Marjorie Kraemer: Right. George Kraemer: First of all, you know the folks have clearances, things like that, that’s going to get a better grade of people. Because they went through all the rigmarole you have to go through. Marjorie Kraemer: I saved one of those questionnaires, those Q clearance deals. I still have it. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Oh, yeah? Marjorie Kraemer: And I left—when I filled mine out, I left two weeks of my life off of this—[LAUGHTER] Franklin: Oh, no. Marjorie Kraemer: Of course it came back and they wanted to know where I was. [LAUGHTER] I was in transit to out here or something. [LAUGHTER] Marjorie Kraemer: And so they wanted to know— Franklin: Those forms went back, what, like ten years or something like that? Marjorie Kraemer: Oh, it was— George Kraemer: Renewed or unless there was a need to upgrade. Marjorie Kraemer: When I first filled it out, of course I was only like 20 years old. So I didn’t have that much to have to put on it. But they went back, and people told us, you know, we were from a small town and of course they told us, these people— George Kraemer: Right. Marjorie Kraemer: They were asking about you and all this— Franklin: Right, calling around. Marjorie Kraemer: Right. George Kraemer: They were wanting to know what was going on. Franklin: Right. Yeah, I know, that’s— Marjorie Kraemer: Wanting to know where you went to school and where you worked back there. [LAUGHTER] George Kraemer: I first got an L clearance when I came here. Franklin: Is that a lower or higher— George Kraemer: That’s a lower grade. And then as soon as I transferred into drafting, I had to get a new clearance, a Q clearance, again. Which I had the rest of my time here. Franklin: Okay, interesting. Were they still any—I’m always a little fuzzy on my dates with this—were there any Atomic Frontier Days parades when you were here? George Kraemer: Oh, yeah. Franklin: Or were those over by the time that— Marjorie Kraemer: No, they were here, and in fact, Sharon Tate— George Kraemer: Yeah, Sharon Tate was in that. Marjorie Kraemer: One of the first few years we were here, she was the Miss Tri-Cities. Franklin: Oh, really? George Kraemer: Yes. Marjorie Kraemer: Yeah. Her dad was at Hanford, you know, Camp Hanford. He was an Army-- Franklin: Oh, that’s right, because I’ve always heard she was an Army—kind of an Army brat. Oh, really? That’s really interesting. I’ve oftentimes asked—I used to ask people about that question and it would miss a lot, so I kind of stopped asking about Sharon Tate. But that’s interesting that you remember seeing her? Marjorie Kraemer: Oh, sure. George Kraemer: Yeah, I remember they had parades down the main—one of the streets. I don’t remember which ones now. Franklin: And you guys went to the Atomic Frontier Days and all of that? George Kraemer: Why, certainly! Yes. Franklin: Yeah, those were very colorful and kind of interesting events. Kind of wish I could have seen one of those in the flesh. Great. And so—gosh, you guys have already run down so many of my questions without even me needing to ask them. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: But I still have a couple. Could you describe the ways in which security and secrecy impacted your jobs, respectively? I’ll start with Marjorie. Marjorie Kraemer: Well, you just knew that you weren’t supposed to—you know, I was in finance. And so I saw all these numbers and all this stuff. And you just knew you weren’t supposed to talk about things like that. But other than that, you know, it didn’t really affect me all that much. George Kraemer: Well, I know, going on vacation or something like that, or going back to Wisconsin. We’d go quite a bit. And, what do you do out there? And you know, in general terms you tell them. But I was trying to remember some specifics. I’m sure there were some to do with security. Marjorie Kraemer: It must have been very hard to work here in the ‘40s. [LAGUHTER] You didn’t know what you were doing, you know, you were building all this stuff. George Kraemer: Yeah, we knew what we were doing, you know. What we were making and all this thing. Franklin: You could talk about it to your coworker. Marjorie Kraemer: Right. Franklin: And not be afraid of being evicted from your home and losing your job. George Kraemer: I remember looking at an old paper. It said, big headlines: it’s bombs. Franklin: Yes. Yes, that’s the Richland Villager from right after the Nagasaki bombing, yeah. Interesting. Do you remember, were there like searches or did they search people on the buses? George Kraemer: Yes. Franklin: Okay. Marjorie Kraemer: Well-- George Kraemer: Going home. [LAUGHTER] A lot of times you just had to open your lunch pail up, and make sure there was nothing in it. Franklin: You didn’t have any atoms in your pocket or anything? George Kraemer: Yeah. Marjorie Kraemer: They didn’t always look. George Kraemer: They didn’t always look, but every now and then they’d have a search day. Franklin: Okay. Kind of keep you on your toes. George Kraemer: And of course all of the cars at 300 Area where the major barricade was. You had to stop, open your trunks if you drove a car. And then if you went into the various—200 Areas, 100 Areas, you had to stop again or you parked your car in the parking lot outside and walked in. And if you went into the various buildings, like PUREX or like in the lab where I was there, you had a number and a radiation badge, and your name and a number you were assigned. When I went to 222-S, it was number ten. I must have got some big wheels for a number or something like that. I was ten. They would look you up to make sure in their file—they’d look at, make sure the picture matched you. Franklin: Wow, and that would be every time you’d come in? George Kraemer: Every time you went in the building there. Franklin: Wow. That’s very tight security. George Kraemer: Yes. Franklin: When you—you said you had to go around the site a lot—how would you get around once you got—so you took the bus in, but how would you get from one area to the other? George Kraemer: Engineering department had cars—government cars. Franklin: Okay. And so then you’d just—could only travel in— George Kraemer: And we just traveled in government cars out to the various facilities. Franklin: Okay. When did the bus service stop? George Kraemer: Good question. Let’s see. Marjorie Kraemer: Late ‘60s? George Kraemer: Hmm. Probably in that era. Marjorie Kraemer: Because when we built the new house, and it was in 1966, and you still rode the bus then. George Kraemer: That’s right. Marjorie Kraemer: So I think it was in the late ‘60s. George Kraemer: I would say in the late ‘60s, it was. Marjorie Kraemer: Or early ‘70s. Franklin: And so then— George Kraemer: And there was much frustration. Franklin: To much frustration? George Kraemer: On a lot of people’s part. Including mine. Franklin: Really? Why was that? George Kraemer: I loved that bus ride. I mean, I loved going out there for—it was changed to, I don’t know, 50 cents or something. It was higher price, anyway. The nickel was just to pay insurance and liabilities. But—so I had to drive my car out or get into a carpool, or whatever. Marjorie Kraemer: But then for a while, they stopped the service in town picking everybody up, and then you could go to the bus lot and catch a bus. For a while, for a few years. George Kraemer: Yeah, they stopped the rounds through town. Franklin: Okay. That’s such an interesting structure of life, to have everybody in one town that all catches the bus, and— Marjorie Kraemer: [LAUGHTER] And work at the same— Franklin: You know when the buses are coming and everyone kind of depends on it, and— George Kraemer: Yes. Franklin: That’s just such an interesting—seems almost kind of foreign to a lot of people today. And so you said that was kind of a chagrin that the bus—is that because you liked just not having to drive, or not— George Kraemer: I liked not having to drive. I knew that I had to be outside there at 6:00 or whatever it was every morning. And it was there. It was— Marjorie Kraemer: You could read, you could do work—you could do all sorts of things. George Kraemer: When I was manager out there for a while, I could do a lot of work on the bus. Franklin: Ah. George Kraemer: I had my own philosophy. I did not like to take any work home. I had my briefcase and I would do a lot of stuff on the bus. That was 45 minutes of uninterrupted time, and I could get a lot of my work done. Franklin: Oh, I bet. Yeah. Interesting. What would you either—both of you, sorry—what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland during the Cold War? And I’ll start with you, George. George Kraemer: Well, I think you’re doing part of it. [LAUGHTER] Let them know what’s going on. And you know, the kids never really knew what—really, what we were doing, I don’t think, in detail. Yeah, they knew in general. As I look back at the government—not too impressed. Franklin: Really? Why is that? George Kraemer: The stuff that goes on out there now—when we were—I was working, I felt I was doing a job. Things were going out—in the shops, things were going out the door. We were making things. Things were happening. I was proud of our work. Now I begin to wonder how long—you know, the Tank Farms have been undergoing their thing for years, and it’s going to be another amount of years before they do anything. It’s—not enough things are happening. Franklin: Okay. Interesting. Marjorie, what about you? What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland during the Cold War? Marjorie Kraemer: Well, it was just such a different sort of life, you know. You were kind of protected, I guess. You know, everybody, like, knew everybody, and you all worked at the same place, and your kids went to the schools in town. You went to the doctors that are in town. It was just a different sort of a— Franklin: Right, like your daughter had said maybe a little protected, sheltered. Marjorie Kraemer: Sheltered life, yeah. Franklin: It’s so interesting to me because—George, the thing you said about feeling like you’d done something—I’ve heard that from other interviewees who had worked in that transition period, who had worked when Hanford was producing and felt a real sense of accomplishment. And then kind of felt like it was mired down during cleanup and that the mission’s unclear, the work doesn’t progress. And Marjorie, it’s always been amazing to me to hear that, that it does seem like a really safe and peaceful place, but when you look at it kind of on—there’s a flipside to that, though. It’s amazing that there’s this safe, peaceful place next to nine nuclear reactors. [LAUGHTER] Marjorie: And you know— Franklin: And you know, like a major target in the Cold War. Marjorie Kraemer: Well, I guess that’s true. I don’t know. You just-- Franklin: But I think those two can exist side-by-side. That it could be, you know, a place of production but also of danger and a place of safety but also—you know, and of security. I just—it’s—there’s a lot of contradictions in Hanford that I think are really interesting that get brought out in these interviews. So thank you. Is there anything that I haven’t asked either of you about that you would like to talk about? George Kraemer: No. I’m sure I’ll think of some when I get home. Marjorie Kraemer: Yeah. Franklin: That’s very common. That happens all the time. I get emails a lot from people like-- Marjorie Kraemer: Yeah. Franklin: --I wish I had said this. George Kraemer: Oh, let’s see. I think when I was a shop engineer out there in the shops, best years of my life out there. Again, I felt proud that we were doing something, things were going out the door. I was responsible for a lot of critical measurements and things of—the jumpers, the tanks, and everything that we did in the shop. And then troubleshooting. There was some failures out there and I would go out to troubleshoot to see how we could fix things. Contaminated vessels and things like that. But those were good years. Best years I had out there. Management was good, but there are a lot more responsibilities. But those worked out, too. Franklin: Right. Great. Marjorie Kraemer: And I think the schools were—you know—were good. Franklin: Right. Marjorie Kraemer: The kids had a good education, had good teachers. Franklin: Right, I’ve heard that a lot that people—there were a lot of well-educated people that worked at Hanford and at first Battelle—Hanford Labs, and then Battelle and Pacific Northwest National Labs. So that there was a high focus on education and— George Kraemer: Another thing is, probably more so than now, but the school sports. Didn’t have too much else to do, so there was a lot of basketball games and football games and soccer games and all that sort of things that people went to. And they really supported the high school sports. Franklin: Okay. You think that’s more then than now. George Kraemer: I think more then than now. There was less to do. Franklin: Right, it was a little more of an isolated community. Marjorie Kraemer: Right. And of course this year they went to the— George Kraemer: Well, this year’s different. [LAUGHTER] Marjorie Kraemer: --the tournaments. But when our daughter and son were in high school, they were always going to tournaments. And I always had to take kids and chaperone, you know? Franklin: Oh, yeah, yeah. Great. Well, thank you so much for coming. George Kraemer: Ah, it was our pleasure. Franklin: I see that you’ve brought some things. Would we be able to scan those and keep them with part of your—with your interview? George Kraemer: You can have those. That’s my work history. Franklin: Okay, great, we’ll scan this and put this with your interview, too. George Kraemer: And she’s got some pictures there, too. Franklin: Are these family pictures, or--? Marjorie Kraemer: No, these are pictures of— George Kraemer: No, they’re-- Marjorie Kraemer: Out at Hanford. This is one when I worked out at the Area. This was a million man hours without an accident, you know? Franklin: Oh, wow, okay. Marjorie Kraemer: And they had a fashion show. And this is me right here in radiation outfit, you know, that we modeled the—we modeled the outfits they wore in the contaminated labs and all that. Franklin: And which one are you? Are you the one in the white cowl? Marjorie Kraemer: Yeah, I’m the one right—with the— Franklin: Okay. Marjorie Kraemer: All covered up. Franklin: Yeah, kind of a little hard to tell. That’s great. That’s a great picture. Ah, yup, General Electric Photo Division. Marjorie Kraemer: Yeah. Franklin: Yeah, would we be able to scan these and put them with your interview? George Kraemer: Yeah. Franklin: That would be wonderful. Okay. Great. Well, thank you again, thank you both so much. ITts been a really excellent interview. George Kraemer: Good! Marjorie Kraemer: Thank you. Franklin: You did good. <a href="https://youtu.be/cnCDk351BVY">View interview on Youtube.</a> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:57:59 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 100 Area 200 Area 300 Area 700 Area 703 Building B Plant N Reactor T Plant Tank Farm Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site ~1955-today Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. ~1955-1991 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Kennedy Sharon Tate Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with George and Marjorie Kraemer Description An account of the resource An interview with George and Marjorie Kraemer conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 12-09-2016 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2017-15-12: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. Relation A related resource <a href="http://hanfordhistory.com/collections/show/25">George and Marjorie Kraemer, Oral History Metadata</a> 100 Area 1955 200 Area 300 Area 700 Area 703 Building Award Awards B Plant Battelle Cold War General Electric Hanford Kennedy Kennewick Mountain Mountains N Reactor PUREX Quonset hut Quonset huts Stores T Plant Tank Farm Tank Farms Theater War Westinghouse https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F3709e8204c8899a93c9c81308951a94c.JPG 84a45b395471c72ce61c06a25b1e3919 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Michael Lawrence Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Michael Lawrence on February 1st, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Mike about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Michael Lawrence: Michael J. Lawrence. L-A-W-R-E-N-C-E. Franklin: Great. Thank you. So, how did you come to the Hanford Site? Lawrence: I went—I grew up in Washington, DC. I was born and raised in Washington, DC, and I went to the University of Maryland and lived at home when I did so. And I was a physics major. Between my junior and senior year of college, I was fortunate enough to get one of five internships at the Atomic Energy Commission. That internship had me working in a division of the AEC, or Atomic Energy Commission, called the production division, which was responsible for, among other sites, the Hanford Site, because of its production of plutonium. During that summer, I actually shared an office with an individual who was responsible for the operations and missions of the N Reactor which was located here. So I had an opportunity to learn a little bit about Hanford at that particular point in time. When I graduated from Maryland with my degree in physics the next year, I had already been offered and had accepted a full-time job with the Atomic Energy Commission when I went back to the production division again to work. I was working on isotopes programs and other things when I was called into the director’s office one day. It just so happened that several years previously, in 1969 I believe, President Nixon had signed the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, and one of the provisions in NEPA called for something which, at that point in time, was not known at all. Something called an environmental impact statement. You had to do environmental impact statements for any major federal projects, and our division was responsible for two projects that were going to occur in the early ‘70s here. One was the design and building of the quite a bit. And also had a sense of what it was going to be involved dealing with the public on important and issues that were of concern to the public, like the Z-9 crib and plutonium production. Because one of our hearings for those environmental impact statements was held down in Portland. And I can recall going down there, and there were demonstrators in radiation contamination clothing protesting and all the rest. And you got a chance to see just how the public felt about it. But that was my first instance of dealing with Hanford. Then later in the mid-‘70s—again, I’m still back in Washington, DC; AEC had become the Department of Energy—and I was responsible for a program to manage and store commercial spent nuclear fuel. And that program, the contractor and site that was helping us out was the Savannah River site in South Carolina. But because of the heavy burden they had, I decided it would be best if we changed the management of that program, or the contractor working on the program from Savannah River to the Hanford Site and to the Pacific Northwest National Lab—at that time was Pacific Northwest Lab; it wasn’t a national lab, but PNL. And so I started coming out again and working with the people here. So I had a pretty good understanding of the community and what was out here, and I liked it. But in the early 1980s, in 1982 to be exact, after several years of very, very intense negotiation back in the halls of Congress, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act was passed by Congress which set up a process and legal requirements for identifying, selecting, licensing, building, operating, and funding a geologic repository for commercial nuclear waste from commercial reactors and defense waste from the production of plutonium, primarily either at Hanford or at the Savannah River plant. I was one of several people called down from where I was working in Germantown, Maryland, down to Washington, DC to work on the direct implementation of that act. Obviously, that was a very—it was controversial, it was huge, and the new Secretary of Energy at that time—his name was Donald Hodel, who had formerly been the administrator of Bonneville out here in the Pacific Northwest—he was very familiar with the issues involved. And I got an opportunity to meet and work with him rather closely. And after several years of doing that, he asked me to come out here to be the manager of the Richland Operations Office. Franklin: Wow. Thank you. That’s really fascinating, with all of your lengths between DC and to here. Did you—I want to ask—you mentioned a hearing in Portland where there were demonstrators. And that—I think it fits pretty well into what we hear a lot about how the west side and the east side of the state think about Hanford. Did you find a pretty supportive public here in Tri-Cities when you would come and hold meetings here in the area about, like, for example the Z-9 crib or other projects? Did you find a pretty supportive public? Lawrence: I wouldn’t use the term supportive, I would use the term very informed and knowledgeable. They understood, to a greater degree, what the risks, what the concerns were, what the precautions were. Not universally, obviously. There were—and I have a good example of what a protestor would be. But basically, they seemed to be more informed, and certainly they were more knowledgeable of the situation. So the further away you went, the less direct knowledge people had of the situation. And so consequently—and it’s understandable, you know, they really didn’t have the same—they didn’t know people who worked at the Site. They didn’t—couldn’t appreciate the values that they had, their sensitivities. So that would be more the way I would describe it. Franklin: Okay. Lawrence: What was interesting, and I just had alluded to, was after coming out here—this was in 1984; I came—arrived in July of 1984. And at the beginning of that year was when the PUREX Plant, which processed the fuel coming out of N Reactor and reprocessed it to recover the plutonium, had just gone back into operation after a number of years of being mothballed. This was all part of President Reagan’s buildup of our military strength and weapons complex to more or less challenge the Russians or the Soviet Union in their ability to do so. And so we were gearing back up, really, the plutonium production mission at the Hanford Site. It was obviously very controversial here in the Northwest. And it was just starting up, and there had actually been a leak from the PUREX Plant right after it started up. And what I found when I arrived here in July was that even though the people on the Site—the contractor and the officials here—were saying, no, this is what it was and this is what the effects were. There was very little credibility. People would not believe them. And there was a strong opposition to what they were doing. That was a challenging situation to walk into where you really don’t have any credibility. But the first week I was in town, first week as manager, down in my office in the Federal Building, which is up in the northeast corner of the Federal Building, seventh floor, looking out over John Dam Plaza and the park, and I looked out on the street, and there’s a person with a big sign and billboard saying, Mike Lawrence, carpetbagger, go home. And he’s just sitting on the park bench in front of the building. And I—you know, I’ve just arrived in town, and I’m looking at him. His name was Larry Caldwell. He was known to everybody in town; he liked to protest. And I’m looking down at him and I—I sort of like to engage. I don’t like to ignore things. So I said, you know, I think I’ll go out and talk to him. Well, that caused quite a stir. But I walked down and walked across the street, walked up to the park bench, introduced myself, sat down and we started talking. I wanted to find out, well, since you don’t know me, why do you call me a carpetbagger, why do you want me to go home? Let’s talk. And it was funny because in the midst of discussing this with him, I happened to glance back over. And if you’re familiar with the Federal Building, it’s just full of windows. Every window was filled with faces looking out. [LAUGHTER] They said, this is our new manager and he’s out there. Security was very concerned. But you know? It worked out fine. Larry told me what his problems were. He didn’t like the mission. I told him, I said, I understood that. I had a job to do; Congress had appropriated the money, and I’d been given a job to do, and I was going to do it the best I could. But I was going to do it trying to do it in keeping the public informed of what we were doing and being as upfront and—now the term is transparent. We didn’t use that term back then—but as transparent I could be in handling it. So that was my first direct encounter with a protestor, if you will. But I thought it turned out pretty well. But that gets to a broader topic that I’d like to address, and that is, as I said, the Department and its contractors, I found they didn’t have credibility. And I’m not saying it was anyone’s fault, but it’s my opinion that it’s very easy for organizations—Department of Energy, Richland, Hanford—to lose credibility. And the only way you regain that credibility is through individuals, by really engaging with people so they get a sense of who you are or who the people are doing the work. And so we tried from the very beginning back in 1984 to go out and to meet with the public, to engage the public, to be as open as we could to explain our perspective and what we were doing. Obviously, we didn’t expect everyone to agree with us; some people were just diametrically opposed to it. But you’d like them to at least sense that the people doing the work shared some of their values, shared their concerns, in doing their work. The best example I have of that is—I believe it was in 1985. Again, Hanford, because of our role going back into the nuclear weapons complex had been quite controversial. I received a call from the pastor of the Catholic church down in Kennewick, St. Joseph’s. And he said, Mike, I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but the three bishops—Catholic bishops—in Washington State are having prepared a letter—very, very critical of Hanford, its operations, and the people who work there. And he said, I just think that it’s being, I guess—a focal point was being headed up by a person in Yakima where the bishop was a Bishop William Skylstad. And I happened to have met and knew Bishop Skylstad from my own personal dealings with the church. And so I thanked the priest in Kennewick, and I called up Bishop Skylstad, and I said, I’d really like to come—I understand you’re having some work done on behalf of yourself and the other two bishops, and I’d like to really come and talk to you about it. And so I actually took the president of Rockwell Hanford, who operated PUREX, his name was Paul Lorenzini—very, very intelligent, smart guy—with me. And we went to meet with Bishop Skylstad and he had the individual who was writing this who happened also to be a member of the Hanford Education Action League in Spokane. And, you know, I read what they had prepared. It was talking about the Department of Energy is lying about this, and they’re poisoning, and they’re making these intentional releases. And in discussing that, after a while, Bishop Skylstad said to me, he said, Mike, Mike, calm down. He says, you’re taking this personally. And I looked at him and I said, Bishop, of course I’m taking it personally. When you say the Department of Energy is lying, who is that? Who is it that you’re saying is lying? And it was amazing, because he just stopped; all of a sudden, it dawned on him. He said, oh my goodness, I never thought of it that way. But you had to put a face in front of the organization. And that helped a lot. Now, the letter still came out and it was still very critical. But it wasn’t as accusatory as perhaps it was. It says, we’re opposed to the mission. That’s fine; that I understand. But when you get into the motives and the ill will of the people, that’s where it goes a little too far. Franklin: Mm. Right. The difference between unintentional or passive action and then direct action. Lawrence: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Franklin: I wonder if you could talk about what it was like in the early ‘70s to actually—to physically get to Hanford from Washington, DC. Was it still very—was travel still kind of tough to get to Hanford? Or was there easy air travel or car travel? Or did you find it to be a little still off the beaten path? Lawrence: Well, it was a lengthy trip. Coming from Washington, DC, I would fly from Washington, DC to Chicago, Chicago to Seattle, then Seattle to Pasco. And usually that was like going United, and then I think there was—it was called Airwest—Hughes Airwest, owned by Howard Hughes. Then it did get significantly easier later on when Northwest Airlines had a direct flight from Dulles Airport in DC to Seattle, and then you’d fly back over here. I always used to enjoy those trips. I mean, air travel was a lot different then than it was now in that it wasn’t as—a chore and the like. It was a little bit more creature comforts in traveling as well. Franklin: When you mentioned NEPA and the need for the EIS, Environmental Impact Statement, and digging at Z-9 and I’m sure probably a couple other facilities—did that also trigger any kind of cultural resources work, archaeological digs? Were there ever any—was there any cultural resources work or things found? Lawrence: In the ‘70s, no. I mean, that work was right in the middle of the 200 Area. Which is—it still today is the most concentrated area. I believe, if I recall correctly, the EISs probably said—would address that. But not—I mean, EISs then were maybe 100 pages long. Now they’re—[LAUGHTER]—multiple volumes and many thousands of pages long. But I wasn’t aware of any. I think the first real instance of dealing with Native Americans and their concerns was with a project we had on the center of the Site called the Basalt Waste Isolation Project, or BWIP, which was on Gable-- Franklin: I was going to ask you about that next. Lawrence: --which was on Gable Mountain. But I’ll let you ask about it. Franklin: Well, no, I was going to ask if you—you talked about the Nuclear Waste Policy Act and finding a geological repository. And I was just going to ask, I assume that’s BWIP, then, that is the— Lawrence: Yeah, and, actually there’s a slight difference there. But the whole idea of the geologic repository, especially since I had been responsible for that program before coming here, led people to suspect or conclude that it was a foregone conclusion that Hanford was going to be named the geologic repository for the United States. And actually, when I came here, that Nuclear Waste Policy Act had set out a process for narrowing down until you had three sites that you would thoroughly characterize. We had gone from nine sites to five, and when I came out here, there were five sites under consideration. Once I was here, it was narrowed down to the three finalists, if you will: Hanford for basalt, Nevada for tuffs—that’s the Yucca Mountain Site—and in Texas there was a salt formation called Deaf Smith County. And so that was being looked at. Now, BWIP itself was not the geologic repository site. It was a test facility built into Gable Mountain—and Gable Mountain, of course, rises up and the geologic repository was going to go down several thousand feet. But it allowed the scientists to put heaters into basalt rock to see how the rock responded to it—expansion, contraction, did it attract water, was it pushed away, and the like. It was actually a quite successful project. We learned quite a bit about how basalt rock would interact. However—getting back to the cultural resources—during that period, we also found out that the Native Americans—the Yakamas, I believe—used to use Gable Mountain for vision-quest-type activities and places to send people on a spiritual adventure. This didn’t happen right away, but we finally worked out—because I saw no reason why we couldn’t—with a day’s notice, we let the Yakamas—we said, we will let you come on and go up to the site, and do whatever ceremonies, to do whatever you want to do. We just need to know about it. Obviously there is physical security and there’s safety we had to provide for them. But I think we were able to work out and arrangement with the Yakamas where they would have access. Perhaps not as freely as they would like, but it did allow some compromise to be worked out so they could still perform some of their religious ceremonies there. Franklin: Sure. So you came—you arrived in July 1984, you said. And that was kind of—that was under this Reagan era mandate of basically restarting production. Lawrence: Right. Franklin: Because it had just been N Reactor through most of the ‘70s, correct, and into the early ‘80s. So I’m wondering if you can just elaborate more on that mission and some of the activities needed and the push back—if there was any push back—and the whole thing. Lawrence: Well, there was opposition, particularly on the west side and in Portland to restarting plutonium production facilities. While N Reactor had continued to operate, the fuel had not been processed and plutonium had not been recovered in many instances until PUREX started back up. So that was the process of really then getting back into plutonium production. That’s what was leading to opposition to what we were doing. We did the best we could to try to go around and to explain at least what we were doing, how we were doing it, how we would interact. I can recall going with my wife to a meeting up in Spokane. I just went up on a weekday night and the Hanford Education Action League had asked me to come up and talk to them. It was clear. It was clear then, that there was very, very strong opposition to what we were doing. A person I remember asked me the question, did I realize that I was acting just like Hitler? [LAUGHTER] I said, you know, I don’t think of it that way. I think about what I do very seriously, and I’m doing something that’s approved by and funded by the government of the United States of America, from the President and the Congress. I have to do it safely, and I have to do it in accordance with the law, but that’s what needs to be done. But, again, it was another effort to try to get out and at least be present, answer the questions; you may not make them happy, but at least you know you’re there trying to interact. Franklin: And so how many facilities ended up being restarted or brought online from when you got here to when things were shut down? Maybe you could kind of walk me through that process. Lawrence: Well, as I indicated, N Reactor had continued to operate, because N Reactor, unlike the other production reactors that were at Savannah River, was a dual purpose reactor. It not only produced plutonium in the fuel elements, but the water which passed through the reactors for cooling it was then sent over to a facility operated by the Washington Public Power Supply System to turn turbines and to produce electricity, on the order of a gigawatt of electricity a year. And because of that, we needed to—the cycle of the N Reactor was different than other production reactors: it was on a shorter cycle. That was for production reasons, the type of plutonium we were producing. So N Reactor went from producing what was fuel grade—it was called fuel grade plutonium—for reactor development programs like the Fast Flux Test Facility and ultimately would have been a breeder reactor. It went to making weapons grade, which meant much shorter irradiation periods. Also, prior to their restarting of PUREX, the fuel was just stored. With the starting of PUREX, you would then let the fuel cool in the basin at N Reactor then ship it in casks on rail cars to the center of the site at PUREX where it would be dissolved in PUREX. The waste would be sent to waste tanks, the plutonium concentrate in a liquid form would be sent to the Plutonium Finishing Plant over in the 200-West area, where it would then be converted into a plutonium metal button about the size of a tuna fish can. And that would be then sent to Colorado—Rocky Flats Plant—where it would actually be fashioned into the material used in a nuclear weapon. So it was the facilities associated with reprocessing at PUREX, handling waste from PUREX, and the facilities associated with the Plutonium Finishing Plant for converting the plutonium to metal that were the primary set of facilities that had to restart. Franklin: And so then N Reactor was the only reactor that was operated during that time? Lawrence: It was the only production reactor on the Hanford Site at that time. And the only reactor that was producing water that was—steam—that was then used to produce electricity. There was another very important reactor at Hanford that was operating then. It was called the Fast Flux Test Facility, which had just started operation a year or so before I got here. And that was to be a precursor of a commercial breeder reactor. The developmental—the reactor, the full-scale reactor that was going to demonstrate the breeder process was going to be built in Oak Ridge, Tennessee at the Clinch River Breeder Reactor. But they built the FFTF prior to that in order to get a feeling for how the sodium cooling worked, the fuel worked, the interactions. It was a prototype, if you will, to see just how that system was going to work. And quite frankly, the FFTF was a tremendously successful test reactor and developmental reactor for liquid sodium. It operated flawlessly, really. Unfortunately, though, it shut down because the breeder program was canceled and there really wasn’t a need for it. People tried diligently to find a mission, to find a need for it. But it was a—it just wasn’t in the cards, and it eventually—it took until the late 1990s for it to be permanently shut down. But that was the other reactor that was operating when I came out here. Franklin: Okay. Yeah, I’ve interviewed several other people that worked at FFTF, and they’ve all— Lawrence: Oh, and they’re very enthusiastic about the FFTF. And I can understand it. It was a great reactor. Franklin: Right, and a reactor with kind of a different mission than any of Hanford’s other reactors. Lawrence: Yes, yeah. Franklin: Save maybe the N Reactor which had a dual— Lawrence: No, it was very different. It didn’t have that plutonium production role. Franklin: How long did the production go at Hanford—that ‘80s Reagan era production? Lawrence: Well, in 1986, the reactor in Chernobyl blew up—April of 1986. That was in Ukraine, at Chernobyl. Of course, there was very little information coming out after the news of that explosion occurred. You couldn’t get in; the Soviets weren’t saying anything about it. But they couldn’t deny it, because you could detect the radiation coming. But people knew, generally, what type of reactor the Russians were operating there. It was graphite-moderated, water-cooled, and very quickly they came upon the fact that, wait a minute, there’s a graphite-moderated, water-cooled reactor operating in the US out of Hanford that’s called the N Reactor. So consequently, I believe it was in the first week of the Chernobyl accident, one afternoon—I guess it was a morning—in the lobby of the Federal Building, it was mayhem. There must have been 50 to 100 people, representatives from all of the television networks, the major newspapers and wire services—all there wanting to do a story on N Reactor, the Chernobyl of the United States. So I got on the phone to Washington, DC and I said, look, we’ve got a problem here. Because we had been told, do not talk to the press about this. This is one of the few times when I was manager here that we were ever given instructions from Washington about how to interact and how to manage the sites. The managers had much greater authority then than they do now. And there was only one manager here at that point in time, as opposed to three that they have now. So we had a lot of leeway, but we’d been told, don’t talk about it because it’s very sensitive; it’s international news and we’re concerned about it. So when I called and said we have this mob scene in the lobby all wanting to talk about and go see the N Reactor, they said, don’t talk to them. Don’t do anything. I got back on the phone and I said, look, there’s stories that are going to be coming out of here. They can either be based on fact or they can be based upon fiction. If they’re based upon fiction, it’s not going to be pretty. And it’s going to be inaccurate. And I said, look, I will not speculate at all on what happened at Chernobyl. I don’t know. I care, but I’m not going to say a thing about that. I just want to explain how N Reactor works and what its safety features are, so that they can see for themselves. So reluctantly but finally, they relented and said, okay, you can show them. Go take them out. So we got a big bus. We put everybody on the bus—it was multiple buses. And we went out to N Reactor. And as you know, that’s about an hour’s drive out. But they were chomping at the bit. And I can remember the look on their faces when they saw—I think they were expecting a little Quonset huts with steam rising out of vents and out of chimneys and all the rest. And when they see this massive building—and in fact we were able to open one of the doors, which was three feet thick of concrete and steel. They looked at that and they were kind of amazed. And I explained to them that although commercial reactors have a system called containment, which is a big steel dome, production reactors don’t. It’s called confinement. It’s different. So it leads to speculation. Well, you know, containment’s going to keep it in; confinement’s not going to do it. And I was pointing out how we had ways of safely venting steam and pressure so it wouldn’t build up, so it couldn’t explode. And we went through all the safety systems, showed them in the inside, the face of the reactor. And consequently, the next several days in USA Today—I mean, it was front page stuff. But at least it was based upon, well, you know, here are all these safety features. It still raised a lot of issues and concerns because nobody knew what caused Chernobyl, so how could we say it couldn’t happen here? We could only say, here are all the safety systems we have to prevent something like that from happening here. Now, ultimately, we found out over time, that what happened at Chernobyl was a physical characteristic called a positive void coefficient. But basically something that didn’t exist in the physics out at N Reactor. But the damage was done. We did need to do some safety upgrades at N Reactor, which we did. But ultimately, in 1988 I believe it was, the Secretary of Energy, John Harrington, in testifying before Congress announced that the US had now produced so much plutonium that we were in fact, quote, awash in plutonium and didn’t need to produce any more. And quite frankly, with that being the case, we no longer had a justification for operating N Reactor. And ultimately it was shut down. To this day, I applaud the hard work and dedication of all the people out at N Reactor. They worked on the safety upgrades and the operation of that reactor, they worked extremely hard and were very, very proud of the operation of that reactor. I think we all owe a debt of gratitude to those people. They did a great job. Franklin: There’s several things that strike me as really interesting that I want to return to in what you just said about Chernobyl and N. One was one of the last things, that John Harrington, awash with plutonium; the US had produced enough. Did you agree with that statement then? That we were—because that would be, I mean, your boss or boss’s boss. Lawrence: Quite frankly, I didn’t know what the total plutonium numbers were for the country. I didn’t know what the total demand was. I do know that plutonium has a very long half-life and sooner or later, you’ve got to have more than you need. We had thousands and thousands of nuclear warheads then. So, I mean, I didn’t know for sure, but I knew at some point we were going to reach it, and quite frankly felt we probably had overshot. So I did not disagree with Secretary Harrington on that. Franklin: Okay, because I mean, we had passed mutually assured destruction quite a long— Lawrence: Yeah, yeah. Franklin: And I guess, we know a lot more now about our stockpile then than we did then. But it’s a very interesting way to phrase that. We’re awash in— Lawrence: Yeah, I mean, it conjures up an image that you really don’t want to have. Franklin: Yeah. I wanted to return to the Chernobyl thing. It strikes me as interesting that this reaction of don’t talk to the press, which is—you can understand in some way, because you don’t want misinformation. But isn’t that the same kind of criticism that we would level at the Soviets? That they were clamming up and not saying anything, and we wished that they were saying something? So this reaction to not say anything on our side is—could have been seen as—you know—being too controlling maybe perhaps? Lawrence: Well, I mean, it went against my instincts, but it’s understandable. The Soviets were the one who had the accident. Now, if we had had an accident and they said, don’t talk to them, I would have been incensed. But basically, we were just going along and people want to come in and try to write a story and say, you’re just like Chernobyl. Well, in a sense, we didn’t know what Chernobyl was, how could we have definitely refuted that? So I can understand their perspective, because, quite frankly, some people at other sites had been quoted by the press as saying, well, we think this is what happened at Chernobyl, or that happened at Chernobyl. And it was just—it was getting out of hand. So I understood that. That was—my point was, I’m not going to talk at all about Chernobyl, because I don’t know. I do know N Reactor. I do know how it works, and I do know its safety features; that’s all I’m going to talk about. And I was awfully glad they let me do it. Franklin: That’s good, yeah. I’m wondering if you could talk about—being in charge of the Site here, I’m wondering if you could talk about the effect of Chernobyl on employee morale at Hanford. Did you notice a particular change—what changed as a result of— Lawrence: I really don’t think I saw any change in the behavior of the people here. They were going about their work. They knew the systems and the procedures and the processes they worked by, the protections that they were given. I’ll tell you candidly one thing that always bothered me then and it bothers me today, is that sometimes people, they get off work and they act somewhat cavalier or bravado about the work they do. Whether it’s to impress somebody or what, I don’t know. But they say, oh yeah, we deal with this. You know, handling it not as seriously as it needs to be. I know on the job, they do and they have to. But then like a macho reaction at the Gaslight Tavern or something like that talking about what they’re doing. That bothers me because it leaves a wrong impression with the public. And it’s certainly not the way we act onsite. Franklin: I guess I’d like to maybe rephrase that question. Did you see like maybe a level of—or rise of kind of the fatigue of workers, maybe thinking that anti-nuclear folks or that there was a new public perception that this was really unsafe or that there was really an imminent danger at Hanford? Do you think that weighed on—did that weigh on you, or did that weigh on anybody else? Lawrence: Well, I think there was a sense on their part that there was an overreaction, that people were, in a way, paranoid and exaggerating the risk. They knew the risk. The people who work here know the risk. But they also know the precautions, so they can balance it out. And consequently, they felt like there was an overreaction. But even before Chernobyl occurred, there was an event that put the Site under somewhat of a microscope and an intense scrutiny, and that would have been, I believe it was September of 1985. Now, Chernobyl happened in April of ’86; this was September of 1985 on a Sunday, The Spokesman Review newspaper in Spokane came out with a multiday series on what they called the downwinders. Basically, they were interviewing and writing stories about an area across the Columbia River in Eltopia, Mesa, where farmers had experienced or felt they had experienced undue health effects—a number of health effects and cancers, and even some wildlife—some of their livestock being born with—there was reports of double heads and the like. And this was a major news piece done by a reporter called Karen Dorn Steele, and quite frankly she did an excellent job of researching this and writing it up. And I—you know, this is the first any of us had heard about this. That was on a Sunday-Monday. So, again, trying to engage on this topic, that Thursday, just several days after it had come out, we had a public meeting over at the Edwin Markham Middle School in Eltopia, across the river, with the public to say, we’re here. What are your concerns? This is—let us tell you what we’ve been able to measure and monitor, and you tell us what your concerns are. And I had some people from Battelle who—we put out an annual monitoring report saying, here are the releases, here are the quantities, here’s how they compare with standards and the like. It was somewhat emotional. You know, people are worried about their health and people dying of cancer and the like. But we also knew that we, in our numbers—we weren’t showing anything that should have resulted in something like that. During that meeting, one of the farmers who had been prominently noted in the article, his name was Tom Bailey, he actually got up and said, well, okay, we’re not saying that you’re doing that to us now, or that you’re intentionally doing anything now. But what happened in the past? What happened back in the ‘50s? When he said that, I realized that, although we had monitoring reports going back to the Manhattan Project—here’s what people were measuring and monitoring and releasing—most of those had been classified secret. And they had never been declassified. It wasn’t malicious; it’s just not a simple process to declassify a document. But I knew because of the extent of time involved, they could be. So, I then at that meeting said, you know, if you want to know, we can go back, we can review and declassify those documents and make them available so you can actually see what was being done. That seemed to both surprise but also satisfy. So we came back and started the process of declassifying monitoring reports going back to the mid-1940s. That is a time-consuming and expensive process. But we were doing it. And we were keeping the public—I used to have monthly press availabilities at the Federal Building and we’d talk about that. But we didn’t really have the first batch of documents, which was 19,000 pages deep, ready to release until February. Now, one thing I’d like to make very clear and to get on the record: we’re in the process of doing that—time-consuming and expensive—but in January, one month before we completed and released the documents, a Freedom of Information request was filed for those documents by an environmental group. I’m not certain of who it is, so I won’t say who it was. But it was an environmental group, filed a Freedom of Information request. And we said, wait a minute. We are releasing these; it’ll be ready next month—the first batch. The reason I raise that is because subsequently, to this day, I hear from time to time people say, you released those documents—they were forced out of you by the Freedom of Information request. And I say, that is just not true. We had—if you go and check the record, we had committed to doing that a long time before. Again, getting back to credibility—it was easy to make that charge. In fact, I had National Geographic call me about ten years ago checking a story and that specific point. Because they didn’t know if it was right or not and they were able to research it and confirm it. But anyway, we were able to release those documents. But when those documents came out—and this was a mistake on my part—there was a lot of information there, but where was the understanding? Where was the, if you want to call it, education of the public, so they could understand what they were reading? And very quickly, it was found that one of the monitoring reports from 1949 had talked about something called the Green Run, where fuel that had been cooled for shorter than normal, so there were radioactive elements in it, was dissolved and more radioactivity went up, intentionally, through the stack. Some of the background as to why that was done had to be deleted—because it was still classified. When this document—when that report was found and the Green Run was discussed, there was speculation that it was associated with human experimentation: let’s release it and see what happens to the public when it hits them. That was not the case at all. In fact, I knew from reading the documents, they had delayed the Green Run because unfavorable weather conditions that they thought might be harmful to the public. But nonetheless, since certain portions had to be deleted because of classification, we couldn’t really explain it to people. And that created quite an uproar. It’s normal and naturally you would expect people to think you’re trying to intentionally harm the public or experiment on the public. Ultimately, what we decided to do was that, even though we could not tell the public the intent of the Green Run, congressmen and senators from Washington and Oregon, by purpose of their position, have clearance and can be told. So I went back to Washington, DC with a person here from the lab and in a classified conference room in the rotunda of the US Capitol, we had the entire delegations from Washington and Oregon there, and we were able to explain to them the classified reason why the experiment was done and why it was still classified today. Tom Foley, who was later to become the Speaker of the House, from Spokane, more or less led the group. He appreciated it, but he pushed back. He says, I’ve got to have more to tell the public than that. I have to be able to tell them whether we know, but we can’t tell you. You’ve got to give me a little bit to tell them as to why it’s so classified. So I was able to get on the phone, again, back to the department, talk to them about it. And ultimately we were able to explain that the reason it was done was to allow the US government to improve their methods for determining and detecting what the Soviet Union was doing with their production program. Ultimately, it became known, if you measure the iodine and the cesium, you could cut back and see what they’re producing. And the reason it was still classified was that we were still, back in 1986, using that technique for nuclear non-proliferation detection around the world. So it’s since been declassified, but that was the reason. I felt that was a good use of our government and our representatives to represent the people and be able to explain to the people what was going on. But ultimately that whole—all those documents led us to create something called the Northwest Citizens Forum for Defense Waste, which was 25 individuals picked from a broad cross-section: academia, industry, church leaders—to be given the information and to be briefed on the information and ask and have answers provided for any questions they have. So they could act as the public’s representatives on what was being done. And that ultimately turned into all of the citizens’ groups that are formed at the DOE sites now. Where you have—here it’s called the HAB, the Hanford Advisory Board. But it was the first ever citizens’ group to oversee and look at what was going on at the DOE sites. Franklin: Great. Thank you for that. That’s really illuminating. Wasn’t it still a calculated risk, though? Sorry, the Green Run, the actual action itself. Certainly there’s still, I think, in the mind of a lot of people—even though it may have been check the release to see how much the Soviets were releasing, there still is a real calculated risk, though. Or do you think that there’s still a calculated risk there—that there could have been some environmental or human population damage resulting from a higher-than-average—or kind of breaking protocol that was set to release that much contaminate? Lawrence: Well, based on what I was able to look at and the rationale and how it was done, they were doing it at levels such that it would be a fraction of what the public was allowed to be exposed to. Even with that higher amount. It would just be a fraction. And that’s why when weather conditions weren’t right, and they felt it would rise above that, they didn’t do it. There are always risks. And were the standards that they were a fraction of, were they right, were they wrong, were they conservative, were they not strong enough? I mean, hindsight, you can go back and ask all those questions. But based upon the knowledge that they had at the time, they were being conservative. That also happened to be at the time when we were doing atmospheric testing at the Nevada Test Site. And you’re setting off nuclear bombs that people are going out and watching, you know, maybe 20 miles away. I’m not saying that’s right, and we know now it was wrong. But it was a fraction of the exposure that might have existed there. Franklin: Right. I get—yes. That’s very true and that’s a good point. I guess it just—the only thing that still strikes, at least in my mind, as a difference is that they’re informing the public about the nuclear bombs so people can go and watch them. Whereas the Green Run was kind of this—I think that maybe— Lawrence: Yeah, it was secret. No. Franklin: It came out after the fact. And it was like, what else could these guys be hiding? Because, like you said, there was already that level of mistrust there. Lawrence: Yeah. Franklin: It just seems like that event can never really shake that level of mistrust in some ways with some people. Lawrence: In hindsight, that’s true, but it was a very different time. A very different time. Franklin: Of course. That’s just an interesting legacy. So, thank you for covering Chernobyl so much. I just have one more question. What role did Hanford play in assisting the Soviets—Hanford and Battelle play in assisting the Soviets with Chernobyl? Wasn’t there a team— Lawrence: None at the time. Franklin: --that went over? Lawrence: None at the time. The Soviets didn’t ask for any. Ultimately, and actually when I came back to the Tri-Cities in 1999 and eventually started working for the Pacific Northwest National Lab, under my responsibility was the team we had at Chernobyl helping to build the new sarcophagus, the confinement structure, that now has been completed and rolled over the destroyed reactor. And I’ve been to Chernobyl a number of times and visited on that project. So we were involved in that. But I don’t recall us being asked to provide any assistance or having provided any assistance at that point in time. Franklin: I was wondering—I’d like to—Chernobyl made me think of another incident, maybe hop back in time real quick and get your perceptions on that. You weren’t here, but I know you were still working in the nuclear industry, and I’m wondering maybe if you’re going to guess what I’m going to ask about, but I’m wondering, in the late ‘70s, the Three Mile Island scare. I’m wondering if you—because you were not here at the time of Three Mile Island, right, you would have been back east. But I’m wondering if you could talk about the legacy of that incident and how that affected people’s perceptions of nuclear— Lawrence: Oh, it affected everybody’s perceptions of nuclear because—everyone in the nuclear industry had gotten a little sloppy, implying an accident cannot happen, it will not happen. You know, we’ve got all these precautions; the risk is so small, they’re non-existent. Well, nothing is non-existent. Everything is a risk, and if enough things go wrong, yes, you can have a problem. And they certainly had it there. Much more serious than they ever expected it to be. But in hindsight, the fact of the matter is, the systems all worked to contain it. There were never any releases harmful to the public. There was never a single fatality or anything associated with the Three Mile Island accident. I can remember exactly where I was when I heard about it. I was getting ready to go take a run at lunchtime in the AEC—or it would have been a DOE at that time—building. And someone said, hey, did you hear they had some reactor incident going on up in Pennsylvania? You know, it started then and several days later I was getting calls from good friends who we were godparents of their child who lived in Hershey saying, should we evacuate? And I said, follow what the governor says. I really don’t have any firsthand knowledge, but it really did shake people’s fears, because it led people to say, you said it couldn’t happen and it did. And that’s always a problem. Franklin: That’s such a tough issue of framing, though, right? Because you can either say, well, it could happen but we have really good safeguards so it probably won’t, which leaves open the door in people’s minds to something happening. Or you can say, well, it won’t, we’ve got this under control and it won’t happen. How do you frame—framing disaster seems to be a very tricky subject. Or framing the possibility of disaster. Lawrence: Yeah. In part, because you can say, just looking at risk and probability, you can say you’re more likely to be hit by lightning than to die from this. And you’re willing to accept one but not the other. It’s what people are associated with. And if they think, I don’t have to deal with that, I don’t even want to deal with that minimal risk. I just don’t want to do it. That’s understandable; it’s part of human nature. Franklin: It kind of comes to, we see this a lot in current day in dealing with—well, won’t go into that. But there seems to be a—there’s these fact-based arguments but they can’t always counter the emotion-based arguments. And a lot of the response to nuclear seems, in some cases to be emotionally-based and not fact—and immune, almost inoculated against the factual side of it. Which seems to bother many who have a lot of intimate knowledge, a lot of people who worked at Hanford who know the risks can’t ever seem to communicate that to the critics. I wonder if you could expand on that at all, being someone who would have been trying to communicate that to critics of Hanford. And how you’ve dealt with that fact-versus-emotion in your career. Lawrence: Well you see it—you still see it today. Fukushima is an excellent example of that. Assist you with the nuclear accident first. That tidal wave hits, completely washes over, and the plant loses all power. Now, most importantly that was an avoidable accident. Even as hugely severe as a tsunami was, if they just had have had the secondary generators higher and separated more from the plant, they wouldn’t have lost power, and the reactors would have been fine. In this country, we have that requirement. They didn’t have it there. So that reactor accident, which was catastrophic, it was devastating, could have been prevented if rules that we have here had have been used there. But the other thing—and this is more to the point you made—18,000 people were killed by the tsunami, by the flood, by all of the devastation caused by the tsunami. None were caused by the nuclear accident. And yet all of the attention is on the nuclear accident. And it’s not like, oh, but there’ll be 18,000 in the future—there won’t. You know, looking at the numbers, it’s hard to say if there’ll be any. And people are evacuated now, when perhaps they don’t even need to be, but it’s out of the fear of whatever’s left there. And consequently, because of that, it’s causing stress that have led to heart attacks and have led to fatalities. Are they caused by the nuke—they’re not caused by radiation, but they’re caused by fear of radiation or caused by fear of the displacement. So how do you put that in perspective, where as a nuclear accident has gotten all the attention, but a tsunami that killed 18,000 people, it’s sort of like, well, that’s an act of nature? And so, I really don’t know how to balance that. I do know that on NOVA last month, they had a very good show about that. Because nuclear is a carbon-free source of baseload electricity, and if we’re going to deal with climate change, I know I believe and many people believe nuclear has to be part of the solution. Franklin: Yeah, I would personally agree with you. I wondered—so, moving past Chernobyl then, you mentioned that as kind of a major—you know, it definitely is a major event in regards to people’s perceptions of Hanford. And you mentioned in ’88 this—awash in plutonium. How did it play out after that? What was the drawdown like? What happened in the community when that—when it was realized that Hanford was—the mission was going to change? Lawrence: Well, you know, there was fear, because Hanford—the Tri-Cities over time, going back to the ‘50s and ‘60s had gone through booms and busts. And whenever Hanford production was up, the community was good; whenever it was down, homes were for sale, property values dropped and all the rest. So there was a feel, that was going to continue. And if N Reactor was shutting down, PUREX was down, it was going to happen to have a devastating effect on the economy again. Of course, what also happened at the same time was the commitment to the cleanup mission and the negotiation in signing the Tri-Party Agreement, which led to the cleanup mission here, which has continued and kept levels and funding levels right up to where they were and actually higher than in the production days. Maybe not employment necessarily, but it’s close. But also the Tri-Cities has significantly diversified from Hanford. Still very much—we get through $3 billion a year from the federal government between the Site and the national lab in this community, and that’s got huge benefits. But we’ve diversified quite a bit. But, getting to the Tri-Party Agreement, that was a direct result of a legal decision in Tennessee in 1985 that said that Department of Energy sites had to comply with national and state environmental rules. Up until that time, it had been assumed that the Atomic Energy Act, that the department operated under absolved us from that, or we did not have to do that. When that ruling came down, ultimately, it led to getting together with federal regulators in the form of the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, and state regulators in the form of the Department of Ecology, to find out, okay, where are we in violation, what do we need to change, and how do we do that? You don’t do it instantaneously. Which, obviously, is clear. And that led to the negotiation and the ultimate signing in May of—May 15th of 1989 of the Tri-Party Agreement. But that has provided a rather steady employment, funding, and—you know, I realize it’s taking longer than people thought, it’s costing more than people thought. And fortunately, it’s not an urgent—it’s not the type of crisis where something has to be done immediately or here’s the catastrophic result. It’s a problem in slow motion that the main thing you want to do is get the solution right the first time. You don’t want to go hot with the Vit Plant and then find out it doesn’t work. Because you’ll never—you won’t get around to it again. So let’s make sure we’ve got it right. It’s been an enduring process, and I’m very pleased and proud of the enduring capabilities of the Tri-Party Agreement. Franklin: And what was your role in the negotiation and signing of the Tri-Party Agreement? Lawrence: Well, we—the Richland Operations Office had the responsibility and role of negotiating with EPA Region 10 and the Department of Ecology for what the cleanup agreement would look like and what it would entail. And we kept Washington, DC informed of what we were doing and we’d get feedback from them. But it was our main responsibility to do that. Initially a person by the name of Jerry White and then ultimately Ron Izatt who worked for me as division directors had that responsibility of negotiating. And they would brief me every other day and we would get involved. From time to time, I would have discussions with the head of ecology who was Chris Gregoire, who subsequently became governor of the state, on issues that they would rise to our level. Or with Robie Russell, who was the head of EPA regionally, on issues that would come up. But we eventually worked out, basically, the agreement: this would be done and this was the timeframe for doing it. Then it came time to saying, okay, this is what we’ve got. It was in December of 1978 when we had pretty much wrapped everything up. Franklin: Sorry—’88? Lawrence: I’m sorry. ’88, yes, I’m sorry. December of ’88. So I went over to Lacey near Olympia where Ecology is located, to meet with Chris Gregoire and her team, and I had Ron Izatt and a lawyer from our team, to talk about what we were going to do. And at that meeting—it was a Friday afternoon—they said, okay, what we want to do now is we want to take this to a court and have a judge bless it, make it law: this is what has to be done. And we couldn’t go along with that, and the reason was that the lawyer for the federal government is the Department of Justice. And anytime you go to court as a US government agency, the Department of Justice represents you. They do not believe in friendly settlements. They will fight everything. I don’t mean that to be critical; that’s just the approach they take. And I said to her, I said, Chris, if you insist on taking this to court, we, the Department of Energy and I, lose all ability to deal with this, and it goes into the hands of lawyers who get paid to fight it. And you’re going to win. You’ve got the law on your side. But it’s going to be two, three years from now at great expense. I said, why don’t we just sign it as an agreement, shake hands on it, and you wait for us to violate it, and then take us to court. And she—we went back and forth on that issue. EPA, by the way, had stepped back and said, if you two can reach agreement, we’ll go along with anything that you say. Because they knew we had the tough issues. And so finally, you know, she said, no, we need it in court. These were her instructions, or this is where the governor wanted to go. And I said, well, Chris, can we take this to the governor? And, fortunately, through my tenure here, I had wonderful relations, a great respect for Governor Booth Gardner, who was the governor at that time. And she said, sure, we can take it to him. Subsequently, the following Friday I went over by myself with her and we met with Governor Gardner in his office in Olympia in the state capitol. And I went through the message of, you know, I don’t have the authority to sign this in court. If it goes to court, Justice will fight it, you’ll win, but it will be two years from now or whatever. Didn’t sway the governor. You know, it was clear: no, we want this—we want the law behind it and make it in a court of law. I must have said the same thing three times. Always slightly different. Maybe I warmed him, I don’t know what. But finally the governor looked at Chris and said, well, Chris, could you live with it as an agreement until if and when they fail to live up to it and then go to court? And she said, you know, Governor, if you can, I can. And the governor says, okay, that’s what we’ll do. And so it was an act of faith and it worked for a long time before it ended up in court. But we would not have had the Tri-Party Agreement when we did in the manner in which we did without his willingness and her willingness to concede on that point and let us move on with it. Franklin: And so when the Tri-Party Agreement was established, what did that lay out for the future of Hanford? Lawrence: Basically, it took the entire Site and all the areas in which we were in non-compliance, whether it was currently operating sites—even though the plant wasn’t operating, there were still facilities that were operating that fell under the state, or old sites which fell under EPA. All of those things, and when they would be cleaned up, the schedule and process for doing it. And that’s what it laid out. It also laid out, like, the ability to modify the agreement as you went forward. Because the simple fact was, we were operating with nowhere near the degree of knowledge and specificity you would need to have hard-and-fast deadlines. And the other thing was, we didn’t know, and we still don’t know today, what the funding will be year to year. Okay, or problems that will come up. But there was a process in there to move with it and to let it happen. And that was, I think, one of the best features of the Tri-Party Agreement. And it required parties to act in good faith. And I’m pleased it did. Franklin: Excellent. Was there anything in there about any of the history at Hanford or preserving any of the historic activity at Hanford, whether—keeping buildings there or documenting the history in some way, or saving equipment or anything used in the process? Lawrence: Not really, no. I mean, this was all compliance. This was an enforcement order. But we did make sure that B Reactor was going to be one of the last things to be—actually, originally, they wanted all of the reactors out on the Site by the rivers to be decontaminated as best they could, and then they wanted to dig under the reactors, bring in the big crawlers they use at Cape Canaveral to move missiles, put it under there, lift up the block, and take it to the center of the Site. And I thought, oh, my good—and that was to be done early in the process. And we said, let’s move that ‘til about 25 years from now. Of course, subsequently they’ve learned how to cocoon and maybe that’ll be found to be good enough. But, I mean, that was—we didn’t have the level of specificity or knowledge or information that you need to do a good cleanup then as we do now. Franklin: I know that the B Reactor Museum Association was founded in the early ‘90s, but were there whispers then when you were signing that agreement or afterwards about saving B Reactor or saving something onsite as kind of a testament to the production at Hanford? Lawrence: There very well may have been. I just—I wasn’t cognizant of it. Franklin: Sure. So when did you leave working at the Richland office? Lawrence: I left in July of 1990. Franklin: Oh, okay, so you were—and why did you leave? Where did you go after? Lawrence: Well, in part, I went to work for a company in Colorado that was doing cleanup work. But I was only there less than a year when the state department offered me a diplomatic post in Vienna, Austria. Because that was right after the first Gulf War, when they discovered that the Iraqis had a clandestine nuclear program, and they wanted the International Atomic Energy Agency, who was supposed to monitor things like that, to become stronger and more efficient and effective. And the State Department decided that they wanted a person with technical knowledge and ability but who also had had some international experience, which I had in the ‘70s under a Carter program doing international negotiations. So they called me up and I went to Vienna, then, to do that. I left here, one, because the managers’ authorities had been greatly, greatly reduced. Franklin: Was that a result of the Tri-Party Agreement, or just from the shift or production to cleanup? Lawrence: In part, it was due to the Tri-Party Agreement in that as we were negotiating the Tri-Party Agreement—we had the responsibility for doing that here, but kept Washington informed of our activities and getting their agreement as we went along. And right after those meetings that I told you about with Chris Gregoire and Governor Gardner, that was in December. In January of that year, a new Secretary of Energy was coming in. Admiral Watkins had been appointed to be the Secretary of Energy. So he was transitioning in, and there was an acting secretary. Her name was Donna Fitzpatrick, who was interacting with him as this transition occurred. Acting Secretary Fitzpatrick—they all knew what we were doing here. But as it happens, the agreement was formally signed in May 15th, 1989. But three months prior to that—what would that have been, February—is when—you have to give a three-month notice before you do something like that, for public comment and the like. As it turns out, everyone was so pleased with coming to agreement that the announcement of agreement was made in the rotunda of the Capitol in Washington, DC. Governor Gardner was there, I was there, representatives of DC and the Department were there, EPA were there, and it was announced we had reached agreement and it would be signed in three months in May. You know, after the formal comment period and any changes that had to occur. Well, in the normal question-and-answer period that went on, with that announcement, the State said, this is going to be commit the government to be spending $25 billion for the cleanup of Hanford. Now, it just so happened that the very next day was Admiral Watkins’ first day as Secretary of Energy. During that first day, he was to meet with all of the site managers, including myself. That morning, when it appeared in the paper that Washington State says it’s committed to paying $25 billion—whatever that means—the Office of Management and Budget, which, evidently had been left in the dark—I don’t know. I had no responsibility to inform them. They called him up and said, what in the world’s going on over there? What are you doing committing us to $25 billion? We go into the meeting with the new secretary. And he proceeded to just chew me up and chew me down as to, this is the worst thing we’ve ever done, how could we be so bad and stupid, and all this other stuff. And I just sat there, and—you know, you can’t push back, really. You just think—and unfortunately, the former acting secretary, Donna Fitzpatrick was sitting next to him. She knew all about it, but she couldn’t do anything. And it really just set a very bad tone with the secretary. Subsequently, however, as the kudos started coming in about what a good agreement this was and how it showed good cooperation and compliance by the Department, Admiral Watkins was very happy to take the credit for the Tri-Party Agreement. But life was a little uncomfortable out here. And I decided then I was going to be leaving. But I didn’t want to leave in the first year, because I wanted to make sure the Tri-Party Agreement got off to a good start. So, subsequently when I did leave, a lot of it was about the fact that it just wasn’t the same job. And quite frankly, a very important tenet of any management job is never accept responsibility that you don’t have the authority to fulfill. If you don’t have the authority, but have the responsibility, it just doesn’t work. And I didn’t, and I left. Franklin: Interesting. How did you come back to the area? Lawrence: That’s an interesting story as well. After I left Vienna in 1985, I was hired by— Franklin: Sorry, you mean 1995. Lawrence: ’95, I’m sorry, yeah, I have my years mixed. 1995. I went to work for a company called BNFL, which stands for British Nuclear Fuels, Limited. And they had bought a company in Los Alamos, New Mexico and they asked me to be president of it. I was running the company, and then they subsequently asked me to move back to their Washington, DC headquarters for their US operations as the chief operating officer, which I did. But that was also the same time when BNFL had gotten the contract to design the Vitrification Plant for the Hanford Site. And they had brought in engineers and managers from the UK to head up that project here in the Tri-Cities. So, I’ve gone back to Washington, DC as the chief operating officer of BNFL, Inc., which is the US component. And shortly—not so long after it—I was there less than a year—the manager of the project in Richland came back. And they had signed an agreement of what they were going to do and the government was going along with it. It was basically, for $6.5 billion they would build and operate the plant and process the first so many million gallons of waste, for $6.5 billion. When that manager came back, he indicated—he said, you know—he’s British; I’m not going to do a British accent—but he said, you know, I really—I’m not fitting in well with the community. I just don’t understand those people out there. I don’t fit in well with the community. We need somebody out there who understands things. Well, I love this community. I know this community. They were very, very good to me and my family when we were here. So I raised my hand and said, I know those people. This was our biggest project by far for our company, I’d be willing to go out and head up the project. And so subsequently, I came out to head up the Vit Plant. Within a week of getting here, I had to go and report to the new Office of River Protection, which had responsibility for it, what the status was of our cost estimates. I had only been here a week, so they give me the numbers. And I asked the—are they aware of this? Yeah, they’re aware of this. So I went in and, oh, all hell broke loose. Because the number—it had risen. It was higher than 6.5. And Dick French, who was the head of the project, rightly so, says, I can’t—this is terrible. Your first report—and it’s over budget already. And I knew Dick, and I understood his position. And basically, I said, let me go back and find out what’s going on. I was told you were on board with this. You obviously are not. Let me find out. I subsequently found out that there had been an arbitrary 20% cut in their estimates, thinking they were just going to drive things harder and shave things off and make it cheaper. And I had a—obviously, I had a major problem with this. Because in the beginning, you don’t shave back. You have contingency that’s built in and you work off. It doesn’t work the other way. And so I’d moved back here, we bought a house, I’m running the—and this project is going downhill quick. What was worse was that I tried to tell BNFL, we need to go to the Department and say, this number, $6.5 billion, for the plant and operations of it is not going to work. We need to renegotiate. We need to do something different. And I got nothing but pushback. We would not do this. And I was even—I said, you know, if we don’t do something, we’re going to be fired. And they said, they can’t fire us. They’re not going to fire us. And I said, I’m sorry, I said, I can’t continue to operate like that. So I resigned. Resigned from the project. Didn’t have another job, but I figured, I’ll find something. But I can’t continue with this. And within two months, Secretary Richardson had fired BNFL. Fortunately, a couple months after that, Battelle and Pacific Northwest National Lab hired me to run their nuclear programs. That’s how I came back, and that’s how I spent my first two years back. As managing a dying project and then transitioning to a new job. Franklin: And how long did you work at PNNL? Lawrence: Well, I worked from 2000 up until 2008. And during that period, I had responsibility—I was the associate lab director for energy. But in the latter part of that timeframe, I was also deputy lab director for facilities and was responsible for the putting together and funding and getting approved the new—they called it a consolidated lab—facilities that are just north of Horn Rapids Road and two private facilities that are on the campus. And then Battelle asked if I’d be willing to lead a team to manage the national nuclear lab in the United Kingdom. They had put together a team with two other companies to do that. And I said I’d be willing to do that. I had spent time in Europe already. And I went over and subsequently we won the contract in the early 2009. So in 2009 and ’10, I was the director of the national nuclear lab in the UK. And then I retired and came back and retired here in West Richland. Franklin: Wow, great. Well, thank you so much, Mike. Is there anything that we haven’t covered that you’d like to talk about? Lawrence: Well, I’d like to get on record that I’ve been very, very fortunate in my life to hold some very interesting positions and to work for some phenomenal people. But the job that I enjoyed the most was as manager of the Richland Operations Office. There was a spirit, a camaraderie, a support, a community spirit that I felt there that I’ve just—as much as I’ve enjoyed my other jobs, nothing quite as good as that. It was really, really enjoyable, and aside from my wife and family, probably there was nothing better that had ever happened to us than to move to this area and be involved in these activities. I’ve really enjoyed it. Franklin: Great. Well, thank you so much. Thank you for coming in today. Lawrence: Okay, very good. Thank you. Franklin: All right, yeah. Lawrence: Thanks. Franklin: Yeah. That was a great-- <a href="https://youtu.be/SiYN7OCJOAs">View interview on Youtube.</a> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:23:14 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 200 Area B Reactor Fast Flux Test Facility N Reactor Vitrification Plant Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1972-1990 2000-2007 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1972-1990 2000-2007 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Donald Hodel William Skylstad Paul Lorenzini Howard Hughes John Harrington Karen Dorn Steele Jerry White Ron Izatt Chris Gregoire Robie Russell Carter Governor Gardner Donna Fitzpatrick Admiral Watkins Dick French Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Michael Lawrence Description An account of the resource An interview with Michael Lawrence conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 02-01-17 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2017-15-12: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. 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This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. 200 Area Atomic Energy Commission B Reactor B Reactor Museum Association Battelle Cat ceremonies Dam Department of Energy Fast Flux Test Facility Hanford Kennewick Los Alamo Los Alamos Manhattan Project Mountain N Reactor Plutonium Plutonium Finishing Plant PUREX Quonset hut Quonset huts River Road Savannah River School Sun VIT Plant Vitrification Plant War Washington Public Power Supply System https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F1c41aaa490304c678bc3e8c1f2b697ee.jpg 4edca9efa5b020755d209c72f854cb83 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F08e2a82e15be87724cc35f3cc14a3127.mp4 b8689a451a342a533ee6e816848384f1 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Jerome Martin Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I’m conducting an oral history with Jerome Martin on June 1st, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Jerome Martin about his experiences working at the Hanford site and his involvement with the Herbert M. Parker Foundation. And you—just wanted to use your legal name to start out with, but you prefer to be called Jerry, right? Jerome Martin: Yes, I do. Franklin: Okay. Martin: Jerome’s a little too formal. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right. Just for the technical purposes. Sure. No more, we will not mention the name— Martin: Okay. Franklin: Again. [LAUGHTER] So for the record, you did an interview with the Parker Foundation sometime in 2010. Martin: I believe it was earlier. Franklin: Or possibly earlier. And some of the Parker Foundation videos, as we know, were lost. And so this video is an attempt to recapture some of the information that would have been in that oral history, but also add some other information, and also to give you a chance to talk about your involvement with the Herbert M. Parker Foundation. So just as a introduction to whoever views this in the future. So why don’t we start in the beginning? How did you come to—you’re not from the Tri-Cities? Martin: Not originally. Franklin: All right. How did you come to the Tri-Cities? Martin: Well, a little quick history, I got my bachelor’s degree at San Diego State College and then I was a radiation safety officer at San Diego State for about three years. Then I had an opportunity to go to the University of Colorado in Boulder, where, again, I was a radiation safety officer and on the faculty of the physics department. After several years there, an excellent opportunity came up for me here at Hanford with Battelle, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. So I moved here in 1976, and had a great opportunity to work with many other more senior people here at Hanford that had been here since the beginning. One of those, of course, was Herbert M. Parker. He was former director of the laboratories under General Electric, and then retired, but stayed on with Battelle as a director. I had a few opportunities to interact with him, and was quite impressed. I have heard stories about, he was a rather demanding taskmaster. And I could kind of imagining myself trying to work for him, but it would have been a challenge. Franklin: What do you feel is important to be known about Herbert M. Parker for the historical record? Martin: I’ve had an opportunity to review many of his publications. They were quite professional and very well researched, and in many cases the leading authority on several topics. So I was very impressed by his publications. I didn’t have a direct opportunity to work for him, so I don’t know about his management style or other things. But that was the thing that impressed me the most, was his publications. Franklin: What topics did Dr. Parker write on—or do his research? Martin: His early professional career was in medical physics. He was at Swedish Hospital in Seattle for many years. Then he was called upon, as part of the Manhattan Project, to set up the safety program at Oak Ridge. He did that for about a year or so. Then he was called upon to do the same thing here at Hanford. So he came here and established the entire environmental safety and health program for Hanford. Of course he had all the right background to be able to do that, and he was able to recruit a number of really talented people to help him with that. So I think Hanford ended up with what could be known as the best environmental safety and health program, among all the early AEC and then DoE laboratories. One of the things that impressed me most by that program was the record keeping. And I had an opportunity to work on that in later years. But the way the record keeping was designed and set up and maintained was quite thorough. It was designed to be able to recreate whatever may have happened according to those records. It turned out to be very valuable in later years. Franklin: Who instituted that record-keeping? Was that Parker? Martin: I don’t recall the name of the individual that set it up, although I know Ken Hyde was involved very early on. He may have been at the very origin of it. But I’m sure Parker certainly influenced the rigor with which that program was established. In later years, John Jech was manager of the record keeping program, and then my good friend, Matt Lyon, was the manager of that. I worked with Matt, then, on American National Standard Institute’s standard for record keeping. We incorporated into that standard virtually all of the fundamentals that Parker had established initially. Franklin: The first name was John— Martin: The second manager of records was John Jech. J-E-C-H. Franklin: Do you know if he’s still living? Martin: No, he’s not. Franklin: And what about Lyon? Martin: Matt Lyon passed away about ten years ago, as did Ken Hyde. Franklin: What’s that? Martin: Ken Hyde—I think they all three passed away about ten years ago. Franklin: Okay. Martin: Yeah, give or take. Franklin: So you mentioned that the record keeping was designed to recreate an incident as it happened. Do you know of any such—or can you speak to any such times when that record keeping system was crucial into a safety issue? Martin: The one that comes to mind is one of the more I guess infamous incidents here at Hanford. It occurred just around the time I arrived here in 1976. It was sometimes called the McCluskey accident out at the 231-Z Building. There was an explosion in a glovebox that resulted in very significant contamination of Mr. McCluskey by americium-241. And the response to that incident, and then all the following treatment of Mr. McCluskey was very well documented. In fact, those documents then became the basis for a whole series of scientific papers that described the entire incident and all the aspects of it. So that was one major case where excellent record keeping was very valuable. Franklin: Excellent. And what—I’m just curious now—what happened to Mr. McCluskey? Martin: He survived for about ten years after the accident. He initially had very severe acid burns and trauma. But he was very carefully treated for that. The americium contamination that he had was gradually eliminated—not eliminated, but reduced substantially. He survived for another ten years after that incident even though he had heart trouble. I know several people that assisted in his care, and it was quite remarkable what they were able to do and what he was able to do. Franklin: Wow. Did he ever go back to work? Martin: No, he was 65 at the time of the accident. Franklin: Oh, okay. Martin: So he kind of went into medical retirement at that point. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right. Yeah, I can imagine. So you said you came in 1976. Martin: Right. Franklin: And what did you—what was your first job, when you came to Battelle? Martin: Well, I worked in what was called the radiation protection department, later called health physics department. My first assignment was called ALARA management. ALARA stands for maintain our radiation exposures as low as reasonably achievable. I would monitor the exposure records of Battelle workers, and watch for any that were the least bit unusually high, and then look for ways that we could reduce those exposures. And I monitored other things like average exposures and the use of dosimeters and things of that nature. The overall assignment was to generally reduce the workers’ radiation exposure. Franklin: How successful do you feel that the department was in that effort? Martin: I think we were very successful, and it went on for many years, even after I had that assignment. I remember one time, looking at a report that DoE put out annually on radiation exposures over all the major DoE facilities. Those average exposures, highest individual exposures, and things of that nature. Battelle and Hanford had among the lowest averages of all the other DoE facilities. So, I believe it was a very effective ALARA program here at Hanford. Franklin: Do you know if that report was ever made publically available? Martin: Oh, yes. Franklin: Oh. Martin: Yeah, those are published every year by DoE. Franklin: Oh, great. I’ll have to find that. Sorry, just scribbling down some notes. Martin: At one point, Battelle had a contract with the DoE headquarters to actually do the production of that report each year. Franklin: Okay. Martin: And I was involved in the production of it—oh, three or four years, as I recall. Franklin: Okay. So you mentioned that you had moved on out of that program or department, so what— Martin: Right. Well, I started getting involved in management at kind of the bottom level. I was an associate section manager, and then I got an assignment as section manager for the radiation monitoring section. I was responsible for all the radiation monitors—or as they’re now called, radiation protection technologists—the radiation monitors for Battelle and two other of the contractors here at Hanford. It was kind of ironic that I was located in what used to be the 300 Area library, and my office was on the second floor. And my office was the former office of Herbert M. Parker, when he was director of laboratories. Franklin: Wow! Martin: It was an honor to have that space, and recall memories of Mr. Parker. Franklin: Wow, that’s great. And how long did you do that for? Martin: I did that two or three years, and then another opportunity came along in 1979—no actually, it was ’79, but I guess I’d been on that management job for about a year and a half. In September of ’79, which was about three months after the Three Mile Island accident, we had an opportunity to make a proposal to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to provide support for their staff in emergency planning work. At that time, NRC was making a big push on all the power plants, all the nuclear power plants across the country to enhance their emergency planning programs. So we began about a ten-year project with NRC to supplement their staff. The NRC established the requirement for annual emergency exercises at each of the nuclear power plants, where they had to work up a scenario, and then they would activate their emergency response staff to demonstrate that they would know how to handle that accident scenario. We served as observers. We had teams of observers with the NRC staff. We did a total of 800 of those exercises over a ten-year period. Franklin: Wow. Martin: So we had a lot of staff out there, doing a lot of travel. Franklin: Yeah. So that would have been—so you said for power, would that have been for all of the power reactors in the United States? Martin: Yes. There were 103 plants at the time. Franklin: Wow. Did you do any in foreign countries? Martin: I didn’t personally, but we did have some staff that went to a similar kind of program with the International Atomic Energy Agency, and visited foreign nuclear power plants. Some in France, that I recall. Franklin: Wow. So you said 103 power plants? Martin: In the US, yeah. Franklin: Wow. Martin: Actually, that was the number of reactors. There was a fewer number of plants, because many of them are two or more reactors at a site. Franklin: Oh, okay so the 103 is the number of reactors? Martin: I believe that’s correct. At that time. Franklin: How did Chernobyl affect your field and your work? Martin: That’s an excellent question, because that was in this period. Of course, the Chernobyl accident happened in 1986, and I was working directly with NRC at that time. I was project manager on that NRC contract. When Chernobyl happened, there was an immediate reaction, and NRC had to study the Chernobyl accident as well as we could, and then determine what could be applied to US power reactors by way of improvements and emergency planning. One of my managers, Bill Bair, was part of a US delegation led by DoE and NRC to actually visit the Chernobyl area shortly after the accident, interact with the Russians, and do lessons learned that was turned into a series of DoE and NRC documents that tried to extract as much useful information as we could from Chernobyl and apply it here in the US. Franklin: Right, because if I’m not mistaken, the design of the Chernobyl reactor—there were reactors of similar design in the United States. Martin: Not exactly. The Chernobyl reactor had no containment vessel. There were a few reactors in the US that also did not have containment vessels, but they had other safeguards. The N Reactor was one of those. Unfortunately, I would call it an overreaction of the US government to a reactor with no containment. Severe restrictions were put on N Reactor, and some re-design was required that ultimately led to the end of N Reactor. It’s interesting to note that at that point in time, which was about 1986, 1987, N Reactor had generated more electricity from a nuclear reactor than any other plant in the world. So it’s unfortunate it came to an early demise. Franklin: And—sorry, my ignorance here on the technical aspects. You said some of them don’t have a containment vessel. What does a containment vessel look like and what role does it play, and why would there would be reactors with one and without one? Martin: Well, N Reactor went back to the early—the late ‘50s, I believe when it was designed. It was designed similar to the other reactors here at Hanford that were intended for production of plutonium. But N Reactor was a dual purpose, in that it also generated 800 megawatts of electricity. But it had a similar kind of design to what you see out at B Plant, for example. So it didn’t have the same kind of containment vessel that other modern pressurized water reactors or other nuclear power plants have that is designed in such a way that if there is reactor core damage, any radioactivity released can be contained and not released. Franklin: Okay. Martin: Or released in a very controlled fashion. Franklin: I see. Kind of like a clam shell that kind of covers the— Martin: Well, it’s basically—yeah, in many cases a spherical kind of containment. Franklin: Okay. Excellent. So after—obviously the demise of N Reactor, ’86, ’87, is kind of the end of operations—or I should say of product production—product and energy production on the Hanford site. So how did your job change after that? And what did you continue to do after the shutdown? Martin: I wasn’t directly affected by N Reactor shutting down. And the other production reactors had been shut down before that, so I wasn’t really directly involved in that. But I had yet another opportunity came up that turned out to be really a challenge for me. The Pantex plant in Amarillo, Texas is the primary assembly and disassembly facility for nuclear weapons. At that time, it was managed by a company called Mason and Hanger. Mason and Hanger had that contract for many years, and DoE challenged them to rebid the contract. So Mason and Hanger reached out to Battelle for assistance in teaming on environmental health and safety. So my manager talked me into being involved, so I went down to Amarillo and visited the plant and worked with the team there on the proposal that had to be presented to DoE. And we won the contract. Of course in the fine print it said I then had to move there. Franklin: Ah! Martin: But it turned out great. By that time, my family was pretty well grown, kids were through college. So we moved down to Amarillo, and I went to work at Pantex. We really enjoyed that. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Amarillo’s a very nice town, a lot of nice people. The work at Pantex was very challenging. I enjoyed that very much, too. Franklin: Great. So how long were you at the Pantex plant? Martin: Well, I was manager of the radiation safety department down there for three years, which was my original contract obligation. During that time, we were very closely scrutinized by the Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board, which was an organization established by Congress to be a watchdog over DoE. Their method for watching DoE was to watch the contractors very closely. So they would scrutinize everything we did, and then challenge DoE if they found something. They pushed us in a way that was good, because one of the things they promoted was professional certification. I’m a certified health physicist, certified by the American Board of Health Physics. At the time at Pantex, I was the only one we had there. But the DNFSB pushed us to add more, so I got more of my staff certified. There was a similar program for technicians called the National Registry of Radiation Protection Technologists, and at the time, we had two of my staff that were registered with NRRPT. Again, they pushed us to promote more training. By the end of that three-year period, I think we had ten of our technologists registered and certified. So we really improved the credentials of our staff. We instituted some new programs, again, related to ALARA radiation reduction. Probably the most interesting or challenging day of my life occurred down there in 1994. We were working on disassembly of the W48 program. The W48 was a tactical weapon used in—that was deployed in Europe—it was never used. But it was a very small, cylindrical nuclear weapon designed to be shot out of a 155 millimeter howitzer, which is amazing just to think about. But the plutonium pit in this device was surrounded by high explosive. It turned out to be rather difficult to disassemble this particular design of nuclear weapon. It also turned out that the plutonium pit had a relatively high dose rate, compared to others. So the workers were getting some increased exposure to their hands in the process of working on this. So we were concerned about their extremity dose. So we worked up a method for doing a classified videotape of the disassembly operation, so that we could study each step in the process to find ways to improve worker safety. Providing shielding, remote tools, things of that nature. The process on this was to take the plutonium pit and high explosives and put it in liquid nitrogen bath for a period of time. Then bring it out and put it in a little tub-like, and pour hot water on it. The HE would expand rapidly and crack off. And for the most part, it worked very well. Well, there was this one particular pit that we were working on when we were doing the videotape for this study. Apparently the HE wasn’t coming off the way it should, and so they had to repeat this process over and over. They brought it out of the liquid nitrogen, poured hot water on it, and the plutonium—the cladding, the beryllium cladding on the plutonium pit actually cracked, due to the severe temperature change. The workers who were working on this were trained very carefully that if that cladding on the pit ever cracks, get out of there fast, so you avoid a plutonium exposure. So that happened. One of the technicians heard an audible crack and saw it on the surface of that pit. And they all evacuated immediately. They got just outside the door of this special facility, and they called our radiation safety office, and fortunately my three best technicians were standing there by the phone. They said, pit had cracked. And so they got over there as fast as they possibly could. They recognized the danger of having an exposed plutonium pit, and how that can oxidize and cause severe contamination very quickly. They decided to put on respirators to protect themselves, but they didn’t bother with any of the other protective clothing because they wanted to save time. So they made an entry where the cracked pit was, still there with the water bath on it, and the video shooting this picture. They took samples right on the crack and on the water and all around it. They managed to take that plutonium pit and get it into a plastic bag and then they doubled bagged it and then they triple bagged it and sealed it up. Then they came out. Of course, the samples revealed that there was indeed plutonium contamination coming out of that crack, but they had contained it very quickly. When we made a later entry to retrieve the video tape that was still running, and we looked at the timestamp on it. From the time the crack appeared until they had it in the bag was seven minutes. Franklin: Wow! Martin: That’s about as fast as you can possibly expect a response team to come in and secure a situation like that. And so, following that, of course we had the incident debriefing, and I had to chair that. But we very carefully went through and recorded every little thing that happened from the time they were working on the disassembly to the time they exited. Got that all documented, and then the videotape of course documented all of that. The scrutiny by Department of Energy, the Amarillo office, the Albuquerque office, Headquarters, any number of others—we had a lot of attention that day. It was a long, hard day at the office, but very exciting. Following that, we had to debrief many other investigation committees and others. But we had that videotape to rely on, and that just was invaluable. That’s my—that was probably the most exciting day of my life, down there. [LAUGHTER] Got a follow-up to that. That W48 weapon was designed by Livermore. They came in at a later time and did a post-mortem on that cracked pit. And when they did, we discovered that the amount of plutonium contamination there that was available for distribution had it not been contained, would have totally just made that facility useless. I mean, extremely expensive clean-up, if it ever got done. Franklin: Not just the room, but the entire facility? Martin: Well, mainly that room. Franklin: That room. Martin: But it was a very big room, and a very valuable room, specially designed. But the quick response of our radiation safety technicians and getting that contained saved that room and millions of dollars in expense. Franklin: Wow. And so this was a weapon that was the size of a howitzer shell? Martin: 155 millimeters. Franklin: Wow. And what is the—I don’t know if you know this—but what’s the explosive power of that—is it—I guess it could be— Martin: Well, it’s just like the atomic bombs used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, about 20-kiloton fission device. The plutonium pit is designed to implode and cause a super-critical reaction. Franklin: But fired out of a howitzer, instead of— Martin: Fired out of a howitzer, perhaps 20 miles or something. And then you can somehow coordinate the careful detonation of this-- Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Martin: --device. It boggled my mind. Franklin: I guess that’s best that that was never ever— Martin: There’s quite a large number of different nuclear weapons. Many of them were tactical weapons used in Europe—or deployed in Europe during the Cold War. Many other more modern ones are part of Polaris missiles and other large bombs that can be deployed by B-52s or B-2s. Franklin: Sure. Martin: Yeah. There’s quite a wide range of different models and designs. I didn’t know that at the time, but it’s fascinating. I remember one day standing in one of the disassembly rooms, and they had this nuclear weapon in a cradle standing there on the floor, and they had the top off of it. And I could just look down in the top of it. I couldn’t touch it, but I could look in there and just see the engineering in one of those things was just amazing. Just beyond belief. Franklin: I bet. I can only imagine. Martin: Yeah. But I’ve gone off on this nuclear weapons story and departed from Hanford. Franklin: It’s okay. Martin: Maybe I should come back. Franklin: I think that’s a very interesting story. I certainly—I’ve also, like I said, heard of plenty of bombs—ICBMs, missiles, but I’d never quite heard of a howitzer-type fired weapon. But also just the fact that your team and your field was able to prevent a really nasty incident is pretty amazing. Martin: Right. Franklin: It speaks to your profession and your skill. Martin: Well, like I mentioned, the professional credentials. Two of the three technicians who responded were certified by NNRPT. And they had the right kind of training, knew what to do, did it very well. Franklin: Great. Martin: I had an opportunity a year later to nominate them for a special DoE award for unusual—not heroism, but effective response. And they won the award that year. Franklin: That’s great. So how and when did you leave Pantex? Martin: Well, the first time, was in ’96—no, I’m sorry, in ’93—and I had a special appointment back at DoE headquarters in Germantown. So I went back there for two years to work with the branch of DoE that was like an inspector general—the internal inspection branch, if you will. Very similar in scope to what the DNFSB—Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board—was doing. Scrutinizing all the DoE operations at the national labs and other facilities, and trying to always make improvements. Franklin: Wow. Martin: So I worked with the DoE headquarters staff on many different audits that we did at other DoE labs. At the time, I specialized in dosimetry, both internal and external dosimetry, and other operational health physics parts of the program. Franklin: Wow. So when did you come back to the Tri-Cities? Martin: Well, I had a couple other interesting assignments in there. After DoE headquarters, then I went back to Pantex for three more years. And then another opportunity came up on an old facility near Cincinnati that needed to be decommissioned—decontaminated and decommissioned. And I went to Oak Ridge first, worked with the Foster Wheeler Company on the design of what became the largest radon control building that had ever been done. I was the radiation safety officer for that project at Oak Ridge in the design effort. And then we moved to Cincinnati for a year and I worked at the Fernald facility in actually building this radon control facility. What we were trying to deal with were these large concrete silos that contained residual ore material from the Second World War. They have to go back to—when the Manhattan Project was trying to bring together the necessary uranium in addition to the plutonium that was produced here at Hanford, they were using a rich pitch blend ore that was coming from what was then called Belgian Congo in Africa. It was shipped from there up the Saint Lawrence River to a facility near Niagara Falls. And then it ended up being processed to extract as much uranium as possible. But there were these residuals. They ended up in these concrete silos near Niagara Falls, New York as well as this Fernald facility, just outside of Cincinnati. So we had three big concrete silos that—I don’t recall—they must have been 80 feet in diameter and 50 feet high. So they held a lot of uranium ore residuals. It contained a fair amount of radium, which gave off radon gas. This facility was located not too far from a residential area. So it became a greater concern for getting it cleaned up. We put together this radon control facility that had these huge charcoal beds and you could pipe—you could take the head gas off of this silo, pipe it into these charcoal beds where the radon would be absorbed, and then the clean air would circulate. So you could fairly rapidly reduce the concentration of radon inside the silo to much lower levels. In the process, the charcoal beds got loaded up by absorbing radon. There came a point where you had to heat up that charcoal to drive off the captured radon. We devised a clever scheme with four different beds where we could kind of keep one of them recirculating on all times and have the other three working. Franklin: So you say drive off the captured radon, where would it be driven off? Martin: Over to the next charcoal bed, which hadn’t yet been completely saturated. Franklin: Oh! But then eventually you still have charcoal that— Martin: but it decays with a 3.8 day half-life, and that was built into the plan, too. Franklin: Oh! Martin: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: But if it was to escape, right, it would get people very—it would contaminate or get people sick, or--? Martin: Well, it was pretty carefully designed not to— Franklin: Oh, but I’m saying that radon— Martin: Oh, if it escaped from the silo. If there was no control of it—a certain amount of radon was escaping from the silo. For the most part, it’s a light gas, it just goes up and the wind blows it and disperses it. So it was very difficult to even measure anything offsite. But there was that concern there that we were dealing with. Franklin: But if enough of it was released at once, then there might have been an issue? Martin: Like if the whole roof of the silo was suddenly removed and it all came out, that could be a problem, yeah. Franklin: Interesting. I didn’t realize it had such a short half-life. Martin: Yeah. So I did that, what amounted to ten years of offsite assignments. About that time, my wife and I got tired of moving. So we came back to the Tri-Cities, and our kids are here. I came back to work at Battelle for another few years before I retired. Franklin: When did you come back to Battelle? Martin: I came back in 2001. Franklin: Oh, okay. So then you worked for—it says you retired in 2006. Martin: I retired about four years later. And the last major project I worked on was also very interesting. It was the project for customs and border protection. It was to install radiation portal monitors at seaports. This was shortly after 9/11, and there was a concern about dirty bomb material being imported by any means. We had one part of the project dealt with seaport, another part airports, and a third part postal facilities. Franklin: Wow. Martin: So I worked on the seaports part, and I had the Port of Los Angeles was my assignment. Another one of us had Port of Long Beach, which is right next door, which are the largest seaports on the West Coast and have the largest number of shipping containers coming in. So we devised a method for monitoring those shipping containers as they were unloaded and making sure nothing was coming in that way. Franklin: Did—oh, sorry. Martin: Very interesting project. Franklin: I don’t know if you can speak to this, but was anything caught by these monitors? Martin: Yes. But not dirty bomb material. Franklin: Oh, okay. Martin: Turns out they were so sensitive, they would detect any kind of elevated background radioactivity. For example, kitty litter is a little bit elevated in background. Any kind of stone product, and there are various granite and other stone products imported from different places. Those had a high enough background activity that they would trigger our monitors. So we would run all these containers through a set of monitors, and any that triggered that amount would then be sent over to a secondary monitor, where they’d examine it more carefully, verify what was actually in the containers, sometimes inspect them. Franklin: So recently our project staff got a tour of some of the facilities at HAMMER. And I believe we saw one of those monitors. Would that have been the same? Martin: Mm-hm. Big yellow columns? Franklin: Yeah, that they run it through. Martin: Yep, that was the one. Franklin: So you helped design— Martin: We helped design—oh, I didn’t really get involved in design. That was done by some real smart people out here at Battelle. But I was onsite trying to get them installed. Franklin: Oh, okay. Martin: And tested. Franklin: Wow. That’s really—that’s fascinating. Martin: Yeah, it was. I had a chance to do a lot of fun things when I worked at Battelle. Franklin: Yeah, it sounds like it. Sounds like maybe I need to go get a job over there. Maybe they need a traveling historian. So, where—what have you been doing since you retired? Martin: Well, for about five years, I worked for Dade Moeller, which is kind of a spinoff company from Battelle. And they had a major contract with NIOSH—National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health—as part of an employee compensation program for radiation workers. Initially, the way this was set up was we got the actual radiation exposure records for former employees and examined their measured radiation exposure, and then did some other calculations that would tend to take into account anything else that they might have been exposed to but was somehow not measured on the dosimeter and many other factors to kind of add up their maximum possible radiation dose. And then that was compared—this is where it got a little complex. There are many different types of cancer that can be caused by radiation at a high enough level. Some types of cancer can be caused by a radiation level lower than some others. So it depended on what type of cancer the individual had as to which—how we measured their maximum possible radiation exposure to the likelihood that that cancer was caused by radiation. We did a careful calculation using probability and determined that if their cancer was at least 50% probable that it was caused by radiation, then they were granted an award. Well, we did that for several years in a very careful, scientific way that was well-documented. Then it became political. A lot of former workers, then, applied for another category within this overall compensation program that they called Special Exposure Cohort. Which meant that it didn’t matter how much radiation exposure they had, if they had the right type of cancer, they could get the award. And it’s kind of degenerated that way. But for many years, I think we did it right. I also had an opportunity to work on another part of that project where we did what we call the technical basis documents, where we reconstructed the history of how radiation exposure records were developed and maintained at each of these different sites. Every one varied a little bit. I did the one for the technical basis document for Pantex in Amarillo, because I was familiar with that. But I got to do several other interesting sites, one of which was Ames Laboratory in Ames, Iowa. Going there and interviewing some of these old-timers and looking at their old records, I found that there was a chemistry professor at what was then Iowa State University. He was called upon by the Manhattan Project in 1943 to help them improve their methods for extracting uranium metal. The old process that had been used by the Curies and other early scientists was really quite inefficient. But this professor developed a method used in a calcium catalyst that was very effective. He was able to purify uranium metal much quicker and in larger quantities. The story was that he would have to get on the train every Sunday afternoon and go to Chicago for the meeting with the Manhattan Project and report on the progress of his research and so on. One week after successfully isolating an ingot of uranium metal, he took it with him in his briefcase. Went into the meeting with Manhattan Project and clunked it on the desk, and passed it around. He said that this is a new method for producing substantial quantities of uranium metal. All the scientists around the table kind of poked at it and scratched it and so on and didn’t believe it was really uranium, but it was. And they finally decided that he had made a great breakthrough, so they sent him back to Iowa and said, make a lot more, fast. And he did. So he had the material they needed, then, for the Manhattan Project. Franklin: Wow. Martin: Interesting story. Franklin: Yeah, that’s really fascinating. So how did you become involved with the Parker Foundation? Martin: About ten years ago—almost ten years ago—my friend Bill Bair and Ron Kathren and a couple others on the Parker Board invited me to participate. Matt Moeller was chairman of the board at that time—invited me to participate, and I just joined in, and found it very rewarding. I really appreciate what the Parker Board does in the memory of Herb Parker and in the sense of scholarships and other educational programs. So it’s a pleasure to contribute to that. Franklin: Great, great. You moved in 1975 or ’76? Martin: I moved here in ’76. Franklin: ’76. And you mentioned children. Were your children born here, or did you move here with them? Martin: My oldest daughter was born in San Diego, and my younger daughter was born in Boulder, Colorado. Franklin: Okay. Martin: So they were six and eight, I think, when we moved here. Franklin: What were your impressions of Richland in the mid-70s when you moved? Did you live in Richland or did you--? Martin: We did. Yeah, we lived just a few blocks from WSU here. Franklin: Oh, okay. Martin: In North Richland. It was a very different community, but one that I came to know and respect. Because at that time, education was really paramount in the minds of parents and the school system. And my wife was a teacher. So we really took an interest in that. My kids got a really good education here in Richland. Went to Hanford High, and then did well in college. One of the main features of Richland at that time, I think, was a superior education program. Some of the other history of Richland with old government housing, and then we got a new house, and things like that are entirely different, but also very interesting. Franklin: And is that what you kind of are meaning when you say it was a different community? I guess I’d like to unpack that a little bit more. How—in what ways was it different? Martin: Well, a large part of Richland was originally government housing, and you only had to drive through town, you could see all the evidence of that. And then on the north side of Richland, they had opened up—beginning in 1965, I believe—development of newer private housing. We got here just in time to get in on a new house, and worked out fine for us. Franklin: Great. Was there—being next to a site that was primarily involved in product production, plutonium production—was there a different feeling about the Cold War in Richland per se than anywhere else you had lived in the United States at that time? Martin: There definitely was different feelings about the Cold War and living anywhere near a nuclear power plant. I remember when we were working with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission at many different reactor sites around the country. In many cases we would have public meetings to introduce the local folks to what we were trying to do to improve the emergency planning. There was a lot of concern about living anywhere near a nuclear power plant just a few years after TMI. I tried to explain to people how I live within 30 miles of nine nuclear power plants. But I understood radiation. I understood the risk, and I understood what could go wrong or how to deal with it. And it didn’t concern—didn’t bother me that much to live here. I found that to be generally true of a lot of people in Richland that were part—working at Hanford and were well-educated. They understood the risk and they could deal with it. Whereas many other people were just afraid. And I attribute that to what I call now about a 71-year deliberate misinformation program on the part of mass media to scare people about radiation. Franklin: I like that. I’m writing it down. How do you feel that the—do you feel that the ending of the Cold War changed your work at all? I guess the reason why I ask— Martin: It did. Franklin: --these questions about the Cold War is because it was the impetus for much of the continued production of the material. Martin: Yeah. I was in Germany in 1988, just before the Berlin Wall came down. I was also there in Berlin in 1984, and we actually crossed through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin on a special tour. Franklin: Really? Martin: It was quite amazing. I was in Berlin for a meeting of the International Radiation Protection Association. I took my whole family; it was a tremendous adventure for them. But we were able to be part of a special US Army tour that went through Checkpoint Charlie. I think they did this once a week. And we had a little tour of East Berlin while it was still under the control of the USSR. We visited their Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and they had a little ceremonial changing the guard there. And we visited the square in Berlin where Hitler had burned the books that one night in 1939. And then we visited a huge Russian war memorial, and there was a building there where the Germans had surrendered in 1945. There was quite a story about that. But I was really impressed with this huge Russian war memorial. There were five mass graves that each held 100,000 soldiers. It was done in kind of the Russian style, with statues and other honorary symbols to clearly show their respect for the lives of all those soldiers. But that was an impressive sight. But I was there again in 1988 just before the Berlin Wall came down, and you could kind of see the end of the Cold War coming. So it was a great opportunity that I had, working for Battelle, being able to travel like that, and do many exciting things. Franklin: Did you get to ever talk or meet with any of your counterparts on the Russian side? Martin: Yes. Franklin: After the Cold War ended. And what was that like, to finally work with what had been considered the enemy? Martin: It was quite unusual. I was scheduled to go to Russia a week after 9/11. It almost got canceled, but I managed to go. I was giving—they were having a conference for young scientists and trying to introduce them to international concepts of radiation safety. So I gave my paper and four others that we did to that group. It was located at what was the Russian equivalent of Los Alamos, their design facility. There weren’t very many Americans had been in there up to that point. So I was watched very closely. [LAUGHTER] And not allowed to see much, actually. But it was a very interesting exchange. The papers I was presenting were prepared in both English and Russian. And then we also did what they called a poster presentation, where we had a big poster with diagrams and everything—again translated to Russian. So we were able to put these up at this conference for these young scientists. They, I think, got a lot out of it because it was in their language so it was easy for them to understand. Working with an interpreter was a new experience for me. I would give this oral presentation, so I’d say one sentence and the pause. The interpreter would repeat that. I’d say the next sentence, and—kind of an awkward way to do an oral presentation. Franklin: I can imagine. Martin: But their hospitality was very good. This was in 2001. So the Cold War had been over for quite a few years. But we were trying to establish better relations. I think it was quite effective in doing that. I had another opportunity to work with Russian scientists on an NRC program, again where NRC was trying to provide training to their equivalent Russian inspectors for nuclear power plants and explain to them some of the ways that they did inspections, things they looked for, how they documented findings and things like that. We had four Russian inspectors and their interpreter come over from Moscow. I was their host in Washington, DC, and we worked with them there with the NRC headquarters for a week, providing training. And then we brought them out to Idaho to the Idaho National Lab, north of Idaho Falls, and went to a large hot cell facility at Idaho. A hot cell is where they have a heavily shielded enclosure with mechanical arms that do things on the inside. It was quite a sophisticated facility and somewhat unlike what the Russian counterparts were used to. But it was a good learning exercise for them. We kind of went through a demonstration of how we would do an inspection—a safety inspection. So, I had those kind of opportunities to interact with Russian scientists and found that very exciting. Very interesting. Franklin: Did you find that there was anything that you had learned from them at all? Or do you feel that the US was much more advanced in radiation protection and health physics? Martin: Well, I kept my ears open when I was talking to them, but they didn’t reveal much. [LAUGHTER] So, we didn’t pick up much that way. Franklin: Sure. Martin: We were trying to help them. Franklin: Right. Were you at Hanford during the Russian visit to Hanford when they toured the Plutonium Finishing Plant? Martin: No. That was after I retired, I think. Franklin: Okay, just curious. Martin: I heard about it of course. Franklin: I’m sure. That must have been a pretty big deal from the standpoint of both countries. Is there anything that we haven’t covered that you would like to talk about? Martin: I think there’s one thing I remember from when I did this interview the first time that I wanted to mention. Franklin: Sure. Martin: I’ve been talking about all the varied experiences I had, and excellent opportunities over the years. But I think one of the perhaps most impressive things that I was able to do was to be able to hire several good people into my organization. I won’t mention names, but there were several that I call superstars that are now leaders in the field. I was able to bring them in right out of college or from another job, and hire several really good people that certainly enhanced our program, and then gave them great opportunities to grow and expand. Like I say, they’re now leaders in the field. That was one of the most rewarding parts of my job. Franklin: That’s great. Maybe you can give me their names off camera and we could contact them. Martin: I think they’re already on your list. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Oh, okay, good. Martin: But I’ll do that. Franklin: Well, good. Martin: We’ll do that. Franklin: They should be. Tom, did you— Tom Hungate: No, I’m fine. Franklin: Emma, did you have anything? Emma Rice: No, I’m fine. Franklin: Okay. Well, I think that’s it. Jerry, thank you so much. Martin: Well, that was fun. Did we stay on target? Franklin: I believe we did. Martin: I wandered a little. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: That’s okay. Martin: There’s some stories there that might be interesting. Franklin: I think the stories help keep the oral histories—they have a human-centered focus and they’re interesting for people to watch. Martin: I hope so. Franklin: And I think there might be a couple things that merit some more research in there that personally, for me, I’d like to find out some more about. Martin: Oh, okay. Franklin: Especially the howitzer thing. Martin: Oh, yeah. [LAUGHTER] Hungate: One thing I’d just like to ask— Martin: Sure. Hungate: You’ve been involved in a lot of things over a broad range of time and experiences and I just kind of wonder what you would feel is the one—maybe the item or two that you’ve worked on that will leave the most lasting impact? Martin: The most lasting impact. Hungate: Or that you wished had been developed more that didn’t quite complete, you’d like to see more work done on it, it was either defunded or it was— Martin: Well, I’m thinking of several different things now. I’ll just have to think it through. The work we did with NRC to improve emergency planning on nuclear power plants I think was very effective. And that’s still being maintained today. Work we did with DoE at Pantex on nuclear weapons. You mentioned the end of the Cold War, that’s when many of these tactical nuclear weapons in Europe were brought back and declared obsolete, and so we were doing a massive disassembly operation on those. I learned a lot about nuclear weapons and found it fascinating. We implemented some methods at Pantex that I think are still in use in the maintenance programs that they do now. But we were able to, I think, substantially improve on radiation safety at Pantex. Certainly to the point where we were finally blessed by DNFSB and DoE. I think the quality of that program has been maintained. There’s several other projects that I’ve worked on over the years, but I guess there’s no one thing that stands out that I would be concerned about that it was defunded or ended or somehow went downhill. I’m sure that’s happened, but I haven’t kept track of everything. Franklin: Being as nuclear power and nuclear weapons have different objectives, and you mentioned this retirement of a lot of nuclear weapons, do you feel that nuclear weapons still have a role to play in security— Martin: I do. Franklin: You do? Martin: Yes. Because the Russians still have a lot of them, China has some, the French and English have a few. It’s what I call the mutual deterrent, which is a term that’s been used. It just means that we don’t ever want to use one again, but if any one of those countries had some kind of an unbalanced advantage, it could be used. So if we have this mutual assured deterrence, it keeps that in balance. So it’s important to maintain that stockpile. Franklin: Interesting. Thank you. Hungate: Okay. Franklin: Great. Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I’m conducting an oral history with Jerome Martin on June 1st, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Jerome Martin about his experiences working at the Hanford site and his involvement with the Herbert M. Parker Foundation. And you—just wanted to use your legal name to start out with, but you prefer to be called Jerry, right? Jerome Martin: Yes, I do. Franklin: Okay. Martin: Jerome’s a little too formal. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right. Just for the technical purposes. Sure. No more, we will not mention the name— Martin: Okay. Franklin: Again. [LAUGHTER] So for the record, you did an interview with the Parker Foundation sometime in 2010. Martin: I believe it was earlier. Franklin: Or possibly earlier. And some of the Parker Foundation videos, as we know, were lost. And so this video is an attempt to recapture some of the information that would have been in that oral history, but also add some other information, and also to give you a chance to talk about your involvement with the Herbert M. Parker Foundation. So just as a introduction to whoever views this in the future. So why don’t we start in the beginning? How did you come to—you’re not from the Tri-Cities? Martin: Not originally. Franklin: All right. How did you come to the Tri-Cities? Martin: Well, a little quick history, I got my bachelor’s degree at San Diego State College and then I was a radiation safety officer at San Diego State for about three years. Then I had an opportunity to go to the University of Colorado in Boulder, where, again, I was a radiation safety officer and on the faculty of the physics department. After several years there, an excellent opportunity came up for me here at Hanford with Battelle, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. So I moved here in 1976, and had a great opportunity to work with many other more senior people here at Hanford that had been here since the beginning. One of those, of course, was Herbert M. Parker. He was former director of the laboratories under General Electric, and then retired, but stayed on with Battelle as a director. I had a few opportunities to interact with him, and was quite impressed. I have heard stories about, he was a rather demanding taskmaster. And I could kind of imagining myself trying to work for him, but it would have been a challenge. Franklin: What do you feel is important to be known about Herbert M. Parker for the historical record? Martin: I’ve had an opportunity to review many of his publications. They were quite professional and very well researched, and in many cases the leading authority on several topics. So I was very impressed by his publications. I didn’t have a direct opportunity to work for him, so I don’t know about his management style or other things. But that was the thing that impressed me the most, was his publications. Franklin: What topics did Dr. Parker write on—or do his research? Martin: His early professional career was in medical physics. He was at Swedish Hospital in Seattle for many years. Then he was called upon, as part of the Manhattan Project, to set up the safety program at Oak Ridge. He did that for about a year or so. Then he was called upon to do the same thing here at Hanford. So he came here and established the entire environmental safety and health program for Hanford. Of course he had all the right background to be able to do that, and he was able to recruit a number of really talented people to help him with that. So I think Hanford ended up with what could be known as the best environmental safety and health program, among all the early AEC and then DoE laboratories. One of the things that impressed me most by that program was the record keeping. And I had an opportunity to work on that in later years. But the way the record keeping was designed and set up and maintained was quite thorough. It was designed to be able to recreate whatever may have happened according to those records. It turned out to be very valuable in later years. Franklin: Who instituted that record-keeping? Was that Parker? Martin: I don’t recall the name of the individual that set it up, although I know Ken Hyde was involved very early on. He may have been at the very origin of it. But I’m sure Parker certainly influenced the rigor with which that program was established. In later years, John Jech was manager of the record keeping program, and then my good friend, Matt Lyon, was the manager of that. I worked with Matt, then, on American National Standard Institute’s standard for record keeping. We incorporated into that standard virtually all of the fundamentals that Parker had established initially. Franklin: The first name was John— Martin: The second manager of records was John Jech. J-E-C-H. Franklin: Do you know if he’s still living? Martin: No, he’s not. Franklin: And what about Lyon? Martin: Matt Lyon passed away about ten years ago, as did Ken Hyde. Franklin: What’s that? Martin: Ken Hyde—I think they all three passed away about ten years ago. Franklin: Okay. Martin: Yeah, give or take. Franklin: So you mentioned that the record keeping was designed to recreate an incident as it happened. Do you know of any such—or can you speak to any such times when that record keeping system was crucial into a safety issue? Martin: The one that comes to mind is one of the more I guess infamous incidents here at Hanford. It occurred just around the time I arrived here in 1976. It was sometimes called the McCluskey accident out at the 231-Z Building. There was an explosion in a glovebox that resulted in very significant contamination of Mr. McCluskey by americium-241. And the response to that incident, and then all the following treatment of Mr. McCluskey was very well documented. In fact, those documents then became the basis for a whole series of scientific papers that described the entire incident and all the aspects of it. So that was one major case where excellent record keeping was very valuable. Franklin: Excellent. And what—I’m just curious now—what happened to Mr. McCluskey? Martin: He survived for about ten years after the accident. He initially had very severe acid burns and trauma. But he was very carefully treated for that. The americium contamination that he had was gradually eliminated—not eliminated, but reduced substantially. He survived for another ten years after that incident even though he had heart trouble. I know several people that assisted in his care, and it was quite remarkable what they were able to do and what he was able to do. Franklin: Wow. Did he ever go back to work? Martin: No, he was 65 at the time of the accident. Franklin: Oh, okay. Martin: So he kind of went into medical retirement at that point. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right. Yeah, I can imagine. So you said you came in 1976. Martin: Right. Franklin: And what did you—what was your first job, when you came to Battelle? Martin: Well, I worked in what was called the radiation protection department, later called health physics department. My first assignment was called ALARA management. ALARA stands for maintain our radiation exposures as low as reasonably achievable. I would monitor the exposure records of Battelle workers, and watch for any that were the least bit unusually high, and then look for ways that we could reduce those exposures. And I monitored other things like average exposures and the use of dosimeters and things of that nature. The overall assignment was to generally reduce the workers’ radiation exposure. Franklin: How successful do you feel that the department was in that effort? Martin: I think we were very successful, and it went on for many years, even after I had that assignment. I remember one time, looking at a report that DoE put out annually on radiation exposures over all the major DoE facilities. Those average exposures, highest individual exposures, and things of that nature. Battelle and Hanford had among the lowest averages of all the other DoE facilities. So, I believe it was a very effective ALARA program here at Hanford. Franklin: Do you know if that report was ever made publically available? Martin: Oh, yes. Franklin: Oh. Martin: Yeah, those are published every year by DoE. Franklin: Oh, great. I’ll have to find that. Sorry, just scribbling down some notes. Martin: At one point, Battelle had a contract with the DoE headquarters to actually do the production of that report each year. Franklin: Okay. Martin: And I was involved in the production of it—oh, three or four years, as I recall. Franklin: Okay. So you mentioned that you had moved on out of that program or department, so what— Martin: Right. Well, I started getting involved in management at kind of the bottom level. I was an associate section manager, and then I got an assignment as section manager for the radiation monitoring section. I was responsible for all the radiation monitors—or as they’re now called, radiation protection technologists—the radiation monitors for Battelle and two other of the contractors here at Hanford. It was kind of ironic that I was located in what used to be the 300 Area library, and my office was on the second floor. And my office was the former office of Herbert M. Parker, when he was director of laboratories. Franklin: Wow! Martin: It was an honor to have that space, and recall memories of Mr. Parker. Franklin: Wow, that’s great. And how long did you do that for? Martin: I did that two or three years, and then another opportunity came along in 1979—no actually, it was ’79, but I guess I’d been on that management job for about a year and a half. In September of ’79, which was about three months after the Three Mile Island accident, we had an opportunity to make a proposal to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to provide support for their staff in emergency planning work. At that time, NRC was making a big push on all the power plants, all the nuclear power plants across the country to enhance their emergency planning programs. So we began about a ten-year project with NRC to supplement their staff. The NRC established the requirement for annual emergency exercises at each of the nuclear power plants, where they had to work up a scenario, and then they would activate their emergency response staff to demonstrate that they would know how to handle that accident scenario. We served as observers. We had teams of observers with the NRC staff. We did a total of 800 of those exercises over a ten-year period. Franklin: Wow. Martin: So we had a lot of staff out there, doing a lot of travel. Franklin: Yeah. So that would have been—so you said for power, would that have been for all of the power reactors in the United States? Martin: Yes. There were 103 plants at the time. Franklin: Wow. Did you do any in foreign countries? Martin: I didn’t personally, but we did have some staff that went to a similar kind of program with the International Atomic Energy Agency, and visited foreign nuclear power plants. Some in France, that I recall. Franklin: Wow. So you said 103 power plants? Martin: In the US, yeah. Franklin: Wow. Martin: Actually, that was the number of reactors. There was a fewer number of plants, because many of them are two or more reactors at a site. Franklin: Oh, okay so the 103 is the number of reactors? Martin: I believe that’s correct. At that time. Franklin: How did Chernobyl affect your field and your work? Martin: That’s an excellent question, because that was in this period. Of course, the Chernobyl accident happened in 1986, and I was working directly with NRC at that time. I was project manager on that NRC contract. When Chernobyl happened, there was an immediate reaction, and NRC had to study the Chernobyl accident as well as we could, and then determine what could be applied to US power reactors by way of improvements and emergency planning. One of my managers, Bill Bair, was part of a US delegation led by DoE and NRC to actually visit the Chernobyl area shortly after the accident, interact with the Russians, and do lessons learned that was turned into a series of DoE and NRC documents that tried to extract as much useful information as we could from Chernobyl and apply it here in the US. Franklin: Right, because if I’m not mistaken, the design of the Chernobyl reactor—there were reactors of similar design in the United States. Martin: Not exactly. The Chernobyl reactor had no containment vessel. There were a few reactors in the US that also did not have containment vessels, but they had other safeguards. The N Reactor was one of those. Unfortunately, I would call it an overreaction of the US government to a reactor with no containment. Severe restrictions were put on N Reactor, and some re-design was required that ultimately led to the end of N Reactor. It’s interesting to note that at that point in time, which was about 1986, 1987, N Reactor had generated more electricity from a nuclear reactor than any other plant in the world. So it’s unfortunate it came to an early demise. Franklin: And—sorry, my ignorance here on the technical aspects. You said some of them don’t have a containment vessel. What does a containment vessel look like and what role does it play, and why would there would be reactors with one and without one? Martin: Well, N Reactor went back to the early—the late ‘50s, I believe when it was designed. It was designed similar to the other reactors here at Hanford that were intended for production of plutonium. But N Reactor was a dual purpose, in that it also generated 800 megawatts of electricity. But it had a similar kind of design to what you see out at B Plant, for example. So it didn’t have the same kind of containment vessel that other modern pressurized water reactors or other nuclear power plants have that is designed in such a way that if there is reactor core damage, any radioactivity released can be contained and not released. Franklin: Okay. Martin: Or released in a very controlled fashion. Franklin: I see. Kind of like a clam shell that kind of covers the— Martin: Well, it’s basically—yeah, in many cases a spherical kind of containment. Franklin: Okay. Excellent. So after—obviously the demise of N Reactor, ’86, ’87, is kind of the end of operations—or I should say of product production—product and energy production on the Hanford site. So how did your job change after that? And what did you continue to do after the shutdown? Martin: I wasn’t directly affected by N Reactor shutting down. And the other production reactors had been shut down before that, so I wasn’t really directly involved in that. But I had yet another opportunity came up that turned out to be really a challenge for me. The Pantex plant in Amarillo, Texas is the primary assembly and disassembly facility for nuclear weapons. At that time, it was managed by a company called Mason and Hanger. Mason and Hanger had that contract for many years, and DoE challenged them to rebid the contract. So Mason and Hanger reached out to Battelle for assistance in teaming on environmental health and safety. So my manager talked me into being involved, so I went down to Amarillo and visited the plant and worked with the team there on the proposal that had to be presented to DoE. And we won the contract. Of course in the fine print it said I then had to move there. Franklin: Ah! Martin: But it turned out great. By that time, my family was pretty well grown, kids were through college. So we moved down to Amarillo, and I went to work at Pantex. We really enjoyed that. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Amarillo’s a very nice town, a lot of nice people. The work at Pantex was very challenging. I enjoyed that very much, too. Franklin: Great. So how long were you at the Pantex plant? Martin: Well, I was manager of the radiation safety department down there for three years, which was my original contract obligation. During that time, we were very closely scrutinized by the Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board, which was an organization established by Congress to be a watchdog over DoE. Their method for watching DoE was to watch the contractors very closely. So they would scrutinize everything we did, and then challenge DoE if they found something. They pushed us in a way that was good, because one of the things they promoted was professional certification. I’m a certified health physicist, certified by the American Board of Health Physics. At the time at Pantex, I was the only one we had there. But the DNFSB pushed us to add more, so I got more of my staff certified. There was a similar program for technicians called the National Registry of Radiation Protection Technologists, and at the time, we had two of my staff that were registered with NRRPT. Again, they pushed us to promote more training. By the end of that three-year period, I think we had ten of our technologists registered and certified. So we really improved the credentials of our staff. We instituted some new programs, again, related to ALARA radiation reduction. Probably the most interesting or challenging day of my life occurred down there in 1994. We were working on disassembly of the W48 program. The W48 was a tactical weapon used in—that was deployed in Europe—it was never used. But it was a very small, cylindrical nuclear weapon designed to be shot out of a 155 millimeter howitzer, which is amazing just to think about. But the plutonium pit in this device was surrounded by high explosive. It turned out to be rather difficult to disassemble this particular design of nuclear weapon. It also turned out that the plutonium pit had a relatively high dose rate, compared to others. So the workers were getting some increased exposure to their hands in the process of working on this. So we were concerned about their extremity dose. So we worked up a method for doing a classified videotape of the disassembly operation, so that we could study each step in the process to find ways to improve worker safety. Providing shielding, remote tools, things of that nature. The process on this was to take the plutonium pit and high explosives and put it in liquid nitrogen bath for a period of time. Then bring it out and put it in a little tub-like, and pour hot water on it. The HE would expand rapidly and crack off. And for the most part, it worked very well. Well, there was this one particular pit that we were working on when we were doing the videotape for this study. Apparently the HE wasn’t coming off the way it should, and so they had to repeat this process over and over. They brought it out of the liquid nitrogen, poured hot water on it, and the plutonium—the cladding, the beryllium cladding on the plutonium pit actually cracked, due to the severe temperature change. The workers who were working on this were trained very carefully that if that cladding on the pit ever cracks, get out of there fast, so you avoid a plutonium exposure. So that happened. One of the technicians heard an audible crack and saw it on the surface of that pit. And they all evacuated immediately. They got just outside the door of this special facility, and they called our radiation safety office, and fortunately my three best technicians were standing there by the phone. They said, pit had cracked. And so they got over there as fast as they possibly could. They recognized the danger of having an exposed plutonium pit, and how that can oxidize and cause severe contamination very quickly. They decided to put on respirators to protect themselves, but they didn’t bother with any of the other protective clothing because they wanted to save time. So they made an entry where the cracked pit was, still there with the water bath on it, and the video shooting this picture. They took samples right on the crack and on the water and all around it. They managed to take that plutonium pit and get it into a plastic bag and then they doubled bagged it and then they triple bagged it and sealed it up. Then they came out. Of course, the samples revealed that there was indeed plutonium contamination coming out of that crack, but they had contained it very quickly. When we made a later entry to retrieve the video tape that was still running, and we looked at the timestamp on it. From the time the crack appeared until they had it in the bag was seven minutes. Franklin: Wow! Martin: That’s about as fast as you can possibly expect a response team to come in and secure a situation like that. And so, following that, of course we had the incident debriefing, and I had to chair that. But we very carefully went through and recorded every little thing that happened from the time they were working on the disassembly to the time they exited. Got that all documented, and then the videotape of course documented all of that. The scrutiny by Department of Energy, the Amarillo office, the Albuquerque office, Headquarters, any number of others—we had a lot of attention that day. It was a long, hard day at the office, but very exciting. Following that, we had to debrief many other investigation committees and others. But we had that videotape to rely on, and that just was invaluable. That’s my—that was probably the most exciting day of my life, down there. [LAUGHTER] Got a follow-up to that. That W48 weapon was designed by Livermore. They came in at a later time and did a post-mortem on that cracked pit. And when they did, we discovered that the amount of plutonium contamination there that was available for distribution had it not been contained, would have totally just made that facility useless. I mean, extremely expensive clean-up, if it ever got done. Franklin: Not just the room, but the entire facility? Martin: Well, mainly that room. Franklin: That room. Martin: But it was a very big room, and a very valuable room, specially designed. But the quick response of our radiation safety technicians and getting that contained saved that room and millions of dollars in expense. Franklin: Wow. And so this was a weapon that was the size of a howitzer shell? Martin: 155 millimeters. Franklin: Wow. And what is the—I don’t know if you know this—but what’s the explosive power of that—is it—I guess it could be— Martin: Well, it’s just like the atomic bombs used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, about 20-kiloton fission device. The plutonium pit is designed to implode and cause a super-critical reaction. Franklin: But fired out of a howitzer, instead of— Martin: Fired out of a howitzer, perhaps 20 miles or something. And then you can somehow coordinate the careful detonation of this-- Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Martin: --device. It boggled my mind. Franklin: I guess that’s best that that was never ever— Martin: There’s quite a large number of different nuclear weapons. Many of them were tactical weapons used in Europe—or deployed in Europe during the Cold War. Many other more modern ones are part of Polaris missiles and other large bombs that can be deployed by B-52s or B-2s. Franklin: Sure. Martin: Yeah. There’s quite a wide range of different models and designs. I didn’t know that at the time, but it’s fascinating. I remember one day standing in one of the disassembly rooms, and they had this nuclear weapon in a cradle standing there on the floor, and they had the top off of it. And I could just look down in the top of it. I couldn’t touch it, but I could look in there and just see the engineering in one of those things was just amazing. Just beyond belief. Franklin: I bet. I can only imagine. Martin: Yeah. But I’ve gone off on this nuclear weapons story and departed from Hanford. Franklin: It’s okay. Martin: Maybe I should come back. Franklin: I think that’s a very interesting story. I certainly—I’ve also, like I said, heard of plenty of bombs—ICBMs, missiles, but I’d never quite heard of a howitzer-type fired weapon. But also just the fact that your team and your field was able to prevent a really nasty incident is pretty amazing. Martin: Right. Franklin: It speaks to your profession and your skill. Martin: Well, like I mentioned, the professional credentials. Two of the three technicians who responded were certified by NNRPT. And they had the right kind of training, knew what to do, did it very well. Franklin: Great. Martin: I had an opportunity a year later to nominate them for a special DoE award for unusual—not heroism, but effective response. And they won the award that year. Franklin: That’s great. So how and when did you leave Pantex? Martin: Well, the first time, was in ’96—no, I’m sorry, in ’93—and I had a special appointment back at DoE headquarters in Germantown. So I went back there for two years to work with the branch of DoE that was like an inspector general—the internal inspection branch, if you will. Very similar in scope to what the DNFSB—Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board—was doing. Scrutinizing all the DoE operations at the national labs and other facilities, and trying to always make improvements. Franklin: Wow. Martin: So I worked with the DoE headquarters staff on many different audits that we did at other DoE labs. At the time, I specialized in dosimetry, both internal and external dosimetry, and other operational health physics parts of the program. Franklin: Wow. So when did you come back to the Tri-Cities? Martin: Well, I had a couple other interesting assignments in there. After DoE headquarters, then I went back to Pantex for three more years. And then another opportunity came up on an old facility near Cincinnati that needed to be decommissioned—decontaminated and decommissioned. And I went to Oak Ridge first, worked with the Foster Wheeler Company on the design of what became the largest radon control building that had ever been done. I was the radiation safety officer for that project at Oak Ridge in the design effort. And then we moved to Cincinnati for a year and I worked at the Fernald facility in actually building this radon control facility. What we were trying to deal with were these large concrete silos that contained residual ore material from the Second World War. They have to go back to—when the Manhattan Project was trying to bring together the necessary uranium in addition to the plutonium that was produced here at Hanford, they were using a rich pitch blend ore that was coming from what was then called Belgian Congo in Africa. It was shipped from there up the Saint Lawrence River to a facility near Niagara Falls. And then it ended up being processed to extract as much uranium as possible. But there were these residuals. They ended up in these concrete silos near Niagara Falls, New York as well as this Fernald facility, just outside of Cincinnati. So we had three big concrete silos that—I don’t recall—they must have been 80 feet in diameter and 50 feet high. So they held a lot of uranium ore residuals. It contained a fair amount of radium, which gave off radon gas. This facility was located not too far from a residential area. So it became a greater concern for getting it cleaned up. We put together this radon control facility that had these huge charcoal beds and you could pipe—you could take the head gas off of this silo, pipe it into these charcoal beds where the radon would be absorbed, and then the clean air would circulate. So you could fairly rapidly reduce the concentration of radon inside the silo to much lower levels. In the process, the charcoal beds got loaded up by absorbing radon. There came a point where you had to heat up that charcoal to drive off the captured radon. We devised a clever scheme with four different beds where we could kind of keep one of them recirculating on all times and have the other three working. Franklin: So you say drive off the captured radon, where would it be driven off? Martin: Over to the next charcoal bed, which hadn’t yet been completely saturated. Franklin: Oh! But then eventually you still have charcoal that— Martin: but it decays with a 3.8 day half-life, and that was built into the plan, too. Franklin: Oh! Martin: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: But if it was to escape, right, it would get people very—it would contaminate or get people sick, or--? Martin: Well, it was pretty carefully designed not to— Franklin: Oh, but I’m saying that radon— Martin: Oh, if it escaped from the silo. If there was no control of it—a certain amount of radon was escaping from the silo. For the most part, it’s a light gas, it just goes up and the wind blows it and disperses it. So it was very difficult to even measure anything offsite. But there was that concern there that we were dealing with. Franklin: But if enough of it was released at once, then there might have been an issue? Martin: Like if the whole roof of the silo was suddenly removed and it all came out, that could be a problem, yeah. Franklin: Interesting. I didn’t realize it had such a short half-life. Martin: Yeah. So I did that, what amounted to ten years of offsite assignments. About that time, my wife and I got tired of moving. So we came back to the Tri-Cities, and our kids are here. I came back to work at Battelle for another few years before I retired. Franklin: When did you come back to Battelle? Martin: I came back in 2001. Franklin: Oh, okay. So then you worked for—it says you retired in 2006. Martin: I retired about four years later. And the last major project I worked on was also very interesting. It was the project for customs and border protection. It was to install radiation portal monitors at seaports. This was shortly after 9/11, and there was a concern about dirty bomb material being imported by any means. We had one part of the project dealt with seaport, another part airports, and a third part postal facilities. Franklin: Wow. Martin: So I worked on the seaports part, and I had the Port of Los Angeles was my assignment. Another one of us had Port of Long Beach, which is right next door, which are the largest seaports on the West Coast and have the largest number of shipping containers coming in. So we devised a method for monitoring those shipping containers as they were unloaded and making sure nothing was coming in that way. Franklin: Did—oh, sorry. Martin: Very interesting project. Franklin: I don’t know if you can speak to this, but was anything caught by these monitors? Martin: Yes. But not dirty bomb material. Franklin: Oh, okay. Martin: Turns out they were so sensitive, they would detect any kind of elevated background radioactivity. For example, kitty litter is a little bit elevated in background. Any kind of stone product, and there are various granite and other stone products imported from different places. Those had a high enough background activity that they would trigger our monitors. So we would run all these containers through a set of monitors, and any that triggered that amount would then be sent over to a secondary monitor, where they’d examine it more carefully, verify what was actually in the containers, sometimes inspect them. Franklin: So recently our project staff got a tour of some of the facilities at HAMMER. And I believe we saw one of those monitors. Would that have been the same? Martin: Mm-hm. Big yellow columns? Franklin: Yeah, that they run it through. Martin: Yep, that was the one. Franklin: So you helped design— Martin: We helped design—oh, I didn’t really get involved in design. That was done by some real smart people out here at Battelle. But I was onsite trying to get them installed. Franklin: Oh, okay. Martin: And tested. Franklin: Wow. That’s really—that’s fascinating. Martin: Yeah, it was. I had a chance to do a lot of fun things when I worked at Battelle. Franklin: Yeah, it sounds like it. Sounds like maybe I need to go get a job over there. Maybe they need a traveling historian. So, where—what have you been doing since you retired? Martin: Well, for about five years, I worked for Dade Moeller, which is kind of a spinoff company from Battelle. And they had a major contract with NIOSH—National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health—as part of an employee compensation program for radiation workers. Initially, the way this was set up was we got the actual radiation exposure records for former employees and examined their measured radiation exposure, and then did some other calculations that would tend to take into account anything else that they might have been exposed to but was somehow not measured on the dosimeter and many other factors to kind of add up their maximum possible radiation dose. And then that was compared—this is where it got a little complex. There are many different types of cancer that can be caused by radiation at a high enough level. Some types of cancer can be caused by a radiation level lower than some others. So it depended on what type of cancer the individual had as to which—how we measured their maximum possible radiation exposure to the likelihood that that cancer was caused by radiation. We did a careful calculation using probability and determined that if their cancer was at least 50% probable that it was caused by radiation, then they were granted an award. Well, we did that for several years in a very careful, scientific way that was well-documented. Then it became political. A lot of former workers, then, applied for another category within this overall compensation program that they called Special Exposure Cohort. Which meant that it didn’t matter how much radiation exposure they had, if they had the right type of cancer, they could get the award. And it’s kind of degenerated that way. But for many years, I think we did it right. I also had an opportunity to work on another part of that project where we did what we call the technical basis documents, where we reconstructed the history of how radiation exposure records were developed and maintained at each of these different sites. Every one varied a little bit. I did the one for the technical basis document for Pantex in Amarillo, because I was familiar with that. But I got to do several other interesting sites, one of which was Ames Laboratory in Ames, Iowa. Going there and interviewing some of these old-timers and looking at their old records, I found that there was a chemistry professor at what was then Iowa State University. He was called upon by the Manhattan Project in 1943 to help them improve their methods for extracting uranium metal. The old process that had been used by the Curies and other early scientists was really quite inefficient. But this professor developed a method used in a calcium catalyst that was very effective. He was able to purify uranium metal much quicker and in larger quantities. The story was that he would have to get on the train every Sunday afternoon and go to Chicago for the meeting with the Manhattan Project and report on the progress of his research and so on. One week after successfully isolating an ingot of uranium metal, he took it with him in his briefcase. Went into the meeting with Manhattan Project and clunked it on the desk, and passed it around. He said that this is a new method for producing substantial quantities of uranium metal. All the scientists around the table kind of poked at it and scratched it and so on and didn’t believe it was really uranium, but it was. And they finally decided that he had made a great breakthrough, so they sent him back to Iowa and said, make a lot more, fast. And he did. So he had the material they needed, then, for the Manhattan Project. Franklin: Wow. Martin: Interesting story. Franklin: Yeah, that’s really fascinating. So how did you become involved with the Parker Foundation? Martin: About ten years ago—almost ten years ago—my friend Bill Bair and Ron Kathren and a couple others on the Parker Board invited me to participate. Matt Moeller was chairman of the board at that time—invited me to participate, and I just joined in, and found it very rewarding. I really appreciate what the Parker Board does in the memory of Herb Parker and in the sense of scholarships and other educational programs. So it’s a pleasure to contribute to that. Franklin: Great, great. You moved in 1975 or ’76? Martin: I moved here in ’76. Franklin: ’76. And you mentioned children. Were your children born here, or did you move here with them? Martin: My oldest daughter was born in San Diego, and my younger daughter was born in Boulder, Colorado. Franklin: Okay. Martin: So they were six and eight, I think, when we moved here. Franklin: What were your impressions of Richland in the mid-70s when you moved? Did you live in Richland or did you--? Martin: We did. Yeah, we lived just a few blocks from WSU here. Franklin: Oh, okay. Martin: In North Richland. It was a very different community, but one that I came to know and respect. Because at that time, education was really paramount in the minds of parents and the school system. And my wife was a teacher. So we really took an interest in that. My kids got a really good education here in Richland. Went to Hanford High, and then did well in college. One of the main features of Richland at that time, I think, was a superior education program. Some of the other history of Richland with old government housing, and then we got a new house, and things like that are entirely different, but also very interesting. Franklin: And is that what you kind of are meaning when you say it was a different community? I guess I’d like to unpack that a little bit more. How—in what ways was it different? Martin: Well, a large part of Richland was originally government housing, and you only had to drive through town, you could see all the evidence of that. And then on the north side of Richland, they had opened up—beginning in 1965, I believe—development of newer private housing. We got here just in time to get in on a new house, and worked out fine for us. Franklin: Great. Was there—being next to a site that was primarily involved in product production, plutonium production—was there a different feeling about the Cold War in Richland per se than anywhere else you had lived in the United States at that time? Martin: There definitely was different feelings about the Cold War and living anywhere near a nuclear power plant. I remember when we were working with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission at many different reactor sites around the country. In many cases we would have public meetings to introduce the local folks to what we were trying to do to improve the emergency planning. There was a lot of concern about living anywhere near a nuclear power plant just a few years after TMI. I tried to explain to people how I live within 30 miles of nine nuclear power plants. But I understood radiation. I understood the risk, and I understood what could go wrong or how to deal with it. And it didn’t concern—didn’t bother me that much to live here. I found that to be generally true of a lot of people in Richland that were part—working at Hanford and were well-educated. They understood the risk and they could deal with it. Whereas many other people were just afraid. And I attribute that to what I call now about a 71-year deliberate misinformation program on the part of mass media to scare people about radiation. Franklin: I like that. I’m writing it down. How do you feel that the—do you feel that the ending of the Cold War changed your work at all? I guess the reason why I ask— Martin: It did. Franklin: --these questions about the Cold War is because it was the impetus for much of the continued production of the material. Martin: Yeah. I was in Germany in 1988, just before the Berlin Wall came down. I was also there in Berlin in 1984, and we actually crossed through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin on a special tour. Franklin: Really? Martin: It was quite amazing. I was in Berlin for a meeting of the International Radiation Protection Association. I took my whole family; it was a tremendous adventure for them. But we were able to be part of a special US Army tour that went through Checkpoint Charlie. I think they did this once a week. And we had a little tour of East Berlin while it was still under the control of the USSR. We visited their Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and they had a little ceremonial changing the guard there. And we visited the square in Berlin where Hitler had burned the books that one night in 1939. And then we visited a huge Russian war memorial, and there was a building there where the Germans had surrendered in 1945. There was quite a story about that. But I was really impressed with this huge Russian war memorial. There were five mass graves that each held 100,000 soldiers. It was done in kind of the Russian style, with statues and other honorary symbols to clearly show their respect for the lives of all those soldiers. But that was an impressive sight. But I was there again in 1988 just before the Berlin Wall came down, and you could kind of see the end of the Cold War coming. So it was a great opportunity that I had, working for Battelle, being able to travel like that, and do many exciting things. Franklin: Did you get to ever talk or meet with any of your counterparts on the Russian side? Martin: Yes. Franklin: After the Cold War ended. And what was that like, to finally work with what had been considered the enemy? Martin: It was quite unusual. I was scheduled to go to Russia a week after 9/11. It almost got canceled, but I managed to go. I was giving—they were having a conference for young scientists and trying to introduce them to international concepts of radiation safety. So I gave my paper and four others that we did to that group. It was located at what was the Russian equivalent of Los Alamos, their design facility. There weren’t very many Americans had been in there up to that point. So I was watched very closely. [LAUGHTER] And not allowed to see much, actually. But it was a very interesting exchange. The papers I was presenting were prepared in both English and Russian. And then we also did what they called a poster presentation, where we had a big poster with diagrams and everything—again translated to Russian. So we were able to put these up at this conference for these young scientists. They, I think, got a lot out of it because it was in their language so it was easy for them to understand. Working with an interpreter was a new experience for me. I would give this oral presentation, so I’d say one sentence and the pause. The interpreter would repeat that. I’d say the next sentence, and—kind of an awkward way to do an oral presentation. Franklin: I can imagine. Martin: But their hospitality was very good. This was in 2001. So the Cold War had been over for quite a few years. But we were trying to establish better relations. I think it was quite effective in doing that. I had another opportunity to work with Russian scientists on an NRC program, again where NRC was trying to provide training to their equivalent Russian inspectors for nuclear power plants and explain to them some of the ways that they did inspections, things they looked for, how they documented findings and things like that. We had four Russian inspectors and their interpreter come over from Moscow. I was their host in Washington, DC, and we worked with them there with the NRC headquarters for a week, providing training. And then we brought them out to Idaho to the Idaho National Lab, north of Idaho Falls, and went to a large hot cell facility at Idaho. A hot cell is where they have a heavily shielded enclosure with mechanical arms that do things on the inside. It was quite a sophisticated facility and somewhat unlike what the Russian counterparts were used to. But it was a good learning exercise for them. We kind of went through a demonstration of how we would do an inspection—a safety inspection. So, I had those kind of opportunities to interact with Russian scientists and found that very exciting. Very interesting. Franklin: Did you find that there was anything that you had learned from them at all? Or do you feel that the US was much more advanced in radiation protection and health physics? Martin: Well, I kept my ears open when I was talking to them, but they didn’t reveal much. [LAUGHTER] So, we didn’t pick up much that way. Franklin: Sure. Martin: We were trying to help them. Franklin: Right. Were you at Hanford during the Russian visit to Hanford when they toured the Plutonium Finishing Plant? Martin: No. That was after I retired, I think. Franklin: Okay, just curious. Martin: I heard about it of course. Franklin: I’m sure. That must have been a pretty big deal from the standpoint of both countries. Is there anything that we haven’t covered that you would like to talk about? Martin: I think there’s one thing I remember from when I did this interview the first time that I wanted to mention. Franklin: Sure. Martin: I’ve been talking about all the varied experiences I had, and excellent opportunities over the years. But I think one of the perhaps most impressive things that I was able to do was to be able to hire several good people into my organization. I won’t mention names, but there were several that I call superstars that are now leaders in the field. I was able to bring them in right out of college or from another job, and hire several really good people that certainly enhanced our program, and then gave them great opportunities to grow and expand. Like I say, they’re now leaders in the field. That was one of the most rewarding parts of my job. Franklin: That’s great. Maybe you can give me their names off camera and we could contact them. Martin: I think they’re already on your list. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Oh, okay, good. Martin: But I’ll do that. Franklin: Well, good. Martin: We’ll do that. Franklin: They should be. Tom, did you— Tom Hungate: No, I’m fine. Franklin: Emma, did you have anything? Emma Rice: No, I’m fine. Franklin: Okay. Well, I think that’s it. Jerry, thank you so much. Martin: Well, that was fun. Did we stay on target? Franklin: I believe we did. Martin: I wandered a little. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: That’s okay. Martin: There’s some stories there that might be interesting. Franklin: I think the stories help keep the oral histories—they have a human-centered focus and they’re interesting for people to watch. Martin: I hope so. Franklin: And I think there might be a couple things that merit some more research in there that personally, for me, I’d like to find out some more about. Martin: Oh, okay. Franklin: Especially the howitzer thing. Martin: Oh, yeah. [LAUGHTER] Hungate: One thing I’d just like to ask— Martin: Sure. Hungate: You’ve been involved in a lot of things over a broad range of time and experiences and I just kind of wonder what you would feel is the one—maybe the item or two that you’ve worked on that will leave the most lasting impact? Martin: The most lasting impact. Hungate: Or that you wished had been developed more that didn’t quite complete, you’d like to see more work done on it, it was either defunded or it was— Martin: Well, I’m thinking of several different things now. I’ll just have to think it through. The work we did with NRC to improve emergency planning on nuclear power plants I think was very effective. And that’s still being maintained today. Work we did with DoE at Pantex on nuclear weapons. You mentioned the end of the Cold War, that’s when many of these tactical nuclear weapons in Europe were brought back and declared obsolete, and so we were doing a massive disassembly operation on those. I learned a lot about nuclear weapons and found it fascinating. We implemented some methods at Pantex that I think are still in use in the maintenance programs that they do now. But we were able to, I think, substantially improve on radiation safety at Pantex. Certainly to the point where we were finally blessed by DNFSB and DoE. I think the quality of that program has been maintained. There’s several other projects that I’ve worked on over the years, but I guess there’s no one thing that stands out that I would be concerned about that it was defunded or ended or somehow went downhill. I’m sure that’s happened, but I haven’t kept track of everything. Franklin: Being as nuclear power and nuclear weapons have different objectives, and you mentioned this retirement of a lot of nuclear weapons, do you feel that nuclear weapons still have a role to play in security— Martin: I do. Franklin: You do? Martin: Yes. Because the Russians still have a lot of them, China has some, the French and English have a few. It’s what I call the mutual deterrent, which is a term that’s been used. It just means that we don’t ever want to use one again, but if any one of those countries had some kind of an unbalanced advantage, it could be used. So if we have this mutual assured deterrence, it keeps that in balance. So it’s important to maintain that stockpile. Franklin: Interesting. Thank you. Hungate: Okay. Franklin: Great. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:02:44 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 300 Area B Plant N Reactor Plutonium Finishing Plant Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1976-2006 2001-2006 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Herbert M. Parker Ken Hyde John Jech McCluskey Mason and Hanger Dade Moeller Bill Bair Ron Kathren Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 2001-today Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Jerome Martin Description An account of the resource An interview with Jerome Martin conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 06-01-16 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2017-15-12: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. 300 Area B Plant Battelle Cold War Department of Energy General Electric HAMMER Hanford Livermore Los Alamo Los Alamos Manhattan Project N Reactor Nuclear Regulatory Commission Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Park Plutonium Plutonium Finishing Plant River Ron Kathren Safety Sun War https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F2ec1506d174ea046db6843f0eaa6c1bc.JPG 2764bff7fb33c346ce02b07d1ae6b487 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Roger McClellan Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with 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. <a href="https://youtu.be/85Jpe-VRlqQ">View interview on Youtube.</a> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:32:42 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317 kbps Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Gene Conley W.E. Johnson Oren H. Pilkey Walter Pilkey Oren Pilkey Doctor Lyle Swindeman Albin Pherson Leo K. Bustad Kathleen Donnegan Herbert M. Parker Harry A. Kornberg Dr. Cantrell Sherwood Fawcett Dag Norwood Lester van Middlesworth Leo Bustad Eugene Elafson Gene Olafson Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 300 Area Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1944-today Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1960- Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Roger McClellan Description An account of the resource An interview with Roger McClellan conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 09-02-2016 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2017-15-12: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. 1954 300 Area Atomic Energy Commission Battelle Cancer Cold War DuPont General Electric Hanford injuries Los Alamo Los Alamos Manhattan Project Park PUREX School Street Sun War https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F9ad3a90fc43d92e9610d6107002bd0ea.JPG 608989d427c45abccfa52c4a12dd91e9 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Edward Milliman Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: I’m ready here. Tom Hungate: We’re ready. Franklin: We’re ready, okay. My name is Robert Franklin and I am conducting an oral history with Edward Milliman on July 6th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Edward Milliman about his experiences working at the Hanford site and living in Richland. So I guess the first place to start is the beginning. So why don’t you tell me how you came to Hanford and to Richland? Edward Milliman: From 1960 until ’67, I worked for General Electric and Douglas United Nuclear. I got laid off in ’67, so then I went to Montana, Bozeman area. Ran a couple of ranches there for a couple years. Went up to Cut Bank, Montana. In fact, it was winter for Montana. And 40 below there in the winter was nothing. The only way you could get to town, which was 20 miles away—they would start their D8 Cat up with the blade on it, and blade through all the way to town. And town was a grocery store and a tavern. Some of them old cowboys there, they’d get snowed in all winter. When spring thaw come, they and their hired help would all come into town and come into the saloon there, the bar. And I noticed every time I would go in there, one fellow was always there. If you left late at night, he was still there. And I asked the bartender, which was from Longview, Washington. He said, no, we just lock him in. He just stays here, and if he drinks anything through the night, the money’s always to the side there. And those old cowboys would come in, and they would get all drunked up. That one guy would say—and the bartender told me—see them two old fellas? And they must have been 70, 75. He said, stay away from them, just leave them alone. No matter what happens, leave them alone. Don’t say anything. Pretty soon their voices started getting loud, and I started paying them some attention. He said, that was not your calf. That was my calf that crawled through the fence and I just pulled him back. You’re a liar! And them two old fellas jumped up and went to knocking each other around and down on the floor. And they weren’t kidding. They were really hitting knuckles to each other. And pretty soon, the bartender took a bar towel, a wet bar towel on them. They got up, and sat there and sopped the blood up on their nose and their lips. They sat there, having a drink, and they started laughing. The bartender said, you know, neither one of them’s ever had a cow or a calf in their life. They’re wheat farmers. And he said, they’re just so glad to see each other, they beat the devil out of each other every year. [LAUGHTER] And he said this happens every spring. And pretty soon, he said, now just sit still, man. It ain’t over yet. I said, my goodness. So pretty soon, he said, you hit me harder than I hit you. No, I didn’t. Smack, bang, down they went again. [LAUGHTER] And that finally ended it. Anyway, just some of the funny things that happened to me. Then I came back and put an application in for Battelle. Franklin: In what— Milliman: 1970. They hired me on January the 5th, 1970. I was working for a doctor, Dr. Alfred P. Wehner, which happened to be during the war a fighter pilot for the Germans. He joined the Luftwaffe, the Hitler Youth. His father was SS. He’s also written a book, From Hitler Youth to United States Citizen, which I probably have the second autographed copy. But we were doing all kind of bioassays and lifespan studies using—mainly then it was hamsters, Syrian golden hamsters. We were making them—we would put them in these exposure chambers. They were introduced to nickel oxide in this one particular chamber. The next chamber would be cobalt oxide. And then also we went on to introduce cigarette smoke to them. You’d put them in a tube and plug them into a Hamburg-2 smoking machine which had 30 cigarettes on this turn. And the machine would take a puff off each cigarette and blow it in the chamber. They had no choice but to inhale it. And asbestos exposure. And at that time, all we had on was a lab coat and a little white paper face mask. [LAUGHTER] At that time, they didn’t know the dangers—really bad dangers of asbestos. Then in 1974, Johnson and Johnson talcum powder exposure. That lasted for two years. In the meantime, all the employees out at 100 F, where we were located, they moved into the new Life Science Laboratory here in 3000 Area. But we couldn’t leave, because we had animals on exposure. Weren’t allowed to move them. So I was out there at 100 F until 1975, ’76. And then I moved into town. I think it was ’77, we went out on a two-year asbestos concrete exposure. Of course, by then, they had us pretty well suited up in fresh air and respirators and all this stuff. Then I moved over—that was over at the annex. Then I moved into the Life Science Laboratory, which we used to say, we’re stuck one story down in the ground in a rat-infested hole. Which—all we had was rats and mice down there. They had four macaque monkeys, and they were doing dental implants on them. We had this one comrade down there that—he was kind of a strange fellow. He would go into the monkey room, the macaques’. They had them in—there was four: it was three males and one female. If you’re mean to an animal, there’s no second chance or anything. If they catch you mistreating an animal, you’re out the door right now. They’ll escort you out and you’re finished. Well, when you went in the monkey room, these macaques—they’re only set up, oh, about two, three foot. When you’d come into the room, they would hang onto the bars on their cage. And Dan would come up and smash their fingers and tell them to get back, get back. They tell you, don’t let them get ahold of you, they’ll pull your arm right out of the socket, they’re that strong. And I’ve seen them get ahold of a chain and pull a half inch eyebolt right out of the concrete. They’d put their feet against the wall, and—anyway. This one male macaque which was the dominant one there, he would turn around real fast when Dan would come in and throw his posterior up in the air, which in monkey language, that’s insult, that’s a challenge, come on. Anyway, Dan kept doing that, and being mean to him, and kicking the cage, and making him get back. Always had a safety man looking through the glass at you, all the time when you’d go in there. Dan was washing the floor out, and he got too close. And he dropped the hose, and he took a step forward to pick the hose up. That macaque reached out and got him by the front of the coveralls and pulled him up against the cage, and drew his fist back like a human, and he Dan so hard—[LAUGHTER]—through the bars of that cage, he knocked him out. And the safety man run in, and all the rest of the macaques were all standing up looking, hey, what you doing? And they pulled Dan out and took him to first aid. Dan come back, he had most beautiful black eye I’ve ever seen in my life. And his nose was kind of pushed over to the side a little bit from the swelling. Our supervisor called Dan in and said, you must be careful. Don’t let them get ahold of you. Okay. Well, about two weeks later, Dan was in there. It was his turn to go in. He was in there washing the floor out, and feeding them. [LAUGHTER] He got too close. That monkey reached out and got Dan by the head of the hair and chun-kinged him into the bars and knocked him out again. Well, the safety man, he says, I run in and pulled Dan back out and took him to first aid. And now Dan come back, now he’s got this black eye that’s starting to turn green, because it’s healing up. And now he’s all bandaged up around his head. He got stitches in his head. The boss called him in again. Dan, you got to be careful. Stay away from them things. Okay. About two weeks later, Dan went in there, and to check their water, you had about a six-foot galvanized pipe. And it was crossbar—across the upright bars on the thing, and then there was a divider there. You’d go in, you’d take that pipe, and you’d stick it against the water nipple to make sure that they were getting water. This little female macaque, she would grab the pipe and poke it on there and shake her head, yes, it’s okay. That’s how smart they were. Well, Dan got to that big old male monkey—macaque—and he stuck the pipe in there. And the safety man told us later, he said, I knew exactly what was going to happen. Because you could sit there and see in that macaque, he’d kind of sit there and think about that, watching Dan put that pipe through there on the other cages. He grabbed the pipe, pulled it out of Dan’s hand, chugged him in the belly and folded Dan over, put the pipe over the crossbar there, and romped down on the end of it. Hit old Dan under the chin and knocked him out again. And the safety man, he said, I was laughing so hard, I couldn’t—I had to crawl in on my hands and knees and pull Dan out of there. Here comes Dan back, he’s still got bandage on his head, he’s still got a black eye, and now he’s got stitches in his chin. [LAUGHTER] And the boss called Dan in, and said, Dan, I’m going to have to pull you out. Them monkeys are killing you. [LAUGHTER] That’s just some of the humorous things that’s happened there. I guess it wasn’t humorous to Dan, but—and we all kidded Dan so bad, he left. He finally retired. [LAUGHTER] And then we got—after the asbestos concrete exposure and went to LSL-2 down the basement, then they got a lot of contracts from the NCI and a lot of organizations. There were probably eight or ten exposure rooms in that basement. They designed these special chambers for our inhalation studies. Dr. Owen Moss designed the chambers. And I designed a device to generate particulate matter, which I have a patent on. There were four control rooms that controlled those eight or ten rooms. They were using my device to generate indium phosphide. It was a component they use in computers and chips and things like that. Opening day, two-year contract, about $25 million. And me and this other employee, we were their technicians. They had finally computerized the readouts on all these chambers, and they had 1,200 rats in all these different chambers. This chamber got 10 micrograms per liter, this chamber got 20, 30, and on down the line. There were 1,200 rats in all these different chambers. They were generating this delivery system. I was 200 feet away from where this stuff was being delivered to the animals. I’m sitting in the control room all comfortable. Started that thing up, and started generating that indium phosphide. I was looking at the computer, checking the different levels in the chambers. You had ten minutes before T-90 to get up to 100% of the target. The other fella asked me, how’s it doing? I’m tweedling knobs and regulating air flows and stuff, and I’m watching the computer. And one of the last readings I seen was that it was 65% of the target. And it exploded. And it blew me and him out the door. I’m glad the door wasn’t latched—it was closed, but didn’t lock. Blew us into the hallway. The indium phosphide and the smoke come rolling out of the ceiling. We slammed the door shut, grabbed some tape and sealed the door. All the other technicians down the room in the control room, they stuck their heads out and hollered and hit the panic button, which was one button on all these control rooms. When you hit the panic button, it shut everything down that they were exposing. They broke the barrier and went out through the sterile, which costs a lot of money to clean up, because that was all a sterile area. They couldn’t come my way, because the fumes and the dust. Look in there, and it was the most beautiful violet flame. That stuff was burning. And I’m sitting here looking at it. [LAUGHTER] Buddy, he got his fresh air on and everything, running for the fire extinguisher and put the fire out and we sealed the door again. And then they called the fire department and they evacuated the whole building. Nobody asked us if we were okay. They would just walk up and say, what did you do? [LAUGHTER] It just blew up! Anyway, the PR people got ahold of us right away—public relations people. They said, you will not say anything—an explosion, or the dang thing blew up. [LAUGHTER] Okay, but it did. You can’t say that. It killed all 1,200 of those rats from the concussion. Franklin: Wow. Milliman: And it went and blew out—went through the heap of filters, went through the scrubbers, and out into the air. Which they kind of glossed over. When I read it in the paper, anyway, it was—it said two scientists had previously been in the room. No one was there when it—the incident—happened, is the way they put it. Franklin: Wow. So, I guess rolling back a little bit—no, I guess we’ll keep going, then we’ll roll back. So, what year did that happen, the incident? This incident, with the—what did you call it, the indium? Milliman: Indium phosphide. Franklin: Indium phosphide. Milliman: Yeah. Gosh, that must have been late ‘80s or early ‘90s. Because I retired in 1996. Franklin: And you had worked for Battelle from 1970 to 1996? Milliman: Yeah, yes. Franklin: Okay. Milliman: Yes. Worked for the same doctor, same scientist. Until very later on the started having some heart trouble and he retired. But we’re still good friends, we stay in contact. Many, many—I think the worst exposure I was ever on was CS2. It was a teargas with a disabler in it. We got the contract from the Army. Even though you had protective gear on and fresh air, you would take your outside protection off, and you had a pair of coveralls on underneath. If you’d walk out into the hallway, everybody would shun you like you had the plague, because that stuff just stuck with you. One time, some got into my fresh air mask somehow. I plugged the area, and it gave me a full shot in the face. Down I went. Safety man pulled me out and went and got a wet towel. They had a compound that kind of nullified that stuff. It was Triton X-100. He soaked that towel in that Triton X, and I got it on my face. Of course, you don’t even know where you’re at. The disabler is like a bad dream. It just—your hand will fly up and slap you in your own face, and you got no control over anything. It only lasts for a little while, but it’s very effective, I can tell you. [LAUGHTER] It—gosh, it just burns your eyes, you can’t breathe, your throat constricts, and you’re disoriented. Franklin: Do you know when this was? Do you remember when this was? Milliman: That must have been in the ‘80s, too. Probably the late ‘80s. We had so many chemical exposures going on, just one after another. These were all lifespan studies. And they figure a rat lives—a rat or mouse—can live a couple of years. Their lifespan is two years at the max. I have a stack of papers eight inches high of all the disclosure of what we were getting exposed to, and we had to sign we were aware of what the exposure would do. There were so many chemicals, like 1,3-butadiene and propylene. And next time you open a bag of Lay’s potato chips or any kind of a—the bags are all puffy and look like they’re plump full—I mean—full. [LAUGHTER] Ha, the last thing they shoot into that plastic bag before they seal it up is propylene, a preservative. And all these contracts that we received were to see if they were—they were all potential carcinogens, and we were testing the effects of them to see if they were carcinogen. That was the main thing that I did for 26, 27 years on all these inhalation exposures. Franklin: So, can you tell me about propylene? Is it a carcinogen? Milliman: I didn’t get to read the report on that. They would mostly debrief us after the exposure was over. And of course they’d write a scientific article about it. I’m not sure whether it was or not—it probably was because—gosh, methyl methacrylate, a lot of things they use in the carpets, 1,3-butadiene, propylene oxide, methyl methacrylate, and—it just goes on and on and on. Everything that’s in this room—potential carcinogen. A lot of the glues they put into the carpets and the dyes and stuff. A lot of the household cleaners—the chemicals and stuff they put in them—they’re—everything you do is bad. Everything you buy is bad. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right. [LAUGHTER] Milliman: Yeah. Franklin: So let’s roll it back a little bit. Where actually—where were you born? Milliman: I was born in Washtucna, Washington. Franklin: Oh, okay, that’s right. And what year was that? Milliman: 1938. Franklin: 1938. Milliman, November 15, 1938. Franklin: And how long—did you grow up in Washtucna? Milliman: I don’t even remember being there. Then my parents moved from there to Spokane, out in Moran Prairie. Franklin: Okay. Milliman: My father was a farmer and he was also a steam engineer. We left Spokane—he had a small farm there—we left Spokane in 1947 and moved to Benton City. And he had a farm there. He worked for the Benton County road department. Then, before that, they had—the old prison camp out at Horn Rapids. Him being a steam engineer, he hired onto the Morrison-Knudsen construction company and he fired the boilers for the whole complex out there at the old prison place. Which, there was no prisoners there, but they’d converted it into almost like a small community for the construction workers. They had all the barracks and the hutments and—just like a small town there for a while. It’s all gone now, but— Franklin: Those were construction workers at Hanford? Milliman: Yeah, and they— Franklin: In the late ‘40s, early ‘50s? Milliman: Yeah, this was in the ‘50s. Most of them were working building railroads up—and construction work. Franklin: So then you went to school—so you said ’47, you moved to Benton City? Milliman: Yeah, I started third grade in Benton City. Then I graduated in 1956. Franklin: Then what did you do after you graduated? Milliman: Went up to work—went up to Seattle and hired on for Boeing at the Renton plant. We were making—we were working on the KC-135 tankers. They had me working the plumbing bays, tying down the bladders and the pumps and everything for the KC-135s. Then one day, after I was there about two months, the boss called and said come with me. Okay. So he took me over and he said, now you’re an electrician. [LAUGHTER] So went to school for that, and we wired up the tankers from the nose back to where they joined the wings on. And then—its assembly was from the nose back to where they put the wings on; no wings yet. And they were on tracks and when it would come time to move, they would just roll it down and another one would come into position. They would just—in one end, out the other. And one day I happened to look over and thought, what is that? That’s not a tanker. They said, well, that’s the first commercial jets—passenger. The first six were Pan-American—for Pan-American Airlines. We built six of those. And then the next one was American and Qantas and all of the foreign companies. But all a 707 was at that time was a KC-135 tanker with the fuel base taken out, and the boom and everything on the back for refueling. And they made that—[LAUGHTER] Boeing made a fortune off a government expense building those KC-135 tankers and doing all the design work and the engineering on them. And then they just simply made the 707 out of that tanker. After I was there a couple of years, in one part of the hangar, they started putting this big black shroud up from the ceiling to the floor. The rest of the crew says, what’s going on over there? The boss wouldn’t say anything, just shut up and mind your own business. These guys started walking around in suits with their dark glasses on inside the building—sunglasses. And they’re all leaning a little bit to their left. I got up close enough look and said, oh, this guy’s got a hog leg in there—he’s got a pistola. They were Secret Service. What they were doing there was building Air Force One. A 707—the first one. Franklin: Wow. Milliman: They picked six of us, and they assigned one of those Secret Service guys to two people. And he would follow you wherever you went—even to the bathroom. And I would—being me, I’d tell them a joke, and he’d just stare at you. [LAUGHTER] The boss’d call us in the office. You leave those guys alone. You don’t speak to them, you answer their questions, and that’s all there is to it. Well, I said, they haven’t got a sense of humor. [LAUGHTER] You especially—[LAUGHTER]—knock it off. Okay. If you came out of that shrouded area to go to the tool room to get a tool, a pair of footsteps right behind you. The guy’d say, what are you doing? Why do you need that? Ask you all kinds of questions. He’d look and check it all out, follow you right back in again. You go eat lunch, the guy’s sitting there looking in your lunchbox and seeing what you’re eating. Hey, want a sandwich? [LAUGHTER] Oh, oh, oh, back in the office, the boss shaking his finger at you. I left there in—I started getting homesick. I wanted to smell the sagebrush again and the cottonwoods in the springtime and all that fuzz they put out and everything. Then I came home and courted my girlfriend and got married. Then I went to work for General Electric in 1960. I had two boys and a girl. Was living and moved into Richland at that time, and then moved back to Benton City, which was my home. I’d been there all my life. Franklin: How long did you live in Richland for? Milliman: Probably two years. Franklin: Where did you live in Richland? Milliman: Oh. Marshall Street. Don’t remember the exact address, but it was on Marshall. I’d come in on Van Giesen. Moved from there, rented a place there, and then moved to Benton City and bought a home and raised the kids up. Got them up through high school. They graduated there. Then, like I say, went to Montana for almost three years. Then back home for Battelle. Franklin: What did your wife do when you worked at Hanford? Milliman: She—just a homemaker. She worked at grocery store, checker. And we got a divorce in—gosh—imagine that. I can’t even remember. The kids all got married. They had kids. Then I remarried. Wife’s a registered nurse, works here at Life Care Center in Richland. Franklin: Oh, okay. Milliman: Very talented person. And she will come home and tell me strange stories that happens there. Like this one fellow was in this motorized scooter. And he was just dying for a cigarette. Nobody would give him a cigarette. So he got in his motorized scooter and he escaped out the door. He went down to the corner to the 7-Eleven store and buy him a pack of cigarettes. Now, this guy is on oxygen. And he come back, and he lit up. My wife, Christine, said she heard, my goodness! That man’s on fire! She said they all rushed out the door! [LAUGHTER] And the guy’s on fire, and they got the fire out. It melted the plastic right into his face. And she says, every time I look at him, I can hear that. That man’s on fire! And he’s still there. Then they have—she says that one person in particular keeps calling the Richland police and telling them that—hey, they kidnapped me. They’re holding me against my will. [LAUGHTER] And she says the police show up with their hands on their guns. She says, I just put my hands up and say it’s a false alarm. About the third time he calls, they’ll say, well take his phone away from him then. [LAUGHTER] Some of the funny things that happen in life. Franklin: So when you worked for—what did you do when you worked for GE and Douglas United? Milliman: We were metal handlers, which meant they were canning up six an agent uranium slugs for the reactors. A metal handler, all he did was they had—you’d stand in front of this hydraulic machine that the metal carrier, after they got—dipped those things in the hot aluminum and silicon, inside of aluminum can, then the guy who had a pair of tongs, he’d come over and he’d put them in these two baskets. And the baskets would drop into the water, come up, and drop again. And then the basket would turn towards you, and my job was you pulled slugs out. They had a metal container around them. You had to scrape the aluminum and silicon off the metal can. And then you took out the uranium slug that was clad in aluminum and put it in the pallet. The process went on like that all day long. Then I moved back to final inspection. The lights were so bright in this cubicle we had. And you would look at the welds—they had to weld endcaps on these slugs and you had to look for pinholes and voids. I did that for a year or so, and then I went to final inspection, which we were radiographing, x-raying the slugs for voids and stuff. Beside the station there where we were radiographing these slugs, there were about 30 autoclaves, just—they stood up about this high above the metal floor. There’s 200-pound hydraulic door that closed on those autoclaves, and what they would do, they would load 60 of these slugs—these uranium slugs—in a basket. They had little round cylinders, and you’d put the slug in so they wouldn’t bump against each other. You’d put six in the basket, and they’d get an array of six baskets, which were 240 slugs. They all had a hole in the basket through the center. They would load this—put this big steel rod down through the baskets and they’d put a pin in the bottom. And the crane would come overhead and pick that whole stack up and lower it down into the autoclave. Then the operator would give the signal, close the door. Then he had a pipe—there was a handle sticking out, and he had a pipe he’d stick under a big cheater bar. And he would pull that door shut and the locking lugs would all come out and lock the lid on there. Now, on the end of that pipe on the door was a round hole. Underneath of it was a hydraulic device that had a pin in it. And the pin had to come up and go through that hole in the handle before he could ever bring it up on pressure. He’s looking at his control panel, okay, this one’s okay. I’m going to bring it up on tremendous pressure—steam pressure. We were radiographing our slugs, me and this other employee. Pretty soon the floor started shaking. What? Earthquake? What? And then we seen the operator. He got up and he started walking over towards this one autoclave. His head come up, and his head come up and he looked like a giraffe. He looked like his head was this high above his body. He looked, and he just turned and started to run, because he could see that door on that autoclave shuddering. And that pin had just barely touched the edge of that hole and give him the signal that the door was locked, which it was not. And that thing just worked that door around until it got past the locking lugs. The hinge pin on that 200-pound door was two-inch solid steel. It snapped that like a toothpick. It blew the lid off, and blew it up through the roof and stuck it right in the monorail—the crane rail, and just bent a big U and stuck right there. The steam pressure on that started firing those baskets and those uranium slugs—it was just like a cannon barrel. You know—zoom—boy. Me and this other fellow jumped onto this steel table. And the workers that were on the outside of the building, they said they seen those baskets and those slugs go 80 feet above the building and then they came back down through the roof, back down on us. And these things were hitting—dropping all around us. And of course me and him were under the table. People scattered. It just happened to be that this was right at shift change. The other crew was coming in; we was getting ready to leave. And right in the middle, that thing went through the roof. What was—after the slugs kept raining down, after they stopped, me and that fellow underneath there was on our hands and knees and we started laughing—just giggling insanely. [LAUGHTER] You know what, because you can hear these things hitting above you on that table—ba-ding, ba-ding. Then the criticality alarm went off. And that wasn’t funny. We thought, uh-oh. One of those slugs ruptured and we’re all crapped up. And that’s what they—crapped up. And then they told us that it was a false alarm—which seemed kind of strange. Criticality alarm going off. But the bad thing about working back then for General Electric and Douglas United Nuclear was they picked six or eight of us—I think there were eight of us—and they took us out of the 313 Building where we were canning slugs up. They took us over in this Butler Building, they called them. A tin—kind of a tin shack. Went in there, and all this fancy equipment in there and a great big, long, open-front hood. What are we doing here? We had a supervisor, his name was Paul Rhoades. They called him Dusty Rhoades. He said, you guys have been picked—[LAUGHTER]—for guinea pigs. [LAUGHTER] Well, yeah, what’s new? [LAUGHTER] They had designed a process to can up thorium. And thorium is a white powder; it’s just like flour, like a sandy flour. It was for the atomic subs, and they used that on the front face of the reactor in the sub as a biological shield, because thorium oxide is not radiation-wise as hot as uranium slugs. Franklin: But they were the fuel element? Milliman: Fuel element, yeah. Franklin: But they were safer. Milliman: Instead of uranium, it was thorium. Instead of a uranium slug, it was thorium oxide. Thorium oxide is a bone seeker. Cancer of the bones and stuff. Once, when we first started out—now, we’re working in this open-faced hood, and we’re pounding this stuff in the can. You got a—oh, it’s a rod about this big around with a flat on top. And it comes on a conveyor belt to you. The scale is weighing it out on an electronic scale. And these are little tin cylinders. You take it and you got a funnel thing here and you put the aluminum can in and lock it down. Pour the thorium oxide into the can and then pound it in there. You had a mark on that tamping bar that you had to put it down, get it to that mark, or else it would cause a variation in the quantity that was in there. You had to put it all in, or no go. There were six of us pounding that stuff into those cans. Now, you had a pair of white coveralls on, you had your surgeon gloves on, taped at the wrist, and you had a leather glove. No respirator, no anything. You just—the glass came down about nose-high. And you were working with that stuff, and it was just a white fog in front of you. Now, when they’d blow the whistle for you to go to lunch, what we would do was we would—and we were—that powder would be all the way up to your elbows. You could see it on your coveralls. You would brush your coveralls off, and then you would take the leather gloves off, and you would take the tape off, and leave your surgeon gloves inside there in the trash. And then we would all come out of there and walk over to the step-off pad, and all six of us are getting out of our coveralls and—I thought, man, that stuff’s got to be going airborne. Then we’d take the Scintran. We’re okay, no bad stuff on us. They would take us down, when we first started out, once every two weeks to the Whole Body Counter. They’d scan us from head to foot. Then it got to be once a month, and then once every two months. They pulled me out of there and they said, you eat a lot of fish? No, why? They say, you got a high zinc content in you. And I didn’t think much of it at the time. But I got my dose reconstruction back here in 2012. I was contaminated with thorium oxide, which turns into some exotic thing, so they say. And they had the audacity to tell me I picked it up in the 1960s during atomic testing. And it just happened to be thorium oxide, which—anyways. [LAUGHTER] I turned the claim in, which was denied. But for the other three cancers, I got compensated for that. Two basal cell carcinomas and one other cancer that is pretty common in a male—prostate cancer. They compensated me for that, which—it doesn’t make up for your health now. But I just got examined the second. In fact, the Cold War Patriots, which I’m very proud of—to be a member of—they found the asbestos in my lungs when they gave me my—every three years you’re allowed a complete physical. They go over you from head to foot, and they picked up the asbestos in my lungs. Franklin: Wow. Milliman: And then the second, they told me because of that, they told me I have COPD and lung capacity is at half. Which makes it hard to do anything. Franklin: Oh. Milliman: Went to Cancun—my wife and I—on vacation. They got a mile-and-a-half zip line there—1.7 miles. Of course, the towers—the different towers you got to get on. [LAUGHTER] Take me a half-hour to get onto the top of the tower. Run out of steam before you get there. It’s been an interesting life; it’s been an interesting career. While we were in canning up thorium oxide, they had—they were all plywood walls, and they had that—it was like crepe paper insulation back in the days when they built those back in the ‘42s and ‘43s. And sat there, and I happened to look at the wall. They had painted the wall with a white epoxy paint. I got to looking at the wall, and, man, that thing’s blowing bubbles. I told the guy, and he looked over and said, how come that wall’s bubbling? I don’t know. So we come out of the hood, got cleaned up and went over there. Was looking at the wall and that epoxy would blow a bubble and then pop. What’s going on here? Well, little did we know there was a welder on the outside of that tin building. And he was welding us up some gas manifold pipes, and he set that insulation on fire. We had a big exhaust fan up in the attic and it was whipping that up—the flame up through there—and it was blistering that plywood epoxy paint. And the boss come over and said, what are you guys doing? Get over and get to work! He said, what are you doing? I said, well, we’re looking at the wall here. He’s looking and he said, how come that’s bubbling? [LAUGHTER] He says, do you see any smoke? He says, no. And they have where they’d plugged—patched the plywood with the—you’ve probably seen it—little square there, a diamond-shaped thing in the plywood where they’ve patched a hole in. One of them popped out. And he looked and he said, uh-oh, I see some fire. Now, you guys just stay here. He went and locked the door! He stepped out and locked us in there! And then he pointed to the back, which—it was a step-off pad off the back, a concrete area they had roped off. We could go out there and stand. And here come the firetruck. He missed the place, he backed up and come, and the other guy’s still welding. He don’t know he set the building on fire. And they chopped a hole in it, put the fire out. Boss sent us to lunch. We come back, never missed a lick. Just went right back to work again. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Wow. [LAUGHTER] That’s— Milliman: That was kind of sad. One of the sad things was I was watching the TV and they detonated the smokestack out at 100 F. I thought, man, that was right beside the building we were working in. Franklin: Do you remember any Navy officials ever coming to inspect the process-- Milliman: Navy? Franklin: --you were working on? Milliman: Navy? Franklin: Yeah, because you said you were making these slugs for the nuclear submarines. Milliman: Yeah. And we didn’t know that until after we got—we did two different sessions over there, two different years. Never seen any Navy personnel—of course, we were just—we were just the employees, and not privy to that. But with Battelle, that was different. When the sponsor—NCI or any of the dignitaries from the companies that we had a contract with, they would all come and talk to us. I can remember, we got called in the office—a good friend of mine that worked there with me and his name was Gary Ell. The sponsor—and he was the head hog, I mean over everything—he was in the change room with us. And when we’d first seen him, about a year before that, he was huge. He was a very large man, almost a beast. When he come the second time, I swear, he must have lost 200 pounds, because he looked normal, you know. And he was in the change room with Gary and I, and we were suiting up getting ready to go into one of the sterile zones. And Gary said, I bet I know what—well, first the sponsor said, hey, what do you think, guys? I lost about 200 pounds. Yeah. Gary said, you know what? This guy’s name was Joe. He said, I bet I know what Joe’s thinking about right now. I said, what? He said, I bet he’s thinking about a big chocolate milkshake. [LAUGHTER] The guy had some choice words for us. And next thing you know, we were sitting in the boss’s office and he’s shaking his finger at us. [LAUGHTER] If you couldn’t put some humor into the situations we were in, it wasn’t worth being there, because— Franklin: Right! Milliman: [LAUGHTER] But it’s been very rewarding for me, all except the—like I say, back then they didn’t know what asbestos—the danger of that, and the potential carcinogens. Franklin: Right. Milliman: But been very rewarding. Franklin: Do you—were you working onsite, or do you remember when they started to bring the spent nuclear—the submarine reactors back-- Milliman: No. Franklin: --to be buried onsite? Milliman: We had nothing to do with that whatsoever. We were just making the fuel for them. We never got—weren’t privy to what happened afterwards. Franklin: Oh, okay. Milliman: But we didn’t know that was for the atomic subs until—it was quite a while after they finally told us, hey, you’re canning up fuel for the atomic subs. Franklin: Kind of interesting, though, to think that you canned that fuel and then now Hanford is the repository for all of the spent reactors. That they cut them up and buried them in the same place. Milliman: Yeah. A friend of mine, he just retired. He was working out there for CH2M Hill and a bunch of other contractors. His job was to go sample the burial grounds after they dig them up. He had a lot of interesting stories to tell about that. One thing that—[LAUGHTER] This was during the ‘60s. If you recall, in the paper, Hanford put out a news blurb about any of the duck hunters. They were checking thyroids on ducks, and they wanted you to bring your duck heads in—their neck and their head, so they could check them. And they come up with some strange reason why they were doing this. Well, a friend of ours, he brought this big old mallard duck in. That thing was so hot, he ought not have been anywhere near that thing. They grabbed him and scrubbed him down until his skin was bleeding. Those ducks were going out to the cooling ponds out in the Area, which weren’t screened over at that time. And ducks were dabbling down at the bottom, picking up strontium-90 and all these radioactive elements. And then that guy’s got that duck in his hand and put the Scintran up there and that thing went nuts. And they scrambled and suited up. And they never did come out with why they were doing that until later on. It finally came out that those ducks—you know, they see a big pond out there, they go out there and dabble around in it and get crapped up. Franklin: When did they finally start screening those, do you remember? Milliman: Oh. No, it was—that must—they had them all screened over by—probably by ’75. If I recall, it was about that time. But that friend of mine said, boy, they scrubbed me until I was bleeding. Oh, they went to his home, also. Franklin: Oh, wow. Milliman: And they tore up the carpets, furniture—everything. Because he come in the house, hey look at this duck I got you. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right. So later, when you worked for Battelle, you said that you had done that animal testing, and you introduced animals to nickel oxide and cobalt oxide. Why those two chemicals? Were those used at Hanford, or did those have other applications? Milliman: Other applications: commercial. Most of the testing was manufacturing-type applications, like the asbestos concrete exposure that I was on. That was the sawdust off of transite pipes. When the craftsman would saw the pipes to length, he’s inhaling that transite pipe dust, and he don’t know there’s asbestos in it. Most of the—well, in fact, all of the contracts we got were to test whether they were potential carcinogens. Franklin: Wow, that’s really—so when you were doing cigarettes, then, was it—when you were doing this, was it known that they were—obviously, most people, like, knew, but was it a stated fact, federally, or— Milliman: Not at that time, no. Franklin: Or did your research help lead to that? Milliman: Yeah. We got that contract from the National Cancer Institute. Later on, for Battelle, they did a—maybe it was Liggett and Myers. They were doing a cigarette exposure, which was very hush-hush. Nobody would tell you a thing about what went on in that room. Even the technician was sworn to silence. Because of the manufacturer of that product, not because there was anything sneaky going on; they just didn’t want it to get out before they finished the study. And also expose them to diesel exhaust smoke. Franklin: Oh. Milliman: We went over to Kennewick one time, right there on the main street. We set up an air sampler on all four corners. The asbestos content in the air was higher than it was in Johns-Mansfield’s where they’re putting these asbestos bats together for insulation for homes. The reason for that, it was coming off the break rooms. There was asbestos in the break rooms. And the cars going by kept that stuff fanned up. You walk down the street, you’re taking on asbestos. And then we went to all the food stores around and bought different liver—hog liver, beef liver, chicken liver. Dashed that down, went to the chemical analysis of it. [LAUGHTER] I would never, ever—I never liked it anyway—but I would never, ever eat liver. There was Dibestrol and growth inhibitors, hormones, heavy metal. [LAUGHTER] No liver for me! [LAUGHTER] But that—all these things they’ve been pumping in all these animals, in these feed lots and everything, Dibestrol and growth stimulators and hormones, left a residue in the liver, which is the collecting point of everything—your filter. And then people are eating that and they’re ingesting it and it’s sticking with you. Franklin: Yeah. Wow. Were you working—you were working onsite when JFK visited in 1963. Did you go to the dedication at the N Reactor? Milliman: Yes, went out to see him, yeah. Franklin: What do you remember about that? Milliman: I can remember him saying, boy, you have a hot country here. And he was pulling on his—here. That was a thrill, to see the helicopters, there he comes! And they said, no, that’s the decoy. And then they finally came in and landed. It was just blistering hot that day. People were passing out in the crowd. It was—you couldn’t see the ground for the people, I mean, there was hundreds out there. It was very hot. But that was kind of a thrilling thing to see the President. Big to-do about it, of course. Franklin: Were there any other events or incidents that happened at Hanford while you were working there that—or at Battelle that stand out to you, besides the couple explosions you mentioned? Milliman: Just minor humorous things that had happened. One time, they brought all these Japanese dignitaries. Now, our aerosol physicist was named Douglas K. Craig. And he was a very proper person. He called me an illiterate savage. But that was early on in my career. When I hired in, he was the—I worked for the doctor, the German. And Douglas K. Craig was the aerosol physicist. The doctor got the contract; the aerosol physicist was responsible for the outcome and the design and everything. Me being an old country kid at that time—his speech and his manner, and being so stiff and prim and proper, you know, kind of made me chuckle. I proved him wrong a couple of times. And he would say, but that cannot be! That cannot be! [LAUGHTER] Well, it is! [LAUGHTER] Anyway, I endeared myself to him by just using common sense, and he and I got to be—he’d come and ask me, he’d say, how would you do this? And all it was was common sense—an uncanny knack of figuring out how to generate all these exotic chemicals we were using. The one thing I do remember, before the asbestos exposure ever started, they had this huge cylinder, and it was—it had this tube with a plunger in the bottom. And they’d put the asbestos in there and screw it in the bottom of this big column. And it had the air jets going in. It would suck the asbestos—you had to maintain the concentration within 10% for six hours. Which—pbbt—there went the asbestos in the chamber. So the engineers—aerosol physicists, they worked on this thing for months. We were about ready to lose the contract. And they finally gave up on it. And I asked them, I said, hey, what are you going to do with that generator? And they said, well, we’re going to junk it, bury it. Can I play with that thing? Humph! Yeah, sure, Mr. Einstein, go ahead. By the time I got done, that asbestos generator was this tall, and by chance, I found out you had to pack that stuff into the tube and tamp it down—13 grams in exactly seven inches. I turned that thing on, and I couldn’t find an aggregate that the air jets wouldn’t—I didn’t want the air jets to blow in there and send that stuff out. I tried pieces of gravel, and I tried little kid’s jacks—I cut them up and put them in there, and they’re rattling around on top. And everything got dull. I even took some screws and cut them in half and dropped in there. Anyway, I was sitting there one day trying to—I thought, boy, you’re a dummy if you can’t figure this out. And I had a bunch of crucibles, and the lids sitting on the shelf there. And I thought, ceramic, ceramic, I wonder. So I took the crucible lid and put it in a paper towel and took a hammer and beat it up. And I took those pieces and I looked and I said, well, that one looks about right. I picked up four of them and I dropped in that tube and that stuff started rattling around. They never did get dull. The first—we were shooting for 24 micrograms per liter. And the first sample I took was 23.9. And I thought, wow! So I got ahold of the aerosol physicist and he come over. And I had all my data; I’d been taking samples of that all day long. And he come over and he says, what is this? No, that can’t be! Yeah, it can be. I said an illiterate savage like me, I’ve got enough brains to figure this out, you know that? Dr. Douger. [LAUGHTER] Anyway, we got the contract. He would walk around me and look at me and he said, but you have no—you have no education, you know. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, well? All mine come from common sense. And that would infuriate him. But went up to his office one day, why, fellow technician, and he had a rock as a paperweight there. It was kind of a U-shaped rock. And I said, Doug! He said, you’ll address me as Dr. Douglas K. Craig. Doctor will be fine. That’s okay. Douger, where’d you get that rock? [LAUGHTER] Lay some of this hillbilly stuff on him. He said, why? I said, you know what? Where’d you get that? And he said, well, my walk down at the river one day. [LAUGHTER] I said, my gosh. Don’t you agree? And my partner, he said, oh yeah. He went right along with me, you know. He said, why? What? I said, do you know what that is? That’s a left-handed Indian throwing rock! He says, what? Oh my! An artifact? And I said, yeah! See how it fits your hand? I said, the Indians throw them and knock them jackrabbits over. And he said, oh my! And he took it away from me. He was looking at it, and—[LAUGHTER]—he put it there and said, wow. I’ll cherish that. An artifact. Wow! And he was talking to himself. About that time, the other scientists come in, and they knew we were a couple of jokers. And he come in—his name was John Belue. And John heard what we were doing, and when we come out of the office, he said, you better hope he never finds out. [LAUGHTER] What that junk of rock. And I said, my goodness, maybe we ought to not play that joke on him. But Dr. Douglas K. Craig and I ended up being good friends. He finally—he moved down to California and went to work for another research outfit. And he would call me up. And he’d say, Edward, my friend! And when he’d start that, I knew he wanted to know something. And when I got the device that I patented, the calls were coming in from all over the world—foreign companies, research outfits—because the device they had on the market was the Dust Right Speedmill. And it was very unstable way of generating any kind of particulate or solids. And it would break down. Very poor performance on them. When I made that device, all you had to do was pour the powder in. Two working parts, two bottle brushes, one spirally wound like an auger, the other was flexible brush. And it was just in a—you’d pour the—it had a Lucite—I made it on my kitchen table one night. About a year later, after I got the patent on it, I checked in to see what they were selling them—Battelle Development Corporation made a nice design and stainless steel and--$15,000 a pop. For two bottle brushes. I got one silver dollar for the patent and taken to supper, and that was that. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Milliman: [LAUGHTER] So, they’re making money hand-over-fist on me. But a lot of people calling for reprints. I had to write a technical report on that, and they published it. I didn’t bring one of them copies with me, but I got calls from all the world—scientists wanting to know about it, how—I say, well you can make it yourself on your kitchen table. And there’s the boss, whopped me on the head, don’t tell them that! Sell it to them, you dope! [LAUGHTER] But that was probably the highlight of my career, was the—just common sense. Now, the scientists and the doctors—12, 13, 15 years of college education. But they don’t teach them anything about common sense. And that’s all I ever worked on, was—being a farm kid, having to repair your own machinery, things like that. It wasn’t hard to figure out how to endear myself to the company by just using common sense. Franklin: That’s great. Just a couple more questions, I guess, until we move on to the stuff you brought, which I’m really excited to have you narrate. Do you remember—how did—sorry—do you remember any impact from large nuclear incidents on your work, like Three-Mile Island or Chernobyl? Because you would have been working for Battelle at that time. Do you remember any particular impact of those incidents on your work or kind of the attitude of the work or people here? Milliman: I remember reading it in the paper, and wondering how much of that stuff was going around the world in the airstreams. Probably paid more mind to Chernobyl when it blew its stack. Now, when Mount St. Helens blew up, I was in Yakima. I was going up and going camping. I spent the night in Yakima. I woke up, I thought it was too early and went back to sleep. I woke up, and I thought, my goodness. Did I sleep all day? It’s getting dark out. And I turned the radio on, and—uh-oh. I took off for home, and I just beat that dust cloud down to Benton City. Most of it went over the top of us, like, end up at Moses Lake and Spokane and—but we got the contract for exposing hamsters to Mount St. Helens fly ash. And if you looked at the fly ash under a microscope, it looked like—it was kind of crystalline, and it was—it looked like a little kid’s jack they play with, but a million spikes sticking on that thing. It looked like a sandbur. And that stuff, when you inhaled it, just cut your lungs up to pieces. Franklin: Oh, I bet. Wow. How did the atmosphere surrounding the Cold War affect your job or your life? Did you notice anything, or can you recall anything? Milliman: A lot of contracts from the Army. A lot of contracts. And, like I say, one of them was the CS2 with the disabler in it. A lot of activity that nobody would say anything about. They’d say, hey, what you guys working on? What you fellas working on? Blank stare and walk on, you know. You’d better not ask them anymore. But a lot of activity from the Army. Didn’t seem—I don’t think I ever saw any Navy personnel; if I did, they weren’t in uniform. A lot of strange people around that time coming and going. Franklin: What about living here, living next to Hanford and all the activities? Did you ever feel like maybe you were safe because of all the Army attention here, or maybe you were not safe because Hanford might be a target if a war ever broke out? Milliman: I always thought about it being a target, being there were quite a number of reactors out there. You thought, well, if they’re going to hit something, it’ll probably be Hanford. Never lived in any fear of it, but when they start all this down-winders stuff in the papers—contamination from Hanford, that did make me kind of wonder. It didn’t make me feel ill-at-ease, but it just—you didn’t know what you were inhaling. You didn’t know what was coming down the ground that the cows were eating and you were drinking your milk, which ended up being a big deal in later years. My children never thought much about it, either. My brothers and sisters did, and they all moved away to different places. I told them, hey, you can’t outrun the air currents. That stuff’s coming down all over. Especially during the atomic testing, when they were— Once they sent me to—Battelle sent me to University of Davis to represent them. This was—I’d only worked there about a year-and-a-half, two years, maybe, at the most. They sent me down there and little did I know they—[LAUGHTER]—They sprung me as their guest speaker. I didn’t know anything about it. Boss of mine set that up. Boy, I thought, my goodness, what in the world am I going to talk about? And I thought, you got to put some humor in this thing. Because I’m shaking. I’m young and dumb and I said, whoo! And all these people sitting there watching me, all the dignitaries and the—I said, well, we’re doing research with hamsters. And most of these were all hamster people. It was a big hamster research convention there. I said, the first thing you have to do, as you all know, is you got to get them loose from your finger. [LAUGHTER] Those are the bitingest animals in the world. Everybody thinks they’re so sweet and cuddly, until it latches onto your finger. And I can remember when we were making them—introducing them to cigarette smoke—of course they had the smoking dogs out there, too, which are famous, you know, every time they mention the—and those dogs were addicted. They’d fight you for a cigarette. You’d open the cage and they’d jump right in your arm and stick their head in the mask. You know, put the cigarette in and light it up, boys! But I can remember many times those hamsters latching on and locking their jaws up and biting you right through the fingernail, right to the bone. You’d have to take the handle on the pair of tweezers and jack his jaw open to get your finger back out. If the boss knew this he’d kill me. We had this one particular hamster, he didn’t bite you—I mean, he’d go after you. He’d bite you every time you—most of them, they’d bite you once and let it go at that. But this one he’d bite you ever time you got near him. And he’d just defy you. Pick me up, I’m going to bite you. Well, me and my partner said, what do you think? Well, I’m tired of him biting me. I hope he’ll pretty soon. Maybe he’ll die. He wouldn’t die. So we grabbed him one day, got him by the scruff of the neck and we took him by the side cutter and cut his teeth off. And after that, he’d chomp down on you, and hey, can’t bite, you know! Well, for the rest of his life, we had to soften up his food and feed him so he wouldn’t die. He couldn’t bite you. But we said maybe we ought to not done that. Those hamsters—what actually—the asbestos hamsters were the only ones that would do this. Their water nipple hung above their head, and you had a big water tree you’d put on the cage. And that’s how they got their water. They’d take their finger and stick in that water nipple and sit in there and let the water run on them. We’d sit there and watch through the window. And of course, they’d make a terrible mess. Because we had them on these racks, and we had absorbent pads underneath of them. In the morning when we’d take them out, we’d have to roll that pad up and put it in the garbage. Well, they’d just flood that thing. Their tray had a lip around it. It was an awful mess to clean up. So we got to watching them—we’d look through the window at night. And there they are, they’re taking their finger and sticking it in that water nozzle and letting the water coming down there and they’re showering and shampooing and shaving. We’d go in there and quit that, quit that. They’d all quit, and the minute we’d leave, there they are with their finger in the water nipple taking a shower. Franklin: And it was only the asbestos ones? Milliman: Only the asbestos animals did that. Franklin: Interesting. Do you think that was maybe like some kind of neurological--? Milliman: I think it was the fibers tickling them and itching them. Franklin: Oh. Milliman: Because that stuff was all over them. Franklin: Right. Interesting. So, anybody else have any questions? Emma Rice: Yeah. Minor clarification. When you worked at Battelle, what was your job position exactly? Milliman: Started—hired in just as a—well, for Battelle, it was just technician. Rice: Technician. Because you went from being a metal handler to— Milliman: Yeah, from General Electric, they called us a metal handler. Rice: Mm-hmm. Milliman: Then they made me the inhalation specialist. And then things kind of slowed down, so I kind of got demoted back to a technician again, and that’s when we went into the control rooms and each of us had an assigned control room that we ran. Many, many different chemicals would go through them control rooms that we were generating. Everything potential carcinogen. I like that word. Potential carcinogen. [LAUGHTER] Formaldehyde—that’s some bad stuff, too. Franklin: So, should we do the pictures now? Hungate: Okay. I’m going to stop now. Franklin: Okay. Hungate: Change— [NEW CLIP] Milliman: “About air pollution except the U. S. Patent Office which has awarded a patent to the Department of Energy for a device that will ‘deliver uniform concentrations of dust for a long period of time.’ It was developed by Edward E. Milliman at the Pacific Northwest Laboratory operated for DOE by Battelle Memorial Institute. People, however, need have no fear as the dust is used in research to test the potential health effects of dust compounds when inhaled into the lungs of laboratory animals. Some of the tested dusts have talc powder, CS2, and Mount St. Helen’s ash. The prototype of the unit cost is about $50.00, and the number is 4,424,896 – if anyone cares.” Franklin: So this was the device you invented that then they were selling for— Milliman: Yeah. Franklin: $15,000? Milliman: 15,000. Rice: Do you want me to take some of these smaller ones? Milliman: Yeah. Now, this is how you make a hamster smoke cigarettes. Franklin: And that’s you? Milliman: That’s me, 1970. Boy, I had a lot of hair. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Milliman: There’s 30 cigarettes in this turn, and it will take a puff off of each cigarettes, and then it rotates, and there’s 30 hamsters in these tubes. They have no choice. The smoke comes down through this column here. They have no choice. Franklin: I forgot to ask you—did you ever smoke cigarettes? Milliman: Yes, I did. Franklin: Okay. Milliman: After we took the lungs out of these animals, I put the cigarettes in the garbage can and never smoked since. Franklin: Wow. Rice: [INAUDIBLE] Milliman: This one of the exposure chambers. This is where they—each rat— Hungate: Whoops, just one second, we’re getting quite a bit of glare. Milliman: Okay. Rice: Can you hold it from the top? See if you can hold it flat. There we go. Franklin: There we go. That looks good. Milliman: This is the exposure chamber, designed by Battelle. Rats and mice and hamsters were all individual in each compartment. And then I think they would a couple hundred critters. The—whatever you’re going to make them inhale comes down a pipe and goes into the top and it’s exhausted out the bottom. The doors are glass, so you can watch—observe the animals. Franklin: Wow. Rice: Was this just for smoking—the cigarette smoke—or was this--? Milliman: No, any kind of chemical. Rice: Any kind of chemical. Milliman: Vapors, dust—any kind of compound. Rice: Okay. Next one? Hungate: It’s the smoker. Rice: The smoker, yeah. That’s what I was thinking. Milliman: And that’s how you load a hamster into a smoking tube after you get him off your finger. Now, you can see here that the one—he’s saying, uh-oh, I’m next. And it was also the asbestos exposure. This is all the protection we had on. Just a white paper face mask. Franklin: Wow. Milliman: And this is one guy that—this is what they do. You take them apart, all the way from his nose, all the way down. Take samples, everything, make slides, and it goes to histology, pathology. Rice: New one. Here. Milliman: This was what your lungs will look like if you inhaled Mount St. Helen fly ash. Franklin: Wow. So what is the lighter one there on the— Milliman: NEFA is Nickel Enriched Fly Ash, which has a high content of nickel in it. And the one on the far right is a normal lung. Franklin: Okay. Wow. Rice: And the one on the middle is also— Milliman: That’s nickel-enriched fly ash. The one on the far left is just fly ash. Franklin: What was the level of exposure here to get this? Milliman: Probably 25 micrograms per liter. It is equivalent to what a human breathes. Everything was scaled down hamster-size compared to a human. Franklin: So if you just were walking around and breathing it— Milliman: Right, correct. Franklin: How would that compare to, say, cigarette smoking? Milliman: Cigarette smoke is a long-term thing. Nickel-enriched fly ash is short-term—that does the damage right away. There’s no long period to it. Cigarette smoke, the latency period on that is years. People smoke for years. Franklin: I guess, like—the damage that’s done, is that equivalent to a certain number of years of smoking? Milliman: No, this— Franklin: Or is it kind of a different— Milliman: This is different here. The lifespan after you inhale this stuff, everyday compared to a cigarette, is very, very short. Cigarette you last quite a bit longer. Hungate: So on that—I’m just a little curious—so was that fly ash from— Milliman: Mount St. Helen’s. Hungate: But it’s not after the explosion, because that’s dated ’77 and the explosion was in ’82. Milliman: Well, see, they stored this stuff up and we didn’t do the exposure until after that thing blew up. Now these lungs here were probably some of the preliminary stuff. Because they were testing volcanoes from around the world. Hungate: Oh, so, yeah. Franklin: Oh, okay. Hungate: So this was just volcanic fly ash, as opposed to— Milliman: Yeah. Hungate: --Mount St. Helens. Franklin: Oh, okay. So that explains the date. Rice: Do you have another one? Milliman: This was the asbestos concrete exposure. Now, this was probably in ’78. And you can see here they finally started figuring out that asbestos was bad for you. Compared to white paper face masks, this— Franklin: Right. Now you have a full-body, looks like you have a respirator mask. Milliman: Yup. We had rubber overshoes on, Tyvek protective clothing, and respirator. Franklin: Wow. Milliman: This just to have to be around exposure chamber there. These were with hamsters also. Franklin: Wow. That’s great. Milliman: And we are smoking rats. [LAUGHTER] We’re doing the physiology on it. That’s a graph machine, it’s like a lie detector. We’re doing the testing on their respiratory rate, their heart rate. Everything’s sterile. To get where I’m at right there, you had to shower and shave and disinfect and be fully protected. That’s to keep us from giving them disease. It’s not to protect us from the animals. It’s to protect the rats and the mice and the hamsters. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Milliman: Here we’re doing the same thing. This is when you go red, you’re on actual exposure from the contractor. Franklin: So—oh, so there were different color suits for— Milliman: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. So red would be when you were directly working with chemical—with the particulates? Milliman: Not necessarily, but that’s what they wanted from us. There was no difference in—other than the color of the—everything’s sterile and sanitized. Franklin: Is that so that other people working would know that you would be— Milliman: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. Rice: There’s just these. Do you want to talk about those at all? Milliman: [LAUGHTER] This is one of the funny things that happened to me. Girlfriend and I were over at the Black Angus in Pasco. We were sitting in the booth and we were eating our supper, steak and mushrooms, and having a fine time. Started getting quiet. I’d already paid for my bill and ordered a cup of coffee and we were sitting there drinking a cup of coffee. Got awful quiet. So I got up and there was nobody around. So we went to go out the door—we guessed everybody left—so we started to go out the door. Well, the door’s locked, we can’t get out. I went in the kitchen hollering, hey, hey, let us out! Bartender gone, kitchen gone, nobody’s there. I got on the pay telephone and called 9-1-1, and I said, hey, we’re locked in the Black Angus. Said, what? [LAUGHTER] Are you playing a joke? No! We want to go home! I got to go to work tomorrow! [LAUGHTER] So they said, what’s your phone number there? So I give them the phone number, they called the place next door. The next door place called us. Phone rang, I picked it up. Yeah, we’re here. He called back, they said, they’re in there. So they figured what happened was we hid in there and we were going to rob the place but we couldn’t get out. So they called me back and they said, well, okay, we’re coming down. I said, don’t come with the police dogs and the guns and stuff and the sirens, because I got to go to work tomorrow. [LAUGHTER] So they—here they come. We were sitting there waiting on them, and there was a little console there and there was some kind of video machine that she and I were trying to figure out how to play. And all at once I told her, don’t move, keep your hands on the table. She said, why? I said, I smell a cop. And slowly, both of us turned our heads, and there were three heads peeking around the door at us. They came in, and they all had their hands on their guns. Whoa, fellas. Get your hands off that hog leg, you’re making me nervous. I’ve been shot once and it ain’t fun. They really questioned us. How’d you get in here? Said, well—they had this manager with them. And he said, you pay for your supper? And I said, yeah, and left a tip. If you keep on being mean to me, I want my tip back. And I kept looking to one police officer, one that came back from Montana and worked at the Bon Marche before they opened up. Me and him were in there as a security guard. He was moonlighting because he was a Pasco cop. And I kept looking at him, I said, Archie Pittman? Archie Pittman? And he looked mad! He said, what are you doing here? I said, just eating supper. And he said, okay, guys, I know him. Let him go. But that come out in the paper said, they knew businesses was hard up for patrons but they didn’t think they was going to lock them up just to keep them! [LAUGHTER] And this is my old friend—I was in the Cub Scouts, I think it was? Me and my old Poncho. Old lifelong friend. Franklin: That’s cute. Milliman: That’s the box elder tree my brother dove behind to— Hungate: Dodge the bullets? Milliman: Dodging a bullet. Rice: There you go. Milliman: Great. Franklin: Well, thank you so much. Milliman: Well, I hope I didn’t make a fool out of myself— Franklin: You did not. Milliman: Or bore you to death. Franklin: No, it was really exciting. It really was! You have some great stories. Hungate: He’s a story teller. Milliman: Man, please behave yourself. Don’t lay that hillbilly stuff on them. [LAUGHTER] <a href="https://youtu.be/h3TfrARrCto">View interview on Youtube.</a> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:31:58 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 3000 Area 313 Building N Reactor Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Edward Milliman Description An account of the resource An interview with Edward Milliman conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 07-06-2016 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2018-29-1: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. Relation A related resource <a href="http://hanfordhistory.com/collections/show/23">Edward Milliman, Oral History Metadata</a> 3000 Area 313 Building Battelle Boeing Cancer Cat Cold War Department of Energy drinking General Electric Hanford Kennewick N Reactor Safety Street War https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F82ba25b80eee33668ba65ff5f01064ef.JPG adfe3b554307d8be1e998288231177cf Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Wanda Munn Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I’m conducting an oral history interview with Wanda Munn on November 2nd, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Wanda about her experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your name? Wanda Munn: Wanda Iris Munn. W-A-N-D-A, last name M-U-N-N. Franklin: Great. When and where were you born, Wanda? Munn: I was born in Brownwood, Texas, which is 17 miles from the geographic center of the state on September 13th, 1931. I was a Depression baby. So I had all that background and the joy of being a native Texan. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] How and why did you come to the area to—how and why did you come to work at Hanford? Munn: Well, in technical terms, I’m a retread. I decided in midlife that I needed to finish a college degree, and I wanted to do it in some discipline that was really challenging and had great contribution capability for the planet and especially for my nearer community. When you make those decisions in your 40s, you have some knowledge of what you’re doing. And it was not an easy one for me to do, although I did an asset-liability framework in my mind of what I could do, what—I was a divorced mother of two children and had the responsibility for a declining mother and a dependent sister. So it was incumbent upon me to do this as quickly as possible. I only had about a year’s worth of actual college credit, most of it at the University of Texas, much earlier in life. When I decided that I was going to go for nuclear engineering, my friends and colleagues were actually horrified. They all could understand my going out to find myself somehow, but a technical degree like nuclear engineering was a real stunner to them. They were fond of saying to me, but Wanda, you’ll be over 40 by the time you get your degree! And my response was, I’m going to be over 40 anyhow. I’d rather have it with this degree than not have it with this degree. So because my prior material was not actually engineering, it had been medicine, I really had to start from scratch. I didn’t have any money and essentially sold everything but the children, and I couldn’t find a good buyer for them. [LAUGHTER] But I tried to do a four-year curriculum in three years and managed to do it. But it wasn’t easy, and I don’t recommend it. [LAUGHTER] Nevertheless, by the time I had finished my engineering degree at Oregon State University—I was living in Corvallis at the time—I had fallen in love with breeder reactors. This was in the mid-‘70s, and in the mid-‘70s, the big game in town as far as breeder technology was concerned was right here at Hanford. The Fast Flux Test Facility was in the process of construction at that time, and it was the most exciting technical thing on the horizon. I was delighted to be able to come here and interview for a position there. And that’s exactly what I did. I became a member of the Westinghouse Hanford team that was constructing that reactor. And never looked back. It was a wonderful choice for me. A very exciting time, building on the shoulders of the giants that we’d had here three decades earlier. And I have never regretted a day of it. Franklin: Excellent. So, tell me what kinds of work did you do at FFTF? Munn: I was—for the most part I was a cognizant engineer. Westinghouse had an excellent program at the time of rotational program where you had an opportunity, if you chose to do so, to work in three different aspects of the construction, design, startup process. I originally chose to go into plant operations. It seemed the most exciting to me and we were actually building the structure at that time. We—I did two other rotations which made it possible for me to go all over the site, actually. When I say the site, the site that I’m talking about right now is the FFTF site, what we refer to as the 400 Area. It did not include the old production reactors and the waste projects that were underway by Rockwell Hanford at that time. I had been the cognizant engineer for the reactor system for a variety of the other head compartment systems. For the longest period of time, my responsibility was the sodium systems, especially the sodium testing system and the gas sampling systems. During a long period of time, I also worked in nuclear safety, which, again, took me literally all over the plant. It was a very exciting time. The Fast Flux Test Facility was a flagship. There’s no question about it. It was the most advanced research and development reactor in the world. Not only at that time, but no one, to my knowledge, has exceeded the capability that we had, nor the type of long-term vision that we had at FFTF. It was a specialized group of men and women. More men than women, obviously. That, of course, was another aspect of the times. And if you want me to talk about that, I can a little bit. It may or may not be interesting to your audience. Franklin: I would love for you to talk about that. Munn: As anyone who lived through that era knows, a woman with a technical degree was not welcomed, nor did they actually have access to many portions of the engineering technology. There were a few. I was not what I think of as a first wave, but I was certainly the second wave. The first—whoa. Sorry about that. I didn’t mean to— Emma Rice: Overload the circuit? Franklin: Overload the circuit. Munn: Cause—yeah, I didn’t mean to overload anything. We— Franklin: Did we—yeah, I was going to say—so we-- Vargas: No, we’re fine on the camera. Franklin: Oh, okay. Vargas: It’s battery-powered. Franklin: Oh, great. Munn: Okay, very good, that’s fine. We just—I had as my mentors women, several of whom had had careers in the military. It was one of the few real engineering doors that were open to them at the time. And the woman who was the technical vice president for Westinghouse Hanford at the time was Lieutenant Colonel Arminta Harness, recently retired from the Air Force and NASA. She had worked on the Space Program and had known me as a result of our interaction in the Society of Women Engineers. We called her Minta. Minta was the last of the two-year-term national presidents for the Society of Women Engineers. And she and her colleagues had been among those who were not allowed to go into other forms of engineering in the public sector, because they had two routine answers that they heard from potential employers. One was, we don’t have a women’s restroom in our building. And the other, that I thought was probably closer to the truth for most of them was, we accept the fact that you could do this work—not can, but could do this work. However, if our clients knew that the work was done by a woman, it would never be accepted. Now, that probably had some ring of truth to it, but nevertheless, it was almost an insurmountable barrier for those women. But as anyone who knows anything about the social history of the United States knows, in the ’60s and early ‘70s, there was a real revolution in this regard. I think it’s a spin-off of what happened during World War II. It rather astonished people that women could take the jobs that men had left and had done such a fine job with them while the men were away from the country. But it was just assumed that when they returned, of course, they would return to their positions, whatever they were, and that the women would go back and put their aprons on. There’s nothing demeaning about that, except it was pretty infuriating for the women who had shown for five years that they could do these jobs and had done it very, very well, to be told now that—not that they—they would no longer accept that they couldn’t do it, but they were told that they should not do it. And therefore were not going to be allowed to. These were the women who had daughters who were not going to accept that as an answer. So as the social process began to move, and the legislative process began to bring itself to bear, more and more employers were finding it necessary to hire a certain number of women in order to fulfill the requirements of a government contract. This was both an enormous opportunity and a terrible detriment for those of us who were living in that time. That social action, as a matter of fact, was a part of the reason why I had decided to go into nuclear engineering. It was the first time the doors were really open to do that. But the two-edged sword was very easy to see if you stood back one step and looked at it. That is, these women were going into a milieu where the individuals who occupied those spaces had thousands of years of history behind them, of being world leaders, commanders of all they surveyed, and they had only two interactions, they—well, I take it back—three interactions they’d ever had with women throughout their entire lives from the time they were infants. The women with whom they had ever interacted had either been caretakers, sexual objects, or clerical employees. There were no other options. That was their interaction. Now, women had been doing reasonably well in small entrepreneurial businesses of their own for quite some time. But this was a different thing. This was high technology. The fact that people like Admiral Grace Hopper were making the beginnings of the Digital Age come to life were not seen by the general public. That was such an outlier; it wasn’t commonly known. But as those of us who came into this profession during this period of time learned very quickly, the people in power were all masculine, as one would expect. But they had no experience in how to deal with a female colleague. Females, yes. They had females around them and a basic part of their lives forever. But dealing with a woman on a level playing field in a technical way was not an experience that they even knew anyone who could relate to them. So the first thing they thought was, one: you’re only there because you got a leg-up; you’re being given a free ride because you happen to be female. And the other thing they thought is: and if the free ride gives you as much power as we’re afraid it’s going to, you’re going to take my job. So as we went in, we had to do two things. One, we had to prove we really were engineers; we really could do the work. And two, we had to prove to them that we were colleagues of theirs, not interlopers who—we all know the general story about how women got ahead in that time. We had to prove that wasn’t on the slate, and that we were not going to take their jobs. This ain’t easy. And I’m very, very glad that I was older at the time this occurred, because I’d been accustomed—you know, I’d grown up with these guys. I knew who they were. I knew what they were like, and I understood what their lives were. So, it wasn’t hard for me to understand the disturbance that was going on in their intellectual world. But younger women coming in at the time didn’t understand that. They saw this as being some kind of real repression of some sort—an attempt to keep them from fulfilling their potential. This, in my view, was not the case. I still see that quite often, that sometimes women in technical fields have a tendency to think that they’re playing the minority card. But that is, in my view, no longer true. The concerns that I had at that time have long since passed, and I’m glad that’s true. Franklin: What was—I’d like to step back a bit, and thank you for that. I think that was a really illuminating aspect, and I might have you come lecture my US History class on women in the workplace at some point. Munn: I’d be delighted to do that. Franklin: What was—so, going—coming back to your motivation to go back to school, what was it—was there a moment, or when did you realize that you wanted to—when and why did you realize that you wanted to go back to school? Munn: Okay, now this is really getting down in the weeds here, but that’s okay. The reason I left the University of Texas was to marry. [COUGH] Excuse me. As I think I mentioned. I was in pre-med. I had grown up with great ambitions. It had never occurred to me that there was much that I couldn’t do because I was female. It occurred to me that there were limits to what I could do because of my intellectual prowess, but I had always been drawn to medicine as a child, and had actually hoped to go into psychiatry. Which I’m glad I didn’t do. But that’s not the issue here. The issue is, I left the university to marry. I was 18. Because I had graduated from high school at 16. I had chosen pre-med because that’s what had been in my head for a long, long time. It was science, it was technical, it was beneficial: it was all the things that I wanted my life to be. But marriage interrupts that kind of thing. It takes you to a different kind of world, a different kind of setting. My then-husband was in the Air Force, and so I followed him in the Air Force. He was an enlisted man. He was from a working class blue collar family. No one in his family—a large family—no one in his family had ever gone to college. This made absolutely no sense to me—why one would not advance their education in a period and in a place where it was difficult, but it wasn’t all that difficult to find a way to pay tuition. You know, why not? There’s state schools all over the United States. Choose something and go there. So it was rather difficult on my then-husband, because he was not prepared for college work at all, and I was just fairly insistent that he was going to do that. So he had a great deal of remedial work to do, and this essentially meant that I had spent about seven years of my life trying to assist him in his studies, and essentially support the family in doing so. He did finish not only his bachelor’s degree but also his master’s degree and was in the education field. During all that period of time, I was essentially doing professional work of one sort or another for individuals who held authoritative positions, but whose shoes I could have filled easily. I did not have what I call my union card: I didn’t have a college degree. Further, I did not have the technical training to do the kinds of science and technology that really and truly interested me. So in the ‘70s, I found myself the divorced mother of two, as I said, and with considerable family responsibility. I knew that I could not continue to support what is now a rather large number of people on the salaries that I was able to get as a glorified administrative assistant. By the way, there’s been a change of terms. In that period, the term administrative assistant did not mean a secretary, although my secretarial and clerical skills were very high. That was not the real reason I had the post. I actually was an assistant to the person who held the title, whether it was physicians, accountants, insurance people, academics—that’s what I did. But there’s a factor of about two, sometimes three, in the monthly salary of those individuals and in mine. So you don’t have to be a follower of Dr. Einstein to be able to work out the math. You know, it doesn’t take very long. I needed a professional salary. And besides that, intellectually, I had been spinning my wheels for 20 years. And I was tired of it. I was absolutely tired of it. I wanted to be doing something that was challenging me, and in which my contribution was a contribution. Not a contribution to the person who was doing the contribution. It isn’t that I wanted to be recognized for that; I’ve always been of the school that it’s amazing what you can do if you don’t care who gets the credit for it. I didn’t care who got the credit for it. I just wanted to be on the ground floor. That’s all. Franklin: So for all the degrees—the things you could have chosen in what we now call the STEM fields that would make a solid difference, why nuclear engineering? Munn: Can you think of anything else that’s more challenging and more imaginative? I can’t. At the time, it took me a while to measure down to engineering. I started with thinking of medicine, still. But when I realized the amount of time and the amount of money that was going to be necessary for me to do that, not to mention the time—the concentrated daily schedule that’s necessary for that kind of thing, given the family duties that I had—it seemed like an impossibility. So I had to rule out medicine. Besides which, it would have taken me seven years to get to the point where I could actually get to hands-on anything. That—I didn’t have that much time. I had to do this in—and I had no money. As a result of that, I really had to do something in a much shorter time. And it seemed to me that three years was all I was going to be able to handle. Now, when you take that away and you start looking at the other science things, the biggie at the time also was computer technology. We were just getting out of the room full of server stages, and every college campus finally did have a computer center where you could go in the dead of night and run your deck which you had typed. [LAUGHTER] It was still unknown to the general public. I happened to own the first 35 that was sold at the Oregon State University bookstore—the first handheld computer. [LAUGHTER] It’s still on my desk, as a matter of fact. But that was—it was an exciting time then, but I—what little I knew about computer technology, I knew the detailed precision that was necessary to do this. I’d already known—had the experience of trying to make a computer do what I wanted it to do instead of what I had told it to do. And knowing that the misplacement of one character could demolish the efforts of a whole deck just did me in. I couldn’t handle that kind of concept. I knew I would not be a good computer engineer. Too much real detail oriented in that. Being a big picture kind of person makes a difference. So I set that aside. The other thing that really seizes the imagination is something that so many people don’t think about—that is the basic requirement for any life anywhere is not food, clothing and shelter. It’s even more basic than that. It’s energy. If you don’t have adequate energy, there is no way you can do any of the things that you have to do to survive. The energy picture right there right then was easily as muddled as it is now, and possibly even more. I had looked—thought about mining, too. It just really sounded dull to me. Just dull. I’d been raised in Texas. Petroleum engineering was a big thing at the time. Oh, for crying out loud, you look around in the dirt, you find oil, you think you might have oil, you drill for oil, you either have it or you don’t have it. Then you either have success or not and you move onto another well. That just—that didn’t sound like much of a thrill to me, either. So long as I couldn’t be there to watch the well come in, what’s the point? This gets—there was, of course, a great deal of hoo-ha about solar, wind, ocean current—all those things were very big in the human imagination at the time. I kept thinking, really? No. Not really. Excellent for specific purposes. Useful? Oh, my, yes. Pursue it by all means. But the biggie? No. I already knew that there were only two concentrations of energy that could possibly serve an industrial society. And I’m all for industrial societies. And I knew that that was carbon-based fuels and nuclear. Well, let’s see. Which is the most interesting of those? Gosh, it didn’t take me long to figure that out. So, to me, it was just a pyramid. You start at the bottom and you work up, and the star of the fleet as far as I was concerned was nuclear engineering. How fascinating can you get?! My word. Totally unknown until less than a few decades before. And now the most incredible amount of power. Energy that we’ve never even been able to imagine, we’ve got it, we know how to control it, we can do whatever we need to do with it. With breeder reactors—hey. The only place I know you can make enormous amounts of electricity and still be creating more fuel at the same time. Don’t know anything else that does that. Highly imaginative, and not getting good press at the time, either. Franklin: I wanted—and I think you might have answered some of the question, my next question. But you mentioned that your friends and colleagues were terrified that you chose nuclear engineering. Munn: Yes. Franklin: Why was that? Munn: Too hard. Underwater basket weaving, popular psychology, you know, art, the many of the social sciences, the things that do good things for society but don’t require that much in the way of focused knowledge of some sort. That’s—you know, it takes a lot of work, but it takes a different kind of brainpower. We really live in two worlds, you know. C.P. Snow pointed that out in his books quite some time ago. We live in an enumerate world and an innumerate world. There’s nothing wrong with either of those worlds, it’s just that they don’t communicate well. And a significant number of people are math-phobic. Have been most of their lives and probably will be most of their lives. But the only way you can explain most things in science is numerically. So you either see that as a form of language, or you don’t. And I was able to see it as a form of language. Please don’t misinterpret me; I am not a good mathematician. But I do see the mathematic relationships in things. I see the mathematics in color spectra. I see the mathematics in music. I see the mathematics in what we’re doing here right now. And many people don’t see the relationship between these technologies and mathematics. Franklin: You had mentioned earlier some of the challenges that women of your generation—or in the generation—the time at which you entered the workforce, you mentioned some of the challenges that women were facing. Did you—were there any of those challenges specifically at FFTF, or can you kind of describe how that was to be a woman at this newly—this brand new reactor? Munn: Yes. One of the things that was very frustrating about it was that we did have a number of women who, in their lexicon, were breaking barriers, and I was glad they were there. They were doing semi-technical jobs. Many of them non-professional jobs, but nevertheless requiring interaction with the hands-on people who were on the floor putting things together, and doing cool things, like being able to stand over the open reactor before it was filled and feel how far it was from one wall to the other. Those are the kinds of things people don’t get to do. I got to do those things. It was wonderful. But we had a couple of things. Women had never been taught anything but dress codes. And knowing how to dress in a true working engineering facility was not a common thing. We would, for example, one of our Society of Women Engineers sections when I was visiting had a woman come and talk—a popular topic of the day was dressing for work. Dressing for work essentially meant dressing like the woman who was speaking to us who was an attorney. Now, the toughest physical barriers that she faced in her workplace were the carpet in the courtroom, trying not to slip down on marble floors. This is not the challenge that we faced in the workplace that we were talking about. So clothing alone became a big item for many of our young women who were coming in. They had been taught to dress attractively and a little bit sexy, you know. Always that little bit of come-on. And it was a bit of a challenge to convince them, first of all, that if you were going to be working in a plant, you don’t even consider wearing a skirt. I’m sorry, you just don’t. You’re not going to be able to walk across the grids. You are not going to be able to climb ladders. You are not going to be able to go where your male colleagues have to go to do their job. If you’re going to do this job—you can’t do it while you’re worrying about your femininity. I’m sorry. You can do that if you want with color. We lucked out there, didn’t we? It’s okay for women to wear any kind of color they want to. So you can be very feminine in your clothing, in terms of color. But I’m sorry, the long tresses that are so popular today? You’re not going to go in a working plant with this lovely, flowing hair that looks so good in a commercial, but is rotten when you’re walking around operating machinery. You don’t want to get pulled into that headfirst. No kidding. So—and there’s the business of the shoes. Even after my plant—the plant that the FF team put together—even after that was completed, in order to get there, if I didn’t want to walk two-and-a-half miles around the plant on concrete, I was going to have to walk across crushed rock. This is an operating plant. You know, we’re not dressed up for Sunday best. We’re working here. So why do you have on those heels? You’re going to have to walk across crushed rock. Why would you do that? I know it looks nicer with this particular outfit—fluff, fluff. But I’m sorry; that’s not why you’re here. So I had—the woman that I mentioned earlier, one of my favorite mentors, Arminta Harness—had what she called the Ten Commandments for a Woman Engineer. Most of them were humorous, but none to me was more humorous than what I believe was number seven, which said, Thou shalt not be sexy at the office, even if thy cup runneth over. I thought that was extremely humorous, and it still remains my favorite commandment to young women going into engineering. Thou shalt not—that’s—wherever else you want to be sexy, you may, but please don’t bring that to the workplace. So I have had one or two confrontations with—in each case, they were a technician or a runner for some of the construction people—but young women who insisted on wearing provocative t-shirts, especially. I’ve made a couple of them rather angry by telling them that I spent a great deal of my life trying to teach the men who are working here that I am their colleague, I’m an engineer, we’re building something together here. What I may think of you or what you may think of me otherwise has no bearing on why we are here. We’re being paid to do this very important job, and it will be done right. Don’t distract these guys with something like this while I have to come along behind them and tell them that this has to be done in a different way. And they’re not listening to me. They’ve still got you hung up in their mind. Tsk. Don’t do that. Those are—they seem a little strange now, given what transpires in today’s workplace and given the clothing that we have now. Frankly, I’m a bit disappointed as an individual that we as women have finally been allowed by the males who occupied those positions to allow us to use the capabilities that we have to perform the same kinds of functions, and yet you have—it never occurred to me that dress, as we see it now, was going to devolve into this, and to me devolve is the appropriate word. Never occurred to me that we would get so far afield from keeping our eye on the ball and staying focused on the task at hand when we’re in professional positions. But, hey. The world moves on. Brave new world. Franklin: Indeed. Were there any—did you face any kind of discrimination or attitude from your male colleagues at FFTF at first? Or was it—it sounds like you’ve described a pretty congenial relationship. Were there any instances that stand out? Munn: Well, there were one or two. But they only happened once. When they happened, I felt it was my responsibility both as an older female worker and as a real professional person to clear the air and make it very plain—not try to send double messages ever. And I think—when you’re dealing with human—rational human beings, you don’t have to keep doing the same thing over and over again. All you have to do is clear the air, make the straight statement that needs to be made, and you’re fine. And I have had to tell a couple of my—of people in my management chain, look, the last thing I want to be is where you are. At the time, it was assumed that a woman with a technical degree and an MBA was a really hot ticket. So of course, naturally, what the idea was—came to work at FFTF, and a year later started working at the Joint Center for Graduate Study, which is the origin of the facility we’re in right now. It’s now morphed into Washington State University Tri-Cities. It’s wonderful. But at the time, there were four regional colleges that had been pulled together, interestingly, by one of the people that was very instrumental in that was a man named Leland Berger, who was just—we just lost Lee last week. He was one of the people who were instrumental in putting together the conglomerate of universities to make it possible for the people who were working on the Hanford Site at the time to be able to pursue graduate degrees. It was a difficult proposition for someone who came here, especially if they were going to be a long-term worker, individual leader, here on the Hanford Site. They’re very far removed from any campus. So doing master’s work was very difficult to do. The whole concept of the individuals at the time who put together this consortium of universities was so that people could live here and, sure, it takes longer because you’re working full-time, but evening classes that are taught by fully-accredited universities made it possible for us to do that. So my MBA’s from the University of Washington. Go Huskies! Sorry about that. Franklin: It’s okay. Munn: Nevertheless—I’m not forgiven. Nevertheless, it was a concerted—a really concerted program, and it was almost impossible to take more than six hours a term, because you’re working full time. And at the time, we were in acceptance, testing and startup at FFTF, which meant that my days were easily ten hours long, and I don’t mean four tens. [LAUGHTER] I mean, work days were easily more than ten hours—ten hours or more. And whenever we had actual tests running, when we had things that were going on 24/7, quite often through the holidays and through weekends, we worked. But that meant classes were relegated to evenings only, and you didn’t have any spare time to do a lot of off-campus work. So we did have a challenge in that regard, but I think most of the people who were trying to do all of those things at the same time recognized that the benefits outweighed the problems that we were having to face in doing it. Scheduler problems are very hard. I was a fortunate person in being able to get by with about five hours’ sleep a night. Did that for a long, long time without any real detriment. But you do burn out on that after a while. We’ve been fortunate in so many ways in this region. The academic opportunities that we’ve had, despite the major problems that we have—not the least of which was isolation, geographically. Not isolation, but harder to get from here to there than it is a lot of places. Franklin: Mm-hm. Can you describe— Munn: Did I answer your question? I’m sorry. Franklin: No—yes. Munn: Good, all right. Franklin: You did, and then you actually answered another one I was going to ask you. Munn: Another eight or ten. Yeah, sorry. Franklin: So, can you describe a typical work day at the FFTF? Munn: Yes. Typical work day. Up at 5:30 or 6:00, something like that. Breakfast for the kid or kids still at home. Out the door before 7:00, because the traffic was terrible. The traffic was not just the work folks going out to Hanford; we also had three private sector commercial nuclear plants being built at the same time. So the construction traffic going out to the Hanford Site was pretty scary. You needed to take plenty of time, because heaven knows what was going to happen on the way. By 7:15, needed to be through security. Security is not often a time-consuming thing, because you do it every day and it’s routine. But you know that anything that you’re carrying has to go through the x-ray, and you know that you, yourself, have to go through x-ray. You are likely to need steel-toed shoes whether you take them on or off—whether you put them on at work or whether you put them on beforehand depends on whether you want to take off heavy boots and walk through barefoot or not. And it depends on whether or not there’s any real hang-up on the way in. Usually there isn’t. But, nevertheless, you have to take time to assure that you’re going through security or not. Then the place that you parked was never—it was impossible to park in a place that was near to the security gate that you had to go through. So, there’s a little bit of a walk to get to security, and then from security, there’s a little bit of a walk to where you’re going to be. You’re expected to be in your workplace and working at 7:30. Not just arriving at the facility at 7:30. So if you’re going to get coffee or if you’re going to have to wait a little bit for your computer to boot up, any of those things, you need to be in your office by 7:15, because at 7:30 you are truly expected to be ready to go. Much of the management in my part of the world was ex-Navy nuclear trained, and precision, as far as time was concerned, was important to them. So you learned fairly early that it became important. You didn’t have the enormous amount of flex hours that I observe people having now. That just didn’t exist. By 7:30, you had either documents that you were having to deal with on your desk, or you were dealing with the material that was being incoming by that time on your computer. If you had a computer on your desk, interestingly, it was—I had been onsite for probably five, six years before engineers actually had computers on their desks. That was—we’re so accustomed to that now, it’s interesting to think back, how—in my lifetime--comparatively recently, it’s been. And I was one of the few people who was ranting and raving about that, because most of the new engineers who were just coming out of school had just learned—they’d just been computer-trained. This first batch of computer engineers who were computer-trained at school. The others were completely on the ground for those. So there were very few literate people in terms of computers around in the mid-‘70s. There just weren’t a bunch. We had access to the computer facility down the hall, but you had to get computer time much the way you did in college. There was only one real server, and you had to go there to do what you needed to do. One of the first things I did in the circles that I moved in—the engineering circles I moved in—the first thing that we did at FFTF was the Plan of the Day. We called it the POD, and the Plan of the Day was usually at 8:00, which meant you had time to get your hardhat and walk from wherever you were to wherever the POD was being held. And I took—I had a hardbound journal about this size that I kept notes in. You had to keep notes, because too much was happening in too many different ways and it affected you in one way or another. You need to remember who said that and when it was going to be done. So you took your journal, you put on your hardhat. You had to have your hardhat everywhere you went. I’m sorry about the hairdo. That’s tough. You had hardhat hair if you were working onsite. POD could take anywhere from half hour to 45 minutes. They didn’t like to tie people up, because they wanted—the object was to try to get you to your workplace with your instructions for the day by 8:30. But that’s sometimes hard to do. Nevertheless, Plan of the Day, POD, was first thing. After the POD—not everybody attended. It was rare for me not to attend, for one reason or another, whatever position I was in, something was usually happening and I was required to be there. Certainly, after I went into nuclear safety it was a daily thing. I didn’t have a choice. I needed to be there, had to be there. And the plan of the day often—the individuals who were way up the management chain from those of who were there, quite often would appear to give specific instructions about some aspect of what we were doing at that time which was very crucial. We all were aware of what the timeline needed to be. Project management was key to how things were done in that particular facility. And they were done on time and in budget. There wasn’t any question about it. It didn’t matter what it took, you stayed and did it. And it was a team effort. I was never privy to any discussion about doing it any other way. This was an enormously devoted team. So, after the Plan of the Day, you had your marching orders for the day; you knew what you had to do. And you went to wherever the action was for you that day, and you did that. We took a half-hour for lunch. Depending on where you were, for a brief period of time, you had access to cafeteria food. We had a cafeteria in the 300 Area when most of the planning and engineering was going on there. We had a cafeteria for a short period of time in the 400 Area during construction. It didn’t continue. As many people brown bagged as not. Almost all of us had a lunch pail, and it was not uncommon for an entire group, an engineering group, to remain at their desks and working through the lunch hour—through the lunch half-hour. It was expected that you take a 15-minute break for coffee, twice during the day. Once in the morning and once in the afternoon. It was expected, otherwise, that you’d be at your desk, or if you were going to leave your workplace, in every engineering group I was in, we had a sign-in/sign-out board at the door of our group structure, wherever that was. And you always wrote where you were going. If you weren’t going to be obtainable at your desk, then you had to be reachable at wherever you were going. So you signed out at the time, and when you signed back in, you erased it. I got tired of writing Reactor Facility when I was going to the reactor, and started writing BRT. This was an enigma for about a week, until finally my immediate manager couldn’t stand it anymore, and he said, all right, Wanda, we know where you’re going but what does BRT mean? It meant Big Round Thing. But it became a common usage. We were going out to the big round thing. We were very fond of the big round thing. We were going to make sure it was built right and that it operated right. Franklin: And what is the big round thing? Munn: The big round thing is the containment dome in which the reactor—the Fast Flux Test Reactor itself was located. It’s quite a structure. Probably the safest place that I could find myself. I can’t think of a safer place to be, actually, than in that particular facility. I was—there was never any trepidation about going there, either in terms of construction or machine activity, or in terms of nuclear safety. Never concerned. Franklin: How did you transition into nuclear safety? Munn: How did I--? Franklin: How did you trans—you mentioned that you had started during construction and that later on you started working in nuclear safety. Munn: Oh, well, it’s seamless. Franklin: Seamless, okay. Munn: Absolutely seamless, yes. During the first years, we did not have an engineering building where the engineers themselves could work and stay. It was all constructing the facility itself. It’s a very exciting time, because just moving the huge vessels that had to go inside that containment building had to be barged up the river, offloaded here in North Richland, and taken by tractor across—directly across—the desert to FFTF. Because they weighed so much that it was impossible to do it in any other way. They were in a J sling, transported across. And the lamps and cranes were some of the largest and most spectacular in the world at the time. Those lifts were—placing those huge vessels was a sight to see if one has not been privy to that, then you’ve missed a very exciting—it’s slow. It’s like molasses. Nothing happens quickly. But it was done in a remarkably precise way. But it was entirely seamless. If you were in engineering at FFTF, then as the actual operation of the facility proceeded, your location and what your responsibility was likely changed as well. Franklin: Okay. When did the FFTF shut down? Munn: Shut down in the late ‘80s. Only operated for about a year. We went critical for the first time in early 1980. And we did our first power demonstration later that year. So 1980 was the key year for startup at FFTF. You bear in mind, we didn’t operate the way a commercial power plant operates, because we were a research facility. And what we had going on inside of the reactor was experimentation. We were proving that all of the materials and all of the equipment that were necessary to operate a fast reactor could be done safely and within the bounds of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s licensing agreements. So that this could move from a research and development technology to a commercial technology. That’s what we were doing at the time. So we started up and shut down according to what the tests were in the reactor at that time. It was very important that those materials have the length of exposure and the density of exposure that was necessary in order for us to show how that particular equipment or that particular material reacted under the worst possible conditions. Franklin: Okay. And so how long did the facility operate for as a research facility? Munn: It operated about a decade. Franklin: About a decade. Munn: Uh-huh, yes. And it was closed down in increments. There were a number of individuals and organizations that tried very hard to persuade the Department of Energy that the Fast Flux Test Facility should be continued to be operated as a producer of medical isotopes. It was one of the few facilities that could do that, because of the enormous range of flux that we were able to provide to the material inside. Although it had not been built specifically for that purpose, we were able to show that we could have produced a number of very unusual, very rare, very much needed isotopes. And could pay for about 70% to 80% for the operating costs of the FFTF. The response that we got back was, no, we won’t consider that unless the entire cost could be covered. This didn’t make any sense to me, because the many—there was no other facility in the DOE complex that paid its own way completely. You know, that just—that wasn’t why. The organization was funded by Congress. But we never quite understood the politics. There was general consensus among the folks that I knew that the shutdown was a political activity and not really and truly a technical one. Because we had fulfilled our mission. The original mission was to prove, as I said, that the materials and machinery that’s necessary to operate an advanced reactor could be—could meet NRC requirements. We’d proved that we could do that. And what we were attempting to do was to convince the establishment that there were other extremely beneficial uses for this machine and that we should continue to run it. But since the decision had been made not to pursue the advanced reactor concept in the US—I really shouldn’t get into that, because I get pretty rabid when I think about the terrible destruction that was done to the nuclear technology in the United States during that particular period. But that’s water under the bridge and can’t be undone. But because that advanced program had been shut down, and we had fulfilled the original purpose, then the position was, you’re toast. Franklin: Was this work taken on in the private sector, then? Because you mentioned— Munn: It would have been taken on in the private sector. Now, what we do in this country is a little odd. We have over 35,000 procedures a day in the United States that require manufactured isotope of some kind. We get over 90% of those isotopes from other reactors outside the United States. So, we in our medical profession and maintaining the health of the nation rely heavily on other nations’ ability to produce these and to transmit them to us in a period of time where they’re still useful. Because when you’re talking about medical isotopes, you’re talking about short-lived isotopes. They have to be—they have to give off their energy quickly in a precise way in order for it to be useful. If you’re going to keep them for long periods of time, the high density of energy that you need has dissipated because of the half-life of isotopes. Now, we could talk about that for a long time, too. But the sad thing is that we could have had that facility operating right up to this day, in my personal opinion, producing isotopes. And we opted not to do it. Franklin: Can you—or are you willing to speculate on the political motivations for shutting the program down? Munn: I think the political motivation is—was then, and still is—more fear than any other single thing. The most commonly misunderstood physical phenomenon in this world, of which I’m aware, is nuclear radiation. We have—we, being the technical community and the nuclear world—have allowed other people to define our terms and define our reality. It was a serious mistake. We spent the first 20 or 30 years of our existence telling people that this was an extremely technical science they shouldn’t worry their heads about; we’ll take care of it. And then when you’re dealing with an educated public—and we do have an educated public here—you’ve sold them short. And you’ve allowed them not to be learning on the same curve you’re learning on. That—to me, that should have happened. And we have technical people arguing about whether or not one additional millirem or gray or whatever unit you want to use is more dangerous than it actually is. And how one of anything can begin a huge cascade of cancer in anybody—this is all statistical garbage. It’s not true. It cannot be. But that aside, you know, we send people to policy-making positions—we elect people to policy-making positions who attempt to do a good job but who don’t know how things like radiation work. And when we have folks with concrete financial agenda going to them saying, these frightening things are happening to people and they’re happening because of this dreadful thing we call radiation, and it needs to be stopped. Then how can you expect a policy to allow an advanced technology to continue when the basic response to the word is fear? We’ve done it to ourselves to some degree. But we’ve allowed policy to continue when it just should not be—perhaps I’m overstating the case, but I don’t believe so. I truly believe fear of radiation is what has hamstrung humanity’s best hope for a continuation of adequate energy supply indefinitely. Franklin: What about the linking between nuclear and weapons, that was strengthened—started in World War II and strengthened throughout the Cold War? Do you think that might have a role in people’s perceptions of nuclear power? Munn: Oh, of course it does. One of my favorite comments is the one made by someone much more observant than I that if the electric chair had been invented before the electric light, we would have no electricity today. And I think that may be an apt comparison. We also have a tendency to believe that the effects of that—of nuclear weapons—are much more long-lasting than they actually have been shown to be. But that’s not a good headline, you know? Why bother with that? That doesn’t raise anybody’s ire and doesn’t even start a good argument. Franklin: It’s not quite as bad as you thought, but it’s still pretty terrible. Munn: It’s pretty terrible, yeah, there’s no question. So are wars of all kinds. I wouldn’t want to be in Syria right now, either. Franklin: Yeah. When did you retire from the Hanford Site? Munn: I left with Westinghouse. I always said that I would. The political and managerial aspect of what transpired changed rather radically when Westinghouse took over the large responsibility for the full site in 1986. Prior to that time, Westinghouse Hanford had been a rather small organization. We only had—what—3,000 or 4,000 employees, and we concentrated in the 400 Area. We were research and development. When the bid was made for the larger contract that covered all of the Site and took in the waste sites, the old production reactors, took on all of the legacy of the World War II—of the original Manhattan Project, a great deal changed in how things were operating. Then, later, in that period when we—when the decision was made to go back to having multiple contractors rather than just one or two, then it became very uncertain in my mind what one was likely to be able to expect to do to fulfill their job requirements. And I had said, always, I came here for research and development on advanced reactors. I have been a part of that throughout our ability to do it. That’s now gone; Westinghouse is leaving the area, so am I. So that means that the end of 1995, I retired and ran for city council. Franklin: And did you win? Did you make it to city council? Were you city council? Munn: Yes. Yeah, I was. The next four years, which was a very interesting period in Richland city planning, as well. That’s another whole program. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Can you tell me about some of your professional service? I see that you are a member of Health Physics chapter and a member of the American Nuclear Engineers and a member of the Society of Women Engineers. Munn: Yes, I’m a fellow of SWE—of the Society of Women Engineers. In 1976, when I became a senior in the department at Oregon State University, I was carrying an incredible load, trying to get through that last third year. But we had been, for a couple of years, we’d had a group of females—female engineering students—on campus that we had wanted to morph into a student section of the Society of Women Engineers. I was elected chair of that group, and that year we did become a full-fledged student member—full-fledged student section. So I was the initiating chair of that student section. The same year, the fellow who had chaired the American Nuclear Society’s already very well-established student section just made the announcement, oh, Wanda will take this for me next year, because we’re having a regional conference and there’s a whole lot that needs to be done. So Wanda can do that. Oh, good. So I was chair of both student sections on the Oregon State campus during the ’76-’77 year. And we did, as I said, we chartered the SWE section and we held the regional meeting for the ANS section. And somehow I managed to survive that. I’m not sure how. But when I came to—I came here—the Joint Center for Graduate Study had an interesting program that allowed an internship during summer for students. And so, as an, actually, still as a sophomore in the summer of ’76, I was here as an intern working in the FFTF offices at the time. And that was the year that this professional section, the Eastern Washington section of SWE was chartered as well. So I happened to be here during that charter. So for all intents and purposes, I’m a charter member of the current section. The Health Physics Society—in both organizations, I have been active throughout my life, both locally, regionally, and at the national level. I was inducted as a fellow of the Society of Women Engineers a few years ago. And I’ve served as—on the nominating committee and a couple of the other national committees for that organization. The American Nuclear Society—I’ve held all of the local offices and still remain in the position of—I’m called the historian. It’s kind of an honorific sort of thing. But I’m still very active in the local ANS section. I’ve chaired the National Environmental Sciences division for ANS. And I’ve received the national award for public information from ANS, along with a couple of other accolades of one type or another. The Health Physics Society, I’ve never belonged to the national organization, but stay closely connected to the membership and to the local Columbia chapter of Health Physics. The two—the American Nuclear Society and Health Physics Society overlap each other in interests so strongly that it’s almost impossible to be busy in one and not busy in another. So those three organizations have been a constant in my life since the mid-‘70s. Franklin: Okay. Can you talk a bit about—I understand that you were invited to—that you’ve had your hands in both helping with the NIOSH and the EEOICPA. Munn: Oh, yes. Franklin: And so I was wondering if you could both tell us what those are and then kind of talk about your involvement. And I guess we’ll start with the NIOSH. Munn: Okay, NIOSH I think is an acronym that I think is familiar to most people in the technical world. It’s actually the National Institute for Safety and Health that applies to everybody who works—has a workplace—in the United States. NIOSH was chosen to be the governing agency—I should say the administrative agency for a bill that was signed into law during the very latest days of the Clinton Administration. It was put together as a legislation to compensate workers in all aspects of the Department of Energy’s weapons sites during the entire period from the 1943 early activities here to the present. One thinks of the weapons complex as being the three major DOE sites: Hanford, Los Alamos, and Oak Ridge. The truth of the matter is there are over 230 sites that are covered by this particular act, because there were institutions that ranged from just over a mom-and-pop shop to Bethlehem Steel that were involved in one way or another in what we term the weapons complex. PANTEX in Amarillo is a huge facility as well. The Portsmouth facility. There are—you know, it—as I said, it goes on more than 230 sites. The concept here was that there were people who had been seriously—whose health had been adversely affected by their work in these communities. And of course, there is some of that that’s true. But the real impetus of this bill was to compensate people who had cancer as a result of radiation exposures that they had suffered. Now, one needs to begin, from my perspective, by understanding that there is no evidence of a statistically significant increase in cancers in any of these populations. And yet our Congress says—states that they believe folks have been dying like flies as a result of having been exposed to the radiation that they worked in. This organization was then, in accordance with the law, put together during the first years—first two years of this century. And President George Bush was charged with the responsibility of putting together an advisory board for this group as required by law. So, that was done in 2001. Our first meeting—I was requested by the White House to be a member of that group. I accepted, and became one of the original members of the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health. This is supposed to be the citizens’ advisory portion of the energy employees act with the long name to which you referred. Franklin: EEOICPA? Munn: Yes. Energy Employees Occupational Illness and— Franklin: Compensation? Munn: Compensation Act, right? Franklin: Something like that, yeah. We missed the P, but— Munn: Yeah, that’s—I’m not sure. That activity has gone on now from that time to the present. I’ve been a member of it during that entire time. It has now distributed more than 13 billion, with a B, dollars to people across the United States who have a situation where they both have cancer and they also have worked at one of the complexes for more than 250 days. And this is not the appropriate place for me to state my real concerns about that. But I do not believe that this is a reasonable approach. The local newspapers are—I shouldn’t say newspapers—the local newspaper is a member of a national newspaper chain. And that newspaper chain just last year or the year before ran a series of articles about this particular action with a great deal of really, really heartrending material about people’s lives that have been ravaged by cancer. And there’s no way one can shortchange that. But I take issue with the assertion that those things are a result of workplace when there’s no evidence to show that’s the case. Nevertheless, that’s a continuing concern, and one of the frightening things that people continue to say over and over again with respect to our technology. Franklin: Mm-hm. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and/or living in Richland during the Cold War and afterwards? Munn: It was, I like to remind people, a cold war. The purpose of all that was the assumption that if you work from a position of absolute strength, that you can deter the use of the weapons that we don’t want to use by someone else. And that if we’re assured, ourselves, we’re not going to be first strikers, then it gives us a feeling of protecting ourselves by being strong. That is a reality of the time in which we live. It can be changed in a number of ways. And politically, probably will morph into other things continually throughout human history for as long as human history continues. But being here during that time, was—would seem frightening to many people. It was never frightening to me; quite to the contrary, it was interesting in the extreme. But you must bear in mind that I actually was not involved in the nuclear proliferation issues. Quite to the contrary, the technology that I was dealing with was utilizing plutonium—we used mixed oxide fuels—was utilizing plutonium as a fuel to create electricity and to make nuclear isotopes—medical isotopes. And it used the plutonium and the other weapons materials as a fuel to create energy that we needed domestically and at the same time generate more fuel that can be used to continue to generate electricity ad infinitum. That seems like pie in the sky to so many people, but it is not pie in the sky. It’s a technology over which we have control, and we can do it. So, the way the weapons program is viewed is not something I can truly address appropriately, simply because that wasn’t a part of my life. I didn’t—I wasn’t horrified by it. I felt that it was a necessary part of the historic time in which we were living. I agree that we’ve done a good job of ramping that down in terms of nuclear arsenals. But the concept of not maintaining strength in that regard is extremely unwise to me. Being in Richland is living in a cocoon. It’s very much like living in an advanced university community. The people with whom you interact and the things about which you talk, the way your lives are lived is connected to, but not the same as, what transpires outside the cocoon. Because it is so densely populated with people and with ideas that are concentrated on a limited number of activities. So I’ve never felt anything but extremely safe in Richland. I have a hard time getting my mind around the fears that we—in my efforts to provide information to folks, I’m continually running across people like educators and physicians, especially in the Seattle area and in the heavy-population corridor on the west side of the state who are fearful of driving down Highway 240, for absolutely no reason except that they think there’s a mysterious ray of some kind that reaches us all. And they can’t understand what I’m talking about when I say, hey, the heaviest radiation you’re getting is—you’re absolutely right, it’s from the biggest reactor. We can’t control it; it’s completely out of our hands. You call it the Sun; I just call it a great big reactor. Yeah, that’s where you’re getting your radiation. Whether you’re driving down the highway that surrounds the Site, or whether you’re on the beach in Waikiki. It doesn’t really and truly matter. You’re being irradiated. Franklin: Or if you fly on a plane, right, you’re exposed to higher background— Munn: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. [VIDEO CUTS] Munn: If you live in Denver, hey. Or I can move from Richland to Spokane and almost double my external exposure. Because we have very low exposure here in Richland, contrary to popular belief. But the sad thing about this entire time, from my perspective, is the facts don’t matter. What people feel in their gut matters. That’s what’s driving us as human beings; apparently, it always has. Living here is a true experience. I’ve enjoyed it. I’m always surprised when people say there’s nothing to do in Richland. My problem is—probably because I’m continually invested in technical activities of some sort—my problem is, I don’t have enough time on my calendar. But it’s true. It’s an interesting, interesting place to live for a technical person, and I’ve enjoyed it immensely. It’s been a fascinating period of life. I’m very fortunate to have lived to be an ancient old lady. Very long in the tooth. And unfortunate that so many of my colleagues have already gone to their reward. Many of us feel highly rewarded, however, for having been here, having been a part of history. I have no feel for how much of this history is going to be written and how much of it’s going to be accurate. We all know, history’s written by the people who write history. And that’s very rarely the technical folks. So, what you’re doing with these oral histories, in my mind, is exceedingly important, not just to the technical community, but I think it’s very important for us now and in the future to hear the actual words of the people who were there. Remember the old—you may be too young to remember the You Are There little snippets of history that we used to get in the movie houses from time to time, and later on television. It’s nice, I think, to see the folks who were there, hear their words, and get some feel of the perception they had of their reality. It’s been a great ride, all the way from Model As to joint activities and the space crafts. Franklin: Well, Wanda, thank you so much for such an enlightening and well-delivered interview. I really appreciate it. Munn: Thank you. It’s been a wonderful, wonderful time to be here. Appreciate you, appreciate what Washington State University, and the national system are doing. It’s been a delight. And thank you to the long-gone Westinghouse Hanford Company. That was—and the Fast Flux Test Facility was and will always be an outstanding member of the research and development community. A facility like no other. We were very honored to be a part of it. Franklin: Great. Well, thank you so much. Munn: Thank you. <a href="https://youtu.be/RXmA9oJF9IU">View interview on Youtube.</a> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:35:43 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 300 Area B Reactor K Basins K Reactor T Plant Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site late 1970s-today Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1980-1995 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Minta Admiral Grace Hopper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Wanda Munn Description An account of the resource An interview with Wanda Munn conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 11-02-2016 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2018-31-1: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. Relation A related resource <a href="http://hanfordhistory.com/collections/show/24">Wanda Munn, Oral History Metadata</a> 300 Area Atomic Energy Commission B Reactor B Reactor Museum Association Bechtel BRMA Cold War Department of Energy Flood Floods Hanford K Basin K Basins K Reactor K-Basin K-Basins Manhattan Project Mountain Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Park River Safety Savannah River supplies T Plant War Westinghouse https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F55e95ce232b5f056280415f614f4b56e.JPG 4c0cb7db921db74673faf5dce0bac40e https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F6a71efa32d1dcd70e19f991fd73fdef4.mp4 a755e008b26dcebec6765d1df054cadb Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Douglas O’Reagan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Sue Olson Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data 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. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:19:21 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 200 West Area 300 Area 703 Building B Plant K-West Area Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1944-today Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1944- ~1974 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Wilfred "Bill" Johnson Sam Volpentest Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Sue Olson Description An account of the resource An interview with Sue Olson conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 02-05-2016 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2018-31-1: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. 200 West Area 300 Area 703 Building B Plant Cold War DuPont General Electric Hanford K-West Area Manhattan Project School Street War https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fdff2838652d98539e2d337d50bc2bb24.JPG ee6cb6157ca5d2dcadedfa2b78bd3f2d Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Ronald Palmer Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound 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. <a href="https://youtu.be/81_pUoreaDo">View interview on Youtube.</a> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:16:48 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 2-East Area 300 Area K-West Area Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1979-1984 2007-today Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1979-1984 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Ronald Palmer Description An account of the resource An interview with Ronald Palmer conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 10-26-2016 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2018-31-1: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. Relation A related resource <a href="http://hanfordhistory.com/collections/show/19">Ron Palmer, Oral History Metadata</a> 2-East Area 300 Area Battelle Bechtel Cold War Container Containers Department of Energy Event Hanford K-West Area Kennewick Mountain River Savannah River Street Sun War https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F88bce9b81ca249db9848f70b7af43ee8.JPG 2e687cd91e36f387ec1b2604db2a6752 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Robert Parr Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: And do you like to go by Robert or by Bob? Robert Parr: Bob. Franklin: Okay— Parr: If I get going too far, Robert is usually a buzzword that causes me to refocus. Franklin: Okay. We will have to put out your full legal name when we introduce you. Parr: Okay. Franklin: But then I’ll refer to you as Bob from then on. Parr: Yeah, okay. Franklin: Okay, you ready Victor? Victor Vargas: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I’m conducting an oral history interview with Robert James Parr on November 17th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Bob about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your name? Parr: My last name is spelled Parr, P-A-R-R. My first name is Robert, R-O-B-E-R-T. My middle name is James, J-A-M-E-S. Franklin: Great, thank you. Thanks, Bob. So tell me how and why you came to the area to work at Hanford. Parr: I graduated from WSU itself in 1973 with a degree in police science and administration. Franklin: In Pullman. Parr: Pullman, the big campus. And after I graduated, I went into work into law enforcement. I ended up in the late ‘70s working for the State of Washington State Liquor Control Board, long before cannabis, as an enforcement officer. It was a good agency, both regulatory and criminal enforcement. So it was—no day was the same. But when I looked at it, the pay and benefits weren’t what I thought they would be. And then I noticed—I saw an ad in I believe it was either the Seattle Times or Seattle Post Intelligencer that Atlantic Richfield Hanford—ARCO—was looking for people to work for them in their uniformed security group called the Hanford Patrol. So I checked it out, and I found out that their pay was much better than I was working for the state. So I went and interviewed with them at a hotel—I think it was the Doubletree, or is the Doubletree now at Southcenter in Renton, Washington. So I did the interview, and I noticed that everyone else being interviewed, we were all ex-military or law enforcement. So I took the interview, and then they offered me a job. I had previously applied with ARCO, and of course at that time the transition occurred, so it was now Rockwell Hanford. So they offered me a job starting in—I interviewed, I think, sometime in the December timeframe, and then right after New Year’s they offered me a job starting to work in February 1980. So I was married at the time, so we moved over to Tri-Cities, got an apartment, and I had done my physical and all the screening before. And then I started to work for Rockwell Hanford in February of 1980. My initial employment—my initial job was with Hanford Patrol. So, they had their own—they called it an academy, and it was at what is the 1100 Area, which used to be—one of the activities we did at the 1100 Area was the bus lot. Because we had buses onsite. So at the office where the buses were dispatched from, about the back third of it was the Hanford Patrol Training Academy. It wasn’t much, but that’s where I went to work, and initial training was about seven weeks. While I was there, I received my—I already had had a clearance from the Department of Energy—security clearance. So my security clearance showed up, and since I had a security clearance—many of my peers in this class—there were about 20 or 30 of us—didn’t have clearances, so they were work approvals, what we called WAs. But I had my Q security clearance, so I went right to work. My first assignment was in 200-West, 200-East, and 100-N. So I worked out at the north end of the site for a couple months. And then I got reassigned to 300 Area, which was a composite area of—we did fuels production and research there. So it was the contractors—we had Rockwell providing security and fire services and transportation. United Nuclear was operating fuels production for the N Reactor at the north end of 300 Area. We also had Northwest National Labs, Battelle Memorial who was operating in there; they had several facilities. And then Westinghouse Hanford was doing fuel production and research for the Fast Flux Test Facility, which wasn’t online yet, but almost was nearing completion. So I did that for—I was there for quite some time. And then about less than six months after I showed up, I got promoted. The Hanford Project, the uniformed security and protection onsite hadn’t really adjusted to changing times in society there. They issued us revolvers, and that was when revolvers were starting to be phased out. Automatics, or a more modern sidearm, was being issued. So the big change in technology was their alarm systems. Westinghouse Hanford had led the way. They actually wrote the software. We were using computer-operated security system at 300 and 400 Areas, 400 being Fast Flux Test Facility. So I got to get in on the ground floor of that. I participated in the acceptance test process for both 300 and 400 Areas. We brought the system online. It was state of the art. Westinghouse had gone out and found the best equipment and the best systems, and then wrote their own software for the system. So it was much beyond the old analog systems we used to have onsite. Many of the alarm systems at that point, particularly ones at the Plutonium Finishing Plant were technology from the ‘50s and were probably installed in the ‘60s. And here it was the ‘80s—and the mid-‘80s by now. So we did that, and eventually Rockwell, they also put in a similar system at Plutonium Finishing Plant. But they had a problem: the people that they hired to write their software were two guys in a garage. And it didn’t go well. God bless them for trying, but it didn’t go well. So they ended up buying the Westinghouse software and then they had their software people come in and make some adjustments to it based on their equipment. So they were similar systems. So I got qualified to operate all of them, and shortly thereafter I got promoted again. So now, instead of being a supervisor in an alarm facility on a rotating basis, I was now the coordinator responsible for all four rotating shifts, first at 300 Area and eventually at Fast Flux Test Facility. So I did that until 1993. During that time, Department of Energy was also ramping up its efforts on security, trying to be a little more professional and coming into a more modern era. So they had developed a central training academy down at DOE Albuquerque, at that field office. So they came up to Hanford, and they had developed a training program to teach supervisors on security forces how to train their employees. So I took it, and that worked good. But I was also—when I first moved to Tri-Cities I was on Coast Guard Reserve and I drilled at Station Kennewick, a small search and rescue. It’s the navigation station. So I drilled there, but the Coast Guard started downsizing in the Reagan administration. So I shifted over to the Army National Guard, and shortly after I joined the National Guard, they sent me to a school to learn how to be what the Army called an instructor. So all of the sudden I had two pieces of paper—one from the Department of Energy and one from the Army—saying I was an instructor. Well, in 1993 I was offered a job at Plutonium Finishing Plant with the training department. So in the fall of ’93, I left Safeguard and Security, the Hanford Patrol, and went to work at Plutonium Finishing Plant as a—you could call it instructor, but the official job title was Training Specialist. And then they went through several changes, so I think I’ve been a technical instructor, I’ve been a senior training specialist, and so four or five different job title changes; same job. At Plutonium Finishing Plant, they hadn’t quite—they had a vacancy, so they put me in it, and initially my manager’s idea was, well, you can assist someone on a key training project. So I got assigned as the second instructor on several training projects. And then one day, he walked in—the manager walked in, and he was looking for one of the employees that I was paired up with on one of the projects. And he said, well, where is he? And I said, I don’t know. He said, well, are you running that class today? And I go, what class? Because my peer and I hadn’t even talked about it. So next thing I know, I was now the person responsible or person-in-charge at Plutonium Finishing Plant. And it was a program we set up in response to a finding: when you have an event in those days, they would investigate it and then they would figure out what the corrective actions would be. So the finding, the corrective action, was that we would start a training program at Plutonium Finishing Plant for person-in-charge. So we mirrored it after a similar program at FFTF. And next thing I know, I’m running a training program, and we’re putting all the supervisors—the workforce supervisors in the plant are going through it so they can learn how to perform work at the plant. Almost all our work at the plant was done in either procedures or work package. Work packages were usually maintenance- or construction-related. So I got to be the—my title soon became the PIC-meister. Because not only did I have to coordinate their training, but I also had to develop their certification and qualification. So I did that much of the time I was there. And then other programs started going my way. I also ended up teaching Safety Basis. Because at a DOE facility, it’s somewhat similar to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission-regulated facility, an operating commercial reactor. But their idea is that the Safety Basis is those documents, those commitments that have been made on how the plant can be operated. In other words, to a non-commercial DOE facility, it’s your operating license. So every time we proposed an activity, we had to look—or sometimes even a construction or maintenance package, we had to ensure it was within the Safety Basis. So I ended up teaching that course. So pretty soon my work focus seemed to be emergent training. Anything we had an event or an incident, where training was needed the day before yesterday, it ended up on my plate. So that’s what I did. By that time I was in the Army National Guard, and then after 9/11 happened, the 27th of September that year, I got a phone call at work telling me to come in. So I cleared work as fast as I could, came home. My eldest daughter was living with me. She fixed a boxed lunch for me, and I got in the car and I started driving towards Fort Lewis. And that first time I was gone sixteen months. Then I was home and I left again for a year-and-a-half. Went to Iraq twice. And then I came back, and in between that, there was all kinds of little three- to four-week taskings from the Army. And then in 2008, I left for four months, and came back for three months, and then I left in—January 2010, I got a phone call, and the phone call was, Sergeant Major, are you going to be on the plane tomorrow? I go, what plane? Well, you’re flying to Afghanistan tomorrow. Well, thanks, could you send me a set of orders? So they faxed a set of orders, and I walked up to my manager and said, I’ve got to leave. And that was about 9:00 in the morning, and by—before 11:00 I was turning in all my keys, my security badge and everything, and I was leaving. And then I didn’t come home for two years. And I came back, and by that time, President Obama was President of the United States. He used stimulus money to many federal agencies. And the Department of Energy took it, but their approach was a little bit different. While in the Army, we used some of it, but we hired companies to come in to do work for the Department of Defense. Whereas DOE used the approach of having their contractors hire more employees. So I came back and the stimulus money was running out and they were overstaffed. So the next—they offered a voluntary reduction of force, a layoff, early retirement. So I asked my management what my retirement’s worth. And they—so I drove down to, I think it was Stevens Center, not far from WSU Tri-Cities. And I walked in and they went over my retirement with me, and god bless them, they gave me credit for time served. Not like a jail sentence, but my time on active duty with the National Guard. So I raised my right hand and said, I’ll take it. And I left, and my last day was the end of September in 2011. And I had four years of great veteran’s benefits through the VA bill. So I took my veterans benefits and came back to WSU Tri-Cities this time. No athletic eligibility so the university couldn’t screw with me much. And I got another degree. Franklin: And what’s your degree, what was that degree in? Parr: The second degree is a Bachelor of Arts in Social Science. So I got to take all those cool classes that—the first time around, I declared my major the first year. And in the early ‘70s, once you declared your major, your goose was cooked, you took what they told you. They offered you a very narrow pathway. So the second time around I got to take fun things like economics and lots of psychology and some English courses. A lot of history. So I think I developed into a better-educated, much broader person. Franklin: That’s really fascinating. Parr: Yeah. Franklin: Good to see someone come in the social sciences, too, as a historian. So I see here on some of the notes Emma had written up that your father worked at Hanford as well? Parr: My father was an Army officer. Hanford started out as an Army project. Corps of Engineers and the DuPont Corporation, which was quite a corporation back in the day. It still is. But they did a lot of work for the government in the ordnance field. And the Navy used the approach—because the Navy was heavily involved—not heavily—but involved in the Manhattan Project, and they were doing some of the uranium research. So the Navy ran it through their Ordnance Corps. The Army ran it through the Corps of Engineers, but the Corps of Engineers didn’t have all the resources. So one of the things was, because at the time Hanford was believed to be a viable target in the event of total war. So initially we sided—my father was Coast Artillery which later became Antiaircraft Artillery. So my father was one of the officers that was detailed here temporarily to site the guns. And they did some site work, and eventually that siting work, when they put one of the Nike systems—the missiles, to ring the Hanford Site and I believe around Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane. Some of the siting work that they had done in the ‘40s was used to site the missiles when, I believe, they were being placed in the ‘50s. So my dad was here temporarily. He was one of a lot—a lot of Army personnel came and went. I think people get the—we even had MPs here. We of course had antiaircraft artillery which later became air defense. So for many years there was a heavy Army presence here. It wasn’t totally—it wasn’t like you’d see an Army uniform everywhere, but Colonel Matthias was the commanding officer. And a very unique approach, because his approach was that—and Dad told me about it—his approach was that he was the commanding officer, and he was responsible. Later, when I came back to work here, I didn’t see that same attitude with the Department of Energy. Because one of the things I noticed is—I worked for a lot of contractors. First started looking at ARCO, then it was—when I came here it was Rockwell Hanford, then it was Westinghouse Hanford, then it was Babcock & Wilcox, which a lot of people think of them as the maritime boiler company, but they’re also heavy into the nuclear business. A great company to work for. They were only here for a year. And then it was with Fluor. Then eventually when they broke up all the little contracts, I worked for a company called NREP, which was the training contractor—one of the training contractors onsite. And then eventually after I left, after I retired, NREP went away and they consolidated back. One of the things that I noticed about DOE is a contractor will be—of course they don’t screw with Battelle. It’s hard to screw with those guys because they do great work for a lot of different things, and they’re on the cutting edge of so many different technologies and they’re so important to our national wellbeing. But DOE would start beating up on the contractors. So you know that contractor’s probably going to be on its way out. And Department of Energy over the years—god bless them. They’re great Americans. But they can’t seem to make up their mind how they’re going to run. Sometimes it’s—when I first came here it was five or six principal contractors, and then they went to one big contractor, and then they broke it down again, and then they subcontracted out a lot of work, and then now they’re bringing it back. Franklin: Do you think that has to do with the fact that DOE—higher-ups in DOE are subject to political appointments? Parr: Not only the political appointments but also the budget process. But I don’t see that constant shifting—you see it in other federal agencies, cabinet-level agencies, but not the extent that DOE does it. It’s almost like, well, we can’t do it. And then oftentimes, I’ve known—I think one of the things that’s responsible for a lot of—for some of the problems—we didn’t have a lot of problems—but some of the events we had out at Hanford were directly related to the field office, Department of Energy Richland. They’re great people and everything, but sometimes I think the guidance they gave, and oftentimes the funding for the program was stopped at the end of the fiscal year, we were told, don’t spend any more money on it, leave it as-is, do something else. Well, that’s kind of what happened at the PRF explosion. But it wasn’t DOE—it wasn’t the field office’s fault? Strange. Franklin: Can you talk a bit more about that event? That was in ’97? Parr: Mm-hm. Franklin: And you were working at PFP— Parr: I was in a training group. It occurred on a weekend. So got to work, and you could actually see the—some of the—you had to know what to look for, but you could see the external damage to the facility. And of course, I had been involved in training the shift supervisor. I was at his oral board when he qualified as shift supervisor, because I supported oral—one of the things I got assigned with was supporting the oral boards. So I was at his oral board, and I’d known him for several years, and I thought he was probably one of our better shift supervisors at Plutonium Finishing Plant. But I had—I noticed, as we did it, and then they came looking for the training packages, well, we never—we did initial training on operating of PRF, but it got stopped, they withdrew the money from it. So I don’t even know where the training packages were. But they were concerned—and I noticed that our emergency response to the event was flawed. We didn’t respond well. We hadn’t trained on it, and we hadn’t really devoted a lot of time and effort to emergency preparedness. It hadn’t been a focus. So I got involved in the corrective action. I ended up teaching. We now instituted a drill program at the plant. So I got involved in the drill training program. In other words, how to train people that are working the drills. Many of us were ex-military, so we understood how to run a drill. No big thing. But we had a formal training program. I ended up adding some material to the PIC training program. So there were a lot of corrective actions, and eventually we demonstrated readiness to go back to work. But the issue still was we were told to stop working at PRF. So it just—and we didn’t really devote—we should have devoted time—we should have had the resources to look back at that and figure out what the hazards were that were still remaining in PRF. But we were told not to spend any more money on it. So when it’s the end of the fiscal year and you’ve got no Costco to charge activities to, you don’t work. Franklin: Our project’s grant funded. Parr: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: We’re a subcontractor, so I understand. Can you talk a bit about—so you would have been at Hanford during that—and I think on patrol during that transition period when the Cold War ended and when production wrapped up and we shifted into this new phase. I wonder if you could talk about that transition. Parr: Well, the big transition initially was—and the one was much harder to discern—was the transition from the Carter administration to the Reagan administration. All of the sudden—it was much easier to see in the National Guard, because all of the sudden, new equipment started showing up and you started getting money to train with and send soldiers to schools. But here at Hanford we started getting new equipment. That’s when we—security had pretty much done—we’d upgraded all our alarm systems. But then we started getting money for communication systems, Hanford Patrol’s initial entry training started changing. And I noticed it elsewhere onsite, because we went from kind of a standby mode as far as defense work then, to actively producing material. Really significant change. And that went on for several years. As the Reagan administration ended and we went into President Bush’s administration, the level of effort kind of reached its maximum, as far as funding for defense work. And then I remember when the wall came down, we kind of backed off defense work. And then, okay, stop that, we’ve got enough plutonium. We closed down PUREX. FFTF was going away because they decided that that type of reactor wasn’t going to be it, even though we had received funding from the Japanese to do work. And they couldn’t find research work for FFTF, so they started shutting it down. Even though it was, at the time, it was probably the most modern reactor the Department of Energy had. But we had never, never gone to the idea of making a dual-purpose reactor and producing power. We’d done the engineering studies for it, we’d done some of the preliminary design work, but we never installed them. Franklin: I thought N Reactor was. Parr: N Reactor was, but we were going to do that to FFTF. So we’d actually—there was actually a piece of ground at the Fast Flux Test Facility where they were going to do that. And the engineering and preliminary design work had been done. So we kind of shifted from that, and it’s as if we were struggling for a national energy policy—where are we going to go? Franklin: Interesting. Parr: So we kind of—and the N Reactor—when Chernobyl went, the N Reactor, I believe, was in a fueling outage—its annual outage. So then we began to look at the fact that the N Reactor was a unique reactor. Very effective, very economical to run. Washington Public Power Supply System had built their generation plant next to it. But the political—Chernobyl caused a lot of—well, obviously, it was a severe blow to the Soviet Union. And the Ukrainian people are still having to deal with it. But the ramifications and fallout from any event in an industry, and nuclear’s probably one of the more visible ones, causes a ripple effect elsewhere. And our ripple effect was we never—we did the engineering analysis, but I think the political outcry was a little bit too much to reopen—or resume production at the N Reactor. Then also we really didn’t need any more plutonium; we had sufficient for national defense. So it kind of became the issue. There’s a lot of politics. So let’s go into that for a minute. Let’s talk red and blue states. Red being the party—a red is a Republican state; a blue state being a Democratic state. We are a blue state. Both US Senators come from the other side of the mountains. In this area we have one voice in Congress that speaks for us, the local congressman. So when even Spokane, which is Republican, too, when it begins to turn against this industry and this area, then politically it becomes no longer viable. Then of course we had—the congressional delegation from Oregon was speaking out against it. So it becomes politically unviable. Franklin: Right, right. It was kind of—Chernobyl kind of kicked off like a perfect storm to just kind of hurt the nuclear industry and Hanford. Parr: And then—I believe it was 2000—there was an event in Japan, a criticality at a production facility. And that also caused a wave of consternation. Although it was interesting, because one of the subjects I instructed at PFP was criticality safety. And we were very diligent about it. We did refresher—everyone got a—you got your initial site training and then because you worked at PFP, we had a PFP specific class talking about the risks we had for criticality safety. And then we had an annual refresher course. So we looked at what was going on in the industry, using the lessons learned, and some of the changes in process we were doing to plan. It was usually a one- to two-hour refresher class every year. So we looked at all that. But when the Japanese had their event it was kind of interesting. Some of the experts—or the people I depended on to give me advice on what to put in the training event—were criticality safety experts from Northwest National Labs. And all of a sudden, I’m calling someone—well, he’s not here. Well, where is he? Well, he’s in Japan. Then I realized, okay. So, some of our top people in our industry from right here at Hanford went over to deal with the issue. Franklin: Interesting. You worked for a lot of different contractors. That’s always kind of a—it’s interesting to me how, you know, because we say Hanford Site, but that really obscures the organization of the site and the work. I’m just wondering if you could talk a bit more about that—shifting between contractors like that, and how that affected the mission of the site, how that might have affected employee morale, and how it kind of affected you personally. Parr: Well, I think that the big transition—because I got here after Rockwell had come in. So I’m working for Site Safeguard and Security. And I get my paycheck from Rockwell. But I work at 300 Area, which in those days—United Nuclear was about 10 to 15% of the puzzle. Because I knew—I saw what our funding was for security services coming from. But most of it came from Westinghouse Hanford, Northwest National Labs, Battelle Memorial. And I noticed that, working with their security staffs from all four companies, that they were very—Northwest National Labs was very, very different. The people they had working their security programs were security professionals. They were very much into assets protection. Not only people, but information and also property. So assets protection was very big for them. One of the things that I—the first thing that struck me was when I went to work at 300 Area, they’ve got a book—a three-ring binder—and it’s got every one of their facilities with a floorplan and a description of what’s there, is there any special nuclear material there, are there any classified document storage areas? You know, what is the security force protecting? Incredible. No one else had one. Westinghouse was pretty much on the same level. Very much an administrative security. Had great programs. If you needed—if something unusual happened and you needed their management’s approval on it to get it, you were talking on the phone with those people and usually within three to five minutes, they’d be calling you. Incredible. They had a different mindset. They were building FFTF at the time, and they were very much—their corporate and company philosophy was very much on operating reactors. Because they built reactors, they built reactor vessels themselves, so they were very much into that commercial power production. They were a large government contractor, not only for DOE but other agencies. They did a lot of defense work. They did a lot of work for other federal agencies: Department of Treasury, Department of the Interior, Department of Justice. So there was a big mindset of meeting the customer’s needs. Westinghouse was very employee oriented. Of course they were only about 1,500 employees, whereas Rockwell was several thousand more. So it was very interesting working for Rockwell but being in a Westinghouse Battelle UNC facility. So I kind of—we kind of felt like orphans. It’s like—no, I’m very serious. Each one of the contractors had their own company newspaper. So, Rockwell, we’d get it two or three days later. Westinghouse, the day it was published, it was brought by our building, too. Even though everyone that worked in that building except for the janitor—the custodial staff—was a Rockwell employee, Westinghouse delivered it. They reached out to us. And then when they ran the big—at that time, and that’s when DOE field office went to one big contractor—of course Battelle had their own thing. So that didn’t change. But all of the sudden, it’s like the management of my own group was very—they worked in a Rockwell facility at the north end of the site. They weren’t too happy. But we didn’t have any problems making the transition, but they did. There was a lot of turmoil—not a lot, but a significant amount of turmoil in the north end of the site, particularly in Safeguard and Security, because all of the sudden Westinghouse had a successful program and they went out there and they weren’t impressed by some of the programs they found. Franklin: So that’s the reason, then, for some of that turmoil or hard feelings? Parr: Oh, yeah. Westinghouse, you didn’t want to lose control of special nuclear material. That’s really a bad thing. And Westinghouse’s standard, how they did their administrative program and their controls, was much more developed, much more thorough. So when they moved in—so now they’re taking over Plutonium Finishing Plant, which had a large amount of plutonium back in the days. They weren’t—it was kind of a shock to Westinghouse. Oh, we’ve got all this—before it was just fuel components. Now they’ve got weapons grade material that’s designed for ultimate defense work—the end use being defense work. So there was a little turmoil there, but then in about six months it all kind of evaporated. And then employees were actually sad when Westinghouse left. Because Westinghouse was much more attuned to employee communication, employee benefits. Rockwell—it was kind of interesting. I remember one time I had to go to east. This is where Rockwell Hanford’s corporate office was. I go out there and I’m walking around and I look, and in all these offices—even in cubicles—because there was some offices, but there was also cubicle land. You’d walk out and you’d see pictures of the B-1 Bomber which was a Rockwell aircraft, when Rockwell still made aircraft. And I’m looking around, and down at Westinghouse, everyone was an ex-Navy nuke or ex-commercial power nuke. But out at Rockwell, they were all refugees from when the B-1 program got canceled, so Rockwell moved all these engineers out here. So it was a very different mindset: the aviation versus naval nuclear and the commercial nuclear industry. Franklin: Interesting. So you said Rockwell was the aviation. Parr: Yeah, North American Rockwell, the old aviation company. Probably the most famous aircraft that—I’m sure that they made other ones—but the one that comes to mind is the P-51 Mustang. That was their biggie. Franklin: You’ve mentioned of the older security systems that were still in place in the 80s and you said analog. Can you give me an example of an analog security system? Parr: Well, it was a system where the point of where the actual, shall we say, sensor, whether it’s a magnetic or whatever, when contact is broken it sends—you lose connectivity, so it would send a signal and it would—the little mechanical panel would go red and make an audible tone and go red. So kind of a dated technology, whereas-- Franklin: How would you track that from a central area? Parr: Well, it’d be hardwired, usually to a facility that would be nearby. Franklin: Okay. Parr: At PFP, the alarm facility—the central alarm facility was a little wooden building—no, I’m serious— Franklin: I believe you. Parr: --that was near the main entry point into the plant. Franklin: Okay. Parr: But a more modern system would—you could actually, you’d get—the signal would—you could actually query the signal to see the strength of signal and is it because the system—there’s a power problem? In other words, is there a problem with the system, or is it an actual alarm? So you could query it back. And there were no microwaves, there were no—they were usually—their presence detectors were very limited in capability and obviously, no cameras—or very few cameras. Franklin: So like CCTV would have been a big introduction. Parr: So when they did install CCTV, there was—the fuels production facility was the first one to bring it online. They actually had—you could see the entry point into the secured area, you could see the hallways, you could see the primary rooms where the primary points of value were. And then on the perimeter, they normally had fixed cameras, pan-tilt zoom, but then they also had cameras with low-light capability, with flood lights on them. So it was much—and then there was actually a perimeter fence line and security system. Although at the 300 Area it was kind of dicey, because we were retrofitting a security system into an area where there’d been none. So there was some areas you couldn’t put a double fence line, so we ended up with a single fence line, supplanted with motion detectors—microwave motion detectors. And then they also had a fence that was monitored. They called it a taut wire system, because it was a weapon that if it ever were touched—and sometimes by small animals or tumbleweed—we seem to have some of that out here at Hanford—it would go off. So you’d take a look on the camera, see what it was. Franklin: Oh, okay, yeah I bet that would help you reduce a lot of false alarms. Parr: One year after a fire—we seem to have fires out at—well, range fires at Hanford are not unknown. But we had one fire, and I can remember at FFTF that the debris from the fire kept plugging up our perimeter system for several days thereafter until we got a work crew in there to actually pick up the debris and partially burned pieces and the full tumbleweeds. Because the fire would generate a lot of heat in the air, so not only do you have debris from the fire itself, but you also have debris being moved by the air currents. And the way the wind was blowing off Rattlesnake Mountain. Franklin: Did you—sorry, I’m just looking over some of my notes here, and I wanted to ask you about—oh, shoot. It says here that in the 1980s, you helped during an anti-nuclear protest at the Federal Building? Parr: Oh, I remember that. No, I didn’t do it. I was on duty that day. And what we’d done is, in the ‘80s we had anti-nuclear protests. And we believed that one was going to be big. So Safeguard and Security and the Hanford Patrol being the uniformed service, they pulled a lot of us in to work that day, and then they took key people—and they actually had buses from Site Transportation, they were going to take care of the demonstrators. Because once they crossed onto the Federal Building property, that was DOE’s area of responsibility, no longer the city’s. So anyway, there’s about—there weren’t that many protestors, perhaps 20 or 40 at most downtown. So there were all these people, and we probably had 50 to 70 people staged and ready to go. Get the buses, put them on the buses, and take them to the federal magistrate. Then all of the sudden, there’s a call come out. There’s people without badges inside West Area at the north end of the site. And apparently—we’re down—I think I was at either—I can’t remember if I was at the 300 Area in the alarm facility or 400 Area—but I’m listening to this, and all of the sudden the frequency’s going crazy—patrol’s primary operating frequency—and then the second frequency, the tactical frequency, is getting busy too. You can hear the voices on the radio, a little bit of stress going on. And we’re all laughing like hell, because, you know, hey, that’s where the weapons-grade material is. Aren’t we protecting that? Of course, we were heretics. We’re giggling, you know. It’s funny because it’s not happening to us; it’s happening to someone else. Because we had additional staff at 300 Area and we had additional staff at FFTF because it’s an operating reactor at the time. So apparently what the demonstrators had done is they walked in from Highway 240, and West Area isn’t that far in. They’d walked in, hopped over the outer fence, a single fence line in West Area—hopped over the fence line in West Area and they’re marching towards—and of course, unless you know West Area, the big, tall, long buildings all look alike. They’ve all got stacks and water towers. You can’t tell the difference between one of the old canyon buildings—one of the old production facilities—and PFP. So, all of the sudden, they’ve got protestors in West Area, but all their resources, except for the bare minimum, are downtown. But then it gets even better. When they got the protestors, they put them on a bus, and they thought they’d just being going to the district court in Kennewick. No, took them to the federal magistrate, out of town. Franklin: Wow. Parr: Yeah. So, it was kind of funny. But we had gone and—the funny thing was, because of the—they actually, in those days, most of us wore tactical uniform, camouflage or whatever. But the people who were actually going to detain and transport the protestors all had to be in full uniform, you know, pants and shirt and badge. So it was one of the better events. Franklin: I interviewed a gentleman a while back who worked at PFP who talked about when they would load the product up, and there would be very heavy security and people that almost looked like they were in black ops, or like very—I was wondering, were you ever involved in any of that or did you— Parr: The Department of Energy had a courier program, and they were based, I think, at Albuquerque at the time. And they usually had a transport vehicle and escort vehicles. They were specially trained to protect the shipments. There’s other ways to move things, but usually once a weapon is produced, it’s turned over to the military, and their transport is their responsibility. But components—whether it’s plutonium or whatever—would usually be transported by the courier group. When they took all the material out—and that happened while I was—probably most of it was done while I was in Afghanistan. It was the same courier group. They had extremely good communications, so it’d always be known where they were, and there were contingency plans in case there was an event. And I don’t think they ever—other than a mechanical failure of a vehicle, I don’t think they ever had an event. And of course protestors were always fixated on, you know, the media was always fixated on the white train. Yeah, okay. [LAUGHTER] I’ve never seen one, but—[LAUGHTER] Franklin: What were the most challenging and rewarding aspects of working at Hanford? Parr: The most rewarding one was—I think the people. When I worked in training, I got to know everyone—almost everyone in the plant would come to one of our training events. Some groups needed—the higher-risk job, the more training you got. So it was working with the people. And then some people, it was just a paycheck. But the employees who took pride in their work and enjoyed their work, those were always the fun people to be with. Not that they were there for fun, but just, it was very rewarding to work with them. Now I’m retired and I still see some of them around the community. So it’s always fun to see someone that I spent—you know, worked with. I still see the vice president of the Steel Workers’ Local, because I worked—I got to work closely with him. So to see those people, and to see their successes and to do that. The difficult part, sometimes, was employees who were just there—or people who were just there for the paycheck. Or struggling through personal issues. Being able, trying to help them, or to get—a shift, a work crew doing a work package, they’re people. And the strength of any group is always at the level of the lowest performer. So the performers who were struggling, those were the tough—or the ones who were—sometimes you get cynical. People get emotional. And dealing with the cynicism. I think one of the toughest things I ever had was—I wasn’t involved in the project; I was training, but I wasn’t the trainer for that particular project, but I was doing some other training. They worked hard, they were staging the materials—I think it was the Pencil Tank Reduction at PFP. They were about to take the pencil tanks, clean them up, reduce them in size, and then shift them off to scrap. And they were making hard to get the materials to write the pre-procedures to do the job, get their training in order, and get ready to go. In the aftermath, when Department of Energy said, well, we’re not going to do that right now. But materials had already been—a considerable amount of resources had been pushed in that project to get it ready to go. But then Department of Energy said, well, no, we’re not going to do that. We’re going to take that money and we’re going to use it for something else. Planning at Hanford is always one of our toughest things. Has been for years. There’s so many things we did that—where it never came off, or things changed. Not too far from here are the bus lots at 1100 Area. And the parking lot’s at 300 Area. We spent a lot of money—or the government spent a lot of money improving those parking lots, making sure they had the good drainage and so on and so forth. Improving the bus lot and making it a much safer, much more efficient operation. And then we canceled bus service. A couple years later, I know that our local law enforcement—I think Richland Police Department—used it for a pursuit driving course, that piece of ground, and now it’s gone commercial. But all the things we do, and then all of a sudden—boom—we never realize the full value of what we had spent money on. Franklin: You kind of—I’m sensing from that and the comment you made earlier about the lack of energy focus—maybe do you see kind of a lack of focus at Hanford or kind of surrounds some activities at Hanford? Parr: I think when Congressman Foley—Tom Foley—was speaker of the House, and he was from—let’s see, we’re four, I think that’s 5th Congressional District, in Spokane. Speaker Foley—and this was probably about the time of the Chernobyl issue and all of that—Speaker Foley proposed, in a public statement, transitioning Hanford from Department of Energy back to Corps of Engineers. And knowing a lot of engineers, Army engineers, they’re great people and they do great things. And I looked at that, and I go, I don’t think that’s the right move. But now looking back on it, and having worked with the Corps of Engineers in both the reconstruction of Iraq, before we withdrew, and then a lot of the work—there’ve been some mistakes—a lot of mistakes in Afghanistan and Iraq. But looking at some of the work they’ve done there, I hate to admit it, but I think Tom was right. We should have switched. Because I think the Corps of Engineers is a lot more focused and a lot more planning. Because they don’t look at—oh, we’re going to—I think the Corps looks at the long-term: five, ten, fifteen, twenty years. And looks for a strategy. Whereas I see Department of Energy, particularly—and I know the field offices are all different. What I saw in DOE Albuquerque was different than DOE RL, was different than DOE Rocky Flats. I think the Department of Energy field offices, particularly Richland, focused on the near-term, not the long-term. The near-term being this fiscal year and maybe next. But I see that in working with Northwest National Labs, I noticed they were always looking at where we’re going to be in four, five years. And I think—because with the Army I got to support a couple projects. Then I was in Afghanistan. We were doing something and I needed some reach-back capability. So unofficially I reached back to Northwest National Labs to give me help with something in Afghanistan that I was encountering. And it took me a couple days to find the right person and then get him up on a secure—I’m not Hillary. So I used a secure—all my emails were in a secure system—and to reach out and get that information, so how we could be more effective in Afghanistan. So I saw that kind of work, and I see—dealing with them and watching what they’re doing, they’re looking at the—they look at, they forecast out in the future. What’s it going to be like in ten, 15, 20 years? What’s the end state? I think RL has gotten, or particularly in my time, they were in the survival mode, reacting, rather than planning. I think one of the key losses we had—we had the DOE RL manager one time was a guy by the name of Mike Lawrence. And later he left, but I noticed when he left—I think Mr. Lawrence was—he planned, he looked at things. He tried to anticipate where the federal budget was going and what the program was going to be. And I think after that, it became a more reactive group. And now I continue to watch, and I watch them—we were spending money—apparently taxpayers were spending money on upgrading the Federal Building, because they’re the primary occupant there. And then they said, no, we’re going to move our office—move our staff out to the Stevens Center Complex, which is right off—between George Washington Way and Stevens. So we’re going to move out there. So you figure, oh, okay, that’s going to cost a little money. And then what’s going to happen to the contractor employees there? Well, they’re going to just—the taxpayer owns the Federal Building, but the Stevens Center is leased facilities. So I can’t—I can’t figure that one out. God bless them, but I can’t figure it out. Franklin: Yeah, we exist in a similar thing here at WSU. Our project is in a leased facility and it seems to be the way that—I would agree with you that that is—there’s more focus recently on our near-term solutions, especially here in Richland, but ignoring the long-term solutions. Maybe because the long-terms are scary. I don’t know. But— Parr: You’ve got to—what do they say in the Army? Oh. Embrace the suck. Franklin: Yeah. Is there anything we haven’t talked about that you’d like to cover? Parr: Well, it was interesting being at Hanford Patrol initially and watching them come from a more security force that was designed just to check badges and check classified repositories and respond to alarms, become more a professional force. It was really exciting watching their training group. When I first came here, they’d get up and read a manual and that was your training. Their firearms training was superb. Best I ever had. Probably better than anything I’ve seen, even in—I would put their marksmen up against the best of the best. Whether it’s HRT and the Bureau. I definitely think they can out-shoot the Ranger, but—not criticizing the Army Rangers—but their people can out-shoot Army Rangers. And perhaps, Force Recon in the Marine Corps. I think they’re up there with the more elite organizations. And I think that firearms training was incredible. They took people who couldn’t shoot, and they teach them theory and technique and then work with them and find the faults and get them to correct it to that point. I’ve never seen anything like that in any law enforcement academy or any military training. It was incredible. But the rest of it, there was no lesson plans. Training is always analysis, design, development, implementation where you get up and teach it, and then evaluate it to see if the training took. I didn’t see that in Rockwell’s training program for the Safeguard and Security team force. But eventually to see them as, when Westinghouse took over, they started putting those standards in. And I think Department of Energy did it nationwide. So I think watching that change and transition was exciting. Was great stuff. It was an exciting place to work. And right now they’re tearing down the Plutonium Finishing Plant where I spent, what, 17, 18 years of my life—except for some trips elsewhere. But to see it come down, but then to realize what we achieved there. I was there the day a button caught fire, a plutonium button. That was exciting. Because we were testing out the security system, and—why do we have employees taking off their clothing on camera? What’s going on here? And then call up to building emergency, is something going on inside the plant you kind of should let us know about? And why is the fire department coming? And then watching it go through things, and then eventually watching the cleanup process, stabilizing plutonium, and seeing where that goes. So I’m glad I had the opportunity to come in today to talk a little bit about what it was like to work at Hanford. I remember when he had buses and then we didn’t have buses because they decided we didn’t need them anymore. And then watching the density of vehicles on the highways going up to work onsite. I can remember when they decided that—there’s a four-lane road; Stevens is a four-lane divided highway out to the Site. You know, when you’re doing remediation and you’re constructing the Vit Plant, there’s a lot of trucks and trailers with heavy loads that are in the right-hand lane. So then somebody came up with the bright idea of—and they’re slower-moving. So we’re going to have that traffic in the left-hand lane going northbound, and everyone going, they’re driving the speed limit or those going beyond the speed limit would drive in the right-hand lane. Excuse me? Really? Really. And then there was a thing where we decided to put—you know, how far it is from this place to this place. And we’re going to do it both in the English system and also in metric. Good idea, that makes sense, because a lot of the world is metric. Makes a lot of sense. So then they put the signs up, and they put—the letters are about that high in a 55-mile-and-hour zone. So how close do you have to be to read a sign that’s got letters that are about two inches high, going about 55 miles an hour? Excuse me? [LAUGHTER] And also that’s now—isn’t that kind of like a visual impediment to traffic safety? Franklin: Yeah, seriously. Parr: The other one is right up on Stevens in the 300 Area. You’ve got 300 Area—I can’t remember the name of the street. It comes out and goes onto Stevens—we used to have our own highway system out there, so that’s called Highway 4 South. So the traffic is going west onto a north-south—onto a road that’s in the right-hand side is going north. But you want to turn left and to head back into town. So they put a stop sign on a wooden post right at the stop line. Well, that’s right on the edge of the traffic—it’s right on the traffic lane. So about every week or so, low lights, not well lit, you get weather, so all of a sudden, about every, once a week, you’d see the stop sign about ten meters over with the pole broken off—the big four-by-four wooden post. So I remember one time, I go, jeez, that’s not very bright. So I put in a safety suggestion. So they thanked me for my safety suggestion. Rockwell Hanford gave me a little product worth 50, 60 cents. Thank you! Okay, but we’re not going to do that, and we’ve already considered it, and it’s safe. And I got that, and I was working shift work. So I’m going home about 7:00 in the morning. And there’s the stop sign over there, the sign sheared off again. So all of the sudden—it never get installed again. They painted a stop sign, they painted stop letters, they moved the sign back. [LAUGHTER] But my suggestion wasn’t going to—so that was kind of fun. Franklin: Well, thank you so much, Bob. Parr: Yup. Franklin: I really appreciate you coming in and giving us a slice of it. Parr: You know, thank you for doing this, because the Manhattan Project was such an important piece in our history. And being—I’ve been taking a history course and being a former—retired National Guardsman, and the son of a World War II veteran from the Pacific Theater, and seeing the carnage that was Okinawa, and then realizing what the invasion of Japan would have been. I think that puts it all in perspective. And then the work we did—and for me, as a veteran, the big night was the night the wall came down in Berlin. Because that didn’t only put my weekend job in perspective, but it also put the work we’d done out at Hanford. So I think we—the work they do at the national labs, and when we had a criticality safety lab onsite, the work that they did at those facilities—just incredible. I just wish we could have kept FFTF and done power production there. Beautiful reactor. I mean, it had an availability rate of almost 100%. Oh. So. But it’s all about people. Franklin: Yeah. Great. Well, thank you so much. Parr: Well, thank you for having me. Franklin: Yeah. Don’t forget your coffee there. <a href="https://youtu.be/-Tu2YqK6vfU">View interview on Youtube.</a> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:02:15 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 100 Area 1100 Area 300 Area 400 Area Fast Flux Test Facility K-West Area N Reactor Plutonium Finishing Plant PUREX Vit Plant Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1980-2010 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1980-2011 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Colonel Matthias Babcock & Wilcox Tom Foley Hillary Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Robert Parr Description An account of the resource An interview with Robert Parr conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 11-17-2016 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2018-31-1: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. 100 Area 1100 Area 300 Area 400 Area Battelle Cold War Department of Energy DuPont Fast Flux Test Facility Hanford K-West Area Kennewick Manhattan Project Mountain N Reactor Nuclear Regulatory Commission Plutonium Plutonium Finishing Plant PUREX Safety Theater Transportation VIT Plant War Washington Public Power Supply System Westinghouse https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fc4211ec6a53281a6318043beb7f6bf4d.JPG cdd2118310627db7445aa6f6790e0c89 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F1bd3aca714e3e33a9ea3bebd16a631ae.mp4 622c42fc03f7b13d72bae927f5091fb8 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Victor Vargas: Yeah, we should be good. Robert Franklin: Ready? Vargas: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin and I am conducting an oral history interview with Ann Roseberry on January 25th, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Ann about her experiences growing up in Richland. And for the record can you state and spell your name for us? Ann Roseberry: Yes. Ann Roseberry. A-N-N R-O-S-E-B-E-R-R-Y. Franklin: Great. Thank you so much. Tell me how you came to Richland. Roseberry: Well, I was born here. Franklin: Okay. Roseberry: I was conceived here. My folks met after the war. Dad had been active in the Air Force and came here to work for GE. Mom was recruited by General Electric, so she came out from Chicago. When she got here, he was a personnel manager for GE, and he gave her her first day orientation, and promptly asked her out to dinner. So that was 1948. Franklin: 1948. Roseberry: Yeah. Franklin: I was going to say that probably wouldn’t fly with the human resources department nowadays. Roseberry: I’m fairly certain not. So they married in 1950, and I was born in 1951. And just grew up here, yeah. Franklin: Okay. And where did you live? Or where did your parents live in Richland? Roseberry: Okay, they lived at 710 Stanton, which was a precut. Stanton is a little two-block street that runs perpendicular to Lee. So we had a two-block walk to Marcus Whitman Elementary. Franklin: Mm-hm. Yeah, I live on that street, too, as you know. Roseberry: Yeah. Franklin: So what was it—so you, then, would have been about seven when Richland was privatized. Roseberry: Yes, yeah. Franklin: So what do you—what can you recall about those—your early childhood or those early years? Maybe from your own experiences or what your parents told you about that early Cold War era, government-owned era of Richland? Roseberry: Yeah. Well, in regard to the 1958, I remember Mom and Dad talking about showing me a piece of paper that they were buying the house. As a seven-year-old, it wasn’t terrifically meaningful to me, but I understood that it was to them. That same year, my youngest sister was born and we added a room onto our house, the precut. So those actually have more primacy in my recollection than the thing that meant more to Mom and Dad. Franklin: Sure. Roseberry: But I do remember that. And I probably, at the time, said—because children do—oh, how much does the house cost? And Mom would have replied, we don’t ask those questions, dear. So just one little example of a culture of secrecy that I’ll—yeah. We—I guess my elementary school years, in some way were both peaceful—the idyllic, small town family life—but punctuated by the air raid drills, where we would get under our desks or go out into the hall and line up against the hall in a sort of a crouching position. Or now what we would call pose-of-a-child in yoga. But as flat on the ground and as taking up as least space as we could. Franklin: Mm-hm. Did you ever do the kind of drills with the evacuation routes, where the families would drive out to a spot in the desert? Roseberry: Yeah. We did once, but the school children were bussed. So as we were—I actually have a fairly strong recollection of that, because it was terrifying. That I was alone on the bus. And I remember counting on my fingers, where’s Mom, where’s Dad, where are my sisters? Trying to sort of get a mental picture of where they were. Because even though we knew it was a drill, we were in a bus by ourselves being driven somewhere. So, we never went out as a family in our car. Franklin: Okay. Roseberry: Yeah. Franklin: What did your mother do for GE? Roseberry: She came out—her training was as an x-ray technician. So, she came out and—I won’t get all the timing of this right, but at one point, she worked for early Kadlec. And then went out to the Project and she was x-raying samples. What they were samples of, I’m not clear. But samples. But inanimate samples. I remember her talking about her work environment and that the badges, they were also radiation detectors and would indicate when the human body had had enough. But she said that she also had frequent x-rays of her hands. And she said that—the term was hot—hot hands—when she had hot hands, it meant that she had had enough radiation and she had to not do that work for a while. So. Franklin: Radiation from the handling the samples, or radiation from the x-rays? Roseberry: I think from the samples. There are a lot of things where—we were raised in a culture of don’t ask questions. So often, if I would have asked a question, she would have said, well, they were samples. And that would have been the end of the discussion. So, rocks, pieces of equipment, I don’t know. But something that for some reason she was x-raying, but they would have been giving radioactivity, yeah. Franklin: Hmm. Do you know where your mother worked on the Site? Did she talk about the Area? Do you know if she worked at 300, 200? Roseberry: I don’t know. When Dad was out onsite, he was at 200-West. Franklin: Oh, because he was still personnel manager at that time, or--? Roseberry: Well, I don’t think so. When we would ask him what his job was, he would just say a manager. And that’s really all I know. In probably the last maybe 10 or 15 years of his working career, he was transferred into the Federal Building. And what he said then was that he was writing or editing technical reports. And he did have a master’s in English, so that’s credible. But I don’t actually know that that’s what he was doing. In the earlier years, it was just, I’m a manager. So questions like that, that a child would ask, we were given an answer and we just accepted the answer. Franklin: Sure, sure. Did he have any other technical training, besides a master’s in English? Did he have any training that would fit to be more site-specific? Like, production-specific? Roseberry: I don’t think so. When he was talking about the later years and technical reports, he made the comment that scientists and engineers, their work often needed editing by someone who had a better understanding of the English language. So—and he was a published author; he was a skilled writer. So all of this is very credible to me, but I just don’t really know that he was doing that from the ‘50s through the ‘80s. Franklin: What kinds of work did he publish or write? Roseberry: Fiction, primarily. Fiction. He had a book that came out right before Pearl Harbor, Bobbs-Merrill, and he had just started on the author promotion tour when Pearl Harbor was bombed. So pretty much the next day he went and signed up and served stateside in—it was then the Army Air Corps, because he had had an injury. And almost literally to his dying day, that—he felt embarrassed that he hadn’t gone overseas. He felt that he hadn’t really quite done what he should, because he hadn’t been overseas. But then after retirement, he published a couple more fiction books and wrote some family histories, but mostly it was—he was a fiction writer, yeah. Franklin: Okay. You mentioned that your mother talked about her work environment. Did she ever talk about the gender makeup of her environment, or her experience of a woman working out onsite? Roseberry: She talked about a couple of men who she worked with right in her unit. And very warmly. Very—it clearly was a comfortable work environment for her. I’m interpreting from what she said that they were older than she was. She was in her mid-20s and very cute. But a very modest woman. Raised in the Midwest, small town in Iowa. So her comments came across as if they were avuncular or fatherly to her—warm, but not anything uncomfortable for her. Yeah. So that’s about all of her comments. I know she was back and forth between Kadlec and the Site during those years. She would have worked roughly from 1948 to 1951. I was born in March of ’51, and possibly she had to quit work before that because she was working with radiation. Franklin: Are you the oldest? Roseberry: I’m the oldest. Franklin: Okay, so after you were born, she stopped working to be your full-time— Roseberry: Yeah. There were three of us, so she stayed home until the year I turned 13, I believe. And then she went back to work part-time x-ray at the Richland Clinic, which is no longer a clinic. But—and then she worked through until retirement. Franklin: Okay. Roseberry: Yeah, yeah. Franklin: Can you tell me about growing up in the prefab neighborhood? Because it’s slightly—from what I understand they’re slightly different than the Alphabet House neighborhoods in terms of not only the character of the houses but the income levels of the residents. Roseberry: Yeah. We were—some of what I will tell you, to give a caveat, is my recollection. And I was a child at the time, so I had my own lens. But in our particular neighborhood, which is to say the one block, every person who lived in that neighborhood had a family member employed at the Project or at the Site. And in those years, it was all the men. The women were home. So across the street was an electrician, next door was Hanford Patrol, next door the other side, was—I don’t know what he did; I know he was a craftsworker. So in our block, all the other families were crafts families, except for ours. That was a very strong distinction, was—you were management or you were the crafts. And what I was told was that in our part of town, there was a conscious desire to mix within a neighborhood so that there would be some management people and some crafts people. In the block up, where you live, we didn’t know as many people. One of the high school teachers lived there at the time. It was close enough that we were allowed to trick-or-treat there. But we—within our own block, we were in and out of houses and borrowing a cup of sugar, and that kind of thing. But it was a very small one-block neighborhood for us. Franklin: Interesting. How long did your parents live in that house? Roseberry: Mm. From 1950 until 2013. Franklin: Oh, wow. Roseberry: Yeah. My dad died at the end of 2004. And Mom stayed in the house until 2013. She had a series of falls. And after the last one, she said, I think it’s time for me to move. So we got that to happen, but—and she was—she had three other friends from the early days who at that time were still living in their homes. Only one with her husband; the other women had been widowed. But for her, this was not an unusual situation, that you would move into a house and you would live there your whole life. At some point, when I was in late elementary school, I know that Dad got a promotion at work. And this would have been before 1958. And so at that time, he was offered the chance to move to a different neighborhood to what would have been considered a nicer house. I remember our talking about that, and I just spoke right up and said, well, I don’t want to move. I like my school. I like my neighborhood. And so he didn’t accept the move. And I don’t remember now where it was. I just remember that to me it seemed really silly. Well, this was our house. Why would we move? This was home, yeah. Franklin: Do you know if the—you had mentioned that separation between trades—crafts people and managerial. Do you know if that ever caused any tension with neighbors and things like that? Roseberry: Yes. Not in our neighborhood, not among—this was a neighborhood where in the summer, Dad would cook hamburgers outside on the fireplace he built, and the neighbors would come over and have hamburgers. Or they’d come over and have watermelon, or they’d come over for the fireworks. So none of that happened there. But in the school environment, very much so. There were times where it would come up within the schoolroom. And fairly laterally, I want to say the early ‘60s—at any rate, there was a significant strike out at the Project and another one threatened. That was the time I remember most clearly that there were enough people out on strike that management were being placed in various locations. So Dad was driving a bus during that time. The buses came right into the neighborhoods, so he had a half-a-block walk to get the bus that took him to work. And I remember very distinctly getting into it a little bit with another girl. So—might have been fifth grade—I don’t remember the year, but there were lines drawn. Because her father was in the crafts and he was also—had some position of responsibility in one of the unions. And we didn’t fight, and we weren’t enemies, but we were just never close again. It wasn’t—this discussion happened and the lines were drawn, and we never quite managed to get back across again. But there were some neighborhoods—there were some neighborhoods in the ranch houses where the mix of people who lived there was such that, yeah, it was an issue in the neighborhood. In one case, a family—the same family where the father had quite position of responsibility, and the neighborhood lived across the street from a family where the father was a high-ranking PR person for the Project. And you felt it. You felt it; it wasn’t fighting, but it was tension, I mean—yeah. Franklin: Sure. Do you remember what that series of labor movements was about? Roseberry: I do not. Franklin: Okay. Roseberry: I do not. And I wish that—because the memory is so clear, I’ve wished that I’d gone back to research it to find out what it was. I remember Dad saying that his concern or management’s concern was that this would be a disruptive enough situation that we would lose—we would no longer have federal funding. And so the other thing that’s unclear to me now is, the strike would have been against the contractor. But of course, all of the contractor money was federal money. So there was real concern that jobs would be lost. I do remember that. Franklin: Did you ever—given that up until Richland was privatized, you had to work for Hanford to live in Richland—did you ever lose friends or notice people—had people that you knew that left during that time because they lost their jobs at Hanford? Roseberry: No. And that is a really interesting question to me. I don’t remember ever losing any friends for that reason. And I don’t remember until high school that families were moving in from some of the other secret cities or Savannah River. I remember a family coming in from Savannah River. It isn’t that it didn’t happen. I don’t remember it, and there was no one in my close circle who left. And I really don’t remember much influx. My high school years would have been ’66 to ’69. And there were several families that I remember then. Franklin: Did you go to Richland High School? Roseberry: Mr. Franklin, that would be Col High. Franklin: Col High. Sorry. Roseberry: That would be Col High. This is essential for accuracy. Yeah. Marcus Whitman, Carmichael, and then Col High. Franklin: Col High, right. You’ll have to forgive me. Roseberry: I do forgive you, but I will correct you, of course, because this is so important. Franklin: Point taken. Would that be the Col High Bombers? Roseberry: Yes, that would be the Col High Bombers. Franklin: Okay. Roseberry: Yeah, yeah. Franklin: And how long—then did you leave Richland shortly after graduating? Roseberry: Mm-hm. I left in the fall of ’69. I went to Cheney for my undergrad degree, and went through in three years because I had two sisters behind me. Then went to Michigan for my library master’s and then came back and my first job was in Yakima. So— Franklin: I’m wondering if—you may have been too young for this next question, but I’d like to see what—if you remember. You know, Richland, up until the mid-60s or late-60s was primarily, almost exclusively white. Roseberry: Yes. Franklin: Due to housing restrictions on African Americans and other minorities, they had to live in East Pasco. And although African Americans were employed by the Hanford Project, they couldn’t live in Richland— Roseberry: Houses—right, right. Franklin: --at that time. So I’m wondering if you could speak to that, having observed—or if you observed discrimination or any civil rights attempts to address it. Roseberry: Yeah. So in elementary school, at my elementary school at Marcus Whitman, there were two African American families who had children in the school. In second grade, I had a birthday party, and I’d invited people from school. And I remember this very clearly. We had added on the living room, so we’d set up card tables in the living room. And I had invited my friend Kathy Baker. And she didn’t come. And I remember going to the front door watching for her, and wondering why she wasn’t coming to the party. The Baker family is African American. Her mother is still here, Mrs. Baker. I remember—and I asked Mom, why didn’t Kathy come to the party? And in some way, Mom would have said, maybe she didn’t feel comfortable because she’s—in those days, we would have said Negro. And that wasn’t disrespectful. Sorry, I remember this really clearly. And it just made me so sad. She was almost my best friend, and she didn’t feel she could come to my birthday party. My folks were very—whatever opinions they might have had to the contrary, we were raised that race was not an issue. It was not a matter of discussion; it wasn’t—it was an irrelevant thing. I look back now—hold on, I’ll get hold of myself. I look back now and I think of family names that we would have heard. But in our family, nobody ever said, this name tells you that their family came from Russia or Ireland or Germany or—that was not a—we didn’t know to make those connections. It just wasn’t discussed. So, the issue of race was, it just, it wasn’t present in the way we were raised. I didn’t really question in grade school that there were only two families. When I got to junior high, as it was then, I remember two Hispanic families being added. That was at Carmichael. And I may be forgetting somebody. By high school, another African American family and a Chinese family. But at one time—and I’m not sure I could do it right now—but I counted that in my growing up years, we had nine families of color in Richland. So we had some African American families, one Chinese family, and I think maybe by high school three Hispanic families. But I didn’t know that was unusual. I just didn’t know that was unusual. Franklin: Sure. The children—the African American children that you went to elementary school with, they were allowed to live—the family was allowed to live in Richland? Roseberry: Mm-hmm, yeah. The Bakers lived over—it’s an area of town just on the other side of Duportail. I’m so bad with directions. There was a little market there, Dietrich’s Market, that’s now Minute Mart or something. But they lived in that neighborhood. And I think Mrs. Baker is still in the family house from those days, too. Franklin: Oh, wow. Roseberry: Yeah, mm-hmm, yeah. Franklin: Great. Thank you. Do you remember any later civil—like, any of the later civil rights actions in Kennewick and Pasco, or did you not—have you not connected much with— Roseberry: I was not—no, I was not connected. We didn’t really have any family friends in Pasco or Kennewick. One exception, a friend of my dad’s in Kennewick on Canal Drive. But the world was very small. You knew people from school, where parents of other children—more strongly in elementary school of course, and then you knew people from your church. And in the people I knew, everybody went to church. Everybody belonged to a church and they went to church. And so we belonged to Central, to CUP. So, that’s how I met children from other parts of town, because I would meet at church. But we didn’t—in the early days, very actively encouraged to stay in Richland. Shop in Richland, go to a doctor in Richland. Not go out to dinner in Richland because there really weren’t many options. But you lived in Richland, you did your business in Richland, and you socialized in Richland. After 1958, I suspect the message wasn’t quite so strong. But still strong. Franklin: Probably because it had been ingrained. Roseberry: It had been ingrained, uh-huh. And there was still—even after Richland re-formed as a First Class City, all of that secrecy and deliberate attempt at isolation was still very present. Because we were in a very strong part of the Cold War. So the secrecy did not—and the fear—did not go away once Richland re-formed as a city. But no, I was unaware of those. In high school, a man named Duke Mitchell, who has come back—homecoming king? Anyway, one of those dances where someone is king and queen and there’s an election, and he was. So in some ways, you could say that this community was not— Franklin: And I’m sorry, who was this? Roseberry: Duke Mitchell. Franklin: Is that CJ’s son? Roseberry: CJ’s oldest, yeah. Franklin: Okay. Roseberry: So he had a very strong position of leadership in the high school. Liked and respected. I couldn’t really answer adequately about how it felt or how it was. I can report that, yeah, he was held in acclaim. He was class president, too. I—once I left, I left. I just remember strongly that he was very well-liked and respected. And certainly one of the first things I did when I came back to Richland to be the library manager here was to look him up and say, I need you on the library board. But he could speak to that better than I can. Franklin: Okay. Did you ever feel—you talked a bit about the duck-and-cover drills that made you kind of feel the fear of being separated. What about later, as you grew up and entered adolescence or early adulthood and knew more about what was being produced at Hanford. Did your feelings toward—what were your feelings toward Hanford? Did they change at all from when you first found out about what was being made there and--? Roseberry: I never went negative. Partly that is because my dad was—even postwar, he felt that the work that was being done there was patriotic. He still felt that it was protecting the United States. A personal characteristic of his was loyalty. So, he would have valued, in a patriotic way, and defended the Project until the day he died. So that did not occur for me. And I was never afraid in a way that you would be about something that you could do something about it. When we were very young, and maybe into pre-adolescence, I remember that he would try to teach us from the ground what planes were overhead so that we could identify them. Because it was, plane: Russia is going to bomb us. That was our default response. I got as far as being able to distinguish between a small plane, like a Piper Cub, or a B-52, or a jet. I never got—but even those distinctions, if you were—I’m the eldest. I was, I mean, day one, take care of your sisters. So I’m out on the street with my sisters, maybe walking over to the school grounds to play, and a plane goes overhead. And first I look up, try to decide if they’re in danger or not, and then look down, okay, there they are; they’re safe. And it’s not something that woke me up in the middle of the night, or I had emotional problems with. It was just part of where we were. And, again, how did we know that that wasn’t everywhere? So, learn to distinguish. But it was actually pre-adolescent. It was third grade, and we were being taught about the half-life of plutonium. I would say that my strengths have always been on the verbal, not the quantitative side. But even in third grade, I could do the numbers on that and realize that no amount of duck-and-cover was going to save any of us if we were—nuclear bomb fell. But that was, for me, a little bit like, huh. Okay, well, maybe we’ll get bombed, and maybe we won’t. So it wasn’t a fear moment; it was like, hmm, do you guys think we can’t do these numbers and figure it out? But it was really more a moment of clarity than fear. And we just never—living in Richland and reading only the local paper—although Mom and Dad always subscribed to the Spokesman Review, so we did have a paper that wasn’t local. Lots of magazines. But having very limited even television access, news like that just didn’t show up here. And it just—if we weren’t hearing it at home, and we weren’t hearing it at school, we just wouldn’t have heard anything anti. Really, the first time I kind of went, oh, people are upset about this was at Cheney, so that’s late ‘60s, early ‘70s. I took a class called environmental geography. Anyway, one of the field trips was here to Hanford; another was to some of the bunker silver mines in north Idaho where there was, in fact, damage from something that was manmade. And so then I started getting it. But not here. Not here. Franklin: Thank you. Did the neighborhood or Richland change perceptibly after it became a First Class City to you? Did you notice any changes? Roseberry: Mm-mm. Not to me. Franklin: Did the fabric of—or I guess, did the fabric of the neighborhood change while you lived there after it incorporated? Roseberry: Very little. I think that from 1951 to 1969, on our side of the street, the house at the corner of whatever that is and the house at the corner of Stanton and Lee, those houses had changed out once in 18 years. I don’t think any of the others had by the time I left to go to Cheney. In the mid- to late-‘70s, there were some deaths on the street and some houses changed out. But I think just those two. And those were precuts, the much smaller house. So the one up by Lee, that changed out pretty quickly. They needed a larger house. And the one on the other end, it was retirement or something. But only those two, yeah. Franklin: When did you come back to Richland? Roseberry: I came back on May 15th of 2006. That was my—I got here on May 14th. I threw stuff in my car, drove to Mom’s, unloaded the car and started that Monday. And May 16th—I remember it very clearly because May 16th was the day of the bond election for the new library building. And it passed. So those dates are just really clear for me. Yeah. Franklin: Right. And since that time you’ve been working at the Richland Public Library. Roseberry: Mm-hm, yeah. Franklin: Tell me about your involvement in promoting Hanford history and that kind of thing. Roseberry: Oh! Okay. Well, I really started with meeting Ron Kathren—Dr. Ron Kathren. He has been, for a long time, a library supporter. And I met him on May 16th—the evening of May 16th. The polls had just closed; it had been declared that the bond had passed, and we were walking out to the parking lot together. And I offered him a carrot, my go-to snack, and he accepted. So pretty much it was friendship at first sight. And he started coming into the library and just chatting with me. He’s an excellent teacher among other things. And there was something about his love of Richland and the value he places on the scientific work that had been done here that just—it created or it caught a spark in me. And then I just started thinking about it more and thinking about my parents’ generation having been pioneers of a sort. And this is no disrespect to the people who were here farming at all. But they left the Midwest, the East Coast, and they came out probably on trains and got off to a desert that had no trees. They moved into tents, or if they were lucky, trailers, and then barracks, essentially—dorms. They did work that they had no idea what they were doing. And in the early days, they couldn’t tell their families where they were, what was going on. They just seem extraordinarily brave to me. So the environmental situation that they had to deal with—against—and the work they were doing created this bonding among them that is really phenomenal. They feel that at some level they all care about each other, still. Because they were on this great adventure and venture. Then the more I learned about the science and technology and creativity and innovation that went into that, I just got fascinated. Just got fascinated. And the people who made that choice and stayed, they have a strength that I think is uncommon. And they were—we now look at that and we talk about the effects of an atomic bomb and nuclear waste, which—I’m not stepping away from that. But for them, to have been doing something that they thought was not only very important but maybe vital to the survival of the country. If you can just understand that mindset. I just admire them very much. And they’re a generation that did not complain. Did not complain. You still—no matter how much you probe with my 92- almost 93-year-old mother, she will not complain. She will not say anything bad or—she just won’t. And that’s very, very common among her friends. So I just—I think the combination of the science, but also the creativity that fueled that science, I think that’s what it was. Just started fascinating me. And I also, as a librarian, I understand that the kind of history we have here is singular. We’ll find similarities with Oak Ridge and Los Alamos, but there are three secret cities in this country. Arguably three secret cities in the world. We’re not regular. And I kind of started embracing being weird and finding the ties that we do have with those other secret cities at every possible level: the level of education, the fact that we still expect our garbage to be picked up in certain ways, that we are used to a very sturdy, robust infrastructure—we just have a lot in common. It seemed to me from a history point of view that there was some pretty important history stuff. As the public librarian part of my job—not just my interest, my job—was to collect the stuff, to protect it, to wait for WSU to be ready to have the Hanford History Project, so we could have a real, live, professional archives. And I don’t know, it just—somehow out of respect and admiration, it started being important to me. Franklin: Great. Roseberry: Yeah. Franklin: What would you like—I think you’ve already covered this somewhat, but I’d like to ask it again. What would you like future generations to know about living in Richland during the Cold War and what was done here during the Cold War? Roseberry: Wow. Respect the science. Respect the creativity. Respect the strength of the people who were here. I might say plan ahead. One of the stories Dad told was—so, context. We were in Portland. My husband and I were living in Portland, and each year in Portland, Nagasaki Day is not celebrated, but noted. Franklin: And why is that? Roseberry: The people draw chalk outlines of bodies on the ground in memory of what was left after that bomb, that there would be sort of a—just a charred outline on the ground, because the body had been so thoroughly incinerated, that’s all that was left. Franklin: Sure, sure. I—sorry, but why Portland? Or why does that happen? Is there a special reason? Is it like a sister city relationship? Roseberry: I don’t know. I just—from having lived in Portland for 30 years, I would say, that’s just Portland. I don’t have a good—I don’t have a good answer for that. Franklin: Sure, sure. I was just wondering if there was a deeper connection. Roseberry: Not that I know of. Franklin: Okay, sorry. Roseberry: But at any rate, Mom and Dad were in town, and we were walking, downtown Portland in the city hall area. Dad asked what they were, and unthinkingly, I told him the truth. Never seen him so angry. Never saw him as angry as that. He was saying, we were saving lives, we were saving American lives. Very, very, very angry. When he calmed down a little, I said, you know, people are concerned about the waste, Dad. This aside, there’s a legitimate concern about the nuclear waste. And the reason I laugh, you’ll understand, is he said, well, for Pete’s sakes. They only built those tanks to last 20 years and look how long they’ve lasted! So for future generations, I would say, maybe a 20-year tank for nuclear waste when we already understood the aforementioned half-life—maybe add that element into your future planning, yeah. So, yeah, I mean, 20 years, the life of radioactive material: not a really good match there. Franklin: Some disconnect, perhaps, between science and then the administrative side of-- Roseberry: Exactly, exactly. Franklin: --of legacy waste commitment. Roseberry: And the difference between getting federal funding to, in their hope, finish a war, end a war, and in their hopes, defend the United States, and—oh, huh, yeah, well, now we want to fund something else. We don’t want to fund this. So it’s pretty big picture, but, yeah. Franklin: Oh, hey, we’re going to need a lot more money for many hundreds of years to come to manage the— Roseberry: Right, yeah. Franklin: Yeah, that’s a tough sell. Roseberry: it’s a tough sell. It’s a tough sell. Garbage cleanup. It’s a tough sell. Franklin: Yeah, it is. Everybody wants it, but nobody wants to do it. Roseberry: But nobody wants to do it. So, yeah, I guess, not a question I’ve thought about, but probably that’s what I’d say. Franklin: Great. Is there anything that we haven’t covered that you wanted to talk about? Roseberry: I don’t know. I have said—maybe a little bit about the hierarchy in Richland, because from a point of view, it has the worst of a military reservation, an academic community, and a company town, where in those environments, at some level hierarchy is all. So even in the later years—I think this is changing—but the division, if you will, between management and crafts or the trades. I think, I hope, that Richland has grown so much, benefitting from people who weren’t born here, that some of that is being mitigated, but—and feel free to eliminate this if it’s in somebody else’s story. But GESA Federal Credit Union was GE Supervisors’ Association. And my dad was one of the founders of that. I have his passbook; it’s number four. But it was only for supervisors, period. Period. So about a year later, I think—I think GESA was founded in 1954, I think. At any rate, approximately a year later, HAPO was founded. So if you were not a GE manager, you could still join a credit union. And now both of them are very, very strong, very community-minded. But lines like that were drawn. And there were some sort of informal, unspoken rules about what kind of car you could drive, according to your status at the Project. And so my dad, not being a scientist or an engineer, was maybe sort of middle. So we had—growing up we had Dodges, kind of a medium. And then, at one point, I was gone, but he got another promotion and he and Mom bought an Oldsmobile, because that was okay. Whereas when I was in grade school and junior high, that—there were people above him in the hierarchy who drove Oldsmobiles. And so that—there’s some big car stuff in this community that sometimes is at the base of—people who weren’t born here or grew up here, they observe things, but they can’t decode them. And there’s no way in the world they would ever be able to decode them. The other thing where there was a hierarchy—and I don’t know that I really have an opinion about it—but certainly, in second grade, I remember actively and clearly, we were given standardized tests. So starting in second grade, we were tracked, according to what they called ability. So in second grade, we took the Stanford-Binet, which was considered a measurement of IQ. And so the result of that, partly, was that even though when I graduated high school—that would be Col High, yeah—I graduated high school, 676 people in the graduating class, but I only really knew a fraction of them. Because even in grade school, we were ability-tracked. That continued through junior high and certainly at high school, there was advanced this and honors this. The focus on academic ability—very, very strong here. So I think for children who were perceived to fall into that, you could not have had better college prep. You could not have. We—my first formal researched-with-citations research project was in fourth grade. We were writing from very early on. We were being taught research skills from very early on. And when I left and went to Cheney, I found that that was not the norm. So the school system here is very, very focused on that. And I benefited from it; my sisters benefited from it. So, I just—I have this niggling sense that that could have been improved or fine-tuned, but because I benefited from it, I wouldn’t be a very credible voice on that. But the whole concept of hierarchy: just so strong here, yeah. Franklin: And you think still to this day? Roseberry: To a certain extent. I think more so in the people who are still here who were here in the very early days. Which now would be the ‘50s, because I think most of the people who would have gotten here early ‘40s to build the Project, they’re gone. And the people who arrived just post-war, like my folks, they’re dwindling, you know. They’re dwindling. But the people who came early-ish, I mean strongly in the Cold War era, like in the ‘50s, a little bit. Because that was the Project environment. Franklin: Right, and there’s a real difference to authority, too, among those. And kind of a—one thing I’ve noticed is a belief in corporate benevolence, and that you’ll be taken care of with—the hard work and things will be rewarded in a corporate environment. That struck me as more present here, I think, due to the nature of the contractor relationship. Roseberry: I think so, I think so. That—so for that generation, they had world-shaking events, okay? My folks lived through the Depression. My folks both were of an age to understand what Pearl Harbor meant. But I might suggest that my generation, the Boomer generation, had the first conviction that there was not only not corporate benevolence, there was not government benevolence. The World War II generation, they were patriotic. They were responding to those calls from President Roosevelt. My generation, particularly here, learned very early that, um, duck-and-cover wasn’t going to work. That there remains a question, many questions, about the assassination of President Kennedy. That the Vietnam War was not exactly about protecting democracy. So I agree. There’s more acceptance, respect for an authority figure, yeah. Franklin: Yeah. Roseberry: Yeah, I think so. Franklin: Even—you mentioned some big events and kind of betraying of trust. I’d like to ask you about how you think maybe people’s reactions to the Green Run fall into that. Because that happened pretty early on in ’49. But a purposeful release of dangerous material that seems to be accepted by the community as something that happened and maybe shouldn’t have, but did nonetheless. But to outsiders is shocking. Roseberry: It’s shocking. Franklin: And a betrayal of trust, because it’s not a corporate—it’s the government. It’s supposed to be— Roseberry: Right, yeah. And I did not know about that until after I came back in 2006. Franklin: Oh, okay. Roseberry: None—information about the Project, any of the science, any of the politics—not in the Richland school system. Not there. And in our family, not discussed. Ever. Ever, ever. So I did not know that. Franklin: Sure. I forgot to ask: did you go to see President Kennedy? Roseberry: Yes. Franklin: Or did your family go to see President Kennedy? What was your—what do you remember about that day? Roseberry: Okay. So, it was very hot and windy and dusty. And we were out in the middle of the desert, okay? However, we were just thrilled beyond any belief. He was—and just my family—but he was a beloved president. People did trust him. They followed him. People—I don’t think during his presidency, you would ever have heard him referred to as Kennedy. It always would have been President Kennedy or the President. Always, always. And partly that was then. But he, as a person and a president, people liked him, they cared about him. Here, we were so—we so completely understood that we were isolated, that that was on purpose, that for someone that important to come here was just—it was amazing. It was just amazing. And we were just thrilled. We all had to submit a security clearance paperwork. Mom just handed to me the papers for my youngest sister who was about seven, yeah. So I remember filling this out—no, she wasn’t even seven. She was more like five, she was more like five. So I filled it out, and there was a space called Membership in Subversive Organizations. And, you know, I thought about—I took this really seriously, and— Franklin: And that was a voluntary thing that you would fill out, or that’s--? Roseberry: No, we would not be allowed onsite. Franklin: No, I mean, that was a form given to someone to fill out, so they would trust that you were being honest about your membership in a subversive organization? Roseberry: Right, right. Franklin: Okay. Roseberry: And I put in that, yes, the only organization she was part of was the CUP Sunday school. But she was a member of that organization. But, I mean, what, to express rye amusement at the vagaries of life, but filling out a security clearance form for a little tiny girl, but we did, and we took it seriously. So we went as a family—I think I got off track, but we went as a family, and it was a big deal. But it was windy, and the wind was blowing up the sand. And it was hot. And the helicopter came in and blew up more sand. But, no, we were just thrilled. Just thrilled. The most important, the most famous person we had ever seen. And, oh, it was big. It was big, yeah. Franklin: Cool. Well, did you have anything else you wanted to add? Roseberry: I can’t think—you know, Robert, I could go on for a long time, but that’s—you’ll talk to other people and they’ll either confirm or deny, and— Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Roseberry: But you know, so much was family-centered. And then your school and then your church. Those were the circles. Oh, I guess just one other note and then you should probably just turn the equipment off, but—I don’t know if you’ve heard this or not, but Richland did not appear on any maps or on any road signs. So that piece of understanding that we were secret and that the government didn’t want people to be able to get here, they didn’t want people to know where we were or what was going on. That was—there was just sort of this combination of you just sort of accepted it, and then you’d say, hmm, I wonder why that isn’t true of Pasco and Kennewick. But even a question like that, the answer would be, well, Richland is different. Franklin: Yeah. Roseberry: Yeah. Franklin: Well, thank you Ann. I really appreciated your talking today. Roseberry: You’re welcome. Oh, I’m really happy to. I’m sorry the Kathy Baker story got me. Franklin: No, it’s okay. I appreciate it. Roseberry: But you know, it’s funny, we were so young, but I just remember I just kept going to the front door, watching, where’s Kathy? Where’s Kathy? Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:09:01 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317 kbps Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1988-2006 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Bobbs-Merrill Dietrich Mrs. Baker Duke Mitchell Ron Kathren Kennedy Kathy Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Ann Roseberry Description An account of the resource An interview with Ann Roseberry conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 01-25-2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2018-31-1: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. 1954 Clinic Cold War General Electric Hanford Houses Kennedy Kennewick Los Alamo Los Alamos Market Organization Organizations River Ron Kathren Savannah River School Sun War https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fe820e4a33e2a225f113a1dfd8ce52dc1.JPG 763070d0c7da2d875ae83bbbafedfcb8 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F5a38f1b11c375d7f5ef4abaa0f87f2ee.mp4 7f343470174833d48c62897595db0b57 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Bauman Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Norvin Sasser Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Northwest Public Television | Sasser_Norvin Robert Bauman: We’re pretty much ready to go? Man one: Whenever you're ready. Bauman: All right. Okay, we're going to go ahead and get started. So we could start by having you say and spell your name for us. Norvin Sasser: My name is Norvin Sasser. N-O-R-V-I-N, S-A-S-S-E-R. Bauman: Great. Thank you. And today's date is October 23rd of 2013. And we're conducting this interview on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. So I wonder if we could start by having you tell me how you came to Hanford, when you came here, what brought you here. Sasser: Well in the spring of 1943 I graduated from high school. And I was expecting to be drafted into the military service. But Uncle Sam said I was physically unfit for military service. So I started looking about for some way to support the war effort. And I learned from McQuinn’s that there was a recruiter in town recruiting people for a highly secret defense job at a place called Pasco, Washington. So I had somewhat of an agreement with the guy that told me about this that we would meet in town on a certain date and sign up and ship out. Well, he didn't show. So at the end of the day I struck out on my own. And I arrived at Hanford on the 27th of September, 1943. All by myself, no buddies, no friends, no relatives. Bauman: And what was your first impression when you arrived? Sasser: Well it was all strange to me. I grew up in the Ozark Mountain region. And the desert was all new. However, I had seen part of it before. But it was exciting. I was on my own, no obligations to anybody. And I just took it as a great adventure. Bauman: And did you have any idea of what sort of work you would doing, or what was being done at Hanford? Sasser: Well I knew that I was signing on as a laborer. And that meant probably a pick and shovel. And that's what I started doing, digging ditches around Hanford. Bauman: And what sort of housing was available when you-- Sasser: We lived in the barracks, lived in the barracks and ate in the mess halls. The project had been going about six months when I arrived. And I was never a tent resident or anything. But they had the barracks going when I arrived. Bauman: So where did you start working? Where on site did you start working here? Sasser: In the town side of Hanford. And then after a few weeks I was transferred into what they called the 101 Building, or the 105 Craft, where they were fabricating the graphite to lay up the reactor cores for the D and F Reactors. Then a short time after I was transferred into there, they gave me a clerical rating and moving me into the superintendent's office as a clerk. And the work was a lot easier, and they paid me more money. Bauman: And how long did you work there? Sasser: Well let's see. I was in there a short time, a few months. And then I went out to another fabrication shop out at White Bluffs as a clerk. Then, when all of this was winding down, in the end of '44, I was transferred into Richland, where I worked for what they called special construction, where we was moving the government furniture into the government housing. Each piece was identified by a number. And you had to record the street address that you put that piece of furniture in. And each house was set up for a certain amount of furniture in a certain arrangement. And then after that finished I went back out to a place they call Leisure Spur, railroad siding, where they were handling excess material and shipping out the leftover materials that they had. And then in a few weeks their office ended up in Hanford. And I was in Hanford when they--the last group to move out of Hanford when they closed it up in the spring of '45. And lo, in the spring of '45 I had an offer to go to a job in operations. And then they released me from construction. And I went over into operations and moved into Richland in the spring of '45. And the organization that I was in eventually ended up in transportation. So I spent the rest of my working career in transportation and administrative work and in management. I spent 30 some years associated in the management of the plant bus operation. Bauman: Oh, okay. And so when did you retire? When did you-- Sasser: I retired after the 30th of November, 1988. I was at Hanford 45 years, two months, and three days. Bauman: So going back to when you first arrived, you talk about living in the barracks and eating in the mess hall, what was that experience like? And was there entertainment, things to do for fun? Sasser: Yes, they brought in name bands, name entertainers, movies. They built a movie theater. When I first arrived it was an outdoor theater. Then when it was in a tent, and then they got a theater built. Then they'd have dances on Saturday nights in building mess halls as the camp grew. And they'd get the mess hall built before they got the barracks occupied. And that's what they would use for the dance hall. They'd bring in bands, name bands, local bands, stuff like that. Hey, it was exciting, as far as I was concerned. I had one person to call me on an interview on what hardships that the Hanford workers went through. And I said what do you mean hardships? I had three hots and a cot. I had a good paying job that wasn't too hard. I was free to come and go as I pleased, and nobody was shooting at me. I've seen a lot of the articles. A lot of people complained about the dust storms. Yeah, they was dust storms. But I don't remember them as being all that terrible. Bauman: And so at what point--how long did you live in the barracks then? Sasser: I was out there about a year. I moved in when I first arrived on the 27th of September, got married on the 1st of September the next year. And then in a couple of weeks so I moved out of my barracks and we got a trailer over in Pasco. And then in the next spring, after it went into operation, we moved into Richland in the B house. Bauman: Okay. Oh, a B house? Sasser: Yeah. Bauman: What was Richland like as a community in those early years? Sasser: It was nice. At that time, at one time the average age of the tenants in Richland 35 years old. Everybody had kids. Great activities in school, scouting and church activity. I must have been pretty well satisfied with it. I stuck around a long time. Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Yeah. You mentioned when you first started working that you were--you said White Bluffs at some point? Sasser: Well, I first started in Hanford. And then went through the 105--the 101 Building, which is 105 Craft, and then they had a metal fabricating plant out at old town side of White Bluffs. I went out there for a few weeks, a short time. And incidentally, the drug store in White Bluffs was still open, still operating when I was working out there. Because I was working the swing shift. And we'd go over there and buy stuff. Bauman: Were a lot of the residents still there at the time? Sasser: Well, I don't know where the guy was living. But he was still operating--the drugstore was still going. And that was in the spring of '44. Bauman: Were a lot of the other buildings still around on those town sites, or had they-- Sasser: Oh, they were all still there. I won't say all of them, but yeah, the main buildings were. There might have been some removed to make way for progress of building. But the main street of it was still pretty much intact. I think the old bank building is still standing. Bauman: Right, yeah. So what sort of work schedule did you have? How many days a week were you working, how many hours a week? Sasser: Well I'll tell you a story. When I first started to work our regular schedule was six ten-hour days. And then they came around on Saturday afternoon and if anyone wanted to work on Sunday, be down at the bus lot number one, catch the bus, go out to 200 West. There’ll be somebody there to show you what to do. Okay, I didn't have anything better to do. So I worked on Sunday. That went on for my first seven or eight weeks I was in Hanford. I worked a 70-hour week. So the first full paycheck that I got I looked at and I thinks oh my gosh, what's wrong here? $90? I only worked 70 hours. And I was getting $1 an hour. Bright kid--I could figure that out. So I went to my boss and I said hey, something's wrong here. They've paid me all of this money. I only worked 70 hours. And he said well, you worked Sunday, didn't you? I said yeah. He said well, that was double time. And what you worked over 40 hours was time and a half. It's your money. I wasn't used to that. Hey, someone told you they was going to pay you so much money, that's what you got. But it was a surprise to me. Bauman: So when did you find out what the purpose of Hanford was, about the atomic bomb? Sasser: When they announced it after they dropped the bomb. We was working in Richland then. And we got out in our vehicles and drove around town honking our horns. That's the way we celebrated here. Bauman: And then you said at some point you moved into transportation? Sasser: Well, when I went over into operations, it was handling the personal effects for people that was on a contract they're shipping in or out. And it was part of traffic. But then transportation absorbed traffic. And then I changed jobs within the organization and ended up in what was transportation then. And that's where I spent the rest of my working career. This was just a short time that I worked in traffic. It was combined with transportation. Later there was a function of it pulled back and put back in traffic. But then the part I was in stayed in transportation. Bauman: Oh, okay. And so what did your work in transportation involve? Sasser: Well I was an administrative clerk for a while. And then I went over with the bus and rail operation, where I was listed as a routing and scheduling clerk. And from that I went to a shift manager. And from that I went back under the administrative side as a staff assistant. Bauman: Obviously, Hanford was a very secret place, a lot of security involved. I wonder if you could talk about security or secrecy at all? Sasser: Well, yeah, you were warned just not to talk about it. And I'd only assumed got to be a condition. You never really thought about it one way or the other. You went through the security check. But I would never worked in a secure area, other than going in and out of say, the administration building. And then after, on lesser occasions, I went out to the production areas to check on transportation requirements. But I had a Q clearance all the time. But I never worked in any of the secluded areas. Bauman: I wonder, during all your years working at Hanford, there were any part of the jobs that you had that was the most challenging or anything that was the most rewarding about what you worked on? Sasser: Well that'd be hard to say. I think the most rewarding part that I had, I was privileged to work on the transportation to accommodate the visits of two Presidents to the Project. When Kennedy made his visit here, I worked on making up the schedules for transporting the people from the production areas to the N, where they were to attend the celebration. And then when Nixon made his appearance here, I was coordinating the transportation to transport the people from the Richland area out to the Battelle area, where he was making his presentation. Bauman: And were you present when both Presidents were here? Sasser: I got to go to the Kennedy presentation under the N. But during the Nixon I was involved in transportation, so I didn't get the opportunity to go out there. Bauman: Do you have any specific memories about when President Kennedy was here, about the day or anything about that? Sasser: Well one thing I remember about it--getting out of the traffic, getting on the way home, listening to him making his speech in Salt Lake City. And that's still on the road trying to get from 100-N back to town. Bauman: So it was really crowded. How did you feel about Hanford as a place to work? What was it like? Sasser: It was great. It afforded me the opportunity to make a worthwhile living, to raise my kids, send them to school. And the benefits were good, a nice retirement. And Hanford was very good to me. I never explored any possibility of leaving. Bauman: And you were there during World War II, the Cold War. You saw a lot of things happen, and also Hanford going from very early construction and production and then eventually a de-emphasis on production and starting to focus on cleanup. But I wonder how any of those changes in mission affected you at all, or what you thought of any. Sasser: Not really. I worked for six different contractors. But I stayed on basically the same job and a different contractor. But no, I don't—let’s see—I retired in '88. They had not started a lot. They had shut down 100-N. But there was not much of the cleanup work started at that time. It was still pretty much in production. But of course, there was the diversification. At one time GE had the entire contract. And then they split it up and whatnot and just melted into different companies. Instead of dealing with the chain of command or whatnot, you had cross-relations with different companies. So that was about the only thing that was different. Bauman: Were there any events or things that happened--special memories that really stand out in your mind during your years working at Hanford? Sasser: Well you may have read about where that Hanford workers contributed a day's pay to send a bomber on its way. Well, I participated in that. And I got to take a walking tour through that plane when it was on site, before it was turned over to the Air Force. They had it in Hanford. And so I walked through the Day's Pay. Bauman: That must have been a special feeling for you. Sasser: Well I think it was a unique experience. [VIDEO CUTS] Sasser: But there was probably so many of them, it's hard to— Bauman: I teach courses on recent American history, on World War II, on the Cold War, and of course most of my students were born after the Cold War ended. What would you like current young people and future generations to know, remember about what it was like to live at Hanford during World War II or the Cold War? Sasser: Well, I think there’s a lot of young people gave up their life and their time and whatnot to continue to maintain the freedom that we have. And what they have now has been earned by their predecessors, their parents or grandparents, like that. They shouldn’t take a lot of things for granted. Bauman: Is there anything I haven’t asked you about that you think is important to talk about, about your years there or that you’d like to talk about? Sasser: Well, I know that atomic energy and the atom bomb has come under a lot of criticism. But I think that we didn’t start the war, and by dropping the bomb on them, we ended it a lot sooner than it would have, and saved a lot of lives. So, I think the good exceeds the bad. Bauman: Well, I want to thank you very much for coming in today and sharing your experiences with us. Really appreciate it. Sasser: Well, I’m glad to do it. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:21:43 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 101 Building Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1943-today Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1943-1988 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. McQuinn Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Norvin Sasser Description An account of the resource An interview with Norvin Sasser conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 08-23-2013 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2018-31-1: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. 101 Building Battelle Cold War F Reactor Hanford Kennedy Mountain Sun War https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F5004807cdab02ed901130c6c2d144671.JPG 1d9ff302dc0efcf4ee11d86c83d6be20 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fddda1570e3fff97baa01b4ef0f7d0005.mp4 2e095f92470d1f4278f84252b3f1b62d Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Bauman Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Ken Silliman Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound 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. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:28:21 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 189 kbps Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1931-today Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Case Family Carl Williams Alfred Amon Brandland Spike Jones Jack Teagarden John Dam Geri Dam Clint Bill Bryce Tom Moak Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Ken Silliman Description An account of the resource An interview with Ken Silliman conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 07-02-2013 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2018-31-1: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. 1954 Boeing Dam Entertainment Grain Hanford Kennewick Park River School Street Sun supplies War https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F0b20dd276fa5ac4ca837d367c65bf082.JPG 77fb0b56f0b1701be17b5aafb6ce8daf https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F89f29cf9702d2c71c70e2a8d3e7b103f.mp4 f8ff582fbae313653484f5f2be4d8f46 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Jerry Tallent Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Tom Hungate: We’re rolling. Robert Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin and I’m conducting an oral history interview with Jerry Tallent on June 15th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Jerry on his experiences working on the Hanford site. Before we begin, Jerry, could you say your name and spell it, please? Jerry Tallent: My name is Jerry Tallent. And that’s J-E-R-R-Y, T-A-L-L-E-N-T. And you’ll have to excuse my speech. Franklin: That’s okay. Thank you very much. So, I guess, let’s start at the beginning. Tell me how you came to Hanford. Tallent: I was running a D8 Cat up on Rattlesnake Mountain for a guy—a friend on the ranch. I was raised on a ranch. Franklin: Okay. Tallent: And he came to me and said, you’re the one that drives the D8. And I said, yeah. He said, I want to dig some petrified wood out of Rattlesnake Mountain. So we hauled up the Cat and I dug a bunch of petrified wood. Anyway, when we got done with that, he said, your dad’s leaving the farm. Is you gonna to run it? I said, no, I’m gonna get out. He said, I’ve got a job for you at Westinghouse Hanford in the 308 Building and you’d be working with plutonium. There it is. [LAUGHTER] I went to work for him and I worked inside 308 Lab. I think it’s all gone now, finally. The last building, they had to clean it up—clean the fuel up in it. But I worked there for about eight or nine years. And then an engineer I had, named Bobby Eschenbaum, she wanted me to come down to 305 Building, because, she said, you got a lot of brains. [LAUGHTER] That was a long time ago. [LAUGHTER] So I did. I left 308 Building and went to work for her. The pictures I got there are the stuff I designed and built. I did a lot of it back in our machine shop. I got in trouble with the machinists’ union out there. [LAUGHTER] But they ended up saying, okay, it’s a prototype and if you want any more built, we have to build it. No problem. So they patted me on the back and left, but, boy, they all showed up in force. They were after me. Because the technicians and engineering technicians weren’t union, and the metal fabricators were. So I was stepping on the metal fabricators’ toes. But then they realized it was all R&D—research and development. So they—it’s okay. And I had them build some stuff for me. We became pretty good friends, you know. Franklin: Yeah. Tallent: Yeah, it was after a while, I’d go into their building and—hey, how you doing? [LAUGHTER] Help me out all they could. Franklin: Wow, that’s great. Tallent: So that was pretty good. But, yeah, I enjoyed it. We had a couple of problems in the building. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Can you elaborate on the problems? Tallent: Well, one of them, they sent me downtown to radiation specialists. It was— Franklin: Was that at the time, or recently? Tallent: No, no, that was at the time I was working out there. We worked in gloveboxes. Franklin: Okay. Tallent: And we had some plutonium from Arco. As a matter of fact, it was from Karen Silkwood. [LAUGHTER] That sound familiar? Franklin: It doesn’t; I’m sorry. Tallent: It doesn’t? Franklin: No. Karen Silkwood? Tallent: Karen Silkwood was from Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Franklin: Okay. Tallent: And there was a show about her. She defied them, so they—I’d get in trouble with them. So they sabotaged her and said she stole plutonium out of the building. Well, there was no way. You can’t—that stuff, if I had a can of it in here and you had a radiation detector in the corner, it’d go off scale, you know. Franklin: Right. Tallent: So, anyway. It was a sabotage deal. Because she was—what do you call it—telling on them. Franklin: A whistleblower? Tallent: Yes, yes, she was kind of a whistleblower. And I said no. Franklin: And so you had some plutonium from her? Tallent: Well, they’d send it up here. Franklin: Oh, okay. Tallent: And thank you for getting back on the right track. Anyway, I dealt with her, and we went to open up the can and re-can it and put it in our vault. Well, we opened up the outer can. Of course, it’s in a bag, and then another can, which is in another can. Well, we opened up the outer can, and took out the inner can, and the plastic bag looked like it had been on fire. It was burnt to a crisp around the plutonium. Franklin: Oh! Tallent: Yeah, that’s what we said: oh! And my lead that was with me, I looked across and I said, Bob, we’d better get a radiation monitor inside. And he said, well, we got a detector here. And I said, yeah, well, okay. And about that time, I looked across. His gloves were black. And all of a sudden, on his arms, I could see white. And I said, don’t move. Your gloves are rotting off on your arms as we talk. Franklin: Wow. Tallent: And I looked over at the door—and the alarm going off, and I looked over at the door. I had two radiation monitors standing there. They come running in with masks on, put a mask on me, and put a mask on Bob. I do have a little piece of plutonium in my lung. Franklin: Wow. Tallent: In my left lung. It’s just a tiny nodule. And Hanford, downtown, said that’s the best place to have it, is in your lung. I said, oh yeah. [LAUGHTER] But they said, no, because as soon as it goes into your lung, your body protects it from you and puts a nodule around it. So I said, okay. So it hasn’t bothered me since ‘80s and ‘90s. I’ve got COPD and emphysema. But that don’t have anything to do with that tumor that’s in there. Franklin: Wow. Tallent: Anyway, that was one incident, and then another one was just in our lab, just on normal. One of the guys that was working with us, he’s dead now. He died of cancer. One of our guys was opening up a can with a can opener. And you know how sharp the lids are. Well, he cut his glove, so he hollered for help, and I ran in with a couple of masks. You had masks always in your drawer, in a bag. If they weren’t in a bag, then you couldn’t use them. But they are always in a bag. And I tore open the bag, and put one on me, and tore open another bag and took it in, and put on him and hit the button for the radiation monitors. And they come in, and they looked in, seeing masks, and—oh boy. [LAUGHTER] So they come in, and what they do is cut the—I’m shaking. They cut the sleeve off your arms and pull them down and then cut the tape on your gloves—your gloves are taped to your arms. You got rubber gloves on. And they’re taped to your arms, so they cut that off. And then slide everything off, and leave it in the glove, and then tape over the glovebox—over the opening. Franklin: Right, right, okay. Tallent: So nothing gets out. And you’re on negative air. It was—you know—if I had to do it over, I’d work out there again. It’d be no problem. Can’t work there now; it ain’t there no more. But just a few minor things here and there. We’ve had a few after that glovebox. Their gloves deteriorate and fall off. We got into the habit of changing them out once a week. Franklin: Wow. Tallent: To keep them from—you get plutonium in there, it deteriorates rubber fast. And we tried the lead-lined—rubber lead-lined gloves, but they were so heavy. So you work in them for 15 minutes, you’re exhausted. So my lead and I, we threw them out and said to hell with them. [LAUGHTER] Shoved them into the glovebox and put on new gloves. Everything—nothing comes out. [COUGH] I’m sorry. Nothing comes out. Everything goes in, and then gets bagged out. Franklin: Right. Tallent: With a sealer. Franklin: Right. Tallent: You get a fork to pull everything, put it in a bag and then pull it out and put it on this table and it puts a seal across it—a double seal. So it was—it was safe. And then we put it in a waste—radiation waste. That’s what they’re working on out there now. Franklin: Right, all that stuff. Tallent: All our crap. [LAUGHTER] Well, not all ours, but—it was stored down in the basement at 308. Not many people—I don’t know if I was supposed to say that. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Well, it’s gone now, so— Tallent: If I get a bunch of Feds come to my door—[LAUGHTER] Franklin: No. Tallent: There was a big room downstairs in the basement that held all these barrels of waste—radiation waste. Do you mind? Franklin: Oh, no, not at all. Take your time. Tallent: And once in a while, a radiation monitor would grab somebody to go down the basement with them. Because they can’t go alone—a monitor can’t go by themselves. So I had—[LAUGHTER]—a lady monitor that kind of liked me a little, and she would always grab me to go down the basement with her. And we’d check them for seals and leakage. We did hit one that was leaking. So that was taped off right away, and no problem. But when we’d go to ship—that was one thing that got me. When they’d go to ship plutonium out, a black Chevy Blazer would come in, and then a truck behind it—and there’s another one I might get in trouble for. Franklin: Oh, no, it’s all documented. Tallent: A black Chevy Blazer would come in and then a truck—an unmarked truck—and then another black Blazer. And they’d pull up to our loading dock, and there’d be one Blazer on each side of the loading dock. And the truck’d back up to the loading dock. The back doors would open up to them Blazers, and here’s a guy or a woman sitting there with a machine gun. [LAUGHTER] And there’d be three or four people—one of them a gorgeous lady that carried machine gun. I wouldn’t want to say anything bad to her. [LAUGHTER] She had a machine gun, and she stood guard, and she was not friends with anybody. And don’t come out on the dock. The only one allowed on the dock was the one with the truck—with the forklift. Franklin: Right. Tallent: And everybody else stayed inside—or else. Franklin: Wow. Tallent: And they’d load that up, close the doors, lock it, and I said, what happens if you got hit? I asked one of the guards, because she’d come in for a drink of water, thank God. And I said, what happens if you got hit? And she said, that truck—the minute that they don’t have the code to get into that truck would fill instantly with foam. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: So then it would— Tallent: It would just be foam, instantly. And they couldn’t get it out. It’d take them a week to get to it. Franklin: Wow. Tallent: So I said, well, that’s pretty amazing. It was pretty interesting. Franklin: Yeah. Tallent: And, like I said, shortly after that is when I went down to 305 and started R&D on the other equipment. But I enjoyed working in the hot lab. Franklin: The hot lab, you mean 308? Tallent: Huh? Franklin: You mean 308? Tallent: That was 308, yeah, yeah. Franklin: Hot lab. Tallent: I enjoyed working there, but it got to the point it was just too—[SIGH]—political. And that’s as far as I’m going to go with that. Franklin: Sure, okay. I understand. Tallent: You had to put in guaranteed overtime. And it wasn’t for any reason. You just had to be there. Bring your cards and your Playboys. And I’m not that kind of person. If I’m there, I’m gonna work. So. Franklin: Interesting. Tallent: There’s another one to be after me. Franklin: No. Tallent: Be a bomb at my door. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: I’ve heard—funny. Those stories circle around, so you wouldn’t be the—there’s no harm in sharing that stuff. Tallent: Well— Franklin: Oh, yeah. Please, feel free. You mentioned—the first incident you mentioned, you mentioned your guy—your lead, Bob. What was—do you remember his name? Tallent: Bob Henry. Franklin: Bob Henry, okay. Tallent: Yeah, he’s long-dead now, I’m sure. He was a good old boy for a while. Then him and I got into it over this mandatory overtime. He took a week’s vacation and I didn’t work it. So he told a supervisor, the manager of 308. No more raises, no more that kind of stuff. So that’s when this Bobby Eschenbaum that was an engineer in 308 for a while, she heard about it, and she said, I need you. Come to work for 305. Franklin: Wow. Tallent: So I did. Franklin: What year did you start at Hanford? Tallent: Oh, boy. ’73, ’74, somewhere. Franklin: Okay. Tallent: Yeah, I left the ranch. We sold out. Franklin: And where was the ranch? Tallent: On the Yakima River just outside of Richland. Franklin: Okay. Tallent: My dad and his partner which owned the Richland Laundry were partners on it—Harvey Stoller. Him and his wife both got killed in a car wreck in California. It was right across from the West Richland golf course. That’s what I loved about it. When we weren’t working, I’d go down to the river and go fishing all the time. We had a heck of a bass hole down there. My mom and I, we’d go fishing there all the time. We’d go up on the upper end or down by the house. And went up on the upper end one time, and out of all things, she got a huge hit. And I said, that is one big bass! Come out of the water, it was a steelhead. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Wow. Tallent: So she caught a big old steelhead. Franklin: Were your—where—so did you grow up on the ranch then? Did you grow up here? Tallent: Pretty much. I lived in Kennewick for a long time. My dad worked in the shipyards, fixing them up during the war. Franklin: Okay. Tallent: And he’d be one of the first guys going in, open up the hatches of these ships all shot up, come in. And he said he didn’t like that at all. That was ugly. He left there, and then he went to—heard about the dams. He was a carpenter. So he came to Kennewick and started working on the dams. Franklin: Okay. Tallent: He went to Alaska for a short time. Thought he’d try that out, because it was good money. All he did was sit on the Cat and haul sleds off the LSTs—materials—off the Aleutian Islands. They said, don’t get down. He’d go to get down. They said, don’t get down. That’s your home, right there, you just stay on that. You’re going to be working 24/7s. So he just slept on the Cat. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Wow. Tallent: Yeah! But that didn’t—they got all the stuff they needed there on the islands, so they—he come back here and started working, building the dams. He worked Ice Harbor—constructing the dams. Franklin: Oh, okay. Tallent: Yeah. Franklin: And so where were you born, Jerry? Tallent: I was born Hamilton, Montana. Franklin: Hamilton, Montana. And what year were you born? Tallent: ’45. 1945. Franklin: Okay. And—sorry. Tallent: And then we moved here to the Tri-Cities in ’47 I guess it was. So I wasn’t much bigger than a—I was a little guy when came. Franklin: Little sprout? Tallent: Yeah. [LAUGHTER] Yup. Franklin: And then your family lived in Kennewick until they bought the ranch? Tallent: Yeah. My dad got—he wanted to be his own boss again. And he’d always loved farming. He farmed in Hamilton—an orchard and all that. So he knew a lot about it. We raised 350 head of Black Angus—registered Black Angus animals. And just a few pigs and sheep and that to eat. But every once in a while, we’d get a barren cow and she didn’t have no calves, so she wasn’t worth nothing. So that was her downfall. She’d end up being on our table. Franklin: Right. Tallent: Yeah. You know, about once a year. If we didn’t need any meat, they went to the stockyards—went to the show—sale. We sold them. We sold all the male calves. He’d keep an eye out for a good-looking bull, and we might raise a bull. But most all the males were sent to sale. And then the heifers, we would keep them and put them with the new bull, so there’d be no inbreeding. Franklin: Right. Tallent: So that’s how we lived for years, ‘til ’73 or something like that, I believe. Then that’s when I got the chance to go out to the Area. And Dad says, I’m out of here. I’m retiring. He bought a big doublewide and some property out in Burbank by his one brother and retired out there. Ended up dying. He’d worked in the coal mine in Idaho and Montana, and died of black lung. Franklin: As a lot of coal miners do. Tallent: Yes, sir. But he still had a good life. I mean, he was 70-something years old. Franklin: That’s not—yeah, that’s not bad. Tallent: No. Mom died at 88. Franklin: Wow. Tallent: Years old. And she just died of old age. [LAUGHTER] She was like me. Too damn ornery to die. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] So, tell me a little more about—I heard some weird stuff about the 308—you said the hot lab. You said that they used a can opener to open the cans. Do you mean like an actual can opener, like a regular can opener, or was it like a specially designed can opener? Tallent: No, just a can opener. Franklin: Like, just a—one you buy at the store. Tallent: Had a rubber handle on it, so it wouldn’t poke a hole in your glove. Franklin: Right. Tallent: And when—it comes sealed. And they would seal them, but then they’d be in a can in a can, and they’d have the plastic bag around them. But the last can—the first can that had the actual materials in it was a sealed can. Safety is not spared. Franklin: Right. Well, yeah, it’s a pretty valuable product. So when you went to—you went with Bobby Eschenbaum to the 305 Building. So what kind of work did you do at the 305 Building? How was that different from the 308? Tallent: Well, there was no material down there. It used to be a hot building, years ago, before I got there. It had, actually, a reactor in it—in the basement of it, from what I heard. Franklin: Okay. Tallent: And what I understand. It had—that’s where the dismantling machine went to. It’d go clear down into that basement. It was about—probably 16, 18 feet deep. Franklin: Wow. Tallent: It was quite deep. Franklin: So what kind of work was done at 305? Tallent: All research and development lab. Just what them pictures show. Franklin: Okay. Yeah, I’d love to get the camera on those pictures in a little bit so you could talk to us a little about that. Tallent: Yeah. She said, well, we’re going to build a dismantling machine to hold the fuel driver assembly and somehow cut it open. So she gave me an endcap, and go to work. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Wow. Tallent: On the mechanism to hold it with, you know. We actually built clamps around it in two or three different areas, and they would rotate. The arms would come out, and they didn’t move, but inside the clamps rotated. So it would—and the base would turn. No, it wasn’t the base; it was the upper part. There’s a picture of the upper part. I designed the motor and had the gear built for that and put the motor on there and it worked amazing. It was great. I patted myself on the back ‘til I hurt my arms. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: So for the non-real-technical people, what was the main purpose of that machine? Tallent: The main purpose was to cut open the fuel driver assembly to get the fuel pins out. Once they’d been irradiated, they swell. Franklin: Okay. Tallent: And some of them even burst open. Franklin: Oh. Tallent: Yeah. Which was—aw, shucks. But they were in a hot place; they were in a cell. They would—had to design something to cut these open to get all these fuel pins out. And I cannot remember how many was in there, but there was a bunch. You got it with them pictures, you can see them. Franklin: Yeah, it looked like a lot. Tallent: But there were configurations. The first row would be not as many as the next row, the next row, and the next row, and then it’d go back down again. To fit that octagon or hexagon or whatever it was—six-sided or eight-sided—fuel driver assembly. Franklin: Right. Tallent: And so I was—my engineer and I, we scratched our heads, and figured it out. He was a good guy, Pete Titzler. Franklin: Pete Titzler. Tallent: Yeah. I don’t even know if he’s alive. Franklin: Sounds like he would—well, if he is, he sounds like he’d be really interesting to talk to. Tallent: Huh? Franklin: If he is, he sounds like he’d be a really interesting guy to talk to. Tallent: Yeah, he would be, he would be. Franklin: So then you mentioned after—how long did you stay at 305? Tallent: Well, it wasn’t—probably only three or four years. Franklin: Okay. Tallent: And then— Franklin: Oh, sorry, go ahead. Tallent: Then I went away. Franklin: You mentioned earlier that you went to FFTF for a short time. Tallent: Yeah, a short time. Franklin: And you left FFTF, just because it was mostly desk work? Tallent: Huh? Franklin: You left FFTF just because it was mostly desk work? Tallent: Yeah, basically it was just gonna be—one of the guys really liked it. In the picture there. He went out there, and he liked doing that kind of stuff. But I want to be the guy doing the work. I want to, you know, run the metal arms or push the lawnmower—anything. I want to do something. I don’t want to sit on my backside and write notes and tell this guy what to do and tell that guy want to do. I want to do it myself. Franklin: Right. Tallent: You know. Franklin: So when did you—do you remember the year that you left Hanford? Tallent: No. In the ‘80s—early ‘80s sometime. Franklin: Okay. Tallent: You’re making me reach way back there now. [LAUGHTER] I’m a feeble old-minded feller. Franklin: No, your recollections are great. I don’t—I can’t get to the early ‘80s myself, either. That’s because I was born then. What did you do after you left Hanford? Tallent: Well, I worked for this one construction company for a short time. I won’t tell you his name, because he didn’t like me because I was buddy with the lead. And he didn’t like me being friends with him, so he gave me all kinds of hell, and wouldn’t give me a raise and all that. So I walked off and said, keep your company. I’m going. Well, he—the last paycheck, he wouldn’t—I was going to get, he bounced it. They wouldn’t accept it. So I had a buddy of mine that owns the tavern in Richland, Two Bits and a Bite. Franklin: Oh yeah. Tallent: Yeah. Yeah, he’s a good friend of mine. We lived together for a while. Anyway, he had me do a bunch of work there for him. I remodeled his kitchen for him. And then one day, this guy comes in and says, hey, Jerry. I’d met him through this other construction company. I said, yeah. He said, I got a bathroom remodel, and I can’t do it. You want to do it? I’ll give it to you. And I said, no, but you and I can do it. Well, I don’t own nothing, you’ll have to show me. And I said, let’s get to work. That was in the early ‘90s. Him and I been buddies ever since. Now he’s—I can’t do anything anymore, and he’s decided to—he takes care of all the Head Start schools around the Tri-Cities. Richard Meyers is his name. He’s the best friend I’ve ever had. He comes by—in fact he was there this morning—he’ll come by and spray my weeds and weed it and clean the filters on my fish pond, and—man, he’s just a wonderful fella. Franklin: Oh, that’s great. And where do you live now—do you live in Richland? Tallent: Yes, I do. Franklin: Okay. So, let’s see here. We’ve talked a bit about Hanford as a place to work and your kind of challenges there. Is there anything else you’d like to say about working at Hanford? Is there any special challenges or rewarding aspects of your work? Tallent: It was all very rewarding. I wouldn’t ever deny it—I’d do it all over again. Franklin: Really? Tallent: Yeah. Franklin: That’s great. Tallent: I’d do it all over again. Now, speaking of reaching back into the past for memories, I’m going to ask you about some—to do that again for me. What are your memories of any major events in the Tri-Cities, like plants shutting down or starting up, or any local events? I guess that’s kind of a two-parter, so we can just start with stuff at Hanford. Tallent: Well, I know that all the barracks out here went away and the trailer courts on the right-hand side, they all went away after—you had all these construction guys. I’ve seen pictures of those at the DOL office, they’ve got all these guys at the dinner table, the big long tables in the barracks. I remember when Kadlec Hospital was just a barracks. Now it’s huge. Franklin: Yeah, it is. Tallent: And getting bigger. Franklin: Yeah. Tallent: It’s really a mess right now. I had to go there yesterday, and they’re making the hospital bigger, but there’s no more parking than they had. There never was no parking before! Franklin: Yeah, I drive by there every day when I go— Tallent: Yeah, it’s like the park down here in Richland. They built that big theater there, but there’s no place for anybody park to go to it. Oh, I’ve been here forever. I remember in Kennewick—the road to Kennewick was Columbia Drive. And that’s how you got to Pasco, was on Columbia Drive. That was the only way you could get from Kennewick to Pasco. Franklin: Oh, right. Tallent: Yeah. Yeah, it was. That was pretty interesting. My uncle, he also lived here. He drove bus at Hanford. He drove a bus—everybody that was working out there, he would pick up in Pasco and drive them to Hanford to work—bus driver. Franklin: Wow! And when did he start doing that? Tallent: Oh, gosh. I’m sure in the ‘50s. Franklin: Oh, wow. Tallent: Yeah, ‘40s—somewhere in there. Franklin: Did you have any other family that worked at Hanford? Tallent: I guess my real dad worked here for a short time. I have—the man and the woman that raised me was really my aunt and my uncle. But they raised me since I was in arms. My real dad and mom was having marital problems, and they said, here, hold on to this, we’ll be right back. [LAUGHTER] And they ended up going through a big [dispute], and my real mom says, the woman that raised me, she didn’t have any kids, and I didn’t have the heart to take you back. I just met her a few years ago. Franklin: Really? Tallent: Yeah, my real mom. She was wonderful. I got to see my dad. I went back to a one-and-only family reunion. And it was quite a story. We were back there—my son and my daughter went with us. And—no, it wasn’t my daughter. My son and his wife and my granddaughter—she was—my daughter-in-law was carrying my grandbaby. And we went back there to the family reunion, and my real dad, he come up to me. My dad was dead—my real—the man that raised me, my uncle. And he said, your mom wants to meet you. I said, my mom? She’s dead! No, you got her confused with who I married afterwards. She’s still alive, and she wants to meet you. Franklin: Wow. Tallent: So, I got to meet my real mom. And it was a good thing, because she was well up into her late 80s. Franklin: Wow. Tallent: And she lived in Arizona, and she went back to Arizona and died, right after the reunion. But we were at this community center, having lunches and drinks and everything, and my real dad come up to me. Now, this is the first time I’d seen him in years. He come up to me and said, you drinking Rainier, huh? And I said, yeah. Oh, come up to the bar. He was drinking a Rainier. He drank Rainier just like I did. I said, that is—we never socialized together, and you drink Rainier just like me. Yep. My favorite beer. We weren’t done that. He said, how about a hard drink? I said, yeah. He said do you like Black Velvet? I said, that’s the drink I drink. So we both drank beer and the hard booze the same brands. That was just—it just drove me crazy! I said, I can’t believe this! Franklin: Yeah, that’s really something. Tallent: Yeah. We live clear across the country from each other and we both drink the same drinks. Franklin: Well, you know, the apple doesn’t fall from the tree—fall far from the tree. Tallent: Yeah, not far from the tree, yup. Franklin: So what was it—so you mentioned you first moved to Kennewick and then you lived kind of in West Richland area. What was it like growing up from a really small child in the Tri-Cities? You know, it’s kind of a special place next to Hanford. Tallent: Yeah, Kennewick was—Dad built the house we moved into. We had lived up above, up the hill from it. And he had this pasture—he’d always loved animals. He had the pasture below us and on the side of our property. So he decided he’d take this old concrete slab that used to be a barn and build a house. So he got that done. He’d get off work, go down and work until midnight. God, he was just—endless hours of work. Franklin: Wow. Tallent: And he got that house built, and I helped him—[COUGH]—Excuse me. Franklin: It’s okay. Tallent: Helped him hang the cabinets and put up all knotty pine inside—knotty pine panels. It wasn’t the four-by-eight sheets; it was the one-by-six—or half-inch-by-six. And we put up all this stuff. Made room for a fireplace and he decided he wasn’t going to put in a fireplace, so we put in a window there instead. Built that there, and I loved it there. I had a good buddy up the hill. He ended up being a Vietnam hero. We used to go bike riding all the time when we were kids and run up and down the roads and get into little trouble. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: And this was in Kennewick, or in Richland? Tallent: Yeah, in Kennewick. Franklin: Okay. Tallent: But then Dad decided that he’d had enough of this little place. I met this guy that’s got a big ranch and he wants me to come out and look at it. And I said, well, I want to finish school here. It didn’t happen. Franklin: So what school did you go to in Richland? Tallent: Huh? Franklin: What school did you go to in Richland? Tallent: Col High. Franklin: Okay. Tallent: Columbia High in Richland the last two years. And I was a real derelict. Because I was—all my friends were at Kennewick. Franklin: Right. Tallent: Everybody I run around with, girlfriends, boyfriends, all were in Kennewick. And I couldn’t get to hardly meet anybody here in Richland. I just—they all had their different little cliques. Franklin: Right. Tallent: And so I was kind of a loner, so I did a lot of school skipping. [LAUGHTER] I’d go to Kennewick and walk the halls with all my buddies. And then they started checking for—where you from? I was in—I went to the study hall. [LAUGHTER] Went to study hall with them. I was sitting there and talking, and all of the sudden there was a hand on my shoulder. Who’s your homeroom teacher? [LAUGHTER] Out the door! Franklin: Oh, jeez. So what was it like to grow up in the Tri-Cities during the Cold War? Was it—did you ever have—I mean, did you know what was being made at Hanford when you were growing up, or when did you first start to realize-- Tallent: I— Franklin: --what was going on onsite? Tallent: Yes, I did. I did know that it was for the Manhattan Project. I never missed that show. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Tallent: That was a good series. I knew that they were building reactors and everything out there, yeah. In fact, from 308 Building, right across the driveway there was the old PRTR building, which was one of the first reactors. 309, I think it was called. And that was a gutted-out reactor. It had a round dome on it. Franklin: Okay. Tallent: We went over there and visited that, and they’d give us a tour. This is what was there, and this is where it was at, and all this stuff. It was pretty interesting. Franklin: So what—did you ever—so you would have been—born in ’45, so you would have been kind of a kid in the late ‘50s, early ‘60s. Do you remember special emphasis on the Cold War, you know? Or preparations—especially being so close to a major, you know, nuclear weapon—you know, site for nuclear weapons fuel. Tallent: Yeah. Franklin: Do you remember any—what was kind of—what was it like to grow up in that? Was it scary, or was it just normal, or--? Tallent: It really didn’t bother me. It worried the heck out of my mom. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Really? Tallent: Yeah. I guess it’s—the Korean War, she wouldn’t get away from the radio. We didn’t have TV. Franklin: Right. Tallent: She wouldn’t leave the radio and read every newspaper while all the problems of the Korean War. And after the Korean War, I was getting close to the age. And then here come Vietnam. You’re not gonna go to Vietnam. You’re not gonna go. [LAUGHTER] I said, Mom, I’m gonna sign up. No, you’re not. And I snuck out and my buddy—he became a war hero; he was on a chopper—rescue chopper—and went down, and he saved all of his buddies. Hung them up on the—he dove down in the water I don’t know how many times. And they already had a loaded bunch of—shot-up or—you know, crew from another helicopter. Franklin: Wow. Tallent: And they were—so he lost most of them. But his pilot—his captain said that if it wasn’t for him, a lot of people wouldn’t have been there. Franklin: Wow. And so you never went to Vietnam then? Tallent: Huh? Franklin: Did you go to Vietnam? Tallent: No, because I was on the ranch, and I went to sign up with all my buddies—seven of them. You might remember Sam Francisco. You heard of him? Franklin: No. Tallent: Samson—Sam Francisco? Franklin: Sam? Sam Francisco? Tallent: Sam Francisco. He never came back. His body’s here now. His sister in West Richland wanted it back and they haven’t given it back to him yet—to her yet. But Jimmy was one of the few that made it back. We kind of—after—I signed up, but—I was a 1-A, and I signed up to go with them. And I didn’t have the brains Jimmy did to be a pilot—a Navy pilot, or on the choppers of that. You had to be pretty smart on your math. I don’t know how smart you had to be to run a gun, but—[LAUGHTER] But anyway, he got to go. And I was 1-A, and then they sent me a letter said, you’re a single son, and you’re on a farm. You’re not going. Franklin: Mm. Tallent: They made me a 4-F. Franklin: Wow. Tallent: So they wouldn’t take me. My mom, she was—ooh, mad at me. How come—where’d you get this? Well, I signed up to go with Jimmy to Vietnam. I told you, you’re not gonna go! [LAUGHTER] She wanted me to go to Canada or something. Don’t go! And I said, I’m gonna go with my buddies. I guess maybe it was a good thing I didn’t. Because I’d have been a ground pounder. I wouldn’t have been—you know. Franklin: Yeah. Do you—can you describe any of the ways that security or secrecy at Hanford impacted your work? Tallent: Well, I know you had to have a badge. I had a Q clearance, which was a top-of-the-line. I could go anywhere out there. You had to show that badge every morning, and then pass through the metal detector. If you didn’t—you didn’t get by if you had metal on you. One of the guys—his name was Arnie—he was in the Air Force, and his—he was the tail gunner. It wasn’t during the war, but he was a tail gunner, and the plane crashed. And he was in the tail. He ended up in the cockpit. And he had nothing but pins in his legs. He could walk all right; he played volleyball at lunchtime with us out on the grass. But he couldn’t pass the metal detectors. He had to have a special permit saying he had— Franklin: Oh, wow. Tallent: Stainless steel pins in his legs. Arnie’s something. Arnie Dupris. Franklin: Dupris. And what did he do on— Tallent: Huh? Franklin: What did he—did he work in the 308 and the 305 with you? Tallent: No. He worked in 308, but I don’t remember—I can’t tell you where he worked. Franklin: Okay. Tallent: But—no, I’m the only one that went to 305 besides that one engineer. She became a manager and ran the 305 Building. Franklin: Bobby? Tallent: Bobby Eschenbaum, yeah. Her husband was an engineer. And I’m not sure where he went to. He was a nice guy, too. I got along with both of them good. [LAUGHTER] Oh. Bobby Eschenbaum was a little, short lady. She held a meeting—she was an engineer—so she held a meeting out in meeting room at 308, before we went down to—so she’s like this, and grabbing the table, leaning back in her chair and talking to us, grabbing the table. Missed. Poot. I was sitting closest to her. I grabbed her dress, pulled it down, and helped her up. She was pretty embarrassed. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Oh, jeez. That’s awesome. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford—your work at Hanford, or what the role of Hanford in history? Tallent: Well, there ain’t no future in Hanford, except way out there now. I’d say, go for it, if you get the chance. Franklin: No, I mean, what would you like future generations to know about Hanford? Or to—when— Tallent: Well, it was very instrumental in winning the war. Franklin: Right. Tallent: It shortened up the war to Japan. Franklin: Sure. What about the Cold War? And the nuke—arsenal and things. What about Hanford’s other role, after World War II? Tallent: Well—boy, you know, all I know is they built fuel for reactors to go into reactors—light-water stuff, the enriched uranium reactors and plutonium reactors. But—I don’t know what else I can tell you about that. [LAUGHTER] Really. Franklin: That’s okay. Is there anything else that we haven’t talked about that you’d like to mention? Tallent: Well, I don’t know. You’re pretty thorough. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Oh, thanks. [LAUGHTER] Emma, is there anything? No? How about could we take a few minutes and go through some of those photos? Tallent: Sure. Franklin: And then I can hold them if you’d like and you can make talk through them a little bit. Because those are really interesting; I’d like for the camera to see the things that you developed. Tallent: Well, hold them up here or something. Franklin: Okay, great. So how do we— [NEW CLIP] Tallent: Dismantling machine. Right there. Franklin: And that’s you, right? Tallent: That’s me. Franklin: With all the hair. Tallent: Yup, the fuzzy hair. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Tallent: I’m trying to remember what this is. This was part of the dismantling machine right there. And this turned. They would cut the top open. Franklin: And just to be clear, the dismantling machine dismantled what, exactly? Tallent: This. The fuel drivers. Franklin: Okay, okay. Tallent: It would take that all apart. This is all what’s in the reactors. Franklin: Okay. Tallent: There’s—I don’t know how many in the reactors. And we had—after they come out of the reactor, they would go in to this room. You can see down there below the concrete, this second story down there. But this would come up—this door would open, and this would come up and go in there. It’d rotate and they’d cut the top off. Boy. I don’t know what all—[LAUGHTER] But they would—here’s the steel arms that would—manipulators-- Franklin: Wow. Tallent: --that would grab ahold of it and help it. And I believe this took place so it could rotate—goodness sakes. That would rotate this guy more, instead of having to turn it by hand or something like that. Franklin: Okay. Tallent: That’s just a proof for the photographer. Franklin: This one here? Tallent: Yeah. That was just proofs. Franklin: Okay. Tallent: But there’s probably a picture of that. Once you’re out on the floor, you got to wear a hard hat. Franklin: Right. This one is interesting, can you tell me what— Tallent: That’s a glovebox there. Franklin: So it’s supposed to be like that, right? Tallent: Huh? Franklin: Should be like this, right? Because—yeah, there’s the person. Tallent: Yeah. That’s actually 308 Building. That’s the only picture I got. This was loading the fuel pellets. There’s fuel pellets in there. Franklin: Wow. Tallent: Holy mackerel. How’d I get that? [LAUGHTER] Anyway. The fuel pin is right there, and then that’s—you can see that bag? Franklin: Mm-hmm. Tallent: That’s on the open room. So this is sealed up tight, and then I’m shoveling fuel into that fuel pin. Then you have a spring—goes in and then you plant them and then put the endcap on. Franklin: Wow. Tallent: And then it gets welded—goes over to the welding lab. Franklin: Wow. That’s— Tallent: Yeah. That’s a—that was—that’s not ours. Franklin: Right. Tallent: They—that’s what they were building for Three Mile Island, but it never happened. And they were wanting us to build a better one, because that one wasn’t very good. Franklin: Mm. And that’s just another— Tallent: Yeah. And I said, let’s design a better one. But it never happened. Franklin: Tsk. Right. Okay, so here’s another one here with the— Tallent: That was going to be a one-time deal. You’d build it, and then it stays in the bottom of the Three Mile Island. Franklin: Oh, we’re talking this thing here—this robot. Tallent: Yeah, because Three Mile Island, that’s where they had that bad accident. Franklin: Right, right. Tallent: There, and Idaho Falls. Franklin: So what’s going on in this picture here? Tallent: Okay. [LAUGHTER] Your guess is as good as mine. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Okay. Emma Rice: It looks like there’s those arms there. Franklin: Yeah, we have the-- Tallent: We were getting ready to—oh, there’s a clamp. Oh, okay. That’s ready to be taken off. It’s cut at the bottom, and see that there? Franklin: Yeah. Tallent: That’s grabbing ahold of the assembly, the outer assembly. Franklin: Right. Tallent: And it’s starting to lift it off. This is a—you can see it’s cut open. So, it’s not hot; it’s just all—you know. But this lifts it off, and down the hole that goes, and this lifts it off and then it rotates and sets it aside. Franklin: Mm. Tallent: And this is—that’s what I was working on, too. So it’s a little rough, but there’s all the pins on the bottom—the bottom fuel pins. And once you lift it off, then it shoves these pins—there’s locking pins that holds all this into place, and it kicks them out. Franklin: So here—and this is kind of that hexagon or—upside-down? Oops. Tallent: There you go. Franklin: There we go. So this is that formation you were talking about, right? Tallent: Yeah, see those pins? Franklin: A six-sided—yes. Tallent: They’re held into place. I’m shaky. Franklin: No, it’s okay. Tallent: I’m sorry. Franklin: No, it’s all right. Tallent: These pins are holding these into place, and once they get—my brain. [LAUGHTER] Not working good. Anyway, once they get the—oh, it is off of it. This is not the fuel driver assembly; this is a canister to hold these fuel pins. Then I’m not sure after that. Franklin: Okay. Tallent: So I’m at a loss. Franklin: That’s all right. Tallent: There’s all the people. Franklin: That’s you right there. Tallent: That’s me. That’s my secretary. That’s my engineer. And these guys are—no, that was one of my engineers. His name was Steve. This was Pete Titzler. This is the one him and I got an award for designing this stuff. Franklin: Great. Tallent: Yeah. And he was—this guy here was— Franklin: This gentleman right here? Tallent: --Manager of all the other ones. Bobby isn’t in there. Franklin: Okay. Tallent: Oh, she—I don’t know. I can’t remember. She left or something. Franklin: So here’s—it looks like another view of the arms there. Tallent: Yeah, that’s— Franklin: You’ve got some nice bellbottoms on. Tallent: Yes, I had my bellbottoms. I was a hippy. On days off, I had a headband on, too. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: So what are you doing here in this picture? Tallent: You know, I was trying to remember that myself. I’m running the dismantling machine. Franklin: Okay. Tallent: I’m making it turn and go up and down on all that stuff. I never did that. They just wanted it for pictures, basically. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Just to have you pose? Tallent: Yeah. Franklin: Oh, I see. Tallent: Get your hair done, and—you know. Franklin: Yeah. So here you are again. Tallent: Yeah. And this one was—this one was a—and they had to have room, so you had a two-story one. You had the gloveboxes down here and a glovebox down here, and you could go up to work on it. Franklin: Right. Tallent: And Greg is in there working on it. Just demonstration. Franklin: What is HEDL stand for? Tallent: Hanford Environmental Development Lab. Franklin: Okay. Tallent: How’d I remember that? Franklin: I don’t know; your memory’s good. Tallent: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: That just came right off. Tell us about this photo. Tallent: Okay, that—you tell us about it. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] You brought it! Tallent: Oh, boy! You know, I—it’s a single pin. See, there’s wire wrapped around this fuel pin, too. That keeps them from touching each other. Franklin: Okay. Tallent: But I don’t remember what that—that was my baby, SN005. Franklin: Right, you mentioned earlier when you showed this before that you had invented this machine here, right? Tallent: Oh. Franklin: Or you worked on it, or--? Tallent: I helped invent it. Franklin: Helped invent it. Tallent: Yeah, I helped invent this whole—that whole guy, wherever it went to—the dismantling machine. Franklin: Yeah, we saw that earlier. Well, I think we have maybe some of that here. Tallent: Yeah. Franklin: Right? Over on this side, over here. Tallent: Yeah. Franklin: Wow. That’s just kind of part of the crew there. Oh, no, you said this is the group of— Tallent: Them’s the group of foreign people. The—I don’t see a Japanese fella. Maybe that’s him. But there’s French and German and they all wanted to see it work. They were all excited about it, so we had to put it on display. It was kind of a last-minute thing for me. All of the sudden, they come up to my office, my desk, and say, hey, Jerry. Come on down. We’re gonna—you’re gonna be on the show here. They filmed it all. Franklin: Wow. Tallent: And he said, we have all these foreign delegates here that want to see this thing work. And I said, oh, you’re kidding me. Get somebody else! [LAUGHTER] I didn’t want to—this is the first thing they had. This actually is an auger. And that would cut that open. And—that’s right, I—this thing is floating on air. It weighs probably 800, 900 pounds. And it’s floating on air and you can move it back and forth. But see that—those there? Franklin: Mm-hmm. Tallent: Those are stops. These come out, and center it up. Franklin: Huh. Tallent: And they had to be set just right. There’s two on each side. When the machine would turn it on, these would come out and center up the machine so it’d hit it right on the corner and cut that open. Franklin: Wow. Tallent: But that’s when they said that they didn’t like that, because of all the shavings. Franklin: Right. Tallent: It left great big chunks of stainless, and they were going to be irradiated, so it was going to have them all over the floor. So I said, okay. Back to scratching their head and finding out. That’s when I discovered stainless steel and copper don’t like each other. Franklin: And can you tell us again how you kind of helped develop this new process for getting these open? Tallent: Well, Pete and Steve Dawson? I think his name was Steve Dawson. Anyway, Pete come to me and said, hey. He explained to me that all these shavings on the floor were gonna be irradiated. You’d turn off the light and you’d see shavings everywhere, and they were hot. So let’s develop a method for cutting them open that has no shavings. Franklin: Right. Tallent: And he said, how about a cutting torch? They had a lot of smoke, and they don’t want the smoke. So I tried—that’s when I tried the TIG welder. Well, TIG welder didn’t do much but leave a weld on it. Franklin: Mm-hmm. Tallent: So I asked Pete. I said, what won’t stick to that stainless steel? He said, copper. Get me some copper rod. Okay. Went and got me some copper rod and I—that’s what I told you earlier, I mentioned—it just popped open. Franklin: So you’d just weld that to the steel and then it’d— Tallent: It bust that wide open— Franklin: Pfft. Wow. Tallent: It’d split. Just enough to relax all the fuel pins inside. Franklin: Okay. Tallent: To where they’re not—because the fuel pins would expand after being irradiated. Franklin: Right. Tallent: And with that being busted open, it would relax it so you could— Franklin: Pull the fuel pins out. Tallent: Pull the—yeah. Pull this off, pull the driver assembly off, so you could get to the fuel pins. Franklin: Wow. That’s really ingenious. Tallent: Yeah, it was pretty cool. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] That is pretty cool. So what— Tallent: I was just—scared the heck out of me the second time I did it. Because when I used the copper, he said, well, do it again. I’ll get you another chunk. Got another chunk, and he stood right there and we were watching it and it got to the end and it just popped and jumped off. And we both jumped back. Franklin: Wow. Tallent: He said, you got an award coming. Franklin: Wow. Yeah, you said you got like a $500 bonus or something? Tallent: I got a $500 bonus, and that was quite the deal. Franklin: That’s great. Tallent: And Westinghouse got the patent. Franklin: Ah, of course. [LAUGHTER] Tallent: [LAUGHTER] Nothing—not allowed to have the patent. Franklin: Right, because you’re a government contract. Tallent: Yeah, that government. This was a different style of steel arm there, the manipulators. We could change them out to go to them big ones or the little fingers. Franklin: Right. Tallent: They got little fingers on that? No, it’s got the bigger on one that. Franklin: I think it’s the same kind of— Tallent: Yup. Franklin: --Steel arm. That’s another duplicate. Tallent: That’s just about all. Franklin: I guess we got one more left here. Tallent: Yeah. That hippy on the left. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] So what are—what’s being—do you know what’s being—is this a glovebox in here? Tallent: Well it— Franklin: What’s being watched here? Tallent: Well, it would be the glovebox looking at the dismantling machine here, and that’s through six feet of glass. And that’s just the wall—it was pretend there, but out there, FFTF, it was real. But this would be six foot of concrete with steel BBs in it. I mean lead BBs. And lead—plutonium doesn’t like lead. Franklin: Right. Tallent: So it don’t want to go through the wall anyways. Franklin: Right. Tallent: But even at that, it’s six foot thick. And then the glass is six-foot thick. And looking through that all day long would drive you crazy. I mean it’s just hard to look through. Franklin: Hurt your eyes? Tallent: Yeah, I mean, six foot of glass. Back then I wasn’t wearing glasses, was I? Franklin: It doesn’t look like it. Well, Jerry, thank you so much for your oral history and for going through all these pictures with us. It’s been one heck of a time. Tallent: It was a great ride! Franklin: Thank you so much. We’re gonna really—we’re gonna digitize all of these and we’ll have them with your—we’re gonna digitize them all and we’ll have them with your oral history. And this will, I think, really be a great resource for students and scholars. Tallent: Yeah. No problem. You can hang on to them. Franklin: Great. Tallent: Just don’t lose them. Franklin: Well, I promise you that. We will not lose them. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:58:15 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 305 Building 308 Lab Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1947-today Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. ~73-early 80s Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Bobby Eschenbaum Karen Silkwood Bob Henry Richard Meyers Sam Francisco Arnie Dupris Pete Titzler Pete and Steve Dawson Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Jerry Tallent Description An account of the resource An interview with Jerry Tallent conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 06-25-2016 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2018-31-1: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. Relation A related resource <a href="http://hanfordhistory.com/collections/show/14">Jerry Tallent, Oral History Metadata</a> 305 Building 308 Lab Arco Cat Cold War drinking Hanford Kennewick Manhattan Project Mountain River Safety War Westinghouse https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F0e8ec1acfacc64c93a4185af1960afd1.JPG ba0753bebe4a5e9196d61a13dd7642d3 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F4deb5256e218f3c0425866921dafc55e.mp4 9c9701135b3936f46666e429fb158abd Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Barbara Brown Taylor Location The location of the interview Clark Place in Moscow, Idaho Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Camera man: Whenever you’re- Robert Franklin: Ready? Camera man: We’re ready for you, yeah. Do your thing. Franklin: Okay, let’s, yeah, let’s go. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Barbara Brown Taylor on January 6th, 2017. The interview is being conducted at Clark Place in Moscow, Idaho. I will be talking with Barbara about her experiences growing up at the Hanford Site and her father’s experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Barbara Brown Taylor: Barbara Brown Taylor. B-A-R-B-A-R-A, B-R-O-W-N, T-A-Y-L-O-R, no hyphens. Franklin: Great, thank you. So let’s start from the beginning. How did you come to the Hanford Site? Taylor: In 1943, my father was hired from a company—wait a minute, take that off. In 1943, my father was hired to be the landscape architect in a new city. What an exciting thing for a landscape architect, what kind of an exciting job! We came from Illinois. I don’t know if he was the sole architect, but I do remember some of the things he did. That’s how I came here. Franklin: And how old were you when you came? Taylor: I was eight. Franklin: And so the city that you’re talking about, that would have been Richland? Taylor: Richland. Franklin: Richland, Washington. Taylor: And we didn’t know, of course, what it was. It was just a new city in the desert, had something to do with the war. Franklin: Were the Alphabet Houses being constructed at that point- Taylor: Yes. Franklin: Or did you arrive before—okay. Taylor: Well, he arrived in ’43. Franklin: Right. Taylor: The houses were being built. And my mother and brother and I lived on a farm in Illinois until my father wrote to us and said, the house is ready. So at that time, you signed up for a house, the men did the work there. As soon as it was ready, you could bring your family. It didn’t have any glass in the windows, but it was ready. Franklin: Wow. That seems like a pretty crucial component of— Taylor: My mother thought so. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah, especially with the winds that would blow. Taylor: Absolutely, absolutely. It was covered with dust. Franklin: So your father, then, would have worked with Albin Pherson, the head architect for the— Taylor: I assume so. He didn’t talk about the people he worked with. I never met another landscape architect there. He was very busy all the time, because he had a crew that supplied the grass seed and rented—not rented, lent out the lawn mowers and shovels and all sorts of things. As I remember him saying, there was an instruction sheet, which he put out. Somehow the government decided you couldn’t just have a city built on sand with nothing in the yards. Maybe you couldn’t keep people there. I don’t know the reason. But they hired these crews of men who worked on supplying the needs to do a lawn. And as I remember it, you had to have a lawn. If you couldn’t do it with what the city gave you free, then you had to pay somebody to put your lawn in. Because after a certain amount of time, you had to have a lawn. Franklin: Mm. Taylor: Not necessarily flowers, just you had to have grass. Franklin: You had to have grass. What other kinds of work did your father do besides planning out yards and lawns and things like that? Taylor: Well, he did that for churches and schools. There were only two churches, a Catholic church and a Protestant church. The government built two churches. That was it. And he would landscape those. Any public buildings that needed it—library—there were a few things like that. It was very sketchy and basic at the beginning. Franklin: Mm-hm. Taylor: So I think he landscaped whatever was there. I think that’s why they brought him. Franklin: Tell me about growing up in wartime Richland. Where did you go to school, did you go to church, you know, what was the atmosphere like there? Taylor: Well, I was eight. And we came here in June, and September was the first day of school. And I went to Lewis and Clark Grade School, which was right up the street of Locke. I lived on Casey Street in an A house. I walked up to school. And that first day, the teacher said, I want to know where all of you are from. Give your name and tell us where you came from. So one at a time, we got up, gave our names. I said Illinois. One of my new friends said New Jersey. Somebody else said Texas, somebody else said Colorado. And I thought at the time, I don’t think this has ever happened before. I don’t think the first day of school, people are from somewhere else. And I’ve always remembered that, how interesting that was to see all those new kids make new friends. When you’re a kid, as long as you’re with your parents and you feel love in a family, it’s great to have new adventures. [LAUGHTER] I don’t think my mother liked it at all! But, you know. That’s one thing. The first year, perhaps a little longer, but the first year, there were no telephones in homes. And as I recall, if the wife was going to have a baby, they would issue her a phone for the period just before she had the baby. So she could call the doctor, her husband at work, whatever. But the minute she had the baby, they came and took the phone out. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Wow. [LAUGHTER] Taylor: And there was a phone that first summer on many telephone poles. The kind that just hangs up. You could go there and make a call, free. But you had to find one to do that, because there just wasn’t that accessibility to phones. Franklin: How would you know who to call? Would you get an operator when you— Taylor: You’d get an operator, of course. You always got an operator in those days. Franklin: Sure, and then they would connect you to another telephone on a pole on a different street? Or how would— Taylor: No, no, you probably wouldn’t get a call back. I don’t remember ever walking down the street and hearing a phone ring. [LAUGHTER] It was an out kind of thing. Let’s say you wanted to call your grandmother in Illinois or something. You might get to use it. Franklin: Oh, okay, I see. It wasn’t an in-town— Taylor: No, not really. I don’t think so. Franklin: And what did your mother do? Taylor: My mother was a homemaker, but she had been a registered nurse. And she went back to that when I grew up and was off to college. Franklin: And were your parents still in Richland at the time? Taylor: Mm-hmm. Franklin: Oh, okay. Taylor: Here’s the thing. I don’t think that the government intended to keep the city. As I remember, we were going to live there as long as we needed to. When the war was over, you’d all go back to wherever you came from or somewhere else. But they didn’t build that city to keep. The wood was not the best, the floors were pine and splintered. Those little prefabs—I didn’t live in one, but they were tiny. Franklin: I live in one. Taylor: So you know. Franklin: They’re very tiny. Taylor: You know what I mean. They were built out of cardboard—I mean plywood. Plywood was new in those days. And they built them so fast that I remember going to that school up the street, to Lewis and Clark, that first year. And there’d be one when I’d go to school, and when I came back there’d be three. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Taylor: So during the day I was going to school, the men were slapping those things together. It was interesting [LAUGHTER] seeing, ooh, we have a new house, we have a new house. Franklin: What do you think your mother did not like about living—you mentioned that she wasn’t too happy about moving there? Taylor: Oh, she was from Illinois—they were. And Illinois is a green, beautiful state with woods. And Richland was sand. It was sand. So when we moved in, there was no glass in the windows, which they said they’d put in pretty soon. And the yard was all sand. My mother would look out the window with no glass in it, and almost cry. I was eight, and I looked out the window and saw the little girl next door playing in the sand in front of our house. And I remember yelling out the window to her, stop playing in our yard! Stop digging our yard! She was digging a hole in our yard. And my mother put her head against the wall and said, Barbara, we don’t have a yard! [LAUGHTER] Which was very true; we didn’t. As soon as the work really got going with planting the grass everywhere, I remember my father going out—there were things called tract houses, which had been there before the Hanford place was built. Some of them were abandoned, because the government had bought them. They were abandoned, and here were rose bushes and lilac bushes and things that people had had in their yards. Since it now belonged to the government, my father had permission to go and get them. And he would. He took his trailer and he went out there and dug them up himself and brought them in and put some of them at the libraries, and some of them at the churches, whatever. That was one reason we had nice shrubs. Because he would do that. Franklin: Where was your father stationed during those war years? Taylor: Where did he live? Franklin: Where did he work, where was his office, where did he work out of? Or was he just kind of a roving— Taylor: No, it wasn’t freelance in any way. There were government buildings. There was probably a landscaping building with a parking lot full of lawnmowers. One of his crew was in charge of the lawnmowers. They were probably locked or fenced or something. He had some kind of a building, maybe a hutment—I don’t know what kind it was. I didn’t see him at work. I saw the results of his work. Franklin: Yeah. Taylor: And he also had trucks and drove around in a truck and worked out of his truck, too. The crews, of course, did the work. He was the manager at the time, after he landscaped all the buildings and how they were going to look, ultimately. And he turned the papers over to his supervisors, and they did the work. Franklin: How did your father get started with landscaping architecture? Taylor: Well, at the University of Illinois, just before I was born, he graduated in the architecture department, which at that time had the landscape architecture program in it. So he really was an architect with a specialty in landscape architecture. He was just out of college in 1929 when the Masters Tournament golf course was being built. He was very fortunate to know a man named Bobby Jones who designed the—he was an architect, designed the Masters Tournament—built the course. And he hired a bunch of just-out-of-college men like my father. My father and mother had just gotten married. They went to Augusta, Georgia, and my father worked on that golf course. He did some of the—what’s that white part? Franklin: Sand trap? Taylor: Sand trap. Franklin: I’m not much of a golfer. Taylor: He worked on the sand traps, designing them. And had little models—plaster of Paris models. I wish I had one today, because we always had them around the house. Which my father had gotten when the thing was built. Then they didn’t need those anymore. So he had done that for a few years. By the way, the Masters Tournament golf course was built in 1929. My father told me the money to build it was in escrow. The people who had given the money to build this beautiful golf course had their money tied up in a way that the stock market couldn’t touch it. So that’s why they could build such a beautiful thing in 1929. Franklin: I see. Taylor: And ’30, I think. Anyway, that’s what he did. Then during the war, he had a harder time because who was landscaping anything? Not very many people. And he got a job with the government in the CCC program—he was a supervisor in Illinois in the woods where they had workers that were building roads and bridges and beautiful little stone—what do you call that? Well, stone bridges, I guess. And I remember those days, I was very little, like four or five. But I remember that he would take me to the woods and show me what he was doing. So he had that job, and that was a very steady job, because the CCC supported a lot of people during those days. That would have been the ‘30s. Then when the war came along, there were some military plants. One was at Kankakee, and we were there for a year or two, where my father was in charge of all the grounds for the whole plant. I think it was at that time that he was approached to come to Richland. Because they were building Hanford. And they had to build the city, even if they weren’t going to keep it. They had to build it. And hired him to do it. There weren’t that many landscape architects in those days. Franklin: Sure. Taylor: So I think the word must have gotten out that there was one available. Franklin: And how long—so your father, did he stay working for Hanford, for the government after the war ended? Taylor: Yes. A lot of people stayed. I don’t think that the government people understood the idea of a sense of place, where people make their home somewhere and they’re very reluctant to let go of it, even if it has pine floors and is not very up-to-date with everything. Their kids were now in school. They had a job. And it was far enough from the cities—some people liked that, and wanted to stay. It’s right on the edge of the Columbia River, which is one of the most beautiful places in the world. So, my father joined them and wherever there was a job that he could get—because he also had many drafting skills and things like that. There was also a program called the as-built program. I think that was in the ‘50s. But Hanford had been thrown up so fast that there hadn’t been good blueprints of what they did. They hired my dad to run a little office with lots of blueprint machines. And he and some other people would go out and look at the buildings and draw, you know, make sketches of what was really there. Franklin: Mm-hm. Taylor: The measurements and all that. And then the idea was now the government knows. Now the firetrucks can go to the right place. Because there were places nobody knew what they were, you know? Franklin: Sure. Yeah, no, I’ve heard of that program before. And, like you said, it was very necessary. Taylor: It was very useful, very useful. Then, about that time, 1955, ’56, people were building golf courses again. They hadn’t been all through the war. I don’t think there was one built—but I don’t know that. But they were building them, and Richland wanted to have a golf course and Kennewick wanted to have a golf course—just nine holes. And they hired my dad to design these. Interestingly enough, my father was very generous, and he accepted the jobs even though they weren’t going to pay him. They agreed to give him memberships in the clubs to cover what they should have given him for a salary. [LAUGHTER] Because that’s all they had to offer. And he wanted to see golf courses there. So he built one in Kennewick, and he built one in Richland. He also built Columbia Park, which is all along the river, maybe one of the longest parks in Washington. I don’t know. Franklin: Really? Taylor: But it’s very long, and it’s very narrow—some places only 20 feet. Franklin: Mm-hm. And when you say built it, he— Taylor: Designed it. He had a good arrangement there, because a lot of the woodsy part—he was very fond of Russian olive trees. And a lot of those were already there, all along the river. So all he had to do was built driveways and parking spots, camping spots, and smooth out the rough places. Make a road—because there’s a road the whole length of it. Franklin: Yeah, that’s a very widely used park in town. It’s a great park. Taylor: He loved doing that. I don’t know what they paid him for that. Much later, he built the Memorial Gardens, along the west edge of Richland, which is a cemetery. I have a picture in there of my parents. They gave them a pair of plots instead of paying them. Because they didn’t have the money to pay them. My father wanted a cemetery there. So, I think he was very generous. He was very community-minded. He was on the Benton County Planning Commission for many years. Encouraging parks, encouraging more and more landscaping and making it a more livable town. It needed to be kept up; the work that was done at the beginning needed to be continued, because there were a lot of people who lived there. And he could see the need for that. He told me once, if you live in a desert, you need twice as many trees. And I don’t think everyone agreed with that. Some of the businessmen thought, there’s some land; we’ll build on it. But my father hoped he could get parks in there. And he had to go through the council—Benton County Council—to get those parks approved. Franklin: Sure. How long—did your parents stay in Richland for the rest of their lives? Taylor: They did. Franklin: Okay. Taylor: They did. I wanted to tell you that my father died of liver cancer. And we always thought it was the plant. Because when he was in the as-built program, he had to go and inspect the buildings. And one day, he came home and told my mother that the little badge he had to wear had gone off. Lit up, made a noise, and that meant he had been overexposed to something. They had taken him into a safe room, made him shower, given him different clothes, sent him to the doctor. And within a year, he was dead. He had liver cancer. And he never drank. We knew it was not that kind of thing. Franklin: Sure. Taylor: And a lot of people had that happen. It hasn’t been added up, I don’t think. But there were a lot of people like that. Franklin: Sure. And what year did he pass away? Taylor: 1966. Franklin: 1966. Taylor: He was 64 years old. Franklin: Oh, okay. And you mentioned that you had grown up there and then eventually went to college. What year did you leave Richland to go to— Taylor: 1953. Franklin: Okay. Right. So I’m wondering if you could tell me a little more about growing up in Richland. Did you stay in that same A house for the time that you were there? Taylor: Yes, yes, until I went to college and got married a year or so later. My parents lived in that house. And then it became possible for residents to buy houses. Franklin: Right, in 1958. Taylor: They could buy the ones they were in and they could also buy ones nobody wanted. So they bought theirs. And they bought a little one on the other side of town as an investment, which they rented out. A lot of people did that. Franklin: Right, right. I wonder if you could tell me about what you remember about the coming of the commercial—like the Uptown and kind of how Richland transitioned a little bit after the war. To start to become more of a normal town, but still totally government-owned and controlled. Taylor: Yes, I can tell you that. I thought Uptown was great. There was a theater there! There were stores there, which we hadn’t had much of before. My father was very busy trying to get a park in the spot where that was. And writing things for the Tri-City Herald. And going to the Benton County meetings, trying to encourage a park in that spot. It was quite near a school and the school had a big yard. But there was George Washington Way, was right between where he wanted the park, where Uptown is. And the businessmen just, you know, they had the power and they got it. I always enjoyed it, because I was just a kid. I was in high school at that time. Franklin: Sure. Taylor: Didn’t realize how ahead of his time my father was. Because he loved trees, he loved building a better environment for people. Considered himself a conservationist. Also considered himself an urban planner, because that’s right in that—he didn’t have degrees in that. But I don’t know that there were degrees at that time. He just built on his education as he went along and did a lot in those fields. Franklin: Do you remember the day when people found out about what had been produced at Hanford, or what was being produced at Hanford? Taylor: Well, I was nine. Franklin: Sure. Taylor: What did I know? I was nine. I saw—we took the Walla Walla Union Bulletin paper. I was sitting on the front lawn, and the paper came. And said something like, the war is over. It was our bomb. Something like that. Franklin: Mm-hm. Taylor: And I looked at it. With my nine-year-old understanding, I thought, does this mean we’re leaving? Does this mean the end of Richland? Of course, I didn’t know. I remember that paper, I just don’t remember the exact words of the headline. My parents kept it for a long time, and a lot of people did—kept that newspaper that came out. And of course, I didn’t know what the place was for anyway, except something about the war. And we had lived at Kankakee, and that was something about the war. But my father didn’t seem like the kind of person that would be working in chemistry or in physics or anything like that. By the way, my father grew up in a Quaker family. Franklin: Oh. Taylor: And he was very pacifist. Franklin: Mm-hmm. Taylor: I think he would not have been in any kind of a job that had to do with hurting people. But he didn’t know what it was for. He didn’t know it was a terrible bomb that was being built. And he had a good job. I mean, coming out of the Depression, if you could get a good job, you took it. Franklin: Right, right, yeah. No questions asked. What do you remember about civil defense? Drills and things like that in kind of the early part of the Cold War? Taylor: Well, I remember getting under the desk. I don’t remember much other than that. Franklin: Did you ever feel any fear or anxiety about living so close to Hanford, something that might have been a potential target in the case of aggression? Taylor: No. I think a lot of kids might have. But my parents were not the kind to let us worry. And years later, my mother told me, Barbara, we didn’t know that America was going to win. We had no idea. We had been through the First World War, we had been through the Depression. We knew bad things could happen. And here was the country fighting on two fronts, two parts of the world. We were not having you worry. Because we never knew whether we would win. So we didn’t tell you much. When the newspaper came, we got it, we read it, we read the cartoons to you. You listened to Charlie McCarthy, and the Great Gildersleeve. All those humorous shows, Jack Benny. All those things that never touched on the war. Franklin: What about later, though, during the Cold War? When you would have been in high school or starting to get a little bit older and maybe hearing more about the kind of conflicts that the US was involved in? Taylor: Well, I did have an interesting situation. After I married, my husband joined the Army, because there was a draft. And his grades were not as high as they should have been. He was going to Eastern, to college—Eastern Washington College in Cheney. His grades were not as good as they could have been, so he decided to join. Because they promised him an electronics job. He didn’t have to a frontline military person. Franklin: Mm-hm. Taylor: And he wanted to be in electronics. So he joined in 1957. And our little boy was born in ’59. I went to Germany a few months after that. My father said, don’t take that baby over there. Because he had been through the Second World War and he knew how bad things could be. And there was a wall. Franklin: Right. Taylor: And there were all those things. And we were--I don’t know how many miles from the wall he was. And he didn’t want me to go. That was one of the few times I ever saw him cry. So we went, we stayed there two years, had a wonderful time going to places even though we didn’t have any money. But it was dangerous. The Army told us, you must keep several days’ worth of diapers, food, clothes, all your papers—you must keep them in one place. Because some morning, a truck may pull up in front of your house—an Army truck. And they’ll say, come and bring your things. And we had to get in the truck—they warned us this might happen—and we’ll drive to France. They had places of protection and more food and care for the children and all that. But it’ll be in France. Franklin: Sure. Taylor: If something happens with the wall. Franklin: Do you think your parents might have felt anxiety during the Cold War, living in Hanford in kind of a—I mean, now knowing what was being produced there and that it might have been a target for retaliation? Taylor: Well, they never said so. They never said so; they didn’t want to worry us. That’s the kind of parents they were. They protected their children. I think there were a lot of young people who had parents like that. I don’t remember anybody saying they were scared. Franklin: Sure. Taylor: They were busy going to school. We never felt like we didn’t have a future. Franklin: Did you ever come back to Richland? I’m assuming you probably would’ve come back to visit your family, but did you ever come back to live there again? Taylor: Yes, my husband and our children came back to live there for a short time when he got out of the Army, he happened to be—it was 19-early-60s and it was hard to get jobs. He got a job there inspecting pipes. The kind of pipes that had nuclear things going through them. And they were welded. He got jobs inspecting the welding. He didn’t like that kind of thing, and so he went on and did other things. He had a degree in industrial arts. He did some drafting for a while. And then he became a police officer in Pullman. Franklin: Okay. Taylor: So that’s how we ended up back in Pullman and raised our kids there. So I only went back to Richland a few years. Wanted to go back to Pullman. I really had a good time in college there, and I liked having a university. There wasn’t any Tri-Cities center at that time—Tri-Cities branch. Franklin: Sure. And then you mentioned that you worked at WSU as well. Taylor: 27 years, yeah. From 1967 to 1995. From 1967 to 1995, I was a full-time secretary at WSU. And felt very good about it. I loved working at a university. I went to school along with it, which was great because I had not quite finished college. And so I took a lot of classes. Franklin: Is there anything else that you’d like to—that we haven’t touched on, that you’d like to talk about? About your father or Hanford or Richland or your own life? Taylor: Well, Richland was a very safe place for children at that time. As I look back, I didn’t appreciate that. We could get on our bicycles and ride anywhere in town as long as we were home for dinner. We could go to friends’, we could go to school, we could be in summer programs. They always had summer activities for the kids. And I think a lot of the amenities that a city has, even though it was a small town—actually we called it a village. It was known as a village. But I loved that. The freedom. And now, of course, you can’t just tell a kid, just be home for dinner. But they did. I could go to the movies on Saturday. There were two theaters and they had double features all the time. I always felt free to do whatever. I think it felt safe to do that. Another reason might have been we were very middle class. I never saw a black child when I was in school. Franklin: Sure, because African Americans weren’t allowed to live in Richland. Taylor: They were not allowed to work there. I don’t think that was an open policy, but they didn’t. They lived in Pasco. Franklin: Mm-hmm. Taylor: And they were not really given jobs at Hanford. I didn’t know about different races. I was a child. It was a middle class town, and you had to have a job to have a house. Franklin: Sure. And everybody worked for the same employer. Taylor: Absolutely, at the beginning, they did. Everybody did. I remember my mother saying when they first moved there, rent was $27 a month. And it was an A house. $27 a month. Which was very reasonable for the time. Franklin: Well, that included pretty much full service, too, right? Taylor: I think so. Franklin: The government delivered coal and-- Taylor: Water. Franklin: Changed the light bulbs, and— Taylor: I don’t remember that part. I think my father probably would have done a lot of those little things, but— Franklin: Okay. Taylor: I think they probably would. But I remember the electricity and the water were included. Franklin: Richland has such a unique history of being this government constructed and owned town for 15 years. And I’ve always found it interesting to hear people’s experiences, like yours, about how safe and free they felt in a town that was so entirely unique in terms of its—like you said, it was middle class. Everyone who was there had a certain income— Taylor: Had a job! Franklin: They had a job. But the government also owned and controlled who could live in that community. So it’s a community of safety, but it seems to be of not the traditional freedoms that we associate with any other kind of community or anything like that. It’s always stuck out to me, in looking at Richland. Taylor: Well, perhaps an adult would see that. To me it was just feeling safe. Franklin: Sure. Taylor: I don’t know that I felt unsafe in Illinois. I was in the kind of family that were very caring, that always put our care first. I had very good parents. Franklin: I’ve had—a couple other times when I’ve interviewed people that have grown up in Richland, one thing that they’ve mentioned is that at some point they were struck how there were no old people, really. Taylor: Yes, yes. Franklin: And I wonder if you could talk—was there a moment when you realized that everybody was either children or young adults for the most part? Taylor: The only people who were there who were old were grandmothers and grandfathers who came to visit or lived with them. I mean, really. I was aware of that. Very much so. Franklin: And so did anyone in your extended family ever come to Richland to visit? Or how did you keep in touch with them, with that barrier there? Taylor: Well, in those days you only talked on the phone if somebody died. You didn’t call the family back east, wherever it was. Because it cost money. And you just didn’t do it. There were letters that you would write and then send one to one member of the family, and they would send it to another, and they would send it to another. In that sort of round robin thing. I knew other families that did that. But my grandmother—my grandfather had died young. My grandmother had no money. In those days, a woman might be a housewife, a homemaker, a farmer’s wife, and end up with nothing. Franklin: Sure. Taylor: No income, no savings. She had two daughters. So she would travel by train from Illinois to stay with my aunt for a while. And then to Washington to stay with my parents for a while. Franklin: Okay. Taylor: That was common in those days, that an older person would live with you. I had lots of people I knew whose grandmother lived with them, or grandfather lived with them. Or Uncle Joe who was just not quite right. Families took in family. That was not unusual. Franklin: Right, to have a multigenerational household. Taylor: Right. Franklin: Like that. Taylor: So I thought it was perfectly natural. And it was natural. I got to know my grandmother very well and learn things from her that I wouldn’t have if she hadn’t lived with us. Franklin: Sure, sure. Well, and a lot of families, psychologists and a lot of research points to that being very beneficial, too. Taylor: Right. Franklin: And it’s how most of the world lives. Taylor: She had no money, absolutely none. Franklin: Sure, sure. Taylor: My parents paid everything. Franklin: Because she wouldn’t have had a job. Taylor: I don’t think she ever had a job except butter and eggs. Franklin: Well, she worked, certainly, right, and probably worked very hard. Taylor: Oh, she worked on the farm, I’m sure. But it’s not the kind of work that was paid. And that would have been before social security. Because that started just about the time I was born. Franklin: Right. And even then, women got much less than men did. Taylor: And still do. Franklin: Yes. [LAUGHTER] What would you like future generations to know about growing up in Richland during World War II and the Cold War? And about the work that your father did? Taylor: Well, I think the jobs our parents had—especially fathers, because most women were homemakers. I think that meant a lot to kids. I wouldn’t say that it was a caste system, but I was very aware that a girl named Betsey had a father who was a doctor, and they had a nicer house. I don’t know how the housing worked, but all those number houses, they had one of the better houses that was a single-family house, and on a hill, and just nicer. And I was a little jealous that my family wasn’t that wealthy that they could have a better house. So that’s very normal for kids, I think, to be aware of where their family is in the scheme of things. Franklin: Mm-hm. Taylor: I came from the Midwest. I thought my parents were middle class, middle-educated. They both had degrees, but not graduate degrees. We lived in an average house. I was very middle. [LAUGHTER] I don’t know what else to say. But there were people who had a little more money. They were managers, they were doctors, they were professionals. And I think we were aware of that. And I think they were aware of that, the kind of cliques. High schools have those. Franklin: Oh, yeah. Taylor: You know, that’s all there is to it. There’s always going to be the athletes and the wealthier kids and the smarter kids and whatever. But I graduated from Columbia High School in 1953 as Barbara Brown. I loved high school. We had choruses, we had bands; we had various kinds of activities like that. And I was in the choir for four years and loved it. Just loved it. There was a teacher named Harley Stell, S-T-E-L-L. And it’s Harley. He was hired right out of college, about 1950, to start a music program, a vocal music program, and he did. Trios, chorus—I think it was called a chorus. And I sang with them and made some really good friends with them for four years. We sang at graduation. I’ll never forget that. Which was a wonderful experience. He added a lot to the school. Because music is an enrichment that students need. Franklin: Yes. Taylor: So they started with very basic classes. Just first to eighth grade, and then they kept adding these things. Which is what all towns do, but it was starting, as I was in high school, starting to be a normal town. And people stayed because this is where their roots were now. I think that was quite a shock to the government, that we wanted to buy our houses. We wanted to stay there. Franklin: Right, because like you’d mentioned earlier, the community was from all over the country. Taylor: That’s right. Franklin: And no one knew anyone else when they came. Taylor: But that’s a sociological fact. Franklin: Sure. Taylor: I think, as I said, a sense of place. A sense that this is where we are, let’s stay here and do the best we can with what we’ve got. Franklin: Right, right. Yeah, that’s really fascinating. Thank you. Well, I just want to thank you for interviewing with us. As someone who lives in Richland, I’d like to thank you for your father’s work— Taylor: Thank you. Franklin: For bringing green and trees and things to Richland. Because it helps break up the heat and the sage brush. Taylor: Well, it’s a pile of sand. That’s what it was to begin with. Franklin: Yeah. Taylor: We had terrible windstorms. We had a fire one year way out in the desert. And I remember that everybody—cars came through the streets and said everybody move to the east side of town, down by the river. Franklin: Wow. Taylor: That was frightening. Franklin: Yeah, I bet. Taylor: But this fire was going faster than a man could run. Franklin: Wow. Taylor: It was coming from the big hills over there, the Rattlesnake hills. It came pretty close. I remember that very well; I must have been ten, something like that. I remember that the wind used to cut your legs. Girls wore dresses then; they didn’t wear pants like they do now. Walking home from school, the wind and the sand would cut your legs. Little tiny cuts. And you’d feel like to go hide behind a tree, but you’ve got to go home. Franklin: Right. Wow. Taylor: And that was really painful. Franklin: I bet. Taylor: They said there was something called a jackalope out in the desert. Nobody ever saw one. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Usually just taxidermists make those. Taylor: With big ears. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Well, Barbara, thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure talking to you. Taylor: I want this to be about my dad. So please emphasize that. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:46:41 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317 kbps Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Albin Pherson Bobby Jones Harley Stell Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1943-1953 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Barbara Brown Taylor Description An account of the resource An interview with Barbara Brown Taylor conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 01-06-2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2018-31-1: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. Relation A related resource <a href="http://hanfordhistory.com/collections/show/27">Barbara Brown Taylor, Oral History Metadata</a> 1955 Bull Cat Cold War Hanford Houses Kennewick Park River School Street War https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F482a9fe8af3a5584b2466b9e4084da93.mp4 44a30f23746c53a6ea7287aa443ab156 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F246206de477347a3c79fc8f80c19bf0b.jpg e7d3130df0dd990982909b39fd3f84a7 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Bauman Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Bob and Dianne Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Northwest Public Television | Taylor_Diane_Bob Man one: Okay Robert Bauman: All right. Good to go? Man one: You ready? Man two: We're ready to go. Bauman: Okay. All right, well, we'll get started. And I'm going to start first by having each of you say your name for us. Make sure we have that on there. So go ahead. Bob Taylor: My name is Bob Taylor. Bauman: All right. Dianne Taylor: And I'm Dianne Taylor. Bauman: And Dianne is spelled with two Ns? Dianne Taylor: Two Ns, yes. Bauman: Okay, great. And my name's Robert Bauman, and we are conducting this interview on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. And today is June 10th of 2015. And so, if we could start maybe, start, Bob, maybe, with if you could tell us a little bit about your family and how they ended up coming to the Tri-Cities area and when that happened. Bob Taylor: My father was employed by the US federal prison system. He went to work as a guard at McNeil Island in 1934 for the Department of Prisons, the US Bureau of Prisons--there, I'm finally saying that correctly. And he started off as a guard and was employed at McNeil Island from 1934 actually until he retired in 1955. But the real story to talk about is how I happen to be sitting here. And in the early stages of the creation of the Manhattan Project and what was developing here with the acquisition of all the lands for Hanford, very early in that process, the US Army went to the Bureau of Prisons and contracted for a minimum security type prison camp to be constructed here in the Richland area. The purpose of that being the minimum security prisoners would be farming the lands and the orchards that were being acquired by the Manhattan Project, but would have no men available to take care of the fields and the orchards. And so the Bureau of Prisons contracted with the Department of the Army on behalf of the Manhattan Project to maintain those fields out in Vernita, White Bluffs, all in this area. And they agreed—they, the Department of the Army--agreed to build a, what they call, prison camp. It turned out to be right out on the bend of the Yakima River right near Horn Rapids Dam. And they constructed buildings, facilities, kitchens, dining areas, administration buildings, and the facilities to house and support approximately 250 federal prisoners who were brought in in early 1944 to take care of the agricultural needs of this area. And my father, who was at that point then had been with the federal prison at McNeil Island and had become a senior guard, was chosen to come over here and become superintendent of this camp. The name of the camp is Columbia Camp. And that's a little story in itself. The people in Washington, DC, were out here and didn't quite know the geography. They knew the Columbia River was here somewhere nearby, and even though the Yakima is a much smaller river, they didn't realize it. And so they named this federal prison camp Columbia Camp simply because they were on a river and they thought they were on the Columbia River. That's how it came to have the name Columbia Camp. Anyway, they started bringing the prisoners in in early 1944. And as I say, they typically for the next three and a half years, had about 250 prisoners on site at any given time. I think the number in the various information files I have, there were probably more like 700 prisoners rotated through this area. But the facilities were actually to hold about 250. So my dad took over as superintendent of the prison camp. He came here in early 1944, and initially they had—and I have many pictures of the whole camp, the buildings, and also the housing—there were initially 16 Quonset huts that were built out there for the initial officers and their families to move. At the time he came, those were the first. We moved in here actually on D Day, 1944, June 6th, in the middle of a major windstorm. And my mother who was born and raised in Western Washington, to arrive here in those kind of conditions—I don’t have to say that we had no air conditioning, and fans weren't even really very available. We moved into a Quonset hut. We ultimately, by the next spring, they—the Army, the prison—built eight more fancy housing. They brought in prefabs, the basic 609 square foot prefab that everybody in Richland is familiar with, of which there are still hundreds of them. That was the new fancy housing, and my dad as superintendent was able to claim the first one in the row next to the administration building. So in the next spring, then, we moved into a prefab. Again, I have lots of pictures, family pictures, of our housing. The kids, we were bused into Richland. Initially we all went to Sacajawea the first year we were there. And then when Jefferson grade school opened in the fall of '45, we all went there, switched over to there. We had a couple of older kids—family, kids in the camp—that went to high school at what was then called Columbia High School. My mother was a teacher, actually ended up teaching at Columbia High School part of the time that we were here. So as families living at Columbia Camp, we were bused into town, pretty much bused back home. And we played. As kids we played in the heat of the summer and cold in the winter and just pretty much in the desert surrounding the camp out there. The camp itself existed from early 1943. In early 1947, they started—they, again, the US Bureau of Prisons and the US Army--started writing back and forth corresponding about the continued need for the maintenance of the orchards and the fields and ultimately decided that it wasn't necessary anymore. And some of those fields ultimately were left to go, and others were maintained I guess in other ways. In the files that I have, my dad's files, I've got a tremendous amount of correspondence between he and the officials in Washington, DC. The Department of Army, I've got synopsis of what all was done during those period of years. I have interesting files about prisoners and some of their experiences in managing them as agricultural workers, how they got them to work every day, how they kept them fed every day. There's a lot of material in the files that I have of my dad's about that sort of thing. There's a lot of information about the contract itself between the US Army and the Federal Bureau of Prisons as far as payment of fees and expenses and also the type of crops that were harvested in volume and in prices and that sort of thing. It makes for very fascinating reading to have this kind of information available to me about what went on out there. Then ultimately in the fall of 1947, I think we were about the last to leave as a family. We left in November of '47. And basically the place was abandoned. I have, again in the files, there's information about dismantling the camp and sending knives and forks to Leavenworth and dishes to somewhere in Arizona. So there's a lot of very detailed information about the camp. But the long and the short of it is that the camp existed for those three and a half, almost four years. And very, very, very few people anywhere even know about it. The families, the other families, were rotated to different jobs. Three or four of the families went back to McNeil Island. Others went to Arizona, Leavenworth—other federal prison camps. And everybody just went their own way, and nobody was left here to even be a historian for what all went on. And thanks to my mother, who keeps all these documents and records and letters, and even—there’s a lot of letters between my father and my mother when he first came over here, where he's giving examples of daily life here in Richland in 1944 that are just fascinating reading. And the cost of a rental house that the government was charging for people and the cost to buy a refrigerator, things like that. So it's really fun for us to be able to come and sort of make some of this information available as to what Columbia Camp was all about over many, many, many years in Richland, because nobody was here to contradict that statement. A lot of people said, oh, it was a prisoner war camp. And ultimately, finally, that got changed. There was some documentation. At the present time, out at the day camp, there's a kiosk out there with a few pictures and a commentary posted out there, a little parking lot that you can drive to that gives just an extremely brief summary of what Columbia Camp was. There's a picture of a man, a far distant picture of a man standing in front of the administration building. Cannot guarantee it, but I think it—I'm pretty sure it's my dad. He was the superintendent of the camp, so his picture's out there in that kiosk for anybody that wants to go out there and look. But that's what Columbia Camp in a nutshell was all about. We have many, many, many pictures of the camp, the buildings, the dormitory buildings, the kitchen, the administration building, the power plant, the steam plant. And then we ourselves have taken pictures recently from some of those same positions, including the foundation of the steam plant that we've got so we can supplement a lot of what I've been talking about. Well, everything that I've been talking about we can supplement with pictures, and letters, and documents, and correspondence, and files. Dianne Taylor: Memories. Bauman: Yeah, right. So really interesting, and so first of all, let me confirm that there are still rumors out there. I've had students tell me, wasn't there a prisoner of war camp? Dianne Taylor: Really? Bauman: Oh, yeah. Bob Taylor: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bauman: Or, wasn't a Japanese internment camp here? Bob Taylor: That's what-- Bauman: No. Dianne Taylor: Mm-mm. Bauman: So this is great to--one great thing about interviewing you is to clarify that for people as well. Dianne Taylor: One of the things that I'd like to bring in, because we didn't know about this for so long. Dad would not talk about his prison experiences. He was a loving, wonderful, wonderful father and grandfather and wonderful father-in-law. But this was never discussed. It wasn't until he died and I'm going through all of their things because Bob's an only child that I find all of this stuff. So Bob's mother's in a nursing home. She's quite elderly. We find this stuff. We get so excited over these pictures. Of course, she thought we were crazy to move to Richland anyway because her memories are not the Richland it is today. So we went, took all these pictures. And all she did was she took them from me, put them down in her purse. And I said, well, Mom, this is exciting. We found all dad's stuff, and we want to talk about it. No, it's secret. She would not talk about it. It was secret. And this is in 19--when did she die? Bob Taylor: Well, this was in 1995, I think, that we-- Dianne Taylor: It was so ingrained in her, the secrecy of their lives, that even after all that time, she couldn't talk to us. So we took the pictures. I said, mom, I've got to have the pictures. And we took them back. But I think that's when it really hit me what their lives must have been like living here at that time. Bauman: Right, that even that, which was only tangentially connected to Hanford-- Bob Taylor: Exactly. Dianne Taylor: Yes. Yeah. Bauman: Was very secret, right? Dianne Taylor: Yeah, absolutely. Bauman: So let me ask you a few questions. So first of all, what was your father's name? Bob Taylor: Harold E. Taylor. Bauman: Harold Taylor, okay. And your mother's name? Bob Taylor: Doris C. Taylor. Bauman: Okay. And so it was the three of you when you--well, your father came initially, and then you and your mother came. Bob Taylor: Right, in June. Bauman: In June of '44. And you mentioned the dust storm. Bob Taylor: Termination wind. Bauman: So, and you said that it could hold about 250 prisoners at the camp at once. Bob Taylor: Yes. Bauman: So it was minimum security. So what sorts of--but they were federal prisoners. Bob Taylor: They were. Bauman: So what sorts of crimes would these men have committed? Bob Taylor: The vast majority of federal prisoners were not necessarily minimum security, but they were white collar crimes. In some cases bank robbers would sometimes fit into the category, depends on the nature of the individual. But bank robbers weren't necessarily restricted from ever being in the so-called minimum security camps. And, see, we went back to McNeil Island, where my dad then took over the minimum security part of McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary. And so some of these same prisoners went with us back over there. That's kind of an aside, but it's part of explaining to you, or answering your question about minimum security and who qualified. I'll finish that answer first. A lot of them were conscientious objectors. And in fact there's correspondence in the files where prisoners would be sent here to Columbia Camp, but they were always—the conscientious objectors—they were always being monitored, talked to, perhaps convinced that it would be to their best interest if they would revoke their claim to being a conscientious objector and go back and join the Army and basically reinvent themselves in society. And there's a few prisoners did that. We've even got in those boxes, we've got a couple letters that one or two of them wrote to my dad personally thanking him. He's gone back, he's gone in the Army. He feels better about himself. So we've even got that kind of stuff in the file. Anyway, then, just as an interesting aside, when you talk about minimum security versus the hardcore inside the walls type, like at McNeil Island, state prisoners—murders, that sort of thing—of course they're maximum security. But any white collar crime, including—might not sound like white color crime—but bank robbery, that sort of thing, there can be any number of-- Dianne Taylor: In those days. Bob Taylor:--forgers. There can be any number of kind of people that aren't really hardcore criminals, but they've made mistakes. They've done things bad. But they know that they're decent people. And these are the people that, even on McNeil Island, again, same as here, they would stay in a minimum security area and do the weeding, doing the gardening, doing the orchards, doing the fields, like over there like they were doing here. My dad, as superintendent of the camp at McNeil, we had kind of a beautiful estate, ranch home estate with about an acre and a half of rockeries and gardens and rose trellises. And we had five--as a kid, I never mowed the yard. I had five prisoners that—we did, the family did—that took care of our yard and our place. It was kind of a strange childhood that I had. But that's what minimum security means, that they could be trusted. They were called trustees, as a matter of fact. Bauman: And so about how large of a staff was there working at the camp? Bob Taylor: Here at Columbia Camp, there were 24. 24 with families, and then there were another ten to 12 that lived in Prosser, Benton City, some of them right here in Richland that would come to work. So there was less than 40 total staff, 24 of whom were on site with families. Dianne Taylor: Tell him the story that you were telling me about Dad writing a note about getting these guys to come in on Sunday for roll call. Bob Taylor: Oh, it was one of the notes, one of the memorandums to his officers in the files that I read. It's something to the effect—no, I guess it was a memo to the entire camp, to the prisoners and the officers. And it's just kind of a tongue-in-cheek, that it seems to be hard to get prisoners to make bed call or duty call or account for themselves on the weekends. And it was just kind of an interesting, the way he wrote that even on the weekends, they still, after all, are prisoners and have to account for themselves. They actually only had I think it was three escapes. Nobody actually ever fully totally escaped. They had three that walked away, but they were caught along the river on the way to Benton City. So that was part of the minimum security idea is that they weren't particularly threats. They knew they just needed to serve their time and get out. And so they weren't trying to break out. Dianne Taylor: And where could they go? That's the desert. There's no transportation. That's one of the stories Dad did tell me about two of the guys walking to Benton City. And of course they didn't get there because there's nowhere to hide. Bauman: And so how old were you then when you came here? Bob Taylor: My birthday's in July, so I was six years old when we moved here in June. And as I said, it was D-Day. And then just turned seven in July, and then I was ten when we left in late '47. Bauman: Okay. And so what was that like as someone roughly between the ages of seven and ten living out here in the camp in initially a Quonset hut? Is that right? Bob Taylor: Initially in Quonset hut and then in a prefab. Well, first of all, six-to-ten-year-olds don't really think about hot and cold. The only thing that we were ever really cautioned about by our parents is it's a little problematic to go running around in the desert barefooted. There were rattlesnakes. Never got bit by one. Saw a few. But we had the swimming hole right there at the bend of the river for summertime, spent a lot of time in the swimming. The pictures you can see the two rows of Quonset huts. It was kind of, I call it a parkway, which wasn't necessarily what you would call a bunch of grass in 1944. But nevertheless, there was a grassy strip, two street, two roads for cars, and the Quonset huts and in the middle grassy strip that that's where we played our soccer and mostly soccer that we played there as kids. And we were either in the river, out there in that strip, or just wandering out in the desert barefoot. And with our bicycles, there's a picture I've got showing me standing beside a tree that was very near our house that I crashed into and cut my head open. That sort of thing as living here as a kid. We were typical kids, even though we were--in fact, my entire life growing up was always subject to prison service. We lived on McNeil Island, which was, when we went back, I mean, my grade school and my high school years, I went to school in Lakewood Tacoma, Clover Park High School. But we still lived on the island. We had to catch a prison launch back and forth every day. As kids growing up, none of us ever had the typical life experience of just walking to the store, walking to the theater. We didn't live on Swift and could walk down to the Village—to the theater. We never had those kind of experiences. Speaking of the theater, we did get to come into town. Our parents would carpool or whatever, and we'd come into town to the Hopalong Cassidy, Tom Mix movies on Saturday afternoon at the Village Theater here in Richland. But it was never anything we could ride our bike to or walk to. Bauman: Yeah, I was going to ask you about that, about getting into town and how often you were able to do that. And what was the town of Richland like? What sorts of memories do you have? Bob Taylor: Well, I mean, you've got all the pictures as a historian. You know what Richland basically looked like in 1944, 1945. It was like that. I mean, we came into school. The first year I said we went to Sacajawea. The second year, we from then on went to Jefferson. We would become friends with kids in the class and do things with kids in the class, but it was always more difficult. I was in Cub Scouts. My dad would have to drive in to make separate arrangements to go, and to some of the other kids out there as well, to come in to the Cub Scout meetings. One of my memories, and I'm not sure why, but one of my memories was one of the girls’ parents had--and I don't quite understand it now, but her parents had—I can't say they owned, but maybe they did—a large enough piece of ground that she could ride her horses. And I remember some of us—and it was like right here. It was straight north from Jefferson that we would come out of town, although not very far, and ride horses out here in the open prairie. And it might have been right here. I don't know. But we were able to socialize to some degree with the kids in town. But again, one of the things that I have to say, it's like my mother. Even as kids, talked about secrecy. We were instilled with absolutely every bit of that, just like the adults. We absolutely were. And it was just a way of life, so we didn't question it. We didn't try to violate it. We just--everything was secret. Bauman: So you didn't talk to anyone about the camp at all really? Bob Taylor: Just that we lived out there. And that was all. Bauman: Right. So did you know what Hanford was, what was going on? Bob Taylor: No, not until the bomb was dropped and the paper headline right here in Richland. That's when we knew what was going on. The road now as you go out there is not the same road it was then. What is Horn Rapids Road, which comes across—wherever we are—comes across, that was the road that we came in on. So we came in a little further north into Richland than we do now, where the intersection is. And so right at that corner right there was the beginning of the trailer camp where so many people were living and so many of the kids in school with me were living in the trailer camp. And there was a wire fence along the road, and so we just knew we were outside the fence, and something was going on on the other side of the fence. But we didn't know what it was—until the article came out in the paper. Bauman: You mentioned, so, the prisoners, would they get transported, then to different fields-- Bob Taylor: They were bused. Bauman: --to different farms then? Bob Taylor: There were like, I think as I recall in reading the files, there were sometimes as many as ten different gangs or groups, for lack of a better term, that were bused out to the various sites. And that's part of what's in my dad's files is just the logistics of taking--they called it dinner then--lunch out to feed everybody at lunchtime, and just the difficulties of that sort of thing in running this prison camp. Because some of them out in Vernita, for instance, they basically had to leave with the lunch service right after breakfast to get it out there. Because the road, the road was not great going out to Vernita from here. The road that we drive now and think nothing of was basically just a dirt road in those days going out there. Because the road, the paved road, bent south and went to Benton City when you go out that way. So yeah, there were a number of different orchards. I can remember clearly the—what are now all the Richland ranches on Cottonwood and Birch and Cedar, all those where all the Richland ranches were ultimately built in 1948. All of that was cherry orchards. And we always had one or two crews harvesting the cherries, for instance, right here in town. And a couple times my dad brought me out and actually I helped them pick cherries. So that's just one of my memories is picking cherries in what is now that major housing part of Richland. Bauman: Right. Now, so, in 1947, when the camp closed and you left, I assume maybe your mother was probably happy about going back to the west side? [LAUGHTER] Bob Taylor: Extremely, yes, extremely happy to get back to the cool west side, yes. Dianne Taylor: She was a tiny, tiny, lovely lady, a teacher. Heart and soul a teacher, and totally supportive of Bob's father. But she wasn't happy to be here at all. [LAUGHTER] And she was very, very happy when they finally left. Bauman: You mentioned she taught at Columbia High School. Dianne Taylor: Yeah. Bauman: What did she teach? Bob Taylor: English, primarily English. And she was in charge of the journalism one school year. Dianne Taylor: She had to quit teaching, though, because of her duties as--and the words are official hostess of the camp, which is really interesting. She organized bridge activities, social activities, to keep the wives that were thrown out here in the middle of the desert happy. Because of course they weren't working, very many of them. So she worked that first year at Hanford, and then she quit and was kept busy keeping activities going on for the women and children. Bauman: That’s very interesting. Were there a lot of children around your age you were able to play with? Bob Taylor: I'm trying to remember. There were, of my own specific age that were my closest friends, there were seven of us that were either within one grade one way or the other. I think there were some older kids that came into high school. Our bus—I think there were about a total of 12 or 14 of us rode the bus into town. There certainly weren't two kids in every household of the 24 officers that worked there. Some of them were more senior and kids were grown and gone. Bauman: So did you have your own bus, then, that would just take a group of kids from the camp? Bob Taylor: I guess, yeah, we must have, that there was just a bus that came out and got us and took us back into town. There was nobody else to pick up. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: And do you remember how you felt about first of all coming here? Do you have any memories of that, and then when you left in 1947? Bob Taylor: I certainly had no--at age six, everything in the world was exciting to me. I think I mentioned earlier heat and wind, that sort of thing didn't really mean much of anything to me. I have no recollection of being upset about being here, other than knowing that my mother was upset about being here. I liked it here. I had good friends. I was kind of disappointed to go back to McNeil Island. Three of my closest friends at camp that were out there too--let's see, Kenny and Jerry and— Dianne Taylor: Were they out there then? Bob Taylor: Yeah. There were, I think, five of us actually went back to McNeil Island. So, at least I wasn't--had my friends going back there with me, which made it better. And then we had a very--from a prefab in the desert, we went back to a fairly palatial estate that we lived on because of my dad's position, so I liked that. And then that next year I started junior high at Clover Park. And so starting then I went back to--I rode the boat to Steilacoom and caught the bus to school. And then I was off on a whole ‘nother part of my life. I think I'd say I was probably happy to be leaving, but not the way my mother was happy to be leaving. Dianne Taylor: Well, I think it was a pretty idyllic childhood for kids like this. They've got the free reign of the desert, within reason. They've got the swimming pool. Nobody was worrying about jumping into the Yakima River. And they had friends, and they'd go into the movies. We've got a picture of Bob--we think it's Bob--with his buddies. There was a picture in Richland years ago at the post office there was a little museum. Bauman: A kind of display. Dianne Taylor: Yeah. And there's a picture of the kids outside the Uptown--not the Uptown, the old Village Theater. And we're pretty sure he's there. But the stories he would tell me, running around, riding their bikes, it was-- Bob Taylor: I just think of it as fun and unique. I really do. Dianne Taylor: What about the stories about Dad and the baseball field? They had a baseball field there for the prisoners, for their recreation. Bauman: Oh, at the camp. Bob Taylor: Well, that was their big activity on the weekends. They had a very nice ball field. Again, there's pictures of it outside of the administration building. And my dad was a good guy. For somebody in 1934 to survive starting as a prison guard at McNeil Island, those were tough times. Those were really tough times. I don't mean living as a family, my mom and dad. I mean just as a human being who felt some degree of emotion about people. Prison guards anywhere in any prison in 1934 were really tough, mean guys. They had to be. But when he came over here, he really--and it shows in his correspondence--he really had a lot of humanity and caring. And he ran a really great camp here and has lots of letters saying so from people, from superiors. What started me on that was just her idea about the baseball. He wanted to make sure that they had sporting activities to do things with over the weekend. Bauman: Recreation and entertainment. Bob Taylor: Yeah. Bauman: I find it very interesting neither of your parents really talked about this stuff, but they kept-- Dianne Taylor: Yeah, oh yeah. Bauman: --the photos and the documents that you didn't even know. Bob Taylor: Yeah. We didn't realize they had all that. Dianne Taylor: And Dad would talk about it a little bit. It wasn't like he never talked about it. But he told me the story one time about the prisoners escaping, and he talked some of these things. But it wasn't something that you talked about very much. It was once in a while. I mean, like every few years there'd be a comment. But Mom didn't talk about it at all, other than the teaching, which of course she loved to be a teacher and loved doing that. But it was a very, very quiet non-discussed part of their lives. Bauman: Are there any other either events or things that happened that were humorous or special things, memories that stand out in your mind about your years here? Bob Taylor: One of my major memories actually was the very first summer we were here. And three or four six-year-old boys never, ever, ever, ever got in trouble. But for some reason, we chose to go into the crawl space underneath our Quonset hut. I mean, there was no foundation in the sense you’d think of a foundation. But there was a raised floor and so there was space under there with snakes and bugs and spiders. And my parents never specifically told me, don't ever go down there. You'd sort of think that was understood. But three of us, one hot, hot, hot day, we thought, well, it was just boiling hot outside. It was boiling hot in the Quonset hut. Those things are not fit for human habitation without air conditioning. And so we got the smart idea it might be cooler down there in the crawl space. So we got down in the crawl space, and then for some reason some guards--I say guards—some of the men came around doing some kind of a check of the housing. I don't know what they were necessarily—but here we were, little boys where we were pretty sure we weren't supposed to be, and the adult men walking around sounded like we just knew they were looking specifically for us to get us in trouble. That's kind of silly, really, but it was a big thing for me as six years old to be down there where I'm pretty sure I shouldn't be and knew what kind of trouble I was going to be in when they found us. The other thing is the coming into the shows in the afternoon and standing in the line outside the theater. And, as I say, Tom Mix, and Hopalong Cassidy, and whoever else, the Saturday afternoon shows at the theater. I remember going to those a lot. Dianne Taylor: One of the fun things that we go out to there. We hadn't been there for a few years, out to the camp. It's just kind of fun to walk around and realize what was there--the families, the men—brought together from all over the country for one purpose. And they fulfilled their purpose and kept the orchards going and the fields, and then they left. And to me there's a lot of kind of neat spirit and ghost—ghost isn't the right word. But there's a sense that there was something really interesting, good happening here—good or bad depending on the way you looked at it. But it's just an interesting place to go and walk around out there. You should do it sometime. Bauman: Yeah. And a unique place. Dianne Taylor: Very unique, very unique. And it's fun to walk around, and we think we found the kitchen. So I'm thinking about the guy making the good cinnamon rolls. He was there. And you think you found where Dad—where the office was. Bob Taylor: Yeah, I'm pretty sure I can identify where the administration building was. But the various cement foundations or partial foundations that are still out there can pretty well match up with the pictures that we have from back then. Bauman: Well, great. Maybe this might be a good time, then, to sort of end this part, unless there's something we haven't talked about yet that you'd like to in this part of the-- Bob Taylor: Well, I've covered the things that I certainly, the bullet points that I had in mind that I wanted to cover. There's probably always more things to talk about. Part of it is sitting and having the box and going through and pulling a piece of paper might remind me to say something else. But I feel comfortable right now in saying that anybody watching this interview is going to know a whole lot more about what Columbia Camp was about than they knew before. And that's the main point of what we're trying to accomplish here. Dianne Taylor: There were no fences at Columbia Camp. Bob Taylor: Right. Dianne Taylor: There were no fences. Bob Taylor: Right. Bauman: Right. And these were all male prisoners, right? Bob Taylor: Oh yeah. Bauman: Yeah, well, maybe this would be a good time to end this part, and then we can look at some of the photos and have you comment some of those. Dianne Taylor: I wish that they had shared it with--Bob's mom and dad had shared it with us sooner, because there would be so many more stories and so much more understanding. Man one: Okay, so I'm going to give this. Why was it located--I mean, I know it was located for the orchard support and stuff. But why where it was? Ever hear why it was located? Bob Taylor: I don't specifically know, other than it was near Hanford. It was on the river, which helped with the infrastructure. It was away from this burgeoning 1,500 population big town of Richland. Man one: And yet kind of remote. Bob Taylor: And kind of remote. I mean, it was remote for those days. Bauman: Like you said, escaping was tricky because-- Bob Taylor: Yeah, it was far enough. Dianne Taylor: Yeah. Man one: It was Alcatraz in its own way. Dianne Taylor: Well, it was. It was, because it was--I mean, can you just imagine being out there and trying to escape? And how are you going to get water? It's the true desert. Bob Taylor: I guess the real answer is, if you realize that Hanford took everything from here north and they weren't going to go across the river, and here's Richland, and down there is Benton City, and this is the Yakima winding out there and just kind of a nice little bend in the river of the Yakima. Bauman: I love that they call it Columbia Camp even though it's not-- Dianne Taylor: Isn't that funny? Man one: I know, it's great. Close enough. Bauman: They didn't know their geography very well. Dianne Taylor: Yeah. We know it wasn't Bob's father because there were guys from Washington out here long before that. But it's kind of interesting. Man two: Well, [INAUDIBLE] will bring that light around, put it behind that camera if it'll reach. If it won't I'll bring--or just unplug it and I'll move this cord. Dianne Taylor: What you doing? Bob Taylor: Just got one minor issue. I'm just seeing if anything's-- Dianne Taylor: Yeah, this guy had no clue what it's like to be raised in the city, because he started-- Man one: The stories that you tell remind me of this other guy I knew that had grown up--his father was in the Navy. And he grew up on Midway, I think. Midway or Wake Island where it was a mile this way, and it was two miles that way, and that was it. Bob Taylor: Yeah. Man one: And as a kid, he loved it. Down at the beach, having a good time, going to the movies, all he wanted, soda pop and all that stuff. But the parents were going crazy. [LAUGHTER] Bob Taylor: Oh yeah. Dianne Taylor: Well, when we got this little note from Bob's mother--there's pictures in there of the women of the camp. And if you watched at all the Manhattan Project TV show that was on for a while, these gals are—it's the same women. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:45:43 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 189 kbps Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1944-1947 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Harold E. Taylor Doris C. Taylor Kenny Jerry Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Bob and Dianne Taylor Description An account of the resource An interview with Bob and Dianne Taylor conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 06-10-2015 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2018-31-1: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. 1955 Dam Hanford Manhattan Project Park Quonset hut Quonset huts River Road School Sun swimming Theater https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F90d54a5a9837fe9b43e6690103af02d6.JPG 9169c15b4493b42c01ad4b597f76b831 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F8d3e66c137874c342df2cbfdcec381f5.mp4 e48c0d6128bcde0bbba8a20ce7f31cef Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Bauman Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed William Tyler Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Northwest Public Television | Tyler_William Robert Bauman: Now you can give it right back to her? William Tyler: Yeah, I plan on it. Man One: Exactly. All right, get this off your face there. Bauman: Does your daughter live here in Richland? Tyler: She lives right across the street from me. Bauman: Oh, does she? Oh, there you go. Well, you can really give it to her then. [LAUGHTER] She can't avoid you. Tyler: Well in fact, we work together at HAMMER. Man one: I’m rolling. Bauman: All right. Well I think we're ready to get started. So let's start by having you say your name and also spell it for us. Tyler: My name is William T. Tyler. W-I-L-L-I-A-M, T, T-Y-L-E-R. Bauman: And you go by Bill? Tyler: Bill, yeah. Bauman: All right. And today's date is August 28th of 2013. And we're conducting this interview on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. So let's start, if we can, by maybe having you talk about what brought you to the area. When did you come to work at Hanford, and what brought you here? Tyler: We came out here on vacation from Oklahoma in 1947 to see my dad's brothers and sisters. And we were going to stay for a week or so. And my dad applied for a job here and got it, and we stayed. I thought it was the end of the world. This was not a pretty place in 1947. But I went in the Navy in 1950, got into the nuclear program and came out here in 1955. Went to work at Hanford. Worked as an HPT until '82, I believe. And then I went into management in health physics. Bauman: So HPT, you mean health physics technician. Is that was HPT is? Tyler: Uh-huh. Sorry. Bauman: That's okay. So how old were in 1947 when you came on vacation? Tyler: I think I was 15. Bauman: Okay. What sort of job did your father get? Tyler: He worked in transportation. Bauman: And you already had aunts and uncles who came here? Tyler: Yeah. Bauman: So you said you thought this was the end of the world. What do you mean by that? What are your first impressions of the place? Tyler: [LAUGHTER] Well, my first impression is we got here July the 5th. And my aunt and uncle had a little cafe on downtown Kennewick, on Kennewick Avenue. And it was about 104 degrees out. And we were driving down the street looking for it. And my dad says, man, I wouldn't live here if it's the last place in the world. And back then there was not a lot of trees. There was in Kennewick, and a few in Richland. But every time the wind blew, it was dusty and the tumbleweeds flew, and a lot of dust storms. In fact, they call them termination winds. Because everything was booming out in Hanford and every time the wind blew, people didn't like that and they'd just pick up and quit. So they called it termination winds. Bauman: Do you know when your aunt and uncles came here? Tyler: My aunt was born here in Kennewick. My uncle came out here in '37, '38, somewhere along that area. Bauman: Oh, okay, so you'd had relatives here before the Hanford site. Tyler: Oh yeah. Bauman: And so when your family first came in 1947 and you dad got the job and stayed here, where did you live? Tyler: We lived in Kennewick for a year. And then we got a house in Richland in 1948 at 635 Basswood. Bauman: That was a government home then? Tyler: Uh-huh. It was ranch house. And we moved in Thanksgiving Day of '48. And my future wife moved in next door the same day. I didn't know that was my future wife, but it turned out to be. And I still live on Basswood. Different house, but-- Bauman: So did you go to high school here then? Tyler: I went to Kennewick. I started in Kennewick because that's where we lived and I didn't want to transfer. So I rode the intercity bus every day to Kennewick and back. I graduated in 1950 and then somebody in Washington wanted me to join their services. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: So how would you describe, outside of your first impression, how would you describe the community of Richland in late '40s, early 1950s? Tyler: It actually—it was a very good place to live. I didn't realize it at the time. It was smaller, much smaller--probably 5,000 people in each of the cities. It was a good place to live if you could ignore the wind blowing and the dust storms and that sort of thing. But it kind of grows on you. I know I wouldn't live anywhere else. Bauman: In those early years when you were here in the '40s and '50s, do you remember any particular community events that stand out in your mind? Tyler: Yeah, Atomic Frontier Days, the Grape Festival in Kennewick, and then the fair. Nothing big or spectacular, but it was something to do. Bauman: Can you describe Atomic Frontier Days a little bit? What sorts of things-- Tyler: Well, normally they had a queen and a parade of course. And it was just kind of a—I don't know how--just a parade and kind of a get together type thing for the people that lived here. Bauman: So let's talk about your work a little bit now. You said you started working in '55. Tyler: ’55. Bauman: So can you talk about who you worked for at time and a little bit more detail about what sorts of work you did? What area of the Hanford site you worked in? Tyler: Okay, I started February the 22nd, 1955. And my first work assignment was 200 West Area tank farms. And then I went up to the REDOX facility which was a separations facility. A couple months later, then I went to U Plant. And then I went to T Plant, which were all separation facilities. And then I went over to PUREX in December of 1955. That was prior to startup. We started up our first spiked run was I think March or April of '56. And I worked there until '62 I believe. When I worked there, we also was switched with the 100 Area HPTs, or RCTs, or radiation monitors for exposure reasons. Because they got a lot more exposure than we did, so we would switch with them. And I got to work in all the 100 Area reactors except N when they were running, and some of the 300 Area. Bauman: So just about everywhere? Tyler: Yeah, I worked basically in every facility out here except 234-5. Bauman: And so was GE the contractor? What contractor did you work for? Tyler: GE. They were the prime contractor. And they left here in '66 I believe. Then Rockwell and Westinghouse and Fluor Daniel and MSA. Bauman: So as a health physics technician, what exactly did that mean? What sorts of things did you do on a daily basis? Tyler: Well as you know, there was a lot of contamination, radiation. And our job was to set the dose rates if people were going into a radiation area. We would go in, set the dose rates, stay with them. Got to make sure that the dose rates didn't increase while they were in there. We surveyed them out when they were done with the GMs and alpha detectors to make sure they didn't take any contamination home with them. And that was our prime responsibility. We maintain control of personnel exposure rates and their contamination, if they had any, and made sure that everything was as clean as we could get it. That's the short and sweet version. Bauman: Yeah. And you did that, obviously, at all these different areas you worked at on the site? Tyler: Everywhere, inside, outside, burial grounds. Bauman: Were there ever any incidents while you were doing this where people did have excessive exposure or anything along those lines? Tyler: Yeah, there was a lot of them. When GE came here--well, they were the prime contractor. Back in those days, you really couldn't talk about your job. You could say that you worked at Hanford and that was pretty much it. But yes, there was a lot of good memories and bad memories. Some really high exposure rates almost on a daily basis, because everything was running. And what will go wrong probably does. And it was very interesting work. It was something different every day. It's the kind of job that you look forward to doing and working. I did. I really enjoyed it. Bauman: So what was the process or procedure if someone had an overexposure? Tyler: Well, you had your dosimetry, which—Battelle read that. So you know what they got. And that's the record that's with you forever. At that time I think we worked--[PHONE RINGING] Shit. We worked under a 50 millirem per day limits, or 300 a week. And sometimes you would exceed that. But we were issued dosimetry everyday when we came to work. And you had a film badge which was read I think once a month. But they kept a running record of your exposure. That's why when we, when 100 Area radiation monitor--[PHONE RINGING] Hello. Can I call you back, Ian? Okay, thanks. Sorry. I don't know how to turn it off. Bauman: So we're talking about the dosimeter-- Tyler: Yeah, they kept records of all your exposures. And then every month they would send you a copy or let you know what it was. But if before the end of the year was out, if you were running short of exposure, then they would transfer people--particularly the radiation monitors--to different areas. And they what they were doing was using our exposure instead of--and letting their people cool down a little bit. It was just a way of equalizing the dose rates to the personnel. And it worked good in theory. And there was some--and I probably shouldn't say this—but there was some little minor ripples in the water, because people accused the other people of hanging back and now I got to come save you, that sort of thing. But it was all in fun. Everybody knew how serious the job was. And that was just part of their job. Bauman: And so how long did you work as a health physics technician then? Tyler: I think until 1982 and I went into management in health physics. At that time, they called us managers. And I was the manager of East tank farms until 1988. And then I transferred over to the West Area environmental group and took that over. My responsibilities were all of the outside radiation contamination areas. Burial sites. '89 I retired. Came back three months later and went to work in the environmental restoration part-time. And I did that until 1995. And then when Bechtel came in, I left there and went back to health physics side and become a evaluator at HAMMER for radiation protection, which I still do. Bauman: So you still work for-- Tyler: Two to three days a week. Bauman: So you mentioned earlier the sort of secrecy of some aspects of Hanford. Obviously secrecy, security were a very important part of. I wonder if you could discuss that at all, any ways that impacted your work? Tyler: GE had a very rigid plan of how they wanted things to go. And security of course was top secret. If you went—and a few people did--they go down and have a beer at the bar and they get to talking. And you never know who you're talking to you. And there was cases where people didn't have a job the next morning. Because security would overhear them. And you were pretty much done. So people didn't talk about their job. They didn't even talk about it with their family. Security was very strict. When you—well, for instance, when you go to work in the morning or if you're on shifts, same thing. You would catch the bus at the bus lot. Get on the bus, go through the barricade at the Y. If I was going to PUREX, we'd go up, pull in to the front gate of PUREX. You'd get out, off the bus. Go through the badge house. Pick up your dosimetry. Go out. Get back on the bus. The bus would pull inside the gate. Get back on the bus. Go down to PUREX. Get off the bus. Go through their badge house. And they would check your lunch bucket and all that. And then go into the building. And then in the evening, just reverse that process and back out again. So they were very strict. If you drove your car, you could not drive it past the main gate of East Area. You parked outside. And when you could drive inside, security would check the glovebox and the trunk and whatever was in the car. So it was very regimented. Bauman: I wanted to ask you about, in 1963 President Kennedy visited for the opening of the N reactor. I wondered if you were there and have any memories of that event at all? Tyler: I was not there because I was on shift at that day, or I probably would have been. Bauman: Mm-hm. Obviously, one of things that happened with Hanford is the shift from focus on production to focus on clean up. And I wonder if that shift impacted your work in any way? Tyler: Yes. Like I said before, I was the manager of East tank farms. And my office was at Semi Works, which is in 200 East Area, which was a pilot plant for PUREX. Semi Works was running. We were doing strontium cesium runs. But then when the edict came out that we were going to phase out and clean up, one of the first facilities--well I think it was the first facility—that we started tearing down was Semi Works. And D&D did the work. But we shut it all down and demolished the building and just imploded it in place. Built a dirt berm over it, cleaned it up. Most of the cells and the tanks are still in place, but they're full of grout. And then there's concrete over it. And what we did was tear down—this was approximately a three-story building with three stories underground. So when we tore down the building—it had a lot of piping and columns—we tore down the building and left the west wall standing. And we filled everything we could get inside like the basement and concreted it in place. And then we undercut the west wall. And this is probably four foot thick. And got a couple of Caterpillars and chains and hooked it over the top of the west wall. Pulled it down over like a lid. And then dirt berm over it, and there it is. And the stack that was there—the exhaust, the big stack—they imploded that and laid her right alongside the building. One guy did that. We deconned it first, and he came in, and a dynamite expert told us where we was going to put the stack and put a stick out on the end in the ground like they do now on the TV. And laid that stack right down on that stick, all by himself. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: So that definitely did make for significant changes then, the shift from production? Tyler: Very significant, because that was kind of pilot test for all the other anticipated deconning and decommissioning they we're going to do, which is still going on. Bauman: Let's shift now and talk a little bit about HAPO. I wonder--I know you've been involved with them quite often. I wonder if you can talk about your involvement when you became involved in HAPO and how that came about? Tyler: Well let's see. First, HAPO was a GE acronym which stands for Hanford Atomic Products Operations, which was the name of GE's part of this. GESA, which is another credit union down the street, was the General Electric Supervisors Association. GE was very particular about their managers or supervisors were a step above the blue collar worker. And I think they still maintain that. If you were a supervisor, it's white shirt and tie. And you don't fraternize with--So when the credit committee wanted to get started, that's the name they chose, just HAPO. And it's '53. And I was looking at one of the early--the record book. And I think there's five or six of the charter members of the first—that I worked with that were radiation monitors just like I was. But I never joined HAPO until my wife was--she likes C First. And I never joined HAPO until I think '71. And then a friend of mine that I worked with talked me into getting on the committee that approved loans, credit committee, which I did. And then I got invited later to go on the board of directors and got voted in and been there ever since. I really enjoyed it. It's a great credit union. Bauman: So is it the board of directors then, primarily is it either current or former Hanford employees? Tyler: No. It used to be when we were federal, you had to work out here to join HAPO. And then they relinquished or changed the bylaws so that anybody could join HAPO. If you give them $5 and signed up, you were a member for life. But initially it was you had to work here to join. Bauman: And you said you didn't join until '71. What led you to decide to join at that point? Tyler: The guy I carpool with, one of them, convinced me that I should do that. [LAUGHTER] And I didn't like C First. I never did like C First. But my wife liked them because you got at the end of the month, you got all of your checks back. And she liked that. But I joined HAPO and started my own checking account. And then she finally joined shortly after I did. And now the rest is history. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: So, I know you weren't part of the formation of the credit union. But I wonder if you can talk about it a little more? If you know more, were the employee unions at Hanford involved in the credit union, establishing that? Tyler: Yes. Bauman: And anything you can talk about that? Tyler: Helen Van Patten was one. GESA started it first. And then the blue collars said well, we got to have one of those. The first store was down by the Spudnut Shop. I think we had one or two employees. And everything was in a ledger, handwritten. Joe Blow borrowed $25. It was very basic. But fortunately, it kept growing and membership increased. Bauman: So the unions saw it as a way to provide credit union opportunities-- Tyler: Right. Bauman:--for blue collar workers or laborers or whatever? Okay. So I want to—going back to your work at Hanford, what are some of the more challenging aspects of your work, and maybe some more rewarding aspects of your work? Tyler: That’s a good question. Probably one of the most challenging was the responsibility when you're out on a hot job where the contamination levels are great and the radiation levels are great, and you have a whole crew of people. It challenges you to--it's always in the back of your mind that something's going to happen and I'm not going to see it, or I'm not going to catch it. And somebody's going to get overexposed. And that's always in the back of your mind. Because--and I have to beat my own drum here for a bit—radiation monitoring and health physics now, whatever they are, it's a very challenging job. You're responsible for--you're taking care of people. And they trust you. And they expect you to look out for them. And it's a lot of responsibility, but most everybody accepts that gladly, because they know how important it is. Because you're responsible for--you could get somebody really overexposed, and who knows what the consequences are? As far as rewards for that, I think is the satisfaction of when the job is done, that you knew you did your best job. Nobody got hurt. Nobody got overexposed. Nobody got contaminated. And the job got done. Bauman: Were there any events or incidents or anything, sort of unique things that happened during your time working at Hanford that sort of really stands out to you? Tyler: When I first hired in, like I said, I went to REDOX. One of the problems they had shortly before I got here was they had a ruthenium—they ran some ruthenium and they played it out in the stack. And then it broke loose. And it kind of went out in the desert and on the ground. And you had ruthenium chunks of—it looked like white paper that built up on the inside the stack and then finally broke loose and fluttered out and went everywhere. And one of my first jobs with a GM and a walking stick was walking out through the desert and finding these things. Little specks, big specks, didn't have any trouble finding them. [LAUGHTER] They were very hot. And I remember we used the KOA cans from T Plant, which were little round cans, metal cans about that big around, about this high with a snap-on lid. And that's what we put them in, with dirt for shielding. And then buried them. But there's been a lot of incidents of hot burials from PUREX. I remember some where we used a burial string. We used a locomotive, a whole bunch of flat cars. And then at that time, they'd build big wooden boxes. And I recall one big one that had enough lumber in it to build two B houses. Huge—it sat on two flat cars. And we put it in, and we took readings over the top of the tunnel as it went out of the tunnel towards the burial ground. And it read greater than 500 R. And as you know, 500 R for an hour is a lethal dose rate to 50% of the people, 60%. And then you go down the railroad track behind B Plant, pull it across the highway which patrol barricaded the road. So you pull the string across the road and then back it into the burial ground. And then you had to sink—this box was built on skids. And a big long steel cable lay on another flat car, three or four flat cars away from it. So you would pull that. And you would pull it down into a burial trench. And the Cat would be down there ready. And the train would back up and they would grab that cable, put the eye on. Hook it to the Cat. And then the Cat skinner would pull the cable off. And the train would move up until the boxes sit here and the cables here. And the Cat's down here pulling. And then we'd get up to the--and there was a dock where you could slide it off. And you would turn that box and pull it in. Pull it down into the trench, down to the other end, wherever you wanted it. Unhook the Cat. Leave it. Pull the Cat out. And then they would backfill that box. And that's the way they did the burials. And it worked great except when the box collapsed unexpectedly. Bauman: Then not so great. Tyler: Yeah, that's not a good--that happened once or twice. Bauman: During your years working out there, were you ever concerned about your own safety, health, protection, in any way? Tyler: Well as stupid as it may sound, no. I never was. Because I always figured I knew what I was doing. And I received some very good training in the Navy, which helped. But I never worried about it. I always trusted me. Bauman: Were you a member of a union when you were working at Hanford? And what union was that? And I guess, what sort of relationship did the union have with management here at Hanford during the time you were here? Tyler: Good and bad. [LAUGHTER] I used to be chief steward for the radiation monitors. I went through two negotiations. And after the last one, I decided I didn't want any more of that. Chief steward's a thankless job, but somebody's got to do it. Bauman: What does that mean exactly? What—chief steward-- Tyler: Well, you're the union rep plant wide for all of the HPTs. And I had this grandiose idea that I could just change everything. It's a great idea, but it doesn't work. It's a job that somebody has to do. And it's a job that is thankless. Because somebody's always mad at you. Whatever you do, in some of the people's eyes, you could always do better. And it's just not a good job. [LAUGHTER] But I enjoyed it. You learn a lot. And you learn both sides of the fence--how the company thinks and how the union thinks. And then you try and compromise. Bauman: Were there ever any times you were here where there was a strike or any sort of-- Tyler: Two--'66 and '76. Bauman: And were those sort of across the site? Tyler: Yep. And in '66, after we settled the '66 strike, GE left. Bauman: Was that one of the reasons they left? Tyler: Yeah, well, they had planned to leave. And then that's when--because when GE was here, they were the only contractor. And then when they left, they kind of broke it up into the 200 Areas and the 100 Areas. And it's always been different contractors, not just one prime contractor. Bauman: Do you remember what some of the key issues were in '66 and '76 in terms of-- Tyler: Wages. Wages were always the key issue. Well, I take that back. '66 or '76 was, they were going to do away with the buses. And that was a key issue for everybody. It didn't happen, but it was a--that was when they spent all the money redoing the bus lot. And then a couple years later, they did away with the buses anyway. But we did get air conditioned buses. Before we had old buses, the old green buses. Well like the ones sitting down at-- Bauman: The CREHST Museum? Tyler: Yeah. Those were some of the newer ones. The older ones were international buses that looked like a truck. Cold in the winter and hot in the summer. But they worked. When they did away with the buses, see, that did away with a lot of jobs in the bus lot. Maintenance, everything there, which was a lot of people. Bauman: So part of that was about jobs and issues of transportation? Tyler: Mm-hmm. Bauman: Anything I haven't asked you about that you'd like to talk about or that you think we should talk about? Tyler: Well, we've covered pretty much every--well, we've covered pretty much everything I think. I don't really know what you're looking for. Bauman: Just your experience. That's why I wonder if there's something that you experienced some event or something that I haven't asked you about yet that you think would be important to— Tyler: Well. When I retired, I took the first early out and then got bored to death and came back. When I was in the environmental group in West Area, a good friend of mine was an environmental manager outside the site. But he talked me into coming back part time and become a waste shipper and a waste handler. Which was--I'd never done it. I knew what it was. But I finally relented. I enjoyed it. It's entirely different. Because I was kind of burned out on radiation protection, and I wanted to do something different. Didn't want to retire, but I wanted to do something different. So I went to the classes and become a certified waste shipper and a waste handler. And we took care of all of the sites outside of 200 East, 200 West. All the burial sites, all the drilling sides, the river, pretty much everything. And it was very interesting. Until '95, when I decided I didn't like the contractor. [LAUGHTER] And I went back to health physics. Bauman: Most of the students I teach now were born after the Cold War ended. Obviously most of your career, the Cold War was going on during most of the time you were working at Hanford. So I'm wondering what you think would be important for young people today and people in future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War? Tyler: I'm trying to remember. We had the strike in '66. And there was almost another strike four or five years later. In fact midnight was the deadline when we were supposed to go on strike. And at 11:30, we got a notification that the President had put a stop to the strike because of the situation with the Cold War thing. And I think that's the first and the last time that ever happened. But as far as-- Bauman: So then about 1970 or so? Tyler: Early, yeah, '71 or '72 maybe. No, it was before that, because I was still on shift. It was probably '68, '69 maybe. But as far as the Cold War, it's still going on in different forms—my personal opinion. You look back at history--and I've lived through a lot of it--nothing has really changed. Like what's going on now, and the Bible says there'll be war and rumors of war. And that's correct. Because whatever our President does—whatever he does is going to be wrong in a lot of people's eyes. It's kind of like if you don't do it, you should have. And if you do do it, you shouldn't have. [LAUGHTER] It's a different type of cold war. Instead of—we used to worry about Russia. And I'm not too sure that—maybe we should still be worrying about Russia and a lot of other countries that--Things have changed. But they haven't—the basic things that caused the Cold War hasn't changed. There's all kind of weapons. I don't know. Bauman: All right. I think that's all the questions I have for you. Tyler: Okay. Bauman: I want to thank you for coming in today. Tyler: Thank you for having me. Bauman: Pleasure to talk to you. Tyler: Good. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:47:27 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 244 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 100 Area 2-East Area 200 Area 200 East Area 300 Area B Plant K-West Area T Plant U Plant Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1947-today Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1955-still working Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Helen Van Patten Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with William Tyler Description An account of the resource An interview with William Tyler conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 08-28-2013 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2018-6-2: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. 100 Area 1955 2-East Area 200 Area 200 East 200 East Area 200 West Area 300 Area B Plant Battelle Bechtel Cat Cold War General Electric HAMMER Hanford K-West Area Kennedy Kennewick PUREX T Plant U Plant War Westinghouse https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fedf7236819f3117076a04483382863fc.JPG 801d3189701089821afade8c44ed0a3a https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F46e26fcabd0ae0e47f6875a5987ed284.mp4 838f33e480e051227c99777ef102fc38 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Douglas O’Reagan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Everett Weakley Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Everett Weakley: And there I worked in the lead process for years. And then I moved over later— [VIDEO CUTS] Douglas O’Reagan: My name is Douglas O’Reagan. I’m conducting an oral history interview with Everett A. Weakley on January 13th, 2016. Interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. And I will be talking with Everett, or Ev—would you prefer Everett, or--? Weakley: Just—yeah, Ev or Everett. Either one. Douglas O’Reagan: Okay. About his experiences working on the Hanford site. Okay, well thanks for being here. So—you were just telling me while we were having some camera issues—I’d love to hear about sort of how you got involved with the Hanford site, what you were working on that brought you here, and then your sort of early years, what you were working on here. Weakley: Well, they came up to University of Idaho and recruited people. And I was one of the ones they recruited. So I came down here, and they put me on work at the tritium program extraction process. So I was a process control engineer at that time. O’Reagan: Do you know why they recruited you? Were you working in physics? Weakley: They were after engineers, especially chemical engineers at that time. O’Reagan: I see. Did you know anything about nuclear science specifically? Weakley: Oh, no. We didn’t know squat. [LAUGHTER] Of course. Because we were up at University of Idaho. But it was a lot better than being drafted and sent to Korea. O’Reagan: How much were they able to tell you about the job before they hired you? Weakley: Very little. Very little. They didn’t tell us what was going on. They came down here and they put some people—engineers in this job, some in this job. I was selected for tritium extraction. O’Reagan: Mm-hmm. Could you tell me about your first experiences on that job? What sort of the first month or two like? Do you remember? Weakley: Well, they put us on shift work. I think it was called XYZ shift. And it was only five days a week, but it was—changed. So they were going 24 hours a day, but only for five days. It was a glass line at that time. Tritium was extracted and then you had to send it—you had to pump it out through palladium windows—that’s the way they got the hydrogen out, and the tritium and the deuterium. And then we had to collect those in glass containers. It was all hooked up to the system. And then we were designing one for a metal one. So I went in on the metal designs also. And most of that work was done in the shops down in—oh, what do they call it—the old Hanford site. They had a lab—or a place down there, and they did most of the work—construction work. And then they assembled it all. It was interesting work, actually. Because they kept me out of the Korean War, also, so I was happy about that. I didn’t want to go over there. O’Reagan: Part of what we’re trying to get an idea about is sort of—what was it like working on the Hanford site? Is there anything that sticks out to you about the way things worked? Or the structure, or anything like that? Weakley: Well, since I was a single guy, they put us in the dorms. They ran out of dorms, so they put us—there was two dorms that were down in the women’s dorm area. So they put us in one of those dorms down there. I remember there was a—what the heck street was that? Anyway, those women’s dorms were right close there, too. And then we’d go up and eat at the Mart, which is still here, but it isn’t called the Mart now. And we’d walk through this field of—I think they were prunes or plums or something like that. And you’d go through there and you’d get attacked by the birds. [LAUGHTER] They would actually attack you during the daytime. So it was a lot of things going on. For dorm club, we’d go down to—oh, the Blue Mountains, and we’d go up to Mount Hood, and hunting and fishing was always what I did. It was a good place. Lot of people. It was interesting, because everybody was new, had come in. It was quite the exciting time to see all these people from all over the United States. O’Reagan: Did you live in the dormitories long? Weakley: Oh, let’s see. I lived in there until I got married in ’53. Then we got a B house on Van Giesen Street—one end of it. And I wasn’t the oldest tenant, so I could not buy that anyway. I wouldn’t want it anyway. And then they started selling houses; I got a H house, south end of town and had to remodel that. Had to dig out the basement and all that. By that time, I had several children, so I kind of had to make room for all these kids. Took out the chimney. My wife did not like the coal-burning stove down there to heat the place. So we put in electric baseboard heat. Swamp coolers on the windows. Re-put new—took the chimney out. Had to put new roofing on. All that sort of thing. And later on, we moved to where we are on Pike Avenue now. Then we had more kids. [LAUGHTER] O’Reagan: Keep you busy. Weakley: That’s right. O’Reagan: What was life like in Richland in the ‘50s? Weakley: Well, it was kind of—there was always something to do. Mainly, down along the river in the park. We’d go down there for entertainment in the evenings. There’d be dances. And then I took up square dancing, my wife and I. So that was in different places, but mainly at the end, it was down in the—what do they call it, down there now? At the park. Oh, community house. It’s still going. I think this is their last year. We used to be on what’s now a hole in the ground, on the south end of that building, was where they used to have a structure. That’s where we danced, it was in that. And they had a kitchen in there; everybody’d bring food. It was a nice time. Had a lot of fun. O’Reagan: So you said—do you feel it was easy to get integrated into the community, to be a part of the community at that time? Weakley: What do you mean? O’Reagan: Well, I’m just thinking in terms of your—you’ve been describing a very interesting social scene that people can get into. I’m just thinking, there were a lot of new people coming into town. How—you yourself, of course, experienced this—what it was like to be a new resident in Richland. Weakley: Well, mainly you were in dorms. So, you were all right out of college. Here you are, a bunch of college kids, here—men, and then college women right next door to them. So there was a lot of dating going on. Then we’d go over to Pasco, to the Elks Club at that time. And on Friday nights, they always had a fish dinner. We’d go over there and dance and eat. That was a good time. That was ballroom dancing, it wasn’t square dancing. That was later. O’Reagan: So returning to your work for a minute, I guess to some degree you’ve done this, but could you sort of describe a typical work day, and did that change over the long course of time that you were working there? Weakley: Well, when I went out there, I had to work shift work. XYZ shifts. You’d work daytimes, evenings, and nighttime. I didn’t like that too well. Then when I went to 300 Area, I was all daytime, which I liked. O’Reagan: How much did the work you were doing change as you got these successive promotions, as you got the new jobs? Weakley: Here? O’Reagan: Yeah. I mean, when you were an engineering assistant, was your—I’d assume—if only because it’s decades earlier—how different was your work than when you were principal engineer or senior principal engineer? Weakley: Well, the added responsibility, of course. And I spent a lot of time in the old reactor fuel and then I wrote a lot of documents on how to—the canning process. And that’s probably in here—I’m pretty sure it is. O’Reagan: I noticed here, it says that you are an expert on fuel manufacturing environmental issues. I wonder what—when did that become a priority? The environmental issues, was that something that was always part of your work, or did that develop over time? Weakley: Environmental issues—you worried about what was going out the stacks, especially in 313. We had slug recovery—we’d take the aluminum—the ones that were reject—and they would dissolve the aluminum cans off in caustic, and they always had this exhaust going out. If you didn’t watch it, it would suck out quite a bit of moisture with it, and that would have caustic in it. We had trouble with the women walking by—their nylon hose would disintegrate. And they didn’t like that. I don’t blame them. And you could feel it—you could feel it on your face. They had to fix that up, of course. O’Reagan: Were safety issues or the environment ever something you were concerned about working there? Weakley: Oh, yeah, I was always worrying about—And then at the 306 Building, making fuel elements for the N Reactor, I was involved in that—a lot of things. I had to make trips to the aluminum companies that made aluminum products for us. Bought them back east, and some of them in California. So I did a lot of traveling, going to these different places, trying to get improvements made in aluminum ore, and later on, Zircaloy-2. That was Wah Chang made that down in Oregon—made Zircaloy-2 for us. That was interesting. So you’d take a drive down there and visit their plant. And then you’d go to these other places and visit those plants. O’Reagan: These were to get components for the fuel manufacturing? Weakley: What’s that? O’Reagan: Were these trips to get components for the fuel manufacturing? Weakley: They were making components for— O’Reagan: I see. How much—let’s go with this. Could you describe the ways in which security and/or secrecy impacted your work? Weakley: Well, you couldn’t talk about what you were doing, and we knew that. I made a lot of trips—I went to National Lead Company in Ohio at Fernald. That’s the ones that we would get our uranium cores from, for the old reactors. Then I’d go down to Mallinckrodt in Weldon Spring, Missouri, and that’s where they started making the billets that they’d send up to—on Lake Erie. There was a place that’d take the big billets and make smaller billets for the N Reactor. So I was always traveling around. Then at the same time, I was going down to the Savannah River plant and checking on what they were doing, because they had the same people. Like me, engineers that were busy and they’d get together and compare notes, and try to get the lower prices on some things. Especially aluminum components for the old reactors. Nothing much you could do about the Zircaloy: it was pretty well fixed. The only plant I never go to was the one that made the braze rings for the N Reactor fuel. That was back in—and it had beryllium in it. And I never had gone to there. I don’t know—I just plain missed it for some reason. I don’t know why. O’Reagan: Was it easy to communicate with all the engineers and workers at these plants, or did the secrecy ever sort of inhibit that? Weakley: Oh, no. If you’re buying, say, Zircaloy stuff, you go right down here in Oregon and talk to them. And that’s what we did. O’Reagan: Okay. Weakley: Same way back east on the aluminum plants. Did a lot of traveling. My wife didn’t like that, I don’t think, but we had to travel a lot. And it was old airlines at that time. [INAUDIBLE] had an airline to go to Spokane. You could catch a plane from there, it takes six hours to get into—now takes just a few hours. O’Reagan: Was it unusual that you were traveling that much? Did other people also travel that much from the Hanford site? Weakley: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, a lot of people were traveling. It’s hectic now. I won’t get on an airplane anymore, so heck with them. [LAUGHTER] I’m retired; I don’t do that. O’Reagan: Do you feel the security or secrecy of the place changed much over the decades? Weakley: Oh, yeah. When I started here it was really secret. They didn’t want the Russians to know anything about making tritium. But the secret got out, because somebody in Savannah River—or down at Oak Ridge probably told them. So nothing we could do about it. O’Reagan: Right. Weakley: But oh, yeah, they tried to keep it secret. O’Reagan: What were the most challenging and/or rewarding aspects of your work at Hanford? Weakley: Ooph! That’s a tough one. O’Reagan: It’s a big question. Any particular times that you were working on a project that was really stumping everybody? Any real challenges there that stick out? Weakley: Well, there’s always challenges to make things safer and better, and don’t dump stuff out into the atmosphere, or down the drain out to the ponds. Because at that time, they ponds along the river. And it discharges—a lot of stuff went into that pond. They tried to clean that stuff up, but—oh, yeah. When you have time to go through this, you will find a lot of things in here that I worked on. O’Reagan: Is there anything in there that you’re particularly proud of having accomplished? Or that sticks out? Weakley: Well, I lasted the whole—until I got laid off. [LAUGHTER] That’s an accomplishment—I didn’t get crapped up with anything. O’Reagan: Did you like your job? Weakley: Oh, yeah, I liked it. Oh, sure. It was a challenging job. I wrote a lot of manuals. That’s one of the things I did, a lot of manual writing when I was out there. There are still some of those around on the processes of lead-dip canning process, and co-extrusion process. I did a lot of writing. O’Reagan: Have the Tri-Cities changed much in your time living here? Weakley: Oh, yeah. O’Reagan: And how? Weakley: Oh, yeah, since I came in ’50? Oh, yeah. There’s a lot of changes. They couldn’t even allow the blacks to live in Kennewick. They had to go over in Pasco, for instance. O’Reagan: Right. Weakley: So we didn’t see too many blacks, actually. Now towards the end, they started hiring some people in that were blacks. I had no problem with them. O’Reagan: Yeah, we’re trying to get a sense for how the community has changed over time. I know that’s a vague question. That’s certainly an interesting point about the demographics of it. Anything else about sort of the social life, the number of things going, anything else like that that sticks out to you on how the community’s changed over the decades? Weakley: Well, I always had been hunting and fishing. So when I came here, I took up hunting and fishing again. Some of the people that I—I belong to the Rod and Gun Club—joined that many years ago, and I still belong, even though I got rid of my guns last year. I don’t go out and dig goose pits in the middle of the winter anymore. That’s too cold. I didn’t like to eat geese, anyway. [LAUGHTER] But I had a lot of good trips hunting down the Blues and up north of Spokane, up in that area. O’Reagan: One of the things—well, okay. Let me go to this one next. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and/or living in Richland during the Cold War? Weakley: Hmm. That’s an odd one. Well, for one thing, we couldn’t announce what we were doing anywhere. If you could, you made sure you didn’t. If they said, hey, you’re from Hanford. But it didn’t bother me on traveling too much. Because I’d usually go on to aluminum vendors or Zircaloy-2 vendors. Or I’d go to Savannah River plant, which has got the same restrictions as we have. And it was a free exchange then when you went there or you went to National Lead at Fernald. It was free exchange with the people there. So that was just like being at work. So I had no really problem with it. I didn’t really like traveling that much. But there was nothing I could do about it. O’Reagan: You were mentioning your collaboration people at Savannah River. Can you tell me more about that? Weakley: What’s that? O’Reagan: You were mentioning your training people at Savannah River, is that right? Or just trained people who eventually were at Savannah River? Weakley: No, they were—I met one of them. But they sent people up in tritium extraction. Because they built that plant for tritium. The guy that was running the tritium extraction plant was one of them that I trained. And the last trip I made down there, I met him and went into the tritium extraction plant with him and talked to him. He gave me a tour of what it was like. It was a lot different than what we had out here, of course. Then they shipped their stuff again to Oak Ridge. O’Reagan: Okay. So, I’m also interested in how people commemorate their community, how people celebrate the history, or try to remember the history. I understand that you’ve been involved in some of the historical groups around here. Can you tell me something about that? Why you thought that was important, why you got involved with those groups? Weakley: Are you talking about the Richland Rod and Gun Club, for instance? O’Reagan: Well, them and also the B Reactor Museum Association and so on. Weakley: Well the B Reactor Association, I was one of the earlier ones, before they got the Indians out there. It was interesting, because I was on the ground floor with them. In fact, I was in a meeting this week with them. I still belong to them. Just like the Rod and Gun Club, I still belong to them, even though I don’t—got rid of all my guns because I don’t go out and dig goose pits in the wintertime anymore. So it was interesting. O’Reagan: I always find that there’s an awful lot of things that I don’t know that I should be asking. What could you—what would seem important or interesting that you might want to talk about, or think might be worth discussing that I might have not thought to ask? Anything that comes to mind? Weakley: Hmm. Not right off the top of my head, it isn’t. O’Reagan: Sure, that’s fine. Weakley: [LAUGHTER] O’Reagan: Yeah. We’re just trying, as I said—we’re most interested in getting a feel for life in the Tri-Cities throughout the Cold War, up to the near present. And just how things have changed over time. What it was like to be a worker on the Hanford plants, how work on the Hanford plant changed over time, what it was like living in the community and getting to know people. So really, a broad set of things, but there’s always questions I don’t think to ask. Weakley: Okay. Well, you might have some ideas when you go through this later on. They gave me this, had my payroll number on it and all that. My service dates, 6/19/50 is when I came here. And payroll number 51500 was pretty easy to remember, thank goodness. O’Reagan: As you went through this, did anything— Weakley: Huh? O’Reagan: As you started reading through this again, did any memories leap to mind? Did anything about it sort of jog any fond memories or any surprises? Weakley: Well, we always had surprises. We never knew what was going to happen. Item—let’s see, what is that? Item four. O’Reagan: Mm-hmm. Weakley: I would ship pyrophoric uranium Zircaloy chips and fines back to National Lead. And we had surprises there, because they were supposed to use metal pallets. Somebody brought in wooden ones. And they put all these things that we had full of concrete and chips and fines in it, and they had to take them over across the street into a building. And when they did that, they heated it up and it broke one of the containers, and it caught fire on the shipping containers. They weren’t supposed to use shipping containers. That was a hell of a mess to clean up. Because we had a fire, had to clean all that up then. But we actually shipped the stuff back there and they recovered the uranium and reused it. O’Reagan: Well, I think that’s the written questions I have here. There are certainly a lot more interesting stuff here. Again, if anything comes to mind you would like to speak about, we would love to hear a bit more. Also, it mentions here that your historical knowledge of site activities, particularly in 300 Area, has been extremely valuable in the preparation of the RCRA and CERCLA documents and planning. Could you tell me anything about that initiative? Weakley: Whereabouts are you? O’Reagan: It’s number five, sub-point A. Weakley: Oh, okay. I did a lot of document writing and preparations of these RCRA and CERCLAs documents and planning. And I worked with—what’s her name? Michelle Gerber? O’Reagan: Mm-hmm. Weakley: I worked a lot of work with her, as she was a kind of historian. You’ve probably met her, of course. O’Reagan: I know the name, but I haven’t actually met her, I don’t think. Weakley: You haven’t met her? O’Reagan: I don’t think so. Weakley: Amazing. I’m surprised you haven’t met her yet. Anyway. She needed a lot of work. I would find things in 300 Area when we were cleaning out for the old reactors, getting 313 cleaned out. We would find movies. I’d ship that out to her, and then she made a CD out of it, I think. It showed the canning process, which had never been done before. It was— O’Reagan: Do you think the history of your job is going to be well-preserved? Do you think the records are still there that can reflect on your times, your work? That is again, sort of an open-ended question here. I’m just trying to think through how people will remember this time in history, and sort of the work that you were involved in. You’re mentioning you found this film and were able to get it out there. But probably some materials didn’t make it out, for security reasons or whatever else, or just weren’t preserved. Do you feel that people have an accurate memory of the time as you look through? Weakley: Well, most of them, I think, do. I always rode a bicycle around, between the buildings out in 300 Area. I would collect lead parts that I’d see laying around and get rid of them—or pick up anything else. So that I would ride those into the building. [LAUGHTER] O’Reagan: I saw—I was out at the DoE’s artifact collection—historical artifact collection. They have some bicycles out there that I guess were what you were describing, people traveling around the site. Was that common? Weakley: What do you mean? O’Reagan: You were using bicycles to get around the site? Weakley: Well, it was in our area. Oh, I used it all the time. And it had a basket in the back wheels. I’d put something in there—I would collect lead brick or something like that, and put it where the lead’s supposed to be and kind of clean things up. Well, it was a pretty good-sized area, 300 Area, so if you had to go down to the south end for some reason, you wanted to get there and get back. O’Reagan: Right. Okay. So as I said, I think these are the questions that we had prepared, sort of the general ones here. Weakley: You might have some questions when you—well, you can use anything you want out of this write-up. O’Reagan: Yeah, I think this will be a great help. This has been very interesting from my perspective here. We certainly thank you for your time. Yeah, I think that’s at least our first set of questions. But maybe if anything occurs to us, or to you, maybe we could send follow-up questions? Would that be okay, if any questions— Weakley: Oh, yeah, you can always get ahold of me if I’m around. I don’t go travel too far since I’m 88. O’Reagan: All right. Well, thanks very much. We appreciate your time. Weakley: Oh, she’s still back there. O’Reagan. Yeah. Weakley: [LAUGHTER] Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:33:02 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 300 Area 306 Building B Reactor N Reacor Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1950-today Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1950- Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Michelle Gerber Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Everett Weakley Description An account of the resource An interview with Everett Weakley conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 01-13-2016 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2018-31-1: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. 300 Area 306 Building B Reactor B Reactor Museum Association Cold War Hanford Kennewick Mountain Mountains N Reactor River Savannah River Street War https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F19f8673c03062cba662f73057746c3e9.JPG 11589b192b7b88e4df48e0da8e66b896 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F11e1591d4403d3f4f270ed3cdd923b30.mp4 2fe4d5fbd6741845d7707373526ce083 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Bauman Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Madge Watson Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound 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. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:36:47 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 192 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview N Reactor Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1948-today Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1948-1955 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Jared Davis Ray Kupi Don Watson Leo Bustad Dr. Berry Dr. John Porter Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Madge Watson Description An account of the resource An interview with Madge Watson conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 07-17-2013 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2018-31-1: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. FBI Hanford Kennedy Kennewick Mountain N Reactor Quonset hut Quonset huts River Road School Street https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Ff382a23fcd038452449b8e5f06182749.JPG 3e67685eee00cd52b35ca73813a2bb88 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Dan Ostergaard Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Dan Ostergaard on December 7th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus on Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Dan about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Dan Ostergaard: Okay, my full name is Daniel Vernon Ostergaard. The last name is spelled O-S-T-E-R-G-A-A-R-D. Franklin: Okay, and your first name? Ostergaard: Dan. I go by Dan. Daniel, D-A-N-I-E-L. Franklin: Okay. Great. When I was doing that boilerplate, I almost said December 7th, 1941. Ostergaard. Me, too. Well, that’s in my—I still live World War II. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Oh. So, tell me how and why you came to the Hanford Site. Ostergaard: Okay. I got interested in photography in junior high school in Kennewick. And back—that would have been, well, I graduated from high school in ’65. Franklin: So you’re from the Tri-Cities, then. Ostergaard: Right, I grew up in Kennewick. Franklin: Okay, and when were you born? Ostergaard: December 27th, 1946. Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: So, I got interested in photography kind of through the chemistry class. I was a lab assistant, and the guy who was doing the yearbook needed somebody that’d shoot pictures. And I had done a little bit of stuff with my mom’s help at home, so that just sort of got the ball rolling. Did the usual school stuff, graduated Kennewick High School. And in high school, shot pictures for the yearbook. We had kind of a unique situation where the yearbook actually provided us the facilities, but they actually bought the pictures from us. So we were in essence a little business. Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: We had our accounts down at the local drug store that had a photo counter. And it was a real good training thing. We were given assignments—the yearbook advisor was named Mr. Shields, and he said, I need a one-column-wide picture about four inches high and I want four faces in it. I don’t care what they’re doing. I just want four faces. They won’t buy the book unless their face is in it. So that was kind of the direction we were given, and it was up to us to figure it out. And after I finished high school, went to CBC. In high school, I also worked at a portrait lab named Dave Studio in Kennewick, in the back processing film and prints and doing all the things you do. And continued that at CBC. I had my own stuff shooting on the side. And then I went to WSU in Pullman for two years. Through that time, I had worked two summers for the Hanford photo group. One summer in the Federal Building, and one summer in 300 Area in 3705 Building. It was Vietnam era. I enlisted, went in for two-and-a-half years. Got an early out when they were winding down. I called up my boss, Lance Michael, and I said, hey, I’m getting out of the service; you got any work? And he kind of said, when can you be here? I said, in a month? Okay, you’re hired. That was the interview. Of course, I’d interviewed for two summers prior, in essence. [LAUGHTER] So I started doing lab tech work, just kind of whatever was needed to be done. The reason that was so attractive, because the Hanford photo group was like Disneyland. There was everything there somebody with my background could aspire to want. We had the ability to do all the photo processes. We had very competent photographers. They were hired mostly out of Brooks Institute down in Santa Barbara. We called them Brookies. The lab people sort of saved the Brookies a lot, we thought. [LAUGHTER] After I got out of the service, we had just opened up the photo lab in 3706—they’d moved it from the old wood lab building at 3705. Went over there, and then just kind of evolved into doing higher, higher level things. The photo group had three different photo labs at the time. One in the Federal Building, one in the basement of the ROB, the Battelle building, and then one in 300 Area. They had all evolved for a specific purpose. The Federal Building lab was to keep the AEC/DOE people connected. The ROB lab was just directly for supporting Battelle at the time. They had just gotten the contract in, I think, ’64. Franklin: What does ROB stand for? Ostergaard: Research Operations Building. Franklin: Research Operations Building, okay. Ostergaard: Yeah, and then 300 Area, we did all kinds of things. And this was all pre-computer era. So we had—different labs did specific things. The color was done initially in the Federal Building. The ROB was pretty much black-and-white and copy work. And we did big enlarging and things like that. So some things, the jobs had to move back and forth to each lab’s specialty. So we actually had a courier who started at the Federal Building, picked up stuff and dropped off on the way out. Camera man: I need to interrupt this. I don’t think this is moving. I don’t see any numbers changing or anything. Ostergaard: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Really? Jillian Gardner-Andrews: Oh no. Camera man: It’s bothering me. [VIDEO CUTS] Franklin: …records digital, so I don’t— Camera man: Well, keep going. Let’s—I guess-- Ostergaard: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: He’ll get better a second time. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: So you’re saying that each lab had its own specialty— Ostergaard: Right. Franklin: And that there was a courier. Ostergaard: Right, right. And because each lab was separate, and there wasn’t a computer, the cloud, or anything like that, everybody had their own numbering system. Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: Which has led to complications to this day. Franklin: Tell me about it. Ostergaard: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: I process a lot of photos from onsite and it’s always very confusing as to why some are stamped 300 Area, why some are stamped Battelle, why some are stamped 700 Area, and this is—I want you to go into this in detail for me. Ostergaard: Okay, so, well, we’ll do that numbering thing then. If you see anything like with a 2-digit and then like an A or a B or a C and then three digits afterwards, those are from the ROB lab. Franklin: Sorry, two-digit, ABC, and then three numbers? Ostergaard: Yeah, the idea—first of the year, they would start out at A, and then run with the numbers, you know, the first two digits? So you could look at that. The first two was the year, always. And the second one was just an arbitrary A, and then if it ran through 999, they went to B and upward. The Federal Building numbers started out pretty much as four-digit numbers. And that was a carryover from the GE photo lab days. Some of those things I still never have figured out what they did. And then 300 Area just started out with the year, 7, 8, whatever. And then generally they’d run four digits. It got to be later on they would run five because they were running out of space. And then in 1992, we had our own computer system written, so it kind of linked up. Those dates always started with the first of the year and then the month, you know, 01. And then there was three digits after that. So by looking at those numbers, if you see an 89 blah, blah, blah, you’d know that was shot in 1989. Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: So that was some of the numbering systems. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: And then there were other—we supported some of the metallurgical labs and things who had their own thing going on also. So we supported a lot of specialty labs in the 300 Area, doing things then. So we would process film for them, make prints, and give them back everything. We were doing fuel studies where they would take fuel pins from bundles that had been through the reactor process, and in the 327 Building, section them remotely—because they’re screaming hot—and usually those things were about the diameter of a pencil. So they’d slice that across. And then through periscopes, using 70 millimeter film and Hasselblad cameras is actually shoot like an aerial mosaic of that thing at 75x or 125x magnification. We would process that film, print it on a machine printer 2x, and then literally mosaic them together. So you’d end up with like a large pizza. And that would show the cladding and then what had happened to the fuel inside. These things were fairly important. They spent a lot of money making them, so— Franklin: Right. That sounds like very technical work. Ostergaard: Well it was, yeah. We had at all levels. From the PR thing to the technical part. And you supported a lot of engineers for reports. We did a lot of what would be promotional stuff now for people to go back to DC and whatever, for pushing their project to get funds. In addition to—and then of course just reprinting. Negatives were in the file. And that was the other part of the problem with the negatives, is they were retired, not in any systematic order, they were just—when the lab ran out of space, we’d box up five cabinets’ worth of negatives, send them off to storage—you know, with the transmittal. But still—and then it got complicated—well, you know, I say, all this sounds silly, but it was all at the time very rational. You can’t judge—[LAUGHTER] They were doing good, actually, for what they were doing. But the specific photographers tended to work out of specific labs. Because we usually had seven or eight full-time photographers going at that time. And some of these guys were more specialized in technical things, and some of them were more people-oriented. And so, you had to kind of assign the right type of personality to the job. You didn’t want to assign a technical person to go out and shoot a PR thing somewhere. That would get you in trouble. [LAUGHTER] They just weren’t groomed for that. Franklin: Right. Ostergaard: [LAUGHTER] We had—along those lines—you know, the thing we had a difficulty with in hiring is we would—we were looking for pretty high-end lab tech people, too. So a lot of these folks would be coming out of Brooks with all this money they’ve spent training, and they couldn’t get a photo job. So we would hire them, but we’d caution them all the time—this is not going to lead to a photo job. We’re hiring you to do this technical thing. A few of them evolved over, and it was very frustrating for some folks who—I’m not doing what I want to do. But we already have—you know. So there’s always that line [LAUGHTER] of doing that. And again, back then, we were self-contained. The security was much tighter—I don’t know if you’ve went out to Energy Northwest lately or anything, or if you’ve ever been there, where they’re looking under your car with mirrors and all kinds of things. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, our security was pretty tight. Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: The photographers, on the badge, they had the areas listed in a grid, the areas they had access to. So it was pretty tight, and we were playing TSA going in the gates at that point. We got so you just put your lunch in a plastic bag and just walk by and hold it up. It wasn’t metal detectors, but it was security. So that led to interesting things. The 300 Area lab was the largest, and we probably had the most people of any of them. We did pretty much our own maintenance. These were all chemical processes that needed to be maintained. So there was a great deal of quality control work going on, of running test strips and reading them and adjusting the chemistries. And just the simple things of inventory. We had a phenomenal—we had pretty much one person, that’s all they did was inventory. You know, ordering stuff, seeing that it was in, and then basically rotating the stock, so that we were using the oldest first. There was a lot of stuff going on. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: So you worked mostly at the 300? Ostergaard: Right. Franklin: Okay, and then how many people worked at that operation? Ostergaard: Probably, 20, 25. Franklin: Oh, wow, okay. Ostergaard: Yeah. And the ROB was smaller—I’d say it was about four. Franklin: Oh, okay. Ostergaard: And the Federal Building, they did the color and they could also—everybody could do black-and-white; that was just by default. And that was probably more like a dozen. And then there was a video—motion picture group down there also. At probably the height of everything, we were probably running 62 people. And during FFTF construction, we were doing a shift-and-a-half, basically. Franklin: And that would just be documenting the construction? Ostergaard: Oh, yeah. And then all the other stuff. Because everything that had to do with FFTF was a huge project. It wasn’t just building the facility you see, the white dome out there. There was a high bay in 300 Area, all kinds of research on—oh my god, it was huge. And so there was people busy all the time doing that. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Okay. Did you have much contact with the video people? Ostergaard: Not a whole lot. Franklin: Oh, okay. Ostergaard: That was kind of a different world. Franklin: Oh, okay. Ostergaard: There was also kind of the contention—not necessarily nasty—between the labs. Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: There was always a bit of tension there, that—ah, them dummies they screwed up again, so we got to run down there. There was a lot of that stuff going on. Franklin: Like kind of like a friendly competition? Ostergaard: Pretty much. Mostly friendly. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Mostly friendly? Did you know anybody that worked at the other labs or in the video group that’s still around that might want to talk to us? Ostergaard: Let me think that through. Franklin: Okay. We just--our collection—sorry, go ahead. Ostergaard: No, I was going to say—yeah, I’m just thinking. Because I think Bud Mace is gone. Don Brauer’s gone. Yeah, it’s really thinned out. Thinned out everywhere. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: As happens. We have several hundred videos in our collection. Ostergaard: Right. Franklin: So it would be interesting to talk to somebody about that. Why they filmed certain—because some of them are very interesting films of processes and—so it’s kind of— Ostergaard: Oh, yeah. They were highly technical. We had a technical person who was just in charge of doing extremely technical things. He was out of RIT. And he did some fabulous stuff. I always enjoyed hanging around Roland. Franklin: RIT? Ostergaard: Rochester Institute, yeah. And, again, it was—we had to support ourselves. There was no FedEx in the day. And not getting something done because something broke was not an excuse. That was not acceptable. So you always had at least two or three ways of getting something done. That was—and we always did come through; we had a reputation for that. Franklin: How long did you work at the 300 Area lab? Ostergaard: Pretty much—well, the last year—it was probably 25, 30 years straight. Franklin: So you started in ’72, right? Ostergaard: Yeah. Franklin: So you would have gone into the early—late ‘90s, early 2000s. Ostergaard: Something like that. Well, there was a migration. Everything wound down. As things closed down, the ROB lab was closed first. Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: We moved that activity out to 300 Area. Franklin: And do you know roughly when that was? Ostergaard: Oh, I hate telling it wrong. ’78, something like that. And as things tightened up a little bit more, we actually closed down the Federal Building lab, which was on the third floor. Much to the happiness of the computer people, because there were leaks on the third floor out of all these processors. We had catch pans and stuff under everything. Franklin: Oh, the chemical— Ostergaard: Oh, yeah, these are all wet processes. Nothing digital there. Franklin: And do you know when the Fed— Ostergaard: God, again, that’s just kind of murky. It’s— Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: You know, the big change happened for us when the contract changed in about ’87 or ’88. Franklin: And that was from Westinghouse— Ostergaard: Well, we were actually Battelle. Franklin: You were Battelle, okay. Ostergaard: Right. And the contract changed—consolidation, they liked to call it. We ended up getting transferred over to Boeing. Most of the service groups went as a package to Boeing. And then when Boeing came out and Lockheed came in, then we all were moved to Lockheed. So, as it wound down, we had a couple of pretty big layoffs where you just feel like a survivor the day it’s done, when they lay off twelve people in your group and there’s four of you left. Stuff like that. [LAUGHTER] So we kept plugging away out there, and then they finally found enough money to make us go digital. Franklin: That’s good—I was going to ask about that. What year was that? Ostergaard: Let’s see, I’m trying to think of what machines we were using. We were in the Apple side of the world at that point. And, you know, 7200 Mac or something was pretty jazzy at the time. [LAUGHTER] You know? So again, those dates are just—I could probably do some thinking on that, but I’d just hate to say something specific. But as we wound down, then they decided that we were too big of an expense to be in 3706. So we ended up moving down to the Snyder Building. This was under Lockheed. And set up shop down there. And of course, I was always—by that time, I had migrated my work into more doing archival stuff. I kind of just created that, in a way. I got tired of people asking for stuff that I knew we had, that nobody could find. Franklin: Right. Ostergaard: And so I just started—in the time when I didn’t have anything better to do, I just literally started going through the drawers. And that kind of got me the bug. [LAUGHTER] So my intention was to make a three-ring binder with Hanford’s 100 greatest pictures. That was my first goal. Well, that pretty quickly evolved into about 35 or 40 binders— Franklin: Yeah, I was going to say, that’d be kind of— Ostergaard: Yeah, well you didn’t realize what you were up against, you know. So you get to the point where you say, okay, I’ve got enough stuff here to make a collection of each of the reactor areas. So there’d be the 100-B book, there’d be the—you know. And do that. And then as a spin-off I would do aerials. Wherever I’d had enough stuff to organize, I would make another binder. And then, oh, about around 2000, when Hazel Leary was head of the Department of Energy, she was due in for this great opening up of all the information. And they started a project at DDRS— Franklin: DDRS? Ostergaard: Yes. And that worked out of the library there at 300 Area. They had, I think, five or six derivative de-classifiers. And they had a couple of students out there. Their goal was to scan 100 negatives a day. And they would arbitrarily take a storage box—have you ever seen a storage box? A real Hanford box? Franklin: No, I don’t know if I’ve seen a Hanford box. Ostergaard: Okay, well, most of these things early on—most everything was four-by-five negatives. So it was a half-cubic-foot box about yea high with a top that comes off. And then inside, there’d be rows, and there’d be a manila envelope with glassines, mostly, where there’d be a date and stuff written on them. And that was kind of—you got the date range to and from. And they started out and they did about 55 boxes. I don’t know how they were necessarily selected. But they did that. And the first box they did, they came down to us and wanted to see how they were doing. We had a higher-end scanner than they did. They were running off $150 scanners at the time, which was basically trash. Franklin: Yeah, really low DPI. Ostergaard: Yeah, you see some of those things now, those really crappy looking things. That was out at that project. Franklin: Like 400k-size image files, if you’re lucky. Ostergaard: Yeah, right. Franklin: We get requests about images that people find online and they’re like, do you have a higher version of that? And I was like, that was scanned in 2002. Like, you know, sorry. Ostergaard: Well, that’s the disconnect now. And they keep talking about getting me out there to help put some of that to bed and maybe leave a better trail than we did. It’s—yeah. [LAUGHTER] It’s an art to find some of that stuff. Franklin: I bet. Ostergaard: And you can’t do it—I don’t know what the mechanism is—I’ve been out of there now two-and-a-half years. So I don’t know if there’s anything in place. But I had pretty much, at the time, looking for things, I had the ability to request boxes endlessly. And so what I would do was I would get out my notebooks and stuff with all the transmittals and all my little notes I had made on the side. I had hand-written sheets for every time I’d order a box. And this went on for years. I would note the box and the date, and then I would look for what I wanted. But then anything else that was interesting in there, I would go ahead and make a note of it so I could backtrack a little bit. And that’s what I hope—that stuff hasn’t been disrupted too badly that it can’t get in there and say, this is golden. It looks awful, but this will really save you. [LAUGHTER] So, that takes a lot of dead-ends, but it also leads you to discoveries. And there was always the push to put more stuff into iDMS. My project for four years, one of the clerks, name of Bonnie Campo and I, pretty much, we did 20,000 a year into ARMIS, the database at the time. The selection process—that was my call. We’d literally start going through the files, and anything to do with helping the site be cleaned up, remediated, construction—all that was golden stuff. So that was the selection process for that. And then if I found—and I kind of took it upon myself—there were some culturally significant things, I’d put those in, too. So I would scan them, I’d transfer them to Bonnie, she would upload them with appropriate information. So we did 20,000 a year, so we did 80,000. Franklin: Wow. What do you—can you expand on culturally significant things? Ostergaard: Well, things like back in the ‘50s, where they would have pensioners’ dinners. They celebrated the employees. They weren’t disposable. They were treated with much more respect—this is all my personal stuff. [LAUGHTER] But it was celebrated more. And then also, up until ’58, ’59, the City of Richland was a company town. Franklin: Yeah. Ostergaard: Basically owned by GE. And they documented all kinds of cool stuff. So, a lot of that would go in. And just things like the first house being sold. And things like that. And then just the culture—the pictures of the safety prizes. If everybody—the thermoses and things. And then probably not socially appropriate things anymore of get some gal up on a ladder for Friday the 13th holding a broken mirror. And just stuff like that. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Any idea where those—where do those pictures live now, or those negatives? Do they— Ostergaard: Oh! It’s all at 3212, the newest records— Franklin: Oh, okay. Ostergaard: Yeah, that’s pretty much where everything is, that I know about. And I’ve tried the damnedest to find everything. It gets to be a challenge. [LAUGHTER] But those first ones they did, that was where what we dubbed the DuPont Collection came out of and the GE Collection. Those first five boxes were the D numbers, the P numbers. Those were, of course, the most interesting ones, and that caught my eye right now. And then ultimately when they were asking, what could we do—national archives, they want stuff from us; we’ve never given them anything. And by that time I’d kind of rescanned a lot of the what I call the D numbers, the DuPont ones, just because they were very, very useful. Franklin: Is that what the D stands for, then, on that? Ostergaard: Okay, okay, let me go through that. There’s a set of numbers—or prefixes. D stood for Determinant, of all things. I found down, when the CREHST Museum was still operating, I had enough leeway, I would go down and kind of mine their resources. And I found the memo one day that directed from somebody in Delaware that they wanted this thing photographically copied, and it set the parameters for each eight-by-tens of each shot and to show construction progress. So there was the P number which was progress. D was determinant. There’s a few Es, which were emergencies. That wasn’t used too much. There was S for safety. And there was M for meteorological. I think I got them all. And the D ones—well, of course the P is progress, and what they generally did for—I mean, down to outhouses almost. They would shoot every couple of weeks or whenever something significant happened, shoot that. So you can combine those into collections of a particular building being built down to small little workshops and things. I found that memo down there, and then I found the part that is really the key to that thing, is there were—since everything was automatically classified at some level, just by nature of it existing, it was classified. And they had to move these around to get things made or whatever. So since it was classified, there had to be a transmittal for every time it moved. So here were these onionskin sheets that listed a set of numbers. And it said, okay, this was D such-and-such, taken on such-and-such a day, and this is what it was. That was just part of the security routine. So there was the marker that described that image by default. Franklin: Right, yeah, the metadata kind of— Ostergaard: Right, exactly. Franklin: Produced in an ancillary process to— Ostergaard: Right, so I kind of went, oh, how about this! [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah, that’s something. Ostergaard: So I handwrote some notebooks just so I could find that stuff easier. And—oh, also, what happened—there was a lady before I ever—I never even met her, name of Flo. She was the archival records genius lady. She could find anything. Flo Unterhagen, I believe her name was. And there was somebody in the ‘70s had taken all of those DuPont negatives. They looked kind of like—from the surface—like they’d kind of lived a rough life. Like they had probably just been thrown in boxes and stuff. And somebody organized those into the storage boxes, each with an individual manila envelope and the number on the outside, and that was about it. But somebody had organized that. Somewhere in the ‘70s, near as I can tell. And then the other—the GE ones were dubbed the Flo Five. Those were very significant. Because that was building up to the Cold War stuff. So that was the second project that I suggested to them. The first one was actually what we dubbed the Settler Collection. When I was doing my work for getting those 80,000 in there, I kept coming up with pictures of people prior to Hanford. Franklin: Right, the residents in the towns of White Bluffs and Hanford. Ostergaard: Right, so I kind of got the bug at that point. And some of the folks I knew—Annette Heriford, I knew her from—she worked in the photo group. Franklin: Really? Ostergaard: Oh, yeah! Franklin: I didn’t— Ostergaard: Yeah, Annette, yeah. Franklin: We just recently got the collection of Harry Anderson. Ostergaard: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: A lot of his photos and things. Ostergaard: Good old Harry! [LAUGHTER] Franklin: But we’ve been going through those, and I know that he worked with Annette and with the White Bluffs and Hanford Reunion-- Ostergaard: Right. Franklin: Organization. Ostergaard: So I went to the last five or six of those things, and almost was accepted. But I did work for the government, so that automatically made me suspicious. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Oh, right. Ostergaard: Harry was a piece of work. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: I’ve heard! Ostergaard: Yeah, one time, on one of the tours, we all went out on a bus. And I come out, and what I did—I had the van, the photo van, and I had some composite, big map things I’d made. We had the ability to mount and laminate and everything. So I would show up with the van, would hang these things around the side of the van just as talking points for these people, and that would get the conversations going. They’d start to look at that and go, oh, well there’s my place, and then off you go. Cool stuff. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: That’s really neat. Ostergaard: And so Harry was out there one day, had the van, and he was trying to—he said, you know, you’ve got a van here, how about we go over here and look at something? And I was going, ehh, I’ve got to get back to town. It’s like, I don’t want to get loose with Harry! [LAUGHTER] Get in all kinds of trouble. But, yeah, he was something else. Franklin: And he also worked for— Ostergaard: He was a security type. Franklin: The Project. Ostergaard: Yeah, oh, god, yeah. Well the rumors I’d hear was he’d hang around in bars, basically, and if people were talking too much, get them called in for—he was something else. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Wow, he was one of the—it’s just so interesting that he’s this transitional figure between White Bluffs and then— Ostergaard: Yeah. Well he was in the right position, and probably rogue enough to— Franklin: Yeah. Ostergaard: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: And then you said Annette worked for the photo group, okay. Did you she work for your photo group? Ostergaard: She was down in the Federal Building. And so we always got along real well. She was a stickler. I’d show her stuff, and boy, if she thought that date was wrong, she was on your case like—[LAUGHTER] But so when they said, what can we give to the National Archives? I said, well, I’ve been collecting up these images, and I know a lot about them. And there are about 200 of them. So, we did the whole process as a trial thing, and pulled retired negatives out of our files to them and kind of learned the whole process. And it got a lot of nice press, and that’s what they wanted. They were making progress. And that went so well, they said, well, what next? And I said, well, we’ve got all this stuff DuPont shot. We’ve pretty well got it all scanned into our files. We’ve kind of got all the information out of it we’re going to need. So, we went ahead then and retired those over there. Which, again, was great for everybody concerned. It’s nice to kind of get them over there. I think it was five boxes, six boxes. And then the third series we did was GE—kind of the same thing, again. So we got a little more sophisticated each time. And then also the ability of iDMS to take file sizes got better each time. We were kind of held down to, oh, ten-meg JPEG compressed at first. And they would only take JPEGs. And then by the time we got to GE, it was like, well, pretty much just send us anything you want. Which was just the evolution of the whole thing. So I was making pretty good-sized scans. Franklin: And is that how—so, I’m a little confused. Did you send the originals to NARA, or did you send the scans to NARA? Ostergaard: No, they didn’t want anything to do with digital; they wanted the physical stuff. Franklin: But you scanned the originals and put them into iDMS. Ostergaard: Right, yeah. Franklin: Oh, so is that still in iDMS, to your knowledge? Ostergaard: Yeah! If you get ahold of somebody who can get you to the collections, it’s under the GE collection or the DuPont collection. Franklin: Because we have access to iDMS. Ostergaard: Okay, now it’s not—things are hardly ever taken out of iDMS, so you do a D number or something, you might come up with the old, nasty scan, you might come up with the one we put in. Franklin: Okay, I’ll make sure to look at the file type and size. Ostergaard: Yeah, because that’s—it’s a quirky thing to use. ARMIS, its predecessor for photos, was much better. And what we did a lot of—the folks—and this is what I learned—when they were doing their initial work on the DuPont stuff, they were making their best guesses to what it was they were looking at. Because they didn’t—they just had a negative and an envelope. And so a lot of those were way off. So Bonnie and I—if you had spare time, you’d just go, show me everything from 1952 or something. And they migrated all the stuff over from the Battelle system into ARMIS system. Of course, the things never fit the right boxes. And so we kind of just reworked the information—we had the ability to do that. Put structure in the structure box, and maybe leave the title. Because a lot of times they would write the title with the structure in it. So, it was—again, it was kind of an art form. [LAUGHTER] To define stuff. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right, I’m totally aware. Ostergaard: You’re finding that out. Franklin: Well, I’ve been in archives for a little while, so I’ve seen— Ostergaard: Oh, yeah. Well I had the big battle with the GE thing. They wanted to change the filename around to suit their system which then totally destroyed the providence of the damn negative. It just—ugh. [LAUGHTER] So, every time you do a move, you lose something, pretty much. Franklin: Oh, yeah. Ostergaard: And what we did for GE by then—security—we’d kind of gotten really in tune with security folks and their concerns. They wanted to know what we’d sent off. A lot of times, they were more concerned about the envelope than the negative. Franklin: Right, because the envelope has the information and description. Ostergaard: Right. By the time we got down to the GE stuff, I was overscanning the negative. I was scanning—put it on the flatbed and scan outside the boundaries of the actual negative itself. So they could see whatever had been written in the boundaries. I wasn’t cropping or doing anything like that. I was all about giving you the whole package. Franklin: Right, because you can also crop that out later. Ostergaard: Later, right. See, that’s what—you can’t put it back. I’ve always looked at is as me being the intermediary in this process, for somebody like me 30 years from now. I don’t want to box them in—I learned that real quick. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: It’s so refreshing to talk with somebody who understands-- Ostergaard: Yeah. Franklin: The basics and things like provenance and— Ostergaard: Yeah. Because things tie together later. Franklin: Yeah, they do. And you need that if you’re coming at it without that institutional knowledge. Ostergaard: Oh, my. Well, then, the other thing, I’m sure you’ve discovered it by now, is like the DuPont final report. The four-volume— Franklin: [inaudible] Ostergaard: Oh, boy. Okay, DuPont published, probably in February or March of ’45, what they called their final report. It’s four volumes, 1,500 pages where they do an incredibly good job of describing what they did without saying a damn word about what they did. Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: Or what it was for. Franklin: Right, that sounds— Ostergaard: That thing is—that, and Groves’ diaries if you can stand—not Groves, Matthias’ diaries—those things. But I’ll get you the Hanford numbers for those DuPont things. Because that is a treasure trove. Once you get in there and start reading, you realize they did everything for a purpose and a reason. Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: It was—and a lot of it—and then there’s some very miscellaneous other reports that link pictures to things that are—but that DuPont report gives you an incredible insight. Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: Into what they did. Yeah, that’s—when I finally discovered that, I was going, oh, my god. It was so fun over the years, you kept having these—oh my god, I know what this is for. [LAUGHTER] It just evolved, you know, more and more into me doing archival things and less and less the other. Of course, I carried a big footprint around because I had all these negatives attached to me. And so we moved to Snyder, we actually had to have the floor reinforced where these—these are great big fireproof safes. So to get them down there—and I had them all fitted in, and then we were there for several years and then they wanted to move us to the Garlick Building over here. And so they’d give me a room to put stuff in, and then as we got it over there, the movers got all the cabinets moved in there, and then the powers that be decided, no, we don’t want to file the negatives here. We want to use this room for storing our junk or something. So, that was rather traumatic that day. [LAUGHTER] So I ended up putting my stuff in moving boxes around the hall in various places, and I was still working out of them. What I did when I was unloading the drawers, I color-coded each file cabinet. I had a number for each cabinet, and then a little chip of paper that corresponded to that. And then I would start a drawer one, box one, drawer one, box two, right on down the row. Finally, after a year or two of that, they ended up moving me down to the 712 Building, which is now where they’re building the new—across from the Richland Library where they’re building the new City Hall. That was the original records place, built in ’51 or ’52. It was just a big concrete bunker, basically. [LAUGHER] Which is a really cool place. So I ended up getting moved into there in some space. The print people—the union print shop was still there at the time, so it was me and them. And I loved that place; it was just Hanford from the ‘50s. It hadn’t changed a bit. We stayed in there, and of course that was a very expensive building to maintain because it was all full of asbestos and that kind of stuff. So that’s when we ended up getting moved to 3212 and they were building 3220 to store the collection. So that’s where I got out there with all my stuff again. So I had, like I say, this huge footprint carrying these negatives around. [LAUGHTER] And that was a great place to work for an archivist. It was in the back of the building, back with all the pipes and everything. Nobody bothered you; you were just back there doing your thing. It was great. Franklin: And so how long did you—you don’t still work out there? Ostergaard: No. Franklin: No, and when did you finally retire? Ostergaard: Well, they asked me to leave two-and-a-half years ago. One of those. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: One of those early retirement, or kind of--? Ostergaard: Yeah, it was like—hi? You’d walk in there, the human resources lady is there. Like, okay, I know what this is. It’s like, okay, don’t blow it. [LAUGHTER] Just make nice. Nothing good will come out of anything other than being nice. So that was two-and-a-half years ago. So what you’re seeing me now doing is volunteer work. I got connected up with Colleen and stuff. And I still thrive on doing this stuff. That’s why I’m doing it. Franklin: Great. Ostergaard: I love access. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah. And so you still have your clearance and everything to get in there? Ostergaard: Nope. Well, see, that’s all B Reactor, see, it’s open to the public. Franklin: Oh, okay. Ostergaard: I’ll do it again coming up this year. The Russians come over for their reactor inspection tour, PPRA, yearly. That’s a treaty that we signed with them in late ‘90s, I think it was. We inspect each other’s reactors to see what’s happening and make sure that, one, we’re not making plutonium, and two, they are because they’re dual-purpose reactors, what they’re doing with it, apparently. So I was doing that for five or six years before. And I found it quite fascinating. It’s something you have to be respectful and careful. We duplicate the picture we shot the year prior for their report they make. If the building still exists. And now it’s getting down to a little bit of 100-K West and B Reactor. So I’ve really—the PNNL folks like it because I’ve done it enough, they—Battelle knows me; the Russians know me. And everybody likes that uniformity. So that’s a fun thing to do, for me. And that one, again, you get a temporary badge where we’re going. I truck along. And do different pictures real quick for them, and then we have a final banquet where they sign the report and everything. That’s always quite interesting. Franklin: Oh, yeah, I bet. Ostergaard: It’s really cool. They love to toast everything. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yes, they do. Ostergaard: It takes a while. Franklin: Yeah, I’ve been to Eastern Europe. Toasts are a way of life. Ostergaard: Oh, god. So anyway, I’m still doing that and I’m looking forward to doing more of that. Franklin: That’s really great. How did you get involved with BRMA, the B Reactor Museum Association? Ostergaard: Well, it was kind of after I quit working out there regular. These guys, I was aware of them, you know. And so one of them called me up and said, you know, we’re looking for something. And everybody’s always calling me, looking for something. He said, you know, you ought to join. And I said, well, I probably should just to keep my hand in things. So that’s kind of how I became connected with it. And it’s really neat to sit in a room where there’s twenty guys who really knew their stuff. It’s something else, to have that ability. So I’ve been doing that. And then of course, I hear of things coming down the road and kind of watched the national park thing develop, and getting involved with Colleen. Every once in a while I have to remind her: you got something coming up, do you need pictures? Oh, yeah. [LAUGHTER] But that was the way out there. We always, especially when we were working for Lockheed. Lockheed was working on getting the MSA contract. So they were in the full PR, look how good a company we are, you should have us do the contract thing. So we were doing all kinds of stuff, back, again, ten years ago, things weren’t as tight as they are now. So our display group was actually making all kinds of display stuff for Lockheed Corporate under Linda Goodman. She grew her outfit quite large, but we went along for that ride. So we had people to go just do nothing but do displays and take them out. That was not a Hanford-related thing, but it was—we kind of had the ability to do all kinds of stuff. Which has always be exciting to be involved with something like that. Franklin: Right, to make some things from site-specific to like more PR. Ostergaard: And of course everything couldn’t be done fast enough. And you learn there that when they want it, they want it, but they don’t think they want it. So you have to sort of manage your managers in a way. You have to be ready to—well, they haven’t asked yet, but you know they’re going to want. You just learn after you get— Franklin: How was the transition to digital photography for you as a photographer and someone that works—and an archivist—I’m kind of curious as to how you’ve managed that transition. Ostergaard: Well, for some reason it was much harder than it should have been to get the digital equipment. Somehow it got involved with the printing people and how much elaborate stuff they go through to buy equipment. And we had people high up go, how in the hell is this taking so long? You just go buy some computers. But it’d somehow gotten into somewhere where you had to write things of why this would be good, and—ugh. It just drug on interminably. So we did—on the computer part, we had—the film scanner was always kind of a difficult thing, because they just weren’t that good at the time. And we’d always kind of prided ourselves in doing good things, exceptional things. Well, that’s when the thing I should mention of the evolution of film sizes. Four-by-five was kind of the standard from the ‘40s. When I came out there, I had to have the fortune, through our little business arrangements at the high school—I was making money, actually—and I needed a camera to shoot. Because they weren’t giving me anything. So I ended up buying a Hasselblad of all things in 1965. Franklin: That’s an expensive—for a high schooler-- Ostergaard: The list price was 600 bucks. Franklin: Yeah, that’s like a car. Ostergaard: And the local photo camera down there, the guy, he knew I was looking for one and I was a regular. He said, well, he said, you know, if you can keep your mouth shut, I’ve had this Hasselblad way too long here in my inventory. He said, it cost me 435 bucks. I’ll sell it to you for my cost to move it. So I got it at a discount. I still have it. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Wow. Well, those are cameras that you—I mean, you pass those down. Ostergaard: Oh, god, yeah. So I’ve still got all the stuff. So I was kind of primed up and then I started working summers out there. And then you see all the real—the stuff you see at magazines here, it is in front of you. So as it evolved, when I went out there, they weren’t shooting Speed Graphics, they were shooting Linhof Technikas. Big, huge, gorgeous cameras. Heavy as—and then there were view cameras, too, because of just the technical stuff that they did. And then it kind of evolved into two-and-a-quarter roll film, which was principally a Hasselblad with a set of lenses. Everybody had one. Everybody pretty much had a Technika setup, they had view cameras, and they had the Hasselblads. And 35 millimeter was considered miniature, and it was only for shooting slides, pretty much. And that kept on, and some of the illustrator types in Battelle wanted to have that editorial look so they would go shoot black-and-white. So they’d get the grain look and all that stuff. But the thing of choice was two-and-a-quarter roll film. And then of course it evolved from black-and-white and then the color started slipping in there. They were shooting some color sheet film, and it seemed like the preferred way at that point was transparencies first. And there are still some of those floating around in the files. And then it would move over into 50/50 black-and-white. Sometimes they’d go out and shoot black-and-white and color at the same assignment if they had the time. Sometimes you were moving around, you couldn’t do that. But they still wanted black-and-white prints versus color, because color was considered premium cost. So to make it look like you were not wasting money, you had it done in black-and-white. I’ve had people tell me that I don’t care what it costs, but I don’t want it to look like I spent any money. [LAUGHTER] You know, you’re out there, you just roll with whatever—and that’s part of the key to my being there so long, was I was quite flexible in going with whatever. You could do—so anyway, it evolved into roll film. And then we finally, on the digital thing, when we finally got this block of equipment, I think they bought two Nikon D1s. Which, probably your cell phone now would—[LAUGHTER] But we had all the Nikon stuff, so it was a natural to go with that, because the lenses still were compatible. And that was the beauty of that. We always were Nikon out there, just because we had massive amounts of lenses and everything. Franklin: That’s why I always buy Canons, because I just inherited Canons. Ostergaard: That’s what you do. There’s no sense in reinventing the wheel there. So that’s kind of how that evolved. And you can see that. And also you can see the quantities of negatives shot increase with the smaller film. Sheet film, you’re pretty—there’s a lot of work involved loading holders and processing and everything. And then when you get to roll film, well, hell, there’s twelve on a roll. So you shoot them all. Franklin: And then now in the digital age, you’re just limited by— Ostergaard: I’ll go out to B Reactor, you figure that’s 300 shots, easy, without even thinking about it. And you give somebody 25. Franklin: Yeah. Ostergaard: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: It’s a different—which is also I think a challenge for archivists moving forward is— Ostergaard: Oh, I know. Franklin: The amount of stuff we produce in the digital world is greater. Ostergaard: And how much of that stuff I’ve been giving you—well, I’ll give you the raw and what I gave the customer, but then here’s the other 250 which I can’t bring myself to throw away, unfortunately. [LAUGHTER] You just never know. Franklin: So, did your parents work for Hanford at all? Ostergaard: Nope! [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Okay, so you were the first one. Ostergaard: Well, what happened—all my uncles and ultimately my dad, they were all in the service in World War II. This is all from Nebraska. They had had a rough time in the Depression. They’d lost the farms. They were traveling around before the war, picking fruit, doing whatever. They’d been out here before the war. My grandma’s sister was out here with—and they had her—the family farm they had was a typical chicken and eggs and fruit and alfalfa—everything, a truck farm. And so after the war, they all decided that it was time to get out of Nebraska. So in all their travels they had decided this was the good spot to go. I was born in ’46—essentially ’47, and I think they came out in ’48 and settled right when the Cold War was starting to ramp up. So there was plenty of employment. The family had always been carpenters and the like, and Dad, he had carpentry experience and working in lumberyards and stuff. It’s kind of my joke out of Caddyshack is he ended up right in the lumberyard. Of all the places you could work in here, he never made an attempt to get on at Hanford. He was working various lumberyards around and wholesale hardware and stuff like that. My other uncle did get involved in it, so. But, yeah, so that’s how it come to be. And Mom, she finally—she was secretary for First Lutheran Church. And again there, you’ve probably picked up, there was—then especially—sort of an animosity against Richland from Pasco and Kennewick. Franklin: Can you talk about that a little bit? Because that’s—I think that’s very interesting. Ostergaard; Well, you know, the perception was—especially because Richland was a company town at first. They were renting these places, in essence. So GE was the landlord. Everybody worked—Pasco, Kennewick, they were their own. So it’s like, well, they need a lightbulb changed, they just call somebody up and the company come change the lightbulb. Just all that kind of stuff. Locally, I totally, growing up in Kennewick, benefited from Hanford bigtime. Because a lot of Hanford—specially the doctor level and stuff, they didn’t live in Richland. They lived in Kennewick and Pasco, and they wanted their kids as well educated as the kids in Richland. So there the push was, boy, you have good schools in the Tri-Cities. That was just the accepted thing. So a lot of my contemporaries then, their fathers worked out here. So there was just a different set of expectations that went along with all that. Franklin: So that kind of—the middle-class and upper-middle-class affluence sort of Richland-- Ostergaard: Oh, yeah, it spilled over. Big time. But I benefited totally from that environment and just those expectations: you were going to go to college, you were going to do this, you were going to— [LAUGHTER] Franklin: But so you’re saying there was maybe some resentment that GE and the government took care of people in Richland— Ostergaard: Oh, yeah way past— Franklin: And there was this idea that they were freeloading or something— Ostergaard: Yeah, and that was just probably a jealousy or something. Dad, he worked in the lumberyard in Pasco. And in summer, he’d have to come up and help fill-in—there was a lumberyard up here on Van Giesen. Where Boehm’s Chocolate is—or was. There was a lumberyard in there at one point. So he hated to come up here. He said, they expect so damn much and they don’t want to pay for anything. He called them smashers—for atom smashers. Franklin: Oh, okay. Ostergaard: Damn smashers! God, I hate them! [LAUGHTER] Franklin: That’s really—I’ve not heard that before. Ostergaard: Well, that was his term. Franklin: Right, I like that. Ostergaard: And of course at that time, Richland had a really, really good basketball team. Art Dawald was the coach in that era. So there was a—boy, that was kind of the high school sports thing. And then Pasco and Kennewick had a giant rivalry in football. And that game was the only day game they played, and that was always on Veteran’s Day. That was a big deal, big time. Franklin: Can you describe growing up in the Tri-Cities in the Cold War and how—being so close to Hanford, but living in Kennewick or Pasco, was there any kind of fear that Hanford would have been a prime target if the war were ever fought? Ostergaard: Oh, yeah, we were totally afraid of the Russians. [LAUGHTER] There was not necessarily anything nasty out there, it was more the Russians. We had, probably not as intense as Richland with the duck-and-cover stuff. I don’t think we were ever scrambling under desks or anything. We didn’t have any air raid sirens; I know Richland did. They brought those things in from World War II and set them up around town here. So we had our instructions. And I know one time—I wish I had one of these things. They were flying around in airplanes one time throwing out little pamphlets to—What Should You Do— Franklin: Like civil defense pamphlets? Ostergaard: Yeah, right, yeah! It was just— Franklin: That’s an odd way to distribute that. Ostergaard: God, I know it. But I wish to hell I had one! Because I found one stuck in a tree. But, no, and unfortunately, it was hyped up enough at home—lived in a wood frame house. And in the night the wind would get to blowing and banging against the house and stuff. And there were several times I convinced myself that it was a bomb going off. It was serious stuff. You were totally into it. Franklin: Was there ever any worry that you knew in the communities—Kennewick, Pasco—of the environmental aspect of Hanford— Ostergaard: No. Franklin: Or any kind of— Ostergaard: No. That just wasn’t happening yet. Franklin: Okay. Even though—I mean, because the Green Run was in 1940— Ostergaard: I mean, nobody knew of that until—not even heard of it until probably 20 years after it happened when the Down Winders got going. Yeah, I’ve sat there thinking about 1954, November. Where the hell was I that day? The wind was coming out of—so you start thinking about it then. But, yeah, like I say, for me, I was kind of proud of the place. I still am. Of what had happened and everything. So I’ve benefitted—[inaudible] but have benefitted greatly from the whole business. We had one couple of Christmases ago, the family got together. And my brother, he’s working sheet metal contract out there—foreman for that. And his two sons, they were working down at Hermiston in getting rid of the mustard nerve gas and stuff. Franklin: Oh, right. Ostergaard: And I going, damn, World War II’s still been good to this family. We’re still working because of it. [LAUGHTER] Which is, you know, true! Franklin: Yeah, yeah, there’s legacy aspects of weapons production. Ostergaard; Totally. And of course back then the science thing was big. I remember in 1957, the International Geophysical Year and all this stuff we got handed at school. It was something to be—technology was just to be treasured. In this environment especially. Franklin: What are some of your memories of any—some of the major events in the Tri-Cities? Like did you go to any Atomic Frontier Days parades? Or did you—what about Kennedy’s visit or Nixon’s visit? Ostergaard: Okay, well, let’s see, Atomic Frontier Days—that was still when Richland was—we didn’t go to Richland. That was, no, we don’t go to Richland. [LAUGHTER] We were much more Kennewick and Pasco oriented on that. I missed the Nixon visit because I was in the service. And the Kennedy visit was ’62, ’63? Franklin: ’63. Ostergaard: That one, Jesus. I was probably—well, I was 16. I just wasn’t conscious of it at that point. It just wasn’t something you did. I do remember they had Eisenhower come out in ’54 to dedicate McNary Dam. And they ran school buses—loads of kids—down to see it. My folks wouldn’t let me go because they didn’t like him. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Were your folks Democrats? Ostergaard: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: [LAUGHTER] Oh, hardcore. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: But like FDR era, Progressive New Deal-era Democrats or--? Ostergaard: Yeah, kind of. They were just like—[HISS] Republican. So there was that type of thing going on. I became aware of—fortunately, in high school, I had some very good instructors who made us politically aware. And so I knew all about Magnusson and Jackson and how all that works. The more I find out, the more interesting that gets. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah. Yeah. Could you describe the ways in which security or secrecy at Hanford has impacted your work? Ostergaard: Oh, yeah. Well, that’s just what you did. It was just an expectation. You go out there and here’s all these guards and all this stuff. You just played the game. I’d never considered it, necessarily, a burden. It was tedious and ponderous at times, but you just—you do what they say. They make the rules, they can change the rules, they can enforce the rules or not enforce the rules. You’re powerless, so you just go along. It’s real simple. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War and then afterward? Or just your kind of experience at Hanford? Ostergaard: Well, first thing I’ve kind of learned is you can’t judge anything from the past in light of how you judge things today. That is the most—people kind of, especially Pearl Harbor and the activities around then—we were sort of caught flatfooted. And then some of the things that went on—internment camps and things like that. It’s just like, you got to go—okay, we didn’t know what the heck was going on. We didn’t know if they were going to land in Portland the next day or something. And so you react. And some of those reactions weren’t the best in the world. But you can’t end up—of that. And then the same thing with the environmental stuff out there. You can’t call any of those folks dumb or not caring, because all the stuff I’ve seen and all the images and stuff, everybody was doing the best of their ability with what they had. And so there wasn’t any just slipshod, they-don’t-care—except maybe the Green Run or something, but—[LAUGHTER] But you kind of look at some of that as an overzealous—because, again, it’s all driven by fear, or unknowns. Just for that not to be forgotten. And also that those people were as smart or probably smarter than we are, I think, as far as thinking things through and making do. Because that’s always been my contention with the construction camp and everything. You have those ’43, ‘44, ’45—they didn’t—if you were draft age, you weren’t there unless you had some real specialty. They recruited out of the southeast. And they didn’t want to recruit workers from the industrial—shipbuilding and all that, take those away. So they were down in the south where there was workers available. And all these people had just survived the Depression. And they knew how to make do. And they came up here and continued to make do. So that’s kind of my thing, is just that whole—and it’s unfortunate that such a great amount of energy and everything was expended on something that had such a nasty result. But—[LAUGHTER]—it’s just— Franklin: What about later in the Cold War though? The ‘50s through the late ‘80s, and kind of that mass of—because a lot of conversations about Hanford, there’s the World War II Hanford, but then there’s the larger, much larger mission but with not such a dramatic conclusion to it, right? The Cold War kind of made 20,000 nuclear weapons around and then just kind of fizzled out. Ostergaard: Yeah, the Cold War ramp-up thing was like—I just caught probably the tail end of that. But kind of—I got wandering here a little bit—but I always think it’s just so cool to be part of this process where all these things were happening. And being somewhat of an insider of it, I have a whole different perspective of things. If you say radiation, I go, well, okay, what kind and how much. Not, radiation?! Now, I’d be that way with nerve gas from Umatilla—which way do I run? [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Nerve gas is nerve gas no matter which way you look at it. Ostergaard: That’s right! So I have just always been kind of a—had a little better understanding of what was going on and realized there are phenomenal risks still out there. And when you’re working with guys who, in the day we were doing in-tank waste tank inspections by putting a Hasselblad on a rig, shooting argon on the lens to keep it clean, button this thing up in plastic, and dropping it down a riser and rotating the camera, shooting pictures with a strobe inside to see the tank walls. Franklin: Wow. Ostergaard: Now they do it digital. Franklin: Yeah. Ostergaard: So that was some of our specialists who just—that’s what they did. And I got involved in—always in the after thing of all that stuff. I would be handling the film and processing things. Franklin: Was that done for all of the tanks? Ostergaard: Oh, god, yeah. I did-- Franklin: That’s such a laborious— Ostergaard: Oh, totally. Franklin: I mean, that’s necessary work, but that’s such a laborious technical process to go through that. Ostergaard: Oh, yeah. I went through—for an outside contractor, went through and basically did all the single shell tanks that we could find. Everything I could find on each one of them. Of course that stuff was in essence obsolete now because of age and whatever. Yeah, it was fascinating stuff because it was just so scary—or so potentially bad. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah. Yeah. Ostergaard: Yeah, that was just a really—just in technical—I want to throw in a little pitch. The environmental stuff for the photo lab, we—back when I first came there, pretty much everything went down the drain. And again, it’s photo chemicals. And then in—when was it? When the Hunt Brothers kind of tried to corner the silver market there for a while, our boss, Les Michael—we had massive amounts of fixer we were generating. So he, on his own initiative, started reclaiming silver. We had a whole setup out there. We used an electrolytic process. So we were kind of ahead of that curve by our own doing. We were actually scraping—you know, we were doing the whole thing. And then as it got tighter and tighter, we started doing whatever is deemed proper at the time. So we had that running pretty tight. There was one time we—the state—we were actually functioning like a photo lab like you’d see in Seattle or Portland or anywhere else. Pretty much doing the same rules, because it’s just all the same stuff. They had some state inspector come in, and they were—since we were Hanford, we were kind of targeted, I think. We ultimately, one time, ran parallel processes on all the waste streams coming out of our processes, running typical batches of film. The state people brought in their sets of jugs and stuff to collect. And since the Hanford people didn’t quite trust and vice versa, they were doing a double set. And then they sent this stuff off, spent horrific amounts of money that proved we were doing everything right. [LAUGHTER] We weren’t really getting pats on the head. Everybody was just glad it was over. Whoops. So, we were doing a good job. Franklin: Cool. Ostergaard: And the cool thing about that, too, is our negatives are still hanging in there really well as far as process. I’ve had that question before: well, aren’t your negatives getting old? And blah, blah, blah, blah. Some lady from somewhere back east, one time, and I was very nice about it. But I said, well, no, our negatives are wonderful. They’re not fading. They’re not, because one, we had the budget and everything to do everything correctly. So everything was thoroughly washed, thoroughly fixed, everything. And also they’ve all been stored in human conditions. They haven’t been in a CONEX box or anything. They’re out where people are. And we’re in a desert; there’s no humidity. Everything-- Franklin: Yeah, that’s really good for long-term. Ostergaard: Yeah, so everything’s fine. We do have—I think they got them out now—I went through and did a study on nitrate-based negatives. And I found you do all your work and mostly early ‘50s and mostly it was Ansco and it may be a few DuPonts and stuff. I found about 1,100. And you could just—in a storage box—you could just open the box up and sniff and tell. Oh, there’s something in here. So I went ahead and kind of made the guys—I think they pulled them out eventually. But that nitrate thing, especially at the Hanford environment, what do you do with them? Fortunately they’re scattered all over the place so there’s not a critical mass of them. And what the archive folks were doing with them is they were pulling them out and freezing them. But here, if you have a whole freezer full of nitrate negatives, you’ve created a waste. So it’s a double-edged sword. [LAUGHTER] But we had our share of 90-day storage pads and saving film to recycle and the yearly contract and we had our ion exchange column. We were doing everything. It was good. Franklin: That’s good. Is there anything that I haven’t asked you about that you’d like to talk about or mention? Ostergaard: Oh, I’m sure there will be 20 things the minute I walk out the door. Franklin: Well, thank you so much, Dan, I really appreciate it. It’s really illuminating to hear you—to get some of that information on the photos and your perspective on Hanford, having not only worked there but also having seen so much of the history from the photo side. Ostergaard: Yeah, great. Well, like I say, I didn’t want it to end. I was just having way too much fun. Franklin: Yeah, I bet. Ostergaard: And it was, the more—like you—the more time you invest and the more time goes on, the more you start to make connections of things. It’s just like, wow, this is just—I’m just getting good! [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah. Well, thank you so much. Ostergaard: Okay, all righty. Franklin: All right. Ostergaard: Great. <a href="https://youtu.be/fTjZHnejr9Q">View interview on Youtube.</a> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:13:04 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 300 Area 327 Building 700 Area B Reactor Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1946-today Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. ~1970-2014 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Mr. Shields Lance Michael Bud Mace Don Brauer’s Bonnie Campo Groves Matthias Colleen Linda Goodman Art Dawald Kennedy Nixon Eisenhower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Dan Ostergaard Description An account of the resource An interview with Dan Ostergaard conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 12-7-2016 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2018-26-2: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. 1954 300 Area 327 building 700 Area B Reactor B Reactor Museum Association Battelle Boeing BRMA Cold War Dam Department of Energy DuPont Energy Northwest Hanford Kennedy Kennewick Organization School War Westinghouse https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F6636b7d3ee2798561e5afe99caf2da22.JPG 1e22122264ec625e8c5e2ce56b375112 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fb4a77dbb03596cf36d5d337a3b5f42a5.pdf e09664da34b9a91f8f4cdfd651377fd4 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fe6f5ee7f141b337982328a96183b1fdd.mp4 d0903c921bd7b6006b4ff4f9bbf7d5ac Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Shirley Carlisle Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Shirley Carlisle on November 7, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Shirley about her experiences growing up in Richland. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Shirley Carlisle: Shirley Ann Carlisle. S-H-I-R-L-E-Y. Ann, A-N-N. Carlisle. C-A-R-L-I-S-L-E. Franklin: Great, thank you, Shirley. And it’s okay if I call you Shirley, right? Carlisle: Sure. Franklin: Okay. So, you were born in Richland? That’s correct? Carlisle: I was born in Kadlec. Franklin: Okay. And Richland was still a—until—and you were born what year? Carlisle: 1947. Franklin: Okay. And that’s when— Carlisle: It was still under government control. My mother had an Army doctor. Franklin: Okay. And so, to have lived here at that time, your family must have worked— Carlisle: My dad was a Hanford patrolman. Franklin: Okay. And when did your dad come to the area? Carlisle: My grandfather died in Pasco in 1937. My dad came out after that. Franklin: Oh, so your family was here before the Manhattan Project. Carlisle: Before, yes. Before the Manhattan Project. Probably ’34 or something like that. Franklin: Okay, and do you know what your grandfather did in Pasco? Carlisle: My granddad homesteaded down along the Columbia River. Franklin: Oh, wow. Carlisle: So, he had a small little homestead down along the Columbia. Franklin: And so your father came out before your grandfather died, or after? Carlisle: You know, I’m not really sure. It was sometime around the time that my granddad died. Franklin: Okay. And what did—did he come to take over the farm? Carlisle: He—yes, he came out to help his mother and he had five brothers and sisters, so he came to help with family. Franklin: Was he one of the older? Carlisle: He was the oldest. Franklin: He was the oldest, okay. So his brothers and sisters still lived with his father and mother on this homestead. Carlisle: Right. I had two aunts—or, an aunt and an uncle that graduated from Pasco High School about 1947, ’48. Franklin: Okay. So what led to your father starting to work at Hanford? He must’ve worked for DuPont eventually, right? Carlisle: He did. That was his first job, was DuPont. He had worked, you know, around Pasco, the farms, that kind of thing. Franklin: Okay. Do you—mention why he got a job at the Manhattan Project? Carlisle: Well, because it was the going thing. And it was much better pay. And he didn’t think there was security there—longevity, I should say. Yeah. He actually worked there maybe ten years and still didn’t think he was going to be there very long, so he bought farm in Colville and when Hanford went down, he was going to go back to farming. Well, we never went back to farming. Franklin: So he must’ve moved—did he move to Richland, then, when he started the job? Carlisle: Yes. Franklin: Okay. Carlisle: My folks, they were married in ’45 in Hood Park, and then his—their first house they had was 90 Craighill, a little one-bedroom prefab because it was just the two of them. And he went to work for Hanford as a patrolman. My dad wasn’t a very big man; he didn’t particularly care to like being a patrolman because it was kind of rowdy in those days. And so my dad quit. So my mom said, one day about two weeks after he quit, a knock on the door and this Hanford patrolman, and they wanted to know where my dad’s at. Well, he’s out in the backyard. So they go out and talk to him, and patrol leaves and my dad comes back into the house. My mom says, well, what did they want? He said, I can’t quit. So my dad went back to work. Because it was a war effort. So my dad couldn’t quit. So they put him, then—he was working maintenance, then, after that. And eventually ended up in power. Franklin: Oh, okay, in power, where? Carlisle: He was the junior power operator out in the Area. Franklin: Okay. Do you know where specifically he was stationed? Carlisle: The last place he worked at that I remember was the D Area. But he was in several of the different areas. Franklin: And was he running the power plants that supplied the reactors? Carlisle: You know, I really—they didn’t tell you a whole lot, and I really don’t quite know exactly. I just know his title was like a junior power operator. Franklin: So instead of quitting, he was kind of forcibly transferred because they needed— Carlisle: They agreed that they would put him in a different job other than the patrol. Franklin: Well, because also if he quit, they would have to leave the house, right? Carlisle: Right, yes, and they were prepared to do that, because Dad didn’t particularly like all the rowdiness and stuff that was going on at Hanford. He wasn’t a big man, so he just wasn’t able to handle some of the fights and stuff that happened out there. Franklin: Oh, okay. How did he get in—did he do any security or law enforcement previously to--? Carlisle: No, no. Franklin: No? Carlisle: They hired everybody on the spot. My dad was like 5’7” but he was very stout, and so I guess, maybe, because of his stoutness, they figured he could handle that. But he said he was a little too short for that. Franklin: So he was placed into that job, then. Carlisle: Yes, yes. Franklin: He didn’t pick being a patrolman, okay. Carlisle: His mother also worked out there. She worked in the kitchen in one of the barracks-type places. Franklin: Oh, in the mess hall? Carlisle: In the mess hall, yes. Franklin: Oh, wow, so a long—like, several generations or two generations— Carlisle: Right. His brothers and sisters—his sister was a telephone operator for two years out there. Franklin: Oh, wow. Carlisle: And then one of his brothers was a truck driver out there. Franklin: Oh, wow, so a big kind of family—you know. Carlisle: Yeah, it was a whole-family thing. Franklin: Wow, that’s really interesting. Did any of them continue to work after the war, at Hanford, or was it just your dad? Carlisle: Well, Dad was out there about 27, 28 years. Franklin: Right. Any of his other family? Carlisle: No, no. Ella Mae was only there about two years. Franklin: She’s the mother? Carlisle: The sister. Franklin: The sister, oh, okay. Carlisle: And Grandma, which was Mary, she was only there maybe a year. Franklin: Oh, okay. And did they have to ride all the way out from Pasco up there, or did they get— Carlisle: Of course, Dad lived up here in Richland, so he got on the bus and went out. And Grandma, I think lived in a barracks. Grandma and Ella Mae, her daughter, lived in a barracks out there. Franklin: Oh, wow. Carlisle: Because Ella Mae, I think she walked to wherever she was going. Franklin: Oh, wow. Did your family know any of the settlers that had been in the area before 1943? Carlisle: Not that I’m aware of. Because they were basically from Pasco. Franklin: Sure, but they had known that those people had been evacuated. Carlisle: Yes, oh, yes. Franklin: Did they ever talk about that? The evacuations? Carlisle: No, uh-unh. Franklin: Okay. So your family lived in a one-bedroom prefab before you were born, right? Carlisle: Before I was born. Franklin: And then moved to a two-bedroom. Carlisle: Right, because my mom was pregnant and so we moved up above the hill to a two-bedroom prefab. Franklin: Okay. What do you remember about growing up in a prefab? Carlisle: You know, the things I remember, I think, are so normal that—for other people that didn’t live in a government town would not be—it would be different. I can remember us having FBI agents walk down the street, which I thought was very normal for everybody. You know, asking about your neighbors and interviewing you about what was—what your neighbors was. That was very typical. I can remember that. Usually two guys walking down the street. The little house that we lived in, it was supposed to be temporary so it didn’t have any skirting or anything on it. My dad had to put skirting on it so I wouldn’t crawl underneath the house. And it didn’t have a—it just had flat roof. My mom said, one time when I was little, we had a sandstorm because I lived on the edge of town. She had gone to Burbank where her sister was living. And when she came back—she had left the windows open. She had to put me in the little utility room to clean up all the sand that had blown in, because it was so sandy. And we had a hot water—hot water—a water tank not too far from—just across the street from us. And down the street was an air raid siren that they tested, I remember once a month; it might have been more than that. Franklin: So, there was no hot water heater in the house? Carlisle: No, what I meant to say was it was a water tank—a big water tank for the city. Franklin: Oh, that supplied the water. Carlisle: The supply, yes, yeah. Franklin: So like one of those classic ones on the stilts? Carlisle: Yes, with stripes on it. Black and stripes and— Franklin: Oh, wow. There’s one of those in the town I grew up in. It’s like the tallest thing in our town. Carlisle: Right. Franklin: Yeah, we call it the water tower. Carlisle: Yeah. They eventually took that down and it laid on the ground for a long time and we—they took the top off of it. So us kids got to play inside of it. It was really fun to run up and down the walls of that thing. Franklin: Oh, I bet. And by that time, I guess, the city had put in sewer. Carlisle: Right. Franklin: Right. So, if your water came from a tank, what—do you remember what the bathroom—were there bathroom facilities? Carlisle: Yeah, yeah. Franklin: Oh, okay. Carlisle: Yeah, we had the sewer line and the bathroom and—yeah. We had an irrigation ditch that ran right behind Carmichael and down towards what’s now the freeway. Franklin: Oh, wow. Carlisle: Right above Fred Meyer’s was an irrigation ditch. So we had irrigation water. Franklin: Oh, wow. And that had been there from the people before, right? That irrigation ditch had been laid before, for the old farming residents of Richland? Carlisle: In the area that I lived in, as far as I know, there was not a lot of old—well, there was no farm houses that I remember. Where Carmichael was, I vaguely remember that was like an orchard in that area and some of the houses that—the first house that we lived in had like a peach tree or an apricot tree or whatever it was in the yard. So there was still fruit trees left from when it was an orchard. So there really wasn’t a whole lot of farmhouses. Franklin: Oh, wow. Your mother’s family, were they from the area as well? Carlisle: She came out from North Dakota in probably, oh, ’43, something like that. Franklin: Did she come out to work at Hanford? Carlisle: No. Her sister was the one that lived—her sister’s husband worked for Hood on the dairy, which is now Hood Park. So she came out to stay with her sister. Franklin: Okay. And how did—so her and your father met— Carlisle: Yeah. My Uncle Wayne, my aunt’s husband, his dad had a truck farm, and they all lived in the Pasco area, and they just knew my dad, and so— Franklin: Kind of set them up. Carlisle: Yeah, he did. My uncle actually asked him to come out to the house and he needed an excuse, so he was going to buy some car parts that my uncle had. The only thing is, my dad didn’t have a car. He had to borrow a car to out to buy these car parts to see my mom. And then the dog bit him, so. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Wow, what an eventful day! Carlisle: Yeah! Franklin: That’s a really cute story. So, what we know about the prefabs is that they were not really built to last— Carlisle: Correct. Franklin: They were houses from the Tennessee Valley Authority. They were from the New Deal. So it’s kind of amazing that most of them are still standing. I’m kind of wondering what—your parents kind of grew up in older houses, maybe craftsmans or farmhouses. Did they ever talk to you about their impressions of the prefabs, or did they have anything they liked about them or anything they really didn’t like about them? Carlisle: Well, you know, they both came off farms, so I’m sure that having an indoor toilet was, you know, quite nice for them, because they were used to having the outdoor toilets. My mom was very happy with the little house that she had. It came furnished. I still have some of the prefab furniture that we had when I was a little kid. Franklin: Oh, wow. Carlisle: They did everything for you. If the lightbulb went out, you called, and they came up and changed the lightbulb. They had people that came and emptied the garbage. We had three crews that came around. We had a little cubby hole in that prefab and there was a little tiny garbage can; they would take it out of the cubbyhole, set it on the street. The next crew would come along and pick it up, and the third crew would come along and put it back. My mom locked herself out, she’d call and they’d just come up and unlock the doors and let her in. Franklin: Oh, wow. Were your parents pretty happy with that level of kind of control, right, by the government over the domestic situation? Carlisle: You know, I don’t think they really thought it was control. I think they just thought that it was benefits of the job. Franklin: Sure. It’s always kind of—strikes me that a lot of that service that’s done for these people kind of similar in a lot of ways to descriptions of a socialist utopia, you know, where—full employment, provided housing, and all services provided to people. So your parents were happy with that benefit of the job. Carlisle: Yeah. Because they came from—my dad came through the Depression, where he didn’t have anything. He and his brother roamed the fields of Wyoming picking up animal bones to take to the bonemeal factory to make money. Franklin: Really? Carlisle: And so this was really nice. Franklin: Yeah, I bet. So your—you mentioned earlier that your father always kind of had this anxiety about the security or kind of permanency of the job, but he ended up staying there for 20— Carlisle: About 27 years, yeah. Franklin: Yeah, so, wait, why did he choose to stay? Did he ever talk to you about why he kept on the job? Carlisle: Well, because it was a good job. I mean, he had health benefits and, you know, all kinds of things that he wouldn’t have had if he had gone to farming. So that would’ve been his second choice, and that’s what he bought, was a farm, up in Colville. And never did go there, because he didn’t know whether Hanford was going to be here that long or not. He didn’t know what they were making out there. Hadn’t a clue. So. Franklin: Sure, sure. What did your family do with the farm out in Colville? Carlisle: Well, they had until like the ‘50s and then ’57, ’58 and then sold it. He rented it out and from when he bought it to when he sold it, he rented it out. And then he decided that maybe Hanford wasn’t going anyplace and that he would continue on out there. Franklin: Did your mother ever work out there? Carlisle: No, she didn’t. She worked for Newberry’s in Richland. Franklin: Oh, okay, and that was a department store. Carlisle: Yeah, it was a department store. Franklin: And that was in the Uptown? Carlisle: Yeah, in the Uptown. Franklin: In that corner now where the antiques— Carlisle: Where the antiques store is. Franklin: And how long did she work for Newberry’s? Carlisle: Oh, she worked there until it closed and from the time I was little, so probably about 20 years. Franklin: And do you remember when it closed? Carlisle: You know, I don’t. Franklin: Okay. Carlisle: It was—I don’t know. Franklin: It’s okay. Carlisle: Yeah, I just— Franklin: Newberry’s was a chain, correct? Carlisle: It was, uh-huh. Franklin: Kind of like a Woolworth’s? Carlisle: Right. Franklin: Yeah, that’s kind of a forgotten era of retail today. Carlisle: Yes, yeah. Franklin: What did Newberry’s provide? Like, what kind of things did they sell? Carlisle: Oh, at Christmastime, they had Toyland upstairs. Wow, that was pretty good. Franklin: Ooh. Carlisle: Stores closed about 5 or 6:00 at night. And the only night they were open late was Friday night. And then at Christmastime they might be open on Saturday late. And never were they open on Sunday. Franklin: So the Uptown was kind of the locus of shopping. Carlisle: Yeah. Franklin: In the area. Do you have any other memories about that area? Carlisle: Well, of course, I could walk from my house to Newberry’s. And my mom—of course, I didn’t drive, so then I would ride home with her sometimes. Of course Uptown Richland, we had Macy’s, The Bon, that was up there. Franklin: The Bon Marché, right? Carlisle: Bon Marché was on the corner of Jadwin and—in the Parkway, up there. Franklin: Oh, right. And what was a Bon Marché? Carlisle: It—what was it? Franklin: Yeah. Carlisle: It was a clothing store. Franklin: Like a Macy’s, or--? Carlisle: Yeah. Franklin: Some of the others— Carlisle: Well, Bon Marché went from Bon to Macy’s, so. Franklin: Oh, okay, gotcha. Gotcha. Interesting. And then do you remember the Parkway being an actual park before they paved it through? Carlisle: No. Franklin: Oh, okay. Carlisle: I remember the theater down at the end, that we could go to the theater down there, and then Uptown Theater. And there was a drugstore in where there’s a bunch of offices now, where the Players is. But, no, I don’t remember that it was ever anything but the Parkway. Franklin: Okay. Did you go down to Howard Amon much at all? Did you go down to swim in the river and did you have many interactions with the--? Carlisle: I actually didn’t swim in the river very much. My dad actually preferred the ditch. We’d go across the street, and my dad was a good swimmer, so he would swim in the ditch. But we didn’t—he didn’t—he might’ve when he was—before I remember, he might have done a lot of swimming in the river. Franklin: Okay, interesting. So you went to school in—all your schooling was in Richland, or K through 12, right, was in— Carlisle: Marcus Whitman, Carmichael, and at that time, Columbia High School. Franklin: Okay. Do you remember doing civil defense drills? Carlisle: Oh, yes. Franklin: Okay! Can you—it’s so foreign to so many people today, especially anyone of my generation or younger. Can you talk us through one of those? Carlisle: And it was so normal for us. I don’t remember whether we did it—at least once a month, maybe every two weeks; I can’t remember. And when I was a kid, the air raid siren would go off. Because we had air raid sirens, and it would go off, and we’d have to go out in the hallway and get down on our hands and knees and duck our heads, and then we’d have to wait for the all-clear signal. And then as soon as we could hear the all-clear signal, then we could go back to class. But that was normal for us. Franklin: Was it, really? Carlisle: It was normal. It wasn’t anything scary; it was just something we did! I don’t know that at age that we really truly understood what that was all about, but— Franklin: Sure. How long did you do those for? Carlisle: I think we did them probably up until I was in—Carmichael is now middle school, but it was junior high then. And we would do, a couple of times, they loaded us all on buses and took us on an evacuation route in case we needed to be evacuated. So probably until I was in junior high school. Franklin: Do you remember where the evacuation route went? Carlisle: You know, I don’t think it was very far. I know we went down Wellsian Way and around and I really don’t know that it was very far, but. Franklin: What was the atmosphere of that like, for the children? Was that kind of like a field trip-type thing? Carlisle: Yeah, it was more of a fun-type thing. Because I—you know, most of us, a lot of us had lived here all our lives, so we were familiar with that kind of thing. That was not un-normal for us. So it was a day to get out of a few classes. Franklin: How old were you when you first knew what was being produced at Hanford? Carlisle: Oh. You know, I don’t know that I ever really—until I grew up and maybe got into high school, really, understood what was going on out there. Because, like I said, what was normal for us was, you know. We didn’t know anything. If I asked my dad what he did out in the Area, oh, he read dials or that kind of thing. And he would tell me more of the animals that he saw out in the Area. My mother would make him two sandwiches: one cat food sandwich and one sandwich for himself. He would feed the cat food sandwich to the raccoons and he’d tell me all about that. When he worked in town, he would bring me birds and all kinds of things that he would find. Franklin: Huh. But I assume, at some point, you did start to kind of piece together, you know, understand that—when did you first really understand Hanford’s kind of connection to the Cold War and all of that? Carlisle: Probably—you know, when you’re a kid, you don’t—those things don’t mean a whole lot to you, especially when you’ve grown up with that. So probably when I was in high school, and when my dad—I knew that when my dad couldn’t quit, because it was a war effort, then I kind of understood then that, you know, it was a war effort. Franklin: Sure. Sorry. I just lost my train of thought. And so, then, you went to Columbia High as well, and the mascot at that time was the Bombers, right? There’s been—it seems like there’s always kind of a simmering controversy surrounding that mascot, and I’d like to ask you your thoughts about that. Carlisle: Well, you know, the bomb does terrible things, but it also stopped the war and put the end to the war. So, there’s two sides to that. So, it—to me, it’s, the mascot being the bomb, that’s what we were all about, that’s what we made here, and, so that’s fine. I didn’t— Franklin: Okay. Were you ever concerned—when you started to realize that there was—your dad was working next to a nuclear plant, were you ever concerned or was your mother ever concerned about his safety, or, you know, any kind of effects from being so close to radiation? Carlisle: Not when I was growing up, but as I got older, I was very much aware of that, and was actually involved in a lawsuit. Franklin: Oh, really? Carlisle: Concerning that. Franklin: Okay. Carlisle: Not because I—I was a downwinder, a Hanford Downwinder. So for 20 years, we kind of fought with the government. Franklin: Can I ask you more about that? What made you join—or, what made you initiate that? Carlisle: Well, I had and still have a disease that the emissions that was going on, it increases that disease. So I decided—my aunt was also involved in Hanford Downwinders. She also signed off on that, but she was able to get the—she was exposed to stuff out in the Area, so she was able to get the, whatever it is, the money that they give out for that. Franklin: The EEOICPA? Carlisle: Yes, yeah. Franklin: Yeah. How did your litigation attempts turn out? Carlisle: Well, it—I think it went on for 20 years. It was very interesting. We eventually lost. I think there was two cases that won, and we eventually—we settled. I shouldn’t say we lost. We settled. Franklin: Okay. Are there terms—can you discuss that settlement, or is there— Carlisle: Yeah, I’d rather not. Franklin: Sure, I totally understand. I guess, I’d like to ask you about the—so growing up in Richland, your father worked for the Site, then eventually you have a disease that is linked to emissions at Hanford. Joining that lawsuit, was that hard for you, kind of having grown up in this very patriotic, pro-Hanford atmosphere? Did you feel like you were turning on the community or on yourself, or—how did you feel about—was there a conflict, I guess, is my question. Carlisle: Yes and no, because we were very proud to be working for Hanford. But it was sometimes really hard to realize that we weren’t told everything that was detrimental to our health. So that becomes kind of a conflict, like you don’t want that to happen to somebody else, so you want to bring that out. It maybe wouldn’t ever benefit me, but it certainly might benefit someone else. Franklin: Right, okay, thank you. So you would’ve graduated—when did you graduate high school? Carlisle: ’65. Franklin: ’65, okay. So I guess I’ll get to that in a minute. So Richland was privatized in 1958. Carlisle: Correct. Franklin: I wanted to hear your thoughts on what you remember about that. Carlisle: Well, that was when we were able to buy our houses. So my dad bought the little prefab on the corner, the two-bedroom prefab. I think he paid about $2500 for it. Because it was a corner lot, it was a little bit more expensive than the other ones that were like $2300. And then eventually the lady that lived next-door moved out, a couple years later, and we bought the precut, and my dad paid $8000 for that. He paid more for his car than he paid for his house. Franklin: Is there a difference between precut and prefab? Carlisle: Yes. Franklin: Okay, can you describe that for me? Carlisle: The prefab, those were ones, twos, and three-bedrooms. They were pretty small. They had the flat roofs that were saltbox-type things. They were some of the first temporary ones. The precut is about 1,150 square feet, and it was built more to stay than the prefabs. Franklin: Did the precuts come in after World War II? Carlisle: The one I’m living in now, I think it was built in 1948. Franklin: Okay, okay. Are those considered Alphabet Homes, or are they— Carlisle: Yes, yeah. I think it’s a Q or something like that. Franklin: Oh, okay, okay. So it is a—and they kind of placed those in that prefab neighborhood. Carlisle: Right. Franklin: Right, because there is a distinct, kind of, zones of mostly what we call Alphabets and then others where it’s mostly prefabs. Carlisle: We had a precut on the corner, a prefab, and a precut. And they took the prefab out of the middle of that and then separated the place. The place that I live in, I think there was a prefab there before it, because the plumbing all runs to the front of the lot; whereas now it’s in the back of the lot. So they took out a lot of the prefabs and put in the precuts. Franklin: Okay, and do you remember when they switched the roofs over on the prefabs? Carlisle: 1950—I think I have it on those pictures there. Franklin: Yeah. 1951? Carlisle: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. You probably don’t remember much about that. Carlisle: No. Franklin: I imagine Richland, when you were a small child, would’ve been pretty devoid of trees or kind of still starting to grow? Carlisle: Yeah, a lot of the people went down to the river and got cottonwoods and the trees to bring up to the houses to plant. So, yeah, there was—we had a few small trees in our yard, but they were—because it was orchard. The neighbor across the street had two peach trees in their front yard. And eventually, of course, they got taken down and different trees put in there. Franklin: Was it the government that took those down? Carlisle: No, well, probably the homeowners. Franklin: Oh, okay. Carlisle: Or, not homeowners, but the people who lived there. Franklin: Sure. Were your parents excited, nervous about the transfer of Richland to its citizens? I’m wondering if you remember anything about like kind of the general mood at the time? Carlisle: No, my dad had the choice of staying with the City of Richland and working with the City of Richland if he wanted, or actually going out to the Area. Because my dad actually worked at the sewer plant. The Rose Bowl, when I was a kid. And when the city switched, then he actually went out in the Area and worked in the D Area and I think he worked in B and several different areas. Because he worked for DuPont, he worked for Douglas United Nuclear, he worked for GE. I think he retired from Douglas. Franklin: Yeah, that would make—you said he worked out there 27 years? Carlisle: Yeah. Franklin: Yeah, okay, that would make sense with the timeline. Yup, okay. As I was trying to like do my mental math. But pretty happy about that transfer of ownership, then? Carlisle: Yeah, yeah. Franklin: Yeah. Okay. So you graduated in ’65. Carlisle: ’65. Franklin: We’ve been piecing together a bit of history and just started a new oral history project on civil rights in the Tri-Cities, and we know that there were a few African American families that lived in Richland. Do you recall going to school with any of the African American families there? Carlisle: When we were in high school, we had some football players and some basketball players that were African American. But we didn’t have a great population of that. We didn’t have any issues. I mean, civil rights didn’t exist to me. Franklin: Okay. Now we know that Kennewick had sundown laws which barred blacks from owning homes in Kennewick and being there after dark, and most lived in Pasco. Did you ever—and there were some NAACP demonstrations around the time that you would’ve graduated, and a little bit of strife. Did you hear anything about that? Did that impact you in any way? Carlisle: No. I remember, we’d go to Burbank and the African Americans usually lived in east Pasco. Franklin: Yeah. Carlisle: But that’s all I remember. I mean, it didn’t seem to be any—no problems. That I remember, anyway. Franklin: Sure. Did your family go much to the other cities in the Tri-Cities, or did you mostly stay—do most of your shopping and socializing in Richland, or did you get out in the wider area? Carlisle: Well, when I was little, there wasn’t a whole lot in Richland, and my dad was from Pasco. So we would go to Penney’s in Pasco. My uncle lived in Kennewick for, you know, 50 years. So we didn’t do a lot of shopping in Kennewick, but usually my dad gravitated towards Pasco. Franklin: Oh, okay. Do you still have family in that area? Carlisle: No. Mm-mm. Franklin: Oh, okay. So after you graduated, then what did you do? Carlisle: I went to CBC for a couple years, and then I went to Eastern Washington State. And then I came back, and I went to work for Payless / Rite Aid on the 29th of October. I’ve been there 48 years. Franklin: Wow. Is that the one on George—? Carlisle: No, it’s on Lee. Franklin: Oh, right, sorry, I always get the Walgreen’s and Rite Aid confused. I shouldn’t, because that’s my pharmacy. Carlisle: Within two miles of that, lived, worked, and was born within two miles of that area, all my life. Franklin: Wow, so you’re really rooted-in-place. Carlisle: Absolutely. Franklin: When you—how long were you at Eastern? Carlisle: I think I was there—I didn’t graduate. I think I was there about a year. Franklin: Oh, okay. Did you—is there any memorable—when people found out you were from Richland, were there any kind of memorable conversations, or did you find it—how was it, living in a community outside of Richland, I guess is kind of my question. Anything you noticed? Anything that was odd to you, or--? Carlisle: No. Franklin: People kind of treat you— Carlisle: I have a friend that lives just three blocks from me, that actually, we went to Eastern together. But she didn’t come to the Tri-Cities until she was in sixth grade. So when I talk about things that went on when I was a little kid, she can’t relate to some of that stuff; she doesn’t quite get it. Because her dad came out later and worked in the Area. Franklin: Oh, right, so she wouldn’t remember the government ownership. Carlisle: Right, the agents walking up and down the streets. That kind of thing. Franklin: I wondered, was your father working out on Site when President Kennedy came to visit? Carlisle: Yes, he was. Franklin: Did you go out to see him? Carlisle: I did. Franklin: I’m wondering if you could—what your memories are of that day. You would’ve been like a sophomore? You were a teenager, right? Carlisle: Yeah. Franklin: What are your memories of that day? Carlisle: Well, it was hot, and it was dusty, and it was dirty, and we were back in the crowd, and we just about saw him, and that was about it. About six helicopters came in, and you didn’t know which one he was in. That was it. I can remember Father Sweeney giving an invocation and Volpentest being up there talking. And then Kennedy talked, but how much I saw from the distance I was at? I don’t know. Franklin: How many people do you think were there? Carlisle: I don’t know. It seemed like maybe there was thousands. But I would guess, I don’t know, 5,000-6,000, maybe? 3,000? I don’t know. Franklin: Was that your first time ever being out on Site? Carlisle: Pretty much, so, yes. It was just out in the middle of the desert, so didn’t see anything. Franklin: Right. Have you been out on Site since then? Carlisle: I have, yeah. Franklin: Okay, and for--? Carlisle: I’ve done the B Reactor tour and some of the other tours. It’s very interesting. Franklin: Oh, great, okay. Let’s see here. What are some of your memories of some major events in the Tri-Cities like plants shutting down in the late ‘80s when Hanford—when things started to shut down. Carlisle: My dad—well, I remember the guy across the street took an early retirement and then had to go back to work. Voluntary retirement, and then had to go back to work because they needed him back there, I remember that. My dad, I think retired about the same time. But he didn’t have to go back; they didn’t call him back. You know. It didn’t seem to be any—my folks didn’t seem to be worried about it, because my dad was getting up there into the retirement age, so it was no big deal. Franklin: What do you remember about the end of the Cold War and the stopping of production at Hanford? I imagine that must’ve made the community pretty nervous about what was going—the economic future of the Tri-Cities. Carlisle: It did, and I think there was a sign on George Washington Way that said, last one out of Richland, turn out the lights, type of thing. So, yeah, people who were not long-term people like my folks were, they moved, they went back to where they were from. But they were still building up and things were still going along. It took a little time, but, yeah, we’re getting there. Franklin: Do you remember the Hanford Family at all? Carlisle: No. Franklin: Okay. Do you remember—what impact did Chernobyl have on the community that you can remember? Carlisle: Well, you know, everybody was concerned, of course. But as far as—I’m sure that sent people out in Hanford scrambling to make sure that everything was okay out there. But I don’t remember anything, other than the terrible thing that happened at Chernobyl, I don’t remember related to us. Franklin: Do you have any memories of social scene or local politics or other insights into life in the Tri-Cities since you were a child? Carlisle: Mm-mm. No, it was all—you know, just—it was very normal for me. All the things that went on. I have a hard time relating to the fact that other towns don’t have the cookie cutter houses that the government built. Because that’s the way I was grown up. Now I realize you don’t—you watch your kids. But when I was growing up, everybody had a Q clearance; everybody knew their neighbors. My mom had no problems with us girls sleeping out in the front yard and running around half the night. Franklin: Sure. And also everybody had a job, right? Carlisle: Everybody had a job. Franklin: It was literally a town of full employment. Carlisle: Yeah. Franklin: And people had strong background checks. Carlisle: Right, right. Franklin: Probably make it one of the safest communities you could— Carlisle: Right. Franklin: You know, because so much crime is caused by low economic status, and so, yeah, yeah, it’s— Carlisle: So you know, those were times that we had no problems. My mother was never afraid that if I was outside playing that something was going to happen. Even if the neighborhood guys were walking across the street—we had the bus stop where the buses stopped to pick up the guys—she knew all the neighbors and she knew they had gone all through security clearances, and she had no issues with that. Franklin: Sure. Did you have a bus stop on your street? Carlisle: Right across the street from the house. Franklin: Wow, and your father would get on and get off. Carlisle: Yup. Franklin: Did you have a private telephone, or did you have like a party line system? Carlisle: Oh, we had a party line. Well, we actually didn’t have a phone until my mom got pregnant with me, and then we had a phone for a short length of time. And then after that, the phone got taken out, and we had phone booths on a couple of corners. One lady across the street from us, the Stanleys, had a phone, and she said, anytime you need the phone, just come on over. My door’s always unlocked. So we would use her phone. But for the most part we would use the phone booth. And then when we first got a phone, it was a four-party line. And then got down to two-party line. Franklin: And then eventually— Carlisle: I’ve had two phone numbers in my whole life. Franklin: Oh, wow. Wow. One—I assume, one would’ve been for— Carlisle: A Whitehall number, and then when they changed it from Whitehall, then, to this one. Franklin: Oh, wow, that’s really interesting. I don’t think many people can say that. I know I’ve had so many phone numbers, I can’t even keep track of them. Okay, I think I’ve reached most of my—at the end of my questions. I just have kind of one large reflective question, and that is, what would you like future generations to know about living in Richland during the Cold War? Carlisle: Well, I think we were very unique and very blessed in many ways to be able to—my dad had a sixth grade education. So to be able to work at Hanford and end up with a good retirement and a pension and medical care, that was very, you know, wonderful for him and my family. So Hanford did well by us. Franklin: What about for yourself? Did you ever feel any fear or excitement or anything, being so close to the producer of two-thirds of the US nuclear weapons stockpile? Carlisle: No, because we didn’t realize all that. You grow up with that, and it just kind of sneaks up on you quietly. We never had any problems from it. No, I never—it never bothered me. Franklin: Okay. Carlisle: Always joked about it, you know. The water—turn off the lights and I’ll glow in the dark, type thing, but—heh. And I remember my dad would call home and say he was hot and he had to take a bath. And he said you never got scrubbed down until you scrubbed down by a Hanford nurse. And he would get something maybe on his shoes or just a minor thing, and, boy, they were scrubbing him down. Franklin: Wow. Carlisle: But that was normal for us. It was a different frame of mind, because if I lived in a different town, and I came to this town, this would not be normal. But for me, it was normal. Franklin: But on the flipside, though, you have a—you and others have a disease that’s likely caused by what happened out at Hanford, so it also, though, impacted you in a very personal way—you and your family probably in a negative way, you know? Carlisle: It did, to some extent. And it’s hard to say that, yeah, my aunt passed away from causes related to Hanford, and that was terrible. But on the other hand, she got a lot of benefits, too. So, you know, it’s hard to really—things happen and she could’ve been someplace else, you know, and things could’ve happened. She could’ve been in a church and got shot. Franklin: Sure. I guess what you’re saying is it’s complicated. Carlisle: It’s complicated, yes. Franklin: What would you like—you know, there’s always, Hanford’s critics are often really focused on that latter part I was just talking about, on the effects of Hanford, you know, people in Spokane or on the west side or elsewhere. What would you like them to know about growing up near it and also being affected by it? What’s your perspective that you could give to them? Carlisle: Again, like I said, you know, it’s hard for me to judge outside of where I’ve lived all my life, and so, you know, I would hope that everybody takes into consideration what has happened in emissions and stuff like that that maybe could’ve been controlled. But you look at that B Reactor out there, and you think, oh my god, how did we live through all of that? Because it looks so antiquated compared to what we have nowadays. So, I don’t—you know. Franklin: Okay, well, Shirley, thank you so much for coming and sharing your insights with us. I really appreciate it. It’s good to hear from people that grew up in such a—it helps to understand what a unique environment Richland really was, when you were a child. Because it really—there’s very few—you can almost count on one hand the number of cities that were like that in the United States. Carlisle: Right, right, and when you say unique, it was unique, but we didn’t realize that. I didn’t realize—I mean, having been born here, I didn’t realize we were unique. I thought everybody lived like we did. So that was not unique to me. Franklin: Yeah. Well, thank you so much. Carlisle: You’re welcome. Franklin: Yeah, I—when I first found out about it, you know, it was just like— Carlisle: You’re not from here? Franklin: No, I’m not. I’m from Alaska. Carlisle: Oh! Franklin: And I’ve lived in Alaska and Hawai’i. Carlisle: Well, they had-- Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:47:46 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317kbps Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Shirley Carlisle Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Shirley Carlisle was born at Kadlec Hospital in Richland in 1947. In this interview she talks about her parent's work at Hanford and growing up in Richland An interview conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by Mission Support Alliance on behalf of the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 11/07/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. 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This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F63597890b84a4bfcdd0fa256e4c9c15d.jpg ffb070bd2b52785563acbfaadfe10742 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fa9b2de3cbe40e470ac71fb166d655fb8.mp4 5cf2ec6e1c33811ff74fe4b4f0fb6cb1 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed David Chambers Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with David Chambers on July 5, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. We will be talking with David about his experiences working on the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? David Chambers: Is David H. Chambers. D-A-V-I-D. H. C-H-A-M-B-E-R-S. Franklin: Great, thanks, David. And do you prefer David or Dave? Chambers: David or Dave, either one. It’s immaterial to me. Whatever’s easiest for you. Franklin: Okay, great. So, tell me, how and why did you come to the area to work for the Hanford Site? Chambers: Well, when I first graduated from college, I taught school for a while. I taught school in Pasco. I went back to the University of Wisconsin – Stout branch, but I was from Wenatchee, Washington. And the Tri-Cities was kind of an up-and-coming community, so I ended up teaching school here. And then I quit teaching school and went to work in engineering for Boeing Aircraft Corporation. There were just too many people in Seattle, so I wanted to get back over here, and got an opportunity to go to work for Battelle Research Laboratories and so I took the job. Franklin: Okay. And what did you do at Battelle? What was your job there? Chambers: I was called a senior engineering technical person. Franklin: Okay. And that sounds kind of vague, so I’m wondering if you could unpack kind of what your job duties were and what kinds of projects you worked on. Chambers: Well, we did a little bit of everything. The first four or five years I worked for Battelle, it was out in the 200 West area. 221-T, head end. And we did what’s referred to as simulated reactor explosion tests. Franklin: Really? Chambers: And what we did, we had a containment vessel and a little reactor core inside of it. And we vaporized high levels of uranium, plutonium, et cetera, different radioactive material, and put it in the reactor and looked at the metals that would withstand it and the coatings we would try to use to utilize to protect stuff, and the chemicals and washes to clean it up after an explosion. So that’s what I did for about four or five years. Franklin: And what kind of work came out of that? Did that lead to changes in reactor design or things used to clean up? Chambers: Well, I’m sure that it did, because stuff was utilized at Chernobyl and also at the Three Mile Island. Basically, sodium hydroxide, NaOH is the best thing we found to wash them down. And after it was washed down to the bottom of it, we collected samples, and run those samples through liquid nitrogen so we could cool it down and put it into little 500-mililiter bottles. And then we set it in the computer that was in a whole room at that time, with air conditioning, naturally, and analyzed it so we could see the drop in the radiation as the time went on. Franklin: Wow. How did your previous work prepare you for this job of testing—reactor explosion tests? Chambers: Well, it didn’t, really. We had a lot of high PhD people that were actually analyzing all the stuff, and there were several of us that basically just did the experiments and stuff. The computer analysis went to the PhD people that analyzed it and looked at it and wrote all the paperwork. At that time, you know, we were kind of bitter enemies with Russia, and yet they were able to get that information somehow and utilize it. And I don’t blame them. Battelle put it out and maybe charged people for it. It was a government-funded program, looking at ways to protect people. That’s what it was for. We didn’t have much protection at all; we had a pair of surgeon’s gloves we put on our hands. That was about it, you know. And a white lab coat. So that was basically what we used. Filled those little bottles with the white surgeon glove, set it over, so. Franklin: Wow. How much shielding was between you and the simulated reactor in these reactor explosion tests? Chambers: There was a lot of shielding there. There was concrete walls, plus the reactor core was steel and metal and stuff and what-have-you. And all the atmosphere was protected because all of the velocities of air went through all kinds of filters and stuff before it was ever released to the atmosphere. And the liquid went into those tanks that are out there now that everybody’s worried about. So any of the chemicals and stuff that we washed down, any of the cleanup that we did on the stuff that we utilized in it, all went into those tanks out there. We also had canisters that we set around, positioned, in the containment vessel at different altitudes, different spaces. And they had little carbon filter systems in them, and we’d switch them on and pull the air through them, and then we’d check the little deals. So, again, over a period of time, we’d do like maybe 15 minutes after it happened, maybe 45 minutes, maybe an hour-and-a-half. Utilization time to see how it dropped off over the periods of time. And it was through—they had these little round canisters, if I remember right, I think they had thirteen of these, each one had like thirteen of them in it, and so we could turn them on individually. So pull air through them, and then look at the radiation content and see the slope that it went down over a period of time. Franklin: Interesting. Chambers: And then we had another facet out there that we utilized. We had a separate building outside of 221-T head end that we had a reactor core in it and put waters in that and had two shields in it, metal shields, and used high pressure nitrogen stuff between the two of them, so that as they heated up the water and put it under tremendous pressure, it wouldn’t blow. When it released the pressure, then it would blow. And we did that along with the other—to see what damage, and what would happen when one blew. One time, in fact the last time we utilized that, they made a little mistake and got the pressures and stuff a little bit too high, and the walls on the reactor, that simulated reactor were six inches thick, and when it blew it split it. And not only that, but it blew the frame back in the concrete and sucked the walls in on the building and lifted the roof off of it. We had a neutron generator sitting out to measure stuff. I don’t know where it went to. Nobody that I know of has ever been able to find it. And it was a tremendous thing—the steel—tremendously heavy. And that volume of water and steam and everything went out of that place, and I don’t know where that neutron generator—we looked and looked and looked for it. Never could find it. I don’t know they ever did find it. Franklin: You mean, it— Chambers: It just went somewhere. Franklin: It flew away. Chambers: It flew away or disintegrated, I don’t know. And that was—we weren’t supposed to talk about that for a long time, and so I never did tell anybody. Several years thereafter, I had a good friends that I fished and hunted with, Bob Cullowith[?], he was the head engineer on the FFTF, so he understood. We were hunting—this was, oh, 25 years after it happened—and I told him about it. So our manager, Gordon Rodgers was a skier and Bob Cullowith[?] would go up to Bluewood skiing. And one day he was sitting next to Gordon on the bus. He mentioned that to Gordon and Gordon said, well, I guess it’s time we can talk about it now. At the time it was supposed to be secret; nobody’s supposed to know it. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] That’s a great story. So to your knowledge it was never found? Chambers: No. We looked and looked and looked for it. We had an RM out there always onsite. Irving Winters was an RM, really a nice fellow. They call radiation monitors something different now, but at that time they were RMs. Went out with Geiger counters and everything. We looked all over that country for it; I don’t know where it went to. Franklin: Wow. Chambers: To this day, I don’t know whether anybody knows where it went to. Franklin: Wow. That’s sure a good thing that no one was standing where that neutron monitor was. Chambers: Oh, why, no, we wouldn’t let anyone out there, because it blew out with tremendous force and velocity. Well, as I say, it pulled the sides in the building and lifted the roof. A tremendous deal. And that reactor core is a pretty good size, and it was mounted in steel and stuff, six inches thick, as I say, and it split it and blew it clear back against—broke the mounting brackets and blew it back against the concrete. And our manager was really upset at that, and I don’t blame him. Because they just made some mistakes. A lot of people think you can’t compress water. But they found that you really can, and when it blows, it blows with tremendous force. In fact, they did a test somewhere, I think maybe Idaho or somewhere, where an engineer was doing that and then it got too much pressure and it blew and just disintegrated him. Franklin: Wow. Chambers: And that’s been several years ago, 40 years ago or so. So that—water compressed can end up being pretty dangerous. Franklin: That sounds like some pretty—I mean, obviously this work would have really big impacts on safety and knowing how to construct better reactors. But this sounds like pretty dangerous—there’s definitely some hazards involved with this testing. Chambers: Well, I don’t think there was really hazard that way. The hazard we were subjected to was the chemicals and the radiation back in the samples that we took, and taking the little air samplers apart. They were little stainless steel deals that we put charcoal in them and filters of a different kind in them. And again, we had a little deal we stuck in our pockets, a little dosimeter, they call them. But if you got too high on them, guys would leave them in their lockers, so that they wouldn’t send you home or whatever, you know? And if you thought you were getting too much of it. So that’s basically the exposure problem was what really was dangerous to us, as far as the reactor core and stuff—we were away from it, we were back in the building when it blew or standing off to the sides and back of it, and watching it when stuff like that happened, or in labs. Franklin: Would you be watching it through like shielded glass or CCTV or—? Chambers: When we vaporized the radioactive material, we were watching it through lead glass. Very thick lead glass. Franklin: So, when guys would get too much dose and get sent home, would they be sent home without pay? Is that why they would leave their dosimeter? Chambers: No, I— Franklin: Because you’re the first person I’ve heard that from, and I— Chambers: I think they were all paid, as far as I know. I don’t think anybody lost any pay. They just sent them to do something else or sent them home or something, what-have-you, so they wouldn’t lose pay. If you got overdosed. Like McCluskey, out there, he was paid all that time. Franklin: Sure. I guess I’m just struggling to understand why someone would intentionally leave their—overexpose themselves over the limit just to keep—there are other guys that could do that job, right? Chambers: Well, you know, a lot of the knowledge at that time wasn’t where we are now. A lot of this stuff they didn’t know back then. You can’t blame them, because it was a job and it paid good. They didn’t know the dangers then that they do now. They know a lot more—like asbestos is a good example. Every pipe we had out there, everything was insulated with asbestos. Well, they didn’t know the ramifications of asbestos, you know, 70 or 80 years ago. World War II, every ship that was built had asbestos all through it. But they learned. Franklin: It’s a great insulator. Chambers: Yes. Fabulous. But very deadly if you—you know. Even to people at home, from the clothes that you take home. The women washed them and stuff, you know, they’d get the fibers and breathe it in their lungs, like coal dust, you know? 100 years ago they didn’t know what coal dust would do, and now they—so a lot of those, a lack of knowledge. Franklin: Mm. You also alluded earlier that this had been a pretty high point in tensions with Russia during this part of the Cold War. Do you think that might have played into the attitude of just wanting to get the job done? Chambers: I think so. I think that they were accept—very acceptable to utilizing our knowledge when it came to cleaning up the reactor and stuff. They had to when Chernobyl happened. I think, if you look back, a lot of our people went over there. A lot of Battelle people went over and helped them, because—that was actually in Ukraine. Chernobyl’s actually in Ukraine; it isn’t in Russia, you know. And lately I’ve been seeing some specials on TV showing the beautiful city that they had there and all the amusements and stuff, it’s just sitting there in ruin, because they can’t go to it now because it’s so highly radioactive. But their reactors, you know, were vertically cooled, which means that the cooling water’s all on the bottom. So they got a hot spot and bubbled the water, so the top of the reactor didn’t have any cooling water. Where ours are horizontally cooled. We got the cooling water up here as well as down there, so we don’t have that problem. Different philosophy of making a reactor. Franklin: Sure, sure. So what did you—so after the reactor—you mentioned you worked at the 221-T head end doing reactor testing, and then you looked at different chemicals for cleaning up. What did you do after that project? Chambers: I went down to the 300 Area and went to work in Robert Marshall’s—that was the manager. I worked directly for a PhD by the name of Gerald Kulcinski. And he actually, I told a young man later, the smartest individual that I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing. And you see him on television every now and then on Discovery Channel, A&E and they’re talking about him. Because he left here and went to University of Wisconsin and he’s in charge of the fusion reactor—the old reactors are fission. What we’re trying to develop now is fusion, where you get 100,000-degree plasma and you can keep it going and contain it. Well, we can get to 100,000 but to keep it going and contain it is different, and that’s what they’re working on. He was kind of in charge of that. Went all over the world to do that kind of stuff, and he’s a professor at the University of Wisconsin. I think now retired, but he talks about now what’s energy on some planet out there and if we could get that energy from here we could run this world for a lot of years and stuff. They’re way out there in this stuff. Franklin: So what was he doing when you went to work out in his lab? Chambers: We were doing metallurgical research. We were taking various types of metal that we were trying to fiddle with or mend or develop or what-have-you, and putting them in reactors around the country, different levels of radiation and then bringing them back to the lab and seeing what kind of damage they sustained. And the way we would do that, we would thin them down with a variety of ways and then put them in electron microscope so we could magnify stuff and see stuff several thousand powers magnification and then look at the damage that the metal sustained. Franklin: And what was the purpose of that work? Chambers: Well, again, to try to develop metals for different things and to try to develop metals that the reactor wouldn’t harm, and to make all kinds of stuff out of, I guess. Stainless steel now has become widely used in all kinds of cookware and knives. When I was a kid, you never thought of having a knife blade, a pocketknife blade, made out of stainless; they were carbon steel. Now they’re all stainless. Franklin: Hmm. So was stainless steel one of the metals to come out of that work that had high applicability for all these different scenarios? Chambers: Well, I’m sure it was. I’m sure Battelle had a lot of work, because they’re a very competent company in a whole lot of different areas. People don’t realize what kind of research they do and a tremendous amount of developments in everything come from Battelle. I think it’s a very, very good company, my personal opinion. Franklin: Were there any tests of metals that stood out to you in that work? Chambers: Not really anything; it was just a combination—and you’d put them in the reactor at this level. At University of Washington, I took some samples over to their reactor, put them in at their level, downtown Seattle and people didn’t realize in Seattle they had a reactor right downtown Seattle with Dixy Lee Ray running it. Very brilliant lady, you know? And we’d send them everywhere and then bring them back and, say, thin them down and just look at what happened. Of course, one of the things that took place when we did that, our lab became very contaminated. Because some of the metal was thicker, so we had to thin it down to start with. Well, I bought a little milling machine with a magnetic base on it and then glued the samples to a piece of carbon steel with epoxy resin and superglue. And then planed them down with a horizontal milling machine. All of those particles and everything went into the atmosphere in our lab. And then, we’d put them in a little holding device and used high current and various acids to spray against it with the current and to thin them, etch them down, until you could finally see some light. And then we put them in the microscope. So all of that atmosphere was what we breathed. It was just in the room. So it became a very contaminated lab. You can understand why. But, again, we never thought anything about it. It was a job; we just did it, you know? Franklin: Were you wearing respirators— Chambers: No. Franklin: --or anything? Any kind of protective--? Chambers: We didn’t have anything on but our street clothes, like this. Or you could change into a pair of coveralls if you wanted to. Most of the time, we didn’t. But I think I’m probably the only one left alive. My compadre, Jack Humason, a great friend of mine, he and I both worked straight for Gerald. He died about a year ago. Had cancers through the bone marrow and all in his blood and stuff, and just fell over dead, went in the hospital. One of the guys I hunted with, Jones is his name, Maxwell Jones, I read in the paper here three or four months ago that he ended up back in Tennessee doing stuff. And he died. And he’s quite a few years younger than I was, and so was Jack. So I’m lucky. I don’t smoke and I’m not a drinker or anything. Unfortunately, I’ve got bad COPD from all that stuff. Franklin: Wow. Yeah, it’s amazing, I can imagine that just a little—what you’d be inhaling would be a really effective—a cocktail of different— Chambers: That’s correct. Franklin: You know, because you’re getting all these samples in from all these different reactors and these different types of metals and milling them and everything. Chambers: Well, yes, and of course the acids and stuff that we were utilizing basically to thin the metals down with the current, the fumes from that that you were breathing, that didn’t do your lungs any good either. Of course, that’s what’s, again, more of what’s in those tanks out there that they’ve got to find a way to drain those tanks and solidify that material. Unfortunately, our vitrification plant is a long way behind time. Franklin: Yeah. Well, it seems like, just from what you just described and talking with other people, it seems like it’s that mix of things that are in the tanks that seems to be a lot of the problem. There’s all these different chemicals and all these different solids and, you know, it’s like a grab-bag. Chambers: Yes, there’s everything under the sun in those tanks and what-have-you. Of course, the acid content and the strong NaOH, that’s what causes the tanks to etch away, leech away and stuff. And you know what an acid will do; pour it on metal, and it’ll eventually burn right through it, you know. Unless you got—if they’d have built the tanks out of stainless to start with, it’d been far better off. But, again, it was knowledge, lack of knowledge. They didn’t have any idea. We had a war to win. When they did this stuff, or when they started doing it. And then we had a cold war for years that we were worried about everything, so we had to do stuff. Now, you wonder if you could win a war now. With the attitude that’s in this country now, it makes you wonder if you could do the things that you did. You couldn’t do the things that they did back then. Franklin: Yeah. So how long did you work at the metallurgical research lab? Chambers: Well, that was over five, about six years there. I had about eleven years in at Battelle. Franklin: Okay, and then you left Battelle? Chambers: Yes. Franklin: Okay, and why did you leave Battelle? Chambers: Well, I had a business going. I had the last year or two, couple of years I was with Battelle, and then I finally went to that full-time. Franklin: Ah, and what business was that? Chambers: I owned Water World Marina, Incorporated at Pasco Boat Basin. Franklin: Oh, okay. So you retired at Battelle to go full-time with your boat business. Chambers: That’s correct. And then I ended up having, oh, about, oh, I don’t know, at the most probably ten or twelve people working for me for—I was in that for 25 years. Franklin: Oh, wow. And so then you sold that as well? Chambers: Yes, that’s correct. Franklin: So you’ve been retired for a while. Chambers: Yeah. Well, I retired and my buddy bought me out, and then not long after that, why, he called me up and said, Dave, would you please come down and go to work for me, you know? Help me out? I need some help, you know. So I said, okay, I’ll do that, I’ll help you out. Franklin: Yeah, it’s hard to stay retired, I’ve noticed. I interview a lot of retired people. Hard to stay retired. When you worked for Battelle, did you live in Pasco the whole time, or did you ever live in Richland? Chambers: No, I lived in Kennewick. Franklin: Oh, Kennewick. Chambers: At the time. I live in Pasco now, but all the years that I worked for Battelle Research Laboratories, I lived in Kennewick. Franklin: Oh, okay. And so you would do the commute every day out to the— Chambers; Yes, that’s correct. And to start with, another thing I don’t understand, we’d drive to the bus lot in North Richland, right off of, basically a continuation of George Washington Way and a couple other streets went together, and had a big parking lot there. And then you get on the buses and ride out to 2-West. And I never could understand why in the world they got rid of those buses, because it kept a lot of cars off the road, and a lot of—one bus carrying 50 or 60 people is a whole lot more economical than a bunch of cars driving out there. Franklin: Yes, yes, it is. Chambers: I couldn’t understand why they got rid of them. It was something you could relax, both going and coming from work. Franklin: Sure. Yeah, I’ve heard that from a lot of people who rode the buses how much they like them. It sure does seem to make a lot of sense to have them. Chambers: No, it didn’t make a lot of sense to get rid of them. Franklin: I think I just have a couple other questions. Yeah, I have two more questions. I’m wondering if you could describe the ways in which the security and/or secrecy at Hanford impacted your work. Chambers: Well, I don’t really think that the secrecy or the security impacted it, except that you didn’t take the stuff home with you. You didn’t advertise to everybody what you were doing, and we were beyond a war, in the Cold War. During World War II, people didn’t even really know what they were doing out there, most of them. There were people in the know that did, but the vast majority of them didn’t know. Well, when I went to work there, everybody knew what you were doing. People downtown didn’t know a lot of the stuff and weren’t privy to the writings and stuff that were going on out there. That went strictly to the government or to some organization. And Battelle does a lot of private company research. And that’s probably more secretive than government research, because if you’re doing research for a company and they paid you a lot of money, they most certainly don’t want a competitor to get that knowledge. So that’s probably more secretive than the government work was when I was out there. And then I can understand why. So I don’t think it impacted what we did at all, except that you were limited on what you could take out there and what you could bring home. You couldn’t bring anything home unless you had clearance to do it. And you most certainly couldn’t take any kind of weapons out there. And dope was prohibited. People maybe tried to take it in and stuff, but I didn’t see any of that in our groups at all. And a lot of our groups, not many of them even smoked. I don’t smoke, and Jack Humason didn’t smoke, and Gerald Kulcinski didn’t, and Homer, our manager didn’t smoke. Very few people. Some of them smoked pipe, and some of them smoked cigarettes. But there were more people that didn’t smoke, even back then, than did. So. Franklin: Interesting. Well, that’s—I mean, good for them. Chambers: Yes, yes. Good thing I don’t, as bad as my COPD is. When I went through the impairment evaluation—started on the deal against the DOL in October of 2012. So it’s been almost five years. And had my impairment evaluation last August. They put you in a little room, and put all connected up stuff, and then they put you on a bicycle with stuff on you. And I had, my lungs got an 86% impairment with my lungs with all that stuff and what-have-you. So I have to breathe inhalers all the time. And then I have a heart that beats fast, because of the oxygen transfer, there are no blood vessels shut down or anything for the oxygen transfer. So I have to take medicine for that, so. Franklin: Oh, wow. Chambers: So it catches up to you after a time. But fortunately, I’ve lived for 82 years, you know. And to say, I don’t know of anybody—there may be one or two still alive that worked out there, but I don’t know, most of them are gone. Franklin: Yeah, well, it seems like you were really in contact—close contact with a lot of different types of material and different ingestion pathways for chemical and radiological materials. Chambers: Yes, we were. Both places. In the 2-West area, doing the experiments there, and then the metallurgical stuff. Yes. And especially—the chemicals are probably the worst things. Radioactive material does damage to you; it cooks you from the inside out. But the acids get into you, and we used sulfuric acid and nitric acid and picric acid. Picric you have to be very careful of. It’ll get in here, and it doesn’t burn immediate—it gets down and then burns from the inside out. It’s a very dangerous thing. And then we used some ether and stuff and what-have-you. And you have to be careful with ether, because if it crystallizes and then you twist the cap off, it’ll explode. So you have to be very careful with ether. Franklin: Jeez. Chambers: Ether, highly explosive. And we used some of that. In fact I found some of it down in the lab in 221-T, heading downstairs, and it was setting up there, in the bottom been sitting there for a long time with crystallization on them. So I called them and they took it out in a container somewhere and blew it up, I guess. Franklin: Wow. Chambers: So. Franklin: That’s really scary. Chambers: But you don’t mess with it, you know. You just leave it alone, you know? As long as you leave it alone, you’re okay, and get people in there that know how to handle it. Franklin: Wow. So, David, my last question is kind of a reflective question, and that’s, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War? Chambers: Well, I think, the thing is to know that we had a job to do, because the world was, at that time, was in a very dangerous situation with China and Russia both. Plus, North Korea. And the bugaboo now, again, is North Korea. And we had things we had to learn and stuff we had to do. And it’s hard to realize, for young people to visualize what the world was like then with Russia developing all kinds of stuff. Shot France’s powers down. When we really—to start with, had a plane that would fly above their missiles. But then they developed a missile that’d shoot them down. So we had to do some utilization there to free him and trade him, you know, to get him back. And Russia was developing stuff. And they had weapons that would blow us to pieces, and we had weapons that would blow them to pieces. And it was just a dangerous situation that we were trying to de-escalate, cool down, and so we just kept doing stuff. It was a job to do, and you had to understand that the world was a different situation then than it is now, and it’s becoming that situation again now. With North Korea and Iran and now Putin in Russia again, and China’s trying to build up islands in the South China Sea. So it looks like we’re heading down that same road again. So. Franklin: Great, well, David, thank you so much for your really great stories and interesting—you had a very interesting jobs out there. Chambers: Well, I think I did. Franklin: Yeah, you did, and I appreciate you taking the time to tell us about them today. Chambers: Well, then, as I say, you know, Battelle was the main instrumentation in this. And you read in the paper what they’re doing all the time now, so I think that’s a wonderful company to have here, and they do a lot of very fine things, I think. Maybe some people don’t like them, but I think they do a wonderful job, and I’m glad we’ve got them here. Franklin: Oh, good. Yeah, they have their hands in a lot of different— Chambers: That’s correct. Franklin: A lot of different stuff. Chambers: And even security, going into airports and stuff. A lot of people don’t realize where that came from; that came from Battelle. Franklin: Yeah, yes, it did. Chambers: You know? And we looked at some IUDs that were put in women in different parts of the world. Intrauterine devices to stop pregnancies. And then analyzed them. And you find that women in different parts of the world destroy those IUDs at different rates. Maybe it’s from their diet, diet and food or what they eat or what-have-you. But just interesting things. Very interesting things. Franklin: Yeah, that is very interesting. Well, thank you. Chambers: You’re welcome. Franklin: Okay. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:33:34 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 221-T Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with David Chambers Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource David Chambers worked for Batrelle in the 200 Areas An interview conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by Mission Support Alliance on behalf of the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 07/25/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Language A language of the resource English Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F7194ce577e47504c63002b978488faf3.jpg fec812f761a66cb868de1623907fd0d9 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F4f96830baf7c716580f9b628fb86b21b.mp4 0cb1dd85a78b125f9469688f27c3d344 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Glen Clark Location The location of the interview Northwest Public Broadcasting studio at the Washington State University Tri-Cities campus. Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: Okay. So, before—so I have a little boilerplate at the beginning, and then we’ll just go straight into it, and I’ll ask you about your dad and mom and— Glen Clark: Okay. Franklin: And what you remember, what they told you, and then your childhood in Richland. Okay, great. Clark: I’m just following the lead. Franklin: Okay, good. Well, eventually, you’ll have to lead. Clark: Okay, I will. We’ll BS with the best of them. Franklin: Okay, awesome. Ready? Lori Larsen: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Glen Clark on February—March 7, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Glen about his experiences growing up in Richland and his father’s and mother’s experiences growing up in the area before Hanford—before the Hanford Site came. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Clark: It’s Glen Clark. G-L-E-N. C-L-A-R-K. Franklin: Great, thanks, Glen. So your father and mother were both born here, in the old towns of Hanford and White Bluffs? Clark: They were raised. Franklin: Raised, okay. Clark: Yes, and actually, I think my dad was born at Hanford. Franklin: At the town of Hanford. Clark: Town of Hanford, yes. Franklin: And then your mother came to White Bluffs? Clark: Right. Franklin: What can you recall about what they’ve told you about their childhoods in the area? Clark: You know, we could go on for hours. Franklin: Okay. Clark: And I had the opportunity, three or four or five times to go out to the site with them, or with my dad and uncles. They used to have a Hanford-White Bluffs picnic every year here in Richland. And if you signed up ahead of time, they’d badge you and you could actually go out to—normally, we met at the high school, what was the remnants of the high school. Franklin: The Hanford high school. Clarke: The Hanford high school. And then from there, they just said, go any place you want. Obey signs, obviously, radioactive signs, and be out of here by 1:00. Franklin: Wow. Clark: So we had an opportunity to go out and actually was able to get into, I call it a basement, but the hollow under my grandparents’ home, that is still there. Franklin: Really? Clark: Yeah, it’s basically a hole in the ground. Franklin: Okay, that would’ve been like a cellar? Clark: Right. Franklin: Okay. Clark: So I think it was a two-bedroom house and they raised six boys there. But slept on the porches and out in the sagebrush or wherever they could find someplace to sleep. And my mom moved here later than that. She wasn’t born here. I think she was born in Prosser. And her stepfather worked for Atomic Energy Commission, and that was actually prior to the Hanford Site being taken over. And they had an orchard out in the White Bluffs area. Franklin: So—but he didn’t work for the AEC before the Manhattan Project. Clark: He worked for the AEC before the Manhattan Project. Franklin: Okay. What was the scope of the AEC at the time? Clark: You know, unfortunately, I was too doggone young to listen to my step-grandfather, who was quite a bit older than my grandmother. But anyway, I didn’t get the opportunity to really find out what was going on then. Franklin: Sure, sure. And do you know roughly when your mother moved to White Bluffs? Clark: No, she went through high school in White Bluffs. Franklin: Okay. Clark: So her grandparents were from Prosser. He was a colonel, Colonel Baker. He was actually a real estate and insurance guy back, turn of the century, and did some surveying work. My grandmother was editor of the paper in Prosser for several years. Franklin: Okay. Clark: Great-grandmother. No, grandmother. Great-grandmother. Great-grandmother. I’ll get it right here sooner or later. Franklin: And how many times did you go out with your father and uncles, out to the Site? Clark: It was either four or five summers that we got an opportunity to go out there, and we’d go down to the pump station along the river, which is just down the road from their old house. And there’s over on this side was a guy by the name of John Kashier, had a five-acre, ten-acre spread. And he was also very prolific in making moonshine. They finally—the sheriff at the time finally caught him, so he went to Walla Walla for several years. Franklin: The penitentiary. Clark: To the penitentiary, because they frowned on that back in those days, I guess. Before he went to the penitentiary, he stopped at my grandmother’s, my grandparents’ house, and gave them a roll of money, and said, could you save this for me until I get back? So they did; they put it in their safe, which was a pipe in the side of the cellar, in the basement. They had a pipe, and they stuck that money in the pipe. So that was kind of the highlight, when he got back to them, he got his money back. So there’s a lot of stories of, you know, the kids going down. John Kashier’s house had a dirt floor, as the story goes, but it was just immaculate. It was swept clean. And he was a bachelor, and he always had a can—or, not a can, but a handful of peanuts and raisins for each of the kids. So I guess by all accounts a very good neighbor. Franklin: Popular one, too, I bet. Clark: With the kids. Franklin: And with the adults, right, for the— Clark: Yeah, for the moonshine. Franklin: Would this have been during Prohibition? Clark: Possibly. Because, like I say, they were pretty intent on him. You don’t normally go to prison, I don’t think, so it probably was during prohibition times. Franklin: When was your father born? Clark: Well, he’s 92. Going to be 92. Franklin: Will be 92. So, 1925. Clark: Math wasn’t my best—yeah. Franklin: Okay. Interesting. So what years did you go out with him? When was the last time you went out? Clark: I think it was the last year of the Hanford-White Bluffs picnic, and that’s probably been gone eight years now, probably, is the approximately the last time they had that picnic. People were just getting pretty elderly. Franklin: Sure, I mean, the last people born in those towns would’ve been born in the early ‘40s, so we’re approaching a wall. Clark: Right. Franklin: And who was running the Hanford-White Bluffs Pioneer Association? Clark: You know, I talked to somebody on that. The one that I know best, and not that I really know her, is Annette Heriford, was really active in that. And then there was another gentleman that—They had a banquet the night before where everybody could kind of mix together, normally down at the Shiloh and then the next day they would have the picnic in the park. Franklin: Was that Harry Anderson? Clark: Harry Anderson, yeah. Franklin: Okay. We recently just got the collection of his papers and all of the association documents. Clark: Mm-hmm, right. Franklin: And so you would go down there with your father and your uncles, you would go to the homestead, right, or the old house. And what else would you go see? Clark: Well, we would then drive down to the pump plant which my grandfather used to operate. Franklin: Oh, the pump station. Clark: The actual pump station where they pump water into Hanford. And drive around and see the different—you know, Gilhulys lived here, and I used to pick asparagus in that field, and—so just kind of doing a little tour. And then we’d normally go by, because my dad retired from 200-East and West house, power houses in 200 East and West Area. So then we’d normally drive around the outside of that and then book on out. Franklin: So your father also worked at Hanford? Clark: Yes. Franklin: So he was one of the—was born there, but then was not fully displaced— Clark: Well, yeah, he was. They came in and took the property. Franklin: Yes. Clark: “Buy.” It wasn’t really a buy; it was just, you get out of here and we’ll give you this amount of money. Franklin: Sure. Clark: And they moved to Yakima. Franklin: Okay. Clark: So that was in early ‘40s, I would guess. Franklin: 1943, yeah. Clark: Yeah. And then my dad enlisted in the Navy. And served in WWII. And then afterwards he went back to Yakima and worked for Picatti Brothers, which is pump operation. Franklin: For irrigation? Clark: Irrigation and domestic, and they rebuilt motors, and then he got on at Hanford as a motor-winder. Franklin: And what is a motor-winder? Clark: They actually rebuild electric motors, all the coils that are inside of them. I don’t think they do that anymore, probably, but back in the day, they did. They actually rewound them. Franklin: What kind of electric motors? For--? Clark: Anything. Any kind of electric motor. That’s what he started at Hanford doing, was in the motor shop. Franklin: The motor shop. And this was in the 200 Area? Clark: That was, I believe, in the 200 Area. And then he finally worked his way up. He was, when he retired, he was foreman for power and maintenance. He had a couple of crews, 18, 20 people, different crafts. Franklin: How long did he work for Hanford? Clark: Well, he retired when he was—started in 1950. And so 40, 40-plus years. Franklin: Oh, so he retired in the ‘90s, wow. Clark: Yeah. Franklin: And so you said he worked his way up in the shop from being a motor-winder to a foreman. Clark: Right. Franklin: Wow, that’s really interesting. That’s quite a long career. Clark: Yes. It was, you know, it was a good job. Franklin: Did he ever talk about—what were his feelings on the forced removal and then being back there, working for that same project? Clark: You know, I just think he got over it. Franklin: Yeah? Clark: Everybody was in the same shape, as far as the old-timers that had lived out there, were in the same shape. Get out. Franklin: Was there any bitterness, do you think? Maybe initially, or--? Clark: Oh, I’m sure there was a lot of—I mean, those people would be saints if there weren’t bitterness. The story goes that one of the guys had an orchard, and he said, just—cherry orchard, I believe. And he said, okay, just give me another month so I can harvest my cherries, and I’ll give you the land. And they said, no. Out. So the story goes. Franklin: Right. Clark: So I’m sure that there was a lot of bitterness. And I’m sure, in those days, nobody knew why. Or what was going on. They just knew that they were gone. Franklin: Did your father ever express any bitterness or resentment? Clark: I don’t believe so. I never saw that. And, actually, my grandparents who moved into Yakima didn’t either. But, there, again, some time had lapsed. Time, they say, cures everything. So. Franklin: Except for old age. Clark: Yeah, well, yes. I keep thinking that, maybe I ought to petition the government to give it back to who it was taken from. Which would be an interesting legal challenge. Franklin: Well, yeah, on a few levels. Because, you know, before white settlers came there was also another— Clark: Indian. Franklin: Yeah, another claim to that land. That would be very interesting. That would face some immediate legal challenges from, I think, many— Clark: Oh, I’m sure that, yeah, definitely would. But the Indians used to stop by my grandparents’ all the time. Franklin: Really? What—did they tell you about that, or--? Clark: Yeah, they’d just say, oh, Johnny Buck stopped and walked in the house and had dinner with us. You know, he was kind of the chief, I guess, of the—And my grandfather, for a period of time, was a Benton County commissioner. So anything that happened in his end of the county, he was kind of—he’d take charge of it. So he knew all the Indians. He used to, the story goes, that he took the family car and went down to Horn Rapids, which is now Winwash or whatever-in-the-heck it is. But the Indians had deals set up; they were netting salmon. So anyway, they gave him as many salmon as he could haul. And he loaded up the backseat, you know. I’m sure it smelled great. And then he went around to the community and handed out salmon to people that needed food. So it was interesting. Franklin: Yeah, that is very interesting. Kind of acting as a redistribution agent for that. So your grandparents, your family had pretty good relations, then with— Clark: With the Indians. Franklin: With the Wanapum. Clark: Oh, yes, yes. Franklin: That’s interesting because I’ve heard other stories from other people who mentioned friendly Wanapum visits, or they would ask people to store things for them if they were going to, like, a fishing camp and they didn’t want to carry everything. Clark: Yeah, no, they stopped—Dad tells one story that the whole tribe stopped by. They were moving to some different area for fishing or for root collecting or whatever they were doing, and the whole tribe came by and waved and stopped for a little bit. Franklin: Wow. Clark: So they were all on very good terms. One of my uncles—there was a lot of arrowheads and those type of things that they found over the years. One of my uncles has actually took a bunch of his collection up to the new museum that they just built up at one of the dams. They built a nice museum, so he donated a bunch of his collection to them. Franklin: Oh, that’s cool. Clark: Actually, I think all of them. Franklin: Oh, wow, that’s great. That’s always good to see that, to hear of that stuff getting— Clark: Back to where it— Franklin: Yeah, repatriated. Clark: I mean, it wasn’t against the law at the time. Franklin: Sure. Clark: It is now, obviously. You’re not supposed to pick anything up. But back in those days, was just doing their thing. Franklin: Right, and if there ever were laws they weren’t as enforced really, much, as they are now. Clark: Right. Franklin: No, that’s good to hear. Clark: They used to—the boys, the older boys—there were six boys, and my grandfather used to go up to Priest Rapids and there was some kind of logjam up there. They would make a raft out of these logs that are floating down from dam construction or whatever they were doing on the river. And then they would float that to Hanford, which was a couple-day ordeal. And that was their firewood for the winter. So they’d pull it up, with the horses, and pull it up on the bank, and cut it up. Franklin: Wow. That sounds really dangerous. To make a raft out of logs. Clark: And you know, all the boys survived. Franklin: Yeah, I’m sure. Well, they also knew how to do it, though, too, right? They had learned. I can just imagine somebody trying to do that today and probably getting killed. Clark: Yes. Yes, probably most likely. Franklin: Very much, I respect that knowledge of how to make a raft, a serviceable raft, out of reclaimed logs. Clark: Well, they’d just lash it together, and put a big boom pole on it. They’d do one or two rafts, and away they went. Franklin: Wow, wow. That’s really something. Clark: Yeah, it’s quite an undertaking. And of course back in those days, they didn’t have chainsaws and all that stuff. So it was a tough way to make some firewood. Franklin: Yeah, well, also, though, your options around here are pretty limited if you don’t want to burn sagebrush all the—which I imagine isn’t very good firewood. Clark: I wouldn’t think so. Franklin: Where did your father fall in the six boys? Was he— Clark: He was number three. Franklin: So he was square, pretty much, in the middle. Clark: Right. Franklin: Did any of your uncles work for Hanford? Clark: Yes. My number two uncle worked out there for many, many years. I can’t even tell you what he—well, he worked with my father. I think on a different shift, but he was in management of some sort or another. Franklin: Are the six brothers still pretty close—or were they pretty close? Clark: They’ve been close all their lives. Franklin: And did they all stay in the same area? After the displacement? Clark: No. Well, the two youngest went to Yakima with my grandparents, because they were still in school. Then all of the older ones were in the service. And then when my oldest uncle got out of the service, then he moved to Yakima and went—his entire life, he only worked for one company and that was Picatti brothers. Who was a friend of my grandparents. The elder Picattis. And they’re still a viable company. So my uncle retired from Picatti Brothers after, I don’t know, a lot of years. Franklin: Your grandparents probably knew him from then— Clark: From Hanford. Franklin: From working at the pump. Clark: Yeah. They—because grandpa used to do, like, general contracting. Hand-dig wells. And so they kind of worked hand-in-hand with Picatti Brothers for pumps and that kind of stuff. Franklin: Oh, I see. Clark: They’ve been family friends for years. Franklin: Would all of the boys often get together and go on the picnic—the White Bluffs-Hanford Reunion? Clark: Normally there was three or four. Franklin: Three or four. Clark: Yeah. Well, probably, a lot of times there were five. One of my uncles ended up moving all over the Northwest for a power company. So he was, a lot of times, down in Medford or over in Montana. Someplace way out of the area. So he normally didn’t come up for the picnic, but the rest of the other five did. Franklin: What did your grandparents do after moving—after being—moving to Yakima after being displaced? Clark: My grandfather—my grandmother didn’t work outside of the house. Franklin: Sure. Clark: But my grandfather went to work for PP&L, Pacific Power and Light. Franklin: Oh, okay. Clark: And he was running a substation there in Yakima for a lot of years. Franklin: Did your grandfather ever get a chance, or grandmother, ever get a chance to go back onsite? Clark: If they did, it was before my time. Franklin: Okay. Clark: They weren’t with us for those years that I went out. Franklin: Sure. When did they pass away? Clark: Now, that’s going back ancient history. Franklin: Okay. Clark: I should’ve brought my book. I’ve got a book that chronicles the whole family back, the Clarks and the Straddlings, which—but I didn’t bring it. Franklin: That’s okay. Do you remember your grandmother or grandfather talking about the displacement, their feelings about it? Clark: I didn’t really, like I say, they were displaced in ’43, ’42-’43, whatever. I was born in ’50. So, no, they’re not going to talk to a five-year-old, anyway, about that. So, yeah, there was never really much of any hard feelings that, at least, were apparent. Then they moved a lot of the graves to Prosser, which is where my grandparents were also buried. But they were buried at—they had never have been buried at Hanford, obviously, or it wouldn’t have been able to be moved. But then they moved a lot of those graves. Actually, I was—we go up there for Memorial Day every year and decorate graves. So I was cruising the—which sounds like fun, cruising the cemetery. And I found that John Kashier’s grave, which is—that one section is Hanford-White Bluffs. They were moved there. So I found his grave. Franklin: Was your family close with any other families that were displaced and stayed in the area? Clark: Not to any great extent. I mean, they kept in touch, but not—others, couple that were fairly close, the Burford family, and then the Meek family. And the Meeks used to own BB&M, was one of the owners of BB&M in Uptown Richland. So Dad used to see them quite a bit. And Don Burford still calls him. I think he’s in Port Angeles or someplace over there and still calls him every once in a while. Franklin: Because your father is still alive, yes? Clark: Yes. Franklin: Okay. And you said he’s 92. Clark: He’s going to be 92. Franklin: Going to be 92. So what about your—do you remember any recollections of your mother from growing up in White Bluffs, or her family’s— Clark: They didn’t have the roots as deeply in White Bluffs as they did in Prosser. Franklin: Ah, I see. Clark: So, it wasn’t as big a deal, I don’t think. Because they had not been there—I guess they had an orchard and something out there. But they hadn’t been there as long as—and of course, with my step-grandfather working for AEC, you know, that was kind of all tied-in. I don’t know how long they actually lived in White Bluffs. Or whether he was one of the first ones there and then the movement came. I can’t tell you. Franklin: Sure. Did you—when you would visit the site with your father and uncles, do you remember any other—are there any other experiences that stand out to you, anything else you saw, or— Clark: Yeah, I mean, there were deer everywhere, as there still are. And we were driving along the river, and there’s a couple of baby bobcats that went up a tree. Back in those days, I was a little young and tougher. A little dumber, too. So I decided I was going to try to get those bobcats. And make pets. Well, they convinced me that that would not be a real smart move. Franklin: The bobcats did, or your— Clark: No, my uncles. Dad and uncles. Franklin: Yeah. I bet Mama Bobcat would have something to say about that. Clark: She wasn’t immediately visible. Not that she wasn’t there. Franklin: I was going to say, she was probably watching. Clark: I would guess. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Clark: But like I say, I was a little younger and dumber back in those days, and a whole lot tougher, so. Franklin: Anything else that stands out to you? Clark: No. It was interesting just to go through and they would point out, well, Gilhuly’s family lived here, and this is where John Kashier lived, this is where such-and-such lived, and this is where—you know. And then we’d go by the old store, which wasn’t there, but the bank in White Bluffs. And then they would talk about, you’d go in there for a nickel and get three ice cream cones or something. So it was interesting. Franklin: And so you moved to Richland in—right, you were born in Yakima? Clark: Born and moved, three days old. I don’t remember the move, but I understand I was three days old when I moved to Richland. Franklin: And you grew up in Richland. Clark: Yes. Franklin: And so your family, you guys lived in an Alphabet House, then, when you were a kid? Clark: Yes. Franklin: A government-owned house. Describe that, describe growing up in Richland in the government days. Clark: It was a great place to grow up. You’ve heard the stories. I mean, we rode bicycles without helmets, we drank out of the garden hose. I remember, I don’t know how often it was, but all the houses—not all of them, but most of the houses had coalbeds. And they would just drive up with a coal truck up to your little chute in the basement, the little window, and they opened up the window and filled it full of coal, and that’s what we heated with. But you didn’t—I was pretty young; I think they started selling those houses, if I remember, ’56, ’57. Franklin: 1958. Clark: Okay. So I was still pretty young to understand, but somebody’d come over and change light bulbs. Normally it was three people, because you had to have safety, and you had to have the manager, and the person who actually screwed the light bulb. So that was just the way it was. And for many, many years after that, when I finally got older and got into business, there was still a lot of people in the business community that didn’t like doing business with Hanford people. Franklin: Really? Why is that? Clark: Because there was the perception that they had been given, for many, many years had been given everything. I mean, you didn’t change your own lightbulbs. So there was that mindset. Franklin: Was that a perception within the community of Richland, or more of a Tri-Cities— Clark: More Kennewick, Pasco. Franklin: Kennewick, Pasco thing. Clark: Right. Franklin: Dealing with Richland people. Well, I guess to a small extent, that was somewhat true. I mean, the level of home service you were talking about. You paid your rent and people came and delivered your coal to your house. Do you remember what kind of house you lived in? What Alphabet? Clark: Yeah. My dad still lives there. Franklin: Oh, okay. And what house is it? Clark: It’s a B duplex. Franklin: A B duplex. And where is it? Clark: On McPherson. 1300 block on McPherson. Franklin: Oh, okay. And that’s where you grew up and— Clark: Right. Franklin: And went through childhood and everything. Do you have any examples of people not—that kind of—because kind of I’m fascinated about that inter-cities relationship between Richland and Pasco and Kennewick. Clark: Yeah, and I don’t have any specific other than you’d go into a business and be negotiating something with—and, you must be from Richland; you have that attitude. Of course, back in those days, you didn’t live in Richland, basically, unless you worked at Hanford. Especially up until ’58. I mean, if you lived there, you basically worked at Hanford or some kind of subsidiary. Franklin: Right, you might have worked at a business in Uptown, or owned a business that had, though, that had the government contract to run that business. Clark: Right. We had a good friend of mine I went to school with that his dad had a floor covering company in Richland. It took him a couple of years to get a contract to be able to do that, but anyway, he finally did. And spent many, many years in Richland doing floor covering. Franklin: Mm. So you say that was kind of a perception from Kennewick and Pasco businesspeople that Richland people were kind of coddled or entitled? Clark: Yeah. Franklin: I guess is the word they’d use? Clark: Entitled, maybe, is a good word for it. Franklin: Okay. And did that persist for a while? Clark: For a while, I mean, it wasn’t—because I didn’t really start in the business and I didn’t graduate from school until ’68, from high school. So it was after that, into the ‘70s before it—and then of course by that time, Richland had greatly expanded; a lot of people had moved in that didn’t work at Hanford. So it kind of changed that whole focus. Franklin: Sure, sure. What do you remember about going to school in Hanford, especially in regard to—were they doing civil defense drills and things at the time that you were in elementary and middle school? Clark: Right. You know, it wasn’t a huge deal, but they’d have an air raid, and you’d crawl under your desk. It wasn’t a huge deal, but they did it on a regular basis. So there was some thought to that. Franklin: Were they practicing emergency routes at the time that you were in elementary, middle school where kids would get on buses and they would practice leaving town. Clark: No. No, there wasn’t any of that that I recall. Of course, you have to understand, my first day of kindergarten, I went to a different school than what I ended up graduating from. First day of school, they got me to school, and when I came home, my folks had moved. And it was like three months before I found them. Nah, I’m kidding. [LAUGHTER] But, no, I don’t recall any bus route. I remember one time as a cub scout, I was able to, with cub scout group, go up to the Nike missiles up on the hill. At the base of Rattlesnake. And got a tour—somewhat of a tour of those missile silos. Franklin: Wow. Clark: And to this day I can’t tell you whether there was actually any missiles in them or if they were just the empty—just the facility. But I don’t think they’d let a bunch of cub scouts around a bunch of Nike missiles. Franklin: Well, I mean, you never know. Clark: And kids were a little dangerous, you know. Hit the wrong switch, and— Franklin: You’d hope they’d have slightly better security for launching missiles than that. Clark: You would hope so. Franklin: When did you first—do you remember when you first found out or became aware of what was being made at Hanford? Clark: No, because it was—you know, by the time that I was like going to school, I mean, that was out. I mean, obviously, they had used the atomic bombs and—so, everybody knew what it was. Franklin: Were you ever worried about the effects of radiation or of production on your dad’s health, your family’s health? Clark: You know, it’s always—I’m in the real estate business, and have been for 40-some years, okay? So one of the first things we got—you know: I don’t want to be anywhere close to Hanford. Okay, people moving into town, not working at Hanford, well, we want to stay as far away as we can. You know, if the people who were in charge of safety lived in Spokane, I might be a little concerned. But they live right here, too. So, really, I was never—never overly concerned that there was any kind of an issue. I mean, it’s all the Hanford employees had their dosimeters, their little badges they have. And then there was a metal box on our front porch for many, many years that the urine sample went in. They’d come around and collect them and they’d check just to make sure people weren’t getting a dose that they weren’t expecting. Franklin: That was for employees, though, right? Clark: Employees, correct. Franklin: So, but what about—did you ever wonder about just the general—anything getting into the air or the water or anything like that? Clark: No, like I said, the people that are in charge of that live here, too. So I was really never all that—and we used to hunt up on the Columbia River, on the Hanford Site, on the shoreline, which was legal to hunt waterfowl. And you know, you just never gave it much thought, that there was still a lot of messes, or still is, out there. Franklin: What about the—given Hanford’s role in the production of material for two-thirds or three-quarters of the US nuclear weapons stockpile, did you ever worry about Hanford—about their being a danger in Hanford from a Cold War perspective? From a—that there might be reason to be doing all that civil defense, that Hanford might be a target? Clark: Well, that’s why they had the Nike missile; that’s why they had Army out here. Franklin: Sure. Clark: Obviously, it was a factor. But one of the times that we went on the Hanford-White Bluffs picnic, and we were all staged there at the old Hanford school, high school, and here came a helicopter. And it swoop, swoop, swoop, sat down right there out in front of everybody, and three guys get out submachine guns. And it kind of goes—okay. And obviously, it was a show. But we were able to go tour the helicopter, so-to-speak, and talk to the people. And I asked them, I said, how—because they have heat-seeking stuff, or did. I don’t even think they have helicopters anymore. But they had heat-seeking. He said, I can find a snake if I want to. If I turn it down to that, I can find a snake. So, obviously, security. And we, being raised in Richland—you know, what does your dad do? Well, he’s Hanford security. One of my buddies all through school was a courier, and he used to take highly secret stuff on trains. And they would take it wherever they were going, Savannah River, wherever, on a special train. And they were all armed with machine guns—I mean, it was pretty brutal. Franklin: Right. Clark: But they just—so I’ve always felt safe. I mean. The Cold War was the Cold War, and Khrushchev taking off his shoe and beating it on the table was part of the rhetoric. Franklin: Right, right. Clark: They have kind of the same thing now. Franklin: In— Clark: [LAUGHTER] In our president. Franklin: Ah. Can you elaborate? In what way, like how— Clark: Well, he’s a little off the wall, kind of like Khrushchev is. Now, I like him; don’t get me wrong. But he’s a little off the wall. Franklin: Yeah, he can get a little—act a little quickly sometimes, maybe. Where—luckily, in the Cold War, clearer heads prevailed—clear heads prevailed. Clark: Right. Franklin: Because I guess that’s where they—I understand the physical security, spies and operatives wouldn’t come, but what about—I mean, much of the Cold War was ruled by the fear of—because most of the nukes were on ICBMs or in planes, so I’m wondering, what about that more existential fear that could’ve become real, of Hanford likely being a site in a nuclear war? Clark: Really didn’t cross my mind. I mean, I honestly would be more concerned right now, because of North Korea, than I was back in those days. There wasn’t really any great fear. Franklin: Right. Yeah, luckily their rocket technology isn’t as good as the Soviets’ is yet—now. They keep trying, though. Very much so. So you live in Richland. Did you go to Columbia High? Clark: Yes. Franklin: Now Richland High. Clark: Right. Franklin: So, proud Bomber. I’m wondering if you could—since you would’ve—you graduated in 1968, right, so you came of age in a very turbulent time in American culture. Clark: Mm-hmm. Franklin: I’m wondering if you could speak to any kind of civil rights action in the Tri-Cities and what you observed if anything— Clark: Not in Richland; in Pasco, yeah. During that timeframe, there was some riots. Pasco High School wasn’t exactly the safest—well, I shouldn’t say it wasn’t the safest place, but there was a lot of unrest. I mean, they kept their thumbs on it, but there was a lot of unrest. Franklin: And what kind of unrest? Clark: Oh, girls of different nationalities ganging together. But it really didn’t spill over into Richland. I’ve got good friends that are African Americans and there was several that—one in particular I went to school with, and then two years older, Fred Milton, who was a big, big black guy, a football player, was a good friend of my older brother’s, so he’d be over at the house all the time. Franklin: And this was in Richland. Clark: This was in Richland. But originally, the stories go, and I believe the stories to be true, there wasn’t any black people in Richland or especially in Kennewick. They were all Pasco. Franklin: Right, because Kennewick had had sundown laws that prohibited homeownership. But there were a few African Americans in Richland, though, right, because— Clark: There were, but not many. Not many. The guy that just passed away was a realtor for many years; I knew him well. Franklin: CJ Mitchell. Clark: CJ. His family was in Richland there. And you know, great family. I mean, it’s—so, yeah, we just—it never was really an issue during my time. Franklin: Sure, sure. Do you remember the JFK visit in 1963? Clark: I do! I was actually out there. Franklin: Were you? Clark: Yup. Franklin: Okay, I’m wondering if you could describe that. Clark: [LAUGHTER] That’s been many years ago. Franklin: Well, sure. Clark: As I recall, it was just hotter than hell. And somehow I went out—I can’t remember now even how, but we got to see him. Maybe it was a scout deal or cub scout deal or something, but, anyway, I was able to go out there and see him. At the time, it was a big deal. Franklin: What else do you remember about the event? Clark: Really not much of anything, other than it was hotter than heck and longer than—you know, when you get a president speaking and a couple of senators speaking, and they’ve all got to say everything they can say. Franklin: Right, also, I bet there’s a lot of lead-up to the actual event. What did your mother do? Clark: She worked. She retired at the public health department. Franklin: Okay, was that for Kadlec or for— Clark: No, for Benton and Franklin Counties. She wrote the checks. Franklin: Oh, okay. Clark: She was a bookkeeper of some type. So I’ve always had a good in with the folks there at the health department. You want your check? Approve this plat or you don’t get your paycheck. Obviously, she wouldn’t do that, but it was always a good story. Franklin: Yeah, I bet. Did she ever work any with Hanford or anybody out at Hanford? Clark: You know, I think she did very early on, but that really would’ve been in the, probably late ‘40s. Because I don’t think, you know, with four kids to raise—I know that she didn’t work after, you know, in my memory. Franklin: Did she ever go out to the Site with any of the reunions? Clark: Not to my knowledge. Franklin: Okay. Has she passed? Clark: Yes. Franklin: Okay. And so then after you graduated from Columbia-slash-Richland High, did you stay in the area, or--? Clark: Stayed in the area, actually bought a B house. Franklin: Oh. Clark: In ’70, I believe. Franklin: Really? At 20 years old. Clark: At 20 years old. And I sold it, I think, ’72 or ’73 and bought some other properties. Ended up moving to Kennewick for a while, and then ended up, in ’80, I think, I bought a house in Pasco. Franklin: Okay. Clark: So, where I currently am. Franklin: And so did you get bitten by the realtor bug early on then, or--? Clark: You know, when I bought my duplex in Richland, I paid $18.5k for it. And I don’t remember much about it. I was kind of doing odd jobs, and I worked for this realtor, Clair Groves, used to have Allied Brokers down the river shore. I said, Clair, if you ever find a house, a B duplex, I’m interested. So anyway, he called me one day, I found one, I looked at it, 18.5. Okay, how much down? $600. So I borrowed the 600 from my grandmother and bought it. And the only thing I really remember off the closing statement was how much money he made. Of course, I didn’t pay him; the seller did. But still. And I thought, that’s a pretty lucrative business; I can do that. So, yeah, so in ’72 I got a license to—and I’ve been in it ever since. Franklin: Ah, I see. So you’ve bought and sold property, then, all over the— Clark: All over the Tri-Cities. Franklin: You’ve sold, I assume, a fair number of old Alphabet Houses or prefabs. Clark: Yeah. Prefabs is—I’m working on one now that I own, and I’ve owned one or two others. But that’s it, because they’re a bearcat to—there’s no halfway fix. Franklin: Right. I live in a prefab. Clark: I know. But if you start remodeling it, there’s no going partway. You’ve really got to do it, do it all. Franklin: Oh, okay. Right. Well, they were really never—I mean, they were temporary housing. Clark: Oh, yeah. Flat roof, just like, an oven, I guess, the first couple years they were there, and then they put the peaked roofs on them. Yeah, they were built to last four years, five years. And a lot of them are still there, and a lot of them are excellent homes. Franklin: Yeah. Do you find you have a special affinity for Alphabet Homes? A connection? Are you keyed into that history at all? Clark: Yeah. No. Well, the market for As and Bs, and Cs, if you can find a C, and there’s another one, D, I think, that are duplexes. They’re almost not—they’re very hard to find, available. So, and the price has gone from, I paid $18.5 for mine, and I sold it for $26, I think. Now they’re about $175 to $200-plus depending on condition and what’s been done. Franklin: So you find they’re desirable, then? Is that what— Clark: Yeah. And extremely well-built. I mean, obviously, they’re getting old. Franklin: Yeah. Clark: But they used extremely good lumber. Because it was a war effort, and they came in. I mean, some of the duplexes actually had full basements that were all completely built that way. And then they found out that the contract said you don’t do that; you only do half-basements. So they went and filled them back in with dirt and put the wall in that was standard. So, yeah, it’s interesting. But they’re good solid properties. Franklin: Great. Clark: And there’s been a lot of money in Richland because of the price they paid for their real estate when they bought them in ’58, so they were paid off, you know, a few years. So people have been able to afford to upgrade them. So it’s hard to find one now that’s original. I mean, something’s been done to them over the years. Franklin: Oh sure, I mean, you’re talking— Clark: Human nature. Franklin: We’re talking about houses that are 70 years old or more, or around there. That’s pretty standard for—at least as far as the—you’re talking especially about insides, right, the guts of the house. Clark: Right. Franklin: Not so much the— Clark: Not so much the outside. Franklin: Well, and if you change the outside too much, then it’s not really the same house anymore. Clark: When I was a kid, probably 12, 12 or 13, my dad went in partners with a guy who bought, I think a half of one of the barracks out here at Hanford when the Army moved out, and then they were going to just tear them down. So we went out and tore it down. We got the lumber that we tore down, recycled it, and my dad built his big garage with it, and we put an addition out the back of the B house on his side. That was a lot of fun. Franklin: Interesting. That’s kind of neat. That’s also kind of historic, or interesting reuse operation, kind of combining this historic Army structure with—that’s very interesting. And that was done in the ‘60s? Clark: Yeah. Franklin: Yeah, that’s really cool. I do historic preservation, so it’s always kind of interesting to hear of good reuse projects like that. Clark: Right. Franklin: And the flavor, that’s great, too. So, being a graduate of Columbia and Richland High—at that time, you graduated, were they using the Bombers, the cloud imagery? Clark: Yes. Franklin: I’m wondering—that’s a very—I don’t know, loaded, or charged, symbol. Clark: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: I’m trying to find a way to phrase that properly. I think you get—I think you know what I’m getting at. I’m wondering, can I get your thoughts on that, on that particular symbol and that mascot? Clark: You know, it served us for many years. I guess I’m just an old redneck, but politically correct is—I mean, it’s just gone way overboard. I’ve got a very good friend of mine that just lost his wife a couple of weeks ago. And she was from Japan. She’d tell stories during the bombing and stuff that they’d take all the kids up and hide them in caves in Japan. But there wasn’t—there hasn’t been really any animosity between us and, like I say, her, she’s been a friend of mine for years. But there wasn’t any—so the bombs created a lot of death, yes. How many lives did it save? And the cost of invading Japan in human lives would’ve been—because those people would’ve fought to the last person. So the war got over, a lot of people didn’t die that could’ve died on both sides. So it was kind of like this, one of the necessities of war. Franklin: Hmm. I wonder, though, how—as that generation is—the World War II generation is almost gone. Clark: Right. Franklin: I’m wondering, how strong of a—how that connection will carry on as— Clark: You mean with the bomb logo? Franklin: You know there’s a generation now that is the grandchildren or great-grandchildren of that, who kind of come— Clark: You try to change it again, and you’re going to get those of us, and there’s a couple of people I can think of their names, that would just have a fit. And very vocal people. So, yeah, maybe another 30 years, when us old guys are all gone, too, maybe they’ll look back and say, well, let’s get rid of that. But it’s just like that R in ’67, that R that was placed up on the hill and that the school district in their infinite wisdom decided to remove without telling anybody. And people came up in arms about it. And now they’ve replaced it. Old school. Franklin: Cool. Is there anything that I—or, actually, no, sorry, second-to-last question. Clark: Okay. Franklin: What would you like future generations to know about growing up in Richland, living in Richland during the Cold War? Clark: You know, I have absolutely no complaints. It was still, then, pretty much a small town, extremely safe town. I mean, you’d be out at midnight, and nobody worried about any kind of violence going on. Or if you’re 17 years old and you got picked up with a six-pack of beer, the cops’d get you. Pour it out, and go home. I mean, it was just laidback, small town, everybody knew everybody. Which is a drawback, because it’s going, who are you taking out tonight? Well, I’m taking out--. Who are you taking out? Oh, yeah, I know her mom real well. Oh, good. That’s not what I wanted to hear. Franklin: That’s interesting. I hear that a lot. And it strikes me that that—the factors that underlie that seem to be that everyone—it was so safe and so secure because the government before ’58 had a very tight control over who lived in the town. But also it was a town of almost full employment and good employment and government employment. So there seems to be—in a town with all this safety and security and freedom, there was also this heavy government hand in some ways. Clark: You know, there, again, in ’58, I was eight years old. So I certainly wouldn’t have felt that. But, yeah, I mean, you couldn’t paint your house or anything that we’re just used to. I mean, you could have it painted; you could get somebody to come in—they’d send a crew of 12 to paint your house; it took them three weeks, you know? But, yeah, there again, I was awfully young to be able to—I probably wouldn’t have felt any of that. Franklin: Sure, sure. Clark: But growing up, like I say, it was—in a fairly wealthy town, from the standpoint that basically all the water and sewer, electricity, all of that stuff was, in essence, given to the city when it became private. So the people in the city didn’t have to pay for it. Now, obviously, we’re paying for it now because a lot of it’s getting old and they have to update the infrastructure. Franklin: Sure. Clark: But that wasn’t the way in the beginning. Because it was all basically in top shape and given to the city to say, here, operate it. Franklin: Right. I mean, they needed good facilities to get good people to come and stay. Yeah, that’s good— Clark: And I’m sure you’ve heard a lot of stories of people coming here and the first windstorm blew them back out of town. Franklin: Oh yeah, very much so. Yeah, it seems people that stayed were more often the exception than the rule in those early days. But that’s a good point, that Richland, when it incorporated, really had started off on a very good foot in terms of all that government investment really created Richland as this middle class, upper middle class city. In comparison to Kennewick and Pasco which had much different origins. Clark: Right. Franklin: And that, like you alluded to before, that might explain—not, you alluded; that you stated, that might explain some of that resentment. Clark: Potentially. Franklin: Potentially. Clark: I mean, they wouldn’t actually put a sign up on the front door saying no Richland people allowed. So it was— Franklin: Kind of subtext, kind of underneath the surface, when the Richland people were gone, they might be like, oh, those Richland people, again, you know? Clark: Well, there again, the wages weren’t top wages, but they were pretty close. They were good-paying jobs. And where most people, you know, I mean, your dad worked at Hanford. You can’t get fired from Hanford, or it’s extremely difficult to get fired from Hanford. You just showed up, did your job, and okay. It’s not the real world, I mean, people in Kennewick and Pasco didn’t have that. I mean, you only worked if you could make the boss money. And in this case, the boss was the people, the taxpayers. So it was kind of like, hey, you’ve got a job here forever. Franklin: Well, and the product was one of very high demand. Clark: Yes. Franklin: You know, at war there. Clark: Well, it’s basically, it’s been good for a lot of families. Franklin: Oh, yeah, very much so. Well, great, Glen, is there anything that we haven’t talked about that you’d like to mention? Clark: No, I think you’ve pretty well done a good job and kind of covered the bases. Franklin: Okay, well, great, thank you. Thank you so much. Clark: You betcha. Franklin: Okay. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:01:51 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317kbps Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Glen Clark Subject The topic of the resource White Bluffs (Wash.) Hanford (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Glen Clark grew up in the pre-Manhattan Project towns of Hanford and White Bluffs and later moved to Richland as his parents went to work at the Hanford Site. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 3/7/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Language A language of the resource English Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F0992948e0811e502f33a2bd348c050ec.JPG 5291abbce0561a907b2d7644e150dd77 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F6ec2237aa7c6afe662829d90aa1b99c5.mp4 8c4228f038926fb13821ea6d37770f4d Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Frank Cobb George Swan Location The location of the interview Home of Frank Cobb Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Frank Cobb and George Swan on August 28, 2018. The interview is being conducted at the house of Frank. I’ll be talking with Frank and George about their experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us, starting with Frank? Frank Cobb: Frank Cobb. F-R-A-N-K. C-O-B-B. Franklin: Great. George? George Swan: George Swan. G-E-O-R-G-E. S-W-A-N. Franklin: Great. When did you two start working together? Swan: Hmm. Was it in the late ‘70s? Cobb: No. Swan: Mid-‘70s? Cobb: I met you in 1980. Swan: Okay. Yeah, we started out where I had projects at the dams on the Columbia River with National Marine Fisheries working with the traveling screens that we put down in the turbine intakes. Frank came on and became one of my maintenance men, and we pretty much formed a team from there on. I was kind of like the junior lieutenant and he was a sergeant major under me. You know, we’re both old marines, so we tend to look at it in that respect. But basically, I was a biologist project leader, and Frank was head maintenance man, doing a lot of the fabrication and making stuff happen in the field so we could get the research projects done. Franklin: What types of research projects did you two do together? Swan: We did the traveling screen stuff at different dams. Putting the traveling screens down and they’re elevated to divert juvenile salmon and steelhead that are drawn in to the turbine intakes with the flow of the river, and then divert it up into gate wells. And then they find a bypass orifice that would draw them through into a bypass system. Takes them down and around the dam into a collection facility. And then they were collected and sorted and some of them were tagged for studies and so forth, and they were taken downstream below all the hydroelectric dams, so they didn’t have to go through any more of them, and release down there. And there were juvenile salmon and juvenile steelhead, primarily. Eventually—did you work with me on the radio, tracking stuff later on? Cobb: No. The first time he and I really worked together was after I got started diving, and we did a spawning survey in 1986. Swan: I was a fisheries research biologist, but also I had an extra duty as diving supervisor in the NOAA diving program for the National Marine Fisheries in the Inland Northwest area. Frank was interested, so I got him into it with me. I had learned to dive recreationally when I was in the Marine Corps many years before. I was not a military diver, but when I got out, when I was going to college, I fed myself off Puget Sound, collecting seafood and spearfishing and collected samples for the different researchers at University of Washington and the Seattle Marine Aquarium. Eventually got appointed as the diving supervisor for NMFS for different things we did underwater, projects. And a lot of it ended up being at the dams in the gate wells and around some of the structures. And then eventually when we got into this checking water withdrawals, pump intakes, all the way from little, small things, somebody plopped the line in to draw water out to water their lawn, up to big industrial and agriculture things. We had a project that ran for about three years, locating all these, finding out who owned and operated them, and inspecting them. The end-goal was to find out if there were fish protective facilities on those intakes that were protecting the juvenile fish that were migrating downstream, again, salmon and steelhead and other resident fishes. Let’s see. Guess that was about it. Then our director of coastal zone and estuary studies in Seattle, Wes Ebel, also a former marine—he was a diver, but he was getting up in years and also his responsibilities didn’t let him get in the field much anymore, but he was a diver in our program up until a certain point. One day out of the blue, he came to me, called me up, and said, get some people asking if we could do a deep water spawning survey in the Hanford Reach. Could you guys do it? And I said, hell, yes, we could do it. And he said, okay. See what you can put together. And I went out in the shop and talked to Frank about it, and I said, we can do this, can’t we? [LAUGHTER] And Frank said, we can do anything. So that’s how it took off. We started—I started researching the literature, finding out about other outfits that used underwater devices to run surveys or collections or different things. And we found that some guys used a sled, like we came up with, to evaluate the turtle excluder on some of the shrimp fisheries in the gulf. They were, you know, netting shrimp, but they were also getting a lot of sea turtles. And they wanted to figure out a way to keep the turtles from getting caught. So they had designed what they called a turtle excluder that would divert them out of there. And in order to—I mean, this is kind of a simplified version; they did a lot of other things, too, but—they used, when the shrimp boat was towing this thing, then it would be towed on this sled and they could actually underwater, you could kind of fly it around, and they’d film what was going on, and that’s how they were able to—instead of just putting it down, undetermined if it would catch any or not, they could start to look at what works best to try to divert the turtles from getting caught and that sort of thing. Cobb: Wasn’t the first one made out of a Stokes litter? A Navy Stokes litter? Swan: Yeah, they actually used Navy Stokes litters that they had onboard ship in World War II. You know, that were-- Cobb: With the wings on it. Franklin: You mean to carry, like a litter, to carry a body? Swan: Yeah, you’d lay a guy in it, and it was a tubing frame and then it had a wire basket that you’d lay the wounded person in. Well, they took two of those and built them into a framework. And then they came up with a diving plane so they could go up or down. So we took that and went a little further with the sled. Frank came up with the one that you’ll see after a while, here. When it was first built, the Plexiglas was clear, of course, and you could see out through it. Now it’s kind of yellowed from sunlight and all that, but it was like a windshield underwater. It would divert the flow over us. Otherwise, we had a tremendous—you had the current of the river coming. We didn’t tow into it when we did our survey; we went across current. So we were catching whatever the river flow was at that point, and having that—we started out with some small things, and then Frank kept coming up with some little bigger and better. You couldn’t go too much. If you get too carried away, it’d be like a bass plug wobbling down there, from the resistance on it. But he got it worked out pretty good, so it put the flow above and below and around the divers. Of course, we’re on scuba, and then we had a problem with, as we’d exhale bubbles, they’d get drawn in front of us, and it was full of bubbles for a while and you couldn’t see. So he came up with some slots that helped let some flow go through there and trained those bubbles and pulled them away from us. So then we had a clear line of vision. That’s kind of in a nutshell. I don’t know if I’ve missed anything or not. Those are the basic things that we worked together on and gradually ended up with a— Cobb: Yeah, as far as that sled, kind of the evolution? Like many things have been throughout history, somebody starts out with a design, somebody else modifies it for their purposes, and that’s kind of the evolution of it. Swan: Yeah, the actual original was just a diving plane, a board, that a diver with scuba gear on would hang on to. And he would just manoeuver that board and it could make himself go up and down being towed by a boat. Cobb: An underwater airplane. Swan: Yeah. And it just kind of grew. Different guys would get different ideas, you know, and expand on it. And that’s how we ended up with this. Cobb: You’ve heard that term, there’s no I in team? Franklin: Yeah. Cobb: That’s what all this was about. There’s no I; it’s we. Swan: Yeah. Franklin: Frank, how did you get started doing fabrication? Cobb: Well, I had a shop teacher in high school that taught me to weld. And then I went four years in the Marine Corps. And then I’ve always done fabrication work, whatever I could figure out to do. And then when I was in the same place he worked, I did a lot of fabrication down there. I never learned anything in school. I was hands-on. Swan: Frank actually fabricated a lot of the big test frames that we hung mats on and things, when we tested the traveling screens or did modifications to the screens. I mean, it was—all the way from little, small items to gigantic things that had to be handled with cranes to move it around and install it. Franklin: Wow. So, what was this 1986 spawning survey, deep water spawning survey, in the Hanford Reach, what was the goal of the project? What were you tasked with finding? Swan: Well, we were approached by the Corps of Engineers that had talked to the director I was mentioning, and knew that we had a dive team, and asked if we could do anything to determine if salmon were actually spawning deeper than they could see from the air. Because up until then, the way they did their counts of salmon spawning was they would fly in an airplane and look down. And when the salmon sweeps the sediment clear where they’re establishing a redd, or stirring up the gravel to lay their eggs and fertilize them—it’s called a redd, R-E-D-D. That’s the way they were determining the amount of spawning that was going on all up through the Hanford Reach. They would fly it once a week for a couple months, or it was usually, they’d start in September and, well, maybe even longer than that. They’d go, I’m pretty sure through November and maybe into December. But the Corps of Engineers had been approached by an organization in Wenatchee area that was trying to promote marketing their produce, like apples and fruit. And see if they could get barge traffic coming all the way up the Columbia to Wenatchee. There are no locks in those dams, so they couldn’t lock the barges through. But they had come up with the idea of a lift, like they have in Europe, I guess. In some of the dams where they would pull the barge in with a tug below the dam, and this cradle would come out, start raising it, and that barge would be disconnected from the tug, and they would lift the barge up to the top of the dam, over it, down into the fore bay. They’d have another tug there that would couple up and take it to the next one. The concern was those tugs and barges going up through the Hanford Reach in those spawning grounds, what effect was that going to have on the salmon spawning? So that’s where they came up with the request to see if we could put together a project to try to measure the spawning and that’s how we got into that. And when we began to use the sled, you know, you could go across the shallow water, which you could see from the air and you already knew they were spawning there. But then we’d start to go deeper, as we went across the river. And we in fact found, in some locations, based on the average main level of the flow in the reservoir, we found that salmon were actually spawning down to 32 feet or so, something like that. Franklin: What was the depth that the plane could view? Swan: The sled? Franklin: No, sorry, what was the depth—you said that before— Swan: Oh, the airplane? Franklin: That the airplane, yeah, how deep could the airplane reliably view to? Swan: I don’t know for sure; it’d depend on water clarity. But I would say on the average, probably ten to twelve, maybe 15 feet would be about max. Franklin: So you were able to go down about double. Swan: Yeah. Franklin: And did you find a lot of salmon spawning in the deep water? Swan: Yup. A lot. Cobb: Yeah, one year the return was like 100,000 of the upriver brights. Swan: Yeah. Franklin: Was that what researchers had expected to find? Or was it a surprise? Swan: I don’t think so, because, as I recall, the guy that was the project engineer for the Corps—[LAUGHTER] He wanted to—we were going to do another study the next year, but what we found out worked against him. And I think it was the Northwest Power Planning Council had approved the study with the Corps of Engineers’ funding. But when they found out how much spawning was going on, to what extent, they put the kibosh on the project right away. They said there’s no way we want barges and tugs running up through those spawning grounds. So, in a way, our success meant our demise. Because we would’ve liked to have done another year of study. But at the same time, they determined that there wasn’t any point in going on with it, because they could see right away it was not a desirable situation to ever try to let get started. Cobb: Between Priest Rapids Dam and just north of Richland is the last free-flowing part of the Columbia River. I think I’ve got that right. Franklin: Yup. Cobb: And that’s part of what people were interested in, not destroying that. Franklin: Right, known as, yeah, that section is, I believe, known as the Hanford Reach. Cobb: Yeah, basically the Hanford Reach, yeah. Franklin: So tell me about how you operated the sled. It’s a two-man sled, right? Cobb: Right. Franklin: And were you the driver as well as the fabricator? Cobb: Yeah, I mean, I usually was the one flying. Flying underwater in a denser medium. Swan: Yeah, we had guys who started to take over and pilot it, but Frank was primary—he was chief pilot, I guess you could say. Franklin: Chief pilot. And so it uses a rudder system. Each hand controls a different rudder, right? Cobb: Well, each wing—it can be individual, so—but at one point we were entertaining ourselves. We were doing barrel rolls. I’d put one wing, can go like this, do barrel rolls, flying upside-down. And, anyway, it was probably illegal to have that much fun making a living. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: And how would you be seated in the sled? Cobb: You’re laying down. Franklin: Laying down, okay. Swan: In the prone. Franklin: So one person is flying the sled and the other person is--? Swan: The observer. Or he would be—we had a button that if he passed over a redd on this, well, what we should probably—Each of our test sites, or sample sites, were, what, 2,000 feet, from upstream to downstream. We would start at the top, the boat would manoeuver across. We had markers set on the bank, and he would go all the way across. Once they were to the other side, then they would drop back 150 feet, and come back across to the other side. And we’d keep doing that until we finished the whole thing. Now, the boat had this towline with a sled on the end of it that was 150 feet. And attached to that towline, so that when the sled was down, just about above us was a float with a cluster of prisms, the reflector mirrors, that no matter what the position of it was, if a beam, a laser beam was sent from shore out to that cluster, it would reflect back. And they had a computer survey company that worked with us how to computer set up. As we would go across, the observer had this button, also had voice communication, but we kind of had a duplication in case our voice system went out. We had this button you could push, would send a signal to shore or vice versa. If the other failed, hopefully, between the two of them. And as the sled would go across, and the guy that was the observer would see a redd, he would just say, redd, and he’d punch the button. As he did that, there’s an antenna on that float that would trigger a signal to the shore, and this tracking device they had would instantly tch-tch, and it would log in the coordinates of where the redd was. And that’s on the maps I showed you, the little red dots? Franklin: Yup. Swan: That’s how they get logged in. Franklin: Oh, okay, okay. Swan: And that’s the basic nitty gritty of how we did this thing. Cobb: I think I gave you some stuff on paper that shows the sled and what he just described. Franklin: Yeah. Cobb: In other words, back in the old days, antique. Now there’s GPS, we could’ve done the same thing, but in today’s GPS. Franklin: Yeah, and we’ll digitize those materials and make them available with the interview for the viewer. So, Frank, you used the sled again to do another survey by N Reactor. Or, no, by one of the reactors, right? Cobb: We did. Basically, pretty much every place that George and I did the spawning survey, we’d punch into the bottom of the river, and we would extract groundwater samples and the target was hexavalent chromium. Now, what else was in those samples, I have no idea. I don’t think anybody wants us to know what we were exposed to. Franklin: Where did—who was leading this project to do the groundwater sampling? Cobb: It was a guy by the name of Steve Hope, and he worked for CH2M Hill, who at that time was basically contracted to Bechtel. I think at this point, CH2M Hill is independent of Bechtel. But Steve Hope was the biologist in charge of it. And there, again, it was relative to the salmon. The EPA and the Indians wanted to know. Franklin: How much hexavalent chromium was in the groundwater? Cobb: Right. Franklin: And what year was this? Cobb: Pardon me? Franklin: What year was this? Cobb: I think ’95 and part of ’96. Franklin: And so what did you find? What were the findings of that survey? Cobb: Well, I think I gave you some paperwork on that also. As far as numbers, I don’t—I don’t remember, and I never—that was not part of my job. So I didn’t—but the concentrations were higher than—I shouldn’t say this—higher than Battelle said it would be. Which they also said we couldn’t do it. But we did it anyway. Franklin: They said you couldn’t do the groundwater survey? Cobb: They said we were not capable of doing it. Franklin: Why is that? Cobb: Well, for one thing, they were questioning our qualifications as divers. Steve Hope had been a Navy diver. I was certified with NOAA’s dive program and two others. But they never bothered to find out we were getting ready to embarrass them, because they said they had told DOE, I believe, that it couldn’t be done because of the high flows. Anyway, a guy came to me, wanted to know if we could do it, and I told him the same thing I told George: you can do anything. Shortest route to failure is do not try. Franklin: Mm-hmm. Was the same kind of—were you also the pilot in that? Cobb: Yes. Franklin: That’s right, and was it the same type of work and same areas, in fact, that you had done--? Cobb: Well, basically, most of the same areas that we did the spawning survey was the same place we did the groundwater sampling, the same areas. Not quite as many as we did in the spawning survey, but basically the same geographical locations. Swan: He drove pipes into the substrate to collect the groundwater, right? Cobb: Yeah, we’d drive those in and then we would purge out the actual river water, with syringes. I think you’ve got pictures of those. And then we would take three samples and they would go to, I think, three independent labs for analysis. Franklin: I imagine that must be—I mean, the flow of the river in that area is pretty fast. How did you keep everything steady enough to take these kind of samples? What was that experience like, being in the river in the sled? Cobb: Well, there again, like with the thing in ’95, ’96, we’d anchor the boat, and then we would park on the bottom and keep the wings down real low, just tight to the bottom. And then the guy beside me was the one that would—basically it was a concrete chipping hammer, gear-operated, to punch in. And then had a long enough anchor you could drop back there again and transit so far back. And then you have to pull the anchor and go and then re-anchor and do the same thing. I forget how many hundreds of feet on the anchor we had. Anyway, they said, can you? And we said yeah. Swan: They were able to stay in place long enough that they drove those pipes down deep enough that they could sample the groundwater after sucking all—purging all that river water out of there so they could get valid samples of the groundwater coming in. And that’s basically what had been said that they couldn’t do because there was too much flow; you’ll never be able to do anything. And they were able to accomplish it that way. Franklin: Wow. Cobb: One of the sayings I love, and I told several of them out there, people a whole lot smarter than I am, I told them, do not limit me by your limitations. Just because you cannot do it does not mean I can’t do it. Franklin: Um. Cobb: That’s one of those shut-up-Frank deals? Franklin: No, no, no, no, no. I just—you did it, so there’s nothing else to say about that. The work was done. So did you use the sled in any other surveys? Cobb: Oh. Let’s see. No, actually, anything that amounted to actual projects, no, I don’t believe so. Swan: The original sled, when we were all done with the spawning survey, and eventually they disbanded our diving group, said we’d outlived our usefulness, and they could call Rent-a-Diver if they needed divers—this is our fisheries outfit. So we kind of pfft, dissolved. And I had all this gear and so I passed it onto other diving units that were still active. And a guy who was up in Alaska got the sled. The last I heard, he was going to use it up there for trying to do studies on king crab. I guess king crab, when they spawn at night or something, they have a behavior of coming together—or maybe it’s the juvenile ones, I’m not sure. But they form into a big ball for protection. And then come, I guess, daylight or whatever, or a certain time, they’ll disperse. Anyway, he was doing a study on something about that, and I don’t know anymore than that for details, but— Franklin: So then, is this sled the same one that was used on the surveys? Swan: No. Franklin: No, okay, so what is the provenance of this sled? Cobb: Well, when I—I was 40 years old when I went to work for the fisheries and I was too old to learn to work for the government. So I went back to shoeing horses full-time, and I built the sled strictly on speculation, thinking someday somebody would want me to do another project. Somebody heard about it and Steve Hope came to me, and I’d already basically had that mostly built. And he told me what they wanted us to do. So then I finished it. Franklin: Okay, so that sled was used in the hexavalent chromium survey. Cobb: Correct. Franklin: And is it safe to say, is it pretty much a copy of the sled that was used in the fish--? Swan: An improved copy? Franklin: An improved copy? Cobb: It is basically—well, slightly improved, but mostly just slightly modified. Franklin: And what were the modifications between the two projects? Cobb: Between the two? Well, I made the wings a little bit more surface on them, and then where the divers lay, I made that where you can reach down—basically, it is very little different than the one that George and I used. Franklin: So how—when you were done with the hexavalent chromium, was the sled just not needed? How did it end up back with you? Cobb: Oh, it belonged to me. Franklin: Oh, so you supplied it to the— Swan: He was a private contractor at that point. Cobb: I was a private contractor. In fact, when I told them how much I wanted, they didn’t want to pay it. So they started calling diving companies. All the diving companies says, say what? There is no such thing as that. That does not exist. Nobody knows—there’s still nothing. It does not exist. So, then, they kept coming back to me. I’d be out shoeing horses, and they would keep calling me on the phone, trying to beat me down on the price. And I told them, no. That’s what I want. So that made me a sole source. So then they finally agreed. And I made them put a cancellation clause in it. And of course that was Bechtel, and they said, well, we can’t do that. And I said, well, then I can’t do that, either. Because I knew what they were going to do. As soon as we satisfied the Indians and EPA, they would cancel the rest of the contract. Which they ended up doing. And then they ended up owing me the $46,000. And I had to go to war to even get that. But anyway. I had heard enough about how Bechtel does business. And they figure they’re the only ones in town to make nay money, and us little dumb guys, we’re supposed to work for nothing. Anyway. Franklin: That’s great. So is there anything else you guys would like to say about either survey, or the sled? Cobb: Not me, really. Other than that I had an awful lot of fun doing it. Franklin: It sounds like a lot of fun. Cobb: It was for me. Swan: The only thing I can think of is, that spawning survey we did, I thought we accomplished something highly unique, and so did a lot of other people. The thing that kind of irked me was, my higher-ups just, like, oh, shit, you guys are just having fun, you know, no big deal. But we got more accolades out of other agencies that were amazed by what and how we did it. I even gave a presentation at Scripps and a couple of different research divers’ conferences, and they were blown away by what we had accomplished. We had Dr. Don Chapman that did a whole bunch of work on the Vernita Bar early, salmon spawning stuff. He came and— Cobb: [LAUGHTER] Swan: I think he was a little skeptical about what we were doing. And so he was up in years then, but he was still diving. So we said, well, you want to go for a ride on the sled? Yeah, I would. So, he went with Frank. I’ll let Frank tell you about that. Cobb: Oh, anyway, we were about the highest flow—our flow meters topped out at ten meters per second, and I don’t know what the flow was there, but the sled was just kind of bouncing around. It was kind of like a gusting wind. So he went across with me, and that was one of the wider places. So we got back over and dropped back, and I said, well, Dr. Chapman, you want to take another ride with me? Anyway, I won’t say the words he said. He said, no! Let me off of this thing! And then I did some diving for him later. That’s another subject. He hired me to do some more diving for him, after meeting him in that particular environment, anyway. Swan: Anyway, a nutshell, to finish up that thing, is, I had some people approach me, and they said, how come we haven’t heard more about this? And I said, I don’t know. My higher-ups didn’t seem to be too impressed with it, you know? Well, a guy in Great Britain got ahold of me and wanted me to come over there and give a presentation on it. He was instrumental in a journal over there called Regulated Rivers. So, we published the paper in it. It’s back in mid-, late-‘80s. It’s “Spawning surveys in a regulated river,” or something like that. I don’t remember the title; it’s been 20-something years. Franklin: Sure. Swan: Anyway, it’s in a journal called Regulated Rivers out of Great Britain, and it gives a real good nutshell of that whole spawning survey project. Cobb: But, yeah—oh, go ahead. Swan: To me, that was kind of, okay, somebody finally paid attention and we got some recognition out of it. Which is what I kind of appreciate you guys doing this. Because, hell, we thought everybody’d just forgot about everything we did, you know? At least you guys are going to try to get recorded so that down the line when we’re long gone, somebody’ll say, jeez, those crazy guys did that! Cobb: The only thing, last thing I got to say is, I’m still very happy that they did not go up to the free-flowing part with dredges for barges and it’s still basically the way we left it. Swan: Yeah. Franklin: Yeah, that is definitely a major accomplishment. Cobb: I’m glad I was instrumental in them not doing that. Swan: I will never forget sitting there in that meeting. We were just there, not to present anything, but just to see what went on. And the guy who was the project leader with the Corps of Engineers who had contracted us to do the diving project—There was a lady on the power planning council there—and I don’t even remember his name, it’s been so long ago. But she listened to the presentation and everything. And then they had a break, and they got together and discussed it and they came back. And she pretty much said, Mister whatever-his-name-was, how is the best way to expedite your demise with this program, or something, in so many words. In other words, she said—no more. We kind of went, phew. And he just went livid. And I don’t know what happened to that guy. Last I heard, he had disappeared. He couldn’t deal with it. But I thought, well, we did our part, and we showed you, you know? And that’s what you asked us for, so. Franklin: Yeah, no, that’s great. I mean, without that, if barges and dredges were up, it wouldn’t be the Hanford Reach anymore, and it might not be a national monument. That’s really one of the great national—ecological treasures of this whole area. Swan: So I guess without really making a big deal out of it, Frank and I can feel like we were instrumental in helping preserve the Hanford Reach. Franklin: Yeah. Cobb: I’m just glad I didn’t get arrested for having too much fun. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right! Well, I told you guys, we do—part of the tours that the national park offers is this pre-Manhattan Project tour where we go to these former sites: Bruggemann warehouse, and the Allard pump house at Coyote Rapids, and the White Bluffs ferry landing. Now they’re very peaceful and you can get a sense of the history there, and if there were barges coming up through there— Swan: Yup. Cobb: Oh, yeah. Franklin: I mean, it would totally change the entire character of the tour. It would just be jarring. Swan: And they would have to dredge those channels and then repeatedly keep them cleared so that would have a hell of an effect all the way up through there. It would also probably affect the flows that would come out of the dams upstream in order to keep enough water for the barges to keep going. So it would’ve affected it tremendously if they’d ever approved it. Franklin: Well, great. Well, Frank, and George, thank you so much for taking the time to talk about these surveys and your guys’ work, having fun in the river, diving around. I’m very—I’m jealous of— Cobb: I’ve run that whole river clear, all the way. I know that river. I know where to stay out of trouble. And everybody used to tell us, you can’t run that river with a prop boat; you’ve got to have a jet boat. Swan: Oh, yeah, that’s something we ought to make a point of. We did that whole thing with an inboard-outboard, and we only dinged one prop, and it was just a goof, you know, loading the boat or something. We did that whole thing and never destroyed one propeller. And they kept telling us, you’ve got to do that with a jet boat. Well, the inboard-outboard seemed to work for our purposes better, so. Franklin: What would be the reason for the jet boat versus the— Swan: Oh, we wouldn’t have a propeller down there to catch the bottom, you know, and you could run in shallow areas. Now, later I did get a jet boat when we were doing our—more of the water withdrawal stuff and that worked out pretty good. But the other problems you run through those milfoil areas and if you don’t zip right through, you’ll suck it full and it’ll pug the intake and you’ve got to go underneath and rake all that crap out. Cobb: And then on top of that, one of the boats—I kept telling them to stay out of those shallow places. So they suck rocks up the propeller. I kept telling them, don’t do that! Twice they did it. Swan: Yeah— Cobb: And I’ve run that whole thing up, prop boat— Swan: Suck the gravel up there, it’ll just chew the propeller up. Cobb: Well, it’ll jam the propeller up, and then if you don’t have an outboard to get you back home— Swan: Yeah, you’d better have an outboard on the set like a trawling motor for fishing. Cobb: I do not want a jet boat. They take at least two or three times as much fuel, and I can go any place I want to go with a prop boat. You just got to know how to read the river. If you don’t know how to read the river, a jet boat will get you in trouble. Franklin: Yeah. Cobb: Anyway, shut up, Frank. Franklin: Nope! No, you’re good. Well, thanks a lot, guys. I think we’ll now switch to getting some shots of the long-awaited sled. [VIDEO CUTS] Cobb: [INAUDIBLE]--and they tried to use it and it scared them to death. And they called me up, wanting me to train them— [VIDEO CUTS] Franklin: We’ll get a couple more pictures while it’s all nice and up on these sawhorses. So you still do horse shoeing? Cobb: Oh, yeah. Franklin: Yeah. Until you’re 80, right? Cobb: No, not me. [INAUDIBLE] Franklin: Oh, okay. Cobb: I’m a young guy. Franklin: I mean until you’re 80. Cobb: My brother—[INAUDIBLE] [VIDEO CUTS] Franklin: Yeah, I understand that. I agree with that. Cobb: [INAUDIBLE] [VIDEO CUTS] Cobb: [INAUDIBLE] people to take care of them. Franklin: Makes sense. Cobb: We’d do the barrel roll one direction, and then the other way of course, and then I’d do upside-down. And the flow, if it was high enough flow, you didn’t even have a tendency to fall out. Franklin: So the flow was kind of keeping you— Cobb: Oh, yeah. Franklin: Wow. Cobb: And then you had— [VIDEO CUTS] Tom Hungate: How it connected, you had a cable, I presume, to the boat? You said that was 150 feet or so? Cobb: [INAUBDILBE] Attached through here, and it was attached to the boat. And the flow, the faster the flow was, that’s what gave you the maneuverability. Franklin: And so then it’s the driver, pilot, on the left here, right? And then the surveyor, researcher, here on the right. Cobb: Correct. [INAUDIBLE] primitive. You want to fly it sideways, you went along like this. If you wanted to do barrel rolls. Side down, and then come back up, like this. Anyway, it’s very maneuverable, if you have enough flow. If the flow is too slow it’s real sluggish. Franklin: Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. But I guess that’s where it’s really kind of made for the Hanford Reach, right? Cobb: Right. Franklin: Because the flow there is fast enough for you to have real maneuverability. Cobb: Right. Franklin: Right? Cobb: I always wanted to fly an airplane. [VIDEO CUTS] Cobb: [INAUDIBLE]—as far as the wings. [INAUDIBLE] experimentation. Franklin: To kind of stabilize the back of it? Cobb: Yeah. Franklin: Yeah. Wow. [VIDEO CUTS] Cobb: Isn’t it nice and [INAUDIBLE[? Franklin: Yeah, it’s really not that—I mean it’s easy enough for two people can— Cobb: Well, when we were deploying it on and off, I had a set of runners, and this wasn’t on it. That was back in the front. And that was sitting down low on the water, and the flow slid up good, and that winch would float it up onto the boat. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:51:48 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317kbps Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Frank Cobb and George Swan Subject The topic of the resource Columbia River Salmon Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Frank Cobb constructed the "Redd Sled" to survey the salmon redd's of the Columbia River and to perform underwater water sampling near Hanford Reactors. George Swan worked for the Army Corps of Engineers and oversaw the salmon monitoring program where the Redd Sled was first created. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 8/28/2018 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. 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This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F4a35f372f4b52570ee849e45d2d5926a.JPG cffa87237eafbc5227c6dc8eb9c913cc https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fd244e6972247b281ea3b84e454b5d96e.mp4 67e666aad21ba00e26e7fb583d01d4b9 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed David Criswell Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an interview—an oral history interview with Dave Criswell on July 20, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Dave Criswell about his experiences growing up in the Tri-Cities and working at the Hanford Site. So, Dave, the best place to start, I think, is the beginning. Where—why don’t you tell me when and where you were born. David Criswell: Born in Portland, Oregon. [SIGH] I guess there’s nothing wrong with 1937. We moved to the Tri-Cities the first time, Dad and I drove up here after midnight, January 1st, 1948. We only lived in Pasco for all of ’48 and part of ’49, and then we moved up to Hungry Horse, Montana. We returned here in spring/summer of 1953. I entered Pasco High School as a junior. The school was brand new that year. They’d just opened the doors for us. So I graduated in 1955. I don’t recall how I ended up being selected as part of a program to become an engineering assistant, was the program, in 1955. They were conducting night classes that we had to take. At the same time, during the day, we would work in the labs out at Hanford in different labs. I started off, because I wasn’t 18 yet—my birthday didn’t come until October; I got hired in September. So 17-year-olds couldn’t work on the Hanford Project. So, Richland, being a government town, and DOE ran everything, including the city library, there was myself and a couple, three other 17-year-olds went to work in the library until we were old enough. And then we were assigned to labs out at Hanford. I was assigned to a chemistry lab in 325 Building. We were separating radioisotopes, from I know not where, to see how efficient the process was that they were using for separation out there. I can’t even remember the names of some of the materials that we were separating. The one that I can remember is ruthenium, I think it was. But day in, day out, taking samples and running them, cooking them down, putting them on filter papers, and then that would go to a lab for reading. Some point in time within first year or so I worked, I was transferred out to 222-S, another chemistry lab, doing the same thing. I suspect that maybe whatever I was running the analysis on was a little fresher than the stuff we had in 325 Building. It must’ve come from right there in the 200 Area. But the same thing. The only thing that—real memory that I had was when I graduated from high school, I wasn’t—I didn’t have—I wasn’t as tall as I am now. I graduated at 5’7.5”. Franklin: Wow. Criswell: And weighed 135 pounds. Went to work out there in September of that same year, ’55, and I was 6’0” and weighed 135. Tired. Man, I was tired. I don’t even know if I ate when I got home, I was so tired. Going to bed was the most interesting thing I had. But at some point in time, in the period of time that I was working at 222-S, apparently had another growth spurt. Because every day you could drive out to the gate of 2-West and then you go through the badge house. And you would then climb on a bus that would take you to whatever events inside of 200 West you were going to. We were going to S, so that’s where we went. And one day, I got off the bus and something knocked me to my knees, and I fell out of the bus. I brought a box with me, and in that is a report that said that they thought maybe I was inattentive, that I had hit my head on the bus, and fallen on the ground. Well, it didn’t dawn on me until years later, maybe even when I read that doggone memo, that the reason I hit my head is I’d had a growth spurt, and all of the sudden I was too tall to go through that bus door without hitting my head. Co-worker said I didn’t throw a shadow on a sunny day, I was so skinny. And ended up being about 6’4” at some point in time early on. Uh— Franklin: Oh, sorry. Criswell: I could not get a hang of chemistry. The night school was difficult for me. I hired a tutor to try and help me; I still couldn’t get the hang of it. They determined I probably wasn’t going to work out in a chemistry lab. And they transferred me into tech informations in 300 Area. If you’re not familiar with that old building, that was the one just inside the south gate of the 300 Area on the west side of the road. That had the plant’s library; across the hall, it had the security files. Documents were stored over there. I didn’t have anything to do with that. Basically, I was putting books on a shelf. I also had the job of traveling all over Hanford. When somebody would have a safety meeting, they would occasionally call us and ask us to bring a film that they had heard about, or asked if we had a film that they hadn’t seen. So, I traveled all over. Franklin: So kind of like a AV, audio-visual, tech? Criswell: Yeah, that’s exactly what it was. Only, I was using 16-milimeter projector. Old-fashioned stuff. I don’t even know if you could find one of them today. Franklin: Oh, we actually—our declassified—not declassifying, but getting ready for public release, some of the materials in the Hanford Collection, and we had to purchase a 16-milimeter projector to view some of the old movies. Which could possibly be some of the old movies that you showed. There’s some about safety, and there’s some of the promotional ones produced for Hanford. Criswell: We had some Walt Disney flicks. We had one that—Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. I think that was The Ventriloquist. Franklin: So, wait, so, these weren’t—these were like movies and shows? Criswell: Some of them were. They were movies. They dealt with safety things. Franklin: Oh, okay. Criswell: They dealt with security, with reinforcing the security, you know, you can’t do this, you can’t do that. I learned early on in the early days if the film broke, I had to take it downtown to a little Quonset hut behind the old Federal Building and they had plant photographers down there. There was a photographer down there that knew how to splice the films. Anyhow, they determined if I was going to keep coming down there, that I needed to have the equipment to repair those things and keep the stuff going and they wouldn’t have me running downtown all the time. So I ended up learning how to do that and take care of my own films. I did that for a couple, about two-and-a-half years. And someplace about 1958 I guess, I ended up being offered a job. I had a coworker that he was married, he had kids, and both of us were offered the job. I wasn’t—I didn’t have the expenses he had. And I told our manager—we were both in there at the same time—told our manager that he had to take a job, and I could wait for the next one that came along. And he said, no, you don’t understand; there’s two jobs. The metallography lab needs a tech in 326 Building and they also need a tech down in 306 Building. So both of us got a job about the same time, transferred out. The other tech’s name was somebody by the name of Ray Beauchamp. And he ended up, a lot of his photography work in metallography ended up being in national competition. And he won a number of awards. He also had the privilege of polishing moon rocks that came back from one of the moon trips. I think that’s probably on display out at one of the Battelle buildings out there, even today, I would guess it’s still there. But he had a lot of notoriety. And I worked inside the fence. I was working on materials that were of nuclear nature before they went into the reactor. And then you end up with things being even more irradiated; you had higher dose rates on the stuff that came out. The work that I did in the lab in 306 Building was to see what the material looked like before it went in the reactor. It was a base study, basically. And then when they came out of the reactor, they took it to another facility in the 300 Area called 327 Building, Radio Met—radio metallography. And they cut up the slugs that they got out of the reactor and they looked at the integrity of the cladding on the different types of slugs they were getting out of there. They’d section them, pass the sections into the next cell. They’d sand on them, pass them into the next cell. They’d sand them down even more, ultimately getting a mirror finish polish on them, then they could put them onto the cell that the metallographs, old photograph metallographs. The technicians that worked over there, I was amazed at what they were able to do with everything that was being handled by manipulators inside of two feet of them, or four feet. I don’t know how thick those walls were, but it was amazing what they could do. I was doing the same thing, hands-on. It took me a while to learn how to put a polish on there that I could photograph without having scratches. [LAUGHTER] That was the secret. You also couldn’t round it off; you had to have it essentially flat. The higher the magnification goes, the flatter it has to be; otherwise, you don’t get very much in focus. So I worked there until, let’s see, I guess that would’ve been August of 1961. I took a vacation and I took a honeymoon at the same point in time, and when I came back, I had a new job. That job just kind of morphed into the job I retired from. It was a materials testing facility down in the 314 Building. Again, in the material that we were using there, it was all cold, new materials that they were going to be using in reactors. Their concern was, how far could a crack grow before it became critical and it went full-length? If this happened, then, essentially the reactor was done, you know. So they wanted to know how big a crack could it grow before—and the water would then be coming out, how much water would they lose before they could determine that they had to shut it down, pull that part out, replace it? They wanted to know what kind of a warning sign they were going to get. Franklin: And this was for the fuel slug that would go in? Criswell: No, because you’re not running water through the fuel slug, per se. It’s not going to leak. You’re talking about process tubes. Franklin: Oh, okay. Criswell: Probably the first—I don’t know if we did anything on the K Reactor; I think that was in another facility. I didn’t have anything to do with that. I know there was another facility that was testing graphite. But K Reactor and N Reactor, those two had process tubes that they put the slugs into. They were both water-cooled. Franklin: Okay. Criswell: So they wanted to know if they were going to be able to determine when things were getting anywhere near the critical point, and they could shut it down, pull the process tube, and then start it up again. We also developed inspection probes for the reactor in 300 Area, what they referred to as PRTR. Let’s see, Plutonium Recycling Test Reactor. And here, again, they wanted to know from our inspections, what we could determine as far as wear and tear on the process tubes. So, we were actually sitting right on the faceplate of the reactor, with the access port open, running our inspection probes down. One had a camera that took 16-millimeter images of what we determined was down there. And the other one was an inspection probe that sensed the space between the process tube and another tube. And I didn’t really understand all of the process in PRTR. Anyhow, at that point in time, my wife and I had at least one child, and I don’t remember exactly what the date was, but I came to work on a Monday morning and was told to report to PRTR. I was amongst the first that they suited up. Over the weekend, a test that had been in the reactor failed. And in turn, that test caused damage to the two tubes that the test was inside of. Damaged those, and water was released and it went right down into the very lowest level of that reactor, the bottom shield. And they dressed us up, put all kinds of monitoring equipment on us. Anyhow, went through what looked almost a porthole in a sub, and it was only probably about four feet high, to go through. Gave us a mop and a bucket and told us, one at a time, we were in there mopping up as much as we could in 20 seconds, and we had to be out of there. I have no idea to date what my dose was on that. Anyhow, I spent two more days over there, but never went back down there. They determined we had too much dose and we were sent back to our labs. That was the end of PRTR. They never did bring that thing back up for operation again, as far as I know. Franklin: How long did it operate, do you know? Criswell: I got married in August of ’61. And got a letter from President Kennedy in October of ’61. Had to report to Fort Lewis the day after Thanksgiving in ’61. I got out in August 1st of ’62. Reported back to Hanford, and when I got back there, we were building the inspection probes to inspect. So, I don’t know if PRTR was operating at that point in time. It might’ve been close to that point in time. And anyhow we finished it up, and we probably spent maybe three or four outages where they’d—every time they’d have an outage where they’d pull fuels out or do something or whatever, then they’d give us two or three days to go in and inspect. It was twelve on, twelve off for us, for the techs. And they had the top shield had two rings that they could rotate. By rotation of the two rings, they could get us to the center and to the outer of all the process tubes. The inner ring would actually rotate and go all the way to the outside and all the way to the inside. The outer ring would rotate around, so they could—they’d set it up for us and they’d have the thing open for us when we got there, and we’d just start running stuff. Anyhow. Franklin: What did you go to Fort Lewis to do? Criswell: In 1961, Jack Kennedy was having problems with Russia and the Cubans. We were also involved in the Vietnam War at that point in time. My service dates include the Vietnam process, but I had nothing to do with that. We didn’t really know what the heck was going on. There was more secret over there that, what was going on, that we just didn’t understand. One of the strange things was that I got assigned to an amphibious truck outfit out of California. Know what the DUKW is, it’s a floating deuce-and-a-half truck. You can sink it with an M-1. Just fire at the waterline, it’s going to sink. [LAUGHTER] When I got over there, the day after Thanksgiving, there was nobody there to receive us; we spent Friday, Saturday, Sunday sitting around in a bunkhouse, essentially, waiting for somebody to show up. Finally, Monday, we started getting processed. But the strange thing was, after things got up and operational—I was the only one that had ever worked at Hanford. They gave me the job of explaining how to avoid radiation. I found it really strange. Here I am, a Spec/2, an E4, and I’m giving a lecture on how to avoid radiation. Basically, if you’d double your distance from your source, you divide the radiation exposure by four. That was a real handy thing, if you just get yourself as far away as you can in the shortest period of time. That was the message we had to give everybody. Our company was picking up duffel bags and equipment from other companies that had been brought in. We were loading them onto a MATS aircraft over at McChord Air Force Base, loading a great big aircraft with all kinds of stuff. Anyhow, we never saw the troops get on them when we were loading their material. Strange thing was, in July of ’62, we were told we’d be going home August 1st. And no explanation. Nothing. We still didn’t know why we were there, outside of we were loading troops onto airplanes to go to Berlin. Anyhow, much later, I had a friend who was a mess sergeant, and at that point in time, he worked—when he wasn’t in the military, he worked as a tech for Bell Telephone. He quit that job and he went to a company, Collins Electronics, down in Texas. Next thing I know, he’s in Vietnam installing new avionics in military aircraft. And I found out later, he was all over the world installing new communication electronics. Ultimately, he’s got plaques on his walls referring to him as Colonel—I’ll stop the last name—Colonel. Anyhow, he told me, good grief, that had to have been in ’71, ’72, nine, ten years later. He said, do you know what you were over there for? I said, no, not really. Basically what it was is the Russians had been in the habit of rotating a division into East Berlin, or East Germany, and the old one would go home. In ’61, they rotated a second—no, good grief, mind block—rotated another group in there and didn’t send one home. So now they got two. At the same time, the Russians are moving missiles into Cuba. Jack Kennedy, if he was still alive, you wouldn’t want to play poker against the man. What I found out, and I don’t know what the date was, but I have in the past ten years, I have seen confirmation of what I was told about three different times, different people. Some of them were military talking to our news people. But Jack Kennedy, I think it’s a little jet, I think it’s a B-47, a little—actually two pod jets hanging from the wing, small jet engines hanging from the wing. They got one sitting in the tarmac in front of Boeing Museum of Flight in Seattle. We had well over a thousand of those things. The term I was told was thousands. You can see pictures of those things lined up in the desert down in Arizona. They’re waiting to become beer cans. Jack Kennedy ordered all those things loaded up and he sent them all to Russia. I may be in trouble for this, but it’s a story that not very many people have heard. But it’s true. It happened. He sent them all up. Plus, they knew that all of our subs, basically, they didn’t know exactly where they were, but they knew we had them, they knew the numbers. And they knew that our missiles were capable of making the trip. They could actually see all of the jets headed there. They knew they could take out a lot of them, but they knew they couldn’t take all of them out. They knew they were going to get hit, and they were going to get hit hard. The Russian leadership blinked. They got on the phone and they called Kennedy and they told him, you turn those planes around. Turn them around now, and we’ll pull out of Cuba. We’ll take the division out of Germany. Things will go back to the way they were. And they did. And August 1st, we went home. But never a word as to why we were there; never a word as to what the heck was happening when they released those planes. I didn’t know why I was asked to tell people how to avoid radiation. Didn’t have a clue. So, came home, went back to work, and same organization, group, I was with when I left. That was still GE. I was still with GE. Franklin: So were you—when you got pulled to Lewis, were you in the Guard? Criswell: No, I was active Army. Franklin: Oh, you were active Army. Criswell: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. But the whole time you were active Army you were stationed at— Criswell: I could’ve been there until August 1st or if the Russians didn’t call Kennedy, I probably wasn’t coming home. Franklin: Right. Had you—so were you in the Army before you got called up to— Criswell: Yeah, I’d spent six years in National Guard. Franklin: Okay, all right. Criswell: Pasco National Guard. Franklin: Okay. Criswell: When my six years were up, which was probably about April of ’61—I think someone was unhappy with me leaving, and they put my name in there. Strange thing is, at the point that I got released from the Pasco National Guard, they were an amphibious truck outfit. So my MOS was a key personnel as a filler for an amphibious truck company from California. It made sense why I ended up there. I mean, quotation marks around my name. It had to stand out, you know? I don’t know how many of us there were nationally. I don’t think there were that many of us. I think there was truck drivers that were pulled in to help fill, mechanics to help in the shop, what-have-you. I was one of the few people that came in, I think, that knew anything about an amphibious truck. You know, how you have to take care of it and what-have-you. It was interesting time, but I’m glad, maybe, they didn’t tell us what the heck was going on, because then, you know, I think it would’ve put a whole new light on why we were there, and something for us to really worry about, I think. They basically kept us like a bunch of mushrooms. [LAUGHTER] So definitely kept us in the dark. But anyhow, once back here, went back to work for the same company, the same actual group. They had developed or were in the process of putting together the probes to inspect the reactors. That just morphed into all kinds of different things over the years. One of the engineers that came to work, he was new, he was hired from Boeing, he was interested in fatigue cycling. Franklin: What is that? Criswell: Cycling is, there’s thermal cycling—the reactor heats up, it cools off when they shut it down for a period, heats up, cools down, and you’re talking about a lot of heat. You’ve got mechanical cycling where you have load changes. Everything that’s built probably has a fatigue starter in it someplace. Either something in the manufacturing, in a casting, in the machining. Things happen when you’re making parts. They wanted here, again, to see how long—we actually put together a system where we were fatiguing process tubes that had a little slot machine partway through it. Then we had to put endcaps on it. Then we had to pressure cycle each thing. Something like the reactor. You got water pressure going through there, and then they shut it down. We were doing this cold. And ultimately, the crack would grow. And the first problem we ran into is the crack was growing, but then it was leaking. The crack didn’t go all the way through, initially, but once it got growing, it went all the way through. So we were having oil squirting out every which way, on this end was oil. And we could pressure to, I think, 2,000 psi is what this machine could do. We weren’t getting that high. So we had to come up with a way of keeping it from—keeping the oil. So we figured out a way to patch the inside of it with a thin piece of material, yet it was flexible enough that it wouldn’t hurt the integrity of the load cycling. Ultimately, we figured out how to make this thing grow until it blew. And then, I mean, you had gallons of oil all over. After the first one, where it was just squirting like that, then we have to have it turned toward the measuring device which is optical. When it blew, I’m on one side of what we’re doing, and the engineers are on the other side. Anyhow, they didn’t know how to turn the thing off. It had a second part to the system that would replenish the oil that it was losing to expansion. It was an air-operated pump that would just put more fluid in there. Anyhow, they couldn’t turn it off, and I had to duck underneath the stream to get around. Then I had to mop up all the oil. So the next thing was to come up with a hood that we could do the test in that had a glass that we could look through, but when it blew, the oil would just drain back into a bottle. Instead of—oh, I had a mess in that basement. I had to clean it up. That was one of the tech’s jobs. Well, ultimately, ended up the company that made that first piece of equipment, electronics, the machine that would cycle the oil pressure, was an MTS corporation out of Minneapolis. And we ended up with a lab in the basement at 326 Building, we had ten different machines that went—one machine, I built. It was a 1,000-pound machine. And we had machines, the rest of them, MTS built, and they went up to a half-million pounds. Some were 100,000, 50,000, 20,000, 10,000-pound machines. The whole idea of all these machines was to take a chunk of metal that they were planning on using in the reactor or find out which one they could use in building the reactor. They would fatigue it, and they’d fatigue it different speeds, they’d fatigue at different temperatures, and different environments. Replicating what environment the part might see if it was being used in a reactor. So ultimately, we ended up having to send a whole bunch of polished specimens just like the ones we were testing in 326 Lab to the reactor. I had to polish all of these things, and we’d put them in a stack, and we had to separate them so we could keep the fluid flowing between them to keep them cool, and we sent them over to a reactor. They would irradiate these for a period of time until they got a certain exposure rate, then they’d send them back. We’d take the top off, we’d extract certain specimens out of there, and then we’d put new ones back in, and then we’d send—it was, you know, just constantly. But then we had a collection of irradiated materials so that we could compare the radiation damage to the same materials as we were testing in the labs. This allowed them to get a good idea of what they could expect for the mechanical integrity of the material once it was irradiated by the reactor. Franklin: And what kind of material was this again? So this wasn’t fuel, this was— Criswell: No, this was structural material. Franklin: Okay, so, like a process tube? Criswell: Maybe a hanger that held up pipes, or maybe it’s the support for the reactor vessel. I don’t know what parts they were looking at; I have no clue. I just know that we went through maybe a couple dozen different types of materials. There’s 314 stainless; I remember that. 316 stainless. Maybe there was, there’s Hastelloys and Inconels. They refer to them as superalloys. These are all high temperature materials that are designed to operate at high temperatures. Franklin: Was there anything—did you come across anything surprising in the tests? Anything that was unexpected? Criswell: I just ran the tests. Franklin: Right. Criswell: I’m the one that—in doing the fatigue cycling, you’d cycle it, to begin with, a large number of cycles, maybe 20,000 cycles. It might run a week, and then I’d open up the—turn things off, open up the furnace door, put a microscope in there and measure how far the crack had grown. Franklin: Okay. Criswell: And the idea was to get about a twenty-thousandth—twenty-thousandths—0.020 of growth. As it would begin to grow longer and longer, then the fatigue cycle would become shorter and shorter. So finally, I’m down to where I’m measuring these things a couple, three times a day. And every time I’d open up, maybe this doggone thing is running at 1200 degrees F. And I open it up; I’ve got to get in there and measure that thing. And my eyes, I mean, I don’t know what—numerous times a day, I’m opening this thing up, and I’m putting a microscope in the furnace door, and I’m measuring how long that crack is, get the furnace door closed, get it back up to temperature and start the cycling again. And I did this—oh, good grief—probably from 1965, and I was still doing fatigue cycling to the day I retired in 1999. Franklin: Wow. Criswell: Some of it, with GE and Battelle, in the early days, and Westinghouse—Westinghouse, we basically fixated on the structural materials. Battelle, when I worked two times with them, they had a different charter that they worked under. The government allowed them to test materials for small companies that had questions about what they were doing. That was probably more interesting than when I was working for Westinghouse, because Westinghouse, day in, day out, everything was the same. The only thing different was when they finally got the materials back from the reactors and they sent me over to 324 Building and we set things up in there to start running tests on their irradiated material. There was problems in that process. You’re looking through four feet of leaded glass at a test frame that’s probably two, three feet from the glass. I guess the only thing that made things work is, with my height I’m able to get up—at the top, the lead glass is tilted. It’s not vertical; it’s tilted looking through the cell wall. I’m having to look down through there to get as vertical a sight on the crack that’s growing as I can. Otherwise, every plane of glass in that window—that’s not a single pane; it’s multi-paned—would give me a little bit of—it would-- Franklin: It would bend the image, right? Criswell: It would distort the image. Franklin: Because of refraction. Criswell: Yeah, refraction or—I wasn’t getting a clear image. And that was, oh man, just a real learning process. The whole idea of the polishing before they went into the reactor and became irradiated—I put a mirror finish on them. The last polishing that I did had to be vertical to the crack’s growth across it. The idea being that when you opened the thing up, and you shined a light down from the top, the image that you’re looking at is black. You don’t see the light. But if there’s a crack growing, then the crack would show up as a white line. You can measure from the initiating point, there’s a machined notch in the specimen, so you measure from here to the crack tip. We did this for a couple, three years, over a 324 Building. For whatever reason, I guess money ran out, for that program. Battelle is a little more interesting. I was able to run tests on aircraft parts, ship—One of the problems, going clear back—not that I had anything to do with Liberty ships, but if you remember clear back in the early ‘40s, they were sending ships out that they were making as rapidly as they could for the Second World War. They’d run into the North Sea, and all of the sudden, the ship is floating—what’s left of it is floating in two halves until they sank. They rapidly developed a test called a nil-ductility drop-weight. They determined that the problem was in the structural material of the ship and the weld material that they were using to weld the plates together with. Strangely enough, my dad worked during the Second World War part-time—well, actually he had two jobs. One with Bonneville Power and one eh worked for a period of time for a shipyard in downtown Portland, and he was of small enough stature, they were sending him in between a double hull of a ship to weld. I don’t know if he was working on Liberty ships or what. But anyhow, the nil-ductility test, they would weld with a very brittle weld material. About a two-inch bead on top of a plate and then we’d cut a notch in that. And then you could, at different temperature, drop a given weight a given distance, so that you have how many foot-pounds you hit it with. If it didn’t break, that was fine. So you make things get colder until it breaks all—I think just the one side; that was a break. Some of them would break part-way across; that wasn’t a break. If the break arrested itself, fine. But if it would go all the way across, then that was a failure. So you’d end up going back to where you keep dividing things in half on the temperature until you found out where it would break and where it wouldn’t break. And then the temperature it wouldn’t break was nil-ductility. But I did run tests on ice breaker, I think it was the Polar Star, I think is the one, we said, a big chunk of this Polar Star, my gosh, that thing’s thick. The idea is that they would ride up on the—they didn’t cut and break it; they would ride up on it, and the weight of the ship would bust the ice. They didn’t know the history of what material was in there, but they wanted to make sure that they didn’t have any material from the Liberty ship era in it. I mean, the Polar Star was old enough, I guess, they had to worry about it. I’ve done testing on aircraft parts. Again, I mentioned earlier that you can impart a crack starter into a finished part. If it’s a threaded part, you can get this if, say, the coolant material is interrupted for just a second. Well, then, you’re going to get a hot spot. You can turn and make sure you can get the stuff going again, and you can start it again, but chances are, it isn’t going to break immediately, but over 1,000 cycles, this crack is going to grow more and more and more through this thing, and then it’s going to break duct-ally over here on this part. And that’s the part that broke last. This part over here, I mean, if you look at it under high enough magnification, it looks like a bunch of waves have washed up on the shore, each one making another line on the shoreline. You can actually go backwards through those waves to where is the smallest part, and you can find that there was a hot spot there, or there’s a piece of carbon there that was embedded in the material at some point during its manufacture. In the early days when I was in metallography, we had to use metallograph. Probably the highest you could go without having image problems was, say, 200, 250x. It would go to 500x; you could probably go to 1,000x, but you’re only going to see just a very, very small part of what you’re looking at. You’re not going to see—because getting a flat surface that doesn’t have any curvature at all. So the era of the electron microscope came in and that allowed us to not only not have to polish it; you could look at a fractured surface, I mean, something that has been pulled apart, and you can actually see down into the fractured surface. That allowed us to take a look at broken pieces, you can look at those benchmarks, you can look, and if there’s a piece of material— In one case, a copper part was actually failing and it was catastrophic when it failed. Copper, pure copper, is something—you might as well be looking at a blank wall: there’s nothing there to see. I mean, you can polish it and there’s nothing there to see. It’s strange stuff. Anyhow, I’m down to the tip where the crack is at. We had to break it apart. This stuff, in order to form it, they had formed it using a thermal weld, or explosive weld process, where you put two plates going different directions, and then you hit it with an explosive charge. This thing, they kept breaking them. What we found was, I noticed something that looked completely different. In this whole thing, there was one piece that looked different. Electron microscope, again, you can zero in on one item, hit the button, and basically, it’ll melt a little piece of that, and it will tell you what you’ve just melted. It will tell you that, okay, this is carbon, or this is iron, or this is, in this case, it was phosphate. You know, phosphate’s part of the explosive. There’s a material, a copper material, it’s called phosphated copper. They can use that as a spring material in making copper parts where they want flexibility, but they also want to keep contact. I don’t know if it’s what they use in, say, a flashlight where they make contact with the back of the battery. Excuse me. But anyhow, it’s something like that. But the problem with phosphated copper is that it’s also extremely brittle. I knew that from some exposure I’d had years before. When I found that, I went to the engineer, I says, this is the problem. And the end result was they were able to tell the customer, okay, you’ve got to find another way of fusing these together that doesn’t use phosphate. I told you that parts that are machined or, the one I’m thinking of is they were basically putting a serial number on every part, and then these were being used in some sort of a structural event. For some reason, these things were breaking. What we found was that if they had a part that had a 1 laser-etched on it, or a 7 with a vertical line on it, or a 9 with a vertical line on it, an L, F, Es, anything with a vertical line on it, these things didn’t last any cyclings at all. They’d break. We noticed that, say, a Z, we could cycle a Z for almost forever. What would another letter be? Ss. They didn’t break. Franklin: X. Criswell: A zero, that’s a round zero, it didn’t break. So our suggestion was that they change their laser. If they’re going to keep using a laser, instead of having vertical lines, that a 7 would have an angular line on it. Nines, maybe a circle, like a 9. Stay away from vertical lines. It was a simple one, but, you know, it was an answer we were able to give them. We actually did testing for a little mom-and-pop company down in Irrigon, Oregon. He got the license to build a gimballed trailer hitch for fifth wheels. A standard trailer hitch didn’t allow for any torqueing. If you’re going over a curb someplace. If you’re backing into a parking place and you’ve got two different levels, you know. You tried to unhook, you’re going to have a problem. They actually came up with a gimballed trailer hitch; they had the license for it. But they wanted to know, how many cycles would this take? We were able to tell them, hey, you know, with the exception of maybe a farmer carrying 50,000 pounds of hay on a flatbed trailer, you’re probably not going to have a problem. If it’s just an RV trailer, I wouldn’t worry about it. I actually did testing for Ti Sports. They came to us. They had developed a new welding technique, and they wanted to know how good it was or wasn’t. So we compared a lot of their old welds to their new welds. And found the new weld was significantly better than their old weld. Franklin: And what product was this for? Criswell: Ti! Titanium. Titanium bikes. Franklin: Titanium bikes. Criswell: Expensive bikes. Apparently one of the problems that they’d had with the early ones was that the weld technique left something to be desired. So they developed a new one, and it was much better. Battelle was interesting, because there was always something new coming in the door. Franklin: It says here that after you retired, you took up a part time job at Battelle as a security escort? Criswell: That wasn’t with Battelle. Franklin: Oh, okay. Criswell: That was with a couple different companies. When I retired, essentially, November 1st, I took that day off. It was my first retirement day. I went back to work on November 2nd, half-time. I worked Monday through Wednesday noon. [LAUGHTER] They were setting up a new lab. Somebody remembered I’d worked in the metallography lab years earlier. The tech specialist that was setting up the metallography in that lab retired. They needed somebody else, and somebody’s memory remembered me. So I’m working part-time before I retired in there, and then I’d go back to my lab and do some testing, if it required. And they were bringing in somebody new. But the facility I was going to be working in, it was going to be a secured facility. It had special requirements, everything. By the time I was asked if I’d mind going full retirement, which was in April—It was financial situation, they had a lady who also had worked in metallography and she was still young, they wanted her to continue in that respect. But the lab was going to be secured. We were taking pictures. In my case, I was using a copper penny to check out how things were working. Totally new metallograph, it was all digital, I mean, it was much different than anything I was used to. So having to set this thing up so it would work with computers. Oh, man. The only thing significant there that we found, and I did find, what was going to be a security problem, made a suggestion, and they got excited. We had to go out and find something new that was going to meet security requirements, so I guess I did my part. [LAUGHTER] Knowing what they have to do in a secured facility—every time an engineer or a scientist writes a paper, before it can be released, it has to go for review. It has to be—it can be unclassified or it’s given a classification. If it has given a classification—number one, in ’99, when I retired, things were being transmitted by the internet—no way were they going to transmit anything via the internet, if it’s classified. At least, not when I got out of there. You know, if they had to transmit someplace else, it was hand-carried if it’s here on Hanford. If it’s got to go to somebody that’s working on the same program at another facility, you’re going to have a courier take it; it’s not going via US Mail or it’s not going via the internet. So this is the way things work. Before I retired, I did some escort work with foreign nationals. They could work in certain facilities, but they couldn’t go elsewhere. So after I retired, full retirement, April of ’99, my wife saw an ad in the paper, anybody that still has their clearance or can get a clearance may have a part-time job for you. And my wife saw to it that I signed up for that. [LAUGHTER] I was put back to work out at Dash-5, construction work out there. Construction craftspeople, temporary, they’re not going to go to the trouble of getting them all a full security clearance. Each security escort can escort up to five. If you’ve got two, though, you need to have two escorts, and then you can escort up to nine. Because if one person has to go to the head—you know. So we always had a few extras. But if somebody’s got to go to the tool room or if they got to go talk to somebody, they have to have—the escort has to escort them to that point, be with them full time, escort them back. You can’t leave nine people short, so. Just keeping, making sure they didn’t wander off making trouble someplace. We have to be aware of where the radiation areas are. We can’t go there. So did that for another eight years. Took another short time job with—kind of with Battelle again. That lasted for about five, six months. Then I’ve been retired since then. Franklin: Finally retired? Criswell: Yeah. To say the least, I kind of miss it. I guess one of the things that—they sent me to a couple of short courses on something called failure analysis. Again, why things break. It kind of fit in with what I was doing, only I was the reason things were breaking. I mean, I was getting paid good to break things. Who could argue with that? You could hire an eight-year-old to break things for you. [LAUGHTER] But that half-million-pound machine we had, an interesting one. They sent the actuator back to the factory and set it up so it would high rate. I forget what the rating would travel at, but it would break things up to 500,000 pounds in the blink of an eye. Or you could do it slow. It would go either way. You had control over how that machine worked. We were doing work for, I guess, Areva at that point in time. We were doing some testing for them. But, again, Battelle was interesting. I do miss it. I was kind of hoping I could be summer relief or something like that after I retired. But they brought in—matter of fact, the gentleman I recommended for the job ended up getting it. I hope he isn’t too mad at me. I think that was one of the—it bothered me. He was a long-time Westinghouse employee. When I retired in ’99, I think he might still have been working for Westinghouse. Or—but anyhow. He had either four or five weeks of vacation. And he was a tech specialist. I guess they hired him as a tech specialist. So he could keep his vacation. Shortly after he was hired in, Battelle determined they needed to tighten up on finances or some darn thing, and they saw fit to reduce him back to a technician, and he lost some of his vacation, I understood. That didn’t go well. He wasn’t happy about that. He’s a good man. I recommended him, because he’d worked with MTS equipment. He knew it. And I knew him to be a self-starter. You weren’t going to have to hold his hand and have somebody there with him full-time; he was going to work. One of the people that put a name in for the job, I didn’t know him, never heard of him. And the other one was a tech specialist, but he hadn’t worked with that kind of equipment, either. And I didn’t know whether he was a self-starter or not. So Mike got the job, and I guess Mike is still there. Good grief. 17 years later? Franklin: Yeah. I have a couple questions I’d like to return to some stuff you said earlier, if you don’t mind. Criswell: No. Franklin: When you mentioned you moved to Tri-Cities January 1st, 1948 at midnight—why does that stick out to you so strongly in your mind? How do you--? Criswell: Well, the family had a get-together. They were in Portland to celebrate New Year’s Eve. After that, Dad and I climbed in the car and drove to Pasco. Franklin: Why? Criswell: Because he had a new job up here. Franklin: Oh, okay. And what did your dad do in Pasco? Criswell: He went to work for a company called Empire Electric. Empire Electric had a shop, a storefront, there on Lewis Street about three, maybe four, doors west of the corner building there on, let’s see, that’d be the northwest corner of 4th and Lewis. That corner building in 1948 and up through ’61 was a drugstore. Can’t think of the name of the drugstore, but it was a drugstore. Anyhow, Dad worked there for a year—better than a year, anyhow. He got the— You know, I don’t know what Dad did for them. I really don’t. Dad was kind of a public informations officer. When the opening came up, up at Hungry Horse, Montana, he took the job up there as public informations officer. We were there for, oh my gosh, we moved up there in February. I’d never seen so much snow in my life. And cold, my gosh, it was cold. But it wasn’t as cold as it got. I actually saw 40-below when I was still in grade school. I had to put on the skis and I actually skied down to the grade school. It was downhill from our house. I mean, when it got 40-below, it was clear. I mean, it was so clear, it was beautiful. Because what humidity was still in the air was coming out as little sparkles. It’s amazing. But I hated it. My grandmother on my mom’s side was into knitting, and she knit us kids, out of wool, probably some of the first facemasks. She found a pattern for these things. They had a mouth, they had a place for your nose, and two eyeholes. At 40-below, the tears from your eyes froze to the wool. You might want to turn this off. By the time I got to school—you can edit it. I’d have a wad of snot hanging on that wool, and it’s frozen. And my mouth, breathing around here, I got a lot of moisture around here. This probably wasn’t snot, probably vapors. But, ugh, terrible. It got worse. Franklin: I was going to say, I grew up in Alaska and I remember some really— Criswell: So you know what I’m talking about. Franklin: Cold. Oh, yeah, where you— Criswell: Did you have a wool one, or did they finally come up with those nice nylon ones that slick them? Franklin: No, we had the nice nylon. But still, you’d get the—you’d go outside, and you’d feel the heat being sucked out of your nose and your mouth as soon as you open to breathe, you just feel the moisture being pulled out of your face. It’s cold, yeah. Cars won’t start, usually. Criswell: Oh, yeah, so you know exactly what I’m talking about. Franklin: Yeah, I don’t miss those days. Criswell: Hungry Horse was interesting. Summer times were great. Get the fishing pole and go fishing. Summer time was that. Excuse me a second. Franklin: No worries. And so when you returned, spring/summer of ’53, what was your family—did your mom work at all this whole time, or was she a housewife? Criswell: Housewife. 1953, the job up in Hungry Horse was done. President Truman had come through, dedicated the dam. My dad actually wrote the speech. Public informations officer, he wrote the speech, he knew the information about Hungry Horse. Anyhow, I do remember, I was either in the eighth grade or I was in high school, going to school in Columbia Falls at that point in time. We went down to where the railyard went through Columbia Falls. Train’s stopped, Truman’s on the back platform on the train, he talks to the crowd out there. I mean, all the kids in school went out there. And then he climbed in a car and up to Hungry Horse he goes. So, that’s one of the memories. When Dad came back down here, he had a job as, again, kind of a public informations officer for Franklin County PUD. Franklin: Oh, okay. Criswell: That was ’53. In 1960, Dad, Mom, and the rest of the family packed it up and went to Springfield Municipal Utilities. He actually sold himself the job of being the director for Springfield Municipal Utilities and down there, that was water, sewer and electric. Franklin: And where is— Criswell: It wasn’t part of the city. They were a municipal utility that was separate from the city. Franklin: Are you talking about Springfield— Criswell: Springfield, Oregon. Franklin: Oh, Springfield, Oregon, okay. Criswell: He held that job until he retired in 1960. I forget exactly when he retired. But he was there—no, went there in ’60. 1980 he retired. So he held it for 20 years. Franklin: Wow. Criswell: And then he ruined the family name; he took a job as a—oh. [LAUGHTER] Kind of a political job. Lobbying! The Oregon State Legislature. [LAUGHTER] We kidded him about taking that job. Franklin: Getting into politics. Criswell: Yeah. [LAUGHTER] Anyhow. Franklin: So— Criswell: About the only job Mom had is, both Mom and Dad were involved with what is now the Water Follies. In the ‘50s and ‘60s, it was the Pasco Water Follies. And the races were down at Sacajawea Park. Dad was president of the Pasco Water Follies for a period of time, and I think Mom—I forget if she was the treasurer or the secretary, I forget which. Maybe both at one point in time or another. But they were heavily involved in the Pasco Water Follies. I’m pretty sure that Dad came up here only once to watch the Water Follies after they became the Tri-City Water Follies, and he saw the new boats running. I don’t think he enjoyed them as much as he did the old thunder boats. That’s the part I always enjoyed. You go down there in the Columbia and the thunder boats are running five in a heat, it almost felt like the ground you were standing on was shaking when they were going by. That’s the part I really miss. I know the new ones go a whole lot faster, but. There’s just something about the old boats; they were special, as far as I was concerned. I knew John Owsley. He had the Pasco Boat Basin. He was probably responsible for the sleds they use at the Tri-City Water Follies. I know he was building them. He built a couple small ones, probably for the Pasco Water Follies. Ultimately, he ended up building kind of a three-point sled that he thought would go faster out there in the river to get to the crashes a little bit quicker. The whole idea was you didn’t have to haul somebody up over the transom of a boat to get them in; you basically just float them onto the back of the sleds that he was building. I thought that was pretty good. I know that when I was in the service there in ’62, came home on leave, and things were pretty tight for the wife and myself. John gave me a job. I guess somebody complained about not having any railings on the docks down there. He gave me a job to build railings on there for him. I did that on leave one time, and he was in the process, I think of building that three-point step one at that time. But things are different today, I’ll tell you. Franklin: Yeah. How did you meet your wife? Is she from the area? Criswell: Oh, that’s another one of those stories. [LAUGHTER] Strange you should ask that one. Somebody else asked me that question here, this past week. I blame it on a Pasco police officer. I was going to night school, oh, I don’t know what I was taking. A number of different night school classes I took over at CBC. I was taking another one. I was working, trying to get myself up to a decent grade point average. But I wasn’t having a whole lot of success. I had a C over there. But anyhow, part of my problem was that in 1960, early ’61, I was baching it, cooking for myself, studying. I get into the studying, I’d burn my dinner. Didn’t have the money to replace it. Decided it’d be cheaper for me if I went down to—it was the Payless Drug on the corner of 4th and Lewis. Payless Drug, they had a lunch counter down there, they cooked dinners down there. I’d get myself a supper; I’d sit there at the counter and study. Anyhow, I was doing that. One evening, police officer—and I mentioned to whomever I was talking to this week, I want to go over to Pasco and find out this police officer’s name. He had kind of a walking beat in downtown Pasco. He was an older gentleman. And he came up to me, he says, Dave, I got a couple of tickets for you. Whoa, what the heck? I’m working at Hanford; I don’t get tickets. I’ve got to be careful. I look at him real strange. Tickets? What kind of tickets? What’d I do wrong? He’s messing with me. He says, well, these are kind of special tickets. I said, what kind of ticket? He said, they’re tickets to the policeman’s ball. These two are for you. I said, I’m not going with anybody! Who am I going to get? He says, I’ve been drinking coffee here. He says, you’ve been watching that little lady over there. He says, you go ask her to go to the policeman’s ball. So I did. And I’d been cashing my checks here, and she’d been cashing my checks. She knew how much I earned. Didn’t pay any attention to what my name was. I had to always take my check downstairs and get it approved by the owner of Payless Drug at that point in time. I think his name was Tom Bishop. Yeah, it was. Tom Bishop. So Tom knew my family. Knew it wasn’t any problem with me getting my cash checked. So he’d initial the check, I’d take it back up, and this little gal would cash my check. So I asked her out. She said yes. Good grief. Next month it’s going to be 55 years. My wife and I have hardly ever been parted. Only when I went over to Fort Lewis. That didn’t last long. We moved the trailer that we were living in over there. A few trips where they sent me to school to learn something, one thing or another. That’s been our—[LAUGHTER] So I need to find out the officer’s name so I can blame him by name. Or thank him. Franklin: Yeah, Officer Matchmaker? Criswell: Yeah. He real did me a real favor, I’ll tell ya. Franklin: Aw. Criswell: But I would like to find his name. I have no idea what his history was or what happened. But after 55 years, I assume by this time, that he’s deceased, unfortunately. I wish I woke up to that question 30 years ago. Franklin: Is your wife from the area? Criswell: She’s born and raised here. Born in Lady of Lourdes Hospital. My two natural-born children were born in Lady of Lourdes Hospital. I don’t know—I know in the early part of my wife’s—they had to—I guess they had to get over to that hospital in a—I guess they had to cross the river in those years in a ferry boat. Franklin: Okay. Criswell: They had a little boat that ran back and forth across the Columbia. Franklin: Wow. Criswell: I’m not too sure what year the old green bridge got built. But I do know in the early days. Another strange piece of information was that my great-grandfather moved to the Northwest from Michigan, I guess. And he went to work in a lumberyard, lumber mill in north Idaho, a place called Harrison, Idaho. His job was training the horses and seeing to the horses’ needs that went out into the woods to pull the logs back in. And my grandmother, when she became of age, she worked in the millinery shop there in Harrison, Idaho. My wife and I have determined, at the same point in time, her grandmother’s family is living in Harrison, Idaho. I think her grandfather, her great-uncle, and an uncle were working in the woods logging up there. So, both of our ancestries have got connections to Harrison, Idaho. A couple, three years ago, my wife and I went up there with my wife’s sister, and we were looking for gravesites. And we found a couple of my wife’s family members in the Harrison graveyard, up on a hillside, up above Harrison there someplace. And still couldn’t find my great-grandfather. Turns out that Coeur d’Alene has two graveyards. And my sister looked in one, but didn’t look in the other one. My sister lives up in Sandpoint. And could not find our great-grandfather. Anyhow, on one of our trips up there, I took the time and went over to the other graveyard and found a gentleman mowing the lawn. He got off, went into the office, came back out, got a book, looked in the book, took us over and he pointed right at a gravesite where my great-grandfather was buried. Turns out that my first name is great-grandfather’s last name. And I always thought that Engelbert Humperdinck’s name was all made up. I never heard of anybody named Engelbert in my life, so I thought that was all a stage name. Turns out, my grandfather’s name was Engelbert David. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Sounds like that should kind of be reversed. Criswell: Yeah! Thank goodness I didn’t get hung up with Engelbert. But I believe my great-grandfather came to this country—he was an immigrant—he came to this country from Austria. I’m not too sure what year he came here. I don’t know how old he was. My great-grandmother and one of my great-aunts, apparently, died during a measle epidemic. I have no idea what year that was. But anyhow, Engelbert David packed up his one remaining daughter and apparently a girl that she was friends with, maybe family friends, and apparently they had problems. Maybe lost some family members also. So he brought the two girls out to Harrison, Idaho. I think, two things make me believe that maybe Engelbert David—he apparently changed his name sometime after my grandmother grew up, he remarried. Now his name on the tombstone is Egbert David. This is quite common. David is probably a frequent name of people who are of Jewish faith. And living in Austria, in probably the late ‘30s, or maybe even early ‘30s, things were not too favorable to the Jewish religion. I think that might’ve been the reason for the migration. And maybe the reason for changing the name at some point in his life. But my dad’s father, my grandfather, was blind at the time. My youngest years, almost totally blind by the time I remember him. He was a radio operator for the railroad—telegrapher for the railroad. And then he went to work in the merchant marines, was in the merchant marines when the Second World War blew up. And then he was in the Pacific. But his eyesight got so bad he couldn’t see to write anymore. And he couldn’t read the messages that had to be sent. So they had to release him. So I grew up—Grandpa Criswell was kind of funny. Let’s face it, in some ways he was a bit bigoted. I do believe that he was bigoted toward the Jewish faith. I’m sure my dad and his brothers ribbed him incessantly about some of his bigoted views. But they were all a bunch of cards, as far as I was concerned. They were some of the funniest things they ever came up with. But anyhow, he couldn’t see my dad and his brothers laughing at him, unfortunately, but maybe he would’ve changed his mind with time. But strange things. So I really don’t know that much about Great-grandfather. My grandfather lived to be 101. My grandmother lived to be four hours short of 102, deceased a few months later. Literally, if she’d lived to midnight, she would’ve lived to be 102. But aunt and uncle moved them down to Florida when they were in the 80s. I think my uncle was figuring they only had a few years to live. That didn’t happen. My grandfather, when he was packed up and ready to leave, he didn’t want to go. They were flying him down to Florida. Uncle Hank worked for the United Airlines. He’d made arrangements for them to fly. Probably made arrangements then to fly them first class. The story granddad got was that all the coach seats were full; they’d have to seat them in first class. Of course they got real good treatment, so granddad didn’t mind traveling anymore. But when he was getting ready to leave, he didn’t want to fly. Visited him just before he left. And I asked Granddad, I says, why don’t you want to fly? Because it’s a great way to travel. He tells me, straight-faced, they fly so high you can’t see the ground. I’m thinking to myself—I’m polite—I was thinking to myself, Granddad, you can’t see the ground you’re standing on. You know? I don’t understand why—you know. One of my uncles was coming by to take him down to see the Rose Festival parade. Oh, that’s cool. Well, we’re not going to the Rose Festival parade; I'm upset. Why? Well, they’re taking us to the warehouse that they decorate the floats in. What’s the matter with that? You don’t have to stand there for hours to watch. You can’t see anything. His reason for not liking the warehouse versus standing on the street is he doesn’t get to see any of the pretty girls. He hasn’t seen a pretty girl for 50 years. [LAUGHTER] Well, I don’t understand him. Anyhow, that’s my granddad. Franklin: When you—[LAUGHTER] Thank you for that. You started work at Hanford, were you still living in Pasco? Criswell: Oh, yeah. Franklin: Did you ever move to Richland, too, or did you live in Pasco the whole time-- Criswell: No. Franklin: --you worked at Hanford? Criswell: My wife and her family lived in Kennewick. But when Helen and I first got married, before we got married, I was living in a little studio apartment there in Pasco. And we found a single-wide 50-foot mobile home. We figured this’ll hold us for a while. We set it up on a lot there in Pasco. Right across the highway from the outdoor theater there. Anyhow, that was supposed to hold us for a few years. Well, we moved in and a few months later, we ended up having to pack it up and move it over to Olympia. And then we moved it back to Pasco when we got out in August. So we lived in Pasco. While we were in the service, my wife knows that she was expecting our first. Anyhow, after we moved back, we discovered that our single-wide mobile home and an infant—we were wall-to-wall toys within no time at all. We found somebody who decided that their house was too big for them to care for any, and they were willing to make a deal on it, and we took their house. So that was—then we moved to Kennewick. I guess, basically, we either lived in Kennewick or just outside of Kennewick now for a number of years. It’s been— Franklin: One of the things— Criswell: Excuse me. Franklin: Oh, no, that’s okay. There’s kind of several big events or things that happened in the Tri-Cities during the ‘50s and ‘60s. One of them is—it’s kind of commonly known that Pasco, especially east Pasco, was one of the only places that African Americans could live when they first came to Hanford during the Manhattan Project, and then was one of the only places they could buy property, up until, you know, civil rights legislation kind of forced some changes. I’m wondering if you could speak to any of that, or if you ever noticed segregation or witnessed that, or kind of your experiences living in Pasco during that time? Criswell: Well, I lived in Pasco in ’48-’49. I guess I never noticed it. I wasn’t old enough to understand those things, I guess. ’48, I would’ve been 11. ’49, probably living in Montana by then. Yeah, we moved up there in February of ’49, so. Anyhow, by the time we moved up there, didn’t seem to notice anything. Moved back to Pasco in spring of ’53, summer of ’53. Junior in high school. There was students that were black. Some of them I got to know. There weren’t very many. Yeah, it was strange. But when I was a kid going to Portland, I didn’t—this wasn’t something that I saw in Portland. I didn’t know it; I didn’t understand it. My wife, however, she went to Kennewick schools. Kennewick was one of the cities that, I guess, on the Kennewick side of the bridge, the old green bridge, there was some sort of a sign over there. I never recognized it as being there, but it told our black population that they needed to be out of Kennewick by sundown. Both my wife’s family and my family, that’s not the way we were brought up. My wife’s family were essentially farmers, lived on the outskirts of Kennewick and went to Kennewick schools. My wife’s family lived just on the west side of Kennewick. The only way to get to Pasco was across that old green bridge, so you had to go through Kennewick. My wife says that they had people to come from Pasco that would help her family on the farm. They were blacks, black people, Negro, whatever term is politically correct, socially correct. I don’t want to offend anybody. But their family, their kids grew up, their kids played on her farm. If they ended up picking until sunset to get the crop in, the family, kids all went out and they slept in the barn, or the extra bedrooms, or I guess my wife and her sister, bedroom was probably in the basement of the little house they lived in. So the families that were working on the farm worked and then they slept down there. But they all ate together. Somehow my wife grew up, didn’t know that there was a problem, didn’t understand the difference. Franklin: Do you remember the civil rights demonstrations in Kennewick? I think it was 1963 or 1964 when the NAACP— Criswell: I didn’t. At that point in time, I’m out at Hanford working. Franklin: Sure. Criswell: Went to work out there in August, no September, of 1955, I hired in out there. I was working with colored people, black people. There Fort Lewis, I met a gentleman who didn’t end up in my company, but while we were there on Friday, Saturday and Sunday before the troops came back to Hanford—they were all gone for Thanksgiving. Anyhow, he played for pro ball for, I think, the New York Giants. Big man. Told great stories. Great stories. He entertained the few of us that were stuck in that barracks for the weekend. You know, they stuck us in that barracks over there, it was empty, it had the cots, the mattresses were folded up, no blankets. There was no coal for the furnaces, no hot water. Having had experience with Fort Lewis, I became—I don’t want to say a leader, but definitely I knew what the heck to do to get around things. So I had three or four of the other gentlemen that were stuck there with me—that may have been the one from New York Giants; I don’t really recall. I had my sleeping bag, so I was all right. But anyhow we needed to get heat. So I told the guys, let’s find some boxes. And after dark, we went down the line and found some barracks that had kindling. We found barracks that had paper. We found barracks that had the coal. Anyhow, we took anything we could find. I knew all about those barracks. We got a fire lit. We knew we had to take turns watching that fire through the night and we had hot water in the morning. We had heat in the barracks through the weekend; we just had to keep watching that fire. All of us ended up having a fairly decent weekend; it could’ve been miserable because there wasn’t anybody else there to help us. They threw us into that barracks and, adios, we got the weekend off. That’s the last we saw of them. Well, we got the fire lit, and we had power in the day rooms, so we had television and we had a pool table. I guess maybe we shared some of the coal with the day room so it’d have heat. Monday morning here they come back and we all got to take physicals and we all end up getting busted up and going different places. Franklin: Did you go to the N Reactor dedication when President Kennedy came to— Criswell: N Reactor. No, I didn’t. I don’t know why. Probably because I was working. [LAUGHTER] And sometimes, they didn’t even want me taking a vacation when I needed one. They let me know they would remember that. If I insisted on a vacation, they couldn’t stop me, but they’d remember it. You know, getting a raise was—My dad was here for that. Because Dad was part of the—what’d they call that group of power companies, public utilities? He was part of that. At one point in time, he was president of BWIP. Of the contributors or whatever-the-heck they called that group. Anyhow, he was one of the—he was up here for that. He sat in the audience. He was up here for all the BWIP meetings that they would hold. No, that wasn’t BWIP. BWIP, Basalt Waste Isolation. No, he was one of the, I guess they call them stakeholders. The electrical utilities that signed on for—but anyhow, he was here for that. And for all of the meetings they had here for that. He was here when the president came up for the dedication. Seemed to me that was Kennedy, wasn’t it? Franklin: Yeah. He came for the dedication of N Reactor in September of 1963. Criswell: Okay, well, I know where I was. If that was in late ’61 or spring of ’62, I was over at Fort Lewis. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: No, it was September of ’63. It was just about two months before the assassination. Criswell: September of ’63, okay. Well then, okay, yeah, I remember that all too well. Yeah. Franklin: One of my last questions is one a little earlier, probably, when you were going to school, but when you were here in Pasco or in Hungry Horse do you remember doing lots of civil defense things? Because that would’ve been right during the height of the Cold War. So what can you tell me about civil defense? Criswell: I don’t think Hungry Horse they were worried about it. They never did anything like that up at Hungry Horse. Franklin: What about here in Tri-Cities? Criswell: I’m trying to think about Tri-Cities. Pasco High School, brand new school, graduated, second graduating class from Pasco High. I don’t remember anything special about it. I really don’t. And I don’t—after I graduated and then the Russians started playing around like they did in—that’d have been late ’61. Yeah, late ’61, that’s when they pulled all of us in. And then in ’62, and ultimately they sent us all home when they talked the Russians into pulling everything out of Cuba. But it was a strange time. Franklin: Did you ever feel any sense of urgency or fear, living so near to Hanford? You know, knowing what was being produced, how it was contributing to the nuclear weapons stockpile? Criswell: Well, when I was over there at Fort Lewis in—it would’ve been ’62, probably the early spring of ’62—I am a lowly Spec/4. That’s the equivalent of a corporal. I got called into the office and I was told I was going to give a class on irradiation and avoiding irradiation, minimizing exposure to radiation. And they had me a book and I had no clue as to why they were giving that to me. I didn’t have a clue. They didn’t tell us nothing over there! I mean, hey, we were a bunch of mushrooms. Anyhow, I had to give the company I was part of a breakdown on, you know, how to avoid radiation. Basically what the difference was between contamination and radiation. There’s a lot of people don’t understand that today. You double the distance, you reduce your exposure by four. That’s one of the big things. Get the heck away from it as fast as you can. You don’t know where it’s at, but distance from the source is big. I had no reason why I’m giving this class. The only reason I understand now why I’m giving a class is I worked at Hanford. [LAUGHTER] That’s it. I didn’t know what I was talking about. [LAUGHTER] So that’s why I had to give this thing. So I did my best. And that’s the last I ever heard of it. We never had another seminar on it. There was never anything else about it. Franklin: Interesting. Criswell: It was a strange, strange period of time. But I don’t think anybody really understood what the period was. Nobody in the military told us, really, why we were there. Nobody told us a thing. We were a bunch of mushrooms. It just didn’t make sense. Didn’t make any sense. But, you know, number of years later, I was told why things happened the way they did. And Kennedy, if Kennedy was born today, you wouldn’t want to play poker with the man. He pulled the ultimate bluff on the Russians. Every B-52, and we had a thousand, or more than 1,000—I think they’re B-52s, the lightweight ones? Or are those B-47s? Franklin: I think those are B-47s. Criswell: Okay, B-47s. Lightweight. They got two engines hanging on a pod on either side, on the wings. And they’re all small, lightweight bombers. Had thousands of those things. And to my knowledge, they’re still all lined up in the desert, down there in Arizona, unless they made beer cans out of them. But sometime, probably the early part of ’62, Kennedy pulled the ultimate bluff. He wanted the second division pulled out of East Berlin. He wanted the missiles out of Cuba. And he told the Russians—no, he unleashed all those B-47s at the same time. And the big ones. All of our big ones. The Russians could see them. There wasn’t any questions. The Russians could see that they weren’t going to be able to stop them all. They knew that they were going to get through. We were going to lose a lot of planes; we were going to lose a lot of crews. But we were going to have one big mess. I forget who the heck the Russian was at the time. He got on the phone with the Kennedys, he says, turn those planes around. Turn them all around. He says, we’ll pull out. We’ll get the stuff out of Cuba. The extra division will go out of East Berlin. And that’s the way it went. But we, at Fort Lewis, we didn’t hear a dumb thing about it. It wasn’t until years later that a friend of mine told me what the heck had happened. Kennedy pulled the ultimate bluff. You don’t want to play cards with a guy like that! But if I’d known, I think I’d have—I don’t know what the heck you’d do. Franklin: Is there anything that I haven’t asked you about that you’d like to talk about before we conclude the interview? Criswell: The only thing I can say is my career at Hanford was interesting. I did a lot of different things. I’d still like to be working out there. I’d still have a ball working out there if I could. Unfortunately, I had a senior engineer PhD do a number on me. Franklin: What do you mean by that? Criswell: He lied. Franklin: Okay. Criswell: Okay. He wanted to come into my lab, he wanted to set up a series of tests. At the point in time, I was telling management that we’ve got to get new controls for the equipment we’re operating. These things are getting old, they’re unreliable. I knew this machine would fail. I couldn’t predict when, I couldn’t figure out why. I referred to it as a ghost. I mean, one time it does something wrong, and the next time you go to look for it, it isn’t there, it’s working perfectly okay. But you can’t trust it no more. This PhD insisted that I use this particular machine. There’s another one sitting alongside of it that would’ve done the job. He wants to use this machine. I tell him, no. This machine is flaky; it can’t be relied on. He tells me before I leave his office, before we run any tests, your fault, the machine’s fault, I’m going to get you. So, either the first or second test, I’m sitting there. We run a block of cycles, we take a reading. Start it up again, run a block of cycles, take a reading. It’s at high temperature, what-have-you. So I’m tilted back against the cupboard, waiting for the cycles to end. All of the sudden, bang! Doggone thing fails. Oh, by the way, I told the engineer that I directly tied to that, hey, this isn’t a good machine, you don’t want to use it. But he insists on using it. Anyhow, he goes running to my manager. It’s all my fault. He lived up to his word. And my manager accepted it. Franklin: Wow. Criswell: So I didn’t get a raise. And that would’ve been January 1st of ’99. I didn’t get a raise. So I wrote a letter, put it in my file that, no, this wasn’t my fault. And I had told him it wasn’t my fault. But I tried to keep the thing going, work to make sure that things ran properly, but I needed some support from management. I didn’t really get the support I wanted until after I left. Franklin: Right. Criswell: When they brought in the gentleman that replaced me, then they replaced all the electronics. But if I can figure out what—each one of these electronic things has got a whole bunch of drawers in it, and it’s got a whole bunch of pieces in each one of the drawers. If you can figure out what controls what, and it stays broken, then you can fix it. But when it goes back and forth, no. That’s when I call it a ghost. It didn’t work. So, anyhow, they kind of promised me that if things worked out, I’d get a raise in July, mid-term, mid-year. Anyhow, that didn’t happen. So I decided, well, I’ll be 62 in a couple more months and then I can retire. And I did. But I came back half-time. I’d probably still have been out there. I don’t know how long I would’ve worked. Hey, I enjoyed the work. It was interesting, and I was good at it. But unfortunately I couldn’t get the backing to replace the equipment when I needed it. And I ended up taking the hit. Unfortunately, this particular engineer, scientist, ended up causing problems for others. I guess, maybe, I’m kind of happy or proud about one thing. The gentleman I recommended to take my job ended up with it, and he’s still there. Franklin: That’s good. Criswell: I picked a younger man who, I’m assuming he’s still there. That’s been a lot of years. Franklin: Maybe you should call him up. Criswell: I probably ought to. I know that—I talked to him a few times since they moved out of the building we were in and moved downtown. That was one of the things they did, was they had to leave the basement that I was in. And they asked me about moving this big piece of equipment, this half-million-pound machine, how are we going to get that out of there? I told them how it was done. Anyhow, I don’t know what went wrong. But they had that—I suspect I know one thing. They had to back the semi down a ramp to the basement of the building. And if they got cockeyed or if the wheels are sitting in the hole, the deck on the flatbed is going to be canted. So they have to lay this huge frame down on its side. They have to get it over to where there’s an elevator that goes up to the half level that it’s got to go out of. But when I was there, they did this. They had to support this huge frame using railroad ties. And I’m there to watch, make sure that they don’t do anything wrong. All of the sudden, I hear this really screwy noise. And I go out in the hall. They’re out in the hall with a chainsaw cutting creosoted railroad ties to length to prop the elevator bed at a half-level between the floor level and the exit level. Because it won’t support the weight of this machine. So they got to support it there, and then they got to put a ramp going out. So anyhow, there’s this blue fog going down the hallway. I mean, this is—railroad ties with creosote on them, they’re cutting them with a chainsaw out in the hall of the building. [LAUGHTER] Stinky poo mess. But they got it out. This is when I was there. And they take it over to 324 Building. And they lift it up, they sit it on the ground upright, they take the lid off of 324 Building, the roof off of it. They take the shields off of 324 Building, they set them on the ground. And then when they got access to the hot cell in 324 Building, they go over there and they pick this machine up and they lift it up, over, and they set it down inside of the hot cell in 324 Building. They’re going to do some low level work. They wrap it with plastic and everything else. And then, later on after they finish doing whatever testing they were going to do, they pick it up again to go through the reverse, they bring it over and they set it down. Some other point in time, they take that thing—they’re making another lift on it, and anyhow, it crashes down. The actuator on that thing is about three feet in diameter. It generates 500,000 pounds of force using 3,000 psi of oil pressure. And it crashes. No, that’s upright, yep. Anyhow, yeah, they got it sitting off the ground over at 324 Building, outside of the cells, getting ready to make a lift. And all of a sudden, the cable comes loose from the drum on the winch on the crane. And this huge doggone frame drops a foot or two, down onto the ground. Anyhow, one of our engineers is looking around behind, he’s headed back to 300 Area proper. He looks behind him, and he can see the cable of the load cell going up, coming back down, going up, coming back down. And then pretty soon it just falls to the ground. It’s come off the drum on the frame. So anyhow it’s sitting there on the ground. And now the riggers have got to go through about four months of writing reports on why they dropped this thing. So anyhow, they lift it up, they finally lay it back down, and they get it over to our lab and they lift things back up, and they put it back in our lab. We make sure it’s nice and clean, it’s okay for use. When they get ready to take it out of that lab—this is after I’ve left—and they’re putting it onto a flatbed truck, instead of using a crane to move this thing with, they’ve got—they haven’t hired the riggers. They went out and hired a tow truck company. [LAUGHTER] They’ve got a flatbed truck sitting there by the rollup door, and it’s going down here, and apparently it’s tilted to the side. And they’ve got nothing on there to keep this thing on there. Anyhow, instead of lifting it, they’re dragging it up an I-beam incline on rollers. They’re using a tow truck in front of the semi that’s going to haul this thing over to the new building where it’s going to be installed at. So they get it up through the rolling doors and onto the flatbed truck, that apparently is at an angle. One of the gentlemen that’s watching this, he says, all of the sudden they get it out there, off the I-beam that it’s been pulled out on, and this thing starts to roll sideways off the flatbed truck. And it falls off and crashes. Well, this huge actuator is really quite a delicate piece of equipment. Number one, the rings inside of this piston—I don’t know how many are in there; I’ve never seen the inside of one of these things. But the cylinder itself is coated with silver. It’s got a silver plating in there. And the silver in this case is there for additional lubricant, besides having the—it’s a paraffin-based hydraulic oil is what they’re using, so very specialized. But when it lands on its side, you’ve got all the weight of that piston going to one side. And you’ve got seal rings in there, you’ve got wiper rings in there, to keep the oil inside of the things, so that it doesn’t leak oil very much. And then there’s a provision for oil that does get by the seal rings to go out and go back to the pump. That’s about that big around. Well, when this thing smashed down, it dented those seal rings. It dented everything in that doggone thing. Well, they sent it back to the factory, but—no, they didn’t! No, they did send it back to the factory. I’m getting mixed up, because I wasn’t there. I’m trying to remember everything. But they did send it back to the factory, but it was to make sure the columns in the load frame were vertical. I don’t know if they rebuilt the actuator or not. I really don’t’ know, but I don’t think so, because it came back, it’s leaking oil badly. Because the seal rings in there and everything are flattened on one side. I mean, you’ve got tons of force, wham. And if it came off the bed of the truck, that bed’s got to be four, five feet in height. So to my knowledge, it’s still leaking today. But that was a pretty special piece of equipment, and I wish to heck—like I said, I wouldn’t mind going back to work. [LAUGHTER] I enjoyed it. They’ve got new electronics now. To my knowledge, everything’s working fine. Franklin: New stuff to play with. Criswell: This is kind of specialized equipment. The old stuff, the old bald ones, the old Instrons, they’re not—you just program to do one thing. One thing. It’s either to travel a certain distance at a certain rate or you could tell it to increase the load at a certain rate. Either way. If you’re increasing the load, when the specimen starts to break, it starts to travel faster to keep up. So for most testing, when you’re testing something like this, you want to have this thing traveling at a certain ram rate. This way the load goes, and when it starts to yield, it bends over, and then it starts to drop off and it’ll fail. So this is the way it’s supposed to work. MTS will do it any way you want it to do. It’ll control the speed of the actuator; it’ll control how fast you load something. But when it starts to break, and if you’re under load control, it’s supposed to keep loading so many pounds per unit of time. When it starts to fail, then it isn’t keeping up, so it speeds up. This thing can go really fast. And then it can control load, displacement. It can also control—you can use something called an LVDT where it opens, it’s on the deflection of the specimen you’re trying to break. So there’s different ways of breaking things. But anyhow it’s all closed loop. You tell it you want it to go so many pounds per unit of time, it’ll do it. You tell it you want to go one inch in an hour, it’ll do it. But only one of those things can it do at the same time. And if it’s leaking oil, it isn’t going to keep up. So anyhow they’ve got a mess. They can’t keep up with it now I guess. My recommendation was they send it back. I don’t know. That’s an expensive process, plus they’ve got to get that actuator out of there. Franklin: Well, Dave, thank you so much for sitting down and talking with us today. I really appreciate it. Criswell: Yeah, it’s a good thing you caught me before my mind’s completely gone. Franklin: Yeah. No, you had so much to say. I mean, it was a great interview. Criswell: Yeah. Franklin: I appreciate you sharing your knowledge. Criswell: The equipment was great. It really was great. You program it right, it’ll do what you want. But like I said, when you’ve got a ghost in your electronics, it works most of the time, but one split second it goes haywire, whatever you’re doing is gone. And some of these things, you’ve got to be real careful of. Franklin: Yeah. Well, thank you very much. Criswell: You betcha. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 02:17:59 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 300 Area PRTR 222-S K Reactor Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with David Criswell Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Atomic Products Operation Description An account of the resource David Criswell worked at various facilities in the 300 area including separations labs and the PRTR. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. 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The Hanford Oral History Project operated under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who were the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F086b14362420c4dd52a43bbf5e5e0b36.jpg 3b9817accaa1e01263a76c3dc07ed128 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F0bc49f909539b18632f713f021af9ab5.mp4 dcc3c56a58bfbaa6987b71cc189ab983 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Jim Daughtry Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Jim Daughtry on April 4, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Jim about his experiences working on the Hanford Site. And for the record, Jim, can you state and spell your full name for us? Jim Daughtry: James Daughtry, spelled D-A-U-G-H-T-R-Y. It’s often misspelled and often misspoken, but that’s what it is. Franklin: Great, and James is J-A-M-E-S? Daughtry: J-A-M-E-S, James. Franklin: Okay, but you prefer to go by Jim, correct? Daughtry: Sure, yeah. Franklin: Well, whichever— Daughtry: No, I go by Jim. Franklin: Okay, good. [LAUGHTER] So, Jim, tell me how you came to the area to work for the Hanford Site. Daughtry: Yes, I was hired in 1973 by Peter Hoffmann. Peter Hoffmann was earlier with Battelle Northwest, but at the time, he was a manager in Westinghouse. I guess it was referred to as Westinghouse Hanford Company at the time. He had a physics background and he had responsibilities related to the physics aspects of the Fast Flux Test Facility. Franklin: Okay. Daughtry: So, I had contacted him and expressed interest in coming here and came out for an interview. And eventually, we reached an agreement and I came in to work and he assigned me to a core engineering group, and assigned to a manager by the name of Bob Bennett, who was the manager of core physics at the time. Franklin: Okay. And where did you come here from? Daughtry: Where did I come here from? I had been with Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago, Illinois. Franklin: And what were you working on there? Daughtry: Well, interestingly enough, I was actually working on the engineering mockup experiments for the FFTF. That was the connection. I had been working on that for a couple of years, and those experiments were ramping down, and I thought, well, okay, I have that experience and it would be of value here. So that’s why I contacted Peter Hoffmann, and we went on from there. Franklin: What interested you about the FFTF? Daughtry: Well, of course I got interested early on, because of the experiments we were doing. We were doing experiments there that would be used to calibrate the computer codes that would later be used for all of the physics analysis for FFTF. So, the interest was there because I knew what FFTF was all about. Franklin: And when you say computer codes, we’re talking about a much older type of computer, right? Were you using punch cards at that time? Daughtry: Yes, indeed. Yes. Actually, it was interesting, because the Department of Energy had turned the design responsibility for the FFTF to the advanced reactors division at Westinghouse Corporation in Pittsburgh. So they had their own computer codes, which were of their advantage, anyway. I was working at Argonne National Laboratory; they had their computer codes. And out here at Hanford, they had their computer codes. They were all different. They did about the same thing; they didn’t always agree exactly the same. But we knew that the codes that were developed here would be the ones that would be used as we started up the plant and did the final calculations. And also, those needed to be calibrated with the experiments that were done at Argonne National Lab. So you said punch cards? Yes. When I first came to work here, our offices were in the Federal Building, first floor of the Federal Building. I believe the computing center was in the basement of the Federal Building. We would prepare the calculations for the day and those would then be punched on punch cards and those then would be probably verified by someone else, and then go into the computer. I don’t remember now what the turnaround was, but I suppose if it was a large calculation, we might have to wait until the next day to get the results. Franklin: Wow. How did you get the three different systems to match up? Or what kind of effort did it take to get those three different systems to kind of match up so this engineering mockup information and the headquarters in Pittsburgh, how’d they all talk to one another? Daughtry: Well, there were a lot of meetings, of course, between the Advanced Reactor personnel in Pittsburgh and the personnel at Argonne National Lab, and people here at Hanford. But it wasn’t necessary for the codes to match up. They had to be close enough that they could decide on what experiments to run at what we referred to as the engineering mockup. I even brought a picture that you might see. This is what the—this was called ZPR-9. ZPR stands for Zero Power Reactor. The engineering mockup was assembled there. This would be a front face. The core of the reactor in FFTF is about three feet high, four feet in diameter. This represents the core and the shield. But, see, this was done at the engineering mockup near Chicago. Franklin: Oh, at Argonne. Daughtry: Yes, at Argonne. This was designed and built based on meetings between the people here at Hanford and the people at Argonne. They decided what experiments to do, and they designed it what they thought at the time that the FFTF would look like. Anyway, I just brought that to show, because you never see what the actual core of FFTF looks like, because—but this is the front face of a— The way this works is the engineering mockup was divided into two halves, and it was movable. So that when it was pulled apart, it would never go critical. It was only when it was brought together and the control rods moved out, it would become critical. But it never operated at power. It was called Zero Power Reactor. It never reacted at power. It was just an experimental facility. It was very important to the final design of the FFTF. Because by building an assembly that replicated what FFTF was going to look like, then they could run a whole series of experiments on it to predict what we would see when we ran the FFTF. Franklin: Okay. Backing up a little bit, what was—I guess, maybe enlarging the scope. What was the purpose of the FFTF and the breeder reactors, breeder reactor program? And how was it different from the other reactors at Hanford? Daughtry: Well, the Fast Flux Test Facility was built to test materials and fuel that were going to be used in the Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor Program. Liquid metal, meaning sodium, which would be the coolant. And by fast reactor, it means that the neutrons’ fissions would occur while they were at high energy, rather than, in light water reactors they are allowed to, what they call, thermalize, to come to lower energies where the fission cross-sections were higher and the probabilities for fission are higher. But the breeder program, you probably know, it was intended to build a reactor that could convert depleted uranium into plutonium, and so it could make fuel as it burned fuel, and therefore it could extend the usefulness of the uranium supply by orders of magnitude. Franklin: Great. And so what kinds of—you mentioned your work at Argonne and the engineering mockup was critical to the success of the FFTF, which makes sense, right? Building this prototype would allow you to work out kinks. Were there any significant kinks or things that you figured out doing the mockup that changed the as-built of the FFTF? Daughtry: I’m not sure I can answer that. The design of the FFTF was not completely finalized during that time, so there were some changes made to the design of our experiments there as the design work proceeded. Again, with the design, final design was given to the advanced reactors division of Westinghouse Electric Corporation. They had their offices in Pittsburgh. But I mentioned that, not so much to highlight that aspect, but just to point out that when I came here to work, the first job that I had was to analyze the experiments that had been done in engineering mockup. And so the experiments were all done to support the final design, the planning for the startup and testing in the FFTF. So my first job there was analyzing the experiments that we had done back there. So that and then I came into an organization that was called the core physics group, and that was managed by, at that time, by Bob Bennett. The core engineering organization, which included him, and Wilbur Bunch who managed the shielding and criticality group, were all focused, pretty much, on planning for the startup. We were not involved, really, in the design of the plant. That was still under Westinghouse Electric’s responsibility. But we worked with the Department of Energy to design what we called a reactor characterization program, which was to determine the characteristics of FFTF. That was done during the acceptance testing program. We had a fairly extensive set of physics measurements that were done shortly after the reactor went critical for the first time. So, much of our work from ’73 up until the time that the plant first went critical had to do with the preparations for that, and also preparations for refueling after the plant started into normal operation. Franklin: Oh, okay. And what was the date that the FFTF went critical? Daughtry: I believe it was 1980 when it went critical. As a matter of fact, I have another little thing that I can show you about that. There was an announcement that I still—I kept a copy of that. Well, anyway. This was February the 9th, 1980. Franklin: Ah, February 9, 1980. Daughtry: You may have seen a—this has been shown before, a number of times. It shows the—it’s a diagram that was taken off of the charts in the control room. This shows the time of day, and this shows the neutron count rates in counts per second. And what it shows that at this time, when this line became straight, this is a logarithmic scale; it shows that the power level or the flux level is increasing exponentially. And you can even pick out from this the fact that it had increased by about a factor of ten in less than a minute. Franklin: Yeah. Daughtry: And so at this point in time, we confirmed that the reactor was critical, February the 9th, 1980, at about 3:46 in the afternoon. And then they inserted the control rods a little bit at this point and leveled it off at a higher power. This was still essentially at very low power. It was not at full power. We were just demonstrating that we could take the plant critical. Franklin: Oh, okay, interesting. Earlier when you said you worked in this reactor characterization program for the DOE to determine the characteristics of the reactor, the reactor design, I guess, then, was solidified, but maybe the plant design was still being worked out? Or how did this work with this reactor— Daughtry: No. As a new reactor, there was a fairly extensive acceptance test program. You had to verify that all of the plant was working the way it was supposed to work. Part of the acceptance test program was this reactor characterization program, which was primarily a physics program. We were measuring things like the neutron spectrum, the energy spectrum of the neutrons in the reactor, reaction rates of all—of various materials. Any materials that would be used, we would want to determine the rate at which the reactions would occur. And part of that would be the fission rate, the rate at which fissions would occur, and a wide range of fissionable material that was actually in the reactor fuel, but it could be in experiments that would be in the reactor fuel. So we would measure the gamma ray distribution, and the heating from gamma rays. This was done throughout—I mentioned to you that the size of the actual fueled region was only about three feet high and four feet in diameter. This was surrounded by a stainless steel reflector, they referred to it, and the fuel pins would have stainless steel above and below the fuel part. Franklin: And this was in the sample, or this was in the final reactor? Daughtry: This was in the actual reactor itself. And we had sample—special characterizer assemblies, that we’d call them, that were made that we could put the test pieces into, in order to make the measurements. Franklin: So then this is a much smaller reactor core than the plutonium production reactors. Daughtry: Yeah. It was— Franklin: Because B is massive. It’s a massive face. Daughtry: Yeah, this was operated at a thermal power of just 400 megawatts, whereas a full scale reactor might operate at 2,000 megawatts power, and then they would be generating electricity from that. So this was just a small version. But the fuel assemblies were similar in size to ones you would put into a full-scale reactor. Franklin: Okay. Daughtry: By “an assembly,” an assembly is a collection of pins that are held together and then put into the reactor core in one long, it’s referred to as a fuel assembly. Franklin: And then that was irradiated inside the core. Daughtry: Yes. Franklin: And then pulled out. Daughtry: Yes, now—yes. This particular, the Fast Flux Test Facility, was designed to test fuels and materials that would be used later on in the breeder reactor program. So it was intended not to have long operating power production cycles, but to have cycles that you could put a test in and run it for a period of time and then take it out and examine it. So there was a whole different organization from the operation organization that did that. Westinghouse Hanford Company had a fairly extensive program to do research on reactor fuel, reactor—oh, various types of stainless steel, materials that would be in there, and just see how they performed in the environment that you’d anticipate in a breeder reactor. Franklin: So this, then, was pretty kind of cutting-edge research for this program, but also very different from a lot of the other activity going on at Hanford. Daughtry: Well, yes, it was entirely different from the weapons program. So the FFTF was unique in that respect. I and many others never worked in the weapons program at all. We were all here because of our interest in the possibility of a breeder reactor program in our country. Franklin: Hmm. And so how—could you tell me a little more about the breeder reactor program? Is it still running, how long did it run for, what’s the status of that? Daughtry: Well, it was in full swing when FFTF was—when the decision was made to have that. There was great anticipations that we could build reactors that would breed fuel. And so the Department of Energy had some degree of enthusiasm. So they wanted to have a robust testing program. FFTF was the center of that testing program. There was other work, of course, going on at other national labs. At Argonne National Lab, in particular. But the Department of Energy, with obviously some probably politics involved, decided to build the FFTF here at Hanford. So it became an important step in the overall breeder program. Unfortunately, by the time the reactor started up and was ready to go into operation, the breeder program was not as enthusiastically supported by the administrations, for various concerns. They were concerned about nuclear proliferation and other issues. And eventually, I believe it was under the Carter administration, decided that they wanted to terminate the breeder program altogether. So by the time FFTF had been successfully demonstrated that it went critical, went to full power, that it could operate, and do what it was intended to do, its reason for being disappeared. Franklin: Ah. Daughtry: So there was quite a bit of effort, following that, to determine if there were other ways to use FFTF. To generate medical isotopes to support other missions and so a great deal of effort, after the breeder program was—well, there was a lot of hope that the breeder program could be resurrected. But they had to find some reason to continue to operate FFTF without the breeder program that it was intended to support. Franklin: Right. So its entire reason for being was gone before it was—really, before it started. Daughtry: Well, I’m not sure about the exact date now, when the breeder program was terminated, but certainly, it wasn’t long after the reactor started up and went into operation and began its design testing programs that the Department of Energy was looking for ways to cut back on the cost. So immediately, shortly after the initial power ascent, they tried to cut back on the staff out there, and our group, which was under Bob Bennett at the time, was split up into two parts. One part stayed out at the plant to help, actually, it was necessary for fuel management, to determine, to plan the fuel loading for each cycle. And then the other group went back into what would be the Hanford Engineering Organization to be involved in other activities. However, it wasn’t long before we were asked again to do analyses for FFTF to support alternative missions, to estimate how much tritium we could produce, how much plutonium-238, how much of other materials, how much medical isotopes. So there was a lot of work of that nature that was done after the plant had gotten into full power. I might mention, I did—you know, achieving criticality was a major step, and it was something that everybody who had been involved in it wanted to be here when it happened. I brought this picture because it says—this was just a picture of the plant. But all around it is the signatures of everybody who was present at the time when it actually did go critical. At that time, the president of Westinghouse Hanford Company was John Yasinsky, and you’ll find his signature is up near the top there. And the project manager was John Nolan, who later became president of Westinghouse Hanford. Franklin: Yep, I see his signature. And I see Bob Bennett. Daughtry: There. Franklin: Yeah. Daughtry: So anyway, all of those people were here. Which reminds me that the day before this occurred, the project organization wanted to make sure that indeed the plant went critical, because all of these people were going to be here. So they’d have been very embarrassed if we’d pulled out the control rods and the plant wasn’t critical. Franklin: Right, right. Daughtry: So I remember the day before, we had a meeting. And my group was responsible for projecting criticality. And as we met there with the operations organization, I remember—I don’t remember who all was there at the time—but I remember the question came up, they said, well, we have, I think, 58 assemblies in the core now; should we proceed with withdrawal of the control rods? And I remember saying, no, we need to add one more assembly. So we added, I think it was the 59th assembly. And then the next day, they pulled out the control rods, and sure enough, the reactor went critical, and of course, everybody was there and everybody applauded and I believe they may have passed around a bottle of champagne. I don’t know; I didn’t get any. But anyway, it was a big deal, because it had been started back in the mid-‘60s, and this was 1980. So you see a lot of time, a lot of effort had gone into it and of course the cost estimates had gone up and all of that. Franklin: And you yourself had at this point—you weren’t there from the beginning-beginning, but you had been working on this thing for seven-plus years. Daughtry: Since 1973, yes. And actually a little before that, since I was working on the critical experiments before I came here. Franklin: Right. Daughtry: So, yeah, I spent almost all of my career after graduate school working on the FFTF. Franklin: Wow. Daughtry: And how long did the FFTF run its various research missions? Daughtry: I don’t remember the exact dates. But it ran through several operating cycles in which many tests were irradiated. I cannot tell you when it was—when the decision was made to shut it down and not operate anymore. It would’ve been in the—I think it would’ve been in the mid-to-late-1980s. I don’t remember the exact date. Franklin: Okay, yeah. You had mentioned other ways—other alternate missions for the FFTF, other ways to use the reactor. Were some more successful than others? Daughtry: Well, none were completely successful. I’m sure what the Department of Energy would be looking at would be, it takes so much money to actually operate the reactor. You have all the operating crews, you have the security, you have safety organizations, quality assurance organizations. So you have a large number of people and you could squeeze it down only so far and still operate safely. So that cost a designated amount of money. So what the Department of Energy would look at is, how can I get a return comparable to the cost from some other mission? So they looked at a lot of different possibilities. But none of them came up to the point where they said that either this or any combination of these missions put together did they feel would justify the cost of continuing operation. I was not in that aspect of it. But that’s just my take on it, that it came down to dollars and cents. Franklin: As many things do. Especially in the world of the federal government. So then it really was designed, then, for its original mission. Daughtry: Oh, sure. Franklin: Which it never really fulfilled. Daughtry: And it was not intended to run forever anyway. But it was intended to operate for a long time, because they anticipated a continued testing program that—and to follow up to this was to be the Clinch River reactor in Tennessee. That’s when that was canceled and then the breeder program was canceled. As successful as FFTF was, it still didn’t have, any longer, reason for being. The experience was really great. The personnel that operated the plant were extremely capable, extremely—they set an amazing record. And I felt that the people I worked with here were just top-notch. I was pleased. I’ve heard many people in the management realm complain about not being able to get good workers, skilled workers. That was never my experience. The people that worked in my organization were just exceptional. And that was true of most of the people involved in the FFTF program. Franklin: Great. Did the FFTF influence any other reactors, either in the United States or worldwide? Daughtry: Well I think, Japan had their own test reactor, and I believe they—well, I know that they had some experiments in the FFTF, and were interested in the results of those experiments. They had continued on, and their breeder reactor program was not terminated at the same time ours was. It eventually was, but theirs had extended on quite a few years beyond our program. And I’m thinking that some of us who were involved in the startup and testing at FFTF went over to Germany to talk to people there who were planning to start up a similar test reactor to the FFTF. Unfortunately, they didn’t ever start up. They got very close. They brought the fuel in, they built the entire reactor, and they brought the fuel in. But I think the state, one of the organizations there, never gave the approval to operate it. And so it was never done, never operated in Germany. So there was interest around the world. Russia went further than we did in liquid metal—the breeder programs. And I’m not abreast of what they have operating now, but they did build probably the equivalent of our Clinch River plant and then maybe even beyond that. Franklin: Mm. What did you think of Richland when you arrived here in the early ‘70s? Daughtry: Okay. Well, I had grown up and spent most of my early years and education and all in the eastern part of the US. So when I came out here, my family and I arrived by car, I believe July the 1st. And we didn’t have a home, so we had to look for a home. But the temperature that day was over 100. We were fortunate they let us stay in the Hanford House while we were waiting. We did finally, after the first week, found a home, which we purchased, but couldn’t move into until the end of July. So we stayed at the Hanford House for almost 30 days. And outside of the Hanford House, I believe the bank had a sign out there that would have the temperature on it. Of the first 30 days, 15 of them were over 100. So that was our introduction to Richland and to Hanford, and to the Tri-Cities. It was quite a change, quite a change from what we were used to. But it’s all behind us now and after 1973 to now, that must be something like 44 years? We thought this is a, really an easy place to live. Franklin: And did you purchase a house in Richland? Daughtry: We did. We purchased a house in Richland. Franklin: So you lived in Richland. Daughtry: We did for 20 years, and we then later built a home out in Benton County where we live now. So we lived in Richland in 20 years, and we’ve lived where we are living now for 24 years. So we have, I guess, about 44 years in the Tri-Cities. Franklin: Sure. How has Richland changed from when you moved here in the ‘70s to now? Daughtry: Oh, well, not just Richland, but I believe at the time, I’m pretty sure Richland was larger than Pasco, and Pasco has grown. West Richland was almost nothing, but now West Richland has boomed. The Tri-Cities as a whole have changed more than Richland itself. The whole area has just—has thrived over the years. But it’s still a comfortable place to live. Franklin: Sure. Were there any—considering you had worked for different national labs in the field of nuclear technologies since getting your degree, was there any—you kind of were, maybe more indirectly, I guess you could say, involved in the Cold War, or directly involved in technologies that played a vital role in the Cold War. Did you feel connected to that conflict at all in any way, or did you feel any anxiety about living next to a place of weapons production during the Cold War? Daughtry: No, I did not. I was aware of what was going on, and I was aware of what happened at Chernobyl. I was aware of what was happening here at Hanford as far as weapons production. But I was focused on our mission, and that consumed my time and I was never uneasy about living where I was living. But, no, I never ended up working in the weapons program at all. After FFTF was shut down, I spent a short period of time involved in some of the calculations, criticality-related calculations, for the cleanup effort. But that was a small part of my career; most of it was with the FFTF over those years. Franklin: Speaking of Chernobyl, how did—I’m wondering if you could give me your impression on how that incident kind of reverberated in this community? Daughtry: Well, I think one of the first concerns that people worried about around the country was the N Reactor was a graphite-moderated reactor and Chernobyl was, too. So people wanted to compare it. But there was significant differences. And again, I wasn’t involved in that, so I could not tell you what exactly the differences were. But people argued that, no, no, no, the N Reactor was not like Chernobyl. But other people around the country were not so convinced. And ultimately, of course, that was shut down as well. But we hated to see Chernobyl happen because any major accident anywhere in the world affects everybody else in the industry. So we hated to see an accident anywhere. That was, unfortunately, a very serious one. Franklin: Yeah. Probably the worst manmade nuclear accident—Fukushima is the result of a tidal wave, and so, nature— Daughtry: Yeah, tsunami and a tidal wave. Franklin: Nature played more of a role there. So, okay. Thank you. When did you retire from Hanford? Daughtry: As I recall, it was December of 1994. So I had that—I’d worked for Westinghouse about 21 years. I think, if I recall, it was the next fall that Westinghouse, essentially left and Fluor took over operation here at Hanford. So all of my time here at Hanford was with Westinghouse. Franklin: What drove your decision to retire? Daughtry: Well, I don’t know. It was a bad—it was not as healthy a time. It seems like there was so much effort to reduce cost. And the cleanup program had not, seems like, gotten the support that it got later on. And the FFTF had been shut down. There were other things that we could do and other things that we did do, but—I think because of the Department of Energy were putting pressure on Westinghouse to cut back staff, they offered early retirement incentives. I looked at the opportunities and what there was left of interesting work to be done, and I just decided to take the early retirement opportunity. Franklin: What I’m getting is kind of a picture of a kind of a rudderless era, maybe, in some ways, compared to the production period. Daughtry: Well, yes. That was really a time of great enthusiasm when we had this mission and we had a goal. So many times, you’ll see government projects start and go a while and then stop and never be completed. For example, there was the superconducting supercollider. It was to be built in Texas. And it was funded and it was approved. But then eventually, probably due to financial issues again, it was terminated. So you see so many projects that start and don’t make it, but we saw it. We didn’t see the breeder program, but we saw a reactor whose concepts were first developed in the mid-‘60s. They went all the way to completion. The reactor was built, it was operated successfully, and to see something really successful is really a good part of a career to see that sort of thing happen. After that, of course there was other work, and there was the cleanup program. But I never saw anything here that engendered the same level of enthusiasm that the FFTF did. Perhaps there were that I was just not aware of. But I was happy that I had the opportunity to work there when I did. Franklin: Right. What did your wife do while you worked out at the FFTF? Daughtry: My wife has a degree in physics as well. Franklin: Oh! Daughtry: An undergraduate degree. But she came here, and we had, at that time, two children. So her goal was to make sure those children were raised properly. As time went on, she became quite interested in gardening and decided, as the children got older, that she’d join the Master Gardener program here in the Tri-Cities. So she actually worked with that for, I believe, over 35 years, she was involved in the Master Gardener program. She assisted the program director, Marianne Ophart. So that was a great fulfilment for her. She found a real place where she felt like she could contribute, and she did. Franklin: Oh, wow. Great. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War? Daughtry: Well, that then goes back mostly to the work that went on here that I was not involved in. I think you need somebody else to answer that question. The Cold War competition between the Soviet Union and the United States led to a series of burst of activity here at Hanford. They felt like that they needed to make more weapons periodically. So Hanford did its share. And of course we’re paying much of the price for that now, because we have the remnants to be cleaned up. That’s taking much longer than anyone might have anticipated. But at the time they were producing plutonium here, that wasn’t the major concern. A major concern was that there was a competition between the Soviet Union and the US. But that’s a whole different area, and that’s not my—that was not my involvement, where I was involved. Franklin: Sure. Let me rephrase that question, maybe tailor it better to you. What would you like future generations to know about working on the FFTF and the breeder reactor program? Daughtry: Well, I think future generations should remember that there is a concept that has been proven, that we could generate electricity, and we could—we do have, in the form of uranium, a fuel that could last for a long, long time. It doesn’t produce greenhouse gases. So it’s there, and it hasn’t gone away. The fact that we’re not following right now doesn’t mean that it won’t be followed sometime in the future. But I believe that FFTF served its purpose then. It might have accomplished a great deal more than it actually did. But the breeder program is something that was not just a pie-in-the-sky; it was real. And it’s still a possibility, and perhaps we’ll have to just see what the future holds. Whether that will ever resurrect itself remains to be seen. Franklin: Great. Is there anything that we haven’t discussed that you’d like to talk about today? Daughtry: Not that I—I think we’ve sort of covered the issues, covered the things. I just hope, you know, what I’ve been able to pass on to you is somehow helpful. Franklin: I think it is. Thank you very much, Jim, I really appreciate it. Daughtry: Yeah, appreciate it. Franklin: Your photos, would we be able to make digital copies of those and place them with your interview? Daughtry: Sure. They’re easily—I think they would be available. Franklin: Great. So if you don’t mind, what I’ll do is I’ll take those with me and I’ll make digital copies, and when we process your interview in a couple weeks and make a DVD out of it, we’ll slip these in the mail along with the DVD. Daughtry: I think those are the ones that I mentioned to you. Franklin: Okay, great. Is there any others that you think are of historical significance that you’d like to have with your interview? Daughtry: This is the first ascent to full power. Franklin: Oh, okay. Daughtry: And it went up step by step. There was also—I don’t know, does that show there was a bunch of signatures around there as well? Franklin: Yeah. Daughtry: So it’s a similar thing, that people wanted to be there the first time the reactor got up to its designed operating power, full power. And by that time, it could be that John Nolan may have been taken over as president of Westinghouse Hanford. I’m not sure of the exact time. But it’s a similar sort of thing. Achieving criticality was one major step, but another major step was when the reactor actually reached full power for the first time. Franklin: Great. Wow. This is great. Thank you so much, Jim. Put these in my folder here, and I’ll put these in a nice protective envelope when we mail them back to you— Daughtry: Okay. Franklin: So they don’t get all beat up. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate— Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:52:47 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317kbps Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Jim Daughtry Subject The topic of the resource Fast Flux Test Facility (Wash.) Westinghouse Hanford Company Richland (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Jim Daughtry came to the Hanford Site to work at the Fast Flux Test Facility. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 4/4/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project, who can provide specific rights information for this item. 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This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F4b3b39e87ce2507d604a1502d8a7ab60.jpg 770df6b0e7699c07a4956c77fd36fe8a https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F52781766779487f891c66cb12dd10aac.mp4 80f3a4e1bf5e27d53fb0329c79865a7f Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Elaine Davis Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: Are you ready? Elaine Davis: There. Franklin: Better get that closed. Ready? Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Elaine Davis on September 2, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Elaine Davis about her experiences growing up in Richland. So, the best place to start is at the beginning. So why don’t you tell me where and when you were born? Elaine Davis: I was born September 27, 1948 at Kadlec Hospital. I grew up on 1918 Howell in Richland and I went to school at Jefferson Elementary, Chief Jo Middle—Chief Jo Junior High at that time, and Columbia High School. Franklin: And Columbia later became Richland? Davis: Richland High School. Franklin: Yeah, the gentleman I just interviewed also went to Columbia High School. And so, Elaine, we’ve already talked a bit, and I’ve read your bio here that my intern put together, and so you were born here, but your dad, your family didn’t work at Hanford-proper, right, but they worked for the government here? Davis: My dad, I think, worked for the Manhattan Project. He came in March 1944. And my mother came out in June of 1944, after she finished nursing school. And then my brother was born on the 2nd of August, 1944, and he was the first baby born in Kadlec. They didn’t have bassinets at that time; they put him in a dresser drawer. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: How new was Kadlec Hospital at that time? Davis: They had just completed the emergency room and the maternity section. Franklin: Okay. Davis: So my mom was admitted on the 1st, but she didn’t have him until the 2nd of August, 1944. Franklin: So your brother is somewhat of a local celebrity at the time, correct? Davis: Yes, he is, right. He was grand marshal for one of the parades that Richland had, with my mother sitting beside him, and they were the grand marshal. Franklin: I guess he kind of, in some ways he might symbolize—the first birth of the community, right, is something for the community to kind of gather around. Because up until that point, right, there was no one who worked for the Manhattan Project who had any kind of—no one could say, like, oh, I was born in Richland. You know? Davis: Mm-hmm, right. Franklin: Or at least the new Richland that was—is distinct from the— Davis: Because Richland did exist before the Manhattan Project. Franklin: Right, yeah, but most of those people had had to leave and were of a very different—they would’ve had very different lives and memories of Richland than all of the people that would’ve came. Davis: Yes. Franklin: So what did your father do at the Manhattan Project? Davis: He worked—he was one of the—not the first male nurse out on the Project, but one of the first male nurses out on the Project in 1944. Franklin: And— Davis: And— Franklin: Oh, please. Davis: But he didn’t, you know—he didn’t know what was going on. All he knew is he was here as a nurse to help out in any way he could. Franklin: Do you know where he worked in those early days? Davis: He didn’t tell me where he worked. I’m sure it was probably because it was so secretive. Franklin: Right, right. So then he transferred over to Kadlec when it was completed then? Davis: Yes. Franklin: Okay. And what did he do for Kadlec? Davis: He was the administrator for Kadlec. Franklin: Okay. So was he then in charge of like the day-to-day operations? Davis: Yes, he was. Franklin: Okay. And you also mentioned that your mother worked there? Davis: My mother worked from the time I was 13 months old, and she worked until I was in the third grade, when I was about nine. She went to work for Dr. Buren Lee for 17 years and then they started the Richland Clinic. She worked for Dr. Ballmann for 17 years after that. But she continued working until she was 78 years old. Franklin: Wow. Davis: Because of having Alzheimer’s, they had to let her go. Franklin: Right, right. And what did she do when she worked for the doctors? Davis: For Dr. Lee, she was a surgical nurse. For Dr. Ballmann, she was his medical nurse. Franklin: And how long did your father work at Kadlec for? Davis: I’m going to say for maybe a year, year-and-a-half, after Kadlec came into existence. Franklin: Okay. Davis; And then he worked for HEHF when they got the contract. Franklin: When was that? Davis: I’m not really sure when that was. He worked until he was 65 for HEHF as the administrator. Did all the hiring and firing for HEHF. Franklin: Okay. It says here that your father lived in the barracks at one time? Davis: He lived in the barracks for the first three months. And then they lived on Armistead—and I don’t know the exact address—for four-and-a-half years. And then they moved into 1918 Howell, three months before I was born. My mother was out watering the new lawn when she started her labor with me. Franklin: How—sorry. Did your father have any stories or anything about—or your mother—about—well, actually, I guess that’s a good question. So your father came in ’44, and your mother in June ’44. Do you know if your mother worked on the Manhattan Project? For the year— Davis: No, she didn’t. She did not— Franklin: Okay. Davis: --work for the Manhattan Project. But she did tell stories of standing in line for rations, meat rations, sugar rations, coffee rations, when it was 110 degrees and no trees. Franklin: Oh, man, wow. Davis: They would both talk about the terminating winds that people would just leave because it was dusty, so dusty you couldn’t see. And every day, you had to clean out your window sills because of the dust that piled up in the windows. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Wow. Do your parents have any other stories about that time? Anything that sticks out to you that you can remember? Davis: Now, they went and watched Eddie Feigner, the baseball player, was here. They went to a lot of baseball games to watch him, and they did a lot of their own entertaining. They played bridge every week, and rode their bikes an awful lot, played a lot of tennis. Franklin: I see. Oh, that’s good. I mean, you got to stay entertained. Tell me about growing up in Richland, you know, being a government town. I understand you would’ve been young for a lot of that, but during the Cold War, being this government town. Davis: I remember in grade school, we had to do duck-and-cover under our desks. We did that once a week. Franklin: Can you walk me through that process? Davis: You got under your desk and got on your knees and put your hands over your face, and you waited until they said everything was clear. Franklin: And you said you did that about once a week? Davis: Once a week. Franklin: So that means you got—I bet everybody got pretty—was it the same time all the time, or did you just hear the bell and know it was duck-and-cover time? Davis: You’d hear the siren and they’d have you—give you directions to do the duck-and-cover. Franklin: When did you understand, first understand, what was at Hanford or what was being produced at Hanford? Davis: I think that I learned about it when I was about 14, 15 years old. Franklin: Oh, really? Davis: Yeah. Franklin: Okay, and what do you remember about that? Davis: That everything was secretive. Nobody could discuss their jobs, what they were doing, or anything. So there was a lot of secrecy in it. But we didn’t question it. Franklin: Really? So, what did you think about it, when you found out what was being made at Hanford? How did that make you feel, or— Davis: I think it made me, you know—that saved our country. If we hadn’t done it, we might be slaves to the Japanese or to the Germans. Franklin: What about the work that had happened after the World War II, what about the continued—because, you know, when you would’ve found out about that, right, there was still a lot of production for the Cold War weapons arsenal. What about—so, I understand that feeling of in the World War II there’s that feeling you mentioned about being physically at war with other countries, declared war. But what about the Cold War? Is that trickier to draw a feeling about, or how do you—what about the Hanford’s relationship to the USSR and to the Cold War and to the nuclear weapons stockpile? Davis: It was, I thought, was scary, growing—learning about it. There was nothing that we could do as citizens ourselves. It was up to what the government—it was their decision, not ours. I really don’t have anything to comment on. Franklin: Sure. I just—the main reason I ask that question, these kinds of questions is for people—I grew up at the very end of the Cold War, but for myself and for people to come, it’s illustrative, I think, to hear from experiences of people that lived in that time and lived with the fear or the risk or just in that situation. Because it’s so unique. Davis: It is. Franklin: And such an interesting period of time, because World War II is so easily well-defined, and it ended with a lot of joy here and this kind of momentous occasions. Whereas the Cold War had its ups and downs. Davis: Right. Franklin: So that’s why I ask those—not to sort of draw any kind of gotcha moments or anything like that. But to just explore how you felt, or, like, the feeling of the sense of being in that conflict. Davis: I didn’t do a lot of reading, but I did listen to a lot of the news commentators and stuff like that. So just learning about it was an experience to go through. Franklin: Oh, yeah, I bet. So you would’ve found out about Hanford as a teenager, and then do you remember the sale of when Richland became privatized? Davis: Yes, I do. Franklin: I guess you would’ve been about ten. Davis: My dad showed my brother and I the biggest check we’d probably ever see written by my parents when they bought their house for $8,000. He took it with him when they signed the papers so that—we had ownership of our house, rather than the government coming in and changing lights; we changed our own lights, we could do reconstruction or construction—remodeling on the house and stuff like that, where we couldn’t before. So it was a great experience for my brother and I to go with them and to see what the process was in buying the house. My parents’ first house. Franklin: Did life change for you substantially after Richland was—or did you notice changes? Davis: I didn’t notice anything changing. We never locked our house or our cars. The kids in the neighborhood played out in the summer until 11:00 at night and you didn’t have to worry about children missing or being molested. We were a safe place to live and grow up. Our main activity was going to the river and swimming and water skiing everyday during the summer. During the winter, we snow skied. My dad learned to snow ski at 48. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Davis: We taught him. He took a few lessons, but he learned, basically, from my brother and I. Franklin: Wow, that’s really cool. And so you graduated in— Davis: 1967. Franklin: And then what? Davis: Then I went to two-and-a-half years at CBC. And I’m dyslexic, so I could take about 12 credit hours. And then I decided after two-and-a-half years, I could get a job in the Area and my dad said—I said, can you help me get a job? And he says, I don’t want to be owing to anybody for getting a job for you. He says, if you get a job, you’re going to have to get it on your own. So I laid out of school for a year-and-a-half and I worked at Roger’s of Walla Walla in a potato shed. We had no air conditioning. Franklin: Whew. Davis: You inspected the potatoes and they were done then made into French fries. They’d come down the conveyor belt, and you’d pull the potato off that was rotten, or it wasn’t good enough to be used. So you pulled them off. And then you also packed five six-pound bags into a box and put it on the conveyor belt to go into the freezer. Another job was to make the box—the boxes were made, but you had to put it on a conveyor belt down to where it was put into—the potato sacks were put into the boxes and shipped to the cooler. What made me decide to go back to school was, I was working graveyard the whole year-and-a-half I worked there. But I’d worked there three summers and got a job full-time. Two women got into a brawl, biting, kicking, scratching, and I quit that night and said, I’m going back to school. I went back to school and majored in recreation, park administration at Eastern Washington University. It was a state college then. Franklin: Right. Davis: And I worked between my junior and senior year of college for the Richland Recreation Department. And then after I graduated from college, a year-and-a-half after I graduated from college, I got a job, my first job at Exxon. My salary for the whole year was $5,000 a year. Which was low in ’74 when I started. But everything was lower. Prices were lower then. And then I worked for them for four years, and then I got hired in by United Nuclear in 1978. And I worked in document control through many changes of companies until I was laid off in 2005. And then— Franklin: Oh, wow. Davis: 27 ½ years. And then I got a job working for the Richland School District as a bus aide for special needs kids, and just loved it. And I just quit working when I turned 66 two years ago. Franklin: Wow, that’s really—well, it’s great that you really enjoyed your last job. Records control, was that at the Federal Building? Davis: In the Federal Building, when I worked for United Nuclear, I went out and changed the operating procedures for N Reactor and the production of making the fuel rods for N Reactor. And then I worked in all aspects of document control for 25 years. The last job I worked at was procedures. I would take around procedures for safety operations, environmental, and I’d get the signatures from the engineers and that’s what I did. Franklin: And so what did—when you’re doing document control, what would those duties usually consist of? Davis: What would what be? Franklin: Sorry. When you were doing document control, what did that consist of? Like, what were your duties? Davis: Like I said, I retired records, and they were stored in records storage. Then my last job, like I said, was working with the engineers on writing of the procedures. Franklin: Interesting. It’s very similar to what I do as an archivist, is I manage records as well. Although in a different—manage them for research use. But it’s very similar steps, right? You follow a disposition schedule, you file the records in appropriate places, after a certain time you send things to— Did you send things to the National Archives at certain times, or--? Davis: No, we didn’t. I did not. But my group did. Franklin: Okay. How big was your group? Davis: We had about six people in that, in all different aspects. Franklin: How many different contractors did you work for, starting with United Nuclear? Davis: I worked for about four different companies. The last one was CH2M Hill. Franklin: Okay. And so what were the other two? Davis: Boeing. And I can’t remember what the other one was. Franklin: Is it Lockheed? Davis: Yes, Lockheed Martin. Yeah. Franklin: Yeah, I’ve seen their— Davis: It was Boeing and then Lockheed Martin. Franklin: LMSI. Davis: LMSI. Franklin: I’ve seen that on a lot of the documents we have in the Hanford Collection. Davis: Yeah. Franklin: I just—it’s nice to kind of trace that—I’m just going to write that down. United Nuclear Industries, Boeing, LMSI, CH2M Hill. Thank you. That’s very helpful to me, actually. Because it’s not always clear to reconstruct form the documents. So your brother, the famous Ed Quigley, Jr., the Richland-famous Ed Quigley, what did he do? Davis: He has a degree in social—not social work—psychology and sociology as a double major. But he didn’t—he got into the clinical aspect of it and didn’t like it. And then he started taking—his first wife, Chris, was accepted into Dalhousie University in Canada and they moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia. And he started—that’s where he started his clinical work and decided he didn’t like it. So he was really interested in music, and he took guitar lessons and now he is teaching at Ted Brown’s Music Center in Tacoma. He’s been there for 40-some years. Franklin: Wow. Davis: And he just went with us to Canada. We went to Canada for a month. Just got back last week. And he went with us. That’s what he does. Franklin: Oh, cool. Davis: And he lives in a beach house which has got 210 stairs up and down to his house, so anything you bring down and all the garbage has to go back up. Franklin: I bet he stays in pretty good shape doing all that, right? Davis: Yeah, he is. Franklin: Yeah, I was going to say, that would—maybe I should get 210 stairs to my house. Is there anything else that you would like to tell us about your work or growing up in Hanford or your parents? Davis: I can remember, during the time that we were government, if you dialed 0 you got the FBI. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Did that accidentally happen in your new household? Davis: We did! Once! [LAUGHTER] And got in trouble for it. Franklin: Wow. Davis: You know, we lived in a real sheltered community. When I was growing up, there was only one person that—or one family that I knew was divorced. They were a doctor and his wife and their three kids. That was the only divorce that I knew. So we were a pretty sheltered community. If your kids got in trouble, you were out of here. They didn’t put up with it. But I feel blessed to be in a community that was so caring and so carefree with letting us play outside. Now, you don’t let your kids go outside without being chaperoned. Some of my friends have got grandkids, and they don’t let them out of the house, because of the crime situations, child molestations. So I feel pretty blessed that I lived in a community where nobody bothered anybody, but you knew everybody. Franklin: Right, but I suppose a lot of that is due to kind of the single focus of that community being on Hanford employees, right? Davis: Right. Franklin: And the government control of the—the fear of—maybe not the fear of retribution, but knowing that there was kind of something watching over you. Davis: Right, right. Franklin: Which was the government. What about—did you—like the racial situation in Pasco or Kennewick ever make a mark on you, or do you remember any, like the civil rights era kind of stuff in the Tri-Cities? Davis: As a child, or as parents, our parents never took us to Pasco because of the racial situation there. And Kennewick didn’t allow any blacks, either, at that particular time, growing up. They were all in Pasco, on the east side. So we didn’t really go to Pasco a lot, or to Kennewick. We just stayed in our own community. Franklin: Because Richland just excluded—until ’58, you couldn’t live there unless you worked there, and they didn’t hire many African Americans. Davis: No, they didn’t. Franklin: At all, because there was no civil rights legislation to push equal—you know, push away discrimination in housing or employment. As you mentioned, Kennewick had sundown laws that kept African Americans from owning property. What about, is there any other significant events in Tri—do you remember like the Atomic Frontier Days parade? Davis: Yes, I do. That was one of the big things in Richland, was to go to the Atomic Frontier Days. We went every year, and just had a lot of fun. Franklin: How long did those go till? Davis: Now, that, I’m not sure. I can’t remember that. Franklin: Do you remember President Kennedy’s visit in 1963? Davis: Yes. I was let out of school to go hear him dedicate N Area, N Reactor. Franklin: How was—can you talk a little bit about that? How was that? Davis: Lots and lots of people. It was so crowded. It was good to see—that was the first time I’d ever seen a president up close. Franklin: How close were you? Davis: We weren’t right up front, but we were in the midst of the crowds that was out there. And it was a great feeling. Franklin: Wow, that’s great. Any other events in the Tri-Cities’ history that come to mind? Davis: No, I can’t remember a lot about that. Franklin: How did—so you worked for several different contractors and you also worked from production to shutdown to kind of cleanup. I was wondering if you could talk first about, how did your job change with different contractors? Or how was that—did the work situation change at all, or was it pretty constant? Davis: No, you did the—I was doing the same job that I was assigned to. Nothing seemed to change when a new contractor came in. Franklin: So was there kind of a lack of like an organizational culture with each contractor? Davis: Now, when we went—when CH2M Hill came in, we had to apply for our—re-apply for our jobs, and that was real unsettling to everybody. Because you didn’t know whether you were going to be the one that was going to be out on the street or whether you weren’t. So that was a lot of pressure was put on us. Franklin: Wow. I bet. What about, how did your job change at all from production to stoppage of production and then to the cleanup phase? Davis: Now, from production we changed a little bit, but not a whole lot. And then when we went into—I was laid off in 2005. And so I don’t know—I didn’t work with any of the cleanup completely. Like they are now. So I don’t know. Franklin: What kind of—well, but then—since production stopped in ’87, ’88— Davis: Yeah. Franklin: What happened in those years of the ‘90s and up? Davis: Well, N Area was still going. And then when they closed that down, things started changing, document-wise, with that. Franklin: How so? Davis: You had different things that we were given to do that were different from what we were doing when we were in production. Franklin: Could you describe that? Or like maybe some—what was different about them? Davis: I can’t really explain it. Franklin: Okay. Davis: But it was different. We had different things to do and different things to follow during that time. Franklin: Okay. Is there any example that comes to mind? Davis: Not really. Franklin: Okay. Let me see here. How did—can you describe how this kind of element of security or safety impacted your work at Hanford? Davis: You took pleasure in your job, and you were really loyal to what you were doing. You just had a great sense of gratitude for how we were doing it and what we were doing. Franklin: That’s great. What about for your father? Was he ever—do you know if he was ever impacted by security restrictions or safety stuff, or how that affected his job? Davis: That I don’t know, because he didn’t really discuss that with us. Franklin: Right. Davis: His work thing was separate from his family and social life. So we really didn’t hear about it. Franklin: Oh, right, okay. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland during the Cold War? Davis: I think that, you know, we were safe. And then when the Cold War came on, we weren’t as safe, because we didn’t know if somebody was going to send a bomb over and destroy us. Or destroy themselves, because we would probably retaliate. And to think that we could wipe the whole world out by what we were doing. We just didn’t trust each other. And we still, to this day, don’t know a lot about what’s going on either. We know more, but we don’t know everything. Franklin: Mm. Yeah. That is very true. One of the last things I’d like to ask you about is your relationship or your involvement in the B Reactor Museum Association. Davis: We just joined in June, so we’ve had— Franklin: Of this year? Davis: Yeah. Franklin: Oh, okay. Davis: So we’ve had two meetings [LAUGHTER] before we left to go to Alaska. Franklin: Oh, okay. And why did you choose to get involved in that? Davis: We wanted—because we both, both Charles and I worked here, and we wanted to get active in the organization to promote what Hanford’s about and the B Reactor especially. We went on the July 16th thing to B Reactor. It was great. We learned a lot. Just to walk into that face, and see the face of the reactor. Franklin: Was that your first time to B Reactor? Davis: That was my first time. Franklin: Yeah, it’s almost a religious experience in some ways. Davis: Yes, it is. Franklin: To be confronted with that massive, powerful reactor. You said your husband, Charles, worked on Site? Davis: Yes, he did. Franklin: And what did he do? Davis: He worked, to begin with, as a Hanford Patrol. And then he went from there into nuclear operator, and then from there he went into operations at T Plant. He was one of their administrators. He wasn’t high up, but he— Franklin: And how long did he work at Hanford for? Davis: He worked for 24 ½ years before he got laid off. Franklin: Oh, okay, and what years were those? Davis: Okay, ’78 to 2003. Franklin: Oh, okay. Davis: ’80. No, I take it back. 1980 through— Franklin: And—oh, sorry. Where did you guys meet? Did you meet at Hanford? Davis: No. We met square dancing. Franklin: Oh, okay. That’s really great. Did you meet him before you were working at Hanford or after? Davis: No, after. Franklin: Okay, you worked there pretty much around the same timespan. Davis: Mm-hmm, yeah. Franklin: Oh, that’s really interesting. Cool. Davis: You might want to interview him, too. Franklin: Yeah, that would be really interesting. Davis: He wasn’t born or raised here, but— Franklin: No, but that’s—it’s really good to get—one of the things we’ve been looking for is perspectives of those who worked during the later Cold War. Because, you know, it’s such a big event. Davis: Right. Franklin: And then the shift, too, from production to cleanup is a really important shift that will become more historical as time goes on, so it’s good to get the people while they have fresher memories than trying to make them drag out stuff from 50, 60 years ago. Which is—if that’s the best you got, then that’s the best you got. Well, great, Elaine, thank you so much for the information and the interview. Did you want to narrate some of the stuff you brought, or did you just want to donate that to us to scan? Davis: I’ll donate that to you. Franklin: Okay, great. Well, we’ll have that and we’ll put it in the file with your interview and so people can take a look at that, too, to kind of—if they want to see pictures of Ed, Jr., and all the newspaper articles. Well, I mean, I think there’s really something important about a community coming together to celebrate that first new life. That’s so important at the beginning of a community to see that happening, it makes it, I think, a nicer place to live. So that’s really neat. Well, thank you so much. Davis: You’re welcome. Thank you. Franklin: Yeah, watch out for the microphone up above you. Sorry. Davis: Oh! How’d I do? Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:42:39 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317kbps Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Elaine Davis Subject The topic of the resource Richland (Wash.) Hanford Atomic Products Operation Douglas United Nuclear, Inc. Description An account of the resource Elaine Davis grew up in Richland in the early Cold War. Her father came to Richland in 1944 and was an administrator at Kadlec Hospital. Her older brother was the first baby born in the new town of Richland Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 9/2/2016 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project, who can provide specific rights information for this item. 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This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F9b9686e50c88c457899c6d7831221e3f.JPG d2cbc16ee310bc1c491a5128b063e47a https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F89eaaa9583a9445b5b1ec0f7bb88fbe0.mp4 f972553908e020e5deaacbd5c300a90a Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Marilyn Devine Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Em DeVine on May 21, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Em about her experiences growing up in Richland and working at the Hanford Site. For the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Em DeVine: M-A-R-I-L-Y-N. D-E-capital-V-I-N-E. Franklin: Great, thank you. And you prefer to go by Em? DeVine: I prefer Em. Franklin: Okay. DeVine: Although most people down here know me as Marilyn, because I didn’t change it until many years later, after I had left. Franklin: Oh, okay, gotcha. So tell me how your family came to the area to work at the Hanford Site. DeVine: Well, we didn’t come from far. We’re from Ellensburg, Washington. Franklin: Oh, okay. DeVine: My dad was a fireman there. And I know nothing about how he heard about the Project or anything like that. But he came to work at Hanford in 1943 and then the family didn’t move—he came early. Perhaps July or June. But the family didn’t move until December 6th of [19]43. And the reason I know that is because it was my brother’s 10th birthday. That’s the only reason I know the date that we moved. We lived in a farmhouse that of course had to be abandoned by the owners. It was ten miles from Hanford; it was three miles beyond White Bluffs. So we were in the country. And I’m so sorry I didn’t ever ask my dad why—how we happened to have the privilege of being there. Franklin: Maybe because they wanted him to be close, close to the fire station in case there was— DeVine: Possibly. Franklin: --an emergency. DeVine: Right, that’s certainly plausible. Franklin: Because I know that some patrolmen were allowed to live in some of the old houses, because they wanted them close. And how old were you when the family moved down? DeVine: I was nine. Franklin: You were nine, okay. DeVine: Yes, I had just turned nine the month before. Franklin: So your father leaves some time in the middle of 1943. And did he tell you why he was coming down to Hanford? DeVine: No, I don’t remember knowing why he was gone. They must’ve told us he was working someplace else. Franklin: What were your first impressions of the Hanford Site when you moved here? DeVine: Oh, of our house? Franklin: Yeah, of the whole thing. DeVine: And that area? Well, it was definitely old and dead and dry. The house was old and not a very—well, it wasn’t very good. We didn’t have running water. We had one electric light. We had a wood stove, of course. The bosses, the rulers of the Project, they had people build us a water barrel. It was up on stilts, and they would bring water every week. That was our water supply, except that it was a farm house and there was a barn a little bit down a hill. I can remember my brother and I loading up pots of water from that well and taking them in our Little Red Rider wagon to the house, and that was what we bathed in. Franklin: Oh, wow. DeVine: We drank and cooked with the other water, yeah. Franklin: Right. Did the house in Ellensburg have more modern— DeVine: Oh, my, yes. Yeah, it had a telephone, running water, lights in every room. It was very different situation. Actually, there were four kids. I had an older sister. She was eleven at that time, and my younger brother was probably about four, three or four, years old. The house had a kitchen, of course, and the dining room, and what was probably called a parlor, and then a living room, and one bedroom. But it had a covered, or a screened-in sunporch, I suppose it would’ve been. Franklin: This is the house here out at Hanford? DeVine: That’s the house at White Bluffs, right. So we three older kids had beds in that room. And then my baby brother had a crib in my parents’ room. It was—well, my mother had chickens. I think she had five chickens. And we had a dog that we had taken with us. While we were there, we bought two young goats, which were an awful lot of fun. Now my sister, Charlene, didn’t have a good teacher. The school system was not great. It wasn’t well-developed at that time. So she and my younger brother, because our mother was sickly quite a bit at the time, they moved back to Ellensburg with relatives. So it was just Terry and me for most of the time that we were there. It was a wonderful place to live, I thought. I mean, for kids that age, exploring and—it was just a really, really great opportunity, experience. Franklin: Were you near any other houses? DeVine: No! No, there was a number of fields between us and the houses that were along the Columbia River. They looked big and nice. They were painted white and all that stuff. It was really nice. Franklin: Were there any crops left on the farm? DeVine: No, just—well, actually, there probably was wheat or hay. But I didn’t really recognize it as such. But looking back, thinking back, there probably was some. But it was more just like weeds. Yeah. Franklin: What can you tell me about the school system out at Hanford during the war? DeVine: Well, the grade school kids went to what had been Hanford High School. It was a two-story brick, or block, construction. It’s still there. The high school kids were bussed into Richland, here into Richland. We went on double shifts. We had the morning shift, so that meant, I think, school was like from 6:00 to 11:00. Something like that, maybe 7:00 to 12:00. Very crowded rooms, although we all had desks. Because our mother was sickly, my older sister, my sister and the baby went back to Elle—I said that already. Sorry. Franklin: Oh, sorry, go ahead. DeVine: You go ahead. Franklin: Okay. DeVine: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: What did you do for leisure time when you were out there in this farmhouse? DeVine: Oh, gosh! We explored. Not too far from our house, there was a gravel pit. And one of the things that I especially remember is that my brother would stand up at the top, and I would go down below into the gravel pit. He would throw rocks down, and we would see if we could break them open to see if there was something interesting inside. We knew about thunder—hmm, now I have to think, the rocks that have something really—thunder eggs. I don’t think we found anything precious. If we thought it was, we would take it to our mom and have her look at it. That summer, spring after we were—before we had to leave, there was a meadowlark nest not too far out in one of the fields. That was fun to go watch the babies grow, and then they flew off. And as I recall—I could be wrong—as I recall, I was there when they took off, and each of the four birds went in a separate direction. Like, as if it had been planned or scripted, you know. I don’t know about that. Sometimes we would go down to the river and wade and catch minnows and take them home in jars. That was pretty much what we did. Franklin: Did you go like shopping with your father or down to the construction camp or into the town of Richland at all? DeVine: Not to Richland, no. We went into Hanford; there was a doctor’s office there. I was having health problems, too, so we would go there for odds and ends of things. Yeah. And my mother was hospitalized there for a short—a few weeks. And, no, I never did see the inside of any of the—well, let me take that back, because different famous groups came through to entertain as part of the war effort. I remember Truth or Consequences came, and then there were some others. We went in to those events. Franklin: So you’re kind of a local—like, I guess almost as local as you could get, coming down here, except for the people that had been displaced. DeVine: Right. Franklin: But you must’ve went to school with kids from all over the US, right? DeVine: Yes, yes. Franklin: I’m wondering if you could talk about that, about being in this community where everyone was brand new. DeVine: Yes. There was a huge campground—trailer park, and I met one of the girls there was Louanna Ivers. She and I were friends up until she passed away just a year or so ago. Franklin: Oh, wow. DeVine: Yeah. Which was fun. It was fun to have someone that went all the way from fourth grade through. Franklin: Where was she from? DeVine: Mm, Oklahoma somewhere? I don’t know exactly. But yeah. Everybody else that we knew was from someplace else: Utah, the South, the deep South. Yeah. Franklin: Did you know anything about the communities that had been there before the Manhattan Project? Did you ever run into anybody who had been displaced from the area? DeVine: No, not that I know of. Franklin: Okay. DeVine: I surely must’ve. I know that I heard somewhere along the line. Some of the people went to school to learn what they needed to do so that they could move back and work. But they weren’t allowed into their old homes, into their old homes out there anyway. Franklin: Did you live near any of the Hanford facilities? Or did you watch any of them go up? DeVine: Actually, the reason we had to leave in June of 1944 was because they were building B Reactor. We couldn’t see anything except that this concrete thing was going up. But we had to leave anyway, and our house wasn’t finished in Richland. So we had to go to for a few months, and then I think we came from Sunnyside in August to a prefab. Yeah. That was kind of interesting, too. We lived about a block from the stockyard, which was rather odorous. [LAUGHTER] Given the wrong wind direction. [LAUGHTER] But, gosh, we had a real house. It was a real kitchen, toilets, running water, electricity— Franklin: This the house in Richland? DeVine: No, the house in Sunnyside. Franklin: Oh, this is Sunnyside. DeVine: Right. So then when we moved to Richland in August, I think, of ’44, we were in a little prefab. And I asked—I wish I had remembered to ask my dad—I think I said this before—why we had gotten to live north of White Bluffs, because we didn’t have a telephone. There wouldn’t have been a way for them to contact him. That I can think of. Of course, my memory’s fuzzy at this point. Yeah. In Richland we had a prefab on the corner of Swift and Wright. Franklin: How many buildings—bedrooms, sorry. DeVine: Three. Franklin: Three-bedroom prefab? DeVine: Yeah. And I asked my dad not that many years ago why we had a prefab when there were bigger houses. I said, was it because of the money, the rent? And he said, probably. [LAUGHTER] He probably didn’t really remember either; he was pretty old by that time. But that was the last street west at that point, and that’s why my mother chose it. She did not like being hemmed in. Franklin: Oh, right. Yeah, because at that time it was just open—everything was just fields and-- DeVine: It was open. We played all the way to the Yakima River. And there was an old car body chassis out there. And of course there were rattlesnakes and bull snakes and scorpions. But nobody that I know ever got hurt with any of those things, yeah. It was a good place to live. Franklin: How did the prefab compare to other houses you had lived in? Was there anything unique about it? DeVine: [LAGUHTER] Well they were called cracker boxes. You may have heard that. Because of their shape; they were just a big square put on a platform that was about three feet on over side smaller, so that you had a place to play in—[LAUGHTER] I guess a place to play in the shade. Franklin: And they had the flat roofs then. DeVine: And they had a flat roof, yes. They had a swamp air conditioner in one window. Franklin: Swamp cooler? DeVine: When the sand blew, it came in the house. It was very dusty anytime we had any kind of a wind storm. We were lucky. We had nine peach trees. We were planted right in the middle of a peach orchard. My dad, being a farmer at heart, knew exactly how to take care of those trees. He had the best peaches in the city, and he would have contracted each year with a store to sell the peaches to them. Every year we had a big wind storm that blew most of the peaches off. So, yeah, that was very—a sad situation for him, especially. Because it sort of made him feel like nothing he did went right. You know what I mean? Franklin: Oh. Yeah, yeah. DeVine: Yeah. Franklin: I know exactly what you mean. DeVine: And we didn’t have grass; we didn’t have paved streets, no sidewalks. We had irrigation water, one irrigation hose in the yard, which was different than our house water. Franklin: And from when you moved in until ’58, they—did your parents stay in that—did you stay in that home the whole time? DeVine: No. Franklin: Okay. DeVine: We moved in ’48. We moved out to a ranch house, and it, again, was on the last street west, on Cottonwood. That was before Cottonwood Loop was built. So, once again, we were out as close to the open as we could be. And that made us all very happy. It was nice. It was four bedrooms. We fit in a little bit better. I think I was going into high school at that point. My sister, she lived with us for two years before she graduated and went to college. And then my older brother and I graduated in ’52. My younger brother graduated in ’57. So we’re all Richland Bombers. Although the high school was called Columbia High School at that point. Franklin: Yeah, Col High. DeVine: We consider ourselves—yeah. Franklin: It’s always interesting that it was Richland High and then became Columbia and is now Richland High again. DeVine: Right, right. Franklin: So you were in Richland—you moved into the house on Wright in ’44. DeVine: Correct. Franklin: So you were in Richland when the war ended. DeVine: Yes. Franklin: What do you remember about—I’d like to ask you about two events. The first would be the dropping of the bomb. What do you remember about that, that day, that time? DeVine: I remember that there was jubilation and people were saying, the war is over, the war is over. I don’t know why we had the car home that day; maybe our dad was—he worked shiftwork, so maybe he was sleeping. Anyway, the four of us kids got on the hood of the car with American flags and my mother drove us all around through town, yelling and celebrating that the war was over. It was later, I think, that I realized that the Hanford Project had had such a pivotal response to that. Franklin: Hmm. And that’s also a time when a lot of people— DeVine: Contribution to that. Franklin: Contribution, right. That’s also a time when a lot of people found out what was being done, even a lot of the workers. DeVine: Exactly. Franklin: Do you remember your parents talking about that moment when they realized what they had— DeVine: No. I don’t remember, except that I know my uncle, my mother’s brother, was in the war. And he went around—supposedly went around yelling, my brother-in-law did that! My brother-in-law did that! [LAUGHTER] And I don’t know if that’s true, but that’s the story that was passed on to us. So it was a wonderful time. It had been such a fearful time for us. When we lived in Ellensburg, we had—the college had been taken over by the Army. We had war bonds to buy; we had parties and weekends and people coming to town to try to get people to spend more on war bonds. And you could buy victory stamps, and when you got your book full of stamps, then you could buy a bond. And my brother and I sang over the radio—it was a really big thing, and there were airplanes flying over. There was a tank in a parade. So there was a lot of fear. We knew that we could be bombed, or we were led to believe that we could be bombed. We practiced air raids by ducking under our desk, which is pretty ridiculous. All of the houses had cans of sand in case of fire. All of the houses had blackout curtains for nighttime. So there was a lot of fear. But also a lot of joy in our lives. You know, I think our parents and our relatives did a really good job of trying to neutralize that fear. Franklin: Did you have a victory garden as well? DeVine: We did, yes! My dad, being a frustrated farmer, he had a big garden in our yard there. But he also had what we had a victory garden at my great-grandparents’ home. So he had two big gardens going on. Franklin: Richland, for all this time that you were living—or until 1958, was a government town. DeVine: Yes. Franklin: I’m wondering if you could—what you remember about that era in respect to that peculiar nature of there being really no private property in Richland. DeVine: I don’t think we knew the difference. Franklin: What kinds of things was the government responsible for in terms of people’s housing? DeVine: Well, they chose the designs. [LAUGHTER] They chose the colors. They chose what would be where. They did not dictate anything about landscaping or anything like that, that I know of. It just seemed like a normal town, really. Except that we didn’t have the streets and those kinds of things. But that didn’t really affect us. And then when we did get pavement downtown, when we’d go to a show on Saturday for a dime, we would go barefoot and we would stand in the shade of a building and then we would run as fast as we could across the pavement to the next shade. Because the pavement was so hot—blacktop pavement—was so hot on our feet. But it just—well, I remember one thing, too, that we had very long lines at the post office and they probably had long lines at the bank, although I don’t really remember going to the bank. I remember going to the post office. Franklin: The town had a pretty active bus system. DeVine: Yes, they did! And it was free. Franklin: Yeah. DeVine: Later. All the workers could ride the bus to work. And in fact, many years later, I did that when I was working at 300 Area. I rode the bus a lot of the time. Not all the time, but a lot of the time, yeah. Franklin: What schools did you go to? DeVine: Well, we started out at Sacagawea because Marcus Whitman hadn’t been completed by that time. But that was only until maybe Christmas break. Then we went to Marcus Whitman. And then, of course—there was no junior high at that time, so then we went straight to Columbia High School from eighth grade. So it was a four-year high school. Franklin: And what year did you graduate? DeVine: ’52. Franklin: ’52, okay! DeVine: Yes. Franklin: And then you went to—you being working out on Site, shortly afterward? DeVine: Yes! I was 18. So I had to have a birth certificate to prove that I really was. I worked at 300 Area as a lab assistant. What we did was process sheep pee to—it was just for a local control of the nuclear activity in the animals. I don’t even, to tell you the truth, know what they were looking for. We just were told what to do and we did it. I loved it. Franklin: Yeah, why? DeVine: I like anything science or anything medical. A number of years later, I came back. I had married, moved, had children, came back. And then I got a job as a chemical analyst. And, oh my goodness, that was such a good job. I really loved it. It was important. It was also in 300 Area. Then our little unit ran out of money, and I was the last hire, so I had to go to work at B, in B Reactor for six months until the new budget was passed. Franklin: What did you do out at B Reactor? DeVine: I swear to goodness, I do not know. I know we were processing samples. I don’t know what they were looking for, I don’t know where the samples came from, anything about it. Except that when I went on the tour of the B Reactor, I thought, oh yeah! This is—I do remember it. So I don’t know very much about that. It only took about six months to be out there. And then I remarried and got pregnant and moved to Alaska. Franklin: Okay. DeVine: So that kind of— Franklin: So you worked out on the Site—for how long total did you work out there for? DeVine: Oh, total, oh gosh. Not very long, actually. Maybe five years was all. I really hated leaving Richland, because for one thing, I really enjoyed the work. And I loved the people that I worked with. And it was important work. So—but I left, because I had to. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: What were the most challenging or rewarding aspects of your work out at Hanford? DeVine: Well, the rewarding part, especially when I was a chemical analyst, was knowing that it was so important for our safety, locally. But I think it was an international safety, as well. All we were permitted to say was radiochemical analysis of fission products. That’s how secret it was. But we did know, because they thought it was important for us to know, what we were doing so we would be especially careful, and especially precise. I guess the hard part would’ve been being in a closed system for the entire work day. The challenge was just doing a good job, you know? It was just a wonderful job. Harvey Tenney was our chemist, and then they went on up from there. Franklin: Did you have to wear any type of special protective clothing or equipment to handle— DeVine: Yes. Well, we wore lab coats. And of course gloves and safety glasses. We did not wear the masks. We didn’t have our hands in places where the radioactivity was so great that we had to wear the big gloves. These were just medical nursing gloves. Franklin: What about radiation monitoring? Were you monitored at all? DeVine: Oh, yes, absolutely. We wore a badge and on the badge was some sort of thing that could detect radiation. We checked our hands before we left work, and then we turned in our badges once a month to be read. At one point, I did get what’s called crapped up when I was working out at B Reactor. It was interesting. At one point I had to take off my dress and wash it. And of course I had a lab coat to put on. They washed it. And then I wore it home, of course. And another time, they were going to check my house, but I hadn’t taken anything home. If I had, I would’ve been fired right then. But I hadn’t taken anything home. So it was fine. Franklin: Where did you—did you live after you graduated and you started working on Site? Did you still live with your family? DeVine: I lived with my parents for a while, and then when I came back, I had three children, so I bought a prefab, a little three-bedroom, added another bedroom and remodeled the bathroom. It was on the corner of Hoffman and Smith. So I was on another corner, yeah. Franklin: Okay. I know that area pretty well. It’s kind of over by where I live. Could you describe a typical work day as a chemical analysis— DeVine: As a chemical analyst? Franklin: In the lab? DeVine: Well, yes, we would go and show our badges to get through the gate, go into the building, 325, I think it was. And put on our white shoes and our lab coat. Go into an airlock, close the door behind us, and then we could go into the actual lab. I can’t really give much about that, except that we prepared samples and then they were taken out to be radiated. And then we would get them back a few days later and process them again to see what the radioactive content had been. And I have no idea of any of the finished information, of the ending information. Yeah. Franklin: Right, yeah, that would’ve been passed up the chain. DeVine: No! [LAUGHTER] Franklin: What are some of your memories of any major events in Tri-Cities history, such as plants starting up--? DeVine: No, I don’t really remember anything like that. Atomic Frontier Days was the big celebration of the year in the summer. A big parade and all that. And the sports activities were an important thing. Franklin: I’m wondering if you could talk about the Atomic Frontier Days. What kinds of themes were there and what kind of activities were common in those celebrations? DeVine: Well, we had a parade, like I mentioned. And we had a Miss Tri-Cities. Hmm. I’m sure we had baseball games that were connected with it. Speakers, politicians would come and speak. I don’t remember any famous entertainers coming like they did at Hanford during the wartime. But—oh, one thing that I thought was fun. We had a swimming pool, Richland, the town of Richland had a swimming pool down by the Columbia River. And I thought it was really a huge pool and it may not have been. But there were so many people here that you could only swim for an hour, and then you had to get out and stand in line again for another hour to try to get in again. That made an impression on me [LAUGHTER] because I just had never heard of such a thing before. There wasn’t enough space for everybody to swim at the same time. Franklin: Yeah, wow. DeVine: They since filled that in and built another one up at Richland High School. Franklin: Yup. Yeah, the George Prout pool. DeVine: Yes. Franklin: Were you here when President Kennedy visited? DeVine: Yes, I was! Franklin: Did you go out to see him? DeVine: I did not. Franklin: Oh, okay. DeVine: My mother went. She was sick with cancer at the time, and she felt like she had touched him when he walked by. Whether or not she actually did, I don’t know. But it suited her to think that she had actually touched him. It was a very big thing, that visit was a very big thing around here. Yeah. I’ve seen pictures of it. But I didn’t—and I knew it was going on. But I don’t know why I didn’t go. I might’ve been at work. I don’t know what day of the week it was or anything. Franklin: Could you describe the ways in which security and/or secrecy at Hanford impacted your work? DeVine: Well, we always felt real safe. [LAUGHTER] It’s not like life today. It wasn’t a big deal; we just had our badge, and we turned them in each month and got a different one. So probably we rotated. That’s the only thing I can figure. They wouldn’t have been able to do all the badges, like, for instance, over the weekend or something. Because that job in 300 Area was just straight Monday through Friday, 6:15 to 2:00-something. Yeah. So it wasn’t a big deal. Franklin: What about the secrecy aspect? Did that ever impact your daily life or your friendships or relationships with anyone? DeVine: In a way, it probably did. You know, we had the signs: we will bury you; Khrushchev saying, we will bury you. And loose lips sink ships. And how important security was. Now, when I first got that job—maybe I shouldn’t say this, but when I first got that job as a lab assistant, I was telling a friend, a neighbor, about it. And she thought I went too far. Franklin: Oh. Like you had said too much about what you were doing? DeVine: What I was doing, right. Franklin: Oh. DeVine: She asked me, thermal heat or—? [LAUGHTER] And I said, oh, yeah—no. So, her sister, I guess, was the one that told me that she thought I’d said too much. Franklin: Oh, wow. So there was like kind of community policing in that regard. DeVine: There was, yes. Franklin: Do you remember—I’d heard stories that there were FBI agents that would kind of walk down the street or go to people’s houses to interview people about— DeVine: I think we were aware of that, yes. Yeah. Interesting. Franklin: Yeah, isn’t it? It’s kind of—it’s strange. When you were in school, did you have to do the duck-and-cover drills, civil defense drills? Was that a concern? DeVine: No, I don’t—I may be wrong. But I was so impressed with the ones that we had in Ellensburg, that anything else probably wouldn’t have been important enough to even think about. Franklin: Knowing what was being made at Hanford, and knowing the geopolitical situation—you mentioned the ‘we will bury you’ signs—and knowing that Hanford played a large role in the development of atomic weapons, did you ever feel like you were on the frontlines, or like the Hanford community might be a target in case of an eruption of hostilities? DeVine: You know, I think probably a lot of people did. I don’t remember feeling that. Now, I may have. That’s been a long time ago and a lot of things have happened in my life since then. Maybe that’s why is not a big memory. But I don’t think that I—there’s always fear of war and terrorism and stuff like that. But I don’t think it affected my life significantly at all. Franklin: How long did your father work out on Site until? DeVine: Well, he started in ’43, and then he would’ve retired probably when he was 60 or 65. He retired as a fireman there. Franklin: Oh, okay. DeVine: And I don’t—I was gone. I don’t know what year it was. Franklin: Did he stay in Richland his whole life? DeVine: He did, he did. They moved away for a little—five years or something. Then they lived up in Chelan for a while, on Lake Chelan, in Manson. But then he came back and lived here until he died. Franklin: What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland during the Cold War? DeVine: Well, it was a unique situation, certainly. Many of us have stayed in touch with people. Part of that is the result of a thing we call—it’s like a daily newsletter, we call it The Sandstorm. So that we know what’s going on among our friends. They talk a lot about no other town ever being like this. I don’t buy that, myself. I think there were a lot of safe towns, unique towns. But it was interesting. We didn’t really know the difference, I don’t think, at that time. I mean, things were safe. You could walk home any time of the day or night. Neighbors played in the streets, you know? Things like that. But I think that happened in a lot of towns. But we, because we were here, and maybe because we came from so many different places in the United States, we saw it as being very unique. And I don’t know. Franklin: Certainly, until ’58, you had to have a job at Hanford or be working— DeVine: Correct. Franklin: --to live in Richland. DeVine: Right. Franklin: So everyone had a job. DeVine: And many of them were, like, the stores. You could be an employee in the stores and things like that. You didn’t have to have a job on the reservation. Franklin: Right. But even those stores all had to have contracts with the Atomic Energy Commission— DeVine: Right, right. Franklin: --to operate the store. I think, maybe, that’s where a lot of people feel the community is unique, certainly because most towns didn’t have 100% employment and were owned by the government. DeVine: That’s true. That’s true. Franklin: I mean, there was no private—there was private property, but there was no—all the land and everything was— DeVine: Right, right. Franklin: It certainly is very interesting. DeVine: Yes, it is. Franklin: In how we think about small town America. DeVine: Right. And I don’t even know what small-town America is like, anymore. I think it’s changed so much since I was a youngster. Franklin: I wanted to ask you, when you moved back to Richland in 2000—how had the Tri-Cities changed from when you had left to when you came back? DeVine: The most staggering thing was the growth. The busy streets, the highways going in. Just the stores, traffic, all the time. It was—that was the thing that struck me the most. Franklin: Well, Em, thank you so much for—I guess I’ll, last point, is there anything else you wanted to say in regards to— DeVine: I can’t— Franklin: Your life in Richland? DeVine: Nothing significant comes to mind. I’m sorry. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: No, it’s fine. I just didn’t want to end without giving you the chance to—if there was something that you had thought of. DeVine: Right. Well, there’s lots of things, but not important enough to— Franklin: Well, I don’t know about that. What comes to mind? DeVine: I guess all high schools have this rah-rah-rah mentality. And we did, perhaps in the extreme. Because we had come from all over, there was just a different kind of closeness, maybe. And inclusion, they would call it now. [LAUGHTER] I don’t think we even had that word back then, as far as people are concerned. Yeah. Franklin: Because everyone—that’s another thing, actually, I wanted to ask. So you had family that was close by. DeVine: Yes. Franklin: Extended family. But many others didn’t. DeVine: Oh! Franklin: Do you think that led—how do you think that impacted people? Is that maybe what led to some of that inclusion? DeVine: Oh, I think it was so hard on so many of those families to be far away form any relatives at all. And yes, I think you’re right, that that did have something to being neighborly and being inclusive in our schools, and really gelling as a community. It must’ve been absolutely horrible. Now, my mother was raised, born and raised in the Ellensburg, Kittitas Valley, as was my dad. And she called these hills, those bald-headed hills. I mean, she really, really did not like the topography. [LAUGHTER] The fauna. Franklin: Right, she must’ve missed the trees and— DeVine: Oh, my gosh, it was terrible. But our neighbor from Kansas called them mountains. [LAUGHTER] You know? So there was just a different perspective for everybody that came here, and what was great and what was terrible. But I do think that having people come, and some of them maybe never seeing their relatives again. I don’t know about that. But it must’ve been just— When I drive through the countryside now and I see these farm houses, I think back to the days when women were out on their own—families, with their husband and whatever children—all by themselves. And I think about that every time I go by these buildings that are somewhat isolated, still. But they have cars, they have phones, they have TV, you know, so they can get around and they can see what’s going on in the world. We had no idea what was going on in the rest of the world, except the war. Yeah. Oh! President Harry Truman came and visited and talked. Franklin: Oh. DeVine: And the Richland High School band marched in a parade for him. That’s the closest I ever got to a president. Franklin: Do you remember what year that was? DeVine: Gosh. Well, I was in high school, so it had to have been ’49 or ’50 would be my guess. Franklin: So during the second term. DeVine: Yeah, ’49 or ’50. Franklin: That brings me to another question. So after the war ended, it looked like Hanford might shut down for a while. DeVine: Yes! Franklin: And I’m sure some people were probably making plans to move or leave or figure out—do you remember—did your family have any such plans or— DeVine: I think there was quite a bit of turmoil for a lot of people in that regard. But then they just kept finding things to do and finding things to do. There was a lot of—I think there were a lot of families that left, fearing that it would shut down, and went and found jobs other places. But a lot of us stuck around, just hung in there. Franklin: And there was a new boom in the late ‘40s, early ‘50s when they built K East and K West and some of the other reactors. How did that impact Richland, and do you remember much about that? DeVine: I have no idea, except that people came in. I’m still astonished by how many houses are being built here. Where are the people coming from? Who are these people? Why are they coming here? [LAUGHTER] You know? Franklin: Back then or right now? DeVine: Now. And I probably thought the same thing then. Why are all these people here? Franklin: Well, I’ll tell you, as someone who’s trying to buy a house right now, it’s a tight market and everything’s getting snapped up. Yeah, I wonder that, too. But our economy must be good. Housing’s tight. DeVine: Yeah, it’s very interesting to watch it. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m trying to buy a house, too. I need a bigger house. I bought a small house just for me. Turn that off. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:49:52 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317kbps Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Marilyn DeVine Subject The topic of the resource White Bluffs (Wash.) Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Marilyn (Em) DeVine spent part of her childhood in White Bluffs, living in an old farmhouse during the Manhattan Project. Her father was a patrolman and had to be stationed on the site. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 05/21/2018 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Language A language of the resource English Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operated under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who were the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Ff3da4d16bba583704caea6d400bb98ce.mp4 cbd5b1985472081504ab0215ba4f5c1a https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F57cb3e60dc53182221069668bb36efb4.JPG fdcdc00119f25a1ff49da8ae8822fac3 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Marilyn Drake Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: We’re ready. Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducing and oral history interview with Marilyn Drake on July 17, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Marilyn about her experiences in the Hanford area. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Marilyn Drake: My name is Marilyn Drake. It’s M-A-R-I-L-Y-N. Drake is D-R-A-K-E. Franklin: Great. Thank you, Marilyn. And so tell me how and why you first came to the Hanford area. Marilyn Drake: Well, I was born in the state of Kansas, and when I was about five weeks old, my parents headed west. And somewhere when I was a baby, I would guess less than a year old, we ended up at White Bluffs out in the Hanford Area. Not long after being here, because of the dust storms and things, I got dust pneumonia, so my parents had to leave. So they ended up in Belfair, Washington. My father was planning on working in the shipyards there, and instead went to the Aleutian Islands. So anyway, we were out of the area then until about 1950, ’51. He was well enough to come back here and work as a carpenter out in Hanford. We lived in North Richland, the first time, in the 200-block, I believe it was, of north Richland, in the trailer park that was out there. Franklin: Oh, wow. Marilyn Drake: And it was approximately a mile long and two miles wide. [LAUGHTER] So it was a big trailer park. Then, of course, being on construction, he was in and out of jobs, because they’d finished up or whatever. So we had a home in Ellensburg and we’d go there until he got a job again, and we’d come back. So the second time, we were in the 1100-block on F Street in north Richland. I have fond memories of that time. I loved the John Ball School that was there. I went fourth grade with Mrs. Campbell. Fifth grade was—I take that back. Fourth grade was Mrs. Atkinson. Fifth grade was Miss Campbell, and sixth grade was Mr. Hoffman. Mrs. Atkinson gave me a love of knowing about travel, I guess. She shared experiences with being in Switzerland, which really got me interested. Taught us some things abut the Danube River. Then Miss Campbell was the next teacher, and I enjoyed her. And then Mr. Hoffman, he shared where he was during the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He was decorating for a high school prom. So we went to school at John Ball in sixth grade until about halfway through the year, they moved us into Richland to, I believe it was, Marcus Whitman School, if I remember correctly. Evidently overcrowding. But the school was a neat place. We were in Quonset huts. The big cafeteria was huge; at least it seemed that way to me when I was a child. That was the times when teachers stayed with the class from the morning until they went home in the afternoon. So we wouldn’t go in the cafeteria, and we’d all join hands around the table, and we’d say the Lord’s Prayer before we had lunch. Which nowadays would not be done. [LAUGHTER] We had a Christmas play there. I played the accordion and I played We Three Kings of Orient Are for the play that was going on. When we went outside to play, there wasn’t any grass; it was all dust and rocks. So we took—the girls anyway—took the rocks and laid out floor plans for houses, and we’d play house while recess was going on. We also had air raid drills which, we all went out and there was a big ditch out there that we all jumped into, covered our heads with our hands, and got ready, in case it happened. The rooms were smaller Quonset huts; they had wings off of the main hallway. Whoever sat in the last of the row had to be a short person, because otherwise they’d hit their head on the roof of the Quonset hut. Franklin: Yeah, the semi-circular roof. Marilyn Drake: So it was an interesting school, but just really had fond memories there and really enjoyed it. I still think about it. And had some good friends. Each block in the trailer park, at the end of the block, there was a playground. We had swings and a couple teeter-totters. I think that was about it. The rest was an open sandbox and so on. So we kids spent a lot of time in the playground. There was also a large laundry room that had restrooms—because most of the trailers in those days didn’t have bathrooms in them. So you had restrooms there and there was a laundry room across the end of it. So usually after dinner, mostly the girls would go to the laundry room, and we would have a small ball. And we played bouncing against the wall and clapping your hands to catch it and so on. That was our form of entertainment. We didn’t have the TV and the Xboxes and so on that people have today; we had to make our entertainment. Franklin: Did you have a radio? Marilyn Drake: Yes, we did have a radio. I remember my father listening to the news, which I didn’t enjoy. But. [LAUGHTER] As I was young, then. Franklin: I never enjoyed it when my father would watch the news on TV when I was young, either. Marilyn Drake: Well, there were times he would lay on the couch and go to sleep and the radio was up above that in the front window on a ledge. So I’d sneak up the side of the couch and crawl across the back when he was asleep and either turn it off or change channels. And the minute I did, he’d wake up. So it was futile. Franklin: So did your trailer have a restroom? Either one that you lived in? Marilyn Drake: The first one didn’t. It was just a bed in the back, and we had a couch in the front. The second one had a bathroom and it was one-bedroom so I had the couch to sleep on. Franklin: Did you have any brothers or sisters? Marilyn Drake: I had seven half-brothers and a half-sister, but all of them didn’t live with us. Once in a while, one would come and stay a while. So I was more or less an only child. Franklin: I guess that makes it easy in a one-bedroom trailer. Marilyn Drake: My parents were quite a bit older; they were in their mid-‘40s when I was born, so— Franklin: Okay. Marilyn Drake: I grew up with older people. So the kids were mostly—the other kids in the other family were mostly grown and on their own by that time. So that was interesting. I remember the pharmacy or drugstore as we called it then in north Richland. Always loved to go in there because they had a big rack of magazines, all kinds, outdoors, comic books, whatever. Liked to do that. My neighbor next-door, they had two children: a daughter that was older than me and a son that was about three years younger, who I just reconnected with this last week. Franklin: Oh, really? Marilyn Drake: We hadn’t seen each other since 1954. So it was interesting. We had a good time visiting and we’re going to do more things together. His parents wouldn’t let him go to the movie unless I went with him, so it was kind of my first date. [LAUGHTER] Baby-sitting, I guess. But nice family; they were from Nebraska. Most all the people out in Hanford were from somewhere else, because they came in here to work. My maiden name was House, and this gentleman I just talked about that I reconnected with, his name is Tool. And across the street were the Surpluses. And so people would come by and say, did you guys put these signs up to be funny, or what? They didn’t realize we were actually with the names that we had. So just fond memories of the whole situation. [LAUGHTER] I remember the old steam plant that used to be, I think, on the hill not far from here. As you started up into north Richland, it was there. And that’s what they heated, I guess, the old barracks and stuff. So you had the big tubes that ran along the streets. Close to there, there was part of the lot that it as on, they had these piles of, I think, it was coal. And if you went there, you could find mercury. Being stupid kids that didn’t know better, we’d go and play with the mercury in our hand or whatever. Not a good idea to do, but we did. It was part of growing up, I guess. Had some pretty good dust storms during that time, which the Tri-Cities used to be well-known for. Also, a few rumbling thunderstorms that moved through. The streets at north Richland were paved by the time I lived there, but there are some pictures in the book that I brought that shows it without paved streets. There were several thousand people lived in this area. Franklin: Do you remember—you said there were blocks of these trailers, do you know roughly how many blocks there are and the amount of houses per block? Marilyn Drake: Okay, these were trailers, so you had 12 blocks long, or wide, whichever way you want to call it, by 24 blocks the other way, so— Franklin: Okay, and that was that mile by two miles? Marilyn Drake: Yeah, more or less. It was a big place. And we rode our bicycle everywhere; we didn’t have to worry about being kidnapped. It was a lot to explore around the area. We could ride down to the river and see what was going on down there. Franklin: Now, were these personal trailers that people brought or were they government owned? Marilyn Drake: No, they were personal. Each trailer had a roof, a second roof over top of it, just like the roof of a house, because of the heat. So that helped somewhat, because there wasn’t much air conditioning around in those days. We did get an old, old swamp cooler that my parents put in the backdoor of the trailer that we had, which helped. But it could get pretty hot. So anyway you had all these roofs that there were that many roofs over that many trailers. Franklin: Wow. And did the government provide those roofs for each trailer? Marilyn Drake: Yes. Yes, they provided. Franklin: Okay. And did they provide any other amenities? Marilyn Drake: Just the washroom and utility room area. I think, if I remember correctly, we paid $20 or $25 a month to the government for rent on the lot. You could raise—it was big enough that you could have a small garden or flowers, whatever you wanted. And people kept them up pretty well. Franklin: I bet. That was another thing I was going to ask about. Was there much landscape—you mentioned the roads were paved by that time and at the John Ball School there was no grass. But was there landscaping in the trailer court? Marilyn Drake: If each person wanted to put it there. There was nothing—the playground was dirt—actually sand, around here. So we weren’t the cleanest kids around when we came in from playing. But it was, I guess, what you’d call pristine compared to today’s standards. Most everybody had grass, which we had water to water it with and stuff. If they liked flowers they could have flowers. My folks planted up the one side, they strung, just off the—there was a wood deck, just like a porch. Just off of that, my mother got some, they were called something-cucumbers, and they strung them up, and they grew up the strings, so that you had shade. That helped a whole lot with the heat, too. So that type of thing, yeah. Franklin: Let’s see here. At school, you mentioned doing the air raid drills. Did you ever have to do evacuations? Where they would get people on buses and they would go outside? Marilyn Drake: No. Just, we went to the ditch and dropped down and covered our head. Franklin: Oh, wow. So I guess it must’ve been interesting having—you probably didn’t remember being in White Bluffs, but having been at White Bluffs and then now, the area’s totally transformed. Did you ever meet anybody from the old towns of Hanford and White Bluffs after you came back to Richland? Marilyn Drake: Not that I’m aware of. I’ve read stories, and I have the book that is put together about Richland, which shows things and tells about the schools. I’ve heard about the families that had to move out, government came in and said, tch, so many days and you’re out of here, and took it over. Which seemed kind of sad, because some of them had been like pioneer families. But it was for the nation’s cause, so. Franklin: You said that your father moved to Richland to do, was it carpentry? Marilyn Drake: Mm-hmm. Franklin: Why did he move to White Bluffs originally? Was it to farm, or to do carpentry? Marilyn Drake: To do carpentry. He went to work for—or, I think he went to work for Hanford. I don’t know how long that lasted because of my illness. But, yeah, he had been a builder of wooden barracks in Kansas when I was born. So for whatever reason, it was move west, young man. I guess. So he came out here and he was more or less a rough carpenter. Didn’t do finish work and stuff for the most part. Franklin: Okay. And do you know what kinds of buildings or projects he worked at on the Site? Did he ever talk about that at all? Marilyn Drake: I don’t know that he ever named them like 300 Area or 1000 Area or whatever that way. They built a lot of forms for buildings out there. He ended up with three broken ribs at one point because someone had put a two-by-four, stood it against the wall, and he bent over to get something out of his toolbox and the two-by-four came down and hit him across his back. Franklin: Ooh. Marilyn Drake: So he was kind of in pain for a while until that healed. But I don’t remember him specifically saying exactly where he worked. Franklin: And you said that after a while, when you were in sixth grade, your family moved into Richland proper, right? Marilyn Drake: Mm-hmm. The school did. We still lived in north Richland. But they did. Franklin: Oh, the school did. Marilyn Drake: Yeah. Just our class. Franklin: Okay. Marilyn Drake: I think it was the sixth grade class that they took the whole class in. And I’m assuming it was because they had too many students and needed the room at John Ball. And I was only there part of—I think we left in March of that year. The job ended here, and we ended up going up to Bridgeport, Washington to work on the Chief Jo Dam up there. So I was only a part of the sixth grade year. Franklin: Did you mostly hang out with north Richland kids, or did you know anybody in Richland? And was there a real—it sounds like there was kind of a separation between north Richland and Richland. Marilyn Drake: Yeah, more or less. The kids were usually the kids that went to school out there; there were quite a few of us. I remember one classmate, his name was Ronny Sloan. He liked beans. And my mother would make ham and beans, and whenever that happened, Ronny got invited to dinner. Because he enjoyed the beans. There was the Saltz family, which had, I believe, 12 kids. They had a very small trailer, but they had a truck that had like cattle racks on it, and they had canvas over the top of it. Most of the boys, I think, slept in the truck. They eventually owned a trailer park in Kennewick until a few years ago, and apparently sold it. Franklin: Oh, wow. Marilyn Drake: So I’ve been able to track a few of the kids, not knowing—not talking to them, but at least knowing where they were. Franklin: Were there stores in north Richland, or did you do your shopping in Richland proper? Marilyn Drake: For the most part in Richland. Like I said, there was a pharmacy, I believe there was like a soda fountain in the pharmacy if I remember correctly. I don’t remember any—there was a movie theater. That’s where we went to the movie. Saw Titanic with this neighbor I was telling you about. The original Titanic. I don’t remember any of the stores being there. Uptown Richland was really pretty new at that point; it had just opened not too long before that. So we went in there for groceries and anything else that we needed. Franklin: Okay, great. So then eventually your family moved away, right? You said up to work at the—which dam? Marilyn Drake: Chief Jo, up at Bridgeport, Washington. Franklin: But eventually, you came back to Richland, right? Marilyn Drake: When I graduated from high school in 1960, I was looking for a job and came down to Pasco and applied for Pacific Northwest Bell as a telephone operator, and I got the job. Had met my husband and he was in Sunnyside and I lived in Yakima when we met. But he was also down here with his parents. We ended up being married here in Richland by Judge Erickson. Franklin: Okay. Marilyn Drake: Our daughter was born in the old Kadlec Hospital which was the old barracks from the Hanford time. And then we moved away then to Michigan for five years, came back and spent 13 years here. We bought an F house and lived in it. Over on Mahan Street. Ended up in California for 23 years, which we didn’t initially plan on, but it worked out that way, and we came back in 2007 to retire here. Franklin: Okay. And what did—and so you said you lived here for 13 years, so from ’70 to ’83. Marilyn Drake: Mm-hmm. Franklin: And your husband worked out on Site? Marilyn Drake: Mm-hmm. Franklin: And where did he work? Marilyn Drake: He worked on FFTF, Number 1, a lot of the other places out there, 300 Area. Bob Drake: 2 West. Marilyn Drake: 2 West. He was construction, also, so you worked whatever job was going at the time. Bob Drake: The office buildings in the 300 Area, yeah. Franklin: I just want to say, for the record, Marilyn’s husband, and you prefer to be called Bob, right? Marilyn Drake: Yeah. Franklin: Right, Bob Drake is here. Just so—for whoever’s watching in the future. And what did you do while your husband worked out on Site? Marilyn Drake: I had a daycare in my home. Franklin: Okay. Marilyn Drake: Over that period of time, I had somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 children that went through my daycare. Plus raised my own three children. We had two boys that were born in Michigan while we were there. Yeah, so we had three children. Then my mother—my father passed away, and we moved my mother in with us. I had no trouble staying busy. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah, I bet. Marilyn Drake: It was a busy time. But enjoyable time. We had good neighbors and enjoyed them. Couldn’t say enough about our neighborhood at that time. Hated to leave, but work is work and you like to eat, so— Franklin: Yeah. And how come you left Richland at that time, in ’83? Marilyn Drake: Because WPPSS had shut down the plants out there, the construction of them. For about a year-and-a-half, my husband was without work, and we finally decided, better start looking before the savings account dwindled. He and some other men from here went down to South Bay of San Francisco and found work there. That’s where we ended up living, was in California, for the 23 years. Franklin: Okay. Marilyn Drake: And there I went to work for the school district as a head custodian and spent 14 years. Franklin: Oh, wow. And how come you ended up moving back to Richland? Marilyn Drake: Well, in the process of living in California, my husband was an over-the-road truck driver for a while. We kind of watched everywhere we went, didn’t find anywhere that we liked any better than we like it right here. So then we came back. Our daughter lives in Yakima. Our two sons came back about the same time we did; the one son was here a little bit ahead of us. So that was the first time in 23 years that we’d all been in the same state together. So it was a—we just kind of like the area. This is, we consider home. Bob Drake: Consider it home. Franklin: Sure. No, that makes sense. Well, great. Was there anything else that you wanted to say about— Marilyn Drake: Let me think a minute to—just that we really like the Tri-Cities, the history is here. Our kids went to Richland School District until we moved to California. The two boys graduated from down there. They had good friends here and stuff, and still keep in contact. So just really enjoyed it, and like the history that is here. Got a lot of water to play with if you want to. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah. I wanted to ask you a couple more questions that are on my sheet here. I wanted to ask, what are some of your memories of any major events in Tri-Cities history, such as you talked a little bit earlier about the WPPSS plants shutting down. So I’m wondering if you could tell me a little bit more about any of your feelings about that and how it impacted your family and your life? Marilyn Drake: Okay. About the time that WPPSS shut down, we were living in a rental house in Richland Village. The newspaper sent out some reporters to the schools to interview some of the kids to see how this was affecting the families. Just happened, our daughter, who was a third grader at the time, was one of them that was interviewed. She had heard in the morning, my husband had asked me something about money. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but he made the comment that he only had $0.38 in his wallet. Well, she picked up on this, and she told a story that Daddy only had $0.38 in his wallet and we just didn’t know how we were going to buy food or any of the things we needed. So it made the paper. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Oh, wow. Marilyn Drake: The one night I was fixing dinner, and I can remember, I was stirring gravy, and the phone rang. There’s this man’s voice on there. He’s, I understand you’re having a hard time making ends meet, something to that effect. So my gravy is getting thicker and thicker as he’s trying to talk to me. I didn’t recognize his voice. Finally, I told my husband, I said, you talk to him. But it turned out it was the father to this young man that I just reconnected with. He had read the article in the paper and had called to give me a bad time about it. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Oh, jeez! Marilyn Drake: So that was kind of a fond memory. We did go out and watch them set the dome on the— Bob Drake: Number 1. Marilyn Drake: The Number 1 plant out there, which was interesting. I’ve always regretted—because you couldn’t—used to couldn’t take cameras out there, so I didn’t take a camera that day. Well, it just happened that that was the day everybody could have a camera. So I didn’t get pictures. But it was very interesting watching that huge dome go on there. Bob Drake: The crane that they set that dome with was, at the time, the largest track crane in the world. And it still is, as I recall. Marilyn Drake: It’s the Lampson crane. Franklin: Oh, wow. Marilyn Drake: That had the big cement deals on the back of it to counter balance it. It was quite a sight. Franklin: Was that the first time you had ever been out on Site? Marilyn Drake: Yes, for me. Franklin: Oh, okay, for you. Marilyn Drake: Yeah, we’d gone through the highway that goes out to Vantage many times, but you could just see from a distance. There was always signs, no camera, don’t take pictures, you know. Franklin: Yeah, don’t stop. Marilyn Drake: Yeah. So, that was an interesting time. Franklin: How did that affect the community more generally? Marilyn Drake: Well it— Bob Drake: A lot of people lost their jobs. Marilyn Drake: Yeah, there were like 6,000 people lost their jobs in a very short period of time. Bob Drake: In about a week’s time. Marilyn Drake: So it was rough on everybody. The Tri-Cities always seems to come back, though, when they’ve gone through something like that. Hanford was one of those things that when the funding was there, jobs were good, and then it kind of petered out. So things would be quiet a while, and then they’d give some more money, and so here we go again. [LAUGHTER] So, being construction, if you’re smart, you save some money while you’re making it, to get you through those times. And usually the bad times were always around Christmas time, because weather’s bad and that was usually layoff time. So you better have some laid back a little bit. And of course I had my daycare, which helped out, too. Franklin: Yeah. Marilyn Drake: And I only did that because our youngest son, we were in a neighborhood that was mostly retired people, and he didn’t have anybody to play with, so I thought, well I’ll take care of a child or two and he can have playmates. Well, that mushroomed on me. [LAUGHTER] So I became an owner. [LAUGHTER] But. Franklin: What were your memories of like the social scene and maybe like local politics of that time that you lived in Richland? Marilyn Drake: Things, as I recall, were fairly quiet in those days. We didn’t have the problems that we’ve got today, because we didn’t have as many people, for one thing, I think. Richland was the smallest, I believe, of the Tri-Cities at that point. It was an All-American city. I believe it was in 1959, if I remember right, which was a little before we moved here, but we enjoyed our government house that we bought. It was well-built. About 1200-and-some square feet we raised three children in. They have fond memories of living there, which surprised me. [LAUGHTER] As far as the politics, I don’t remember—I remember President Kennedy, when he came and talked at Hanford. Franklin: Yeah. Marilyn Drake: That was a big deal here. Franklin: Did you—but you didn’t get to go see--? Marilyn Drake: I didn’t get to go to that, no. We watched it on TV in those days. So, I did get to see it. The hydroplane races are a big thing, still, here. They used to be a little bigger than they are now. But that was a big thing for everybody to go to the hydroplane races. Tri-Cities has always been a giving community. Not just Richland, but the whole area. When there’s a need for a family or whatever, people chip in and give. That’s very nice. Franklin: Great. I guess my last question is, what would you like future generations to know about living in Richland during the Cold War? Marilyn Drake: That it—I know there’s been a lot of controversy over the years with the Richland Bombers. I never thought of it that way. It was just a mascot that the high school had. I think that it’s a good place to raise children. There are things here now to do. Like I said, when I was a child, you made your own fun. And we stayed out of trouble doing it. [LAUGHTER] Like anywhere, there are problems. More so now than there were years ago. It’s a nice clean place to be. We’re kind of located where it’s not that far to Spokane or Portland or Yakima or Seattle. So you’re not confined just to the Tri-Cities. It’s becoming more and more farming all the time. The desert is not what you think of as a desert anymore. It’s green! [LAUGHTER] We don’t get the dust storms that we used to when I worked at the telephone office in 1963 through ’65, the Horse Heaven Hills were all wheat fields. So in the spring, they had the fields tilled up and then the winds would come. There were many times that the highway would shut down because of the dust; you couldn’t see. So that, with the vineyards and stuff that we have now, that’s not as much of an issue. So I just like the Tri-Cities. It’s good weather. We did have a little bit of snow this last winter, but that’s not all bad. Bob Drake: It is rare. Marilyn Drake: It’s rare for here, yeah. So just enjoy being here. Franklin: Oh, great. Well, thank you so much for coming and taking the time to interview—or let us interview you. Marilyn Drake: Enjoyed it. Thank you. Franklin: Okay, great. Watch the microphone when you stand up. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:30:14 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317kbps Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Marilyn Drake Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Marilyn Drake grew up in the North Richland Construction Camp, attended the John Ball School, and then lived in the town of Richland. Her father worked at the Hanford Site. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 7/17/17 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Language A language of the resource English Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operated under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who were the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fdc0f2cdd12f6011b8d91de6fd335cf02.mp4 2c1ac9f583c71829747c1d137160ba4f Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Robert Drake Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: Same deal. I got the introductory boilerplate, and then we’ll just, we’ll get right to it. Marilyn Drake: Okay, thank you. Franklin: Ready? Marilyn Drake: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Robert Drake on July 17, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Bob about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Robert Drake: Robert J. Drake. R-O-B-E-R-T. J. D-R-A-K-E. Franklin: Great. And you prefer to go by Bob, correct? Bob Drake: That’s what most everybody calls me, yes. Franklin: Okay. Is it all right if I call you Bob? Bob Drake: Business world, doctors and so on, they all call me Robert. But that’s— Franklin: Okay. Well, I’ll just call you Bob if that’s all right with you. [LAUGHTER] Bob Drake: That’s fine. Franklin: I’m not a doctor. So. Bob Drake: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: I just play one on TV. So, Bob, tell me how and why you came to the area to work on the Hanford Site. Or just first came to the Site in general. Bob Drake: Well, I graduated from Sunnyside High School in 1959. I didn’t even know the Tri-Cities existed until one night, my dad decided to bring me down here and show me Pasco, anyway. Then— Franklin: I guess that would’ve been kind of the big city of the area, right, besides Yakima? Bob Drake: Yeah, I think Pasco, at the time, was the larger of the three cities. Franklin: Okay. Bob Drake: Because it was the oldest. Franklin: Yeah. Bob Drake: Then my dad and my mom and myself moved down here, and we lived in a mobile home park in Pasco. He was working on one of the dams up the Snake River. Then I went to Montana myself and worked in a sawmill up there for about, I don’t know, six months or so. Then my dad told me, come on down, he says, I’ll get you called up on the dam as a laborer Monday morning. Well, I sat for six months without any work. I finally went to work in Columbia Park, and I worked in Columbia Park for five years. Franklin: And what did you do there? Bob Drake: A little bit of everything. Drove dump truck, bucket loader, mowed with the mowers that they had at the time. I just—whatever I was asked to do. Franklin: Sure. Bob Drake: So then, how we got to Michigan was, this gentleman and his wife came out, and I was taking care of the campgrounds in Columbia Park at that time. I did that for two years. But anyway, Fred Driller was his name, and Jackie was his wife. He was a pipefitter, and he worked out in the Area out here. Well, he’d get laid off every so often. After he went back to Michigan, he wrote me a—well, he called us. He said, Bob, if you come out, he says, you can get any craft that you want to be in, as an apprentice. Well, I went back and the first job that offered me an apprenticeship was in truck driving. I told them, no, I didn’t want to do that. And then finally decided that—my dad had always been a carpenter, so carpentry would be good enough for me. We spent five years back there. Our first son was born in the old Beyer Hospital in Ypsilanti, Michigan which was just east of Ann Arbor, about maybe five miles. Then they built the new Beyer Hospital. Well, I was a carpenter and I worked on the new Beyer Hospital. So our second son was born in the new Beyer Hospital. It’s kind of a joke between the wife and I, when we moved back to Richland, they had built the new Kadlec Hospital. My wife looks at me and she says, don’t even think about it. So, yeah, we already had our daughter. But anyway, I went to work for George Grant, I believe was the first contractor I worked for. I take that back; it was Lydig. Lydig was the first one. Then George Grant and Halverson pretty much kept me busy for most of the years I was here, except for when I worked at FFTF and at Number 1. Franklin: What was the name of that first contractor? Lydig? Bob Drake: Lydig. Franklin: How do you spell that? L-I-D-I-G? Marilyn Drake: That’s right. Bob Drake: I only worked for them the one time. Franklin: Oh, okay. Bob Drake: My brother—yeah, Lydig, he worked for them for years. But I only worked for them the one time. Franklin: And what did you—what was your job at FFTF? Bob Drake: FFTF? Franklin: Yeah. Bob Drake: Oh, I was just a carpenter. Franklin: And like what did you make? What did you— Bob Drake: Forms. Forms for—and every time we’d get the forms built for a pour, we had to wait for a whole month before they made that pour, because if they made the pour, it was already obsolete. What the deal was, every month they’d get in new—mm! Marilyn Drake: Specifications. Bob Drake: Mm. My mind’s blank. Marilyn Drake: Specifications. Bob Drake: Well, specifications, but that wasn’t they called it. But anyway, because if they wanted to make any changes in the pour, they would do that. Franklin: So this was like a wood form— Bob Drake: Yes. Franklin: To mold the concrete? Bob Drake: For pouring walls. Franklin: Oh, for pouring walls, okay. Bob Drake: Yes, that’s what we poured mostly. When I went to work there—I worked swing shift for about nine months. Franklin: Okay. Bob Drake: Then I quit that job and went to work elsewhere. Franklin: Okay. And then you mentioned that you worked at WPPSS, the Washington Public Power— Bob Drake: Yup, I started up pretty much on the ground floor of that. Made the base for the containment, was the first big pour that was made. And then the form worked for the containment was poured in ten-foot heights and we went up to over 300 feet. Franklin: Wow. Bob Drake: But as you got used to—you got used to going up to those heights, because it was just ten feet at a time. Franklin: Sure. Bob Drake: I never got afraid of heights at that time. And like my wife said, we worked out there until they got ready—in fact, the carpenter work was virtually done when the big layoff came. They had come out about maybe three weeks before that. Superintendent on the job told all of his carpenters, we wouldn’t have to worry about work because he had 24 other plants on the drawing board at the time. Not knowing that the nuclear system was just about done as far as that went. Franklin: Yeah. Bob Drake: But, yeah, it was quite a deal. I remember the one guy that, on our crew, Ray was his first name; I don’t remember if I ever knew his last name—but because of the information that we’d received, he and his wife went out and bought a new home, new cars, new everything. And then they walked up to us about three weeks later and handed us our final check. Ray said, you can’t lay me off. I got to have this job. And the boss says, we’re sorry, but we’re—they’re shutting it down. And as far as I can remember, it seems like to me, that one of the guys told me that Ray had had a massive heart attack and died shortly after that. Because of just the worry of how he’s going to make his payments on his home and stuff. But up here at the golf course in Kennewick, Meadow Springs, a lot of the guys that worked out there, men that worked out there, had gone up there and bought homes. They just let them go back, because they couldn’t afford to make the payments if they didn’t have any work. So they just all left the area. Most of the iron workers went to Denver, Colorado. Most of the carpenters went to South Bay, California, down around San Jose. Franklin: Which is where you ended up. Bob Drake: Yes, that’s where I ended up. Yeah, and it was really a surprise when we went down there. The parking lot at the carpenter’s hall was pretty good size. And there must’ve been probably 60 or 70 of us carpenters that had our—well, we stayed in the parking lot of the carpenter hall. And they welcomed us there because they said the carpenter hall had been broken into several times. But I take it you’re more interested in the things that went on-- I worked at the Tank Farms. Franklin: Oh, really? Bob Drake: Yeah, worked for George Grant when we were pouring bases for the tanks. I don’t remember which farm it was that I worked on. I helped build several of the office buildings in the 300 Area. It was Grant and Halverson. Halverson was out of Spokane; Grant’s local here in Richland. But, like I say, for the 13 years we lived here, George Grant and Halverson, out of Spokane, kept me pretty busy. Franklin: What were some of the unique challenges doing carpentry at Hanford versus elsewhere? Bob Drake: It wasn’t any different. I remember one time, we’d made the lift that had the forms all formed up and ready for a pour. And they had the company people come out and check the forms and everything, and they said everything was fine. Then they sent the government inspectors out and they said—well, before they ever wanted the forms they told us they weren’t going to okay that pour. Well, 59 straight days we were there, waiting for them to give the okay to make the pour. Now, that meant Saturdays and Sundays, so we were taking home some pretty good paychecks. We mostly sat around and did nothing, just waiting for them to give us the okay to make that pour. And then they made the pour, and then of course, we made the next ten-foot lift. But yeah, 59 straight days that we were on the job. Franklin: Wow. [LAUGHTER] That is classic. Bob Drake: Yeah. Franklin: I’d like to ask a similar question to the one I asked your wife: what are your memories of the major events in Tri-Cities history such as the plants shutting down, WPPSS shutting down, and also but the plants starting up, like FFTF. Bob Drake: Well, by the time FFTF took off and was actually functional, we were living in California at that time. Franklin: Oh, yeah, that’s right. Bob Drake: Number 1 was, I believe, 65% done when they laid most of the people off. The only carpentry work left to do out that at that time was building scaffolding and such for pipefitters and the electricians. And then it was several years after that before they ever got Number 1 online. What was the question again? Franklin: Oh, just, I wondered, some of your events of the shutdown. Bob Drake: Oh, the one thing that sticks in my mind—when Columbia Center first went in, Richland was offered to take that in, and be in the City of Richland. But for some reason, the heads of the city decided they didn’t want to take the Columbia Center. Which I thought at the time was kind of foolish because of the tax revenue that they could get off of it. But, yeah, they allowed Kennewick to take Columbia Center. Franklin: Ah. Bob Drake: But that’s the one big thing that I thought was a little bit ridiculous, as far as the city— Franklin: Tri-Cities history? Bob Drake: Yeah. Franklin: You mentioned, earlier, that you—or your wife mentioned earlier that you have stage IV lung cancer that you link to working at Hanford. Is that something you want to talk about? And if not, that’s totally fine. Bob Drake: Yeah, it don’t bother me at all. In fact, I’ve come totally at peace with it; did shortly thereafter because I am a Christian, and if the good Lord decides to take me home with him, it’s a win-win situation. Franklin: Sure. Bob Drake: It was a big surprise, because prior to getting the information that I had the stage IV lung cancer—I play golf three days a week, and I walk the course. Never ran out of breath or anything like that. Then the winter hit, and I was—neighbors on each side are—well, the one lady’s 90 years old, so she couldn’t scoop snow. The neighbor on the other side, he has lung problems and he’s on oxygen 24/7. So I was scooping their driveways and sidewalks with snow, and never got short of breath. The good Lord had his hand in that, too, because I was sitting at home one day and the phone rang. And it was our primary care doctor’s nurse or receptionist called and said, Bob, according to our records, you haven’t been in in over a year for your physical. So we set up a date, went up there, and she checked my breathing and everything, and said more or less that I was fine. And then Marilyn, my wife, said, why don’t you tell her about when you lay—because six or eight months prior to that, when I’d lay on my right side when I was in bed, I had a hard time breathing. And so I mentioned it to her, and she checked my lungs again. She said, I’m going to send you downstairs and have an x-ray taken immediately. And then she said, within the next two days, I’ll give you the results. Went down and had the x-ray taken and left. By the time we got home, the phone was ringing, and we answered, and it was a doctor. She said, I want you to see a pulmonary doctor. She said at Kadlec they have three of them. She said, I want you to take the first appointment you can get. So my wife called and it was 4:00 in the afternoon and they were all gone home, but she left a message on the phone. The next morning, we got up and we just kind of lazing around the house. The phone rang, and again, the receptionist or nurse from the pulmonary doctor said we want you at Kadlec Emergency ASAP. So went over there, and they took—they had the x-rays and the doctor looked at me and he says, I can almost guarantee you, you have stage IV lung cancer. So, anyway, the next day, the three pulmonary doctors got their heads together and decide the next step they needed to take. So they decided to go in and take— Marilyn Drake: A biopsy. Biopsy. Bob Drake: I can’t— Franklin: A biopsy? Bob Drake: Yes, biopsy. So the next morning at 6:00, I was in and the doctor took the biopsy. It took seven days to get the results back. But anyway in the meantime, the pulmonary doctor that I had, he said that I had anywhere from three to five liters of liquid in the area where the lung was supposed to be. Well, the lung had totally collapsed. Franklin: Wow. Bob Drake: That evening about 5:30, he put the tube in, in my side, and drained about a liter-and-a-half of liquid. And—[LAUGHTER]—my wife has some pictures she can show you of—I was sitting in my bed, trying to watch TV and I was propping my eyes open, trying to—because all of the sudden, I couldn’t see the TV. She looked at me and I was swollen up like a toad. Well, what had happened when he took the biopsy, he must’ve nicked the lung, and the air was going into my body— Franklin: Oh, my gosh. Bob Drake: Yeah, and they related it to— Marilyn Drake: Rice Krispies. Franklin: Rice Krispies? Bob Drake: Yeah, Rice Krispies. Yeah, it was really strange. Franklin: Wow. Bob Drake: So anyway, they had virtually every nurse off of every floor down there wondering what they could do for me. And the head nurse on the fourth floor where I was at, she finally decided that they better call the doctor in. Well, it was about 8:30 when the doctor got in there, and he put this other tube in my side that was about at least a half-inch in diameter. They started pumping all of this air out of my system and so on. I was in the hospital for nine days. Franklin: Wow. Bob Drake: That was during the worst part of the winter when the weather was really bad. Then they sent me home and told me to go see the cancer doctor. I walked in and sat down in the room, and he told me, he says, Bob, if you don’t have anything done—any procedures done, you’ve got three to four months to live. So, anyway, as time went by—well, I took five days of massive radiation, five consecutive days. And that was over with. Then it was about six weeks before they got the okay for the medication. Pfeifer, I believe, is the name of the company, but it was going to cost $15,300 a month for the medication they were—it was a pill they were going to put me on. Well, I couldn’t afford that. So, anyway, the nurse and other people said, well, have you had your income tax made out yet this year? And we said, no. So they said, well, go down and get your income tax made out as soon as you can. And we took all that information back to the cancer doctor’s office. The lady there sent the information back to Pfeifer, and they said that they would give me my medication free. Franklin: Wow. Bob Drake: Which was a good—well, it was wonderful. Anyway, my oldest son and my wife were sitting there, and I said, if the pill makes me deathly sick, I’m not going to take it anymore. I’ll just—meet my maker. My oldest son says, Dad, you got to consider you’ve got loved ones here that love you. Well, anyway, as it turned out, the first morning I took the tablet, it made me a little nauseated and a little bit weak. The second morning, virtually the same thing only a little less, and since then, it hasn’t bothered me at all. Franklin: Hmm! Bob Drake: And I take that cancer pill twice a day. Franklin: Wow. And what led you or the doctors to suspect that you had got that—that cancer was linked to Hanford? Bob Drake: Well, I really can’t say. But anyway we filed through the government for the program they have going. Franklin: Right, the EEIOCPA, I think? Bob Drake: I believe that’s right, yeah. Anyway, they accepted my—you know. The forms that we filled out and sent in and so on. Franklin: Oh, that’s great. Bob Drake: So, yeah, I was accepted into the program. Franklin: Oh, that’s great. Bob Drake: Because of the time period that I worked in the Area was the main reason that I got accepted in without any having to prove or so on. Franklin: Right, because you would’ve been out there doing carpentry work during production. Bob Drake: Yeah. Yeah, well, like I said, I worked in the Tank Farms, and I remember looking over at a tank maybe 60, 80 feet away and it had rust around the bottom. You could tell that it had probably leaked. Franklin: And you were there constructing new, additional tanks. Bob Drake: Yeah, we spent some time out there building new bases for more tanks. Franklin: These would’ve been the double shelled— Bob Drake: I believe, so, yes. Yeah. Franklin: So concrete surrounding the steel. Bob Drake: I believe so, yeah. Franklin: Well, great. I mean—great that you were able to get into that program at the end easily without too much of a fuss. And thank you for sharing your story. Thank you for sharing your story with us. Bob Drake: Well, it’s—no problem. Franklin: I’m wondering if you could describe any ways in which secrecy or security ever impacted your work? Bob Drake: No. Out at—when I worked out at 2 West, I had to check through the gates every day. Of course any time you worked in the Area, you had to go through the gates. But out there once a week, we had to get new permits and new tags that we wore around our necks. And those checked the radiation that we received while we were out there. Franklin: Mm-hmm. Bob Drake: But, no. It wasn’t that bad, the security, at all. Franklin: Okay. That’s good to hear. And my last question is what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War? Bob Drake: It was just—to me, it was just another job. As far as the future generations, I still think that atomic energy is probably among the best electrical plants that you can build. And me and my wife have discussed this before, we’ve told each other many times, that we’d much rather live around an atomic energy plant, as to a—come on, dear, help me out. Marilyn Drake: Chemical. Chemical. Franklin: Chemical, or— Bob Drake: Chemical plant, yeah. Anytime. Franklin: Yeah, you hear that a lot from people that live next to nuclear power plants and chemical plants, yeah. That’s a very— Bob Drake: Well, you think of all the ships, most of the ships we have now in the Navy are atomic powered. And they’ve never had any problems with one of those, that I know of. Franklin: Right. Bob Drake: So, yeah. I’m not afraid of atomic energy. But chemical plants, yes. Franklin: Yeah. Yeah, me too. Well, great, well, Bob, thank you so much for sitting down and interviewing with us today. I really appreciate it. Bob Drake: I just wish my memory was still quick enough that I could answer your questions without hesitation and so on. Franklin: You did a great job. That’s just how it happens with memory. You know? It’s just the way it goes. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:27:18 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317kbps Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Robert Drake Subject The topic of the resource Fast Flux Test Facility (Wash.) Washington Public Power Supply System Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Robert Drake was a carpenter on the Fast Flux Test Facility, the WPPSS Project, and the Tank Farms. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 7/17/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Language A language of the resource English Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operated under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who were the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F73092d11e38acf02e3f9139b59ff29ad.JPG 855dc47ad850f54f3f4a02b434262fd0 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F433d0cbcf01c6525d92c4404f0e21d8e.mp4 b708f88df97c4cbe45941c20fca189c6 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Bernal Femreite Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Bernal Femreite on June 12, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Bernal about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Bernal Femreite: Bernal Femreite, known as Bernie Femreite. The spelling is B-E-R-N-A-L. Last name is F-E-M-R-E-I-T-E. Franklin: Great, thanks a lot Bernie. So, tell me how and why you came to the area to work for the Hanford Site. Femreite: Well, during university, I was determining where to go to work and what kind of work I wanted to do. And the last—about in graduate school, I became very interested in nuclear energy. At that time, Hanford was still a very viable part of the weapons program. Most of the reactors were still running in the late ‘60s. They had a big program here and a lot of very interesting work for engineers. I was a metallurgical engineer, so everything about the Hanford fuel production was intriguing. And beyond that, I had read about everything I could about the Manhattan Project. The whole thing was fascinating to me. The fact that they went from a theory and some practical experiments to full-scale production in such a short time, under wartime conditions, obviously, that whole thing was very intriguing to me. So, long story short, I had—at that time, engineers coming out of university had a lot of opportunities. So I had a lot of choices. But I was particularly taken with the choice to come here with Douglas United Nuclear at the time. So I took that position and began as what they called process engineer in the 300 Area, where we were producing fuel for the K Reactors, C Reactor, D, and N, N Reactor. We were using the standard process at the time, which was encapsulating the uranium for exposure in the reactors. And we were—my job was, I was charged with developing a new, better and faster process for doing that. So I spent most of my time in what became known as the Small Pilot Plant in 300 Area. And we were producing a new method of encapsulating the uranium slugs that was faster and more reliable. Franklin: How was the old—I wonder if you could walk me through the steps of the old process and how your new process was different. Femreite: Well, the old process was what you might call a canning process. We had pre-formed aluminum jackets that came in, basically, the shape of a cylinder with a cap on one end. The uranium slugs came in milled to a certain diameter. They had a whole through the center for cooling, additional cooling. And then that was inserted inside this aluminum can, which we call cladding. And the whole thing was dunked under what we call a eutectic alloy of aluminum and silicon. That has a relatively low melting point. That would just flow in and form a bond between the uranium and aluminum. And they put a cap on the upper end, and then machine off the excess material. Then they would put on, ultrasonically, they’d weld on a small aluminum fin, which we called a leg, which gave the fuel slug some clearance between the tube that it would go into and the reactor, would allow the water to run past it. Franklin: Right, so that water could go around the entire— Femreite: Yeah. Franklin: Yeah, I’ve seen those. Femreite: And through the center. Franklin: Yeah, there are kind of fins on all sides. Femreite: Yeah, you’ve seen them, probably at the N Reactor—or the B Reactor Museum, if you’ve been out there. Franklin: Yes. Femreite: There are some examples of those. That was called the AlSi process, and it referred to the aluminum-silicon alloy that was used to bond— Franklin: Is that spelled how it sounds, A-L, S-I? Femreite: Yup, mm-hmm. It’s capital-A, L and then capital-S, I. So it stands for—it’s aluminum-silicon. It’s the scientific nomenclature for aluminum and silicon. And that process was developed and used for a long time. It had some disadvantages in that it had some byproduct, or leftover product waste that had to be disposed of. So there was the—AlSi would become—well, it would become fairly radioactive from being exposed to the uranium in—small amounts of uranium would be dissolved in it. So that was kind of a hard thing to deal with. Franklin: Can I ask how—what was the process for disposal of that spent product? Femreite: Well, I don’t know that part. Our job was to get the job done, and other people dealt with the disposing of waste. We can tell from what we’re finding in the papers today about the disposal of waste here, was there was a variety of methods, including just plain old burial someplace. Franklin: Yeah, the 300 Area, if I remember correctly, had some interesting waste footprints in the ground. Femreite: It does. And the area surrounding it as well. North of there they had burial pits. They had a waste pit over to the, it’d be the west side, towards what now is the Areva plant. And there were different places. Franklin: So this AlSi process, was this the original process used? Femreite: As near as I can tell, that was the original process. Now, they, in the early years, I read a lot of the classified documents as a young engineer when I first got here to understand some of the history. And they had experimented with different alloys and different heat treatments and things like that over the years, and finally settled on what I was familiar with, as the new engineer on the block, so to speak. I was chartered with developing what was called the hot die sizing process, which was to take the uranium slugs and basically extrude a coating of aluminum onto the slug. Franklin: Like using— Femreite: We used—we put them through what was called an extrusion die. And we’d start off with a small can shape of aluminum. That would sit in the die, and then the uranium slug would come down on it, and we’d basically squeeze the slug through the die, almost like toothpaste—although it was solid. And that would bond the aluminum to the uranium slug. Once it was bonded that way, all we had left to do then was to put a cap on the end. And then that the cap had to be bonded as well, so in order to do that, we used specialized heating coil. And we put the end of that fuel into that heating coil under pressure. It was called induction heating. That would bond that cap to the slug and to the other aluminum. So it was a much simpler process; it basically had no waste, except maybe some aluminum that would be machined, just to dress it up. And of course that aluminum was recycled, so. It was faster than the AlSi process. So my job, for most of the time I worked there, was to develop that, and also to solve any technical problems that came up in the existing AlSi process. So the AlSi process was still big, because that’s how the factory was set up. And we developed our hot die sizing process on a pilot scale. Then we moved the pilot line into big production facility and ran it in parallel with the big production facility and kept track of cycle times and quality. We were trying to prove that on an industrial scale, this was going to be an improvement to the AlSi process. I should mention that that whole thing sounds quite simple. But in the end, it was complicated. Each one of these fuel elements went through a very tight quality control process, where every single one went through an ultrasonic defect device—detector for defects in the fuel. That was all done with ultrasonic sound. Franklin: Huh. How did that work, exactly? Femreite: Well, the sound was transmitted through the cladding onto the uranium, and you get a certain pattern if there’s a good bond there. If there’s a bad bond, you get a completely different pattern from the ultrasonic sound. And so you could detect any, what we call, unbonded areas. You had to have a good bond on every part of the surface, because if you didn’t, you’d get a hot spot in the reactor. And that would, basically, cause the fuel to melt at that point—the cladding to melt at that point, and it would leak. We didn’t want leakers in the reactors because then that led to contamination in the water that flowed through those. Franklin: And you might have to shut the reactor down, too. Femreite: Yeah, if you got enough—if there were enough leakers in there to where you were getting high radiation readings on the discharge side of the reactor, they would have to shut it down, discharge that fuel, put new fuel in. That was not very efficient, and it was time consuming and fairly expensive. Franklin: Yeah. Femreite: So the quality control part of the process was very stringent. Franklin: So where was the uranium machined? Where was it formed into the— Femreite: That came out of a plant in Ohio. Franklin: Okay. Femreite: I think—I forgot the exact name of the plant, but I think it was Fernald. They came in by train in big wooden, pretty strong wooden crates. And then the aluminum was purchased on the market from various suppliers. We had a tight specification on which alloy and dimensions and quality and all that. So the aluminum was pretty generic, but it had to meet all of our specifications. Then the uranium, of course, came from Fernald and that was a single source. Because that was all government-run. Franklin: So was the hot die sizing process a success? Femreite: It was, yeah. We produced, on that parallel line, we produced most of a reload for one of the K Reactors. At that time, K West and K East were twins. So you didn’t know which reactor your load was going to go into. They determined that out there. So that fuel did go into the K, one or both of the K Plants. Franklin: Right. Femreite: So yeah, it was an improvement. And they would have—I believe they would have continued on that path and retired the AlSi process, but about that time, they determined that they weren’t going to run the K Reactors anymore. C had already shut down, or was preparing to shut down. So there wasn’t going to be demand in the business reason to change their method. And if they had—at that time, I think they had just put the Ks on standby, in the event that they might need to get back into producing plutonium. But they were already getting plutonium out of N Reactor and it was still running. So the demand for plutonium dropped, and so they began to phase things out. If they had needed to ramp production back up, it would’ve been fairly simple to start everything back up, because it sat there, basically, on reserve for quite a little while. Franklin: So, and what timeframe was that, when— Femreite: Well, it was late in the history of Hanford. I began work here in 1967 after graduating university. And so that was basically about a three-year deal, before things started to ramp down. So about 1970, they were threatening layoffs and reduction of staff and that kind of thing, simply because they just weren’t going to produce that much fuel. Franklin: Right. Where did you go to university; where did you get your bachelor’s? Femreite: University of Idaho. Franklin: Okay. Femreite: Mm-hm. Franklin: So are you from the area? Femreite: I’m from north Idaho. Franklin: Oh, okay. Femreite: Yeah, mm-hm. Franklin: So then in 1970, you transferred to Exxon, right? And went into commercial fuel production. Femreite: Yes. Franklin: And how—I wonder if you could talk about that transition and how that industry was different or similar, you know, how the work was related. Femreite: Yeah. The work there was—first of all, it was all what you would call private enterprise. So Exxon was in business to produce fuel for big commercial power plants. At that time, there were—I don’t know the exact number, but some 20 to 30 nuclear power plants operating in the United States producing electrical power. Those were built mainly by General Electric and Westinghouse. And in Europe, craftwork union was doing the same thing, and there were a lot of power plants in Europe. So Exxon decided they were going to get into this in a big way, even though they were an oil company, they knew that they were really an energy company. So they decided that they could build fuel and supply it to these power plants in the US and in Europe. So they began the business here, largely on the basis that there was a lot of technical know-how here. They knew that they could recruit from Hanford, which was basically winding down, and they had the access to Battelle. And Battelle had a huge amount of knowledge, collectively, about all things nuclear. So Exxon came in and bought land inside the City of Richland city limits and got all the permits and built the plant. So when I started work, it was a piece of sand out here on Horn Rapids Road. And we had offices downtown, rented offices downtown. There were only just a handful of us. So I had the good fortune of coming in on what they call the ground floor. Exxon—by the way, Exxon was called the Standard Oil of New Jersey. It’s only in later years that they rebranded themselves. And so the plant—the business out here began as Jersey Nuclear, just an offtake of Standard Oil of New Jersey, and that’s how they began. I have a picture of their business sign here if you want to keep that. So that was, for us that had worked there for a long time, the sign was pretty significant, because it was the very beginning of a long-standing business. At any rate, they were a taxpaying business in the City of Richland, and everything was commercial and they had to meet all of the standard safety regulations and all that that any industry does. So they began from, like I said, a flat piece of sand to building a plant out here that could produce this fuel for these power plants. That fuel, as a process engineer and as a metallurgist, that fuel was far more complicated in its design. Franklin: And why was that? Femreite: Well, the fuel for Hanford was, as I explained earlier, just a slug that was a uranium slug, we called them, that was encapsulated in a cladding and then tested and put in the power plant. But the fuel for commercial plants—and you’ve probably seen displays around the Tri-Cities and different places—are individual pellets about the size of a pencil eraser, more highly enriched than the fuel for the plutonium reactors. And it’s encapsulated in a pretty exotic alloy, zirconium alloy. So each tube, then, produces heat and a lot of it. So they have to be made to extreme precision and very high quality. You have to build them with a very robust process, and then you have to test them under very robust conditions to make sure that they’re going to produce and perform the way they’re supposed to. So the whole thing was quite interesting. And over the years, what we called the nukes, the nuclear engineers, who were experts on how to load these power plants with different kinds of fuel, they came up with a lot of different designs. Basically all the same design in terms of outward appearance. They were tubes with uranium pellets in them. But they varied the sizes and the enrichments and all that kind of things to get better performance in the power plant. So that whole thing was pretty challenging for all of us. Franklin: You had mentioned that Exxon, Jersey Nuclear, Standard Oil, New Jersey Nuclear, Exxon, had drawn—or one of the decisions to put it here was the availability of knowledge of the nuclear industry. Did a lot of former Hanford workers go to work for New Jersey Nuclear? Femreite: They did. Franklin: Okay. Femreite: Yeah, there were quite a few. And there were a lot of—well, not a lot, but quite a few scientists from Battelle that were retained, you know, under contract. They helped us build the first reload, as an example. Our first reload went into a power plant by the name of Big Rock Point and Oyster Creek. So they kind of held our hands to get that first delivery made. To start from zero requires a whole lot of stuff, because you have to come up with all your procedures and all of your quality documents and methods and processes and you have to train your staff. So it’s really quite a complicated enterprise to bring something from zero to fully functional business. Franklin: And how long did you stay with that company? Femreite: Well, I retired there 30 years later. Franklin: Oh, so in 2000? Femreite: Yes. Mm-hmm. Franklin: And did your job change at all during those 30 years? Femreite: Yes, mm-hmm. Yeah, I started out as a process engineer, individual contributor. And the last five years I was the vice president of manufacturing and the Richland plant manager. So I managed to work my way through the organization. Franklin: Yeah. Femreite: But it was all very challenging and all very gratifying work. In that 30 years, we replicated the Richland plant in Germany. Mainly because—well, I should back up. We delivered a lot of fuel in the United States and quite a bit of fuel overseas. Overseas, there was a huge tariff on the fuel because it was imported. Germany kept saying, well, you know, if you guys want to beat this import deal, you should just build a plant over here. And we can facilitate that, and suggest a place that’s suitable for that kind of business. And they did. They struck a deal with what, by then, was called Exxon. We duplicated—replicated this plant in a small village in northwest Germany, and began supplying Europe from that plant. We took all the best technology from the Richland plant that we had developed up to that point, and we had developed a lot of it, and then transferred it to Europe in that little—what I call a little—Lingen plant. It was actually a sizeable plant in what was a very friendly village there. So that was quite remarkable, too, because we had to recruit people that didn’t know what nuclear even meant to come to work there. But they were all crafts of different kinds: welders, machinists, and other crafts that’d come through the trade schools or industry in Germany. So we put together a very successful operation over there. And so that, then, basically, put an end-run on the tariffs. And it was good for their economy and good for our business. So it turned out quite well. Franklin: How did the fortunes of what is now Areva respond to kind of the ups and downs of the nuclear power industry, at least domestically? I know that—I feel like there’s been some downturn in that industry or has come under a lot of criticism in the past few decades. Femreite: Yeah, well, yeah, there is a lot of bad publicity, which is unfortunate because it’s a clean—it’s basically a clean energy. It doesn’t produce any greenhouse gases and all that kind of thing. But the bad publicity with Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and all that puts it at a real disadvantage, and there’s a lot of public opinion against it. But as a business, we just carried on. Despite the publicity, there was still demand for electricity. And that didn’t go away. [LAUGHTER] So the utilities that ran the power plant just said, well, we’ll do everything we need to do to keep our plants safe. But we have to carry on, because people want their light to turn on when they go home. So it wasn’t quite as remarkable a result as some people might think, from a business standpoint. But there are becoming fewer and fewer power plants because the ones that were built a long time ago are getting old or are so old they had to be closed down. So there are fewer. Although the Nuclear Regulatory Commission keeps saying that they’re prepared to license some new plants, improved plants—what they would call improved plants. But basically just from a business standpoint, it was fairly stable. The hardest part of meeting the market was to meet the power plants’ schedules, because they have, as you might know, just like the plant up north here, Energy Northwest, they closed down about every two or three years to refuel. When they do that, they want their fuel then and then only. So you have to run your business to kind of match up with the refueling schedules of these various plants. Franklin: Right. That makes sense. And so you went back to Hanford in 2001, right? Femreite: Yes, after I retired, I was asked to participate in a, oh, I don’t know what the—you might call it a short study, about a month’s study, of industry experts that they assembled to figure out why they were having so much trouble in the K Plants, getting the fuel out of the basins and dried and stored. They developed a process to do that, and basically it took the old residual fuel in the basins out there, put them through a drying process and encapsulated them in a very strong container. And that’s stored out there in the 200 Areas. Franklin: What is the drying process? What is that doing? Femreite: It’s basically a vacuum. They put it in a big chamber and run a vacuum on it for a long time—a relatively long time. Franklin: And why is that done? Femreite: Well, they want the fuel to not corrode any further. Franklin: So how is the fuel being stored? Femreite: It was being stored in the water pools at K East and K West. So they were stored underwater in 30 feet of water, as a shield. It was spent fuel, so it was hot, radioactively hot. Well, thermally hot, too. And that was stored in those pools and had been for years by 2001. I was familiar with those plants because I worked out there when I began in 1967. Because I’d go out there a lot to consult with the engineers that were running my pilot—my new fuel through their plant. Franklin: Right, well, you might’ve even have helped to make some of that fuel that was in the basin. Femreite: Oh, absolutely, yeah, sure. I should digress a little bit. When I first came here in ’67, I was out at those plants and for my own pleasure I interviewed a lot of the old-timers that had worked there through the war. And I was always fascinated by the fact that they didn’t know what they were actually doing there, because it was secret. It was all compartmentalized. So you could talk to a person who worked on, like the front face of K Reactor, and he’d tell you that that’s all he knew at that time; he didn’t know what went on anywhere else. [LAUGHTER] And furthermore, they couldn’t talk about it. So that whole thing was very intriguing to me. But, anyway, back to our topic, I was one of, I think, about 12 people, so-called industry experts, that were called in to understand why things weren’t going well out there, and they weren’t meeting anything close to their schedules that they were supposed to dry this fuel and store it. So they brought in experts in almost every field. A lot of them were safety experts, regulation experts, and things like that. I went there as a manufacturing expert. So we spent, I think, two weeks there. I determined very quickly that they were not running that as a what I call a manufacturing process, which it really was. They were running more as an engineering process. So I wrote a report about that at the end of my little short tour of duty there and left it with the management. Then I went on a trip, a vacation with the family after that. Well, I got back and my phone was ringing of the wall. They said, Bernie, you need to come out here and help us figure this out, because we think that we have all this advice from all these people, but this seems to be the real key to getting this straightened out. So I then went to work under a contract, and basically taught them what’s called a constraint management manufacturing. Which we used in our own plant. And what that means is that any process—you can name almost any process: human process or manufacturing process, or almost any process—and you can find what’s called a bottleneck. You can put together any scheme of sequential operations. One point in there will be what’s called a bottleneck, or what I call a constraint. The real secret to making that all work is to zero in on the constraint and figure out if it can be made better or not. If not, manage the constraint and everything else pretty much takes care of itself. And so I called it constraint management. It’s called different things. In order to—so you’d identify the constraint, and then you put in modifiers that support the constraint. You put in what’s called queues, upstream and downstream, which a queue is just simply a place to store things that you either going to process or that you have processed. And then everything else pretty much runs itself. And they had a serious constraint out there, but they weren’t managing it; they were trying to—a group of engineers that were making charts everyday, trying to schedule everybody for every hour of the next day, to get them to do what they were supposed to do. [LAUGHTER] And it wasn’t working out. So I taught them how to do constraint management and what we call process control. Just in a short time, it just started working great. And in fact, the constraint turned out it wasn’t the constraint that they thought it was, because once we focused in on it, they got smart about how to run it, and it moved the constraint further downstream. So that became the new constraint down there, and then we started managing that as the constraint. So anyway, long story short, it put everything put together very well. Their production levels went, like, improved by three or four times. And I think they ended up actually beating their endpoint schedule before by implementing that method. Franklin: Oh, wow. Femreite: So it was pretty gratifying. And I got a lot of calls about how well that worked, and they were quite happy with it. So that was very successful for them and very gratifying for me. Franklin: How long were you on that project? Femreite: I was there for—that only took us about three months. Franklin: Oh, okay. Femreite: Yeah. They wanted me to stay on and work as a consultant there, but I told them, look, I’m retired. My job now is to stay retired. So I declined to do that. Franklin: Was that the last time you worked out at Hanford? Femreite: That was the last time I worked there, yeah, mm-hmm. Franklin: Great. Well, we’ve got to most of my questions. I do have a couple more just quick ones. I’m wondering, was Richland—I know you came to Richland after the town had been turned into private ownership. But I’m wondering if Richland was still, at that point when you arrived, if there was anything remarkable or unique about it, or what your impressions were compared to where you had grown up? Femreite: Oh, definitely. You could tell that it was still very much a government town. There wasn’t a lot of infrastructure here, compared to what we’re used to now. Columbia Center was just desert, for instance. There wasn’t anything out there. The government housing had just, as you said, turned back to civilian ownership, just a few years prior. The housing around town was still largely what had been built for the war effort or after the war. Franklin: Did you live in an Alphabet House when you arrived here? Femreite: I lived in what was called a Richland Village house, which was government construction. Richland Village was just north of Safeway, that whole area in there. Those were all mass-produced government houses. They weren’t really called an Alphabet House. I could’ve been in an Alphabet House very easily, but it just turned out that the Richland Village was a good choice for renting. I wanted to buy a home, but I didn’t want to do that immediately upon arrival here. I kind of wanted to get the lay of the land. So we rented what’s called a Richland Village home at the time. At that time, that whole place was run by one business. One business owned all those houses and rented them out, and were wanting to sell them to individual owners. So a lot of them are rented, and I’d say maybe half of them had maybe been sold to individuals at that time. But as you drove around town, it was largely still the government-built houses that you saw. Very few new construction. And the furthest, the northern extent of Richland at that time was where the 7-Eleven is on G-W Way down here, on Saint. In fact, that area where the 7-Eleven is and Washington Square Apartments was a drive-in theater. [LAUGHTER] It was still operating. [LAUGHTER] And the houses on Harris—there were no houses between G-W Way and Harris Street. But at the time we came here, Harris was being developed as a new upscale development. So all those homes along Harris there that are along the river were upscale houses. To get there, there was one street over to Harris, I think it was the street that goes past the 7-Eleven now, and you went across the desert to this strip of land along the river where these homes were being built. I was explaining to your colleague a while ago, this campus was one building, and it was called the Graduate Center. Franklin: Yes. Yeah, it’s what’s now the East Building of our campus. Femreite: Yeah. So, yeah, it was still kind of a frontier town in my opinion at the time. It was quickly changing. We saw a whole lot of changes in the time we’ve lived here, that’s for sure. Franklin: And where did you end up—I’m assuming you ended up buying a house. Did you end up living in Richland? Femreite: I did. Our first home was what I’d call a starter home, just off of the boundary of the Richland Village. There was a string of little, three-bedroom two-bath places that had been built and we bought one of those. Later on, there was a new development further north. I don’t recall if it even had a name, it just—a lot of nicer homes, bigger homes. Split-level and that kind of thing. So we ended up going there, moving there later on. And then I was asked to go to Germany, so we sold that and went to Germany. And came back and lived in a similar house in that area. Then Exxon asked me to go to Idaho Falls. We went down there and ran a secret weapons project that I never talked to you about earlier. But Exxon was asked to go down there and run what was then a secret project, military project. Then when we came back, we moved to a home on Harris Avenue and lived there until I retired. Franklin: Oh, okay. I’m wondering if you could describe the ways in which security of secrecy at Hanford impacted your work while you were there? Femreite: Well it made—you had to be very, very conscious of it. I had proper clearance to where I could get almost any kind of classified document that I wanted, and I needed to, because there was a lot of science developed there that was Top Secret. So as a practical matter, every engineer there had a fairly sizeable safe. And we kept all of our documents in that safe. Including documents that we had checked out to use or to read or whatever. And then our own writings, our own documents, were sent to a classification officer before they were published and he gave them their appropriate classification level. So at the end of the day, you made sure that everything that was classified was in the safe. And then patrol would come around in the evenings and odd hours, just to see if there was anything left that shouldn’t be. Or unattended. You could not leave a classified document unattended; you had to have it with you. If you left it on your desk and walked out, that was a no-no. If you were going to go somewhere, you locked it back up. Franklin: Did you ever run afoul of— Femreite: No, I never did get a security infraction. I knew people that did. Franklin: That’s good. Did you ever have something that you had authored become classified to where you couldn’t use it again? Femreite: Well, I could use it, but others couldn’t. Uh-huh. Yeah, I had several things that were classified. Mm-hmm. Franklin: My last question is, I’d like to ask you what you would like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland during the Cold War? Femreite: Well, the Cold War for people of my age was very concerning. I was raised in the period where they were teaching students to duck under their desks. [LAUGHTER] As a civil defense exercise. There was a lot of information and publicity, or maybe even propaganda, about the threat of nuclear war. A lot of films got shown in the schools about what nuclear war was about, and what atomic bombs were like, and what you might be able to do to protect yourself, or might not be able to do to protect yourself. And then there was, of course, the headlines about tensions between Russia and the United States. Cuban missile crisis and all that. So it was very disconcerting. As a child, or an adolescent, I was worried about it, as were my colleagues about the same age. And then as a young engineer, working here, it became clear that there was a lot of very high technology being developed and that was important to our health and safety as a nation. It was guarded very well. People were quite dedicated to their work here. That was always very gratifying to me, that people weren’t taking it lightly; they knew what their responsibilities were and how important it was. So for anybody looking back on it, I think they can just be grateful that there were a lot of folks that had a very high principles and very high expectations and were very capable. And, you know, now, in retrospect, there are quite a few workers who were essentially overexposed. At the time they didn’t know it, and neither did management, but in retrospect you see reports of people, a lot, that have lasting diseases and that kind of thing, from the exposures they took here. So, those folks are heroes. They laid their life on the line for the rest of us. They’re every bit as much a hero as the people that were fighting the war, I think. Franklin: Great, well, thank you, Bernie, for coming in and talking to us about your career. Femreite: Yes, it was my pleasure. Thank you. Franklin: Okay. Awesome. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:50:37 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317kbps Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Bernal Femreite Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) B Reactor National Historic Landmark (Wash.) Hanford Atomic Products Operation Description An account of the resource Bernal Femreite came to the Hanford Site to work for Douglas United Nuclear. He worked in the 300 Area, and at many of the Hanford reactors. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 6/12/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Language A language of the resource English Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operated under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who were the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F8cb143e89916aa0afa68367bf91d52fd.JPG e123c8b06a200ffab7c43b07f6e8ec39 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F9dd90cc6aac4bf4dd9bf4487c9e1bdc7.mp4 83fffa719d331b65d485ff782228aed4 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed John McFadden Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: All right, my name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with John McFadden on September 20, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with John about his father’s experiences and his own experiences living at the towns, the town of Hanford, and then the Manhattan Project and afterward. For the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? John McFadden: Yes, my name is John McFadden. J-O-H-N. M-C-capital-F-A-D-D-E-N. Franklin: So, let’s start talking about your father. Tell me, where and when was he born? McFadden: My dad was born in 1911 in Ellensburg, Washington. Franklin: Oh, so kind of already a local guy? McFadden: Absolutely. He was--his father-in-law was the sheriff of Kittitas County, and original or very original member of Roslyn, back before Washington was a state. And he was--his father-in-law was actually the sheriff and a judge and a mayor, and all kinds of things in Roslyn. Then after it became a state, he got Roslyn involved in statehood as well as--then he ran as the sheriff of Kittitas County. And he became the sheriff of Kittitas County, and his daughter then married my grandfather, and my father was a product of grandfather and my grandmother. Franklin: Right. Do you remember the gentleman’s name who was the sheriff? McFadden: I certainly do. Isaac Brown. Franklin: Okay. McFadden: He came over from England and started as a miner and became a pretty, kind of a big shot in Roslyn, back in the day. Franklin: Yeah, the history of Roslyn is really, really quite an interesting history in Washington State. McFadden: Yes, yes. Franklin: So, your dad was born in Ellensburg. McFadden: Correct. Franklin: And how does he find his way down to the town of Hanford? McFadden: Oh! Well, okay. His father, my grandfather, was a senior engineer on the Northern Pacific Railroad. And so, he was--he went to work for the Northern Pacific in 1901, as I found out, after starting his career in Mexico. History had it that he went there and worked for Pancho Villa. I’ve since proven, no, that’s just another McFadden lore. Anyway, he came to Ellensburg with the Northern Pacific Railway, met and married my grandmother, and then was transferred to Pasco. So, he was a railroader in Pasco from about 1914 or so, till his death in 1942. Franklin: Wow. McFadden: So that’s how Dad got there. Franklin: Down to the Tri-Cities area. McFadden: Yes, yes, to Pasco. And Dad went, then, to Washington State College and graduated in 1936 with a degree in education. Went to work as a high school teacher, history teacher and coach and principal of Hover High School in the old town of Hover. Franklin: Oh! Yeah, kind of south of Finley. McFadden: Hover-Finley, yup. Franklin: We actually, I think a year ago, we interviewed a group of brothers in their 90s who grew up in Hover. Because, you know, you probably know, Hover was covered by the dam, by either McNary or Ice Harbor, it covered--oh, that’s really interesting, neat. McFadden: Yeah, correct. Franklin: Okay, so he’s down in Hover. McFadden: Right. And then in 1940, he had an opportunity to go to Hanford and he became what I have heard; I can’t--who knows?--the youngest superintendent in the state of Washington. I believe it was 26, if I remember correctly. So, he was then superintendent of schools at Hover from 1940 through ‘42 or ‘43. I’m-- Franklin: Sorry, Hover or Hanford? McFadden: Oh, Hanford. I’m sorry, yes, Hanford. Yeah, I get all the Hs mixed up. Franklin: No, its no problem. They’re pretty close geographically-- McFadden. And historically. None of them are there. So yeah that’s how he got there. Franklin: Did your father ever talk about life at Hanford and what it was like and what kind of town? McFadden: No. Not really. Mom talked every now and then. Franklin: Oh, yeah, sorry, let’s go back. When did your father marry your mother? McFadden: I believe that was 1937. Franklin: Okay. McFadden: She was a graduate of Central--no, that would be--yeah, Central Washington Normal Teachers College. Franklin: Teachers College, yup. And she’s from Ellensburg as well? McFadden: No. She’s from Walla Walla. Franklin: Oh, okay. McFadden: Yeah. And her father was the resident manager of Pacific Power and Light Company in Walla Walla. And Dad courted her on a friend’s motorcycle. Franklin: Oh, wow. McFadden: Which didn’t go over well with the country club head of Pacific Power and Light, you know. When a railroad engineer’s son would call on his daughter on a motorcycle. Franklin: Yeah, I bet not. McFadden: [LAUGHTER] Anyway, so-- Franklin: So, she moved, then, with him to Hover and then to Hanford. McFadden: Yes. Franklin: But so she expressed history or-- McFadden: Yes. Franklin: Can you kind of relate some of that to us? McFadden: She loved it there. Had lots of friends in the grange. Was not able to continue teaching because it would take away a teaching job from a man. And her job was to stay home and have kids, I guess. But, yeah, she loved the friendship of the community. Everybody was involved. I have--she saved--Dad saved very little--but she saved like programs and so on that they’d put on in the high school or the grange, and this group would sing, and Mrs. So-and-so would bring cookies and they’d--yeah, it was that kind of a community, White Bluffs and Hanford and so on. As I understand from Mom, yes. Yeah. Franklin: And--oh, shoot. I just lost my question. Keep going and hopefully my question will-- McFadden: Oh. So, yeah, and there of course was no doctor in Hanford. So, I was born in Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, which was exactly two blocks from my father’s home that he grew up in Pasco. And I think the total--well, I still have the total bill. It was like $6.96 for the room and my--all of those things. So, I wasn’t actually technically born in the town of Hanford, but everybody in the town of Hanford thought I was, because there weren’t-- Franklin: Well, I mean--yeah. McFadden: Yeah. But they spoke a lot of the camaraderie, and I saw that in later years when I would find, after my dad moved on from that and all of those places, that there would be people who were working for his school district who had been residents in White Bluffs or at Hanford or, in other words, still a community connection, still. Franklin: Where was your parents’ house in the town of Hanford? Do you know? Have you ever bene out to see it, or do you know where it is on the map? McFadden: I have found it on the map, because of the grange insurance always put coordinates on the map. I have all of the grange information that my mother collected. So I actually had the coordinates, so I went into the old declassified maps of Hanford-White Bluffs and that entire reservation area, and was actually able to find my mother and father’s name and where it was. And then using the coordinates, came close. But you know, some of the coordinates are different today than they were at that time. Franklin: Sure. What were your mother and father’s names? McFadden: Oh. My father was Charles B. McFadden. He went by CB. And my mother was Eileen McFadden. Yeah. Franklin: And so then, the big defining event of Hanford, of the whole site, is the eviction. McFadden: Correct. Franklin: Did your parents--what do you know about the eviction on you and your parents? McFadden: Well, my father really never spoke about it. My mother told stories of, they were given like two weeks or three weeks of a notice and had to pack up and leave. That’s my childhood recollection of what she said. Dad--you know, it’s very interesting, he talked a lot about Hover and before. And he talked a lot about Hanford until. And it was like, we don’t talk about that, because--I just don’t know. Franklin: Sure. Do you think that it affected him? You know, emotionally, or--? McFadden: Yes. Yes, I--yes, I do. It was something he loved, being in that community. And he loved his job there. And he was working very hard to get the high school and the Hanford schools accredited. He wrote letters to Pearl Wanamaker, who was the superintendent of public instruction at the time. I have letters going from my father to her and then back from her to my father, saying, there isn’t enough population and student numbers to accredit your schools at this time. But keep trying. By the way, you’ve got a tremendous library and history program there. But it never came to fruition in my dad’s time, and I have a feeling that that bothered him till the end of his days. Franklin: What was so important about getting the schools accredited? Do you know? McFadden: I believe that it had to do with federal monies, that if your school was accredited, then you could get more matching funds from the state to improve programs and to do those. And I believe that was his driving force. Later on, that became an important part of the next phase of his life after that. Franklin: And when were you born? McFadden: I was born in 1942. Franklin; What day and-- McFadden: Well, I’m old. Okay, no. April the 11th, 1942. Yeah. Franklin: So you were pretty eleven--sorry, I’m writing the word eleven--the number eleven while I’m trying to talk. So, you were pretty young. McFadden: Yeah, absolutely. I have no personal memories at all of Hanford. I have pictures of where we lived at the time when we came back, and Dad worked for DuPont in the Hanford Project. Franklin: Yes, so let’s talk about that, because I’ve heard of employees--I’ve heard of former residents going back for DuPont, and I just--it’s hard to imagine how different that must’ve been for people that lived out there to watch that transformation, and to play a part in its transformation. McFadden: Yeah, I always had the feeling that Dad did that as his part of the war effort. You know, they were at war and for some medical reasons and also because of his size, he kept being turned down for service. Franklin: Too small? Too tall? McFadden: No, he was six-six and weighed about 240 pounds. Franklin; Oh, wow, that is tall. McFadden: So, they couldn’t fit him into a uniform. They said, oh, wow. Well. And it really bothered him. As a matter of fact, later on, when I went into the service, he pulled me aside and he said, I’m really proud. You’re doing something that I wasn’t able to do, son. So, I took it, that moment, that that bothered him big time. So, he went back to do, I think--I feel--his part for the defense of our country. Franklin: And what was his job at Hanford? McFadden: The best I can--well, I know for a fact, he was an investigator. Franklin: For DuPont. McFadden: For DuPont. He went to work for DuPont in, that would’ve been June of 1943. And he worked for them through September of 1944 when he went to Moses Lake, population 360, to become superintendent of schools there. Franklin: Wow. Yeah, before the Cold War, Moses Lake was a pretty sparsely-- McFadden: I do have memories of that. Franklin: Wow. I was just there at a conference last summer, and, yeah, it’s an interesting little spot. What was he investigating? People? Like a police investigator? McFadden: No, from what I’ve been able to ascertain, first off, he never talked about it. Ever. Sworn to secrecy. That’s, oh! Franklin: Right. Classified. McFadden: Oh! You don’t talk about that, son. But he’d tell me something that was really interesting. He said, well, I’ll just put it this way. Spies don’t work a 40-hour week, so neither does your father. [LAUGHTER] Okay? Okay? Franklin: That’s a really great quote. McFadden: Yeah. That’s what I was told. So I take that to mean he was checking on employees, investigating, are you talking on the side, do you---those kind of things. Franklin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where did your family live during this time where your father worked for DuPont? McFadden: We lived in Riverview Homes in Pasco. It was commonly known, the housing project. Franklin: Oh! That’s right. Before the camera started, you mentioned that your father was involved in trying to get the Pasco Naval training at the town of Hanford. McFadden: Correct. Franklin: Right? I’d like to hear more about that. McFadden: Oh! Well, I discovered letters--as I mentioned before, my mother never threw anything away. She used mucilage glue and glued everything to pages. Franklin: Well, as an archivist I love the first part of that, and hate the second part of that. McFadden: Yeah, well, you should try to tear some of them out. Franklin: We just don’t--yeah, it’s the worst stuff and it browns stuff. McFadden: Yeah. Franklin: Well, that’s how we learn. McFadden: Yeah, no, that’s true. And gotta love my mother, you know? Franklin: She was here. McFadden; Well, no, that’s true. Yes, he was involved at writing to the naval reserve in Seattle, to try to arrange to set up a pilot training program in and around Hanford and White Bluffs, because of the terrain and the masses of--there was a lot of land and very few population centers and so on. So I have correspondence back and forth between them, and the last one stating that, while there are other things involved--this is the one that I’d mentioned earlier. So he was always concerned about helping his high school students get careers and gainful employment whether during the war years or even till he passed on. Franklin: Right, I mean, that would bring a lot of jobs. Because you would not only have the jobs but also the economy service built around that. McFadden: And there might have been an ulterior motive to get more students into his high schools and schools so that they could get accredited. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Sadly, the military had bigger designs. But Pasco, though, if memory serves me right, Pasco did become a major naval training center-- McFadden: They did. Franklin: --for the Pacific and one of the largest railroad depots in the United States. McFadden: That is correct. I have lots of great childhood memories going down to the roundhouse in Pasco and all those kinds of things with Grandpa and with--yeah, anyway. Franklin: What did your mother do during the war? McFadden: Ah, well, okay. She was a housewife. She also would substitute teach in the schools. She was very involved in the Eastern Star and the grange. Whatever there was to do, my mother had to, apparently, have a finger in it. Franklin: Really? McFadden: Yup. [female off-camera] She watched airplanes constantly. McFadden: Oh, yeah. She did, yes. Okay. Franklin: Oh, okay. Thank you. McFadden: Our little time in Acosta, she would take me down to the beach, and she was a spotter for the government. So she would sit in a spotting shack with me and look at airplanes. And she had--I still have somewhere; I can’t find them--all of the silhouettes of the airplanes that she would have to-- Franklin: Right, the Japanese bombers and-- McFadden: Correct, correct. Franklin: Wow. McFadden: So, she did that for--yeah. Franklin: Oh, that’s really cool. So, you lived in the Riverview Homes in Pasco until ‘44 when your family moved up to Moses Lake. McFadden: Moses Lake, yes. Franklin: So, what do you--I mean, you were really young, but what do you--what are your memories of wartime Pasco, if any? Because I imagine that must’ve been a bustling, bustling place. McFadden: Well, what I remember is that for the most part, my great-uncle John and my uncle Norm involved all of the little boy cousins at going to the roundhouse and talking to all the people coming in. I do remember trains coming into the Pasco station and going down with Mom in my little buggy. We’d watch, like, workers come in. I don’t know if that had anything to do with my dad’s job. I don’t know that. But they would bring them in by the trainload and then of course, bus them or whatever they did, to--yeah. But other than that, no. My memories really start in Moses Lake. Franklin: Sure, I mean, that makes sense, time-wise. McFadden: Yeah, yeah. Franklin: So how long did your family stay in Moses Lake? McFadden: We moved there in 1944 and we moved out in 1956. Franklin: Oh okay. McFadden: So Dad was superintendent of schools there from 1944 through 1956. Franklin: That, I imagine--was that a major period of change for Moses Lake? McFadden: Yes. Franklin: Because when was--the air base was constructed somewhere-- McFadden: Well, yeah, the air base was there, I know for a fact, in 1942. It stayed there--I don’t recall. We were gone when it was finally shut. But it was at first, Moses Lake Army Airfield. I do remember that. And then there was the Ephrata Army Airfield. Yeah, when we moved to Moses Lake, I know there were 360 people. And it had just been changed, the town’s name, from Nepal or Neppel to Moses Lake. And when we moved from Moses Lake in 1956, there were 12,900 people there. And that didn’t include the air base. Franklin: Wow. McFadden: So when we moved there, there was one school for the grade school and high school. When we left, there were all kinds of junior highs and new high schools and all kinds of things. Franklin: Must’ve been pretty exciting for your father to try to just keep things going. Or you know. During that period of growth like that. McFadden: Yes, yes, yes. And that’s also where I learned that the Japanese internment camps, during World War II? Not all Japanese went to internment camps. Franklin: Yeah. McFadden: There were many who came to Moses Lake, Quincy. So, I’m from Bainbridge Island and so forth. And they could work on the farms in the agriculture there. So yeah. Franklin: Yeah, actually, earlier this week, we interviewed the Yamauchi family, who is from Pasco. The Columbia River was the dividing line for Executive Order 9066. Part of the family was interned, but part of the family was allowed to stay in Pasco. Which is really something. Just an amazing history. McFadden: Yeah. I have found some correspondence between Japanese students that my father had in Moses Lake. Where they, after the war was over, they sent greetings to my father and my mother for all of the--for being congenial and friends and so on during that time. And I’m trying to contact those families and make sure they get the actual letters. Because I think that’s important. It’s a fond memory for me, but it’s personal for them. So, I’m in the process of trying to do that. Franklin: Oh, that’s really wonderful. How old were you when you first remember learning about Hanford and what your father had been a part of? McFadden: Well, what my father had been a part of, probably 60 years old. What my father was a part of. My mother’s tales started at early childhood. Yes, yeah. But what my father actually did--he always spoke highly of Hanford, Hanford High School, all of those parts. But he never said anything about DuPont and those times. Franklin: Well, how old were you when you found out about the Hanford Engineering Works and the atomic bomb--that your father was connected with the work to build the bomb? McFadden: Well, I think, by inference, I was probably in my 40s. Franklin: Oh, okay. McFadden: Okay? As far as knowing for real, my research that I’ve done lately. We always knew that Hanford--I mean, I always had the information that that’s what they were doing there, building that bomb, making those things. So I knew that he had to have something to do with it somehow. Because I had a feeling that I know he did work there, but I didn’t know anything about what he did. Never said a word. So, yeah. Franklin: Wow, wow. McFadden: I’m sure he contributed to the airplane. Franklin: Yeah, I would imagine so, because that came in June or July or ‘44. McFadden: Yes, yeah. Day’s Pay. Franklin: Yes. In fact, the son of the pilot of that is coming next week. McFadden: Oh, wow. Franklin: To town to take a tour and stuff like that. Yeah, it’s really quite a busy few weeks around here. McFadden: Well, yeah, yeah, that’s great. Franklin: It just seems always to happen, too, around the--because we’re getting close to the anniversary of the startup of B Reactor, and all of those things. McFadden: Yes, yeah. Yeah. Franklin: Did your father keep--did your family keep in touch with anybody from the old town fo Hanford? From the town itself, not the McFadden: Ah, yes. Yes, they did. And once again, here’s where you learn later in life. I graduated from a school called Connell High School, okay, which is-- Franklin: Right. McFadden: Yeah, just down the road. Franklin: miles-ish? McFadden: Yeah, from Pasco. Across from Ringgold and that way. Franklin: Still kind of in the area. McFadden: Yes. And what I learned is that Dad stayed in touch with several families from before those times. But I didn’t really understand that until I started doing research and, wow, this name is familiar. You’re kidding me! Franklin: Do you remember the names? McFadden: Some, yes. One is the Weber family. Another is the Heideman family. And then there was the Purser family, and they lived in Ringgold. Franlkin: Oh, right, across the-- McFadden: across the river, mm-hmm, yes. And see if there’s anymore. Well, then there was the Collie family. And I think you have an interview with one of the Collies. Franklin: Do we? McFadden: Mm-hmm, or maybe it’s in another site. But yeah, the Collies were early settlers around here as well. They had properties out in Hanford, they lived out there. Yeah. So. Franklin: Did your father ever go to the Hanford-White Bluffs reunion? McFadden: One. Franklin: One. McFadden: Yeah. Franklin: Which one? McFadden: Well--okay. It was the one, it had to have been held in the ‘70s sometime. AN they were allowed back on the reservation. Franklin: Was that the first time that that ever happened? McFadden: That was the first time they were ever back. Franklin: So I think that was the ‘68 reunion, because we have a lot of pictures from that reunion from Harry Anderson, who helped lead those with Annette Heriford. So, I think that’s ‘68, if I’m-- McFadden: No. That could absolutely be true. But I know Mom and Dad talked about that forever. Franklin: Really? McFadden: Oh, yeah. They said they got to go back on the reservation and-- Franklin: When we get back to my office, remind me to show you some photos of that, and maybe-- McFadden: Okay. Franklin: It’d be really neat, maybe if somehow, you know, your parents were in one of these photos. McFadden: Oh, that’d be great. Yeah. Franklin: Okay. McFadden: That’d be superb. Franklin: And I believe they had that reunion in Richland, and then, yeah, they bussed them out to the site. McFadden: yeah, yeah. Franklin: Great. Oh, that’s really--and so you, after Moses Lake, I’m inferring, but you moved to Connell. McFadden: Well, actually, we spent two years in Tacoma. Franklin: Okay. McFadden: And then we moved back to Connell, yes. Franklin: And then you ended up going to WSU. McFadden: Go Cougs! Franklin: Yeah, yeah. Go Cougs! McFadden: Yeah. Yeah, I did. Franklin: Yeah, it’s a wonderful place. McFadden: Yeah, yeah. Franklin: And then, did you ever come back to the area at all? The Tri-Cities, Hanford area? McFadden: To live, or--? Franklin: Yeah, to live or work. McFadden: Not really, no. No, no, no. I’ve come back many times. I’ve taken all the tours at Hanford and done that. But as a matter of fact, as I mentioned to you earlier, I went on one of the very first pre-Hanford tours. And actually got to stand and look at my father’s high school, the shell that’s left. And I don’t know if I should say this out loud, ubt they let me go ahead of the fence so that I could--you know. Franklin: Well, every now and then for special folks--like we had Dick Groves, the grandson of Leslie Groves here. McFadden: Oh, sure. Franklin: A couple months ago and they took him all over the place. Because he’s--you know. Because--you know. When you’re the grandson of Leslie Groves. McFadden: yeah, hey! When you have a park named after you--[LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right, exactly. That tends to open a few doors, literally. Well, that’s great. Yeah, it’s a wonderful tour. Where did your parents end up settling and staying? McFadden: Oh! Okay. They actually ended up in Brush Prairie, Washington. Franklin: Where is that? McFadden: That’s outside of Vancouver, Washington. Dad finished out his career in a town called Stevenson, Washington, which is up the Columbia Gorge. He retired there. And Mom went back to work as a special education teacher. And so she finished out her 30-year career. Then they retired and motorhomed and did the good life and Dad passed away in ‘82, and Mom passed on in ‘84. Franklin: Oh, wow. McFadden: So, yeah. But they ended up in Brush Prairie. Franklin: Well that’s really cool. So your father, at the Hanford Engineering Works for DuPont, from what you gather, is part of the security apparatus? McFadden: Correct. His official title that I can--is investigator. Yes. He was there on the reservation and we know where his office was. Franklin: Where was that? McFadden: Well, it was on a map. Franklin: Oh, okay. McFadden: So what I’ve done is I’ve taken the Google map that they have and you can still see all the outlines of things on that map. Franklin: yeah, are you talking about the construction camp? McFadden: Yes, mm-hmm, and the headquarters and that. So then I have another map that was done back in--that showed the actual what it was and give the, like the bus stops and number and that. So I’ve imposed the two over each other and it had the investigative offices, so I knew that’s where he must’ve worked out of. Franklin: Did your father ever bring you on Site? McFadden: No. Franklin: Okay. McFadden: Not that I--no. No. Franklin: And let’s see here. I think that’s most of my questions. What would you like--what do you think your parents would want future generations to know about living at Hanford before the project and kind of living through the Manhattan Project and the transformation of this area? McFadden: Well, I--wow, that’s a great question. I think that they would want young people today to know that they were citizens and people of courage who had huge convictions, not always agreeing, but had convictions that America was the best place in the world you could be or live and had given them and their families tremendous opportunities to flourish and to do what they chose to do with their lives. And that the Hanford Project was somewhat unfair to those citizens who had gone to this rock-scrabble land next to a river and made it into a beautiful orchard country and agriculture and built themselves their own irrigation system before that was really a big deal. And then they came in, and they were just told to leave, basically, and paid peanuts for what they had, their hard work, and their camaraderie and community and all that, had built these towns. And it was gone. And with really very little notice. And really very little consequence, except this is what is going to happen. And they’d like to know that it was part of a success and helped end a war. And that it was part of the patriotic duties that we’ve done to keep our country free. I think that’s what they’d like to have people remember, and that it was a hard-working group of people. It was a time when everybody came together. Yeah. So. Franklin: Great. That reminded me, when you talked about when people were removed, did your parents, do you know anything about the compensation that the government paid to your parents? McFadden: I do not Franklin: Okay. McFadden: No. Franklin: Okay. McFadden: Except Mom said it was paltry. Franklin: Yeah, that’s seems to be the prevailing--from what we’ve seen-- McFadden: But what “paltry” means, I don’t know. Franklin: What we’ve seen from the financial documents was that it was pretty wide-ranging, but some of the valuations were pretty low. McFadden: Yeah. Well, I got a kick out the history of the Bruggemans: We ain’t going. And so they had to keep sending--you will be gone. But, yeah, yeah. So. Franklin: Yeah, no, so many great stories to tell out there. Well, John, thank you so much. McFadden: Oh! It’s my pleasure and thank you for the opportunity to speak for my folks. Franklin: Mm-hmm. Tom, did you have any questions? Tom Hungate: No. Franklin: Okay, great, well, thanks. McFadden: Thank you! Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 37:56 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317kbps Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with John McFadden Subject The topic of the resource Hanford (Wash.) Hanford Site (Wash.) Du Pont Company Pasco (Wash.) Description An account of the resource John McFadden's father, Charles, was the superintendent of the Hanford (Wash.) school district and later an investigator workig for the Du Pont Company. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 9/20/2018 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Language A language of the resource English Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operated under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who were the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F9c20fe3d0ef3378f837cbcac10d470e0.mp4 8ff7134b7fd9fbf590e1911a6bcad7c9 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Pre-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area prior to the Manhattan Project Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area prior to the Manhattan Project Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Shirley Stewart Location The location of the interview Royal City (Wash.) Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound 0:00:00 Tom Hungate: And we’re rolling. Robert Franklin: We’re rolling. Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Shirley Stewart on January 17, 2020. The interview is being conducted at Shirley Stewart’s home outside Royal City. I will be talking with Shirley about her experiences growing up in what became the Hanford Site. For the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Shirley Stewart: Shirley A. Stewart. S-H-I-R-L-E-Y. Adele, A-D-E-L-E. Stewart, S-T-E-W-A-R-T. Franklin: Great, thank you. And Shirley, what was your family name that-- Stewart: Oh, McGee. Franklin: McGee, right? And tell me where--tell me a bit about the ranch that you grew up in. 0:00:49 Stewart: Okay. My grandparents came into Cold Crick in 1908. And it was my dad’s stepdad and two brothers and Daddy and his sister. He was a blacksmith, and he used to ride his horse from Cold Crick clear to Hanford to shoe horses. This was in the early days. I believe that they did dryland wheat, some. But in 1916, maybe, they were looking for natural gas. And this guy came by and asked around if he’d be interested in drilling a well on his place. Grandpa thought about it a minute and he said, well, you know, I’m interested. But he said, I want to tell you this: if it’s water, it’s my well. If it’s natural gas, it’s yours. Well, the guy set up his thing to drill and he probably lasted a year or a little after and he finally ran out of funds. So then of course Grandpa went on with his life. Then in another year the guy came by and asked him the same thing. And he said, well, if it’s my well, it’s water, and if it’s gas, it’s yours. And I don’t know how deep that well was, but it had to be fairly deep. Well, they hit just a gusher of artesian well. That was the first--that was Brown’s well at Cold Crick. Franklin: And why was it called Brown’s well? Stewart: Well, because that was my grandpa’s—it was my dad’s stepdad, see? Franklin: I see. Okay, okay. 0:02:36 Stewart: And then they raised—they had a little orchard, as I remember them telling me, because I was too little then at first. But anyway, and then they had grain, hay. And but anyway, then my dad, at 18, he filled out to get a homestead—on the Homestead Act. Franklin: And your father’s name was Chester. 0:03:05 Stewart: Chester McGee, mm-hmm. And he had worked on that like maybe a year or two and then the war came along, and he went into the Navy then. Then when he came back out of the Navy, it was 125, I think, acres that he’d already approved on then. Well then Mom—my mother, meanwhile, my mother was a school teacher at Cold Crick, and that’s how Dad met her. So in 1919, they got married in December and they moved to White Bluffs for two years. He managed an orchard. And then he became a deputy sheriff of Benton County for eight years. Well, while he was there, he kept improving on this ground and getting it ready for when he was going to be through his thing. In 1928, a well driller got ahold of Dad and said would you be interested in drilling a well? And Dad said, well, yes, but I don’t have the funds to pay you. Oh, he said, that’s no big deal. Well, anyway, so Dad said, okay, I’ll give you 100 acres if you can get water for me. And we did. We had the biggest well. It was 1,150 feet deep. 90 pounds pressure and 100—let’s see if I’ve got—I figured I’d write this all down and then I’d tell ya. Franklin: We’ve heard of people drilling down several hundred feet, but I have not heard of anybody drilling down—like over 1,000 feet, I mean, that’s a really deep well. Stewart: Yeah, okay. They had 1,800 pounds pressure. Franklin: 1,800 pounds? Stewart: Mm-hmm, because that’s to irrigate over 300 acres with it. Franklin: Wow. 0:04:52 Stewart: Well, anyway, meanwhile, between the time Grandma’s well come in and ours, there was three other wells drilled at Cold Crick, but theirs were more shallow—they were shallower wells. And they had little farms there, too. I could name some of the people, but-- Franklin: Sure! Could you? Stewart: Rothrocks was one name. Meekers. M-E-E-K-E-R. Franklin: Okay, that name’s familiar. Stewart: And the other one was Schlosser. Raymond Martinez: Schlosser. Franklin: Is that like-- Stewart: S-C-H, wasn’t it? Martinez: Schlosser, Bob Schlosser. Stewart: Schlosser, uh-huh. Franklin: Okay. Stewart: Didn’t he move to Sunnyside? Martinez: Huh? Stewart: He moved to Sunnyside, didn’t he? Martinez: Yeah, he moved to Sunnyside. Franklin: Oh, and just for the record, that’s Raymond Martinez sitting off to the side who also grew up in Hanford-White Bluffs. That’s for our transcriptionist, who’s going to have to type all this out, just so she knows who you are, to put your name next to what you said. 0:05:55 Stewart: So then, after Dad’s time, it was eight years he was deputy sheriff. So they meanwhile were building—I think what they did is bought two old shacks and rebuilt them for our home. And then we moved there—I was about 18 months old, so it’d be 1931, we moved to the ranch then. Franklin: Okay. And you were how old in 19—so, sorry. When were you--when and where were you born? Stewart: I was 18 months old when they moved. Franklin: 18 months old. So you were born in White Bluffs, then? Stewart: I was born—actually, well, no, I was born in Kennewick. Franklin: And did your family live in Kennewick? Stewart: They lived in Kennewick when Dad was deputy sheriff. And I had a brother. My brother was seven years older then. Yeah. Franklin: So you were born in 1929? Stewart: 1929, I was born, mm-hmm. Franklin: Wow. Okay. And so where did you live in Kennewick? Stewart: I don’t know. Franklin: Do you remember? Or do you know where the family lived in Kennewick? 0:06:57 Stewart: They lived in a—I think, first they lived in Prosser for a while and then they moved to Kennewick. But I couldn’t tell you. I don’t know the streets. I think we went by there one time, and it was kind of just a little house that was there. I just don’t remember. Franklin: That’s fine, that’s fine. I was just curious. Because I live in downtown Kennewick, so I was just wondering-- Stewart: Well, it was kind of just at the edge of town. You know where the road goes on back up to Tri-Cities, I mean up to Hermiston. What is that? Martinez: Umatilla? Stewart: It was just off of that. Franklin: Yeah. Okay, interesting. Stewart: Two or three blocks. Franklin: Okay. So 1931, you moved up to Cold Creek. Stewart: To Cold Crick. Franklin: In kind of the house that your father had put together. 0:07:34 Stewart: Yeah, oh, yeah. But we did not have electricity. The power lines went right by, but they didn’t have transformers, see. But we never had electricity. Franklin: Not in the whole time? Stewart: Uh-uh. Never. Well, we had lots of water. [LAUGHTER] Power to the--yeah, no, brought it into the house and we had a bathroom. We had an outside poo-hoo for quite a long time and then we remodeled and Dad had an inside bathroom. But then we had a propane stove, like, I mean—with a firebox on one end to heat the water, because it was without electricity, you know? I can remember that. And then we had, Dad figured out some way of putting propane lights in through tubes on the ceiling. But it wasn’t very bright. You couldn’t read by it, because it was kind of just dim, you know. But it was fine. Franklin: And that’s to kind of see your way at night. Yeah, okay. Interesting. 0:08:40 Stewart: And let’s see, what do I need to tell you? My dad raised hay, mostly hay, and potatoes. And they did really good with those potatoes like in 1935 or ‘36, they bought a new John Deere tractor and a car, with my uncle’s dad and him, they farmed some together. The uncles, meanwhile, I was going to tell you, when we drilled our well, it was on the same strata as my grandmother’s, and it dried up. Franklin: Right, I had heard that. Stewart: Okay. And where the grape vineyards are now, at Cold Crick, that’s right where Grandma’s place was. Franklin: Right, the ones you can see kind of off to the—so that’s where the Browns-- Stewart: That’s where the Browns lived. Franklin: And you were closer to the road. Stewart: Yes, right. Well, we were right on-- Franklin: On what’s the road now. [TELEPHONE RINGING] Stewart: Hang on. Franklin: Here, we’ll just take a little pause. [VIDEO CUTS] Franklin: Okay. So that’s pretty interesting, in the middle, then, of the Depression, your parents were doing okay. 0:09:39 Stewart: Yes. And I can remember this, my brother was a teenager, you know, going with my uncles, they used to haul the potatoes up on the pass in the park and sell the spuds on the pass up there. Snoqualmie Pass. Franklin: Oh, wow, really? Stewart: And then they took them clear to Seattle. And I remember my brother going a time or two with Uncle Russ down to the shipping place on the bay. Franklin: Wow. Stewart: Yeah. But they must’ve done pretty good, because they—you know, affording a new rig or two. We didn’t--I think Dad had one hired man part of the time. But with that artesian well, it was then the system that he had set up was really good. But we farmed with horses. We had a set of mules, Buster and Wally were their names. And then we had a set of heavy horses. Then they had one horse that we used to pull up, the derrick horse, we called him. And his name was Cato. That was my job when I was about six or seven, I got to go out and put up hay. Franklin: Oh, wow. Stewart: Yeah. Franklin: And what happened when your grandparents’ well ran dry? I could imagine that-- Stewart: So they moved to Priest Rapids. Franklin: Okay. 0:11:12 Stewart: And they started a sheep ranch down there, the Browns did. I don’t remember too much, other than I knew they had a beautiful, great big barn, the people that had it before. And I think they had a few dairy cows, too, at one time. But they ended up in the sheep business. They put up hay at Priest Rapids, too. Franklin: Okay. And is that farm still there? Stewart: Oh, no, oh, no. Oh, no, no. They had to move also. Franklin: When—the dam? Stewart: Mm-hmm. When--no. They had to move--in fact, they let them finish—let me say this again. They let them lamb out their sheep that winter that everybody had to move out in ‘43. So Browns got to stay until January after the lambing. And then, meanwhile, they bought a place up at Vantage. Franklin: Wow, I see. 0:12:14 Stewart: That’s where they moved to. So, yeah. And we had about 100 head of ewes and I can remember Dad, they gave them to Browns. They herded them up there. And I don’t know how they did. They used to use that one tractor. They must’ve had to drive it. It was about 12 miles. Was it about that? Wasn’t it? About 12 miles to Priest Rapids from Cold Crick. They’d drive that tractor back and forth and use it. Isn’t that something? And then in 1937, I think, Dad bought another one. So they had two John Deeres. So they didn’t--by then have to--yeah. Franklin: What are some of your fondest memories growing up out there? 0:13:01 Stewart: [LAUGHTER] Oh, gosh. Well, you know what we did in the summertime a lot was pack a big lunch on Sunday and go down to the river and go swimming. And this was with the hired help and all of us kids and friends, and go swimming. And we’d always pack up wood and bring it home, because there was lots of wood, and that’s what we’d burn in the wintertime in the stove in the living rooms. Franklin: Right. Oh, yeah. Stewart: We always had wood stoves. Franklin: Kind of like driftwood that would come down? Stewart: Oh, and there was so much. Yeah. Yeah. Franklin: Wow. Stewart: Those were wonderful memories when we used to go swimming. In the wintertime, a few times, where we used to go--we’d go ice skating. But we did that right at home, because Dad had this—they could never turn the water completely off from the well in the wintertime. It always leaked around there. And then we’d skate down on kind of a canal-like thing. Those were precious. The other thing. Dad always loved to listen to the news, and all we had was a battery radio. Well, when he saw this—this is a funny—he saw where he could get a wind charger. So he got this first one that came out that charged the battery. He got up and put it on the point of the house and got it all ready. And, boy, it worked really good. It charged the batteries so fast. Well, one day, one time, we had a really bad windstorm and it blew so hard it shook the dishes out of the cupboard. Franklin: Wow. Stewart: So we had to disconnect the-- Franklin: The charger, yeah. Stewart: Yeah. And he had to put it on a pole. But, yeah, of course when the war started and everything, they listened to a lot of news, you know. But you only got to listen to that and Fibber McGee and Molly, and I think one other, and that was about all you got to listen to. But that was probably the length of the battery, I don’t know. Anyway. Yeah. Franklin: That’s really-- 0:15:11 Stewart: My family were really musical. My brother played the trumpet, and from the time he was, I don’t know, in grade school, I guess. I need to back up. We went to school at Vernita. Do you know where that was? Franklin: Yeah, down, right kind of where the bridge is today. Stewart: Down the hill. And actually I have a picture of the school. But anyway, that’s where I went. And then they went on down to White Bluffs to high school. And I went, let’s see, three-- Franklin: How far was that? Stewart: Six miles. Franklin: And how did you get there each day? Stewart: Well, they had a school bus. Franklin: Okay. Stewart: At one time, there was several kids. I don’t remember just how many, probably four or five of us went from there down to Vernita to this school. Well, on the first three grades, the first year, there was about eight or ten of us, one teacher. The next year, some of the kids had left and they’d gone to high school or moved. So there was like five, I think. The next year, there was two boys and I in the whole school the whole year, in the third grade. [LAUGHTER] That was a disaster! Anyway, then for two years, we went with the high school kids to White Bluffs on the bus. And the old—it was like wooden sides, and the dust would just boil in. Do you remember that, Raymond? Oh! It was awful. Franklin: It would shake—was it-- Stewart: Oh, yeah, it would shake, you know? Franklin: Was it basically just kind of like a converted truck? Stewart: No. It was solid sides with windows. Franklin: Oh, okay. Stewart: But there was—the dust just would—anyway, I went two years to White Bluffs. And then two more years, more kids started moving in because of the Midway substation that Bonneville was building. Franklin: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Stewart: And so there was more kids. Well then the eighth grade, they took the seventh and eighth grade with the high school kids clear to Hanford that last year. And that was 1943 when I graduated eighth. They closed it the fifth of May. I can remember that. Franklin: Wow. Yeah. Oh, speaking of that, I wanted to ask, what were your memories of the eviction or the evacuation, getting, maybe getting the notice, what do you remember about that time? 0:17:54 Stewart: Oh, it was a real shock. A real shock. But I want to tell you one thing. We didn’t do very good, but Dad was very patriotic. Because he’d been in World War I, and he knew we had to do something. They had to do something. I can remember that. But, yeah, it was really hard. We had a really beautiful place, and they did really well with what we had. Yeah, Dad didn’t have—he wasn’t—it bothered him—he knew it had to be done. Some people just kept that hatred in them all their years. They never got over it. Franklin: No, they didn’t. No, we’ve interviewed some people who were still-- Stewart: Bitter. Franklin: --angry at DuPont all these years later Stewart: Well, Dad went to work—when he couldn’t irrigate, he still grazed the sheep on it, didn’t they? Do you remember that, Raymond? Martinez: What’s that? Stewart: Oh, Dad grazing the sheep on our hayfields. Do you remember that? Martinez: No. Stewart: Anyway, but he was a Pinkerton guard for the Bonneville power. Franklin: Oh, really? 0:19:04 Stewart: And we got to stay at Cold Crick till October. However, they took the high school kids to Sunnyside that year, and I started high school in Sunnyside for—I was only there a couple months, I think. But that was always—and dirt, talk about dust. Franklin: Wow, yeah, that is a ways. Stewart: And it was just in on all—no grass, it was all gravel. Franklin: Right, jeez. So you said you got to stay until October. That was October 1943? Stewart: Mm-hmm. Franklin: You got--oh, wow. Yeah, that’s pretty-- Stewart: And he was sent to Spokane to two different substations up there he was over. And then we moved to Spokane then and bought a little place up there. And I graduated from high school, Rodgers. And I went two-and-a-half years to WSU then. Franklin: Okay, okay. Stewart: Mm-hmm. Franklin: Tell me a little more about Cold Creek-- Stewart: Cold Crick. Franklin: Cold Crick, sorry. What kind of community was it? Did it have services, or was it just-- Stewart: No. Franklin: --kind of a gathering of-- Stewart: No, no. Franklin: --people? 0:020:08 Stewart: There was a little gas station at the bottom of the hill before you would cross the crick there. Franklin: Okay. Stewart: But, no there wasn’t any services, no grocery store. I might mention this: we used to be--maybe you have it down in your thing--used to be a stage come clear from Kennewick. They would bring the mail up. I think to Hanford, White Bluffs and all up to us. And then if we needed something, he’d always stop at the Reiersons’ grocery store at White Bluffs. If we needed something, we could call down there, and they’d bring it up with the mail and everything. Franklin: Oh, wow. Stewart: Yeah. and the people they’d tell you if they had to go from Kennewick to White Bluffs, they would come on the stage. Franklin: Wow, okay. Stewart: I just wondered if you’d ever heard about that. Franklin: No, I haven’t. That’s really interesting. You mentioned you did not have electricity, but did you have phone? Stewart: Yes, we had phones. It was--yeah. Franklin: Okay, interesting. Stewart: You rang two shorts or two longs. Franklin: Wow. Stewart: Yeah, if your phone rang, everybody who lifted up could hear what you were saying. [LAUGHTER] Yes. Franklin: So you had traveled to White Bluffs for school. Did you also travel there to go to do all your shopping as well? 0:21:27 Stewart: Well, what shopping we did. We had always--my folks always raised a big garden. We had a lot of garden. We had a small orchard of our own. We raised fruit trees. And the one I hated the worst was the pie cherries. My brother and I always had to pick those pie cherries. We just picked the cherries right off the tree, leave the seeds on the tree. [LAUGHTER] Oh, yeah. And Mom did a lot of canning. My folks canned. And Dad butchered; he was a good butcher. And so your basic things that you needed were like sugar and flour and those type of things. So you didn’t go to the grocery store very often. Franklin: Right, right. But to get like clothes and other-- Stewart: Well, yeah. We would go to Yakima about twice a year. Franklin: Okay. Stewart: And probably--you know, I’m trying to remember whether you went to--maybe he went to Sunnyside for parts. I think Dad did; we did go there some too. But, yeah, we would get--and then we used to use Sears and Roebuck. We ordered-- Franklin: Oh, right. What was social life like-- Stewart: Oh, my gosh. Franklin: --for you for your parents? Did you go to White Bluffs or Hanford often to go to movies? 0:22:45 Stewart: Well, we didn’t need to; we had such a community. Wonderful community. I have pictures of--we had a woman’s group. My God, I got whole lots of pictures of them. And it was called a Priest Rapids Ladies’—I can’t think of the ladies’ club. But it went clear from up Priest Rapids clear almost down to Riverland. Down to Allard. Allard’s. Franklin: To the Bruggemanns’ and then the Allards’. Stewart: Uh-huh. Yeah. Mr. Bruggemann’s picture’s in here. Franklin: Oh, wow. Stewart: Yeah, they had--we had a real good--and my dad was on the school board. He always helped with that. We had a small school. And something that I always have remembered, you know, in those days, you didn’t have oranges or things like that. And the big thing every year, we always had a play at Christmastime for the little school, and we always had Christmas baskets. And they always got oranges, those kids could hardly wait to get that orange. And now the kids don’t think a thing about--you know? Franklin: No, no. Stewart: And a little bit of candy, a candy cane, and I don’t remember. An apple, I suppose we had apples in them. I don’t remember that part. But I do remember they used to go down along the river and get a juniper for Christmas trees for the school. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] 0:24:06 Stewart: The other thing I remember, and it was always in my mind--I was just a little girl. They had candles on those trees. Burning candles. At the school! Franklin: Wow. That sounds like a serious fire hazard. Stewart: Yeah, but now, my God, it would--[LAUGHTER] This was the school. Franklin: That’s really cool. And this was where? Stewart: That was Vernita. Franklin: Oh, Vernita School. Stewart: I have the only picture of it. Franklin: Would we be able to-- Stewart: Yes! Franklin: --take some of these and scan them and send them back to you? Stewart: Yes. Yes, you can. Franklin: Oh, that’d be wonderful. Stewart: Go through these things, because I’ve got some really good ones. Franklin: No, it sounds like you have some great photos there. 0:24:40 Stewart: But anyway, I can remember—but we always had school plays. Even if there was like only four of us kids in the school. That was always the big thing, in the fall we’d have--I don’t remember anything at Thanksgiving. I think we used to have—we had a potluck. We had a lot of potlucks. The ladies’ club would have potlucks. And they used to have social dancing. My aunt played the piano. My two uncles, one played the saxophone and the other clarinet. And my brother played the trumpet. And my dad played the fiddle, and my mother and I both played the piano. So, that would be kind of our social thing, like on Sunday afternoons. We’d get to my grandparents’, up there, and play music. That was--yeah. Franklin: So, I wanted to ask you about your family for a minute. So your dad’s name is Chester. What was your mom’s name? Stewart: Clida. Ratcliffe was her last name. Franklin: Okay. Clida Ratcliffe. Stewart: Clida, mm-hmm. Franklin: Clida Ratcliffe, but McGee, I guess-- Stewart: Yeah. And Dale McGee. Franklin: Dale, your older brother. Stewart: I just have the one brother. Franklin: Just the one brother. Stewart: Yeah, and seven years older than me. Franklin: And so Yvonne is your sister-in-law. Stewart: Sister-in-law, mm-hmm. Franklin: And then your dad had brothers and sisters. You said you had an aunt and uncle? Stewart: Well, yeah. He had a full sister, Cassie, who was two years older than Dad. Franklin: And where did she live? 0:26:00 Stewart: She lived with her--well, for years she lived in California. Because she worked in a bank, I think. And then I don’t remember just when she came back to Cold Crick. Or maybe she went to Cold Crick first and then down there. I think that may be that. Because she used to do go down and work in the packing house with the—in fact, her picture’s in one of these, with those ladies that-- Franklin: Oh, really?! Stewart: Yes. Franklin: Oh! Right on. Stewart: I’m sure that’s her. Franklin: Okay. Stewart: But she was a bookkeeper. Franklin: Okay. Stewart: Also. So she was single for a long time. In fact, I met my—this should go on later. Well, anyway, how I met my husband. I went down and helped her cook for the lambing crew at Vantage. And my husband-to-be was working for them at the time. Franklin: Aw. Stewart: And she had never been married, and we dated with another fellow, and she ended up marrying him. She was in her 40s--50s. Franklin: Oh, wow. Stewart: Isn’t that interesting? Franklin: That is interesting. Stewart: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Franklin: Huh. And then you also mentioned an uncle, too. 0:27:15 Stewart: Two uncles. Russ and Wynn. Brown. They were just little ones when they moved to Cold Crick, just tiny boys. Franklin: Okay. Stewart: Yeah. Franklin: And they lived with the Browns, then. Stewart: Yes, they did. Mm-hmm. Franklin: Okay, gotcha, gotcha. Stewart: And then, I think there’s pictures of them. I ought to show you. Oh, man. Martinez: They’re in the book. Stewart: They’re in this. Martinez: They’re dressed for winter in that book. Stewart: This one. Martinez: Yeah. Stewart: I’ll [INAUDIBLE] Franklin: Really? So most of the photos for that book we got from the Edmund Anderson family. Stewart: Yeah. Franklin: Harry Anderson, as part of what they collected for the Hanford-White Bluffs Association. Stewart: Yeah, it’s the same-- Franklin: But we never--didn’t get any-- Stewart: Yeah, Wynn and Russ are in this picture. Franklin: Oh, really? Oh, that—okay! Stewart: Uh-huh. Franklin: Oh, wow. Stewart: Wynn and Russ Brown. Franklin: Oh, that’s really neat. Stewart: And then they were in the White Bluffs Band. My uncles were in that band. My brother was in the band. They used to go--there actually was the community, not just the high school, that one band. I’ve got pictures of that, too. Franklin: See, this is crazy, because you know, we got all this, but we never got this information as to who these people were. Because we just got these pictures and we never got the people to tell us who was in the pictures. Stewart: Yeah, isn’t that interesting? Franklin: Oh, yeah, that’s really neat. That’s really cool. Stewart: Yeah, Wynn and Russ were both in this picture. Franklin: Wow, that’s neat. That’s good to know. Stewart: So I always saved that. I had that for a long time. Franklin: Oh, that’s really good to know. Stewart: Anyway, let’s see what else I was going to tell you. Oh, I need that. Whatever you want to ask me. I don’t think I’ll remember. Franklin: Do you remember when--you mentioned Midway. Stewart: Yes, I do. Franklin: Do you remember around when that came into the area? 0:29:00 Stewart: Yes. About 19--well, it was--they started it in about ‘41. Because I remember my brother went one year to WSU, he graduated in 1940. So that fall he went to a--the reason I remember, the next--he worked at the next summer. It was so hot. It was 116 or 117. Oh, it was hot! Down in those—I can remember him getting so sick. Franklin: Oh, that sounds awful. Stewart: Oh, it was really hot. Franklin: That sounds really--especially before-- Stewart: And no air conditioning. Franklin: No, of course not. Stewart: You didn’t have that. We just went swimming a lot. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Were there a lot of families that came with the substation, or was it--did it-- 0:29:42 Stewart: Well, I can remember of only--yeah, there was a few. And then they built houses for them later, see? The one family had three girls, and they kind of helped getting our school back going. Franklin: Oh, yeah. Stewart: Yeah, and the one girl was in my class. I don’t remember a whole—there was some older children that went on to White Bluffs, I remember that. But mostly there were just men that started working there and then didn’t bring the family. Well, there wasn’t any place for them to live. Franklin: Right. Was that pretty exciting to have the dams come up and the electricity come through the—did you maybe start to get the sense that things were going to change a bit? Stewart: Well, I think I did. I think I did. But it was so many changes so fast. And I remember, when we moved to Spokane, we probably only had—we lived in that same place. We probably only had one old truck, and probably made two trips. One with this piano, of course. Franklin: Of course. Stewart: But what I’m saying is now, look at everything everybody has. If I moved out of here--[LAUGHTER] Oh, God. You know, people don’t think about that. Franklin: Oh, yeah, yeah, of course. Stewart: And I’ve lived in this house 66 years, you guys. Franklin: Wow. Wow. Stewart: So I’m one of the old-timers here. Franklin: Yeah. Wow, that’s really cool. So, oh, shoot. What was I going to--what was my next question? Oh! So, there were a lot of social life in Cold Creek. Stewart: Yes. Franklin: But you did go to White Bluffs for-- 0:31:16 Stewart: Yes, we did, and Dad was very active in the American Legion, and they used to have like dances and things. And then when my brother was in high school, of course we went to the basketball games. They’d have basketball and softball. Franklin: Do you remember when the schools burned down? Stewart: Yes, I do-- Franklin: The White Bluffs-- Stewart: --remember that day. I was taking piano lessons. I was in fourth grade. And we had just started—Mom had come and got me, and we were just headed back out to go home and we saw the fire. We saw it. Yeah. I remember that real plain. Franklin: Okay. Were you talking--White Bluffs or-- Stewart: The White Bluffs High School. Franklin: --because I know both schools burned down at one point or another and then were rebuilt. But it was White Bluffs is the one that you remember? Stewart: White Bluffs, and they didn’t rebuild. No, that was just right before it was-- Franklin: Right, right. We have some photos of that, yeah. A big blaze. Okay. And what about for church? Where did you go-- 0:32:17 Stewart: Well, we really didn’t go--we were too far. I would go with a friend or so. But we didn’t have any churches at Cold Crick or Vernita. There wasn’t anything. They didn’t have anything. Franklin: And Vernita at that time was still the ferry. Stewart: They had a cable ferry, and if you don’t think that wasn’t scary--that would drift across—I remember going across—my dad was so entrenched on building the Grand Coulee Dam. He was really interested in it. And Mom’s sister was running a motel in Coulee City. So about once a year, we’d make a trip up to Grand Coulee. Which was a really quite a trip in those days. Franklin: Oh, yeah. Stewart: And when you went across that ferry, it would drift way down and go up, and it was real sandy. We always had a shovel. We always had extra water and gas with us, and probably usually got stuck at least once. Well, we’d go up as far as Coulee City and stay all night with my aunt at the motel. And then the next day we’d make the trip clear in to see the dam and come back. I can remember where the water is now on Biggs Lake, all the farms that were between there. And I remember Dad saying, these people are going to have to move, and that’s just kind of like we were when we were little. I can remember that, just as plain. I wasn’t that old, but anyway. Yeah, I can remember that. Franklin: Right. That’s kind of ironic, isn’t it? You know, like going up and kind of—and not thinking that would-- Stewart: It could happen to you. Franklin: Yeah. Stewart: Yeah. But I can remember that just as plain, yeah. Franklin: That’s really neat. Were there any—I know you were just a kid for a lot of the time as you lived there, but were there any like bad or hard times when you were living there? Any memories that stick to you in that vein? 0:34:09 Stewart: You know, I don’t really remember because I think we were fairly well--you know, Dad didn’t have to pay for any water. And electricity. And he had cows—you had horses, so you didn’t have to buy gas. You think—we probably were pretty well sufficient. My mother was really a good cook, too. We usually had hired help. She had a gas lawnmower—I mean, a gas washer, and we washed out in the yard and then hung everything up. That was just the way you did it in those days. And she canned a lot, and we had a cellar. And Dad had it all fixed up with shelves for the fruit, you know. And like, for your potatoes—well, we ended up building a potato shed, Dad did, and sorted our own spuds in the later years there. Franklin: Wow. Stewart: Uh-huh. Franklin: Do you remember—did you know the Bruggemann family at all? Stewart: I did. I did. They weren’t very—they really weren’t very social. She was more so than him. Franklin: Oh, Paul was pretty-- Stewart: Yeah. I can remember them. And the kids were just little. Franklin: Right. Yes, they were, yeah. They were three and five I think when the eviction happened. And what about Allard? Did you know Sam Allard? Stewart: I don’t remember him, but I remember the name. But I knew people that lived on there, the Austins. And I-- Franklin: Right, Levi Austin. 0:35:43 Stewart: Levi Austin and--oh, shoot, what was their name? I can kind of remember those other people. At Vernita, there was about five orchards. Five or six soft fruit orchards. They weren’t very big. Because I think part of them, just irrigated from a well, like a pump. Because they had electricity at Vernita. And then part of them pumped it out of the river, I think. I think Richmond—Richmond was one name, and they had the ferry. Richmonds was their name, Tom Richmond. Franklin: Okay. Did you ever go all the way down to Richland at all or to the Tri-Cities? Stewart: Yes, we did, because Dad and Mom still had friends that lived down there. We used to go down and visit them. Yes, we did. But I don’t remember much. There wasn’t much at Richland. White Bluffs was bigger than Richland. Franklin: Right, right. I wanted to ask you about—so you were—the eviction happens and eventually you leave in October and you moved up to-- Stewart: Spokane. Franklin: Spokane. When did you start going to the reunions? 0:37:00 Stewart: You know, they’ve never mentioned anything in these books about it, but right after the war, they had picnics at Prosser. Franklin: In Prosser, yeah. Stewart: Yes. And we went to several of those. So my old friends that I went to school with, I can remember that. Franklin: And how long did you go to those for? Do you remember, how many years? Stewart: Well, it seemed like only a couple of years, and then of course I went off to college and I didn’t—we didn’t go—I don’t remember how long they had the ones at Prosser. Not very long, I don’t think. Franklin: No, yeah, we didn’t include much about it in the book, because we didn’t—the information we had about them really comes from 1968 on when they started meeting in Richland. Stewart: Yeah. And then we used to go to all those. We went to them all. Franklin: You went to all of those? Stewart: Yeah, most of them, yeah. Franklin: Were you able—have you been able to go back to the homestead since the Hanford Site-- 0:27:54 Stewart: Yeah, there’s nothing there. [LAUGHTER] Yes, I have! [LAUGHTER] But, yeah, our old spud shed was the only thing that was left there. There was nothing, you know. You knew they took our water and piped it 18 miles to the first reactor. Franklin: Yeah, I’ve heard that, yeah. Stewart: That was our well. Franklin: Yeah, that’s amazing. I mean, it was a gusher. Stewart: Ah, I’ll just show you a picture. Well, whenever you want. Go ahead. Franklin: Sure. Stewart: Go ahead and ask me. Yeah, we did, we used to have lots of social things, you know, like potlucks in the summertime. At least once or twice at different people’s places. Yeah, we never did--you know, we weren’t lacking for social things. Franklin: Oh, sure. Stewart: Raymond, what were you going to say? Martinez: Can I say something off the record? Franklin: Sure. Yeah, let’s take a little pause. Hungate: Sure. [VIDEO CUTS] Franklin: So you sorted-- Stewart: Apricots-- Franklin: There was a packing shed down by the-- Stewart: At Riverland, yeah. Martinez: When you go down the hill, before you get to the bridge, there’s kind of a dip, the railroad went through there. Stewart: It’s right there. Martinez: You can see where the railroad track was. Stewart: Right there, right there. Martinez: There was a packing shed right there on the railroad track. And then the livestock corral was right next to it where they’d load the sheep to go to Montana or wherever. Stewart: Cattle. Oh, yeah. Franklin: So, and Riverlands was kind of the stop for Bruggemann’s, because Bruggemann’s was the Riverlands Ranch. Martinez: Yeah. Franklin: Right? Is that correct? Stewart: Yeah. Franklin: okay. Martinez: The packing warehouse is right practically on the Bruggemann ranch. Stewart: Yeah, practically on there. Right there. Franklin: And you worked there when you were 13? Stewart: 13 years old. Right when the war started. Martinez: Everybody worked there. Stewart: Everybody worked there! Franklin: Everybody worked there. [LAUGHTER] Martinez: No child labor laws then! Stewart: No, there sure wasn’t! Franklin: You know, I grew up on a farm as well, and there’s always-- Stewart: Did you? Franklin: Yes. Stewart: Where was that at? Franklin: In Alaska. Stewart: Oh, my gosh. Franklin: Yeah, a farm/nursery. Martinez: Well, Salvini was a pretty noted family down there. Stewart: Yes, they were. I remember them. Franklin: Salvini, okay. Stewart: Salvini. I don’t know if it was a-- Martinez: They moved to Sunnyside. Stewart: Oh, did they? Martinez: Yeah. Stewart: I knew the Killian girls really well because Maria and Sylvia were in my class. Martinez: You got that picture with the flume and the sheep and the horses in your book to show them? Two horses and all the-- Stewart: Yeah. Here’s the picture of the well in our can right there. In fact, you can have one of those, because that’s… Here’s the band. [LAUGHTER] Okay, which one are you talking about? Franklin: Oh, yeah, this, yes, I’ve seen this. Martinez: The one with the horses and the hay wagon and the--where the sheep are right behind him. Stewart: Can you see that? Martinez: It was one of your team of horses they used in the wintertime. Franklin: Oh, wow. Martinez: I know you had it; you had it last time I was here. Franklin: Tom, did you have any questions? Anything that came to your mind that you wanted to ask? Martinez: They built a-- 0:40:56 Hungate: When they were asked to move. Why? Franklin: Why--? Martinez: They built that wooden flume. Hungate: What did they speculate-- Franklin: Oh! Hungate: --was the reason they had to move? Franklin: Yeah, yeah, yeah, good. Hungate: Something for the war, but what? Because you can’t help but think, what is it? Martinez: They built a wooden flume for the well that went about three miles over toward the bluff. Hungate: And the mail came from Kennewick. Stewart: Right. Hungate: But you didn’t go shopping there-- Stewart: Not much. Hungate: You went to Yakima. Stewart: Well, not very much. We didn’t hardly go there very much. Hungate: But you said a couple times. Stewart: Yeah. Hungate: I mean, you didn’t go to the Tri-City area-- Stewart: Not very often; only to visit. Hungate: And that would seem to be closer? Stewart: Well, it probably was. Hungate: Maybe about halfway. Stewart: But my folks had friends in Kennewick; we’d go visit. That’s the only thing I can remember. Franklin: Yeah. Hungate: Yeah. 0:41:47 Stewart: Now, here’s something you might be interested in. This was in 1917, the first--my grandfather and another fellow dug a well. And it was only good probably part of the year when the water was running it. See what it was—yeah, isn’t that interesting? Franklin: I like this picture of the well and the guy standing next to it. Hungate: Oh, god. Franklin: That’s pretty neat. Wow. This one with the guy standing next to it. Stewart: Oh, yeah. Hungate: It’s a geyser! Franklin: Yeah, it’s a real gusher. Stewart: Now, this is my grand--is that the same? That isn’t the same one. Hungate: No. Franklin: No, it’s not. Stewart: Okay. This is my grandmother’s well. Look at that. Franklin: The Brown well. Oh, yeah, wow. Stewart: And when they hit that, they didn’t know how to cap it. Martinez: Cap it, yeah. Stewart: Oh, it ran on down; it just went way down in the crick, and they had a heck of a time trying to—yeah. Franklin: Phew, it’s just so—I mean, seeing this well in the treeless--you know. Stewart: Isn’t that something? Franklin: Yeah, it really is something. Stewart: Now here’s another picture of the White Bluffs band. My brother was in it. Franklin: Oh, wow. Hungate: Oh, wow. Franklin: Oh, yeah, there’s that--your brother in Pullman. That thing is still--that’s right outside of the Murrow Building. It’s right outside--it’s right by the old women’s dorm. I know right where this is. Because I’ve been there, like, many times. Hungate: Oh, the memorial? Franklin: Yeah, the little-- Hungate: The veterans’ memorial ting? Franklin: Yes, that’s where it is now. It didn’t always be that, but there it is on the campus. Smart-looking guy. Stewart: Where did you live in Pullman? Franklin: Oh, so I did my master’s in Pullman. Stewart: Oh, you did? Franklin: So I lived in Pullman, and then Tom lived in Pullman for quite a while. Stewart: Okay. Franklin: Yeah. And you said you went to school-- 0:43:36 Stewart: I went to Pullman, yeah. The first year I went, it was--I graduated in ‘47, that fall, and they had just built these dorms for the women and then there was 400 girls, freshman girls and there was 1300 boys. That’s when everyone came home. It was Quonset huts or whatever it is they were. Franklin: Yes. Stewart: You remember that? Well, you probably don’t remember that. Franklin: I did a lot of university history, and I remember the photos, because after the war, they struggled to find places to put all these new students that they had given the GI Bill. Stewart: Well, then the next two years, I was up on the campus at Davis Hall. Up on the-- Hungate: Mm-hmm. Franklin: Yup. Still there. Hungate: Still there. Franklin: Still there. Stewart: I’m sure it is! [LAUGHTER] I didn’t graduate—I didn’t finish, but I got to go for two-and-a-half years. Martinez: Shirley, Shirley, let me see your photos. I’ll find the picture. Franklin: So, Shirley, I had a couple more questions. Stewart: Here. Martinez: Just a minute. Franklin: Okay. Stewart: I don’t know where I put it. Franklin: Oh, I’m sure we have it. When you got the notice to move, I imagine that it must’ve been shocking. Stewart: Terrible shock. Franklin: But I also imagine people must’ve been speculating why. You know, why would they move all these--so do you remember anything about that time? 0:45:00 Stewart: Well, I remember, it was just such a shock, I remember that. And I can remember my mom said, Chester, what are we going to do? I can remember Mama saying that. That was the—what were we gonna do? But Dad never got--I said, and my brother mentions in his book that he was so—he felt that we needed to do something. Franklin: Right, he was very patriotic. Stewart: Very, very, very. Franklin: Did people--did you have-- Stewart: Some of them weren’t. Franklin: Did you ever wonder kind of what was going to happen to all this farmland? Stewart: Oh, yeah! Franklin: Why would the government take it? Stewart: How can they take it with all that fruit hanging on the trees? Franklin: Right. 0:45:45 Stewart: I don’t remember very much about Vernita, those people saying much. I don’t remember. And I don’t think Dad let us hear anybody’s really having a big fit over anything. We knew some of them did, though. I can remember a family or two. Franklin: Do you remember when you found out what—why it was taken? Do you remember when you found out about the dropping of the bomb and that-- Stewart: Oh. We felt-- Franklin: --had happened now at Hanford. Stewart: Then we felt like we had done the right thing. To be real honest with you. That’s the way Dad talked. And whatever he gave up, he felt that it saved all of us. That’s the way my family were. Franklin: Sure. I imagine that must’ve been-- Stewart: And of course my brother was in the service, you know? Franklin: Yeah, yeah. I imagine that must’ve been a big shock, too, right? Stewart: Oh, it was! Franklin: That that had happened in what had been your home. 0:46:41 Stewart: Yeah. And to think of leaving it. That was hard, yeah. But anyway, with Dad—and then after the war, of course, Dad didn’t—they didn’t need the guards anymore. So he decided—he knew he wanted to locate back in the Basin. But he didn’t want to start another farm, because that was--so he suited an old pickup and sold auto parts. There were jobbers in those days. So he got an idea of maybe he could find a place that he’d like to take over. And that’s what he did. He found a place in Stratford, and it was a little grocery store and service station. And he just loved that. He did. It was kind of a, everybody would come in and have coffee in the morning and that type of thing. They were putting in the Long Lake Dam and the canals just when Dad first bought that. So he had all these workers in there for a number of years, which worked really good—he did really well. Franklin: Where was this again? Stewart: Stratford. Out of Moses Lake, straight north from Moses Lake. There’s Stratford Road that goes just out of Soap Lake. You know where Soap Lake is? Franklin: Kind of. I think you probably know that area a lot better, Tom. Stewart: In Ephrata. Hungate: Near Ephrata. Stewart: Ephrata. Franklin: Tom was based in Wenatchee for a long time. Stewart: Yeah, so Ephrata, yeah. Franklin: Okay, interesting. So is that where he and your mom settled, out there? Stewart: Yeah. That’s where we settled, and they had it for about 20 years. My mother passed away--he was there about five or six years after Mom died. Anyway, yeah. And he really—and then later, there was a lot of hunting and fishing, so then he sold a lot of fishing and shells and stuff, you know, and lunch, mostly lunch-type things. So that worked really good for him, people hunting and they’d come in there. Franklin: Yeah. And your brother was in the service in the war. Stewart: Yes. Franklin: When did leave for the war? And was he in the service when you were evicted? Stewart: No. Franklin: Okay. 0:49:00 Stewart: No. He was, I think--let’s see--graduated--’40. He graduated in 1940. He was in college. Franklin: Oh, okay, so he was in Pullman. Stewart: Let me see. He was at Pullman. Franklin: How did he take the news--how did he-- Stewart: Well-- Franklin: When you got the notice, how did he-- Stewart: I just don’t remember. I don’t’ remember. But I do know that then he got in the B12 training his second year at WSU. And then that summer he was sent back east to finish getting his—in the Navy. And he was a lieutenant. Franklin: And what did he do after the war? Now that he kind of couldn’t come back. Stewart: Oh. He came back to Pullman and finished and got his degree in agronomy. Franklin: Okay, that’s right, you mentioned that. 0:49:45 Stewart: And he worked about three or four years in Colfax. They lived in Colfax. And then he got a really good job out of Vancouver, and he was there for a number of years, eleven years I think. And then he was sent to Silverton, Oregon, and then finally ended up the head guy out of Salem, Oregon, the head guy, yeah. He did that all those years. Franklin: And then you eventually came here to where we are. You said you’ve been here 66 years. Stewart: Yeah, uh-huh. [LAUGHTER] Yeah! Yeah. My husband was a cowboy. Franklin: Yeah? Stewart: And my kids are cowboys. [LAUGHTER] I have one grandson that was in the national finals twice. Franklin: Wow. Stewart: Yeah, and he’s team roper. That was in ‘99. And then 2000--let’s see, ’98 and ‘99 and 2000 he went to the national finals in team roping. Well, then after that, he got hurt. [VIDEO FILE CORRUPTED] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Shirley Stewart Subject The topic of the resource Hanford (Wash.) White Bluffs (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Shirley Stewart's father, Chester McGee, settled in the Cold Creek area and drilled the last, and one of the largest, artesian wells on the central plateau. Shirley grew up on the McGee homestead and attended school in White Bluffs. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1/17/2020 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Language A language of the resource English Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operated under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who were the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F329749fd42c233cf6cd2c02dc34e1314.JPG 98d42c9d88f2243abec0c2b50adc08dd https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F41556d64837fd14beb77a5c103e2ec43.mp4 d7ae61c1201c7caca4f3f86fbd36c455 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Larry Gabaldon Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Larry Gabaldon on July 11, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Larry about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Larry Gabaldon: Larry Gabaldon. G-A-B-A-L-D-O-N. Franklin: And L-A-R-R-Y? Gabaldon: Larry? Yes. Franklin: Okay. So, Larry, tell me how and why you came to the area to work for the Hanford Site. Or, are you from the area? Gabaldon: No, I’m from, originally from New Mexico. Franklin: Okay. Gabaldon: And I went in the service for four years, and I had a brother-in-law that worked up here in farming and chicken, or egg producing field. And he says, when you get out of the service, if you need a job, come on up. So I came up to work for him, and within six months or so, people told me, you should go out and work in the Area and make big money. And I—what area? I had no clue. So I looked into it and I joined the electrical union and within 11 months or so I was out there working. Franklin: What year was it that you— Gabaldon: 1977. Franklin: Okay. So did you have electrician training in the service then, or how did you get into that field? Gabaldon: No, other than—this sounds crazy, but wiring chicken houses. But these are huge, you know, they’re 80,000 chickens per house. So they’re huge commercial operation. And the processing plants and stuff. So I was an electrician there and I learned a lot in a hurry and was running crews and stuff like that. And I’m bilingual so that helped a lot. So anyway, I didn’t know anybody in the electrical field, you know, out here where a lot of people, you either need to have a relative or a friend or somebody that could help you get in. Like I said, I was only here for about 11 months. Anyway, they hired me. Franklin: And what was the first job you had out on the Site? Gabaldon: The 300 Area, as an electrician—electrician apprentice. I tried to drive right onto the 300 Area, it’d be the north gate. And got stopped. [LAUGHTER] And a superintendent was coming out at the same time. He says, oh, you must be the new electrician apprentice. So he kind of escorted me over to the electrical trailer. Franklin: So were there still the buses in those days, or--? Gabaldon: Yes, yeah there was. Franklin: Oh, okay. But you didn’t know about the buses, or—did you not— Gabaldon: No, they said report out to the 300 Area and I drove right out there. Yeah, I didn’t—it was all new to me. Franklin: Yeah, I bet. Did you know right away what was being made at Hanford, or did you just know it was a good-paying job? Gabaldon: As I started, you know, getting closer and closer, I was learning more and more about it. I was asking a lot of questions. Of course, as soon as I went out there, they’re telling me to put these coveralls on and all this plastic stuff. And, why? [LAUGHTER] There’s a lot of people that just didn’t want to do it. They’d just quit. As soon as they’d tell them they had to put all this PPE, they’d just, nope, I’ll go somewhere else and work. But it was interesting. And you understand it. It made sense then, anyway. Franklin: What do you mean? Gabaldon: As far as, you know, protecting yourself from contamination. Franklin: Oh, yeah. Did you find it challenging to run electrical lines and do electrician work in the PPE? Gabaldon: Sure, sure. It was hotter. It was probably the worst thing about it. You know, it was a lot of time consuming. Things go at a slow pace out there. By the time you get dressed and get in and get out, there’s a lot to it. Franklin: Did you work with guys who were around your age, or were there some senior guys in the— Gabaldon: I would say most of them were senior. They’d been around there for a while. And then there was a few newcomers like me. But, yeah, most of them were senior. Franklin: What types of buildings did you work out and support out at the 300 Area? Gabaldon: Well, just pretty much all of them. I mean, 300 Area had a pretty diverse type of buildings. There was—I’m trying to remember the buildings, but 305, 308, some of the things that stuck out were the labs—not labs, the cells down there. I’m not sure what they call them now. The lead cells with these big windows, lead windows. I mean, it was a big operation to penetrate those for a conduit or for electrical wires. You know, they had manipulators that went in and out, and we actually used the manipulators to help if we could. Franklin: Oh, really? Gabaldon: Oh, yeah. To pull wire. I mean, you feed it in from the outside. And I’ve been in the cells. I had to dress up. And those cells are only probably eight by eight, if that. And then they’re full of junk, full of piping. Once they put it in there, they don’t take it out. So it just keeps getting cluttered. And then now you’re dressed up with a full two pair of coveralls and plastics and usually fresh air. And gloves, you’ve got three pairs of gloves on. Franklin: I imagine that gets really—I mean not only does that decrease your manual dexterity, but I imagine that gets unbearably hot. Gabaldon: Sure, that’s what I mean. Franklin: How would you guys deal with that? Especially in the summertime. Gabaldon: Well, there was—not so much—time was a big thing. Just limit your time in there. And then radiation limited your time quite a bit, too. But out in 100-N, we’d go out there for outages, and they actually had icepacks. A vest that they’d keep in the freezers, and they’d put these icepacks on you. They’d last, you know, an hour. Of course, now, they’re heavy. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: I was going to say, that seems— Gabaldon: So they’d melt and now you’re carrying this water around. Franklin: Wow, that sounds—I mean, I guess you’d appreciate that inside, but that sounds really uncomfortable at first. Gabaldon: Mm-hmm. And then fresh air—there’s a purge system on those things that blows air, and you could keep somewhat fresh air blowing on your face at least. Franklin: And was that a tank that—or was it a hose—would you carry the fresh air in with you, or was it a hose that— Gabaldon: Both. It’s both. We carried tanks on our backs, if it was too far in, too remote. But if it was within, I think, I can’t remember, 300 feet or better—about 300 feet, I think, was the max, you could run the hoses. Franklin: Wow. Gabaldon: Hoses, of course, were unlimited. You could stay a little bit longer and, like I say, use lots of air. Where the tanks, they would run out. Franklin: Right, yeah, and you don’t want to run out. Gabaldon: No. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: In one of those cells. So you started as an apprentice. And how long did it take for you to become a full electrician? Gabaldon: Four years. Four years, at least. Franklin: Is that pretty standard? Gabaldon: It’s five years now. Yeah. But I got in just right before that. Franklin: Oh, okay. Kind of got grandfathered in. Gabaldon: Yeah. Franklin: What were some of the unique challenges, in your mind, to working at a place like Hanford, versus a more commercial building? Gabaldon: Well, I guess that, the radiation was probably one of the biggest. Having to dress up and having to do things in a way that you can pull wire in, you can’t pull it out. Everything goes into a cell or into a contaminated area, but very little comes out. Franklin: Yeah, what would you do if you had to change wiring or run—you know, you had old wiring in the way. What would you do in that case? Gabaldon: Well, like I said, you would pull it, but you can’t—it might be easy to pull it out, but you can’t. You’ve got to pull it in. Contamination, you don’t want to be spreading it. So it would all go in. Once it was in, it was trash. It was contaminated trash. So it had to be disposed of a particular way. So once it was trash, we didn’t deal with it. Laborers would come in and dispose of it some way. Franklin: Oh, okay. So it wouldn’t—all of it wouldn’t accumulate but maybe certain types of things would. Gabaldon: Sure. Depending on how contaminated it was. So, you know, the HPTs or the techs there would determine that. Franklin: What was the most I guess frustrating space that you ever had to work in as an electrician, or job that presented the most challenges to you, onsite? Gabaldon: Well, those cells come to mind. It’s in the 300 Area there, but there’s a place where railroad cars back in there and they fill them with waste of who-knows-what. But we were just working on the building and the heaters and the lights and stuff like that. We’re in a man lift, a JLG, I don’t know what they call them, but anyway, a basket. We were trying to keep the machine from getting contaminated, so they’re trying to protect the tires and stuff. And then it extends out above this train and the closer you got to this train car, the more the radiation, the dose rate was higher. So you were always worried about that dose rate. But they had all kinds of gizmos and gadgets for timers and all these pencils. So they were keeping pretty good track of you. Franklin: The pencil dosimeters? Gabaldon: That’s a dosimeter you carry all the time. But when it was a higher dose, they gave you, I want to say a patty. But it was a timer and it measured radiation, and you were allowed so many, you know, I think it was 300 millirem a week? I forget what the doses were. But anyway they would set it 20-30% lower than that, so as soon as that went off, you had to come out. And that was frustrating, as to—you’re just about done, and it goes, beep, beep, beep, you’ve got to get out! Franklin: Wow. Gabaldon: And so you come out. And then you may not be able to go back in, so somebody else has to go in. So you’ve got to explain everything to them and what you did and how to finish it. Franklin: Did that happen— Gabaldon: Oh, constantly. Franklin: Constantly? Gabaldon: Yeah. And out in the outer areas, 100-N especially, they called them burn outs, where they would take us in on a Friday afternoon and we would work for maybe two hours and we would get burned out for that week. Which, like I say, if it was 300, we would get up there about 280 or so in the dose rate. So we’re done for the week. Well, the new week started at 4:30, whenever we got off work. So they’d pay us overtime, and now we’re on the next week, so they would send us in for another two hours, and they’d burn us out for the next week. So now we’re no good for two weeks—or at least for another week. So they’d send us back here to the 300 Area. Franklin: Oh, wow. Gabaldon: So they’d rotate all the people out there. But you’d only get it to go in there for maybe an hour or two hours. Not a whole lot you can do. And then like I said, you’re done; somebody else is going to take over. Franklin: That sounds like that would be really complicated to do a large project in that kind of— Gabaldon: Oh, yeah. Franklin: --situation. Gabaldon: The pipefitters, I’ve seen where they were running in, making three or four turns on a wrench or a pipe wrench and right back out. And then here comes another guy right behind him, doing the same thing until they would tighten a fitting or a bolt or whatever they’re doing. But it may take four or five people to do one bolt or one fitting. Just because they can only be in there two or three minutes. Franklin: Right. Gabaldon: So I never had to get real close to that, thank God. Franklin: Yeah, that sounds like that’s pretty—you would be working in a pretty hot area. Gabaldon: Yeah, real hot areas. Franklin: Wow. What was the most challenge—I already asked you that one. What was the most rewarding job that you—or project you supported in your time onsite? Gabaldon: Wow, there’s quite a few. I’m trying to remember some of them, but a lot of them—there’s the 331 Building, where they had a lot of animals. They were doing all kinds of studies on them. We would watch the progression of them, you know, the animals, some animals had been there for years, and others were just coming in. We would set up whatever they needed as far as electrical support. So we would be able to watch something from the start and right through the end, we could see the whole thing. Even if we were finished with that, we’d be on another project right next to it or close by. So we could see the finished product, I guess. Where a lot of places, you know, you go in and they tell you pull wire from A to B, and you do that, and that’s your job and that’s all you know. But what did the wire do, what’s it for? And the same thing, another crew went in and said, run conduit from A to B and had no idea what. The 300 Area, we got to do everything. We ran the conduit, ran the wire, hooked it up, and turned it on and tested it. So you know, we’d walk away when it’s complete. Franklin: Right. But certainly—if I get what you’re saying, there was a greater level of detailed completeness at Hanford because you were— Gabaldon: Well, the 300 Area. Franklin: 300 Area. Gabaldon: Yes. Speaking of which, where I—I started in the 300 Area. Eventually I ended up at some of the bigger plants: Hanford 1 and 4, Hanford 2. Anyway, they were big jobs. And I got into a little bit of that where you have a print that only shows this part of the building, and it says run from here to here. You have no idea why. And you’ll never see the end of it; you’ll never see the finished product. It was not as—you went home whether you did something or not, it didn’t mean anything. It didn’t have any meaning to it. Where, here, you know, you looked forward to, we’re almost done, we’re going to finish this, we’re going to make it work. Franklin: So you liked the kind of—sounds like it was more of like a collegiate or community at 300. Gabaldon: Oh, yeah. Franklin: Because of—maybe you’re saying because of the smaller buildings or the—kind of how things were, there were a lot of different small projects in 300 Area, versus really large ones. Gabaldon: Yes. And they were all smaller projects. There was a few larger projects where—not very many buildings went up, but—where you might work on the same project for a couple, three months. But usually it was smaller stuff. Just building a greenhouse around a building so that they can open up hatches into a hot area. Of course we’d have to put in ventilation and lighting and maybe heating. Just creature— Franklin: Why would they need to do that? Gabaldon: Where are they? There’s pits, they’re, I want to say, valve pits. So the fitters need to go in there and change valves, replace valves or fix valves, whatever. But these pits are—you know, they’re fenced off, and then you go in closer and they’re concrete pits and they’ve got big, concrete lids. Those are all sealed up. I don’t know what—they’re obviously pumping something contaminated or hot. So they go in and build a greenhouse, encase, enclose it. And of course now they need lights. But then they need ventilation to change the air out. Then they come in with a crane and pull these big concrete lids and expose it. So everything’s got to be contained. And there may be some electrical work in there, too. Franklin: So it sounds like it’s a pretty big greenhouse, then, if it can accommodate a crane. Gabaldon: Well, no, the crane—they would open up a small opening, just for the cable. Franklin: Oh, okay, gotcha. Gabaldon: Yeah, big crane sitting outside somewhere. And then as soon as it’s done, they kind of—and there you go again with the contamination. That cable, they’re doing everything they can to keep the part of the cable that comes in the greenhouse covered. They cover it with plastic or something, and they’re checking it as it comes out. I hear about locomotives and bulldozers and everything else being buried out there because they’re contaminated. Rather than trying to clean them up, they just bury them. Franklin: Yeah, that’s—a lot of what’s in that tunnel that collapsed recently is material of that nature. Gabaldon: They don’t know what— Franklin: A guy described it to me as contaminated solids—solid equipment. It’s not waste as we think about waste, but, yeah, containing liquid and it was too costly or impractical to decontaminate. Gabaldon: Right, right. Franklin: So how long did you work in the 300 Area for? Gabaldon: Off and on for 23 or 24 years, 25 years, I suppose. Franklin: Oh, wow, okay. Gabaldon: I worked a total of 27 years, but the last, oh, I’d say, in that total time, maybe three or four years, I worked, oh, in town here locally. And then some of the bigger projects. But, like I said, I didn’t care for the kind of work. As soon as I had a chance to go back to the 300 Area, I was ecstatic when I got to go back there. Franklin: Yeah? What other projects did you—you said you did shutdown out at N Reactor. Gabaldon: 100-N, yes. Franklin: Right? And how long did you do that for? Gabaldon: I did quite a few of the burnouts I was telling you about. We’d go out there for maybe a week or two at a time. And it was still kind of a loan basis, where, maybe low on work where we were, and they needed help out there, so we’d go out there and work for them. Franklin: And also maybe low on exposure, too. Gabaldon: Well, that was where the burnouts were, yeah. Franklin: Yeah, right, right. So they could take you and kind of send you back to the 300 Area. Gabaldon: We would get small doses in the 300 Area, and sporadically here and there. But out there, you definitely got a big dose. Franklin: In these burnouts, what kind of work exactly—to get that amount of dose in a couple hours, you must’ve been working kind of near the core, or--? Gabaldon: Well, we were supporting pipefitters, most of the time. And I just remember big tanks and having to crawl under these tanks to get on the other side of them—that’s the only way you could access—and set up lighting for whatever their project was. So we had to drag cords and these quartz lights. Franklin: How much space did you have to go under these tanks? Gabaldon: Oh. I would say less than two feet. Probably 18 or—very little. Franklin: And you were in PPE? Gabaldon: Two pair of coveralls and plastic and then, I believe, fresh air. Fresh air with a hose. Franklin: Wow, and dragging equipment. Gabaldon: Oh yeah. Franklin: There was no other way to get to the other side of these— Gabaldon: No. I got contaminated in that instance there. I got contaminated. There was—like I say, they told me to go in, and there was a ladder. Go down the ladder, under these tanks and set up lighting. So with these masks, you have these big canisters and your field of vision is pretty limited. So when you—to look at something, you can’t just look at it; you’ve got to turn your head. So, anyway, I had to back down this ladder and I’m trying to get all these hoses to give enough slack. And the ladder stuck up—but it wasn’t a ladder, it was just a, I want to say homemade, but it was made with steel, and it must’ve been longer but the cut it off with a torch. So it had really rough, sharp edges on top. I’m looking at the ladder, and I turned around to go down the ladder backwards, and when I did, when I backed up, it poked me in the back of my leg. And I’m like, oh, there it is, okay, so I moved over, and okay now I’ve got ahold of both ladders and I slowly went down the ladder. And then I crawled under these tanks. Well, it’s wet down there, very wet. That’s why we were wearing plastic. And I had a hole in the plastic that I didn’t know about. So anyway I got some moisture in there. When we came out, they—you walk in with your arms spread and laborers that are cutting tape and cutting plastic and taking it off away from you to keep you clean. And then you go to the next step-off pad and they take your first layer of coveralls off. And they kind of check you real quick. Anyway, I was screaming on the back of my leg. So anyway, they kind of set me off aside. They did go back and find my coveralls and find my plastics and they found where it was torn and they found the wet spot on the coveralls. Whatever liquid it was, it was contaminated. So I had to take probably four showers, scrubbing with Tide detergent laundry soap, scrubbing my leg, trying to— Franklin: Your bare leg. Gabaldon: Yes. Franklin: Oh, wow. Gabaldon: Just about my butt, really. But the upper leg. But I was just about raw by the time—and it was still—it was 200 counts or less, but they could still read something there. But they said if they could get it down to 200 or less they’d let me go. Franklin: Okay. And they finally did? Gabaldon: They finally did. They kept my underwear. Franklin: What’s that? Gabaldon: They kept my underwear. Franklin: Kept your underwear? [LAUGHTER] Never got that back? Gabaldon: Nope. Franklin: Probably for the best. Was there any follow-up examination? Gabaldon: No, no. Franklin: And has that spot ever given you any trouble? Gabaldon: No. Not as far as I know. Franklin: Well, that’s good. Good to have caught it so quickly. I guess maybe it being wet down there may have— Gabaldon: Well, that’s what spread it, I’m sure. Franklin: Yeah, yeah. But I guess that’s also—you’d know real quick if you had a hole in your PPE if there was moisture. Gabaldon: Well, I didn’t feel it. But they sure caught it real quick. Franklin: Wow. Well, that’s good. I mean, that’s good for the safety aspect. Gabaldon: Yeah, I guess so. Franklin: That sounds like a very challenging job, you know, to crawl under tanks with all that equipment. Gabaldon: Yeah, it is, and you—yeah, I was young then, and it wasn’t a big deal. But I think about some of the older guys that are having to do that. It’s claustrophobic and it’s hard to breathe in those masks. And then you start exerting yourself, you can get overheated pretty quick. Franklin: I bet. And there’s no way to take that stuff off and get some fresh air. Gabaldon: No. Well, the thing to do is to come out. You’ve just got to come out. Franklin: Wow. And so you said you worked out at 100-N. Did you work out at any other— Gabaldon: The Tank Farms, sure. I worked at the Tank Farms for I think a year or so. Franklin: Oh, and what did you do at the Tank Farms? Gabaldon: The Tank Farms, you know, they call them farms, they’re just fenced-in areas above tanks. And all the piping that goes in and out of the tanks is there. They’re either—whatever they’re—who knows what they’re doing. But mostly, when I was there, it was mostly trying to figure out how to clean these tanks up or how to pump them out or how to examine them. So just a lot of sensors, a lot of—oh, gosh, I don’t know. Valves, electric valves, stuff like that. But same thing, you’re dressed in quite a bit of clothing, coveralls. If there was going to be any moisture at all, you’d be in plastic. There was a lot of scares, a lot of vapors and stuff that people were either getting sick or getting—smelling something. So it got to the point where it was required to have fresh air when you’d go into these areas. Of course, it kind of funny that a little chain, or a ribbon—on one side you had to have a mask and fresh air, and right on the other side of it, you’re okay. [LAUGHTER] Wide open. Franklin: Seems kind of arbitrary. Gabaldon: Yeah, so. I don’t know. It’s hard to—you know, you did what they told you to do. And I guess you had to trust and go on their, on all these machines that, the sensors that are trying to detect all this stuff. Franklin: Yeah, I guess that would need a lot of electrical support. Make sure those sensors are constantly running. Gabaldon: And all that. Yeah, it was important. Franklin: Yeah, yeah. You also worked in the 400 Area, too, right? Gabaldon: Oh, yeah, yeah. Franklin: At FFTF? Gabaldon: Yes. Franklin: FFTF, was that still operational when you worked— Gabaldon: It was just—it was operational at first, but then they went through the whole phase where they shut it down, and they tried to keep it up and they tried to maintain it. I remember changing batteries out for—not sure—some kind of a backup system in there. And then there’s some kind of heaters on the sodium loop that we worked on quite a bit. Franklin: Oh, to keep the sodium— Gabaldon: Keep the sodium liquid. And that was a big deal when they finally shut the power down to that, where that sodium solidified and there was no going back after that, I guess. Franklin: Yeah. Gabaldon: But the building right next to it, MASF. I started on that from the ground up. Franklin: And what is MASF? Gabaldon: Maintenance and Storage Facility for FFTF. Franklin: Oh, okay. Gabaldon: It’s a square building right next to the dome. Franklin: Yeah, okay. Yes. Yeah, our project I work on, our collection of historic objects and archives used to be right in the 400 Area, right across the street from that building. We were in a warehouse out there. Gabaldon: Okay. Franklin: So that’s the only site I’ve really been to with any real frequency. Gabaldon: Oh, yeah? Franklin: And I guess it’s one of the few that’s still mostly intact, too. Everything is original— Gabaldon: Yeah, I’m not sure what—I haven’t followed it, but FFTF is just sitting there— Franklin: Yeah, it’s kind of eerie that you drive up and the old guard shack is still there, you know, and the parking lots are starting to get overgrown with weeds. There’s still a few people that are staged out there. But it’s mostly, they just use most of the warehouses for storage now, and no one’s really in the facility, except to monitor. Gabaldon: Yeah. In that building, there’s a huge crane— Franklin: In MASF? Gabaldon: Yes. Franklin: And what was that for? Gabaldon: Well, just moving stuff around in there. It had a huge garage door on one end where they could bring in—just huge tanks. I want to say railroad tracks went in there. Franklin: Mm. And what kind of work was involved constructing a facility from the waist—heh, from the waist up—from the ground up, at Hanford? Gabaldon: Well, obviously, a lot of big power to go into that building. So all the main power coming in, huge conduit, six-inch conduits, in the ground and ditches. Like I say, it was just a big hole in the ground when I started. So we ran all the power in there and stubbed it up where it needed to come up. And then we watched it slowly coming up. Then they started pouring concrete, and then they started building the steel structure. I remember—this is how far back it was—running conduit on the steel structure, I could walk on an eight-inch beam, 40 feet on the air, and sit on it and hang underneath it and put a piece of conduit on, and stand up and walk another ten feet and do it again. Anymore, you’ve got to be tied off. Franklin: Oh, so you were just up there. Gabaldon: Well, the ironworkers were doing it, and I thought, well, I’ve got to get out there, too. I wasn’t afraid of it; it didn’t bother me or anything. But it makes me laugh kind of. The things that we would’ve gone through if we tried to do it now, with all the safety and stuff involved. Franklin: Yeah, wow. What other types of equipment went into MASF that you helped install? Gabaldon: Like I say, when we did it, it was brand-new. I mean, it was big, wide, open space. There was very little in there. We went back, from the 300 Area, we would support that whenever they needed something. But there wasn’t a whole lot except for a little maintenance here and there. But just, it seemed like a big, open area. It’s so big that one little project was over here in the corner, and some other little project over here. But as far as what they were, I have no idea. Like I say, we just supported the building. Franklin: And you also worked in the emergency response center at what’s known as WPPSS? Gabaldon: Yes, okay. Franklin: Yeah, and what did you do there? Gabaldon: That was just pretty much a big office building, a few, I don’t want to say labs. But nothing out of the ordinary, just brand-new, and hundreds and hundreds of lights, hundreds and hundreds of plugs and receptacles and, you know what I mean? So just real basic mundane electrical work. Franklin: Oh, okay, so you weren’t called out to do electrical stuff from there, you were supporting that— Gabaldon: We built the building. Franklin: You built the building with all the lights and switches and everything had to go. Gabaldon: Yeah, the actual construction of the building. Franklin: I imagine an office takes probably a bit more—it’s probably a bit more repetitive, mundane and— Gabaldon: Yeah, a lot of—that’s what I say, a lot of repetitive, office after, one after another, everything the same over and over again. It got to be a race. How many offices can we do in one day? Or how many, whatever. You put up 100 lights today instead of, you know. Yesterday we only got 80, today we got 100. Franklin: Right, kind of challenging yourself. Gabaldon: That was the only challenge we—you know? Franklin: Yeah, the challenge wasn’t like, how do we run this wire through here in this one-of-a-kind installation? Gabaldon: No. No, it wasn’t. Now maybe at the big sites. The cooling towers, 1 and 4, I believe—or maybe it was Hanford 2. But I remember, the huge wire. Are you familiar with wire, 500mcm? Franklin: I’m not. Gabaldon: 500 millimeters—million centimeters—mcm, I’m not sure what that standards for. Anyway, it’s huge wire. It’s almost an inch in diameter. And then they’d run, there’s three legs for three-phase power. So they’d run three for A face, three for B face, three for—so there’d be nine wires plus grounds and stuff. So there’s a bundle of wire that’s huge. Pulling that wire, I mean, normally, you use some kind of a machine to pull it. It’s just, physically, it’s too much to handle. And the requirements were no mechanically—cannot be pulled mechanically. It’s got to be pulled by hand. So that was, you know, there’d be 30 or 40 of us. It’s like a team of horses—a team of people. You’d just line up, and when it was time to do that, you would bring the whole crew and they’d literally pull it by hand because they weren’t allowed to pull it with a machine. Franklin: How come they weren’t allowed to pull it with a machine? Gabaldon: Some silly spec that said that. You know, I guess not to hurt the wire. With a machine you can nick the wires or damage them in some way. Either way, it takes x amount of force to pull this wire. Whether it’s manmade force, horses, or a machine, you still have to pull that hard. But they made us do it by hand, so. I kind of—I just—you know—questioned it, but I mean, what do you? You just do what you want them to do. Franklin: Right, if that’s the spec, that’s the spec. Gabaldon: Yeah. The control room in Hanford 2, they were just getting ready to start it up. So it was just in the finishing phases, just the last things getting done. I was working in the control room, and I went out there. They hired me, and I went right directly to the control room, I remember. And they said—they gave us all kinds of brushes and dusters, like them plumes, like peacock feathers, I think they are? Some kind of a feather, brushes, you name it. There was cabinets, they kind of went around in circles somewhat, and there was just rows and rows and rows of them. And there was just millions of terminations in there, wire terminations. Our job was to dust these terminations. And I was surprised because they’re live electrical terminations; I don’t know how much voltage was in there. But we had to go in there and with a little brush dust them. And—okay. So you’d open up a cabinet and you’d start at the top and work your way down and dust all the way down. There was two of us, I believe. And it took us three days, I believe, to get through that whole control room. And, okay, we’re done. We came back and said, okay, what do you want us to do now? And he says, you got that done? Yeah, we got it. And he says, well, do it again. [LAUGHTER] I thought, again? Didn’t take long to figure out they’re basically killing time. They just wanted us to be busy there, waiting for, I guess something else to come up. They wanted to keep us entertained or busy. So we dusted them again! [LAUGHTER] But one job I’d like to have seen—once they started, everybody had to come out of there, so. But we were close to when it started, when Hanford 2 started production. Anyway. Franklin: Yeah. And so later, the 300 Area began to close down, right? So you were moved out of there. And where did you go to? Gabaldon: Oh, wow. I believe the Tank Farms. Franklin: Okay. Gabaldon: I think the Tank Farms is where I went. I spent a couple years—a year or two, maybe a year-and-a-half there. And then I went out to, it’s called East and West. There’s that two— Franklin: 200. Gabaldon: They’re two identical reactors? Franklin: Separations facilities, processing. Gabaldon: Okay. So I was there for you know four or five months. Then I went out to somewhere out there. Oh, gosh, it’s one of the most, the highest security jobs. Franklin: PFP? 234-5? Gabaldon: Dash-5, Dash-5. And like I said, I wasn’t even there long enough to, oh, get to know the place. I just remember lots of high security. We’d have to drive our service trucks in there, and they’d have to be searched everyday. We actually built an exercise room for the security officers. Franklin: Oh, so the— Gabaldon: Inside there. So that they wouldn’t have to come out to exercise; they could just go to work and stay in there, and just exercise and work out. Franklin: Boy, that sounds kind of nice. Gabaldon: Yeah, it was. Franklin: An exercise room when you’re— Gabaldon: It was a nice room. Franklin: You mentioned they searched your truck. Gabaldon: Oh, yeah. Franklin: Did you get searched personally as well, or--? Gabaldon: We had to go through a metal detector. And of course show our badges and stuff. So you’d park the truck, and walk back through and go through metal detectors and then walk back around, get in the truck and drive in. Franklin: How else did security impact your work while you were there? Did they monitor—were they monitoring you, or--? Gabaldon: Well there were places there that there was security all the time. They were, I don’t want to say watching you every second, but they were real close by. Franklin: Mm-hmm. Was that level of security different to you than the other places you had worked out on Site? Gabaldon: It seemed higher, a little bit higher, but not a whole lot. Franklin: You were pretty used to that routine? Gabaldon: Yes. Yeah, just whatever they want, you know? You can’t—you’re not going to bunk the system, you know. Why are you doing that? Don’t ask questions. Or you know, they might tell us, you can’t go in there today. Okay. Find something else to do, because you just weren’t going to go in there until whatever was wrong was cleared. So there was a lot of that. Franklin: How far up—did you end up leading your own crew at one point at Hanford? Or where’d you work your way up your organizational structure? Gabaldon: Well, I don’t know if I worked my way up too far, I mean, as an electrician, a journeyman, and then a foreman. But that’s about as far as I went. Franklin: Did you go to foreman? Gabaldon: Yeah, yeah. Franklin: Okay. Gabaldon: And that changed—when we had lots of people working, when we had a big project, they’d say, okay, Larry, you’re, you know, going to be a foreman over this. Then we would get down to, I believe, four to six men, so there was only one foreman, so the rest of us were workers. So they would kind of cut us back. Then as soon as we’d get more work where they needed more, we would bring in travelers or temporary-type help, okay, to do bigger jobs. So that’s when— We had a few outages while we were changing out the services in some of the buildings out there in 300 Area. I’m trying to remember the names of the buildings. As you drove in the—what is this south, the G-Way, if you go straight in, is that the south gate? Franklin: Yeah, I think so. Gabaldon: As you go right into the gate, there was a library on the left side? Franklin: Yeah, the technical library. Gabaldon: Okay. And then right across the street, right across the road on the right-hand side, what’s the first big building? Franklin: Oh, I don’t remember. Gabaldon: 324? Or 328, maybe? I can’t remember. But it was a, you know, three or four story building, and a huge electrical service to it. It had been there for years. So we had to literally take all that out and put all new stuff in, and then hook up all the old wiring back to it, and do that in two days. Franklin: Oh, wow. Gabaldon: So there was a lot of pre-preparing. You had to find every conduit coming into it, identify it, identify what’s in it, where it goes, what it feeds, and label it. And then the new equipment, you know, that’s going to sit on that, you have to have it set up to feed all these things. And then everything got upgraded. Pumps and motors and stuff had to be protected a certain way. So it’d take me a couple months to lead up to that, to prepare for it. And then we’d start on a Friday night, start tearing out the old stuff—and they would shut it down, of course—and Saturday and Sunday. We had to have it running by Monday, so. Franklin: Did you end up working a lot of weekends or varied hours? Gabaldon: More than I wanted, but yeah. A lot of the guys that, oh, they were kind of off-and-on work, they loved the overtime. You know, they were in it to make money. I was there pretty steady, so I would rather have a steady paycheck than a big chunk here and there. So I wasn’t crazy about overtime. But when you’re the foreman, you gotta be there. Franklin: Sure. Did things change for you when the different contractors would come and go? Gabaldon: Yeah, slowly. Nothing real major. I can’t even remember all the contractors, but it started out with, I think, JA Jones. And it went to—oh, gosh, I can’t even think of the names of them. But they must’ve changed names, three or four, five times? Franklin: Yeah Gabaldon: But everything pretty much stayed the same. You know, there’d be a big scare. They’re going to lay you all off and then they’re going to hire you back, or they’re going to lay you off and hire somebody else back. It all worked out. I don’t know. A lot of political stuff, but everything, just basically the names changed. Franklin: But the scope of your work didn’t change. Gabaldon: Yeah, the scope of the work stayed pretty much the same. Franklin: I mean, it doesn’t really make sense to fire everybody and not hire them back when they’re the ones that knew how to do the job in the first place. Gabaldon: Right, right. But on the other hand, through the electrical unions, the hiring procedures were what they were kind of was opposing them. You know, the union says, if you don’t have work, you lay them off. And when you have work, you hire from the top of the list. You can’t—the people that were working and got laid off go to the bottom of the list. So you know, you want to rotate the other people. Franklin: And you’re not allowed to bring in—you can’t hire outside. Gabaldon: Well, they’ve got stipulations where you could hire a foreman, call him out by name, basically. So there was loopholes where they could do that. Franklin: And you were a member of the union? Gabaldon: Yes. Franklin: What was your take on the union? Did you find it served you well, protected you? Gabaldon: It served me very well and they protect me very well. When there was concerns about contamination, working around the radiation. If we had an issue, we would take it back and the union would fight for us and make sure that we were protected adequately. So, yeah. Tickled to death with them. Franklin: What’s that? Gabaldon: Oh, I’m really glad that I got into the union. Franklin: Oh, good, good. That’s good to hear. Do you have any—is there any interesting or funny/amusing or compelling stories or anecdotes that got to you when you were— Gabaldon: There’s actually quite a few, but I’ll tell you afterward. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Okay, all right, all right. Understandable. Not camera-worthy, huh? Gabaldon: I’m kidding. Franklin: So you mentioned earlier that you were bilingual. Gabaldon: Yes. Franklin: And you said that kind of served you well when you were doing chicken houses, because I guess you would’ve been working with a lot of people of—who probably spoke Spanish— Gabaldon: Yes. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: --as a primary language. So did you grow up in a bilingual household then? Gabaldon: Yes, yes, I did. Franklin: Okay. Gabaldon: Actually grew up speaking Spanish until I went to school, I started learning English. Franklin: So you’re Hispanic by— Gabaldon: Hispanic. Franklin: Did you get a chance to use that much out at Hanford? Were there a lot of other— Gabaldon: Very little. Very little out there. No. Like I say, working with the chicken ranch, I used it quite a bit. But out at Hanford, very little. Franklin: Did you find there was any prejudice against you as a Spanish speaker? Gabaldon: No. No, not at all. No. There was—I don’t want to call it prejudice, but more segregation, as far as—not unions, but crafts, I guess. Between the different crafts, and then between construction and maintenance, and supervision, I guess. So there’s—oh, everybody was—hey, that’s my job, no, that’s maintenance, and no, that’s construction. And then you’ve got supervision trying to just get it done, whoever’s—[LAUGHTER] Franklin: Whoever needs to do it. Gabaldon: But other, as far as any other, no, there was not an issue at all. Franklin: Oh, well, that’s good. So you eventually retired from Hanford. Gabaldon: Yes, I did. Franklin: And when did you retire? Gabaldon: Well, officially, about two years ago. But I quit work, let’s see, 11 years ago. When was that? Franklin: 2006? Gabaldon: Yup, right about there. 2006. So I just—it got frustrating out there, you know, the kind of work, like I said, in the 300 Area, I was content and I had plenty to do, we could work as much as we wanted. You know, there was nobody telling you slow down, or stop, or don’t do this. We could get something done. There wasn’t the red tape involved. They would say, get this building done and whatever it took within reason. But when I went out there in the further areas, I mean, they were, oh, watching every little move you made. And just seemed like they were just trying to stop you from working. There was more people stopping you from working than people trying to get you to do anything. And it’s just not the way I like to work. So I just basically played their little game. But I was trying to do stuff on the side. I got rental houses that I started putting together, and then I finally got to the point where I thought, okay, I can do this, I can wean myself off of this working. I was skeptical, but I knew I wasn’t going to get rich working out there. I was making a good living and comfortable but I was always answering to somebody. So I basically went to work for myself and had a lot more free time, and didn’t have to answer to anybody. Franklin: Sure, you could work at your own pace. Sounds like the 300 Area was really kind of the place where you found the most— Gabaldon: Oh, satisfaction. Franklin: Satisfaction, in your career. Gabaldon: Now, the 3000 Area, I worked there for probably two years. Franklin: And that’s in— Gabaldon: Where are we? We’re almost in it. Franklin: Yeah, we’re right next to PNNL. Gabaldon: So, it was the old JA Jones fabrication shop. Franklin: Oh, okay. Gabaldon: They had pipefitters, boilermakers, electricians, fitters, just about a little of everything, carpenters, painters. So they had pretty much everything right there. We were like a two-man crew, maybe three-man crew there. There was a foreman and one other guy and I was an apprentice. Oh, I learned to weld; I learned all kinds of stuff there. But we were making jumpers. They call them jumpers, but they’re a mechanical thing that hooks up to a valve fitting here and it’s got to go up and around all this other junk, and plug into a valve over here. Well, in our case it was electrical fittings. So these big heads had contacts in them. And you’d have to wire them up, run wire through this conduit, and you had to support this conduit so it would stay rigid and stay in that configuration. And it had to be a balanced point, so they’d pick it up with a crane, so it balanced perfectly level. And they could drop it into this thing and it was done remotely. They were made for some kind of radiation-type pits or— Franklin: Yup, yup. We have some of those in our collection. Maybe you made them, I don’t know. Gabaldon: I don’t know; could be. Franklin: Yeah, they would use them in the separations facilities where it was too hot. Gabaldon: Right. Franklin: Where they would operate everything remotely. One of the guys out there told me that every—all the electrical, any of the plumbing, like it all had to go through jumpers, because it would all have to go through this solid wall. Because they really couldn’t service it on the other side or ever go—So, yeah, I did know that they— Gabaldon: So anyway those-- Franklin: --used first— Gabaldon: They’re very interesting. And real complicated. So it was a real challenge to—because the foreman would take a piece of—oh, like a coat hanger—a welding rod and a piece of wire. He would scale it to the scale of the drawings, but he would bend it at a certain angle, and then he’d bend it the other way a certain angle. So here’s this piece of wire that’s got 12 or 14 different angles in it. And the finished product is the wire sticking out here and here, and that’s where these heads went. The heads had a big nut on the back of them and when you’d run that nut in and out, these fingers would come around and grab and then suck it in which would make contact. So if you loosened it, you know. And they had a big, I want to say pneumatic, kind of like an impact wrench that would run that. And that was run remotely, too, with a crane. But they would run that on there and grab onto that nut, and spin it, and this thing would let go and open up and then it would come off. So we would put the female end, or the opposite end, and weld it to a table. And then over here, 20 feet away, we would weld another one so they’re permanently mounted. Now we’ve got to connect those two with all these angles in it and make it work. So when the finished product was, we could pick it up with a crane and hook it up to those. Franklin: And it would be level. It wouldn’t— Gabaldon: Oh, yeah, it had to be level this way, but also the way—we’d have to put counterweights or you know, things to balance it, just to make it hang perfectly level. Franklin: That sounds really complicated. Gabaldon: It was. It was a real challenge. It was fun! It was really fun. Franklin: I bet. I mean, that’s really, yeah, tat’s something that gives you a great sense of accomplishment, getting those in. Gabaldon: Well, we never got to—we got to make them work there in the shop, and we were confident that they were going to work, but we never saw them work in the field. We’d make them, once they were finished and done, they’d ship them out. I don’t know where they’d go. Franklin: Into some places you don’t want to go. Gabaldon: Right, right. Franklin: Well, great, Larry. I just have a couple other—so you moved to Richland in the late ‘70s, pretty—it had not been a government town for a while, but was Richland different from what you were used to? Was there anything unique about Richland when you moved here? Gabaldon: I moved to Pasco. Franklin: Oh, okay. Gabaldon: But, no. It was actually kind of like a little farming town, and where I was was out in the farming community there, Glade North Road in Pasco. So it’s actually halfway to—what’s it called, Eltopia? Franklin: Oh, okay, on the— Gabaldon: About ten miles out of Pasco. Franklin: Oh, okay, so you lived there for most of your time? Gabaldon: Well, I lived in town. You know, I lived in Pasco and Kennewick. But working out there for the first year, I was driving out there. Franklin: Oh, yeah, out with chicken coops and stuff. Gabaldon: Yeah. So that, yeah— Franklin: And then you eventually moved to West Richland where you live now? Gabaldon: Yes, yes. Franklin: Oh, okay. So I already asked you about secrecy and security. Well, I guess my last question is what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War? Gabaldon: Wow. [LAUGHTER] What would I want them to know? Franklin: Yeah. Gabaldon: Well, that’s a good question. But now everything seems to be going to cleanup, to how are they going to clean this mess up? [SIGH] Protect yourself, I guess. [LAUGHTER] There’s a lot of stuff out there, unknown stuff. Whatever they did back in the day when there was no restrictions or no—everything was new, and now we’re paying for it. I feel like my lungs aren’t quite like they used to be, and I don’t know if it was—between asbestos and beryllium and radiation, I don’t know. I’m sure it didn’t help any. So. Franklin: Were there ever any larger worries about working at a defense, you know, a plant, an area that produced nuclear weapons material during the Cold War? Were there ever any worries for you about that? Gabaldon: No, not at all. I mean, it’s funny to—I saw a lot of people come and go. People from all over the country would come here to work on a temporary basis. You know, the things—you know how Hanford is. Anyway, so they’d come from all over the place. I saw a lot of worry, a lot of people really concerned about radiation, and then about attacks. About, if whoever, some of the big powers, wanted to retaliate against the United States, that this would be a target. Well, I don’t know, I never did worry about that. But they were always talking about, Hanford 2, the way it was built would withstand an airplane hitting it. You know, I’m not sure if that’s true or not, but I was wondering, who would ever fly an airplane into that? And then sure enough, they did it to the towers. So I guess it’s possible. But other than that, no, no worries. The river, I guess. The one in Grand Coulee, I heard people talking about the possibility of that breaking. If that broke, it would wash away Hanford. I don’t know how true that would be, but I’m sure there’d be a lot of water there. Franklin: Yeah, there sure would. It probably would do a bunch of damage all over the place, everywhere downstream. Gabaldon: Well, it would just compound down the river as it—I think if one dam broke, it would break the rest of them. Franklin: Yeah, sounds like it would be pretty—I don’t know what you would— Gabaldon: But, no, that’s never been a big concern of mine. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: That’s good. Well, Larry, thank you so much for coming— Gabaldon: Oh, you’re welcome. Franklin: --and taking the time to talk with us today about your work. I really appreciate it. Gabaldon: No, no problem. I hope I helped some. I don’t know. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah, no, you did. It was really good. It was good to hear about your perspective on being out in 300 and especially some of that outage work, what it took to get the job done in terms of the PPE and kind of the— Gabaldon: Yeah, it’s—I’m sure they still do it even more. They’re more, what do I want to say? Well, let’s just put it this way. In the 100 areas, when you came out, you were in your skivvies, your underwear. And there’s 20 guys lined up, standing in their underwear, and there’s gals surveying them, every little nook and cranny of their body. Nowadays, they have, I guess modesty clothing or whatever you call it. So it’s come a long way from there. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Gabaldon: You know, back, it was a big deal. But then as soon as you went into a radiation zone, you know, forget all that modesty stuff. Franklin: Right, yeah, you’ve got to take care of yourself. Gabaldon: Yup. Franklin: Modesty be darned. Great, well, Larry, thank you so much. Gabaldon: You’re welcome. Franklin: Watch your head there when you stand up. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:07:17 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 9983KBPS Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 300 Area 100-N (N Reactor) FFTF 305 Building 308 Building Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 40 years Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 29 years Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Larry Gabaldon Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Larry Gabaldon moved to Washington in 1977 to work at the Hanford Site. Larry spent time in the 300 Area as an electrician, and also assisted at 100-N (N Reactor), Tank Farms, and the FFTF. An interview conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by Mission Support Alliance on behalf of the United States Department of Energy. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 7/11/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F9448b8f1dd5c8a4e487f8847aea17e6b.jpg b3d590060b68612ff79f75d465e19241 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F73750084bb78927a601beb5277b58006.mp4 3c5558b62c1f91153fb057b87244818c Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Bauman Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Robert Bown Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Man one: Are you-- Man two: Ready to go. Man one: Okay. Robert Bauman: You guys ready? Man one: We're rolling. Man two: We're rolling. Bauman: We're rolling? Okay. Great. Robert Bown: I'm supposed to smile a lot. Right? [LAUGHTER] Bauman: If you want to. Bown: Oh, okay. Bauman: All right. So I'm going to the official sort of business out of the way first. My name's Robert Bauman. I'm conducting an oral history interview with Robert Bown on June 17 of 2013. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University in Tri-Cities. And I will be talking with Mr. Bown about his experiences working at the Hanford site. Okay? Bown: Yep. Bauman: Okay, great. So I'm just going to start by asking you if you could tell me how--why you first came to work at Hanford? Bown: Well, I graduated at the University of Colorado, and was looking for a job. And Norm Thompson from General Electric Company interviewed many people and we got together and I was hired. And I was--do you want to know why I was—okay, I'll--well, I was impressed with the idea that here is a new energy system. And I wanted to be part of it. So I was pretty excited about working in this industry. Bauman: And what was your degree in? Bown: Chemical engineering. But I consider myself, now, a nuclear engineer by experience. Bauman: And so what was your initial position? What was the initial job, then, that you had? Bown: Well, started out as a technical graduate, and spent some time in training. And actually I had to have a security clearance, so I was in a survey team laying out power lines, things like that, to begin with. Just to mark time. When the clearance came, well then the work started. And I went to--you want an experience? Bauman: Absolutely. Bown: As a technical graduate, I sort of made stops at several spots so that they could look at me and I could look at them. Went to separations and the reactors, and I chose the reactors and they concurred. And we lived happily for some time. Bauman: And so what year was this? What year did you start? Bown: I came here in 1948. And I left in 1971. In the meantime, I worked for General Electric, Douglas United Nuclear, the US--United States Research and--Energy Research and Development Administration, and then the Department of Energy. Bauman: Great. So how long for General Electric then? Bown: Well, until they left the project, whenever that was. I don't remember it precisely. Bauman: And so when you started at the reactors with your first job, were you at the B Reactor? Bown: I was at B Reactor. Bauman: What was your job there? What sort of things were you doing? Bown: Well, first of all, of course, it was in training on shift. Eventually I became a shift supervisor. And then an area supervisor—or operating supervisor, if you will. And then I went into—since that was shift work—went into a day job. And I was the in charge of scheduling and forecasting of the Hanford production and integration with the separations people and Federal Department or--yeah, the government until I actually went to work for the government. Bauman: So scheduling and forecasting, what--could you maybe explain that a little bit? What did that entail? Bown: Well, there were varying numbers of reactors. And I had worked at B and H, but in my day job I worked for all of them. I scheduled the outages, and took care of the accounting for the production of all the reactors, made the reports, and scheduled their outages. Because that takes a lot of people when they're shut down, so you only want one at a time. So you have to be governed partially by the need for discharging, refueling. So you get those variables, and you come up with a schedule that efficiently utilizes the force available. Bauman: And then--so after you did that, what was your next position then? Your next job? Bown: Well, I went to Washington, D.C. and worked for the Department of Energy there. Bauman: Oh, okay. Bown: And that's sort of a big blank period. I don't remember what I did. I must have worked hard, though. Bauman: [LAUGHTER] When you first came to the area then, where did you live? What sort of housing did you live in? And-- Bown: I lived in a ranch house. I was the prime--first occupant. So when the ranch houses were new, I got one. I lived in a little trailer in North Richland for a while. I lived in that house and ended up with two children and a lot of good memories. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: What was the area like when you first arrived here? Bown: What was the which like? Bauman: What was the area like? Richland as a place to live and-- Bown: The area was a mess. The big flood of 1978 had just occurred. Smell was not too good and roads were torn up. A fresh dyke had been built and it was not fully landscaped. And it was sort of a difficult time, but we survived. Bauman: And one of the things I like to ask people about is--Hanford was a very—a lot of security, right? Sort of a secret site, to a certain extent. Wonder if you could talk about that at all? What did that mean for you in terms of your work, in terms of security? Could you drive your car to work? Did you have to-- Bown: What was that last point? Bauman: Could you drive a car to work, or did you have to take the bus? Or how did that-- Bown: Well, either one. I preferred to take the bus and let somebody else do the driving, because the areas were quite distant. But you could drive, and I would drive when necessary. And since I didn't always get my work done in the total allotted time, I'd have to get there on my own to catch up. Bauman: And were there any other—any security issues at all? Did you--I know you had to get a special clearance to work-- Bown: Had to have a what? Bauman: Get a special clearance to work on the site? Bown: Oh, yes. Q clearance. Well, in the security situation, you don't talk too much about work away from work. But Richland—you weren't very far from work, and everybody else was in the same boat, so we could talk shop some, since they were cleared, too. Bauman: Right, yeah. So you worked--what various places on the site did you work then? You worked at the B Reactor, you mentioned. Bown: B Reactor and H Reactor. I think I spent some time at F Reactor also. And then in town for when I was scheduling and forecasting. Bauman: Okay. At the Federal Building in town? Bown: The what? Bauman: At the Federal Building? Or-- Bown: 703. Bauman: Okay. Do you remember any--were there any events that really stand out to you? Any strange happenings or memorable events that took place during your years working at Hanford? Things that really stand out to you? Bown: Well, there was always something happening, and usually it was bad. And you spent a lot of time recovering from incidents, or radiation problems, or fuel element failures--for which becoming quite common when power levels were raised up to very high levels and quality of the fuel wasn't. Incidentally, I spent a year or two in fuel production, too--fuel fabrication in the 300 Area. I think between the time that I was a shift supervisor and the time I became an operating supervisor, I spent a year or two building—making fuel elements as a foreman for the crew of people working with the bare uranium. Bauman: When you worked at B Reactor and you said H Reactor also, how large of number of employees generally were there? Bown: Well, we had--the crew was generally an operating supervisor, called an area supervisor, a shift supervisor, a chief operator, four pile operators, and a couple of the next level down--whatever that was. Utility operators, I guess they were called. And then we had side groups that didn't report to me, but were helpful. Health monitoring--or HI--health, whatever it is, and the maintenance people, we would work with. So just a general plant operation. Bauman: Yeah. Okay. One quick thing I want to ask about was President Kennedy came to the Hanford site in 1963 to dedicate the N Reactor-- Bown: Yes. Bauman: --and I wanted to know--ask if you were there? Were you at the event? Any memories you have about that? Bown: About when the President was there? Bauman: Yeah. Bown: Well, I wasn't personally involved with--I was just doing my job. I was impressed, of course, with the President, and the notoriety or fame that we enjoyed. Bauman: Did you and your family go out to watch him do the dedication at all? Bown: I think we did, yes. And my daughter says, okay. She was there. Bauman: Yeah. Must have been a pretty interesting—I mean it sounds--as I talk to other people they said that it was sort of one of the first times they really opened up the site to let family members come on to the site, to see the President. Bown: Well, it was just a big holiday. And I think they were impressed with the operation. And I hope they are again today. It's still there, but not operating. Bauman: Yeah. So you worked at Hanford from 1948 to 1971, you said. Bown: Yes. Bauman: Of course much of that, the height of the Cold War. Did you have a sense of sort of the important work you were doing? I mean what did you--what of your, sort of, thinking about—the Cold War would have been-- Bown: As I mentioned earlier, I was pleased to be associated with a new energy at nearly the ground level. It had been going for a while before I got there. And I enjoyed working there. I took a part in community functions, too. Elected to City Council and my wife was elected to be one of the freeholders--20 freeholders--that wrote the--whatever it's called. Wrote the charter-- Bauman: The charter-- Bown: Charter, yes. Bauman: For—the City of Richland Charter? Bown: Yes. So we were involved, both of us--myself and my wife--in the founding of the city itself. It was a going operation before that, but under government control. Bauman: Can you talk about that a little more? When were you elected to the City Council? And what made you decide to run for a seat on the City Council? Bown: Well, I can't remember the exact date, but I was sort of encouraged to participate by an old friend, Fred Clagett, who has better credentials as an old timer. And he kind of encouraged me to work there—or to work in the community. And I served on the Planning Commission, things like that. Bauman: So you were very involved in-- Bown: I was quite active. Bauman: --city government-- Bown: City government, yes. Bauman: --in an early period. And you said your wife was involved in the-- Bown: Yes, freeholder operation. Bauman: Yeah. Why did--do you know why she chose to get involved in that? Why you thought it was important? I know you said Richland initially was a federal city under federal government control. Why you thought it was important to move to becoming a sort of independent city? Bown: Well, you like to be independent of the government control. But since they're picking up the tab, you have to listen to them and accept their advice, usually. And still remain your own person. We tried not to be a servant of the Atomic Energy Commission, whom I generally ended up working for. But we cooperated quite nicely. We worked together. I think it was a fruitful situation where we-- Bauman: So what happened then when the transfer happened from federal government control to becoming an independent city? In terms of the homes, for instance? Were people able to purchase their own homes? How did that-- Bown: Well, they sold the homes to us at a bargain rate. It was 75% of assessed valuation, I think. So we got a good deal. And we were proud to be property owners. Real citizens of a free city--atomic city--famous. Bauman: Were there any--in those early years in Richland, any community events, special celebrations, or community events that were important to the city early on? Bown: Well, nothing really stands out. We had the general celebrations. And it was just normal--a normal city. And we had a good time living it. Bauman: You know, what would you like future generations—maybe somebody will watch this video 20 years from now, or 50 years from now. What would you like people in the future, who might see your interview, or watch part of it, or listen to it--what would you like them to know about working at Hanford? Bown: About what? Bauman: About working at Hanford? And what that was like. Bown: Oh, working at Hanford. Bauman: And what it was like to work at Hanford? And/or living in Richland during that-- Bown: Yeah. Well, since it was my first job, I didn't have an awful lot of experience. Well, I'd worked construction jobs, and things like that, but it was--I was proud to work for General Electric. I didn't have an emblem tattooed on me or anything, but I was a faithful cheerleader for them. And I still like General Electric. I still like the federal government. And they were good to me, and I think I gave them a good--my best. Bauman: And how long--you mentioned that you worked at Hanford from 1948 to 1971, how long did you live in Richland? Did you move at that point? Or-- Bown: I left Richland in 1971 for a job in Washington, D.C. with the Atomic Energy Commission. Bauman: And how long were you there? Bown: Until 1986. Through several employers--General Electric, and Douglas United Nuclear, Energy Research and Development. It seems like there's one--Was there another one in there? Two? Then the—yeah, Energy Research and Development. Well, ended up with the Department of Energy, anyway. Bauman: And when you were in D.C., what sort of work were you doing in D.C.? What was your job there? Bown: Bureaucrat. [LAUGHTER] Well, it's hard to tell you my actual responsibilities, but--because they kept varying. But I don't know. I kept busy. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: And then I'm going to go back now to when you first came to Hanford, you said something about sort of being a mess because of the flood that year. And I know some people who came here in the '40s talked about the termination winds, you know-- Bown: Yes. Bauman: --when the dust would blow and a lot of people would leave. Bown: The winds blew. They still blew. And the dust blew. But I didn't terminate. Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Bown: I was from a dry Midwestern situation, so the desert wasn't too serious a problem. Bauman: It wasn't too unusual for you. Bown: No. During the Depression and drought, the wind blew and the tumbleweeds collected in the fences, and the dust drifted like snow and you could walk over the fences. So I'd had experience. It wasn't too different from the Hanford-- Bauman: Right. Bown: --situation. It wasn't—it did rain a little more, but not much. Bauman: In your various positions working at Hanford, I was going to ask you a question about unions. Were there unions on the campus? Bown: Well, there were not, to begin with. And they were organized. And I was not involved in the bargaining unit, but I had to learn to work with a union as well as the people. No problem. Bauman: Did you have a favorite part—what was your favorite part of working at the Hanford site? Do you have something that you really enjoyed doing during your time here that--of the various things you had to work on? Bown: Well, the scheduling and forecasting was pretty interesting. I started out just scheduling. And then they cut the number of reactors and I also took over the forecasting operations, and some inter-site work--the shipping off of a special products that you made at the reactors. I handled those. And it was a varied job, and quite interesting. I enjoyed it. Bauman: Clearly, yeah. Is there anything I haven't asked you about that you would like to talk about? Anything about your experiences either working at Hanford or living in Richland? Any special memories or things you'd like to share that you haven't had a chance to talk about? Bown: Well, I got myself a ski-boat and we whizzed up and down the river quite a bit. And we spent time with our family in the Portland area, so we weren't too far from friends--from old friends and family. Climbed a few mountains. Travelled a lot--Europe, Alaska. We had a pretty full life there. Bauman: It sounds like a good place for recreational activities. Bown: Yes, and for growing a family it was real good. Bauman: And you said you had two children? Bown: Two children, daughters, are both here. Bauman: And they both grew up in Richland? Went to high school and so forth in Richland? Bown: Let's see. Where did you go to high school? Daughter: We moved when I was in 9th grade. Bown: Oh, okay. We moved east. So they ended up in Maryland for high school--most of high school. Robin went to the University of Montana, and Karen, the younger one, went to Evergreen State College. Bauman: Well, thank you very much. Again, is there anything else that you want to talk about? Or memories you have from working that I haven't asked you about? Bown: Well, you've asked all the right questions. I hope I gave the right answers. Bauman: Well, thanks again, very much. I really-- Bown: Sure. Bauman: --appreciate you coming in and sharing your stories and memories. Bown: Thank you for the opportunity. Bauman: Thank you. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:27:07 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 7999kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview B Reactor H Reactor 703 300 Area Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site at least 23 years Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 23 Years Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Norm Thompson Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Robert Bown Subject The topic of the resource Hanford (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Robert Brown started at the Hanford Site from 1948-1971. Robert worked for B Reactor and H Reactor, 300 area, 703, and was an elected member of the Richland City Council. He worked for General Electric, Douglas United Nuclear, and Energy Research and Development. An interview conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by Mission Support Alliance on behalf of the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 6/17/2013 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Language A language of the resource English Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operated under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who were the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. forecasting Hanford hanford site reactor scheduling https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fd9b5b13dffbede93df7368c37e2ebad4.JPG 54583d7039ab0df30eab83cbf73dff85 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Jack Fix Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: Are you ready, Jack? Jack Fix: Mm-hmm. Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Jack Fix on March 30, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Jack about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Fix: Well, my full name is John James Fix. That’s J-O-H-N. J-A-M-E-S. And then F-I-X. Franklin: Okay. Great. But you prefer to go by Jack, correct? Fix: Yes. My dad’s name was John, so I’m a Jack. Franklin: Okay, to alleviate confusion? Fix: Yeah. Franklin: Right, okay. Great. Well, tell me how and why you came to the Hanford Site. Fix: Well, I first came here as part of a—well, as a little bit of background, I was very fortunate to get a—when I graduated out of college, I was extremely fortunate to receive one of the Atomic Energy Commission fellowships. So I had to take the Graduate Record Exam advanced test, which I took in physics, and then get three professors—they willingly sent in these letters. Just remarkably, it was a gift of a lifetime to receive one of these fellowships. As part of that fellowship, there were various institutions throughout the United States that supported these fellowships. In the Northwest, the only one was University of Washington. Oregon State didn’t have it at that time, or I would’ve gone there. But anyway, I went to University of Washington and sat—in the summer after I finished my first year of grad school, we had to go to a national lab. And I chose Hanford. So I came here as a summer, I guess, intern, if you would call it that, in 1969. Franklin: And why did you choose Hanford? Fix: Well, because I was born and raised in Pendleton, Oregon and that was close to home. And, you know, there were lots of reasons to stay as close to home as you could if you didn’t have a lot of money. That’s also why I chose University of Washington, because it was the closest university to Pendleton, basically. Franklin: Okay. And what did this AEC fellowship cover? Fix: Well, it covered everything. They paid—it was a full ride fellowship. They paid all your tuition, they gave you a stipend. I mean, it was really a—it’s hard to imagine how much of a gift that really was. Franklin: Oh, yeah, I bet. And this was for graduate school. Fix: That was for graduate school, right. This is called the Atomic Energy Commission fellowships, and they were certainly very valuable. Franklin: Right, I bet that looks pretty good, too, on a CV after graduating. Fix: Well, yeah, except intriguingly, most people don’t realize, but after the United States landed a person on the moon, they didn’t have that need for all those high PhD physicists anymore, so many of those people got laid off and they all went back and were retraining into like medical radiation physics and things, which is actually where I got my degree, is in medical radiation physics. So things ebb and flow. So when I graduated with my master’s degree in medical radiation physics, it was still very challenging to get a position. I was fortunate that I had worked two years at the University of Washington as a— You know, I don’t want to get too detailed here, but my graduating class from college was the first graduating class that would no longer have student deferments for graduate school because of the Vietnam War. Those were all—that was the very first year. So it affected many people. And then later they introduced the lottery system. So I had a low number. So I actually had to stop my graduate studies. And I was very lucky to get a position at the University of Washington, because I was going to be drafted. There was really no opportunity for me to go into the service to get more training or what-have-you. So anyway, it was just a point of history that affected a lot of people. I don’t know how many people, and I don’t know how many people are familiar with that. Hopefully it’s never repeated. Franklin: Yeah, that would be nice. Is medical radiation physics similar to health physics? Fix: Yeah, it’s very—it’s excellent, yeah, medical is really all part of radiological sciences. It all deals with radiation, it all deals with—radiological science is actually a very broad field, really. It can go from, you know, cosmic radiation to what heats the core of the Earth, to the various types of uses of medical isotopes in medicine. So it’s a very broad field. Franklin: Sure, sure. What did you do that first time at Hanford Lab in the late ‘60s? Fix: Well, in ’69, when I was here as an intern? We, first of all, there was dedicated people on the staff here that supported things, so we had a lead scientist that I reported to. Actually, I reported to Ron Kathren, who many of the people know here locally. Franklin: I know Ron very well. Fix: Yes. Well, Ron Kathren was my sponsor. He sponsored me and another student from the east—from the Tennessee area. So we did all various types of educational things, such as—I don’t recall now—but we did a little bit of work with tritium, as I recall. We were doing things with an area called thermoluminescent dosimetry, which is a little special types of salt crystals which will luminesce when they’re irradiated with different types of radiation. Franklin: Is that the type of stuff that’s in a scintillator? Is that what it’s called? Fix: Well, a scintillator—scintillation is used in like, sodium iodide detectors for radiation and that. It’s very similar. One’s luminescence and one’s scintillation. It’s both emitting light that’s counted by a photo tube and you can relate that to the amount of radiation and the type of radiation. But the right type-- Franklin: What was the—oh, sorry. Fix: Well, it just depends on the instrumentation, that’s all. Franklin: What’s the impetus to develop that type of counter? Fix: Well, you’re always trying to be able to do things more precisely, at greater sensitivity. So, there’s always been impetus to have better detectors, more sensitive, better resolution. It goes on even to the current time. That’s one reason why they maybe use liquid nitrogen to cool the crystals down, so that there’s less entrancing noise. So it all has to do with the improved capabilities. Franklin: Interesting. And what was tritium used for? Fix: Well, tritium is very widely used. First of all, it is an isotope of water. So tritium is extensively used, especially in medical research, because most/many organic molecules include tritium—include, not tritium, excuse me—include hydrogen. So you can have like tritiated label thymidine, all the different amino acids for the DNA. Many. There’s so many uses it’s hard to describe them all, in terms of medical research. Franklin: Okay. Would that be for like marking DNA so that it would be visible? Fix: Well, actually, if you wanted to label an organic compound that’s used in some type of, say, like a hormone or an enzyme that’s used in the body, you could potentially use this to label it. I mean, other nuclides that were widely used were iodine and carbon. There was many, many applications for these. Franklin: What was tritium being studied for at Hanford labs? Fix: Well, another use of hydrogen and tritium—I wouldn’t say that these were studied at Hanford labs, per se. I was taking that as a general question. At Hanford another significant use of tritium was in thermonuclear weapons. The fusion device utilizes tritium. As a matter of fact, all of our nuclear armaments to this day have to be maintained to keep the supply of the use of tritium in those devices, which has a half-life of about 12.5 years, to be adequate for their intended use. Franklin: Okay. And so what were you doing in regards to tritium? Fix: Well, we were, with Ron, we were just studying. I forget what we were doing now. I mean, it’s—this was 40 years ago. Franklin: Sure, sure. Fix: First of all, tritium is a relatively—one thing in the use of a student is, tritium is relatively non-hazardous. It’s a very low-emitting beta emitter. Very low. So it’s relatively—it’s not very hazardous. So if you’re teaching students, that might be attractive. It’s also easily available. And so. Franklin: You said easily available, so it was being produced at Hanford, then, for research use, or where did the tritium come from? Fix: Well, I’m not sure where the—certainly, there was a lot of tritium available at Hanford; there’s no question about that. Whether it was being purified and isolated for use by others, I’m not sure right now. I’d have to think about that. Franklin: Sure, sure, and— Fix: Tritium— Franklin: Oh, sorry. Fix: Undoubtedly, tritium was everywhere at Hanford, as you know. The groundwater plume has tritium in it. It was an isotope that’s widely available. Also, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the history of nuclear atmospheric testing and nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, but there was tritium all over the world caused by nuclear weapon testing in the atmosphere. Franklin: Right. And that’s one of the things that health physicists or others, medical researchers could use to monitor people, because everyone of a certain generation had so much tritium in them, right? Fix: Yeah, I wouldn’t use the words “so much,” but they certainly—since it was not a relatively hazardous nuclide, but everybody had, certainly, measurable quantities. Franklin: Yeah, sorry, I guess I meant so much as to be measured. Fix: Yeah. And interestingly, later on, I’ll describe, but when I eventually became an employee at Hanford, we documented—since when I came here in 19—let’s see, I came here—after I graduated from the University of Washington, I actually went to work for AEC, Atomic Energy Commission, at the national reactor testing station in Idaho. Franklin: Okay. Fix: And there, I was responsible for the environmental surveillance program in the context of analyzing—looking after, gathering the data, which was—these were well-established programs that every major DOE site had—at that time AEC site. So I was just one person in a series of people that had these responsibilities. But my position was responsible for analyzing all the data and writing the annual report. So we wrote these reports and distributed to all the state and representatives and different AEC sites. These were required; there was a DOE order that specified what had to be included, so we did that. And also, when I was at Idaho, we had NOAA was responsible for atmospheric dispersion—the National Oceanographic and Aeronautics Agency. And they also had the USGS, the United States Geological Service, responsible for the geohydrology of the Idaho site. So a couple years later, I came to Hanford and basically assumed the same responsibilities. I came here to do the site wide environmental surveillance program for the surface. And basically at that time, because many of the Hanford facilities had been shut down, the once-through reactors were closed down in the late, like ’68 or so. And worldwide fallout had, by that time, an international pact to stop the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. So you could see in the environment, very quickly, this decrease in radioactivity, primarily from fallout. Franklin: Right. Fix: But near a site like Hanford, there was also the Hanford contribution. Because there’s quite a difference in the nuclide mix between weapons and at Hanford, which involved reactor effluence. So when we came here, the environmental data, meaning foodstuffs, air, water, you know, wildlife, anything that you could measure that might have importance to people was monitored, had been monitored for years. And has continued to be monitored for years since then. But anyway, when I came here the environmental measurements had gotten to the point where you really couldn’t measure much in the environment. So when I came here, I kind of adopted the techniques that were used at Idaho in which everything was calculated. You would take the effluent data and you’d take dispersion models and calculate what the off-site impact might be. And then you would verify that with the environmental data. So if you calculated minimal impact and then you didn’t see anything with the environmental program, then you felt very comfortable. But, so anyway, Hanford researchers that had these capabilities for using dispersion models, models, et cetera. So we wrote a series of reports, how the radioactivity in foodstuffs, wildlife, the river, how all that varied with time, and how it was declining. And one of the examples was tritium in the river. We wrote a report showing how that had changed since they had all this data. So we wrote a series of historical reports. Franklin: How were these reports received by both inside the kind of DOE/AEC complex, but also outside? Fix: I think they’re fine. I think everybody really appreciated it. I think, for one thing, it was very instructive to see how quickly it had changed. Franklin: You mean, quickly from the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty to— Fix: , Yeah, right. Franklin: Okay. Fix: Yeah. It was very—and I think it was—there are lots of very interesting things in this data. I guess, being a technocrat, we like data. We love to analyze data. But most people don’t realize, for example, that, say, milk from the western side of the state, Seattle area, had twice the levels of strontium-90, as, say, this area, even though we had Hanford. Franklin: And why is that? Fix: And the reason is because worldwide fallout was predominantly following the pattern of rainfall. So the areas that had more rainfall had more radioactive—had more nuclides from worldwide fallout. And the same thing was true of cesium-137, say, in deer meat, or cattle, what-have-you. But their levels of cesium from worldwide fallout was higher where there was more rainfall. So, anyway, the data that Hanford collected, the contractors at Hanford collected for the AEC, included all of this information. So we included in some of our reports, but it was just a snapshot. What we did was kind of interesting, because things were changing. Everything was going down. And there was some new techniques of analyzing data that we found very—we really wanted to apply this data where we were looking at everything in terms of distribution, statistical distributions. Because you would expect, say, like, particle size of dust particles in the atmosphere would follow a certain distribution. So you can use this method of analysis to see, maybe, what type of—how much of, say, like, a particular nuclide that might exist in the atmosphere and in the environment from different sources, how much might be due to worldwide fallout, how much might be due to Hanford. It was particularly useful for data that might have significant amount of information below detection level. So we were applying these methods and the reports are publicly available and we enjoyed writing them. Franklin: So would you say, then, that for the west side, or for people in areas of high rainfall, would you say, then, that the threat that they faced from radioactive isotopes was more from the testing than from the Hanford production from effluent going into the Columbia River? Fix: Well, I wouldn’t want to characterize it in terms of threat or risk, because, you know, the evidence is that low levels of radiation may not be hazardous. That’s a very—that’s an open— Franklin: Are you talking about, like, Tony Brooks’— Fix: Well, Tony Brooks, but, I mean, in general, the evidence is that, for example, when you go to the dentist to get your dental x-rays, do you worry about the radiation you’re getting? Or if you’re taking a trip to Europe on an airplane, are you worried about a small amount of dose? Franklin: Well, no, of course, but a nuclear reactor represents, you know, I think, a sociocultural fear factor there. Fix: Well, I think that’s true, a social fear factor. I agree with you; there’s a lot of fear. I guess, in my mind, I’m always focused on how much dose is involved, because— Franklin: Sure, because that’s the measurable quantity, right, it’s not—the fear— Fix: Yeah. And actually, that’s why the amount of radionuclides that were becoming prevalent in the environment, it’s why there was worldwide outcries about continuing the nuclear weapon testing in the atmosphere and what led to the worldwide ban on atmospheric testing. Even after they had the testing agreement, there still continued to be some testing in the atmosphere by certain nations. Franklin: Right, more of rogue nations. Fix: Yeah. Well, rogue and even some very—yes. For a long time. And actually in the environmental programs, one of the interesting sidelights or aspects of these environmental programs, whenever there was a test in the atmosphere, we could pick it up very quickly. That was another use of this type of analysis we were talking about. We could pick it up very quickly, and actually at that point, those particular data we would kind of go on to a different program, because people wanted to know what we were seeing. And I don’t think it constituted a hazard or anything per se, but it was meaningful to—it was meaningful information. Franklin: Sure, sure. And it’s an important point you bring up that people are exposed in many everyday, what we think of as kind of everyday activities. Fix: Yes. Franklin: And that we not to worry about those, because I think we’ve categorized those as necessities, you know. And this is, we view, I think, weapons production maybe in a different light. Fix: Well, I think we all agree that we don’t want to take unnecessary risks. But interestingly, like, probably the nuclide that contributes more dose, significant dose to humans from all is potassium-40. You know, that’s a primordial radioactive nuclide that’s been there since the beginning of the Earth—or, time, I should say. And it has a very energetic gamma radiation of 1.46 MeVs. It’s very, very penetrating. And yet it’s unavoidable. Anytime you have a banana, there’s no way to avoid the potassium-40. That is a part of the potassium that we all take in. So there’s no way to avoid it. Franklin: Unless you stop eating bananas. Fix: Well, I think, yeah, but I think the amount of potassium in your body is primarily regulated by the body. If you get too much potassium, it gets eliminated. If you don’t get enough, it starts taking more of it, absorbing more of it. So, potassium, you can’t live without potassium. Franklin: Sure, sure, sure. I was also being facetious. Fix: Well, you know, but these are the games that—I don’t know, “games,” but the perspectives that you have to weigh in. Franklin: Sure. Well, I want to go back a little bit earlier, when you said that when you first got to Hanford, you couldn’t measure much of the environment? And why was that? I’m wondering if you could discuss that challenge. Fix: Well, because all of the reactors at that time, once-through reactors, were closed down in the late ‘60s. The reprocessing facility was, I think, PUREX was—I forget its exact operating history, but it was being phased out. So it just wasn’t that many releases from Hanford. We certainly could measure some of the residual. The design of these surveillance programs was always to compare near versus far, upriver versus downriver, to do all sorts of sensible things, to try to see what impact there could be on the environment. Franklin: And where things were going— Fix: Yes. Franklin: --from, once they were created. Fix: Yeah. And for example, there was, of course, the history of the deposition of nuclides in the Columbia River, say, in the sediment behind McNary Dam. So we were always—at that time we were always trying to develop more sensitive methods, since things were—since you don’t really want to have data that has below detection level. That really is not—that’s really very difficult data to analyze. Franklin: Sorry, so, I’m a historian, not a—my last science class was a little bit ago. How do you have data “below detection level”? Fix: Well, if you can’t measure it with your method of analysis, then we just call it below detection level. Everything has a noise level, and if you just can’t discern a signal, you just call it below detection level. You can define what the detection level is. Franklin: So you’re saying that if you know that there is a very small amount of that element there, but you can’t detect it because of background radiation or something, then you would just say— Fix: Or noise in the instrumentation. You know, things are not perfect. Typically, if you, say, take a measurement, and you didn’t put any sample in there, you would have a reading. And historically, yeah, a person might say, the detection level is twice the variability of background that you get in the instrument with nothing in there. Franklin: Okay. Fix: So you might say, well, I can’t detect anything below that, because that’s just background. Franklin: So unlike a scale, you can’t just tare it out to zero and get a clean reading every time. Fix: Right, that’s right. Franklin: It’s always—okay. Fix: Everything has tradeoffs. So what you try to do is you try to either concentrate the material, or you try to combine samples. Like if we’re measuring levels of radionuclide in the air using air filters, they have a certain efficiency. What you might do is start to combine—this actually was done at Hanford, where, like, you’d have the routine samples for every month, for example, or in some cases every week, and then you might take all of them for a whole quadrant that you want to and ash them all on a quarterly basis so you get more information— Franklin: More data into it. Fix: More data, or more if you were collecting a certain isotope, you’d get more of that isotope and so you’d have to—then that would enhance your detection level. Because detection level, at least, would typically be measured on how much air you sampled, versus how much radioactivity you counted. Franklin: So you might need to add multiple samples up in order to get something— Fix: Right, and that actually was commonly done to get to greater detection levels. Like, say you wanted to measure plutonium in the atmosphere, for example, which does exist. So there were always techniques. Or using totally different technologies. Like, we went to filter resin sampling of the Columbia River water, because it was a much more efficient method of analyzing. You could analyze a lot more water with it. Franklin: Oh, okay. Fix: So I used all sorts of techniques to try to get positive data. But at some point, you have to weigh, what is the underlying risk in the first place? Franklin: Sure. What other kinds of challenges did you face in gathering this data and writing reports about it? Fix: Well, in those—I think—well, the primary challenge is you want to be sure that your surveillance program doesn’t have any—is not possible to miss anything. That’s probably the first and foremost. But I had joined a very mature program here that they had been conducting this program for many years, and I was just one person in a line of people that had these responsibilities. You had to be sure that you interpreted the data accurately, as well. Franklin: Sure. Fix: So I think it was a very well-run program and everything went together very smoothly. Every site had these programs. So I did that for several years, and then I was transferred to the dosimetry program. Franklin: Was there a lot of communication between sites in these programs? Fix: Oh, sure, yeah. A tremendous amount. Yeah, all throughout all my years of these—that’s one of the most enjoyable things about these programs, is since they were programs that were run to meet AEC or DOE orders, they had to be done by a certain time. They had to cover certain subjects. But, yes, we communicated with other colleagues at other sites all the time. Franklin: Great. One last question about the surface environmental program. Were you, and if so, how, were you impacted by the growing environmental movement in the United States from the creation of the EPA and that kind of growing environmental concern in the general public? Fix: Well, I would say—I wouldn’t call us being impacted, I’m thinking most of all my colleagues were highly supportive. I mean, we all really wanted the data and certainly, I don’t think anyone was in favor of nuclear testing in the atmosphere. But I mean it’s all really—I mean, that’s way before EPA. I don’t—I guess I never really thought about it, because so much of EPA’s focus has nothing to do with radioactivity. So we’re kind of a small aspect of that. Franklin: Or, I guess, were you impacted by the growing anti-nuclear movement? Fix: Oh sure. Sure. Oh, sure. I was impacted, you know, employment-wise. You always wondered why, say, nuclear power couldn’t have been more, as a technology, couldn’t have been more fault-free, let’s say. It just had a few accidents, but the accidents were so significant. Because basically all you’re doing is using the nuclear to heat the water that goes, and the steam drives a turbine. Same thing you do with coal or natural gas or what-have-you. So, like, when I was at the national reactor testing station, we had many reactors there. Because, say, like the Army wanted to have small portable or remote reactors, because you could fuel them, put them in, say, the Arctic Circle, they’d run for years and years, and could be maintained by just a couple people. Franklin: Right, you wouldn’t have to keep trucking in fuel. Fix: Right, you wouldn’t have to ship in, wouldn’t have to have—yeah. It’s totally different dynamics, in terms of the tactical aspects of maintaining the facility. The same reason, or similar reason why you have the nuclear submarines. Franklin: Right. Fix: Nuclear-powered submarines. Franklin: So tell me about the occupational external dosimetry program. Fix: Well, after I had spent about five years in the environmental program here, then it was common practice there of my management to transfer professionals to other disciplines. So I think in about December of ’79 or so, I started here in ’74, and then ’79 I was transferred to the site-wide personnel dosimetry program. And that was very interesting, because, whereas the environmental surveillance program is kind of somewhat removed from operations, we kind of always gathering data, even though we write the official reports of the impact and everything, it’s kind of like after-the-fact. When I went to the external dosimetry program, we were really a part of the operation. We were a part of what would happen with, you know, doses where people actually working, say, yesterday, if we had a significant job, versus— And even though there I was primarily responsible for the dosimetry that would determine the official dose of record. We were responsible for the nuclear accident of personnel dosimetry. And actually interestingly we did the environmental dosimetry as well at that time. Because it was all part of the same type of technology. Franklin: And was this site-wide? Fix: Yes, site-wide. Franklin: Okay, so for every Hanford employee. Fix: Every Hanford employee. Everybody, both employees and visitors to the Site, all were required to wear dosimetry, and it served everybody. This is a program that, of course, had started with the very beginning of Hanford operations in the ‘40s, ’43, ’44 or whatever it was. And through time, there had been technological changes. So when I came here, it was common practice for every site to have designed its own dosimeters and its own technology reader systems to process these dosimeters. Because there really was no commercial source of equipment that could be used for this. Franklin: What types did Hanford have? Fix: What’s that? I’m sorry. Franklin: What types did Hanford have? Of dosimeter and reading? Fix: Well, they had actually, they had—about ’71, they introduced a new type of dosimetry called the thermoluminescent dosimeter. Again, this was a small crystals of salt that had the capability of responding to radiation, storing the signal, and then upon heating, would give off a light, give off a signal, in the form of light that could be measured that was indicative of the amount of radiation received. Franklin: And was that part of what you were working on as an intern? Fix: Well, that’s a great—you mean as a graduate student? Yeah. This thermoluminescent dosimetry was being used everywhere. At University of Washington, we used it also. Everybody used it. It was the replacement to film dosimetry. You know, you had these little crystals of salt that you could use that were just very handy. There’s quite a bit of physics that went into using these properly. But fundamentally it was sort of the latest technology at that time. Franklin: Okay. And what other kinds of equipment did Hanford—did you use to monitor? Because you mentioned Hanford had its own dosimeters and dosimeter process equipment. So what other types of equipment? Fix: Well, first of all, the dosimeters are really the after—they provide the official dose of record, but that’s really after-the-fact. When people go into the workplace, you’re not depending on a dosimeter to keep them safe. They go in with instruments, primarily instruments. People have knowledge of the work environment—typically they know what the hazards are. Now, as you probably know, that Hanford had a special workforce called the radiation protection monitors. Their whole job was to evaluate the work environment and accompany workers when they entered to make sure they were not taking undue risks using instruments. So instruments were always the number one thing. And one of the reasons this particular program involved working with this field was because you had to really make sure the dosimetry and the instrumentation were consistent. There’s a lot of science behind using the right instrument as well as using the right dosimetry. Because at Hanford we have many types of radiation. We have different types of radiation that have different energies. And they all may require different methods of measurement. So anyway, you know, maintaining this equipment and making sure it was accurate was my responsibility. And also we had the nuclear accident dosimetry. So I know, like, the first—I came to this program in December, and I had to spend two entire weekends out in December because there had been a situation where a worker reported that he had a high dose and saw a blue flash. So that involved a tremendous response by the contractors. I remember it happened on a Friday night. So we had the nuclear accident dosimeters at the facility. These are actually devices that are located at fixed positions in the facility. So we had to process all of those. And at that time we interfaced with the Site medical staff. So as soon as—actually, I should’ve said, the first clue on this was the dosimeter came in and was read very high. Not very—now, we don’t want to say very high, but certainly very unusually high; it wasn’t a normal dose. Franklin: Sure. It was above the— Fix: Above the action level. We had all sorts-- Franklin: Above the dose of record. Fix: Well, not the dose of record. Franklin: Oh, sorry. Fix: It was above the—we have all sorts of action levels. Certainly, we have the legal allowable, then below that then you have where you have to take action, et cetera. But anyway, this was unusually high. Wasn’t like, life threatening, but it was—so we immediately, you know, the Site response took over, and probably took him to, I’m sure we probably took him to the medical staff, had some blood drawn. You could take blood and have it analyzed, at that time, at Oak Ridge. But anyway, to make a long story short, none of this happened. I mean, it did—the person reported that there was a blue flash and that he had this high dose. But it turned out that the worker, after investigating and the contractor working all weekend, trying to resolve this situation, the person apparently—all the evidence was that he actually took his dosimeter and put it in like a baggie, dropped it down into the spent fuel pool to expose it either—I don’t know if he wanted to get some time off for New Year’s or—because this was happening at Christmas time. Anyway, I don’t think he had any idea what was going to happen, but sadly, we had all sorts of bits of information. This was very much like forensic science, because with this radiation, we knew what type of radionuclides were in the spent fuel, we knew what type of residual contaminants had gotten onto the exterior of the dosimeter. We could tell, essentially, almost exactly what this person had done. And of course once it was all put together, sadly, you know, he lost his job. Franklin: Sure. Fix: Anytime anybody did anything with the dosimetry to—anyway, that was an employment-ending activity. So, anyway, we worked all weekend on that, sadly. But that was, in the long-run that was good, because that was one of my responsibilities. It didn’t happen very often but we had to process those dosimeters. The physics of criticality in particular is very, very complicated. So you really have to make sure that the system works properly and you get the type of data you needed. But anyway, at the same time, we had an effort going on to adopt performance standards for dosimetry nationwide. It actually started years before, actually, decades earlier. But while I was—really become quite a common activity when I took this new position, and of course I was very supportive on performance standards as well. So, we worked on that. We actually made testimonies to Congress about—because there was complaints that if we enacted these performance standards, it put a lot of small processors out of business, et cetera, et cetera. So it’s always these tradeoffs between what was the better, greater good. But the performance standards were eventually adopted and they were quite rigorous in terms of their criteria and what was achievable. There were all sorts of tests done. So I eventually became chairman of the—so this involved a couple of activities. One was every two years you had to pass a performance test where they would take dosimeters that actually employers would wear, send them to a lab to expose to, say, three different type, four different—depends on how you add it up, but several different types of radiation at different does levels, totally blind to you. And then send them back in three rounds of testing, and you had to pass the performance test. Once you got the performance test results, if you passed, then you get an onsite programming appraisal, at least within the DOE system, by two technical experts. So then those results would then be sent to the oversight board to—I don’t know what all I have in here, but I mentioned this is my million-mile backpack from Delta for travel over the years. But I was basically they had the DOE lab accreditation program oversight board, so all the results then went to the board. And there was five of us. Then we would make recommendations whether to accredit them or not. It was a very important thing, because if you didn’t have an accredited program, you weren’t supposed to be able to do dosimetry. So it’s very significant. So anyway I got this nice plaque from the Department of Energy, this service award, because I was the very first chair of the DOELAP Oversight Board for personal dosimetry, which later became external. So I did that from ’86 to ’91. I was actually on the board for a lot longer. But I was just the chair for this particular time. So that was a particularly important award in my—or, recognition in my life from DOE Headquarters. So anyway, it was obviously a very relieved moment in my own personal history when the Hanford program achieved accreditation. Franklin: Sure. Fix: Because, you know, that was not a given. It was a very difficult test. Especially for a site like Hanford, because with plutonium, we had the low-energy photons from the plutonium and also the neutrons so it was not an easy test to pass. So anyway, that program involved a lot of challenges and so I eventually left that program. When I said at the beginning, we had to all maintain our own equipment, our own dosimeters, et cetera. Well, later in time, the commercial, and I guess partially because there was this performance standard, the commercial companies then had something to really focus on. And they eventually came up with technology and reader systems and dosimeter systems that were certainly, the performance was good enough to pass these standards and it was just much cheaper to buy a commercial system. So actually Hanford then implemented a commercially-based system in January of 1995. And at that time, I kind of had left—then I left the program at that point. Franklin: In 1995? Fix: Approximately. Because people were asking questions—were increasingly asking questions about the historical dosimetry at Hanford and elsewhere. I had—since I was responsible for the program, running the program, we were responsible for also going back and looking at the historical trends and patterns. The Hanford workers were an important component of the epidemiological study of the radiological effects on workers. The reason is because there was a lot of Hanford workers; they were employed early in the development of atomic energy; and Hanford had maintained excellent records. And the dosimetry seemed to always be of very good quality, historically. But there were still trends in data that looked kind of unusual where if you started looking at details of the dosimetry, there were some trends in that that people wanted some explanation of. They could be a lot of things. There could be a change in the technology of the dosimetry, or there could have been changes in calibrations, or they could’ve been changes in operations. You know, there could’ve been a cleanup operation or there could’ve been a reactor, could’ve been shut down or what-have-you. So myself and others got very involved in analyzing data, historical data, to provide to the epidemiological community who were evaluating the Hanford studies. So to make a long story short, I did a lot of the—quite a bit of this, partially while I was still a part of the dosimetry team. But then to support the Hanford worker epidemiological study, we did this. Then when that was—the people that were responsible for that program had done some of the epidemiological studies, then those studies were combined with other studies from other sites, like, notably in my case, Oak Ridge and Rocky Flats. So, because they had the problem of trying to—fundamentally, they were trying to determine was there an association with the rate of incidences with various types of cancer with radiation dose. And since, as you know, cancer occurs spontaneously, with or without Hanford. The question was, did Hanford increase the incidence of various types of cancers? And that was very difficult question to answer, epidemiologically. So there they were always trying to enhance their statistical precision, either in terms of trying to have, basically, in terms of trying to have more data. So Hanford, the studies at Hanford, the statistical precision wasn’t really quite adequate, wasn’t sufficient to detect that. So then they combined that with Oak Ridge and Rocky Flats. Still, there, they wanted more precision, so then that was eventually combined with what was called the Three Country Study, an international agency for research on cancer. That was combined with Canada and the United Kingdom. So I supported those studies. I was the—I don’t know what all I have in here, but I had—I was the chair of the international agency research on cancer dosimetry subcommittee at that time. And then we—did I mention then we took that study from the three countries and went on to do eleven countries in the world? Franklin: Oh, wow. Fix: Yeah, for the international study. So I was just the support, the dosimetry support. So the epidemiologists and biostatisticians from all these different residents from all these different countries and everybody would get this data. We would make judgments as to what dosimetry we thought had greater accuracy than others. For example, it was hard, historically, and it’s still hard even to this day to measure neutron radiation. While there’s many types of facilities that have no neutrons, Hanford—many facilities at Hanford did not have neutron radiation; some did. And so we got involved in supporting those studies. So that led—that’s probably why I got my million-mile thing, going—I got many trips to France and that, supporting these studies, which were widely published. Franklin: I see you have a nametag or a thing there with Cyrillic on it. Fix: Yeah, I haven’t gotten to that part. Well, actually, after—I’ll get to that right away. Franklin: Okay, sure, I was just curious. Fix: Yeah, well, actually, after I was doing this for the thing—for the epidemiologists and that, just trying to cover, quickly, my career. The first phase of my career really was the environmental part, which we talked about. The second part was really the Hanford Site dosimetry program, which we talked about. The third part of my career really had to do with sort of taking the data and applying it to different types of programs. One of those was the epidemiology studies, which I was involved in the Hanford program, then the three sites, then the three-country, and then the eleven-country for IRE. These were only kind of part-time efforts; these were not full-time efforts. And then I became involved—then I took over the role in the joint US-DOE/Russian Mayak worker study. Franklin: Okay. Fix: Which you’ve probably heard about? Franklin: I have. That’s going on today, right? Fix: Yes, it is. Franklin: Yeah, I’ve met—I don’t remember the gentleman’s name, but I— Fix: Yeah, Bruce Napier, probably. Franklin: Yes. Yeah. Fix: Yeah. Franklin: Yeah. I met him over the USTUR. Fix: Yeah. Well, when Bruce—originally, he was primarily responsible for the environmental part, because they had a lot of effluent from the Mayak operation, which is very similar to Hanford in terms of its scope of— Franklin: But they had more releases. Fix: Well, they had more and also but they didn’t have a river like the Columbia. Franklin: Oh. Theirs was slower and— Fix: And also they reposited a lot of it to a lake. Franklin: Yeah, and I don’t know if this is going to be apropos to you, but most of what I know about this is what I read from Kate Brown’s book, Plutopia, which I know had mixed reception among some folks here. But it’s very interesting, her coverage of how different the environmental conditions were in Mayak that led to much greater contamination. Fix: Yes, right. Well, that’s right. You know, when you had eight single-pass reactors running at Hanford and they’re dumping it into—first of all, they went to pools to let some of the radioactivity decline. But then eventually when it went into that big river, and all got sent downstream. Franklin: Sure. Fix: And Russia didn’t have that. But anyway, my job was not the environment. My job was for the workers. Just like we had done the study for IRE for the workers. Because the context was there that the workers should have the very highest doses of all. They’re working in the facility, they live in the environment. And they’re monitored. If anybody should show an effect, you should be able to pick it up with these workers. So I took over the role as the technical lead for the external dosimetry part, working with my Russian colleagues. So that led us to many trips to Russia and many studies. This is actually my name in Russian. You know, my nametag. You know, so? Franklin: Right, no, I can read that. Yeah, Djon Fix. Fix: So, I don’t know why, this is just a collection of things in here. I did this for several years, until we had a major publication special edition of Health Physics devoted to this particular—results from this program. Franklin: The US-Russia— Fix: US-Russia collaboration, right, for studying the Mayak workers— Franklin: How did you find working with your Russian colleagues? Fix: Well, first of all, they were—we worked with them long enough that we really developed some real personal ties. I mean, for example, the interpreters were very nice people to deal with. They knew more about American culture than I did. I mean, they knew all about—their main source of information, I believe, was American movies and American music. So they could name—they were just remarkable in being able to know singers and songs and movies, much more capably than I could, and I lived here. Franklin: Right. Fix: [LAUGHTER] But we were there long enough to see them come in as young interpreters and then get married and then have babies and then have toddlers, you know? So it was quite a nice experience from the human aspect. As far as the Russians, it took us a while to—it took, I think, working with the same team on both sides for them to develop a level of comfort with, say, at least the American approach. Our American scientific approach is that everything is checked and double-checked, and there’s no—you shouldn’t really have any personal—you shouldn’t feel defensive if people are checking your work. What you really care about is that it’s accurate. And I think the Russians initially were not too inclined to have us checking their work, but that was our job, was to check everything. So after a few years, I think it all worked out really well. Our primary job—and actually, this was true throughout my career, my primary job was typically always writing everything up. Writing it up and letting other people check it. Anyway, for the Russians, we did the same thing. It was Russian workers, a Russian facility, and we were there just to mentor them and I guess to represent the DOE’s interest in this work. The reason that DOE was there is because, generally speaking, the impact on workers from American facilities was, at best, controversial. It was never a clear answer to that question. Well, the Russian workers could’ve gotten as much dose in one year as the American workers got in their entire lifetime. So you really were going to a situation where there ought to be some impacts. Not only did that, they had some accidents with workers. So that actually where they actually did have the medically-exhibited elements of radiation syndrome. So most of those were removed from our—from the epidemiologic study, because they’re really more like an accident evaluation. Franklin: Right, you were looking at the dose that someone would get from normal work in Russia. Fix: That’s right, that’s right. Which—that’s correct. Interestingly, the Russians—because we had what were called these hidden cities. So we would go to the hidden city where Mayak was located. These are interesting experiences, because when you enter these towns, you need to only—you can only enter by imitation. Because you go through a—they know how to really have a fence or a border. Because you go through an outer one, and you sit between two barbed wire—you know, with razor wire on the top, with guards walking back and forth with AK-47s. Nobody’s cracking any jokes. So anyway, but the city inside that, they had records for everything. All your family, all your medical exposures, any medical abnormalities you may have will be part of your personal record, as well as all the occupational information. So it’s really a goldmine; it doesn’t really exist, probably, maybe outside, in another country, outside of that type—where you have a captive city, all these records, all the records are maintained, and it be available for study. So we worked with the Mayak facility there as well as what was called the Southern Urals Biophysical Institute, to come up with these studies. Franklin: Is that another secret city? In the Southern Urals— Fix: No, that’s the institute inside, that was located within the—at the hidden city. They’re no longer hidden now, but at one time. Meaning that they would never show them on maps of the area. Franklin: Right, and you couldn’t get in without a really good reason for being there. Fix: Well, we had to be invited by the Russian—it had to be approved by the Russian government. And actually because of politics going back and forth between the United States and Russia, we weren’t always allowed to go into the city. Sometimes we had to—our team had to stay outside of the city, and then they would come out and meet with us scientifically, for the scientific work. But anyway, that’s just part of international politics, I guess. But anyway—let’s see, where was I? So we went on that, and when I eventually left that program when we achieved all these major publications. Because I was getting a little bit further along in my career at that time, and that’s a lot of work to go to Russia. When we land in Moscow, we have to—Russia is a very big country; it has eleven time zones. So once we landed in—we usually landed at Frankfurt, and then at Frankfurt, then you have essentially the same remaining flight that’s going across the United States, four more time zones. There, we had four more time zones from Frankfurt. And then we had to get on a bus and ride for two hours. So it was—you know, you were very tired by the time you got to these facilities. So it was nice working with the Russians. They really developed—you had to be there long enough, I think they initially were very suspicious of you, but I wouldn’t say that that’s any different, you know, if you go and investigate—if you go there like as part of this DOELAP program I was talking about, basically site experts like say the Hanford Site expert and Los Alamos Site expert would go to Oak Ridge to evaluate the Oak Ridge program, there’s plenty of opportunity there for sensitivity. But it all went very smoothly because I think everybody believed in the benefits of the program. Franklin: Right, Well, I mean, it kind of makes sense with the Russians, right? I mean, we were enemies for 40 years and we created all these weapons out of fear of each other, and I guess—I mean, it seems like it’s not hard to imagine, if the roles were reversed, Russian scientists—Americans being very defensive about Russians questioning their research method or their research. Or at least that kind of, that initial— Fix: Well, no, I agree with you, Robert. Even—there’s a little bit even more there to that, I think. First of all, the Russians were in a communist society, and where being a member of the communist party was really a very important thing. They couldn’t always trust their neighbors, let alone trust a foreigner. And the other thing is, is interestingly, where we used to go to work near, Yekaterinburg was the main city where we flew to, that’s where Gary Powers was shot down. In the U-2 plane. I’ve always wondered how would Americans feel if there was a high-flying Russian airplane flying over the United States? I mean, we have—I mean, this is just a question of opinion, because I’m sure we would say we have good reasons to be looking at—they’re not an open society; we’re an open society. Russians can live here. We can’t really live there in Russia. So this is a very complicated thing, but you can certainly understand some sensitivity. But anyway, they handled it very well, and amazingly we were in Russia at this—we used to go there and basically stay at what’s called a danya dacha. It’s a dacha, it’s like a country estate. Franklin: Yeah. Fix: Type of thing. Really was not that nice, but it was comparatively a good place to be. But anyway, when the United States invaded Iraq, we were actually in Russia. Franklin: You mean the ’91 invasion? Fix: Yeah. No— Franklin: Okay, the first Gulf War. Fix: The one where we invaded—no, not the first one. The second—not from—the younger Bush invasion. Franklin: Oh, the second Gulf War. Fix: The second one, yeah. We were actually there. Franklin: Oh, okay. Fix: And on the Russian TV, we could see all of this going on, but we couldn’t understand what was happening. The Russians would very politely not really say—they could only really ask the interpreters. But I was very impressed with how much many of the Russian scientists how much they could do in English. Because we certainly weren’t talking in Russian. We always had to have interpreters. Anyway, it was a good experience overall. You know, initially, it was kind of stressful, because we really had a mission which was we wanted to get the study done, we wanted to verify that the methods were methods that we would agree with. And so we eventually were able to achieve all those things. But it was a challenge. Franklin: So that leads me to a couple questions. You mentioned that in America, the link between workers and cancer was—what did you call it? You didn’t say ambiguous, but you said it was— Fix: Controversial. Franklin: Controversial. What did you find in Russia in regards— Fix: Well, those studies are still being put together and published. First of all, you’ve got to gather the datasets; you’ve got to validate the dosimetry; you have to decide if you want to use all of the population or a subset. You know, like I mentioned these workers that were exposed to very high levels, you may not want to include those. You may want to put them in a separate study. The other thing is, is some of the epidemiological studies, at least historically, really used the recorded dose of record being the dosimeter. Because, like for example at Hanford, everybody had a dosimeter. You had a measurement for everybody. You had people had very little dose, and you had people that had a lot more dose, depending on what their jobs were. But within that population of people, you also had some workers that were exposed to, that had intakes of plutonium or other nuclides. Really those people are actually, maybe should be in another category, because not only did they have external radiation, they have internal radiation. So there’s many ways to slice this data, trying to figure out what data is best to use. And then there’s those that have the neutron radiation. Certainly some workers, like the plutonium workers have neutrons, they have intakes—some have intakes—and they also have external. So that was our role; that was kind of my role as a dosimetrist supporting these epidemiologists to say, well, you know, I really wouldn’t put a lot of—as far as identifying what was the higher quality data, I might pick people that only worked at reactors, for example. They only get exposed primarily to high energy gamma radiation. They’re in this facility, it’s a huge facility with all this shielding. Anything that can get through that shielding, the dosimeter’s going to measure relatively very accurately. So we would go through and analyze various scenarios as to what would be the better data. But to answer your question, I don’t think those data have been published fully yet. Franklin: Okay, so it’s still ongoing. Fix: Yeah, yeah, the study’s still ongoing. Franklin: How did the Russian program differ—dosimetry program differ from the American dosimetry program, if at all? Fix: Well, I’m trying to remember exactly. Well, first of all, they’re always behind us a little bit as far as like, they used film dosimetry for a very long time. A lot longer than we did. I’m not sure if there was any thermoluminescent dosimetry data in what we analyzed. It was all—there’s nothing really wrong with film, but it is—in some ways, film can actually be superior, but it does have—in general, it’s not as good for broad, like if you’re exposed to many different types of radiation. It has challenges with neutron dosimetry, for example. Franklin: Oh, okay, okay. Fix: So it has a special different type of film that’s used for neutrons. It’s called neutron track emulsion. So I would say that the data was—I think the record keeping and the use of the dosimetry was well done, but as far as the technology, it was probably—they were just getting, I think, getting to the point of implementing thermoluminescent dosimetry when we were there, I think, as I recall. Franklin: Oh, okay, so in that regard, then, they were a couple decades behind. Fix: I would say so, yes. Franklin: Oh, okay. Interesting. So-- Fix: I wouldn’t say “behind”; I would say using different, older technology. Franklin: Oh, okay, okay, sure, sure, yeah. Sorry, I didn’t want to—I know phrasing’s important, so I appreciate that. Fix: Yeah. Franklin: So when did you—so what was next, after the Russian dosimetry program? Fix: Well, actually, I was getting to be about 66 or so, and I know I decided that I’d had it with the Russians because one day—I’d suffered from arrhythmias. You know, I got a pacemaker when I was about 45. So I was pulling my suitcase at 2:30 in the morning through the snow in Russia to the Yekaterinburg airport. And I was kind of falling behind the other three or four members of our team, and I was—because you kind of get kind of tired if you have the arrhythmia problem. So I thought, jeez, this is ridiculous, I’m going to have to quit this and I’m kind of at a good place to quit. So I decided there that was my last trip to Russia. Fortunately, we’d already had these publications and there were people to take on whatever my responsibilities were. So I left it at that point. And then I went on, as you may know, around 2000, Congress—another role that I had was Congress, you know, passed the DOE Worker’s Compensation Act? The Energy Employees’ Occupational Illness Act? Franklin: The EEOICPA? Fix: Yeah. That one. Well, I was very involved in that, because I’d been doing this work on dosimetry construction for the epidemiologists and we’d been publishing documents on how to dosimetry construction for—and how to— Franklin: Yeah. [UNKNOWN] Fix: And how to take in considerations of energy and angular dependence because, you know, in a dosimetry program, you had the measurement—you really only know what did the dosimeter get. Because that’s what you’re measuring it with. You really don’t know what the body’s getting. So since cancer is organ-dependent, typically—I mean, you have particular types of cancer, usually it’s organ-dependent. Like leukemia, it would be bone marrow, et cetera, et cetera. So we’d done a variety of work to try to take into consideration the energy and the angular dependence on the dosimetry to come up with better estimates of organ dose, because that’s really what epidemiologists needed. And when they came out with the energy workers’ employment compensation act, which it’s been called, I guess, some of our publications they thought, well, this is a way we can measure organ doses. Because we’re talking about cancer for the workers, we can use these methods to estimate organ doses for the workers in different ways. So at least our stuff got of interest to NIOSH who was responsible for dosimetry construction and also in 1995 the Congress had mandated that DOE transfer their epidemiologic studies to NIOSH. So I’d already had a relationship with NIOSH, even on like the IRAC studies, later. Initially it was DOE then it transferred to NIOSH. So I got very involved in the NIOSH-DOE worker. And when I left Battelle, when I reached 60 I left Battelle and went to work for Dade Moeller and Associates— Franklin: An NV5— Fix: Huh? Franklin: An NV5 company, right? Fix: Now it is, yeah. But at that time, it was Dade Moeller and Associates. So I went to work for them. And even when I was still doing the DOE program. So there I became the principal external dosimetrist for the NIOSH for external dosimetry, but working with many other people and it was the NIOSH researchers. I must say, all throughout my career, you know, I was just one person that—we always had small teams, we were always working together, everybody—my job, usually, typically, was writing it up. And then everybody else would tear it part. And I’d write it up again. And go through a few cycles and then we had something everybody felt good about. So I did that for several years. And there I got to travel to many DOE sites, because every site needed a technical basis document to do dosimetry construction. So I got to travel to, you know, many DOE sites throughout the nation and prepare these documents. So anyway, that was kind of the end of my career after a while. The NIOSH program was a friend, colleague of mine. I went to part-time status in 2011 and in March of 2013, a colleague of mine that I worked with for a long time, you know, there was some kind of cutback, some reduction in funding for that particular project, as I recall. And he decided that he’d just as soon retire and leave the money, whatever money that was available, make sure it was available for younger people. And I thought, well, I’d do the same thing, and we both left. Cleaned out our offices and went on to different things. Franklin: Finally retired? Fix: Yeah. And I had to finish a paper that I was—for the national—well, it used to be the National Commission on Radiological Protection in the United Kingdom. They changed their name to something. Anyway, the same group though. But they wanted the paper written on their epidemiologic study on their recommendation then. I didn’t want to do it but eventually I did do it. Because all the people that could’ve done it better than me seemed to be occupied doing other things and they weren’t able to do it. So once I finished that document, then that’s when I was totally done. Franklin: Okay. Fix: That happened in March of 2013, and then that was the end of my career. Franklin: I’m sure you’re still keeping busy. Fix: Oh, yeah, now. I’m really not doing anything professionally but I’m certainly doing a lot as far as taking care of my body and exercising and going to the local Fun, Fit and Over Fifty club, which is a great club. Doing yoga. So kind of a different perspective. Franklin: Great. I just have one last kind of closing question. Fix: Uh-huh. Franklin: And that’s, what would you—I have one last closing question, then I guess we could show, if you want to show any of the plaques, we could do that and you could talk about those. Fix: Yeah. Franklin: My one last closing question is what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford or living in Richland during the Cold War? And after. Fix: Well, I think I would stress being a student of science. Science is just so remarkable, and Hanford’s just one particular aspect of science that had to do with nuclear energy or nuclear—I say it had to do with nuclear, radiological sciences. But that’s such a broad thing, I mean, you can talk about the stars, cosmic radiation, terrestrial radiation, studying the functions of the human body and medical research. My whole life has just been so amazing, because of the technology. I would just encourage anybody who loves science—I mean, you can always question maybe the politics, but the science is universal. So it’s just been a great career. Franklin: Great. Fix: Really. Franklin: Well, thanks, thank you, Jack. So the best way—so, if we could show them, we need to get the camera here. Fix: Well, this is my one for the DOE-Russian study. I didn’t know which ones I had here, but— Franklin: What we’ll do is we’ll move this. Okay. Fix: This is my role on the Russian as US team lead for the Russian program. I don’t know if the reflections is— Franklin: That’s not too bad. No, that’s okay. Victor Vargas: There’s a shadow. Fix: I guess you can’t really see that very well. Yeah. Franklin: US Team Leader for External Dosimetry. Fix: Yeah. Franklin: September 2007. Great. Fix: Yeah, I got that from them. It was very nice of them to do that. Franklin: Yeah. Fix: And I think you already have the other ones I have. Franklin: Is that from the Health Physics Society? Fix: Yeah, well, I have a bunch—actually, I was chair of the other role I forgot to mention was I was chair of the Health Physics Society standards committee. I mentioned my commitment to standards, like the standards for that, but I actually worked for, I think I was, for eight years, I was on the committee and then I became chair of the committee. So then I was the committee chair. Then after this, actually, near the end of my career, I actually went out to the international standards organization. Franklin: Oh, wow. Fix: Yeah, so I went to meetings in Paris and Vienna, representing the DOE interest in radiation protection for what’s called Technical Committee 85 Scientific Committee 2, which means nothing, but anyway, it has to do with this one small area. International standards are something that’s very important to all of the world, probably other than the United States. We’re kind of sitting over here and the rest of the world really relies on these international standards. And so do we. If we want to market goods, internationally. Franklin: Sure, sure. Did you have anything—any other— Fix: Well, no, I don’t want to bore people with all of these. I’ve shown those particular ones. I do have a number of health physics-related. Franklin: Like your Herbert M. Parker award. Fix: Yeah, I was very fortunate to receive that and as you know, Herb Parker is, you know— Franklin: Kind of a legend in the health physics world. Fix: He’s a legend and a person that really understood the importance of dosimetry and record keeping. So I was very fortunate to receive that from my colleagues. Franklin: We actually have a painting of Herb Parker in our office, framed, that was given to us. But it’s good. He sits over our coffee pot and watches over us. Fix: Yeah, I’ve only—I don’t think the rest of them are really—they just have to do with— Franklin: It’s totally your choice. Fix: Yeah, I don’t think the rest of them are really worth—I don’t know where my—oh, this is my certification one. This shows a very old person, these are all my recertifications as a health physicist. Franklin: And when do all those start, from-- Fix: 1977, I think. Franklin: Oh, founded 1960. Fix: No, these are all my accreditations. I can’t really function as a certified health physicist without being recertified every four years. Franklin: Oh, I see. Fix: So it shows a very old fellow. Franklin: You just put in your dues. Fix: Yup, that’s right. Franklin: Well, great, well, thank you so much, Jack. It was a really illuminating interview. Thank you for putting up with my limited knowledge of science and health physics. I think you did a great job explaining what it is that you did and the importance of it. So thank you. Fix: Yeah. Glad to be here. Thank you, Robert. Franklin: Yeah, thank you, okay. Yeah, that was really-- Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:23:21 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 9985kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview Hanford Lab Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 55 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 44 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Jack Fix Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Jack came to the Hanford site in 1969 as an intern and built his career at Hanford labs. He received an AEC Fellowship and worked with thermoluminescent dosimetry. Ultimately expanded the field of Medical Radiation Physics. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 03/30/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F39d03f0487c714c2a40d8c325d3d92b7.JPG 66034390ea94cc8b347e1ed88f62672f Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed John G. Garcia Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound 0:00:00 Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with John Garcia on May 22, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with John about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? 0:00:19 John Garcia: John G. Garcia. J-O-H-N. G. G-A-R-C-I-A. Franklin: Okay, great. So, John, tell me how and why you came to the area to work for the Hanford Site. 0:00:34 Garcia: A friend of mine that I met in Fort Knox, Kentucky, he and his wife moved back out here. They were originally from the Sunnyside area. And he got a job at Hanford, more or less following in his mom’s and dad’s footsteps. He was a welder. So he told me they were going to restart PUREX and PFP and he got me in that good old-fashioned paper application. So I filled it out and mailed it in, and then I drove out here all by myself in August of 1982. I wasn’t here long, and I called the employment office. In the meantime, I found—I had a job picking grapes for Welch’s grape juice and other more or less temporary jobs. 0:01:26 Then they decided to hire people for the restart of PUREX and PFP. It was about 60 or 70 men and women. According to my tribal knowledge, it was the biggest hire of women and minorities in the history of Hanford. They trained us, you know, more or less from the ground up. There were people that were college graduates, there were people that were high school dropouts, and everything in between. So they taught us about safety, about radiological safety, criticality safety, and how to work the process. When our clearances came in—you had to have either an L or a Q, Q being the highest, to work at PFP or at PUREX. When they came in, then you got to go into the building. You had somebody that mentored you for a while. 0:02:33 In December of ’83, that’s when they started the Plutonium Finishing Plant up for real. We were using real life plutonium. What the idea was was extract plutonium from waste products or from the processed fuel rods that came from the reactors, primarily N. And then they would take that to PUREX, separate out some of the uranium from the plutonium and it would go over to PFP and get concentrated. They would make hockey-puck-sized—what we called buttons. It would fit inside of a tuna fish can. About two-thirds of the nuclear arsenal came through PFP in the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. 0:03:29 So most of us had no clue how it worked. But we learned it. We made lots of mistakes. It was sometimes chaotic. [LAUGHTER] But we got through it. 0:03:34 Franklin: How old were you when you came out? Garcia: I was 30. Franklin: What had you been doing before? 0:03:51 Garcia: Back in Kentucky where I met my friends, I worked at like a grocery store for the military. They called them commissaries. Franklin: Yeah, like a PX. Garcia: Yeah. Well, a commissary is like the foodstuff. PX is like the hardwares and jewelry. So his wife was in the Army, so they invited me to come out here. I lived with them in Sunnyside for eight or nine months. Then I got the Hanford job and moved to Richland. 0:04:24 Franklin: Where were you from originally? Garcia: Kentucky. Fort Knox, Kentucky. I grew up all over the country, and a few places in Europe. So moving around was no big deal to me. Franklin: Were you a military— Garcia: Brat, yeah. Franklin: A military brat. 0:04:41 Garcia: I tried to join the Army—that’s another story. I tried to join the Army and the Air Force during the Vietnam War. And I couldn’t see the eye chart well enough to pass the physical. So I decided, go to Plan B, and that was to make nuclear weapons. [LAUGHTER] Garcia: As it turned out. 0:05:02 Franklin: Yeah. What did you know about Hanford before you drove out here? Garcia: Just from what my friends told me and a small article in the World Book Encyclopedia, that it was a World War II project, and that’s pretty much all the article said in the encyclopedia. And what my friends told me is, yeah, this is where they make plutonium. Plutonium! And so they’re going to start it up again and they’re going to hire a lot of people. Not a whole lot. I learned a lot on the fly. 0:05:37 That was the—I wasn’t a science major or any—in school. I never went to college much. But history was my thing. So here we are, surrounded by history at Hanford. All those old buildings. I was looking for an apartment in Richland, and I drove through there, and it was like E.T. Home, home! Because it looked like military housing. So I felt more comfortable there and I never looked in Kennewick or Pasco. It was Richland. And they had a bus system that would get you there no matter what. Rain or shine, sleet or snow. I lived in Richland about 35 years. Just recently moved to Pasco after I retired. 0:06:23 There’s a picture of N that they took when it was running in 1944 that’s got some steam plumes and all the buildings that are there. That was in the article in the World Book Encyclopedia. It was only a paragraph or two about it. It was still running; it was still secret. So they couldn’t say much. 0:06:50 Franklin: Right. Let’s see here. What were your first impressions of the area when you came? Garcia: Of Hanford? Franklin: Yeah, of Tri-Cities and Hanford. 0:07:00 Garcia: I drove with some friends from Tacoma to Pullman. We came down that hill. There used to be a restaurant, the Silver Dollar, and there’s a long stretch of road that comes out of Moxee and Yakima, and it was all lit up. It was at night. I said, what is that? Oh, that’s Hanford. And that’s about all they would say. So little did I know, that would be my future. Like I said, it was that history from World War II and the Cold War. And I knew this area—I’d been through here before—was desert. There was dry, sagebrush, cheatgrass. It wasn’t the spectacular part of the Evergreen State, the green part. I knew it was dry and barren. But I was impressed by the Columbia River going through all of this and it was dry almost right up to the shore. 0:08:00 Franklin: Where all onsite did you work? Garcia: Let’s see. I worked for 20 years at PFP. I worked about a year or so at PUREX. Worked a few months at Tank Farms, one of the Tank Farms. I worked a little while, a few long months, at what they called True Retrieval. They were digging up waste drums and solid, big, giant boxes full of waste. Franklin: Was that at one of the burial grounds? 0:08:34 Garcia: Yeah. That’s where they would go and dig up stuff out of the burial grounds and then reprocess it and store it in all those big barns across the street from it. And then my last seven or eight years was with MSA, or its forerunner, doing a lot of things. They’re like the—they take care of the electrical grid, they take care of the cranes that work in the Tank Farms, mostly, surveying offices, roads, vegetation, animals. I did a lot of that at the end. That was a nice job. I had a nice little cubicle all my own and worked at my own pace. It was a good job. 0:09:19 Franklin: Oh, wow. So you started as a nuclear process operator. Garcia: Yeah. Franklin: Right? At PFP. Garcia: Yes. 0:09:24 Franklin: And can you describe a typical work day as a nuclear process operator? Garcia: Well, not long after they started up, we went to shift. X, Y, Z: days, swings and graveyard. So that was something new to me, although I’d worked nights on the grape harvest. We’d come in and we’d get put on our, what we call SWPs, the white cotton clothes. We’d tape on booties and surgeon’s gloves, two pair. Put on a pair of canvas gloves, and we’d go to our office—or the control room. The manager would tell us, this is what we’re going to do today. This is where you’re assigned. It wasn’t exactly a pre-job, which in later years, really took hold. It was more just the assignments. That was pretty much how they did it every day. 0:10:20 The first part of the PFP experience was the solvent extraction part. Getting the plutonium in nitrate solution concentrated to about 300 grams per liter. Then they would store that. After they got enough of it made, then that’s what they would use to make the buttons. So that was a different thing. They shut down the solvent extraction then we’d concentrate and get some training on the button production. We could make about, on a good shift, about six or eight buttons a shift. If things went wrong, not so many. 0:11:00 But I changed. The first buttons we made, I reached into the glovebox and looked at it. They were about the size of the palm of your hand. They’re a gun metal gray, and they’re warm to the touch. Because there’s so much activity. It’s about 99.9% plutonium, which is what they want. And then eventually they would use that to hone the spheres that went into the weapons. And I looked at this button, and I thought, what have I done? I have sold my soul to the devil. Because this thing could kill millions and billions of people. I put it down. 0:11:41 Then I started looking for another angle. That’s when I got into health physics protection. It’s had a number of different names, but it’s pretty much the same job, setting radiation dose rates for workers, contamination checks, and a million other things. So the snarky answer I made up for my relatives and other people is, I protect workers, the environment, and the public from the detrimental effects of ionizing radiation. Because people asked me what I did, and it could take a long time to explain it without giving away too many secrets. So that was the nutshell answer I came up with. Franklin: That’s pretty good. 0:12:29 Garcia: Thank you. And then later on, they stole my idea and I read that in a textbook. At first, we were radiation monitors, then we were RPTs, radiation protection technologists. Then we got into health physics technologists. 0:12:43 Franklin: Yeah. And that was your way of kind of distancing yourself from directly participating in the production of the weapons-grade— 0:12:55 Garcia: Yeah. I knew I needed a job that paid well and had benefits. And I took less money to do it. I wasn’t married, so I had nobody to account for. So it fit my political philosophy a lot more. And it wasn’t unheard of for somebody to get out of operations and get into radiation protection. But it wasn’t common. But yeah. I was glad I did it. I felt a lot better. And my radiation exposure went down to next to nothing. Franklin: Right. 0:13:34 Garcia: The first two-and-a-half years or so, you know, my exposure was—you know, not life-threatening, but enough to—yeah. And we would have a meeting and the boss would say, well, if we don’t stop doing this, and if we don’t get this done, we’re all going down the road. But I think what he meant was, he was going down the road. So we’d do better, and still make mistakes. And I just got tired of hearing it. It didn’t motivate me. So I said, well, I’m going to find a job I could maybe take elsewhere. 0:14:08 But working at a reactor, a power reactor, like Energy Northwest or somewhere else, that’s a different ballgame. It’s way different. They’re a lot more educated, they’re a lot more talented, and they’re a lot more independent. We were just sort of side-by-side with the operators. At first, in the old days, they looked to the RMs for guidance and protection. But later on, operations sort of ruled the roost. They weren’t interested, so much, in what you had to say. But still it was important what dose rates you were having or the contamination you might encounter. 0:14:53 Franklin: When you said you could produce—was it six to eight buttons a shift— Garcia: Yeah. Franklin: --if things went right; you said, fewer if things could go wrong. What kind of things would complicate the process? 0:15:08 Garcia: Valve leaks, pipe leaks, just like counting leaks, like, were we supposed to have this much material? We only have that much, and then they’d have to look for it. Just breakdowns, mostly mechanical breakdowns. Sometimes in the room, there were the constant air monitors. They were sampling the air, and it had an alarm set point. It had a detector inside of it, and if enough plutonium got on the air sample filter, it would alarm. It would be a red flashing light and a ringing bell. It got your attention. 0:15:45 So you’d have to evacuate the room, because nine times out of ten, you weren’t wearing a respirator. So you had to go out of the room, and then go back—make a plan, and go back on respiratory protection and clean it up. Plutonium oxide is real flighty. It’s almost like alive. You’d have a little bit here and you’d wipe it up, and some of it would go over there. So you were chasing it down. And multiply that by a big room. So that was one of the problems. As well as an internal deposition problem. So that was probably the biggest hold up, was if there was a leak in a glovebox or a bag, then they would seal the material out in like an industrial-strength seal-a-meal. If it sprung a leak, then you’d have to clean it up. Because you couldn’t work effectively with a respirator on. You couldn’t see as well, and it’s a real stressor on the human body. 0:16:42 Franklin: Right, and very hot, too. Garcia: Yeah, you’d sweat up a storm, break your seal and, yeah. You had to pass a physical every year. Part of it was you’d put on a respirator and you had some sensing tubes in it coming out of it. You’d do, turn your head around, read catchy phrases that’d move all the muscles around in your face, to make sure you were getting an adequate seal. And they had you know, just like canisters that would, the particulates, then they had fresh air, then they had SCBA. And the more of that, was more protection. Franklin: What’s the SCBA? Garcia: It’s S—well, that’s what we called it. It was like, on your back like you would wear for scuba diving. Franklin: Oh, right, right. 0:17:33 Garcia: Yeah. That afforded you a lot of protection, but more mobility. The other type was the fresh air, and that was on a hose that connected to your mask. But you know, you had the risk of breaking the connection in the hose, or somebody would step on the hose and things like. And you’d be dragging this hose around wherever you went. So the SCUBA, I don’t know if you could maybe get 45, 50 minutes out of it. But you had mobility. But when the alarm went off, it was time to go and probably get another bottle. But I’d say probably 80% of my time was on the canister. In the old days, they had a single canister, looked like a World War I gas mask. And then later on they got more modern. But it wasn’t the place to—I thought I was bulletproof. Come to find out, I wasn’t bulletproof. 0:18:30 Franklin: So after the being a nuclear process operator at PFP, you moved into being a health physics tech. Garcia: Mm-hmm. Franklin: Right? And that was mostly at PUREX? Or no, PFP. Garcia: Most of it was at PFP. PUREX, Tank Farms, and the other MSA job, the True Retrieval. 0:18:52 Franklin: Could you describe a typical work day as an HPT? Garcia: Just depending on what you were assigned to. You could be assigned to covering the crane maintenance people. You know, those big giant things, that lift up cover blocks that weighed tons or moving equipment around. You had a lot of independence with that. Your boss wasn’t looking over your shoulder all the time. And he would go meet with like the crane operators, and so, what are you guys doing? Sometimes they did and sometimes they didn’t. So it was different enough everyday but it was similar everyday not to be taken by surprise all the time. 0:19:36 The first thing you would do is you’d come in and you’d set up your instruments. You’d make sure they were in calibration, you made sure they worked right. And you would do a source check with radioactive disks and you’d make sure that you were in your parameters for your instrumentation. Because that’s what it was all about. You were nothing without your instruments. My first mentor, he said, John, don’t go anywhere, in a building or anywhere, without some kind of instrument. Because then what good are you? You might as well be a fencepost. So I always, whatever I did, wherever—I always had instruments, then backups to the instruments. Because you could get pretty far afield and you’d break one or it’d go bad somehow and you would, instead of driving ten miles to go get another one, you’d better have another one in your truck. 0:20:31 Franklin: What kinds of instruments would you use for monitoring? Garcia: There was a homemade invention developed at Hanford called a CP. Franklin: A cutie pie. 0:20:43 Garcia: A cutie pie. A lot of the nomenclature for the instruments and almost everything else was secrecy. The CP was pretty much, looked the same from when they invented it. They modified some. It had a cylinder about maybe four or five inches in diameter, about four inches, five inches long. And the radiation would go into the cylinder and it would ionize the air in the cylinder, then it would move a needle. Franklin: Right, you’d kind of point it at like— Garcia: Yeah, or do it from the side, yeah. Franklin: From the side. 0:21:16 Garcia: It had two different kinds, for beta and for gamma, you could take this window off. It made of some plastic-y looking material. Then underneath that was Mylar, it looked a lot like real thin aluminum foil. Then that was for radiation. There were other kinds for that. Then there was what we call a poppy, for alpha. Then there was a GM, a Geiger Mueller. That was for beta-gamma. It looked like a lollipop, only bigger. And it had a screen and the radiation would go through— Franklin: Right, it had a probe. Garcia: Right, a probe. Franklin: We have examples of all of these in our collection. Garcia: Okay. 0:21:58 Franklin: And so the alpha was used—the poppies were primarily to monitor plutonium. Garcia: Mm-hmm. 0:22:05 Franklin: Right? What’s the difference between the CP and the GM? Why would one—you know, they both measure beta-gamma. What was each one good at? Garcia: The saturation point for a GM was pretty low. You could peg it and it wasn’t good anymore to you. It wasn’t made for setting a dose rate; it was to find contamination. Franklin: I see. 0:22:28 Garcia: The CP was for dose rates. And all the dose rates you set and the contamination found was a legal record. We’d have to write what we call a survey report, after every job or after every day. And the dose rates you wrote down, and you signed your name to it. They’re still on file somewhere, probably in a cold storage place in Seattle. All that stuff is a legal record and it’s been used in litigation. So they really—as time went on, you had to write your survey report correctly, because it had ramifications beyond just that day’s work. Franklin: Yeah. Yeah. 0:23:11 Garcia: One of the—the coolest job I had was for about six years I surveyed tumbleweeds all over the Site. From Yakima to the Wye Barricade and everywhere in between. Because they would go—the taproot can go about 20 feet, and they would get into contamination, being a very primitive plant. They’re looking for calcium. So cesium and strontium, yeah, that’s just as good to the tumbleweed. And they would soak it up. Because they only live about a year, they would get into the root primarily, and they would break off and roll around. So we would survey the root, the stem, and if they were contaminated—and maybe 3% were—we’d put that in a special truck and then they would take that to ERDF and bury those. 0:24:02 But the rest of them, they would put in a regular old white garbage truck-looking thing and take that to a pit. After they got enough of them, they would burn them. And you’ve never seen a fire till you’ve seen a tumbleweed fire. You could be 100 yards away and still feel the heat. They get pretty hot. I thought maybe they could make starter sticks out of them for campers. They never found anything useful for a tumbleweed. 0:24:32 That was a good job. I got to see a lot of stuff. Especially as an HPT. And in that particular assignment, a lot of places that other people never went to, didn’t have a chance to go to. Because they were stuck in their little facility and couldn’t get out. Franklin: So you’d kind of go out into the natural environment. Garcia: Yeah. 0:24:53 Franklin: Did you ever find much evidence, artifacts from the pre-Manhattan Project settlers-- Garcia: Well— Franklin: --that were evicted? 0:25:00 Garcia: Well, yeah. Yeah. But pretty much that had been cleaned up, and we knew better than to mess with it. We just left it in place. We might tell our manager, he might tell somebody, you know, they found this, this tool or coin or something. But most of it was pretty gone. We never went much into the old town site. A few times, but mostly the tumbleweed search was around Tank Farms. Because they didn’t want contaminated tumbleweeds blowing into the Tank Farms and creating a problem. But yeah we went to a lot of places. 0:25:38 Franklin: What was the most challenging aspect of your work at Hanford? Garcia: Probably convincing workers that I was there for their best interest. Sometimes they would disagree or want to fight or just were stubborn. And their managers, besides. Because it was production versus safety. Even though they may preach and talk, yeah, safety over production, that wasn’t always the case. They were under pressure to produce the plutonium or to get so much stuff cleaned up or whatever. I could see their point, but at the same time, I never had to put myself between them and harm’s way to protect them. But that was probably the biggest challenge. 0:26:33 Being an introvert, for the most part, I had to have a different personality at Hanford than I did at home or anywhere else. And it was exhausting. I had to like, grr. Some people, it didn’t faze them because they were an extrovert all the time. We even had a few patrolmen, when they cut back on the number of patrolmen, who transferred into radiation protection. They had, for most of them, that worked perfectly, because they were used to chewing people out and trying to straighten people out. And I, you know, I would try to be diplomatic, if not polite, trying to tell people what kind of mistake or what ramifications it might have. Sometimes they would listen sometimes not. 0:27:21 So it was—because from what I understand, people that are from 18 to 25—don’t take this personally—they think they are bulletproof. That’s why a young man will get off a landing craft and run onto the beach in northern France. Because they don’t think anything’s going to happen to them. And peer pressure. And a lot of these guys I worked with, that was their age frame, and they thought they were bulletproof. They weren’t going to get contaminated, they weren’t going to get internal deposition. But a lot of them did. Franklin: Right, they just wanted to make some money. Garcia: Yeah. Franklin: Right? 0:27:54 Garcia: They wanted to make money and they didn’t think there was anything to worry about. Franklin: Yeah. Garcia: Maybe that was a defense mechanism; I don’t know. But I had healthy respect for it. But then I was a little older. 0:28:04 Franklin: Yeah. Yeah. What was the most rewarding aspect of your work at Hanford? Garcia: Probably bailing people out of dicey situations. Decontaminating their skin. Checking their nose for contamination, and just occasionally pulling them out of the fire. Some of them thanked me, and some of them didn’t. I’d almost—I didn’t live for it, but I didn’t back away from it. Sometimes one of those cam alarms would go off and there’s a room full of people. Then you’ve really got a situation. And I liked doing it. I just wanted to help them out. I knew how they felt: it happened to me. I wanted to make sure that they went home in good shape. And I never had anybody get hurt or really get into a bad situation. 0:29:04 Franklin: Right on. What were some of your memories of any major events in Tri-Cities history such as plants shutting down? Garcia: I think 100-N, when that shut down, it had a ripple effect. You could kind of tell things weren’t going to be the same. And then when they decided they couldn’t run the Plutonium Finishing Plant anymore, they had a lot of excess material that they needed to stabilize. The biggest problem was carbon tetrachloride. They couldn’t find a substitute for it that worked as well in their system. So they tried a number of things and when they came to the realization that they couldn’t do it again, then they shut PFP down. They stabilized the material as best they could, and then shut it down. But that took like about ten years to finally realize, yeah, this isn’t going to work anymore. Franklin: Ten years after--? Garcia: After the initial shutdown. After the Cold War shut down. Franklin: Oh, wow. 0:30:17 Garcia: I never thought it would happen. I thought, you know, the Soviet Union would exist forever, and we’d be making plutonium and nuclear weapons—forever. I read a book earlier this year by Daniel Ellsberg. When that movie came out about the Pentagon Papers? He was also a nuclear war planner. And not only did he steal the Pentagon Papers, he stole a lot of material about weapons and nuclear war. He said that this mutually assured destruction was the craziest idea in the history of the human race, because nobody was going to win. The planet would be destroyed. Every body and every thing would die. Because of the power of those weapons and everything, we would create the nuclear winter. It gave me another perspective. I’m like, God! I really sold my soul to the devil. And his dad was an engineer and a plant designer, and he helped design PUREX and a few of the other places. I never heard that till I read his book. Franklin: Huh. Garcia: So, yeah, that was quite an awakening, too. Franklin: Oh, I bet. Garcia: But I was retired, so I was innocent after that. No, I did my share. Franklin: Wow. 0:31:43 Garcia: But I would talk to people and said, hey, what do you think of this? Don’t you think this is bad? And I would pick my subjects very carefully. Because you didn’t know. There were still, you know—secrecy; the FBI would send you questionnaires and things like that. And it got worse as time went on. And most people said, yeah, there’s a thousand other people that would take my job tomorrow. So it doesn’t matter that I’m doing it, because somebody else will do it. So I pretty much left it at that. I only tried that question two or three times. 0:32:22 The secrecy got changed. At first it was like, you didn’t say a word. The old days, you didn’t tell your wife and kids or relatives what you did. And that pretty much stayed the same until the Cold War had been over for a little while. After some time, they had another level of security and you had to take a psychological test on paper and on a computer and fill out more forms and answer more questions. You know, you had to live pretty much a boy scout lifestyle. But the Tri-Cities always had this squeaky-clean reputation to some people. But underneath the surface. [LAUGHTER] Not so much. There’s a lot of stuff going on. So that was at my time at PFP. 0:33:22 Then when I left that, I got out of that program. Where I worked wasn’t as secure. I didn’t have gates to go through. You had the Wye or the Yakima gate. And then there was another gate, closer in 200-West, 200-East and they would search your trunk, open up your glovebox—or from Idaho, jockey box. You couldn’t say, no. Because otherwise, adios. And that died off. They got rid of those 2-East and 2-West gates and it was just the one, and that was mostly a guy looking at your badge and waving you through. Franklin: Yeah, looking at your badge and then— Garcia: Yeah. 0:34:00 Franklin: Yeah, yeah, because when I go on Site to do artifact evaluations, it’s always—I think that’s a lot of security, but I mean, I wasn’t here in the Cold War days, you know. Because also to get into PFP there was also security at the entrance, too, right? Garcia: Mm-hmm. Franklin: Where they checked your bags, you had to go through like a metal detector and everything. Garcia: Yup. Franklin: So there were several layers. And PFP was also surrounded by, like, anti-tank, there were some anti-tank things and like guard shacks and things like that. 0:34:40 Garcia: Yeah. Yeah, I was going to get to that. Yeah, there were two fences, barbed wire. There were sensors on wires or in the ground. And then the rooms were locked. You couldn’t just go in because you wanted to, in most areas. You had to have somebody open the combination or with a key, and most often you had to have another person with you. You had to have a reason to be there, and you had to have your badge on. Once in a while you’d find somebody that left it behind somewhere. And there were cameras on the outside and on the inside. And PUREX was pretty much the same way. You know, the fences and the guards and the cameras. So yeah. The other places, not so much. 0:35:27 Franklin: It’s funny you mentioned that question that you asked, that kind of tricky question. It’s a question I myself wrestle with. I’m also not from here, and I’ve always—it’s a question I’m always very interested to ask but don’t ask very often. You know? But I’m curious to ask you later about it, if you want to answer it. Garcia: Okay. No problem. I haven’t asked anyone that question in a long time. 0:35:58 Franklin: I bet. I bet not. I mean, my last question I ask is, what do you want future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland during the Cold War? And usually the answer I get is about World War II, the bomb won the war. I didn’t ask them about World War II. I’ve always found that was a very interesting way of viewing the Cold War through the lens of the “good” war. But anyway. So I guess that gives you a little time to think about how you want to answer that question, too. I’ll ask that one later; I like to conclude with that. Garcia: Okay, cool. Franklin: I’m just foreshadowing, I guess, for you now. Garcia: All right. I’ll use part of my brain to think about that. 0:36:45 Franklin: I wanted to ask you about, so you had been working out at PFP during the Chernobyl incident. Garcia: Oh, I was at PUREX then. Franklin: PUREX, sorry, okay. Garcia: Which has its own story. Franklin: You were out on Site. Garcia: Yeah. Franklin: How did that affect Hanford, and how did that affect the community? 0:37:04 Garcia: That was one factor in the shutting down N. Because they were similar, but not identical. Though, somehow, I understand that the Russians would pull the fuel from the top. [LAUGHTER] Maybe I’m wrong. But at B and all the other reactors, N, they would push the fuel out the back. It would fall in a big water basin. So, when that problem erupted, literally, they said, well, you know, these are too similar. They had shut it down to do some maintenance—long-term maintenance, and then they never started it up again. That was a ripple effect from Chernobyl. 0:37:47 When I was at PUREX, we had these about half-a-meter square tables. They were about a meter off the ground and had plastic coating on them. There were a couple dozen of those. So we would take a technical smear that was on this funny paper. And then you would check it with your instrument. And my manager said, well, when you’re outside doing that routine, be sure you check all those tables, because Chernobyl fallout is predicted to come this way. I never found any. The tables were really there for stuff coming out of the PUREX stack. But I never found anything from Chernobyl. That only lasted a few weeks, and then we never did that again. 0:38:37 Franklin: Was it a flashpoint in how people viewed Hanford? Garcia: Not that I recall. Most people were there to do their job, and they just wanted to get through the day, through the year, through their career. It never—there may have been other parts of the community that really got excited about Chernobyl and how Hanford was similar, but not to my knowledge. Franklin: Hmm. Were there any events or incidences that happened at Hanford while you were working out there that stand out to you? Garcia: Hanford-wise? Franklin: Yeah. 0:39:26 Garcia: There were so many. Where to—[LAUGHTER] What to choose? Not so much. I think one—it wasn’t Hanford-related but it was another turning point. When the Russians shot down that Korean airplane that had wandered into their airspace. That gave me a little more resolve and understanding why all of this had to be, like it or not. I guess, just shutting down PFP, shutting down PUREX and the last reactor, N. Those were big dominoes that fell. But I knew, being higher on the seniority list and having a job that was pretty necessary that it wasn’t going to affect me. Franklin: What—oh, sorry. 0:40:25 Garcia: Oh, when people would get laid off from other crafts, it did bother me. You know, people that you knew or just remotely knew. I knew that their lives were going to be turned upside-down. And it bothered me. Franklin: Was there a general feeling of anxiety during the shut down or the change, the switch from production to clean up? 0:40:49 Garcia: Yeah, because you didn’t know what to expect. When it was in production days, you know, you had this goal to make as much plutonium as you could. But after that was over, the clean up days, it was a rollercoaster. You didn’t know what to expect from one day, one month, one year to the next. And maybe they didn’t either. If the funding was different from year to year. You just didn’t exactly know what to do or what they expected. So, yeah, that was—there was a change. And I used to tell people, you know, it was more fun making bombs than it was cleaning up. Because the regs were all different, the goals were all different. But you knew in the button production days that, yeah, that was what you were here for, whether you agreed or disagreed or not. Franklin: Right, it’s kind of like, where to start? Right? Like, where do you—spent 40 years making this big mess. Garcia: Yeah. Franklin: 45 years. 0:42:02 Garcia: They’ve still got a ways to go. I’m not sure how the Vit Plant’s going to turn out. I mean, there’s three or four big, huge buildings, 88 feet tall, 90 feet long, four, five feet of concrete where the chemical separations was done. Like PUREX, B and T Plant. Good luck! Franklin: Well, and you heard about the recent teardown of PFP, right? A building you worked at, where they found contamination well outside—not high levels—but contamination well outside the projected footprint of where it would be. 0:42:46 Garcia: I was a little angry and a little disappointed, and I just couldn’t understand why they could take down a plutonium facility out in the open air. Maybe they could’ve put a big tent over it or something. Whoever sees this, yeah. [LAUGHTER] You’re crazy! You know, they did the best they could, I guess. They would put blue goo on it to hold the contamination down. They would use big water cannons to water it down. And it just got away from them because of production and money pressure, in my way of thinking. When they first started tearing it down, I was long gone, because I could see the handwriting n the wall. They thought they could turn it into another Rocky Flats. And that’s pretty much how they did Rocky Flats, which-- Franklin: What would that involve? Sorry, I’m not— 0:43:47 Garcia: You know, the blue goo, the water cannons, and just a big crane with a great big chomping device. Chomp down the walls, the pipes, anything inside, and then put it in these big, long semi, like a semi trailer-size containers, and then take that to the ERDF place and put it in the ground. And I think they pretty much did something similar at Rocky Flats, and that was a real small facility compared to Hanford. I think Rocky Flats was about the size of the 300 Area. They got that done quickly but maybe not so successfully. So a lot of those guys, managers and workers, came to Hanford from Rocky when the things wound down, and they thought they could do the same thing here as they did there. And it was just a different way of thinking. Everything was just too different to fit into their mold. So yeah. 0:44:55 It was not a good idea. It really makes me sad. Especially for those workers that inhaled it. My goal always was on any job, that was a failure point to me, if anyone got internal deposition. It happened a couple times and I felt awful for months. It does damage to your body. There’s ways to get it out, but I just didn’t want to look that person in the eye and say, I’m sorry, but— 0:45:27 There for a while, the training philosophy was a rem is a rem—a rem is a measurement of radiation. And whether it’s inside your body or goes through you, like an x-ray or a gamma ray or neutrons. Any body, having it in your body is a different mindset. Even though they can give you the DTPA shot and get most of it out of you, or you can drink a lot of beer and get a lot of it out of you. Just, that’s a different way of thinking. Franklin: Is there something special about beer? Or it’s just a fluid? Garcia: Diuretic. Franklin: Oh, right. Yeah. 0:46:12 Garcia: When I first got to PFP as an HPT, we had a meeting with the dosimetry boss and he said, everybody in here has plutonium in them. Well, yeah, that’s the first name of the place, Plutonium Finishing Plant. So it wasn’t a surprise, but it was just another reality check. Because you know you go into a room, do a job, even if the cam didn’t go off, there’s still some in there. Your instruments are only so sensitive. Otherwise, you could make them more sensitive but they’d be useless. You might say something is clean, but it might be just below the threshold. So he told us different ways to avoid a problem. 0:47:01 But, yeah, I’m—They would give us a lung count, these sensitive devices, sensors on your chest or you’d lean up against the sensors. And then the real fun was your annual bioassay. [LAUGHTER] They’d drop this kit of five, six bottles, and you would urinate in them and turn them in in a few days. And if things really went bad, the fecal sample kit. I only had to do that a couple times. But, you know, they boil it down, cook it down, and then use really sensitive instruments to count how much you encountered. But, yeah. [LAUGHTER] I’d almost forgotten about those things! Franklin: We have a couple examples of those, unused in our collection. Garcia: Okay. Franklin: Yeah, when we do exhibitions or bring them out, they always get a—people will be like, oh yeah! I forgot about that thing. 0:48:00 Garcia: Yeah, I’m sure. You kind of have to delete some of your files. And then those people that had the problem at PFP, they had to do that. The urine and the fecal. But we’ll see, we’ll see, who reaps the whirlwind. That’s from some classic book. And I’m afraid some of the workers are going to pay the price. Because I’ve read articles and books about workers from Oak Ridge and other places. The guy’s got a table full of medicine, and most of it’s related to his work in the nuclear industry. So some of these guys, as bulletproof as they may think they are, they will, down the road, something’s going to give. And I feel bad about that. 0:48:54 Franklin: Yeah. Yes. Could you describe the ways in which security and/or secrecy at Hanford impacted your work? Garcia: The rooms were locked up for the most part. You know, all the gates and fences and stuff, you had to fill out a questionnaire every five years or at random. They’d call your boss up, say, send so-and-so over. You had to give another drug screening sample. Or fill out the questionnaire, or just, if somebody had run into a security problem, they would ask you what kind of person is this? Has he ever said anything threatening to the country or to the plant? 0:49:42 And it wasn’t with the FBI, but I had some problems in my younger years and I sought counseling and I didn’t disclose that. Because I knew what they would do, what they would think. So somehow or another I thought they found out. [LAUGHTER] And they put me in this little room, and, yeah. That was another tough hour. But nothing came of it, but I told them, I said, I understand why you think this, but there’s a long line of people that have marital problems, psychological problems, drug and alcohol problems that you should worry about more than me. I was just, you know. I had some emotional issues. I never heard any more about it. After I signed the papers and got out of that little tiny room, I never heard any more about it. 0:50:41 But, yeah, the security was always on your mind. People, unless you were another Hanford person, you really didn’t talk to other people much about it. I know one of my first bosses when we first started up PFP, he said, don’t say anything. It was like the World War II days, almost. So I got on a bus to come to PFP, the whole bus was talking about it. That had just worn off; they didn’t understand the significance from the old days. So that was okay. 0:51:17 Franklin: Were there any old-timers there when you started work? Garcia: A few. A few that had worked at the reactors. I don’t think anybody from the World War II days was still around. They’d either retired or died. But I had a couple guys I worked with that were pretty close to retirement that had worked at the other reactors in the Cold War days. They had some stories. And if they had a story to tell, I wanted to listen to it. Because they had a vast amount of experience and knowledge. And even if I’d heard the story before, I wanted to hear it again. But for the most part, they kept us away from the old-timers, because they didn’t want us to learn their tricks and their bad habits. They wanted us to be a new generation that followed the procedures, did what our managers said, and weren’t going too cowboy. Later on, we did. But at first they didn’t want their bad habits to rub off on us. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] That’s funny, because I’ve heard a lot of stories, too. I mean, that’s the nature of doing oral history, but, yeah. 0:52:25 Garcia: Did anyone ever tell you about this guy named Don, who was a control room operator at PFP? And a DOE tour came. So Don is sitting there at the console with his feet up, reading the newspaper, which was a no-no, twice. So his manager was leading the tour and he said, Don, what are you doing? Shouldn’t you be paying attention? And he said, you know, if I’m up here calling down valve changes to the floors below in the gloveboxes and the dials are going crazy, you’re losing money. But when things are calm and running smooth and I can read my newspaper, you’re making money. [LAUGHTER] And they left him alone. He was one of those guys, you could call up in the dead of night and say, Don, this is doing that, and that’s doing this, what do we do? And he would know. He probably should’ve been something more than just a nuclear process operator, but he had years of experience and he knew what it was all about. So, yeah. Franklin: Wow. Garcia: He was pretty cool. Franklin: That’s crazy. That’s a good story. So we’re at the last question now. Garcia: Okay. 0:53:36 Franklin: And that is, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War? Garcia: [SIGH] That it was a dangerous job, a crazy job, but a job that could be done safely. For whatever detrimental effects it was to the workers and obviously to the environment. I’m sorry. But I think Hanford was run better than maybe in North Korea or in the Soviet Union. They respected the life and the health and the skills of the workers at Hanford more than at other places. Places, not ever having seen or encountered anybody; I just have that notion. And the legacy that Hanford has left, in terms of all the nuclear weapons, all the contaminated ground and water. I’m sorry it happened, but it had to be done for its own reasons and in its own way. 0:54:45 But I didn’t feel any more patriotic when I was doing it and I don’t feel anymore patriotic about it now. But, yeah, the men and women that worked out there, a lot of them I still remember, still talk to, and they worked hard. It was a dangerous, sometimes crazy job. I don’t want any flowers or trumpets; it was just a job and everybody tried to do it—well, almost everybody tried to do it well and safely. And if we’ve left some problems behind, well, sorry, good luck. That’ll be your thing to handle. Franklin: Well, John, thank you so much for taking the time to come and interview with us today. I really enjoyed your very thoughtful responses. Garcia: Well, thank you. Franklin: Is there anything else you’d like to say before we turn the camera off? Garcia: No. I think I’ve about said it all. I gave this—I even had some time to give it a lot of thought, and I’ve pretty much said everything I thought of. Franklin: Great. Awesome. Well, thank you. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:56:00 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 9987kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview Hanford Site Plutonium Finishing Plant PUREX Tank Farms Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 42 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 21 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with John Garcia Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource John Garcia's career at the Hanford Site spanned over 20 years, primarily working as a nuclear process operator at the Plutonium Finishing Plant (PFP) and as a health physics technician (HPT) at various facilities like PUREX, Tank Farms, and the True Retrieval project. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 05/22/2018 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F5e9efc1b839b0942a2fc6c28de0572a1.JPG e51ba630a75d56cfe24750c1cb18284e https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F0a6a3259a499c7fe1121af655576364b.mp4 dda71579ddc44f30b311d45592186704 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Peggy Gardner Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound 0:00:00 Robert Franklin: I have a little bit of boilerplate to begin with. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Peggy Gardner on May 2, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Peggy about her experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Peggy Gardner: Peggy Gardner. P-E-G-G-Y. G-A-R-D-N-E-R. Franklin: Great, thanks, Peggy. Tell me, how and why did you come to the area to work at the Hanford Site? 0:00:36 Gardner: My father was a real estate agent in the state of Indiana where we were born and raised. And his cousin lived here in Richland, Washington. And he said their real estate market’s doing wonderful. So my father took a leap of faith. And he was not a man of adventure. So he left my mother for a year and came out here, got his real estate license, and that’s the rest of the story, basically. They moved here, and I followed three years later. 0:01:07 Franklin: And how old were you when you moved here? Gardner: 23. Franklin: 23, oh, okay. So you were in Indiana while your parents relocated here, and then you moved to be closer to them? Gardner: Yes, I did. Franklin: Oh, okay. 0:01:22 Gardner: My father took me on a statewide vacation with my mom and showed me the area, trying to convince me to live here. Franklin: And it seems like he was successful. Gardner: Oh, yes. And I never regretted it. Franklin: Really? What kind of attractions did the Hanford area have over Indiana? 0:01:42 Gardner: Well, not in particular the Hanford area at the time, because I wasn’t that familiar with it. But the state offered a lot more mountains and lakes and fishing and boating and just a lot of things I enjoyed doing. Plus the fact that where we live, the humidity’s so low. And where I’m from in Indiana, there’s very high humidity. So it was a big difference in the weather. Franklin: Yeah, yeah. It’s the hardest part about going east, back east, for me in the summer is the humidity. So how did you begin—well, so you moved when you were 23. Did you go to college? Gardner: I did, and I quit. Franklin: Okay. 0:02:23 Gardner: And when I quit, I got a job as a gas station attendant for Marathon Oil, and became a minor tune-up mechanic and drove the wrecker for three years. So that was where I got my mechanical aptitude, was within that job. But I guess I’ve had it all my life, because I’ve always— Franklin: So you were doing that in your teens and 20s then? Gardner: 19. Franklin: Okay. Driving a wreck—like a tow truck and--? 0:02:51 Gardner: Yes! A brand-new 1976 Chevy. And it had dollies on it. So, yeah, that was kind of fun. Franklin: Did you work with mostly men in that industry, I gather? Gardner: Mm-hmm. 0:03:02 Franklin: Did you find kind of ready acceptance by your male colleagues, or did you—you know, how was it being a woman in a what I think people still today think of as a predominantly male job? Gardner: Yeah. I don’t remember any challenges. I grew up with brothers and grew up as an athlete, so I spent a lot of time around a lot of men, and was very comfortable and confident in that environment. Franklin: So did you find—you said you had this aptitude all your life. Did you find a real kind of calling in mechanics? Gardner: Mm-hmm. 0:03:36 Franklin: And so how did you—you were working for Marathon Oil. How did you—when you moved here, did you go to work right away for Hanford, or how did you get involved out on the Site? Gardner: I wanted to have a career with a job that had paid for me to be able to enjoy life. And I applied at an apprenticeship program. That program then got me into Westinghouse. Because I was accepted in September of 1978, and it was a machinist program that I went into. So that’s when I began. And they accepted me, because they saw the aptitude that I had for that field. 0:04:23 Franklin: Okay. And was that kind of like a technical school kind of apprenticeship, or like on-the-job training? Were you immediately in the job, or was there like classroom training and things that went along with that? Gardner: It was both. It was a state-approved apprenticeship program. Instructed by a couple of supervisors and an estimator. They taught the classes right onsite, and we would go work eight hours and then go to class right there at the building. So that was real convenient. 0:04:59 Franklin: How long would the class be each day? Gardner: Probably two to three hours; I don’t quite recall. But there were three different subjects, ongoing that we were— Franklin: So you were pulling some pretty long days then. Gardner: Well, when you’re young, you don’t see it that way. [LAUGHTER] 0:05:15 Franklin: Right, right. Were there any other women in the program with you? Gardner: Not in the program, but prior to me, there was two other women. They both had quit and moved on to different positions. Then another lady was hired on when I was there and there were probably 35 men and then the two of us. So, yeah. Franklin: So still in a predominantly male workforce. Gardner: Yes. 0:05:44 Franklin: Did you find ready acceptance by your male colleagues there? Were there any struggles or issues that you had to deal with, being one of the only women in this field? Gardner: Yes, there were. It was kind of during the time when equal rights and the women’s movement and “I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar” was out. And there was a lot of resistancy by some of the older craftsmen. But on the other hand, I feel like I assimilated pretty well. And you learn to know who feels that way about you and just be thoughtful about that. Franklin: Sure. Are there any incidences that kind of ring out in your mind? Any experiences that you care to elaborate on? 0:06:35 Gardner: I’ll say two I have, just right off the top of my head. The first week I hired in, the lunchroom, we had union breaks. I went in and sat down, not thinking each chair was sacred, like in church when you go to church, you know people sit in their own pew or whatever. I sat down in a chair, and a gentleman came in and took me by the scruff of my coveralls and literally raised me up out of my chair and moved me over. And I thought, well, I guess I shouldn’t sit here! [LAUGHTER] But he was a real crotchety old fart, but I loved him to pieces. So we gained a really close friendship. But that was my first week. 0:07:19 Another interesting part of my career was, I was working on a project that another fellow machinist had been working on. And the setup was rather slow. So I was given an overtime job to continue on with his job. And I changed the setup and actually was able to complete the parts a lot quicker. And I got written up for it. For not going to my manager and asking to do that. So that was kind of hard. It hurt. And I didn’t make a stand for myself back then. I probably would now that I’m older. So that was an interesting situation. 0:08:07 Franklin: Yeah. I know in the early days of desegregating some of these jobs that bathroom access was often an issue for women. Were there fully functional women’s bathrooms at the time that you started, or were they still kind of figuring that out in the buildings? Gardner: Well, they did have restrooms. I mean, it had office space in the front of the machine shop, so there were restrooms for women. But they didn’t have the shower facilities. So for the first couple years, I’d shower in the men’s shower. The guys would just, one guy would stand outside the door and I would go in and shower. That’s sort of how we did it. But then the company built me my own shower, so that was nice to have, and not have to be in the men’s restroom. Franklin: With a guard. Yeah, I imagine, that must’ve been quite an interesting experience. So you said there was kind of the offices in the front of the house. Were the offices mostly staffed by stereotypical secretary positions—is that where most of the women were, was in the front offices of the buildings? 0:09:20 Gardner: The building itself housed different occupations, unrelated to the machine shop, but yet related to safety and the estimators and the purchasers. Yeah, so it was a combination of men and women; it wasn’t just administrative. Franklin: Did you hang out or kind of form friendships with the men you worked with that carried on after—like, did you hang out primarily with machinists, or were your friends not working at Hanford? Gardner: Not working at Hanford. I had a few friends that I would do things with. And coworkers also. But when you talk about my core group of friends, it would probably be I had maybe a couple, three that I was very close to throughout my career. And others that I was close to but wouldn’t see on a regular basis outside of the job. 0:10:20 Franklin: Okay. I guess, describe for me the day, a day in a machinist—what types of things would you be machining, what kind of tasks would you be asked to do, and what kinds of operations would you be supporting? Gardner: When I first hired in, the FFTF was being built. So we did a lot of support for that. Really interesting work. We worked a lot with stainless steel. The machine shop itself had full heat treat capabilities and also a grinding room, which was rather unique, from the standpoint, a lot of machine shops may just have machining of the parts. This machine shop had the full spectrum. Which, also the apprenticeship was—I was very blessed to be a part of that, to have such a large amount of knowledge within the trade that some people don’t get. But working for the FFTF and that project and the completion of that was very unique for me, being the only breeder reactor in the United States and being a part of that. 0:11:27 Franklin: Oh, wow. And you brought something that you made on your first day, correct? Gardner: Yeah, I did. My boss said, let’s take you to a machine—which I’d never been on any—and this was on a lathe. And he just gave me a blueprint, and was able to give me the tooling and tell me how to operate the machine. He walked away, and I did this little part. It’s just a practice piece; it doesn’t have any application to it. Franklin: Oh, okay. And how long would it take to construct something like that? Gardner: Oh, maybe an hour. Franklin: And would you start from a solid piece and then machine it down? Gardner: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Franklin: Oh, okay. Gardner: Yeah. 0:12:13 Franklin: So what kind of parts were you making for the FFTF, what kinds of things did the machine shop create for the FFTF? Gardner: They have fuel pins within the FFTF and they would be bundled in these great big stainless tubes. So we would machine these stainless tubes. I don’t know how long they were, but maybe over six feet. Maybe less than that. And then inside would be small quarter-inch pins that would run the length of these inside. They would have several bundles inside this but also several parts inside the reactor. Yeah, that was just one piece, though. I mean, one part of it. We machined other things. I don’t have a good recall for all that. But it was very exciting to be a part of that. 0:13:06 Franklin: Did you need a special clearance to work in the machine shop or to be kind of manufacturing these reactor components? Gardner: Depended upon what we were machining. Some of the machinists had what’s called a Q clearance. That allowed them to be exposed to different information that we weren’t allowed to as just the regular clearance. So there were some that were able to machine more confidential things. But in general, on a day, we had a lot of certifications to the metal that went into the nuclear reactors for the fact that it had to have provisions, knowing that the metal needed to be a certain quality. So that was something that we would keep record of when we were given a job. We would document things and make sure it had the proper certifications from the manufacturer of the metal. 0:14:05 Franklin: Did that require you to test the metals at all for strength and for the amounts of various—if it was a composite, the amounts of its components? Gardner: Well, there was metal testing onsite. There were places that we could take metal for its tensile strength. And to make sure, if it didn’t have any stamped certification on it, we could use some chemicals to find out exactly what’s in it, and to know that the material is what we wanted. 0:14:38 Franklin: Interesting. And so eventually, the FFTF kind of was sidelined, right, as—and so I assume that you weren’t then working on fuel pins or the bundles anymore. So what did you do after the FFTF had ceased operations? Gardner: Well, when we moved from the nuclear to the cleanup mission, we supported that in different ways. But they actually closed our machine shop down and moved the machine shop out to the 200 Area. Franklin: Sorry, so where was the machine shop before that? 0:15:18 Gardner: In the 300 Area. Franklin: 300 Area, okay. Gardner: 328 Building. So, I’m going to guess, for 14 years I was there. And then the company—that was during the time when there were many contractors bidding for the job, so instead of it just being Westinghouse, there were three main contractors. UNC was another one; Rockwell. Then they started having more people come in and the contracting work out became a popular thing, the transition in our way of doing business. Not just with Hanford, but throughout the United States. So we moved to the 200 Area and Kaiser took over part of that. I was only out there for two years supporting the cleanup mission, but this is when the tanks were being discovered that some weren’t even marked where they were on the ground. I really don’t have a lot of knowledge about what all went on, other than they were digging up a lot of things, finding ways to pay for the area. 0:16:28 Franklin: Right, yeah, finding some history. Nice. I’m wondering if you could share your opinion on what that was like, to go from a single contractor to multi-contractor, and if you saw that as a beneficial change for Hanford operations, or—basically, how that affected you and how that affected worker morale and the scope of work that you were being asked to do. 0:16:55 Gardner: I just really have one thought on that when you asked me, and that is, because the history and the value of the employees that were there, some, not from conception, but there for a very long time that had a lot more knowledge—once they were bringing several contractors in, people would come in without any history or background knowledge. I felt that was a real critical part or piece that needed to stay consistent for the continuity of understanding the dangers or the concerns. It was taken more serious, from my standpoint, of those that had been there for a long time or had more history with the Area. So contracting work out and bringing new contractors or several contractors in, I felt, was a safety issue. 0:17:45 Franklin: Oh, interesting. Okay. That’s a really interesting point. Did you find that each contractor had its own kind of culture or corporate culture? And was it easy for employees of different contractors to work together? Gardner: There was some competition, I think, when I initially hired in between the contractors. But there were only three at that time. I guess not. I didn’t pay that close attention. 0:18:16 Franklin: Okay. And so when you got moved out to the 200 Area, what kinds of—you’re obviously not going to be manufacturing fuel pellets—or fuel rods and things. So what kind of work were you doing out there to support cleanup? Like, what kinds of things were you machining out there? Gardner: There would be tools that needed to be made, specific tools, that were unique to cleanup. So we would be manufacturing those. Franklin: Can you give me an example of a tool that’s unique to cleanup? Gardner: I can’t. [LAUGHTER] I can’t even remember those things. 0: 18:50 Franklin: Oh, okay. And how long did you stay out in the 200 Area? Gardner: Probably a year-and-a-half. Franklin: Okay. And was it the same kind of atmosphere in the 200 Area that you’d had in the 300 Area? Or was it changed? 0:19:08 Gardner: Well, the R&D world that we were in with the nuclear industry—it was just a lot different in the culture and the different things we fabricated. So when we changed out to the 200 Area, it was a big shock of having to do different types of work. Probably less R&D than it was when I worked in the 300 Area. R&D is research and development, where sometimes we do one or two things, or sometimes we just manufacture something or fabricate something to see if it’s going to work, just as a test piece. Franklin: A little more experimental. Gardner: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Franklin: Like, intuitive than— 0:19:59 Gardner: But the culture was very different out in the 200 Area. The buildings were old. The building I moved into was not insulated. I had to wear—they gave us all Carhartts to wear in the wintertime. Pipes froze in the restroom. And snakes—I had a snake pass me in the building. Mice were in my coverall bag. So it just really wasn’t an environment I wanted to continue my work in. So I ended up quitting and moving over to Battelle. That was one of the best moves. I absolutely loved Westinghouse, but when they moved us out in the 200 Area, I felt like I could make a better change. So I quit and went to Battelle and worked in the environmental industry there. Franklin: Okay, and what kinds of work did you—were you still a machinist then in the environmental— Gardner: Mm-hmm, yes. Franklin: And how would you support—that seems like kind of a different mission change from what you’d be machining. So how did you support the environmental research group? 0:21:04 Gardner: I’ll just give you one example of some parts that I was working on. Battelle is worldwide in how they work with the business. There was a job that I was working on that was going to go on an airplane, filtering the air in the atmosphere in Mexico. Because the pollution was so bad there. So that was interesting to know, you know, that this job I was working on was going to be attached to an airplane that was going to be flying around Mexico. I think Mexico City, actually. We also did animal research. One example of that is when the checks that we write, everyday checks from our checkbook that has the carbon copy, when we would utilize those carbon copies—when they first were manufactured, the workers that were making these pieces of paper, or making the paper to go in our checkbooks were getting ill. So they exposed laboratory animals to this paper until they were healthy; they were not having any side effects from being around any of the particulates caused from the manufacturing. So that was one of the first projects that I worked on. I literally made, they’re called plethysmographs. They were Plexiglas tubes where they housed the mice to expose them to these things. It was hard for me, because I’m an animal lover. So that was a hard job, but it was interesting to see the application of it for the health of the people in the industry. 0:22:51 Franklin: Mm. Do you know what kinds of data was gathered from that research? Did there end up being a link between the illness and the carbon paper? Gardner: Yes, well, they already knew there was an illness just from the people that were manufacturing it originally. So all I know is they decided to change whatever went into the paper, and that did have a good impact. 0:23:15 Franklin: Oh, that’s good. So how long did you work for Battelle in the environmental research group? Gardner: For 16 years. Franklin: Oh, for 16 years. And so from—you said you went out there in ’95, and then 16 years, so 2011, or about 2010? And did you retire then— Gardner: Mm-hmm, I did. 0:23:40 Franklin: Okay. And what have you been doing—have you still been involved in the machinist industry since retirement, or how have you been keeping busy? Gardner: Well, I pretty much put my tools away. But I’m still a handywoman; I like to do projects around the house and help people with projects that need some repairs. My first year, I just enjoyed. I took a job out at Canyon Lakes golf course and worked as just a helper at a catering business there. A few times, drove the beverage cart which was lots of fun. I was raised as a golfer. That was fun for me. So just enjoying my life and making it a choice every day to explore something that I haven’t done and wasn’t able to do since I had a full-time job. 0:24:32 Franklin: Sure. Now, your bio here that Jillian took says that you went to HAMMER and were a teacher for trainings on MSDS work conditions safety and health concerns? Gardner: Yeah, for a short time, a couple years. So maybe two or three times a year, I would work at HAMMER for a week at a time. Franklin: Was that after you retired? Gardner: No, it was during the time. Franklin: Oh, okay. 0:24:57 Gardner: I actually was working at Westinghouse, and I think I continued HAMMER once, maybe, when I was at Battelle; I can’t really recall if I did or not. But it was before the new facility was built, so we were over on George Washington Way. Franklin: Oh, okay, okay. That makes sense. Well, that’s great. I just have a couple more questions. Are there any ways in which security or secrecy at Hanford impacted your work as a machinist? Gardner: In what way? 0:25:37 Franklin: Oh, well, I don’t know. Is there any times in which, say, an element of security or secrecy stopped you from working on a project, or you could only work on specific pieces on it because of not enough clearance or something like that? Did you ever work on a project that was very secret or kind of a need-to-know basis? Gardner: I didn’t, but there were machinists that did. You’re right, it is called a need-to-know. I remember one time they put big barriers up around the Project just so it was in compliance for the security of machining it. So, yeah, that has been a part of my career. But I wasn’t a person on the job. 0:26:27 Franklin: Okay. And was it challenging to—because you moved here during the Cold War and then—although it seems that most of your machine work was for peaceful reactors, you know, the majority of reactors at Hanford were producing plutonium which was being used for the US nuclear weapons stockpile. Did you ever feel unsure or unsafe about working at Hanford, either in a safety sense or in a larger, kind of geopolitical sense, especially as tensions were heating up in the 1980s? 0:27:10 Gardner: Not in the geopolitical sense, but as far as some of the chemicals and materials that I machined, a few years after becoming a machinist, they became classified as carcinogens. The PPE, the protective equipment that we wore, would be required or some of the chemicals were actually pulled off the shelf. So, yeah, that was a concern, because I think the invincible feeling of being young, you know. You think everything’s going to be safe working for large companies like that, and they wouldn’t expose us to things that are unsafe. But that’s not true. They did the best they could, and as things progressed and our health concerns were addressed, then, you know, they would see that some of those things needed to be looked at differently. So the government was able to classify things as carcinogens. And companies could no longer use those. Franklin: Interesting. And did that impact your work in any way? Or did you feel pretty comfortable with the measures that were addressed? 0:28:21 Gardner: I think there was resistancy because some of the materials we could only machine well with certain chemicals. When they pulled those off, we had to really be creative to find something that was just as good or settle for something that wasn’t as good and try to make the parts as well as we could. But I knew that there were health effects, even throughout my career, in my own body that I had to address from being exposed to things. And I was able to, and got it taken care of. Franklin: Oh, that’s good. So kind of a balance, then, between doing a job in the most effective way, but also making sure that it’s safe in terms of having your worker safety protected. Gardner: Mm-hmm. 0:29:15 Franklin: Well, great, and my last question is, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland during the Cold War and afterwards during cleanup? Gardner: I feel that our government was doing a wonderful job keeping our nation safe, and that was their priority in creating Hanford, protecting us. The residual, while being, it is very nasty and the ramifications of all the buried things is a very difficult piece, the reasons behind it were very genuine and ultimately for our country. Franklin: Hmm. Okay, great. Did you want to show any of the things that you brought with you? Gardner: I don’t. Franklin: Okay, not a problem. Well, maybe if they’re—if you wouldn’t mind, maybe we could take them and digitize some of them and then we’ll put them with your interview when it goes online and post the pictures. Gardner: Yes, I brought newspapers that would come out monthly. I’m not certain if it was monthly or weekly, from Westinghouse. And they’re fun to look back, probably more for me. But, on the other hand, yes, that’d be great if you could digitize it. Franklin: Great, well, thank you so much, Peggy, I really appreciate it. Gardner: Oh, it’s been my pleasure. Thank you. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:30:42 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 9982kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview Westinghouse 200 Area Battelle HAMMER Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 26 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 23 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Peggy Gardner Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Peggy Gardner relocated to the Hanford area when she followed her parents and started out working as a gas station attendant/mechanic/wrecker driver before accepting a machinist position with Westinghouse. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 05/02/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F46718f8d2b200c1c3b4ec42c71009a29.JPG 7f4ae434c4a7a90a4a89297e7d171285 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Cliff Groff Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound 0:00:00 Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Cliff Groff on August 10, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Cliff about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Cliff Groff: G-R-O-F-F as in Frank is the last name. Franklin: Okay. And your first name? Groff: C-L-I-F-F as in Frank. Franklin: Okay, great, thanks, Cliff. So, tell me, how and why you came to the area to work for the Hanford Site. 0:00:38 Groff: Well, I came to the area because I came to work for the newspaper here. I came here in 1966. And I worked for the paper for approximately nine years. Franklin: And which paper was that? Groff: The Tri-City Herald. Franklin: Okay, great. Groff: But don’t hold that against me, please. People don’t like the Herald for different reasons. But I did work on it. I was hired as the Sunday editor of the paper. So it means I worked on the news desk all those years. In fact, we moved here from Santa Maria, California, where I was the news editor of that paper. That’s why I got hired. Franklin: Okay. 0:01:26 Groff: For a couple of years, I did some odd jobs. Principally in PR, public relations. And then in 1977, I got hired by Arco to work out at Hanford as a specialist to write operating procedures. That’s what I did. During that 17 years there, I became not only a writer of them; I became a manager of them. When I retired, I was a senior engineering writer, that’s what I was. Franklin: Okay. And so what kind of procedures did these cover? 0:02:21 Groff: Well, what we worked with—we were hired—I was hired in 1977, a year after McCluskey got injured in the Dash-4 project, when he had the americium and acid explosion. And everything was shut down, and they determined that the operating procedures were not—that the engineers couldn’t write them very well. And they wanted to hire people with a background in journalism and English, which I have. So that’s why I was hired. In the job, we would interview operators, process engineers, and supervisors, and we converted standard operating procedures into what were called job performance aids—JPAs. This was based on human factors engineering, which came out of what the Air Force did with their training of their pilots. So I learned a lot about human factor engineering and actually took a lot of classes later on that the company had me do. 0:03:48 Franklin: Okay. So basically, if I can summarize this right, your job was to kind of translate what the engineers—how the engineers felt the process should be done to the process that would actually do the process, because there was kind of a breakdown in communication before, between the engineers and the technical employees. Groff: That’s right. The engineer would write long, essay-type instructions. My job was to convert and write in short declarative sentences, called command language. We had to use very few verbs—we had a verb list. So that’s what we had to instruct the operators to know what we were talking about. And it worked. We converted thousands of SOPs into JPAs. And then they found that the—we had illustrations, very extensive. So then we converted the JPAs into P-O-Ps, POPs, plant operating procedures. So that’s what we were doing when I retired back in 2000. I don’t know what they’re doing now. Franklin: Do you have an example of a successful SOP to JPA that stands out in your mind? 0:05:17 Groff: You know, I worked at all the Tank Farms and I managed a group of engineering writers. We probably did thousands of them. We had to deal with—I worked at PUREX, for example, at the head end control. We had to deal with the panels, that’s what we did. We had to instruct the operators into what the buttons and the bells and whistles meant. Tank Farms, same thing. Also we did the—I worked also at the processes where they converted—well, let me see. At this point, I’m confused, so do you want to stop the camera for a minute? And I can remember something here. Isn’t that awful? I can’t remember. I worked at all the plants; that’s all I can tell you about. Franklin: Sure, sure, that’s fine. Are we ready to roll again? Groff: Oh, is it stopped? Oh, that’s good. Hungate: [INAUDIBLE] Franklin: We’re good. We can edit that out; don’t worry. So in doing this, did you have any background in the technical knowledge behind these processes? How— 0:06:45 Groff: Well, I had to learn on the job. I did a lot of studying. Well, in high school and college I took a lot of science. I wasn’t a science major. I took additional classes at CBC. I took classes in pre-calculus math, chemistry, so I could understand the processes. And I knew how to read blueprints which I had to read a lot of those to understand the processes. So it was, for me—besides I was training other people, I was learning myself about it. Franklin: Oh, wow. Groff: You know, one interesting thing, I was thinking about something. You know we got this eclipse coming up? Franklin: Yeah. 0:07:40 Groff: Everybody knows about that. Well, there was one, I think, in 1975 or ’76, somewhere, we had an eclipse. And this very good friend of mine who worked for me, we walked out on the coal pile to watch the eclipse that was then. So I think that’s one interesting thing that we did. My office was very near the coal plant. I know that there were coal-fired plants at both East and West. My office was located in East. Franklin: Oh, wow. And how big was this division that you were in? Groff: The division? Franklin: Yeah, or your group, the people that-- 0:08:29 Groff: Well, we were highly—there was a lot of, oh, what I call—stop again. Bureaucracy. Very bureaucracy. And I was in research and engineering division, and that was broken down into different process engineers that worked at the different plants. My group, basically, was about 40 people. We consisted of engineering writers, illustrators, secretaries, and the clerk that took care of that. Once we wrote them, we had to have them test it, called user tests. We had to have all sorts of sign-offs, quality assurance, as I recall. The plant manager has to sign off on our procedures. They could not be issued without half-a-dozen signatures on that, including mine, as the engineering writer. 0:09:45 Franklin: What was the most challenging aspect of this work? Groff: Well, we had to know from—the Department of Energy had massive volumes of information and one of the things that we had to study was the SARPs. These were when we had to ship information, these were special—damn. I didn’t know you were going to ask that. Franklin: You said they were SARPs? Groff: Yeah, there were SARs and SARPs and we had to learn what those meant. They were rules written by the Department of Energy, and we had to incorporate our knowledge of SARPs into operating procedures when we were going to ship them. So that was the most challenging for me, was learning the bureaucratic system of the Department of Energy. Franklin: Right. Yeah, I bet. 0:10:54 Groff: And our operating procedures, we had guidebooks that told us how to prepare them, all the different parts of it. The introductions—we had to incorporate safety features into it for the operators. There was a lot of training we had to do that had to be trained as we did in radiation and criticality and alarms. We had to know how to suit up to go into rad zones. I did, I knew how to do that. That was a long time ago. We had to learn how to put on the suits, especially to go into the canyon building upstairs. We had to have a mask on us, gloves. And that was a very challenging thing, too, because I had to go up and observe things so I could write my operating procedures. That was just one aspect of it. 0:11:59 Franklin: Were you allowed to take recording instruments in, like a tape recorder or a pencil and paper? Groff: Well, paper and pencil is just about the main thing I had to do. Because you had to worry about if something got radiated, you’d have to lose it. One of the things you didn’t want to do is wear your wedding ring. Because if it got radiated, it’s goodbye wedding ring. They’d get rid of it, being low level waste then. Franklin: Did that happen enough that that was a real worry for people? 0:12:35 Groff: Well, it must’ve been, because they talked about it. But it’s been a while since I thought about suiting up. We were trained every year on how to do that, how to suit up to go into a rad zone. And going into the Tank Farms, we had to wear things over our shoes and laboratory coats, and as I recall we wore things over our hair. It was very interesting, all those—we had to suit up for the different process buildings. And I worked at all of them. And all the Tank Farms. 0:13:22 Franklin: Wow. So you really got to travel pretty much all over the Site. Groff: In my job, yes, I was everywhere on the Plant. Franklin: What kind of clearance did you have? 0:13:33 Groff: Ultimately, I had a Q clearance, was the high level one. That helped me get into a couple of buildings. One of the plants, we stored plutonium. I had to go in there to do some assessments and I had to go in and I had an armed guard with me. I had radiation protection people, and other managers. I had to go in there and it took about nine or ten people to escort me. And, we had what I call Z Plant, Plutonium Finishing Plant. I had to have a clearance to go in there and observe and study the gloveboxes which is where they did the plutonium work. Now, these plants I think are mostly torn down now, decommissioned. But when I worked there, we were actually producing plutonium. PUREX was actually working. So it was interesting work for me. 0:14:45 Franklin: Great. Are there any other ways in which security or secrecy impacted your work? Groff: No. Franklin: Okay. Groff: No. I was examined—well, when I first went there I had to fill out a personnel security form, a PSQ, for the FBI to investigate my life. And they had to check my life all the way back to when I was in college. And when I was in service, which I did for two years, active duty. I had to remember where my duty stations were and my eight years in reserve. So they had to check everything. Plus, I had to name my relatives, my family members to check into, including my mother-in-law and my father-in-law. So it was very extensive. But I was proud to get that FBI clearance. 0:15:45 Franklin: I would imagine so. I want to move, now, to—and thank you for sharing so much about your work. I want to move to something that I think is really interesting, and that’s the creation of the Hanford Family and your involvement. And I’m wondering if we could start from the beginning of that. How did—what was the Hanford family and how was it started, why was it started? Groff: Well, we started because there was an awful lot of activity against us. Organizations like HEAL out of Spokane and of course in Seattle they had the organization that Gerald Pollet had, America Northwest or something. They were always pounding on us. And we wanted some recognition that what we were doing was good for the country. And that’s why we organized it. I think we felt that we were besieged. I know I felt that way. And I felt we should fight back. And for about five years, that’s what we did. We organized and our leader was Mike Fox, who was an incredible engineer. We had a lot of other help; Larry Haler, for example; Bob Drake, who’s a county commissioner; me; Ruth Nelson managed our office. And we just sort of grew and we just sort of started, we sold caps that said Proud of Hanford and our bumper strips and things. 0:17:41 Franklin: What were the ways that these groups like HEAL, which stands for Hanford Environmental Action League, right? Is that— Groff: That’s exactly what it was. Franklin: What were the ways that HEAL and Gerald Pollet’s group that you felt— Groff: Heart of America Northwest. Franklin: Heart of America Northwest, that’s right. 0:18:03 Groff: Well, they would constantly get in the media and write stories about us. So what we felt was, we were going to have to get in the media and rebut or refute what they were saying, and that’s what we did. I remember one time we went to Spokane and Wanda Munn, who was interviewed by—well, I forget which—it was one of the channels up there. We were there to support her in a debate. And then a bunch of us went to Seattle to also go to a debate. There was always movements to close us down. That’s what they wanted to do. Shut everything down, oppose the Hanford Project. And like I say, we felt that we were under siege. We only lasted for about five years, but we did communicate our message a lot, wrote letters to the editors, raised money, we had rallies. A couple times we went to the state capitol and had a rally there, and I was proud to be the master of ceremonies and introduce everybody. And we did get in, I think we did get in to see Booth Gardner, who was the governor at that time. And we were always going—people that opposed us—Wyden, Representative Wyden of Oregon, did not like us, was always coming out against the Hanford Project for something. And Brock Adams was the senator as I recall at that time. We tried to get these people to support us instead of constantly opposing us. So that’s why we got organized. 0:20:10 It was five years of pretty exciting times, being able to speak in favor of things like PUREX, the N Reactor, which we thought was a valuable resource, dual action, dual purpose. N Reactor produced plutonium and power. Which was your pictures—President Kennedy was here when that was operating. He was here to speak on that. So we were proud of what we were doing, and that’s why we say we are proud of Hanford. Of course, now everything’s gone out there, and that’s the way it—you know. As I have always known, all good things have to come to an end. And that did. 0:21:03 Franklin: What did you feel that you accomplished with the Hanford Family? Groff: Well, I think we accomplished giving our message out. And a couple other things follow after that. Ray Isaacson and I organized the Energy Communities Alliance, which is still in effect. We got together, we met in Denver with people from Denver. There was a nuclear project there. North Carolina. Franklin: Denver is Rocky Flats, right? Groff: Rocky Flats. We met with people from there and organized that, the ECA. And I was proud to be one of the first vice presidents of it. 0:21:49 Franklin: And what did the ECA do? What was its mission and what did it— Groff: Again, it was to get the message out that energy—that the cities can defend themselves. That’s essentially what we did. and we organized Benton County and Kennewick, Richland, was in that, as I recalled. Benton City. And that’s what we did, was to organize a group. We were advocating for nuclear power. That’s what we did. And we were different cities that were part of the Manhattan Project originally. We felt that was an important message to keep going with. So that’s what we did. Franklin: And how long were you involved with the ECA? 0:22:46 Groff: Oh, just a couple of more years. I was on the Kennewick City Council when I went back there. Ray Isaacson was on the Benton County Commission and he represented Benton County. I basically represented the cities when we organized the ECA. And I understand they’re still in effect today even. Franklin: Yeah, they’re actually meeting in Richland later this month. Groff: Yeah, I heard that. I’m very pleased with that. Franklin: Yeah, I think a lot of the attention now has shifted to the Manhattan Project National Historical Park and how the cities— Groff: Yeah, the B Reactor. Part of that. Franklin: Yeah, and how the cities can support that. 0:23:27 Groff: But I think that’s what we did. That was what we were trying to do was say, we did something for this country. And we’re proud of that. We used to argue with people about World War II and the bomb. You know, well, in my case, personally, it saved my dad’s life. He was in the Air Force, and a lot of men had to go from Europe to fight in the Pacific. And I think it saved hundreds of thousands of American lives and Japanese. We used to debate that with people on the peace—the people who were, what I call a peacenik. I don’t mean to be insulting. Franklin: No, no, that’s fine. Groff: Anyway, that was my personal opinion. 0:24:18 Franklin: Sure. Sorry, excuse me. In your opinion, what do you think—why do you think people misunderstood Hanford? Groff: Well, I think it was a lot of things. 12 Island—things happening at the other reactors, like 12-mile Island, which my understanding is that it simply proved the backup systems worked. And Chernobyl. Well, I read a lot about that. And my understanding is that Russian engineers took out the backup systems and they were testing something when that happened. I am a retired member of the American Nuclear Society, and that’s where I got a lot of information on the technical side. I’m not an engineer. I was a journalist, a writer. I knew how to do good English. I can string words together. One of the things I said, the most difficult thing is, people have trouble just producing a simple, declarative sentence. And that’s what we had to do in our operating procedures. Anyway, I think we did good things. Franklin: Do you think those skills helped you in your work with the Hanford Family? Your journalistic skills and— 0:25:50 Groff: Oh, I think so. That, and I was apolitical science minor. And of course, later on, some things happened. We organized, we were part of the organizing of the Hanford Speakers Bureau. Mike Fox was a big part of that. I was in that. I had to have extra training to be a part of it, and I would actually go out on behalf of Hanford, the Project, to talk about radiation, waste management. I was proud of the things that we did. I think back on it, and I think we did good things. Of course, Hanford is gone. And that’s, like I said, all good things come to an end. Franklin: Was there ever any points of agreement that you had, that Hanford Family had with groups like HEAL or Heart of America Northwest? 0:26:54 Groff: I don’t think so. I think we fundamentally disagreed with them. They didn’t like what we were doing. We felt like we were doing the right thing. When I think about it, I know the newspaper in Spokane always supported HEAL’s comments. The newspapers in Seattle were always working with Gerald Pollet’s organization. Of course, now he’s in the legislature, as is Larry Haler, which I think is interesting. Franklin: Yeah. Groff: Both Haler and I ran for the city council in Richland in 1989. He won in Richland; I won in Kennewick. I served two terms and I’m pleased with that. It was on the basis of my work in Kennewick that I helped to organize the ECA. Franklin: Oh, shoot, I had a question and just slipped out of my mind. Groff: I hope I’m making some sense. 0:28:03 Franklin: Oh, yeah, very much so. When did the Hanford Family—well, actually, before I ask about the end, you mentioned earlier that you did fundraising. What did you use those funds for? Groff: Well, we had an office that we opened up on George Washington Way. We bought office equipment. We had to have a telephone line; we had to pay for that. And that’s where much of the money went for. And of course we would buy caps, have caps produced. We’d sell that to raise more money. At the end of it, we gave money—we gave furnishings to an organization known as the Columbia Basin Shrine Club. And I believe that much of the money, I think, went to the American Nuclear Society, the local chapter. To the best of my memory; that’s what I recall. Franklin: Sure. Were you supported at all by the government—by the Hanford contractors? Groff: No. Franklin: Oh, okay. Do you know how they felt about the Hanford Family? Formally or informally? Groff: I don’t think they cared one way or the other about what we were doing. Or if they did, they didn’t tell us. 0:29:34 Franklin: How did the Hanford Family come to an end? Groff: Well, we just sort of ended. We just sorted of stopped. We didn’t do anything else. For a couple of years, a bunch of us, we’d get together who were left, we’d get together for lunch. Everybody now has pretty much passed away. Like Mike’s gone. And people like Ruth Nelson, who was a key player in this when she ran the office. She was there every day, managing the office. Franklin: Mm-hmm. You kept working at Hanford after the Hanford Family kind of stopped being active, right? And so you worked, during the ‘90s, during that—right after the Tri-Party Agreement was signed, and the focus on Hanford shifted. Groff: That was one thing. We were asked to support the Tri-Party Agreement, which we did. In fact, I recall a few of us did drive to Pendleton, Oregon and there was a meeting there and we did support that. We did ask to support that. Yeah. 0:30:58 Franklin: How did your work change after the Tri-Party Agreement, your Site work? Groff: Well, for me, nothing. Franklin: Really? Groff: No. I did the same thing. I started writing operating procedures, creating manuals, information manuals. And that’s what I ended up doing through three different contractors. Arco and Rockwell and Westinghouse. And also, one thing I was thinking about, when I was at Hanford, I was on the safety commission that we had. I was chairman of it, and I produced some interesting safety films for video tape, which I enjoyed doing. I got to do a lot of stuff. Franklin: Oh, that’s great. Groff: With my acting ability. I was in the Richland Players at that time. I was on the council. And was very active just being—doing a lot of stuff, getting to perform. Franklin: You said training films. These were for the contractors? Training films for— Groff: Yes it was. I did three of them that were all safety-oriented. I naturally performed in all three of them. And they were produced at Battelle. Franklin: Okay. 0:32:28 Groff: The company gave me some money, about, oh, $8,000 to $10,000. That’s what it cost to do. And I wrote the scripts, and we went out, picked locations, and filmed them. So I wish I had copies of those left, but I don’t. I enjoy watching me in them. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] I think we—I’ll have to check our collection for those. It’d be fun to see if I can spot you. Groff: Yeah, there were three safety films. What I was in was the accident prevention council, the APC. I was a member and then I was promoted to chairman of it. And as part of that, I actually attended safety meetings with the president of the company. At that time, it was Paul Lorenzini, was our president. And I really liked him. He was—In one film, if I can retain this, the first one I did, I did a pratfall. Which I was stage trained to do. We filmed that at the Federal Building. And when we showed him, his safety people, he said, well, weren’t you injured doing that? I said, no, sir, I enjoyed doing it. Didn’t hurt me a bit. Well, I think he thought I was a little wacky, but that’s—being a little actor like that, a ham, he enjoyed that. So they had me do two more of those. 0:34:10 Franklin: Oh, that’s great. How did the mood of the community change when the production was shut down at Hanford and it moved to cleanup? Groff: Well, I honestly don’t—I don’t know if I can answer that. Franklin: Okay. Groff: I guess the people just accepted that’s what was going to happen. We were decommissioning and things. I felt bad about it. I thought we should’ve been doing more. 0:34:46 Franklin: When you were on the Kennewick City Council, and you served two terms, you engaged in a fight over wind turbines. Groff: Oh, yes, I did. That was something that—some of the money that we had helped fund that. It was about—there was a proposal to put wind turbines on Rattlesnake Mountain. That annoyed me, because I thought wind turbines were just totally ugly. And I did a lot of research calling—there were several sites in California: Altamont Pass, Tehachapi. And I would talk to people. I got a whole bunch of information, technical information, on why we shouldn’t have wind turbines. And I was in debates around the city and I won that one. I went, that’s one thing I’m proud of. We did stop the installation of wind turbines on Rattlesnake Mountain. Now I understand that the Indian tribes are dealing with that now. I guess they feel—it’s a good place for them. But I used to look up there at that mountain, you know, the highest—3,000 feet, the highest point without vegetation. I thought that was kind of interesting. And why ruin it with wind turbines? So I did, I led that fight. 0:36:19 Franklin: Great. And you retired, you said, in 1999, 2000? Somewhere in there. Groff: 2000, yeah. I worked 17 years there. Franklin: Great, well, we’ve covered just about everything. I just wanted to ask you just a couple more questions. So Chernobyl, obviously, was a major event worldwide but it also had some pretty big ramifications here in Tri-Cities. Groff: Well, they tried to compare it to the N Reactor. That’s one of the things that were used against N Reactor, and 12-Mile Island. 0:37:05 Franklin: And how did you—how did the Hanford Family and others deal with that? I’m wondering if you could kind of describe the dialogue or the kind of battle? Groff: Well, actually, we dealt with it—we were members of the American Nuclear Society. All of us were, kind of had dual memberships. We felt that the ANS did come out with a lot of good information on what actually occurred at Chernobyl and 12-Mile Island. Those were major, major events. I think it hurt this area. Franklin: Did you find the public to be pretty accepting of that information? 0:37:48 Groff: I think so. I think the Tri-Cities, we were in a lot of newspaper stories here and in Seattle, Spokane. And we were on TV a lot, too. Larry and I and Mike were interviewed a lot, talking about our side of it. So I think—and I think we had community support. They’re the ones who would come out to the rallies. Once we got people who came out to the rally when we had it. I think we actually had two of them when we went to the state capitol in Olympia. Well, we had to get some busses, three buses. And that’s where a lot of the money went, to hire the buses. We had a lot of—it was excitement for people. It was for me. I’ll admit it. I was excited. I felt like we were doing something. We were part of something. An important part of something. 0:39:57 Franklin: Yeah. I kind of—off that statement, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War? Groff: Well, I think we did our duty. I think we were important to the country. I think that’s the main thing. Hanford contributed in history as part of the Manhattan Project, and I think people should realize that what we did was vital to the nation, to the nation’s security. I think that’s the important thing. We were important to the security. And that’s why I was proud to work there. 0:39:46 Franklin: Yeah. Well, Cliff, thank you so much for coming and sharing about your career and your work with the Hanford Family. I really appreciate it. Groff: Well, thank you for the opportunity to do that. Franklin: Yeah. Groff: Like I said, I hope I made sense. Franklin: Yeah, no, you have. It’s been a really wonderful interview. Is there anything else you’d like to add before we conclude? Groff: No, I can’t—all I can say is thank you, and thank Wazzu for doing this. Well, I think I mentioned, I was an on-air talent a long time ago for fundraising for Washington State University, and I’m proud of that. Very proud. Franklin: I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that we’re generously funded by the Department of Energy through MSA. So, I want to thank them too. Groff: Okay. Franklin: Well, great. [VIDEO CUTS] 0:40:45 Groff: SAR is safety analysis report. We had to incorporate those into our procedures. Franklin: And what was that you were saying earlier about the evaporator crystals? Groff: Yeah, we had evaporator crystallizers. It was some of the last projects that I recall working on. There was one in East, one in West. Yeah, evaporator crystallizers, that was— Franklin: And how did you help with those? Groff: Writing procedures for the operators. I remember going out and climbing up the stairs. They were—the stairs were these three where you looked through like grates. You know what a grate is? Franklin: Mm-hmm. 0:41:39 Groff: You look down. Me with my agoraphobia, I did that, climbing around those buildings. You know those process buildings were 1250 feet long, about five stories deep, and I could walk up and down those stairs and it wouldn’t bother me a bit. Franklin: Wow. And just a minute earlier off-camera, you mentioned that you were the only non-engineer at that time to pass the engineering test. 0:42:13 Groff: Yeah. That was—in our group, the process control engineers, all of us had to take Phase I. Phase II was they had to study a plant that they’re working at, like B Plant was just where I worked out, WESF, PUREX, C Plant, T Plant, U Plant. The test was on all the aspects of that plant. And I picked that for B Plant WESF and passed it. And I got a certificate, I’m the only one—the only engineering writer that did that, that actually studied enough about it to know what went into that plant. Franklin: Wow. That’s really impressive. Groff: It was impressive and I—my manager at that time, Blaine Barton, who was the group manager, he told the guys, he said, you know, here I am a journalism guy, and I did that. And he thought it was quite an impressive achievement. And I didn’t mention it, but she did. But at home, I still got the certificate. It’s been framed. Franklin: Oh, that’s great. Well, Tom, thank you for that question. Hungate: Yeah. Franklin: That was a good one. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:43:37 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 9987 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview The Tri-City Herald ARCO Tank Farms PUREX Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 58 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 23 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Cliff Groff Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Cliff Groff was a reporter for the Tri-City Herald before becoming a writer for the Hanford Site. He started writing as an operations procedure specialist and retired as the senior engineering writer. In addition to working as a writer for the Hanford Site Mr. Groff also served two terms on the Kennewick City Council and was a member of the Richland Players. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 08/10/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F8d98d6cd831eab3e0ea30e58a8baf8be.JPG 75a0accb0e39a4826303cbf0441b58c2 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Lito Ines Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound 0:00:00 Tom Hungate: Okay. Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history with Joselito Ines on November 6, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I wil be talking with Lito about his experiences working for the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Lito Ines: Full name is Joselito Ines. J-O-S-E-L-I-T-O. Last name, Ines, I-N-E-S. And I go by Lito. Franklin: Great, thanks, Lito. So tell me how and why you came to the area to work for the Hanford Site. 0:00:35 Ines: well, it was my main background was hotel/motel management. A lot of my—that’s when I was pretty young, in my teens. I was approached by all my best friends to go and work at Hanford, because they said they pay more, and less hours. So I did. I signed up for the apprentice program for the operating engineers, local 370. That’s how I started with working out at Hanford at the 200 Area, as an apprentice heavy equipment operator. Franklin: Heavy equipment operator, okay. Did you need any particular background or training to do that? Or did they kind of just take you in the apprentice program at the ground level? 0:01:27 Ines: Yeah. The apprentice program is usually you have to take an aptitude test to make sure you know how to read, write, add, subtract. [LAUGHTER] You know, that kind of stuff. I mean, you just can’t get in there. And what I did is on that year, in ’79, early ’79, there was about 2,000 people that applied for this apprentice program, and there’s only ten people that’s going to make it. So I knew I didn’t have a chance, because my background is something else. And then I talked to everybody, and everybody was in construction and military and farm. Nothing. And for some reason, I got up in the top five, just on aptitude. Because military gets a discount. [LAUGHTER] And I didn’t have that either. But I made it to the top five. Franklin: Wow, that’s great. I want to rewind just a little bit. How did you come to the Tri-Cities area? When did you come to the area? Ines: To the area. Well, my grandfather started a farm here in Kennewick in 1950. So in 1950, my family was the first Filipino that settled here in the Tri-City area. Franklin: Wow. Ines: The farm that he had was in Kennewick. It’s called Canyon Lakes now. But that used to be our farm. My father decided to come because he passed away for a funeral. So when he came here in ’65, he decided he wants to stay here. And so two years later on—because he had to go on the immigration process and things like that—and two years we came in here, in ’67, and I was 15. Immigration there was pretty lax. So as soon as we got here, we got a green card right off the bat. 0:03:24 Franklin: So you came here from the Philippines. Ines: From Philippines, yup. Franlkin: Oh, okay, so your grandfather was already here, but your father and you were in the Philipines until 1967. Ines: Yeah, my grandfather actually came to the United States in 1923. Franklkni: Oh, wow. Ines: During the year where they took a lot of Asian, they took Japanese, Korean, I think even some Portuguese. The Chinese were already here because of the railroad. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right, right. Ines: But these are all the agriculture because what they did is they—the United States figured out that this group of people are good in growing sugar cane and pineapple. That’s why they all went to Hawaii first. That’s how he got here. Franklin: Okay. Ines; And then of course, they were in Hawaii and then they went to California. Franklin: Mm-hmm. Ines: And then they started the revolution for the union workers. The Filipinos started that, not the Spanish people. And then from there he moved to Union Gap. Then he came here in 1950. Franklin: Oh, okay, cool. And then your family, you and your family were in the hotel business until ’75— Ines: No. Franklin: Oh, no? Ines: Just me. Franklin: Oh, just you. Ines: I was in the hotel—my dad was an architect here at Hanford. Franklin: Oh, really? Ines: Yeah. Franklin: When did your dad start working at Hanford? Ines: Well, when we became citizens. Because at that time you had to be a citizen to work at Hanford. So he tried and applied here before ’71. That’s when we got all our citizenship. And they all hired him, but then they found out he wasn’t a citizen. So we had to wait until ’71. So he became a citizen, all of us, in ’71, and that’s when he started. But I didn’t start till later on. Franklin: And what did your dad do for Hanford again? Ines: He was a senior architect here at Hanford. Franklin: Okay. So I assume he had gone to school for that back in the Philippines? Ines: Yes. He was a—actually had two things in the Philippines. He was an architect and a patent examiner. So he worked for the government up there for the patent office. Franklin: Okay. And what were some of your dad’s duties as senior architect at— Ines: Well, they just build all the structures here for the Hanford Project, yeah. Franklin: Oh, okay. And then you waited—it wasin ’79 then that you came to work at—and you worked for JA Jones? Ines: JA Jones was the first company I worked for at the 200 Area. Franklin: Right,a nd they were one of the major— Ines: At that time. Franklin: contractor—construction contractors, right? Ines: At that time, yes. Franklin: At that time. Ines: Yeah. Franklin: So kind of like walk me through a typical day for a heavy equipment operator. 0:06:15 Ines: Well, the first thing we’d do at Hanford, you know, as everybody knows, it’s probably the safest place to work when it comes to safety. Because that’s all they think about, is safety. So we have our safety meeting, usually consists of at least half-an-hour. Because at that time, we all meet together, all the different crafts. And all the different crafts have different duties and different tasks. SO we talked about everybody’s safety topic for that day, what they’re going to be doing and what kind of safety, or accident they could get into so we could talk about it before they get in there. And then after that, then they split us up and then the boss will tell us, this is where you’re going, this is what you’re going to run, and this is what we’re going to be doing. And you’re going to be working with this kind of craft. Because my craft at Hanford was just a support group. Because I normally worked for a certain craft. I used my machine to do the lifting, whatever it is, for them. Running cranes, I have to move things around for them and things like that. Franklin: Okay. And do you primarily worked—early on you worked in the 200 East and 200 West areas? Ines: Yes. Franklin: Okay. Did you know of any other Filipinos working for Hanford at the time? Or— Ines: No, just my family. Just like I said, we were the first Filipino family here in the Tri-Cities. [LAUGHTER] I mean, growing up, we were it. You know? So if you say, hey, do you know those Filipino family? That’s us! [LAUGHTER] Franklin; What other—you mentioned that the first thing you’d do would be the safety meeting with other crafts. What other kinds of crafts were represented? Ines: Well, they had plumbers, they had carpenters, they had laborers, they have ironworkers, sheet metal workers, insulators. I don’t know what else if I missed. Yeah, I think that’s— Franklin: And what kind of structures did you—do you have any examples of any specific structures that you helped put up or helped support the construction of? Ines: Well, a lot of the buildings we built was in support of the old buildings. You know, because in those years, all the reactors and all those other—it’s already built. So the only thing we were building is we were building sometimes more buildings for the new people, office people, engineers that come in so they have a place to work. Or laboratory for the scientists to work on. And a lot of the things I did, too, in those years was digging up the Tank Farms. Because in that years, we were building a lot of Tank Farms. Franklin: Oh, okay. Ines: So we were building a lot of—digging a lot of those, and that’s where we find a lot of old—[LAUGHTER]—old things that’s not in the record! Franklin: Oh, okay. I’m wondering if we could talk about—can we talk about that a little bit? Like, what kinds of— Ines: Well, sometimes we’d find like vaults or things. I mean, cans that’s not labeled and then we’d always have, we call it an RCT, someone to see if there’s any radi—and most of the time they go out there and the scale would just go, brr! [LAUGHTER] And we don’t know what it is. And then they’d look at their history, see if there’s anything written. Of course there’s none. And then what they do, is we can’t touch anything, so they’d have to call somebody, if they’re still alive, that worked in that area. And then they’d come down—[LAUGHTER] So all these 90-year-old people. [LAUGHTER] They all go in there, and they’re kind of like, yeah, I remember I dug that, and we buried this and that. But you know. That was it. [LAUGHTER] But we’d find all kinds of stuff. One time we were digging a big hole for the tank, and we had a clamdigger and my RCT was sitting on the bank. It was a deep hole. And I was down there, because one of my jobs was to make sure that the elevation was right, we don’t go too deep. And this clam bucket, it’s attached to an old—well, in those times, our machines were really old. [LAUGHTER] And it’s a clam bucket that opens up and then he drops that and then when he picks it up, it closes and brings out the dirt. It’s the old machine. Now they don’t—all, everything’s hydraulic. So one time I was standing there and all of the sudden he dropped that thing and he hit something solid, like dunk! [LAUGHTER] I looked, I go, ho, that thing go! And then I looked at that—the RCT was on the top of the slop. He stood up, he looked at his Geiger and he started running! And I said, hold it! What is this? Am I supposed to run, too? And I said, come on, you guys, let’s get out of here! Because I guess they buried it. And he was on top, and this was in the hole. And it buried his needle. So he said, go! And then of course he sounded the alarm and then of course all of this Hanford Patrol, I mean, everybody—the whole place was packed, and they shut the whole thing down. And just like I said, they don’t know what’s in there, because it’s supposed to be clean. That’s why we’re digging. So the same old scenario; they had to call somebody who’s about 90 years old and say do you remember what’s in there? And that’s the same thing it is. He’s in the thing, he goes, yeah, we dug that thing and we put something in there. But yeah it’s like a vault or something. But he doesn’t know what’s in it. Because most of the time the only one that knows is whoever the head dudes. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right, the other guys would just bury the stuff. Ines: Yeah! They told them to bury that thing in there. Franklin: Yeah. Ines: There’s a lot of stuff out there. I worked at that 618-10. Franklin: I was just about to ask you aobut that, yeah. Ines: I mean, I knew that’s what they were dumping—they’re dumping that all over the place. Franklin: Right, and 618-10 was trying to take care of that stuff that had been left out there and not really well-documented. Ines: Yeah, they’re not documented. The thing I did there, the last project I did is I built an area where they can practice on how to dig these cans. The reason why is, if you open these cans accidentally, it explodes and it gives out gas, and it gives out flames. They don’t know what’s in those cans. That’s the worst part about it. They don’t know what emits. It could be deadly poison or just radioactive; they don’t have a clue. That’s what 618-10. But the other job that I just did out there was an experimental thing at 324 Building. If you guys have heard about it; it’s the most highly deadliest building out there at Hanford. Franklin: Yeah, and that’s just up here in the 300 Area. Ines: [LAUGHTER] Yeah! Not too far! Franklin: And that’s the one that’s still up, right? Because they haven’t— Ines: They can’t. Franklin: --figured out yet—yeah. Ines: Yeah, they can’t, bevause if you go in there, like, if you open the door, you’re probably dead. That’s how hot it is. They call it an IDLH building—immediate death to life and health. So if you open that, you’re dead. Franklin: Wow, I’ve never heard that acronym before. What is it, ID— Ines: LH. Franklin: IDLH. Okay. Ines: Immediate Death to Health. [LAUGHTER] 14:12 Franklin: Doesn’t sound good. Ines: Immediate Death to Life and Health, that’s what it was, yeah. Franklin: To life and health. Ines: Yeah. Franklin: Wow. Ines: Yeah. And the thing of that, what we were doing is, we were doing the experimental stage of how to get to it, and eventually we’re going to do everything robotics. So that’s supposed to be a five-year job for us to experiment and do the, you know, everything in robotics with the screen andeverything. But everything failed. [LAUGHTER] All of our experiments failed. We were there for about six months, and of course, those were all engineering. See, everything at Hanford is budget-related, whether the government gave you, this is for this, and that for that. So the engineering budget was done, and they all failed. So they laid us off—[LAUGHTER]—because we had all the money to do the experiment for five years—and gave it back to engineering. But I think they just started. I think—yeah, I can’t remember who’s doing it. I think it’s Apollo and something. It was in the paper. Franklin: And they’re using robotics to go inside the building. Ines: Eventually, when we go, when we get there. Right now they’re just starting, just prepping the area. Franklin: Oh, right. Yeah. That’s really interesting that you mentioned that they had kind of bring these older retired guys out to explain what’s in these stuff that you would find, because it kind of sounds like making them an ad hoc oral history with them of, like, what’d you do when you buried these things out here? Ines: Exactly. That’s basically what they asked. And of course, we had the Native Americans out there, too, so if we dig up any kind of bones or— Franklin: Did you witness that? Did that happen while you were working in heavy equipment? Ines: You know, I ran into one of them, but he was out at Hanford. He was just across the river. We were doing a bike path. [LAUGHTER] And all of the sudden, the skeletons started popping out. Of course, you know the American Indians used to bury their dead next to the river. Franklin: Right. Ines: So we couldn’t do an excavation because every time we’d do something, you know, they’re coming out. I think it’s from—I don’t know what the reason why. They’re just popping out. So finally they said, well, can’t dig anymore. What you’re going to have to do is you’re just going to have to go on top of them. [LAUGHTER] So that’s what we did! It’s amazing. I don’t know why they didn’t at least excavate it and move it or do something. But it’s Native American Indians; they have different things that they do. Franklin: Yeah. I imagine you would’ve had an archeologist on staff when you were doing a lot of these projects. Ines: Yes, always. We have an archeologist and—there’s another department up there, they just sit there. [LAUGHTER] I don’t know what kind of job they have. They said, yeah, that’s our job! WE sit there and watch you guys, make sure you guys don’t dig out anything. And another one—oh, I think it’s environmentalist. We have another person usually that just stands there. Usually they use college kids. And they just sit there and they look for, like, even if you disturb like little birds, or little eggs. You can’t touch anything! [LAUGHTER] They look at all of those things, so once it’s there, it’s roped off. You can’t do anything. That’s why we don’t want to see those kind of stuff in there, because it’ll delay your job completely. THere's a lot a lot a lot of wild animals up there. One time I was walking from one trailer to one trailer, I almost got stampeded by elk. I mean, like, at least 100 of them. I go, where did they come from?! [LAUGHTER] I go, wow! But they know—they’re not scared of people up there, those animals, because they’re used to it. Sometimes we have like babies that will be up there. Baby elk, baby deer, will just be walking up there. Franklin: Right, because they’re all protected on the reservation. Ines: They’re protected. Franklin: They can’t be hunted there. Ines: Yeah, and for some reason, I think they know. [LAUGHTER] Like the elders tell them, oh, we’re okay here. [LAUGHTER] Go beg. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah, that’s always—I do tours with the Manhattan Project National Historical Park, and we’re out on Site, when we’re lucky, we see them, and if we’re really lucky, we get close. I think about people that go up to the mountains to hunt and pray that they get really close—you know, half as close to an elk as we do. Yeah, it’s really—Hanford’s kind of a—I think you alluded to it, it’s kind of a wildlife refuge in many ways, kind of accidentally. Because they never—it’s just the nature of taking all that land away for plutonium production that made it kind of a wildlife sanctuary. Ines: Yeah, well, you know, with this radioactive thing, you never know. I mean, they always say that this area might be clean. But wildlife, they fly in there. They eat the stuff, and they go everywhere. Franklin: Right, they’re not bounded by that invisible line on the map. Ines: Yeah. They don’t get a badge. They don’t get a dosimeter. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: You always had a dosimeter when you were out there, right? Ines: Yes. If you ever work—if you work in that type of environment, of course, you have to have one. It depends on the level of exposure you’re going to get; you have different types. Franklin: I wanted to ask you, how long were you in the apprentice program? How long of a program was that? Ines: Apprentice is usually about four years. Franklin: Four years. Ines: Kind of like going to college, but you get paid. [LAUGHTER] That’s another good thing about it. And you can make mistakes. Unless you kill somebody or something. [LAUGHTER] You’d probably get fired. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah, I would imagine so. Where did you move next after you worked in the 200 East and West Areas? Ines: I just kind of, basically, I’m dispatched through my union. So after—in construction, you know, you start something, it’s eventually going to end. You’re going to finish. So after that ends, they usually move you to another area. Franklin: Right. So you were a project-based—I mean, as the needs of these different projects determined, that’s where you went. Ines: Yes. And then of course after we built Hanford 2, which is Energy Northwest, I think around that time, it’s all cleanup by then. But I remember when I used to see all those—they used to have like a helicopter and an armored truck. Every time they produced a plutonium, they’ll be out there in the 200 Area. Oh! They built some more! [LAUGHTER] Because they’re superly guarded with a helicopter and an armored guard and a caravan of security. Franklin: You’re talking about when they would ship out the finished product, the plutonium, the product. Ines: Yeah. Well, something—they moved them around. It depends on where, it’s either going to go to the finishing place, and then—I didn’t even know this until later on, but they have what they call a railroad building. There’s like, I think, four or maybe six buildings, and what it is is that’s where, after they produce some plutonium, and they’re in the railroad cars, and they store them there to cool down. I’ve never seen them, for years and years. Because they’ve got big mounds of dirt. I passed by them millions and millions of times, until I worked for a contractor, what we did is we had to re-roof all the old buildings here at Hanford. And so we had to re-roof these. And of course it was radioactive so we can’t get inside until everything is clean. But they were there. I mean, they even had a big—I didn’t even know, there’s a big, huge crane in there to lift up the—I don’t know what they’re lifting, but they’re usually in the cart. And what they do is after they build it is I guess they park the cart there and get it cooled. And then once it’s cold, they transport it to wherever they want it to go. Franklin: Wow. Ines: Yeah. That’s a lot of—and then you know, like I worked at the 100-K East and K West. They’re about a mile long, apart. I didn’t know there was a tunnel that goes from one end to the other end. That’s a mile long. There’s a lot of tunnels in there. [LAUGHTER] One time we had—they said they were going to blow up the elevator. This is when we were cleaning up at K East. They said, we’re not going to work that weekend, because they’re going to blow it up so they can eliminate it. And of course when you blow up things, you don’t want to—it has to be a controlled blast so it doesn’t affect the whole area. Well, you know, all of our reactors out there, they used to use asbestos shingles, because it was supposed to make it cooler, I don’t know what it is. But that’s what they used for the walls. So Monday we came back to work, right? [LAUGHTER] It was funny. We’re all—our eyes were that big. They said in the meeting, they said, the blast was—everything was safe, everything was good, nothing happened. And we kind of looked and said, well, how come the shingles are all over the place? And that’s asbestos. And just like that one thing that we cleaned, K East, the pond, because that’s where they used to cool all those spent fuel, they said, when they first detected it was leaking, I don’t remember exactly what the wording was, but the guy who was explaining it said, this is the wording, they never really claimed it. They said, it wasn’t enough leakage—they said something about the leakage was not enough to make it warrant to clean it. But then he told me, yeah, it was leaking like thousands of gallons per day. [LAUGHTER] So that’s what we’re doing, we’re cleaning the whole thing. It was pretty, pretty, pretty hot when we got down there because we had to dig next to the wall and it’s at least 900 millirems or something like that. But we still had to go there. What we did is we had a dozer, and what we did is, to get close to it, we built barriers, like dirt. I pushed it and then once I pushed, we can’t stay there. Then I have to back up all the way as fast as I can. Bcause before I Got there, there was another contractor that was there, and I noticed all their machines were all parked on the side. And they’re all contaminated. I mean, they had to get—you can’t clean them, once it’s penetrated, it’s history. And they said they have like five people that got burned out every year. I mean, their allowed radioactive exposure is gone for the whole year. So they have five. So when we got there, there was only two of us that went in. I said, how you guys going to do that? There’s only two of you. So that’s how we did it. We just went there and came out, and we put barriers, dirt barriers, so we’re always being shielded. And the only thing we got was three. Which is pretty good. Franklin: Three what? Ines: Millirem. Franklin: Oh, three millirem. Ines: Yeah, which is basically not much. Franklin: Yeah. How long did you work out at the K Basins for? 0:27:40 Ines: On and off. I think the first time I went p there is when I built a couple of buildings attached to, next to the ponds, so we can extract the old spent rods. So I built this building so they can transport it, you know. They bring the rod out—what year was that? I can’t remember. But they said that building can only be there for five years. So what it is is they extract that rod on the crane, because I had to build a crane, and then there’s a truck that comes in—this is inside the building—so everything is inside and then it loads up to thet ruck, and then it went up to the—I think they used to call it the smurf building, the blue building up there. You know, where they’d get sealed again or something like that. That was the first time I think I worked at K. But I worked at all of them. I worked at, you know, even D and DR. Franklin: And what did you do there? 0:28:49 Ines: I think that was during the cleanup already. We were cleaning things up. So I asked them, I said, how come there’s a D and a DR? And they said, this is called DR because it’s D Replacement. And I said, what happened to the D? Well, they had a meltdown. The D had a meltdown, so they had to—kind of like what happened to Japan. I don’t know if they realy controlled it. But most of them are cocooned nowadays. We all cocooned them. I even worked at—because my dad used to tell me, he used to go to, I think it was J or A? J? I can’t remember, where they have a lot of experimental stuff with animals. You know, they— Franklin: Oh, F. Ines: F. Is it F? Franklin: Yes. Ines: Yeah, they said, yeah, you should go there. They have all kinds of animals in there, and some of them are smoking weed, some of them are doing this, some of them are being injected by radioactive. And then I had to go clean that up. That was very interesting, because they buried a lot of stuff in there where it was supposed to be clean, and they buried stuff in there, like dead animals. Franklin: Right, the pigs, right? Ines: Yeah. Franklin: The pigs and the dogs. Ines: Yeah. And it stinks. Franklin: Yeah? Ines: Yeah, I don’t know why they didn’t get rid of it properly, because when I was trying to clean that area, you know, make it—we’re supposed to bring it back to American Indians—Native Americans. And I started to vlean it and I was coming up with all of these vaults and tanks. And sometimes I’d open one of them, oh, it was terrible! So we’d always have to call somebody to check out what’s going on. But it’s different. Franklin: So basically the process that you were involved in for cleaning was really just removing the contaminated earth and then where did that go, and what did you replace it with? 0:30:52 Ines: Okay. Well, basically, what we’d do is when we’d—I think the big scenario when I did, they called it the Big Dig. They usually used me for—I’d do a lot of experimental stuff. I’d do the first thing. And so what we did is we had the Big Dig, and that was at B. The hole that I dug, there’s two of them. It’s like four football fields on the bottom. And it slopes out, so it’s a pretty good size. There’s two of them. Becaues by the time I—and what they do, is we separate—we have people that are checking which one is clean, which one is dirty. So we segregate them. So the one that’s dirty, it gets hauled out. And that’s where all of this trucks that you see that have linings and tarps, those are the contaminated ones. Usually the one that’s clean is usually what we put back to backfill. And then they find a place where they can get some more dirt that’s clean. There’s a lot of dirt out there. I even built what they called a mulai-mulai. Have you ever heard of mulai-mulai? Franklin: Yeah, the ridges. Ines: The ridges. Franklin: The upwellings. Ines: Yes. Franklin: They’re leavings of the Ice Age floods. Ines: So that was at N. Franklin: Yeah. Ines: And my job—are you ready for this?—is to rebuild the moolai-moolai that was taken up. Franklin: Really? Ines: Yeah! And I said, so—and the mulai-mulai is an Indian name. It’s an Indian name that means, god made this. So I had to rebuild this mulai-mulai. And the engineer got the design so I know where to start and the height and the dimension. So finally I told them, you know what? By the time I build this thing, it should be Lito-Lito, because I made it! [LAUGHTER] Not mulai-mulai. So everybody was laughing at me. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Wow. I’ve never—how many did you build? Like, how—do you have an idea, an estimate— Ines: How many mulai-mulai I built? Franklin: Yeah, how long did you work on that? Ines: Well, I can build—you know, they’re not that big. They’re probably less than this building, I mean this studio. They’re not that big. Some of them are a little bigger. But they’re not—I’m guessing probably the highest is maybe ten feet. Franklin: did you have photos to work from or--? Ines: No. Franklin: How did you approach that? 0:33:38 Ines: What do you mean by photo? We have plans, you know, blueprints. Is that what you meant? Franklin: Yeah, I mean, I’m wondering— Ines: Yeah, it’s engineered. You know, it’s surveyed, the outline is surveyed, and then they give—it’s kind of like building a golf course. Have you seen a golf course? You know, they have like mounds. Same thing. Kind of like, if you want to make a nice garden in your yard, you know, you make like a pattern, that’s where you start and you build up. It’s the same thing. It’s surveyed. But nowadays everything is satellite surveyed. SO you just put your rod, and that’s how high it goes. Franklin: So were these mulai-mulai that had been taken away for the construction of N Reactor? Ines: Yes. Franklin: There are still some natural ones. Ines: Yes. There are some still in there. Franklin: That’s just so interesting that they would re-put that there, because now it’s a manmade mulai-mulai. Ines: Lito-Lito. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: And you would know. It’s just fascinating to me, because you would know—I mean, you would’ve restored it, but you would know and it would also be—that’s really interesting. Ines: Yeah, isn’t that amazing? Well, you know, in the Philippines we have what we call a chocolate mountain. Have you ever heard of that? Franklin: No. Ines: Kind of a similar thing. There’s millions of them up there. But they call it chocolate mountain because of the Kisses. You remember the chocolate Kisses? That’s why they call it a chocolate mountain. Franklin: Oh, interesting. Ines: Yeah, very. Franklin: I want to go back to a couple things. So these railroad car areas, you mentioned where they would store the hot railroad cars. Ines: Yeah, the one they just— Franklin: Were these like large tunnels, or— Ines: Oh, no. Franklin: Especially if it had dirt on it— Ines: Well, no, the dirt is a barricade to hide those buildings. The buildings are pretty big. They’re probably the size of Floyd. Franklin: Okay. SO it was a building. Ines: Yeah. Franklin: But you couldn’t see it from the roadway— Ines: No. Franklin: --because it was obscured by a—and was it manmade dirt? Ines: Yes, yes. Franklin: Oh, okay. Ines: It’s all manmade, yeah. Franklin: Okay. Wow. Ines: Yeah, they were hiding it. Franklin: And how many did you say there were? Ines: I think there were at least—I’m guessing—it’s been a while—either four or five, because, you know— Franklin: And what area were they in? Ines: They’re in between East and West, 200 East and West. Franklin: Okay. Ines: So that’s why—I’d never seen it! Because you go through, when we go to the H, it’s one way, and then the other way is you go to the West area. You pass by—it’s in between, it’s right over there. Franklin: Interesting. Right, because the cars would take the fuel from the reactors to the 200 Area, drop it off, processing, and then I guess, I’m assuming, that’s where then they would stage those rail cars to let them cool down. Ines: Yeah, that place used to be railings all over the place. Sometimes when I’m doing some cleaning up, I’d end up with, oh, there’s railroads here. And they’re all interconnected, all of those reactors. Franklin: Right. Ines: Yeah, rails was the form of transportation. Franklin: Yeah, yeah, for the fuel, yeah. I wanted to ask you about your time spent working at WPPS in the early—what was that like to work on a commercial—was working on a commercial reactor different than working— Ines: It was very, very different. Because, you know, it’s not really a—it’s not like the Hanford, the government job that we had, because it’s kind of outside of it. What it is is you had, oh, we had different contractors. There’s so many different contractors working on Hanford. You only had one. This was you’re working with like 12, 20 different contractors. So, everybody’s different. So like our meeting would be just on our company. And then our place—it was really, really different. Because that was the year when we had a lot of people that came form—I don’t know why, there were a lot from Texas. They were Texas—I mean, everywhere I looked, they were from Texas. And then of course like the parking lot is full of different trailers. But the one thing that really stuck to me when I was working there that was really, really different is they used to have portable brothel. Franklin: I’ve heard things of this nature about WPPSS construction. Ines: You’ve heard, and it was the truth. It was the truth. There were trailer—there were campers out there. And that was just so—oh. But I was young, plus I didn’t have enough money. [LAUGHTER] And those guys—I mean, a lot of them make—I mean, we make tons of money out there. But that was really something else. That they—ad then another thing they do, is they all have this gambling—everybody’s—each group has their own just gambling thing. Like in this one cuhte that goes from the bottom all the way to the top—because I run the cranes—and most of the time I’m not busy, I run the overhead cranes. One of our crane guys runs the chutes that goes from the bottom all the wy to the top, because there’s no crane there. So he has like a little portable crane. So I went to visit him, and then I looked in that chute, and I looked down there, there’s this big, huge circle. Kind of like a target. It had like different size rings in it. And in the middle is dirt, and I know there’s a lot of coins down there. And I go, what’s that for? He said, oh, yeah, you throw your coins in there and you put your name, and at the end of the week, whoever’s close to the center takes the whole pot. I said, you’re kidding me! [LAUGHTER] And then they even have contests of rolling your coins on the dirt and whoever gets the farthest wins the pot. And I’m not a gambler, and I don’t really play too many game cards or anything like that, card games. I learned a lot from that place. [LAUGHTER] And this is another thing. This is earlier. My first day there at work. In our building, I walked in there, it’s probably half the size of this. And as soon as I walked in the door, that whole wall, that whole ceiling was filled with penthouse pinups. I go, wow! You can’t do that anymore, because it’s illegal. Franklin: No, you couldn’t. Ines: [LAUGHTER] So, I walked in so I just kind of stood there because I’ve never seen some of them. So I was looking, and then finally the boss—what are you doing there? We’re having a meeting! I said, I was looking to see if my girlfriend’s in here. [LAUGHTER] It was different then. Franklin: Yeah, it really kind of sounds like the Wild West of construction. Ines: It was. As a matter of fact, sometimes when they’d tell me, well, I don’t have nothing to do. Yeah, you don’t have nothing to do? Just go walk around. What do you mean, walk around? Just walk around. Just explore. [LAUGHTER] Really. Yeah. But then one time, they told me, they said—just like I said, I run the overhead cranes, and one day they come up to me and said, we need somebody to do the crane test on tower something. And I was new, so I was just kind of looking around. And they said, nobody else volunteering, so I guess Lito’s going to do it because he’s different. So I said, okay, I guess. So I went. And I went in there, and as soon as I went in there, they got bleaches built on three sides. Now all of the sudden, it’s kind of like a boxing game or something. SO they all got filled up with all these people in suits. What’s going on? And then a camer shows up. Just like that. So it was a big thing. And then I have to deal with an ironworker, because they’re the ones that used to do the signals all the time for the cranes. So finally I looked at the thing and then there’s this big, huge obstacle in the middle that I know if I run the crane northeast, east, west and south, whatever, I’m going to have to cross that or go on top. Well, you know, you have the big hook, right? And I know I’m going to go in there and it’s going to crawl and drag on top of that. So I’m going, well, that looks unsafe. And so finally I said, no, I was going to go ask him, to make sure he checks it. So finally I got to the control and it was red-tagged. You know, the thing where they put tags if there’s something wrong with it. If it’s red-tagged, you can’t touch it. So I said, well, I can’t touch it. And the ironworker said, what do you mean, you can’t touch it? It’s red-tagged! That means there’s something wrong with it or whatever. You don’t know; I don’t know. And so he got mad at me, and he said, I’m going to talk to your boss. Blah, blah, blah, we’ve got all these people out here, these are all big dignitaries, they’re supposed to see both of us do the work. And I said, well, I’m not going to do it until you do that. He goes, oh, okay. And finally they got a superintendent—they called somebody, and he signed, and said, okay. So I finally got it started. And I said, now another thing you need to do is you need to check on top of that thing, make sure there’s nothing on top. So he got mad. You know hwo construction people, they cuss and they yell and they throw stuff. I said, I don’t care what you do, but check it. He said, argh! It’s clean. I said, okay. So of course, he’s the one that does the signaling. So he’s walking, he’s checking the thing, he’s giving me the signal, then final yit’s time to go and drag the big hook on top of the thing. Of course, I can’t see the other side. And I was doing it, and he keeps saying, yeah, keep going, keep going. He was on the other side. Guess what. There was something on top of that thing. And it fell, almost hit him. And I said, there you go. [LAUGHTER] He goes, argh! It didn’t hit me. [LAUGHTER] And there was all kinds of stuff in there. That’s amazing, though—and then, eventually after that thing was built, one of my high school friend that was in my wrestling team, he became a lawyer. Of course you know at Hanford when they were building that thing, a lot fo people were punching in at two, three different time clocks. They did that. And so this high school friend of mine—and that’s what he was—he just got out of college and he said, my company’s auditing the Hanford, Energy Northwest for what they did. So I told him, I said, it’s true. [LAUGHTER] Yeah. People are punching in at different times. I mean, it was just amazing what they did there. Franklin: You mean people were turning in like multiple—like claiming— Ines: Yeah. Franklin: --like that they’d worked different hours, or— Ines: No, no, not just—they were punching in on three different time clocks. Not just— Franklin: Not just the one, but— Ines: Yeah. Franklin: And then they would get paid for three times the— Ines: Yeah. I was there, too, when they did that. You know, when people were saying, they’re time-clocking in but they were saying that they worked—I was there, because I knew who they were. Franklin: Wow. Ewre you still with WPPSS when the default happened and the whole thing shut down? Ines: Oh, you mean the Hanford 1 and— Franklin: 1 and 4, yeah. Ines: Oh, yeah. Franklin: Were you there when— Ines: Yeah. Franklin: I wonder if you could describe that. How did people take it, and what happened to the work? Ines: Well, basically, all the people that was involved in it was devastated because they lost their job. I didn’t really care. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Why is that? Ines: I was just an apprentice. Because I know eventually I’m going to get a—what I did is they transferred me to build an airport, someplace out there by the dam? I think it was called Electric City. Franklin: Okay. Ines: So while they were hassling that problem, I was working someplace else. And I hate—I don’t travel. So that’s why I didn’t stay that long. I said, there’s nothing here! So I came back. Franklin: Okay. Ines: Yeah. Because the problem with working with unions, they send you this and that, and you have to take it. But now that I’m a little bit senior in the ladder, I can choose. And of course, I can hassle for my work. Because I have so much background; I’ve worked with this, this, this, this. I usually just call them up. Franklin: And so after you came back, you spent most of your time just working on cleanup. Ines: Cleanup. Franklin: Right? Ines: Yeah, after that, it was after the—when they were doing the Hanford 2. After that, it was—and it was tough security then. When ti was top secret. I mean, you can’t go—my first day at Hanford in the security at Wye Barricade, and I noticed, why is everybody leaving their key in the trunk? Well, because you’re supposed to open the trunk, they check all your lunch bag, they look underneath, they got the dog. You know, you have to—it was security. And I was wondering why they leave—all those people leaving their keys in their trunk. Then I finally realized, so they don’t have to go out. [LAUGHTER] Nowadays, you can just push a button. But I was wondering about that. I said, those guys are stupid, leaving their keys in there. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: I’m wondering if you can talk about the reaction to the shutdown in the late ‘80s when Hanford was told to stop producing. I’m wondering if you can talk about how that affected you or other workers in the community. Ines: It didn’t affect me at all. You know, because, like I said, they always sent me out—one of ym biggest job is, I was a tech engineer, so I usually do the layout, I do the surveying, that kind of stuff. So I’d do all of that kind of stuff. And that’s in demand. Everywhere you go, they always need somebody on that field. That’s why I kept doing that. Mots people don’t like that, because you’re responsible. [LAUGHTER] You’re the main dude. I mean, yeah, that’s where we start, that’s where we dig, and that’s where we put thigns. People didn’t like that. A lot of people that are in construction, that’s the reason that they’re in construction: they didn’t want to go to college. So the job I had was almost pretty safe at that time. They just want to run the machine. You don’t need to know how to add or subtract or some things like that. The people, I mean, in general, the Tri-City community was devastated because that’s when a lot of people moved out. That’s the best time to buy a hosue. That’s when I bought my first house, is that era. Because everything was cheap. The house that I bought was in the market for over two years. So I got it dirt-cheap. Franklin: Did you buy a house here in Richland? Ines: Kennewick. Franklin: Kennewick, okay. Ines: Yeah, I always lived in Kennewick. Franklin: Okay. What do you want to remember about the Chernobyl incient and how that affected Hanford and the Tri-Cities? Ines: Well, I think that was just kind of like a wakeup call for us here, because it can happen here. But most of the people will tell me, oh, Hanford is safe. They said, everything is—you know, they tell us everything is safe here. Everything is—but I’m sure Japan was the same way. But they brainwash you a little bit. Franklin: Yeah? Ines: Tell you, oh, it’s okay here. Just like, well, I was working at the Vit Plant. So you remember aobut the collapse of the tunnel? Franklin: Yeah, I was out onsite. Ines: Onsite? That was at 200 East. Franklin: Yeah. Ines: Well, the Vitrification Plant is just the other side of the fence. Well I was there. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Okay. Ines: So when it collapsed, I didn’t even know. I was there in my rig, and I said, why is everybody running? [LAUGHTER] You know, we always have false—we always have drills. So finally I said, is this a drill, or is it for real? So I called the radio, I said, for real! I said, oh! So you’re supposed to shut everything off and go to the nearest building, take cover. So I did. Which is close to the gate. Which is, where the tunnel is, you can see it from where I was. Well, I’m diabetic. And so I was there for over two hours. Because we stayed there for a long time. Of course, we have to turn off all the air conditioner. So I was hot. And of course, there’s no food. So it’s not good. SO finally somebody from our main building said, you know, if you guys have any diabetic people make sure you have him here because we have all the things you need, like water, whatever. So I said, well, I guess I’m going to go. And they let me go. Eventually, what, three weeks ago, a month ago, they said that there was contamination release. And they let me out. [LAUGHTER] To go to this other building. So now I’m having problem with my chest. I’ve been coughing lately. So I don’t know, hopefully there’s nothing. Franklin: Yeah. Wow. That’s a really— Ines: It’s really—I was at K—was it K? No, it was D. Could be N. [LAUGHTER] I’ve done all—but I was backfilling this trench that goes from what they call the dam that dumps off the cooled water—it’s supposed to be cooled and cleaned water—that dumps out into this trench into the river. It was like 40 feet deep. It’s deep. The concrete’s been gone. They took it off. So I was backfilling it. So I’ve got this big huge truck. You’ve seen those big trucks? With big, huge tires about the size of this building. And then they dump the dirt in front of me and then they push it towards this hole. So one time I was, in the morning, I had this guy that does the thing, I was helping him take out the ropes so nobody will go through there. We usually put a big berm at the end of my job so nobody will fall in. So I was helping him put the ropes. So he set his Geiger counter, and I was telling him, why don’t you guys once in a while survey that? Make sure what we’re doing—oh, it’s—they swear, it’s clean. It’s clean-clean. This guy looks at me and goes, yeah, see if you can just help me. So he puts his thing on the ground and then we were moving that and all of the sudden his machine went [TRILLING]. He looked at it, and he picked it up and said, you didn’t see that. Okay. [LAUGHTER] That’s a lot of stuff out there that’s really weird. Frankli: What would’ve happened had you had seen that? Would they have had to stop work? Ines: Yeah. Franklin: IS that, you think, the reason for some of that behavior? Ines. Yeah. Yep. The same thing out at Hanford, you know, besides Hanford. If you find a big dinosaur bone, it’ll shut the whole job. That’s your livelihood. That’s everybody’s livelihood. Franklin: Right. But it’s also—in the case of bones or burials or cultural sites, though, it’s also a resource that was just discovered, right? Ines: Yeah. Franklin: There’s value in that thing that was discovered. Ines: It’s a different industry. Franklin: There’s a real tension between— Ines: Yeah. Franklin: Right, the project—the construction forces and then the cultural forces. Did you ever see—were there ever any big disagreements—any real tensions that erupted in any of the jobs you were at, between like cultural people and like construction people or kind of— Ines: no. Franklin: No? Okay. Ines: Not really. I’m sure they—after they find out, they probably hash it out someplace and they probably yell at each other. [LAUGHTER] But they don’t show us that. Franklin: Sure. Let’s see here. And so, ah, so you’ve really just kind of been—and you’re still working. Like, you’re semi-retired? Ines: Semi, yeah. Franklin: Okay. What does that mean? Ines: That means I’m not working that much. Yeah. Franklin: Okay, but you still are like— Ines: I’m still—I can still go. Franklin: You’ve done some work on the 324 recently? Ines: 324—well, no, that was a couple years ago. Franklin: Oh, a couple years ago, okay. Where was the last place that you worked? Ines: The Vitrification Plant. Franklin: Oh, right. With the tunnel, earlier this year. Ines: The tunnel, yeah. Franklin: And what were you doing out there? Ines: At that time, I was running what you call a vacuum truck, because we can’t use big machinery to dig stuff and rip everything out, so we used this—that’s why just—why are we running this? This is a truck? It’s supposed to be Teamster. Look at it, it has a wheel. But we run it. And it’s pretty neat, because it sucks everything. It’s amazing at what it does, but it doesn’t ruin anything. Unless you keep jabbing on something. But it’ll even go through those what we call, kind of like a light concrete, it’ll penetrate it. Franklin: Wow. How many reactors did you work on cocooning? Do you remember? Ines: I think basically all of them. I did all of them, because— Franklin: What was the process for that? Ines: Well, the process, first you have to clean all around it. There’s a lot of contamination. You know, when they’re building—when they were doing the reactor itself, they used to be all kinds of chemicals. You know, like ammonia and all kinds of stuff. The process is you have to clean around it first. Then you had to do—that’s why we had that big rig, too, is we were looking for—I can’t remember what chemical that is—and it’s weird, I never seen it before-but if it gets contact with water, it turns green, like a lawn. It’s really—it’s bright green! That’s why sometimes when we’d get done, the next day we’d come back and say, ho, there’s green stuff in there! So at least we know where it’s at. Just like—they gave us a perimeter where to dig. When we start getting done, we saw this one area, the slope is still green. So it needs to go farther that way. There’s a lot of contamination. Because they used all kinds of defunct chemicals to supposedly clean those railroad carts and things like that. And they used all kinds of stuff. One time I was in B, I found a whole bunch of boron, boron balls. That’s what they used to clean the tubes for the reactor. I dug a bunch of those. And I go, ho, bowling balls! They’re nice, perfectly round, white—I mean, it’s white. It’s kind of—hey, there’s all kinds of stuff in there. Franklin: And then you would have to—when you went to do the cocooning, were all the support buildings still there? Ines: No. Franklin: Like power houses and— Ines: No. Franklin: Oh, okay, so those had been-- Ines: Yeah. You work out the perimeter first, and you take all of those things out. Franklin: All the support buildings. Ines: All the support buildings and all of the sudden it’s just the reactor tiself. Franklin: And then you kind of—and then what’s the next—do you remove the roof, or like, how do you get that—because now it kind of looks like a polygon. So how do you get from the big chunky reactor building down to that polygon? Ines: Well, that’s what they do. Just like I said, we start from the outside, we take all of the support building and part of the different building is part of the support building of that reactor. The only thing that’s left there is actually the casing of the reactor. And then, of course, that’s when they put the dome in there. I don’t know what—and they tarp it [MUMBLING] Franklin: Cool. Ines: Yeah. Franklin: Just a couple more questions. Kind of larger-scale questions. I wanted to ask you, what were some of the most challenging and/or rewarding aspects of your work at Hanford? Ines: Hmm. To me, it’s probably getting all those reactors clean. That’s the biggest ting. Because that’s a big—that’s basically what our mission is, to clean everything. Franklin: Yeah. Ines: That’s our challenge, and we did it safely. We all went home everyday, none of us really got hurt. That was the most challenging things. And then fo course, the reward is I survived it. We all survived it. And then now we got all this monuments that we could show the people. Franklin: What do you mean, monumnets? Ines: Well, you know, the cocooned reactors. We could show the people the history of Hanford. Franklin: Right. Ines: Instead of just flattening everything out. Franklin: Yeah, and well, now there’s the B Reactor Museum, too— Ines: Yeah, I was there. Franklin: Part of the park. Ines: And we cleaned that. Hopefully they don’t say—kind of like, well, how the South are tearing down the monuments. I hope that doesn’t happen. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah, that’s always sbeen an interesting connection to me. I wanted to ask you if you could describe the ways in which security or secrecy at Hanford impacted your work? Ines: A lot of secrecy. It’s basically a lot of paperwork. And just like what they said before, you can’t talk about your job up there. Franklin: Was that true even in the ‘80s and ‘90s? You felt like that in— Ines: Ah, it depends on where you’re at, see? I mean, if you’re working where they produced—because I remember it was just right here, 300 Area. I didn’t evne know—and that was late. And we had to clean a basement. And I walked in there, and it’s an old, old building. You know, those big, like semi-round buildings. And it’s a shop. It’s a machine shop. So I walk in there, and I go, this is where we’re going to be working at? Yeah! So I go walk in there, and then as soon as I walked in there, there’s a door, kind of like that. And I opened it. And as soon as I stepped in there, the whole place lit up. I said, whoa, what happened? What did we do? You know? They got sirens, they got all those rotating lights and then somebody came. And said, what are you doing here? And I said, well, I’m supposed to work here. And I told him what room. And of course, I don’t know where it’s at. He said, well, you can’t just be—you have to have a special badge. I said, oh. And so finally, I worked there for a whoel week and this always happens. You have to wait. And every time I go in there, I notice everybody—they have like desks and they have all kinds of stuff, and every time we go through there, they have this big canvas or cloth and they cover whatever they’re doing. And I go, hmm, that’s odd. And then it’s kind of weird, too, but by the time I got to the stairs, it was deep. It was at least 100 feet deep. My first day there, there was lockers, old army lockers, there’s lockers all the way around that thing. And I was curious, so I start opening those lockers, and they still have unifroms, but from the Army. That’s still in there. It was odd. And then, the only thing that bothers me is on the roof, you know, like Star Wars, they have that ray gun, that goes, bzzt. And once in a while it does that. It goes, brrrrt. And I go, what? Are we in an experiment or what? But I didn’t think anything about it. So my last day there and after I got done, we didn’t have to exit in the same place. We had to exit in a different place. So we had to wait. So finally, I asked the guy who was my escort, I said, you know, today’s my last day here. I just want to ask you something. What in the hell are you guys doing here? I said, what are you guys hiding? He said, well, you know, we’re with the defense department, US defense. I said, what are you guys doing? He said, we’re researching plutonium warheads. [LAUGHTER] I go, I thought you’re not supposed to be doing that anymore. [LAUGHTER] It’s an old building. Like I said, it doesn’t even look—it’s those—but, you know? And the front of it is a machine shop. So they’re still doing it, the last time I saw that. But most of the time, all of them are gone. Another thing, my first tme here, I used to see a lot of those silos. They have holes in the ground, they have rockets. And they told me about it, but since I run around with my machines, so I drove in there. Because, what they told me, usually, in the middle of the field, there’s a bunch of trees? Tha’ts where they’re at. It’s pretty obvious, because the whole place is desert and then you see these trees around it. And it’s like in a circle or rectangular thing or square. So I went in there, and there it is. There’s silos in there. Franklin: Right, yeah, I heard those used to be anti-aircraft batteries before they were—yeah, the Nikes, right? The Nike missile silos? Ines: yeah. Franklin: My last question is, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War? Ines: We made good money. [LAUGHTER] WE made good, good money. We made good money working at Hanford. Because, you know. And everything is—and it was good. It made the Tri-Cities. Because without the Hanford Project, I don’t think the Tri-Cities would be this big. But I know the Hanford Project wasn’t the only industry here, ebcase one of the big things we have here is agriculture. Franklin: Sure, yeah. Huge agriculture. Ines: Yeah. And you know, without the Hanford, too, we couldn’t have gotten Battelle. Battelle is one of our biggest—my dad used to tell me, he said—because he’s the one that used to build the buildings here, and everything had to be approved. He said, you know about Battelle? If they want a building, they get it just like that. [LAUGHTER] The other corporations, no. It has to go through the proves. Battelle, yeah, if they want something, they’re going to get it. Bcause that’s where all the research was at that time. Franklin: Yeah, that makes sense. Ines: Yeah. Franklin: Well, Lito, thank you so much— Ines: Thank you. Franklin: --for coming and talking with us. I really enjoyed your stories. They were great. Grade A. Ines: Different, huh? [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Colorful is the word I would use. Ines: IT’s not like working in Disneyland. nd. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Washington State University Tri-Cities Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:08:02 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 9987 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 200 Area 300 Area Hanford 2 Energy Northwest 100-K East K West Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 57 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 45 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Joselito Ines Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Lito Ines started as an apprentice operating engineer for the local 370 working as a heavy equipment operator. He immigrated from the Philippines at age 15 in 1967. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 11/6/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. 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This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F5b83b94c68de50301b8e97b9e7e3f03f.jpg bc9fdbf398dab35f02e87bb819f53807 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fa30711922620dbac020fc42a9e65de4f.mp4 240a25c48ff69ef6becf66f630e9f7b1 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Sandra Paine Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound 0:00:00 Tom Hungate: I’m ready. Robert Franklin: Ready? Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Sandra Paine on July 5, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Sandra about her experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Sandra Paine: Sandra Lee Paine. P-A-I-N-E. Sandra, S-A-N-D-R-A, Lee, L-E-E. Franklin: Great, thank you so much, Sandra. So tell me, how and why did you come to the area to work for the Hanford Site? Paine: Well, I was born and raised here, and I went out to CBC. When I was—after my three boys got into school age, and I knew they were going to be growing up and I’m going to be bored staying home. So I happened to go out and take a test and they sent me to school. Because I went out there and took the nuclear chemical operator classes. Franklin: Oh, really? Paine: Yeah. Franklin: Oh, okay. 0:01:11 Paine: And when I graduated from that, I turned in my resume, and I was hired right away. Franklin: Wow, and what was it about nuclear chemical operating that made you want to join that field? Paine: Well, my ex-husband worked out at Hanford. And he was a nuclear chemical operator at that time. Franklin: Oh, okay. So you figured if he could do it, you could do it? Paine: Yeah. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: I’m sure it probably pays-- Paine: Oh, yeah. Franklin: Were you supporting your three children on your own then? Paine: No. No. Not then. Franklin: Oh, okay. You were remarried. Paine: I was married at the time. Franklin: Oh, okay. And when you say you were born and raised here, where were you born? Paine: I was born right here in Pasco on North 8th and Sylvester Street. Franklin: Oh, okay. Paine: Second house in, big old square white house, two-story house. My mom ran kind of a boarding room upstairs; she rented out the rooms upstairs. Franklin: Oh, really? How long did she do that for? 0:02:13 Paine: Oh, god, quite a few years, till I was married and gone. I was adopted into the family, so I was adopted when I was two years old. Franklin: Oh, okay. Paine: To Virgil Lamb and Lara Lamb. They adopted me. Franklin: Okay. And did your mother run the boarding house--do you know what years or-- Paine: Oh, from the time I was about--well, when I was adopted in, she was running a boarding house upstairs. Franklin: Oh, okay. So you turned in your resume to Hanford, and which contractor did you end up working for? Paine: CH2M Hill. Franklin: CH2M Hill, okay. So you said you were hired right away. So where did you go to work, right off the bat? Paine: PUREX. Franklin: PUREX. What did you do at PUREX? 0:03:14 Paine: Well, I worked on the line and didn’t like that. So I got a chance to do surveillance in the building, going around checking all the fire extinguishers and checking out places that most people didn’t normally get to go. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Such as? Paine: As the tunnels. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Oh, okay. You mean the tunnels that were recently in the news? Paine: Yeah, mm-hmm. Franklin: Oh, wow. Paine: They were there then. Franklin: Yeah, because they were built in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Paine: Yeah, mm-hmm. Franklin: I’m wondering if you could describe what that was like to go in that abandoned tunnel, or that place. Paine: Well, it really wasn’t abandoned then. There was stuff going on in there. Franklin: Oh, so people were putting material in there? Paine: Yeah. Franklin: And what did it—were there lights in there, or how much room did you have to move around in those tunnels? 0:04:14 Paine: Well, you wore a headlight and carried a flashlight and stuff. There were lights in some areas. Franklin: What kind of protective gear did you wear to go inside the tunnel? Paine: Usually a pair of white coveralls and that’s it. Franklin: And that was it? Paine: Mm-hmm. Franklin: Wow. Paine: Back then, it wasn’t required to wear a mask or anything, till later. Franklin: Oh, okay. And what year did you start at PUREX? Paine: 1980. David Chambers: 1990. Paine: 1990, yeah, 1990. Franklin: 1990, okay. Great. So that sounds really, really interesting to kind of get to go around--so you said you kind of--sounds like you did some mundane things like check fire extinguishers, but you also--what other types of places did you get to go that other folks who worked out there may not have gotten into? 0:05:22 Paine: Well, I could go pretty much anywhere I wanted to. It depended on what kind of clearance you had, where you could go. Franklin: And what kind of clearance did you have? Paine: Well, I don’t know, it was, whatever was needed for the job. I can’t remember what they call them. Franklin: Sure, no, no, no, no problem. Paine: You get COPD, you get problems remembering. Franklin: Sure, no, I completely understand. How long did you do this kind of maintenance job out there? Paine: Well, I preferred doing that than working on the line, so I did surveillance all the time. Franklin: Okay. And then how many years did you do surveillance for? Paine: Oh. Chambers: Probably two or three, and then you went—you finally ended up at the Tank Farms. 0:06:21 Paine: Yeah, two or three and then went to Tank Farms. Franklin: Oh, okay. Paine: Worked on the drill rigs. Franklin: Worked on what? Paine: Drill rigs, which we took 19-inch core samples out of all the waste tanks out there. Franklin: Oh, wow. Can you describe how that was done? 0:06:37 Paine: Well, you had a big old truck that you backed up there that had a pipe going down, that just actually drilled down to the waste. But we sent a sampler down in there that it filled the sampler, and then we’d have to pull the sampler out and put it in a cask to be sent to the lab. Franklin: Okay. And so that was to test the different composition of the tanks? Paine: The type of waste that was in it, and that type of--yeah. How radioactive it was and how--because they put different layers of different waste in there. Franklin; Yes, yes, they did, yeah. What made you decide to go do that work? Paine: Well, I liked to be outside. I didn’t want to be closed up in a building. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Okay. Yeah, I mean, I guess you would get plenty of outside. The tanks are all outside. Did--sorry, excuse me. Did you enjoy the Tank Farms work? Paine: Yeah, I liked working out there, yeah. Franklin: Yeah? Were there any challenges? Were there any tanks that were more challenging than others? 0:07:55 Paine: Oh, yeah, uh-huh. Yeah. Bringing up higher radioactive waste that you had to really be careful. Put lead blankets and stuff around to keep--so HPTs kept us on our toes while it was coming up. Franklin: Who did? Paine: HPTs. Franklin: What’s an HPT? Paine: Hazardous--monitors. People that monitored the waste, you know. The radioactivity. Chambers: That was a radiation monitor. Paine: Yeah, radiation monitors. Franklin: And what kind of protective gear did you wear when you were working out at the Tank Farms? 0:08:36 Paine: Well, depends on what type of job you were doing. Sometimes you were in one pair of whites, sometimes you were in two pairs of whites. Sometimes you were in plastic lead-lined clothing on. Franklin: Mm. Did you feel that out at the Tank Farms that the protection was adequate for the job you were being asked to do? Paine: Yeah. [UNKNOWN] It doesn’t matter if you’re even outside the Tank Farms then you’re going to get the radiation, you know? Whether you--just because you don’t get contaminated, the radiation still is-- Chambers: Let me make a comment for you here. Dave Flinger[?] is the one that come up with a really good one on this. Some of the people from the DOE were talking and they were asking about--she said, they said well, those areas are fenced off. And they said, well, yeah, you mean those magical chain link fences stop the fumes from coming through? [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Very true. Paine: Magical chain link fence. Franklin: Yeah. What other types of challenges did you find at the Tank Farms? 0:10:19 Paine: Well, I enjoyed my job, so I really took it one step at a time and figured--try to do the best that I could, whatever challenges, it was up to my ability. Franklin: Sure. And how long did you work out at the Tank Farms for? David Chambers: You were there probably—probably about 15 years. Paine: 18 years. Chambers: 18 years total, about. Paine: 18 years, yeah. Chambers: At Tank Farms for 15 of it. Franklin: Oh, okay. Chambers: And she also--she didn’t tell you, she was responsible for driving the emergency evacuation bus, so she had to take that out every now and then and drive that so if we had an emergency, she’d fill it up and get it out of the Area. Franklin: Was that when you worked at the Tank Farms, or at PUREX? Paine: PUREX and I did have Tank Farms. Franklin: Oh, okay. Was there ever a time when you had to drive the emergency evacuation bus for-- 0:11:07 Paine: Oh. No. We had to keep certified on it, so we had to go out and drive it. So we got to go drive around the Hanford Area, you know, where--we had to put so many hours in to keep your license up. Franklin: Sure, sure. But you never--there was never an emergency where you had to use the bus. Paine: No, no, never. Franklin: Well, that’s good. So, 18--so you retired--or you left the Tank Farms in 2008, then? Paine: Yeah, 2008-2009, yeah. Franklin: Wow, that’s quite a long time out there. Were there any major changes into the way that the work out there was approached when you started at the Tank Farms versus when you left? 0:12:02 Paine: Well, changes in amount of protection, clothing protection that you wore when they were beginning to get up on it a little bit. But I don’t know, I just enjoyed working out there, and didn’t really pay attention. [LAUGHTER] Chambers: The pay was good. Paine: Huh? Chambers: The pay was really good. Paine: Yeah, the pay was good. Not many women made 30 bucks an hour at that time. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: No, no, that’s very true. That’s very true. Was that one of the things that you enjoyed the most about working out there, was the compensation? 0:12:43 Paine: Well, no, I enjoyed the company and the people out there, you know, were really nice, and had a lot of good times, too. You know, that’s what—liking the people you work with and the thing you do helps you get up and go to the job every morning. Franklin: Yeah, it really does. It really does. Did you work with the same people day to day, usually? Paine: Pretty much. Franklin: You had kind of a crew that you knew well and depended on? Paine: Yeah, mm-hmm. Franklin: I’m wondering if there were any ways that security or secrecy at Hanford affected your work? 0:13:22 Paine: Well, I just never talked about what I did out there. I didn’t want to make a mistake and say something that I shouldn’t, so I just kept my mouth shut. You know? You never know. Might say something that somebody might want to find out more from you. Put you on a--[LAUGHTER] Franklin: Like some pushy history interviewer? Paine: No. [LAUGHTER] I don’t mind doing it to you now. Franklin: Oh, thank you. That’s great. So I guess as just a final question, the same reflective question I asked Dennis, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford during the--well, you didn’t work during the Cold War, but I wonder, how about working at Hanford, dealing with the legacy of the Cold War? Paine: Yeah, well, it’s a must, that must be done. And the future’s going to depend on it. Franklin: How so? 0:14:25 Paine: Because we have to keep up with the world, what the world’s doing. They’re developing nuclear stuff and we need more power plants and electricity’s getting higher and higher. You know? Franklin: I’m wondering, do you feel that we can manage the risks, the waste-- Paine: Yes. Franklin: --responsibly and effectively? Paine: I think we can, yes. Franklin: Yeah? Paine: Yeah. We need more places like Yucca Mountain. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Okay. Great. Yeah, because it’s not really doing too hot in the tanks, is it? Paine: Mm-mm. Franklin: Great. Well, Sandra, thank you so much for coming and talking with us today. It was really interesting to hear about your experiences. Paine: Well, I hope some of my information helps. Franklin: Yeah, no, it’s really great to hear about, you know, not only the work, but women doing this kind of work out in the workforce and being a real important part of--and showing that women are capable any job. Paine: Well, thank you, we had quite a few women on my crew of my graduating class that went to work out there. We worked, a lot of times, together. Franklin: Oh, that’s great. Paine: So there were quite a few. Chambers: Sandra’s got quite bad COPD, too. She started her performance evaluation on June the 10th. And they’ll send her over to a little room to get on a bicycle, too. But the bicycle, evidently, from what I understand is broken. Maybe it’s fixed now. So, she’s waiting for the call to go over there and do that, you know. And then of course, she’s been on hers for four years now, too, to try to get everything resolved. Franklin: Wow. Well, I hope you get a quick resolution and just compensation. Paine: Thank you. Franklin: Okay, well. Thanks to both of you. I really appreciate it. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:16:19 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 9980 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview CH2M Hill PUREX Tank Farms Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site Since birth Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 18 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Sandra Paine Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Sandra Paine talks about her time working in the Tank Farms as a Nuclear Chemical Operator. She reflects on the changes that have happened and the pleasant memories while working at the Hanford site. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 07/05/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. ch2m hill Hanford nuclear chemical operator PUREX Tank Farms Woman Women https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F206452690c8885d2fd3e2569f534c285.JPG 466ec2396ffb6f5e3897b77412c7231f https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F05fbc818de7c9ff8a2d133d46e686b4d.mp4 1092ddd880390c6414afc6d74a7556c3 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Betty Norton Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Betty Norton on August 28, 2017 The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-City. I’ll be talking with Betty about her experiences growing up in Richland. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Betty Norton: Betty, B-E-T-T-Y. My maiden name was Bell, B-E-L-L. And a lot of this is because of my dad. And last name is Norton, N-O-R-T-O-N. Franklin: Okay, great. Thanks, Betty. So, tell me, how and why did you come to the area? Norton: Because my dad came. At the time, we were--well, we started out in Tennessee, and Dad was working for DuPont. Well, he got transferred to Kankakee Ordnance with DuPont in 1942 in October. So we were there about 18, 20 months or so. And then the guy kept telling Dad, you need to go out to Hanford. Well, he’d heard about that scary place out in the desert and everything. And, no, he wanted no part of it. We were from Tennessee and Kentucky and Arkansas. Beautiful country. And he wasn’t about to get that much farther away from family. So, the guy kept insisting, though, and he kept saying, Cecil, I think you need to. So finally my dad said to Mom, well, it sounds like he knows something that we don’t. So, maybe we’d better do it. So Dad got out here. 24 men. Reading my dad’s book, which is absolutely fascinating. He wrote some things--”The things I remember and some I don’t remember” by Cecil Bell. And I think part of it is probably things he didn’t remmeber. But anyway, he and 23 other men were in one sleeping car, coming from Kankakee out to here the first day or two of February of 1944. So they all ended up pretty much being very good friends over the years. One of the guys even was in the other half of our A house, which was on Stevens Drive. In fact, it’s the big one right now across from where the old Sacajawea School was. It now has the big six white pillars and the brick front. Franklni: Oh, yeah, I know that one, yeah. Norton: That’s now, the Catholic priest lives ther,e I believe. Or at least he did for years. So that’s the house, we moved into the south end of it. And Mom and I didn’t get there until June. And my two younger brothers and I, we spent probably a couple of months in a hotel in Kankakee because they took our furniture, but then it was stacked up so long that our furniture didn’t get there until June. So we spent all this time in a hotel. Mom and, I was the oldest at ten, and two younger brothers which was heartbreaking for Mom. So when she found out it was still going to be another month, probably in May, then we hopped on a bus and took off back to see, to Arkansas, to see her folks. I can remember, Mom was holding my little brother, and then my other brotehr and I took turns sitting on a suitcase in the aisle, and the other one got to sit in the seat next to Mom. So anyway, we got out here mid-June. And I was reading in Dad’s book, and I didn’t realize it, but they gave him a house plenty early, this big A house at 1221 Stevens. They came with a refrigerator and a stove. Nothing else. But they gave the men, there were three things: a bed, a chair, and a dresser. And that was the furniture he lived with from probably early in April or something like that, till we gt here in June. So, I had often wondered about that, and then I was going through my dad’s boko last night and I came across that. I’d always wondered, you know? Our furniture was sitting back there. But of course the trains were used for troop movement. So, got here, and of course there wasn’t a blade of grass or tree in sight. And of course we’re from that beautiful green country back there. And ther ewere no rugs on the stairs. There were three kids in our half of the A house with wooden stairs. And two, one of the men that came out, they were in the other half with two kids. ANd I thought, later, after having my own four kids, my mother must’ve cried a million tears back there with all of the dust, the sand, the noise, living in a house with somebody else with kids racing up and down stairs all the time. But they stuck it out and then lived here--he died in September of ‘88 and she followed him six months later in March of ‘89. But I stayed here, married a guy that was working out on the Project after he came back from the army. And we had four kids. Then they had five granddaughters. Ten great-grandkids and now I have four great-great-grandsons. So we’re all still here after--ever since June of ‘44. So I remember a lot about growing up but not too much. It was a fun time. You never had to worry about--well, we never even thought about worrying about bad goings-on or anything. I think we were probably in especially safe town, if nothing else. But I remember playing out from daylight to dark, never having to worry about going home. You went in if you got hungry. Other than that, you played outside all day. I remember the mosquito sprayers. And I read on--some gal, many years ago, probably 20 years or so ago, started something--I don’t know if you’ve heard of it from Col High--from Richland High--the Sandstorm? Franklin: Mm-hmm. Norton: Okay. About--that is an absolutely fantastic thing to have grown up with all these years. There is so much history brought through. The kids start one subject, and then everyone, from all over the world actually can chime in. And I just wish I had thought to find out just how many people she has on her list, because we get things from China, from Japan. In fact, I have a cousin teaching at a university in Japan. But her dad was hte one that laid out, according to this, Georgia Koda, laid out the Uptown area and then helped draw up the plans and build the Carmichael. And my brother was the first ASB president there, Cecil Bell, Jr. And then he went on to be ASB president at Col High--Richland High. Richland High, it’s a hard thing to break. Franklin: That’s okay. Norton: You knew who I was talking about. Franklin: Yeah. The first time I heard it, I was not familiar, but I’m a seasoned-- Norton: Right, but you’ve heard it a few times now in the years, I’m sure. Right. Uh-huh. So, you know, we ran in the mosquito sprayer. We didn’t know anything. We stayed out and played Annie Annover, throwing balls over houses. Loved going down to the park, to the little swimming pool. I could still remember how cold that Columbia River was, because they just piped that straight into the pool down at Howard Amon Park. ANd you got in line, and I think they blew a whistle when it was time for you to get out. So everybody got out of the pool, ran to the back of the line, visited, until they blew the whistle again, and then the next group of people--because you could spend your day just going in and out of the pool, freezing all the time when you were in it. That was one of my favorite things. You could ride the buses, go where you wanted to. We could ride bikes. It was just a fun time. Like I said, I’m sure Mom cried a million tears with all the dust and all of that. But we lived in that house, then, from June of ‘44. Then in ‘49, my dad was supervisor. He was in--it was a machinist. And he got all kinds of upgrades. Well, he was a backhills country boy, and his dad was a horseshoer. What’s that? Franklin: I thought they called it-- Norton: A blacksmith. A blacksmith. Franklin: yeah. Norton: Uh-huh. So Dad knew all that stuff. So when he came out here there were, even in Kankakee, there were a lot of things that he culd do because he knew tempering the fires and all that stuff. So he did real well there working on things that no one else was used to doing. When he came out here, it was the same kind of thing. In fact, it was funny, he came out here before they had any tool sofr him to be a machinist. So they had all these little whelels and wires and whatever they were, motors, that had to be fixed, but he didn’t have any tool.s So he wrote Mom a letter describig everything he needed and sent it to her with money. And then she went and bought it and mailed it back. So he was here working on the Project with tools sent from Kankakee, Illinois, because this big million dollars worth of Plant didn’t have the tool sfor him to work with for awhile. So I always thought that was one of the funny things that happened. But he was real good at inventing-type things. So he did really well. He was in the steam power plant down there, and he was head over that. He knew when they dug the streets and put in pipes, water pipes, he felt at the time, it was the wrong thing because they were only going to be here five years. So he said, oh, they didn’t have to put sand down for all these big pipes and everything. Well, of course they started wearing out. Well, then they would start having leaks, and the bills for people would go up in the air. And I remmeber reading one, well, what he would do is, he would hae a pretty good idea from seeing where the spike would be on the charts that they had, so they could go and dig down there. And he said eh usually could find the broken pipe, no more than two digs. One took him five digs before they could find it. And then the old hotel at the time, all of the sudden, the guy came comlaining--he was the manager--came complaining to Dad because his electric bill had just spiked all of a sudden. All of a sudden, just outrageously. So Dad went back and looked at all the charts to see, and it was about 2:00 in the morning every day, this thing would just jump skyhigh. So he said to the guy, I dont know what’s happening at 2:00 at your hotel, but something is. So the guy said, well, I’ll find out. He went down, and the guy that was supposed to be cleaning all the floors and stuff, mopping them, he found it was a lot easier to hook his one-inch pipe into the big 700 gallon tank that was for the whole hotel, because he’d been using the little 200 pipe that was meant for the kitchen. And so he was using the big one, that made it a lot faster, easier. So the hotel guy set him straight on that so he could no longer do that. He did that. He worked the steam plant for a long time. In fact, he was there-- Franklin: And this was like the steam plant for the City of Richland. Norton: Uh-huh, right. Blew the whistle everyday at noon. Was one of the things he got to do for many years. In fact, somewhere in this book, I should’ve written that down instead of marking it. But when the plant was finally torn down in ‘65 or--no, it must’ve been much earlier than that. So, anyway, he was doing that. So then after that went down, though, then he went out to stores. So then he spent the rest of his time out there. Franklin: When you say went out to stores, can you-- Norton: That was the big stores building out on, just as you’re coming out into the Project where they used to have all the buses around down there and everyhing, I think. Franklni: Okay. Norton: Yeah. So he was there until he retired in February of ‘75 when he turned--but he felt that when people needed something for something that broke down, they needed it immediately; they didn’t want to have to wait and get it on a list. And so Dad would let them come in with their list of what they needed, pick it up, get the order filled, and take it. Well, this went on for a few years. It wasn’t their rules, but the guys that were in charge never said anything because Dad got along so well with all thepeople and had no problems with them. Got everybody satisfied and happy about it. Well, then he mentioned a name, but I don’t remember it and I wouldn’t say it. But he was just a couple of months or few months or minutes or so before Dad retired in ‘75, a new guy came in and he was going to have it his way. People were going to have to send in an order and in three or four days, it woudl get to them. Well, Dad knew this would not work. So he finally told the guy--oh, and then they came in and took out--there were two telephones, so people could call right to the desk and get the things that they needed ordered and get them out. Well, then one day, some guys came in and started to take the phones out. And Dad said, you’re not going to take those phones out. And they said, well, it’s an order. ANd he says, no, you don’t. So anyway, I guess, he talked to Mr. Big and told him, said, you’re not taking those phones out until I leave in two more weeks. If you want to ruin it after that, you can ruin it. But this is what people need. And this guy says, that’s not according to the rules. And Dad says, well, you either leave those phones when I leave or you get rid of me at the same time. So, they left the phones in for the two weeks till Dad lft, and then after that, they went back to this where people had to send in their list they wanted, wait till it could be fixed up several days later. So he was glad to get out of there by that time. He was a very special person. I would say he’s probably one of the most-liked people here. He got along with people all the time from when he started. That was why he got his first job with DuPont. Because he was friendly with a little lady that ran a grocery store there, and she knew the big guys. Well, Dad and his brother-in-law had gone over there and visited in the store. And that’s when he met my mother. So, when they were just about to give up on ever finding a job, she said, well, you take this over to--and I think the name was Brown--over in employment. You come back tonight and you get the letter that I’m going to write you, and you take it to this guy and only this guy. And Dad worked from then, 1932 or so, until ‘75 without ever losing a day’s pay. And was liked by everybody. He really, like I said, he could fix anything. So he fixed little motors that nobody had been able to figure out. He could--there was one section in here on something when they needed something with a sharp point, well, the metal wasn’t--whatever they do with it, tempered right or something. Well, he knew how to temper it right because he’d been shoeing horses with his dad ever since he was ten years old or so. So he told the guy Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:55:47 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 9987 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview Steam Plant Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 80 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Betty Norton Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Betty reflects on moving to Richland from Tennessee when her father (Cecil Bell) moved from working with Kankakee Ordnance to Hanford in February 1944. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 8/28/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. hanford site steam plant https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F9929b6d8d9a06ce53f2c9de05d80f158.JPG e9e0a5bfad333a32a583659be9800d7f https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Ffad5af57705d4852e40bd30af70ea14a.mp4 5b9fdfc06f213cf89162c1795cd0a77c Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Donna Whiteside Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound 0:00:00 Robert Franklin: Ready? Tom Hungate: Yeah, we’re ready. Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Donna Whiteside on April 25, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Donna about her experiences working at the Hanford Site. For the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Donna Whiteside: Donna Whiteside. D-O-N-N-A. W-H-I-T-E-S-I-D-E. Franklin: Great. Thank you very much, Donna. So tell me, when did you first come to the Hanford area? Whiteside: 1953. Franklin: Okay. And I know you weren’t working then. Whiteside: Uh, no. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Okay. So can you tell me a little bit more about why you came to the Hanford area? 0:00:46 Whiteside: My dad had a brother-in-law who worked for DuPont, as a matter of fact. And he got him out here from eastern Montana. And Mom and three kids came later. We did not move into Richland right away, because we had to be put on a housing list. So we lived in three different places, as I remember, in West Richland. Franklin: Okay. Now, but your brother-in-law wouldn’t have worked for DuPont in ‘53. He probably worked for GE. Whiteside: Well, he came out with DuPont. But, yeah. Franklin: Came out with DuPont and then stayed during the Cold War expansion of the Site. And then eventually you moved into an A house, right? Whiteside: Yes. The summer before I started kindergarten. Franklin: Okay. And do you know what year that was? Whiteside: ‘53. Franklin: ‘53. Whiteside: It was ‘53, yes. Franklin: And how long did you live in the A house for? Whiteside: Until I was a senior in high school. Franklin: Okay, and what year was that? Whiteside: 1965. Franklin: So your family purchased the house. 0:01:43 Whiteside: Yeah, they were the senior renters, so they had the first opportunity to buy the A house, which they did. Franklin: Okay. Did they convert, or-- Whiteside: No. The A houses, one half had a full basement; one had a half basement. We had the half basement part. So the first thing my mom and dad did was dig out the rest of the basement, take out the coal furnace, and make a TV room and half bath downstairs. Franklin: Okay. And then what about the other half of the A house? Whiteside: We rented it. Franklin: Oh, okay. Whiteside: We rented it. Franklin: And so tell me, what was it like growing up in a--what do you remember about growing up in a government town? 0:02:20 Whiteside: It was great. It was very, very safe. You could walk home alone after dark knowing nothing was ever going to happen to you. It was just, you know. Every so many blocks, there was a little park that you could go and play in. There was a grocery store, a drug store right at the end of this park. It was just fun! Franklin: Because these were designed to be very, almost utopian kind of communities by the architect, with those kinds of things in mind. Whiteside: Mm-hmm, it was, yeah. Franklin: The parks and the kind of decentralized shop—there were stores in each neighborhood and everything. And were your parents, overall, happy with the quality of the housing, or--? Whiteside: I think so. I think so. Franklin: So you said you lived in that house until you graduated. How long did your parents stay in the house? 0:03:12 Whiteside: We all moved when I was a senior in high school. My dad passed away when I was young. But we all moved out to north Richland the year I was a senior in high school. I didn’t graduate until ‘66. It was the first part of my senior year that we moved. Franklin: Oh, okay. And why did you move? Whiteside: Because my mother wanted to. And our house had been sold to a couple that lived across the street on the same street we did. And they did convert it into one house. Franklin: Oh, okay. And did you move into newer construction, then? Whiteside: Brand-new house. Franklin: In north Richland. Whiteside: Brand-new house. Franklin: Like a ranch style? Whiteside: Yeah, sort of. But it did have a basement. Franklin: Okay, okay. So you said your father passed away pretty early. Whiteside: He was 35. Franklin: Oh, wow! Can I ask how he-- Whiteside: He either had a fishbone or chicken bone get caught in his throat. Franklin: Oh, my. Sorry, I’m not laughing, that’s just such a-- Whiteside: No, no, no, no. I understand. He actually bled to death is what happened. Franklin: Wow. Was he alone when this happened, or--? Whiteside: He stayed home from work, which was very unusual for my dad to do. My mom did not work. So she was home with him. Franklin: Okay. 0:04:18 Whiteside: The weird part about this was I was coming home from school—I was at Carmichael at the time, which was then a junior high rather than a middle school. An ambulance came down the street and, I said to the gal that I was walking home with, my mom’s in that ambulance. And she was. And she stuck her head out the door and said what was going on. So I just continued on home. Franklin: Wow. What did your father do for General Electric? Whiteside: He was an assistant engineer. But what he did, I have no clue, because nobody what anybody did, you know? [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right. And after your father passed away, did your mother go work as well, or--? Whiteside: Um. Yes, but not right away. Franklin: Okay. Whiteside: She got Dad’s VA and his social security and all of that stuff. The VA is what put three kids through college. Franklin: Oh wow. Whiteside: Yeah. Franklin: So your father was in World War II then. Whiteside: Yes, he was. Franklin: Okay. Whiteside: Yeah, he was. Franklin: And so, you left Richland, then, in the late ‘60s, mid-to-late-’60s? Whiteside: Yeah, I went to college. Franklin: And where’d you go to college? Whiteside: The first term, I went to Bellingham. Franklin: Western Washington? Whiteside: Yes, Western. Franklin: And then where? Whiteside: Then I came back and went to CBC, and then I graduated from Eastern in Cheney. Franklin: Okay. And you got your degree in social work. Whiteside: Yes. Franklin: Right, with a minor in psychology. And tell me how you came back to work for Hanford. 0:05:40 Whiteside: Well, I interviewed for several different jobs in the social work field. Besides wanting me to have a master’s degree, they wanted five years of experience. Well, I could’ve gone back to school and gotten the master’s degree, but I still would lack the five years of experience. I had an uncle on Patrol at the time, and he said, why don’t you send in your application or get ahold of—whoever, I don’t remember even who it was I needed to get ahold of. But that’s what I did. And at the time, they were hiring minorities, and they considered women minorities on Patrol. Franklin: Sure, because women would’ve probably been very underrepresented-- Whiteside: Yes. Franklin: --in the patrol force. Whiteside: Yes. Franklin: And so--okay. So you send in your resume, and can you walk me through the process as how you got on? 0:06:28 Whiteside: Well, I went down to have—I went down to the Federal Building, in the basement, because that’s where Patrol headquarters was at the time. I interviewed with the assistant chief, whose name was Paul Beardsley. Next thing I knew, I was on Hanford Patrol. I do have to tell you, though, at the same time I was also offered a job as a Sunnyside policeman. Franklin: And how come you chose Hanford Patrol? Whiteside: Well, I figured I would probably be safer than I would in Sunnyside. And the chief in Sunnyside had a few concerns about the fact that I was a female and that I’d have a male partner and things could get out of hand with his wife or whatever. You know. Just because we’d be on night shift together. So I said, okay, I’m just going to go to Hanford. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Sure. That’s—given the time, the era, that would be a possible--a concern that a male chief would have. I guess we’ll put it that way. So you came on in what year? Whiteside: January of ‘74. Franklin: Okay. and were there other women working at Patrol at that time? 0:07:37 Whiteside: I was like the fifth one hired. Franklin: Okay. Do you know around what time the first woman was hired for Patrol? Whiteside: I think they were hired just prior, like sometime in late ‘73. Franklin: Oh, okay, okay. Whiteside: Because we all had to go through x amount of training and some of them were still in training when I started. Franklin: Oh, okay. And so, describe working for Hanford Patrol. What were your expectations and did it meet them, and how was it—some of the challenges you might have faced? Whiteside: Well, the biggest challenge was being a female. Franklin: Okay. 0:08:12 Whiteside: They had to convert dressing rooms. They had to convert restrooms. They had to remodel men’s uniforms so women could wear them. Franklin: Was that already being done by the time that you came on? Whiteside: Yeah, it was, it was. Franklin: How were you received by your male colleagues and then the Hanford workers at large? Whiteside: Most—most of the patrolmen were fine with it. A few of them—you know, you don’t need to be here. You need to be at home. Franklin: Ah. Were they older patrolmen that had that--or was it just maybe-- Whiteside: Most of them were older. Franklin: --that’s just how they had been brought up? Whiteside: Most of them were older. A couple of them was due to their religion. Franklin: Ah. Whiteside: Enough said. [LAUGHTER] I mean! Franklin: Sure. No, that’s fine. Whiteside: Enough said. Franklin: Yeah, right. And what about the employees at large? Did you ever receive any kind of criticism or anything from them? Whiteside: No. No. Franklin: You were just another-- Whiteside: I was just there. Franklin: You were just there. 0:09:21 Whiteside: But I will tell you, I would meet some of them in public, and they’d look at me and they’d say, you look familiar. I should know you. And I’d say, yeah, and if I put on a uniform, then you’d know who I was, wouldn’t you? [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right. And were you firearms trained? Whiteside: Yes. Franklin: You carried a gun? Whiteside: We carried .38s at the time. Franklin: Oh, wow. Whiteside: And we had to qualify with .38s, shotguns, and M-16s during the day and at night, at least once a year. Franklin: Wow, M-16s. Whiteside: Uh-huh, M-16s. Franklin: So fully automatic weapons. Whiteside: They were, but we didn’t shoot them fully automatic. Franklin: Okay. Whiteside: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Wow, that’s quite, that’s very--that’s impressive. Whiteside: And I was usually the last one to qualify. Franklin: Yeah? 0:10:05 Whiteside: Because my mindset was, we can’t use these until you’ve tried everything else in the world, you cannot draw a gun and use it. And it’s like, then why do I have to learn how to shoot these stupid things? But I did. Franklin: Okay, right, right. Yeah. But your service piece would’ve been a .38. Whiteside: Yes. Franklin: Right? Whiteside: Yes. Franklin: Where were you stationed out of for patrol? Whiteside: Mostly out in the outer areas. I was headquartered out of 2-East and that covered East Area and al the 100 Areas. Of course, all the reactors but N Reactor were down at the time. But there was still a few checks that we had to make on the back shifts. Franklin: On the what shifts? Whiteside: Back. Graveyard and swing. Franklin: Oh, graveyard and swing, okay. Whiteside: Yeah, and of course weekends. Franklin: Wow. Okay. And what were some of your regular duties, besides the checks? Did you-- Whiteside: We had to let people in and out the gates. We had to check classified files. There were various gates and things that we had to check. You know, just being alert. Franklin: Just being alert? Whiteside: Yeah. And that’s sometimes really hard on graveyard. Franklin: Oh, I imagine. I imagine so. Whiteside: There was a tower on the river at N Area that was manned also. Franklin: Did you ever man that? 0:11:18 Whiteside: Oh, yeah. Because you rotated. Most of the time you rotated every two hours, unless you were at a barricade, and then it was like four hours. Franklin: What was the most unusual thing that you saw working on patrol? Whiteside: I can’t say there anything very unusual. It was pretty—it was pretty much like night watchman work. Other than letting people in and out of the gates and checking the files and stuff, it was pretty much just routine. Franklin: I guess that’s good that—I guess unusual on patrol is probably a bad thing, usually, right? Whiteside: Yeah. Yeah. Franklin: Was there ever any kind of humorous or anecdotal incidents that you saw while doing these duties? Whiteside: Well, I can tell you what happened to me one time. Franklin: Okay. 0:12:00 Whiteside: Once I got my Q clearance, I had to go with various patrolmen—and it was usually on the backshifts, so I would know all the checks. Because being the youngest person, seniority-wise, I could be sent to 300 Area, to 400 Area, to the Federal Building, to 2-West or whatever, to cover for vacations. So I had to learn all of the outer area stuff. We went into a building in West Area, I think it was 222-S, I’m not sure. But it was an S building; that’s all I know. The file we had to check was in a zone where we had to put on a lab coat and shoe covers. So, I followed the patrolman into the change room. Well, it was the man’s change room. And somebody looked at me and said, you have awfully long hair to be a guy. And I said, well, I’m not a guy. And he said, well, then you’re in the wrong change room. Anyway. I continued with my lab coat and shoe covers and we went and checked the file and we came back out. The patrolman said, now, you go in there and you drop off your shoe covers and your lab coat and then meet me on the outside. So I went through the women’s change room on the way out. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Oh, thank you. And so how long did you work as the watchman, night thing--? Whiteside: I was on patrol for eleven-and-a-half years. And then I went to the PUREX building and helped with the special authorization badges and the security. Then I went back to 100-N. Franklin: So that whole first eleven-and-a-half year chunk, was it pretty much the same kind of duties? Whiteside: Yeah, it was. Franklin: Considering that you didn’t train for patrol work in college, was there anything about patrol work that surprised you or stuck out to you in any way? Whiteside: Not really. Franklin: No? Whiteside: Mm-mm. Franklin: Did you find it pretty satisfying to do, given that it wasn’t something that you had trained for initially? Whiteside: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. And so then you said you went to PUREX. Whiteside: Mm-hmm. Franklin: And what did you do at PUREX? Was that work different from the-- 0:14:02 Whiteside: It was like clerk work, but they also had one section of the building, you had to have a special badge to get into. So all the people that wanted badges for that area, the paperwork was sent to me. Franklin: Okay, and then-- Whiteside: Then I sent it to the manager of that section for him to sign off on. Franklin: Okay. So it was much more of a cler--still security-related, but more-- Whiteside: Right, but more clerical. Franklin: More clerical. Whiteside: Yeah. Franklin: And did you enjoy that work more or was it nice to be in a single spot or-- Whiteside: Well, it was day shift. Franklin: Oh, yeah. Was-- Whiteside: It was day shift. Of course, on the last couple years of patrol, I was on days, too. But, yeah, it was just—you knew it was Monday through Friday and-- Franklin: No covering for vacations. Whiteside: No covering for vacations. [LAUGHTER] Any of that kind of stuff. Franklin: How many people worked at the PUREX facility at that time? Whiteside: You know, I really don’t know. Franklin: Okay. Whiteside: I really do not know. Franklin: I guess, by that time, though, you had a pretty good idea of what was happening, what was going on at Hanford, what was being made, and why. 0:15:05 Whiteside: Yeah, I guess it got a lot more open, you know, than it had been when I was growing up. Franklin: Sure, sure. And how did you—did you feel safe working at Hanford? Whiteside: Oh, yeah. I mean, I grew up here. Didn’t bother me at all. Franklin: Okay. Even from the kind of--you know, because Hanford wasn’t isolated from political or international incidents. So did any of the events in the Cold War ever cause you to worry, you know, or did you ever sense a kind of heightened sense of anxiety? Whiteside: Mm-mm. Franklin: Okay. Whiteside: Nope. Franklin: And so you said, after—how long did you work at PUREX for? Whiteside: You know, I don’t know for sure. Because the last five years was PUREX and then it was back to N Area. And I can’t tell you where the division came. Franklin: Oh, sure. By the time you worked at PUREX, were the attitudes towards female employees in security and patrol, had they largely changed by then? Do you think people were more used to seeing females in the-- Whiteside: Oh, yeah. They were. Franklin: --in those kinds of roles? Whiteside: Because we had female lieutenants and all of that by that time. Franklin: Do you ever think about it or does it ever surprise you how kind of quickly that change happened, from no women in that workforce to women being kind of commonplace or not out of the ordinary? Whiteside: Well, I guess, being there, it really didn’t. Franklin: And so you said for the last part, you went to work at N Reactor. Whiteside: Yes. Franklin: And what kind of job was that, what kind of duties? 0:16:34 Whiteside: Basically I worked for the security guy at N Area. I was in charge of all the keys for all the 100 Areas and for Rattlesnake Mountain. Franklin: Oh, okay. Whiteside: So if somebody needed a key, they had to come to me to check it out. Franklin: Did you approve those requests, or--what was that process like? Whiteside: Well, if they needed the key—I can’t remember exactly, but probably the guy or the woman that was ahead of that had said, okay, so-and-so needs a key to get in here. Of course, we’d have to call the locksmith if we were shorthanded on keys or whatever then. Franklin: What were the kinds of reasons that people would need keys, especially to go up to like Rattlesnake Mountain or into a reactor that had been shut down? Whiteside: Just for safety checks, more or less. Franklin: Safety checks. Whiteside: Yeah. Franklin: Same with Rattlesnake? Because was that facility still active when you were doing patrol? Whiteside: No, it wasn’t. Franklin: Okay. 0:17:29 Whiteside: It was still there. And it could’ve been made active, but it wasn’t. But it’s quite a facility. Franklin: Why don’t you tell me a little bit about it. Whiteside: It had sleeping quarters; it had a kitchen; it had big meeting rooms. Because that was where all the important people would’ve gone, if something had happened at Hanford. Franklin: Right. Whiteside: They would’ve bussed them up there. But it was a neat building. It really was. Franklin: So you went inside of it? Whiteside: Oh, yeah. Franklin: Was that part of your patrol duties? Whiteside: Well, no, that was not. One of our checks, if you worked in the 300 Area was to go up there and check the gates. But since I had the keys, just before I quit--I got to retire when I was 42 years old--we, a bunch of us, decided we wanted to go up there. Because I had the keys, we got the okay to go. Franklin: Oh, okay. So this was kind of like before you retired kind of checking it out kind of thing. Whiteside: Yeah, yeah. Franklin: Okay. Did you socialize mostly with people from--that worked at Hanford? Whiteside: We did, because my husband and I were both on the same shift. Franklin: Oh, so did your husband work patrol as well? Whiteside: No, no. He ran N--he was one of the shift managers at N Reactor. Franklin: Oh, okay. So you kind of worked together for the last-- Whiteside: Well, we--no. When I went back to N, he’d retired. Franklin: Oh, okay, okay. 0:18:49 Whiteside: Westinghouse was coming in and the benefits he would get from UNC were better than those he would’ve gotten from Westinghouse, and he was 62 years old. Franklin: Oh, okay. Whiteside: So it was an optimum time for him retire. Franklin: Sure, yeah, a little earlier retirement and-- Whiteside: Yeah. For the most part, we worked the same shift. So our family, essentially, was the shift you were on. Because you had long changes together, you had days off between swing and days together. So we did a lot of things with them. Franklin: You say your family, you mean like your work family? Whiteside: Yeah, yeah. Franklin: Okay. So the people you socialized with were the people that were on the same shift. Whiteside: For the most part. Franklin: Would you say that was pretty common throughout-- Whiteside: I think it was. Franklin: --all the shift people, like graveyard people were associated with the graveyard people? 0:19:35 Whiteside: I think so. There were some straight day people that we did things with, too. But for the most part, if you wanted to do anything in the middle of the week, it was with the people that you were on that shift with, because we all had that day off. Franklin: Sure, sure. Whiteside: You know. Franklin: That makes sense. And did you meet your husband working out at the Hanford Site? Whiteside: I met my husband when his daughter and I started kindergarten at Spalding. Franklin: Oh, okay. So your husband was-- Whiteside: 23 years older than me. Franklin: Okay! And how did you become involved with your husband? Were you working out at the Site at the time? 0:20:04 Whiteside: yes, I was. I got my clearance, and the night that the patrolman took me to N Area to show me the checks, he told me that he thought Bob Whiteside was the shift manager. And I said, well, did he used to live in Richland and he’s got two kids and he moved back to Sunnyside and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah? And of course, the patrolman didn’t know. So he went into his office and he was not there. So, another guy--I don’t remember who it was--took me around and showed me the various parts of N Area. When we got back to Bob’s office, he was there. And somebody had told him that I was looking for him. Of course, he admitted later, he had no clue who I was. To me, he looked the same as my friend’s dad, 20-some years before. But I didn’t look the same to him, of course. [LAUGHTER] I mean, you know? Franklin: Well, sure, yeah. So that’s when you kind of I guess reconnected with him. Whiteside: Yeah, it was. Yeah, it was. Franklin: And then you guys started dating at some point. Whiteside: Mm-hm, yup. Franklin: Interesting. And so you retired when your husband did, right? Whiteside: No, I worked for three more years. Franklin: Oh, you worked for three more years. Whiteside: Yeah, yeah. Franklin: Okay. And that was that split-time between PUREX and N. Whiteside: And N, yeah. Franklin: So why did you choose to retire from Hanford? 0:21:28 Whiteside: He wanted to sell our house. We had an RV and he wanted to travel and see part of the country. And I was all for it. Franklin: Okay. Whiteside: So we did that. Our house sold and we moved into the RV and covered most everything on our side of the Mississippi. Franklin: Oh, wow. Did you live in an Alphabet—the house you sold, was it a newer construction? Whiteside: It was new. It was on Spengler, right across the street from the 7-Eleven that’s on Spengler. Franklin: Oh, okay, gotcha. Whiteside: And you know what used to be where the 7-Eleven is? A drive-in theater. Franklin: Oh, wow. Whiteside: Yeah. Franklin: Interesting. Yeah, kind of a shame that those went away. Whiteside: Yeah, they were fun. They were fun. Franklin: Yeah. I’ve heard. It’d be nice if they could come back. They’re almost extinct now. Whiteside: They are, yeah, and that’s too bad. Franklin: Yeah. And so eventually, though, you came back to the Tri-Cities, obviously. Whiteside: Yes. Franklin: And why did you choose to come back to the Tri-Cities? Whiteside: Bob always knew that eventually, I wanted to come home. Franklin: Okay. 0:22:26 Whiteside: And I wanted to come home with him, not after something happened to him. So in ‘05, well, can we move home now? And he was 80 years old at the time. He said, yeah, it’s time. He was from Sunnyside, so essentially he was home, too. So he said, okay, you better call a realtor. So I did. And we bought a house. Franklin: Okay. And did the rest of your family still live here in the area? Your mother and-- Whiteside: My mother did, yes. My sister and the oldest of my brothers were in Spokane. One was in Salem; one was in [UNKNOWN] California at the time. Franklin: Okay. And so is your husband still with us, or is he-- Whiteside: No, he passed away almost five years ago. Franklin: Oh, okay. And so what have you been doing since you came back? 0:23:13 Whiteside: I volunteer at the cancer center; I volunteer at the book room at the library. I do all the cards for the local Goldwing motorcycle chapter. I wear about three hats at church. I belong to the Cancer Guild. Franklin: So you’re keeping busy in retirement. Whiteside: I keep busy, yes, I do. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: As just about every retired person I know seems to be more busy than when they worked. Whiteside: Oh, believe me, it’s true. It’s true. Franklin: Were you—I’m wondering, this is probably going back a ways, but do you remember when JFK came to dedicate N Reactor? Whiteside: I do. I do. Franklin: Did you go out-- 0:23:52 Whiteside: I was not let out of school. My parents didn’t want me to get out of school. But I knew he was here. Franklin: Oh, okay. Did you have friends that went to see him? Whiteside: I probably did, but I can’t remember. Franklin: Okay. Were there any other events or incidents that happened in the Tri-Cities or Hanford that happened when you were a child or later on when you worked at Hanford? Whiteside: No. Just regular stuff. Franklin: Okay. What would you like future generations to know about living or working--living in the Tri-Cities and working at Hanford during the Cold War? 0:24:31 Whiteside: Well, I still think it was a very, very safe place. I think that perhaps, if it wasn’t DOE at the time, whatever it was, it would’ve been a little bit more open with what was going on. I think there would be not quite as many negative thoughts, ideas, whatever, about Hanford and Los Alamos and Oak Ridge and all of those. Franklin: So you’re saying, then, that that level of security is kind of—there’s been a legacy cost associated with that. Whiteside: I think so. I think so. Franklin: In terms of people’s maybe mistrust of nuclear. Whiteside: Well, you fear the unknown, and it was unknown. I mean it really was. Franklin: Sure, sure. And then when releases did happen, they were very hushed—you had to kind of pry that information out of them. Whiteside: Yeah, you did. Yeah. Franklin: The level of mistrust grows from the unknown, I guess. Whiteside: Yes, it does. Franklin: Well, Donna, is there anything else you’d like to mention before we close up today? Whiteside: I don’t think so. Franklin: Okay, well, thank you so much-- Whiteside: Thank you. Franklin: --for coming in and interviewing with us. Whiteside: You bet. Franklin: Okay. Great. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:25:39 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 9980 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview Hanford Patrol 2-East 100 Areas East Area 300 Area 400 Area Federal Building 2-West West Area 222-S PUREX 100-N N Reactor Rattlesnake Mountain Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 71 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 24 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Donna Whiteside Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Donna Whiteside reflects on moving to Richland when her father moved the family from Montana. Donna worked as a patrolman working graveyard or swing before taking other security related positions until she retired and traveled for sometime in her RV. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 04/25/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F634eff6a9b7e1a96710e2b8db34c897a.JPG 8f04c3d9db869862b8c052daad298c59 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fb29d88f4fdd0a54ab37ae0ab13fc1325.mp4 2ab7a1d9b1c3cde0b5d45a67502f108c Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Garrold Lyon Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Garrold Lyon on August 30, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Garrold about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full legal name for us? Gerrold Lyon: It’s Garrold, G-A-double-R-O-L-D. I use F as in Frank as an initial. And Lyon last name, spelled like the cat except a Y instead of an I. Franklin: So L-Y-O-N? Lyon: Yes, sir. Franklin: Great. So, Garrold, tell me how and why you came to the area to work for the Hanford Site. Lyon: Well, I was in service in Korea in ‘52 and ‘53. And I had two brothers out here when I got the release from active duty. Actually, I didn’t get a discharge until 1960. Franklin: Okay. Lyon: But I got released from active duty when I got home from Korea. Anyway, I had like brothers out here, so that’s why I come out here. Franklin: What brought your brothers out here? Lyon: Well, my older brother, he kind of worked in the fruit and stuff. But my younger brother, he’s nine years older than me, I come from a family of 13 and I’m the last boy. I have two sisters. Franklin: Wow. Lyon: But he was a tanker driver. I think he logged something like 2 million miles or whatever. Franklin: And did either of your brothers work out at Hanford? Lyon: No. Franklin: Oh, okay. And do you remember what year you came out here? Lyon: That was in ‘54. I come to work out at Hanford in ‘55 in March. Franklin: did you move out to Richland when you came to work at Hanford? Lyon: I did eventually, but at the time I got here, I think--anyway, I lived in my brother’s garage until I got a house. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: What year did you move into Richland? Lyon: Well, it had to have been in ‘55, I guess. Franklin: Okay. So Richland was still a government-owned-- Lyon: Yes, right. Franklin: -town when you lived here. Lyon: Yes. I was patrol, and we patrolled Richland somewhat, too, you know. Franklin: And who did you come to work for? Lyon: GE. Franklin: What was it like living in--I wonder if you could describe living in Richland when it was managed by General Electric. Lyon: Well, I was impressed by the water running down the street. Didn’t seem to have any control, as far as watering your lawn or something like that. And then I think we had to pay for our electricity, but that was about the size of it, until they sold out the town. I could’ve went police force or stayed in the Area as a patrolman, which I did. I spent most of the time that I was with GE, I was a patrolman. And about ‘62, I think it was, I got the chance to get on as a utility operator. I had to pass just a test with the interviewer. I got experience as far as charge, discharge and everything-- Franklin: Sorry, I want to back up for a minute. What is a utility operator? Lyon: Utility operator is an understudy for a journeyman operator. Franklin: And what are you operating? Lyon: Well, actually, we would make metal for charge/discharge and we would actually charge it into the unit and as you charge in the unit, the exposed metal that they want drops out in the rear face and then into about 20 foot of water. Franklin: Just to clarify here, we’re talking about--the unit is the reactor? Lyon: Yeah. Franklin: And the charge/discharge is loading new fuel in and older fuel is coming out. Lyon: Right, right. Franklin: Okay. Lyon: Yeah, they had metal that they bring in and they make up the charge. The elevator is down on the floor and it goes clear to the top. So anyway you have a machine and you have like a carrier for one tube and you don’t carry it on your back; I forgot just how they did it. But they had them made up on poles, as far as they had a spacer there that they could only go so far back and then they’d shove the metal in and put a spacer on this side and cap it up. But you had a machine that charged it into the--you just-- Franklin: You mean that pushed the fuel and the spacers in? Lyon: yeah, as I recall, it had a cylinder that would push as you drop it over into it. Franklin: Okay. Lyon: Yeah, the charger that they had perfected enough they could use, anyway, at that time. Yeah. And it was a number of charges that when you go down with your unit, why, they would charge/discharge and then I guess they got a time to keep the unit where it’s activated they got to come up, you know, in a certain time. And the physicists, they figured that out, time-wise. Franklin: Right, they would be doing calculations to figure out which process tube to charge/discharge. Lyon: Right. Franklin: And how long did you do that work for? Lyon: Probably four years. And then I was on the supplemental crew and worked around the clock, you know, A, B, C, D. They were getting close to discharging there before I left. I figured that I better get out if I wanted to stay around. I had a chance to bid on radiation protection and which I got. And I spent 24 years as a radiation protection technologist. I took the national test for that, and passed it in ‘82. I had the book, but I got so rattled here thinking, I’m not going to get over there anyway, I left it in the truck out there. Franklin: Oh, okay. Lyon: But it does have my name in it. That’s the only book that I’ll probably ever have my name in. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: So when you were working as a utility operator, which reactors did you work at? Lyon: I worked in most all of them. Because they would come--we were a crew that was coming in and helped the home team, if you will, for that particular reactor. We would do the work that they would normally have to do, I guess. But they always had help for charge/discharge, extra help. Franklin: How many men would it take to do a charge/discharge? Lyon: Well, I suppose two or three could do it. It would have to go in at different times and say--if they were going on charge/discharge, they would have to open the rear face, and they would have to take a monitor and probably three or four utility operators to actually do the work. And you had to suit up in rubber in the rear face. The dose rate was, most of the time, pretty high. You couldn’t--they’d burn you out before you got your job done, and they’d have to send somebody in to replace you. Franklin: How did they--what types of equipment did they use to monitor in the dose rate in the rear face? Lyon: Cutie pie. Franklin: Cutie pie. Did you wear personal dosimetry equipment as well? Lyon: yes, yes. Franklin: What kinds-- Lyon: Oh, it was your badge, and then they had, it’s a little piece of--I can’t describe it right now, but anyway they would run it through where they could expose it and tell about what I’d get. They’d have a source there that exposed, and then you would wear one on you when it was out here all the time, and you took it in the rear face, you just had it covered up so you wouldn’t get it contaminated, you know. Franklin: Yeah. So you said when you were in the rear face, you had to dress up, right? Lyon: Yeah, you had two pairs of whites and one rubber. Franklin: Wow. Could you describe the types of the whites and the rubbers? What types of clothing-- Lyon: Well, you’d put on kind of a white coverall, and they would tape your first pair of gloves on. Then you would put leggings over and tape them to the legs. But you had two pair of those. And your second pair, you’d have to tape your gloves and then you had a glove that was insoluble, if you will. Your first glove was kind of like a doctor’s glove or something, where you’d put them up and tape them. The main thing is you don’t want to come out of there all contaminated. So you’d put on about three pair and then you come out of the rear face and there’s a hamper there where you’d take your raingear off and drop it in there in the step-off pad. Then you’d take your first pair of whites off, and by the time you got the third step-off pad, well, you was pretty well down to your shorts and shirt. Franklin: I imagine all that clothing would be pretty uncomfortable to work in. Lyon: Well, the rear face, as I recall, there’s enough water there that it wasn’t too hot thermally. Franklin: Oh. Lyon: But you had to watch out if one of those slugs would accidentally hit the discharge and hit on the elevator, you’d have a few seconds to get out of there. Otherwise, you’d get a lethal dose. Franklin: Right, because those slugs would be screaming hot. Lyon: Yeah, maybe. Franklin: Radioactively like really, really hot. Lyon: Yeah. Franklin: And I imagine that all of that clothing would kind of hurt your dexterity, too, right? Was it hard to move-- Lyon: I don’t remember being--we had wrenches that we had to open the back cap, if you will, and loose them, then you’d pull it out. And they would take the elevator up top before they discharged, of course, and let you out at the top, I believe. I’m not sure now. They may have let you out at the same level, but you had to get the elevator at the top before you started the process. You don’t want a whole lot of hot metal on the elevator. Franklin: Right, right. Yeah. Wow. Lyon: So they’d just drop over into the basin. Franklin: When they got pushed out. Lyon: When they got discharged, yes. Frankin: Was there ever a time where a slug got--you mentioned earlier--when it hit and got on the elevator, you’d only have a few seconds. Did that ever happen? Lyon: Not to my knowledge. Franklin: Okay. Were there any incidences that stand out, accidents or funny things or interesting things, when you were a utility operator? Lyon: Well, I remember the specialist, he would find maybe a spot that he would want to go in. I don’t quite understand why he would stop more or less just for one, but they called it a spline, and on the front, you could do that without your clothing, on the front face. They would run this spline, and as I understand, it was kind of an absorber if you will. I can’t think of the name right now. It would cool that spot that he wanted to. Boron, I think it was. But he would go in that rear face. I’m not clear, really, right now, how come he’d open that up. But it had to be done down where it wouldn’t come out. But I think we’d done that a few times. I remember going in there with him and he was kind of a character. When he went in the rear face--you’d have to wear a mask of course--and he’d have a cigar that he’d cut and put it in his mouth and chew that while he was in. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] What, so smoking a cigar while being in the-- Lyon: You don’t smoke it. He was chewing it. Franklin: Just chewing the cigar. Lyon: Mm-hmm. But he had a full mask and then he was all taped up and your mask is taped, too, so you won’t get any contamination. You have a hood over it. Franklin: Right. Lyon: Yeah. Franklin: But he had a spot for the cigar. Lyon: No, he had it in his mouth chewing it. Just chewed it, yeah. Franklin: Interesting. Lyon: I can imagine me trying to chew a cigar for maybe a few minutes or whatever and swallow it. [LAUGHTER] Lyon: Oh, it was--anyway-- Franklin: That doesn’t sound like fun. Lyon: No. Franklin: Backing up a little bit, when you were a patrolman, what areas did you patrol? Lyon: I patrolled in all of them. I started out in B/C, but I was younger on the totem pole, and sometimes I would have to go into another area to relieve a man on vacation or something like that. But like I worked in K-E and K-W, H and F and D and DR, and B/C. I worked in all of them. Franklin: So you really got to go around the whole Site. Lyon: yeah. Franklin: Was there an area that was more difficult or better to patrol than the others? Lyon: I don’t think so. You had about the same routines. You had to patrol from the water facility--there was a tunnel there that goes from there underground over to the unit. One thing, there, in K area that was kind of amusing, especially for new men, they had a coffin and a dummy in it. But first time you seen it, you’re going through there with your flashlight and stuff, and there’s a coffin and stuff. You open it up and they get a good laugh when you get out of there. Franklin: Why was there a coffin? Lyon: I don’t’ know. It’s a prank, I guess. Franklin: Wow. Lyon: That was in K-E, I think it was, or K-W. Franklin: Wow. What was your uniform like as a patrolman? Lyon: Well, they were mainly like you would be on a civilian police force. I wore khakis in the summer, and it was kind of a Woolrich’s part in the winter. And you had a coat, of course, you know, for it. And a hat. Franklin: What kind of weapon did you carry? Lyon: A .38. .38 special, probably. Franklin: Any other interesting incidents that happened while you were on Patrol? Lyon: Well, in our cars, if I was on patrol on traffic or even on your fence car, you had a submachine gun and an M1 rifle in the trunk. And I had a shotgun right beside you there that would--you could unlock it as far as that, take it out. We’d get calls, mainly just for training. A captain would go out and give a location, and you had to see how quick--they clocked you and stuff when you answered to get to the stop that they wanted you to be there. Franklin: Cool. Let me go back to my questions here. And then after the reactors were shut down and you went-- Lyon: radiation protection. Franklin: Yeah, as an RPT, where did you work? Lyon: Well, I worked at D and DR, most of the time, probably. Franklin: Even after it shut down? Lyon: Yeah, you can--well, after it shut down, but--that was before it was shut down, particular--I don’t know, they hauled metal and of course kept security as far as that’s concerned. Franklin: Okay. Lyon: I can’t think of any incidents that happened there, really big, exciting, or anything. Franklin: Where else did you work as a radiation protection technician besides D and DR? Lyon: I worked over in 200 Area. They had kind of a decon thing going there and that was C Farm, I believe, in 200 West. We had pumps there--they had evaporators of course, that was trying to pump off the hotter tanks in the Tank Farm. And they would pump them out and then at a certain level they’d decide that that particular pump had to go. And they would physically go in there and they had to stretch out and they would put down paper and stuff to load that physically on that little boy. And they would kind of tape it up and everything to keep it from dripping. I know one particular one when I think it was B Farm, I’m not sure, but anyway you could track it with a GM from the time you left the gate clear down to the burial ground. We had some interesting work there to get that up and you know went in the burial ground. They tried to use road graders and stuff to get rid of it at first. They done stuff there that they had to go in, maybe, by men just to pick it up. You’d have to suit up to do that, of course. They maybe had to chip the asphalt where it would go down on the road from the evaporator to the burial grounds. Franklin: Oh, wow. Could you describe a typical work day? Lyon: Well, usually if you had a farm, why, you would suit up or you could--in one pair of whites, anyway, to go to the farm. You checked people out and you might have a crane come in to pull the cover off for, maybe PUREX was pumping stuff through there. And you’d have a crew there that would--operators and they would take care of whatever they was maybe wanting to flush or they could get back in operations and cover up the pit. I had one experience, I was at A Farm and we had a crew coming in to take filters from your stack, change them out, your HEPA filters. We would have a greenhouse there to get the people in there, and you had to wear a certain type of mask. Anyway, it was good for where you didn’t have air, fresh air. And you’d have it in a plastic kind of room, if you will. They would take the filter out and box it up and take it off and they’d put a new filter in. I remember getting--I didn’t have the masks with the chemical filter on it. And I tried to go in there and set the men up first. And what I remember, I got a real strong kind of a--anyway. Didn’t take your breath, but you were conscious of it, anyway. I asked the engineer about it, and he said, well, if you can stand it, it wouldn’t hurt you. So I don’t know. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: If you can stand it, it won’t hurt you? Lyon: Well, I mean, without the mask, I got--it was like you’d maybe inhaled vinegar or something like that, you know? But that’s the only thing that I can remember that I was a little uneasy about, because I thought I probably got a good shot of contamination or--I do have asbestosis in my right lung. And I don’t know exactly where I got that, as far as that’s concerned. But down through the years, why, I helped to decon 222-S lab and we’d just go in there with a crew, like construction. They’d go in and take so much of a dose to clean up whatever they were trying to clean, and we would check them. We’d set dose rates for them to work and keep time. Usually they’d go in and maybe 50 was all they could take at the time. Franklin: 50--? Lyon: Mrem. Anyway, they had gamma pencils they would wear. And plus the badge. There was another badge that you could get, just for the job. We could read that ourselves rather than have to send it down to get it read. We used to ship out metal there that we’d load metal there from the pickup chutes to the storage area. They would out a bucket, say, of metal. They would have a railroad car come in, and you’d take them underwater back to where you could get it in there where you could put the lid on it, the lid was on the container under the water. Anyway, they had a crane there where you could lift it up and they would remove the lead from the train carrier and you’d use your hoist and go over and put it down in there, and they’d put lead on it and you’d have to smear it out after it got--well, when it was covered up, the radiation was pretty well stopped. But you didn’t want to send anything out that was contaminated, you know, going down the road, spreading your contamination where you went, railroad. Franklin: So you’re talking there about taking the fuel out of from underwater and loading them into the train car? Lyon: No, you’d take them out of the water, load them into a bucket-- Franklin: The cask? Lyon: Yeah, a cask, bucket. It’s approximately like this. It held, I think, 350 of the enriched, that’s slugs. And then your U-238, it’s a slug probably about like that. And the number was less because of space. But they shipped both of them. You didn’t pass anything over the enrichment with something that might react. Yeah. They had that pretty well figured out. We had pretty good supervision as far as that was concerned. The radiation protection was, well, you had authority to stop the job if you thought it was getting out of hand. Franklin: Did you ever have to do that? Lyon: I don’t remember any particular time, but we had, sometimes, especially with construction, they wanted to get the job done, sometimes they were reluctant to come out when their time was up. Franklin: Oh, you mean come out of a zone where they would be getting dose. Lyon: Yeah. As far as when you shipped those cans in the railroad car, well, they have enough metal or stuff that would stop anything from coming through the side to speak of anyway. And the lead would be--I think they had kind of a pressure--I mean, wrench that you could tighten up a bolt to the caps to hold them down. I don’t know how far those railroad cars went, as far as that’s concerned. I just--I personally loaded them and I don’t remember bringing them in. Most of their metal that they charged in was U-238, which you could handle with your hands, you know, before they put it into the unit. You had your enrichment in the core that would fission and start the process. Franklin: What were the most challenging and rewarding aspects of your work at Hanford? Lyon: Well, I worked at 233, and it was contaminated with alpha. We had to dress maybe two or three pair and come out the same way. You had to be careful, because it seemed like I had the pam, you know about that, that’s kind of just for an instrument--for alpha? And you’d have to check over them physically, you know, before they could come out and remove any clothing that was contaminated. If they were contaminated, you had to decon them. Franklin: What was the decon process like? Lyon: Well, they would send you to the shower, and if you could wash it off where it was nothing detectable with the pam, and your beta gamma, your GM, if those two contaminants, you didn’t detect on the person, well, you call them clean. If you couldn’t clean them, well, you send them downtown and they went through a process down there. Franklin: What about rewarding? What was the most rewarding aspect of your time at Hanford? Lyon: Well, I kind of liked it when I completed a job that was satisfactory. Believe it or not, I have had a few compliments anyway in my history of being a radiation monitor. I was a lead operator--lead monitor, rather--for probably about 12 years of my last years of service. I have relieved my supervisor when he went on vacation. That was in C Area. They were deconing kind of a silo, but it went down. We worked off of two-by-twelve, and they would try and decon the walls of the stuff there. I had a makeshift elevator that was like a two-by-twelve and they’d let you down, and you had a rope with a suit on in case you fell off of it, why, it wouldn’t let you go to the bottom. Franklin: Wow. Sorry. The bottom of what? Lyon: Well, it was kind of an inverted silo. Instead of going up, it was down. Franklin: Okay, got you. What are some of your memories of major events in the Tri-Cities’ history, such as plants shutting down or starting up? Lyon: I can’t remember any real problems. They had that pretty well--physicists figured out the time that they were coming up. When they were shutting down, they dropped the verticals and it would pull out part of your control rods. And when they’d put them in, rather, to shut down. Franklin: I guess the question is more orientated towards not the physical act of reactor shut down or startup, but when, in the late ‘60s, when the decision was made to actually permanently shut down and deactivate the reactors. I imagine, was that of concern in Richland and the community? Was there a worry about jobs? Lyon: I don’t think so. It seemed like they would lay off and then they would hire. I don’t know, it seemed like it was kind of up and down. Franklin: Yeah. When did you retire from Hanford? Lyon: I retired in ‘89 at 58. 58 years. I mean, I was 58 years old. Franklin: Years old, oh okay. So you retired, really, right when the production mission ended. Lyon: Yeah. Well, N Area was still running, and I think, maybe one of the Ks or both Ks ran for a while. But, like, B and C and D and DR and F, H, most of those were shut down. Franklin: Was there a big worry about when the Cold War ended about what would happen to Richland and Hanford? Lyon: I don’t know. I was looking for another job. And I found--I got on with radiation protection. So I had it there as long as I--had I wanted to stay, I could’ve stayed. But, in fact, I got called back when I was 80 years old to go out to HAMMER. I was changing irrigation, believe it or not, in the field, and the phone rang. The guy was on the phone, said he wanted to work out a salary or a number, anyway. And I’d checked with construction to see what they were paying. Anyway, I told him what I could get for construction, and it was more or less $33 an hour, with $3 going towards your insurance. And he said, well, how about $35? And I said, okay. But I got to thinking later, I could’ve probably got $40. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: And what did you do at HAMMER? Lyon: In what? HAMMER? Franklin: What did you do at HAMMER? Lyon: Well, they have a mockup, you know, of like your hoods. It’s the next thing to being the actual thing, if you will. They got rooms there like where they have supposedly hot trash and hoods where they work in, too, in the labs. These are all clean, as far as that’s concerned. And you take people in there, make them dress up to a code, like they were actually going in and doing the job. And you go in and you give them a false reading, maybe. You know, because it’s clean. But you take your cutie pie in there and measure it and tell them like, it’s reading four or five rad or something like that. Anyway, you give them a talk-to first, and you try and impress them with the way they dress and the job that they’re doing. And then you take them through and let them do the job. And then you grade them. You can flunk them, or you can pass them. Franklin: So you were doing RPT training? Lyon: Yeah. Well, I was an RPT then. And I would just evaluate the people that come in. They have to pass a test, radiation, like a test for--to work out there. If they can’t pass that test, why, they have to give it another hitch, or else they probably have to move from their job. Franklin: What events or incidents happened at Hanford while you were working there that stand out to you? Lyon: Well, Dash-5 had their problem while I was out there. And they had a problem there at 222-S. They had contaminant in their pipe, their fresh air pipe became contaminated and some people got a dose there that they shouldn’t have. Franklin: Wow. Lyon: You can see the man on TV, I think, still show him. He could probably sit down and breathe on a GM or a pam or whatever and see the needle move by what he exhaled or whatever. Franklin: Do you remember the McCluskey incident? Lyon: That’s what I was talking about. Franklin: The Dash-5? Lyon: Yeah. Franklin: Yeah. Lyon: Yeah. Franklin: Were you near there when that happened? Lyon: No. What I heard is there was a burial there and it had a drip, drip, and it got so much, why, it would go critical. I think he was right there when it did. Franklin: What about when--did you go to see JFK when he came to visit in 1963? Lyon: I did not. I don’t know whether I was on shift at the time. I worked around the clock a lot of the times. I’d be on graveyard for seven days and then I would have--well, from Friday morning until Wednesday afternoon off. And then I would work swing for seven days. And then I would have two days off, and go on graveyard. That’s the way it went. Franklin: Wow. What was it like living in Richland in the 1950s when it was still a government town? Lyon: Well, I didn’t have any problems. I was a patrolman as far as that’s concerned. I done my job. We would patrol Richland, as far as that’s concerned. I could’ve stayed, had I wanted to become a policeman. But-- Franklin: What type of housing did you live in? Lyon: I lived in a prefab, two-bedroom prefab on 1613 Mahan. Franklin: Okay. Do you remember any particular community events? Lyon: Any ex-what? Franklin: Any particular community events? Lyon: Well, the thing that I remember is the pump that they pulled from the evaporator, they didn’t have it wrapped up good so it contaminated quite a bit of area there that we ended up digging up a little bit of blacktop before we could get it all cleared. Franklin: Okay. Lyon: But I think mainly it was fairly quiet. Franklin: Sure. [COUGH] Oh, excuse me. Could you describe the ways in which secrecy and security at Hanford impacted your work? Lyon: Well, when I was on patrol, you was always looking for something that, maybe they had left out on their desk. You went through the offices and if you found something that should’ve been secured, why, you called them and they either come out and took care of it or else we took it up to headquarters and they wrote it up. That’s about all I know about security, as far as that’s concerned. People were responsible for what they were working with, and they weren’t supposed to leave it laying out so somebody could just come along and look at it. And I wouldn’t have any idea what a lot of that was about, as far as that’s concerned. Just maybe concerned with the work or, I don’t kind of a secret that they had there. You just had to be careful what you talked about. Franklin: Did people talk about what they did? When you’d meet them, and you knew they worked at Hanford? Or were people secretive about their jobs, or were you secretive about your job? Lyon: Yeah, physically, I’d talk to, especially people that I worked with, you know. Most people in Richland were connected some way there, first off, anyway. Franklin: Did you ever talk about your job to your family? Lyon: Huh? Franklin: Did you ever talk about your job to your family or friends? Lyon: Oh, probably to my wife, yeah. But I don’t think I divulged any classified material-- Franklin: Sure, sure. I wasn’t implying that. Lyon: Oh. Franklin: So you recently took a B Reactor tour, right? Lyon: Yes. Franklin: What was it like to take a tour to B Reactor now that it’s a museum? Lyon: Well, I sat down in the chair and got my picture taken by--I had some people out here, relatives. I think I may have sat in that chair once. I was by no means a reactor operator, but I have sat at the board a little bit. But under supervision. Because you don’t go in there and just start operating; you have to take it slow and--same way with charge/discharge. You have to get the knack, otherwise you won’t drop that metal in, you’ll be doing more damage to the metal than you should. Franklin: What does it mean to you that B Reactor is now a national park? Lyon: I think it’s nice. They got it all cleaned up and they can see. As far as the lecture, they could be a little bit more amplified sound or something in there where you could hear better. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: That’s a-- Lyon: I’m a little hard of hearing anyway. Franklin: That’s a common piece of feedback we get. We’re still working on it. Lyon: Yeah. Franklin: So my last question is, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland during the Cold War? Lyon: Well, it was some of the best money that I made, so I really looked at it as a good deal for me. The only thing I was trying to keep myself clean and not get polluted, you know? That’s about the size of it. I enjoyed the money. As far as that’s concerned, it was a decent place to work, I thought. I have two boys, and my youngest boy is going to retire the 20th of next month. He has 40 years as an electrician out there. He’s going to go to HAMMER, if you will, and teach electrical, maybe three to five days a week, when he retires. He’s talking about just--he gets a wage for that, and then they don’t--well, I guess they can give him insurance, too, if they want him bad enough. But he went through a training there in Yakima where they have the training for electricians and stuff. Then he come out here and--it’s Garry Lyon, and he’s 60. Franklin: Oh, wow. How do you--sorry, I guess I have one more question that I just kind of thought of. How do you feel about your work contributing to the growth of nuclear weapons and proliferation of nuclear weapons of the Cold War? Lyon: Well, I think we had to do it. I still think we’re--well, politics there--but one of them sold Russia some of our stockpile of whatever, you know, uranium, whatever. And they need that, I guess, if they’re going to make bombs. I don’t know whether they’re so advanced now that--it was bombs that we dropped. By the way, did they have--I thought that was a Fat Man and a thin man, but there was a woman here the other day, said it was a Fat Man and a Little Boy. Franklin: That--yes, there was, apparently--it’s Fat Man and Little Boy. There was a Thin Man, which was a developmental plutonium gun weapon, but it didn’t work. Lyon: Oh, I see. Franklin: So they went with--because the uranium was a gun-type bomb. Adn then Fat Man was the plutonium implosion bomb. So there was a little bit--but it was just a development, and it never saw the light of day. Lyon: I see. Well, I disputed her a little bit. I said, I thought it was a Fat Man and a Thin Man, and I’d never heard about the Little Boy. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: They’re all kind of funny names for the weapons. Well, Garrold, thank you so much for taking the time to come and interview with us today. Lyon: Okay. I have one more boy out there that, he’s an engineer for, well, trying to do the solidification, you know? Franklin: The vitrification. Lyon: Yeah. And he’s 62. Franklin: Wow. You’re kind of a Hanford family. Lyon: Yeah. Franklin: Yeah. Well, that’s great. Well, Garrold, thank you for taking the time to come in and interview with us. Lyon: You bet. Franklin: Okay. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:55:46 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 9986 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview Hanford Patrol A Farm D DR K-E K-W C Farm B Farm 200 Area 200 West 222-S lab HAMMER Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1955 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 24 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Garrold Lyon Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Garrold Lyon talks about his time working in Hanford Patrol and at various reactor sites and tank farms. He talks about his sons that still work at Hanford. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 08/30/2018 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F42af466f014b615aae8ad77bcb4e6927.JPG 697aa5d799157fbcf33e7ff2b8b8cab9 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Carlos Leon Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: All right, red light’s on. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Carlos Leon on October 5, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Carlos about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Carlos Leon: Carlos Leon. That’s my full name; never got a middle name. C-A-R-L-O-S L-E-O-N. Franklin: So, Carlos, when and where were you born? Leon: I was born in 1953 in Toppenish. Toppenish Memorial Hospital. Franklin: And what had brought your family to Toppenish? Leon: Oh, golly. My grandparents were all born in Mexico. My dad in Texas; my mom in Kansas. And then my ma’s parents moved to Toppenish early ‘40s. Then my dad’s parents moved while my dad was in the service. When he moved back, he moved back to Toppenish. Then making a long story short, that’s where they met. Franklin: And were both of those families in agriculture? Leon: Yeah, they worked the fields. They worked the fields. My grandparents, my parents and stuff, they worked the field. My dad had a trucking firm that, you know, so we hauled potatoes and peas and all kinds of produce. And that was our summer job, working out in the fields, or in the orchards and stuff with my mom or something like that. So we were always--we were always busy. So a lot of the times, really, though--like when you worked, like the potatoes. It’s hot, middle of the summer, and you’d work basically as soon as the sun rose till 10:00 in the morning. All these rows of sacks of potatoes up and down the rows and stuff and everything else. And they’d put them on the trucks, and that’d be the end of the workday. But it was a long and hot workday type of thing. So we got the afternoon as kids to really actually be kids, too, at the same time. Franklin: And is fieldwork what brought your grandparents out of Mexico? Leon: Well, my-- Franklin; Did they ever talk about it? Leon: Well, my grandfather on my dad’s side worked in the salt mines in Kansas. You’ve heard of the famous salt mines of Kansas, Lands, Kansas. And then my grandfather on my dad’s--my grandfather, my dad’s father worked the railroads in Texas. So my dad grew up in Georgetown, Texas. So that was--yeah, so, he has a couple sisters, so they eventually moved to I think Montana it was, and then eventually back to Toppenish, Washington. Franklin: What was it about Toppenish that drew your family there? Leon: Oh, golly. Well, agriculture, really. My mom’s family settled in, I guess, migrant cabins at the Golding farms in Yakima. It was the biggest hop ranch in the world at one time. I don’t know if it still is or not. So they had cabins and stuff there and eventually they had to sell the house about four blocks away. I didn’t know my grandfather. I was three years old when he died. But my grandmother, his mom, lived with us and nine kids and then my other grandparents lived only like four or five blocks away. So we were very close and they all knew each other real well. All my aunts and uncles, actually, from both sides of the family know each other. Yeah, it’s really seamless in a lot of ways. So we had a big family and so, yeah, I was very fortunate. We didn’t have much, but we had a lot at the same time. Franklin: Mm-hmm, a lot of family members and family gatherings, relationships. Leon: Oh, yeah, oh, yeah. And it was Mexican culture, also. So you know, my grandparents didn’t speak any English, so. Hence you heard me speaking Spanish at the Sacajawea thing, Heritage Days. Franklin: Oh, that was really wonderful. The kids were like-- Leon: Oh, I enjoy that tremendously. Franklin: They really dug that. Leon: I give credit to my parents on all that. My parents were very outgoing and they stressed education and they stressed making people comfortable. That was the biggest thing, really. Franklin: Did they--did your parents want you--I know a lot of times with immigrant families, the children are often not taught their parents’ language; they want them to learn the language of their adopted country. Leon; Well, no, you know, my parents never really said one way or another. My older brother and my younger brother, Rudi, after me, like the first three boys, we kept it fairly, whatever. But the thing is, we were never educated in it. We didn’t read it; we didn’t write it. We spoke to our grandparents with it, and it was all around us with our extended family and stuff, people that visited my parents and that type of thing. So, you learn the, what do you call it, the morays, the norms, of the culture. With the fiestas and that type of thing. And I grew up with the food and when I went to college, I told people, I had to learn how to use a fork. I really did. Because it was just tortillas. And to this day, gimme a tortilla and beans and some rice, and I’m happy. You know, in a way, with my kids and stuff, I see them eat kind of like--cool, watching them eat with their hands and stuff. So there’s part of that there. They aren’t going to have the full meal deal that I had growing up, but with my aunts and uncles are still around and my brothers and sisters, they impart quite a bit. And I’m really proud of that. I’m really really proud of that. Franklin: Was there already a--how large was the Latino community, or was there already a Latino community when both sides of your family moved up to Toppenish? Leon: There was quite the Latino community. But really nothing like it is nowadays. You know, now it seemed like 75% of the town is Hispanic. Up and down the Yakima Valley. Or something like that. There was a large community, but it wasn’t like the influential that you have now, it seemed like. When I went to--when I graduated from high school, a handful of Hispanics that graduated with me. And I think two, maybe three--I’m just thinking--African Americans and that was really the--that was it back then. I graduated in 1971. But that was it. I never felt like I wasn’t part of the town. Franklin: Right. And you said you went to college. Leon: Mm-hmm. Franklin: And where did you go? Leon: Oh, for--[LAUGHTER] that’s a long story. But to make it short, when I graduated from high school, I went to Eastern in Cheney, and got tired of school after about three years. Kind of like basically, when you go to college, you meet the world. You meet kids that have a lot of money, or kids that don’t have much. Kids that want to be away from home, kids that are longing to be back home, and have a different kind of relationship with their parents. To me, it was all normal. I just kind of like--anyway, but living on a shoestring, kind of like eventually on your own kind of gets to you a little bit. So after three years and stuff, that’s where, ad in the paper, reactor operator? Sure, why not? Franklin: Really? You answered an ad in the paper. Leon: Ad in the paper. Franklin: Do you remember--a paper in Cheney? Leon: No, no, I was actually, during the summer, it was a Tri-City paper. I think it was my uncle that called and said, hey, there’s an ad in the paper for--and I saw it. I think it was in the Yakima Herald also. Kind of blurry about that. And interviewed with Paul Vinther. I don’t know if you’ve met-- Franklin: Really? Leon: Uh-huh. Franklin: Oh, yeah, I’m very--yeah, he has the Hanford Retirees. Leon: Paul, oh, yeah. Franklin: And he trained reactor operators. Leon: A long time ago. He’s a physicist by trade. Anyway, it’s funny, in talking with him--very, oh, man, talk about a larger-than-life personality. I mean, here, look, here I am, a 21-year-old kid, look at how small I am. I mean, barely weighed 120 pounds, maybe, at that time. I’m a lot heavier now, type of thing, but think about that. And, you know, he’s a big man. So he had this big, booming voice, great personality, just kind of like--and, heck, I can’t even remember the questions he asked and stuff. It wasn’t very long after that that they gave me the job offer. And so-- Franklin: What did you know about Hanford when you took that interview? Leon: Oh, golly. Well, I guess a couple things. You know, I remember the Kennedy thing, because that was covered; that was in the news. That was everywhere. I mean, eastern Washington, are you kidding? I mean, the President of the United States?! I know the Herald and the Tri-City really covered it at that time. But also the Yakima paper, Toppenish--that’s what we got, the Yakima Herald, all the time. And I remember that. And then driving truck for my dad in potatoes, like going to Othello, we’d be driving out 240. And so you’d see these stacks. You’d see these buildings, see the vapor coming out. And it was just kind of like--you know, now, you’re thinking about it, as I’m looking out. And I know the area so well that I was actually looking, at actually B Reacotr, you know, the one that was the closest to see that. But going on up, you’d see the processing coming out of the 200 West. And I know the story on when I’m on the bus is kind of like, back in those days and stuff, if you pulled over like for a flat tire or something like that, the Hanford Patrol would be right there, almost immediately, seeing what--if there’s something wrong somewhere, hurry up and fix your tire and move on. Because it was really, really secret, still. Franklin: Yeah. Leon: You know, I mean, highly sensitive and all that stuff. So that as my--and then I knew a lot of smart people worked there, I guess. I mean, that’s what it comes down to because all these scientists and all that type of thing. They used to have a school day when they’d have, you know, two or three kids from each school from all over the areas would go and tour Hanford, and they’d show them all that type of thing. So I had a couple friends that did that, and whatever, I wasn’t one of the smart kids. So they went and they’d tell, whatever, that they were picked and all that stuff. Franklin: But then here you are, 21, you got a job offer as a reactor operator. Leon: And I had no idea what I was getting into. Franklin: Well, what did you get into? Leon: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: What was that like? Leon: Well, come down to it, first thing was that they, you know, saw how much they were going to pay me. $184.84 a week was my--and I’m going, whoa. I mean, nobody’d ever paid me that much for anything, whatever. Franklin: What kind of wages were your parents earning, or what would’ve been the prevailing wage in like driving truck at that time? Leon: my dad didn’t pay me. Franklin: Oh, sure. Leon: My dad didn’t--his trucks and I got room and board. Put gas in and paid insurance for my car and that type of thing. Franklin: Sure, I mean, how did that compare to what you might have earned back in Toppenish if you were working? Leon: Oh, heck, I’d’ve be a millionaire almost type of thing. Oh, I’m not kidding! That was--$184, that’s like $4.50 an hour in 1974. And, really, when I first came here, my brother had already started to work out here, my older brother. And so we found a place in Pasco, like an old hotel set up to stay there until I found something, whatever, until we found something. And just a block of I guess would be south of the Uptown, there were some apartments, and I found them-- Franklin: Those little one-story apartments? Leon: Yeah, the one-story, the Anthony Apartments it’s called, whatever? Franklin: The what apartments? Leon: I lived 1209. 1209 George Washington Way. Franklin: Oh. What did you call them? Leon: Anthony Apartments, they were called at the time. And I don’t know who--I can’t remember the owner’s name. But anyway, so we stayed there, lived there for actually the whole four years that I actually worked as an operator at N. So me and my brother moved in there, $200 a month. And so he covered the first month, because he’d been working and he had money, and I hadn’t gotten paid nothing yet. And then eventually--but no cable, no phone, you know, any of that type of thing. Because we--you know. I got in trouble with the no phone business with work. My shift manager--I got sick, and I didn’t call. And this was at the, oh, probably been working three or four months or something like that. So, I was gone--I was not at work for a couple, two days. And I got on the bus, and got to work a couple days later. He was really mad at me because I didn’t call. Well, I don’t have a phone, Cliff. And he said, well, go to a payphone, whatever, that type of thing. And at that time, I didn’t have--I’m trying to remember the phone number of the control room or his number, just kind of like--that was like--but whatever. It was a year before I got a phone. You know, really. Franklin: Wow. What did your older brother do? Leon: He worked, actually, just with finance. That’s what he wanted to do and stuff, so he worked in the finance part. He never went into the reactors or nothing like that. Franklin: What was your first impression when you showed up for your first day? Do you remember? Leon: Oh, I remember my first day. My first day? My first bus ride. Remember, you caught the things, so they’d give you the instructions on how to catch the bus. I didn’t know about the shuttles at the time. I ended up catching the bus right across the street on George Washington Way, eventually, when I got on shift. But I ended up on the bus ride and we were just passing--just before we were going to pass the 200 East Area. Of course, I didn’t know the 200 East Area, but I know now, that’s just why I’m telling you. Anyway, passing 200 East Area. The bus was pulling over. And I was kind of like, oh, this must be the reactor or something like that. But there was some commotion and stuff Well, there was a guy three or four seats in front of me, because I was close to the back, he was having a heart attack. I’d never seen anything like this. So they escorted him off and a patrolman came on out and stuff. So they left and then the bus drove off. They left him standing there with the patrolman and they took care of him or whatever. But it was nothing like nowadays with the EMTs and all that type of stuff. It’s totally different. And kind of like, okay. It was just--and then I, you know, like showed up in front of the admin building and I got off. I didn’t know anybody. And walked in, and there was the admin building, and they had told me just to go up the stairs and the corner office and there was Dottie, Vinther’s secretary. Big old smile on her face and everything. You know, so welcomed me and every thing, and talked about her guys, because she just loved the operators. And then eventually got escorted into the 105 Building. And the 105 Building for N is huge. Huge, compared to, you know, the B and the rest of the other reactors. Got introduced to whatever shift manager of the shift that was on at the time and everything, and all the various other people. It’s kind of like, lost. And then Larry Haler came on, too, the same date that I did. Franklin: Same exact day? Leon: Yeah, same day. Franklin: Wow. Leon: And so we kind of hung around together and asked--gave each other a lot of blank looks a lot. You’ll have to ask Larry what he remembers. But it was a blur, basically, it’s what a blur was. And we were basically assigned to work back in the fuels area to package fuel and that type of thing. That’d be our first thing of learning being a reactor operator. Franklin: So it was all on-the-job training. Leon: Ohm es, I did not take one single classroom. It was just, this is the books, read the books. And it had all the systems and all that type of stuff. And then--I was--to go forward a little bit, eventually I was assigned to shift. And I was, looking back on it, I was very fortunate to be put on the shift that I was on, B shift, is the shift I was on. Got A, B, C, and D. Franklin: And why was that so fortunate? Leon: Ah, because of the individuals. And I guess, I guess, maybe if I would’ve been on A shift, C or D, I would’ve--but I got to meet other guys on the other shift and got to know them, too, don’t get me wrong there. But B shift was just the characters that were there, but at the same time, the character that they gave me, I guess that’s--and I was telling Tom earlier, it was kind of like, those guys helped me grow up. I was 21 years old, and I was bulletproof. And the next youngest guy on my shift was 45 years old. Franklin: Oh, wow. So they were, a lot of them were kind of like father figures almost? Leon: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. They had kids like me and older, type of thing. And so--yeah, I guess you could say, they probably knew me much better than I knew myself in a lot of ways. But it was--they really wanted me to learn, and learn right. That was the one thing that I’m very, very thankful for. Because, boy, I tell you, if you did anything wrong, if you went one way or--against what you should actually be doing, it’s just kind of like, you don’t put your finger into a socket for electricity. Well, you don’t walk into a radiation area unless you know what you’re going to face. And it’s that type of thing. And they’re very, very, very good--not the operators; the HP techs--we called them RMs at the time, radiation monitors; we didn’t call them HP techs--all the shift managers, the guys in maintenance. On and on, I mean, I could name them. I tell everybody, like the last scene of the Titanic, you know, where the camera’s going, you see the barnacled ship and then eventually it gets into its glory, the grand staircase. I can close my eyes and walk in to the 105-N. And there, Duke Anthony’s in there, you know, Granva Philips’ office, there’s Bob White’s in there, and there’s Cliff Young, shift managers’ offices, right off the back, you walk through. And then the INC shop over here, the entrance into the N, and then walk over here, walk in and stuff, closing my eyes. And I see Bob Stees, my first control room supervisor, Dale Tahyer, my other one. Oh, golly. Then all of the various operators: Ralph Hagensic or Nels Kass. Chet Regal, Claire Miller. Howard Sidig. I mean, just--you know, it’s just so clear. Right now as I’m talking to you, I can see their faces. I can recognize their voices. Even--that was my crew. That was my crew. And in the back, Nellie and Kenny and John. And then these--you know, the mechanics would come in. And the INC techs, the electricians, Jack Black--no, Jack White, Mike Black. Rodney Brown. All these different people that would come in. Harold Petty, the 105 supervisor in the power side and stuff. And Harold would always make, on the last night in graveyard, would always make us breakfast. Just give him a couple bucks and big old pancakes and bacon, it was kind of like--I mean, for a kid that never had had that type of stuff before, it was just kind of like, wow! This is amazing to me. It just, you know, all the various foods, stuff that people brought for lunch. We had this great big, actually, big kitchen at 105-N. And gas stoves. This was before microwaves and that type of thing. So they had these big gas stoves and stuff, and people would cook and bring their lunches and stuff, and see what the heck, all the various sandwiches and stuff. I was really fascinated by egg salad. I’d never had egg salad and someone gave me half of an egg salad sandwich. I was going, wow, this is really amazing. And then, you know, on a break, here’s a guy that was--looked like an apple, you know, he’s cutting it and eating it type of thing. And I’m like, what’s that, Cecil? Kohlrabi’. Kohlrabi is the way you see it now. And he said, you’ve never had it? I said, no. How would I know? So he cut off a piece and gave it to me. Took a bite of it, tasted like a dirty radish. But I like radishes and dirt don’t bother me any, so. So every once in a while, I--whenever I see kohlrabi I think of this guy, Cecil Moss. Really, a good guy. Really a good guy. Like I said, I had a really good time with all of these different people and stuff like that. I’m rambling, aren’t I? Franklin: No, it’s great. Did you work when you first started, did you work with anybody from the Manhattan Project days? Were any of your coworkers-- Leon: Oh, yes. Franklin: From-- Leon: Oh, yes, in fact, oh, yes, in fact, a physicist at B, but my first visit to B was a guy--again, all the reactors were shut down. So all the keys to all the reactors were hung in the control room in a little cabinet in B and stuff. One of the older gentlemen that was there, one of the guys that helped do the training or went along with it was Ralph Wallen. He actually has a narration on that, it’s W-A-H-L-E-N. Anyway, so, he has like a story that he’s written that you can actually get online. They actually have it. And he talks about that. Anyway, so, one time when I was the extra man on shift and that type of thing, he said, you wanna go over to B? I said, sure! So, again, this was, had to have been, I’d had been there at least a year then. It had to have been ‘75. Got flashlights and stuff and got in the car and drove on over to B. He unlocked the gates and everything. So we went into the, down the hall. No power anymore. I think I remember it being cool. And shined a light on the front face and stuff. Whoa. I said, that’s more tubes than N. You know, by that time I knew what--but, looked a lot, looked very, very similar. Said, is that the C elevator there? Yeah, that’s the C elevator. I mean, so all of these different things there, they were very, very similar. And I think one of the ways he really wanted me to see this, because I could go in there and not worry about any kind of exposure. And learn about it. And not too years later that I really realized that that’s what he was doing. Because I’d see something and I’d explain to him. The ball hoppers, even up on top and that type of thing. And then went into the control room, and how much smaller it was. Then we actually walked across the slats in the fuel pool. It was dusty, and everything, so I don’t ever remember--and I know we didn’t survey ourselves. Nothing to survey--supposedly. Like it is now, I tell you. But that was my first experience with somebody that really actually told me. But then Howard Sidig who was on my shift, he was only on my shift for about a year-and-a-half. He was getting to be retirement age. But he used to be an operator, and he was one of the original operators for B. He’s long dead now and stuff, but he is a good father for me. I got to know him outside of work and stuff through the church and everything. And him and his family and his wife, Rosemary. Very, very--oh, just endearing, endearing people. So he actually showed me--you know the certificate at the tour center that shows that people were part of the war effort, that they gave to various operators, I guess? Or to whoever--whatever. I was visiting Howard and he went on up to--he said, I gotta show you something. And beaming, he has this certificate. I’d never seen it before. I read it and stuff, helping out the war effort, blah, blah, blah. His name was on it. He was very, very proud of it, you know? That was the mentality. Well, yeah! You know? And they helped end a very cruel part of our history. So he was very, very proud of that. And I looked at it and said, whoa. He said, there aren’t very many of these. Okay. Apparently there aren’t. To have--I don’t know how many were handed out during--and that type of thing. And then there was also another individual--well, actually two. Archie Stark, who was in the fuel-handling in the back, and then George Madison, who was actually a supervisor, and both of them were B Reactor people. But again, I’d ask them questions, but I forget half the answers about that type of thing. But, you know the biggest thing that they would say is, ah, you wouldn’t have existed, you couldn’t have handled all that hard work back then. Oh, you know. They would always kid me with that. But growing up in the family that I did, you know, helped me. Like I told you about my parents, to treat people with respect and that type of thing. But I have a thick skin. You know, when you grow up with nine kids, seven boys, especially, you do. And so, man, they want to banter? Okay, here I am! I banter right back. And just, yeah, whatever, I just loved it. I loved it. Growing up with it all. So, I don’t know, you want me to show you some things or whatever? I brought something with me. We’re not at that point in our conversation? Franklin: Why don’t you show me at the end? Leon: Okay. Franklin: Then we can get like a stand or something to put it on. We could then do that--that way the camera doesn’t have to refocus. Could you describe a typical work day as a reactor operator? Leon: A typical work day. Franklin: Yeah. Leon: Well, I can tell you a typical work day, maybe about three or four different typical work days, if you get down to it, because there was lots of aspects to it. One o the--probably the first aspect was, if you’re like in the back, in the fuel pool and you’re actually packaging fuel. Or you’re actually part of the refuel process. In, you know, when they were pushing the fuel out, you could either be on the discharge or the charging elevator. Or you could be out back in the fuel pool. We actually had three positions. Or I was never--they would never let me operate the charge machine; you need some experience in that. But other than that-- Franklin: Is that what pushes the fuel through? Leon: Pushes the fuel through. It’s a great, big, you know, 55, 60-foot long elevator on steel platforms that they had that actually would get--and we’d make charges already. And that’s another story. When it comes to a typical day, it really is hard for me to tell you what a typical day was, because so much changed. And then it depended what shift you were on, if you were on graveyard, swing or days. All of those things made a difference as far as what a typical day was. But to really get down to it, you know, like if you were a fuel handler, you were in the back. You are actually packaging the fuel and putting them into canisters and the canisters, you’d be putting them in order in the fuel, in those canisters and then lowering them into the pool. When you discharged the fuel, you’re seeing the images of the fuel coming out and hitting the trampoline and into the carts. They actually had track--they had carts where you’d get, I think, three tubes in each cart. And then travel on out, and then come on out and they’d dump it into baskets. So everything would be into the baskets. So then you’d eventually, when everything started up and stuff, well, you had all these baskets of fuel. You actually had to let them cool a little bit longer than--you know, you don’t start packaging them right away. But you had to do rearranging. You had to make sure that everything was arranged and stuff, and if any pieces that fell out, you’re looking for them. It’s an accountability issue, make sure that we had everything. So the fuel pool--and that was different, N Reactor’s was a really long fuel pool. It didn’t have a grate across it like ethe other reactors did. It was just a pool, and you actually had trolleys that traveled the length of the fuel pool. And, oh, that was a--oh, golly, talk about memory. That was a source of fun for me, let’s put it that way. They had no idea. They had these big old tongs and stuff that would hang to pick things up and that type of thing. And you’d bring it all the way up to the top and stuff. But it had a faster or slow motion going. I would hit the jog button, and I’d hit the travel button and that sucker would sped up. Not like it went really, really fast, but it would go a little bit faster to get to the other end. And then as soon as I’d hit that, I’m telling you, George Madison, who was my supervisor at the time, he’d be on one end, and, you know. I got this idea during graveyard and stuff, going really fast. Eeee. And it was in a big enclosure, and echoed like crazy if you really wanted to make it echo. Well, hey, here’s my chance. So I go in there and I hit it and I go, GEEEEEEOOOOORRRRRGGGE! And go running. And then I said, no, I’m going to say GEEEORRRRGE! It just echoed like crazy. And George was just doing this thing, whatever. So those types of things, just little by little, all of these various things. You know, it made it enjoyable. It made it enjoyable, a break in the monotony of a lot of the things. And you know, I was just a good target for them all. They would always say something or whatever like that. Especially because my age. More than anything else because my age. Because I’m kind of like-- Franklin: You were kind of young, young buck? Leon: Oh, golly. And then of course they wanted, when I was on long chains, we had four days off, four-and-a-half days off, whatever. I’d head to Portland or Seattle or Spokane, visit friends and this and that or whatever like that. 21, 22-year-old kid, coming back, like, oh, yeah, what’d you do? Oh. Franklin: Right-- Leon: Oh, I’d embellish a lot of the time, whatever. But it was. It was, in fact, especially from Portland or Seattle I’d stop by at home and say hi to the folks and stuff and then head back to Richland. But they just thought I just lived a wild life sometimes, kind of like--yeah, I guess I did. In some respects, I did. Franklin: Were your parents or family concerned about you working at Hanford? Leon: No. Not really. Not really. They were--I guess, you know, tell them, what do you do? Oh, I’m a reactor operator. I operate a nuclear reactor. When I first got here, it was like, I was driving a borrowed car. One of the guys from the reactor had a car that he wanted to sell. ‘68 Toyota Corolla. Franklin: Wow, that’s one of the first ones. Leon: I mean, a little box. A little box, yellow box, what it was. Franklin: Those are very collectible nowadays. Leon: Oh! You know. 500 bucks. And he said, you could probably go to HAPO and get a loan. You know, I mean, who’d give a kid a $500--so I went over to HAPO. You know, at the time, you could only be--since I was a union or whatever, hourly employee, I could only go to HAPO. GESA was for the managers and that type of thing. That’s the way it was divided. So I went on over there, and I got a $500 loan. And I had to--my payments were like $75 a month. So they worked it out so that I could pay my rent and still live and that type of thing. First time I drove it home, my mom was just beaming, really proud, kind of like, it’s just nice--I mean, you’ve got to think about it, as far as our upbringing not having much money and stuff. My parents, they just struggled to provide for us. And we, of course, you being a kid, you don’t really realize how much they’re struggling. And anyway so she was just beaming and happy and feeling it’s so nice to see that you have some money in your pocket now, mojo. And your car and on and on. Just--yeah, no, no, my parents weren’t really, say, like scared of, what, or apprehensive. What was apprehensive though was like I had my next-door neighbor there in Toppenish--because you know to get a clearance they filled out all this paperwork. So one of my neighbors said, in Spanish, you know, what kind of job do you have? I had some guy come talk to me and ask about you, type of thing. Don Santiago was his name. So it’s really kind of funny. There was nothing--it was a job, and it provided, and it provided very well. It provided very well. Franklin: Yeah. And how long did you--how long were you a reactor operator? Leon: I was a reactor operator for four years. I was certified for two-and-a-half during that time. Going back to your typical workday type of thing, The typical workday in the control room, it really--a reactor operator likes it boring. Franklin: Sure. Boring and predictable is good. Leon: Boring and predictable and everything steady state is a great thing. It’s a great thing to have, really, you know? It gets a little tiresome or whatever like that, especially during graveyard. But you know, like I said, there was always--we were always talking. We were always talking. Anyway, so a typical day, depending on whether you were at the nuclear console, whether you were at the A console where you had all the turbines and the steam generators or the BN console where you have your dunk condensers and your rad monitor thing and stuff. But you always had duties; you always had something that you were doing. So if you were the fourth person, you were on relief. So you had other surveillances to do and on and on and everything. But if you had an emergency, like a scram, or like I say, some abnormal happened, whatever. Temperature here too high or steam generator levels getting too high or whatever like that, you know, open up a blow-down valve, and how long, how’s the chemistry looking and that type of thing. All of these various things. So there was always something. There was always something. I love--at the same time, though, I love startups. Startups were fun. Yeah. I learned a lot. That’s where a lot of the guys, you know, when I was telling you about being hands-on. A lot of the guys would let me [LAUGHTER] manipulate, under instruction, bringing up the turbines to full speed from 1800 to 3600. And you know, pull rods in and out. One experience I had was putting on what’s called dump condensers, heating up dump condensers. Because the way N Reactor was designed was that it sent steam over to the Hanford Generating Plant, but it also had dump condensers so that if you had a load rejection where something happened to those turbines and stuff, N Reactor could take the steam and actually dump it and actually continue running. So you had raw water going through the tubes on those dump condensers. And they’re huge. Oh, heck, I’d say they’re like 15 feet across, 30 feet high, whatever like that, and hanging. It was--they’re massive. They were massive. But anyway, you have to open up a little bit of steam to heat up the tubes. I got a lesson in water hammer. Very classic thermodynamics thing. The power operator called my shift manager and said, hey, the control room is making the condensers move. Because you get the water hammer in those dump condensers, it would move. We were talking about two or three inches. And make noise and everything else. So Cliff, about 6-foot-4. Hey, saying, look who in the BN console, said, are you learning, Carlos? Yeah. I’ll put the steam on a little bit. Said, you know what water hammer is? Uh, no? [LAGUHTER] So, he sent me to the power side and went with and talked to the--Harley was the guy that was on the power side. And so he had one of the operators. So called on the radio, I’m standing by this dump condenser and stuff. Said, okay, open up the steam valve on it. He opened it up just a little bit more. Next thing I know, that dump condenser went fwrrrrr and really just sloshed and really just made this thunder sound. I learned about water hammer, and I respected water hammer, and I’m--I know now when I tell people and said, you don’t want to water hammer pipe. When I teach fundamentals and that type of thing. I mean, you--no. It’s not a--it scares you. It scares you to no end. Franklin: Yeah, I bet. Leon: So those are the type of things that you kind of like, you--again, whether somebody would teach you that way now, I don’t know. But I doubt that was the way I was taught, you know? Like, even one other thing, I had quote-unquote the pleasure of seeing and experiencing was being on top of the reactor. And I was--we were getting to start the reactor again from a shutdown. So one of the things that we had wanted to do was check all of the ballhoppers to make sure they were all cocked and loaded. So we had a tool and stuff to cock it and load it and that type of thing. So I was up there doing that type of thing. Well, they had to a surveillance on the fog spray. On the fog spray, we had on each side, eight big risers which fed the reactor. And anyway, so these fog sprays were on top, on the top on the inside. In case there was an accident or a pipe break or something like that, the fog sprays would come on and actually rain down onto those pipe spaces, so none of the fission products would come out. And so they called and said, hey, we’ve got to test the west side fog spray. I never seen them before, type of thing. So they turned on two diesels to go into those sprays. Oh, golly. I jumped from one side to the other. It was so loud, and I thought I was going to get sucked in. Just because, you would drown. You would drown. When somebody says fog spray in a nuclear reactor, they mean fog spray. It’s not a mist. You know. It’s like a waterfall times ten. I mean, it was--and so, not only is it raining down like that right next to you, I was probably from here and that was five feet away. And you could just feel that, you know, air going that way. Oh, man. [LAUGHTER] And Ralph Hagin said, who happened to be the operator when they started it, I called him and I hear him over the phone saying, are they on? Yeah, Ralph, they’re on. Then next thing, you hear him just laughing and laughing and laughing. Okay. Oh, man. That scared the heck out of me, I tell ya. But those are the type of things that you--I guess, later on, it’s a story to tell, but at the same time, it’s also a lesson learned, because now I can tell. I can tell people. [LAUGHTER] When you hear this word in a nuclear reactor, fog spray, believe it. Franklin: Yeah. Yes. Leon: So those are the type of things that-- Franklin: What did you do after you were--what was next at Hanford for you after being a reactor operator? Leon: Oh, well. I actually wanted to go back to college. In 1976, they had a strike. So I spent all my money living off my savings and stuff to go back to school, so I didn’t. And then I ended up, then, in 1977, I actually took a trip around the world. I actually got a leave of absence, they actually gave me a leave of absence, to take a trip around the world. It took me ten weeks, and I was gone. I went with a singing group. And had a--well, the thing is, to be able to do this, it cost $3,400. So in February, when they found out about it, we were leaving in June which is when the thing was supposed to be going. It was a group that I had met through this other, another friend. So how am I going to get the money? Anyway, so, my friends on B deferred working overtime to let me work overtime. Franklin: Wow. You mean at N. Leon: At N. Franklin: Yeah, okay. Leon: They deferred. Because you were on a schedule type of thing, you know, you’d sign up for overtime. So they didn’t sign up and let me. So for my shift I got a chance to work a lot of overtime. When you work overtime, you come in ahead of shift. You got double time for the shift you came in on and your own shift. And I worked a lot of double-doubles. I--thinking about it nowadays, later on, I was very appreciative of it, but think about that, kind of like, you know, these guys wanted to work overtime, too. But at the same time, it’s kind of like, wow. Anyway, so guess what? Six weeks later, I had enough money. Franklin: Crazy. Leon: So yeah. It was $3,400 and it was well worth it, and it was well worth--because I’m saying, I can’t put a price on the friendships. At all. Oh, well, why was that story? But anyway, a story comes up. One of the guys in the back, Adolphus Nelson--we called him Nellie--he invited me and my brother to his house for dinner one evening. And, okay, never been to any place like this before, anybody to their home or whatever. He lived in Kennewick. Went over to his house, and wife made this real nice roast beef dinner with potatoes and stuff. We had good conversation and everything else. And then, you guys ready for dessert? Dessert? These are Okies, they’re from Oklahoma. Anyway, so, Fae was her name, brought out this pie. Sucker was this--it’s like, whoa! Banana cream pie. Got a slice. Oh, I thought I was in heaven. I’d never had banana cream pie before. I’d never had banana cream pie like that since. And it was just kind of like, aw, man. I just kind of like gushed over it. I told Nellie about it and stuff. And a couple weeks later, he said, hey, Carlos, got something for you at lunch time. Come on back. So I go back there. Guess what? A piece of banana cream pie. Oh! So yeah. I don’t know why I brought that up. Just kind of like it--it was just a story. Like I said, there’s stories like that. There’s lots of, yeah. There’s a lot of things that, oh, golly, my mind just races like crazy. Communications of things. There was a guy named Tommy van Lear that was--I knew him as our steward and then eventually he was a shift manager and stuff. Just the craziest guy. Just the craziest guy. He would--at that time, there were like, you could say, you could do a lot of things over what they called the announcement within the reactor. You could pick up the phone and dial--I don’t remember what it was, 7-1 or whatever. And then you paged somebody. And he would dial that and everything else when he’d come on shift. And this was on graveyard or--he was on graveyards when nobody was around, the management wasn’t around type of thing. And he’d go, no friggin’ in the riggin, no pokin’ in the passes. I just kind of went, oh. Tommy’s here, Tommy’s here. And the other thing that I remember was a guy named--oh, golly. Anyway, last name was Pease. He was what they called a chief. He worked in the power side in 184 Building. So they would always have diesel oil coming in. So you’d always hear him--he was just a Texan. Got a load of Texas tea coming in, a load of Texas tea. So everybody knew they had to go, whoever was assigned, to make sure that it was unloaded. Eventually, some manager didn’t like the way he was announcing that and stuff. Was kind of like, we’re more professional than that. So it just kind of like, took away that--Charlie Pease was his name. But anyway, those are the type of memories that still echo. And then--so you’re making me remember these things that I’ve forgotten. Oh, golly. I’m going to cry. Franklin: Aw. So how long did you work at N Reactor for? Leon: I worked at N Reactor for four-and-a-half--actually, five-and-a-half years total. Because after I--I went to college I went to Pacific University in Oregon and graduated with a degree in science. Plain science; a bachelor’s degree in science. Franklin: Just, science. Leon: Science. I got 30 hours of physics, math, chemistry and biology. Franklin; What were you studying when you were at Eastern? Leon: More the sciences, that’s where I had most of my credits. That’s where I had most of my credits, so when I transferred over and transferred my credits, those were ethe credits that stuck out. So I said, I’ll just do it that way. And having now, quote-unquote the background that I had, the work background that I had. But you know, in reality, you think about that--a lot of people think--I guess, whatever, I live two lives with work. Okay, I know the left brain stuff of reactor operating and thermodynamics and all those other things. But my other part of my life is kind of like I’m playing guitar and goofing off and doing all these other things that I like doing. Creative type of thing. I write songs and that type of thing. So, that’s what I bring to the--you’ve seen me with my tours and stuff. Franklin: Yeah, no, you’ve very-- Leon: But that’s what I like doing. Franklin: Did you come back to Hanford after you graduated? Leon: Yes, I did, uh-huh. I worked there for about a year-and-a-half in the training department and teaching new operators in fact that came on that are real good friends of mine, really, when it comes down to it. A lot of them that came afterwards. In fact, one of them is actually Mark Jensen. Franklin: Oh! I just saw Mark yesterday. Leon: Mm-hmm. Franklin: Wow. Leon: And so, it’s--and Larry Haler had gone into training. It was a natural fit, really. It was a real natural fit, because training had changed. Three Mile Island had happened. So that was during the time when things were actually changing in training, to the point that we’re where we are now, really. That was just the infancy part of it. Of course, with the opportunity, having the degree, and being at N, and then having, I guess, two things. Going back off to college, and then having that thing with the trip around the world just made that travel bug even bigger. There was--what do you call it? I can’t remember. Nuclear News magazine they used to have all the time, we used to get it. And it’d be in the shift manager’s office and stuff and I’d read it. There was an ad for General Electric for--and so I submitted an application with General Electric in nuclear. This was the same time that the first WPPSS plant was being built, Number 2. And that was a BWR, GE BWR. So one of the managers was visiting and stuff and called me and asked if I wanted to interview and stuff so I did. Lo and behold, guess what the question that he asked me about, just to see what my background was and stuff? He asked me a water hammer question. [LAUGHTER] Oh, that was easy. Kind of like-- Franklin: You were like, I got this. Leon: Oh, yeah. Right now. Golly, divine providence. There is a god! And that’s where I got on with General Electric. The thing that he promised me at that time--didn’t come to fruition--but to certify on their BWR6 line and then have like a two or three year assignment in Spain. And doing that in Spanish. Oh, boy, as soon as he said that. Oh, yeah. And then they ended up canceling the plant. That was during the time when--that’s when nuclear was out of vogue after that. So, yeah, but that came back in ‘89 at Columbia. Worked in the control room and did all kinds of things, corrective actions and stuff. Franklin: That would be Energy Northwest. Leon: Yeah, Energy Northwest. And then, now, I’m with the Vit Plant. You know, people still ask me, well, what do you do? I teach reactor operators. I teach people how to run nuclear reactors. Even though it’s not a nuclear reactor, it’s so much simpler just to say something like that than try to explain what I do. But being an instructor is--I’ve just gotten to enjoy it. Whether I know something about a certain subject or not, eventually I’m--I tell, like people at the Vit Plant, well the first time will be a little boring maybe a little bit more rough type of thing. But the second or third time, no prob. Because you do, you get more comfortable and you know the slides and you know the subject matter. And knowing your audience is probably the biggest thing. Franklin: Yeah. When you started at N, were there a lot of other--were there any other Hispanic/Latino workers? Leon: Oh! Golly. Let me tell--okay, well, now you really are going to make me cry. I was the first person in my family, anybody related to me, to get a college degree. I have cousins and stuff that, they have PhDs and masters and all that type of stuff. I’m very proud of them. But I was the first one. But well when I got on, you know, I didn’t really realize it, but one of the things that--this was at the very beginnings of equal opportunity, EEO. I really didn’t realize it until after I had been there maybe six months that they’re really pushing me to get certified. And they went out of their way a lot to make sure that I saw certain things on a startup, shutdown, and that type of thing, and make sure that I held over, or came out early, and all these different things. It was really kind of against what the union was--you know, the guys that are around, and other shifts. Again, this is where I was really fortunate with my crew. Because my crew, like, they knew me and they kind of like picked up on this. Without even saying certain things. They had a lot of--whatever, I just kind of like--so, in the last, I’d say month and a half before I actually did get certified, I was really actually working quite a bit to learn various aspects. To make a long story short, I was the first Hispanic ever to certify. Franklin: At N Reactor? Leon: At N Reactor. Franklin: Oh, wow. Leon: There was other Hispanic workers, but none in reactor operations. So, I didn’t try to make a big deal out of it. I didn’t know how to handle it, let’s put it that way. More than anything else, I didn’t know how to handle it. Would I handle it differently now? Probably, in a way. And then also, it was really unsaid. It was really unsaid in a lot of ways. But you could sense it. So when went through my--to get certified, you actually took a written test, very comprehensive. And then you had a walkaround and it’d be a full day type of thing, a shift. Walk you around and asking you how does this work, how does that work, can you put this on, can you shift this, can you do that, type of thing. Do you know what a water hammer is? And then be in front of an oral board of three people that would ask you all types of questions. Which was a piece of cake. When they asked me--when I went to the board, I was nervous. But at the same time, I was kind of like, they can’t ask me anything. I was that confident, by that time. And so the day that I got my certificate, a photographer came in and took pictures of me and my shift manager and my control room supervisor and another operator, me standing at the board. And I’ve got that picture. I’m going to show you later. Standing on the board and talking like I’m communicating somewhere. Yeah, it was a real proud day. It was a real proud day for me. Whatever, thinking about it. Like I say, I had no idea how to deal with it, because nobody--I had nobody to really I guess talk to about it, type of thing, really. Franklin: Right, you-- Leon: The only thing I was really being harassed about or people were talking about, the other guys on my shift that like a couple of electricians, hey, first time you sit on that nuclear console all by yourself, I bet you it scrams. [LAUGHTER] It shuts--it only took the second time for me to sit there that it scrammed, really. But the thing that really--other that the guys would say was now you’re really going to get paid. Because basically my pay went up almost $200 a week, just like that. Franklin: Wow. Leon: The following week. And that was just for getting certified. That was my incentive. You can talk about-- Franklin: That’s a good incentive. Leon: --incentive, you know, a spiritual incentive, a moral incentive, and all these different things, kind of like whatever. But for a poor kid from Toppenish, and going through the college things that I did? Boom. You know, all of a sudden, here I am, almost $400 a week, just like that. And it was just incredible. It was just incredible. So I mean, that’s why I look back in retrospect, you know, the guys, especially Cliff Younghands. I can’t catch him, you know? Golly. He was a great guy. Without him, I can really say--[EMOTIONAL]--without him, I wouldn’t be--I wouldn’t have learned like I learned. There’s no way. Franklin: That’s wonderful. Leon: I mean, all the other shift managers were great. And they probably had other guys under their wing and that type of thing. But there’s just something about Cliff that he took a real interest in me. He wouldn’t let me--he’d give me a little rein to goof off here or there, that type of thing. But he’d come in, and he’d quiz me. And he knew his prints forwards and backwards and inside out. There’s only about three or four other people that I knew at N Reactor that knew them like that. And that really taught me a lot. Taught me a lot of discipline. There’s a time for everything. He, Cliff, had the respect of all the other guys, too. And then later on when Cliff got off of shift and stuff and working in training and doing all these other things, he actually signed my certificate. And I’m proud that he had signed my certificate. Because he was--of all the individuals that I got to know--when it comes to operating and being disciplined for it, trying to encourage--I try to encourage a lot of other operators, like at the Vit Plant itself, you have new commissioning techs that are coming in, try to encourage them, and I think of Cliff while I’m doing it. Franklin; Yeah. He was like a real mentor to you. Leon: He very, very much was. Very, very much was. You know? And you know, over the lifetime, you can count how many people in your hand that really mentored you in some way. You know, whatever. When it comes to that discipline of bearing down and learning. You know, kind of like, do everything that you can. He turned his back on some of the things that I kind of liked that I shouldn’t have done to go into the reactor, to learn. Because I know with him I was learning and that type of thing. I don’t know if I should say in front of the camera or not. [LAUGHTER] But, you know, I have--I think my lifetime exposure was like--I’m kind of thinking like 14 or 15 R lifetime exposure in those short years that I worked. But I know that I probably had more. Because when we were shut down, and graveyard, I’d walk into the--I’d dress down and go into the zone. But I’d leave my dosimeter and stuff hanging in the lunch--and I’d spend two or three hours walking around, learning the reactor. Franklin: Wow. Leon: I mean--and I knew whatever, to stay away from certain things and that type of thing. But I didn’t want to--my exposure was when we were refueling and doing things and that type of thing. You know, what--nowadays, I’d be in trouble like crazy. Maybe I’m going to get in trouble saying this, I don’t know. Franklin: No, no, don’t worry. Leon: But those are the--that was what it was. That’s where that real concern. Like I say, that was just--it just started with Cliff, though. It just started with him. All of those other operators and stuff were--they were right there, making sure that I was learning things and being safe. And doing it correctly. From top to bottom. From top to bottom. And that’s why I said like, oh, boy, never in their wildest dreams would they ever think that B Reactor would be open the way it is for tourists. Franklin: Do you mean the--the guys that taught you were who were old timers? Leon: Yeah. And that’s what I say. Like I say, when I close my eyes and I see al these guys and I see their names and stuff, I’m just, yeah, I’m very, very proud. I’m very, very proud to have been a part of Hanford history. But more important, making friends with who I made friends with. The sad part is, I’ve gone to too many funerals. And memorial services and--but at the same time, that’s part of life, and that’s just something that--it’s my makeup now. It’s my makeup. And that’s part of my story and stuff. There’s a lot of things that happen, I mean, that will--that I won’t tell you. And they’re going to die with me. A lot of things died with them. And it’s not necessary. And that scares--that’s the way I look at it. You know, being a historian, you know, you want to get into all of the facts and that type of thing. And there’s a lot, yeah. Franklin: Well, that’s kind of a great segue way into my next question, which is, could you describe the ways in which security and secrecy at Hanford impacted your work there? Leon: [SIGH] Security and secrecy. Well, since it was my first job, really come down to it, besides driving truck, I just took it as the norm. I just took it as the norm. Being in the control room wasn’t so much secret or quote-unquote secure. Because you could just walk right--back then, you could just walk right in. You’d open up your lunch bag or your pack, whatever you’re--whatever, and look in, lunch, close it. Come through. You’d already gone through the Wye Barricade, so why--I guess. It was a different kind of security. And secrecy? The only real secret was held by the scientists or the plant manager or the guy who does the fuel calculations on how much plutonium was being generated. We all knew we were making plutonium. We all knew how much exposure everyone was getting, that type of thing. But how much was being processed and being shipped and that type of thing? That was really the only secret. The security of everything. But, no, I never really--the stories, the old stories about whispering and that type of thing? That was when they were building the B Reactor in the early days. By the time 1974 came along, it was a secure area, more than it was a quote-unquote secret area. That was all in the 200 Area with the plutonium finishing Plant and how much they were processing. That was really what, come down to it. We just made electricity and plutonium at N. Franklin: What were the most challenging and rewarding aspects of your work at Hanford? Leon: The most rewarding? Franklin: And challenging. Leon: And challenging? Franklin: Yeah. Leon: Well, the most challenging is actually learning how something so big works. All of the stuff that’s--all of the different things that make a reactor work: the water, the steam, the electricity, the design and on and on and on, I mean, it just kind of like--wow. Who put this thing together? That was--and challenging? That was challenging. Franklin: That was challenging. Leon: That was challenging. And what was the other? Franklin: Rewarding. Leon: Rewarding. [LAUGHTER] Ugh. I’m getting too old for this, Robert. Rewarding was, it was the friendships. Without a doubt, that is top to me. And hopefully, when I talk in front of the crowd, in front of the front face of the reactor, is that I’m talking for these guys, the people that came before me. That’s what I want to really--yeah, I talk about myself. But I want their personalities to come out. Franklin: Yeah. Leon: You know, some of the stories I say, and some of the voices I use in describing things, what would Ralph say? What would Nells say? And that type of thing. And that’s where, you know, whatever, that’s top. That’s really, really top for me, it’s that I--without a doubt. It afforded me to be able to have a quote-unquote good lifestyle I guess, too, because of the pay. So, yeah. Franklin: So my last question is what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland during the Cold War? Leon: [SIGH] Wow. Wow. Well, 1974, when I started, in July, Vietnam hadn’t been--the last troops to Vietnam hadn’t left yet. Nixon resigned a month after I started. And it was still the AEC. It wasn’t ERDA and it wasn’t Department of Energy yet. I guess in talking with the guy who’s in charge of fuels, the guy’s name Bob Firster, and he just died just a couple years ago in fact, and got really, really just the most nice, straightforward guy. He would talk about the fuel to an extent. Because he had the high clearance and all that stuff. And you’d talk to the guys in the control room, it’s kind of like, we had no idea how much nuclear arsenal, power, whatever that the Soviet Union had at the time. So it was kind of like a race of the two big bullies on the block. There was no backing down from any of the individuals, any of the guys in my control room, any of my crew, any of the other crews, kind of like we were there for national defense. Without a doubt. And that’s what I think kept this place going. They were very, very, very proud individuals. And so I guess that instilled--that’s what instilled in me, that type of thing. You know, like when I was growing up, Toppenish would play Richland High School in basketball. Because there weren’t very many communities. Richland had to play somebody. They had to beat up somebody; they might as well beat up Toppenish. They would put their green and gold bomb smackdab in the middle of our court. And they’d come. Yeah, but they were good. So I guess maybe when you talk about, when it comes to it, you know, eventually, you could see why they were so proud. They got their “proud of the cloud” type of thing. And it permeated. It permeated the whole Tri-City area. I think that’s probably what--the Cold War was something that I remember, you know, when I was in grade school and going through junior high and high school. I guess, just this just magnified it, my awareness of it. Because they were always experimenting and stuff. They had what’s called a subtle facility to irradiate different other things to see what they could produce and that type of thing. So it was a long, long, long line of history. I got to say that I am very, very proud to have been part of that. Good, bad, indifferent, it’s what it is. Franklin: Yeah, yeah. Well, great, Carlos, thank you. Why don’t we take a couple minutes to look at the photos you brought? Leon: Okay. Sounds like a deal. [VIDEO CUTS] Leon: If I wasn’t the first, I’m pretty close to it. Franklin: Well, you’re definitely the face of a changing workforce. Leon: Well, yeah, and I could’ve talked about the women and stuff, too, back when they first came on. Because that’s when they came on, too. In fact, you should--have you ever interviewed any of the operator women? Franklin: A few, yeah. Leon: Martha Coop or Leslie Jensen? Franklin: Leslie--I think we’ve interviewed Leslie Jensen. Let me get those names from you, though and then we’ll-- Leon: Okay. Franklin: And then we’ll follow up with them. Because I’m always trying-- Tom Hungate: Okay, I’m just-- Franklin: Are we good? Leon: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. Leon: I don’t know. Whatever. Hungate: So, tell us what we’re seeing. Franklin: Yeah. Leon: Oh, this was my second certificate--or, no, the original certificate when I got certified. Emil Leitz. Franklin: Oh, that’s Larry’s father-in-law. Leon: Larry’s father-in-law, uh-huh. Roy Dunn. Franklin: We’ve interviewed him. Leon: So this was the certificate that was hanging on the wall out there. So, yeah, it’s just something that just--that’s part of the picture that’s what’s called the BN console and as you go around, it’s the A console. And so, yeah, when I left, I made sur that I took it with me. Franklin: Oh, that’s great. Leon: And then, this right here, they’re the pictures that I was saying on my--on the day that I got qualified, there’s Emil Leitz and Dave Ferguson, my shift manager, handed me my certificate. Franklin: Ah, yeah, that is solidly in the middle of the ‘70s, isn’t it? [LAUGHTER] Leon: Oh, you just love that, don’t you? Okay! And then there’s my--and this right here is-- Franklin: It’s nice to see you have good consistency with your look. [LAUGHTER] Leon: Yeah, yeah, that’s--yeah. And here I am at--and this is the nuclear console. There’s me and that’s operator, Claire Miller, and that’s Dave Ferguson in the back right there. Anyway, so, yeah, I mean, I could talk about all of these different--like the meters and stuff that you’re seeing But this is the picture that-- Franklin: Wow, look at that computer. Leon: Where I was sitting in front of the AA console. They had me pose like I’m talking. And I have this picture up in my wall at work with my certificate and stuff, my old certificate, I had them laminated. And so people walk into my office and they look at it, kind of like, is that you? Where is that? Is that B Reactor? Because they have a hard time equating that type of thing. Franklin: It’s so--I mean, I’ve only ever seen the B Reactor control room. That’s so much more involved. Leon; Oh, definitely, much more. Just because you had to have--you had recirculation pumps there. There’s a primary system and secondary system. Franklin; Right, it was much more complex. Leon: Oh, yeah. You’re talking 1600 pounds of pressure on the primary side. So, yeah, it was a whole different bag. And like I said, like, lo and behold, no way that I know they were going to set me up for life the way that I know it, as far as what I know, technically. Franklin: Right, right, yeah, a lot of technical knowledge. Leon: Anyway, so, I made a copy of this. I have a card at home somewhere. But anyway, this was just the membership card of the union that I belonged to, the Nucleonics Alliance. And if you look at it, this is a charter member card, when they actually, you know, formed that part of the union. Franklin: Oh, cool. Leon: It’s still kind of like ethe Hanford Works thing or whatever. But I was a charter member. Franklin: Wow. Leon: And this probably is something that--I wish I--I probably should’ve printed it color, but this was sat the Gaslight Tavern. Franklin: Yeah. Leon: ON George Washington way? Franklin: Yeah. Leon: every swing shift, the last night of swing shift, we’d get off and we’d show up. We’d call ahead of time, to the Gaslight. Every shift did this. Franklin: That was nice of you guys. Leon: Every shift did this. But we’d call in ahead of time, and say, well, 20 guys are going to show up at 1:00. They close at 2:00. So, wondering if we could get pizza. Of course, the kitchen was closed by the time we got there. But the cook, before he left, would make up, like ten pizzas or something like that. So, the bartender would then, you know, about 12:30 put them all in there. By the time we got there at 1:00, the pizzas were ready. And of course, the beer was cold. So this was part of the group that I took a picture of. And so in fact, a couple guys from the Hanford Generating Plant back there. This guy back there this is Billy Johnson. We used to call him Billy White shoes back then, whatever. Here’s a couple HP techs and stuff. Ben Garrity, he’s still around. Dale Thayer’s back there. There’s Walt Like, he’s a little German INC tech. But, oh, oh, golly, and talk about the end of shift, 1:00 in the morning, we had one hour. Not only did we consume all that pizza, boy, but I tell you we downed a lot--those guys taught me how to drink beer. I had no idea that you could drink that much beer! I mean, even in college. These guys were old hands. They were old hands. Franklin: Wow, that’s great. Leon: Anyway, so that’s what I have. Franklin: Thank you, Carlos. Leon: That’s what I brought. Franklin: Oh, those were wonderful. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:30:12 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 9986 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview N Reactor B Reactor 200 East 105-N PFP Vit Plant Energy Northwest Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1953 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1974 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Carlos Leon Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Carlos Leon talks about the hiring process, the friends and mentors he had while working in the N Reactor. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 10/05/2018 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F10b72a1bb887a33181ac6eabae5a358e.jpg e4bfb4cd44077ca2ec6d0844208858b6 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F02706db0d9e51e4754e345df41b8f353.mp4 f2c38a4f81e871c00bf44e4b0f9b7d96 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Margie Ann McCormack Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history with Margie Ann McCormack on April 27, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Margie about her experiences working at the Hanford Site. ANd for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Marjorie Ann McCormack: Yes. M-A-R-J-O-R-I-E. A-N-N. McCormack, M-C-C-O-R-M-A-C-K. Franklin: Great. And thank you, Marjorie for coming in here to do this oral history interview with us. So I understand that your involvement with Atomic Energy and kind of what became the National Labs and thigns starts before you came to Hanford, and it starts at Oak Ridge. So I’m wondering if you could tell us a little bit about your time there and what led you to come to Hanford. McCormack: Well, I took my training, the x-ray training in Knoxville. So then I went to work in Oak Ridge. And the war had just ended, and it was a military hospital still. So all the doctors were officers, and I went to work for a very wonderful x-ray technician--doctor. He was from San Diego, originally, but he was working there. He was just a wonderful guy. But he got mustered out. And they started to fill in the places in Oak Ridge Hospital there with civilian people. So, a civilian doctor who came to work for us, and he was setting up an office of his own in Knoxville. Well, they had two x-ray departments there. One an in-patient, and the other a regular out-patient one. So I was sent in the outpatient one. Well, there was a young man, an x-ray technician who had been in the service, and the two of us were working in this outpatient place. Well, he came to me one day, this young man, and he said, I don’t know what to do, he says. This doctor, radiologist, everyday is asking me to take some very important attachments for the x-ray machine out and put it in his car. So we decided what he was doing was he was furnishing his office in Knoxville with the equipment ther ein the place. Well, that was--he was stealing government equipment. So, he said, I don’t know what to do. And I said, well, you’re married and have children, and I’m single. I said, I’ll go report him. So I did. And somhow or other, he got word, and fired me. And so there I was, at the ripe old age of 23, being fired from my job. So my next-door neighbor was head of personnel. And he said, well, are you going to contest it? And I said, why? I don’t want to work for him. And he doesn’t want me! And he said, well, are you goigng to fill out some papers to send somewhere that you’re loking for a job? And I said, no. I don’t think at this point, I don’t even know whether I want to stay in x-ray or not. But unbeknownst to me, he borught a couple of folders over and filled them out with my help. That’s when I saw them. So I went home to my home in Virginia and sort of though, well, what am I going to do here? And lo and behold, he had filled a couple out and sent them off, and I had an offer for a job in Texas. So I called the number and they said, yes, they’d love to have me. And so I thought, well, fine. But then I didn’t hear anything more from them. And so in the meantime, I got an offer for a job out in Oak Ridge--I mean, excuse me, hold up a minute--out in Washington State. So I wrote back and said, well, yes, I would be interested in your job. And they wrote and said, well, we’d like to have you. So, I got the job here. And I wrote and said, well--it said Richland on the thing. So I went and wrote out there and said, well, where do I come in to? And I can’t find Richland on the map. So they said, well, come in to Pasco. So in due time, I got on a train and three days later, I came to Pasco. Well, to digress a little bit, I had met a woman in Chicago and she happened to ride out with me. Her family was meeting her, and I was supposed to have had a guy--it was the train came in at midnight. I was supposed to have had a driver to take me to a hotel. I didn’t have any--and I called--it was called transient quarter. And I said, do you have a room for Marjorie Hyatt to night? And they siad, no, we don’t have any record of it. And there I was at midnight in Pasco, no driver, no place to stay. Which is--well, where do I go from here? But her lady that I had ridden out with, her family was meeting her. And she realized that something was happening. So she said, let’s hold off a little bit. And when I called and they didn’t have any rooms, they said I could have a room for one night. So they brought me in to Richland and I had my one night at this estate. I was a little confused about that time. I didn’t know whether I wanted to work for these people called General Electric. Was that right, GE, General Electric? And got up the next morning and looked out the window, and they said, there’s a big river, and tehy told me this was a desert! So I went down and I said, is there somewhere here I could eat? And they said, well, across the way, there’s a big cafeteria. You can get breakfast. So I was all dressed up, you know, and I started across this big lot of grass. I’d never seen one of these watering things that turns and sprays. And one of them sprayed me and got me just soaked. Well, that was the end of the line for me. I thought, well, I’ll go back. I’m dying to get back home. And when I opened the door to the TQ, they said, are you Miss Hyatt? And he says, they’re out there looking all over for you. He said, he found the notice this morning that you were supposed to have come in last night and have a room. And they didn’t know where I was. So that was my entry into Richland. But everything was straightened out and I joined the--I got my job and I joined a group called Dorm Club. It was a single club for all the people who-- Franklin: The Dorm Club? McCormack: It was called the Dorm Club. Franklin: And what year did you come out? McCormack: 1947. Franklin: Okay. McCormack: And from then on, I loved it. Franklin: Oh, okay. How did you get involved in x-ray? McCormack: Well, I went to college to be a lab technician, and then I went into Knoxville to go and they had a hospital there. They had an opening for an x-ray technician and a lab technician. And they said, would you mind switching from lab to x-ray first? We have an opening there now. And I siad, well, I’ll give it a try. And I hadn’t been in x-ray three days till I knew that that was what I wanted to do, and I never did do the lab. Franklin: Oh, wow. So did you spend the war, then, in college? McCormack: Yes. Franklin: Okay. And wehre did you go to college? McCormack: Mary Washington College. It was a division of the University of Virginia. It was in Fredericksburg. Franklin: Okay. And so you got here in ‘47 and you, besdies having kind of a rough first day, you--so can you tell me a little bit more about the Dorm Club, this kind of singles club, and what single life would’ve been like in the rough-and-tumble town. McCormack: Let me get a drink here. Franklin: Oh, sure. McCormack: Well, when I came here, all the single people lived in dorms. You had to be married to get a house. But they had a lot of dorms. They had, at one end of town, had women’s dorms, and the other end had dorms for the men. And the Dorm Club was just a reason for all the single people to get together. Franklin: Okay. Was wanting to get out of the dorms, you think, kind of a motivator for some people to get together? McCormack: Well, we were having so much fun--[LAUGHTER]--that I never heard any complaints that way. The single people just didn’t get rooms. At that time I came, they weren’t sure that Richland was still going to be there, you know, and there was a time where they thought we’d be folding all up. And then the--what was the name of the war about that time? Franlkin: Korean War? McCormack: No. [camera man]: Second World War. McCormack: So, about that time, the war had fracas with Russia. Franklin: Oh, the Cold War. McCormack: Cold War, that’s what I’m looking for, was the Cold War came along and all the sudden, things boomed again. And I was here, came here in 1947 in April, and that summer, they hired 100 new tech grads. And, boy, was that fun. 99 of them were single. [LAUGHTER] And there was all these dorms. And that sort of what spurred things on in the area. The Dorm Club is where we got together, once a week. It was on Mondays. The boys, as I say, lived in the dorms at one end, and we in the other. But there was something going on all the time in the Dorm Club. Every Sunday night, there was a dance. Different places around town, there was two places that had a dance floor and a music nickelodeon or something like that. So that’s where we had the dances. And after a while, we started organizing a few things. LIke there wa s acamera club, and there was a bridge club. There was different kind of organizations. So there wasn’t any reason for anyone to sit around and mope; there was plenty of things to do. The war was still--you know, just finished. The men didn’t have any cars. But as time went on, the fellas started getting cars. And a lot of them were second-hand cars, not what you called the fancy cars, but they had wheels. So that’s when we started doing a few things out of town, like going hiking and camping in the summer. We tried to go to the city when something music or something was being shown, either Portland or Seattle. So we’d go--what’s that? Franklin: Can you describe an average--or can you describe the room in the dorm for me? What did the rooms look like? McCormack: Oh! They had singles and doubles. I was never in the men’s dorm, believe it or not. But it was single rooms, and it was a good-sized double room. And it had two beds, windows in the front. We each had a desk and a closet, a chair, and all the linens were furnished, and we had daily--somebody came in every day and made the beds and everything. We had it pretty easy that way. We were comfortable. And I happened to be in a dorm with this big cafeteria, just like walking across this room. So taht’s where you went to eat. Franklin: For your three meals? McCormack: Uh-huh. Three meals, yeah. It was a big huge cafeteria. Well, the building’s still there. Franklin: Oh, really? McCormack: Yeah! Franklin: Which building is it? McCormack: It’s changed into several things, but the main building is still there. Frankin: ANd the women’s dorms were kind of down by where Albertsons was-- McCormack: Mm-hmm. Franklin: --right, off of Lee? Kind of around that area? McCormack: Mm-hmm, Lee Street. In fact, it was Albertsons I think that they tore down and put some of the buildings. Franklin: Oh, interesting. And so what was--you started work at Kadlec, right, Kadlec Hospital. So I’m wondering if you could tell me kind of about an average day at work? Kind of what your duties were and how you McCormack: Well, I went to work at 8:00. Eight to five everyday. I don’t know whether you’re familiar with the original hospital there. It was one long building with wings. Government issue. And we had a very nice x-ray department with two rooms, two different x-ray machines, and a portable facility. It was for the workers and for the civilians. Once in a while, something would come up and we’d have a busy day of 100 patients, government ones. Others, it was just the regular people around town, like any other town that needed x-ray business. Good equipment. Fraknlin: What was it like to--what was recreation like in Richland at the time? Was the Uptown mall here when you moved here? Or was that constructed later? McCormack: It was a very small town. That’s why the Dorm Club was so busy. There wasn’t much to do. We had two theaters, which the buildings are still there. There is one of them original, the theater group bought the building. Franklin: Oh, the Richland Players, right? McCormack: Uh-huh, bought the building and it’s still in use. And the other one just lasted until not too many years ago, and it was torn down. And that’s along George Washington Way, pretty close to where the--I keep forgetting. The big hotel. [LAUGHTER] Franlkin: OH, yeah, yeah. McCormack: I was trying to think of the name. Franklin: No, that’s okay. Yeah, is it the Red LIon, is that the one you’re thinking of? McCormacK: Yeah. It was pretty close to that. Franklin: Yeah. And so how long did you work at Kadlec for? McCormack: I worked at Kadlec nine years. Franklin: Okay. And did your duties change at all during that time, or were you still a technician for the whole time? McCormack: I was x-ray tehcnician the whole time. Franklin: How was it, being so far away from your fmaily? And kind of being single and alone, kind of by yourself in Richland? McCormack: Well, I was so disillusioned when I left Oak Ridge, and I got out here, and I just felt like I was in another world. ANd I was, really. And I put Oak Ridge behind me and just had a wonderful time here. I actually--you talk about taking somehting out of your brain. I actually forgot the name of that doctor, because he was such a scoundrel. I digress a little bit. They didn’t even wait to get a replacement for him; they fired him. Which was pretty unusual then. So I just couldn’t remember his name. Franklin: Sure. McCormack: I didn’t want to think about him. Franklin: Did you go back home--did you go back to the east coast at all to visit your family the first few years you were here? McCormack: I went back just about every second or third year until my mother died and until I got married and had three little kids. I didn’t travel so much then. Franklin: Sure, sure. And I heard that you--one of the people that you knew from when you first moved here was Steve Buckingham, right? McCormack: Oh, yes. [LAUGHTER] Franlkin: And how did you meet Steve Buckingham? McCormack: At the Dorm Club. Franklin: At the Dorm Club. So he was also living in the dorms, too, right? McCormack: Mm-hmm, yeah. Franklin: And you’re still friends with Steve, right? McCormack: Still friend.s We dated for two or three years. He wa sa great guy, because he’s a local--that being Washington State. We had a good time together, but we just never got married, and drifted away. My birthday--I am one week older than Steve. ANd we used to have birthday parties together. We were good friends, but it just wasn’t meant to be married. Franklin: Sure, and that happens. Well, that’s realy sweet. So you met your husband, Jerry. How did you meet? McCormack: By the time he came along, I had moved into a prefab here--I digress again. For a very short time, when I came here, they thought they wren’t going to be here, so they started letting a few places out to single people. So there was a few prefabs. And there was one that had three girls in it. When one of those girls left, a friend of mine took her place. ANd when somebody in the house left, another one took their place. And finally one day, they called and said--me, I’m still in the dorm--would you like to move in with us? So I moved into a three-bedroom prefab. They only had about three of them left, because things had picked up here in this Cold War, and housing was short by then. So I was lucky to be in one. Franklin: And how was that different from living in the dorm? McCormack: Well, we could do what we wanted to. We had the house, and it was completely furnished. The dorm was a dorm, you know, with all those people. We had our own ways of doing things. I guess the interesting thing was, it became this social house for a lot of our friends, because they would come to the house. We couldn’t do the dorm. Franklin: Sure. Yeah, you didn’t have the space to have people over, right? McCormack: I’m sorry? Franklin: In the house, you had space to have people over and the yard-- McCormack: Yeah, it was just a normal three-bedroom house. It wasn’t a huge thing. But the boys in the dorms loved to come, because they were in the dormitory, too, and just had a room. But it actually was a lot of fun there. We had a lot of good times there in the prefab. We could--no overnights, though. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right, of course. When you moved in, did it still have most of the original furniture and fixtures that it had come with? McCormack: If you didn’t have it, it was furnished. All the furniture was furnished in this, even to the linens. The oly thing we had to furnish ourselves was our pots and pans and dishes. We sent the laundry out when we wanted; they came and picked it up, no charge. Franklin: Really? McCormack: Well, yeah. They paid for things back then. We paid $35 a month for the prefab. And that was for all three of us. Franklin: Wow. McCormack: Yeah. And any time anything went wrong, the stove wasn’t working, the lights, we called the number and they came and fixed it, no charge. [LAUGHTER] It was pretty cheap living there. Franklin: Yeah, I was going to say, that sounds kind of nice. I don’t get that kind of service from my landlord. McCormack: No. [LAUGHTER] Yeah. Franklin: So then in ‘56, you met your husband. Right, 1956? McCormack: No. I met him in 1950. I was here in ‘47 and he came in ‘50. Franklin: Oh, okay, sorry. You were married in ‘56. McCormack: ‘56, yeah. Franklin: Oh, okay. And did he also live in the dorms as well when you first got here? McCormack: Mm-hmm. Franklin: Oh, okay. And did you guys also meet in the Dorm Club? McCormack: Wel, that’s an interesting story, too. One night one of the fellas I knew called and said could we bring a fella up tonight? It’s his birthday. And I said, oh, sure. So in due time, three or four fellas went and rang the doorbell and marched in. Each one of them had a six-pack of beer on their shoulder. And so I didn’t drink beer, but the fellas did. And so one of them said, Jerry, show us how you can stand on your head on a beer can. And guess what? He did. [LAUGHTER] And then they left. And I never did really know who this guy was. He was just the guy that had the birthday. About, oh, gosh, it must’ve been a year or so later, another friend said, would you like to go skiing with us this weekend? And I said, sure, I’d like to. And we went out to Stevens Pass and we rented a cottage. It was one of those that had the real steep roof and the snow was up to here. So the guy said, let’s go tobogganing off the roof of the chalet or whatever you call it. We’d stand like we were on a big sled, and then somebody would give us a push. Well, I happened to be the one across the top. This guy came leaping up, and he missed with his foot and he hit me in the back of the head like this. Franklin: Oh, jeez. McCormack: Well, that was my husband. I knew who he was that time. [LAUGHTER] So that’s how we really met. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right, right. Oh, that’s funny. And Jerry was a chemical engineer? Right? McCormack: Yes, chemical. Franklin: So when you got married, then, you stopped working at Kadlec and-- McCormack: Yeah. Franklin: And became a full-time-- McCormack: Full-time. Franklin: Full-time mother and housekeeper, everything. McCormack: Yeah. Franklin: And so then I must imagine you must’ve moved out of the prefab. And where did you--so this would’ve been ‘56, so you would’ve gone to another government-run house. McCormack: Yes, we did. We went to [unknown] house. It was clear across town from where I lived in the prefab. And we stayed there until, oh, about three or four years. And then moved into a--here again I forget its name. And then we decided--our third child was on the way by then, and we decided it was time to buy a house. There wasn’t much choice. We were looking for a special--Jerry wanted a basement and one other thing. [LAUGHTER] Anyway, there were very few houses on the market, but we finally found one that we liked that had what he wanted on it, honestly. He wanted a basement and four bedrooms. That was what it was. Franklin: Four bedrooms. And what was--the house you finally purchased, was it an Alphabet house, or was it newer construction? McCormack: It was a D house. Franklin: Oh, a D house. McCormack: Uh-huh. And they only made about six or seven of them. Franklin: Yeah, that’s not a very common one. McCormack: So that was why it was nice, because it had space and it was a prefab--it wasn’t a prefab, I mean. It was a government house, but it was bigger and a little bit better-built, I think. And we’re still in it. Franklin: Oh, wow. That’s great. I wondered if oyu could talk about the experience of going through the privatization of Richland, when the governement sold off Richland in ‘58, and how richland changed from being a government town to being a private town. McCormack: Well, you know, it happened gradually. The houses were sold, and I don’t know that there was a great deal of difference in the town, really, except that people were in the homes. Most of them who had bought the homes, they owned them istead. But then there was a lot of remodeling started, because you couldn’t do that until the house was in your own hands. But there was quite a bit of remodeling. In fact, the prefabs, it’s hard to find a prefab that hasn’t been remodeled. You know, there was 1, 2, 3, you know that. And it was hard to find just a little old one-bedroom one, like there were any of the prefabs. Franklin: Oh, sure, yeah, I live in a two-bedroom prefab, and it’s been extensively remodeled. Which makes sense. Jillian, who you met earlier, she lives in one that has been much less remodeled. It’s probably not original, but it’s much closer. And it’s very different. It feels like two totally different houses, even though they’re exactly the same size. From the outside, they look almost exactly the same. McCormack: Well, you understood why, when we got one, and only three or four single gals who had one, how much it meant to all the fellas to have a house to go to. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Oh, yeah, I lived in dorms in college, and I imagine, gathered from your experience, sounds like the dorms here must’ve been a bit like college dorms. McCormacK: That’s an interesting, because my husband says, being in the dorms was like being in college with classes and with money. Franklin: I was going to say--because everybody has a job, so you can actually afford the beer. McCormack: Yeah. No classes and money. Franklin: Taht’s interesting. LIke grown-up dorms. For-- McCormack: Well, they still had rules and regulations, like no gals on the second floor, I guess. Franklin: Oh, sure. McCormack: I was going to say, I never was in one of them, but boys, as soon as they could, they got out and bought--or got into a prefab or something like that. By that time, they were starting to make a few buildings. A single man could get that. A single wouldn’t couldn’t, but they allowed to single men to get in. And if you had two men. And that was the first time for the fellas getting out of the dorms. Franklin: Yeah, it’s really interesting to hear at that time about a group fo single women living together, because the image of Richland then is such a family town, or of single people living in dorms. But three single women living together, do you know, did that ever cause a stir, or was anybody ever concerned about your safety or anything liek that? McCormack: well, it was a pretty safe town. [LAUGHTER] It really was. Yeah, pretty safe town. But there were some people--I know one couple got married and they couldn’t get a house and she came to me and said, why don’t you girls move back to the dorm and let us have the house? And I just looked at her. Are you kidding? But she was serious. Franklin: I bet she was, I bet she was. And so you raised three children in Richland. And what was that--do you think their childhood was different from your own, or--I mean, because Richland’s kind of a unique town in its--everybody kind of works in the same place and many of the houses are very similar, and I’m wondering if you could kind of contrast that with your own McCormack: Well, see, I--living here with three boys was--I don’t think there was anything really too different from, like, if I had my three kids in Virginia. They went to school a block away, and the church was not too far. It had a lot of advantages, really. You know, I’ve never thought about it that way. But they’re good kids, so I guess we raised them okay. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Sure, yeah. Yeah. And so they all went to the local schools and everything, Columbia High--? McCormack: Yup. Yeah, we live right by, a block away from Jefferson. And tehy went there and then they went over to--what’s the one across the--junior high, and then Hanford. In fact, our oldest son was the second graduating class from Hanford. Franklin: Oh, from Hanford Hihg. Oh, so right over here by where we are today. McCormack: Yeah. But it was sixth grade and then two or three grades. I don’t know why I can’t remember. And then Hanford High. Franklni: Sure. Did Hanford’s role--because you knew what was being produced at Hanford when you came out to work for GE, right? McCormack: Yeah. Franklin: Was its role in the Cold War ever--how did you feel about that, and did it ever concern you, having a family here, for your own safety, being so close to not only an area that produced plutonium, but also what might have been a target in case of hostilities between the United States and the Soviet Union? McCormack: Well, things were still pretty secret when I first came here. Of course I was at Oak Ridge, see, for a while. And the day I hired in was the day that peace was decided. So it was still pretty army-like. You had to get--are you familiar with Oak Ridge? Franklin: Not very. McCormack: Well, the whole area, the town and everything, is enclosed down there. And you had to go through a gate and show your pass, even for housewives. Well, here, it was different. Here the town was wide open. They couldn’t--you had to work for somebody here, but you weren’t enclosed in a fence or anything. Franklin: Sure, people from Kennewick could drive in and visit somebody from Richland and vice versa without having to go through anything. You couldn’t get out to the Site without-- McCormack: No, uh-unh. Franklin: --you had to have a bus. McCormack: You had to have the bus--the pass and everything to get out there. Franklin: Sure. Do you remember anything, any kind of civil defense measures, or did you ever have to practice evacuations or duck-and-cover, things like that? McCormack: Well, every now and then, the whistle would blow. But we never had to evacuate or do anything. BUt still, every now and then, they still ring that whistle on a certain day. Franklin: Yeah. Do you remember President Kennedy’s visit in 1963? To dedicate the N Reactor? McCormack: Yes. Franklin: Did you go out to see him? McCormack: No, I didn’t get to. I had to stay with home with the three kids, and my neighbor went. Franklin: Oh, okay. McCormack: Yeah, I missed that. Franklin: Oh, sure. Were ther eany other events or incidents that happened at Hanford or in the Tri-Cities that stand out to you? McCormack: When they stold the houses, that was a big event? Franklin: Yeah? And you guys weren’t in your house long enough--were you on the priority list for the house that you lived in at that point? McCormack: The house we bought? Franklin: No, in 1958 when they sold the houses, were you the resident that could buy that house? McCormack: They had just said they were up for sale, and the people went over to see it were ready to sell it. By that time, they must’ve bought it themselves. And they were ready to sell it. They were moving on to another place. By that time, they were building houses out north, and they were building a new house out north. And we bought the house from them. Franklin: I’m wondering if--could you describe the ways in which security or secrecy at Hanford impacted your work at Kadlec? McCormack: Well, didn’t bother me, because I had a pass to go out there. But that was the only way I had one is because I had the [unknown] business. But you just didn’t go out there. You could go as far as the fence around ther,e but unless you had a pass, you just didn’t go. Franklin: Sure. McCormack: Like, there was one special time they opened it up for a day and the wife could go out to the Area. That’s the only time in all the years my husband worked that I was ever in his office. Franlkin: Really? McCormack: Mm-hmm, closed. Franklin: Yeah, sure. And do you remember when that was? McCormack: Give me a clue. [LAUGHTER] Jerry McCormack: I’m not sure. Around--maybe in the ‘80s. I don’t remember. Franklin: Oh, so much, much later. Jerry McCormack: Much later, yeah. Franklin: Okay, that’s really interesting. McCormack: But things were still tight that way. Franklin: Sure. Wow. That must’ve been interesting to see, finally, kind of where--to go out there and see where he’d been working for all those years. McCoramck: IT was. Yeah, it really was. I finally got there one time. Franklin: One time. Even though you had been here longer than he had. McCormack: Yeah. Well, I didn’t have any reason to be in his--that way. Franklin: Sure, oh yeah, of course. McCormack: So then they just made this very special day for the, whoever they wanted to to go out, and that was it. Franklin: Sure. Any other major events in Tri-Cities’ history, like some of the plants shutting down and kind of--do you remember that time as well from kind of the concern over what would happen in the late ‘80s when they shut N Reactor down? McCoramck: Well, I don’t think it was like ti was when I first came here. They really thought that this whole plant was just going to quit. When I got there, DuPont had been from the beginning was here, and it was so soon after that that we were still using some of DuPont’s stationery and stuff. I mean, that’s how close it was. They hadn’t even--General Electric hadn’t even been there long enough to get some paper in from us. So it was pretty early in the game when I came here. But I don’t remember any big catastrophic things happening. You think I’d remmeber these things, I suppose, because I’ve been here 70 years this month. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Wow, tha’ts quite an anniversary. McCormack: Yeah. Franklin: Well, great, my last question is just what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland during the Cold War? McCormack: What I would like for them to know? That we were concerned. Everybody was concerned. But we coped. Everything geared up. When I first came here, we’d have maybe, I don’t know, I’d say an average day of maybe 30 to 40 patients. Then all of the sudden, there was streams of men going out, lined up to get into x-ray. They were hiring as fast as they could. That was, I think, the big change. That was pretty soon after I came here. But since then--well, the talent’s grown so much, too. It’s hard for me to realize how small a town was when I first came here, because it’s grown so gradually over the years. We had, maybe, one or two grocery stoes, and one dress shop, and one barber shop and a couple other things, and that was it. If you wanted to go anywhere, you went to Pasco. Kennewick was only about--in fact, Richland was a little bit bigger than Kennewick. So that was where we went to shop, was Pasco. Franklin: Right, right. Because Pasco was the oldest town. McCormack: Yeah, and it was the big town. [LAUGHTER] Franklin; The big town. That’s so different. I guess now, they’re each so large that you wouldn’t really need to go to the other for any-- McCormack: No, each one has plenty of everything now. Franklin: Yeah. That’s really itneresting. I’ve only been here for a little bit, so I-- McCormack: How long? Franklin: Just about a year-and-a-half. McCormack: Well, you’ve got still a lot of things to learn around here, haven’t you? Franklin: Yeah, I do. McCormack: IT’s growing so fast, this town, that it’s just hard for me to realize it was this little three towns that I caem to 70 years ago. Franklin: Right. McCormack: That’s a long time. Franklin: Yeah, I bet, I mean, just the roads and everything are different. So, Margie, is there anything else you’d like to add that we haven’t covered today? McCormack: Well, let’s see. The Dorm Club is what was probably the nicest thing that could’ve happened to us bunch of single people. Because we all got together and we partied and we went to plays, and we went all over. We were all pretty much the same age. And we all became friends, and a lot of us ended up marrying each other. I don’t know, I think I’d say, my life here, that little dorm club is the thing that made me want to stay here. Franklin: Kind of like a family away from home. McCormack: Yeah. Franklin: Because most of the people in that--almost everyone in tat club was not from the area, right? You were all from all over the country. McCormack: Well, he--my husband--being the Washingtonian was the odd one. Everybody else was from somewhere else. Franklin: Right, kind of scattered across the US. McCormack: Yeah. Franklin: Yeah, I bet. That sounds--especially, too, in a town where there weren’t--no one had any grandparents or any real relatives here to speak of, right? Even just the families had their own family unit. McCormack: Well, you had to--they just didn’t allow anybody in. And I supposed if you had a house, married and had a house, and had a mother to come live here, but that was different. But we single people, we were here on our own. Franklin: Right. So the Dorm Club really kind of would’ve een your lifeline. McCormack: Yeah. Franklin: You know, to some kind of normal life. McCormack: Well, I loved the West. I grew up in the mountains, and I loved the wide open spaces. And that and the Dorm Club were what kept me here. Franklin: Interesting. Well, great, Margie, it’s been really wonderful to talk to you and hear your story, your experiences. I just want to thank you for coming out here and talking to us today. McCormack: Well, I appreciate the offer and I enjoyed it, too. And hope I gave you a few little insights as to what our life was like here in the big city of Richland. Franklni: The big city of Richland. Yeah, I think, just hearing about being a single person and a single woman in Richland is really interesting and kind of a differetn stories than a lot of the other oral histories. McCormack: Yeah, well, you know if I’d gone to the place in Texas was a city, it woudl’ve taken me forever to make the friends I made here overnight. Franklin: Right, right. Yeah, that close proximity and that close--well, that’s great. Well, Margie, thank you so very much. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:44:23 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 9986 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview Kadlec Dorm Club N Reactor General Electric Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 77 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Marjorie Ann McCormack Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Margie talks about her involvement with Atomic Energy / National Labs, and Kadlec. She fondly remembers the Dorm Club. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 04/27/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. atomic energy dorm club GE kadlec N Reactor https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fc8a6855bb1b3e060992686d04a7bdb9e.mp4 45d6a3c82248cc29aed874f35d1f45fb Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Latino/a Oral History Project Subject The topic of the resource Oral History Description An account of the resource An ongoing oral history project focusing on the history of the Latine/Latino community of the Tri-Cities, Washington area. Previously known as the WSU Tri-Cities Latinx Oral History Project headed by History faculty Robert Bauman and Robert Franklin. Hanford History Project made the decision in 2024 to use Latino/a instead of Latinx as the former more reflects the grammar and practical use and identification of Spanish speakers. We know that one term will not encompass all those identities. For example, Latine, a gender neutral pronoun and product of the queer Spanish community, was considered for use but we use Latino/a to reflect the prevalence of gendered pronouns in the Spanish language. However, we would like to acknowledge that the discourse around which term to use is complex and evolving. Every person has the right to use the term that captures who they are and that feels the most welcoming to them. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Language A language of the resource English; Spanish Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Bauman Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Alexia and Manuel Estrada Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound English: Robert Bauman: So there are a few things I have to say upfront just to make it sort of official. Alexia Estrada: Mm-hmm [affirmative] Robert Bauman: So I’ll do that first- Climaco Ivarka: *interprets to Spanish* Robert Bauman: So my name is Robert Bauman um and I am conducting oral history interview along with Climaco Ivarka who is serving as interpreter Climaco Ivarka: *interprets to Spanish* Robert Bauman: And we are doing the interview with Aleixa Estrada and Manuel Estrada Alexia Estrada: Mm-hmm [affirmative] Climaco Ivarka: *interprets to Spanish* Robert Bauman: On July 12th, 2022 Climaco Ivarka: *interprets to Spanish* Robert Bauman: And the interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington Satate University Tri-Cities Climaco Ivarka: *interprets to Spanish* Robert Bauman: And so uh another sort of official thing, Alexia can you say and spell your first and last names please Alexia Estrada: Yeah, Alexia Estrada A-L-E-X-I-A, Estrada E-S-T-R-A-D-A Robert Bauman: And then Manuel Climaco Ivarka: *interprets to Spanish* (directs to manuel) Manuel Estrada: Manuel Estrada Climaco Ivarka: *continues interpretation in Spanish* Alexia Estrada: M-A-N-U-E-L E-S-T-R-A-D-A Robert Bauman: Thank you. Um so Manuel I think I will begin with you I wonder if you could talk a little bit about um as I understand from emailing Alexia you you came here from Mexico um could you talk about your life and what led you to leave there and come here. Climaco Ivarka: *interprets to Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *questions in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: *clarifies in Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *responds in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: [interprets to English] Okay so yes I am Mexican I was born in Mexico in a small town we had limited resources, I lived in poverty we had necessities and I decided to come to the United States I have returned Robert Bauman: And about how old were you when you came to the United States? Climaco Ivarka: 1977 *interprets and questions in Spanish* Manuel Estrada: Si Climaco Ivarka: Yeah first time they came in 1977 Alexia Estrada: *converses in Spanish to Manuel Estrada* Manuel Estrada: *replies to Alexia in Spanish* Alexia Estrada: *converses in Spanish to Manuel Estrada* Manuel Estrada: *responds in Spanish to all* Climaco Ivarka: [interprets to English] I was twenty five years old Robert Bauman: Okay um and um did you know someone already here in the United States? Ahh when you came to the U.S. did you come to meet someone or how did you how did you make it here, how did you come here? Climaco Ivarka: *interprets to Spanish* Alexia Estrada: At Tri-Cities Manuel Estrada: *questions for clarification in Spanish* Alexia Estrada: *attempts to clarify in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: *clarifies in Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *questions for clarification in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: [clarifies question to Robert Bauman] Are you ask him or the Tri-Cities. I let them know that you wanna know how he got here and then Tri-Cities Robert Bauman: Yes to the U.S. yeah first yeah Climaco Ivarka: *interprets to Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *responds in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: [interprets gradually to English] When I came here I didn’t know anybody I came with a friend, I started to make acquaintances and that’s how my life continued Robert Bauman: Mhmm and uh did you go somewhere before coming to the Tri-Cities somewhere else in the.. Climaco Ivarka: *interprets to Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *responds in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: [interprets gradually to English] Okay so we started in Los Angeles or LA then we left to Oregon we didn’t like it there so we came here to…he lived in Yakima where he arrived and lived nine years and from there he moved to the Tri-Cities and the rest of the time I’ve been living here. Robert Bauman: Mhmm. And when you were in Yakima and then Tri-Cities what sort of work were you able to find? Climaco Ivarka: *interprets to Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *responds in Spanish* El campo El campo Climaco Ivarka: [interprets to English] Farm work, agricultural Robert Bauman: Mhmm. And did you have when you left Mexico did you have other family members there? Did any of your family also come at some point? Climaco Ivarka: *interprets to Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *responds in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: [interprets gradually to English] Yeah [inaudible] My brothers, three sons I had that were underage. With time since, they were able to come here as well. Now I have family in Mexico and here Alexia Estrada: *converses with Manuel Estrada in Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *responds in Spanish* Si Alexia Estrada: My dad was one of the ones Robert Bauman: One of the, aha Alexia Estrada: Yeah, one of his sons Robert Bauman: Mhmm Manuel Estrada: *confirms in Spanish* Si Robert Bauman: And when you arrived in the Tri-Cities, what was the Hispanic community like here when your first arrived here Climaco Ivarka: *interprets to Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *responds in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: [interprets gradually to English] There was not that many- not many Hispanics, there was one or two stores that were Mexican stores. We would call it a small town, maybe two or three police cars [inaudible].. four or resources were not available. There were not that many Hispanics but they started multiplying now we have a beautiful city Robert Bauman: Mhmm mhmm. Um and ah when you came here where did you find to live initially when you first arrived here. Climaco Ivarka: *interprets to Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *responds in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: [interprets to English] Pasco, pasco that is where he found.. Manuel Estrada: *continues response in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: [interprets to English] We arrive here in January first of eighty seven Alexia Estrada: *converses with Manuel Estrada in Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *responds in Spanish* Alexia Estrada: Okay Climaco Ivarka: [interprets gradually to English] So we lived in the city with time.. Manuel Estrada: *continues response gradually in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: [interprets gradually to English]... I worked like a farmer for twenty two years, nineteen years of a supervisor. The first four years were just like a regular worker. With time I was able to go to the farm and he gave me a home to stay then I retired and now I came back to the city now I live in the City Pasco. Robert Bauman: Mhmm mhmm. And then how many children, grandchildren? Climaco Ivarka: *interprets to Spanish* Alexia Estrada: *converses with Manuel Estrada in Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *responds gradually in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: [interprets gradually to English] He says I don’t have that many three sons, grandchildren I have eighteen, and grandsons I have five Robert Bauman: Aha and are they all in the Pasco Tri-Cities area? Climaco Ivarka: *interprets to Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *responds in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: [interprets to English] Some are in Yakima Manuel Estrada: Yakima [continues response in Spanish] Climaco Ivarka: [interprets to English] And others are here Robert Bauman: And do you.. have you gone back to Mexico very often to see family or Climaco Ivarka: *interprets to Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *responds in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: [interprets to English] He says I would go often now it’s been about six years since I’ve last been Robert Bauman: Mhmm mhmm. Um okay, Alexia I am going to ask you a few questions now if that’s alright Alexia Estrada: Yeah, sounds good Climaco Ivarka: *interprets to Spanish* Robert Bauman: Um so how was growing up in the Tri-Cities area for you? Alexia Estrada: Yeah, ahh well it’s all I knew but it was great I it’s great I love it. I had the opportunity to grow up in a really close knit neighborhood um in pasco so I actually lived in a really diverse neighborhood. We had different religions on my street, different ethnicities and it was very intergenerational so yeah. Robert Bauman: Um and I know from talking to other people that you've been involved in community organizations and so forth. Alexia Estrada: Yeah Robert Bauman: Can you talk about some of those things you've involved in and and when and why and how you sort of got involved in those things. Alexia Estrada: Yeah I think oh there is there is [LAUGHTER] ohh let me think of where to start. Um well, I think the biggest thing I grew up going to boys and schools club so the second after school program and that opportunity really along with the church my grandpa is a pastor. I think those two combined instilled in me just the desire to serve and do service um and so when I went to college which I found my university through the after school program that took me to the university to view it; um I just came back and knew I wanted to do service so that’s how I got plugged in with community organizing and I think that’s something that is growing in Tri-Cities. Um so I’m involved with quite I don’t know just a couple of different things right now currently the pop up clinics is probably what’s taking up quite a bit of my time making sure our community gets vaccinated because of the pandemic so we are in front of Super Mex every weekend um encouraging folks to get vaxxed and making it accessible to people. Robert Bauman: Mhmm and what organizations or [inaudible] Alexia Estrada: That’s that’s through the Tri-Cities Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and then I worked for Latino Community Fund when I moved back from university um yeah and now I am with Heritage University. Robert Bauman: Okay, yeah um so you know you mentioned vaccination the pandemic COVID-19 you know studies have shown have impacted like non-white communities more heavily right.. Alexia Estrada: Mhmm. Yeah Robert Bauman: …economically, more illness, higher death rate that sort of thing; um so being involved in pop-up clinics what sort of impact have you seen on the Hispanic community here I wonder Alexia Estrada: Yeah, I think the way that our community receives information is through word of mouth and through trusted messengers and so what I have noticed that the most important thing is to really get trusted messengers out giving accurate information and I think there is a lot of stigma on folks not wanting to get vaccinated which part of it is true but I also think the accessibility piece was like number one so we intentionally had clinics on Saturdays in the afternoon and on Sundays because we knew our community was out working and that alone and the convenience of it and I’ve had folks tell me “I don’t have the stress of having to go do an appointment at Walgreens where they don’t speak Spanish and like the anxiety of it all,” “like ohh I was just going grocery shopping and you spoke to me in Spanish and we were able to get it without and appointment” and the convenience of it I think that was the biggest impact that or the biggest thing I learned was just accessibility and having trusted messengers. Robert Bauman: Mhmm yeah and you mentioned and I would assume language was… Alexia Estrada: Yeah Robert Bauman: …an important part of that right, yeah. Yeah that’s really interesting um what other um obviously so that’s been a really important issue the last couple of years Alexia Estrada: Mhmm Robert Bauman: Um what other issues do you see in the community sort of currently that you think are really important Alexia Estrada: Hmm Robert Bauman: Or ones that you've been involved in Alexia Estrada: Yeah I think one of the biggest ones is how do we educate our community on being involved in local government and I think how do we make it accessible but also how do we get knowledge out there and how do we empower folks to use their voice. Because a lot of times there is just no education, people don’t know how to fill out their ballot and maybe they are a citizen but they never filled out a ballot before and building that trust with like knowing that your vote does matter, I think that is one of the biggest issues I’ve seen. My grandpa voted recently and registered to vote [converses with Manuel Estrada in Spanish] Manuel Estrada: Yeah Alexia Estrada: Si so like just and knowing that it makes a big difference Robert Bauman: Sure Alexia Estrada: Um so I think just empowering folks to use their voice and know that their voice does matter and is heard is one of the biggest issues and then I also think that we are developing so rapidly as a city and my biggest fear is that folks are going to be left out and cooked out--kicked out of their spaces and their homes. I live in East Pasco and we currently have the Amazon buildings going up.. Robert Bauman: Yup, right Alexia Estrada: ..Those warehouses and I need to get more information on it myself but we’ve been told that that side is industrial and that’s zoned industrial so that’s why folks are able to build there and we don’t have anywhere else to go but when we look at the history of Tri-Cities we know that side was industrial because certain people lived on that side of the city. And so there is a trailer park right next to those Amazon warehouses that’s getting built and I am very curious to see in the next few years how we are going to work to protect the people that live there who have had that home for years and years. And so I think as we build and develop as a city how are we taking care of those in our community who have been here and keep room for them Robert Bauman: Right, so housing and as you mentioned also the ah politics right elections and um it sounds like you have been involved in all of those um sort of issues. Um so was it sort of growing up in the community and you said the boys and girls club and then that kind of led sounds like led to your involvement something.. Alexia Estrada: Yeah, I think.. Robert Bauman: Somethings in college anything I mean or combination of Alexia Estrada: A combination of everything, I think I just got really blessed like I have a lot of great mentors a lot of people I have poured into my life from. Miss Conner I don’t know if you are going to interview her. You should; Sabiha Khan, she was my high school teacher at Kamiakin and she influenced my life a ton she’s a mover and shaker here in the Tri-Cities. Um my boys and girls club mentor just people have continued to pour into my life and I am very grateful so I think; when I went to university our motto was like the motto of the university was is “Engage the Culture, Change the World” but what I learned there is that the way to change the world is to go back to your community and it happens in the small in the small spaces where people are not really paying attention that’s where the change happens so Robert Bauman: Mhmm Alexia Estrada: Moving back to Tri-Cities isn’t always something that people get excited for so [LAUGHTER] So um, it can be a hard move for a young adult um there is not much for young adults here yet so Robert Bauman: Right, yeah as you’ve been talking too I’ve been thinking about you know your grandfather’s story. Alexia Estrada: Hmm Robert Bauman: I wonder um the influence of his experiences and story… Alexia Estrada: Yeah Robert Bauman:.. What sort of influence does that have on you? Alexia Estrada: Mhmm. Well,um my grandpa here is a servant leader. I don’t think he’d call himself that, I don’t think he would call himself a community organizer either but um he’s also said he said he was a farm worker but he is also the pastor of a small church that serves um lamasomlida--like the most humble people in our community. And so uh just seeing how he shows up for other folks and the need that there are and the folks that come to his church; um that definitely influenced me and I also think holding on to stories that he shared, that my dad shared on everything that they’ve had to endure to get to where I am at now. Like I am college educated, I am able to go to city council meetings and attend and like understand what is happening and share and advocate and do all these things um because someone chose to immigrate here and work towards that for us so. Robert Bauman: Yeah so you mentioned a college education, was that something that was really emphasized a lot in your family. Were your parents able to go to college or are your first generation or what’s that? Alexia Estrada: My mom was able to go, she actually went to WSU in Pullman and I think that opened a lot of doors for me too and so there’s that and my dad was also super encouraging so um yeah. Robert Bauman: So education was-- Alexia Estrada: --Priority, yeah number one.[LAUGHTER] Robert Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Alexia Estrada: *interpret conversation in Spanish to Manuel Estrada* Manuel Estrada: Oh yeah, number one Alexia Estrada:Yeah [LAUGHTER] Robert Bauman: And so do you have brother sisters? Alexia Estrada:Yeah, I have four younger siblings Robert Bauman: Okay Alexia Estrada: We uh have a big age gap too. I’m going to be twenty five on Sunday and my little sister is ten years old--my youngest sister. So we have a few years in between us Robert Bauman: And uhh I wonder what sort of influence you're being on your-- with your younger sibling, do you think Alexia Estrada: I I am just sainly thought. I don’t know I think about that all the time. Like every generation has set up a new foundation um and my siblings are getting to grow up with a lot of different voices in the room and a lot of different opinions in the spaces and so we’ll see how they’ll navigate those and what they do with them Robert Bauman: Mhmm. Um so Alexia you know this is a university right, a lot of young people--we have a lot of “non-traditional students” but a lot of young people. What, what advice might you give a young person college age or someone that’s in college um about um like community engagement sort of things Alexia Estrada: Yeah. I would say that you are the expert. I don’t think we hear that enough as young people but you know your community, you’ve lived here, you have your own lived experiences and those are very valid and that’s your truth. And so I would say go confident in that and know that when you enter into spaces or maybe there are folks that have different experiences that are older or different generation, you also bring up a lot to the table and what you bring to the table is rich and so just being confident in that and knowing that you are the expert Robert Bauman: That’s great advice um I’m going to go back to Manuel and ask him some questions. Climaco Ivarka: *interprets question to Manuel in Spanish* Robert Bauman: Um, when you sit here next to your granddaughter and know what she has achieved in her young life so far, what sort of thoughts do you have as you see the young person she’s become and the younger generation Climaco Ivarka: *interprets question to Manuel in Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *responds in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: [interprets to English] He’s very proud of her, very happy. Robert Bauman: Mhmm Manuel Estrada: *continues response in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: [interprets gradually to English] Her confidence, that she’s-- since she’s young. I admire her alot. She sounds funny and she always counts on me for my support in all the areas. I’m very proud of her, it’s an honor. Alexia Estrada: Gracias Abuletio Robert Bauman: Have you ever given Alexia advice of any kind and if so what sort of advice have you given her Alexia Estrada: All the time [LAUGHTER] Climaco Ivarka: *interprets question to Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *questions in Spanish* Alexia Estrada: “converses with Manuel in Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *responds in Spanish* Alexia Estrada: Alot. Climaco Ivarka: [interprets to English] I would say many Manuel Estrada: *continues response in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: [interprets gradually to English] Lots of advice for her only benefit. Alexia Estrada: I think my grandparents they’re on Shoshone street they’re right by city hall and they both sit on the porch all the time and people come and visit them and talk to them and I- I’ve said that “that porch has heard all of the world’s conversations.” And so sometimes I would go by and I’ll see them and I’ll just drive over and go park and I’ll be like “hey, this is going on like what advice do you have for me” and I’m very surprised at how--I shouldn’t be surprised my grandpa is very wise and says a lot of things and oh “that’s really good.” And I think it’s just the importance of intergenerational relationships in our community; I think we really need that .But he gives me lots of good advice Alexia Estrada:*converses with Manuel in Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *replies in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: [interprets to English] I hope I give good advice. Manuel Estrada: *continues response in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: [interprets gradually to English] It’s difficult for our young generation, these times the life is very complicated, very difficult. For them there are responsibility from parents and if we have the opportunity we need to come to hand. Robert Bauman: So um Alexia as you look sort of forward a little bit, what um things would you like to see happening in the near future in the community? Alexia Estrada: Mhmm, yeah.. mmm Robert Bauman: Are there changes that you think still need to happen or that you'd like to see happen or… Alexia Estrada: Yeah, oh yeah. Um I think there is a lot of helpers and there is a lot of people at work already doing this stuff so it’s not really new but I’d love to see a um more capacity being given to it. But one of my passions that I really want to see happen here in the Tri-Cities is conversations around mental health and accessibility to that. I don’t think especially in the Latino community, I would love to see us be able to talk about and navigate conversations around dimensions more and and what is anxiety, what is depression but also what is joy and like how do we celebrate that. And I think with just how our society is set up we are all so busy working and we are all so busy trying to survive day by day um but I think those conversations really need to happen. So I’d love to see-- I would hope maybe one day I can come back and open up a community center or something where folks can come in and just receive culturally appropriate therapy and ahh I don’t know a lot of different things but I don’t think we have those conversations I see that. And I also think education on how much people's voice and vote does make a difference and why it’s important to vote for those who can’t Robert Bauman: Mhmm Alexia Estrada: Mmm, those things. Yeah Manuel Estrada: It’s fine. [CHUCKLE] Alexia Estrada:[LAUGHTER] Mhmm Robert Bauman:[CHUCKLE]. Is there anything I haven’t asked you or your grandpa Manuel or Alexia that you think would be important to talk about either about your family, story- immigration story, or community issues or anything Climaco Ivarka: *interprets question to Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *responds in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: [interprets gradually to English] Maybe yes, we come to this country, we come to work, we suffer. People say it’s the land of opportunities and it depends on our behavior what we accomplish or what we want or you lose the opportunity. In my case I worked a lot always labor work in the farm, I taught my kids to work. I wanted them to go to school get educated. They did not want to go to a school get educated now they have to learn to work, how to make a living out of it by working. And thanks alot I was able to accomplish maybe not what I wanted but I was able to get them a table of food before them. I have two sons that I am very proud of, the father of my granddaughter here he’s a very experienced worker hard worker entrepreneur. He has his businesses, he’s a good citizen; that’s satisfaction for me and I can say with honor that it was worth all my suffrage all my farming working times. I feel happy, I received the goods that was hard work for us to accomplish. I have my wife and my grandchildren who are very close to me that love me and I’m very happy. I remember through all the suffrage I had while I was working, I just want to say if someone is listening to me that it’s worth it and if god lets-gets us fly, one day we will be happy and enjoy what we. I’m very thankful for all the work that I did, I paid off at the end- it pays off at the end Manuel Estrada: Yeah Robert Bauman: Mhmm. How about you Alexia is there anything that you would like to add or anything that I haven’t asked about Alexia Estrada: Hmm I don’t know. I think just making sure you get all the voices in this room in front of this camera to share their story. I had I during one of the election years there was lot of just a lot of stuff going on and so that summer I said “you know what I am going to work in the fields ” and I want to know what it feels like and I want to be able to actually experience it. He went through all of it so I wouldn’t have to but I still chose to kind of go out there and um the people that I met in our community that work so hard to put foods on our tables, I want those stories to be heard. I got to work alongside a lady named Donyateray for weeks doing the apple [picking] and I think I learned more from here that summer that I would have learned from any other space so just making sure we get those folks here Robert Bauman: Yeah, absolutely. And so that reminds me one question that I will ask if you have other people we connect we can interview Alexia Estrada: Yeah I do actually. Yeah Robert Bauman: Absolutely, so we can talk about that afterwards Alexia Estrada: Sweet Robert Bauman: Yeah, that would be absolutely terrific. Um so I want to thank both of you very much for coming in today. Gracias, muchas gracias um really appreciate it um getting your stories hearing your stories, both of you. It’s really important we have it, the generational- Climaco Ivarka: *interprets in Spanish gradually* Alexia Estrada: Yeah Robert Bauman:- story is really really great. Alexia Estrada: We should’ve brought my dad. I was thinking about it too Robert Bauman: [LAUGHTER] We can bring him another time Alexia Estrada: Yeah I was thinking that Manuel Estrada: *comments in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: [interprets gradually in English] Thank you for letting us having this privilege to express our stories I’m hoping that if somebody sees it it can benefit them, thank you for that for the time the opportunity that you gave us today we are here to serve in what we can Robert Bauman: Well thank you very much, muchas gracias Climaco Ivarka: *interprets in Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *responds in Spanish* Espanol: Dr. Bauman: Hay algunas cosas que tengo que decir antes de comenzar. Para que sea todo oficial. Marco Abarca: Hay algunas cosas que tengo que decir al inicio para hacerlo oficial. Dr. Bauman: Mi nombre es Robert Bauman. Yo estoy conduciendo una entrevista histórica oral junto con Marco Abarca quien será interprete el día de hoy. Marco: Mi nombre es Robert Bauman estoy conduciendo una entrevista oral con ustedes, junto con Marco Abarca quien será el intérprete. Dr. Bauman: Estamos conduciendo la entrevista con Alexia Estrada y Manuel Estrada Marco: La entrevista va a ser con Alexia Estrada y Manuel Estrada Dr. Bauman: El 12 de Julio del año 2022, Marco: El 12 de Julio del 2022 Bauman: Y la entrevista está siendo conducida en Washington State Tri-Cities Marco: La entrevista está conduciendo aquí en el WSU Tri-Cities Bauman: Otro requisito oficial. Alexia puedes pronunciar y escribir tu primer nombre y apellido, por favor. Alexia: Si. Alexia Estrada. A-L-E-X-I-A. Estrada, E-S-T-R-A-D-A. Bauman: Ahora, Manuel Marco: Usted puede decir su nombre Manuel: Manuel Estrada Alexia: M-A-N-U-E-L, E-S-T-R-A-D-A. Dr. Bauman: Gracias Entonces, Manuel. Creo que comenzare contigo, me pregunto si podrías platicar sobre, de lo que tengo entendido por correo electrónico con Alexia, usted llego de México. Podría contarnos sobre su vida allá y que lo llevo a irse y venir acá. Marco: Manuel voy a empezar contigo. Como nos contó tu nieta Alexia que llegaste aca de México nos podrías contar un poco de tu historia en México y como llegaste acá. Manuel: De México? Marco: Si, de México. Manuel: Pues soy mexicano y nací en un rancho y vivimos una vida normal en medio de la pobreza y muchas cosas de necesidad y todo. Salimos adelante a cierta edad, me dieron ganas de venirme a los estados unidos y me vine en el 77’, 1977 cruce para los estados unidos y desde entonces radico aquí en los estados unidos e ido a México a visitar, me estoy yendo (risas). Marco: Yes, I am Mexican. I was born in Mexico a small town, we had limited resources, we lived in poverty, we had necessities and i decided to come to the united states, i have returned. Si, soy mexicano. Yo nací en México, en un pueblo pequeño con pocos recursos, y vivimos en la pobreza con varias necesidades y decidí venirme a los estados unidos, y he regresado. Dr. Bauman: ¿Alrededor de que edad tenía cuando llego a los Estados Unidos? Marco: 1977’ dijo que vino en el 77’? Manuel: Si Marco: Si, la primera vez que llego fue en 1977. Alexia: ¿Y cuantos años tuviste? Manuel: ¿Donde? Alexia: Cuando viniste Manuel: Tenía 25 Marco: 25 años de edad Dr. Bauman: ¿Y conocía a alguien que estaba aquí en los estados unidos? ¿Cuándo se vino, vino a encontrarse con alguien? ¿O como llego, y como lo logro? Marco: ¿Cuándo llego acá a los estados unidos conocía a alguien cuando venía acá, o como llego aquí? Alexia: A Tri-Cities Manuel: A Estados Unidos o los Tri-Cities? Alexia: Los dos Marco: Aquí para empezar y luego... Primero los Estados Unidos, luego los Tri-Cities Manuel: Cuando entré a los estados unidos, me vino con un amigo, no conocía a nadie, empecé hacer amistades aquí, y así fue como recorrí mi vida Marco: Cuando entro a los estados unidos, vino con un amigo, no conocía a nadie, empezó hacer amistades aquí, y así fue como recorrió su vida Dr. Bauman: Fue algún lado antes de llegar a los Tri-Cities? Algún otro lugar Marco: Donde llego antes de llegar a los Tri-Cities? Manuel: Llegue a los angeles, tuve un tiempo pequeño en los angeles, de allí me vine a oregon, y no me gusto los angeles, no me gusto Oregon, me vine a Washington, y aquí me gusto, y aquí llegue a yakima Marco: Llego a los angeles, estuvo un tiempo pequeño en los ángeles, de allí se fue a oregon, y no le gusto los angeles, ni oregon, y se fue a Washington, y si le gusto Manuel: Allí viví nueve años, y allí me cambie para acá, y el resto lo he vivido aquí. Marco: Se mudo a Yakima, donde vivo nueve años y se mudó a los Tri-Cities Dr. Bauman : ¿Cuándo estaba en Yakima que tipo de empleo pudo encontrar? Marco: Cuando estaba en Yakima y después Tri-Cities que tipo de trabaja estaba usted haciendo? Manuel: El campo Marco: Trabajo de campo Manuel: El campo, la agricultura Bauman: ¿Cuándo se fue de México, tenía miembros de su familia? dejo familia allá? ¿Algún familiar llego en algún punto? Marco: Cuando usted dejo México, dejo familia, ¿vinieron su familia de allá para acá? ¿Como estuvo? Manuel: Si, deje a mis padres, a mis hermanos. De hecho, tres hijos pequeños que tenía. Marco: Si, dejo sus padres, sus hermanos, y tres hijos menores de edad, Manuel: Con el tiempo, lograron venirse también. Y ahora tengo familia en México y tengo familia aquí. Marco: Con el tiempo, pudieron venirse también. Y ahora tiene familia en México y aquí. Alexia: ¿Uno era mi papa verdad? Manuel: Si Alexia: Mi papa era uno de sus hijos Manuel: Si Dr. Bauman: Cuando llego a los Tri-Cities, como era la comunidad hispana cuando usted llego? Cuando primero llego Marco: ¿Cuándo llego usted aquí cómo era la comunidad hispana? Manuel: ¿Aquí? Marco: Aquí Manuel: Eran muy, muy pocos, no había casi hispanos. Había una o dos tiendas mexicanas. Era un rancho, con unas dos o tres patrullas. Todo muy pobre, se podía decir. Muy escaso, pocos hispanos, pero se fueron multiplicando y ahora tenemos una bella ciudad. Marco: Eran muy pocos, no había casi hispanos. Era un pueblo muy pequeño, con unas dos o tres patrullas. Todo muy pobre, se podía decir. Muy escaso, pocos hispanos, pero se fueron multiplicando y ahora tenemos una bella ciudad. Dr. Bauman: Cuando llego, donde encontró donde vivir, ¿al inicio cuando llego primero? Marco: ¿Cuándo llego aquí en donde llego a vivir? Manuel: A Pasco Llegue aquí el primero de enero del 87’ Marco: Llego aquí el primero de enero del 87’ Alexia: ¿Y viviste en la ciudad o en el rancho del campo? Manuel: En la ciudad Marco: Él vivió en la ciudad Alexia: Está bien Manuel: Con el tiempo, este, trabaje con un ranchero 22 anos, 18 anos de supervisor en el rancho, 4 anos como peón, con el tiempo me fui al rancho, me dio casa, llego el tiempo me retire y regrese a la ciudad, y ahora vivo en Pasco Marco: Trabaje en un rancho 22 anos, dieciocho años de supervisor, y los primeros cuatro años como trabajador regular, con tiempo me dio una casa en el rancho. Y me retire y regrese a la ciudad de Pasco, y vivo allí. Dr. Bauman: ¿Y cuantos hijos tiene? ¿Nietos? Marco: ¿Cuántos nietos o bisnietos? Alexia: ¿Cuántos hijos tienes? Manuel: Pues hijos no tengo muchos Marco: No tengo muchos hijos Manuel: Hijos, tengo tres. Pero nietos tengo dieciocho, y bisnietos nietos tengo cinco Marco: Tres hijos, dieciocho nietos, y bisnietos tengo cinco Dr. Bauman: ¿Todos están en esta región de Pasco? Manuel: No, unos están en Yakima Marco: Unos están en Yakima Manuel: En Yakima, pero otros aquí Marco: Y otros están aquí Dr. Bauman: Y usted a regresado a México? ¿Seguido? Marco: ¿Regresa a México seguido a mirar familia? Manuel: Antes iba seguido, pero ahora tengo unos seis años que no he ido Marco: Antes si, ahora tiene seis años que no ha regresado Dr.: Bauman: Está bien, Alexia ahora te voy a preguntar algunas preguntas Marco: Ahora le va a preguntar a su nieta Alexia: Si, muy bien Dr. Bauman: Como era crecer en la área de los Tri-Cities? Alexia: Si, era todo lo que conocía, pero era genial me encanto. Tuve la oportunidad de crecer en una vecindad muy cercana en Pasco. Yo vivía en una vecindad muy diversa, con diferentes religiones, etnias/raza, muy intergeneracional. Dr. Bauman: Se por mucha gente que estas muy involucrada en varias organizaciones, nos podrías contar un poco sobre eso: un poco sobre cómo, cuando, y porque te involucraste Alexia: Creo que. A ver donde comenzó, crecí atendiendo el club de niños y niñas, un programa después de la escuela, y esa oportunidad, y la iglesia, porque mi abuelo es pastor, creo que esas dos cosas combinadas inculcaron ese deseo de servir y hacer servicios. Y entonces cuando fui a colegio, y encontré mi universidad por el programa a cuál asistía después de escuela. Yo regrese y quise servir a la comunidad, y me involucre. Y creo que es algo que está creciendo en los Tri-Cities Estoy involucrada con un poco de diferentes organizaciones. Las clínicas emergentes están consumiendo mucho de mi tiempo, para asegurar que la comunidad sea vacunada por la pandemia, ahora estamos en frente de la Súper-Mex cada fin de semana alentando a la gente que se vacunen y ayudando a la gente con accesibilidad. Dr. Bauman: ¿Con cual organización es esto? Alexia: Con los hispanic commerance of chamber, y también trabaje con latino community fund cuando regrese de la universidad, y luego con Heritage University Dr. Bauman: Muy bien. Entonces, mencionaste las vacunaciones, y la pandemia COVID-19 Estadísticas han enseñado que han impactado a las comunidades latinas mucho más fuerte. Económicamente, en salud, y riesgos más altos de muerte, involucrada con las clínicas emergentes que impacto has visto en la comunidad hispana aquí Alexia: Creo, que la forma en que nuestra comunidad recibe información es de boca en boca, y mensajeros de confianza. Lo que yo he notado es poder enviar mensajeros de confianza, para poder mandarlos con la información correcta y para poder dar información precisa. Creo que también hay demasiado estigma sobre mucha gente que no quiere ser vacunados, y por parte es verdad, pero creo que la accesibilidad es número uno. Nosotros intencionalmente tuvimos las clínicas los sábados por las tardes y los domingos porque sabíamos que nuestra comunidad estaba trabajando y con solo eso ayuda. Mucha gente me ha dicho que sienten el estrés de tener que hacer una cita en Walgreens donde no hablan español. La ansiedad del proceso, han dicho que al ir de compras y les hablamos en español, y les ayudamos sin una cita. La conveniencia de todo creo que fue el impacto más grande, o lo que yo aprendí y la accesibilidad y mensajeros de confianza son importantes. Dr. Bauman: Como mencionaste, asumo que la barrera de lenguaje tuvo mucho que ver Alexia: Si. Dr. Bauman: Si, es muy interesante. ¿Que otro, obviamente ese a sido un tema bastante importante en los últimos anos. ¿Que otro problema has visto en la comunidad que son importantes, o cual es uno en el que has sido involucrada? Alexia: Si, creo que uno de los temas más grandes. Es como involucrarse con el gobierno, y creo que como hacerlo más accesible y poder agrandar el conocimiento de la gente y empoderar a la gente para usar sus voces. No hay educación o la gente no saben cómo llenar un folleto, o no sabían que tienen el derecho a votar. Saber que tu voto si importa, es uno de los temas/asunto que he visto. Mi abuelo voto recientemente. Y esta registrado para votar. Verdad, votaste Manuel: Yeah – Si. Alexia: Al saber que si se hace una diferencia grande Creo que, empoderando a la gente, para que utilicen su voz y que sepan que voz si importa y es escuchada es uno de los problemas más grandes. Y también creo que estamos desarrollándonos muy rápidamente en la ciudad, y mi mayor miedo es que la gente va a ser dejada atrás y sacada de sus espacios y hogares. Yo vivo en el este de Pasco, y actualmente tenemos los edificios de Amazon que están siendo construidos y las bodegas. Yo – necesito más información, pero nos han dicho que ese lado es industrial y es una zona industrial y por eso la gente puede construir allí y no tenemos a donde ir, pero si vemos el pasado de Pasco, se sabe que ese lado es industrial porque cierta gente vivió de ese lado y hay un parqueadero de traíllas a un lado, y me da curiosidad ver que será construido en los años que vienen, como vamos a proteger a la gente que ha vivido en esa área por años y años. Al construir y desarrollamos como una ciudad como cuidamos a esos que han estado en esta comunidad y como los mantenemos aquí. Dr. Bauman: Correcto, viviendo y como mencionaste también la política, elecciones suena que has estado involucrada en todos esos asuntos. ¿Entonces fue al crecer junto a la comunidad y el club de niños y niñas que te dirigió a involucrarte o fueron cosas de colegio? Alexia: Si. Bauman: O una combinación. Alexia: Si, una combinación de todo. Creo que fui bendecida. Tuve bastantes mentores, mucha gente ha podido... desde Ms. Conan, si la va a entrevistar, la debería entrevistar, Sevilla Con era mi maestra de la secundaria en Kamiakin y ella influencio mi vida bastante aquí en los Tri-Cities, mis mentores en el club de niños y niñas, y mucha gente que ha podida atribuir a mi vida. Estoy muy agradecida, y cuando fui a la universidad, la frase de la universidad era 'comprometer la cultura para cambiar el mundo,’ pero lo que aprendí allí era que la forma en cambiar el mundo es regresar a tu comunidad, y sucede el cambio en los espacios pequeños donde la gente no pone tanta atención y allí es donde sucede el cambio, entonces regresar a los Tri-Cities no es siempre algo que emociona a la gente. Puede ser una mudanza difícil para los jóvenes, todavía no hay demasiado para los jóvenes. Bauman: Correcto. Mientras has estado hablando, he pensado sobre la historia de tu abuelo. Me pregunto, como te ha influido su experiencia. Alexia: Si. Bueno, mi abuelo es un servidor para la gente, pero no creo que se llamaría eso ni tampoco se llamaría un organizador de la comunidad. Él también es trabajador agrícola pero también es pastor de una pequeña iglesia que le serve a lo más humilde, se refiere a la gente humilde en nuestra comunidad. Entonces al ver como él está allí para la gente y la necesidad de la gente que viene a la iglesia definitivamente me influencio y también creo que mantener sus historias. Seguir contando las historias que ha compartido, que mi papa ha compartido sobre todo que han tenido que sobresalir para llegar donde estoy ahora. Yo tengo mi educación universitaria y puede atender y participar en las juntas del consejo del pueblo, entender y compartir lo que está sucediendo y todas estas cosas porque alguien decidió emigrar aquí y trabajo duro para nosotros. Bauman: ¿Si, la educación universitaria era muy importante? ¿Pudieron tus padres asistir al colegio? ¿O eres primera generación? Alexia: Si, mi mama asistió al colegio. Mi mama fue a WSU en Pullman, y creo que eso me abrió demasiadas puertas también. Y mi papa también me estaba alentando, sí. Bauman: La educación era muy importante Alexia: Una prioridad, número uno. Bauman: Si Alexia: Verdad que la educación era muy importante Manuel: O, sí. Número uno. Alexia: Si. Bauman: ¿Entonces, tienes hermanos o hermanas? Alexia: Si. Tengo cuatro hermanos menores. Bauman: Está bien. Alexia: Si, tenemos una gran diferencia en edad también. Yo cumplo 25 el domingo y mi hermana pequeña tiene 10 años, la más pequeña. Tenemos algunos años entre nosotras. Bauman: Me pregunto, que embelleciendo has tenido en tus hermanos pequeños Alexia: Si. Yo no sé, yo pienso en eso todo el tiempo. Cada generación a creado una fundación, y mis hermanos están creciendo con diferentes voces y opiniones en todo aspecto. Tendremos que ver como navegan y que hacen con esas voces. Bauman: Alexia, esta es una universidad, verdad. Muchos jóvenes, y estudiantes no tradicionales. Alexia: Sí. Bauman: Que consejos le darías a un joven en la universidad sobre como involucrarse en la comunidad, Alexia: Yo diría que tú eres el experto. No creo que lo escuchamos lo suficiente como jóvenes. Pero conocemos nuestra comunidad, tú has vivido aquí. Cada uno ha tenido sus propias experiencias y son muy validas y son sus historias. Yo digo que confíen en eso y que sepan que cuando entren espacios... Hay gente que han tenido diferentes experiencias o son mayores o diferentes generaciones, tú también tienes mucho que contribuir y eso es importante, entonces tener confianza y saber que eres el experto. Bauman: Muy buenos consejos. Voy a volver con Manuel y preguntar unas preguntas Marco: Vamos a regresar con usted con unas cuantas preguntas. Bauman: Al estar sentado aquí con su nieta al saber lo que ella ha logrado en su vida cuáles son sus pensamientos al ver la joven en la que se convierte y en la generación. Marco: ¿Ahorita que está sentado cercas de su nieta lo que ella ha logrado hasta ahorita, como se siente usted? Manuel: Muy orgulloso, de ella muy contento. Marco: Muy muy orgulloso, está muy feliz. Manuel: Si, de los logros que ha tenido Marco: Sus logros que ha logrado Manuel: Es una joven esforzada, valiente, es una de las cosas que le admiro mucho Y creo que ella cuenta conmigo y siempre ha contado y seguirá contando con mi apoyo en todas las áreas Marco: Esta joven, la admiro mucho. Ella cuenta conmigo y siempre contara con mi apoyo, en todas las áreas. Es un orgullo para mí lo que ella ha logrado Marco: Estoy muy orgulloso de ella. Alexia: Gracias abuelito Bauman: ¿Le ha dado algún consejo a Alexia? ¿Qué tipos de consejos le ha dado? Alexia: Todo el tiempo Marco: ¿Le da usted consejos a su nieta? Manuel: Mande Marco: Le ha dado consejos a Alexia Alexia: ¿Y si, cuáles consejos? ¿Cuáles tipos de consejos me has dado? Manuel: Pues yo creo que son varios Alexia: Bastante Marco: Muchos Manuel: SI, varios consejos Marco: Muchos consejos Manuel: Para su beneficio. Marco: Por su bien Alexia: Yo creo que mis abuelos, están en la calle Shoshone St a lado del consejo del pueblo y los dos se sientan en el porche todo el tiempo y la gente los visitan y platican con ellos. Y yo he dicho que ese porche ha escuchado todas las conversaciones del mundo. Y entonces a veces pasare y los vere y me estaciono y les digo ‘hola, esto está sucediendo que consejos me pueden dar’ y me sorprende, no debería de sorprenderme mi abuelo es muy sabio. Dice muchas cosas y pienso que es lo importante de relaciones intergeneracional en nuestra comunidad Y creo que necesitamos eso y me da muy buenos consejos, buenos consejos me das. Manuel: Bueno, eso espero Marco: Espero dar buenos consejos. Manuel: Esta difícil para la juventud en estos tiempos Marco: Es difícil para la generación de jóvenes en estos tiempos Manuel: Muy dura la vida Marco: La vida es muy complicada para Manuel: Muy poca responsabilidad de los padres Marco: Muy poca la responsabilidad para los padres Manuel: Y pues nosotros que tenemos la oportunidad hay que echarles la mano, ayudarlos Marco: Darles una mano y ayudarlos Bauman: Alexia, tu que miras hacia adelante que te gustaría ver en el futuro cercano? Alexia: Si Bauman: Algunos cambios que todavía tienen que pasar o que deberían pasar Alexia: Si. O, sí. Yo creo que hay muchos ayudantes y mucha gente que está trabajando en eso, no es algo nuevo, pero me encantaría verlo. Mucha más capacidad dada, pero una pasión mía que me gustaría ver, conversaciones sobre la salud mental y la accesibilidad a eso. No creo que, especialmente en la comunidad latina, me encantaría ver y poder hablar y navegar conversaciones sobre las emociones. Sobre que es la ansiedad, la depresión, ¿y que es la felicidad? ¿Y cómo lo celebramos? Y yo creo que como nuestra sociedad está rodeada estamos todos trabajando y tratando de sobrevivir el día a día. Pero creo que esas conversaciones son necesarias, espero poder regresar un día y poder abrir un centro comunitario donde la gente puede venir y recibir terapia apropiada para nuestra cultura y algunas otras cosas. No sé, bastante cosas, pero no creo que tengamos ese tipo de conversaciones, yo veo que eso falta. Y también veo que la educación en cuanto la voz de la gente y sus votos si hacen la diferencia. Y porque es importante votar por los que no pueden, esos asuntos. Manuel: Está bien. Bauman: Hay algo que no les he preguntado o a tu abuelo, Manuel o Alexia que creen que son importantes para platicarlo sobre su familia, su historia, su historia migratoria, ¿o sobre la comunidad? Marco: Hay algo que no le hemos preguntado sobre usted sobre su historia que cree que debe contarnos, que se quedó sin decir, ¿pero cree que sería bueno decirlo? Manuel: Pues este, tal vez sí. La historia es que viene uno a este país Marco: Posiblemente si, se viene a este país Manuel: a trabajar Marco: Se viene a trabajar Manuel: se sufre, pero como sigue diciendo la gente es un país de las oportunidades y depende del comportamiento de uno. Si uno logra lo que quiere o pierde la oportunidad. Marco: Se sufre, pero como dice la gente es el país de las oportunidades. Depende en el comportamiento de uno, si se cumple lo que uno quiere o se pierde la oportunidad Manuel: Yo en mi caso trabaje mucho, siempre en la labor en el campo. A mis hijos les ensene a trabajar. Yo quería que estudiaran, no quisieron el estudio pues tiene que aprender a trabajar como ganarse la vida, trabajando. Marco: En mi caso trabaje mucho, siempre la labor, les ensene a mis hijos a trabajar. Yo quise que fueran a la escuela, pero no quisieron y tuvieron que trabajar. Manuel: Y gracias a dios logre, quizás no lo que quería, pero logre un bienestar para mi vida y para mis hijos. Tengo dos hijos varones, de los cuales estoy orgulloso de ellos. El papa de aquí, de mi nieta. Un varón trabajador, un empresario, tiene sus propios negocios. El otro es un buen trabajador también, buen ciudadano. Y para mi es una satisfacción y puedo decir con un orgullo que valió la pena lo que sufrimos en el campo lo que trabajamos, ahora me siento contento del fruto que algún día nos costó mucho para lograrlo. Tengo mi esposa, mis nietos que están muy acercados a mí que me quieren y los quiero. Y soy feliz Recuerdo los sufrimientos, los trabajos, pero quiero decir que, si alguien escucha, vale la pena, vale la pena si el señor nos presta vida. Marco: Tengo dos hijos varones, de los cuales estoy orgulloso de ellos. El papa de aquí, de mi nieta. Un varón trabajador, un empresario, tiene sus propios negocios. El otro es un buen trabajador también, buen ciudadano. Y para mi es una satisfacción y puedo decir con un orgullo que valió la pena lo que sufrimos en el campo lo que trabajamos, ahora me siento contento del fruto que algún día nos costó mucho para lograrlo. Tengo mi esposa, mis nietos que están muy acercados a mí que me quieren y los quiero. Y soy feliz Recuerdo los sufrimientos, los trabajos, pero quiero decir que, si alguien escucha, vale la pena, vale la pena si el señor nos presta vida. Manuel: Un día disfrutamos lo que cosechamos lo que algún día sembramos. Y doy gracias a dios por mi familia. Marco: Y le doy gracias a dios por mi familia, todo vale la pena al fin. Bauman: ¿Y tú Alexia, algo que te gustaría agregar? ¿Algo que no he preguntado? Alexia: No se. Creo que asegurarse de capturar todas las voces en este cuarto en frente de esta cámara para compartir sus historias. Durante las elecciones, había mucho que sucedió. Ese verano decidí ir a trabajar al campo para tener esa experiencia, el paso por todo eso para que yo no tuviera que pasar por eso. Pero yo decidí ir. La gente que conocí de nuestra comunidad que trabaja muy duro para poner comida en nuestras mesas, yo quiero que sus historias sean escuchadas. Pude trabajar junto con una señora, Doña Tere por varias semanas, en la manzana. Creo que aprendí más de ella ese verano que en cualquier otro lugar. Asegurarse de escuchar sus voces, y traerlos qui. Bauman: Eso me recuerda. Tienes a otra gente para recomendar. Antes de irte, me gustaría hablar contigo sobre eso. Alexia: Absolutamente Bauman: Quiero agradecerles mucho, a los dos por venir el día de hoy. Muchas gracias, muchas gracias. Marco: Muchas gracias por haber venido, por compartir su historia. Se aprecia mucho, escuchando las historias de ambos. Bauman: Se les aprecia mucho. Por escuchar su historia, a los dos. Muy importante, la historia generacional Marco: Las historias generacionales y intergeneracionales. Alexia: Hubiera traído a mi papa, lo estaba pensando también. Bauman: Lo pueden traer otro día Manuel: Muchas gracias a ustedes por permitirlos este privilegio, por decir yo. Marco: Gracias por dejarnos tener este privilegio. Manuel: Por poder expresar algo de nuestra vida esperando que si alguien mira con beneficio. Gracias por el tiempo y la oportunidad que nos dan. Estamos para servir en lo que podamos Marco: Poder expresar nuestra vida, si alguien lo mira. Gracias por el tiempo y la oportunidad. Estamos aquí para servir en lo que se pueda. Bauman: Bueno, gracias. Muchas gracias. Marco: Muy bien dicho. Manuel: No hay de que. <div class="capti-toolbox-close"> </div> <div> </div> Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data video/mp4 Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:30:45 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 10317kbps Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Alexia and Manuel Estrada Subject The topic of the resource Oral History; Latin American; Hanford Site; Richland, WA, USA Description An account of the resource Manuel Estrada discusses his journey from Mexico to the Tri-Cities starting in 1977, his work in agriculture, and experiences incurred during the immigration process. Alexia Estrada discusses growing up in the Tri-Cities, experiences in a diverse community, her involvement in community organizations and her passion for social justice. Her work on various community initiatives, including vaccination campaigns and voter engagement. The influence of her family, particularly her grandparents, on her life and values. Her aspirations for the future of the Tri-Cities community, including increased mental health awareness and community engagement. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource July 12, 2022 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part, or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. English: Robert Bauman: So there are a few things I have to say upfront just to make it sort of official. Alexia Estrada: Mm-hmm [affirmative] Robert Bauman: So I’ll do that first- Climaco Ivarka: *interprets to Spanish* Robert Bauman: So my name is Robert Bauman um and I am conducting oral history interview along with Climaco Ivarka who is serving as interpreter Climaco Ivarka: *interprets to Spanish* Robert Bauman: And we are doing the interview with Aleixa Estrada and Manuel Estrada Alexia Estrada: Mm-hmm [affirmative] Climaco Ivarka: *interprets to Spanish* Robert Bauman: On July 12th, 2022 Climaco Ivarka: *interprets to Spanish* Robert Bauman: And the interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington Satate University Tri-Cities Climaco Ivarka: *interprets to Spanish* Robert Bauman: And so uh another sort of official thing, Alexia can you say and spell your first and last names please Alexia Estrada: Yeah, Alexia Estrada A-L-E-X-I-A, Estrada E-S-T-R-A-D-A Robert Bauman: And then Manuel Climaco Ivarka: *interprets to Spanish* (directs to manuel) Manuel Estrada: Manuel Estrada Climaco Ivarka: *continues interpretation in Spanish* Alexia Estrada: M-A-N-U-E-L E-S-T-R-A-D-A Robert Bauman: Thank you. Um so Manuel I think I will begin with you I wonder if you could talk a little bit about um as I understand from emailing Alexia you you came here from Mexico um could you talk about your life and what led you to leave there and come here. Climaco Ivarka: *interprets to Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *questions in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: *clarifies in Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *responds in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: [interprets to English] Okay so yes I am Mexican I was born in Mexico in a small town we had limited resources, I lived in poverty we had necessities and I decided to come to the United States I have returned Robert Bauman: And about how old were you when you came to the United States? Climaco Ivarka: 1977 *interprets and questions in Spanish* Manuel Estrada: Si Climaco Ivarka: Yeah first time they came in 1977 Alexia Estrada: *converses in Spanish to Manuel Estrada* Manuel Estrada: *replies to Alexia in Spanish* Alexia Estrada: *converses in Spanish to Manuel Estrada* Manuel Estrada: *responds in Spanish to all* Climaco Ivarka: [interprets to English] I was twenty five years old Robert Bauman: Okay um and um did you know someone already here in the United States? Ahh when you came to the U.S. did you come to meet someone or how did you how did you make it here, how did you come here? Climaco Ivarka: *interprets to Spanish* Alexia Estrada: At Tri-Cities Manuel Estrada: *questions for clarification in Spanish* Alexia Estrada: *attempts to clarify in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: *clarifies in Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *questions for clarification in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: [clarifies question to Robert Bauman] Are you ask him or the Tri-Cities. I let them know that you wanna know how he got here and then Tri-Cities Robert Bauman: Yes to the U.S. yeah first yeah Climaco Ivarka: *interprets to Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *responds in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: [interprets gradually to English] When I came here I didn’t know anybody I came with a friend, I started to make acquaintances and that’s how my life continued Robert Bauman: Mhmm and uh did you go somewhere before coming to the Tri-Cities somewhere else in the.. Climaco Ivarka: *interprets to Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *responds in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: [interprets gradually to English] Okay so we started in Los Angeles or LA then we left to Oregon we didn’t like it there so we came here to…he lived in Yakima where he arrived and lived nine years and from there he moved to the Tri-Cities and the rest of the time I’ve been living here. Robert Bauman: Mhmm. And when you were in Yakima and then Tri-Cities what sort of work were you able to find? Climaco Ivarka: *interprets to Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *responds in Spanish* El campo El campo Climaco Ivarka: [interprets to English] Farm work, agricultural Robert Bauman: Mhmm. And did you have when you left Mexico did you have other family members there? Did any of your family also come at some point? Climaco Ivarka: *interprets to Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *responds in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: [interprets gradually to English] Yeah [inaudible] My brothers, three sons I had that were underage. With time since, they were able to come here as well. Now I have family in Mexico and here Alexia Estrada: *converses with Manuel Estrada in Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *responds in Spanish* Si Alexia Estrada: My dad was one of the ones Robert Bauman: One of the, aha Alexia Estrada: Yeah, one of his sons Robert Bauman: Mhmm Manuel Estrada: *confirms in Spanish* Si Robert Bauman: And when you arrived in the Tri-Cities, what was the Hispanic community like here when your first arrived here Climaco Ivarka: *interprets to Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *responds in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: [interprets gradually to English] There was not that many- not many Hispanics, there was one or two stores that were Mexican stores. We would call it a small town, maybe two or three police cars [inaudible].. four or resources were not available. There were not that many Hispanics but they started multiplying now we have a beautiful city Robert Bauman: Mhmm mhmm. Um and ah when you came here where did you find to live initially when you first arrived here. Climaco Ivarka: *interprets to Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *responds in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: [interprets to English] Pasco, pasco that is where he found.. Manuel Estrada: *continues response in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: [interprets to English] We arrive here in January first of eighty seven Alexia Estrada: *converses with Manuel Estrada in Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *responds in Spanish* Alexia Estrada: Okay Climaco Ivarka: [interprets gradually to English] So we lived in the city with time.. Manuel Estrada: *continues response gradually in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: [interprets gradually to English]... I worked like a farmer for twenty two years, nineteen years of a supervisor. The first four years were just like a regular worker. With time I was able to go to the farm and he gave me a home to stay then I retired and now I came back to the city now I live in the City Pasco. Robert Bauman: Mhmm mhmm. And then how many children, grandchildren? Climaco Ivarka: *interprets to Spanish* Alexia Estrada: *converses with Manuel Estrada in Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *responds gradually in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: [interprets gradually to English] He says I don’t have that many three sons, grandchildren I have eighteen, and grandsons I have five Robert Bauman: Aha and are they all in the Pasco Tri-Cities area? Climaco Ivarka: *interprets to Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *responds in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: [interprets to English] Some are in Yakima Manuel Estrada: Yakima [continues response in Spanish] Climaco Ivarka: [interprets to English] And others are here Robert Bauman: And do you.. have you gone back to Mexico very often to see family or Climaco Ivarka: *interprets to Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *responds in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: [interprets to English] He says I would go often now it’s been about six years since I’ve last been Robert Bauman: Mhmm mhmm. Um okay, Alexia I am going to ask you a few questions now if that’s alright Alexia Estrada: Yeah, sounds good Climaco Ivarka: *interprets to Spanish* Robert Bauman: Um so how was growing up in the Tri-Cities area for you? Alexia Estrada: Yeah, ahh well it’s all I knew but it was great I it’s great I love it. I had the opportunity to grow up in a really close knit neighborhood um in pasco so I actually lived in a really diverse neighborhood. We had different religions on my street, different ethnicities and it was very intergenerational so yeah. Robert Bauman: Um and I know from talking to other people that you've been involved in community organizations and so forth. Alexia Estrada: Yeah Robert Bauman: Can you talk about some of those things you've involved in and and when and why and how you sort of got involved in those things. Alexia Estrada: Yeah I think oh there is there is [LAUGHTER] ohh let me think of where to start. Um well, I think the biggest thing I grew up going to boys and schools club so the second after school program and that opportunity really along with the church my grandpa is a pastor. I think those two combined instilled in me just the desire to serve and do service um and so when I went to college which I found my university through the after school program that took me to the university to view it; um I just came back and knew I wanted to do service so that’s how I got plugged in with community organizing and I think that’s something that is growing in Tri-Cities. Um so I’m involved with quite I don’t know just a couple of different things right now currently the pop up clinics is probably what’s taking up quite a bit of my time making sure our community gets vaccinated because of the pandemic so we are in front of Super Mex every weekend um encouraging folks to get vaxxed and making it accessible to people. Robert Bauman: Mhmm and what organizations or [inaudible] Alexia Estrada: That’s that’s through the Tri-Cities Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and then I worked for Latino Community Fund when I moved back from university um yeah and now I am with Heritage University. Robert Bauman: Okay, yeah um so you know you mentioned vaccination the pandemic COVID-19 you know studies have shown have impacted like non-white communities more heavily right.. Alexia Estrada: Mhmm. Yeah Robert Bauman: …economically, more illness, higher death rate that sort of thing; um so being involved in pop-up clinics what sort of impact have you seen on the Hispanic community here I wonder Alexia Estrada: Yeah, I think the way that our community receives information is through word of mouth and through trusted messengers and so what I have noticed that the most important thing is to really get trusted messengers out giving accurate information and I think there is a lot of stigma on folks not wanting to get vaccinated which part of it is true but I also think the accessibility piece was like number one so we intentionally had clinics on Saturdays in the afternoon and on Sundays because we knew our community was out working and that alone and the convenience of it and I’ve had folks tell me “I don’t have the stress of having to go do an appointment at Walgreens where they don’t speak Spanish and like the anxiety of it all,” “like ohh I was just going grocery shopping and you spoke to me in Spanish and we were able to get it without and appointment” and the convenience of it I think that was the biggest impact that or the biggest thing I learned was just accessibility and having trusted messengers. Robert Bauman: Mhmm yeah and you mentioned and I would assume language was… Alexia Estrada: Yeah Robert Bauman: …an important part of that right, yeah. Yeah that’s really interesting um what other um obviously so that’s been a really important issue the last couple of years Alexia Estrada: Mhmm Robert Bauman: Um what other issues do you see in the community sort of currently that you think are really important Alexia Estrada: Hmm Robert Bauman: Or ones that you've been involved in Alexia Estrada: Yeah I think one of the biggest ones is how do we educate our community on being involved in local government and I think how do we make it accessible but also how do we get knowledge out there and how do we empower folks to use their voice. Because a lot of times there is just no education, people don’t know how to fill out their ballot and maybe they are a citizen but they never filled out a ballot before and building that trust with like knowing that your vote does matter, I think that is one of the biggest issues I’ve seen. My grandpa voted recently and registered to vote [converses with Manuel Estrada in Spanish] Manuel Estrada: Yeah Alexia Estrada: Si so like just and knowing that it makes a big difference Robert Bauman: Sure Alexia Estrada: Um so I think just empowering folks to use their voice and know that their voice does matter and is heard is one of the biggest issues and then I also think that we are developing so rapidly as a city and my biggest fear is that folks are going to be left out and cooked out--kicked out of their spaces and their homes. I live in East Pasco and we currently have the Amazon buildings going up.. Robert Bauman: Yup, right Alexia Estrada: ..Those warehouses and I need to get more information on it myself but we’ve been told that that side is industrial and that’s zoned industrial so that’s why folks are able to build there and we don’t have anywhere else to go but when we look at the history of Tri-Cities we know that side was industrial because certain people lived on that side of the city. And so there is a trailer park right next to those Amazon warehouses that’s getting built and I am very curious to see in the next few years how we are going to work to protect the people that live there who have had that home for years and years. And so I think as we build and develop as a city how are we taking care of those in our community who have been here and keep room for them Robert Bauman: Right, so housing and as you mentioned also the ah politics right elections and um it sounds like you have been involved in all of those um sort of issues. Um so was it sort of growing up in the community and you said the boys and girls club and then that kind of led sounds like led to your involvement something.. Alexia Estrada: Yeah, I think.. Robert Bauman: Somethings in college anything I mean or combination of Alexia Estrada: A combination of everything, I think I just got really blessed like I have a lot of great mentors a lot of people I have poured into my life from. Miss Conner I don’t know if you are going to interview her. You should; Sabiha Khan, she was my high school teacher at Kamiakin and she influenced my life a ton she’s a mover and shaker here in the Tri-Cities. Um my boys and girls club mentor just people have continued to pour into my life and I am very grateful so I think; when I went to university our motto was like the motto of the university was is “Engage the Culture, Change the World” but what I learned there is that the way to change the world is to go back to your community and it happens in the small in the small spaces where people are not really paying attention that’s where the change happens so Robert Bauman: Mhmm Alexia Estrada: Moving back to Tri-Cities isn’t always something that people get excited for so [LAUGHTER] So um, it can be a hard move for a young adult um there is not much for young adults here yet so Robert Bauman: Right, yeah as you’ve been talking too I’ve been thinking about you know your grandfather’s story. Alexia Estrada: Hmm Robert Bauman: I wonder um the influence of his experiences and story… Alexia Estrada: Yeah Robert Bauman:.. What sort of influence does that have on you? Alexia Estrada: Mhmm. Well,um my grandpa here is a servant leader. I don’t think he’d call himself that, I don’t think he would call himself a community organizer either but um he’s also said he said he was a farm worker but he is also the pastor of a small church that serves um lamasomlida--like the most humble people in our community. And so uh just seeing how he shows up for other folks and the need that there are and the folks that come to his church; um that definitely influenced me and I also think holding on to stories that he shared, that my dad shared on everything that they’ve had to endure to get to where I am at now. Like I am college educated, I am able to go to city council meetings and attend and like understand what is happening and share and advocate and do all these things um because someone chose to immigrate here and work towards that for us so. Robert Bauman: Yeah so you mentioned a college education, was that something that was really emphasized a lot in your family. Were your parents able to go to college or are your first generation or what’s that? Alexia Estrada: My mom was able to go, she actually went to WSU in Pullman and I think that opened a lot of doors for me too and so there’s that and my dad was also super encouraging so um yeah. Robert Bauman: So education was-- Alexia Estrada: --Priority, yeah number one.[LAUGHTER] Robert Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Alexia Estrada: *interpret conversation in Spanish to Manuel Estrada* Manuel Estrada: Oh yeah, number one Alexia Estrada:Yeah [LAUGHTER] Robert Bauman: And so do you have brother sisters? Alexia Estrada:Yeah, I have four younger siblings Robert Bauman: Okay Alexia Estrada: We uh have a big age gap too. I’m going to be twenty five on Sunday and my little sister is ten years old--my youngest sister. So we have a few years in between us Robert Bauman: And uhh I wonder what sort of influence you're being on your-- with your younger sibling, do you think Alexia Estrada: I I am just sainly thought. I don’t know I think about that all the time. Like every generation has set up a new foundation um and my siblings are getting to grow up with a lot of different voices in the room and a lot of different opinions in the spaces and so we’ll see how they’ll navigate those and what they do with them Robert Bauman: Mhmm. Um so Alexia you know this is a university right, a lot of young people--we have a lot of “non-traditional students” but a lot of young people. What, what advice might you give a young person college age or someone that’s in college um about um like community engagement sort of things Alexia Estrada: Yeah. I would say that you are the expert. I don’t think we hear that enough as young people but you know your community, you’ve lived here, you have your own lived experiences and those are very valid and that’s your truth. And so I would say go confident in that and know that when you enter into spaces or maybe there are folks that have different experiences that are older or different generation, you also bring up a lot to the table and what you bring to the table is rich and so just being confident in that and knowing that you are the expert Robert Bauman: That’s great advice um I’m going to go back to Manuel and ask him some questions. Climaco Ivarka: *interprets question to Manuel in Spanish* Robert Bauman: Um, when you sit here next to your granddaughter and know what she has achieved in her young life so far, what sort of thoughts do you have as you see the young person she’s become and the younger generation Climaco Ivarka: *interprets question to Manuel in Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *responds in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: [interprets to English] He’s very proud of her, very happy. Robert Bauman: Mhmm Manuel Estrada: *continues response in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: [interprets gradually to English] Her confidence, that she’s-- since she’s young. I admire her alot. She sounds funny and she always counts on me for my support in all the areas. I’m very proud of her, it’s an honor. Alexia Estrada: Gracias Abuletio Robert Bauman: Have you ever given Alexia advice of any kind and if so what sort of advice have you given her Alexia Estrada: All the time [LAUGHTER] Climaco Ivarka: *interprets question to Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *questions in Spanish* Alexia Estrada: “converses with Manuel in Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *responds in Spanish* Alexia Estrada: Alot. Climaco Ivarka: [interprets to English] I would say many Manuel Estrada: *continues response in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: [interprets gradually to English] Lots of advice for her only benefit. Alexia Estrada: I think my grandparents they’re on Shoshone street they’re right by city hall and they both sit on the porch all the time and people come and visit them and talk to them and I- I’ve said that “that porch has heard all of the world’s conversations.” And so sometimes I would go by and I’ll see them and I’ll just drive over and go park and I’ll be like “hey, this is going on like what advice do you have for me” and I’m very surprised at how--I shouldn’t be surprised my grandpa is very wise and says a lot of things and oh “that’s really good.” And I think it’s just the importance of intergenerational relationships in our community; I think we really need that .But he gives me lots of good advice Alexia Estrada:*converses with Manuel in Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *replies in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: [interprets to English] I hope I give good advice. Manuel Estrada: *continues response in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: [interprets gradually to English] It’s difficult for our young generation, these times the life is very complicated, very difficult. For them there are responsibility from parents and if we have the opportunity we need to come to hand. Robert Bauman: So um Alexia as you look sort of forward a little bit, what um things would you like to see happening in the near future in the community? Alexia Estrada: Mhmm, yeah.. mmm Robert Bauman: Are there changes that you think still need to happen or that you'd like to see happen or… Alexia Estrada: Yeah, oh yeah. Um I think there is a lot of helpers and there is a lot of people at work already doing this stuff so it’s not really new but I’d love to see a um more capacity being given to it. But one of my passions that I really want to see happen here in the Tri-Cities is conversations around mental health and accessibility to that. I don’t think especially in the Latino community, I would love to see us be able to talk about and navigate conversations around dimensions more and and what is anxiety, what is depression but also what is joy and like how do we celebrate that. And I think with just how our society is set up we are all so busy working and we are all so busy trying to survive day by day um but I think those conversations really need to happen. So I’d love to see-- I would hope maybe one day I can come back and open up a community center or something where folks can come in and just receive culturally appropriate therapy and ahh I don’t know a lot of different things but I don’t think we have those conversations I see that. And I also think education on how much people's voice and vote does make a difference and why it’s important to vote for those who can’t Robert Bauman: Mhmm Alexia Estrada: Mmm, those things. Yeah Manuel Estrada: It’s fine. [CHUCKLE] Alexia Estrada:[LAUGHTER] Mhmm Robert Bauman:[CHUCKLE]. Is there anything I haven’t asked you or your grandpa Manuel or Alexia that you think would be important to talk about either about your family, story- immigration story, or community issues or anything Climaco Ivarka: *interprets question to Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *responds in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: [interprets gradually to English] Maybe yes, we come to this country, we come to work, we suffer. People say it’s the land of opportunities and it depends on our behavior what we accomplish or what we want or you lose the opportunity. In my case I worked a lot always labor work in the farm, I taught my kids to work. I wanted them to go to school get educated. They did not want to go to a school get educated now they have to learn to work, how to make a living out of it by working. And thanks alot I was able to accomplish maybe not what I wanted but I was able to get them a table of food before them. I have two sons that I am very proud of, the father of my granddaughter here he’s a very experienced worker hard worker entrepreneur. He has his businesses, he’s a good citizen; that’s satisfaction for me and I can say with honor that it was worth all my suffrage all my farming working times. I feel happy, I received the goods that was hard work for us to accomplish. I have my wife and my grandchildren who are very close to me that love me and I’m very happy. I remember through all the suffrage I had while I was working, I just want to say if someone is listening to me that it’s worth it and if god lets-gets us fly, one day we will be happy and enjoy what we. I’m very thankful for all the work that I did, I paid off at the end- it pays off at the end Manuel Estrada: Yeah Robert Bauman: Mhmm. How about you Alexia is there anything that you would like to add or anything that I haven’t asked about Alexia Estrada: Hmm I don’t know. I think just making sure you get all the voices in this room in front of this camera to share their story. I had I during one of the election years there was lot of just a lot of stuff going on and so that summer I said “you know what I am going to work in the fields ” and I want to know what it feels like and I want to be able to actually experience it. He went through all of it so I wouldn’t have to but I still chose to kind of go out there and um the people that I met in our community that work so hard to put foods on our tables, I want those stories to be heard. I got to work alongside a lady named Donyateray for weeks doing the apple [picking] and I think I learned more from here that summer that I would have learned from any other space so just making sure we get those folks here Robert Bauman: Yeah, absolutely. And so that reminds me one question that I will ask if you have other people we connect we can interview Alexia Estrada: Yeah I do actually. Yeah Robert Bauman: Absolutely, so we can talk about that afterwards Alexia Estrada: Sweet Robert Bauman: Yeah, that would be absolutely terrific. Um so I want to thank both of you very much for coming in today. Gracias, muchas gracias um really appreciate it um getting your stories hearing your stories, both of you. It’s really important we have it, the generational- Climaco Ivarka: *interprets in Spanish gradually* Alexia Estrada: Yeah Robert Bauman:- story is really really great. Alexia Estrada: We should’ve brought my dad. I was thinking about it too Robert Bauman: [LAUGHTER] We can bring him another time Alexia Estrada: Yeah I was thinking that Manuel Estrada: *comments in Spanish* Climaco Ivarka: [interprets gradually in English] Thank you for letting us having this privilege to express our stories I’m hoping that if somebody sees it it can benefit them, thank you for that for the time the opportunity that you gave us today we are here to serve in what we can Robert Bauman: Well thank you very much, muchas gracias Climaco Ivarka: *interprets in Spanish* Manuel Estrada: *responds in Spanish* Espanol: Dr. Bauman: Hay algunas cosas que tengo que decir antes de comenzar. Para que sea todo oficial. Marco Abarca: Hay algunas cosas que tengo que decir al inicio para hacerlo oficial. Dr. Bauman: Mi nombre es Robert Bauman. Yo estoy conduciendo una entrevista histórica oral junto con Marco Abarca quien será interprete el día de hoy. Marco: Mi nombre es Robert Bauman estoy conduciendo una entrevista oral con ustedes, junto con Marco Abarca quien será el intérprete. Dr. Bauman: Estamos conduciendo la entrevista con Alexia Estrada y Manuel Estrada Marco: La entrevista va a ser con Alexia Estrada y Manuel Estrada Dr. Bauman: El 12 de Julio del año 2022, Marco: El 12 de Julio del 2022 Bauman: Y la entrevista está siendo conducida en Washington State Tri-Cities Marco: La entrevista está conduciendo aquí en el WSU Tri-Cities Bauman: Otro requisito oficial. Alexia puedes pronunciar y escribir tu primer nombre y apellido, por favor. Alexia: Si. Alexia Estrada. A-L-E-X-I-A. Estrada, E-S-T-R-A-D-A. Bauman: Ahora, Manuel Marco: Usted puede decir su nombre Manuel: Manuel Estrada Alexia: M-A-N-U-E-L, E-S-T-R-A-D-A. Dr. Bauman: Gracias Entonces, Manuel. Creo que comenzare contigo, me pregunto si podrías platicar sobre, de lo que tengo entendido por correo electrónico con Alexia, usted llego de México. Podría contarnos sobre su vida allá y que lo llevo a irse y venir acá. Marco: Manuel voy a empezar contigo. Como nos contó tu nieta Alexia que llegaste aca de México nos podrías contar un poco de tu historia en México y como llegaste acá. Manuel: De México? Marco: Si, de México. Manuel: Pues soy mexicano y nací en un rancho y vivimos una vida normal en medio de la pobreza y muchas cosas de necesidad y todo. Salimos adelante a cierta edad, me dieron ganas de venirme a los estados unidos y me vine en el 77’, 1977 cruce para los estados unidos y desde entonces radico aquí en los estados unidos e ido a México a visitar, me estoy yendo (risas). Marco: Yes, I am Mexican. I was born in Mexico a small town, we had limited resources, we lived in poverty, we had necessities and i decided to come to the united states, i have returned. Si, soy mexicano. Yo nací en México, en un pueblo pequeño con pocos recursos, y vivimos en la pobreza con varias necesidades y decidí venirme a los estados unidos, y he regresado. Dr. Bauman: ¿Alrededor de que edad tenía cuando llego a los Estados Unidos? Marco: 1977’ dijo que vino en el 77’? Manuel: Si Marco: Si, la primera vez que llego fue en 1977. Alexia: ¿Y cuantos años tuviste? Manuel: ¿Donde? Alexia: Cuando viniste Manuel: Tenía 25 Marco: 25 años de edad Dr. Bauman: ¿Y conocía a alguien que estaba aquí en los estados unidos? ¿Cuándo se vino, vino a encontrarse con alguien? ¿O como llego, y como lo logro? Marco: ¿Cuándo llego acá a los estados unidos conocía a alguien cuando venía acá, o como llego aquí? Alexia: A Tri-Cities Manuel: A Estados Unidos o los Tri-Cities? Alexia: Los dos Marco: Aquí para empezar y luego... Primero los Estados Unidos, luego los Tri-Cities Manuel: Cuando entré a los estados unidos, me vino con un amigo, no conocía a nadie, empecé hacer amistades aquí, y así fue como recorrí mi vida Marco: Cuando entro a los estados unidos, vino con un amigo, no conocía a nadie, empezó hacer amistades aquí, y así fue como recorrió su vida Dr. Bauman: Fue algún lado antes de llegar a los Tri-Cities? Algún otro lugar Marco: Donde llego antes de llegar a los Tri-Cities? Manuel: Llegue a los angeles, tuve un tiempo pequeño en los angeles, de allí me vine a oregon, y no me gusto los angeles, no me gusto Oregon, me vine a Washington, y aquí me gusto, y aquí llegue a yakima Marco: Llego a los angeles, estuvo un tiempo pequeño en los ángeles, de allí se fue a oregon, y no le gusto los angeles, ni oregon, y se fue a Washington, y si le gusto Manuel: Allí viví nueve años, y allí me cambie para acá, y el resto lo he vivido aquí. Marco: Se mudo a Yakima, donde vivo nueve años y se mudó a los Tri-Cities Dr. Bauman : ¿Cuándo estaba en Yakima que tipo de empleo pudo encontrar? Marco: Cuando estaba en Yakima y después Tri-Cities que tipo de trabaja estaba usted haciendo? Manuel: El campo Marco: Trabajo de campo Manuel: El campo, la agricultura Bauman: ¿Cuándo se fue de México, tenía miembros de su familia? dejo familia allá? ¿Algún familiar llego en algún punto? Marco: Cuando usted dejo México, dejo familia, ¿vinieron su familia de allá para acá? ¿Como estuvo? Manuel: Si, deje a mis padres, a mis hermanos. De hecho, tres hijos pequeños que tenía. Marco: Si, dejo sus padres, sus hermanos, y tres hijos menores de edad, Manuel: Con el tiempo, lograron venirse también. Y ahora tengo familia en México y tengo familia aquí. Marco: Con el tiempo, pudieron venirse también. Y ahora tiene familia en México y aquí. Alexia: ¿Uno era mi papa verdad? Manuel: Si Alexia: Mi papa era uno de sus hijos Manuel: Si Dr. Bauman: Cuando llego a los Tri-Cities, como era la comunidad hispana cuando usted llego? Cuando primero llego Marco: ¿Cuándo llego usted aquí cómo era la comunidad hispana? Manuel: ¿Aquí? Marco: Aquí Manuel: Eran muy, muy pocos, no había casi hispanos. Había una o dos tiendas mexicanas. Era un rancho, con unas dos o tres patrullas. Todo muy pobre, se podía decir. Muy escaso, pocos hispanos, pero se fueron multiplicando y ahora tenemos una bella ciudad. Marco: Eran muy pocos, no había casi hispanos. Era un pueblo muy pequeño, con unas dos o tres patrullas. Todo muy pobre, se podía decir. Muy escaso, pocos hispanos, pero se fueron multiplicando y ahora tenemos una bella ciudad. Dr. Bauman: Cuando llego, donde encontró donde vivir, ¿al inicio cuando llego primero? Marco: ¿Cuándo llego aquí en donde llego a vivir? Manuel: A Pasco Llegue aquí el primero de enero del 87’ Marco: Llego aquí el primero de enero del 87’ Alexia: ¿Y viviste en la ciudad o en el rancho del campo? Manuel: En la ciudad Marco: Él vivió en la ciudad Alexia: Está bien Manuel: Con el tiempo, este, trabaje con un ranchero 22 anos, 18 anos de supervisor en el rancho, 4 anos como peón, con el tiempo me fui al rancho, me dio casa, llego el tiempo me retire y regrese a la ciudad, y ahora vivo en Pasco Marco: Trabaje en un rancho 22 anos, dieciocho años de supervisor, y los primeros cuatro años como trabajador regular, con tiempo me dio una casa en el rancho. Y me retire y regrese a la ciudad de Pasco, y vivo allí. Dr. Bauman: ¿Y cuantos hijos tiene? ¿Nietos? Marco: ¿Cuántos nietos o bisnietos? Alexia: ¿Cuántos hijos tienes? Manuel: Pues hijos no tengo muchos Marco: No tengo muchos hijos Manuel: Hijos, tengo tres. Pero nietos tengo dieciocho, y bisnietos nietos tengo cinco Marco: Tres hijos, dieciocho nietos, y bisnietos tengo cinco Dr. Bauman: ¿Todos están en esta región de Pasco? Manuel: No, unos están en Yakima Marco: Unos están en Yakima Manuel: En Yakima, pero otros aquí Marco: Y otros están aquí Dr. Bauman: Y usted a regresado a México? ¿Seguido? Marco: ¿Regresa a México seguido a mirar familia? Manuel: Antes iba seguido, pero ahora tengo unos seis años que no he ido Marco: Antes si, ahora tiene seis años que no ha regresado Dr.: Bauman: Está bien, Alexia ahora te voy a preguntar algunas preguntas Marco: Ahora le va a preguntar a su nieta Alexia: Si, muy bien Dr. Bauman: Como era crecer en la área de los Tri-Cities? Alexia: Si, era todo lo que conocía, pero era genial me encanto. Tuve la oportunidad de crecer en una vecindad muy cercana en Pasco. Yo vivía en una vecindad muy diversa, con diferentes religiones, etnias/raza, muy intergeneracional. Dr. Bauman: Se por mucha gente que estas muy involucrada en varias organizaciones, nos podrías contar un poco sobre eso: un poco sobre cómo, cuando, y porque te involucraste Alexia: Creo que. A ver donde comenzó, crecí atendiendo el club de niños y niñas, un programa después de la escuela, y esa oportunidad, y la iglesia, porque mi abuelo es pastor, creo que esas dos cosas combinadas inculcaron ese deseo de servir y hacer servicios. Y entonces cuando fui a colegio, y encontré mi universidad por el programa a cuál asistía después de escuela. Yo regrese y quise servir a la comunidad, y me involucre. Y creo que es algo que está creciendo en los Tri-Cities Estoy involucrada con un poco de diferentes organizaciones. Las clínicas emergentes están consumiendo mucho de mi tiempo, para asegurar que la comunidad sea vacunada por la pandemia, ahora estamos en frente de la Súper-Mex cada fin de semana alentando a la gente que se vacunen y ayudando a la gente con accesibilidad. Dr. Bauman: ¿Con cual organización es esto? Alexia: Con los hispanic commerance of chamber, y también trabaje con latino community fund cuando regrese de la universidad, y luego con Heritage University Dr. Bauman: Muy bien. Entonces, mencionaste las vacunaciones, y la pandemia COVID-19 Estadísticas han enseñado que han impactado a las comunidades latinas mucho más fuerte. Económicamente, en salud, y riesgos más altos de muerte, involucrada con las clínicas emergentes que impacto has visto en la comunidad hispana aquí Alexia: Creo, que la forma en que nuestra comunidad recibe información es de boca en boca, y mensajeros de confianza. Lo que yo he notado es poder enviar mensajeros de confianza, para poder mandarlos con la información correcta y para poder dar información precisa. Creo que también hay demasiado estigma sobre mucha gente que no quiere ser vacunados, y por parte es verdad, pero creo que la accesibilidad es número uno. Nosotros intencionalmente tuvimos las clínicas los sábados por las tardes y los domingos porque sabíamos que nuestra comunidad estaba trabajando y con solo eso ayuda. Mucha gente me ha dicho que sienten el estrés de tener que hacer una cita en Walgreens donde no hablan español. La ansiedad del proceso, han dicho que al ir de compras y les hablamos en español, y les ayudamos sin una cita. La conveniencia de todo creo que fue el impacto más grande, o lo que yo aprendí y la accesibilidad y mensajeros de confianza son importantes. Dr. Bauman: Como mencionaste, asumo que la barrera de lenguaje tuvo mucho que ver Alexia: Si. Dr. Bauman: Si, es muy interesante. ¿Que otro, obviamente ese a sido un tema bastante importante en los últimos anos. ¿Que otro problema has visto en la comunidad que son importantes, o cual es uno en el que has sido involucrada? Alexia: Si, creo que uno de los temas más grandes. Es como involucrarse con el gobierno, y creo que como hacerlo más accesible y poder agrandar el conocimiento de la gente y empoderar a la gente para usar sus voces. No hay educación o la gente no saben cómo llenar un folleto, o no sabían que tienen el derecho a votar. Saber que tu voto si importa, es uno de los temas/asunto que he visto. Mi abuelo voto recientemente. Y esta registrado para votar. Verdad, votaste Manuel: Yeah – Si. Alexia: Al saber que si se hace una diferencia grande Creo que, empoderando a la gente, para que utilicen su voz y que sepan que voz si importa y es escuchada es uno de los problemas más grandes. Y también creo que estamos desarrollándonos muy rápidamente en la ciudad, y mi mayor miedo es que la gente va a ser dejada atrás y sacada de sus espacios y hogares. Yo vivo en el este de Pasco, y actualmente tenemos los edificios de Amazon que están siendo construidos y las bodegas. Yo – necesito más información, pero nos han dicho que ese lado es industrial y es una zona industrial y por eso la gente puede construir allí y no tenemos a donde ir, pero si vemos el pasado de Pasco, se sabe que ese lado es industrial porque cierta gente vivió de ese lado y hay un parqueadero de traíllas a un lado, y me da curiosidad ver que será construido en los años que vienen, como vamos a proteger a la gente que ha vivido en esa área por años y años. Al construir y desarrollamos como una ciudad como cuidamos a esos que han estado en esta comunidad y como los mantenemos aquí. Dr. Bauman: Correcto, viviendo y como mencionaste también la política, elecciones suena que has estado involucrada en todos esos asuntos. ¿Entonces fue al crecer junto a la comunidad y el club de niños y niñas que te dirigió a involucrarte o fueron cosas de colegio? Alexia: Si. Bauman: O una combinación. Alexia: Si, una combinación de todo. Creo que fui bendecida. Tuve bastantes mentores, mucha gente ha podido... desde Ms. Conan, si la va a entrevistar, la debería entrevistar, Sevilla Con era mi maestra de la secundaria en Kamiakin y ella influencio mi vida bastante aquí en los Tri-Cities, mis mentores en el club de niños y niñas, y mucha gente que ha podida atribuir a mi vida. Estoy muy agradecida, y cuando fui a la universidad, la frase de la universidad era 'comprometer la cultura para cambiar el mundo,’ pero lo que aprendí allí era que la forma en cambiar el mundo es regresar a tu comunidad, y sucede el cambio en los espacios pequeños donde la gente no pone tanta atención y allí es donde sucede el cambio, entonces regresar a los Tri-Cities no es siempre algo que emociona a la gente. Puede ser una mudanza difícil para los jóvenes, todavía no hay demasiado para los jóvenes. Bauman: Correcto. Mientras has estado hablando, he pensado sobre la historia de tu abuelo. Me pregunto, como te ha influido su experiencia. Alexia: Si. Bueno, mi abuelo es un servidor para la gente, pero no creo que se llamaría eso ni tampoco se llamaría un organizador de la comunidad. Él también es trabajador agrícola pero también es pastor de una pequeña iglesia que le serve a lo más humilde, se refiere a la gente humilde en nuestra comunidad. Entonces al ver como él está allí para la gente y la necesidad de la gente que viene a la iglesia definitivamente me influencio y también creo que mantener sus historias. Seguir contando las historias que ha compartido, que mi papa ha compartido sobre todo que han tenido que sobresalir para llegar donde estoy ahora. Yo tengo mi educación universitaria y puede atender y participar en las juntas del consejo del pueblo, entender y compartir lo que está sucediendo y todas estas cosas porque alguien decidió emigrar aquí y trabajo duro para nosotros. Bauman: ¿Si, la educación universitaria era muy importante? ¿Pudieron tus padres asistir al colegio? ¿O eres primera generación? Alexia: Si, mi mama asistió al colegio. Mi mama fue a WSU en Pullman, y creo que eso me abrió demasiadas puertas también. Y mi papa también me estaba alentando, sí. Bauman: La educación era muy importante Alexia: Una prioridad, número uno. Bauman: Si Alexia: Verdad que la educación era muy importante Manuel: O, sí. Número uno. Alexia: Si. Bauman: ¿Entonces, tienes hermanos o hermanas? Alexia: Si. Tengo cuatro hermanos menores. Bauman: Está bien. Alexia: Si, tenemos una gran diferencia en edad también. Yo cumplo 25 el domingo y mi hermana pequeña tiene 10 años, la más pequeña. Tenemos algunos años entre nosotras. Bauman: Me pregunto, que embelleciendo has tenido en tus hermanos pequeños Alexia: Si. Yo no sé, yo pienso en eso todo el tiempo. Cada generación a creado una fundación, y mis hermanos están creciendo con diferentes voces y opiniones en todo aspecto. Tendremos que ver como navegan y que hacen con esas voces. Bauman: Alexia, esta es una universidad, verdad. Muchos jóvenes, y estudiantes no tradicionales. Alexia: Sí. Bauman: Que consejos le darías a un joven en la universidad sobre como involucrarse en la comunidad, Alexia: Yo diría que tú eres el experto. No creo que lo escuchamos lo suficiente como jóvenes. Pero conocemos nuestra comunidad, tú has vivido aquí. Cada uno ha tenido sus propias experiencias y son muy validas y son sus historias. Yo digo que confíen en eso y que sepan que cuando entren espacios... Hay gente que han tenido diferentes experiencias o son mayores o diferentes generaciones, tú también tienes mucho que contribuir y eso es importante, entonces tener confianza y saber que eres el experto. Bauman: Muy buenos consejos. Voy a volver con Manuel y preguntar unas preguntas Marco: Vamos a regresar con usted con unas cuantas preguntas. Bauman: Al estar sentado aquí con su nieta al saber lo que ella ha logrado en su vida cuáles son sus pensamientos al ver la joven en la que se convierte y en la generación. Marco: ¿Ahorita que está sentado cercas de su nieta lo que ella ha logrado hasta ahorita, como se siente usted? Manuel: Muy orgulloso, de ella muy contento. Marco: Muy muy orgulloso, está muy feliz. Manuel: Si, de los logros que ha tenido Marco: Sus logros que ha logrado Manuel: Es una joven esforzada, valiente, es una de las cosas que le admiro mucho Y creo que ella cuenta conmigo y siempre ha contado y seguirá contando con mi apoyo en todas las áreas Marco: Esta joven, la admiro mucho. Ella cuenta conmigo y siempre contara con mi apoyo, en todas las áreas. Es un orgullo para mí lo que ella ha logrado Marco: Estoy muy orgulloso de ella. Alexia: Gracias abuelito Bauman: ¿Le ha dado algún consejo a Alexia? ¿Qué tipos de consejos le ha dado? Alexia: Todo el tiempo Marco: ¿Le da usted consejos a su nieta? Manuel: Mande Marco: Le ha dado consejos a Alexia Alexia: ¿Y si, cuáles consejos? ¿Cuáles tipos de consejos me has dado? Manuel: Pues yo creo que son varios Alexia: Bastante Marco: Muchos Manuel: SI, varios consejos Marco: Muchos consejos Manuel: Para su beneficio. Marco: Por su bien Alexia: Yo creo que mis abuelos, están en la calle Shoshone St a lado del consejo del pueblo y los dos se sientan en el porche todo el tiempo y la gente los visitan y platican con ellos. Y yo he dicho que ese porche ha escuchado todas las conversaciones del mundo. Y entonces a veces pasare y los vere y me estaciono y les digo ‘hola, esto está sucediendo que consejos me pueden dar’ y me sorprende, no debería de sorprenderme mi abuelo es muy sabio. Dice muchas cosas y pienso que es lo importante de relaciones intergeneracional en nuestra comunidad Y creo que necesitamos eso y me da muy buenos consejos, buenos consejos me das. Manuel: Bueno, eso espero Marco: Espero dar buenos consejos. Manuel: Esta difícil para la juventud en estos tiempos Marco: Es difícil para la generación de jóvenes en estos tiempos Manuel: Muy dura la vida Marco: La vida es muy complicada para Manuel: Muy poca responsabilidad de los padres Marco: Muy poca la responsabilidad para los padres Manuel: Y pues nosotros que tenemos la oportunidad hay que echarles la mano, ayudarlos Marco: Darles una mano y ayudarlos Bauman: Alexia, tu que miras hacia adelante que te gustaría ver en el futuro cercano? Alexia: Si Bauman: Algunos cambios que todavía tienen que pasar o que deberían pasar Alexia: Si. O, sí. Yo creo que hay muchos ayudantes y mucha gente que está trabajando en eso, no es algo nuevo, pero me encantaría verlo. Mucha más capacidad dada, pero una pasión mía que me gustaría ver, conversaciones sobre la salud mental y la accesibilidad a eso. No creo que, especialmente en la comunidad latina, me encantaría ver y poder hablar y navegar conversaciones sobre las emociones. Sobre que es la ansiedad, la depresión, ¿y que es la felicidad? ¿Y cómo lo celebramos? Y yo creo que como nuestra sociedad está rodeada estamos todos trabajando y tratando de sobrevivir el día a día. Pero creo que esas conversaciones son necesarias, espero poder regresar un día y poder abrir un centro comunitario donde la gente puede venir y recibir terapia apropiada para nuestra cultura y algunas otras cosas. No sé, bastante cosas, pero no creo que tengamos ese tipo de conversaciones, yo veo que eso falta. Y también veo que la educación en cuanto la voz de la gente y sus votos si hacen la diferencia. Y porque es importante votar por los que no pueden, esos asuntos. Manuel: Está bien. Bauman: Hay algo que no les he preguntado o a tu abuelo, Manuel o Alexia que creen que son importantes para platicarlo sobre su familia, su historia, su historia migratoria, ¿o sobre la comunidad? Marco: Hay algo que no le hemos preguntado sobre usted sobre su historia que cree que debe contarnos, que se quedó sin decir, ¿pero cree que sería bueno decirlo? Manuel: Pues este, tal vez sí. La historia es que viene uno a este país Marco: Posiblemente si, se viene a este país Manuel: a trabajar Marco: Se viene a trabajar Manuel: se sufre, pero como sigue diciendo la gente es un país de las oportunidades y depende del comportamiento de uno. Si uno logra lo que quiere o pierde la oportunidad. Marco: Se sufre, pero como dice la gente es el país de las oportunidades. Depende en el comportamiento de uno, si se cumple lo que uno quiere o se pierde la oportunidad Manuel: Yo en mi caso trabaje mucho, siempre en la labor en el campo. A mis hijos les ensene a trabajar. Yo quería que estudiaran, no quisieron el estudio pues tiene que aprender a trabajar como ganarse la vida, trabajando. Marco: En mi caso trabaje mucho, siempre la labor, les ensene a mis hijos a trabajar. Yo quise que fueran a la escuela, pero no quisieron y tuvieron que trabajar. Manuel: Y gracias a dios logre, quizás no lo que quería, pero logre un bienestar para mi vida y para mis hijos. Tengo dos hijos varones, de los cuales estoy orgulloso de ellos. El papa de aquí, de mi nieta. Un varón trabajador, un empresario, tiene sus propios negocios. El otro es un buen trabajador también, buen ciudadano. Y para mi es una satisfacción y puedo decir con un orgullo que valió la pena lo que sufrimos en el campo lo que trabajamos, ahora me siento contento del fruto que algún día nos costó mucho para lograrlo. Tengo mi esposa, mis nietos que están muy acercados a mí que me quieren y los quiero. Y soy feliz Recuerdo los sufrimientos, los trabajos, pero quiero decir que, si alguien escucha, vale la pena, vale la pena si el señor nos presta vida. Marco: Tengo dos hijos varones, de los cuales estoy orgulloso de ellos. El papa de aquí, de mi nieta. Un varón trabajador, un empresario, tiene sus propios negocios. El otro es un buen trabajador también, buen ciudadano. Y para mi es una satisfacción y puedo decir con un orgullo que valió la pena lo que sufrimos en el campo lo que trabajamos, ahora me siento contento del fruto que algún día nos costó mucho para lograrlo. Tengo mi esposa, mis nietos que están muy acercados a mí que me quieren y los quiero. Y soy feliz Recuerdo los sufrimientos, los trabajos, pero quiero decir que, si alguien escucha, vale la pena, vale la pena si el señor nos presta vida. Manuel: Un día disfrutamos lo que cosechamos lo que algún día sembramos. Y doy gracias a dios por mi familia. Marco: Y le doy gracias a dios por mi familia, todo vale la pena al fin. Bauman: ¿Y tú Alexia, algo que te gustaría agregar? ¿Algo que no he preguntado? Alexia: No se. Creo que asegurarse de capturar todas las voces en este cuarto en frente de esta cámara para compartir sus historias. Durante las elecciones, había mucho que sucedió. Ese verano decidí ir a trabajar al campo para tener esa experiencia, el paso por todo eso para que yo no tuviera que pasar por eso. Pero yo decidí ir. La gente que conocí de nuestra comunidad que trabaja muy duro para poner comida en nuestras mesas, yo quiero que sus historias sean escuchadas. Pude trabajar junto con una señora, Doña Tere por varias semanas, en la manzana. Creo que aprendí más de ella ese verano que en cualquier otro lugar. Asegurarse de escuchar sus voces, y traerlos qui. Bauman: Eso me recuerda. Tienes a otra gente para recomendar. Antes de irte, me gustaría hablar contigo sobre eso. Alexia: Absolutamente Bauman: Quiero agradecerles mucho, a los dos por venir el día de hoy. Muchas gracias, muchas gracias. Marco: Muchas gracias por haber venido, por compartir su historia. Se aprecia mucho, escuchando las historias de ambos. Bauman: Se les aprecia mucho. Por escuchar su historia, a los dos. Muy importante, la historia generacional Marco: Las historias generacionales y intergeneracionales. Alexia: Hubiera traído a mi papa, lo estaba pensando también. Bauman: Lo pueden traer otro día Manuel: Muchas gracias a ustedes por permitirlos este privilegio, por decir yo. Marco: Gracias por dejarnos tener este privilegio. Manuel: Por poder expresar algo de nuestra vida esperando que si alguien mira con beneficio. Gracias por el tiempo y la oportunidad que nos dan. Estamos para servir en lo que podamos Marco: Poder expresar nuestra vida, si alguien lo mira. Gracias por el tiempo y la oportunidad. Estamos aquí para servir en lo que se pueda. Bauman: Bueno, gracias. Muchas gracias. Marco: Muy bien dicho. Manuel: No hay de que. <div class="capti-toolbox-close"> </div> <div> </div>