42 50 4772 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F82c0a0a33dac0ed909ac8ac2a2a2f92e.jpg c58a9f7c1c60cd487d4d47d1154594a9 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F27dee9e94a824f3bbe65bb5565f8902a.mp4 1c2a49f1944dd0e9b5e5139e5eaf223c 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 Parker Foundation Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Nuclear science; Richland, Wa.; Hanford, Wa.; Parker, Herbert, 1910-1984 Description An account of the resource "The Herbert M. Parker Foundation collects valuable personal perspectives from key individuals who worked in radiological and environmental protection at the Hanford site in the early years of its development. Since 2004, student interns have recorded interviews from health physics and related science professionals. These historically valuable interviews document their personal experiences, observations, contributions and ideas. Several of the distinguished professionals who have spoken at the Annual Herbert M. Parker Lecture are also included. The videotaped interviews and accompanying biographical sketches will be made accessible to the public." See https://tricities.wsu.edu/parkerfoundation/ParkerHistory Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 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. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Bill McMurray Description An account of the resource An interview with Bill McMurray conducted by the Herbert M. Parker Foundation at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Herbert M. Parker Foundation at Washington State University Tri-Cities https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F1f3f2ad4eabfdc6465a8afa210779012.jpg 269c664e01e416ed126dfd99c1175b8c https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F7daa69ce21ddcd39044ef6f3581c873d.mp4 9cadf5113faa28298003da2a0f4ba0f5 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Bauman, Robert Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Rickard, Bill Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Northwest Public Television | Rickard_Bill Robert Bauman: Turn the microphone on here. Man one: Yeah. Bauman: Okay. Man one: Go ahead and just get comfortable. And whenever you’re ready. Bauman: Okay. All right. We're going to go ahead and get started. I need to put my glasses on so I can see what I’m doing here. So if we could start first by just having you say your name and then spell your name for us. William Rickard: Okay. My name is William H. Rickard Jr. W-I-L-L-I-A-M H. R-I-C-K-A-R-D Junior, J-R period. Bauman: Thank you. And my name's Robert Bauman. Today's date is December 4, 2013. And we are conducting this interview on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. So maybe we could start by just having you tell us a little bit about your background--where you're from, when you came to Hanford, what brought you here, that sort of thing. Rickard: Okay. Well, the first time that I ever heard the words atomic bomb, I was rifleman in an infantry company for the Chinese combat command in a place in China called Chihkiang. Chihkiang was a dirt airstrip. There were about 100 soldiers there. Our main duty was to guard an ammunition dump at an airfield. In August, 1945, I'd been in the Army for 15 months. I was 19 years old. The captain called us together and said that United States Air Force had dropped a bomb in Japan. It was an atomic bomb. Of course, I was extremely glad that the war was over. It was a few days later, I stood on the same airstrip and a Japanese airplane flew in. Only I'd been in the Army in January, February, and March, and April along the Burma Road in China. During that stay in Burma, slept on the ground every night. Kept my M1 rifle with me all the time. When I got to China, I got a bed for the first time in four months. So Chihkiang duty was pretty soft compared to Burmese duty. And when they dropped the atomic bomb, I knew I would be going home. Well, they had a point system in the Army. I think you needed 65 points. And you got points for combat experience and so forth. Well, I was one point short. So guess what. I got assigned to a military police company in Shanghai, China. For six months, I was an MP in Shanghai, which is probably more dangerous than my stay at Chihkiang. But anyway, I finally got home. Like most veterans did, I used the GI Bill to get a degree. I graduated from the University of Colorado in 1950 with a degree in botany. And I got a job at the University of Colorado at that time installing weather stations in the Front Range. While I had a job, I decided to go to school some more, and I wanted to be a high school teacher so I could teach botany and biology. Well, I graduated from Colorado in 1950 and got a master's degree in 1953. And then I decided, well, maybe I ought to think of teaching in college. So I applied for a research assistant appointment at Pullman. So in 1953, Barbara, my wife, and I went to Pullman. And there I graduated in 1957 with a Ph.D. with Dr. Daubenmire. The first job I got was as assistant professor of biology at New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas, New Mexico. But it was a part time teaching job. The other part was a field research job at the Nevada Test Site. And the purpose of my work at the Nevada Test Site was to study the impacts of atomic explosions on the botanical aspects of the Nevada Test Site—Yucca, Frenchman Flat and Jackass Flat. I worked there for four years and saw the last above ground explosion, which was during the operation of Project Hardtack and Plumbbob. While I was at the Test Site, I met Jared Davis, who was working at Hanford. He was in the biology department and he offered me a job at Hanford. So I moved to Richland in 1960 and was employed by the General Electric Company. At that time, most of the interest was on developing peaceful uses of atomic energy. And one of these was to use nuclear explosion to dig a harbor at Cape Thompson in Alaska. And part of our job there was to get baseline data on the biota of the Arctic, and also to measure how much radioactivity had already been deposited by the years of nuclear testing by the United States and Russia. So that was the start of that. And I worked up there for a couple of summers. And I worked with Jerry Davis there, and Wayne Hanson, Don Watson, and Roy Nakatani, and Leo Bustad, and Frank Hungate. Frank was my boss for a while. And Jared Davis was the boss. But my real interest at Hanford was, although I did the uptake of radioactivity from soil to plants, I was really interested in perhaps getting a part of the Hanford site set aside as a kind of a research park. Had lots of help from various people that thought this was a good idea, particularly Rexford Daubenmire at Pullman and Herb Parker, who was manager of the Hanford Laboratories. We conceived the idea perhaps establishing Rattlesnake Mountain as a research natural area. And with the help of other people, particularly Benton County Commissioner at that time, and the building of the Highway 240 from Richland to Vernita Bridge, that set Rattlesnake Mountain apart from the rest of the site and offers a good excuse to--since it was primarily a buffer zone, that this would be a good place to establish the reserve, which eventually turned out to be the Arid Land Ecology Reserve. Which in 2000, was turned over to the Fish and Wildlife Service as a part of the Hanford Reach National Monument. So most of my research activity was done on ALE Reserve after the work we'd done in Alaska. Bauman: And so what sorts of work were you doing at ALE Reserve? Rickard: Well, the first project we started on was the impact of cattle grazing on shrub steppe. And we did that in conjunction with the International Biological Research Program--yeah, International Biological Research Program, which was divided up into various sections. One part was grasslands of North America. And the ALE Reserve is representative of sagebrush steppe vegetation in the Northwestern United States. There were other sites in New Mexico, Kansas, Colorado, Montana, North and South Dakota. And that lasted for several years. Then as time went on, I got older. And most of the work that I did was then associated with environmental impact statements. Even did the first environmental impact statement from what was the WPPSS plant at that time--the Basalt Waste Isolation Program. And I finally retired sometime. I don't know. Can't remember. I was 65 years old. But while I worked for the General Electric Company, I also taught school at an Army barracks down where the bus lot is today. And I taught the first class in plant ecology. And among my students over the years was Lester Eberhardt, Dick Fitzner, and Dennis Dauble, and Brett Tiller, president of Environmental Assessment Services. So for 30 years, I've taught as an adjunct professor at Washington State University in the Tri-Cities. Bauman: And where was that located again, when you first started teaching at the Army? Rickard: It was an Army barracks. That was the building that was the beginning of the WSU campus. One of my first students was Les Eberhardt, Dick Fitzner, which later were killed in an airplane accident in the Yakima Firing Center. But over the years, many people that worked at Hanford had taken my classes. Bauman: I want to go back, if we can, to when you were talking about your work in New Mexico, at the Nevada Test Site—it’s interesting. What sorts of things did you find in your research there? Rickard: Well, one of the first things that--these were small explosions—ten to 40 kiloton range, maybe up to 100. And they fired them one a week. Of course, when you watch one of these things from ten miles away, from a shot that's on a tower, maybe 500 or 600 feet off the ground, first thing you'd see is just a flash of light and then as the ball forms, it's just a whole mess of colors--purple, orange. And then it disappears and a whole lot of activity, just a massive amount of activity. And then things catch on fire. There's creosote bush, yucca trees a mile away just ignite like kitchen matches. And then the cloud develops and the big stem and the mushroom cloud. But the vegetation just disappears. It's just cooked. But even after a few summers, the surviving vegetation comes back. And the physicists at the test site that made these things, people from Los Alamos and Livermore, about the only thing they noticed that after a year or two after the explosion, that the ground was bare and then it would get green. And that was a big surprise to the physicists. But was quite common to plant ecologists, because the plant was Russian thistle. It would blow across the landscape, scatter seeds, and the first invading plant was Russian thistle. Just like at Hanford, where you plow up a field and leave it, what do you get? Russian thistle, and then a whole lot of other plants come in. And in time, it would recover because most of the radioactivity wasn't at the site, it was gone. It went someplace else. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: Hmm. Interesting. And then your work in Alaska-- Rickard: Yes. Bauman: What sorts of things did you find in your research there? Rickard: Well, the main thing there was my colleague, Wayne Hanson, he was interested in the food chain of American Eskimos, and the fallout from nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific and Russia and various places. The northern hemisphere got most of the fallout, and in heavy fallout areas, with rain, like in Arctic Alaska. And the flora there was occupied--a great part of it was lichens and mosses, which were the food of caribou. Radioactive fallout comes down with rain and snow. And if you have a long lived plant, it keeps accumulating on the leaves until the leaves drop. And then they hit the ground and decompose, and cesium and strontium, which are about a half-life of 30 years, eventually get into the soil and then can recycle. In Alaska, the mosses and lichens, they don't die right away. And they keep accumulating radionuclides, and builds up so that it has very high levels of radionuclides as compared to trees that drop their leaves, grasses that die. And lichens are an important food of caribou in the wintertime. So they accumulated large burdens of radiocesium. And then the people, the diet of the American Indians and Eskimos of Alaska consisted of caribou meat. So the people had higher levels of radiocesium than people in the United States. That's a health physics concern, which is like Ron Kathren, that's their job. Bauman: Yeah. So you talked ALE a little bit, and your involvement in that. And you mentioned Benton County Commissioner. Do you remember a Benton County Commissioner who was-- Rickard: I don't remember his name, but he loved wildflowers. And at that time, the county was interested in building a road from Prosser to Vernita Bridge. They wanted to go through Snively Canyon. But the Department of Energy didn't think that was a good idea. But we had to convince the county that it wasn't a good idea. And the county commissioner, he decided that he ought to side with the Department of Energy. Bauman: So what was it about—why the desire to create ALE, I guess? What was it about the area that you thought was-- Rickard: Just the desire to create a natural area, probably dates back to the days of Theodore Roosevelt setting apart National Forests and National Parks. And we have nice National Parks in the country--Mount Rainier in Washington, and Olympic, all representing mostly forested areas. Rocky Mountain National Park, Yosemite. But nobody was interested in saving sagebrush, sagebrush grass habitats. This was primarily because sagebrush was not viewed as a useful resource. In fact, it was a pest. And rangeland managers thought it was a good idea to get rid of it. And when the first travelers crossed southern Idaho, they burned it because it provided fuel. But they hated it because it didn't provide any food for their cattle or sheep. So it was then regarded as a pest. And every Bureau of Land Management started campaigns to get rid of it. But before you got rid of it, we had to understand if it had any good. But this was a tough sell. You're not going to sell this, that keeping it has any benefits. But it's also wise if you have a resource that you can destroy it, or at least you ought to understand how it works. It's been here a long time, and learn the mechanics that has enabled it to stay this way. And the biggest threat to the shrub steppe was people. When Lewis and Clark came here, there was several resources in Washington State that people could use right away. One was the fish, one was the forest, the other was grass. So it's no surprise our first white people in Washington used the grass. They brought in cattle and sheep. Then came the magnificent discovery of the plow that now you plow up this stuff and raise crops. You could even raise more crops with irrigation. So it started to disappear. Half the sagebrush steppe in Washington disappeared by 1914. So this resource was getting smaller and smaller. So at least some of the people think that, well, maybe we ought not get rid of it all. And the Hanford site was an unusual opportunity to do this, because people who were farming were moved. This is the first time in history that a productive, cultivated land was converted to a lower use instead of a higher use. Higher uses are urban areas, places like Hanford, industry. Lower uses are cattle grazing. But the highest use of all is probably research and education. So here we have an opportunity where we had towns completely destroyed, abandoned productive fields that are now allowed to go revegetate by themselves. And they have. For the last 70 years it's been slowly changing back to what it would be, but it's been impeded by a lot of alien species that came with agriculture. Among these are cheatgrass, Russian thistle, and others. So it's important to have a place where you can just monitor the changes that take place over time. Bauman: I want to also ask you about something that you're involved in, the National Environmental Research Park? Rickard: Yes. Bauman: Could you explain that, what that was? Rickard: It was the national--all the DOE sites--not all, but most of them--belonged to the National Environmental Research Park. Oak Ridge, Savannah River, Hanford, Los Alamos. I think those are the--and Savannah River, yeah. And the purposes of the park was just to serve as places where we could do ecological research in different kinds of ecosystems. Bauman: So there are scientists at each of those places and parks? Rickard: There were scientists at each--it was never as popular at Hanford as it was with the other parks, partly because ALE Reserve had already been set aside acting as a National Environmental Research park before the other sites. Idaho is also a member. The Department of Energy, as far as I know, decided not to support that, but did support ALE. Bauman: We're going to go back to when you first came to work at Hanford, 1960. Had you been here before? Rickard: I was here--I went to Pullman in '53. And I'd been to Richland. Bauman: What were your first impressions of Richland, have you thought-- Rickard: Well at the time, I thought it was kind of--a lot of other places in Washington I'd rather be. [LAUGHTER] I think it was in August when Barbara and I--we got here in September. No, in '53, Barbara and I drove down from Pullman to Celilo Falls because I wanted to see Celilo Falls before it got covered up by a dam. We stopped in Pasco, and it was 112. [LAUGHTER] 112 degrees in the shade. We decided this wasn't a real nice place. Of course, we'd been at Indian Springs, Nevada, too. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: So what about when you came back in 1960 then, what did you think of the place? Rickard: Well, I was impressed, really, mainly with the people. When I worked at the 100-F Area, the first couple of days I stood by the 100-F Reactor and thought that maybe in a few years that this reactor would be closed down and that there'd be Russian thistle growing around the edge of it. The N Reactor closed in 1965. So in the five years that I was here, the F Reactor wasn't working anymore. I thought that was probably a good thing. Bauman: So you worked initially for General Electric? Rickard: General Electric, yeah. Battelle came in '65. Then I joined Battelle, so I was one of the first people. Bauman: So did you work essentially sort of in different places all over the site? Rickard: I did. I was on the ALE reserve at the old Army camp. At the buildings there for ten years, perhaps. I was at 331 Building. When I retired I still worked as part time for Battelle—PNNL then. And in other years, I've worked with the--what was the—NORCUS program. It was a DOE-sponsored, program where faculty and students from the campus here, could be assigned to PNNL and work. And I did that for a number of years too. And many of the graduate students that we had came through the NORCUS program to PNNL. And we had students from all over the country that spent summers here at Hanford working on ALE. We had graduate students that worked on elk. The first studies of elk on the Hanford site were done by graduate students. They had people studying small mammals, bald eagles, deer, coyotes. I don't know how many graduate students from the University of Washington, Montana, Oregon State that over the years actually got master's and doctorate degrees through what was then NORCUS programs. Bauman: So it was a teaching place as well? Rickard: Teaching program too, yeah. Bauman: Wanted to ask you--President Kennedy visited this site in 1963 to dedicate the N Reactor. Do you have any memories, or were you there when he was here? Rickard: No. I remember when he was here, but I didn't go to the celebration. I think I was probably out of town or maybe assigned to someplace else in the '60s. Bauman: I wonder, of the different kinds of work that you did at Hanford, the different projects you worked on, what was sort of the most challenging thing that you worked on, and maybe the most rewarding part of your work? Rickard: Oh, I think probably the most rewarding part was the working with students, working with the actual people. And then I think the day that the Arid Land Reserve appeared on the map. Bauman: Sure. Rickard: That was probably the-- Bauman: And what about the most challenging aspect of your work--was anything that— Rickard: Oh, I never found them particularly challenging. I just took heart--I think one of the professors at Washington State told me, research is about 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. So, it's work, but it's enjoyable. And there's always some satisfaction in learning something you didn't know before, no matter how small it is. I don't imagine it's nearly as important as somebody that discovers a cure for cancer or heart disease or something. But it's pleasant when you can just discover something that you didn't know before. Bauman: So when you look back at your years working at Hanford, overall, how would you assess Hanford as a place to work? Rickard: I think it's been a good ride. I liked teaching, but I enjoyed the research more. I'm more of a researcher rather than a teacher. But I think they belong together. Bauman: Is there anything that--event or incident or something that happened when you were working at Hanford sort of stands out in your memory that-- Rickard: Oh, I think the thing that probably stands out, not in a good sense, but it was when Les Eberhardt--[EMOTIONAL] [VIDEO CUTS OFF] Rickard: I'm sorry about that. Bauman: That's fine. No problem at all. Okay. So I just have one or two more questions. One was, I wanted to ask you about--so you started in 1960. Rickard: Yes. Bauman: I wonder what sort of changes you saw take place at Hanford--either in technology or in what was being done. Rickard: Oh, there's been lots of advances since I started. Certainly computers, GPS, DNA analysis. All these things advanced field research. DNA is very useful now in plant taxonomy. A recent case about the White Bluffs bladderpod. Perhaps you know about the White Bluffs bladderpod, an endangered species. Argument whether it's a real species in danger or whether it's just a variety of a more common species of bladderpod. So I think probably Endangered Species Act has a great deal to do with the desire of people to protect rare endangered species. And certainly, the Arid Land Ecology Reserve does that very well. It preserves samples of native vegetation, and the impacts that people have had on the natural environment. Particularly in Native American people and their view of the environment is much different than the people that want to use the environment. So all these technological advances have helped answer these questions. Bauman: Obviously, at some point, the mission at Hanford shifted to cleanup from production. Did that start happening while you were working at Hanford? And if so, how did that impact what you were doing, or did it? Rickard: Well, Hanford has a long history of recognizing that particularly the production reactors were releasing radionuclides into the river and to the ground. And there was a great deal of concern of whether these radionuclides and associated toxic metals really had an impact on the river and the biota that use the river. Over the years, the number of Canada geese that nest on the islands has been well documented. During the years the reactor operations, geese populations increased. Populations of bald eagles increased. Populations of deer decreased. Populations of quail increased. Even though with the closure of the reactors, some animals have not increased. When you got people work--there was no hunting. There was no grazing. There was no farming. But some of the animals continued to go down. Two of these--one was the sage grouse. Another one was the sage sparrow. These animals, the birds, depend upon sagebrush. Sage grouse eat sagebrush. Sage sparrows, they nest in sagebrush. Although you can destroy sagebrush by plowing or burning, burning has always been a part of the shrub steppe. It always takes out the shrubs. In time, the shrubs comes back. It burns, the shrubs disappear. And if the area is very large, the amount of fire is very small. So that there are substantial populations of sage sparrows and sage grouse that as the sagebrush returns by itself, they move back. Got down to the point where you have a small amount of sagebrush and if it burns, it takes years to come back. And even though at Hanford, it wasn't destroyed by farming anymore, fires have been a tremendous impact. So the number of acres of mature sagebrush today is very small. Not because it's been plowed, but simply because we had a lot of wildfires. And the sage grouse disappeared in 1960. The sage sparrow is nearly there now. So the sage grouse is now up for consideration to be an endangered species. It might be a good idea to restore sagebrush to Hanford, or sage grouse to Hanford by planting sagebrush. Bauman: So I guess one last question then. In your years of studying the ecology of the area here, what was sort of the most significant impact of the Hanford site on the ecology of the area? Rickard: Well, land use on the Hanford site, it's been different. It's different. There's no place else in Washington that ever supported plutonium production. It's the only place where productive land has ever been stopped agriculturally. I think it's important just for us to keep watching and monitoring and reporting this as time goes by. I think that's the future of it. It'll be cleaned up. But we've got to decide what to do next. And in my opinion, I think probably that if we were really interested in saving sage grouse, for example, on the Hanford site, that the best use would be a commercial nuclear power plant. Occupy a very small area. Develop the rest of the land back to habitat suitable for sage sparrows and sage grouse, and use it for recreational purposes. I don't think that the public is going to go for farming or things like that. So a combination of industrial facilities with wide areas of natural habitat would be the most likely use. That's my opinion. Bauman: Well, is there anything that we haven't talked about that you would like to discuss, or anything I haven't asked you about? Rickard: I think I'm pretty well exhausted. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: Well I, want to thank you very much for coming in today and sharing your experiences. Rickard: Well, I certainly appreciate your help here. Bauman: Thank you very much. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:42:32 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 194 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 100-F Area Reactor N Reactor F Reactor Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1960-2013 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1960-? Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Davis, Jerry Hanson, Wayne Watson, Don Nakatani, Roy Bustad, Leo Hungate, Frank Parker, Herb Kathren, Ron Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Bill Rickard Description An account of the resource An interview with Bill Rickard conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Subject The topic of the resource Hanford (Wash.) Hanford Site (Wash.) Hanford Nuclear Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013-12-4 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2016-07-22: Metadata v1 created – [RG] 100-F Area Reactor F Reactor General Electric N Reactor Richland (Wash.) https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fd382783712b08bf6be307544059c5fbe.jpg 46556228b49e4c6eab15739db2de54e7 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fbbc20f3443e5cfe89816dac5e3ab14e6.mp4 378fc26a4317e76e45c83dd6f7f76697 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 Parker Foundation Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Nuclear science; Richland, Wa.; Hanford, Wa.; Parker, Herbert, 1910-1984 Description An account of the resource "The Herbert M. Parker Foundation collects valuable personal perspectives from key individuals who worked in radiological and environmental protection at the Hanford site in the early years of its development. Since 2004, student interns have recorded interviews from health physics and related science professionals. These historically valuable interviews document their personal experiences, observations, contributions and ideas. Several of the distinguished professionals who have spoken at the Annual Herbert M. Parker Lecture are also included. The videotaped interviews and accompanying biographical sketches will be made accessible to the public." See https://tricities.wsu.edu/parkerfoundation/ParkerHistory Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 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. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Bill Rickard Description An account of the resource An interview with Bill Rickard conducted by the Herbert M. Parker Foundation at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Herbert M. Parker Foundation at Washington State University Tri-Cities https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fcf048689636f43deed4c23ae7d4d4d14.jpg dc383eed74d4438fdac9c7ad9c068eca https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F3841380e69217cef6aa70840d8479a53.mp4 e48c0d6128bcde0bbba8a20ce7f31cef Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Bauman Robert Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Tyler, Bill Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Northwest Public Television | Tyler_William Robert Bauman: Now you can give it right back to her? William Tyler: Yeah, I plan on it. Man One: Exactly. All right, get this off your face there. Bauman: Does your daughter live here in Richland? Tyler: She lives right across the street from me. Bauman: Oh, does she? Oh, there you go. Well, you can really give it to her then. [LAUGHTER] She can't avoid you. Tyler: Well in fact, we work together at HAMMER. Man one: I’m rolling. Bauman: All right. Well I think we're ready to get started. So let's start by having you say your name and also spell it for us. Tyler: My name is William T. Tyler. W-I-L-L-I-A-M, T, T-Y-L-E-R. Bauman: And you go by Bill? Tyler: Bill, yeah. Bauman: All right. And today's date is August 28th of 2013. And we're conducting this interview on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. So let's start, if we can, by maybe having you talk about what brought you to the area. When did you come to work at Hanford, and what brought you here? Tyler: We came out here on vacation from Oklahoma in 1947 to see my dad's brothers and sisters. And we were going to stay for a week or so. And my dad applied for a job here and got it, and we stayed. I thought it was the end of the world. This was not a pretty place in 1947. But I went in the Navy in 1950, got into the nuclear program and came out here in 1955. Went to work at Hanford. Worked as an HPT until '82, I believe. And then I went into management in health physics. Bauman: So HPT, you mean health physics technician. Is that was HPT is? Tyler: Uh-huh. Sorry. Bauman: That's okay. So how old were in 1947 when you came on vacation? Tyler: I think I was 15. Bauman: Okay. What sort of job did your father get? Tyler: He worked in transportation. Bauman: And you already had aunts and uncles who came here? Tyler: Yeah. Bauman: So you said you thought this was the end of the world. What do you mean by that? What are your first impressions of the place? Tyler: [LAUGHTER] Well, my first impression is we got here July the 5th. And my aunt and uncle had a little cafe on downtown Kennewick, on Kennewick Avenue. And it was about 104 degrees out. And we were driving down the street looking for it. And my dad says, man, I wouldn't live here if it's the last place in the world. And back then there was not a lot of trees. There was in Kennewick, and a few in Richland. But every time the wind blew, it was dusty and the tumbleweeds flew, and a lot of dust storms. In fact, they call them termination winds. Because everything was booming out in Hanford and every time the wind blew, people didn't like that and they'd just pick up and quit. So they called it termination winds. Bauman: Do you know when your aunt and uncles came here? Tyler: My aunt was born here in Kennewick. My uncle came out here in '37, '38, somewhere along that area. Bauman: Oh, okay, so you'd had relatives here before the Hanford site. Tyler: Oh yeah. Bauman: And so when your family first came in 1947 and you dad got the job and stayed here, where did you live? Tyler: We lived in Kennewick for a year. And then we got a house in Richland in 1948 at 635 Basswood. Bauman: That was a government home then? Tyler: Uh-huh. It was ranch house. And we moved in Thanksgiving Day of '48. And my future wife moved in next door the same day. I didn't know that was my future wife, but it turned out to be. And I still live on Basswood. Different house, but-- Bauman: So did you go to high school here then? Tyler: I went to Kennewick. I started in Kennewick because that's where we lived and I didn't want to transfer. So I rode the intercity bus every day to Kennewick and back. I graduated in 1950 and then somebody in Washington wanted me to join their services. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: So how would you describe, outside of your first impression, how would you describe the community of Richland in late '40s, early 1950s? Tyler: It actually—it was a very good place to live. I didn't realize it at the time. It was smaller, much smaller--probably 5,000 people in each of the cities. It was a good place to live if you could ignore the wind blowing and the dust storms and that sort of thing. But it kind of grows on you. I know I wouldn't live anywhere else. Bauman: In those early years when you were here in the '40s and '50s, do you remember any particular community events that stand out in your mind? Tyler: Yeah, Atomic Frontier Days, the Grape Festival in Kennewick, and then the fair. Nothing big or spectacular, but it was something to do. Bauman: Can you describe Atomic Frontier Days a little bit? What sorts of things-- Tyler: Well, normally they had a queen and a parade of course. And it was just kind of a—I don't know how--just a parade and kind of a get together type thing for the people that lived here. Bauman: So let's talk about your work a little bit now. You said you started working in '55. Tyler: ’55. Bauman: So can you talk about who you worked for at time and a little bit more detail about what sorts of work you did? What area of the Hanford site you worked in? Tyler: Okay, I started February the 22nd, 1955. And my first work assignment was 200 West Area tank farms. And then I went up to the REDOX facility which was a separations facility. A couple months later, then I went to U Plant. And then I went to T Plant, which were all separation facilities. And then I went over to PUREX in December of 1955. That was prior to startup. We started up our first spiked run was I think March or April of '56. And I worked there until '62 I believe. When I worked there, we also was switched with the 100 Area HPTs, or RCTs, or radiation monitors for exposure reasons. Because they got a lot more exposure than we did, so we would switch with them. And I got to work in all the 100 Area reactors except N when they were running, and some of the 300 Area. Bauman: So just about everywhere? Tyler: Yeah, I worked basically in every facility out here except 234-5. Bauman: And so was GE the contractor? What contractor did you work for? Tyler: GE. They were the prime contractor. And they left here in '66 I believe. Then Rockwell and Westinghouse and Fluor Daniel and MSA. Bauman: So as a health physics technician, what exactly did that mean? What sorts of things did you do on a daily basis? Tyler: Well as you know, there was a lot of contamination, radiation. And our job was to set the dose rates if people were going into a radiation area. We would go in, set the dose rates, stay with them. Got to make sure that the dose rates didn't increase while they were in there. We surveyed them out when they were done with the GMs and alpha detectors to make sure they didn't take any contamination home with them. And that was our prime responsibility. We maintain control of personnel exposure rates and their contamination, if they had any, and made sure that everything was as clean as we could get it. That's the short and sweet version. Bauman: Yeah. And you did that, obviously, at all these different areas you worked at on the site? Tyler: Everywhere, inside, outside, burial grounds. Bauman: Were there ever any incidents while you were doing this where people did have excessive exposure or anything along those lines? Tyler: Yeah, there was a lot of them. When GE came here--well, they were the prime contractor. Back in those days, you really couldn't talk about your job. You could say that you worked at Hanford and that was pretty much it. But yes, there was a lot of good memories and bad memories. Some really high exposure rates almost on a daily basis, because everything was running. And what will go wrong probably does. And it was very interesting work. It was something different every day. It's the kind of job that you look forward to doing and working. I did. I really enjoyed it. Bauman: So what was the process or procedure if someone had an overexposure? Tyler: Well, you had your dosimetry, which—Battelle read that. So you know what they got. And that's the record that's with you forever. At that time I think we worked--[PHONE RINGING] Shit. We worked under a 50 millirem per day limits, or 300 a week. And sometimes you would exceed that. But we were issued dosimetry everyday when we came to work. And you had a film badge which was read I think once a month. But they kept a running record of your exposure. That's why when we, when 100 Area radiation monitor--[PHONE RINGING] Hello. Can I call you back, Ian? Okay, thanks. Sorry. I don't know how to turn it off. Bauman: So we're talking about the dosimeter-- Tyler: Yeah, they kept records of all your exposures. And then every month they would send you a copy or let you know what it was. But if before the end of the year was out, if you were running short of exposure, then they would transfer people--particularly the radiation monitors--to different areas. And they what they were doing was using our exposure instead of--and letting their people cool down a little bit. It was just a way of equalizing the dose rates to the personnel. And it worked good in theory. And there was some--and I probably shouldn't say this—but there was some little minor ripples in the water, because people accused the other people of hanging back and now I got to come save you, that sort of thing. But it was all in fun. Everybody knew how serious the job was. And that was just part of their job. Bauman: And so how long did you work as a health physics technician then? Tyler: I think until 1982 and I went into management in health physics. At that time, they called us managers. And I was the manager of East tank farms until 1988. And then I transferred over to the West Area environmental group and took that over. My responsibilities were all of the outside radiation contamination areas. Burial sites. '89 I retired. Came back three months later and went to work in the environmental restoration part-time. And I did that until 1995. And then when Bechtel came in, I left there and went back to health physics side and become a evaluator at HAMMER for radiation protection, which I still do. Bauman: So you still work for-- Tyler: Two to three days a week. Bauman: So you mentioned earlier the sort of secrecy of some aspects of Hanford. Obviously secrecy, security were a very important part of. I wonder if you could discuss that at all, any ways that impacted your work? Tyler: GE had a very rigid plan of how they wanted things to go. And security of course was top secret. If you went—and a few people did--they go down and have a beer at the bar and they get to talking. And you never know who you're talking to you. And there was cases where people didn't have a job the next morning. Because security would overhear them. And you were pretty much done. So people didn't talk about their job. They didn't even talk about it with their family. Security was very strict. When you—well, for instance, when you go to work in the morning or if you're on shifts, same thing. You would catch the bus at the bus lot. Get on the bus, go through the barricade at the Y. If I was going to PUREX, we'd go up, pull in to the front gate of PUREX. You'd get out, off the bus. Go through the badge house. Pick up your dosimetry. Go out. Get back on the bus. The bus would pull inside the gate. Get back on the bus. Go down to PUREX. Get off the bus. Go through their badge house. And they would check your lunch bucket and all that. And then go into the building. And then in the evening, just reverse that process and back out again. So they were very strict. If you drove your car, you could not drive it past the main gate of East Area. You parked outside. And when you could drive inside, security would check the glovebox and the trunk and whatever was in the car. So it was very regimented. Bauman: I wanted to ask you about, in 1963 President Kennedy visited for the opening of the N reactor. I wondered if you were there and have any memories of that event at all? Tyler: I was not there because I was on shift at that day, or I probably would have been. Bauman: Mm-hm. Obviously, one of things that happened with Hanford is the shift from focus on production to focus on clean up. And I wonder if that shift impacted your work in any way? Tyler: Yes. Like I said before, I was the manager of East tank farms. And my office was at Semi Works, which is in 200 East Area, which was a pilot plant for PUREX. Semi Works was running. We were doing strontium cesium runs. But then when the edict came out that we were going to phase out and clean up, one of the first facilities--well I think it was the first facility—that we started tearing down was Semi Works. And D&D did the work. But we shut it all down and demolished the building and just imploded it in place. Built a dirt berm over it, cleaned it up. Most of the cells and the tanks are still in place, but they're full of grout. And then there's concrete over it. And what we did was tear down—this was approximately a three-story building with three stories underground. So when we tore down the building—it had a lot of piping and columns—we tore down the building and left the west wall standing. And we filled everything we could get inside like the basement and concreted it in place. And then we undercut the west wall. And this is probably four foot thick. And got a couple of Caterpillars and chains and hooked it over the top of the west wall. Pulled it down over like a lid. And then dirt berm over it, and there it is. And the stack that was there—the exhaust, the big stack—they imploded that and laid her right alongside the building. One guy did that. We deconned it first, and he came in, and a dynamite expert told us where we was going to put the stack and put a stick out on the end in the ground like they do now on the TV. And laid that stack right down on that stick, all by himself. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: So that definitely did make for significant changes then, the shift from production? Tyler: Very significant, because that was kind of pilot test for all the other anticipated deconning and decommissioning they we're going to do, which is still going on. Bauman: Let's shift now and talk a little bit about HAPO. I wonder--I know you've been involved with them quite often. I wonder if you can talk about your involvement when you became involved in HAPO and how that came about? Tyler: Well let's see. First, HAPO was a GE acronym which stands for Hanford Atomic Products Operations, which was the name of GE's part of this. GESA, which is another credit union down the street, was the General Electric Supervisors Association. GE was very particular about their managers or supervisors were a step above the blue collar worker. And I think they still maintain that. If you were a supervisor, it's white shirt and tie. And you don't fraternize with--So when the credit committee wanted to get started, that's the name they chose, just HAPO. And it's '53. And I was looking at one of the early--the record book. And I think there's five or six of the charter members of the first—that I worked with that were radiation monitors just like I was. But I never joined HAPO until my wife was--she likes C First. And I never joined HAPO until I think '71. And then a friend of mine that I worked with talked me into getting on the committee that approved loans, credit committee, which I did. And then I got invited later to go on the board of directors and got voted in and been there ever since. I really enjoyed it. It's a great credit union. Bauman: So is it the board of directors then, primarily is it either current or former Hanford employees? Tyler: No. It used to be when we were federal, you had to work out here to join HAPO. And then they relinquished or changed the bylaws so that anybody could join HAPO. If you give them $5 and signed up, you were a member for life. But initially it was you had to work here to join. Bauman: And you said you didn't join until '71. What led you to decide to join at that point? Tyler: The guy I carpool with, one of them, convinced me that I should do that. [LAUGHTER] And I didn't like C First. I never did like C First. But my wife liked them because you got at the end of the month, you got all of your checks back. And she liked that. But I joined HAPO and started my own checking account. And then she finally joined shortly after I did. And now the rest is history. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: So, I know you weren't part of the formation of the credit union. But I wonder if you can talk about it a little more? If you know more, were the employee unions at Hanford involved in the credit union, establishing that? Tyler: Yes. Bauman: And anything you can talk about that? Tyler: Helen Van Patten was one. GESA started it first. And then the blue collars said well, we got to have one of those. The first store was down by the Spudnut Shop. I think we had one or two employees. And everything was in a ledger, handwritten. Joe Blow borrowed $25. It was very basic. But fortunately, it kept growing and membership increased. Bauman: So the unions saw it as a way to provide credit union opportunities-- Tyler: Right. Bauman:--for blue collar workers or laborers or whatever? Okay. So I want to—going back to your work at Hanford, what are some of the more challenging aspects of your work, and maybe some more rewarding aspects of your work? Tyler: That’s a good question. Probably one of the most challenging was the responsibility when you're out on a hot job where the contamination levels are great and the radiation levels are great, and you have a whole crew of people. It challenges you to--it's always in the back of your mind that something's going to happen and I'm not going to see it, or I'm not going to catch it. And somebody's going to get overexposed. And that's always in the back of your mind. Because--and I have to beat my own drum here for a bit—radiation monitoring and health physics now, whatever they are, it's a very challenging job. You're responsible for--you're taking care of people. And they trust you. And they expect you to look out for them. And it's a lot of responsibility, but most everybody accepts that gladly, because they know how important it is. Because you're responsible for--you could get somebody really overexposed, and who knows what the consequences are? As far as rewards for that, I think is the satisfaction of when the job is done, that you knew you did your best job. Nobody got hurt. Nobody got overexposed. Nobody got contaminated. And the job got done. Bauman: Were there any events or incidents or anything, sort of unique things that happened during your time working at Hanford that sort of really stands out to you? Tyler: When I first hired in, like I said, I went to REDOX. One of the problems they had shortly before I got here was they had a ruthenium—they ran some ruthenium and they played it out in the stack. And then it broke loose. And it kind of went out in the desert and on the ground. And you had ruthenium chunks of—it looked like white paper that built up on the inside the stack and then finally broke loose and fluttered out and went everywhere. And one of my first jobs with a GM and a walking stick was walking out through the desert and finding these things. Little specks, big specks, didn't have any trouble finding them. [LAUGHTER] They were very hot. And I remember we used the KOA cans from T Plant, which were little round cans, metal cans about that big around, about this high with a snap-on lid. And that's what we put them in, with dirt for shielding. And then buried them. But there's been a lot of incidents of hot burials from PUREX. I remember some where we used a burial string. We used a locomotive, a whole bunch of flat cars. And then at that time, they'd build big wooden boxes. And I recall one big one that had enough lumber in it to build two B houses. Huge—it sat on two flat cars. And we put it in, and we took readings over the top of the tunnel as it went out of the tunnel towards the burial ground. And it read greater than 500 R. And as you know, 500 R for an hour is a lethal dose rate to 50% of the people, 60%. And then you go down the railroad track behind B Plant, pull it across the highway which patrol barricaded the road. So you pull the string across the road and then back it into the burial ground. And then you had to sink—this box was built on skids. And a big long steel cable lay on another flat car, three or four flat cars away from it. So you would pull that. And you would pull it down into a burial trench. And the Cat would be down there ready. And the train would back up and they would grab that cable, put the eye on. Hook it to the Cat. And then the Cat skinner would pull the cable off. And the train would move up until the boxes sit here and the cables here. And the Cat's down here pulling. And then we'd get up to the--and there was a dock where you could slide it off. And you would turn that box and pull it in. Pull it down into the trench, down to the other end, wherever you wanted it. Unhook the Cat. Leave it. Pull the Cat out. And then they would backfill that box. And that's the way they did the burials. And it worked great except when the box collapsed unexpectedly. Bauman: Then not so great. Tyler: Yeah, that's not a good--that happened once or twice. Bauman: During your years working out there, were you ever concerned about your own safety, health, protection, in any way? Tyler: Well as stupid as it may sound, no. I never was. Because I always figured I knew what I was doing. And I received some very good training in the Navy, which helped. But I never worried about it. I always trusted me. Bauman: Were you a member of a union when you were working at Hanford? And what union was that? And I guess, what sort of relationship did the union have with management here at Hanford during the time you were here? Tyler: Good and bad. [LAUGHTER] I used to be chief steward for the radiation monitors. I went through two negotiations. And after the last one, I decided I didn't want any more of that. Chief steward's a thankless job, but somebody's got to do it. Bauman: What does that mean exactly? What—chief steward-- Tyler: Well, you're the union rep plant wide for all of the HPTs. And I had this grandiose idea that I could just change everything. It's a great idea, but it doesn't work. It's a job that somebody has to do. And it's a job that is thankless. Because somebody's always mad at you. Whatever you do, in some of the people's eyes, you could always do better. And it's just not a good job. [LAUGHTER] But I enjoyed it. You learn a lot. And you learn both sides of the fence--how the company thinks and how the union thinks. And then you try and compromise. Bauman: Were there ever any times you were here where there was a strike or any sort of-- Tyler: Two--'66 and '76. Bauman: And were those sort of across the site? Tyler: Yep. And in '66, after we settled the '66 strike, GE left. Bauman: Was that one of the reasons they left? Tyler: Yeah, well, they had planned to leave. And then that's when--because when GE was here, they were the only contractor. And then when they left, they kind of broke it up into the 200 Areas and the 100 Areas. And it's always been different contractors, not just one prime contractor. Bauman: Do you remember what some of the key issues were in '66 and '76 in terms of-- Tyler: Wages. Wages were always the key issue. Well, I take that back. '66 or '76 was, they were going to do away with the buses. And that was a key issue for everybody. It didn't happen, but it was a--that was when they spent all the money redoing the bus lot. And then a couple years later, they did away with the buses anyway. But we did get air conditioned buses. Before we had old buses, the old green buses. Well like the ones sitting down at-- Bauman: The CREHST Museum? Tyler: Yeah. Those were some of the newer ones. The older ones were international buses that looked like a truck. Cold in the winter and hot in the summer. But they worked. When they did away with the buses, see, that did away with a lot of jobs in the bus lot. Maintenance, everything there, which was a lot of people. Bauman: So part of that was about jobs and issues of transportation? Tyler: Mm-hmm. Bauman: Anything I haven't asked you about that you'd like to talk about or that you think we should talk about? Tyler: Well, we've covered pretty much every--well, we've covered pretty much everything I think. I don't really know what you're looking for. Bauman: Just your experience. That's why I wonder if there's something that you experienced some event or something that I haven't asked you about yet that you think would be important to— Tyler: Well. When I retired, I took the first early out and then got bored to death and came back. When I was in the environmental group in West Area, a good friend of mine was an environmental manager outside the site. But he talked me into coming back part time and become a waste shipper and a waste handler. Which was--I'd never done it. I knew what it was. But I finally relented. I enjoyed it. It's entirely different. Because I was kind of burned out on radiation protection, and I wanted to do something different. Didn't want to retire, but I wanted to do something different. So I went to the classes and become a certified waste shipper and a waste handler. And we took care of all of the sites outside of 200 East, 200 West. All the burial sites, all the drilling sides, the river, pretty much everything. And it was very interesting. Until '95, when I decided I didn't like the contractor. [LAUGHTER] And I went back to health physics. Bauman: Most of the students I teach now were born after the Cold War ended. Obviously most of your career, the Cold War was going on during most of the time you were working at Hanford. So I'm wondering what you think would be important for young people today and people in future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War? Tyler: I'm trying to remember. We had the strike in '66. And there was almost another strike four or five years later. In fact midnight was the deadline when we were supposed to go on strike. And at 11:30, we got a notification that the President had put a stop to the strike because of the situation with the Cold War thing. And I think that's the first and the last time that ever happened. But as far as-- Bauman: So then about 1970 or so? Tyler: Early, yeah, '71 or '72 maybe. No, it was before that, because I was still on shift. It was probably '68, '69 maybe. But as far as the Cold War, it's still going on in different forms—my personal opinion. You look back at history--and I've lived through a lot of it--nothing has really changed. Like what's going on now, and the Bible says there'll be war and rumors of war. And that's correct. Because whatever our President does—whatever he does is going to be wrong in a lot of people's eyes. It's kind of like if you don't do it, you should have. And if you do do it, you shouldn't have. [LAUGHTER] It's a different type of cold war. Instead of—we used to worry about Russia. And I'm not too sure that—maybe we should still be worrying about Russia and a lot of other countries that--Things have changed. But they haven't—the basic things that caused the Cold War hasn't changed. There's all kind of weapons. I don't know. Bauman: All right. I think that's all the questions I have for you. Tyler: Okay. Bauman: I want to thank you for coming in today. Tyler: Thank you for having me. Bauman: Pleasure to talk to you. Tyler: Good. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:47:27 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 244 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 200 West Area U Plant T Plant 100 Area 300 Area 200 East Area Tank Farms Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1947-2013 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1955-1995 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Kennedy, John. F Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Bill Tyler Description An account of the resource An interview with Bill Tyler conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Subject The topic of the resource Hanford (Wash.) Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Nuclear weapons plants--Environmental aspects--Washington (State)--Hanford Site. Nuclear weapons plants--Health aspects--Washington (State)--Hanford Site Region Nuclear weapons plants--Waste disposal--Environmental aspects--Washington (State)--Hanford Site. Nuclear waste disposal Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013-8-28 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2016-07-18: Metadata v1 created – [RG] Bechtel Building 200 East Building 200 West General Electric GESA (General Electric Supervisors Association) HAMMER HAPO (Hanford Atomic Products Operations) Reduction-Oxidation Plant (REDOX) Richland (Wash.) T Plant Tank Farms U Plant https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F482a9fe8af3a5584b2466b9e4084da93.mp4 44a30f23746c53a6ea7287aa443ab156 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F246206de477347a3c79fc8f80c19bf0b.jpg e7d3130df0dd990982909b39fd3f84a7 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Bauman Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Bob and Dianne Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Northwest Public Television | Taylor_Diane_Bob Man one: Okay Robert Bauman: All right. Good to go? Man one: You ready? Man two: We're ready to go. Bauman: Okay. All right, well, we'll get started. And I'm going to start first by having each of you say your name for us. Make sure we have that on there. So go ahead. Bob Taylor: My name is Bob Taylor. Bauman: All right. Dianne Taylor: And I'm Dianne Taylor. Bauman: And Dianne is spelled with two Ns? Dianne Taylor: Two Ns, yes. Bauman: Okay, great. And my name's Robert Bauman, and we are conducting this interview on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. And today is June 10th of 2015. And so, if we could start maybe, start, Bob, maybe, with if you could tell us a little bit about your family and how they ended up coming to the Tri-Cities area and when that happened. Bob Taylor: My father was employed by the US federal prison system. He went to work as a guard at McNeil Island in 1934 for the Department of Prisons, the US Bureau of Prisons--there, I'm finally saying that correctly. And he started off as a guard and was employed at McNeil Island from 1934 actually until he retired in 1955. But the real story to talk about is how I happen to be sitting here. And in the early stages of the creation of the Manhattan Project and what was developing here with the acquisition of all the lands for Hanford, very early in that process, the US Army went to the Bureau of Prisons and contracted for a minimum security type prison camp to be constructed here in the Richland area. The purpose of that being the minimum security prisoners would be farming the lands and the orchards that were being acquired by the Manhattan Project, but would have no men available to take care of the fields and the orchards. And so the Bureau of Prisons contracted with the Department of the Army on behalf of the Manhattan Project to maintain those fields out in Vernita, White Bluffs, all in this area. And they agreed—they, the Department of the Army--agreed to build a, what they call, prison camp. It turned out to be right out on the bend of the Yakima River right near Horn Rapids Dam. And they constructed buildings, facilities, kitchens, dining areas, administration buildings, and the facilities to house and support approximately 250 federal prisoners who were brought in in early 1944 to take care of the agricultural needs of this area. And my father, who was at that point then had been with the federal prison at McNeil Island and had become a senior guard, was chosen to come over here and become superintendent of this camp. The name of the camp is Columbia Camp. And that's a little story in itself. The people in Washington, DC, were out here and didn't quite know the geography. They knew the Columbia River was here somewhere nearby, and even though the Yakima is a much smaller river, they didn't realize it. And so they named this federal prison camp Columbia Camp simply because they were on a river and they thought they were on the Columbia River. That's how it came to have the name Columbia Camp. Anyway, they started bringing the prisoners in in early 1944. And as I say, they typically for the next three and a half years, had about 250 prisoners on site at any given time. I think the number in the various information files I have, there were probably more like 700 prisoners rotated through this area. But the facilities were actually to hold about 250. So my dad took over as superintendent of the prison camp. He came here in early 1944, and initially they had—and I have many pictures of the whole camp, the buildings, and also the housing—there were initially 16 Quonset huts that were built out there for the initial officers and their families to move. At the time he came, those were the first. We moved in here actually on D Day, 1944, June 6th, in the middle of a major windstorm. And my mother who was born and raised in Western Washington, to arrive here in those kind of conditions—I don’t have to say that we had no air conditioning, and fans weren't even really very available. We moved into a Quonset hut. We ultimately, by the next spring, they—the Army, the prison—built eight more fancy housing. They brought in prefabs, the basic 609 square foot prefab that everybody in Richland is familiar with, of which there are still hundreds of them. That was the new fancy housing, and my dad as superintendent was able to claim the first one in the row next to the administration building. So in the next spring, then, we moved into a prefab. Again, I have lots of pictures, family pictures, of our housing. The kids, we were bused into Richland. Initially we all went to Sacajawea the first year we were there. And then when Jefferson grade school opened in the fall of '45, we all went there, switched over to there. We had a couple of older kids—family, kids in the camp—that went to high school at what was then called Columbia High School. My mother was a teacher, actually ended up teaching at Columbia High School part of the time that we were here. So as families living at Columbia Camp, we were bused into town, pretty much bused back home. And we played. As kids we played in the heat of the summer and cold in the winter and just pretty much in the desert surrounding the camp out there. The camp itself existed from early 1943. In early 1947, they started—they, again, the US Bureau of Prisons and the US Army--started writing back and forth corresponding about the continued need for the maintenance of the orchards and the fields and ultimately decided that it wasn't necessary anymore. And some of those fields ultimately were left to go, and others were maintained I guess in other ways. In the files that I have, my dad's files, I've got a tremendous amount of correspondence between he and the officials in Washington, DC. The Department of Army, I've got synopsis of what all was done during those period of years. I have interesting files about prisoners and some of their experiences in managing them as agricultural workers, how they got them to work every day, how they kept them fed every day. There's a lot of material in the files that I have of my dad's about that sort of thing. There's a lot of information about the contract itself between the US Army and the Federal Bureau of Prisons as far as payment of fees and expenses and also the type of crops that were harvested in volume and in prices and that sort of thing. It makes for very fascinating reading to have this kind of information available to me about what went on out there. Then ultimately in the fall of 1947, I think we were about the last to leave as a family. We left in November of '47. And basically the place was abandoned. I have, again in the files, there's information about dismantling the camp and sending knives and forks to Leavenworth and dishes to somewhere in Arizona. So there's a lot of very detailed information about the camp. But the long and the short of it is that the camp existed for those three and a half, almost four years. And very, very, very few people anywhere even know about it. The families, the other families, were rotated to different jobs. Three or four of the families went back to McNeil Island. Others went to Arizona, Leavenworth—other federal prison camps. And everybody just went their own way, and nobody was left here to even be a historian for what all went on. And thanks to my mother, who keeps all these documents and records and letters, and even—there’s a lot of letters between my father and my mother when he first came over here, where he's giving examples of daily life here in Richland in 1944 that are just fascinating reading. And the cost of a rental house that the government was charging for people and the cost to buy a refrigerator, things like that. So it's really fun for us to be able to come and sort of make some of this information available as to what Columbia Camp was all about over many, many, many years in Richland, because nobody was here to contradict that statement. A lot of people said, oh, it was a prisoner war camp. And ultimately, finally, that got changed. There was some documentation. At the present time, out at the day camp, there's a kiosk out there with a few pictures and a commentary posted out there, a little parking lot that you can drive to that gives just an extremely brief summary of what Columbia Camp was. There's a picture of a man, a far distant picture of a man standing in front of the administration building. Cannot guarantee it, but I think it—I'm pretty sure it's my dad. He was the superintendent of the camp, so his picture's out there in that kiosk for anybody that wants to go out there and look. But that's what Columbia Camp in a nutshell was all about. We have many, many, many pictures of the camp, the buildings, the dormitory buildings, the kitchen, the administration building, the power plant, the steam plant. And then we ourselves have taken pictures recently from some of those same positions, including the foundation of the steam plant that we've got so we can supplement a lot of what I've been talking about. Well, everything that I've been talking about we can supplement with pictures, and letters, and documents, and correspondence, and files. Dianne Taylor: Memories. Bauman: Yeah, right. So really interesting, and so first of all, let me confirm that there are still rumors out there. I've had students tell me, wasn't there a prisoner of war camp? Dianne Taylor: Really? Bauman: Oh, yeah. Bob Taylor: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bauman: Or, wasn't a Japanese internment camp here? Bob Taylor: That's what-- Bauman: No. Dianne Taylor: Mm-mm. Bauman: So this is great to--one great thing about interviewing you is to clarify that for people as well. Dianne Taylor: One of the things that I'd like to bring in, because we didn't know about this for so long. Dad would not talk about his prison experiences. He was a loving, wonderful, wonderful father and grandfather and wonderful father-in-law. But this was never discussed. It wasn't until he died and I'm going through all of their things because Bob's an only child that I find all of this stuff. So Bob's mother's in a nursing home. She's quite elderly. We find this stuff. We get so excited over these pictures. Of course, she thought we were crazy to move to Richland anyway because her memories are not the Richland it is today. So we went, took all these pictures. And all she did was she took them from me, put them down in her purse. And I said, well, Mom, this is exciting. We found all dad's stuff, and we want to talk about it. No, it's secret. She would not talk about it. It was secret. And this is in 19--when did she die? Bob Taylor: Well, this was in 1995, I think, that we-- Dianne Taylor: It was so ingrained in her, the secrecy of their lives, that even after all that time, she couldn't talk to us. So we took the pictures. I said, mom, I've got to have the pictures. And we took them back. But I think that's when it really hit me what their lives must have been like living here at that time. Bauman: Right, that even that, which was only tangentially connected to Hanford-- Bob Taylor: Exactly. Dianne Taylor: Yes. Yeah. Bauman: Was very secret, right? Dianne Taylor: Yeah, absolutely. Bauman: So let me ask you a few questions. So first of all, what was your father's name? Bob Taylor: Harold E. Taylor. Bauman: Harold Taylor, okay. And your mother's name? Bob Taylor: Doris C. Taylor. Bauman: Okay. And so it was the three of you when you--well, your father came initially, and then you and your mother came. Bob Taylor: Right, in June. Bauman: In June of '44. And you mentioned the dust storm. Bob Taylor: Termination wind. Bauman: So, and you said that it could hold about 250 prisoners at the camp at once. Bob Taylor: Yes. Bauman: So it was minimum security. So what sorts of--but they were federal prisoners. Bob Taylor: They were. Bauman: So what sorts of crimes would these men have committed? Bob Taylor: The vast majority of federal prisoners were not necessarily minimum security, but they were white collar crimes. In some cases bank robbers would sometimes fit into the category, depends on the nature of the individual. But bank robbers weren't necessarily restricted from ever being in the so-called minimum security camps. And, see, we went back to McNeil Island, where my dad then took over the minimum security part of McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary. And so some of these same prisoners went with us back over there. That's kind of an aside, but it's part of explaining to you, or answering your question about minimum security and who qualified. I'll finish that answer first. A lot of them were conscientious objectors. And in fact there's correspondence in the files where prisoners would be sent here to Columbia Camp, but they were always—the conscientious objectors—they were always being monitored, talked to, perhaps convinced that it would be to their best interest if they would revoke their claim to being a conscientious objector and go back and join the Army and basically reinvent themselves in society. And there's a few prisoners did that. We've even got in those boxes, we've got a couple letters that one or two of them wrote to my dad personally thanking him. He's gone back, he's gone in the Army. He feels better about himself. So we've even got that kind of stuff in the file. Anyway, then, just as an interesting aside, when you talk about minimum security versus the hardcore inside the walls type, like at McNeil Island, state prisoners—murders, that sort of thing—of course they're maximum security. But any white collar crime, including—might not sound like white color crime—but bank robbery, that sort of thing, there can be any number of-- Dianne Taylor: In those days. Bob Taylor:--forgers. There can be any number of kind of people that aren't really hardcore criminals, but they've made mistakes. They've done things bad. But they know that they're decent people. And these are the people that, even on McNeil Island, again, same as here, they would stay in a minimum security area and do the weeding, doing the gardening, doing the orchards, doing the fields, like over there like they were doing here. My dad, as superintendent of the camp at McNeil, we had kind of a beautiful estate, ranch home estate with about an acre and a half of rockeries and gardens and rose trellises. And we had five--as a kid, I never mowed the yard. I had five prisoners that—we did, the family did—that took care of our yard and our place. It was kind of a strange childhood that I had. But that's what minimum security means, that they could be trusted. They were called trustees, as a matter of fact. Bauman: And so about how large of a staff was there working at the camp? Bob Taylor: Here at Columbia Camp, there were 24. 24 with families, and then there were another ten to 12 that lived in Prosser, Benton City, some of them right here in Richland that would come to work. So there was less than 40 total staff, 24 of whom were on site with families. Dianne Taylor: Tell him the story that you were telling me about Dad writing a note about getting these guys to come in on Sunday for roll call. Bob Taylor: Oh, it was one of the notes, one of the memorandums to his officers in the files that I read. It's something to the effect—no, I guess it was a memo to the entire camp, to the prisoners and the officers. And it's just kind of a tongue-in-cheek, that it seems to be hard to get prisoners to make bed call or duty call or account for themselves on the weekends. And it was just kind of an interesting, the way he wrote that even on the weekends, they still, after all, are prisoners and have to account for themselves. They actually only had I think it was three escapes. Nobody actually ever fully totally escaped. They had three that walked away, but they were caught along the river on the way to Benton City. So that was part of the minimum security idea is that they weren't particularly threats. They knew they just needed to serve their time and get out. And so they weren't trying to break out. Dianne Taylor: And where could they go? That's the desert. There's no transportation. That's one of the stories Dad did tell me about two of the guys walking to Benton City. And of course they didn't get there because there's nowhere to hide. Bauman: And so how old were you then when you came here? Bob Taylor: My birthday's in July, so I was six years old when we moved here in June. And as I said, it was D-Day. And then just turned seven in July, and then I was ten when we left in late '47. Bauman: Okay. And so what was that like as someone roughly between the ages of seven and ten living out here in the camp in initially a Quonset hut? Is that right? Bob Taylor: Initially in Quonset hut and then in a prefab. Well, first of all, six-to-ten-year-olds don't really think about hot and cold. The only thing that we were ever really cautioned about by our parents is it's a little problematic to go running around in the desert barefooted. There were rattlesnakes. Never got bit by one. Saw a few. But we had the swimming hole right there at the bend of the river for summertime, spent a lot of time in the swimming. The pictures you can see the two rows of Quonset huts. It was kind of, I call it a parkway, which wasn't necessarily what you would call a bunch of grass in 1944. But nevertheless, there was a grassy strip, two street, two roads for cars, and the Quonset huts and in the middle grassy strip that that's where we played our soccer and mostly soccer that we played there as kids. And we were either in the river, out there in that strip, or just wandering out in the desert barefoot. And with our bicycles, there's a picture I've got showing me standing beside a tree that was very near our house that I crashed into and cut my head open. That sort of thing as living here as a kid. We were typical kids, even though we were--in fact, my entire life growing up was always subject to prison service. We lived on McNeil Island, which was, when we went back, I mean, my grade school and my high school years, I went to school in Lakewood Tacoma, Clover Park High School. But we still lived on the island. We had to catch a prison launch back and forth every day. As kids growing up, none of us ever had the typical life experience of just walking to the store, walking to the theater. We didn't live on Swift and could walk down to the Village—to the theater. We never had those kind of experiences. Speaking of the theater, we did get to come into town. Our parents would carpool or whatever, and we'd come into town to the Hopalong Cassidy, Tom Mix movies on Saturday afternoon at the Village Theater here in Richland. But it was never anything we could ride our bike to or walk to. Bauman: Yeah, I was going to ask you about that, about getting into town and how often you were able to do that. And what was the town of Richland like? What sorts of memories do you have? Bob Taylor: Well, I mean, you've got all the pictures as a historian. You know what Richland basically looked like in 1944, 1945. It was like that. I mean, we came into school. The first year I said we went to Sacajawea. The second year, we from then on went to Jefferson. We would become friends with kids in the class and do things with kids in the class, but it was always more difficult. I was in Cub Scouts. My dad would have to drive in to make separate arrangements to go, and to some of the other kids out there as well, to come in to the Cub Scout meetings. One of my memories, and I'm not sure why, but one of my memories was one of the girls’ parents had--and I don't quite understand it now, but her parents had—I can't say they owned, but maybe they did—a large enough piece of ground that she could ride her horses. And I remember some of us—and it was like right here. It was straight north from Jefferson that we would come out of town, although not very far, and ride horses out here in the open prairie. And it might have been right here. I don't know. But we were able to socialize to some degree with the kids in town. But again, one of the things that I have to say, it's like my mother. Even as kids, talked about secrecy. We were instilled with absolutely every bit of that, just like the adults. We absolutely were. And it was just a way of life, so we didn't question it. We didn't try to violate it. We just--everything was secret. Bauman: So you didn't talk to anyone about the camp at all really? Bob Taylor: Just that we lived out there. And that was all. Bauman: Right. So did you know what Hanford was, what was going on? Bob Taylor: No, not until the bomb was dropped and the paper headline right here in Richland. That's when we knew what was going on. The road now as you go out there is not the same road it was then. What is Horn Rapids Road, which comes across—wherever we are—comes across, that was the road that we came in on. So we came in a little further north into Richland than we do now, where the intersection is. And so right at that corner right there was the beginning of the trailer camp where so many people were living and so many of the kids in school with me were living in the trailer camp. And there was a wire fence along the road, and so we just knew we were outside the fence, and something was going on on the other side of the fence. But we didn't know what it was—until the article came out in the paper. Bauman: You mentioned, so, the prisoners, would they get transported, then to different fields-- Bob Taylor: They were bused. Bauman: --to different farms then? Bob Taylor: There were like, I think as I recall in reading the files, there were sometimes as many as ten different gangs or groups, for lack of a better term, that were bused out to the various sites. And that's part of what's in my dad's files is just the logistics of taking--they called it dinner then--lunch out to feed everybody at lunchtime, and just the difficulties of that sort of thing in running this prison camp. Because some of them out in Vernita, for instance, they basically had to leave with the lunch service right after breakfast to get it out there. Because the road, the road was not great going out to Vernita from here. The road that we drive now and think nothing of was basically just a dirt road in those days going out there. Because the road, the paved road, bent south and went to Benton City when you go out that way. So yeah, there were a number of different orchards. I can remember clearly the—what are now all the Richland ranches on Cottonwood and Birch and Cedar, all those where all the Richland ranches were ultimately built in 1948. All of that was cherry orchards. And we always had one or two crews harvesting the cherries, for instance, right here in town. And a couple times my dad brought me out and actually I helped them pick cherries. So that's just one of my memories is picking cherries in what is now that major housing part of Richland. Bauman: Right. Now, so, in 1947, when the camp closed and you left, I assume maybe your mother was probably happy about going back to the west side? [LAUGHTER] Bob Taylor: Extremely, yes, extremely happy to get back to the cool west side, yes. Dianne Taylor: She was a tiny, tiny, lovely lady, a teacher. Heart and soul a teacher, and totally supportive of Bob's father. But she wasn't happy to be here at all. [LAUGHTER] And she was very, very happy when they finally left. Bauman: You mentioned she taught at Columbia High School. Dianne Taylor: Yeah. Bauman: What did she teach? Bob Taylor: English, primarily English. And she was in charge of the journalism one school year. Dianne Taylor: She had to quit teaching, though, because of her duties as--and the words are official hostess of the camp, which is really interesting. She organized bridge activities, social activities, to keep the wives that were thrown out here in the middle of the desert happy. Because of course they weren't working, very many of them. So she worked that first year at Hanford, and then she quit and was kept busy keeping activities going on for the women and children. Bauman: That’s very interesting. Were there a lot of children around your age you were able to play with? Bob Taylor: I'm trying to remember. There were, of my own specific age that were my closest friends, there were seven of us that were either within one grade one way or the other. I think there were some older kids that came into high school. Our bus—I think there were about a total of 12 or 14 of us rode the bus into town. There certainly weren't two kids in every household of the 24 officers that worked there. Some of them were more senior and kids were grown and gone. Bauman: So did you have your own bus, then, that would just take a group of kids from the camp? Bob Taylor: I guess, yeah, we must have, that there was just a bus that came out and got us and took us back into town. There was nobody else to pick up. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: And do you remember how you felt about first of all coming here? Do you have any memories of that, and then when you left in 1947? Bob Taylor: I certainly had no--at age six, everything in the world was exciting to me. I think I mentioned earlier heat and wind, that sort of thing didn't really mean much of anything to me. I have no recollection of being upset about being here, other than knowing that my mother was upset about being here. I liked it here. I had good friends. I was kind of disappointed to go back to McNeil Island. Three of my closest friends at camp that were out there too--let's see, Kenny and Jerry and— Dianne Taylor: Were they out there then? Bob Taylor: Yeah. There were, I think, five of us actually went back to McNeil Island. So, at least I wasn't--had my friends going back there with me, which made it better. And then we had a very--from a prefab in the desert, we went back to a fairly palatial estate that we lived on because of my dad's position, so I liked that. And then that next year I started junior high at Clover Park. And so starting then I went back to--I rode the boat to Steilacoom and caught the bus to school. And then I was off on a whole ‘nother part of my life. I think I'd say I was probably happy to be leaving, but not the way my mother was happy to be leaving. Dianne Taylor: Well, I think it was a pretty idyllic childhood for kids like this. They've got the free reign of the desert, within reason. They've got the swimming pool. Nobody was worrying about jumping into the Yakima River. And they had friends, and they'd go into the movies. We've got a picture of Bob--we think it's Bob--with his buddies. There was a picture in Richland years ago at the post office there was a little museum. Bauman: A kind of display. Dianne Taylor: Yeah. And there's a picture of the kids outside the Uptown--not the Uptown, the old Village Theater. And we're pretty sure he's there. But the stories he would tell me, running around, riding their bikes, it was-- Bob Taylor: I just think of it as fun and unique. I really do. Dianne Taylor: What about the stories about Dad and the baseball field? They had a baseball field there for the prisoners, for their recreation. Bauman: Oh, at the camp. Bob Taylor: Well, that was their big activity on the weekends. They had a very nice ball field. Again, there's pictures of it outside of the administration building. And my dad was a good guy. For somebody in 1934 to survive starting as a prison guard at McNeil Island, those were tough times. Those were really tough times. I don't mean living as a family, my mom and dad. I mean just as a human being who felt some degree of emotion about people. Prison guards anywhere in any prison in 1934 were really tough, mean guys. They had to be. But when he came over here, he really--and it shows in his correspondence--he really had a lot of humanity and caring. And he ran a really great camp here and has lots of letters saying so from people, from superiors. What started me on that was just her idea about the baseball. He wanted to make sure that they had sporting activities to do things with over the weekend. Bauman: Recreation and entertainment. Bob Taylor: Yeah. Bauman: I find it very interesting neither of your parents really talked about this stuff, but they kept-- Dianne Taylor: Yeah, oh yeah. Bauman: --the photos and the documents that you didn't even know. Bob Taylor: Yeah. We didn't realize they had all that. Dianne Taylor: And Dad would talk about it a little bit. It wasn't like he never talked about it. But he told me the story one time about the prisoners escaping, and he talked some of these things. But it wasn't something that you talked about very much. It was once in a while. I mean, like every few years there'd be a comment. But Mom didn't talk about it at all, other than the teaching, which of course she loved to be a teacher and loved doing that. But it was a very, very quiet non-discussed part of their lives. Bauman: Are there any other either events or things that happened that were humorous or special things, memories that stand out in your mind about your years here? Bob Taylor: One of my major memories actually was the very first summer we were here. And three or four six-year-old boys never, ever, ever, ever got in trouble. But for some reason, we chose to go into the crawl space underneath our Quonset hut. I mean, there was no foundation in the sense you’d think of a foundation. But there was a raised floor and so there was space under there with snakes and bugs and spiders. And my parents never specifically told me, don't ever go down there. You'd sort of think that was understood. But three of us, one hot, hot, hot day, we thought, well, it was just boiling hot outside. It was boiling hot in the Quonset hut. Those things are not fit for human habitation without air conditioning. And so we got the smart idea it might be cooler down there in the crawl space. So we got down in the crawl space, and then for some reason some guards--I say guards—some of the men came around doing some kind of a check of the housing. I don't know what they were necessarily—but here we were, little boys where we were pretty sure we weren't supposed to be, and the adult men walking around sounded like we just knew they were looking specifically for us to get us in trouble. That's kind of silly, really, but it was a big thing for me as six years old to be down there where I'm pretty sure I shouldn't be and knew what kind of trouble I was going to be in when they found us. The other thing is the coming into the shows in the afternoon and standing in the line outside the theater. And, as I say, Tom Mix, and Hopalong Cassidy, and whoever else, the Saturday afternoon shows at the theater. I remember going to those a lot. Dianne Taylor: One of the fun things that we go out to there. We hadn't been there for a few years, out to the camp. It's just kind of fun to walk around and realize what was there--the families, the men—brought together from all over the country for one purpose. And they fulfilled their purpose and kept the orchards going and the fields, and then they left. And to me there's a lot of kind of neat spirit and ghost—ghost isn't the right word. But there's a sense that there was something really interesting, good happening here—good or bad depending on the way you looked at it. But it's just an interesting place to go and walk around out there. You should do it sometime. Bauman: Yeah. And a unique place. Dianne Taylor: Very unique, very unique. And it's fun to walk around, and we think we found the kitchen. So I'm thinking about the guy making the good cinnamon rolls. He was there. And you think you found where Dad—where the office was. Bob Taylor: Yeah, I'm pretty sure I can identify where the administration building was. But the various cement foundations or partial foundations that are still out there can pretty well match up with the pictures that we have from back then. Bauman: Well, great. Maybe this might be a good time, then, to sort of end this part, unless there's something we haven't talked about yet that you'd like to in this part of the-- Bob Taylor: Well, I've covered the things that I certainly, the bullet points that I had in mind that I wanted to cover. There's probably always more things to talk about. Part of it is sitting and having the box and going through and pulling a piece of paper might remind me to say something else. But I feel comfortable right now in saying that anybody watching this interview is going to know a whole lot more about what Columbia Camp was about than they knew before. And that's the main point of what we're trying to accomplish here. Dianne Taylor: There were no fences at Columbia Camp. Bob Taylor: Right. Dianne Taylor: There were no fences. Bob Taylor: Right. Bauman: Right. And these were all male prisoners, right? Bob Taylor: Oh yeah. Bauman: Yeah, well, maybe this would be a good time to end this part, and then we can look at some of the photos and have you comment some of those. Dianne Taylor: I wish that they had shared it with--Bob's mom and dad had shared it with us sooner, because there would be so many more stories and so much more understanding. Man one: Okay, so I'm going to give this. Why was it located--I mean, I know it was located for the orchard support and stuff. But why where it was? Ever hear why it was located? Bob Taylor: I don't specifically know, other than it was near Hanford. It was on the river, which helped with the infrastructure. It was away from this burgeoning 1,500 population big town of Richland. Man one: And yet kind of remote. Bob Taylor: And kind of remote. I mean, it was remote for those days. Bauman: Like you said, escaping was tricky because-- Bob Taylor: Yeah, it was far enough. Dianne Taylor: Yeah. Man one: It was Alcatraz in its own way. Dianne Taylor: Well, it was. It was, because it was--I mean, can you just imagine being out there and trying to escape? And how are you going to get water? It's the true desert. Bob Taylor: I guess the real answer is, if you realize that Hanford took everything from here north and they weren't going to go across the river, and here's Richland, and down there is Benton City, and this is the Yakima winding out there and just kind of a nice little bend in the river of the Yakima. Bauman: I love that they call it Columbia Camp even though it's not-- Dianne Taylor: Isn't that funny? Man one: I know, it's great. Close enough. Bauman: They didn't know their geography very well. Dianne Taylor: Yeah. We know it wasn't Bob's father because there were guys from Washington out here long before that. But it's kind of interesting. Man two: Well, [INAUDIBLE] will bring that light around, put it behind that camera if it'll reach. If it won't I'll bring--or just unplug it and I'll move this cord. Dianne Taylor: What you doing? Bob Taylor: Just got one minor issue. I'm just seeing if anything's-- Dianne Taylor: Yeah, this guy had no clue what it's like to be raised in the city, because he started-- Man one: The stories that you tell remind me of this other guy I knew that had grown up--his father was in the Navy. And he grew up on Midway, I think. Midway or Wake Island where it was a mile this way, and it was two miles that way, and that was it. Bob Taylor: Yeah. Man one: And as a kid, he loved it. Down at the beach, having a good time, going to the movies, all he wanted, soda pop and all that stuff. But the parents were going crazy. [LAUGHTER] Bob Taylor: Oh yeah. Dianne Taylor: Well, when we got this little note from Bob's mother--there's pictures in there of the women of the camp. And if you watched at all the Manhattan Project TV show that was on for a while, these gals are—it's the same women. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:45:43 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 189 kbps Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1944-1947 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Harold E. Taylor Doris C. Taylor Kenny Jerry Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Bob and Dianne Taylor Description An account of the resource An interview with Bob and Dianne Taylor conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 06-10-2015 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2018-31-1: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. 1955 Dam Hanford Manhattan Project Park Quonset hut Quonset huts River Road School Sun swimming Theater https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F157eb8cc8ada403d8f472d5c48788511.jpg 9d72ff516906fcb85e78925a8663e892 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F0472090f713e05ebf58314e205876e9a.mp4 218d716c6219eb2bb404d57fdee92c83 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Bauman Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Bob Bush Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Northwest Public Television | Bush_Bob </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Robert Bauman: I’m going to have you start just by saying your name, first. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Robert Bush: Okay, my name is Bob Bush. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: My name is Robert Bauman, and we're conducting this interview with Robert, or Bob, Bush on July 17 of 2013. And we're having this interview on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. And we'll be talking with Bob about his experiences working at the Hanford site. And so I'd like to start just by having you talk about how and when you arrived at Hanford. What brought you here? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: Okay. During World War II, I was overseas. My parents were in the area, both of them working. My brother was also here in Pasco High School. When I came home from the service to Southern Idaho, Korean War broke out. Wages were frozen, and so I was looking to better myself. And I applied by mail. I was interviewed by telephone. And I came up here in 1951 to the accounting department, General Electric Company. They were the sole contractor. And for 15 years, in construction and engineering accounting, which was separate from plant operations at that time. And from there, my accounting career followed its path through several successive contractors. From GE to ITT, Atlantic Richfield, to Rockwell, and finally with Westinghouse. When I retired, I was with Westinghouse for one month. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: You said your parents were here during the war. When did they come out? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: It was '43. 1943 and '44, my mother worked for the original postmaster of Richland, Ed Peddicord. And my dad was a carpenter. Built some of the first government houses called the Letter Homes. They were here about two years, I think. And then they went back to Idaho, I believe. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: Okay. And what part of Idaho? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: Twin Falls, Idaho. Where I graduated from high school. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: Okay. What were your first impressions upon arriving in the Tri-Cities? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: That's kind of interesting, Bob. Because I came up ahead of my wife and two--year-and-a-half old, and three-and-a-half-year-old sons. About two weeks ahead of them. And so I found a Liberty trailers to rent—the housing was nonexistent. And I found a Liberty trailer, which means it had no running water, no bathroom. It was like a camping trailer, basically. I sent for them. A brother-in-law who had graduated from high school went directly into the Korean War. He drove them up as far as Huntington. I went on a bus to Huntington and met them, came back. And as we came onto the Umatilla side, and I said, that's Washington. Well, there was no green and everybody was disappointed. But that's the first impression. I mean, there wasn't a bridge over the river in Umatilla. It was a ferry. So you drove around the horn at Wallula. Things were just really different. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: So you said you had a trailer. Where was-- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: In Pasco on a front yard of an old pioneer home, where Lewis Street crosses 10th. That was the end on Lewis Street at 10th. And from there west was called Indiana. And there was about three homes on there. And it just quit. And roughly across from the present day Pasco School Administration Building, which was a Sears building. Across the street there was where this home was. I mean, things have just—in the whole area—have changed so much. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: And how long did you live there then? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: Until I was called for housing in Richland, which was six months. That was in June, no air conditioning. And finally got into an apartment building, a one-bedroom before with two little boys that slept in the same crib. It was still, basically, wartime conditions. Weren't any appliances for sale and you had to stand in line to get a refrigerator. It was a different world. But we were young, so we could take it. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: [LAUGHTER] And was this in Richland then, the apartment? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: No, that was in Pasco. After that trailer, that was only about two weeks. And then we want into this apartment, the one-bedroom. Then we moved next door to a two-bedroom in a five-plex. And then in December, six months later, I got the first--I got a housing call from the housing office in Richland, which sat where the present day police station sits. And the lady offered me—she said, you could have it Saturday. It was a prefab. It had already been worn and pulled out. And I kind of hesitated. I said, I've already got something in Pasco. Well, she said, I could let you have a brand new apartment. That apartment was brand new. It was so clean. My wife, who was very fastidious, she didn't even have to clean cupboards. And the apartments have now been torn down by Kadlec for that newest building. And in fact, this morning I just went by and took a picture of Goethals Street, which is vacated. And it was quite a pleasant move to come out of a trailer into—a non-air-conditioned cinder block building apartment into a nice, brand new apartment with air conditioning, full basement, and close to work. And at that time, my office was downtown in the so-called 700 Area, which is basically where the Federal Building is--where the Bank of America is was the police station. And that's Knight Street, I believe. From there north to Swift, and from Jadwin west to Stevens where the Tastee Freeze was, that was the 700 Area confines. Probably about 22 buildings in there. The original thing prior to computers, everything was manual bookkeeping or accounting with ledgers. And they came out with a McBee Keysort cards, and it was called electronic data processing. It was spaghetti wire with holes in the boards, that type of thing. That building had to be a special airlock building. And that's the Spencer Kenney Building beside the Gesa Building. That building is built especially to house equipment. And they just went from there. And I moved around my office. And after 15 years, I went into what they call operations. I was onsite services, which—did that for 17 years. And that was probably the better part of--second better job that I had, I guess. The transportation and everything, onsite support services. The whole point there. That job took me all over the plant. I established inventories. I took some of the first inventories of construction workers' supplies and tools and shop equipment, rolling stock. My name was Mud. They thought so much of me they gave me a desk in the corner of a big lunchroom. [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: So you did work at various places then? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: Yes. Well, yes. My very first location was in North Richland, then called North Richland Camp, where the bus lot was--the maintenance shops. I'm trying to establish a point up there—what's over there today? There's a big sand dune on your left going by the automotive shops, past the bus lot, where the bus lot was. Opposite that sand dune on the other side of Stevens was a bunch of one-story temporary buildings. That was North Richland Camp. And that's where my first accounting job was there for two or three years. I had been there—I came there in June. And in January of '52, had 22 people along in my department that I worked in. I was a junior clerk at that time. Took me four years to get onto the management roles, but I did. But anyhow, in that room they came in there six months later. After I'd only been here six months, AEC, predecessor to the OA. The AEC has taken over more management, more responsibility. So we're going to be laying off a lot of people. I had only been here six months. And so others grabbed straws and went different places. I always said either I was too ignorant or lucky, I don't know what. But I just sat still and it panned out for the better. I didn't get laid off. I moved from there. But I went downtown to the 703 Building, which stood where the Federal Building is now. There's a building to the rear that the city owns called 703. That was the fourth wing. 703 was the frame construction, the three floors. And the later years, they added a fourth wing out of block building. Made it more permanent. That's why it's still standing today. Now, that was my second location. And then I got on the management role in '55, which meant I went exempt and no more pay for overtime. And went out to White Bluffs site—town site, and that's where the minor construction was located. Minor construction, it's the construction people that are specially trained in SWP, radiological construction work, as opposed to run-of-the-mill construction. And they're the ones that had never had any accounting at all for any equipment, supplies, materials or otherwise. And that's where I had the lunchroom office experience. It so happened that they established--I brought an inventory procedure and established that first inventory during a strike. We had to cut government-owned tool boxes. But still, the workers thought they were private. And we had to cut locks in order to take inventory. And then we feared for our lives when they came back. Pretty rough day sometimes. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: What timeframe would that have been you were out? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: That was 1955 to '56. A couple of years there, and then another person took over from there and I went into budgeting at that point, from accounting to budgeting. And I did that for--until 1963. And then I moved out to the so-called bus lot, which it was. 105 buses and all that. And I was out there for 17 pleasant years, budgeting, billing rate—Because we were the supplier of all plant services. So we had billing rates to the reactors, and the separations, and the fuel prep, and--whoever. The AEC, everything. We billed them, just as if we were like plumbing jobs. And that I enjoyed. That was probably my most productive period. And from similar work to that, I moved over—Let’s see, I was around when the Federal Building was built, but I didn't get into it. That was built in '69. I didn't get down there until 1980. Went down there a couple of years. And then they moved us out to Hanford Square where Battelle Boulevard intersection is. And I was there--I retired from that location in 1977. My wife and I retired the same week. I've been retired 26 years now at the end of this month. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: Was your wife working at the Hanford Site as well? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: She worked after the kids were grown, like most stay-at-home moms do. She stayed until the daughter was of age, and then she went to work for a credit union, which was the government credit union, which was merged later on with Gesa. But that was an interesting job. They worked two hours a day, three days a week. Because it was all hand done, no mechanization. And then she got a job offer from the department in the central stores and purchasing department. She worked there eight years. In 1986, the income tax law changed a lot of things for all of us, effective in 1987. It meant that partial vesting was--IRS has to rule on all things like that. And that meant that if you had 10 years to vest pensions, once you pass the 50% point, whatever the vesting period is, then you were partially vested. And so she had 8 years out of 10. So she got 80%. But she had only worked eight years, so it wasn't a very large accumulation. Because I got my full. Of course, I'd been here 37 years I think it was, however that works out. 36. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: I want to go back and ask you—when you were talking earlier about that period in '55, '56 when you were working out at White Bluffs town site. You mentioned radiological construction? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: Oh, that—those construction workers worked under what they called SWP, Special Work Permit, which meant radiological. They had to wear--the clothing was called SWP clothing then. Today, they call it something else. But they worked under those conditions, so therefore they were subject to different rules. Whereas, construction workers on brand new construction weren’t then—they didn't have any of that to contend with. But once a plant went operational, it became radiologically SWP. This is not an anti-union thing. It's just a demonstration of how things were in those days. They had some old buses that--the original buses in town were called Green Hornets. And they were small. They had chrome bars that went right across the middle of your back. And for 35 miles, that was not very comfortable. When they got the newer buses that you see today, like Greyhound has for instance, they relegated those to the construction workers at White Bluffs. Well, since GE guys worked up at White Bluffs, we had to ride those, too. So all the office workers in the warehouse--GE employees rode one bus. The electricians rode another bus. Pipe fitters rode another bus, even though there were only two or three of them. It was really a segmented-type thing. As close to anything radiological that I came to when I conducting one of those physical inventories—we would be out--all of the construction materials were stored outdoors on the ground. I mean, like stainless steel. 308 stainless steel was pretty high-priced stuff. But the sheets were stored outside on pallets. Well, one sheet is worth thousands and thousands of dollars. So we had to lay down on the ground and count the sheets to do the inventory. This one day—the only time I came close to any contamination, we went back and boarded the buses that evening from White Bluffs. And we saw the guys on the dock there chipping with a chisel and hammer. That meant they were chipping out flakes of contamination. So we asked what was going on. They said, well, we're next door to F and H Areas. And F Area had coughed out something they said. And so I said, well, my crew was outside today on the ground. And if they coughed out because all the--some construction workers could drive their cars. That's the only people. Plant operations people all had to ride buses. No parking lots. So anyhow, those cars were all impounded. Had tape around them. They couldn't go home. And some of the guys, they had to take off their shoes, leave them, and be issued safety shoes in lieu of it. And I said, well, we were on the ground, too. So they proceeded to take us all off the bus and surveyed us with a wand. And they only found a few flakes on our back. And so we were allowed to go home. But that's as close as I ever came to getting contaminated. It's still scary. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: Yeah. Obviously, Hanford, a site where security was prominent-- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: Very tight security, yeah. I was telling the young lady here that across the roadway on Stevens, as you near the 300 Area, there was a real wide barricade, probably eight lanes that you had to go through. And everybody had to stop, including buses. And the guard would get on the bus, walk down the aisle, and check every badge. And at that time, AEC had their own security airplanes. That was the purpose of the Richland Airport was for AEC security in the beginning. They had a couple Piper Cub-type airplanes. And one day we're on a bus going out to work in the morning. And all of a sudden, a plane just zoomed on by. Somebody had run the barricade. The plane goes out, lands in front of them, stops them, and that's how they got apprehended. Another incident of security, yeah, that's the subject? Many years later now, after 1963, and I'm in the transportation assignment. Airspace was off limits to all airplanes over Hanford because they had army artillery guarding it in the Cold War and all that. And a private plane had violated the space. And the AEC planes had forced it down. And once they're down, they can't ever take off. So after a week or so, they sent a lowboy trailer out there, loaded the small airplane on it, proceeded to come down what's the highway and now Stevens. And down where Stevens today, 240 and all that intersection is, there was only two lanes on the road then, not six. But at that juncture there, there was a blinking light. And they had to turn right to go to the Richland Airport. And this guy, the truck driver pulling this low-boy, he had never pulled an airplane before. And he didn't allow for that pull. Well, that blinking light clipped off a wing. And then he got time off. It was not really his fault, that pilot in the beginning. But there's a lot of—I guess full of interesting stories like that on security. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: Great. Did you have special security clearance to work at Hanford at the time? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: Which? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: Any special security clearance? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: Oh, yeah. I had Q clearance, which there's one higher than that, that's top secret. But Q clearance meant you could go into any and all areas. And because the nature of my job, I had that my whole time I was out there. Once you have it, they would tend not to take it away from you because it's quite expensive investigation to get it in the first place. I might mention something interesting in that regard. When I first came to work in 1951, why, the PSQ is Personnel Security Questionnaire. And it's about 25 pages long. And you had to memorize it, because every five years, you had to update it. Well anyhow, I filled that out, and you give references. And I have, in the Twin Falls area, a farmer that had been a neighbor farmer in Nebraska, where I was born, to my parents. I gave him as a reference because he had known me all my life. And that would be higher points. About a year or two later--I guess probably a year later I had gone back down to Twin Falls to visit the in-laws and I went and saw this farmer, family friend. The first thing he said to me, Bobby, what in the world did you do? [LAUGHTER] The FBI had come out to his farm and piled on the questions. And I hadn't told him ahead of time I'd given a reference. So they really did very, very tight security. It's probably tighter than it was when I was in the Air Corps. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: You mentioned riding a bus out to work. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: Yeah, everybody rode it, except those few construction workers in that minor construction area. They were permitted their cars. I don't know why, but no one else drove cars on the plant. Everybody rode on the bus. The bus fare was--of course, it was subsidized. It was a plant operation, like anything else is. To make the liability insurance legal, they charged a nickel each way on the bus, which later on got changed to a dollar or something. But many of the years, we'd ride the bus 30, 35, or 40 miles to work for a nickel. The nickel was just to make it legal. From those old green buses, they came up with some--I forget what they're called. More like Greyhound buses. And then in 1963, the year I went out to the transportation, they bought a fleet of Flxibles. And that's F-L-X. There's no E in it. That's the same kind of flat-nosed bus that the bus lines used today. And they were coaches, not buses. They had storage underneath. And so we had quite a suggestion system on the plant. And you would get monetary award or mention. And somebody said, well, instead of running mail carrier cars delivering mail to all the stops on the whole plant, load the mail onto the now available storage bins on these buses. And that was a pretty good suggestion award, monetarily, to somebody. And they did that. Took it out to a central mail station out there, and then dispatched it. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: You mentioned different contractors you worked for over the years-- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: Uh-huh. The story behind that for the record is that General Elec--well, DuPont built the plant. That's who my dad worked for. And GE came in '46, I believe. And they were here until the group I was in--they phased out in groups. I was the last group to go out. [COUGH] Excuse me, in 196--'66. When the GE phased out, they had a dollar a year contract. Like Henry Kaiser and rest of them did during the war, for the good of the country. But they trained an awful lot of people in the infancy field of nuclear engineering. General Electric trained all those people here and then they opened up the turnkey operations in San Jose and Japan. But anyhow, AEC was still AEC at that point. And then, their wise decision--instead of one contractor, they would have nine. And so there were--the reactors was one. Separation plant was another. Fuel preparation at 300 Area was another. The laboratories, which is today basically Battelle. Site services. The company doctors formed a foundation called Hanford Environmental Health Foundation, which is the MDs that gave the annual exams. And the computer end, it was now getting into the infancy of that, computer sciences corps, we had the first contracts on that. So all together, there were nine contractors. And the portion that I was with went to ITT. They bid, came in and bid. I helped conduct tours of the facility for the bidders. Because I knew all about it and knew the ins and outs on some of the monetary parts that their accounting people would have questions on. We'd walk through shops and all that. Well, anyhow, ITT got the site support--site services. And we had that for five years. And austerity set in in the '70s. Well, '70. They said, we got to get site services' budget down to less than $10 million. And it probably was 13 or 14, I don't remember now. So my boss and another analyst, like myself, sequestered--talk about sequester. We sequestered ourselves in the then new Federal Building for about a week. Almost 20 hours a day, whittling and whittling and working on a budget. And there was only one conclusion. We had to cut everything in half. Went through all that sweat. Went up with our president, Tom Leddy, went upstairs to an AEC finance office, presented our whole case. And the man turns around and says, well, it doesn't make any difference, Tom. Your contract's not renewed anyhow. And so now, Atlantic Richfield, an existing contractor for 200 Areas, somehow the separations plant contractor that is an oil company owned, can all of a sudden manage a site service. And so they did absorb us. But politics were still around in those days. And there were three of us analysts. One had got transferred by ITT up to the new line--newly established Distant Early Warning Line from Russia up to Alaska. So that left two of us. And we waited around. We waited around and never got an offer. And they said, no, we can do it all without you. We don't need you. How come it took so many people anyhow? On a Friday afternoon, the man that I did budgets for saw me in a restroom. He said, you got an offer yet? I said, no, no. I'm working under the table with somebody else. Well, he says, if they don't hire you, I'm going to hire you. And so he went downtown, and about 4 o'clock, I got a call from the man that told me they didn't need us. Said they'd been kind of thinking. So I went over Atlantic Richfield under those. [AUDIO CUTS OUT] And so I'm not mad, not knocking—knocking them, that's just the way things were. And then Rockwell came to town. When they laid off everybody on B-2, I'm trying to think of other--in the community, something might be of interest for the history project. Back into the '50s. Those same green buses, they had, oh, four or five of them that ran in town like a modified transit system. I don't think they had that many riders, but it did. And also, the plant buses ran what they called shuttle routes. And those buses went into Richland on probably six routes and drove around the neighborhoods and picked up workers on the three shifts. And that's why up in the ranch house district, there was the bypass you'll see between homes. The pathways that go clear through lots. Blocks were so long that they had to provide a quicker route to the bus stops. Now, those rides were free because they were shuttle buses. When you got out to the bus lot, you paid your nickel, or a pass, whatever it was. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: I wanted to ask you about accounting in terms of equipment practices. Were there a lot of changes during the time you worked at the Hanford site? Computer technology come in and change things? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: Oh, yeah. For sure. In the beginning, as I mentioned earlier, all accounting was open ledgers and hand posted. Adding machine tapes at the end of the day trying to balance them all out. And we had that until--let's see. 1970s—I think it was 1977, we got our very first taste of it. Every other desk in a group of about 20 people in cost accounting that I was in. There was cost accounting, general accounting, and so on, property management. But anyhow, we had about 20 people. Every other desk had a monitor. Well, they referred to them as a computer. But they were just the monitor. And down at the end of our building was one printer. And everything was on floppy disk. Every program was on a floppy disk. Nothing was built-in because it was just the infancy. The big computers were down in the Federal Building. And a sub-basement below the basement was specially built for that. But back to our office. Across the hall from us, we had two small computers that are--to me, they're about the size of portable sewing machines. And I can't even remember the names of them because they don't exist today but they were the computer locally. So we wanted to run our work order system, we would phone down to the guy down at the other end of the building, insert the floppy disk from work system and wait. Well, I've got somebody's inventory. You have to wait. Because there's only one place to load up down there. So finally, you would put the floppy disk in. And then, you'd run it, which meant it'd run through it and print. But then you'd have to say, now print it. And they got one printer for the whole building. And so it's pretty interesting. Whereas today, I've got a laptop that I can virtually do everything with. But we graduated from hand posted ledgers right into computers. We didn't have anything in between. All of the reports that came out, came out on--referred to as IBM runs because everything was IBM. It was on paper that's about 18 inches wide with all these little perf marks on it to feed it. And you'd get one report and it would be about that thick. It was not that much information, but it's just so much printing. It's even hard to remember after 26 years how antiquated that is compared to today. But prior to that, it wasn't even the PCs. They called everything a PC. Or, was PC compatible. Because prior to that, the only electronic data processing nickname was spaghetti wire. I'm not very conversant in it, but it was some kind of a board that had a bunch of holes in it. They put wires in it and that went to certain things. But all it did was sort things. It didn't actually calculate them. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: I wanted to ask you a little bit more about the community of Richland. What was that like in the 1950s? I know it was a government-- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: In the town? I guess I didn't cover that area. Everything—all houses were owned by government. We rented them. My wife and I and family, we came after the days of free everything. When the coal was free--all the furnaces were coal fed. Some people would convert them later on to oil. But anyhow, they were coal burning. However you got the coal, whether it was government days or you bought the coal from the courtyard, which is down at the end of what's now Wellsian Way. There was a coal yard where that lumber yard is. And that's why those railroad tracks that are abandoned and rundown, that's where the coal cars came in. And I can add something a little bit later about coal cars and the plant. But anyhow, we rented from the government. For example, that brand new apartment that I mentioned moving onto first was a two-bedroom, full basement. Steam heated because--I'll digress a little bit. All the downtown 700 Area, including the Catholic church, central church, the hospital, all 700 Area, including those new apartments, and all downtown shopping area were steam heated by a steam plant, which was located where the back door of the post office is today in that small parking lot. And that one plant furnished steam for everything. Well, back to this new apartment. The steam pipes ran through this full basement. And our kids played—there wasn't any yards. There was just apartments. And they would play in the basement because they were quite small. But they can remember today the pop, pop, pop in those steam pipes. And the rent for that two-bedroom apartment was higher than any other house in town. It was $77 a month. And the reason it was $77 instead of $70 was because it included $7 for electricity. Nobody had electricity meters yet. Even in that new place. So when they did put in electricity meters in all homes later, which had to be—during that time, the year we were there, which is December '51 to December of '52, sometime in that period of time they put the meters in. They took off $7 off the rent because now we're going to pay—and their theory is it was $5 for a one-bedroom place, whatever it was. $7 for a two-bedroom and $10 for a three-bedroom for electricity in those days. And nobody had electric heat, of course. And then, later on they put in water meters. And again, they had to come into your home, invade your home, and put in something. So it was strictly government prior to—well, another—and when I lived in the rental, if something went wrong with the plumbing, they would send out a plumber, but you paid for it, though. But later on when I went to the tall two-story, three-bedroom duplex houses, or called A houses, that was our first house after that apartment. And as I remember, I think the rent was--they had rent districts with low, medium, and high in the more desirable parts of town. And we were on Haupt Street across from uptown district where Hunt Street is and Jefferson Park. And I think our rent for that was like $47 because it was not a brand new apartment. And later on, we—I was on the housing list. And you applied and months or years later, you'd rotate up to move into a nicer place or a different location. But in the meantime, up came an F house, which is a two-story single family, kind of a Cape Cod-looking type of house. And that came up on the housing list. However, the caveat was that you had to cash out the present owner who had made some improvements. He had converted the coal to oil, they put in a clothesline, which nobody had clotheslines, and something else. So cashed him out for—I believe it was $750. And if I do that, I could have it, so I did. We lived in that place for 19 years. Our daughter grew up there and got married out of that home. And that's the only home she ever knew. [LAUGHTER] And we were there until 1977 when the real estate market in Richland was—this is community wide. The housing prices were moving 18% a year, about 1.5% a month. And I thought well, I don't need to be setting still. I mean, if I cash out here, and went on. So we sold that home. I listed it. Earl, my father, was very ill. We were going to Spokane. I listed it. A man came by, looked it out. What were you asking? I said, oh, about 17. He shook his head. And I said, too high? He says, no, 27,000. [LAUGHTER] Just to show you how bad things were. And so it sold right away. What are you going to do now? And I said, well. Would you want to try a mobile home? I know a jewel. And in those days, real estate men did not sell mobile homes. But this couple had bought their first house from him, or something. And it was somebody retiring out of postal, wanted to go back to Montana. Never smoked in it, never had any pets in it, no kids. It was the Cadillac of mobile homes. We were there two years, but that was long enough. Then we moved into the house that I'm still in. I'm widowed now for five years. The house we're in now, we've lived in that longer than in any other place. [LAUGHTER] But the community just has changed so drastically. South Richland. People say today they live in South Richland. We lived in South Richland, which was south of the downtown shopping district to the Yakima Bridge. That was South Richland. What is now South Richland out there was Kennewick Highlands. So it depends on who you're talking to today. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: Yeah. Do you remember any special community events, parades, any of those sorts of things during the '50s and '60s? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: Community events? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: Yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: Yep. Back in GE days, they had Atomic Frontier Days. And they were a big thing. Had beauty queens in it, rode in the float, and all that. Down at the—[COUGH] excuse me. For Atomic Frontier Days down at the lower end of Lee Boulevard, which is still the same shape today. They set up booths all on there. And it was a really big event. Before we had the hydro races even. People look back fondly on that. Talking about community, again, my mother, I said, worked for the post office, which—it stood on the corner of Knight Street, where it touches George Washington Way. There's some kind of a lawyer office building there today. And the old post office is the Knights of Columbus building on the bypass highway. But she would have to take the mail and go over to where the Red Lion Motel is today, at the Desert Inn, a frame building, winged out basically the same. And that was referred to as the transient quarters. And that was for upper management that were going through and it wasn't really a public motel, per se. But she would have mail for these big wigs over there. So she would have to go over there and have a badge to even go in the front door of that Desert Inn. Talking about badges, something humorous on that. We didn't wear things around our neck in the beginning because it was like a little pocket-sized bill fold. It was a little black bill that had your pass, your badge in it. And at every building you went into, you just pulled it out, flashed it to the guard. It usually was a lady security employee. There were guards in the building, but the person on the desk was a security clerk. But you'd just automatically—you’d open it like that and flag and put it back in your pocket. Every building you went into. Downtown, 700 Area, that first building I've referred to. One day I went into a restaurant and I just did that automatically [LAUGHTER] because it's just so automatic. Then they graduated to having the thing around your neck. And then also, if you worked in the outer areas, you had to wear a radiation badge in addition to your security badge. There was two types and one of them was a flat. And I don't know the difference. One's for beta and one's for alpha. I don't know. And one of them was a pencil shaped. And that's what they called it. And the other one was a flat badge, which was carried in something around your neck. And in all the areas I worked, and the places I described laying on the ground that happened and all that, my RAMs, they call it, never accumulated in my working life to be a danger. I had some, of course. Everybody does in the background. But I never accumulated to a danger point. There were people, some smart aleck people that would take their badge and hold it over a source at work so they could get some time off. Because if you got--what was the phrase? Anyhow, if they got contaminated, they put them on a beefsteak diet. And they stayed home. And they come every day and took a urine sample and all that stuff. But they had a life of riley. So that was nice. But the guys got canned that did that. But they would purposely expose their pencil so they could stay home. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: So did all employees have those, either the pencil or-- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: Only those that worked in reactor and separations areas, yeah. I mentioned these departments. Actually, the first department is Fuel Preparations Department, FPD. The present—the 300 Area--most of the buildings have now been torn down that you don't even see them there. But the north half roughly was fuels preparation department headed for the reactors. They took uranium and encapsulated it in cans, like can of peas in just so many words. And the south half of that 300 Area was a laboratory area, the predecessor of Battelle. So the fuel was prepared there. And it was machined and canned and sent as nickname slugs to the reactors. Then, the reactors loaded into all those little tubes. And then from the reactors, they come out the backside into those cooling pods and all that. And transported in casks to the 200 Areas, which are the separated area, separations. And the reactor area on the face side was not that dangerous. The 200 Areas only work on what they called the canyons, PUREX and REDOX, and those kind of buildings. But those cells were very, very hot. But you had to be measured no matter where you were. One of our site services was a decontamination laundry, called the laundry. And all clothing--I mentioned to you before SWP. Well, SWP, radiologic exposure employees wore whites. Carpenters and truck drivers and all that that didn't work around reactors wore blues. And so they were sorted. And we had different billing rates for that laundry because the blues only had to be laundered and dried. Whereas the others had to be laundered, dried, and decontaminated, checked in separate washing machines. And then workers wore—in the beginning, wore World War II-style gas masks for our air supply before they invented a moon-type suit. [LAUGHTER] But they wore gas masks. And the mask would come back to this mask station, which was part of the laundry. And they took the masks, and they'd take away the cartridge. They'd put the mask in dishwasher machines, in racks. That's how they would wash them. And then they would get them a new filter and package them up. Sanitize them and package them up like medical supplies would be in. I can't think of any other unusual operation out there like that. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: I want to change gears just a little bit. President Kennedy visited the site in 1963. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: Yep, 1963. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: I was wondering-- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: When they did that, they let all the schools out. And for the first time, non-workers were allowed to go in cars out there. It was a grand traffic jam, but it was quite a deal. And he landed his Air Force plane up at Moses Lake—at Larsen airbase at Ephrata, whichever you want to call it. And then helicoptered. And of course, like it is today, there were three or four helicopters. And you don't know which one he's on and all that bit. And here, everyone is gathered out the N Reactor area, which is a dual-purpose reactor. They captured the heat from the reactor, put it through a pipe through a fence to the predecessor to Energy Northwest, which was called Whoops. This was a big deal, a dual-purpose reactor. And N stood for new reactor, really. Anyhow, he comes in and they got a low-boy trailer. They fixed up down in the shops where I worked—my office was. And then built a podium just precisely for the President with him emblem and the whole bit. So I was privy to get to see some things like that. But anyhow, that was the stage. And it was a long low-boy, so it accommodated all the senators and all the local—Sam Volpentest, the guy credited with HAMMER, those type of people. Glenn Lee from the Tri-City Herald, you name it. So the helicopter comes in, blows dust over everybody. But anyhow, my wife and kids and all schools were brought out there. And I don't know how many thousand people were out there in the desert. And you could see President Kennedy. He got up on the stage. You get close enough, you could get pictures. Then, that same year in November, he got assassinated. So that was a busy year. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: Do you remember any other special events with dignitaries like that? Or other-- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: Well, I could go way back to World War II. I wasn't here, but I have a family connection on it. All over United States, they had war bond drives for various reasons to help. Build a ship, build an airplane. The one that happened here is not the only one. But they took so much money out of all the paycheck of Hanford workers, which included my dad as a carpenter. And the money they collected bought the B-17 Bomber, which was named Day's Pay. And that bomber—they had a bomber out here, a B-17, so that people could see it, but it wasn't the same one. On the Richland High School wall there's a mural. And that's a rendition by a famous artist of Day's Pay in formation. And so I can say that my parents contributed to that. And that's the story behind that one bomber. Every worker out there, construction or operations, they donated a day's pay. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: I wonder, what was the most challenging part of your job working at the Hanford site? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: As an accounting person, my most challenging part was learning government-ese. [LAUGHTER] How to deal. And in that vein, that took a long time. But once you learn it, there is a way in the US government, period. As I'm sure there is in certain corporations. Later on, when I mentioned that I went down to the federal building for my--finally got located in that building, there was another fellow and I were old timers in accounting. And that year, they had five college grads, accounting grads come in. They hired five at one time. And they ran them by Marv and I for exposure. This is how things are done. This is how the contacts are. And our basic job was to squire these young fellows around and introduce them to certain counterparts and now DOE. Now, this is how you make appointments with them. This is what you do. This is what you never do. And likewise, with senior management. And it paid off because of those five, all four of them became managers or supervisors, and one of them became my manager within two years. Today, that same man is the comptroller at Savannah River Plant. [LAUGHTER] And so I like to feel that I contributed to them being—partially to them being successful. And so that's a reward. But probably the most difficult thing coming from a private—I worked for Colorado Mill and Elevator, which means I worked at a flour mill district office as a bookkeeper. And that's a small town deal in Twin Falls. To come to work for the government where some of your family despises you because you work for the government, but you had to fight that as well as learn how the government operates. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: You mentioned earlier, you were talking about coal being used for heat in Richland. You also said you wanted to talk about coal fires going up at the site. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: Oh, what? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: Coal fires? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: Oh, yeah. Interestingly, the midway power station, substation at midway, is one of the reasons they built Hanford where they did because the Grand Coulee Dam had just been completed and an electricity producer—a major producer. And they put the midway substation down there. That basically was built to furnish huge amounts of power to Hanford, for the reactors, everything. Which in total—because I processed vouchers, I know it was 32 megs. Which today doesn't sound like much, but the whole plant bill was 32 megs when everything was operating. But if the power were interrupted, they had to have a backup. So every area had a huge diesel-powered--like water pumps, where they could pump the water from the river instead of by electrically. They had to be able to pump it because it was critical. Because all the water for the whole plant was taken in at intake water plants near the reactors along the river. The 200 Area water is piped to them in a huge line as raw water until it gets to their place. The backup is these coal-fired steam plants, is what I was trying to say. It got about 30-some cars of coal a day rolled through Richland past the cemetery. In the beginning, the railroad came down from the north, from Vantage area down along the Columbia River. There's a railroad bridge across the river, Beverly I think it is. And it came down to below the 100-B Reactor area. That's where the line ended. And then a plant had its own railway incidentally. It had a 285 mile-long rail line, high line and low line. Then, they built--in 1950, the year before I came, they built the line that we see today that comes from Columbia Center into Richland, by the cemetery. And it ends at the old bus lot area, where that railroad car Columbia Center into Richland, by the cemetery. And it ends at the old bus lot area, where that railroad car rebuilding outfit is now, there is a roundhouse that it's rectangular in shape. But some 30 cars of coal a day came in here to supply because those plants were—they actually operated the steam plants. They didn't start them up from cold. They just ran constantly. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: I wonder if you could provide sort of an overall assessment of how Hanford was as a place to work. What was it like as a place to work? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: It was a great place for me. I came out of an area that was the agriculturally-oriented. And the Korean War started. Wages were frozen, you weren't going to go anywhere. I came up here and I got a new start, like pioneers did. I visualized that's what farming pioneers did the same thing. And it opened up a whole field for me, a big corporate field. And it's just been a great place to work. And it was not dangerous to me. I'm not afraid to drink the water here. I'm asked by a nephew in Hermiston constantly, how do you drink the water? And I said, well, it comes out of the river. How can it come out of the river and that plume’s out there? There's so many false stories around here. But working at Hanford, I think, by and large, almost all employees would tell you the same thing. It was a great place to work. The pay was decent. Maybe you didn't get rich, but it was decent. It's in a nice area to live in. When we came back in the '50s, or in the '40s, and before that even of course, shopping was pretty much nonexistent. They went to Yakima, or Spokane, or Walla Walla. That I didn’t—we didn't experience that too much by 1951 because by that time, the Uptown shopping district was built. And there was a men's store. And there was four women's stores. Because GE was the prime contractor, there was an appliance dealer that handled GE-Hotpoint appliances. We got employee discounts when we worked for GE. We also got 10% gasoline discount when we worked for Atlantic Richfield Hanford. But we just grew with the times. And it's just such an entirely different area now than it was. Just the world is different, too. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: Is there anything that I haven't asked you about? Is there anything you would like to talk about that we haven't talked about yet? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: Now really, work-wise at Hanford, I think I’ve pretty well-covered it. I'll repeat myself. My first 15 years was construction engineering accounting, which is an entirely different field than operations accounting. Operations accounting concerns itself with the reactors and separations and the site services that support them. But I learned a lot by working at Hanford. My family, three adult children live here, are retired here. My oldest son went on Medicare this year. [LAUGHTER] And that kind of puts you in your place quickly. But it's been a good enough place that they stayed in the area. And of the six granddaughters, grandchildren, four of them are in the area. And that's kind of characteristic with a lot of the Tri-City families. They stay or come back. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bauman: Well, Bob, I'd like to thank you very much for coming and talking to us today. I really appreciate it. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX194300000"> Bush: It's been my pleasure. </div> Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri-Cities Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 1:02:19 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 3068 kbps Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1951-2013 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1951-1977 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Volpentest, Sam Kaiser, Henry Leddy, Tom Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview General Electric Atlantic Richfield Rockwell Westinghouse 703 Building F Area H Area 300 Area 200 Area 700 Area WPPSS HAMMER N Reactor 100-B Reactor Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Bob Bush Description An account of the resource Bob Bush moved to Pasco, Washington in 1951 and later moved to Richland, Washington. Bob worked on the Hanford Site from 1951-1987. An interview conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Pasco (Wash.) Grand Coulee Dam (Wash.) Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2016-05-17: Metadata v1 created – [J.G.] Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 7/7/2013 100-B Reactor 200 Area 300 Area 700 Area 703 Building DuPont F Area General Electric H Area Henry Kaiser Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, 1917-1963 N Reactor Richland (Wash.) Washington Public Power Supply System https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F4550fdc413dc83be66111b1f46565f48.JPG cdadd3e83c0c3187276f5e7e8afc64cf https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F1583c61c6744d42545aae8cd7b5f497a.mov 045fb4b829211772af34664992cc239c Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Bauman Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Bob Bush Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Northwest Public Television | Bush_Bob Robert Bauman: I’m going to have you start just by saying your name, first. Robert Bush: Okay, my name is Bob Bush. Bauman: My name is Robert Bauman, and we're conducting this interview with Robert, or Bob, Bush on July 17 of 2013. And we're having this interview on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. And we'll be talking with Bob about his experiences working at the Hanford site. And so I'd like to start just by having you talk about how and when you arrived at Hanford. What brought you here? Bush: Okay. During World War II, I was overseas. My parents were in the area, both of them working. My brother was also here in Pasco High School. When I came home from the service to Southern Idaho, Korean War broke out. Wages were frozen, and so I was looking to better myself. And I applied by mail. I was interviewed by telephone. And I came up here in 1951 to the accounting department, General Electric Company. They were the sole contractor. And for 15 years, in construction and engineering accounting, which was separate from plant operations at that time. And from there, my accounting career followed its path through several successive contractors. From GE to ITT, Atlantic Richfield, to Rockwell, and finally with Westinghouse. When I retired, I was with Westinghouse for one month. Bauman: You said your parents were here during the war. When did they come out? Bush: It was '43. 1943 and '44, my mother worked for the original postmaster of Richland, Ed Peddicord. And my dad was a carpenter. Built some of the first government houses called the Letter Homes. They were here about two years, I think. And then they went back to Idaho, I believe. Bauman: Okay. And what part of Idaho? Bush: Twin Falls, Idaho. Where I graduated from high school. Bauman: Okay. What were your first impressions upon arriving in the Tri-Cities? Bush: That's kind of interesting, Bob. Because I came up ahead of my wife and two--year-and-a-half old, and three-and-a-half-year-old sons. About two weeks ahead of them. And so I found a Liberty trailers to rent—the housing was nonexistent. And I found a Liberty trailer, which means it had no running water, no bathroom. It was like a camping trailer, basically. I sent for them. A brother-in-law who had graduated from high school went directly into the Korean War. He drove them up as far as Huntington. I went on a bus to Huntington and met them, came back. And as we came onto the Umatilla side, and I said, that's Washington. Well, there was no green and everybody was disappointed. But that's the first impression. I mean, there wasn't a bridge over the river in Umatilla. It was a ferry. So you drove around the horn at Wallula. Things were just really different. Bauman: So you said you had a trailer. Where was-- Bush: In Pasco on a front yard of an old pioneer home, where Lewis Street crosses 10th. That was the end on Lewis Street at 10th. And from there west was called Indiana. And there was about three homes on there. And it just quit. And roughly across from the present day Pasco School Administration Building, which was a Sears building. Across the street there was where this home was. I mean, things have just—in the whole area—have changed so much. Bauman: And how long did you live there then? Bush: Until I was called for housing in Richland, which was six months. That was in June, no air conditioning. And finally got into an apartment building, a one-bedroom before with two little boys that slept in the same crib. It was still, basically, wartime conditions. Weren't any appliances for sale and you had to stand in line to get a refrigerator. It was a different world. But we were young, so we could take it. Bauman: [LAUGHTER] And was this in Richland then, the apartment? Bush: No, that was in Pasco. After that trailer, that was only about two weeks. And then we want into this apartment, the one-bedroom. Then we moved next door to a two-bedroom in a five-plex. And then in December, six months later, I got the first--I got a housing call from the housing office in Richland, which sat where the present day police station sits. And the lady offered me—she said, you could have it Saturday. It was a prefab. It had already been worn and pulled out. And I kind of hesitated. I said, I've already got something in Pasco. Well, she said, I could let you have a brand new apartment. That apartment was brand new. It was so clean. My wife, who was very fastidious, she didn't even have to clean cupboards. And the apartments have now been torn down by Kadlec for that newest building. And in fact, this morning I just went by and took a picture of Goethals Street, which is vacated. And it was quite a pleasant move to come out of a trailer into—a non-air-conditioned cinder block building apartment into a nice, brand new apartment with air conditioning, full basement, and close to work. And at that time, my office was downtown in the so-called 700 Area, which is basically where the Federal Building is--where the Bank of America is was the police station. And that's Knight Street, I believe. From there north to Swift, and from Jadwin west to Stevens where the Tastee Freeze was, that was the 700 Area confines. Probably about 22 buildings in there. The original thing prior to computers, everything was manual bookkeeping or accounting with ledgers. And they came out with a McBee Keysort cards, and it was called electronic data processing. It was spaghetti wire with holes in the boards, that type of thing. That building had to be a special airlock building. And that's the Spencer Kenney Building beside the Gesa Building. That building is built especially to house equipment. And they just went from there. And I moved around my office. And after 15 years, I went into what they call operations. I was onsite services, which—did that for 17 years. And that was probably the better part of--second better job that I had, I guess. The transportation and everything, onsite support services. The whole point there. That job took me all over the plant. I established inventories. I took some of the first inventories of construction workers' supplies and tools and shop equipment, rolling stock. My name was Mud. They thought so much of me they gave me a desk in the corner of a big lunchroom. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: So you did work at various places then? Bush: Yes. Well, yes. My very first location was in North Richland, then called North Richland Camp, where the bus lot was--the maintenance shops. I'm trying to establish a point up there—what's over there today? There's a big sand dune on your left going by the automotive shops, past the bus lot, where the bus lot was. Opposite that sand dune on the other side of Stevens was a bunch of one-story temporary buildings. That was North Richland Camp. And that's where my first accounting job was there for two or three years. I had been there—I came there in June. And in January of '52, had 22 people along in my department that I worked in. I was a junior clerk at that time. Took me four years to get onto the management roles, but I did. But anyhow, in that room they came in there six months later. After I'd only been here six months, AEC, predecessor to the OA. The AEC has taken over more management, more responsibility. So we're going to be laying off a lot of people. I had only been here six months. And so others grabbed straws and went different places. I always said either I was too ignorant or lucky, I don't know what. But I just sat still and it panned out for the better. I didn't get laid off. I moved from there. But I went downtown to the 703 Building, which stood where the Federal Building is now. There's a building to the rear that the city owns called 703. That was the fourth wing. 703 was the frame construction, the three floors. And the later years, they added a fourth wing out of block building. Made it more permanent. That's why it's still standing today. Now, that was my second location. And then I got on the management role in '55, which meant I went exempt and no more pay for overtime. And went out to White Bluffs site—town site, and that's where the minor construction was located. Minor construction, it's the construction people that are specially trained in SWP, radiological construction work, as opposed to run-of-the-mill construction. And they're the ones that had never had any accounting at all for any equipment, supplies, materials or otherwise. And that's where I had the lunchroom office experience. It so happened that they established--I brought an inventory procedure and established that first inventory during a strike. We had to cut government-owned tool boxes. But still, the workers thought they were private. And we had to cut locks in order to take inventory. And then we feared for our lives when they came back. Pretty rough day sometimes. Bauman: What timeframe would that have been you were out? Bush: That was 1955 to '56. A couple of years there, and then another person took over from there and I went into budgeting at that point, from accounting to budgeting. And I did that for--until 1963. And then I moved out to the so-called bus lot, which it was. 105 buses and all that. And I was out there for 17 pleasant years, budgeting, billing rate—Because we were the supplier of all plant services. So we had billing rates to the reactors, and the separations, and the fuel prep, and--whoever. The AEC, everything. We billed them, just as if we were like plumbing jobs. And that I enjoyed. That was probably my most productive period. And from similar work to that, I moved over—Let’s see, I was around when the Federal Building was built, but I didn't get into it. That was built in '69. I didn't get down there until 1980. Went down there a couple of years. And then they moved us out to Hanford Square where Battelle Boulevard intersection is. And I was there--I retired from that location in 1977. My wife and I retired the same week. I've been retired 26 years now at the end of this month. Bauman: Was your wife working at the Hanford Site as well? Bush: She worked after the kids were grown, like most stay-at-home moms do. She stayed until the daughter was of age, and then she went to work for a credit union, which was the government credit union, which was merged later on with Gesa. But that was an interesting job. They worked two hours a day, three days a week. Because it was all hand done, no mechanization. And then she got a job offer from the department in the central stores and purchasing department. She worked there eight years. In 1986, the income tax law changed a lot of things for all of us, effective in 1987. It meant that partial vesting was--IRS has to rule on all things like that. And that meant that if you had 10 years to vest pensions, once you pass the 50% point, whatever the vesting period is, then you were partially vested. And so she had 8 years out of 10. So she got 80%. But she had only worked eight years, so it wasn't a very large accumulation. Because I got my full. Of course, I'd been here 37 years I think it was, however that works out. 36. Bauman: I want to go back and ask you—when you were talking earlier about that period in '55, '56 when you were working out at White Bluffs town site. You mentioned radiological construction? Bush: Oh, that—those construction workers worked under what they called SWP, Special Work Permit, which meant radiological. They had to wear--the clothing was called SWP clothing then. Today, they call it something else. But they worked under those conditions, so therefore they were subject to different rules. Whereas, construction workers on brand new construction weren’t then—they didn't have any of that to contend with. But once a plant went operational, it became radiologically SWP. This is not an anti-union thing. It's just a demonstration of how things were in those days. They had some old buses that--the original buses in town were called Green Hornets. And they were small. They had chrome bars that went right across the middle of your back. And for 35 miles, that was not very comfortable. When they got the newer buses that you see today, like Greyhound has for instance, they relegated those to the construction workers at White Bluffs. Well, since GE guys worked up at White Bluffs, we had to ride those, too. So all the office workers in the warehouse--GE employees rode one bus. The electricians rode another bus. Pipe fitters rode another bus, even though there were only two or three of them. It was really a segmented-type thing. As close to anything radiological that I came to when I conducting one of those physical inventories—we would be out--all of the construction materials were stored outdoors on the ground. I mean, like stainless steel. 308 stainless steel was pretty high-priced stuff. But the sheets were stored outside on pallets. Well, one sheet is worth thousands and thousands of dollars. So we had to lay down on the ground and count the sheets to do the inventory. This one day—the only time I came close to any contamination, we went back and boarded the buses that evening from White Bluffs. And we saw the guys on the dock there chipping with a chisel and hammer. That meant they were chipping out flakes of contamination. So we asked what was going on. They said, well, we're next door to F and H Areas. And F Area had coughed out something they said. And so I said, well, my crew was outside today on the ground. And if they coughed out because all the--some construction workers could drive their cars. That's the only people. Plant operations people all had to ride buses. No parking lots. So anyhow, those cars were all impounded. Had tape around them. They couldn't go home. And some of the guys, they had to take off their shoes, leave them, and be issued safety shoes in lieu of it. And I said, well, we were on the ground, too. So they proceeded to take us all off the bus and surveyed us with a wand. And they only found a few flakes on our back. And so we were allowed to go home. But that's as close as I ever came to getting contaminated. It's still scary. Bauman: Yeah. Obviously, Hanford, a site where security was prominent-- Bush: Very tight security, yeah. I was telling the young lady here that across the roadway on Stevens, as you near the 300 Area, there was a real wide barricade, probably eight lanes that you had to go through. And everybody had to stop, including buses. And the guard would get on the bus, walk down the aisle, and check every badge. And at that time, AEC had their own security airplanes. That was the purpose of the Richland Airport was for AEC security in the beginning. They had a couple Piper Cub-type airplanes. And one day we're on a bus going out to work in the morning. And all of a sudden, a plane just zoomed on by. Somebody had run the barricade. The plane goes out, lands in front of them, stops them, and that's how they got apprehended. Another incident of security, yeah, that's the subject? Many years later now, after 1963, and I'm in the transportation assignment. Airspace was off limits to all airplanes over Hanford because they had army artillery guarding it in the Cold War and all that. And a private plane had violated the space. And the AEC planes had forced it down. And once they're down, they can't ever take off. So after a week or so, they sent a lowboy trailer out there, loaded the small airplane on it, proceeded to come down what's the highway and now Stevens. And down where Stevens today, 240 and all that intersection is, there was only two lanes on the road then, not six. But at that juncture there, there was a blinking light. And they had to turn right to go to the Richland Airport. And this guy, the truck driver pulling this low-boy, he had never pulled an airplane before. And he didn't allow for that pull. Well, that blinking light clipped off a wing. And then he got time off. It was not really his fault, that pilot in the beginning. But there's a lot of—I guess full of interesting stories like that on security. Bauman: Great. Did you have special security clearance to work at Hanford at the time? Bush: Which? Bauman: Any special security clearance? Bush: Oh, yeah. I had Q clearance, which there's one higher than that, that's top secret. But Q clearance meant you could go into any and all areas. And because the nature of my job, I had that my whole time I was out there. Once you have it, they would tend not to take it away from you because it's quite expensive investigation to get it in the first place. I might mention something interesting in that regard. When I first came to work in 1951, why, the PSQ is Personnel Security Questionnaire. And it's about 25 pages long. And you had to memorize it, because every five years, you had to update it. Well anyhow, I filled that out, and you give references. And I have, in the Twin Falls area, a farmer that had been a neighbor farmer in Nebraska, where I was born, to my parents. I gave him as a reference because he had known me all my life. And that would be higher points. About a year or two later--I guess probably a year later I had gone back down to Twin Falls to visit the in-laws and I went and saw this farmer, family friend. The first thing he said to me, Bobby, what in the world did you do? [LAUGHTER] The FBI had come out to his farm and piled on the questions. And I hadn't told him ahead of time I'd given a reference. So they really did very, very tight security. It's probably tighter than it was when I was in the Air Corps. Bauman: You mentioned riding a bus out to work. Bush: Yeah, everybody rode it, except those few construction workers in that minor construction area. They were permitted their cars. I don't know why, but no one else drove cars on the plant. Everybody rode on the bus. The bus fare was--of course, it was subsidized. It was a plant operation, like anything else is. To make the liability insurance legal, they charged a nickel each way on the bus, which later on got changed to a dollar or something. But many of the years, we'd ride the bus 30, 35, or 40 miles to work for a nickel. The nickel was just to make it legal. From those old green buses, they came up with some--I forget what they're called. More like Greyhound buses. And then in 1963, the year I went out to the transportation, they bought a fleet of Flxibles. And that's F-L-X. There's no E in it. That's the same kind of flat-nosed bus that the bus lines used today. And they were coaches, not buses. They had storage underneath. And so we had quite a suggestion system on the plant. And you would get monetary award or mention. And somebody said, well, instead of running mail carrier cars delivering mail to all the stops on the whole plant, load the mail onto the now available storage bins on these buses. And that was a pretty good suggestion award, monetarily, to somebody. And they did that. Took it out to a central mail station out there, and then dispatched it. Bauman: You mentioned different contractors you worked for over the years-- Bush: Uh-huh. The story behind that for the record is that General Elec--well, DuPont built the plant. That's who my dad worked for. And GE came in '46, I believe. And they were here until the group I was in--they phased out in groups. I was the last group to go out. [COUGH] Excuse me, in 196--'66. When the GE phased out, they had a dollar a year contract. Like Henry Kaiser and rest of them did during the war, for the good of the country. But they trained an awful lot of people in the infancy field of nuclear engineering. General Electric trained all those people here and then they opened up the turnkey operations in San Jose and Japan. But anyhow, AEC was still AEC at that point. And then, their wise decision--instead of one contractor, they would have nine. And so there were--the reactors was one. Separation plant was another. Fuel preparation at 300 Area was another. The laboratories, which is today basically Battelle. Site services. The company doctors formed a foundation called Hanford Environmental Health Foundation, which is the MDs that gave the annual exams. And the computer end, it was now getting into the infancy of that, computer sciences corps, we had the first contracts on that. So all together, there were nine contractors. And the portion that I was with went to ITT. They bid, came in and bid. I helped conduct tours of the facility for the bidders. Because I knew all about it and knew the ins and outs on some of the monetary parts that their accounting people would have questions on. We'd walk through shops and all that. Well, anyhow, ITT got the site support--site services. And we had that for five years. And austerity set in in the '70s. Well, '70. They said, we got to get site services' budget down to less than $10 million. And it probably was 13 or 14, I don't remember now. So my boss and another analyst, like myself, sequestered--talk about sequester. We sequestered ourselves in the then new Federal Building for about a week. Almost 20 hours a day, whittling and whittling and working on a budget. And there was only one conclusion. We had to cut everything in half. Went through all that sweat. Went up with our president, Tom Leddy, went upstairs to an AEC finance office, presented our whole case. And the man turns around and says, well, it doesn't make any difference, Tom. Your contract's not renewed anyhow. And so now, Atlantic Richfield, an existing contractor for 200 Areas, somehow the separations plant contractor that is an oil company owned, can all of a sudden manage a site service. And so they did absorb us. But politics were still around in those days. And there were three of us analysts. One had got transferred by ITT up to the new line--newly established Distant Early Warning Line from Russia up to Alaska. So that left two of us. And we waited around. We waited around and never got an offer. And they said, no, we can do it all without you. We don't need you. How come it took so many people anyhow? On a Friday afternoon, the man that I did budgets for saw me in a restroom. He said, you got an offer yet? I said, no, no. I'm working under the table with somebody else. Well, he says, if they don't hire you, I'm going to hire you. And so he went downtown, and about 4 o'clock, I got a call from the man that told me they didn't need us. Said they'd been kind of thinking. So I went over Atlantic Richfield under those. [AUDIO CUTS OUT] And so I'm not mad, not knocking—knocking them, that's just the way things were. And then Rockwell came to town. When they laid off everybody on B-2, I'm trying to think of other--in the community, something might be of interest for the history project. Back into the '50s. Those same green buses, they had, oh, four or five of them that ran in town like a modified transit system. I don't think they had that many riders, but it did. And also, the plant buses ran what they called shuttle routes. And those buses went into Richland on probably six routes and drove around the neighborhoods and picked up workers on the three shifts. And that's why up in the ranch house district, there was the bypass you'll see between homes. The pathways that go clear through lots. Blocks were so long that they had to provide a quicker route to the bus stops. Now, those rides were free because they were shuttle buses. When you got out to the bus lot, you paid your nickel, or a pass, whatever it was. Bauman: I wanted to ask you about accounting in terms of equipment practices. Were there a lot of changes during the time you worked at the Hanford site? Computer technology come in and change things? Bush: Oh, yeah. For sure. In the beginning, as I mentioned earlier, all accounting was open ledgers and hand posted. Adding machine tapes at the end of the day trying to balance them all out. And we had that until--let's see. 1970s—I think it was 1977, we got our very first taste of it. Every other desk in a group of about 20 people in cost accounting that I was in. There was cost accounting, general accounting, and so on, property management. But anyhow, we had about 20 people. Every other desk had a monitor. Well, they referred to them as a computer. But they were just the monitor. And down at the end of our building was one printer. And everything was on floppy disk. Every program was on a floppy disk. Nothing was built-in because it was just the infancy. The big computers were down in the Federal Building. And a sub-basement below the basement was specially built for that. But back to our office. Across the hall from us, we had two small computers that are--to me, they're about the size of portable sewing machines. And I can't even remember the names of them because they don't exist today but they were the computer locally. So we wanted to run our work order system, we would phone down to the guy down at the other end of the building, insert the floppy disk from work system and wait. Well, I've got somebody's inventory. You have to wait. Because there's only one place to load up down there. So finally, you would put the floppy disk in. And then, you'd run it, which meant it'd run through it and print. But then you'd have to say, now print it. And they got one printer for the whole building. And so it's pretty interesting. Whereas today, I've got a laptop that I can virtually do everything with. But we graduated from hand posted ledgers right into computers. We didn't have anything in between. All of the reports that came out, came out on--referred to as IBM runs because everything was IBM. It was on paper that's about 18 inches wide with all these little perf marks on it to feed it. And you'd get one report and it would be about that thick. It was not that much information, but it's just so much printing. It's even hard to remember after 26 years how antiquated that is compared to today. But prior to that, it wasn't even the PCs. They called everything a PC. Or, was PC compatible. Because prior to that, the only electronic data processing nickname was spaghetti wire. I'm not very conversant in it, but it was some kind of a board that had a bunch of holes in it. They put wires in it and that went to certain things. But all it did was sort things. It didn't actually calculate them. Bauman: I wanted to ask you a little bit more about the community of Richland. What was that like in the 1950s? I know it was a government-- Bush: In the town? I guess I didn't cover that area. Everything—all houses were owned by government. We rented them. My wife and I and family, we came after the days of free everything. When the coal was free--all the furnaces were coal fed. Some people would convert them later on to oil. But anyhow, they were coal burning. However you got the coal, whether it was government days or you bought the coal from the courtyard, which is down at the end of what's now Wellsian Way. There was a coal yard where that lumber yard is. And that's why those railroad tracks that are abandoned and rundown, that's where the coal cars came in. And I can add something a little bit later about coal cars and the plant. But anyhow, we rented from the government. For example, that brand new apartment that I mentioned moving onto first was a two-bedroom, full basement. Steam heated because--I'll digress a little bit. All the downtown 700 Area, including the Catholic church, central church, the hospital, all 700 Area, including those new apartments, and all downtown shopping area were steam heated by a steam plant, which was located where the back door of the post office is today in that small parking lot. And that one plant furnished steam for everything. Well, back to this new apartment. The steam pipes ran through this full basement. And our kids played—there wasn't any yards. There was just apartments. And they would play in the basement because they were quite small. But they can remember today the pop, pop, pop in those steam pipes. And the rent for that two-bedroom apartment was higher than any other house in town. It was $77 a month. And the reason it was $77 instead of $70 was because it included $7 for electricity. Nobody had electricity meters yet. Even in that new place. So when they did put in electricity meters in all homes later, which had to be—during that time, the year we were there, which is December '51 to December of '52, sometime in that period of time they put the meters in. They took off $7 off the rent because now we're going to pay—and their theory is it was $5 for a one-bedroom place, whatever it was. $7 for a two-bedroom and $10 for a three-bedroom for electricity in those days. And nobody had electric heat, of course. And then, later on they put in water meters. And again, they had to come into your home, invade your home, and put in something. So it was strictly government prior to—well, another—and when I lived in the rental, if something went wrong with the plumbing, they would send out a plumber, but you paid for it, though. But later on when I went to the tall two-story, three-bedroom duplex houses, or called A houses, that was our first house after that apartment. And as I remember, I think the rent was--they had rent districts with low, medium, and high in the more desirable parts of town. And we were on Hop Street across from uptown district where Hunt Street is and Jefferson Park. And I think our rent for that was like $47 because it was not a brand new apartment. And later on, we—I was on the housing list. And you applied and months or years later, you'd rotate up to move into a nicer place or a different location. But in the meantime, up came an F house, which is a two-story single family, kind of a Cape Cod-looking type of house. And that came up on the housing list. However, the caveat was that you had to cash out the present owner who had made some improvements. He had converted the coal to oil, they put in a clothesline, which nobody had clotheslines, and something else. So cashed him out for—I believe it was $750. And if I do that, I could have it, so I did. We lived in that place for 19 years. Our daughter grew up there and got married out of that home. And that's the only home she ever knew. [LAUGHTER] And we were there until 1977 when the real estate market in Richland was—this is community wide. The housing prices were moving 18% a year, about 1.5% a month. And I thought well, I don't need to be setting still. I mean, if I cash out here, and went on. So we sold that home. I listed it. Calder, my father, was very ill. We were going to Spokane. I listed it. A man came by, looked it out. What were you asking? I said, oh, about 17. He shook his head. And I said, too high? He says, no, 27,000. [LAUGHTER] Just to show you how bad things were. And so it sold right away. What are you going to do now? And I said, well. Would you want to try a mobile home? I know a jewel. And in those days, real estate men did not sell mobile homes. But this couple had bought their first house from him, or something. And it was somebody retiring out of postal, wanted to go back to Montana. Never smoked in it, never had any pets in it, no kids. It was the Cadillac of mobile homes. We were there two years, but that was long enough. Then we moved into the house that I'm still in. I'm widowed now for five years. The house we're in now, we've lived in that longer than in any other place. [LAUGHTER] But the community just has changed so drastically. South Richland. People say today they live in South Richland. We lived in South Richland, which was south of the downtown shopping district to the Yakima Bridge. That was South Richland. What is now South Richland out there was Kennewick Highlands. So it depends on who you're talking to today. Bauman: Yeah. Do you remember any special community events, parades, any of those sorts of things during the '50s and '60s? Bush: Community events? Bauman: Yeah. Bush: Yep. Back in GE days, they had Atomic Frontier Days. And they were a big thing. Had beauty queens in it, rode in the float, and all that. Down at the—[COUGH] excuse me. For Atomic Frontier Days down at the lower end of Lee Boulevard, which is still the same shape today. They set up booths all on there. And it was a really big event. Before we had the hydro races even. People look back fondly on that. Talking about community, again, my mother, I said, worked for the post office, which—it stood on the corner of Knight Street, where it touches George Washington Way. There's some kind of a lawyer office building there today. And the old post office is the Knights of Columbus building on the bypass highway. But she would have to take the mail and go over to where the Red Lion Motel is today, at the Desert Inn, a frame building, winged out basically the same. And that was referred to as the transient quarters. And that was for upper management that were going through and it wasn't really a public motel, per se. But she would have mail for these big wigs over there. So she would have to go over there and have a badge to even go in the front door of that Desert Inn. Talking about badges, something humorous on that. We didn't wear things around our neck in the beginning because it was like a little pocket-sized bill fold. It was a little black bill that had your pass, your badge in it. And at every building you went into, you just pulled it out, flashed it to the guard. It usually was a lady security employee. There were guards in the building, but the person on the desk was a security clerk. But you'd just automatically—you’d open it like that and flag and put it back in your pocket. Every building you went into. Downtown, 700 Area, that first building I've referred to. One day I went into a restaurant and I just did that automatically [LAUGHTER] because it's just so automatic. Then they graduated to having the thing around your neck. And then also, if you worked in the outer areas, you had to wear a radiation badge in addition to your security badge. There was two types and one of them was a flat. And I don't know the difference. One's for beta and one's for alpha. I don't know. And one of them was a pencil shaped. And that's what they called it. And the other one was a flat badge, which was carried in something around your neck. And in all the areas I worked, and the places I described laying on the ground that happened and all that, my RAMs, they call it, never accumulated in my working life to be a danger. I had some, of course. Everybody does in the background. But I never accumulated to a danger point. There were people, some smart aleck people that would take their badge and hold it over a source at work so they could get some time off. Because if you got--what was the phrase? Anyhow, if they got contaminated, they put them on a beefsteak diet. And they stayed home. And they come every day and took a urine sample and all that stuff. But they had a life of riley. So that was nice. But the guys got canned that did that. But they would purposely expose their pencil so they could stay home. Bauman: So did all employees have those, either the pencil or-- Bush: Only those that worked in reactor and separations areas, yeah. I mentioned these departments. Actually, the first department is Fuel Preparations Department, FPD. The present—the 300 Area--most of the buildings have now been torn down that you don't even see them there. But the north half roughly was fuels preparation department headed for the reactors. They took uranium and encapsulated it in cans, like can of peas in just so many words. And the south half of that 300 Area was a laboratory area, the predecessor of Battelle. So the fuel was prepared there. And it was machined and canned and sent as nickname slugs to the reactors. Then, the reactors loaded into all those little tubes. And then from the reactors, they come out the backside into those cooling pods and all that. And transported in casks to the 200 Areas, which are the separated area, separations. And the reactor area on the face side was not that dangerous. The 200 Areas only work on what they called the canyons, PUREX and REDOX, and those kind of buildings. But those cells were very, very hot. But you had to be measured no matter where you were. One of our site services was a decontamination laundry, called the laundry. And all clothing--I mentioned to you before SWP. Well, SWP, radiologic exposure employees wore whites. Carpenters and truck drivers and all that that didn't work around reactors wore blues. And so they were sorted. And we had different billing rates for that laundry because the blues only had to be laundered and dried. Whereas the others had to be laundered, dried, and decontaminated, checked in separate washing machines. And then workers wore—in the beginning, wore World War II-style gas masks for our air supply before they invented a moon-type suit. [LAUGHTER] But they wore gas masks. And the mask would come back to this mask station, which was part of the laundry. And they took the masks, and they'd take away the cartridge. They'd put the mask in dishwasher machines, in racks. That's how they would wash them. And then they would get them a new filter and package them up. Sanitize them and package them up like medical supplies would be in. I can't think of any other unusual operation out there like that. Bauman: I want to change gears just a little bit. President Kennedy visited the site in 1963. Bush: Yep, 1963. Bauman: I was wondering-- Bush: When they did that, they let all the schools out. And for the first time, non-workers were allowed to go in cars out there. It was a grand traffic jam, but it was quite a deal. And he landed his Air Force plane up at Moses Lake—at Larson airbase at Ephrata, whichever you want to call it. And then helicoptered. And of course, like it is today, there were three or four helicopters. And you don't know which one he's on and all that bit. And here, everyone is gathered out the N Reactor area, which is a dual-purpose reactor. They captured the heat from the reactor, put it through a pipe through a fence to the predecessor to Energy Northwest, which was called Whoops. This was a big deal, a dual-purpose reactor. And N stood for new reactor, really. Anyhow, he comes in and they got a low-boy trailer. They fixed up down in the shops where I worked—my office was. And then built a podium just precisely for the President with him emblem and the whole bit. So I was privy to get to see some things like that. But anyhow, that was the stage. And it was a long low-boy, so it accommodated all the senators and all the local—Sam Volpentest, the guy credited with HAMMER, those type of people. Glen Lee from the Tri-City Herald, you name it. So the helicopter comes in, blows dust over everybody. But anyhow, my wife and kids and all schools were brought out there. And I don't know how many thousand people were out there in the desert. And you could see President Kennedy. He got up on the stage. You get close enough, you could get pictures. Then, that same year in November, he got assassinated. So that was a busy year. Bauman: Do you remember any other special events with dignitaries like that? Or other-- Bush: Well, I could go way back to World War II. I wasn't here, but I have a family connection on it. All over United States, they had war bond drives for various reasons to help. Build a ship, build an airplane. The one that happened here is not the only one. But they took so much money out of all the paycheck of Hanford workers, which included my dad as a carpenter. And the money they collected bought the B-17 Bomber, which was named Day's Pay. And that bomber—they had a bomber out here, a B-17, so that people could see it, but it wasn't the same one. On the Richland High School wall there's a mural. And that's a rendition by a famous artist of Day's Pay in formation. And so I can say that my parents contributed to that. And that's the story behind that one bomber. Every worker out there, construction or operations, they donated a day's pay. Bauman: I wonder, what was the most challenging part of your job working at the Hanford site? Bush: As an accounting person, my most challenging part was learning government-ese. [LAUGHTER] How to deal. And in that vein, that took a long time. But once you learn it, there is a way in the US government, period. As I'm sure there is in certain corporations. Later on, when I mentioned that I went down to the federal building for my--finally got located in that building, there was another fellow and I were old timers in accounting. And that year, they had five college grads, accounting grads come in. They hired five at one time. And they ran them by Marv and I for exposure. This is how things are done. This is how the contacts are. And our basic job was to squire these young fellows around and introduce them to certain counterparts and now DOE. Now, this is how you make appointments with them. This is what you do. This is what you never do. And likewise, with senior management. And it paid off because of those five, all four of them became managers or supervisors, and one of them became my manager within two years. Today, that same man is the comptroller at Savannah River Plant. [LAUGHTER] And so I like to feel that I contributed to them being—partially to them being successful. And so that's a reward. But probably the most difficult thing coming from a private—I worked for Colorado Mill and Elevator, which means I worked at a flour mill district office as a bookkeeper. And that's a small town deal in Twin Falls. To come to work for the government where some of your family despises you because you work for the government, but you had to fight that as well as learn how the government operates. Bauman: You mentioned earlier, you were talking about coal being used for heat in Richland. You also said you wanted to talk about coal fires going up at the site. Bush: Oh, what? Bauman: Coal fires? Bush: Oh, yeah. Interestingly, the midway power station, substation at midway, is one of the reasons they built Hanford where they did because the Grand Coulee Dam had just been completed and an electricity producer—a major producer. And they put the midway substation down there. That basically was built to furnish huge amounts of power to Hanford, for the reactors, everything. Which in total—because I processed vouchers, I know it was 32 megs. Which today doesn't sound like much, but the whole plant bill was 32 megs when everything was operating. But if the power were interrupted, they had to have a backup. So every area had a huge diesel-powered--like water pumps, where they could pump the water from the river instead of by electrically. They had to be able to pump it because it was critical. Because all the water for the whole plant was taken in at intake water plants near the reactors along the river. The 200 Area water is piped to them in a huge line as raw water until it gets to their place. The backup is these coal-fired steam plants, is what I was trying to say. It got about 30-some cars of coal a day rolled through Richland past the cemetery. In the beginning, the railroad came down from the north, from Vantage area down along the Columbia River. There's a railroad bridge across the river, Beverly I think it is. And it came down to below the 100-B Reactor area. That's where the line ended. And then a plant had its own railway incidentally. It had a 285 mile-long rail line, high line and low line. Then, they built--in 1950, the year before I came, they built the line that we see today that comes from Columbia Center into Richland, by the cemetery. And it ends at the old bus lot area, where that railroad car Columbia Center into Richland, by the cemetery. And it ends at the old bus lot area, where that railroad car rebuilding outfit is now, there is a roundhouse that it's rectangular in shape. But some 30 cars of coal a day came in here to supply because those plants were—they actually operated the steam plants. They didn't start them up from cold. They just ran constantly. Bauman: I wonder if you could provide sort of an overall assessment of how Hanford was as a place to work. What was it like as a place to work? Bush: It was a great place for me. I came out of an area that was the agriculturally-oriented. And the Korean War started. Wages were frozen, you weren't going to go anywhere. I came up here and I got a new start, like pioneers did. I visualized that's what farming pioneers did the same thing. And it opened up a whole field for me, a big corporate field. And it's just been a great place to work. And it was not dangerous to me. I'm not afraid to drink the water here. I'm asked by a nephew in Hermiston constantly, how do you drink the water? And I said, well, it comes out of the river. How can it come out of the river and that plume’s out there? There's so many false stories around here. But working at Hanford, I think, by and large, almost all employees would tell you the same thing. It was a great place to work. The pay was decent. Maybe you didn't get rich, but it was decent. It's in a nice area to live in. When we came back in the '50s, or in the '40s, and before that even of course, shopping was pretty much nonexistent. They went to Yakima, or Spokane, or Walla Walla. That I didn’t—we didn't experience that too much by 1951 because by that time, the Uptown shopping district was built. And there was a men's store. And there was four women's stores. Because GE was the prime contractor, there was an appliance dealer that handled GE-Hotpoint appliances. We got employee discounts when we worked for GE. We also got 10% gasoline discount when we worked for Atlantic Richfield Hanford. But we just grew with the times. And it's just such an entirely different area now than it was. Just the world is different, too. Bauman: Is there anything that I haven't asked you about? Is there anything you would like to talk about that we haven't talked about yet? Bush: Now really, work-wise at Hanford, I think I’ve pretty well-covered it. I'll repeat myself. My first 15 years was construction engineering accounting, which is an entirely different field than operations accounting. Operations accounting concerns itself with the reactors and separations and the site services that support them. But I learned a lot by working at Hanford. My family, three adult children live here, are retired here. My oldest son went on Medicare this year. [LAUGHTER] And that kind of puts you in your place quickly. But it's been a good enough place that they stayed in the area. And of the six granddaughters, grandchildren, four of them are in the area. And that's kind of characteristic with a lot of the Tri-City families. They stay or come back. Bauman: Well, Bob, I'd like to thank you very much for coming and talking to us today. I really appreciate it. Bush: It's been my pleasure. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:02:19 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 256kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 200 Area 300 Area B Reactor 700 Area N Reactor Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1951-1977 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1951-1977 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Ed Peddicord Tom Leddy Glen Lee Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data mov Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Bob Bush Description An account of the resource Bob Bush moved to the Tri-Cities in 1951 to work on the Hanford Site. An interview conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 07-17-2013 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mov Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2017-13-11: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Pasco (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) 1955 200 Area 300 Area 700 Area 703 Building B Reactor Battelle Cat Cold War Dam Desert DuPont Energy Northwest F Area FBI General Electric H Area HAMMER Hanford Henry Kaiser Hunting Kennedy Kennewick N Reactor Park PUREX River Savannah River School Street supplies War Westinghouse https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fb0d2b19efffa0ad88d63d3130754f212.jpg 19b5e159a69cc04990dfaf86d4785ae1 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F7bcee5a245334ba4142d1d3a6e69a18d.mp4 0c0f1ca7bc8d257afecff27f9cf439cb 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 Parker Foundation Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Nuclear science; Richland, Wa.; Hanford, Wa.; Parker, Herbert, 1910-1984 Description An account of the resource "The Herbert M. Parker Foundation collects valuable personal perspectives from key individuals who worked in radiological and environmental protection at the Hanford site in the early years of its development. Since 2004, student interns have recorded interviews from health physics and related science professionals. These historically valuable interviews document their personal experiences, observations, contributions and ideas. Several of the distinguished professionals who have spoken at the Annual Herbert M. Parker Lecture are also included. The videotaped interviews and accompanying biographical sketches will be made accessible to the public." See https://tricities.wsu.edu/parkerfoundation/ParkerHistory Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 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. 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 Colley Description An account of the resource An interview with Bob Colley conducted by the Herbert M. Parker Foundation at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Herbert M. Parker Foundation at Washington State University Tri-Cities https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fd24bb8f61d5a3ab812b92b65fdb12fb3.JPG 4603d9664f2a0077ae96546b4e6df8ea Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Bob Ferguson Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Robert Ferguson on December 21st, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Bob about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Bob Ferguson: Yes. Robert, R-O-B-E-R-T. Louis, L-O-U-I-S. Ferguson, F-E-R-G-U-S-O-N. Franklin: Great, thanks. So tell me how and why you came to the area to work at the Hanford Site. Ferguson: Well, I was in the Army. I had spent three years in the Army and I was at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. And a friend of mine stopped by that was sort of at the end of my obligation, and his father had worked here. His name was Fred Boleros. And he told me about GE here at Hanford. So, it was my first job when I applied when I left the Army, was with GE at Hanford. They accepted my application, and that’s how I happened to come to Hanford. Franklin: Okay. And what was the job that you applied for? Ferguson: Well, I came under a program called the—[LAUGHTER]—bear with me. Franklin: That’s okay. Ferguson: Can you cut, can we cut, or you’ll cut? Franklin: We can edit. Ferguson: We’ll edit? Franklin: After the fact, yes. Ferguson: Okay. Emma Rice: Tech grad something? Ferguson: Yeah. The tech grad program. It was the tech grad program. It was a program to—for GE to find out what your interest was as well as their interest in you. So, anyway, I signed up for that, and I had three assignments with that. One in operation, one in reactor physics, and one in radiation testing. My permanent job—my first permanent job with GE was as a reactor physicist at C Reactor. But we did physics work—at each of the reactors, there was an onsite physicist and an onsite engineer. We rotated to all of the different eight reactors in the course of our assignments during relief work. But I was permanently assigned to C Reactor—C Reactor Physicist. Franklin: C Reactor? Ferguson: C Reactor. Franklin: Okay, and where is that located in relation to B, D and F? Ferguson: Well, as you probably know, the first reactors were B, D and F. And then HDR and then H, and then C Reactor in K-East and K-West. So C Reactor was one of the newer reactors, before the K-East and K-West design. And it was collocated with B Reactor in what was called the BC Area. They were right next door to each other. Franklin: Okay. And was that based off of the same design as the B Reactor? Ferguson: It was a different design. Higher power level and a little different fuel design. And because it had a higher power level, it had also a higher flow rate. Franklin: Of water? Ferguson: Of water, right. Franklin: Great. And how long did you work as a reactor operator? Ferguson: Physicist. Franklin: Reactor physicist, sorry. Ferguson: Right. Well, actually I was asked—I guess because of my interest in operation—I was asked by GE management to go into their management program, which was an accelerated management program. And so that took me into operations. And so to accelerate the learning process, they had a school in the evening that they sent us to. But also, we had supplemental crews. For each of the shifts, there was a supplemental crew that went from each of the reactors, in the case of outages or in the case of startups, where they needed extra people. So you learned in the supplemental crews, all of the operation of all of the reactors in a very short period of time. So from there, then, I was assigned as a shift supervisor at B Reactor. So I was an operating supervisor at B Reactor. In fact, I was the youngest of shift supervisor that GE had at the time. Franklin: Oh, wow. Where were the classes held for the management program? Ferguson: Well, there were two kinds of classes. There were—WSU had—actually there were—WSU and some of the other western universities had a program here. But they were technical programs, and then GE in the same facilities, in what—the old barracks area, near where the DOE headquarters is now, the RL headquarters, in that area. But they no longer exist. They were in huts. Franklin: Oh, okay, Quonset huts. Ferguson: Quonset huts, yeah, yeah. Franklin: World War II— Ferguson: Right. Franklin: Had you gone through any other—before you took the tech grad program with GE, had you had any training in nuclear physics or anything? Ferguson: Well, I had a degree in physics, and I’d also spent a year at Redstone Arsenal at Huntsville, Alabama in guided missiles. So, there was a lot of related work in the guided missile field to the nuclear field as well. Franklin: And were you in the Army because of the Korean War? Ferguson: No, I went into the Army from—I was graduated. Went to Gonzaga University and graduated in ROTC, and had a commission. And because I signed up for the guided missile program, I had a three-year commitment then, rather than just two years of active duty. Franklin: Okay. Ferguson: But it was—we were on alert in my junior year of the Korean War. And then the Korean War, fortunately, was over in my last year. So, I was able to miss that. Franklin: Yeah. Can you describe the B Reactor as a place to work? Ferguson: Well, it was—actually, a fascinating facility. I don’t know, perhaps, if you’ve been there. Franklin: I’ve been able to take the public tours. Ferguson: But the operation of the reactors were fascinating. You can picture that there’s eight reactors operating 24/7, seven days a week. At that time, there was pressure for more plutonium for the Cold War. It was during that period of time when there was a lot of tension with Russia. It preceded, actually, the Cuban Missile Crisis by a few years. But anyway, there was intense pressure for production, so we were—GE was very sensitive about the time operating efficiency of the reactors and the power level of the reactors. B Reactor, when it was first designed was designed for 250 megawatts. And when I was last in the control room, we were operating over 2,000 megawatts. We used to—in order to get more power, we used to—Bonneville would lower water from under the dams so our inlet temperature was lower. The operation of the reactors—they went once through the reactors, and so they had to keep the outlet temperature below boiling. And so you wanted the maximum delta t across the reactor, you could get so the lower the inlet temperature, the higher the power level you could get, maintaining a safe margin in the outlet temperature. But also at that time, we were experimenting—I participated both in the physics side as well as the operations side—in the use of flattening of the pile. And by flattening, I mean flattening the flux so you could get more power level, or better distribution and more production, in any one cycle. And so we used—we experimented with splines, which were boron designed things that would go under the process tubes, and you could jack them in actually from the front face of the reactor in order to flatten the flux of the reactors. We also did poisoning at that time of the reactor. A temporary poisoning, so we could start the reactors up at a higher power level. Because the operation of the reactors was very complicated, because you had different temperature coefficients that affected the reactivity of the reactor. So you had a positive graphite temperature, but that was—the graphite would heat up over time. And so that would increase the reactivity, and you had a negative temperature coefficient—fast reactor coefficient. And then the coefficients would change as the amount of plutonium occurred in the reactor. And so the operation of the reactors were really dictated by the design coefficients, but, more importantly, by the discovery of xenon and iodine, which shut the reactors down when Fermi was here. That was—they didn’t even know about the xenon absorption of neutrons at that time. And so when the reactor was first started, it shut down. And they had originally—perhaps you’ve heard this story, that originally the reactor was designed for about 1,500 process tubes. But then DuPont doubled it to 2,004 in order to—for safety margins—and they needed all of that safety margins to override the xenon. But anyway, when you’re at steady state operation, and then you shut the reactor down, then the buildup of iodine that then decays into xenon, and xenon is a poison. So if you were operating at full power and the reactor scrammed, you had a very short period of time in order to bring the reactor up to power level. Otherwise, you were down for 30-hour outage. So that meant that you lost production during that period. So we basically devised what we called quickie plans. This was especially true—we were experiencing a lot of ruptures at that time because we were pushing the envelope of the design of the fuel. It would rupture, and then we’d have to get rid of that, because they’d been once through on the water, the radioactive material would go directly into the river. So anyway, when we had a rupture, we would need to get it out of the reactor. But you only had a few minutes. At that time because of the power levels we were operating at, we only had about 15 minutes to recover. And that meant planning a crew in the rear and the front, and alerting the people in the powerhouse, because you had to bring the water pressure down. But you had to keep plenty of water on the tubes, because otherwise the temperature—outlet temperature would be very high. So you had a very difficult time to valve on the front. So I would go—I would basically stay in the control room and have a supervisor in the front and rear. And then when we shut the reactor down, we would do all of this valving, kick the rupture out, and then restart. And you’d have to restart the reactors to about two-thirds of the power that you were at, otherwise you’d go sub-critical, and you’d be down. So it was a very delicate challenge to start it up to a power level that you could—without running out of rods, then, because also the higher power level, the more reactivity you had. So, it was a—it’s something that I learned in physics, because that’s what the physicist did. He calculated all these transients. So when I went into operations, it was sort of natural for me to be able to manage this kind of thing. Franklin: Interesting. And so—that’s also, like, kind of real-world application of all of that physics that you had learned, right? Ferguson: Right. Franklin: How did—I think it’s hard for people who—especially younger people—to imagine doing all of that without digital technology. It’s always been something that’s really fascinated me. And I’m wondering if you could speak to that or if you’ve ever thought about that at all, that the kinds of—maybe you could talk a little bit about the kinds of equipment you had to work with, and the limitations of using the analog readouts in the control room. Ferguson: Well, that’s a very good question. The reactors had to be operated when you started them up—what we called a blind startup, because we didn’t have instruments that told us how subcritical we were. So, you had to—the physicist would calculate the reactivity coefficients for the operation, and depending upon the precursor operation, would determine exactly what the startup conditions were. But because we couldn’t measure the subcritical condition of the reactor, we had—we pulled to about—well, it’s called 100n hours subcritical, then pulled into that. But we had people at a PC manually, if you can imagine, manually counting the count rate as we approached criticality. Because if you pull too many rods out, you can get into a fast period, which will shut you down. So we had to do all this manually. And you probably, having seen the control room—you had 2,004 process tubes. Each one of those tubes was monitored for pressure on the inlet and temperature on the outlet. But those gauges had to be manually moved and adjusted by a crew in the front of that panel—the panellette, that whole 2,004 panel in the control room, right to the right of the control panel. Anyway, you had a whole group of people on startup in ladder-like things that would roll those gauges, instrument man on the rear, but he had to keep the gauges within a range, or you’d trip. So as the water pressure came up, you had to roll all of those. But this was all done manually. And then we had ways of—we had devices that calculated the power level, but it was very deceptive. So those of us that had been trained in physics could basically do a lot of those calculations in our head on the power level. Because what I’ve experienced—I’m sure others did, too—that if an instrument failed, say a flow instrument failed on one side of the reactor, it would indicate you’re only at half of the power level that you’re actually at. So you needed to look at other instruments, and you learned to look—like there was an instrument called a Beckman instrument, which monitored the radioactivity on the rear face. So by walking the control room and looking at all these different instruments, you could check one against the other. But it was all very, very, very, manual. And we did our physics calculations on Marchant calculators, you know, the calculators you punch. Franklin: Oh, yeah, yeah. [LAUGHTER] Ferguson: We did all our physics calculations on those at that time. And they were just introducing the IBM 650. GE had a computing facility where we would punch the cards and get some central computing for some of the physics work that we did. And that’s also where they kept track of the production in the reactors. If you could imagine keeping track of eight reactors with 2,004 tubes—there were more than that in the K reactors—but the six older reactors. And keeping the production in each one of those tubes was a function of the flow through that tube and the reactivity and the temperature of each one of those tubes. So you had to keep track of how much plutonium was being produced, because if you leave the fuel in too long, the buildup of plutonium-240 builds up. And so weapons-grade plutonium is about 6% to 10%. So we were operating at getting really pure weapons-grade plutonium. Something below the—at least 10% of 240, because it was—in the early design of the bombs, they found that if plutonium-240 spontaneously fissions, it creates a background. And if it’s too high, it’ll get a premature detonation of the bomb beforehand. So that’s why we had to manage the production. And that’s why there were frequent shutdowns. Unlike commercial reactors, where you operate a long time. And that’s why people confuse—plutonium that’s produced in commercial reactors has a high 240 content which is not good for weapons. Franklin: Oh, interesting, okay. So you’re saying—I just want to paraphrase so that I can make sure I understand. So you’re saying that it was the nature of the weapons process that the fuel would only be in there for a short period of time in order to get—and it’s plutonium-240—which one is the-- Ferguson: Is low. 239 is the weapons grade. Franklin: 239 is the weapons-grade. Ferguson: And 240 is the low grade. Franklin: Right, so that you wouldn’t build up too much 240. So— Ferguson: And that required a frequent charge and discharge of the reactors. Franklin: Right, so in some way, then, the energy reactors by nature are just not really meant for weapons. Ferguson: They’re the opposite of that. You want them to run. The Energy Northwest reactor which I was responsible for building—it was called BNP2 at the time. But they recently set a record of running for over two years without a shutdown. Franklin: Because you also want—when you’re producing energy, you want a reliable output of energy— Ferguson: Right, fixed, right. Franklin: You don’t want to be starting and stopping and have that kind of fluctuation in the grid. Ferguson: Right. Franklin: That’s really—I think that’s a good basic point to have established for anyone who’s doing research on that. Ferguson: But an interesting subset of your question about instrumentation. Rickover, in the nuclear navy, who relied on analog instrumentation and ways of measuring things. Because he wanted people to really run the reactor all the time. He didn’t want any risk of that. So it was a transitional period in the nuclear business. And some of the instrumentation that was designed to detect neutrons was very new at the time. Even the badges that we wore, at that time, did not detect neutrons, both fast and slow. And so we had to do experiments on the front face of the reactors to be able to predict what dosage you’d get from neutrons, rather than alpha, beta, and gamma. Because it was not known then exactly the biological effect of neutrons on the human body. Franklin: Given that the reactors ran, most of the time they had 24-hour shifts, I’m wondering if you can describe to me kind of an average day as a nuclear physicist operating the B Reactor. Ferguson: Well, it depends—well, let me answer that by, when you—at that time, you couldn’t drive your car out to the Site. So you came to the 700 Area, and there was a—lights up there that indicated which reactors were running. And that told you, if you were a supplemental crew, which reactor to go to. But anyway, to answer your question, if the reactor is operating normally at full power, it’s very—typically, you’d go in and you had about a 15- to 20-minute transfer process from one crew to the other. We kept a detailed log of the activities during our shift. You’d do a—we would typically do a count of the uranium slugs that were stored in the front face so that we’d keep materials accountability. So we would make sure that from shift to shift, there was a transfer of accountability for the slugs that were there. There was a transfer of any ongoing activity that would be taking place. But during normal operation, we had two operators in the control room and then a chief operator. And then the other operators would be picking fuel up out of the basins. That was all done by hand. If you’ve seen the reactor, the fuel would come out, go down in chutes. But all of those fuel elements had to be picked up by hand through the water—through 20 feet of water, put in the buckets, and then those buckets would be transferred under water over to a station where the railcar would come in from the 200 Area, all underwater. And then that bucket that contained the radioactive slugs would be, then, taken by railcar over to the 200 Area where it would be reprocessed. So, that—typically, then, you’d do maintenance work that could be done when the reactor was running. And then you had a daily routine of walking through the whole reactor. It’s very interesting; you could—Robert, you could tell, after you’d been there for a while, by the sounds if things were okay. If there was a shrill sound where the water pressure coming through, the water flowing through the reactors, and all of the different fans had different sounds. So you walked the reactor—always walked, went to the rear—in the rear of the building is a little place with a lead glass shield that you could look through to see the rear face. So you’d check the rear face for any anomalies, for leakage, or anything like that. And then you’d have your—we always had a health physicist on each shift. He had his rounds to check on the radiation levels in different areas. And different areas were controlled depending on whether there was radioactive material or contamination in the area. We had step-off pads, where you’d go from one area to another. Dual step-off pads, if you had a highly contaminated area. And the people—some of the crew would sort laundry as well. Because we went through a lot of laundry, because you had to change into what we called SWPs, special material when you came on shift. So anyway that would be rather routine. Now, during an outage, or during a startup, then you have a beehive of activity. The place that we—the shift supervisor had total control and authority over the running of the reactor. So even the manager and other people that were there for startup, they would have to leave, because of the intensity of the operation during startup. So, if it were an outage, you went into—you were doing charge/discharge. So you have a front face crew and a rear face crew, and you’re doing a lot of physical work. The charging machines would—you’d have to load them up by hand—load the slugs by hand. So it was—it’s hard to explain the level of activity that was going on during an outage. Because we would have maintenance. We would have some maintenance on the process tubes that had to be removed because they were leaking. So we’d have to—the maintenance people would come in and remove those. So it was very, very, very—it’s like a huge manufacturing operation. Franklin: Right. Ferguson: But a lot by hand. So the dichotomy between—you’ve got a very sophisticated—you get no sound from the reactor itself but a lot of sound from everything that runs the reactor. Franklin: The water and the electronics and everything. Ferguson: Right. And the reactors were cooled by—inerted by gas by helium and carbon dioxide. And so one of the auxiliary rooms was a place where you controlled mixture of the helium and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of the reactor. Because you could change the reactivity by changing the temperature of the graphite. You could heat it up with CO2 and cool it off with helium. Franklin: Interesting. So how long did you work as a reactor physicist—nuclear physicist and shift operator? Ferguson: Well, nominally about two years as a physicist and about two years as an operating supervisor. So it was about 50/50 while I was here. I’ll tell you, interesting story. Probably we don’t want to put it on television, but—on September 27th, 1960, I was—it was a Tuesday, and I was starting the reactor up. And I got a call that my wife’s water had broken and she was on the way to the Kadlec Hospital to deliver our second girl. So it was the first time in history a reactor went critical the same time a woman went critical. [LAUGHTER] I could tell you exactly where I was standing in that reactor out there when that happened. I’ll always remember that. And Kadlec Hospital at that time was just Quonset huts, as well. Franklin: Right, yeah, wow. Thanks for sharing. [LAUGHTER] Where did you—I’m assuming you guys lived in Richland while you worked out at Site, right? Ferguson: Right, yeah. Franklin: And so you lived in Richland during—so you would have lived in Richland, then, while it was a government town and then also during the transition. Ferguson: When we first came here, the government owned the town, and we lived in a B—I was going to say B Reactor. [LAUGHTER] Okay. We lived on Kimball—1524 Kimball in a duplex. Franklin: Okay. Ferguson: And then the second home here was a ranch house. But then, while we were there they sold. And when we were first here, GE provided coal. We had coal for our heat and lightbulbs. Those were all provided. I think we paid $47 a month rent at that time. And then the town was sold off. And our neighbors had the right to buy the B house. Franklin: Because they had been there longer than you? Ferguson: They were one of the original occupants. And so then we rented from them. So we were here during that transition. Franklin: Can you describe that transition? What you remember, or your thoughts on it? Ferguson: Well, it was very interesting. When we first came here, there was—and one of the reasons that the road system is the way it is is because of the security in the town. There was only one road in at the time and one road out. And that’s the way—you had to be cleared in order to live and work in Richland during that time. And so we—you know, we had a bus system that picked us up. We had a—during that time as well, those of us that worked in radiation levels, every month we’d have our urine sampled. And so the people that worked there set their bottle out by the front door to be picked up and monitored. So then as the town—after the town was sold off, then, there was more interest in changing the—upgrading the buildings, painting, and more things like that. So you could see the evolution from a government-owned town to private ownership. More and more attention to yards and things like that. So we—my wife and I—my family experienced that transition. And we left—came here in 1957. I left here in ‘61 to go to Argonne. And then we came back in 1972, and the town had totally changed, then. When we came back, we looked at a couple of houses in Meadow Springs and the realtor told us it would be pretty iffy to buy there, because that may not go. And there was a dirt road at that time between that and Columbia Center. Columbia Center didn’t exist when we were first here. We came back, and here’s Columbia Center. So having left here and come back, we’ve seen this transformation of the Tri-Cities. Rather remarkable. Franklin: Right. And how come you left Richland in ’61? Ferguson: Well, actually I was in the control room of B Reactor when we heard about an accident in Idaho called the SL-1 accident. Franklin: I’ve heard about that. Ferguson: It was a military accident that killed three military people. Anyway, it’s kind of a long story, but I’ll make it pretty short. Part of the accident investigation indicated that there was no one AEC organization responsible. The reactor was designed at Argonne in Chicago at Argonne National Lab, but built and operated by the Army at Idaho. And they Idaho office wasn’t responsible; Chicago wasn’t responsible for making sure. So anyway, I was recruited by AEC to go to work up with the AEC to set up the safety program for what was then called the Second Round reactors. These were commercial reactors that were built to encourage the development—commercial development of nuclear power. But Argonne had a lot of reactors at the time, both at Idaho, as well as at Argonne. Both thermal reactors, research reactors and fast reactors. And so anyway, I was recruited because they were looking for people with actual physics and operations experience to work in safety. And so, shortly after I was there, I was sent to Oak Ridge School of Reactor Technology for an accelerated program in state-of-the-art safety. But then we—anyway, then we did a review of all the reactors under Chicago. And those were reactors at Idaho, reactors at Santa Susana in California, Atomics International reactors. And then we had commercial reactors at Piqua, Ohio and Hallam, Nebraska. And—oh, there were two other ones, anyway, that were funded by the AEC, but privately owned. But the safety responsibility was the AEC. So anyway I went back there because of the emergence of the need for people with actual operating experience. There were only two places: that was Savannah River and here at Hanford. Franklin: Right. And up until that time, you had not worked with commercial reactors; you’d only worked on production. Ferguson: Yeah, there were no—no, that’s correct. Franklin: So can you describe that transition? How was that for you? Even though you would have had operating experience, like we talked about earlier, the operation of the commercial reactor is almost opposite. The purposes are very different. And so I’m wondering if you can describe that transition. Ferguson: Well, it’s also a cultural transition. And one of the difficulties in the development of commercial nuclear power was because of this cultural issue. Some of the utilities were oversold on the ease with which nuclear power could be used to produce electricity. And so they didn’t understand the need for the training and the quality assurance and the rigorous of operation. And that led to some accidents in the early days, because the utilities really were not sensitive to that. Admiral Rickover was even worried that the private sector, the commercial sector, was not able to manage nuclear. And he was afraid that they would have accidents. And that’s why he built and operated Shippingport, which was one of the first commercial reactors, but it was built by the Navy. But anyway, it was a cultural change. And after the SL-1 accident, it was really a wakeup call even within the AEC for the need for rigorous oversight, rigorous design review, design construction, and operation. The need for safety at all of those areas from the time you procure a piece of equipment, to its built, to its put in operation, and then maintained. All of that was new to the industry. So I actually lived through that transition, I guess, if you would call it that. Because GE was—and DuPont were very rigorous in their safety. Very rigorous. Because people didn’t really know much about nuclear power at that time, or nuclear energy. Franklin: So you’re saying some of that safety-consciousness kind of came over from the folks involved in production, who then went on to commercial. Ferguson: Right. Franklin: I’ve—when talking to people similar to yourself who’ve been in the industry, very familiar with nuclear production and power, I’ve often heard that the nuclear industry is one of the most tightly regulated and safe industries, or focused with safety. And I’m wondering how you feel about that statement, how you would respond to that. Ferguson: Well, it is, because of the potential or the risk. Even though the commercial, there has been no deaths in the commercial nuclear industry in the United States, the potential is there as well. I can just give you a little feel for that. Three Mile Island was a very bad accident, but nobody was hurt. I was there. I was—fifth day of the accident, I was in the control room of Three Mile Island. It was really a bad accident, but nobody got hurt. On the other hand, I was at Chernobyl after that accident. That was a very, very bad accident. A lot of people were killed in that accident. People don’t really understand that—going back to your question about the rigorous safety requirements—Russia did not have a requirement for containment for their reactors. So, Chernobyl had no containment. You couldn’t build and operate that kind of a reactor in the United States. So, one of the issues that emerges from the rigorous safety criteria is the difficulty in transition to new instrumentation, for instance. Because you had very prescriptive regulatory requirements, it was more difficult, basically, to introduce new design, new equipment. And it’s one of the difficulties of the nuclear industry, unlike cars where you’re changing them often, it’s very expensive to build one. And then it’s hard, as innovation and changes take place, it’s hard to introduce those in the course of the licensing. So our licensing system has changed somewhat. You used to have to have two permits for commercial reactor. A permit to build it, and then another permit to operate it. Now those are combined into one, because you wouldn’t want to spend all the money to build a reactor and then not be able to run it. And for the antinuclear community, they used that as a way to stop the operation—or the startup of a lot of reactors. That caused a lot of expense, too. So anyway, it’s been a dynamic change, but not as rapid as your iPhone and changes like that, which can be made very quickly. Franklin: Wow, thank you. Really illuminating. I really like that you mention that there was a cultural transition into the commercial reactor, and I assume, there, you’re talking about dealing with utility companies, but I’m also wondering, was there—did you also work with—because you mentioned fast reactors. Did you also work with scientists and people from the university side of operations when you moved into commercial power? Ferguson: Oh, yes. Franklin: And was that also part of the cultural shift? Ferguson: Well, for instance, going into Argonne—Argonne was where the nuclear technology started. I mean, Argonne came from Fermi’s work in Chicago, basically. All of those scientists went to work at Argonne. And they didn’t like to be—scientists don’t like to be regulated or overseen. And so that’s the reason that the reactor—many of the reactors that Argonne worked with were put in Idaho, in a remote area, where you could do a lot of experimentation away from a big city. So that’s where the series of reactors called the BORAX Reactors, where you could actually explode them—pull into a fast period and cause a prompt critical. But you could do that in Idaho because it was so remote. But anyway, it was always a certain amount of tension between research. And one of the current issues right now, there is so much regulation in commercial reactors, it’s hard to introduce any new technology. For instance, Bill Gates is investing in a reactor being designed in China. And he would do that here, but he went to the NRC and it’d take him 24 years to get a permit just to build it here. So, the rigorous licensing process also inhibits development of new technologies. And we don’t really today have a good answer for that. We need to have an intermediate step where you can work on new reactor designs that are not ready for commercial operation yet but need to be run. Because unless you can do experimental work, you can’t develop anything new. Franklin: But that experimental work is held up by the regulations— Ferguson: Of the regulations, right. Franklin: Do you think the public has an inadequate understanding of nuclear technology in general, and nuclear power specifically? Ferguson: Well, there’s a lot of work has been done with respect to why people fear nuclear which is really very safe, statistically. The probability of being hurt by a nuclear accident is essentially zero. Yet, people will get in their car and they’ll drive their car. So there’s a lot of psychological fear. And a lot of that fear, we think, comes from the use of nuclear technology for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In other words, the notion of equating weapons with nuclear power. And that has continued to this day, because many people don’t understand here at Hanford the difference between commercial waste and waste from both the Second World War and the Cold War. It’s a very different issue, but people think of it all as one. And one of the problems is that with the evolution of the organization that manages that. I mean, I worked, when I was head of the FFTF project, I worked for the AEC, I worked for ERDA, and I worked for the Atomic Energy Commission in the same job. And so you can understand then. And that—the weapons program is still in the Department of Energy. I’m a big advocate of removing it, because—and removing the waste from the commercial—to create a separation. As long as they’re managed together, how do you expect the average person to believe that they’re not one in the same thing? Or that the issues are not one in the same thing. So that fear of nuclear is real. And there’s been a lot of work done about why people fear it when it is not really unsafe. And generally you find that the people that work with nuclear are very comfortable with it. And the farther away you get, the more fear there is. For instance, here at Hanford, people are very used to working with it. We have clean water. You go over to Seattle, they want to tell us how to—why to be afraid here at Hanford. Well, we live here. We drink the water, we eat the fish. We’re not fearful of it, because we’ve lived with it. We know it. So a lot of that is proximity. Franklin: Yeah, thank you, I appreciate you expanding on that. It does give it a troubled reputation, doesn’t it? Since the birth of nuclear energy is related to death and bombings and then was a very visible part of our very large stockpile of nuclear weapons. Ferguson: And it still is a threat with the proliferation. And it’s a huge threat. Franklin: And to have a peaceful arm of that, though, I think to some people maybe they confuse both heads of that same— Ferguson: That’s not unnatural that they would do that. The other thing that’s happened, you know, we had—Three Mile Island happened right after Jane Fonda’s movie, The China Syndrome. And then we had Chernobyl. And then we had the accident in Japan. So these big accidents get a lot of publicity. And there’s a lot of fear that comes from the reporting of that, which isn’t always accurate. Because the nature of reporting is to make things dramatic. And so it gets dramatized in the public. So it probably will take generations to—people to address that. Franklin: Right. Because certainly our current—where we get our current energy from is also a problematic source of energy, in terms of its political and human and environmental costs. Ferguson: Right. The irony is that 20%, nominally, 20% of our electricity comes from nuclear. 70% of the carbon-free generation—70% comes from nuclear. And so there is no way the country can ever meet its goal of carbon emissions without a greater use of nuclear power. Because solar and wind are both intermittent. You can’t store them. For instance, if you had to rely on them during the cold weather we just had—we had no sun, it was cold. Where would you get your energy? Where would you get your energy? And the other thing that people really don’t understand is that both wind and solar are nuclear energy. Their source is nuclear energy from the sun. The sun—and the earth gets all of its energy from radiation from the sun. Yet people don’t think of that radiation as bad radiation. They think of that as good radiation. And other radiation, from nuclear power, is bad radiation. Franklin: Interesting, I don’t think I ever thought of it quite like that before. But it’s very true. Ferguson: All of the weather comes from absorption of energy from the sun in the oceans, creates the wind, picks up the moisture, delivers it. That’s where we get our hydro power. Solar power—all of that is nuclear energy from the sun. The sun is our source of nuclear energy. Franklin: Well, even in a way then oil is also from the sun, because it’s decomposed carbon matter— Ferguson: Originally— Franklin: Originally. Ferguson: No, really, it preceded the sun in the sense that it was a part of matter when it was created at the Big Bang. Franklin: True. So I’d like to go back—tell me about coming back to Richland to work on the FFTF. What brought you back from Argonne to Hanford? Ferguson: Well, the people—the assistant manager at Argonne for the AEC I had worked with there—and he became the manager of the Richland Operations Office. And then another fellow I had worked with there, Alex Fremling, became his deputy. And so they asked me to come back. They were having a lot of difficulty with the management of the contracts here. And I’d had a lot of experience in project management at Argonne in both high energy physics and reactor projects, and a lot of experience in contracting. So anyway, I came back and I was originally head of contracts. And then shortly after that I was made technical director for the Site. That was at a period when—or at a time, in 1972, when 106-T leak occurred. That was the 105,000-gallon leak that really was the first major leak of radioactive material from the tanks. And it’s the first time the public then became aware of the real problem here at Hanford. And so I was on the investigating committee for that event. And we went back to—Dixy Lee Ray was Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and then subsequently our governor. But we asked for a supplemental appropriation--$20 million supplemental appropriation to start building double-shell tanks. So that’s when we started building the double-shell tanks, thinking that there would be a solution fairly soon. And I can take you all the way back to when I was with GE, I did some—one of my jobs there, I measured some—the radiation level in some of the tanks, because as early as that time, GE was concerned about leaking tanks. Because the radioactive material in the tanks stratifies. The radiation level is different and it creates a temperature stress in the tanks. So we were—as early as then, we were worried about tanks leaking. Now—that was 1958, ’59. Here we are in 2016 and we’ve got leaky tanks and no solution. [LAUGHTER] Not much progress. Franklin: Sadly no. Ferguson: Anyway then FFTF was in trouble from a cost and schedule standpoint. So I was asked to set up the FFTF Project Office. And the manager of Richland went back to Washington, and he became head of nuclear energy in Washington. His deputy became manager here—Alex Fremling became manager here and so they—we’d all worked together. And so they asked me to set up the FFTF Project Office. Franklin: Okay. Ferguson: And that’s when—in 1973—I stayed here until 1978 and then Jim Schlesinger, the chairman of—Secretary of Energy for DOE asked me to go back and take over the nuclear program in Washington. Franklin: And what do you feel like you got accomplished from ’73 to ’78 on the FFTF Project Office? Ferguson: We built the most remarkable fast reactor test facilities that’s ever been built. At the time that I was asked to take it over, there was a member of the—Bill Anders—who was the astronaut that went around the moon the first time. Anyway, he was a member of the AEC. But he helped me get the project office set up based on the way NASA set up their offices: decentralized. But he told me that the FFTF was far more difficult technical job than putting a man on the moon. So the development of the technology that we developed and demonstrated with FFTF was really incredible. And a lot of that technology’s now being given to Japan—to China—for their new development program. A lot of the sodium technology, the fast reactor technology. So we accomplished a lot. But it didn’t—and then it got killed. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right, right, it did. I wonder if you could talk about that. What happened to the FFTF? Ferguson: Well, at the time FFTF was built, the policy of the United States and the Atomic Energy Commission was to reprocess and have breeder reactors. And so that you would take the fuel from commercial reactors, reprocess it, take the plutonium out of it, use that plutonium for fuel for fast reactors. So essentially, by using fast reactors, you have basically an unlimited supply of energy. So that was the policy when FFTF was built. Clinch River was to be a commercial demonstration plant at Clinch River in Tennessee. Clinch River was killed when Carter came in. Carter killed the breeder program because he thought that—first of all, he didn’t think nuclear was going to be here to stay, and he didn’t want to—thought reprocessing would facilitate the spread of nuclear weapons around the world. Because when you do reprocess, you can use that same technology to extract plutonium for weapons. So it was killed for that reason. And Carter was pushing coal at the time, saying we had, essentially, an abundant supply of coal. And so he thought that nuclear really wasn’t going to—it was a last resort, as he put it. Because of our lack of reprocessing, we have influenced the design of Yucca Mountain for the deep geologic storage. Because at the time that the Nuclear Waste Policy Act in 1982 was set up, there was a conflict between those that wanted to reprocess and those that didn’t want to reprocess. So Yucca Mountain is designed for retrievability. It’s designed for permanent storage of defense waste, but retrievability of commercial waste. So at some date in the future, it could be reprocessed. Because about 90% of the energy value is still in fuel once it’s discharged from a commercial reactor. So anyway, that decision has affected a lot of subsequent issues that the country has faced. Franklin: How come the program didn’t come back under Reagan? Ferguson: Well, in January of 1982, I was asked to participate in a—that’s when Reagan was president, and George Bush, Sr. was his vice president. And he called a meeting that I was invited to, to discuss what was going on in nuclear at that time. And at the time, I was head of WPPSS. And the cost estimate—this was post-Three-Mile Island. The cost estimate for plants was going up, they were having delays. And so Reagan called this meeting from executives to find out what could be done with nuclear. Well, as a result of that meeting, then, we were instrumental in getting the Nuclear Waste Policy Act started which he then proposed as a way of dealing with commercial nuclear fuel. Because up until that time, there was no solution to commercial nuclear fuel. So—and there still isn’t. Franklin: Oh, okay. Ferguson: There still isn’t. Because Obama killed—or tried to kill the Yucca Mountain project. But we stopped him from doing that. I was one of the principals—law suit that the courts ruled that he didn’t have the authority to do that. But he stopped it. So now there is no solution, yet, to what to do with commercial fuel. So commercial fuel is now stored all over the United States at all of the reactors. Franklin: Right, right. How did you become involved with the WPPSS project? Ferguson: Well, I was recruited out of Washington. Franklin: So you’re just back and forth from here to Washington and then back. Ferguson: Well, people that had known about my success in building FFTF and turning that around—and it turns out Senator Jackson was one of those. And so when I was recruited, I’d been in the government 20 years, and I was still pretty young. I didn’t want to leave the government, because I had no retirement. I wasn’t old enough to retire. Anyway, Senator Jackson told me that if I would come out and solve the WPPSS problem, he would make sure I got back in the government. Well, a long story short, I came out and I did solve, I think, the WPPSS problem. But I also had open heart surgery and ruined my health and then Senator Jackson died. So I never went back into the government. He died and I never had a pension. So—[LAUGHTER] so that’s what WPPSS did to me! But anyway, I was recruited—going back to your question—there was a national recruitment because of the difficulties WPPSS was having building the plants. Franklin: And how long did you work at WPPSS for? Ferguson: Three years, ’80 to ’83. Franklin: Okay. And what did you do after that? Ferguson: I started up a company, R.L. Ferguson and Associates, a consulting company. And we sold that to SAIC. And then I started up another company, Nouveau Tech. And we acquired a nuclear waste facility that’s out here, now it’s called PermaFix Northwest. We acquired that out of bankruptcy from ATG. And then in 2007, I sold that to PermaFix. And since then, I’ve been writing books and consulting. Franklin: So you’re still not retired. Ferguson: No. I’m still consulting. Franklin: Still consulting. But still on— Ferguson: And I’ve written two books on the nuclear waste issue, so— Franklin: Okay, great. Well, which two books are those? Ferguson: Nuclear Waste in Your Backyard: Who’s to Blame and What to Do About It. And the first one was called—I can’t remember the name of it. Something about Obama and Reid wasting money. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Ah. Tell me about your involvement with the Tri-Cities Nuclear Industrial Council, TRICNIC, which later became TRIDEC. Ferguson: Well, after I left WPPSS, I was asked to be the chair of TRICNIC. Because I was kind of in a period when I was trying to recover for my health. And so Sam Volpentest was the executive vice president, and Glen Lee was publisher of the paper then, and Bob Philips was the president. And they would ask me to be the president of TRICNIC. And then because of the need to diversify the economy in the Tri-Cities, we merged TRICNIC with the Tri-City Chamber, and that became then TRIDEC. And so I was the first president and chair of TRIDEC, when it was formed. And Sam stayed on until his death. He worked up until he died. And then Gary Petersen took over his place to head up the Hanford part of TRICNIC. Franklin: I wonder if you could talk about working with Sam Volpentest. Ferguson: There’s been a whole book written about that. [LAUGHTER] Did you read it? The godfather? Franklin: I have, yeah, The Community Godfather by C. Mark Smith. Ferguson: Much of my life is in there. Franklin: Okay. Ferguson: [LAUGHTER] But anyway, no, yeah, he was one of those remarkable people that you know in your lifetime. He worked right up until he died. I told a story at his funeral—a eulogy—I said, you know, the clock was set right after 5:00 because he wanted to put in a final shift before he died. [LAUGHTER] So he died right after 5:00. [LAUGHTER] But Sam was very devoted to the Tri-Cities and the economic development of the Tri-Cities and spent his whole life on behalf. But he was probably largely responsible for my—or one of the reasons for taking over WPPSS, because he was close to Senator Jackson. I had worked with him in the community on FFTF as well. When I took over FFTF, we not only—the prior head of the nuclear in Washington had testified it would be completed for $187 million. But we didn’t—not only couldn’t you complete it, we ran out of money that year. And Sam was instrumental in TRIDEC—or TRICNIC was instrumental in getting a supplemental appropriation to keep FFTF. That’s one of its early, early almost-deaths. So I started working with Sam in the community at that time. So then when I left WPPSS, I was asked to get more involved. Franklin: Great. I’m wondering if you can remember or can tell me about any kind of notable events or incidents that happened at Hanford while you were working out there. I think you would have been gone for the JFK visit, which was in ’63, but if there were any other— Ferguson: Right, I was at Argonne then. Franklin: But if there were any other notable events or incidents that happened at Hanford while you worked there. Ferguson: Oh. Other than the leak? 106-T leak? Franklin: Pretty notable. Or maybe in general in Tri-Cities history, or any—did you ever go to any of the Atomic Frontier Days parades or anything like that? Ferguson: No, I didn’t, no. I’m trying to think of—well, 10,000 people marched in support of keeping WNP-1 alive. Have you ever seen that picture? Franklin: Yes. Ferguson: 10,000 people, can you imagine that? Franklin: Yes, yeah, that’s— Ferguson: Supporting nuclear power? Where else in the country could you do that? Franklin: Not too many places. Ferguson: Well, I’m trying to think, what--? Franklin: It’s okay if you don’t. Ferguson: I really—I can’t. Franklin: It’s one of my stock questions. Ferguson: Oh, okay. Franklin: You know, in case something pops up. Ferguson: Right. Franklin: So, I guess—let me look over this. Ferguson: Probably told you more than you want to know! Franklin: Yeah, we’ve covered quite a bit. And I just have kind of one last question that’s kind of a wrap-up question. But I’m wondering what you would like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland in the Cold War. Ferguson: Well, I think it would be very important, and I think it’s even important for this generation to understand the circumstances under which people operated the reactors. There’s been a lot of public criticism about the fact that we discharged waste into the ground. And people just, I think, don’t understand the pressures and the circumstances. The major thing people should understand is that Hanford was very carefully chosen because of the potential risk of an accident or even discharge of radioactive material. The selection of Hanford is unique in the location. The 200 Area, it’s unique in the sense that under the site is a layer of caliche, it’s like cement. Overlaying on that is sand. And they looked up on this as basically a way to hold up the radioactive material and they put it in the ground. And so it wasn’t just people being careless or anything like that. There were the pressures and unknowns. People didn’t know a lot about nuclear, but there was an incredible safety record in spite of all of that. So anyway, I think the big disappointment I have is that the waste hasn’t been take care of, and it’s mostly a political issue than a technical issue. It could have been taken care of a long time ago, but it’s terrible. It’s an issue that has become politicized. Franklin: Right. Because sites with smaller amounts of waste have been able to encapsulate—begin or even in some cases finish encapsulation programs like West Valley, Savannah River—have been able to deal. Ferguson: And most of our waste out here doesn’t really have to be vitrified, either. It’s high activity, because of where it came from, by law. It came from reprocessing. But it’s high-level waste, but it’s low-activity waste. And so if you remove the cesium from it, you could basically secure the waste in a cementaceous form and send it to Texas. About 80% of the waste could be done and we wouldn’t even have to build a vit plant. So it’s been—the design of the Vit Plant was wrong from the beginning. The Hanford waste is unique from a lot of different wastes, in that it’s such a mixture of so many different kinds—it’s not homogeneous. So the design of the Vit Plant, rather than have multiple facilities to treat separate kinds of waste, they basically have a pre-treatment plant where they want to treat all of the waste to make it in a consistent form to feed into the melter. Well, the pre-treatment plant is what’s stopping everything. So there’s been a lot of—you know, I’ve lived through about three or four different starts of the Vit Plant. So, I’ve seen it, and it’s very frustrating to see how political it has become, and a lack of science-based decisions that are made. Franklin: Yeah, I’ve seen some of the bumper stickers, I forget exactly what they say, but I’ll paraphrase here: Vitrification in 2007, or Hanford Vit Plant. You know, 2007 or 2004. And then we’re—it’s 2016 and we’re still waiting. Ferguson: Still waiting. Still no— Franklin: Perhaps—as you said, perhaps for a plant that is not the best approach— Ferguson: Right. Franklin: --to the problem. Well— Ferguson: Sam Volpentest predicted before he died that the Vit Plant would never be built because of the cost. And now you’re seeing it being questioned because of the cost. People are saying, why do we have to spend this kind of money? Because it’s—about $3 billion comes here every year for Hanford, including Battelle. But it’s a huge amount of money. It’s like the WPPSS plants. People used to say, well, we have to build them no matter what. Well, they got too expensive and the need for power went away, and so they didn’t get built. So there comes a price when things are not affordable. And there’s not really a risk to the river. The waste needs to be treated and cleaned up, but there’s no risk, really. There’s no health risk. The flow of the river is so great, any material gets in there is so diluted you can’t even detect it. But that’s not a solution. Right after 106-T, Battelle did some studies for us, just what-if studies. And we said, what if all the waste went in the Columbia River? Well, downstream, it wouldn’t be a problem. It’s so dilute. Not that that’s—I’m not advocating that at all. But it just shows you that the risk to the health and safety of the public is not—does not demand what we’re doing with the waste out there. It doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be taken care of. I’m just—because at one time Sam and I faced some members of Congress who wanted to put a fence around Hanford and not do anything with it. Just leave it there. [LAUGHTER] So, anyway. I’ve been there, done it. Franklin: So at least we’re away from that solution. Ferguson: Well, I hope we’re not going back there. But when the price gets so high, people away from here and the demand for money in the budget gets so tremendous, it’s—strange things can happen. Franklin: They sure can. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Well, Bob, thank you so much for coming in and interviewing with us today. Ferguson: Okay, Robert. Franklin: I really appreciated it. Ferguson: I hope I didn’t cover too much for you. Franklin: You did a great job; we touched on a lot of really great things. So thank you. Ferguson: Okay. Franklin: All right. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:14:41 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 200 Area 700 Area C Area B Reactor Vitrification Plant Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1957-1961 1972-today Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1973-1978 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Fred Boleros Admiral Rickover Alex Fremling Bill Anders Clinch River Sam Volpentest Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Bob Ferguson Description An account of the resource An interview with Bob Ferguson conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 12-21-2016 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2017-01-12: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. 200 Area 700 Area Atomic Energy Commission B Reactor Backyard Battelle C Area C Reactor Cold War Department of Energy DuPont Energy Northwest Hanford Mountain NASA Quonset hut Quonset huts River Savannah River School VIT Plant War https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Ffe9a50c1a35bab2152ff15c70337877a.docx 7fae046e4f5288229ccf98b57dc5da3f https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F549de1a1ba468072a9400e9179f229a8.JPG b10024e6e3b4b98104d826d85c756ada Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Bob Heineman Location The location of the interview Richland, WA Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound 0:00:00 Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history with Robert Heineman on July 6, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Robert about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Bob Heineman: My name is Robert Heineman. H-E-I-N-E-M-A-N. Franklin: And Robert’s spelled just like “Robert”? Heineman: Robert. Franklin: R-O-B-E-R-T? Heineman: Just like yours, yup. Franklin: Okay. But you prefer to be called Bob? Heineman: Yeah, sure. Franklin: Okay, so we’ll use Bob for the rest of the interview, then. Heineman: Okay. Franklin: If that’s okay with you. Okay. So, Bob, tell me how and why you came to the area. 00:00:47 Heineman: Well, I went to school at Washington State University and majored in police science because I took one of those classes as a general university requirement, and I was fascinated that policemen would actually go to school. So I went through and I got done. I was married very early and had a baby, so I had nothing else to do but schoolwork and take care of the baby while my wife worked. So I graduated when I was 20. And I really wanted to be a police officer or a sheriff’s deputy. But graduating at 20, I was too young to go to work. So I stayed in school and got my master’s degree, and then graduated. Franklin: And what did you get your master’s degree in? Heineman: In police science and administration. Franklin: Wow. 0:01:40 Heineman: And then I came back to the Tri-Cities, because I had nothing left except the end of my thesis and I could do that here at WSU Tri-Cities. My mother got an office looking out over the river where I could work on my thesis. So that’s how I got back to Richland. Franklin: And that’s when it was the Joint Center for Graduate Education, right? Heineman: Yes. Franklin: Or as they would call it, the GE College of Nuclear Knowledge. Heineman: Yup, exactly. But-- Franklin: But you had—sorry. So you had pre-existing connection to the Tri-Cities before you came back after going to WSU? 0:02:21 Heineman: I did. We moved here—my father moved here to work at the Site when I was about three or four years old. Franklin: Do you remember what year that was? Heineman: That would’ve been 1954 or 1955. Franklin: Okay. Heineman: So we lived in a government house on the west side of Richland over on Cedar Street and then moved over—when they sold the houses, we moved over to a house actually on the river, which was great for a little kid, when I was in third grade. And my mother was going back to school to get her master’s degree in librarianship. And she was working at the library in the 300 Area at Hanford. And my father had come here to apply his physics degree from the University of Michigan. Most of the plutonium production work was pretty well staffed at that time, because it was after the war was over. So he decided he wanted to go into breeder reactor research. So he was instrumental in designing some of the cores for the early breeder reactors, and was the project manager for the Plutonium Recycle Test Reactor, the PRTR, and was always very proud of having participated in the design of the core and then managed the design and construction of the overall reactor in early operations. And then when he was finished with that, he moved over to FFTF and worked there for years for GE, and then transferred over to Battelle when Battelle took over that part of the work. And so he spent the rest of his career either in breeder reactor research or safety analysis for the breeder reactor research. 0:04:37 So I have a whole generation before me that was Hanford before me. It was really just kind of happenstance that I came back, because I wasn’t old enough to go to work as a police officer. So while I was finishing up my master’s degree and applying to various places, a job came open on Hanford Patrol. I was living with my father-in-law and he handed me the advertisement and said, gee, maybe it’s time you got your own house and moved, you know, go to work, son. [LAUGHTER] So I did that. 0:05:21 Franklin: Wow. So just to back up a little bit—and thank you for talking about your father. That’s a really interesting career trajectory of breeder reactor research. Your mother, though, she also worked onsite, correct? Heineman: She did. She worked in the 300 Area library, which was the technical library for the whole Hanford Site. And then after she went back to school, she came back to the library, and the decision was made by, at that time, I think it was the AEC and Washington State University, actually in cooperation with the University of Washington and I think maybe Oregon State? Franklin: Yup, yup. That’s all correct. Heineman: To develop a joint center for graduate study. One of the things they wanted to do was to build a big, new library. They would take the reading room from the Hanford Site, the public reading room, and take over that function for the Department of Energy, then AEC. And so they asked her if she would be willing to be the interface on the design and construction of the library that turned out to be the library here at WSU Tri-Cities. Franklin: Wow, okay. 0:06:48 Heineman: So she said, sure, I’d be happy to do that. So she was the primary contact. Then when they got ready to open the library, they asked her if she would run the library. So she did that until she retired. And got to help with the design of the new WSU Tri-Cities library, and was really proud of that. She worked for Brian Vollett at the time. She put everything she always wanted in a library into the design, and they gave everything that she wanted to her. So she worked there until she retired. Franklin: Oh, that’s great. Our offices were in that library for kind of the first year-and-a-half we were here, and I’ve always really enjoyed spending time in there. So that’s really interesting to know. Heineman: Well, she really, she really loved helping the students. I mean, when you would sit down and talk to her about her day, all she would talk about was who came in to see her, what they needed for research, how she could help them. She really enjoyed it. 0:08:01 Franklin: That’s great. Heineman: Yeah, it was cool. Franklin: We need more library—well, we have lots of great librarians. But that’s a great quality in a librarian. Okay. So, to go forward again, you heard about this job as a Hanford patrolman. Heineman: I did. Franklin: Okay, and so you applied. 0:08:19 Heineman: I did, and I got the job. When they took me around to interview with people, they didn’t have anybody actually on Hanford Patrol that had a degree at all, much less a master’s degree. So they were all very excited that they had somebody that was the new model for what they could do for security at Hanford. So that was pretty invigorating for me. Franklin: Did you feel a lot of pressure, though? Because I imagine you’d be going in, there’s a lot of guys who had a lot of years of experience, and kind of, you’re this young guy with a master’s degree in police science. Did you feel any pressure or anything? Or out of place? Heineman: I was actually a little bit. But more I was just fascinated by the whole thing, because most of the people that worked at Hanford and almost all of the people in security or patrol had started during the war. Franklin: Oh, wow. Heineman: So they were 50 to 65 years old. And there weren’t any young people anywhere. In all the interviews I went to, they were all 60-plus and had all this experience and they were so expert at what they did, you know? That part was sort of awe-inspiring. But I didn’t really feel uncomfortable; I was just sort of awestruck by the whole situation and the people. And they offered me a job, and I went to work. So that was pretty cool. Franklin: That is cool. I bet you heard lots of great patrol stories. Heineman: Oh, yeah. Franklin: From the war. 0:12:13 Heineman: More than I could ever tell, yeah. Yeah. I think the folks who worked here during the war and in the post-war years up to when I went to work in the early ‘70s had been through an awful lot of things. The folks in security were—people were a little nervous about them, but at the same time they were pretty much revered because of the effort to keep everything secret during the production years. There were a lot of people that had security clearances at a pretty high level, but the security people, of course, most of them, had access to almost all of the information associated with production of plutonium. So I think people were a little bit standoffish from the security and the patrol folks, but at the same time, there was a lot of respect for what they did. It was a much different world than it is today in that way. Franklin: Interesting. Did you start out as a patrolman? Heineman: I did. Franklin: So how did that—was it like what you had expected, going through school and learning all—going all the way through your masters in police science? Heineman: Not a bit. Franklin: Not a bit? Heineman: Not a bit. Franklin: I’m wondering if you could describe that discrepancy there. 0:11:46 Heineman: So I had always wanted to be a police officer. And honestly, I really wanted to be a King County sheriff’s deputy. In that role, then, your primary role is law enforcement. So most of the education that I had dealt with the basics of law enforcement, investigative techniques, crime scene investigation and all those kinds of things. We didn’t do hardly any of that here. Our primary job here—we had some law enforcement functions because we were deputized Benton County sheriffs, and I believe they still are. But if we had what I would call pure law enforcement functions to be taken care of, we would call Benton County, and they would send deputies out to perform those functions. We did investigate thefts; we investigated areas where there might have been violations of the law regarding classified information and the control of it; we did basic traffic enforcement and those kinds of things. But anything beyond that, we would call Benton County to take care of it. Our function was to keep the Site safe and secure. And in that sense, it was completely different than anything I had ever expected to do. 0:13:22 When I came to work, there were only two other young people on Hanford Patrol, and there were only about a hundred Hanford patrolmen anyway. The other two young people had come in six months before me. Everybody else had been hired during the war or shortly after. During the layoffs in the late ‘60s, they got laid off, many of them. And then when they needed to staff up again, they rehired those same people. So everybody was 58 to 65 when I came to work. Boy, they had a lot of—as you said, a lot of stories, and they had a lot to teach me. But it was mostly about what’s going on on the Site, what are we trying to do, what are we trying to protect, and how do we do that? And then if things went wrong, our job was to go get involved and resolve that. Franklin: Interesting. So how long did you stay as a patrolman? Heineman: Three months. [LAUGHTER] 0:14:38 Heineman: Yup, in three months, I went through basic training all by myself, because, as I said, there weren’t any other new people. So I had three instructors and I spent about six weeks going through basic training. All our classroom instruction, all our firearms instruction, all of that was three-on-one. It was a marvelous opportunity for me. And then I graduated from their basic training after six or eight weeks, and then got assigned to go work with patrol crews in all the different areas at Hanford so that I could get an understanding of what was going on. First in the 100 Areas where the reactors were and where they were producing plutonium and how all of that happened. And then in the 200 Areas where they separated the fuel into plutonium and uranium and waste. And then finally, when I was ready to work all by myself, then they put me in the 300 Area, and I split my time between 300 Area and FFTF, which was under construction at the time. So we had this big construction site security challenge that we had to fulfill. 0:16:12 Then after three months, they called me up and said—the context is that in 1972, the year before I went to work, there was a very significant terrorist attack at the Munich Olympics. By ’73 or early ’74, they had realized that those same terrorists might be interested in diverting plutonium. And it created a huge concern for the government and so they began to expand their security capabilities. One of the things that the company I worked for, Atlantic Richfield Hanford Company, needed to do was to add a couple of professional security people. In those days, they called us security agents. And they had just lost somebody, and so they needed a new security representative that would be responsible for education and enforcement of all the rules related to classified information and plutonium production and control. They asked me if I wanted to go do that. So I said, yes. 0:17:43 Then shortly after I got hired as a security agent, the other person that was working as a security representative retired. My boss was about 64, and sort of struggling with costs, budgets, some of the more basic business aspects of doing work here. So a year-and-a-half after that, they decided that they needed a new security manager. So then all of the sudden, out of the blue, I was the security manager for Atlantic Richfield. And it just sort of, it was like January of ’75, I guess. And I was just barely out of school. I thought, I don’t know if I can do this. I went out and I interviewed with the guy that I would work for, and I said, I don’t know if I’m ready for this or not. He said, oh, you can do that. Franklin: Wow. That is quite a— Heineman: Bing, bang, bang. Franklin: Yeah. [LAUGHTER] 0:19:00 Franklin: That’s a really interesting tie into—I never would’ve put the ’72 Munich Olympic terrorist, that PLO offshoot, into increased security at Hanford. I mean, I can understand their desire to want to probably obtain plutonium for probably a dirty bomb, because they probably wouldn’t have the capability to make their own weapon. But that’s a really fascinating tie-in to the Cold War. To kind of these world events. Heineman: Right. Well, the Munich Olympics event had an effect worldwide on people’s view of what the bad guys were willing to do with their automatic weapons and their willingness to kill people. Those folks, those terrorists, they were willing to die. That was foreign to the country at that time. We weren’t used to people being willing to die for their cause. It had a profound effect on the nuclear industry, and especially the plutonium and uranium production capabilities in the United States. It lasted for—as we talk a little more, you’ll see that it lasted for another 20 years and drove the expenditure of billions of dollars in security upgrades across the AEC, then ERDA, and then DOE production complex. I was lucky enough to come in at the head end of that. So I was right in the middle of the whole thing, and it was really fascinating. Franklin: Wow. So how long did you stay as—so—well, I don’t want to ask how long. What was your primary job as security manager? Obviously, you took the job, you got the job, right, was promoted to security manager at Atlantic Richfield Hanford. 0:21:00 Heineman: So, my primary goal, I would say, was to work with the production managers and the research managers and the folks that were involved in the 200 Areas where we were taking the spent fuel from the production reactors and converting it into plutonium and uranium. My primary objective in those days was to try to help them understand the risk of what at the time seemed to be a pretty outlandish threat, and convince them that there were controls that needed to be put into place on the people, the production processes and the information in order to assure that Hanford was the last place that those terrorists would want to go at the United States production complex. If they wanted to go attack the production complex and divert plutonium or uranium or obtain classified information, my job was to work with all these production and information control managers and convince them that we wanted to look like the very last place those terrorists would go if they decided to try and get some information or material. Franklin: So you— Heineman: And— Franklin: Oh, sorry. Heineman: And it was not an easy task. They didn’t understand; they didn’t really believe that it was real. They didn’t fight me, but I spent the bulk of my time in their offices with their staff talking about the history, talking about the risks, showing them how easy diversion might have been in the old days before we put in all of the security upgrades that we did. And then trying to convince them that it was appropriate to take a big chunk of the money they had to produce plutonium and spend it on security. Franklin: That’s interesting. Interesting for several reasons. So you basically had to kind of bring this threat home to them, to make it real for them, whereas they might have thought you were maybe making a mountain out of a molehill. You know, oh, this happened so far away. Heineman: That’s exactly what it felt like. Franklin: It’d never come here, and kind of blinders on. But the money to increase these security upgrades and security systems came out of their—like they had to spend the money out of their budgets? Heineman: Sure. Franklin: Is that where some of the resistance came from? 0:24:10 Heineman: Hanford would get a set amount of money every year. And the whole funding situation, even in those days, was very complex. But the bottom line is, Hanford was only going to get so much money. Their primary job was to produce plutonium. I mean, that was the goal. It was like—like, General Motors: the goal is, how many cars can you put off the other end of the line? And anything you do other than building cars takes away from how many cars you can produce. Since Hanford, its primary mission was to produce plutonium, it produced 80%, plus or minus, of the nation’s plutonium stockpile. Anything that they couldn’t spend on plutonium production seemed like a diversion from their primary mission. It really was so new, actually, to the whole world that people were willing to die for their cause, it was very difficult. Very difficult. But I was a young guy; I had a lot of energy, a lot of emotion. I was awed by these folks and very respectful. And I think that helped me a lot, over the security folks that worked for some of the other contractors that were older. So I just put in as much time as I had to to work with them and help them understand. And help me understand what the challenges were going to be from their side. If we started putting additional controls in place, how was that going to affect their ability to produce plutonium and spend as much money as they could on that primary mission? Franklin: So, really—it does seem so simple that this would be a concern to us today, but really this was kind of the—you were working in the kind of formation of this idea of how international terrorism could—the idea that terrorists in one place could affect people internationally and that they would use a global supply chain in order to cause havoc or to get material to attack civilians indiscriminately. That’s really—I mean, it sounds so, I guess, maybe 40 years later, we’re much more inured to that kind of thinking, or we see that so much on the news. Heineman: Sure, if you remember, and maybe you can’t, but in those days, when you went to get on the airplane, you showed them your ticket. That’s all there was. Franklin: I do! Heineman: Right? Franklin: It’s been a while, it’s getting further and further, but— Heineman: There was just none of today’s mentality that there need to be some basic controls in place to protect everybody. 0:27:23 Franklin: I’m wondering if you can give me an example of a control that was instituted that affected the way in which people produce plutonium, or one of the controls that you instituted in the process to keep materials safer? 0:27:39 Heineman: Sure. There’s lots of examples. I mean, in later years, I had the opportunity to manage projects that put an awful lot of hardware in place to do that. In the days when I went to work, between the city of Richland and the plutonium storage vault, there was the barricade, the Wye or Yakima Barricade that was no fences on either side; it was only controlling cars. There was a hog wire fence around each area with a gate and a badge house. But it doesn’t take very much to go through a hog wire fence. There was another hog wire fence around the separations plants or the Plutonium Finishing Plant. And inside that, nothing. The doors weren’t even locked. In the summer, at the Plutonium Finishing Plant, which had 47 exterior doors, two-thirds of those doors on both levels were wide open at night because it was so hot and they couldn’t air condition it. So that’s all there was in security. So over the next 15 years, we put an awful lot of hardware in place. We spent, honestly, billions of dollars to design and procure and construct barriers and detection technology, to hire additional guards, to set up special tactical weapons teams. We procured boats and canines and helicopters. We bought some of the best weaponry available anywhere in the country. We put controls over the production statistics so that if there was any indication that we didn’t have the amount of plutonium at the end of the process that we predicted at the beginning, that we could stop and go figure out why. Franklin: Did that also extend to the publication of the amount produced? Heineman: Yes. That has always been classified. Franklin: Oh, okay, okay. Heineman: And was classified all the way up to the end of production. Franklin: Okay, okay. 0:30:50 Heineman: There is a lot of production data on—open source data out on the internet. But even today, my ability to talk about how much we produced or how much we could produce from a given amount of fuel is limited by the regulations on classified information. I cannot share that. But there is a lot of information in the open literature out there now about that. But in those days, that information didn’t exist, and it wasn’t tolerated. If we saw little bits of data beginning to appear somewhere, our job was to go figure out where did it come from. Was it accidental, or was somebody actually sharing that data, and what did we need to do about that. So we had a lot of control over production data, over production processes, classified information, the hardware side of security. I think at one point when I was safeguards and security director, we had something over 450 Hanford patrolmen. And that compares with about 80 to 100 when I went to work. So we really went through a huge hiring spree. And our physical standards for those folks and the training that we provided for those folks, the equipment we supplied to them, was by 1980 or ’85 was just orders of magnitude improved over when I went to work. Franklin: Wow. Hanford was also a pretty early adopter of CCTV and computer alarms, correct? Heineman: Yes. Franklin: Was that part of—were you responsible for those upgrades as well? 0:33:02 Heineman: Yeah, after about a year-and-a-half as security manager, the contract changed for the production areas on the Site. Atlantic Richfield decided they didn’t want to be in the war business anymore. They didn’t want to be associated with plutonium; they wanted to focus on oil and chemical. And the contract was secured by Rockwell, which had operated the Rocky Flats site for a number of years in Colorado. When Rockwell came in, they asked me if—we were right in the middle of the recognition that we needed to do big things, and we were going to have to go spend a lot of money on upgrades. They asked me if I would be what, in their terms, was the safeguards project manager. And so I worked for two different people: I worked for the safeguards and security director, and I worked for the chemical processing director that had all of the reprocessing plants and the Plutonium Finishing Plant. He was the one that truly controlled the resources. So on one side I worked for the guy that was responsible for the technical aspects of security, and on the other side I worked for the guy that had the resources and the plants that we were trying to protect. It worked very well. It was a marvelous experience to work for both of them. And gave me quite an opportunity to interface with the plant managers in a very different way than I ever had when I was purely security. Franklin: Did you find it was easier to rationalize the upgrades and the expenditures at that point to security? Heineman: I think so, maybe partly because of the organizational set up. But partly, too, because a couple of years had gone by and there were other things happening in the world. The plant managers and their staff were reading about that in the paper; they were beginning to understand. So the job got a lot easier then. I think, the other thing that really helped was that the field office manager for the Richland operations office had this philosophy that he wanted to be—he wanted Hanford viewed as the hardest place to go to if anybody wanted to steal plutonium or classified information. And he worked very hard with headquarters—I think we’d just transitioned from the AEC to the Energy Research and Development Administration, ERDA. And he worked very hard with the folks back at headquarters to convince them to go talk to Congress and set up a discreet funding process for the security upgrades that was outside the production budget. Franklin: Ah. Heineman: So all of a sudden, I had access to tons of money. [LAUGHTER]—that I didn’t have to talk from the plant managers’ budgets. Franklin: Oh, okay, yeah. Heineman: And over the seven, actually, eight or nine years that I did the project manager job and the safeguards and security director’s job, we probably spent somewhere between one and two billion dollars, independent of the production budget to go design and construct and operate all those physical systems. Franklin: Such as? 0:37:30 Heineman: Well, the standard protection for a vital area in the Department of Energy today would be several layers of security outside that vital area, but then a double-perimeter fence with a goodly distance in between, with barriers on top of the fences to slow people down, alarm systems between those fences. Closed-circuit television cameras observing the whole area and activating immediately if you had an alarm so you could see instantaneously what was there, with a central alarm facility that was watching all of that. A space between the inner fence and the facility itself that was protected. This superior patrol force with the best of the best assigned to the plutonium facilities. Alarms around the entire exterior of the production plant. Alarms throughout the inside of the production plant that detect motion or heat or vibration or a variety of other things. Patrolmen on the inside of the plant looking out to keep people away if there is an attack, not respond too late to get them. And then a similar set that everything I just described, around the perimeter of the actual production area and the actual storage area. So you had eight to ten different layers of barriers, alarms, surveillance capability and response capability before anybody could ever even get to the door into wherever the plutonium was. And that’s a lot of money. [LAUGHTER] It’s a lot of money. And quite a bit of the funding that we had went into hiring, training, equipping and retraining our patrol force so that we had the best of the best available to respond if we did have a problem. Because it does you no good at all to know the bad guys are there if you can’t resolve that situation in your favor. Franklin: Yeah. Did the training of Hanford Patrol change—how did it change from when you had signed on in ’73 to what you’re describing now when Rockwell took over? You mentioned you went through like a three-month class. Did that expand, was there—I imagine all this would need new training as well. 0:40:50 Heineman: It was six to eight weeks, and the bulk of that was classroom training and just classified information and that kind of thing, and some of the basic production processes. Probably 50% of it was firearms and other similar training. By the time I left that part of the business in ’87, our basic training class, people had to have a background to begin with that was probably equivalent of what I had when I finished basic training. But we were able—we paid enough money and we were attractive enough to folks that we could hire them with that to begin with. Then we gave them anywhere from three to four months of dedicated training. And they had a minimum of two weeks and up to eight weeks a year of retraining, depending on what job they were assigned to. So for our tactical response folks, they were in training two out of twelve months a year, being retrained and optimizing their abilities to respond both individually and as a group. Of course, with the advanced weaponry and equipment capabilities that we provided to them, that in itself required a fair amount of additional training and retraining every year so that they could stay proficient in the use of that weaponry. Franklin: Yeah, wow. For example in the 200 Area where I imagine there was a lot of these new hardware and controls went in because of the storage and separation, were the alarms and CCTVs, were those managed centrally, or were they monitored in each facility, or was there a central facility—how did that work? Heineman: Yes, yes and yes. Franklin: Yes, yes, and yes? 0:43:13 Heineman: Each of the production facilities had its own control center. So the Plutonium Finishing Plant had one, the Plutonium-Uranium facility, PUREX had its own facility. FFTF had its own facility. And then we had a central alarm facility between the 200 Areas that both received duplicate signals independently of the local ones, and monitored how things were going on at each of the production facilities. In the early days, we even had a third level, which eventually we decided was superfluous, which was down in the basement of the Federal Building, that sort of monitored all of that. Franklin: Yeah, I could see how that—how would that third level respond to an emergency, being all the way out there, how would they have detected something that those first two levels wouldn’t have detected? Yeah. Interesting. Heineman: It was mostly information control down there. Franklin: Oh, okay. 0:44:35 Heineman: And it gave them a direct access to—back in the early days, senior site management both for the government and for its contractors were all downtown. None of them lived way out here in the Site. So it gave them information and the ability to monitor stuff from down in the city of Richland that they otherwise would’ve relied on people to tell them instead of see directly. But it was about that same time that we shut that center down that by then I think it was the Department of Energy who said, you know, you contractor management teams, you really need to be out there where the action is and close to your folks and in control. So everybody began to move from the city of Richland out onto the Site. Which, actually, as a support service employee was very helpful to me, because they were now close to the reality of the day-to-day and it was a lot easier for me to deal with them. Franklin: Oh, yeah, I imagine. Well, great, that’s so interesting. So I see in 1980 you became safeguards and security director? Heineman: Yes, 1980. Franklin: So describe that. It seems like you got more responsibility, then, right, with Hanford, not only Hanford Patrol, but also fire and emergency preparedness and nuclear safeguards? Heineman: Yes. Franklin: So was that kind of a similar work, just kind of monitoring all of the different emergency and security possibilities onsite? 0:46:31 Heineman: Yeah, my job really changed a lot between being in charge of security or the projects to do the upgrades, when I went to safeguards and security director. Because we did, we had Hanford Patrol, Hanford Fire. We had site-wide emergency preparedness. Safeguards, which was the accounting for the plutonium and other nuclear materials. And then the professional security folks that had been years before. And so I had chief of Hanford Patrol that ran Hanford Patrol. I had the chief of the fire department who ran the fire department. That wasn’t my job anymore. [LAUGHTER] So probably the closest thing to what I’d done before that I was still in charge of was emergency preparedness. Because it was fairly small and the senior managers on the Site really looked to me individually when something went wrong to take charge and organize and run things for them. I mean, they had the final decisions on a lot of stuff. But the rest of it, I was managing professional managers that were in charge of patrol and security and fire. And I didn’t do that anymore. So I could give them advice. I could help them decide how to respond to different kinds of both management and technical challenges in a consultation kind of environment. But my primary job was securing funding for the additional upgrades we wanted to do, which we were by then doing both, not just for security, but the Hanford Fire Department. All the old Hanford fire equipment from World War II was falling apart, breaking down. We’d take three brush trucks to a brush fire out in the desert, and one of them would make it. [LAUGHTER] So probably— Franklin: Really? You guys were still using World War II-era equipment— Heineman: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Franklin: --in ’80? 0:49:05 Heineman: Absolutely. In fact, there is a road that goes up Rattlesnake Mountain to get to the top. If we had fires on Rattlesnake Mountain or anywhere north of there, sort of like the Silver Dollar fire or the big fires before that, most of the fire vehicles couldn’t go up that road. It was too steep. And they wouldn’t make it. Either they couldn’t make it at all because they weren’t powerful enough, or they’d break down on the way. So we put a fairly substantial amount of money into upgrading all of the fire equipment on the Site, too. And up until that point, we were buying excess equipment. When something would break down and we’d need a new brush truck or a new fire engine or a new ambulance, we would go out on the government’s excess list—[LAUGHTER]—and get stuff that had already been used, mostly used up, someplace else. And we decided we couldn’t keep doing that. So we worked with the government and we worked with our companies to secure funding to go through and upgrade all of that equipment. And we began upgrading training and all the other stuff to go with it. So at that point my job was almost entirely securing funding, being the liaison between the security and fire functions, security and emergency services functions and the production management, interfacing with the Department of Energy on where we wanted to go years from then. It was a very different job than I’d ever had before and very enriching. I mean, it was—it really was—it was something I was very proud to be able to do, and something I think, between myself and the management team I had, that we did very well. Franklin: Wow. And you were also still in charge of nuclear productions safeguards and securing that production information, right? Heineman: Yes. Franklin: And making sure that every bit of plutonium was accounted for from what would be possible to generate. 0:51:39 Heineman: Right, and in fact for a number of years, we hadn’t really had much production going on after the Cold War was over, most of those production processes were either phased out or phased way down. Then under Ronald Reagan, there was a decision that we needed to increase our nuclear capabilities. We moved forward with, again, we spent a ton of money upgrading both our production capabilities and our security capabilities for restarting the PUREX plant to process K Basin, K Reactor fuel that was in storage in the basins and separate out the plutonium and uranium, restart the Plutonium Finishing Plant to purify the plutonium, and restart what was called the UO3 plant to process the uranium from the fuel. Franklin: And before that, these had all been in shutdown mode? Heineman: Pretty much in standby, yeah. Franklin: So not taking a lot of security resources then? I mean, still a basic level, right, but not in active use, so much easier to monitor when they’re in shutdown. 0:53:10 Heineman: Actually, in some ways it’s easier; in some ways it’s harder. Because you don’t have active operations going on, but you still have the presence of the materials, both in the process and in storage. The decision to deactivate plutonium production was always a political decision, both when they slowed it down at the end of the Cold War, and then—I’m not sure I remember which president, Jimmy Carter, maybe—decided that we weren’t going to produce nuclear material anymore. It was always a political decision that had to be executed in days or weeks, leaving a huge amount of material still inside the chemical processes at the various plants. Because it takes a long time to process a batch from one end to the other, and they never gave us enough time to do that clean-out. Franklin: Right, they just wanted you to turn off the lights, lock the door— Heineman: Just stop. Franklin: Yeah, send everybody home. Heineman: Just stop. Franklin: Which is where we get the K Basin spent fuel. 0:54:40 Heineman: The K Basin fuel, all the material that was held up and in storage at the PUREX plant. The Plutonium Finishing Plant had—there are some articles, I don’t remember the numbers now—but there were some articles that we published publicly on how much and how many different varieties of plutonium types of products were at PFP, the Plutonium Finishing Plant at the time we couldn’t process anymore. A wide variety of different kinds of materials, each one with its own unique safety and security challenges. A lot of it. [LAUGHTER] And so in some ways, it was actually harder form a security standpoint to control things during the shutdown days than it—or suspended operation days—than it was during the production days. Franklin: Interesting. Yeah, I mean, I guess that makes sense. There’s less eyes on it. It’s got lots of safety issues of just sitting there. Yeah, okay, thank you. 0:56:08 Heineman: The whole McCluskey room event was purely a function of being directed to shut down a process without having the time and the resources to come back and clean that system out. I don’t remember, frankly, what the instigator was for that particular shutdown in the americium recovery facility, but it was down for a long time and ultimately resulted in a chemical reaction and an explosion. There are examples like that, not as public and not as dynamic maybe, across all of Hanford. In the reactor areas, in the separation areas, in the finishing areas, in the lab areas in 300 Area. Just tons of examples there. Franklin: Hmm. Wow. So when production is restarted, then, and they were kind of bring back up PUREX and PFP, and UO3, did your job change significantly, or did it kind of feel like the Cold War days again? 0:57:32 Heineman: Yeah, it felt like going back to the ‘70s and very early ‘80s. Mostly in the ‘70s. There was a high degree of esprit de corps across the whole Site. People were focused on a common mission. Everybody was rowing the same direction. We were excited that the government had provided enough money to hire the people and to get the processes upgraded to restart. There was a real energy and an enthusiasm again that had been missing for a number of years. That was really fun. Franklin: And your job still stayed mostly the same through those years in the ‘80s, then, safeguards and security director? 0:58:31 Heineman: Right. I left that job in 1987. Westinghouse—again, DOE had rebid the contracts and they went to a single site contract. So what had been run by eight different contractors became the responsibility of Westinghouse Hanford Corporation. Westinghouse had their own safeguards and security director at the time they won their contract. I told them I still wanted to work for them even though they already had somebody to do the job that I had, and they had me consolidate the emergency preparedness programs from the eight different contractors into one. So I spent about a year doing that job. And then my world changed yet again. [LAUGHTER] And I started doing something completely different. Franklin: Which was? 0:59:39 Heineman: They called me and said they thought I’d gotten that done to their satisfaction. They were having difficulty because they were now in charge of radiological control, health physics, radiation protection technicians, all those functions. They were now in charge of radiological protection for the whole Site. Which was bringing together a whole bunch of people that had never worked together, that had different systems, different processes, different procedures, different regulations. The poor manager that was trying to manage all that was really struggling. They had decided that they needed somebody to come in fresh, and so they asked me if I would go do that. And I tried to explained to them I didn’t know anything about radiological protection. I wasn’t a health physicist. I’d never been an HPT or an RPT. I really didn’t know much about it. And they said, that’s not what we need you for. We need you to go create a well-functioning organization. They asked me to go do that, and I did that for the next seven years. That was a very rewarding job. Franklin: How so? Heineman: In two different ways. First, again, I was responsible for supplying support and services to all the individual plant managers. So it gave me a chance to reacquaint myself with all of them and some of the newer ones, and to be talking on a different plane than security about what we could do different, what could we do better, where were they frustrated with the support that they were getting, where was I or my folks frustrated with the way they were doing business that might have involved risks, radiological risks we didn’t need to take. So there was a whole new relationship between myself and all the plant managers across the Site. And the other one was that the business agent for the HPTs, health physics technicians, sometimes called radiation protection technicians, was a young, very forward-looking person. He and I really teamed up and resolved an enormous number of management labor problems between radiation protection management and the bargaining unit, RPTs, HPTs. He and I were so in sync with each other over what was best for everybody that there almost was just not a problem that came up that we couldn’t resolve, working back together with the people in conflict. Franklin: Do you remember his name? Heineman: John Jeske. Franklin: John Jeske. 01:03:10 Heineman: And John is still employed at the Site. In fact, when the Site—we sent John over to Idaho late in my radiological protection career. We sent him over to the Idaho site to find out what was going on in this new program, safety—shoot, I can’t remember what we called them. But let’s call them safety stewards, where a union representative would be appointed from every facility. That sole job was to be the safety representative for all the folks that worked there. Something that prior to that time had always been the job of the safety manager or the safety professionals. We gave a job just like that to a union person. That’s what they were doing at Idaho. He came back and was able to sell that concept across Hanford. When he was approaching the time where it was time for somebody else to become the business agent for the RPTs, he decided to start up and run that kind of a program across Hanford. And has been doing that until just this last year when a new person took over that job. So John has—he’s always been ten years ahead of his time. He’s just an amazing person. Franklin: That’s great. Well, I have two questions—or, I guess a comment and then a question. I’ll start with the question. Did that—radiological control management, did that include environmental control as well, or was it just health physics? Heineman: No. Franklin: Just human—okay, so worker-oriented— 1:05:31 Heineman: Yeah, environmental was a completely separate discipline with a different set of skills and capabilities. I mean, obviously, radiological protection is out there to protect the environment as well as the people. But it was strictly from a radiological contamination perspective. Franklin: Did you find quick acceptance from the RPTs and health physicists that you were asked to manage, or was it kind of a—did you have to kind of grow—because you’re obviously coming at this from not their profession. So, would you find a pretty quick acceptance to your management, or did you have to kind of grow into that role and kind of earn their trust? Heineman: It took a fair amount of growing, I would say probably a good two years of the seven. I was accepted much more quickly by the bargaining unit representatives than I was by the professional staff. The professional staff didn’t understand why they would have a boss that didn’t have a background or know anything about their business. They didn’t understand that I would let them do that job and make those decisions. And it took quite a while for them to begin to trust in that. The bargaining unit folks were pretty—as I said, they were in a lot of conflict and having a lot of trouble as the previous manager was trying to merge all these different cultures and procedures. Franklin: These are the eight different contractor units we’re talking about? 1:07:20 Heineman: Right, of those, probably four had radiological protection folks. And so the rank-and-file employees, both bargaining unit and non-bargaining professionals at the non-management level, they were not very happy with their management. And my job in the safeguards and security business from almost the get-go had been to create people that had capabilities they never had before. And to equip them with materials and logistical capabilities that they’d never had before. So it was a builder’s job. It wasn’t a manager’s job; it was a builder’s job. So when I went into radiological control, I kind of had that same attitude, that the most important people in the organization were the ones that had the instruments in their hand, just like the ones with the guns in their hands or the firehose in their hands. It wasn’t the managers. It was the people that were going to protect things. And they were really resonated to that. So it was pretty easy for me to connect with the HPTs and the non-management professional people. The management team took a little while. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] That’s interesting. Heineman: Yeah. Franklin: But that kind of makes sense. So during this time while you were doing this or a little before, you were also responsible for shutting down the B Canyon, and upgrades for the waste encapsulation for cesium and strontium. Heineman: That came after—that was the next— Franklin: That came after, oh, okay. Heineman: The next big change in my career. Right. Franklin: The next, okay, then let’s go there. 1:09:19 Heineman: So—[LAUGHTER] one of the five reprocessing plants at Hanford which separated the fuel into its constituent parts was B Plant. Very similar to PUREX but built in the early ‘50s instead of later like PUREX was so it wasn’t as technically capable. And really never got used for separating fuel. Franklin: What was it used for? Heineman: B Plant was built—there’s a long story associated with how the reprocessing plants advanced from T Plant, which was the original one, to REDOX, which was a dramatic new technology over in West Area. And then from REDOX to PUREX. And B Plant was kind of built right in the middle of there. It was almost unnecessary from the beginning, because REDOX and then especially PUREX—PUREX was able to process the fuel from all of the production reactors all by itself. Even though the original design was we needed six reprocessing plants, by the time it was built, the technology had advanced and it did the job all by itself. Franklin: But it was also producing a different finished product—or, no, sorry, that wouldn’t go to the PFP. Sorry, never mind. Heineman: No, everything from all five or six or those reprocessing plants was supposed to go to PFP. Franklin: PFP, okay. Heineman: And then PFP converted this less-enriched plutonium solution over to the final product, either plutonium powder or plutonium metal. That we then sent to the weapons facilities. Franklin: Right, but PUREX as an extraction process was able to handle the different fuels coming out of all the different reactors. 1:11:24 Heineman: All of the reactors. So it basically just made all the other four obsolete and prevented the construction of the other one that was going to go up in East Area. So B Plant got the job, because it was there, it was online, it was proven using cold chemicals. It was ready to go, but we didn’t need it. So the government realized that we had a huge amount of uranium in the tanks that went with the tank waste when you extracted the plutonium from the fuel. And the idea was that we could take uranium and pull it out. So they gave that mission to the third reprocessing plant over in West Area, which was U Plant. And the key question for B Plant, then, became how can you contribute? And about that time, the temperature of the liquids in a number of the waste tanks was becoming hot. The tanks were actually boiling, and there were huge safety concerns developing about how are we going to control this wild combination of chemicals in liquid in these tanks. So they redesigned the process inside of B Plant. Didn’t involve a lot of physical changes, but the chemical processes, to take waste that was sluiced with high pressure water jets out of the higher heat tanks, and through the chemical process separate out the cesium and the strontium, which are the two radionuclides that contribute the most heat. So they would remove the cesium and the strontium and then put the waste back in the tanks, subsequently, much reducing the heat load in those tanks. Franklin: Right, making the tank safer. Heineman: So they began to do that and they realized that they needed a way to store the cesium and the strontium. Franklin: Right, because these are very dangerous radionuclides for human health. 1:14:10 Heineman: Yeah, they’re high radiation radionuclides. That is, they have a very short half-life, so they’re giving off tons of radiation. That’s what generates the heat, and the radiation is pretty dangerous all by itself. So they built the Waste Encapsulation and Storage Facility, WESF, on the end of B Plant. And its job was to take the cesium and convert it to cesium chloride, a powder, and the strontium and convert it to strontium fluoride, a powder. Load those powders into double-thick stainless steel capsules about 30 inches long and about this big around. And you had one welded shut inside of another welded shut. And then store those capsules under 20 feet of water, which both kept them cool, so that the capsules didn’t melt, and protected the people in the facility from the radiation. Franklin: Yeah, I’ve heard about this facility before. Heineman: It’s a fascinating facility. And it’s still operating and still has all 1,930 capsules in the pool cells. It’s a beautiful facility when you turn the lights off, because you got a beautiful blue Cherenkov radiation glow. It’s gorgeous. But the sooner they can find a way to dry store those capsules, the better, because they’re—in my mind, once I went over and understood them better, I really believe they were one of the highest risks anywhere at Hanford. Franklin: More so than the tanks, or equal— 1:16:23 Heineman: Oh, yes, in terms of human health, as opposed to the environment, way, way worse. Way, way worse. We used to joke that if you had a capsule sitting in an empty field and it hadn’t melted yet from the heat inside, you couldn’t get within 100 yards of it, no matter how fast you ran, because you would die before you got there of radiation poisoning. Franklin: Wow. 1:16:54 Heineman: These capsules—and you can find, I think, some of the data on the ‘net on their radiation levels. Honestly, by now, I’ve forgotten the numbers. But they’re easily the most radioactive things anywhere at the Hanford Site. They contain a third of the—in these, just these 1,930 capsules, they have a third of the radioactivity of the whole Hanford Site. In one little set of pool cells. They’re just amazing, amazing things. And now they have a project going they pretty well completed the design. The heat transfer is the problem: how do you put them inside a dry capsule, or a dry cask and not have them melt inside? Because someday you might have to open that cask, right? Franklin: Sure, sure. 1:17:58 Heineman: So they’ve pretty well completed their calculations, and thy have a project to move those things from the pool cells, where if they ever got uncovered, you’d have a disaster, to dry storage where they could live for a long time without hurting anybody. So anyway I was doing this radiological control job, and things were sort of starting to run pretty flat. Everything was going good. B Plant had been—once they terminated the cesium and strontium recovery process, it had been sitting there in a standby condition for, oh my goodness, 20-plus years. And for the staff just to keep it safe, to keep the utilities and the other stuff, to keep it from falling apart and harming the environment, my recollection is it was about $35 million a year for a stay-safe condition. And another $10 million on top of that to operate WESF and keep the capsules safe. Franklin: Well, I imagine B Plant, processing all that cesium and strontium, it would be pretty hot itself. 1:19:39 Heineman: Yeah. It needed to be controlled. And so they were beginning—the cleanup mission was beginning in earnest then. And they realized that there was a lot of stuff they couldn’t do because they were having to put $35 million a year into the B Canyon. And it was giving them nothing except a safe condition. And they decided if there was some way to clean it up, isolate it from the environment so that you wouldn’t have any leaks or anything, and basically take all the people out, they’d have $35 million they could go use to clean up other stuff. And so they called me up and said, we don’t really have any money— Franklin: That’s a great way to start a— 1:20:38 Heineman: Yeah, it was a great conversation. The vice president that called me, his name was Ron Bliss, and he was another one of those guys that was always ten years ahead. But he called me up and he said, there’s kind of a no-lose thing here. We’ve got this facility that’s costing us $35 million. We don’t have a lot of money to put into cleaning it up. But would you be willing to go over there, kind of investigate what the money’s being spent on, how it’s being spent, see if you can’t find a way to convert the workforce from babysitters to cleaner-uppers, and see if you can get us out of this $35 million. So I said, I don’t know anything about that either, but sure, I’ll go over there. So I went over, and fairly quickly realized that there was quite a bit of money going in there for the effort that was truly required for safety. A lot of it was just carryover from the production days, and nobody’d ever really looked at, does all this stuff still need to be done? And so I began putting some information together and some different approaches. And the deputy manager for DOE’s Richland office came out to our facility one day, and I think he and my boss, the vice president, had talked a little about how he could help. So he came out. His name was Lloyd Piper. And he had a bunch of get-out-of-jail-free cards in his wallet. Franklin: You mean like from Monopoly? 1:22:30 Heineman: Yeah. Yeah. Except he’d had them made for him, with his name on it. Franklin: Oh, okay. Heineman: And it said, one get out of jail free card, on one side, from Lloyd Piper. And on the other side it said something like, if you don’t strive you never achieve, or something like that. So he came out and met with me and my team. He said, I’ll tell you what, he said, I’m going to challenge you to try to get this done in three years. And I’ll give you access to x amount of additional money on top of the $35 million a year, because I know you’re going to have to go separate WESF which used all the B Plant utilities: power, water, all that stuff. Franklin: Oh, so you’d have to get separate utilities out to it. 1:23:26 Heineman: Right, because WESF still needed to be functional. He said, so I’ll give you this amount of money or access to that much money if you need it to do that separation. But I’d like you to try to get done in three years. In three years, let’s see if we can’t have WESF separated, and nobody working at B Plant at all. And we said—and he handed out these cards. And so we said, ah, hell, sure, it’s free, right? Get out of jail free. So we took that challenge on and over the next—it took us about six months to do the detail planning. We put together various task teams and at the end of the six months, we had a plan. We had to hire a few more people that we didn’t have at B Plant that we needed. We had a lot of piping work to do, because we had to flush the entire system, as you said. The residual cesium and strontium was pretty high radiation levels and we needed to clean the inside of the canyon out. So we had to hire a few additional staff, and mostly craftsman. Over the next three years—the original challenge was out the gate in ’98. And we did that. We did that. We got it done, and we put a padlock on the front door. We found jobs for all but two of the 150 people that worked there. Franklin: Wow. Heineman: So we didn’t have a big layoff, and the $35 million went to like $500,000. The cleanup was completed for about $100 million less than the long-range plan for environmental cleanup of B Plant. So we saved that $100 million in addition to making the $35 million a year go away. Marvelous opportunity. It was really terrific. Had a great relationship with the DOE folks here and with the DOE folks at headquarters. So we did that and B Plant has a padlock on it today and WESF keeps operating and doing its thing and everything’s cool. Franklin: Oh, that’s great. You should be really proud. 1:26:09 Heineman: Yup. Yeah! We were. It was a great team. We had people that did some stellar things, that came up with some incredible solutions to what seemed to be intractable problems. We had—the team got along so well, we really had a good time. Franklin: Wow. So after B Canyon shut down, you switched to your last job on site, right? Heineman: Right. Franklin: Which was— Heineman: Wasn’t supposed to be my last job, but it was. Franklin: Okay. [LAUGHTER] The beginning of decommissioning the PFP, right? I’m wondering if you could talk about, why’d you come over to PFP? 1:26:51 Heineman: Well, we were about three months from putting the padlock on B Plant, and the rest of it was just sort of, kind of the last few things. And we’d found jobs for almost everybody in. So I felt like I was pretty well done. PFP had been shut down by the government. It was in its cleanup mission, which was really critical. As I said earlier, there were a lot of different kinds of materials, some of them not very stable left at PFP when they said shut down, because we didn’t have time to do anything, we just had to stop. So it was a fairly fluid situation in terms of trying to keep everything safe. But they had made some errors and had three what are called criticality violations over about a two-week period where employees had done things that were prohibited by criticality preventions standards. The government stepped in and said, stop. You can’t do anything. You can’t move anything. They even had to get special permission from the government to move bags of used laundry. It was a terrible situation. And they had been in that mode for about nine months, and had tried twice to upgrade their operations, prove to DOE that they could do it better than they did it before DOE shut them down, and failed. And so I start thinking, well, what’s my next challenge going to be? And I thought, well, I don’t know what I’m going to do next. But I went to my boss, who was by then the president of Babcock and Wilcox, B&W Hanford Company. And suggested to him that since we didn’t really know what I should do next, the guy that had finished up putting a padlock on PUREX was available. So I suggested that he come over and do the final three months at B Plant and that I go over to PFP and help the plant director there with upgrading all the operations and procedures and things and trying to convince DOE to give us another chance to restart the cleanup operations. And so I went over there in June of ’98 and thought I would be there six to nine months, until we could get it restarted. And by then I would find something else fun to do. And I retired from there in 2012. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: 14 years later. Heineman: I never got out. That’s right. That’s right. Franklin: So what happened? What turned what you thought would be a six-, nine-month job and took the rest of your career out there? Was it something about the job that made you want to stay, or was it the job so big that you felt like you couldn’t walk away from it? Heineman: I think it was both. The Plutonium Finishing Plant is easily, easily the most interesting place that I’ve ever worked at Hanford. Franklin: Why is that? 1:30:50 Heineman: The variety of processes, the degree of control that’s needed over the process, the procedures, the people, to be able to do work safely and avoid a really serious problem. The history of the facility, the nature of the commitment of the people who worked there. There was nobody that worked at the Plutonium Finishing Plant that couldn’t, based on seniority, have transferred out and gone to work someplace else. And there were a lot of people that transferred over to the PFP, didn’t like it because of all those controls, and turned around and left. But the people who stayed were people who were really committed and really good at what they did, and very willing to accept controls because they understood the safety implications and why it was necessary. The whole place is just the most fascinating production plant I could ever imagine. So that was certainly part of it. The people, the quality of the people and their commitment was part of it. Part of it was, frankly, the personal challenge, because there was not one day that things ran steady in trying to clean up that Plutonium Finishing Plant. Not one single day, from the time I went to work until I went home at night, went the way it was supposed to. Dynamic, exciting, energizing, making a contribution. I just never, never felt a desire to go do something else, and frankly as I looked around at the cleanup activities in other areas, nothing compared in complexity and importance to PFP. Franklin: What were some of the milestones that were accomplished while you were at—sorry, was your job managing the decontamination—or what was your specific job at— Heineman: Until— Franklin: At PFP. 1:33:40 Heineman: Until CH2M Hill took over the contract fairly recently at that time, I think I spent three-and-a-half years with CH2M Hill. But up until the time that they took over the contract, I was variously the deputy director for PFP or the senior project manager for cleanup. I had a variety of titles, depending on the organizational structure. But I was typically the number two guy at PFP, and responsible for, I would call it, the strategy of how to go about cleaning it up as quickly as possible for the least amount of money in a safe way. The director, then, was responsible for all the crews that made that happen, once the plan was laid out. So he managed all of the folks that worked in the plant; I managed the people that strategized and designed the cleanup processes. As far as major milestones, I think those are, as I look back now, they seem fairly obvious; they weren’t obvious at all at the time. But there were, let me just say, 15 completely unique kinds of plutonium compounds left in the plant. Some of them liquids, some of them powders, some of them metal. All different kinds with different qualities and characteristics. One by one, we took each of those types of plutonium from whatever condition they were in at the time we shut it down, to the point that they were a stable material that could be containerized and stored without risk of a chemical reaction or causing other kinds of problems, like fires, et cetera. So, there were like 15 mini-milestones as we completed—because every one of those 15 needed a different process to convert it from this unstable form it was in, into something that we could put it in a can and be confident it was safe for the long-term. We could talk about some of those kinds of processes, but each one of those processes had to be designed, had to be proven in the laboratory with small quantities, had to be constructed, operated, and then we’d claim victory on that particular product. So there were 15 little mini-milestones. 1:37:15 But the completion of the plutonium stabilization mission, to me, was huge. Because it gave us material that we could store safely, that we could ship across country. Because we couldn’t—if we’re going to clean up and shut down PFP, we couldn’t have all this plutonium in there. So we had to ship it someplace. It had to be safe to ship. So getting all of that stabilized and put into the vaults, waiting to be shipped across the country, either to Rocky Flats in Colorado, or mostly to the Savannah River Site in South Carolina—huge. Huge, from a safety standpoint, a money standpoint, manpower, the type of mission. Because that was very technical, very research-intensive. We needed plutonium chemists. We had all kinds of capabilities that we would never again need at PFP once that was done. So that was a really key point. The next key milestone was easily when the last of the plutonium was shipped offsite. When we shipped the last safe, secured transport vehicle—they’re high-security shipments to move plutonium—when we loaded and watched the last of these shipment vehicles leave PFP for Savannah River, knowing we now had no more discrete plutonium anywhere in the plant—we had residual contamination in the pipes, the ventilation ductwork and stuff we were going to have to go clean up—but the product was now gone. That was another major milestone. Franklin: You kind of closed out the whole—I mean—it was the last shipment. Heineman: That was the end of the production mission, yep. Franklin: Yeah, that was the actual end of the production mission. Wow. That’s really something. With the 15 different processes, did it get easier as time went on? I imagine the first couple would be, you know, you’d be doing something new here. Did it get easier? Heineman: They were all completely unique. Franklin: Really? Okay. Tom Hungate: Sorry—oh, I’ve just got to change the battery. Franklin: Oh, okay. Hungate: Yeah. Heineman: We’ll take a break. [VIDEO CUTS] Hungate: Sorry, you can go whenever. Heineman: I think we were talking about those 15 types of plutonium? Franklin: Yes. Yes, we were. Heineman: And each one of those was so entirely different from another that I wouldn’t say it got easier or harder. Each one started out as a material that we would need the scientists for characterize for us: what’s the safety risk, what are the bad things that could happen, what causes that to happen, what do we need to do to it so that it’s safe and stable and can go in a can? And every one of them was different. So, for example, one of the largest quantities we had to deal with was—I think we had 4,000 or 4,500 liters of relatively rich plutonium nitrate solution, which was the product of the PUREX plant. Franklin: Yes. 1:40:54 Heineman: Late in the PUREX process, we installed an oxide conversion line where—we didn’t want to ship that liquid by truck across the Site anymore because of the safety dangers—so we converted that liquid into powder before we took it over to the Plutonium Finishing Plant. But prior to that being installed, there was all this plutonium nitrate liquid that had been sent over to PFP. And PFP actually generated a fair amount of plutonium nitrate liquid in the plutonium reclamation facility. When you had product that didn’t meet specification, we had to burn it or dissolve it in the PRF and dissolve it in nitric acid. And then that would be the head end of the PFP processes to create metal or powder. So we had 4,000 or 4,500 liters of plutonium nitrate solution. Well, you can’t ship it. It’s not safe. The containers had to be vented because they create pressure, they generate hydrogen, because of the acid inside. So you have hydrogen being generated inside these enclosed containers. Franklin: Hydrogen’s very explosive. 1:42:31 Heineman: Absolutely. And it’s just a bad situation, unless it’s for a short-term. So we had to design processes that would take that plutonium nitrate liquid and turn it into a stable powder, plutonium oxide. We couldn’t use the massive plutonium production processes. There wasn’t near enough material to be able to do that. So we had to build a new process. Franklin: Well, I mean, it was also to clean those processes up in the first place, so why would you want to run a crew— Heineman: Yeah, we had crews in there doing clean-out of all the gloveboxes and everything at the same time that we were trying to stabilize all these types of plutonium. Franklin: So you basically had to scale-down the refinement process and create—like, create a scaled-down version for each type of plutonium. Heineman: Yes. Yes. Franklin: Wow. Heineman: Yes. Franklin: And do all this in the PFP. Heineman: At the same time crews were cleaning out the rest of it. Franklin: Wow. 1:43:37 Heineman: So, it led to an amazing series of projected plans and milestones and then accomplishments when we got each one done. We just started filling the vaults up with all this stabilized material getting ready to ship it. Franklin: It’s easier to see now why that cleanup mission took so long. Heineman: Oh, my goodness. Franklin: I mean, I’d never known about that specific aspect of it. And that seems—very important work, but also very time-consuming, too. Heineman: And I neither remember, nor do I know if I can talk about, how much plutonium, in terms of stabilized kilogram product we produced. But we probably did get to talk about that in some of the interviews and articles that were generated during that process, probably have some of that data in it. But let me just say, it was an enormous amount of plutonium. I would guess that there wasn’t that much plutonium in one place anywhere in the United States. Franklin: Wow. Heineman: We had to get it all stabilized and packaged and shipped out of here if we were going to clean up the plant. Franklin: Wow. That’s really fascinating. I’m definitely making a note to look to see if I can find out that number. So, after these 15 processes—after this 15 different types of plutonium were done, when did that finish, by the way? When did the last shipment go out? Do you remember? It’s okay if you don’t. I was just curious. Heineman: I don’t, actually. Franklin: That’s fine. 1:45:35 Heineman: You’d think that would be burned in my memory, but it was just another step in the process, as I say. It’s easier looking back to pick out what some of those key milestones were than to remember. I remember we had the public and politicians out. We did speeches, we did all kinds of things. So it’s out there in— Franklin: Oh, sure, sure. Heineman: Yeah. And the folks in CH and MSA communications should be able to very simply—from their archives, should be able to very simply pull out some of the briefings and things we gave to the press on quantities and dates and all that kind of—I mean, it’s all out there. I just don’t— Franklin: Oh, no, sure, I understand. Heineman: My mind’s too full. Franklin: No, I understand. And we work for MSA, so it’d be easy for me to get ahold of that. Okay. So what else happened in that time you were out there? 1:46:46 Heineman: Since you work for MSA, one of the best sources for that kind of data that’s still out at the plant is the business manager at PFP. Franklin: Okay. Heineman: Her name is Julie Widney. She and I managed the two groups that did all the planning and we created almost all of the presentations and briefings and things. So she still has all that in her files. If you said, what were the major types, how much plutonium was in them, when did they get done? She’d just send you a little summary of that. Franklin: Oh, that’s great. I actually made a new contact at CHPRC when we had our initial problems with the interview. I found Tanya Reyes— Heineman: Oh, did you? Franklin: --in Pop Fone. And we had a really interesting conversation about what they’re doing at—because they’re doing that mini-documentary about— Heineman: I have no idea what they were doing. I thought it was you guys. Franklin: I know! But it was actually really great, because it opened up a new source of information, and she’s talked to people out at Site. So it was very interesting to hear about what they were doing— Heineman: Did you explain to her, by the way, what happened? Franklin: Yeah, because she was confused, because she was confused because she didn’t know about us. So she thought she was scheduling you for something and then you didn’t show up to that; you thought it was us. So she was also very confused. But it made sense how the confusion happened. As soon as I got to talking to her, I was like, everything makes sense now. You got caught in the crossfire of two different worlds, two different projects. Heineman: Well, I just didn’t understand it was two different things. Franklin: Yeah, it was just really funny. It was a very good conversation, though. Okay, so anyway. So, you do the 15 different types, and then was there any other major milestones out at PFP besides those, the last shipment and the cleanup of these 15 types? 1:48:48 Heineman: Well, sort of like finishing the cleanup of all the material was a major milestone that was supported by a milestone for each of the 15. So the cleanup of the facility itself, which obviously was completed for the Plutonium Reclamation Facility and for the Americium Facility, what they call the McCluskey Room. The cleanup was completed for each of those and there’s a milestone associated with when they said this is now ready for demolition. But the main plant, the 234-5 Building, has a whole series of sub-milestones associated with cleaning out various geographical portions of the plant. There were three different laboratories inside the main PFP facility. There were three different primary production process areas. There were a lot of storage and support areas that needed to be cleaned out. You had—I don’t even remember the number anymore. I thought I would never forget, but—gloveboxes. There were x number of gloveboxes, hundreds and hundreds of gloveboxes. Franklin: Mm-hmm. Stacked on top of each other—or not— Heineman: Yeah, sometimes they were some-four high. But mostly the production ones were long. And the material would move from liquid at one end, and then go through a whole series of things, all the way down the line until you had plutonium oxide powder or plutonium metal at the other end. So you had all those gloveboxes that all had to be cleaned out inside, through the gloves. Then they had to be isolated from the work area somehow, and cut up, and separated from ventilation and piping and everything, and all the instrumentation, and then removed. So all of those things, like cleaning out the analytical laboratory was a milestone. And when it was done, there were no gloveboxes. It was virtually clean. Franklin: I just realized, we’ve been talking about cleanup so long, I—how does one—I understand removing these things and putting them in, like, ERDF, like solid waste. But how does one clean up, like, contaminated ductwork? Is there a special chemical process that one uses to neutralize the radiation, or how does—what exactly does “clean up” mean? Heineman: So, let’s talk about a piece of ventilation ducting. Franklin: Okay. Heineman: There were a few areas in the ventilation ducting just like the drain lines and sewer lines in your house that have a tendency to collect material as it goes through. Franklin: Sure. 1:52:31 Heineman: And in the case of ventilation ductwork, it’s going through as an airflow. And at certain points in the way the ductwork is designed, it would collect material. It’s generally distributed in a fine layer on the inside of the entire duct. But there were some areas that had enough plutonium that it was of a criticality concern, which means you could have an uncontrolled reaction if you added water or you consolidated it into a particular form or configuration. So we had to go into those—and you find that by using instrumentation that measures the radiation being emitted through the wall of the ductwork. We would have to go in and remove those concentrations of plutonium and that was all almost by hand. You would penetrate the duct under tight radiological control so that you didn’t lose plutonium into the environment or your workspace. And you would go inside, and with various tools and instruments, remove those deposits of plutonium, package them, and prepare them for disposal. The bulk of the ductwork simply had this fine deposit of plutonium, which might have a lot of plutonium, but it’s over 250 feet of ductwork. When you break it down into removable sections that will fit in the disposal boxes, it’s a small enough amount of plutonium that you don’t need to do anything except cut the pieces of pipe out so they’ll fit in these boxes. And then ship those boxes, when it was operating, down to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant out of Carlsbad, New Mexico. Which is where the majority of the waste from PFP has to go because the law says over a very small amount transuranics—of which plutonium is one—transuranic material has to go to WIPP. It cannot go into ERDF or any of the onsite burial grounds. So it has to be very dilute in order for us to send it over for onsite burial in the ERDF facility. So, all of that ductwork would be measured, cleaned out if it was needed, then they would separate it into sections using giant plastic sleeves, and then cutting inside the sleeve. Franklin: Oh, wow. Heineman: And then tying off the ends and putting it in a box. Then you’d go back and do the next section. Franklin: And the workers, of course, would be wearing full radiological— 1:56:02 Heineman: Completely outfitted in protective clothing, often two layers. Respirators, hoods, everything. Franklin: Wow. That sounds really challenging to perform even basic labor in that kind of suit, in those suits and in that environment. Heineman: As I mentioned earlier, there’s a reason I never left PFP. And it’s because it’s such fascinating work. And the people that do it, they’re like nobody else at Hanford. They are so inventive and so capable of operating in such a highly controlled environment that I just have nothing but respect for those folks. They’re just amazing people. It is just a struggle, everyday, to make progress when you have to do the work under those controls. But the downside is somebody has an accident and gets contaminated or, god forbid, an uptake, inhaled or whatever, you just can’t afford that. Just can’t afford it. So, a simple thing like removing 50 feet of ductwork turns into one to three months’ worth or work and a bunch of burial boxes. And when you take that and you start thinking about what you have to do to clean out and cut up a glovebox that might be 50 feet long and eight feet high, or 15 feet high, because it’s a double-layer box—when you start thinking about expanding the challenge to something like that, where you’re actually cutting sections out of this box, always having to keep it contained, and using that machinery inside that plastic containment, it’s just incredibly challenging. Franklin: Because they’re stainless steel, right? Heineman: Yes. Franklin: Yeah, we have one in our collection, which was never used, but it’s eight feet tall, it weighs about 10,000 pounds, had to come in with a really big forklift. Heineman: I think that one originated at FMEF and went to PFP and we never ended up using it. So we sent it down as kind of a demonstrator. Franklin: Yeah. And it’s great. It’s one of the best things in the collection. But now, thinking, all right, how would you be inside a facility and cut that thing up when it’s hot, radiologically hot—you need heavy equipment to move that thing. People can’t— Heineman: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Franklin: It’s not like ductwork, which is very— Heineman: Oh, no. Well, even the ductwork is super-thick stainless steel. So even the ductwork needed machinery, hoists, and lifts and all kinds of stuff, just to handle a five-foot piece that would fit—actually those boxes are only four feet long, so—wow. Franklin: Yeah, wow. That’s amazing. That’s such an intense job. Yeah, I can see why you would stay so long. So, you ended up retiring in 2012. Heineman: September of 2012. Franklin: September of 2012. Heineman: Yeah. Franklin: And what—was it just time to go, or--? Heineman: It was. Franklin: Yeah? Heineman: Yeah, I’d been at it long enough. Franklin: 39 years, right? Heineman: I was a month short, I guess, of 40. Franklin: Wow. Heineman: Yeah, I went in September and I think October was my anniversary date. Franklin: Yeah, that’s what I have here. Wow. That’s really—that’s quite a career out there. Heineman: I loved every day of it. Franklin: Yeah, I bet. It sounds really fascinating. 2:00:22 Heineman: And who would ever have the opportunity to do such a wide variety of things as they let me do over that period of time? I mean, it’s just, even today, it boggles my mind that they would give me that opportunity, you know? It was really fun. Franklin: Yeah, you really moved around and managed some really like amazing projects. So I just have one kind of final reflective close-out question, and that’s, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and/or living in Richland during the Cold War? Heineman: During the Cold War? Franklin: Yeah. 2:01:05 Heineman: Well, the Cold War was ending as I went to work. It was that post-Cold War environment that I came into, which was a huge transition for all the people that were here. So the perspective that I have on the Cold War and the attitudes and that sort of thing are what were held by the people that I was working with when I came to work. As I said, there were very few young people; it was mostly people that start work here after the war or afterwards. Even if they’d been recently hired, it was because they were re-hired, not starting. And I guess I would say those folks were beyond proud of the contribution that they had made. I think they were distressed that the government was beginning to make decisions not to use their talents and these amazing facilities to continue doing what they’d been built for. I think they were afraid of what was to come. Partly on a personal level: what’s that going to mean to me as far as my job and my welfare and the welfare of my family? But partly, it was just a complete unknown regarding this Hanford Site and everything it had always stood for, and it was never going to be the same again. What it was going to look like was never clear. What cleanup meant was never clear. It evolved over decades. The first ten years after we shut everything down, I’m not sure we even understood the scope of everything we were going to have to do to clean up the Site. But those folks were very proud, and concerned, and I think a little fearful of what the future might bring. If that’s what you were asking. Franklin: Yeah, I mean, it’s just, you know, that’s a very understandable and very human reaction to these very large events and the role that Hanford plays in them, and how Hanford’s fortunes are tied to politics and to international events. Yeah, I’m guessing—I want to ask you kind of a follow-up that’s not on my sheet but kind of directed towards your experience, and that’s, so you started kind of at the draw-down of the Cold War, although there’s that Reagan kind of blip. But then you spent a large, majority of your—at least half of your work in the cleanup area. I wonder how you felt about—what are your thoughts on cleaning up all the waste generated because of this Cold War mission and where—just your thoughts about that. I don’t want to put anything into your mouth. 2:04:29 Heineman: Well, it gave me a great career, so, from that perspective, I’ll never think badly about the Site and the opportunities that it provided to me. But in hindsight, using information that the government and the Army would never have had access to, I think nobody would ever make the kind of investment in manufacturing if they understood even 10% of what the cost of cleanup would be. And it’s not just monetary, either. It’s in terms of human beings and the environment. I think it’s a real dilemma now. The advantage they had is they had no idea. And if they did, cleanup defined in the context of 1950 or 1960 would be very different than cleanup in 2000 or 2020. And in fact, cleanup as defined—cleanup of the Hanford Site and the end of that cleanup is incredibly different, incredibly more complex, incredibly more costly than we ever envisioned in the first 20 years of the cleanup mission. We had no idea where society was going to go in its values, where science was going to go and its ability to detect and predict and all those—just amazing. And I think it’s pretty hard to judge people in 1940s or even late ‘30s by today’s standards. So I’m hesitant to do that. But if we were facing an equivalent question today, we would never have built Hanford. Never. Franklin: Interesting. Maybe because we knew—we have a greater understanding now of the long-term costs and risks. Heineman: Yes. Franklin: With building that—with producing that kind of material. Heineman: But we wouldn’t have had to do it in a couple of years. We wouldn’t have had to do it with technology that was being upscaled from a lab to a 570-square-mile production complex. So it couldn’t ever happen again. But we would never do it again. I know that. Franklin: Interesting. Well, Bob, thank you so much. That was a really thoughtful—what’s the word I’m looking for?—reflection. And thank you so much for coming in and interviewing with us. Heineman: Sure, it’s fun. Franklin: I had a great time. Heineman: It’s fun to go back and think about it again and kind of put a little different perspective on how I think about things, too, so I appreciate the opportunity. Franklin: Well, great, thank you so much. I think this interview’s going to be very interesting to a lot of folks, so I appreciate it. Heineman: Cool. I hope it’s helpful. Franklin: Well, great. All right. Heineman: All right, thanks. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 02:08:13 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 10303kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 300 Area, PFP, PUREX, 100 Area, 200 Area Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1951-2018 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1972-2012 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Bob Heineman Description An account of the resource Interview with Bob Heineman for the Hanford Oral History Project. Bob talks about his parents work at Hanford, his education in Police Science, and his work on Hanford Patrol. View the interview on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmQWfstxiTY">YouTube</a> Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 7/06/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operated under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fed25944dab4903146b0422e355ce7f2d.jpg 4c5ec9de7b2c58b0a02aa1b112e4fdb8 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fbac10c255985e6bd8454dc3880c7a868.mp4 0536d4ccbf8f9f6ffa0583d6596b8741 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Bauman, Robert Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Petty, Bob Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Bauman: Okay. All right. My name's Robert Bauman. And I'm conducting an oral history interview with Mr. Bob Petty. Today is July 10th of 2013, and the interview's being conducted on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. And I will be talking with Mr. Petty about his experience working at the Hanford site. So, Mr. Petty, if it's okay with you, I'd start with how and why you came to Hanford, where you came from, and when. Robert Petty: My mother and father came from Arkansas. My dad came in August of '43, my mother in 1948. And I was born and raised here, born in 1948. And I--well, I'm retired from the Department of Energy. I first started working out here at the age of 11. Bauman: Okay. Petty: My father was in transportation. He would put me in the trunk of his car. And since his brother, my uncle, was a security patrolman, would wave me on through, or wave my dad on through. And this went on for several years. And my dad kept me hidden for those two years. And on numerous occasions, kind of a funny type of note, people had hit deer and killed them. Of course, my dad being the back woodsman that he used to be, stopped and put the deer in the car. And one particular time, I was in the trunk with that deer. And I am screaming, I want to go home, I want to go home. Well, we didn't go home. But I was a laborer. Helped build WNP out here for the nuclear plants, and decontamination and decommissioning of numerous reactor facilities. Pump houses, power stations, and things of that nature. There were some good times and some bad times. The controls that what I would expect I don't think were in place. And starting in 1971, we started doing D&D, and I was allowed to go anywhere I wanted, with the exception of in the reactor facility itself. And we did go into some potential hotspots. And at no time were we told to wear a mask or have a dosimeter. And at no time—all I had was just a badge that had Bechtel on it. And so nobody ever told us to--you know, working around the asbestos—of which I have asbestos-related disease—that you need to protect yourself from not only asbestos, but from potential chemicals, maybe radioactive contaminants and things of that nature. And so I eventually went to work for the Department of Energy in 1990? '91? '91. And I retired as a management analyst due to my health. And then shortly thereafter, I went to work as a senior technical advisor for CH2M Hill. Bauman: I'm going to ask you to go back a little bit- Petty: Sure. Bauman: And go back to the stories first of as an 11-year-old, your dad taking you out to the site. So he was in transportation? Petty: Yes. Bauman: And do you know--so he came during the war, correct? Petty: Mm-hm. Bauman: How did he—from Arkansas. Do you know he heard about Hanford--? Petty: Well he--my dad originally was in the Civilian Conservation Corps in central Arkansas. And he had heard about this place out in the desert. And when he got here, I do remember him telling me--he passed away in '82, that, oh my god, what have I got myself into. It is hot. There are windstorms that you just couldn't believe how bad they were. And so he came up here. My mother and father were married at the time. And my mother did come out several times, and then went back home, and eventually settled out here later. And so he was a truck driver, then a bus driver. And then after my mother moved out here, she worked out here from '48 to I think about 1950, working next to a hot box. And she became contaminated. And she eventually died of lung cancer, bone cancer, skin cancer, and multiple myeloma. But when she was contaminated, she was pregnant with me. And I am involved in litigation over this. But trying to prove something is not easy. Bauman: Where was she working at the time? Petty: She was working in the 3--I think the 300 Area. I don't remember which building it was. I am not positive the location, but I think it was there. Bauman: And what was her job? Petty: I really don't know. No, I couldn't say that for sure. My mom has been dead for a number of years. And so there's a lot of questions you don't get to ask that you would like to have asked. Bauman: And you were born in '48? Petty: Yes, November of '48. Bauman: And did you have other siblings? Petty: Yes, I have three sisters. Four sisters, one is gone. So I have three remaining sisters. And one now works at Oak Ridge, and I have two that live—one in Pasco, one in Kennewick. Bauman: And when your dad first came to work here, he came basically by himself? Your mom would come visit sort of, and then-- Petty: Yes, yes. Bauman: And did they have any kids at that point, or it was just the two of them? Petty: No, no. My oldest sister wasn't born until June of 1944. But my mother had went back home, then came back numerous times. Bauman: When your mom was working here, and you said she had symptoms of being exposed, did she know what she was working with at the time, do you know? Petty: Not really. And now there are procedures in place where if a woman is pregnant or think they may be pregnant, they're not allowed to go in any potential hotspots. That was not the case back then. Bauman: So your father would basically sort of smuggle you, I guess you could say, into the site? Petty: Lack of a better word, yes. Bauman: With the help of your uncle. Petty: Yes. Bauman: So what would you do when he got to work with you, then? What did you do during-- Petty: My dad originally started out as a house mover. And one of my particular jobs was I'd get underneath the house and cut the piping loose, take all the asbestos off of the piping, snakes, cats, dogs, dead or alive, indifferent. And odd jobs around that he thought I could do, and so—oh yeah. Bauman: So what houses were you moving? Petty: Back in those days, most of them were structural wood buildings from the Hanford site to whoever wanted to buy them. Bauman: So houses that were on the Hanford site, had been there prior to the war? Some of the older houses? Petty: There may have been several, but most of them were either on-site or from Camp Hanford. Bauman: Oh, okay. And so his job was to move those off. Petty: Right, correct. Bauman: You crawled under— Petty: And there are many, many of those still around today. Bauman: And so how long did you do that? Petty: Up until after my dad passed away 1982, I decided to sell the remaining equipment and what we had. I didn't want anything to do with that portion of the business. And so from then, I started going back to school. And I have numerous college degrees. And so eventually I went to work for the Department of Energy. Bauman: So when you were 11 and 12 and out onsite helping your dad, were there other workers there who knew you were there? Petty: My dad tried to keep me isolated. There were the people around, and they knew what was going on. But they didn't say anything. And there was kind of some camaraderie—you scratch my back, I'll scratch your back. And so they didn't say anything. Bauman: So you were born in '48. Did your family live in Richland, then? Petty: Yes. Originally came to Pasco, lived in Sunnyside, then shortly moved on to Richland. Bauman: And where in Richland did you live in the '40s and '50s? Petty: I think it was 1311 Marshall. Bauman: And what was Richland like at the time as a sort of place to grow up? Petty: Richland, since August of '43 through December of 1958 I think it was, was a government town. And they came in and said, you're going to do what we tell you to do. And since this is a government town, secrecy was of utmost importance. And I didn't remember a whole lot about that per se. But I do remember numerous times where we had to duck and cover in grade school. And we had drills and things of that nature. But on the whole, I do remember Richland being very hot, maybe because there were hardly any trees. And there was so much construction going on around Richland, new homes being built. Bauman: My sense is that people, workers, families, came from a lot of different places. Was that sort of true? Did you experience that the families that you knew, friends growing up, that they had come from all over the United States? Petty: My dad did tell me when he first came out here there were people from all over the nation, just about every state in the union. And the men stayed in the men's barracks and the women stayed in the women's barracks even though they may have been married, until their name came up for a house. And times like that were very tough on my mother and father. And I do remember meeting numerous people when I was young telling me that they were from maybe New York or Connecticut or something like that. Yeah. Bauman: And when you were growing up, do you remember any special community events, parades, any of those sorts of things in Richland? Frontier days? Petty: I do have pictures of parades. And I have a book from Richland--or Hanford, Hanford Days, Richland Days, I think it is. And it shows parades in there also. And I do have several pictures of parades that we had here in town. And so those were good times. Played Little League baseball, we formed a baseball team and didn't do very well. But on the whole, I think pretty much the only thing we did was--well in summertime—was go swimming. They had a small pool in Howard Amon. But for the most part, we didn't do very much. Bauman: Okay, let's talk more about the work you did at Hanford. When did you start working at Hanford? Not with your father, but-- Petty: I first started in earnest--I became a laborer in the local laborers here in town. And went to work at FFTF back around '70, the early '70s. And some things that went on, I won't say on camera, because they're not very nice. And when FFTF was first started, it was projected to be about $79 million in costs. And that particular job, being a cost plus contract, ended up being almost $800 million, which you see today, in fact. And my job was just basically a laborer. A broom, shovel, hammer. Bauman: During construction--? Petty: Yeah. And it was not uncommon at all to have six or eight laborers on a one-man job. That was very common. Bauman: And that was--you were working for what contractors? Petty: Working for Bechtel, Chicago Bridge & Iron. Yes. I think Mellon brothers. Bauman: And that was in the early 1970s. Petty: Yes. Bauman: And then earlier, you had mentioned going places--you said you were allowed to go sort of anywhere, no dosimeter. Could you talk a little bit more about that, like what sorts of places you were talking about? Petty: A lot of the buildings that you see--or have seen in the past, you'll see pictures of them, many times there was as much below ground as there is above ground, like in the water treatment facility, for instance. We would go down below ground and take out all the scrap iron and stuff like that, all the wiring, all the piping. There were wells, numerous wells around those sites that we went in. And they had a thick brass shaft. We would go down into the well and cut that off and scrap the brass out. And there were numerous of those around. Bauman: And this was sort of all over different places on the site? Petty: Yes, yes. And so subsequently, the--I was young, but--and then when I became a laborer, and we pretty much just had the free run of all the facilities, with the exception of the reactor itself. And at no time did I ever think I was in danger. I was born here, lived here, raised here, and worked here. I have no problems going out there today. Bauman: Now I know, especially during the war and early Cold War years, security obviously was very tight. You had to ride in the trunk of your dad's car to get through. When you were actually a laborer, was there still a lot of security? Did you have to have any special clearances, anything along those lines? Petty: There was security, but since my dad was a private contractor, no. Although you had to go through a checkpoint—several checkpoints in fact, entering and leaving. And they would check your vehicle for maybe any contraband, drugs, weapons, or alcohol. And if your car did not have a sticker on it, it had to be searched. But since my dad at times had special privileges, was not. And so here's a little story that—I put myself through school. And I was working weekends, but working full-time here. And I gave a tour to a group of senior citizens from Boston. And I got everybody on the bus, and a little old lady with a cane sat up next to me and we got to talking. And she says oh goody, I want you to take me out and show me where the cowboys can shoot the Indians. And she actually believed that they did that today out here. And she asked me what kind of work I did. And I says, well, this is a former nuclear weapons plant. Well, what do they do out here? Well I said, they made plutonium production for nuclear weapons. And she got up and moved to the back to the bus. And that paradigm has not changed in many people's minds. And so they still have a perception of if they get anywhere near here, they may become contaminated. Potentially, maybe yes. But highly unlikely. Highly unlikely. And so I had the perception when I worked out there I'm not going to get contaminated, or I'm not going to get sick or something like that. Well, I was wrong. But I have no compunction about going in places like that. Bauman: So you worked for Bechtel. And then in '91 you moved to DOE? Is that right? Petty: Yes. Bauman: Okay. And what sorts of work did you do there? Petty: I started in procurement, since I have a procurement degree, working contracts. And after three years there, I moved to the different side of the house. Worked on environmental safety and health as a management analyst. And I was more of a technical person, wrote, maybe, technical reports, read them, made recommendations to the assistant manager, who was the boss of my director. And although I have numerous college degrees, I am not a scientist or anything like that. I'm more of basically just a paper pusher. Bauman: When you were working out at the site, were there ever any sort of events that stand out in your mind or things that happened? Fires, or anything--incidents like that, I guess. Petty: I was involved in a very serious accident in which my dad was demolishing and standing too close to a building. And I don't know if you've seen a very, very old silent movie where a silent film screen star was standing in a building and the entire wall just came over on top of him. But he was standing in the doorway, and it missed him. And that's what happened to me. The entire wall came down, and I was standing right in the doorway, and it missed me with the exception of one of the beams had come down and caught me on the head. And I have permanent damage as a result of that. There was a very large fire here which I think covered about 240,000 acres at one time. On national news, people had the perception of this is going to be the end of the Tri-Cities if something goes wrong. Well, nothing was going to go wrong. And there are too many protections in place, and these buildings are too well-fortified to have anything escape. Bauman: The incident where the wall fell down around you, how old were you at the time of that event? Petty: I was about 15--16, something like that, yeah. Child labor laws weren't very stringent then. And so I think people got away with a lot more than they should have. Not only with work environment, but it's also--if I can put this very delicately--men living in men's barracks and my mom living in the women's barracks, and there was a barbed wire fence separating them. And my dad told me that the only way that they had relations was through a barbed wire fence. And during the day, they didn't see each other very often. But they would go to dances, and maybe occasionally a vacation. But I don't remember any of those. Petty: Did your dad have any other stories about his time here before your mom was here permanently? Bauman: You know, I remember when my mom came up--well, she went back home numerous times in the '50s. And everything she cooked was fried. Fried everything. And she would take the grease and make into gravy, and I thought that was the best food in the world. But now my veins kind of cringe. And that was the way—predominantly, I think, a lot of the diet that people had back then. But I do remember catching several rattlesnakes out here when I was young, at a young age. Which—I don't remember playing with them, I do remember catching them. And I would just let them go. Bauman: President Kennedy visited the Hanford site in 1963. Petty: Correct. Bauman: The NPR. I wonder if--you would have been 15 at the time, roughly? Petty: Yes, I was 15 at the time. At the time I seen him, he was maybe 40 feet away. And of course my mom thought he was the best-looking man she'd ever seen. And I thought it a very, very interesting, very cool, you know, I get to see the President of the United States. Which he wasn't the first--or he was the first, but he was not the last. But overall, I thought John Kennedy was very, very likable. Bauman: What else do you remember about that day or him being here at the time? Petty: When he first arrived, I looked out there and I'd seen a mass of people. And I do remember first thinking, all these people can't be here for the president. But they were. And I really didn't grasp the ramifications of maybe his political influence being the president. And I really wasn't interested in that type of thing when I was growing up. And it kind of dawned on me that this is important. He's a very important man, one of the most important men in the world. And so that had kind of a profound effect on me, and I eventually went into--took government courses in school. Bauman: Any other times when you were working there at Hanford that you remember dignitaries coming, or other presidents or anything like that? Petty: We were working on-site one particular day. And somebody was using a cutting torch, and we had started a fire. It was during the summertime. And tremendous amount of cheatgrass around. And I do remember we had started a fire, and it got out of control very quickly. And I thought the building that we were working on was done. But luckily, we got the fire department there in time. And it had consumed several acres and a portion of the building that we were working on, but we ended up saving it. A little scary. Bauman: About when would that have been, roughly? Petty: '72. Yeah. Bauman: And what area of the site might that have been? Petty: That was 200 West, I think. Yes. Bauman: Overall, how would you describe Hanford as a place to work? Petty: In the '40s, '50s, '60s, there was a mindset that it was just a job. And even when I worked out here in the '70s and '80s, I felt it was just a job. And then when I went to work for the Department of Energy, the mission had changed from nuclear production to cleanup. And so to kind of put it in perspective, my grandfather worked out here, my dad worked out here, his brother—in fact all his brothers, all his sisters, all their kids, my sisters. And people have the perception of, well, I'm from here. All my relatives worked out here. Well, you owe me this job. Well, that's not true. And when I worked at DOE, the manager came in one day and we had an all-employees meeting. And he said, all you employees are very well-educated, make very good money, have numerous college degrees. We do not owe you a job. And that's true. And I feel that's the same way here at Hanford. We do not owe them a job. Most of those people are very well-educated. And so in the next 20 years, things are going to be ramping down, probably more so than they are now. And today's paper said that one firm here in town was going to be reducing their staff by 90%. And I think people need to become aware well, the well is going to run dry. It was good while it lasted. And I made very good money here. And I knew my time wasn't going to be here forever. But people I think need to change their paradigms, and I certainly changed mine. And we had some very, very good times out here, and a few bad. And since we have changed to environmental cleanup, everything we do is scrutinized. And from if you spill a quart of gasoline or paint, it has to be written up and you have to make a report. Just to give you an idea of--very, very stringent. Bauman: When did you notice that change? Was it when it shifted from production to cleanup more, or was it--? Petty: I think I first started to know the change about 1988, I think it was, when they first--what happened at Chernobyl. I think that was a major turning point. And then they seen the similarities between Chernobyl versus the N Reactor. Although I don't think that could have happened at the N Reactor. And I think from that point on, from the point they shut it down here at the N Reactor, they started to focus more on environmental cleanup. Bauman: I want to go back a little bit and ask you a little bit more. One of your first jobs was working FFTF? Petty: Mm-hm. Bauman: That became somewhat of a controversial facility, to a certain extent. Petty: Very much so. Not so much--well, it was a cost plus contract. Not so much during the construction and operation. In the initial operation it actually was never really used. There wasn't a whole lot of controversy. But the controversy came later when the government wanted to shut it down. And that's a tremendous amount of money just to let loose of. And it could have done a lot of good. But the government finally decided that it would be best if they shut it down. And a great number of people think it was political, which it may have been. I don't know. Although I'm going to keep my thoughts to myself, and I'm not going to say anything about that. Although when they did shut it down, I do remember doing a number of correspondence with different people from Washington, DC, here at the Hanford site and at DOE here regarding to the FFTF. Bauman: I wonder for--you said things have changed, obviously, at Hanford site over the years. And I wonder for future generations, people 20 years from now or 50 years from now, what would you like them to know about working at the Hanford site, what it was like? Petty: Well going back to 1943 when the site was first picked, this isn't something they had ever done before. And their number-one priority, number-one goal, was to end the war. And now their number-one priority is to clean up this mess. This isn't something they'd ever done before, either. This is the largest cleanup project in the world. And subsequently, I think that a lot of this new areas that they're going into is how do they clean up these certain types of chemicals or radiation or contamination. And there's so many things that they don't know and they don't know how to treat. They've never done it before, like the Vitrification plant. This is never something that they've done before. And they say it's going to work, take this liquid sludge and turn it into glass logs. It'll probably work, yes. But it's not something they've ever done before, and I think generations down the road need to realize that we cannot stop plutonium production. There are many, many environmental groups out there, but other countries in the world, all over the world, are now getting nuclear weapons power plants, the potential to produce nuclear weapons. It is not going to stop. And if we stop producing plutonium, uranium, for weapons, nuclear power plants for nuclear or electricity production, then if we're not moving ahead, then we're falling behind. And we are falling behind now, at least in my estimation. And so I think we need to change the paradigms of our youth that this can be a good thing, or it can be a bad thing. And if we make it safe enough, with the controls in place, there should be no problems. Bauman: Is there anything that I haven't asked you about that you think would be important to talk about, or any other memories from your experiences working here that you-- Petty: No. Bauman: --want to share? Petty: Have you been on-site before? Bauman: Yes. Petty: Okay, so you kind of understand what's going on out there and the history portion. I do hope that the B Reactor museum comes to fruition, because I think we need to leave a legacy for our children and our grandchildren and generations farther down. And I think it's extremely important not to forget that, but also be respectful and mindful of what we did and hopefully never, never, ever again. Bauman: Well thank you very much for-- Petty: Sure. Bauman: --coming in and talking to us today. We really appreciate it. Thanks a lot. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:37:49 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 250 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 300 Area Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Kennedy, John F. Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1948-2013 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Bob Petty Description An account of the resource An interview with Bob Petty conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Subject The topic of the resource Hanford (Wash.) Hanford Waste Vitrification Plant (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Hanford Site (Wash.) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013-7-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2016-07-19: Metadata v1 created – [RG] 300 Area Department of Energy Housing Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, 1917-1963 Richland (Wash.) Secrecy Vitrification Plant https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Feedc5fccd193a378981173beb0d0136a.jpg 118fe6ae90840ec1411e82c29ac1adf4 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F60c1c02414a925fb0ebfa6b3b6ba31b5.mp4 9918c042c46673ef73b3220ee13b9fb1 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Bauman, Robert Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Shea, Bob Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Northwest Public Television | Shea_Bob Robert Bauman: --start. So let's start, first of all, just by having you say your name and spell it for us. Robert Shea: Okay. Yeah. My name is Bob Shea. Bauman: And can you get the last name spelling? Shea: Oh, S-H-E-A. Bauman: Great. Thank you. And my name is Bob Bauman, and today's date is November 13th of 2013, and we're conducting this interview on campus Washington State University, Tri-Cities. So maybe if we could start by having you talk about when you and your family arrived here at Hanford, and talk a little bit about maybe your first impressions of the place. Shea: Well, my dad came over here in early March of 1943 from Missoula, Montana as a construction carpenter. And then my mother, and brother, and I came here after school was out in 1943 from Missoula, Montana. And we arrived, interestingly, the night of—or the morning, very early morning, of June 20, 1943 in the Pasco train depot there. And the reason I say it's quite interesting, because that day happened to be my dad's birthday, my mom and dad's anniversary, and Father's day. [LAUGHTER] So it was kind of a big day. But about two o'clock in the morning--and I might mention that, to me it was fascinating, because I was ten years old there in June of 1943. And when we arrived at the train depot there in Pasco, it was really in the middle of the night, and there were probably upwards of 2,000 people milling around; military—Army, and of course Navy personnel, I suppose, from the Pasco Navy base, and construction workers. There were little what we would call taco stands today around. Anyway, very interesting, very interesting. Just milling around. So anyway, Dad took us out to, at that time, the Hanford construction town site, which occupied the village area of Hanford, what was Hanford at that time. And in the middle of the night. Dad had brought over a very small trailer house, handmade trailer house. And that's what he'd been living in. And at that time, the trailer court for the Hanford construction workers was very primitive. They had put in most of the wash houses and most of the streets, but there was still a lot to be done. And so anyway, we made do. And to begin with, the trailers just sat out in the sun, so to speak. But it wasn't too long before the government realized that they should maybe put some canopies over the trailers to shield the trailers so they'd be more comfortable in the summertime from the heat of the sun, and keep some of the snow, and ice, and all off during the winter. So they put up canopies. I think the government had the idea that they would not allow anything as far as living quarters in the trailer portion of the Hanford construction site there. But it wasn't too long before they realized, with the number of children and so forth, they were going to have to allow some leeway there, and let the people build small little extensions to the trailer or whatever. And in our case, that was very important, because the trailer the mom and dad had was very small, maybe 21 feet at the most. And so we built a little lean-to establishment behind the trailer, which was very, very comfortable for my brother and I. By the way, my brother's five and a half years older than I am, so he went to work almost immediately. He was, what, 15 and a half, something like that. And he went to work immediately for one of the construction companies in their kitchen. I think he started out as a dish washer. And he worked there, I think, most of the summer of 1943. But at any rate, we had a nice, comfortable, well insulated with all sorts of Celotex that we are able to get--and it was very roomy, and comfortable. It was great. It served us very, very well. So that gets us established there at Hanford, and then of course the rest of the summer, for me, was roaming around, getting acquainted with various things to do, and not to do that I did anyway. And to begin with, the swimming facility—which was very important at that time for the construction workers, as well as the people in the trailer court—was in the river, just over the bank, so to speak, from what was beautiful downtown Hanford, which consisted of one gas station and maybe two little stores. But anyway. But it wasn't too long before they realized that that might not be too good of an idea to have that swimming area down in the river, because some of the fellows, especially--there were a lot of young men there working in construction. And some of them decided that it'd be kind of a challenge to swim across the river, and some of them were getting into trouble. I don't think there were any drownings, but there were some problems. And so it wasn't too long before they went what I call across the highway to the south of the trailer court about, oh, it would've been a good strong mile, I suppose, from the river. And they dug out some beautiful swimming areas, big ponds, with nice berms and all, to hold the water. And then they brought the water in from the river, and flooded those areas, and kept them in good shape. And so we had a nice, sandy bottom, and diving boards, and very, very nice. Very nice. So I've rambled along a little bit. Maybe you have a specific question that has come up or something. Bauman: You mentioned that you did some things that were okay for you to do, and maybe some things that you weren't supposed to do. Any stories from--that you want to share? Shea: Well, you know, maybe—well, I don't think of any right off hand. I might mention that—I'm sure I wandered off some, and probably worried Mom and Dad. But everything was wide open. And the good—at least from my point of view as a youngster there—there was never any problem for me as a little kid roaming around. And I I'll get into some of the detail later. But they went into the barracks of the white guys, as well as the barracks of the black fellows. And keep in mind that this is 1943. This is segregation. Right or wrong, good or bad, it was segregated. And there were black barracks. There were white barracks. And there were very, very few black children. But they had kind of a segregated area there in the trailer court for that also. But never any problem. And I spent a lot of time in the black barracks. One of my little sidelights as an entrepreneur out there, a ten-year-old entrepreneur, somewhere I got tied in with the Cloverine Brand Salve people. And I would get these tubes of Cloverine Brand Salve. And I think there are ten or 12 in each carton. And I would go to the black and the white barracks both on Sunday afternoons, and sell that salve. And boy, they just gobbled it up. They loved it. And so I made a few dollars that way. I shined shoes, which was quite--that was quite an activity for kids my age. We had little shoeshine kits. We'd carry them around, and if the guy wanted a shoeshine, $0.25 for a good shoeshine. It was a way to make money, and we enjoyed it. And maybe I'm jumping ahead, but anyway, when school started in the fall, of course, it was during the war. They had a shortage of teachers. They had a shortage of room there at the site to begin with for the school kids. And so we only went to school half-day, which was pretty tough to take as a kid, [LAUGHTER] but we managed to do it. So that gave us a lot of free time for activities, playing or making a few bucks doing whatever. So anyway though, during that summer of '43, got acquainted, and by the end of the summer, the trailer court was in great shape, and it was being added to daily. You might be interested in the--I forget exactly, but for about every 25 or so trailers, there was what we called a wash house, which--in the front of the building, or wash house, there would be an area with washtubs where the ladies could wash clothes. And then immediately across the street there were huge areas to hang clothes. No clothes dryers at that time. And so there were facilities for hanging the clothes and drying the clothes. And there was a lot of good weather, and for the most part, the clothes dried even during the winter. It wasn't too bad. But anyway, the wash house, the laundry facilities were in the front. And then on either side--on one side was the ladies’ toilet facilities, showers, and so forth. Then on the other side, the men had toilets, showers, sinks for shaving and all. And that would accommodate quite a few. And as I recall, it was around 20-25 trailers for each wash house. And of course, people could use any of the wash house facilities anytime they wanted to, if they walked around the trailer court, or whatever. Plus, as far as toilet facilities were concerned, there were portable--what we would call portables today. They were wooden. But they would accommodate people, too, and they had the female and the male outhouses, or portable toilets. And another thing very, very important there, throughout the barracks areas, throughout the whole trailer court, there were many, many water barrels. And that's really what they were. They were wooden barrels. I imagine they were an outgrowth of whiskey barrels of bygone days. But they had wooden barrels supplied with ice and water. Very clean. Everything was clean. And by the way, the portable toilets were kept very, very clean, and taken care of, in great shape. And the water barrels—and all the water barrels had salt distributors. The little distributors of salt would have little pills of salt, if you felt you needed salt. And I might add now that in the trailer court, I don't know how many there were, but for every, I would guess, 100 or so trailers, they had an icehouse, probably a building of 15 feet by 15 feet, something like that, well insulated, and then filled with ice. And the people from the trailer court could go get the ice anytime they wanted, all they wanted. No charge. And you could go and help yourself. Now you might say, well, why ice? Why not just turn the refrigerator on? Well, at that time, there weren't--all the trailers, most of them were very primitive. Very few electric refrigerators or electric heat. And so the ice went into the ice chest, of what we call an ice--a refrigerator that was cooled by ice. So it was great. And that, I might add right here, that that free ice was very important to me, because one way of making some dollars, or making some money as a kid out there--well, I guess I need to back up for a second. Virtually all hot water and heating throughout the whole Hanford town site, that in 1944 consisted of about 52,000 people--but all of the heating of the water, heating of the wash houses, heating of the barracks, and all, was done by steam—steaming. So that meant that there had to be quite a few large steam generating facilities throughout the whole Hanford site there to heat the water to produce the steam. Well, that was coal fired, and most of that coal came from up near Cle Elum. Roslyn was a big coal producing area there. And they would--the train loads of coal were brought in from Roslyn. But the steam plant was important to me because I could go there, and I could borrow a wheelbarrow. And I could take that wheelbarrow to the icehouse. And I could fill it with free ice. Then I could go to the grocery store, and I could buy Coke, or Pepsi, or whatever they happened to have, put it on that ice, and then push it down to where the buses--and I say buses in quote. We can talk about that later, if you like. But when the buses with the construction people would come in from the outer job sites every night for the guys living in the barracks and in the trailer court--and I would sell that Coke or Pepsi that had been on ice to the men. I think I bought it for something like a nickel a bottle. They didn't have cans at that time. A nickel a bottle, and I sold it for a dime. So a pretty good deal. Bauman: That's a good profit. [LAUGHTER] Shea: Good profit, good profit. Yeah. So anyway, that tells you about the icehouses. It tells you about the wash houses. And of course those wash houses, it was kind of interesting, because every morning, there would be--it was kind of like an anthill. You’d see the ladies walking over, and the men walking over, and shaving, showering, whatever, taking care of their needs for the morning, there, to begin with. So it was good. The government--or we could say the Corps of Engineers, because the Corps of Engineers really ran Hanford. That was their thing--they bent over backward to help people enjoy to the degree possible the living quarters, and they wanted to keep the people there to work. And so they had a lot of activities for the kids. We had tumbling, and then, as I mentioned, swimming. They had softball and all sorts of things. And of course we could work. The older kids—well, bowling at that time, which it still is to some degree today—bowling was very, very, very widespread throughout the whole country. And there were several bowling alleys there at Hanford. And the older kids, like 14, 15, 16, they didn't do the shoe shining and the selling the pop, and some of these other less important jobs. They were pin setters. Because at that time, you didn't have the automatic pin setters in bowling alleys. So they would go and set pins. And they apparently made good money setting pins and all. Plus, as I mentioned, by the time the kid was 15, they could work in the cafeteria, or what we called mess halls, really. I suppose the mess hall term came in from the military, there. But they were huge dining areas. We'll put it that way. So anyway, I'll stop for a minute, see if you have any questions. I'm kind of rambling here. Bauman: No, that's all great stuff. You said something about the buses. Do you want to talk about the buses a little more, and describe them a little bit? Shea: Yeah. Really, the transportation that was provided for the workers from Hanford out to the various areas, and in some cases, I suppose they had to go upwards of 15 miles, maybe 20 miles or so, were kind of glorified cattle cars, really. I mean, for the time, it was good. But they were wooden benches in these—actually, they were semi trailers that had a tractor, a truck tractor, attached. And they would haul, I suppose, 30-40 workers. And the poor guys, during the summer, they'd pull in to where they--kind of the disembarking area there, and those poor guys, I mean their tongues were virtually hanging out, because I mean, they'd come through this very hot ride in this very hot vehicle. And that's why they really sucked up those iced Cokes, and all. So anyway, but that's enough of—Actually, I might add that the grade school aged kids, grades one through eight, they went to school there at Hanford. But the high school age, nine through 12 there, they were transported into Richland for their high school years. And they rode those cattle cars too. They had buses, or anyway, transportation to and from. And it was pretty crude. But they got in. Bauman: So could you talk about the school a little bit? You went to school at Hanford town site, and could you talk about that a little bit, what that was like? Shea: The white building that is still out there, kind of shot up and beat up, which was really the Hanford high school, that's where the--they had, I don't know, probably eight, ten, 12 classrooms. And that's where I attended fifth and most of sixth grade, there in that school. But then they also had a many Quonset huts outside the school, immediately adjacent to the school. And they had a lot of classrooms in those Quonset huts, too. So I don't know how many, all told, kids that they would have had in the school. It had to be hundreds, but I don't know how many hundreds. But there were a lot. Bauman: Was it close enough for you to walk to? Shea: Oh, yeah. In my case, it was a piece of cake. I only lived about three blocks from--what we would think of today as blocks. And it was real simple. And they named the streets like Egypt, and such as that. I happened to live on Egypt Street--Egypt Street, and I guess it was actually the second block. And the trailer space number was 20. So my address was E 2-20. But now some of the kids, though, that would have been a pretty good hike for them. Some kids, I suppose, had to walk upwards of a good mile. A good mile. And no buses at all at that time for the school kids and all. The teachers, bless their hearts, I'm sure they did the best they could. But they had both morning and afternoon sessions. I imagine by the end of the day, they were pretty tired cookies. But they did as well as they could, and they were well respected, and taken care of. And basically it was the three Rs at that time. Bauman: Were you morning or afternoon session? Shea: I forget. At least one year, either the fifth or sixth, it was morning. Because that gave me all afternoon to go. But the second year, or one of the years, I don't remember if it was morning or afternoon. But anyway. And I'm not so sure, I don't remember, it could be that after one semester, they flipped us, also. If you had been going morning, maybe then they switched to afternoon, or vice versa. I'm not sure. I think maybe that happened, in case there was some reason that they thought it was better for the kids to be turned around there. Bauman: So the high school building was there, and you mentioned a gas station, maybe a couple of grocery stores. Were there a lot of buildings still from the Hanford town site, still there? Or had some of them been torn down? Shea: I think for the most part, those that had been--were there to begin, they retained them, like a gas station and a couple of small stores. But the Corps of Engineers, I suppose under contract, had--there in the trailer court, there were probably three very large grocery stores. And I remember, I believe at least one large grocery store over in the vicinity of the barracks, where the people out of the barracks could go if they wanted to get food, or maybe some clothing, this type of thing. And of course those stores were well stocked, well stocked, but just jam packed. And so you had, just as everywhere out at Hanford, you had long lines, whether it was a post office, which was general delivery, or stores, or whatever. In fact, some kids made some money standing in line for people. They would go and stand in line for Mrs. Jones at the grocery store, and when Mrs. Jones got her groceries, they'd come over, and naturally the kid had moved up several spaces. So anyway, there were all kinds of interesting things. I'd like to go back just a minute to the dorm--the barracks and the grocery store there, and the mess halls, although they were fantastic. The food was excellent that served the people, and the mess halls provided, if the guys wanted them, lunches to carry out to their worksite, so that they didn't have to prepare them, which would have been pretty tough in the dormitories. But the mess halls served excellent food. And actually, the people from the trailer court were welcome anytime they wanted to go to the mess hall. And I think, if I recall correctly--I don't know about the breakfast and lunch--but the dinners were a great big whopping $0.35 apiece per person. And that was family style, and you could eat all you wanted. Mom, and Dad, and my brother and I went to--I can remember at least two or three times going there for Thanksgiving and/or Christmas dinners. And, oh, excellent food. Excellent. And I'll have to tell you a little story there. The one experience, we went, and of course it was family style. It was just benches to sit on, and wooden tables. I think at Thanksgiving and Christmas, they did put a tablecloth on. But the one time we went, one fellow sitting across from us, obviously living in the barracks or someplace, didn't have his family with him. Anyway, during the time that Mom and Dad and my brother, and I were sitting there having our dinner, he consumed five pies. No meat and potatoes, the only thing he had besides that was coffee. He had five pies. Now these weren't huge pies. But they were pies. And he just took his time. And that's all he had. That was his dinner. And you could do that. It was family style. You could have all you wanted, and just go for it. Well, again, I've been rambling. Can I-- Bauman: Did you and your family eat there fairly regularly, or was there more special occasions that you would go to eat at the mess hall? Shea: The only times I remember are maybe three or four times there at Thanksgiving or Christmas. There may have been other times. Sunday afternoon, Dad might have taken us over there. I don't really remember that, no. Mom was an excellent cook, and unbelievable what those ladies were able to do with their limited facilities. Again, most of the trailers were very small, very crude. By today's standards, they would have been just shacks. But they did great. However, there were some manufactured trailers, and even with inside toilet facilities and all. But that was very rare there in the trailer court. Bauman: So you were about ten years old when you were there? Shea: I was ten in April of 1943, and we got there in June of 1943. So I was ten in two or three months, yeah. Bauman: So did you have any idea what this big project was, why your dad had come out here to work? Shea: No. Bob, at that time there were just a handful of people who really knew what was going on. And most of them didn't have a great idea. I mean they'd been told that it was--well, just for an example. A man that I later worked with on the Hanford project, he had come here as an expert in radio communication. And it was he and the crew that he had that put an antenna up on Gable Mountain. And he was told that, okay, this is, of course, super-secret, and one day, we will tell you more. And he said that before B Reactor went online, they came to him and said, okay, now B Reactor is going to go online because of thus, and thus, and thus. And we don't have any idea what it will do, if anything, with the radio communication, radio waves. It may be nothing. But be alert to the fact that, you know, you're the man. And so he said, but when it went online, no problem, no change. But anyway, that was interesting, what he had to say. I don't know if the name Robley Johnson means much to anybody anymore, but he was the official photographer. And he was a young man. And he was all over that place taking photographs and all. And later, I got to know him pretty well in the 1950s, when he had his photography shop here in Richland. And he shared some things that he thought was real interesting. But even he didn't know what they were doing, but so few did. And I suppose the few that did, they'd have said nothing. And of course the old Desert Inn Hotel here in Richland that basically was on the ground there where--what is it, Hanford House, or whatever they call it now? Anyway, it housed a lot of very famous people. But again, most of them were there with code names, now. Bauman: Do you remember when you found out what was being built out at Hanford? Shea: Kind of interestingly, in, I guess it was August of 1945, Dad decided he needed a few days off, so we took a vacation. Went over to the Seattle area, actually up to Everett, and then back down to Auburn and visited some people. And as we were going down, I guess, the old 99 Highway, Dad had the radio on, and it said, hey, you know, guess what? Across the mountains at Hanford, this is where the material for the second bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki came from. That's where we learned. So when we got back over here, though, then there was a lot of—all sorts of interesting things brought out. So that's how we found out. Bauman: So how long did you live in the trailer, then? Shea: Okay, we lived at the Hanford construction town site there from June 20th of '43 until--I'm not sure of the exact date--late March, 1945. And by that time, they moved everybody out of Hanford, all the barracks, the trailer court, again, anticipating that something could happen, and we would have been downwind from the B Reactor. And so then, yeah, we dispersed. And people--many of the people--were able to move directly into Richland that went to work in operations. They moved directly into Richland. But not everybody. They weren't able to house everybody. My dad went to work in operations from construction there. But we had to find a place, and we wound up in a house with a couple of other families down in what we know as Columbia Park today. Where the gazebo is today, that's where the house was. And so we lived there from end of March until--it was early July, I guess, when we got a house in Richland, and moved into Richland. And the family lived in that house--I mean, Mom and Dad--until in the 90s. So they lived there for better than 50 years. Bauman: It sounds like, for someone who was ten, 11 years old as you were, that living in the construction camp was quite an adventure in many ways. Shea: It was. It was a wonderful opportunity. I'm 80 years old, and as I look back on my life, two--we'll call them adventures, or two opportunities, let's put it that way, that I have always praised the Lord that I could enjoy--one, being a kid out there at Hanford, and the other, believe it or not, to be able to go through the United States Marine Corps Boot Camp. That was a great, great opportunity for me. I loved it. In both cases, I loved it. And as a take-off on that question, if you don't mind, that first summer of '43 there, one of the things that I enjoyed the most was going across the river and climbing around, and hiking around the bluffs. I called it my playground. And the thing--they had a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week ferry. That ferry never stopped. It was not a big ferry. It was a tug-pushed barge that would hold four or five automobiles. And it just went back and forth, back and forth. And it didn't cost anything. Again, it was free for the employees. And the kids would go down there, and we'd cross the river, and go hiking on the bluffs, and chase rabbits, and kill rattlesnakes, and had a good time. So that really was great, though. I don't know if you wanted to take time or not on that—I brought a piece of aluminum, though. You know, that's kind of unique. But anyway, it's a piece of aluminum that came off of an airplane. One evening—toward evening, it was five, six, seven o'clock. One of the aircraft from the Naval training center there in Pasco, it was a dive bomber, had come around from the south, and the bluffs, of course, were across the river to the north, at very low altitude. And the engine was sputtering some. And, I mean, pretty obvious it was in trouble. And they were able to clear the bluffs by a couple hundred yards, maybe, 400 or 500 feet. But then it crashed and it burned. And so some of the men went out and got souvenirs. And the instructor and the student pilot were both killed in that crash. But it was unfortunate, but it was kind of interesting that they came through there. Bauman: And this is when you were living at the camp there? Shea: Yeah, right. And it just came right over the Hanford site there, the Hanford town site. We didn't see many of the planes from Pasco, there. I suppose a few that we saw came in on a cross-country training flight. But, talking about airplanes, we have to talk about the big airplane yet. We have to talk, I would hope, anyway, about Day's Pay. Now first of all, I want to correct something that--the idea that Day's Pay landed at some airstrip out at—oh, boy, the little town site to the west of Hanford— Alice: White Bluffs? Bauman: White Bluffs? Shea: --White Bluffs. Some would have you to believe that. But Day's Pay, when it came in, when it was flown in, it landed on the highway about a mile west of the school there. It landed, and there was plenty of room. It made a great landing strip: it was straight, and no hills, or whatever. It landed there, and then taxied up to the school, within 100 feet of the school, and parked, cut its engines, and they got out and did their thing. They christened it. There was a lady there that christened it. And they had their ceremony. And then it started up, taxied back to that highway strip, and took off to the west. And so that's where Day's Pay landed and took off. And for those who are not familiar with the Day's Pay thing, the reason it was named Day's Pay is all of the construction workers there at Hanford, building what we know as the Hanford Works, donated a day's pay to buy that B-17 bomber. And so anyway. Bauman: Yeah. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about when you went to work at Hanford then. When was that, and what sort of work did you do there? Shea: Can we come back to this other for a minute? Bauman: Oh, yeah, sure. Shea: Before we finish it? Bauman: That’s fine. Shea: Yeah. Again, praise the Lord, I was able to—right after finishing high school in 1951, and by the way, I graduated from Columbia High School in Richland. Well, it wasn't immediately after that. I had to get healed up from a broken ankle first. But by August of 1951, I was able to go into construction work, and I went to work helping build the 100-C Area, which was right adjacent to 100-B. And so that's where I started my construction work. And I worked there until September of 1952, at which time I started college. And so the rest--the several years after that, then, I would work in the summers, or if I had a real good job, I would work in the summer and maybe a winter quarter, or spring quarter, or whatever, in construction. So, my term, I helped build 100-C, helped build PUREX. And then in the mid-50s, I helped build--I don't know how many thousands of yards of concrete I hauled from the batch plant to the 100-K East and West basins, when they were putting the basins in, which was an excellent job. And I made good money, and was able to go back to school there after about six months. Then after that, after I got my degree, then I went into teaching. But as things would have it, I went to work back at Hanford in 1967. At that time, it was for what they call ITT/FSS. And they had the fire department security and several other responsibilities. And I went to work there for a couple of years. Then after that, actually, I didn't work at what is known as Hanford Works until the BWIP Project. And most people are not aware of what is called the BWIP Project. BWIP, B-W-I-P, stands for Basalt Waste Isolation Project. They were going to at least check on the feasibility of going down into the basalt under the Hanford site, and have storage for nuclear waste in containers. But politics being as it was, that didn't happen. BWIP and several other projects that they were experimenting with throughout the United States, went to Yucca Mountain and died, or at least is still dead. It may come back. But anyway, I went to work on the BWIP, but that didn't last long, because they abandoned that job. And then it wasn't until about 1983 or 1984 that I went back to work at what we'd call the Hanford site. And off and on there, and working on the two commercial sites that—Eventually, in 1996 I retired. So all told, if that's of any interest, I spent about ten years working at what we would call Hanford, in operations or construction. Bauman: Okay. Shea: Yeah. Bauman: Mm-hmm. Of the different sort of jobs and places at Hanford site that you worked, was there a job that was sort of the most rewarding, that you found the most rewarding, enjoyed the most, or one that was sort of the most challenging or difficult? Shea: Well, going back to August of 1951 there, yeah, I went to work in construction. And I was working through the union driving a truck. I mean I'd had some experience in that during high school. And so I was driving a flatbed truck, and one day I went to the boss, and I said, Charlie, I really appreciate this job. And I said, could I maybe drive a dump truck, or get some experience? Oh, sure, Bob, yeah, we'll fix you right up. So he said, go out--see that Euclid out there? This is a huge—to me, a huge piece of equipment, diesel powered, and it would haul about ten yards of dirt, and all. He said, yeah, go climb on that Euc, and take it over here to this power shovel, and work with them today. And anyway, I went out, to make a long story short, I finally got it started, with some help from some other guys, because I'd never driven diesel before. But this was the largest earth-moving equipment that they had out there at the time. And so I operated the Eucs for about a year, and I loved it. That was the most interesting part, I think, of my construction. And of that work, the most important and most interesting was we—right down to the north from the B Reactor there, we put in a new, I guess they'd call it to siphon, to draw water out of the Columbia River. We had to go about 100 yards out into the river, and built a levee for them to eventually put and lower the pipe--after it was welded, lower the pipe down to the floor of the river. And so hauling dirt out to the end of that, and you had to back the whole way and dump the earth, that it was quite a challenge. So I enjoyed that. But the other very interesting thing really didn't have anything to do with the Hanford site. It did have to do with what we know today as--well, what we knew then as unit number two, which today it's known as, what, Power Northwest? Bauman: Energy Northwest. Shea: Energy Northwest. Their number two unit out there, I was the welding inspector on all of the welding, and all for the structural steel that went on top of the reactor building, including the overhead crane. And that was very—I had never done that type of work. I had never walked steel before, and I haven't walked steel since then, and I never will walk steel again. But that was very interesting, very interesting. And it was very important work. And it was all nuclear grade welding. And so it was very fascinating. Even though that wasn't technically connected with the Hanford site, it was on the Hanford site anyway. Bauman: Sure. Shea: So it was very good. I don't know if you had-- Bauman: I have a question about when you actually, then, moved to the town of Richland. What was that like? What was Richland like in the late 1940s then? Shea: Very, very good question. It was very different, and I suppose that was true also of Kennewick and Pasco. It was a melting pot—people from all over the country—which is true at Hanford, too. Very interesting. Lot of people had come up from the South for the construction. Some people came up from the South and all to work in operations. And people like us had come in from Missoula, Montana. They'd come in from all over the country, South Dakota, North Dakota, all over. And it was true at Hanford, and it became true, really, at Richland, too. Many of these people, especially out of the South, had worked at that time—1943, even during the war years—had worked for maybe $1 a day. And they came to Hanford in construction out there, and laborers were making, I think, about $1.10 an hour. This was great. Many people moved into Richland, ourselves included. Mom and Dad had never owned a home. It had always been a rental home in the almost 20 years that they'd been married. They were provided nice houses, all the coal was furnished. They had to pay for their own phone, they had to pay for their own electricity. But I think the water and sewer was provided, all the coal. It was great. It was a new world. It was a new world for a lot of people, including the Sheas. And Dad appreciated it, Mom appreciated it. And they took very good care of things, and I don't think they took advantage of anything. But they enjoyed it. It's kind of interesting, I think—Alice and I share this every once in a while. Along toward '47, '48, in that frame, maybe '49 too, it was not uncommon that a neighbor might come to you in Richland there, and say, well, you know, it's been nice having you as a neighbor, you know, and we wish you well, and all that. We're being reassigned. And you would ask, reassigned? Oh, you're going to go to do a different job. Yeah, I'm getting a different job. Well, as it turned out, several plainclothes FBI agents lived with their families in the city of Richland, there, because at that time they were checking pretty carefully about communists. And of course it wasn't too long after that McCarthy in the US Senate, with McCarthyism there, and all, and the big communist situation there, as far as seeking them out. So that was kind of interesting. And there were, unfortunately, some families, the dad would be approached, and just say, okay, pack up, you're out of here. Your kids aren't behaving as they should be, or maybe they were a drunk. In other words, it was pretty tight, pretty tight. And it was kind of interesting, too, until probably 1950 or maybe even later, there was kind of a police headquarters, which was really government control. But the headquarters there. And they had police officers throughout the city, but nothing real heavy. But if—and this happened to us--if people come out of town would come, relatives from podunk corners, or wherever it was, would come to town. And they'd stop, and they'd say, well here's a police headquarters, we'll check and see where the Sheas live, because we're confused. And they would just be escorted. If they stopped with the police, there, the police would escort them right to our home, and they would say, do you know these folks? And, well, yeah. This is Uncle George, or whoever. Oh, okay, that's fine. You know them. That's good. We weren't sure what the deal was. So we brought them over. So that was kind of interesting. Bauman: Wow. Yeah. Very tight security. Shea: Tight security, yeah. Tight security. And I think that lasted pretty much until the mid-50s probably. Bauman: So, in terms of security, then, when you started working there in the 50s, did you have to have special clearance? Was there training about security, too, when you worked there? Shea: You had to fill out some paperwork. In construction phase there, it was pretty loose, not much. But in 1955, when I went one summer, when I was off from college, I went to work for what was known at that time J.A. Jones Construction Services. And I was going to be working some in D and DR, and F Areas. And I had to qualify with a Q clearance. So I got a Q clearance there in 1955, and I had it restated later, too. In fact, when I retired I had a Q clearance. Not too many had it at that time. For some reason they'd lowered the standard some. But yeah. So it was tight. It was very tight. And you've probably heard about the aircraft, the patrol aircraft that flew--the main reason for the Richland airport was to accommodate the half dozen Piper Cubs, really, that were constantly doing surveillance work over the Hanford site for, well, all of the 40s, and probably, I would guess, until 1954, '55, or maybe a little bit before that. After the Army moved in, anyway, and there was tighter security there. But the security was tight, yeah. Very tight. Bauman: Do you have something else you want to get back to that we were talking about before? Shea: We could go back to Hanford. But I might mention one thing, for anybody that's kind of interested in sports. This is kind of off, but anyway. There at Hanford, and after that, they had a MP, or Military Police Detachment of US Army personnel. And they were--of course, most of them were pretty young men, and all. And they had some good teams, softball teams and all. But a little sidelight, one of the men, one of the MPs, after he got out of the Army, there in late 1945, he went to various colleges around the area, and universities, and tried to get a football scholarship. He’d played a little high school football, and all. And so they all said, well, no, thanks, but we're in pretty good shape. So, okay, well, that's fine. So he decided, well, I'll just go back home. So he went back home to Illinois. And then in 1947, he reappeared in the Rose Bowl, and he was the quarterback for Illinois. And they proceeded to beat UCLA, something like 45 to 14. But his name was Perry Moss. And he'd been a GI MP out at Hanford. So I thought that was kind of interesting. Going back to Hanford, there. I might--two things I might mention that were very significant, and very important, not to me or my family, but I'm sure that many of the guys in the--and some of the guys in the trailer court, probably, some of the fathers, and maybe older boys—they had some excellent baseball leagues out there. Again, black leagues, white leagues. But the baseball field they had out there rivalled any major league ballpark in the nation at that time, other than the seating. There was only seating for about 6,000, I think it was. But the grass was perfect. They maintained it. And lighting was excellent, because most of the games were played at night, when the guys would come in after work. Excellent, though, and a lot of great baseball, a lot of great baseball was played there. And then I guess it would be just absolutely wrong not to mention something about the auditorium, or I guess that's what the main name for the huge building that they put up virtually overnight. That's not quite true. But really, within two or three days, they put up this huge building that they called the auditorium. It had a regulation-size gymnasium floor, and no seating such as that, except around the perimeter. But they had many dances, big dances. They brought the Globetrotter basketball team in. And I'll have to ask Alice to help me with the name of the--what was the band leader? Alice: Kay Kyser? Shea: Kay Kyser. Brought Kay Kyser in. And to this day, as far as I know, the grand piano that they brought in for Kay Kyser to use is still in what I know as Carmichael School. Alice: Chief Joe. Shea: Huh? Bauman: Chief Joe—Chief Joseph? Shea: No. Carmichael. Alice: Yes, Chief Joe. Shea: Okay. [LAUGHTER] Anyway, the one on Lee Boulevard at the top of the hill. That building. Anyway. I guess that, unless you have other questions-- Bauman: I was just going to ask you, did you get to attend any of the baseball games, or the auditorium, stuff in the auditorium at all? Shea: A couple of the baseball games. Since they were at night, Mom and Dad kind of rode herd on me a little bit there. But I did go to a couple of baseball games. And there was one ceremony there, too, that they brought a pilot and maybe one or two of his crew in who had to been taken prisoner by the Japanese. They'd been shot down, and they'd been taken prisoner by the Japanese, but they were able to escape. And so for one of the war bond drives, they brought them in to talk to the people. And they had a big ceremony there, and it was in the evening. And speaking of war bonds, or war savings bonds, and such as that, that was a big thing. That was a big thing there at Hanford, and for the kids as well as the adults. And so it was very well contributed to, really, or bought. A lot of war bonds there. So anyway, that was good, a good way to save money. Alice: What about seeing the fellow, the gentleman who had been shell shocked, and how they dealt with him? Shea: Oh. Yeah, that was the only really sad thing that I remember from Hanford days. And then, it was a passing thing. But one evening, near me was all of a sudden a congregation of several of the, we'll call them police officers, there at Hanford had formed a ring around--and I'm talking about ten or 12 of them--around this fairly young man. And as it turned out, he had been in the service, probably in Europe. And he went bonkers. And after—well, excuse me—he had come to Hanford and went to work. But that evening, he kind of went bonkers, and so these police officers just had to kind of slowly move in on him, and get him under control. And I think they cuffed him and took him away. But that was sad, because it was obvious that he thought that these were Germans that he was fighting. These were bad guys, and he was going to get all he could. That was sad, but anyway, those things happen. So I don't know if you have any other questions about Hanford, there, or--oh, excuse me. I just thought of one thing. One wonderful, wonderful thing there at the Hanford town site--well, let me back up. You're probably all aware of the fact that in 1943, when the government moved in, they really took over three little villages: Richland, Hanford, and White Bluffs. And Hanford and White Bluffs are, I think, separated by, what, six miles, or something like that, of highway. But between Hanford and White Bluffs—and I suppose on either end, west of White Bluffs, and east of Hanford, too—orchard, after orchard, after orchard of just wonderful fruit: peaches, big Bing cherries, pears, apricots—wonderful fruit. And we had the opportunity to go out and pick there--during the summer of '43, go out and pick, and get cherries. And another thing, the track houses, the farm houses that had to be abandoned, many of us went out and cut sod out of their lawns, and put the sod around our trailer, and watered it. It was great. It was great. And many of the houses that had been farm houses, they were taken over by the upper military of the Army Corps of Engineers. And they lived there, several guys in a house. But one thing that I understand is that every year the railroad would bring in--excuse me. Unless it was a bad winter and the apricots were frozen, they brought trains in to load up with apricots to send all over the country—LA, Texas, New York, and all, because those were the earliest apricots in the country. And they were wonderful apricots, too. So they hit the market, unless they got frozen off that winter, which I guess was very, very rare. Apparently that area around Hanford and White Bluffs, the air currents, or whatever, during the winter, carried fairly mild air temperature-wise, and so anyway. But that was interesting. Bauman: So it sounds like a lot of the farm houses were still there, and the crops. Shea: They eventually—probably in the late 40s—they cut all the orchards down, and so none of them existed. You can see a lot of stumps, but no orchards. And then interestingly, probably by 1948, you'd have never known that there was any barracks, wash houses, nothing. It was completely leveled. And today, it's just a few little asphalt strips that you'd see where the various streets were, and all. But yeah. That's it. Bauman: So was it just that first summer of '43 that you were able to pick the apricots and cherries and stuff? Just that first summer? Shea: Yeah. No, I'm sorry. I beg your pardon. No, no. '43 and '44. I beg your pardon. But not '45, because we were out of there by March. But all of that summer of '43 and '44, it was great. And again, I think it's important to remember that virtually all of 1944, that Hanford town site was the fourth largest city in the State of Washington, about 52,000 people, men, women, and children. Yeah. That fruit was wonderful. Bing cherries the size of quarters. Wonderful, wonderful fruit. Bauman: Well, is there anything you haven't had a chance to talk about yet that you’d like to still, that we haven't been able to talk about yet? Shea: Let’s see. As it relates to the bond drives, and all, here's a--my mother saved this because my little fat face was in it. But they had what they called The Sage Sentinel newspaper out there, and this is just an example. This is from June of 1944. It just showed some of us kids. They had bought war bonds, and they had a little blurb there about that. Bauman: Okay. We can probably get this on film. Shea: Or you might want to make a copy of it, or whatever. You're welcome to, if you'd like. Bauman: All right. Well, I want to thank you very much for coming today and-- Shea: Well, my pleasure. Bauman: --sharing your stories and memories. Shea: My pleasure. Bauman: I really appreciate it. Shea: No, it's my pleasure. So thank you. Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:14:48 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 230 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview B Reactor 100-C Area 100-B Area D Area DR Area F Area Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1943-2013 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1951; 1967-?; 1983/1984-1996 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Johnson, Robbley Moss, Perry Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Bob Shea Description An account of the resource An interview with Bob Shea conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Missasion Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013-11-13 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2016-07-21: Metadata v1 created – [RG] Subject The topic of the resource Hanford (Wash.) Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) 100-B Area 100-C Area B Reactor D and DR Reactors F Area Housing Plutonium Uranium Extraction Plant (PUREX) Richland (Wash.) https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F7f6d2722f96af5759ce34d284e17ceb3.jpg 2e6c63401f341726a5d00d80c6b894e0 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F35192d6fa7246bcbeafa4d77f812dca4.mp4 5118fbd730bbe880f6366cbc5584f62f Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Bauman Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Bob Smith Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Northwest Public Television | Smith_Bob </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: I'm going to start by just maybe having you state your name first. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: That's Robert Lee Smith. I usually go by Bob. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: Okay, and my name is Robert Bauman, and I'm conducting an oral history interview with Bob Smith on July 16th of 2013, and the interview's being conducted on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. And I'll be talking with Bob Smith about his experience working at the Hanford site. So I thought we'd start today by just asking you to talk about how you came to Hanford, how that happened, when that was, and what brought you here. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Well, it had to happen about 1951. My Kansas National Guard unit got called into federal service during the Korean War, and we wound up at Fort Lewis. So one day, a friend and I were hitchhiking into Yakima, and this car, Oldsmobile station wagon--looked like a brand new one--pulled up to give us a ride. So we got to asking him questions about, well, gee, you must have a nice job to afford a car like this. Yeah, I've got a pretty nice job, he says. Well, what do you do? He says, I'm a guard over at the Hanford Atomic Works. I says, well, where's that? He said, oh, it's 80 miles down the road. We weren't bashful about asking questions, so we says, well, how much do you make? He says well I make $100 a week. $100 a week? Wow. I had just left Pittsburg, Kansas at a job at $30 a week as a clerk typist. So I thought to myself, I want to check that place out. So eventually I did. I wound up as a clerk when they were building the K Areas, not making $100 a week, but I was making $60 a week. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: And did you have any idea of what Hanford was at the time? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: I had read a short article in the newspaper, I think, over at Fort Lewis, something about they had atomic energy work going on here, and it was secret, and it got my imagination, my curiosity up. I thought, I'm going to have to check that place out. So I eventually did. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: And what were your first impressions of the place when you first arrived to work? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: I thought it was a real nice place. I got here on June 8th in 1953. And the weather was nice and clear and really nice. I saw the Rattlesnake Mountain off of the site, back over there, and I thought, man, that's really pretty. We didn't have any mountains like that back in Kansas. So I was living at the dormitory, so I would run out in the morning and catch a bus, take me to the bus lot, and then from the bus lot I'd go out to 100-K Area. So anyhow, I was very impressed with the area around here. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: And so what was your first job? What sort of job were you doing? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: It was a clerk typist out of 100-K Area, when they were building the K-East and K-West Reactor. It was back in 1953. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: And so which contractor? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: General Electric. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: General Electric. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Yeah, General Electric Company. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: Okay, and you said you lived in a dormitory when you first came? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Yes, mm-hmm. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: And where were those at the time? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: It was where Albertsons Grocery Store is now on Stevens--Stevens and the Lee Boulevard. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: And it was an all-men dormitory? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Well, it had a W-21, which stood for Women's, but there were two dormitories in there that had men in them, but they started with a W because eventually they thought they would be women's dorms. But they had more men than women, I guess, so I wound up in W-21. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: And how large was the dorm? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Just like any college dormitory, actually--two story, stairs on the outside you could go up, as well stairs inside--typical college-type dorm. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: And how long did you live in the dorm then? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Well, I lived in the dorm until I got married in 1954. I got married in May of '54, so. While living there, they eventually transferred me up to M-1 dormitory, which is up close to Jadwin and Symons, something like that. Because—for some reason, maybe they had sold their area to Albertsons. I don't know. But I eventually moved up there. So I was there about a year. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: Okay. And then after you got married, where did you move at that point? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Well, we got an apartment over in Kennewick, but we were only there for about week before our names came through. We had put in for a house to rent in Richland, because it was still a government town at that time. And we got a B house at that time at 1413 McPherson. So being over this one bedroom basement apartment in Kennewick only lasted about a week, so we moved into the Richland B house. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: And what were your impressions of Richland at the time? What sort of community was it? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: I thought it was real nice. It had the downtown section and also the uptown. The uptown section was fairly new at that time. But I thought it was very good. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: And you mentioned Richland was a government town. Do you remember any special community events--parades, any of those sorts of things during that period? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Not too many—being a government town, why, you did the job that you had to do. Well, they did have this music group that had opera singers and plays that you could go to and take part in choruses, singing. So I did join the Richland Light Opera Team for maybe one year and did a little singing there. But that was only for a few months, until I met my wife, and then I lost interest in singing. [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: And at some point, Richland I guess, gains independence, I guess, or whatever you want to say. Do you remember anything about that period and that process at all? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Yeah, that was around 1957 when that happened. And being in a B house, which meant there was a family on each side, the people that were there ahead of us had the opportunity to buy the house, but they didn't want to buy it, so they asked us if we wanted to buy it. Well, didn't have enough money to buy anything, so we said, no. So they went ahead and bought it, and we just stayed there. The rent for the General Electric time was $37.50 a month, and we continued paying that for about a year, and then it went up to about $50 a month. But that was still pretty reasonable at that time. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: So you mentioned you started as a clerk typist in the K Area, right? At some point you moved in to Health Physics. Is that right? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Yes. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: How did that happen, and when did that happen? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Well, by the time my year was up as a clerk typist, I had a chance to move into a job at a little bit of pay. The job was called field assistant, but it was half clerical typing job, and the other half of the day would be radiation time-keeper following J. A. Jones personnel around, minor construction, keeping time on them—radiation time in radiation zones to make sure that these construction workers didn't receive more than 300 MR in a seven-day period. Because in those days, although we had dosimeter pencils, they were not the self-reading kind where you could just look up at the light. What they would do is at the end of the day, you would drop your badge and pencils in a rack, in this case, 200 West Area and then go home for the night. Well, they had what they called pencil girls that would come out on swing shift, and they would collect these badge and pencils, and they would read these pencils. They had a manometer upstairs above the guard house, and they would stick these pencil in the manometer. It would read how much radiation it had collected. Then they'd put them back with the badge and put them back in the rack. So the next morning when you came, you'd pick them up again. Well, my time as a radiation time-keeper was up to me to keep track with pencil and paper about how long they could stay in the radiation zones, depending on how high the radiation dose was. As a radiation time-keeper, we'd accompany radiation monitors--they called them Health Physics Technicians--everywhere the construction guys went. And they would tell us the reading, and we would calculate how many minutes they could work in that zone. And then when they would leave that zone and go to another one, then we'd calculate that. So we did that for the full eight hours a day. Well, at least four hours a day. Half the day I might spend as a clerk typist writing up construction schedules for the--we had a General Electric engineer and also a J. A. Jones engineer. So they would write up the schedules, and I would type them up for the first half of the day, and the second half of the day, I would go keep time on the guys in the radiation zones for about half a day. So I did that from 1954 to 1959, and then I had a chance to transfer into radiation monitoring, which I did. And I worked in that job from '59 until I retired in '93. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: Oh, okay. And so when you moved to radiation monitoring, what did that mean in terms of your sort of everyday job? What sorts of different things would you be doing? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Well, we would go with the operations personnel, like operators or maintenance people, and accompany them on jobs and find out how much radiation was in the area, and then go in there with them and stay with them, in a lot of cases, as long as they were in the zone. And then sometimes we could set the job up if the radiation was not going to increase or decrease, then we would leave the job. But oftentimes we would have to stay with them because they would move from one place to another. So we were kind of following construction people and operations engineers—everybody that had to go in a radiation zone. We'd either go ahead of time and check the readings off and take smears--some floor smears and air samples and that sort of thing--to make sure they were within the limits of a the Hanford project. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: So you worked in various places throughout the site. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Yeah, I worked at--eventually over the period of time, I was in that job at all nine reactors at the Hanford project. And also I worked three separations buildings, PUREX 200 East Area, D Plant in 200 East Area, and also at the REDOX. When I was a radiation time-keeper, partly I kept time on the construction people because they were building a crane viewing room in the REDOX, so I did work there also as part of my job as a time-keeper. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: And I imagine, given the number of years that you worked there, that were a number of contractors that you worked for over the years. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Yeah, General Electric left about 1965, so about that time I had a chance to transfer over to the 200 Areas at an outfit called Isochem had the contract. And they only did that for about a year or two, when they left and turned their work over to Atlantic Richfield. And Atlantic Richfield did it eventually until Westinghouse eventually took over. In between those periods there, I also worked at Douglas Labs, which is out on North George Washington Way. And I did the same type of work, except I also was taught how to irradiate TLD badges because TLDs took over the place from film badges. So I would issue these badges for all workers for Douglas Labs, which was, at that time, probably less than 100 people. And I worked at that from about '73 until '76, when Exxon bought the building for Douglas Labs, and then I worked for them for about another couple three years. So actually I was gone from the Hanford project for about five years there, roughly--two and a half for Exxon, and two and a half for Douglas Labs. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: Okay, okay. Now, at some point, the mission of the site changed from production to clean up. Did that impact your job in terms of radiation monitoring in anyway, and if so, how so? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Yeah, some things did, all right. About 1987, all the reactors were shut down except N Reactor. And then they decided to shut N Reactor down '87. But they still had a lot of fuel elements left in the basement at N Reactor. Sometimes they would ship those few elements over to K Areas for storage. But they needed to be processed to make plutonium. Even though they were going to quit making plutonium, they should've dissolved these fuel elements and got rid of them. Instead they just let them store in the K areas for several years. And that was too bad, because eventually K Areas had to get those fuel elements out of there and send what's left of them over to T Plant, what they call T Plant now, for storage of some of the stuff that's left. So it made a difference in the kind of radiation monitoring you did. You didn't have to go into operating reactor buildings. Eventually, I transferred into what they call a D&D group, which was Decontamination and Decommissioning, which meant I went around to all of the old shut down reactors with operators. Well, they were called D&D workers at this time. We would go with them and make sure that there was no radiation around, take smears of the floor. About the only thing left in them would be radon, so we'd check for that. Sometimes we'd run onto a rattlesnake in these old shut down buildings. And one that really surprised once--we went to 105 C Reactor, and we saw this rattlesnake curled up underneath an old maintenance room. And the operator said, darn, the last time I killed rattlesnake, the environmentalists really got on to me. I says, okay. Well, it was on Friday afternoon, so I said--we had a radio, of course. So I said, I'll go out in the radio car and radio the office and see what the supervisor wants to do. So I did, but the supervisor had left early to go to town, so the assistant was there. I say, what do you want us to do with this rattlesnake? We hadn't killed him yet. [LAUGHTER] And I took a camera with me from the pickup. And he says, well, use your own judgment. Well, our judgment is we're going to run into that thing again in a month from now, and I didn't want him to be surprised and bite me. So I took a shovel in with me, and I handed it to the operator and says, do you want to kill him, or do you want me to do it? He says, I'll do it. So he took the shovel and whacked the head off of this thing. So after a few minutes there we got ready to leave. He scooped up the head on a shovel and carried the tail with his hand. And he went on outside to C Reactor, and he threw the tail over the roadway out into the desert. But the head, he laid down on the concrete there in front of the entrance to C Reactor. He says, let me dig a hole here to bury this head. We didn't want a coyote or something to eat that head and die of rattlesnake poison. So while he was digging that hole, one of the other D&D operators, who had a safety-toed boot on, took his boot and gradually moved it up towards that head, and this was after that thing had been killed for about ten or 15, 20 minutes. And that snake, much to our surprise, his head came up about six inches off the ground, came down, and his teeth had latched around fangs on that guy's boot and snagged the top of it for about an inch. And man, I'll tell you, the three of us looked at each other and says, did you see what I saw? We had never seen that before or heard of it. So that surprised us to no extent. So anyhow, that was one of the exciting jobs. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: That’s quite a story. What a surprise. Yeah, wow. So I was going to ask you--you were involved with a lot of radiation monitoring. So if a worker was exposed too much, their pencil or whatever showed--what happened at that point then for the worker? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Well, we had a limit of 300 MR per seven-day period, and as a radiation time-keeper, when the worker reached that point, why, we would go in and pull him out of the zone and tell him, that's it for the week--300 per week. Also, we had a limit of 50 MR per day to start with. So whenever they reached 50 for that day, we would pull them out. The next day they'd go in for another 50. But they would do that until they got 300 in a seven-day period. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: In reading the information from an interview you did ten years ago or so, it talked about that you had been involved in creating a tube that was uses to pinpoint the area of contamination. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Yeah, we had what we called a P-11 probe, a Geiger counter. And what we did was, in a process of surveying our people, this P-11 probe was about two, two and a half inches in diameter. I think I've got a copy of it. Anyhow, I would lay this piece of paper down on whatever was contaminated. If it was the bottom of a shoe, we would survey that shoe and find the hottest spot on that shoe, and then we would mark it, a pencil mark around the P-11 probe. So it was a round circle for the hottest spot. And then I would—in my days as field artillery in the army, I used to be work on fire direction center. So we would be fire forward and fire backwards. I thought, well, maybe I could use this P-11 probe like that. So I got the hot spot, and then I would move the P-11 probe down, and then I would draw a circle around it--below it. And then I would go back and find the hot spot and move it to the right, and move it until the radiation went away. Then I would draw a circle around that. Then I would take it up above and do the same thing there and off the left-hand side. So when I got through, I had a spot in the center of it about the size of your thumbnail, and that would tell us where the hotspot was on the bottom of the shoe or whatever you were decontaminating. So that saved you some time in decontaminating. Like on the bottom of a shoe you'd use sandpaper or emery cloth, something like that to clean it off, or masking tape or duct tape. So that kind of helped me anyhow—just tools of the trade. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: Right, and when did you develop that? What time frame would that have been? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Probably around 1970. At that time, I was going over to CBC. I used to be an awards chairman for the Health Physics Society years ago, and my job was to contact the instructor for a nuclear technology class for the CBC and find out who we could give a scholarship to--$500 or something like that. So this guy called me up one day. He says, Bob, we need to have somebody in your group to come over and give radiation monitoring classes to our students because they were learning how to be operators in the reactor buildings or radiation technicians. I said, sure, I could do that. He had gotten his experience from the Navy. He was a Health Physics technician, or they called them something else in the Navy. And he says, we need somebody over here to help them out and teach them. Could you do that, or could you find somebody? I says, yeah, I could probably do that. So I contacted my manager, and after six months or a year, they give me permission to go over there and do that about once a month. So I would go teach you one or two hours in the morning and another one or two hours in the afternoon. So that's what I thought about this thing here, which I had done out of work--finding little hotspots and then bringing them down to a small area. So that's about the time that I was doing that, and so I passed it on to the students so they would know, too. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: So it was sort of the teaching the students that led you to sort of thinking about that and developing that process? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Yeah, some of those students--in the summertime we would hire maybe five or six of them to come out at N Reactor as interns for the summer, because we were shut down for about a month or so for all the repairs and stuff. So we'd hire some of these students to come out and go around with us and learn jobs. So that at the end of that summer, if the company wanted to hire some of them, they could hire one or two or all six of them. So that kind of worked out good for both of them. And then they shut that teaching job down several years ago because the contractors at Hanford quit hiring people because we were starting to shut down reactors and laying people off. So if there's no need for them, then they quit teaching it. But then here, about two years ago, they started up that program again. I don't have anything to do with it. But they do teach them now three jobs, either a radiation operator type job or health physics technician type job or as an instrument technician job. They can go three different ways, so that's a good program at CBC right now. It's kind of like nuclear technology. It's a two-year program. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: And about how long did you teach classes? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: About ten years, from about 1970 until about 1980. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: Mm-hm. And in reading about this, it sounded like you also were instrumental in developing a scholarship program at CBC? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Yeah, I noticed that we always had white persons. There was never any blacks, and not even many Latinos either. So one day I asked Larry, I said, how come we don't ever have any Afro-Americans in here? He says he didn't know. So I went to the guy in charge of Afro-Americans over there hiring people, and he says he didn't know. And I thought, well, probably the reason is they were just like I was when I was getting out of high school. I didn't have any money to go to college. So I says, maybe we should start up--maybe the college could do something. So I thought, well, we ought to have an auction. So we had an auction there at CBC, and we had all the kids in the class bring things to donate and put out to sell. And we advertised it, sent information around to a bunch of companies. And I met about seven or eight companies to see if they wanted to donate equipment for it, which they did. But the day of auction came along, and I don't think we even had six people show up to buy anything. So, I says, well, we'll leave this equipment here, and CBC can have an auction some other time and maybe they'll collect more money, which they did. However, we had a guy that was pretty high up in the company for Westinghouse, and he was attending meetings over there. And one day I went to the building over there, and I saw all these, three or four or five other companies, not Westinghouse, that had plaques up on the wall that they donated $5,000 from one company, $10,000 for another company for scholarships. And so one day, we had a fellow that was pretty high up in Westinghouse stop by our building out there for a safety meeting one day. I says, we're going to have an auction, and it would be nice if Westinghouse could donate some money towards this thing and hire these minorities. So he took that information into the vice president of Westinghouse, and they okayed it. And I says, it'd be nice if we had four $1,000 scholarships to give to these kids. So they came up with that for that year. However, the next year, they came up with $28,000 for scholarships. So that was--the guy who was in charge of all safety for Westinghouse at the time sent me a note and said this was coming off. So that made me feel pretty good that Westinghouse did do that because all these other companies had done something. But they followed through with it, which was great. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: So you worked at Hanford from the 1950s into '93. Is that what you said? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: With some years in between there when you weren't. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Right, from about--well, at Hanford from '53 until '93, but I was a radiation monitor from '59 until '93. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: Did the technology change quite a bit in terms of radiation monitoring over those years, and if so, how did it change? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Well, yeah, they got better instrumentation down at--Battelle did some of our reading of our badges and this sort of thing. So their instrumentation got better as the years went along. And the same with our Geiger counters. They went from the old style to ones with P-11 probe. Nowadays, I'm not sure they even have a P-11 probe. It might be two long probes that they could use either one for beta, gamma and alpha. Before, we just had the P-11 probe for Geiger counter, and for an alpha meter, we had the probe for alpha--two separate ones. So yeah, the instrumentation did change. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: I was also going to ask you during years--well, Hanford was obviously—emphasized security, and I was wondering, especially when you started in the 1950s, what that was like in terms of security? Did you have to have special clearance? When you went to the site, did you have to go through special security or anything along those lines? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Yeah, I did. When they originally told me, while I was still the Army, there would be several weeks for them to check on my clearance, I thought, okay, several weeks. Well, as it got closer to discharge time, I thought, man, they haven't contacted me, so I better go down to Fort Lewis and check on civil service jobs. So I did, and I had qualified for two jobs. One was a warehouseman because I had worked six years in a grocery store, and the other job was a billing, clerk typist, in the transportation department. So I stayed there from December of '52 ‘til June of '53. But I got so tired of driving the fog and the rain over there around Fort Lewis and Seattle-Tacoma area that I just got sick of it. I had an old 1940 Ford. The heater didn't work, and the defroster didn't work either. So I'd have to drive about half way out and scrape the ice off the outside and the inside. And one day, I was cleaning out the back of it, and I saw all this mold in the backseat. I said, holy cow, the thing didn't warm up enough to dry that out. So finally I decided, well—I was kind of disgusted with General Electric for not notifying me. So although I didn't want to go back to Kansas because my mother and stepfather didn't get along too good. They fought like cats and dogs, and under no condition, no way did I want to live in the same house with them. So put off of going back there. I could have gone back to Pittsburg, Kansas, where they had a four-year college there. I could have lived at home, but I didn't want to stay there. So finally, I thought, well, I'm going to write General Electric a note. I didn't cuss them out or anything, but I wrote some wording on there that said, I thought you guys were honest in your estimations of how long it was going to take for this, but it's been so long. You said several weeks, and it's been several months. So I put that letter and mailed in my outbox at Fort Lewis, Washington. And when I got home that night, I found a letter in the mailbox from the General Electric Company and it said, from Zane Wood. He says, Bob, you've waited long enough for a job. We're ready for you now, so you can come on over. So I says, okay, I'll give my boss two weeks’ notice and come on over, so I did. But I was--clearances took an awful long time in those days. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: And when you started working, did you drive your car on site? Were you able to do that, or did you have to take a bus, or how did that work? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: No, they had bus service around Richland that you could take buses down the sort of streets, and then you'd catch--we were leaving at the B house, so a bus would come by within about a block, so I'd catch my bus there, take it to the bus lot, and then we would get on the bus that went to K Area. And so I would get in there, pay a nickel for a ride out and a nickel to ride back home, and this was 1953. So I did that until I went into the radiation time-keeper job, and we had buses to 200 West Area then, all the areas, but you still just dropped a nickel in when you went in and a nickel when you came out. So I caught the buses there also. So mainly buses--they didn't get rid of the buses until about a year after I retired. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: I know President Kennedy visited the site in 1963 for the N Reactor dedication. I wondered if you were here at the time, and were you on the site that day? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Yeah, I was here at that time. I had two boys and a girl, so--and the wife. We loaded up in my station wagon and drove out to N Reactor and was there for his talk. And that was--I think there was about 40,000 people out there, too, so it took us an hour to get out of there with so many people. But that was an interesting time. I also went to Battelle one time when President Nixon came out here to dedicate something to Battelle. So I was able to see both presidents that way. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: Do you have--were there ever any events that sort of stand out in your mind, period of time working there, or any incidents of any kind or accidents or any sort of events that stand out in your mind from your years working at Hanford? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Well, one thing that kind of surprised me—about the time I was to retire in 1993, I used to go over to B Reactor whenever they would have out-of-the-country people for a tour of B Reactor. My manager at that time said that he would like for me to be in on the tours because I used to work there when it was an operating reactor. So in case they ask him, well, what was is equipment used for or that one, I could tell them a little bit about it. So I went over there once with about five or six Russians, and they wanted to look at B, so they were looking around there. So finally, one of them spoke up and said, well, since you're about to retire here in a few months, what's your lifetime radiation exposure? I says it's 66 rem. And he says, aha! Mine's 600. I knew—I figured they took a lot more radiation. I thought to myself, man, you must have been at Chernobyl or something. But they took a lot more than what we were allowed here at Hanford. Our limit—official—was 5 rem per year, to not include more than 3 R gamma. But they had a lot more over in Russia. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: What were some of the more challenging aspects of working at Hanford? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Well, sometimes as a radiation monitor, you were the only person that knew much about radiation and contamination on a job, so it was up to us. We had a limit of 15-mile per hour speed limit on wind. So it was always up to the monitor to decide whether or not to shut a job down or not. And I thought, man, that's a big responsibility, because some these jobs are pretty important. So I carried around a wind gauge underneath the seat of the pickup. And I thought, well, if necessary, I'll get that wind gauge out. Because it got so I could take a look at sagebrush, a light piece a sagebrush. I would take the wind gauge out and watch when the wind blow to see when that sagebrush would roll. And I thought, well, that thing's going to roll maybe 17 mile an hour, and the bigger piece of sagebrush would take a little more wind. So I had this wind gauge out at one job, and the wind was 16 miles an hour, so I shut the job down. Well, that went over like a lead balloon with the rigging supervisor. We were on a diversion box, BX tank farm. And he says, I'm going to call up your boss, Bob. So he did, and my boss came out. By then, the wind had stopped, but I hadn't said anything about you could go back to work. And he says, Bob, how come you shut the job down? I says, well, it says on RNWP 15 miles an hour. Here's the wind gauge--16. He says, well, it doesn't look like it's blowing now. I says, well, it's not. As far I'm concerned, they can start working again, so they did. But every once in a while, you would be challenged. Once again I was challenged. I was working with the D&D group. We were at 100 K burial ground. Sometimes the waste in the burial ground will either travel down deeper, or sometimes they could go up, or they can go to the left or to the right over a period of time. And we had a car—we had one monitor that would drive this SUV-type instrument around where it has radiation detectors on the front bumper. And he would drive over to the tank farm. Whenever it would have a spot above the limits, like the limits on the tank farm are maybe 100 counts a minute above background. Well, whenever he hit this limit, why, it would alarm. So they notified our group that they needed to go in and lay some more dirt down, so they did. They were doing this job, putting more dirt on top of the other dirt. And this engineer--they were running out of money for these truck drivers to do that. And he says to my boss in radiation monitoring, he says--we have to radiation monitors checking the tires of these trucks that were coming and going. And says, why not check every truck coming in and out, going in and out? Why not every other truck or maybe only two tires instead of all four? And I said, no, we can't do that. Because we had run into exactly that same problem at N Area once. It wasn't me, it was another radiation monitor. He had decided on zone that I'm going to start checking every other truck. Well, one of these trucks came up with hot tires from the N Area place, and he tracked contamination down the highway a ways, and that's not good. So I says, well, I'm not going to do that. So the engineer was so mad, he went up to my supervisor. And I guess my supervisor took word over to the manager of radiation protection for all of the 100 Areas at that time. And somewhere there, my supervisor had told me that, Bob, don't survey every tire, just survey some of them. And I was so mad at that, I said to myself, I can't do that. We go through a certification program that you don't compromise the situation. So I was all set to go back to work, but I was going to check all four tires. And just before I left, my supervisor came back and said, our top manager says, keep doing it the way you have--surveying all four tires, so we did. So once in a while, you'd run out of money on a job, why, upper management wants to change things, and you can't do that if you're—why, I had resisted that. I figured I might get laid off or fired or something, but it didn't come to that point, thank goodness. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: So then, what were some more rewarding aspects of your job and working at Hanford? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Well, one rewarding thing was the scholarships that the Westinghouse came up with. And the other rewarding job was just you knew in your own mind whenever you were doing something right, and there was always a temptation to take shortcuts, but a good monitor never did. Because we had friends did try that, and they got into trouble so. One time I got to note from two former operators I used to work with, and he said--I had been long retired since then, and they were working as ministers, and they sent me a note that said they had appreciated my job as radiation monitoring, that I was different than some of the others. Some of them seemed to not try to get along with other people, operators, and tried to be too rigid. And they thought that I had tried to do the right thing. So that made me feel pretty good, that even though you sometimes wonder, I thought that I did a good enough job. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: So overall, how would you describe or assess Hanford as a place to work? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: I think it's a real good place. There are times when some people think that Hanford is—because it's got the most contamination the country, probably because we also made most of the weapons for Hanford, probably 65% or so of all the source of the bomb’s material. And I thought that people were trying to do badmouth the plant here too much. They also tried to badmouth Hanford DOE—or AEC, they called it in those days. But I didn't see it that way, because they were always trying to follow rules and regulations, and I thought they did a good job, and I thought Hanford overall did a good job. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: My students now, some of them anyway, were born after the Cold War ended. So they have no memory of the Cold War. They don't know much about it. I guess especially for people who are that young that really have no memory, what sorts of things would you like them to know about Hanford or working there? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Well, I think they need to know that, like I do, that I thought that Hanford did a good job of controlling radiation and the spread of it, because that was my job was to be one of the monitors out there watching these things and following the rules and regulations. So since I had a job in controlling it, I knew what was supposed to happen and what did happen. So I got to feel like most all the percentage of the time, Hanford did a pretty good job of it. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: Is there anything I haven't asked you about that you'd like to talk about or any specific memories, things that you'd like to talk about that you haven't talked about yet? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Well, yeah there's one of them that kind of bothered me a little bit. Back in 1966, we had a strike here at Hanford. And being in the radiation monitoring group—that was a union job. So we went on strike for about six weeks. During that time, I worked as a kind of a electrician helper down in California. California could not get enough electricians to work in their jobs. All their local people were busy, so they called around the country to get other electricians. Well, they wanted 20 from Hanford, but they could only get ten. So they says, okay, we'll take five instrument technicians and five radiation monitors, since we all belong to the same union. However, those radiation monitors have to have worked around electricians for at least a year, so they could help out as a helper. So my union steer called up one day and said, Bob, do you want to come by and drop your name in the hat and see if it gets drawn out for five guys to go down to Californian? I says, sure, so I did. And luckily enough I did, so I was down there for, well, it was a six-week strike. The first week we just stayed home. The next five weeks I worked down there. Well, when I got back—we would get these bottles, urine bottles, because they wanted to bring everybody up to date. Well, I'd been gone for six weeks, so I put my urine bottle out in front for the truck driver to pick up. Well, he picked it up, but a couple, three days later he came back again with some more of them. So I asked, well, how come I got some more urine bottles here? He says, well--he shouldn't have told me this because he's just a truck driver—but he says, well, I've had to redeliver several extra bottles around to different people. Because there was one guy over to 234-5 Building, where they were making plutonium buttons, that had gotten into an incident and gotten real contaminated. And they think that the bottles were washed—for me to do my sample in—well, mine were washed in the same batch that his were, and they cross-contaminated to my bottles. But that's just a rumor, they don't know for sure. Well, I did get notified by my manager at that time that I was giving an extra 5 rem of radiation because of those urine bottles. And I called him up and I says—Bill McMurray was my manager. I says, Bill, I wasn't even here at that time. How can I get that? He says, well, Bob, Battelle had done a lot of updating of their equipment, so maybe they got more sensitive equipment now than they did six weeks ago. I said, okay, Bill, whatever. But anyhow, they put that on my record, and it's been there ever since. They wouldn't take it off. So that kind of miffed me a little bit. That's one of the things you learn to put up with. [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: All right. Anything else that you'd like to share, any other stories or memories? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Well, let's see. Not offhand. Things went pretty smooth, as far as I was concerned. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: Well, I want to thank you for coming in today and sharing your stories and your experiences. I appreciate it. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Smith: Well, you're welcome, my pleasure. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX91453010"> Bauman: Thanks. </div> Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri-Cities Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:52:37 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 224 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview K Area 100-K Area 200 West Area PUREX 200 East Area D Plant 200 Area N Area 100 Area K-West Reactor N Reactor 105 C Reactor C Reactor B Reactor Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1953-2013 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1953-1993 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Bob Smith Description An account of the resource An interview with Bob Smith conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 7/16/2013 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2016-06-24: Metadata v1 created – [J.G.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. Subject The topic of the resource Richland (Wash.) Hanford Site (Wash.) Hanford (Wash.) Nuclear weapons plants--Health aspects--Washington (State)--Hanford Site Region Nuclear instruments & methods 100 Area 100-K Area 105 C Reactor 200 Area 200 West Area B Reactor C Reactor D Plant Hanford (Wash.) K Area K-West Reactor Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917-1963 N Area N Reactor PUREX 200 East Area Richland (Wash.) https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fa31c26430907da4e0a19d5b7bb6d29a8.jpg 07f64c8effbe9c97b319bdc1a8939610 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fbe9cd6adfcbbb0c356027b6a14c97e90.mp4 d790f5ba40edf9478c5d9c6a4ef277c3 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 Parker Foundation Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Nuclear science; Richland, Wa.; Hanford, Wa.; Parker, Herbert, 1910-1984 Description An account of the resource "The Herbert M. Parker Foundation collects valuable personal perspectives from key individuals who worked in radiological and environmental protection at the Hanford site in the early years of its development. Since 2004, student interns have recorded interviews from health physics and related science professionals. These historically valuable interviews document their personal experiences, observations, contributions and ideas. Several of the distinguished professionals who have spoken at the Annual Herbert M. Parker Lecture are also included. The videotaped interviews and accompanying biographical sketches will be made accessible to the public." See https://tricities.wsu.edu/parkerfoundation/ParkerHistory Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 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. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Bob Smith Description An account of the resource An interview with Bob Smith conducted by the Herbert M. Parker Foundation at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Herbert M. Parker Foundation at Washington State University Tri-Cities https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F4a29592b9fdcb92361c601c9780654b9.jpg 942575806f4c91dcdb25f2c314c07250 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fda9bdaa86e4a0b3fb6ca2b77c28bd8d8.mp4 0577d8dfe7a437ff33dff12d7b984e64 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 Parker Foundation Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Nuclear science; Richland, Wa.; Hanford, Wa.; Parker, Herbert, 1910-1984 Description An account of the resource "The Herbert M. Parker Foundation collects valuable personal perspectives from key individuals who worked in radiological and environmental protection at the Hanford site in the early years of its development. Since 2004, student interns have recorded interviews from health physics and related science professionals. These historically valuable interviews document their personal experiences, observations, contributions and ideas. Several of the distinguished professionals who have spoken at the Annual Herbert M. Parker Lecture are also included. The videotaped interviews and accompanying biographical sketches will be made accessible to the public." See https://tricities.wsu.edu/parkerfoundation/ParkerHistory Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 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. 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 Wilson Description An account of the resource An interview with Bob Wilson conducted by the Herbert M. Parker Foundation at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Herbert M. Parker Foundation at Washington State University Tri-Cities https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F5062440c1c96697b8a1cbf306b6b00cf.JPG d6d018dc86ec42219474d096eac81420 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fb7e5e93ecb8d86ccc4e43070311b6984.mp4 0e20f9e91d4739df06707ceee0bb1df1 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 Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford Subject The topic of the resource African Americans; Oral History Description An account of the resource A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource National Park Service Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 9/1/2017-9/1/2019 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project. Relation A related resource RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RG2_8 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 Bobby Sparks 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 Bobby Sparks on May 8th 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. We’ll be talking with Bobby about his experiences living in the Tri-Cities and working at the Hanford Site. And for the record can you state and spell your full name for us? Bobby Sparks: My name is Bobby, B-O-B-B-Y, Ray, R-A-Y, Sparks, S-P-A-R-K-S. Franklin: Is Bobby your given name? Sparks: Bobby is my given name on my bible. It wasn’t a birth certificate; it was a bible. We recorded all the births on the bible. That’s my given name, yup. Franklin: Okay. They just went straight to Bobby. Sparks: They went straight to Bobby, yup. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Okay. Because I’m a Robert. Sparks: They didn’t change to Robert later. They said he’s a Bobby, they left me as a Bobby. Franklin: Right on. So, Bobby, your family migrated here during WWII, right? Or parts from your family migrated here during WWII from Kildare? Sparks: Yeah. Part of them migrated. Actually some of them partially migrated. They was migrant workers, they came up and worked a few months and then they went back to Kildare. That was my grandfather, Connie Davis. He came up during, like you said, in the ‘40s and stuff to work at the B Plant. Franklin: The B Reactor or B Plant? Sparks: He was actually working on building the reactor. He was doing—yeah, the reactor building. Franklin: You said his name was Connie Davis? Sparks: Connie Davis. Franklin: Great. Who else from your family came up? Sparks: Connie Davis, he was the only one that I know of that came up in that generation. He was one of the older ones. My uncles came up later. They might’ve came up in the early ‘50s and stuff, but-- Franklin: Who were they? Sparks: One was Dave Smith. Franklin: Okay. Sparks: James Sparks, and Alford Sparks. Franklin: When did you come? Sparks: I came to the Hanford in 1965. Franklin: 1965. Sparks: I was in the third grade. Franklin: Third grade, okay. When and where were you born? Sparks: I was born in Kildare, Texas in 1955. Franklin: How come your parents moved up here? Sparks: My father was a farmer. We had maybe 60 acres of land. So he farmed the land in Texas, in east Texas, and it was hard work, very hard work. What happened, his teacher, which was Vanis Daniels, moved to the Tri-Cities area. Franklin: His teacher? Sparks: He was one of his instructors, Vanis Daniels. Franklin: Okay. Is that Vanis Daniels, Senior? Sparks: Senior, yeah. He sent a little note back and said, hey, this is not too bad! You guys need to join me in the Hanford Site. That’s how my dad got here. He came up before I did. He came up a year before the family moved, checked it all out and got us a home and then we moved up. Franklin: What else do you know about your dad’s life before you came up here? Sparks: My dad was farmer, like I said, he worked on the farm for years. He went to the military, fought in the war. He was just a hardworking man. What he did, he fed the family by hunting and fishing and gathering. We did a lot of fishing and hunting and raising animals. He built his own house down in Kildare, Texas. Basically, being a father of fourteen children, he didn’t have much time for anything else except for raising the children. Franklin: Wow, so you have thirteen siblings? Sparks: Yeah, I have thirteen siblings. And back in Texas, that was not very unusual, because they basically got married when they was very young, thirteen, fourteen-year-olds and they started having children. Franklin: How old were your parents when they got married? Sparks: My mother, I believe she was like fourteen and my dad, he might have been eighteen. They were very young when they got married. Franklin: What is your mother’s name? Sparks: My mother’s name is Annie May Davis. Franklin: Davis, okay. So Connie Davis, your grandfather, was your mother’s father. Sparks: Mother’s father, yeah. My dad’s father died when he was really young. So, what he did, he actually went up to eighth grade—no, no, it wasn’t even the eighth grade. I think when he was like in the sixth grade, he had to drop out of school and help raise the family. He ended up not only raising his brothers and sisters, but he actually, after they were grown, he raised us, also. Franklin: Tell me about your mom’s life in Texas. What did she do, and her education and things like that. Sparks: My mom, since she got married at a very early age, she dropped out of school when she was like in the eighth grade. Basically her life was, she took care of the family. She cleaned and took care of home, cooked, and just took care of the business around the house. My dad, he worked in the lumberyard, he actually worked on the railroad down in Texas also. And because the hours were so long, she had to take care of the children. The weirdest thing about the house that we were born in, we had no electricity, we had wooden stoves. In order to wash the clothes they had a little creek in the back of the house, and we had to get the water. She was—basically, she didn’t have all the microwaves and the stuff that we have now, so everything that she did, she started cooking in the morning and cooked all day. So that was her job was to-- Franklin: Did the house have running water? Sparks: Didn’t have running water, we actually had a well in the back of the house where she had to go in and pull the water up out of the well. When she washed the clothes, she had a washboard that she would use. It was from the old school, very old school; we had a wooden stove, we had to go gather wood. For Christmas, we’d go out into our property, cut a big tree and make our own decorations and decorate it. The community we lived in, in Kildare was a very—it was a divided community, it was a black community and there was a white community. We were basically self-sufficient. We didn’t mingle very much with the Caucasians. So we kind of had our own little city, our own little things that we did. We canned, we hunted, we gathered; basically took care of each other in the community. It was kind of old school. If your house burned, we’d go over and help you build your house back up. If I start rambling too much, let me know. Franklin: No, no. It’s really important to kind of set the stage from where—how life was there and why so many people left. What do you know about your parents’ initial experience of coming to work at Hanford and finding a place to live? Sparks: As far as my mother, when they initially got here, there was this placed called the Navy Homes, Navy Homes in Pasco; that’s where a lot of the people moved into. You have thirteen, fourteen sisters and brothers, where do you live in? You go over to the military base and they had houses built in like A-frame homes that we lived in. So they had no issues finding a place to live. My dad, because he was a laborer, it was easy for him to find work in the Hanford Site. Because they were looking for—it was a big demand for hard workers, and my dad was a very hard worker. So he actually got into pouring concrete. Once they got here, their whole social life was around their community, the black people. They didn’t mingle much with the Caucasians. Franklin: Okay, but they also—at that point, there was a pretty large amount of people from Kildare that had moved, that your parents were either related to or knew pretty well, right? Because you would’ve been related either by marriage or by blood either to the Daniels and the Mitchells and the Browns and that big network. Sparks: We have a huge, huge extended family. The Miles, the Davises. The community, when we get together at Kurtzman Park, I mean, it was like a family reunion. Everybody was there. So they had a great networking of friends that they ran around with. Franklin: How old were you, you said you came in ‘65? Sparks: I was in the third grade. Franklin: Third grade. Sparks: Third grade when I came. I went to Longfellow Elementary School. Franklin: When you came, what were your first impressions when you arrived? Sparks: Because we didn’t have all the convenience, it was like it was the greatest place I’ve ever seen in my life. I can actually remember traveling up from Kildare in the station wagon with my uncle. And I remember driving into a restaurant and going in like an Arctic Circle, and having my first ice cream cone at the Arctic Circle. It was like, hey, this is the greatest thing in the world. And to get here, walk into the house and hit a light switch and the lights come on, we didn’t have the kerosene lights. It was actually great to me, I thought we was living the best life in the world, from what we came from to what we had here in the state of Washington. Franklin: Wow. How long did you stay at the Navy Homes? It wasn’t your permanent residence? Sparks: We actually stayed at the Navy Homes, we stayed there until I was, I think I was in junior high school. Franklin: Oh, okay. Sparks: Is when my dad finally bought a house on Elm Street in Pasco, in east Pasco, mm-hm. Franklin: What was the hardest aspect of life in this area to adjust to? Sparks: As a kid, you don’t notice things. My mom and dad, like I said, they took care of us. We went to school, we came home. Because my dad was into spending a lot of time with his kids, we did a lot of fishing, a lot of hunting, a lot of gardening. We weren’t able, when I was in elementary school, to go play AAU baseball and all that stuff. So we weren’t mingling very much in the community, because we stayed to ourselves, because we were from Texas. When you’re from Texas, you kind of know what to do and what not to do, what you can get away with, and what you cannot get away with. We had learnt that at a very young age. As far as elementary school, not an issue. Now when you start growing up a little bit and you get into junior high school and you start mingling, and kids are not very kind. They’re not, they’re very hard. I remember when I got in junior high—it was actually in my sixth grade in elementary school, because I had a Southern accent, very, very strong Southern accent, and I would say yes, ma’am, and no, ma’am. I was in a class with kids who didn’t talk like that. So right away they started criticizing. You can’t talk that way, that’s the way slaves used to talk. We don’t say yes ma’am or no ma’am; we say no. Even this older lady pulled me aside one time—I used to mow her lawns—and she said, no, we don’t talk like that. They made us do that in Texas. Don’t call me yes, sir and no, sir. Things like that we had to deal with. Another thing that they did, when I noticed what was going on, the first class they put me in, they put me in a special ed. Class. Because I was Southern, they mistake the Southern accent for I had a learning disability. In that class, it turned out, they had all the other kids that were like the really bad actors, and so we were all in the same class. When you get in that class, like in the sixth and fifth grade, they normally take you all through that system in that class, special ed. type of class. What happened was, I had a teacher, his name was Ted Ogata, and Mr. Ogata, he pulled me aside and said, Bobby, you’re like in fifth or sixth grade now. He said, if you don’t get your act together, you’re going to be in this class for the rest of your life. And in that class you actually had a different lunches, you rode in a different bus to school--I mean, it was really isolated. Mr. Ogata kind of became my mentor. He worked with me, took me to his home, and he was able to switch me from, at the time I was like a D to F student, flunking out of school. Within a year, I was able to increase my grades up to—when I got in junior high, they started putting me in honor classes, because I had one person that stepped in and influenced me. Franklin: Did your parents ever talk about their adjustment here, and what their initial thoughts were or how they adjusted from Texas to the Tri-Cities? Sparks: Like I said, my mother, she worked in the home. And because they were from Texas, they knew, they were very polite. They didn’t have many experience, like when my dad would come home and say this man called me out of my name. Because my dad was a big man, I mean, he had arms like this, so not very many people wanted to cross my dad. My mother, she was the most loving lady you ever seen in your life. So when you’re nice, and kind, and loving, it’s kind of hard for people to treat you bad. She was the kind of person, she treated her enemies like she wanted to be treated. They kind of, what went around came around. Since she was nice, they kind of treated her nice. I never remember my mother sit back and say, this person spit on my face, this person closed the door on my face, I couldn’t go into this restaurant because there was a sign. They never shared that with us. They kind of sheltered us from that. Franklin: What about culturally? Was it a tough adjustment for your parents to leave the family and friends, and kind of culture of Texas and come to an environment where things were—because Texas, segregation had been on the books and it had been upfront. In the North, it had existed but it was more subtle. Sparks: It was very subtle up North. And because my dad, when he came here, he didn’t experience the true issues that came with segregation. When he came here, he was in demand, we need workers. So there was a demand for laborers; he could get a job. Housing at that time was booming, and there was a community that he could move into to get a home. So he didn’t have those kinds of issues when he got here. His mother was already here also. She had a home, my uncles had a home. The east Pasco neighborhood was our neighborhood. And that community, it was houses, it was stores, it was restaurants, they even had a placed called a cotch ball, that’s where, if they wanted to go out to the casinos late at night, they had their own little casinos where they could hang out and drink. Franklin: What was it called? Sparks: Call it cotch ball. Franklin: Can you spell that? Sparks: Cotch. Spelled it just like a cotch. I can’t spell it, but they just called it a cotch ball. Like a couch. Like-- Franklin: Oh, I got you. Sparks: And actually, these little places boomed up in east Pasco. When all the other bars and things closed, the Hanford workers would come out late at night and they could gamble and hang out at the cotch ball and have dinner and all kind of other activities went on at the cotch balls. They had their own community. Because my dad was used to that isolation in Texas, he would go and work at the Hanford Site, but all of his social life was in that little community that we had there. That’s why, like I said, my dad, he never talked about it, my mom didn’t talk about it very often. Because my mom, taking care of the house, the only time she experienced stuff is when she went shopping. And even then, because she is a very quiet woman, she didn’t share those dramatic stories with her kids. Franklin: Sure. How would you describe life in the community, east Pasco? Sparks: It was—when you’re poor and everybody else around you is poor, it was bliss. We hadn’t been exposed to people that was very affluent and had the beautiful homes and stuff because we stayed to ourselves. I mean, I would get up and go to school, and hang out with all my buddies all day, just a normal life for us. The only time we started seeing issues is when we started becoming more aware of ourselves and what was happening in the community. When you get a little older in junior high, and high school and you go to college, and then you see that culture shock between what you got and what others got. And then you start mingling with people from all over the state, from the Seattle area, Spokane area, and then you start seeing the chaotic, the racism and stuff that was going on. But as a kid coming up, until I was in probably ninth grade, everything was—to me was—I had no issues. Franklin: What did you do in your spare time? Sparks: As a kid, like I said, my dad—we spent a lot time with my dad fishing in Eagle Lake and Moses Lake, and all over the state fishing and hunting, working in the garden. My dad, he was like, he brought up all of his Southern crops up here with him, the okra, the black-eyed peas, the cotter peas. And what he did was, he had a five-acre lot of land, and what he would do, he would farm that lot of land and people would come from all over the state to get his crops. He actually had a huge pig pen and we had pigs and cows and stuff. My normal day would be getting up at like 5:00, going out with my dad, working in the farm. Then after I worked in the farm, we’d come home. My mom would always have a big breakfast with biscuits, and gravy, and ham. We would have a huge breakfast, and then we would go to school. Go to school all day, get off of school like at three, we would come home and my dad would always have chores for us to do. You create stuff. He’d say, son, go pull out those nails out of the boards. He’d have big piles of boards. So we couldn’t go out and play until we did our chores. Dad was very strict; it was only one rule: it was his way or the highway. Because he didn’t have time to negotiate with that many kids. He had to have a plan and he stuck to the plan. That’s how we were raised, me and all of my sisters and brothers. Franklin: Do you remember any particular community events from when you were a kid? Sparks: Oh, we had so many events. The biggest we had was, we had the Juneteenth. That’s when the whole community got together and we celebrate the freedom of slavery at Texas, because all of us was at Texas. At that time, it was like the whole Kurtzman Park, everybody would show up at the park and we would and we would play baseball and have basketball tournaments, have fashion shows, and have preaching and singing. It was just a huge festival that we did. That was the biggest, is the Juneteenth activities, which we did once a year. But with my family, because we had such a huge family, we had a lot of—both side of my family is huge. So we would always have family reunions and everybody would come from down South, and from California, and we would get together, and just have a great time. Go out and rent a park and take over the whole park, get to know our family that we hadn’t seen for years. Franklin: Right on. Did you attend church? Sparks: Oh, yes, I attended church. Franklin: And what church did you attend? Sparks: All of us that came from Texas, there was a church called Saint John the Baptist Church, that’s in Texas. That’s where I originally started going to church. After we moved to the Tri-Cities, all of my uncles and aunties, and nieces went to New Hope Baptist Church. So our family joined New Hope Missionary Baptist Church, and that’s where we spent a lot of our spare time. They had vacation bible school, they had dinners, so a lot of our social life was centered around the church. Franklin: What role did the church play in the black community? Sparks: Actually, the church, if you go back and look at it, it was one of the things that started the civil rights movement. You look at the fact that God created man and made all of us equal. So then you start looking at a lot of the preachers and stuff in our community. It’s like, hey, we’re second to none. You look at a man based on his character but not by the color of his skin. It was very instrumental, a lot of the meetings, Sister Barton, who is one of the city councilmen in the Tri-Cities, she went to my church. The Mitchells, sister Mitchell, their mom went to our church. So a lot of their training as far as speaking publicly, they developed that skill in the church. And their beliefs that all men are created equal and you should treat everyone like you want to be treated, that basic fact was nurtured in the church, and then it grew out into the rest of the community. Even now, the church is the springboard for what happens in that community over there. Because all the meetings, the influential people that’s into the movement came out of the church. Franklin: Were there any opportunities here that were not available where your parents came from? Sparks: Oh, there were so many opportunities. Because it was such a little country town, didn’t have the colleges, didn’t have the financial support. If I had have stayed in Texas—I got to tell you a story. My dad when he moved here, he came here first and he got set up in homes. What he did, he sent a letter back to my mother and he said it was really tough out here, because he was away from his family. He had left his children. He did like they did at Hanford Site; he actually left his crops in the field, because he had to move up here really quick. And because he had left all of that he went through a state where he was—you can imagine what he went through, leaving all his children. So he went to a state where he was discouraged. He wrote a letter to my mom, and he told my mom, he said, well, I think I’m going to come back, because he missed his children. My sister, Frankie, intercepted that letter and she knew we didn’t have the same opportunities in Texas as we would have here in the state of Washington, as far as education, homes, sending us children to some of the better schools and stuff. She didn’t give that letter to my mom. That’s why we got here, is because she saw that the opportunities here was really great for us. Franklin: Where are you in the sibling order? Sparks: There is fourteen of us and I sit right there in the middle. I am number seven. Franklin: Oh, yeah? What is the range between the oldest and the youngest? Sparks: My oldest sister is like 71, and my youngest sister is like 40, 42. So it was a huge range. So for many years—you asked what did my mother do? She made babies. And that’s a lot of labor, a lot of labor. Franklin: Yes. In what way were opportunities here limited because of segregation and racism? Sparks: Well, it starts back, if you were a black man and came to the Tri-Cities, you joined the labor local. The labor local took basically unskilled workers, and they taught you how to pull a jackhammer, they taught you how to dig holes. Now, it’s been developed a little higher than it was then, more skilled labor. But it was just—basically, the farmers came and they gave them a skill and that’s what they did. Now what has happened since the Labor Hall developed, then with the changes in the society that the labor unions had to start bringing in more blacks into the halls. When you get into the Electricians’, the Pipefitters’ locals, they had to open it up because of the laws had changed. And even in the Hanford Site, for years, they didn’t have blacks that was moving up through the ranks, but with the government organizations, you can’t do that. They actually went out with the equal opportunity employee situation, they started bringing blacks in, making them managers, working in the mail rooms: not just the laborers anymore, they started becoming skilled laborers. With the skilled laborer and the money they were making, now they could afford to send their kids to college. The kid has more time to play sports now, he doesn’t have to work in the orchards with his dad. For my case, what it did for me after opening up and my dad started making money, it allowed me to start doing sports; I didn’t have to get up in the morning and work in the garden and stuff anymore. Because I had been a hard worker my whole life, I was just a natural in sports. Franklin: Makes sense. What schools did you go to? Sparks: I went to Longfellow Elementary School, I went to Captain Grey Elementary, I went to McLoughlin Junior High, and I graduated from Pasco High School in 1974. I got recruited to wrestle at the University of Washington from 1974 to 1980, and I graduated from the University of Washington in 1982. Franklin: What did you get your degree in? Sparks: I got my degree in business economics. Franklin: How did racism or segregation affect your education? Sparks: Like I said, I ran into Mr. Ted Ogata, and one man changed my whole perspective on education. Before then, if I had stayed in the system the way that it was set up, I would not had the opportunity to go to the University of Washington. Because even though you get a certificate through the special programs, you cannot apply for the colleges and stuff. If I had not have had Mr. Ogata, I would not have gotten a scholarship to go to the University of Washington. So it would have affected me. Because I did have someone who believed in me and he saw great things that I could do, he pushed me so I got out of that program. But a lot of my buddies did not get out of it, so it did affect them. It affect their income now, it affect their lifestyle, because they didn’t have the same opportunities and opportunities to advance and go to college. Franklin: Right, they would have been shut out of a lot of-- Sparks: They would’ve been shut out, would’ve been shut out, yeah. Franklin: To an education. Sparks: And me, when I was in the University of Washington, one way it affected me—when I got to U-Dub, I started seeing the culture changes and I started seeing the culture shock, the difference in those that have and those that have not. I remember taking a—I think I was taking a logic class and I was struggling with this class. Oh, I was struggling bad. So I was barely getting a C. So the professor brings me into his office and says, you might as well drop out of school. What are you doing here anyway? You’re not going to graduate with a C. I looked at him and I said, well, I may not graduate, but I’ll tell you what. I said, when I get out of school, I’ll make more money than you are making right now. Because I know how much you’re making, and I can drop out right now and become and electrician and make double what you’re making right now. What I did, I wasn’t a nice guy anymore. You challenge me, then I would fight back. And that was a good thing, because you had to have tough skin to make it through the system. Franklin: Yeah. Could you describe any interactions you or your parents had with other people from other parts of the Tri-Cities? Sparks: Oh, yeah, I had—because I did sports, I interacted with a lot of people from Pasco, Kennewick, Richland, Walla Walla, Wenatchee. I got to meet a lot of different people. Which was probably the best thing that happened to me because I was raised in an isolated community. So basically I had to end up learning how to speak two languages. Speak the language of my community and speak the language in college, you had to be able to relate to a lot of people. You know, it’s not integrated. If it’s segregated, you can’t get that interface, you can’t grow. You don’t feel comfortable. If you don’t feel comfortable around all races, you can’t go work at Pacific National Laboratory, because we got people from all over the country. You got to be able to get along with everyone. Franklin: All over the world, right? Sparks: All over the world. We got them from Japan, we got them from Russia, all over. So that interfacing works to your advantage when you get older. Because now when I interview you, I can speak your language, because I got to sell myself. How can I sell myself if I’m not interfacing with people in the community? So sports helped me a lot in that way. Because I was able to travel all over the United States, even in high school, going to Texas, going to Iowa, Denver, all over the world. I even had an opportunity to go to Japan to mingle with my teammates. We even traveled in a van together from here all the way down to Iowa, circle Oklahoma, go to all the universities, then come back. So we developed a lot of long-lasting friendships. Franklin: So you graduated in ’82? Sparks: Mm-hmm. Franklin: Then did you come out to work at the Hanford Site? Sparks: Oh, that’s a long story. [LAUGHTER] I graduated ’82. I had a degree in business economics. I went to University of Washington for five years, and I got out, and I said, I got to go make some money now. So my very first job interview, the guy said, you know what? I applied for a bank. Business economics, go to the bank and get a job. We’ll pay you eight bucks an hour to do this and this and this, and then after so many years, you’d be up to so many bucks an hour. So I went back to what I told that college professor. I said, I can make more money as an electrician than I can make working at the bank. So what I did, I applied for the apprenticeship program, IBEW, electrical apprenticeship program. That’s how I got to work at the Hanford Site, as an electrical apprentice. And I guess I’ll go one year back. When I was in college, I had an opportunity to come out here and work as an intern. I worked at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory my sophomore year in college. And it’s the craziest thing. My job was, they put me in an animal research laboratory and they had beagles. And the craziest thing, my job was to smoke the beagles. And when Vanis was telling a story about the beagles, it was like identical to my story. But I did it as a summer intern. So when I started there, I got my feet in the door for PNL, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, so when I came back—which was years later—and applied for a job there, the payroll number that they gave me when I was a kid, I got that same payroll number, which is 35810, to work for the laboratory. So, yeah, I did work at the Hanford Site as an electrician apprentice for four years. When I became a journeyman wireman, I applied for the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and I actually became an electrician at the laboratory also. Franklin: Where did you work out at the Hanford Site? Sparks: I actually worked throughout the Hanford Site. I worked at the 221-T Plant, I worked at, there was a reactor, I never remember the name of it, but it was out by the river, the deactivated reactor, we did research in there. I worked at the 300 Area, throughout the buildings in the 300 Area, multiple buildings. I worked at FFTF. I worked at—actually, one of the jobs I had was they was going to automate FFTF, and my job was to make the panels that operate the computers and stuff and put those together, the interface panels. Franklin: What on-the-job training did you receive, if any? Sparks: Basically, I took four years on-the-job training as an apprentice. I had a journeyman wireman, and they basically take you from doing absolutely nothing about electricity, then you almost become like a plasma physicist. You know everything about it. Actually, I got to the point where I got challenged and I decided to start my business. So I actually started electrical contracting business along with working at the Hanford Site. Because always—my position was always—I knew if they ever let me go, then I would have my own business to fall back on. Franklin: Good. Sparks: Yeah. Franklin: [YAWN] Sorry, excuse me. Did you acquire any experience or skills on the job that helped you later in life? Sparks: Like I said, the skills that I learned on the job actually led me into become a businessman. I actually opened my own business, electric contracting business. Franklin: What’s that called? Sparks: J and B Sparks Electric. Jevon, my son’s name is Jevon, my daughter’s name is Brittany. So I named it after my son—J and B Sparks Electric. Franklin: Kind of a good coincidence that your last name is Sparks. Sparks: Sparks! Everywhere I go, it’s perfect. Automatic advertisement. That’s the Sparks. Pick that guy up! [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Can you describe a typical workday out on the Site? Sparks: Now? Or when? Franklin: [COUGH] Sorry, excuse me. I have something stuck in my throat. Sparks: Now? Franklin: No, like when you were out on Site as an apprentice when you were working out at Hanford. Sparks: Actually, as an apprentice, I worked at the WPPSS plant. So my typical day at WPPSS plant would—I would come in at work, there was a crew of probably 50 electricians, we’d meet together. They’d have this guy who would be assigned to me, he would be my journeyman wireman. His supervisor would come up and have a plan of a day meeting. At the plan of a day meeting, he’d give us a task to do. Today, we want you guys to go in those manholes—because all around WPPSS there’s manholes—and we want you to take every manhole up, and we want to drill a hole in that manhole and we’re going to have a pipe to come up through it. So my very first job as apprentice—you’ve seen the movie Conan, when he’s walking around—remember that one deal he had a job where he was actually walking around the whale? My first job was like Conan the Barbarian. I’m out there walking with this big old tap, making holes in these big old huge manhole covers. Franklin: Oh, wow. Sparks: So that was my typical day. You go out, you get a job, and a lot of your jobs would last for, you know, six months. So then once you get your job, you can report to your job site and do the work. Yeah. Franklin: What do you recall about working at B Reactor or any of the other buildings and structures still present on the Site today? Sparks: What I recall is—I was from University of Washington. So I’m coming from a college that’s got 40,000 people or more. Big, huge structures and libraries and stuff all the way, all around the place. So my very first thing, driving up to that reactor, it’s like somebody dropped a nuclear bomb on it. This whole area was just—nothing was there. Nothing but desert and weeds, and I’m thinking, oh, man, what happened here? How did I—I died and went to hell. [LAUGHTER] So my first day on the job site, I drive out to that reactor, and my car break down. So I’m in the middle of this desert, it’s cold and ice, and my car broke down. And that’s when they had the bus system come through. This guy came through in a bus and picked me up and took me back downtown. But it was really bad. It was really—the rules were not the same as the rules we have now in the building. Franklin: How so? Sparks: I remember one building that I worked in, I walked into the building and there was a research project set up. And I looked at the floor, and I said, it looked like the concrete had melted away. It turned out they was doing some type of research and lost whatever they were using, and it actually built a hole in the concrete. And I’m looking at that and said, I don’t want to work here. Because I thought it was not safe. But then over the years, the safety did improve and things are better out there now. Franklin: How would you describe your relationships with your coworkers and your supervisors or management? Sparks: I would have to go back to when I was an apprentice. During that time, because a lot of the guys that was working here was what you call travelers. And the travelers that were guys, like out of, say, Texas, and they were up here looking for work. So the travelers had a different attitude about the people that they work with. Most of them was very humble people, and they taught me everything that I needed to know. But every once in a while you’d run into one who wants to treat you like an apprentice. He want you to run and get his coffee, run and get his lunch and stuff for him. But because I was from a background where, being a wrestler, I had been exposed to the senior guy on the team, you would—that’s the way he treated you. The fraternities, they treated you that way in the fraternity. So in my mind, I said, this is just a pecking order. Because the money is so good, no way in the world am I going to walk away from this. One of the worst incidents that I had on a job site was at WPPSS number 2. Actually, this is when I was in college and I came there to work as an intern. And I was working with one of the older guys there. We were carrying two-by-fours on our shoulder and we was taking them over and stacking them in a pile. Well, he walked past me and hit me upside the head with the two-by-four. And the guy looks at me and I said, oh, that was an accident, huh? He said, yeah, just an accident. But then he came back again. This time, he hit me again, he swung it around, and hit me upside the head. I said, you can’t do that again. Then he looked at me, called me out of my name, and he say, you know what? He said, you took my son’s job. You shouldn’t even be out here. He said, I’m going to kick your butt. So he was behind—there was a big wall like that wall over there. This guy jumped on me, tackled me to the ground—and I’m thinking I’m making more money in my life, but if I don’t get this guy off me, he’s going to hurt me back here. So I actually had to put something on him, get him off of me, control him. And the weirdest thing about it is that we were working in this area where it was like wall was here and wall was there, and it turned out the guys at the job were sitting up there looking at us, and they did not stop it. And I said, why did you do that? They said, oh, we figured it was just a matter of time before you take care of this guy. So yeah, it was some cases of that out there. It wasn’t all good. Yeah. And another, to go back to the social part of the life, I used to go bowling a lot in Kennewick. After a wrestling match, me and my cousin was out bowling. And we were sitting there bowling. This is when bowling was big time, I mean, the bowling alley was full. Everybody was there, that’s where everybody hung out. Franklin: Was this the mid-to-late ‘70s? Sparks: Oh, yeah. It was big time. I’m sitting there bowling, having a good time. And I look up, and there’s two policemen coming in. And I say, what in the heck is this? So everybody—because he comes right out to the bowling lanes. He say, everybody up against the wall! So he makes everybody go up against the wall. He say, you two! He grabbed me and my cousin, and he say, you guys over here. And they took us out. I mean, the whole bowling alley, everybody’s watching—common criminals. I said, what in the world is going on? What happened? He said, a store had got robbed, he said it was a black guy—two black guys, one was tall and one was short. Well, I’m 5’9”. My cousin, he’s about 6’4”, so we fit the description. And the weirdest thing about it is that after he grabbed up, threw us up against the wall, because I’m a wrestler, my next, first reflex is to react. And he went just like this. And if I had reacted further, I would have been shot. So anyway, he took me to the Kennewick police station, they booked us. And I said, can I call my coach? And they said, why? I said, if I call him, he’ll tell you where I was at when this crime happened. You said the crime happened around 6:00. So I get my coach on the phone, I say, hey, I’m in jail. Can you get on this phone and tell this guy where I was at at 6:00? So he gets on the phone, he said, that is Bobby Sparks, and at 6:00 he was out in Walla Walla. We had a wrestling match in Walla Walla. Because he’s our lightweight, he was on the mat at this time. Will you please let him go? So anyway it, like I said, as I got older and as I started mingling, I started seeing a lot of the racism. Even, this was in, like you say, in the early ‘60s and early ‘70s. Franklin: Let’s see here. You already kind of covered some of these. How did your racial background figure into your working experiences? Sparks: You know, it’s the craziest thing. Here I am, let me give you my credentials. I went to University of Washington; I got a degree in business economics. IBEW Local 112, I got electrical training, journeyman wireman. I got my business license, which is electrical administrators for the State of Washington when I started working. So you look at all of my credentials, you say, this guy can go in, and he can get a job anywhere he wants to, based on his past performance. You know, if you look at my application for the companies that I applied for—which, I just found this out recently, and it kind of pisses me off—which is a good deal, I guess, I shouldn’t complain. But instead of going in and hiring me based on my credentials, based on the skill level that I had, they brought me in as an equal opportunity employee, as a special employee. And to me, because I’ve always been a competitor my whole life, I’m thinking, why you got to bring me in that way, instead of bringing me in just normal? So that kind of insulted me, yeah. Franklin: Right, because that idea is to counteract the bias inherent in hiring and to get us to a world that would be strictly merit-based, that’s the ideal. Even though it doesn’t exist. But you’re saying, I’m coming in under merit, but we’re so far away from that for blacks, that you’re going to bring me in under equal opportunity. Sparks: Equal opportunity employee. And I looked at that—because I’ve been a competitor. I was a national wrestling champ coming out of high school. I went to University of Washington, I went to NCAAs and I wrestled and I competed at that level. So then to say, you got to change the playing ground for me to get hired, it blew me away. Yeah, blew me away. But anyway, those are some of the things that, because we are in the state of Washington, it’s the unspoken things. And I found this out after about two, three years ago, when I was looking at some of my forms that had the special Affirmative Action stamp on it. And I’m thinking, affirmative action? And the amazing thing about it is that after I’d worked there, and that’s one of the things that I was going to show you, is the accomplishments that I have received after I got there. From EFCOG, which is one of the biggest DOE operations out there, they gave me a special award. They take me to Washington, DC and I got the DOE Secretary appreciation award. So that affirmative deal on my application just blew me away. But anyway. Franklin: That’s interesting, though, because it seems like one could still argue that without that program you might not have been hired at all. Right? I mean, because that was set up to—because blacks weren’t being hired on merit to begin with. Sparks: You’re correct. If that had not existed, I would not have been hired. But to me, that’s a slap in the face. You bring in a man who meets all the merits, but he’s not given the opportunity because of the color of his skin. But if I hadn’t have gotten hired, I would have been successful anyway. Because I would have just stepped out on my own and probably become a contractor. Which was what I did. But anyway, that’s just a twist. Franklin: That’s an interesting wrinkle into the whole thing. In what ways did the security and/or secrecy at Hanford impact your work or daily life? Sparks: Hm! Even after, like you say, after the early ‘40s and stuff, there was still a lot of proprietary type of things at the Hanford Site and a lot of secrecy. Because a lot of work we was doing was still with—you couldn’t go out—I can’t share right now on this some of the things that I do. So it’s still—it’s not the fact that we building the bomb, but it’s fact that we have companies that we’re working for that were proprietary type of stuff. I can’t just go in and take a picture and give it to you and you show it on this. So the secrecy is still there. But it’s just for other reasons. Franklin: You mentioned how you were treated on the job. What kinds of interactions did you have with coworkers and supervisors outside of work? Sparks: Outside of work, it’s like they say, the church is the most segregated thing on Sunday morning. Franklin: It’s funny, Vanis and Edmon said that yesterday. Sparks: It is, it’s the same thing. So it’s kind of the same way with—I go to Dallas to a convention and stuff, and one thing I’ve learnt because I’m from Texas, I don’t want to go to convention and hang out and drink with you. Because I’ve been on a wrestling team, and we go to, say University of Minnesota. And as a team, we sit around at a bar and we drinking and we having a good time. Then all of the sudden a little boy who’s got a little problem with me wants to challenge me. So in order for me to stop having those confrontations, then before we get too drunk, I’m leaving. So I learned that a long time ago, at U-Dub, at Arizona State, a lot of the college, you know. You get too much liquor and the tongue gets kind of loose and I get a little upset if you call me out of my name. Franklin: Yup. You kind of mentioned some of your first impressions of the working conditions, with the concrete melting—you know, the spill and things. What were the most difficult aspects of the job? Sparks: Because I was from sports, at the time, I was in great physical shape. So as far as the physical side of the job, there was no challenge there. I did have issues with some of the double standards on the job site. Franklin: Such as? Sparks: Such as, you and I sitting here, right, and they having a plan of the day meeting. I’m a journeyman, you’re an apprentice. Normally, at a plan of the day meeting, they come to the journeyman and give him the job. But it got to the point that they started going to the apprentice, give the apprentice the job for the day, and then we would walk out. So, I don’t even think they were aware of it; it was like, that happens. So, just that type of deal. The unfair treatment on the job site. Yeah. Franklin: Let’s see here. So, you mentioned that you worked kind of all over 300 Area, 221, FFTF. How did you feel at the time, during the Cold War, about working on the development of nuclear weapons? Sparks: See, I’m not that old. I’m only 63. So I didn’t have anything to do with the development of the nuclear weapon. My job was more, after the weapons were developed, I got with the research and development laboratory, and our mission was a little different. Our mission was to clean it up. Franklin: Right, but in the ‘80s, Hanford was still producing plutonium for the US nuclear weapon stockpile. Sparks: They were producing plutonium, but, like you say, they weren’t using it. It wasn’t like it was a secret, we’re going to drop this on a country because we’re at war. To me it was more like, especially research, they were finding the effects of it, they were trying to find some medical use. Because I went with research and development. We were more into separating it out than stockpiling it. But you know, it was just like, the threat wasn’t there, we were just trying to compete with Russia, let Russia and all these other countries know that we have it. But Battelle’s mission was different. And a lot of their funding was not for the development of plutonium. The majority they worked with was research and development, maybe for the cigarette companies, automotive companies, and other type of technology. Franklin: Right, what do they call it? It’s like non-1830 or something? Sparks: That type of work. And most of the jobs that I did was that type of work. I wasn’t into the development of the bomb. Franklin: What do you think is the most important legacy of the Hanford Site? Sparks: The most important legacy of the Hanford Site—I saw the guy from Japan. He came here and he saw the bomb and stuff. And they talked to him, because I guess he was from Nagasaki. And he saw the effects of it. Then after he saw the effects of it, then he comes out here. And we were still praising the bomb. So for him to look at that, and see his family’s affected by it and stuff—it was like, a bad thing. But now, because it’s cleaning up and trying to rebrand itself and show that we’re trying to get away from the mission of doing this, and now our mission is to help and develop, like you say, different isotopes to help for cancer, isotopes for prostate cancer and all that stuff. Even though they developed that bad stuff, as long as you can use it for some good things, then that is great. You look at the guy that cried when he saw the bombs, the Richland bomb out there. But you look at it, and I look back at it and I say, if we hadn’t have dropped the bomb, then how many lives would have died, and how many lives was killed at Pearl Harbor? So some good things came out of it, but you can also see the power of the bomb. Now man is able to wipe itself out. So now we have to have some ways of controlling that energy out there after we release, let it out. Franklin: What did you—so you came here in the mid-‘60s and then grew up here, what did you know or learn about the prior history of African American workers at Hanford? Sparks: The prior history? The only history I had of the African workers is, like I say, when I visited my granddaddy in Kildare, Texas, and he had a picture of the Hanford—I think it was one of the old pictures of the Hanford Site. He showed me that picture. So the only history I had was the history of my grandfather gave me of the workers coming out here. They don’t talk about the hardship. They’re from Texas, and they’re real private guys. They’re macho men. We just suck it up, put up with it. So he didn’t go into great detail. It was more, to him, it was like, he was proud, because he knew that I was working there at a place where he had built and he was instrumental in pouring the concrete, getting the concrete in. Franklin: Did he talk about that pride of having— Sparks: Oh, yeah, oh, yeah. I mean, my granddad is a huge man with a booming voice. I’d walk into the house and, boy, how you doing?! He’s yelling at me and stuff. I heard you work at the Hanford Site! He’d say, don’t you know I worked there in da-da-da-da-da?! And he talked a little about the storms and what he did. But he, and a lot of our other family members have land in Texas. So what he did, he didn’t stay here. He made some money, went back and paid for his land, bought him some apartment complexes and homes and stuff, and he lived a great life based on the money that he made at the Hanford Site. So he was really proud of that. Franklin: So it really kind of changed his life. Sparks: It do. I mean, I don’t know the exact amount of money that they were making in Kildare at the time, compared to what they was making there. But I heard it was a huge increase in income. Franklin: Yeah, it certainly was. Sparks: Huge boom. So, it did, it changed his life drastically. Franklin: From your perspective, what do you—what were their, the African Americans that worked at Hanford and the Manhattan Project, what were their most important contributions in the areas of work, community life, and civil rights? Sparks: The guys that work at the Hanford Site, like you say, you look at community life. Not only did they work, but they look back at the community, and they’re saying, dude, you’re back here, you’re breaking your back, you’re making absolutely nothing, just enough to feed your family. If you actually come to the Hanford Site, then you can not only feed your family, but you can raise enough money for your kids to go to college. There’s some opportunities out here that you would never, ever get in Texas. Because in Texas, you couldn’t become an electrician, you couldn’t become a laborer; they didn’t have those trades. You’re a farmer. Either a farmer, or worked in the lumber mills, or you worked on the railroad tracks. And the amount that they paid was below minimum. So there was some huge economic advantages of coming here and moving your family up to a nice home and education. Even sewer system—we didn’t have a sewer system down in Texas. So it was all kind of advantages for coming and working at the Hanford Site. Franklin: What were the major civil rights issues for African Americans at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities? Sparks: The main—it’s weird. I bought a house. Originally I applied for a home in Pasco. They said I didn’t make enough income, money, to buy the home in Pasco. Which is crazy. So then I applied for a home in Kennewick. And they said, oh, yeah, we can let you. It was the same price; it might have just been the institution, but it was weird to me. So I bought the house in Kennewick. And before I bought the house, I had the real estate company that was working for me, and it actually was my buddy. What she did was she brought an old form up, and on this form they even had statements, like no blacks allowed, and this is like, has slave quarters and stuff out there on this form that she gave me. So a lot of discrimination. Ask the question one more time—I think I got kind of sidetracked. Franklin: No problem. What were the major civil rights issues for African Americans at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities during your time here? Sparks: Okay. So that’s the one, is housing. The second one is the double standards. You go to east Pasco and we had dirt roads and no sidewalks. So it wasn’t— Franklin: Compared to west Pasco, right-- Sparks: Compared to west Pasco. Franklin: --which had sidewalks. Sparks: Sidewalks, yeah. Another thing is, when I was put in the special class, they didn’t grade me and put me in a special class because you’re special. They put me in the special class because—you know. Because of the color of my skin, is what I assumed it was. So there was issues like that. So those were the main ones to me, is housing and education. Franklin: What actions were being taken to address those issues? Sparks: Back then? Franklin: Yeah. Sparks: Basically what they did, it got to the point where people start protesting for equal housing. They knew that in order to make a change, we had to get on the city councils, we had to get into touch with the congressmen to change the way that they looked at the black community. Urban Renewal came in, and one thing that they did—a lot of the houses was really not up to code. So one thing that they did, they removed a lot of those older houses that was out of code which didn’t have septic systems in. They brought new septic systems in, they put sidewalks in. In the schools, they started hiring more black teachers so the kids could have a mentor that they could relate to, and counselors. So those are the things that they did. Franklin: Great. Sparks: Yeah. Franklin: Who were the important leaders of civil rights efforts in the area? Sparks: Well, one of the big leaders was, I call her Sister Barton. She was one of the leaders of the civil rights in the area. They had another gentleman by the name of Fletcher, he was another great leader and spokesman for the civil rights movements. They had Jackson, who was—most of these people got into the political side of it— Franklin: Was that Joe? Sparks: Yeah, Joe Jackson. They knew if they got on the political side of it they could make a change. They actually had not only Joe Jackson, you had Wayne Jackson also. He was involved in coming in and working with the cities to improve the conditions in east Pasco. Franklin: What were some notable successes of the civil rights movement? Sparks: Notable successes? Well, I guess I’m one of them. I’m a notable success. Because they made us—they made the government—the unions started counting how many people of color they had working in their armed forces and the services and stuff. And they started seeing there was none, and it wasn’t compatible to what the population was. So then they tried to go in there and ratify that—to take care of it. Franklin: What were some of the biggest challenges? Sparks: The biggest challenges? The biggest challenge is to change the culture. You have people who have believed for a long time that this is right. So you have to change that, to show them that it was not right. It was just wrong. Franklin: Yeah. And you’ve stayed at Hanford since you came here in the apprentice program, right? Or you stayed at Hanford/PNNL? Sparks: Mm-hmm. Franklin: Did you move away at all, or--? Sparks: No. When I left college in ’82, I started working at Hanford, and I’ve been out there for 34 years. Actually, I’m getting ready to retire from the Hanford Site. So like I said, the conditions are really good. They question the safety of it, but the safety is probably—their record is better than any other records in the state of Washington when it comes to safety. So I’ve enjoyed working there. It’s been a great career. Franklin: Good. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in the Tri-Cities during the Cold War? Sparks: During the Cold War? Future generations? Basically, asked me that a long time ago. It’s that basically you got to treat a man the way you want to be treated. If I was to bring my child out there, and he was to get a job at the Hanford Site, I want them to come in there with the knowledge that you are equal. The amazing thing about the Hanford Site is you can be everything from a plasma physicist to, you can be a laborer. There’s so many different jobs that you can do out there, and so many different people, and so much knowledge that you can get from the Hanford Site. Because, like I said, you got the science, you got the biology, you got fishing—I mean, you name it, PNNL has it. And then you got the other sites, which they’re in the process of cleaning it up and making it better. So they still have that also. As far as a place to work, and not only do you work at the Hanford Site—Hanford reaches out to all over the United States. There’s jobs in Seattle and Sequim, Washington. Places you can work doing research with fish, with animals. So it’s very diverse. It’s the most diverse place that you can find for work, is at the Hanford Site. Franklin: Is there anything else you would like to mention related to migration, segregation and civil rights and how they impacted your life at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities? Sparks: I think I covered it all. Franklin: Yeah. Sparks: I think I dipped into everything. Franklin: Yeah, you did a really great job. Sparks: I think I did. Franklin: Well, thank you, Bobby. I really appreciate you taking the time and coming to interview with us. Sparks: Oh, thank you for interviewing me. Yeah. Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview B Reactor Pacific Northwest National Laboratory 221-T Plant 300 Area FFTF (Fast Flux Test Facility) WPPSS (Washington Public Power Supply Systems) WPPSS-2 Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1965- Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1982- Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Bobby Sparks Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Pasco (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Kennewick (Wash.) Migration Segregation School integration Discrimination Civil rights movements Sports Wrestling Electricians Racism Affirmative action Civil rights Description An account of the resource Bobby Sparks moved to Pasco, Washington in 1965 as a child and began working on the Hanford Site in 1982. A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288 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 05/08/2018 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. This oral history collection was done in partnership with the National Park Service under Task Agreement P17AC01288. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F13896fdc609391071af3b38d7afdf2d1.JPG e934fe7b23d724dd0466d8683b1a21b5 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F443c48154ed935540525182cdba1b8ce.mp4 aa4d01011e7e59e9b95562002c38f636 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 Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford Subject The topic of the resource African Americans; Oral History Description An account of the resource A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource National Park Service Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 9/1/2017-9/1/2019 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project. Relation A related resource RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RG2_8 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 Bryan and Rhonda Rambo 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 Bryan and Rhonda Rambo on March 23rd, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Bryan and Rhonda about their experiences living in the Tri-Cities and/or working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, could you state and spell your full name for us, starting with Bryan? Bryan Rambo: Yes. Bryan, B-R-Y-A-N. Middle initial, Keith, K-E-I-T-H. Last name, Rambo, R-A-M-B-O. Franklin: Okay. Rhonda Rambo: My name is Rhonda Rambo. Rhonda, R-H-O-N-D-A. Middle initial, M, and last name, Rambo, R-A-M-B-O. Franklin: Thank you. So, where did your—your parents moved here, right, to come to work at Hanford? Rhonda Rambo: Yes. Franklin: Your father did. Rhonda Rambo: Our father did. Franklin: Where did your father move from? Rhonda Rambo: Bivins, Texas. Franklin: Bivins, Texas. Bryan Rambo: Yup. Thank you. You remembered Bivins, Texas. Franklin: Do you know where that is? Rhonda Rambo: It’s between Arkansas and Kansas—Arkansas/Texarkana border. Franklin: Okay. Bryan Rambo: Northeast Texas. Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. Franklin: East Texas, gotcha. And when did he come to Hanford? Rhonda Rambo: I’m not sure when they came to Hanford, but my mom moved here first, and she stayed actually in Hermiston with a cousin and that was back in 1954. And then my dad was in the service. Bryan Rambo: Yeah, the Korean War at the time—well, he was coming back. Rhonda Rambo: Coming back. And so once he came back, she was already moved—I believe she was already here in Pasco, east Pasco, and he came after. Franklin: So your parents were married before they— Rhonda Rambo: Yes. Franklin: And when did they get married? Rhonda Rambo: Ooh. Bryan Rambo: That’s a good one. Rhonda Rambo: I’m not sure. Bryan Rambo: I’m not— Rhonda Rambo: Maybe in ’48? I wanna think 1948. Franklin: Okay. I don’t know. It’s probably not super important. Rhonda Rambo: Because I can’t remember what Artie— Bryan Rambo: Yeah, exactly, it would be either ’48 or ’47. Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, because whatever Artie’s birthday year— Bryan Rambo: Artie’s ‘52. 1952. Rhonda Rambo: So, I imagine it’d be—well, yeah, then it’d mean about ’51. Because she was kind of pregnant, I think, at the time. Franklin: Ah. That’s not uncommon. Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: So, you said your mom came first; she came to Hermiston. Did she have family in Hermiston? Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, there was a cousin. Franklin: And do you know why they were in Hermiston? Rhonda Rambo: I’m not sure. I think that cousin actually moved further in. But that’s where, that was the first place she stayed. Franklin: Okay. What do you know about their lives before they came to the Tri-Cities? Rhonda Rambo: My grandfather was a sharecropper with cotton, so they worked the land. He had his own farm. Bryan Rambo: He also did truck farming, too. Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. And my dad lived with his aunt. And I guess they were kind of—they had a little bit more money, I suppose, and so my dad didn’t have to work as hard. But my mom—they kind of went to school together and they had met up. After that, they had all of us kids. Franklin: Were you two born here in the Tri-Cities? Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. Our Lady of Lourdes, I was. Franklin: Lady of Lourdes. Bryan Rambo: Only one of us was—our oldest brother was born in Texas. Everybody else was born up in Washington State. Franklin: Okay. What do you know about their initial experience of coming to the Tri-Cities and finding a place to live? Rhonda Rambo: All I remember my mom talking about is the house on east Pasco, saying how bad the sandstorms would be. When the front door—screen door would be just blocked with sand and tumbleweeds, basically. That’s what I remember her talking about, living on the east side of town in that home that she stayed in. It was an apartment complex she stayed in. Bryan Rambo: Right around A Street, what is now A Street. Very dirty and dusty over there. Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, that’s why she just kept saying how dusty it was, and dirty. Coming from Texas with the red clay and more—their land was more forestry, so it wasn’t—for her to come here and see all this dust and dirt and back there it’s more trees and red clay. I think it was a big change for her. Bryan Rambo: Mm-hmm. Franklin: Great. Let’s see here. Do you know what prompted your mom and then your dad to move up here from Texas? Rhonda Rambo: The relatives. Bryan Rambo: Yeah. Rhonda Rambo: Other families from different counties in Texas moved up here and the word got out, and I think they just started migrating— Bryan Rambo: Yeah, the opportunities. Rhonda Rambo: --up here. Franklin: Right, because that was part of a pretty large migration of blacks from east Texas that came, I believe, initially in the Manhattan Project. So your parents were part of that word-of-mouth migration during and after World War II. Okay. So you kind of described the first place your mom stayed after she arrived. When did your family stay together—do you remember the first house that you guys were in, or your parents were in? Rhonda Rambo: The house that I have now, the family home, is on Clark Street. And prior to that, they lived in Navy Homes. Bryan Rambo: Yeah, we called it the Navy Homes over there, off of 10th and Court. Rhonda Rambo: Court, yeah. That’s where most the families started out, in those homes. And eventually my dad saved up enough money to purchase the home that we’re in now. Franklin: And where—is that home in east Pasco, or in— Rhonda Rambo: West. Franklin: West Pasco. Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. Franklin: And what was the address? Bryan Rambo: No, no, no, you mean the Navy Homes and stuff? Franklin: Oh, yeah, so I was—well, both, actually. Bryan Rambo: Oh, Navy Homes is in more downtown but it’s in the northeast part of Pasco. Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. Bryan Rambo: But it’s downtown—still considered downtown. Franklin: Yeah, I’m trying to imagine—like, I’m trying to look at a map of Pasco in my head. Rhonda Rambo: If you know where the Chinese Garden is? It’s straight across the street. Bryan Rambo: Mm-hmm, yeah. Franklin: Oh, okay. Rhonda Rambo: And all those little houses there. That’s Navy Homes. Franklin: Oh, okay. Bryan Rambo: They actually rebuilt those. They’re still there. They remodeled them and they built them like they are today. Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. They’re considered low income, I guess, too. And they were established I guess back then for the Navy families that might have been here at the time, too. After that, I think, just general families were just moving in there. Franklin: How long did your parents stay in the Navy Homes? Rhonda Rambo: It must’ve been until ’62. Because Tim-- Bryan Rambo: Because Tim was still—me, Sean was still there, I was still there, Dwayne and Artie. So we—it was about ’60— Rhonda Rambo: ’61 or ’62, because after that I was at the house. I was born in the house in ’65, so. Bryan Rambo: And I want to make a note, too, that before my father even got out to the Area when he’d come back, he was working for the railroads, too. Burlington Northern at the time—Great Northern. He was there. He was a brakeman there for a short time before he got out to the Area. Franklin: So he must have traveled around quite a bit working for the railroad? Bryan Rambo: Mm-hmm. Well, he stayed local mostly because he was like a—they had the control switch men and all that. He wasn’t working, going up far, he was just doing the locking or—what do they call it? Switchmen. That’s what he was doing, basically. So he stayed close to town a lot. Franklin: Right, right. Makes sense. What was the hardest—did your parents ever talk about adjusting to life here in the Tri-Cities and what maybe was a struggle for them coming from east Texas to here, and maybe what was the benefits of coming? Rhonda Rambo: I don’t remember my mom ever saying it was a struggle. But I think she liked it. Because after she—she took us all one time down to Texas for a family trip. After I seen where she grew up, I kind of understood, maybe, why she chose to come up here and stay and start over as a family. Franklin: What was different about it down there? Rhonda Rambo: It was really—it’s rural. All rural. Bryan Rambo: Yeah. Rhonda Rambo: I mean, you’re way out of town from anyone. When it’s dark, it’s dark. It’s pitch. You can’t see nothing. I mean, she warned us. She made me scared to go because she kept telling us how bad the snakes, the ticks, when you go out to the outhouse, you got to look in there and make sure there ain’t no critter in there. So I kind of had a fear of going. But, I mean, it was fun, but I understood why. And even after I went down again after I was older, I kept—I think you and me were together—and I kept saying, man, I could not live here. Bryan Rambo: Yeah. [LAUGHTER] Rhonda Rambo: There’s no way. With the humidity, it being hot and just living like that. I wouldn’t imagine trying to live like that, but, you know, some people—what you adapt to when you’re growing up, you adapt to. Franklin: Right, yeah, that’s true. Let’s see here. So, tell me about your father’s work—when did he start working at Hanford and what did he do? Bryan Rambo: Well, as I say, when he got here, he did several jobs, but I knew he worked for the Burlington Northern. Then he got a job up in the Hanford Area and that was around 1950—actually probably the year I was born, ’58, ’59, he got there. Franklin: Okay. Bryan Rambo: Started working there. Franklin: And what was his job out at Hanford? Bryan Rambo: Patrol. Franklin: Oh, Hanford Patrol. Bryan Rambo: He was a patrolman. Franklin: Okay. That must’ve been—were there any other—do you know if there were any other African American patrolmen at the time? Bryan Rambo: I had—fortunately, I’ve had some documents that are local news about it, and I believe he was one of the first, if not the first black patrolman out there in the Hanford Area. Franklin: Yeah, I would think so, too, considering that employment was still somewhat unofficially restricted to—most blacks worked outside jobs—outside the Area or more menial, more service-type-oriented jobs. Did he talk about his work as a patrolman at all? Rhonda Rambo: I don’t remember that. Bryan Rambo: Well, we remember—well, basically all we remember, he had a blue uniform and his hat was a barracks hat. And he’d come in—he’d work—with the stripe. It looked like Richland PD back in the day, but—there was like a light blue uniform, he’d come in, his gear, his gun and stuff. Well, he wouldn’t carry his gun all the time. I didn’t see. He probably had it but he hid it. Rhonda Rambo: It was in the holster. Bryan Rambo: But he always had the holster. It was interesting. He would come in, he would go talk to us to make sure we did our chores, see how we were doing. And apparently get good news from Mom that we hadn’t gotten in trouble or anything because he was going to get us later of course! But he was a hard worker. He’d come in—he didn’t talk much about it. But he did take us out there. He took me out there. Franklin: Oh, really? Bryan Rambo: Yes! Rhonda Rambo: I don’t remember going. Franklin: And when did this— Bryan Rambo: You were really young then. Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, I don’t remember. Bryan Rambo: It was interesting, because he brought us through what is now the Prosser Barricade. It’s off of 240 and I think it’s highway, what is that, Highway 4 now? But it’s not the Wye Barricade area, if you’re kind of situated with the 400 Area and all that. It’s like coming into 400 Area is closer. But anyway it comes off of Highway 240 and—gosh, I can’t remember—I think it’s Highway 4. But anyway, there used to be a barricade there and you can’t see nothing there but a parking lot there. But we actually drove in there, we went in, and he started showing us the Area. We didn’t go into the facilities, per se. We went through there, then we went through and drove through what is now the 100 Area. He took us way out there. He was just showing us the scenery, the N Reactor, the 100 Areas. He didn’t show us East and West too much at the time. And 300 Area, he showed us 300 Area and he kind of told us where he worked at, at the time. At the time, he told me, if I remember right, I think he was at 300 Area then. But he’s worked all the areas he said. But I remember 300 Area, he showed us a lot about 300 Area. Franklin: Right, yeah. I think they—most patrolmen kind of got stationed all over the place. Bryan Rambo: Yeah. But we stayed in the vehicle, couldn’t get out. Franklin: Of course. Bryan: Rambo: We just drove around. But, no, I remember that. It was a great experience for me, because I didn’t—you know, I wanted to see where he worked out, what he do. And he just drove us around. And it’s so big, at the time. It was interesting. Franklin: Did your father ever talk about any challenges with his work at Hanford? Maybe ever any racial conflicts or things with supervisors or fellow employees or anything like that? Rhonda Rambo: No, my dad was a pretty quiet man. I mean, I don’t remember ever hearing him—I still don’t remember him even raising his voice. All I remember him is coming home, my mom fussing, and then he’d go out to the garage, and that was his place to kind of wind down, tangle with stuff. I don’t remember—I don’t even remember getting a whupping by him, but they said I did. Bryan Rambo: You did. [LAUGHTER] Rhonda Rambo: But I don’t remember. I remember him taking me and trying to show me how to drive a truck. You know, it was an old, what? That old Chevy truck he had, and the stick was up here. And I remember him trying to push the clutch and he’d tell me to go down with the gear. That’s what I remember. I don’t remember—I do kind of remember the uniform thing, but I don’t remember too much of him complaining about work. Like you said, he would come in, he’d have dinner with us kids and, you know. I just remember him being a mellow, quiet man. Bryan Rambo: Mm-hmm, I agree. Rhonda Rambo: He enjoyed fishing when he had time off. He also had another business. He worked for Sandvik Metals doing their land. Bryan Rambo: Yeah, he had a landscaping business. Franklin: Oh, okay. Oh, wow. Bryan Rambo: And myself and my other brother, we’d go with him and we’d mole and cut and weed-eat and all that stuff. For, like, you said, Sandvik’s. It was several homes in Richland and Kennewick we’d go to, and Pasco. Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, he did that. Franklin: And you guys grew up in Pasco and lived in Pasco your whole lives? Rhonda Rambo: Yes. Pasco High. Stevens Middle School, we went to. Franklin: Okay. How long did your father work out at Hanford for? Bryan Rambo: Exactly ten years. Franklin: Exactly ten years. And what— Bryan Rambo: So it was ’58 through 1968. Franklin: Okay, and why did he leave Hanford? Rhonda Rambo: Got sick. Bryan Rambo: At the time, he was a—well, he smoked a lot, too. He quit smoking, but he had issues with emphysema and stuff. But he wanted to get in town—my mother, at the time, wanted him in town, and Garrett Freight Lines was opening a local delivery truck service in town. And he just decided to go ahead and work with them and stay in town and stop the long drive out to the Area. Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. Franklin: Yeah, that is a long drive out there from Pasco. I imagine, especially with the roads in the ‘60s. Okay. So let’s hear kind of about your guys’ experiences with growing up. So we talked about the kind of housing you guys lived in. Did—so I know east Pasco was kind of the hub of the African American community, but you guys lived in west Pasco. Rhonda Rambo: Yes. Franklin: So you would’ve went to—did you—I imagine you would’ve went to schools that were predominantly white— Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. Franklin: As opposed to schools in east Pasco, which would’ve been predominantly African American at the time. Rhonda Rambo: And at the time, there was only one school in east Pasco. Bryan Rambo: Yeah, Whittier. Rhonda Rambo: Which was Whittier. Franklin: Whittier, right. Rhonda Rambo: And our older brother and possibly— Bryan Rambo: Yep, Artie, he was the only one. Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, Artie was the only one that went there. All the rest of us went to Pasco High. Franklin: Pasco High, right. How large was the African American community in west Pasco where you lived? Rhonda Rambo: Maybe, I can think of— Bryan Rambo: Oh, man, everybody was basically on the east side at the time. Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. Well, the Robinsons lived up the street. Bryan Rambo: Yeah. Rhonda Rambo: There was maybe one family I could think of that was close to us. Bryan Rambo: Yeah it was the Robinsons and that was it. We were one of the first families that went even on the west side of Pasco. For a long time. Rhonda Rambo: For a long time. Bryan Rambo: It was not many blacks would even be on the west side of Pasco, on this side of the—you know, of the town. Franklin: Did you face any challenges being one of the—outside of what had been formally and informally—you know, east Pasco’s formally and informally placed as where African Americans would live. And that line was pretty drawn sharp with the railroad there. Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. Our school, I mean, I remember junior high, not so much elementary, but junior high, I remember one time some girls were saying, well, why are you sitting with the white girls? And I’m like, you mean, my neighbors and my friends? Because they couldn’t even—they couldn’t see that me being black, sitting over here, but being growing up in a majority-white neighborhood, that’s who I grew up with. So I felt comfortable, but I felt a little bit like discriminated against, because I felt pressured into, like, oh, I got to go start socializing with these girls. So that was my first reaction, I guess. Someone showing some kind of discrimination. Bryan Rambo: Now, in addition with what she said, that’s when we moved—we did move from Navy Homes in to Clark Street. Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. Bryan Rambo: Which was further west at the time. And that was considered growing, getting better and everything, as Pasco. And like I said, like she said, with just the Robinsons, I guess, and us, and not many minority or blacks were on that side of town. Franklin: Right. How big is your family? Rhonda Rambo: Seven of us. Bryan Rambo: Mm-hmm. Franklin: Seven--? Rhonda Rambo: Seven children. Franklin: Seven children, okay. And where are you guys age-wise on the--? Rhonda Rambo: I’m now—I was the only girl out of seven—out of six boys. So I’m now the baby. Three out of the seven—six boys—are deceased. So he would be—I would’ve been second-to-the-youngest, first the baby brother, and then he would be third in line from the two older brothers. Franklin: Okay, cool. Did you guys attend church? Rhonda Rambo: Oh, yeah. Bryan Rambo: Yes. Franklin: And what church did your family attend? Rhonda Rambo: Trinity Church of God. Franklin: And where was that located? Rhonda Rambo: On the west side of town. [LAUGHTER] Bryan Rambo: Yeah. Franklin: On the— Bryan Rambo: Well, yes. Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, it was on the west side. Bryan Rambo: Well, it was originally on the east side, though. Rhonda Rambo: No. Bryan Rambo: Yeah, yeah. Rhonda Rambo: Was it? I don’t remember. Bryan Rambo: We went to church on Ainsworth—it was off of—not Ainsworth, but off of A Street—it’s 1st Street. Not 1st Street. What’s the name of that street that there’s only partially of it left on east side, but the church was there. And that’s when we had—it was before Elder Knowles—Elder James. Rhonda Rambo: Oh, I don’t remember him. Bryan Rambo: See? Rhonda Rambo: [LAUGHTER] I was too young, probably. Bryan Rambo: Yeah. Rhonda Rambo: I only remember the church on Shoshone. Bryan Rambo: Yeah, you were young. But it was—but then Elder Knowles taken over and that’s when you remember, and then we moved—the church moved from the east side to where it is now on Shoshone. Rhonda Rambo: Shoshone. 4th and Shoshone. Bryan Rambo: Yes. And there were— Rhonda Rambo: 5th and Shoshone. Bryan Rambo: Yeah, 5th and Shoshone, exactly. Rhonda Rambo: 5th and Shoshone. Franklin: So did its congregation follow when it moved or was it more of a mixed congregation? Rhonda Rambo: It was people from west—east and west—well, east Pasco that came there. Which was kind of nice, because those members, I went to school with, so it was kind of like I still got to see people I knew and went to school with but lived in east Pasco. But yeah there was quite a few members. The majority of the members were from east Pasco. We were the ones I think thatweren’t. From the west, on the west side. Franklin: What role did the church play in the community? Rhonda Rambo: A big part of our family. Our mom, she had us in church three, four times a week. Bryan Rambo: At least three times a week. Rhonda Rambo: I mean, Sunday was twice a day. We went morning service, to Sunday school, church, and then we came back in the evening. Even when we were young and she knew we had to get home with the younger ones, she had the older ones walk us home. So a big group of—here’s seven kids walking down the street. You know, back then, we—today, that’d be a gang. Bryan Rambo: [LAUGHTER] Rhonda Rambo: But, yeah, she sent us home so we can get home and get to bed while she stayed and attended church. Our dad was sick the majority, most of the time. I remember her dragging him to church on Sunday because of football, that was his thing. I don’t want to go, I want to watch the game. But every once in a while, he’d dress up and he’d go, she’d get him to go. But once he started getting sick, he couldn’t go. But she still got up and got us dressed and off we went. Franklin: What was your father’s illness? Rhonda Rambo: Cancer. Lung cancer. Yeah. Bryan Rambo: And emphysema. Well, emphysema plus the—was part of it. Franklin: You said he was a pretty heavy smoker? Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. I don’t remember him smoking, but my mom—both my parents did smoke. But my mom, I don’t remember her smoking, either. So she did quit at some time, and my dad. Bryan Rambo: And they had some issues in 300 Area, too, that happened. Particles that got in there, too. So he had issues there. So he had gotten sick. It was a combination of both. Franklin: Yeah. Okay. And when did your father pass away? Bryan Rambo: 19—I remember I was in— Rhonda Rambo: ’78. Bryan Rambo: Yup. Franklin: About ten years after he retired from Hanford. Bryan Rambo: Yes, mm-hmm. Franklin: Do you recall any family or community activities, events or traditions, including food, that people brought from the places they came from? Like east Texas? Rhonda Rambo: Oh, yeah. Well, of course. Bryan Rambo: It’s a lot. It’s so much. Rhonda Rambo: My mom’s a Southern cook and so am I. So one thing she traditionally kept us eating during, I don’t know, I guess in holidays, she taught me to make gumbo. And I still traditionally make it for Thanksgiving. Bryan Rambo: Every year, mm-hmm. Still do. Rhonda Rambo: I don’t know. We—my momma used to take us picking beans. There was a farm here in Pasco that I guess after they harvested, they would let the families go in and pick again to see anything. So my mom did a lot of canning. She would take us all out there. We picked beans if we could off the vines and bring them home. She canned a lot of it. So we had a lot of fresh cooking. And when she cooked, she’d cook a lot. But yeah, the Southern cooking of snap beans and potatoes and ham and— Bryan Rambo: Preserves. Rhonda Rambo: She had a garden in the yard there, so she’d grow greens and cabbage and tomatoes. She would take tomatoes and cucumbers and pour vinegar and salt and pepper on, and we’d eat slices of that. Fresh corn if it was—either she’d take us and pick it or she—she couldn’t probably grow enough of it. But anytime she could get it, she’d cook it. There was a local guy that would catch fish and bring it to her. Crappies and bluegills, by the buckets, and we’d have fish fry, you know, as soon as we cleaned them all up. Bryan Rambo: Alan. Alan was the guy that used to do that. Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, so traditionally, yeah, she loved to cook and she instilled that in me. I feel like some of my cooking skills came from a young child going in the kitchen and helping her a lot in the kitchen, learning how to do a lot of it. And I thank her for that because it makes me a good woman today, I think. Franklin: Great. Bryan Rambo: And me, I continue to garden, like she said, we just—I still do. I give her the— Franklin: Kind of got bit by the bug? Bryan Rambo: I give her the greens so she can cook them. Franklin: Nice, nice. What about any—like community activities or events, like, celebrations that may have been more specific to the South? Was there anything like that that was brought? Rhonda Rambo: Well, I know, Juneteenth is really big here and in the South. That’s one of the things that they still today do here each year. That was one of the big things I remember as far as traditional things that were done. Easter is a big—I think played a lot here, still today, is the women would come out with the big hair, big hats. My mom was one of them. [LAUGHTER] Yeah. She loved to dress up for anniversary, church anniversaries. That was something big that they—she dressed us up. But I remember, Easter mainly, going and wearing gloves, Easter gloves, hats, little patent shoes, matching your little patent purse. Yeah. So I remember that was a big—and the bonnet of course. Bryan Rambo: Oh, yes. Franklin: That’s cool. Were there any opportunities available here that were not available where your parents came from? Rhonda Rambo: I think work. Just work altogether. I mean, if you didn’t get out from where they lived, you were going to be a farmer. So I think coming here had bigger opportunities, money. The South is hard, back then. You couldn’t do too much down there and not be scrutinized about what you’re doing. So for my grandfather to be able to sharecrop and have some land to work it and not lose it to the white man that was down there was a lot. Bryan Rambo: True. Rhonda Rambo: So I can’t tell you the whole story, but there was a relative of ours that’s supposed to have shot a white man, and they smuggled him out, and he did live, he did survive. But his family—he had to leave his wife and children to start a whole new life away from there, because that person’s family after they left and they were questioned, where was this person, they were basically beaten, land taken from—part of their land was taken from them in order to try to get them to say what had happened. But they kept their mouths quiet. They did get him out, and he did have to start—and my mom actually saw that person. He had started a whole new life, new change of life, new lifestyle, new family. But it was kind of sad, he had to leave his wife and children just to start over, just to get out of the—leaving. But the family that was left there did get tortured because of it. So that’s one story that will always stick with me, because that’s kind of sad that you have to be smuggled out to survive. It’s almost like a slavery-type thing, where you have to run for your life and leave your family. Franklin: Yeah. Rhonda Rambo: You know? Franklin: Yeah, yeah. Sharecropping is—and that Jim Crow system is—too many uncomfortable parallels to slavery. Slavery by a different name. Did your parents ever talk much about the segregation that was in the South and any differences here in Washington? Bryan Rambo: Well, in my experience, we knew that certain parts—we’d go to like—we would walk around a lot when we were growing up. And we knew in the earlier ‘60s, we were told we could go—if we go to Kennewick and walk across the old blue bridge—the old bridge, now it’s gone—we could cross over there. You could go there and shop and do your thing and get done, but you can only—make sure you’re back before nightfall. Don’t be there after nightfall, we were always told that. Us older boys. Because we were worried about, you know, accidents can happen. She just said, just get back because things happen there. I’m not saying there was cross-burning and stuff, I didn’t see that, but there was a fear that could happen to us in Kennewick. So we made sure we did everything we did, we stayed in Pasco or stay outside of town, and not have those kind of problems. Rhonda Rambo: I think one thing I remember is going to school and everybody saying—you know like when we had basketball games against Richland or Kennewick, we always seemed to have the rep of we’re bad. You know, Pasco’s bad, they’re this bad element. And even with—I work in Richland, and even working with some of my coworkers and they say, where do you live? And I say, oh, Pasco. And they say, oh, I would never go to Pasco. And I’m like, good! Stay out. Because we ain’t missing nothing over there that you ain’t bringing us already. But it’s just that fear of hearing, Pasco’s bad. But you know, really, it’s not. I think it’s all in people’s—it may be, back in the day— Bryan Rambo: Mm-hm. Rhonda Rambo: I remember when the prostitutes were legally—not legally—but they walked downtown Pasco. I remember that. I remember the pimps. I remember hearing about the police pulling these people over. I remember hearing they said they put them in the cars and put them back out on the street just to keep doing what they’re doing. I remember after-hours night clubs that they can go to after-hours, on east Pasco. Where they can gamble, drink late at night. I remember all that. But it didn’t affect me because my mom kept us— Bryan Rambo: JD’s. [LAUGHTER] Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. My mom kept us— Franklin: Sorry, what? What’s JD’s? Rhonda Rambo: JD’s was the old—you shut up before I say it now. Bryan Rambo: [LAUGHTER] Rhonda Rambo: Well, it was a grocery store, but I don’t think it was a night— Bryan Rambo: Well, there was some other stores around— Rhonda Rambo: Around there, yeah. Bryan Rambo: Some clubs were up there. Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, there were some after-hour clubs that—they were bars but then they did after-hours stuff. But the prostitution, that went on for years. Bryan Rambo: Yeah. Franklin: Yeah. I mean, all cities have these issues. It’s funny when they pretend they don’t exist or they shove them to an area and stigmatize that area. That’s often—yeah, I’m not from around here but when I did move here a couple years ago, it’s one of the first things I heard about Pasco. Don’t go to east Pasco. Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, don’t go. Franklin: Yeah, and no real reason but that’s the “bad” area of town. Oh, well, then you come to find out the history of east Pasco and you can see why it’s been stigmatized that way, and it’s not due to the residents; it’s more due to careless— Rhonda Rambo: Talk, yeah. Franklin: And prejudice. Yeah. Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, so that’s what I remember, is being labeled as the “bad” town to live in. I mean, Pasco has a lot of good elements to it I still see today. And obviously the growth is one of them. So I still think that it’s a great place to raise your family as far as having your children grow up here. I love it. I go to—I have family, I go—my family’s from the Bay Area, so I go out there and I visit. But I don’t want to live there. I have family in Seattle, I go to visit, but I don’t want to live there. I’m always—this is what I call home. And, see, I probably will die here. I imagine. [LAUGHTER] But I mean, everybody has their own different views. But, like you said, there’s bad element everywhere. You can’t really get away from it; you learn to adjust and hope for the best. I just think that there’s good and bad in everybody. Franklin: Yeah. Bryan Rambo: And also one of the issues I remember that—it was bussing. It wasn’t bussing, because we were never bussed; my mother would take us to school or we walked to school. But I also was at Longfellow at the time, and all of the sudden they moved us out of Longfellow and they switched us to what is now Emerson, the Emerson School. They just moved us around, switched us around, and we were told it was kind of because of a bussing issue—not a bus issue, but they wanted to move minorities around. So things were changing, I guess, so they moved us around. They moved us out of Longfellow to Emerson and then started changing out then. Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. Bryan Rambo: So that was quite interesting, yeah. Franklin: The integration—you’re talking about the integration of schools. Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, the integration, yeah. I remember that. Franklin: And where—sorry, I’m not super-familiar with these schools, so where was Longfellow? Bryan Rambo: It is now on— Rhonda Rambo: 10th? Bryan Rambo: 10th, it’s more in town. It’s on 10th also, 10th and— Rhonda Rambo: Clark. Bryan Rambo: No, actually, it’s 14th. That’s 14th, isn’t it? It’s 14th. It’s 14th. Rhonda Rambo: 14th and Clark. Franklin: And where is Emerson? Rhonda Rambo: Emerson is right on Sylvester. Bryan Rambo: Mm-hm. Franklin: Okay. Bryan Rambo: Well, now it’s not. No, it’s not on Sylvester anymore. It’s moved up, now. It’s—but at the time, she’s right, it was on Sylvester. Rhonda Rambo: It’s now the Boys and Girls Club of America, that’s where it is now, and then they moved it over towards the high school now. Emerson, that’s the new Emerson. Franklin: Were there any ways in which opportunities for your parents were limited because of segregation or racism? Bryan Rambo: I think, personally, I think the opportunities opened, like I say, when they got here, my sister was saying. It just, like I say, it was more work. My dad always had found work and he had, like I say, his own business. Rhonda Rambo: They both went to CBC for a little—my mom got an AA at CBC, and so she taught early childhood education. Bryan Rambo: Mm-hmm, Head Start. Rhonda Rambo: Head Start. I think there were other black women that my mom—the Tates—that one of them worked there with my mom. Bryan Rambo: Yes. Of course, Virgie Robinson. The school’s named after her now. We were real close to her, real close to her. Franklin: Yeah, one of our early interviews for the project was Richie, Richie Robinson, I talked with him. Bryan Rambo: Yeah, Richie’s great, yeah. Franklin: Yeah, he is. That was a really wonderful interview. And his mom, I wish I could have met her. She was a really— Bryan Rambo: Oh, she was great. Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. Franklin: She was a really amazing lady. Bryan Rambo: Yes, she was. Franklin: What about for yourselves? Did you feel in any ways, growing up in Pasco, that—or when you were first starting out in adulthood, felt that your opportunities were limited in any way because of de facto segregation or racism? Rhonda Rambo: I don’t think so. Bryan Rambo: I feel that my parents at the time, they kind of were in the tougher fringes of the—you know, segregation and all. Because they came out of Jim Crow era. And then things were changing in the ‘60s and things were getting a little bit better. I think the opportunities for me opened up. For me, and my sister. We found work, there’s no problem. Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. Bryan Rambo: Even in school, I felt had all the opportunities I wanted to go forward from middle school and high school. Went to Stevens, both went to Stevens, and it was good there. Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. Bryan Rambo: High school. Franklin: And could you describe any interactions that you or your parents had with people from other parts of the Tri-Cities that stand out to you, if any? Bryan Rambo: My father, like we say, he was kind of tight-lipped a little bit about the friends. But he had a gentleman named Mr. Kimbrough. Now, he’s also a fellow patrolman. He’d hang out with him, and he would go out—his house was out further out at right now what would be the farm areas. Its no longer a farm area, now it’s West Pasco, further out. I think he was on 50th or 40—I think Road 53, I think, or 54. But anyway at that time, he’d go out there and he would hang out—I remember he used to drive out there with him. He would help him do his taxes, he would help him do his work in his house. They were really good friends, and they had good rec. He was really good. And they took care of each other. You know, he was a real good friend of my dad’s. Rhonda Rambo: We had good neighbors. We had good friends around our neighborhood. Franklin: Who were some of the people that influenced you as children? Bryan Rambo: Locally, or--? Franklin: Yeah, yeah. And nationally? Rhonda Rambo: Influenced me? I want to say—I don’t know, I think just my upbringing. The way my mother taught us. After our dad passed, my mom really had to step up. I mean, she still had five? Bryan Rambo: Yup. Rhonda Rambo: Five kids in the house to raise. So she immediately—she worked nights, I remember getting up and making her coffee and packing her lunch. As she got older and got sicker herself, she started showing me how to pay bills. So I was paying bills probably at 15, 16 years old, writing checks for her. I felt I might’ve grew up a little faster, but at the same time, she was teaching me what I needed to know at the same time. But just watching her as a woman, growing up and being so strong and independent, it made me who I am today. I think I’m a strong person because of that. So I think she’s my biggest role model. Because of her faith in God, I think that helped shield us from a lot. Because she always taught us, when we came in from school, we prayed. Bryan Rambo: Mm-hmm, we did a lot of praying. Rhonda Rambo: She taught us to pray, if we were in class and we were having issues with maybe our teacher or a fellow classmate, she would say, just—you don’t have to shut your eyes, she said, just say a little prayer. And today, I think she’s kept us out of a lot. She used to foresee things. I kid you not, she would tell us, I saw this in a dream: don’t go over here. One of our brothers didn’t listen. And we had a local pub across the street from our home where we grow up right there on Clark Street. It was First Edition. And she told my brother, I dreamed that you’re going to get injured in that pub; you need to stay out of there. And he went over there and they had a pinball machine. I guess there was someone in there playing on it longer than he wanted, and he went up to the guy and said, hey, I want my turn. This guy punched my brother one time, broke his jaw, and sent him straight to the hospital. My mom said, I told you! Bryan Rambo: Yeah, I remember that! Rhonda Rambo: And stay out of that bar because this was going to happen. There was a couple of dreams that she had about my older brother, and she told him, I had a bad dream. Stay out of here, don’t go over here. My brother didn’t listen. But you know, none of us have done time to where we’re in prison. But she instilled us the right and the wrong. And I think that is what is slacking in a lot of families today. She gave us rules and if we broke them rules, we got the punishment. And my mom didn’t joke. Bryan Rambo: No, she did not. Rhonda Rambo: If my dad came home, and she told, you know your dad is going to whup you, she really meant that, and she meant she going to do it, too. And so we had that fear in us. And so I tried to instill that same thing in my children. Y’all know right and wrong. If you go out there and you did something wrong, don’t expect me to come and get you out of it, if you make that mistake. So I think that that is what people need in this world today, is a little bit of more, put down your foot, let’s just say, and just stick to your grounds. Franklin: Did your mom or dad ever give you any advice or anything on maybe how to handle a delicate situation that may be caused because of someone else’s bigotry or perception of you? Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. Bryan Rambo: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, she did. She said, they’re only words. Try to walk away from—she always taught us to walk away from a fight unless they put they hands on us. I mean, then you have to—if you have to defend yourself. But she’d always try to teach us it’s only words and they’re not going to kill you, and to try to walk away. You know, today, I’ve never really been—I don’t remember being called out of my name. But maybe one time. Bryan Rambo: Yeah. [LAUGHTER] Bryan Rambo: One time for me at least that I know. Rhonda Rambo: Usually I will address it if it is a problem. I usually just go ahead and speak my mind, too. And then—but I’ve never had to physically fight or anything. Outside my brothers. Bryan Rambo: Yeah. Franklin: Right, that’s just— Bryan Rambo: Yeah, we protect our brothers and sisters. Yeah, we did that. Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, but they tried to teach us to love, not to fight. Franklin: Right. So, Bryan, you worked out at Hanford, right? Bryan Rambo: Mm-hmm, yes. Franklin: And how long did you work out at Hanford for? Bryan Rambo: Oh, okay. Franklin: A long time? Bryan Rambo: You want to put a—phew. Since ’86, so— Franklin: Do you still work out there? Bryan Rambo: No, I retired in—what was it? 2014. ’14, yeah. No, ’13. ’13, excuse me. Franklin: So 27 years. Bryan Rambo: Yes. Franklin: And what did you do out there? Bryan Rambo: Like my dad, like my father, like son, I joined—went on patrol. Franklin: Went on patrol. Bryan Rambo: Hanford Patrol. Franklin: And how had patrol changed from your father’s day to when you started? Bryan Rambo: Well, it was interesting because I—when I got out there, there was people that still—even though he was gone, let’s say, he’s been gone more than, at that time— Rhonda Rambo: 20 years. Bryan Rambo: When I started, because that was ’86, so that’s been a span of— Franklin: Almost 20 years. Bryan Rambo: 15, 20 years. Rhonda Rambo: Almost 20 years. Bryan Rambo: Yeah, some people that were still there remembered my father. And again, like my sister said, they had real respect for my dad, and they—I had to, of course, have previous experience in the service—Marine Corps, and they wanted me. But they knew my dad, and actually, the interviewer knew my dad and spoke very good words about him and everything. And it just went from there. But I tried to bring up a photo showing how my father was out there. He was one of the few that watched the first moon rocks that were brought in 1968 from the moonwalk. Franklin: Oh, cool. Bryan Rambo: It was at the Federal Building, and he was—it shows him guarding it, standing up, guarding it. And then there’s a little girl looking at it, and he’s looking down kind of watching everything. It was in the Federal Building at the Science Center then. It was very cool. I was very proud of that. I think PNL still has records of those photos—they’ve got photos of it. But that’s the reason why, again, because they saw Rambo, a lot of those photos because in our academy they had those pictures. They had a picture of my dad still in there. Franklin: In where? Bryan Rambo: In our academy. We had an academy out there at the time, in the East Area. Not East Area, now it’s 300 Area, toward 300 Area. But at the time, they had some pictures in the East Area where I first started at, and they had pictures of patrolmen through the ages of the years, and they had my father’s picture there. It was great, you know, seeing that. So it was great. It was great there. Real professional. Professional work. A lot of years, a lot of good people. Had some issues in those days, but— Franklin: Like what? Bryan Rambo: It wasn’t much—like not much racial issues. But you know a little here and there, little sticklers. Like we said, my sister was saying, my mother and father gave us—look over at the wind, just look over at—as long as it’s not interfering with my job, my work and my job, keep going. Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. Bryan Rambo: And that’s why I did 20-some years doing that. And overall it’s been good. Franklin: What on-the-job training did you receive, if any? Bryan Rambo: Ooh, I started off there as what would be called the SRT or like SWAT, kind of a fast tactical team there at the time. Different than what my father was, which was like just regular security police officer. We were like a [UNKNOWN], they called it. But anyway we would do pretty much everything what my father would do, except if there was an emergency, we would go there for emergencies. Anything, situations, we’ll be ready to go, out at the Hanford Area, whatever it may be. And in the town, also, so, the Federal Building. So it was pretty interesting. Franklin: Did you acquire any skills or experience on the job that helped you later in life? Bryan Rambo: Oh, a lot. Rhonda Rambo: Patience. Bryan Rambo: Patience, yes. [LAUGHTER] Bryan Rambo: A lot of patience. You’ve got to just—being an officer, whether you’re in the Area or you’re a police officer, you’ve got to have the patience, like you said. You got to have—of course have all the necessary training from law enforcement to do my job. Today, I would use those opportunities still in my head—it’s still a race around my head to do it—what to do and what not to do. They help me in life. Plus, like we said, we went to school. I also did—prior to going into patrol, I did four years of college out of University of Hawai’i, went to University of Hawai’i and got a degree there. Franklin: Oh, on—Manoa? Bryan Rambo: Yes, yes, Manoa Campus. Franklin: Oh, I went to University of Hawai’i in Hilo. Bryan Rambo: All right! Good job. [LAUGHTER] Bryan Rambo: Hilo, right, that’s great. Excellent. The Big Island? Oh, my goodness. Franklin: Yeah, the Big Island. Bryan Rambo: It’s great. Franklin: Yeah, I loved it. What made you—this is a little off-topic—but what made you want to go to Hawai’i? Bryan Rambo: Again, when I was in—I went into the Marine Corps right after high school in ’77—I went and I did my training and then after that, my first duty station was Pearl Harbor. So I got to see Pearl Harbor, did my duties there, and at the time I was taking a few classes at the University on my off time and everything. So when I finished my first initial four years with the Marine Corps, I decided, oh, well, I’ll just go back and finish up. So I went back to Manoa and started off there and finished up. Franklin: And what was your degree in? Bryan Rambo: Broadcast communications. Franklin: Broadcast communications. And, Rhonda, did you go to college as well? Rhonda Rambo: I only did a little bit for early childhood education. Because I was kind of working at a daycare where they wanted me to have a little extra training on it. But, no, I didn’t go any more than I had to. [LAUGHTER] Per se. Franklin: It’s not always for everyone. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Hold on, I just want to write that down. So, Bryan, where did you—could you describe a typical workday as a Hanford Patrol officer when you were out there? Bryan Rambo: I can’t tell you everything. But I can tell you some outlooks. Like I say, we get there, get our lineup, we get the time—what happened the night before or what’s going on that happened that day, the activities. We’d get our reports, and we’d be sent out to our various locations, whether it be, let’s say, up close in East or West Area or we’d be sent way down south to 300 or way north to 200-East or 100-N Areas. So we’d roll, we’d do our various security checks, and just traffic control, those things. Franklin: And so that really brought you all over the Site, then. Bryan Rambo: Yes. Franklin: Like your father, you would’ve gotten to know the whole Site pretty well. Bryan Rambo: Yes, I got to know the whole Site. Franklin: How would you describe your relationships with your coworkers and your supervisors and management? Bryan Rambo: Pretty good. I had a good—tons of good coworkers. I’m still having fun with them now. Some of them are still out in the Area today. I still have time with them. In fact, two years ago—well, now it was a year and a half I guess—we went to white water rafting on the Solomon River—Salmon River down in Oregon. Franklin: Oh, cool. Bryan Rambo: It’s fun, you know, we do a lot of good things. Franklin: So you have pretty close relationships, communication, with a lot of them. Bryan Rambo: Oh, yes. Sure do. Rhonda Rambo: I still—well, for my job, there’s one of the inspectors that come through, still, every time he sees me, your brother. Your brother this, your brother that. I’m like, okay, I get it, he’s a good guy. So he was like, I do still hear, people still that do know him say— Franklin: And, Rhonda, where do you work? Rhonda Rambo: I work for a company that’s not in Hanford, but for Hanford, that does radioactive waste from Hanford. Franklin: Okay, which company? Rhonda Rambo: It’s Perma-Fix Northwest. Franklin: There’s such a litany of contractors that’s it’s always, like, I need a map. Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, yeah. Franklin: I’m scared to make one because I don’t know if I have that much space on a piece of paper. Bryan Rambo: Is it all Battelle now? Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, we’re right off of Battelle here, on the other side. Franklin: Our project is a subcontractor of MSA so we’re involved. WSU’s also involved in the web, as I like to call it. The web of Hanford contractors. And how long have you been with Perma-Fix Northwest? Bryan Rambo: You’ve been there— Rhonda Rambo: I’ve been at the site 19 years. It’s been owned three times. So it went from ATG which is Allied Technology— Franklin: Yeah. Rhonda Rambo: To Pacific Eco Solutions which is abbreviated for PECOS to now what is now Perma-Fix. Franklin: And what is your specific job within Perma-Fix? Rhonda Rambo: As of right now, I’m doing material control documentation. Before I was an operator, the other years there. Franklin: An operator of? Rhonda Rambo: On the Site handling the waste. Franklin: Oh, wow, okay. So kind of similar questions to Bryan’s—what on-the-job training did you receive? Rhonda Rambo: Hazardous waste training, material—you know, as far as we had to get a 40-hour— Bryan Rambo: You’re RTC cleared, too, aren’t you? Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. We had to get hazardous waste training. Still today. We still keep that going. A physical every year. And on-the-job training pretty much every year we do it out on Site. It’s a nice job. Yeah. Franklin: Could you describe a typical work day? Rhonda Rambo: Typical work day, we do a job briefing in the morning, about what we’re getting into. We go over the paperwork that we might have to sign saying we understand what we’re getting into, what type of waste. And then usually we go in and suit up, put our respo on, and get to opening up containers and— Franklin: Wow. Rhonda Rambo: --start processing the waste. So now that I’m out in the office, I do the receiving of the waste now. And I enter it into—we have a database that I enter it into. And from there, lots of waste comes, I go to meet the drivers, get the paperwork, sign it. I create the barcodes that we use to mark the containers, and then I track the waste after it goes into the different facilities of the waste is being done at, I track that waste in that database. And then I build the shipment and give it off to our shipper who reviews it and sends it off to get notification and that’s the end of the process. And I do it on a daily basis. Franklin: Wow. Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. Bryan Rambo: And we interacted, because I had to work with her to get— Rhonda Rambo: Waste coming. Bryan Rambo: Into her facilities to bring waste, you know, escort it, make sure nothing happens to it between coming out of the Area to her area. But she’s right, I would go in there with full gear, and—[LAUGHTER] I said, wanna see—the security folks would know me, but once I’d go in there, they’re just worried, what’s going on. Because they didn’t know. Franklin: Right, because I go on the Site and Hanford Patrol is pretty tactical. It’s not much different from what you would see on a base. Which really surprised me when I got here. Especially comparing photos of Patrol guys from the ‘50s and ‘60s that, you know, look like—you know, they kind of look like Mayberry-- Bryan Rambo: Yeah, exactly, and what’s the way it was with my father. And now you see like camouflage and whole wearing gear and everything. Franklin: Automatic weapons. Bryan Rambo: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Franklin: Yeah, it’s a real different—it’s a real different world. Rhonda Rambo: He used to come on my lunch hour, and I’d be playing cards. And he suited up. And they’re like, your brother’s got a gun. We’re not supposed to have guns on Site. I said, he’s still on the job. He can have that gun. On the Site. [LAUGHTER] Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, so. Bryan Rambo: But you tell them, and say, hey, don’t make any trouble with me, which wasn’t nice. Rhonda Rambo: I would say, yeah, don’t mess with me, because there’s that gun right there. I might decide to take a few of you out. But we know, it’s a joke. Everybody knows it’s a joke. But it was fun. Bryan Rambo: It was good seeing sis, though. It’s just—you know, see how she’s doing and vice versa, it was nice. Franklin: That’s good, that’s good. Let’s see here. And similar questions, good relationships with your coworkers? Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. Franklin: And everything? Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. Franklin: No—treated on the job well? Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. Well—yeah. Franklin: Yeah? Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, there’s been a few—maybe not so much—there’s been a few little— Franklin: Maybe in the past? Rhonda Rambo: There’s been a few little incidents. But nothing that couldn’t—that hasn’t been dealt with. So, I could say there has been some people that would say something. And I don’t know if they just didn’t know better. So— Franklin: You mean something like insulting, racially motivated? Rhonda Rambo: Racially. They would kind of in a round-about way say stuff. And then they would think—they’d, ha ha ha. But I would go, ha ha ha and then let them know, yeah, you’re incorrect. So I kind of—I was there prior and I left when it was ATG. And I went and worked at the Interstate Nuclear Services which is a laundry facility off of the Bypass there, on 240. I left and went there for five years. My old supervisor sent a note saying, hey, come back, with the truck driver that was picking up the laundry from ATG. And I read that note, and I thought, you know, maybe I should go back now. But I kind of knew going back that there was things that I wouldn’t tolerate if I go back. Because it was majority—I was sometimes the only woman on the whole crew, with all men. And you know, growing up with boys kind of made me thicker-skinned for some of the stuff. So when I went back, one of the guys, the leads, was saying, you know, you’re going to be on a respo all day. And I said, yeah, I know. And he—I guess he didn’t realize I had worked there before, and he thought he was trying to scare me, intimidate me. I just looked at him like, yeah, I know. He didn’t know I had worked there and I let him know—I know. So some things like that would happen. And I guess, like you say, you’re a woman and lunchroom chatter and belching and farting and the cursing and everything. And the first time, they go, oh, sorry. And I’m like, it’s okay, I’m used to it. I worked here before. But if it became racist or slightly, I usually nipped it in the bud. Because that’s something I’m not going to listen to or tolerate. So pretty much indirect now, people know with me. Oops, I’m sorry. But they usually—right now, we got a good bunch of people I work with and it’s a minority-type—so I’m still the only black person there but it doesn’t affect me like before. Because throughout the years there were other black males there and a few black females, and they kind of gradually left to go out further to the Hanford Site. I remember one of the workers there was from Louisiana—one of the male workers. He came to my office one time and said, Rhonda, I’m leaving you. And we were the only black male and female on the site. And I said, it’s okay. And he said, I really feel bad. And I’m going, it’s okay. I go, I’ve been here before. This is nothing new to me. So I let him know, hey, it’s okay. But he really did feel bad that he was leaving me. He felt like he was really leaving me. And I told him, no, you got to do what’s right for you. This is okay for me to be here, and I accepted it. I don’t feel—I don’t know. I was gone for two weeks here just a month ago and I had emails from coworkers, females, males, saying, when are you coming back? We miss you. How’s your arm—I had arm surgery. They were happy to see me back. I do bring a little life to the party, so, I mean— Franklin: Yeah, I can see that. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: I can see that, awesome. In what ways did security or secrecy at Hanford impact your daily lives? Bryan Rambo: When we worked out there? When I was working out there? Franklin: Yeah. Or—well, maybe starting with your father, if any, and then kind of progressing to when each of you have worked out there. Bryan Rambo: Like I said, for my father, he was, like I said— Rhonda Rambo: Pretty quiet. Bryan Rambo: Yeah, he didn’t talk much about work. Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. Bryan Rambo: He just, not that out there. Not Hanford. Rhonda Rambo: I just remember one time we went on a trip, he’d point to those mountains. And say, you know, there’s missiles out there. And that’s what I remember. Bryan Rambo: Yeah. He didn’t tell me that one, but I’ve been the one ‘til I got out there— Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, he said if we were ever to be under attack, he said, there’s silos out here that are going to shoot missiles that are going to come up. And I still believe that today, that’s probably true what he was saying, but you know, you ain’t going to hear it on the news. But I can’t imagine them not having something out there to protect the Site if need be. But that’s all I remember Hanford work that he’d be saying—we were driving down the road going to Yakima or something, and he’s like, you know there’s silos out there with missiles that would shoot them. Bryan Rambo: Yeah, he never told me that when we were driving through on a drive-around. He didn’t tell me that, so you got something I didn’t know about. [LAUGHTER] Rhonda Rambo: I don’t know, I just think both our parents were strong Afro-Americans and I think that they wanted us to grow up and be strong Afro-Americans in society. And I remember my mom saying, whatever you do in life, whether it’s garbage pickup, working in a fast food restaurant, whatever, do the best you can. And that’s what I believe in today. You give it your all, good or bad, you try your hardest. If you don’t like it, try something else. And I believe in sticking through the thick and thin of things. And when you have a family, I think you have to learn to take a lot of stuff to put food on the table and learn that life’s not that easy sometimes and you have to take whatever’s dealt out to you in life and make it the best that you can. I try to, again, instill that in my family, that, yeah there’s good times and there’s bad times and you just have to learn to strive as a family knit and grow old and learn from your mistakes if you have some. And have faith. I think that’s a lot of it. Franklin: Yeah. How did you feel—how do you feel about your experiences working on the Hanford Site, given the mission of Hanford was to produce material for nuclear weapons, and that larger connection to not only national security but also this element of mutually-assured destruction and the destructive power of nuclear weapons? Bryan Rambo: Ah. Rhonda Rambo: Oh, yeah. Bryan Rambo: Let’s just start with her again. You. Rhonda Rambo: I guess I understand that we have to have something. But how much do we have to have? And what’s the point? Why threaten other countries with annihilation when it’s going to not affect just where you shoot it but everything else around it that may not ever come back? I don’t think that life should be taken so lightly. When you say, oh, I’m going to shoot this and take care of this, when you know once that thing drops, it’s going to take care of a lot of other stuff, too. And I don’t think that we should use that as a means of controlling or getting your way, like a bully type of situation. That, to me, is like—that should be the last streams of something to be used, I would think. But I know we have to say we can protect ourselves. But I don’t know. I just think that that’s—I know my dad was in the era of when they were building the plutonium for the bomb. But he probably didn’t care about that. He cared about putting food on the table, I’m sure. I mean, that was probably the last thing on his mind. He’s probably thinking, I’ve got seven kids I’ve got to feed. And that’s probably all he was thinking about. And the job, it was a good job to have at the time. I don’t know if he was worried about it like that. If he did, I never saw it. Bryan Rambo: He did keep the food on the table, that was important. We never went hungry. Never. Rhonda Rambo: Never. Bryan Rambo: Mom and Dad, they kept it going. For me, it’s different. My sister’s saying a lot that I agree with. It’s just, again, as a patrolman, I can see national security’s very important to me. But the same token, we’re on a—especially here at the Hanford Area now with the cleanup, I want everything to be safe for everybody. And even my sister, she does her part; her part is cleanup. And the plutonium in the Area, that happened, it was the time for it, and I guess they’d consider me a Cold War warrior like my dad was. And making plutonium and stuff was—we needed to have it. But again, do we need it that much? Who’s to say? The way things are going now with North Korea and the other countries—Russia’s even changing their philosophy on how many nukes they’re going to need. But I believe for us right now, for me, it was like my dad’s philosophy probably was. Just, hey, it’s there, it’s a good job. Even more paying job at the time than my father did and it helped me and my family. It kept, again, food on the table and got them to school. Did things I needed. But I do care a lot about the security. But I do also care about cleaning the stuff up, keeping it clean and minimizing it. Less nukes would be better. But on the same token, I’d like to clean up what we have and maintain that and try to not make new ones if we don’t have to. But right now it’s the way it is. Franklin: Yeah. What do you think is the most important legacy of the Hanford Site? Rhonda Rambo: The most important? Bryan Rambo: Oh, this is—well, it was needed during the war—the big war, World War II. It ended it. Questions whether it was needed to make the bombs for the bombing of Japan for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those are questions that wasn’t part of my era, but I know it was important then. It was always going to be part of the history of America that Hanford did this. One of the bombs, at least, was built here and produced. Rhonda Rambo: I think that— Bryan Rambo: Its legacy, though, is—right now is that— Rhonda Rambo: The energy. Bryan Rambo: The energy it still produces. And we had good things that we produced too. Our nuclear reactor that was both producing electricity and made nukes, which was very interesting. The N Reactor. Franklin: The N Reactor, yeah. Bryan Rambo: And the B Reactor, of course, was one of the big first ones built out there. I’m just thinking, it’s a part of our history. You can’t get away from it. Rhonda Rambo: No. Bryan Rambo: If I go to Hawai’i and I visit there—when I went there just to go visit, and when I went to school there, too, you bring up the name—you brought up the names and you live in the Tri-Cities, they wouldn’t say Tri-Cities to me. Oh, you live near Hanford. They wouldn’t even think about saying Pasco, Kennewick or Richland. Oh, you live in Hanford. This is in Hawai’i. This is in Honolulu, with tourists and I’d say that name. Say, I live in Pasco or I live in the Tri-Cities, they’d bring that up. I mean, the ideal of Hanford is, it’s abundance of opportunity for this area to grow, and it did. But then you got—like you said, you got your negative connotation of whoa, it’s the place we built the nukes and also this place has got to be cleaned up because it’s one of the biggest areas of cleanup in the country. So it’s got its goods and bads. Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, I think it’s developed—I think due to the energy that it does produce, still, is good. If you think about all the people that has been employed through there—this place would be a ghost town if that was to go away. So I think that Hanford is—it’s a plus, but it’s a negative, too, because we have to have it. We need to clean it up. We got the energy from it, but we also got the nuke side that was bad, too. So it’s kind of a damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don’t. Franklin: Yeah. Bryan Rambo: Mm-hm. Rhonda Rambo: So, I think we’re thankful for what it has given and even what it’s still taking. Because a lot of lives are being lost due to the exposures that are being done out there. And that’s what’s scary, too. When we, like you said, you go traveling and you say, oh, I’m from Washington. Some people say, oh, Seattle? And then you say, no, Tri-Cities. They’re saying, Tri-Cities? And then you say, Hanford, and then they get it. So that’s the stigma of knowing what does happen here and what goes on here. People say, oh you’re going to glow at night. And I go say, yeah, sure. Franklin: I’ve heard it, too. Rhonda Rambo: So. That’s the good and the negative. Franklin: What did you guys know or learn about the prior history of African Americans at Hanford during the Manhattan Project? Bryan Rambo: There was segregation going on. A lot of segregation. They would work there, particularly in B area, I heard they had— Rhonda Rambo: Separate. Bryan Rambo: You know, your white area and your black area and the folks would stay there and work. They was some interaction but not a lot of interaction. But they all did the same mission, but they had their own—they were still segregated because of the situation during that time. And at the time, Richland, as far as I know, there was no any blacks there. And in Kennewick, I know there wasn’t, or if there was, very few. And of course Pasco was the place for all the black were living at the time. But other than hearing a lot about B area at the time when B reactor was running, I didn’t hear—I was hearing at the time, there was even prison areas out there, believe it or not. We had areas there, just different spots and things were going on that I didn’t know were out or realized were out there that the Army was using and had out there. It’s just interesting. But they—it’s hard to explain other than—just from some of the older folks, though, he was saying, that have been out there. But then they wouldn’t say too much about it. Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. I don’t even remember the bridge being—I remember them saying that there was a sign that said no blacks after a certain time. But like I said, my mom shielded us from a lot of it. So I think we were going to church so much—[LAUGHTER] I don’t think we had time to worry about what was going over on that side of town. I just remember sports stuff, there would be sports after some of the games from the different local—from Richland and Kennewick. I remember there was a riot in Memorial Park. Franklin: When was that? Bryan Rambo: That was in— Rhonda Rambo: Oh, god, that had to be back in— Bryan Rambo: ’60--? Rhonda Rambo: The ‘70s, wasn’t it? Bryan Rambo: I think it was ’70 or ’69 or ’70, but— Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, but— Franklin: Did either of you participate? Rhonda Rambo: Not me, but my— Bryan Rambo: Older brother. Rhonda Rambo: Older brother, yeah. Bryan Rambo: Artis. Rhonda Rambo: And Dwayne, they were in it, you know. Franklin: What—do you know what--? Rhonda Rambo: It was—well, rumor had it that something—one of the guys from Navy Homes had an issue with somebody over here on the west side. All of Navy Homes kids showed up here at the park, in Memorial Park. And all the west side kids, which was one of our brothers or two of our brothers, had all our neighbor kids go there, and it was a big brawl. Franklin: Oh. So it was more like a neighborhood type of beef than like a civil rights demonstration? Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, it was more like a beef between one—the Navy Homes and the west side. Franklin: Ah, okay. Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. But— Franklin: That kind of leads me into my next question. What were the major civil rights issues for African Americans at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities during your time here when you were growing up in that era? Bryan Rambo: Well— Rhonda Rambo: Civil rights? I can’t think of any. Maybe the high school one with Whittier. Bryan Rambo: Well, the high school, it was an issue, too. Artie was more or less—our older brother—was more or less involved in that. But for myself at the time, I was in middle school at the time at Stevens, it was some issues going on. Because it was during the civil rights of the Watts thing, riots were going on. ’68 was the assassination unfortunately happened there, and Kennedy and Martin Luther King further in there. Franklin: Yeah, Malcolm X, too. Bryan Rambo: Things were really static but I was still just going into middle school. Nothing was per se, I was just hearing a lot, hearing a lot of what was going on, but didn’t see a lot of major instances I can remember. Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. Bryan Rambo: But my older brother could, he could probably tell you more insight on that. Franklin: Were either of you involved in any civil rights efforts? Marches, protests? Rhonda Rambo: Nope. Franklin: Anything? Rhonda Rambo: No. Bryan Rambo: No, we were—I was part of the black African American scholarship group. They got that, but— Rhonda Rambo: AA. Bryan Rambo: AA. You weren’t—you were a part of that, too, weren’t you? Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, but I didn’t participate in too many—I mean, I’ve never been in any kind of walks or protests. No. I was a good girl. I was. Bryan Rambo: But again, like—the situation with us, because we were living in the fringe of the west side, I was stigmated myself—I don’t know if my sister wouldn’t say so much or my older brothers—but when I would go there they would say, you talk like you’re a white guy, you talk like you’re black, you’re on this side of town. And there was some—because you moved and you’re over there, now you’re part of them kind of— Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, I do remember that kind of atmosphere. Bryan Rambo: Oreo stigma, I would call it. Rhonda Rambo: You think you’re better because you’re living on the west side. That kind of stuff, you know. Franklin: They maybe see you as being kind of whitewashed. Bryan Rambo: Yeah, yeah, exactly. That’s what I would say. Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. You don’t have to ride a bus because you’re in walking distance of the schools, that kind of thing. Franklin: So you were seen as being maybe in a position of privilege Bryan Rambo: Yeah, and that kind of put a stigma on me, or tried to. But like I said, it’s something that you just get over, but. Franklin: Yeah. Bryan Rambo: But that was our situation. Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, I remember that. I remember that feeling, too, of—you know. But again, my mom taught us, again, it’s only words, so you can’t help but where you were raised. I mean, your parents chose you to live on the east side of town, there was an opportunity for my dad to buy a house, he bought a house. He wasn’t worried about what side of town. I guess maybe he might have been worried about what side of town, but maybe it was closer to work. I don’t know. I mean. I just thought that they just wanted us to have a home. It wasn’t a mansion. It was just a home. A four-bedroom home. Imagine that, trying to put six boys in a four bedroom home. Somebody didn’t get their own room, so. Bryan Rambo: Bunkbeds, it was bunkbeds! Rhonda Rambo: Bunkbeds, you know. Franklin: Yup. Yeah. I forgot to ask, were your parents both from the same town? Rhonda Rambo: Yes. Franklin: Was that how they knew each other? Bryan Rambo: Yes. Rhonda Rambo: Yes. Franklin: Okay, okay, that makes a lot of sense. So I just have a couple kind of large-scale questions and then, I guess this is for both of you. What would you like—this is usually a Cold War question, but I’ll kind of open it up to now and cleanup—but what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford? During the Cold War and then during this cleanup phase. Rhonda Rambo: During it? Bryan Rambo: Like I said, being out there. You mean, opportunities for the folks coming in now? Rhonda Rambo: Or just the opportunity of— Franklin: I guess if you had the chance to reflect on your experience and you could talk to someone in the future and someone was like, wow, what was that like to work at Hanford? What was your contribution, or what do you think Hanford’s contribution is? How would you answer that question if you had to tell a future generation what it was like, or what would you want them to know? What’s the most important thing for them to know about? Bryan Rambo: Well, like you said earlier, it’s a long—of course you got to go from the beginning, and you’re part of that, you’re part of that generation, that long generation from the war, World War II times to now, and the cleanup. You’ve got several various spots you got to look at. Because you got the war, then you got the Cold War era, then you got the cleanup. Each phase has its own—people will probably say different on each phase. Me, being out—again, I’m from the Cold War era because we stopped making a lot of the material, and then to cleanup, I would say, it was a job opportunity and it was a job that had to get done. And it still is. I mean, it’s still—you can’t let it sit out there and not have nothing done with it. You’ve got to be safe, and I trust all the time on my time, those years I’ve been out there, safety was one of the most things—safety and security. You don’t want to take that stuff home. You don’t want to get contaminated. You didn’t want to bring it home to your family or your cars or stuff, like I’ve been hearing about today, last few weeks. Very disturbing to me. Franklin: God, yeah. Bryan Rambo: I think that the newer generation coming in, I think the folks from the older generation that were operators and that stayed out there, been out there, and leaving, like I said, security and safety was the utmost, personally for me. And my feelings now is that the folks out there now is kind of going away from a lot of security. They want to clean, clean, clean and not be safe, safe, safe. I hear a lot of safety, but I think that we need more of doing real protection of the worker to get the job done and not use—if it’s got to be slowed down, so be it, or stop it. But it’s got to be slowed down. Because during my years out there, we’ve had—there have been incidents out there, unfortunately. There have been cleanups that have taken place there that have helped. And then also there’s times there that they could’ve been better, more diligent in the cleanup as far as how to do it and how to protect themselves and all of that. And it hasn’t been done. It hasn’t been done properly. Particularly, areas that as patrolmen, some areas that I would go and check out, areas that I was really worried about, things—a farm that my vent, like they’re talking about now, a lot of venting and things going on—things could happen. And you’re just doing a security check and you don’t know what you’re going to get, you know? I just think, it’s more safety needed out there. And give the folks the tools that the people that are out there, that know, have been out there, give them more of the tools they need. If they say they need masks or they need more equipment to do protection, so be it. Don’t—do it now, don’t wait. Just do it. And do all the proper procedures and do all the procedures. Your full stop, your operational, and then after it’s all done, you do an evaluation and make sure everything’s done right. And what didn’t, what could’ve been done better? Do it even better. As my sister would agree with her job, the same thing, you just have to— Rhonda Rambo: The safety. Bryan Rambo: I just think, the less we hear about it on the news, it’s better for me, always better for me, hearing about it. Especially PUREX that just—that brings some history back there about that issue, about that tunnel. And I’m not too happy about that. Because that could’ve—that situation should’ve been done properly through the years, taken care of. And PFP and things like that. They need to slow down and just do it properly and safely so everybody’s happy, so everybody comes home. That’s the important thing. You want to come home. You want to come home to your family. Franklin: Yeah. Bryan Rambo: And it is a good job, and it is an opportunity, and it is good, because you’re taken care of, not only yourself, but you are taking care of your environment, your future environment in your surrounding in the future as well as the present. It just has to be done right. Rhonda Rambo: Mm-hmm. That’s what I think, too. That it’s important for the generations—I’m sure that if my dad was to talk about it, he probably would’ve said, you know, if you ever work out there, be safe. My mom’s biggest fear was where I’m at now because of our dad working at Hanford. She just kept saying, you know your dad worked in there. You know what he went through. I don’t want to see someone suffer like our dad did. He didn’t die fast. So when I talk to the young people at my job, I specifically tell them, you don’t want to be on an oxygen machine with your lungs collapsing in bed and your family watching you. For me, that’s all I remember of my dad, is really laying in a bed, on oxygen. I remember him being at the veteran’s hospital in Walla Walla and me and my younger brother were so young, we weren’t allowed to go in there to visit. So the older ones would prop the door and we’d sneak in and say hi anyway. You don’t—that’s a legacy you don’t want to leave your family when you’re working out at Hanford. You don’t want to have to think about the ifs and the ands from what could happen to you from coming home—from being exposed. So safety, to me, is a main important thing. And the cleanup is also necessary. We don’t want it in our drinking water. We want this environment—the river runs through all these counties. Everybody enjoys it. Everybody wants to be out there fishing and boating. I tell my kids, I don’t—if you go out to the water, waterskiing with your dad, try not to drink that water. Because we don’t know for sure it doesn’t have the potential of that. Every time the wind blows around Tri-Cities, I worry, because that’s not—everything’s not fastened out there. So a dust storm comes through, that stuff is lifting. So, where is it going? In our air. So we have to think, it’s always here. It’s always around us. The mindset of what people have to think about out there is that same way. Just because you can’t physically see it doesn’t mean it’s not there, and you just have to take all the precautions of if it was there. Safety is the first thing. Training is important. And health is everything. So I want the people to think that it’s a good thing. It’s provided a lot of things in Tri-Cities. The growth is because of Hanford, mainly. Like I said, I don’t think it would be anything here if that was to shut down completely. So the generations of families that come through here, generations of families—children are working in the Area and making better money than probably their parents did and enjoying better things than their parents did. So Hanford is a blessing but it’s also something we really have to be cautious about, too, and treat it safely in the right way. Bryan Rambo: Mm-hmm. Franklin: Yeah. Great. Is there anything else you would like to mention related to migration, segregation and civil rights and how they’ve impacted your life at Hanford and the Tri-Cities? Rhonda Rambo: I just believe that my parents moving here, they moved here because they heard the good news. This project here. To come here and work and the families that moved here were close-knit in some ways. Yeah, they had—most of them—multiple people were in different churches, but those churches still fellowshipped in some way. So those families still hooked up and saw each other and talked about how they grew up and when this happened and when that happened. I just think that they saw it as a big opportunity for black families to come and raise their families in a safe environment and make some kind of living. I think that’s what brought us here today, is that I believe that same token. I tell people all the time, it’s a great place to live. You can make good money here if you apply yourself and look for it, it’s here. Franklin: Yeah. Agreed. Bryan Rambo: And the same—same thing my sister was saying, like I said, it was the great migration. They could’ve easily went north to Chicago or New York, too, at the time, because folks were moving—California, even. I’m glad that our parents moved here. I’m glad that they did. Because we had the opportunities galore here. Even recently, hearing on the news that folks are just moving into Pasco itself is just growing extremely fast because of the housing opportunities, it’s cheaper, and the living conditions is a lot better, everything. And Hanford is a big part of it. Would I like to have Hanford as the big part in the future? Less, I think. I think hopefully we diversify more into less Hanford but more maybe scientific, I would say R&D, more or less. And less of—and things that we learn how to clean up will help other areas across the country and around the world. But I would like it to be less emphasis on Hanford and more emphasis on other products and other things. I know we got a big agricultural base, too, here, that helps also. But looking back, I just—I wouldn’t have any other way, either. I love it here. I mean, I’ve got our children here—we had our children here, we have grown here. From my father, like I said, he got me a good work ethic, my mother had a great work ethic. It helped me get through a lot of racial barriers. If there were, I—I worked harder. My mother said, work harder and Dad said, work harder, and I did. And I succeeded. I feel like I succeeded a lot in life. We’re very blessed and thankful for that. So looking back, I have—I think it’s a great opportunity and I’m glad they did move here and advanced our life and our kids’. Franklin: Great. Well, thank you so much, Bryan and Rhonda. I really appreciate you coming to interview with us and talk about your life and your parents’ life. Rhonda Rambo: Thank you. Bryan Rambo: Yeah, thank you. Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview Hanford Patrol 400 Area 100 Area 300 Area 200 East Area N Reactor Perma-Fix Northwest Battelle PUREX Plutonium Finishing Plant (PFP) B Reactor Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Bryan and Rhonda Rambo Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Pasco (Wash.) Kennewick (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Migration School integration Segregation Discrimination Racism Radioactive waste disposal Nuclear energy Civil rights Civil rights movements Description An account of the resource Bryan and Rhonda Rambo were both born in Pasco, Washington. Their parents moved to Pasco, Washington in the early 1950s. A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288 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 03/23/2018 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. This oral history collection was done in partnership with the National Park Service under Task Agreement P17AC01288. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Ff82a477e980b5eab6aa549537f73593c.JPG 07eedabeb7b7f69b254d9337858f7a73 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 Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford Subject The topic of the resource African Americans; Oral History Description An account of the resource A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource National Park Service Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 9/1/2017-9/1/2019 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project. Relation A related resource RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RG2_8 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 C.W. Brown 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 CW Brown on June 12, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with CW about his experiences living in Richland and working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? CW Brown: C, W, B-R-O-W-N. Franklin: Okay. Does the C and the W stand for--? Brown: Well, yeah, but I don’t go by it that much, but I could tell you what they stand for. Franklin: Sure. Brown: I don’t want too many people to know it, but I will. Because when I went into the military I had to have it. It’s Claude. C-L-A-U-D-E B-R-O-W-N. Franklin: Okay. Brown: Yeah. Franklin: Great. So, CW, your family came to the area to work for Hanford, right? And what year did they come? Brown: I came in ’48, so they were here about three years before that. 1948, when I came out. And they must’ve been here at least two or three years before that. Franklin: Okay, and what—oh, sorry. Brown: That was during when they were, the atomic bomb, they were making out here. Franklin: Yeah. Brown: And they were on line doing all that stuff, so, a lot of them was doing that. And I know my father worked on the railroad out here when that came about, and my mom worked in the cafeteria. Franklin: Out at the Hanford Camp. Brown: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Franklin: And where were your parents from, where were you from, where you were born? Brown: Texas. Texas, Kildare, Texas. Franklin: Kildare, Texas. Brown: I think you can find about most of Tri-City people, you’ll say, Kildare, that’s where I was born! Or where my family—where their roots were started, that’s where most all of them started, a lot of them. Franklin: Right. It seems like the whole, most of the population of the town ended up moving. Do you know how your father or mother found out about the Hanford Site? Brown: Yes, this was through—they had contact with a family which is a well-known, close to the Mitchells, was the Daniels, was the Daniels. And my father was kind of connected with them in a relationship, and one of them came out this way, they’d heard about the work, and sure enough, the information got back, which by being relatives and close partners, like, my dad was on the railroad and they had a lot of that going on. They said, this is how we got started out. And eventually, my mom came out and then we stayed with our grandfolks in Texas. And they came out—during that time, the wives and the husbands couldn’t live together. They had barracks for each one. That was back in those days, yup. So that’s how we came out here, was through Vanis Daniels. And that was the one that, like I say, close relatives. And that’s how it got started with us. And then as we went, our relatives, we got involved and just kept going, and that’s the way it started, yup. Franklin: What do you know about your parents’ lives before they came to work at Hanford? Brown: Before they came to Hanford, we worked at—my dad worked on the railroad there, also in Kildare, and my mom was mostly like a housewife. In Texas, most of the time, we did a little farming, and we did a lot of that. Of course, I can remember back when my brother and I, we was young, we started working—in them days, when you’re 10, 11 or 12, you could work and take care of everything. Because we used to have our own little mule, little wagon, go haul little stuff to people for wood and stuff like that. That’s what we did, mostly farming. Like I said, my dad worked on the railroad for many years, which was good, but we did our own farming, living off the land. Franklin: When were you born? Brown: 1938. Franklin: 1938, okay. So you were about seven or eight— Brown: Exactly, exactly. In those days, when you’re young, when you’re seven and eight, you could do just about everything everybody else did. Because you had to work. You know? You had to work. There wasn’t no playing around. That’s what you had to do. Survivor. On your own. Franklin: What do you know about your parents’ initial experience of coming to work at Hanford and finding a place to live? Brown: Yeah, that was a very difficult situation as a family. Individual, it wasn’t too bad. But family-wise, you had to—to get a house, you had to work for General Electric to get into the homes. And to get into the trailer court was difficult because it was so crowded and you couldn’t hardly find any place. And that was the difficulty of getting us here any earlier. Because you find a space and then you could buy a trailer and then you can have your family. But the husband and wife could not live together. They didn’t have—they had to live in separate barracks, because if you wasn’t working for GE, most the time, you couldn’t get a place to live for a family. And that was the way that it was, especially in the Tri-Cities in Richland. Franklin: And so, during the Manhattan Project, your parents lived in separate— Brown: Yes, exactly. Franklin: --dorms, because they were segregated, right? Men’s and women’s. Brown: Men’s and women’s. Franklin: And also, white and black dorms? Brown: No, no, no, no, no, no. Franklin: No. Brown: That was mixed of whatever. That was a mixed situation there. You could find it mixed. Definitely, because they had to have had a place to stay. And that was very difficult. If you didn’t care what color or whatever you were. Same way in the cafeterias and whatever where my mom worked. They worked together. Franklin: Was that—segregation was literally the law of the land in the South. Brown: Oh, yeah, yeah. Franklin: Did your—what were your parents’ experiences here where segregation was more informal or kind of— Brown: Segregation was—in Richland, Pasco, Kennewick, all of them had part of segregation, as you know. But some of them were worse than others. That’s life, where you go through that. And that’s what you had to put up with, situation like that. And I think Kennewick had not been segregated. To tell you, my wife’s brother was the first black that lived in Kennewick. Walter Howard. Franklin: Walter Howard? Brown: Mm-hm. Because he got a cross on his lawn, his house got burnt, he went through all of that. He was the first black at CBC college, when it was over there by the airport, if you recall any information on that. Yeah. But you know, you run into those situations, no matter where you go. But see, that’s why you had to bypass a lot of that. Which we did. We went through it, but this is what we have to do with that situation when people are listening to me and talking to passersby and look forward. And that’s what a lot of our people has to do for that. Because it’s going to happen, don’t matter where you go. We went through it. We went through it in school, we went through it when we go to play basketball in different towns, we went through some of that. But you know, you have to overcome that. And you have to make a commitment on those situations which carries you through. Because it could be riots, it could be this, it could be that. But you got to be smart. And a lot of times, you have to have trust in God. The Christian way. And that’s what it takes. For nowadays, they forget that. And that’s what—my family was very Christian people. Like my wife now, I bless her heart that she took us through my family and now all my kids are in. And it takes you a long ways when you’re dealing with people. And that’s what you’re going to deal with in life, people. And learn to cooperate. And walk away from things when you see bad. But we don’t do that anymore, a lot of times. But you have to do that. But that’s what we did. And that’s why we got along with people. And my kids are the same way now. You get along with people. You’re going to have conflicts in life, but you got to bypass it and make a commitment to yourself on what you’re going to do, and do it. So simple, really. Yeah. Franklin: Did your parents ever talk about their first impressions when they arrived here during World War II? Brown: Well, yes, yes. It was—see, when they arrived—during those days, they never knew what they were doing, see? Like when people were working on the whatever. Like they never knew exactly what they were doing and what was in their environments. Like they have nowadays the technology to find out what’s this or where you can’t go. But they never knew that. All they knew about was, because they grew up that way, work. I want to work. Work to make a living. I have a family. What do I have to do? I have to work. And that’s the way it was back in the South. They didn’t have contracts. I need your help tomorrow. I experienced it. Pick cotton, all of that. Chop cotton. Pull corn or whatever. All of this stuff. They did it. I need your help, Mr. Weaver, or Mr. Whoever. And that’s the way it was. Yup. That’s just the way life was. Living off the land. Franklin: What were your first impressions when you first arrived in the Tri-Cities? Brown: Well, it was kind of a—I was young. I didn’t know how I was going to be able to accept it. But I’m going to tell you the truth on the situation is that we were athletes. Because we went among people, doing things, playing with people on the playground. Like I said, we used to go in back of the school play basketball, play football, play tag, play this. That’s the impression I got, was good. Because you’re among people, and people accepted you for who you were. We didn’t have a lot of that. Sure, it was around. But that’s kind of the way we worked it out, and it worked out good. Franklin: What about like—what were your first impressions about the environment or the landscape of the Tri-Cities when you got out here? Brown: It was—that’s hilarious. Because jackrabbits? Wherever you see. Fruit? All over. All type of fruit. And fishing? We used to go down to the Columbia River here and fish for fish, throw your line out there and all this. Activities for a family. Something to do, things to do. That was a good impression. Open. It was open, not closed-in. And that gave you more freedom, see? Amongst the people, and they treated you right, and you treat them right. And we got along well that way. But that’s the way we were raised. See? If you’re raised that way, you continue to do it, no matter where you go. Franklin: Sure. Where was the first place that you stayed after you arrived? Brown: In north Richland. In north Richland. What happened was, we couldn’t get out. We couldn’t stay anywhere, that’s why it took us a while to get here, until they bought a trailer and got him a spot. And that’s what it was. In fact, we were probably two blocks from John Ball. We were about two blocks from there. Franklin: Okay. And did you go to John Ball School? Brown: Yeah, yeah. Franklin: Could you describe it? Brown: Well, John Ball, it was made out of—you know how you see these bomb shelters, and it was how they made— Franklin: Quonset huts. Brown: Yes, yes, yes, exactly. That’s what it was. And that’s where they were, they were lined up, one, two, three, down here and in the back the same way. It’s just like that, exactly. That’s the way it was. Yup. Hard chairs inside, and cafeteria. Yeah, but anyway. That’s one thing they did. They always fed people in them cafeterias for the kids. That was the good old days. Franklin: Could you describe the trailer? How big was it and what— Brown: Trailers was based on what you could afford. Franklin: Okay. Brown: That’s the way it was. Because during those days, you wasn’t making a lot of money. But the people that was making a little more money had better trailers. With situation. Some of them had it where you could go to have your water in them and whatever and all that. But most of them out there in those trailers, you had wash houses, they called them, where you do your washing and where you do your showering. Because the trailers we had, some of them was made out of wood, and some of them was made out of the regular trailer stuff, but not very many of them. But you could see the difference of how, whatever you could afford, that’s what you could get. Franklin: What kind of trailer was yours? Brown: It was made out of kind of a wood-ish. Like these little one-bedroom houses, as you see on the TV, where they show those little one-bedroom houses, similar to that, exactly. Franklin: And how many were in your family? Brown: One, two, three, four. Franklin: So it’s you and your brother and your mother and father. Brown: Mm-hmm. In fact, I remember exactly, the trailer was small, and we—[LAUGHTER] It was hilarious, but when we first came here and he had set it up, it was only one-bedroom, but we took the front where the kitchen was and made a bed so we could sleep at night. That’s the way it started. That’s how we were at the beginning, until we could afford to get a better—and that’s what we did. It was quite interesting, but we made it. We made it that way. Survive, that’s what it takes. Franklin: Yeah. And your neighbors in the trailer camp, where were they from? Were they from all over? Brown: All over, all over. All over. Exactly. But in a way, the black community was kind of separate—some of them were separated. In fact, we were right up from John Ball, but we were spread out quite a bit. Because I knew—we had a white family—I know the Hecksons, all of the Heckson Brothers, that was a big family who lived down on the corner by the school, and there was a few more lived in-between, but it was mostly kind of segregated, be honest, with the blacks in this area, and a few over here. Because you had to get what you could get because it was so crowded. And if something come available and you on the list, you go. And that’s the way it was, what color you were, whatever, that’s the way it had to be. Franklin: And who did your father work for at this time, when you were in the trailer camp? Brown: Bronat? Bonat? In fact I did a search on that. He worked for the railroad. I think it was called Bonat, something like that. Franklin: And he was working out at Hanford? Brown: Oh, yeah, he worked on the railroad going out to Hanford and all that. And my mom worked at the cafeteria. They had a big cafeteria. Franklin: Where? Brown: Here, out at north Richland. Franklin: Oh, in the trailer camp. Brown: Well, it was where they, like—I can almost visualize it, give you an idea of where it was, it was the men’s barracks and this was the big cafeteria where everybody could come to the cafeteria, and there was a movie theater right off from the cafeteria, and there was a fire station, up here above, and there was Dawson Richards down here in the little town where the food store, Mr. Dietrich. In fact I used to do a little work for Mr. Dietrich when I was a little kid. Go pick up things and take them and pick up bottles and take them down and sell them. That’s kind of the way the situation was. And then you had the big—as you going up, there was a big house where ice—you had to your buy ice—and that was the trailer court. And it comes right down from by the ice place, right down toward Dawson Richard, little store for clothes, and over there with the food store. It’s kind of—I can visualize it all and see what’s going on. That was major. Franklin: Where did your family move—how long did you stay in the trailer court? Brown: Let’s see. We did it twice. First when we came out, we stayed there until all the work had stopped. Then we moved to the other area in Hermiston. We went to Hermiston, where the McNary Dam started. That’s how the people started accumulating over there in Hermiston, because of the McNary Dam. Same contact with the family. Some more came. There was my cousin, my aunt, my uncles, which was the Miles. They came, and several others came. The Rambos. I can remember that. And they came to Hermiston, probably a few more of them I might miss, but that’s where that started. As soon as the McNary Dam finished, they shot back to Hanford. That’s where we came back to Hanford. The trailer court had went down, but it started booming again in Hanford. That’s why we bought another trailer, which was a better trailer this time. And lived almost in the same spot from John Ball up there, where we had the other trailer. In fact, I can visualize it now. The trailer we had here, the new one we just bought, and we lived right over from it in the other one. And we could walk right on down from—it was amazing. It was amazing. And that’s where my uncle, which are Wallaces, was my mom—his wife and my mom was sisters. And they lived next to us. And you had the Allens, all of those people were at the trailer court, too. That’s when it was booming again back in this area. Franklin: Was that the early ‘50s? Brown: Yeah! Exactly, ’53, ’50-something, because I was in Chief Jo then. Franklin: Okay. Brown: That’s when I went to Chief Jo. Yup, exactly right. Franklin: And then where did you move after that? Did you get more of a permanent residence? Brown: Permanent resident, exactly. We didn’t go anyplace else. Franklin: Where’d you move to? Brown: We moved in—well, we were going to—when the trailer court disappeared and everything was going away, that’s when the Army was out, and everything was going away, people had to move out. Because they were moving it. Okay. Prediction was that we were going to Pasco. We already had had our plans. But my dad had to get a job. And fortunately enough, he got a job for GE, for General Electric. That way, we could get a house. Franklin: And what did your father do for General Electric? Brown: He worked on the railroad also, out at Hanford. But it was through General Electric, doing things. And also they got him another job, he was working kind of as a sevice, somewhere out, I don’t know wherever it was. But I used to take him there, get him on the bus, and he used to go there. That’s how that started. And to be honest with you, athletic ability, they didn’t want us to go to Pasco. Because we had Chief Jo, where we started out athletic ability with Mr. People, which was a great athletic coach, and luckily enough, like I say, before we got ready to move, in fact we were all ready to go, he got a job in GE and that way we stayed. And we got a house right behind the high school, Richland High, in a two-bedroom. Franklin: Do you remember the address? Brown: One’s 805 Smith; this must’ve been 803 Smith. Because we moved from this two-bedroom to the three-bedroom, and it was next-door. So it must’ve been something. But 805 Smith is where we stayed, but we were there until we got our bigger house. Franklin: And how long were you there in those two hosues? Brown: The rest of 19—from when we moved there, we stayed there, in fact, most of our lives. Franklin: Oh, okay. Brown: We didn’t live anyplace else. Franklin: I used to live right in that neighborhood. Brown: Did you? Franklin: When I first lived here, yeah, Stanton. 804 Stanton. Brown: Oh, Stanton. Oh, okay, 804. Oh really? That’s amazing! Yup, so it was easy for us to go to school. Franklin: Oh, yeah, I bet. Brown: And it was perfect. I mean, you could go to school, go home and eat if you want to. That’s where the rest of my life was, right there. Because we went through Chief Jo, went to high school, and went all. Franklin: Okay. Earlier you’d mentioned church and God, and so I assume your family attended church. Brown; Oh, absolutely. Franklin: And what church did you go to? Brown: New Hope Baptist Church. Franklin: And that was in Pasco. Brown: That was in Pasco. Franklin: Or, is in Pasco. Brown: It is in Pasco. We started out in those little—we started out with the church—it’s amazing how things are in life and you meet people. But we started out in them little crib, whatever you call them out there John Ball. They let us have one, and Reverend Wilkins, which is Senior, and Brother Green and Brother Upton came out to teach us Sunday school. That’s how that started back in those days. That was in ’52, ’53, whatever. That’s how it started accumulating for Reverend Wilkins got a church in Pasco. Franklin: And that’s Morning Star. Brown: No, no, that’s New Hope. New Hope Baptist Church, which is by Reverend Dr. Wayne Jenkins now. Which is—but they’re close, still so close together and they kind of associate. But that’s where we went to church. In fact, that’s where my mom was going to church, that’s where I went to church, my brother and all. It’s changed a lot now than then, because during those days, we had one of the best choirs that was around. We had, when the Army was here, a professional singer, and music: incredible—was our teacher. We used to sing all over the place. There was the Tates family, there was Carrie Anne, she’s close to the Daniels family and whatever, myself, and Shep Tate, which is a preacher now, all of that. Miss Owens, Robert Owens and Mary Harrison. We had a heck of a choir. And preachers. It was just fantastic, we’d just sing all over. It was just wonderful. Wonderful, wonderful. And like I say, right now, see, Reverend Jenkins, he works at the hospital now. He is, like God sent him there to do whatever, as the shepherds do. He is excellent. He takes care of people, he takes care—if anybody ever want to know anything about the Bible, which he calls the Bible is a library, and that’s where you can find everything. And he knows it from head to toe. We have Bible studies on Wednesday and it’s amazing. I used to not go as much, but now I go. My wife goes all the time. And it’s amazing how things in the Bible you wouldn’t believe that it’s true. And it’s wonderful. I mean, you say you don’t like—but you get in those classes with him talking and explaining, and it’s incredible. And it’s true life. And that’s what makes it nice that you can—you have faith and trust in somebody like that. And it’s proven. And it’s wonderful. And that’s where we—my daughters are in the choir, they sing. Every one of my kids are in church. Franklin: And is it still New Hope that you go to? Brown: Mm-hmm. Franklin: Okay. Brown: Yeah, they’re in the choir, beautiful sing, they—it’s just wonderful. Franklin: And how come your family went to a—because I know there were Baptist churches in Richland, how come you went to Pasco? Brown: To Pasco? There wasn’t any church—black churches in Richland at that time. There’s a few now. But that’s where most of the black accumulated for the churches. And when we came out, when we were in the trailer court, they’re the ones that came and we got the tent, I mean, inside the school where we started the Sunday school, and that’s how that started. Yup. They came out, gave us Sunday school lessons and whatever. Franklin: What role does church play in the black community? Brown: Major roles. Because in the black community, it’s one of the out-going-est things there is in the community. Because that’s the way they were raised from their environments, early in the years. That’s how they sung. Togetherness. As you can see in some of the movies they make, how they sing and they praise the Lord, and they work together with each other. See, that’s the thing we need to do more now with everybody, don’t care what race or whatever you are. You need to do that. That’s how we got along, you know? Church has a convention, they go up there, they go, oh man, and coming up, seeing that, get in their wagons, they go and accumulate food, and oh my gosh, it’s just amazing. And that’s the way it should be all over. And that makes you feel good when you go and you see that. That makes you, as a whole, work together as everything in life itself. It makes it easier. It makes it easier. If I cut, you bleed, if you cut, you bleed same blood. So you know? And that’s the way it should be. Franklin: How would you describe life in the community in Richland? Brown: It’s wonderful. Especially to have a family. That’s the only place to be in a place like this, with a family. Not—we’re fortunate. And people don’t realize it, how fortunate you are to be in the cities where you can’t go out and run and have a good time. It’s just a fortune-to-be. And that’s what’s happening now, so many people are coming here because of that. Family people. What they have? Activities. Incredible. Franklin: Speaking of activities, what did you do in your spare time? Brown: Most of the time in the spare time, on age-wise, most of the time we played sports. That’s a lot. And what we did is work. We always had a job when we were out of school. That was our main thing, work. Chores, you had to do. It ain’t like nowadays, you tell them to do something, you come, they aren’t done. We didn’t have to—if it wasn’t done, you know what happened back here. That was a true story. You’d get—and people don’t realize, if you obey your parents and do things, life is a lot easier. We used to get up if we had to make our bed and do whatever and get it done, you’re free to go. Just stay out of trouble. And that’s what we did. And that’s growing up here, you have everything in between you. If you want to go to Seattle big city, if you want to go to Spokane, want to go to Portland, everything’s here. It’s wide open. It’s beautiful for family. It’s just wonderful! That’s why you find a family with five or six people, they don’t worry about it. See? It’s a lot of activities for them. Something to do. And it’s not as good as it used to be where you could leave your house open, leave the kids playing, they know they aren’t going to do anything wrong in your house. And that’s the way it was. Franklin: Do you remember any particular community events? Brown: Yes. In regards to which? Good or bad? Franklin: Good and bad. Brown: Yeah. We had a few, like a few in sports, and you’re the only black, you’re going to have conflicts. That’s just obvious with people. It’s over—almost over now, but we had it—I had it in Sunnyside once. We played, we had a little name-calling and whichever. Of course, we beat them pretty bad, but that’s part of the thing. Coming up in school, I can say, we didn’t have as much, because we were athletes, and that makes a difference. Franklin: Why? Brown: I don’t know. The people gets to know you, and they gets to meet you, and you become part of them, I would say. You become part of everybody’s—and they get the wrong impression before they know you of what it is until you—geez, that’s a nice guy, why do they always talk about da, da, da, da? And this is what happens with a lot. They become your best friends. And that’s what happens. A lot of times, if some people let go and let the kids work it out themselves, it’s a lot better. And I had another conflict in school where I was a prince, and we went over to Kennewick to a dance. They wouldn’t let us in. Franklin: They wouldn’t let who in? Brown: Wouldn’t let me and my escort in. We both were black. And they hadn’t segregated that. Over there, it was a teenager house, where we just had had our deal and we all were going dancing. So they wouldn’t let us go in. That’s where that situation—but it got straightened. But it takes, sometimes, something like that happening to start things rolling. So that was a great event. There was myself, Carrie Anne Barton, she was involved in it. It was a big write-up. You probably could go back into history, back in those days, when I graduated in ’58 and around in that area in ’57 you could find it in the Tri-Cities. Franklin: I think I’ve seen that. Brown: Have you? Franklin: I think I’ve seen what you’re talking about in the paper. Brown: Yeah, exactly. Franklin: You were—it was a public place, it was a public dance, and you had been refused entry. Brown: Exactly. Those things happened. I think it happens for the good in some respects, just like everything else, like when Martin Luther King marched and sang “We Will Overcome.” Things happen for a purpose: to make it better for other people. And that what it takes sometimes. Franklin: What about more positive community events? Do you remember like the annual Atomic Frontier Days celebration? Brown: Oh, gosh, yes. All of that. All the different incredible, incredible things on all events and situations like that. A lot of entertainment, and like I say, in the community, they didn’t accumulate as much as black and other races together like they do now on other events, like bringing in stars in and doing this and stuff like that. But I can’t think of too many other incidents like they have now, the boat races and all of this stuff, as a community. They didn’t have a lot of that then-days. [VIDEO CUTS] Franklin: We were talking about events. Brown: Exactly. Franklin: Were there any accommodations or events that you were unwelcome at or refused because of your race— Brown: Race, nah. Franklin: --besides the event in Kennewick? Brown: No, no, no, no. Franklin: How many—blacks were pretty much a minority in Richland, right? Brown: Exactly. Franklin: How many black families were there that you can— Brown: Well, give you an example, I think there was only five black in Richland High School. I think it was myself, and I think it was about five that I know of. I think we were close to one or two coming here. In fact, it wasn’t that very many, because not very many worked for General Electric, see? And the ones that worked out there mostly lived in Pasco, especially in the black community. Pasco was the main area. Franklin: Were there any divisions between the blacks that lived in Richland and the blacks that lived in Pasco? Brown: [LAUGHTER] You had to ask that question. Franklin: I did, yeah. Brown: You had to ask. It’s hilarious! To me, it is. Because people would get on our case. Oh, you guys lived out in the rich part of town. You know how they go. You live in Richland. We live in Pasco. And they thought—that, oh, it used to just ache, especially my mom, my wife. The kids, when we used to go, when I was married and had kids and all, oh, you guys think you’re so good, because you lived in Richland. It wasn’t—we did have that little conflict there with the blacks. Because we lived in Richland, and we were fortunate enough to live in Richland. And it happens. People think you’re more high-class, that’s what they think. Even so, we dressed the kids nice and when they go to church, people get inferiority complex or something along that. Like, hmm. How can they afford to dress them like that or do this? We had comments like that, seriously. It happened. It happened to a lot of the families that’s coming from Richland and living in Richland. And like we say, you can live anywhere you want, if you want to. You can buy any kind of car you want, if you want to. If you determine to do it, and made a commitment, you can do it. And it was jealousy, that’s all it was. Thought we were high-class, but we wasn’t. We just living the life the way God had blessed us to be. Franklin: Do you recall any family or community activities, events, or traditions that people brought from the places they came from, basically, that blacks had brought from Texas up here? Brown: I can’t recall. Events in church, I know they have those. That’s norm for there and here. They had all kind of events there. Franklin: Like what? Brown: Like we just had a—the church been there 60 years—I’m just saying events like that situation. And like they have a pastors’ anniversaries. They have all these anniversaries. They do that now, here. And—go ahead, yeah. Franklin: I was going to ask, what about food, for example? Brown: Food! They don’t have a feast, but they do it on anniversaries. We just had one this past week where it was the 65 years and they—not just a feast. They do have June 16th or 18th or whatever. Franklin: Juneteenth? Brown: Yeah. They do that. Which is a big event together where they have all the different soul foods and whatever. That don’t come about every year. Franklin: What about with the family, did people bring their food traditions with them? Up here? Like did your parents bring the foods of the South, the soul food up with them? Brown: Absolutely, absolutely. How they cook it and how they make it and all that. Franklin: What kind of foods in particular do you remember? Brown: Particular? Barbecue, sweet potatoes, black-eyed peas, okra, cabbages, greens, good old long onions, where you just take a good old bite. Squash. This is what they lived off the land. Tomatoes. They lived off the land with all of this type of food. Iced potatoes. That kind of stuff, they lived off the land to survive. And that’s what, when you go—we just had a feast in church and they had all the, oh my gosh, corn bread, make they own, used to make they own butter—milk the cow. I used to churn it myself. Franklin: Back in Texas? Brown: Back in Texas, absolutely. I used to do that. Kill they own. That’s why I say, as a family, they got together and they did all this stuff together. And they’d feast, oh my gosh, it’s incredible, incredible food. Good stuff, too. Have all this organic stuff and this. Oh, it’s unreal, unreal. Franklin: Were there opportunities available here that were not available where you or your parents came from? Brown: Absolutely. Your opportunity to go to a store, transportation, that was a major thing. Franklin: What do you mean, opportunity to go to the store? Brown: I mean, the store you had to go to there, you had to go miles, or you had to buy all you need here because you had to go 10 or 12 or 13 miles to get to a store to get the other type of groceries. So you were way out here and farming and wherever, they had it in one little central area, so everybody’d come like this. And like now you could get on a trolley or bus or these things and go or walk to it easily—no, no. That’s a difficult thing. And you’d see a lot of them take their wagon, get the mule hooked up, take off to the store, get all they sugar and all this stuff and flour in big sacks, so they didn’t have to go. So you can see, it’s a great difference, great difference. Franklin: What about education? Brown: Education. Education was good, but not as good, because of the work status. It’d been many times you had to pull out—my uncles—when I lived with my grandmother, there was 14 in my family with my mom—and had to stay, chop cotton, pick cotton. Franklin: You mean they had to be pulled out of school— Brown: Exactly, exactly. And you had to do that to survive on living. Franklin: Right. Brown: And that’s what made it—oh! That’s what made it so—experience to see that and what happened and how they doing it nowadays and what they have, and how they don’t take advantage of what they have nowadays. Like what they had to do back in those days. I experienced that and got to see it. Living off the land. Living off the land. No—how you get irrigation? There wasn’t no irrigation! What is irrigation? God has a way of doing it. And that stuff grow incredibly. It’s hard to believe. It’s hard to believe. Franklin: Yeah. Brown: It really is. To think about that. But I got to experience it and see it. That’s what makes it nice. And you see now, water? What’s that? Hot? I mean, hot-hot. But it grows. Franklin: In what ways were opportunities here limited because of segregation or racism? Brown: Well, it’s hard to say. You’re not limited anymore, I don’t think, too much. I think it’s mostly—you don’t find that anymore as much as it used to be. Because it’s changed in the South. And that’s where it used to be, you go to the backdoor, he go to the front. We experienced that. I experienced that. But you don’t have that anymore. Which is good, which is good. Franklin: What about here? Were there opportunities that were limited when you were a child or coming up? Brown: Well, in certain areas it was; like I say, Kennewick was that way. But other than that, I didn’t experience too much of other places. Like I say, by being small group of people in the area, it wasn’t too bad. Because they got along well. But it could still be there, which it’s going to be every place; don’t matter where you go. But you don’t see it as much. Because it was a small community of black in the area. That’s where you—the most of those people was Christians. That makes a difference on a family, you come from Christian families, you’re going to find a cooperation that’s great. That’s what it takes. You treat me well, I’ll treat you well. Franklin: Yeah. Did segregation and racism affect your education? Brown: Say that again? Franklin: Did segregation or racism affect your education? Brown: Did it lure it? Franklin: Did it affect it? Your education. Brown: Oh, no. That was up to me, to do whatever you have to do in your classwork. And to prove the point is that, whatever you did, you didn’t know whether you doing it right or wrong, whether they did that, but you assume you were, because they did pass you, give you a grade, give you whatever. And by that time, you would compare other people, you could tell. You could tell by other people whatever they’re doing in the class or whatever and whatever what you’re doing. And you can tell the smart one and the one that’s not smart. Franklin: Who were some of the people that influenced you as a child? Brown: As a where? Franklin: As a child. Brown: As a child? As a child. I think my parents influenced me by work. I think as teachers, coaches, how to discipline and what you can do with your life. You look at some of the coaching staff and some of the teachers, that they could take more time with you when they know that you’re struggling. That was a blessing. I can go back—because you can look at some of the teachers would take you in and say, you need help in this and help in that. Because like a lot of our people are slow learners because they were taken away from a lot as they grew up, coming from the different environments. But it got where you make a commitment for something, you do it. And that’s what it took. A lot of people—I can use that as an educational with CJ Mitchell, that’s a good example. He was almost—what was he? 35, 40, before he got his degree in something. But he kept going. Still have a job and going, but he wanted to get better. And that’s what he did. And that’s what you have to do when you lose out on a lot of that. You look at your coaches, you look at how they treat you and try to help you and do things for you. That’s a motivator. And I had a lot of it. I had a lot of it in my lifetime. Because I got missed out on school in certain ways when I was younger. Like they normally tutor people, you know, when they can’t—we were moving around here, moving around there. It affects you. It really does. Franklin: Yeah. You graduated in ’58? Brown: ’58. Franklin: And what did you do afterwards? Brown: Afterwards, I went to school, I went to CBC for two years. Played sports there, had a scholarship. I went there two years, my brother and I both. And after I left CBC, I went up to Cheney. Got a scholarship in Cheney. Franklin: For Eastern Washington? Brown: Eastern Washington, yeah, up at Cheney. And I had a scholarship in basketball there, but it didn’t work out. So during that year, I dropped out. And I shouldn’t have. But I did! That’s the year they was drafting people into the service. And I got drafted into the Army. 24th Division Germany, I went. And on a story, as you talk about that, I met my wife at CBC, she was from California. That was her brother that I was telling you about in Kennewick. And I went and got married. She was from Bakersfield, California, my wonderful wife. And I got to Bakersfield, California, took my mom and took all. And my brother didn’t call me and tell me I had my papers for the military. And he finally told us and my wife says, tell them I’m pregnant! Tell I’m this! You don’t need to go. But I went into the service, and went over in Germany, and I stayed in Germany four years. Special duties. I was in the 24th Division. Went all over Europe as basketball divisions. I got to travel all over Europe: Italy, France, Germany, Austria, all over, for four years. I was a basic trainer for physical education, bayonet training, hand-to-hand combat training. I did that for four years over in Germany. And that’s when I was in AIT in California. My wife got pregnant and she says, it’s time for you to come home. And I didn’t come home, because I extended for a year. And that’s when she called the Red Cross. And they said, yeah, he’s extended. And so I didn’t—I wasn’t able to see my daughter when she was born. And that’s where my life started. Right there. But I grew up over there in the military. I would tell anybody, go to the service, whatever you have. It grows you up. It makes a man out of you. Because I knew I had responsibilities. It just was the wonderful thing I could’ve ever done. And I stayed in there four years and got out, went to reserves and I started working for GE. That’s where I started again. Franklin: Out at Hanford? Brown: Out at Hanford. Franklin: What year was that? Brown: ’64, ’65. Franklin: What did you do for GE? Brown: GE? I worked in the mailroom. That’s where a lot of us started, in the mailroom. That’s where I started, in the mailroom. And as they—because when I first left and went into the military, I had started to work for GE, but I had got drafted. And so Mr. Wood, out here the Woods Nursery—he worked for GE in hiring people. And I’ll never forget him. He says, don’t worry about it. He said, when you get back—he worked for GE—he said, we’ll get you a job. And sure enough they did. So when I got out of the military, boom, they got me a job. It was wonderful. That’s kind of the way it happened on that. Franklin: And how long did you work out at Hanford? Brown: About all my—most until I retired here in—of course, they changed companies. As they changed companies, like I went from GE to Westinghouse, from Westinghouse to Bechtel, from Bechtel back to Westinghouse. I’ll never forget when I was working for GE, me and one of my friends, I forget his name, we had to change the lights in the whole fixtures of the lights they had up in downtown in the 703 Building. 703 Building, still there that one. That’s where I started out, him and I. Taking the lights down, cleaning them. And then as the thing go, I started working for GE and then I went to Battelle, and I went to Westinghouse, and that’s where I started most of my work, working on FFTF. Franklin: What did you do at FFTF? Brown: I was a manager—a supervisor. Franklin: Supervisor for--? Brown: Of mailroom, duplicating, reproduction, and all the satellites for the projects. I had, what, 12 women and one guy [LAUGHTER] working for me. I worked there, and I’ll never forget, I worked for a guy named Laurence Smith. He was a go-getter. When I first started working out there in the Area. When we started to put the project number two, I was in charge of all of reproduction, duplicating, buying equipment, buying all that. Franklin: When you say project number two, do you mean the Washington Public— Brown: Northwest Energy, yeah. Franklin: Yeah, Energy Northwest. Brown: Yeah, they used to call it Whups! [WPPSS]. Franklin: Yes. Brown: Yeah, we had five— Franklin: Yeah, they like to get away from that acronym now. Brown: Exactly. We had five projects going at the same time. Franklin: Right, but only one of them— Brown: One of them made it. All of them was—oh, what a mess. Franklin: Yes. Brown: What a mess. I mean, I had equipment going back to people, just—oh, it’s so much—oh! That was a disaster. But we made it through. But the one project going is still going. That was a good experience. I used to have my group have to work litigations and—oh, my gosh. In fact, my kids worked out there, a couple of them. Laquida and Chrissie and one of my others, too, Carolyn, the one’s in Vegas. But it was quite a deal, though, to see all that stuff just go to—ah. With all the money that people—oh. Sad sap, all of that. But anyway, that was my experience working. I worked there and retired out of there. I’ve been retired 23 years. I took the early retirement. My wife worked for Battelle. She put 30 years in. We both retired at the same time, 1994, I think it was. Franklin: Wow. What did your wife do at Battelle? Brown: She was in charge of the library. Franklin: Oh, okay. Brown: She worked in the library. She used to go to Washington, DC to do things and everything. She had a good—it was a good job for her. She loved it. She’s dedicated anyway, because that’s the way she is in the church. She’s on the treasury and this and that. But she loved the library. Mr. Wayne Snyder was her boss. Quite a guy, yep, yep. Wayne Snyder. Never forget it. She always would talk about him now. But anyway, she worked there 30 years. Franklin: Wow. The whole time for Battelle? Brown: Yeah, Battelle. Franklin: Wow. Brown: Yeah, she worked all the time for Battelle. She was in photography for a while, and then she went on to the library and she worked her way up through that. Been married 57 years. Franklin: Wow. Brown: [LAUGHTER] I know it. I need a trophy. I keep telling her that, when we talk to people in the church. And she says, you guys been married, what? 57 years and I need a trophy. [LAUGHTER] But it’s been wonderful. It really has. Franklin: Good. Brown: To be able to do that, travel, and the time go by so fast. And that’s why she says—in fact, the pastor just told her the other day, we was having Bible study and we were on a subject like that, and she says, Leda, how long did you work for Battelle? She says, 30 years. That’s what I want to tell you. You made a commitment to what you wanted to do. And that’s what Christians should do, he said. Make a commitment of what you want to do. And you did it, and look at you now! See? You make that commitment in life what you want to do, and you can do it. But you got to make a commitment and do it and stick to it. Yup, yup. Franklin: How would you describe your relationships with your coworkers and your supervisors at Hanford? Brown: At Hanford? Wonderful. Because whatever they wanted, I did it. And to say it so, they used to call me No Problem Brown. Go see him, he’ll take care of you. That’s what they used to call me. The litigation, the lawyers used to need stuff. I didn’t care what it cost, overtime or whatever. My relation with them was good. It had to be, because I was in a service department. And you got to learn when you’re in something like that, do whatever they want you to do. Not say, I can’t. I’ll try and do it. Whatever it takes. And get it done. Too many people criti—oh, we don’t need to do this; that ain’t right; this ain’t what you need to do. Do it if they want it. And that’s what happened. That’s what made my job so easy. And I’d tell the people, can you work overtime tonight or whatever? Yes, I’ll do it. Can you get this out? What do we need to do? Need to take it downtown, commercial? Do it. I didn’t have any problem with any of them because I did my job of what they wanted. And they was managers and whatever. Let them fight the problem, not me. I didn’t have any problem. That’s why I was successful at retiring in the same place, yeah. Franklin: What kinds of interactions did you have with coworkers and supervisors outside of work? Brown: Outside of work? I can’t recall any outside of work. You saying, people outside of work, or just supervisors or—how do you want to--? Franklin: Yeah, the people you worked with and your supervisors. Because I imagine even in the ‘60s and ‘70s, right, blacks would’ve been a minority, a real minority— Brown: Well, I really didn’t have any problem with that. Honestly. Because I was raised to do your job if you’re working for somebody. And do a good job, no matter what you’re doing. Do a good job, and you ain’t got to worry about who you are or what you doing here or there. Do your job like it’s supposed to be and you won’t have a lot of problem. Franklin: In what ways did the security and secrecy at Hanford impact your work or daily life? Brown: Security? Franklin: Yeah. Brown: Not really. Because you knew the security violations of whatever you had to do. No. Security was good for the people, good for you, because you had to provide by the rules and regulations. That’s self-explanatory. If you do something you aren’t supposed to do in regards to the rules and regulations, you get punished for it. Simply. You know? It’s just like driving a car. If you are supposed to go 25, and you’re going 40, that’s you. Rules and regulations doesn’t say that you can do that. Franklin: What do you know about your parents’ reactions to learning that the work they had done contributed to the development of the atomic bomb? Brown: Well, they didn’t know what they were doing until the fact came out. Franklin: Yeah. What do you remember about that? Brown: Well, I don’t remember too much about it, until I—I was so young during that time—until I found out why and what they were doing later. Kind of frightening about it, because some of the things that came out into the parents’ situation by radiation—which my mom went through it. Yeah. My dad was exposed to it, but not as bad. But other than that, I can’t recall, because I was kind of young when that happened. Until I found out later that the people didn’t know what they were doing; they were just working. And that’s tough. But that’s the way life was, and you had to accept it the way it was. Franklin: Yeah. What do you think is the most important legacy of the Hanford Site? Brown: The most important is work. Nuclear. Electricity. Environments, keeping it clean for other generations. That’s one of the most important because the danger that they set here on Hanford. Soon as you say the word Hanford, people think about radiation this and that. That’s just the way life is. So, that’s— Franklin: I’m going to move on to talk about civil rights now. Brown: Okay. Franklin: What were the major civil rights issues for African Americans at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities during your time here? Brown: I can’t recall too much. In the Tri-Cities? Franklin: Yeah. And at Hanford. Brown: Let’s see what you—how can you put that in another way? Franklin: What kinds of civil rights issues was the black community in the Tri-Cities struggling with? What were the main areas of concern? Brown: Okay, okay. I think work. Jobs. You can see a lot of that. I’m making—I’m giving an example. Ten dollars, they’re getting 12. But I’m doing more than they are. I’m a specialist. I’m a service worker. You see a lot of that. That was really a tough situation. In fact, that go on now. It goes on. Politics, situation of people, you know people and they do this and do this and whatever. That’s the only thing I can see. But actually a lot of people don’t know that, unless they communicate with people and find out. Otherwise it goes on that I’m making a good living and doing good and whatever. But sometimes they could say, well, we’re only getting so-and-so. You getting what? I’m not even getting that. Communication through things, it happens that way. Segregation situation. And I think a lot of time, to be honest, we do it ourselves. We’re afraid to take a chance on situations. Like going in and asking for a job or getting an application or do things like that. We’re frightened and say, aw, they ain’t going to hire me because of my—but that’s not really true. You never know until you do. You got a good background and you have a trace of a good background, somebody’ll see you. But never give up. Keep moving forward. Franklin: Any other issues besides employment that the black community struggled with in the Tri-Cities? What about housing? Brown: Housing? Franklin: Yeah. Brown: No, I don’t think so. No. Because I can go with my family, where I live—I live in all the area with the Mormons. They become as a family. It was wonderful. I had a house built in 1972 over there. I’m still there. And just like now, my daughter lived out in West Richland where the new houses Hayden put up. They bought one there right in the middle of everybody. It’s money counts now. Franklin: What about historically? You mentioned that your wife’s brother— Brown: Yes. Franklin: --had tried to live in— Brown: And he did live in Kennewick. Franklin: So, historically, was housing a concern for the African American community in the Tri-Cities? Quality housing? Brown: Well, because if they could afford it. They could live in Kennewick or Richland. Not Kennewick. But in Pasco or Richland. But over there, you found very few people would live over there in Kennewick because of the surrounding of where you would be. They were mostly on the east side. Now, be honest, it moved. They started moving on up—you know how people, generation to generation, get involved in it. But in Richland, if you could afford it, because it was so—it was expensive more in Richland, in the areas. Different, new areas. The old areas wasn’t too bad where the old, what do you say, during-the-war-houses— Franklin: The Alphabet Houses? Brown: Prefabs and precuts and situation. But they were something like a dime a dollar in those days. But if you had the job to be able to afford it, you could do it. And that was the basic there. Franklin: That kind of goes back to your first point, though, where jobs were a concern because at times jobs may have been there but at the time African Americans were being paid less for the same job or there were classes of jobs that just weren’t really allowed— Brown: Right, exactly. You analyzed it perfectly. That’s exactly-- Franklin: So that kind of influences the quality of housing. Brown: Quality, absolutely. You’re right. Absolutely. I’m only making this, and they making that, and how can they afford it? Situations. That happened. Franklin: Because that happened to CJ Mitchell, right? Brown: Absolutely. Franklin: That he had been—people thought maybe because he bought a nice house, maybe they were paying him too much. Brown: Mm-hmm, exactly! You’re exactly right. And that’s the same way with us. That when we moved over there, and the people at work were worse than the people where we lived. They says, where you live? I live in Westview Acres. What?! And she says she saw a supervisor drive by her place. And says, that’s where you live? And she drove—we had a Mercedes. I drove a Mercedes. 1978 Mercedes. She drove it to work. She didn’t drive it no more. How can you afford a Mercedes?! You know, those kinds of things, how can you do this and how can you do that? She couldn’t stand it. We parked it. [LAUGHTER] We still got it, though. It’s a good car. Still restored. Yeah, it was her baby. Anyway, you’re right. You run into those situation. Yup. You’re paying them too much. Franklin: What action was taken to address the disparity in jobs and housing? Brown: In regards to buying, selling or getting? Franklin: Yeah. Brown: Well, like I said again, I’ll go back to if you could afford to do it, there was no problem. But to get into certain neighborhood, you couldn’t. You know, it was limited to a certain thing because of that. And to tell you the truth, on something else in regards to what you’re talking about, in selling a house or buying a house, people would want to know who’s moving next-door. We just went through that with my daughter. They were selling a house, but the people seeing the pictures and they couldn’t sell it. Soon they took the pictures down and done, showing that was black, it sold right away. That’s amazing. You follow what I’m saying? Franklin: Yeah, I follow what you’re saying. Brown: Yeah? So you can see. It just happened, too, recently, to this house that he got ready to sell out in Richland because his upstairs is five-bedroom and the kids are all mostly gone. He said, I will not leave any pictures or anything here. And it sold pretty fast. Franklin: You mean pictures of the family? Brown: Yes. Knowing that they were black, see what I’m saying? That happens. People don’t realize it, but it happens. And you can see what I’m referring to. Franklin: Oh, yes, very much. Who were the important leaders of civil rights efforts in the area? Brown: In the area? Hmm. I’d have to go way back on that. I think, mostly it was, I’ve seen CJ had a lot to do with some of that. And you have the pastors. Reverend Wilkins, he was a strong man as a pastor through all this. He worked down—I think he worked for GE or some of them people. But Reverend Wilkins was a very strong believer in that. And Reverend—I can go all the reverends really. Reverend Jackson, he was quite a leader. Reverend Upton. Franklin: Reverend who? Brown: Upton? Franklin: Upton? Brown: U-P—I guess that’s the way you spell it, Upton. I’m trying to—well, you had like Reverend—I know he was. I’m trying to figure out his—gosh. Who else was that? Some of those names will come to me later but won’t come to me now. Reverend Allen. Reverend Allen, that’s who I wanted to say. He was a real strong believer in that. Because he—Reverend Allen, he was quite a guy. Franklin: Why were the reverends so much at the forefront of civil rights? Brown: Because of the Christian-type. You know, just like, Martin Luther King situation, Christian. And that’s what they believe in the Bible and believe that all people are created equally and that’s the way it was taught. That’s one of the main things in the church, as a pastor. And like they say, the dictionary is here in the Bible. If you follow that, you can’t go wrong. So that’s kind of the way things were with the people back there. Reverend Allen was a plumb believer in—he was with the missionary through all the big churches. He was in charge of all that through Seattle and whatever and pushed all that stuff. He was one of the head top nachos in that. Franklin: What were some of the notable successes of civil rights efforts in the area? Brown: Oh, god. Non-believers? Did you say non-believers? Franklin: No. What were some of the notable successes? Brown: Oh, the successes! Oh, okay. I follow you, what you’re referring to. Well, I’m trying to recall some of the situation with that, successful. Okay. People used to not vote. That was one of the main things. People would not sit back so they aren’t going to—but every vote counted. They publicize that very well in the churches. That was the main thing. To get us better, to get us where we at, we need to go and vote. That was one of the main things in their life that they would publicize of what you need to do. They would bring that up in church; in fact, they do now. And that was the main thing. So you have to get out and support the things that you want to have done. If you don’t, they’re just going to continue to do them. That was the main issue. One of the main, main issue on that. Get out and vote on the stuff. You’re a citizen and you have the rights. But lot of them just, ah, they don’t listen to me. Franklin: What were some of the biggest challenges? Civil rights challenges? Brown: Of having your right to go places, having your right to buy things, not because of your color. And having the rights to be able to live where you wanted to live. That was some of the big issues, I think. In regards— Franklin: Were those issues here? Brown: Yeah, you’re always going to have those kind of issues. You have them, don’t matter where you go. You’re going to have them. And you’re going to find people that—it’s fading away. Because we’re moving forward instead of staying down where it’s bad. We want to move forward in regards to what’s going on. Yeah, you’re going to run into the issues. You got to ignore them and go on and try to make things right. Because that’s the way life is. You look at the past; you got to let the past go and look at the things going forward. We got to move forward. Because we can’t think about the past of how—and that’s why our ancestors set our paths for us. And come up with these situations, like you say, the Martin Luther King going for the march and this and that, and vote and getting out the vote. These are the things you need to do to make it better. Franklin: Right. Were you directly involved in any civil rights efforts? Brown: No, not really. Not really. Franklin: Okay. Brown: Nope, nope. Nope, I just stayed mostly in sports. Mostly in sports, coaching and— Franklin: Do you think sports was a special kind of path to acceptance for African Americans? Did it offer you something special in terms of acceptance? Brown: Yes. Sports was—like, I coached for 28 years. I did at Hanford and I did at Kamiakin. Me and Emmett Jackson. You know Emmett. Franklin: Yup. Brown: And the people accepted us as who we were and what we did. We didn’t do it as politics-wise. We did it as a person who wanted to make a commitment to do what they had to do. The discipline that they had. And this is the way we coached. People love that. We used to have people say, well, what’s wrong with him? How come you aren’t playing him? How come you aren’t doing this? The simple answer is, come to our practices. He came to the practice and he left. Next day, he say, I see what you’re saying. See? You bring people in to see what’s going on, when you’re trying to help them and they don’t cooperate or do what they’re supposed to do, let them see it themselves. And that made a difference. Because we treated them as human. As if they were my kids or whatever. And we tell the parents, give them to us for an hour, and then you can have them back. Leave them alone. And we have nowadays guys saying, hey, Coach Brown! You can tell how you treated the people to give you that respect that you did it right. Franklin: You and your brother were kind of sports stars in Richland. Brown: Right. Franklin: Right, Richland High School. I forget who I interviewed earlier, but someone said that it seemed to them that high school was harder for black women because they didn’t have the sports outlet; whereas, if you could play sports, there was a degree of acceptance. Could you—what are your thoughts on that? Brown: Well, could be negative and could be positive in some respect. It’s how that other person and you react to the environments of the people. See, I might take it a different way, because they treat me in a different way for what I do than compared to what I do. So there’d be a difference in that situation. Franklin: Were there ever any social or sporting events when you were in high school where your race was an issue? Brown: Yes. There was especially when we were playing. That’s what you’re referring to. Like, Sunnyside, we had a problem. Break out. You probably have heard about that one. Emmett probably told you about that, too. That’s when we was in high school. They didn’t see very many blacks. And when we do go play out, we dominate. And when you dominate somebody in they own place, you get criticized. Don’t matter where. And that was the outbreak. They had to call the police, they had to do this and whatever. Franklin: Really? They had to call the police? Brown: Oh, yeah. They had to call the police and everything. Escorted us out of there. Franklin: Who were the police called on? What was the— Brown: Security, they called them on, because the coaches called them, too. Art Dawald, he was the coach. Franklin: Of Richland? Brown: Of Richland on that situation. Never forget it. Yup, an outburst. Because we beat them so bad. Oh, them so-and-sos and so-and-so—it was bad. It was really bad. It was in the paper. I’m sure if you go back in those days, you could probably easily find it. Franklin: Did they use— Brown: Oh, yeah, oh, yeah. Franklin: --racially-charged language? Brown: Oh, yeah. It was out. Yup, yup. They don’t belong here, these… But yeah, I’ll never forget that. That was the only most disaster thing that ever happened. That was in high school. I think you’ll go back and find the paper, it’ll be in the paper. Franklin: Do you remember what year that was? Brown: Let’s see. It had to be in my high school year. Because my brother and I both was playing together. So that had to be in ’57, ’55, ’56, ’57. In that area. Because we both was playing. Franklin: Is Norris older or younger? Brown: Older. One year. Franklin: One year, okay. Brown: Yup, he was a year ahead of me. A year ahead of me. That was only the big outburst we had. Franklin: Did you ever—how do I ask this question—what was dating like? Were you ever—you know, because I’m sure you may have had friends—lots of white friends— Brown: I got you. I got you. Franklin: Was there any strict requirement— Brown: Gotcha, gotcha. Franklin: Okay. Brown: Dating was very interesting. Because of sport athletic ability that you have, you aren’t going to have much problem. I had a white girlfriend. Dated her. Lived out in north Richland here. And we were in school together. You know how you go down and you go to the locker with them and this and that, okay? They had an outburst. Somebody did. And they found out who was doing the outburst. Our vice president, I’ll never forget him, Solly? Solly, have you heard the name Solly? Okay, he was our president. Him and Mulligan, George Mulligan, called the guy in and said, we aren’t going to have this. And they called us and apologized to me. Franklin: When you say “incident” and “guy,” what do you— Brown: What they did is, they didn’t want us to date the white girls. And they was prejudiced against it. Franklin: Was this other students or parents? Brown: Students. Students. They even had an assembly on it. Franklin: Had assembly about what? Brown: About this situation. To the people. And told them, said, we aren’t going to have it. Honestly, I’ll never forget that. We used to have assemblies all the time before basketball and things and any activities. The president brought it up. Franklin: So there weren’t a lot of African Americans at Richland High School. Brown: No, no. Franklin: So did you feel like this was—I mean, you and your brother must—this was targeted about your situation. Brown: Right, right. Because that happened in junior high in Chief Jo. As that led on, we didn’t have any problem after that. They showed the support through the faculty, of the president and all of that. Boy, it went away. Never did have any other problem. Never did have any other problem. They treated us just like whatever. And I could say a lot of it probably was our athletic ability of what we did for the school and for the community. Got well-known, and that carries us through it. And like I say, I can only count little ones, not a lot of them. Same way, going to the sock hop, they used to call it. They call your name and call your girlfriend up to start out. I can remember that. It showed how closely you were with the facilities of the people. And that made you feel good, to show you have that support. Franklin: Yeah. Brown: Yup. I went through it, experienced it. Yup. Franklin: I just have two kind of open-ended questions left. First was, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland during the Cold War? Brown: During that time? During the Cold War? That’s many years, wasn’t it? Franklin: It was, about 45. [LAUGHTER] Brown: I know it, that’s what I’m saying! Well, I tell you— Franklin: I guess maybe the high point of the Cold War, you know? Brown: Yeah, I know. Of living in that environment? You know, it doesn’t affect you as much as you’d think about it until afterwards. Because you can’t see exactly what’s going on. You can hear about it. Until it happens or what done happened in the Cold War of what your parents went through. Because you can’t see it. All you are is trying to have a good time, go to school and do things like that and enjoy life. Where they were doing things incredibly. So the experience did not change in regards to being a young person or whatever. We still had activities. But in those days, we made our own activity situation where we would be happy. As long as our parents was working and bringing in something for food, we were happy. Because we was not informed with the other situation. They didn’t publicize it like they publicize now. Because they got all this stuff now, they know what’s going on, what’s this and whatever going on, and people know. All we was concerned about: going to school, parents was working, making a living, and getting some food in our old stomach. And having a good time. That’s what we were concerned about, back in those days. Franklin: Sure. Brown: Yup, that was it. And that’s how we met a lot of friends, too, by that situation. Making our own playground, making our own things together. And communicating together. And that’s what made it nice. And made it nice and—wherever you—it just, it’s not like that anymore. Gosh. It just aches you to see it. But that was the good days. Good days. Like now, I see Hecksons—I don’t know if you know them or not—Jerry Heckson and Roger was the old—we used to play together. They’re white, and we just had a good time. We made our own fun. And that’s—they don’t do that anymore. It just—ugh. That’s why you have so many problems with segregation, people and this and that. But Christians, that means a lot, when you have faith and trust in God and those situations, and your family. It carries you a long way through life. Makes you think twice. Instead of blowing up. And that’s what it is. Communicate, you listen. I learned that in, when I was working, when I used to go to seminars. The guy used to get up, after he’d go through everything, he’d say, I’m going to leave this with you people. Learn these two things in your life. Learn to listen. And communicate. And you got it. It’s amazing. Yup. Franklin: Is there anything else you would like to mention related to migration, work experiences, segregation and civil rights and how they’ve impacted your life at Hanford and Richland? Brown: Yeah, I think growing up, as you can single out a person in my life, where I grew up with a lot of black or whatever, I think it was a good experience to be able to communicate with a different race. When you knew you were down, lower race, which they considered, but you didn’t have to be. You proved yourself that you could go higher. That’s what I’m saying to people. Prove yourself. Soon as you prove yourself, bam, you got it. Same way they say, you’re living in an area with the Mormons. They’re human. Treat them right. We used to go to the—my son, we used to take to father days. You do all of that. Human beings. And that’s what I say about Richland. So great with a family. Family people. And that’s what it is. It’s just great. And that’s what we should have all over. Makes it easier for everybody. My neighbors, they have potatoes, they bring potatoes to me. They have this, they bring some to me. Vice versa, they need help, I’ll help you. It’s wonderful. Makes you feel good. And you bring your kids up the same way, and they doing the same thing. That’s all it takes. Now I see some of the kids of his and all my neighbors, hey, Mr. Brown! Hey! You know? It’s wonderful. Makes you feel good. Makes you feel good when the environment that you live in that you can have trust and faith in people. God is good, all the time. Franklin: Yup. Well, CW, thanks so much for coming and interviewing with me today. Brown: No problem. Franklin: I really appreciate it. Brown: No problem. My pleasure. <a href="https://youtu.be/1UtyTpP6R6g">View interview on Youtube.</a> Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview General Electric Westinghouse 703 Building WPPS Battelle Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1948- Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1964-1994 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with C.W. Brown Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Pasco (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Kennewick (Wash.) Segregation McNary Lock and Dam (Or.) Nuclear industry Nuclear energy Civil rights Racism Description An account of the resource C.W. Brown moved to Richland, Washington in 1948, and worked at the Hanford Site from 1964-1994. A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288 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 05/12/2018 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. This oral history collection was done in partnership with the National Park Service under Task Agreement P17AC01288. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F62d9a8436aa68d523231a11c1fd12550.jpg cf654522f54074b7e9a73043a1991e80 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fdef6f13f1b87c38a2583f8f2fa20db09.mp4 88d26c6ec37bd9e2ea23d63fb95e1ccd 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 Parker Foundation Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Nuclear science; Richland, Wa.; Hanford, Wa.; Parker, Herbert, 1910-1984 Description An account of the resource "The Herbert M. Parker Foundation collects valuable personal perspectives from key individuals who worked in radiological and environmental protection at the Hanford site in the early years of its development. Since 2004, student interns have recorded interviews from health physics and related science professionals. These historically valuable interviews document their personal experiences, observations, contributions and ideas. Several of the distinguished professionals who have spoken at the Annual Herbert M. Parker Lecture are also included. The videotaped interviews and accompanying biographical sketches will be made accessible to the public." See https://tricities.wsu.edu/parkerfoundation/ParkerHistory Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 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. 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 Carl Corbit Description An account of the resource An interview with Carl Corbit conducted by the Herbert M. Parker Foundation at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Herbert M. Parker Foundation at Washington State University Tri-Cities https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F42af466f014b615aae8ad77bcb4e6927.JPG 697aa5d799157fbcf33e7ff2b8b8cab9 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Carlos Leon Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: All right, red light’s on. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Carlos Leon on October 5, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Carlos about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Carlos Leon: Carlos Leon. That’s my full name; never got a middle name. C-A-R-L-O-S L-E-O-N. Franklin: So, Carlos, when and where were you born? Leon: I was born in 1953 in Toppenish. Toppenish Memorial Hospital. Franklin: And what had brought your family to Toppenish? Leon: Oh, golly. My grandparents were all born in Mexico. My dad in Texas; my mom in Kansas. And then my ma’s parents moved to Toppenish early ‘40s. Then my dad’s parents moved while my dad was in the service. When he moved back, he moved back to Toppenish. Then making a long story short, that’s where they met. Franklin: And were both of those families in agriculture? Leon: Yeah, they worked the fields. They worked the fields. My grandparents, my parents and stuff, they worked the field. My dad had a trucking firm that, you know, so we hauled potatoes and peas and all kinds of produce. And that was our summer job, working out in the fields, or in the orchards and stuff with my mom or something like that. So we were always--we were always busy. So a lot of the times, really, though--like when you worked, like the potatoes. It’s hot, middle of the summer, and you’d work basically as soon as the sun rose till 10:00 in the morning. All these rows of sacks of potatoes up and down the rows and stuff and everything else. And they’d put them on the trucks, and that’d be the end of the workday. But it was a long and hot workday type of thing. So we got the afternoon as kids to really actually be kids, too, at the same time. Franklin: And is fieldwork what brought your grandparents out of Mexico? Leon: Well, my-- Franklin; Did they ever talk about it? Leon: Well, my grandfather on my dad’s side worked in the salt mines in Kansas. You’ve heard of the famous salt mines of Kansas, Lands, Kansas. And then my grandfather on my dad’s--my grandfather, my dad’s father worked the railroads in Texas. So my dad grew up in Georgetown, Texas. So that was--yeah, so, he has a couple sisters, so they eventually moved to I think Montana it was, and then eventually back to Toppenish, Washington. Franklin: What was it about Toppenish that drew your family there? Leon: Oh, golly. Well, agriculture, really. My mom’s family settled in, I guess, migrant cabins at the Golding farms in Yakima. It was the biggest hop ranch in the world at one time. I don’t know if it still is or not. So they had cabins and stuff there and eventually they had to sell the house about four blocks away. I didn’t know my grandfather. I was three years old when he died. But my grandmother, his mom, lived with us and nine kids and then my other grandparents lived only like four or five blocks away. So we were very close and they all knew each other real well. All my aunts and uncles, actually, from both sides of the family know each other. Yeah, it’s really seamless in a lot of ways. So we had a big family and so, yeah, I was very fortunate. We didn’t have much, but we had a lot at the same time. Franklin: Mm-hmm, a lot of family members and family gatherings, relationships. Leon: Oh, yeah, oh, yeah. And it was Mexican culture, also. So you know, my grandparents didn’t speak any English, so. Hence you heard me speaking Spanish at the Sacajawea thing, Heritage Days. Franklin: Oh, that was really wonderful. The kids were like-- Leon: Oh, I enjoy that tremendously. Franklin: They really dug that. Leon: I give credit to my parents on all that. My parents were very outgoing and they stressed education and they stressed making people comfortable. That was the biggest thing, really. Franklin: Did they--did your parents want you--I know a lot of times with immigrant families, the children are often not taught their parents’ language; they want them to learn the language of their adopted country. Leon; Well, no, you know, my parents never really said one way or another. My older brother and my younger brother, Rudi, after me, like the first three boys, we kept it fairly, whatever. But the thing is, we were never educated in it. We didn’t read it; we didn’t write it. We spoke to our grandparents with it, and it was all around us with our extended family and stuff, people that visited my parents and that type of thing. So, you learn the, what do you call it, the morays, the norms, of the culture. With the fiestas and that type of thing. And I grew up with the food and when I went to college, I told people, I had to learn how to use a fork. I really did. Because it was just tortillas. And to this day, gimme a tortilla and beans and some rice, and I’m happy. You know, in a way, with my kids and stuff, I see them eat kind of like--cool, watching them eat with their hands and stuff. So there’s part of that there. They aren’t going to have the full meal deal that I had growing up, but with my aunts and uncles are still around and my brothers and sisters, they impart quite a bit. And I’m really proud of that. I’m really really proud of that. Franklin: Was there already a--how large was the Latino community, or was there already a Latino community when both sides of your family moved up to Toppenish? Leon: There was quite the Latino community. But really nothing like it is nowadays. You know, now it seemed like 75% of the town is Hispanic. Up and down the Yakima Valley. Or something like that. There was a large community, but it wasn’t like the influential that you have now, it seemed like. When I went to--when I graduated from high school, a handful of Hispanics that graduated with me. And I think two, maybe three--I’m just thinking--African Americans and that was really the--that was it back then. I graduated in 1971. But that was it. I never felt like I wasn’t part of the town. Franklin: Right. And you said you went to college. Leon: Mm-hmm. Franklin: And where did you go? Leon: Oh, for--[LAUGHTER] that’s a long story. But to make it short, when I graduated from high school, I went to Eastern in Cheney, and got tired of school after about three years. Kind of like basically, when you go to college, you meet the world. You meet kids that have a lot of money, or kids that don’t have much. Kids that want to be away from home, kids that are longing to be back home, and have a different kind of relationship with their parents. To me, it was all normal. I just kind of like--anyway, but living on a shoestring, kind of like eventually on your own kind of gets to you a little bit. So after three years and stuff, that’s where, ad in the paper, reactor operator? Sure, why not? Franklin: Really? You answered an ad in the paper. Leon: Ad in the paper. Franklin: Do you remember--a paper in Cheney? Leon: No, no, I was actually, during the summer, it was a Tri-City paper. I think it was my uncle that called and said, hey, there’s an ad in the paper for--and I saw it. I think it was in the Yakima Herald also. Kind of blurry about that. And interviewed with Paul Vinther. I don’t know if you’ve met-- Franklin: Really? Leon: Uh-huh. Franklin: Oh, yeah, I’m very--yeah, he has the Hanford Retirees. Leon: Paul, oh, yeah. Franklin: And he trained reactor operators. Leon: A long time ago. He’s a physicist by trade. Anyway, it’s funny, in talking with him--very, oh, man, talk about a larger-than-life personality. I mean, here, look, here I am, a 21-year-old kid, look at how small I am. I mean, barely weighed 120 pounds, maybe, at that time. I’m a lot heavier now, type of thing, but think about that. And, you know, he’s a big man. So he had this big, booming voice, great personality, just kind of like--and, heck, I can’t even remember the questions he asked and stuff. It wasn’t very long after that that they gave me the job offer. And so-- Franklin: What did you know about Hanford when you took that interview? Leon: Oh, golly. Well, I guess a couple things. You know, I remember the Kennedy thing, because that was covered; that was in the news. That was everywhere. I mean, eastern Washington, are you kidding? I mean, the President of the United States?! I know the Herald and the Tri-City really covered it at that time. But also the Yakima paper, Toppenish--that’s what we got, the Yakima Herald, all the time. And I remember that. And then driving truck for my dad in potatoes, like going to Othello, we’d be driving out 240. And so you’d see these stacks. You’d see these buildings, see the vapor coming out. And it was just kind of like--you know, now, you’re thinking about it, as I’m looking out. And I know the area so well that I was actually looking, at actually B Reacotr, you know, the one that was the closest to see that. But going on up, you’d see the processing coming out of the 200 West. And I know the story on when I’m on the bus is kind of like, back in those days and stuff, if you pulled over like for a flat tire or something like that, the Hanford Patrol would be right there, almost immediately, seeing what--if there’s something wrong somewhere, hurry up and fix your tire and move on. Because it was really, really secret, still. Franklin: Yeah. Leon: You know, I mean, highly sensitive and all that stuff. So that as my--and then I knew a lot of smart people worked there, I guess. I mean, that’s what it comes down to because all these scientists and all that type of thing. They used to have a school day when they’d have, you know, two or three kids from each school from all over the areas would go and tour Hanford, and they’d show them all that type of thing. So I had a couple friends that did that, and whatever, I wasn’t one of the smart kids. So they went and they’d tell, whatever, that they were picked and all that stuff. Franklin: But then here you are, 21, you got a job offer as a reactor operator. Leon: And I had no idea what I was getting into. Franklin: Well, what did you get into? Leon: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: What was that like? Leon: Well, come down to it, first thing was that they, you know, saw how much they were going to pay me. $184.84 a week was my--and I’m going, whoa. I mean, nobody’d ever paid me that much for anything, whatever. Franklin: What kind of wages were your parents earning, or what would’ve been the prevailing wage in like driving truck at that time? Leon: my dad didn’t pay me. Franklin: Oh, sure. Leon: My dad didn’t--his trucks and I got room and board. Put gas in and paid insurance for my car and that type of thing. Franklin: Sure, I mean, how did that compare to what you might have earned back in Toppenish if you were working? Leon: Oh, heck, I’d’ve be a millionaire almost type of thing. Oh, I’m not kidding! That was--$184, that’s like $4.50 an hour in 1974. And, really, when I first came here, my brother had already started to work out here, my older brother. And so we found a place in Pasco, like an old hotel set up to stay there until I found something, whatever, until we found something. And just a block of I guess would be south of the Uptown, there were some apartments, and I found them-- Franklin: Those little one-story apartments? Leon: Yeah, the one-story, the Anthony Apartments it’s called, whatever? Franklin: The what apartments? Leon: I lived 1209. 1209 George Washington Way. Franklin: Oh. What did you call them? Leon: Anthony Apartments, they were called at the time. And I don’t know who--I can’t remember the owner’s name. But anyway, so we stayed there, lived there for actually the whole four years that I actually worked as an operator at N. So me and my brother moved in there, $200 a month. And so he covered the first month, because he’d been working and he had money, and I hadn’t gotten paid nothing yet. And then eventually--but no cable, no phone, you know, any of that type of thing. Because we--you know. I got in trouble with the no phone business with work. My shift manager--I got sick, and I didn’t call. And this was at the, oh, probably been working three or four months or something like that. So, I was gone--I was not at work for a couple, two days. And I got on the bus, and got to work a couple days later. He was really mad at me because I didn’t call. Well, I don’t have a phone, Cliff. And he said, well, go to a payphone, whatever, that type of thing. And at that time, I didn’t have--I’m trying to remember the phone number of the control room or his number, just kind of like--that was like--but whatever. It was a year before I got a phone. You know, really. Franklin: Wow. What did your older brother do? Leon: He worked, actually, just with finance. That’s what he wanted to do and stuff, so he worked in the finance part. He never went into the reactors or nothing like that. Franklin: What was your first impression when you showed up for your first day? Do you remember? Leon: Oh, I remember my first day. My first day? My first bus ride. Remember, you caught the things, so they’d give you the instructions on how to catch the bus. I didn’t know about the shuttles at the time. I ended up catching the bus right across the street on George Washington Way, eventually, when I got on shift. But I ended up on the bus ride and we were just passing--just before we were going to pass the 200 East Area. Of course, I didn’t know the 200 East Area, but I know now, that’s just why I’m telling you. Anyway, passing 200 East Area. The bus was pulling over. And I was kind of like, oh, this must be the reactor or something like that. But there was some commotion and stuff Well, there was a guy three or four seats in front of me, because I was close to the back, he was having a heart attack. I’d never seen anything like this. So they escorted him off and a patrolman came on out and stuff. So they left and then the bus drove off. They left him standing there with the patrolman and they took care of him or whatever. But it was nothing like nowadays with the EMTs and all that type of stuff. It’s totally different. And kind of like, okay. It was just--and then I, you know, like showed up in front of the admin building and I got off. I didn’t know anybody. And walked in, and there was the admin building, and they had told me just to go up the stairs and the corner office and there was Dottie, Vinther’s secretary. Big old smile on her face and everything. You know, so welcomed me and every thing, and talked about her guys, because she just loved the operators. And then eventually got escorted into the 105 Building. And the 105 Building for N is huge. Huge, compared to, you know, the B and the rest of the other reactors. Got introduced to whatever shift manager of the shift that was on at the time and everything, and all the various other people. It’s kind of like, lost. And then Larry Haler came on, too, the same date that I did. Franklin: Same exact day? Leon: Yeah, same day. Franklin: Wow. Leon: And so we kind of hung around together and asked--gave each other a lot of blank looks a lot. You’ll have to ask Larry what he remembers. But it was a blur, basically, it’s what a blur was. And we were basically assigned to work back in the fuels area to package fuel and that type of thing. That’d be our first thing of learning being a reactor operator. Franklin: So it was all on-the-job training. Leon: Ohm es, I did not take one single classroom. It was just, this is the books, read the books. And it had all the systems and all that type of stuff. And then--I was--to go forward a little bit, eventually I was assigned to shift. And I was, looking back on it, I was very fortunate to be put on the shift that I was on, B shift, is the shift I was on. Got A, B, C, and D. Franklin: And why was that so fortunate? Leon: Ah, because of the individuals. And I guess, I guess, maybe if I would’ve been on A shift, C or D, I would’ve--but I got to meet other guys on the other shift and got to know them, too, don’t get me wrong there. But B shift was just the characters that were there, but at the same time, the character that they gave me, I guess that’s--and I was telling Tom earlier, it was kind of like, those guys helped me grow up. I was 21 years old, and I was bulletproof. And the next youngest guy on my shift was 45 years old. Franklin: Oh, wow. So they were, a lot of them were kind of like father figures almost? Leon: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. They had kids like me and older, type of thing. And so--yeah, I guess you could say, they probably knew me much better than I knew myself in a lot of ways. But it was--they really wanted me to learn, and learn right. That was the one thing that I’m very, very thankful for. Because, boy, I tell you, if you did anything wrong, if you went one way or--against what you should actually be doing, it’s just kind of like, you don’t put your finger into a socket for electricity. Well, you don’t walk into a radiation area unless you know what you’re going to face. And it’s that type of thing. And they’re very, very, very good--not the operators; the HP techs--we called them RMs at the time, radiation monitors; we didn’t call them HP techs--all the shift managers, the guys in maintenance. On and on, I mean, I could name them. I tell everybody, like the last scene of the Titanic, you know, where the camera’s going, you see the barnacled ship and then eventually it gets into its glory, the grand staircase. I can close my eyes and walk in to the 105-N. And there, Duke Anthony’s in there, you know, Granva Philips’ office, there’s Bob White’s in there, and there’s Cliff Young, shift managers’ offices, right off the back, you walk through. And then the INC shop over here, the entrance into the N, and then walk over here, walk in and stuff, closing my eyes. And I see Bob Stees, my first control room supervisor, Dale Tahyer, my other one. Oh, golly. Then all of the various operators: Ralph Hagensic or Nels Kass. Chet Regal, Claire Miller. Howard Sidig. I mean, just--you know, it’s just so clear. Right now as I’m talking to you, I can see their faces. I can recognize their voices. Even--that was my crew. That was my crew. And in the back, Nellie and Kenny and John. And then these--you know, the mechanics would come in. And the INC techs, the electricians, Jack Black--no, Jack White, Mike Black. Rodney Brown. All these different people that would come in. Harold Petty, the 105 supervisor in the power side and stuff. And Harold would always make, on the last night in graveyard, would always make us breakfast. Just give him a couple bucks and big old pancakes and bacon, it was kind of like--I mean, for a kid that never had had that type of stuff before, it was just kind of like, wow! This is amazing to me. It just, you know, all the various foods, stuff that people brought for lunch. We had this great big, actually, big kitchen at 105-N. And gas stoves. This was before microwaves and that type of thing. So they had these big gas stoves and stuff, and people would cook and bring their lunches and stuff, and see what the heck, all the various sandwiches and stuff. I was really fascinated by egg salad. I’d never had egg salad and someone gave me half of an egg salad sandwich. I was going, wow, this is really amazing. And then, you know, on a break, here’s a guy that was--looked like an apple, you know, he’s cutting it and eating it type of thing. And I’m like, what’s that, Cecil? Kohlrabi’. Kohlrabi is the way you see it now. And he said, you’ve never had it? I said, no. How would I know? So he cut off a piece and gave it to me. Took a bite of it, tasted like a dirty radish. But I like radishes and dirt don’t bother me any, so. So every once in a while, I--whenever I see kohlrabi I think of this guy, Cecil Moss. Really, a good guy. Really a good guy. Like I said, I had a really good time with all of these different people and stuff like that. I’m rambling, aren’t I? Franklin: No, it’s great. Did you work when you first started, did you work with anybody from the Manhattan Project days? Were any of your coworkers-- Leon: Oh, yes. Franklin: From-- Leon: Oh, yes, in fact, oh, yes, in fact, a physicist at B, but my first visit to B was a guy--again, all the reactors were shut down. So all the keys to all the reactors were hung in the control room in a little cabinet in B and stuff. One of the older gentlemen that was there, one of the guys that helped do the training or went along with it was Ralph Wallen. He actually has a narration on that, it’s W-A-H-L-E-N. Anyway, so, he has like a story that he’s written that you can actually get online. They actually have it. And he talks about that. Anyway, so, one time when I was the extra man on shift and that type of thing, he said, you wanna go over to B? I said, sure! So, again, this was, had to have been, I’d had been there at least a year then. It had to have been ‘75. Got flashlights and stuff and got in the car and drove on over to B. He unlocked the gates and everything. So we went into the, down the hall. No power anymore. I think I remember it being cool. And shined a light on the front face and stuff. Whoa. I said, that’s more tubes than N. You know, by that time I knew what--but, looked a lot, looked very, very similar. Said, is that the C elevator there? Yeah, that’s the C elevator. I mean, so all of these different things there, they were very, very similar. And I think one of the ways he really wanted me to see this, because I could go in there and not worry about any kind of exposure. And learn about it. And not too years later that I really realized that that’s what he was doing. Because I’d see something and I’d explain to him. The ball hoppers, even up on top and that type of thing. And then went into the control room, and how much smaller it was. Then we actually walked across the slats in the fuel pool. It was dusty, and everything, so I don’t ever remember--and I know we didn’t survey ourselves. Nothing to survey--supposedly. Like it is now, I tell you. But that was my first experience with somebody that really actually told me. But then Howard Sidig who was on my shift, he was only on my shift for about a year-and-a-half. He was getting to be retirement age. But he used to be an operator, and he was one of the original operators for B. He’s long dead now and stuff, but he is a good father for me. I got to know him outside of work and stuff through the church and everything. And him and his family and his wife, Rosemary. Very, very--oh, just endearing, endearing people. So he actually showed me--you know the certificate at the tour center that shows that people were part of the war effort, that they gave to various operators, I guess? Or to whoever--whatever. I was visiting Howard and he went on up to--he said, I gotta show you something. And beaming, he has this certificate. I’d never seen it before. I read it and stuff, helping out the war effort, blah, blah, blah. His name was on it. He was very, very proud of it, you know? That was the mentality. Well, yeah! You know? And they helped end a very cruel part of our history. So he was very, very proud of that. And I looked at it and said, whoa. He said, there aren’t very many of these. Okay. Apparently there aren’t. To have--I don’t know how many were handed out during--and that type of thing. And then there was also another individual--well, actually two. Archie Stark, who was in the fuel-handling in the back, and then George Madison, who was actually a supervisor, and both of them were B Reactor people. But again, I’d ask them questions, but I forget half the answers about that type of thing. But, you know the biggest thing that they would say is, ah, you wouldn’t have existed, you couldn’t have handled all that hard work back then. Oh, you know. They would always kid me with that. But growing up in the family that I did, you know, helped me. Like I told you about my parents, to treat people with respect and that type of thing. But I have a thick skin. You know, when you grow up with nine kids, seven boys, especially, you do. And so, man, they want to banter? Okay, here I am! I banter right back. And just, yeah, whatever, I just loved it. I loved it. Growing up with it all. So, I don’t know, you want me to show you some things or whatever? I brought something with me. We’re not at that point in our conversation? Franklin: Why don’t you show me at the end? Leon: Okay. Franklin: Then we can get like a stand or something to put it on. We could then do that--that way the camera doesn’t have to refocus. Could you describe a typical work day as a reactor operator? Leon: A typical work day. Franklin: Yeah. Leon: Well, I can tell you a typical work day, maybe about three or four different typical work days, if you get down to it, because there was lots of aspects to it. One o the--probably the first aspect was, if you’re like in the back, in the fuel pool and you’re actually packaging fuel. Or you’re actually part of the refuel process. In, you know, when they were pushing the fuel out, you could either be on the discharge or the charging elevator. Or you could be out back in the fuel pool. We actually had three positions. Or I was never--they would never let me operate the charge machine; you need some experience in that. But other than that-- Franklin: Is that what pushes the fuel through? Leon: Pushes the fuel through. It’s a great, big, you know, 55, 60-foot long elevator on steel platforms that they had that actually would get--and we’d make charges already. And that’s another story. When it comes to a typical day, it really is hard for me to tell you what a typical day was, because so much changed. And then it depended what shift you were on, if you were on graveyard, swing or days. All of those things made a difference as far as what a typical day was. But to really get down to it, you know, like if you were a fuel handler, you were in the back. You are actually packaging the fuel and putting them into canisters and the canisters, you’d be putting them in order in the fuel, in those canisters and then lowering them into the pool. When you discharged the fuel, you’re seeing the images of the fuel coming out and hitting the trampoline and into the carts. They actually had track--they had carts where you’d get, I think, three tubes in each cart. And then travel on out, and then come on out and they’d dump it into baskets. So everything would be into the baskets. So then you’d eventually, when everything started up and stuff, well, you had all these baskets of fuel. You actually had to let them cool a little bit longer than--you know, you don’t start packaging them right away. But you had to do rearranging. You had to make sure that everything was arranged and stuff, and if any pieces that fell out, you’re looking for them. It’s an accountability issue, make sure that we had everything. So the fuel pool--and that was different, N Reactor’s was a really long fuel pool. It didn’t have a grate across it like ethe other reactors did. It was just a pool, and you actually had trolleys that traveled the length of the fuel pool. And, oh, that was a--oh, golly, talk about memory. That was a source of fun for me, let’s put it that way. They had no idea. They had these big old tongs and stuff that would hang to pick things up and that type of thing. And you’d bring it all the way up to the top and stuff. But it had a faster or slow motion going. I would hit the jog button, and I’d hit the travel button and that sucker would sped up. Not like it went really, really fast, but it would go a little bit faster to get to the other end. And then as soon as I’d hit that, I’m telling you, George Madison, who was my supervisor at the time, he’d be on one end, and, you know. I got this idea during graveyard and stuff, going really fast. Eeee. And it was in a big enclosure, and echoed like crazy if you really wanted to make it echo. Well, hey, here’s my chance. So I go in there and I hit it and I go, GEEEEEEOOOOORRRRRGGGE! And go running. And then I said, no, I’m going to say GEEEORRRRGE! It just echoed like crazy. And George was just doing this thing, whatever. So those types of things, just little by little, all of these various things. You know, it made it enjoyable. It made it enjoyable, a break in the monotony of a lot of the things. And you know, I was just a good target for them all. They would always say something or whatever like that. Especially because my age. More than anything else because my age. Because I’m kind of like-- Franklin: You were kind of young, young buck? Leon: Oh, golly. And then of course they wanted, when I was on long chains, we had four days off, four-and-a-half days off, whatever. I’d head to Portland or Seattle or Spokane, visit friends and this and that or whatever like that. 21, 22-year-old kid, coming back, like, oh, yeah, what’d you do? Oh. Franklin: Right-- Leon: Oh, I’d embellish a lot of the time, whatever. But it was. It was, in fact, especially from Portland or Seattle I’d stop by at home and say hi to the folks and stuff and then head back to Richland. But they just thought I just lived a wild life sometimes, kind of like--yeah, I guess I did. In some respects, I did. Franklin: Were your parents or family concerned about you working at Hanford? Leon: No. Not really. Not really. They were--I guess, you know, tell them, what do you do? Oh, I’m a reactor operator. I operate a nuclear reactor. When I first got here, it was like, I was driving a borrowed car. One of the guys from the reactor had a car that he wanted to sell. ‘68 Toyota Corolla. Franklin: Wow, that’s one of the first ones. Leon: I mean, a little box. A little box, yellow box, what it was. Franklin: Those are very collectible nowadays. Leon: Oh! You know. 500 bucks. And he said, you could probably go to HAPO and get a loan. You know, I mean, who’d give a kid a $500--so I went over to HAPO. You know, at the time, you could only be--since I was a union or whatever, hourly employee, I could only go to HAPO. GESA was for the managers and that type of thing. That’s the way it was divided. So I went on over there, and I got a $500 loan. And I had to--my payments were like $75 a month. So they worked it out so that I could pay my rent and still live and that type of thing. First time I drove it home, my mom was just beaming, really proud, kind of like, it’s just nice--I mean, you’ve got to think about it, as far as our upbringing not having much money and stuff. My parents, they just struggled to provide for us. And we, of course, you being a kid, you don’t really realize how much they’re struggling. And anyway so she was just beaming and happy and feeling it’s so nice to see that you have some money in your pocket now, mojo. And your car and on and on. Just--yeah, no, no, my parents weren’t really, say, like scared of, what, or apprehensive. What was apprehensive though was like I had my next-door neighbor there in Toppenish--because you know to get a clearance they filled out all this paperwork. So one of my neighbors said, in Spanish, you know, what kind of job do you have? I had some guy come talk to me and ask about you, type of thing. Don Santiago was his name. So it’s really kind of funny. There was nothing--it was a job, and it provided, and it provided very well. It provided very well. Franklin: Yeah. And how long did you--how long were you a reactor operator? Leon: I was a reactor operator for four years. I was certified for two-and-a-half during that time. Going back to your typical workday type of thing, The typical workday in the control room, it really--a reactor operator likes it boring. Franklin: Sure. Boring and predictable is good. Leon: Boring and predictable and everything steady state is a great thing. It’s a great thing to have, really, you know? It gets a little tiresome or whatever like that, especially during graveyard. But you know, like I said, there was always--we were always talking. We were always talking. Anyway, so a typical day, depending on whether you were at the nuclear console, whether you were at the A console where you had all the turbines and the steam generators or the BN console where you have your dunk condensers and your rad monitor thing and stuff. But you always had duties; you always had something that you were doing. So if you were the fourth person, you were on relief. So you had other surveillances to do and on and on and everything. But if you had an emergency, like a scram, or like I say, some abnormal happened, whatever. Temperature here too high or steam generator levels getting too high or whatever like that, you know, open up a blow-down valve, and how long, how’s the chemistry looking and that type of thing. All of these various things. So there was always something. There was always something. I love--at the same time, though, I love startups. Startups were fun. Yeah. I learned a lot. That’s where a lot of the guys, you know, when I was telling you about being hands-on. A lot of the guys would let me [LAUGHTER] manipulate, under instruction, bringing up the turbines to full speed from 1800 to 3600. And you know, pull rods in and out. One experience I had was putting on what’s called dump condensers, heating up dump condensers. Because the way N Reactor was designed was that it sent steam over to the Hanford Generating Plant, but it also had dump condensers so that if you had a load rejection where something happened to those turbines and stuff, N Reactor could take the steam and actually dump it and actually continue running. So you had raw water going through the tubes on those dump condensers. And they’re huge. Oh, heck, I’d say they’re like 15 feet across, 30 feet high, whatever like that, and hanging. It was--they’re massive. They were massive. But anyway, you have to open up a little bit of steam to heat up the tubes. I got a lesson in water hammer. Very classic thermodynamics thing. The power operator called my shift manager and said, hey, the control room is making the condensers move. Because you get the water hammer in those dump condensers, it would move. We were talking about two or three inches. And make noise and everything else. So Cliff, about 6-foot-4. Hey, saying, look who in the BN console, said, are you learning, Carlos? Yeah. I’ll put the steam on a little bit. Said, you know what water hammer is? Uh, no? [LAGUHTER] So, he sent me to the power side and went with and talked to the--Harley was the guy that was on the power side. And so he had one of the operators. So called on the radio, I’m standing by this dump condenser and stuff. Said, okay, open up the steam valve on it. He opened it up just a little bit more. Next thing I know, that dump condenser went fwrrrrr and really just sloshed and really just made this thunder sound. I learned about water hammer, and I respected water hammer, and I’m--I know now when I tell people and said, you don’t want to water hammer pipe. When I teach fundamentals and that type of thing. I mean, you--no. It’s not a--it scares you. It scares you to no end. Franklin: Yeah, I bet. Leon: So those are the type of things that you kind of like, you--again, whether somebody would teach you that way now, I don’t know. But I doubt that was the way I was taught, you know? Like, even one other thing, I had quote-unquote the pleasure of seeing and experiencing was being on top of the reactor. And I was--we were getting to start the reactor again from a shutdown. So one of the things that we had wanted to do was check all of the ballhoppers to make sure they were all cocked and loaded. So we had a tool and stuff to cock it and load it and that type of thing. So I was up there doing that type of thing. Well, they had to a surveillance on the fog spray. On the fog spray, we had on each side, eight big risers which fed the reactor. And anyway, so these fog sprays were on top, on the top on the inside. In case there was an accident or a pipe break or something like that, the fog sprays would come on and actually rain down onto those pipe spaces, so none of the fission products would come out. And so they called and said, hey, we’ve got to test the west side fog spray. I never seen them before, type of thing. So they turned on two diesels to go into those sprays. Oh, golly. I jumped from one side to the other. It was so loud, and I thought I was going to get sucked in. Just because, you would drown. You would drown. When somebody says fog spray in a nuclear reactor, they mean fog spray. It’s not a mist. You know. It’s like a waterfall times ten. I mean, it was--and so, not only is it raining down like that right next to you, I was probably from here and that was five feet away. And you could just feel that, you know, air going that way. Oh, man. [LAUGHTER] And Ralph Hagin said, who happened to be the operator when they started it, I called him and I hear him over the phone saying, are they on? Yeah, Ralph, they’re on. Then next thing, you hear him just laughing and laughing and laughing. Okay. Oh, man. That scared the heck out of me, I tell ya. But those are the type of things that you--I guess, later on, it’s a story to tell, but at the same time, it’s also a lesson learned, because now I can tell. I can tell people. [LAUGHTER] When you hear this word in a nuclear reactor, fog spray, believe it. Franklin: Yeah. Yes. Leon: So those are the type of things that-- Franklin: What did you do after you were--what was next at Hanford for you after being a reactor operator? Leon: Oh, well. I actually wanted to go back to college. In 1976, they had a strike. So I spent all my money living off my savings and stuff to go back to school, so I didn’t. And then I ended up, then, in 1977, I actually took a trip around the world. I actually got a leave of absence, they actually gave me a leave of absence, to take a trip around the world. It took me ten weeks, and I was gone. I went with a singing group. And had a--well, the thing is, to be able to do this, it cost $3,400. So in February, when they found out about it, we were leaving in June which is when the thing was supposed to be going. It was a group that I had met through this other, another friend. So how am I going to get the money? Anyway, so, my friends on B deferred working overtime to let me work overtime. Franklin: Wow. You mean at N. Leon: At N. Franklin: Yeah, okay. Leon: They deferred. Because you were on a schedule type of thing, you know, you’d sign up for overtime. So they didn’t sign up and let me. So for my shift I got a chance to work a lot of overtime. When you work overtime, you come in ahead of shift. You got double time for the shift you came in on and your own shift. And I worked a lot of double-doubles. I--thinking about it nowadays, later on, I was very appreciative of it, but think about that, kind of like, you know, these guys wanted to work overtime, too. But at the same time, it’s kind of like, wow. Anyway, so guess what? Six weeks later, I had enough money. Franklin: Crazy. Leon: So yeah. It was $3,400 and it was well worth it, and it was well worth--because I’m saying, I can’t put a price on the friendships. At all. Oh, well, why was that story? But anyway, a story comes up. One of the guys in the back, Adolphus Nelson--we called him Nellie--he invited me and my brother to his house for dinner one evening. And, okay, never been to any place like this before, anybody to their home or whatever. He lived in Kennewick. Went over to his house, and wife made this real nice roast beef dinner with potatoes and stuff. We had good conversation and everything else. And then, you guys ready for dessert? Dessert? These are Okies, they’re from Oklahoma. Anyway, so, Fae was her name, brought out this pie. Sucker was this--it’s like, whoa! Banana cream pie. Got a slice. Oh, I thought I was in heaven. I’d never had banana cream pie before. I’d never had banana cream pie like that since. And it was just kind of like, aw, man. I just kind of like gushed over it. I told Nellie about it and stuff. And a couple weeks later, he said, hey, Carlos, got something for you at lunch time. Come on back. So I go back there. Guess what? A piece of banana cream pie. Oh! So yeah. I don’t know why I brought that up. Just kind of like it--it was just a story. Like I said, there’s stories like that. There’s lots of, yeah. There’s a lot of things that, oh, golly, my mind just races like crazy. Communications of things. There was a guy named Tommy van Lear that was--I knew him as our steward and then eventually he was a shift manager and stuff. Just the craziest guy. Just the craziest guy. He would--at that time, there were like, you could say, you could do a lot of things over what they called the announcement within the reactor. You could pick up the phone and dial--I don’t remember what it was, 7-1 or whatever. And then you paged somebody. And he would dial that and everything else when he’d come on shift. And this was on graveyard or--he was on graveyards when nobody was around, the management wasn’t around type of thing. And he’d go, no friggin’ in the riggin, no pokin’ in the passes. I just kind of went, oh. Tommy’s here, Tommy’s here. And the other thing that I remember was a guy named--oh, golly. Anyway, last name was Pease. He was what they called a chief. He worked in the power side in 184 Building. So they would always have diesel oil coming in. So you’d always hear him--he was just a Texan. Got a load of Texas tea coming in, a load of Texas tea. So everybody knew they had to go, whoever was assigned, to make sure that it was unloaded. Eventually, some manager didn’t like the way he was announcing that and stuff. Was kind of like, we’re more professional than that. So it just kind of like, took away that--Charlie Pease was his name. But anyway, those are the type of memories that still echo. And then--so you’re making me remember these things that I’ve forgotten. Oh, golly. I’m going to cry. Franklin: Aw. So how long did you work at N Reactor for? Leon: I worked at N Reactor for four-and-a-half--actually, five-and-a-half years total. Because after I--I went to college I went to Pacific University in Oregon and graduated with a degree in science. Plain science; a bachelor’s degree in science. Franklin: Just, science. Leon: Science. I got 30 hours of physics, math, chemistry and biology. Franklin; What were you studying when you were at Eastern? Leon: More the sciences, that’s where I had most of my credits. That’s where I had most of my credits, so when I transferred over and transferred my credits, those were ethe credits that stuck out. So I said, I’ll just do it that way. And having now, quote-unquote the background that I had, the work background that I had. But you know, in reality, you think about that--a lot of people think--I guess, whatever, I live two lives with work. Okay, I know the left brain stuff of reactor operating and thermodynamics and all those other things. But my other part of my life is kind of like I’m playing guitar and goofing off and doing all these other things that I like doing. Creative type of thing. I write songs and that type of thing. So, that’s what I bring to the--you’ve seen me with my tours and stuff. Franklin: Yeah, no, you’ve very-- Leon: But that’s what I like doing. Franklin: Did you come back to Hanford after you graduated? Leon: Yes, I did, uh-huh. I worked there for about a year-and-a-half in the training department and teaching new operators in fact that came on that are real good friends of mine, really, when it comes down to it. A lot of them that came afterwards. In fact, one of them is actually Mark Jensen. Franklin: Oh! I just saw Mark yesterday. Leon: Mm-hmm. Franklin: Wow. Leon: And so, it’s--and Larry Haler had gone into training. It was a natural fit, really. It was a real natural fit, because training had changed. Three Mile Island had happened. So that was during the time when things were actually changing in training, to the point that we’re where we are now, really. That was just the infancy part of it. Of course, with the opportunity, having the degree, and being at N, and then having, I guess, two things. Going back off to college, and then having that thing with the trip around the world just made that travel bug even bigger. There was--what do you call it? I can’t remember. Nuclear News magazine they used to have all the time, we used to get it. And it’d be in the shift manager’s office and stuff and I’d read it. There was an ad for General Electric for--and so I submitted an application with General Electric in nuclear. This was the same time that the first WPPSS plant was being built, Number 2. And that was a BWR, GE BWR. So one of the managers was visiting and stuff and called me and asked if I wanted to interview and stuff so I did. Lo and behold, guess what the question that he asked me about, just to see what my background was and stuff? He asked me a water hammer question. [LAUGHTER] Oh, that was easy. Kind of like-- Franklin: You were like, I got this. Leon: Oh, yeah. Right now. Golly, divine providence. There is a god! And that’s where I got on with General Electric. The thing that he promised me at that time--didn’t come to fruition--but to certify on their BWR6 line and then have like a two or three year assignment in Spain. And doing that in Spanish. Oh, boy, as soon as he said that. Oh, yeah. And then they ended up canceling the plant. That was during the time when--that’s when nuclear was out of vogue after that. So, yeah, but that came back in ‘89 at Columbia. Worked in the control room and did all kinds of things, corrective actions and stuff. Franklin: That would be Energy Northwest. Leon: Yeah, Energy Northwest. And then, now, I’m with the Vit Plant. You know, people still ask me, well, what do you do? I teach reactor operators. I teach people how to run nuclear reactors. Even though it’s not a nuclear reactor, it’s so much simpler just to say something like that than try to explain what I do. But being an instructor is--I’ve just gotten to enjoy it. Whether I know something about a certain subject or not, eventually I’m--I tell, like people at the Vit Plant, well the first time will be a little boring maybe a little bit more rough type of thing. But the second or third time, no prob. Because you do, you get more comfortable and you know the slides and you know the subject matter. And knowing your audience is probably the biggest thing. Franklin: Yeah. When you started at N, were there a lot of other--were there any other Hispanic/Latino workers? Leon: Oh! Golly. Let me tell--okay, well, now you really are going to make me cry. I was the first person in my family, anybody related to me, to get a college degree. I have cousins and stuff that, they have PhDs and masters and all that type of stuff. I’m very proud of them. But I was the first one. But well when I got on, you know, I didn’t really realize it, but one of the things that--this was at the very beginnings of equal opportunity, EEO. I really didn’t realize it until after I had been there maybe six months that they’re really pushing me to get certified. And they went out of their way a lot to make sure that I saw certain things on a startup, shutdown, and that type of thing, and make sure that I held over, or came out early, and all these different things. It was really kind of against what the union was--you know, the guys that are around, and other shifts. Again, this is where I was really fortunate with my crew. Because my crew, like, they knew me and they kind of like picked up on this. Without even saying certain things. They had a lot of--whatever, I just kind of like--so, in the last, I’d say month and a half before I actually did get certified, I was really actually working quite a bit to learn various aspects. To make a long story short, I was the first Hispanic ever to certify. Franklin: At N Reactor? Leon: At N Reactor. Franklin: Oh, wow. Leon: There was other Hispanic workers, but none in reactor operations. So, I didn’t try to make a big deal out of it. I didn’t know how to handle it, let’s put it that way. More than anything else, I didn’t know how to handle it. Would I handle it differently now? Probably, in a way. And then also, it was really unsaid. It was really unsaid in a lot of ways. But you could sense it. So when went through my--to get certified, you actually took a written test, very comprehensive. And then you had a walkaround and it’d be a full day type of thing, a shift. Walk you around and asking you how does this work, how does that work, can you put this on, can you shift this, can you do that, type of thing. Do you know what a water hammer is? And then be in front of an oral board of three people that would ask you all types of questions. Which was a piece of cake. When they asked me--when I went to the board, I was nervous. But at the same time, I was kind of like, they can’t ask me anything. I was that confident, by that time. And so the day that I got my certificate, a photographer came in and took pictures of me and my shift manager and my control room supervisor and another operator, me standing at the board. And I’ve got that picture. I’m going to show you later. Standing on the board and talking like I’m communicating somewhere. Yeah, it was a real proud day. It was a real proud day for me. Whatever, thinking about it. Like I say, I had no idea how to deal with it, because nobody--I had nobody to really I guess talk to about it, type of thing, really. Franklin: Right, you-- Leon: The only thing I was really being harassed about or people were talking about, the other guys on my shift that like a couple of electricians, hey, first time you sit on that nuclear console all by yourself, I bet you it scrams. [LAUGHTER] It shuts--it only took the second time for me to sit there that it scrammed, really. But the thing that really--other that the guys would say was now you’re really going to get paid. Because basically my pay went up almost $200 a week, just like that. Franklin: Wow. Leon: The following week. And that was just for getting certified. That was my incentive. You can talk about-- Franklin: That’s a good incentive. Leon: --incentive, you know, a spiritual incentive, a moral incentive, and all these different things, kind of like whatever. But for a poor kid from Toppenish, and going through the college things that I did? Boom. You know, all of a sudden, here I am, almost $400 a week, just like that. And it was just incredible. It was just incredible. So I mean, that’s why I look back in retrospect, you know, the guys, especially Cliff Younghands. I can’t catch him, you know? Golly. He was a great guy. Without him, I can really say--[EMOTIONAL]--without him, I wouldn’t be--I wouldn’t have learned like I learned. There’s no way. Franklin: That’s wonderful. Leon: I mean, all the other shift managers were great. And they probably had other guys under their wing and that type of thing. But there’s just something about Cliff that he took a real interest in me. He wouldn’t let me--he’d give me a little rein to goof off here or there, that type of thing. But he’d come in, and he’d quiz me. And he knew his prints forwards and backwards and inside out. There’s only about three or four other people that I knew at N Reactor that knew them like that. And that really taught me a lot. Taught me a lot of discipline. There’s a time for everything. He, Cliff, had the respect of all the other guys, too. And then later on when Cliff got off of shift and stuff and working in training and doing all these other things, he actually signed my certificate. And I’m proud that he had signed my certificate. Because he was--of all the individuals that I got to know--when it comes to operating and being disciplined for it, trying to encourage--I try to encourage a lot of other operators, like at the Vit Plant itself, you have new commissioning techs that are coming in, try to encourage them, and I think of Cliff while I’m doing it. Franklin; Yeah. He was like a real mentor to you. Leon: He very, very much was. Very, very much was. You know? And you know, over the lifetime, you can count how many people in your hand that really mentored you in some way. You know, whatever. When it comes to that discipline of bearing down and learning. You know, kind of like, do everything that you can. He turned his back on some of the things that I kind of liked that I shouldn’t have done to go into the reactor, to learn. Because I know with him I was learning and that type of thing. I don’t know if I should say in front of the camera or not. [LAUGHTER] But, you know, I have--I think my lifetime exposure was like--I’m kind of thinking like 14 or 15 R lifetime exposure in those short years that I worked. But I know that I probably had more. Because when we were shut down, and graveyard, I’d walk into the--I’d dress down and go into the zone. But I’d leave my dosimeter and stuff hanging in the lunch--and I’d spend two or three hours walking around, learning the reactor. Franklin: Wow. Leon: I mean--and I knew whatever, to stay away from certain things and that type of thing. But I didn’t want to--my exposure was when we were refueling and doing things and that type of thing. You know, what--nowadays, I’d be in trouble like crazy. Maybe I’m going to get in trouble saying this, I don’t know. Franklin: No, no, don’t worry. Leon: But those are the--that was what it was. That’s where that real concern. Like I say, that was just--it just started with Cliff, though. It just started with him. All of those other operators and stuff were--they were right there, making sure that I was learning things and being safe. And doing it correctly. From top to bottom. From top to bottom. And that’s why I said like, oh, boy, never in their wildest dreams would they ever think that B Reactor would be open the way it is for tourists. Franklin: Do you mean the--the guys that taught you were who were old timers? Leon: Yeah. And that’s what I say. Like I say, when I close my eyes and I see al these guys and I see their names and stuff, I’m just, yeah, I’m very, very proud. I’m very, very proud to have been a part of Hanford history. But more important, making friends with who I made friends with. The sad part is, I’ve gone to too many funerals. And memorial services and--but at the same time, that’s part of life, and that’s just something that--it’s my makeup now. It’s my makeup. And that’s part of my story and stuff. There’s a lot of things that happen, I mean, that will--that I won’t tell you. And they’re going to die with me. A lot of things died with them. And it’s not necessary. And that scares--that’s the way I look at it. You know, being a historian, you know, you want to get into all of the facts and that type of thing. And there’s a lot, yeah. Franklin: Well, that’s kind of a great segue way into my next question, which is, could you describe the ways in which security and secrecy at Hanford impacted your work there? Leon: [SIGH] Security and secrecy. Well, since it was my first job, really come down to it, besides driving truck, I just took it as the norm. I just took it as the norm. Being in the control room wasn’t so much secret or quote-unquote secure. Because you could just walk right--back then, you could just walk right in. You’d open up your lunch bag or your pack, whatever you’re--whatever, and look in, lunch, close it. Come through. You’d already gone through the Wye Barricade, so why--I guess. It was a different kind of security. And secrecy? The only real secret was held by the scientists or the plant manager or the guy who does the fuel calculations on how much plutonium was being generated. We all knew we were making plutonium. We all knew how much exposure everyone was getting, that type of thing. But how much was being processed and being shipped and that type of thing? That was really the only secret. The security of everything. But, no, I never really--the stories, the old stories about whispering and that type of thing? That was when they were building the B Reactor in the early days. By the time 1974 came along, it was a secure area, more than it was a quote-unquote secret area. That was all in the 200 Area with the plutonium finishing Plant and how much they were processing. That was really what, come down to it. We just made electricity and plutonium at N. Franklin: What were the most challenging and rewarding aspects of your work at Hanford? Leon: The most rewarding? Franklin: And challenging. Leon: And challenging? Franklin: Yeah. Leon: Well, the most challenging is actually learning how something so big works. All of the stuff that’s--all of the different things that make a reactor work: the water, the steam, the electricity, the design and on and on and on, I mean, it just kind of like--wow. Who put this thing together? That was--and challenging? That was challenging. Franklin: That was challenging. Leon: That was challenging. And what was the other? Franklin: Rewarding. Leon: Rewarding. [LAUGHTER] Ugh. I’m getting too old for this, Robert. Rewarding was, it was the friendships. Without a doubt, that is top to me. And hopefully, when I talk in front of the crowd, in front of the front face of the reactor, is that I’m talking for these guys, the people that came before me. That’s what I want to really--yeah, I talk about myself. But I want their personalities to come out. Franklin: Yeah. Leon: You know, some of the stories I say, and some of the voices I use in describing things, what would Ralph say? What would Nells say? And that type of thing. And that’s where, you know, whatever, that’s top. That’s really, really top for me, it’s that I--without a doubt. It afforded me to be able to have a quote-unquote good lifestyle I guess, too, because of the pay. So, yeah. Franklin: So my last question is what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland during the Cold War? Leon: [SIGH] Wow. Wow. Well, 1974, when I started, in July, Vietnam hadn’t been--the last troops to Vietnam hadn’t left yet. Nixon resigned a month after I started. And it was still the AEC. It wasn’t ERDA and it wasn’t Department of Energy yet. I guess in talking with the guy who’s in charge of fuels, the guy’s name Bob Firster, and he just died just a couple years ago in fact, and got really, really just the most nice, straightforward guy. He would talk about the fuel to an extent. Because he had the high clearance and all that stuff. And you’d talk to the guys in the control room, it’s kind of like, we had no idea how much nuclear arsenal, power, whatever that the Soviet Union had at the time. So it was kind of like a race of the two big bullies on the block. There was no backing down from any of the individuals, any of the guys in my control room, any of my crew, any of the other crews, kind of like we were there for national defense. Without a doubt. And that’s what I think kept this place going. They were very, very, very proud individuals. And so I guess that instilled--that’s what instilled in me, that type of thing. You know, like when I was growing up, Toppenish would play Richland High School in basketball. Because there weren’t very many communities. Richland had to play somebody. They had to beat up somebody; they might as well beat up Toppenish. They would put their green and gold bomb smackdab in the middle of our court. And they’d come. Yeah, but they were good. So I guess maybe when you talk about, when it comes to it, you know, eventually, you could see why they were so proud. They got their “proud of the cloud” type of thing. And it permeated. It permeated the whole Tri-City area. I think that’s probably what--the Cold War was something that I remember, you know, when I was in grade school and going through junior high and high school. I guess, just this just magnified it, my awareness of it. Because they were always experimenting and stuff. They had what’s called a subtle facility to irradiate different other things to see what they could produce and that type of thing. So it was a long, long, long line of history. I got to say that I am very, very proud to have been part of that. Good, bad, indifferent, it’s what it is. Franklin: Yeah, yeah. Well, great, Carlos, thank you. Why don’t we take a couple minutes to look at the photos you brought? Leon: Okay. Sounds like a deal. [VIDEO CUTS] Leon: If I wasn’t the first, I’m pretty close to it. Franklin: Well, you’re definitely the face of a changing workforce. Leon: Well, yeah, and I could’ve talked about the women and stuff, too, back when they first came on. Because that’s when they came on, too. In fact, you should--have you ever interviewed any of the operator women? Franklin: A few, yeah. Leon: Martha Coop or Leslie Jensen? Franklin: Leslie--I think we’ve interviewed Leslie Jensen. Let me get those names from you, though and then we’ll-- Leon: Okay. Franklin: And then we’ll follow up with them. Because I’m always trying-- Tom Hungate: Okay, I’m just-- Franklin: Are we good? Leon: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. Leon: I don’t know. Whatever. Hungate: So, tell us what we’re seeing. Franklin: Yeah. Leon: Oh, this was my second certificate--or, no, the original certificate when I got certified. Emil Leitz. Franklin: Oh, that’s Larry’s father-in-law. Leon: Larry’s father-in-law, uh-huh. Roy Dunn. Franklin: We’ve interviewed him. Leon: So this was the certificate that was hanging on the wall out there. So, yeah, it’s just something that just--that’s part of the picture that’s what’s called the BN console and as you go around, it’s the A console. And so, yeah, when I left, I made sur that I took it with me. Franklin: Oh, that’s great. Leon: And then, this right here, they’re the pictures that I was saying on my--on the day that I got qualified, there’s Emil Leitz and Dave Ferguson, my shift manager, handed me my certificate. Franklin: Ah, yeah, that is solidly in the middle of the ‘70s, isn’t it? [LAUGHTER] Leon: Oh, you just love that, don’t you? Okay! And then there’s my--and this right here is-- Franklin: It’s nice to see you have good consistency with your look. [LAUGHTER] Leon: Yeah, yeah, that’s--yeah. And here I am at--and this is the nuclear console. There’s me and that’s operator, Claire Miller, and that’s Dave Ferguson in the back right there. Anyway, so, yeah, I mean, I could talk about all of these different--like the meters and stuff that you’re seeing But this is the picture that-- Franklin: Wow, look at that computer. Leon: Where I was sitting in front of the AA console. They had me pose like I’m talking. And I have this picture up in my wall at work with my certificate and stuff, my old certificate, I had them laminated. And so people walk into my office and they look at it, kind of like, is that you? Where is that? Is that B Reactor? Because they have a hard time equating that type of thing. Franklin: It’s so--I mean, I’ve only ever seen the B Reactor control room. That’s so much more involved. Leon; Oh, definitely, much more. Just because you had to have--you had recirculation pumps there. There’s a primary system and secondary system. Franklin; Right, it was much more complex. Leon: Oh, yeah. You’re talking 1600 pounds of pressure on the primary side. So, yeah, it was a whole different bag. And like I said, like, lo and behold, no way that I know they were going to set me up for life the way that I know it, as far as what I know, technically. Franklin: Right, right, yeah, a lot of technical knowledge. Leon: Anyway, so, I made a copy of this. I have a card at home somewhere. But anyway, this was just the membership card of the union that I belonged to, the Nucleonics Alliance. And if you look at it, this is a charter member card, when they actually, you know, formed that part of the union. Franklin: Oh, cool. Leon: It’s still kind of like ethe Hanford Works thing or whatever. But I was a charter member. Franklin: Wow. Leon: And this probably is something that--I wish I--I probably should’ve printed it color, but this was sat the Gaslight Tavern. Franklin: Yeah. Leon: ON George Washington way? Franklin: Yeah. Leon: every swing shift, the last night of swing shift, we’d get off and we’d show up. We’d call ahead of time, to the Gaslight. Every shift did this. Franklin: That was nice of you guys. Leon: Every shift did this. But we’d call in ahead of time, and say, well, 20 guys are going to show up at 1:00. They close at 2:00. So, wondering if we could get pizza. Of course, the kitchen was closed by the time we got there. But the cook, before he left, would make up, like ten pizzas or something like that. So, the bartender would then, you know, about 12:30 put them all in there. By the time we got there at 1:00, the pizzas were ready. And of course, the beer was cold. So this was part of the group that I took a picture of. And so in fact, a couple guys from the Hanford Generating Plant back there. This guy back there this is Billy Johnson. We used to call him Billy White shoes back then, whatever. Here’s a couple HP techs and stuff. Ben Garrity, he’s still around. Dale Thayer’s back there. There’s Walt Like, he’s a little German INC tech. But, oh, oh, golly, and talk about the end of shift, 1:00 in the morning, we had one hour. Not only did we consume all that pizza, boy, but I tell you we downed a lot--those guys taught me how to drink beer. I had no idea that you could drink that much beer! I mean, even in college. These guys were old hands. They were old hands. Franklin: Wow, that’s great. Leon: Anyway, so that’s what I have. Franklin: Thank you, Carlos. Leon: That’s what I brought. Franklin: Oh, those were wonderful. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:30:12 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 9986 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview N Reactor B Reactor 200 East 105-N PFP Vit Plant Energy Northwest Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1953 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1974 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Carlos Leon Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Carlos Leon talks about the hiring process, the friends and mentors he had while working in the N Reactor. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 10/05/2018 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F282d79133f3fbaf20d1606a0a84e5aa6.jpg dd42e807bf426e60ed9a74ef24c02b08 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F16628f955b4b4836f11e22e38ba79262.mp4 0108b922f11ed437013cd0c242fe4e38 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Bauman, Roberts Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Roberts, Carol Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Carol Roberts: I think I’ve talked to every organization in town about the history of this place. [LAUGHTER] Robert Bauman: Probably. Man One: Whenever you’re ready. Bauman: Okay. Man One: So, I’ll go ahead and start rolling. Bauman: Are you ready? We’ll go ahead and get started? Roberts: I’m ready anytime you are. Bauman: All right, great. Man One: We’re rolling. Bauman: Okay. Well, let’s start by just having you say your name for us. Roberts: Carol B. Roberts. Bauman: Roberts, okay, great. Thank you. And my name is Robert Bauman, and today is June 30th of 2015, and we’re conducting this interview on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. So I wonder if we could start the interview by just asking you what brought you and your family here, and when did you come, and why did you come to Richland? Roberts: Well, my dad worked for DuPont in Denver, Colorado. He was an electrician, and I understand he was one of the very best. So when this came up, DuPont asked my dad to come out here. Well, my mom wasn’t happy about that, but then of course—[LAUGHTER] He came—he drove out here in his own car. They gave him tires and stuff like that. Because it was wartime, and things were rationed. But he could take his own car and he had his gas coupon. And he left the day after Christmas. Well, he got a site picked out—picked out a site for our house. When it was ready, we came out here and we landed at Wallula Gap—only it was Wallula Town at that time--to change trains. And we were supposed to go all the way into Kennewick. But my dad was waiting in Wallula—he couldn’t wait for it. And it was June the 20th, 1944, that we landed here. But my dad picked us up, had cost $5 tip to the porter to get us off the train. Because we were supposed to land in Kennewick, you know. I don’t know how they ever explained how five people disappeared—[LAUGHTER]—from that train. Anyhow, he was sent out to the B Reactor first. Of course, he landed in Pasco, and Pasco didn’t know anything about it. But he finally managed. He was one of the few—well, I don’t know—people that weren’t higher up that had a Q clearance to go to all the areas. That’s how my mom and sisters and I got here. And then when my husband got home from the service, after—well, it was in October after—he was with the Occupation Forces in Czechoslovakia. And he came home October the 21st, 1944, and went to work for DuPont. And that’s how we got here. Bauman: And, so what were your parents’ names? Roberts: My parents’ name was Bubnar. B-U-B-N-A-R. It’s Ukrainian. Bauman: What were your parents’ first names? Roberts: It’s Ukrainian for drummer. Bauman: Oh, okay. Roberts: So, I’m always such a cut-up, I’ve decided that my name Carol Catherine Bubnar means—Catherine is pure—and Pure Song of Delight Champion. Bauman: That’s a good name. Roberts: Yeah. Bauman: Sounds good. Roberts: It’s as good as any. Bauman: So your dad came out here in December ’43, right? Roberts: Right. Bauman: So there’s about six months between the time he came and you came. Roberts: Oh, yeah. Bauman: So was he able to write to you, and did he describe the place at all? Roberts: Well, he came home once and told us that—I think it was probably April that he came home and told us what was going on. And he told my mom that as soon as they decided that our house was ready, that they would come in and move all of our furniture. And we, including the dog, was to move into the hotel in Boulder—we lived in Boulder—and move into the hotel. All expenses paid. So we were there three weeks when my mother got the notice to be in Denver at a certain time, have the dog crated—[LAUGHTER]—you know, all that sort of stuff. And we got on in Denver at 4:00 on—well, let’s see, it took us two and a half days. And we landed here on the 20th. So that was about 17th or 18th, that we left Denver at 4:00. Well, we weren’t allowed off the train. And the porter was very good about bringing cards, to play cards and stuff like that for us. But they only served two meals. One was between 6:00 and 8:00 in the morning, breakfast. And 4:00 to 7:00 at night for dinner. But this wouldn’t hold kids. They get hungry in between. Well, I’ve always had an idea. So I said to the porter, if you’ll let me off—because they used to sell sandwiches and stuff in the depot station there—I’d go buy some egg salad sandwiches and stuff for the kids. And he hemmed and hawed about it, and we came up with $5. And that was a lot of money back then. So he turned the other way and I slipped off out of the car, got some food for the kids. And I don’t know whether I would have that kind of bravery today. But I sure didn’t want those kids hungry. [LAUGHTER] So, anyhow, like I say, we got here, and our house was supposed to be ready. Well, when we stepped out of the car, and our feet—dust all over the place, all over our shoes—my mom started to cry. She didn’t want to come anyway. And she says, Johnny, you have brought us to a lot of places—because we lived in coal camps—he was very well, because electricians were very rare then. Anyhow, we went in, the lights weren’t on, the water wasn’t on, and so we had to spend three days in the trans court until it got ready. Well, that didn’t suit my mom either. She always wanted to go back to Walsenburg, where her mother and brother and my sister were buried. And she wanted to go back, and that’s all she talked about. Then all of the sudden one day, she said, no, I don’t want to go back to Walsenburg to be buried. I want to be buried here! And I want to be cremated. So that settled that. We didn’t have to worry about anything else. But then my dad was offered a job out in Hawai’i as an electrician after the war, getting Pearl Harbor back in shape and all that sort of thing. And he would be there for two and a half years. They would pay him, oh, a quarter of what his salary was, send my mom a quarter to live on, and the rest they would deposit so that when the two and a half years was up, he would have the money plus interest. I don’t remember, I think interest was only about 1% or something like that, which is better than what we’re getting now! Bauman: Yeah. [LAUGHTER] Roberts: And my mom said absolutely not. She wasn’t going to be by herself. We were all able—my sisters and I, except for my baby sister—we were all able to take care of ourselves and help mom. But no. My mom didn’t like change at all. So he just stayed here until he got sick. He had cancer of the lung. And of course, he was given benefits. He died ‘65. Anyhow, it was something like 25 years after he died that they notified me that we had money coming. It was $75,000 for me and my one sister that was living. That was so much fun, not having to worry about taxes, and just spend it any way you wanted to. You didn’t have to budget for it. So all of my grandkids and all of us, whole family, I divided the money up. And I don’t know what my sister did with hers. But it was a fun time. Bauman: Now, was cancer a result of working at Hanford then? Roberts: That’s what they said, that it was—yeah. Whatever it is that caused the cancer. But it was funny how we had an expo over at the—it’s the Red Lion Kennewick now. We was going around to the different vendors, and I came to this one and I saw this picture of the Day’s Pay. And I said to the girl that this was what—my family here. And she asked me about my dad, and she said, I think he’s eligible. So she took the information and first thing you know, they called me and told me all about this. It took three months to get the money. But I just couldn’t understand how my dad, he always said, I will always take care of you—that how he could manage even after all these years to be sure. But it’s been a good life here. We’ve had change and stuff like that, but we never had to worry about money, because everybody had a fairly good job. I don’t remember that we had all this homelessness and stuff like that that we have now. Bauman: Now, when you came here, you and your mom and your sisters came in 1944. So how old were you when you came? Roberts: 22. Bauman: Okay. And how old were your sisters? Roberts: Well, Dorothy was four years younger than me. So I was 22, she was 18. And then my sister, Evelyn, was six. She was my folks’ afterthought. Bauman: And then—you were married already, right? Because your husband was in the service. Roberts: Yes. I got married after I finished nurses’ training. You couldn’t marry and be in the nursing class if you were married. But I didn’t take the certification test in Colorado, because I knew I was going to be coming here. When I got here, I fully intended to work as a nurse, but my dad had never been happy with that decision. And he says, they really need teachers. And so I got my emergency teaching certificate, and I didn’t have a steady class—I was a substitute in various places. Then after the war, they told me I had to get my teachers’ certification. Well, I wasn’t about to go through all that. I didn’t want to teach, and besides that, my sister became very ill. And I was taking care of her two kids plus my two kids, and I just said no. And I’ve just been doing everything but collecting a paycheck. [LAUGHTER] I’ve spent—I’ve got 8,000 at the Kadlec Auxiliary, and I should have more, but I kind of got involved in some other things. I’m a 70-year member of the Girl Scouts. And I’m on the Library Foundation Board. And then, of course, Kiwanis. I have been a Kiwanian for 24 years, and I have been their newsletter editor for that long. I didn’t intend to do that, but somehow or another—it was supposed to be temporary, but you know, temporary isn’t spelled right. [LAUGHTER] It means—you have to have to spell everlasting instead of temporary. But it’s something for me to do now, because I can’t do all the active things. I can’t climb stairs and all that sort of thing. And I don’t hear well. Well, somehow or another, the warranty has run out and there’s no place to buy extra parts. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: So, when you father came to work in 1943 and you came in 1944, did you have any idea what sort of work he was doing? Did you know what he was doing at Hanford? Roberts: All we knew was he was an electrician, and that was it. And he absolutely refused to talk about anything at work. He did—I don’t know what kind of an invention it was—but he invented something, and DuPont paid him for it, and they got the patent, whatever it was. I have no idea what it was, only that he that he got—I think it was $8. That was a lot of money. My husband had invented something, too, and DuPont bought it. But he only worked for DuPont for ten months, and then of course, GE took over. But he only worked for DuPont ten months when he got home from the service. Bauman: Your husband? And what sort of job did he have? Roberts: He was the chief power operator for the N Reactor. And his only boss was in Washington, DC. He was in charge of everything—the power house. And then he got sick. He worked for them for 32 years, and then he passed away. He had cardiomyopathy, which was very new 32 years ago. They didn’t know very much about that. But now, they know all about it. They know a lot of things. Bauman: Right, right. So, when did you find out what was being made at Hanford, or the role that Hanford was playing in the war? Was it after the atomic bombs were dropped? Roberts: Uh-huh. And that was something else. We—my mom and dad and I were out in Grandview picking peaches when the bomb was dropped. And of course, we were out in the orchard when the woman who owned the property came out and told us to get off her property, that we were nothing but murderers. And we had no idea what she was talking about. My dad tried--and she says, take those peaches with you. My dad tried to pay her, but she said, no, I won’t take blood money. So we came home, turned on the radio, and of course, we knew then what had happened, that they had dropped the first bomb. And then we were—the fire sirens alarms were supposed—the first stations were supposed to turn out when the Japanese surrendered, but they didn’t surrender, as you know. And then they dropped the other bomb. And they still didn’t surrender. So they—the higher ups, Truman and all of them, they didn’t know what they were going to do. Because they only had two bombs. But they weren’t going to let the Japanese know it. But finally, on the 14th of August, the Japanese surrendered. And the official surrender was signed in September, making the total war over with. And MacArthur signed the papers. Well, I don’t know if you wanted to know that, but that’s what I remember. Bauman: Right. So what was the community of Richland like in 1944, 1945? Roberts: Well, I’ll tell you. We had a bunch of alphabet houses that had been built. And there were no paved streets. And sometimes you’d go someplace and when you wanted to come back, there was no street there. They had done something else. There were very few houses, track houses as we called them, left. Everything had been torn down and made room for the government houses. And there’s one on George Washington Way—it’s as you enter town and it’s on the left-hand side. And it’s just been newly painted and everything, and it has a little bit different—they put a porch and stuff on it. So it’s a little bit different, but it is one of the original houses. I wrote a history of all the houses that were left. Bauman: Where was your house, the house that you moved in to? Roberts: We lived—my dad picked out 316 Casey. That’s—oh, I don’t know how to tell you where it was, but it was on the corner of Comstock and Casey. Bauman: Okay. Roberts: And he had a lot of—my dad was raised on a farm, and he never got over it. So, there was a lot of vacant space. And they gave him permission to go out into the area to dig up plants and trees and stuff from what was left over from those people who had moved out of the area. He had a persimmon tree that he was very proud of. But it never bore any fruit. What he didn’t know was that it had to be pollinized. He had to have two. And he grew roses. He belonged to the Rose Society and everything like that. But when we first came, where the Richland Village—the Richland Theater is now—Players Theater—was the Richland movie. And I’ll never forget that movie after the bomb had been dropped. The Song of Bernadette was being played, and I wanted to see that in the worst way. We got into the movie, and was watching it when all of the sudden, the lights went out. There was plain darkness. Well, we just knew the Japanese had sneaked over! [LAUGHTER] And had done something to us. Well—very orderly, they were nice—the manager told us to leave the building. We left the building, and waited, only to find out it was lightning that had—[LAUGHTER]—the Japanese had nothing to do with it. [LAUGHTER] We had a treaty with the Wanapum—Johnny Buck—with the Wanapum Indians that he could go through the barricade to Gable Mountain, and do whatever they had to do. And he identified all the members as tribe members with him. And he made sure when he left that he had the right number going back. It was one of the few treaties that the US ever kept with the Indians, or so we were told. But there were just a lot of things—little things—that doesn’t creep up in history, but makes history interesting. Bauman: Right. Roberts: That here we were, breaking treaties, but we did manage to keep one of them. Now that they’re—when they’re talking about removing the Nike missiles from the top of the Rattlesnake Mountain. And some of us said no, and others say, yes, let it go back. The Indians didn’t want it there—I should say Native Americans now, but it’s easy to keep the vernacular in historical content. So, what else? Bauman: So, there was a theater here, how about shopping? Was there a place to go shopping in ’45? Roberts: No. They had—where the John Dam Plaza is, on the other side was a store called the John Dam Grocery Store. And they—the government—wanted him to take over and furnish, but he didn’t want to go through all the red tape and all. But they built, oh, just construction thing all down—at the time, when government took over, George Washington Way was called Benton. Yeah, they had the grocery store, and then they had the beverage store right next to it. And on the corner, they had the post office. And we had to go get our own mail—they didn’t deliver, of course. [LAUGHTER] If we wanted to go do any shopping—real shopping—we had to go to Kennewick or Pasco or Walla Walla. But you had to have a C gas stamp, too. If you used your C gas stamp, you were grounded until the end of the month, when you got your new stamps. And then, of course, we paid for meat with red stamps, and canned goods with blue stamps. And you had shoe stamps, and sugar stamps, and, I don’t know. I still have a partial ration book in my collection. So that was kind of interesting. But I remember one time, I went to the store for my mom. And I went on the bus, and they dropped me off, I got what we wanted, went up to the cashier. And she was—well, she wasn’t exactly friendly. [LAUGHTER] And I handed her this $10 bill that my mom had given me. And she said, I want so many blue points and so many meat points, whatever. And I said, yeah, and I handed her the ten and was getting my book. And she said, I said! I want! And I said, okay! And I tried—I got the stamps out and picked up my things and left, only to find out that I still had the $10 bill when I got home. [LAUGHTER] Well, I’m one of these people that money doesn’t mean very much to me. As long as I can have enough to buy food and buy a toy for my grandkids, I’m okay—and pay what bills I have. But I didn’t know whether I wanted to go back up and give her the $10, or whether I should keep it. Well, I finally decided I’d just keep it and put it in the church collection the next Sunday. And that’s what I did. And I don’t know—I hope she didn’t get in too much trouble, being $10 short on the cash register. Bauman: Right. Roberts: And then they would get shipments of things through the day. One of them was towels—bath towels. Well, my dad, he didn’t have a bath towel. And so he went up to buy one, stood in line, because he knew they were there. When he got there, there was no towels—they’d all been given away. So the next day he did it two or three times. Finally, the cashier, or whoever was dispensing them, felt sorry for my dad, so she put one under the counter. So when he got in line, he got his. And he lived in the woman’s dorm, which is now the Yakima Federal and Loan. After the government gave up, it became the Saddler Hotel, and now it’s the Yakima Savings. See? I’ve watched it grow. Bauman: You have! Well, before we started talking, you showed me a photo of Uptown Shopping Center. Do you remember any of that, when it first opened, or being constructed? How did that change things in Richland? Roberts: Oh! It was great. We had some place to shop! That little bit in the middle—that was J.C. Penney’s. And, boy, that was really coming uptown, you know. And then they got other things in there. I can’t remember the stores, all the little stores that was there, but I know there was a restaurant. John Dam’s Plaza was called the Volunteer Park before the government took over. And the Women’s Club took care of it. They mowed, they watered, the dug holes for the trees. And so part of that is still probably about 100 years old. [LAUGHTER] And I’m very proud of it, because I belong to the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, too. But the fact—we didn’t think about sprinklers, I guess. They didn’t think—well, we didn’t have them, maybe, sprinklers. But they toted hoses and, like I say, mowed the lawn with a hand mower. No, there’s no power mowers then. We got—where the Allied Arts is was where they dispensed grass seed and lawn mowers and hoses and everything for everyone to keep up their yard. And then the garbage—we didn’t put the garbage cans out, they came and got them and emptied them and brought them back. And then they also furnished the coal, and just before winter would set in, they’d fill our coal bins in the basement. And we didn’t pay—we paid rent, but it included water and all that we pay now. I can’t think of anything else. But, oh, they took the rent out of the paychecks. When my husband came home, we lived in a B house on Marshall. And they would dump the coal in, and one time they left the window open where they dumped it. And we got overextended with mice and had to get that taken care of—set traps and stuff. Because—oh, I don’t know that we had the rat poison stuff that they had today. Well, they don’t even have the—well, they do have rat poison, yeah. Bauman: You also mentioned Day’s Pay a little bit earlier, and you showed me a photo—you’re in the [INAUDIBLE]. What can you tell me about that day? What do you remember? Roberts: Oh, I wrote a paper on how—you know, they had the barricade, and you couldn’t go out into that area. The Day’s Pay was—the money that was collected by the carpenters—all employees were buying war bonds, but the carpenters wanted to do something more. So they decided to buy an airplane. Well, they raised $300,000 for the plane. So when it was getting ready to be sent over to Europe, it stopped here. They lifted the barricade. We couldn’t take cameras or anything in, but we could go in. My dad managed to get my sisters—and my mother wouldn’t go, she just wouldn’t go—and I in to watch the ceremony. And then I remember, oh, those—[LAUGHTER]—those pilots, they were so handsome in their uniform—watching them. And then they got in the plane, and they took off. They lowered their wings to say goodbye to us, and sailed off into the wild blue yonder. It was a magnificent—awesome sight. That great, big plane, up there against—and it was a hot day. It was July the 20th, 1944, and it was a hot day. I don’t know if it was a 100 degrees like it is today. But it was hot. And watching it against the blue sky. Well, it made 26 missions over Europe. And every member of the crew received the oak leaf cluster. Then the plane, after the war, they took it to Arizona, and was there. And then of course there was the Enola Gay that dropped the bomb. And they decided that they were going to bring both planes to Richland, and have them on display—a parks type thing. But by the time they got theirselves moving, they had destroyed the planes. So that ended that dream. [LAUGHTER] Although, the Miss Tri-Cities boat for the boat races, they kept it. [LAUGHTER] But it was an awesome sight. I can still see that plane up there with blue sky. Bauman: You mentioned the boat races. Do you remember any special community events in the ‘40s and ‘50s, things that happened that brought the community together, or--? Roberts: Well, Richland had what they called Atomic Frontier Days. And then Pasco had—I don’t know what they called it. And Kennewick had one. And they each had their own—Kennewick’s was the Grape Festival, I think it was. Can’t remember Pasco. I’ll have to think on that. And I know Sharon Tate was Frontier Queen one year, and she was also the Autorama Queen. And my daughter was the runner-up on that. And I was very unhappy with that. I didn’t want her to be, but I didn’t want to deny her, either. All the sponsors of the girls paid for their dresses, except Buick, which was sponsoring my daughter. I had to pay for her dress. And that didn’t suit me very well. My Scots ancestry—still shows. I laugh at my grandson, Craig. I’ll say, well, I don’t think so, it costs so much. He says, Grams, why are you worrying about money? [LAUGHTER] So it’s just, I don’t know, genetic I guess. I heard this story that my great-grandmother was so tight that if she had an orange, she would peel the orange, give the orange to my grandmother, and then she, herself, would eat the peel. She wouldn’t throw it away. And then she lived in—this was in Scotland, at the Gatehouse for the Fleet River. There was about ten families that lived there, at the Gatehouse for the Fleet River. And they would get an ox bone and then the first one would boil it for so long, and then they’d pass it on down. And then it was somebody else’s turn to have it first, and like that. But they didn’t always buy ten new oxtail bones. Bauman: I want to ask you about one other event that happened, that was when President Kennedy came in 1963 to dedicate the N Reactor. Did you attend that event at all? Roberts: Oh, yeah. Bauman: And what do you remember about that? Roberts: Only that I thought it was a lot of malarkey, just because Kennedy was there, and everybody didn’t really come to see the opening of the reactor. They came to see the President. And he came to see—or to dedicate the reactor. And I—oh, I don’t know—I think sometimes that we put too much emphasis on things that we shouldn’t do. But I was working as the bookkeeper in the Girl Scout office, and I had to take time off to do that. So we were closed during that time. But I don’t know, I wasn’t impressed. And then GE asked my husband to be the chief operator of the N Reactor. So that’s how he got there. He started out as a coal handler at 100-F, and worked up to B operator, we called him. And then he became chief operator. And his only boss was in Washington, DC. Bauman: And you—when we were talking earlier, you mentioned there had been four generations of your family that had worked at Hanford. Your father, right? Roberts: My father, my mother, my sister—she worked the switchboard—then my son, yeah, and my husband, and my granddaughter Cori worked for Battelle, and my daughter-in-law worked for—well, she just retired. And I think that’s all of them. But there’s four generations there. I never did work in the area. I just worked being nosey all around. A know-it-all. Bauman: I wanted to go back and ask you, you mentioned that when you first came here, your mother wasn’t especially happy about the place. What was your first impression of the place, do you remember what you thought of the place? Roberts: Oh, I thought it was the start of a big adventure. I really did. But what do young people know? [LAUGHTER] And we were only supposed to be here five years, and then it was supposed to be all over. But somehow or another, the birth of the atomic age created a lot of things that they thought they could use and carry on. And a lot of people did go back home after the bomb was dropped. But we didn’t. My dad was happy with his job, and Mom had kind of, well, settled in a little. And I think she decided, when Dad—when she wouldn’t let Dad take the Pearl Harbor job, that she’d better do something. But Kadlec Hospital—I can remember when it was built, and they moved the hospital from Hanford to Richland. And it was kind of across the thing. One wing was for the dental offices and stuff, another wing was for the pediatrics, another wing was general, and then they had the one wing for psychiatric. But they only had one bedroom in it. So they didn’t figure people were going to lose their minds. And then it was in—I think it was in 19—oh, shoot. It had to be—I was president of the auxiliary ’84 to ’86, so it had to be ’82, when the hospital was opened, built. And it was three stories. But the top story was used for years just as storage, because they didn’t have enough beds. But one story that we really enjoyed was— Somebody was sleeping in the beds. And we didn’t know who it was. But we do know the bed was left unmade, and there was no sugar or crackers and stuff in the NICU thing. Every morning, it was empty. Well, they never did catch who it was, but it was about three weeks before it finally ended. But we thought it was funny—[LAUGHTER]—that we couldn’t catch him. And we were sure it was a man. [LAUGHTER] And another time, it was about 11:30 at night, and I was working the emergency shift. And this man come in, and he wanted to go upstairs to visit his girlfriend who had just had a baby. And I said, well, I’m sorry, but visiting hours are over. And he says, it’s my girlfriend and my baby, and I get to see it anytime I want! I says, I’m sorry. And about that time, another auxiliary come up and she said, if you’re so sure you want to see it, why didn’t you marry her before the baby got here? Well, of course he threw a holy fit. And I had, since I was president of the auxiliary, I had to talk to her and say we can’t say those kind of things. But my grandson, Craig, he and his mother had been in an automobile accident down here on—oh, well, it’s Jadwin, down there, and McMurray. And he was in the emergency room waiting to be checked out, to see if he was okay. And here I was, and he heard this guy say he was going to drop a bomb on us if he didn’t get to see. And poor Craig, when he saw me, he said, Grams, are they really going to—[LAUGHTER] I said, no, he isn’t. But he was only about, oh, eight years old, and it really sounded something. So I have a lot of stories like that. Bauman: How long were you with the auxiliary—or how long have you been with the Kadlec Auxiliary? Roberts: 34 years. I got 8,000 volunteer hours. And I was the gift shop whatever. And I was also the printer’s devil, as they called me: I helped the printer with printing all the manuals and stuff. And one thing that we did was—AIDS first came on the scene and we first started talking about it. The Public Health wanted a manual to have classes to show how to take care of these patients. So somehow or another, Kadlec print shop got involved, and we made—Tony, the printer and I, we made 1,700 manuals, saved the Public Health $30,000 for materials. We did a lot of good work. But I sometimes did have an emergency thing, and Tony’d call me up in the middle of the night—it wasn’t the middle of the night, but 7:00 or 8:00 at night. And I’d go down and I’d help him get it done. Bauman: So you’ve been here since June 20th of 1944, so 71 years now. How has Richland been as a place to live? Roberts: Well, I grew up in coal camps. So it was different. I didn’t have to carry in coal, I didn’t have to carry in water. But my dad always made sure that we had electricity in the house we were living in. I never did feel that I was needy or anything. I mean, my sisters and I had a great time doing whatever we wanted. Maybe it was hard on my folks, I don’t know. But my dad always had a job. He never had to go on WPA or anything. But he did go away a lot to jobs other places. And we stayed where we were for a while. But, I don’t know, there was all kinds of things, like explosions. I remember one of my dearest friends, her father was in an explosion, and they had to leave. And then we had a lot of foreigners. Especially the—and they were called Mexicans, not Hispanics—Mexicans that were there. And they didn’t speak English. So we learned, even how to swear in—[LAUGHTER]—in Mexican. The equal rights things still weren’t—they hired these people—the blacks—to work in the mine, but they couldn’t live in the camp. They had to live across the railroad. And one of my dearest friends was the cutest little black girl—pigtails, and all. And we were in fourth grade, and we’d walk home together. But she couldn’t come in to my house. And so I’d walk with her to her house, but I couldn’t go in her house. But her mother always had big chunks of bread and jam—they couldn’t afford butter. And we’d sit on the porch and eat it. And the porch was as clean—you could use it without having a plate under it. But we got along real well, just that way—not going into each other’s house. But I think about it now—at the time we never thought anything about it, we just knew it was a rule. And then here, we had the black side and the white side. They had fountains where the Hers and His beauty shop, right across the street from there—they had fountains, and one was labeled Negro Only. And then before they opened up the Parkade and all, government would bring in top-notch entertainers, like Kay Kaiser. And they brought in Marian Anderson. But she couldn’t stay at the [INAUDIBLE] quarters because she was black. And she had to stay in a hotel in Pasco, because Kennewick didn’t allow them, neither. Kennewick—you were caught on the street after 6:00, you were arrested if you were black. So, I don’t know. We’ve come a long ways, yet we’ve got a long way to go to really [SIGH] understand each other. Bauman: You’ve seen a lot of change in Richland, I imagine, over the years. Roberts: Oh, yeah, oh, yeah. Bauman: A lot of growth, obviously, of the population— Roberts: Yeah. I was thinking about the barber shop, Ganzel’s, and how everybody—their chairs were always full of the people getting their hair cut. But I cut my husband’s hair, and my mom cut my dad’s hair. So, we didn’t have to worry about barber shops. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: Well, was there anything else that you want to share with us? Any— Roberts: Well, I don’t know, it seems to me like I’ve been talking your—[LAUGHTER]—talking so much, I don’t know what I’ve said. And it’s all kind of not falling in place. One thing, probably, is Central Church. Bauman: Oh. Roberts: How it was called the United Protestant Church. There were 14 cooperating church sponsors. And the Sunday school was held in the Sacajawea—which is torn down as a parking lot now—Sacajawea School. And the church was held in the high school auditorium. Then we needed a church—the Catholics needed a church, too. And it was the one time the two denominations worked together with the government to build the two churches. It was interesting. I was on the board that was part of the negotiations. Of course, the churches were just typical army style churches. And now look what they are. [LAUGHTER] You never know. And then, they started the school and then—they did, the Catholics—and then they built a convent for the nuns who taught the school. We did that. Oh, and then high school—the schools, we had—when the government took over, we had two schools: the high school, and an elementary school—elementary to the eighth grade, and then high school to graduation. Well, after the government took over, the school became—[LAUGHTER]—I say a saloon. You could go—anyway the blue laws in Washington said that women could not sit at the bar. And so we had to sit at—not that I ever was in there—I use we—our family was teetotalers—my dad, everybody. They had to sit at the table. And they couldn’t be served unless they were sitting at the table. But they weren’t even supposed to be in there, unless they—so that was kind of unusual. And then Howard Amon Park. They had—the government—had changed it to Riverside Park. And it stayed Riverside for a couple, three or four years. And it was Howard Amon Park before that. And the family, as well as a number of other people wanted the name back to Howard Amon. And they changed the name. But when the floor came along, there was a gazebo that they band concerts on Sunday. And when the flood came, it inundated the swimming pool and took the gazebo away. They couldn’t have the swimming pool because it was contaminated. That’s when they built the wading pool. Bauman: Oh, okay, sure. Roberts: I don’t know. There’s a lot of stuff, I could talk all day, I guess. [LAUGHTER] I’m just proud of what we’ve accomplished. But I was proud of what we accomplished in the coal camps, too. We were very close, and there was a lot of funny things that happened in the camp. But we all—the teenagers, we were all together. We didn’t separate to different groups. And then when the gypsies came to camp, that was something else, again. We were very, very sure that one of us was going to get taken away with—the gypsies took kids. But my thought always was, they’ve got so many kids, why do they want any more? Why do they want to take somebody else’s? But you know kids. They think things that other people don’t. Unless you have something else, I— Bauman: Yeah, this has been very interesting, very helpful. You have a lot of memories about Richland. Roberts: And I have a lot of papers that I’ve written. I have written a paper, and it won first place, grand prize in a creative writing contest. It’s called Modern Pioneers. And it tells about all the things that women did in Richland, and to bring it into modern world with Pat Merrill being the first mayor of the city. And—oh, what’s—[INAUDIBLE] who worked with—to develop the bomb. But she was hoping they wouldn’t find it. Then [INAUDIBLE] she designed the reactor. So women—if it hadn’t been for women, we wouldn’t have got anywhere. And then I wrote a very short history of how the Manhattan Project came about. And it, too, won first prize in a creative contest. The judge commented that even when he read the first paragraph, he knew it was going to be the first. [LAUGHTER] And so, I don’t know whether I won legally or not. [LAUGHTER] So, that’s it. Bauman: Great. Well, thank you very much for coming in today, and for sharing your stories and memories about Richland. Roberts: Oh, one thing I want you to know. Have you seen the book Nuclear Legacy? Bauman: Yes. Roberts: I think we need to get that back in schools, because it does tell how we came about from the Indians, and then the Russian side—the kids writing about that. But I think it’s one of the best books that we’ve got on the whole history. And I got a lot of them. I even have Einstein’s—[LAUGHTER]—books, and Heidelberg. I got into an argument with Tom Powers, the author of the book. He came here mostly, I think, to sell books. But anyhow, I suppose, he said that we did not need the atomic bomb. That it was this and that. And he made a couple comments and it—[SIGH]—we were all there listening, and I challenged him on what he said. But, do you know, when the Germans took over in Belgium, we knew that something was going on. But we got it first. And Hitler decided on the V-bombs—what was it called? Something. I can’t remember the name, now, but he thought they had enough power to go across the channel to London and bomb them. So that’s it. Bauman: All right, thanks very much. Hold on a second, we’re going to need to take care of your— Man one: Microphone. Bauman: Your microphone off. Roberts: Okay. Man one: Yeah just a little—you can put it down by the desk. Roberts: Okay. Man one: Thank you. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:05:04 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 252 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview B Reactor N Reactor Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1944-2015 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Carol Roberts Description An account of the resource An interview with Carol Roberts conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2016-05-16: Metadata v1 created – [RG] Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015-6-30 Subject The topic of the resource Richland (Wash.) Hanford (Wash.) Hanford Site (Wash.) Hanford Nuclear Site (Wash.) B Reactor DuPont General Electric Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, 1917-1963 N Reactor Richland (Wash.) https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Facc731c5a9eac023b2b39579d02a6d5a.jpg 66652e9837d55e920d43539024b709a9 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F427796f012ecab479d8a74d099f98483.mp4 66caf5583bbb52ba26c7f7cb60a15e08 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 Bauman Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Finley, Catherine Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Northwest Public Television | Finley_Catherine Robert Bauman: You ready? Ready to get started? Catherine Finley: I guess. Bauman: Okay. My name is Robert Bauman, and I'm conducting an oral history interview with Catherine Borden Finley. And today is July 9, 2013. And the interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. And I will be talking with Catherine Finley about her family's history and about her memories and experiences growing up in White Bluffs. And so maybe we should start. I'll ask you about your family, if you could tell me how and why or when your family came to the area, the White Bluffs area. Finley: My father, Archie Borden, was born in White Bluffs. And his mother and his father, George Borden, come down from Priest Rapids some way. His father was a government surveyor. And he come down the river and settled in White Bluffs. And Grandma Pete came from Ellensburg. Her grandma [INAUDIBLE]. And they married, and they had the three sons. George Borden made a living by running horses between the river and Gable Mountain, and the army bought them. So let's see. And he drowned in the river when my dad was eight years old in 1906. Bauman: And-- Finley: Pardon? Bauman: He operated the ferry at White Bluffs? Finley: Yes. Bauman: In addition to running the horses. Finley: George Borden also owned the ferry, and he had land. He was quite successful for that time. And my mother, she come from South Dakota. And I don't know why they made it up in White Bluffs. But they were married in 1927. Bauman: And what was your mother's family's name? Finley: Shanahan. And they had the seven children. And the oldest one just passed away last year. So there's still six of us left. And one of dad's brothers had three children. And we had lots of cousins and not too close together. It was quite sparsely settled, because of the orchards and pastures and things like that. We lived about two miles north of White Bluffs. And we just grew up. We had all sorts of things to do. We had all the animals for pets. Bauman: What kind of animals did you have? Finley: Oh, we had horses and cows and sheep and dogs and cats and lots of little banty chickens, which we packed every place. The sheep my dad kept on Locke’s Island and brought them over in the winter so they would lamb on the mainland. The cattle, the cows, stayed on the home place. We rode the cows. [LAUGHTER] I don't know if Dad ever knew that, but we did. [LAUGHTER] And now we also had horses that we rode. And that was not the main entertainment that we had or what kids do, but we spent many hours on the horses and playing with the other animals. And the neighbor kids migrated even though it was like a mile or more to the place, and we had the cousins to play with. And we played with the Indian children when they'd come in twice a year to fish, Johnny and his--I don't know how many. I think there was four or five men in the crew and their wives. And they were great playmates, those Indian boys were. Bauman: What time of year would that have been? Finley: They'd come in the spring for the spring salmon run. And they’d come back in the fall for the fall salmon run. And they dried their fish on long racks on the river, on the bar. And their horses were then turned loose on the bar with everybody else's. So we had a lot of fun with them. I think they're gone now. Bauman: And about how long would they stay in the area during the spring? Finley: They were there probably like a month, maybe a little longer, whenever the salmon run was that year. And they always had racks and racks of salmon. So it must have been very good fishing. And they fished at night. They had their canoes that they stored in dugout cellars and little wire pots. And they put hot coals in them or burned something, and anyway put them over the canoe, and the fish would come to the light. And they'd dip them. And then they'd bring them all in in the morning, and then the women proceeded to process them. [LAUGHTER] But it was interesting and a lot of fun. And we learned a lot from them. And Johnny was very, very interesting. He was the chief of the--they were Wanapum Indians. And then at the end of the season, then they would go either--sometimes they went on to the Yakima. Apparently they caught another type of fish there, down here at the Horn's Rapid Dam. Otherwise, they went back up to Priest Rapids and lived in their teepees until the dam was built. And they still lived in their teepees. They parked the car in the living room at the house that was built. And as I say, it was very interesting. And then when they closed it all, they went to the Yakima Reservation, or to Toppenish. But we played with--there was many different nationalities of children there, and we not only went to school with them, they were always welcome at home. And we were just as welcome in their home. Bauman: Do you remember any of the neighbor families or children? Finley: Oh, yeah, there was Johnson. They didn't have any children. They had a nice dairy. And Killians was a German family. Supplee was a German family. Walkers was a French family. I don't remember what the Goodners were. But they were all very successful in fruit. My dad didn't have any fruit, but he traded sheep for fruit, bartered. And we were very fortunate all during the Depression that that's what happened. So we were never hungry. We didn’t really know--I imagine the folks knew what the Depression was. Us kids didn't. We never had bought toys that I remember. My dad would carve things out of wood, out of mostly bark that come down the river, I don’t know, boats and mangers and whatever happened to be handy. But we could always go down on the bar with him--we never were allowed to go to the river by ourselves--and pick up odd driftwood. And we made animals out of them for some reason and rocks. Rocks made wonderful trucks and cars and just any old thing—corrals to keep all these stick animals in. And we went to school in a four-room schoolhouse. It was a large white building, divided in four rooms. And that was about a little over a mile from where we lived. So in the spring and in the fall when it was still warm, we walked to school. And Mr. Anderson, the school bus driver, would pick us up during the winter when it was cold. And he was a father of Harry Anderson that was quite active in the White Bluffs picnic when it was here. Bauman: Do you remember any of your teachers from the school? Finley: Yes, Mrs. Moody. Mrs. Moody, I remember her well. She taught kindergarten, first grade, second grade, third grade, and sometimes fourth grade, depending on how many children were present. And then my second teacher I had there was a Ms. Smit. And she taught the fourth, depending on who had the most room in the classroom, and fifth and sixth. And the seventh and eighth graders got to go upstairs. They were special. They were really big folks. But then when the government come in, the last year they held school we went for six days a week so we could get the time in because the letters come in early spring, like in February, and not knowing when they would close or however they were going to work it, so we were out of school the first part of May. Bauman: So you went an extra day to make up for the-- Finley: Yeah, to make up for the school days that we wouldn't be able to go to school. Bauman: So how old were you at the time, then? Finley: I was in the--hm, gotta think. Fifth grade when they closed the school. I was a year older because I liked one grade real well. And the sixth grade I spent in Hanford. And then the folks moved and we went to Benton City. But it was fun. It was interesting, like I said. Sometimes I kind of feel sorry for kids that have so much that they didn't have to work for. They weren’t, you know, not denied--but we didn't know we were being denied anything. We didn't know we were supposed to be poor. [LAUGHTER] Or that he didn't have a car. Dad had a car, but he never used it. He rode one of the horses into work. It was just easier, and he could sleep coming home because the horse would come home. Bauman: Did you place have electricity at all? Finley: Oh, yes, we had electricity. We had indoor plumbing, until the government moved in and they cut it all off. I mean the plumbing and the water, stopped all the wells and brought our water out to us in 250-gallon wooden barrels every day. In the summer they'd put ice in them so it would be cold. Winter, they'd chip the ice off. Oh, and put us up a nice, new toilet. We really thought that was--an outside toilet with a moon and a star. Now, why that impressed kids, I don't know. But it did. Bauman: What about a telephone? Did you have a telephone? Finley: Oh, yeah, we had phones. My grandfather, Grandpa Shanahan, Mama's father, worked for the telephone company, Wilkerson and Brown out of Kennewick, had the telephone company. And then of course, when the government come in, the government had it. My dad was a refrigeration engineer. He made ice for the railroad. And in the summer, they would bring their fruit cars down, and he would pack each end of the car with ice. And they put all their produce and food in the center. And as long as it was moving, there were fans moving in it, and it kept it cold. And that railroad went back to Othello, and the Milwaukee line picked them up. Bauman: Okay. Finley: But we got to go on the train. We got to ride in the caboose. If we wanted to go to Seattle, we rode in the caboose. And the brakie took care of us, no trouble at all. Mom would just put us on the train, and by that time, my grandparents had moved to Seattle. And he'd go down to King's Station and take us off, and then put us back on when our visit was over, and we'd come back. Bauman: Did you get to do that very often? Finley: We done it probably twice a year. Sometimes we stayed longer. Sometimes it was just a short time. Bauman: Now, how big was your property? Finley: I really don't know. We didn't have a large place. The most I think, other than orchard, I think most of the land was kind of leased, because the island, he owned. And the government bought that. But I don't know how much land they had on the mainland. It seemed like an awful lot once in a while. Bauman: And so in addition to the house that was on your property, were there other buildings on the property as well? Finley: On the last house we lived in, yes, there was a barn, and there was this two-story house. And there was a large barn and the chicken coop and whatever buildings that would be on a farm. On the other one, there was a barn and a chicken coop. And they called them soldier tracks at that time because they were built for the men coming back from World War I. And there was a house and a barn a chicken coop and a nice, new toilet. That always seemed to be very important. And, well, it wasn't occupied then. Some other person could lease it for the land. I don't know how many acres were in even those places. But in one of Dad's places, it was up, and then there was a flat, and then it dropped on down to the river, to the river bar. And there was a lot of land in that place, as I remember. It looked like a lot of land to a kid. Bauman: Now again, how many siblings did you have, how many brothers and sisters? Finley: Seven. I have one brother, and I had five sisters. Bauman: And were you all born in White Bluffs? Finley: Mm-hm. Teresa was the last one. She was born in '43, I think. Bauman: Okay. So we talked about the school. I was wondering about other community events or celebrations. Finley: Oh, they had the grange hall down in Old Town, which is where the ferry landed. That was where any big gathering was held. It was a bigger building. And we had a theater that run movies. Mr. Anderson, the school bus driver, he also run the theater. And I think he brought a show in probably like once a month for kids and adults. And there was a lot of little school plays. And the high school, there was always the high school. And there was always the ball games. So there was there was a lot to do, as I remember. Bauman: You mentioned that your father wouldn't let you go down to the river without him there, is that--? Finley: An adult had to be with us. Bauman: Did you ever go swimming in the river? Finley: Oh, yeah. We swam in the river. And he went back and forth across river all the time. He had a boat, and the river was part of living. But Mom always made sure that we didn't go down by ourselves. In the summertime when the water come up, it come up clear up almost over the whole bar. And it was very swift, because it went through, cut off like an island. There Barrett's Island. And the water flowed through that in the main island, and it was swift. And the river was quite narrow then, because there was no dams on it. And I think Dad always said it went at 12 miles an hour. And there were whirlpools that his dad drowned in, was a whirlpool. And so we were well watched. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Sure. Finley: And we played with the cows. Like I said, we had the cows we rode. Bauman: You mentioned taking the train to Seattle. Finley: Mm-hm. Bauman: Did you go to any of the other communities, Pasco or to [INAUDIBLE]? Finley: They would go to Yakima. And that's where I was born, and then they took me to White Bluffs. And I don't know why they went to Yakima, because that was about 60. And Pasco must have had the hospital by then. But they didn't have a bridge across it. So they had to ferry there. And I don't know why they didn't. Probably because Benton County wasn't a county at that time. There was a Yakima County, but no Benton County. And that's where they went, and Pasco. And we went to Walla Walla and Prosser, of course. Then by the time I was born, that was a county, so then all the business had to be tended there. Bauman: We talked a little bit about when the government came in 1943 and the impact it had on the school and the school days, an extra day. I was wondering what memories you have of that. What response did your parents have to being told that they had to leave? Finley: It was very hard for my dad. Because he had lived there his life. And I think one thing that was bad, they just come in and took the property and said, the next letter, you have 10 days to leave. And nobody knew when that 10 days was there. Some of them got their letters very early. My mom and dad didn't get theirs until they closed the plant. Nobody could go into it. But the fruit farmers had to leave their crops on their trees. And that was very hard on them, and no future, no money, cash in hand, like that they could go out and buy another place. And most of them had just been farmers, so they were spread all over. I mean, they moved wherever they could get a place to live. And it was hard on them. My dad sold sheep and sold most of the cattle, kept a couple of the horses. And he moved to Benton City in '44, I think, we moved there finally. But he worked there. He kept his job there as making ice. Bauman: Okay. Finley: Though the train didn't use it for that purpose or transporting food. DuPont used it for the summer months. They had huge, large holes in the ground. They just dug down in rock and covered it with sawdust, put sawdust in it. And you covered it with plastic and put ice in it, and then covered it again. And then in the summer when the plant couldn't produce enough ice for their needs, they dug that up or uncovered it and took it out, it was just like when they put it in there. We watched him do that, going back and forth to Hanford on the bus. Because the bus ran parallel of where they were building this vast hole in the ground. And that was very interesting. Because no kid could understand what they were doing. And at the same part, they were building F area. So we watched that, what you could see of it. You never knew if you were going to get home at night on the school bus for fear they’d dug a trench across the road. Bauman: You actually stayed there. You were there for several months after they started constructing-- Finley: Yes, oh, yeah, we were there probably a year and a half after--no, we were there longer than that after we got the letter. Like I said, we were the very last ones out there. We left and the gate was--the civilians couldn't go back in then, just the workmen. They had taken out all of Camp Hanford. And all of the construction work was done, or finishing work on the plants that they had started to build. After we left, they built some more. They put H in right down where we lived, tore down everything. They tore down—they put bulldozers through most of the buildings out there, probably to prevent coyotes and rats and whatever else from occupying them. Bauman: Do you remember what you were told about what was being done out there? Finley: As I remember the letter, it just said that on such-and-such a day, your land was taken by the government. And no, nobody knew what was going on. And that caused a lot of hard feelings, because they had their share of boys that went to the service. And they weren't allowed back in to see their parents who were working there. Like the Gilhulys, they had the garage. They run the garage. And all of the town people that had businesses, if they had a boy, the boy couldn't come back, which made a lot of hard feelings. And there again, as I said, they took everything, or changed all the housing. They put many families in--they would put two families to a home if there was enough room for two bedrooms, because there was no housing for all of these thousands of people coming in. And we didn't have to share our house, but any house that had been vacated, that's how they utilized them and took down the outbuildings of any barns or sheds or things like that. They were very nice people, the ones that come in. We got to know a lot of them, being kids. It was DuPont that come and took our house. We weren't happy about that. Bauman: The families that you got to know who came, were they from all over the place? Finley: Oh, yeah, one family was from Alabama. One was from Louisiana. One was from Boston. And I can remember us kids talking and laughing. We'd laugh at them, because they talked different from us. And we talked different from them to them, too. [LAUGHTER] But they were all nice people. Bauman: And you mentioned that your father owned the island? Finley: Yes, mm-hm. Bauman: And he sold that? Finley: The government bought that. Bauman: The government bought it from him. Do you know how much money he received for that? Finley: No, it wasn’t--I don't know how much they got. First they leased it, and when they knew that it was going to be--I guess; I don't have any other reason--a longer span of time, they bought the island and turned it over to, I think, Fish and Wildlife habitat. It's still there. He was very proud of that island because there was a large Indian cemetery on it. And he guarded that with his life to keep it from being dug. And several times during the night, he'd go. If he saw a bonfire over there, he'd go down to the river and row across it and get them off the island. And also, so they wouldn't set it afire. But he guarded that cemetery with his eye teeth. Bauman: I just want to go back to the community itself a little bit again. You talked a little bit about the grange, was it? Finley: The grange, mm-hm. Bauman: And school. Were there churches that were nearby? Finley: Oh, yes. There was a Methodist church and a Presbyterian church, a Catholic church. But there was many different religions. There was Seventh Day Adventists. In 1937 I believe it was--I'm not sure about the dates, they brought--and I don't even know how many. I think there was something like 13 families of Mormons in, which was kind of sad. Because they brought them in in August, and they had no time to put wood in or gather wood or canned--only what they could bring. And it was a very long, cold winter. And they did suffer. I mean, us kids thought, oh, they must have been poor. [LAUGHTER] Because they didn't have wood. I can remember my dad going and getting a couple of the men, and we had a flume in the river, which in high water caught all the logs and everything coming down the river. And he took them down there and told him to get what wood they needed to keep from freezing. And that winter, as I said, was very, very cold. And it was a very long winter. It was just kind of unfortunate. Bauman: Were those families able to stay on? Finley: Oh, yeah. They, come the next spring, they planted their gardens like everybody else did and went to work for one of the fruit farmers. And most of them didn't leave until the government come in. They were very nice people. Bauman: The town itself, I was going to ask you, are there any--you mentioned there was a theater. Were there any businesses that you remember at the time? Finley: Oh, yeah, on one side of the street there was a barber shop and drugstore and a grocery store. And the hotel burned down. I don't know when, but in the '30s, it burned. And then there was a bank and a tavern and a little park where they had the bands and things and a post office and a tavern. They had all the good things in life. A couple of gas stations, the train depot and a creamery, or where everybody took their cream in for the Twin City Creamery to come out and get. They picked it up. And I'm trying to think what else they had--and the coal storage. The coal storage I think was the largest building there. Well, the concrete part’s still standing. They didn't take down, but all around this--or on two sides if it, because one side was next to the railroad, there was packing sheds for fruit. And Dad just filled up huge canyons with ice to ship the fruit. There was a lumber yard there. Really, it was quite complete. And Hanford was also quite complete. They each had a ferry to get back and forth across the ferry. And then there was another ferry up the river, the Wahluke Ferry, which- I'm trying to think of where their end was. I think the Wahluke ended at Burke's Corners, up above the road. And it went to Ephrata. The White Bluffs Ferry went to Othello, the road. And the Hanford Ferry went out what is now the blocks. You could get to Ringgold and all in that area. And there was a road up down the other side of the river. It went from Uncle Matt's place, you could go up to Ringgold. Bauman: I think you mentioned earlier something about a baseball team, sports, I’m wondering about, for the schools. Finley: We had baseball teams. They had I think mainly basketball. I don't remember football. But there again, I wouldn't have been interested in that. But they always had music. They had bands. All three of the towns had bands. And yeah, because somebody told me they went to White Bluffs to play baseball one time. So they must have had a team. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: When you mentioned that when your family did leave, you moved to Benton City? Finley: Yes. Bauman: And did your father have sheep and cattle there again? Finley: No, we had a milk cow for a long time, and then we finally give that up. But we kept the horses. We always had horses. All us kids rode. He did, too. He was a really good horseman. But these weren't-- mostly just us kids' horses. And he just rented pasture for those. We didn't have any land for a long time. We had a building in town and a house, but we didn't have any land. Eventually, he did buy land. And part of the kids still live there. Three of my sisters still live there. Bauman: So you all grew up, spent the rest of your years [INAUDIBLE]. Finley: Yes, we all stayed together. I'm trying think. I think Veronica is the furthest one away, and she is in Goldendale, so she didn't get too far. One lives in Pendleton. My brother went to--was it Korea or Vietnam? Must have been Korea. That was in the '50s, yeah. And when he come back, he spent his time on different islands. Thank God he didn't--he joined the Navy, and he became a mechanic, an air mechanic. And they put him on the islands. He come back, went to school, went to college, got his degree in education and went back to the South Seas and taught there until he retired. And he's just younger than I am. He bought land and built himself a house up at Chesaw when he come back, which is up by Oroville, I think, and happy as a lark. Bauman: I was wondering what you think would be important for people to know about what it was like growing up in White Bluffs? What sort of a place it was. Finley: It was warm. It was a very warm community. The people were your friends. And they helped each other. If somebody needed something, somebody would either share or give or provide for them. And they didn't do it for--just because family needed it at that time. Or if one was sick, somebody was always available to take them to the hospital, which was either Pasco or Yakima. And I think it was just-- and to be happy. The people were happy. There weren't--not too many grouchy ones that I can remember. And to do with what you have. Don't want something more if you can't afford it, I guess, in this day and age. Just be happy with what you have, and work for something better. Bauman: There's one question I meant to ask you earlier that I'll ask you now, and that is the weather in the area. I know we get high winds and dust storms. Finley: Yes, there was high— Bauman: What about growing up? Did that impact your community at all? Finley: No. The ground wasn't tore up like it is now. So we didn't have the massive--I don't remember the dust storms, let me put it that way. We did have wind. And it was very cold in the winter and very hot in the summer. I mean, it was 120 and nobody thought anything about it. Very few shade trees. So it was hot, but you could always got get a pan of water. Mom used to--the wash tubs that they had then, she'd fill one every day and put it outside and us kids played in it. And I guess we were just used to it, because it didn't seem to bother us. And cold, as I said, the school bus took us to school in the winter because it was cold, and it was a mile or a little more to school. And there was no shelter, no nothing. You just were walking on sand. That's mostly what's out there. Bauman: Yeah. Do you remember the river ever freezing over at all? Finley: I don't. I don't remember it freezing. My dad would tell about the river freezing, and that's how they brought their sheep down. They kept them on--I don't know why they took them to the mountains, either, but they took them to pasture in the summer and then wait for the water to freeze to bring them over. And they lambed and sheared before the thaw so they could get them back across the river. Otherwise they had to ferry them or drag them clear down and put them across the bridge that they had then built between Pasco and Kennewick. And that was quite dangerous, he said, because they could only run so many sheep at a time. And it took a long time to put a band of sheep across. I can remember being--we had a cow that got down the outside one time, and she froze, instead of getting in the barn where she belonged. She was a young heifer, and she just didn't know, I guess. But people prepared for it. They knew it was going to be cold. It got cold early in the year. And it stayed that way until March or April. Now, the river didn't stay froze that long. It was just cold. But it wasn't cold enough to keep that river frozen. But they took the horse and everything else across it. I mean, he remembers it. But I remember the freezing out quite far from the bank, but not freezing across where they could put animals on it. Bauman: Right. Is there anything I haven't asked you about or any family stories or special memories that stand out that-- Finley: [LAUGHTER] What kids do for entertainment? Bauman: Sure. [LAUGHTER] Finley: Yeah. [LAUGHTER] We had this real nice family down the road a ways, and they had a mule. That was one of those poor Mormons that didn't know what they were getting into. And they had two boys. And Delores and I decided one day that we would put the mule harness on a horse. We did not know that there was the difference in them. There is. So we took Dolly, the horse, and took her up on the little knoll and hooked her to this wagon. I don't know where us kids got the wagon. Somebody gave it to us. And hooked the horse. We didn't know you were supposed to have shafts or something on this to stop this wagon. Well, she went to barn with this wagon bumping her all the time in the back end. And Dad came out and was quite upset because we had knocked the door off the barn. So we went in. We took Dolly, took her back out to the pasture. And we thought, well, now we've done that, and that was because it was too steep. That hill was too steep. So Mom and Dad had to go to Yakima. And us kids stayed at home, because there was nothing, nobody there to harm us. You know? [LAUGHTER] And we left Randall, my brother. We took this cow, Dolly, and put this mule harness on her. I don't know how. [LAUGHTER] And took her up about a quarter of a mile from the place through an old cut down apple orchard. And when we waved our hands and dropped them down, Randall was supposed to sic the dog on the calf in the barn. Well, Delores didn't make it to the wagon. She put me in first, and that cow went home. When we got home, the wagon did not survive it. And Dad couldn't figure out what was wrong with old Dolly that night. She was so touchy when he went to milk her. [LAUGHTER] We didn't try that again. But there was always two of us, so if one got in trouble, we could share it. One time we took the sheep who were over still on the mainland. And he had a nasty, nasty buck, but he produced good lambs. And there again, we were warned, you don't get in that corral with that buck. Because he actually could have killed a kid, I imagine, if he’d, you know. And Delores and I figured and figured if we got two ropes on him, we could tie him to two different posts in the corral. And then we could ride him. This is a big sucker, nice long wool and everything he had. And we did. Well, finally we wore—anyway, we rode that poor, old buck ‘til he just laid down. And Dad couldn't figure out what was--his name was George-- couldn't figure out what was wrong with George that night, because he just didn't want to eat anything. We never told him until we were grown--and I guess we were both married by that time—what happened to George. Bauman: Figured it was safe to tell him then. Finley: He just looked at us and he said, well, that's probably only one of the things you done that I didn't know about, sweetheart. [LAUGHTER] But we created our own fun. And to us, it was not mean or cruel or mischievous, because we knew the cow wouldn't die. She was too ornery. And we finally broke Dolly to ride with a saddle, so that was a little safer, too. We just had fun and grew up. And I don't know what else we done. Spent 13, 14 years there. I must have done something more. We worked hard in the summer. I remember that. Because Mom had to can. She canned the fruit. If somebody butchered--it always surprised me that if somebody in the community butchered, and they had too much meat, then it was spread out. Because there was no way of keeping it. And neighbors got along well that way. Bauman: So what sorts of work or chores did you do as a young child growing up? What sorts of things did you help out with? Finley: Oh heck, I could cook a meal by the time I was in the third grade. I learned to make bread, canned. We all canned. That was a whole family project. It wasn't just one person there, because it all had to be done on a cook stove. And somebody had to bring in wood and peel fruit. It had to be continuous. And what else? I remember Mama canning meat one time--twice. And that had to be cooked for six hours. Because it was just a water bath. They didn't have pressure. Later on, I guess, there was pressure cookers. But that's how they cooked it, put it in a wash boiler. And I think it held 12 quarts, the wash boiler did. And they cooked it all day, all day long. And that stove had to be kept burning. So on that day also, if you were canning, you also made bread. Because the oven was hot. And it was busy. It was a busy time. And then in spring, they had to take care of the stock. And the fruit was a little bit earlier than what it is here. It was just like a week earlier. Of course, it ended a week earlier, too. But there was always tomatoes and Mom put up an awful lot of tomatoes and peaches. I can remember that. Bauman: So you grew a lot of your own-- Finley: Grandma Pete, my dad's mother, was a peach farmer. So they always had peaches. And she also grew a very large garden. Or they would go down to Ringgold and there was the Japanese family there that had a truck farm. You could always get your tomatoes there in quantity. Bauman: Do you remember what their name was? Finley: The name of the-- Bauman: Japanese family? Finley: No, I have no idea. We just went down there and they were wonderful gardeners. They had everything up off the ground. They planted the plants and then they put chicken wire mesh panels over it so that the tomato plant grew up through the mesh and all the tomatoes then were on the wire. They were never on the ground. I always thought that was amazing. And they had corn. They had all vegetables. I just remember the folks buying the cantaloupe and the tomatoes. But they had-- I imagine it was a good sized truck farm. It was to me then. But I don't actually how big it was. And there was always apples. And apricot trees grow wild almost, so there was always plenty of apricots and apples. There was somebody had apple trees that they couldn't use them up. And they just simply shared. They had too much, they shared. It really kind of spoiled people for today. There's a lot I can't understand about today, why people don't get along better. [LAUGHTER] But I'm trying to think what else us kids would do. We played on a pile of gravel. That was our mountain. White Bluffs was very flat. Because the bluffs surrounded the whole river. The river is on our side, but you know. And unless you went to Yakima, there's a very small opening between Rattlesnake and the Bluffs in reality, just enough for the river to flow through. It was quite flat and hot. So you could do most anything. You could swim in the irrigation ditch. Bauman: Where was the pile of gravel that you-- Finley: What? Bauman: Where was the pile of gravel that you played on? Finley: Oh, the pile of gravel? Well, I guess they were going to gravel the road. They never got it done because they just piled this big pile of gravel there across the road from us. Well, for a long time, there was a sign on it. I don't know what the sign said. But there was one on it. [LAUGHTER] But it was sloped on one side, and then you could jump off the steep side, see. Boy, oh boy, we'd run up and jump off and run up and jump off. Daddy come out and says, now you know, Joe's going to get after you for that. Well, Joe didn't see us, so I guess we thought we were safe. It's still out there today, but it isn't near as large as I thought it was. I've been out a couple of times while I worked there in the '50s. I worked out there and drove that same circuit. Bauman: What part of the site did you work at, what did you--? Finley: I worked out of 300. I delivered instruments to the areas. So I had to go to each area every day. And I've been there since then also, and the roads are still there if you know where you're going. You can get around pretty good. Now, they're not in top--some of them are still paved. Bauman: So how long did you work there, then? Finley: I worked out there two years. And then we had a family, and I didn't go back to work. Bauman: When is the last time you were out there? Finley: Oh, let's see. The White Bluffs picnic--I don't quite remember when it stopped. But every year, you could go out there if you went to the picnic. You could drive out there on one afternoon. I think it was Saturday afternoon. And you could go through town. You went through town, and down to the old ferry landing, down to Old Town. And then in later years, if you could, you could go to where your home was. If the roads were there. And I drove out a couple of times to where we lived, because we lived on the river. And the last time I went out, there was this fence and big concrete building there. I knew that's probably the last time I'd see the homestead. They had to build H. But that's all right. It was a good place to live, good place to grow up in. And you learned a lot of things that you didn't know you learned. Bauman: Well, I want to thank you very much for being willing to come here and share your stories and your memories. Finley: They've really been terrific. I will try and get some pictures. Can I just call the number on the letter and just bring them in? Bauman: Absolutely, yeah, sure. Finley: Because we have them. I just don't know where in the world I've put them. We even have one of Johnny and Daddy, Johnny Buck, the Indian, the chief. He was quite old then. But he would take his kids and tell us in Indian--my dad could speak Indian, or that dialect of Indian. And he'd talk to us in Indian. We never bothered to learn. Isn't that sad? Bauman: Did your dad know that dialect from having spent a lot of time with them? Finley: Yes, he grew up there. Johnny, as a young man, worked for his father, George, and the horses. And I don't know, but then after George died, he still come and fished, his tribe. And Dad just grew up with him. They were always part of the neighborhood. You knew they were coming when the fish started to run. And then you watched for them. They had beautiful horses, or I thought, Delores and I thought. The other thing, he had a friend. He was in Yakima. He lived in Yakima. And he would come down. And him and Daddy would visit. And us kids would listen to the stories. And one day, he turned his hands over, and they were white. And I never realized that the man was black. We had no--there was no difference in people. This man was the tallest, blackest Negro. I've seen some from Africa lately that are more recent, but he was a delightful--he was an apple grower, had a large apple orchard in Yakima. And had he not turned those hands over, I, to this day, would have swore he was just like us. And I think that is one that is very important for kids, that there is no difference in people. They're all--the Indians looked the same to me. I don't remember what this man's name was, because he did. Or my mother's parents that were strict Irish. They looked the same. There was no--we even had a Filipino family in there. He was good. He raised raspberries. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: In White Bluffs? Finley: Yeah, in White Bluffs, yeah. He raised berries. Bauman: Do you happen to remember his name at all? Finley: His name was George--I can't remember his last name. He moved to Benton City. And they still bought berries from him. Bauman: He moved to Benton City after 1943, after the government-- Finley: Yeah, mm-hm. I remember a lot of people. I mean, Mrs. Barrett, her husband was one of the first railroad men out. He worked for the Union Pacific. And they lived at Wahluke at the time of the Walla Walla massacre. And she'd tell a story. I had a lot of opportunity to learn. And she was a sweet lady. She raised three boys and a daughter. I never remember her husband, but I remember her very, very well. And Russos was another--I don't know what nationality they were, but they all seemed to have something to do with fruit. And there was just a great, big mixture of all types of people and all getting along very, very well. Bauman: Well, thank you again. I really appreciate you coming in today to share your stories and memories. Thanks very much. Finley: Well, I thank you. And I hope it turns out halfway decent. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:05:20 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 250 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 300 Area F Area H Area Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1950s Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Bordern, Archie Borden, George Anderson, Harry Buck, Johnny 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 Catherine Finley Description An account of the resource An interview with Catherine Finley conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013-7-9 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2016-06-6: Metadata v1 created – [RG] Subject The topic of the resource Hanford (Wash.) Hanford Site (Wash.) Hanford (Wash.)--History--20th century. 300 Area DuPont F Area Fishing H Area Horseback riding White Bluffs Bank (Wash.) https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F6ec3e8f4ece16fe2f8e90a40e794f465.jpg 5cf3e70b4428b5caeafb4070bcbe656e https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F01546f5dc61b7dd087c005e7be022894.mp4 4c412857203994da1f60ff4e6cffcafa 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 Parker Foundation Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Nuclear science; Richland, Wa.; Hanford, Wa.; Parker, Herbert, 1910-1984 Description An account of the resource "The Herbert M. Parker Foundation collects valuable personal perspectives from key individuals who worked in radiological and environmental protection at the Hanford site in the early years of its development. Since 2004, student interns have recorded interviews from health physics and related science professionals. These historically valuable interviews document their personal experiences, observations, contributions and ideas. Several of the distinguished professionals who have spoken at the Annual Herbert M. Parker Lecture are also included. The videotaped interviews and accompanying biographical sketches will be made accessible to the public." See https://tricities.wsu.edu/parkerfoundation/ParkerHistory Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 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. Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Cecil Drotts 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 Cecil Drotts Description An account of the resource An interview with Cecil Drotts conducted by the Herbert M. Parker Foundation at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Herbert M. Parker Foundation at Washington State University Tri-Cities https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F64422e015afd6bb006b595400e645c1c.JPG bf75b261e2b75becbf2be621e89efa72 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F1dd18530d8068508b6d8fed49e87ab2e.mp4 6bba4faf1df15a9c196d5923a31d04a7 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Charles Davis Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I’m conducting an oral history interview with Charles Davis on December 19th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Charles about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Charles Davis: It’s Charles Davis. C-H-A-R-L-E-S D-A-V-I-S. Franklin: Great, thank you very much. So tell me how and why you came to the area to work for the Hanford Site. Davis: Back in 1977, I got out of the Army and I was working at Fort Lewis as a civilian. And it was a just-barely-over-minimum-wage job with no benefits, and I was looking for employment. And one of the employment people suggested I try out for Hanford. And it was Rockwell at the time. I came over and interviewed for Hanford Patrol and was hired. Franklin: Okay. And when did you start at Hanford Patrol? Davis: Well, I started working for Rockwell in August of 1978. And I went through the training for Hanford Patrol starting in January of 1979. Franklin: Okay. And what did you do for Hanford Patrol? Davis: Well, I was a patrolman. I worked most of the time out of the 300 Area until the 400 Area got its own headquarters. And then I was one of the people that moved to the 400 Area. Later on in 1980, I believe, I became one of the first four AMS—Alarm Monitoring System—lieutenants. Franklin: Okay. AMS stands for Alarm Monitoring System. Davis: Monitoring System. Franklin: And so that was the electronic system, then, that, like, was monitored at a central location? Davis: Well, there were several of them. One of them was around 234-5Z in 200 Area. That was the first one. And then around the 324 complex in 300 Area. And around the protected area at the 400 Area, Fast Flux Test Facility. Franklin: Okay. So we—a couple weeks ago I did an interview with Bob Parr. Davis: Mm-hm. Franklin: Do you know him? Davis: Yes, I do. Franklin: He also worked as—and he mentioned the development of this system and how it changed—or kind of changed some of the tasks of the patrolmen. Or how—I think he mentioned that before, Hanford Patrol was kind of antiquated in its security systems, and I was wondering if you could talk about that switch from the older system to this alarm monitoring system and how it changed your job. Davis: Well, before the Alarm Monitoring System went in, everything was visual. You had to be onsite and looking to see something happening. After the AMS system came in, there were several different systems around each of the Areas. There were microwaves, motion detectors, there was the Israeli fence, which was a taut wire fence. If you stretched it this way or to crawl through it, it set off an alarm. If you cut it, it also set off an alarm. Franklin: And it was called an Israeli fence? Davis: Israeli fence, because the Israelis were the ones that developed that technology. Franklin: Oh, okay. Interesting. Would that get triggered often by wild animals or tumbleweeds or anything, or was it pretty— Davis: The microwaves did, yes. Franklin: Yeah? Davis: And there were also cameras surrounding the protected areas. And if you got an alarm, the camera would come on automatically. For that particular location. They also—the cameras rolled through the security screens, so you’d see everything in a—I can’t remember the timeframe—two or three minutes. But if an alarm went off, the cameras automatically focused in on that particular location. Franklin: Interesting. Davis: They also had cameras on the inside of Dash-5. Franklin: Okay. Davis: And in fact, the first time we were out there training on the system, they had a problem. They had a plutonium container break, and it crapped up quite a bit of the backside and main hallway in Dash-5. Franklin: Oh, wow. Was there—were you near that area, or were you just in the building? Davis: Well, the place where the alarm monitoring system was located, the control room was in a separate building. Franklin: Oh, okay. Davis: But it was within the protected area. Franklin: Right. But you’re saying though, that—it’s interesting that when you were training on that system, in that building there was like a pretty serious accident— Davis: Yes. Franklin: --that occurred. Okay. And I guess you probably would have been pretty new on the job still, then, or--? Davis: Well, I’d had two years on Hanford Patrol-- Franklin: Okay. Davis: --but only a month or two as an AMS lieutenant. Franklin: So kind of describe for me the—you know, your average workday, both as a patrolman and then later as an AMS lieutenant. Davis: Well, the patrolmen were security for the Site. So most of the time, we were at a fixed location, at a gate or at a barricade like the Y barricade or the Yakima barricade, and we checked badges of people coming in. Franklin: Okay. And then what about as an AMS lieutenant? Davis: That was mostly sitting in the control room, monitoring the system. Although the systems weren’t fully operational for a while after the four of us were promoted to lieutenant. So we assisted the shift lieutenant and did whatever they needed. Franklin: Hm. How come the systems were only installed in those select areas? Davis: Because those were the protected areas. Franklin: Protected areas, okay. Davis: Right. Franklin: So what designated a protected area from a non-protected area? Davis: Mostly it was where plutonium was stored, and that had other classified information. Franklin: Okay. And how long did you work on the AMS system? Davis: Up until I got out of patrol in August of ’82. Franklin: Oh, okay, so just for a couple years then? Davis: Yeah. Franklin: And then what did you do after leaving AMS? Davis: I became a nuclear process operator. Franklin: Okay. Davis: And I worked at Dash-5. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Oh, okay. And what is a nuclear process operator? Davis: Well, I was hired to do terminal clean-out. And there were two production lines at Dash-5: the A line, which was the original one, and then the C line. We were going to be doing terminal clean-out, or getting it ready to be destroyed, for the A line. And they figured there was somewhere around 3,000 grams of plutonium in the system, and we would get about half of it out. And that was based on a non-destructive assay. And it turned out we got over 5,000 grams out, and there was still about 1,500 left in it. Franklin: Oh, okay, so there was kind of more than double the original estimate. Davis: Right. Franklin: Wow. And was that plutonium usable, or was it in a form that was not usable? Davis: It was scrap—powder and mixed in with other chemicals. It was all collected, put in little plastic jars about this tall, and stored. It could have been sent through the Plutonium Reclamation Facility and reused. I can’t remember if any of it was or not. Franklin: Okay. To give, I think maybe our future viewers and myself an idea—how much is 5,000 grams of plutonium? Like what size, what amount would that be? Can you compare it to something? Davis: Well, a plutonium button usually runs around 2 kilograms or 2,000 grams, and it’s about the size of a hockey puck. Franklin: Right, right. Which is why they’re sometimes called pucks. Davis: Right. The scrap we were getting out was mixed with other stuff, so it was—the volume was a lot larger. Franklin: Oh, okay, okay. So there were 5,000 grams of plutonium mixed in with a lot of other— Davis: Right. Franklin: Okay, I see. And how long did it take to do the terminal clean-out of the A line? Davis: Well, we were also cleaning equipment out. And the whole thing lasted well over a year. Franklin: Okay. And then what did you do after that? Davis: Well, then we went on to removing a vacuum system. There was a vacuum system throughout the facility that people used for various processes. And one of the things they used for, at the beginning, was if you had some extra solution, they kind of sucked it up and so it disappeared. Well, it didn’t really disappear. It went into the piping and kind of sat there. And these were about six inch in diameter pipes. And in some locations, they were half-filled with various stuff. Chemicals mixed in with plutonium. Kind of like a salt cake. Franklin: Okay. So kind of similar to the waste tank scenario, then. Davis: Exactly. Franklin: There’s stuff in there from the process and no one really knew the exact elements and concentrations of chemicals and things. Davis: Correct. Franklin: Wow. Davis: And we took the piping out, pipefitters cut it, the operators bagged it and lowered it down, and then it went into storage boxes. Franklin: And then I assume those were disposed of in like a solid waste landfill, or--? Davis: I’m not sure where they ended up. Franklin: Sure. This—what you’re describing sounds a lot—similar to what’s going on there today, in terms of the tear-down and demolitions of the buildings. Davis: Right. Franklin: I’m wondering if you could talk about kind of the protective measures that you and your coworkers worked in and the kinds of safety equipment that you used then. You don’t have to compare it to now if you don’t know the current—but I’m just kind of curious as to how—what the kind of precautions and kind of culture of safety was then. Davis: Okay. Well, of course, whenever we were on the backside of the operations side of Dash-5, we were in SWPs. Which are canvas overalls. Franklin: Okay. Davis: And whenever we were working in a glovebox, we taped up with surgeon gloves. All the gloveboxes had lead-lined gloves in them. And if we were doing anything that might be—might cause a puncture in the gloves, we wore either canvas or leather gloves over them. Franklin: Okay. Davis: When we were taking the vacuum system out, we would build plastic greenhouses around the area that we were working in to control contamination, in case something happened. We went in usually with two pairs of coveralls, and respirators. Sometimes we only used air purifying respirators, and sometimes we used power air purifying respirators. Franklin: What’s the difference? Davis: The powered ones had battery packs and it was forced air. So you always had a positive airflow through your mask, so if anything happened, the air went out, rather than when you were breathing in, it could get around the edges of your mask and be pulled in if you didn’t have a good enough seal. Franklin: Oh, okay, okay, I see. And I assume you wore dosimetry equipment—the personal-- Davis: Yes, all the time. Franklin: What kind do you remember? The badge kind, or--? Davis: Every once in a while we used the pencils, but not very often during terminal clean-up. Later on, I worked on the RMC line when they were producing plutonium buttons, and then we wore the pencils also. We also had dosimetry on our ring finger. Franklin: Oh, the finger dosimeters. Davis: Right. Franklin: Okay. Davis: And those were changed out monthly, both the badge TLDs and the ring ones. Franklin: Interesting. And—great, thank you. And so where—when you finished with the A line, and then you moved to the piping. Davis: Right. Franklin: How long did the piping take to— Davis: Again, over a year. Franklin: Oh, over a year, okay. And then— Davis: And some of the piping was over the office side of Dash-5. Franklin: Oh. So how did you handle that situation? Davis: Again, we built big plastic greenhouses. Franklin: Okay. Davis: And fortunately we didn’t have a problem. We never lost containment or anything. Franklin: So that building was still producing—or what was the purpose of the 245—sorry—it was the-- Davis: 234-5Z. Franklin: 234, what was the purpose of that building? Davis: It turned plutonium nitrate solution into plutonium buttons. Franklin: Oh, okay. So it was like a plutonium processing— Davis: Right. Franklin: Okay. And was that still in active use when you were removing the piping and the A line? Davis: No. Franklin: Oh, okay. Davis: However, after we stopped, they—because of the buildup during the Reagan years, they revamped the RMC line and started using it again. Franklin: Okay, so you’d already taken out the A line, you’d taken out some of— Davis: Well, the A line actually—when we finished with it, it sat there for another 25 or 30 years, and it just was removed within the last two or three years. Franklin: So what did you do with it, if you didn’t—you were just cleaning it, instead of removing— Davis: Right. Franklin: Oh, okay, okay. Was it used again after you cleaned it? Davis: No, because they took out all of the equipment. Franklin: Right. But the C line was still in use. Davis: Right. Franklin: Okay, interesting. So you removed the piping over the offices, and then what happened? What did you move on to? Davis: Then we moved on to revamping the RMC line. Franklin: Okay. And what is the—do you remember what RMC stands for? Davis: Remote Controlled and then C is just like A, B, C, D. Franklin: Oh, okay. And what was the purpose of the RMC line? Davis: To change plutonium nitrate into plutonium buttons. Franklin: Okay. So you said you revamped it. So what— Davis: Well, it was sort of mothballed. Franklin: Okay. Davis: So some of the equipment had to be replaced. Some of the leaded glass windows had to be replaced. Franklin: And that’s that really thick glass. Davis: Right. They were inch-and-a-half to two inches thick. And the reason they had to be replaced was you couldn’t see through them. Because of the radiation, they got fogged over. So it was the operators’ job to prepare the area for the boilermakers to go in and actually do the window change. Franklin: Okay. Davis: You know, union rules. Because it was a pressure vessel, the boilermakers had to do the work on that. That was a pretty dangerous job, because some of these hoods were powder hoods. And if you think of talcum powder, that’s what the plutonium powder was like, so it had a tendency to fly all over. Fortunately, we never had any skin contaminations on any of the window changes. A good pre-job planning, and everybody knew what they were doing. Franklin: So, when you went in to those hoods, there would have just been powder from the processing in there. Davis: Right. Franklin: Okay. Wow, that’s—so then you were able to change the—or to prepare it—how would you—did you remove the powder, or--? Davis: As much as we could. But you could never get all of it. And even though the hoods are negative pressure, when you’re disturbing them, there’s a chance for the powder to come out of the hoods. Franklin: Sure. And how did you handle that exactly? Davis: Well, we built greenhouses—plastic greenhouses—around them. The people that went in were on supplied air respirators, so it was even more than the powered air purifying. The supplied air, there were large tanks of air inside and hoses that went in, connecting to the mask. And they—people had escape packs, little five-minute emergency bottles, so in case something happened they could still get out. And when we were doing changing the powder hoods, we wore the two pair of coveralls plus a plastic suit. And these plastic suits were made by the plastic shop up on the third floor of the building. So it was a pair of trousers that went up about mid-waist—mid-chest. And then like a parka that went over the top. And then they got taped to the coveralls, and then gloves over them, so there was—you were completely encased in this plastic. Which made it awfully warm, too. Franklin: I would imagine—yeah, that was going to be my next question. How was it to work in that? I imagine your dexterity is somewhat compromised, and your vision is somewhat compromised. What is it like to work in that kind of suit? Like, I’m imagining you just—your body feels different. Davis: Mostly hot. Franklin: Mostly hot? Davis: When you get out of there, you usually could wring sweat out of your underclothes. Franklin: Really? Davis: Yup. Franklin: Wow. Were there any instances of people ever overheating in that? Like, having exertion and not— Davis: Not that I recall. Franklin: Oh, okay, but just very hot and humid. Davis: Yeah. Franklin: And then what about trying to manipulate tools with so many layers of gloves on, on the fingers? Davis: Well, we wore surgeon gloves as the inner protecting. With the surgeon gloves, there’s not a problem. Franklin: Sure. Davis: At least not for me. I wore as tight of surgeon gloves as I could, rather than having really loose ones like some people did. With the canvas gloves, it was a little awkward. Franklin: Interesting. Davis: The people taking—like taking the bolts off of the powder hood and stuff, it wasn’t that much of a problem, because they were usually wearing gloves anyway. You know, boilermakers. So they’re used to it. Franklin: Would the boilermakers also need—I imagine they would also need the same level of protective equipment. Davis: Oh, yeah, everybody that went in it wore that. Franklin: Oh, okay. So that was a basic level of training no matter—union job—because they had to have different groups of people, like pipefitters to deal with pipes, right, boilermakers to deal with—okay. Davis: Right. And like on the A line when we were removing equipment, the operators didn’t remove the equipment. Didn’t disassemble the equipment. Millwrights disassembled the equipment. The operators would seal them out of the gloveboxes. Franklin: Okay. And then would you move the equipment, or would teamsters be needed to move the equipment? Davis: No, we could move the equipment. Because it was contaminated. I mean, it was obviously inside the hood, so it was contaminated. Franklin: Right, right, right. Okay. So after the RMC line, where did you move to next? Davis: I also—while we were working on that, I was also working up in the Plutonium—PFP—PRF, Reclamation Facility. Which is the six-story building that’s attached to 234-5. Franklin: Okay, and that’s the one that’s coming down—no. Davis: It’s, I think in the process right now. Franklin: In the process of coming down right now, okay. And what did you do in the PRF? Davis: That was also refurbishing it to be used. Franklin: So this was during the Reagan— Davis: Right. Franklin: The Reagan buildup. Davis: Right. Franklin: And describe refurbishing. Davis: Changing out piping that was old. It looked like when they shut it down people just walked off so there were tools left inside. The system used nitric acid, tributyl phosphate, in the process. And we would find things like pliers that had been left in nitric acid for a year or two and were sometimes almost as sharp as knives, because the acid would eat away. Franklin: Wow. Davis: And we’d seal that stuff out. We were replacing pumps and— Franklin: So, like, literally, it looked like they had just walked off-- Davis: Yup. Franklin: --the job one day in the middle of work. Davis: Right, just— Franklin: Did you ever figure out why that was? Is that actually what happened, or--? Davis: I think it was, well, we were never going to use this again, so we’ll just leave it. Rather than taking time to clean it up and— Franklin: Do you know how long it was from when they had stopped work to when you went into start refurbishing it? Davis: No. Franklin: Oh, okay. Do you have any guesses, based on— Davis: Probably about ten years. Franklin: Oh, okay. So it had been a fairly— Davis: Yup. Franklin: So there probably was dust everywhere, and— Davis: Yeah. The PRF had six floors. The top two were just small areas where the top of the columns were. The other four floors had gloveboxes in them where the operations was conducted. And from the control room, which was up on the fourth floor, depending on what exactly they were doing at that particular moment, they’d get out their procedure and run through it. You needed an open valve, whatever number it was on the first floor, and closed valve on the second floor and so on and so forth. Franklin: Okay. And so how long did you work refurbishing—how long did the refurbishing work take on PRF? Davis: I can’t remember. Probably six to eight months. Franklin: Oh, okay. To get it back ready for operation. And how many men would be working on a project like that? Davis: [LAUGHTER] That’s a good question. There were quite a few. Franklin: Oh, okay. Davis: Not just men. Men and women. Franklin: Sorry. People. Davis: We had women nuclear process operators. Franklin: Oh, okay. And when—were there women nuclear process operators when you started? Davis: Yes. Franklin: Okay. And so what happened after the PRF was refurbished? Davis: I moved out to shipping and receiving at Dash-5. Franklin: Seems like a pretty different job change. You know, a shift. Davis: It was shipping and receiving radioactive material. Franklin: Oh, okay. So still handling—but this time handling kind of the finished product instead of cleaning it up. Davis: Right. Once they started making buttons in the RMC line, they had to go someplace. Franklin: Right, okay. Davis: And that’s what we were doing. Franklin: And can you describe shipping and receiving? What was an average day like in shipping and receiving? Davis: I don’t know if there was really an average day. When we had a shipment going out, the shipments were sent on SSTs, Safe Secure Transports, which are semi-trucks that are specially designed to transport nuclear material. Franklin: And what does the special design consist of? Davis: The tractors were armored. The trailers had anti-tampering devices, so to speak. If you look at a regular semi-truck trailer, walls are about this thick. Walls on these were this thick. And I don’t know all of the devices they had in those, but they—if somebody tried to hijack them, it would have been virtually impossible. Somebody said that they had a foam device that if the trailer was tipped over or if it was opened without keys, the foam would come in and solidify around the containers inside. And the trucks were driven by special couriers who were armed. They usually had one to two SUVs traveling with the truck, full of armed men. And I don’t remember ever seeing any women in that group. Franklin: Okay. And how often would a delivery take place? Davis: I can’t remember any frequencies. Franklin: Now, what about receiving? Is that when you would intake the solution to make buttons? Davis: Right. Franklin: Okay. And describe that process. Davis: The PUREX plant in East Area was operating at that time, and they separated the plutonium out of the fuel rods and turned it into plutonium nitrate solution. These were shipped over to Dash-5. Most of the time in 55-gallon drums that had inner containers that were about six inches in diameter and two-and-a-half to three feet tall. That’s because that’s a criticality safe configuration. And you certainly didn’t want a criticality to happen. Franklin: Right, so that way you could put two drums next to each other—or near each other, and there would be enough space in between the— Davis: Right, that and the shape of the container’s cylindrical, no more than six inches in diameter. So you wouldn’t want to just put it in the bottom of a 55-gallon drum, because that would not be a critically safe configuration, and you could get a criticality. Franklin: Interesting. I wonder how they figured that out. Davis: Hopefully not through trial and error. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Some things are better figured out not through trial and error. So how long did you work in shipping and receiving? Davis: About two years and then I moved to the burial grounds and Central Waste Complex. Franklin: Before we get to that, what was your job in shipping and receiving? Were you just like a clerk, or--? Davis: No, I was an operator and we loaded the containers. Franklin: Oh, okay. So you unloaded probably at the receiving end and then— Davis: Right. Franklin: I heard from somebody else—I interviewed somebody that worked there and they said the guards on the transport trucks were not a friendly bunch. Did you ever have any interactions with them? Davis: No. Franklin: Or was it just strictly business? Davis: Strictly business. Franklin: Okay. Davis: The—never mind. Franklin: No, no, no, no, no, go ahead. Davis: It flew out of my mind. Oh, I know what I was going to say. Some of the SSTs were driven around completely empty. And some of them were full. Franklin: Right, probably to— Davis: So that just because there was an SST on the road, people wouldn’t know whether it was loaded or not. And even if it was loaded to the maximum that they could carry, compared to a regular semi-truck, they were light. Franklin: Oh, right. Light in load. Davis: Lightweight. Franklin: Lightweight. Interesting. I could see how that is kind of a good counter-espionage tactic. Davis: Mm-hm. And the other thing that we did in shipping and receiving was monitor the vaults where they had both plutonium buttons and plutonium powder in the vaults. And every once in a while, they would come in and take containers out to assay it, just to make sure nobody’s sneaking it out in their lunchbox, I guess. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: And that’s where the can monitoring units were, right? In the vault? Is that where those were employed? Davis: Yeah. Franklin: Okay, we have a couple of those in our collection. And I’ve seen the—you go into the vault and they’re all kind of strategically-arranged around so you don’t have a criticality incident. So you monitored those as well? Davis: Right. Franklin: Did you ever perform any of the assays, or was it--? Davis: Well, there were people that actually performed the assays. But operators including myself were the people that went into the vault, take the containers, and put them in the assay machines. Then they’d do the—and then we’d put them back. Franklin: Was there—anyone ever sneak, that you know of—sneaked—seems like a very risky thing to do for a very small amount of material. Davis: There were monitors on the exits, and you couldn’t have gotten through. In fact, the monitors would go off if somebody had, like, radiation, iodine, x-ray. Franklin: Oh, okay. Davis: You know, downtown. And they’d come out to work and the monitor—alarm would go off. Franklin: Interesting. And so there’s a pretty tight level of security, then, at the Plutonium Finishing— Davis: Yeah. There had to be at least two people whenever you went into the vault. Franklin: Oh, okay. And then there was checks on entry and exit as well. Davis: Right. And remember the AMS system? Franklin: Yeah. Davis: There were cameras in there so they could see what you were doing. Franklin: Was that the same at the other places you worked at? At the 234-5Z and other places? Was the security system similar, was it pretty high— Davis: Well, the shipping and receiving building was inside the 234-5Z compound. So it was part of that. Franklin: Oh, okay. And then what about when you were working in kind of the refurbishing or cleanup? Was there also pretty tight security presence there as well? Davis: Not as much. Franklin: Okay. Probably because there’s no finished product there. Davis: Right. Franklin: So then you said you went out to the burial grounds. Davis: Right, and Central Waste Complex. Franklin: Central Waste Complex—and just describe that. What went into the burial grounds? Davis: Anything they wanted to get rid of. Franklin: Okay. Davis: Low-level waste. Franklin: Low-level. Solid? Davis: Yes. Franklin: Okay. Davis: When they started back in the ‘40s, it was back your truck up to the edge of the burial ground and throw whatever was on it into the ditch. So you had drums and boxes every which way, you know, laying on top of each other. By the time I got there, they were stacking them neatly and doing recoverable storage—if anybody ever needed to get whatever they buried out again. Franklin: Okay. So much more like—I don’t even know how to describe it. But not just like a dump anymore, but in case they accidentally sent something to the disposal that they needed back— Davis: Right, or wanted to get back to reprocess it later. Franklin: Oh. So what kind of system kept track of that? Like, how would you—how would somebody come and get something back? Davis: There was paperwork on everything that we put in there. And the paperwork was saved, so if somebody was looking for something, we buried such-and-such item in 1987. They could look through and find out where it went and the position in the trench, how far from the front or the back. Franklin: Oh okay, so it was still being buried in the ground. Davis: Right. Franklin: And so would you fill those when they got full? Davis: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. Davis: They, in fact, every so often, they would—as we went from one end of the trench to the other, and when there was a certain number of feet of items that were being buried, they brought bulldozers in and covered the boxes and drums. Franklin: Okay. Now, what would the process be if somebody needed to get something that was buried by bulldozer out? Would they have to excavate and then— Davis: Yeah. It never happened while I was there. So I’m not sure how they would do it, exactly, but they’d say, well, it’s x number of feet from the beginning of the trench, and that would be right here, and I guess we’re going to have to dig a big hole and try to get it out. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: And so how long did you work at the burial ground for? Davis: Up until ’91. Franklin: Okay. Davis: So another couple of years. Franklin: Okay. Davis: And Central Waste Complex is a series of buildings that they stored radioactive waste in, rather than burying it. Franklin: Oh, okay. So that’s different from the burial grounds, then? Davis: Well, the people doing the operations were in the same group. Franklin: Okay. But the burial—so the Waste Complex, was that—that’s not tank waste, or is that? Davis: No. Franklin: Okay, that’s just other types of waste. Davis: Right. There were 13 buildings that were 4,000 square feet and they had just built those when I got into burial grounds. And there were four more buildings built after that. The biggest one was 56,000 square feet if I remember correctly. Franklin: Wow. Davis: 12 of the original 13 buildings, we received waste from 100-H Area. Franklin: Okay. Davis: And that was from one of the trenches out there that they sent water from the reactors out and let it settle. And they were—it was mixed waste. Radioactive and chemical waste. Franklin: Oh. So how would that—so then that got into the soil, I— Davis: Right, so then they were digging up the soil, putting it in 55-gallon drums and then sending it to Central Waste Complex with the idea that it would eventually be reprocessed to separate the radioactive material from the chemical material. Franklin: Wow. Did that ever happen? Davis: No, not to my knowledge. Franklin: Oh, okay. So they just—oh, sorry, go ahead. Davis: The original containers were 55-gallon drums. And they started getting pinhole leaks from the chemicals that were in there. So they repacked them in 110-gallon drums. And some of those started getting leaks. So they repacked them in plastic drums, bigger—even bigger. Franklin: Any leaks on those? Davis: Not by the time I left. Franklin: Okay. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: But those were stored aboveground then, in these buildings. Davis: Right. Franklin: Probably, I guess, for easy— Davis: Retrieval. Franklin: Retrieval and— Davis: And for monitoring also. Franklin: Yeah, I was going to say, that’s—I mean, that’s obviously how they knew there were leaks in them, which is good. Someone was monitoring them. And so then the other buildings mostly just stored waste that needed to be monitored and retrieved at a— Davis: Right. Franklin: Okay. So what did you—where did you go after the burial grounds or the Central Waste Complex? Davis: I actually stayed in burial grounds but I went exempt. I went into administration. Franklin: Oh, okay. Davis: And I was there until 1996 when I was asked to move to T Plant. And then I was the building administrator out at T Plant. Franklin: And— Davis: Building administrator is the guy that orders supplies, makes—coordinates moves of people into or out of the plant and things like that. Franklin: And what was the T Plant doing at that time? Davis: They were decontaminating equipment. Franklin: Okay. And the T Plant was one of the canyons, right? Davis: Right. Franklin: And it was one of the canyons where things were remote controlled because of the radioactivity? Davis: Right. Franklin: Okay. Davis: In fact, it was the original processing facility. Franklin: Right. So that was undergoing cleanup at the time—or a form of cleanup. Davis: Well, they were decontaminating equipment from other places, plus whatever was in there. Franklin: Okay. And so what—so kind of describe—well, so—sorry. So, they’re bringing in equipment from other places in there to also decon— Davis: Right. Franklin: So that was kind of a decontaminating location? Davis: Right. Franklin: So how long did that work take? Davis: As far as I know, they’re still doing it. Franklin: And where did that take place? I imagine that the canyon itself— Davis: In the canyon. Franklin: Oh okay. Davis: The cells where the processing took place was below deck. Franklin: Mm-hm. Davis: And each cell had a concrete cap on it that could be removed by a crane. And these were probably six feet thick. Franklin: Wow. Davis: And they were stair-step so you could make a good seal. And the processing—the decontamination stuff took place on the deck. Franklin: On the top. Davis: Right. Franklin: Of the—okay. And so I imagine the people that were in there were in full— Davis: Right. Supplied air respirators. Franklin: I guess that makes sense, right, because if you’re decontaminating something and it gets crapped up, I mean, you’re already in a pretty hot place. Davis: Right. Franklin: As far as radioactivity goes, so you’re not going to wreck a place that has no or very little radioactivity. Davis: If— Franklin: what kinds of equipment would you be cleaning up? Davis: All sorts. Franklin: From what—from other canyons, or--? Davis: Yeah, I’m not sure where it all came from. Franklin: Oh, okay. But from other buildings onsite. Davis: Right. Franklin: Because at that point it was decontaminate—there was no processing anymore, right? Davis: Correct. Franklin: It was just decontamination. Davis: There is a pool on the north end where, when I got there they had fuel elements in that came from offsite. I’m not—back east some place. Franklin: Okay. Davis: Sea-something? Seabrook? Someplace way back east, like on the coast. And while I was there, they built a new facility in East Area that they stored the reactor—irradiated reactor fuel from N area. They also took the stuff out of the T Plant pool and moved it over there, too. Franklin: Oh, okay. Davis: If you want to talk to somebody that had a really interesting job, talk to one of the crane operators that worked at T Plant. Franklin: Yeah? Okay. Do you know anybody? Davis: I’d have to think on their names. It’s been—[LAUGHTER] Franklin: 20 years? Davis: Not quite. About 15 since I got laid off. Franklin: And so—how long did you work at—how long were you the building administrator at the T Plant? Davis: Up until I got laid off in 2003. Franklin: Okay, so you worked for about 25 years— Davis: At Hanford, right. Franklin: At Hanford, okay. And what did you—were they just drawing down operations then— Davis: Yeah. Franklin: Or were you just kind of a senior person and they were like, well— Davis: There were 300 people laid off the same day I was. Franklin: Oh, okay. Davis: So it wasn’t like, just you. Franklin: It wasn’t personal? Davis: No. Franklin: But were operations kind of dwindling, then, at that point? Davis: Yes. Franklin: So a lot of the work scope had been accomplished. And then what did you do after you were laid off? Davis: I worked for the Washington State Patrol. Franklin: Oh, okay. So kind of back to patrol. Davis: Right, as a—I was a commercial vehicle enforcement officer. Franklin: Interesting. And that’s at the waystations? Davis: That’s one of them, yeah. I worked down at the Plymouth waystation. And then I got promoted to CVE-02 and went into compliance review, which is investigating trucking companies. And then I went to be the lead worker at the interior detachment for our district, which is from Yakima to the Idaho border. Franklin: Okay. How long did you do that for? Davis: 11 years. Franklin: Oh, okay, so you just retired from that as well? Davis: Yup. Franklin: And then how did you get involved with the B Reactor Museum Association? Davis: Well, that was something that I was kicking around for a long time to get involved with. And last April I finally said, let’s do it. So my wife and I joined. Franklin: And why? What was the interest there? Davis: Preserving B Reactor. These buildings and processes out there just fascinate me. Franklin: How so? Davis: Just because of the at-the-time-cutting-edge technology that was being developed. I mean, obviously, you look at what we have today compared to what it was in 1944, but back then it was just amazing. And the facilities—just—I just find them amazing. Franklin: What other buildings or processes do you wish could be saved or would have been saved on the Hanford Site? Davis: I think they should save T Plant, because it was the first production facility. Franklin: Right, because I mean, it’s also kind of groundbreaking in that way. And you can’t really tell the story of B Reactor without that other half. Davis: Right. Franklin: And what else—are there any others? Davis: Let’s back up just a second on T Plant. Franklin: Sure. Davis: Back in the 1960s, after they shut down the processing there, they cleaned up the canyon enough so that they invited the families of workers to come out, and they had some sort of function in the canyon. Franklin: Wow. That is really interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that before. How did you hear about that? Davis: Some of the operators, when I first went into operations, were at T Plant when that happened. Franklin: Wow. Davis: And if it could be cleaned up that much so people could actually get into the canyon, I think that would be fantastic. Franklin: I think I agree—I agree with you. That would really—goes a long way into telling that story. Because otherwise, it—you know, what happens to the fuel after we irradiate it? Davis: Right. And I think the 400 Area, the Fast Flux Test Facility would be a good addition, too. Franklin: Why is that? Davis: Because it was a sodium reactor. Sodium-cooled reactor. Franklin: Yeah, it’s a fascinating piece of technology. A couple weeks ago we interviewed the guy who patented it, Eugene Astley. And it’s a very—a shame that that reactor didn’t get to kind of live up to its fullest potential, being shut down so quickly after it was created. Can you describe living in—your thoughts on living in Richland—I guess I should ask, did you live in Richland when you worked at Hanford? Davis: Yes, most of the time. Franklin: Most of the time. What was it like living in Richland during the Cold War and then the shift to not the Cold War and the rise of environmental consciousness? Davis: I don’t think it was very different than anywhere else. Franklin: Okay. Davis: I wasn’t there when it was a company town where you had to be working at Hanford, before you could live in Richland. Franklin: Sure. Davis: Those type of questions, I’m sure you asked my wife. Franklin: Yes. We usually do ask, you know, anybody who was there at the time. Did you ever feel an immediacy to the Cold War, kind of living and working in a site that was producing material for the US nuclear weapons arsenal? The fact that Hanford might have been a prime target— Davis: Yeah. Franklin: --for Russian bombing. Or knowing what the work was contributing to, do you have any feelings about that, good or bad? Davis: Well, we realized that Hanford might be a target. But we—at least I thought it would probably be other places before Hanford, because anything we produced there, it would take so long to get into the system. Franklin: Oh. Davis: I was more worried about somebody trying to steal plutonium or technology than somebody dropping a bomb. Franklin: Is there anything else that I haven’t asked you that you’d like to talk about? Davis: Not that I can think of. Franklin: Okay, well, Charles, thank you so much for coming in and interviewing with us today—participating in the interview. You’re not interviewing anything. But thank you. You gave a lot of great detail about some of the cleanup and refurbishment. And I really appreciate that; I think that was really interesting work, kind of working at this pivotal time between kind of the shutdown of the Carter administration and then the uptick in the Reagan administration is really interesting and not really—a story that hasn’t been told really well yet at Hanford. So I really appreciate you shining a lot of light on that. Davis: Okay, thank you. Franklin: Great. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:51:51 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317 kbps Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1977-today Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1978-2003 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Charles Davis Description An account of the resource An interview with Charles Davis conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 12-19-2016 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2017-29-11: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. 2-East Area 200 Area 300 Area 400 Area B Reactor B Reactor Museum Association Cold War Fast Flux Test Facility H Area Hanford Plutonium PUREX supplies T Plant War https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F7fac4848f66409d9124c1e7622c5a538.jpg 1a30221e25e2d86a09b0284d758d88af https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F4dbea66ec8658597ffd85e7fe05366df.mp4 e35c2a900fef7f4778481825804aac4f 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 Parker Foundation Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Nuclear science; Richland, Wa.; Hanford, Wa.; Parker, Herbert, 1910-1984 Description An account of the resource "The Herbert M. Parker Foundation collects valuable personal perspectives from key individuals who worked in radiological and environmental protection at the Hanford site in the early years of its development. Since 2004, student interns have recorded interviews from health physics and related science professionals. These historically valuable interviews document their personal experiences, observations, contributions and ideas. Several of the distinguished professionals who have spoken at the Annual Herbert M. Parker Lecture are also included. The videotaped interviews and accompanying biographical sketches will be made accessible to the public." See https://tricities.wsu.edu/parkerfoundation/ParkerHistory Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 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. Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Charles Jenkins Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Charles Jenkins Description An account of the resource An interview with Charles Jenkins conducted by the Herbert M. Parker Foundation at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Herbert M. Parker Foundation at Washington State University Tri-Cities https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fec6c8f7c3bbb31f56925babeecf6b4ea.mp4 f93d3a58c920203a28c20c15faa00ad6 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F88cdb1fa45ad2f4e200b759062e541f1.JPG 42ba19f559413681d72de561bf6a41dd Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Christina Robison Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound 0:00:00 Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Christina Robison on January 11, 2018. I need to fix that there. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Christina about her experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for me? Christina Robison: Yes. Christina Robison. It’s C-H-R-I-S-T-I-N-A. R-O-B-I-S-O-N. Franklin: Okay, thank you. So, tell me how you came to the Hanford. Tell me how you came to the area, and then how you began work at Hanford. Robison: Sure. Well, we came from--well, I grew up in California. But we had moved—my mother had remarried and we moved to Huntsville, Alabama, where my stepfather worked for Rockwell International on the space shuttle. Franklin: Oh, wow. 0:01:00 Robison: Yeah, he was a supervisor on the space shuttle there. His name’s Racy Storm. He’s since passed away. But Rockwell asked him if he’d be interested in transferring. And it’s kind of funny, because they gave him three different states to choose from, and my mother picked Washington to come to, because it had four seasons, was her reasoning behind going. So, I was only 15 at the time. He took the position with Hanford and we moved here to the Yakima area. He started working, you know, right away when we moved here. And then followed by that was my stepbrother, also worked. He worked at the REDOX labs, 222-S labs. And then my sister got a job as a nuclear process operator at the PUREX facility. Franklin: Oh, wow. Robison: And following that, probably a year, year-and-a-half after she started working, I graduated from high school and then got my job out at Hanford. So it was kind of a family affair. Franklin: So what did your father do—or, your stepfather, sorry—do out at Hanford? 0:02:08 Robison: He was an engineer. I couldn’t tell you for sure exactly what kind of engineer, but he was an engineer at Dash-5, at PFP. I know he could—they’d call him in the middle of the night, from what my mother tells me, and he could recite procedures from memory. He would tell them what page to look on, and which section it was. Yeah, he was a pretty smart man. Yeah, so he kind of started, I think, a lot of the family’s careers out at Hanford. And that’s how mine started. Franklin: Do you know what he did on the space shuttle? Like, I’m just wondering how that experience translated to plutonium processing. 0:02:48 Robison: Well, I don’t know--I probably couldn’t tell you a lot about what he did at the space shuttle. I actually had an opportunity to go look at the space shuttle and actually board the space shuttle, but I was 14, and wasn’t interested. So I missed that opportunity of a lifetime. So, yeah, that was disappointing when I looked back on it. And he told me I would regret it, and I did, and do. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Well, you know, hindsight is 20/20. There’s a lot of--when I interview-- Robison: Yeah-- Franklin: Oh, sorry-- Robison: No, well, when you’re young, you just--you don’t realize the significance of something. And I didn’t, and so I didn’t go. Franklin: Yeah, it’s just a fact of life. So, it was kind of a family--it became a family affair then, that kind of work. And tell me how you got hired on at Hanford. 0:03:39 Robison: Well, I had originally applied for a custodial position. When they actually called me to come to work, the gentleman on the phone--I don’t recall his name--asked if I would be interested in being a D&D worker, and that stands for decontamination and decommissioning. I recall my sister telling me that was a horrible job and not to accept it. But I asked him why, because I had applied for custodial; I had not applied for D&D. And he had told me that they needed their quota of women. And so I accepted. Wanted the job. So I accepted. Franklin: What led you to accept the job when your sister had warned you about it? And I guess--let me back that up a second. Why did she say it was--do you recall why she said it was such a terrible job? 0:04:32 Robison: Well, D&D—this was in 1983, and D&D then was one of the lowest paid positions on the Hanford Site. It was a relatively new, for lack of better term, new craft. And you had to do some really dangerous work. And a lot of hard work. You know, we, D&D, did a lot of other crafts’ work in radiation zones. So, it was, from her experiences being a nuclear process operator, being one of the crafts out there, you know, the knowledge that she had of D&D, it was just not—it wasn’t one of the top ranking jobs, you know, on the Site. I chose to take it because I wanted my foot in the door. I wanted to work. I was extremely independent person; I still am. I wanted to have a job and move out of Mom and Dad’s house. So I accepted it. And I thought I could move on to different positions once I was out there. Franklin: Right. Had you thought about going to college at all, or did you--were you kind of focused straight on working? 0:05:52 Robison: I was focused only on working. I had always—I’d worked since I could, since I was 11, baby-sitting, and had no interest in going to school. I was extremely glad I’d graduated high school and was out. I just wanted to be in the workforce and start making my own money and paying my own way. Franklin: Cool. So tell me about entering this world, this D&D world, as part of a quota. Like, I guess, I’d like to know about the kind of social aspect of being a woman in a male sphere, but also if you could talk about the kind of work that was happening. 0:05:31 Robison: Okay. Sure. Well, D&D is like what it says, it’s decontamination and decommissioning. So as far as what it was like, you know, I was a 19-year-old, young girl, fresh out of high school, the only thing I’d ever done was waitress. So it was a bit of a shock, going to work at Hanford. I really didn’t have a clue about what was involved and what to expect. It was truly a man’s world. I was surrounded by men, and being young you’re a little bit interested in that, but it was a bit of a culture shock as well. So, I had quite a bit of adjusting to do. And as far as the work, you know, again, the only thing I’d ever done was waitress and go to high school, and within six months, I was climbing scaffoldings and running jackhammers. So it was quite the change. But I really enjoyed the work. In D&D, then, and I believe even probably it’s true today, because they still have the D&D craft out there, you were successful every day. Every day brought a new challenge and once you’ve finished decommissioning or cleaning something up, you got to move on and do another project and do something different. So it was really enjoyable. Franklin: Wow. What kinds of buildings did you work on, and areas? 0:08:04 Robison: Well, I’ve been in probably every building on Site, except for N Reactor, K, PUREX and a bunch of the facilities in the 300 Area. D&D has touched a lot of the areas out there. So, we could decommission a change facility, a change room, meaning we’d go in and cut it, essentially demolish it. We did asbestos abatement in all of the reactors. We did fuel storage removal--fuel storage—the fuel rods from the reactors, cleaned out all of those from all the basins in all the reactors. We tore down buildings. I don’t know, you name it, we probably did it. Jackhammered, took up railroad ties. It was a lot of fun. I mean, I enjoyed it. Franklin: So was your job similar to the remediation today, where it was just to take the building down to slab? Robison: Yes. Yeah. It was probably a lot like what it is today. Only more sophisticated, because technology’s so far—so much more advanced than it was in the ‘80s. But-- Franklin: What was the monitoring environment like when you started with D&D? I assume there was a radiation protection-- Robison: For personnel, monitoring? Franklin: Yeah. Well, like the radiation monitoring. And what’s changed from then till today? Robison: Well, I couldn’t tell you a lot about what’s changed; I don’t really do radiation work anymore, so I don’t go into any kind of zones. But we had dosimetry then. We had air monitoring. You know, it would be set up on us or that would surround us to monitor the air. So I don’t know that the monitoring has changed significantly from when it was in the ‘80s. I think it’s pretty much the same, but I really haven’t been involved in that. Franklin: Sure. You mentioned that it was kind of a culture shock, and it was a real—it was a man’s world, or like a boys’ club. Robison: Mm-hmm. Franklin: I kind of want you to expand on that a little bit, if you could. How did people initially treat you, and did that change over time as they got to know you, or, like, what kinds of attitudes--the spectrum of attitudes that you encountered? Robison: Well, I think that they were—it was probably wide-ranging. You know, again, I was young, so--a lot of the people that I worked with were young. I don’t know then that I could tell a lot of difference on how I was treated. You know, reflecting back for the age I am now and my life experiences, I know that there were times that I was treated less than a human. But at the time I didn’t realize that. That was just kind of the way it was. Franklin: Sure. Are there any notable memories or moments or people that stand out from that time? Robison: Well, moments—when you asked me about, you know, the way things were back then in terms of how women were treated, one of the memories that I have, and a lot of women that I worked with could attest to this, was the dress-out procedures when you’re coming out of a radiation zone. Then, some of the companies, men didn’t have to wear modesty clothing. And being a D&D worker, that was one of my jobs, was to undress as individuals were coming out of the radiation areas. So, it didn’t faze them at all to walk around in their underwear. You know, as a young girl, that was a bit—I didn’t quite know what to expect from that. So you just do your job and keep moving forward. Today, it’s different. I mean, I know they have modesty clothing. Franklin: Sure. Robison: So that doesn’t happen. Franklin: Did you—forgive me if this is too personal, but did you also have to walk around in your underwear? Robison: No, I wore modesty clothing. Franklin: Okay. 0:12:27 Robison: So, yeah. I had a T-shirt and shorts. The problem was that if they became contaminated while you were in the zone, and it did occur on occasions, you didn’t get to keep those. So that was part of the reason a lot of people didn’t wear modesty clothing, because if it got crapped up, is what they called it, they’d lose it. That was just money out of their pockets. So a lot of people weren’t willing to do that. But, no, I would wear shorts and a T-shirt. Franklin: Sure. Robison: Yeah. Franklin: When you started, were there separate facilities for men and women? Like, restroom facilities and-- Robison: Yes. Mm-hmm, yes, there were. Uh-huh. Franklin: So, you mentioned a couple times when we were talking earlier about the 183-H-- Robison: 183-H, yeah. Franklin: --project. I’m wondering if you could talk about that, because you had that—we’ll put that picture online, but that picture of you in the gunk, I guess, is the best way to-- Robison: Yeah. Franklin: I’m wondering if you could talk about a project in your work on that and what you accomplished. 0:13:24 Robison: Well, so, the 183 solar basins, I believe there were four of them in total. And two of them were filled up—well, the basins were constructed a lot like a pool would be where you have a shallow end and a deep end. The muck that was in these could range anywhere from a foot in the shallow end all the way to six or seven feet deep in the deep end, at the back part of the solar basin. And all of this muck came from the 300 Areas, places that would generate chemical wastes and wouldn’t have any place to put them. They were in a liquid form. So the material, evidently, was trucked out to the 183-H solar basins and placed there for, essentially, the liquids to volatilize off, to vaporize. Well, that happened over a number of years, of which I wasn’t there. But when we did go and D&D went to clean these solar basins out, what was left of course was the muck. The stuff was just really strange, because if you--it’d be a hard surface, and then when you stepped through it, it would just liquify. It was very different. And then we didn’t—because of the depth of some of this muck, they couldn’t really put a piece of equipment in there to clean it out. It was such a large basin that if you put a backhoe or something in there to try to lift this muck out, it would’ve just swallowed up the equipment. So they put people in there, me included. And we wore protective chest waders and plastics over the top of us, and mind you, this was in 100-degree heat. So it was very hot. And we used buckets, five-gallon buckets, and we literally bent over and picked up a bucketful and filled up drums. I would expect we probably filled up about 5,000 drums at that time. Franklin: Of 55-gallon? Robison: Of 55-gallon drums, uh-huh. Franklin: Wow. Robison: Yeah, it was a long project. It was one of the places that I was stationed at for any length of time. But, yeah, it was quite the project. But I have a lot of good memories from there. It was a good crew that I worked with and good managers. Again, the technology wasn’t available then like it was today. I’m sure they would’ve done it differently today and taken more precautions for their workers. But at the time, it was all manual labor. It was all very physical. Franklin: Well, at the time, too, Hanford was still producing, right? Robison: Yes. Franklin: Its primary job in there--because I assume this would’ve been sometime in the mid-’80s, late ‘80s? Robison: Yeah, I want to say I was probably—I think I was probably out there about ‘86, ‘87, yeah. Franklin: Okay, so still in production. Robison: We were still in production, yeah, at the time. Franklin: And so cleanup not--I mean, obviously, a priority, because they have D&D, but certainly not the major priority it is today, right? 0:16:51 Robison: Right. No--yeah, it’s definitely more of a priority today. I mean, Hanford’s in environmental cleanup status. But I would like to say that even though we were in production and--because I kind of feel like Hanford gets a bad rap sometimes when they really try to do a lot of good, too. But DOE was actually in environmental restoration back in the ‘80s when I worked there, because that’s essentially what D&D was. It was decontaminating and decommissioning. So they had already begun doing cleanup activities in the ‘80s. At least when I started. And they, obviously had probably started even before I arrived. Production was their focus at the time, but they did think about the environment. They had started the steps towards cleanup. And, keep in mind in the ‘80s when I hired on, a lot of the regulations didn’t exist. There were none of the regulations that governed Department of Transportation and Shipping. And none of those regulations were there. But DOE was taking—had the stance to start doing some environmental cleanup. And they knew they needed to do something. And I was happy to participate. Franklin: Awesome. Robison: Mm-hmm. Franklin: Where else did you work doing D&D? Robison: Again, all over the Site. You know, I worked in 200 East area and 200 West area. I was stationed at Dash-5 for a while, the PFP building that they’re currently trying to bring down to slab. Let’s see. At semiworks, although I couldn’t tell you a whole lot about that facility. I didn’t work out of that building very long, but it was alpha contamination there. Where else was I at? Franklin: Were you at REDOX? 0:18:50 Robison: I was, when I first hired on that’s where I was stationed. My very first--that’s where I learned to climb a scaffold, and that’s where I first learned to use a jackhammer, and that’s where I first learned how to take up railroad ties and railings. Franklin: Wow. Robison: Yeah, did quite a bit there. There was nobody in the facility at the time. I mean, other than us. It wasn’t being utilized. But, yeah, so REDOX--I had been there, worked, again, at PFP. D&D, we didn’t stay in one place for any really long length of time, because new projects would come up and so we’d have to go work out of this shed, or—a little bit like construction work, I suppose, where those guys have to go to motel to motel. I just went from building to building. Franklin: Yeah, like, the opposite of construction, really. Robison: Right, except we got to tear it down, yeah. Franklin: Yeah, yeah, okay. That makes a lot of sense. How long did you do D&D for? Robison: I was probably D&D for about seven years. Franklin: So through the ‘80s? 0:20:00 Robison: I wanna say--yes, all the way through the ‘80s until about 1990. And then I worked in the powerhouses that no longer exist. Franklin: For the reactors, right? The reactor power? Robison: The steam power--the coal-fired powerhouses. Those powerhouses used to supply steam to the production facilities, like PFP or PUREX. Franklin: They’d use those old steam lines that still—did they use the old steam lines that are still all in the 200 Area? Robison: Yes, those are still operational. Franklin: Wow. Robison: I was called a power operator. So, I did do some work in the main powerhouse where they actually fed coal into boilers and created the steam that supplied energy. Franklin: They were still using coal in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s? Robison: Yup, yup. Franklin: Wow. Robison: Yup, they were. Franklin: That’s always struck me as--I don’t know if it’s--it’s not irony, but the fact that the energy and the steam to supply nuclear--this high-science nuclear processing was coming from coal, you know. This very basic energy source plays a role in creating a very technical scientific energy. Robison: Yeah. Well, you know, I guess in hindsight, you look back on it and it is kind of—again, technology’s just so far advanced today than what it was then, but, yeah, it’s-- Franklin: What was it like working with coal? I mean, did you get regular shipments? Robison: Yup! Franklin: And did you have to wear special protective gear and-- 0:21:41 Robison: No, didn’t really have--unless you were right up in it. They’d provide you with paper masks if you didn’t want to breathe in the coal dust. But, yes, the coal was brought in by rail and poured into hoppers. It went up a conveyor belt and fed the hoppers, and those hoppers in turn fed the boilers that were down below. Again, I didn’t operate those that much. I ran the filter plant which supplied the drinking water for the Hanford Site. But, of course, you know, you’re around it all the time, so you pick it up. Pick up different things here and there. Franklin: And which powerhouse and filter plant did you work at? Robison: Both. I worked at both of them. Franklin: Which reactor area? 0:22:21 Robison: Well, so, 200 West area would’ve fed PFP, REDOX, T Plant, U Plant--any of those that required heat or--and then East Area, of course, fed the Tank Farms and PUREX and all the other facilities that were in operation at the time. Franklin: The water--the purification, that came from the river, right? So would that use one of the river pumphouses? Robison: Yes. Franklin: Okay. Robison: The water—in fact, it’s still being used today. Franklin: That’s the one by B Reactor, right? 0:22:54 Robison: Yes, mm-hmm, yup. That pumps raw water from the Columbia River. DOE has a water right to be able to do that. It pumps the raw water up to the 200 West Area now--because East Area’s filter plant is closed up. But the West Area still produces the drinking water, and sanitary water, in probably close to the same fashion as I did back in the early ‘90s. Franklin: Oh, wow. That’s really interesting. I’m wondering if you could talk about--when Hanford got the order to shut down, you were working there, right? Robison: I-- Franklin: With the switch from production, when they got the order to stop production? Were you-- Robison: Yeah, I don’t--I don’t remember the date they did that. I actually couldn’t talk very well to that. I don’t recall it, so--of when it actually happened, I don’t remember. Franklin: I was just--I was going to ask, because I’m wondering if you remember kind of the general mood of the community or of your coworkers, how people dealt with that switch. Was it a big deal, or did the work continue on? 0:24:09 Robison: Well, what I recall, which isn’t very much--I left the Hanford Site in 1993 and went to work for Department of Ecology, so I don’t recall a lot. But I know the Tri-Cities—and I was living in Yakima. The Tri-Cities went through booms and busts quite frequently. A lot of it dealt, or was a result of whatever happened to be going on at Hanford. So when there’s big layoffs, Tri-Cities would plummet, housing would plummet. And then when it was up and running, things were really good. So, as far as when they actually made the shutdown, I want to say that that happened a little bit later, after I had left the Site. Franklin: Okay. Robison: Yeah, sorry, I couldn’t really talk too much to that. Franklin: That’s okay. So what kind of work did you do for the other DOE, ecology? Robison: For Department of Ecology? Franklin: Yeah. 0:25:07 Robison: Well, when I originally left in ‘93, I hired on as a hazardous waste inspector. And then I moved to underground storage tanks. I did that for about 16 years. Franklin: So were you still working—and was that Hanford Site, Hanford underground storage, or was that different? Robison: No, I actually went to work for the Yakima office. Franklin: Oh, oaky. 0:25:26 Robison: So, the Yakima office, or central region of Washington, actually does regulate, even today, does regulate underground storage tanks at the Hanford Site. But the nuclear waste office that’s here in Richland regulates everything else at Hanford. So, when I left, I left the Hanford Site, essentially. I hadn’t been here for about 16 years. Franklin: Okay. But your work was still connected to the Hanford Site? Robison: Yeah, in a roundabout way it was, because the Department of Ecology regulates them. So my interaction with the Richland office wasn’t that frequent. Being from the Yakima office, we regulated different things, and Hanford wasn’t among them. Franklin: Okay. Robison: But I always had stayed in contact with Hanford. I’d been out here long enough and knew quite a few people. And then in 2009, I just decided to come back. So I’ve been back to Hanford since then. Franklin: Why did you decide to come back to work for MSA? 0:26:36 Robison: Well, because the amount of things that you can learn working at the Hanford Site are infinite. It’s a continual learning cycle every day you come to work. So it’s challenging, and I just knew that I would enjoy playing that role again, and being part of Hanford. Especially today because they’re doing cleanup and the restoration work. I wanted to be part of that history. Franklin: Yeah, because you had kind of started doing that. Robison: I started it when they were in production and had a really good time while I was out here. Franklin: So you’re currently environmental compliance officer, right? Robison: I am, mm-hmm. Franklin: The eco—yeah. And so, part of your job is ensuring regulations are met, right? Or being followed on the Site. 0:27:28 Robison: Yeah, it’s a little bit like consulting work, only MSA’s comprised--well, we take care of the infrastructure of the Hanford Site. So we make sure everybody else keeps running, essentially. We take care of the roads and the grounds and the water and power and all of that. So, my job is to help those organizations that supply, or that provide that support for infrastructure that make sure that they comply with all the regulations. So I deal with all kinds of stuff, whether it’s water or solid waste. I deal with hazardous waste; we deal with air requirements. Just about everything that’s environmental, my job is to make sure that they follow those rules and regulations. Franklin: Okay. So, I would imagine that includes working with a lot of tradespeople. Robison: Yeah, from time to time, I do, mm-hmm. Franklin: I’m wondering, in terms of regulations, how have things changed from when you started doing D&D work, kind of this ground-level, to where you are now? Robison: Oh, immensely. Franklin: How has work on the Hanford Site changed? 0:28:36 Robison: Immensely, because none of them really existed when I started in ‘83. You could kind of do whatever you wanted. They’ve come a long way, and I have to tell you, from the time I left in 1993 till I came back to work at Hanford in 2009, the change at the Hanford Site has just been—it’s been huge. It’s been significant. They’ve accomplished a lot. And they did so following all the rules and regulations. So there’s a lot out there now. Good example of that would be, in 1983, people were still dumping their waste oil that they’d removed from their cars down storm drains that fed straight to the Yakima River to the Columbia River. And today they don’t do that anymore. And that’s a result of regulation and saying not to do that and education, yeah. So it’s changed significantly. Franklin: So, wait, out on Site, people were dumping--? Robison: Well, yeah, well--they used to use waste oil for dust suppression. Of course, that’s not done anymore. Franklin: Right, to spray it down and then of course you’ve got waste oil all in the--which is going to get into the water. 0:29:49 Robison: Yes. And in groundwater. But we’ve learned so much from the ‘80s to today that--and it’s always evolving. Regulations are always changing as you learn new things, you know, more studies. I mean, you’re a historian, so if you were to study the history of regulations, every year they learn something new through technology or something, and so regulations change. That’s part of my job, is keeping up with those changes and helping the organizations out there implement those. Franklin: Right. Because the status quo today is only today’s status quo; it’s not the environment that you would’ve worked at in the ‘80s. Robison: Yeah, it was very different in the ‘80s. Franklin: So you mentioned that the D&D work initially there, it was great because you always felt like you were accomplishing something. Do you feel the same way today with your current work? 0:30:49 Robison: I do. Probably it’s--you know, I don’t get to see daily changes like I did in D&D. But I do, because I’m playing a small role in the overall picture of the Hanford cleanup. And that matters to me, it means a lot to me. Franklin: Great. Let’s see here, da, da, da. Okay. I’ve gone through all the fun--I have some stock questions. I’m just wondering if I had missed anything. Robison: Okay. Franklin: But we’ve really covered a lot of really great stuff. Robison: Well, I probably didn’t make much sense, and-- Franklin: No. Robison: I was trying to make sense. But you know, you get a picture in your mind, and getting it out of your mouth is-- Franklin: No, you’re doing great. And I do understand that, though. So you always lived in Yakima when you worked at Hanford. You’ve always lived outside of the Richland area, outside of Tri-Cities? Robison: I lived in Tri-Cities for a few years. Franklin: Okay. 0:31:41 Robison: Just prior to taking my job with the state. So that would’ve been in 1993. So I lived here from--I think I moved to the Richland area, I want to say, around ‘91. So I lived here for about two years. But, yeah, primarily in the Yakima area. Franklin: What sort of housing did you live in in Richland? Did you live in an Alphabet house or anything like that, or did you live in a newer-- Robison: I did. I actually bought a prefab when I lived here. It was a small three-bedroom. I just—I loved it. I was a single mom, and it was perfect for my son and I. Yeah. Yeah, I loved it. Franklin: I lived in a two-bedroom when I first got here, a two-bedroom prefab. Robison: Did you? Franklin: It was small. [LAUGHTER] Robison: Yeah, they’re notably--well, it’s less than 1,000 square feet. What is a prefab, like 900 square feet or something? Franklin: A three-bedroom, yeah. 0:32:43 Robison: I remember, I was doing--I had a boyfriend at the time, and we were--I wanted to do some remodeling because they had put--they had completely covered the entire house in brown paneling. So it was very dark, which, you know, for a small house, makes it even smaller. So I wanted to pull--we pulled--I wanted to pull all the paneling off and paint, or just paint the paneling. My boyfriend convinced me, let’s pull the paneling off. And it was sea blue plywood underneath of it. It was no insulation, no drywall. It was just plywood that had been painted a sea blue. It was horrible. So we quickly put up drywall and painted. Franklin: Wow. Yeah, those weren’t--I know if you know much about the history of those, but they weren’t meant to be any kind of permanent housing. Those were from the Great Depression, just relief houses. Robison: Yeah. Was that true for all of them? For the A? Because I remember an A house--I lived in an A house--it was a two-story-- 0:33:43 Franklin: No, those were built to be permanent houses. Those were built with like Douglas fir and they were constructed by an architect out of Spokane who--and DuPont demanded that they provide quality housing. But they couldn’t build the Alphabets fast enough, so the Army Corps kind of forced DuPont into bringing in all these prefabricated units. They didn’t want them, but they gave the prefabs to more blue collar-type folks. And the Alphabets were more for managers or white collar. Robison: Wow! Franklin: So there’s definite quality—because I live in an A now. There’s a definite quality difference. Robison: Wow, no, I had no idea. Because the quality of the house I was in was not good. Franklin: Yeah, they’re basically plywood. Robison: And that’s about all it was, was plywood that had been painted sea blue. It was—yeah, it was, oh my gosh, I got to get drywall up pretty quickly, because—yeah. But I still--I’d love to, when I was living there, I would’ve loved to known who’d owned it before me and when it was actually built. I never researched it. Franklin: What was the address? Robison: 803 Winslow. Franklin: Oh, okay. I used to live almost right next to there. Robison: Is that right? Franklin: It was 804 Stanton which is just like two blocks. Robison: Yeah, I think I-- Franklin: Two blocks down. Yeah, I know that neighborhood very well. 0:35:04 Robison: I’ve driven by there—when I worked for the state, I would have to come to the Tri-Cities, because I was underground storage tanks. So I regulated a lot of the gas stations—well, I regulated all of them for all of central Washington, including Benton County. And so I would go by my old house and I couldn’t hardly even recognize it. I had big, huge maple trees and they’re gone. Somebody took them all out and---yeah, but I would’ve loved to have known who lived there. Franklin: Oh, interesting. Robison: --back when they were in production. I had no idea about the quality of construction was so different, though. Franklin: Yeah, they were really meant--they were Depression era; they were meant for families in the Tennessee Valley—or, they were built by that Tennessee Valley Authority to just get people in houses and in relief communities. Yeah, it’s a very interesting socialist beginning of these--you know, yeah. They’re really meant for people who were in hard times. Robison: Wow, that’s interesting. Franklin: The fact that there’s so many of them--because you know that that neighborhood, it’s all--you know. Robison: It’s all prefab. Franklin: One-bedroom, two-bedroom, three-bedroom, two-bedroom, two-bedroom. And then you go in the Alphabets and it’s like A house, A house, A house, F house, A house, B house. Robison: Yeah. That’s true, yeah. Wow, interesting. Franklin: Yeah, I could tell you tons about them. I know too much. I’m wondering if you could describe the ways in which security or secrecy at Hanford impacted your work. 0:36:35 Robison: Well, as far as secrecy, you know, we weren’t allowed to talk about anything. Security was really tight. Yeah, even in ‘83. It was really tight. Any sign of incident when you were inside the 200 East or 200 West Area, it was a total lock down. And they didn’t care if you were just getting off work. Gates were locked, and everybody stayed inside the gates. You were not allowed to leave. That was same true for—not leaving all the facilities, because they weren’t all high security facilities—but places like PFP were. And so you were searched going in and you were searched coming back out. That was just a daily occurrence; that’s just kind of the way that they were—they were pretty secure. All the badges checked every day. You weren’t allowed onsite without one. Everybody had to have a clearance. If you didn’t, you had a worker’s clearance, a W badge, and you weren’t allowed to do a whole lot. You could come to work and do some things, provided they weren’t inside any kind of secured areas. Franklin: Did you ever, like, forget your badge? Just like accidentally left it--? Robison: Oh, yeah. You had to bring Spudnuts if you forgot your badge. Franklin: Really? 0:37:51 Robison: Yeah, you had to bring doughnuts, yes. You’d be issued a temporary badge, but you’d be restricted as to what you could do for that day. Franklin: And everybody knew you and your crew-- Robison: Oh, you got harassed, yeah. You got harassed because, you know, when you couldn’t go into zones or do the job that you were supposed to do--and this wasn’t just true for D&D, it was for all the crafts, for everybody--you know, it impacted everybody else. They had to work that much harder because they were a man down, because that person forgot their badge. So, oh, yeah, you were harassed, yeah. Franklin: That’s funny. Robison: Yeah, I remember having to bring Spudnuts, yeah. Franklin: A Richland institution. Robison: Yes, mm-hmm. Franklin: Oh, I just had something on the tip of my brain and now I can’t-- Robison: About-- Franklin: Oh! Could you drive onto Site at that point, when you started work, or did you get bussed in? Robison: Yes. Well, you could do both. Franklin: Okay. 0:38:42 Robison: You could do both. I actually--I forgot, I probably should’ve mentioned, I did live in the Tri-Cities after I first hired on. I lived here for a couple of years. I lived in the Brass Lamp Apartments. What street was that on? Was that Van Giesen? I can’t remember. Anyhow, that’s how I was able to pick up Spudnuts out of--because I lived in Richland, so I would go pick those up. But, yeah, you could drive your car or take the bus, and I did both. Hated the bus. Franklin: Why? Robison: Hated, hated, hated the bus. Franklin: Really? 0:39:18 Robison: Oh, yeah. I didn’t ever--I tried hard not to ever have to. When I had to work shift schedule, the A, B, C, D, shift schedule, I took the bus a few times. Because it took forever. It’s slow. I hated the bus. Franklin: There wasn’t any like fun camaraderie on the bus-- Robison: No. Franklin: --with the people? Robison: No, no. Franklin: Oh. Must’ve been for a different--because I’ve--some of the older folks I’ve interviewed that you could only take the bus out there, they had special tables where they would play cards on the bus, and they had these very kind of fond memories. Robison: Oh, is that right? Franklin: Yeah, these very fond memories of the bus. Robison: No, they didn’t have any of that when I-- Franklin: Picking them up outside their house and dropping them off. Robison: Yeah, no, not when I took the bus. It was boring, everybody slept, it was--no, I hated it. So I drove myself a lot. Just--yeah. Franklin: Interesting. What about--I’m wondering if you remember, you know, how the community or you dealt with major international events, such as, I guess the first one I’d like to ask about is Chernobyl. Because you would’ve been working onsite at that time. Robison: Yeah, that was, when, I want to say ‘86? Franklin: Yeah. Robison: Is that when that happened? Franklin: Yep. 0:40:36 Robison: You know, there was concern, even on the parts of all the staff, on the Hanford Site. It was a long ways away. I think the talk, which was probably among just the general populus, was is the cloud going to come over to the United States? And then, is Hanford going to blow up? I mean, yeah, that was pretty scary. I remember receiving security briefings from our supervisors and managers about, you’re still not to talk to anybody about things. And then some reassurances that, we’re fine, we’re not going to blow up over here. And of course we didn’t. But, yeah, I do actually remember Chernobyl. That was a scary time. Franklin: I bet. And then just a couple years later, the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War pretty much ended. Robison: Ended. Franklin: Kind of in a—you know, not so much a bang, but kind of a whimper or a fizzle. And I’m wondering if you could talk about how that may have affected you or the community, you know, to have this decades-long conflict, and the whole reason, really, for all this activity at Hanford is now kind of gone. 0:41:55 Robison: Yeah, and the Berlin--you know, I’m probably not one of the better--yeah, probably not very familiar with that. I mean, I don’t recall the mood of the people. It wasn’t something I stayed focused on. Franklin: How did you feel? Robison: You can probably scratch that part right out of the interview. Pbbt. Franklin: Sure. Well, how did you feel about it, though, because I imagine that--you were aware, right? How did you--or, what did you see that Hanford would do after that? Robison: You know, I didn’t—I don’t know that I gave it a huge amount of thought, but--because, again, even in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s, environmental wasn’t real concept then. So I don’t know that I’d be very good at telling you what my frame of mind was at the time. I was in my 20s. Yeah, probably, you could scratch that part from the interview. Franklin: No, it’s-- Robison: Aaaahh, cut! No. Franklin: We all experience things differently and often when-- Robison: I honestly--I mean, I remember watching the Berlin Wall fall and all that on TV, but I don’t--I really don’t remember what my mood was or what my thought processes were then, so-- Franklin: It’s fine. You know, it’s one of those events that maybe grows more—or we think about how significant it was later, you know? Or people that didn’t experience it and lived through it maybe attribute more to it than people that--where that was just life for a while. Robison: Yes, yeah. Franklin: Don’t worry about it. What was I going to ask? Shoot, I had another question. Robison: I know when you were out on the Site, you were talking about wanting to know more about Affirmative Action. Franklin: Yes, that was actually my next—yeah. I’m wondering if you could tell me about that. Just, how--yeah. How it played out for you and for others, and how it changed the workforce. 0:43:53 Robison: Well, for me, I didn’t realize it at the time that that’s why I was being hired, was that it was part of Affirmative Action. You know, being 19, I just—it didn’t cross my mind. All I cared about was getting a job, but I actually attribute my entire career to this day to that affirmative action, to that one phone call, because I wouldn’t be sitting here today after 30-plus years doing environmental work, had it not been for that affirmative action. So, my whole career is based on it and I’m appreciative of it. I know that there’s some controversy that surrounds Affirmative Action and whether it really did any good, or does it play any role anymore. And I guess I’m living proof that it does, or that it did. Did it work for everybody? Probably not. But it did for me. And so I’m glad that it was around. Franklin: How did the workforce change that you noticed from when you started to--did it really open up a lot of positions for women, did you find yourself over time working with more and more women and minorities? 0:44:58 Robison: You know, truthfully, I did not. And there’s still, in my opinion, there’s still a considerable amount of men on the Hanford Site, as compared to women. That could just be, there’s people that worked out there for 40 years and a lot of people that have worked out there for 30 and 40 years. So, could just be that that new workforce just hasn’t been able to inch their way in. I mean, I do think that Affirmative Action has certainly helped, because I think that there’s women in their careers today that, like myself, that wouldn’t be there without it. There’s other minorities that are in their careers today that wouldn’t be here without it. So, do I think that there’s some room to grow still? Absolutely. But I think it’s coming along. I certainly saw a lot more changes off the Hanford Site when I worked for Department of Ecology than I do on the Site. Life outside of Hanford’s a very, very different place. It’s much more sophisticated and--what’s a good word? It’s more--it’s a more diverse world off the Hanford Site. Franklin: How is Hanford less sophisticated than the outside? 0:46:37 Robison: I think that Hanford--that they could--and maybe it’s because I’m not involved in some of the more newer technologies like what they have at Tank Farms, so I’m certainly not an expert at speaking at it. But in my own little world of environmental and where I’m located, I think that there’s easier and better ways to do things, but process and procedure’s so ingrained on the Hanford Site that everybody’s afraid to deviate. And I think that that’s not a good thing. I think finding new ways and new alternatives should be a goal. Franklin: Right. Robison: But, you know, they’re getting there. They’re coming around. I mean, they have recycling programs today that they didn’t use to have in the ‘80s. They’re getting caught up. But it is more diverse offsite than it is working on the Site. Franklin: I’ve noticed that, too. It’s-- Robison: Yeah. Just don’t use that in the interview. I want to keep my job. Franklin: Well, no, I think-- Robison: I don’t want DOE to get upset with me. Franklin: Oh, I don’t think—I mean, that’s of levels so far beyond. Maybe that’s something that they still need to hear. I think it does matter, too, by profession. I’m a subcontractor in the cultural resources department, and that department is majority-women. And I find, in the work I’m in, in archives, male archivists are a minority. Largely because librarianship and archives has commonly been a woman’s profession. Robison: Yeah, yup. Franklin: Which is—and I think maybe a lot of these trades, crafts, D&D, you know, have been--there’s that disparity--I mean, it’s hard to over-- Robison: To overcome that, yeah-- Franklin: Decades, years--I mean, decades of-- 0:48:40 Robison: And you’re absolutely right. I mean, a lot of the crafts out there has traditionally been men’s jobs and women just don’t enter those fields. Excuse me. They’re more into the professional, you know, environmental-type work that I do. And there are several women that work out there. It’d be good if they could recruit or try a little bit harder to have more diversity. I don’t just mean women, I mean the minorities as well. But again, I think that’s coming. I mean, I could see that coming even before I retire from the Hanford Site, just because the workforce out there is a much older workforce. They’ve been there for thirty-plus years. All the contractors know that a big retirement’s coming for a lot of different people out there. That’s when I think that the diversity and the changes will start to occur. And maybe some changes in procedures and processes that will help make a big difference. Franklin: Yeah, that really struck me when I meet a lot of folks out there, there are so many people, oh, I started here in the late ‘70s/early ‘80s, late ‘70s, you know? Robison: They’ve been there for a long time. Franklin: And they’ve endured all these contractor changes. And it seems maybe it’s a result of having so many contractors that they just keep the people that know how to do the job, because the new contractor needs that expertise and so-- Robison: Oh, yeah, I mean--well, you know, DOE just recently sent out a request for proposals and new acquisitions. So even my company, Mission Support, is having to rebid. Franklin: Oh, I know, we’re a subcontractor of MSA. Robison: Yes. Franklin: And this is funded by MSA. Robison: Yeah. So whoever gets the contracts, it would be crazy for them to just bring in a whole new workforce. You couldn’t do it. Franklin: No. 0:50:36 Robison: I mean, Hanford is truly a unique operation in what they deal with daily. You do have skilled people, you do have to have knowledgeable people about what they’re doing, or things would be really, really bad out there, could be really bad. So it would be good, and I think that they’ve got a plan in place where they start training some--bringing on some newer people so that the ones that are still there could get them trained up on how they do their jobs. It is a unique set of skills that’s required to work out there. You have your basics and then you have to kind of learn the way Hanford does things. And that’s not, you know, trying to diss them or something. It’s truly because it’s unique. They have to handle things a certain way. Franklin: Right, there’s unique challenges, there’s unique regulations. Robison: It’s chilly in here. Franklin: It is, I’m sorry. There’s a lot of-- Robison: He’s freezing, too. Franklin: We turned the heat--they keep this room unheated when it’s not in use. We turned the heat on earlier in the day, but, I’m sorry, it takes a little-- Robison: Oh, it’s all right. It’s just why I’m kind of like grinning because it’s a little chilly. Franklin: No, I know. I have my coat on, too. Because it’s cold! So, yeah, because there’s a lot of institutional knowledge that may leave soon. Robison: Yes, they’re already starting to leave. Franklin: Yeah, I’ve noticed that. 0:52:00 Robison: Yeah, that’s a true statement. And Hanford needs that knowledge. What you’re doing, I think, is just, it’s phenomenal. I think it’s really great that you’re going to capture, obviously not all of the history, but some of it. Franklin: Going to try. Robison: So that you know, kind of, where we came from and where we’re going. I mean, I just think that’s great. And they need that at Hanford as well, because things like with what just happened at the PUREX tunnels. If some of those individuals had been gone, we wouldn’t have known what was in there. Hanford’s really good at documenting everything, but I just think having the people there--you got to capture that knowledge somehow. Franklin: Hanford’s also done so many things that aren’t documented. A lot of burials, for example, were not well-documented. Which is why they find things every now and then, right? You know. You’ve probably found stuff-- Robison: Yeah. Franklin: --that wasn’t supposed--I’ve always found that to be interesting, too. Hanford’s really good at documentation on some things, and then-- 0:53:09 Robison: And then others maybe not so much. Well, I think that was probably more in the ‘40s and ‘50s when things were quite, you know, really secretive. One of the things I like to give Hanford credit for, for knowing—for accomplishing what they did in such a short amount of time—in less than two years built an entire nuclear reservation. That’s pretty impressive. And not having any knowledge on how to deal with the waste and the cleanup. You know, to me, they’ve done phenomenal at addressing the issues that were done back in the ‘50s and ‘60s and figuring out how to deal with them today. I think they’ve, so far, they’ve done a--they’re trying to do a good job. I realize it’s slow, but it is a big task. Franklin: Well, and also the processing waste wasn’t a priority for Hanford for a long time. Robison: Correct. Franklin: It was production. They had quotas and so many of those folks came from regular industries, from chemical industries, where they’d processed the waste in the way they knew how. They pumped it in tanks, they stored it. Robison: Yeah. Or dumped it on the ground. Yup, yup. Franklin: In the ‘40s, that’s what you-- 0:54:26 Robison: That was an acceptable--well, they didn’t know what environmental harm, you know, would come of that. I mean, and again, that’s a good example. In the ‘80s, environmental rules, regulations, didn’t really exist that much, where today, they do. At least now they’re addressing them. Franklin: Right. I guess it’s funny, as a child of the ‘80s, it’s amazing to see how far we’ve come in just my lifetime. I mean, in terms of like you said, in ‘83 when you started, you just couldn’t do that kind of work now. You wouldn’t suit up and go into the solar basin-- Robison: Right, and-- Franklin: And use five-gallon-- 0:55:07 Robison: And use buckets to muck muck into drums. No, they’d find something more sophisticated to--and keep the workers out of harm’s way. But, you know, again, the technology just didn’t exist like it does today. So they have, in my opinion, they have come a long ways. I mean, Hanford has. And when I left in ‘93, all the reactors were still in process of being shut down and cleaned up. When I came back in 2009, almost all of them had been cocooned. So in that 16 years, that was an enormous amount of work. So I thought that was really impressive. 300 Areas is completely changed. For cleaning up literally a radioactive site, I think they’re doing pretty good. Franklin: Have you been out to B Reactor since it’s become a national park? Robison: Yeah, briefly. Yeah, a couple times. I actually was stationed out at B Reactor, so, like I said, we did fuel storage-- Franklin: Oh, during D&D? 0:56:11 Robison: Yes, during D&D. And we did asbestos abatement in all of the reactors. So I’d been in B Reactor a number of times. In fact, I could show you where my changeroom was at in there. Franklin: Oh, wow. I’m wondering what your thoughts are on B Reactor being a museum. Robison: Oh, I think that’s awesome. I think it’s one of the coolest things that DOE said that they wanted to do. I just think that having--preserving that history to show the contributions that those people made and that all the scientists, and even the government, made to the war efforts, I just think is phenomenal. I think it’s really cool. Franklin: Cool. Robison: Yeah. Franklin: So my last question is a big open-ended question. And so, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War? 0:57:11 Robison: The amount of commitment and patriotism--and that seems like kind of a corny word to young people today, but--I just think that the people that worked here during the Cold War and even today are really just out there to do the right thing, and to give their small contribution, to make this country better. I’d like for them to know and learn or come to appreciate the level of effort that was put into what they accomplished out here in such a short amount of time. To me, it’s awe-inspiring. Franklin: Well, great. Is there anything else that you’d like to add? Robison: No. I can’t really think of anything. Franklin: Okay. Robison: It was easier to talk to you out at my office than right here. Franklin: Sorry! Well, I hope it was still enjoyable. Robison: Yeah, no, it was. It was. I’m thrilled to get to be a part of this. I really am. Franklin: Yeah, the imposed environment of the studio can sometimes change things. But for continuity reasons and things, we like to have a-- Robison: Mm-hmm. Franklin: Also the sound is--we have good sound. Robison: Do you? Franklin: Soundproofing. And lights. Well, thank you, so much, for coming-- Robison: Thank you for having me. Franklin: --and talking about everything. And you know, and thank you for doing what you do in continuing to do environmental work. It’s a good mission. Robison: Oh, you’re welcome. I really do thoroughly enjoy it. Again, I feel like I get to play a small role in a really huge picture, but it’s my role; it’s my contribution. I love history and happy to do it. Franklin: Well, now you’ve helped our collections two ways. By first helping with the lamps and now by doing an oral history with us. Robison: Yeah. Franklin: So your imprint there. Robison: And you can count on my continued support. I’ll keep looking for stuff for you. Franklin: Good. Please do. Tom Hungate: Okay. Franklin: Awesome. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:59:29 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview B Reactor Plutonium Finishing Plant Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Christina Robison Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Christina talks about her career as one of the first women to do "D&D" (decontamination and decommissioning) work at the Hanford Site. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 01-11-2018 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operated under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F752985ef89ddfb05340c9c61880e3ced.jpg bcd5fbfbf8b6881935c4d8740e87e45a https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fd3a0d5dae4362573ee96fac2d26b8cf2.mp4 2408e3bcb2d9670ad5c1555f3b4a7da3 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 Parker Foundation Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Nuclear science; Richland, Wa.; Hanford, Wa.; Parker, Herbert, 1910-1984 Description An account of the resource "The Herbert M. Parker Foundation collects valuable personal perspectives from key individuals who worked in radiological and environmental protection at the Hanford site in the early years of its development. Since 2004, student interns have recorded interviews from health physics and related science professionals. These historically valuable interviews document their personal experiences, observations, contributions and ideas. Several of the distinguished professionals who have spoken at the Annual Herbert M. Parker Lecture are also included. The videotaped interviews and accompanying biographical sketches will be made accessible to the public." See https://tricities.wsu.edu/parkerfoundation/ParkerHistory Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 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. Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Chuck Elderkin 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 Chuck Elderkin Description An account of the resource An interview with Chuck Elderkin conducted by the Herbert M. Parker Foundation at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Herbert M. Parker Foundation at Washington State University Tri-Cities https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F7431462bb07767c287b915705abb20d8.jpg ac89b048f2f0b86b70c582b0c56e5af7 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fd901ddcf5e611b5b25e98ca302e2062f.mp4 c191c20ed638fb100beff1c58d128e44 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 Parker Foundation Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Nuclear science; Richland, Wa.; Hanford, Wa.; Parker, Herbert, 1910-1984 Description An account of the resource "The Herbert M. Parker Foundation collects valuable personal perspectives from key individuals who worked in radiological and environmental protection at the Hanford site in the early years of its development. Since 2004, student interns have recorded interviews from health physics and related science professionals. These historically valuable interviews document their personal experiences, observations, contributions and ideas. Several of the distinguished professionals who have spoken at the Annual Herbert M. Parker Lecture are also included. The videotaped interviews and accompanying biographical sketches will be made accessible to the public." See https://tricities.wsu.edu/parkerfoundation/ParkerHistory Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 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. 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 Chuck Jensen Description An account of the resource An interview with Chuck Jensen conducted by the Herbert M. Parker Foundation at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Herbert M. Parker Foundation at Washington State University Tri-Cities https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F8530dda398fb0c9e8a7decd68d4d3758.jpg 3142adf019d9de516b8f2a4add7fa436 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F616a067d52fab2686c04cbe6e6a6912b.mp4 240981a59517bb87ea7cccdfd57c3fca Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Bauman, Robert Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Michell, CJ Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Northwest Public Television | Michell_CJ Whenever you're ready. Whenever we're ready, OK. All right, I guess we're good to go. OK. All right. [LAUGHTER] Robert Bauman: All right, let's start by having you say your name, and spell it for us. CJ Mitchell: All right. CJ Mitchell. And actually there's a Junior on the end, and that's CJ, no periods. It's initials only. M-I-T-CH-E-L-L, and then of course Junior, J-R. Bauman: All right, thank you. And my name's Robert Bauman, and today's date is October 30th of 2013. Mitchell: It's my mom's birthday. Bauman: Is it really? Mitchell: Yes. Bauman: Hey. Mitchell: [LAUGHTER] Bauman: And we're conducting this interview on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. So CJ, if we could start by just having you talk about when you first came to Hanford and what brought you here. Mitchell: Well, I came October 3, 1947. And I was 16 years old at the time. And in the early years, in 1943, my relatives, primarily my uncles and also my father-in-law, and others from my community down in Northeast Texas came to work on the Manhattan Project. And, of course, then I came here in '47, and that's the start of the Cold War. Yeah. Bauman: And you know how your relatives heard about Hanford? Mitchell: Yes, and I was a young kid I guess at that time, but anyway I remember people coming to the community and talking about, and trying to identify people to come out here to Hanford. And actually they gave them a number. And when they got to Pasco, they matched up that number. And then when they got there, they found out it was another forty miles out to Hanford. Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Was that DuPont, then, that people from-- Mitchell: I would think it was DuPont doing that time. I'm not sure, because I was young, I don't remember exactly what it was, yeah. Bauman: Right. And so you arrived here, as you said, in 1947 as a 16-year-old. What were your first sort of impressions of the place? Mitchell: Well actually it was really interesting, because when I first came--and I got here at nighttime, which most people will tell you that--but anyway, came into Pasco, and there was five of us. I had two first cousins, myself, and then two other people from my community. And we didn't actually come out here the first day. We went to East Pasco, because my relatives live there. And we slept in a little tent about maybe five--it wasn't even five feet. One uncle had a trailer on one side, the other one had a trailer on the other side with a little--I would say it's a little porch in between. And of course our tent was just out at maybe 20 feet away, out in the yard. That's where we slept at night. We visited during the day, and then crawled in there at night and slept. Bauman: How long did you sleep there? Mitchell: We were there for about, actually about three months. Because when I first came, I got a job working right up over the hill here, up on the trailer park, right up on North Richland right here, on the east side of George Washington Way. But they didn't have the barracks ready at that time. So we would catch a bus in the morning and ride out here until they got the barracks ready. And my first job was working in the--for every trailer they had a washhouse. There was no indoor plumbing. So all the homes, they had a washhouse, where they did the laundry and where they went to the bathroom. And so that was my job, helping complete those. Bauman: Oh, okay. So you lived in East Pasco-- Mitchell: Just for a couple of months, and then we were able to move into the barracks when they got the barracks finished. And that experience was that—well, it was only $1.40 a week to live there. And that included daily maid service and clean linen once a week. And so that was pretty good. At the mess hall, for lunches--when we'd go to work, for our lunch we could get a lunch box for $0.50. And that included a couple sandwiches, maybe an orange, an apple. Maybe a slice of pie or something. Yeah. Interesting stuff. Bauman: What sort of were the working hours? What sort of hours-- Mitchell: Well, actually, we worked eight to ten hours a day and then a half day on Saturday. And so I think I was making like $1.30 an hour. And I think, like $65.00 a week was big money. Because back in East Texas I could make like $25.00 or $30.00 a week. And I was working in a sawmill. A little portable sawmill. Yeah. Where they made cross ties. Interesting work. Bauman: Now what was the town in East Texas that you-- Mitchell: It was a little place called Kildare. K-I-L-D-A-R-E. All it was there, it was maybe like four little businesses and a train station, and just a crossroad. Dirt roads, no pavements. No. Everybody walked. Bauman: So when you came in '47, what was the racial situation here, were things segregated? Mitchell: Well, they had discrimination. You couldn't eat there, and the bus station in Pasco. And everybody lived on the east side, and I think there was a few people lived there maybe just west of the underpath and up on 1st or 2nd Street right in there. Course I was, you know I didn't get involved because I was working. But that was what the situation was, yeah. Bauman: Did that surprise you at all, or—the sort of segregation? Mitchell: Not coming from East Texas. Because I grew up in a segregated world. So that wasn't a surprise to me. Bauman: Was the workplace segregated also, when you moved up to live here as well? Mitchell: Well, yeah, actually the crews were segregated. The labor, and mostly general labor, that's what I knew about, was general labor. But I think me being a young guy, they put me over with the plumbers. And what I was actually doing, when they put the joints together, they did sorting in those days, and you had to--they called it bell holes, where you'd have room to work around those, and put those together. That was my job, to dig those bell holes. Bauman: Oh, okay. And so how long did you do that work? Mitchell: Well, I did that work about three months. Because what happened--I came in October, and really, I got homesick. And if you've never been homesick, you don't know what I'm talking about. It's really--and then at the end of I think in January, I went back home. I went back to Texas for--I'd been here about three months and man, I was so homesick I went back. And then I came back in the spring of 1948. Right about the time they had the big flood. And then, after that, when I came back then, and also lived in the barracks at that time, but I helped build the ranch houses there in Richland. Yeah, built those ranch houses there. And I also worked on the 100-H reactor. Helping build the 100-H reactor at that time. Bauman: So what brought you back in '48? Was it the opportunity for work? Mitchell: Just the work. Knowing the work and the pay. It's just that, well, I had to get over the homesickness. I went back to the East Coast, see. Came back because I knew the work was here, and that's what I did. And then I stayed until after the big cold winter in 1949 and '50. And then in that maybe like February or March, somewhere in there, it was three of us. We pulled a single wide trailer from North Richland to San Francisco, because one of the guys had a sister living there. And then as we were going to California, pulling this trailer, we got down around Williams, California, in Northern California there, and somebody wanted to know if we wanted to stop and pick cherry blossoms. I never thought, you know—we'd never heard of a job picking cherry blossoms. And so then we didn't pick cherry blossoms. We went on into San Francisco, and we didn't get any work there right away. And one of men and myself--we went back to Texas. And then the other gentleman, he went into the military. And then that's when I got back there, in 1950. That's when my wife--my wife was my high school sweetheart. I married her, and we went to Chicago for the next 15 months. And then I came back to the Tri-Cities in 1951. And then I worked on McNary Dam. Moved out to Hermiston, Oregon and worked in construction there, and then in the spring of 1952, I came back to Pasco, worked on the blue bridge, helped that. And the construction on the irrigation canal, irrigation project coming down through the basin. That was my job when I came back in 1951. And then, after that, then I worked on, built the 100 Ks. The 100-K East and West. I worked on that, and then I worked in helping build the PUREX facility in 200-East Area. And then in the spring of 1955, I went to work for General Electric. That was in the fuel preps department in the 300 Area. Bauman: 1955 was it? Mitchell: 1955. And that's when I was working there, and that's when I got out of construction. And then when I got into the fuel preps area, well, they had locker rooms and showers and lunch rooms. And the work there, we had a break. I never heard of a break before. [LAUGHTER] So my job on the production line was to take two fuel elements, and put them in a basket. And they would go down in some aluminum Al-Si. And when they come out, another person would take those two and take them to what we call canning and get them canned. Take them over to get canned and then take them to the quench tanks cooling area. And I did that. Now, in the locker rooms there was a bulletin board, and on this bulletin board, that's where all the job postings were. And those were gotten by seniority. And every Monday morning was when you selected. And I noticed, nobody ever turned those jobs down. So I said, there's got to be something out there better than what I'm doing over here. And then I started thinking, well, you better get something between your ears. I'd go to college in those days. And by that time I had a wife and three children. That's when I decided, well, I better get going. So I'm embarked upon a night school program and I went to night school for 14 years. I didn't know if I'd ever get a degree or not. But I played basketball, just pick-up basketball, and one of the guys that was an engineer out there, he played some basketball. And he said one of things you can always have, math and chemistry. So I didn't know if I'd get a degree or not, so I studied math and chemistry. And through that, I was able to work my way out of that into—out as a technician, and then later on in the human resources. And I just started that program and I stayed with it. 14 years. Bauman: So I want to go back, a little bit, to when you were talking about working fuels prep. Mitchell: Sure. Bauman: Did you have to wear special equipment to do the job you were doing? Mitchell: Yeah you had to have coveralls. You had to have special coveralls, to wear that, and shoe covers. You had to wear those, yeah. Bauman: That was to protect you from anything splashing? Mitchell: Protect you, yeah, protection. And you had to wear of course safety goggles, you had to wear those. Bauman: Right, right. And you said that was with GE. Mitchell: Yeah, that was General Electric. Bauman: General Electric. Mitchell: Yes. Bauman: And so how long did you work that? Mitchell: I worked General Electric until 1964. Not that particular job, but what I did as a result of going to school, I did several jobs there. And one of the jobs that I had there was I worked as a person that drove a forklift—could unload fuel elements and help the guys put them on the truck to take to the reactors once they had gotten what we called canned. And also we had a couple little warehouses where we stored things. And we would have certain fuel elements in there, just bare uranium elements there. During that time they started what they called the big extrusion press for the fuel elements to go to the N Reactor, when they were going to build the N Reactor. So actually I hauled the first fuel elements, they were billets, to be put through an extrusion press for the N Reactor. And they did that in the 306 Building. Interesting work. And I had gone to probably 15 interviews before I even got a job, and on my 16th interview I came in on a swing shift and my boss says they would like to interview you over in the 327 Building. And of course out of courtesy, I went there. I didn't expect to get anything because that was pretty disappointing, that many times and nothing. And so once I got over there and talked to the gentleman over there and I got back to my workstation, about an hour later he came back and he said, well, you're going to have that job over there. And when I went over—the job I was working in was a bargaining unit job, a union job. And they had like three classifications. They had a C, a B, and an A. One-two-one was the ratio. And when they hired, you moved up. If they laid off, you moved down. So I was a C operator. I was caught in the sling here. So when I got the chance to go over to the 327 Building, I had to give up my seniority there. And I took a $17.00 a week pay cut, to take that job and take a chance on it. And they could've laid me off the next day. But I took that job, and really I've never looked back since. Turned out to be a great move for me. Bauman: Yeah. And so how much longer did you work at Hanford, then? How long did you work there? Mitchell: Well, I worked there at—in fact, when I got over into the radio metallurgical part where they do an examination on radioactive fuels, studying the whole why they had ruptured in the reactors and dissolving samples for research, things like that. And then I worked for a gentleman named Mike McCormack, who was really a legislator in this area. And he was a chemical engineer by profession. And he had designed some of the casts that they transported elements in. They had a situation where they wanted to bring in a swing shift. And they talked about that, in the meeting he says, if any of you folks are going to school or want to go to school then we don't have to go identify other people that has to come and go in shift. My hand went up. It was the only hand went up. And then the next week they decided they weren't going to have that shift. But one since my hand went up, they set up a special shift for me to go to school. That gave me a chance to make some extra time at Columbia Basin College. And I worked a swing shift, and then Mike McCormack being a chemist--I would come in early on swing shift and he would teach me, he taught chemistry with me during that time. Actually one the best jobs I've ever had was in that group, even though moving up to human resources and all that was great. But just the whole environment there was one of my special places in my career. And then when I got into human resources, that was when the civil rights movement started. Also, just prior to that, there was a job in the 325 Building doing some research. We were studying what happened out in space capsules, there were certain parts of the capsule that would freeze up. And so they developed these uranium oxide pellets to place in there so it would take care of that situation. And I was able to go over into the 325 and work one-on-one with the guy that was doing that research. So I helped do that. And the way I got that job, I had more math and chemistry than anybody in the lab that didn't have a degree at that time. And so I got selected for that. And then just by my going to school and my other community work, when the civil rights movement started, I got an opportunity to go into human resources. And then I ended up getting a degree in business. So I'm half technical, half business. So it turned out a great career for me. Bauman: And how long did you work in human resources, then? Mitchell: Oh, 20, 30—the last 28 years I was there, in human resource. Did a lot of hiring of those science and engineers. Orientation of new staff or putting in 401(k) programs. Did a lot of things. Bauman: And which contractor contracted? Mitchell: That was General Electric until Battelle came in, 1965. Battelle came in, I worked for them. Bauman: Yeah, okay. I want to go back a little bit, first to when you initially came back in '47 as a 16-year-old, and you said you were living in a tent. What was that like? What was East Pasco like at the time? Mitchell: There was no indoor plumbing over there. The streets were all dirt. Yeah it was pretty--it wasn't very good. It was kind of like back in East Texas. Because we just had dirt roads, we had no pavements or anything then. Did a lot of walking. And so yeah, it was like that there. Looking back. Bauman: And then you moved to the dorms, right? Mitchell: And then we moved out here to the dorms. And that was an experience. Because I'm 16 years old, and these guys—I never heard swearing and things like I had heard in that. I know my head was going like this all the time. Because I'm telling you, these guys, they were something else. And on Sundays, I would try to get some kind of a ride back into East Pasco where my uncle and his wife lived, and then that would get me away from that. And then there was also some other people that we knew each other from there and so we would go there too. So I'd ride over with them and come back. Bauman: And then you mentioned you had gone back to East Texas and you and your wife got married. And then you went to Chicago. Mitchell: Chicago for a couple of summers. Bauman: Now, why'd you go to Chicago? Mitchell: I had a brother had lived there. He'd been military and he lived there in Chicago. And I had stopped there during the time when I first came to Washington. And the way I got there, I knew where he was. And when we left home, I don't know, I did some things that maybe were maybe kind of silly when I was growing up. But in Texarkana, we were all getting ready to come to Washington. And I got off the train and I went--they used to have these phone booths where you could go in to have your photo taken. And so when I got back on the train, and on my way to come through Saint Louis, come into Saint Louis and that way you came around Saint Louis, Chicago Minneapolis, Saint Paul, and then around the northern part here. Well, I lost my billfold or something in there. And so my one uncle gave me money and I got off the train in Chicago, and my ticket, and I went and stayed with my brother. And stayed with him for about a month. And then I went back to Texas. I worked at a punch board factory. You know, you made punchboards. In the old bars, used to have where you'd go and punch a board, and punch on punchboards. Well, they were making punchboards, down on Michigan Avenue. Well, I got enough money to get back to Texas and maybe work a few more weeks and get some more money to come back. And so I got off the train in Chicago because I lost my billfold. And then I worked there for three or four weeks. Got enough to get back home and then came back again. And then in the summer of '48 when I was coming back to start working on the ranch house in Billings, Montana. I got off the train to get a newspaper. I looked up and the train's gone, leaving. So I ran the train down, caught the train. So just about the time I'm getting on the train I hear a guy yell, well if you can't make it, you can go home with me. I caught the back of the train. Worked my way up through all the cars. And then finally the guys on the train said, God, what's wrong with this kid, I'm sure they said that's the craziest kid I've ever seen. But anyway, because you know, my jacket was there, my coat was there with my ticket and everything. But I caught up. [LAUGHTER] But then of course I learned. But that's what happened. And then I came back, yeah. But then going to Chicago was--I played baseball. We didn't have baseball in school, but I played with the men teams back in Texas. And I loved baseball. And when we got married and went to Chicago, well then I knew there was always jobs in Chicago. Whether you liked the job or not, there's jobs there. So we went there. And we stayed there, and our oldest son was born there. And I would go out to Northwestern University out at Evanston, and try out for baseball. I was pretty good at it. I could hit and I could run. My arm, I couldn't throw very well. But I could hit and I could run. But anyway, I just thought well, maybe—you know, 19 years old, you still have it in you. And then I realized, after being there for a while and going to a lot of the games--and I saw the big name players at Comiskey Park and Wrigley Field. And they had double headers in those days. And you could see all these players. And I got to see Jackie Robinson, and Don Newcombe, and Bob Feller, and Joe DiMaggio, and Ted Williams. I got to see all these big name players which I was fascinated by. And of course then I was working for a smelters, and I had a fairly good job. But then I got to thinking, well I know where there's fresh air, and I know where the work is good. And so we came back. And she went home and stayed with her father down in East Texas for maybe like a couple of months while I got situated here, and then she came here. And then we've been here ever since. Great experience. Bauman: And when you came back then, where did you live? Mitchell: When I came back here, that's when I came back and I lived in East Pasco. But I worked on McNary Dam, I moved out to Hermiston where I could be six miles away. Just go down and come back. I always believed in living close to work, and so that's what I did. And then in the spring of '52, that's when I came back. Worked on the blue bridge, helped build that. Irrigation canals out here, and then-- Bauman: And did you move back to the area here, through then? Mitchell: Yeah, I moved back to Pasco. And I lived in Pasco then until 1955. Because when I went to work for General Electric in 1955, then you could get housing in Richland. Your name would go on a list and you could get housing. And that's when it really, really took off for me. Really took off for me. Bauman: And was housing readily available then? I mean, as an African American? Was that difficult? Mitchell: Well if you could get GE out—you couldn't buy a house. I couldn't buy a house in Richland because I was black, you know, from real estate people. And that was as late as 1965. But back then it was the government homes, and if you worked you could get a home. And so it didn't matter. It wasn't up to them, then. It was up to General Electric then. And I rode the bus back and forth to work, $0.10 a day round trip. $0.05 a day. I could walk up to the bus stop, catch a bus, and go to work. And then in the outer area, the construction in outer area, they paid you isolation pay. They paid you $4.00 a day to go out there doing construction all the way out there. 300 Area, you didn't get anything, but way out there, and then the crafts got more. Interesting. Those days are gone forever though. Bauman: So when you did go to buy a home then in Richland, did you experience some difficulty? Mitchell: Oh yeah. It was tough. The guy, he just flat told me, said because you're black, we won't sell you a house. I can't take a chance on my investment. And so then of course, at that time, there was like the NAACP and other groups wanting to come in and get involved and I said no, I'll take care of it myself. I said well, my kids live here, my kids got to walk down these streets. I'll take care of it myself. And I just let it go. And then there was a gentleman by the name of Everdy Green had a real estate company. He called me up and he says well, he said I hear you're having problems getting a house, and I'll sell you anything you want. And I said yeah, I know you will, because your prices eliminate me. I said the level of your homes, what they cost, I said I'm just making a weekly salary. I can't afford one of your homes. And the interesting thing about that--and I never knew I'd be in real estate. And once I got into real estate I ended up selling Everdy Green's home. Yeah. Ended up selling the home that he owned. And he was the guy, but--it's interesting. And then, where I live now--I just live on Spring down here, right down the street here--first night I was there I picked up the phone, phone rings, some guy said, this is the Ku Klux Klan he said, and you're next. That was what I got on the phone. And so I just called and reported it. But nothing ever happened after that. But that's what happened to me. Bauman: Right. Were there other incidents where people opposed you sort of moving in, or-- Mitchell: Well no, but I heard later on from Ron Kathren, when Ron Kathren bought his house. The one who lives on the street. It was kind of interesting. But the place where I was turned down was in Beverly Heights. Beverly Heights is where Fred Meyer is, and up on the hill, that's the area. Well later on, even years later, I went up and there's a home for sale by owner. Up there, a house. And then I knocked on the door, and when he saw I was black, he just slammed the door. He says, go over there, there's some houses over there. Point prefab area. But you know, you run into that. And then I had one person that worked with me in the laboratory. He says, I don't have to worry about that. He said I don't have to worry about this. Said I'm white, said I don't have to worry about that kind of stuff. It's just been interesting, it's just been an interesting experience, a real interesting experience. But what it is, I just let it roll off and keep moving. That's how you have to do it. Can't change things. Bauman: A little bit earlier you mentioned civil rights movement. Were there organizations, NAACP and other organizations, here in the Tri-Cities area? Mitchell: Yeah, there was NAACP, and there was one guy by the name of McGee. And sometime he would be kind of like a one-man walking picket. He was a real fighter, and everything like that. But I wasn't as involved as a lot of people, because I was working all the time. But I knew things was going on, and I did my share. Where I've lived I've always been involved in community. I was on a planning commission, and things like that. All that. Bauman: In Richland? Mitchell: Yeah, oh yeah. Bauman: And about when was that? Mitchell: About 1969, '70. Back in those days. Bauman: And what did you think of that experience? Mitchell: Yeah, it was an interesting experience. It really was. But you know, I made the motions on a planning commission to put the infrastructure into Meadow Springs area of South Richland. And I went to work the next day and out in the 300 Area was a 3760 Building which they just tore down recently, in the last few months. Was called a technical library, up in the upper area. I walked in one morning, there was a guy named Guthrie, G-U-H-T-R-I-E, named Guthrie. I don't know what his first name now was, but anyway, he was kind of a loud guy in the community. But anyway, he cornered me and he said, 'bout all the what it was going to be, paying the taxes, what it was going to cost and all that. And I said, well I don't know who you are, but my philosophy is that if you're going to have a good community, you've got to make it a good community. And it's going to be no better than the people that live in it. And that's the way I left it. And then he got on the city council for a while, and he was kind of a different guy. But pretty soon he just kind of faded away. I don't know where he is now. He was the same way--because when I was in the lab, I was in charge of employee benefits. Had some responsibilities there. And he was a little different there too, because he just wanted you to give him the money and he would buy his own ticket to get his own benefits. He wasn't interested in regular benefits like everyone else. But you get some of that. Learned a lot. Bauman: So I know at some point you got into officiating, doing sports officiating. Mitchell: Yeah, in 1964. Well, a little earlier than that they wanted me to get into officiating but I was going to night school; I was trying to get finished up. And there was a gentleman they said, well they had no African American people in officiating spots, you know, here. And the guy who came to me was working as a garbage pickup person in Richland. The garbage pickup person, his name was Johnny Singleton. And there was a guy in Pasco by the name of, I believe it was Jim Pruitt. Big, tall, about 6'6" African American guy. And Singleton, by him being on the garbage truck crews, like they'd pick up garbage. And they dumped it by hand then, instead of the sophisticated stuff they got now. But anyway, talked to him about somebody getting into sports. Refereeing sports. And of course my kid was already playing little league here at that time. And so he thought about me and Pruitt. And so the three of us, we started out. And of course when I got in it, because I'd been around baseball, my curve just went up. It just went like that. And I was in the Pac-8 in two-and-a-half years. I didn't even know I was that good. In the first year I worked, they picked me for the little league playoffs, but they said we don't let first year people work in that. But there was never a year when I officiated sports that I wasn't picked for some playoffs like that. And then all that got me into American Legion, then into--actually I worked pro ball before I went to that two-and-a-half years, year and a half. I had been down to Kennewick working one day, one morning, and I came home about 4:00 and the phone rang and it was a guy from the Tri-City Braves at that time. Ever hear of the Pro Ball Club? Bauman: Yep. Mitchell: He says get out here at 6:30, you got double header. So I go out there and I work double header. So the guy I was sitting in the room with, his name was Biddick. His name was B-I-D-D-I-C-K. I'll never forget his last name. And he was telling me about how to do it, and he said well, he says if the catcher has to reach out a little bit, he says just go ahead and call that a ball. He said, because the fans will get on you. I said well, listen I don't know who you are, I said, but what I’ve been taught is if the ball hit the strike zone any place, whenever it hits the strike zone, it's a strike. I don't care where it goes beyond that. And I said, and that's what I'll do, they may not have me back. And there was a guy by the name of Ted Sizemore. Ted Sizemore, University of Michigan. He was a catcher. He ended up as a second baseman for the Dodgers. But he was a catcher at that time. And I worked that game, and in the Tri-City Herald the next morning, Ted Sizemore says the best balls and strikes game they had ever had called, since he had been there. And then, and I know I'm jumping way ahead, but way back in 2000, when I was inducted into the NCAA Hall of Fame in Chicago, when I got up to talk and I was telling them about, I said my first game was behind a guy by the name of Ted Sizemore. And his wife happened to be in the audience. Bauman: Really? Wow. Mitchell: His wife was in the audience. And I didn't know it but his wife was in the audience. And that was pretty interesting. Bauman: That’s pretty amazing. Mitchell: But then, well it just turned to gold. I could run. I could run, I just enjoyed it. And I don't know why, later in years we call it you've got to be in the place when lightning strikes, whatever it is. You've got to be when lightning strikes, there's your opportunity. But I was working, taking a half day's vacation to work a game with Columbia Basin College. That was my second year. And the guys from the Pac-8 in those days was there watching some players. And after the game was over, one of the guys came over to the car and he says you ever thought about coming to work in the Pac-8? And I says, well I'd love to someday. He said, well what I did, he said, we watched you work the bases. Your focus never left what you were doing. We watched you work the plate. Your focus was always there. And he says, well you're really better than some of the guys we have up there. And I said, well I'd be happy to try it. What I know about it, I never been there before. But anyway, that's how I got there. Bauman: And how many years did you do-- Mitchell: I did it for 30, I did it for 36 years in the whole Pac-8 team. And then I evaluated umpires until they went to the Pac-12. I would go from here. I wouldn't go evaluate officiants—I wouldn't travel. But I would just go to WSU, my wife and I, until they went to Pac-12. Then I thought well, it's time for somebody else to do it. And I did a lot, overall I got 21 World Series under my belt. And two Olympic. I worked Olympics in '84 and '88. And I worked the first games, when they were demonstration sports for the Olympics. I worked ball and strikes on the first game ever in [INAUDIBLE] Colorado in '78. It was turning to gold, still getting it. I was at SeaTac this past weekend for hall of fame. Bauman: I saw that, the legion, yeah. Mitchell: I've always been involved. And right now, the one guy that was in the Pac-10 with me, there was nobody taking care like Columbia Basin College doing that. So we incorporated it. We own that, and now run it administratively. We just own that association. I'll take care of that. But Hanford's been good. The Tri-Cities has been--I call it virgin territory. And for me, traveling around—when I did get into human resources, well I would travel to different schools for science and engineers. And I got into that just by, the guy was going to go WSU and he says they had three schedules for interviews, and they only had two. And he says, you know how to talk about the lab, come on. So I go to WSU, and they've got three schedules. Two starts at 8:30, one start at 9. Well my training was sitting in with one of the other interviewers for 30 minutes—that was my training. Then you're on your own. And of course, then I end up doing all that. And then when I was out going to different place like Purdue, Michigan, Wisconsin, Donald, Stanford, and all those places. I always picked up a local newspaper, would start to look at what the economy was kind of like. And for the last 60 years, the Tri-City has been as good as any and better than most. I had opportunities to leave, but I wouldn't leave. Good place to raise families. The schools were good. And my wife was very active in--she stayed on top of things within the school boards, and the city council, and all that stuff. She was a real tiger there. But she always did her homework. And so we just always been involved. And I always encouraged other people to get involved, but it's hard sometimes to get them to do anything. But I always taught my kids to try things. Because you can always come back to nothing. And Art Linkletter, I heard him years ago say, if you're ever going to get any place, do anything, you got to take some chances. Got to stick your neck out. I never forgot that. Bauman: I was going to ask you, so you worked construction-- Mitchell: Sure. Bauman: --and then fuels prep, and then eventually human resources. Mitchell: You bet. Bauman: Of those three sorts of different kinds of jobs you had in Hanford, was there one that was sort of more challenging than the others, and maybe one that was more rewarding? Mitchell: They all were reward--I'll tell you, moving on to the research lab where they did examinations of the fuels and radiometallurgy, where they studied things, like what happened and why they failed and all that—that was tremendous. But the one thing that got me out to get me the exposure was human resources. And what happened there is, I went in one day and I had been doing what are called employee benefits or whatever. Administration and all that stuff. And I went and asked my manager for the job. And he said, you think you can handle that job? I said yeah, I've been doing it all the time. I said yeah, so he said okay, so he gave me a chance at it. And of course the people that was involved around it that I worked with, I didn't get any help there. But there happened to be a guy by the name of Bob Steiken, he was working in payroll—he was in payroll at a different building. And he was the guy that coached Little League baseball, and all the kids playing sports. And had a relationship with him and everything, and I'd get some information from him. I'd consult with him once in a while. And then also there was a guy by the name of Dick Dibble. And he was an attorney, and he had been a professor over on the coast. And he was an expert in group dynamics. And when they had the civil rights movement, they wanted—you would go and talk about the civil rights things and things that happen. And during that time, I would talk about my experiences. I would talk with groups about my experience and things like that. And then he was the guy they wanted, come on, and then I'd go and talk things like that. And he says, you know how to talk about this. Come on, we want to hear about your experience and all that stuff, like, talk about that. And then he taught me group dynamics. How to handle groups. For example, if when there's good information going, don't shut it off. If it wanes, redirect it. You know, he taught me group dynamics. And I watched and I learned. And I always pick people's brains. I sit and I'll listen all the time. I'd sit and I'd listen to staff meetings, whatever meeting. And then when they got ready to put in the 401(k) program--actually, I was doing employee benefits at that time. And then we'd go back to Columbus, and we got to go back to Columbus headquarters and learn about things, and we'd present and all these things. And then, the guy that was in payroll, and then we had employee benefits, and then there was industrial relations--that was all part of human resources. Well the guys in employment over there, they were in charge of us going round to the different groups in the lab and explaining these benefits, when they were going to sign up for their 401(k)s. And the guy that was in charge there was kind of a different kind of guy. He never helped me at all, he never helped me do anything. And they brought in another lady to help us out, and she was just like high school, and they taught her everything. But they never taught me anything. So now, when we're getting ready to go, we doing these seminars and these presentations and everything, well, he would do all the presentations and that. So I told my wife, I said, I know what he's going to do is later on, he's going to put me on the spot. I knew it was coming. And so what happened was, was that we went to the 200 Areas, and he made the presentation, oh, the first about 11:00, and then over the noon hour. And then we go to 200 West. He doesn't say anything to me about it. Get out group together, and he explained all that, and then he said CJ's going to do this one. I did it. I was ready. When I got done, there was two questions. Two questions, all. And on the way back, and we were about 200 Area, right where they built the Vit plant now, she looks over and she says, gosh CJ. She said, golly, you did good. And she said, there was only two questions. I didn't say anything. I just rode in back. But I knew he was going to put me on the spot. But I was ready. But I was ready. And so I always got my homework done. And that's why standing out there today, I was out there ten minutes before you. I was standing out waiting. Bauman: I know. I was going to ask you, I'm a little worried your mic is going to get caught there. If you could put your arm on the other side there, yeah, put your arm above the cord. There we go. As long as it doesn't-- Mitchell: It's been a great, it's been a great, great, great thing. And another thing is, is that when my oldest son--when my son now that's a judge, when he got out of Washington State and he was going to law school, and he was going to pass the bar and all that. One of the guys in my office there, one of the payroll guys there, was talking about how tough it was to pass the bar and all that. And we had a guy at Battelle in contracts that never did pass the bar. And he was in contracts, and what he was telling me really, oh, what he was telling me really, he's probably never going to pass the bar and all that kind of stuff, I didn't even worry about that. And then when our oldest son went to the Air Force Academy. And he went to Air Force Academy. But my wife was on top of everything, all the time. And one of the girls that--the girl, Anne Roseberry, down at the library, you know who she is? Bauman: Yeah, sure. Mitchell: Well she was a classmate of my oldest son. And her dad was a liaison for the Air Force Academy. And he asked her after school one afternoon, who are some of the young boys down there who would be worthy of maybe recommended for the Academy? And Duke was one of those guys. And he did. And then Greg, my second son, he went to Naval Academy. He went to Naval Academy prep school, but he didn't like it back there and he came back. He came back, went to CBC for a couple of weeks, and came home one day and threw his books away and told his mother, he said I'm not going back. He left, and he was gone for about three weeks, and he called up one day and she say, where are you? And he said I'm at the University of Puget Sound. He'd gone over, walked down, got him a scholarship, and she said, what made you go there? And he said I looked at their schedule and I saw they were going to Hawai’i next year. So one of his friends, Cary Randall, from Richland was over there too, so he had a chance to go there. And then my third son who's a fireman in Seattle, he went to Washington State University, when he could play. He could play baseball, or football, or basketball. But that was one kid that was anti-everything. He was going tell them how to run the program when he got over there, so they just told him to get lost. [LAUGHTER] They just told him to get lost. But he's doing well in Seattle, doing well. But anyway. And then my daughter, who's a sweetheart. And then Cameron, the one that was high school--Cameron, the judge, was a high school All-American in football and baseball. He was a first team All-American in football. And he still doesn't say much. He never did. Never did say much. But one thing I learned from kids is that we create all of our--most of our problems. For example, my uncle that lived here, the first one up in Pasco there. We went over one afternoon, and we were right about Road 68. Where Road 68 is now, coming home. And Richland and Pasco was playing one of these big rival games. And they wanted to buy hamburgers on the way home. And I said we're not going to buy hamburgers, we don't have any money. All you guys want to do is eat, we don't have any money to buy hamburgers. Well I get home, and I'm probably there ten minutes. And I'm walking through the house. You guys got to get ready, we got a ball game, if you don't go, we’ll leave you here. So he went to his mother, he says, I don't understand. He says, dad says we don't have money to buy hamburgers. He said but we're going to a basketball game. He said it takes money, he'll buy us anything we want once we get there. So if he'd never said that, I'd have never heard that. But it just tells you to be careful what you say. You create a lot of your own problems. I learned that. I observed that and paid attention to that. And also, he was always on the honor roll, and I told my wife, I says, God, he's always on the honor roll. I don't see him studying, how is he doing this? I'm wondering if he's cheating. So she told him about it, she said he says no, no, I study when I go to bed at night. He said when I go to my room at night, he said, I study. And he was the same way, he was same way all the way through. And he was an academic Pac-10 guy. And well when he got out of school, Buffalo wanted him to come back and run back [INAUDIBLE]. So he wouldn't. He said, I'm not that big, so he went to law school. And he was the same way there. He would just study, study hard. All the time, he always did. And so, here he is. But it's just been a nice, it's been a different road, all different, but very good. And my youngest son, Robin, my youngest son has got potential--I think--to make more money than all of them put together. If he could get it all together. I think he's got potential to make more than all of them together. Because his mind, the way he does things, and how he can put it together. And where the others are just completely different. Bauman: I wanted to ask you a couple more questions about your work at Hanford. First of all, did you have to—when you were working out there--did you have to have special security clearance, or-- Mitchell: Yes, you do. You have to have security clearance. Yeah, and it was very secret. All the time, secret. You just didn't talk about what you did. But you had to have security clearance all the time, yeah. Always security clearance. And also, during the early years, in the laboratory you had what they called--they had some pencils, they were the ones that could detect radiation, and that kind of thing. Very interesting work. Actually for me, very good work. Looking back at it, and how you had to go. But that break thing made me soft. I'd never heard of a break. I'll tell you, that was something else. I got so soft I couldn't--God, that was the worst, you know, physically. Bauman: I was going to ask you also about President Kennedy came in 1963 to dedicate the N Reactor, I was asking about that. Mitchell: Yeah, you bet. Took my whole family to that. I had some 35 millimeter slides for a long time, I think I've still got them around someplace, when he came during that time. That was a great experience, yeah. Bauman: Do you have any specific memories of what the day was like, or-- Mitchell: Yeah, it was very hot. It was very hot, and lot of people went out and lot of people had car problems out there on that day. And what they did to get us out there, what they did--to make room, they had taken the graders and pushed back a lot of the sagebrush and stuff so we could go, a lot of people could get out there. It was a great thing. They came in by helicopter, oh, from Moses Lake. And that was really an interesting day. Bauman: You certainly have been in the Tri-Cities a long time, and seen a lot of changes. I wonder what some of the changes you've seen. Mitchell: The changes I've seen is in well, the racial situation has changed a lot. Of course you're never going to completely get rid of that, but it's changed a lot. Because I know there were times when you couldn't do things. They tell the stories about Kennewick. I don't know all about those things like that, but I know—with the troubles that I had. But one of the things that really was tough, my uncles that lived in East Pasco, with the relative citizens over there--before I moved to Richland, we had a group called the East Pasco Improvement Association, where we would clean up vacant lots and trash and try to get things cleaned up on our own. The streets were not paved, but my uncles, after I moved to Richland, they would go to city council and they would just get completely ignored there. And they were trying to get sewer—get sewer and pavement and things like that over there. And then, the people used to live in Pasco, as you go on the underpath, all to the right and to the left, hey lived all—especially to the right—all the way down to A Street, they lived all the way there. And then the city commercially pushed those people all the way from the railroad tracks, all the way out to right where Kurtzman Park is now. They pushed those people all the way back out there, and all the way through. They had people all the way down in there, there were people who lived in there. So they pushed them out of there and pushed them back farther out. But they went through a hard time on there, trying to get their water and sewer, and getting the streets and all that paved, and that sort of thing. And then of course, as far as the schools were concerned in Richland, my kids didn't have a lot of trouble. But--the schools were excellent--but what happened is, my wife, she always went to PTAs, she stayed involved. We got them into scouts, Little League programs, all organized stuff. And so they had a chance to participate. And we also, when I first came to Richland, you had to fill out an application and tell what religion are you. When I put down Protestant, well in about a day or day and a half, the people from Richland Baptist Church—just right down here on GW Way—my kids grew up in that church. And that's a Southern Baptist Church which say they were not racially happy to have you there. But you know what, they treated us good there. We went there, we learned a lot, a lot of things you learned there, a lot of things were different. As the kids got older, people kind of thought maybe my son wanted to marry some of their daughters or something. But anyway, I learned a lot there and I went there and everything and it turned out good. Of course, because I wanted the kids to be able to participate where they live. I didn't want to drive back to East Pasco every Sunday or something. Soon as I get out of school, I'd run there. No, I want them to participate where we are and where we live. And that turned out good in that way. And we lived down at 100 Craig Hill when we first moved to town, and then we moved to 612 Newcomer. That was right after I couldn't buy the house that I ended up at Newcomer, ended up there. And then we could walk. They hadn't had that development down where Safeway and all that is there. We used to walk down, the kids walked across that field to church right there. And so I wanted to be able to go to church and they would participate with the people they go to school with and they see every day. Bauman: After you moved in and got your house in Richland, did you see Richland start to open up a little bit more? See more African Americans at all, or-- Mitchell: Yeah, it did open up a little bit. Especially, well see, when the government owned it—I think there was a guy named Fred Baker and Fred Clardy when I moved. But anyway, because other people moved to Richland. Mr. Wallace did, Mr. Rockamore moved there, the Burns moved there, because they got jobs. And then as things developed in long about '65, and when I bought my house in '76 down here, then the Burns bought a house, then some other people bought. The Browns, CW, and those guys, they bought homes and that. And CW and Norris Brown, in fact they were from my hometown. And their dad and my dad worked on the Texas Pacific Railroad together. And that time when we moved to Hermiston in '51, to work on McNary Dam, well that dad worked over there too. They went to middle school over there. When the middle schools came over here to play these guys, those guys just literally tore them apart. So when Mr. Brown moved back and they started working here, well they got a job for Mr. Brown so those kids could go to school over here and play basketball. And they also were in the trailer court. They lived in the trailer court, the Brown boys did. And they went to John Ball School. There was a little elementary school up here called John Ball, and that's where they went to school—elementary school. Then from there, they moved to Hermiston, played and then they come back, and then they went to Richland High, and all of that. That's how we all got back over here. We moved around where the work was. And so it turned out that they'd done well. I think we've done well, considering the opportunities. We just moved ahead. You can't change things. So you have to make the best of what it is. And that's what we tried to do. Bauman: So overall, how was Hanford as a place to work for you? Mitchell: Well for me, it was all right. Course, construction, you know, guys, I just do my job. I didn't get involved in talking about what the government was doing and all that kind of stuff, I didn't worry about the politics, I just did my job. And I tried to learn as much as I could learn, and I always paid attention to what's going on, what they doing, and how they're doing it and everything. And I always just paid attention, that's what I tried to do. Bauman: Is there anything I haven't asked you about that you think would be important to talk about, that we haven't talked about yet? Mitchell: What now, anything-- Bauman: Is there anything that I haven't asked you about yet-- Mitchell: Oh, let's see. No, no I don't think so. I think you're okay, and if you think of something you can always call me or something. Well, I've gone through all of it, and I didn't see any blood at the end. And I think people know when I walk down the street, I think people are not going to bother me. In fact, speaking of that, I coached baseball. I didn't coach the Little League, but I coached the next one, they call it Pointer League, 13, 14, all the way up through Legion, back in Legion. I coached that, and was very successful at it. And what I would do is, when I would work the games at Washington State or wherever I was, at night I'd make notes of what happened, what they did, how they did it, and in what situations they did that. And then when I coached, I had winning teams here. Turned out everybody wanted to play for me. I took them to California, and to state tournament, which they hadn't been before. And so it got so that if I wanted to go for walk, I had to go down by the river. If I'm walking down the street, screech! Mr. Mitchell, you need a ride? No, I'm fine. Pretty soon, screech, you need a ride, Mr. Mitchell? That's a good feeling, to be able to walk and people want to stop and give you a ride. That's a good feeling. So you just never know, you just do the best you can, do what you know to do, and do it right. I never felt like holding grudges, or anything like that. Don't have time. Don't have time for that. I'd get it done. The one thing, I would never make a social worker too good. The reason being is that nobody ever gave me anything—I mean anything. And for those people that can't work, they can babysit or do something for those that can work. And I know that people, if they have to, they can--and I was going to Seattle the other day, my wife and I, there was people picking apples, Saturday morning. It was cold. Sunday, they were picking apples. As long as there's work, you can go do it. I just think nobody have to give you anything. You got health and strength, you can go work. You can go do stuff. Just get out of your way and give you opportunity and make it out there and go get it. And to think about we have to bring people from Mexico in to do all of our work and harvest all our crops. You got to do it because we don't want to do it I guess. I guess Americans don't like to work in the field, do that straining of work. And the other thing is, Dr. Bauman, if we could get people to officiate sports--and I don't care what sport it is—we could solve unemployment problems. Kids keep coming. There's no downsizing. The least you're going to make in any kind of a youth sport, like AAU or middle school basketball, is about two to three times minimum wage per hour. You're going to make somewhere between 20 and 30 bucks an hour, just officiating basic sports. Just going down here at 4:00 in the afternoon on Saturdays. And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to do all of that. And it's out there. And everybody says, we don't want to do it. In the clinic, we teaching clinic, and the guy says, well, what do you think is the worst thing about it? Well, maybe I'll make a call or something that costs the game, some parents are mad at me, angry at me. I said well, just think about when you're learning to drive a car. When you first started driving a car, you weren't very good at it. But as you got better at it, you learned. Your parents let you drive it to the store, and then pretty soon on GW Way, and pretty soon you drive to Pasco and Kennewick, pretty soon the freeway, and pretty soon you get pretty good at it. Then you can go to Seattle and drive on the freeway in the city. And I said, you have to do it a step at a time. That's how you do it. So to me, there's no such thing as an excuse. My grandfather says that—on my mom's side, because I don’t know my grandfather on dad's side--he said, there's no such thing as excuse. He says, in Cunningham, killed can't, and whipped couldn't until he could. He said there's no such thing as an excuse. And I know. I kind of like that, because you can always do something. If you can't do it, like I said, you can babysit for somebody that can do something. And I get after people all the time. There was a guy at Richland, his son played basketball. Couple years ago, three years ago now. Good ball player, 6'6". And his dad was a big guy, he played pro-basketball or something. And he says, I'm kind of a guy that like to stay back. I said, what? He said, I kind of like to stay back and stay out of things. I said, well I think you ought to move up, not stay in back. I said. That's the problem. I said, get up here and see what's going--get in the middle of things, and see what's going on. That's how you get there. And I learned one thing, Dr. Bauman—if you go to someplace all the time, you don't have to say anything to anybody. But after a few times, somebody's going to stop you and talk to you and ask you a question, because they figure must interested because you came. And they going to stop and ask you a question. And I sit and I’ve observed it all the time, and I look at people and I say, well. Of course it's easy for me, maybe. But for them it's probably hard. But if you just get out and participate, you just get out and see what's going on, it can do a lot for you. It can do an awful lot for you. Bauman: I want to thank you very much for coming here today and talking to us. Mitchell: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Bauman: Always good to see you. Mitchell: Yeah, it's always good to see you. Bauman: Thanks very much. Mitchell: It's a great community. And the other thing about opportunity, just get out of my way, I don't expect anybody to hand me anything. Just move over, I'll get it. And I always told my kids that. And they know how to talk to people, they know how to tell you if they disagree without calling you a bunch of names—without calling you a bunch of names and throwing a fit. They can disagree. And the other thing I wanted them to learn to do was to get up in front of a microphone and say thank you. That sort of thing. Yeah. Well, I got plenty to do-- Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:00:29 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 188 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 300 Area 200-East Area 200 Area 100-H N Reactor 325 Building Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1947-2013 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. ca1948-1965 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. McCormack, Mike Kathren, Ron Dibble, Dick Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with CJ Mitchell Description An account of the resource An interview with CJ Mitchell conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013-10-30 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2016-07-21: Metadata v1 created – [RG] Subject The topic of the resource Hanford (Wash.) Hanford Site (Wash.) Hanford Nuclear Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) 100-H 200 Area 200-East Area 300 Area 325 Building 3760 Building DuPont General Electric N Reactor Plutonium Uranium Extraction Plant (PUREX) https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F6d1399b27916dd5ec2646fdea94cfdf0.jpg 4d18af5d2a912b3c9382f4de8cd59003 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F84b51170a0a057f293a80eb6a4ea3769.mp4 86d389ba8c63a7491cf4de7dd24ce2b9 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 Parker Foundation Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Nuclear science; Richland, Wa.; Hanford, Wa.; Parker, Herbert, 1910-1984 Description An account of the resource "The Herbert M. Parker Foundation collects valuable personal perspectives from key individuals who worked in radiological and environmental protection at the Hanford site in the early years of its development. Since 2004, student interns have recorded interviews from health physics and related science professionals. These historically valuable interviews document their personal experiences, observations, contributions and ideas. Several of the distinguished professionals who have spoken at the Annual Herbert M. Parker Lecture are also included. The videotaped interviews and accompanying biographical sketches will be made accessible to the public." See https://tricities.wsu.edu/parkerfoundation/ParkerHistory Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 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. Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed C.J. Mitchell Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with CJ Mitchell Description An account of the resource An interview with CJ Mitchell conducted by the Herbert M. Parker Foundation at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Herbert M. Parker Foundation at Washington State University Tri-Cities https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F45acbc1bc142ae437076d7713580593e.JPG d11aecf203cd64ef630c4b0ccf863714 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F7b6c49d1ceaf6d495ad6d3e71ead4e45.mp4 92df87acc3350aecb21784f91896fc3e 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 Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford Subject The topic of the resource African Americans; Oral History Description An account of the resource A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource National Park Service Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 9/1/2017-9/1/2019 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project. Relation A related resource RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RG2_8 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 Clarance Alford Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I’m conducting an oral history interview on Clarence Alford on May 17th 2018. The interview is being conducted on the Campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. We’ll be talking with Clarence about his experiences living in the Tri-Cities. And for the record can you state and spell your full name for us? Clarence Alford: Okay, Clarence Alford, Junior. That’s Clarence, it’s C-L-A-R-E-N-C-E. The last name is Alford, A-L-F-O-R-D, that’s a junior. Franklin: Okay. So, Clarence, tell me how and why you came to the area? Alford: Well, I came to the area to see a brother. I had a brother who lived here that worked up at Battelle and I came to see him. After being here I met a young lady, came back to see the young lady and thought I would take a job and a few months later she was gone and I was stuck. I wasn’t able to find my way out. Franklin: When was this? Alford: This was 1968. Franklin: 1968. And where did you grow up? Where are you from originally? Alford: I’m from the State of Louisiana, a little small place called Ringgold. Franklin: Can you spell that? Alford: R-I-N-G-G-O-L-D. It’s 35 miles east of Shreveport, 100 miles north of Alexandria, 203 miles from Baton Rouge. Franklin: Were you born in Ringgold? Alford: I was born in Ringgold, yes. Franklin: What year were you born? Alford: 1944. Franklin: 1944. You moved here from there? You were in your mid 20s when you moved out? Alford: Yes. Franklin: I wonder if you can tell me about life growing up in the South during the Jim Crow era. Alford: In what sense? Franklin: I guess, let’s talk about opportunities. What were your educational opportunities and experiences? Alford: I was out of six of us: three girls and three boys in my family. Parents, one parent finished first grade and the other one finished eighth grade. Their push for us was to get an education. Out of the six of us, five of us ended up with degrees. Two finished high school and there was one that did not finish high school, probably the smartest of the group, he later got a GED and ended up in a unique position in the State of California. The schools that I attended was segregated schools, because at that particular time, integration has not taken place in the State of Louisiana. The pluses for me was the support of my parents. I didn’t want to go into the armed services. I had heard about the Teacher Corps and they had another corps, it wasn’t the Teacher Corps where young people could actually go and participate in an activity. And I found out very soon that that wasn’t an option. My parents very soon decided what we did. It wasn’t a decision that I decided. So when I got in college, I really had some difficulties trying to figure out what field I should go into. But I met a young lady who was a chemistry major and I thought, I like her, chemistry probably would be the subject. So I got my degree in mathematics with a minor in chemistry. I think sometime if she would have been a recess major I probably would’ve been in recess as a career. Franklin: What college did you attend? Alford: Undergraduate was Southern University in Baton Rouge Louisiana. It’s the largest black land grant college in the United States. Franklin: But did you go on to get an advanced degree? Alford: Yup. I was one of those individuals that was very fortunate, I had a chance to go to Pratt Institute in New York. Pratt, if you know it, has two things that people go there for; one is if you are in art and the second if you’re in chemistry. I had a chance to go there. I met a professor that told me I should go and get a degree and get a master’s degree, and so I did. When I got my master’s degree there was probably one of those individuals who took a little bit of interest in me and that was a plus. But that was—I took part of my degree here at Washington State University on campus and here. The fun part about it is that—something that I never anticipated—was I ended up teaching a class about three doors from here. That’s a whole different story but that’s a little bit from my background. Franklin: That’s really interesting. What about work opportunities? What did your parents do in Louisiana? Alford: My father and mother was farmers. My father ended up marrying my mother who was somewhat ambitious and they bought 40 acres of land in Louisiana and started a farm, and so they were farmers. It was a small farm with some mules and plows, but that was the lifestyle until the kids all grew up, they didn’t have enough people to continue the farm and so my father got a job working in the logging industry. He did that until he got a job driving a school bus on the last portion of his life, and the rest of it is history. Franklin: Tell me about the house you grew up in. Alford: The first house that we lived in I don’t really remember, because I was there for like two years. My parents built a house. The house that they built, we didn’t have an indoor plumbing but we had a five bedrooms. Because we didn’t have a living room; the living room was one big bedroom. That was the room that my parents lived in. it was on top of a hill, and in Louisiana you don’t have a lot of hills, but in that case we were on a hill surrounded by pine trees and oak trees. A good place to go fishing and hunting. It was a major highway. But prior to that time, for my brothers and sisters, it was different because at that particular time he had not built the house and so the distance between where they lived and the main highway was about eight miles, it was down a dirt road. When it rained, you didn’t go anywhere because the car couldn’t make it up the hill. But for me, the house we had was a neat house. My dad talked about the one—my brothers and sisters talked about going to bed at night and waking up thinking that someone urinated on you. But if you looked up you could see sometimes the moon and the stars and when it rained, from what I understand, the water came down wherever the holes happened to be and if you didn’t move your bed you had a pond in it for the rest of the night and it was cold. Franklin: During your childhood, the South was under segregation, right? I wonder if you can talk about your experiences with segregation and with Jim Crow, in the town, commercial activities, things like that. Alford: Well, because my parents did farm, I learned to work in the field very, very early. There was no such thing as a time frame that you start in the morning at 8:00 or 7:00. You started when my parents said time to go and we stopped when they said we’re going home. Because my father was one of these individuals who was able to communicate with people, we had a number of people that would visit us, who happened to have been quite unusual but common. My father’s relationship with those particular fellas, they would come up sometimes at night, knock on the door, they would bring something to drink and sit around or on our porch and drink. I don’t know how he developed that relationship. I don’t know why they felt comfortable to come to our house, but it happened. In terms of me getting in trouble, didn’t happen until I was in high school. One night, we were going to the carnival, and of course there we called it a fair. I was driving home and I got stopped by a police officer. The police officer had us to get out of the car, he patted us down, he wanted to know where we had been, and we told him. So he decided that we should go to jail, so he took us to the little city in Ringgold. There, he put us in jail and I asked him how long we would be there, and that wasn’t the question that I should’ve asked. He said some things that are not very nice to hear. But later on he came-- Franklin: Like racial slurs? Alford: Yes. A little bit later on I asked him if I could call my dad. And he asked who is my dad. I had given him my license from the State of Louisiana. He looked at it, but I guess he had not connected the last names. So, he asked me who’s my father and I told him and he said, oh, okay, you can come out. I was able to come out and call my father. My dad drove down and came into jail, and he wanted to know why. The fella said, well, he was driving the car and they was in the car and I stopped them. My father said, why? And I can’t remember what answer he gave, but my father said I’m taking my son, I’m taking these boys with me. He said, no, you’re not taking them. And my father said, no, I’m taking them. And he gave them one of the fellas that lived in the city, he said, either I’m taking them or he’s going to come down here and get my boys out of here. That was my connection with law enforcement. He did let us go, and they didn’t write up any charges, they just dropped two boys out at their house and told their parents and they were very thankful that we was at home. But other than that, just maybe a couple occasions where you were stopped by somebody and say some things that are inappropriate but life has been pretty good. Franklin: Segregation pervaded pretty much every aspect of life in the South. Alford: Right. Franklin: What about—I understand you grew up on the farm, pretty rural. But when you went to town, did you have to use separate facilities, or when you traveled did you have to use separate facilities from whites. And I’m wondering if you can you describe those facilities? Alford: Yup, it was—looking back at that particular time, it’s very difficult to determine what’s right and wrong because that’s just a set of rules. When I was growing up it was just a set of rules. If you were walking down the street and there was a white female coming in that direction, the appropriate thing was to step off the side walk. If you went into the store and you was buying something and someone else came in and who happened to be white, you took your items while they took care of theirs. In terms of so many things—when you only know one things when you only know x, it’s very difficult to see why. The reason behind that is that growing up in the South and where I grew up, that was just a code of ethics, if you will. I hate to use the word “ethics” in this case, but it was just a sequence of events that had been there for I don’t know how many years. So being born there, it’s just the way it was. That’s just the way they city operated. So when you saw a police officer, you wanted to make sure that you didn’t get very close to him, and the reason was because police was not considered to be your friends. Where, if they went to the left, you went to the right; if you could avoid seeing them, you did. That was taught to me by parents, is that I don’t want to see you in one of those cars being taken to jail. Franklin: Right. Alford: If you do these types of things, you can avoid it. That was the process of growing up in the South for me and my family. Franklin: Were whites and blacks addressed differently? Alford: It’d depend on the location. What I mean by that is that when you walked into a store, whites was always mister, okay, mister and missus, miss. That’s the way you addressed them. But there was cases where that part didn’t work. I’ll give you a case and it’s a case I think about quite often and I’m not so sure why it occurred. I remember my oldest brother, he had a friend and they used to play together, about the same age. When they got to be older, I don’t remember the age somewhere around sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years old, I can remember my brother, older brother, being in the store with us and Ray. Ray was a white kid who was about the same age as my brother, and we played together, we talked to each other, and we called him Ray all the time. On this particular day my older brother says, hey, Ray, let’s go hunting, or something. And these other individuals who happened to be white said, hey, he told his dad, did you hear what that boy said to your son? His name was Otis. And Otis said, what? What happened? He said, he called your son by his first name, he should be calling him mister now. I think I will probably remember this forever, Mr. Otis turned around and said to this fella and he says, the first time my son asks Max—that was my brother’s name—he called him mister I’m going to kick his bump-bump-bump all the way home. It was the first time that I had ever heard a case where a white person said to another white person that this will not happen with my son. But why’d it occur, I don’t know; I just remember it happening. And we have talked—the family we have talked about that I don’t know, numerous times. The sad part about it is that when we got old enough to consciously get to think about it, the father was deceased and so was the son. I never had an opportunity—it was one of those cases where I wished I had an opportunity to go and talk to the father and ask him why, why we call you mister, but you didn’t want my brother to call your son mister? It’s a rare case and I don’t know the answer; it’s just something that occurred. Franklin: How did the civil rights movement begin to affect your life in the South before you left Louisiana? Alford: How did segregation impact my life in Louisiana? I think for me, it did three things: one, it gave me an idea of what power was able to do—what a person with power was able to do. The second part, I think, was, because of the conditions, and because my mother was so fixated, if I could use that word, with us going to college, that it made a big difference. There was six of us, and five of the six ended up with degrees, college graduates. Three of us with masters—two of us with masters; one should have gotten his, but he didn’t go back. But two masters and just the one that didn’t do as well. But I think because of the conditions and because of my mother always wanted to go to school. She said she always wanted to go to school and she never had a chance to go, and by and by, whatever, my kids are going to go. And that was what she wanted. I think that because of her, having a vision that we should go to school, has impacted my life. I think about it quite often with my own kids, that it has an impact on them as well. Franklin: One of your brothers was working at Battelle, you mentioned. How did he come out to Richland, to Battelle? Alford: He got his degree from Southern University in Baton Rouge. He was an agriculture major with a minor in biology. What happened is that after he finished school, he ended up getting a job in Idaho. He used to write to us when he got to Idaho, he lived in a little small place. I think this is true—less than 5% of the population was black. And so he worked there in the Department of Agriculture. And then he ended up going to some conference, and a fella was talking about the farm that he had in the State of Washington. Somewhere in that process of them communicating their jobs, he ended up coming to the State of Washington. The fella had a friend who worked for Battelle, and they were doing some type of research on some type of plants and he ended up going to take a job with Battelle. So that’s the way he got here. Franklin: When you came to visit, what were your first impressions when you arrived? Alford: Why would anybody live here? [LAUGHTER] That was—I could not understand why anyone in their right mind would come here; there was no grass, just lots of dirt. When I came to visit my brother, we had a wind storm. We was outside and you stopped and everybody would bow until the sand passed over. I thought it was a stupid place to live, no trees and all you got is dirt and sand, and very few of us, people of color. So I had not anticipated ever living here. Franklin: What made you stay? What made you decide to put down roots in Tri-Cities? Alford: At that time I was teaching school in California and I met a young lady while I was here. The Superintendent of the Pasco School District—there was someone else on the phone, but I remember him getting on the phone and saying, we would like for you to consider a job here in Pasco. We are looking for people with backgrounds in math and science, and I think you would enjoy it. Would you like to come? Yes, I’ve been there. Would you like to come back? We would like to talk to you. So, I came back to see the girl and it was a free trip because they were going to pay for it. I thought, I’ll go back and go through this little interview and see her and I’ll be back. I came and I made the mistake of listening to what the superintendent was talking about. What he was talking about, what he said, I can still remember it. He said we have a place here where we got—at that time he said—lots of Negro kids, that’s living and we don’t have that many teachers. We really would love for you to come here and work here. Then he said—he started talking about the benefits of coming and the area and all. And I thought, you know, maybe if I would take this job and stay for three or four years, learn as much as I can, I’m going to go back to Louisiana, and I’ll take what I got out of California, working out at a Catholic school, what I get out of this school here, when I go back I’m going to be very powerful. I took the job with the understanding that the whole intent wasn’t so much Pasco, but me developing some skills, some knowledge, that I could go back to Louisiana and work with a group of kids that look like me and make a difference. At the end of the second year I began to think, okay, yeah, I think I could pull this off. The third year, they integrated the schools in the city that I lived in that I wanted to go back. And that was a very sad moment. You put a lot of effort in something, and then you find out the possibility doesn’t exist anymore. It was a sad day to think that I’ve acquired some skills, some knowledge, and I’m going to make some difference in the lives of a group of kids. And that opportunity no longer exists. Franklin: I thought integration was a major goal of the civil rights movement. How would things have changed for you so much when they integrated the schools back in Louisiana? Alford: I grew up with a group of black kids, black family, and there are some things that are somewhat unique with us as a group. And so with my understanding, if I could take the knowledge that I have acquired from California and the knowledge that I have acquired form the State of Washington, and if I can bring those kids in, I could talk about possibilities. Not read about them, but talk about them. I think there’s a difference between walking and hoping to walk. There’s a difference between believing and thinking. There’s a difference between doing and talk about doing. And for me, I knew, under the right condition, I could make a significant difference in the lives of kids that look like me. And that to me was exciting. The school that I worked in California was a Catholic school, and there was a sister, Sister Marion. Probably one of the best teachers that I had ever seen in my life, and she allowed me to come into her classroom and sit and observe during my planning period. Then one day I made a mistake. Made a big mistake. Sister Marion used to come in and she would have her books underneath her arm, and it seemed like she had just gotten a big dip of snuff, and she would put her books down and she would walk over and she would start her lesson. And I emulated that. She came in one day to do my observation. And I came in with my books the same way as Sister Marion, and then I did the same thing. She called me in after I taught that class and she told me, what’s this? I said, Sister Marion, I saw you walking in with your books that way, I saw you introducing. She said when you get 30 years of teaching, when you’ve taught 30 years of teaching, then you do that. Until that, you go back to the things that work for you. She says, you have a connection with kids, she says, you love kids, she said, they love you, and she said, you teach. She said, forget about the things that I do in my classroom. Because what Sister Marion did in her math class—she came in and comes to find her way in which the strategies of teaching. But I was so impressed with her that I didn’t understand that to get to that stage you have to have made all these minor steps. So I was blessed to have had a person who was able to tell me that. And as a result of that, I went back to teaching the traditional way, until I got to be a little bit better, and then I took some of those things that she did. Because it was a great skill; those were great strategies. Because she would walk in and she would call the kid in the back of the classroom. But I didn’t have those years. But by the time I finished my teaching career, I, too, could call the kid in the back of the classroom and emulate her. Franklin: So, what led to your decision to stay? Because you mentioned that you had a plan of building skills and going back to Louisiana. Alford: Right. Franklin: But obviously you stayed. What led your decision to stay and to want to, you know, work on things here? Alford: Well, one was that the school was integrated. It was no longer the black school that I had anticipated making a difference in. They were going through a series of problems. They were not—the schools were still having difficulties of integration and the problems that integration can bring. They don’t have to, but they can bring with them. Different races of kids, different backgrounds, different beliefs and if not done correctly, you spend more time on those nitpicking pieces than you do on instruction. That was one piece; the second piece is that in Pasco, I had been there for a number of years, there was a number of families that kids had gone through my class and I was a half-decent teacher. I would say that on a given day, I could probably do fairly well. I had a relationship with kids and with staff and parents that made teaching not a job. Not a job. Because I don’t think teaching is a job. But I think teaching is about relationships, and out of that relationship, somebody turns out to be a little bit smarter when they leave than they were when they came into the classroom. Now that doesn’t just mean that the kids learn; I’ll tell you what, I’ve learned a lot from kids. I have kids that come and tell me about things that are happening in their lives and how they dealt with it that has allowed me to help someone else. Going back to Louisiana and schools being desegregated not having what I thought was going to be there, I stayed. And there were some opportunities where, I wasn’t looking for them, but I was fortunate enough to get into special programs where we was trying to help kids who was coming—even in Pasco, there was a desegregated plan. It was a grant from the state. And I keep in mind that this area is integrated but where people lived was segregated. And they came to school, when they came to school, they brought with them not only their bodies but their knowledge and their skills and their makeups, and in many cases there was conflicts, misunderstanding, between kids who was white and kids who was black. As simple as someone calling another person a name, a person not understanding that this person may not have had breakfast and is hungry. There was lots of small things that occurred and I was given the opportunity to put together and implement a project, and this project was to deal with desegregation that was in the Pasco school system. At that point, we began to take a serious look at changing the model that we had. Prior to that time, black kids that lived in a certain area went to the school in that certain area. Franklin: Right, earlier you had mentioned that for elementary, most of the—like, Whittier was the school for—because it was in east Pasco, right, and so it was predominantly black. Alford: Black, yes. So when we began to desegregate the schools in Pasco, then Whittier was eliminated as a school. And those kids—because there was a bus throughout Pasco—they was bussed to schools where the schools were located in an area where almost no blacks lived. And with that, they kids took with them their knowledge that background, their likes, their dislikes, their misunderstandings and there was some problems, some racial problems that occurred in those schools. I was given the opportunity to be able to try to resolve that. The strategy that we attempted to use wasn’t so much of the kids as it was to do things so that the parents would understand the differences that was happening. Which is a total different idea than just working with kids. Franklin: Was there a resistance to busing here? Alford: There was a resistance. Franklin: Could you talk—how did that take shape and how did you deal with it? Alford: Well, what happened is that kids who lived in the same area—you know, you buy a house in the area because the school is supposed to be a very productive school, and someone come to you and says I want your kid to move to a school that’s not performing—it’s a very hard sale. It’s a very difficult concept that parent who moved in that area is saying, wait, I moved here because of the school and now you’re telling me that you want to send my kid over here with Snuffy who is having difficulties. That’s not right. So the process was to sell a different concept. It wasn’t about where the school was located; it was what was in that school when you got there. If my kid is supposed to be attending this school, but he would get a better education on these particular subjects in this school, maybe we can talk. Maybe there’s—and that was what we attempted to do. We attempted to take the schools that had a particular population that had not been as successful and add to that school some things that made the school a magnet. Then you could ask parents, would you like for your kids to go here, versus tell the kids. And there’s a big difference between asking and telling. Franklin: Yes. How long did the busing continue? Alford: Until about ’66, if I remember correctly. There was a law in the State of Washington that came out, that allowed the school district to provide services without. What happened then the school district began to add different types of programs to different schools and began to consciously take a second look at boundaries. In other words if you have a gifted program here, any kid that wants to go to a gifted program can attend. It’s just located here. It’s not that you have to go there, but we have a gifted program here, we have a select program here, and we have another program here. Now you select a program for your kids. It’s about doing what’s best for kids. Franklin: Right, so you’re having schools focused on different areas and be magnets and stopping any kind of changing the model from schools reflecting the neighborhood which resulted in—because of housing policy, resulted in all white schools—mostly white schools and mostly black schools and the property tax differentials-- Alford: Haves and have-nots. Franklin: Okay, that was an attempt to kind of split that apart. Alford: Right. Franklin: Great. When you moved, you taught in Pasco, so you lived in Pasco, right? Alford: Right. Franklin: How would you describe life in the community when you got here in your early years here? Alford: When I first came? I guess when I first came, it was so different in the sense that each school was considered a separate entity in itself. The idea of kids having teachers who happen to be non-white was almost not existent. But the school district made some decisions of purposely looking for individuals who happen to be a minority or blacks that matched the population that we had here. What happened then is that those teachers were spread throughout the schools. Families and kids began to see, in their building, teachers who happen to be black. Not only—so you have black teachers, white teachers, and some Korean teachers—not very many, but you have some of other ethnic groups. One fella that, before we got married we lived together, we had like three of us, we needed an apartment. So it was easy to get an apartment on the teacher salary if you can divide the cost by three versus paying for it individually. All of a sudden we ended up, just by chance, one of the fellas was white, one was black—that was me—and the other one was Chinese, and we lived together. We lived in the same apartment. That made a difference. Because we were together, we went places together, we saw kids together, we talked about kids. That in itself at a high school level makes a difference. When you talk to a kid and the kid says, but he said or she said. But we were allowed to do some things that I think they would agree—the fellas—and I think that there were some teachers that were a part of the group at that time—I look back and we would invite—like there would be a fight this week between some white and black kids somewhere, it seemed like it occurred just—of differences. We would allow those kids to come where we stayed, we had a little barbeque. At that time, you could go down to the store you could get chicken for 15 cents a pound and you could get some SevenUps. So we invited the kids and many times we invited the kids who was involved in fights. And what would happen is just by talking to those kids and having those kids together, they became friends. In some cases we encouraged them to participate in athletics. But it was just a different time. Jeff Dong—I don’t know if I should call names but for the purpose of people wanting to know who they were, who was Chinese. Very good history teacher. If you love history, you would love Jeff; if you hate history you would’ve hated him, because he loved the subject. He was about 5’6’’, 5’7’’. Then there was Sam Hunt, who was very light complexion and blonde hair. Comes from a politician, born in Yakima, brought with him a whole different set of skills. And then me, little black-looking fella from the south. And Keith Boyd, you know that group? Maybe I shouldn’t have called names. But anyway, there were some kids that came through the system, that knew us, and we could go to games. We were supervising games, because our salary was very low as classroom teachers. Someone says, we need someone to chaperon a bus. Well, guess what? The three of us was always there, it was a way to make an extra dollar to take care of the rent. Then of course, we started getting married and that part dropped off and the wives took over. Franklin: So initially you rented the apartment with these—with your two other coworkers. Where did you rent? Alford: It’s Cartmill, oh, it’s in Pasco. I don’t know if I should’ve called the name, but it’s in Pasco. Franklin: East Pasco or west? Alford: No, it was in west Pasco. Probably, from Pasco High and that’s where we taught at, we were—one, two, three—about six blocks away from Pasco High. Franklin: Okay. Did you have any—because East Pasco had been prominently—was overwhelmingly African-American-- Alford: Right. Franklin: There had been some resistance, as you’ve mentioned earlier, in Kennewick and some parts in Pasco. Did you have any resistance or trouble finding a home or living west of east Pasco? Alford: Yeah, well, I’m not so sure how to answer that other than to say, I can remember looking for a place to live, and when we showed up—this is after I got married—showed up at the location where this apartment or house was, and the individual would come out and they would have kind of a look on their faces. I don’t know if it was just that I hadn’t combed my hair that day and I looked different, but I’ve had some walkthroughs in apartments where they say, okay, this is the bathroom and this—and you never stop. You just start, you go through and you end up back right outside the door there. But I think—I don’t think they were bad people; I just think there was word about what could happen to their property. There were cases where we would go to places and you got there and it had been rented. You call and make an appointment—but I just think there was just a degree of luck that sometime you just end up at places where they get rented earlier, sometimes the person is in a hurry because they have to go to a meeting or something. I don’t think they are bad people; I think that they just want things to be the way they’ve always been. And sometimes when we want to keep things the way they are, it creates a misunderstanding. So I don’t think they were bad people; I just think they were just concerned. Franklin: Was it a legitimate concern? Alford: From their standpoint, yes. In cases where you have misunderstanding, in cases where the only thing you know is bad about someone or bad about a situation, that’s all you know, you form a conclusion. In mathematics we tend to say that when you’re doing a proof in geometry, you take all the information and from that information, you come up with a conclusion. I think in the school system, anywhere you go, people collect information and from that information they come up with a conclusion. Sometimes the data doesn’t support it, but it’s the best decision that they can make. I think it’s unfortunate sometimes when you take the data and you put it together and you draw your conclusion and your conclusion doesn’t support—is not supported by your data. In geometry we say, we collect the data and based upon the data, we look for conclusion. But I think in a racial situations sometimes we forget that piece. Franklin: Did you attend church? Alford: Yes. Franklin: What church did you attend? Alford: Well, before I got married, I attended a Baptist church in Pasco. It was a short period of time. Franklin: Which one? Alford: It was called Mount Zion. Franklin: Okay. Alford: It was short-lived. I got married, and my wife was Catholic. My father told my wife and I, after we got married, he said, now, if you’re going to make the marriage work, you need to go to church together, you need to live together and you need to be honest together. When we came back, I talked to my wife, she was Catholic and she didn’t want to change her faith. I was Methodist and I didn’t know a lot about religion. I wasn’t headed in one direction. And so, for me, going to church with her was not a bad thing. As a result we went to the Catholic church, and even today in the Catholic church in Pasco the number of all blacks—I can’t tell you what it is—I would like to tell you that number—but it’s a very small number of us. So we go to church together. Family that attend church together, live together and do things together—sometimes I think it turns out to be okay. Franklin: Right, because most—the Baptist Church and Methodist Church were much more predominantly African-American in the Tri-Cities, right? Alford: Right. Franklin: Morning Star and New Hope. You had been brought up in the Methodist tradition? Alford: Yes. Franklin: What role—did the church play a special role in the black community? Alford: Yes, a very special role. It taught the importance of men—appreciating men. And what I mean by that is that there is a Supreme Being, and because of a Supreme Being, what we do and who we honor is that Supreme Being and all the other things are not that important. But relationships--if you go to a black church, when the service is over, if you want to see people hugging each other and showing affection for each other, it happens there. It’s not about I love this person, but it’s a religious belief that we are children of someone greater than men. So yes, it plays a significant role. Franklin: Do you recall any family or community activities, events or traditions that people brought from places they came from? Alford: Yep, one of the things that—I’ll take my family as an example. After church services, when I was growing up, families would get together. You would go to someone’s house, not so much to eat but the fellowship. It is something that connects individuals. You always have enough time to—you make time to form those relationships. I think those that came from southern states that were black, I think most of us came with the understanding that Sunday is a day you don’t work. It’s a day where—it’s a God day, just some things you don’t do, you don’t do them on a Sunday. It’s changing now, but when I was growing up, Sunday was a Sabbath day; it was a day devoted to our maker. You form relationships and you laugh and you cook. That part is slowly being dissolved. And as a result of that, I think that we are losing something that is very important. Franklin: Were there opportunities available here that were not available where you came from? Alford: Yes. Now in order for me to answer that question—it’s a two-part question. I came from a little small town. It was about so big. And I came to one that was bigger. In this little small city there is only five jobs, so the opportunity is for five people. In a larger city you had fifteen jobs, so fifteen different opportunities. Numbers make a difference. Conditions make a difference. I think opportunities in the State of Washington also, because of economics, because of education, because of businesses there are so many pieces that fit into a puzzle that it’s kind of hard to come up with a simple answer to it. Franklin: In what way were opportunities limited because of segregation or racism? Alford: To what extent? Franklin: Here, in Tri-Cities. For you or that you observed for others. Alford: I think, when I think of opportunities, if the playing field was equal, it doesn’t mean that the result will be equal. The reason that I mention that is that the experiences that individuals have—and I think that in many cases, economics plays a role. It plays a role in some cases where, because this person has not been able to do these types of things, they have not had this type of experiences. It can be as simple as never having the chance to drive because their family didn’t have a car. And there’s a job for a milk man. Now, this person may have an education that fulfilled the requirement, but because they do not have a car at home or because of the conditions, the scale is somewhat unequal, even though the two individuals have very similar skills, the one skill that the one doesn’t have is that one person doesn’t have the skills to drive. His education level may be higher, but because the lack of one skill, the job opportunity is zero. When I think of this whole educational piece and the whole thing that has happened in the Tri-Cities is the playing field is very difficult to make sure that it’s equivalent. Franklin: You mentioned when you moved here that Kennewick—you knew one black family there, but that was it. Did you have any interactions or any business in Kennewick? Any notable interactions with people from either Richland or Kennewick? Alford: When I first came? Franklin: Yeah. Alford: No, when I first came, no, there was only—I started to give a name, but it was just one black family that I could think of at that particular time that was here. And there probably was more, but I didn’t know them if they were. I think that makes a difference. I think it makes a difference. Franklin: What does? Alford: If you know people—for example, if you can consciously go back and think of relationships, opportunities, people getting along together—if you know someone, you can come to form a relationship. If you don’t have any contacts, you don’t know that person, the idea of forming a relationship doesn’t exist, regardless of how hard you try, it’s just not going to happen. When I first came here, for example, most of the individuals that I knew that happened to be black or African American at the time lived in Pasco, and most of them lived within a mile of each other and you probably had 90 percent of them, all right there together. If there was an activity in the black community, you saw the same population. But most of their activities was in the community that they lived. The idea of going outside of the community to talk to somebody, to see somebody, is almost zero. Franklin: Was the sign still on the bridge to Kennewick when you came here? Alford: Yeah, it was there. Franklin: Do you know what I’m talking about? Alford: Yeah, it was sign that said Out Before Dusk. That was on the old bridge. It was a green bridge at that particular time, now the cable bridge. Yep. Franklin: Do you remember seeing that sign? Alford: Yep. Franklin: How did that, you’d grown up in Jim Crow, you’d grown up in the situation where segregation was strict and it was legal. I think a lot of people’s perceptions of the North and the West is that it wasn’t the same system. How did seeing that sign make you feel? Alford: I don’t—to be honest with you, it didn’t bother me, because I didn’t really—maybe I wasn’t smart enough. I think sometimes, as they say, ignorance is bliss. You see the sign, it’s there, and after a period of time you don’t even see it again. You become immune to things around you. I think that’s what happens in communities sometimes is that things have existed for such a long period of time that no one can see that there’s anything wrong with it; it’s just the way things are. Franklin: Did you feel less welcomed in Kennewick because of that sign? Alford: Well, I didn’t—no, I didn’t. Because I had a brother who lived in Kennewick and I would go across the bridge to his house, and then, for the most part if we left and went somewhere and crossed that same bridge take a right and went to east Pasco. I don’t think I was smart enough at that particular time, and when I say smart enough, I don’t mean of a particular knowledge, but I think sometimes you become—you see things, and if you’re not very careful you say, it applies to others but not to me. There’s the other part of it is that sometimes the best way to deal with something is to tell yourself, guess what? It doesn’t pertain to me. Because if you allow those types of things to affect you, it also changes your behavior. And what happens in many cases is that one of the big racial problems that we have—when there’s a problem in race—for the most part, it’s a misunderstanding. One person misunderstood the other person. Whether it be words, whether it be actions, whether it be just one disposition. It causes problem. Franklin: Yeah. Did you spend much time in east Pasco? Was it a—did you have a social life there? Alford: Yeah, when I first came to Pasco, there was a tutorial program over there. And, oh, God, I’m trying to think of her name that ran this—I can see her face right now. Maybe I’ll come to the name a little bit later, but she ran a tutorial program for kids. Franklin: Is it Virgie? Alford: No, it wasn’t Virgie, it wasn’t Virgie. God, I can see her face right now. But she ran a tutoring program and I used to go over and teach. I loved going over there because all the kids from the community would come in and you’d work with them and some of those kids now are adults. I’m trying to think who was on the bus who would’ve been one of those kids. Franklin: You mean out to the—when we took the tour? Keith Barton? Alford: Yeah, Keith Barton’s sister, because Keith would’ve been real young at that time. But, yeah, we used to go over and have a tutoring program at night with and work with kids and we’d plan activities with them. It was just kind of a fun time, really, but it was a way of helping kids. I look back at it and I think that the sad part about it is that those tutoring programs did more than just tutor; it actually gave kids an opportunity to see what can be. Franklin: What do you mean? Alford: In a tutoring program, and I’m talking about math and science because that’s my background, if you’re really working with the kid on a tutoring program and let’s say doing fractions—it doesn’t have to be fractions; it can be percentages—it doesn’t matter. You can talk about how to apply this concept—for example, if you are working on percentages, and the kid is trying to figure out how to do percentages, teach the kid and say, you know what, take a candy ball and say, you know what, I’m going to divide this up with three people. If I divide this up into three pieces how many parts will I have? Okay, if I just take this one piece, what part is this? This is one out how many? Out of three. Oh, got it, you meant—how do you do that? You just got—that’s a fraction. Well, I wonder if we can make it into a decimal. I wonder what would happen if we divided three into the one, we’d got 0.3333. Let’s add all this threes together, oh my god. So, there’s a relationship between fractions and decimals. And now you can teach the concept that the teacher’s trying to get the kid to understand. So, I guess what I’m saying is that tutoring allows for relationships and also knowledge. It also gives the person the chance to think. And I think the tutoring program that we used to have over there was great, because you had the kids there, their parents came to pick up the kids so you got a chance to meet their parents. And the parents were so thankful. I can remember parent saying, oh, thank you very, very much, guess what, he did pass the test. Those little pieces—it’s not about money, it’s not about somebody like me, but it’s about the kid. The kid that wakes up one morning and says, you know what, this person made a difference in my life. That’s what education is all about. Franklin: Yeah. Hanford was such a pull factor for African Americans from World War II and beyond, into the Cold War. What did you know or learn about the prior history of African American workers at Hanford? Alford: Well, I guess the only thing I knew—I took a class. In this class, that was one of the things that they talked about, was blacks working at Hanford. That was one of the pieces. But prior to that time, I didn’t—it was there. Franklin: What class was this? Alford: It was an educational class through Central Washington State University. It was called—let me think about it a minute and I’ll try to remember the class, because it’s been a long time. Franklin: From your perspective, what were African Americans’ most important contributions in the areas of work, community life and civil rights at Hanford? Alford: Okay, now repeat that once more for me. Franklin: From your perspective, what were African Americans’ most important contributions in the areas of work, community life and civil rights? Alford: Okay, let’s take the civil rights piece and Hanford. There was a—I’m trying to think of his name. There was one person, and hopefully the name will come to me, that lived in Richland who was a real advocate for blacks. Franklin: Are you talking about CJ Mitchell? Alford: Uh-unh, no, it wasn’t CJ. It wasn’t CJ. He was very active; he was really—I can’t think of his name. But he was involved. He would come to the East Pasco Neighborhood Council meeting, which was a group over in east Pasco, and participate in activities where they was trying to integrate something, or there’s a worker somewhere, somebody being mistreated, a police problem or whatever. He was always one of those individuals that wanted to make sure that people realized that their rights were being violated. Sorry, I can’t think of his name. I can see his face, but I can’t put a name with him. Franklin: Did he work at Hanford? Alford: Yeah, he worked out of Hanford, yeah. I may have to call you back and give you that name. Franklin: Sure, sure, sure. What were the major civil rights issues for African Americans at Hanford in the Tri-Cities during your time here? Alford: I don’t know lots about Hanford. Franklin: Okay, what about Tri-Cities? Alford: Okay, repeat the question then. Franklin: What were the major civil rights issues for African Americans in the Tri-Cities during your time here? Alford: Okay. One was employment. Okay, and I can’t speak for Hanford, but employment was a big one. Schools in Pasco—that was a big one. So I would say employment, schools, police relationships. And school parent—school kids and relationship was another problem. For example, a kid would do something on the bus—he lived in east Pasco, and do something on the bus and the bus driver would put the kid off the bus because of his or her behavior. And I’m not saying the behavior they did was—it existed. But to put the kid off the bus was an answer—okay, it probably stopped the interaction between those two kids, but that meant somebody’s kid was on that bus that lived miles away. Franklin: Kid’s possibly in danger. Alford: Yes, if you did it today you could probably have a lawsuit. Franklin: Yeah. Alford: But at that particular time, it was he or she did whatever and they put him off. Parents at work, parents—I don’t know where the parent is, you know. Franklin: What actions were being taken to address the issues you just mentioned? The employment, schools and police relationships? Alford: They had an NAACP group that was here, and they attempted to deal with some of it. I would say the East Pasco Neighborhood Council probably they did a better job than those. They had numerous people who was the head of it, but a lady by the name of Kita Barton probably—and I hate to say this because it may not be totally correct—but I think she had a greater impact than anyone that I can think of. Franklin: That’s Keith Barton’s mother, right? Alford: That’s Keith Barton mother. Franklin: Yeah, he talked quite a bit about her in his oral history. Alford: Yeah, the lady, she had a way with words. She was the nicest person in the world, but she was very intelligent lady. Then there was another lady by the name of Mrs. Upton. I can remember the meeting we had was—there was an incident that had occurred where an African American was involved and we had asked the police officer and the Mayor to come and talk to us. They were talking, and so Sister Upton raised her hand. She stood up and she made a comment—one that I think about quite often. She said, I brought a tablet and I brought a pencil to write down all the important things that you’ve said tonight. And she said, I don’t have anything on my paper. What I learned through that comment that she made is that sometimes we talk, but there’s nothing to write down. Franklin: It’s just empty words. Alford: Yes, yeah. And I think about that—when I am trying to talk to somebody, I think of Sister Upton and whether she would have said, Mr. Alford, I have my paper and my pencil, but I don’t have anything written down. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: What were some noticeable successes, of the issues you mentioned? Alford: I think that there’s probably five or six. I think one of the successes is that the individual was able to convince members of the school board that we had to make changes in the school system. And part of those changes happened to be taking a look at where kids are being bused to, and what types of opportunities are available to them. That was one piece. I think the second piece was a part where individuals within the community began to participate. And so people began to be a part of the city council or be a part of a group. And then police department did something about bringing on an African American on the police force, which I’m sure he probably caught lots of problem. But it made a difference in the sense that it was somebody that you could go and at least talk to. Not that he could give you answers, but just to say, did you know. Franklin: Well, and just that there was someone that looked like you on the police force. Alford: Right. Franklin: What were some of the biggest challenges in getting movement on the civil rights issues here? Alford: I think they’re still there. Maybe not to the same extent. I think one is education, because what was happening there is that kids were being bused to a school outside of the area that they live in. Teachers who was teaching in the schools lived outside of the area where the kids are coming from. And sometimes in order to understand someone, you have to understand a little bit about the person. If you can’t visualize, for example, and I’ll give you an example—I was in middle school and I remember one day, this kid did something at school and I decided to take this kid home and talk to the parents. At that particular time I didn’t realize that men should not—I don’t know—there probably was a rule, but I didn’t know it, that a man shouldn’t be with a girl without another woman. Anyway, I got this kid I put in the back seat there in the car and took her home to talk to her mother. I get there, knock on the door, the parents come out, and I say, I brought your daughter here. She was in a fight today. I said, this is—I forgot how many fights this kid had been in—I said, you’ve got to stop it. Come on in, Mr. Alford. I went in. She said want some coffee? I said, no, I’ll have some water. So she brought me water. We sit down and we spent that time just talking. And for the first time I recognized why the girl was having some difficulties. Part of the reason for the difficulties that was occurring was because mom was giving one impression of the school and that was impacted in the way the girl was reacting in school. There were times when parents came and negatively impact their kids. So, it’s not always negative, but there are some cases. Franklin: Yeah. Were you directly involved in any civil rights efforts? Alford: Directly? Well, I don’t know how to answer this, but I’ll just tell you what I’ve done. Franklin: Okay. Alford: I’ve done little marches, for example, where—like in east Pasco where we used to have concerns about what was going on with African Americans or whatever—when we had little marches, I participated in those. Cases where somebody was in jail, was mistreated, I’d help them go down and talk to people in the city about those types of behavior. In the school system—because I was in the school system, I could actually go to the superintendent, and not have to—or go directly to the board and talk to them about seeing things that happened. But I have not been one of those individuals who have ever planned an event for others to participate in. I always felt that—my father told me this, so forgive me—this is one of those pieces where he said, if you want something done, do it yourself. If you give it to someone else, they may or may not do it. My belief is that anytime something occurs that you think is inappropriate, first try to do it yourself and if you can’t do it yourself, then you talk to others as your last resort. Franklin: Those are all important things that you mentioned. You know, civil rights encompasses so many different activities. How did the larger national civil rights movement influence civil rights efforts in the Tri-Cities? Alford: I think that when you think of people being elected to office or people in certain positions and you see things happening on TV where you see somebody has done somebody incorrectly and so now you’re have a community meeting to deal with the same type of issue in Pasco. I remember having to go to a meeting where the city manager was meeting with a group of blacks about some things that was going on the city. And there was a lady who was so much smarter than me, I wish I had never thought of it. She stood up and she said, I have this piece of paper and I have this pencil—and I hope I haven’t told you this already, but if I have, forgive me. Franklin: I think—no one said anything important, so I haven’t written anything down yet? Alford: Right. Okay. From that piece to the next piece that happened after he gave his—he started up again. The second piece that happened is the lady that came up to him and said to him, I think we know what you want to do. And he says, okay, let’s do it. She said, what we are going to do—we’re going to send you home and you’re going to talk to the police about this and you’re going to come back. And then everybody got up and we left. I think it was the most effective thing I’ve ever seen in a community meeting. Very simple, straightforward, and it made a difference. Franklin: From your perspective and experience what was different about civil rights efforts here compared to the national movement? Alford: What was the difference between here and the national? I really don’t know what the biggest difference was between those two, other than the size of the national group. But I think it was just at a smaller scale—duplication. The people were different of course. Yeah, the people are different so you’re going to have different remarks, but very similar, very similar. Franklin: Okay. Is there anything else you would like to mention related to migration, work experiences, segregation and how they have impacted your life in the Tri-Cities? Alford: I think they made me a better person. I think I’m the most blessed person, probably in the Tri-Cities. Yeah. I came here for a teaching job, and I was blessed enough to have been able to work with students from a classroom teacher, to a coordinator, to the administrator, including being the principal. I was blessed because I had those opportunities. And I think I learned more from the kids than they would ever learn from me. I learned more from the parents than the parents would ever learn from me. At the end of the day, if we would just sit down together, I think we would agree that the major accomplishment that was made is that we put in the time to make a difference. Time is important. Sometimes I think people merely go to meetings just to garble and then they go home, but they never take the time to sit a little bit and understand what’s really going on. These kids are now adults and grandparents and it’s a little scary that they all came along. But I was blessed. I have been extremely blessed. I got my undergraduate degree and I’ll just back up just a little bit, why somebody, somewhere up there had blessed me. There was a fella named Dr. Gabriel—well, let me start from the beginning and see if it makes a little bit of sense to you. I decided one day that I was going to leave, that I was going to go elsewhere. And I had a chance to talk to the superintendent. And a few days later he came back and said he’d had an idea, and he offered me a different job. That job gave me a chance to work with a fellow who was at Central Washington State at the time, and a little bit later on there was a fellow who worked out at WSU; I got sent to work for him for a period of time. At the end of my school career, the fellow that was at Central, Dr. Gabriel, my boss—I was his boss. The fella at WSU, at the end of my career, he retired and came back to work a program with me. I look at those experiences and I think back through it—for example, when I was working on my masters—I did my master’s degree I turned it in, they go through and they check all this little things and tell you that you need to make this changes in it. One of the fellows that was on my committee, as I was leaving he came out and he said to me, hey, I know what you’re going to do. Now, it’s probably not going to make lots of sense—it’s not going to make lots of sense to you. It’s Dr. Gabriel, the fellow that I was working for was the dean of the school at Central at the time. He said, you’re going to go home and you’re not going to turn this in. I know, he said. Because he asked me, he said,—no, no, no, no. Let me back up—let me back up just a little bit. I had gone in—and this is for my masters, you go in and you present all your information and you show them your little package that you have, and he wanted a copy of it. And he said—because what had happened is that, when I turned in my thesis—I didn’t realize that this is the way it goes—you go in—he wanted to go step by step—so, he gave me the—he said, this is what you’re going to have to have this, this, this, and this. And I didn’t know at the time that you’re supposed to finish this, you take it into—he’s supposed to take a look at it and see if it’s okay, and then you go to the second chapter and you do it and when you get through, you put it all together. I thought, since we had agreed on the topic, that I could just go ahead and do it all and then bring it in. I didn’t—seriously. I did not know that you’re going to compile it all your research data to support your idea, you submit that, they look at it—I didn’t know that. I just thought you go and do what you’re supposed to do and bring it in complete. So, he said to me I know you’re angry, you are going to take it home, you’re going to throw it away, you’re not going to come back. He was right, that was exactly what I planned to do. And he said, it’s not a good time right now, you need to do this. So I went back, got another topic, did my review of my literature, went in to talk to him. The next step, and went in and talked to him. And I turned it in, but at the end he looked at it, and I can still remember, he said, I really like this. Take it down and get it bound and bring us back a copy because I want to use it with my students, and we’ll use it as a model. I was walking out the door, and Dr. Gabriel came up and he said, no. I said, what? He said, I know what you’re going to do, you’re going home because you hate the bum-bum-bum and won’t make a copy. He said, but you’ll be sorry someday if you don’t, because you’ll move to Central one of these days you’ll want to show it to your kids and your grandkids and you won’t have a copy of it. He said, but the decision is yours. And I thought about that the many times—he was right. That’s exactly what I did, and as a result of that, I never got my little master’s degree in my little folder in Ellensburg. I guess what I’ve learned through all of this is that sometimes the winner loses. But then sometimes you can smile and say that’s one he didn’t get. But I’ve been blessed though; I’ve had some real neat opportunities. In fact, I even had a chance to teach here one summer. And that’s so funny because Dr. Gabriel, who was on my committee, was no longer working here. I got a job working one summer here and I don’t know why they thought—I think they got me mixed up with someone else and they didn’t want to hurt my feelings. But then I hired Dr. Gabriel to work with me. So, I guess what I’m saying is that, if we take a serious look of all of the things that had happened to people, many, many times, I think those experiences don’t have to be negative. Those hardships don’t have to be negative. Sometime, you can come out as a winner. Franklin: Great. Well, Clarence, thank you so much for that and thank you so much for the interview. Alford: Well, you’re more than welcome, you know. I appreciate the opportunity and if you find one or two little ideas that you want to put on a piece of paper, good luck. But it’s going to be hard; you’re going to have to look real hard. Franklin: No, I’m not going to have to look hard at all. But thank you; that was a great interview. Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1968- 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 Clarence Alford Subject The topic of the resource Pasco (Wash.) Kennewick (Wash.) African American universities and colleges Migration Civil rights Teaching School integration Civil rights movements Description An account of the resource Clarence Alford moved to Pasco, Washington in 1968 and taught for the Pasco School District for many years. A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288 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 05/17/2018 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. This oral history collection was done in partnership with the National Park Service under Task Agreement P17AC01288. 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%2F89fce3241701c3d58378786875fff7cf.JPG acba8b9b6c77d3630951a4bb70d16234 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F8d82eea1f502ff3eef5b9efd443d8103.mp4 8fd48403898a7a19ee7162e11f819f35 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 Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford Subject The topic of the resource African Americans; Oral History Description An account of the resource A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource National Park Service Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 9/1/2017-9/1/2019 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project. Relation A related resource RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RG2_8 Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Vanis Daniels Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Cornelius Walker Location The location of the interview Home of Cornelius Walker (Pasco, WA) Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Vanis Daniels: Mr. Walker, we would like to conduct an interview with you as to when you came to the Tri-City area. And the reason why we are wanting to conduct an interview with you—we are with the Triple-A-S History and Recognition Committee and we would like to interview you to find out the part that blacks played in developing the Pacific Northwest and their contributions to like World War II and the Tri-Cities in general and the Pacific Northwest since then. So, my first question to you is, do you remember when you arrived in the Tri-City area, what year did you come here? Cornelius Walker: ’48. Daniels: In 1948. Walker: Right. Daniels: Did you come by yourself, or did you come with someone, like a group of people? Walker: I traveled by myself. Daniels: You traveled by yourself. Where did you live before you came to the Tri-Cities? Walker: I lived in Vallejo, California. Daniels: And before Vallejo? Walker: St. Louis. Daniels: And before St. Louis? Walker: Gregory, Arkansas. Daniels: Say that again? Walker: Gregory, Arkansas. Daniels: Gregory, Arkansas. Okay. What kind of work did you do in Arkansas, before you— Walker: Farm work. Daniels: Farm. And when you went to St. Louis, what kind of work did you do? Walker: I worked in the steel foundry. Daniels: How many years did you work in St. Louis at the steel foundry? Walker: Oh, I’d say about, it was pretty close to two years. Daniels: And then, when you went to Vallejo, what kind of work did you do there? Walker: Worked at the shipyard. Daniels: How many years did you work at the shipyard in California? Walker: Oh, I would say almost three years, around. Daniels: Do you remember how old you were when you left Vallejo and came to the Tri-Cities? Walker: 18. Daniels: 18. Walker: Oh, wait a minute—no, I don’t know what I’m talking about. Hold on now. Just wait just a minute. Erase that. When I left— Daniels: Arkansas? Walker: No, I left Vallejo and came here. Daniels: Mm-hm. Walker: Vallejo. Now, ask the question over again. Daniels: Okay. Do you remember how old you were when you left Vallejo and came to the Tri-Cities or Pasco? Walker: I must’ve been 22, I believe. Daniels: Okay. Why did you leave Vallejo and come to Pasco? Walker: Because I heard it was better jobs up in here. And I think, I’m pretty sure, some of the Hanford work had started and I just heard it was better construction work up here. Daniels: Do you remember—I’m getting kind of personal, but do you remember your rate of pay when you came here, against what you were making in Vallejo? Walker: Oh, I think we was at that time, we must’ve been getting $0.80-something an hour. That was at the shipyard. So when I came—no, at the ship—let me get it straight. I left the shipyard and started working construction. I worked at Fairfield, California. Vacaville, I worked there, all up through there. Of course, my company had a job, I’d go one job to the other one. When I left there, I came here. Daniels: Okay. And you heard about Hanford and that it was paying more money? Walker: Oh, yeah. They said there was a lot of work out here. I wouldn’t worry so much about the pay. I was young, I was looking for longer work, you know. Daniels: I understand. Leonard Moore: Did he stay in construction work? Daniels: Did you stay in construction work? Walker: Yes. Daniels: Okay. Now, when you left Vallejo and came here, did you come by car or train, bus--? Walker: Bus. Daniels: Oh, okay. And did you come to—you came from Vallejo to Pasco by yourself? Walker: Right, I didn’t have no—I didn’t travel with friends. That’s the way I’d make it by myself. I didn’t travel with friends. I just—because I didn’t want to get nobody—if I found me the bed, I wouldn’t need to help nobody. So I just traveled by myself. Daniels: Now, do you remember when you first came to the Tri-Cities or Pasco, do you remember where you lived? Walker: I got a job and I lived at the—North Richland, in the barracks. Daniels: Okay. Can you tell me a little bit about your living conditions? What was it like? Walker: It was really nice there. We had good food, we had the maid change the beds and everything—it was a joint to clean the barracks everyday. It was good living conditions there. I really did like it there. Daniels: Now, did you eat in a mess hall, or did—in the barracks, were you allowed to do your own cooking, or did you eat in the mess hall? Walker: No, they had a big mess hall. [INAUDIBLE] They had a small one first before they got the big one built, then they closed down the little ones, small ones. Of course, you know, they really started hiring later, and they had to get that done where the men had a place to stay and eat. That was their position, to feed the mens and house them. Daniels: Now, after you came here and went to work, do you remember what areas you worked in? Walker: Well, I didn’t work in the Area at first, because I worked for a company, J.A. Turlin. Richland was classified as the Area, but it wasn’t out in the Area that we might be speaking about. Daniels: Okay. How did they treat you? I mean, when you lived in the barracks out at Richland, was they segregated? Were they mixed? Walker: Oh, they was mixed. There wasn’t no segregation at that time. They didn’t have separate barracks for this race, they all lived together. If there was room in a certain barracks, that’s where we went, wherever they wanted to put you at. There was nothing about like no segregation. Daniels: Now, once you got to the barracks, how did you get to and from your job, from the barracks to your job and back to your barracks? Walker: They had transportation for that. Worked their way from the barracks. Daniels: Again, were you a skilled craftsman or did you do plain labor, or what did you do? Walker: I did labor work, like that. Most of the time, I did skilled work because I was a pipe layer. I laid pipe. So that would be classified as skilled work, but it’s labor skill. Daniels: Again, would you give me the name of the person you worked for? Walker: The company? Daniels: Yes. Walker: J.A. Turlin. Daniels: J.A. Turlin, okay. Now, I want you to tell me in your own words how you felt about working at Hanford. And before you say anything, when I ask you this, coming from Arkansas to St. Louis to Vallejo, California to the Tri-Cities, the transition is what I’m trying to get from you, as to whether you felt that you were treated right or you felt comfortable with your job and with your supervisors, or did they sort of, I guess what I want to say is, kind of intimidate you? Walker: No, there was no intimidation. I had a good job, and the bosses all, from the superintendent down, were just like that with me. Because they believed in me, they trusted me, over the crew, over the type of work we were doing. Because they knew if they sent me on, it’s going to be done. That’s the reputation I had. Daniels: Now, what was the hardest thing for you to adjust to—and this is the entire area, including your work—when you came to the Tri-Cities? And that means the social life, after work, at work, the area in general, you know, was built up, was it shacks? Whatever it was. Walker: No, no, it wasn’t no shacks. It was all new barracks. They’d build ‘em, they’d move them in. Because that’s the way they was hiring at the time. They couldn’t hire too many mens at the time and have somewhere for them to stay. They didn’t come, or hire nobody that they would depending on having them find place for themself. They had a place for them. Daniels: Now, do you remember what you did once you got off work as far as social life? Was there places to go? Could you go out and eat dinner or maybe dance, or whatever your preference were? Walker: No, there wasn’t no places like that then. Because Richland was the closest place, and it wasn’t built up. At the time, the places that was, they was kind of segregated, you know? So I didn’t worry about going to them of course. We had fun at the barracks, we could play ball like with the fellows around there, you all got together, you could do that. Moore: Did you play baseball? Walker: Beg your pardon? Moore: Did you play baseball? Walker: Yeah, I played a lot of baseball. But I didn’t get as good as I wanted to get. Of course, I wanted to go to the big leagues. But then my situation I had come here to work and so forth so I just kind of forgot about it. Daniels: I see. In working out at Hanford, did anybody ever tell you, or did you ever know, the project you were working on? What I mean by that is, did you know what—when you built whatever you built, worked on whatever you worked, did you know what they were going to do with it after you got it built? Walker: Well, I know is something was on a chemical plant, like I said. Something I worked at before they started building the building, I was laying pipe and such as that. Daniels: And nobody ever told you that this was to further the war effort or anything like that? Where you worked, were you allowed to talk about it after you got off work with people that you knew? Walker: It was explained to us, they didn’t want the mens going out doing talk about the Project. They was explaining that to you at least once a month. Of course, there’s new guys coming in. They just wouldn’t take the new guys; they’d go over everything with the old guys, too. They listened to it, too. They had to. Daniels: I see. Can you tell me a little bit—I understand that you left here in the early ‘50s and did a lot of work in Alaska, but you would come back. You still had a family and a home and all that stuff here. So can you tell me a little bit about your travels and your jobs and how you would progress through the years and able to retire and— Walker: Well, when I would go to Alaska, I always had good jobs—always had a job. I had people, after the first year, I had companies that I’d work for and when they got ready for me, they would either send for me, or if I didn’t have the money, they would send it and just get the ticket and come over. They’d refund the ticket. Them kind of people I would work for, and that’s the kind of job—I was a hard worker, taking care of my own business. I didn’t associate—it was all right, but I didn’t associate, drinking. A lot of guys get off from work, they’d sit around the barracks and drink and get drunk. Well, that wasn’t my thing, because I didn’t drink. So not that I thought I was more than they were. They weren’t doing what I liked to do. I found God, we sat down, sometimes we’d play cards. You could play cards and all that stuff. Sit down and talk about some of your back-life, where you come from and how you come up and all of that. Daniels: Do you remember any African Americans or black people, do you remember the names of any of them that you worked with while you worked here at Hanford? Walker: Mm—names I don’t hold in my head so good. But let me see if I can think of some of them. [man off-camera]: I’m going to stop it right here. [VIDEO CUTS] [man off-camera]: Okay, go ahead. Daniels: Okay, I understand that you worked on McNary Dam, and at the time, you moved from the barracks to Pasco. Can you tell me where you lived when you came to Pasco? Walker: Mm, let me see now. Where did I move when I moved from Pasco? I really—I’m sorry to say, I really don’t know exactly where I was living at the time. Moore: Was it a house or a trailer? Walker: It was a house. Moore: But here in east Pasco? Walker: Yes. Moore: Okay. Daniels: When you—do you remember what year you worked on the dams? Walker: I don’t know exactly what year I worked—I know it was in the ‘50s. Moore: In the ‘50s. Daniels: Would it have been ’50, ’51 and maybe the first part of ’52? Walker: I worked there in ’52, I know that, yeah. I worked at the dams a little while. Moore: What kind of work did you do? Daniels: What kind of work did you do at the dam? Walker: Well, I was just labor, but I worked in concrete. Daniels: And you can’t remember any of the names of the people, either by nickname or real name, that you worked with? Walker: Oh, one guy, Stan Cooper, he lived up in Hermiston. Stan Cooper. That was one guy. Let’s see, I’m trying to think now. You know, I just can’t call it now. It been long time. Daniels: That’s okay if you can’t remember. Walker: And got old. Other things have happened since then. [LAUGHTER] Daniels: Now, do you have any pictures or anything of any of that area back in there that you might want to share with us? Walker: No, I don’t have no pictures. I’m sorry. Daniels: Well, do you know of anyone else that we might be able to talk with and interview and get some information from them? Walker: Not other people that worked on the dam with, they gone. But one guy, I don’t know if he’s still living or not. I don’t think he’s still living, because he used to come over and see me every year. That was EC Stalker. I worked with him. I just don’t know. [VIDEO CUTS] Daniels: Can you tell us a little bit about your kids and grandkids? Walker: I just had that one kid. I got another boy, but I don’t know which way he went after I left St. Louis. I used to try to keep up with him, but when they got of age, they just get away from their parents sometimes. Moore: But you had the one daughter. Walker: Yeah. Moore: Her name was—your daughter’s name was Eva? Walker: No, not Eva. Martha. Moore: Martha. Okay. Daniels: Yeah, and your grandkids? Names? Walker: Avery and Elvis. Daniels: All right. Moore: They don’t live around here. Daniels: No. Walker: They live in Fresno, California. Daniels: [whispering] Shut it off just a sec. [VIDEO CUTS] Moore: Ask him about the house. Daniels: Okay, now. Walker: We didn’t come by that house. They didn’t buy because they had no money to buy from. Walter, the husband, he worked over there at the cemetery. And right across the street, he got acquainted with these people. On account of him associating and so forth, the people— Moore: Let me have you start over, because we don’t know who these— [VIDEO CUTS] Daniels: Now, can you tell us about your daughter and son-in-law living in Kennewick and owning a home? Walker: Well, this is what happened. Her husband were working at the cemetery, and right across the street, the people lived. So he got acquainted and the peoples gave him the home. They gave him a home, but the people didn’t want him to live over there. So in order for them not to live over there, somebody just set the house on fire and burned it down. By them, hadn’t been able to get insurance and everything, so there wasn’t nothing left for them but to get out of there. Daniels: So, in the early years, there was still prejudices in the Tri-Cities, and this is one example of what you could and could not do in the Tri-Cities, or what they wanted you to do and what they didn’t want you to do. Walker: Well, like job and things, if hye didn’t want you on, you wasn’t gonna have no job. That’s just it, because they wouldn’t hire you. All there wasn’t a contractor for, some do union, like that. We had a business here, maybe you know who I’m talking about, because his name Charlton Knapp. Daniels: Yes. Walker: He was really prejudiced. He wouldn’t send a black man out on no kind of good job. He’d just have to—contractor started squawking, you finds me mens! So that’s the only way they got out. Moore: He was a union? Walker: Yeah, he finished his BA. Daniels: He finished his Business Agent. [man off-camera]: And what was his name? Walker: Charlton Knapp. Moore: Okay. So there was—let me turn this off for a minute. [VIDEO CUTS] Walker: Be caught after dark. That’s just the way it was. They wasn’t mean people, but there was mean people over there. You know, mean people, and they would hurt you if you were caught over there. If you doing—if you had to go the store or something over there, do some business, get out of there before dark. Moore: That was Kennewick. Walker: Yup. Daniels: Yeah. [VIDEO CUTS] Walker: You know, at the time, when I first got going, it wasn’t too many black people living nearby. It was like four or five there and some of them had they own homes, some of them was just there. But as time went by and all the work started, then they had to hire black because they was crying for people to come to work. At one time, young white peoples, they was kind of like scared to go up there. They wouldn’t take the chance that the black would take. They had a job, man, they kept it. Most of them did have jobs here. But a lot of black people left their jobs here because a lot of them wouldn’t study. They had no future to look out for. They working when they needed them, but when they got done, you didn’t have no job. So that’s the way that went. Moore: Okay. Walker: Moving to Anchorage, they got good jobs, they had foreman jobs. Of course, they had the opportunity to have ‘em, because they needed fresh peoples there. The man needed somebody to work. On a lot of jobs, they didn’t want to work black, but they had to. And then when the union got strong, when they called—you can call, you could call and request us all the time but they weren’t calling for nothing but white people. The union broke that up. You say, you call, I got mens. I’ll send you who available. If it don’t work out, send them back to the hall. Daniels: Yeah. Okay, Mr. Walker, that concludes our interview. We want to thank you and hopefully we have gotten some information and we thank you very much for your interview. Walker: Yeah. <a href="https://youtu.be/c3vUd_46coM">View interview on Youtube.</a> Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1948- Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1948-1952 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 Cornelius Walker Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Pasco (Wash.) Kennewick (Wash.) Migration McNary Lock and Dam (Or.) Discrimination Description An account of the resource Cornelius Walker moved to the Tri-Cities in 1948 to work on the Hanford Site. An interview conducted by the African American Community Cultural and Educational Society (AACCES) as part of an oral history project documenting the lives of African Americans in the Tri-Cities during the Manhattan Project and Cold War. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource African American Community Cultural and Educational Society Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mpg https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fa47502c08171bf80f5b805fefabd2e46.jpg 1dcfd89b533e26e399b9d34554899883 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F6660f59b710ac080c60889fce79ca005.mp4 7c1924e452a95fb176cdede01fe84200 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Bauman Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Curt Donahue Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Northwest Public Television | Donahue_Curt Camera man: Rolling here. I'll set this while you do your-- Bauman: Okay. We'll go ahead and get started. I'm going to start by just having you say your name and then spell it. Donahue: Oh, okay. It's Curt Donahue. It's C-U-R-T D-O-N-A-H-U-E. Bauman: Thank you. And my name's Robert Bauman. Today is August 7th of 2013. And we're conducting oral history interview with Mr. Donahue on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. And we'll be talking about Mr. Donahue's experiences working in the Hanford site. So I'd like to start maybe with having you talk about how you came to Hanford, what brought you here, when you came, and that sort of thing. Donahue: Okay. In 1944, my father was out of work, and we lived in White Salmon, Washington. And the superintendent of schools was receiving a job here in Richland as the principal at one of the schools and asked my dad if he was interested in having a custodian job here. And he was. He wanted any job. So we moved here in September of 1944 and lived in one of the original houses. I was nine years old, and I tell people now I used to roam the streets of Richland before they were streets. It was a very unique period to grow up and a unique town to grow up in. There were so many things that we were able to do that kids just can't do today. So when I graduated from high school, I went to work in the 700 Area to begin with. And, after a few months, transferred out to the 300 Area and ended up working really all over. I was in regional monitoring and then radiation monitoring. Bauman: So let's talk a little bit first about your years growing up here. You mentioned that there were sort of things that kids could do here that— Donahue: Yeah, we— Bauman: Do you have any stories or memories about that? Donahue: Yeah, one of the things that I remember most, and that was to be able to sleep outside. Just take a blanket and a piece of canvas and roll up in the backyard and sleep outside. The only hazards were the mosquitoes, and sometimes I'd wake up with an eye shut and a fat lip. And then there was a stream from an irrigation flue that ran along Wellsian Way. And my wife doesn't believe me, but there used to be a lake there. And there was a wooded area right where the flue emptied. And it was kind of a pool there and a sandy beach. And several of my friends and I would go camp overnight there, three blocks from home. But we were off in another world, and we really enjoyed having that freedom. Bauman: So this is near Wellsian Way? Is that sort of near where Fred Meyer is now? Donahue: Yeah. Where Fred Meyer is right now is actually the spot that had the sandy beach. And we would bring potatoes from home and bury them in the sand, build a campfire over them, and then have a potato snack before we went to sleep. [LAUGHTER] It was a lot of fun. Bauman: And you said you moved into one of the early homes. Where was that, what complex? Donahue: That was on Fitch, right on the corner of Fitch and Douglass. And the people that lived in the other end, the Browns, actually had the first option to buy, but they chose not to, so my parents bought the house and remodeled it and lived there for a good many years. 38 years, I think. Bauman: So what schools did you go to then? Donahue: I went to Lewis and Clark. In fact, that's where my dad was a custodian in those early years. And then I also went to school at Bethlehem Lutheran in Kennewick a couple of years. And my freshman year of high school, I spent at Concordia Academy in Portland, and then came to Columbia High School in Richland for the last three years. In fact, we're having our 60th anniversary this year. Bauman: So '53? Donahue: '53, yeah. Bauman: How big was the class, do you remember? Donahue: I think the class was 159. I know I graduated 59th out of that group. I was kind of in the middle. Bauman: Other memories of Richland at the time? Were there community events, any sort of special events that you remember? Donahue: Yeah. Atomic Frontier Days, of course, was our big event every year. And the church that I went to, the youth group usually put together some kind of a float. Sometimes it was maybe dressing up in something patriotic and riding on the back of a flatbed truck. But it was fun, and the people enjoyed it. And also, there was a group called the Mini Singers, and I was a member of that group and put on concerts every year until I outgrew it and was no longer considered a Mini Singer. When your voice changes from soprano to tenor, you are no longer invited. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: My sense of Richland at the time, especially in 1944, there's still wartime--'45, that there were people coming from all over the United States to work here. Is that your experience growing up? Donahue: Oh, yes. Yeah. Every other classmate was from a different state, and it made for interesting living. They all had stories. Some of them were worth retelling, [LAUGHTER] and some of them were not. Bauman: Let's talk about your work, then. You said you started basically right after you graduated high school, working at Hanford, 1953. Donahue: Yeah. Actually, in August of that year, I got hired on. I worked in the reproduction shop in the 700 Area. My first job was a back tender on an ozalid machine. And that merely meant that when the ozalid prints came off that machine, they'd come out in a continuous sheet, so you'd have to trim each one, fold it up, and package it according to the orders. So you had to be rather speedy to keep up with the machine. And I managed to work my way through several different promotions in there and got to run a good number of the machines—Photostat machine, offset printer, things that we don't use anymore, really, because of the new reproduction facilities. Bauman: So what sorts of things were you printing up there? Donahue: It was configurations of equipment that was being built out at the project, buildings, and a lot of floor plans and that sort of thing. You really didn't have time to look at what it was, other than here’s the edge of it, cut it, and fold it up and keep moving. Bauman: I want to go back quickly to before you started working there. Growing up here, how much did you know about Hanford and what was going on there? Donahue: We knew nothing until they dropped the bomb. And then the Villager newspaper had that massive headline, and the word got out what was going on here. And there was a parade leaving town. There were, I guess, a goodly number of people who wanted no part of it or were afraid of it, essentially. Bauman: So your recollection is a lot of people left at some point after that. Donahue: Yeah. Bauman: But by the time you went to work in '53, obviously, you knew what was-- Donahue: Oh, yeah. Yeah, we did. Bauman: So you said you started the 700 Area, and then at some point, you moved to the 300 Area? Donahue: 300 Area, and a group that was called regional monitoring. And the function there was to gather samples of vegetation, water, soil, and air samples and bring them back to the lab. So all we did was drive around the country, collecting samples and bring them back. Bauman: So you would get samples from various parts of the area? Donahue: Yeah. One route might be picking up water samples in all of the 100 Areas. Another route would be vegetation samples along the highway from 300 Areas to Two West. Soil samples in most anywhere. And then we'd do, with a Geiger counter, monitor about a 100 square foot area plot, here and there. And if we found large radioactive particles, we’d scoop them up in an ice cream cup and bring them back to the lab for their analysis. Bauman: So at that point, it’d go to someone else who would do the analysis? Or were you involved in that analysis? Donahue: I'm sorry. I didn't hear. Bauman: After you brought it back to the lab, that would go to someone else? Donahue: It would go to the lab. Yeah. We were not really part of the lab, other than we were the collectors. So we didn't know what the results were. Bauman: And so if you detected something that seemed to suggest that there was something present, you would scoop it up and-- Donahue: No. On one trip—it was a cross country trip through the sagebrush. And on my way to Rattlesnake Mountain, and an eagle, a golden eagle, jumped up alongside of me and got about five feet off the ground and right back down, and running, and it turned in front of me, and I hit it. And it was injured, so I killed it and brought it into the lab, and they did an autopsy on it and gave it back to me, frozen. And so I had it mounted. It was a 59 inch wingspan. Beautiful bird. It was a shame to have hit it, but I didn't know why it wasn't getting off the ground until they gave it back to me. It had a whole rabbit in its stomach. It was a little too heavy [LAUGHTER] to lift off the ground, I guess. Bauman: Too much weight. [LAUGHTER] So about how many people were, in terms of number of people, were involved in going out and giving this monitor? Donahue: As I remember, about 15, I think. Bauman: And so how long did you do that? Donahue: Oh, almost two years, I think. And then I went into radiation monitoring. Bauman: Okay. And so with the radiation monitoring, what did that involve? Donahue: Dress up and tail a pipe fitter. Make sure it's okay where he's at, what he's doing, that he doesn't get over exposed. And just keep monitoring that process. And that was primarily what I did in the Hot Semi-Works in the 200 East Area. And then the last months that I worked there, I was going school at CBC and wanted to be on a rotating shift. And so then I monitored for the mobile x-ray crew. And we might end up anywhere in the area to x-ray something that they were interested in. Bauman: And so your job was to make sure that people didn't too much exposure? Donahue: To set up a barrier, and we'd find out what it is we're going to x-ray. And the technician would say, well, I'm going to have to use this much amperes and so on. And so I'd get an idea of, really, how far away do we need to keep people? And we'd set up that kind of a barrier and then do the job and get out of there, go do another one somewhere. It was interesting. Bauman: Yeah. And were there dosimeters or something that you would check out? Was that part of it, as well, or--? Donahue: I had a—I don't remember the name of the instrument now. That's a long time ago. It read rads, rather than millirads as a gauge. And so that's the tool that was used to monitor that operator and myself. And also would walk the perimeter to make sure that we had the level as low as we needed to. Bauman: So this was in sort of mid to late 1950s? Donahue: Yeah. I left in November of 1957. I got caught in an ROF and, having just got into radiation monitoring, I was in the lower 10%, and that's about—I think I was the last one in that group to be laid off. Bauman: And what did you do, then, after that? Donahue: I went into fraternal life insurance for a short time over in Olympia and applied at Boeing. And because of the time I spent monitoring for mobile x-ray, I got on as an x-ray technician in the Boe-Mark tank shop. And then worked my way from there through engineering. And then my last assignment before I retired was the engineer operations manager for Commercial Avionics Systems. Bauman: And that was all at Boeing and-- Donahue: Spent 36 years there. Bauman: So during your time in radiation monitoring, was there ever an incident where someone did—was exposed to too much or anything along those lines and sort of incidences? Donahue: We had a problem—excuse me. At the Hot Semi-Works, there was a rupture in one of the lines going to tank farm. And so they brought in a big drag line to dig that up and connect to it and get a loop around the other side of where the break was. And I was monitoring that, and—it was a TP instrument that I was trying to think of earlier—and had it on a probe, a 30 foot probe. And I was halfway down in the hole, monitoring every scoop that the drag line brought up. And he finally brought up one that meter went off scale, and I come scrambling up out of the hole to get to where I could get a reading to determine what exposure I had and what the people up around it had, because there was 15, 20 people watching this excavation. And when I come running up out of the hole, they went running away. I was in the office, I think, for two weeks after that. Just kept me out of any more exposure for that length of time. Bauman: Right. And was that sort of the practice if someone had been exposed, they had to stay-- Donahue: Yeah. Depending on what level of exposure you got, I knew guys who had to sit for a couple of days was all. And some had even longer than I did. Those things happened in that kind of business. And you deal with it the best way we know how. Bauman: Yeah. Obviously, secrecy, security were very much a part of Hanford. Did that impact you at all? Donahue: Well, security was, I think, very good, and you were checked everywhere you went. And by the time I was working out there, there wasn't so much secrecy anymore. Processes were, and it didn't seem like any one person knew the whole process. And the kind of work that I did, I was not interested in the process. I was interested in keeping somebody safe and myself safe. So processes weren't high on my priority list. Bauman: Did you have to have special clearance to-- Donahue: Oh, yeah. I had a secret clearance. Bauman: In terms of getting on the site, did you drive your own car? Did you take buses? Donahue: No, drove cars and Jeeps and Dodge Power Wagon. I had the distinction of getting a Dodge Power Wagon stuck twice. Once because of a coworker told me, oh, you can get through there, and got about 15 feet into this wash that soaked to the running boards. It took two of those large Mack wreckers to lift that thing out of there. And then the other time was down by Horn Rapids. In the wintertime, the ground had frozen and then had thawed, so there was about an inch of thawed mud on top of the ice, and you could not get any traction at all. And it had to drag it out of there. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: What you would say were sort of the biggest challenges in working at Hanford for yourself, and what were some of the best rewards about your job there? Donahue: I think the challenge was—particularly the jobs that I had on the project—were one of being alert to whatever radiation aspects, whatever exposure you were getting. Make sure you were alert to it so that you knew how to deal with it, how to handle it. And, of course, out on the project, when you're running around with a Geiger counter out in the sagebrush, you're pretty alert for rattlesnakes, too. And some of us had those experiences. But I guess I never considered what challenges we were facing. I have a very healthy respect for radiation, radioactive material. I was never afraid of it. And I think that the guys I worked with had the same attitude. Bauman: And so the most rewarding part of working there, then? Donahue: I think that when you took a guy into a cell in Semi-Works or a PUREX facility, and you brought him out, and you could tell them that, hey, you didn't get anything significant today. And the thanks that they showed and displayed, thanks for watching my back, so to speak. That was the most rewarding. That, and just the people you worked with. I can't recall anyone I worked with that I had really dislike for. Everybody was fun to be around. Bauman: A lot of the students that I teach now were born after the Cold War ended. Obviously—you were working at Hanford in the 1950s, which was, really, in many ways, the height of the Cold War. I wonder if you have any thoughts about that in part for people who were born post-Cold War, things that you think would be important for them to understand about that period and working at Hanford during that time? Donahue: I don't think people who were born really do understand. We grew up having the fear—in fact, the day that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, we lived in White Salmon, and we went to church in Hood River, Oregon. And that toll bridge that we crossed, the toll taker told us that we had just been attacked. So on the way back from church, as a six-year-old, I'm looking downstream, afraid they're coming up the river. And that's kind of what we lived under for the next several years. And, of course, when those wars with Germany and Japan were ended, and it wasn't very long and we were into the Cold War. And lived again with, get under your desk, and this is what you do, and we practice it. And then the whole time working out here, well, until Gorbachev became the Premier of Russia, we lived under that threat. And so that was just the way you grew up, and I don't think people who have lived since then or even were real young in those latter years can really comprehend what that was like. And would I live that way again if I needed to? Yes. It was a time when everybody pitched in and did their part. Bauman: I wonder if there are any other incidents or events or humorous things that happened during your time working at Hanford that sort of stand out to you? Donahue: Yeah. The night after we found out the Russians had launched Sputnik, the x-ray technician and I, at the time that we were told it would be passing over, we stopped and got out where we were away from light, and we saw it going across the sky. And I just remember the eerie feeling to be able to look up there and see something that people had put up there. And it was working. And what did that mean? Where are we going to go from here? And of course, we've gone a long ways from there. And fortunately, we caught up and passed everybody. That was probably the thing that I would say stuck out most as a happening. Bauman: Sure. And then how would you overall sort of assess Hanford as a place to work during your years there? Donahue: I'm sorry. Say again? Bauman: How would you assess Hanford as a place to work? How was it as a place to work? Donahue: Oh, I was happy there. If I hadn't gotten laid off, I'd have retired there, I'm sure. I think it was a good place to work. I had fair management, and I thought I was paid a fair salary for what I was doing. I was very happy there. And I was disappointed to get caught in that kind of a situation, but I understood that it was seniority, and so you just roll with the punches and deal with it. Bauman: Is there anything that I haven't asked you about or that we haven't had a chance to talk about yet that you'd like to? Donahue: Hm. I have to tell one story. We were about 11 years old, I guess. The superintendent of schools at that time was Mr. Fergen, and his youngest son was the same age as me, and they lived in the house next door to the first house we lived in, one of the original homes, just east of the laundry dry cleaners. And Truman and I would wander, like I said, the streets before they were streets. And he was just wild about animals and plants and that sort of thing. And that's what he ended up doing in life, too. He studied biology. And one day, we were wandering around, and here was an irrigation ditch that had pretty well run dry. There was a dead muskrat. And he got so excited, and he picked that muskrat up, and he cradled it like it was a little baby, took it all the way home, and I thought, Truman, you're nuts. You have no idea what that thing's been—the next day at Lewis and Clark, he had it on a cart with the principal and going around to each classroom and giving all kinds of details about how the muskrat lived, and showing them their teeth. And I just—blew me away. I thought when he got home with that thing, his parents were going to tell him to throw it in the garbage can. [LAUGHTER] Here he showed the whole school! Bauman: Good story. Donahue: Ah, there's lots of other stories. My first job was selling newspapers in the cafeteria. And the cafeteria is the old buildings right across from the Federal Building. And I'd sell a Spokesman Review, and there were a number of men who would, when they finished reading their paper, as they went out to get on a bus or on one of the stretch cars, would give me the paper back, resell it. So it was kind of fun. Bauman: This was a cafeteria for Hanford workers? Donahue: Yeah. There were some big shots in there that would, because they had these stretch '42 Chevys, I think they were, that they'd piece together, and they had about four doors, five doors on each side. And some of these guys rode those, so you knew they were pretty much up there. And I believe that one of my customers was Enrico Fermi, because he was here incognito, and when I see pictures of him, I guess one of the guys that gave me my paper back. You don't forget those guys. Bauman: So what year would this have been around when you-- Donahue: Well, that would have been in '44, early '45. Bauman: Shortly after you got here. Donahue: Yeah. And then about mid '45, I got a paper route of the whole south end. Then I was in the big money. Right? [LAUGHTER] Bauman: So what paper was that? Donahue: Spokesman Review. Yeah. I earned enough to buy a brand new Columbia bike, and I used that for the next several years, delivering papers. That was a proud moment. Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Sure. Well, I want to thank you for coming in today— Donahue: Certainly. Bauman: --and sharing your experiences and memories. I appreciate it. Donahue: I'm glad to be here, and it's fun to reminisce, too. So it's been fun for me. Bauman: Good, great. Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 700 Area 100 Area 300 Area 200 Area Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:34:00 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 207kbps Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1944-1957 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1953-1957 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Curt Donahue Description An account of the resource An interview with Curt Donahue conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013-8-7 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2016-04-22: Metadata v1 created – [RG] Subject The topic of the resource Hanford (Wash.) Hanford Site (Wash.) Hanford Nuclear Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) 100 Area 200 Area 300 Area 700 Area Boeing Nuclear weapons plants--Environmental aspects--Washington (State)--Hanford Site. Richland (Wash.) Secrecy https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Feaffdba6eb85d327d3752eeb0b145f4f.jpg 91411fd67fa3fa6486529aee6826ef94 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F486861acfd5501c812a8507407fc59fd.mp4 f8067ad3743d7a4d5cc770ea8ac84100 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 Parker Foundation Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Nuclear science; Richland, Wa.; Hanford, Wa.; Parker, Herbert, 1910-1984 Description An account of the resource "The Herbert M. Parker Foundation collects valuable personal perspectives from key individuals who worked in radiological and environmental protection at the Hanford site in the early years of its development. Since 2004, student interns have recorded interviews from health physics and related science professionals. These historically valuable interviews document their personal experiences, observations, contributions and ideas. Several of the distinguished professionals who have spoken at the Annual Herbert M. Parker Lecture are also included. The videotaped interviews and accompanying biographical sketches will be made accessible to the public." See https://tricities.wsu.edu/parkerfoundation/ParkerHistory Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 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. Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Dade Moeller 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 Dade Moeller Description An account of the resource An interview with Dade Moeller conducted by the Herbert M. Parker Foundation at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Herbert M. Parker Foundation at Washington State University Tri-Cities https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F5a7f0be5bf62e7a272f5cf9e90bc30b2.jpg ec69668cfd105a3844bc1dfc036df261 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F66986ea49c777b4977889b8a654cf444.mp4 6007493e41305ba6e1266b686800d020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Laura Arata Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Dale Denham Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Northwest Public Television | Denham_Dale </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Laura Arata: I feel ready. I think Dale feels ready. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Dale Denham: Yeah. Are you going to ask me some questions to begin with, or just-- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Arata: I sure am. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Denham: [LAUGHTER] We're here, huh? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Arata: If we could just start by having you say your name, and then spell your last name for us, please? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Denham: Okay. Dale Denham. D-E-N-H-A-M. I always let people know it's like the denim jeans. Can't forget me. [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Arata: Thank you. My name's Laura Arata. It's December 12, 2013. We're conducting this interview on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. So if we could just start, I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about when you came to Hanford, why you came to Hanford, and what you knew about it at the time. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Denham: Well, maybe it's better if I tell you when I first came in 1947. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Arata: Please do. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Denham: But as a young person, came with my family because my dad was invited to come up here and start a radio station. And Dad was in the radio business since the '20s. And his buddy says, boy, this is just a golden opportunity, and dad said, oh no. The war's over and this place is going to fold. Obviously, he was a bit wrong, but he had been through the Depression and all those kind of things. So we came. My sister and I would come up on the train and spend weeks, because they had a couple daughters. And they moved in in '47 and stayed here 'til '57. So the station today is KONA, but at that time it was KWIE. And it began in that period, and so we made lots of trips. But they lived in Kennewick, so I really didn't spend much time in Richland. They brought us out to see the barricade out here on Stevens, and the bypass to even get to the 300 Area. And at the time, their studios were being built, and so they were doing things in the Hanford House, which is today the Richland Red Lion. So I had some introduction to the Tri-City community. But I came as a graduate student, 1961, as part of a fellowship from the Atomic Energy Commission, which was in Health Physics. And it turns out I was in the first class of graduates of master's degree from the University of Washington. There were like ten of them, ten of us. We came and spent the summer here in '61. I got married that summer also. And we became acquainted with the site by--much like they did most of the engineers, they moved us around on site, kind of give us a familiarity with all the different aspects of health physics, which was radiation protection, basically, for the people and the environment. And so that was my introduction to the place. But while I was here, the opportunity to get a master's, because they didn't have a master's program at UW at the time, because we were the first class. And while we were here during the summer, a program opened up to get a master's by going back for the second year. So I went on back to University of Washington and was able to get my master's. Matter of fact, I was studying rheumatoid arthritic patients looking for ways to use the reactor there at the university to evaluate the gold in these patients, because gold was not a cure for the disease, but it could slow it down and at least make people so they could--so I worked with two individuals. I collected all their urine, because we were looking for activation techniques. And it took me most of the year because the opportunities were great to look to the future, but we didn't have all the technology yet. I was doing a lot of my work using a single channel analyzer and looking at different photo peaks, energy, gamma ray energies coming off of these radionuclides, because we're all full of sodium, and sodium has a very high energy activation product, sodium-24. And so that was a real issue. And I had to try different ways is to subtract that material, or that impact that we would see on the scans. But that was the beginning. And so I completed the degree. And then my wife had been born in Long Beach, California. Her grandmother was still down there. And so got the opportunity to go to Lawrence Livermore Laboratory--it was called Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at the time--in Livermore, California. So went down there and spent seven years--no, five years--and then came back up here. She developed some real allergy issues. And the kids were still young, small, a couple years old. So it was a good opportunity to come back. We knew what the area was like. We had spent the summer here, which is a tough time. And of course we remembered--I remembered from my childhood all the dust storms and the running out to grab the laundry to bring it in because it was getting dusty. But I just thoroughly enjoyed the sunshine. And my parents, Dad was from Baker City, Oregon, and mother was from Boise, Idaho. So it made sense, in one sense, that they might select to come here. But Mom didn't get along too well in the heat, and so this was not a favorite place. So that was probably part of the equation, too, that they chose not to even go any further, even though their friends were very successful here and sold out, and bought the station in Hood River and then retired, which is what they all did. So that was my introduction and coming to Hanford. And I served in a variety of departments--I mean, by name, but they all were basically radiation protection, health physics, mostly applied. In other words, I was dealing with how to take air samples, where to take air samples, how to take river samples, how to measure them, what to measure them for. I got into the environmental arena, which was really my long-term interest. And so I was involved in the late '60s in the water monitoring portion of the Hanford program, where I looked at the water in the schools, took water from the public schools, water from the wells, drinking water. We sampled water from the river directly. We monitored the river by passing it through detectors. And this was a period when most of the reactors were operating, so there was plenty of activity, and a real challenge to trace that. Where did it go? How was it going to impact the public? But I worked primarily in the 300 Area until I retired from Battelle in '95. Oh, by the way, that's who I came to work for, was Battelle. And I spent all my career up to that point with Battelle after I'd come back from Livermore. And I took the certification exam in health physics and became a certified health physicist, a diplomat of the American Board of Health Physics. I served on the board for that--certifying other individuals coming along. I taught some of the classes here. We started here when this was the graduate school, the graduate center, long before Washington State University became a part of the community. And so I had a lot of involvement in that arena. I just really enjoyed the field because it was broad enough that we could be concerned about x-rays and radiation that you would get externally from contamination, or get it on your body, in your body, so internal evaluation. But I was primarily interested in keeping the environment clean, which was--And I have to mention Herb Parker because he was really the father of the radiation protection, radiation safety here at the site. And Herb called me up one day--this was in the early '70s--and said, I've got an opportunity for you. I think that you would make an excellent candidate to make this move. And I said, well, I wasn't interested in moving. Well, he says, I think you should come over to my office and let's chat. Well, he had a job in an environmental organization called Radiation Management Corporation. He was a consultant to them, and they were in Philadelphia. And I'd always lived all my life on the west coast, so I wasn't very enthused. But I went, I listened. He sent me back for an interview. I went in December, just about this time, a horrible time to go back there. It was crummy weather. It was wet, dark, I couldn't see anything. But it was a little company, and they were about to grow with the nuclear industry to supply environmental monitoring support for the nuclear power reactors up and down the east coast. So I turned them down. But two years later I got another call and says, gosh, we really need you, and here's an opportunity. You better come. So by '74 I did take advantage, moved back there. And then I think it was Jimmy Carter that desired not to reprocess any fuel, and so the nuclear industry, the nuclear power industry dropped off—well, at least began its diminished increased places, increased sites, increased utilities going with nuclear. So that led to the need—we had too many people, grew fast, but then--And matter of fact, my original boss here, Bob Junkins by name, hired me in '67, and I worked with him for almost two years before I moved to the environmental. I was in the criticality safety, nuclear safety business in that time. And my whole role was to develop a criticality safety manual that we could use to audit and evaluate the users of nuclear material here on the site—Battelle's portion of the site. And that led me--then, with that environmental interest, I moved into the environmental monitoring portion in the late '60s. And that's what set me up for that. I went to Philadelphia, but I had to go find something else. And unfortunately, in that time period, I also got divorced back there in Philadelphia. And my children moved back to the west coast, to Bainbridge Island. So it was now, where do I go? Fortunately, there were lots of jobs. I didn't have any problem finding a job. But I chose to go back to Livermore because I was familiar with the territory and the people. And so I went back there. But it was only a couple of years, because I met a gal that I had dated in high school. And she ran into my sister, and my sister gave me an address. I wrote to her, and she called me up and says, what are you doing for Christmas? I said, I'm taking the train to go see my kids. Well, why don't you stop here and see me on the way in Salem? And we both went to Willamette University. That was where our degrees were from. And I'm still married to her today, 35 years. And we've had a great time here at Hanford. When I did retire, I moved—well, I helped--because she was Vice President of United Way. And so I took on the role of the listener as the United Way representative volunteer at the Reemployment Opportunity Center. This was 1995, when we had some 5,000 layoffs. I was part of that, only I wasn't a layoff. I took a voluntary retirement, early retirement. And through that I discovered that there were other positions available on the site, and Bechtel Hanford had come in as the environmental restoration contractor. And golly, I was involved in all that sort of stuff. So it was a perfect opportunity to send a note—I knew the head of the department from my health physics background and membership—and was offered that opportunity to go to work for them. So I spend another eight years with them. And then to finish my career, so to speak, I retired from them in '06, and then I got a call from Battelle, said, we're doing all these calculating the radiation risks of former atomic energy workers, and we really need some help. Could you do this for us? And that was nice because I did it at home. I would come to meetings with Battelle. And one of my close friends, the two of us kind of worked together, which was great, because we were working at home. I had to buy a new computer and all that because I needed access to much more sophisticated equipment than I had, because I was just a little email and that sort of thing. My exciting things that happened here, my work in the nuclear—criticality safety—that was one of my first papers, major papers, because while I was at Livermore I studied the transuranics, which meant the materials that were heavier than uranium, uranium, neptunium, plutonium, americium, curium and so on up the chain. And I got very familiar because I was working with a group of chemists in California as their radiation safety person, where they were trying to come up with these heavier elements. And so I got to know most of that material. And when I got up here and the criticality safety, because that was a concern too. We knew that some of these materials could go critical with the right conditions. So that gave me an opportunity to use that background that I had in knowing these materials, and then to put together, really, a summary. I evaluated the fire safety aspect, the explosion aspects, the radiation—internal as well as external—aspects. So that was one of my real highlights. And that came right at a time when I took the exam to become certified in health physics. The next the set of the exciting things were the working with the environmental, where I got involved with nuclear power reactors and in helping develop criteria for their environmental monitoring programs. You see, we went from Atomic Energy Commission, AEC, to ERDA, Energy Research and Development Administration. That was in '74. And then we became the Department of Energy, and that was about '77, '78. So I went through that period, so I was working for all three agencies, so to speak, just because one followed the other. I think my document that we finally issued on how to use environmental monitoring—that is, what techniques and so on—were recommended by what was called ERDA at that time, but became the DOE position for all the sites. And the way we handled that was, we went out as teams and visited Oak Ridge and Savannah River and Chicago. And we even went to some of the power reactors, or the early--not so much power, but the early development reactors, Idaho, testing, and checking out how they were doing things so that we could then look at a composite and gather the folks. We held a couple of workshops where we brought in folks from all these other sites and said, you know, here's what we see that ought to be the basic criteria. So that was a great opportunity to explore and see other sites. So I visited many of the DOE sites, Los Alamos and Livermore, as all part of that, too. So I had a wonderful time and experience in a whole variety of things, handling these transuranic materials that not a whole lot was known. And you came to know these things by working with them, working on developing shielding, because these materials also—not only external radiation but also neutron radiation, which you get primarily from accelerators, or from particular radionuclides that do give off neutrons as they fission. And so those were areas to explore and develop. But what a great place to have to have worked, to have had my time, and I really don't want to leave the community. We've enjoyed--and my wife, I thought, who really was--after she finished school at Willamette, she stayed there in Salem and went to work. And she's always been in the social services side of things. And she came here, and she headed up Girl Scouts, she headed up Red Cross, and then got involved with United Way. So we ended our careers here, so to speak, but a great place that we have enjoyed. And of course it's far different today than when I came 60 years ago to visit, because the agriculture and all those other things that have occurred as part of the site. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Arata: All right. That was a wonderful overview. I'd like to back up for just a minute to when your father first came here to start this radio station. I know you said he lived in Kennewick, but-- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Denham: No, he didn't. It was my father's best buddy. Yeah. They both were in Portland radio stations. Dad, and his name was Clarence McCready, but we called him Mac. And he chose to come, and brought us along to come and see. But Dad refused to come and be a part of the team. Dean Mitchell's the name I can think of right now. He was—and Dean Mitchell, I think, is still in the community, I think he's still alive. And I believe he goes to Kennewick United Methodist Church over there. I hope to see him because I'm going to be speaking at that church here in a couple weeks, actually about three weeks, in January. But I know I linked up with him because I had a lot of pictures from all this development of the radio station that my family—not my own personal family, but our very close family friends. And we only celebrated Easter and Fourth of July with his family. So you can see, we would come up here and be up here, and in a good time of the year, spring. Summer was hot, but these were occasions. Yeah, so my family never did move up here. But they came to visit when I finally settled here in '67. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Arata: Visited. Okay. So do you recall any impressions of the community at that time from your visits, what it was like to be here? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Denham: Well, the things I remember--and even as a graduate student, the rest of the guys--there were four of us came together--no, three of us. Three of us who had all gone to Willamette together--went to UW for our first year, and then all came here, and then went back to UW to complete that program--they all lived in Kennewick, but I lived here in Richland. I couldn't pass up the nickel each way bus. And I lived in on Gribble Street, which is now where Kadlec has taken over those what were two-story apartments and one-story fourplexes. And that's where I lived that summer in '61. And the bus came right down our street, hopped on for a nickel, and whether I went out to our areas or the 300 Area, because we spent one day a week during that time in the 300 Area in classes in the library, because that was an opportunity for us to learn more about the site, and about the profession and the field. So we had people tell us about instrumentation, told us about environment, told us about the various things that were related to radiation instrument development, and different kinds of survey instruments, and so on. And that was a nice part, because coming back a few years later--well, I left here in '62, finished my degree, and didn't come back 'til '67, so I was gone for five years. The bus system was still here, but the rates were different, and I wasn't using the bus then. And I went to work for Battelle, and my office was in the Federal Building. So I was able to walk to work. And I'm a busser, a walker, and I've been that all my life. I did that in Portland. So it was a logical step for me. The fact that I could get around--I was not much of a commercial--I didn't buy a lot of stuff. And so to this day we're not much consumers. And so it was great. There were a few places. I bowled, you know, I played tennis, golfed some, took advantage of the things that were available right here. I had a cousin--couple of cousins still in Baker City, Oregon, so we'd go down for weekends to go down and see them. And he was a dentist, so he took care of my dental needs early on. But once I settled here with my wife and family, it was no longer making those kind of trips for that purpose. We still had the friendship and relationship. I enjoyed just the—well, I guess I wouldn't say I enjoyed the heat, but yet I liked lots of sunshine, and the people. Enjoyed working with the people. And that was a tough part of retiring. And of course, I took care of part of that by volunteering over at the Reemployment Opportunities Center, which was over in Kennewick. And at that point we had moved out to the Village at Canyon Lakes. It was brand new, building that community and retirement. And so I thought, well, we'll get in on the ground floor. We'll be there and get acquainted, and so on. But then the opportunity with Bechtel, but clear out at the north end of the site. And after two years of that long commute, we moved back to Richland. But the opportunities here for my interests, and the opportunities on the job, because I didn't just stay right here, because I was working for Battelle, and we did a lot of—I suppose you would call it contract research because that was Battelle's primary activity. But yet it really took me to visit other sites and to see how we could improve what we were doing right here. And I think that that opportunity—I didn't have to go somewhere else. Yes, I did interview for jobs along the line, along the way during the time. I interviewed at Los Alamos. I interviewed at Rocky Flats and so on. But this was home, so to speak. And so it was a good place to stay. It wasn't—30,000 or so population. And the population of Richland, today I'm not sure what it is, but I don't think it's doubled in all this time. But the boundary where Yakima came in to the Columbia there was kind of the southern end of Richland. There was Richland Y and so on. But I lived essentially all my time within that confines. And of course now there's many homes and developments south, and yet still part of the incorporated portion of Richland. So yes, this was a delightful place, and it still is for me. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Arata: We've heard lots of fun stories about card games and checkers games and different kinds of things going on, on these buses. Do you have any fun stories? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Denham: Well, yes. I tell you, what I used the bus for was sleeping. Being a newlywed and having all these classes and riding the bus every day, I would often take a nap on the way home. And often I'd end up at the end of the bus. Rather than getting off at my stop, I would discover, oh, I missed the stop, so I got a little walk in. [LAUGHTER] But yeah, there were card games on the buses. I was not a bridge player, and that was one of the—I played at pinnacle and hearts. And we played on the job. My goodness, we kept our scores on the blackboard in the office. Yeah, we played hearts. And there were other games, I'm sure, but that's what I remember the most. And I remember, also, we were conscious of our walking hour, keeping track of our weight and all. So we would walk over—after lunch we'd walk over and check our weight at the medical, go weigh on the scales. And I was never a smoker, but one of the guys in the group, even the leader, was a heavy smoker. But one of the guys who was roughly my age--and matter of fact, he went back to grad school, and that opened the door for me to step in and take his job in the environmental in the late '60s. So that was ideal. And that was another thing. We were paying attention to those things that now the society is beginning to look at. So we looked for those kinds of things. I think the working environment was great. In my later years here, before I left Battelle, it was altogether different, because now the opportunities within Battelle were more in the research arena. And that wasn't my forte, it was not my capabilities, not my interest, in going out and trying to obtain contracts and so on. So I found it--and that's—when the opportunity to retire early, I just took advantage of it. My wife had a good job, and so she became my sugar mama to take care of me, take care of us. And we had no children living here. Our children were all grown by then. And so our needs were different. But I missed the people. But yet I was interacting every day, because I was there usually half a day. But some days I'd be there all day. And I kept the hot water hot so I could make cocoa, or soups, or whatever people who were coming to find jobs and to look. We did mock interviews and all that sort of thing. So it was a continuation of that people interaction that I really enjoyed. And of course, when one does retire, a number of my friends have said the same thing. And yet today I don't know how I have time to work, because I'm plenty involved in the community. And so that's part of--my wife and I joined the Gideons, and so that's been one of our major activities in our retirement, that we've served as presidents of the local camps on a geographic basis, and also area directors. And we have a state convention coming up this next spring, so we're heavily involved in that. So we have enjoyed that aspect of life here. And we have a daughter in Olympia, and we have a son—well, a daughter and family in Olympia and same in Portland. Otherwise the kids are south of Eugene and Cottage Grove, and then a son and family in Albuquerque. Neither of the sons—both have PhDs—and neither are involved in the nuclear business. Both of them engineers. One basically what I would call a—well, one's a civil engineer with water interests. And the other is involved in materials engineering, works for Ball Aerospace, so has a lot of involvement in things that I might have had an involvement in, but not from the nuclear standpoint. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Denham: Yeah, the things I remember—like I say, we had activities with other families right here. We were involved in the church. We got involved in the church. I'm in a different church today, but that's where we raised our kids. So it was a good community environment. In terms of what else did I do, well, I think I mentioned I had the children, and we did things with them. We camped. And I wasn't a fisherman or a hunter, so those things weren't part of my interests here in the community. But I remember we would do the sledding and so on when the conditions were right, the snow and Carmichael Hill, because we lived not far from there, we'd walk over there, and swimming pool. Back in the very early days--and let me go back to that for just a moment. Because when we came, McNary Dam wasn't here. So we had to take a ferry to cross from or Oregon to Washington, or we had to take the Bridge of the Gods back, 40 miles out of Portland, and then take that route. And we'd usually come over Satus Pass and come into Kennewick that way. Today you can take Highway 12 and 14 in all the way to Vancouver on the Oregon side--I mean, on the Washington side, excuse me. So that was interesting because this was a free-flowing river. There weren't any dams in that area. And so riding that ferry in a fairly narrow portion of the river was—and these are one- or two-car type ferries. I mean, this wasn't a big ferry like you see out of Puget Sound. And it was difficult to reach the shore. Sometimes you'd get close and you'd have to back up and try again. And then I watched all the highways come in over the Horse Heavens. Because it used to be you could stay on the Oregon side and come around through Walla Walla that way. So it was a whole different—and it took longer. The roads weren't as nice. And so I watched the—several times they've rebuilt the highway over the Horse Heavens. Because we have family in Portland, we go down there every month or two with grandkids. They're about to finish—well, the last one is in his senior year in high school, and the other's in college. And all the rest of our grandkids, except the ones in Albuquerque, are all over 21. So our involvement with them is a lot different than when they were younger. So yeah, it was a different place just because of the getting around. And we didn't have a public transit. We didn't have—in those early days right here. But we had the Hanford buses. And you can see the one down there by the Crehst Museum. And that's what I rode much of the time, up until when I chose my work with Battelle. By then, going out on the site, it was about $50 a month to ride the bus then. It was more expensive. And then I did go through some periods of spending time out on the site, where I'd spend a couple weeks for some activity, work-related, and I would end up being able to take a government car. And I worked in the Federal Building, so it was convenient. We had a motor pool there. So that’s some of the background. I don't know if there's other things that you were hoping to talk about, or remind me of. [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Arata: I think I just have couple more questions. One thing I wonder if you could talk about, obviously much of your career at Hanford spans the Cold War period. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Denham: Mm-hm. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Arata: So of course security was a very important concern. Can you talk a little bit about how that impacted your career? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Denham: Well, it certainly did. And I was fortunate in the sense that I had the Atomic Energy Commission fellowship. In order to get that and apply it at the University of Washington, I had to get security clearance. So I was cleared, and that happened when I went to Livermore. Right after I finished grad school, I arrived at Livermore. And because I had a clearance, I was assigned those facilities to be radiation safety person. I know that you know the name Ron Kathren, or have come across Ron Kathren. And Ron Kathren became my officemate there. He didn't have the clearance. So I got to be in places and work things that he wasn't able to—well, he was eventually, I mean, he got the clearance also. And of course, late in my career—like when I went to Philadelphia, I didn't need a clearance back there. And when I came back, yes, I had to get my clearance re-instituted in Livermore, because Livermore is still very much involved with weaponry, or at least the development of materials. And so yes, clearance. But fortunately, I didn't have an issue, and because I had had it really at the beginning when I went to grad school, that didn't impact me. And some of my site visits at Oak Ridge, I had to have special clearance to get into some of the places. One of the things I didn't mention, and I should, I got involved in the decommissioning. And of course, that was the activity with Bechtel Hanford. But the other thing I got involved in was what we call development of an emergency assessment resource manual. We called it HEARM, and they called—because I was working with some gals, too, that was my harem. But it was Hanford Emergency Assessment Resource Manual. Well, our sponsor at DOE headquarters began to see the utility of that at some of the other DOE sites. So we went to Livermore, we went to Los Alamos, we went to Oak Ridge, we went to Savannah River. We developed those same manuals for these other sites. And basically what it was was an identification of the--a safety assessment. And DOE was forcing all to look at the safety of their business. And if something went wrong, how bad could it be? So that's what this manual was, was to identify the facilities and the materials. It was structured originally about radiation, but it became clear that there were also hazardous chemicals and other materials that needed to be of concern. And if they had an explosion, if they had a venting, they had a situation, where would that stuff go? So we developed this. We looked at site boundaries. How far to the site boundary, in what directions, look at wind speeds, all of that. So we combined all of that into a manual so that we could use that here at Hanford, called the Unified Dose Assessment Center, UDAC. And that provided a tool so when an emergency occurred, we knew we had an indication of how bad it could be. We could flip to the page that was Building XYZ, and we could say, ah, this really is not likely to be any kind of an issue. Or just the opposite, that it was an ABC, it was the top priority, the most hazardous materials on the site handled in that building. And what were the projected, from the safety assessments, for the actual use of those facilities? And so that was an exciting kind of thing, because we got into sites where they had more security need than what I had to do for those. And so yes, we got into those. Matter of fact, some of the materials that we developed were basically classified information on how much material is in this building, where is this building relative to the site, and so on. So those kind of things we had to tone down, we had to talk about and find ways. And they became, essentially, not top secret, but at least they were less. And so we provided not only these manuals for right here, but also DOE headquarters got the same copies. So whenever something was going wrong, they're evaluating what's happening out here, or from Livermore, or from Sandy, or Savannah River, or one of the other sites. So yes, that was the emergency management aspect. And Battelle, that was one of the things that I moved from that development into working with the—Battelle had a contract for the 60 nuclear power plants to do emergency exercises. And I even got involved with my wife with the Red Cross, because Red Cross would get involved in emergency exercises, especially for the supply system here. And I remember Mesa School was the first one. And so I got a couple of my health physics buddies, and we would go and be the consultants. Because the farmers would come in and say, well, what should I do? My cows are out there on this potentially contaminated ground. What do I need to do? This was just--these were what-if type exercises. So that was an aspect I guess I just had passed over and forgotten all about. So even had an involvement with my wife indirectly because of that. So with these nuclear sites, I got involved as an evaluator to go out either for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or DOE, and evaluate these exercises. So I was involved not in developing those exercises, but evaluating and being there on site. And also, as a result, I got to go to the Kennedy Space Center and involved in a couple of spacecraft launches that had nuclear materials. And so that was exciting, paid to go. And also got involved in many cancellations. You know, weather didn't turn out right, we'd get thunderstorms or a rain, and you'd have to wait it out for a few more days. Those sort of things. Galileo, I think, was the one major one that we were sending heat sources, radioactive sources into space, so if they were to have aborted—not for reentry, but on the launch, that's why we were there, to take air samples, you know, we were teams spread out. So there's another aspect I'd forgotten about. [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Arata: Very cool. You had this multiplicity of great jobs, it sounds like, throughout the course of your career here. Is there anything that stands out as being the most challenging or the most rewarding? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Denham: Well, I think the challenge came later in the career when—as I mentioned, that Battelle was going off in a research wing, and that wasn't where my expertise and my capabilities were. And so a challenge to—if I'm not going to stick around, what am I going to do? Because nuclear power was obviously diminishing with time, especially when you get up in the 90s, and so on. So that became one of the challenges, if I were to retire, what would I do? I was young enough, late '50s, I didn't need to retire that early. And the other side, the side as I shared, I think sort of the three or four major things that I was involved in that I very much enjoyed, one—and I haven't shared this directly—I was involved with Joe Soledad. And I don't know whether you've interviewed Joe, but I know Joe's been interviewed. I just don't know who were involved. But Joe was developing all the criteria to evaluate all these radionuclides that had been released here in Hanford, had been released at other sites, or could be—weren't necessarily all released, but I mean, if they got into the environment and got into people, what kind of doses could those--Well, I was involved with Joe as my mentor. I developed the numbers that went in—in other words, I looked at the decay schemes of each of those radionuclides and then built the numbers that would go into the equations. I didn't develop the equations for how much got into the human body, but I developed if you had radioiodine, or you had strontium, or you had cesium, or you had plutonium, what could that mean inside the body? And so that was a great opportunity that I had developing those, because those became—and still used today—all that environmental pathway stuff that Joe had developed is still in use today, used by the EPA, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Yeah, they've added more materials and modified things a bit. But the modifications are more related to, now, more knowledge about some of those decay schemes and so on, but that impact. So that was one of the exciting things. The criticality safety manual. I get the manual done, and I got to move on to something else, because once you've developed the manual, unless you're using it--yes, I was. I was out evaluating criticality safety. I was auditing, basically. Oh, that was, yeah, I could do it, but it was more fun to go out and get involved in the environmental monitoring, choosing which sample, where to sample, what to analyze those samples for, and then write the report to show what this means impact-wise for the site. Going from there, then, into developing what should an environmental monitoring program look like, either for a nuclear power plant or a place like Hanford. That was that exciting and thrilling, and I felt I made a contribution. And then to jump over into, now you understand that stuff, and now relate that to emergency preparedness and evaluating emergency preparedness. Did you take into account? I will have to say, because I was involved in a course, and I've forgotten what the course was called, but it was at the Nevada test site. And we were there--and I think it was only Hanford person there at the time. That's when I was involved in emergency preparedness. And this was a course to really walk us through scenarios and situations, and see the mistakes we could make. We could walk over a wire on the ground that we shouldn't have because it was live, or could've been live, and not recognizing that. You're taking an action for what you see in front of you, but then missing out on something that you shouldn't have done as part of that. And that became part of our evaluation, when we looked at mistakes they would make, not take an air sample, or take it where it shouldn't have been. You should have taken it over here instead of over there, you know, those kind of things. So was able to use all that background and material that I had had as part of my career. I feel like, yes, had I started over today, I think I would've probably gone the environmental, but more from an atmospheric and understanding weather. That was an interest as a kid. I've watched—this is before television—and I would pay attention to the thermometer and what was going on. Is it going to snow tomorrow, or that kind of thing. But otherwise, no, it was great. And the courses and the opportunities afforded by this diverse kind of a field, that when I came, and when I was a health physicist, I didn't know what a health physicist was, but I think I have a pretty good idea today. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Arata: So obviously, a lot of my students now were born after the Cold War. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Denham: Right. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Arata: They don't really understand that time period. Is there anything you'd like for future generations who may be watching this video to know about what it was like to work during that time period and contribute to that effort? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Denham: Well, obviously, one of the things, being here in Hanford, was because we had all these reactors operating, which meant that there was always contamination going into the river, contamination going into the ground. Reprocessing was occurring, but was stopped at a time period. So then we had to—and of course, today we still hear about whether it's from the west side or else around the country. Even our own family ask questions. What about the leaking tanks? What does that mean? And from my perspective, I have an idea what that means. And I think I look at it in a lot different mindset, because I know that yes, it's of concern, and it should be. But on the other hand, it's not going to kill me. It's not going to give me a dose that I won't want to stay here, I won't want to live here. And because, like I said, in the older days, when all the reactors were operating and so on, we had a lot more radioactivity to deal with. But Joe's equation--Joe Soledad--those pathway formulas and equations and so on that we used, we proved with that that hey, yes, there is material out there. It's of low consequence to you and me as residents of the community. And I think that that was probably a kind of thing that we—the scientists, let's say, the science side--were not very successful in communicating that to the public. And I don't think we are today. Because I can remember one of my daughter's friends, when they had the different kinds of sweeteners, and they would say no, we're going to cut those off. And so when her dad worked in the grocery business, he could bring that stuff home, and no, I don't think we want to use that. Again, uninformed about those kind of things. And I think that's the aspect—that we get a bug, a thought of what an impact could be, and yet we don't know the whole story. And I know I tried, but on the other hand, that wasn't my role particularly. But I was aware. And I think that, looking today, we look at so many more things today in terms of hurtful environmental impact kinds of things. I'm thinking just the environmental movement, if you will, because our daughter-in-law is very much involved there, and her daughter is now in college and looking in that same arena. The other daughter-in-law down in New Mexico, that was one of her areas of interest. And she studied bugs and insects and that sort of thing. Today she's not using that, because she's really into health and doing private yoga and exercise training. But the Cold War meant that--well, that's where it was nice when I got to go the other sites, because that allowed me to kind of see, and to put all this together as an understanding of the whole package, and not just what's happening in Hanford or what's happening at Oak Ridge or whatever, to be able to realize that probably some choices—I mean, the making the choice here of Hanford, I think, was a wonderful choice. Choosing this remote location--it's not so remote today, but I think it was an excellent—from all the material, all the information we knew at the time. And yet places like Savannah River, where you've got all kinds of groundwater and all kinds of those kind of issues, maybe that wasn't such a good place, where the ability of stuff to move would be greater than a place like this. And I think what we saw, and what I remember just from the public, my own families—our own families would ask questions, which was very reasonable. And I think the understanding—and we've been watching—I'm digressing for a second, but we've been watching the Presidential wives series on television, so we're going back over the history and seeing some of the things that were going on as this whole business developed in our lifetime, things that we didn't realize, because some was top secret, not shared. And of course, I was perfectly happy to work in a closed environment, where you didn't share everything you did. For someone today, I think that the question aspect of business, and for the future, is always question what you're doing, how can it impact the environment, how can it impact people, how can it impact you yourself? Cellphones, all kinds of things that we use and are in use daily, but do we really know what the long-term impacts of these devices are? I think for the moment we feel quite certain that we're not creating monster issues that become-- But I like the environmental movement, because I kind of put my life together around that, an interest in seeing that we're doing the right things to keep us safe, and yet not say, you can't do that. And of course, the environmental impact statement business. I was involved partly in that too, in helping develop those. I guess my last one that I was involved in was in Tennessee, for the Tennessee Valley Authority, because they were going wide with lots of nuclear. And that was in the '90s, as I recall, when I went down there and was involved. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Arata: Is there anything I haven't asked you about that you'd like to tell us about? Any other stories that stand out? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Denham: Well, of course, we did have accidents. We had things that—yeah, I got involved in a cleanup in the 300 Area, where an underground pipe had broken. And this was americium, was a principal nuclide that had gotten into the ground. And we ended up digging that all up. But just chasing it, deciding where to sample, and digging up and then discovering, oh, the pipe is all corroded. So yes, everything that went down that drain. And so those kinds of things, I really enjoyed those, because you were evaluating a condition that was really an unknown. And I think that's part of what the environmental restoration contract--the Bechtel work that I was involved in, we were doing some of that, too, because we were making measurements and then determining, did those measurements give us what we need to know so that we can take the appropriate steps for remediation? And so I think that aspect, so to speak, of research piece might have been--if I were to start again, I might be more interested in research. But at the time, I was more interested in what we need to know so that we can take the right steps to move forward. I think that those are my observations. I was an enthusiastic worker. I just loved the opportunity and the people to work with. And we did a lot of group things. You know, I can remember back in the old days, Ron Kathren and I would have an equation on the blackboard we were trying to solve, and then leave it up there for a while with getting more information to make things fit. You took the information you had. And I was successful, probably published about, I don't know, 50 different papers in Health Physics Journal. And I also was involved in the Society for Radiological Protection in the British Isles. I gave two different presentations over there in the '80s and '90s, which is always nice to go and experience others. I had even looked at that as a possible exchange. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Denham: And as a result of those visits, I got invited to go to the Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna and work on an environmental plan with folks from all over the world. And we had interpreters, because we had Russians, and we had Canadians, and we had French and Germans. And so on—all that was nice. And they paid my way, and I got to spend--matter of fact, I made two trips in the same year on that activity. I had a third one, but the Department of Energy wouldn't allow me to go on the third one. So that adds to your enjoyment, your understanding and working with people who have come from different places, and yet have similar issues and problems, and how are you addressing—especially when we're trying to write a manual, an international manual that would be used wherever, in developing countries as well as advanced countries and so on, to protect people in the environment. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Arata: Is there anything else at all? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Denham: Not that's coming to me at this point. [LAUGHTER] I'm just delighted to have had this opportunity to share with you, even though it's very uncoordinated. [LAUGHTER] I certainly rambled. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Arata: No, that was wonderful. You gave us some great details. That’s always exciting for us to hear about. And I want to thank you so much for sharing with us. We really appreciate you taking time out. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Denham: Well, Laura, it was a pleasure sharing with you and getting to know you. I wish you well in your— </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Arata: Thank you. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516"> Denham: --future work and finishing your PhD. I never got there. </div> Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri-Cities Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:06:42 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 5261 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 300 area. Bechtel Hanford Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1947-2013 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1961-1995 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Parker, Herb Kathren, Ron Soldat, Joe Carter, Jimmy Junkins, Bob McCreedy, Clarence Mitchell, Dean Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Dale Denham Description An account of the resource An interview with Dale Denham conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 12/12/2013 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2016-05-24: Metadata v1 created – [J.G] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Nuclear weapons plants--Environmental aspects--Washington (State)--Hanford Site. Nuclear weapons plants--Waste disposal--Environmental aspects--Washington (State)--Hanford Site. Nuclear instruments & methods Richland (Wash.) Kennewick (Wash.) 300 Area Battelle (Wash.) Bechtel Hanford Kennewick (Wash.) Livermore Los Alamos Oakridge Richland (Wash.) Savannah River https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F6955c537970dc3aa5b0acd11fa6b0624.jpg 2755805dc6daaea81178c05e12fd3c0b https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F642abc3557e1ed1079901d924947b4f3.mp4 8ac6411faddd4405475ea9b0a6ed6b2b 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 Parker Foundation Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Nuclear science; Richland, Wa.; Hanford, Wa.; Parker, Herbert, 1910-1984 Description An account of the resource "The Herbert M. Parker Foundation collects valuable personal perspectives from key individuals who worked in radiological and environmental protection at the Hanford site in the early years of its development. Since 2004, student interns have recorded interviews from health physics and related science professionals. These historically valuable interviews document their personal experiences, observations, contributions and ideas. Several of the distinguished professionals who have spoken at the Annual Herbert M. Parker Lecture are also included. The videotaped interviews and accompanying biographical sketches will be made accessible to the public." See https://tricities.wsu.edu/parkerfoundation/ParkerHistory Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 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. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Dale Denham Description An account of the resource An interview with Dale Denham conducted by the Herbert M. Parker Foundation at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Herbert M. Parker Foundation at Washington State University Tri-Cities https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F156ae5a23d99e114d4fc420bc6affd34.JPG e505b5a0d33ff5467de00ab9299817f6 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F1d549236d7131465cdccfda6dfdcff75.mp4 c97c0371a3e7620cabaaa2104cade5da 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 Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford Subject The topic of the resource African Americans; Oral History Description An account of the resource A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource National Park Service Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 9/1/2017-9/1/2019 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project. Relation A related resource RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RG2_8 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 Dallas Barnes Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: Hi. My name is Robert Franklin. I’m conducting an interview with Dallas Barnes on March 22, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking about Dallas and his experiences living in the Tri-Cities. And for the record can you state and spell your full legal name for us? Dallas Barnes: Dallas Barnes; D-A-L-L-A-S B-A-R-N-E-S Franklin: Great, thanks, Dallas. Let’s talk about your life before you came; are you from the Tri-Cities? Barnes: I’ve been around the Tri-Cities for about 60 years. Franklin: 60 years? Okay. Barnes: Quite a while. Franklin: When and where were you born? Barnes: I was born in Arkansas. Franklin: Okay, and what year? Barnes: 1940. Franklin: 1940, okay. When did you first come to the Tri-Cities area? Barnes: In 1952. Franklin: Why did you come? Barnes: I came because my mother came up here to be with her sister because Hanford was going and employment was supposed to be good. Franklin: Her sister would be your aunt? Barnes: Yes. Franklin: Did your aunt work out at Hanford? Barnes: No, she actually had a house and was actually providing some of the meal services to people who needed a lunch to go to work and a place to stay after they got off work. Franklin: Your mother came for job reasons then? Barnes: She did, she did. We didn’t come from Arkansas; we actually came from Saint Louis to Pasco. Franklin: Okay. What was life like in St. Louis? Barnes: Well, certainly it was segregated. I came when I was at age twelve and didn’t necessarily know about segregation at that point. I lived in an all-segregated community, went to segregated schools, and didn’t necessarily know any different other than just the urban life. Street cars, busses, sidewalks and a little grass, those type of things in the city. Franklin: But you were certainly aware that you lived in a segregated society. Did you-- Barnes: In St. Louis not nearly as much as I did when I moved to Pasco from St. Louis. We had all of the things—we had teachers, principals, doctors, schools, things like that in our local neighborhood, as well as the gangs and the churches and all of the things that go along with urban living. Franklin: How was Pasco different? Barnes: Pasco, when I came we had tumble weeds and horny toads, and people were scattered about. There wasn’t necessarily a community where we lived—a community in the sense of congested neighborhoods—but moreover, a very loose semi-rural community. So it was different. Franklin: What were your first impressions when you arrived in Pasco? Barnes: Well, wasn’t quite sure. I got off of the train and the place I was going to live in was next to the train tracks. It was a little bit windy and I saw a tumbleweed run down the road and I didn’t quite know what that was. But all was well, because I was greeted by family and that was a good thing. My first impression was fine: I was meeting with family. And as far as the rural community, there was a lot of open space. And so my very first impression was, you know, just—my goodness, here is a real difference. Franklin: Yeah, I imagine a real difference from St. Louis. Where was the first place you stayed after you arrived? Barnes: With my aunt. In her house apartment if-you-will type-thing. She had rooms that she rented to some of the workers at Hanford, and we stayed in one of the rooms there when we first got here. Franklin: Did you get to know any of the workers—the people that worked out of Hanford? Barnes: Well, yes, but they were transient in a sense. They would get up, they come get their lunch and they go work and I would go to school and so we didn’t necessarily have a relationship if you are talking about a community-type regular involvement—we didn’t have that. Moreover, the business at the time that I came was people that was working and supposedly making money. Franklin: That was the main reason why they were there? Barnes: Pretty much. Franklin: Your aunt’s house was in east Pasco? Barnes: No, it actually was in west Pasco but so close to east Pasco because the difference between east and west Pasco was the train tracks. And we lived in west Pasco next to the train tracks. Franklin: Kind of as far east as west Pasco went? Barnes: As far east as west Pasco went. Franklin: Okay. Barnes: That’s right. Franklin: When did you—how long did you stay with your aunt, and when did you move into your own place? Barnes: Oh, I’d imagine we moved in there may be within a few months, no more than a year. I don’t recall exactly, but it wasn’t that long, because there were other apartments across the street and we moved from her house to an apartment right across the street. Franklin: Still in west Pasco? Barnes: Yes, still in west Pasco still next to the train tracks. Franklin: Was it just you and your mother? Did you have any siblings? Barnes: I had siblings; all of them were left in St. Louis, and it was just me and my mom who came up. Franklin: How come just you came? Are you the oldest? Barnes: No, I am actually the youngest. Franllin: Oh, okay. Barnes: I am the youngest and I came because some family issues there and we needed a break and so that break was out in Washington. Franklin: Okay, that’s wild. What was the hardest aspect of life in this area to adjust to when you first got here? Barnes: When I first got here, it wasn’t that difficult. The difference between living on the west side of Pasco and the east side of Pasco is that I went to an all-white school. If I lived in east side, I went to an all—or predominantly, I should say—black school which was Whittier Elementary School at that time. But I went to Longfellow School which was predominantly white, and that’s for people who lived in west Pasco at that time. Franklin: Were there ever any issues where you were ever made to feel unwelcome in all-white school, being that there was a majority-black school nearby? Barnes: Not necessarily in the early days. When I came at twelve, I was received fairly well. You know, I certainly knew my minority status, because everybody looked differently. But I wasn’t treated extremely different. I can look back and see some things that was different, but at the time that I came I didn’t notice anything other than me being one of one or two blacks that was there in that school while all of the other blacks were at a different school. And my affiliation with those other blacks was quite simple—all you had to do was walk across the track, and we all attended the same church. So I did have a black connection after schools as well as a white connection after school, to tell you the truth. Franklin: You were kind of in both-- Barnes: I was in both worlds. Franklin: You were in both worlds. What do you know about your mother’s life before she came out here to—kind of drawn in by Hanford? Barnes: Well, she had an interesting life. We came from Arkansas because there were opportunities in St. Louis. Things was not good in Arkansas for people of color, black ones in particular. My father at that time worked in a packing company—a meat packing company—and jobs were plentiful. He was a military service person and so were all my brothers were. And jobs were plentiful there in the factories, and shoe factories, and garment factories there in St. Louis, as well as domestic work for the ladies who want to put on their aprons and go out and be of domestic help for the white folks who wanted to have people do some house work. Franklin: Right, very fairly common job for African American women. Barnes: Especially during that time, oh, absolutely. Franklin: You mentioned that early on there were not real issues with going to a predominantly white school, but you kind of alluded that maybe later on there was a conflict? Barnes: Later on, after elementary school, then there was only one junior high school. Franklin: Oh, for every—for white and black. Barnes: For white and blacks. As I went into junior high school—we’re still talking about the early ‘50s—‘52, ‘53 or ’54—whatever the time was in there. There wasn’t many, many blacks in there, but those who were there they had jobs and there wasn’t a poverty line per se if you will; people working at Hanford and doing the domestic thing. But in junior high school, I did notice that people tend to cluster together: the blacks who were from the east side of Pasco had their friends there and in junior high school they maintain those friendships. And because I was part of the church community and the other community, I could fit in with that as well and my classmates from Longfellow Grade School as well, still again I was in both communities. Franklin: Were there ever any incidences that pulled at you to one side or the other? Did you find yourself in an awkward position? Barnes: In junior high school? Franklin: Or in high school. Barnes: Oh, certainly, as I got out of high school and as I got older, certainly, oh, absolutely. But I am not sure where you want me to go from my junior high school experience into high school or college or adulthood. I’m not sure where you want me to jump this at this particular point. We were traveling from grade school to junior high there for a minute. Franklin: That’s true. Let’s keep, I guess, going by—chronologically. Barnes: Yeah, the sort of chronological thing. Franklin: Then we’ll return. I wonder if you can describe life in the community when you first arrived here and in junior high, what did you do in your spare time and were there any important community events? Barnes: Mostly there was the baseball, horned toads, there was fishing on the river. I would say that there was a quite robust community life for the black kids. We were living in a segregated community there on the east side—not totally segregated; there were some white folks that were involved in that. But during the junior high days, it was the same. We had representation and in many of the classrooms; maybe two or three blacks in the classroom with one or two or three Asian folks. Still again in the junior high years, there wasn’t that much notice on my part of me being treated that much differently on the basis of race during my junior high years. Oh, there was an occasional comment—but this is looking back as opposed as experience with a teacher or two who might have had—looking back here again, maybe an attitude towards blacks as opposed to whites. But not so much that I want to say that it was a major problem for me. The one or two people there could be easily avoided, and everything else was okay. Franklin: In what ways was the segregation in Pasco different or similar to the segregation in the South in St. Louis and in Arkansas that you would’ve grown up in? Barnes: Well, the difference in Pasco is that you knew that you were being discriminated against. Here looking back at it for you to be on the east side—and as you study and know this stuff—that that was part of the plan, for settling the Tri-Cities, is for blacks to be located on the east side of Pasco. And that would be a looking-back. I can remember—I’m not sure if I was in junior high school; I think it might have been in early high school—of segregated lunch counters there in Pasco. Where, if you were to go into the drugstore where the lunch counters were, then there was the little corner were blacks would normally sit at and maybe two or three stools while the rest of the counter was white. So that was noticeable to me; I do recall those incidents. I recall sometimes when you go into clothing stores that you seem to be awful careful that some of the merchants didn’t want you to try on your product before you buy it. You bought it. You assume it will fit. I guess they didn’t want you to contaminate a shoe or a dress, in case somebody white might be interested in putting it on afterwards. I don’t know, but that’s what I think. Because that’s the way it was in some stores. Franklin: Right, right. There’s a pretty famous case of discrimination where a lunch counter was sued in Pasco. This would have been before you got there, but I was wondering if you ever heard of the Hazel Scott case? Barnes: I did hear of the Hazel Scott case. I think she came in and was refused service somewhere, but I think that was in a restaurant close to the railroad tracks, because I’m not sure if she came in by rail or whatever it was, and that service was refused. I don’t know a lot of detail about it, but I did hear about it and I know about it. Franklin: Okay, let’s see here. Running down my questions. You mentioned that you attended church. Barnes: Yes. Franklin: Which church did you attend? Barnes: I attended the church—the Morning Star Baptist Church. Franklin: That was a—to my understanding, that’s a pretty prominent fixture in the African American community then and-- Barnes: And now, yes. Franklin: What role did the church play in the community then? Barnes: Well, it was the gathering place, pretty much like it was in the South. I understand it was founded by some people who would meet in their homes and then as the home gathering grew, then they started a church. From those churches then we had some other churches over time to split off and get a couple of other Baptist churches in the east Pasco community or in the community. But it was quite central: it was the place that people meet, it’s the place we buried our dead, it’s the place that we married each other, it was the place where you could go and get your spirits lifted. Franklin: Yeah. Do you recall any family or community activities, events or traditions, including food, that people brought from the places that they came from? Barnes: No, a lot of laughter, if you want to go that route, and a lot of comfort and feeling in being accepted among your own community. There was always a release, because I always sensed the tension when you go into the other communities. There’s a difference between being invited somewhere and feeling welcomed. Well, in the black community, you are actually welcome; in the white community you might have been invited to spend your money, but just don’t stay too long. And don’t seek to be a part of that community. Franklin: That’s an excellent analysis. Lori Larson: I have a question; is that possible? Franklin: Sure. Larson: You mentioned that elementary and junior high that you were a part of the—outside the school you were part of the white community. What did that entail? Barnes: That entailed me riding my bicycle up and down the streets and chasing horned toads with my schoolmates and some of them owned shops there in town. And certainly as I was riding my bike with them and playing with them I was always welcome in their shops and I was treated very nicely by their folks. I was one of the Longfellow folks or the McLoughlin High School folks and felt that way—sincerely felt that way—by the people that I associated with. Franklin: Awesome, thank you. What opportunities, or were there opportunities, available here that were not available where you or your parents came from? Barnes: Opportunities such as? Franklin: Such as—this could include education, work, housing or social or recreational activities. Barnes: No, we were pretty much—as I still look at it, I think about it, the blacks who were not working at Hanford—and there’s a thing about Hanford and I’ll tell you about that in just a second. But most of the blacks who were not working for Hanford either worked weeding beans and picking grapes and doing some of the field work as migrants. I did that myself. Also—or as domestics. You either go out and go to Richland or Kennewick, clean houses for somebody or cut their grass or something like that. And then you go home and if you were in good shape you would take home a half a chicken or something like that they didn’t eat from the day, you know what I’m saying, that type of thing. It was an acceptable kind of a lifestyle, and people tend to be all right with that because you could still go and pick grapes, there was jobs or pull weeds, be a domestic if you are not working at Hanford. If you were working at Hanford, then you were in a little better shape, because your paycheck was regular and you had a little bit more status in the community. Although you might be absent a lot, but when you did come around, you were in good shape and made sure that the community was in good shape by spending your money in the community or paying your tithes or whatever you did in church and representing the young people of working hard and getting ahead. Franklin: I want to jump ahead for just a second, because this question is in my mind and you had mentioned how things were different for people who worked at Hanford than others. One of the things in this project that we are trying to find is what was the relationship between the African American community and Hanford, and was it different than the relationship between Hanford and the white community. Barnes: Well, it depends on how you look at it. If we were to take a look at the times, if we look at the times, Hanford got started at about ‘43, ‘44, ’45—somewhere during the war time. At that time, things were very well segregated in our country—even the military was segregated at that particular time. Most of the people who migrated up here to work for Hanford were from the South, I think at that time, and maybe even now you find a lot of people from Arkansas from all places—that’s where we were born at—and some of the other places. And they brought that particular attitude and culture with them to the Hanford Site. And so we do know that Hanford was very much segregated: blacks and whites. As time went on maybe down in the ‘60s—this is before Affirmative Action came along and Art Fletcher there in the ‘60s—I’m not sure if people talk to you about that in some of your other interviews. But prior to that, it was a prize for a black to work inside a building. You see, if you had a job at Hanford, you were going to be working outside, either as a laborer or something like that, but inside as a clerk or something like that—I don’t know what the cooks and all those folks experienced. But I did hear talk among the men folks about just simply having a job and getting some overtime and things like that. And I did hear talk, as time went on, about having a job were you would work inside a building. Even as a janitor, that was supposed to be a prize kind of a job for a black man. Franklin: Right, because it signified a space that they had been excluded from-- Barnes: Yes, absolutely. Franklin: --out on Site. It may have not been a highly skilled job, but it would have been one that maybe would’ve been looked on as more permanent or more status than-- Barnes: It was more status because if a black—and during the times—had a position that a white person could fill—not during those times; during these times, but that’s further on in the discussion, I guess. But the fact of it is, if a white person could fill that job and be advanced more than a black, then the white person got that job. If it was janitor and it was on the inside, out of the elements, then that’s a white man’s job. If you’re going to have to put on a rain suit and get out there in the elements, then that’s a black man’s job. And you found that in the military and everywhere else. During those times, the whites had the privilege—that’s the little comment that they make these days—and blacks did not. Franklin: Yeah, yup. There seems to be—I’ve done several of these interviews—there seems to be somewhat of a sense of betrayal by members of the black community that they felt that their family that worked at Hanford may not have been fully informed about the dangers that had been out there or they had not been properly compensated for some of the dangers that they experienced. I’m wondering if you could speak to that. Barnes: I don’t have any firsthand experience with that, but from what I would think about that, that would be the case because that would be consistent with everything else that went along during those times. They used to make funny comments about who was your N-word last year? Which means, who picked up the worst end of the stick. So if people knew that the radiation was high in a certain area, they certainly did not—it’s like in the military: who on earth do you think went up there on the front line to deliver the ammo? My brother got shot doing that, but he didn’t get killed, but he got wounded doing that. If you were to explore the military history, who do you think delivered the bombs and got blown up on the ships and all of that? So it wouldn’t surprise me a bit although I don’t have no firsthand experience on that, and knowing that the more dangerous situation is, the more expendable black people are. Franklin: Thank you. In what ways were opportunities here limited because of segregation and racism? Barnes: Well—are you talking about now or then? [LAUGHTER] I mean, I guess it doesn’t matter, because if you’re last hired, you’re first fired—you’ve heard that; I’m sure somebody maybe in your interviews may have talked about that. If you have to have a special law called Equal Employment Opportunity, that in and of itself tells you how things are structured, and that if you’re a person of color, that you’re on the short end of the stick. Not too many white folks had to go to school or get a job because of an Equal Opportunity Employment. You don’t have to worry about getting a house because you’re a Fair Housing Community or an Equal Educational Opportunity product. Everywhere a black person tried to find—wherever they found themselves, there was always a special legal permission or allowance for them to be there. And it had a different name to go with it. You want to go to school? Well, yeah, we got Title IV so that you can come on in. You want black people here? Give us some Title IV money and we’ll welcome them in. And if you are familiar with all that, for women it was Title IX, and so forth and so on. And that’s the way it was: very deliberate, very meticulous and certainly very clear as to who the targets of the special consideration was for. Black people, at that time—now we’re talking about that time. Now it may be immigrants or somebody else, but at that time, it was blacks. Franklin: Right. In attempt to change the imbalance, but certainly those that had the privilege may not have seen it that way. Barnes: Well, don’t get us wrong. We are talking about me coming to the Tri-Cities in 1952, but don’t forget during the struggle between 1952 and 19—well, it’s really in the ‘70s—well, it’s really continuing—but the Civil Rights Act didn’t pass until 1964. We had all of that time of struggling before you even got to where you were legally eligible for equal opportunity. So it’s just obvious, during those times, it was hell. I mean, I could use some other polite word, but that’s what it was. In my mind it’s just crystal clear as that light you have shining here. To me. Franklin: Right, and certainly after the Civil Rights Act of ‘64-- Barnes: ‘68, ‘54. You know in ’54, Brown v. Board of Education—come on, all of that. Supreme Court action that broke up segregation and all of this, and so the people who lived before 1964, which was much of Hanford, especially the building of Hanford, it was just common practice to segregate blacks out, give them the short end of the stick. And that was common practice because most of the people who settled or came to Hanford or to the Tri-Cities came from the South. They came from the South where segregation and Jim Crow—we’re still in Jim Crow. That’s how come you can’t even serve a celebrity. We’re still in Jim Crow, you can’t live where you want. Franklin: Similar to Hazel Scott. Barnes: Yeah, that’s right; you see what I mean. Franklin: Yeah, it’s not like civil law passes and magically--laws also don’t—they provide a mechanism for change, but they don’t initiate the change. Barnes: That’s right. Franklin: Yeah. This is a very vague question, but maybe you can think of a specific example. Could you describe any interactions you or your parents had with other people from other parts of the Tri-Cities area? Anything that comes to your mind. Barnes: Not necessarily, I’m not sure if you are talking about other people of color or just other people in general? Franklin: In general. Barnes: Well, during those particular times, don’t forget it was much of any of the work at Hanford was based on a need-to-know. You could hardly ask another person if it was daylight outside without them asking you, what is your need to know, because security was just that tight based upon the work they were doing in Hanford. I did work in Hanford when I was—in the ‘60s—in the early ‘60s—and even then, it was a need-to-know. You had your badges, and your badges allowed you to certain places, and you could go to work in a suit and put your jumpsuit or whatever you’re going to do behind those walls and no one would know what you did. That was an interesting kind of observation that was made later on, because regardless of your position was at Hanford, when you went to work you could have one presentation; while you were at work you could have another presentation. You know, your status may not be as high when you walk through the gates, because you had to un-robe and dress up and put on various outfits and so forth and so on. But the point I was making by saying that is that the interaction with people all over, if they worked for Hanford, you didn’t talk about it. You talked about fertilizers, lawnmowers and upkeep, and whether or not you drove a Ford or a Chevy or something like that. Franklin: And the weather, as long as it’s not out at Hanford. Barnes: Yeah. Don’t talk about the weather too much; some isotope might be falling out the sky. Because you don’t—seriously, incidentally. [LAUGHTER] But, no, everything was sort of superficial but we got along well because everybody did it; hello, how are you? Fine, church was great, yeah, sure enough—that type of thing. Franklin: Thank you. Before high school—and I think after this couple questions we’ll switch, right, because it sounds like kind of more a time of change in your life. But before then, did segregation and racism affect your education? Barnes: In high school? Franklin: Before then. Barnes: Well, let’s see. Coming from St. Louis I didn’t necessarily know, coming from St. Louis and the urban living where, during my days in the classroom, I recall girls sitting in one side of the classroom and boys sitting on the other, and during recess the girls played on one side of the playground and the boys on the other, and that little strip between the two was just a hill as they competed for the top dog in the minds of the ladies or whatever. And then as far as—you were talking about competition, I’m sorry I-- Franklin: How did segregation and racism affect your education? Barnes: During high school, there were some teachers—white—in fact, all of my education in Pasco was without any black influence whatsoever. There was not a black teacher in the school district. I don’t even know if there was a black teacher in the Tri-Cities. But—I can’t speak for all the rest of them—but for me there was not a black teacher who influenced my education during my junior high and high school days, period. Okay. Given that, there were some white folks who were interested in my future and asked me what I was going to do. And there was white folks who in high school was hoping that I could go and be a body fender man because vocations were good. That’s an acceptable trade. And was pretty much concerned about that, and there were some who might have thought that there may be something else like being a teacher that I should at least further my education there in high school. So, I’m going to say that I had an exposure to vocational education and less exposure, but nonetheless exposure to maybe higher education which could have been just junior college. But still again, there was that interest, some of the teachers were interested in my future, educational future. Franklin: Were there any other people that influenced you as a child? Barnes: Influenced me as a child, like what? Franklin: It could include family members, friends or other teachers. People that influenced you to kind of—positive influence-- Barnes: Yeah, there were community members who went to all-black colleges who were quite articulate and usually those people would go to the city council and petition the council for paved roads or water or whatever it was that wasn’t there in the east Pasco community. That was sort of impressive because you could tell that they were very fluent in the way that they presented their concerns to the city council. And actually had some backbones in doing so. That was one of the things that came out of the South, the same—like the people who came out of the South under segregation and was fighting for a better presence in the scheme of things in life actually had some commitment to it. So there was an influence there. I remember there was a reverend in Lakey who was in the community and he was on this—I think it was called the Town Hall. In fact, he came through the community last year. There was that religious group, they call it the Town Hall Group or—I’ve forgotten what they called them—and he was a minister at the Methodist church—a young man—and people used to just gather around him and just listen him to talk about not only religious-type things but moving ahead in life, and just good role modeling on his part. There was him and there was some other men, the brick masons in town, other people here were other people who certainly would—there were other men folks who had an interest in the community development that was impressive, I thought. That I know, I should say, I didn’t think, I know—and that was an influence on me, yes. Franklin: Yeah. When you were going into high school—I guess we’re getting into the later part of the ‘50s—did things begin to change locally for you in regard to race relations or the change between the white and black communities? Barnes: Right. Now, we were immune here in the Tri-Cities to all of the noise that was going on down in the South. You know, in 1954 we’re talking about Brown v. Board of Education; we’re talking about 1957, we’re talking about George Wallace and standing up there and taking the strongest military force on earth to get little kids to go to high school. Strongest military force on earth. Imagine that. [LAUGHTER] To a get a few kids. All of that sort of—not sort of—it did have an impact on me, because I was not a part of that. Now, part of my junior high days and playing baseball on the sandlots and all of that, I was sort of athletic, and it just seemed to me that the folks that looked like me was taking a beating and I wasn’t doing too much about it. Probably like the veterans did where Pearl Harbor got bombed and people went to join the drafts so that they could be part of the action to defend the country. Well, all that civil rights noise was going on back south in the Midwest and I’m sitting out here chasing horny toads and playing basketball, and doing pretty good but not affected by it. But it did affect me. The national crisis for black people was a calling for me to play my part in doing whatever I could to fight the battle that was going to benefit me or my kids or whoever else was coming along. Franklin: What did you see as action that you could have in that? Barnes: Well, one of the things that we were doing—and I have to give credit to the white folks who were more sensitive to this than I was—the ones who actually came in to the black community and educated us on what was happening to us. And I also want to give a recognition to the white folks that came into the community to educate the black kids the tutorial services. Sometimes—I understand that other white folks didn’t like other white folks coming over educating black kids to help them understand their school work and all that other stuff, but they did it. What did we do? I participated in marches up and down the street. I think that was about the size of it. There were other things going on there, too. I may as well just mention it, because it is true. At that particular time the LDS Church—the Latter Day Saints Church—had this particular belief about blacks and their worthiness of priesthood, things like that. So I got into a discussion with friends and things like that, and when you put it all in perspective, if you got—during those times, if you got laws that are going to segregate against you on housing and employment and everything else and then you got a whole religious institution with millions of folks heavily representing the area that believe that your soul isn’t quite ready for heavenly matters. Now you’re really in a bind. Now I’m also going to say this, but it was members of the LDS Church that were some of my biggest supporters on moving forward, too. I want to throw that out there. I’ll tell you, if you want to know what a strain was, it’s to look of person face-to-face and have that person tell you that you are not ready yet to receive blessings that they have. Now that is a sensation. And they were sincere about it, and good people, too. I don’t want to say that there were a big, humungous explosion, but it did require to do some deep thinking about it; there’s an apparent contradiction, at least in my mind. Franklin: That is quite a contradiction. Barnes: It was. Because, I have to tell you, my relationship with my LDS friends was first-rate. But to look at them face-to-face and they’d tell me I’m just quite not ready yet. [LAUGHTER] That actually will make your blood corpuscles turn different shapes. Franklin: I would imagine so. Barnes: They were serious about it; they were dead serious about it. Franklin: Right, it was part of their doctrine. Barnes: That’s what I’m talking about. And you’re living in a community that is the case. You got all these people from the South thinking one way, you come out here and you discover—because nobody talks about this; you have to talk it out however you find it out. Then you have millions of people over here thinking another way. And in both ways, you lose. Franklin: Yeah. Barnes: Yeah, that’s what it’s like—that’s what it was to me growing up here. Franklin: You mentioned marches earlier. I’m wondering if you could talk about those—some details, where they were and what your role was there. Barnes: My role as a young person was just to be a participant; I wasn’t necessarily a leader. In my high school day it was, who’s going to stand up on this side of the issue? Whose parents are going to lose their job because you’re standing on this side of the issue? Or are you going to lose any stand in the community, because here you are standing up, marching and then your friends are standing on the side, they’re not marching with you, looking at you march and all of this because some kid got bombed down in Louisiana, Birmingham; or Martin Luther King has gotten shot; or none of the black are being employed in the grocery stores, or any of that. There was two marches I remember. I remember marching in Pasco and I remember marching in Kennewick. I’m not exactly sure; I think it was the NAACP who sponsored those marches and sometimes they had to have people come in—because the leader may have been in Yakima, Spokane or Seattle. They would come to the Tri-Cities to help the people who didn’t have organizational skills to organize and let it be known that we are concerned, too, about the condition of black people and their wellbeing in the community. Franklin: Do you remember the years of those marches? Barnes: They had to be in the ‘50s, and I’m trying to think if they were in the ‘60s. I think they may have been in maybe the ‘50s or ‘60s—somewhere there. Franklin: Okay. Was there any outcome of those marches? Barnes: No, because they were pretty much all involved with the same kind of—it was all plugged into the national concerns: better jobs, better educational opportunities, better job opportunities, type thing. The regular things that people was concerned about—equal employment, equal housing, equal educational opportunities. Franklin: When did you graduate high school? Barnes: ‘59. Franklin: ’59. And you said that in the early ‘60s you went out to work at Hanford. Barnes: I did. Franklin: Was that your first job after high school? Barnes: It was. It was, except for when I went to junior college, I had a job changing sprinklers and working at the golf course, because I was an athlete and part of your scholarship was that they would loan you the money to go to school and you worked to pay off the loan. So I had that job before I went to work at Hanford. Franklin: Did you go to CBC? Barnes: Mm-hmm. Franklin: Did you graduate from CBC? Barnes: I did. Franklin: What was your degree on? Barnes: It was—what was it? I’m trying to think. I think it may have been in the sciences, but I know it was just the liberal arts, AA degree. Franklin: What sorts of work did you do at Hanford? Barnes: Believe it or not, I was one of the guys that worked on the inside. Franklin: On the inside? Barnes: I worked on the inside. Franklin: Okay. Barnes: I worked on the inside and my job was to—actually to change samples in the sodium iodide crystal which would determine what isotopes was in whatever the sample was. Like testing the rain water that we talked about earlier, or testing the river to see how much contamination may had been in there, and testing anything else they brought in that need to be tested for various isotopes. Franklin: Was this in the 300 Area? Barnes: Yeah, it was 300. Franklin: Do you remember what building you were in? Barnes: 326. Franklin: 326, yeah that sounds about right. What on-the-job training did you receive, if any? Barnes: Well, I think I had my six months’ probation or whatever that they normally do. And it wasn’t necessarily that challenging. They would pay me to go to school and I took advantage of that. And, oh yeah, I went to school, and that’s where the little scientific effort came, because they was paying for me to be better at what I was doing. So I learned a couple, two to three formulas there, to learn to calculate the half-life of various kinds of isotopes and how to calibrate the machines and things like that. That was about it, there was some schooling and on-the-job training type thing. Franklin: Did you require any skills or experience on the job that helped you later in life? Barnes: I actually quit that job—well, I went to work for General Electric and when they diversified or got out of the picture, then I went to work to a company called US Testing. Because the US Testing got that part of analyzing certain isotopes from certain environmental areas. Your question was, did that help me in life? Franklin: Did you require any skills or experience that helped you-- Barnes: Oh yeah, that helped me, yeah. I mean, I learned experience, I can talk a little of that talk. I’m surprised I’m able to recall that right now. But it did, it gave me a lot of confidence. The thing about the scientific community, either you’re right or wrong, and if you want your job, you’d better be right, if not all the time, so close to it that you can have the confidence that your calculations are right and that everything is going on. It was a good confidence-builder, the collegiality that I had in my job was great. It was great. I actually quit that job after Kennedy got killed and some other things went on to join the War on Poverty. Franklin: Oh! Oh, okay Johnson—Lyndon Johnson. Barnes: Yeah. To join the War on Poverty, and the Community Action Committee and things like that was just getting started here in the community. I quit that job to take a position there so that I, again, I could make my contribution to what going on in society instead of taking care of their—you know, doing a pipette and a beaker and a Bunsen burner and that type of thing. Franklin: Is that pretty much what a typical day was like at Hanford for you? Barnes: It was. And I recall a conversation that I had with my boss who was first-rate—first-rate—and he called me in one day and we were talking about where am I going from here, because you could get pretty much stuck in there. It’s a small company so everyone else is going to stay there for 40 years like you, or whatever it is, if you wanted to. He was talking about moving up and if I had any type of talent or been able to converse with people get along and whatever my athletic talents allowed me to do in terms of being competitive and this and that and so forth. He made a point, he said, Dallas, you would be very good at sales, but we can’t do that. Because white folks won’t buy from you, he said that. Franklin: He said that to you? Barnes: Oh, very--his and our relationship was first-rate, first-rate. First-rate. He said, I would love to do it but I can’t do it, because they won’t buy from you. He was just acknowledging that our society is prejudiced and they will not buy from a black person. And he said why don’t you go back and finish your degree in chemistry or whatever the science might be, and be the first-rate scientist that you can be. That way you can work in the lab, make a whole lot of money, but don’t nobody know who you are, you see what I mean? It’s just your product is marketable. In essence he’s saying your product is marketable; you’re not. You see what I mean? And it made sense, don’t get me wrong. I had to digest all of that, and it made sense, especially as I got older and understood it better. But we did have that conversation and he was trying to move me forward so that I could make some money and have a decent life. But he was telling me to stay away from sales because those white folks would not buy from black folks. So be a scientist. Let your product be the best that it can be and people would never know that you did it and your company would pay you well and all of that, and you could do all the things that money would allow you to do. Franklin: But you obviously didn’t go that route. Barnes: No, I didn’t. Because the calling for social involvement was a much louder call, much louder call. You can’t have kids out there taking a beating while you’re sitting in a lab titrating some damn sample. You just can’t do it. Franklin: Your conscience wouldn’t let you do it? Barnes: It wouldn’t let me do it. Franklin: Before you move on to that I just had a couple other questions about your job at Hanford, some of these you already answered. How were you treated on the job, were you treated--? Barnes: I was treated well; I was treated like everyone else. Like I say, if you make mistakes you’re not going to be there too long. [LAUGHTER] If you’re good at what you do—and very few people knew what that was because there was a need-to-know, I had a little small work group and I carried my share of the load in an acceptable manner and I was treated well on all of the jobs that I had at Hanford. Franklin: What kinds of interactions did you have with your coworkers and supervisors outside of work? Barnes: Outside of work? Well, we had a bowling team, me and my other—there were a lot of spaces. I went hunting, bird hunting, deer hunting with my colleagues and we talked a lot about tractors and whether or not you’re going to have a Toro as opposed to a Craftsman. Franklin: You weren’t making that up earlier? You were really serious. Barnes: I’m not kidding about that. That is the truth. Franklin: I guess a safe conversation? Barnes: It was safe conversation. We had a bowling team there at work and every now and then they would throw a little social at work and we’ll socialize and all that and the company’s profit—that’s after we started working privately as opposed to working for the government. It was great, it really was. Franklin: Could you describe the working conditions? Barnes: You showed up on time because it’s almost—it wasn’t quite a conveyor belt, but the people would run in with their urine samples or whatever it is that you have to test that day, and before the half-life got away, you better chase it down and all of that. The working conditions was pretty straight 8:00 to 5:00 and usually samples come in at a certain, particular time. If you’re working at a lab, you had to treat it and after they treat it then you count it and so forth and so on. My job was pretty much regular routine; the variety came in the samples that I was going to work with. And incidentally, I had some chance to work with some moonrocks during that time. Or at least it was in the lab there and I got to see that. There was some variety, but it was routine and we all had it. You do your part, you pass it to John Doe and they do their part. And I’m sure that all of that had to deal with the security because that’s they way that Hanford worked. You never did get to know too much. You always get to know how to do your part and you do it very well. Franklin: What were the most difficult aspects of the job? Barnes: My job at Hanford? Franklin: Yeah. Barnes: I don’t know if I had any, because they moved you along as you were able to move along. In other words, I thought Hanford, when I worked there, you master this particular part then you qualify to go to the next. Like school, you pass the first grade, you can go to the second. That’s the way that it bounced along. Franklin: What were conditions like in terms of health and safety? Barnes: In my case, we had our badges there that it would tell us that we were exposed and we had to take a whole body count every so often. As I look back on it, I thought it was great. Because we had our badges there, if we got exposed it would show up. And part of our job—part of the job with the company that I worked with was to analyze the exposure that came on those badges for people who were out in the Area. So looking back at it, I felt pretty safe. Franklin: How did your racial background figure into your work experience? Barnes: My racial background figure into my work experience? Franklin: Yeah. Barnes: I think that if I went to work in 1962, I’m not exactly sure when Affirmative Action came along because I know that it may have been a little bit after that. Franklin: I believe so. Barnes: Or maybe during that time, because I know that Hanford had to have so many--you know, they want to call it quotas and things like that—I don’t think I was affected by that. I think it came after I was out there in Hanford. And I think—I’m not exactly sure how—I got to Hanford, I applied for a position, got it however all of that was, and they get the background check, they check with your neighbors, they check with your school, they take your blood count; whatever they do to make sure that you are going to work out there real nice. But in terms of my racial—factored into this I don’t think I considered myself an Affirmative Action employee, if you know what I mean. Franklin: Yeah. Barnes: I don’t think that I was that—at least I didn’t feel that I was that. Franklin: We already talked about this a bit but I wanted to ask and see if anything else comes up. In what ways did security and/or secrecy at Hanford impact your work or daily life? Barnes: No more than it did to anyone else. There was nothing—if you don’t know anything, you can’t see anything. I think that Hanford made sure that no one knew too much. Franklin: Gotcha. Barnes: Certainly separation between work and play—being at work and being off work. Franklin: What did you know or learn about the prior history of African American workers at Hanford? Barnes: What I know about them? Franklin: Yeah. Barnes: Well, when I came, I knew that there were a lot of people that worked at Hanford that was back in 1952, ’53, and knew at the time that they were building Hanford and people were working there. I knew something about when Affirmative Action came along, and it was required that they do a better job in distributing minorities and women in the various levels of employment. They could be employed, but women don’t necessarily need to be in the kitchen all the time. They may want to be clerks or supervisors or chemist or whatever else, and with the other minorities too. I do remember that coming along and I do remember an effort of contractors trying to meet those obligations so that they can qualify to renew those contracts. There was efforts out to recruit minorities and historical black schools, and other communities, and make publications, and black newspapers and things like that—put ads in black newspapers, and I’m sure there were other publications, so that they would know that there were opportunities at Hanford for employment. Franklin: From your perspective what were their—and “their” being African Americans that worked in Hanford—what was their most important contributions in the areas of work, community life and civil rights? Barnes: Well, they were pretty much the stability of that. If you have a long-term job that’s going to pay you well then you can buy your house, and you can be a member of the community and you can send your kids to school with some decent clothes, if that was it. It was stable. It was pretty much that way for everybody here in the Tri-Cities as far as I’m concerned. That if you worked for Hanford, if you didn’t work for Hanford, then you worked for the school district, if you didn’t work for the school district, I don’t know where you worked then. But anyway any of those supporting type, trucking and foreman, pulling weeds or beans or whatever you’re doing. So, I don’t think it was much more different than regular flow of life in the Tri-Cities. Franklin: Hm, okay. I want to switch now to kind of talking about civil rights activities, Hanford and the Tri-Cities, and then by extension some of your work in the War on Poverty. What were the major civil rights issues for African Americans at Hanford in the Tri-Cities during your time here? Barnes: Still again, getting more people to be at the various levels of employment out at Hanford was a big issue. When Affirmative Action came along, we wanted better representation on the jobs in different fields. We wanted some professional blacks working at Hanford, some chemists, some physicists, some business people, some clerks and secretaries or whatever it was. We didn’t necessarily want to be relegated to the cleaning crew out there at Hanford, whether it would be outside or inside. I do recall that there was an effort to get more professional people there and the same was true in the school districts too. Franklin: What about any living conditions issues? Did that play into the civil rights efforts here? Barnes: Well, there is always—and I still think and hear rumors that there are certain communities that you’re not welcomed; people don’t even advertise some homes because they want to be selective to who is going to come into that neighborhood, especially those by the rivers in some places. Other than that, I hear rumors that realtors are still steering professional peoples away from Pasco and especially they may tell people that don’t want to live in east Pasco and something like that. But east Pasco as you probably have heard from others that had a bad reputation at one time, and it may still have that. But I doubt if you’ve heard very much that was all by design, by the officials who wanted east Pasco to be just that. Just, where do you want to put your homeless? Well, you certainly don’t want to put them out, down there where the boat basin is. Franklin: That also reflects, too, on things like redlining and the Fair Housing Authority and things like that-- Barnes: All of that. Franklin: --that created segregation in all of our major cities. Barnes: We were concerned at one time about having police representation—I mean some minority representation, black in particular, on the police force there Pasco since blacks represented a good sizeable portion of the police business, since they put all the vice over in east Pasco. They’re located over there and then they go harvest that for whatever money they can get out of that. But even then when people would qualify coming from the other places with police backgrounds and military backgrounds, there is talk that if you became a member of the police force, then they don’t want you to go police in the white communities. If you’re black, you go police in the black communities, but the white can police in the black and white community. I guess there was just a problem with having a black police officer come to a white household to settle a domestic dispute. Couldn’t handle it. [LAUGHTER] And if you think of the times—and we’re not too far from those times. We’re talking about my lifetime and here I sit, you know what I mean? The point of it is, you still have those at the highest level—at the highest level of enforcement in all of this, saying, you can be a police officer but not in my community. So you go over and arrest the black folks there, but don’t come to the white folks and knock on somebody’s door and talk about you’re going to settle a domestic dispute. Are you kidding? They just lay it out there, some of them, and I think I may be simplifying it but that’s the way it was. Franklin: No, I think you’re saying it really well. And you’re right about how that history’s not that old and what is happening right now around the US that speaks directly-- Barnes: Absolutely, absolutely. Franklin: What actions were being taken to address these civil rights issues at Hanford and the Tri-Cities? Barnes: If it wasn’t protest, we had one person who came through, Art Fletcher. Art Fletcher. He came through, he started a credit union in east Pasco. If you look up his history, I think he was one of the first blacks to play for the Los Angeles Rams. There was other programs, all kinds of—OIC, occupation old industry—something or another where you had on-the-job training and placement for underprivileged for low income or minority kids, so forth and so on. And he started the coop. What else did we do? Place people in grocery stores and if they didn’t hire black we were going to boycott the stores. Boycott was going to be one of the tools we used some black representation in some of the markets. Things like that. And the thing about east Pasco at the time, we actually had a little community where there were black businesses, cafes and service stations, and things like that; whereas today I don’t think you have a one. And if you did have one, it’s just one. Franklin: Were there any other important leaders of civil rights efforts in the area? Barnes: Oh, yeah. There was some local people. We had a person named E.M. Magee who was a one-man demonstration—I remember that. He was an inspiration, too. E.M. Magee was a one man-demonstration. I remember picking up at the labor hall and because a lot of people I think it was a little bit fearful of the consequences if you get out there and it may make some of the white folks mad at them. They don’t want to be seen. They’d be supportive, but they didn’t want to be seen supporting people, sort of like the silent contributor. That we have today, you know other people—psst—say, I support you but don’t let nobody know. Franklin: Probably—they could’ve been afraid for their job, or recrimination or retribution. Barnes: Absolutely, absolutely. And then you have those people who would quit their job to get out and fight that battle. Because it’s sort of pitiful, you know what I mean? That a person would let their morals—I guess I can call it that; maybe there’s a better word for that—that a few dollars would get in the way of that. And it’s not uncommon. Please, believe me, and I’m sure you do, that money makes people do crazy stuff and compromise morals and everything else. They do it in marriages; they do it certainly for civil rights and things like that. But our heroes were the ones who went against that. And we did have people, we had East Pasco Improvement Association where we would always go and petition the city council to provide better roads, to oil the roads or to put in a sewer pipe so we don’t have to have a cesspool out there in the community, or to fill the holes so the kids won’t hurt themselves or something like that, you know, to put up a stoplight. Franklin: Things that were lacking in east Pasco compared to the other communities? Barnes: Oh, absolutely, and in fact so lacking that we actually had an urban renewal program to come through east Pasco. Franklin: Right. Barnes: To get rid of the blight and all of that particular kind of thing. Franklin: Those have such a long and storied history in America. I wanted to ask you, were you living in the Tri-Cities during that urban renewal program? Barnes: Right, in fact I worked for the Urban Renewal. Franklin: Okay, so it has—then I’m sure you’re aware of this kind of long and kind of complicated history of Urban Renewal, how often it seemed to move the problem around, or in some cases it would demolish older neighborhoods that may have had problems, but it would often result in—there were a lot of failures in public housing or in pushing people farther away from their jobs. I wondering if you could reflect on Pasco’s urban renewal and whether or not it was a success. Barnes: Pasco’s urban renewal—and, in fact, I served as the relocation officer there for a while—you would come in and you demolished the houses and then you would either find them another place to stay or to help them build a house or something like that after they were compensated for that. And at that time Fair Housing and all of that was at play as well. Certainly, the east Pasco community got broken up with urban renewal, people left the area, people moved to the west side of Pasco. I guess they considered that an upgrade—and it would be, the streets were paved and everything else. But Urban Renewal came through east Pasco and paved some of the streets; they had a rehab program where they actually would take some of the houses that were structurally sound and give people either grants or loan to fix them up. So we had some improvement there, then we had some builders to come in and build some low income housing and things like that. In Pasco, I think that the urban renewal had its advantages for that one little section that they did, but when blacks moved out then white flight begin. Franklin: One of the other legacies of Urban Renewal. Barnes: Yeah, you see, because as soon as black people move in—you know, they could always have one, but then there is a critical mass. And I forgot the ratio, but it’s out there in the literature somewhere, that if you get too many then the property values are expected to go down. You had—if you recall Lewis Street, south of Lewis is where the renewal took place the most, and some of the people wanted to move into the north side of that. And then you have the white flight to move out and blacks took over some of that at that particular time. And then there was an occasional one close to the tracks. Not farther west, but closer to the tracks, a little bit further than it was when I first moved to Pasco. Franklin: Thank you. What were some notable successes of the civil rights efforts in the Tri-Cities? Barnes: Certainly, we saw an influx during that one time of more professional black people coming in. Because I think once Hanford and GE, and DuPont, and—I forgot them—ARCO, or some of those large contractors got out of the picture and we did more diversification. Companies made an effort to go and get people of color—blacks that I’m making reference to—and did a lot of recruiting. So we actually brought more black people to the community to work at Hanford and that built the community, too, because that built integration in the communities. You still had your need-to-know and things like that and if you really wanted to sit down, laugh out loud, you’d get the hush-hush. If you really wanted to get down and laugh loud, then you had to find a little cluster minority folks where you can do that. So one of those successes was that we brought more people into the area as supposed to laborers like we did when we were building Hanford. The second part of that is that when it was required and Title IV, and all of that, where school districts and other entities got money for hiring people of color, we actually had a black superintendent in Pasco named Dave Hill—superintendent of schools—and we had principals, and teachers. The people of color—predominantly black during the time that I’m talking about, as opposed to Hispanics, which is predominantly now—they had more role models. You actually can say that I actually had a black person to contribute to my formal education. I don’t even think too many white folks these days can say that, because I don’t see that many blacks present in our school districts now as I did at that one time, if you see what I’m saying. Franklin: I do. As a direct result of these civil rights laws, you’re saying that in the ‘60s and ‘70s-- Barnes: You actually had and affirmative effort on the parts of school districts and contractors to go and get people so that they can meet what you may call—I don’t want to call them quotas--but anyway, so you could show there is a good faith effort to make your workforce reflect the society that’s paying the bills, like tax payers. Franklin: Right. Barnes: That type of thing. So we saw that. You don’t see that now—I don’t see that now and I’m not looking closely as I did at one time. But I don’t see representation of black teachers in the school districts. And it’s problematic, because we’ve got a whole bunch of problems as a result of no role models in the community. And I don’t see the commitment on the part of school districts to do that as I did at that one time that they actually made an effort to do it. Franklin: That’s really interesting. I don’t want to get too off-topic, but I’ve done some research into this area, and it seems schools now schools are more segregated than they were in the ‘70s or ‘80s because of the ongoing white flight. But it seems like the attention has shifted from that—it seems like maybe many had thought we had done enough effort or kind of structurally solved this problem, and it’s really faded. But things are worse now than they were then and that’s only getting worse as suburbanization and white flight continues. Barnes: That’s right and I’m going to say that it is based on a conscientious efforts on the part of the people who is doing the flighting to do it. Because once the problem has come to their attention—it’s almost like the Civil Rights Movement itself--all of these advances or gains that I just got through talking about is with the white community being caught off guard. And so there was a pacification period that resulted in Title IX, title this, that, and so on, until, like a chess game, you organize your pieces and then you get what we got right now. Franklin: Yeah. That’s a really poignant way of looking at it. Barnes: Well—[LAUGHTER] Franklin: You just call ‘em the way you see ‘em, right Barnes: You asked me to call it as I see it— Franklin: I want you to. Barnes: --and that’s the way I see it. And, you know, we are advanced we got all kinds of techniques to get the message out and we also got all kind of techniques to subvert efforts that we don’t want around and people. Franklin: What were some of these challenges in civil rights efforts in this area? Barnes: In this area? Franklin: Yeah. Barnes: Mainly to get people to—well, number one to recognize we have a problem because a lot of people live in a state of denial. They say if you work hard and all that kind of stuff that you’ll get ahead and be rewarded your due. That’s not true in my experience, and in my exploration of looking for it to be true. It is not true. Hard work don’t necessarily get that. I think we are—we talk in terms of political correctness—but I think politics have contaminated honest efforts on the part of good people. I think there’s a lot of good people that got cast to the side. If you talk a lot of civil rights talk and equality talk, I don’t think that that’s a popular conversation this days. Franklin: No, I would I agree with you. It seems to be very divisive in our political climate and there’s a group of—a large constellation of people who are opposed—I think opposed to that and want things to be merit-based. Barnes: They call it merit-based, but as we-- Franklin: I’m going to use that with quotes, right—“merit-based.” Barnes: Yeah, please. Because I think as we look at the whole history of race relations in the country, there was nothing meritorious about it. You don’t redline something on the base of merit, unless we’re talking about white privilege. You don’t necessarily pass people up in cabs when they’re ready to pay the toll. You’ve seen the little studies that do that and all of that, you don’t do that. No, no, no, no. It is not a basis of merit. During my day, there was old sayings that used to fly all the time, say, I’m white, free and 21. I’m not sure if you heard that. Franklin: No, I haven’t. Can you repeat that? Barnes: White, free and 21. They said that a lot when I was growing up. I’m white, free and 21, suggesting that you could do whatever you want, whenever you want, to whomever you want. White, free and 21. I’m sure that if you google it, it probably will pop up there somewhere. And that type of thing; and who was your N last year, N-word, you know. Which means who did all that stuff-- Franklin: I just heard that on a podcast this morning. Barnes: Oh, you see what I mean. So, it was part of the culture to make sure—and everybody wants to talk about, I’m not privileged and all this, but they just need to review a little bit more history and go sit down or something. But you know the reality of it is there unless we want to deny history there and say that the Holocaust didn’t exist or something. We got people who do that kind of crazy stuff. Franklin: We sure do. Barnes: That’s the way it is, and it’s almost taboo to talk about it these days, and we can see that we are moving back to where we once were. The have-nots are the have-nots again, and they’re very well-complected. And the haves are pretty much white. Franklin: Yeah. How did the larger, national civil rights movement influence civil rights efforts in Hanford and the Tri-Cities? Barnes: How did the larger Civil Rights did it? People came here with different attitudes, and people don’t want necessarily to bring the problems—the national problems to this locality—and they don’t want to bring them by keeping the people of color out of this locality, that’s the way I see it. This is fine, and I’m sure that as you explore the literature, you’ll find that the Northwest is supposed to be where the white folks are supposed to take over this part of the country. So you got all of your posse groups up in north Idaho and Western Washington, up there close to the Canadian Border and all that other kind of stuff. You know, we’re pretty heavily represented from Portland here, with white supremacists or whatever you want to call these people with, now, it’s-all-right-to-be-white publications floating around in the community and that type of thing. The national scene—that’s what the national scene is now as I see it. I actually would say that we actually had a better time in history, where people got along a heck of a lot better than we do right now. The question is why is that so? And I’m saying it’s because the people of ill will have maneuvered the pieces like you do on a chess board to make it that way. Franklin: Hmm. What was different about the civil rights effort here, if anything, than compared to the national civil rights effort? Barnes: Well, the civil rights effort here was that it had its heyday and then people let that fade away. There is no replacement; there’s no recruitment; there’s not even hardly a discussion. If you take a look at it, we have gone from Black History Month, Native American, women this, to this thing that we call diversity. Diversity dilutes any particular concentrated effort. That’s why we use it. Because in a diluted state, you have no power—or you have less power, less impetus. You know, we’re going to have one day and we are going to have spaghetti for the Italian and, you know what I mean, some chicken for blacks, some Spanish food for the Hispanics and something like that and we’re going to do it all in one day. Well, that’s not what that’s all about. We have that particular thing every day. What we want to do is review where we have been, where we are coming from and how to make it better so we can keep our eyes on the prize. We’ve been taken away from that. You don’t find that in schools anymore. You don’t find people talking about Black History Month. You don’t see that—you don’t. And that was a deliberate effort, because people are now asking, where is the white history month? They’ve been asking that for ages. As if a lot of people don’t know—and some of them don’t, maybe. That’s where the emphasis is now is that we want to put the emphasis up on white folks. Franklin: Just last week—earlier this week in Franklin County, the coroner posted something on his social media page saying exactly that—a meme from a white power organization. This is an elected person in our own community who was—in the most positive way you can spin it is blissful, maybe, ignorant of that, or perhaps a more cynical eye would say he is more than ignorant. Barnes: You would expect that at one time—and kudos to Columbia Basin College—but you would normally expect that universities would sort of lead the pack in at least keeping contemporary issues alive, somehow or another. We don’t see that—no, I don’t see that. I don’t see their intellectual institutions taking alive—I don’t see enough of that. In the old days, you used to see a lot of that, you used to see a lot more. You used to have controversial or at least high-profile figures coming and speaking on campuses, things like that, just to invite the public out to hear different points of views. We used to—I remember Julian Bond coming into the community, I remember-- Franklin: Who’s that? Barnes: Julian Bond was a very prominent civil rights leader during the day. Franklin: Okay. Barnes: Yeah, very much. One of the first blacks legislators I think in Georgia, the—it’s escaping me—the NAACP, I think he was the head of that. But anyways, his name was Julian Bond, but he came to the Tri-Cities. And there was another one: the guy that integrated the University of Mississippi, he came through and spoke. I was going to call him Julius Lester, but that’s not him; Julius Lester is an author of a book that’s very interesting. But they came through the community and yet even some of the Hispanic people that would come through and give the community an opportunity to hear diverse opinions or to just listen to somebody who knew what they were talking about talk about pretty pertinent issues just to stay focused. But I don’t see much of that going on at any of our institutions of higher learning as I once did. And you have to ask the question why. Not only that, I don’t see many people of color even in our institutions of higher learning so that people of color can contribute—can contribute—to the education of the younger generations coming along. In the olden days if you were going to hire somebody, they used to say, if you are going to hire a black person make sure that it’s in the sciences or in P.E. so you’re not a threat there. Just don’t put him in the social sciences where there’s variance and opinions can be changed. If you’re going to see a black employee usually in higher education or something like that, he might be a scientist. You might have a language teacher or something like that in a non-threatening situation. But not in sociology or political science, maybe, or things like that. Something to observe. I haven’t taken a look recently, but I know that was the case in the past. Franklin: Yeah. You mentioned that you had done—went to do War on Poverty work and then did part of the east Pasco redevelopment. Were there any other civil rights activities in the Tri-Cities that you were involved in? Barnes: Not really. Not anything that made a mark upon any institutions or things like that. I belonged to certain community groups, and if the opportunity presented itself—like this opportunity did—and they get to hear me say comments similar to the ones that I’m making to you, or whatever I’m able to say. But in terms of—no, because in a lot of cases it wouldn’t be allowed. It wouldn’t be allowed. I wouldn’t be allowed for certain reasons. If I were to go into the classroom, for example, and just talk simply about the history as I am talking to you, I would offend somebody, because their religious orientation would say, oh no, you can’t say that. Incidentally, I’m not guessing at this; this is a fact, in my life. I’ve been in situations where I’ve had people to stand up in chairs, to tell you the truth, to point their fingers on issues. But I understood it, because they’re committed to that, and heavily invested into their religious beliefs. Whether it would be a Jewish person think that blacks ran them out of New York or an LDS person that thinks blacks don’t know what they are talking about, or whoever it is. It doesn’t matter. That’s just the nature of the beast. Sometimes institutions want to cut out the speaker and let the problem exist because it’s easier to do that. Franklin: Do you have a specific example? Barnes: I have some, but I’ll reserve those. Franklin: Okay, that’s fair. You left your job at Hanford to come work on War on Poverty issues and civil rights. And then what was the rest of your career like? What did you go on later to do? Barnes: Okay. Later on then, I went to work on the civil rights and I worked for Urban Renewal as I mentioned there. Right in 1968 when things were getting really hot, when Martin Luther King was shot and Lyndon Johnson was trying to pass civil rights bills and all of this other kind of stuff, and I participated in this and that and was junior college this and so forth and so on. I went on—I was recruited by WSU in 1968, because they were rioting and protesting up there on the main campus. Some of the people from the Tri-Cities had gone up to WSU. And there was a couple of sociologists that came down to study the Tri-Cities gangs and poverty and all of these. Because I was there in Urban Renewal and I had grown up in the community, I was able to provide some guidance as to where they may look for some of the answers that they may be seeking. Long and the short of the story is, I was recruited to go up to WSU to help them formulate, or to get them this new thing—because they were recruiting minority students and there was no program or anything up there to deal with them coming out of Los Angeles and all over the place with the attitudes that they had and especially being indoctrinated—and I don’t want to use that, because that sounds a little bit suspicious—but anyway, being seasoned by the civil rights problems—Martin Luther King had gotten shot, Malcom X had gotten killed, the literature was pretty heavy into how bad we were treated, and all of that. Not only that, there was some other people that got killed, the kids got blown up in Birmingham and all of this. WSU was up there with the community that was fighting with the fraternities and blacks and all of this. So I was recruited at WSU to be part of a program that was going to advise at-risk students coming to WSU. I went up there in 1969. Left my Urban Renewal job and went up to WSU to become a counselor for that group of students. And to advise the administration to how we might move forward. Franklin: To better serve minority students? Barnes: Yeah, and at-risk students. Because the program that I was involved in had them all: Native Americans, Hispanics, Blacks, prisoners, it was all right. Now, don’t get me wrong, I didn’t go there in a lead capacity, I went there in a support capacity, to add with the people that were taken a lead. And some of the people that were taken a lead took a beating. Because there was always—at that particular time, you’re bringing in kids who don’t belong here, they don’t have wherewithal to be college students and you’re going to have this help programs and all of that, when we want the cream of the crop. Franklin: Right. But how do you help kids that have a poor education because of their race, because of where they live? How do you help them get into a serious higher education institution when they haven’t had the opportunity to get that kind of education to help them thrive? Barnes: Yeah, but the thing about that is the kids that were recruited did have the wherewithal, see? Franklin: Oh, they have the wherewithal. Barnes: They had the wherewithal and their opportunities to express that was hampered by the low expectations that some faculty members had about their presence there. Franklin: I also imagine that they would’ve, just by nature, faced different pressures than the average college student at that time. Barnes: Oh, absolutely. There’s no doubt about it, they actually had a mission to represent well. Franklin: Right. Barnes: Pretty much like the kids in 1957 down there at Little Rock, you see. You didn’t just send anybody out there, to impress the white folks. Franklin: Right. They were ambassadors of a sort? Barnes: They were ambassadors of sort. Some of them had issues because a lot of them were athletes and the coaches exploited them. That was during the time you could graduate a black college athlete and they were reading at a third, fourth grade level with the college degree. All of that kind of problems and I went up there to help deal with some of that kind of stuff. Franklin: How long did you stay at WSU? Barnes: I stayed up at WSU up in Pullman for—doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo—at least 30 years. Franklin: Oh wow. Did you live in Pullman the whole time? Barnes: Yeah, mm-hmm. Franklin: Did you do similar types of jobs the entire time? Barnes: I did and became—the truth of the matter is—I will just say this—I got myself in hot water because somebody claimed that I had too high of an expectation for minority students. Franklin: Okay. Barnes: Did you understand what I just said? Franklin: I did understand. Barnes: Can you imagine that? Franklin: It’s hard to imagine that. Barnes: That’s right. And as a result of that I had to take my proper place—hadn’t been seasoned, like I told you, prior to going up there—to stand up for those who couldn’t stand up for themselves—inspired by persons like E.M. Magee—if I had to stand up by myself. But I didn’t have to stand by myself. But that actually did happen. Franklin: Wow. What led you coming back to the Tri-Cities? Barnes: That. Franklin: That. [LAUGHTER] Yup. Is there anything else that you wanted to say about civil rights in the Tri-Cities? Barnes: No. You know, there is a lot that could be said. I guess we could get into detail, but I think you would have to drag that out in as much that there’s so much. I have nothing to volunteer other than to say that I personally, even as we speak, feel a similar calling. Although I don’t have the energy as I did when I quit my job at Hanford. Because look at the country. You look at the country, it’s almost worse than it was back then. Franklin: I agree. Barnes: And then you ask yourself—there is no more Martin Luther King around—don’t get me wrong, I’m not even in the vicinity of that. But the point of it is that if you look at the state of the nation as it is in the condition of people of color—and blacks is what we’re talking about now and Hanford Project an all of that—I don’t see that much representation in our schools, in our institutions of higher learning. When I go to stores and shop at Costco, WinCo, ShopKo and any other Co, I don’t see black faces there behind the counters. If I go get me a McDonald’s hamburger, I don’t see people, black, that much. And, if that is the case now, and we are going to build a future on that, then what are we saying that the future’s going to look like for the people who look like me? I mean, it is so obvious that I don’t think people see it. You walk across your parking lot—I don’t know what your status is here on the campus—but anyway, you look around the halls—and I’m not talking about a black; I’m talking about an American, Afro-American black. And you’re going to say, where are they? And I’m going to say—I haven’t taken a look—but my best guess is, they’re not there. Franklin: I’ll tell you, in my classes, it’s been few and far between. Pullman was a little bit—well, no, even in Pullman, too. Barnes: And what classes were you teaching? Franklin: History class. Barnes: See? And don’t get me wrong—you’re a modern day scholar. Franklin: My last two questions are pretty broad and reflective questions for you. First is, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in the Tri-Cities during the Cold War? Barnes: Certainly, if they put it in context, they can’t miss it. Because if we’re talking about Hanford, and the reason that black people came here in the first place was for job opportunities, but Hanford was a segregated place. The communities that supported Hanford were segregated. And all of this took place before we even integrated the military of all places—before then. And then this was a struggle in the ‘50s trying to integrate the schools, trying to get people to upgrade east Pasco where the cities had gotten together and decided that’s where we’re going to put all the blacks at that particular point and time, in terms of living conditions; they had the segregated barracks out there. Then if they were to trace it down to where we got some civil rights laws and some Affirmative Action things and we had this little bulging of black presence in the communities where we had the superintendent of schools, we had blacks in the classroom and we had students going off to college, we had a community, we had a representation in some of the stores as sales people, students and teachers and all of that. Then we are not that anymore. We are heavily represented in the prisons and the foster homes and things like that. And we can account for with a little bit more study. We’ll see how that all happened. We had a program where blacks were thriving before we had Initiative 200. You might recall Initiative 200. Franklin: I don’t. Barnes: Initiative 200 is where we had a certain—the Affirmative Action Program. Some states still have it; the federal government still has it; but the State of Washington doesn’t have it—where the contracts with the State of Washington to require that a certain percentage of that would go to women and minority businesses. And then there was an initiative that came along and said that that’s discriminatory and they cut it out. And minority businesses and all of that didn’t fade off; it dropped off. It didn’t fade off; it dropped off, and you can almost see that we don’t have—in terms of state procurement—minority and women business. The women are doing all right, because they are heavily represented by white women. But all of that in the state has curtailed the efforts of the people that put forward. Incidentally, there is an effort ongoing right now where they’re trying to repeal that initiative and get back to where we can have some state agencies procuring for minority businesses and all that, as a little side point. But anyway, so that they would see that. See, Hanford isn’t doing—I don’t think of Hanford as Hanford because everything is so diversified right now—is doing anything. I don’t even think that you can point to a minority community as such—a black community. I don’t think you can do that. I don’t think you can say that there is an east Pasco anymore that’s predominantly black. In fact, I know you can’t. You can’t do that. If you’re going to say the black have been absorbed in the community, then you can’t say that’s the case, because we can’t see their physical presence in your classroom, or on this campus, or distributed through the mainstream or business community that you would expect, having them come through all of that. In terms of what Hanford did, I think Hanford made an effort during this day. But I think Hanford’s efforts with blacks, just like their efforts with the reactors out there: they’re decommissioned. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Man, you’re giving me so many quotable lines in this interview. Barnes: So we’re starting to lose our significance, just like some of those reactors have out there on the Project. Our time has come and gone. That’s what it looks like. Franklin: Is there anything else that you’d like to mention about migration, work experience, segregation, and civil rights and how they impacted your life? Barnes: No, I—say that last part again? Franklin: Related to migration, work experience, segregation, and civil rights and how they impacted your life at Hanford and Tri-Cities. Barnes: Certainly everything that I am in terms of being an adult and all of that, for me personally, I think I’ve had a good experience in the Tri Cities, for me personally. At Hanford, it was fine. And my position in the Tri-Cities or in Pasco, that’s fine. I qualify with some of the good old boys with those of us that are still left from my time there in the community. As I look at the future, I don’t necessarily see much of a legacy that’s being left by those blacks who were here, and who have done things. There is no visible presence. If I had to make a guess—I’m going to make this guess, and you can tell me or edit it out or whatever you want to do—I might be the only black you saw all day. Franklin: Well, no, but in an average day, probably. Barnes: That’s the point that I’m making. Because I drove all the way over here and I haven’t seen anyone yet, except when I went to the restroom and looked at myself. The point that I’m making is, that’s how absent we are in the scheme of things. Franklin: Yeah, things are very different in the three cities, that’s certainly true. And in general. Barnes: And in general. Franklin: Yeah. Well, Dallas, thank you for such an honest and powerful interview. I think you really spoke truth to power, and I really appreciate you laying out your experiences, and how you see things. It was just a wonderful interview. Barnes: You’re welcome. Franklin: I’m the richer for having you interviewed today. Barnes: Well, then the banner has been passed on to you. Franklin: Well, we’ll see, but thank you so much. Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 300 Area 326 Building General Electric US Testing Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1952-1969 1999- Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1962-1969 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 Dallas Barnes Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Pasco (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Pullman (Wash.) Migration Segregation School integration Race relations Affirmative action Civil rights Civil rights movements Description An account of the resource Dallas Barnes moved to Pasco, Washington in 1952 as a child. A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288 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 03/22/2018 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. This oral history collection was done in partnership with the National Park Service under Task Agreement P17AC01288. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F57631c519df54a6d2fcc81f5d77e6f8c.JPG 2299ac49014cf0639a7ca8caa7aa3d1c https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fe1bbc2468804125f13a953e4d99240e7.mp4 8881b49dab96f97ca7b17982ffb2d902 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 Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford Subject The topic of the resource African Americans; Oral History Description An account of the resource A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource National Park Service Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 9/1/2017-9/1/2019 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project. Relation A related resource RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RG2_8 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 Dallas Barnes, Webster Jackson and Albert Wilkins Location The location of the interview Morningstar Baptist Church Pasco, Washington Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Dallas Barnes, Pastor Albert Wilkins and Webster Jackson on May 31st, 2018. The interview is being conducted at Morning Star Baptist Church in East Pasco. I’ll be talking with Dallas, Pasto Albert and Webster about their experiences living in the Tri-Cities. And for the record, can you state and spell your full names for us, starting with Dallas? Dallas Barnes: Dallas Barnes, D-A-L-L-A-S, E, and Barnes, B-A-R-N-E-S. Albert Wilkins: Mm-hmm, yes, and I’m Albert Wilkins, A-L-B-E-R-T, capital-T, W-I-L-K-I-N-S. Webster Jackson: Mine, I am Webster Jackson. Webster, W-E-B-S-T-E-R, the letter U, J-A-C-K-S-O-N. Franklin: Great, thank you. So we’re at Morning Star Baptist Church. Tell me about the church, how it was founded, and the role that it plays in the community—played in the community. Wilkins: Mm-kay. Well, the church was founded in 1946. It began in the homes of several of the older members. I don’t remember all their names, but Brother Luzell Johnson, who was a major deacon in the church for many years, his wife, Etta B. Johnson, his sister— Jackson: Velma. Wilkins: Velma, Velma Williams, and several others. It was later—it established in a building in downtown Pasco off of Lewis Street in the early ‘40s, ’46? Yeah, around ’46, ’47. It was later moved to the corner of Butte and Wehe, I think in 1940--? Barnes: Eight, I believe. Wilkins: Mm-hmm, ’48. Where—it stayed there until 1956, when this particular building was built and established. This is where it’s been ever since. Franklin: I’d like to ask each of you three what your first memories are of the church. I’ll start with Dallas. Barnes: Well, I was involved with the church. We moved from St. Louis to Pasco in 1952. And I remember being taken to church, of course, by my mom, here to Morning Star. And I was in, I guess, junior high school or early—sophomore or somewhere around there. And became a member, did all the things that youth did in the church, and was baptized then in the Morning Star Baptist Church when it was on Butte and Wehe. Wilkins: Yeah. We also moved here in 1952. I was two years old at the time, so my recollection of the move is non-existent. However, I do remember living next-door to the church in ’53, ’54, ’55, and I was baptized in Morning Star Baptist Church and I believe it was indeed here in this particular building around 1956, ’57. Jackson: My folks, we came out to visit my mother’s sister and their families in 1948. And we stayed out here for about a month. We came from Texarkana, Texas. And we went back. My dad was a principal in the high school back in Texas. Actually it was in Arkansas. Texarkana, Texas and Arkansas, where the state line goes right through the center of that city. And we stayed out here for about a month visiting and then we went back to Texarkana. And my dad decided basically that we really needed to go back to Pasco. So we packed up and came back to Pasco. My brother, he enlisted in the US Navy out of Texarkana, and me and my mother and dad came out here. And he went to work at Hanford. And me and my cousins and so forth, the only thing we did was rode all the way around the city limits of Pasco, which was not that great. It was not that expansive in— Wilkins: That time. Jackson: In 1950 and so forth. I also—my dad, he joined St. James Methodist Church, and me and my mother joined Morning Star. That was also down on the corner of Butte and Wehe Street. And I was baptized in Morning Star Church. Franklin: Webster, could I ask you what your first impressions were? Because you were in your teens when you came here, right? Jackson: Correct. Franklin: What were your first impressions of Pasco when you came here in ’48? Jackson: Oh, it was the place to be for us youngsters, for us kids. Like I said, I had several cousins here, family—extended family here. We just had a good time as far as that’s concerned. At that age, I mean, in high school, in Pasco High—I graduated from Pasco High School, and it was not that many African American kids in there. I would guess at this time, I would say it was less than ten. We all got along. We had our ups and downs in school, as far as that’s concerned. But, like I said, we really rode our bicycles every day and we just had a good time. Franklin: Great. I would—so you came from Texarkana, and Dallas you came from—? Barnes: St. Louis. Franklin: St. Louis. And, Albert, where did your family move from? Wilkins: We came here from Louisiana. My father was a preacher as well. Franklin: Oh, okay. Wilkins: And so he came up here to work on the dams. He came up in ’50, and we followed, then, in ’52. Franklin: Right on. I guess, what role did the church play in the black community? Both historically and here in Pasco. Wilkins: Hmm. I don’t know. The church was the central piece of the community. At that time, the vast majority of African Americans lived in east Pasco. The church was the center of the community, so the role they played was—it maintained, or set the standard for moral behavior in the community. The pastor of the church really was the voice of the community and issues concerning civil rights or some injustices or any relationships with the authorities, the pastor of the church was the voice. You have to remember, at that time, this was a very segregated area. In fact, I think I was seven years old before I ever saw another white person, you know? Really. Franklin: Really? Wilkins: I’m serious. Because it was that isolated. And so everything that we did, like Webster was saying, was done right here in east Pasco, riding our bicycles or walking out to Sacajawea Park or going out to James Johnson’s ranch and riding horses. Everything was done right here for a long time. For a very long time, in fact. As I recall, probably around 1964, they had built Isaac Stevens Junior High School, and I was attending there, and I remember being in class, I was the only African American in the class. And that’s when they first started putting TVs in the classroom. And they were showing the civil rights movement in the South. It was really a traumatic experience for me, because they had this lady on the television, they were interviewing and asking her what she thought about segregation. And she looked directly into the camera—and you have to remember I’m the only African American in this room—she looked directly into the camera and she said, well, niggers can’t learn! [LAUGHTER] I was mortified! I’m sitting there, going, huh. So what I had was a retreat to east Pasco where I could feel safe. I could feel safe. And that’s kind of the role the church played in my life: it gave me a safe haven where I could always come to. But yeah, it played a central role in the community for a very long time. When there was a physical community of African Americans, mm-hmm. Barnes: And we did have a real community. You know, service stations that was owned and operated by black people, taverns, JD’s Store, and a community. We would, in many cases, because the workforce was intransient, a lot of folks, and a lot of folks came from the military base in Othello to Pasco to make it a little more robust, and from other places, too, like Hermiston. And just for the region, Pasco was the center for the weekend recreation and things like that. So in many ways, we could say that Pasco, for a lot of the people who were here and visited here, partied fairly well on the weekend and went to the church on the Sundays to get ready for that Monday morning work experience, be it back on the military base or out at Hanford and things like that. So if you’re talking about back in that period of time, yeah, segregation was really, really real, and we did have a refuge in east Pasco. And the church very much was the moral center place for keeping us all together as a community. Wilkins: Yeah. Jackson: And also, we talk about, yes, east Pasco was the dominant residential section for the African Americans as far as that’s concerned, but on the underpass, the railroad tracks underpass is what divided east Pasco from west Pasco. And 1st Street, you go underneath the underpass and you go on 1st Street, there were African Americans between 1st Street and the railroad track, which is only one block. And these people, they had—in fact, their names was Coleman. Barnes: In fact, that’s where we lived, on that first street off of Wehe—on the side of the railroad tracks. Jackson: And when we came to Pasco, we lived on Tacoma Street. But it’s right next to the railroad track. And I can’t recall any African Americans or black people living past that first street. Wilkins: What about Navy Homes, that was all the way down the end of 1st Street? Jackson: Navy Homes was at the end of that, and Parkside Homes was just to the west side of 1st Street. Wilkins: Yeah, I remember— Jackson: When we moved from Tacoma Street, in that building, there was me and my mother and father, like I said, my brother was in the US Navy, and my aunt and uncle—had two aunts and uncles, we all lived in the same—it was kind of like a little shack of a triplex, I guess you would call it. It wasn’t no triplex, it was—because there was only just one room and a bathroom. Barnes: Are you talking about Navy Homes or Parkside? Jackson: No, I’m speaking about on Tacoma Street. Barnes: Oh, I see. Jackson: Tacoma and Sylvester. And not very long after that, then we moved to Parkside Homes. That led moving into the ward off. Wilkins: I know, that was as close to the west side as you gonna get. [LAUGHTER] Jackson: Exactly. Barnes: Parkside and Navy Homes was part of the—well, even CBC had some of those particular—started out at the Air— Wilkins: Mm-hmm, Naval— Barnes: Yeah, at the Naval place out there where they had their station out there. As well as Port of Pasco had some military attachments to the Pasco community. So, Navy Homes and—Parkside was Army, Navy Homes was Navy and so forth. And we had down here an intern camp for some of the—I’m not sure if they were German or Italian prisoners, but one of the two. Jackson: Yeah, there was no African Americans living in the Navy Home—I mean, yeah, Navy Home—other than, you know, military attachments, as far as that’s concerned. Later on, African Americans was able to live in Navy Homes. Wilkins: Yeah, it became your first low-rent place. Those were just tentacles, because everything ended up being sucked back into east Pasco for any kind of community stuff. Barnes: Right. That’s right. Wilkins: And again, the church was the centerpiece. Morning Star is indeed the oldest African American church that was established back in the early ‘50s. Two other churches came out of Morning Star, because it had gotten so crowded. And so New Hope Baptist Church up the street came out of it, and then Greater Faith Baptist Church came out of it, as well as St. James, actually, the Methodist Church, because all of it was in one place at one point. Franklin: Were those—you mentioned because it had got so big—were those pretty peaceful splits of the congregation, or was there any kind of disagreement that led to the foundation of the separate churches? And did it fragment the community as well, or was everyone— Barnes: I don’t necessarily think that the community itself was fragmented. Wilkins: No. Barnes: And it probably could have been a combination of reasons. But certainly, growth would have been one of them and maybe—I’m just thinking about the dynamics of any large group, you know. That could happen. But I would say, it could’ve been a combination, and I’m not sure what percentage of the causes would be. But the community stayed intact. These churches get along very well even right as we speak, and from the time of their origin, they got along well. Wilkins: And you have to hold in mind that during that time, there was a significant influx of African Americans continually coming in— Barnes: This is what I’m saying. Wilkins: --but were concentrated—had to be concentrated in this area. So of course the church swoled--swelled up real good. And so the splits—I wouldn’t even really call them splits, so much. Yeah, I guess they were, because you got a new church name and everything. Barnes: New church name and all of that. We maintained the Baptist piece on all of it. And still again, if there’s a death, for example, or a wedding, or any other kind of celebration, then all these congregations come together wherever we go and whosever church we’re at, as one community family, one family. One church family. Wilkins: Yeah, in fact, what we have in the works now—and I haven’t really announced this completely—but on the fifth Sunday in July, all three of those churches are going to come together for a unified worship service, which I think should be a real historic event since we haven’t done that. Yeah, for years and years. I don’t know that we’ve ever done that. Jackson: I don’t think it’s ever happened. Wilkins: But we’re gonna do it the fifth Sunday. Barnes: Something other than a funeral or a wedding or something like that. Wilkins: Something other than a funeral! [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Where is that going to take place? Wilkins: Right here at Morning Star. Right here at Morning Star, it’ll be an 11:00 service like we normally do, only the other two churches are going to put signs on their doors saying, come to Morning Star. So any visitors will—hopefully, we’ll be able to fill it up in here. Franklin: Oh, that’s great. What were—in the early days, the ‘40s and ‘50s, what were the conditions like in east Pasco compared to west Pasco? Wilkins: Mm. Barnes: ‘40s and ‘50s? Franklin: Yeah. Barnes: I’d have to start off in the ‘50s. Jackson, you were here in the ‘40s. Franklin: Yeah, maybe we can start of with Webster. Kind of you can tell us, when you came, what was the comparison? Jackson: In 1948, compared to the present? Franklin: Yeah. Or compared to west Pasco. How was east Pasco different from west Pasco? Were there any services or conditions that were unequal? Wilkins: We didn’t have sidewalks or— Jackson: No! Wilkins: Paved streets. Jackson: There was no pavement. Barnes: You didn’t even have sewer over there at that time. Jackson: Let’s see, what was it, the Pasco—your organization? Barnes: East Pasco Improvement Association? Jackson: East Pasco Improvement Association. And my dad was part of that. And Luzell— Barnes: Johnson, Thelma—not Thelma. Jackson: Vanis Daniels, Thelma Hawkins. Barnes: Hawkins, yeah. Jackson: In fact, Thelma Hawkins was the lead in building that building that’s up there in Kurtzman Park right now. But the conditions, I mean, the difference is like day and night. Because there were certain places that black people could not go after a certain time. Like Kennewick, after 6:00 in the evening, when the stores close, you couldn’t—there were none allowed in Kennewick. And I’m not speaking about what I heard, or what Pastor Wilkins or Dallas Barnes is saying. I didn’t hear it from them. Wilkins: We know that. Jackson: I myself was—and two other friends. We were only youngsters, 16, 17 years old. But was turned around by the police in Kennewick. There used to be a green bridge across the Columbia River from Pasco to Kennewick. If we dropped off the Kennewick side of the bridge, the police turned the red light on, followed us around the curve there and pulled us over and said, the stores are closed. You have no business in Kennewick, so turn around and go right back across that bridge. And naturally, we obeyed his commands. But I must say that we didn’t stay in Pasco very long, because we turned around and went right back to Kennewick. [LAUGHTER] Wilkins: Yeah, but would you say that in terms of just things like street lights and paved roads, that there was a distinct difference between east Pasco and west Pasco? Jackson: Correct, correct. Wilkins: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Parks. Didn’t really have any until we— Barnes: We didn’t have until we built Kurtzman Park. Wilkins: Until we built Kurtzman Park. Franklin: Right, and the community built that park. Wilkins: The community built. Barnes: Right, the community built. Kurtzman donated the land, and the community helped go seed it and so forth and so on. Wilkins: Yeah, so when you asked the question, what was the difference between east Pasco and west Pasco, on the landscape side, you know, there were very few amenities in east Pasco. Barnes: Right. There was no sewer here. I think if you look at the Urban Renewal record of the kinds of buildings that was being demolished and the kind of relocation that took place, you’ll find that we had trailers that had little attachments to them to make them two-bedrooms, those travel trailers. You had outhouses, water faucets on the outside of buildings and things like that—on some of the buildings, not all of them of course. But you did have a blighted area. And east Pasco was totally, totally neglected. And it was set aside like that. Now, we talked about the cows over there, that I had forgotten it was over there, but you got that toxic dump right over on the other side. Wilkins: Oh, yeah! The dump was on the other— [LAUGHTER] Barnes: So I don’t want to put it in the harshest terms, but if we’re pressed for time, all of the debris and the trash in the minds of some city officials and whoever else the planners were, put the people who they considered a little less valuable as well as the livestock and the toxic trash all in the same category, and we called that east Pasco. Now, on the other side of town, when I lived over there? We had paved roads, we had segregated lunch counters over there, and many of the people who worked there, they weren’t working at Hanford; they worked as domestic or field hands. Like picking potatoes and weeding beans. I’m talking about, there were black work crews in those days that would get up early in the morning and go out and weed farmers’ beans or—I remember Charles, you know, he drove that tractor for I don’t know how long, and did all kinds of farm work before it became more mechanized and things like that. So that’s what east Pasco was back in the early ‘50s as I recall. And mid-‘50s and even later than that. Even the late ‘50s. And ‘60s. Wilkins: Early ‘60s. Barnes: And the ‘60s. Everything that Pasco got was a product of advocacy on the part of his dad, his dad, and other people who came from the South with education. The ministers of the church played an active role; they always were the voice for the community. And if they were not, they certainly was a very, very close second of someone who was more articulate or had expertise on that issue. But the pastor of the church rallied the members, who was the community, to go down and to petition the city for paved roads, running water, better policing if it took that, better employment consideration over there, and that type of thing. Wilkins: Yeah. The church played a pretty central role in that. Barnes; Very, very, very much. Wilkins: Because I recall my father, Reverend Bill Wilkins, was—I think he was the first African American city councilman? I think he was the first. Barnes: I think, he may—yeah. Wilkins: Advocated quite a bit for the community in a lot of different ways. But, yes, the church has been around for a good long time, and it’s only had five pastors. I’m the fifth, actually. Which is a testament to something. You know. [LAUGHTER] I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but when we look around and see how pastors go through various churches and you see the longevity that they have here. That speaks of some kind of unity. But yeah. Franklin: Dallas, you mentioned Albert and Webster’s fathers. I’d like to ask each of you about your dads, or your parents and their experiences before coming here. I’ll start with Albert. Because, Dallas, you said that they were educated. Barnes: Well, they were the spokespeople. I remember them very well facing the, if you will, powers to be. But they were men who stood tall in the community during those days. Franklin: Great. So, Albert, you said your family came from Louisiana. Wilkins: They did, they did. My father, like I said, was a Baptist preacher. The reason he came, I said, was because he went to work on the dams, which was true. But the real reason he came to Washington was because he had married a black man to a white woman. And the woman was the sheriff’s daughter, and they were going to hang my dad. Franklin: He had done this in Louisiana? Wilkins: He had done that in Louisiana. So, late in the midnight hour, everybody put money together and sent him to Washington. Franklin: Oh, wow. Wilkins: To save his life. Franklin: Was that against the law in Louisiana at that time? Wilkins: Absolutely. Barnes: It was the law in America. Wilkins: Absolutely. And so that was the reason he came, and then we came up a few years later. Franklin: Okay. Wow, that’s quite a story. Wilkins: But he was an Army veteran. He’d fought in World War II. He was—my father was a man of many different talents. And he was a very outspoken man. Barnes: Yes, he was. Jackson: Yes, he was. Wilkins: So yes. Franklin: What do you know about his initial experience in coming to work at Hanford and finding a place to live here? Wilkins: Well, my father never actually worked at Hanford until later in his life. His major work was on the dams. Franklin: Oh, right, right. Wilkins: Mm-hmm, was on the dams. That’s what I recall. But my father was also a mortician and he would help sometimes with the mortician work here at Greenlee Funeral Home back then. Yes. And he was a carpenter as well. But mostly, he was a preacher. Jackson: And he—in fact, Reverend Bill Wilkins, we worked at—I was working at Hanford and my office was in downtown Pasco. Actually, we were in the Federal Building. And Reverend Wilkins, he worked there at the same time. Wilkins: And they carpooled there. Jackson: He was in charge of the carpool. Franklin: In Richland? The Federal Building in Richland. Jackson: The Federal Building, you know, where people come to check out—visitors come in from other states and so forth, and they would check the cars out from the carpool. There was one right there at the west side of the Federal Building. Franklin: Right. And, Webster, you mentioned that your family came from Texarkana. Jackson: We came to Pasco from Texarkana. Texas, over on the Texas side. Franklin: Right. What do you know about your parents’ lives before they came here? Jackson: Oh, everything. Well, like I said, my dad was a principal of a school down there. Also, he did what people do in the South. He cut logs and this type of thing—I think they called billets, little short—harvest logs and this type of thing to make ends meet. Farmed. Just did everything. Pretty well-rounded as far as the South. I mean, that’s what African Americans did down there. Barnes: You got to realize that Jim Crow didn’t end until ’64 now, so, we’re talking about back in the ‘40s, you walked on your side of the sidewalk, you said, yes, ma’am to little girls and all that kind of stuff, and you ran from the Ku Klux Klan like you had better do if you want to— Wilkins: Live. [LAUGHTER] Barnes: --Survive, yeah. And so you had that kind of thing and the people who came to Washington came with that same kind of ideology and that’s how come we had to had an east Pasco and you couldn’t go to Kennewick over here or Pasco over there or whatever you have, because the culture came here and is still with us, the remnants of it. Franklin: Yeah. How did your father hear about Pasco and why did he choose to move the family up? Jackson: Like I said, my mother’s sister—she had two sisters here on the west coast. They lived in Portland and they worked and they lived in Vanport in Portland, and they worked in the shipyards. They left the shipyards and moved to Pasco in order to work at Hanford. That’s where we visited them here in Pasco. Like I said, we stayed out here for about a month. Him talking to my folks, mom and dad, and talking with their mom’s sister and their husbands and this type of thing, and they were working at Hanford, so it seemed to be a better deal. We wasn’t getting anything and getting it aware down South. So we moved out here, and my dad went to work for, I believe it was JA Jones. Franklin: JA Jones Construction? Jackson: Right, but at Hanford. And my mother worked in—and her sisters, all three of them, they worked in, oh, heck, downtown, what was that Chinese restaurant down there? Barnes: Chinese Gardens. Chinese Gardens. Jackson: Chinese Gardens? It was Frank’s. Wilkins: There was another one down there on Lewis Street. Jackson: No, it was Frank’s Grill. Barnes: Frank’s Grill, oh, okay, okay. Wilkins: You remember Frank’s? Barnes: Yeah, I remember Frank’s Grill, yeah, I remember that. [LAUGHTER] Jackson: That’s where they worked. Wilkins: Frank Ng, Frank Ng. Jackson: Mm-hmm. Franklin: Frank Ng? Wilkins: Mm-hmm, right. Right there on Lewis Street. Barnes: And he’s still around, too. Wilkins: Is he? Barnes: His son is. Wilkins: His son is, yeah. Jackson: Oh, yeah, Frankie. Little Frankie, right. Franklin: Oh, wait, is this—was it a Chinese restaurant or was it a— Wilkins: It was a Chinese restaurant. Barnes: Chinese/American restaurant. Franklin: Okay. It was called Frank’s Grill? Jackson: Yeah. Wilkins: Frank’s Grill, yeah. Franklin: Oh, that’s interesting. Wilkins: There were only two at the time: Frank’s Grill and Chinese Gardens. Jackson: I think so. Wilkins: On opposite ends. Franklin: And were these in east Pasco? Wilkins: No. Barnes: No. Franklin: West Pasco. Jackson: I can’t think—later on, the Eastside Market was the big store in east Pasco. In fact, the owners of the East Side Market gave this church, Morning Star, a house on Wehe. Wilkins: Yeah, it was donated—I can’t remember. Jackson: I can’t think. Gene, Gene, the first name? Gene Wright. Wilkins: That’s right. Yeah, yeah. That was the only other—I mean, it was that place and George’s place were the only white establishments in east Pasco. If I’m right. Barnes: Yeah. The other thing you want to do is, there’s the north side of east Pasco and there’s the south side of east Pasco. And white folks lived on the north side of east Pasco, and there was a few—like the Wilkins—folks who would move on the north side of— Wilkins: Of Lewis Street. Barnes: --of Lewis Street until White Flight took over, and I’m not sure when that was, and they all moved to the west side of Pasco. Wilkins: That was between ’68 and ’72. Barnes: Somewhere in there. But for the longest, it was divided that way, too, in east Pasco, where the whites lived on the north side. And that’s where you see the nicer houses, back in those days, when Urban Renewal came in and wiped out the south side of east Pasco. Jackson: The Urban Renewal project consisted of thirteen blocks in east Pasco. And like I said, it was mixed— Barnes: Commercial and residential. Jackson: A residential house would be right there and next-door would be a trucking company and this type of thing. And Wehe, Wehe Street is the one that divided them. And the fence and the tree grove is still there right now. So the city’s project, the purpose of the project was to separate those. And we did that. Under the Urban Renewal project, we had three phases of it. It was called— Barnes: Demolition— Jackson: Rehabilitation, relocation— Barnes: And demolition. Jackson: And demolition, right. Franklin: You two worked on—Dallas and—Webster, you were in charge of the Urban Renewal, right? Jackson: Right, right. Franklin: Dallas, you worked on the Urban Renewal. Barnes: Mm-hmm. Franklin: So I guess since it’s been brought up, I guess, what was the impetus to start the Urban Renewal project? Where did that come from? Barnes: Well, that was—the city got their contract to—well, you had model cities in some of the—you remember the Model Cities program, a federal program. Urban Renewal was a federal program, and then you had these zones that they had for development, so there was a lot of federal money running around. I forgot the person who—the city manager was pretty progressive— Jackson: Mar Winegar. Barnes: Winegar was pretty progressive in there, and Art Fletcher was pretty progressive—folks who helped to move Pasco forward. And so those folks were with it at all, put some of this activity in motion and they were successful in getting the Urban Renewal grant. I left the Community Action Program to join Urban Renewal as their relocation officer before I took another job at Pullman. But that’s where it came from, and the intent was those three aspects: demolition, relocation and rehabilitate—rehab. So we had all phases of that. And Webster can speak about all three of those phases; I just came in as the relocation officer-- Wilkins: Do you think— Barnes: --finding people places to move before their houses got destroyed and— Wilkins: Do you think that that was like a precursor to gentrification? Barnes: I could say—well, it was. But I’m not so sure that the thinking was there at that time. Because at the time, we still had—we still was fighting segregation. Right at the moment I’m thinking about, 1968. ’68, Martin Luther King got shot; ’68, Bobby Kennedy got shot; ’68, the laws came in where we’re talking about no discrimination and things like that. So, at least that’s when I went into the Urban Renewal domain. And before that, we had the War on Poverty under Johnson. So all of those things, all of those avenues sort of opened up. And, even to this day, even to this very day, you’ll find that much of Pasco’s growth is based upon money trying to do something for the low income. We got CBC out there who is a Hispanic service institution. And part of that—we had all those Title I, IX, VII, IV and all that other stuff that built a lot of gyms up and down the valley. You know, I’m not saying that people of color got their fair share—well, let me take that back. It’s worthy of investigating whether or not they got their fair share of the money that was intended for them in service. But being on the War on Poverty, I had a chance to see some of that at work, and certainly being in the vicinity of some of the politics of all of that, I know that that was a concern of a lot of the people in the valley. But we’re speaking about Pasco specifically. So, what am I saying? I’m saying that all of those federal programs—Model Cities, Urban Renewal, Title I, Title IV, Title IX, and all of that—that Pasco itself has benefited greatly from that. And Urban Renewal was a part of that. That’s a long way of answering your question, but you asked where did it come from. It came from the federal government. I’m not sure that our city government did anything until Fletcher and Winegar came along and tapped into the federal funds to get some activity on this side of those railroad tracks. Because if you’re wondering where our city money went from our tax dollars, maybe you’re wondering where the state money went—I think the state may have done something—but if you’re talking about our tax dollars and the services we got from it like paved roads and streets like that? No. Jackson: Well, there were the—like I said, and I think I mentioned it—the Urban Renewal project was a $4 million project. When they started running out of money to do things, there was 26 states across the United States, we all got together and went to Washington, DC. We met with a representative. We had lunch with him. Senator Warren G. Magnuson was the representative from the State of Washington. All 26 of us made our presentation to our representative from our states. There was money that had not—federal money that had not been released. And I distinctly remember, during my presentation there in the meeting—in fact, I said—I was telling about the poverty, the percentage of poverty here in Pasco and this type of thing, and to be honest, Senator Magnuson knew more about it than I did. [LAUGHTER] Jackson: Because he chimed in and helped clarify some of the things that I had said and this type of thing. And when we got back, he came back and there was x number of dollars relegated for Pasco that had not been released the same way. And I remember—I can’t recall his name, but a couple other states, Kentucky is one that I distinctly remember—but we all made our presentation and got that money released. Franklin: Webster, how did you become involved in the Urban Renewal project? Jackson: I was perfectly satisfied at Hanford. Franklin: And what were you doing at Hanford? Jackson: I was a draftsman. I was a draftsman at Hanford. For, what, Rockwell? Rockwell—I knew it was Rockwell. Barnes: Rockwell-Westinghouse, I think. Jackson: Yup. Wilkins: Mm-hmm, Rockwell. Jackson: Right, Rockwell. Now, the people in the community, they could not—they was not getting any place. There was relocations, there was—like you said, there were shacks and this type of thing, here in east Pasco people were living in. They did not trust the— Wilkins: Establishment. Jackson: --director of Urban Renewal. He was a white gentleman. And he just couldn’t communicate with the people. And Mar Winegar, the city manager, opened it up for recruitment for a new director. And many, many, many people in the community asked me, Webster, why don’t you—we would like for you to apply for that position and this type of thing. I applied the last day. The last day it stopped, like I came in from work. I would get off work at 4:13 at Hanford. And I stopped by city hall on the last—on the closing date to help with the city manager. And he said, Webster, if you drop your resume off—the police department was attached to city hall down on Clark Street here—you drop your resume off at the police department where I’ll get it the first thing in the morning and I will go up—I will consider your resume. And I think there was a—it was like, I think they selected about six applicants, and I was one of those. Lo and behold, I’m the one that was selected. But I did not come to the city under any pressure, because my department director at Hanford told me, he said, Webster, if anything go wrong with that City of Pasco, you just give me a call and you can come right back here. So I just come in and they gave me two inventories about that thick. In those days, I could do a whole lot of reading and a whole lot of understanding and ask a whole lot of questions and this type of thing. The original—Dallas, what was that? In Seattle, yeah. Barnes: You’re talking about the main office there? Jackson: The main office. Barnes: Yeah, HUD. Jackson: Yeah, yeah, yeah, the HUD. Barnes: Health and Urban Development. Jackson: Yeah, the HUD office in Seattle. I got to be—we got on first name basis with all kinds of people in there that had responsibilities for the Urban Renewal projects. We got a lot of things done. We got everything—we got all of the relocations done except two, two houses. That was—I don’t know if I should call the names or not. [LAUGHTER] Wilkins: It’s all right. Jackson: But we were able to address all of the houses in the 13-block area, except two, the people that still would not budge. And one of them is still sitting there today. They’re both sitting there today. Franklin: Wow. [LAUGHTER] Jackson: One is next to—a couple of houses from this church. And the other one is down across from Kurtzman’s Park. The people that just would not sell. And although under the Urban Renewal rules and regulations and this type of thing, we had the power of imminent domain, we could’ve taken those houses and forced the people to move. But Mar Winegar, the city manager said no, he didn’t want to force anybody out of their homes, and we did not. Franklin: What was the effect of Urban Renewal on the east Pasco community? Barnes: Well, we had a relocation program. A lot of people—it was fairly good, certainly from a home improvement situations, it was great. And at that time, we had some Fair Housing laws in place and we were right in the thick of the civil rights movement, the 2008 civil rights, no discrimination in housing and all that. And a number of people was able to move, if you will, to some of the places on the west side. We got all 1st Street so we might’ve moved out to 6th or 8th or something like that. We didn’t get out to Road 68 or anything like that. [LAUGHTER] Barnes: For two reasons: number one, I don’t think they money would allow it, and certainly the pressure of the neighbors who might not have been friendly wouldn’t encourage it. But that was one thing. We certainly improved the housing situation, we got some streets in, we got some curbing in, that people did not have to pay for. Jackson can talk more about the final product, but in terms of—and on the downside of it, we destroyed the community. On the downside of it, we destroyed the community. We got the housing project right there that the labor union put in, right next to Kurtzman Park. I don’t think that was part of Urban Renewal— Jackson: No. Barnes: --but it took place during that time. And we had a lot of black people move into that low-income housing, which was better than those trailers that was— Wilkins: Terrible. Barnes: And outhouses and things like that. So that was a product of it. And by and large, we still had residents over in east Pasco. Some people rehabbed the homes, as opposed to moving out, or they had some homes built and whatever it is. But in terms of the whole community and such, we got better streets, got some streetlights, got the paved road up here, and that type of thing. And you can talk about the other physical part. But I know that that part with the relocation and people taking the money that they got from selling their houses and buying another house that was up to code, which was a requirement, and moving on. They still came to Morning Star Church, though. Whatever church was around at the time, and I think it was just Morning Star still at that point. But that’s what it did to the community at the time that I was there and that I observed. It broke up the community, it improved people’s homes physically, substantially. Jackson: And it dispersed people. Barnes: Well, that’s what I’m saying. Jackson: In fact, the pastor of this church lived next-door here, okay? He was relocated over on 14th. Wilkins: Across from the high school. Jackson: Across from Pasco High. In other words, the people, they was free to move to wherever they could afford at that time, out of east Pasco. Wilkins: Which essentially destroyed the community. It was no longer—the church was no longer the center of a physical community. It moved—Urban Renewal’s a good thing on many fronts, but what it ended up doing was causing a stand-up in a psychological community rather than a physical one. So that diminished—in my view, anyway—the power and the influence of the church, because it was no longer the center of a physical community. Jackson: I might say right here, you gonna edit this interview anyway. And Vanis Daniels just walked in. Franklin: Yes, Vanis Daniels did just walk in. Jackson: And I can just see him smiling and this type of thing. Wilkins: He’s remembering. Jackson: He’s got some additions that he could do if you could get another chair up here or something like that. Wilkins: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [VIDEO CUTS] Jackson: We mentioned Art Fletcher. But when Art came to town—he was the emphasis on the East Pasco Neighborhood—East Pasco Co-op. Barnes: Yeah, it was a co-op, mm-hmm. And we had OIC up there that he was involved in, at least a part of. Jackson: Right. But Art was very instrumental. In fact, he had a daycare here— Barnes: That was at St. James, wasn’t it? Jackson: No, downstairs here, in this church. Barnes: Oh, okay. Jackson: But he was very instrumental in the community. I recall him getting a little upset because he said he had a $5,000 bill when he came to Pasco, and at that particular time, he didn’t have anything left. I bet he put— Wilkins: All of his money into it. Jackson: --all the resources into— Wilkins: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Jackson: --this and that. Barnes: The co-op. Jackson: And then when he was here is when he got the position over in the Nixon administration as Assistant Secretary of Labor. Barnes: In charge of domestic affairs. And what’s key about that, is that oftentimes when blacks get appointment over there, they’re the ambassador to Ghana, to Kenya, to Dominican Republic or something like that, and don’t have opportunities to influence things— Wilkins: Nationally. Barnes: Nationally. He was. And so we get Affirmative Action, the Philadelphia Plan, and all of that had his fingerprints on it. Franklin: Oh, wow. And he was— Barnes: He was part of this community. Franklin: He was part of this community. Did he grow up here? Barnes: Oh, no. Wilkins: No, he was an import. Franklin: Oh, okay. And what did Art Fletcher do here before he went to the Nixon administration? Wilkins: He was a councilmember. Franklin: Pasco City councilmember? Barnes: Yeah, but I think there was some other—I don’t recall what brought him to Pasco; it wasn’t to be a councilmember. Jackson: No, no, no, what was it? Wilkins: I cannot remember. Barnes: I don’t recall, but I know that— Jackson: Something— Barnes: It seems like to me, he was associated with, I’m not sure if it was state or federal, but he had some involvement. But he certainly made his mark in the east Pasco community organizing a cooperative for east Pasco. We had a credit union under Art Fletcher, and some consciousness about how to go about community organization and self-help programs, that type of thing. Jackson: Yeah, that was one of the greatest assets that he had, was to get people together. Wilkins: He could organize. Jackson: And he could speak, I mean, he could tell one of those benches over there to come alive, and it would start moving. Barnes: And you do know that he ran for lieutenant governor, too. Franklin: Of the State of Washington? Barnes: Of the State of Washington, as a republican. And I don’t think he lost by very much, either. Jackson: No, he didn’t. Right. Wilkins: Yeah. Franklin: I wanted to ask about opportunities. Were there opportunities available here that were not available where you or your parents came from? Barnes: You talking to any of us? Well, I don’t know which one of us wanted to say yes or no first. But I mean, you know. If you want to start with—well, I’ll just wait and let you go. Well, there were some opportunities here and I think that was the attraction here, and that opportunity was Hanford. We came up here because money was flowing freely—more freely than it was in St. Louis. And there were some other incentives: we had relatives here to come here, and the job opportunities even as a domestic—domestic going as people who worked for Hanford, and clean their houses while they were out making real money, you’d get to bring home half a chicken or whatever they had leftover plus one or two dollars an hour. Seriously. Where you were getting 50 cents in the South for an hour, washing dishes through the back window with the segregation things in people’s houses and all that. So, from that particular point of view, the things out here was better. I don’t think the Ku Klux Klan was riding as freely, and I don’t think—I think the economics were such in this community that we didn’t have the kind of competition or need to exploit, as you would in the South. I’ll just stop that piece right there by saying the bottom line is yes. Wilkins: Is yes. Yes. You know, my father was a World War II veteran. What he got in the South in terms of respect for his service was minimal to nothing. Plus, being a preacher, and I told you the circumstances surrounding his coming here, it was definitely a better advantage to be here than there. And as Dallas pointed out, there was much better work opportunities here, not just at Hanford, but you had Ice Harbor Dam, you had McNary Dam. You had all these dams being built, and a lot of—a good number of African Americans worked on them and made good money. Jackson: Including me. Wilkins: Yeah, that’s right. You worked on it as well. Jackson: Yeah, I worked on Priest Rapids and—Priest Rapids up in Mattawa and the one up in— Barnes: Ice Harbor? Jackson: --on the side of Wenatchee. Barnes: Oh, mm-hmm. Wilkins: Yeah, so— Jackson: Rocky Reach. Rocky Reach Dam. Wilkins: I think in answer to your question, it’s a pretty resounding yes. Definitely. Franklin: Kind of the flip side of the question, what ways were opportunities limited because of segregation or racism? Barnes: What was that question again? Franklin: In what ways were opportunities limited because of segregation and racism? Barnes: Well, you still had your place. Even when Art Fletcher made a big dent in the Hanford Project out there, as well; his advocacy reached the Hanford Project with the Affirmative Action and some of those other kinds of things. I think in an earlier interview, there were certain jobs even at Hanford reserved for blacks. And those usually were the ones where you worked outside. They were black laborers. We didn’t bring in many or any professional people. I think Webster and his brother probably, because they had drafting positions or whatever positions that put them inside. You know, I had an inside position, a little bit better than washing pipettes and test tubes, but not that much hard. The point that I’m making is, we had to have—there was segregation out there at the plant, as there is today, according to the information that I got yesterday. So, the point that I’m making is that you’re still limited. You’re still limited; you oftentimes are in a come-and-go. I understand now that there are—you’re employed as long as the contract lasts and then you get to go, and there’s no continuity of employment. But back in those days— Wilkins: It was very limited. Barnes: It was very limited. There was plenty of jobs there because they were still building everything there. We were still in the war deal, making plutonium. You know, there was building bombs, there was the Cold War. Wilkins: But you didn’t have any nuclear operators, you didn’t have any engineers, you didn’t have any technicians, really. You had laborers, janitors, that sort of thing. So in terms of limits, that was it, okay? Still, that was better than sharecropping. Barnes: Yeah, even if you’re thinking in terms of when they desegregated the military, even the concerns they had there during the ‘40s, same time they building these bombs, you know, blacks was limited to cleaning out latrines, being kitchen aides on military ships. And so those people brought all of that particular kind of thinking to Hanford, and that’s what we got, and it was better than what we had at that particular time. And so, because money was not a huge issue, relatively speaking, situations for blacks were a little bit better. But if you’re talking about what was the obstacles? There was a lack of opportunity. The reason that we have a law of equal educational opportunity—that’s the law. Without that law, uh-unh. Equal employment opportunity. That’s the law. Without that law? No. You know. And so forth and so on and so on. Without those laws, then you imagine—and you, generally, not just you two folks here interviewing—what it would be without it. We would be in bad shape as far as I’m concerned as black people. We’re already in bad shape. And without those laws, we’d be in worse shape. Wilkins: That’s a great point. Jackson: Well, I—I mean, opportunities really opened up after 1952. Because I graduated from high school in 1952, and I think I might have mentioned this to you in previous interviews as far as I’m concerned, but my ambition was to be a pipefitter. The last six weeks or two months or whatever, to seniors in high school, they take an aptitude test in school, and mine came out to be plumber and pipefitter. And that’s what I wanted to be. My high school teacher in that department in high school sent me down to plumbers and steamfitters union hall here in Pasco. And I go down there and fill out the application. When I filled it out, took it back to the desk, gave it to the secretary, the lady that was sitting there, and that was up there, Tony Osborne Chevrolet is where it was. And when I turned my application in and walked out the window—walked out, and I just happened to look at the window there, and she took my application and put it in the trash can. And I went back to Pasco High and told it to my teacher what happened, and he went, well, Webster, was there any other building and trades—that’s what I wanted—did you have a desire for or this type of thing. Well, I like to build things. I would like to build things. So he suggested that I go to the carpenter’s local and I did and that’s what my career—I’m the first black person that completed a four-year apprenticeship program in carpentry. And it was—it did me a whole lot of good. Get me to the point where I put this floor here, I put this floor in this church. And I worked that trade for eight years. And then I decided to get my degree from Eastern Washington University. In fact, me and my brother both got one. And my brother, he worked at Hanford as a supervisor for, I don’t know, 35, 36, 37 years before he retired. But that’s one of the things that, with this happening, and Dallas mentioning, you know, the laws that said equal, or civil rights law or this type of thing, but at that time, the only place I knew to go to was back to Pasco High and tell what happened. But I very seriously doubt if that type of thing would happen now. Wilkins: Mm. Okay. Jackson: Those kinds of things is devastating. They were and are and still is, if it exists. And I’m sure some of exists now. Barnes: It still exists. Jackson: But things a whole lot better now. Barnes: Okay. Jackson: Go. Barnes: No, the only thing that I’m saying is, there’s a new reality for black people right now. I’m not sure that that’s where you want this interview to go, but our presence in public employment is noticeably absent in key positions. We don’t have a Webster Jackson at city hall anymore if you take a place like Pasco, where we have some evidence that black people used to be here. We only have, I think, only two employees for the whole city that’s black. And this is not a minority interview; this is one dealing with African Americans. And so speaking for African Americans, our presence in public places is conspicuously absent. Jackson: That’s a point that I’ll touch on, also. I went to work for the City of Pasco in 1971, finished here at the Urban Renewal project in four years. And the city manager didn’t want me to leave, and I didn’t want to leave. So he made me his assistant to the city manager. Under that hat, I was the personnel—I was in charge of personnel. During my time with the City of Pasco in that position, we had 13 black employees. And just like Dallas just stated, to my knowledge there is only two now. Wilkins: Mm-hmm, yeah, but you have to hold in mind also that in that period of time, you watched the African American community in Pasco disperse throughout the rest of the Tri-Cities. So you really didn’t have—what happened is now what was a black community is a Hispanic community. You look at their representation in the city, it’s commensurate. Barnes: The thing that I know is we didn’t have—when I came through high school, there was not one black that contributed to my education. Not one. Going through the Pasco school system and Columbia Basin and—you know, we had a visitor come through, somebody like Art Fletcher or somebody from—a guest speaker here or there to come there. But in terms of a teacher or such, we didn’t have it, during—when I graduated in ’59. Now, when the laws came along, War on Poverty and some of all of that, there was a special effort to go and recruit. We actually brought in a number of black teachers from some of the schools down South and from back east and so forth and so on, and our kids in the community had an opportunity to see role models that looked like them. This is not to say that the white teachers were not supportive and good teachers for black folks; they just wasn’t necessary the visible role models that a lot of other people benefited from. And so the lack of our presence was overcome with that mandate: if you want some federal dollars, you better make sure that your workforce looks like your taxpayers, and they went out and recruited. Now, we got that term “minority,” that diminishes—I think deliberately, I mean, but that’s another subject matter—the significance of blacks’ contribution to the whole civil rights struggle and the laws that we currently enjoy, or employ at least, and that particular kind of thing. And all the other folks: immigrants, women. And all we have to do is just look at the record. I don’t necessarily have to do anything but remind you to look at the record, and you can see who the real beneficiaries from that civil rights struggle or black struggle or whatever you want to call it, but I’m talking about where black people actually paid the price to get in the record, those books that supposed to uplift people, and other people are benefiting except for the blacks. Wilkins: And, you know, I’m a product of—see, these guys came along decades before me. Barnes: Just one. Wilkins: One decade, one decade. Maybe two. [LAUGHTER] Barnes: Oh yeah, you got him over there. Wilkins: So they were my role models, actually. I mean, he graduated in ’59, I graduated in ’69, he graduated in ’52. So you can see— Barnes: The progression. Wilkins: --incrementally, how things improved. I mean, because of these guys, I got the opportunity to be the first one in my family to attend a major university and graduate from it. And it was because of these guys that went before me and stood up and fought for these various rights and things that mostly—and Dallas I think accurately points out—mostly is underreported and underappreciated. I appreciate it, because it wouldn’t have happened without that. You know, I got a football scholarship from Pasco High School to go to University of Washington, which might not have happened if there hadn’t been some folks before me, you know? Barnes: Let me point this out. There’s a graduate named Duke Washington who is a Pasco-ite, and he just recently died. But they almost—WSU almost didn’t play at the Texas stadium because of segregation. They didn’t want to play a football game if he was going to play in it. And I’m not sure if you followed that in your studies about the history of Pasco. Franklin: Uh, yeah. Barnes: You have followed Duke Washington? Franklin: Yes, yeah. Barnes: Okay, well, then I need not go down that trail. But that may give you an example of just how deep this situation is. Like I’m a product of his and Webster’s, just like you say, that progression is there. And as we sit down when we get a chance to talk to each other about that, we realize—and then your fathers before us—that we’re their children. You see? Wilkins: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Barnes: We have a duty. Wilkins: Interesting journey. Interesting journey. Franklin: All three of you had kind of mentioned education before. I wanted to ask how—we kind of spoke about the lack of visible role models, especially for Dallas and Webster. But who were some of the people who influenced you as a child, during your education here? Wilkins: I can think of one right off the top of my bat that wasn’t a black person. It was my history teacher at Pasco High School. Name was Bernie Hancock. He’s passed. Jackson: Yeah, I went to school with Bernie. Barnes: Yeah, I remember Bernie. Wilkins: Yeah, he’s passed. But Bernie Hancock, I think, grew up in east Pasco a lot. Jackson: I think he did. Wilkins: He was a history teacher, and I remember going into his class, I must’ve been a sophomore at the time, and he pulled me aside and he said, you know, Albert, I want you to remember one thing. And that is that the first person to die in the Revolutionary War was a fellow by the name of Crispus Attucks, and he was a black man. Don’t forget that. That was the only piece of black history I got in my whole high school education. And that was revolutionary. Because you just didn’t hear anything. Barnes: You didn’t hear anything. Wilkins: About black people in history. Barnes: In my case, there was a family of Catholics and an organization of Catholics, a group of Catholics that used to come to east Pasco and take us out to their ranch on Road 64. Wilkins: 64! Way out there! [LAUGHTER] Barnes: And make sure that we have some out-of-east-Pasco experience, it’s almost like some of the programs they have in the inner cities, where you have this concrete jungle and you get out and the person gets to know what it’s like to— Wilkins: See some grass! Barnes: Yeah! That type of thing. And they used to come over, and they would provide tutorial services. We actually went out there, and they sort of made sure—and there was several efforts like that with different folks from Richland, even from the Hanford Project: white folks, engineers, PhDs, that would come over and provide tutorial services in some of the churches to give some of the kids opportunities that they didn’t have when—I mean, just in the normal scheme of things. And all of them, at least the ones that I know, were Catholics, both in Pasco and both from Richland, and I’m sure there were some in Kennewick. I didn’t keep track of where all of them were from, but I do know that. And it was a concerted effort—they caught hell for that, too. You know, there’s a price. Even in your classroom at the college level, if you ask some people about race relations, a student, at least in my experience, had no problem saying, the only thing that people hate worse than an N-word is an N-word-lover. Wilkins: Wow. Barnes: Just as plain—I think I even kept the paper where he wrote it. But the point that I’m making is that they paid a price for helping black kids. And white people, I’ve heard tales, pay a price for hiring black people, you see what I mean? Why didn’t you hire a nice white kid? Or why didn’t you even marry a nice white girl or man or whatever it is. You hear that when you’re privileged enough, or close enough to someone who will tell you what the thinking is. And this is coming from some old timers that’s older than me. Wilkins: Today, you just hear it in dog whistles, you know? Barnes: Okay, but still again, you have that kind of thing. And thank goodness there’s pockets of support. And I know goodness will—and this isn’t just happening to me. This Catholic coterie of folks that were out to help people with less opportunity—and we had Mexicans and this type of thing. Native Americans was one of the other groups, then. And we were beneficiary. And they would come over here after work and put on tutorial programs. And they would take us to their homes, they made sure that we fed and played guitars. And we wasn’t always singing Kumbaya, either. The point that I’m making is, I know goodness will, in my case, that ranks high in how I moved forward with my education. Very high. Jackson: Well, you know, just one comment here on way back when. Barnes: And their name was Heidlebaugh, I want to put that in there. Wilkins: Heidlebaugh, I remember. Barnes: Just in case— Jackson: George Heidlebaugh? Barnes: George and Rebecca Heidlebaugh and their children. Jackson: Oh, yeah. Yeah, they were— Barnes: And I forgot the other’s name. Jackson: Yeah, they were in the corners. You know, when I was growing up as a kid back South, and, like I said, we moved here. Came out to visit in ’48, moved here in ’50. You know, we didn’t—the black kids and so forth, like in Texas, we never did use the N-word. The N-word, I mean, you better be ready to fight. I mean, the black kids—the blacks didn’t use the N-word back there. Wilkins: Back then. Mm-hmm. Jackson: No. I mean, I was surprised when I got out here. Wilkins: Yeah. Jackson: No. We went to—and as far as me wanting to be a plumber and a pipefitter and this type of thing, you know, John Mitchell I believe, he’s the only one that I’m aware of that is a—no, he’s not. What’s his name? One of the—Bobby. Bobby Sparks, I believe it is. Isn’t he a--? Wilkins: Electrician. Jackson: He’s electrician. But John Mitchell is a pipefitter. He’s a pipefitter. Wilkins: Yeah. Jackson: Bona fide pipefitter. Barnes: In other words, we don’t have many representatives in the various trades. Franklin: What were the major civil rights issues for African Americans at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities? Barnes: What was the major civil rights issues at Hanford? Franklin: And in the Tri-Cities. Barnes: And in the Tri-Cities? Franklin: Yeah. Wilkins: Civil rights issues, huh? Barnes: Civil rights issues? Well, it depends on which institution we want to start at. Education is always been one, employment has always been one. We’ve got a criminal justice system that has never been fair to—in the minds of a whole lot of folks, because of the sentencing situation. And every black that doesn’t have any money have to plea out and pick up a felony just to get reduced time because they don’t have the money to hire the good lawyer. You know, it’s always interesting to say, make sure you get a good lawyer, like there’s a whole pool of bad ones that you might select and pay your money to. [LAUGHTER] Barnes: But the point is—and that’s a true statement, too, you see. So the civil rights is front-end on all fronts: education, housing, employment, health— Wilkins: Mm-hmm, criminal justice— Barnes: Health, there’s some issues there with—I’m not sure how prominent it is in the Tri-Cities with abortion piece being more present in the black community than in other communities. We did criminal justice and that. And I’m sure there’s an add on this, but I can’t think of a single public institution, whether it be military, health, criminal justice, politics, any of that, that has a plus sign on it for blacks. That’s from my point of view. And maybe there’s somebody else who can say, well, you’ve got some athletes out there. I don’t even see them there. Wilkins: Mm-hmm, yeah. Barnes: I don’t know if we have any—I don’t want to say anything except that I do know they’re putting academic requirements on your eligibility for sports in college. And I don’t want to go there, because there’s a lot of stuff there, but if you’re talking about the impacts on black people, or the impacts on people with no opportunity, then the opportunities to use athletics as a way out of their economic situation is closing down when they don’t have the grades to get into college or some of those other kinds of things. So, I don’t want to just start there at the college; it starts way down there, you know? Wilkins: So what was the question? Franklin: What were the major civil rights issues for African Americans at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities during your time? Wilkins: I think Dallas covered just about everything. Franklin: Okay. Wilkins: Okay? Barnes: Well, thank you. Wilkins: I mean, if you had to tease out one single thing, I think you’d have a difficult time doing that, because it’s such a broad spectrum there. Yes. Certainly, economics. Certainly economics. Franklin: So, what actions were taken to address those issues? Barnes: Protest was one. They have gutted, both at the state and federal levels, the civil rights laws and the budgets for civil rights agencies. At one time, the onus was on the employer to prove discrimination didn’t exist; now it’s on the poor, less-educated and less-legally-support complainant to prove that discrimination do exist. And the strategy is always to carry it out so far until you can’t afford to defend your own rights, see what I mean? So, that’s one. Franklin: Who were the important leaders of civil rights efforts in the area? We talked about Art Fletcher. Barnes: And we talked about Bill Wilkins. Franklin: Art Fletcher and Bill Wilkins. Jackson: What about E. M. Magee? Barnes: We talking about E. M. Magee. We talking about Tom Jackson. We’re talking about— Jackson: All of those old-timers. Barnes: --Wally Webster. Depends on how far you want to go back. Jackson: Yeah, right. Wally Webster, he’s quite a ways back because he and I— Barnes: But still again. Jackson: He and I, we were running about even here as far as age-wise and this type of thing. But I mean, you know— Barnes: You can take the ministers in the church. You can take Pastor Wilkins. You can take—if you want to know who’s in forefront, our ministers are still in the forefront. Did you say in the Tri-Cities? Franklin: Yeah. Barnes: In the Tri-Cities? Have you talked to Dan Carter? Is Dan Carter on your list of interviewees? Franklin: We have talked to Dan Carter, yes. Barnes: Okay, well, put his name on there, you know because we’re-- Franklin: People are always less willing to nominate themselves. Wilkins: Velma Jackson? Barnes: Put Velma Jackson on there. And in fact, I’m not so sure who not to put on there. [LAUGHTER] Barnes: To tell you the truth. Although they may not have taken the lead. It’s like being in church. If you can’t clap, I mean if you can’t holler, just raise your hand. Wilkins: Do you remember— Barnes: So the point that I’m making is that—but the spokespeople are the ones who’s the most articulate and the ones who can afford to stand up then and say something. Jackson: Well, there’s another one. I mean, as far as stepping up and taking up the lead and this type of thing, I can’t— Barnes: Oh, yeah, Joe Jackson. Jackson: Right. And— Barnes: Katie Barton. Jackson: Oh, Katie Barton was— Wilkins: Definitely one. Jackson: She was out there, and did not bite her tongue. Barnes: No. Jackson: And would talk to anybody. But Wayne Jackson was a—he was a teacher— Barnes: Counselor at Pasco High. Jackson: Counselor at Pasco High until— Barnes: Put his name on there. Jackson: --he retired. And he was one who wouldn’t bite his tongue, either. Barnes: And Clarence Alford. Franklin: Oh, yeah, I just talked to Clarence Alford a couple weeks ago. Barnes: Okay, he has talked to Clarence Alford. Wilkins: Pastor Ronnie White, who’s no longer here, of course. Jackson: And Clarence is one that can talk without alienating whoever. Franklin: He was one of the teachers that was brought in, right, from the South. Barnes: Right, and Wayne Jackson was, too. Franklin: Yeah, we talked to Wayne as well. Barnes: Okay, and him and his wife. Jackson: His wife, Katie. Franklin: So, in the civil rights issues here, what were some of the notable successes? Barnes: You know, we got—protests got Roland Andrews his job at Eastside Market, didn’t it? You know at that time, I think— Jackson: Those was big pluses back in that day. Barnes: I was just going to say, we’re sorta—just to get a job, that we have to put that up as a plus, that ought to show you how low— [LAUGHTER] Barnes: --things were. Because we had a lot of farm workers out there, weeding beans and all that to get a job — Wilkins: Picking grapes. Barnes: All of that, yeah. And so one of the big successes—when a success has to be a job as a cashier, and we had a whole program up there training cashiers called OIC, when that came in, we were training cashiers so that you could go down and have a cashier job at the store. You know what I’m saying? Wilkins: If I had to think about it on a personal level, I remember coming here back from college, we had what was called the Youth Involvement Program that was, I think, funded by some of the moneys you guys were talking about. And I was able, through that program, to get a couple people hired out at Boise-Cascade. I’m thinking of one young man right now that I helped to get hired out there who just recently retired from being out there all these years. So little things like that would not have otherwise happened, were it not for civil rights. So. Jackson: Well, you know, it’s-- Barnes: What were the-- Jackson: Go— Barnes: Excuse me. What were the name of the program that we used to have? I don’t want to call it a boys’ ranch, but they used to go and recruit kids and put them in a federal program. Yes, they came through here. I remember carrying a group out at Hanford. Wilkins: I don’t know. Barnes: It is a big one. A big one. Job Corps. Wilkins: Job Corps, yeah, Job Corps, that’s what it was. Barnes: Job Corps. Job Corps is what it was, for men and women. We have one up in Moses Lake and all of that. And people used to get a little money. We used to have some kind of little trainee thing, and you used to get a little presence of people of color, we’re talking about African Americans right at this point, because you would pay the employer half their salary, and people could pick up an employee you don’t have to pay, and soon as that little—you know, it’s mainly only job training to get them skills and all that. I think it was either OIC or Job Corps, one of them. Or maybe even both of them. But the point of it is, and then the employer would use up that extra money and get that extra service, and then you recycle them through again. You don’t get a job, you just sort of get recycled and they get a benefit, and that person get the opportunity to act like he had a job. Wilkins: So some of these things came about because of civil rights, and so you could call those kind of pluses. Barnes: Okay, we can put it in the plus column, because certainly without them, we wouldn’t even have that half of representation, you know what I mean? In the employment field. Jackson: Well, you know, even like the federal programs, like Urban Renewal for instance, see, there was a requirement that the cities, where they spent their money and this type of thing, it had to resemble the makeup— Barnes: Of the community. Jackson: --of the community. For instance, for those four years that the Urban Renewal project was going, like I said, it’s not that they were not qualified or anything like that; they were qualified. But there were 13 African American employees with the city when I was in personnel, and each year, I had to send a report in to HUD. I don’t want to go—what happened quite a few times in recruitment. Because on the interview committee, it would always be myself, as the personnel manager, and the director of the department that the position was open in and so forth and this type of thing. And in those interviews, we started looking—getting ready to make that decision as who was going to offer the job to and this type of thing. It was not a walk-in in order to get these people. In other words, if there was a certain requirement for a position to do what this gentleman’s doing, and if there was a minority applicant that could do that, but then there was an un-minority applicant that could do that, and could do that, and could do that, many times, they wanted the person who could do all of these three things. And I’m sitting there saying, wait a minute, we’re not hiring anybody to do that and that and that, we just want somebody to do this right here. And fortunately, the city manager has the last say. Wilkins: So you got it done. Jackson: And he always went with my recommendation. Barnes: I think—okay—I mean, I realize that, but— Jackson: And the employee worked out great. Barnes: Well, you hired him for the job that was advertised, that’s what you hired him for. Jackson: Job-specific. Wilkins: So, there were definite pluses, okay? Definite pluses. And I don’t know how much longer we’re going to do this interview, but I don’t want this interview to end without me saying emphatically and enthusiastically that the function of the church with respect to all of that was to continue to teach the principles of Christian development and growth. And to make sure that what we did with respect to Urban Renewal, what we did with respect to educational improvement, what we did with all of that was driven from Christian principles. That was the function of the church, and I think it did well over all of those decades in keeping that in the forefront. And is still doing that. Although we don’t have the numbers we used to have, we still teach Christian principles in the church. And we will. Franklin: Awesome. Barnes: I remember this church sending me off to college. Wilkins: Oh, yeah. Barnes: With a buffet kind of little thing that included some of the commodities that came from welfare recipients. That’s one of the reasons I’m back here this very day. Never will forget it. Wanted to say that. Wilkins: Yeah, praise God. Franklin: Yeah. Well, I think we are kind of getting close to the end. You guys have all been wonderful. Jackson: Yeah, I’m beginning to look at the clock up here. Franklin: Oh, yeah, no worries. I’ll just ask one wrap-up question but before I do I just want to thank all three of you. It’s been a really wide-ranging and really wonderful interview. You were right, Albert, you guys play off each other really well, and this is a real experience that I’m very happy for. So, well actually, I guess, you know what? I guess maybe that is a good place to end. I’ll just ask, is there anything else that any of you would like to mention in regards to the themes of this project, which are migration, segregation and civil rights and how they impacted your life in the Tri-Cities? You can take a moment to think about it. Jackson: You sound like the Cash Cab there. “Take a moment to think about it.” [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Oh, I love that show so much. I just watched it last night. Wilkins: I don’t know. I can’t think of anything we haven’t covered already. Barnes: I think between the individuals in this group interview and the people that you got on your list, those 25 or 30, however many you’ve interviewed, I think anything I have to say have been covered. Unless you have some specific questions. Franklin: We’ve covered a lot, I think. I think it was really— Jackson: I think Herb and Renetta? Venetta? Barnes: Rendetta Jones. Herb Jones, Rendetta Jones. Jackson: Yeah, they’re the first blacks to live in— Barnes: --Kennewick, that was the Slaughters, John Slaughter and Mary Slaughter. I think you got their interview. Franklin: I did, we actually went to where John Slaughter’s living right now and interviewed him. Barnes: Okay, you got John Slaughter over there. Franklin: Yeah, it was a, that was a really great, really powerful interview. Jackson: I don’t know if he could chip in a whole lot, but—recall his name. And I got him on my phone while you were—Wally Webster. Franklin: Wally Webster, yeah, I’m still trying to get a hold of him in Washington—over on the west side at his home. We’ll get through. Wilkins: I remember him. It was Jackson’s nephew. Barnes: I’m trying to think of who else might be over there with. Did you—oh, I know who one is. Nat Jackson. Nat Jackson, he’s over in Lacey, Washington. And in fact, Nat Jackson just recently got the Affirmative Action initiative back on the ballot for the State of Washington. I mean, he was very central to that. Franklin: Is he from--? Barnes: He was here. He was here, yes, he was. He was here involved in Urban Renewal. Franklin: Do you have contact info for him? Barnes: I do. Franklin: Maybe I can get it after— Barnes: I can give you his number after we— Franklin: Great, awesome. Well, I think that’s a really good place to end. Wilkins: Okay. Franklin: And again, I want to thank all three of you for taking the time to interview with us, here at Morning Star Church, such a central place for the community. 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 Dallas Barnes, Webster Jackson, Albert Wilkins at Morning Star Baptist Church, Pasco, WA. Description An account of the resource Dallas Barnes, Webster Jackson and Albert Wilkins discuss life in Pasco since 1950 and the history of the Morningstar Baptist Church. A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288 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 05/31/2018 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. This oral history collection was done in partnership with the National Park Service under Task Agreement P17AC01288. Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Pasco (Wash.) Kennewick (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Church Segregation Migration School integration Affirmative action Civil rights Civil rights movements https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F22a47cdc1d3b88313269d6f802e6dda2.JPG 4a35f1e3a59831bd654729595c60c719 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fc93035045c2b495868c9d383987a3bd0.mp4 23cdfe57608f10a6543cbc8bda83af7e 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 Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford Subject The topic of the resource African Americans; Oral History Description An account of the resource A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource National Park Service Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 9/1/2017-9/1/2019 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project. Relation A related resource RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RG2_8 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 Carter 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 Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin and I am conducting an oral history interview with Daniel Carter on February— Tom Hungate: 19th. Franklin: 19th, thank you, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Dan about his experiencing living in the Tri-Cities and working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Dan Carter: Daniel G. Carter, Junior. Franklin: Okay, and can you spell that out? Carter: D-A-N-I-E-L, G, C-A-R-T-E-R, Junior, J-R. Franklin: Great, thanks a lot, Dan. So tell me how you first came to the Tri-Cities area. Carter: Well, I was recruited by GE, that I refer to as Generous Electric, and I think that’s because of the fact that they had their own appliance store here and we found it very generous of them to allow us to buy GE appliances at a discount. Franklin: Okay. [LAUGHTER] Carter: I was recruited by GE, and I was supposed to be going to Florida. And then I got a call from Schenectady. They said, no, we want you to go out to the Hanford Site near Pasco, Washington. Do you know where it is? Nope, never heard of it. So, that started the ball rolling, and I started getting calls from the HR people here with GE at Hanford, trying to schedule a date for me to come out for an interview. And it took me a couple of months to do that, because I was teaching school at the time. And I told them I had to wait until the school year was over before I could break loose and take a trip out here. Franklin: Where were you living at the time? Carter: In Louisiana. Franklin: Are you from Louisiana originally? Carter: Yes, I’m originally from Louisiana. Franklin: Could you give us your birthdate? Carter: September the 19th, 1939. Franklin: Great, thanks. So what was your educational background at that time? Carter: I graduated from Southern University in Baton Rouge with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry. Franklin: Okay, and is that what you were teaching? Carter: I taught chemistry, general science, physics, and geometry. [CHUCKLING] Franklin: And what position had you applied for at General Electric? Carter: Just a scientific position. Franklin: Okay. And when you were living in Louisiana, that was—you were born into segregation. Carter: That’s correct. Franklin: Right, and Louisiana was still segregated at that time? Carter: That’s correct. Franklin: Can you talk about how that impacted your life and your education? Carter: Well, first of all, I went to a segregated school all twelve years of secondary education. It was interesting that, at that time, due to the segregated system, our school was lower on the totem pole for resources. For example, the textbooks that I got were not new. They were used textbooks that were sent over from the all-white high school when they got new textbooks. It was in later years that they decided they were going to try to do better and started giving the all-black schools new textbooks. And started building some new buildings at that time. When I went to Southern University in Baton Rouge, I had no choice of going to Louisiana State University. However, if you were in graduate school, you could possibly get into a program at that university. But for undergraduate work, you couldn’t do it. Franklin: Was Southern University an HBC? Carter: Yes. Franklin: Okay. And where did you grow up, your formative years? Was that in Baton Rouge? Carter: No, central Louisiana. Franklin: Central Louisiana. Carter: Yeah. Franklin: And your town, all of its facilities and everything were segregated? Carter: That’s correct. Franklin: Did you also—was the town itself segregated as well— Carter: Yes. Franklin: --from the—and so what—can you describe what some of the segregated facilities were and kind of the differences between the white facilities and the black facilities? Carter: Well, you had, on the social side, the restaurants, it was either all-white or all-black. The churches were either all-white or all-black. There were efforts to try to bridge that gap between church members, especially when it came to civil rights. So, like I say, the black communities on one side of town generally, and the white community on the other side of the town. Franklin: Did you—I know it was a common practice at that time for blacks to use the backdoor of a restaurant in order to take food to go. Was that the case in your—where you grow up? Carter: Yeah, if you went to one of the white restaurants, yeah. Franklin: You could order food, right, and give them money, you just couldn’t eat the food— Carter: There. Franklin: --inside the restaurant. Carter: Yeah, right. So, normally, you would go to a black restaurant. Because there were black restaurants. Rather than go to the white restaurant and get food out the backdoor. Franklin: Right. So when you started getting these calls from this Hanford place, kind of take us through that and kind of how you got to the Tri-Cities. Carter: Well, they gave me a little information about the Hanford Project and the fact that they were doing some really scientific work that I thought was very interesting. I wanted to learn more about it. So— Franklin: What did they tell you about it? What did they tell you about what they were doing, and what kind of detail did they go into? Carter: Well, they didn’t go into a lot of details, because they were—you know, still a lot of stuff was just absolutely secret at that time. But they explained that they were part of the Manhattan Project, but they didn’t go into any details of building bombs or operating reactors or any of that kind of stuff. They just talked about the scientific work that was being done here. They thought I could be a participant in that. Franklin: Okay. And so what happened next? Carter: Well, I came out for my interview, and I was really impressed with the high-level scientific work that was going on in the laboratories, in the reprocessing facilities and the reactors. That was all new stuff to me. I just found it very interesting, so I was thinking, you know, I think I’d like to become a part of that. So I went back home and I was married at the time and had one child. My mother-in-law said, you know, it’d probably be a good idea for you to take that job. I think mother-in-law wanted me to be in a position to properly support her daughter. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Oh, right. Had you left the South before that? Carter: No. Franklin: No, so going to Hanford was your first time north of the Mason-Dixon Line? Carter: Oh, no, no, that’s not true. Franklin: Oh, okay. Carter: I had relatives in Detroit, so we made trips to Detroit from time to time. Not often, but occasionally. Franklin: Okay. So you eventually picked up your family and moved to Hanford. When was that, approximately? Carter: In mid-’64. Franklin: Mid-’64. What were your first impressions, and your family’s first impressions of the Tri-Cities? Carter: It’s a very desolate place. A lot of open space. Not many trees. We’re used to lots of trees. Never had seen tumbleweeds rolling down the streets. We saw that. Had to water your lawn to have any grass, and that was new to us. Franklin: Where did you first live when you came to work for the— Carter: In Richland Village. Franklin: In Richland Village. And what type of house did you live in? Carter: I don’t know what—it was a two-bedroom house. They didn’t have the ABC names in those houses. Franklin: Okay. And what were you kind of—tell me about your work, what did you first start out doing for Hanford? Carter: I started working in the Analytical Laboratories in the 300 Area. Franklin: Okay, and what type of work did you do? Carter: Analytical chemistry. Franklin: Okay. [LAUGHTER] Tell me about kind of— Carter: And—and— Franklin: --a day in a life of an analytical chemist. Carter: Well, you work in a laboratory and you’re doing analytical work. Separating materials out, studying materials and—that’s the kind of stuff you’re doing in an analytical laboratory. You’re also making a determination of what kind of concentration you have of certain chemicals in a compound and so forth. That was my first assignment. I was on what they call the tech-grad rotation program. So I spent three months in the Analytical Laboratories and then I was sent out to the PUREX Plant and to spend another three months out at the PUREX Plant also in the Analytical Laboratory. Then after that, I moved back to the 300 Area, and that’s when GE decided to leave. And I went from GE to Battelle. Franklin: And is that because Battelle took over that work— Carter: Yes. Franklin: --when GE left? Carter: Yes. Franklin: Okay, okay. Carter: And I had a choice of staying with GE at one of the other locations, like out at the 200 Area with the PUREX Plant, or agreeing with GE to move to another city. Franklin: Oh. And how come you chose to stay and go to Battelle? Carter: Well, the human resources person who recruited me leaned on me very heavily to go with him over to Battelle. Franklin: Why was that? Carter: I suppose that he thought that I would make a good fit for Battelle in the technical area. So he didn’t want to lose a, I guess, another technical person to another location. Franklin: Oh, okay. Tell me about the—more about the tech grad program and kind of the makeup of it. It was college grads. Carter: Yes. Franklin: Right. Was it—how diverse was it? Did you work with mostly white coworkers, or did you have—were there any—and was it segregated at all? Or—I’m wondering if you could talk a bit about that. Carter: No, there was no segregation, because I was it. There were no other—all the people in the program were white. Franklin: Okay. Carter: There were no minority people at all. Franklin: What was your perception by your white coworkers? Carter: Got along fine with everybody. They treated me well. Franklin: And what about in Richland? I’m wondering if you could talk a bit about moving from a formally segregated society to a not formally segregated society. Carter: We didn’t have any problem. We fit in very well. We did not—my bride and I never had an issue. Franklin: Sure. I guess I’m just wondering about how it felt, maybe, to go into spaces that, in the South, would have been whites only, but in the North would have been open to anyone regardless of race. I’m just kind of curious how that—was there something to get used to there? Carter: Not at all. Franklin: Not at all? Carter: Nope. Franklin: And you’ve lived in Richland your whole time since moving here, right? Carter: That’s correct. Franklin: And we know there’s a large African American community in Pasco. How large was the African American community in Richland? Carter: Very small. I would say less than 100 maybe. There were some families that were here long before I came, like the Mitchells, the Wallaces, the Browns. So there were other families here before I came. Franklin: Your wife, you mentioned. Did she work outside the home, or was she--? Carter: Yes. Franklin: Okay, and where did she work? Carter: First job was in the Battelle Technical Library. Franklin: Okay. Carter: Then she went from there to the Technical Shop. Then the 300 Area. And then from there, she went to—what was it called? Hanford Environmental Health Organization, who did all the medical work out at Hanford, she went to work for them. Franklin: Oh, the HEHF, Hanford Environmental Health Foundation. Carter: Yes. Franklin: And what was her background? Did she have a college education as well? Carter: She did not finish her college degree, because we got married in college, and we promptly started a—with a child. So she dropped out of school. But she was majoring in business. So she did clerical work, you know, and that kind of thing when she worked out at Hanford. Franklin: Oh, okay. Did you have any interaction with the African American community in Pasco? Carter: Sure. Franklin: I’m wondering if you could talk about that. Carter: Oh, I initially met people in that community through the church. Franklin: Mm. And then how—what other types of interactions did you have? Carter: Well, over the years, I met different people. And at one point, there were some of us—the African Americans here in Richland, and the ones in Pasco—became good friends, and we would have a Pokeno party once a month. Franklin: A keynote? Carter: Pokeno. Franklin: Oh, Pokeno. Carter: So then about three or four couples from Pasco and about three or four couples from Richland would get together and go from one home to another home. We did that for a number of years. Franklin: Okay. Did you go to church in Richland or in Pasco? Carter: I went to church in Richland, and I attend church at Central United Protestant Church over the years. However, we would go to special events at especially the St. James Methodist Church over in east Pasco. But we also participated and attend the black Baptist churches over there. Franklin: Okay. I’m wondering if—I know there were some—so, you know the ‘60s, kind of when you came and the few years after you came, that was kind of the growth and kind of the climax of the civil rights movement in the United States. Carter: Mm-hmm. Franklin: I’m wondering if you can talk about how that affected you and your family and others that you knew in the African American community. Carter: Well, first of all, my bride and I were part of the very first largescale downtown marches during the Civil Rights period, and that was in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Franklin: Okay. Carter: Where we were part of the first big march that went into downtown Baton Rouge. In fact, the university was shut down for two days because of the—well, I guess you could say the concern for people on both sides of the arguments there. But we finally got things settled back down. And it had to do with—one of the things that bugged the hell out of me a lot was—I have a distaste in my mouth for Walgreen drugstores now. And it goes back to when there was a Walgreen drugstore in my town that had a lunch counter. And I could not go and sit at the lunch counter and order a hamburger. And that always bothered me. [CHUCKLING] But after my bride and I came here, we went to wherever we wanted to go. We went to any restaurant or the store or whatever. We never had any issue. We never did. Franklin: What motivated you to participate in that civil rights march in Baton Rouge? Carter: Oh, we had a lot of—we lived—my bride and I both lived on the campus. And the dormitory councils held meetings about it, and we just said, hey, we’d jump in and participate in this thing. Because I don’t like what’s going on either. So, we don’t like this segregated lunch counters downtown where we have to go spend our money for our clothing and our shoes and so forth. Franklin: Right. But you can’t eat lunch there. Carter: Yeah! Franklin: Yeah. I understand there was a little bit of civil rights activity in Pasco, as well. Did you participate in any of that? Carter: We did not participate in any of the marches or anything like that in Pasco. We were aware of them, and there was a CORE organization here in Richland. CORE, Congress from—what was it called? Franklin: Congress of Racial Equality, right? Carter: Yeah, something like that, yup. We were not a part of that group, but I did join the NAACP. What we did do, Dr. Dallas Barnes and some others, we put together a corporation called the Matrix Corporation and built a facility over in east Pasco called the Matrix Building, which is still there. Our idea was to bring employment opportunities, investment opportunities and a rebuilding of the east Pasco community. Unfortunately, there were some people who didn’t like that idea who lived there, and they bombed the building a week before we was going to have the grand opening. Franklin: Did they ever find out who bombed the building? Carter: No. Franklin: Do you have any idea? Carter: Yeah, mm-hmm. Franklin: And can you say? Carter: No, because I can’t prove it. Franklin: Right. Can you say which community it may have been in? Was it someone from the African American community? Carter: Yeah, yeah. Franklin: Oh, okay. What do you think the potential motivation to bomb—to sabotage that building? Carter: Jealousy, hatred for Richland people. There are people who thought, for some reason or another, that we looked down on them and was going to be doing stuff that was not favorable for them, for some reason or another. But at the same time, all of the commercial facilities in east Pasco were owned by whites. And they didn’t have any problem going to that white grocery store over there and spending their money. Or having to drive all the way across town to a white-owned laundromat, when we built a very nice one there. It was one of the nicest ones in the Tri-Cities area there. So it was jealousy and just disgruntlement toward Richland people. Franklin: Interesting. Carter: Even Dr. Dallas Barnes lived right there in that community, and he was a part of the program. Franklin: So it wasn’t just Richland people; it was like a collaboration between Pasco residents and Richland residents. Carter: Yes. Franklin: Yeah. You had mentioned Dallas Barnes before, before the interview and just now. I’m wondering if you could tell us a little bit about your relationship with Dallas Barnes and— Carter: We met Dallas and his wife, Lozie, the first year we were here. In fact, the second week, I think, we were here, because my bride came out here alone on the train with two babies. Franklin: Wow. Carter: And she just fell sick after she got here. She was just exhausted. So I had to put her in Kadlec Hospital and Dallas’ wife, Lozie, stepped up to help me with the babies until I got my bride out of the hospital. That’s how we met. At that time, Dallas was working as a technician out at the 300 Area. Franklin: Oh, okay. And is that how you knew each other, was from—you had met at work? Carter: No, we had not met at work. We just met through—probably one of the nurses at the hospital knew about Dallas’ wife, Lozie, and said, you know, I bet she can help take care of those babies of yours. Franklin: Oh, that’s really great. And you guys became kind of lifelong friends? Carter: Yup, that’s right. Franklin: And you mentioned that Dallas later went on to a career at the university, right? Carter: Yes. Franklin: But still continues to live in Pasco? Carter: No, he lived up in Pullman for 20-something years, probably. Franklin: Oh, right, right, right. Carter: But he left Pasco and went up there and got his bachelor’s degree, and then went on and got his PhD and joined the staff up there. Franklin: Oh, okay. Did you—when did you first purchase a home in Richland? Carter: My first year here. Franklin: Did you have any problems buying a house here in Richland? Carter: No. Franklin: Okay. Carter: At the time, the Richland Village was a rental community. And they decided that they wanted to get out—the outfit that owned it wanted to get out of it and sell all the houses in Richland Village. Which, you know, was hundreds of houses. So the manager of the organization called me and said, Dan, we’re going to sell these houses and you can buy the house that you’re in, or you may prefer to have a larger house, like a three-bedroom, since you have a family. So, we chose to look at one of the three-bedrooms he had, and we bought that. Franklin: What was the address of that house? Carter: I think it was 2027 Newcomer. Franklin: Okay. So right in central Richland, in Richland proper. Carter: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. Let’s see here. I’ve heard from others and by doing a little research that Kennewick was kind of an unofficially segregated town in that African Americans were not encouraged to be there after dark or were not encouraged to live there. I’m wondering if you had any experiences with— Carter: When we moved here, as far as we knew, there was not a single black family that lived in Kennewick. However, interesting, through some of the people at work, we were invited to homes over in Kennewick for a social gathering. Franklin: Okay. Carter: One of the first black families to get a home in Kennewick was the Herb Jones family. Herb Jones and his wife, Rendie, Rendata. They purchased a home over in the old part of Kennewick. And as far as we know, they were the very first ones to own—black family to own a home there. I think both Herb and Rendie worked out at Hanford. And I think they were a part of the CORE organization, too. Franklin: Okay. Do you remember about what time that was? Carter: I’m going to guess late ‘60s? Franklin: Okay. When you would go to Kennewick, did you feel welcome in the area? Did you ever get any kind of— Carter: No. Franklin: --undue harassment by the police or anything? Carter: No, never. Franklin: Okay. Carter: And we went there for shopping, you know. Franklin: Okay. How would you describe life in the community of Richland when you first moved here? Carter: Well, like I said, we never experienced an overt negative situation at all. As far as I know, when we came here, Ed Smith and I were the only black professionals here. Franklin: Okay. Carter: And Ed has passed away now. Ed was an engineer, and I was a scientist. As far as I know, we were the only ones back in the mid-‘60s. I came in ’64, and I think Ed and his family came here in probably ’62, ’63, thereabouts. They were here before we were. And we became lifelong friends also. And like I say, Eddie died about five, six years ago. But we went to whatever store we wanted to go to. We were treated with respect. At church, we were well-received. At the time, my wife went to Christ the King, and I went to Central United Protestant, and over the years, she transferred over to Central United Protestant because of the music program. She wanted to get in a music program. Franklin: Oh, okay. Carter: Christ the King didn’t have much of a music program, so she came over there and sang in the choir at Central United Protestant for about 30 years. Franklin: Oh, wow. Carter: So I was never called names or anything like that. I can’t remember anything like that happening to me or to my family. Franklin: While you were here? Carter: Yes. Franklin: But did that kind of thing happen in the South, when you were growing up and when you were in college? Carter: Yeah, things like that happened, but I don’t remember it happening to me. We sort of did all of our activities, if you will, in the black community, the black churches, black restaurants, and movie theaters and so forth. Franklin: Sure. Do you remember any particular community events in Richland that stand out to you when you moved here and the years after? Carter: Well, I became an activist myself. I helped start the first Head Start program for Benton and Franklin Counties. I recall loading stuffed toys in my old station wagon and hauling it over to the Unitarian Church in Kennewick, where we started the program. And that, like I said, that was at the Unitarian Church in Kennewick where we started the Head Start program. Franklin: Okay. Carter: I became the first president of the Community Action Agency for Benton and Franklin Counties. Franklin: What did that agency do? Carter: It still does community services. It’s a community service organization. It does a lot of things. Housing, weatherization, and all kind of community support activities. They’re located in Pasco over there on Court Street. So they’ve been around ever since. I was the first chair of the Benton, Franklin and Walla Walla Private Industry Council. That’s an organization we set up for job training, and became a part of the—grew out of the Job Training Partnership Act. I serve on the state level in that organization, and then when they decided to set up the private Industry Council, then I had the knowledge. So the county commissioners called me in, and we met at the Franklin County courthouse for our first meeting to start this program. And the county commissioner said, Dan, you’re going to have to head this thing up to get it started. And I did, to get it started. Franklin: Oh, wow. Carter: In fact, I even have a plaque from President Reagan for my activities in that program. Franklin: Really? Carter: Yup. Franklin: Wow. How—kind of returning to your Hanford work— Carter: Yeah. Franklin: Going to flip over to the Hanford side of things. It says here that you hold a US patent in one of the PUREX processes. Carter: That’s correct. Franklin: How did that happen? Carter: That’s the work I was doing in the laboratory, doing research work in the laboratory, and stumbled upon something that was—I was working on PUREX work in the laboratory in the 300 Area. Franklin: Was that for Battelle? Carter: Yeah, that was under Battelle, right. Franklin: Without getting too technical, I wonder if you could describe the patent. Carter: It has to do with the suppression of hydrogen generation during the PUREX process. Franklin: And what was the importance of that? Carter: Well, if you get too much hydrogen in the system, you can have an explosion. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: So, you as a private person, can hold a US patent while doing government work? Carter: You get a patent issued under your name, but the government owns it. Franklin: Oh, okay, okay. That’s still really, really cool. So it says here that you began working for GE, and then to Battelle and then to Westinghouse. Carter: Mm-hm. Franklin: How long did you work for Battelle for? Carter: About five years. Franklin: And was it all in the 300 Area? Carter: Yes, all the Battelle work was in the 300 Area. Franklin: And when you transferred to Westinghouse—well, first of all, why did you transfer, and then what did you do? Carter: Because Battelle lost the funding for reactor programs. And at the time, I was working in nuclear fuel on development. So, if I wanted to stay in the reactor-related program where the funding was, I had to go over to Westinghouse. And Westinghouse was awarded the contract to build the FFTF, the Fast Flux Test Facility. So, I jumped to Westinghouse to become a part of the Fast Flux Test Facility design, construction and operation. Franklin: How long did you stay working with the FFTF? Carter: I can’t tell you exactly the number of years, but maybe ten years. I’m not sure it was that long, because I signed up to become a part of the startup crew for the reactor. So I had to go through nuclear power training for that. And a part of that was done down at Idaho Falls. So, I had to go down to Idaho Falls and work down there in the reactor business at the EBR-II reactor down there to qualify. And then when I came back, I was sent out to the 400 Area at the Site to work with Bechtel on constructing the reactor. So, one of the things that we had to know, as a part of the reactor operation program, we had to learn every system in that reactor. And as a result of that knowledge, Bechtel would lean on me when they need to find something in the plant as we were building it. So I walked the plant every day to see what was being built where, and I could work with the design people and the construction people to make sure we were building the reactor properly. Franklin: What was the importance of the FFTF? Carter: It was the leading edge of the Breeder Reactor program. We were going to demonstrate how you could generate more fuel than you burned and also at the same time generate electricity. It was called the Breeder Reactor Program. So, we were the first to do that, and we had the most sophisticated reactor in the world at the time. And then based on the work we were doing at Hanford and the design we came up with, a large breeder reactor was designed to be built at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. And I had to go down there, also. But when the thing with the Carter Administration came in and decided to pull the funding out of that program even though we had the design, a lot of that facility, and all these beautiful stainless steel components built and ready to go in, poured the foundation and ready to start coming up out of the ground with it, and they pulled the funding out of it. Franklin: Ouch. Carter: So that was essentially the deathblow to the Breeder Reactor Program, even though Westinghouse continued to build the FFTF and we got it built and got it up and operating. At the time it became operational, I was not involved because Westinghouse farmed me out all the time as a consultant to the Department of Energy, to United Nuclear, to Rockwell Hanford—I worked for almost ten years as a consultant. Franklin: What kinds of things did you consult on? Carter: It had to do with documentation of systems and components, like when DOE was going to build the, what was called the B-WIP program, where they were going to dig this big hole out in the 200 Area and go down into the basalt— Franklin: The Basalt Waste Isolation Project. Carter: Yep, yep. I was—DOE had me to come in to work with them to write up documents on design and construction for that project. So I worked with them on that. And in fact, DOE even sent me down to Puerto Rico for a trip to go down there for a while. Franklin: Why did you go down to Puerto Rico? Carter: Oh, they wanted me to represent them down there at a big conference. Franklin: Must’ve been fun. Carter: I thought it was the worst conference I’d ever been to. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Why is that? Carter: So, it was terrible. I wrote it up as being very terrible. But my wife and baby enjoyed it. [LAUGHTER] They went along, too, and they had a great time out on the beach. Franklin: Was it terrible because of the technical aspects of the conference, or was it a— Carter: Yeah, because of that, and the people who they had as keynotes—speakers and so forth. They were just terrible. Franklin: Okay. That’s funny. Carter: And I let them know it. Franklin: Okay. And when did you—you eventually retired, right, in 1996? Carter: Yeah, ’96, I retired, because we lost our contract with DOE. Franklin: Who did? Carter: Westinghouse. Franklin: Okay. Carter: And Fluor-Daniels and their buddies were coming in, and I felt that, no, I didn’t think I was going to fit into that bunch. At the time, I was doing a lot of science education work for Westinghouse. I traveled extensively to the Washington, D.C. and the southeast, working with colleges and universities doing science education work. Served on like the College of Engineering Advisory Council at Southern University, for example. Franklin: So you were kind of moving out of direct Hanford operations at that time with Westinghouse. Carter: Mm-hmm. Franklin: Westinghouse left. Okay, and what did you do after retirement? Carter: My wife had a business going, and I decided to support her. Franklin: Okay. And what’s that—what was the business? Carter: She had a National Car Rental for Tri-Cities and Yakima for a while. And then she operated a post office for the West Richland community for a while, and then she went out a bought a travel agency and set up a tour company called Genie Tours that had—and she built up a fleet of almost a dozen tour buses. And it tours throughout the western part of the United States. And she also did tours back to, like, Branson, but she didn’t take her own bus. Franklin: Okay. Carter: She would fly them back there and she would charter over somebody’s back there where she did that. But back here, many trips to Portland, Seattle, down to California. Like when WSU played in the Rose Bowl, both times, she took one of our buses down there with people on it. Franklin: Oh, okay. Your wife was quite entrepreneurial. Carter: Yeah. Franklin: All of your kids—how many children do you have? Carter: Three. Franklin: Three. And they all grew up in Richland and— Carter: Yup. Franklin: --attended Richland schools. Carter: Hanford. Franklin: Hanford High. Carter: Mm-hmm. Franklin: Did they ever talk about experiencing any kind of discrimination or segregation or anything due to the— Carter: Nothing serious, you know. There were probably a few occasions where there may have been a name-calling or stuff like that. But, no, they did okay. And they ended up going from Hanford to WSU Pullman. Franklin: Okay. All three? Carter: All three, except for our youngest son decided, nah, I want to do something different. So he went into the Air Force and studied for a little while, and then he came back out and formed himself a band out of Spokane and bummed around. And finally decided, you know, it’s not doing too well. So he came back home and now he’s working out at Hanford. Franklin: Okay, kind of continuing in the family tradition. Oh, shoot, I had a question. What was it? Oh, and then you also, at some point, joined the B Reactor Museum Association. Carter: Correct. Franklin: And when did you join that group? Carter: Right when it started. Franklin: Oh, so back in the ‘90s. Carter: Yeah, wherever it was. I don’t remember, yeah, yeah. Franklin: Okay, okay. Did you play any roles within the association? Carter: No, I did not. Franklin: Okay, just a supporter? Carter: Yeah, I was too busy with other activities, you know. When I joined my wife with her tour company, it was all I could do to try to keep up with that operation and help her keep up with that operation. Franklin: Oh, I bet. Running a business takes a lot of work. Carter: Especially that particular business, because she got buses going and coming, and you have breakdowns and you have situations at the hotels for your people, you got to make sure they’re taken care of. She used to do the spring training for Mariners baseball down in Phoenix every year. Franklin: Oh, yeah, yeah! Does she still operate the business? Carter: No, we had to shut that down. My bride is now suffering from Alzheimer’s. Franklin: Oh, okay. Okay. Carter: So I’m her principal caregiver now. And she requires 24/7 care. Franklin: Yeah, I would imagine so. I just have a couple questions left, kind of larger reflective questions. In what ways did security and secrecy at Hanford impact your work on, or daily life? Carter: Well, I can’t say it impacted. We know that if you had a Q clearance, there’s certain information you had access to, and you couldn’t talk about it with people that didn’t have Q clearance or the need-to-know. So, I knew that, and I worked accordingly. Franklin: Did you have a Q clearance? Carter: Yes. Franklin: Okay. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland during the Cold War? Carter: That one of the most talented group of scientists and engineers anywhere in the world were right here at Hanford. And they shared their knowledge with you. I learned probably more from coworkers than I learned at the university. Franklin: How so? Carter: Because they knew what was going on. And they would help me understand processes and how technical things worked. Franklin: Was there ever—did you ever have any fear or trepidation about working with nuclear materials-- Carter: No. Franklin: --at all when you came to take the job at Hanford? Carter: No, never. Franklin: Did your wife at all? Carter: No, no. Franklin: Okay. Carter: In fact, when I worked at 325 Building, I was sometimes looked upon as the mad scientist. Because on occasions, I would have a little minor accident and blow up something and fumes coming out into the hallway. [CHUCKLING] And people coming, Dan, you okay, you okay? Yup, everything’s cool, everything’s cool. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Kind of a laissez-faire attitude to industrial hazard. Is there anything else you’d like to mention related to migration, segregation, and civil rights and how they impacted your life in the Tri-Cities? Carter: Well, I feel that my bride and I were very fortunate in our family, because, like I say, we were treated well, we were well-respected, and we had opportunities to participate in a lot of community activities. My bride did, also, too. She was very active over at CBC, for example. The Martin Luther King monument over there, she was one of the persons who helped raised the money to build that monument over there at CBC. She served on the Foundations board for several years. Franklin: Oh, okay. Carter: So, yeah, we became a part of the community, and I think we made some significant contribution to our community here. And as a result, we choose to still live here. Franklin: Yeah, I would say so. Well, Dan, thank you so much for coming and speaking with us about your life and your work at Hanford. I really appreciate it. Carter: It’s my pleasure to share whatever knowledge I can share about the Hanford Project and the great work that’s been done out there, and the wonderful, highly technical people that worked out there. As a result, I got a chance to meet some outstanding scientists from around the world: some scientists from England that came over and we worked with them. I did some research with a scientist from Berkeley, who ended up at WSU Pullman and he tried to get me to leave Hanford and join his research team up at Pullman. But I chose not to do so. I met Bob Sanko, from Connell, who—he and his other colleague who were authors of textbooks—tried to get me to come up and join their research team up at Connell and I chose to stay here. So, as a result, my work at Hanford, I got a chance to meet a lot of outstanding scientists. Franklin: Great. Well, thank you again, Dan. Carter: My pleasure. Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 300 Area PUREX 200 Area HEHF (Hanford Environmental Health Foundation) FFTF (Fast Flux Test Facility) 400 Area B-WIP (Basalt Waste Isolation Plant) 325 Building Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1964- Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1964-1996 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 Carter Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Pasco (Wash.) Chemistry African American colleges and universities Segregation Civil rights Civil rights movements Description An account of the resource Dan Carter moved to Richland, Washington in 1964 and worked on the Hanford Site from 1964-1996. A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 02/19/2018 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. This oral history collection was done in partnership with the National Park Service under Task Agreement P17AC01288. 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%2F866f4dc1ee97127bc030dbc0e1cda11c.jpg 369953453c2a6c4d1d213754904a555b https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F1fa70e25a8e3aeba0cc6e6bcb13dfa80.mp4 3dbf13537584bbe0cb93002f5c3ea15d Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Daniel Barnett Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:09:21 Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 225 B Encapsulation Building B Plant Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1944-2016 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1965-1995 Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin and I’m conducting an oral history interview with Daniel Barnett on July 13th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Daniel Barnett about his experiences growing up in Richland and working at the Hanford site. So the best place to start, I think, is the beginning. So why don’t you tell me where you were born and what year. Daniel Barnett: I was born in Aberdeen, Washington in 1938—August 13th. Franklin: Okay. Barnett: And when the war started, my dad was working for the Harbor Patrol in Seattle as a patrolman. He heard that they were hiring over here, so he came over here and they hired him almost instantly because he already had the security clearance and everything. Franklin: Ah. Barnett: So he called my mom and told her that he had a job over here and to get herself packed, because he was gonna get her. But when she moved here, she couldn’t move to Richland. It wasn’t even on the map at that time. They took it off the map and everything. She had to move to Prosser. Franklin: Okay. Barnett: And later on when they finally got a prefab built, we moved into a prefab at 1011 Sanford. Franklin: Where was your father from? Was he from Washington? Barnett: He was from Oregon. All my family is from Oregon except for me. My dad said he couldn’t get across the border fast enough. Franklin: So being from—what drew him to Hanford? Was it the pay? Barnett: I think so. Well, he was originally—he worked at a plywood plant, then he went to work for Harbor Patrol. He had asthma, which the wet climate apparently irritated. So he had a chance to get over here, so he moved over here. Franklin: Okay. So the climate played a— Barnett: Yeah. Franklin: --big factor and wanted the dry and the sunshine. Barnett: Well, probably the pay, too, because the pay was good for those times. Franklin: Right. And how long did your family live in Prosser before you moved? Barnett: We were there about a year, I think. I don’t remember truthfully—I was only about five when we moved there. And I was there probably about a year. I just vaguely remember moving to Prosser. Franklin: Right. Okay. And you moved—so you came over in 1944— Barnett: Yeah. Franklin: --right? And so you would have moved to Richland in 1944? About there? Barnett: Oh—I think we actually—Dad came over, I think in ’43. A year later, in ’44 we moved over. Franklin: Oh, okay. Barnett: Because I remember ’45 when they announced the war—dropping the bomb on Japan, and Mom told Dad when he come home, I know what you’ve been guarding! [LAUGHTER] Because he didn’t even know what he was guarding at the time. Franklin: Right. Wow. Did your dad talk about his work much? Or maybe [INAUDIBLE] Barnett: He worked as a patrolman until they sold the town and then he became a painter. Franklin: A painter? Barnett: Yeah, he was an artist so then he became a painter and painted the houses and the buildings in Richland. Because when the government owned Richland, if you had a paint job needed done on the house, you called them and they come in and painted it. You didn’t hire somebody from a company to paint it. The government did it. Franklin: And was he a patrolman onsite the entire time until they sold the town? Barnett: Yeah, yeah. Franklin: Okay. Was he assigned to a specific area, or--? Barnett: No, just general patrol. He talked about patrolling the fences, taking their Jeeps and going down the length of the fences and checking them out, and all that sort of stuff. But just a general patrolman, not any special area. Franklin: Okay. And you said that your—what did your mother do when she first got here? Barnett: Oh, she was just a housewife. She eventually went to work as a waitress. And then finally she got on to work at Hanford. She worked with Battelle for about 29 years as a lab tech. Franklin: Oh, wow. Do you know which lab she worked in? Barnett: Well, she did—where they did testing on the animals. Though at that time they were testing marijuana on chimpanzees and different types of animals. She did the test work on the meat from the animals. Franklin: Oh, wow. Barnett: So I don’t know exactly—it was—again, probably wasn’t supposed to be told, so she didn’t say much about it. Franklin: Did she have any schooling beyond— Barnett: Just high school. Franklin: Just high school. And what about your father, did he--? Barnett: He was just high school. Franklin: Just high school as well. Where did your mother waitress at? Barnett: Well, the first place she had was O’Malley’s Drug Store which now is a—what do you call it? A Tojo Gym? Where they teach different martial arts? Franklin: Oh, okay. Barnett: It’s down on Williams, right off of Williams. That’s what it is now. Franklin: Okay. Barnett: O’Malley’s Drug Store eventually closed, moved up to Kadlec. And a lady bought it from him, and now she’s down there on George Washington Way. Franklin: Okay. Barnett: And right by O’Malley’s Drug Store used to be a Mayfair market. So I sold newspapers out at the lunch halls at Hanford. Sold—well, I don’t remember—but I think it was the Columbia Basin News to start out, because that was the first newspaper of the Tri-Cities, was the Columbia Basin News. Then they bought them out and became the Tri-City Herald. But I remember selling—give you an idea, you can figure out how much time, because I remember one of the headlines was—one of the union leaders had been arrested by the government. And I don’t even remember who it was, it’s been so long ago. But I remember that was one of the headlines of one of the newspapers. Franklin: What about—do you remember the Richland Villager at all? That was a local paper. Barnett: Yeah, but it wasn’t very much. It was very small. Franklin: Okay. Barnett: I delivered the Seattle P-I. Franklin: Seattle P-I? Barnett: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. And you said your mother started waitressing at Malley? At O’Malley’s or Malley’s? Barnett: At O’Malley’s. Franklin: O’Malley’s. And then did she waitress anywhere else in Richland? Barnett: Not that I know of. From there she went out to Hanford. Franklin: And that was when pharmacies or drug stores as we know them now, they used to have lunch counters. Barnett: Yeah, yeah. Franklin: Right. And so they would go there and they were more of like a café-slash-pharmacy. Barnett: Yeah. The one up on Thayer, I think it was Densow’s at that time. That had a heyday lunch counter in it, coffee shop. It closed up and now I think it’s just pharmacy. Franklin: Mm-hmm. Barnett: But where the south end—what do you call it? You know when you get down here, you sit and try to remember things and you get kind of jumbled up—Salvation Army building is now on Thayer was originally the Mayfair Market. Franklin: Okay. And what did they sell there? Barnett: Well, that was the grocery store. Franklin: Grocery store, okay. Do you remember—so you said you moved into—what was the address on Sanford? Barnett: 1011 Sanford. Franklin: And do you remember what kind of prefabricated house it was? Barnett: It was three-bedroom. Franklin: Three-bedroom prefab, okay. Barnett: No, I think it was two-bedroom, because my sister was just a little baby then. Franklin: Okay. And did you share a room with your sister? Barnett: Probably with my brother. Franklin: Oh, so how many siblings— Barnett: Had three kids. I had an older brother. We were about five years apart. Franklin: Oh, okay. So an older brother, you, and then a younger sister. Barnett: Yeah. Franklin: And then how long did you live at 1011 Sanford? Barnett: I don’t really remember, but it must have been three or four years, because as soon as they got the A houses built, we had a chance to move into one. And we moved immediately to one. Because we had three kids, and a prefab’s kind of tight for three kids. Franklin: Yeah, yeah. I live in a two-bedroom prefab. And it’s—with just my wife, and it’s pretty— Barnett: Well you know why they’re called prefabs. Franklin: Tell me. Barnett: They were built by a company, brought in in two sections and then put together. They were prefabricated. Franklin: Yeah, the prefabricated engineering company out of Portland. Barnett: And nobody could figure out why they put that little square door in the back other than to throw the garbage out it. I don’t know—have you ever heard of Dupus Boomer? Franklin: Yes. Barnett: He made some cartoons about that backdoor. Franklin: Right, and that the rooves had a tendency to fly away. Barnett: Yeah. Franklin: And they had to put— Barnett: Well, in 1955, they did. They had two of them blow off. Franklin: Yeah, those are great cartoons. Barnett: Like “Pa wants a bathtub.” [LAUGHTER] Franklin: So tell me a little more about growing up in Richland. Which schools did you go to? Barnett: Well, the first school I went was Carmichael. And that was probably a mile-and-a-half away. We walked to school. Nobody thought anything about it. There wasn’t any buses. There was a bus system in Richland, but it was run by the government. It was a little old bus that you could pick up in two places in Richland to go downtown and go to a movie and come back. But no buses hauled you to school. There was high school buses that hauled people. They picked them up in the Horse Heaven Hills on farms and brought them to Hanford—I mean to Col High—it’s Hanford now. But, no, I walked to school real regular, didn’t think about it, nobody had any panic about walking to school. Everybody did it because it’s normal. Franklin: And do you remember—so you would have been going to—was it Carmichael—growing up right in the early Cold War. What do you remember about civil defense? Duck-and-cover, air raids. Barnett: I don’t remember doing that. Franklin: Really? Barnett: I don’t know whether we did or not, but I don’t remember doing that. Franklin: Do you remember knowing what was being made at Hanford? Did you ever have any fear—how real did the Cold War seem to you? Barnett: Well, the Cold War affected me quite a bit because I was in eight years during the Cold War—in the Air Force. Franklin: Right. Barnett: The security was a lot tighter. I mean, there was—you couldn’t go out to Hanford without having your security badge checked. Now you can drive clear to the Area and before you go in the Area have your badge checked. Franklin: Right. Barnett: But then, there was a badge check when you got on the buses, the badge check, when you got out to your area, and then again they checked your badges when you left the area. Franklin: Right. Barnett: So it was—the security was real tight. Franklin: Mm-hmm. But what about when you were growing up, when you were a kid in school? Did you ever have any special fear or pride in what was being made at Hanford? Barnett: Nope. It was—like I said, nobody knew what they were doing out there until they dropped the bomb. Then they found out they’d been protecting part of the atomic bomb. Franklin: Right. Barnett: But I had no fears about it. I went down the irrigation ditch—there used to be an irrigation ditch that ran through town that started—it had two, three ponds on Wellsian Way that were the settling ponds for Richland’s water system. And we used to go there and swim in them. One of the ponds they eventually made a juvenile fishing pond. And the irrigation ditch runs from there, clear down to where the hospital is, down in front of the hospital, several ponds down through the hospital and then under—well, through the Uptown district, one of them went through the Uptown district, and one went to the Columbia River. And wasn’t until ’48 that they finally put a pump in there, because in ’48 when they built the dam—they built the dike, rather—the irrigation ditches plugged up. So they had to put up a pump station in so they could pump the water irrigation ditch up into the river. We used to fish in that. We used to go down there and slide down—slide over where the pump was, because it was all slick and slimy. We’d put on an old pair of jeans and go down there and slide into the water. I mean, that’s things kids then. Nowadays they wouldn’t even think about it. My mother told me when I could swim 25 feet, I could go in the river by myself. Mainly because you didn’t go to the river too often in the winter; you went in the summer. And there’s not a place in the Yakima, if you can swim 25 feet, you can’t get back to the shore. So I spent all my—most weekends and spare time at the Yakima River playing around. Franklin: Wow. What about—maybe you could talk a little bit about the growth of Richland and kind of the building of some of the major hallmarks, like the Uptown and the— Barnett: Well, the Uptown was built—the rest of it closed up, but originally the Uptown—as you come into Uptown off to the left—that was a big theater. And we used to have a big matinee. The Spudnut’s shop has always been there. I can remember going to the movie on a Saturday and the lineup for the movie—I think it was 20 cents for a movie then. But it was clear past the Spudnut shop. We used to watch the owner there making the Spudnuts while we were waiting to get into the movies. Franklin: Has that been in its same location-- Barnett: Yeah. Franklin: --in the mall? Barnett: Spudnut’s has been there ever since it started. They originally were out there in Kennewick. If you go in there and pick up their menu, they have a little story about where they started. They started out there in the Wye. Franklin: That’s great. And what else about it? Because Richland kind of developed out towards-- Barnett: Well, Newberry’s was on the other end of the Uptown district. That was kind of a department store type. I think the only one I saw was about 15 years ago, and that was in the Dalles, Oregon. I don’t even know if they exist anymore. The downtown district, every year we had different contests for the kids. They had marble shooting contests and bubblegum blowing contests—all kind of contests to keep the kids’ interest. Franklin: Right. Barnett: At that time, the—what is it? The Allied Arts, or was that in the Atomic Frontier Days? Franklin: Can you talk maybe a little bit about the Atomic Frontier—do you remember going to the parades? Barnett: Yeah. They had a lot of the old western movie stars come to the Atomic Frontier Days. Franklin: Like—do you remember any names in particular? Barnett: No, I don’t. Like I say, a kid doesn’t retain names like that. He hears them and doesn’t retain them. But my dad, apparently, knew a couple of them, so he visited with them. It started out as just a celebration of Hanford and stuff. And then it worked into the Allied Arts show. Franklin: Okay. And do you remember any particulars of those celebrations, like the parade—the floats, or— Barnett: Well, there wasn’t any parade. There wasn’t any parade, and where Howard Amon Park is, there used to be a swimming pool. You know where it makes a turnaround? Well, there off to the right there used to be a swimming pool. And right now, they still got the old children’s swimming pool there, but then there was a regular swimming pool in the water. And in 1948 when the big flood came, it filled up full of water and they ended up breaking it up and burying it and building the Howard Prout pool. But we used to go down there and swim just about every day. And we’d go to the other end of the park and pick peaches, because it used to be a peach orchard. Because there were orchards all over town. Where Jason Lee was—the old Jason Lee—that was a cherry orchard. Where Densow is, that was a cherry orchard. Carmichael had an orchard. There was orchards all over town. Because this was an agriculture district at the time the government bought it and moved in. Franklin: Were you in any clubs or— Barnett: I was a boy scouts. Franklin: --organizations? Boy Scouts? Barnett: Yeah. We had—one that sticks in my mind the most was we had one of our young scouts drowned at the Uptown. That’s the one I mentioned. He went on an inner tube, fell in the water and drowned. That was in ’48. And actually, the water where the hospital was, the irrigation ditch you got there, that was 15-foot deep at that time. Franklin: Wow. Barnett: That backed up so much, they—that’s when they built what they called the America Mile, the dike. They called all the earthmovers from Hanford out to Richland to build that dike. Because when they started, the water was lapping over the edge to go into the houses. And they poured that thing in about 24 hours. Franklin: Wow, that’s amazing. Barnett: Now, the George Washington Way was closed to all civilian traffic, and these great big earthmovers were just going down the road, 30, 40 miles an hour. Franklin: Wow. What other kinds of activities did you do in Boy Scouts? Barnett: Oh, built models. Car models. You whittle them out, put the wheels on them, all that, have races with them. Went on trips. Just normal Boy Scout stuff. Got a little more sophisticated, but just the normal Boy Scout stuff then. Franklin: Right. And so after you went to Carmichael, did you then go to Richland High? Barnett: Col High. Franklin: Col High? Barnett: [LAUGHTER] It was Col High then. Franklin: Oh. Barnett: They changed the name because there was a Col High downstream on the Columbia that had had the name before Richland High was called Col High. So they changed it to Richland High instead of Col High. Franklin: Oh. But was the mascot always still the— Barnett: All the bomber. Franklin: --bombers? Okay. So the Col High Bombers? Barnett: Yup. Franklin: Okay. And when did you graduate high school? Barnett: 1957. Franklin: And then what did you do? Barnett: I went in the Air Force. I think about two months after I got out and I went in the Air Force. I already spent 27 months in the National Guards. I got in the National Guards when I was 16, and when I went to sign up for the Air Force, the squadron commander of the National Guards was—he got shook up because he enlisted me when I was 16. [LAUGHTER] So they changed the date on my discharge papers from the National Guards. So according to my discharge papers from the National Guards, I’m 78 right now. Franklin: Oh. Barnett: Those days, they did things like that, nobody thought anything about it. Franklin: Wow, yeah. Barnett: Because if you were warm they took you into the military then. Franklin: Right. [LAUGHTER] And what did you—describe your time in the Air Force. Barnett: Well, of course there was basic training. The first place I went was Westover, Massachusetts—that’s Springfield, Massachusetts. And that was a total culture shock for me, because I grew up in a comparatively small city. And Springfield then had over 100,000 people in it. Franklin: Right, and I guess, too, at this point you would have completely grown up when Richland was a government— Barnett: Yup. Franklin: --still was all government space. Barnett: Yup, they sold it while I was in the Air Force. Franklin: Can—actually I guess maybe we can back up a little bit. What strikes you, maybe looking back on that, or— Barnett: I watched them build the Alphabet Houses. And there wasn’t one or two people on the houses; there was five or six building these houses. And they seemed to go up overnight. One of the things that I don’t know is fact or not, but knowing the government it probably was—is they were supposed to build half basements for a coal fire furnace, a coal bin, and two tubs, and place for a washing machine. The contractors screwed up on some of them and built a full basement. And the government found out about it and made them go back in and seal half the basement with dirt. [LAUGHTER] Typical government. Franklin: Were your—granted you were a kid at this point, but was your sense—were people happy— Barnett: Oh yeah! Franklin: living in a government-controlled and -owned town? Barnett: Nobody thought anything about it. There was very little crime. Because at that time, there was only about two, three ways to get out of Richland. So there was nobody causing any big deal. And if you got in a whole bunch of trouble—you didn’t live in Richland unless you worked at Hanford. And if your kids got into too much trouble, they told the parents, you calm them down or go find another job. So it was stopped. Franklin: Right. Did you—was Richland mostly a white community at that time? Right? Were there any other— Barnett: Yeah, there was—one, I think there was only one black community in Richland—Norris Brown. And I think they lived in Putnam. Franklin: Okay. Barnett: I remember we had a basketball game in Sunnyside. And Sunnyside wasn’t gonna let them play on their court. And we told them, fine, we’ll just get up and leave. So we all started to get up and leave and they finally broke it and gave in and let them play on the basketball court. Franklin: How did you know this family? Did you go to school together? Barnett: Yeah, I went to school with them. Franklin: Oh okay, and did you play basketball? Barnett: No! I’m not a sports—I had my first surgery on my knee when I was about 13, so— Franklin: Oh, wow. Barnett: I’ve never played any sports. My sporting then was hunting and fishing. Franklin: But you kind of heard about this story? Barnett: Oh, yeah. We all know them. Went to basketball games. Then there was sock hops and at noon they taught dancing in the lunchrooms for kids that wanted to learn how to dance. Franklin: So do you know what the patriarch of that family would have done at Hanford to be able to earn a place at Hanford? Because mostly from what I’ve heard, mostly African Americans had to live in Pasco. Barnett: Yeah, because they wouldn’t let them live in Richland—I mean Kennewick. Franklin: Yeah, in Kennewick. So how did—do you know any particulars as to how that family was able to live in Richland? Barnett: I think it’s just that the government—that they had to be equal on them, and they just hired them and they went to work out there. I don’t know any particulars on it, but that’s basic what it was. Franklin: Oh, okay. Barnett: They were in a government town, and there was no way that anybody could refuse—and there was nobody that complained about it. Franklin: Right. Barnett: Again, the government controlled it. They said, if you don’t like it, goodbye. Franklin: Right. And they would—they called the government for pretty much anything you needed on the house, right? For coal? Barnett: Right. Lightbulbs, chains, coal. But coal was delivered once a—I don’t know whether it was once a month or once a week. But coal was automatically delivered. And like I say, if there was anything major done, you called the housing department. They came in and fixed it. Franklin: I think sometimes for outsiders looking in, it’s kind of striking to hear about the government completely owning this town and controlling the lives of the people and having that much control on people’s freedoms and responsibility. But from the people I’ve talked to who grow up in Richland, they have very fond memories of it. Barnett: Yeah, there was no restrictions on the normal freedoms. There was restriction on if your kids got into trouble, because, like I said, the patrol would go up to the person that had the kids that were causing the problem and said you either straighten your kids out or you go and find another job. Which, to me, made common sense. And so it was actually pretty decent. Franklin: Did you ever get any sense from your parents that they felt, maybe, restricted, not being able to own their own home or do any of their own repairs, or did they just— Barnett: No, not then. I think—that was just after the Depression—I think they were just happy to be able to get a home. Franklin: Right. Interesting. Because, you know, for some people looking outside, you could look at that level of government control—because we have these big debates about the role of the government in society today, and it’s kind of interesting to hear about it. Barnett: Well, there was no control where the government come in and said, you do this and you do that and you do this. As long as you didn’t get into trouble and you did your job, and were a normal person, there was nobody ever complained about it. I remember I was back behind where the Racquet Club is. I was hunting ground squirrels with a .22 one day. And at that time, nobody had any problems with it. And one of the Richland patrol people came and picked me up and brought me back to the patrol station. And he called my dad. My dad come in and he says, what’s wrong? He says, we caught your boy shooting .22s at such-and-such area. He said, well, is he aiming at the road? Said, no. Said, did he shoot it at anybody? Said, no. Then what the hell are you bothering me about? I mean, that’s just how it was in those times. It wasn’t any of this, oh my god, he’s got a gun. It just was normal. Because I had my first rifle when I was about—I must have been about eight years old. And we used to go out and go rabbit hunting. Franklin: Did you ever spend much time in Kennewick or Pasco—in either of those--? Barnett: Not really. My wife was born in Pasco. Franklin: Okay. Barnett: I never spent much time in it because I had no reason to. I mean, it wasn’t the case of I was afraid to or wary about it—just I had no reason to. All, everything I needed was in Richland or around the Richland area. Franklin: Why did you first have to get surgery on your knee at 13? Barnett: Well, my knee locked. I didn’t find out until about 25 years later that the doctor had actually not fixed it. Because what they found out was there was a meniscus cartilage—you know in your knee? And mine was oblong and it had broke in half. And it had slipped between the joint and it had locked my knee so I couldn’t straighten it out. So I’d have to pick it up, lay it across the other leg, and pull it and pop it back out. But that was the first—I was accident prone. I had a radical mastoid when I was about 15. By the time I got out of high school, I probably had 100 stitches in me. I mean, if it happened, I did it and got it happened to me. I was playing baseball, jumped over a fence, and landed on a guard rake with the thongs up—four thongs in one of my foot. Franklin: Ouch. Barnett: Weird things like that are always happening to me. One time, when I was in school, I reached up to open a door and a kid slammed it and put my hand through the window, sliced across this way. And I looked at it, bleeding, and I closed it up and went to the nurse’s office. The nurse got all panicky. She called my mom, and I could hear my mom say over the phone real loud, again?! And the nurse must’ve thought she was the hard-heartest old lady there ever was, but my mother was just used to it. Franklin: Yeah, right. Barnett: And I didn’t do things out of the way to have it happen, just—if it’s gonna be an odd thing, it happened. Franklin: Right. Barnett: So I kind of, like I say, with all this mess I got with my knee now, I call it Young Stupid Male Syndrome, a lot of it. I don’t—I get frustrated with it, because I love to garden and I can’t garden anymore. But I don’t get worried or depressed about it, because it’s there and nothing I can do about it, so just live with it. Franklin: Right. So jump back ahead now. So you said you moved to Springfield in the Air Force for basic training, and that was— Barnett: No, I was—San Antonio for basic training, and then to Springfield. Franklin: And that was a big culture shock. Barnett: Oh, yeah. I mean, I drove a vehicle and drove into town to haul officers into town. And here is a town with 100,000 people and I’d never been in anything bigger than Richland, Washington. So you can imagine the shock it was, being in that kind of traffic. Franklin: Right. And then where did you go after that? Barnett: Well, I was there for about a year-and-a-half, two years. Then I went to Thule, Greenland. Franklin: Interesting. Barnett: Top of the world. Franklin: Yeah. And what were you—was that for the—weren’t there bombers stationed— Barnett: No, they had the fueling planes there. Yes, they had SAC planes all over the world at that time. But at Thule they had the KC-135s and the KC-97s that were fueling planes. Franklin: Right. Barnett: So we were there to support them. Franklin: And those were there to refuel the— Barnett: The B-52s. Franklin: --the B-52s that were carrying weapons in case of-- Barnett: Yup, because there was one from every base in the world in the air 24 hours a day. Franklin: Right. And can you talk—what was that like, to be in—and was the base separated from any other communities in Greenland, or did you-- Barnett: It was a base of its own. There were no other communities besides Thule, that’s it. Franklin: And how long were you there? Barnett: Year. Franklin: And what was that like? Barnett: Well, it’s an interesting place to visit, but you don’t want to live there permanently. [LAUGHTER] Let’s put it that way. They have permafrost which is—oh, I guess about two foot down. So in the spring there are all these little beautiful tundra flowers—yellows and whites and all that. And then when they’re gone it’s just green grass and that’s it. And when they went to put a pole in the ground, they put a can—a barrel of oil in the ground, and light the oil, and then dig around that barrel. Because that’s the only way to get down past the permafrost. Because permafrost is almost like concrete. Franklin: Yes, yeah. I’m from Alaska originally, and so I’m very familiar with permafrost. So after Greenland, where did you go? Barnett: Went to Mountain Home Air Force Base. Franklin: And where is that? Barnett: Idaho, Washington. Franklin: Oh, okay. So kind of close to-- Barnett: Yeah, out in Mountain Home. They had B-47s then at Mountain Home. Franklin: Okay. Barnett: I figured out that they actually phased out B-47s because they were built before the B-52s and they figured the B-47s weren't worth keeping around. Franklin: And what did you do in the Air Force? Barnett: I drove. I drove every kind of vehicle you can think of. Franklin: Oh, really? Barnett: Yeah. When I moved to Fairchild from Mountain Home, I was trained to tow B-52s in the back, in the hangars. Franklin: Oh, okay. Barnett: With a five-ton Yuke. Four-wheel drive, five ton, and you had wing walkers on the outside that would guide you, and you would back this thing up, this big B-52 into a hangar. Franklin: Wow. Barnett: They would pull it down to a fueling station or whatever. Franklin: Cool. And then when did you come back to Richland? Barnett: 1965. I got out to Richland and we moved to--I can't remember the address, but it was on Marshall. We moved to a house on Marshall. Franklin: Was it an Alphabet House, or was it a-- Barnett: Yeah, it was an Alphabet House. I remember it most because the neighbors had a monkey. And the monkey kept stealing my daughter's candy from her. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: So you said--wait, so by this point you had a family? Barnett: Yeah, I had--I adopted my oldest boy and I had two children. Franklin: Oh, okay. Barnett: They were all born at Fairchild. Franklin: Okay. And a wife, I presume? Barnett: Yeah. Franklin: And what did your wife do in Richland? Barnett: She was just a mother. But we divorced in about '70. And then I remarried. Franklin: Okay. And what did you do when you came back to Richland? Barnett: Anything I could. I worked at O'Malley's Drug Store for a while. I worked at his house--O'Malley's house, leveled his backyard. I worked at Walter's Grape Juice, I worked at Bell Furniture, I worked at—at that time, it was originally called the Mart, at that big building right next to the Federal Building. At one time, that was a big--what would you call it? They had a cafeteria and a grocery store and all the other—kind of like Walmart. Franklin: Right. Barnett: It was called the Mart at that time. And I worked there in the clippers that they washed the dishes with. And then I went to work for the bowling alley, Atomic Lanes, which was right there where the Jacks and Sons Tavern is. That was a community center and a bowling alley there. And I worked there for about a month, and then they went automatic. So, about that time, I was just about ready to get out—finish high school. And I don't think I had any other job after that, and I went in the Air Force. Franklin: Oh, so--I'm sorry. When you came back to Richland, what did you do? So in 1965. Barnett: Oh, I did everything then. You name it, I took a job. Before—I'm sorry, I got it backwards. Before I went in the Air Force, there wasn't many jobs for people in the—who were kids in Richland. And I worked the bowling alley and I worked down at a dry cleaning outfit. But when I come back to Richland, that's when I had all these other jobs. I worked all these other jobs to keep supplied for the family. Franklin: How had Richland changed in the eight years since you had been gone? Barnett: Well, the Uptown district had--the Newberry's had left. And there was a Safeway store right next to the theater. Right now I think it's a—I don't know, some kind of a multi shop deal. And both of the stores that were there originally are gone. They're now all antique stores. Franklin: Right. Barnett: So it was—when it was built, it was the first big complex for going shopping in Tri-Cities. Franklin: Right. Barnett: And after they built that, they built Highlands. And that was another big complex for shopping. So I worked everything I could, and 19--oh, what was it? [SIGH] About '67 or '68, I went to work at Hanford. I finally got on with them. Because I'd been applying at Hanford for three years. And I finally got to work with them. I won't mention how I got to work for them, because to me, it's kind of a ridiculous deal, and I don't know whether it was prejudice or not. Well, I'll go ahead. Franklin: I was gonna say, now you've got my interest. Barnett: I was--how I'd shop for a job, I'd go out and fill out an employment application, and I'd just distribute--go out all over town and fill out employment applications. And every week, I'd go back and check them. Well, one time, I was filling out an appointment application, and one of the guys I knew, I met him, and he said, hey, there's a new employment office over there at the new Whitaker School. And you might check it out. So I went over there and checked it out and signed up. And three days later, Hanford called me for a job. And I found out that that originally was a minority employment office. Franklin: Oh. Barnett: So I've always had the feeling that somebody didn't look at the records right. They didn't see the C. [LAUGHTER] Because I didn't get hired until I went to there and did an application. Because the government was required to hire a certain number of minority-- Franklin: Right. Well, but you did get hired. Barnett: Yeah. Franklin: So what did you do at Hanford? Barnett: Well, I can say as little as possible, like everybody else. [LAUGHTER] That's a common joke. Of course, it took me about--I couldn't understand it. It took me about three months to get a security clearance. When I was in SAC, I had a Secret clearance. Both my folks worked at Hanford, they had Secret clearance. But it still took me about three months to get a security clearance. And all the time, since I've been on the Air Force, I've lived in Richland, I never could understand the government—why they wasted so much money on a security clearance for me. But when I got out there, I started as a process operator. And started at B Plant. And there was no training at that time. I mean, when you went into a radiation zone, one of the guys that was experienced took you with him. And you dressed like he did, hoping he knew what he was doing, because that's how you dressed. And that's how you learned to dress right. So I started out going into the canyon--I don't know if you knew what the canyons were—okay? We went into the canyons and I helped mixed chemicals in the chemical gallery. And that's where I think I really screwed up my knees, because I can remember—remember, I call it Young Stupid Male Syndrome--I remember throwing a hundred-pound sack of chemicals on my shoulder and going up three flights of stairs with them, rather than wait for the elevator. Young and dumb, indestructible. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Actually, maybe for those who might be watching this who might not be as familiar with some of this stuff as I am, can you describe the canyon? Barnett: Well, the canyon was—well, like I say, the building was about 150-foot wide and about 800-foot long. And it was four stories deep and there was just one--the reason they call it canyon was because it was a gigantic canyon. It went the full length of the building, and they had huge cranes that moved different stuff so they could process the atomic waste. Because in B Plant, they process the nuclear waste. They ship it down to B Plant and we go through chemical stuff to separate the strontium and cesium from it. And that would be sent to the encapsulation plant. That was built about—oh, six years after I went to work at B Plant. They closed up after I'd been there for ten years, and I went to work for Encapsulation Building. But the canyon is an immensely big, empty storage building, really what it is. And I don't know how—or what they're gonna do with them now, because there is some radiation there that you wouldn't believe how hot it was. We took samples of radiation behind lead shields, and then they were so hot that they ended up having the crane pick up the samples and dispose of them, because we couldn't move them. Franklin: Wow. Did you—and so when you came back, your father was no longer working at Hanford, right? Barnett: Yeah, he was still working at Hanford. Franklin: Oh, was he still working—so you guys worked at Hanford at the same time. Barnett: Yeah. Franklin: Oh, wow, that's really interesting. So can you tell me a little bit more about what a—describe in a little more detail the job of a process operator? Barnett: Well, real basically, we were what you might call nuclear janitors. Franklin: Okay. Barnett: We clean up the messes that pipe fitters or millwrights or electricians made. We process all the chemical--mixed all the chemicals and processed—did all the processing of separating the strontium and cesium from the nuclear waste and ship them to tank farms. And that was basically what our main job was. We had a few major accidents. Now it'd be all over the world, about how bad it was and all that. But we just went about our business cleaning it up and went on our job. None of us got an overdose of radiation. We relied on our radiation monitors and they were good radiation monitors. If we were getting too much, they yanked us out of there real quick. So we didn't even think about it. It wasn't the case of being scared of it or anything else. It's like your hazardous wastes that they got, like coming from the hospital, where they work in an x-ray lab, they throw all the gloves and stuff and that. That's called mixed hazardous waste. Well, you could take a bath in that and not get any radiation on you. But according to what the public knew, those things are really highly radioactive boxes. And I think the biggest problem the government had is they didn't tell the people enough about what was really going on after the war was over. Franklin: Oh. Really? Barnett: Yeah, because there would have been less worry about things that were going on then, if they would have known. Because if you don't know anything about radiation, and you hear somebody mentions something is irradiated, you get all panicky about it. The expression for radiation out there was, you get a crap up. You get a crap up, you scrub it off and go about your business. Now, they panic and take you to town and do all that sort of stuff. There, we just scrubbed it off and went about our business. Franklin: Right. Barnett: And I never worried about it. Franklin: Okay. So you said you were a process separator at B Plant. And then you went to the Canyon, and what did you do-- Barnett: Well, I didn't go to the Canyon, I went to 225-B, the Encapsulation Building. Franklin; 225-B, the Encapsulation Building. Barnett: That's where they encapsulated the strontium and cesium. Franklin: Okay. Barnett: We all did a multitude of jobs. We worked on the cells, processing the strontium and cesium. And we worked behind the cells in mixing chemicals and we worked from when they loaded the chemicals for shipment for a long period of time when they were shipping cesium to the radiation plant for irradiating medical waste. And that ended when the guy was what they called recycling the cesium capsules too much. They get real hot. I mean, temperature-wise. And he was setting it in the water for a period of time and taking it out of water and cooling them off and stashing them back in the water. Well, one of them leaked. Franklin: Ooh. Barnett: And so they ended up, the whole place had to have all those capsules moved back. So that was a big fiasco. And again, it wasn't our fault. It was the guy doing the work was stupid enough to not check and see what he was doing. Franklin: Right. Barnett: And that's usually what happens with most—any of the radiation. And if you work with radiation, it's not the guy doing the work, it's somebody that's stupid and doesn't check what he's doing, doesn't follow regulations that causes the problem. Franklin: So did you have any other jobs at Hanford? Or what-- Barnett: I don't know, you ever heard of McCluskey? Franklin: Yeah. Barnett: Well, I was over there when we cleaned—for five weeks cleaning up that building. Franklin: Really? Barnett: Yeah. Franklin: Were you there at the time of the accident-- Barnett: No, no. Franklin: --or part of the cleanup for that? Barnett: Afterwards. They were trying to clean up the rooms so they could go in there and get things squared away. And we spent five weeks there. And to tell you how screwball the government can be, the last week-and-a-half we were there, we finally told our supervisor, look, all of worked on this radiation for 15, 20 years. We know how to clean it up. Quit telling us what to do. Let us go in there and clean it up and we'll get it cleaned up for you in no time at all. So they took a chance. And what they did is we ragged all along the bottom of the building, and we took water fire extinguishers. Because it's americium, and americium is a powder substance, it floats real easy. But it's water soluble--it'll run down with water. So we went in there and sprayed the walls with it real heavy. Then wiped everything down, moved everything that was movable, bagged it up in plastic bags and moved it out. And inside of a week, we had it down to mask only. Before then, we were wearing three pairs of plastic and cooling air and fresh air. Franklin: Wow. Barnett: And we cleaned it up in a week-and-a-half because they didn't want the people that knew what they were doing doing it. And that's the biggest problem with the government: they've always got the bureaucracy up here that knows what's going on, but they never ask the poor guy that’s doing all the work what's going on. I think you've seen that numerous times. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: I think so. [LAUGHTER] Wow, that's really fascinating. So how long total did you work at Hanford? Barnett: 30 years. Franklin: 30 years. Barnett: I had to take a medical retirement in '98. Franklin: '98. So then you were there, then, kind of from the shift from production to cleanup. Right? The production and shutdown. Barnett: No, when I left they were just getting ready to start cleaning things up. Franklin: Okay, so can you maybe talk about the shift from production to shutdown? How did that affect your job? Barnett: Well, I really didn't get in on any of the cleanup, because I left before they did. But I talked to a number of the guys out there that I worked with that were in the cleanup. The biggest problem they had is they put such a limit on chemicals they could use to do cleanup that they had to use things that they claim were not environmentally safe. They had to void all that--like Tide. They wouldn't even let us use Tide to wash the walls down. Now, you use Tide in washing machines. [LAUGHTER] Come on, give me a break. That's a hazardous chemical? And I guess it took them quite a while to get the thing cleaned up. Because, like I say, they didn't start cleaning it up until after I left. Franklin: Right. So what did you do in the shutdown era? Like after '87, from '87 to '98? What was your job primarily? Barnett: They didn't shut down--they shut B Plant down, but they didn't shut 2-and-a-quarter down. 2-and-a-quarter was still processing strontium and cesium. Franklin: Oh, okay, so then you kept in the waste encapsulation. Barnett: Yeah. Franklin: Can you describe a little bit more the process of waste encapsulation? Barnett: Well, strontium is not soluble--not water soluble. And strontium is. And what they had--they had a special process--I don't know exactly the process. I just know what we did. You would take a mixed chemicals with the cesium and you would dissolve it and then you would heat it up to--I think--800 degrees into a liquid. And then you had a machine we called a tilt-pour which would pour seven capsules at a time full of cesium. And then you'd take these capsules and you'd put a sensoring disc in them to make them airtight. And then you'd weld a cap onto that. That'd be welded by a machine. And most then it was computerized. Then that was decontaminated until it was clean. And then it was put into another capsule, and that capsule was also—put a lid on it, but it was soldered on—welded on. And that was moved into the pool cells. Pool cells are 13-foot deep. What you had is a special hole built into the wall with water that you would shove that capsule through. And then the guy on the other side in the pool cell would grab the capsule and pull it out. And he would go to the pool cell that he's designated to go to, and he would shove it through a hole in the wall. And somebody on the other side would grab it and pull it and then you'd put it into its spot. So it was quite a process. And the fear was--you couldn't get that capsule within five feet of the top. Because if you did, you'd get a high radiation alarm. They’d read millions of rads on those capsules. They were hot, no two ways about it. And one thing I've always wondered is why does cesium glow blue when you turn the lights out? Franklin: Wow. Barnett: You turn the lights out in the pool cell, and all these cesium capsules will glow blue. And I've never--I've had somebody say it's something about the speed of light and all that. But I'd like to know the real reason it does that. Franklin: That sounds kind of strangely beautiful. Barnett: It was. It's a blue glow all along the bottom. The strontium doesn't. Strontium is not water soluble and it doesn't glow at all. In fact, I got some strontium in me one time when I had a tape when one of the manipulators--I don't know if I didn't mention--all the work was done from the outside with the manipulators. You know what manipulators are. Franklin: Right, yeah. Barnett: Okay, and all the capsulation, all of the work was done with manipulators from the outside. And it was amazing what some of those guys could do. They could take a little bottle about so big with a little bitty top and they could pick up that bottle, hold it here, and took up the other--the cap with the lid and put it on it. Franklin: Wow. Barnett: I was never that good with it, but there some guys out there who got real expertise with that. It just takes a lot of work to learn to use those things. Franklin: I bet. Barnett: That's one reason my hand's tore up--my hand just didn't take it so much. Franklin: And you said you got strontium on your hand? Barnett: Yeah, I got--I couldn't handle manipulators good because my hand was falling apart on me. So I took all the decontamination of the manipulator. Because that's--a manipulator has to be pulled after so many--I think it's so many weeks, the Mylar coating on it starts deteriorating. So it has to be pulled, decontaminated, and new Mylar sheath put on it. And I was in there decontaminating one of the manipulators, and one of the—well, they were trying new bands that controlled the grips. And one of them broke and sliced my hand. And I got some strontium in my finger. It was about 700 counts. I wasn't too worried about it. But they took me to town and went on all government roads, documented and everything and brought me back. I couldn't work with radiation for about three months until that thing finally deteriorated--worked out of the body. Franklin: Wow. Barnett: But I didn't worry about it. It wasn't enough to do any harm. Franklin: Wow, that's really-- Barnett: See, that's the difference between working with the stuff and knowing what it does, and not working with the stuff. Franklin: Right. Right, I've heard a lot of similar things about-- Barnett: It's like chemicals. I'd rather work at a radiation plant than at a chemical plant. Because if you have good radiation monitors, you're not gonna get an overdose of radiation. But with a chemical plant, look what they have out there now. A guy gets a whiff of chemicals, they all go panic about it. Franklin: Yeah, I see where you're--I see your point. So you said--earlier when you said you would put the cesium in the pools—cesium cans, you couldn't get them too close to something, because they'd get too hot. Sorry--can you-- Barnett: No, it wasn't too close--they're in--oh, it probably was a--well, what would you call it? It was like a cabinet with holes in it. You would drop these in there. And they're spaced out. You couldn't pull them too high. Franklin: Oh, okay. Barnett: If you pulled them sometimes when you're getting ready to transfer them to the pool cell, they would hydroplane and come up. And if you pulled them too fast, they would come up and you'd get a high radiation alarm. You’d just drop it back down and it'd go off. Franklin: Oh, okay. Barnett: That's what it was. Franklin: I got--okay. I gotcha. So-- Barnett: It only takes one time, you remember not to do that anymore. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: [LAUGHTER] I bet. So even though your area—your work didn't change much when most of the plans ordered to shut down. You still probably worked with a lot of people whose jobs might have changed-- Barnett: Yeah. Franklin: --during shutdown. Can you talk about that transition between process--? Barnett: Well, I talked with some of the guys and they were talking about how much work it took to get things cleaned up. Like the area behind the pool cells, that had to be completely decontaminated. And we finally got it down to where it was just one pair and no masks. That took a lot of work. Decontaminating just takes a lot of hand-scrubbing. I mean, it's not a case of, you can put something there and pick it up and get rid of it. You got a scrub a lot of places until it's gone. It takes a lot of work. And I talked to one fella, and he said that they had all the cells that were down to clean—and what they consider clean is no radiation in them. And it is hard for me to believe, because some of those cells were really hot. But I never got a chance on the cleanup. Franklin: How was--so when Hanford was shifting over, how was this change explained by management, or some of the--how was it conveyed, or how did the community take it? Barnett: Management never explained anything to anybody. [LAUGHTER] I don't remember hearing the community complaining about anything, because most of the guys worked out there, and they knew what was going on. So there was no big panic about it. It wasn't the case where some guys didn't work here, they were told this was going on and got all excited because they didn’t know what was going on. Most people knew what was going on. So there was no big panic that I remember. Franklin: Okay. Barnett: We didn't panic with radiation, because we had good radiation monitors. Franklin: Right. Barnett: And that makes a big difference when you're working around radiation. Franklin: So being in waste encapsulation, how did other events--other nuclear accidents around the country or around the world, like Three Mile Island or Chernobyl, kind of affect how your job or how-- Barnett: It made us see how ridiculous--because Three Mile Island actually worked. It was [UNKNOWN] what it was built for. And the moderation they got--radiation they got was not as much as you get flying from here to Denver City. Because you get more radiation from the sun than you do from—what the people at Three Mile Island got. But they blew it up so big, because so many years the government kept radiation such a secret. And that's the reason there's so much panic whenever they say radiation. Of course, there's been some real bad accidents. That one in Japan—that was a horrible thing. But as far as Hanford goes, most of the people that worked at Hanford don't—I guess they're not working around radiation anymore; it's all chemicals. Because they're getting—they get the chemicals and to me, that's the management's problem. Because they're doing something wrong in taking care of the people. The people are doing what they're told to do. If management is telling them, hey, you got to wear this, and they're not wearing it, then that's their problem—that’s the worker's problem. But when the management doesn't do anything about it, that's their problem—that’s management's problem. And I think from what I've heard and read, most of this is a managerial problem. It's not a case that the worker is going out of his way to ignore any safety concerns. Franklin: Right. What about the accident in Chernobyl? How did that--did that affect your job, or-- Barnett: Yeah, it affected it because they shut down N Reactor. And N Reactor, up until then, was as safe as any reactor in the country. It had so many safety pieces on it that you could darn near slam a door and make it shut down. But they shut it down because it was something like Chernobyl. And that's where the big effect was. Franklin: How did--oh, how did security policies change over time? Did they change with the different contractors or in response to different events? Barnett: No, the security’s main thing was basically the same. You had the security guards at like 200 East—well, they left the security guards that you couldn’t get out to Hanford without a security clearance. But that quit because they had the buses, and that stopped. And they had the security guards checking the buses and stuff as you went through. And then typical government, they started screaming about, oh, we're burning too much gas. We can't afford gas! So we'll shut the buses down. [LAUGHTER] So everybody had to drive out. But the guards at the gate checked your badges, checked your cars. If there was anything in it--you couldn’t take cameras or anything like that out there. If the guard knew you, he checked you out whether he knew you or not, because he had to make sure your wife didn't leave a camera sitting in your backseat you didn't know about. Franklin: Right. Barnett: Which happened on occasion. Franklin: Right, I bet. How did your job change with the different contractors coming in? Did it change much, or did you-- Barnett: Well, every contractor that came in, the engineers thought they were gonna remake the world. They would come up with some plan that they saw on a schematic and say, this is the way we want to do it. And we'd tell them point blank, it won't work. We've tried it that way. And they say, oh yes, it will! So we'd spend $50,000 in parts and stuff to put this together, and then it didn't work. And then they went around, well, why didn't it work? Well. The only one I ever saw that was a decent engineer is when he'd draw up a plan to do something, he would go to the millwrights, he would go to the operators, he'd go to the instrument techs and ask them to look at it and see if there's anything that needs done on it. And he had never had any problems. But these that come straight out of school and thought they could reinvent the world were a pain in the butt to us because they cost money and time. Franklin: Do you remember who that good engineer was? Barnett: He left. I don't remember who he was. But he left and went to work for a big company some place. Franklin: Oh, okay. Do you remember President Nixon's visit in--I think it was 1970 or 1971? Barnett: I might have. I didn't see him. I don't worry about politics. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Barnett: He didn't do our place any good or any bad. Just a big political statement. Franklin: How did the Tri-Cities change from when you came back in 1968 until today? What kind of strikes you as major changes? Barnett: Well, there seem to be more, you might say, petty crimes. There wasn't as much as there was before--there was more than there was before, I should say. But the city maintained its equilibrium about the same, because the people have been here for 20 years, and then they sold the city to the town. There was no big change in the government. The police stayed the same. The biggest change was you had to call a painter if you wanted your house painted. And they sold the houses to the people, and that was the biggest change. Franklin: How about, though, since—from when you came back in 1968 until today? Has there been any--has the community changed at all? Barnett: Well, a lot of the businesses have left Richland. They moved out Columbia Center area, or up there in that area. We don't have--you got to go to Columbia Center to find a business. There's a few still there. There's Home Depot and stuff like that down there, Big Lots. But there's not as many as there used to be. And mostly antique shops or stereo shops. Franklin: Right. Barnett: But there's always the Spudnut. It's always been there. Franklin: There is always the Spudnuts, yeah. They're good too. Is there anything else that I haven't asked you about that you'd like to talk about? Barnett: Well, us kids had different ways of playing that nowadays they would just panic about it. We used to have BB gun fights. We’d put on leather jackets and extra pair of Levi's and a hat and go into these orchards like where Densow's was and we'd have BB gun fights. And you haven't really lived until you've had your butt shot by a BB. [LAUGHTER] But nowadays there'd be some big panic about it that you're gonna shoot an eye out. Well, nobody ever shot an eye out because we made sure that we didn't shoot towards the head. [LAUGHTER] When they were building the houses, that's what was amazing, how fast they put these houses up. It wasn't a week or so to get a house started--it was almost a week and they had the thing almost done. And we used to go to different houses and have clod fights. Things like that that you don't dare do nowadays. Franklin: When you had what kind of fights? Barnett: Clod fights. Clodded earth. We'd get behind stuff and throw clods at each other. And the snow then was two, three foot deep. Because I remember building snow forts in my yard three foot high and never have to go to the yard to get snow. So there has been a big change in the weather. And the shelterbelt, that made a big difference, because I remember when we had sandstorms--not dust storms, sandstorms. And my dad would pull his car up in front of the house to keep the sand from blasting the side of the car off--the paint. So there's been big changes. The shelterbelt was one thing the government put in that actually worked. It’s kind of surprising. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: That's great. Is there anything else? Anything else you'd like to talk about? Barnett: Well, not really. Just that the area behind--you know, in West Richland at that time used to be Heminger City and Enterprise. They were two cities then. Franklin: Okay, tell me, were those cities that predated the Hanford Project? Barnett: Yeah. Franklin: Okay, and how big were there? Barnett: Oh, they were just little communities. It was just one run into the other. There was one called Enterprise, one was called--what did I just say? Franklin: Something city. Barnett: Heminger City. Franklin: Heminger City. Barnett: One of the elections went out for voting, they had one of the places that you went to was called Enterprise. Franklin: And how long did those communities last after Hanford came? Barnett: Not very long. I can remember Dad going out to the first town—first little town was Heminger City. And that was right where Cline's computer shop is, it was automobile shop there. And those were all owned by one group--one person. I think it was--Herricks was the name. And she had a little taco stand in one of the places. And OK Tire Shop had part of the one building that they sold tires and did car repair out of. So it was a slow change in West Richland. We had a feed store for a while. But Hanford went on strike and our feed store went down the tubes. They used to have what they called parking lot critter sells. People would bring all their animals, little animals that they wanted to sell in cages. And we would sell them for them and get 10% of the interest. It was a pretty good deal, because a lot of people had pet rabbits and stuff like that and they wanted to get rid of them. Usually had them at the un-boat races. You heard of the un-boat races? Franklin: Why don't you tell me? Barnett: The un-boat races? You ever heard of them? Franklin: Why don't you tell me? Barnett: Well, the un-boat race was you went up to the Horn Rapids Dam, and you put something in. It could not be a boat. It could be a bath tub, it could be inner tubes--it could be anything that you could see above that would float and it could not be called--it was called un-boat race. And there was a prize that they got down towards the bridge that crosses the Yakima there on George Washington Way. Got down about that far, there was a prize who got there first. But they ended up cutting that out because people left too much stuff—garbage alongside the road. They wouldn’t pick it up and take it with them when they were done with it. But that was a lot of fun. We used to stand up on the ridge. Always started about May. And we'd stand there and watch people come down the river on these un-boats. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: That sounds really fun. Anyone else have anything? Okay, well, Dan, thank you so much for talking to us today. I learned a lot of great stuff about Richland and waste encapsulation. I really appreciate it. Barnett: Okay. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Daniel Barnett Description An account of the resource An interview with Daniel Barnett conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by Mission Support Alliance on behalf of the United States Department of Energy. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2016-08-12: Metadata v1 created – [J.G.] Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Nuclear instruments & methods Nuclear weapons plants--Health aspects--Washington (State)--Hanford Site Region Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 07/13/2016 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities 225 B Encapsulation Building B Plant Hanford (Wash.) Hanford Site (Wash.) Hunting Nuclear weapons plants--Health aspects--Washington (State)--Hanford Site Region Richland (Wash.) https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fb04e035b1c8928176dadb5a42646cc81.JPG d741c436a87a4df782ed4afe3b9f60b6 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F25b95c192b96464279627aadd09cf21d.mp4 9f530d60f6f74bc722817bb2999877a3 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Daniel Barnett Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin and I’m conducting an oral history interview with Daniel Barnett on July 13th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Daniel Barnett about his experiences growing up in Richland and working at the Hanford site. So the best place to start, I think, is the beginning. So why don’t you tell me where you were born and what year. Daniel Barnett: I was born in Aberdeen, Washington in 1938—August 13th. Franklin: Okay. Barnett: And when the war started, my dad was working for the Harbor Patrol in Seattle as a patrolman. He heard that they were hiring over here, so he came over here and they hired him almost instantly because he already had the security clearance and everything. Franklin: Ah. Barnett: So he called my mom and told her that he had a job over here and to get herself packed, because he was gonna get her. But when she moved here, she couldn’t move to Richland. It wasn’t even on the map at that time. They took it off the map and everything. She had to move to Prosser. Franklin: Okay. Barnett: And later on when they finally got a prefab built, we moved into a prefab at 1011 Sanford. Franklin: Where was your father from? Was he from Washington? Barnett: He was from Oregon. All my family is from Oregon except for me. My dad said he couldn’t get across the border fast enough. Franklin: So being from—what drew him to Hanford? Was it the pay? Barnett: I think so. Well, he was originally—he worked at a plywood plant, then he went to work for Harbor Patrol. He had asthma, which the wet climate apparently irritated. So he had a chance to get over here, so he moved over here. Franklin: Okay. So the climate played a— Barnett: Yeah. Franklin: --big factor and wanted the dry and the sunshine. Barnett: Well, probably the pay, too, because the pay was good for those times. Franklin: Right. And how long did your family live in Prosser before you moved? Barnett: We were there about a year, I think. I don’t remember truthfully—I was only about five when we moved there. And I was there probably about a year. I just vaguely remember moving to Prosser. Franklin: Right. Okay. And you moved—so you came over in 1944— Barnett: Yeah. Franklin: --right? And so you would have moved to Richland in 1944? About there? Barnett: Oh—I think we actually—Dad came over, I think in ’43. A year later, in ’44 we moved over. Franklin: Oh, okay. Barnett: Because I remember ’45 when they announced the war—dropping the bomb on Japan, and Mom told Dad when he come home, I know what you’ve been guarding! [LAUGHTER] Because he didn’t even know what he was guarding at the time. Franklin: Right. Wow. Did your dad talk about his work much? Or maybe [INAUDIBLE] Barnett: He worked as a patrolman until they sold the town and then he became a painter. Franklin: A painter? Barnett: Yeah, he was an artist so then he became a painter and painted the houses and the buildings in Richland. Because when the government owned Richland, if you had a paint job needed done on the house, you called them and they come in and painted it. You didn’t hire somebody from a company to paint it. The government did it. Franklin: And was he a patrolman onsite the entire time until they sold the town? Barnett: Yeah, yeah. Franklin: Okay. Was he assigned to a specific area, or--? Barnett: No, just general patrol. He talked about patrolling the fences, taking their Jeeps and going down the length of the fences and checking them out, and all that sort of stuff. But just a general patrolman, not any special area. Franklin: Okay. And you said that your—what did your mother do when she first got here? Barnett: Oh, she was just a housewife. She eventually went to work as a waitress. And then finally she got on to work at Hanford. She worked with Battelle for about 29 years as a lab tech. Franklin: Oh, wow. Do you know which lab she worked in? Barnett: Well, she did—where they did testing on the animals. Though at that time they were testing marijuana on chimpanzees and different types of animals. She did the test work on the meat from the animals. Franklin: Oh, wow. Barnett: So I don’t know exactly—it was—again, probably wasn’t supposed to be told, so she didn’t say much about it. Franklin: Did she have any schooling beyond— Barnett: Just high school. Franklin: Just high school. And what about your father, did he--? Barnett: He was just high school. Franklin: Just high school as well. Where did your mother waitress at? Barnett: Well, the first place she had was O’Malley’s Drug Store which now is a—what do you call it? A Tojo Gym? Where they teach different martial arts? Franklin: Oh, okay. Barnett: It’s down on Williams, right off of Williams. That’s what it is now. Franklin: Okay. Barnett: O’Malley’s Drug Store eventually closed, moved up to Kadlec. And a lady bought it from him, and now she’s down there on George Washington Way. Franklin: Okay. Barnett: And right by O’Malley’s Drug Store used to be a Mayfair market. So I sold newspapers out at the lunch halls at Hanford. Sold—well, I don’t remember—but I think it was the Columbia Basin News to start out, because that was the first newspaper of the Tri-Cities, was the Columbia Basin News. Then they bought them out and became the Tri-City Herald. But I remember selling—give you an idea, you can figure out how much time, because I remember one of the headlines was—one of the union leaders had been arrested by the government. And I don’t even remember who it was, it’s been so long ago. But I remember that was one of the headlines of one of the newspapers. Franklin: What about—do you remember the Richland Villager at all? That was a local paper. Barnett: Yeah, but it wasn’t very much. It was very small. Franklin: Okay. Barnett: I delivered the Seattle P-I. Franklin: Seattle P-I? Barnett: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. And you said your mother started waitressing at Malley? At O’Malley’s or Malley’s? Barnett: At O’Malley’s. Franklin: O’Malley’s. And then did she waitress anywhere else in Richland? Barnett: Not that I know of. From there she went out to Hanford. Franklin: And that was when pharmacies or drug stores as we know them now, they used to have lunch counters. Barnett: Yeah, yeah. Franklin: Right. And so they would go there and they were more of like a café-slash-pharmacy. Barnett: Yeah. The one up on Thayer, I think it was Densow’s at that time. That had a heyday lunch counter in it, coffee shop. It closed up and now I think it’s just pharmacy. Franklin: Mm-hmm. Barnett: But where the south end—what do you call it? You know when you get down here, you sit and try to remember things and you get kind of jumbled up—Salvation Army building is now on Thayer was originally the Mayfair Market. Franklin: Okay. And what did they sell there? Barnett: Well, that was the grocery store. Franklin: Grocery store, okay. Do you remember—so you said you moved into—what was the address on Sanford? Barnett: 1011 Sanford. Franklin: And do you remember what kind of prefabricated house it was? Barnett: It was three-bedroom. Franklin: Three-bedroom prefab, okay. Barnett: No, I think it was two-bedroom, because my sister was just a little baby then. Franklin: Okay. And did you share a room with your sister? Barnett: Probably with my brother. Franklin: Oh, so how many siblings— Barnett: Had three kids. I had an older brother. We were about five years apart. Franklin: Oh, okay. So an older brother, you, and then a younger sister. Barnett: Yeah. Franklin: And then how long did you live at 1011 Sanford? Barnett: I don’t really remember, but it must have been three or four years, because as soon as they got the A houses built, we had a chance to move into one. And we moved immediately to one. Because we had three kids, and a prefab’s kind of tight for three kids. Franklin: Yeah, yeah. I live in a two-bedroom prefab. And it’s—with just my wife, and it’s pretty— Barnett: Well you know why they’re called prefabs. Franklin: Tell me. Barnett: They were built by a company, brought in in two sections and then put together. They were prefabricated. Franklin: Yeah, the prefabricated engineering company out of Portland. Barnett: And nobody could figure out why they put that little square door in the back other than to throw the garbage out it. I don’t know—have you ever heard of Dupus Boomer? Franklin: Yes. Barnett: He made some cartoons about that backdoor. Franklin: Right, and that the rooves had a tendency to fly away. Barnett: Yeah. Franklin: And they had to put— Barnett: Well, in 1955, they did. They had two of them blow off. Franklin: Yeah, those are great cartoons. Barnett: Like “Pa wants a bathtub.” [LAUGHTER] Franklin: So tell me a little more about growing up in Richland. Which schools did you go to? Barnett: Well, the first school I went was Carmichael. And that was probably a mile-and-a-half away. We walked to school. Nobody thought anything about it. There wasn’t any buses. There was a bus system in Richland, but it was run by the government. It was a little old bus that you could pick up in two places in Richland to go downtown and go to a movie and come back. But no buses hauled you to school. There was high school buses that hauled people. They picked them up in the Horse Heaven Hills on farms and brought them to Hanford—I mean to Col High—it’s Hanford now. But, no, I walked to school real regular, didn’t think about it, nobody had any panic about walking to school. Everybody did it because it’s normal. Franklin: And do you remember—so you would have been going to—was it Carmichael—growing up right in the early Cold War. What do you remember about civil defense? Duck-and-cover, air raids. Barnett: I don’t remember doing that. Franklin: Really? Barnett: I don’t know whether we did or not, but I don’t remember doing that. Franklin: Do you remember knowing what was being made at Hanford? Did you ever have any fear—how real did the Cold War seem to you? Barnett: Well, the Cold War affected me quite a bit because I was in eight years during the Cold War—in the Air Force. Franklin: Right. Barnett: The security was a lot tighter. I mean, there was—you couldn’t go out to Hanford without having your security badge checked. Now you can drive clear to the Area and before you go in the Area have your badge checked. Franklin: Right. Barnett: But then, there was a badge check when you got on the buses, the badge check, when you got out to your area, and then again they checked your badges when you left the area. Franklin: Right. Barnett: So it was—the security was real tight. Franklin: Mm-hmm. But what about when you were growing up, when you were a kid in school? Did you ever have any special fear or pride in what was being made at Hanford? Barnett: Nope. It was—like I said, nobody knew what they were doing out there until they dropped the bomb. Then they found out they’d been protecting part of the atomic bomb. Franklin: Right. Barnett: But I had no fears about it. I went down the irrigation ditch—there used to be an irrigation ditch that ran through town that started—it had two, three ponds on Wellsian Way that were the settling ponds for Richland’s water system. And we used to go there and swim in them. One of the ponds they eventually made a juvenile fishing pond. And the irrigation ditch runs from there, clear down to where the hospital is, down in front of the hospital, several ponds down through the hospital and then under—well, through the Uptown district, one of them went through the Uptown district, and one went to the Columbia River. And wasn’t until ’48 that they finally put a pump in there, because in ’48 when they built the dam—they built the dike, rather—the irrigation ditches plugged up. So they had to put up a pump station in so they could pump the water irrigation ditch up into the river. We used to fish in that. We used to go down there and slide down—slide over where the pump was, because it was all slick and slimy. We’d put on an old pair of jeans and go down there and slide into the water. I mean, that’s things kids then. Nowadays they wouldn’t even think about it. My mother told me when I could swim 25 feet, I could go in the river by myself. Mainly because you didn’t go to the river too often in the winter; you went in the summer. And there’s not a place in the Yakima, if you can swim 25 feet, you can’t get back to the shore. So I spent all my—most weekends and spare time at the Yakima River playing around. Franklin: Wow. What about—maybe you could talk a little bit about the growth of Richland and kind of the building of some of the major hallmarks, like the Uptown and the— Barnett: Well, the Uptown was built—the rest of it closed up, but originally the Uptown—as you come into Uptown off to the left—that was a big theater. And we used to have a big matinee. The Spudnut’s shop has always been there. I can remember going to the movie on a Saturday and the lineup for the movie—I think it was 20 cents for a movie then. But it was clear past the Spudnut shop. We used to watch the owner there making the Spudnuts while we were waiting to get into the movies. Franklin: Has that been in its same location-- Barnett: Yeah. Franklin: --in the mall? Barnett: Spudnut’s has been there ever since it started. They originally were out there in Kennewick. If you go in there and pick up their menu, they have a little story about where they started. They started out there in the Wye. Franklin: That’s great. And what else about it? Because Richland kind of developed out towards-- Barnett: Well, Newberry’s was on the other end of the Uptown district. That was kind of a department store type. I think the only one I saw was about 15 years ago, and that was in the Dalles, Oregon. I don’t even know if they exist anymore. The downtown district, every year we had different contests for the kids. They had marble shooting contests and bubblegum blowing contests—all kind of contests to keep the kids’ interest. Franklin: Right. Barnett: At that time, the—what is it? The Allied Arts, or was that in the Atomic Frontier Days? Franklin: Can you talk maybe a little bit about the Atomic Frontier—do you remember going to the parades? Barnett: Yeah. They had a lot of the old western movie stars come to the Atomic Frontier Days. Franklin: Like—do you remember any names in particular? Barnett: No, I don’t. Like I say, a kid doesn’t retain names like that. He hears them and doesn’t retain them. But my dad, apparently, knew a couple of them, so he visited with them. It started out as just a celebration of Hanford and stuff. And then it worked into the Allied Arts show. Franklin: Okay. And do you remember any particulars of those celebrations, like the parade—the floats, or— Barnett: Well, there wasn’t any parade. There wasn’t any parade, and where Howard Amon Park is, there used to be a swimming pool. You know where it makes a turnaround? Well, there off to the right there used to be a swimming pool. And right now, they still got the old children’s swimming pool there, but then there was a regular swimming pool in the water. And in 1948 when the big flood came, it filled up full of water and they ended up breaking it up and burying it and building the Howard Prout pool. But we used to go down there and swim just about every day. And we’d go to the other end of the park and pick peaches, because it used to be a peach orchard. Because there were orchards all over town. Where Jason Lee was—the old Jason Lee—that was a cherry orchard. Where Densow is, that was a cherry orchard. Carmichael had an orchard. There was orchards all over town. Because this was an agriculture district at the time the government bought it and moved in. Franklin: Were you in any clubs or— Barnett: I was a boy scouts. Franklin: --organizations? Boy Scouts? Barnett: Yeah. We had—one that sticks in my mind the most was we had one of our young scouts drowned at the Uptown. That’s the one I mentioned. He went on an inner tube, fell in the water and drowned. That was in ’48. And actually, the water where the hospital was, the irrigation ditch you got there, that was 15-foot deep at that time. Franklin: Wow. Barnett: That backed up so much, they—that’s when they built what they called the America Mile, the dike. They called all the earthmovers from Hanford out to Richland to build that dike. Because when they started, the water was lapping over the edge to go into the houses. And they poured that thing in about 24 hours. Franklin: Wow, that’s amazing. Barnett: Now, the George Washington Way was closed to all civilian traffic, and these great big earthmovers were just going down the road, 30, 40 miles an hour. Franklin: Wow. What other kinds of activities did you do in Boy Scouts? Barnett: Oh, built models. Car models. You whittle them out, put the wheels on them, all that, have races with them. Went on trips. Just normal Boy Scout stuff. Got a little more sophisticated, but just the normal Boy Scout stuff then. Franklin: Right. And so after you went to Carmichael, did you then go to Richland High? Barnett: Col High. Franklin: Col High? Barnett: [LAUGHTER] It was Col High then. Franklin: Oh. Barnett: They changed the name because there was a Col High downstream on the Columbia that had had the name before Richland High was called Col High. So they changed it to Richland High instead of Col High. Franklin: Oh. But was the mascot always still the— Barnett: All the bomber. Franklin: --bombers? Okay. So the Col High Bombers? Barnett: Yup. Franklin: Okay. And when did you graduate high school? Barnett: 1957. Franklin: And then what did you do? Barnett: I went in the Air Force. I think about two months after I got out and I went in the Air Force. I already spent 27 months in the National Guards. I got in the National Guards when I was 16, and when I went to sign up for the Air Force, the squadron commander of the National Guards was—he got shook up because he enlisted me when I was 16. [LAUGHTER] So they changed the date on my discharge papers from the National Guards. So according to my discharge papers from the National Guards, I’m 78 right now. Franklin: Oh. Barnett: Those days, they did things like that, nobody thought anything about it. Franklin: Wow, yeah. Barnett: Because if you were warm they took you into the military then. Franklin: Right. [LAUGHTER] And what did you—describe your time in the Air Force. Barnett: Well, of course there was basic training. The first place I went was Westover, Massachusetts—that’s Springfield, Massachusetts. And that was a total culture shock for me, because I grew up in a comparatively small city. And Springfield then had over 100,000 people in it. Franklin: Right, and I guess, too, at this point you would have completely grown up when Richland was a government— Barnett: Yup. Franklin: --still was all government space. Barnett: Yup, they sold it while I was in the Air Force. Franklin: Can—actually I guess maybe we can back up a little bit. What strikes you, maybe looking back on that, or— Barnett: I watched them build the Alphabet Houses. And there wasn’t one or two people on the houses; there was five or six building these houses. And they seemed to go up overnight. One of the things that I don’t know is fact or not, but knowing the government it probably was—is they were supposed to build half basements for a coal fire furnace, a coal bin, and two tubs, and place for a washing machine. The contractors screwed up on some of them and built a full basement. And the government found out about it and made them go back in and seal half the basement with dirt. [LAUGHTER] Typical government. Franklin: Were your—granted you were a kid at this point, but was your sense—were people happy— Barnett: Oh yeah! Franklin: living in a government-controlled and -owned town? Barnett: Nobody thought anything about it. There was very little crime. Because at that time, there was only about two, three ways to get out of Richland. So there was nobody causing any big deal. And if you got in a whole bunch of trouble—you didn’t live in Richland unless you worked at Hanford. And if your kids got into too much trouble, they told the parents, you calm them down or go find another job. So it was stopped. Franklin: Right. Did you—was Richland mostly a white community at that time? Right? Were there any other— Barnett: Yeah, there was—one, I think there was only one black community in Richland—Norris Brown. And I think they lived in Putnam. Franklin: Okay. Barnett: I remember we had a basketball game in Sunnyside. And Sunnyside wasn’t gonna let them play on their court. And we told them, fine, we’ll just get up and leave. So we all started to get up and leave and they finally broke it and gave in and let them play on the basketball court. Franklin: How did you know this family? Did you go to school together? Barnett: Yeah, I went to school with them. Franklin: Oh okay, and did you play basketball? Barnett: No! I’m not a sports—I had my first surgery on my knee when I was about 13, so— Franklin: Oh, wow. Barnett: I’ve never played any sports. My sporting then was hunting and fishing. Franklin: But you kind of heard about this story? Barnett: Oh, yeah. We all know them. Went to basketball games. Then there was sock hops and at noon they taught dancing in the lunchrooms for kids that wanted to learn how to dance. Franklin: So do you know what the patriarch of that family would have done at Hanford to be able to earn a place at Hanford? Because mostly from what I’ve heard, mostly African Americans had to live in Pasco. Barnett: Yeah, because they wouldn’t let them live in Richland—I mean Kennewick. Franklin: Yeah, in Kennewick. So how did—do you know any particulars as to how that family was able to live in Richland? Barnett: I think it’s just that the government—that they had to be equal on them, and they just hired them and they went to work out there. I don’t know any particulars on it, but that’s basic what it was. Franklin: Oh, okay. Barnett: They were in a government town, and there was no way that anybody could refuse—and there was nobody that complained about it. Franklin: Right. Barnett: Again, the government controlled it. They said, if you don’t like it, goodbye. Franklin: Right. And they would—they called the government for pretty much anything you needed on the house, right? For coal? Barnett: Right. Lightbulbs, chains, coal. But coal was delivered once a—I don’t know whether it was once a month or once a week. But coal was automatically delivered. And like I say, if there was anything major done, you called the housing department. They came in and fixed it. Franklin: I think sometimes for outsiders looking in, it’s kind of striking to hear about the government completely owning this town and controlling the lives of the people and having that much control on people’s freedoms and responsibility. But from the people I’ve talked to who grow up in Richland, they have very fond memories of it. Barnett: Yeah, there was no restrictions on the normal freedoms. There was restriction on if your kids got into trouble, because, like I said, the patrol would go up to the person that had the kids that were causing the problem and said you either straighten your kids out or you go and find another job. Which, to me, made common sense. And so it was actually pretty decent. Franklin: Did you ever get any sense from your parents that they felt, maybe, restricted, not being able to own their own home or do any of their own repairs, or did they just— Barnett: No, not then. I think—that was just after the Depression—I think they were just happy to be able to get a home. Franklin: Right. Interesting. Because, you know, for some people looking outside, you could look at that level of government control—because we have these big debates about the role of the government in society today, and it’s kind of interesting to hear about it. Barnett: Well, there was no control where the government come in and said, you do this and you do that and you do this. As long as you didn’t get into trouble and you did your job, and were a normal person, there was nobody ever complained about it. I remember I was back behind where the Racquet Club is. I was hunting ground squirrels with a .22 one day. And at that time, nobody had any problems with it. And one of the Richland patrol people came and picked me up and brought me back to the patrol station. And he called my dad. My dad come in and he says, what’s wrong? He says, we caught your boy shooting .22s at such-and-such area. He said, well, is he aiming at the road? Said, no. Said, did he shoot it at anybody? Said, no. Then what the hell are you bothering me about? I mean, that’s just how it was in those times. It wasn’t any of this, oh my god, he’s got a gun. It just was normal. Because I had my first rifle when I was about—I must have been about eight years old. And we used to go out and go rabbit hunting. Franklin: Did you ever spend much time in Kennewick or Pasco—in either of those--? Barnett: Not really. My wife was born in Pasco. Franklin: Okay. Barnett: I never spent much time in it because I had no reason to. I mean, it wasn’t the case of I was afraid to or wary about it—just I had no reason to. All, everything I needed was in Richland or around the Richland area. Franklin: Why did you first have to get surgery on your knee at 13? Barnett: Well, my knee locked. I didn’t find out until about 25 years later that the doctor had actually not fixed it. Because what they found out was there was a meniscus cartilage—you know in your knee? And mine was oblong and it had broke in half. And it had slipped between the joint and it had locked my knee so I couldn’t straighten it out. So I’d have to pick it up, lay it across the other leg, and pull it and pop it back out. But that was the first—I was accident prone. I had a radical mastoid when I was about 15. By the time I got out of high school, I probably had 100 stitches in me. I mean, if it happened, I did it and got it happened to me. I was playing baseball, jumped over a fence, and landed on a guard rake with the thongs up—four thongs in one of my foot. Franklin: Ouch. Barnett: Weird things like that are always happening to me. One time, when I was in school, I reached up to open a door and a kid slammed it and put my hand through the window, sliced across this way. And I looked at it, bleeding, and I closed it up and went to the nurse’s office. The nurse got all panicky. She called my mom, and I could hear my mom say over the phone real loud, again?! And the nurse must’ve thought she was the hard-heartest old lady there ever was, but my mother was just used to it. Franklin: Yeah, right. Barnett: And I didn’t do things out of the way to have it happen, just—if it’s gonna be an odd thing, it happened. Franklin: Right. Barnett: So I kind of, like I say, with all this mess I got with my knee now, I call it Young Stupid Male Syndrome, a lot of it. I don’t—I get frustrated with it, because I love to garden and I can’t garden anymore. But I don’t get worried or depressed about it, because it’s there and nothing I can do about it, so just live with it. Franklin: Right. So jump back ahead now. So you said you moved to Springfield in the Air Force for basic training, and that was— Barnett: No, I was—San Antonio for basic training, and then to Springfield. Franklin: And that was a big culture shock. Barnett: Oh, yeah. I mean, I drove a vehicle and drove into town to haul officers into town. And here is a town with 100,000 people and I’d never been in anything bigger than Richland, Washington. So you can imagine the shock it was, being in that kind of traffic. Franklin: Right. And then where did you go after that? Barnett: Well, I was there for about a year-and-a-half, two years. Then I went to Thule, Greenland. Franklin: Interesting. Barnett: Top of the world. Franklin: Yeah. And what were you—was that for the—weren’t there bombers stationed— Barnett: No, they had the fueling planes there. Yes, they had SAC planes all over the world at that time. But at Thule they had the KC-135s and the KC-97s that were fueling planes. Franklin: Right. Barnett: So we were there to support them. Franklin: And those were there to refuel the— Barnett: The B-52s. Franklin: --the B-52s that were carrying weapons in case of-- Barnett: Yup, because there was one from every base in the world in the air 24 hours a day. Franklin: Right. And can you talk—what was that like, to be in—and was the base separated from any other communities in Greenland, or did you-- Barnett: It was a base of its own. There were no other communities besides Thule, that’s it. Franklin: And how long were you there? Barnett: Year. Franklin: And what was that like? Barnett: Well, it’s an interesting place to visit, but you don’t want to live there permanently. [LAUGHTER] Let’s put it that way. They have permafrost which is—oh, I guess about two foot down. So in the spring there are all these little beautiful tundra flowers—yellows and whites and all that. And then when they’re gone it’s just green grass and that’s it. And when they went to put a pole in the ground, they put a can—a barrel of oil in the ground, and light the oil, and then dig around that barrel. Because that’s the only way to get down past the permafrost. Because permafrost is almost like concrete. Franklin: Yes, yeah. I’m from Alaska originally, and so I’m very familiar with permafrost. So after Greenland, where did you go? Barnett: Went to Mountain Home Air Force Base. Franklin: And where is that? Barnett: Idaho, Washington. Franklin: Oh, okay. So kind of close to-- Barnett: Yeah, out in Mountain Home. They had B-47s then at Mountain Home. Franklin: Okay. Barnett: I figured out that they actually phased out B-47s because they were built before the B-52s and they figured the B-47s weren't worth keeping around. Franklin: And what did you do in the Air Force? Barnett: I drove. I drove every kind of vehicle you can think of. Franklin: Oh, really? Barnett: Yeah. When I moved to Fairchild from Mountain Home, I was trained to tow B-52s in the back, in the hangars. Franklin: Oh, okay. Barnett: With a five-ton Yuke. Four-wheel drive, five ton, and you had wing walkers on the outside that would guide you, and you would back this thing up, this big B-52 into a hangar. Franklin: Wow. Barnett: They would pull it down to a fueling station or whatever. Franklin: Cool. And then when did you come back to Richland? Barnett: 1965. I got out to Richland and we moved to--I can't remember the address, but it was on Marshall. We moved to a house on Marshall. Franklin: Was it an Alphabet House, or was it a-- Barnett: Yeah, it was an Alphabet House. I remember it most because the neighbors had a monkey. And the monkey kept stealing my daughter's candy from her. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: So you said--wait, so by this point you had a family? Barnett: Yeah, I had--I adopted my oldest boy and I had two children. Franklin: Oh, okay. Barnett: They were all born at Fairchild. Franklin: Okay. And a wife, I presume? Barnett: Yeah. Franklin: And what did your wife do in Richland? Barnett: She was just a mother. But we divorced in about '70. And then I remarried. Franklin: Okay. And what did you do when you came back to Richland? Barnett: Anything I could. I worked at O'Malley's Drug Store for a while. I worked at his house--O'Malley's house, leveled his backyard. I worked at Walter's Grape Juice, I worked at Bell Furniture, I worked at—at that time, it was originally called the Mart, at that big building right next to the Federal Building. At one time, that was a big--what would you call it? They had a cafeteria and a grocery store and all the other—kind of like Walmart. Franklin: Right. Barnett: It was called the Mart at that time. And I worked there in the clippers that they washed the dishes with. And then I went to work for the bowling alley, Atomic Lanes, which was right there where the Jacks and Sons Tavern is. That was a community center and a bowling alley there. And I worked there for about a month, and then they went automatic. So, about that time, I was just about ready to get out—finish high school. And I don't think I had any other job after that, and I went in the Air Force. Franklin: Oh, so--I'm sorry. When you came back to Richland, what did you do? So in 1965. Barnett: Oh, I did everything then. You name it, I took a job. Before—I'm sorry, I got it backwards. Before I went in the Air Force, there wasn't many jobs for people in the—who were kids in Richland. And I worked the bowling alley and I worked down at a dry cleaning outfit. But when I come back to Richland, that's when I had all these other jobs. I worked all these other jobs to keep supplied for the family. Franklin: How had Richland changed in the eight years since you had been gone? Barnett: Well, the Uptown district had--the Newberry's had left. And there was a Safeway store right next to the theater. Right now I think it's a—I don't know, some kind of a multi shop deal. And both of the stores that were there originally are gone. They're now all antique stores. Franklin: Right. Barnett: So it was—when it was built, it was the first big complex for going shopping in Tri-Cities. Franklin: Right. Barnett: And after they built that, they built Highlands. And that was another big complex for shopping. So I worked everything I could, and 19--oh, what was it? [SIGH] About '67 or '68, I went to work at Hanford. I finally got on with them. Because I'd been applying at Hanford for three years. And I finally got to work with them. I won't mention how I got to work for them, because to me, it's kind of a ridiculous deal, and I don't know whether it was prejudice or not. Well, I'll go ahead. Franklin: I was gonna say, now you've got my interest. Barnett: I was--how I'd shop for a job, I'd go out and fill out an employment application, and I'd just distribute--go out all over town and fill out employment applications. And every week, I'd go back and check them. Well, one time, I was filling out an appointment application, and one of the guys I knew, I met him, and he said, hey, there's a new employment office over there at the new Whitaker School. And you might check it out. So I went over there and checked it out and signed up. And three days later, Hanford called me for a job. And I found out that that originally was a minority employment office. Franklin: Oh. Barnett: So I've always had the feeling that somebody didn't look at the records right. They didn't see the C. [LAUGHTER] Because I didn't get hired until I went to there and did an application. Because the government was required to hire a certain number of minority-- Franklin: Right. Well, but you did get hired. Barnett: Yeah. Franklin: So what did you do at Hanford? Barnett: Well, I can say as little as possible, like everybody else. [LAUGHTER] That's a common joke. Of course, it took me about--I couldn't understand it. It took me about three months to get a security clearance. When I was in SAC, I had a Secret clearance. Both my folks worked at Hanford, they had Secret clearance. But it still took me about three months to get a security clearance. And all the time, since I've been on the Air Force, I've lived in Richland, I never could understand the government—why they wasted so much money on a security clearance for me. But when I got out there, I started as a process operator. And started at B Plant. And there was no training at that time. I mean, when you went into a radiation zone, one of the guys that was experienced took you with him. And you dressed like he did, hoping he knew what he was doing, because that's how you dressed. And that's how you learned to dress right. So I started out going into the canyon--I don't know if you knew what the canyons were—okay? We went into the canyons and I helped mixed chemicals in the chemical gallery. And that's where I think I really screwed up my knees, because I can remember—remember, I call it Young Stupid Male Syndrome--I remember throwing a hundred-pound sack of chemicals on my shoulder and going up three flights of stairs with them, rather than wait for the elevator. Young and dumb, indestructible. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Actually, maybe for those who might be watching this who might not be as familiar with some of this stuff as I am, can you describe the canyon? Barnett: Well, the canyon was—well, like I say, the building was about 150-foot wide and about 800-foot long. And it was four stories deep and there was just one--the reason they call it canyon was because it was a gigantic canyon. It went the full length of the building, and they had huge cranes that moved different stuff so they could process the atomic waste. Because in B Plant, they process the nuclear waste. They ship it down to B Plant and we go through chemical stuff to separate the strontium and cesium from it. And that would be sent to the encapsulation plant. That was built about—oh, six years after I went to work at B Plant. They closed up after I'd been there for ten years, and I went to work for Encapsulation Building. But the canyon is an immensely big, empty storage building, really what it is. And I don't know how—or what they're gonna do with them now, because there is some radiation there that you wouldn't believe how hot it was. We took samples of radiation behind lead shields, and then they were so hot that they ended up having the crane pick up the samples and dispose of them, because we couldn't move them. Franklin: Wow. Did you—and so when you came back, your father was no longer working at Hanford, right? Barnett: Yeah, he was still working at Hanford. Franklin: Oh, was he still working—so you guys worked at Hanford at the same time. Barnett: Yeah. Franklin: Oh, wow, that's really interesting. So can you tell me a little bit more about what a—describe in a little more detail the job of a process operator? Barnett: Well, real basically, we were what you might call nuclear janitors. Franklin: Okay. Barnett: We clean up the messes that pipe fitters or millwrights or electricians made. We process all the chemical--mixed all the chemicals and processed—did all the processing of separating the strontium and cesium from the nuclear waste and ship them to tank farms. And that was basically what our main job was. We had a few major accidents. Now it'd be all over the world, about how bad it was and all that. But we just went about our business cleaning it up and went on our job. None of us got an overdose of radiation. We relied on our radiation monitors and they were good radiation monitors. If we were getting too much, they yanked us out of there real quick. So we didn't even think about it. It wasn't the case of being scared of it or anything else. It's like your hazardous wastes that they got, like coming from the hospital, where they work in an x-ray lab, they throw all the gloves and stuff and that. That's called mixed hazardous waste. Well, you could take a bath in that and not get any radiation on you. But according to what the public knew, those things are really highly radioactive boxes. And I think the biggest problem the government had is they didn't tell the people enough about what was really going on after the war was over. Franklin: Oh. Really? Barnett: Yeah, because there would have been less worry about things that were going on then, if they would have known. Because if you don't know anything about radiation, and you hear somebody mentions something is irradiated, you get all panicky about it. The expression for radiation out there was, you get a crap up. You get a crap up, you scrub it off and go about your business. Now, they panic and take you to town and do all that sort of stuff. There, we just scrubbed it off and went about our business. Franklin: Right. Barnett: And I never worried about it. Franklin: Okay. So you said you were a process separator at B Plant. And then you went to the Canyon, and what did you do-- Barnett: Well, I didn't go to the Canyon, I went to 225-B, the Encapsulation Building. Franklin; 225-B, the Encapsulation Building. Barnett: That's where they encapsulated the strontium and cesium. Franklin: Okay. Barnett: We all did a multitude of jobs. We worked on the cells, processing the strontium and cesium. And we worked behind the cells in mixing chemicals and we worked from when they loaded the chemicals for shipment for a long period of time when they were shipping cesium to the radiation plant for irradiating medical waste. And that ended when the guy was what they called recycling the cesium capsules too much. They get real hot. I mean, temperature-wise. And he was setting it in the water for a period of time and taking it out of water and cooling them off and stashing them back in the water. Well, one of them leaked. Franklin: Ooh. Barnett: And so they ended up, the whole place had to have all those capsules moved back. So that was a big fiasco. And again, it wasn't our fault. It was the guy doing the work was stupid enough to not check and see what he was doing. Franklin: Right. Barnett: And that's usually what happens with most—any of the radiation. And if you work with radiation, it's not the guy doing the work, it's somebody that's stupid and doesn't check what he's doing, doesn't follow regulations that causes the problem. Franklin: So did you have any other jobs at Hanford? Or what-- Barnett: I don't know, you ever heard of McCluskey? Franklin: Yeah. Barnett: Well, I was over there when we cleaned—for five weeks cleaning up that building. Franklin: Really? Barnett: Yeah. Franklin: Were you there at the time of the accident-- Barnett: No, no. Franklin: --or part of the cleanup for that? Barnett: Afterwards. They were trying to clean up the rooms so they could go in there and get things squared away. And we spent five weeks there. And to tell you how screwball the government can be, the last week-and-a-half we were there, we finally told our supervisor, look, all of worked on this radiation for 15, 20 years. We know how to clean it up. Quit telling us what to do. Let us go in there and clean it up and we'll get it cleaned up for you in no time at all. So they took a chance. And what they did is we ragged all along the bottom of the building, and we took water fire extinguishers. Because it's americium, and americium is a powder substance, it floats real easy. But it's water soluble--it'll run down with water. So we went in there and sprayed the walls with it real heavy. Then wiped everything down, moved everything that was movable, bagged it up in plastic bags and moved it out. And inside of a week, we had it down to mask only. Before then, we were wearing three pairs of plastic and cooling air and fresh air. Franklin: Wow. Barnett: And we cleaned it up in a week-and-a-half because they didn't want the people that knew what they were doing doing it. And that's the biggest problem with the government: they've always got the bureaucracy up here that knows what's going on, but they never ask the poor guy that’s doing all the work what's going on. I think you've seen that numerous times. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: I think so. [LAUGHTER] Wow, that's really fascinating. So how long total did you work at Hanford? Barnett: 30 years. Franklin: 30 years. Barnett: I had to take a medical retirement in '98. Franklin: '98. So then you were there, then, kind of from the shift from production to cleanup. Right? The production and shutdown. Barnett: No, when I left they were just getting ready to start cleaning things up. Franklin: Okay, so can you maybe talk about the shift from production to shutdown? How did that affect your job? Barnett: Well, I really didn't get in on any of the cleanup, because I left before they did. But I talked to a number of the guys out there that I worked with that were in the cleanup. The biggest problem they had is they put such a limit on chemicals they could use to do cleanup that they had to use things that they claim were not environmentally safe. They had to void all that--like Tide. They wouldn't even let us use Tide to wash the walls down. Now, you use Tide in washing machines. [LAUGHTER] Come on, give me a break. That's a hazardous chemical? And I guess it took them quite a while to get the thing cleaned up. Because, like I say, they didn't start cleaning it up until after I left. Franklin: Right. So what did you do in the shutdown era? Like after '87, from '87 to '98? What was your job primarily? Barnett: They didn't shut down--they shut B Plant down, but they didn't shut 2-and-a-quarter down. 2-and-a-quarter was still processing strontium and cesium. Franklin: Oh, okay, so then you kept in the waste encapsulation. Barnett: Yeah. Franklin: Can you describe a little bit more the process of waste encapsulation? Barnett: Well, strontium is not soluble--not water soluble. And strontium is. And what they had--they had a special process--I don't know exactly the process. I just know what we did. You would take a mixed chemicals with the cesium and you would dissolve it and then you would heat it up to--I think--800 degrees into a liquid. And then you had a machine we called a tilt-pour which would pour seven capsules at a time full of cesium. And then you'd take these capsules and you'd put a sensoring disc in them to make them airtight. And then you'd weld a cap onto that. That'd be welded by a machine. And most then it was computerized. Then that was decontaminated until it was clean. And then it was put into another capsule, and that capsule was also—put a lid on it, but it was soldered on—welded on. And that was moved into the pool cells. Pool cells are 13-foot deep. What you had is a special hole built into the wall with water that you would shove that capsule through. And then the guy on the other side in the pool cell would grab the capsule and pull it out. And he would go to the pool cell that he's designated to go to, and he would shove it through a hole in the wall. And somebody on the other side would grab it and pull it and then you'd put it into its spot. So it was quite a process. And the fear was--you couldn't get that capsule within five feet of the top. Because if you did, you'd get a high radiation alarm. They’d read millions of rads on those capsules. They were hot, no two ways about it. And one thing I've always wondered is why does cesium glow blue when you turn the lights out? Franklin: Wow. Barnett: You turn the lights out in the pool cell, and all these cesium capsules will glow blue. And I've never--I've had somebody say it's something about the speed of light and all that. But I'd like to know the real reason it does that. Franklin: That sounds kind of strangely beautiful. Barnett: It was. It's a blue glow all along the bottom. The strontium doesn't. Strontium is not water soluble and it doesn't glow at all. In fact, I got some strontium in me one time when I had a tape when one of the manipulators--I don't know if I didn't mention--all the work was done from the outside with the manipulators. You know what manipulators are. Franklin: Right, yeah. Barnett: Okay, and all the capsulation, all of the work was done with manipulators from the outside. And it was amazing what some of those guys could do. They could take a little bottle about so big with a little bitty top and they could pick up that bottle, hold it here, and took up the other--the cap with the lid and put it on it. Franklin: Wow. Barnett: I was never that good with it, but there some guys out there who got real expertise with that. It just takes a lot of work to learn to use those things. Franklin: I bet. Barnett: That's one reason my hand's tore up--my hand just didn't take it so much. Franklin: And you said you got strontium on your hand? Barnett: Yeah, I got--I couldn't handle manipulators good because my hand was falling apart on me. So I took all the decontamination of the manipulator. Because that's--a manipulator has to be pulled after so many--I think it's so many weeks, the Mylar coating on it starts deteriorating. So it has to be pulled, decontaminated, and new Mylar sheath put on it. And I was in there decontaminating one of the manipulators, and one of the—well, they were trying new bands that controlled the grips. And one of them broke and sliced my hand. And I got some strontium in my finger. It was about 700 counts. I wasn't too worried about it. But they took me to town and went on all government roads, documented and everything and brought me back. I couldn't work with radiation for about three months until that thing finally deteriorated--worked out of the body. Franklin: Wow. Barnett: But I didn't worry about it. It wasn't enough to do any harm. Franklin: Wow, that's really-- Barnett: See, that's the difference between working with the stuff and knowing what it does, and not working with the stuff. Franklin: Right. Right, I've heard a lot of similar things about-- Barnett: It's like chemicals. I'd rather work at a radiation plant than at a chemical plant. Because if you have good radiation monitors, you're not gonna get an overdose of radiation. But with a chemical plant, look what they have out there now. A guy gets a whiff of chemicals, they all go panic about it. Franklin: Yeah, I see where you're--I see your point. So you said--earlier when you said you would put the cesium in the pools—cesium cans, you couldn't get them too close to something, because they'd get too hot. Sorry--can you-- Barnett: No, it wasn't too close--they're in--oh, it probably was a--well, what would you call it? It was like a cabinet with holes in it. You would drop these in there. And they're spaced out. You couldn't pull them too high. Franklin: Oh, okay. Barnett: If you pulled them sometimes when you're getting ready to transfer them to the pool cell, they would hydroplane and come up. And if you pulled them too fast, they would come up and you'd get a high radiation alarm. You’d just drop it back down and it'd go off. Franklin: Oh, okay. Barnett: That's what it was. Franklin: I got--okay. I gotcha. So-- Barnett: It only takes one time, you remember not to do that anymore. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: [LAUGHTER] I bet. So even though your area—your work didn't change much when most of the plans ordered to shut down. You still probably worked with a lot of people whose jobs might have changed-- Barnett: Yeah. Franklin: --during shutdown. Can you talk about that transition between process--? Barnett: Well, I talked with some of the guys and they were talking about how much work it took to get things cleaned up. Like the area behind the pool cells, that had to be completely decontaminated. And we finally got it down to where it was just one pair and no masks. That took a lot of work. Decontaminating just takes a lot of hand-scrubbing. I mean, it's not a case of, you can put something there and pick it up and get rid of it. You got a scrub a lot of places until it's gone. It takes a lot of work. And I talked to one fella, and he said that they had all the cells that were down to clean—and what they consider clean is no radiation in them. And it is hard for me to believe, because some of those cells were really hot. But I never got a chance on the cleanup. Franklin: How was--so when Hanford was shifting over, how was this change explained by management, or some of the--how was it conveyed, or how did the community take it? Barnett: Management never explained anything to anybody. [LAUGHTER] I don't remember hearing the community complaining about anything, because most of the guys worked out there, and they knew what was going on. So there was no big panic about it. It wasn't the case where some guys didn't work here, they were told this was going on and got all excited because they didn’t know what was going on. Most people knew what was going on. So there was no big panic that I remember. Franklin: Okay. Barnett: We didn't panic with radiation, because we had good radiation monitors. Franklin: Right. Barnett: And that makes a big difference when you're working around radiation. Franklin: So being in waste encapsulation, how did other events--other nuclear accidents around the country or around the world, like Three Mile Island or Chernobyl, kind of affect how your job or how-- Barnett: It made us see how ridiculous--because Three Mile Island actually worked. It was [UNKNOWN] what it was built for. And the moderation they got--radiation they got was not as much as you get flying from here to Denver City. Because you get more radiation from the sun than you do from—what the people at Three Mile Island got. But they blew it up so big, because so many years the government kept radiation such a secret. And that's the reason there's so much panic whenever they say radiation. Of course, there's been some real bad accidents. That one in Japan—that was a horrible thing. But as far as Hanford goes, most of the people that worked at Hanford don't—I guess they're not working around radiation anymore; it's all chemicals. Because they're getting—they get the chemicals and to me, that's the management's problem. Because they're doing something wrong in taking care of the people. The people are doing what they're told to do. If management is telling them, hey, you got to wear this, and they're not wearing it, then that's their problem—that’s the worker's problem. But when the management doesn't do anything about it, that's their problem—that’s management's problem. And I think from what I've heard and read, most of this is a managerial problem. It's not a case that the worker is going out of his way to ignore any safety concerns. Franklin: Right. What about the accident in Chernobyl? How did that--did that affect your job, or-- Barnett: Yeah, it affected it because they shut down N Reactor. And N Reactor, up until then, was as safe as any reactor in the country. It had so many safety pieces on it that you could darn near slam a door and make it shut down. But they shut it down because it was something like Chernobyl. And that's where the big effect was. Franklin: How did--oh, how did security policies change over time? Did they change with the different contractors or in response to different events? Barnett: No, the security’s main thing was basically the same. You had the security guards at like 200 East—well, they left the security guards that you couldn’t get out to Hanford without a security clearance. But that quit because they had the buses, and that stopped. And they had the security guards checking the buses and stuff as you went through. And then typical government, they started screaming about, oh, we're burning too much gas. We can't afford gas! So we'll shut the buses down. [LAUGHTER] So everybody had to drive out. But the guards at the gate checked your badges, checked your cars. If there was anything in it--you couldn’t take cameras or anything like that out there. If the guard knew you, he checked you out whether he knew you or not, because he had to make sure your wife didn't leave a camera sitting in your backseat you didn't know about. Franklin: Right. Barnett: Which happened on occasion. Franklin: Right, I bet. How did your job change with the different contractors coming in? Did it change much, or did you-- Barnett: Well, every contractor that came in, the engineers thought they were gonna remake the world. They would come up with some plan that they saw on a schematic and say, this is the way we want to do it. And we'd tell them point blank, it won't work. We've tried it that way. And they say, oh yes, it will! So we'd spend $50,000 in parts and stuff to put this together, and then it didn't work. And then they went around, well, why didn't it work? Well. The only one I ever saw that was a decent engineer is when he'd draw up a plan to do something, he would go to the millwrights, he would go to the operators, he'd go to the instrument techs and ask them to look at it and see if there's anything that needs done on it. And he had never had any problems. But these that come straight out of school and thought they could reinvent the world were a pain in the butt to us because they cost money and time. Franklin: Do you remember who that good engineer was? Barnett: He left. I don't remember who he was. But he left and went to work for a big company some place. Franklin: Oh, okay. Do you remember President Nixon's visit in--I think it was 1970 or 1971? Barnett: I might have. I didn't see him. I don't worry about politics. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Barnett: He didn't do our place any good or any bad. Just a big political statement. Franklin: How did the Tri-Cities change from when you came back in 1968 until today? What kind of strikes you as major changes? Barnett: Well, there seem to be more, you might say, petty crimes. There wasn't as much as there was before--there was more than there was before, I should say. But the city maintained its equilibrium about the same, because the people have been here for 20 years, and then they sold the city to the town. There was no big change in the government. The police stayed the same. The biggest change was you had to call a painter if you wanted your house painted. And they sold the houses to the people, and that was the biggest change. Franklin: How about, though, since—from when you came back in 1968 until today? Has there been any--has the community changed at all? Barnett: Well, a lot of the businesses have left Richland. They moved out Columbia Center area, or up there in that area. We don't have--you got to go to Columbia Center to find a business. There's a few still there. There's Home Depot and stuff like that down there, Big Lots. But there's not as many as there used to be. And mostly antique shops or stereo shops. Franklin: Right. Barnett: But there's always the Spudnut. It's always been there. Franklin: There is always the Spudnuts, yeah. They're good too. Is there anything else that I haven't asked you about that you'd like to talk about? Barnett: Well, us kids had different ways of playing that nowadays they would just panic about it. We used to have BB gun fights. We’d put on leather jackets and extra pair of Levi's and a hat and go into these orchards like where Densow's was and we'd have BB gun fights. And you haven't really lived until you've had your butt shot by a BB. [LAUGHTER] But nowadays there'd be some big panic about it that you're gonna shoot an eye out. Well, nobody ever shot an eye out because we made sure that we didn't shoot towards the head. [LAUGHTER] When they were building the houses, that's what was amazing, how fast they put these houses up. It wasn't a week or so to get a house started--it was almost a week and they had the thing almost done. And we used to go to different houses and have clod fights. Things like that that you don't dare do nowadays. Franklin: When you had what kind of fights? Barnett: Clod fights. Clodded earth. We'd get behind stuff and throw clods at each other. And the snow then was two, three foot deep. Because I remember building snow forts in my yard three foot high and never have to go to the yard to get snow. So there has been a big change in the weather. And the shelterbelt, that made a big difference, because I remember when we had sandstorms--not dust storms, sandstorms. And my dad would pull his car up in front of the house to keep the sand from blasting the side of the car off--the paint. So there's been big changes. The shelterbelt was one thing the government put in that actually worked. It’s kind of surprising. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: That's great. Is there anything else? Anything else you'd like to talk about? Barnett: Well, not really. Just that the area behind--you know, in West Richland at that time used to be Heminger City and Enterprise. They were two cities then. Franklin: Okay, tell me, were those cities that predated the Hanford Project? Barnett: Yeah. Franklin: Okay, and how big were there? Barnett: Oh, they were just little communities. It was just one run into the other. There was one called Enterprise, one was called--what did I just say? Franklin: Something city. Barnett: Heminger City. Franklin: Heminger City. Barnett: One of the elections went out for voting, they had one of the places that you went to was called Enterprise. Franklin: And how long did those communities last after Hanford came? Barnett: Not very long. I can remember Dad going out to the first town—first little town was Heminger City. And that was right where Cline's computer shop is, it was automobile shop there. And those were all owned by one group--one person. I think it was--Herricks was the name. And she had a little taco stand in one of the places. And OK Tire Shop had part of the one building that they sold tires and did car repair out of. So it was a slow change in West Richland. We had a feed store for a while. But Hanford went on strike and our feed store went down the tubes. They used to have what they called parking lot critter sells. People would bring all their animals, little animals that they wanted to sell in cages. And we would sell them for them and get 10% of the interest. It was a pretty good deal, because a lot of people had pet rabbits and stuff like that and they wanted to get rid of them. Usually had them at the un-boat races. You heard of the un-boat races? Franklin: Why don't you tell me? Barnett: The un-boat races? You ever heard of them? Franklin: Why don't you tell me? Barnett: Well, the un-boat race was you went up to the Horn Rapids Dam, and you put something in. It could not be a boat. It could be a bath tub, it could be inner tubes--it could be anything that you could see above that would float and it could not be called--it was called un-boat race. And there was a prize that they got down towards the bridge that crosses the Yakima there on George Washington Way. Got down about that far, there was a prize who got there first. But they ended up cutting that out because people left too much stuff—garbage alongside the road. They wouldn’t pick it up and take it with them when they were done with it. But that was a lot of fun. We used to stand up on the ridge. Always started about May. And we'd stand there and watch people come down the river on these un-boats. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: That sounds really fun. Anyone else have anything? Okay, well, Dan, thank you so much for talking to us today. I learned a lot of great stuff about Richland and waste encapsulation. I really appreciate it. Barnett: Okay. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:09:22 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 200 East Area B Plant N Reactor 225-B Encapsulation Building Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1968-today Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1968-1998 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Newberry O'Malley Walter Jacks Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Daniel Barnett Description An account of the resource An interview with Daniel Barnett conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 07-14-2016 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2017-08-11: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. 1955 200 East B Plant Battelle Cold War Dam Hanford Houses K-Basin Kennewick Market N Reactor Park River School Sun swimming War https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F0f094d5a53d9f182e7f0e025e2f2b8be.jpg 8c6a9bb1b96c15e52e5e257665176a13 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F0f2c69c8057ad2de89bc821a77371c1e.mp4 a98291ac678ac0e576af292cdf1abeae Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Bauman Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Danny Henry Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 220 kbps Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Northwest Public Television | Henry_Danny </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: My name is Danny Henry. Spelling is D-A-N-N-Y. Middle initial is R for Ray, R-A-Y, Henry, H-E-N-R-Y. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: All right. Thank you. And my name's Robert Bauman, and we're conducting this interview on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities on July 2nd of 2014. So let's start maybe by talking about how and when your family first came to the Tri-Cities. When that was, and why they came. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Okay. Actually, my father first of all came to the Tri-Cities. And he came to the Tri-Cities, I believe it was somewhere around '48. It was in the mid or late 40s. And he actually came out from the South, from Arkansas--Atkins, Arkansas, Polk County. And he was married to my mom at that time, but she stayed back in the South, and he came out to work for the government during the war effort. And he worked out here for some period of time. I don't know how long, but he liked it out here. And so once his mission was done, he went back to the South. And then later years, came back out and found work with the railroad. And then eventually he started working construction. And he became a laborer, and worked construction. Then he came back out to the site, and worked at N Reactor for some period of time. And I can even remember back in the 60s when John Fitzgerald Kennedy came out here, the President, to give a speech about the N Reactor. I was a kid. I think I was probably about seven or eight years old, maybe 10, somewhere around there. And then he decided to stay out here. When he came back out to the Northwest, back out to Washington, decided to stay out here and got work, and then sent for my mom, and she came out. And so they made a life and stayed on. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: Hm. Do you know how he originally heard about Hanford? It's a long way from Arkansas. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: My understanding from my older brother, which is 20 years older than me, he said that he actually received direction from the government, or allowance from the government, and received gas credit, or chips, or whatever, in order to drive out and to show up at the Hanford site at some designated time. And so him and another one of his friends both drove out, and they went to work out here during in the 40s. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: So he was recruited in some way or something, right? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Yes. Yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: So then you were born in the Tri-Cities? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Yes, I was born in Pasco, Washington in 1953, May 7, 1953. And I graduated Pasco High School, went on to college, and graduated from Evergreen State College, and then returned back here to the Tri-Cities and found employment out at Hanford. First of all, it was with Rockwell, and with the fire department. I'll back up a little bit. During the summer of when I was in high school, two summers, I did work out for J. A. Jones at that time in the 300 Area, and I actually worked as a printer, or learned—as a summer job, and learned how to print on these old, offset printers. And did that for two summers. And so when—actually I had graduated from college and came back. While I was at college, I did receive an emergency medical technician certificate through the State of Washington, and so it was a good shoo-in to go to work for the fire department as a firefighter. So let's see. It was Chief Good at that time who hired me. And at that time there was only a few that had EMT certifications. And Chief Good had told me that there was no intention at that time to actually have the fire department respond for emergency care. They had always called the Richland fire department, or Kadlec, or some other emergency services. And so I didn't really see a whole bunch of future in staying there at the fire department. So I heard that they were hiring down at N Reactor for reactor operators, and the pay was a bit better. So I thought that would be a challenge. And so I applied. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: And so you got a job there, then? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Yeah. I started working at N Reactor, I believe it was late 1978, and went into the reactor operator program, and eventually—well, started in the fuels department, and then had the opportunity to get into the certification program for the control room. And decided I would take on the challenge. There was a lot talk back and forth with the other operators. Some was pro and some was con. No, it's not really better to work in the control room. It's better to work in fuels. But I seen a challenge of being able to actually operate a reactor. And I really wanted that certification. And so I did go in the certification program. And after, I think, two years, two and a half years—I think the class started out, I think it was like 24, 26. And the final certified reactor operators, I think there was six of us. I could probably name them. Yeah. And all the other operators dropped out, and they went back to fuels, or they got into the trades, or just left the company. But I stayed on and was certified. It was very, very challenging, very hard. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: Right. And so how long was that training program again? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: The training program, I think it was about a year and a half, two years. With all of the qualifications, you had to be trained on all the different systems. You had to get checked out by the senior operators, and they would ask you questions, and make sure you were proficient in every one of those before you got the sign-off. So you had to complete all of that, as well as take tests, periodic tests, on the systems. And when you had finished all your actual qualifications, then you were allowed to take the eight-hour exam. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: Oh, okay. Hm. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: And so once I had finished up mine, there was testing. And I took the eight-hour exam, and passed the eight-hour exam. I think I probably took about 10 hours to finish it, but that was fine. And passed the exam. And from there, you were then allowed to do a walk through, where a senior trainer would take you out into the facility, and basically ask you anything he wanted to, all the way from the front face, to the rear face, to the confinement valves, to the emergency cooling system, and anything in components or valves, and circuitry, and all of that. And I passed that, and did quite well. I spent a lot of time actually—when I was an operator, the duties primarily was laundry, because there was a lot of SWPs, or radioactive clothing that was used. So someone always had to maintain laundry. And then also some of the duties was housekeeping. Some of the duties was actually patrol, where actually you went through the reactor, and made sure all of the outside systems and everything was in correct alignment, and there wasn't any out-of-spec conditions. So I spent a lot of time out in the reactor. At the time when I was out, I took it upon myself to take prints with me, and actually verify and look at a lot the systems out there, so I knew them pretty well. So that was one of the things that really worked for me when I did my walk-through. I was really ready for that. And I think I scored highest in my walk-through of the three tests. The final test was the oral exam. And the oral exam consisted of a senior person from training, senior person from operations, senior person from nuclear safety. And they all sat on your board. And I think there was one other individual also, I think may have been quality assurance, maybe. And basically they sit in a room like this, and you sit in front of a table, and they ask you questions, and you answer the questions. And they had the choice of asking you whatever questions they chose to, as long as it related to reactor operations, up to and including the electrical distribution systems that powered or brought power to the reactor, as well as the power going out, steam systems, all of the different auxiliary systems part of the plant. But anyway, I passed that exam also, the oral board. And so then I was granted my certification. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: A pretty grueling process. [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: It was, very much. [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: And so how long were you an operator, then, how long did you work? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Actually, as a certified operator—I maintained my certification, I believe, for a year and a half, maybe two years. There was a requalification. I think it was about a year and a half. I did operate the reactor, the nuclear console, the AA console. That probably doesn't mean anything to you, but the water systems, or the actual nuclear panel, where you actually pulled and maintained power, and adjusted power, and also a lot of the air balance systems, and the secondary systems, where the steam was produced and sent over to Washington State Public Power. We sold steam. It was a dual purpose reactor. And worked on all of the panels. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: And so before you were an operator, you worked in fuels, you said. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: So what sort of work did that entail? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: The fuels operation--[COUGH] excuse me—was actually--the fuel that would come, that would be the spent fuel that was discharged out of the rear of the reactor would come out, go down, and go what was called a trampoline, and go into the water, and hit this metal mesh chain type of trampoline to slow it down. These fuel elements were, I think, as I remember, somewhere around 50-60 pounds. So coming out of the back of the reactor, they were there pretty heavy. And so then they would roll down into conveyor carts, and that's one of the duties as a fuel operator, doing charge discharge. You'd basically take the fuel after it went through the cart, move it out, index it, take it out, and then place it in various different storage compartments in the back face of the reactor, or actually in the basin, what was called the fuels basin. And then also--that was the primary job of a fuels operator, yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: And so how long total did you work at Hanford, then? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Total time at Hanford is 35 years. I've been out here 35 years. It's been a long haul. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: Yeah. And so you started in the late 60s? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: '78 or '79. I believe my actual start date was 8/1/1978. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: So you were there for a little while, and at some point the mission shifts to clean up. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Yeah, yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: How did that impact the sorts of things you were doing? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Well, one of the things about being--as an operator, is that you work shift work. And so I actually worked shift work, I think, for like three years, rotating shift, A, B, C, D; graveyard, swings, days. So I never got used to that. I had a family. I was just starting a family and stuff, and I wanted to be able to spend a lot more time with my kids and my wife on normal hours. So I looked for another job at N Reactor, and there was an opening for actually a process standard engineer/nuclear safety engineer. And so I applied for it. I got the job, and was responsible for maintaining standards, process standards, which is day-to-day operations. If there was any changes or deviations to the operations, there had to be approval. There was an approval process. And so I was kind of responsible for maintaining that, reviewing it, and then approving it through the control room, through my management, in order to make any changes to reactor operations. Pretty much that was that job. It was straight days. I liked that. Five days, I was off the weekends. It was great. And there was some other opportunities also during that time in that position. I wanted to mention, I had a very good mentor. His name was John Long, and he was the nuclear safety engineer, or nuclear safety manager, manager of nuclear safety at that time. And John was very instrumental in assisting and helping me, and I really do appreciate his efforts. He's deceased now. But anyway, John helped me quite a bit when I was in that position. There was other opportunities also. I moved from there, and became—actually went into the planning aspects of outages. And so the reactor would run for so long, sometimes there was a planned outage, sometimes an unplanned outage. Unplanned outages usually were because the reactor scram for some reason. Maintenance had to be done, something had to be fixed or repaired. So for the actual planned outages, I became a planner/scheduler, or took a position as a planner/scheduler, and actually planned to do various different maintenance. What that consisted of was drawing out a long-term plan, and when the reactor was down, to manage that plan, and for the systems to be fixed, repaired, coordinated for the least amount of time so the reactor could actually come back up and running. We were being paid. And it was one thing I wanted to mention about N Reactor. There was a lot, a lot of good spirit. The people who worked out there, they really knew that they were on a mission. This was during the Cold War, and we knew what we were doing, and it was just a lot of good spirit. You know, when you'd ride the bus out--by the way, I rode the bus back and forth. And when you'd be on the bus, and the reactor was down, and you'd get past the fire department, and you'd make that last left turn, people would just kind of wake up. And they'd be looking, and they were looking to see if that green light goes on. There was—on the board, there was a green or red light. And someone up front would say, yeah, we're up. And it was just a lot of that kind of spirit of wanting the reactor to run. I really, really liked that. So being a part of the--doing the planning and scheduling, or a position as planner/schedule was a real shoo-in to going to work as outage manager. I then became an outage manager, where actually I managed the outage center. And the outage center basically coordinated, on a daily basis, on a shift basis--there was six of us, and I guess you could say we were kind of elite, we were very picked to run that, because it was so critical to the mission—and your responsibilities was to make sure that things got done as scheduled, as planned, and that you had the craft resources to do them. You coordinated with the operations folks, the fuel folks, the engineering. That was your job, to coordinate all those efforts. A lot of the things that happened in the plant and the repairs actually required that you have engineers in place in case there was questions, technical questions, changes to paperwork that had to be authorized, and so on and so forth. So that was part of the job as outage--primary job as an outage manager is to make sure of that. And you reported directly to upper management, and sometimes DOE. So you were responsible on a daily basis to coordinate and have those meetings, and ensure that work got done and statused at the end of the day. So shortly after that, they announced that—or probably, I guess, maybe about six to eight months in that position--they announced that N Reactor--after Chernobyl--they announced the N Reactor would no longer be on the same mission, and it was going to shut down. So I moved from there to another job. I actually left N Reactor, and went to 200 Area, and worked as a nuclear safety engineer, over for—I'm trying to think right now. I can remember who I worked for. I worked for Arlen Shade. But actually, my responsibilities was over B Plant WESF. And at that time they had just started to bring back the capsules that was basically sent down to--I forget exactly--Decatur, I think. Yeah. And anyway, these capsules, there was some problems with them. But anyway, they were bring them back. And so I was right as part of that. I don't know what happened to that mission, but I served there as a nuclear safety engineer with oversight responsibilities over people at WESF for a period of time. And then after that, let's see. I almost have to look at my resume to think. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: It's really been--it's actually been that long. Of course you're going to be cutting and doing clips and stuff. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: Yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: So I can just-- Oh, by the way I have a--I actually pulled this out. This was actually my certification. Wally Ruff's name over to the right there kind of faded. It must have gotten wet. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: Oh, yeah, huh. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: That's the original certification. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: [INAUDIBLE] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: What's that? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: --the control room on the-- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Yeah. Yeah. So I didn't know exactly what you guys would want, but I just grabbed some stuff. This was my 30-year recognition with Fluor. I don't have a 35. I don't know. They didn't give out a 35-year recognition. I don't know why. Let's see. Where am I? Process standards, senior outage planner, outage manager of nuclear safety, principal engineer. Oh! Yeah. Then after that there was—actually, when I was--as the nuclear safety principal engineer oversight over B Plant WESF, there was a position that came available for a manager for OSHA compliance, OSHA safety and health program. We had previously been benefited, let me say, with headquarters coming out, and they were called the tagger team. And they basically came out to the site, and they went through the whole site, and they were doing assessments. They had a very, very large group, and they assessed the site, with the effort to give feedback to the improvements that needed to be done at Hanford. Well, part of the actions, or corrective actions, was to develop an OSHA type of assessment program that would look at occupational safety and health, industrial hygiene, and in some aspects, I think, fire protection. Anyway, there was a position open, and I did not have the background in occupational safety and health, but I talked to my manager, and talked to my manager, and finally I convinced him to put me in as a temporary position, just as an acting manager. And so he went ahead and authorized that. So I then moved from the outer areas down to 300 Area, and from there, he basically said, okay, Danny, you want this position. You think you can do it? He says, okay, here's a stack of resumes. You have two staff and that's it, and a student worker. Okay, so you need to first of all hire and find some people that are qualified to be inspectors in occupational safety and health, and hygiene. And then you need to have all this done, by the way, and a program developed in four months. And so that was quite a challenge. It was really a challenge. I did hire—went outside and hired some people, and they were good people. We were a very good team. I didn't know about occupational safety and health, but they taught me. I knew I could hire people that were smarter than me. And I actually hired--and maybe for reference, one of the people was Judy Larson I don't know if she still is living. But she was a certified industrial hygienist. She was working for PNNL, and she transferred over. I also hired a student that--well, no, he actually had graduated with a mechanical engineering degree, and he wanted to do fire protection. So I said if he came over I'd get him trained up. And so he came over. And I also hired another individual that was an industrial hygienist—or two other individuals, a Clinton Stewart, and the first occupational safety and health person I hired, his name was Steve Norling. And he would be a good person to interview in the future. I would recommend that you do that. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: How do you spell the last name? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Norling. N-O-R-L-I-N-G. Steve. He's a good guy. He still works PRC. I haven't seen him in a few years, but I think he's still out there. But anyway, we developed a program. We put the program together, hired a contractor to actually help us with the writing of the program, and we set it up. And we actually went out in the site, and first of all, we had to compile all of the buildings, because we were basically responsible for all of the Westinghouse people, and all of their facility. So we had to figure out all of the facilities in the whole site. And then we had to have some kind of system to figure which ones we would go look at first, based upon risk. And so we developed that program, and to make a long story short, the tagger team came back out to check the corrective actions on all of the site, and when they got to us, our program, they had no findings, absolutely no findings, zero findings. And they only had one recommendation, in that we needed to involve the employees more. And so then we transitioned into the Voluntary Protection Program. But that was very outstanding. And that really impressed my management. So then from acting manager, I was made manager of the organization, and proceeded on to continue my career. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: So what time frame was this, roughly, then? [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Oh, let's see. That was May 1991 to September 1992. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: Okay. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Okay. Let's see. From there, I transitioned into basically manager of safety programs assessments, which developed. And basically our mission at that point was to develop baseline hazard assessment programs for facilities. And basically, for each facility that you had operations in, to go and do a baseline hazard of everything, both the occupational safety, industrial hygiene, the nuclear aspects of it, and any other types of hazards, so that for that facility, all of the known hazards of that facility would be known and could be communicated, and basically programs and systems set up in place to keep the workers safe. From September 1992 to February 1994, I worked in that position. And after that, I worked as the manager of the Voluntary Protection Program, or actually manager of Industrial Safety Planning, which consisted of managing the Voluntary Protection Program for Westinghouse and for Fluor Hanford, doing their contract transition. And of course the Voluntary Protection Program is still out here on the site, as you probably well know, and there's different--but I was very instrumental in getting that program off zero. After that, I worked as operations engineer. I transitioned and went back out to the site, to 105 K-East and K-West. I worked as an operation specialist in development of the Canister Storage Facility and the Cold Vacuum Drying Facility out at K-Basins and at 200 East, is where the Canister Storage Building is. And then also K-East and K-West storage facility. I was assigned to the shift office, and worked as an OE, Operating Engineer, basically under the direction of a shift manager. And basically managed the facility's work activities, coordinated those on a daily basis to get work done, assigning work to the craft personnel, releasing work packages during lockout/tagout, and various different aspects of operations for that facility, managing that facility. After that, let's see, that was from 1998 to 2002. And from January 2002 to present, I've worked as a management assessment coordinator. And responsibilities are primarily to develop the Management Assessment Program and Integrated Evaluation Plan database for DOE-RL. And let me explain, that Integrated Evaluation Plan is basically a database that takes RL's assessments and our assessments, and basically puts them together, so we have one integrated plan. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: I see. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: And that effort is to actually benefit, or to alleviate, or eliminate redundancy in assessments, teaming with the site and doing various different assessments, rather than they doing one and we doing the same one. Yeah. So that's currently where I'm at right now. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: So you've had several different sorts of positions. You've worked at N Reactors, and K-Basins, and different parts of the site. Of the different jobs you had, over the 35 years, different places you've worked, what was—was there a specific job or place that was sort of the most challenging and/or most rewarding, that you got the most sense of accomplishment or reward? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Yeah, there was. I would have to say probably the reactor operations was probably, I'd say, number one, because I know there was no other African Americans that had ever certified at N Reactor, and then later on I found there wasn't any others in any of the other facilities of the plants. So I felt very good about that. And it was very challenging. The second area would have been in developing the OSHA compliance program, because that was basically, I knew basically nothing. And I had to go find people in order to work that were much smarter than me, and be able to develop a program that would actually meet the muster of headquarters when they came back out. And it was very challenging. I stayed up quite a few nights thinking about it and worrying about it. And yeah, it was very challenging. But it was a very, very well-put-together program, and it met everything that they were looking for. So I'd have to say those two positions were the most challenging, yes. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: When you were talking about working at the N Reactor, you talked about riding the bus, and the sort of spirit, the sense of mission, I think, in the Cold War-- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Yes. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: So when the Cold War ended in 1989, 1990, did that sort of sense of mission change? Did it shift somewhere? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: I guess I couldn't really expound on that, because what I was speaking of was during the time I was working at N Reactor. And once the Cold War ended, I was at that time working--when did the Cold War end? That was-- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: Well, I guess it depends, right? The Berlin Wall came down in '89. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: When the wall came down. Okay. Yeah. I was—where was I at at that time? Yeah, I was actually up in the 200 Area. I was oversight. I was a part of an appraisal team doing integrated safety appraisals out of the 200 Area. So I had transitioned away from N Reactor some years before that. So I didn't really feel a difference with what I was doing. The real thing that I seen that really affected a lot of the people at N Reactor was when they announced that it was not going to—it no longer had a mission. It wasn't going to be restarted. The reactor was run very hard, run very well, and produced a lot of power, and was very good in its mission. And there was just a lot of pride there. And when that was announced, there were a lot of people that really was hurt by that, because it was a reason to come to work. It was really a reason to come, and a reason to work for something. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: I want to go back to something you talked about early when you started talking. And you mentioned President Kennedy's visit when he dedicated the N Reactor. So do you remember that? Did you-- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: I actually remember that very well. And in fact, it was my father, and my mother, and my sister, and me, and my friend, Ronnie Brown. I haven't seen him in years, but I understand he's doing well. My dad brought us all out to the site, and drove with all of the, what seeming like thousands and thousands of cars, you know, we were just kids, and all the way out to N Reactor. And yes, I definitely remember that. I can remember the helicopters coming in, and the dust flying, and all that. And I didn't know that President Kennedy's hair was red. [LAUGHTER] But on that day, seeing him that close, because me and my friend, we kind of wormed all the way up as close—we were just little tiny kids, so people let us by. And we got up there, and we were able to stand up on—there was like different seating that people had brought. And we just kind of stepped up on one of the little seats that were there, and we had to get our heads up over the crowds. And we could see him when he stepped out of the helicopter, and he walked over to the podium. I can remember that, just like the yesterday. I also remember that day very well because my sister—it must've been over 100 degrees there--my sister was suffering from heat exhaustion. I remember when we actually came back, my mother was taking care of her. She was getting water into her, and everything. That was a very vivid day. That was a very, very, very good day. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: What I also wanted to ask you was, like growing up in Pasco in the 50s and 60s, was it a segregated place? Or was it—what was it like? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Not when I came along. Not actually in the 60s. I hear stories about the way it was, but I don't know. I went to Pasco High School. I went to Stevens Junior High School. It was all integrated. My grade school was Whittier. It was integrated. It just was East Pasco, and it was primarily blacks. But also there was Hispanics and whites all went to that school, but it was predominantly black. Then after, actually, when I finished sixth grade, they divided sixth grade, and then seventh, eighth, and ninth. It was junior high school. I was selected, because of where I lived in East Pasco. I was assigned to go to Stevens Junior High School, which was, at that time, way across town, and nothing, hardly anything around it. So we rode the bus over to Stevens. But prior to that, the majority of blacks, African Americans, Hispanics, basically went to McLoughlin Junior High School. But McLoughlin at that time was what is now Pasco City Hall. That used to be McLoughlin. [LAUGHTER] But my brother goes back, I mean my brother's deceased. And he passed away, in fact, about a year and three months ago. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: This was your brother who was about 20 years older? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Yeah. He actually went—the high school at that time was McLoughlin, which then became City of Pasco. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: Okay. [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: And Whittier was the grade school, junior high school when he went to school. I do have some pictures of him. He was part of the patrol that went out and let the kids across the street and stuff. Yeah, he had the little patrol hat on, and all that. I have all those pictures of him when he was really young. And by the way, my brother, he is 20 years older than me, but he graduated from Pasco High. He then entered the Army--or no, he was drafted. He was drafted, and he actually fought in the Korean War. And he corrected me. Every time I said Korean War, he said, no, it's the Korean conflict. It was not a war. [LAUGHTER] And he served two terms in Vietnam, and was wounded. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: What was his first name? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Thurman. In fact I have a—here—obituary out of the paper. But he had what I consider a pretty impressive military career. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: Yeah, 20 years of active service. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Yes. Two terms in Vietnam, a very unpopular war. Me growing up in the 60s, it was, gee, I've got a brother that's overseas fighting, with all the racial strife and stuff here in the United States. But he was very proud of his country, and he was willing to go and do whatever he was assigned to do. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: And so you had an older brother, and how many other siblings did you have? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: I had a sister. I actually had a half-brother and a half-sister, that—they didn't live here. They lived--Margie lived in Wichita, Kansas. And my other brother, half-brother, lived in--I think he lived in Wichita, Kansas, too. I didn't really get to know him that well. I got to know Margie pretty well. Then I had my sister, Marilyn. She graduated from Pasco High School. A teacher for 34 years in Yakima. She just retired about three years ago, I think. And still living in Yakima. But she taught school. And those were all of my siblings. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: So would you say that Pasco, Tri-Cities was a good community to grow up in? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Yeah, I think so. I really think so. No, I don't have any--I have to just--not so much the community as much as pointing back to my parents. I think I had very--I've seen other people, my friends with different parents and stuff. And I think I had some pretty good parents. My dad was very industrial. He worked construction as a laborer, but he had rentals. And he had--and of course, I came along much later. But he had houses and rentals, but he worked construction. And him and his best friend, Mr. Louzell Johnson. He was a bricklayer. My dad was a laborer. They kind of was a team. And they worked, and they built a lot of houses throughout Pasco, Kennewick, and Richland back in the 50s and 60s. And he worked on a lot of the dams on the Snake River. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: Oh, really? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: The building of a lot of the dams. And I can just remember--well, I can remember my mother talking, and also my dad. And on Sundays we would take drives, and he would take us way out to where the dams were being built, and stuff like this, for something to do on Sunday for the family. And I didn't pay any attention to it really. But I can remember. I can remember. Those were very good times. My mother, she worked at the Navy base that was in Pasco. Have you heard— </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: Yes! </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: --that there was a Navy base there? She worked in the laundry at the Navy base. And then we came along, my sister and me, and so she just stayed home and took care of us, and my dad worked. But I spent a lot of years painting, and fixing hot water tanks, and unplugging sinks when I was a kid. I was very cheap labor. [LAUGHTER] So I learned to do that stuff really early in life. So that's pretty much my parents. They were very good people. Anybody you ask, they were very good people. There’s the obituary of my mom. I didn't get the obituary of my dad. I didn't find it. I have it somewhere, but there's this picture here. Anyway, go ahead. I just—I’m kind of rambling. So you can--it's a good thing you're editing this, and you can cut out all the-- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: Are there any other events? You talked about the JFK visit. But any other events that sort of stand out in your mind from growing up, or from your years working at Hanford? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: You know, I can't really--not really. Not really anything that really, really stands out. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: So overall, then, in looking back at your 35 years working at Hanford, how do you assess it as sort of a place to work? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Overall, I'd say that Hanford, for me, it's been a very good place to work. I was given opportunity. You know, I had opportunity. And anyone that's going to achieve anything in life, if they prepare themselves, and when the opportunity comes, they step forward and they take it. I mean you can't much ask for much more than that. My dad gave me some advice, of course, when I first started working out there. You know, he said, make sure you keep your eyes open, and you watch everything around you. And do not worry about if there's people against you, because God will always put one person there for you. And I always remember he told me that. And so I think about that, that different times during the time I worked out there, the people that have been there, that have assisted me and mentored me, and helped me to continue to do better work, a better job, and basically to feed my family and keep on living, as my mother would say. Yeah. I can't think of any other outstanding--there's been a lot of accomplishments, just small little milestones that have been made in safety and our management's commitment to safety, and our management's commitment to the workers, and making sure that they are heard, and that they're actually dealt with, and talked to, and gotten back to when they have safety concerns. And I guess there's a lot of pros and cons about that. But I see safety as being not just the number one thing at Hanford, but being integrated in all that we do at Hanford, is how I see it. And so I know there's a lot of things—I've seen the media. I've seen there are things that are going on out there that I don't know about. I have not worked in some of those areas. But for all of the areas that I have worked and been in, that has been the primary concern, is safety. And you compare to what we have out at Hanford, compare it to out in the real world, and we have a lot of commitment and concern, and actually management standing up, and taking responsibility for things, and actually dealing with them, trying to correct them, and working to try to make events or things that happen not reoccur. I actually brought a--you can get back to your questions, but I'll forget. But I actually sent off--you know, I seen it on television, and then a fellow employee told me about the Cold War Patriots? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: Oh, yeah. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: And you probably know. I got my little certificate. And I got, actually, the pin. Whoops! I actually got this pin that came with it. And I have it—of course I can't bring my badge in here, because it's a Hanford badge. But I stuck my little pin on the badge, and so I thought that was kind of neat. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: Yeah. Actually, I talked to the Cold War Patriots last week about the project here. Well, I don't have any other questions for you. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Oh, okay! </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: Unless there's something else that we haven't talked about yet, or I didn't ask you about that you think is important, to-- We can--Eric can actually film some of this sort of once we’re done talking. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Eric: Yeah, anything that you showed him we’d want to get photocopied. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Okay, sure. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: They could always integrate that, then, into the interview. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Okay, sure. Sure. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: Anyway, thanks very much for coming in-- </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: You bet. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: --and doing the interview. I really appreciate it. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Okay, yeah. You know, if you don't step forward and make sure that you're a part of history, you won't be. [LAUGHTER] </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: Absolutely. So how did you--I was going to ask you, how did you hear about the project? Did [INAUDIBLE] contact you? </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: Actually, I was at a PZAC meeting--President's Zero Accident Council— </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Bauman: Oh, okay. </div> <div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238"> Henry: --meeting--and there was an individual that works-- </div> Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri-Cities Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 300 Area 200 Area N Reactor 105 K-East 105 K-West K Basins 200 East Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1953-2014 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1978-2013 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald) Long, John Ruff, Wally Larson, Judy Stewart, Clinton Norling, Steve Brown, Ronnie Henry, Thurman Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:52:04 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Danny Henry Description An account of the resource An interview with Danny Henry conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2016-06-1: Metadata v1 created – [J.G.] Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 6/2/2014 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Hanford (Wash.) Nuclear weapons plants--Environmental aspects--Washington (State)--Hanford Site. Nuclear instruments & methods Pasco(Wash.) Richland(Wash.) 105 K-East 105 K-West 200 Area 200 East 300 Area B Plant WESF K Basins Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917-1963 N Reactor Washington State Public Power Supply System. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F7979506dcf39c0bb292c727b9f9b0e0b.JPG 2c7a6cf253f23a1ad1751be3abceed88 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Dave Harvey Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Dave Harvey on February 21st, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Dave about his experiences working on the Hanford Site and helping to preserve the history of Hanford and the Tri-Cities. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Dave Harvey: David Harvey. H-A-R-V-E-Y. Franklin: And D-A-V-I-D? Harvey: Oh, yeah, D-A-V-I-D. Franklin: It’s okay. So, Dave, what is your background and how did you first come to Hanford? Harvey: Well, I got a degree--[LAUGHTER]—oh, gosh, many years ago—undergraduate degree in American history and government in 1970, back at a private university in New Jersey. And then went to—did various other occupations, but then decided to go to graduate school and came out here to Western Washington University in 1973 and was in history. At the end of my two years in grad school, they were just getting historic preservation kind of component. It was mainly just history, government, what-have-you, and the whole cultural resources management, historic preservation—I should call it occupation, for want for a better term—just got going. I mean, the National Historic Preservation Act wasn’t passed until 1966. So it was kind of like the archaeologists had been doing work on cultural resources, mainly—you know, just archaeological, like with the dams out here, with the construction of all the hydroelectric and irrigation water storage dams. So there was a lot of need for kind of emergency archaeology to document before those areas were going to be flooded. So they got into the cultural resources management game a lot earlier than historians, architectural historians, you know, landscape architects and what-have-you. So, initially, I would be on field crews with the archaeologists. In fact, I even went to an actual field school in France at one point. I had a lot of interests in archaeology and I got on some digs and so forth. But more and more, my interest and focus was on the built environment and dealing—especially out here in the Northwest, and of course Hanford’s a perfect example. You have this continuum. Besides the prehistory you have the early settlement and the agricultural landscapes. And everything is much more intact. There’s a lot of public land, so there’s a lot of opportunity to go out and document, because federal agencies are required, under National Historic Preservation Act, to—they’re supposed to be proactive to document. All the cultural resources, whether it’s prehistoric or on the built environment, you know, houses, cabins, agricultural remains, and landscape. It’s just really fascinating. So that’s another attraction for being out here in the Pacific Northwest. And after I got my master’s and then—boy, that was in 1975. Ever since, kind of went back and forth between the built environment and archaeology, but I would say the last 35 years has mainly been dealing with the built environment. Franklin: And when you say built environment, could you define that term for us? Harvey: It would be any aboveground structures. And that could be early settlement remains. You know, there’s that fine line. When you come to an old farmstead, homestead, and it’s dilapidated, let’s say there’s just remains. Well, you’re going to use archaeological, maybe, techniques as well. But essentially you can document it and do—go to the historic record to get your information. So it’s basically, you know, that’s the built environment. But it can be like the government homes in Richland. Let’s say you have over 3,000 government homes. That’s the built environment. And I had a lot of experience documenting those just here in Richland. But out at Hanford, once again, it’s also the industrial Cold War era, Manhattan Project era buildings, and what they call the recent past, which more and more is no longer recent. But at one point when I was working documenting out here for the Pacific Northwest National Lab—that’s what brought me over to the Mid-Columbia, to Richland back in 1993—you know, the Cold War era was basically just ended, and there was a big movement to document these properties before they disappeared. Because technology today—well, even back then, but much more so today—things change so rapidly that you’re going to lose these significant properties and so forth. Yeah. Franklin: Great. So then, the built environment can encompass anything from a single structure to an entire town or— Harvey: Yup. Franklin: Like the Alphabet Homes, to many even thousands of structures connected to a historical event or a historical period. Harvey: Mm-hm. Franklin: Right? Harvey: Correct. Franklin: Okay. So how did you get—why did PNNL bring you out, or why did you come out in ’93 to— Harvey: Well, I had been in Seattle. In fact, I had worked as kind of a consultant, freelance, like a lot of archaeologists had done for decades. But there was a need for historians, architectural historians, to document, as we were saying, about the built environment. So I had projects in Alaska, all over Washington, Oregon, California, and then I found out through the State Historic Preservation Office that the Department of Energy—well, actually Pacific Northwest National Lab, Battelle Memorial Institute that operates the lab—was looking for cultural resources specialists but more dealing with buildings and structures. Because they had archaeologists. This was in 1993, so I applied and my wife and I moved over from Seattle. Franklin: What attracted you about working on the built environment, architectural environment, in Hanford? Or in the Tri-Cities? Harvey: Well, initially, I don’t know if—I think I gained that appreciation after being here for a while. It sure was quite a transition, especially back in the 1990s. And you could talk to my wife about that. But seriously, it was quite different. I mean, I think today, it would be a much larger community and there’s a lot more things to offer. But at the time, it was quite different. All of the sudden, you’re out here in the shrub steppe environment, and I was so used to the [LAUGHTER] marine, wet environment of western Washington, western Oregon. So it took some transition, but I wouldn’t want to leave now. Franklin: Was it also a cultural or political transition, as well, coming from Seattle, doing cultural resources work there versus doing cultural resources work here? Harvey: Oh, yeah! Extremely. And I guess you could say, the Big Sky country. I should actually backtrack a little. One of my quarters when I was doing my masters at Western Washington was with the Bureau of Land Management in south central Montana, south of Billings. I was stationed out of Billings. So I did have some connection with that type of environment, with, you know, the arid west, so-called. But it was definitely a transition. It was a cultural and [LAUGHTER] political. It was just so different. But I think occupationally, you know, it’s—yeah, I think—well, actually, there had been times, like I even worked a project in central Oregon for a half a year back in the ‘80s, the 1980s, where it was kind of a shrub steppe—that was more of the high desert. So I kind of knew what I was getting into, but I think not so much about Hanford. That was a big transition. Yeah. Franklin: Had you heard about Hanford before you had accepted— Harvey: Yeah, and to be honest, I said, gosh, why would anybody want to live—[LAUGHTER] I’ll be honest, because after living in western Washington, it was—the transition—I didn’t appreciate at the time like I do now. And just the wide open spaces and the—I mean, and I’m also looking for personal reasons why we like it over here just from recreational—and so forth. Because we do a lot of hiking and bicycling and so forth. So, yeah, there was a lot of transition going on there. I’m glad we took it. Franklin: Good. What did you first start working on when you came in the early- or mid-‘90s for Battelle? What were some of your projects? Harvey: Well, it had to deal with kind of the Manhattan Project/Cold War era industrial properties. A lot of the concrete block buildings. And of course there’s a lot of prejudice against that, meaning, gosh, how are these significant? You get that question all the time. And of course, we’re looking at the unbelievable scientific contributions, what was going on in these properties during the Manhattan Project and early Cold War. And Hanford was one of the—produced over two-thirds of the plutonium for the country’s nuclear arsenal during the Manhattan Project/Cold War. And all these outbuildings and—I shouldn’t even say outbuildings. But it was kind of—we had to document them because the Department of Energy wanted to tear them down. A lot of them were contaminated, and so they—and part of the Tri-Party Agreement to clean up Hanford, there was this big movement—I think that’s why they needed somebody who had experience with the built environment—with building structures. And there was, I’ll have to admit, a steep learning curve, because I hadn’t worked, necessarily, with these type of buildings. But I caught up pretty quickly. And the scientific and technology, and the unbelievable challenges of what took place. I’m still learning to this day about the Manhattan Project and so forth. And now of course with the National Historic Park, it’s pretty fascinating, and just the contributions. Franklin: What kinds of resources did you use to document those industrial landscape? Harvey: Oh, boy. There were a lot of—a wealth of material, archival material, at the Department of Energy and the different contractors. It wasn’t just in one central location; they did have the central files. And that’s changed over the years, where you can get this material. Of course a lot more is available today than back in the ‘90s. And historic photos. And at that time, of course, you could talk to a lot of long—unfortunate—long-time residents and people that worked out there that unfortunately are no longer with us, but we got to talk to them. Especially a number of the early settlers or immediate descendants of the early settlers. And that was pretty fascinating. Franklin: So you were doing, then, the pre-’43 agricultural documentation as well as the Manhattan Project. Harvey: Yeah. I was remiss; I didn’t mention that. Yeah, and that was—I came kind of at the perfect time, because a number of these people unfortunately are no longer around. But we got to talk to them and their stories were documented, fortunately. Just the contributions. It was just—and that’s the whole part of the removal of over 1,500—it was more like 1,500 families, as well as the Wanapum Indians up at Priest Rapids. Just becoming exposed to this, it was really—I’d never—see, I wasn’t able to or wouldn’t have had the good fortune of being able to be exposed to that over—if we had stayed in Seattle. Yeah. Franklin: And so where—in the timeline of remediation or removal of the buildings, when did your work often happen? Was it right before the building had been— Harvey: Yup. Franklin: Was there ever an outcome where your work had revealed that a building was— Was there ever an outcome where your work may have changed the decision to remove or tear down a building? Harvey: Pretty much no, unfortunately. Most of the buildings since then have been removed. But we were able to document them and also get the artifacts. A lot of the industrial artifacts, we tagged and got them removed. Or if they were too large to remove or going to be too contaminated for storage, then we were able to document them. Photo and— Franklin: So you’re talking now about the Hanford Collection. Harvey: The Hanford Collection, which you’re in charge of. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: So can you—what was your involvement with that? Were you there at the beginning of when that was being set up? Harvey: Yeah! Franklin: Okay, so can you tell me how that came to be, within the Department of Energy? So, politically and then what steps you took to document artifacts and bring them in? Harvey: Okay. And I don’t think I answered fully your original question. Franklin: Oh, sure, sorry. Harvey: Let me finish that. No, that’s good, that’s great. We documented the buildings, like you said, prior to being demolished. Because the ones that had been determined eligible—and a lot of them, you know, for the National Register of Historic Places, being federal facilities, this is a federal agency, Department of Energy, which is required under the National Historic Preservation Act. Because they—the Department of Energy, as a federal agency, was required to document and basically take into consideration any properties of what we call historic properties, properties that are listed or determined eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places. So they had to take into consideration that these properties—they could go ahead and remove them, demolish them, or modify them. But if they’re found eligible, and then— Now, fortunately we’ve been able to save B Reactor and a lot of the artifacts from that era from some of the other reactors ended up there. But of course that’s only one of the nine reactors. But on the others—so this all kind of all of the sudden there was a dilemma here, because you’re going to have to go through this extensive documentation process for each building, almost, or at least ones that have been determined eligible. So that’s—we got into the whole Programmatic Agreement where we had a group of buildings that we’ve—no longer eligible—or I should say we determined not eligible so we didn’t have to do much documentation, if at all. Others were eligible but not really significant. And then we had a third group, really significant that required more extensive documentation. That’s kind of in a general sense. So this Programmatic Agreement was with other contractors, other cultural resource management specialists. I won’t go into all that, but that was kind of signed, I think in 2002. A programmatic agreement with DOE and State of Historic Preservation Office. And that kind of streamlined the whole process. Now, as part of that, you had mentioned about the industrial artifacts. That was kind of an offshoot of that, because these are just as important sometimes as the buildings themselves. And it’s not—it could be signs, it could be instruments. It’s not necessarily just big pieces of industrial equipment. So anyway, those—then we would go in and tag these. So it kind of made us aware—at least, at the moment, don’t touch these, and then we’ll decide later on, if they end up being contaminated or if DOE can’t remove them, then at least we’ve made record of it. Franklin: Right, right. How many buildings do you estimate that you were able to perform this documentation of, and/or the artifact removal? Harvey: Well, see, there were a thousand buildings that ended up—but because there was this streamlined, you know, the Programmatic Agreement, we didn’t have to go to each building. We went to a lot of them. But we—some had already been documented, some—if it was just kind of a generic—let’s say Butler Building, corrugated metal or something like that, might have to just take a picture or something like that. And we did visit—like I said, there was other cultural resources specialists for the other contractors: Bechtel—well, there was Westinghouse and then Bechtel—and so there were a number of other contractors. And then part of the—I would say, the largest productive outcome of this whole effort was this book, The Manhattan Project Cold War Era Facilities, that kind of outlines and chapters on each significant--whether it’s military operations, the reactors, the chemical separation plants in the 200 Area; the 100 Area, you have the fuel manufacturing. There were all these chapters done on Site security, and research and development. And there was—I think Tom Marceau was the lead editor, I think it was with Bechtel, and there were about seven or eight of us were coauthors of several of the chapters. Franklin: Okay, thank you. Harvey: Yeah. Franklin: Did you directly participate in the efforts to—any efforts at B Reactor—because I know it was a Historic Engineering Landmark, right, and then it’s gained kind of more recognition— Harvey: It became a National Historic Landmark. Franklin: National Historic Landmark. Did you participate in any of that? Harvey: Some of the research. There was a whole—you know, B Reactor Museum Association, which I’m a member. There were a lot of other people that did a lot more work than I did out there. There was a lot of work to do out here. [LAUGHTER] And that was a great success. We’re also looking to kind of preserve landscapes within the new national historic park—Manhattan Project National Historic Park. So we did some background research that have led to realizing—like out at the White Bluffs-Hanford town sites, it’s a larger area of significance than what’s actually strictly in the park. Franklin: Right, because the park, as of right now, just includes the landmark and not any—not actually any feet around it. Harvey: Right, and those are the pre-’43, like we were talking about. And you have canals—irrigation ditches, you have remains from the ranches and farmsteads and actually the foundations for some of the buildings. But it goes way beyond the actual little communities of White Bluffs and Hanford. And then there’s a pumping plant out there on the Columbia. So it’s—yeah—and that’s what we’re kind of—that’s what we’re facing now. There is, I guess, I think a lot of agreement, especially Department of Energy, that that boundary should be expanded, when we’re telling the story out there. Franklin: Are there any buildings that were remediated that you really wished had been saved for this kind of—something like a public park or for the public to view? Harvey: Yeah. We don’t have anything in the 300 Area, which was the fuel manufacturing. That’s too bad, because you had Building 313, Building 314 and a lot of other labs and so forth. They were all just—they’ve all been removed. Franklin: Why are those important? Harvey: Well, that’s where some of the first fuel was manufactured. Before the cores were made into what they call slugs, and then they were transported up to the 100 Area reactors for irradiation. So they were both built in ’43, ’44. So, yeah, it’s kind of too bad that one of those at least wasn’t preserved. But they were pretty contaminated in the walls, underground. But at least we did get to document them. But there’s not much left in the 300 Area from the era, yeah. Franklin: Are there any buildings that are still up that have been selected for remediation or are in the remediation pipeline that you wish were saved for their historic value? Harvey: Well, T Plant has an active—is part of the park, but that has an active role right now in cleanup out there in the 200 Area, chemical separation plant. I think that’s what your question is, right? Something that’s still standing now? Franklin: Yeah. Harvey: Well, some of the reactors are left, but they’re going to be mothballed except for B Reactor. I think the issue is more that we’ve got about five, six pre-’43 buildings. Now, the bank is pretty much going to be stabilized, the White Bluffs bank, First Bank of White Bluffs. But we do have some—the Hanford High School and Bruggeman’s warehouse and the Allard pumping plant, you know, they could use a lot of work. So at least efforts should go, because we really need to tell that story about the people that were sacrificed—they had to remove for the war effort. Some of the sons that were overseas and they’d gotten note from the parents that they were no longer here, because we had to leave. Yeah, so that will tell that side of the story, which is really important. Franklin: What about any other reactors that you feel are historic—because I know some reactors are kind of very similar to others, right, like D and F are pretty similar to B. But what about N or FFTF? Harvey: Well, N would’ve been really decent. That was the last one, and it was the dual generation, could produce steam for electricity as well as plutonium. That would’ve been—yeah, I would have liked to see that one preserved. Because that was the one where President Kennedy came out in ’63 and dedicated. And then I think you had just mentioned the Fast Flux Test Facility. And that was completed in 1982 and that was determined eligible in the ‘90s. Once again, the recent past. Franklin: Breaking that 50-year—so-called 50-year rule. Harvey: Yeah, because it was found to be of exceptional importance. Franklin: And why was that? Harvey: It was probably the cornerstone of the peaceful usage of nuclear energy, because it was the breeder reactor program, that I think began in the Carter Administration for commercial fuels. It was pretty significant for that. I mean, that’s why it was determined eligible. And we went in—a lot of these, I remember we went in and took videos and so forth. We have extensive documentation as well as photo documentation. But—and to be honest, I haven’t been out there for a good while. I believe some of it’s still standing. But I don’t know—there aren’t any plans to stabilize it. I think it’s going to eventually be totally demolished. Franklin: Yeah, I believe so, too. How long did you work doing cultural resource work at Hanford PNNL? Harvey: Through 2005. Franklin: Okay. Harvey: And then I went into—I had my own consulting firm for a couple years. I actually worked in Katrina for four months for FEMA. So just—in fact, I remember coming back here in 2006 and helping, I think it was Washington Closure at the time, to document more, or finalize the artifacts. What was going to be preserved or—and then we kind of were eliminating, once again, the artifacts that were either too contaminated or too large to preserve. So I had some work on that. And then I went with an environmental consulting firm in 2007, oh, through 2013, 2014, I guess. And since then, I’ve been pretty much on my own again, at my own consulting firm. Franklin: And are you still working on Hanford-related projects? Harvey: Yeah, in fact I have a contract with Battelle, actually through another environmental consulting firm that has a kind of a master services agreement with Battelle. So through that kind of agency or—I was able to get this job with Battelle. And it’s good, because there’s several properties on the Battelle campus that they want to document—they wanted to do this Section 106, National Historic Preservation action compliance work. And the main campus, which is a perfect example of mid-century modernism, I’m working on right now. Another facility in the process of wanting to demolish, so I did the—basically, guiding them with their cultural resource compliance regulations that they have to comply with. Franklin: Which facility is this? Harvey: That’s the research technology lab, the RTL. Franklin: Ah, that’s right. That’s the one you contacted me on. Harvey: Yeah, it used to be the Donald W. Douglas Labs, constructed in 1996. Douglas United—I should say the Douglas Aircraft Company and United Nuclear kind of did a joined venture and constructed that. They had it until ’71 and then Exxon purchased it and then Battelle purchased it in 1982. It was to do a lot of work on fuel fabrication, the technologies behind that research. Franklin: And so how—do you think that mid-century modern, kind of corporate campus environment will be maintained there at Battelle, or— Harvey: That’s the aim. I think they would like me to write up a management plan, kind of a maintenance guide on. You know, because they’re going to be kind of a repetitive type of maintenance things. They don’t want to have to come back every time to the State Historic Preservation Office or go through the whole process. So if we come up with a guide where certain activities that they have to maintain, whether it’s keeping the existing color palette or replace-in-kind, then they don’t have to come back to go through the whole compliance thing. So we—they realized that it is eligible. It hasn’t been formally determined eligible for the register and now I’m going through that process now. The RTL was found to be an example of commercial modernism. It was constructed, like I said in—actually, it was completed in ’67. So we’re in the process of mitigating that now. And with a memorandum of agreement outlining the stipulations to mitigate the property before it’s—Battelle sells it and/or demolishes it. Yeah. Franklin: Do you find a resistance in some circles to preservation of the modern or buildings constructed in the ‘60s and on, especially associated with the modernist style of architecture? Harvey: Oh, yeah! I mean, when I came on with Battelle in ’93, it was even more resistance. Frankly, even with the Department of Energy, which today is not resistant. But, yeah, there’s—we used to call it the giggle factor. [LAUGHTER] They’d say, you want to preserve that? Is that eligible? Why do you have to look at it? And then sometimes with corrugated metal buildings, we might have to go through the process to at least do minimal documentation. And there could have been, you know, with the National Register of Historic Places, under criterion A, if something of significant event or research occurred in that facility, that kind of outweighs, let’s say, its commonness or common construction, which is actually under criterion C. And that can happen. Franklin: Sure. Harvey: But it has to be integrity. Property does have to maintain its physical integrity to be eligible as well. But yeah there’s always resistance, and we find in the long run, if you comply, it’s a lot more inexpensive, you know, less headaches. Franklin: And it’s also more—correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s also more inexpensive to retrofit an existing building, usually, than it is to tear down a building and then move the materials out and then bring in new materials and construct something. Harvey: In most cases. Now, when you have contamination, radiological contamination, there are issues that certain buildings may be—current owners can’t find a new buyer who could retrofit it possibly, because all the sudden they’re inheriting this type of legacy. [LAUGHTER] You know. So that—and we faced that out at Hanford all the time. In some cases, it’s legitimate, and in some cases, it’s just a way—they want to demolish it and move on. Franklin: Well, I think that—would you say that the PFP is a good example of that, perhaps a building—Plutonium Finishing Plant—perhaps a building that is of exceptional significance, but is too contaminated to preserve in the traditional sense of preservation? Harvey: Oh, right. Yeah, we did document as much as we could, but we couldn’t get into certain areas when we were inside. But we did take a lot of pictures of the gloveboxes and the fascinating technology that went on there. Yeah, in that case—I mean, a lot of legitimate concerns. And I think in many cases, in a lot of the buildings and structures like out in the 300 Area, it was underneath the facilities, there was a lot of—in the pipes, there was a lot of contamination. There wasn’t any fear of us walking inside in street clothes to document it. Franklin: Interesting. Can you tell me about your involvement in documenting the Alphabet Houses of Richland? Harvey: Yeah, we—in fact, I live in a Q house. Constructed [LAUGHTER] in 19— Franklin: Did you move into an Alphabet House shortly after you—when you arrived in Richland? Harvey: Yeah, in 1993, we moved into a B duplex, down by Jefferson Park by Jefferson Elementary School. Those were constructed during the Manhattan Project from ’43 to ’45. And then a year later we purchased—you know, we were renting—we purchased a Q house up further north. I guess you’d say kind of the northeast extension of what we call the Government Home district, just south of Newcomer on Harris, and that was constructed in ’48, the whole neighborhood: Harris, Hetrick and Davison, that neighborhood there. So that’s when I became fascinated, what are these government homes? Alphabet Homes. And I did a lot of reading, and then in 1995, there was a history conference here. A friend of mine who’s an architectural historian, a colleague in Seattle, she grew up here over on Horn, just a few blocks from where my wife and I are living now on Harris. And at the time, she came over and her parents were still alive. So we decided to coauthor a paper on just the government home, focusing mainly on the Manhattan Project when Albin Pehrson, the architect that DuPont hired to kind of design—he’d had a lot of experience in some federal housing projects back in the ‘30s, but he also was one of the architects from the Davenport Hotel. He was out of Spokane. He had kind of a varied resume, so to speak, work history. So it was fascinating, the struggles that he had with the Corps who wanted just the minimal—very minimal. People think—actually our architecture style is called minimal traditional style. There are some classical elements to—architectural elements to the Q and R and S houses and so forth, and the M houses. But the Corps really didn’t—I mean, they would have just as soon had everybody live in barracks. And Du— Franklin: Well, and I think the As—is the A the two-story duplex? Harvey: Yes. Franklin: I think the As especially reflect that stripped-down, very basic— Harvey: Yeah. Franklin: --housing with very little ornamentation. Harvey: Oh, I know! And they’re even—the Qs and Rs—of course the S is two-story, has a little more features, architectural detailing. But—so that really got me going, doing this paper, and did kind of a follow-up then on the late ‘40s. And then you’re getting into more of the suburban ranch-style houses with the later Alphabet homes: the Ts, U, V and so forth. So it’s kind of interesting to see how the town did change and adapted more to suburban tastes as we get into the postwar period. You know, garages were built; no longer had the car compounds where people had shared parking, off the street but behind. And you used to be—access for service vehicles—delivery vehicles in the back. But now everybody has fences and so forth. You can still see places that have those car compounds, that still exist in some of the government home areas. So that’s kind of my introduction to the government homes. Since then—you know, of course there have been a lot of tours. CREHST—the CREHST Museum led tours for a while, and there’s other people involved. In fact, I think this month—next month in March, there’s going to be a tour of one of the government homes. Franklin: Were you involved at the CREHST Museum with the tours? Harvey: Well, the individual, Richard Nordgren, he does a lot. He and I talked extensively, and I gave him some information. Because I learned a lot from him as well. No, I never was actually part of the tours. I’ve given kind of informal—and then all this kind of led to the establishment of the National Register Historic District for the Gold Coast—it’s Gold Coast Historic District, which is about 200 homes. Does not include my neighborhood, because a lot of the houses across the street have been changed for people wanting better views of the Columbia River. Because I’m across—I’m on the west side— Franklin: That also, though, doesn’t include, I’ve noticed, some of the—how do I put this—some of the more blue collar homes, like the duplexes, the As and Bs, but also the—I live in a prefab, a two-bedroom prefab which was brought in kind of against Pehrson’s wishes— Harvey: Oh, right, about 1,800 of them, I think, yeah. Franklin: Yeah, and they were used primarily more for blue collar workers than white— Harvey: Yeah. Franklin: So I’ve noticed even there in the historical record there’s more of a focus on these kind of—the upper end of the Alphabet Houses. Harvey: Right well, see, I think initially Pehrson wanted a mixture of management and operation employees who lived there, involved in the operation. But what happened was the ones that were closed to the river, and that’s how they got the name Gold Coast, because the management personnel, the upper end, during the—well, in this case it would be when some of the homes just at the end of the war or postwar, they wanted these preferred locations. So, Pehrson’s kind of utopian view, mixture, didn’t really hold much water for long. [LAUGHTER] There was a mixture of housing types, but I think in the long run, it didn’t bear that much—he wasn’t able to keep that intact. And what happened after the war, of course, and then with our neighborhood, you got a lot of the professional occupation, the doctors and dentists moved in. And that’s another reason it was called the Gold Coast. And for the area just south of where we are. And now, to answer your question, yes, because a lot of the more blue collar were more in the central part and southwest. I guess we had to pick an area where you had to have at least 60% intact of what we call contributing. There was a lot of leeway: you can replace the windows, but you had to keep the dimensions. Because our house is pretty intact. We have all the original dimensions. We have different window material. So there was kind of that, and I think we ended up about 65% of the 200-plus buildings were found to be contributing. So, like I said, you usually have to have at least 60 in district. Franklin: Did you work on that nomination? Harvey: Yeah. Franklin: Oh, okay. So how did you—did you survey each house? Harvey: Well, we had—a lot of volunteers went out. We took pictures of every home. In fact, it was all over the city, not just what became the Gold Coast. But I helped write up the context, the historic context, and reviewed the statement of significance. I mean, a city—there were a lot of people involved. So I kind of assisted on that. Franklin: Did you find the homeowners to be pretty amenable to the effort to list on the national register? Harvey: Yeah, because, well, you see, national register’s more of an honorary. Unless they were going to use some type of government funds for restoration of their homes. Then they have to go through Secretary of the Interior guidelines for architectural detailing and documentation and so forth. To keep within certain attributes, to keep the original architectural integrity as much as possible. But otherwise, it’s mainly honorary. There aren’t that many funds available now. But it also—it’s mainly like if the federal government wanted to come and put a highway through or something. Then, if it’s a historic district like that, then they have to take into consideration, hey, this is a national registered district. Now, local landmarks would have a lot more teeth, like you have in the city of Seattle, you have a lot of neighborhoods that are historic districts that are landmarks. That’s a lot more stringent. And Portland—I mean there’s a lot of communities. Spokane would be the nearest to us. Well, I shouldn’t even say that. I think maybe Walla Walla and Ellensburg. And you can see economic revitalization goes hand-in-hand with—all of the sudden people take pride in, they’ve got a historic home. Now, we did a survey—I remember, we had a public meeting with the State Historic Preservation Office, we had the city, and I would say 85% were not in favor of a local landmarks ordinance. They liked the idea of a national registered district because it was honorary. But basically if you have a house in there, you can change it right now. The chance of it ever getting de-listed, someone would actually have to make an attempt to contact the keeper of the register or the State Historic Preservation Office— Franklin: And change a bunch of houses—change enough houses to—it would actually have to be a concerted effort— Harvey: Yeah, and to actually get it de-listed. Now, who knows, maybe in the future there’s enough chance—now some people, I have noticed, though, have tried to keep the style of homes that are in the Gold Coast District, so that’s good. Franklin: So when you were talking about local listing, is that the same as a certified local government? Harvey: No, that’s—CLG—there’s a lot of benefits to be a CLG—Kennewick is—because they get these grants, block grants, to restore—maybe take off the exterior corrugated metal that was really popular to put on nice brick facades—you know, this was a popular thing back in the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s. And now they got to—and if you go on through downtown Kennewick, it’s an amazing success story. Franklin: Right, where a lot of that restoration has happened down there. Harvey: Restoration—and you have to follow Section 106 guidelines and Secretary of the Interior guidelines. And I was on the design review board for about five years. So that would be the benefit of being a Certified Local Government. And you have to maintain historic register of properties and so forth, yeah. So that’s different, yeah. Franklin: Did you find that, overall, the people that—when you were working on the national register, the people who lived there in the Alphabet Homes knew and appreciated the history of the Alphabet Home and generally wanted to—wanted to preserve that kind of history? Harvey: Yeah, I think most people even today. I’m trying to think the date when this happened. I think, gosh, it must have been at least ten years ago. Yeah, yeah. We had the State Historic Preservation come over for a meeting and I was on the State Advisory Council on Historic Preservation at the time. So we had them come over and there was a public—we had our public meeting which included the Gold Coast. Yeah, I think there is a lot of—the level of government, they came around. [LAUGHTER] The city government. Franklin: What about the neighborhoods that have traditionally been more renters or lower income, like a lot of the neighborhoods—thinking about where I live in more central Richland that is mostly As and Bs and then prefabs. Harvey: Right. Franklin: I’m wondering—did you—was there ever any surveys made of those? Harvey: Mm-hm. Franklin: Do you think they have a—do you think there’s a historic district to be made there, or there’s enough that it has historic integrity? Harvey: Well, I think we did look at some other areas of the city but that didn’t reach that 60% plateau. And that’s why we picked kind of the area—and then we had kind of that whole theme, that so-called Gold Coast theme. But there are a lot of other cities, communities, across the country where you have so-called blue collar neighborhood or industrial neighborhoods or neighborhoods in transition from industrial—now maybe people coming in and restoring the lofts and so forth, where you do have a lot of pride in that. And you have like automobile rows—they’re looking at Columbia Drive over in Kennewick as part of that. So I think you could still— Franklin: That’s the old state highway, right? Harvey: Pardon? Franklin: That’s the old state highway, Columbia Drive? Harvey: No, that’s the one through the park. This would be—maybe it’s not Columbia Drive is not the right term. It’s just adjacent to the downtown Kennewick, the historic downtown Kennewick partnership. I thought that was Columbian Drive, but-- Franklin: I could be wrong. Harvey: Yeah, yeah. Franklin: You’ve lived here a lot longer than I have. Harvey: [LAUGHTER] But they have a so-called automobile row or stretch, so they’re trying to appeal to that and put in signage that’s more kind of complementary to that era. But I think there are areas all across the country where you have the so-called blue collar, but you might have a higher degree of rentals. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be maintained, but in some places they’re not, so-- Franklin: Sure, oh, and, well, that’s just-- Harvey: Probably, I mean your neighborhood. Franklin: That’s part of the economics of the people that own them versus the people that live in them. If you rent, you have less impetus to do a lot of home improvement. If you’re looking at it as a money-making property, you have less impetus to invest in that thing long-term for its aesthetics and its historical integrity. Harvey: Yeah, that is definitely true. Now, of course if you get into apartment buildings—yeah, that’s different. And you have those in central Richland, in some communities, we have a large apartment building could be eligible for the register, and it’s still all renters in those buildings. Franklin: Sure, yeah. Harvey: Yeah. Franklin: Yeah. Ah. Sorry, I’m trying to think. We’ve covered a lot. Harvey: Yeah, yeah, this has been great. Franklin: So what do you currently—so, right now you said you’re currently working on the Battelle campus. Harvey: Right. Franklin: Is there anything that we haven’t talked about that you’d like to mention? As it relates to Hanford history or Tri-Cities history? Harvey: Well, the more recent development, when President Obama signed the establishment for the Manhattan Project National Historic Park which takes in Manhattan Project properties here and the pre-’43, as we mentioned, as well as selective properties in Los Alamos and Oak Ridge. And I got to—I was chosen with Tom Marceau here at Hanford, both of us went back to Washington, DC for the Scholars’ Forum. Which was real big—and you had scholars and people working in cultural resources, historic preservation, at all three sites there as well and of course Department of Energy— Franklin: Who else was a part of that? Harvey: And the National Parks Service. Excuse me? Franklin: Sorry, who else was a part of that forum? Harvey: Oh, gosh. [LAUGHTER] Trying to think of something—the names—the Atomic Foundation, Cindy— Franklin: Cindy Kelly. Harvey: Cindy Kelly. Because she worked here for a number of years, both with one of the contractors and with the Department of Energy. So she’s been very active with the Atomic Heritage Foundation in DC. And, oh, Ellen—Ellen’s last name—she’s out of Los Alamos. Ellen McGehee, she was there from Los Alamos. The Oak Ridge folks, I did not know as well. Franklin: Were there anybody who had authored any works on Hanford—Bruce Hedley or John Finley? Harvey: Yeah, thank you. In fact, John Finley and Bruce Hedley, both from University of Washington were there. They actually were the ones that set up—they commented—they were kind of the commenter on my presentation back in 1995 when we did the government homes. So that’s when I first met them. And then John—they both have written a number of books on the Atomic Frontier, the Atomic West and Hanford. Excellent books. Franklin: What about—was Kate Brown a part of that? Harvey: And Kate Brown was there. I’m glad you keep mentioning these names because—but also we were expecting the author—he wrote little landmark books on the Manhattan Project and the building of the bomb. Franklin: Brian Sanger? Harvey: Well, there was Sanger. He wasn’t there, but he was supposed to be. But there was another gentlemen—ah, can’t think of the name. You keep telling me these names and I’ll remember. But—and then there was the Park Service, a member of the-- Franklin: Who chose the people to be present at this Scholars’ Forum? Harvey: Well, I think each of the three communities submitted names. Franklin: Okay. Harvey: Colleen French with the Department of Energy submitted Tom’s name and myself, and we were accepted. Franklin: Oh, great. Because I’m just kind of—you know—there’s some people that have renown or certain reputations here, and Kate Brown’s is often a name that’s used—doesn’t always have polite adjectives coming after her name is mentioned or her book is mentioned. So I was kind of curious if you knew how she became involved with that forum. Harvey: No. Franklin: Or if there was any kind of cross-currents or anything—any kind of—how were the proceedings of the forum? Harvey: Oh, I was going to say—there was—I mean, we looked at it as the National Historic Park, there’s many stories to tell in the Park Service. Some people wanted it to be a celebratory-type thing. You know, we built the bomb and helped end World War II. And others saying, you know, no, it should be—it’s more of a commemoration. Let—the Park Service is good at establishing the parameter, the context, and then the visitors make that decision. There’s an internment camp—in fact, this was just the 75th anniversary of the internment of Japanese Americans, and there’s an internment camp in eastern California, near Bishop, I believe. And once again, that’s kind of—they’re telling the story that some might say was not a most glamorous part of American history. Franklin: Sure. Harvey: But we’re showing it. And when we talk about Monticello, we talk about the slaves. So the Park Service is really good. And that’s kind of—we struggled with that kind of—the type of themes that we should be—how the Park Service should be telling the story. Franklin: Can I ask how you personally came down on that issue, whether the park should be one that’s more celebratory or— Harvey: No, I— Franklin: Or one that’s— Harvey: I think just a commemoration. I think each—you know, it’s a lot of significance. We all know about the negative aspect of the Atomic Age, but it is one of the most significant events of the 20th century, by far. And it’s had great technological benefits. It also led to a Cold War and now—which [LAUGHTER] is still—with the spreading of nuclear arms is one of the—oh, I would say, one of the most dangerous things occurring in international politics. Franklin: Yes. Harvey: And as well as the contamination aspects, too. Of cleaning up the legacy. Franklin: Of course, which is still ongoing. Harvey: Which is here at Hanford. But at other places, too. You realize you had workers in a lot of Manhattan Project, early Cold War facilities that all of the sudden they’re realizing—Department of Energy—wait a minute, these people were also, I guess you could say fighting in the Cold War. And now you know, they didn’t have any protections at the time, and are we going to care for these people? Yeah, yeah. Franklin: Right I’d like to ask you something that might be controversial, and if you don’t want to answer— Harvey: Okay. Franklin: I’m fine with that. But, this is a question I don’t have—really feel like I can ask very often. There’s a lot of rhetoric, especially here, that—often-repeated rhetoric that dropping the bomb was necessary to ending World War II. However, most historians agree that dropping the bomb was not necessary to avoid the invasion of Japan; in fact, the Japanese had wanted surrender, were willing to agree to let the emperor abdicate as long as we wouldn’t kill the emperor, and that the bomb was dropped to intimidate the Soviets into more concessions in Eastern Europe. But Truman, over the course of his life, inflated the number of American lives that the bomb would save, and he didn’t even mention it saving lives until 18 months after the bomb was dropped. So with that in mind, do you agree or disagree with the statement that dropping the bomb— Harvey: Well, I see both sides. I mean, you talk to people whose sons were onboard ships going to Japan, ready for the invasion. And so it might be hard to convince that family [LAUGHTER] that the bomb wasn’t a good thing. Also, supposedly—I can’t remember the number we had—50,000 soldiers that were prisoners of war. Supposedly they were all going to be—if we invaded the mainland, they were all going to be killed. And so you hear that, and you say, well, it was a good thing. And also, but at the same time, you do a lot—especially Leslie Groves and others figured, oh, the expense was unbelievable expense at the time. And to justify, maybe we needed to drop this bomb, and quickly, before there was peace. And then I’ve heard about Truman, 18 months later, to kind of more justify. And there was a lot of cover-up on the after-effects of nuclear fallout, for want of a better term, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for the people that were exposed to it, and generations after that. There was kind of a lot of hush-hush. I mean, obviously, the word got out. Franklin: Right, it’s kind of hard to hide that. Harvey: Yeah, in fact, I went to the signing when we were back for the Scholars’ Forum back in DC, and Sally Jewell, who was the Secretary of the Interior at the time, I think her mom was one of the first nurses that went over there. Franklin: Oh, wow. Harvey: Yeah. So where I come around personally—I know General Eisenhower (who became President Eisenhower), he wanted to have a demonstration. Take contingent or—the government of Japan at the time, the military figure, take them out on a boat and show that okay, we’re going to drop—do the dropping of the bomb. Franklin: Kind of like a peaceful demonstration— Harvey: Right. Of course, at the time, we didn’t know what was going to happen after you drop it. It could have been a chain reaction, you know, you read a lot of—so, believe me, I’m not ducking the issue. I really—I can see both sides. A lot of historians feel it was necessary. But then you read the side that it was kind of to show the Soviets we meant business. And also to justify all the expense during the war. Franklin: Sure, it would’ve—could’ve been seen as this major boondoggle, had all this money been spent on something that had never been— Harvey: Well, right. Franklin: --never been used. Harvey: But I’ve heard Truman didn’t lose much sleep over his decision. Franklin: Sure, sure. Harvey: In fact, I think even Oppenheimer went and met with him, and I guess he—you know, it’s too bad what happened to Oppenheimer, his loss of his security clearance. Which eventually I think he got back later. But it was that whole kind of Red Scare during the ‘50s. Franklin: Yeah. Well, thanks, Dave. I guess what I’m hearing from you is that it’s complicated. Harvey: Yeah. Franklin: Which I think like any good historical issue worth discussing, we often have to leave it with, well, it’s complicated. Harvey: Well, I’d like to actually— Franklin: There’s no easy line. Harvey: --to do more research on it, personally. That’s why this profession’s great. I tell my wife I learn something new everyday, not necessarily just in my profession, either, but even so. You can say that about many professions, but being in the history and architectural history field, just pick up something new to read everyday or research angle. Even stuff that I’m doing now, I’m learning more about the history of the area. Franklin: Well, you know, Dave, thank you for all of your efforts in preserving the history of Hanford. Harvey: Well, thank you. Franklin: And I think we’re all excited to see—the national park coming in really is a game-changer in a lot of aspects, bringing in a lot of legitimacy. And we’re all very excited to see where that goes and hopefully the park boundaries will increase and it’ll really get kind of—you know, the park service will have that space to tell that kind of complicated story— Harvey: Well, you know, it’s the heritage tourism. It’s a boon. That’s why there’s so much support—bipartisan support throughout the state, not just here. But I think—and there’s that Atomic Trail, where people go visit these sites now. It’s— Franklin: We found something that democrats and republicans can agree on. [LAUGHTER] Harvey: Yes, one of the few things. Franklin: Well thank you so much, Dave. Harvey: Thanks, Robert. Franklin: Yeah, my pleasure. <a href="https://youtu.be/C9bRLrIWLWc">View interview on Youtube.</a> Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview Pacific Northwest National Laboratory B Reactor 200 Area 100 Area 300 Area 314 Building 313 Building T Plant D Reactor F Reactor N Reactor FFTF (Fast Flux Test Facility) PFP (Plutonium Finishing Plant) Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1993- Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1993- Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Dave Harvey Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Historic preservation Nuclear reactors Conservation and restoration Description An account of the resource Dave Harvey moved to Richland, Washington in 1993 to work on historic preservation of the Hanford Site. An interview conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by Mission Support Alliance on behalf of the United States Department of Energy. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 02/21/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. 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%2F4b3aa15b538860c7f59b7c10347f2eb0.jpg 79472a5b899296e075da2258adef590c https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Ffafe73d0113f10e9dd2ba4567a2f4210.mp4 a79f64e15bc6eda1942c6625971cdc2d 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 Parker Foundation Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Nuclear science; Richland, Wa.; Hanford, Wa.; Parker, Herbert, 1910-1984 Description An account of the resource "The Herbert M. Parker Foundation collects valuable personal perspectives from key individuals who worked in radiological and environmental protection at the Hanford site in the early years of its development. Since 2004, student interns have recorded interviews from health physics and related science professionals. These historically valuable interviews document their personal experiences, observations, contributions and ideas. Several of the distinguished professionals who have spoken at the Annual Herbert M. Parker Lecture are also included. The videotaped interviews and accompanying biographical sketches will be made accessible to the public." See https://tricities.wsu.edu/parkerfoundation/ParkerHistory Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 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. Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Dave Ottley Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Dave Ottley Description An account of the resource An interview with Dave Ottley conducted by the Herbert M. Parker Foundation at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Herbert M. Parker Foundation at Washington State University Tri-Cities https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F6e30d3e337609651104e8500b79d2c9a.JPG 556342979eeca9c416457931981a3047 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Ff603783bd090cbf7b0264ceb196fc541.mp4 98cc7ff788f4b561bb9230343d7a27d4 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 Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford Subject The topic of the resource African Americans; Oral History Description An account of the resource A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource National Park Service Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 9/1/2017-9/1/2019 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project. Relation A related resource RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RG2_8 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 (Duke) Mitchell 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 Duke Mitchell on March 2nd, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Duke about his experiences living in the Tri-Cities and working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Duke Mitchell: My full name is David Lynn Mitchell. D-I-V-A—D-A-V-I-D, I’m sorry. L-Y-N-N for Lynn, and Mitchell, M-I-T-C-H-E-L-L. However, I’ve been called Duke my entire life. I am now 66 years old and very proud of it. But my dad wanted to name me Duke after Duke Snider, baseball player. But my mother said, no. So they named me David after my grandfather, her father, and Lynn after one of my dad’s brothers. Franklin: Okay. Your father was very into baseball, right? Mitchell: Yes! C.J. Mitchell was very into baseball. That was his favorite sport. He grew up doing that, playing that, and he was an umpire for 40 years at least. Umpired in the College World Series four times, did a number of NAIA World Series as well; I think there were about ten of those. And he’s in four or five different halls of fame, not only in the state of Washington, but nationally, in baseball. And then he also umpired and refereed basketball and football at the high school level. Franklin: Wow. That’s great, and we’ll want to talk a bit more about that later. I’d like to kind of start at the beginning. When and where were you born? Mitchell: I was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1951. June 30th. Franklin: Okay. But your father had been to the area before you were born, correct? Mitchell: Yes. Franklin: I’m wondering if you can talk a bit about that. Mitchell: I’ll tell you what I think I know. Franklin: Okay, perfect. Mitchell: He and my mother both told me along the way, but then also I did watch the interview of him just the other day. But I do know that he came out to the Hanford area in 1947 when he was 16 years old, after graduating from high school, Perfection High, in Kildare, Texas. He followed some of his relatives out here looking for work. So he was here for a couple different occasions, it turned out. I didn’t realize until I watched the video on him that he had come here, became homesick, went back to Texas, and then he came back a second time and stayed longer. But then he went back and married my mother, his high school sweetheart, in June of 1950, June 3rd, in fact. Then they moved to Chicago, Illinois, following other relatives, looking for work. While they were there, I was born. We stayed there just a brief time, and then we moved to Hermiston, Oregon in late 1951 or early 1952, as my dad worked as a laborer on the McNary Dam, helping to construct the McNary Dam. Then shortly after that, we moved to Pasco, Washington, and my dad worked on the Blue Bridge as a laborer once again. And he did other kinds of odds-and-ends jobs as well, until he was finally able to get a job out at Hanford, working in construction in all these cases, helping to build the K Basins, he has told us, and other kinds of contracting labor, I guess it would be. Until he was finally able to realize, and was encouraged by some of his supervisors to go to school, go to college. He went to Columbia Basin College and studied chemistry and math, primarily, because those were the things that would apply to what he was doing there at Hanford. And he was able to then work himself into some better jobs as a result, to the point where he became a metallurgical technician in the 300 Area here at Hanford, just north of Richland. That was a good thing for him, got him out of the construction area, into a little more technical fields. And then from there he was able to, again, continue on with his education. Took him 14 years to get his two-year degree at Columbia Basin College it turns out. Franklin: Wow. Mitchell: That’s a long time. A lot of starting and stopping. And in fact, I’m a trustee at Columbia Basin College right now myself, in my eighth year as a trustee. But education has always been an important thing to my parents. All the years as we were growing up, they always talked about education. We were pretty good athletes and played a lot of sports as we were growing up. But my dad and mom always said, that’s not how you’re going to make it, as far as making a living, and you need to get as much education as you can. That’s going to be your ticket to success. They always told us that, and it is definitely true. Franklin: Yeah. Did your mother ever attain higher education as well? Mitchell: Not schooling-wise, but she was a really smart person and hard-working person. And I think the biggest thing is she had a lot of courage and got involved with things. In fact, I’ve thought about them over the last ten years at least, realized how much courage they had to do some of the things that they did as African American people in the time that they did it. So, again, to answer your question, no, my mother did not have higher education, but she did have a lot of experience, life learning, life lessons, I guess you would say. Got involved with a lot of things and allowed us children to also get involved with a lot of things. Franklin: Could you offer any specifics on some of the courageous things that you felt they did as African Americans? Mitchell: Just kind of sticking their neck out, to use one of my dad’s phrases, in that they got involved in areas where they were the only African Americans there. At a time when oftentimes, folks didn’t want to see us around. Franklin: Such as? Mitchell: Such as getting involved with Boy Scouts and the City of Richland. Moving to the city of Richland, for that matter, because—and we moved here in 1955—it was difficult for African Americans to move into Richland because it was a controlled situation. It was a government-owned community; you had to have a full-time job in order to move to Richland. We lived in east Pasco, as all—not all—most African Americans back then, that’s where we lived. That’s where we were allowed to live. So I lived with my parents in east Pasco, probably from the time I was two until I was four or five years old, when we moved to Richland. So the fact that they went to Chicago, following their relatives, places they knew nothing about, then they moved to Hermiston, Oregon. My mother had never been there; my father had. Then they moved to Pasco, and then they moved to Richland, all by the time I was five years old. Like I say, once we got to Richland--and that’s when I can really start remembering what was going on--just getting involved with activities—my mother was involved when I was in Cub Scouts; she was a Cub Scout leader. She used to go to school board meetings, for years, I understand. I wasn’t here after I left in 1969, going to college. But my mother became very active in the community. My dad, also, just the fact that he got involved with a lot of things, took a lot of risks in terms of the jobs that he pursued and he was saying in the video that I watched, the oral interview with him, about taking a pay cut in one instance, hoping to get a job. He did get a job and it turned out real well for him. The fact that he went on 17 interviews, I think was the number that he cited, before he actually got one. Or maybe it was 16 and he got an interview on the 17th. Those kinds of things, in the 1950s, that was courageous for African Americans. I know that now, from my experiences, when I went looking for an apartment to live in in Southern California in the 1970s once I graduated from the Air Force Academy, my first duty assignment. There were certain areas that wouldn’t rent to me, wouldn’t rent to them when they were going through that process. That’s why I call them somewhat courageous. Franklin: Yeah, definitely. Did your parents ever talk about their time living in east Pasco, kind of what the conditions were and why they moved to Richland? Mitchell: Well, I do remember some of the living in east Pasco. I have a lot of relatives that lived there then and still quite a few that live there now. But, to refresh what I had recalled and what I was told along the way, looking again at the oral interview with my father: in east Pasco, back in the late ‘40s, certainly in the ‘50s when I was there, and even into the ‘60s and ‘70s, the infrastructure there was not good. They had outhouses at times while I was there. I remember there were chickens and things walking around, kind of loose in some of the neighborhood when I was a kid myself. Running water, things of that nature, were not what they should have been. It was definitely a second-class environment in east Pasco there. But at the same time, the African American community made themselves a home there. There were a lot of things going on there, there was a lot of cultural things going on there, a lot of activity. But going over to Pasco from Richland, once we moved over here—because we used to go to church in east Pasco, the African American churches, if you will. Franklin: And which church did you attend? Mitchell: We went to Morning Star for one, and there’s a New Hope Church there and there’s some others that we attended. But I had several great-uncles that were in Pasco: Vanis Daniels, Senior, and then Willy Daniels, they were two brothers. They were brothers of my dad’s mother. We used to go over there on Sundays a lot. There were some other relatives that I had there that we would visit as well. But I bring up Willy Daniels because he just lived down the street on Douglas Street there in east Pasco, from Morning Star Baptist Church. I do remember going to church with him. But the reason I get into that, going over there, going through downtown Pasco, Lewis Street was the main drag back in the ‘50s and ‘60s. There was a Sears Roebuck there. I think that might be the Booth Building now; I’m not sure if that’s the same one, where the Pasco School District is located and their facilities. But going again east on Lewis Street, through downtown Pasco, then you go underneath a bridge, I guess it’s a railroad bridge or whatever. That was the dividing line between Pasco and east Pasco. It was like going to almost a different world in some respects, because of just the change in the conditions. Not only the folks, from a Caucasian world, if you will, into an African American world, but just the quality of what was there just wasn’t the same. At the same time, folks made the best life that they could there. I certainly respect and love my relatives who live there, came there, and are still there, some of them. Franklin: You still have some relatives in Pasco? Mitchell: Absolutely, yes. I have a number of relatives still in Pasco. Some in east Pasco, some who have moved. Because when Urban Renewal happened in, what, I think it was the late ‘60s, early ‘70s— Franklin: That sounds about right. Mitchell: Yeah, but then they dispersed some of the ethnic neighborhoods, if you will. Certainly in Pasco it was some of the dispersal of African Americans throughout the community and things of that nature. But Vanis Daniels, Senior lived there, but his son, Vanis Daniels, Junior, is still over there, he and his family. And then Edmon Daniels, his brother. There are a number of others, but I don’t want to name too many names because I’ll leave somebody out and then I will—folks won’t be happy with me. Franklin: I understand completely. It’s so interesting. I like the way you described that, going under the bridge. I think so many of us have heard that phrase, right, “on the other side of the tracks.” Mitchell: Yeah, it’s definitely the other side of the tracks. Franklin: Or sometimes “on the wrong side of the tracks.” But that’s literally how it was. Mitchell: Absolutely. Franklin: I mean, the tracks were kind of this dividing line, this de facto segregated line. Mitchell: Yes, they were. And when I say under the bridge, it was a railroad bridge. The tracks went across the top of the bridge. So going on West Lewis to East Lewis, you’d go down underneath the railroad tracks through this tunnel, this bridge, and then come back up on the other side. Back then, there was Whittier Elementary School, which is where most of the African American students went because that was in our part of town, if you will. There was a definite distinction. Franklin: Awesome, thank you. Okay. So Richland, obviously, was kind of a different world. Mitchell: It was. Franklin: And you described how you had to work at Hanford to live in Richland. I’m wondering if you could talk about your early memories in Richland, and maybe even going back as far as your moving from Pasco to Richland and how that change was for you and your family. Mitchell: I’d love to. As I say, I was probably four to five years old when we moved to Richland from Pasco. At that time, there was myself and then my brother, Greg, would have been—well, he is two years younger than me, so he would have been two to three years old. And then our brother Nestor was born in 1955. He was born in Kennewick General Hospital. I don’t know if he was born before we actually moved to Richland or right after we moved to Richland. But the big thing was, we lived in a prefab at 100 Craighill in Richland and when we first moved there, there was four of us, I would say: my mother and father and myself and Greg. It’s a two-bedroom prefab and it has one bathroom. By the time we moved out of that house in 1965, there were eight of us. Franklin: Wow! Mitchell: That was big, because the bathroom was the crunch point. I mean, that was where—we had to get through the bathroom in order to get to church on time, and we were almost always late for church, which really stuck in my mind. As far as moving there, the community there in what was the old south end of Richland, we were treated pretty well. At the same time, we were—there was another African-American family on the next street, Casey Street, which was the Wallace family. There were a number of children there. Theartis Wallace was a very good basketball player for Richland High School. He had a brother, Maurice, who also played basketball. Another brother, Bruce, several years younger who played basketball for Richland, et cetera. And then down another corner there was the Rockamore family, African American family. They are cousins of mine, ours, as well. All from Texas. Most of us— Franklin: All three families? Mitchell: All three families. Yeah, many of the families that I knew, anyway, came from a place called Kildare, Texas. That’s where my parents went to high school and where they’re from. Franklin: How do you spell that? Mitchell: K-I-L-D-A-R-E. I think my dad did talk about that in his segment, as well. Franklin: Yes, yeah. Mitchell: A lot of folks from Kildare came to the Tri-Cities because once they found they could have a job, find a job, folks came looking for work. Because as my dad always said, you could always find a job here and it paid much better than the jobs did in east Texas. So that was one of the reasons that they were drawn here. At the same time realizing that they weren’t always welcome. But they could find a job, and generally speaking, it was a better condition than what they had left. So they were willing to come here. As far as growing up, once again, I started to say, we were treated fairly well by the folks in our community, the Caucasian folks. Realizing that there were some differences. I’ve thought about those things before I came here today. One of the things that we were always taught was to treat folks well and respectfully. There were some rules, some unwritten rules, certainly, as far as how the races interacted or didn’t interact together. We were aware of those. One of the ones that I think about is, we didn’t go to other folks’ houses, normally, and certainly didn’t go in their house. In my family, we were expected to be home before dark, so we were always home before dark. And my parents were pretty strict with that. We played sports—I was the oldest of the six, of course. When I was eight years old, I started playing Little League baseball, and I was pretty good. My brothers coming along were pretty good as well. Sports was a good thing for us, because it did allow us to interact with others and others to interact with us. And also get to know us, because many of the folks, Caucasian folks, in the community hadn’t really dealt with black folks in the past. So that was a way for us to interact and that kind of thing. That was good. They got to know us, and we got to know them somewhat. Like I say, I was always treated well and the teachers were really helpful. And I was a star on the playground, which was a good thing. But at the same time, again, the school was the big thing for us, according to my parents, and I believed it. However, I finally got to seventh grade, and I played football, baseball and basketball in the seventh grade and eighth grade, throughout. But I didn’t do well in school that seventh grade year. In fact, I got three Ds. Franklin: Oh my. Mitchell: That year, my first report card in junior high school. Not middle school, junior high school back then. My parents said, no more sports for you until you get your grades straightened out. So that caught my attention. Franklin: Yeah, that must’ve hurt, as a— Mitchell: It did, because that’s what I did! I was pretty good. Well, you know, he’d always told me, my parents always told me about the importance of education. And then I was also starting to see that, too. Watching some of the programs on television that I used to watch. Whether it be the sports programs—because I watched every ball game that was on television if I could. Back in the mid-‘50s, late ‘50s, we only had two TV stations, I think, in the Tri-Cities then. Whatever was on that was sports, I would watch it. Especially college football, I would watch that. That’s when I first fell in love with USC Trojan football team, because every November, we could watch Ohio State and Michigan in the morning and USC and UCLA in the afternoon. And I watched them all. I loved what I saw. That was one of the reasons that I started thinking, I think I want to go to college. And then also, the environment in Richland, education is a big thing in Richland, as it is throughout the Tri-Cities, but Richland in particular. And I do—many would attribute that to the fact that Hanford is here and there are a lot of well-educated people here. That trickles down to their kids and it’s expected that you do well in school. Being a competitive individual, some of my classmates were doing really well in education. I can do that, too. In eighth grade I decided that I was going to be on honor roll, because that’s what they do in Richland. I was accustomed—well, being kind of a—I won’t say top dog but certainly competitive. So I wanted to do that. Also in eighth grade is when I had a crush on a young lady and I found out that she liked guys who did well in school. From them on, I did well in school. Turns out, she’s also the young lady that asked me to run for class president when I was a senior in high school. I did, to impress her, feeling I wouldn’t win anyway. However, I did win. I’ve been paying for it for 50 years, in that every time I come home from the military for my class reunions, I had the privilege of giving a speech. And then also since I’ve been back for the last 25 years, my best friend and I have been some of the leaders in putting together the recent reunions. And in fact, I was just asked on Monday at Fred Meyer, what are we going to do for our 50th reunion next year? So, like I say, that’s continued on for a long time, that responsibility. But it’s been a privilege and it also helped me get into the Air Force Academy. Franklin: It’s the gift that keeps on giving, huh? Mitchell: It’s a gift that keeps on giving. Franklin: And what year did you graduate school? Mitchell: Richland High School class of 1969. Franklin: But that would be Columbia High School, right? Mitchell: We were Columbia High School back then. Although we did have an R on our helmets; we were always called Richland, but officially we were Columbia High School. Franklin: I just, I only say that because when I said Richland High School to Ann Roseberry, she— Mitchell: She corrected you? Franklin: She was very—yes. Very, very prompt to correct me that it was indeed Columbia High School. Mitchell: Okay, yeah. Ann Roseberry has recently been the manager of the Richland Public Library. She invited me to be on the Richland Public Library board about nine years ago. So I’m in my ninth year of being on that board because of Ann Roseberry, formerly Ann Chamberlain when we were growing up. Her father is—or was—a retired lieutenant—excuse me, a retired full colonel in the Air Force. When I went to the Air Force Academy one of the people that I talked with when I came back was her father. So we’ve been connected somewhat for 50 years. I’m a lieutenant colonel, retired, and I got through the Air Force Academy as a football player. I was recruited to play football for the Air Force. Franklin: Oh, wow, so sports was— Mitchell: And I did play. Sports was a big thing for us. In fact, of the six of us children, three of us were put through college playing college football. Franklin: Wow. And you played for which— Mitchell: I played for the Air Force Academy. And my brother, Greg, played for University of Puget Sound. He was a wide receiver and defensive back. I was a defensive back and a quarterback and a tailback in college at Air Force. And then our brother, Cameron, who was a high school American football player, and I understand also a high school All-American basketball player at Richland High School, but he played for Washington State University. And he’s now a superior court judge. And I have a brother, Nestor, who was a pretty good baseball player as well. He had the opportunity to play at Washington State University. But apparently he and the coach didn’t see eye to eye, so he didn’t stay there for that purpose for that long. He’s a recently retired fireman from the City of Seattle, however. Franklin: Wow. I imagine when you were growing up watching sports, that would have been the time where the leagues were starting to desegregate, or have more African American players in them, right? Because that would have been— Mitchell: Absolutely. That was one of the reasons, I guess, that I—partially why I fell in love with USC. Because there were not a lot of the major schools that had African American players in the ‘50s, certainly, and into the ‘60s—because I graduated in ’69. But USC had a lot of really good teams; they also had a lot of good—well, not a lot—they had three or four good African American ball players on their team. That was not that big of a—not that prominent—not that prevalent, is the right word. Not that prevalent at that time. In fact, in the SEC, Southeastern Conference, that the Air Force played in Tennessee in the 1971 Sugar Bowl, the SEC was totally segregated. Well, not totally—99.9% segregated. Now you look at the SEC and as far as football and basketball, most of their players are in fact African American. But when we played them in the ‘70s, early ’69, ’70, ’71, is when I played for the Air Force, they did not have more than two or three African American players in the SEC and other leagues as well. Even the Big 10, which had a fair number of African American players, on a given team, you’d probably only have three or four or five and they were all pretty good or they wouldn’t be on the team, probably. So that was a transition period, for sure. In fact, we played, I think at least one game, or one team that was somewhat hesitant to play Air Force because of the African American teams on Air Force. Even in 1969, ’70 timeframe. Franklin: Right. Still definitely well within the civil rights era. Mitchell: Absolutely. That’s another thing that I was thinking about. Again, I went to the Air Force Academy in 1969. I was selected to go there, probably just a little less than a year after Martin Luther King was assassinated. I do know that the United States government was trying to find ways to integrate and to change some of the policies and procedures that were going on in this country at the time. I certainly believe that one of the reasons that I was able to go to the Air Force Academy—I was recruited, again, to play football—but I think there was more emphasis on finding qualified African American students who could be in service academies and other aspects of life in the United States. So. Franklin: Great. You had mentioned some of these unwritten rules and without getting too personal, I wanted to know, how did dating figure into that when you were in high school? Mitchell: Ha, ha. Yeah, that was one of those unwritten areas. It was one of those things that it was pretty well understood that as an African American guy, black guy, you really probably shouldn’t date Caucasian girls, white girls. The first date I had, however, was something called Tolo at Richland High School. It’s like Sadie Hawkins. Franklin: Yes, okay. Mitchell: Where the girls invite the guys. I was invited by a Caucasian lady to go to that with her. And in fact, I was one of two sophomore princes for Tolo in 1967, it would have been. Yeah, ’67. Maybe ’66, ’67, when I was a sophomore at Richland High School. But getting back to the specific question, yeah. We went to Richland Baptist Church on George Washington Way here in Richland. It was—I think we were the only black family there. There might have been others that came and went while we were there. And there were some young ladies that I certainly was attracted to, but at the same time, I knew, no, that’s not going to work. And then also being a Southern Baptist church, just—no. And then another one that has been in the news recently is about Kennewick and how we knew that we weren’t supposed to be in Kennewick. Unless we maybe had a specific purpose, maybe going to a store to pick up something. I think we went to Basin Surplus, I think that’s in Kennewick, to buy something several times with my parents. We played sports over in Kennewick, but then we got on a bus and came home. Franklin: Yeah, I wanted to ask a little bit more about that. I’ve heard from many that there was kind of a de facto rule that African Americans weren’t encouraged—were not encouraged to be in Kennewick after dark and would be stopped by the police if they were. Did that ever happen to you or anyone you know? Do you have any experience or recollection of that kind of treatment? Mitchell: Okay. I have heard about it. I never personally experienced it, because I am one who tried to learn—I tried to learn from others and their experiences. And have always been taught to not put yourself in a situation where you can find yourself in trouble if you can help it. So from my specific situation, I would have to say it’s hearsay. Because I never really saw the sign. But yeah, I certainly heard it, and I strongly believe that I felt it. Even in Pasco and Richland, I mean, there were certain areas that you knew that you probably ought not to be in, and so you didn’t go there. Franklin: Even in Richland? Mitchell: Even in Richland. There were some areas—well, again, in 1965, my dad talked about how he tried to buy a house up in Beverly Heights, which is just to the southwest of Carmichael. Franklin: Yes. Mitchell: Okay. And I do remember that because I was 14 years old at the time and we thought we were going to get out of that two-bedroom prefab with eight of us and get a new house, or a different house. And it fell through. But having been in that area, even in the recent few years, yeah, that would be an area that I don’t think would be welcoming to us, even now. And then my dad who was a realtor for a number of years—he did pass away January 24th, 2016. But he was selling real estate almost up until that time. Franklin: Wow. Mitchell: Well, 2014 is when I found he was ill. He was still a realtor at that time but he didn’t do a lot of selling because I took him to a lot of medical appointments then. But we’ll say 2010, just as a number—a year. But there were some areas in Pasco, West Pasco that he says that he was showing an African American family some potential houses to buy, and some folks came up to him, basically, and said, no, not in this area. You’re not really welcome here. So that was approximately 2010 timeframe in West Pasco. As far as Richland, my dad did experience some difficulties there on 115 Spring Street, which he purchased that house in 2000—excuse me, 1976. 1976. I know that for a fact, because I loaned him $10,000 towards his down payment. The reason that I was able to do that, I was a lieutenant in the Air Force, my wife was working, we didn’t have any children. Also, I had just received a legal settlement and some dollars from my car accident where I had been run into by a drunk in Colorado—excuse me, in Wyoming, on my way back to Colorado. And so, I was able to loan my dad $10,000 for a down payment on that 115 Spring Street house. But he did receive at least one anonymous phone call threatening him and us. And then one of his coworkers there at Hanford did inform my dad that when this coworker was about to move into a house on Spring Street, that this coworker was quizzed as to whether or not he knew about “those folks down the street,” talking about our family. Now, I wasn’t in that house. I was in California at that time. Because, again, I left Richland in June of 1969 on my way to the Air Force Academy. Franklin: Right. Mitchell: Okay. So I would come home during my breaks and such but I never lived in Richland directly again until 1993. So, you know, I observed things, I heard things, but I was gone for 24 years. Franklin: Okay, great. Oh, I say that all the time. Richland, especially when you would have first moved here, was a very peculiar town in that it was owned by the government— Mitchell: Yes, it was. Franklin: --which is a distinction very few towns in America have. I’m wondering if you could talk about whether—I guess it would be more upon reflection, but kind of the peculiarities of living in this government town where everyone had a job and everyone was assigned housing and things like that. Mitchell: I’d love to. Primarily because I’m a retired Air Force officer. And I, along the way, came to realize that the government towns of Oak Ridge, Tennessee and there in New Mexico and also here at Richland were designed and built on a military model—a military base. And the assignment of houses was based on a military model, and that you received the kind of house that you were offered based on your rank, if you will. Whether or not you were a manager or how high a manager, or if you were further down on the totem pole, if you will. For the African Americans, I do remember that almost every one of us that I can think of lived in a prefab. I think there were three-bedroom prefabs and two-bedroom prefabs. I know we had a two-bedroom prefab. I don’t know what the Wallaces had because they had a fairly good sized family as well. I don’t know if they had a two-bedroom or a three-bedroom, 102 Casey Street. Down the street on Craighill, my cousins, again, the Rockamores, I think—they only had one daughter, so I think they had a two-bedroom. But one of the things living in Tri—Richland, I’m sorry, in Richland—I think they had inspections of the yards and things were maintained very well here. Also, Richland was fairly new, too. Because, now looking back on it, leaving here in 1969, and Richland I think was really built in 1943 or ’42, or something like that. It wasn’t that old. Franklin: Yeah. No, it certainly wasn’t. Mitchell: But things were in pretty good shape. We had a lot of what are called Quonset hut-type buildings. The library was in one of those. It’s the buildings that have kind of the round roof, that kind of thing. There are not many left now. Franklin: A lot of those were military surplus. Mitchell: Well, that was military. Yeah, exactly. That’s what I’m saying. And then just up the street—well, up here was where Camp Hanford was. That was a Army camp, because they had the Army here, I believe, to help with security for Hanford. That’s my best knowledge of why we had that group of military stationed here. In fact, my dad’s—one of my dad’s three sisters, Emma Mitchell, now Emma Peeples, married an Army enlisted person while she was here. She moved up from Texas to here to live with our family in that two-bedroom prefab. So there was maybe nine of us at some point. I mean, I can’t remember how many there were. Franklin: When I first got to town, I lived in a two-bedroom prefab with my wife. It was small just for two of us and a cat. I just— Mitchell: Well, we had bunk beds. I know we had two sets of bunk beds. I can’t remember where everybody slept. We had one sister. I don’t think she slept in the same room with us guys. I don’t know that for a fact. It was tight. Franklin: Yeah, I—it would have to be. Mitchell: Yeah. But again, everybody that lived in Richland at that time was pretty much connected to Hanford in some fashion. So we all had that in common. Going to school, education was significant and important to almost everybody. If you weren’t trying to do well in school, you were an anomaly, I would say. That’s the way I felt, anyway. Because we were expected—at least the folks I hung out with, and I hung out with ball players, a lot, and students who did well in school, just because those were the kinds of folks I was attracted to as well. But taking higher math or physics or biology or chemistry or whatever, those were things that I did do, because I realized, again, going back to eighth grade that I wanted to go to college. I didn’t know what I was going to study, but I just wanted to be prepared. And then when I did take the SAT, I did do well on that. I was a semifinalist on the SAT. I didn’t realize what it took to become a finalist until my son took the SAT when we got back here and he did very well with it and he was a finalist. In fact, he ended up being a Rhoads Scholar candidate. He’s pretty bright guy. He’s got a PhD now in history. And then my daughter’s also pretty bright as well. Franklin: Does your son teach? Mitchell: He teaches at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee right now. He’s been there three years; he’s on a tenure track position. Franklin: Those are—I’m a historian myself, I know how coveted those positions are. So he must really be a bright guy. Mitchell: Yeah, he’s pretty bright. Like I say, he’s—well, yeah. And my wife is pretty bright, too. That’s where they got it from, I’m sure. Franklin: Yeah. That’s a good thing to say on camera. Mitchell: Well, that’s how I truly believe. Franklin: Oh, I know. Mitchell: At the same time, I’m no slouch, to use my dad’s, another one of his phrases. Yeah. Franklin: Social events, what kind of social/community events in Richland or in Pasco do you remember participating in growing up? Mitchell: I didn’t participate in a lot. Primarily, it was in church, whether it would be at Richland Baptist Church. There were a few early on, perhaps in Pasco, when we’d go back to Pasco and spend time with our relatives and that kind of thing. But I didn’t go to many social activities, again, while going through—I went through Lewis and Clark Elementary School, Carmichael Junior High, and then Richland High School. And I didn’t go to dances. I didn’t do a lot of things at night, like I said, because we were expected to be home at night. So I generally was. I was the first-born, and I do believe in birth order having an impact on how you do things. I do believe, oftentimes the first-born tries to be a little more obedient to their parents and do what the parents expect. So I didn’t break a lot of rules or whatever. Now, as my parents had more kids, they became a little less strict. My brothers and sisters, I strongly believe, were able to do a lot of things I wasn’t able to do. But at the same time, I really didn’t want to do a lot of those things just because, as I say, I did have that feeling at times that I wasn’t always welcome or that—you know. I was a little different. Franklin: Yeah. Connected to that, you would have been in middle school and high school at the height of the civil rights movement, nationwide. I’m wondering if you could reflect on how that impacted you. Mitchell: Well, it definitely did in that I have relatives who lived in Watts, California, outside of—well, LA. And when Watts was burning and they were having riots there, I was concerned for my relatives and that. I’d been there before, visiting, in, well, 1964. My family and I were there visiting some of my mother’s sisters and other relatives in Los Angeles, in Watts. And so in 1965 when I’m seeing Watts burn and that—and there’s also riots going on in Detroit, Michigan and in Chicago—which, I have relatives in Chicago; I was born in Chicago, as I said. I have relatives in Detroit, I have relatives in Oakland, I have relatives in Portland, Oregon and Seattle, and lots of other places. So I was fearful, I was concerned. I was concerned about what might happen here, locally. Because there was also some strife in Pasco as a result of just the fact that the conditions were not what they should have been. With other folks around the country expressing their frustration with being suppressed in many respects, some things did happen in Pasco as well. So that started getting kind of close to home. So I was fearful, I was concerned, and then, again, when folks started getting shot, I mean, some of our leaders started getting shot—of course, John Kennedy was out here visiting Hanford Site, N Reactor, I think in 1962 is when he visited? Franklin: ’63. Mitchell: ’63, okay. Franklin: About two months before— Mitchell: So then November 22nd, ’63, he’s assassinated. And then his brother gets killed shortly thereafter, and of course, Martin Luther King gets killed, and Malcolm X gets killed. There’s a lot going on in the ‘60s. Franklin: Yeah. Mitchell: And then we had Sharon Tate from Richland High School and Charles Manson. Franklin: Did you know— Mitchell: No. No, no, I’m ’69; I think she was like ’61 or ’62. No, I mean, I would have been in elementary school or probably not even to junior high yet. But we knew about her. And then we had some other significant athletes and such out of the Richland School District that I think—well, I won’t try to name names again, but we had some folks who were prominent. And then one of the guys my dad didn’t make mention of when he was doing his interview—what is his name? Mike McCormick, former state senator, I think he was, for the State of Washington, and he was one of my dad’s supervisors. He’s one of the ones that helped to encourage my dad—or did encourage my dad to go to Columbia Basin College so that he could move on and get perhaps a different job. That did work out for my dad. I did go to school with one of Mike McCormick’s children, I believe it was. If not children, maybe a nephew or niece. So there were just a lot of folks that were important in my life. The football stadium was named after Fran Rish. I played on his last football team. I did start for him as a sophomore in football. I never played, actually, directly for Art Dawald, who the gym’s named after, but I did have him for a government instructor or teacher. I played on the junior varsity my sophomore year for Richland Bombers. And I actually played for Ray Juricich who was the head of the sophomore team, and of course Art Dawald was the overall basketball coach. And then I ran track and field and went to state and relays twice when I was a junior and senior. Did not have real good technique, but I was fairly fast and we had a really good relay team. We, in fact, still have a school record at Richland High School Track and Field after 40-some years. Because they don’t run that race anymore. Franklin: Oh, well, that helps. Mitchell: Yeah. We ran the 4x220-yard dash relay. Now it’d be the 4x200 meters. The girls run that, but the guys don’t run that race anymore. So we still have that record. Franklin: I’m wondering if—what do you know about the events that happened in Pasco, the strife that happened in Pasco sometime in the late—like ’67? Mitchell: Well, I know—some of my relatives, again, were some of the leaders in Pasco that got involved with some of that. As I understand it, it was trying to get running water and perhaps electricity and paved roads in Pasco, were some of the things that came up during that time. Again, just some basic services that we didn’t have on the east side of Pasco that were in west Pasco, or central Pasco, but the black side of town didn’t have those. So some folks were concerned about that. And then some educational things. And just fair treatment all around to begin with. Because even here in the Tri-Cities, there were places that wouldn’t rent to us, that wouldn’t sell us a house, things of that nature, and those kinds of frustrations and feelings of being second-class citizens and such certainly boiled over. It was just a time of United States history when folks started saying enough is enough and we don’t want to accept this anymore. Some of that was here, too. Franklin: Was there any—did you or your family ever face any discrimination in, like, going out to eat for example? Mitchell: I don’t remember that directly, but sometimes you would get to a place and you would—it was kind of like you weren’t there. Folks would walk by you, and didn’t really want to take you to a table or offer you a place to sit. Things of that nature, sometimes. Franklin: They’d just kind of wait you out? Mitchell: Yeah. But we didn’t go out that much anyway, because there were so many of us. Again, family of eight, my dad was working—he worked two or three jobs, back then, two or three. And then he was umpiring along the way as well. But we didn’t go out to eat a whole lot. I never had a steak in my life until I went to the Air Force Academy. That was the first time I ever had a steak for a meal. We went fishing and we did things of that nature, and that was things they did in Texas, that’s things we did here. So we did fish frys and chicken and things of that nature. Peach cobbler was a big thing in our house. My mom did that really well. We had a lot of collard greens and cornbread and beans and things. We never went hungry in my house. We never, ever went hungry in my house. But at the same time, we just had some of those basic kinds of food, and we didn’t often go to a restaurant. In fact, probably one of the first restaurants I really remember—I don’t remember the exact restaurant, but I remember when I went to the state track meet, it was held—when I was a junior, it was held at WSU Pullman. We were undefeated in our relay at that time, and we ended up going from first to last. I think there were eight teams. One of our guys took off too soon, so we had to stop. So we went from wherever we were to the last place. Then we ended up finishing, I think, sixth overall out of the eight. But I remember going to a restaurant there, and that was a big deal for me, because I’d never really done that kind of thing. I don’t remember what I had to eat, but that was nice. And then another time—well, we used to go to the basketball tournaments over in Seattle, because Richland Bombers used to go to state a lot. Kind of like now, like they’re over there right now. I have a nephew who’s playing for Richland this year, Nathan Mitchell, Cameron’s son. But we had relatives there in central Seattle, went to Garfield High School, which was the predominantly black school, back then. We stayed with our relatives, the Lowe family, but we’d go to Hec Edmundson Pavilion there on U-Dub campus and we went a number of years when the Bombers were playing. One of those times we went to Ivar’s, and I don’t think it was with my family, but I don’t know if it was track or what it was related to, but I remember going to Ivar’s, the main one, the primary one, the first one. That was a big deal for me. Franklin: Just because you hadn’t really been to many restaurants growing up? Mitchell: No, no, no, no. Well, when we traveled places, as with most African American families, you didn’t really stop. When we went to California or wherever, we pretty much drove all the way through, and you’d just change up drivers. Because, again, most motels didn’t really want us, and we didn’t stop along the way. You’d pack up the food that you needed and you hit the road and you get there. Franklin: That’s interesting. I’ve heard that related often when people were from the South would say that about the South, but you—even on the West Coast, your family would—just felt safer not stopping? Mitchell: Well, that was it, and that was how you knew how to do it. Because you don’t know when you pull into a place—well, first of all, they’re probably not going to want you there anyway, and secondly, it might not be safe for you. But, again, when I was—after I graduated from the Air Force Academy, and I’d travel between here, the Tri-Cities and back to Colorado Springs, several trips I went with some of my classmates and friends that were Caucasian and such, so we didn’t run into a lot of problems that way. But when I traveled by myself, and I know when I was a lieutenant—I guess I had become a captain—in 1979, I went from California to Montgomery, Alabama for one of my military schools, and back. I was just careful, and even in ’79, you could tell when folks weren’t real thrilled that you were there, wanting to get a room. But I also made sure that I went to the big chains, like Ramada Inn, I would go to that, or I would go to Holiday Inn, or wherever, as opposed to other places. Franklin: Why? Why would you pick a chain instead of a mom-and-pop? Mitchell: Because they probably were a little more accepting and had rules and regulations about how you treat people and also they wouldn’t want to have a lawsuit if they didn’t treat you well. They wouldn’t want to experience any negative situation. Franklin: Right. Mitchell: So that’s something that I just learned along the way, that you try to put things, again, in your favor. So that if you’re going to have a difficult situation, you want to minimize it or avoid it altogether. Franklin: Kind of leverage their want to keep a good reputation. Mitchell: Absolutely. And their want to help keep you safe. Because it’s in their best interest to do that. Franklin: Yeah. Because your money is just as good anyone else’s money. Mitchell: It is. And my money’s not as good if they get a negative rap, then other folks aren’t going to go there, either. And also they could get sued. Franklin: Yeah, definitely. Mitchell: So there was a lot of reasons. But, you know, we all do that. Even today. I’m sure you do those kinds of things, too. You think about it. What’s going to be in your best interest. And certainly, as African Americans, you learn to do that. Because you know there are lot of folks actively not interested in your well-being, necessarily. Franklin: Right. You mentioned when Kennedy came to visit and your—did you go out— Mitchell: Yeah, our whole family went out there. Franklin: I’m wondering if you could talk about that day and that experience. Mitchell: Well, I can’t remember it in great detail, other than that there was a ton of people. It was a big deal. Again, I don’t know if I got it from watching my dad’s segment or not, but apparently they had cleared some of the sagebrush away and waste to ensure that more vehicles could get out there, because we parked in the sand and sagebrush out there, when we got out there. And in the last—well, since I’ve been back here and I’ve worked at the K Basins, and I’ve worked out in the outer area at Hanford over my 18 years at Hanford, it’s a long way out there. Franklin: Yeah, N Reactor’s pretty far out there. Mitchell: It’s pretty far out there. It’s almost out to the, well, not the Vernita Bridge, but it’s almost that far, it’s just not that same road. It takes a while to get out there. But it was a big, big deal. Big in the community, and probably—I don’t know if it was a school day or not, but I think that they let us out of school. Yeah, there was all kinds of folks out there. Franklin: It’s not everyday the President of the United States comes to town. Mitchell: No, especially John Kennedy, I mean—they were really—like they talk about Camelot and all that stuff and then Jackie Kennedy, et cetera. It was a big deal. We were pleased we had an opportunity to go out there. Franklin: So your father, when you moved to Richland, your father started working at Hanford from where you were a young boy, and then he continued working there until you left and afterwards. What did you know about your father’s job at Hanford, and what did you know about Hanford growing up? Mitchell: Well, we were here in Richland when they had the buses that would drive around in the morning and pick folks up and that. And, in fact, my dad was in a car—yeah, a car accident where one of the buses hit him in the fog one time. But it was a very controlled situation. Not everybody—well, you didn’t know what everyone else did, and everyone knew you didn’t know what everyone else did. That’s the way it had to be, because it’s Hanford and it’s all secret and that kind of thing. Government town, there was rules and regulations, standards on the houses and that type of thing. Like I say, there were inspections on the houses if I’m not mistaken, on the various houses and your yards and that kind of thing. They expected you to take care of your yard, just like on a military base. Again, everybody that you knew and you went to school with, had a relative that was working at Hanford. So you felt some camaraderie with that. At that time, Richland Bomber basketball team was a big deal. And in fact, we had the current gym, the big gym that we have, was built, I think, 1965. It has three big floors on it. When they rolled the bleachers back, and I know we had our PE classes and that kind of thing in there. Davis of Yakima was probably our biggest rival early on when I was coming along, and then Pasco, later, became our biggest basketball rival. But they had some good players. For Pasco, a guy named Ron Howard, graduated class of ’70. So I played football against him and basketball just one year for me, but I ran track and field against him, et cetera. But he played basketball, Seattle University, and then he played football for the Dallas Cowboys. And then he was in the Super Bowl at least twice. I probably haven’t seen him for about five or six, seven years now, but last time I did talk with him, he was coaching at Rainier Beach High School in Seattle. And then another guy, Albert Wilkins, who’s pastor over here at Morning Star Baptist Church, and in fact, he presided over the funeral of both my mom and dad. But he was a Pasco High running back, class of ’69, good ball player, went to University of Washington, played for them for a brief time. Then another guy that I never played against but know of is Michael Jackson who played for both the Washington Huskies and also the Seattle Seahawks, outstanding basketball player. As far as Richland goes, coming along, Ray Stein was one of the ones that we all looked up to and that. He went to Washington State University and played basketball for them. I think he graduated in about ’63 or so. And then, of course, the Wallace brothers and the Brown brothers, those were both African American families in basketball. When I was playing football for Richland, we weren’t very good. I was team captain my senior year and also I was the quarterback my senior year, although I got hurt a couple times. I had a super sophomore year as a football player in high school, then injuries in both my junior and senior year. But— Franklin: Speaking of Richland sports, Richland High sports in general, there’s been some controversy in recent years over the mascot of—I just would like to get your thoughts on that subject. Mitchell: Okay. I have thought about that. I’ve also thought—not for this discussion, but I have thought about in the past about it for future discussions. I can understand why a lot of folks don’t like it, because of what it symbolizes as far as destruction—death and destruction in a lot of respects. Same time, I, for one, strongly believe that if it had not been for the atomic bomb being dropped in Japan—on Japan, the war would have been quite different in terms of the loss of life; it would have been much greater on both sides, had the United States and its allies tried to go into Japan and the islands and fight the Japanese until they were willing to give up. I don’t think they would’ve given up, just given their culture and such, and the belief that their emperor was basically like god, they would fight to the death in many respects, I believe. And I think, with the bomb actually being used, it did bring the war to an end much more quickly than it would have been otherwise. Now, as far as the symbol and our still using it, I can understand why folks don’t think it’s necessary or would like to see us get rid of it. And having worn that on my helmet, on my uniform in the past, I would be willing to give it up. At the same time, I’m not willing to be an activist to try to make it happen. But, yeah, I think over time, it’s probably going to go. Franklin: That’s a very well-reasoned response. Mitchell: Yeah. Franklin: Well-thought-out. Thank you. I just—since sports were so crucial to you, I really wanted to get— Mitchell: Yeah. Franklin: Because that’s certainly—it’s definitely kind of a flashpoint in a very—as someone who’s not from the community, not from this area originally, it’s a very—mascots are generally of a certain ethnicity or an animal, and it’s very interesting just in terms of that it’s really a mascot for a focal point in time. Mitchell: Yes, it is. Franklin: And that, to me, is pretty—it makes it pretty unique among many mascots. Mitchell: It does, but Richland, Oak Ridge, Tennessee—yeah, they’re unique communities because of World War II and what resulted in the outcomes of World War II as a result of these facilities. Franklin: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And their, of course, also work in the Cold War, and their 40-plus years of helping to construct the US nuclear weapons stockpile, which is a very formidable resource. Mitchell: And we just tore down the Plutonium Finishing Plant, PFP, recently. And we’re tearing down many of the other facilities, and rightfully so. Yeah. Franklin: Okay, we’ve covered so much, I’m trying to—I just want to get a good gather on where we go now. Did segregation or racism affect your education in any way in Richland? Mitchell: I think once we were here, no. I think that—there are other folks that maybe it impacted, because we were here. But me, directly, no. In that, again, I think sports helped in that I was a good ballplayer—we were pretty good ballplayers. There were other African Americans in the community that were pretty good ballplayers. And as a result, we were somewhat accepted. At the same time, I know there were folks that didn’t like it—who didn’t like us, necessarily. But I don’t care who you are or where you are, there’s always somebody that doesn’t like you, isn’t going to care for you or whatever. But don’t worry about that. I don’t worry about that. I do try to treat others the way I would like to be treated, and treat them respectfully. If I don’t necessarily care for them—and I don’t care for everybody; I don’t think any of us do—but I try to stay away from them if I don’t care for them. Franklin: Sure. Mitchell: And certainly they have as much right to be people and do what they want to do as I do. And I would hope that folks would feel that way about me. And if they don’t care for me or my family, that’s fine. Just leave us alone, and we’ll do the same for you. But— Lori Larson: Can I ask a question? Mitchell: Yes, please. Larson: [LAUGHTER] So how did your insertion and your family’s insertions across the Tri-Cities, how did you affect segregation? Mitchell: Okay. Franklin: Sorry, before you respond, could you state your name? Larson: Oh. Lori Larson. Franklin: Thanks. Mitchell: Okay, Lori Larson. Most of the African American folks in the community, including my family—and my family has been fairly prominent in the community because we’ve been blessed to be able to do some things—I think it’s helped a lot, because folks get to know us and find out that we’re people just like them. Many times, when we haven’t been around other ethnic groups, we don’t know about them, we’re a little bit fearful of them, regardless of what group it is, just because they’re different. And we are different. But at the same time, we’re very much the same. We’re all humans and we all have the same feelings and emotions and needs and that kind of thing. So I think that, especially when we were ballplayers, getting to know people and folks getting to know us, and I know I had my name in the paper quite a bit for sports. But also, I really enjoyed having my name in the paper for being in the honor roll. It was a big thing for me. My kids as well when they were on the honor roll. The fact that, yeah, we can compete and we can do things that are positive. Everything we do is not just negative. And sometimes you feel that folks feel that way about you. That, you know, you guys are just negative. So, have I answered your question? I think that we contributed by allowing folks to get to know us. And see us. And see that we’re not a whole lot different than they are. Franklin: Great, thank you. Were there any civil rights actions or demonstrations in Richland that you know of? I know there was a local, I think a CORE office or a human rights commission. But I’m wondering if there were any organized marches or anything like that? Mitchell: Not that I know of directly, but, again, John Dam Plaza was here then, just like it’s here now. And there might have been something at John Dam Plaza. I know that my mother got involved with some activities—I don’t know if she was part of NAACP or not. But I know there was a guy named Art Fletcher who came from Washington, DC, African American guy, he played football, I think, for the Baltimore Colts back when they were the Baltimore Colts. He was one of the presidential appointees for some of the activity out here in the Tri-Cities and Hanford area. He did get involved with some things related to some racial issues. But I don’t know the details. Franklin: Okay. I’d like to kind of jump ahead. You mentioned that you worked at Hanford. Mitchell: Yes, I did. Franklin: And kind of—I assume that was after your career in the Air Force. Mitchell: Yes, as I said before, I came back here in June of 1993. One of the reasons I came back here, is because, again, of my children, 13 and six. Not wanting to go to the DC area with my family, because I told my wife I was going to retire at the 20-year point, which we did, in ’93. But we came back here and—well, what was the exact question again? Franklin: Oh, I just wanted you to talk about your decision to go to work at Hanford and your job there. Mitchell: Well, one of the reasons that I came back here—and the other place we would have gone would have been Colorado because my wife’s from Colorado and we like Colorado a lot. But we came back to Richland because of the amount of family that I have here, because people know me here, because I could get a job at Hanford. Because my technical background—I have an engineering management degree from the Air Force Academy. And I have a safety and systems management degree from the University of Southern California, a master’s degree. Those kinds of jobs—excuse me, that education tied into jobs I could get here at Hanford. Specifically in the project controls area. Project controls has to do with budgets, cost schedule, performance measures, and that’s what I did, first for Westinghouse and then when they reorganized Hanford, I ended up working for Fluor Daniel Hanford, and Waste Services Hanford, and Waste Federal Services Hanford, and other companies as well. But the continuity of service was the same; it stayed the same, it was just a different name on the paycheck, basically. Franklin: You have no idea how many times I’ve heard that. [LAUGHTER] Mitchell: Oh, okay. And that started in 1996. I got here in ’93. ’96. And I ended up retiring from the Hanford contractors community in 2009. Then I went and found another job working for a company, and that company had a job at Hanford in Richland, Washington, so I took it. Well, I applied for it and I got it. So I worked for a company as a consultant to DOE Hanford, overseeing—or assisting with overseeing the contracts for the 200 Central Plateau area, which is where I’d worked—some of where I’d worked when I’d been working for Fluor Daniel Hanford and other companies. So I came back here, again, because of the job and also because of the school system. Again, specifically the Richland school system, because I am a Bomber and I am familiar with the school system. And also when I was in Alaska as the comptroller sitting up there, and I was up there at Elmendorf Air Force base in Alaska, and I don’t know if I was on the internet or I got some materials from somewhere about the rank order of the high schools and their performance in the state of Washington. And Richland high schools, Hanford in particular, Richland, too, were right near the top of all the high schools in the state of Washington. Having been through the system myself, it’s good for me, good for my kids. Franklin: How long did you live in Alaska? Mitchell: Three-and-a-half years. Franklin: I’m from Alaska, originally. Mitchell: Whereabout? Franklin: Palmer, and Anchorage. Mitchell: Okay, I’ve been through Palmer several times. Of course, as you know, there aren’t many highways in Alaska. Franklin: No, and Palmer’s a town you just pretty much drive through usually. Mitchell: Drive through, yeah, driving through Palmer on your way to Fairbanks and then back around. So. Yeah. I—yes. It’s good. Franklin: It’s fine. I miss it sometimes. I don’t miss the winter. Mitchell: No. Well, I was there three-and-a-half years and I tell folks, when they say, how’d you like it? I say, well, after doing everything three times, I was ready to leave, in that, as you know, everything’s based on the calendar in the year, and when it snows is pretty much predicted, and when it’s going to do this is pretty much predicted, and when the fish are going to run, it’s the same kind of deal. So everything’s very cyclical and very predictable. Franklin: Yes, yes, it is. We have three seasons there, right? There’s winter, break-up, and construction season. Mitchell: Yes. That’s true. Franklin: Yeah, fall’s like two weeks. Mitchell: Not long, not long. Franklin: Anyway. Well, I digress. So you kind of carried on this family legacy of working at Hanford. How did you—did you find—how do I word this question? When did your father retire from Hanford? Mitchell: He retired officially in ’93. Franklin: Okay. Mitchell: When I came back here. So, just almost the exact same time he retired. However, then he continued—they’d bring him back, because he was in human resources person, HR person, and he used to give tours of the Hanford Site. Franklin: Right. Mitchell: So probably from ’93 until maybe 2013, 2014 timeframe, he did tours for Hanford Site and he worked for PNNL part-time, however the contract was set up. So he still had his badge and he still had the access to the facility and such, and he would go out on these Hanford tours that they’re doing right now. In fact, at one time, I was a tour guide myself. I wasn’t real good at it. But he was really good at it, I understand, and a lot of folks have told me that. And a number of folks have been working at Hanford in the recent past go, oh yeah—if they work for Battelle—yeah, C.J. hired me in when I came in! Whenever that was. Yeah, he was out there for a long time. Franklin: Yeah. I kind of want to ask about that. How was that—I imagine that your father must have left a legacy— Mitchell: Oh, absolutely. Franklin: --at Hanford, and you would have become—kind of walked into that and been—and everyone—so many people would have known your father, and known you, and you came back and were working. I’m wondering if you could talk about that, kind of the continuation of your family’s work at Hanford. Mitchell: Well, yeah, that was, and is, a good thing, not only to work at Hanford, but coming back—and today, whenever I go somewhere, I usually see somebody that I know, or somebody who knows me, or of my family. I think even you made mention of the fact, the Mitchell family is fairly well-known around here. But my kids, again, my 13-year-old son and my 6-year-old daughter when we moved back here in ’93. But over the years, being associated with—or seeing that, and hearing that and feeling that, it’s a big deal for us. We feel that we’ve done a lot of positive things in the community and contributed in a lot of ways. We’ve also been blessed and given an opportunity to do a lot of things here. Another reason why I came back. Before I left the Air Force, I would come home and go to lunch with the chief of the financial organization there at Battelle. I’m talking specifically about Allan Johnston and then I bought his house when I came back. But I didn’t work with him directly; he’d already left. When I’d come back on leave, I would go to lunch with him, two or three times, during that period of time, feeling that when I did retire from the Air Force, I was going to apply for a job and hopefully work for him—work for them. I did end up doing the application part and in fact I was invited in 1993 for an interview at PNNL and Battelle, went through that process, flew back to Anchorage, Alaska, feeling I had gotten the job. I’m sure I’m going to get that job. Well, shortly after, I did receive a call or whatever it was, letting me know that I wasn’t going to be able to have that job, because they had an individual who had been basically reduction-enforced—ripped out. So they were going to take care of him and give him the opportunity to have that job instead. So sorry. So, then I turned around and applied for a job with Westinghouse, who my mother had worked for before she became ill—she had dementia. Then I flew down for an interview with them, and I went back to Alaska. I know I’ve got that job. Well, I did get that job. And so I went to work for them in July, probably July 1st or right around July 1st, 1993. And that all worked out. But again, folks knew something of me, they knew about me, they knew something of my history. A lot of folks think they know more about me than they think they know. But that’s with all of us. But, again, my family’s been here for a long time and has been observed for a lot of people, folks know my brothers and my sister and my mom and my dad. And so they feel that they knew me and that’s been a positive for me. And that’s one of the reasons I came back. Franklin: I wanted to ask you about your mother. Was she a working mother, for your childhood? Mitchell: Well, one of the things I’ve learned is that all mothers are working mothers. But! Outside the home. Yeah, I know what you’re talking about. Franklin: Yes, I should be more specific. Mitchell: No, no. She did not work outside the home when I was coming along, but later on, she did go to work for Westinghouse. She was a secretary for a number of senior folks, I understand. But that did have an impact on my youngest brother. Unfortunately, it has been a negative impact, in that he did get involved—I don’t know if it was here or when he was at University of Washington. He went to University of Washington, was a cheerleader there and graduated with a degree in marketing. But he also got hung up in drugs there. I think that’s where it happened. Somewhere. But in 1974, ’75 when I was a lieutenant in Los Angeles’ GPS program, I got a phone call from Robin, my youngest brother. And he was very distraught in that he felt really lonely, he said. Because my mom wasn’t there when he’d come home from school, and just other things. So he felt alone. He was the youngest of the six of us. For the rest of us, we always had younger brothers or sisters. He didn’t have anybody that was younger. We all grew up and moved out, well, he’s still there. So, yeah, that had an impact on him. Even to this day, he’s still dealing with some of those issues. As far as we know, he’s clean, he’s—he went back to school, Columbia Basin College, and then Washington State University Tri-Cities, where we are. And right now, he got an electrical engineering degree two or three years ago. I mean, he’s over 50 years old. But he’s not using that degree directly. He is currently working as a counselor in one of the organizations here in the Tri-Cities, assisting other people who are having substance abuse issues. But, I, for one, tie a lot of his problems to the fact that my mother wasn’t there, the rest of us weren’t there, and he did get off-track. So, yeah, she did work outside the home after I was gone. There was a different dynamic in the family as a result. And I talked about the birth order situation. That was part of the deal in my view, and my perception—and this is all, obviously, just my opinion. But overtime, many parents become a little less attentive to their kids as the kids are growing up and that kind of thing, they’re doing other things in addition to being the parent and that, so things do loosen up a little bit, as far as the strictness. I believe some of that happened in my family when my mom went to work. Not that she shouldn’t have gone to work, because she had the issues—not issues, but needs as well and desires to want to do other things, and she did become active in the community and in particular going to school board meetings and other things. Also, she was one of the committee members on getting the what we call, still, I think, the “new” police station here in Richland on George Washington Way. Her name’s down there on one of the plaques because she was one of the active members on helping get that done, as far as—I don’t know if she did lobbying or help raise money or whatever, but I know that she was a participant in that. How’s that for an answer to your question? Franklin: That’s a great answer. I wanted to go back to Hanford for this next question. When you left the community in ’69, still very much in production mode. Not high production, but still, N Reactor’s running, we’re still processing. And when you came back, the Cold War was over. And you would, of course, in the Air Force would have been a service member during the Cold War and then still been in the—I’m wondering if you could talk about that shift in production to cleanup and the end of the Cold War as you observed it at Hanford and how it changed the community. Mitchell: Well, when I came back here in ’93, they were still hiring more people. Excuse me. That’s why I was hired here, to help with Hanford cleanup. Hanford cleanup was going on for quite a while. I think it started in the late—like ’88, ’89 timeframe. Christine Gregoire who was our mayor—not mayor, our governor, I think at least twice—in fact, when I became a Columbia Basin College trustee, she’s the one that appointed me as a trustee. The reason I get into that is, it’s been going on a while. It’s been a change, certainly. It’s something that has to happen, should happen. We’ve had to fight for it, and we’ll probably have to continue to fight for it, because it has taken a long time and it’s cost a lot of money to clean it up. So, before, during production when I was here as a high school student, things were very secretive, we didn’t know what was going on, but everyone was pretty much supportive of, whatever it is that’s going on needs to be going on. So when I come back—you know, I’d come back off and on, but when I came back in ’93, and now the mission has changed from production to cleaning up all the mess, at that time, in ’93, it was still supportive in that we need to clean up the mess. But over the years—I’ve been back 24-years-plus now—some folks—personally, I do believe that we have some strong senators and other representatives. Sam Volpentest was one. But again, as far as our senator, Patty Murray, I know she’s been a big supporter for Hanford, and others as well have had to fight for the dollars to ensure that we get things cleaned up and that we get what we need in order to do the cleanup. So that’s a big change. But, having been out there, and having been a financial person out there, I am concerned that perhaps there’s definitely some waste going on out there, and I know that we—Hanford gets a rap for that; DOE gets a rap for that. But I’d have to say that, yeah, Hanford and DOE deserve a rap for some of that stuff, my opinion. Because I just think that it’s taking too long and it’s costing too much money. And I could get into some other specifics about my opinions about the Vit Plant and other things, but I won’t do that. Franklin: Okay, sounds good. Maybe off-camera. Mitchell: Yes. Franklin: Let’s see here, I think we’re almost—I think we’re almost done here. I just have a couple kind of larger questions. So, second-to-last question is, what would you like future generations to know about living in Richland during the Cold War? Mitchell: Well, that it was an important mission that we had during the Cold War. And that it was truly a privilege to live in Richland, and I’d say the Tri-Cities overall, for that matter--a lot of folks who work at Hanford don’t live in Richland; they live in Pasco or Kennewick or Yakima or other places. But living in Richland, it was a wonderful place to grow up. One of the reasons to bring my family back here in ’93 is because it was still a wonderful place to raise my kids. And I think it’s still a wonderful place. I do have two grandchildren now in West Richland, my daughter and her family, and they’re going to grow up here as well. I think it’s definitely needed and desirable that we try to build an economy outside of Hanford and diversify and come up with other things. I’m really pleased that my children don’t work at Hanford. Again, my son’s a history professor. I did try to get him to become an engineer, but he says, I don’t want to do that, Dad. And then my daughter’s a nurse. She also has a business degree, as does my son, has a business degree as well. She’s a Cougar and he’s a Husky. Franklin: Quite a household. Mitchell: But I’m a Trojan, and Trojans rule in my house. But I’m just really pleased to have grown up here. Like again, talking about my parents’ being courageous and that type of thing. The fact that they came here, they stayed here, and they built a great life here, I’m really thankful for that. Again, the friends and acquaintances that I have made nad we have made in the Tri-Cities overall and certainly in Richland, we’ve been blessed as a family for over 60 years. Franklin: I’d say so. Is there anything else you would like to mention related to migration, segregation and civil rights and how they’ve impacted your life in the Tri-Cities? Mitchell: Well, certainly they have impacted our life tremendously. One of the reasons my family came here in the first place, my dad was 16 years old and then back a couple different times and then married my mother and came back with me, because of the Cold War, because of the Great Migration of African Americans out of the South, happened because of World War II or after World War II, again, to the big cities of the North in particular, out to the West, resulting in really a much-improved for most all of us who migrated out of the South. Although some did better than others, certainly, and are still doing better, some, than others. But that also gets into, well, you have to do some things for yourself, and also we all have different circumstances and different situations we’re dealt. But I think overall for the African American population, it’s worked out pretty well. There are a lot of problems, still. I certainly—well, education is one of the things, like I said, was big in my family. I think it’s still a key to success in this world. One of the reasons that I’m really pleased and happy to have been, and currently am being a trustee at Columbia Basin College, is to help other people of whatever background to find a path for themselves, to build a better life for themselves. I think a lot of that has come out of—well, again, World War II, the Cold War, the Hanford experience, and as I already said, we were blessed to have taken advantage of it. A lot of folks didn’t or haven’t, but a lot of folks still can. So I hope that they do. Franklin: Great, well, Duke, thank you so much for coming and interviewing with us. It was a fabulous interview. Mitchell: Well, thank you. I’m, again, happy that I was asked and had the opportunity. I’ve watched my dad do a lot of things for a lot of years, and I feel that he’s been an inspiration to others and helped other folks, including myself, to do better than they might have done otherwise. So I’m thankful for that. Franklin: Great. Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview K Basins 300 Areas N Reactor Plutonium Finishing Plant Fluor Hanford 200 Central Plateau Area Battelle Westinghouse Hanford Vit Plant Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1953-1969 1993- Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1993-2009 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 (Duke) Mitchell Description An account of the resource Duke Mitchell grew up in the Tri-Cities first in Pasco, Washington then Richland, Washington. Mitchell worked on the Hanford Site from 1993-2009. A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288 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 03/02/2018 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. This oral history collection was done in partnership with the National Park Service under Task Agreement P17AC01288. Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Pasco (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Kennewick (Wash.) Baseball Discrimination Segregation School integration Basketball Sports Football Nuclear weapons industry Civil rights Civil rights movements Radioactive Waste Disposal Migration https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Ffc26abfcad1867ffbfbc9943486fecef.jpg 50e3b275424ab6190bdb6c842abe8137 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F6e943532e002ba8d078e11a4e7f75958.mp4 ec42f85d52e2ce276b6305ce36a4e155 Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview O' Reagan, Douglas Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Carson, David 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, will you please pronounce and spell your name for us? David Carson: Hi. My name is David Carson, D-A-V-I-D, C-A-R-S-O-N. O’Reagan: Okay, thank you. My name is Douglas O’Reagan. I’m conducting an oral history interview here on April 29th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus on Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be speaking with Mr. Carson about his experiences working on the Hanford Site and living in the Tri-Cities community. Well, thanks for being here. Could you tell us first just a little bit about your life leading up to either moving into the Tri-Cities or starting working at Hanford? Carson: I was born here in Richland at Kadlec in May of 1958. Grew up here, went through all the Richland schools—Spalding and Carmichael, and—I can still call it Col High because I went there then. Went off to college, met my wife. We were biology majors, and about the time that we graduated and were looking for jobs, Battelle, who at the time had a huge biology program, they lost most all their contracts. So that just evaporated. My wife managed to get on with Battelle a couple months after we were married. But it took me over six months before I finally got a break and got hired on at N Reactor as an operator. My-- O’Reagan: And that would have been ’81? Carson: That was in March of 1981. My parents had moved here in the spring of 1951 with my brother and sister. I was a 16-year mistake, so they’re a lot older. But they moved here in ’51. They lived in the trailer camp up north. My brother and sister went to Ball Elementary, for example. In ’53 they were able to buy a ranch house on Cedar Street, and that’s where I grew up. My dad was a fireman. Eventually became a lieutenant and then a captain. My mom was a secretary and then executive secretary. She was one of the very first certified professional secretaries onsite, and did a great deal to spread that program and bring skills and professionalism throughout all of her parts of the work. For years, she worked here—for over 35 years, a couple years longer than my dad, actually. So I’m about as Richland-born-and-bred and Hanford-centered as you could hope to ask for. When I got hired on at N Reactor, I started—as so many people in operations did—back in the fuels department. We called it back, because it was in the back part of the building. It was both the front and the back of the process. So back there, we made up the charges of reactor fuel for charging into the reactor. After that went in, the old fuel was discharged. We also took care of that out in the storage basin. So that was—I started in late March ’81, I was in fuels for six months. I always knew that I wanted to move up into the control room. So after six months, in September of ’81, I moved up front to reactor operations, not fuels operations. Started out as—everyone was referred to sort of shorthand as paygrade. A plain reactor operator was a Grade 18. So I was a Grade 18. That’s where you begin learning the basics of the job. You learn how to take building patrol and what all the readings mean and how to take them correctly. Because you have to go around the whole building twice a shift and check on running equipment, take readings, make sure things aren’t breaking or whatever. Then you start learning more of the jobs, from housekeeping—there were some specialized parts of that. Doing laundry—there was specialized parts to that, because it was—you were dealing with radioactive clothing, so contamination control, you learn that a lot. All the different functions during charge/discharge. This was the time, in the early part of the Reagan Administration when they changed over to once again producing weapons-grade plutonium. It was called the 6% program. Weapons-grade plutonium is judged on how much plutonium-240 has grown into it. If you have more than 6%--PU-240 is a big neutron absorber, so it does not create a nuclear explosive as well. It poisons reactions. So the less of that you have, the less you have to work to separate it out and get just the PU-239 that you want. So changing to the 6% program meant that they were doing charge/discharges a little more than twice as often. Plus, a lot of the maintenance had been let go. For many years they’d been in power only, since the end of the Nixon Administration. And that was something of a coup, to let in startup just to produce electricity through the Hanford Generating Project number 1 that was run by Washington Public Power Supply System. We sent our steam to them over across the fence. We didn’t have anything to do with that, except send steam, get back water. So there was a lot of upgrades going on throughout the whole reactor plant. The reactor plant—we called it the power side, where the steam that we made as we cooled off the primary loop was used to drive turbines that drove the primary pumps that circulated the water. A lot of that equipment was also repaired, upgraded. It took a while to really get up on plane and start operating smoothly again. A lot of operators came in right around within a year or so of the time I did, and four or five reactor-operator certification classes’ worth. They would take about 15 people at a time, and you would run through about a year-long program to learn everything from fundamentals, which was basic math, basic chemistry, basic nuclear science, up through the specifics of the systems in the reactor and how they interacted, how you operated them safely, what you didn’t want to do, what you did do, the reasons behind all that. It got pretty complex. You had to take three tests to become certified. First, after the first couple sessions of classroom training, they would pull us off our shifts. We worked a four-shift rotating shift at the time. Pulled us off our shifts, put us on day shift in the classroom for chunks of time. We’d go back when there were outages, because they needed bodies. When you finished your first couple of sessions of classroom training, there was the written exam, which is called the eight-hour. And it really is. It was almost 50 pages. I finished it in about six-and-a-half hours. I used up an entire pen. Just as I was finishing writing the essay on the last page, the pen died. And I looked at it—it was clear, and there was no ink left. So after you passed your eight-hour, you got a bump. You were then called a Grade 21, and a lot more of your training was real-time in the control room. You would sit on consoles with the other operators, and they would help guide you. You’d get some hands-on time. You’d learn more about that part of the job. After several months, and some more classroom training, you had an examination called the demo, where one of the instructors would come over and they would walk you around the control room and just start asking questions. Your job was to answer the questions, point at stuff, look things up in books—prove that you knew where it all was, what it all meant, what it all did. When you passed your demo, then you went into the final, more intensive part of classroom training to get ready for your oral board. Pass the eight-hour, pass the demo, train some more, then you sat an oral board, in which there were people from operations, engineering, nuclear safety, training, and sometimes somebody else would sit in. I don’t know why, but they did. So once you passed your oral board, you were considered certified—a Grade 23. But you still didn’t get turned loose yet. You still had to have guided time in the control room. You had to do a certain number of evolutions. You had to do so many startups, so many shutdowns, be in on so many scrams, do a little of this and a little of that, until your shift manager, after watching you and talking to the other operators, figured you were ready. So then, one day they say, okay, you’re free and clear. And your certificate went up on the wall with your name on it saying that you were a certified reactor operator, and you got thrown in. And then you really started to learn the job. Because all this stuff was suddenly no longer even partially theory. It was all real. O’Reagan: How many reactor operators were there at a time, roughly, who were licensed? Carson: It went up and down. Each shift was required to have at least four in the control room when you were operating. Typically, during this time in the ‘80s, every shift had seven or eight certified operators, and as many as a dozen Grade 18s—the ones who didn’t want to get into the certification program, who did other stuff around the plant. Because there was always stuff to do, if nothing else—housekeeping, stocking the laundry, and sweeping the floors. We had a schedule that came up every month and you rotated through different jobs in the control room. At the N control room, there was three major parts. There was a nuclear console, where you actually ran the reactor itself. We manually controlled the rod positions and manually monitored the power level and the flux where the neutron cloud was going up or down in the reactor. You wanted to keep that still and stable. You didn’t want it to cycle, because that can get—create stresses, if one part of the reactor’s really hot while this one back here is cold, it stresses—increases the fatigue and the chances for the failure of something. So you wanted to keep it nice and steady. We had instrumentation. We had—the only computer display we had was of temperatures. That was probably the main one, and the charts that showed how the neutron flux was changing. You wanted to keep all the lines straight. There was two of you, and you rotated on the nuke console every two hours—two hours on, two hours off. You’d get breaks and stuff while you were off. The double-A console controlled all of the primary loop and its interface with the secondary loop. That’s where you controlled the drive turbine speeds that drove the primary pumps to circulate the coolant. That’s where you controlled the primary loop pressure, the level of it, the emergency backup stuff—you were responsible for that. So you had this whole corner of the control room and panels that were your responsibility. The third part controlled the secondary loop—that’s the side—the primary loop went into the tubes of heat exchangers and it boiled the water on the shell of the heat exchanger—the steam generators. So that steam went up into the steam header. A lot of it went over to WPPSS. Some of it went down to drive our turbines. We also had a turbine generator of our own in the boiler building that was our onsite power source. You took care of the secondary loop there—its level, its pressure, the way it was. There was also a lot of other things that that operator did—rupture monitoring was at that panel, because N Reactor did not have a containment; it had a confinement. It was designed in 1958, went critical in ’63. They didn’t build—I guess they couldn’t at the time yet—build a full containment to keep everything in. It was designed that if there was a tube rupture and you had a big burst of superheated steam, that would vent. So we had to keep our primary loop really, really clean. And that’s what the rupture monitor was. If you saw signs that the fuel element in one of the 1,003 process tubes was beginning to release uranium into the water, you’d shut down and push that tube right away. There was also a system specifically for cooling the graphite. N Reactor, like the other old Hanford reactors, was called graphite-moderated. It used very pure graphite in a big block with complex passages through it. The neutrons, when they would leave the fissioned uranium atom, would go out and bounce around in that graphite before they found their way back into fuel, slowed way down, so that they could cause another fission. Modern power reactors use the water, the coolant, as a moderator. We used the solid graphite. We had a system to cool that specifically. So that operator took care of that. Also, the gas system, we circulated helium through the core when we’re operating, because at full power, 4,000 megawatts thermal, the temperature in the center of the core was 600, 700, 800 degrees in places, Fahrenheit. Pure graphite—you don’t want any air or water, anything that’s going to react with it at those temperatures. So we used the helium—you had to control that, too. And there’s other miscellaneous stuff, but you had to learn all of this, and you learned all of the classroom stuff, but just like anything, you really learned by doing, where it becomes second nature. The wonderful part about working it in was my shift—I was a little unusual in that I was assigned to one shift at the beginning, C shift, and I stayed on that shift my whole nine years there. Other people would move around, sometimes involuntarily. But I managed to stay on C shift all the time. It’s such a wonder and a joy when you can become that tight of a team to where you knew exactly how any individual’s going to react in a given situation. You don’t even need full words to communicate. We would have entire conversations in acronyms and shorthand. And we—stuff happened and we would ride it out and just—scary as heck, but—when it was over, you knew that the team had just really done its work like it’s supposed to. So that was always—that was a good feeling. O’Reagan: Could you give us an example of one of these acronym exchanges? Carson: Oh. Oh, it’s— What’s the HPIP delta P? 18. Okay, we need that up to 50. So—I’ve lost a lot of that. O’Reagan: Sure. Carson: But as in any installation, every piece has a name. It has typically an official name that meets a standard of naming from an engineering organization, it has the name that it’s normally referred to as, and it has an acronym. Sometimes it might have an even shorter shorthand name that your crew comes up with that you all know what it is, but you also know all the others as well. In a situation where something has begun to get out of line, out of normal--it’s not a crisis, but it’s something that you have to pay attention to and deal with right away—you need to transfer information as quickly and as clearly as possible. And that was how that was done, with shorthand acronyms that everyone knew exactly what you were saying; they could anticipate what you were about to say. So you could get other people to take particular actions absolutely as quickly as possible, and they could get you, by what they said back, to do your actions properly. O’Reagan: Could you walk us through a one specific scram or other sort of stressful event? Carson: I was there in the control room one night when—I believe it was thunderstorms hit a main distribution power line—a 230-kilovolt lines coming from the dams—that happened to be online as our offsite power. Lightning hit one of those transmission lines and caused a power surge that tripped open the breakers at the substation. Offsite power was called A bus. Onsite power was B bus. You needed them active and separated up from 13.8-kilovolt where it came into the reactor, all the way down to 12-volt DC instrument power. You couldn’t have any connection between those two, because that could conceivably cause a fault that would stop the reactor from scramming if it needed to. So they powered everything, but some things were powered more by one bus or one by another. This is one of the main things that we trained for, was a power loss. Of course, if you lose one of your electrical buses, that’s one of the automatic reactor scram trips—there was 23 of them. So the reactor scrammed, and everything’s going along about like you’d expect for a power loss from one bus. Everything’s already prepared and set up to take the proper actions automatically, so you have to monitor those and adjust as necessary. Then all of a sudden, there was some kind of electrical fault in our B bus, our onsite power, which was still online. It tripped off. It was B bus—I believe I’m saying this right—B bus powered the lights in the control room. So you knew if those lights went on, you’d lost B bus as well. Now, if you lost both buses at the same time, that was an automatic trip onto emergency cooling, which for N Reactor was very large, high-pressured diesel pumps would pump water. Valves would open at the inlet and outlet of the reactor and it would change to a once-through. We had a series of water tanks with demin[eralized] water, filtered water and sanitary water. And then through some mechanisms, it would trip all the way to river water. If it was known that if you ever tripped over onto emergency cooling, the thermal shock—because the water was kept hot, but it wasn’t as hot as the reactor—the thermal shock could basically destroy the reactor. And that would be over. Nothing you could do at that point as far as keeping the reactor as an operating reactor in the future. So luckily, A bus had actually come back online just seconds before B bus went off. Then B bus came back, so the lights came back on, and then we lost A bus again. Because the whole BPA network was still having ripples and things. And then it came back up and then we lost B bus again. So when each of these things is happening, there’s stuff you have to do, depending on what it was. We’re running back and forth, trying to do that, and it got really tense. But all that training, you stopped really thinking—just all the training in your brainstem took over and you started doing what you needed to do and communicating in just those short, almost little digital blips of information so that everyone knew what you were doing, and you knew what they were doing and you knew what everybody had to do and that they were doing it. So things got pretty terse in the control room right there. As the buses kept coming up and down, it would reset off hundreds of enunciators and we didn’t have time to try and figure out what the overall cause was; we were just still fighting to keep the reactor from tripping on to emergency cooling. So eventually, we got both buses back and stable and we could continue with our—then it became just a regular post-scram shutdown. The cool-down of the reactor, changing things to work slightly different ways here and there throughout the plant. Then you sit back and giggle and get the shakes a little bit. Everybody talked real loud and real fast for a while, you know? [LAUGHTER] So—just some stressful things like that. Any unexpected scram made you a little tense, a little puckery. Because you didn’t know what happened. We had big CRT monitors mounted up by the nuclear and the double-A console that were tied into an electronic alarm system that they would record all of the enunciators. There were—I think I heard the number once—it was 1,400 different enunciators in the control room. When one of those went off, it sent a signal to this alarm system that put the ID of them in a buffer memory. They would display up in the CRTs. Well, when you scram, you got 400 enunciators within two or three seconds. So all you could see on the screen was the first eight or so. So you didn’t know what was going on. You just had to deal with what you were supposed to do and trust that no further catastrophe was going to happen, and just be ready for it if it did. When the reactor was running smoothly, we called it at equilibrium, when we had not changed power by more than 5% in 72 hours. That was sometimes hard to keep your focus, because all the lines are running straight on the charts, and it’s graveyard, nobody wants to talk, and you’ve all told all your stories a dozen times, and nothing much to say. So you’re sitting, waiting, watching. So like the quote about war, hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. Not as terror-filled as they might be, because we were trained and experienced in most stuff. Sometimes—there was always the possibility that sometimes something could happen that was really untoward, really out of the way, that could be really dangerous, really a disaster. O’Reagan: How much of working in the control room was sort of judgment or sort of work of art as opposed to a sort of objective do-the-next-thing? Carson: Actually quite a bit of it. One of the things that you developed as you gained experience as an operator—we called it getting stick time. When you started getting enough hours on a console and really starting to figure out how everything actually did work, you developed a feel, just from watching how all the different parts of the console you were on interacted. You got a feel if something was maybe not right, if something started looking a little jittery or a little bit out of its normal range that you wanted. Then you’d have to figure out, what little tweak can I make? Because everything was running in automatic, but you could always make small corrections. What little tweak could I make, given what I know about that that’s going on, that would make it better? And you developed what I always called a touch. Because you didn’t just go up and start twisting stuff. You really—with some instruments, some controllers—some control loops more than others—you didn’t want to put any very large change into it at all, because it was so sensitive. In the action that that controller would take, the input back to, say, the primary loop from changing the speed of one of the makeup injection pumps could just suddenly—if you did too much by accident, you could scram the reactor. Or you could cause it to lose pressure, which would scram the reactor another way. So getting to really develop that unconscious feel, similar to the way that when you’re driving and you pull into a parking lot or a real narrow street, you can actually feel with your body where the corners of your fenders are. It’s developing that kind of feel for a huge complex machine that was really what brought you into being a really good, competent operator. Some folks had it on some systems more than others. The older operators who’d been at it forever, it was just completely unconscious with them. That was just the way they did things was smooth and easy, and you don’t just jump in and start fiddling with stuff. You always think it through before you touch anything. And then when you touch it, you touch it very gently and make the changes as slow and small as you can to get the result that you want. O’Reagan: So you worked there through the closing of N Reactor, is that right? Carson: Yes. O’Reagan: How much did that change over the course, before you got to the closing? Was it—job change a lot over that time? Carson: While we were still operating—regular operation—it didn’t change that much. Some new things were put in, but overall they didn’t really affect us much. You had to deal with failures. For example, when the reactor was operating, the water circulated through five steam generator cells. We had six, so one was always out of service for maintenance or repairs or whatever, and you operated with five. Well, one of the cells was undergoing a total refit—a total reconditioning. And then another one of the cells, the primary pump developed some problems that were going to require a rebuild. So the decision was made to go ahead and operate at a reduced power level with only four cells online. That took a lot of adjustments. They had to come up with temporary limits that we had to learn and follow. Some of the procedures changed slightly for that temporary period to take into account the fact that you had a lower capacity and a lower rate of heat removal. So just dealing with a change like that, and then that begins to feel normal. And then they bring another cell back online. So you’re back to the way it was that used to be normal, but you have to kind of reset yourself to working that way. Limits were really the main thing we paid attention to as we were operating. All of the nuclear industry—and N Reactor, certainly, they really drilled this into us—it operates in defense of depth. You don’t ever have just a single barrier to something causing an accident. I called it a box-in-a-box-in-a-box-in-a-box-in-a-box. There’s the actual strength of the machine, at what pressures or temperatures will it break because the materials just physically can’t take it. So that’s your outermost limit that you never, ever, ever got close to. Inside of that was your technical specifications that protected this outer box. Inside the technical specifications were the process standards that protected the technical specification limits. Inside the process standards were your operating limits that protect—you never wanted to break a process standard, because you’d have to have an investigation and figure out why that happened and everything. And sometimes there were even special limits inside the operating limits that were even more restrictive. So those limits changed over time, but that was just part of the job. You had to get used to the new ways things were, and just live with it, because that’s the way it was. They taught us why the change was made, and what it meant, and that this was the new limits here and here and here. That’s the kind of stuff we went through during our continuous training. After you’re certified, the training cycle had all the operators, shift by shift, when they would roll around on dayshift, you would have training days. And every two years, you went through the entire certification curriculum again, from fundamentals through reactor operations, through system interactions—all of it, every two years. We had to take a recertification exam every quarter. So every three months you had a job jeopardy examination to keep on top of stuff. So that’s how all that was communicated to us and incorporated into the way we worked and the way things were operated and handled. As we got past the Chernobyl accident, some people knew right away, that was the death knell for N. A lot of us were still optimistic that the differences were so clear and plain and could be explained, and we could continue. They had plans for upgrading some of our equipment to allow the reactor to run for another 20 years, they said. [SIGH] Didn’t turn out that way. So much political fire came down on all of the DoE complex, but Hanford especially. I don’t know if you remember, at the time, we had a senator who was 100% anti-Hanford. I spoke at the time when South Carolina had three senators and we had one. Because he worked as hard as he could to send all the work, all the waste, all the everything to Savannah River, so that it wouldn’t be at Hanford. I’m just griping now, but—it ended up, it was January 7th, 1997 at 07:31 that the reactor was shut down for the last time. It was going to be for an upgrade. They were going to put in a control room habitability system that did actually get put in, and it worked. It was for a time if there was ever a large release from the reactor, we could have sealed up the control room and lived on recirculated air and supplies for up to two weeks. They put that in. There was another big upgrade. Because of the hydrogen bubble that developed inside the reactor at Three Mile Island from water being split by high temperatures and the presence of metal into hydrogen and oxygen. And the hydrogen formed a big bubble that could have—in very, very small circumstances—could have ignited or exploded. They were worried about hydrogen inside the reactor and power buildings at N. So they were putting in a hydrogen mitigation system that would have been able to take all of the hydrogen evolved from the entire quantity of water in the primary loop. If it all split and turned into hydrogen and oxygen, this system could have recombined the hydrogen and taken away the explosive potential. So we all hoped that, yeah, we were going to get these upgrades and we’d be able to start up again and keep going for a while longer. But we never did. So the people who could leave right away did. But the end of ’97, we’d lost a lot of the real sharp engineers and some of the top people in operations. And then as the years went on, and became more and more clear that there was no future for the reactor, more and more people drifted away. I eventually, in late ’89, I took a temporary upgrade to write layup procedures for the reactor. At the time, they were going to keep it in—well, it went through a whole series. It was going to be on cold standby, where the fuel would still be in the reactor; we would still recirculate the loop, but we wouldn’t operate. We would just maintain it ready to operate if we needed it. Then it was going to turn to dry standby, where the reactor would be defueled and we would circulate dry pure air through all of the piping throughout the plant to keep the corrosion away so that if we needed to restart, we could refuel and restart. So that was one of the big procedures that I took the upgrade to write, was the whole valve lineup to establish that flow path from the 24-inch primary and secondary loop main valves, all the way down to the ¼ inch instrument root valves. I had to find every single one and lay out how they were going to be opened, in what sequence. I also wrote a bunch of other procedures. That’s where I first started learning how to write procedures. But at the end of the six months, they did not want to keep me on there permanent, doing that. And I sure didn’t want to go back to operations, which was by that time two years after the reactor had been shut down, almost three. I could just feel the IQ dribble out my ears, because you can only sweep the same floor so many times. Once the reactor was defueled, there wasn’t a whole lot of anything to do. O’Reagan: How many people were still on doing that kind of work? Carson: Probably about half the number that we’d had at the peak days. Because you didn’t need as many operators to do what we were doing. So people were going to various places. A lot of people went from there over to the K Basins, to deal with the stored fuel. Some of them are still there, dealing, now, just with the sludge. It just—there was no sense in trying to stay there where I was comfortable. So that’s when I got a job with Tank Farms, writing procedures. So I did that for four years. O’Reagan: Was that something that you actively thought—you enjoyed the procedure writing, or was that just another--? Carson: Actually, yes. I’ve always loved writing. For a long time, I desperately wanted to be a writer, a fiction writer or a science writer. And I just never was able to do it. I got a small number of rejection letters from various magazines. Once I started writing for a living, doing procedures, it just knocked all hope of ever writing fiction right out of me. But I enjoyed the process; I’ve always enjoyed figuring stuff out. When I came to Tank Farms, the procedures were horrible. There are standards and—even at that time, it was just coming out of DoE order on how the qualities of procedure has to have—the requirements that it has to meet, in terms of how it’s written, how the data is presented, how things are phrased. So when I came into Tank Farm Procedures, once I got my feet on the ground, I kind of pushed, and we did a complete overhaul of the entire Tank Farms Procedures system. Getting all of the several hundred—I think 740 procedures—getting them all rewritten to current standards. I developed, for the first time at Tank Farms, a standard compliant alarm response procedure. There’s procedures for everything, including when—I talked about all the enunciators in the control room. We had big, thick books of enunciator response guides that told you what tripped it, when it would reset, what it meant, and what you had to do. When 500 go off at once, you’re just doing your trained-in post-scram actions that you know what to do. You don’t look at each individual one. At Tank Farms, they had alarm response procedures, but for a whole facility, the book might be this thick, because anything that happened, the only response was notify management. It was quite a culture shock to go down to Tank Farms, because at N, you needed a college degree of some kind just to get in the door. It was a really fast crowd. Really smart. Even the guys that stayed back in fuels, most of them were really sharp. So we operated at a really high level, had a really high level of in-depth training. Tank Farms, not so much. So I had to get over that culture shock, and then begin to teach the folks that I was writing these procedures for why they’re changing, and what it meant for them, and why it was better to do it this way. So eventually, we did. We were the first group to use electronic photography in procedures. We were the first group to have all of our procedures computerized. And we worked hard and it came out really well. I learned that I really enjoy that process of figuring things out and then of using my writing skills to convey that in the best way possible. I really enjoyed that. After four years at Tank Farms Procedures, a new facility was being built, the 200 Area Effluent Treatment Facility. So I transferred from Tank Farms to the ETF. In part, because they had stuck in a manager that no one got along with. The man was not very—ahem—socially apt. We’ll just leave it at that. I went over to ETF and started developing their procedures as the facility was still being built. That’s where I got laid off. 1995, there was a big layoff by Westinghouse. I got the boot there. So for the next two years—it took me six months to get any kind of job again. And then I was—Fluor Hanford had come in—Fluor Daniels. They had their own built-in temporary company to supply temporary work. So I bounced in and out with that temporary company several times on the canister storage building, a little bit at Tank Farms. And then finally the head of Fluor Northwest just said, we’re done with all these temporary people, because it’s too hard to deal with the temporary company. Just hire them all in. So ’97, I got hired in. And then I got made over into a nuclear safety hazard analyst. That has been my main bread and butter. Hazard analysis, which is a very specific discipline in the nuclear industry, working on safety basis documents, which is the—safety basis defines what you can do and how you can do it, and what you can and can’t do. So the nuclear safety people developed that, the customer—DoE RL—approves it, and that’s what you live by. So we—first we draw the coloring book, then we make sure that everyone colors inside the lines. That’s nuclear safety’s job. Hazard analysis is a part of that, because before you do anything new, or if you’re going to change anything that you’re doing that’s approved now, you have to have a very deliberate process of analyzing all the hazards, figuring out how bad the hazard is, what it could cause, how bad that effect could be—if it’s a real accident or if it’s a no, never mind, that’s already covered by other controls, do the new analysis you need to do, create new controls for it, and get those instituted so that everything is still inside the box. O’Reagan: When you were working on the Tank Farms, do you think those procedures were just left over from a time when people just didn’t care as much about— Carson: Yes. Very much so. I guess I skipped ahead. I talked about the culture shock moving to Tank Farms. At N, we had great training, we had really good procedures that were very well thought out and well developed and well proved. We had a deep understanding of all of our limits, why they were there, what it meant if you violated one in a certain way. All that was just ingrained to us. So you did things by the procedure, you lived inside the limits, you knew why, you knew how. There was no problem. Everybody just worked that way. Tank Farms had for years been kind of a dumping ground of the people who couldn’t make it elsewhere. The only lower step was the laundry. And I worked a little bit with some tank farm operators that, shortly after I got there, got transferred to the laundry because they couldn’t make it at Tank Farms. The whole organizational philosophy was the smart guys know what they’re doing, just shut up and do what they tell you, even if it isn’t written down. Don’t worry about that, that’s just for show. Their procedures were—in one case, it was a page-long paragraph that was one sentence. I don’t think it even had a verb. It was like telling a story, and didn’t have any specifics. Nobody understood them. They all hated them, because they were all like that. We changed that; we made it better. The culture shock was coming from a place like N, where, like I said, we were a fast crowd, we were really dialed in, we really knew what was what, to Tank Farms, where there were still people working there—great operators, they really knew their job, they knew what to do—but they couldn’t read. They had a special dispensation to have their requal exams every year orally. Because they couldn’t read. They couldn’t read valve tags. So people would go out with them and tell them what was what. They knew exactly what to do; they were good operators. But that kind of difference in level really caught me short for a while. It took me a while to change my mind to realize that—okay, they want to do a good job, too, no matter how cranky they seem. So don’t look down on them, don’t ride a high horse. Just—they’re people like you, let them to do the job. And it worked out, it did. I made some friends there and we did some good stuff. I helped a lot of them out where I could, explaining things. I think I’ve forgotten what the question was. [LAUGHTER] O’Reagan: I was just sort of exploring this different or maybe changing priorities about the environment or waste control over time and over different parts of Hanford. It seems like they’re— Carson: Oh, yeah, okay. O’Reagan: We’re really interested in safety and such at N Reactor and having these great procedures, but maybe the less sexy parts of it were not as fully developed yet. Carson: Yeah. This is an example I think that illustrates that. We were among the first to really start taking control of our low-level waste. Every place you come out of a zone, there’s what’s called a step-off pad, where you undress in sequence. You take the outermost stuff off, and you step on one pad, then you take the inner stuff off and step on the next one, so that you’re leaving all of the contamination behind. There were rad boxes sitting there, and so for things like your tape and your surgeon’s gloves, would all get thrown in the rad box. That’s what most of our low-level waste was. That kind of stuff. Nobody used to pay much attention to it; it was just something that you toted down to this room, and then you threw it on a truck and somebody took it somewhere and threw it away. They really started working at following the latest directions for how to properly deal with and account for all of the waste: low-level, higher level waste—anything. Getting the accountability, getting the proper labeling, understanding the proper limits for what could be certain types of waste. We really had that ground into us. And we really griped about it, because we were filling out data sheets and filling out labels and other labels and other labels and double and triple wrapping the boxes and labeling the wrappings as we put them on, and doing all this stuff. The one time I ever had to go down to the burial ground—it’s funny, some jobs some people would catch all the time. You might be there for years and there was things you never got to do because you were never assigned to do them. One of those was taking our low-level waste boxes to the burial ground and throwing them out of the truck into the trench. So we had spent all this time doing all this accounting, doing all this labeling, making sure the packaging was all okay and everything was very carefully set up and everything. And we get to the disposal trench in 200 West Area. So we’re carefully—you’re not supposed to damage the box—it’s a cardboard box inside of a couple plastic bags. You’re not supposed to damage it. We’re just taking them and dropping them over the side out of the back of a truck. And here comes a truck from somewhere in West Area, one of the construction things going on or something. A dump truck with wood and broken plaster and glass and a few rad boxes and stuff. They just wave him up there, and the dump truck backs up and just—pbbt—dumps, and drives away. No paperwork, no nothing. I don’t know what was behind it; maybe there were reasons it was like that. But that was just a contrast that really griped me. But they did a good job at N of explaining why the way we were doing things had to change. Why the new way was actually better, what it meant for stopping releases to the environment, reducing them. Things you should do to lower your impact, lower the amount of waste. That’s where I first really started getting it, and it slowly moved into other places so that things were much more accounted for and controlled. These days, it’s very controlled, it’s very different. It’s much more secure. Nobody uses those rad boxes anymore. The only place I ever see them is in rad update training every year. Everything’s in certified drums. It’s treated certain ways. It’s all measured and accounted for, and inspected before it goes to its final burial to make sure that there is nothing in there that isn’t supposed to be. There’s a whole entire facility in West Area that’s devoted to doing that. Waste Receipt And Processing, WRAP. They get in drums of waste from all over the site, and they do NDA on them to find out how radioactive they are and what kind of radioactive stuff is in them. They X-ray them. If necessary, they will open them up, take everything out, sort it out, so that the stuff that isn’t supposed to be there is out, and then repackage them properly. So everything is very concentrated on making sure that any waste products, whether radioactive or chemical or even domestic waste, is handled and treated properly. And that has really exhibited a standard growth curve. Because when I first started in the ‘80s, there was a lot of resistance, both kind of social and institutional, and among the groups. But the people who understood it just kept pushing, kept pushing, kept getting the message out. Gradually, you saw the same kind of acceptance go up like that, like a normal growth curve. That’s just the way things are done now. So that part’s a lot better. I never really experienced any untoward activities. We were never told to go dump stuff in a hidden place. We were never told to dispose of something in an unapproved way. But a lot of the stuff that we were around wasn’t as controlled or properly packaged or set up as it would be today. That’s all to the good. You used to be able to go just about everywhere and there would be contaminated patches. A lot of those have been cleaned up. People no longer are allowed to just stick something out here and just put a rope around it and call it an accumulation area. There’s very high degree of control and accountability. The job I’m in now with Central Plateau Surveillance and Maintenance, they have a responsibility for all the old retired facilities, the old canyon buildings. And there’s a lot of auxiliary buildings around those and a lot of waste sites and old cribs and trenches. Most of what they do is repeatedly inspecting all that stuff, making sure that anything that’s present is properly in place, that it’s allowed to be there, that they know what it is, that nothing’s going wrong. So that’s all really a lot better. In all of society and all of industry, things are much safer now. People understand chemical hazards especially. We used to be able to go get stuff out of the tool crib that isn’t even allowed to be sold anymore, because it’s carcinogenic. But there, it was an electric cleaner called Swish that was mostly carbon tetrachloride. And you could just get a spray can of it and go and clean things off with it, or kill spiders. [LAUGHTER] O’Reagan: So I’d love to come back to this, but just to make sure we get to it before we run too long on time, could we step back to your childhood in Richland-- Carson: Sure. O’Reagan: --and what it was like growing up in Richland? Could you tell us a bit about that? Carson: Well. Virtually everyone I know, their folks worked in the Area. They never talked about what went on what there or what they did. My dad talked about some fire department stuff sometimes. O’Reagan: Was that the fire department on the site or just— Carson: The Hanford Fire Department, yeah. Nobody ever really knew what was going on out there. The closed-mouth, closed-city—you know. I always thought it was amazing. Very early in the morning, my mom would drive me to a baby-sitter down in south Richland. And I always thought it was amazing, she could look out to the northwest and she would tell me which plant was running. I didn’t know they were reactors; I didn’t know what it meant. But she could look at the steam plumes, because even though they weren’t modern reactors with cooling towers, they still had retention ponds before the water went back in the river, and those would steam. She could just look at tell me which plant was running. And I always thought that was amazing. We had a fairly—at least in my experience anyway, as a middle class, my folks were both working, lived in a nice neighborhood up near Spalding School. We had a very safe, nice environment to grow up in, a good childhood. Just a lot of playing in the street, going over and playing in the playgrounds. You go to school, you have all your friends there, and you go do stuff. Not a lot different than most places, but—I loved then, and I still do, and unless you grow up in a place like here, you don’t get the chance to just walk in the desert, way away from anything where it’s really quiet, and you got all the sagebrush that just smells so good. And you just walk way out there somewhere, and no trees around, and just sky and desert and total silence. That’s something you really only get growing up here and somewhere very like this. Everybody knew about the Area, but never talked about it. I do remember, I was in first grade, I believe, when the Mobile Whole Body Counter came to Spalding. They gave us some tours of it, and they said that some people were going to get to go through it after school. Well, I thought it would be really neat. I think what they were probably doing was running some of the teachers through it, just as environmental sampling, really. This was in—this would have been ’64, around there. About ten years after the Green Run, when there weren’t huge releases like that, but there were still some releases going on, a lot of monitoring. I waited around after school for an hour, hoping to get to run through this. They would bring people in and 20 minutes later they’d come out. I got in trouble because I was so late walking back to my babysitter’s after school because of that. But where else is something like that going to happen? The Hanford Science Center was a pretty special place. To us, it was like just an everyday thing—doesn’t everyone have a neat science museum like this? But, no, they don’t. It was no longer—I was born in 1958. So the city was no longer run by GE. But there were still people—and they were still indulged by the city government—who, if a light bulb went out, they would call up the way that they used to call GE up to come and change it. For a while, that still kind of went on, somehow. I remember the air raid siren tests. On the last—in the last week of the month, I don’t remember what day it always was. But I always remember getting kind of scared about that. There’s nothing like that sound of—Richland had three, then two, then one—of air raid sirens going off. And at that age—eight, nine—I was starting to realize what that meant. That if that ever went off for real, it was all over. It was a big deal, a really big deal, to have to go to Kennewick or Pasco, because there was only the Blue Bridge, which wasn’t the Blue Bridge then. It was green and it was called the New Bridge. And then there was that horrible frightening old green bridge that was taken out. So if you had to go to Pasco, you had to go to and through Kennewick, and then go over one of those bridges. The highway between Richland and Kennewick was—I can still remember when it was just one lane each way. There was actually a stop light at George Washington Way, because the highway came in and curved and there was a stop light at G Way before it went up to the bypass part. Right there at that intersection is where the Rose Bowl was. Everybody knew the Rose Bowl, the sewage treatment plant. Great way to be introduced to a town when you’re first coming into it. As far as I know, it was a fairly normal childhood. My friends and I, we did all the normal things. When the hydroplane races started, there was a couple weeks in the summer where all anybody wanted to do was play hydroplanes. So everybody would have their own little scraps of wood they made into a hydroplane, and you’d drag it behind your bike in the street. Or turn on a hose and set it in the gutter and go make a dam to make a big puddle you could run it through like a boat. Day sleeper signs. Everybody—almost everybody worked a rotating shift—ABCD, where you rotate, at the time, from swing shift to days to graveyard<a>[EM1]</a> . My dad worked a rotating shift for 17 years. Once I started it, I understood how bad it had been for him when I was young, when I was little. But you’d walk around, and in the windows, in houses, “day sleeper.” You just understood that probably most of your friends were going to live in a house just like yours if you lived in one of the Alphabet House districts. A lot of my friends had the same or very slightly different models of ranch house all up in that area. So you knew exactly where the bathroom was, you knew where the kitchen was, you knew where the light switches were, because they were all the same. That’s probably somewhat different. There were virtually no African Americans in Richland. In elementary school, I think there was two—there was a boy my age, and his sister who was a little younger. Caused me some problems, because he slapped me around one day after school, and that affected my attitude for a long time. But because there were almost no black people in Richland, I had no idea what they were like or anything. My parents, a lot of their friends were conventionally racist at the time—it would be very racist now. But at the time it was just conventional. And because there were so few of them, they all knew each other because they had their own community that they would get together. I just thought that it was natural that every black person in the world knew every other one. Because they would always say, hi, how are you, and talk to each other like they knew each other. I thought that was normal. So I don’t know how common that is across all of the US, but it was certainly true here. Because Kennewick was a restricted city, Richland was mostly a city for somewhat upper level workers at Hanford, Pasco—East Pasco was where most of the African American people and the Hispanic immigrants went. It was always used as a term of horror—oh my god, we have to go by East Pasco. I’ve been there, now. It’s people with houses and neighborhoods and kids and dogs. At the time, it was just hell to be—this horrible thing. So I just—I grew up with that. Everybody knew the same things about everything, and believed the same way. That was really about it. O’Reagan: Was going to college when you first sort of left this bubble, if you will? Carson: Yeah. I went to Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, which—I grew up in the Lutheran Church. Really white. Going to PLU wasn’t really all that far outside the bubble. There was a little bit, because there was a very large contingent of Taiwanese kids going to school there. I tried to be all friendly and stuff—it was my first experience with the fact that other people can dislike you, too. So that was a problem. But that was—it was a good experience. It was being away from here, seeing some different things, the way different people lived. Met my wife. So that was a really good thing. But at the time, even though growing up here, I still didn’t really know a lot about Hanford or the nuclear industry, I knew a little more than when I was a kid—but not really that much. So I had no real good arguments or rebuttals for the people who—there in the mid ‘70s were already rabidly, no nukes, no nukes. Get rid of Hanford. Clean it up and throw it away. So that was kind of frustrating. There was one thing I was glad when I got hired on out here, I finally had a chance to learn all this stuff. Other stuff growing up here really is just things based on being here in this area. The place to go if you were going to go ride motorcycles or shoot your bow and arrow or pellet guns or whatever, you went down behind the cemetery along the Yakima River in Richland. O’Reagan: Oh yeah. Carson: Later on that became a place to go when people would go have keggers or wanted to go smoke or make out or whatever, that was a popular place. I never got invited to do any of those things, so I was only ever down there with my motorcycle. I do remember, as I moved into high school, I started to understand the feeling of isolation that Richland had. Because we had been not really a closed, secret city like a lot of the ones in the Soviet Union were, but just like a cloak of invisibility over all we did here. Nobody ever really knew much about us. I was there when Richard Nixon flew in to authorize Fast Flux Test Facility. He had flown into Walla Walla on Air Force One, because at the time to the Pasco airport couldn’t service a plane that large. And then took the Air Force One helicopter and they landed in front of the PNL sandcastle and chopped down a couple trees. I’ll always remember that, because it came down and just—limbs were flying all over the place. He stood—something you wouldn’t see anymore. He was all by himself. He didn’t have a retinue behind him, around him. The Secret Service was sort of out there, but they weren’t really a visible presence. He just went and stood on the steps and addressed people and talked about stuff and announced FFTF and what was going to go on and everything. That night on the CBS News, Walter Cronkite talked about how Richard Nixon made a stop in Walla Walla and then flew to Alaska to meet with the Japanese emperor. It was his first trip to the United States since World War II. Mentioned nothing at all about what happened here, which was really far more important than a very minor diplomatic meeting that lasted two hours or something. I then did start thinking about, and I noticed a lot of that isolation. People around here just got used to never being paid attention to, to never having anyone know where they were or what went on here. So a lot of worlds kind of shrunk down to just here. You just—your church, your softball league, your friends, the hydroplane races, and that was the extent of life. So I am glad that things have really expanded out and the diversification that first started being talked about in the ‘70s has really taken hold, and so much more is done here now than just relying, almost 100%, on money from Hanford. I think if there was another bust—another one of the endless boom and bust cycles that Hanford has had over the years—if there was another big bust at Hanford, I think the Tri-Cities could probably pull through it—Tri-Cities and surrounding areas—could pull through it really very well. O’Reagan: Mm-hmm. Carson: So that’s a big difference from growing up here, is the fact that now we’re somebody. We’re a known quantity, we’re actually a desired destination for many different reasons. We’re known for many different things. Not just, oh, all that secret stuff that nobody knows about. O’Reagan: I understand you volunteered at the CREHST Museum for a while. What was important to you about the history of the area that got you to do that? Carson: The fact that I was—that was in the six months that I was first laid off. I was trying to get contract writer work. That necessitated my becoming a business and getting a business license. So I ended up starting my own little computer consulting business. Because I did that, I heard from a friend of a friend who worked at CREHST that they were having computer problems. So I went down and I volunteered. I said, hey, I’ll be glad to come through and try and clean stuff and help you. And then in talking with the director, Gwen Leth—she started asking questions and found out all the other stuff I could do. So she really wanted me, and so I started working there at CREHST. They were fairly newly open, and I rewrote some of the displays, because they were not well-written. They had errors and they weren’t interesting. So I did that. I wrote an article for a magazine about CREHST—by request—that never got published. I helped with the computers, helped with some of their equipment. I just did stuff for Gwen. I was the publisher of their paper newsletter for several years. They would send me this stuff to do, and I’d put it all together into desktop publishing and did that. So that was fun, they were great people. I learned a lot about community education and what it meant and what it could be. I got to see all the neat behind-the-scenes stuff that is always the coolest thing about anything. The people there were just so wonderful that when I went back to work, I still kept in touch doing things like the newsletter, and then when I got laid off again, I would just go down and start back down there. Volunteer sometimes 40 hours a week, sometimes just a couple days. Whatever was happening that I could do, depending on what was going on with my daughter and stuff like that. So I had desperately missed the Hanford Science Center. I talked about that earlier, that it was such a great place to go, especially as I learned more and then could see more of what was actually being told me at the science center. But then when it closed down, I desperately missed having that there. Because I wanted to take my daughter to it, I wanted to keep doing it. I had volunteered to do some stuff at the science center, just before it closed when it was still in the Federal Building. So being able to help resurrect a lot of that, keep it going there at CREHST, and even provide input on what they were going to show next and things. And seeing how all of that was coming together and the efforts that they made to really reach out to the community and continue the education and the keeping the history. And keeping the artifacts alive and just being able to go in there and wander through anytime I wanted was just really great. And the REACH center is a fabulous, wonderful place. But at the time I was working at CREHST, CREHST was still going to be the lead, and they had plans for a facility about the same size down on Columbia Point that the REACH part of it was going to be a small part of the CREHST Museum. Turned out the other way. But CREHST—even just the efforts that people made to make it come about, the people that got together behind the scenes and worked with DoE, worked with the community to get funding, worked just to make things happen like moving the building of the FFTF Visitors Center from out there down to where it is now. That’s what that building is. The below-stairs part was new, but the superstructure is the old FF Visitors Center. So getting that to happen was not simple, was not easy, wasn’t cheap. But they kept at it and they did it. So that kind of dedication inspired me to do more along that line, like this. O’Reagan: Okay. Well there are always questions I don’t know to ask. Interesting incidents, or themes you wanted to talk about or anything like that that comes to mind that you thought might be worth mentioning. Carson: In terms of work, or in terms of growing up here, or just anything? O’Reagan: Either or both. Carson: One of the things I did at N Reactor was I became one of the designated evacuation bus drivers. At the time, because facilities were manned around the clock, and it was 43-and-a-half miles from my driveway to the N Reactor parking lot—a long ways out there—you had to have some way to evacuate everyone that was there, in case there was an actual big accident. On regular dayshift, all of the buses that brought everybody from town were all there. But there were, parked off on the side, a couple of the old, old buses that were there strictly to be evacuation buses. They didn’t have enough drivers to have one on every shift to make sure that was covered, so they just enlisted operators. We got special training in how to drive the old buses and stuff. So on weekend dayshifts or sometimes on swing shift, and even on graveyard a few times, if everything, all the work was caught up, there was nothing going on, we would go out and practice driving. Just drive around all over. So I got to see a lot of the Area that’s really not terrifically accessible now. Because, man, those buses will go a lot of places. They love a gravel road. Drove all over, saw the Hanford Bank. Drove down, found the big boat ramp between F Area and H Area where the Hanford patrol would put their tactical boat in and out, and also where a lot of bald eagles like to hang out in the winter. Drove out to—way out by Vernita Bridge to the old warehouse, the stone warehouse that’s out there—drove out there, and drove around that. Got out and looked at it. At the time, they still had part of the old highway, the old two-road highway that led down the valley and over to Hanford and White Bluffs and serviced all the farms and everything around there. We drove on this dirt road around B Area, and then all of the sudden, here’s a beautiful paved road where the lines are bright and clear and the pavement is not cracked. So we just kept on driving. That was an exciting find. O’Reagan: Were these evacuation plans pretty well founded already when you got there? Carson: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, you had—in case of an emergency, you had an assignment to come and grab an emergency response card. There were holders of these in the control room. Everybody was supposed to go run in there and grab one and do what it said. Just one thing, whether it was shutting down some equipment, or going and closing something up, or something. You go and do that job, come back, if you’re done then you go and get on the evacuation bus and it will leave when everybody’s accounted for. So the whole evacuation thing had been practiced and set in place for years and years. Luckily we never had to do it, except in a drill. Oh. One of the funny things—one of the first times, it was just us three or four operators going out for a practice drive without the instructor or anything. It was a really hot summer’s day on the weekend. Those buses didn’t have air conditioning. [LAUGHTER] They did have eyebrow vents—one above the driver and one above the door. And we’re driving along and all the windows are open and it’s just too hot. So one of the other guys on my shift, operator, he gets up and he says, I’m going to open these vents. And he reaches up—I was driving—and he reached up above me and opened that one. Air started coming in. And all of the sudden—he opens this one—and there was a big bird’s nest inside that vent. And the way he was, he pulled it and it went right in his face. [LAUGHTER] There was just this explosion of straw and feathers and dried bird poop and stuff. We all tried really hard not to laugh at him, but—[LAUGHTER] he even laughed at himself, so. That was another thing. I remember when Uptown sat kind of alone. There wasn’t really anything built up around it yet. The big Mormon church had been built across the street, but there was nothing else out around it. And over now where that Exxon station and the Fire & Water store and the restaurant and where Hastings is, none of that was there. There was a couple of old wooden shacks. No idea what they were. But one night, it was a fall night, and we went because my dad was there as part of the fire department. There was some kind of—I don’t know—maybe a fire prevention week celebration or something. They were going to burn the shacks down to show what it looks like when the fire department puts out a fire. So my dad was part of that. And there were hundreds and hundreds of people standing in the Uptown parking lot, watching as they set these two shacks on fire. They let them burn for quite a long time, then they came out and put them out, and there was a lot of ooh, ahh. That’s a fairly early thing. One thing that happened through the ‘60s that I took for granted and then didn’t realize when it stopped until several years later—there were all kinds of traveling exhibitions that did come through here from NASA or the Army or the Navy or the Air Force. They would come and bring an exhibit and set up like in the Uptown parking lot or somewhere. They would be there for a day or two and give their spiel and you could go into their trailers and see what they had. Then they would pack up and move on to somewhere else. There were a lot of those. One that I wish I would have done, but at the time I didn’t think it was important—the X-37 Dyna-Soar—it was a first lifting body design for a recovery vehicle, or an early design for a space shuttle in the ‘60s—to go right around the Gemini program. It was eventually going to become a part of the Army’s or Air Force’s manned space laboratory program that never got off the ground. And they brought the vehicle around on a big trailer with a little trailer museum to talk about it and stuff, and I wish I would have gone to see that. But I was too busy doing something else that I thought was more important. So all kinds of stuff like that would come through. There was always—Griggs brought in a lot of these little, cheap tawdry little traveling exhibits and things. Bonnie and Clyde’s death car showed up there on a trailer when I was a kid. Right after the movie had come out and I was just really fascinated by the whole gangster thing. So of course I made my mom and dad go all the way over to Pasco to Griggs to see that. One I felt bad about then and I still feel bad—they had a dolphin that was in like a ten-foot above ground swimming pool, just barely moving. You paid $0.50 to see that, and I just felt bad. And just the kind of stuff that doesn’t really happen anymore. There was a lot of that still. Because the Tri-Cities, I think, moved into the ‘60s a little more slowly than other places. O’Reagan: Well, this has all been fascinating. I know our battery starts running out around this point. Carson: Okay. O’Reagan: So I guess we’ll have to wrap up now. But it really has been great. Carson: Great. O’Reagan: So thanks a lot. Carson: You’re very, very welcome, and I would be happy to come back and talk more about other things. Anything you’d like to ask questions about. O’Reagan: Fantastic, thanks a lot. Carson: Great. Thank you. <div> <div> <div> <a>[EM1]</a> </div> </div> </div> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:35:12 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 248 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview N Reactor 200 Area 200 West Area F Area H Area B Area Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1958-2016 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1981-1997 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 Carson Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Subject The topic of the resource Richland (Wash.) Hanford (Wash.) Hanford Site (Wash.) Hanford Reach (Wash.) Hanford Nuclear Site (Wash.) Nuclear waste disposal Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016-4-29 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2016-07-29: Metadata v1 created – [RG] Description An account of the resource An interview with David Carson 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. 200 Area 200 West Area B Area Chernobyl Nuclear Accident Effluent Treatment Facility F Area H Area K-Basins N Reactor Richland (Wash.) Secrecy Washington Public Power Supply System (WOOPS) https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F63597890b84a4bfcdd0fa256e4c9c15d.jpg ffb070bd2b52785563acbfaadfe10742 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fa9b2de3cbe40e470ac71fb166d655fb8.mp4 5cf2ec6e1c33811ff74fe4b4f0fb6cb1 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed David Chambers Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with David Chambers on July 5, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. We will be talking with David about his experiences working on the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? David Chambers: Is David H. Chambers. D-A-V-I-D. H. C-H-A-M-B-E-R-S. Franklin: Great, thanks, David. And do you prefer David or Dave? Chambers: David or Dave, either one. It’s immaterial to me. Whatever’s easiest for you. Franklin: Okay, great. So, tell me, how and why did you come to the area to work for the Hanford Site? Chambers: Well, when I first graduated from college, I taught school for a while. I taught school in Pasco. I went back to the University of Wisconsin – Stout branch, but I was from Wenatchee, Washington. And the Tri-Cities was kind of an up-and-coming community, so I ended up teaching school here. And then I quit teaching school and went to work in engineering for Boeing Aircraft Corporation. There were just too many people in Seattle, so I wanted to get back over here, and got an opportunity to go to work for Battelle Research Laboratories and so I took the job. Franklin: Okay. And what did you do at Battelle? What was your job there? Chambers: I was called a senior engineering technical person. Franklin: Okay. And that sounds kind of vague, so I’m wondering if you could unpack kind of what your job duties were and what kinds of projects you worked on. Chambers: Well, we did a little bit of everything. The first four or five years I worked for Battelle, it was out in the 200 West area. 221-T, head end. And we did what’s referred to as simulated reactor explosion tests. Franklin: Really? Chambers: And what we did, we had a containment vessel and a little reactor core inside of it. And we vaporized high levels of uranium, plutonium, et cetera, different radioactive material, and put it in the reactor and looked at the metals that would withstand it and the coatings we would try to use to utilize to protect stuff, and the chemicals and washes to clean it up after an explosion. So that’s what I did for about four or five years. Franklin: And what kind of work came out of that? Did that lead to changes in reactor design or things used to clean up? Chambers: Well, I’m sure that it did, because stuff was utilized at Chernobyl and also at the Three Mile Island. Basically, sodium hydroxide, NaOH is the best thing we found to wash them down. And after it was washed down to the bottom of it, we collected samples, and run those samples through liquid nitrogen so we could cool it down and put it into little 500-mililiter bottles. And then we set it in the computer that was in a whole room at that time, with air conditioning, naturally, and analyzed it so we could see the drop in the radiation as the time went on. Franklin: Wow. How did your previous work prepare you for this job of testing—reactor explosion tests? Chambers: Well, it didn’t, really. We had a lot of high PhD people that were actually analyzing all the stuff, and there were several of us that basically just did the experiments and stuff. The computer analysis went to the PhD people that analyzed it and looked at it and wrote all the paperwork. At that time, you know, we were kind of bitter enemies with Russia, and yet they were able to get that information somehow and utilize it. And I don’t blame them. Battelle put it out and maybe charged people for it. It was a government-funded program, looking at ways to protect people. That’s what it was for. We didn’t have much protection at all; we had a pair of surgeon’s gloves we put on our hands. That was about it, you know. And a white lab coat. So that was basically what we used. Filled those little bottles with the white surgeon glove, set it over, so. Franklin: Wow. How much shielding was between you and the simulated reactor in these reactor explosion tests? Chambers: There was a lot of shielding there. There was concrete walls, plus the reactor core was steel and metal and stuff and what-have-you. And all the atmosphere was protected because all of the velocities of air went through all kinds of filters and stuff before it was ever released to the atmosphere. And the liquid went into those tanks that are out there now that everybody’s worried about. So any of the chemicals and stuff that we washed down, any of the cleanup that we did on the stuff that we utilized in it, all went into those tanks out there. We also had canisters that we set around, positioned, in the containment vessel at different altitudes, different spaces. And they had little carbon filter systems in them, and we’d switch them on and pull the air through them, and then we’d check the little deals. So, again, over a period of time, we’d do like maybe 15 minutes after it happened, maybe 45 minutes, maybe an hour-and-a-half. Utilization time to see how it dropped off over the periods of time. And it was through—they had these little round canisters, if I remember right, I think they had thirteen of these, each one had like thirteen of them in it, and so we could turn them on individually. So pull air through them, and then look at the radiation content and see the slope that it went down over a period of time. Franklin: Interesting. Chambers: And then we had another facet out there that we utilized. We had a separate building outside of 221-T head end that we had a reactor core in it and put waters in that and had two shields in it, metal shields, and used high pressure nitrogen stuff between the two of them, so that as they heated up the water and put it under tremendous pressure, it wouldn’t blow. When it released the pressure, then it would blow. And we did that along with the other—to see what damage, and what would happen when one blew. One time, in fact the last time we utilized that, they made a little mistake and got the pressures and stuff a little bit too high, and the walls on the reactor, that simulated reactor were six inches thick, and when it blew it split it. And not only that, but it blew the frame back in the concrete and sucked the walls in on the building and lifted the roof off of it. We had a neutron generator sitting out to measure stuff. I don’t know where it went to. Nobody that I know of has ever been able to find it. And it was a tremendous thing—the steel—tremendously heavy. And that volume of water and steam and everything went out of that place, and I don’t know where that neutron generator—we looked and looked and looked for it. Never could find it. I don’t know they ever did find it. Franklin: You mean, it— Chambers: It just went somewhere. Franklin: It flew away. Chambers: It flew away or disintegrated, I don’t know. And that was—we weren’t supposed to talk about that for a long time, and so I never did tell anybody. Several years thereafter, I had a good friends that I fished and hunted with, Bob Cullowith[?], he was the head engineer on the FFTF, so he understood. We were hunting—this was, oh, 25 years after it happened—and I told him about it. So our manager, Gordon Rodgers was a skier and Bob Cullowith[?] would go up to Bluewood skiing. And one day he was sitting next to Gordon on the bus. He mentioned that to Gordon and Gordon said, well, I guess it’s time we can talk about it now. At the time it was supposed to be secret; nobody’s supposed to know it. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] That’s a great story. So to your knowledge it was never found? Chambers: No. We looked and looked and looked for it. We had an RM out there always onsite. Irving Winters was an RM, really a nice fellow. They call radiation monitors something different now, but at that time they were RMs. Went out with Geiger counters and everything. We looked all over that country for it; I don’t know where it went to. Franklin: Wow. Chambers: To this day, I don’t know whether anybody knows where it went to. Franklin: Wow. That’s sure a good thing that no one was standing where that neutron monitor was. Chambers: Oh, why, no, we wouldn’t let anyone out there, because it blew out with tremendous force and velocity. Well, as I say, it pulled the sides in the building and lifted the roof. A tremendous deal. And that reactor core is a pretty good size, and it was mounted in steel and stuff, six inches thick, as I say, and it split it and blew it clear back against—broke the mounting brackets and blew it back against the concrete. And our manager was really upset at that, and I don’t blame him. Because they just made some mistakes. A lot of people think you can’t compress water. But they found that you really can, and when it blows, it blows with tremendous force. In fact, they did a test somewhere, I think maybe Idaho or somewhere, where an engineer was doing that and then it got too much pressure and it blew and just disintegrated him. Franklin: Wow. Chambers: And that’s been several years ago, 40 years ago or so. So that—water compressed can end up being pretty dangerous. Franklin: That sounds like some pretty—I mean, obviously this work would have really big impacts on safety and knowing how to construct better reactors. But this sounds like pretty dangerous—there’s definitely some hazards involved with this testing. Chambers: Well, I don’t think there was really hazard that way. The hazard we were subjected to was the chemicals and the radiation back in the samples that we took, and taking the little air samplers apart. They were little stainless steel deals that we put charcoal in them and filters of a different kind in them. And again, we had a little deal we stuck in our pockets, a little dosimeter, they call them. But if you got too high on them, guys would leave them in their lockers, so that they wouldn’t send you home or whatever, you know? And if you thought you were getting too much of it. So that’s basically the exposure problem was what really was dangerous to us, as far as the reactor core and stuff—we were away from it, we were back in the building when it blew or standing off to the sides and back of it, and watching it when stuff like that happened, or in labs. Franklin: Would you be watching it through like shielded glass or CCTV or—? Chambers: When we vaporized the radioactive material, we were watching it through lead glass. Very thick lead glass. Franklin: So, when guys would get too much dose and get sent home, would they be sent home without pay? Is that why they would leave their dosimeter? Chambers: No, I— Franklin: Because you’re the first person I’ve heard that from, and I— Chambers: I think they were all paid, as far as I know. I don’t think anybody lost any pay. They just sent them to do something else or sent them home or something, what-have-you, so they wouldn’t lose pay. If you got overdosed. Like McCluskey, out there, he was paid all that time. Franklin: Sure. I guess I’m just struggling to understand why someone would intentionally leave their—overexpose themselves over the limit just to keep—there are other guys that could do that job, right? Chambers: Well, you know, a lot of the knowledge at that time wasn’t where we are now. A lot of this stuff they didn’t know back then. You can’t blame them, because it was a job and it paid good. They didn’t know the dangers then that they do now. They know a lot more—like asbestos is a good example. Every pipe we had out there, everything was insulated with asbestos. Well, they didn’t know the ramifications of asbestos, you know, 70 or 80 years ago. World War II, every ship that was built had asbestos all through it. But they learned. Franklin: It’s a great insulator. Chambers: Yes. Fabulous. But very deadly if you—you know. Even to people at home, from the clothes that you take home. The women washed them and stuff, you know, they’d get the fibers and breathe it in their lungs, like coal dust, you know? 100 years ago they didn’t know what coal dust would do, and now they—so a lot of those, a lack of knowledge. Franklin: Mm. You also alluded earlier that this had been a pretty high point in tensions with Russia during this part of the Cold War. Do you think that might have played into the attitude of just wanting to get the job done? Chambers: I think so. I think that they were accept—very acceptable to utilizing our knowledge when it came to cleaning up the reactor and stuff. They had to when Chernobyl happened. I think, if you look back, a lot of our people went over there. A lot of Battelle people went over and helped them, because—that was actually in Ukraine. Chernobyl’s actually in Ukraine; it isn’t in Russia, you know. And lately I’ve been seeing some specials on TV showing the beautiful city that they had there and all the amusements and stuff, it’s just sitting there in ruin, because they can’t go to it now because it’s so highly radioactive. But their reactors, you know, were vertically cooled, which means that the cooling water’s all on the bottom. So they got a hot spot and bubbled the water, so the top of the reactor didn’t have any cooling water. Where ours are horizontally cooled. We got the cooling water up here as well as down there, so we don’t have that problem. Different philosophy of making a reactor. Franklin: Sure, sure. So what did you—so after the reactor—you mentioned you worked at the 221-T head end doing reactor testing, and then you looked at different chemicals for cleaning up. What did you do after that project? Chambers: I went down to the 300 Area and went to work in Robert Marshall’s—that was the manager. I worked directly for a PhD by the name of Gerald Kulcinski. And he actually, I told a young man later, the smartest individual that I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing. And you see him on television every now and then on Discovery Channel, A&E and they’re talking about him. Because he left here and went to University of Wisconsin and he’s in charge of the fusion reactor—the old reactors are fission. What we’re trying to develop now is fusion, where you get 100,000-degree plasma and you can keep it going and contain it. Well, we can get to 100,000 but to keep it going and contain it is different, and that’s what they’re working on. He was kind of in charge of that. Went all over the world to do that kind of stuff, and he’s a professor at the University of Wisconsin. I think now retired, but he talks about now what’s energy on some planet out there and if we could get that energy from here we could run this world for a lot of years and stuff. They’re way out there in this stuff. Franklin: So what was he doing when you went to work out in his lab? Chambers: We were doing metallurgical research. We were taking various types of metal that we were trying to fiddle with or mend or develop or what-have-you, and putting them in reactors around the country, different levels of radiation and then bringing them back to the lab and seeing what kind of damage they sustained. And the way we would do that, we would thin them down with a variety of ways and then put them in electron microscope so we could magnify stuff and see stuff several thousand powers magnification and then look at the damage that the metal sustained. Franklin: And what was the purpose of that work? Chambers: Well, again, to try to develop metals for different things and to try to develop metals that the reactor wouldn’t harm, and to make all kinds of stuff out of, I guess. Stainless steel now has become widely used in all kinds of cookware and knives. When I was a kid, you never thought of having a knife blade, a pocketknife blade, made out of stainless; they were carbon steel. Now they’re all stainless. Franklin: Hmm. So was stainless steel one of the metals to come out of that work that had high applicability for all these different scenarios? Chambers: Well, I’m sure it was. I’m sure Battelle had a lot of work, because they’re a very competent company in a whole lot of different areas. People don’t realize what kind of research they do and a tremendous amount of developments in everything come from Battelle. I think it’s a very, very good company, my personal opinion. Franklin: Were there any tests of metals that stood out to you in that work? Chambers: Not really anything; it was just a combination—and you’d put them in the reactor at this level. At University of Washington, I took some samples over to their reactor, put them in at their level, downtown Seattle and people didn’t realize in Seattle they had a reactor right downtown Seattle with Dixy Lee Ray running it. Very brilliant lady, you know? And we’d send them everywhere and then bring them back and, say, thin them down and just look at what happened. Of course, one of the things that took place when we did that, our lab became very contaminated. Because some of the metal was thicker, so we had to thin it down to start with. Well, I bought a little milling machine with a magnetic base on it and then glued the samples to a piece of carbon steel with epoxy resin and superglue. And then planed them down with a horizontal milling machine. All of those particles and everything went into the atmosphere in our lab. And then, we’d put them in a little holding device and used high current and various acids to spray against it with the current and to thin them, etch them down, until you could finally see some light. And then we put them in the microscope. So all of that atmosphere was what we breathed. It was just in the room. So it became a very contaminated lab. You can understand why. But, again, we never thought anything about it. It was a job; we just did it, you know? Franklin: Were you wearing respirators— Chambers: No. Franklin: --or anything? Any kind of protective--? Chambers: We didn’t have anything on but our street clothes, like this. Or you could change into a pair of coveralls if you wanted to. Most of the time, we didn’t. But I think I’m probably the only one left alive. My compadre, Jack Humason, a great friend of mine, he and I both worked straight for Gerald. He died about a year ago. Had cancers through the bone marrow and all in his blood and stuff, and just fell over dead, went in the hospital. One of the guys I hunted with, Jones is his name, Maxwell Jones, I read in the paper here three or four months ago that he ended up back in Tennessee doing stuff. And he died. And he’s quite a few years younger than I was, and so was Jack. So I’m lucky. I don’t smoke and I’m not a drinker or anything. Unfortunately, I’ve got bad COPD from all that stuff. Franklin: Wow. Yeah, it’s amazing, I can imagine that just a little—what you’d be inhaling would be a really effective—a cocktail of different— Chambers: That’s correct. Franklin: You know, because you’re getting all these samples in from all these different reactors and these different types of metals and milling them and everything. Chambers: Well, yes, and of course the acids and stuff that we were utilizing basically to thin the metals down with the current, the fumes from that that you were breathing, that didn’t do your lungs any good either. Of course, that’s what’s, again, more of what’s in those tanks out there that they’ve got to find a way to drain those tanks and solidify that material. Unfortunately, our vitrification plant is a long way behind time. Franklin: Yeah. Well, it seems like, just from what you just described and talking with other people, it seems like it’s that mix of things that are in the tanks that seems to be a lot of the problem. There’s all these different chemicals and all these different solids and, you know, it’s like a grab-bag. Chambers: Yes, there’s everything under the sun in those tanks and what-have-you. Of course, the acid content and the strong NaOH, that’s what causes the tanks to etch away, leech away and stuff. And you know what an acid will do; pour it on metal, and it’ll eventually burn right through it, you know. Unless you got—if they’d have built the tanks out of stainless to start with, it’d been far better off. But, again, it was knowledge, lack of knowledge. They didn’t have any idea. We had a war to win. When they did this stuff, or when they started doing it. And then we had a cold war for years that we were worried about everything, so we had to do stuff. Now, you wonder if you could win a war now. With the attitude that’s in this country now, it makes you wonder if you could do the things that you did. You couldn’t do the things that they did back then. Franklin: Yeah. So how long did you work at the metallurgical research lab? Chambers: Well, that was over five, about six years there. I had about eleven years in at Battelle. Franklin: Okay, and then you left Battelle? Chambers: Yes. Franklin: Okay, and why did you leave Battelle? Chambers: Well, I had a business going. I had the last year or two, couple of years I was with Battelle, and then I finally went to that full-time. Franklin: Ah, and what business was that? Chambers: I owned Water World Marina, Incorporated at Pasco Boat Basin. Franklin: Oh, okay. So you retired at Battelle to go full-time with your boat business. Chambers: That’s correct. And then I ended up having, oh, about, oh, I don’t know, at the most probably ten or twelve people working for me for—I was in that for 25 years. Franklin: Oh, wow. And so then you sold that as well? Chambers: Yes, that’s correct. Franklin: So you’ve been retired for a while. Chambers: Yeah. Well, I retired and my buddy bought me out, and then not long after that, why, he called me up and said, Dave, would you please come down and go to work for me, you know? Help me out? I need some help, you know. So I said, okay, I’ll do that, I’ll help you out. Franklin: Yeah, it’s hard to stay retired, I’ve noticed. I interview a lot of retired people. Hard to stay retired. When you worked for Battelle, did you live in Pasco the whole time, or did you ever live in Richland? Chambers: No, I lived in Kennewick. Franklin: Oh, Kennewick. Chambers: At the time. I live in Pasco now, but all the years that I worked for Battelle Research Laboratories, I lived in Kennewick. Franklin: Oh, okay. And so you would do the commute every day out to the— Chambers; Yes, that’s correct. And to start with, another thing I don’t understand, we’d drive to the bus lot in North Richland, right off of, basically a continuation of George Washington Way and a couple other streets went together, and had a big parking lot there. And then you get on the buses and ride out to 2-West. And I never could understand why in the world they got rid of those buses, because it kept a lot of cars off the road, and a lot of—one bus carrying 50 or 60 people is a whole lot more economical than a bunch of cars driving out there. Franklin: Yes, yes, it is. Chambers: I couldn’t understand why they got rid of them. It was something you could relax, both going and coming from work. Franklin: Sure. Yeah, I’ve heard that from a lot of people who rode the buses how much they like them. It sure does seem to make a lot of sense to have them. Chambers: No, it didn’t make a lot of sense to get rid of them. Franklin: I think I just have a couple other questions. Yeah, I have two more questions. I’m wondering if you could describe the ways in which the security and/or secrecy at Hanford impacted your work. Chambers: Well, I don’t really think that the secrecy or the security impacted it, except that you didn’t take the stuff home with you. You didn’t advertise to everybody what you were doing, and we were beyond a war, in the Cold War. During World War II, people didn’t even really know what they were doing out there, most of them. There were people in the know that did, but the vast majority of them didn’t know. Well, when I went to work there, everybody knew what you were doing. People downtown didn’t know a lot of the stuff and weren’t privy to the writings and stuff that were going on out there. That went strictly to the government or to some organization. And Battelle does a lot of private company research. And that’s probably more secretive than government research, because if you’re doing research for a company and they paid you a lot of money, they most certainly don’t want a competitor to get that knowledge. So that’s probably more secretive than the government work was when I was out there. And then I can understand why. So I don’t think it impacted what we did at all, except that you were limited on what you could take out there and what you could bring home. You couldn’t bring anything home unless you had clearance to do it. And you most certainly couldn’t take any kind of weapons out there. And dope was prohibited. People maybe tried to take it in and stuff, but I didn’t see any of that in our groups at all. And a lot of our groups, not many of them even smoked. I don’t smoke, and Jack Humason didn’t smoke, and Gerald Kulcinski didn’t, and Homer, our manager didn’t smoke. Very few people. Some of them smoked pipe, and some of them smoked cigarettes. But there were more people that didn’t smoke, even back then, than did. So. Franklin: Interesting. Well, that’s—I mean, good for them. Chambers: Yes, yes. Good thing I don’t, as bad as my COPD is. When I went through the impairment evaluation—started on the deal against the DOL in October of 2012. So it’s been almost five years. And had my impairment evaluation last August. They put you in a little room, and put all connected up stuff, and then they put you on a bicycle with stuff on you. And I had, my lungs got an 86% impairment with my lungs with all that stuff and what-have-you. So I have to breathe inhalers all the time. And then I have a heart that beats fast, because of the oxygen transfer, there are no blood vessels shut down or anything for the oxygen transfer. So I have to take medicine for that, so. Franklin: Oh, wow. Chambers: So it catches up to you after a time. But fortunately, I’ve lived for 82 years, you know. And to say, I don’t know of anybody—there may be one or two still alive that worked out there, but I don’t know, most of them are gone. Franklin: Yeah, well, it seems like you were really in contact—close contact with a lot of different types of material and different ingestion pathways for chemical and radiological materials. Chambers: Yes, we were. Both places. In the 2-West area, doing the experiments there, and then the metallurgical stuff. Yes. And especially—the chemicals are probably the worst things. Radioactive material does damage to you; it cooks you from the inside out. But the acids get into you, and we used sulfuric acid and nitric acid and picric acid. Picric you have to be very careful of. It’ll get in here, and it doesn’t burn immediate—it gets down and then burns from the inside out. It’s a very dangerous thing. And then we used some ether and stuff and what-have-you. And you have to be careful with ether, because if it crystallizes and then you twist the cap off, it’ll explode. So you have to be very careful with ether. Franklin: Jeez. Chambers: Ether, highly explosive. And we used some of that. In fact I found some of it down in the lab in 221-T, heading downstairs, and it was setting up there, in the bottom been sitting there for a long time with crystallization on them. So I called them and they took it out in a container somewhere and blew it up, I guess. Franklin: Wow. Chambers: So. Franklin: That’s really scary. Chambers: But you don’t mess with it, you know. You just leave it alone, you know? As long as you leave it alone, you’re okay, and get people in there that know how to handle it. Franklin: Wow. So, David, my last question is kind of a reflective question, and that’s, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War? Chambers: Well, I think, the thing is to know that we had a job to do, because the world was, at that time, was in a very dangerous situation with China and Russia both. Plus, North Korea. And the bugaboo now, again, is North Korea. And we had things we had to learn and stuff we had to do. And it’s hard to realize, for young people to visualize what the world was like then with Russia developing all kinds of stuff. Shot France’s powers down. When we really—to start with, had a plane that would fly above their missiles. But then they developed a missile that’d shoot them down. So we had to do some utilization there to free him and trade him, you know, to get him back. And Russia was developing stuff. And they had weapons that would blow us to pieces, and we had weapons that would blow them to pieces. And it was just a dangerous situation that we were trying to de-escalate, cool down, and so we just kept doing stuff. It was a job to do, and you had to understand that the world was a different situation then than it is now, and it’s becoming that situation again now. With North Korea and Iran and now Putin in Russia again, and China’s trying to build up islands in the South China Sea. So it looks like we’re heading down that same road again. So. Franklin: Great, well, David, thank you so much for your really great stories and interesting—you had a very interesting jobs out there. Chambers: Well, I think I did. Franklin: Yeah, you did, and I appreciate you taking the time to tell us about them today. Chambers: Well, then, as I say, you know, Battelle was the main instrumentation in this. And you read in the paper what they’re doing all the time now, so I think that’s a wonderful company to have here, and they do a lot of very fine things, I think. Maybe some people don’t like them, but I think they do a wonderful job, and I’m glad we’ve got them here. Franklin: Oh, good. Yeah, they have their hands in a lot of different— Chambers: That’s correct. Franklin: A lot of different stuff. Chambers: And even security, going into airports and stuff. A lot of people don’t realize where that came from; that came from Battelle. Franklin: Yeah, yes, it did. Chambers: You know? And we looked at some IUDs that were put in women in different parts of the world. Intrauterine devices to stop pregnancies. And then analyzed them. And you find that women in different parts of the world destroy those IUDs at different rates. Maybe it’s from their diet, diet and food or what they eat or what-have-you. But just interesting things. Very interesting things. Franklin: Yeah, that is very interesting. Well, thank you. Chambers: You’re welcome. Franklin: Okay. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:33:34 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 221-T Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with David Chambers Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource David Chambers worked for Batrelle in the 200 Areas An interview conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by Mission Support Alliance on behalf of the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 07/25/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. 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This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F4a35f372f4b52570ee849e45d2d5926a.JPG cffa87237eafbc5227c6dc8eb9c913cc https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fd244e6972247b281ea3b84e454b5d96e.mp4 67e666aad21ba00e26e7fb583d01d4b9 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed David Criswell Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an interview—an oral history interview with Dave Criswell on July 20, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Dave Criswell about his experiences growing up in the Tri-Cities and working at the Hanford Site. So, Dave, the best place to start, I think, is the beginning. Where—why don’t you tell me when and where you were born. David Criswell: Born in Portland, Oregon. [SIGH] I guess there’s nothing wrong with 1937. We moved to the Tri-Cities the first time, Dad and I drove up here after midnight, January 1st, 1948. We only lived in Pasco for all of ’48 and part of ’49, and then we moved up to Hungry Horse, Montana. We returned here in spring/summer of 1953. I entered Pasco High School as a junior. The school was brand new that year. They’d just opened the doors for us. So I graduated in 1955. I don’t recall how I ended up being selected as part of a program to become an engineering assistant, was the program, in 1955. They were conducting night classes that we had to take. At the same time, during the day, we would work in the labs out at Hanford in different labs. I started off, because I wasn’t 18 yet—my birthday didn’t come until October; I got hired in September. So 17-year-olds couldn’t work on the Hanford Project. So, Richland, being a government town, and DOE ran everything, including the city library, there was myself and a couple, three other 17-year-olds went to work in the library until we were old enough. And then we were assigned to labs out at Hanford. I was assigned to a chemistry lab in 325 Building. We were separating radioisotopes, from I know not where, to see how efficient the process was that they were using for separation out there. I can’t even remember the names of some of the materials that we were separating. The one that I can remember is ruthenium, I think it was. But day in, day out, taking samples and running them, cooking them down, putting them on filter papers, and then that would go to a lab for reading. Some point in time within first year or so I worked, I was transferred out to 222-S, another chemistry lab, doing the same thing. I suspect that maybe whatever I was running the analysis on was a little fresher than the stuff we had in 325 Building. It must’ve come from right there in the 200 Area. But the same thing. The only thing that—real memory that I had was when I graduated from high school, I wasn’t—I didn’t have—I wasn’t as tall as I am now. I graduated at 5’7.5”. Franklin: Wow. Criswell: And weighed 135 pounds. Went to work out there in September of that same year, ’55, and I was 6’0” and weighed 135. Tired. Man, I was tired. I don’t even know if I ate when I got home, I was so tired. Going to bed was the most interesting thing I had. But at some point in time, in the period of time that I was working at 222-S, apparently had another growth spurt. Because every day you could drive out to the gate of 2-West and then you go through the badge house. And you would then climb on a bus that would take you to whatever events inside of 200 West you were going to. We were going to S, so that’s where we went. And one day, I got off the bus and something knocked me to my knees, and I fell out of the bus. I brought a box with me, and in that is a report that said that they thought maybe I was inattentive, that I had hit my head on the bus, and fallen on the ground. Well, it didn’t dawn on me until years later, maybe even when I read that doggone memo, that the reason I hit my head is I’d had a growth spurt, and all of the sudden I was too tall to go through that bus door without hitting my head. Co-worker said I didn’t throw a shadow on a sunny day, I was so skinny. And ended up being about 6’4” at some point in time early on. Uh— Franklin: Oh, sorry. Criswell: I could not get a hang of chemistry. The night school was difficult for me. I hired a tutor to try and help me; I still couldn’t get the hang of it. They determined I probably wasn’t going to work out in a chemistry lab. And they transferred me into tech informations in 300 Area. If you’re not familiar with that old building, that was the one just inside the south gate of the 300 Area on the west side of the road. That had the plant’s library; across the hall, it had the security files. Documents were stored over there. I didn’t have anything to do with that. Basically, I was putting books on a shelf. I also had the job of traveling all over Hanford. When somebody would have a safety meeting, they would occasionally call us and ask us to bring a film that they had heard about, or asked if we had a film that they hadn’t seen. So, I traveled all over. Franklin: So kind of like a AV, audio-visual, tech? Criswell: Yeah, that’s exactly what it was. Only, I was using 16-milimeter projector. Old-fashioned stuff. I don’t even know if you could find one of them today. Franklin: Oh, we actually—our declassified—not declassifying, but getting ready for public release, some of the materials in the Hanford Collection, and we had to purchase a 16-milimeter projector to view some of the old movies. Which could possibly be some of the old movies that you showed. There’s some about safety, and there’s some of the promotional ones produced for Hanford. Criswell: We had some Walt Disney flicks. We had one that—Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. I think that was The Ventriloquist. Franklin: So, wait, so, these weren’t—these were like movies and shows? Criswell: Some of them were. They were movies. They dealt with safety things. Franklin: Oh, okay. Criswell: They dealt with security, with reinforcing the security, you know, you can’t do this, you can’t do that. I learned early on in the early days if the film broke, I had to take it downtown to a little Quonset hut behind the old Federal Building and they had plant photographers down there. There was a photographer down there that knew how to splice the films. Anyhow, they determined if I was going to keep coming down there, that I needed to have the equipment to repair those things and keep the stuff going and they wouldn’t have me running downtown all the time. So I ended up learning how to do that and take care of my own films. I did that for a couple, about two-and-a-half years. And someplace about 1958 I guess, I ended up being offered a job. I had a coworker that he was married, he had kids, and both of us were offered the job. I wasn’t—I didn’t have the expenses he had. And I told our manager—we were both in there at the same time—told our manager that he had to take a job, and I could wait for the next one that came along. And he said, no, you don’t understand; there’s two jobs. The metallography lab needs a tech in 326 Building and they also need a tech down in 306 Building. So both of us got a job about the same time, transferred out. The other tech’s name was somebody by the name of Ray Beauchamp. And he ended up, a lot of his photography work in metallography ended up being in national competition. And he won a number of awards. He also had the privilege of polishing moon rocks that came back from one of the moon trips. I think that’s probably on display out at one of the Battelle buildings out there, even today, I would guess it’s still there. But he had a lot of notoriety. And I worked inside the fence. I was working on materials that were of nuclear nature before they went into the reactor. And then you end up with things being even more irradiated; you had higher dose rates on the stuff that came out. The work that I did in the lab in 306 Building was to see what the material looked like before it went in the reactor. It was a base study, basically. And then when they came out of the reactor, they took it to another facility in the 300 Area called 327 Building, Radio Met—radio metallography. And they cut up the slugs that they got out of the reactor and they looked at the integrity of the cladding on the different types of slugs they were getting out of there. They’d section them, pass the sections into the next cell. They’d sand on them, pass them into the next cell. They’d sand them down even more, ultimately getting a mirror finish polish on them, then they could put them onto the cell that the metallographs, old photograph metallographs. The technicians that worked over there, I was amazed at what they were able to do with everything that was being handled by manipulators inside of two feet of them, or four feet. I don’t know how thick those walls were, but it was amazing what they could do. I was doing the same thing, hands-on. It took me a while to learn how to put a polish on there that I could photograph without having scratches. [LAUGHTER] That was the secret. You also couldn’t round it off; you had to have it essentially flat. The higher the magnification goes, the flatter it has to be; otherwise, you don’t get very much in focus. So I worked there until, let’s see, I guess that would’ve been August of 1961. I took a vacation and I took a honeymoon at the same point in time, and when I came back, I had a new job. That job just kind of morphed into the job I retired from. It was a materials testing facility down in the 314 Building. Again, in the material that we were using there, it was all cold, new materials that they were going to be using in reactors. Their concern was, how far could a crack grow before it became critical and it went full-length? If this happened, then, essentially the reactor was done, you know. So they wanted to know how big a crack could it grow before—and the water would then be coming out, how much water would they lose before they could determine that they had to shut it down, pull that part out, replace it? They wanted to know what kind of a warning sign they were going to get. Franklin: And this was for the fuel slug that would go in? Criswell: No, because you’re not running water through the fuel slug, per se. It’s not going to leak. You’re talking about process tubes. Franklin: Oh, okay. Criswell: Probably the first—I don’t know if we did anything on the K Reactor; I think that was in another facility. I didn’t have anything to do with that. I know there was another facility that was testing graphite. But K Reactor and N Reactor, those two had process tubes that they put the slugs into. They were both water-cooled. Franklin: Okay. Criswell: So they wanted to know if they were going to be able to determine when things were getting anywhere near the critical point, and they could shut it down, pull the process tube, and then start it up again. We also developed inspection probes for the reactor in 300 Area, what they referred to as PRTR. Let’s see, Plutonium Recycling Test Reactor. And here, again, they wanted to know from our inspections, what we could determine as far as wear and tear on the process tubes. So, we were actually sitting right on the faceplate of the reactor, with the access port open, running our inspection probes down. One had a camera that took 16-millimeter images of what we determined was down there. And the other one was an inspection probe that sensed the space between the process tube and another tube. And I didn’t really understand all of the process in PRTR. Anyhow, at that point in time, my wife and I had at least one child, and I don’t remember exactly what the date was, but I came to work on a Monday morning and was told to report to PRTR. I was amongst the first that they suited up. Over the weekend, a test that had been in the reactor failed. And in turn, that test caused damage to the two tubes that the test was inside of. Damaged those, and water was released and it went right down into the very lowest level of that reactor, the bottom shield. And they dressed us up, put all kinds of monitoring equipment on us. Anyhow, went through what looked almost a porthole in a sub, and it was only probably about four feet high, to go through. Gave us a mop and a bucket and told us, one at a time, we were in there mopping up as much as we could in 20 seconds, and we had to be out of there. I have no idea to date what my dose was on that. Anyhow, I spent two more days over there, but never went back down there. They determined we had too much dose and we were sent back to our labs. That was the end of PRTR. They never did bring that thing back up for operation again, as far as I know. Franklin: How long did it operate, do you know? Criswell: I got married in August of ’61. And got a letter from President Kennedy in October of ’61. Had to report to Fort Lewis the day after Thanksgiving in ’61. I got out in August 1st of ’62. Reported back to Hanford, and when I got back there, we were building the inspection probes to inspect. So, I don’t know if PRTR was operating at that point in time. It might’ve been close to that point in time. And anyhow we finished it up, and we probably spent maybe three or four outages where they’d—every time they’d have an outage where they’d pull fuels out or do something or whatever, then they’d give us two or three days to go in and inspect. It was twelve on, twelve off for us, for the techs. And they had the top shield had two rings that they could rotate. By rotation of the two rings, they could get us to the center and to the outer of all the process tubes. The inner ring would actually rotate and go all the way to the outside and all the way to the inside. The outer ring would rotate around, so they could—they’d set it up for us and they’d have the thing open for us when we got there, and we’d just start running stuff. Anyhow. Franklin: What did you go to Fort Lewis to do? Criswell: In 1961, Jack Kennedy was having problems with Russia and the Cubans. We were also involved in the Vietnam War at that point in time. My service dates include the Vietnam process, but I had nothing to do with that. We didn’t really know what the heck was going on. There was more secret over there that, what was going on, that we just didn’t understand. One of the strange things was that I got assigned to an amphibious truck outfit out of California. Know what the DUKW is, it’s a floating deuce-and-a-half truck. You can sink it with an M-1. Just fire at the waterline, it’s going to sink. [LAUGHTER] When I got over there, the day after Thanksgiving, there was nobody there to receive us; we spent Friday, Saturday, Sunday sitting around in a bunkhouse, essentially, waiting for somebody to show up. Finally, Monday, we started getting processed. But the strange thing was, after things got up and operational—I was the only one that had ever worked at Hanford. They gave me the job of explaining how to avoid radiation. I found it really strange. Here I am, a Spec/2, an E4, and I’m giving a lecture on how to avoid radiation. Basically, if you’d double your distance from your source, you divide the radiation exposure by four. That was a real handy thing, if you just get yourself as far away as you can in the shortest period of time. That was the message we had to give everybody. Our company was picking up duffel bags and equipment from other companies that had been brought in. We were loading them onto a MATS aircraft over at McChord Air Force Base, loading a great big aircraft with all kinds of stuff. Anyhow, we never saw the troops get on them when we were loading their material. Strange thing was, in July of ’62, we were told we’d be going home August 1st. And no explanation. Nothing. We still didn’t know why we were there, outside of we were loading troops onto airplanes to go to Berlin. Anyhow, much later, I had a friend who was a mess sergeant, and at that point in time, he worked—when he wasn’t in the military, he worked as a tech for Bell Telephone. He quit that job and he went to a company, Collins Electronics, down in Texas. Next thing I know, he’s in Vietnam installing new avionics in military aircraft. And I found out later, he was all over the world installing new communication electronics. Ultimately, he’s got plaques on his walls referring to him as Colonel—I’ll stop the last name—Colonel. Anyhow, he told me, good grief, that had to have been in ’71, ’72, nine, ten years later. He said, do you know what you were over there for? I said, no, not really. Basically what it was is the Russians had been in the habit of rotating a division into East Berlin, or East Germany, and the old one would go home. In ’61, they rotated a second—no, good grief, mind block—rotated another group in there and didn’t send one home. So now they got two. At the same time, the Russians are moving missiles into Cuba. Jack Kennedy, if he was still alive, you wouldn’t want to play poker against the man. What I found out, and I don’t know what the date was, but I have in the past ten years, I have seen confirmation of what I was told about three different times, different people. Some of them were military talking to our news people. But Jack Kennedy, I think it’s a little jet, I think it’s a B-47, a little—actually two pod jets hanging from the wing, small jet engines hanging from the wing. They got one sitting in the tarmac in front of Boeing Museum of Flight in Seattle. We had well over a thousand of those things. The term I was told was thousands. You can see pictures of those things lined up in the desert down in Arizona. They’re waiting to become beer cans. Jack Kennedy ordered all those things loaded up and he sent them all to Russia. I may be in trouble for this, but it’s a story that not very many people have heard. But it’s true. It happened. He sent them all up. Plus, they knew that all of our subs, basically, they didn’t know exactly where they were, but they knew we had them, they knew the numbers. And they knew that our missiles were capable of making the trip. They could actually see all of the jets headed there. They knew they could take out a lot of them, but they knew they couldn’t take all of them out. They knew they were going to get hit, and they were going to get hit hard. The Russian leadership blinked. They got on the phone and they called Kennedy and they told him, you turn those planes around. Turn them around now, and we’ll pull out of Cuba. We’ll take the division out of Germany. Things will go back to the way they were. And they did. And August 1st, we went home. But never a word as to why we were there; never a word as to what the heck was happening when they released those planes. I didn’t know why I was asked to tell people how to avoid radiation. Didn’t have a clue. So, came home, went back to work, and same organization, group, I was with when I left. That was still GE. I was still with GE. Franklin: So were you—when you got pulled to Lewis, were you in the Guard? Criswell: No, I was active Army. Franklin: Oh, you were active Army. Criswell: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. But the whole time you were active Army you were stationed at— Criswell: I could’ve been there until August 1st or if the Russians didn’t call Kennedy, I probably wasn’t coming home. Franklin: Right. Had you—so were you in the Army before you got called up to— Criswell: Yeah, I’d spent six years in National Guard. Franklin: Okay, all right. Criswell: Pasco National Guard. Franklin: Okay. Criswell: When my six years were up, which was probably about April of ’61—I think someone was unhappy with me leaving, and they put my name in there. Strange thing is, at the point that I got released from the Pasco National Guard, they were an amphibious truck outfit. So my MOS was a key personnel as a filler for an amphibious truck company from California. It made sense why I ended up there. I mean, quotation marks around my name. It had to stand out, you know? I don’t know how many of us there were nationally. I don’t think there were that many of us. I think there was truck drivers that were pulled in to help fill, mechanics to help in the shop, what-have-you. I was one of the few people that came in, I think, that knew anything about an amphibious truck. You know, how you have to take care of it and what-have-you. It was interesting time, but I’m glad, maybe, they didn’t tell us what the heck was going on, because then, you know, I think it would’ve put a whole new light on why we were there, and something for us to really worry about, I think. They basically kept us like a bunch of mushrooms. [LAUGHTER] So definitely kept us in the dark. But anyhow, once back here, went back to work for the same company, the same actual group. They had developed or were in the process of putting together the probes to inspect the reactors. That just morphed into all kinds of different things over the years. One of the engineers that came to work, he was new, he was hired from Boeing, he was interested in fatigue cycling. Franklin: What is that? Criswell: Cycling is, there’s thermal cycling—the reactor heats up, it cools off when they shut it down for a period, heats up, cools down, and you’re talking about a lot of heat. You’ve got mechanical cycling where you have load changes. Everything that’s built probably has a fatigue starter in it someplace. Either something in the manufacturing, in a casting, in the machining. Things happen when you’re making parts. They wanted here, again, to see how long—we actually put together a system where we were fatiguing process tubes that had a little slot machine partway through it. Then we had to put endcaps on it. Then we had to pressure cycle each thing. Something like the reactor. You got water pressure going through there, and then they shut it down. We were doing this cold. And ultimately, the crack would grow. And the first problem we ran into is the crack was growing, but then it was leaking. The crack didn’t go all the way through, initially, but once it got growing, it went all the way through. So we were having oil squirting out every which way, on this end was oil. And we could pressure to, I think, 2,000 psi is what this machine could do. We weren’t getting that high. So we had to come up with a way of keeping it from—keeping the oil. So we figured out a way to patch the inside of it with a thin piece of material, yet it was flexible enough that it wouldn’t hurt the integrity of the load cycling. Ultimately, we figured out how to make this thing grow until it blew. And then, I mean, you had gallons of oil all over. After the first one, where it was just squirting like that, then we have to have it turned toward the measuring device which is optical. When it blew, I’m on one side of what we’re doing, and the engineers are on the other side. Anyhow, they didn’t know how to turn the thing off. It had a second part to the system that would replenish the oil that it was losing to expansion. It was an air-operated pump that would just put more fluid in there. Anyhow, they couldn’t turn it off, and I had to duck underneath the stream to get around. Then I had to mop up all the oil. So the next thing was to come up with a hood that we could do the test in that had a glass that we could look through, but when it blew, the oil would just drain back into a bottle. Instead of—oh, I had a mess in that basement. I had to clean it up. That was one of the tech’s jobs. Well, ultimately, ended up the company that made that first piece of equipment, electronics, the machine that would cycle the oil pressure, was an MTS corporation out of Minneapolis. And we ended up with a lab in the basement at 326 Building, we had ten different machines that went—one machine, I built. It was a 1,000-pound machine. And we had machines, the rest of them, MTS built, and they went up to a half-million pounds. Some were 100,000, 50,000, 20,000, 10,000-pound machines. The whole idea of all these machines was to take a chunk of metal that they were planning on using in the reactor or find out which one they could use in building the reactor. They would fatigue it, and they’d fatigue it different speeds, they’d fatigue at different temperatures, and different environments. Replicating what environment the part might see if it was being used in a reactor. So ultimately, we ended up having to send a whole bunch of polished specimens just like the ones we were testing in 326 Lab to the reactor. I had to polish all of these things, and we’d put them in a stack, and we had to separate them so we could keep the fluid flowing between them to keep them cool, and we sent them over to a reactor. They would irradiate these for a period of time until they got a certain exposure rate, then they’d send them back. We’d take the top off, we’d extract certain specimens out of there, and then we’d put new ones back in, and then we’d send—it was, you know, just constantly. But then we had a collection of irradiated materials so that we could compare the radiation damage to the same materials as we were testing in the labs. This allowed them to get a good idea of what they could expect for the mechanical integrity of the material once it was irradiated by the reactor. Franklin: And what kind of material was this again? So this wasn’t fuel, this was— Criswell: No, this was structural material. Franklin: Okay, so, like a process tube? Criswell: Maybe a hanger that held up pipes, or maybe it’s the support for the reactor vessel. I don’t know what parts they were looking at; I have no clue. I just know that we went through maybe a couple dozen different types of materials. There’s 314 stainless; I remember that. 316 stainless. Maybe there was, there’s Hastelloys and Inconels. They refer to them as superalloys. These are all high temperature materials that are designed to operate at high temperatures. Franklin: Was there anything—did you come across anything surprising in the tests? Anything that was unexpected? Criswell: I just ran the tests. Franklin: Right. Criswell: I’m the one that—in doing the fatigue cycling, you’d cycle it, to begin with, a large number of cycles, maybe 20,000 cycles. It might run a week, and then I’d open up the—turn things off, open up the furnace door, put a microscope in there and measure how far the crack had grown. Franklin: Okay. Criswell: And the idea was to get about a twenty-thousandth—twenty-thousandths—0.020 of growth. As it would begin to grow longer and longer, then the fatigue cycle would become shorter and shorter. So finally, I’m down to where I’m measuring these things a couple, three times a day. And every time I’d open up, maybe this doggone thing is running at 1200 degrees F. And I open it up; I’ve got to get in there and measure that thing. And my eyes, I mean, I don’t know what—numerous times a day, I’m opening this thing up, and I’m putting a microscope in the furnace door, and I’m measuring how long that crack is, get the furnace door closed, get it back up to temperature and start the cycling again. And I did this—oh, good grief—probably from 1965, and I was still doing fatigue cycling to the day I retired in 1999. Franklin: Wow. Criswell: Some of it, with GE and Battelle, in the early days, and Westinghouse—Westinghouse, we basically fixated on the structural materials. Battelle, when I worked two times with them, they had a different charter that they worked under. The government allowed them to test materials for small companies that had questions about what they were doing. That was probably more interesting than when I was working for Westinghouse, because Westinghouse, day in, day out, everything was the same. The only thing different was when they finally got the materials back from the reactors and they sent me over to 324 Building and we set things up in there to start running tests on their irradiated material. There was problems in that process. You’re looking through four feet of leaded glass at a test frame that’s probably two, three feet from the glass. I guess the only thing that made things work is, with my height I’m able to get up—at the top, the lead glass is tilted. It’s not vertical; it’s tilted looking through the cell wall. I’m having to look down through there to get as vertical a sight on the crack that’s growing as I can. Otherwise, every plane of glass in that window—that’s not a single pane; it’s multi-paned—would give me a little bit of—it would-- Franklin: It would bend the image, right? Criswell: It would distort the image. Franklin: Because of refraction. Criswell: Yeah, refraction or—I wasn’t getting a clear image. And that was, oh man, just a real learning process. The whole idea of the polishing before they went into the reactor and became irradiated—I put a mirror finish on them. The last polishing that I did had to be vertical to the crack’s growth across it. The idea being that when you opened the thing up, and you shined a light down from the top, the image that you’re looking at is black. You don’t see the light. But if there’s a crack growing, then the crack would show up as a white line. You can measure from the initiating point, there’s a machined notch in the specimen, so you measure from here to the crack tip. We did this for a couple, three years, over a 324 Building. For whatever reason, I guess money ran out, for that program. Battelle is a little more interesting. I was able to run tests on aircraft parts, ship—One of the problems, going clear back—not that I had anything to do with Liberty ships, but if you remember clear back in the early ‘40s, they were sending ships out that they were making as rapidly as they could for the Second World War. They’d run into the North Sea, and all of the sudden, the ship is floating—what’s left of it is floating in two halves until they sank. They rapidly developed a test called a nil-ductility drop-weight. They determined that the problem was in the structural material of the ship and the weld material that they were using to weld the plates together with. Strangely enough, my dad worked during the Second World War part-time—well, actually he had two jobs. One with Bonneville Power and one eh worked for a period of time for a shipyard in downtown Portland, and he was of small enough stature, they were sending him in between a double hull of a ship to weld. I don’t know if he was working on Liberty ships or what. But anyhow, the nil-ductility test, they would weld with a very brittle weld material. About a two-inch bead on top of a plate and then we’d cut a notch in that. And then you could, at different temperature, drop a given weight a given distance, so that you have how many foot-pounds you hit it with. If it didn’t break, that was fine. So you make things get colder until it breaks all—I think just the one side; that was a break. Some of them would break part-way across; that wasn’t a break. If the break arrested itself, fine. But if it would go all the way across, then that was a failure. So you’d end up going back to where you keep dividing things in half on the temperature until you found out where it would break and where it wouldn’t break. And then the temperature it wouldn’t break was nil-ductility. But I did run tests on ice breaker, I think it was the Polar Star, I think is the one, we said, a big chunk of this Polar Star, my gosh, that thing’s thick. The idea is that they would ride up on the—they didn’t cut and break it; they would ride up on it, and the weight of the ship would bust the ice. They didn’t know the history of what material was in there, but they wanted to make sure that they didn’t have any material from the Liberty ship era in it. I mean, the Polar Star was old enough, I guess, they had to worry about it. I’ve done testing on aircraft parts. Again, I mentioned earlier that you can impart a crack starter into a finished part. If it’s a threaded part, you can get this if, say, the coolant material is interrupted for just a second. Well, then, you’re going to get a hot spot. You can turn and make sure you can get the stuff going again, and you can start it again, but chances are, it isn’t going to break immediately, but over 1,000 cycles, this crack is going to grow more and more and more through this thing, and then it’s going to break duct-ally over here on this part. And that’s the part that broke last. This part over here, I mean, if you look at it under high enough magnification, it looks like a bunch of waves have washed up on the shore, each one making another line on the shoreline. You can actually go backwards through those waves to where is the smallest part, and you can find that there was a hot spot there, or there’s a piece of carbon there that was embedded in the material at some point during its manufacture. In the early days when I was in metallography, we had to use metallograph. Probably the highest you could go without having image problems was, say, 200, 250x. It would go to 500x; you could probably go to 1,000x, but you’re only going to see just a very, very small part of what you’re looking at. You’re not going to see—because getting a flat surface that doesn’t have any curvature at all. So the era of the electron microscope came in and that allowed us to not only not have to polish it; you could look at a fractured surface, I mean, something that has been pulled apart, and you can actually see down into the fractured surface. That allowed us to take a look at broken pieces, you can look at those benchmarks, you can look, and if there’s a piece of material— In one case, a copper part was actually failing and it was catastrophic when it failed. Copper, pure copper, is something—you might as well be looking at a blank wall: there’s nothing there to see. I mean, you can polish it and there’s nothing there to see. It’s strange stuff. Anyhow, I’m down to the tip where the crack is at. We had to break it apart. This stuff, in order to form it, they had formed it using a thermal weld, or explosive weld process, where you put two plates going different directions, and then you hit it with an explosive charge. This thing, they kept breaking them. What we found was, I noticed something that looked completely different. In this whole thing, there was one piece that looked different. Electron microscope, again, you can zero in on one item, hit the button, and basically, it’ll melt a little piece of that, and it will tell you what you’ve just melted. It will tell you that, okay, this is carbon, or this is iron, or this is, in this case, it was phosphate. You know, phosphate’s part of the explosive. There’s a material, a copper material, it’s called phosphated copper. They can use that as a spring material in making copper parts where they want flexibility, but they also want to keep contact. I don’t know if it’s what they use in, say, a flashlight where they make contact with the back of the battery. Excuse me. But anyhow, it’s something like that. But the problem with phosphated copper is that it’s also extremely brittle. I knew that from some exposure I’d had years before. When I found that, I went to the engineer, I says, this is the problem. And the end result was they were able to tell the customer, okay, you’ve got to find another way of fusing these together that doesn’t use phosphate. I told you that parts that are machined or, the one I’m thinking of is they were basically putting a serial number on every part, and then these were being used in some sort of a structural event. For some reason, these things were breaking. What we found was that if they had a part that had a 1 laser-etched on it, or a 7 with a vertical line on it, or a 9 with a vertical line on it, an L, F, Es, anything with a vertical line on it, these things didn’t last any cyclings at all. They’d break. We noticed that, say, a Z, we could cycle a Z for almost forever. What would another letter be? Ss. They didn’t break. Franklin: X. Criswell: A zero, that’s a round zero, it didn’t break. So our suggestion was that they change their laser. If they’re going to keep using a laser, instead of having vertical lines, that a 7 would have an angular line on it. Nines, maybe a circle, like a 9. Stay away from vertical lines. It was a simple one, but, you know, it was an answer we were able to give them. We actually did testing for a little mom-and-pop company down in Irrigon, Oregon. He got the license to build a gimballed trailer hitch for fifth wheels. A standard trailer hitch didn’t allow for any torqueing. If you’re going over a curb someplace. If you’re backing into a parking place and you’ve got two different levels, you know. You tried to unhook, you’re going to have a problem. They actually came up with a gimballed trailer hitch; they had the license for it. But they wanted to know, how many cycles would this take? We were able to tell them, hey, you know, with the exception of maybe a farmer carrying 50,000 pounds of hay on a flatbed trailer, you’re probably not going to have a problem. If it’s just an RV trailer, I wouldn’t worry about it. I actually did testing for Ti Sports. They came to us. They had developed a new welding technique, and they wanted to know how good it was or wasn’t. So we compared a lot of their old welds to their new welds. And found the new weld was significantly better than their old weld. Franklin: And what product was this for? Criswell: Ti! Titanium. Titanium bikes. Franklin: Titanium bikes. Criswell: Expensive bikes. Apparently one of the problems that they’d had with the early ones was that the weld technique left something to be desired. So they developed a new one, and it was much better. Battelle was interesting, because there was always something new coming in the door. Franklin: It says here that after you retired, you took up a part time job at Battelle as a security escort? Criswell: That wasn’t with Battelle. Franklin: Oh, okay. Criswell: That was with a couple different companies. When I retired, essentially, November 1st, I took that day off. It was my first retirement day. I went back to work on November 2nd, half-time. I worked Monday through Wednesday noon. [LAUGHTER] They were setting up a new lab. Somebody remembered I’d worked in the metallography lab years earlier. The tech specialist that was setting up the metallography in that lab retired. They needed somebody else, and somebody’s memory remembered me. So I’m working part-time before I retired in there, and then I’d go back to my lab and do some testing, if it required. And they were bringing in somebody new. But the facility I was going to be working in, it was going to be a secured facility. It had special requirements, everything. By the time I was asked if I’d mind going full retirement, which was in April—It was financial situation, they had a lady who also had worked in metallography and she was still young, they wanted her to continue in that respect. But the lab was going to be secured. We were taking pictures. In my case, I was using a copper penny to check out how things were working. Totally new metallograph, it was all digital, I mean, it was much different than anything I was used to. So having to set this thing up so it would work with computers. Oh, man. The only thing significant there that we found, and I did find, what was going to be a security problem, made a suggestion, and they got excited. We had to go out and find something new that was going to meet security requirements, so I guess I did my part. [LAUGHTER] Knowing what they have to do in a secured facility—every time an engineer or a scientist writes a paper, before it can be released, it has to go for review. It has to be—it can be unclassified or it’s given a classification. If it has given a classification—number one, in ’99, when I retired, things were being transmitted by the internet—no way were they going to transmit anything via the internet, if it’s classified. At least, not when I got out of there. You know, if they had to transmit someplace else, it was hand-carried if it’s here on Hanford. If it’s got to go to somebody that’s working on the same program at another facility, you’re going to have a courier take it; it’s not going via US Mail or it’s not going via the internet. So this is the way things work. Before I retired, I did some escort work with foreign nationals. They could work in certain facilities, but they couldn’t go elsewhere. So after I retired, full retirement, April of ’99, my wife saw an ad in the paper, anybody that still has their clearance or can get a clearance may have a part-time job for you. And my wife saw to it that I signed up for that. [LAUGHTER] I was put back to work out at Dash-5, construction work out there. Construction craftspeople, temporary, they’re not going to go to the trouble of getting them all a full security clearance. Each security escort can escort up to five. If you’ve got two, though, you need to have two escorts, and then you can escort up to nine. Because if one person has to go to the head—you know. So we always had a few extras. But if somebody’s got to go to the tool room or if they got to go talk to somebody, they have to have—the escort has to escort them to that point, be with them full time, escort them back. You can’t leave nine people short, so. Just keeping, making sure they didn’t wander off making trouble someplace. We have to be aware of where the radiation areas are. We can’t go there. So did that for another eight years. Took another short time job with—kind of with Battelle again. That lasted for about five, six months. Then I’ve been retired since then. Franklin: Finally retired? Criswell: Yeah. To say the least, I kind of miss it. I guess one of the things that—they sent me to a couple of short courses on something called failure analysis. Again, why things break. It kind of fit in with what I was doing, only I was the reason things were breaking. I mean, I was getting paid good to break things. Who could argue with that? You could hire an eight-year-old to break things for you. [LAUGHTER] But that half-million-pound machine we had, an interesting one. They sent the actuator back to the factory and set it up so it would high rate. I forget what the rating would travel at, but it would break things up to 500,000 pounds in the blink of an eye. Or you could do it slow. It would go either way. You had control over how that machine worked. We were doing work for, I guess, Areva at that point in time. We were doing some testing for them. But, again, Battelle was interesting. I do miss it. I was kind of hoping I could be summer relief or something like that after I retired. But they brought in—matter of fact, the gentleman I recommended for the job ended up getting it. I hope he isn’t too mad at me. I think that was one of the—it bothered me. He was a long-time Westinghouse employee. When I retired in ’99, I think he might still have been working for Westinghouse. Or—but anyhow. He had either four or five weeks of vacation. And he was a tech specialist. I guess they hired him as a tech specialist. So he could keep his vacation. Shortly after he was hired in, Battelle determined they needed to tighten up on finances or some darn thing, and they saw fit to reduce him back to a technician, and he lost some of his vacation, I understood. That didn’t go well. He wasn’t happy about that. He’s a good man. I recommended him, because he’d worked with MTS equipment. He knew it. And I knew him to be a self-starter. You weren’t going to have to hold his hand and have somebody there with him full-time; he was going to work. One of the people that put a name in for the job, I didn’t know him, never heard of him. And the other one was a tech specialist, but he hadn’t worked with that kind of equipment, either. And I didn’t know whether he was a self-starter or not. So Mike got the job, and I guess Mike is still there. Good grief. 17 years later? Franklin: Yeah. I have a couple questions I’d like to return to some stuff you said earlier, if you don’t mind. Criswell: No. Franklin: When you mentioned you moved to Tri-Cities January 1st, 1948 at midnight—why does that stick out to you so strongly in your mind? How do you--? Criswell: Well, the family had a get-together. They were in Portland to celebrate New Year’s Eve. After that, Dad and I climbed in the car and drove to Pasco. Franklin: Why? Criswell: Because he had a new job up here. Franklin: Oh, okay. And what did your dad do in Pasco? Criswell: He went to work for a company called Empire Electric. Empire Electric had a shop, a storefront, there on Lewis Street about three, maybe four, doors west of the corner building there on, let’s see, that’d be the northwest corner of 4th and Lewis. That corner building in 1948 and up through ’61 was a drugstore. Can’t think of the name of the drugstore, but it was a drugstore. Anyhow, Dad worked there for a year—better than a year, anyhow. He got the— You know, I don’t know what Dad did for them. I really don’t. Dad was kind of a public informations officer. When the opening came up, up at Hungry Horse, Montana, he took the job up there as public informations officer. We were there for, oh my gosh, we moved up there in February. I’d never seen so much snow in my life. And cold, my gosh, it was cold. But it wasn’t as cold as it got. I actually saw 40-below when I was still in grade school. I had to put on the skis and I actually skied down to the grade school. It was downhill from our house. I mean, when it got 40-below, it was clear. I mean, it was so clear, it was beautiful. Because what humidity was still in the air was coming out as little sparkles. It’s amazing. But I hated it. My grandmother on my mom’s side was into knitting, and she knit us kids, out of wool, probably some of the first facemasks. She found a pattern for these things. They had a mouth, they had a place for your nose, and two eyeholes. At 40-below, the tears from your eyes froze to the wool. You might want to turn this off. By the time I got to school—you can edit it. I’d have a wad of snot hanging on that wool, and it’s frozen. And my mouth, breathing around here, I got a lot of moisture around here. This probably wasn’t snot, probably vapors. But, ugh, terrible. It got worse. Franklin: I was going to say, I grew up in Alaska and I remember some really— Criswell: So you know what I’m talking about. Franklin: Cold. Oh, yeah, where you— Criswell: Did you have a wool one, or did they finally come up with those nice nylon ones that slick them? Franklin: No, we had the nice nylon. But still, you’d get the—you’d go outside, and you’d feel the heat being sucked out of your nose and your mouth as soon as you open to breathe, you just feel the moisture being pulled out of your face. It’s cold, yeah. Cars won’t start, usually. Criswell: Oh, yeah, so you know exactly what I’m talking about. Franklin: Yeah, I don’t miss those days. Criswell: Hungry Horse was interesting. Summer times were great. Get the fishing pole and go fishing. Summer time was that. Excuse me a second. Franklin: No worries. And so when you returned, spring/summer of ’53, what was your family—did your mom work at all this whole time, or was she a housewife? Criswell: Housewife. 1953, the job up in Hungry Horse was done. President Truman had come through, dedicated the dam. My dad actually wrote the speech. Public informations officer, he wrote the speech, he knew the information about Hungry Horse. Anyhow, I do remember, I was either in the eighth grade or I was in high school, going to school in Columbia Falls at that point in time. We went down to where the railyard went through Columbia Falls. Train’s stopped, Truman’s on the back platform on the train, he talks to the crowd out there. I mean, all the kids in school went out there. And then he climbed in a car and up to Hungry Horse he goes. So, that’s one of the memories. When Dad came back down here, he had a job as, again, kind of a public informations officer for Franklin County PUD. Franklin: Oh, okay. Criswell: That was ’53. In 1960, Dad, Mom, and the rest of the family packed it up and went to Springfield Municipal Utilities. He actually sold himself the job of being the director for Springfield Municipal Utilities and down there, that was water, sewer and electric. Franklin: And where is— Criswell: It wasn’t part of the city. They were a municipal utility that was separate from the city. Franklin: Are you talking about Springfield— Criswell: Springfield, Oregon. Franklin: Oh, Springfield, Oregon, okay. Criswell: He held that job until he retired in 1960. I forget exactly when he retired. But he was there—no, went there in ’60. 1980 he retired. So he held it for 20 years. Franklin: Wow. Criswell: And then he ruined the family name; he took a job as a—oh. [LAUGHTER] Kind of a political job. Lobbying! The Oregon State Legislature. [LAUGHTER] We kidded him about taking that job. Franklin: Getting into politics. Criswell: Yeah. [LAUGHTER] Anyhow. Franklin: So— Criswell: About the only job Mom had is, both Mom and Dad were involved with what is now the Water Follies. In the ‘50s and ‘60s, it was the Pasco Water Follies. And the races were down at Sacajawea Park. Dad was president of the Pasco Water Follies for a period of time, and I think Mom—I forget if she was the treasurer or the secretary, I forget which. Maybe both at one point in time or another. But they were heavily involved in the Pasco Water Follies. I’m pretty sure that Dad came up here only once to watch the Water Follies after they became the Tri-City Water Follies, and he saw the new boats running. I don’t think he enjoyed them as much as he did the old thunder boats. That’s the part I always enjoyed. You go down there in the Columbia and the thunder boats are running five in a heat, it almost felt like the ground you were standing on was shaking when they were going by. That’s the part I really miss. I know the new ones go a whole lot faster, but. There’s just something about the old boats; they were special, as far as I was concerned. I knew John Owsley. He had the Pasco Boat Basin. He was probably responsible for the sleds they use at the Tri-City Water Follies. I know he was building them. He built a couple small ones, probably for the Pasco Water Follies. Ultimately, he ended up building kind of a three-point sled that he thought would go faster out there in the river to get to the crashes a little bit quicker. The whole idea was you didn’t have to haul somebody up over the transom of a boat to get them in; you basically just float them onto the back of the sleds that he was building. I thought that was pretty good. I know that when I was in the service there in ’62, came home on leave, and things were pretty tight for the wife and myself. John gave me a job. I guess somebody complained about not having any railings on the docks down there. He gave me a job to build railings on there for him. I did that on leave one time, and he was in the process, I think of building that three-point step one at that time. But things are different today, I’ll tell you. Franklin: Yeah. How did you meet your wife? Is she from the area? Criswell: Oh, that’s another one of those stories. [LAUGHTER] Strange you should ask that one. Somebody else asked me that question here, this past week. I blame it on a Pasco police officer. I was going to night school, oh, I don’t know what I was taking. A number of different night school classes I took over at CBC. I was taking another one. I was working, trying to get myself up to a decent grade point average. But I wasn’t having a whole lot of success. I had a C over there. But anyhow, part of my problem was that in 1960, early ’61, I was baching it, cooking for myself, studying. I get into the studying, I’d burn my dinner. Didn’t have the money to replace it. Decided it’d be cheaper for me if I went down to—it was the Payless Drug on the corner of 4th and Lewis. Payless Drug, they had a lunch counter down there, they cooked dinners down there. I’d get myself a supper; I’d sit there at the counter and study. Anyhow, I was doing that. One evening, police officer—and I mentioned to whomever I was talking to this week, I want to go over to Pasco and find out this police officer’s name. He had kind of a walking beat in downtown Pasco. He was an older gentleman. And he came up to me, he says, Dave, I got a couple of tickets for you. Whoa, what the heck? I’m working at Hanford; I don’t get tickets. I’ve got to be careful. I look at him real strange. Tickets? What kind of tickets? What’d I do wrong? He’s messing with me. He says, well, these are kind of special tickets. I said, what kind of ticket? He said, they’re tickets to the policeman’s ball. These two are for you. I said, I’m not going with anybody! Who am I going to get? He says, I’ve been drinking coffee here. He says, you’ve been watching that little lady over there. He says, you go ask her to go to the policeman’s ball. So I did. And I’d been cashing my checks here, and she’d been cashing my checks. She knew how much I earned. Didn’t pay any attention to what my name was. I had to always take my check downstairs and get it approved by the owner of Payless Drug at that point in time. I think his name was Tom Bishop. Yeah, it was. Tom Bishop. So Tom knew my family. Knew it wasn’t any problem with me getting my cash checked. So he’d initial the check, I’d take it back up, and this little gal would cash my check. So I asked her out. She said yes. Good grief. Next month it’s going to be 55 years. My wife and I have hardly ever been parted. Only when I went over to Fort Lewis. That didn’t last long. We moved the trailer that we were living in over there. A few trips where they sent me to school to learn something, one thing or another. That’s been our—[LAUGHTER] So I need to find out the officer’s name so I can blame him by name. Or thank him. Franklin: Yeah, Officer Matchmaker? Criswell: Yeah. He real did me a real favor, I’ll tell ya. Franklin: Aw. Criswell: But I would like to find his name. I have no idea what his history was or what happened. But after 55 years, I assume by this time, that he’s deceased, unfortunately. I wish I woke up to that question 30 years ago. Franklin: Is your wife from the area? Criswell: She’s born and raised here. Born in Lady of Lourdes Hospital. My two natural-born children were born in Lady of Lourdes Hospital. I don’t know—I know in the early part of my wife’s—they had to—I guess they had to get over to that hospital in a—I guess they had to cross the river in those years in a ferry boat. Franklin: Okay. Criswell: They had a little boat that ran back and forth across the Columbia. Franklin: Wow. Criswell: I’m not too sure what year the old green bridge got built. But I do know in the early days. Another strange piece of information was that my great-grandfather moved to the Northwest from Michigan, I guess. And he went to work in a lumberyard, lumber mill in north Idaho, a place called Harrison, Idaho. His job was training the horses and seeing to the horses’ needs that went out into the woods to pull the logs back in. And my grandmother, when she became of age, she worked in the millinery shop there in Harrison, Idaho. My wife and I have determined, at the same point in time, her grandmother’s family is living in Harrison, Idaho. I think her grandfather, her great-uncle, and an uncle were working in the woods logging up there. So, both of our ancestries have got connections to Harrison, Idaho. A couple, three years ago, my wife and I went up there with my wife’s sister, and we were looking for gravesites. And we found a couple of my wife’s family members in the Harrison graveyard, up on a hillside, up above Harrison there someplace. And still couldn’t find my great-grandfather. Turns out that Coeur d’Alene has two graveyards. And my sister looked in one, but didn’t look in the other one. My sister lives up in Sandpoint. And could not find our great-grandfather. Anyhow, on one of our trips up there, I took the time and went over to the other graveyard and found a gentleman mowing the lawn. He got off, went into the office, came back out, got a book, looked in the book, took us over and he pointed right at a gravesite where my great-grandfather was buried. Turns out that my first name is great-grandfather’s last name. And I always thought that Engelbert Humperdinck’s name was all made up. I never heard of anybody named Engelbert in my life, so I thought that was all a stage name. Turns out, my grandfather’s name was Engelbert David. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Sounds like that should kind of be reversed. Criswell: Yeah! Thank goodness I didn’t get hung up with Engelbert. But I believe my great-grandfather came to this country—he was an immigrant—he came to this country from Austria. I’m not too sure what year he came here. I don’t know how old he was. My great-grandmother and one of my great-aunts, apparently, died during a measle epidemic. I have no idea what year that was. But anyhow, Engelbert David packed up his one remaining daughter and apparently a girl that she was friends with, maybe family friends, and apparently they had problems. Maybe lost some family members also. So he brought the two girls out to Harrison, Idaho. I think, two things make me believe that maybe Engelbert David—he apparently changed his name sometime after my grandmother grew up, he remarried. Now his name on the tombstone is Egbert David. This is quite common. David is probably a frequent name of people who are of Jewish faith. And living in Austria, in probably the late ‘30s, or maybe even early ‘30s, things were not too favorable to the Jewish religion. I think that might’ve been the reason for the migration. And maybe the reason for changing the name at some point in his life. But my dad’s father, my grandfather, was blind at the time. My youngest years, almost totally blind by the time I remember him. He was a radio operator for the railroad—telegrapher for the railroad. And then he went to work in the merchant marines, was in the merchant marines when the Second World War blew up. And then he was in the Pacific. But his eyesight got so bad he couldn’t see to write anymore. And he couldn’t read the messages that had to be sent. So they had to release him. So I grew up—Grandpa Criswell was kind of funny. Let’s face it, in some ways he was a bit bigoted. I do believe that he was bigoted toward the Jewish faith. I’m sure my dad and his brothers ribbed him incessantly about some of his bigoted views. But they were all a bunch of cards, as far as I was concerned. They were some of the funniest things they ever came up with. But anyhow, he couldn’t see my dad and his brothers laughing at him, unfortunately, but maybe he would’ve changed his mind with time. But strange things. So I really don’t know that much about Great-grandfather. My grandfather lived to be 101. My grandmother lived to be four hours short of 102, deceased a few months later. Literally, if she’d lived to midnight, she would’ve lived to be 102. But aunt and uncle moved them down to Florida when they were in the 80s. I think my uncle was figuring they only had a few years to live. That didn’t happen. My grandfather, when he was packed up and ready to leave, he didn’t want to go. They were flying him down to Florida. Uncle Hank worked for the United Airlines. He’d made arrangements for them to fly. Probably made arrangements then to fly them first class. The story granddad got was that all the coach seats were full; they’d have to seat them in first class. Of course they got real good treatment, so granddad didn’t mind traveling anymore. But when he was getting ready to leave, he didn’t want to fly. Visited him just before he left. And I asked Granddad, I says, why don’t you want to fly? Because it’s a great way to travel. He tells me, straight-faced, they fly so high you can’t see the ground. I’m thinking to myself—I’m polite—I was thinking to myself, Granddad, you can’t see the ground you’re standing on. You know? I don’t understand why—you know. One of my uncles was coming by to take him down to see the Rose Festival parade. Oh, that’s cool. Well, we’re not going to the Rose Festival parade; I'm upset. Why? Well, they’re taking us to the warehouse that they decorate the floats in. What’s the matter with that? You don’t have to stand there for hours to watch. You can’t see anything. His reason for not liking the warehouse versus standing on the street is he doesn’t get to see any of the pretty girls. He hasn’t seen a pretty girl for 50 years. [LAUGHTER] Well, I don’t understand him. Anyhow, that’s my granddad. Franklin: When you—[LAUGHTER] Thank you for that. You started work at Hanford, were you still living in Pasco? Criswell: Oh, yeah. Franklin: Did you ever move to Richland, too, or did you live in Pasco the whole time-- Criswell: No. Franklin: --you worked at Hanford? Criswell: My wife and her family lived in Kennewick. But when Helen and I first got married, before we got married, I was living in a little studio apartment there in Pasco. And we found a single-wide 50-foot mobile home. We figured this’ll hold us for a while. We set it up on a lot there in Pasco. Right across the highway from the outdoor theater there. Anyhow, that was supposed to hold us for a few years. Well, we moved in and a few months later, we ended up having to pack it up and move it over to Olympia. And then we moved it back to Pasco when we got out in August. So we lived in Pasco. While we were in the service, my wife knows that she was expecting our first. Anyhow, after we moved back, we discovered that our single-wide mobile home and an infant—we were wall-to-wall toys within no time at all. We found somebody who decided that their house was too big for them to care for any, and they were willing to make a deal on it, and we took their house. So that was—then we moved to Kennewick. I guess, basically, we either lived in Kennewick or just outside of Kennewick now for a number of years. It’s been— Franklin: One of the things— Criswell: Excuse me. Franklin: Oh, no, that’s okay. There’s kind of several big events or things that happened in the Tri-Cities during the ‘50s and ‘60s. One of them is—it’s kind of commonly known that Pasco, especially east Pasco, was one of the only places that African Americans could live when they first came to Hanford during the Manhattan Project, and then was one of the only places they could buy property, up until, you know, civil rights legislation kind of forced some changes. I’m wondering if you could speak to any of that, or if you ever noticed segregation or witnessed that, or kind of your experiences living in Pasco during that time? Criswell: Well, I lived in Pasco in ’48-’49. I guess I never noticed it. I wasn’t old enough to understand those things, I guess. ’48, I would’ve been 11. ’49, probably living in Montana by then. Yeah, we moved up there in February of ’49, so. Anyhow, by the time we moved up there, didn’t seem to notice anything. Moved back to Pasco in spring of ’53, summer of ’53. Junior in high school. There was students that were black. Some of them I got to know. There weren’t very many. Yeah, it was strange. But when I was a kid going to Portland, I didn’t—this wasn’t something that I saw in Portland. I didn’t know it; I didn’t understand it. My wife, however, she went to Kennewick schools. Kennewick was one of the cities that, I guess, on the Kennewick side of the bridge, the old green bridge, there was some sort of a sign over there. I never recognized it as being there, but it told our black population that they needed to be out of Kennewick by sundown. Both my wife’s family and my family, that’s not the way we were brought up. My wife’s family were essentially farmers, lived on the outskirts of Kennewick and went to Kennewick schools. My wife’s family lived just on the west side of Kennewick. The only way to get to Pasco was across that old green bridge, so you had to go through Kennewick. My wife says that they had people to come from Pasco that would help her family on the farm. They were blacks, black people, Negro, whatever term is politically correct, socially correct. I don’t want to offend anybody. But their family, their kids grew up, their kids played on her farm. If they ended up picking until sunset to get the crop in, the family, kids all went out and they slept in the barn, or the extra bedrooms, or I guess my wife and her sister, bedroom was probably in the basement of the little house they lived in. So the families that were working on the farm worked and then they slept down there. But they all ate together. Somehow my wife grew up, didn’t know that there was a problem, didn’t understand the difference. Franklin: Do you remember the civil rights demonstrations in Kennewick? I think it was 1963 or 1964 when the NAACP— Criswell: I didn’t. At that point in time, I’m out at Hanford working. Franklin: Sure. Criswell: Went to work out there in August, no September, of 1955, I hired in out there. I was working with colored people, black people. There Fort Lewis, I met a gentleman who didn’t end up in my company, but while we were there on Friday, Saturday and Sunday before the troops came back to Hanford—they were all gone for Thanksgiving. Anyhow, he played for pro ball for, I think, the New York Giants. Big man. Told great stories. Great stories. He entertained the few of us that were stuck in that barracks for the weekend. You know, they stuck us in that barracks over there, it was empty, it had the cots, the mattresses were folded up, no blankets. There was no coal for the furnaces, no hot water. Having had experience with Fort Lewis, I became—I don’t want to say a leader, but definitely I knew what the heck to do to get around things. So I had three or four of the other gentlemen that were stuck there with me—that may have been the one from New York Giants; I don’t really recall. I had my sleeping bag, so I was all right. But anyhow we needed to get heat. So I told the guys, let’s find some boxes. And after dark, we went down the line and found some barracks that had kindling. We found barracks that had paper. We found barracks that had the coal. Anyhow, we took anything we could find. I knew all about those barracks. We got a fire lit. We knew we had to take turns watching that fire through the night and we had hot water in the morning. We had heat in the barracks through the weekend; we just had to keep watching that fire. All of us ended up having a fairly decent weekend; it could’ve been miserable because there wasn’t anybody else there to help us. They threw us into that barracks and, adios, we got the weekend off. That’s the last we saw of them. Well, we got the fire lit, and we had power in the day rooms, so we had television and we had a pool table. I guess maybe we shared some of the coal with the day room so it’d have heat. Monday morning here they come back and we all got to take physicals and we all end up getting busted up and going different places. Franklin: Did you go to the N Reactor dedication when President Kennedy came to— Criswell: N Reactor. No, I didn’t. I don’t know why. Probably because I was working. [LAUGHTER] And sometimes, they didn’t even want me taking a vacation when I needed one. They let me know they would remember that. If I insisted on a vacation, they couldn’t stop me, but they’d remember it. You know, getting a raise was—My dad was here for that. Because Dad was part of the—what’d they call that group of power companies, public utilities? He was part of that. At one point in time, he was president of BWIP. Of the contributors or whatever-the-heck they called that group. Anyhow, he was one of the—he was up here for that. He sat in the audience. He was up here for all the BWIP meetings that they would hold. No, that wasn’t BWIP. BWIP, Basalt Waste Isolation. No, he was one of the, I guess they call them stakeholders. The electrical utilities that signed on for—but anyhow, he was here for that. And for all of the meetings they had here for that. He was here when the president came up for the dedication. Seemed to me that was Kennedy, wasn’t it? Franklin: Yeah. He came for the dedication of N Reactor in September of 1963. Criswell: Okay, well, I know where I was. If that was in late ’61 or spring of ’62, I was over at Fort Lewis. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: No, it was September of ’63. It was just about two months before the assassination. Criswell: September of ’63, okay. Well then, okay, yeah, I remember that all too well. Yeah. Franklin: One of my last questions is one a little earlier, probably, when you were going to school, but when you were here in Pasco or in Hungry Horse do you remember doing lots of civil defense things? Because that would’ve been right during the height of the Cold War. So what can you tell me about civil defense? Criswell: I don’t think Hungry Horse they were worried about it. They never did anything like that up at Hungry Horse. Franklin: What about here in Tri-Cities? Criswell: I’m trying to think about Tri-Cities. Pasco High School, brand new school, graduated, second graduating class from Pasco High. I don’t remember anything special about it. I really don’t. And I don’t—after I graduated and then the Russians started playing around like they did in—that’d have been late ’61. Yeah, late ’61, that’s when they pulled all of us in. And then in ’62, and ultimately they sent us all home when they talked the Russians into pulling everything out of Cuba. But it was a strange time. Franklin: Did you ever feel any sense of urgency or fear, living so near to Hanford? You know, knowing what was being produced, how it was contributing to the nuclear weapons stockpile? Criswell: Well, when I was over there at Fort Lewis in—it would’ve been ’62, probably the early spring of ’62—I am a lowly Spec/4. That’s the equivalent of a corporal. I got called into the office and I was told I was going to give a class on irradiation and avoiding irradiation, minimizing exposure to radiation. And they had me a book and I had no clue as to why they were giving that to me. I didn’t have a clue. They didn’t tell us nothing over there! I mean, hey, we were a bunch of mushrooms. Anyhow, I had to give the company I was part of a breakdown on, you know, how to avoid radiation. Basically what the difference was between contamination and radiation. There’s a lot of people don’t understand that today. You double the distance, you reduce your exposure by four. That’s one of the big things. Get the heck away from it as fast as you can. You don’t know where it’s at, but distance from the source is big. I had no reason why I’m giving this class. The only reason I understand now why I’m giving a class is I worked at Hanford. [LAUGHTER] That’s it. I didn’t know what I was talking about. [LAUGHTER] So that’s why I had to give this thing. So I did my best. And that’s the last I ever heard of it. We never had another seminar on it. There was never anything else about it. Franklin: Interesting. Criswell: It was a strange, strange period of time. But I don’t think anybody really understood what the period was. Nobody in the military told us, really, why we were there. Nobody told us a thing. We were a bunch of mushrooms. It just didn’t make sense. Didn’t make any sense. But, you know, number of years later, I was told why things happened the way they did. And Kennedy, if Kennedy was born today, you wouldn’t want to play poker with the man. He pulled the ultimate bluff on the Russians. Every B-52, and we had a thousand, or more than 1,000—I think they’re B-52s, the lightweight ones? Or are those B-47s? Franklin: I think those are B-47s. Criswell: Okay, B-47s. Lightweight. They got two engines hanging on a pod on either side, on the wings. And they’re all small, lightweight bombers. Had thousands of those things. And to my knowledge, they’re still all lined up in the desert, down there in Arizona, unless they made beer cans out of them. But sometime, probably the early part of ’62, Kennedy pulled the ultimate bluff. He wanted the second division pulled out of East Berlin. He wanted the missiles out of Cuba. And he told the Russians—no, he unleashed all those B-47s at the same time. And the big ones. All of our big ones. The Russians could see them. There wasn’t any questions. The Russians could see that they weren’t going to be able to stop them all. They knew that they were going to get through. We were going to lose a lot of planes; we were going to lose a lot of crews. But we were going to have one big mess. I forget who the heck the Russian was at the time. He got on the phone with the Kennedys, he says, turn those planes around. Turn them all around. He says, we’ll pull out. We’ll get the stuff out of Cuba. The extra division will go out of East Berlin. And that’s the way it went. But we, at Fort Lewis, we didn’t hear a dumb thing about it. It wasn’t until years later that a friend of mine told me what the heck had happened. Kennedy pulled the ultimate bluff. You don’t want to play cards with a guy like that! But if I’d known, I think I’d have—I don’t know what the heck you’d do. Franklin: Is there anything that I haven’t asked you about that you’d like to talk about before we conclude the interview? Criswell: The only thing I can say is my career at Hanford was interesting. I did a lot of different things. I’d still like to be working out there. I’d still have a ball working out there if I could. Unfortunately, I had a senior engineer PhD do a number on me. Franklin: What do you mean by that? Criswell: He lied. Franklin: Okay. Criswell: Okay. He wanted to come into my lab, he wanted to set up a series of tests. At the point in time, I was telling management that we’ve got to get new controls for the equipment we’re operating. These things are getting old, they’re unreliable. I knew this machine would fail. I couldn’t predict when, I couldn’t figure out why. I referred to it as a ghost. I mean, one time it does something wrong, and the next time you go to look for it, it isn’t there, it’s working perfectly okay. But you can’t trust it no more. This PhD insisted that I use this particular machine. There’s another one sitting alongside of it that would’ve done the job. He wants to use this machine. I tell him, no. This machine is flaky; it can’t be relied on. He tells me before I leave his office, before we run any tests, your fault, the machine’s fault, I’m going to get you. So, either the first or second test, I’m sitting there. We run a block of cycles, we take a reading. Start it up again, run a block of cycles, take a reading. It’s at high temperature, what-have-you. So I’m tilted back against the cupboard, waiting for the cycles to end. All of the sudden, bang! Doggone thing fails. Oh, by the way, I told the engineer that I directly tied to that, hey, this isn’t a good machine, you don’t want to use it. But he insists on using it. Anyhow, he goes running to my manager. It’s all my fault. He lived up to his word. And my manager accepted it. Franklin: Wow. Criswell: So I didn’t get a raise. And that would’ve been January 1st of ’99. I didn’t get a raise. So I wrote a letter, put it in my file that, no, this wasn’t my fault. And I had told him it wasn’t my fault. But I tried to keep the thing going, work to make sure that things ran properly, but I needed some support from management. I didn’t really get the support I wanted until after I left. Franklin: Right. Criswell: When they brought in the gentleman that replaced me, then they replaced all the electronics. But if I can figure out what—each one of these electronic things has got a whole bunch of drawers in it, and it’s got a whole bunch of pieces in each one of the drawers. If you can figure out what controls what, and it stays broken, then you can fix it. But when it goes back and forth, no. That’s when I call it a ghost. It didn’t work. So, anyhow, they kind of promised me that if things worked out, I’d get a raise in July, mid-term, mid-year. Anyhow, that didn’t happen. So I decided, well, I’ll be 62 in a couple more months and then I can retire. And I did. But I came back half-time. I’d probably still have been out there. I don’t know how long I would’ve worked. Hey, I enjoyed the work. It was interesting, and I was good at it. But unfortunately I couldn’t get the backing to replace the equipment when I needed it. And I ended up taking the hit. Unfortunately, this particular engineer, scientist, ended up causing problems for others. I guess, maybe, I’m kind of happy or proud about one thing. The gentleman I recommended to take my job ended up with it, and he’s still there. Franklin: That’s good. Criswell: I picked a younger man who, I’m assuming he’s still there. That’s been a lot of years. Franklin: Maybe you should call him up. Criswell: I probably ought to. I know that—I talked to him a few times since they moved out of the building we were in and moved downtown. That was one of the things they did, was they had to leave the basement that I was in. And they asked me about moving this big piece of equipment, this half-million-pound machine, how are we going to get that out of there? I told them how it was done. Anyhow, I don’t know what went wrong. But they had that—I suspect I know one thing. They had to back the semi down a ramp to the basement of the building. And if they got cockeyed or if the wheels are sitting in the hole, the deck on the flatbed is going to be canted. So they have to lay this huge frame down on its side. They have to get it over to where there’s an elevator that goes up to the half level that it’s got to go out of. But when I was there, they did this. They had to support this huge frame using railroad ties. And I’m there to watch, make sure that they don’t do anything wrong. All of the sudden, I hear this really screwy noise. And I go out in the hall. They’re out in the hall with a chainsaw cutting creosoted railroad ties to length to prop the elevator bed at a half-level between the floor level and the exit level. Because it won’t support the weight of this machine. So they got to support it there, and then they got to put a ramp going out. So anyhow, there’s this blue fog going down the hallway. I mean, this is—railroad ties with creosote on them, they’re cutting them with a chainsaw out in the hall of the building. [LAUGHTER] Stinky poo mess. But they got it out. This is when I was there. And they take it over to 324 Building. And they lift it up, they sit it on the ground upright, they take the lid off of 324 Building, the roof off of it. They take the shields off of 324 Building, they set them on the ground. And then when they got access to the hot cell in 324 Building, they go over there and they pick this machine up and they lift it up, over, and they set it down inside of the hot cell in 324 Building. They’re going to do some low level work. They wrap it with plastic and everything else. And then, later on after they finish doing whatever testing they were going to do, they pick it up again to go through the reverse, they bring it over and they set it down. Some other point in time, they take that thing—they’re making another lift on it, and anyhow, it crashes down. The actuator on that thing is about three feet in diameter. It generates 500,000 pounds of force using 3,000 psi of oil pressure. And it crashes. No, that’s upright, yep. Anyhow, yeah, they got it sitting off the ground over at 324 Building, outside of the cells, getting ready to make a lift. And all of a sudden, the cable comes loose from the drum on the winch on the crane. And this huge doggone frame drops a foot or two, down onto the ground. Anyhow, one of our engineers is looking around behind, he’s headed back to 300 Area proper. He looks behind him, and he can see the cable of the load cell going up, coming back down, going up, coming back down. And then pretty soon it just falls to the ground. It’s come off the drum on the frame. So anyhow it’s sitting there on the ground. And now the riggers have got to go through about four months of writing reports on why they dropped this thing. So anyhow, they lift it up, they finally lay it back down, and they get it over to our lab and they lift things back up, and they put it back in our lab. We make sure it’s nice and clean, it’s okay for use. When they get ready to take it out of that lab—this is after I’ve left—and they’re putting it onto a flatbed truck, instead of using a crane to move this thing with, they’ve got—they haven’t hired the riggers. They went out and hired a tow truck company. [LAUGHTER] They’ve got a flatbed truck sitting there by the rollup door, and it’s going down here, and apparently it’s tilted to the side. And they’ve got nothing on there to keep this thing on there. Anyhow, instead of lifting it, they’re dragging it up an I-beam incline on rollers. They’re using a tow truck in front of the semi that’s going to haul this thing over to the new building where it’s going to be installed at. So they get it up through the rolling doors and onto the flatbed truck, that apparently is at an angle. One of the gentlemen that’s watching this, he says, all of the sudden they get it out there, off the I-beam that it’s been pulled out on, and this thing starts to roll sideways off the flatbed truck. And it falls off and crashes. Well, this huge actuator is really quite a delicate piece of equipment. Number one, the rings inside of this piston—I don’t know how many are in there; I’ve never seen the inside of one of these things. But the cylinder itself is coated with silver. It’s got a silver plating in there. And the silver in this case is there for additional lubricant, besides having the—it’s a paraffin-based hydraulic oil is what they’re using, so very specialized. But when it lands on its side, you’ve got all the weight of that piston going to one side. And you’ve got seal rings in there, you’ve got wiper rings in there, to keep the oil inside of the things, so that it doesn’t leak oil very much. And then there’s a provision for oil that does get by the seal rings to go out and go back to the pump. That’s about that big around. Well, when this thing smashed down, it dented those seal rings. It dented everything in that doggone thing. Well, they sent it back to the factory, but—no, they didn’t! No, they did send it back to the factory. I’m getting mixed up, because I wasn’t there. I’m trying to remember everything. But they did send it back to the factory, but it was to make sure the columns in the load frame were vertical. I don’t know if they rebuilt the actuator or not. I really don’t’ know, but I don’t think so, because it came back, it’s leaking oil badly. Because the seal rings in there and everything are flattened on one side. I mean, you’ve got tons of force, wham. And if it came off the bed of the truck, that bed’s got to be four, five feet in height. So to my knowledge, it’s still leaking today. But that was a pretty special piece of equipment, and I wish to heck—like I said, I wouldn’t mind going back to work. [LAUGHTER] I enjoyed it. They’ve got new electronics now. To my knowledge, everything’s working fine. Franklin: New stuff to play with. Criswell: This is kind of specialized equipment. The old stuff, the old bald ones, the old Instrons, they’re not—you just program to do one thing. One thing. It’s either to travel a certain distance at a certain rate or you could tell it to increase the load at a certain rate. Either way. If you’re increasing the load, when the specimen starts to break, it starts to travel faster to keep up. So for most testing, when you’re testing something like this, you want to have this thing traveling at a certain ram rate. This way the load goes, and when it starts to yield, it bends over, and then it starts to drop off and it’ll fail. So this is the way it’s supposed to work. MTS will do it any way you want it to do. It’ll control the speed of the actuator; it’ll control how fast you load something. But when it starts to break, and if you’re under load control, it’s supposed to keep loading so many pounds per unit of time. When it starts to fail, then it isn’t keeping up, so it speeds up. This thing can go really fast. And then it can control load, displacement. It can also control—you can use something called an LVDT where it opens, it’s on the deflection of the specimen you’re trying to break. So there’s different ways of breaking things. But anyhow it’s all closed loop. You tell it you want it to go so many pounds per unit of time, it’ll do it. You tell it you want to go one inch in an hour, it’ll do it. But only one of those things can it do at the same time. And if it’s leaking oil, it isn’t going to keep up. So anyhow they’ve got a mess. They can’t keep up with it now I guess. My recommendation was they send it back. I don’t know. That’s an expensive process, plus they’ve got to get that actuator out of there. Franklin: Well, Dave, thank you so much for sitting down and talking with us today. I really appreciate it. Criswell: Yeah, it’s a good thing you caught me before my mind’s completely gone. Franklin: Yeah. No, you had so much to say. I mean, it was a great interview. Criswell: Yeah. Franklin: I appreciate you sharing your knowledge. Criswell: The equipment was great. It really was great. You program it right, it’ll do what you want. But like I said, when you’ve got a ghost in your electronics, it works most of the time, but one split second it goes haywire, whatever you’re doing is gone. And some of these things, you’ve got to be real careful of. Franklin: Yeah. Well, thank you very much. Criswell: You betcha. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 02:17:59 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 300 Area PRTR 222-S K Reactor Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with David Criswell Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Atomic Products Operation Description An account of the resource David Criswell worked at various facilities in the 300 area including separations labs and the PRTR. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. 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 7/20/2016 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. 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.