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Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
Post-1943 Oral Histories
Subject
The topic of the resource
Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War
Description
An account of the resource
Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Robert Franklin
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Tony Brooks
Location
The location of the interview
Washington State University Tri-Cities
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Tony Brooks on February 8<sup>th</sup>, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Tony about his experiences working at the Hanford Site and his lifetime in the health physics profession. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us?</p>
<p>Tony Brooks: Antone Leavitt Brooks. A-N-T-O-N-E L-E-A-V-I-T-T B-R-O-O-K-S.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great. And so let’s start at the beginning. Where and when—where were you born and when?</p>
<p>Brooks: I was born in Saint George, Utah, which is the fallout capital of the world.</p>
<p>Franklin: Is that—that’s southern?</p>
<p>Brooks: Southern. Right as you’re going towards Las Vegas, it’s the last city in Utah before you leave, head out across the Nevada Desert.</p>
<p>Franklin: And why is it the fallout capital of the world?</p>
<p>Brooks: Because we shot off 103 atomic weapons aboveground at the Nevada Test Site. Normally, the weapons would be shot so that the fallout would go north across the Nevada, then turn and come east across Utah. There were a couple of shots that didn’t do that, that came right straight east to Saint George. And so we had some of the highest fallout levels recorded. When we were little kids, we’d be out playing basketball, and they’d say, hey, fallout cloud’s coming over, go in the house. Come on, you know? We’re playing ball here. [LAUGHTER] Or I’m up to bat next, I’m not going in the house.</p>
<p>Franklin: So you had an early connection, then with—</p>
<p>Brooks: Radiation.</p>
<p>Franklin: With radiation and atomic testing and atomic production.</p>
<p>Brooks: Right, right, right, right.</p>
<p>Franklin: So how did you get involved in radiation testing and health physics?</p>
<p>Brooks: Well, see, what I did then, when I went to University of Utah, got a bachelor’s degree there and then I got a master’s degree. And a guy named Robert Pendleton had just gotten a grant from the old Atomic Energy Commission to study the movement of fallout through the environment and into people. I did my master’s degree then following fallout. We set up a series of dairy farm stations. Each week we’d go and we’d sample the milk, we’d sample the grass, we’d sample the people, and count and watch the fallout move through the ecosystem into people. And so that was my master’s degree.</p>
<p>Franklin: And what year was that?</p>
<p>Brooks: In ’62.</p>
<p>Franklin: ’62, okay. And then that—</p>
<p>Brooks: They shot the last of the aboveground tests then. The atomic bomb ban—testing ban came in about then. But one of the last shots they shot was called Sedan. And Sedan was designed to see how big of a hole you could make with a nuclear weapon. So they buried it out in the desert, dug a serious hole with it. And the fallout came right over up across Salt Lake City.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p>Brooks: And so I was there, working on my master’s degree at that time. So we got a good dose of fallout from that also.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow. And does that kind of—I know that there were also those pathway-into-human experiments here at Hanford, as well. Does that kind of—does that mirror—is that around the same time?</p>
<p>Brooks: Yes, yes, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Brooks: They used to have the old Hanford Symposiums up here, and we’d always come up and participate in those.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh really?</p>
<p>Brooks: And so we knew the people here; they knew us. We were doing the same kind of work. In fact, the guy who was one of the big ones here, a guy named Leo Bustad and Roger McClellan, okay?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, we’ve interviewed Roger before.</p>
<p>Brooks: Well, Roger was my boss.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Brooks: So when I got my master’s degree, I went on to Cornell University. It was everywhere, okay? Fallout was everywhere. It was in everything, it was on everything. My concern, then, was, are there health effects? Are there health effects? Are we causing damage? Are we all going to die of cancer? Okay?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Brooks: That was a big concern. And at that time, we didn’t have a whole lot of data on internally deposited radioactive material. So I went to Cornell University and got my PhD there, studying chromosome damage. The chromosome is the most sensitive indicator of radiation-induced damage that we had at that time. You could look down the microscope and see the breaks and the rearrangements caused by the radiation. So that’s what I did my PhD. Then Roger McClellan hired me to go to the Lovelace Foundation, where he was the new director. I was one of the first two people he hired at Lovelace. So that’s how Roger and I got together.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, right. And what did you do at Lovelace?</p>
<p>Brooks: Well, Lovelace—see, I wanted to continue my studies on internally deposited radioactive material, and that’s what they did. They had animals inhale, inject, ingest all kinds of radioactive material. So what I did was study the chromosome genetic damage as well as cancer induced in those animals.</p>
<p>Franklin: Does that also kind of mirror—that mirrors some of the testing done at Hanford Labs and PNNL on—</p>
<p>Brooks: Oh, sure, oh, sure, oh, sure.</p>
<p>Franklin: --animal. First with the pigs and beagles—</p>
<p>Brooks: See, they had a big dog program here, we had a big dog program at Lovelace. They had one at Utah, they had one at Argonne, they had one at—so they had all these programs that were well-coordinated, studying effects of radiation on animals.</p>
<p>Franklin: So, were you all studying different areas of that—</p>
<p>Brooks: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: --or kind of all studying the same, trying to work towards the cracking of the—</p>
<p>Brooks: Each one—each laboratory had kind of an assignment. University of Utah, they inject—they started first. They injected the animals with radioactive material. Well, we don’t get injected much, so, University of California at Davis fed the animals radioactive material. Lovelace and Pacific Northwest Lab had the animals inhale it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Brooks: And so the route of administration was different. But once it got inside, and once it went where it was going to go, then the effects were very similar. So there was a lot of coordination. Every year we’d have a meeting sometime—most—a lot of the times up here. They’d have the big Hanford Symposiums. I came up to those faithfully every year. And so the people up here were well-acquainted with the people down at Lovelace ITRI.</p>
<p>Franklin: And what did you find as a result of—</p>
<p>Brooks: Well, what I found primarily is that radiation is a very good cell killer. Okay? Radiation kills cells. That’s why we use it in therapy, right?</p>
<p>Franklin: Right.</p>
<p>Brooks: If you’ve got a cancer, what do you do? You radiate the sucker, right? Why do you do that? To kill the cells. The other thing I found was that radiation is very poor mutagen. I spent a lot of time trying to look at mutations induced by radiation. It kills too many cells. It’s not very good at mutating. See, about that time, another thing came along that hit here as well as there, and that was Jimmy Carter says, okay, national laboratories, we know a lot about radiation. But we don’t know anything about chemicals. So we’re going to assign each of the national laborites a chemical process for producing energy and let’s look at what that does. We were given diesel exhaust and fluidized coal combustion at Lovelace. Pacific Northwest Lab was given another—I don’t remember exactly what theirs was. I think it was something to do with coal. Okay? And so we went through and took all these techniques and technology we’d developed for radiation and applied them to chemicals. Man, there’s a lot of good mutagens in chemicals.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah?</p>
<p>Brooks: You better believe it. So you get all of these chemicals from burning, chemicals from—you know, I’d take petri dishes and I’d put a bunch of cells on them. I’d irradiate them. Could have put 100,000 cells, radiate them, there’d be 4,000 or 5,000 left to be mutated for radiation. Chemicals doesn’t kill them. It just mutates them. So you get benzopyrene and methylcanthrene, all these really hot environmental chemicals. And so I said, oh, jeez, radiation’s a poor mutagen. It is not a good mutagen. A lot of other things are really hot mutagens; it’s not.</p>
<p>Franklin: And these chemicals were mostly from like carbon and fossil based—fossil fuels--</p>
<p>Brooks: Well—</p>
<p>Franklin: --based applications?</p>
<p>Brooks: Yeah, they were, but Lawrence Livermore Lab was given food, okay?</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Brooks: Cooking hamburgers, folks. Overdoing—burning things.</p>
<p>Franklin: Like, the carbon.</p>
<p>Brooks: The carbon, right, and all the products there. There’s a lot of good stuff in there. And about that time, a guy named Bruce Ames developed what we called the Ames Test. The Ames Test was designed to test mutagens. And we all jumped into the Ames Test. Chemicals are really good at producing mutations in the Ames Test. Radiation didn’t produce any.</p>
<p>Franklin: Interesting. That’s interesting because that kind of contradicts the cultural pop idea of radiation as causing massive genetic disorder or kind of positive disorders like superheroes, you know?</p>
<p>Brooks: Right, right.</p>
<p>Franklin: And stuff like that. But also negative like 50-foot ant, or you know.</p>
<p>Brooks: We all know where the Incredible Hulk came from. We all know Ninja Turtles, we know where we got those. That’s all radiation, folks. That’s all radiation. But in reality, radiation is not a mutagen.</p>
<p>Franklin: It just would have killed them.</p>
<p>Brooks: Sure, sure. [LAUGHTER] It might have mutated them—see, there was a big, big project down at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They called it the Megamouse Project. Now, Megamouse Project was designed to look at mutations induced by radiation. So they took a whole bunch of male mice, radiated them almost enough to kill them. Let them recover, irradiated them again almost enough to kill them, and then bred them. They had hundreds of thousands of offspring of mice from those. How many mutations? 17 extra.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p>Brooks: And so when we started setting standards, the International Council on Radiation Protection and the National Council on Radiation Protection. But when I was young, mutation and cancer were about deemed equal. But as the data came in, mutations kind of went away. Okay, so mutations kind of went away. Cancer was still a big concern. So that’s what I try to do, is take my mutagenesis assays, short-term assays, and link them to cancer induction. So I treat an animal, check through his chromosomes, check for the mutations, then look for cancer in them. And so we were trying to make those links so I could do a short-term test and do a prediction, say. But, again, the more I worked, and the harder I worked, the more I understood, radiation is not a very good carcinogen, either. Otherwise, when we radiate people to cure cancer, we’d make more cancer than we cure. We don’t. The people who are radiated are cured. Some additional cancers come up, but not many.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right.</p>
<p>Brooks: See, you look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki—it’s the thing I always like to talk about—is here we are—boom, you know? We drop two weapons, kill 200,000 people. Radiation’s a good killer. We had 86,000 people survive. We followed that 86,000 people for their lifetime. We know what each and every one of them died of. How many extra cancers did we see in that 86,000 people? 40,000 controls and 40,000 exposed. How many extra cancers? Had a great time, once, I was talking in a ninth grade class, telling them about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They were all about asleep, you know? They weren’t too enthused about it. So I said, okay, here we got two populations. 40,000 exposed, 40,000 controls. How many extra cancers were there in the exposed? I whipped a dollar out of my wallet and said I’ll give the kid a dollar that comes the closest. You think every hand come up?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Brooks: [LAUGHTER] Every hand came up, you know. So I start writing them on the board. Oh, everybody—everybody died of cancer. No, no, you get run over by a truck, you get—everybody doesn’t die of cancer. I started trying to talk them down, trying to talk them down. Well, half of them. Three-quarters, half, a quarter. Trying to talk them down. Couldn’t. Finally some wiseacre rises his hand in the back of the room and says, nobody got cancer. I handed him the dollar because he was way closer than anybody else. So in those two populations, 40,000 people—you got to remember that 25% of us die of cancer. Radiation, no radiation, nothing. That’s a given. About a fourth of us die of cancer. So in the 40,000 without radiation, about 10,000 cancers. That’s about what we expected, about 10,000 cancers. The radiated people, how many extra? That’s always the big question. About 500. So we had 10,000 in one population, 10,500 in the other. No question, radiation increased the cancer frequency.</p>
<p>Franklin: But by a pretty small percentage. By—not—I think—</p>
<p>Brooks: It’s not huge.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, not a huge—</p>
<p>Brooks: It’s not huge. And most of the people who got the cancer were the ones in the close-in zones that just about got killed from the blast and the heat and the fires.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about UV radiation and skin cancer?</p>
<p>Brooks: Well, that’s a complete different story that I don’t have much expertise in.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, sure. That’s like the only kind—</p>
<p>Brooks: But—yeah—ultraviolet light causes DNA adducts that causes skin cancer. No question. You go out and sit in the sun—see, now, the other part of this story—the rest of the story—is that since I’m from southern Utah, I’m a Downwinder, just like a lot of the Downwinders here, okay? So if I get cancer, I get $50,000. No questions asked. I was actually invited to be the distinguished scientist one year at the Health Physics Society meeting. And I’d just gone in to have a bunch of skin cancers removed. I’m not blond. Saint George is a hot place, man. Skin—peel and burn, man, peel and burn. Over and over. So anyway I get a lot of little skin cancers, and I’d just gone in to the doctor to have those removed when I was given this award. And so I was there in front of the group. This guy, Dr. Toohey, Dick Toohey, who’s in charge of reimbursement, came up after my talk and says, hey, what you got there? Well, went to the doctor, had a bunch of skin cancers removed. Well, what kind were they? Well, I told them the kinds. Well, how many did you have? I told him, had three. He says, you know, if you get five, you get your $50k. Okay? [LAUGHTER] Two more skin cancers, I get my $50k. But what are the facts? Is there an epidemic of cancer in southern Utah where the fallout was where we’re getting paid? Utah has the lowest cancer instance in the nation. Southern Utah, where I live, the county where the biggest fallout was, has the second lowest cancer rate in the state. But we still get paid. So I go down there and give a talk and I say, oh, jeez, you know, if they didn’t cause it, why are they paying us? Why are they paying us? That’s a hard question to ask and answer. Because that’s what they ask. Why are they paying us? So what do you tell them? I tell them, well, you had a good senator. Senator Orrin Hatch got legislation through the Senate that said southern Utah had been abused. We had fallout, no question. We had exposures, no question. So, we decided to reimburse you. Well, how many get reimbursed? Can you reimburse everybody exposed to fallout? No. Russia set off a whole bunch of nuclear weapons. We set off a bunch of nuclear weapons. We contaminated the Northern Hemisphere. Brits, they were smart. They went down to Australia to set theirs off. They contaminated the Southern Hemisphere. So, we’ve all had it, okay? So we can’t reimburse everybody, can we? So how many are we going to reimburse? Well, you know, these four counties, this county in Nevada, this county in Arizona, 25% of us get cancer, that’s about right. The same way here at the Hanford Site, you know? Downwinders. People that worked at the Site. Military people. See, so they’ve set up all these programs to pay people off that were damaged.</p>
<p>Franklin: Interesting.</p>
<p>Brooks: [LAUGHTER] So I come at it from a little different position than—</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure.</p>
<p>Brooks: What I ended up doing—I’ve taken you through more than you probably ever wanted to know.</p>
<p>Franklin: No, not at all.</p>
<p>Brooks: But what happened, see, is after I left Lovelace, Roger McClellan left Lovelace, I left Lovelace. I came here and Bill Bair hired me to work out at Pacific Northwest Lab.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, and what year would this have been?</p>
<p>Brooks: It was ’98.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Brooks: So—no, it wasn’t ’98. ’88. Excuse me.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s okay.</p>
<p>Brooks: Anyway, I came here to work at the Pacific Northwest Lab. So I worked here for about ten years at PNNL. And I don’t know how much of that story you want to hear. Probably not too much, but—</p>
<p>Franklin: Well, I’d love to hear about that.</p>
<p>Brooks: But I worked at the cellular molecular biology group at Pacific Northwest National Lab.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. And what did you do there? Similar to—</p>
<p>Brooks: Well, similar. Spent a lot of time on radon.</p>
<p>Franklin: Ah, the home radiation.</p>
<p>Brooks: The home radiator. We had a big radon program at PNNL, and I was the head of that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Doesn’t Spokane have really high levels of radon in the nation?</p>
<p>Brooks: They do. They’re one of the high ones. The Reading Prong in the east, Spokane, several places have quite high radon. And so we did a lot of experimental work on radon. Again, trying to link cancer induction to [UNKNOWN] changes. So we’d have animals inhale radon, we’d look for the chromosome damage and all that. Then we’d try to look for the cancers in them. And a guy named Fred Cross—you probably have interviewed Fred Cross. You surely should have if you haven’t.</p>
<p>Franklin: I think we—I think we might have. I’ll have to go back.</p>
<p>Brooks: Anyway, because Fred Cross ran a great big radon program for exposure to animals of radon. So when I came here, I got talking to Fred and I says, hey, Fred. Rats get a lot of lung cancer when they inhale radon. But not one case of trachea or nasal cancer. You inhale it, it goes down your trachea, into your lungs. How come you don’t get tracheal cancer? You inhale—have hamsters inhale radon, you don’t get anything! Now are we humans more like rats or hamsters? [LAUGHTER] That was one of the questions, you know?</p>
<p>Franklin: [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Brooks: Are we rats or are we hamsters? So I went ahead and started studying that at the cell and molecular level. When I asked a guy named Tony James, said, hey, Tony, how come rats don’t get tracheal tumors? And he says, well, maybe the dose to the trachea—the amount of radiation to the trachea is very different than the deep lungs. You inhale it, maybe it goes and stays better, and maybe that’s what it is. And I says, well, can you help me with the dose? Well, you tell me the diameter of the trachea, you tell me the velocity of the airway, you tell me the particle size, you tell me the branching angles, you tell me this—I can tell you what the dose is. I says, crap, I can’t tell you all that. I’m a simple biologist. So I went ahead and looked at the cells and see what they tell me. So we have the animals radiate, inhale the radon, go in, look at their lungs, look at the trachea, look at the nose, see how much chromosome damage there is. Same all three places. Same amount of dose, no cancer nose or trachea, lots of lung cancer. Same amount of dose. Same amount of damage. Same number of mutations. Huh! So I look at the hamsters—Chinese hamsters, Syrian hamsters. Same thing. Same amount of dose, no cancer in hamsters. Lot of cancer. So I decided that maybe mutations aren’t that important. There are other processes going on besides that. And this was something that really—a lot of people did not like.</p>
<p>Franklin: Why?</p>
<p>Brooks: Because they always thought that mutations make cancer. You got a mutation that releases itself from its control, it goes ahead and it does this, this and this. Before long you have cancer. But, hey. Same number of mutations, no cancer.</p>
<p>Franklin: So why, then, was the cancer—same level of dose, all three areas, same level of mutations, why was the cancer only happening in the lung?</p>
<p>Brooks: Yeah, that’s a good question. And so, what happened then—and this is the last part of my career—is I left Pacific Northwest Lab and came to Washington State University. My office was down the hall about four places on the left down there. And when I left PNL, they were going into the molecular science center, and they closed down the radon program. So I had a couple million dollars’ worth of funding in radon, and they closed it down. Oh, Brooks, you don’t have any funding. No, I don’t, do I? So what are you going to do? Well, I’m going to try to write some grants to get some more funding. No, no, we don’t have time for that. So anyway, I changed positions over there from biology into risk assessment. And I knew that I wasn’t a risk assessor. So I spent my nights and weekends writing grants. I got a grant from NIH, National Institute of Health; I got a grant from the Department of Energy; I got a grant from NASA to study radiation in space, and to study cell and molecular changes. So I hit on three grants, so I came over here and says, hey, you know, I got some money. Is it all right if I come over here? What do you think they said? Oh, yeah, we’d love to have you.</p>
<p>Franklin: Open arms?</p>
<p>Brooks: Yeah, come on. As long as you realize that we’re not giving you any money. But you got your own money, come on. And that was wonderful, it was. It was really good. I came over here and as a result of getting the grant from DOE, then, they started what they called a Low Dose Radiation Research Project. And the Low Dose Radiation Research Project, Senator Pete Domenici out of New Mexico said, hey, we’re spending billions of dollars cleaning up waste, we’re spending billions of dollars on concern over medicine use. We’re concerned about nuclear weapons, we’re concerned about terrorists, but we don’t know much about low doses. We know what happens up here at this high dose region, where we really kicked the devil out of you, you get cancer. What about the low dose? Of course, at that time, we’d sequenced the genome, we had all of these new tools and techniques where we could go down and look. So DOE started what they called the Low Dose Program. They had what they called the Chief Scientist for the Low Dose Program, and I got that. So I sat here at Washington State University and ran the Low Dose Program out of Washington, DC with a lady named Noelle Metting. So, my job was the best in the world. My boss was in Washington, DC. I was here, sitting down the hall. And we helped them run this program where we had about $25 million a year. We distributed it to the very best scientists we could find anywhere in the world. We didn’t just limit it to US scientists. If you had an idea or a technique that was unique, we’d give you money. We gave money to Grey Lab in England where they had a microbeam where they could shoot individual cells. We gave money to the Australians where they were able to look at mutations in animals at very, very low levels. We gave money over in the Ukraine where they went over and studied a lot of the rodents after the Chernobyl fallout. And so we had all the very best—I thought—the very best cell and molecular biologists in the world studying the health effects of low doses. And my job, along with the lady named Leslie Couch, who worked here with me, was to run the program and to take the abstracts and take the information and put it in a kind of language that the lay people could maybe understand. We scientists, we don’t care. If I can talk to my two best friends, that’s all I care, you know. [LAUGHTER] I don’t care if the Rotary Club understands what I’m doing. But that’s one of the problems we’ve had. See, the public’s perception is way over here. The real world is way over there. And we as scientists have not done the job. We have not done the job. So that was my job here for about ten years, at Washington State.</p>
<p>Franklin: So what did you find?</p>
<p>Brooks: We found that the response of cells and molecules at low doses is very different than high doses. At high doses, you’ve got injury, you’ve got repair. At low doses, a whole different set of genes gets turned on, whole different processes are upregulated. But the wisdom of our political system killed the system, shut the program down. I retired and went to White Pass and ran a girls’ camp for a couple of years. And Bill Morgan came to Pacific Northwest Lab and took over at the Low Dose Program. Now, I don’t know if you’ve—Bill passed away last year. Huge loss. So Bill came and took over my job that I had as the chief scientist. And then I got running the website for them, see? And so they gave the website to Pacific Northwest Lab. So while I was running [LAUGHTER] a girls’ camp, plowing snow, which I did yesterday—went up and helped them. [LAUGHTER] Trying to keep the roads clean. Then Bill was running the website here for two years. It’s really interesting because the website really got quite popular. Because we were putting all the new information into it, and publications—lots and lots of publications on what happens at low doses and how different it is than high doses.</p>
<p>Franklin: What constitutes a low dose?</p>
<p>Brooks: Well, what you have to realize is that we live in a sea of radiation, okay? There’s a background amount of radiation that we all have. The higher in elevation you get, the more you get. If you live in Denver, you get way more than you do here. So what usually people do is say, well, here’s the background, and some value above that must be a low dose. [LAUGHTER] How fast you give it is the other thing, is how fast you get it. The body’s able to recover and repair. So if you give 100 rads or one gray all in one second, that does a lot more damage than if you give that over a year. Your body repairs and eliminates the bad cells. And that’s the other thing we found: a lot of protective processes that we didn’t realize existed.</p>
<p>Franklin: You mean the body’s own protective processes.</p>
<p>Brooks: Sure. The body has a built-in system, man. We’re being insulted by all kinds of things all the time, and, golly, we’re still alive. We should have been dead, see, if it wasn’t repairing. So anyway, I ran this Low Dose Program and then I went up to Camp Zarahemla. When I got there, I still had money left in my grant from the Department of Energy. Then I talked to Dr. Metting and I says, look, Noelle, I can send this money back to DOE if you’d like. Or you can let me keep it and I’ll write a book on the history of the program. And so the two years while I was at Camp Zarahemla, I spent every morning writing the history and so I compiled all of publications, put together the history, and got that all published just as I—all put together—just as I came out of there. And they made a website, put it on the website, so it’s been on the website for a while. But I couldn’t get her to publish it. And so, the bottom line on that is that DOE has finally given Pacific Northwest Lab some money to help me get that published. And Washington State University is publishing it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great.</p>
<p>Brooks: And it’s supposed to be out in April.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow, cool. Congratulations.</p>
<p>Brooks: So anyway. [LAUGHTER] But anyway, that’s the history of the DOE Low Dose Program. That’s what I did at the very last of my career. Now, when I got back from Camp Zarahemla where we were running the girls’ camp, Bill Morgan says, you know, this is a lot more work than I thought it was going to be. Why don’t you come and help me? So Bill wrote a contract for me as a private—I set up a company and we—DOE says, well you can run it through PNL, or you can run it through Washington State, or you can set up a private company and run it there. They had a set amount of money that they were willing to give me. I thought, oh, PNL has an overhead rate of a little over 100%. Washington State has an overhead rate of about 40%. My company has no overhead rate. I think I’ll do it that way. [LAUGHTER] So anyway, Bill was very nice, and he helped me set up and get funded through PNL. So I worked, then, for PNL on the website for a number of years after I got back from camp. Then of course Bill passed away and the program there has gone down to where there’s not much left. So that’s where I am today. I still—PNL gave me some money to get the book published, so that’s very nice. And I work for EPRI, the Electric Power Research Institute, where they’ve been paying me some money to write some papers. I got a very nice paper published with two real good people, Julian Preston, who’s a geneticist and David Holm who’s an epidemiologist, where we looked at dose rate. See, now, how important is dose rate? Now, this is a big argument now, whether, if you give dose over a long period of time, it’s less effective than giving it all at once. All the data says that’s true. The Germans, on the other hand, have eliminated nuclear power, and they have decided that there is no benefit of protracting the radiation.</p>
<p>Franklin: Of what?</p>
<p>Brooks: Of protracting it, extending it out in time. In other words, if I give you one unit of radiation in one second, or if I give you one unit of radiation in ten years, the effect is the same. Does that make sense to you?</p>
<p>Franklin: It doesn’t if the data doesn’t support it.</p>
<p>Brooks: Well, the data doesn’t support it. Because every cell in your body is whacked when you give it all at once. You give it over time, the cells are turning over; any individual cell doesn’t see much. All he sees is a very low dose. He responds differently to that than he does this whack.</p>
<p>Franklin: The whack turns on different—</p>
<p>Brooks: Turns on a different set of genes, turns on a different set of processes. I’m trying to survive up here, okay? We found, for example, if you take—we developed a microbeam here at PNL—Les Braby did—where we could take and shoot individual cells with alpha particles. So we get under a microscope, get a bunch of kids that were good with video games, shoot that cell, and move, shoot this one, and shoot that one. We knew exactly which cells we’d shot. We knew exactly how many alpha particles we’d shot them with. Then we look at the response. That was what I was doing, looking at the response. It was really kind of neat, because you’d hit one cell, cell over here would responded. Of course! We’re talking to each other. We’re not a single cell. We don’t have eyes in our liver, you know. Come on. When we develop—and so, that was what we call the bystander effect. This is one of the things we found at the Low Dose Program. You hit one cell, the whole tissue responds.</p>
<p>Franklin: Trying to prevent the damage, right?</p>
<p>Brooks: Yeah, what does it do? It’s trying to prevent the damage. So if you hit one cell, it sends out messages: I’ve been hit! Help! What do the other cells do? Pew! Kill it. You’re out of here. It’s called apoptosis, or spontaneous programmed cell death.</p>
<p>Franklin: You hit the whole tissue at once, then they all can’t respond.</p>
<p>Brooks: Right, everybody’s damaged, folks. But if one cell gets hit, the whole tissue responds to try to save the tissue, not the cell. They’ll kill that cell. It’s called selective apoptosis, where you just eliminate that guy. And so there’s a lot of that—really fun. I just had a great time at it.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s great. Did you ever find out why the rat lungs were prone to cancers, whereas the esophagus and the trachea were not?</p>
<p>Brooks: Well, you know, the thing that we found in the Low Dose Program was the cell communication. The cells in the trachea and esophagus are nicely arranged in nice little columns. And the communication is very nice between them. In the lung, you get this thing spread out. You kill a cell over here, you stimulate another over there, you do this, this, that. Very different project. And so I think that what’s happening is that the cells that are able to maintain communication, maintain structure—if you have an inflammatory disease, okay, esophageal reflex. What do you get? You get esophageal cancer. No radiation, no mutations. Inflammatory disease. So any time you get tissue disorganization, inflammation. We did that with the lungs. We’d have these animals inhale radioactive material. If you gave them enough, you’d kill them. They’d die, pneumonitis, fibrosis, the lungs would fill up with water and they’d die. If you give them a little less than that so they didn’t die of that, almost every one of them got cancer—lung cancer. If you go down a little lower, but still an awful lot, but protracted over a long period of time, almost nothing.</p>
<p>Franklin: And why did the Syrian or Chinese hamsters not get the lung cancer when they were exposed to the same amount?</p>
<p>Brooks: Well, that’s what we call genetic variability, okay? You and I are different. You and I are different. Every one of us has our own genetic difference. As you looked into these animals, they had different pathways. They have different ways to repair. They’re different.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure, sure.</p>
<p>Brooks: If you look at the human population, we’ve got sensitive people, we’ve got resistant people. I think the sensitive people are more like rats and the resistant ones more like the hamsters. That’s one of the things that we’re starting to unravel. What are the pathways and what are the ones that are important? That’s when the program was killed. And so that’s one of the things I’m pushing really hard and working with a lot of people now to see if we can get money back into that program. It’s really a critical thing.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure. I believe you. I mean, it sounds like understanding—because we all live with low dose and varying amounts of low dose.</p>
<p>Brooks: That’s right.</p>
<p>Franklin: And especially as we don’t have that kind of constant testing of radiation anymore, we might get exposed to different variabilities, right?</p>
<p>Brooks: Right, right.</p>
<p>Franklin: I’m wondering if you could talk about the consequences of that. Because I’ve heard a little bit about it, of the loss of the generations that kind of ingested the radiation from atomic weapons testing. Do you know what I’m talking about?</p>
<p>Brooks: Not for sure.</p>
<p>Franklin: That there was ways to kind of track where people were, based on the amount of material in their cells that they had ingested from the atomic weapons testing, and that now there’s a generation that has grown up since the ban and doesn’t have those kind of genetic markers anymore.</p>
<p>Brooks: No. Yeah, I don’t know. I think, of course, once you take the radiation—and we’re very, very good at detecting radiation. That’s one of the things that we’re really good at. And that really impressed me when I went from working with radiation to working with hot chemicals. Radiation—if I spill something—I knew right where it was. Chemical, I spill something, I don’t know where it was. So we’re so good at testing and detecting. My generation, I can go in and get counted today, and they’d tell me how much strontium I’ve still got in my bones. I had thyroid. We counted people all over the state of Utah that had fairly significant amounts of radiation in them. Chernobyl, Fukushima. Lots and lots and lots and lots of people have ingested lots and lots and lots of radiation. And so it’s not a mystery box anymore. The mystery box is the fact that it hasn’t been very effective. And I’ve just been really grateful for that. Because when I was growing up, I thought, oh, crap, you know? We’re going to have a cancer epidemic in southern Utah the likes of which you’ve never seen before. It didn’t develop. Chernobyl, we went over there and set up a study. Guy named Admiral Zumwalt was a Navy admiral. He knew the Navy admirals over in Russia. So we got all of us together and set up a big study to study Chernobyl. We had each of the Russian countries matched with the United States group. We had Ukraine and Belarus and Russia, all matched with Fred Hutch, one group, Texas, another group, Boston, another group. So we got all our best people, matched them with theirs, to go over and look at that. Chernobyl had just happened. We wanted to find out, again, are we going to have terrible cancer epidemic in Russia? And now it’s been 20-plus years, 30 years, after Chernobyl, huh? 20-something years.</p>
<p>Franklin: 30. A little more than 30, because it was 1986, right?</p>
<p>Brooks: Right.</p>
<p>Franklin: April of ’86.</p>
<p>Brooks: So, ’86, I was still a youngster. Anyway, I was sitting on this committee. Been sitting on it for years. When we started, our prediction was that we were really going to have some serious problems with cancer, especially leukemia—especially childhood leukemia. And thyroid. See, the Russians didn’t need people telling people in Pripyat that they had a problem for several days. So they were there sucking in the iodine-131—thyroid getting really kicked. So all of our models, all of that, said, boy, we have a serious problem here. The longer we did it, the more measurements we made, the longer we followed it up—where are the cancers? Where are the cancers? Zero excess solid cancers, with exception of cancer of the thyroid of children. Huge increase in cancer of the thyroid in children.</p>
<p>Franklin: And is that a result of the radioactive iodine?</p>
<p>Brooks: It is the radioactive iodine, very high doses.</p>
<p>Franklin: And we’re talking about people in the surrounding area, not talking about the responders.</p>
<p>Brooks: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. The responders, they got zinged. They got zinged. We killed a bunch of them. You know, the Russians, they had a very different philosophy than what we have. It’s like me having a great big bonfire here and saying, why don’t you go stand in the middle of that bonfire? You know, I’d rather not. They knew how hot that was. They knew going in there was going to be lethal. But they sent them in. See, we wouldn’t have done that. Okay? But, yeah, first responders—</p>
<p>Franklin: So why the children and not adult—if they were all in the same environment, why the children and not the adult?</p>
<p>Brooks: That’s really a good question. Why the children and not the adults? Children thyroids are developing. There’s lots of cell division in there. There’s lots of opportunities for things to go wrong. Adult thyroids are just sitting there, doing their thing. Almost no cell proliferation, almost no cell division, no differentiation. They’re just sitting there. Now, you take the liver, which just sits there—I did a lot of work on liver. Liver cells, you can radiate the devil out of them as long as you don’t make them divide, they seem to be fine. But you stimulate them to divide—I could go in and flop out part of the liver, make the liver divide, up come the cancer. So there’s a lot of processes, but the children’s thyroids were sensitive.</p>
<p>Franklin: And it’s the—so then is the cancer then carried in the division? Is that how it multiplies? [INAUDIBLE] establishing a link--</p>
<p>Brooks: Either that—carried or expressed.</p>
<p>Franklin: Carried or expressed, okay. So does the action of division make it—the cells more likely to turn cancerous? Or do we still—</p>
<p>Brooks: Well, cell tissues that have more rapid cell division have more cancer in them.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure.</p>
<p>Brooks: Bone marrow, GI tract, lung.</p>
<p>Franklin: Skin?</p>
<p>Brooks: Skin, yeah, skin. But you look at the liver, almost never divides. Radiation doesn’t produce much in the way of brain cancer—cells don’t divide. Muscles, nothing. Bone marrow, gut, skin—all of those dividing—rapidly dividing cells. If the exposure is given acutely.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Brooks: But if it’s protracted in time, it’s very different.</p>
<p>Franklin: Interesting.</p>
<p>Brooks: Because the cells are dividing, and one cell gets hit, its great-grandson maybe get hit. But if you get them all at once, and they have to all divide, and they have to all survive, and they have to all repopulate, that’s where it comes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Gotcha. Well, thank you, Tony.</p>
<p>Brooks: Well, that’s probably more than you ever wanted to hear.</p>
<p>Franklin: No, I think it’s really instructive. And it definitely complicates—complicates our idea of how radiation affects the body, but clarifies and I think kind of dispels some of the misinformation and myths that surround—</p>
<p>Brooks: Yeah, fear is a really important part of this whole thing. We had a meeting up at Leavenworth where we brought in scientists from around the world and spent a week up there, trying to decide and discuss what we could do about the fear of radiation. We had a guy from Argentina, we had a guy from Germany, we had a guy from Australia, we had three of us from the United States, and we spent a week up there. It’s really difficult to decide what makes people so afraid of anything. I’m afraid of snakes. Okay. You can tell me that snake’s not going to bite me, but don’t put it on me.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure.</p>
<p>Brooks: [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Well it’s tough, right, because fear is a natural human response to keep us alive. It’s a safety feature. Yeah, fear of the unknown. Tony, is there anything that I haven’t asked you about that you’d like to mention in the interview?</p>
<p>Brooks: Well, I don’t know, other than it has been really an exciting career for me.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great.</p>
<p>Brooks: We’ve had a wonderful time, got to do a lot of interesting things, meet a lot of interesting people. I can say the main thing that I’d like to be able to help with is to help people know that if you go in and the doctor says you need a CT scan, take it. The radiation dose from a CT scan is so low that you don’t worry about it. If you need an x-ray, take it. If the dentist wants to look at your teeth, take it. Because the risks are so very small.</p>
<p>Franklin: And that radiation doesn’t automatically cause cancer.</p>
<p>Brooks: Right.</p>
<p>Franklin: It depends on the time of the dose and the amount of—</p>
<p>Brooks: Right. And, see, that’s the public perception, that if I get radiated, I will get cancer. If I get cancer, the radiation caused it. And that’s a hard perception to break, because it’s absolutely not true.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure, okay. Well, great, thank you so much, Tony. I really appreciated the interview.</p>
<p>Brooks: It’s been fun, I can say.</p>
<p>Franklin: Well, I’m glad we could get this for—and that Parker didn’t have one with you—Parker Foundation. So I’m kind of glad that we could kind of get you in with all those other voices about radiation and health safety. Because you have a lot of—a lot of what you said was really instructive. And you said it so easily that—you know, I’m a historian, an archivist. I’m not a radiation expert. I know I’ve been working on this project about some of the basics, but it was very easy to understand. And so you spent your life dedicated to that; you’re a trustworthy source.</p>
<p>Brooks: Well, that’s right. I’ve invested my life, basically, trying to do that. And I started off scared to death of it. Okay?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Brooks: And the more I worked and the more I’ve studied and the more I’ve seen, all the way from the animals to the humans to the tissue to the cells to the molecules, everything tells the same story.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Great, well, thanks so much.</p>
<p>Brooks: Hey, thank you, man.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, thank you.</p>
Original Format
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mp4
Duration
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00:52:33
Bit Rate/Frequency
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317 kbps
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1988-today
Years on Hanford Site
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1988-1998
Names Mentioned
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Leo Bustad
Roger McClellan
Fred Cross
Pete Domenici
Noelle Metting
Leslie Couch
Bill Morgan
Les Braby
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Title
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Interview with Tony Brooks
Description
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An interview with Tony Brooks 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.
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
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02-08-2017
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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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video/mp4
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2017-13-11: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.]
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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.
Adult
Atomic Energy Commission
Cancer
Children
Cook
Department of Energy
Desert
Hanford
Livermore
NASA
Park
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https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fa8b49961531582554e9868f93f7a942a.jpg
f8a9132ccd53e3c39c0cee5fdd9e9ca4
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F4361045435f51aa42f69dde5f08a4ad9.mp4
e3071fd5aef547b0c5009fc5e2bd304e
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Title
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Post-1943 Oral Histories
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Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War
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An account of the resource
Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War
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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
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Interviewer
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Robert Franklin
Interviewee
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Roderick Coler
Location
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Washington State University Tri-Cities
Transcription
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<p>Tom Hungate: You’re rolling.</p>
<p>Robert Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history with Dr. Roderick Coler, retired MD, on June 1<sup>st</sup>, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Dr. Roderick Coler about his experiences as a doctor in the Tri-Cities area during the Hanford time.</p>
<p>Roderick Coler: Right. And you can—everybody calls me Rod.</p>
<p>Franklin: Rod? Okay, great. Everybody calls me Robert.</p>
<p>Coler: Yeah. Robert.</p>
<p>Franklin: So, Rod, as an early medical specialist in Kennewick, how did you come to Kennewick as a place to practice?</p>
<p>Coler: I heard about Kennewick remotely from patients when I was in the Veterans Administration Hospital Residency Program in Portland.</p>
<p>Franklin: In Portland, Oregon?</p>
<p>Coler: In Portland, Oregon.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Coler: And I was dating a ward secretary by the name of Thelma who later became my wife. She said that we should go where you’re needed.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Coler: So when I got a call from Dr. Ralph deBit who was one of the early general practitioners here—he suggested that I drive down and have lunch at the old Kennewick General Hospital. So Thelma and I drove down, but the car stalled when we got to Umatilla. I went out and started hitchhiking so we wouldn’t be late for the lunch. Nobody picked me up. So Thelma said, get behind that bush! [LAUGHTER] And I went and hid behind a piece sagebrush. She went out and stuck up her thumb, and the first car that went by picked us up and took us to the Kennewick General Hospital for lunch and I was on time. My first experience in Kennewick. Looked pretty rustic. But the five general practitioners here needed an internal medical specialist, and I was finishing that specialty. So I was welcomed. They provided me with an office, and the first three months’ free rent. It went smoothly from there on out. I came to practice where I practiced for 58 years.</p>
<p>Franklin: 58 years. And that was in 1947?</p>
<p>Coler: And that was 1948. Mm-hm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Great. So when you said Kennewick was very rustic, can you kind of elaborate a little more on that?</p>
<p>Coler: [LAUGHTER] There was just a main street, Kennewick Avenue, and 1<sup>st</sup> Avenue. And after that, the avenues weren’t very well traveled. But there were a number of houses around, and it looked like a comfortable place to practice. And the old Kennewick General Hospital certainly needed some medical supervision and a medical specialist. So I was happy to look at this as a place to come. It kept me in the West. I was from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Coler: That is my place of growing up. And I wanted to stay in the West.</p>
<p>Franklin: Why is that?</p>
<p>Coler: I don’t know. There was a certain sense of adventure when you’re in your 30s and you’ve had three years of service in the Air Force, and you’ve come back, and you want to settle down, and you’re through with your training, but you don’t want the big city, even though Portland is a lovely town. But it would be a slow place for an internist to get started.</p>
<p>Franklin: Why is that?</p>
<p>Coler: Because so many doctors just stayed. After their training program in Portland, they just stayed on in Portland. Because it felt like home and felt comfortable. But Thelma said, go where you’re needed. So we came down at the invitation of these five general practitioners. And Dr. Ralph deBit is a piece of history in himself.</p>
<p>Franklin: Can you—oh, sorry, go ahead.</p>
<p>Coler: So we decided then after seeing two or three more places that—Kennewick and the Tri-Cities was the place we wanted to practice.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great. What other places did you visit?</p>
<p>Coler: Well, I went over on the coast where I ran into three days of straight rain, over on the Portland coast. [LAUGHTER] The Washington coast was desolate. And I found the dry side was much to my liking.</p>
<p>Franklin: Interesting.</p>
<p>Coler: Mm-hm.</p>
<p>Franklin: You mentioned that you’d been three years in the Air Force. So were you a doctor in the Air Force?</p>
<p>Coler: No. No, I went into the Air Force as part of weather training. The Air Force was gearing up for a much longer war—this is World War II—gearing up for a much longer war. They wanted to keep a cadre of young men available to train. So they put me in a year of mathematics at University of Washington in St. Louis to study pre-meteorology, which was all mathematics, up through higher numbers. A lot of things that I never would need or use. But then I went out and took six months of weather forecasting, weather observing, and became a weather observer, which was a non-commissioned officer position. So they kept telling me that you would get your rank in the military after you got to your base of work. But I kept being assigned around to training stations and finally I ended up in Coral Gables and had a wonderful time exploring the Everglades, because I only worked eight hours a week out there. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p>Coler: As a weather observer. So I was very happy to have that experience, even though I never was commissioned as an officer, which they had promised me would be at the end of my training.</p>
<p>Franklin: Interesting. Great.</p>
<p>Coler: I still have specimens that I’ve collected from the Everglades, down there. Snakeskins, different plants. And I attended a course in botany of the Florida peninsula while I was there. And it got me interested in the out-of-doors.</p>
<p>Franklin: Interesting. So, returning to your work at Kennewick, what exactly—forgive my ignorance and maybe some of the ignorance of the people watching this later—what is an internalist exactly?</p>
<p>Coler: So an internal medical specialist is someone who specializes in the skin and its contents.</p>
<p>Franklin: The skin and its contents, okay.</p>
<p>Coler: From the standpoint of the diagnosis of diseases and their treatment which are not orthopedic and not surgical. But that includes everything from infectious diseases to degenerative diseases. And it generally doesn’t include childhood diseases, although I saw some very interesting cases.</p>
<p>Franklin: Such as?</p>
<p>Coler: Such as malaria—in Kennewick. Not from the mosquito biting up here, but the mosquito bite carrying the malaria virus down in Central America, and then the patients coming home and coming down with fever here. Fever, chills and anemia.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p>Coler: And finding the parasite in their blood.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p>Coler: We had a good lab at Kennewick General Hospital.</p>
<p>Franklin: So you mentioned early on that you came and you worked with—sorry, can you mention the doctor that brought you up again?</p>
<p>Coler: Dr. deBit, Dr. Ralph deBit.</p>
<p>Franklin: Ralph deBit. And can you elaborate, maybe, on the state of medicine in Kennewick when you came here in ’58?</p>
<p>Coler: In ’58, the five general practitioners were very busy and they wanted an internal medical specialist to refer the difficult or diagnostic problems to. There weren’t too many doctors in those days who were willing to move to the smaller communities. They all seemed to want—the specialists wanted to stay in Portland and Seattle, Spokane. But I was very happy to come to Kennewick, and they were very happy to send me their difficult cases. [LAUGHTER] Because in those days, generalists, or general practitioners as they were called—we don’t have any more today. It’s called family practice today, and it requires a much more rigorous training period than it did in the days of the old GP. But the GPs would take care of something like—would see something like 20 patients a day. And maybe four new patients every day. So they didn’t spend much time with them. If it wasn’t evident what the patient suffered from and what the treatment was going to be, then they were happy to refer the patient to somebody who would deliberate a little more.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. So how did—did you see patients from Hanford?</p>
<p>Coler: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Can you talk a little bit about working with patients who worked at Hanford?</p>
<p>Coler: So HEHF, or Hanford Environmental Health Foundation, had a cadre of doctors which saw patients who worked at Hanford. When I came to town, Hanford workers had to go to that doctor first, and then if the problem was elaborate or detailed or difficult, such as active tuberculosis or a desert fungus infection like coccidioidomycosis, then they would send the patient to me.</p>
<p>Franklin: You kind of laughed a little when you said that last one.</p>
<p>Coler: Well, because that disorder is a fungus infection of the lungs that’s only seen in the Sonoma Valley of California or other desert areas in the United States.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wasn’t there an outbreak of that recently up here? They closed a bunch of county parks in Washington?</p>
<p>Coler: I’m not aware of that, but may be true. Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, interesting. I guess fungus and desert isn’t something that I would assume would go together.</p>
<p>Coler: Well, that’s right, because you’re thinking of something that grows in moist areas.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right.</p>
<p>Coler: Like a toadstool, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right.</p>
<p>Coler: But this was a fungus that is blowing in the wind.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Coler: And if you pass through and drive through those areas when the wind is blowing that particular fungus in the air, you run a high risk of catching one of those desert fungus disorders.</p>
<p>Franklin: I imagine then that they like loose sandy soils.</p>
<p>Coler: Yes. Loose sandy soil that blows, yeah. We didn’t have any up here, but they would come in from California.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Interesting.</p>
<p>Coler: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: So the Hanford Environmental Health Foundation—can you talk a little bit more about that? Do you know much about its origins, or if it’s still around today?</p>
<p>Coler: Well, when the Hanford operation got going, they immediately put in a medical service. They had a superintendent, and they had a cadre of three or four doctors who saw the patients who worked at Hanford. So generally, these were well patients. Generally, they had rashes or they had emotions, or they had injuries from falling, scrapes and wounds, and occasional pneumonia. And sometimes patients would come to work there, because the workforce, remember, during World War II, even at the end of the war, was chosen from people who couldn’t find a job elsewhere, frequently. The country was well-employed, and to find labor and to find the lower jobs, below supervisory jobs at Hanford was difficult. We got patients from the deep South, patients that had migrated in and who sometimes had not been found eligible for work in the war effort elsewhere.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Just going to refer to some of your notes here that you brought me.</p>
<p>Coler: Mm-hmm, sure.</p>
<p>Franklin: So, here we go. I had a question here. So as a part of your 53 years practicing medicine, did you treat families who reported to work at Hanford, and what were your experiences with them and overall feeling towards the work at that site?</p>
<p>Coler: Generally, these were healthy patients. Hanford Environmental Health took care of the workers out there, but their families frequently had to seek medical care in the general practitioners and specialists who were out in the community. So we had good surgical help, and we had good diagnostic help. So I was not a pioneer in any sense of the word, but it was interesting, because I knew I was seeing unusual cases that never would be seen by me if I had stayed in the big city.</p>
<p>Franklin: Can you—without compromising any personal or medical information, can you talk a little more about some of those unusual cases?</p>
<p>Coler: One time I was called up to Kahlotus—I was called up north of Richland to see a woman who was in a stupor. The doctor could not hear a heartbeat. I went up on my afternoon off, on the call, to see her in consultation. Went in to find a woman lying down, weakened, hardly able to talk, and whose heartbeat I couldn’t hear with the stethoscope. I presumed that she had a pericardial effusion. That is, fluid was impacting—fluid in the heart sac was impacting the heartbeat and preventing the heartbeat from being heard, and from being effective in creating circulation by the heart. So I asked for a trocar, which is a big needle, and as I was about to insert it under the ribs, I felt something hard poking me on the other side. I looked down and it was a gun. And her husband was there in the emergency room, and he said, if she dies, you die. She was already very weakened and very—looked like she was on her way into shock and dying. And I plunged the needle through there with a little Novocain, and drained the fluid from the heart sac. And the heart began to beat again and the blood pressure came up and the pulse rate came down, and she woke up. The husband put his gun away. But those were the wild West days.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p>Coler: This was in the Prosser Hospital Emergency Room. Yeah. [LAUGHTER] So that’s one. But I have many. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Please.</p>
<p>Coler: Another one was—a patient ran in the front door of the old Kennewick General Hospital—didn’t wait to go through registration. Ran up the stairs and jumped into a bed and said, call Dr. Coler, call Dr. Coler. So the nurse called me and said they had this hyper excitable patient with a pulse rate of 160 and tremulous and pale and sweating, and we don’t know what’s wrong with him, but he jumped into bed and said to call you. So my office was across the street from the old Kennewick General Hospital. So I ran over there, ran upstairs to find the patient exactly as the nurse described. I figured that the only thing that would do that was that he was on some kind of a stimulant, metamphetamine, but in those days we didn’t have that problem. Or, he had a rare, very rare tumor of the adrenal glands, which was secreting too much adrenaline. Now, the nurse laughed at me, because she knew from her medical studies in nursing that nobody ever sees a case like that. I mean, there’s one per state per every ten years in the United States. [LAUGHTER] I mean, it’s rare. But I drew blood from the—I had the laboratory draw blood for the tests. And then I gave him an antidote for epinephrine. And his pulse rate came down, and he quieted down. We went to x-ray, saw the outline of a tumor near the adrenal gland. And where the adrenal gland would be near the kidney. And I got Bobby Luxon—Robert Luxon, who was a very dashing surgeon in town, to see him. And they operated on him here and removed the biggest adrenaline-secreting tumor that had ever been seen in the state of Washington, according to University of Washington records.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p>Coler: So that was an interesting case.</p>
<p>Franklin: How big was the—</p>
<p>Coler: It was fist-sized.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p>Coler: A fist-sized tumor.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s amazing.</p>
<p>Coler: Now, somebody would say, well, how did it get that big without having symptoms in the months leading up to it? Well, in the months leading up to it, he didn’t squeeze it to put the adrenaline into the blood stream all at one time. He was being treated for hypertension, and spurts of hypertension, but nobody suspected when he came to me—or when the nurse called me to see him—that he could have an adrenaline tumor. Rare.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, sounds like it. That’s really—that’s really amazing. Any other interesting stories?</p>
<p>Coler: Interesting cases?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Coler: Let’s see. Something unusual was happening every three or four months in the practice. But now that’s kind of faded away. Except for the bizarre anemias—pernicious anemia—saw two cases the first month that I came to town. And I was amazed, because I thought, this is a center for pernicious anemia. Or maybe it has something to do with Hanford radiation. But it was simply that Dr. deBit had saved up two cases to wait ‘til I came to town, and then he sent them to me to make me think that this was a haven of unlikely and unreasonable diagnoses. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>[W. E. JOHNSON<a>[EM1]</a> ]</p>
<p>Franklin: Part of—one of these points in your notes here mentions W. E. Johnson, who worked for GE and then was the Atomic Energy Commissioner. We actually have a collection of his files on the project.</p>
<p>Coler: Mm-hm.</p>
<p>Franklin: So I think it’d be great if you could talk about this bit here about W. E. Johnson.</p>
<p>Coler: He was a much-respected administrator. But I saw him in his decline.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Yeah, it says here he suffered from progressive dementia?</p>
<p>Coler: Yeah, he had a progressive dementia problem, yeah. He one time got on his horse and rode out across the country, not knowing where he was or how far he had gone. Maybe after he had gone about seven or eight miles, he was lost. Didn’t know where he was. So he simply had the good sense to put the reins down on the horse’s neck and let the horse go back to the barn for feeding and rest, and take W. E. Johnson with him back to the ranch. But they had a ranch up north of Richland.</p>
<p>Franklin: Mm-hm. Yeah, I’ve seen pictures of that ranch. I’d heard of his love for horses, but I had not heard of that particular story.</p>
<p>Coler: Mm-hm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you ever see him as a patient or—</p>
<p>Coler: Yes, yeah. I saw W. E. Johnson as a patient on a regular basis at the end of his career.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. And that would have been when he was beginning to suffer from progressive dementia.</p>
<p>Coler: Yes, dementia. And we tried some medicines that were popular at that time, but nothing helped. Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin<a>[EM2]</a> : So you raised your family. Did you have children when you came to Kennewick?</p>
<p>Coler: No.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Coler: No, I was engaged to Thelma Cook from Portland. We were married soon after I came to Kennewick. Went back to Portland, had a nice wedding—colorful wedding, nice family. Then she and I settled in to Kennewick and she, being a secretary, managed the secretarial services of my office. And without that, I probably would have gone broke. [LAUGHTER] Working 18 hours a day, gone broke. But she was a—she had a good business head and made the practice pay. We raised four children here. I have three daughters in Portland, and I have Clark Coler, who is chief of staff at the big hospital in Portland.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Coler: Yeah. Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: So what was it like—I guess sometimes people talk or you hear about kind of the shadow of Hanford over the Tri-Cities. What was it like to raise a family in—being kind of somewhat connected, seeing Hanford workers, but raising a family in these communities in the Cold War? Were there any events, or anything that was unique to the Tri-Cities that kind of stands out to you?</p>
<p>Coler: No, it was a good rural area to raise children. They were well-behaved, and joined the clubs at the high school. And came up through the system here. They’re all quite successful. I’m very proud of three daughters, employed and married in Portland, and Clark, at the Swedish Hospital in Seattle.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, great. That’s wonderful. How much—seeing Hanford patients, you must have had some idea of the work at Hanford. Did you have a pretty good idea of what was happening at Hanford? Or what was your knowledge and your thoughts and opinions about the work at Hanford?</p>
<p>Coler: When we tried to recruit doctors to come to the Tri-Cities, they knew that the radiation was surveyed, and patients would be—and people would be safe here. But the wives had this abject fear of radiation. They didn’t want to raise their children within 50 miles [LAUGHTER] of a reactor, because they had heard that you could have babies with small heads or you could have deformities, and that it would be a terrible place to raise a family. I remember having two or three medical doctors and their families and their wives come over, and I would take them on a tour of the Kennewick General Hospital to recruit doctors to come here. And the doctors were very enthusiastic. Over luncheon, they were talking about how interested they would be in coming—a growing community, and practicing medicine here. And we were able to supply them with offices and get them started, even though there weren’t any clinics—everybody was in private practice. This was before the Richland Clinic accumulated their staff from the existing doctors in Richland. But the wives were afraid of radiation. One time, when I had three doctors and their wives come over from Seattle to see about moving here to practice when they got through with their training, a windstorm came up and we had a dust storm off the Horse Heaven Hills. And in those days we had dust storms spring and fall. But it was such a beautiful clear day when we began, and by the time we were finished with the meal, you couldn’t see 40 feet outside the window! [LAUGHTER] Because of the blowing dust. I got thank-you letters from those doctors—those three doctors, but I knew that their wives had canceled any possibility of their coming.</p>
<p>Franklin: Kind of an echo of the termination winds—</p>
<p>Coler: Yes, the termination winds, right.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow. That’s interesting to hear about that so much later.</p>
<p>Coler: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: I like to ask about events—big events that happened in the Tri-Cities. And one that always seems to—usually left an imprint on people’s minds was President Kennedy’s visit in 1963. Did you—were you able to go see President Kennedy, or did you hear about the visit?</p>
<p>Coler: Yeah, I heard about the visit, but I was on duty in the emergency room that day. And we had so many visitors who came and needed help with their heat exhaustion that I was busy in the emergency room and didn’t get out to Hanford to see him.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Coler: But I was well aware of his presence.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right.</p>
<p>Coler: And it was in the newspaper. Of course, a big picture of Kennedy.</p>
<p>Franklin: And his presence probably caused you some extra work then.</p>
<p>Coler: Yes. People that weren’t used to the heat just filled the emergency rooms when we had a special day, such as the boat races. When we had the boat races, people would come from out of town and they weren’t prepared for our heat.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh. And so that would be kind of a yearly—</p>
<p>Coler: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: A yearly influx.</p>
<p>Coler: So we’d have two doctors on-call for the emergency room.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, makes sense. I see here that you have left your mark at the Kennewick General Hospital in terms of a medical center in your name?</p>
<p>Coler: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Can you tell me a little about that?</p>
<p>Coler: They named the first medical center where doctors could practice the deBit Building. That was a place where doctors could come right out of training and, without sinking a lot of money into building or renting an office, they could be put to work and see how they liked it. The organization, the hospital, would then benefit from them admitting their patients who needed to be hospitalized into that institution, as well as having staff meetings and having all of the positions filled for the hospital board. The hospital board at Kennewick General was made up of non-hospital people. But I served on it for a number of years and could advise them on medical matters.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. And I see that you also—there’s also a Rod Coler Center for Senior Health—</p>
<p>Coler: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: At Trios as well?</p>
<p>Coler: Yeah, yeah. So they named that building after me simply because I was here a long time, and I’m still around.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right! [LAUGHTER] Well, I imagine it would have something to do with the quality of work that you performed as well.</p>
<p>Coler: Uh-huh.</p>
<p>Franklin: In some of my preliminary notes here, it talks about the poor—you’ve talked a bit about the excellence of deBit and a couple other doctors that you worked with, but I’ve also heard that there was, in general, kind of a poor standard of medical care in the area when you arrived.</p>
<p>Coler: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was that to do—</p>
<p>Coler: This had to do with surgery. We had a surgical problem at Kennewick General. It was quite evident soon after I came to town and began to read charts and look at records and do consultations that the surgical services were poor and sometimes not very well diagnosed and treated. So I predicted that the Kennewick General Hospital would close by the state reviewing our records at Kennewick General if we didn’t do something about that. So Dr. deBit, again, made me chairman of a committee to go through the charts of all the doctors for the previous couple of years. It was quite evident who was causing the mayhem at Kennewick General Hospital. [LAUGHTER] He was soon moved on.</p>
<p>Franklin: Ah.</p>
<p>Coler: In those days, you couldn’t take away his license to practice, because you would be sued for preventing somebody from working—from interfering with work. We didn’t want a lawsuit against us. So we were able to move him along. But each hospital that looked into the records of that particular surgeon refused to take him, too. So he actually had to retire.</p>
<p>Franklin: I see.</p>
<p>Coler: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Kind of a forced retirement.</p>
<p>Coler: Yeah, a forced retirement.</p>
<p>Franklin: Interesting.</p>
<p>Coler: But we had—in Robert Luxon, who came to town about a year or two after I did, he was an excellent diagnostician for surgical conditions and also an excellent surgeon. So our reputation was saved, and Kennewick General went on to become quite a good surgical center and referral center for surgery. As was Richland, and Pasco. Dr. Ray Rose in Pasco was an excellent surgeon and diagnostic man. He’s passed now. He’s gone. But he was a close friend of mine and we did many mountain hikes together.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s great. I guess the last thing I’d like to ask you about is I see that you live in a historic Kennewick home. Can you maybe talk a little bit about your home and its importance in the history of Kennewick?</p>
<p>Coler: The home on Canal Drive was built out of town of Kennewick in 1914. And was the home of a gentleman who was a salesman and trader. He built his home. And when my wife spotted that house, we were living—when we were married and were living downtown Kennewick, we drove by it one day and she says, turn in here. And I said, why? She said, just do it. Turn in here. So I turned in the road that led across the field that came to the old house on Canal Drive. It was just west of Yelm Street—Yelm, Y-E-L-M. It sat by itself; there were no other houses when it was built out west of that. But she spotted that old home and we pulled in and I went to the door and knocked on the door, thinking this is crazy. You just don’t knock on a door and ask somebody who comes to the door, do they want to sell their house. That’s not the way it’s done! [LAUGHTER] She said, I want to live in that house! Knocked on the door, an old man came to the door, and when I asked him he said, yes. He said, in two months I need to move to Chicago to be near my children, and I would be very happy to sell you this house. At that time, he thought that maybe the house might be worth $20,000. This would be with—this was three acres of land on Canal Drive and an old house that had three bedrooms, and a second floor, and a large kitchen which most farm houses did not have in those days. When that house was built in the 19-teens, 1915, 1914, kitchens were small. But that house had a generous kitchen. My wife fell in love with that house. So when we came back to talk to that man, he had turned it over to a realtor. And now the price was $40,000.</p>
<p>Franklin: Ooh.</p>
<p>Coler: [LAUGHTER] And he was selling—but it took me a long time to pay that off. Yeah. We had to borrow the money and pay the bank to buy the house. But raised four children in that house now.</p>
<p>Franklin: And you said—</p>
<p>Coler: And we were the third owner.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. And you still live in the house today?</p>
<p>Coler: We still live in that house today.</p>
<p>Franklin: I bet it’s worth a bit more than $40,000.</p>
<p>Coler: Yes. Well, the land is.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yes.</p>
<p>Coler: Now, several people said—oh, it’s a beautiful place overlooking the Columbia River and on a knoll above Canal—above the river, and above the park. We would need to—many people say that they would take down the house and build an apartment building there on it. Because it’s right next to the apartment buildings at Yelm Street. But we like that old location—I do, and I don’t know what my children will do with it when I’m gone. So I’m 91. My father lived to 101. So I have a chance to go on for a few more years.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yes, you do.</p>
<p>Coler: Yeah. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Well, Rod, thank you so much. This has been a great interview and I’ve really enjoyed talking with you.</p>
<p>Coler: You’re welcome, Robert. I really enjoyed this myself. Thank you.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great. Thank you.</p>
<p> </p>
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<p> <a>[EM1]</a>Begin sensitive patient information about W. E. Johnson.</p>
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<p> <a>[EM2]</a>End W. E. Johnson</p>
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Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
00:44:00
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
1948-2006
Names Mentioned
Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community.
Thelma
Dr. Ralph deBit
Robert Luxon
Clark Coler
Kennedy
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 Roderick Coler
Description
An account of the resource
An interview with Roderick Coler 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
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
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06-01-2016
Rights
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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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video/mp4
Date Modified
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2017-29-11: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.]
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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.
Atomic Energy Commission
Clinic
Cold War
Cook
Hanford
injuries
Kennedy
Kennewick
River
Street
War
-
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F84bf54bc2ac6706e0f00adbe21db27da.JPG
ed544594c67c3e8aa6499b200de2a1a6
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fccf2d62dd3fe95e6c0f1cc18ad35a634.mp4
4c158ffd560c969ebaefe18a3df9df28
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
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Post-1943 Oral Histories
Subject
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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
Ludwig Bruggemann
Location
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Yakima, Washington
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p><strong>Northwest Public Television | Bruggemann_Ludwig</strong></p>
<p>Camera man: There we go. That's pretty good?</p>
<p>Robert Bauman: Pretty good.</p>
<p>Cameraman: Okay. Seems like we ought to record that.</p>
<p>Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Yep.</p>
<p>Camera man: Yep. We’re rolling.</p>
<p>Bauman: Okay. All right, guess we're ready to get started.</p>
<p>Ludwig Bruggemann: Good.</p>
<p>Bauman: So, if we could start first by just having you say your name and spell it for us.</p>
<p>Bruggemann: My name is Ludwig Bruggemann. Ludwig, L-U-D-W-I-G, Bruggemann, B-R-U-G-G-E-M-A-N-N.</p>
<p>Bauman: All right, thank you very much. And my name's Bob Bauman. Today's date is September 8, 2014. And we're conducting this interview in Yakima, Washington. So, Mr. Bruggemann, I wonder if we could start by having you tell us a little bit about your family, your parents, and if you know why they moved to the area and when they did that?</p>
<p>Bruggemann: Okay. In my father's generation there were three brothers. And my father wanted to become a farmer. And my family had connections to people in Seattle that had access to farms, real estate evidently, real estate people. And my father migrated to America in about 1925, '26. And worked his way up the West Coast, from California on up. And in the between time, his family, or these real estate people had found a farm in the state of Washington that was installed. It was built, everything was there. The person owning it wanted to sell, and my father was able to purchase this 400-acre farm on the Columbia River. Being very important, having water, this is almost a desert area, and he had a big pump station on the Columbia River, water pump station.</p>
<p>Bauman: So that was in place already, when he bought it?</p>
<p>Bruggemann: That was in place, and he took it over and got it going, got it working right.</p>
<p>Bauman: Any idea how much your father paid for it?</p>
<p>Bruggemann: No, no idea at all, no.</p>
<p>Bauman: And so what sort of crops were grown on the farm?</p>
<p>Bruggemann: My father had--what, Paula?</p>
<p>Paula Bruggemann Holm: I don't know if it was soft fruit.</p>
<p>Bruggemann: No, it was soft fruit as I remember.</p>
<p>Holm: Apricots, peaches?</p>
<p>Bruggemann: Cherries, wasn't it? Wasn't it cherries? Peaches? Apricots? Pears, maybe.</p>
<p>Holm: Apples?</p>
<p>Bruggemann: No apples, no. And he later wanted to go into grapes.</p>
<p>Bauman: Oh, okay so that was the plan for down the road.</p>
<p>Bruggemann: Yeah.</p>
<p>Bauman: And your mother--was your father married at the time that he purchased the property?</p>
<p>Bruggemann: My father was married I think at the time he purchased the property. But he got a divorce and then he met my mother whose relatives were running the ferry.</p>
<p>Bauman: Okay.</p>
<p>Bruggemann: At Priest Rapids. And that's how my mother met him, and found him evidently a very attractive man.</p>
<p>Bauman: And what was your mother’s name?</p>
<p>Bruggemann: Mary.</p>
<p>Bauman: And so what memories do you have, I know you were very young when your family left, what memories do you have of the place at all?</p>
<p>Bruggemann: Almost none. It was a big, big place, we had animals and about my fifth birthday I got kicked over by a goat. I was trying to pet one of her children and she didn't like that. [LAUGHTER] And I did experience-I sort of have it in my memory--the two jeeps driving in. With the orders, the government orders, you have two months to pack your things and get out of here. Which is a real blow for a farmer.</p>
<p>Bauman: Right.</p>
<p>Bruggemann: Because, you see, my father had his first crop on the trees. Because later in the dealings, the court dealings he had, they ask him, show us your profits. And he said look, I built up that farm and I had my first crop on the trees and your two jeeps drove in. Military jeeps.</p>
<p>Bauman: Right. So your father then took the government to court at some point? Is that what you're saying?</p>
<p>Bruggemann: Pardon?</p>
<p>Bauman: Your father, did he go to court then?</p>
<p>Bruggemann: Well later, I don't know when, where, we moved then to Yakima afterwards. My father thought that he had put his youth energy into that farm and he still wanted to remain a farmer, but he wanted something smaller, and which he could get here on the outskirts of Yakima. And he went to court, I think that was a normal procedure. You had to go to court I think, to find out what the proceeds would be--what the government would they pay for the property--and you're saying it's worth a lot of money and you have to prove that it's worth a lot of money.</p>
<p>Bauman: Right.</p>
<p>Bruggemann: The land, the crops and so on. And well, the government asks show us your profits. And he didn't have any profits to show, so he got much less than he had hoped he would. Mm-hm.</p>
<p>Bauman: Did your father and mother, do remember them talking about this much at the time or later even, when you were older? Talking about having to move in 1943?</p>
<p>Bruggemann: No, not really. You see, my father was a real dedicated farmer and he took over 12 acres in here, in Yakima, but with cherries, Bing cherries, that were sold in New York. Really good fruit, peaches and apricots and that subject was sort of shoved to the back. I don't really remember any discussions; I do know that they were disappointed on the outcome, the financial outcome.</p>
<p>Bauman: I wonder if you have any other memories of other people--on farms, neighboring farms or other people that you knew in the area or?</p>
<p>Bruggemann: Well, Gary and Margaret Wills, yeah, they had the contact and they were out there also weren't they?</p>
<p>Holm: Yeah, that's where they met them.</p>
<p>Bruggemann: Yeah, okay. Mr. and Mrs. Wills, they were also farmers and also came then the Yakima. See there were two big cities that you would go to, either Sunnyside or Yakima. Mm-hm, at that time.</p>
<p>Bauman: Right. So even when you were living on your farm if you needed to go to the city to buy things or whatever, you would go to?</p>
<p>Bruggemann: Yeah. Either we'd go to Sunnyside or to Yakima. And the Yakima tour was about an hour’s drive at the time.</p>
<p>Bauman: So you were about five years old? Is that right?</p>
<p>Bruggemann: I was just, my birthday's in the summer and those jeeps drove in the summer, so I was almost at my fifth birthday, right? When that happened.</p>
<p>Bauman: So you had not yet started school?</p>
<p>Bruggemann: No, no, no, no, no. I had no kindergarten--they didn't have kindergarten then. I started in Castleville, I think Castleville School, didn't I? I started there, yeah in the first grade and which I just loved--a very good school, Castleville.</p>
<p>Bauman: Now we were talking earlier that you and your sister had the chance to go back on site a couple years ago, Gary Peterson, right?</p>
<p>Bruggemann: Yeah, right.</p>
<p>Bauman: Had you been back before then at all?</p>
<p>Bruggemann: No, we would--you know where the Vantage Bridge is, Okay. I would take trips--on my trips here to the States I would take trips with my parents to the Vantage Bridge. And there's a little stop there, a little rest area there. And we would look over the fence to the old house, we thought it was the old house until--well the house was there for a while anyway, until they tore it down--but that's all, that’s the only--</p>
<p>Bauman: So that time with Gary was the first time you had actually been out--</p>
<p>Bruggemann: In the area, yes. Yes. Yes.</p>
<p>Bauman: What, I'm kind of curious, did it bring back any memories for you? Or what sorts of things.</p>
<p>Bruggemann: Not really. Not really. I don't remember the house at all, for example. I don't remember. I know my memory set in when I came to Yakima.</p>
<p>Bauman: Mm-hm.</p>
<p>Bruggemann: But it was, well wait, wait, wait, one thing, one thing. My mother was always very much loaded with work and cooking and even washing for help, washing clothes and so on for help. It was a real burden for her. I don't think when she married my father, she didn't realize what type of work is involved in a big ranch because if you have 400 acres, you need a lot of help. Cooking and so on, housing these people to a certain degree.</p>
<p>Bauman: Do you remember any of the other buildings that were there? Your sister mentioned the cook house, I think.</p>
<p>Bruggemann: The cook house is still there.</p>
<p>Bauman: The building is still there, right?</p>
<p>Bruggemann: Yeah. No not, not really there. There must've been some big barns and so on there but I just don't remember that at all. I remember having a dog.</p>
<p>Bauman: Yeah. And you mentioned the size of the property, obviously, your father must have hired a number of workers.</p>
<p>Bruggemann: Oh, yes, yes.</p>
<p>Bauman: Do you remember workers being around?</p>
<p>Bruggemann: No, no, no, not really. The only thing I remember was loading--my father would take the fruit to the rails, to the, what was it? What was the rail track station? Anyway there's a there's a railroad station there. And one day—</p>
<p>Holm: [INAUDIBLE]</p>
<p>Bruggemann: No, no. Priest Rapids or something. Anyway one day a big train came in and the engineer, the driver of the train, saw me standing down there with my father and he asked me, do you want a Coke? I must've said yes and he threw me down a Coke. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Bauman: [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Bruggemann: Which really impressed me at that time.</p>
<p>Bauman: That is something that you would remember.</p>
<p>Bruggemann: But that was also something that was very important, getting the fruit out of there, getting it onto the train. Make sure things are running, make sure the fruit gets to the right storage and so on, the cool house.</p>
<p>Bauman: What was the weather like? Do you remember winters or summers at all?</p>
<p>Bruggemann: No, I don't remember winters at all, but summers were warm. Warm, very warm.</p>
<p>Bauman: And you mentioned having a dog.</p>
<p>Bruggemann: Yeah</p>
<p>Bauman: Young people today are used to a lot of things to keep themselves entertained, and so they would probably want to know, as a young child, what did you do on the farm? You were probably too little to have any chores or anything like that, right?</p>
<p>Bruggemann: No, no. My mother would probably ask me to set the table or something maybe, but no, I was really, really too young. And I think also, that my sister and I were quite a burden for my mother. Because she had so much work to do and she had entertain us also. And by the way, your comment is interesting to me because young people today tend to say to the mother: I'm bored, fix that please. I never said that once my life. I took life as it came and that's one of the reasons I liked school so much because school was for me then, exciting.</p>
<p>Bauman: So then in 1943 when you had to move, when your family had to move, you said you moved essentially to Yakima then?</p>
<p>Bruggemann: We moved here into Yakima into a rented house while my father looked for a farm out here on Englewood Avenue then.</p>
<p>Holm: The Canfield--he bought the Canfield house.</p>
<p>Bruggemann: The Canfield house, okay.</p>
<p>Holm: He was a representative for the state or something. He never liked that house.</p>
<p>Bauman: So I interviewed a number of people as I explained to you earlier, both people who lived in the area before 1943 and then people came to work at Hanford during the war. Why do you think it'd be important for people to learn about--know about, learn about--these communities, these farmers, and families that were there before World War II.</p>
<p>Bruggemann: Well, one reason, the hardships that people were willing to go through. If at that time I would have been say, 20, 25 and I got a letter or something, saying you can earn a lot of money if you go to Hanford, well sure, I could have probably earned a lot of money but it would have been a lot of hardship also. And I think that's much different than today. People are not willing to go through hardship like that--building up a community in that short of time and working hard, maybe more than eight hours a day, to get that project working. An atomic bomb was a very important thing, you know? It was one of the factors of winning the war.</p>
<p>Bauman: Right. Are there any other memories, either of the farm itself, the ranch, the area that you still remember or think about, sort of standout?</p>
<p>Bruggemann: No, no, I just remember also a hardship. Now, now look. If my wife wants some butter, like this morning she told me I need butter. So what do I do, I get in my car, I drive a mile down to Freddy Meyer, have a butter within five minutes and I'm back again. If something happened on the ranch, my dad or my mother made an hour trip driving on roads that weren't nearly as nice as they are today.</p>
<p>Bauman: Right.</p>
<p>Bruggemann: So this hardship--I noticed that. That was always a big thing. I'm sure my father had many flat tires coming to Yakima.</p>
<p>Bauman: Right. So things we take for granted today, a lot more work.</p>
<p>Bruggemann: Yeah, yeah. And the thing is, life is so easy now. You're like, let's take Freddy Meyer for an example. I was in that store this morning, it's huge and has everything that I can think of.</p>
<p>Bauman: Mm-hm.</p>
<p>Bruggemann: If my mother at the ranch wanted some little thing she had to go to Yakima to get it. There was no other way of purchasing that. Meaning a trip, a dirty trip to Yakima one hour both ways.</p>
<p>Holm: [INAUDIBLE] White Bluffs. Some of these little towns had a few--a grocery store or something.</p>
<p>Bruggemann: Yes, but--</p>
<p>Holm: I remember, I think he went to Sunnyside.</p>
<p>Bruggemann: Yeah.</p>
<p>Bauman: So I just want one more question unless you have something else you want to talk about but what would you like people to know or understand or remember about your family and the ranch? You know, we were talking earlier, the cook house that's there is one of the few buildings from pre '43 that's still standing that people can see as a concrete reminder that there were families there.</p>
<p>Bruggemann: Yes.</p>
<p>Bauman: So is there anything that you, that either of you would like people to understand if that they get a chance to see that building.</p>
<p>Bruggemann: Well I don't know, the German word, pioniergeist, the willingness to pioneer something. That is the important thing. And then my mother going into this pioniergeist type of thing and finding it a terrible burden. I mean things don't always work out perfectly, you know? And then something like this war situation coming up, and just completely changing your life--now for me it was probably a good change. I think I had an advantage, getting in right away at the age of six, going to a nice school here in Yakima which was probably much better than I would have had out at the ranch.</p>
<p>Bauman: Right. Makes sense.</p>
<p>Bruggemann: Yup. I also at that time, as opposed to today, I had very good teachers. 50-year-old women that knew what they were doing.</p>
<p>Bauman: I was just thinking, your parents in some ways came from very different places, right?</p>
<p>Bruggemann: Yeah, sure, sure, sure.</p>
<p>Bauman: So was your father bilingual? Did he speak English and German?</p>
<p>Bruggemann: Yes, German and English both, yes. Sure.</p>
<p>Bauman: Oh, okay. And did he speak both at home there?</p>
<p>Bruggemann: No, we didn't, at home we spoke English--my mother's language.</p>
<p>Bauman: Right, sure. Did you learn any German from your father growing up?</p>
<p>Bruggemann: No, no I didn't. I learned German the hard way. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Well, the last question I wanted to ask, is there anything that you want to add? Or some memory that we haven't talked about yet?</p>
<p>Holm: Do you remember the hermit?</p>
<p>Bruggemann: The hermit? No.</p>
<p>Holm: On the way to Sunnyside? We'd always stop and talk to him and he just was thrilled to death, talking to my mom, our mom.</p>
<p>Bruggemann: No, no. I don't know that.</p>
<p>Bauman: That's right, you had mentioned him.</p>
<p>Bruggemann: I only remember--Do you remember the halfway house?</p>
<p>Holm: Well the name, yeah.</p>
<p>Bruggemann: The halfway house was an abandoned house that was sort of halfway to Yakima. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Bauman: Oh, so that’s why it’s the halfway house?</p>
<p>Bruggemann: Yeah, halfway house. Yeah they never tore it down, they just let it and yeah it doesn't exist anymore. But that's also an indication that it was quite a trip to Yakima, you know?</p>
<p>Holm: I guess it was quite a trip when I had to go to the bathroom all the time, I'm not doing them well. I just want to kick them and go through the boards.</p>
<p>[LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Bauman: So I guess, you mentioned the Wills family?</p>
<p>Bruggemann: The Wills, yes.</p>
<p>Bauman: Any other family names you remember?</p>
<p>Bruggemann: No, no. I don't know.</p>
<p>Holm: Gilhuly.</p>
<p>Bauman: Gilhuly.</p>
<p>Holm: And Frye. Frye just died here, not too long ago.</p>
<p>Bauman: Okay, so I think you had mentioned that Gilhuly name when I was here.</p>
<p>Holm: F-R-Y-E, I think it is.</p>
<p>Bauman: One other question I was going to ask, did you have a radio or did you get a newspaper at all? I'm curious how you learned about, your family, if you know.</p>
<p>Bruggemann: Yes we surely had a radio but the radio became important here in Yakima, I thought because my dad would sit in the evenings--not at the TV but he would sit at the radio- and he would get the two children and say come on, listen in. And there were also some plays or something on the radio that were entertaining. Pardon?</p>
<p>Holm: The Cinnamon Bear every evening.</p>
<p>Bauman: Okay.</p>
<p>Holm: We didn't have TV until like '51.</p>
<p>Bruggemann: No, no. See TV was much later.</p>
<p>Bauman: Yeah. I just wondered if radio or newspaper, if you—</p>
<p>Bruggemann: No, no. Well, we had the Yakima Herald newspaper everyday, but we listened a lot in the evenings to radio. Just like people sit in front of the TV nowadays.</p>
<p>Bauman: Okay, well thank you very much. I appreciate it.</p>
<p>Bruggemann: Well I wish I knew more, but in one way it's amazing to me, too, that I have such a fragile memory of the whole thing, you know? But things changed then when we came to Yakima.</p>
<p>Bauman: Sure. I don't know that I remember much before I turned five, so.</p>
<p>Bruggemann: Yeah, yeah.</p>
<p>Bauman: But yeah, I appreciate you taking the time out of your trip here to the states.</p>
<p>Bruggemann: Sure. Well, I am very, very willing to do this. It's important to show a good picture of history, the way it was. And especially this project. I think this project—whew, any place in the world, it is surely a huge project that worked and worked under pressure too. A lot of pressure.</p>
<p>Bauman: Right. And we were talking earlier, we want to preserve as many of the memories- both of the people who came to work on the project and also people who were here before that, make sure people understand there were farmers and towns there.</p>
<p>Bruggemann: Yeah, yeah.</p>
<p>Bauman: That's important. Again, thank you very much, I really appreciate it.</p>
<p>Bruggemann: Okay.</p>
<p>Bauman: All right.</p>
Original Format
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mp4
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00:28:13
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189 kbps
Years in Tri-Cities Area
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~1925-1943
Names Mentioned
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Mary Bruggemann
Gary and Margaret Wills
Gary Peterson
Gilhuly
Frye
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Title
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Interview with Ludwig Bruggemann
Description
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An interview with Ludwig Bruggemann 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.
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
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09-08-2014
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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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video/mp4
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2017-27-11: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.]
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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.
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